Popnarcotic

I’m making a thing.

September 3, 2017 at 2:50 am (Uncategorized)

My job is excellent, and some of the most fun, interesting, and exciting work I’ve ever done. But it also involves a lot of time moving data around painstakingly and creating spreadsheets and reports, all of which require focus, and can be a little mind-numbing after a while.

What I’ve found though is that a good music playlist can keep me focused. It can’t be just any slapped together group of songs though; if the music and the order of the tunes don’t engage some section of my brain on a certain level of interest, it doesn’t work. Thus, I’m always on the lookout for an interesting playlist.

About a month ago, I also just for kicks flipped open my copy of Scott Miller’s book, Music: What Happened? Push to shove, it’s my favorite book of music criticism out there. It’s pointed, sharply drawn, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. I’ll come back to the book in another post, but the premise of the book is that it’s a review of the best songs of every year from 1957 through about 2010.

To tie those two things together–playlist seeking and interest in that book–I discovered that someone had taken the time on Spotify to make a playlist of every song in the book. How amazing is that? (I’ll tell you how amazing further down this page). That playlist has gotten me through a ton of busy days of work over the past few weeks, and I’m literally only halfway through it. To cover every song that Miller writes about, it’s going to be a thousand-songs-plus playlist, probably close to 38 hours of music.

But that playlist being on Spotify creates some problems. First, it’s incomplete. In an average year, there are at least two songs that aren’t on Spotify for licensing reasons or other problems. To deal with that issue, whomever made it uses some live tracks (meh) or worse, in at least one case a really terrible cover version. There are also wrong versions of songs here and there.

The net result is that as I listen, I can’t help but be aware of these issues. It isn’t the fault of the amazing human who put that playlist together. That person or persons did some seriously amazing work, and this is all issues with Spotify and that medium. But this person’s hard work inspired me. What if this playlist of songs existed, but filled in the gaps and strove to clear in the proper versions of songs as described in the book? That would be kinda cool, right?

One of my favorite things to read about from people who create things is that in many cases, these creators make something because they wanted it, and it didn’t already exist. That explains some of my favorite documentaries, books, games, and works of art. I can’t make much of anything really. I’m too impatient to be particularly creative. But the one thing I can do fairly well is to make mixes. And I can definitely do that if someone else is providing me with the songs. So, to put it simply, I decided to make my own mixes of every single song in Music: What Happened. I wanted to do that because I wanted to hear it, and it didn’t exist in the form I wanted it.

I’ll explain the process and hop off for a bit, but there are a couple of reasons to explain why this book lends itself so perfectly to mixtape-making. The premise of the book is loosely based on mix CDs, mixes I assume that Miller may have actually made himself. In fact, that mix pretense forms the backbone of the book’s structure. In each given year, Miller restricts himself to only considering enough songs to fill a standard CD, about 80 minutes. That means that every year is about 20 songs or so, depending on track lengths.

The other thing Miller does is that he mentions that he’s clearly listing songs in a particular order because of how they flow together on a mix CD. The first song in a given year that he writes about is meant to be arresting and an attention-getter for the year. The mix then ebbs and flows through the songs that Miller loves the most from that particular year, building to the best tracks and culminating with the song that he feels is the very best of that particular trip ’round the sun.

I’ve been sort of surprised to discover how well his mixes work in practice, but I guess I shouldn’t be. He’d clearly put a lot of thought into the songs chosen, and the order they’d appear. Which is kind of stunning since — as mentioned — over the course of 50+ years/mixes, we’re talking about a thousand tracks. But damn, if there isn’t some inspired stuff here (I mean, “Reuters” by Wire shouldn’t flow so effortlessly into “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac, but damned if it doesn’t.)

As far as process goes, in making my mixes of these songs, I’ve tried as much as humanly possible to match the tracks to the ones described exactly by Miller. That means when we’re in the showtunes-heavy 1950s section, I’m using either Broadway or film cast recordings, depending on the author’s directives. Occasionally, he specifically lists that a song is the radio version, or the 45 rpm single version, and those are the ones used here.

There’s one other issue with particular song versions, though. Miller freely admits to cheating a bit on this in his book. To jam some extra tracks into some years but stay under that 80-minute limit, he freely admits to having used ProTools (a software studio package) to make edits to some songs to make them fit.

