Don't got changing...well...maybe a little, you pig

Found this while doing some research. It's worth a read.

WOMANEWS
LOVE IS DEAD, BUT THE MELODY LINGERS ON
Barbara Brotman.
1 May 1994
Chicago Tribune

The problem with a good love song is that it sometimes lasts longer than the love it was written to commemorate. Such, apparently, will be the case with the body of musical work Billy Joel has produced in honor of his wife, Christie Brinkley, whom he has called his muse.

Reports of trouble in their marriage brought to mind the unfortunate fate of pop music stars of having their private lives inextricably wound with their public songs.

And it brought to mind Joel's most famous love song-the 1977 hit, "I Love You Just the Way You Are," which he wrote while married to his first wife, Elizabeth.

It was seen as a touching declaration of affection. Lovers grew damp-eyed at the opening bars, and made it the theme song of countless weddings and anniversary celebrations.

But I contend that it is not a love song at all. It is a hummable warning of choppy air ahead in the marital flight path.

The ominous signs can be seen in a deconstruction of the lyrics:

"Don't go changing to try and please me"
(Trouble signal already: The party to whom the song is addressed knows the singer is not pleased.)
"You never let me down before
"Don't imagine you're too familiar
"And I don't see you anymore."
(The problem is stated, albeit denied.)

"I would not leave you in times of trouble"
('Nuff said, considering what's to come.)
"We never could have come this far.
"I took the good times; I'll take the bad times"
(Note that the bad times are in the present tense.)
"I take you just the way you are.

"Don't go trying some new fashion"
(Written by someone who subsequently married a fashion model.)
"Don't change the color of your hair
"You always have my unspoken passion
(He never tells her he loves her.)
"Although I might not seem to care"
(He ignores her.)

"I don't want clever conversation"
(Translation: "I think you're dumb.")
"I never want to work that hard"
("I have talked myself into not minding that you're dumb. Besides, I'm a pretty dim bulb myself. Lazy, too. Pass the remote control.")
"I just want someone that I can talk to"
("... on an elementary level.")
"I want you just the way you are.
("... unfashionable and stupid.")

"I need to know that you will always be"
(Note the emphasis on the singer's needs, not his affection for her)
"The same old someone that I knew"
(Now, there's a passionate nickname.)
"What will it take till you believe in me"
(She doesn't trust him.)
"The way that I believe in you?

"I said I love you; that's forever."
(In this context, the literary equivalent of a prison door clanging shut.)
"This I promise from the heart.
"I couldn't love you any better
"I love you just the way you are."
("... such as that is.")

This is no musical cousin to classic love songs like "Misty" or "As Time Goes By." It is an impending divorce song, more properly classified with such marriage dissolution classics as James Taylor's "Her Town, Too" or Bruce Springsteen's "One Step Up."

It is a song of a marriage not meant to last. And, indeed, the marriage in question didn't. Joel and "the same old someone" separated in 1982 and divorced the next year.

In a way, "Just the Way You Are" is more interesting than a true love song. It is common for a songwriter to reveal deep feelings. But this song reveals more than the writer intended, or perhaps realized.

Personally, when it comes to weddings, I would go with Gershwin.

Reason to live

"Whole Wide World" - Wreckless Eric.

Thank you, WFUV.

James Taylor

This profile got butchered beyond recognition. It epitomizes the gap between the book I wanted to read/write and the book they want to publish. But you can't win 'em all. Here's the original version.
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Of the many legacies the Beatles bestowed upon pop music, two are often forgotten. One is the emergence of the pop song as a diarist – one who documents their innermost feelings and then puts them on display via song for the world to hear. John Lennon took this idiom to an extreme in his kiss-off to the Beatles, Plastic Ono Band, a harrowing display of his mental state at the time. In doing so, he helped give birth to a new form of pop artist: the so-called singer-songwriter.

