A Fine Line

Album: Lou Reed, Mistrial, 1985

Best Track: "The Original Wrapper"

Lasting Memory: On the rare ocassion that I play Mistrial, I'm always reminded of how cool Lou Reed used to be. On this last paly through, I was struck by how fine a line there is between awesome and awful.

Sure, everyone knows there is a thin line between love and hate, just as there is a fine line between clever and stupid. But note how one of the following rules, while the other drools.








All of Mistrial drools. Especially "The Original Wrapper," which, unfortunately, is the best song on Mistrial. "No Money Down" and "I Remember You" aren't the worst sonic crimes ever committed, but they aren't especially good, either.

In the title track of this album, Lou Reed pleads for a mistrial to clear his name. If I were the judge in such a case, I'd uphold the original judgment against Reed and order him to play nothing but his hits from the 1960s and early 1970s. You know, when he he the very model of a modern major heroin addict.


"Original Wrapper" and "Wild Side" aren't so different in sound and tructure, but one rocks while one blows. Can there be any explanation other than the reduction in Reed's drug usage?


Up Next: Martin Roach, If We Were Up Your Ass You'd Know Who We Were, 1990

I'd Procrstinate, But What's the Rush?

The less I have to do, the more likely I am to put off doing it.


Declutter Your House

I cannot be alone in this, but I probably surpass practically every other person when it comes to lacking the motivation to do something unless it needs to be done now. Or even better, yesterday.

While this procrastinatory proclivity ill suits someone of whose greatest professional responsibility is to meet deadlines, I have in all but two notable occasions been able to bestir myself in time enough to complete assignments in enough time. Which is why I am much too comfortable typing out this blog post on Tuesday morning instead of working on a handful of one-hour projects that are each due by close of business this coming Friday.

Understand, I am no daredevil. Nor am I under any delusion that I "work better under pressure." The simple truth is that I tend not to work at all unless I'm forced by circumstances to do so. This is why I have tried to keep myself consistently overcommitted for the past year and a half. This is also why my television goes months at a time without being dusted. Most to the point, this is why Thursday and Friday will be quite busy for me.

Self-actualization is purportedly the highest psychological achievement for humans. I wonder what Maslow would say about someone who has come to accept slothfulness, bears no hard feelings toward slackness, and has figured out how to meet deadlines consistently with seconds to spare.

All Their Songs Are Sad

Album: R.E.M., Automatic for the People, 1992

Best Track: "Nightswimming"

Lasting Memory: The first time I watched the video for "Everybody Hurts," the second or third single off of Automatic for the People, I was convinced that it was the saddest thing I had ever seen. That first impression, as so often happens, was mistaken. I now know this to be the saddest thing I've seen. Followed closely by this.

The "Everybody Hurts" video is right up there on the list of sad artworks, though. That first viewing, in a hotel room about 20 miles west of Knoxville, Tenn., on the night of the first and longest day's drive of a 28-day sojourn through the south and central parts of America with my sister Clair, was like taking a punch to the solar plexus. Every song on Automatic is pretty emotionally raw, which goes a long toward placing the album in the ranks of great art. To quote the immortal G.K. Chesterton out of context but in support of the axiom that sad equals good,

His harp was carved and cunning,
His sword prompt and sharp,
And he was gay when he held the sword,
Sad when he held the harp.

For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.
(The Ballad of the White Horse, 1911)

I mean, who doesn't love themselves some "Greensleeves" or "Danny Boy" or "Come on Eileen"? Irish eyes aren't smiling, dammit. They're misting.

So were R.E.M.'s, obviously, when they threw together an album that included two heartfelt tributes to Andy Kaufman, a retrospective piece on Montgomery Clift, several cry-it-out-and-move-on message songs, and the most wistful song about lost youth committed to tape by any rock band since Traffic gifted the world with "Low Spark of High Heeled Boys" in 1971.

Automatic opens with the morose "Drive," which, as all rock songs should, employs the road as a metaphor for life. The album closes with "Find the River," which substitute a waterway for a highway and gently implies that listeners can get clean by returning to where they once went swimming at night.

While driving, you're bound to hurt when your personal hero -- be he a sidewinder or a man on the moon -- pulls off on the great exit to the sky far to soon. And when someone you admire gets a raw deal, that can make you catch your breath. But don't dwell. Sweetness follows.

