If You Didn't See It...Paul Westerberg's Thoughts on the Passing of Alex Chilton

The work of Paul Westerberg and the Replacements is responsible for much regarding my musical proclivities, as well as the main structure of the site that you are reading. (If you're confused by this, Google all but one of its segment titles. Then get thee to Amazon and buy every last Westerberg solo and Replacements record right now heathen.) I learned a lot of new things from the various mentions that Westerberg namechecked in his songs, one of which being the pop-laden beauty that was Alex Chilton's musical catalogue. Thanks to Westerberg penning that perennial song about Chilton for the Replacements' 1985 masterpiece Tim, I'm certain this experience happened to a lot of us.

If you've been living in a cave without newspaper delivery or internet service, Chilton died on St. Patrick's Day at the age of 59. So it seemed utterly appropriate to me when I heard that Westerberg wrote a piece about Chilton in a publication that reached far and wide like the Sunday NY Times. I was at SXSW when the article published, but if you haven't read it, it's a wonderful ode of acknowledgement and gratitude from one musical curmudgeon to another. And given the gratitude I have for Westerberg for introducing me to things like Chilton, I'd be remiss if we didn't publish it here.

Beyond The Box Tops-by Paul Westerberg

HOW does one react to the death of one’s mentor? My mind instantly slammed down the inner trouble-door that guards against all thought, emotion, sadness. Survival mode. Rock guitar players are all dead men walking. It’s only a matter of time, I tell myself as I finger my calluses. Those who fail to click with the world and society at large find safe haven in music — to sing, write songs, create, perform. Each an active art in itself that offers no promise of success, let alone happiness.

Yet success shone early on Alex Chilton, as the 16-year-old soulful singer of the hit-making Box Tops. Possessing more talent than necessary, he tired as a very young man of playing the game — touring, performing at state fairs, etc. So he returned home to Memphis. Focusing on his pop writing and his rock guitar skills, he formed the group Big Star with Chris Bell. Now he had creative control, and his versatility shone bright. Beautiful melodies, heart-wrenching lyrics: “I’m in Love with a Girl,” “September Gurls.”

On Big Star’s masterpiece third album, Alex sang my favorite song of his, “Nighttime” — a haunting and gorgeous ballad that I will forever associate with my floor-sleeping days in New York. Strangely, the desperation in the line “I hate it here, get me out of here” made me, of all things, happy. He went on to produce more artistic, challenging records. One equipped with the take-it-or-leave-it — no, excuse me, with the take-it-like-I-make-it — title “Like Flies on Sherbert.” The man had a sense of humor, believe me.

It was some years back, the last time I saw Alex Chilton. We miraculously bumped into each other one autumn evening in New York, he in a Memphis Minnie T-shirt, with take-out Thai, en route to his hotel. He invited me along to watch the World Series on TV, and I immediately discarded whatever flimsy obligation I may have had. We watched baseball, talked and laughed, especially about his current residence — he was living in, get this, a tent in Tennessee.

Because we were musicians, our talk inevitably turned toward women, and Al, ever the Southern gentleman, was having a hard time between bites communicating to me the difficulty in ... you see, the difficulty in (me taking my last swig that didn’t end up on the wall, as I boldly supplied the punch line) “... in asking a young lady if she’d like to come back to your tent?” We both darn near died there in a fit of laughter.

Yeah, December boys got it bad, as “September Gurls” notes. The great Alex Chilton is gone — folk troubadour, blues shouter, master singer, songwriter and guitarist. Someone should write a tune about him. Then again, nah, that would be impossible. Or just plain stupid.

News: DC in on the Springsteen/Ticketmaster Debacule

You may recall this story from a few months back when people buying tickets for the Meadowlands shows were sent to TicketsNow.com, or what I like to call "Ticketmaster's Sanctioned Scalping Site." Fans, and Springsteen himself, raised a ruckus and as part of its settlement, Ticketmaster will create a wall between its site and TicketsNow.com for one year, and establish a lottery where fans who filed complaints could purchase tickets to Mr. Springsteen’s New Jersey shows. Seems their "wall" is about as flimsy as those go-go beads Greg Brady used for a door because the same thing happened for the show here in DC

Hundreds of concertgoers who thought they bought tickets for a coming Bruce Springsteen show from Ticketmaster but instead purchased seats from TicketsNow, a resale service owned by Ticketmaster, will receive reimbursements or tickets to another of Mr. Springsteen’s shows, The Washington Post reported. More than 300 fans said that they were misled when they bought the tickets to Mr. Springsteen’s show this Monday night at the Verizon Center in Washington. In February, Ticketmaster said that it would change its sales policies as part of a settlement with the State of New Jersey after more than 2,000 Springsteen fans there made similar complaints. In a statement at Mr. Springsteen’s official Web site, brucespringsteen.net, his manager, Jon Landau, wrote that there “appear to be chronic problems” with how Ticketmaster uses TicketsNow and that he and Mr. Springsteen “deeply resent the abuse of our fans.” (Source)

