the riley rock report

Drummer Georgia Hubley turns 66 on February 9, a convenient excuse to plug a favorite covers album that vies with the best. Fakebook's map points every which-way but weak, done respectfully but without pretense or caution, and shared like a favorite quilt. I wrote it up for the Phoenix in 1990, before used records stores started to feel nostalgic… PEOPLE STILL COMPLAIN that they "can't understand pop lyrics," another way of asserting that Tin Pan Alley lounge-bar standards will forever outclass that noisy rock and roll. Not so. What the nay-sayers overlook is rock's song catalog, which is not only sturdy but flexible and overripe for singers to raid.Most acts use cover records to kill time (Todd Rundgren's Faithful), pay respects (Metallica's Garage Days Revisited), or tout range (Siouxsie and the Banshees' Through the Looking Glass), instead of refurbishing guilty pleasures that send you gushing back to the source and digging out your Flamin' Groovies collection. But the thesis behind Yo La Tengo's insinuating summer sleeper Fakebook is that even stooge records (like The Flying Burrito Brothers’ 3rd) have silver linings. Even some of the album's original electric haunts (like "Barnaby, Hardly Working") go down as hushed revelations. Fakebook is a soft-focus record that reveals its edge in dark whispers. Georgia Hubley never uses more than brushes on her snare and cymbal, Ira Kaplan strums a rather stiff acoustic six-string, and Dave Schramm places his bittersweet steel-guitar touches with the care of acupuncture needles.Rock liberated the singer (Dylan, Hendrix, Rotten), and as Kaplan shows, you don't have to be a crooner to master the soft touch. Kaplan's wobbly self-consciousness imbues these songs with just the right inward momentum. It's as if they set out to make a record-length version of "Alyda," the gentle ebb-and-sway duet that made last year's President Yo La Tengo such a knowing dialogue between electric fallout and acoustic repose.Bright shiny ideas straight to your inbox. Click like the wind! Like any former rock critic, Kaplan has a record jones, and his vinyl pancakes don't just sit there. Kaplan is such a Mets fan that he named his group (which also includes Al Greller on upright bass) in honor of the team's original shortstop, Elio Chacón, who yelped out "Yo la tengo!" ("I got it!") every time he went after a pop-up. To confront the critic-wannabe cynicism, Kaplan plugged in and retooled himself into a guitar hero of fierce proportions. Just listen to "Orange Song" on the newly available CD of President Yo La Tengo/New Wave Hot Dog, which includes their 1987 single "The Asparagus Song" backed with Neil Young's "For the Turnstiles."Hubley has such a natural way with a song that it's clear Kaplan's sponging vocal ideas off of her—rock critic marries female drummer and learns how to sing.Yo La Tengo shows have always been known for pushing past this nice Jewish boy's intellect and heading straight for Dante's playground. And live, the band excel with covers, which are often textbook-snoot: Bob Dylan's "I Threw It All Away," Neil Young's "Turnstiles," and Lou Reed's "It’s Alright (The Way That You Live)." Each a map for how non-singers can inform outré lyrics, they also model rock's un-hedging credo of mood over meaning. Fakebook combines arguments: Kaplan adopts an unassuming, non-singer delivery style that makes you sit up and listen, and he's put together a set of songs that sound like instant classics. Not only does Kaplan's drummer wife, Hubley, sing more on this record (on Kaplan's "What Comes Next?" and NRBQ's "What Can I Say?"), but some of the best moments come during their duets. And Hubley does more than give Kaplan something steady to work off: She has such a natural way with a song that it's clear he's sponging vocal ideas off of her—rock critic marries female drummer and learns how to sing.On paper, you have to give Kaplan's taste the benefit of the doubt; he'll do a song by Cat Stevens if he likes it ("Here Comes My Baby," a hit for the Tremeloes in the '60s). And he redeems the home-made credulousness of "Speeding Motorcycle" by Daniel Johnston (Seattle's Jonathan Richman, only simpler). But when you hear Ray Davies' "Oklahoma, U.S.A.," you'll swear you've heard it before and pray that it's on your Kinks Kronicles. (It's not.) For frat hazing, there's "Emulsified," a "Monster Mash" clone by the Mighty Cravers that turns its source into as essential a collection as Nuggets (the At the Party compilation, on Candy Records). And "Yellow Sarong" will lead you to raid your friends' stash for anything by The Scene Is Now.It's not jazz standards that are dead, it's lounge bars. And if people do still want to go out and hear the old tunes, these are the ones they'd rather hear, even if they've never heard them before. Fakebook isn't just an album for fans, like Joan Jett's The Hit List. It's a record about fandom that sends you packing to the used record store.the tunes we carryhttps://music.apple.com/us/playlist/the-february-thang-riley-rock-booth/pl.u-Xy3JfZYgZMzVisit the new playlists page, with monthly custom threads and archival anomalies, including: a Willie Nelson Stardust Deluxe that sews up all the old stuff nicely, a Beck roundelay that lives up to his haircut, and more…noises off* From the archives: Jimi Hendrix Meets the BBC, Peter Carlin nails Springsteen to the cross, and the Simpsons transcend their worst prophecies…* Coming soon: Peter Richardson’s new book, Brand New Beat, on the history of Rolling Stone Magazine* riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

Musicologists have avoided Dylan longer than most other academics, in part because of how folk culture enters intellectual frames only gradually. Academics also need to invent new terms to deal with vernacular speech and how recorded sound differs from written notation. I took aim at this in Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary (1992): “Bob Dylan’s voice can crook emotion the way a prism refracts light…” to contrast against the “written” studio ethic the Beatles developed at Abbey Road (in my first book, Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary, 1988). Guitarist and theory professor Steven Rings has now bridged more of this gap in What Did You Hear? from University of Chicago Press. Tim Riley: Well, Steven, what a wonderful book. Man, do I love this book. It’s so valuable, it’s so interesting, and I’m so taken with it. The first things I wanted to mention were that I just love this analysis of “I Believe in You,” the gospel song, and the high notes that he can’t hit with each pass. And then he finally hits the high note and it’s very satisfying. And then you’re left to wonder, well, is that all just for show? Just really a wonderful, wonderful reading of that song.Steven Rings: Oh, thank you.Tim Riley: And then I love the way you write about “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met),” and then you go to the live version of it, and then that is the first thing he says to the audience when he gets heckled. Oh my God, that is just a bullseye. How have we never noticed that before? I mean, that’s just really, really great. [I’m curious about] what your specialty was as a young music theorist, what you focused on, and how you arrived at the University of Chicago, all of [00:01:00] that. So, the pre-history here.Steven Rings: So, my prehistory… I grew up in Minnesota, though not Bob Dylan’s Minnesota. I grew up in the southeastern part of the state. It’s really a different world. I grew up in the Scandinavian, Lutheran Minnesota. I’ve learned a lot about Hibbing, in the Iron Range, over the course of this. There’s this wonderful book by Dave Engel about his background in Hibbing, and all the ethnic groups that came to work in the mines up there, and it’s a different world. But in any case, Bob Dylan was everywhere as I was growing up.I was a guitar player early on. I also played piano as a little kid, like, dutifully did my piano lessons, but it was the guitar that I really took off with around age 10, played in a lot of bands, and that kind of thing.Some things you never get used to. Other things come free in your inbox bi-weekly: But then I switched to classical guitar in my teens, [00:02:00] and that’s what my first career was. I did an undergraduate degree in that, and then I taught in Portugal for a little while.So, that was my kind of, I mean, in the music world, people would sometimes say legit, that was my legit phase. But then I developed a hand injury in the late ‘90s, and that ended my performing career.So, I pivoted into academia. I always knew that I had a knack for music theory, and decided to pursue that. I went to one of the programs that’s the conservative home of American music theory, which is Yale, and ended up doing a first book that was very technical, mathematical music theory. But I always wanted to return to my pop music roots.I had been a Bob Dylan fan for a long time, and really felt that as a research project it would scratch [00:03:00] an itch. I just wanted to spend time with the music, and now that I’d gotten my first book out the door, I could choose a little more what I was spending time with.The other part was that I wanted to write about something that I figured academic music theory would have very little ready to say about. Bob Dylan doesn’t use very many harmonies, forms are pretty straightforward, and so on.And yet, there is so much richness, and so much complexity, in this music of a different kind, that has to do with performative idiosyncrasy, performative inconsistency, all of these things that I talk about in the introduction to the book. And you know, to be honest, early on I felt like, wow, why did I set myself this challenge?I found it really hard to grapple with at first, and to think about [00:04:00] how to engage his music. But by the time the book was finished, I was cutting enormous amounts of things, cutting chapters, I had so much more to say. So, it almost strikes me as kind of comical that early on I was, like, oh, how do I even engage this? I ended up having so much to say.I say this with a caveat: I think some of these things are quite deliberate. I think others are not. I think there are a lot of things that show that this is just his musical way of being. He’s a very, very experimental musician. And I don’t mean that in the sense of post-war avant garde. I mean it in the sense that experiment is just his thing, and a lot of experiments go sideways and sometimes you hit gold with them. And so, I think sometimes it’s much more a question of trying something out and seeing what sticks.Tim Riley: Well, I’ve read a lot in this space, and music theorists really do have trouble with this aesthetic. I think you do a really good job of describing the challenge and then providing lots of visual and oral examples as the evidence of what you’re talking about, and how you’re making sense of it.I’m really curious how the music theory people embrace this book, ‘cause in my lifetime (and my background is classical [00:05:00] piano), when I was going to school there was just high and low culture. And high people just did not have any patience for low culture. In my lifetime, I have seen those distinctions largely evaporate. Now, people like us can teach this material at the college level, and it’s entirely respectable. It was not respectable 40 years ago, 50 years ago. And I think there’s been a lot of challenge for exactly how to do it.I’ve always thought [Twilight of the Gods musicologist] Wilfred Millers was funny, when he says that the E major chord at the end of Sgt. Pepper is reminiscent of [Gustav] Mahler’s E Major chord at the end of his Fourth Symphony. And I was a young buck, but I was really tough on Christopher Ricks for writing a book about Dylan that did not mention Woody Guthrie [Visions of Sin, 2004]. This just seemed to me, like, how is that possible? And yet, he’s full of insight. He’s full of really interesting textual analysis. You can’t write him [00:06:00] off, but it’s just from such a completely different plane.So, I’m curious how you think about it. The way I try to explain it to my students is that we have two very strong traditions: We have a written tradition, and we have an oral tradition. And most of academia was obsessed with the written tradition for the longest time. Now, we’re seeing this oral tradition. It has landed mostly in ethnomusicology departments. However, you see political scientists engage with rock studies. You see literary people engage in rock studies. So, there’s a number of different portals, and it’s sort of like we’re waiting for it to land, you know?Jazz is interesting because jazz combines the two. Sometimes it starts as oral, and it winds up getting written down. Other times, you’re using a lead sheet and that’s the starting point.Steven Rings: Or in the swing era, it’s usually elaborate charts, and so on. Tim Riley: Right. [00:07:00] I find your approach really persuasive and convincing. Steven Rings: Thank you. In answer to your question, the book is sort of just out, so I only have a hint of how music theorists are reacting to it. Music theory as an academic discipline has been in a moment of reckoning since 2020, and is in the process of reorienting from a highly textualist classical music paradigm, to a paradigm where non-notated traditions are central. At this point, the most work is being produced in popular music… more * What Did You Hear? The Music of Bob Dylan, by Steven Rings (Chicago University Press, 2025)* Scott Warmuth: on Chronicles, Vol. I, an… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

John Lennon would have turned 85 on October 9, cue the holiday box set. Some Time in New York City (1972) still gets underrated, as does Rock and Roll (see this), and Lennon’s vocals win those arguments handily. (Some young turk should re-mash “Luck of the Irish” to omit that cringe Ono bridge.) The Elephants Memory band can still sound amateurish, but that counted for a lot in 1972, much like Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company, or Country Joe and the Fish. Sounding “slick” and “professional” in those days counted as inauthentic, and guess who needs those kinds of politics more than ever. “Woman Is the N_word of the World,” as soaring gospel imprecation takes a certain nerve, and Lennon was that rarity: a deeply humane troubled soul with the chutzpah to shoot off his mouth. “New York City” stands up against any Chuck Berry ditty you’d like to summon (The Who’s “Long Live Rock,” for example). In tribute, here’s the preface to my 2011 biography…“When two great Saints meet, it is a humbling experience. The long battles to prove he was a saint . . .”—Paul McCartney, dedication to Two Virgins (1968)WHEN JOHN LENNON presented his fellow Beatles with the cover art forUnfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins in November of 1968, everybody recoiled. McCartney’s quote sat beneath a photo of Lennon and his lover, Yoko Ono, naked in their bedroom with postcoital grins. EMI’s lordly chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, refused to distribute the record, pronouncing John and Yoko “ugly.” In America, Capitol Records balked, and even when the album was shipped through an independent distributor, New Jersey authorities confiscated thirty thousand copies, declaring the cover “obscene.” Controversy subsumed the record’s experimental sounds. Nobody could understand why Lennon would deliberately extend the public-relations debacle he had already created by leaving his British wife and child for the Japanese-American “conceptual artist,” especially on the eve of the first Beatles album in eighteen months, the double White Album (originally The Beatles).Loose exchanges, precious little respect…Pledge your supportTime has papered over the photograph’s insolence: Lennon was pouring acid on the Beatle myth, demonstrating how shallow and ridiculous pop stardom seemed even as his band hit new creative peaks. This would be just the first of many media campaigns he waged to kick his way out of the Beatles.He rebuilt his peacenik/politico façade while ridiculing his former partner McCartney (in “How Do You Sleep?”), before careening into a hackneyed drunken-celebrity “lost weekend” in the early 1970s…That July of 1968, when this insouciant photograph was taken, the Beatles were slogging through the “poisonous” White Album sessions that prompted EMI engineer Geoff Emerick to quit in a huff. Drummer Ringo Starr walked out soon thereafter. The Lennon and McCartney songwriting collaboration had long since trailed off into independent work, even though the songs still bore the trademark Lennon-McCartney authorship. Increasingly, their partnership had graduated from aesthetic one-upmanship to outright conflict: in that same hectic period, the band vetoed Lennon’s first rendition of “Revolution” as too slow, and even the blazing remake sat on the flip side of McCartney’s “Hey Jude,” the band’s revitalizing summer single.To the others, this widening rift coincided with Yoko Ono’s divisive presence. Lennon could not have chosen a more passive-aggressive way to disrupt the group’s chemistry. Yoko planted herself not only at recording sessions but at private group demos and Apple business meetings, offering comments as if she were a de facto member of the band. Not even the “Beatle wives” had ever been granted such access. She roamed the EMI studios unfettered, without so much as an introduction to George Martin, the band’s producer.But whatever resentments among the band, the bond between Lennon and Ono was already immune to protest. By now, some forty [sic] years after the group’s breakup, the Lennon legend has graduated into myth of an entirely different order than the one that turned him into an international rock star, the one he retired from for the last five years of his life to raise his son Sean. On the radio, he sings to us from some idealized Tower of Song, frozen in time and memory like Buddy Holly or Eddie Cochran, those creative martyrs who