Now….Scott Miller was a professional musician and music producer who made at least four records using ProTools. I’m a dork who wouldn’t know where to begin with professional studio editing software. And, honestly even with some of Miller’s descriptive text, it’s impossible to know exactly where/how he made those edits (I mean, the guy cut the 17-minutes of “Dogs” by Pink Floyd down to 5:30 somehow). But, since digital streaming media no longer puts me under the tyranny of 80 minute CDs, I’ve decided to ignore those homebrew edits. Thus, you get the full force of John Cale’s “Gun” and the aforementioned Floyd cut. You’re welcome.

OK. That’s the “What this is,” and “Process” bits of this. Next post: why this mix of songs rules, and why something I made just for me is now something I’m sharing with y’all. And also, links to the mixes themselves, or at least as far as I’ve gotten (I’m up to 1979 as of Friday.)

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Trick or Treat!

October 29, 2015 at 9:34 am (Uncategorized)

Quick: think of three or four authors of really good short horror fiction. I’m going to guess that most folks would come up with Stephen King, with some H. P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, Edgar Allan Poe, and perhaps even some Shirley Jackson thrown in. Those folks are all fine, and quite good. But none of them write in a way that scares me more or more consistently than a British author who remains mostly unknown to the world. His name was Robert F. Aickman.

In the few bits of biographic information about him that can be found online, it appears that Mr. Aickman was probably kind of a dick. Admiring peers describe him as “prickly” and “crusty”. He could be fussy, condescending, and blunt to the point of social ineptitude. Though he was born in 1914, he seems to have possessed an almost Victorian bearing about himself, though he insisted on living in the heart of Swinging London in the 1960s, where his primness must have seemed completely out of phase.

Born in 1914, like most lads in their twenties Aickman likely “did his bit” during World War II. The first time he was published was in the early 1950s. He had a few stories appear here and there in magazines that weren’t much elevated above pulps. He finished a novel and novella in the 1960s, published a few volumes of short stories in the ’60s and ’70s, and died in 1981 of cancer, with perhaps 50 short stories to his name. His story collections sold decently in his native England, but went out of print rather quickly. He never had any impact in the States.

He wasn’t completely unknown in his time, though. A number of young horror writers knew him and were in awe of him. Fellows like Peter Straub and Neil Gaiman specifically. Perhaps the best tribute to Aickman’s genius at crafting horror fiction was paid him by Roald Dahl, the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory among other works.

Dahl had been commissioned by an American television network to come up with an omnibus television series in the early 1960s. The network wanted him to be the creative force behind a series that was envisioned to be something like The Twilight Zone or Outer Limits. Each week would be a new, half-hour or hour-long filmed teleplay, based on a horror short story. Dahl agreed to sign on for this, under the stipulation that he, and only he, be allowed to pick the 30-odd short stories that would be featured in the various shows. As Dahl tells it, he spent nearly a year reading nearly 740 scary short stories from the national library in London. In doing so, he came to an alarming conclusion: none, or at least precious few, of the stories were particularly scary at all. He concluded on the spot that there simply were too few scary stories. He bowed out of the project.

A few stories did have an impact on him, and Dahl collected those for his own anthology, the utterly wonderful Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories. Dahl chose 14 stories for this collection, including works by esteemed and well-known authors like Edith Wharton and J. Sheridan Le Fanu. He also chose a story by Robert Aickman, a clever and shivery tale called “Ringing the Changes.”

It’s easy to see why Aickman never caught a break from his publishers in the ’60s and ’70s when you read him now. His style is mannered and stately, though rarely florid and obtuse. He sounds like a gentleman out of time, as if Charles Dickens had suddenly plopped into the era of Nixon and Vietnam protests. With some shortsightedness, publishers likely figured that audiences would prefer something more…lurid. Explicit. Modern.

The success of J. R. R. Tolkein and H. P. Lovecraft show how little publishers understood their audiences. If Aickman can be a bit stuffy at times, he’s nowhere near as stilted as either of those aforementioned writers. And Aickman uses his stylistic gestures to excellent effect. His wonderfully British prose is an effective stage patter to distract while the writing magician works to pull a rabbit from his hat for us.