NY Times Reviews New Clash Biography

Back in September, we'd posted about the new self-titled Clash biography that was about to be published in the UK. I haven't heard any first-hand accounts yet, but it's rumored to be the must-own for any Clash fan because this isn't any ol' biography, this one was actually written by Strummer, Jones, Headon, and Simonon and includes never-before-seen photos and commentary. Seems it finally came out in the States last month.

THE CLASH By Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon
Illustrated. 384 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $45

At first glance, the Clash is an unlikely subject for such deluxe treatment. The group blasted out of London as part of punk’s first wave; it opened for the Sex Pistols on the 1976 “Anarchy in the U.K.” tour, on which more than two-thirds of the dates were canceled out of terror, securing the new movement’s reputation. Over the next seven years — a neat parallel to the Beatles’ recording career, in fact — the Clash would create some of the greatest rock ’n’ roll of all time (Rolling Stone named “London Calling” the best album of the 1980s), only to split apart just as the band was achieving commercial success in the United States.

In the intervening years, and burnished by the singer/rhythm guitarist/folk hero Joe Strummer’s death in 2002, the Clash has become the lone punk representative in the classic rock canon. It has attained rarefied status as one of those bands with more books published about them than total albums released.

The text for “The Clash” is drawn mostly from interviews conducted during five days of filming for the Grammy-winning 2000 documentary “Westway to the World.” If this limited access doesn’t always allow topics to be pursued in the greatest depth, it’s enough to give a sense of the four personalities involved: Strummer, the group’s romantic conscience; the lead guitarist Mick Jones, the musical explorer with a head for pop; the bass player Paul Simonon, a rookie musician but the band’s soul and style guru; and Topper Headon, the stereotypical drummer just out for a good time (“Once I’d done my bit we were told to go home, so there wasn’t any trouble or damage bills”).

At least, that’s the easy read of the Clash lineup. The reality is that each one of the foursome comes across as thoughtful and serious about a project so superficially raw and explosive. The most effective part of “The Clash” is the band members’ plain-spoken retelling of their family lives: Jones and Simonon were both products of severely broken homes; Strummer, later known as the populist voice of punk, was the ­Turkish-born son of a diplomat and learned to rebel at boarding school. “I could see from an early age,” he says, “that authority was a system of control which didn’t have any inherent wisdom.”

For the children of an impoverished, racially torn England, punk was a way to fashion a new identity and strike back at an increasing sense of powerlessness. “Part of punk was that you had to shed all of what you knew before,” Strummer says. “We were almost Stalinist in the way that we insisted you had to cast off all your friends, everything you’d ever known . . . in a frenzied attempt to create something new.”

Even the band’s name was an instinctive reflection of the era. “We were in a confrontational situation all the time,” Simonon says. “There was a clash of colors, clash of people — it’s kind of self-­explanatory.”

Surprisingly absent from “The Clash” is much sense of the group’s political side. Though that aspect of the work has been exaggerated over time, this was, after all, a band that titled one album “Sandinista!” But in the musicians’ own telling, their activist side was far more intuitive than strategic. “We were just picking things out of the paper to write about,” Jones says.

Elsewhere, the guitarist adds, “I was always concerned about how a thing looked just as much as how it sounded and what it was about,” and one thing that certainly shines through in these lavishly illustrated pages is the band’s visual focus; some of the photos are simply breathtaking, and every last show poster and backstage pass demonstrates the group’s near-­perfect sense of style.

Each of the four contributes to this story, but time and again, it is Joe Strummer’s voice, his dramatic sense of language, that leaps off the page. He says of one song inspired by a line of movie dialogue that “it was like holding one end of a piece of string which had a song attached to it,” and as things start to go south for the Clash, he describes Jones as behaving “like Elizabeth Taylor in a filthy mood.”

A rock band is a mysterious thing. Somehow, every once in a while, a few individuals bump into one another, and they look exactly right together and share a focus and an aspiration and the right balance of musical similarities and differences. Then, suddenly, they don’t anymore.

“Whatever a group is, it’s the chemical mixture of those four people,” Strummer says. “It’s some weird thing that no scientist could ever quantify or measure, and thank God for that.” (Source)

Listen: Pressue Drop_The Clash

The NY Times Article/Interview with TV on the Radio

This piece with TV on the Radio was in the NY Times recently and provides some really interesting insights on both the band, their outlook, and their new record, Dear Science, which is out today.