Up Next: Lou Reed, Mistrial, 1986

An Album Too Far

Album: R.E.M., Green, 1988

Best Track: "You Are the Everything"

Lasting Memory: During the week before Green was released in September 1988, MTV engaged in an absolutely over-the-top promotional campaign for the album and for R.E.M. that, in retrospect, appeared specifically designed to Def Leppard's yearlong stranglehold on the number-one spot on the Top 20 video countdown. The 6 pm EDT Monday world premier of the video for "Orange Crush" was teased several times each hour. The band was interviewed repeatedly. Kurt Loder all but ordered every viewer to camp out on the sidewalk outside their nearest record store so they could purchase Green as soon as it was uncrated.

I complied. Kurt Loder is not a man you want to cross. When the last time you heard anything from Tabitha Soren?

Shame, then, that Green is such a mediocre album. Despite producing the great-when-you-first-hear-it-but-poke-your-own-eardrums-out-on-the-fourth-listen hit "Stand," fails to make much of any impression at all, good or bad.

For listeners willing to focus, "You Are the Everything" and "The Wrong Child" can be sweetly and melancholicly moving, respectively, but it's easy to zone out on both songs because of they are embedded in such a mire. It was probably inevitable that R.E.M. would put out a relatively weak album in 1988, especially since the band had been touring nonstop and releasing a studio record every year since 1983.

The band recovered its fastball later, and it was welcome relief in the fall of 1988 to finally have videos to watch that were not "Pour Some Sugar on Me," but my copy of Green has spent all but a couple of days of the past 21 years in its tape box slot for a very good reason -- it's not great.

Back to box, Green.

Up Next: R.E.M., Automatic for the People, 1992

The One Positive

My official period of underemployment has begun. The one positive in this situation is that I can honestly report



Or I will be for most of Wednesday.

I haven't had any proper time off from work in months. It is only minisculely overstating the case to report that since January 1, if I've been awake, I've been working in one way or the other. This leads me to hope two things. First, I hope I haven't forgotten how to enjoy time doing nothing. Second, I hope I'm busy again very soon.

Line Readings

Album: R.E.M., Dead letter Office, 1987

Best Track: "Bandwagon"

Lasting Memory: Dead Letter Office features one of my all-time top-10 favorite songs, "Bandwagon." I'd actually forgotten that until yesterday, which was the first time I had listened to the album in going on 20 years. What I have never driven from my mind through either the acquisition of new knowledge or the thorough washing of gallons upon gallons of Irish whiskey and American beer is this liner note regarding the last song on DLO, "Walter's Theme"/"King of the Road":

I suppose if we had any shame we would have never allowed this little gem to see the light of day. This was recorded at the very end of a long alcohol soaked day, and I can barely remember cutting it. This first part was an attempt at writing a commercial for Walter's Bar-B-Q. The second part is King of the Road, kind of. If there was any justice in the world, Roger Miller should be able to sue for what we did to this song.

R.E.M. guitarist peter Buck wrote -- even signed -- that statement included on the cassette insert by of explaning how and why the conjoined songs wound up on DLO, which was a contract-fulfilling final Island recording that cleared R.E.M. to switch labels to Warner Brothers. Buck annotated each of the outtakes and (mostly) Velvet Underground covers that make up DLO's discography, and all the notes are classics of insightful concision.

For instance, regarding "Burning Hell," Buck observed

Sometimes you write a song without even trying. Sometimes those songs are the very best ones. That's not quite the case with this one however.

Outtake from Fables of the Reconstruction.

Buck was also maybe too honest about the cover of Pylon's "Crazy":

A song by Pylon. I remember hearing their version on the radio the day that Chronic Town came out and being suddenly depressed by how much better it was than our record.

Outtake from Fables of the Reconstruction.

As the model for delivering recorded music moves away from the use of physical media, the loss of liner notes is inevitable. When there is no longer a vinyl LP, cassette, or CD, there can no longer be a sleeve or insert that captures the identities of all the contributing musicians and whatever 1,00 words or less thoughts an artist wants to share with listeners. And that strikes me as more than shame.