Most of all, though, Aickman is just a damn good writer of scary stories. He always preferred the term “strange stories” to describe his work, and I suppose that fits the best. His stories are interesting, ingeniously plotted, and all have a clever, if often chilling twist in the plot. You get the feeling as you read his work that the reason he wasn’t prolific is due to him constantly polishing his stories to a high gloss finish before deciding they were done.

In the past few years, Aickman’s undergone a bit of a renaissance. Many of his short story collections have come back in print, as more and more modern horror authors cite him as every bit the foundational genius that Lovecraft, M. R. James, or Poe were for the genre. First edition paperbacks of his collections from the 1970s will fetch upwards of $70 in used marketplaces these days. I personally first heard of him when, during a discussion of great horror fiction, a fellow posting online under the handle DrCrypt suggested that there was Aickman on one tier, and everyone else sitting well below. DrCrypt did more than that, though. He’d gotten his hands on an HTML version of one of Aickman’s best short story collections, a chilling anthology called Cold Hand In Mine. Someone had lovingly transcribed all of the book back in the early days of UseNet and posted it online. It’s long gone, of course.

Except I saved a copy and converted it to PDF. And because it is Halloween, and because I love giving out treats for the season, I’m sharing that with you all right now. Here it is in all its chilling glory, Robert Aickman’s Cold Hand In Mine. Give the story “The Same Dog” a read, if you’re looking for a good entry piece. If you like what you’ve read, consider buying the book and other Aickman collections from Amazon or the online retailer of your choice. Happy Halloween!

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Something I Wrote About The Left Banke…

March 20, 2015 at 10:57 am (Uncategorized)

Yesterday, Tom Finn–one of the founding members of the band The Left Banke–announced that Michael Brown from the band had passed away. While the songwriting chores in the band were more shared than has been traditionally mentioned, I think it’s no stretch to say that Michael Brown was the main creative songwriting force in the group. He was also very unwell, mentally and physically, for what seems like a large portion of his life.

A year and a half ago, I wrote a bunch of words about the Left Banke for Bill Harris at Dubious Quality. I’m reprinting here as something of an in memoriam. That’s what follows here.

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I think it’s only natural that many music lovers harbor something of a soft spot for one-hit wonders. There’s something alluring about the idea that anyone with one good idea for a song might be one turn of public whim from chart immortality. What I’ve all too frequently discovered whenever I try to dig deeper on a one-hit wonder is that the one hit is usually an extraordinary accident of happenstance, and the rest of that artist’s recording output tends towards dreck. You don’t want to go exploring the back catalogue of the Starland Vocal Band, for instance.

The Left Banke are the exception to that rule. They almost certainly qualify as one hit wonders thanks to the song “Walk Away Renee”, but unlike most artists who fit that description, the Left Banke actually left behind a rather interesting and worthwhile catalogue of songs, as well as a fairly interesting story behind their creation and multiple dissolutions.

Listening to the lush, fully orchestrated strings of “Walk Away Renee”, you’d likely never guess that the group’s origins lie in New York City with a couple of guys who sang in street busking doo wop groups. Tom Finn and George Cameron were both thinking about growing out their greased-back hair and giving up on their street corner doo wop hobby when they met at a teen talent show, where both fellows discovered a shared fascination with the then-brand new British Invasion. After that first meeting, they remained friends, but Cameron decided to spend his time cultivating a stylish image as a teen scenester in Greenwich Village. Finn on the other hand managed to get himself into a band of sorts.

It seems that Tom Finn had a buddy who’d secured something of an open-ended recording contract from a medium-sized downtown studio called World United. The studio was run by a respected professional session violinist and producer named Harry Lookofsky. Although Lookofsky had made a name for himself playing on some very high profile classical records, he was also a pragmatic guy and was on the lookout for talented kids who could play the new style of ‘60s rock and roll making waves on the radio. Finn found himself  playing on two songs for an ad hoc group that was dubbed The Magic Plants. Their name was the best thing about them–the songs themselves are pretty forgettable.