Keeping It Indie but Thinking Big Thoughts
By JON PARELES
Published: September 19, 2008

ONE day in July construction next door damaged the outside wall of Dave Sitek’s Headgear recording studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s the studio where the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars and Mr. Sitek’s own band, TV on the Radio, made albums that drew international attention to Brooklyn rock just a few years ago.

Those were the indie days, when TV on the Radio was passing out homemade discs at cafes, and band members squeezed bits of recording time between hours spent at day jobs. Over the past five years TV on the Radio has made its way steadily up the circuit, from independent to major label, from local clubs to international tours, while its music has grown ever more ambitious. Those ambitions are bohemian ones: packing a world of ideas into each song while ignoring both commercial imperatives and ingrown hipster cachet.

Tunde Adebimpe, the singer who started TV on the Radio with Mr. Sitek, unabashedly describes its music as art. When the band moved from the independent Touch & Go label to Interscope Records, one of the stipulations of the contract was that “there would be no involvement from the label on the creative end,” Mr. Adebimpe said. As the recording business loses its ability to create blockbusters, the band’s self-guided, self-sufficient approach looks like a practical survival strategy.

On Sept. 23 TV on the Radio follows its widely praised 2006 album, “Return to Cookie Mountain,” with a magnificent third album, “Dear Science,” (the comma is part of the title). The songs are vertiginous, full of cantilevered rhythms and synthetic sounds, yet openly catchy. Mr. Adebimpe and Kyp Malone sing about war and technology, environmental damage and racism while also invoking pleasure and hope.

The songs are pensive but ultimately joyful. The album starts with “Halfway Home,” an elegy tucked behind a peppy nonsense-syllable chorus, and it ends with “Lover’s Day,” a celebration of sex: “Yes of course there are miracles/Under your sighs and moans.”

Often a song starts with stark, kinetic drumbeats, only to thicken and evolve with layer upon layer of counterpoint. The band’s sound is “representative of the human experience,” Mr. Sitek said. “You have your first introduction to sound and hearing, and then you learn a language and then you learn to confuse yourself with that language, and then you’re left with this euphoric, slap-happy, I’ll call it aging twilight consciousness where you’re just befuddled at the human experience and all of the things you’ve accumulated with no direct guideposts or instruction manual.”

In an era of disposable downloads and ring tones “Dear Science,” is a coherent collection of songs made for repeated listening. “If you’re going to reach for it, reach all the way for it,” Mr. Sitek said. “Albums like ‘Purple Rain’ and ‘Thriller’ and those kind of records, you had to reach far above the din of cynicism and modern living to get to that place, against all the odds. The industry used to support that kind of record making, and just because the marketplace of the industry doesn’t support it now doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still try for it.”

But the album was made on a local scale: in Mr. Sitek’s studio, with a horn section borrowed from the steady-gigging Brooklyn Afrobeat band Antibalas. “I think the album as a format is dying,” Mr. Sitek said. “To do an album of this magnitude, just in terms of the sheer number of things that had to be done and the amount of musicians involved and the amount of studio hours spent — if we didn’t have my studio, who knows? We could have been really in debt for the rest of our entire beings.”

TV on the Radio has held on to the experimental spirit of what was briefly, before landlords and tourists noticed, a neighborhood of low rents and high creative density. “You could go out on a Saturday night and go to eight different places and see eight different bands, and they would all be interesting — really interesting,” Mr. Adebimpe said. There was a feeling, he said, that “I have to keep making stuff that I like so I can keep hanging out with my friends who make stuff that I like.”

Back in 1997 Mr. Adebimpe — at the time a filmmaker doing stop-motion animation, with a day job at Film Forum — and Mr. Sitek found themselves as roommates in a Williamsburg loft, which led to a musical partnership. “It just became apparent very quickly that we were going to be friends,” Mr. Adebimpe recalled in an interview at the Verb Cafe in Williamsburg, “because his room was full of all this musical equipment with nothing but a mattress, and my room was full of paints and video equipment and nothing but a mattress.”

Soon they took on collaborators: Mr. Malone on guitar and vocals, Jaleel Bunton on drums and Gerard Smith on bass. “We bullied everyone else into the band because we didn’t want to go through it alone,” said Mr. Sitek, whose main instrument is guitar. All the band members are in their early 30s.

The four-inch dent in the studio wall is the latest iteration of what’s already an old story: the continuing gentrification of Williamsburg. The members of TV on the Radio all still live in the neighborhood, watching bodegas being replaced by fancy restaurants and boutiques. In one song on the new album, “Dancing Choose,” Mr. Adebimpe sings at near-rap speed:

Angry young mannequin

American apparently

Still to the rhythm

Better get to the back of me

Can’t stand the vision.