haunted his own impressionable adolescence.ShareThe remaining three Beatles reunited in the mid-1990s to tell their own version of their story with the Anthology video and book, the band’s story tunneled into nostalgia. In 2000, the greatest-hits album 1 became the fastest-selling CD in history, reached number one in twenty-eight countries, and went on to sell more than thirty-one million copies worldwide, the best-selling album of the decade in the United States. At decade’s end, the Beatles became the best-selling band of the new millennium. (This would be the last release guitarist George Harrison oversaw directly; he died in November of 2001.) In 2006, the Cirque du Soleil’s Love began selling out six shows a week in a Las Vegas theater with a customized sound system by producer George Martin and his son, Giles. Its remashed soundtrack became still another huge hit.Lennon’s own story, of course, had passed through rock’s looking glass long before. He hovered over every frame of the Anthology, and his familiar quotes heaved with subtext: it was hard to imagine Lennon participating in such a whitewashed, sentimental project devoted to enshrining a myth he had done so much to puncture during his lifetime. His post-Beatles revolts linked the personal with the aesthetic: he first ran off with Yoko Ono, then married her the week after McCartney married Linda Eastman, then howled at the demise of the Beatles (on 1970’s blistering Plastic Ono Band) even as he subtly helped to engineer it. He rebuilt his peacenik/politico façade while ridiculing his former partner McCartney (in “How Do You Sleep?”), before careening into a hackneyed drunken-celebrity “lost weekend” in the early 1970s. Finally, after winning a long immigration battle with the Nixon administration, he washed up onto the shores of storybook “monogamy” and parenthood during a five-year sabbatical. His assassination in 1980 quelled Beatle reunion rumors, but only temporarily…continue reading here...MORE* Power to the People box set, 9 CDs, including One to One charity concert, 1972* The Lenono [sic] Grant for Peace* Plastic Ono Band box (2022)* The Beatles Anthology Volume 4, with “Helter Skelter” take 17* The Beatles Bible, About the Beatles, David Haber’s Beatles Links List,The Art of John Lennon, FestforBeatlesfans, more Beatles links hereand here* Christoper Newport University primary source archive* more Beatles links on timrileyauthor.comreading pileJohn Foster Barlow’s Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times (with Robert Greenfield, Crown, 2019) features choice quotes from Brazil’s Gilberto Gil and Wyoming’s Dick Cheney to move his story along. When he’s not tripping at Radio City Music Hall with JFK Jr, he’s prompting Jackie Kennedy’s thoughts on fame:I’m really kind of shy. But I wanted to be with [JFK] and if that was the price, I was willing to pay it. I then came to see that people were making a big deal out of me, too. At first, I liked this. But then it made me feel like prey. Gradually, I realized that all this stuff in the press really wasn’t about me. It was actually a comic strip that had a character in it that looked like me and did some of the things I did but wasn’t me. It was something they were making up. And I read it quite avidly for a while, and then I realized that it was making me sick so I stopped…noises off* From the archives: hagiography is his “middle” name: Springsteen and Landau Do Hollywood; George Clinton abides in the deepest funk; and Babygirl has nothing on Dying for Sex. * Also: Tom Petty’s “American Girl” for One Battle After Another’s closing credi… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

Peter Carlin and I met while checking out that cringey Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil show LOVE way back in the olden times before Obama, and we’ve kept in touch. He was working on his Paul book while I was working on John, and he gives good blurb. Carlin worked his way into Springsteen’s crew when he wrote his biography, and created alliances that make his new book on Born to Run, now 50, a worthwhile read. I asked him to own up to all those sordid rumors, and he did not: Peter Carlin: Well, when I finished my R.E.M. book, I took a little time off to lick my wounds, and then I had a bunch of time between when the book was done and its publication, and I started scratching around and thinking about what to do next. I'd had an idea for a long time—I was looking around at writing about something set in the '70s.Later in the decade, there was an interesting moment where rock'n'roll became institutionalized, in a sense. When Jimmy Carter became president and, suddenly, you know, you heard all these tales, you know, any band going through DC would stop off and visit the president in the White House, which obviously had never been the case before.We can’t even think of a word that rhymes: And rock'n'roll was kids' music, and counterculture music. There was no exchange between the White House and rock'n'roll, and that began to change. But I got into that, and there were some other coincidental things happening in the culture at the same time, and I thought, well, that's interesting, but it just didn't speak to me.I was trying to [00:01:00] write a proposal, and get my thoughts together, and I kept bumping up against the fact that it just wasn't touching me. I just didn't feel that sense of drive and internal disquiet that really compels you to take on a book.The extent of control that he required, and needing to know every single note, and even the silences between the notes were exactly right, was because this was it: there would be no tomorrow…I was thinking about other stuff that had happened around them, and I began to realize like, wait a second, it's been 50 years, or it will be next year, 50 years since "Born to Run." And I thought of the several boxes of archives I had left over from the Springsteen biography, and I just thought, oh, I bet I have a ton of leftover stuff in there about "Born to Run"—I should do something on that. So I talked about it with my agent who, after months of hearing me complain about my inability to write this other book was like, "Yeah, do that." And so I wrote a quick proposal and my editor at Doubleday was immediately in.Then, I talked to Jon Landau, Bruce's manager. I'd actually floated it by him when I was catching up with [00:02:00] him backstage at a show in San Francisco and I said, you know, "This is something I might want to do next." He was immediately like, "Oh, I think we could be up for that."So once the deal was done, I wrote to them and said, "Hey, this is actually going forward. I'd love to talk to you guys about 'Born to Run.'" Fairly immediately I got a note back from Jon saying we (Jon and Bruce) would both be into doing that. So then they were on board. The challenge was that in March of 2024, the deal kind of unfolded on Doubleday's end.You know how publishing works. You need a lot of lead time between when you submit the manuscript and when the book comes out. Usually, it's a year (or even more) depending on the project. And this time around, clearly we weren't gonna have a year. The message was: if you can do this by October, then let's do this.And I was like, okay, well, what else am I doing? So the clock was ticking from the [00:03:00] moment we all shook hands on it. I just dove right in and obviously the first thing I did was dig through all my leftover material from the biography, and then I suddenly realized, oh, I don't have that much leftover "Born to Run" stuff after all. Doing the biography was a story, you know. It was 60-plus years of a man's life, and none of it wasn't interesting.It seemed key to this great big epic story of Bruce's life. There were certain parts of that book that got in real deep into the making of particular records, but somehow the making of "Born to Run" was more lightly sketched. Fortunately, I could hit the ground at a pretty fast clip because I still had all my contact information left over, and so I knew how to get in touch with people, and they knew who I was, and they knew Bruce and Jon were into the project. So it was [00:04:00] relatively easy to get in touch with everyone, to connect with them, and to get to start talking to them, and collecting more information.I very quickly ran to the usual archives, the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, and the Springsteen Center in Monmouth. And then, I began ringing people up and visiting folks. Once that was done, I canceled all of my social plans and did nothing until it was done, which was in early November… MORE * Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run: publisher page* Peter Carlin author page* Bruce Springsteen.net: many of the Live Series editions pouring out of this shop have great reach and durability, just avoid Only the Strong Survive.