Friday Arts

I spend my mornings while I'm getting ready for work auditing songs for my tab room playlist. Mostly rock, mostly lively. Most albums yield a song or two. When I first started putting the list together, it was hard to keep from adding all the songs off some albums, like Help, for instance. I mean, seriously. What are the bad songs on that album? By now, 1839 songs later, I'm on more obscure, or at least less obvious albums, although there are a couple of major groups I had to remind myself to listen to, and of course, there is music that I just missed the first time around. Very little of the music is of recent vintage. When I try to listen to new music, I usually don't get very far. There are exceptions, though. Just not many. We are not exactly living in a golden age of rock.

These are the albums I listened to in the last week, and the songs that made the list:

No songs, Foghat, Foghat – I have no knowledge of this group, except the name is familiar and maybe they might have had some hits that were on the radio that I’d recognize. They got together in 1971, when I stopped following rock for a while. I listened to their first eponymous album this week and thought to myself that this stuff seemed good, so I put it on hold and will go back to it in the future. Quite promising, I think.

"Hamburger Midnight, " Little Feat, Little Feat — Another eponymous 1971 debut album. In this case, I have a bit of fondness for the group, having acquired a bunch of their albums during the 90s, when I used to run with my Walkman and would acquire cassettes pretty much at random from music clubs when there was a big sale. Only one cut stuck out on this album, but I did enjoy listening to it.

No songs, Super Session, Kooper, Bloomfield and Stills — For some reason, “You Don’t Love Me” was already in the playlist. I considered "It Takes a Lot..." but decided I could live without ever hearing it again. Back in the 60s, Super Session was one of those albums that everyone in the universe seemed to own and no one ever played. For a while you could sort of enjoy “Season of the Witch,” but it got old pretty fast. The key thing about this album was that it was a one-sider—i.e., an album where either one side or the other was really good and the other side wasn't, which meant that soon that other side simply disappeared from existence—something that disappeared in the CD era. There were other albums like this over the years (like Abbey Road), but this one sticks out for some reason. The Bloomfield side A is just noodling. The Stills side B is more noodling, but it least it tries to have the odd song, like "You Don’t Love Me." (And I'm a sucker for Leslie cabinets.) The reason everybody had this album was that Kooper was just coming off BS&T after their first (great) album, Bloomfield was just coming off Electric Flag after their first (great) album, and Stills, late of Buffalo Springfield and two (out of three) great albums, was about to record CSN’s first (great) album. It set the stage for future supergroup albums, even though it wasn’t that good. The bottom line is, a couple of sides of nothing much but noodling is, in the long run, nothing much but noodling. Go out and write some songs.

"Strange Days," "People are Strange," "Moonlight Ride," "Love Me Two Times,"  Strange Days, The Doors — The Doors are one of the more interesting groups of the 60s. Their first album was everywhere, one of the first really 60s albums, following all the mostly British Invasion stuff. "Light My Fire" was played so often on the radio that when I hear it now I have to immediately switch it off. (The Animals’ "House of the Rising Sun," another organ riff ear worm that seemed to be on the radio every five minutes, brings a similar reaction.) People loved the Doors after their amazing and different debut album and eagerly purchased their subsequent albums, like this one, each of which was a little less satisfying than the previous one. For all practical purposes, from day one we got to watch this group unravel after starting at the top. Morrison became more and more of an embarrassment. I saw them at their notorious Singer Stadium concert where people were throwing chairs at the stage out of sheer boredom. This was, I think, right after Morrison’s Florida brouhaha. At least he didn’t expose himself to us. Over the years since the group’s demise, they seem to have continued to dim in people’s estimation. You hear a couple of their hits on classic radio, but you don’t hear anyone playing their albums if you pop over to visit. You might call the Doors a deacquired taste, assuming that’s the opposite of an acquired taste. Nevertheless, when I walked past Morrison’s grave in Paris, it was covered with recent tributes. Astounding. But not far away, Chopin’s grave was covered with even more recent tributes. This was as it should be. (For the record, Oscar Wilde's grave was blocked off to stop people from kissing it into total erosion.)