To my way of thinking, liner notes have several advantages over Web sites, blogs, and MyFriendsterFaceSpaceBook pages. First, liner notes are permanent and frozen in time. Written in the moment and at the end of what were often long and stressful recording sessions, liner notes compelled artists to share information that would stand the test of time. But since they were written then, that information could be subject to dramatically different readings years or decades later. You know, like a book.

Liner notes also forced artists to write short and edit. Infinitely to Buck's credit, the liner notes for DLO are exactly the opposite of Fred Durst's apparently dormant blog.

The last and best thing about liner notes was that they only let listeners as far inside the artist's head and work as the artist allowed. Now that literally everything can be learned about an artist by someone with Web access and too much time to kill, there is no real distance been musicians and audiences. It has become impossible to truly idolize anyone anymore because it is inevitable you will learn that he or she had an unfortunate incident on an airplane, for instance.

I'm with Aerosmith on this one. Toys should be kept in attics.

Up Next: R.E.M., Green, 1988

When Good Things Happen to Great Bands

Album: R.E.M., Document, 1987

Best Track: "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)"

Lasting Memory: As I wrote a long time ago, I saw R.E.M. in concert in 1987, when the band was touring in support of Document. While the boys from Athens were largely outshone as a live act by their Atlanta-based opening act Drivin' n' Cryin', R.E.M. did deliver for me my first lighter-waving moment.

It is such a cliche to wave lighters overhead when a band slips into its iconic power ballad that it can only be done ironically now -- and with cell phones.

Twenty-two years ago, standing on a basketball court, listening to "King of Birds," I would have raised my lighter high if I'd had one. I was already swaying like a mofo, and I may even have gotten a lump in my throat. I couldn't have told you then what the song was about, and I can't tell you now, but dang if "King of Birds" doesn't still grab me and make me all emotional and shit.

Document grabbed many millions of people. The Mrs. Now quatrain "The One I Love" broke R.E.M. into the Billboard Top 10, and the apocalyptic party anthem "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" secured R.E.M.'s promotion from "120 Minutes" poster boy to MTV after school staple.

The other thing Document did was set a rigid template for every subsequent R.E.M. album. It's a great template. Don't knock the template. But also recognize that every post-Document recorded document from R.E.M. contains precisely the same mix of mild political protest, quasi-electronica noodling, and sunshiny pop with a dark core. Further, almost all the later songs sound like slight variations of ones on Document.

By 1987, no band deserved superstardom more than R.E.M., and I'm glad the band got its due. R.E.M. just maybe didn't deserve its due for Document. Even though Time.com lists Document as one of the greatest albums of all time (only American, English, and Irish acts need apply), there is a strong case to be made that Document is only the fourth or fifth best album in R.E.M.'s own catalog. It is certainly not seminal in the way 1983's Murmur was, nor is it iconic in the way 1991's Out of Time would become.

Still, there is not even the faintest whiff of the sell out about Document. It's not as if R.E.M. completely changed its sound and look just so the band could enjoy some chart success. So, good on them.

Up Next: R.E.M., Dead Letter Office, 1987

A Modest Proposal

According to estimates made public late yesterday, Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt sooner rather than later. A commentator on today's NPR Morning Edition said that securing the financial viability of these federal safety net programs would be as simple as noticeably raising payroll taxes or substantially lowering payments to beneficiaries.

I believe I have a better idea. Legalize narcotics and encourage people to use them in copious amounts. Get preteens smoking cigarettes again. Convince everyone that Jerry Springer-guest fat really is where it's at. Lift all speed limits and remove seat belts, airbags, and child seats from cars. Do away with most environmental and food safety regulations.

The underlying problem with Medicare and Social Security is that too many damn people are sticking around long enough to collect benefits. When president Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law in 1935, eligibility began at age 60 and the average life expectancy for Americans born in 1900 was just longer than 47 years. Ah, the good old days of promises the government didn't have to keep.

But even more than that, it seems like everyone has just lost their interest in doing right by society by checking out early. Anymore, no one seems willing to ignore that lump. Fewer and fewer people want to do their civic duty and not call 911 after that chain saw accident.

So here's the choice: Pay more and get less or work to keep people out of the pool. But, you know, only those people who aren't related to me. And certainly not my friends and aquaintenances. All of those people deserve every cent the government can spend and more.