* The riley rock report interview with Warren Zanes on Deliver Me From Nowhere, the basis for the new film. New Nebraska package imminent. * Peter Carlin appears at the Texas Book Festival in Austin on November 8 hot licks & rhetoricThe newsletter archives include implicit commentary on last week’s events: Kimmel met his moment, but he still looks tame by Jen Friedman’s standards. She walked up in front of the dude at a rally talking on the phone, ignoring him for the whole world to see. Jeremy Braddock keeps working on his Firesign Theatre project, including recent talks… and the new Darren Aronofsky film Caught Stealing, has faded rapidly, but so have a few other “mid-budget” thrillers this year. Austin Butler keeps on thumping it, and, in a casting twist to match the thriller’s wit, Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio show up as Hasidic gangsters.This hagiographic Cameron Crowe NYT profile doesn’t mention Roadies (Showtime, 2016), his TV show which extends Almost Famous out into an real-time tour, with Carla Gugino, Imogen Poots, and Luke Wilson. The central irony of his career remains: he didn’t grow up to work as a critic, he grew up to make movies. The Carol Kaye portrait, where she refuses to accept a R&R Hall of Fame induction, fares better. And she doesn’t say it, but it’s obvious: that organization has a Big Gender Problem (Evelyn McDonell, 2011).Few books explain the conflicting American narratives better than A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America by Richard Slotkin, which came out last year and doesn’t feel an inch out of date. Given publishing time lags, this counts as magnificent.Riley appearances“No Limits: Tina Turner’s Global Feminism”Tina Turner Heritage Days in Greenwood, TennesseeSaturday, September 26, 2pm“Rubber Soul Defies Context”EF4Fest Celebrates Rubber Soul at 60November 6-8, Berkeley Oceanfront Hotel, Asbury Park, New JerseyWith Rob Sheffield, Nellie McKay, and othersnoises off* recent Instagram posts: Chris Thile’s Bach Vol 2, Etta James, and LBJ’s scar. * Coming soon: Peter Richardson’s Brand New Beat, on the history of Rolling Stone Magazine; and Peter Doggett’s Brian Wilson book, Surf’s Up, out in England.* riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

Grateful Dead books now rival those about Springsteen, Dylan, and the Beatles in the rock publishing market. Brian Anderson’s Loud and Clear chronicles its quest to create a Wall of Sound concert experience that reproduced the clarity and separation of home stereos. Stanley Owsley, the audiophile designer—and the real-life inspiration for Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne”—insisted on separating as many audio channels as possible. The band poured its resources into realizing Owsley’s hi-fi ambitions, striving for maximum concert fidelity marked by exceptional clarity, volume, and balance. The Dead’s story runs parallel to the Beatles’ studio innovations in the previous decade and has influenced everything from modern touring workflows to venues like the Sphere in Las Vegas. Anderson, who grew up outside Chicago with Deadhead parents, interviewed many key crew members for this vivid account…Tim Riley:So, I want to start by talking to you just about your background. Your parents were Deadheads, they met at Dead shows, and so you came of age in a house where the Dead were like this staple, right? Give us an idea of your background, what your first show was, and what led you to this book project.Brian Anderson:Thanks for your interest in the book. It really means a lot.We don’t like plugging our own product. Just sign up and leave us alone. My parents were early Deadheads who were orbiting the band, and each other, while seeing the band perform in the early to mid-'70s, right in this Wall of Sound era. I really grew up hearing my parents talk about the sonic clarity of this sound system that the band was touring with, right? So, my parents would just kind of regale us with stories about seeing the band back in this era when they had this mountain of speakers behind them. Every time they saw the band, this mountain was getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And this mountain of speakers was called the Wall of Sound, and it kind of blew everyone's mind.…one point that I really try to drive home in the book is that the Wall of Sound did not just drop out of the clear blue sky fully formed one day in 1974. It was this years-long progression that really began when the band began, you know? It was this show-by-show incremental growth and evolution, through fits and starts and trial and error.When I was just a toddler in the late '80s, I went to my first Grateful Dead show. Really, my earliest flashes of memory are seeing the Dead performing on stage when I was just two, three years old. So, this stuff has been around for my whole life.I've always been captivated by the visual of the Wall of Sound. Fast forward to 2015: I was an editor at Vice, and I wrote and published an initial 9,000 word feature story about the Wall of Sound. It just happened to coincide with the Chicago run of the Fare Thee Well shows that were celebrating the band's 50th anniversary. That story ended up getting a bunch of attention, and I remember foolishly thinking after that story came out that "surely this is the definitive take on the Wall of Sound."It only took a couple of days or weeks after that for me to realize that the initial 9,000 word web story really only scratched the surface of a much deeper story about obsession and titanic human achievement in the Dead's quest for audio perfection. So I kept gathering bits of string, and I kept in touch with sources that I spoke with for that initial story, and reached out to new ones as well.Then, in late 2021, I ended up acquiring a part of the Wall of Sound—and that really kicked this whole story into high gear.The meat of the book moves chronologically through this first grand 10-year era of the Grateful Dead, from the founding of the band in 1965 through the end of the Wall of Sound, right when the hiatus hits at the end of 1974. There've been so many books written about the Grateful Dead, which I think is a testament to the enduring legacy of the Grateful Dead phenomenon, but I knew that I didn't wanna write just another book about the Grateful Dead. You know, as a journalist you're always looking for, "What new can I say?" When I acquired this artifact from the Wall of Sound, I knew immediately that I had a very unique angle. I had a window to tell this much bigger story about obsession and titanic human achievement in the Dead's quest for audio perfection. And I could tell it through this artifact—it let me do that.Tim Riley:Most people don't understand what it takes to put an act like that on the road with equipment like that and how much expertise and familiarity it requires. And it turned into a beast that they were tweaking, as the Dead were playing.So, the first guy we have to talk about is Augustus Owsley Stanley, who you describe as an eccentric Kentucky born chemist, which I think is a very neat summary for a very big personality, big person. Talk to me about Stanley. He's been dead since, since when? You have a lot of testimony, and he has a very interesting story arc in this book. Tell us about Stanley.Brian Anderson:Yeah. Owsley is a very interesting character. He earned the nickname "Bear," because he had a very hairy chest. A lot of people in this world just refer to him as Bear. Bear died in a car accident in Australia in 2011, so we were never able to talk. He was a character in the book who is no longer around, who I wasn't able to interview, but he was so instrumental to leveling up the Dead from the very beginning. He first saw the band in late 1965, so very, very early days. He saw them at an early Acid Test, right? The Acid Tests were these psychedelic-fueled audio-visual happenings that took place along the West Coast over a number of months in late 1965 and early 1966. They were organized by Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. And the Dead were effectively the house band at the Acid Tests.Where the Grateful Dead story gets really interesting is in early 1966, when they spent a couple months in Los Angeles, where Owsley rented a giant house for them. And at that point, he basically gave the band his home Hi-Fi stereo system. So, that became an early iteration of their sound system. It was a single Macintosh and a pair of theater speakers—the big, horn-shaped speakers that you would see in old movie houses. So that was Owsley’s home Hi-Fi rig—and he gave that to the band. He would be sitting around watching them rehearse or perform around Los Angeles, and he would be high on his own supply of LSD, and he saw the sound of the band emanating out of his speakers in color.Owsley had synesthesia, so he could experience one sense through another. So, he saw sound as color, and this really had a profound impact on the way that he would be a force of ideas behind what eventually grew into the Wall of Sound. He had this realization, like, I have to remember what this is doing, what this feels like. And at the same time, he had an aversion to unclean signals, so distortion really bothered him.When you look at what the Wall of Sound grew into, over the span of 10 years, the Wall of Sound was six individual PA systems. Each performer had their own rig, and that eliminated what’s known as "intermodulation distortion." What that meant was that no two sound sources were going through the same output, right, because every musician had their own rig. That eliminated distortion. You can see Owsley’s influence there, with his aversion to unclean signals, which he was making very clear to the band from the very early days. He’s like, "we need to purify the signal path from the instrument to the speakers to the minds of the audience," right?… MORE * Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection, by Brian Anderson (St. Martin’s, 2025)* Owsley and Me: My LSD Family, by Rhoney Gissen with Tom Davis (Monkfish, 2013)* No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead by Peter Richardson (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2015)* All the Years Combine: The Grateful Dead in Fifty Shows, by Ray Robertson (… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

