Now it's been almost half a year since I last attended an AMG Guy presentation, so I thought I would track down Richie Unterberger's website and see what the world's greatest living '60s rock historian has been up to. Turns out I wouldn't have been able to attend any of his recent presentations anyway. Because he's been in England, promoting his new book on the Velvet Underground. Hell yes. According to his website:
White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day (now available on Jawbone Press), is by far the most comprehensive book on the Velvet Underground ever published. The 368-page volume details the group's recording sessions, record releases, concerts, press reviews, and other major events shaping their career with both thorough detail and critical insight. Drawing on about 100 interviews and exhaustive research through documents and recordings rarely or never accessed, it unearths stories that have seldom been told, and eyewitness accounts that have seldom seen print, from figures ranging from band members to managers, producers, record executives, journalists, concert promoters, and fans.
Not only do I want to see this presentation, I actually want to read this book. Honestly, if they've been taking up time he could be using to write more books like this one, maybe he should give the presentations a little break. But he seems to be balancing his various projects quite skillfully, so perhaps there is no need for concern. Unfortunately, I was not able to catch him at the Westminster Reference Library in Covent Garden, the Hornsey Library in Haringey Park, or the Leytonstone Library at 6 Church Lane, nor was I able to attend his slightly more North American presentations at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., or the Moonstone Arts Center in Philadelphia. Richie gets around.
Ah, but he appears to have saved the best for last, because on September 1 he will be at the Martinez Library in Martinez, California! You can also find him at the Albany Library on October 7, the San Ramon Library on October 8, the El Cerrito Library on October 22, or even (talk about boring) the Ninth Street Independent Film Center in San Francisco on November 19.
in which the author finds validation for liking his favorite band
I was all set to write a review of VNV Nation's latest album Of Faith, Power, and Glory when I saw that AMG had already posted a review. I found this astounding, as not only has AMG typically waited at least a year to post reviews for VNV's albums, but have pretty much neglected the band as a whole - the biography hasn't been updated since 2001, there's no band pic when plenty are available (see above), and AMG's reviews have generally been lacking or just plain incorrect -one reviewer doesn't seem to even know who's in the band - there's only two members, c'mon it can't be that hard to keep track of.
As taken aback as I was, I was even more delighted when I saw that the reviewer seemed to hit the nail on the head, providing excellent reviews of the new album and Reformation 01. So impressed was I that I've had trouble writing a review of my own for the new album, because I feel that this reviewer said everything that needed to be said. But who is this reviewer, who has Zrbo found to validate his feelings for this band?
Enter - the Raggett! That's Ned Raggett, who, according to wikipedia has written over 4000 reviews for AMG (seriously?!). Browsing around a bit online I ran across Ned's blog, and boy oh boy, does this guy like his VNV Nation! Browsing through his entries I've found reviews, concert impressions, an article from the Village Voice and an interesting presentation he took part in where presenters talked and discussed a song as the song played in the background. His observations are great too, take this impression from his first VNV concert:
Their iconographic approach is a logical descendant of things like Nitzer Ebb... all cleaned up and post-rave to boot. It’s further reflected in the stage projections and the general design and instrumental set-up, lots of striking poses in the back and all. Jarring moments result — they play the beginning of one song which has an extensive sample from some guy about war’s destruction, and then all of a sudden the imagery is a CGI black/white cityscape that’s part Fritz Lang, part Speer/Riefenstahl with the band logo dominating the top of the tallest building while searchlights play up and down it or otherwise reach into the sky.
One thing I've always enjoyed about VNV is their use of imagery and phrases from the past, reworking them into a modern context showing how they're still applicable today. From the use of iconic imagery in the band's logo and stage production, to quotes from FDR, Orwell, Shakespeare, the song 'Chosen' which is practically lifted entirely from a Guy de Maupassant poem, to the latest album featuring a song with lyrics entirely from Sun Tzu, the band is excellent in using these to remind us of our humanity, that we're all in this together on some random rock flying through space, except they express it much more elegantly than I can. They play this Monday at the Grand Ballroom in San Francisco.
And just a reminder that Little Earl and me will be coming to you live from Las Vegas this coming weekend. Expect tales of coke and strippers, and long quotes from Hunter S. Thompson.