Finn had caught the bug though, and wanted to put his own band together. He remembered Cameron, and decided having a guy who not only could sing and harmonize well (not to mention had something of a loyal coterie of hipster friends) in his new group was probably a good idea. Just as Cameron and Finn were firming up ideas for their band, they chanced to meet another kid their age named Carmelo Esteban Martin Caro.

Caro’s parents were from Spain, but he had been born in New York. Cameron and Finn quickly discovered that their new friend possessed a gorgeous and evocative tenor voice. Considering his handsome good looks would make him a natural at helping to attract girls, they quickly enlisted him in the band. Caro–perhaps feeling a bit self-conscious about the prejudices of the time–allowed that he’d be known as Steve Martin from that point onwards. He became the lead singer of the band that was coming together.

Cameron, Finn, and Martin hit it off well and immediately formed a songwriting partnership and started working up a few original numbers. Finn remembered the Magic Plants sessions at World United Studios. The three of them (with a drummer in tow) played a couple of songs for Harry Lookofsky, but the studio manager was unimpressed. He tried to give them some encouragement, at least. It’s easy to see how they failed to register on that first audition. Cameron was just learning guitar, Finn had just switched to playing bass, and their songs were very much works in progress.

While the boys were auditioning, they noticed that Harry Lookofsky’s geeky teenaged son was spending an inordinate amount of time hanging out. Although Michael Lookofsky was painfully shy and awkward, he let it be known to the three that he played piano and keyboards. The guys weren’t impressed. They were the coolest cats in Greenwich Village…and this gawky nerd was not the kind of person to easily add to their social circle. Lookofsky tried again, this time letting it be known that he had the keys to his father’s studio.

Well now. That was something after all. Cameron, Finn, and Martin discovered that Mike Lookofsky had been classically trained and possessed perfect pitch. If they hummed a melody line, he knew what notes were being hummed and could play it back on piano. He began tinkering a bit with a few of the songs that Cameron and Martin had written, most notably adding a bridge to a tune called “Something On My Mind”.

At some point early on, Harry Lookofsky discovered his son and the rest of the band–now calling themselves The Left Banke after a fellow Village denizen suggested the name–banging away at practicing songs in the studio after hours. He became furious with them until the group played “Something On My Mind” for him, assuaging Lookofsky somewhat. He called Finn a few days later with a proposal: he’d offer the Left Banke a contract, provided the band made his son Michael a fulltime member.

Given that choice, the original three members of the group decided to put worries about their hipster credibility aside and took Lookofsky up on his offer. For his part, young Michael Lookofsky decided that if one member of the band could change his name, so could he, and from that point onward he was Michael Brown. The nascent Left Banke spent the next few months rehearsing during studio off-hours while also managing to record their first two songs, “Something On My Mind” and “I Haven’t Got The Nerve”.

During this time, tensions were already building that would afflict the Left Banke throughout their brief career. Simply put, lead singer Steve Martin and keyboardist Michael Brown absolutely hated one another. Brown’s gift for melody was terrific, but he lacked any knowledge or experience in translating that to a rock idiom. Thus, while the band was trying to write, Cameron and Finn would (more or less) patiently work with Brown to transform his melodies into rock and roll songs. Martin, on the other hand would simply become abusive to the 16-year old on the keys. Martin and Brown would then yell at one another and things would fall apart. At various times, both guys had to be literally coaxed into not walking away from the band. It was clear that if history didn’t intervene, the Left Banke was going to be gone before they’d put out a song. As it turns out, history did indeed intervene.

One day while the band was rehearsing, Tom Finn showed up with his new girlfriend in tow. She was a stunning blonde named Renee Fladen. You can imagine the rest of the band trying to play things cool here, but 16-year-old Michael Brown was poleaxed. According to everyone present, he simply couldn’t stop staring at Miss Fladen, and at one point his hands were shaking so badly in her presence that he couldn’t play piano at all. A firm believer of writing what he knew, Brown began work on a song about her.

(The estimable Miss Fladen, the subject of at least three Left Banke songs)

The original melody for “Walk Away Renee” would sound fairly familiar to us today, but it had an almost metronomic quality to it–there was almost no flow whatsoever to the song. Martin, Cameron, and Finn worked the song over with Brown to make dramatic improvements to the way the melody flowed.  Additionally–and in a move that would become familiar to them–the guys in the band turned to their connections in The Village for lyric help. A fellow named Tony Sansone came in and notably punched up the lyrics enough to receive a songwriting credit.