The January inauguration has thrown everything into twisted new context: trauma gloat turns prosaic, overstimulation mocks innocence. Suddenly, Severance’s cult of Kier feels cartoonish, like a miniature theme park. The many sex-driven scripts that wrapped in 2024 now feel like quaint throwbacks, and given the cowering media, the confusion-is-sex meme has ballooned in a puff. You can’t play that P. Diddy testimony for comedy, but parsing these soundtracks cues the gap between intent and effect.#Metoo has already produced some swell movies, like Bombshell, 2019 (an easy target that might have faltered), or Promising Young Woman, 2020 (fierce enough to spawn a backlash), and She Said, 2022 (which almost made the New York Times seem respectable again). But of course, Hollywood’s true nature circles around pulp, and the male gaze reasserts itself despite the relentless impulse to expose taboos. Anora’s Best Picture Oscar accented this conundrum: we root for the emotionally armored professional gal (Mikey Madison), but do we really want her to end up with… a Russian mobster? Any non-rapist will do? These are her choices? In Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022), Emma Thompson honors her desire enough to pay for a male prostitute (Daryl McCormack), and disrobes with disarming physical candor that makes her folly feel like charisma. The quietude of The Assistant (2019) underplays the mundane yet grating humiliations of an office drone (Julia Garner). As the latest Harvey Weinstein trial overlaps with Sean Combs’s freak-offs (rappers vie with moguls in debauchery), the Gods fret at how quickly outrage turns supercilious.Sex is the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” of liminal spaces. Spread the word. Hollywood’s box office might suggest that the high road to an erotic thriller with a 58-year-old female star lies in tapping a female director-screenwriter (Halina Reijn). Babygirl, a huge streaming hit, plays out a fairy tale about a flush CEO processing some intimate demons by cheating on her saintly husband (Antonio Banderas), realizing some stark truths about the Big Turn-On of High-Stakes Humiliation, and trading corporate success for honest orgasms. It’s so thin and manipulative you’d swear it was written by a misogynist. But no, Reijn, a highly regarded Nordic thespian directs this schlock and shoots for sincerity, even pathos. Disrobing at 58 gets treated as “brave.” In this soap opera it’s more like the shallow characters from Eyes Wide Shut return twenty-five years later for… more of the same phony outrage. And doesn’t Kidman already play some variant of this cliché in The Perfect Couple? The music underlines the confused messaging. After Samuel (the daunting Harris Dickinson, from Triangle of Sadness) dares Romy (Kidman) with a glass of milk at a bar, Mozart’s Lacrimosa swells up in the soundtrack, because of course a pivot into darkness calls for his Requiem, some algorithm deemed it so. In the scene where they get down to business, INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart” from 1987 circles the characters, as if that song provides mysterious allure. Oh please: He-Man Michael Hutchence, Model Feminist. Then we get George Michael’s “Father Figure,” that hack 1980s take on dime store bedroom psychology. These choices belie the piece’s forced earnestness. Because it treats grim situations with whimsy, you take the stakes a lot more seriously, and the characters live with you offscreen—you’d kill for this kind of bracing sanity in the face of death, and the characters seem to live outside the script. Nobody “understands” much about what turns them on, and kinks by definition confound political correctness. This does not resemble a sophisticated idea. And while everybody deserves their private fantasies, you don’t have to betray a partner to figure out your favorite positions. Reijn presents a false playbook, a completely narcissistic plunge into over-calculated carnality, where risking a family gets framed as the Ultimate Turn-On, and the scene that maps out permission and consent redefines hairy puppeteering. Gangster flicks put us in high-stakes scenes with low-IQ felons and ask us to sympathize. But what characters do we relate to here? Dickinson’s Samuel intuits what other people want, and he surfs that free-lance dom scene. He’s like a Sex Whisperer—in fact, Romy first spies him calming a mad dog on the street. After some defiantly unoriginal fisticuffs, Banderas’s husband complains, “Female masochism is a male fantasy,” to which Samuel replies “That’s a very narrow view of sexuality, actually.” That’s code for “nobody’s slumming here.” The interaction gets staged as the kid undercutting the husband with wise words of the newly enlightened. This Samuel character moves through these peoples’ lives with impunity, and the husband earns an extra halo because he learns how to bring Kidman to sincere orgasm. The bookend bit reinforces all this: in the “climactic” scene, Reijn crosscuts between Banderas servicing Kidman set against Dickinson in a hotel room—charming a dog. Does anybody really think betrayal leads to better sex? Comedy provides more possibilities, and more embrace. With laughs you get dividends, and less preaching. In 2002’s joyous Secretary, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader, sly smiles to the camera juiced up the tension, and a cool understanding of risks draped the encounters. It confused only the right-wing that’s constantly poised for outrage.In Hulu’s gut-busting Dying for Sex, Michelle Williams confronts a cancer diagnosis with a hard-won goal: to finally reach orgasm with another person (the script by Liz Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock stems from a podcast memoir from Molly Kochan). Because it treats grim situations with whimsy, you take the stakes a lot more seriously, and the characters live with you offscreen—you’d kill for this kind of bracing sanity in the face of death. Leaving her husband up front (good move) lands her on dating apps, a hilarious Nice Guy turn from SNL’s Marcello Hernández, and a deepening bond with her best friend, Jenny Slate (human kryptonite). Slate matches Williams for spark and resolve, and the stiff, prim Dr. Pankowitz (David Rasche) even gets a comic arc. The social worker Sonya (the striking Esco Jouley) signals early on her willingness to go past norms, and you sense a synergy of writers, players, and material that recoils at conventional solutions. Williams’s face radiates a complicated clutch of emotions, from sadness and confusion to delight and dismay. Rob Delaney (from that other marvel, Catastrophe) plays her gung-ho neighbor who enjoys playing sub, and the awkward choreography of their encounters enhances their realism, the opposite of Kidman seeking relevance on all fours. Williams’s gleam points this material far beyond Kidman’s glum.Once again, the soundtrack confirms all your best hopes about clashing emotions: “I Touch Myself,” by the Divinyls, immortalized by Austin Powers; “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” by Cyndi Lauper; “Rebel Rebel” by David Bowie; “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor, and “Tainted Love,” Soft Cell’s swanky remake of the Gloria Jones original from 1965. Can anyone imagine any Babygirl scene featuring “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”?Dying For Sex’s final act features an essay on mortality that lends all the sexcapades some earned depth. Do some great movies carry insufferable soundtracks? Sure. Do some great soundtracks get wasted on awful scripts? Of course, although which happens more might make a great social media spat. When these forces blend and set off boomerang flashes, you feel a great team chasing ideas, generating tensions, and making uneasy sense of situations that defy words.more Imdb pages for Dying for Sex, BabygirlRotten Tomatoes pages Dying for Sex, BabygirlMetacritic pages for Dying for Sex, BabygirlTime magazine’s Stephanie Zacharek offers a different point of view on KidmanDying for Sex podcastMolly Kochan’s memoir Screw Cancer: Becoming Whole (Donnie B Inc… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