Another legacy borne of the Beatles was James Taylor, if not the best practitioner among singer-songwriters, then certainly one of the best paid. One of the first outside artists signed to the Beatles’ Apple label in 1968, Taylor broke through to pop audiences in 1970 with “Fire And Rain.” The song, which went to No. 3, ruminates on the death of a friend, Taylor’s attempts to kick heroin, his experiences in a mental institution, and anything else that happened to be on his mind that day. The song forevermore set forth the image of the well-intentioned white male troubadour, going from town to town singing his pain and dying for the audience’s sins.

One trademark of Taylor's was the lilting acoustic guitar that would form the centerpiece to most of his biggest hits. But the other, which tends to get less attention, is his love for rhythm & blues. To help get this aspect of his music over, he used some of the best session musicians in Los Angeles as his accomplices, such as guitarist Danny Kortchmar (who would later hit paydirt collaborating with Don Henley), bassist Lee Sklar, and drummer Russ Kunkel. This rhythm section would back many West Coast songwriters throughout the 1970s.

Now more of an album artist than a singles artist, two of his last three studio albums went Top Ten without a single to recommend them, a testament to his popularity among aging baby boomers.

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The first two grafs have been rewritten as follows:

James Taylor was one of the most successful performers in the so-called singer-songwriter genre, which generally consisted of hyper-literate and hyper-literary lyricists setting forth their innermost feelings usually dressed with a plaintive acoustic guitar. Picking up the mantle from Joni Mitchell, who briefly dated Taylor, and Paul Simon, James Taylor approached his calling with sincerity and humor.

One of the first outside artists signed to the Beatles’ Apple label in 1968, James Taylor broke through to pop audiences in 1970 with “Fire And Rain.” The song, which went to #3, ruminates on the death of a friend, Taylor’s attempts to kick heroin, and his experiences in a mental institution.

The word is CRACKA!

NEW YORK, April 12 (AVERYLARGENEWSSERVICE) - Radio host
Don Imus hinted on Thursday his days on the airwaves may be numbered after a
30-year career that erupted in controversy over racist and sexist comments about
a women's college basketball team.

MSNBC dumped its simultaneous cable television broadcast
of his "Imus in the Morning" radio show on Wednesday, and several major
advertisers have backed out a week after he called the mostly black Rutgers
University team "nappy-headed hos."

The word "nappy" is viewed as a vile slur describing the
tightly curled natural hair texture of many African-Americans, while "ho" is
slang for "whore," usage of which has exploded in hip-hop music and popular
culture in recent years.

...and "Butthead" is a term used by Caucasian people to connote someone who is acting ill-mannered or unintelligent...

Sleep well, music business

This op-ed piece distills the problems in the record business as it pertains to the consumer better than just about anything I've read.

Full disclosure: Tony is my best friend. But it doesn't matter. It's a great piece anyway.

Sly & The Family Stone

The book is coming along. It isn't what I thought it would be when I started. I'll have more to say on this when it's done, which, hopefully will be in the next two or three days.

What follows is the first draft of my Sly & The Family Stone profile. It's the first thing I've written for the book in weeks that I'm kind of proud of. It's 1,200 words and it needs to be chopped to 500, so I don't know at this point what it's going to look like after I've done so.

Tony hasn't edited it yet, so there's probably lots of dropped words, bad grammar and generally bad habits that he's been trying to break me of.

But I want to post this to have some kind of record of it. Some of you rock crit types will recognize shades of Greil Marcus' definitive piece on Sly from his book Mystery Train. It was hard to avoid, since the book inspires me so much. But hopefully 95-99 percent of it is mine.

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Sly & The Family Stone emerged from the San Francisco scene in 1967 playing a hybrid of James Brown and psychedelic rock. It was more rock and roll than the R&B emanating from Memphis and Detroit. It also reflected much of the idealism of the San Francisco scene with hippie rallying cries like “You can make it you try” or “You don’t have to die before you live.” Only in Sly’s context, it was more than sloganeering. Along with Booker T & The MGs and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Sly & The Family Stone was one of the best and most important interracial bands in pop music. So when they sang, “We got to live together,” in the charttopping “Everyday People,” it resonated with more intensity than most of the hippie blather coming out of San Francisco, because they were putting it into practice, not just racially but from a gender perspective.