Harry Lookofsky heard the band working out the song and realized he was hearing a hit. Enlisting the help of string-playing friends and session musicians willing to work for cheap, Michael Brown (on harpsichord) is the only band member to play an instrument on the track. Just as Martin, Cameron and Finn were preparing to lay down the famously gorgeous vocals for the song, it was discovered that for not the last time the band was on the verge of splintering. Having decided he’d had his fill of Steve Martin after a notable dust up, Michael Brown had persuaded the Left Banke’s drummer, Warren David-Schierhorst to fly out to California with him to start a new band. One problem: Brown was 16 years old still. Harry Lookofsky had the authorities put his son on a plane back to New York immediately upon landing in Los Angeles…and then calmly directed the vocal session for “Walk Away Renee”.

Sadly, Brown’s instability would become a familiar pattern with the Left Banke and haunt the gifted musician the rest of his life. Brown’s mental state veered wildly between an almost patronizing superiority complex over the other members of the band…frequently chased by an almost debilitating sense of inadequacy and inferiority. No doubt his constant fights with Steve Martin did little to improve his mental state.

At any rate, with “Walk Away Renee”, Lookofsky knew he had a hit on his hands and quickly pressed the single (with one of Cameron/Martin’s first songs, “I Haven’t Got The Nerve” as the B-side) and shopped the record to every label in New York. Shockingly, the big labels turned him down. Finally, a smaller company called Smash Records agreed to put the song out. It didn’t take long until “Walk Away Renee” was zooming up the pop charts.

The band’s record label was eager for the Left Banke to strike while the iron was hot and pressed them to record another single and work up an entire album. For his part, Harry Lookofsky–now managing the group–wanted to get them on the road. Somehow the Left Banke managed to accomplish both of these things in an incredibly compressed period of time. Despite playing gigs (which even the band admits today were terrible owing to bad equipment and not being able to even hear themselves sing) across the northeast, somehow they were able to complete an album’s worth of material. This was due in no small measure to Michael Brown’s composition gifts, although he was certainly assisted by the rest of the band, too.

One key element to getting an album finished was enlisting a lyricist with no small amount of skill in the form of a fellow named Tom Feher. As good as Brown (and Martin and Cameron and Finn) were with melody, none were particularly adept with lyrics. Feher, a poet from the Village, could turn a rhymed phrase quite well. With Feher’s assistance, Michael Brown recalled his muse, Renee Fladen, and issued two more singles with her in mind, “Pretty Ballerina” and the stunningly confessional “She May Call You Up Tonight”.  (By this point, Miss Fladen was utterly freaked out by the weird fixating, longing looks from Michael Brown and moved out of state.) The former song peaked at #15 on the charts. The latter somehow didn’t make a dent. On both of those songs, as with the rest of the album being worked up, the musical tracks were almost entirely played by session musicians. Studio time was rare and expensive and Lookofsky still held a (probably deserved) low opinion of the musical abilities of anyone in the band save for his own son.

The Left Banke’s debut album–featuring the top 10 smash “Walk Away Renee” as well as “Ballerina” and 11 other winning tracks is actually pretty fantastic. In addition to all the songs mentioned so far, “Shadows Breaking Over My Head” and “Evening Gown” are fantastic. Depending on your feelings about the 1970’s recorded output of prog rock bands, you can likely lay some of the credit or blame at the feet of the song “Barterers And Their Wives” as an early prime example of cape-rock. Most notably–and here’s some foreshadowing–on the winning “Let Go Of You Girl”, the members of the band play their own instruments…and it sounds just fine. Nothing falls apart.

NEXT: Everything falls apart, super secret guest stars, and an unsung hero.

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Really, I Promise. Christmas Tunes are coming!

December 21, 2014 at 3:00 pm (Uncategorized)

Got hepped to something on Saturday morning that sounded funny to use in future years.  Decided Saturday afternoon that it incorporated such a neat part of 2014 that I wanted to stick it into this year’s mix.

Making a few audio adjustments for posterity today.

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