Historian Preston Lauterbach works the backstreets of rock’s story, the many accidental and circuitous paths the music takes before congealing into a popular style. With Before Elvis, he lands a major statement about how Presley immersed himself in the Memphis of 1948-1945, what he heard on the radio, in churches, and in clubs. We started by talking about one of Presley’s key mentors, the Reverend Herbert Brewster, the preacher who’s style and songwriting shaped the young Elvis… Preston Lauterbach: So the Reverend William Herbert Brewster was a minister, African American minister who came to Memphis from rural West Tennessee. He was born in the latter part of the 19th century and was raised by, you know, highly spiritual parents and grandparents, in fact. So he had all these great memories of his elders singing spirituals around him. And that’s really what brought him up. But he also was determined to become a learned man. “The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react,” subscriber George Bernard ShawAnd so he went off college, went to school in Memphis, the big city. And became involved with the civil rights activities that were already taking place in the city in the 19 teens with regard to mass registration of African American voters. So, the type of activity that we tend to associate with the modern civil rights movement that started, what, over 40 years after this time I’m talking about was, was, really happening on a broad scale in Memphis already. And so that’s really where Herbert Brewster began to develop this social consciousness. For people who saw the Elvis movie, you know, when Elvis is contemplating what he’s going to perform on his comeback special, and whether or not it’s time for him to make a social statement. The comment that he makes to kind of fire himself up to go out there and do it is. Something along the lines of you know an old reverend told me that sometimes there are things that are too dangerous to say and you have to sing them.Well, that’s a an adaptation of a quote from reverend Brewster himself, and so even though the Presley character in the movie doesn’t identify who he’s thinking of in this moment, that’s something that Reverend Brewster told an interviewer. Said that, we realized in segregated Memphis, there were things that needed to be said.And sometimes it was too dangerous to say them, and so you had to sing them. Well, this was Brewster’s motivation for writing a song that became the first million- selling gospel recording called “I Will Move On Up A Little Higher.” And so the context for that song is that the white political boss of Memphis, Mr. E. H. Crump had banished the Black political leadership of the city around 1940. And so this became a, a low moment for people like Brewster, who’d been politically active socially active for such a long period of time. And so from what he felt were the depths of despair, he wrote this beautiful song.And so I think that’s some of what influenced Elvis, not just, you know, the, the lyrics, “that’s all right, mama,” but the feeling, the way that Crudup conveyed feeling that really moved Elvis…I mean, I hope that people will go and listen to Mahalia Jackson singing “I Will Move On Up A Little Higher,” and so that’s part of the social context of Reverend Brewster. The musical context, which I kind of mentioned there, is he’s, in addition to being a voting rights activist, he’s a song composer. And he’s really the hub of the African American gospel scene in Memphis. So he’s a promoter. So he’ll put on big shows down at the auditorium featuring a bunch of different quartets. He was known to give you know, several young artists a start by, you know, putting them out on stage and showcasing them for the crowd. After that, he became probably the first African American radio broadcaster in Memphis.He was certainly like the first really successful Black radio broadcaster. So some people might know that African American formatted radio had its first full time station in Memphis WDIA as of 1949. Well, Brewster was broadcasting locally in like 1938 and onward. So he was broadcasting sermons.He was broadcasting music. So he was on the airwaves and familiar to people. Fast forward to 1953, Memphis is still under the rule of the same segregationist leader, Boss Crump, who Brewster had been fighting against for his entire, you know, adult life at this point. And segregation was the the, the legal way of life in Memphis.more Tim Riley reviews Before Elvis in the Los Angeles Review of BooksPee Wee Crayton’s “Do Unto Others,” the guitar ignition (and lyrical thrust) John Lennon cribbed for “Revolution” Peter Guralnick’s two-volume Presley biographies: Last Train to Memphis (1995) and Careless Love (2000)Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022)Clambake (1967), with Bill Bixby, more fun than John Wesley HardingThe Searcher (2018), Reinventing Elvis: the 1968 Comeback (2023), both worthwhileplaylist of the monthBefore Elvis playlist: from Little Esther Phillips to Calvin Newborn, these influences feel both immediate and timeless (25 tracks)software updateRightMenu Master, convert, sort, copy to, sync, backup, set wallpaperAlfred 5 (reasonable $): happy customer, mostly for custom search URLS with keyboard shortcuts and boundless clipboardLeaderKey: elegant keyboard launch, customizable, Alfie’s best friendreddit.com/r/macapps, geeks minus additudenoises off* Last year stomped: roundup of year-end lists Part I and Part II (with the years best marital dialogue, “…Only you could ruin a perfectly good wordless roll in the ashes of a dead union…”; Eric Wolfson on concept albums; and that new Zep doc getting lots of nods, we’re getting right on that* In the pipeline: Sly Stone, The Pixies, the Simpsons, and Cher’s memoir as read by AI voice as this persona, reader’s choice: * “Pigs at the pastry trough,” John Updike on critics : the riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

When you watch the Netflix Playlist series you get a standard-if-sturdy startup story with legal hurdles and tech geeks coding outside the lines. The labels carry all that golden booty, and they will make Daniel Ek pay. Ek accomodates the gatekeepers and takes over the world; it’s almost weird he didn’t attend last month’s inauguration. Author Liz Pelly agreed that the series works like a genre piece instead of muckrack reporting: Liz Pelly: I thought that, you know, The Playlist, I watched it also when it came out on Netflix. And I also have read the book that it's based on. So the playlist is based on a book called The Spotify Play that came out in Sweden I think the subtitle is “How Spotify Beat Apple, Amazon and Google in the Race for Audio Dominance.” So it's a little bit of like an underdog narrative. But the reporting in it is really good. And I actually find it to be like, a really, really good resource and I appreciate the, you know, in my book, before the acknowledgments, I shout out that book and say that it was really helpful to me in piecing together the early history of Spotify.Subscribe now, or get double-crossed and left for dead.So, yeah, whether you agree with the overall perspective or not, I think that there's a lot of, important reporting in that book. And I would hope, you know, even if someone didn't agree with some of the arguments. Made in my book that they would at least appreciate some of the reporting and revelations that went into it, because it is a work of reported criticism.“…[Spotify’s founder and CEO] Daniel Ek was actually the beneficiary of public funding for the arts in his public school system growing up in Sweden.”You know, it has a perspective. It's not like straight forward business journalism, in terms of the New Yorker review, I'm a big fan of Hua Hsu’s writing, sensibility and perspective on music. So I was really honored that he took the time to read my book and spend so much time reflecting on it.Liz Pelly: There are some general aspects of the, perspective that aren't the same perspective that I have on streaming. And it's funny, this is the second interview today where someone asked me,Tim Riley: Oh yeah,Liz Pelly: of the review.Tim Riley: Well, I realized now that I asked you, it's a bit of a setup.I don't, I certainly, but here, let me frame it a different way. So I'm seeing, and as a music critic, I get asked a lot, like there seemed to be two different, major viewpoints out there. One is streaming is really killing music. It's bad for artists. It's really, it's a peril. It's a poison. We need to resist it.And it's just, it's joined all the other evil empires. And then there's Hua Hsu’s, more, he's sort of more soft peddling it and saying, you know, this is, this is just kind of, where we're at and we have to deal with it. And there's actually some upside to it. And, it's not pure evil. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of upside to this.And my sense is not having finished your book, but that you're trying to really weave a very nuanced path between those two extremes and that you have your own, you know, very well reported take on it. Does that, does that sound like a fair character characterization?Liz Pelly: Yeah, I mean, by the end of the book, there's definitely straightforward arguments that I make in favor of, certain regulatory interventions and just streaming, into different policy oversights that I think would be really meaningful for not just musicians, but for the public as well.I do sort of share my perspective that I really do think that if people are concerned with supporting musicians, and contributing to, the ongoing continuation of music as an art form, that reassessing one's own relationship with both participating as an active listener and contributor to music culture, contributing to sustaining the culture that you want to see exist in the world, is really important.And I don't necessarily think that streaming really has anything to do with that. So there's never a point in the book where I say, Everyone delete your accounts and switch to XYZ service because that's just so simplistic, and I think, I always am of the belief that collective problems require collective solutions and that I think it's too individualistic to suggest that like switching from one streaming service to another or this focus on consumer behavior is, necessarily like any sort of fix all.So yeah, I take a multi-pronged approach to both laying out these ideas for how streaming might be reformed and then pointing in the direction of different alternative models that artists have been working on, whether it be cooperative alternatives to streaming, or different musician unions that have popped up in the past few years.I talk about the importance of increased public funding for the arts, including for music because public funding for music is so insignificant in the United States.Tim Riley: I love how you point out that Daniel Ek [sic] was actually the beneficiary of public funding for the arts in his public school system growing up in Sweden.Liz Pelly: Yeah… MORE “Ghosts in the Machine,” by Liz Pelly, Harper’s, December 2024“Is There Any Escape from the Spotify Syndrome?” Hua Hsu reviews Pelly’s book in the New YorkerTed Gioia’s “The Honest Broker” substack links on spotify coverageMood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, by Liz Pelly (One Signal/Atria)The Playlist, based on the book by Sven Carlsson (Netflix, 2022)The Spotify Play: How Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google, and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance, by Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud (Diversion Books, 2021)PAUL KRUGMAN’s public grievance with his New York Times editorial page implicates both the brass and his colleagues. Editors: if you sense your Nobel Laureate has gripes, you buy him lunch and hear him out. If anything, his flameout tells you how little the enterprise cares about some of its smartest contributors. The silence from his peers tells you a lot… Swift handing Beyoncé her Grammy for Best Country Album felt good, but not good enough… Department of the OVEREXPOSED: Adam Driver… Catching up: Jason “Nepo” Reitman coaxes a series of underrated performances in his SNL biopic Saturday Night, a form that shouldn’t work and feels flukish when it succeeds: Tommy Dewey as Michael O’Donaghue, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster, and JT Walsh—I mean J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle, carried along by a brisk, nonchalant lead from Gabrielle Labelle as Lorne Michaels, who has now starred for Spielberg (as the young filmmaker in The Fabelmans), and as a fetching lout in The Snack Shack. noises off* LAST CALL for IG links, we have all but bailed: all Reels and highlights save across these categories: Tools, Journalism, Rock, Beatles, Dance, Posters, and Misc* Raid the archives for Year in Review issues parts 1 and 2, soulsters sing the Beatles, The Very Great Garth Hudson (especially here, but you know that), and appending Rob Sheffield’s Solo Beatles List. * riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

Moondog Matinee, The Band (Capitol, 1973)Garth Hudson, the last living member of The Band, turned 88 on August 8. Hudson’s Lowrey organ gave the Band regal colors, and he wove in synthesizer lines as if he had three hands. In songs like “Wheels on Fire,” his flourishes evoked the church, the speakeasy, and the carnival, sometimes in the same phrase. Where the Grateful Dead ritualized a long drum passage signaling the set’s final act, Hudson’s long live preambles to "Chest Fever" spun soliloquies of expansive taste (“the Genetic method”). Then he’d strap on an alto sax and ghost Rick Danko’s lonesome vocal on “It Makes No Difference.” On the forthcoming 1974 Live Recordings deluxe box (27 discs) backing Bob Dylan, Hudson’s keyboards ladle hot grease on a runaway locomotive that coughs all around him. I wrote about Moondog Matinee in 2001 for PublicArts, an album that grows in suprise and delight after 50 years. BEFORE THE EXPLOSION of tribute albums in the 1990s, the subgenre of rock cover efforts was a scrappy tradition that sometimes signaled trouble. The Beatles were the prime example: after releasing The White Album in November of 1968, the fabs returned to the studio in January of 1969 with only tidbits of new material. To fill the time, they collapsed into a stream of oldies, or cover songs, as a source of inspiration. The sessions proved overlong and tiresome, and they shoved everything into the vaults for 18 months until the summer of 1970, when their new manager Allen Klein saw an opportunity to make some quick cash by releasing Let It Be, a cleaned-up version of those sessions (produced by Phil Spector). It included only one of dozens of covers (now circulating freely on the web), and it happened to be one of their own songs, "One After 909," which they had left off their first album in 1963.Shoot the riley rock report curl with free issues every other Friday… In similar situations, other bands have followed suit. In 1973, the Band found itself flailing about: after touring with Bob Dylan in 1966 and recording the mysterious Basement Tapes while everyone else freaked out during the summer of 1967, the group released two boldly understated albums, Music From Big Pink (1968), and The Band (1969), which vaulted them into greatness. Pink had three definitive Dylan covers ("Tears of Rage," "This Wheel's On Fire," and "I Shall Be Released"), and one by the inimitable honky-tonker Lefty Frizzell ("Long Black Veil"), which pitched their sound somewhere between cutting edge folk-rock and vintage backwoods C&W. So sure was their attack that in a recent Rolling Stone article about Dylan collectors, "Dylanologist" Mark Jacobson referred to "Long Black Veil" as a Bob Dylan song. Where did these Canadians come upon this ineffably American sound? How could a band sound at once so historically authentic and yet so completely original? It's diffcult to overstate the effect these records and the Dylan connection had on the Band's presence in the early '70s. They were a kind of American Beatles, a band that reached aesthetic heights while commanding a broad, progressive audience. Such heights are difficult to attain, harder still to sustain. The Band's follow-up albums—Stage Fright (1970) and Cahoots (1971)—were curiosities, mostly for the way their elusive sound sometimes eluded even them. While the songwriting could still be sturdy, their inspiration seemed largely spent. After Northern Lights–Southern Cross (1975), they threw themselves a retirement party on Thanksgiving of 1976 with The Last Waltz (1978) and packed off for a studio career that produced only one lackluster album (Islands in 1977) before they fell to pieces. Now [c. 2001], the Band's catalog is getting the treatment it's long deserved: digital remastering that preserves their fragile tone and extra tracks that give aesthetic clues to their work habits. The leftover take of "Up On Cripple Creek" reveals a lockstep arrangement that's at once loose and refined. (Beware, however, of Rock Of Ages, which while sonically enhanced, contains a lackadaisical Dylan appearance on the second CD with a slow version of "Like a Rolling Stone" that sounds more miffed than energized.) Larger questions still hover over their work: where did these Canadians come upon this ineffably American sound? How could a band sound at once so historically authentic and yet so completely original? If such music had sources, what would they be? Moondog Matinee makes sense of the Band in ways their original material never could. For starters, there are rich, emotionally persuasive white treatments of black sources: Richard Manuel's humble recitation of Bobby "Blue" Bland's "Share Your Love With Me," and Rick Danko's achingly modest read of Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come." And if Moondog Matinee does nothing more than introduce new listeners to former light heavyweight ("Kid Chocolate") Lee Dorsey, the New Orleans-by-way-of-Portland-Oregon singer, it will have worked a marvel. ("If a smile had a sound, it would be the sound of Lee Dorsey's voice," recalled Allen Toussaint.) Best known for his 1966 hit, "Working in the Coal Mine," Dorsey's influence extends to John Lennon, who sang Dorsey's "Ya Ya" on his solo covers album Rock'n'Roll. The bonus tracks include a studio version of an original, "Endless Highway" (which only appeared on the essential 1974 live album with Dylan, Before the Flood), and Chuck Berry's "Back to Memphis," which the Band used to open its Watkins Glen set (the "live" version sounds punchier, but it's just got added crowd noise). This ensemble worked the greatest creativity within the strictest of formats, and, like the Beatles, understood how paying tribute could bring out the most expressive originality.Thanks for reading, please clap by sharing:elsewhere Cover Albums Worthy of Their Material Duran Duran, Thank You (1995)David Bowie, Pin Ups (1973)Paul McCartney, Chobba B CCCP (1988), Run Devil Run (1999)John Lennon, Live Peace in Toronto (1969), Rock ’N’ Roll (1975)The Bunch, Rock On (1972)Todd Rundgren, Faithful (1973) Patti Smith, Twelve (2007)Bob Dylan, Triplicate (2017)John Fogerty, The Blue Ridge Rangers (1973)Bruce Springsteen, The Live Series: Songs Under Cover (2019)Joan Osborne, Radio Waves (2022)Willie Nelson, Stardust (1973)Yo La Tengo, Fakebook (1989)Dwight Yoakam, Under the Covers (1997)The Beatles, Live at the BBC I & II (1994, 2003)The Rolling Stones On Air (2017)Quote of the month“This should have been such a happy day,” [investigator Maria] Pevchikh said to me. “But — ” She paused. “This ‘but’ is as big as Earth itself.”—M. Gessen on the prisoner swap, “Navalny Couldn’t Be Freed Until Gershkovich Was Kidnapped. Gershkovich Couldn’t Be Freed Until Navalny Was Dead,” New York Times editorial, August 4, 2024. If Florida and Utah can outlaw books by Toni Morrison, can we assign Navalny as the one documentary all registered and unregistered voters watch by November? Amending That NYTimes Book List Easily the most exasperating thing about the decline in this newspaper’s reputation lies in how it runs Gessen and Thomas Friedman next to wayward headlines and drek like P*mela Paul. This list of "100 Best Books of the 21st Century” opens itself to a number of attacks, and jazz critic Nate Chinen parses some obvious framing issues. Then he lists the ten best music books of this century, and while checking RJ Smith’s masterful and morally dreadful Chuck Berry bio, inexplicably leaves off two titles I’ve been pumping for months: Dan Charnas’s Dilla Time, and Lenny Kaye’s Lightning Striking. Questlove’s new Hip-Hop Is History (with Ben Greenman) dwells in the same territory.playlist of the monthriley rock trailmix August 2024We try to get with Rhiannon Giddins singing Tom Petty, morsels from McCartney’s One-Hand Clapping batch, “Radical Optimism,” the source for Dylan’s “With God On Our Side,” and Kacey Musgraves duets with Willie Nelson (“Are You Sure?”). Willie singing Gram Parson features … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

The Boys, Amazon Prime original (based on the Dynamite Entertainment comic book series written by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, developed by Eric Kripke)With events in the saddle, even this RNC update suddenly feels dated:WATCHING THE NEWS break in real time on July 13, it almost felt like reality had sprung directly from a script for The Boys. In Prime’s vicious and profane (and poorly named) satire of MAGA, the Vought Corporation runs the country by puppeteering The Seven “Supes,” humans injected with a potent serum that manifests as a super-power. These comic-book heroes can either stop jets in the air or outrun trains or inhabit some creepy sea underworld. A curdled smile named Homelander (played with understated relish by Antony Starr) leads this team, a fusion of insecurity and narcissism so arch it approximates a real estate developer from Queens. After he wrests control from his corporate overlords, Homelander bullies America into an autocratic dystopia, with politicians pandering to their testosteroned overlords (cue exploding heads). A scrappy troupe of misfits led by Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid) mount an unsteady resistance. (“With great power,” Butcher says, “comes the absolute certainty that you'll turn into a right c*nt.")Share this riley rock report with a frenemy and keep the vibe groovy. Free issues every other Friday, where temptation gets funky… The show taps such a gusher of the national mood, you could almost eavesdrop on the stage directions as the real Tr*mp dropped to the ground, then insisted on raising his fist and shouting “Fight” as Secret Service agents wrestled him offstage. As many pointed out, a lifetime of media training kicked in to make the moment stick. It was as easy to imagine T’s swift calculus about how to appear defiant in that moment as it was how a slick consultant might have him frame it at the RNC the following week. If anything, The Boys falls short of the cynicism on display from JD Vance, his wife Usha, Melania, Speaker Mike Johnson, and the whole party’s blastoff into cosmic divine intervention. “That chart saved my life.” As Masha Gessen observed, “We grew accustomed to an ever growing gap between reality as we experienced it and the ways in which it was reflected back to us by politicians and journalists…” Seth Abramson published an epic deconstruction of how much Trump gilded his made-for-reality-TV moment when restraint would have taken him further. By demanding sympathy, Trump made himself mannered and petty when even President Biden seemed to sympathize on a human level.The Boys has suffered from a fourth season that tilts into overwrought SDM degeneracy. Saved by flying killer sheep, a seductive octopus, the satire has grown cruder, and harder to watch, as it scrambles to keep up with “real life” (this season wrapped before Trump’s felony convictions). Even Biden’s Covid affliction and Judge Cannon’s dismissal of the National Security case had the hairy-hand-of-the-puppeteer gloss of the show’s marketing gurus. The best touch so far lies in a new supe, Sister Sage, a brainiac black woman (Susan Heyward), “the smartest person in the world.” When teamed with Homelander, her impassivity disguises her manipulations with the weight of history. With the Kamala Harris candidacy ascendant, this now rings out in new shades of irony. Homelander’s self-satisfied grin heaves with rot. And people cower less in fear of his superpowers than his unpredictability, his fecklessness, and all-consuming self-interest ("No God. The only man in the sky is me"). His Barron stand-in of a son makes a fiendishly squalid subplot.Satire this sharp boomerangs oddly. Hulk Hogan wuz robbed of that VP slot. elsewhere* Seth Abramson on Trump’s lies in Proof* About Amazon season 4 preview* more sites* Masha Gesson on the RNC in the New York Times* Timothy Snyder on Veep Stakes* “Democracy” by Leonard Cohen (from The Future, 1992)more on Joe Walsh and the EaglesWe’re tempted to take credit for Hotel California “returning” to the Billboard C&W charts, less a return than an orbit that finally slipped into new gravity. According to Forbes, the album “reappears at No. 47 on the 50-spot ranking of the most-consumed country-only full-lengths and EPs in the U.S…” but I’ll need convincing that it ever charted Country in the first place. If it did, when? In the late ’70s that would have cursed it among rock fans. In 1989, I watched Joe Walsh sing “Desperado” after intermission at Ringo’s All-Star Show, and many mistook him for the original singer. Returns the favor for Don Henley’s Walsh vocal on “Life in the Fast Lane.” Nobody complained but only after I wrote that piece did I even remember that Henley cut a country record (Cass County) in 2015, including duets with Dolly Parton. The forgetting feels understandable, but we still “regret the omission.” Having said that, I still think the Eagles would have made a better country record than this Henley product, which cuts right down the middle and doesn’t compel many relistenings. How is that Henley makes a duet with Parton feel… cynical? Also, a “template for Dwight Yoakam” overshoots the opinion for emphasis, but Yoakam makes better records than that (If There Was a Way…, Under the Covers).album of the monthSchubert: Ländler, Pierre-Laurent Aimard (Pentatone)https://pierrelaurentaimard.com/noises off* Raid the archives for recent bangers on Woody Guthrie, the Kinks, and Eric Wolfson on concept albums. Always lots more Beatles content here. Stop the press: McCartney sneezed. * riley rock index: music’s metaportal—obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link. And the feisty SmallTalk, where substack earns new stripes. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com