Once Through This Portal, There Is No Return

Album: R.E.M., Life's Rich Pageant, 1986

Best Track: "I Believe"

Lasting Memory: A good portion of every paycheck I got from every job I worked in high school was spent on cassettes. No sooner would I have deposited my $167 for 80 hours of labor, then I'd be at the mall record store spending about a quarter of that money on magnetized cellophane encased in plastic.

I don't want to give myself too much credit, but I think it's fair to say that I was the fuel that drove the engine of the mid-1980s American music industry. Without my weekly contributions of 30 or 40 bucks, the whole system of rock 'n' roll would have come crashing down and the world would never have been able to basic in the sonic wonders of big stars like White Lion and Pebbles.

Being unschooled in the ways of art and unable to appreciate the true awesomeness of such radio staples, however, I always opted to spend my hard-won cash on album's like R.E.M.'s Life's Rich Pageant. I should probably feel foolish -- if not outright ashamed -- to this day for making such choices, but the ear's heart wants what it wants.

R.E.M. in 1986 was a year and an album away from scoring a Top 40 radio and MTV hit, but they were on the cusp of breaking big with Pageant in terms of both sales and sound. In fact, I could not listen to Pageant just now without being struck by how transitional most of the songs on the album are. Pageant stands as the collection where R.E.M. made the switch from Southern Gothic bar band to arena rockers.

The change was not entirely unwelcome, but it was sharp and sudden. In sentiment, lyrical content, and tonality, there is little enough difference between Murmur's "Sitting Still" and Pageant's "I Believe," but the execution of the two songs couldn't be more different. Whereas "Sitting Still" is raucous, "I Believe" is ROCKous. The former is fun, the latter is big.

R.E.M. was obviously swinging for the fences on Pageant, and why the first single off the album, "Fall on Me," wasn't the band's first huge hit is anyone's guess. "These Days," "Hyena," and "Just a Touch" also wrap up the jangle thing on which R.E.M. had made its name in listener-friendly packages that radio programmers largely ignored for reasons known only to themselves.

The problem, if it can be so named, with R.E.M.'s turn to the rock mainstream is that once they put themselves on that path, they could never turn back. From the moment the opening chords of "I Believe" were first written in 1985, it was inevitable that "What's the Frequency, Kenneth" would be written in 1993. R.E.M. had perfected the formula for creating noisy crowd pleasers, and they weren't going to abandon that formula.

To quote some of the band's "I Believe" lyrics back at them,

... practice, practice makes perfect
Perfect is a fault
And fault lines change

Fault lines never return to their original shape, however. Without hating the latter-day version, I miss the old R.E.M. Good thing, then, that I held on to my cassettes.

Up Next: R.E.M., Document, 1987

It's Kind of a Concept

Album: R.E.M., Fables of the Reconstruction, 1985

Best Track: "Life and How to Live It"

Lasting Memory: I harbored delusions of rock stardom for exactly 19 years too long. Which is why, at age 19, I toyed with the idea of joining a college friend's cover band as a singer. Specifically, this friend wanted to perform a lot of R.E.M. songs.

I pretty much already knew at that time that I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, but trying to master the vocal stylings of Michael Stipe and Mike Mills ultimately shamed me into giving up my never-started music career.

If you need to be similarly disabused of your dreams, try singing "Maps and Legends" or "Driver 8" off of R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction. If you think you have succeeded, you are either lying to yourself, or you are Michael or Mike. If the latter is the case, how you guys doing?

R.E.M. didn't record Fables to crush my groove, of course. Rather, it appears the band's intent was to construct something very much a like a concept album about living in the last days of antebellum Georgia. Peopled with characters such as "Old Man Kensey" and "Wendell Gee," the world of Fables is very much one Flannery O'Connor would recognized.

All the residents are barely harmless madmen like the real-life person whose tale is told in the album standout "Life and How to Live It." In a story that I can't remember why I heard but which I will never forget, Michael Stipe once explained that "Life and How to Live It" was the title of a self-published book Stipe found hundreds of copies of while helping neighbors clean out the house of a recently deceased, familyless other neighbor.

The book, discovered in the basement of a house divided exactly down the middle and having different sets of furniture and clothing in each half, explained that the best thing a person could do to remain sane was live as one person for six months or so, and then live as a completely different person for the next period of time.