Ah, success - a double-edged sword? When you're the unsung hero, toiling away in the AMG basement, they adore you. But scale your way up the heights of the music critic mountain, and then one day, they turn on you, like a rabid dog on his master. And where's the appreciation, the gratitude, the reward for all your years of AMG glory? Lying in the gutter, my friends, like so many used copies of U2's Pop.
Last week, Stephen Thomas Erlewine reviewed U2's latest albumNo Line On The Horizon, bestowing upon it a nice, noncommittal rating of three stars. I have not heard the album myself, but, let's face it, that probably sounds about right. Some of his readers agreed. But others began doing the unthinkable: they began ripping on Stephen Thomas Erlewine! The nerve. The gall. The insouciance. Just what did he ever do that was so horrible? Listen to some of these "complaints":
I’m not surprised at this review, really. After all, it’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine, the man who gave Paris Hilton’s debut a 4.5. A review that will live in infamy. And Pop a measly and unfair 2.5, but whatever. He’s the king of negative backlash and bias...This sounds like the obligatory 2-star review he gives to just about every major artist once he impulsively declares them past their prime (R.E.M., Madonna, etc.). Good Job, STE, you make us proud.
Can you really trust a man who thinks Ween is better Jimi Hendrix?
Frankly, this is a lazy review, even if it doesn’t quite descend to the sedentary level of the Entertainment Weekly one. It’s almost enough to make you want to go and read Pitchfork (and take them seriously).
STE is as fickle and unrelentingly stubborn as they come...It’s been almost 12 years exactly since the release of Pop and he still hasn’t given it the reappraisal it commands and deserves.
First of all, who knew Pop had such a fanbase? But nevermind. The point is that I was shocked to hear such words directed at the master, the maestro, the AMG magician. Sure he's got his biases just like any other music critic (I still cringe at the thought of his - in my opinion - disproportionate Green Day admiration), but since when did that make him "the king of negative backlash and bias"? Fine, so he thinks Ween is better than Jimi Hendrix. Well guess what, I think Oasis are better than Bob Dylan (note: possibly not, but it sounds provocative so I'm leaving it in). Is a good music critic supposed to bend and contort his or her own personal opinions just so that they fit into some established notion of pop music taste? Hell no. A good music critic is supposed to say what he or she really thinks, consensus be damned. Sure, it may not have been trendy or hip for Erlewine to admit that he actually liked Paris Hilton's album, but hey, if he liked it, he liked it. Have you heard it? Neither have I.
I think the main flaw, if any, in Erlewine's writing is more of a flaw with the editorial style of AMG itself. Meaning: the reviewers apparently have to write their reviews from sort of an omniscient, absolutist point of view. They aren't allowed to simply say, "I" or "me" or "in my opinion," the way other reviewers can. As a result, I think this irritates people a little bit. Because AMG is so otherwise dependable, and because you know that so many people are going to read the AMG review and assume that everyone agrees that "Album #6753" deserves three stars rather than the five you'd give it, you think, "But I don't agree with that! This is just some guy's opinion!" Yet they write as if their opinion simply just...is. My guess is Erlewine would probably rather not compose in this manner, but he's required to adhere to AMG's own self-imposed style guidelines. Nevertheless, I think this keeps his writing from soaring the way that maybe Roger Ebert's does, or even the occasional Pitchfork review does. I just wished he simply tried to speak for himself rather than for some imaginary consensus. But hey, no music critic (other than me) can be perfect.
Anyways, this just goes to show you that you know you've finally made it when you start receiving your own backlash.
So last Wednesday I attended my second Richie Unterberger "rare '60s rock and roll film clip" presentation, and oh man, let me tell you. This time he focused exclusively on clips from the British Invasion, and his goal was to demonstrate, through chronological employment of the clips, how quickly and creatively the British pop scene shifted from early 1964 to mid-1967. And my did he ever. In fact, having realized that he'd assembled such a brutal fusillade of clips, he opted to play them all without interruption for two hours straight and bump the question-and-answer period to the end. Unlike last month's collection, it seems to me that this batch was genuinely rare, as I have not been able to find very many of these clips on YouTube, or at least in not nearly the same quality. Before he began, he stated something to the effect of this: "Let me just say that at first you might be finding a lot of these performers on the cute or the quaint side and you might be wondering why we're even bothering to still talk about this movement more than 40 years later, but hang in there, because once we get to about the 25-minute mark you're going to notice the nature of the music become much darker and edgier in almost no time flat." His final comments cut to the heart of the matter: "I think it's fair to say that, without the British Invasion, our world would be...a much less enjoyable place."