A high-rise apartment building is going up next door to Mr. Sitek’s studio — actually two studios, since Stay Gold, where TV on the Radio made “Dear Science,” is in the rooms next to Headgear. “They build one skyscraper, and skyscrapers get lonely,” Mr. Sitek said in his three-pack-a-day rasp, lighting up in the alley alongside his favorite Williamsburg club, Zebulon. “So then they call their friends and more skyscrapers come, and they throw a party. And the next thing you know there’s a skyscraper blogging about the skyscraper scene in Williamsburg.”

Early on, TV on the Radio benefited from the talent-spotting and reputation-building of the indie-rock blogosphere. But eventually the band felt typecast. “I’m done with cool,” Mr. Malone said. “I’ve been done with cool for years.”

Mr. Sitek said: “We always wanted to reach a lot of people. We never wanted to be obscure. I think it was just hard for us to get a handle on how to make the kind of music we make and how to describe it. And it started to be misunderstood that we were trying to do some kind of weird art-house-rock obscure thing. But that’s not it at all.

“In our minds these songs are that simple. We needed to get a lot of stuff out of our system, but it wasn’t in opposition to something. We weren’t like: We want to make this giant complicated thing. It’s just we had five different people with completely different perspectives, trying to make all of our ideas fit into one thing.”

“Dear Science,” is both an extension and a turnabout of TV on the Radio’s past work. Nervous energy and apocalyptic scenarios filled the band’s 2003 EP, “Young Liars” (Touch & Go), and its first two albums, “Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes” (Touch & Go) in 2004 and “Return to Cookie Mountain” (Interscope) in 2006. The songs on those albums contemplated the aftermath of Sept. 11, the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina. The lyrics were surreal and allusive, arriving in dense art-rock productions that melded looped drumbeats, doo-wop vocal harmonies, atmospheric noise, guitar dissonance and improbable pop hooks.

“I like pop music,” Mr. Malone said in a telephone interview. “I also like the sound of a dying refrigerator. I can listen to that for an hour and a half if I’m in the mood.”

There’s still a deep streak of dread on the new album. Its title, “Dear Science,” includes the comma because it was the salutation of a letter Mr. Sitek posted on the studio wall while the band was working on the album. Mr. Adebimpe said it was written “in a kind of kid’s handwriting on yellow notebook paper.” The letter was addressed to Science itself, demanding that it “fix all the things you’re talking about” or shut up.

But through much of the album there’s a counterpoint of hope. “It’s hard to tour the apocalypse,” Mr. Adebimpe said. “For me the point of songs, the point of getting that stuff out, is getting it out and trying to put it in a place so it’s not eating you alive.”

For this album, Mr. Sitek said, “I didn’t want anything to be misunderstood, and I didn’t want anything to be cloudy in an unintended way.” He continued, “We were unpeeling these layers between us and what we thought was absolutely stunning and beautiful, and not so depressing this time.”

Though the album has angry moments, much of the music tilts toward major chords and willfully upbeat choruses. “The age of miracles, the age of sound,” the song “Golden Age” insists over a beat that echoes the heyday of Michael Jackson, “Well there’s a Golden Age comin’ round.”

Mr. Malone, the song’s main writer, said: “I’m starting to realize that I don’t want to just write jeremiads, even though the times kind of call for them. With ‘Golden Age’ I was trying consciously to create a utopian world inside a pop song. I don’t think that three minutes of music on a commercial record is going to bring paradise, but I feel like there is power in music and power in our words and power in what we put out into the world."

After his interview Mr. Adebimpe walked with a visitor past Stay Gold studios. On the sidewalk was Brian Chase, the drummer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who are finishing an album there with Mr. Sitek producing. Could Mr. Adebimpe drop by later and overdub some whistling on a song? Sure he could. For a moment Williamsburg seemed like the bohemian neighborhood it had been — at least for a little longer.

Correction: September 21, 2008
An article on Sept. 7 about the band TV on the Radio misidentified the owners of Headgear recording studio in Brooklyn. The owners are Alex Lipsen, Dan Long and S. F. Norton; the studio is not owned by Dave Sitek, a member of TV on the Radio. (Mr. Sitek owns Stay Gold, a studio in the same building.) The article also misidentified a recording studio used by the band Liars. It has recorded with Mr. Sitek at Hickory Lane studios, not at Headgear. And the article misstated the cause of damage to the building that houses Headgear. The external wall was damaged after concrete was poured against it; it was not damaged by a bulldozer.