To borrow the lyrics of another one of Fable's songs, "Maybe these maps and legends have been misunderstood." But then again, "the power lines have floaters so the airplanes wont get snagged."

Driving home the concept that Fables was aimed at expressing, the original album cover -- not the one shown above -- was printed in such a way that the title could be read as either Fables of the Reconstruction or as Reconstruction of the Fables. Then the band throws a reinterpretation of "Green Grow the Rushes," which describes the collapse of the agriculture-based economy of the rural South, onto the album. Then the band throws the original "Auctioneer (Another Engine)," which describes the collapse of the dual ties to the people and the land alongside the increasing difficulty of escaping from either, onto the album.

The world of Fables was a weird and depressing place, much like most of the American South in the century and change following the Civil War. Good thing, then, that Georgians have finally put their Confederate legacy to rest and fully emerged as the model of twenty-first century citizens of the world who are not at all haunted by their past.

Up Next: R.E.M., Life's Rich Pageant, 1986

And Then for Something Completely Different

Album: R.E.M., Murmur, 1983 (dub)

Best Track: "Catapult"

Lasting Memory: Arranged chronologically from 1981 through 1985, the record of my album acquisitions would start strongly with the Who's The Kids Are Alright and quickly reach the nadir of Twisted Sister's Stay Hungry. Taping R.E.M.'s Murmur off a friend's dubbed copy of Murmur during the fall of my freshman year of high school righted my musical ship.

In fact, listening to Murmur was a downright conversion experience. I taped the R.E.M. album over my up-to-then revered copy of J. Giels Band's Showtime. Also, as near as I can figure, the only cheesy heavy metal album I bought for the first time after 1984 was Triumph's greatest hits compilation Classics. Still can't get enough "Fight the Good Fight," even to this day. But that's a post for another day.

What is most cromulent now is that there was something about the sound of R.E.M.'s music that grabbed me pretty much instantly and never let go. That reads stupid, I know. All music sounds, but what I'm trying to convey is that the strained-almost-to-breaking jangle and nearly indecipherable not-quite-high-lonesome vocals appealed to me in a way that no other music ever really had.

R.E.M. was my gateway to the contemporary urban folk of artists like Billy Bragg, the traditional country of titans like George Jones, and yet-to-be fusioned alt country of bands like Uncle Tupelo. And R.E.M. was so much unlike any other band being played on the radio in the early 1980s that the music it made, for all any high schoolers knew in those pre-Internet days, constituted a genre unto itself.

Of course, it bears mentioning, as someone who I can no longer identify accurately did decades ago, that no album has ever been more accurately titled than Murmur. Without looking them up, just try to figure out all the lyrics to "Radio Free Europe" or "Shaking Through."

But don't they sound great?

Even greater sounding, to me anyway, are "Perfect Circle" and "Catapult," in which the pretty nonsensical lyrics are reasonably audible. Maybe the inverse property applies, meaning R.E.M.'s lyrics make more sense the harder they are to understand. I'll never know because I truly enjoy the murmuring. It's very comforting, especially when heard coming off my 27-year-old third-generation dubbed cassette and through the impossibly cheap speakers of my 19-year-old mini boom box.

Two other standout tracks off the truly seminal debut full-length album that is Murmur are "Laughing" and "West of These Fields." I've no further insights on the songs, but in chasing down the video links, I found myself marvelling at what advanced sound board recording and stage videotaping setups R.E.M. had when they were first starting out. The boys from Athens, Ga., must have know from the beginning that they would be one of the biggest bands in the world.

Time and events proved them were correct, but the presumption seems a little, well, presumptuous.

Up Next: R.E.M. Fables of the Reconstruction, 1985

Up From Under

Ol' Gil is comin' back. Cha cha cha ...

Last week, I copyedited the equivalent of two scholarly books -- more than 400 pages in all, with extensive bibliographies, tables, figures, and footnotes. Plus, the two sets of manuscripts used different editorial styles.

The week before last wasn't much better workload-wise.

But by noon today, my desk will be clear. WHEW! It'll be nice for a while to not have to work 14-hour days. That written, if you have projects that start after May 15, I'm available.

Expect regular-ish postings to resume tomorrow. In honor of my reentry into the world of the worldly, here's a video:

(H/T Joe Guse)