He started and ended, shockingly, with the Beatles. The first clip of the night was of the Beatles performing "I Want To Hold Your Hand" for an Ed Sullivan dress rehearsal. Watching the clip, I somehow became filled with this powerful but bizarre notion that, as I looked back and forth between each of the four Beatles, it was as if I was really looking at one person. Because I have become so familiar with each of them, I think they appear to me as a complete entity unto itself. As potent of a personality match as other bands might be, they simply do not have this same effect.
Then came the cheesy clips: The Dave Clark Five, Gerry & The Pacemakers, Peter & Gordon, and the impressively dated Freddie & The Dreamers, among others. All of a sudden: The Rolling Stones. Richie played a clip of their first American television appearance, where they were introduced by host Dean Martin, who obviously thought they were atrocious and pretty much said so. But you could tell they were the only other band up to that point, beside The Beatles, who really had it. Mick looked great, Keith looked great, Brian looked great, and Bill and Charlie just looked like...Bill and Charlie. They played "Not Fade Away" and "I Just Want To Make Love To You." I can't imagine how shocking this performance must have been to those innocent young American girls who were seeing The Rolling Stones for the first time.
After that it was straight-up hard rock that would have broken Gerry's pacemaker: The Animal's "House of the Rising Sun," The Kinks' "All Day and All of the Night," The Yardbirds' "For Your Love," and so on. We got Petula Clark ("Downtown"), Manfred Mann ("Do Wah Diddy Diddy), the pre-prog Moody Blues ("Go Now"), a young Tom Jones, a young Van Morrison singing with Them, and the Nashville Teens, who weren't from Nashville at all.
As soon as we came to Procol Harum's 1967 hit "A Whiter Shade of Pale," though, the whole mood of the program changed. This was the point where pop music really began abandoning the love song entirely (which I think was a great move, personally). The second-to-last clip, of Pink Floyd's "Astronomy Domine," was probably my favorite clip out of them all, both because of its placement in the evening's narrative and because of the considerable merits of the clip itself. Since I associate Pink Floyd with a whole other era, it's fascinating to realize that they became famous just as The Beatles were achieving their psychedelic peak. So to see the clip be shown right before the clip of The Beatles performing "All You Need Is Love" via satellite was to suggest almost a changing of the guard. In fact, watching the "All You Need Is Love" clip immediately after the Pink Floyd clip, I almost felt like The Beatles seemed pompous and self-important. I mean, come on, who is John Lennon to tell me that all I need is love? What the fuck does he know about love anyway? Now hear me straight, I haven't been invaded by pod people and I'm not knocking The Beatles, but I think at this stage in my life I might be more in tune with the spirit of Pink Floyd than the spirit of the Fab Four.
Speaking of: this is one clip I was able to find. What I loved about it in the program was how it stood out from all the other clips that had come before. It was a uniquely bizarre clip representing the beginnings of a uniquely bizarre band. I think this Hans Keller fellow must have been told before he came to the studio that night that he would be participating in a discussion on Kant and Schopenhauer. Little did he know what he was getting himself into!
No, not Stephen Thomas Erlewine, but Richie Unterberger. If the name Richie Unterberger doesn't immediately ring a bell, let me just say that if you've spent a reasonable amount of time perusing the All Music Guide, you have most likely read something written by Richie Unterberger whether you've been aware of it or not. For example, the official AMG biographies for obscure cult bands such as the Beatles, Elvis Presley, Pink Floyd, Jim Hendrix, The Doors, The Velvet Underground and Simon & Garfunkel are his, as well as the official AMG reviews for some bargain bin albums named Rubber Soul, Abbey Road, Pet Sounds, Let It Bleed, Tommy, and Are You Experienced?, among others. His specialty appears to be '60s rock, pop, and soul. From what I've gathered, he is one of those hardcore '60s rock purists who thinks that popular music became significantly less worthwhile right around 1971. No progressive rock, singer-songwriter, punk or disco for Richie Unterberger, thank you. At times I feel like he takes '60s rock a bit too seriously, lamenting the subsequent turn to tackiness and tastelessness in the '70s the way a jazz obsessive might have lamented the turn to rock and roll. Yet within that early rock timeframe, Unterberger seems to hold no snobbish tendencies whatsoever. He appears to be just as fond of the Four Seasons as he is of the Beach Boys, just as fond of Lulu (clip featured above) as he is of Dusty Springfield. So I don't quite know what his deal is, but like Erlewine, he's a very informative and reasonable writer.
He also, so I've discovered, lives in San Francisco and gives monthly presentations of rare rock and roll film clips at the Park Branch library on Page St. - only seven or eight blocks from my apartment! Thus was the case last Wednesday, and after seeing the event listed in the Examiner, I knew I needed to attend. Well, Cosmic American friends, it was everything you might have hoped for and more. The crowd was a predictable cluster of anti-social rock geeks, grey-haired baby boomers and stoned hippie burnouts. A sleazy-looking guy behind me asked another slightly less sleazy-looking guy behind me for some pot, but I believe he was refused. Any mystique I imagined Richie to possess after years of reading his reviews dissipated in a short time. He was a slightly balding fellow with a beer belly wearing an Elvis '56 t-shirt. "My God," I thought. "This legendary AMG writer is...just some guy!"
Most of the clips were terrific. At one point he joked that we could probably find a lot of them on YouTube by now but that "you'd be missing out on the wonderful in-person commentary" (I've tried to link to the ones I could find). He showed footage of Alex Chilton performing "The Letter" live with the Box Tops, Linda Ronstadt doing a tune with the Stone Poneys (of "Different Drum" fame), Burt Bacharach leading his band in a solo "performance" (three coquettish blonde girls did the actual singing), Jimi Hendrix running through "Hey Joe" (stopping in mid-song and switching to Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love"), and so on. Richie was particularly enthusiastic about two early rock and roll clips. One featured Bill Haley & The Comets in what looked like a theatrical short that had been filmed in 1954, before the idea of "rock and roll" even really existed. Although Haley has a (mostly fair I'd say) reputation for being square and cornball compared to Elvis and the other early rock and roll performers, in this clip the stand-up bass player began riding his bass around the stage like a horse while the saxophone player essentially humped him. The other was of Gene Vincent ("Be Bop A Lula") dressed head-to-toe in leather, prancing around a stage in France with his gimp leg, for the most part looking (and sounding) a lot like the Hamburg-era Beatles. Finally, we got some killer footage of the Stones on The Ed Sullivan Show doing "Time Is On My Side," The Kinks storming through "You Really Got Me," and the Yardbirds performing "Heart Full of Soul." During the Yardbirds clip a particularly spaced-out audience member proclaimed, "Wow, man...Jeff Beck..." Everyone ignored him.
It was a bit of a mind-meld watching these clips with Richie in the same room with me. For example, as I observed the Yardbirds singing "Heart Full of Soul," I thought, "This, of course, was one of the three famous Yardbirds hits written by songwriter Graham Gouldman, which is a piece of information I learned many years ago by reading...Richie Unterberger from the All Music Guide! Whoa."
Most of all, this was an excellent opportunity for me to feed my own music geek ego, as Richie often asked us questions in between clips and I was eager to shout out the answers. When he started playing a clip of The Move performing "Blackberry Way," I exclaimed "Hey, The Move!" to demonstrate to the people around me that, oh yes, I knew this was a clip of The Move. I received the ultimate opportunity to flaunt my knowledge when Richie showed a clip of the Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac performing "Oh Well." Yoggoth can attest to my recent discovery of the pre Buckingham-Nicks Fleetwood Mac, so I was well-armed for this moment. After the clip ended, I decided to ask a question, the answer to which I was relatively sure I knew anyway. While my hand was in the air, Richie explained that "we had a clip of the earlier and, in my opinion, much better line-up of Fleetwood Mac," to which a man sitting behind me muttered, "Yeah, God, really." OK, we get it guys, you're too cool for Rumours, just keep it to yourself, all right? At any rate, Richie pointed to me and I asked my question: "So was that Jeremy Spencer shaking the maracas and Danny Kirwan playing guitar in the middle?" Richie replied, "Yes" and began explaining the history of early Fleetwood Mac to those who might not have been aware. Which did not include me of course. But although a great deal of my motivation in asking the question was to show off my rock snobbery, I did genuinely want to confirm which band member was which.
So in the end, I can't say I met Richie but I did ask him a question. Besides, since I've learned that he gives these sorts of presentations once a month, I have to admit that there really is no rush and I may possibly meet him in the future.