In the Family Stone, the women weren’t back-up singers. Cynthia Robinson played the trumpet and Rosie Stone played the piano. The rhythm section was integrated with a Greg Errico, a white musician, playing drums and Larry Graham, a black musician, establishing himself as one of the most innovative bass players in rock. Every one sang and harmonized (except Cynthia who, well, vocalized). And driving it all was Sly Stone’s soulful wail and creative arrangements.

You could see it unfold before you in their five-minute-or-so excerpt in the Woodstock film taken from the legendary festival in 1969. In what is possibly the most powerful scene in the film, Stone holds the crowd of 400,000 in his hands. “I Want To Take You Higher” resembles a combination of a church revival meeting and a political rally. And that wasn’t even the band’s peak. That would come in early 1970 with the single “Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin.”

The intro starts with a Graham’s propulsive bass locking perfectly with Fred Stewart’s chicken scratch guitar and Errico’s high-hat. Then Jerry Martini’s sax and Robinson’s trumpet and Errico’s full drum kit launches into the song that initially sounds like cop of James Brown’s “Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose,” but it has more melody, more density and even more creative horn lines. The lyrics are straight out of the bible. In Genesis 32::22-32, Jacob proves his worthiness by wrestling with God in the form of an angel. Sly, with harrowing foreshadowing, wrestles with the devil and triumphs. The song would mark the turning point in his career, for Sly would wrestle with more than a few demons over the next year before returning to the public eye.

“The Incredible and Unpredictible Sly Stone” was how Columbia Records described the star. But the description was getting too close to comfort for most people concerned with his career. For one, there were the death threats from the Black Panthers, who were displeased that he wasn’t addressing their political agenda in his lyrics and objected to his white Jewish manager. He began to show up late for gigs, if he didn’t miss them completely. There were financial problems leading Greg Errico to quit. There was Sly’s obsessive nature in the studio, which held up their next album for two years and led the label to stop royalty payments until the album was completed. And there was cocaine - mountains of it.

“What can you put on vinyl or acetate or plastic? Not just something like a funny shaped LP cover. Gotta be something it says or does. Maybe melt the LP and turn it into something…” Sly Stone said in an interview with Ben Fong-Torres in Rolling Stone in 1970. Sly & The Family Stone’s next album did just that: It was too smoldering to touch. And when it melted, it changed the language of pop music for the rest of the decade.

When There’s a riot goin’ on finally came out in 1971, Sly & The Family Stone had undergone a complete transformation. Rather than the optimistic, idealistic aura of their first four albums, this album was like staring down the barrel of a gun. The music was shrouded in a veil of fog. The grooves were deeper, more rhythmic almost liquid sounding, but this music didn’t invite the audience in. Sly sounded stoned or worse throughout. The words were filled with dread and defeat. Sly would languish over every syllable as if the he were uncertain he would make it to the end of the song. The lyrics festered with images of a barren wasteland. The album would yield a Top Ten single, “A Family Affair,” but even this song was misleading, for the song was not about the unity and community created by a family but rather how families rip themselves apart. To put a fine point on it, he closed the album with a remake of “Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin,” only he titled this version “Thank You For Talkin’ To Me, Africa” and it was a photo negative version of the earlier hit. In 1970, the song was perky and triumphant. In the 1971 version, Sly and the devil are one and no one wins. The song moves like a heroin trip. The song effectively drove a knife through the heart of Woodstock Nation.

Between the band’s new sound and Sly’s unreliable performance record (including some that resulted in riots at some venues), both fans and band members, most notably, Larry Graham, got off the bus. He would regain some goodwill with 1973’s Fresh, which received good reviews and a #12 single with “If You Want Me To Stay.” But Sly would never really return. After Fresh, most of his albums disappeared without a trace. He faces a $3.4 million tax lien. Between 1973 and 1989, there was a litany of drug and gun charges. He was in and out of rehab. He poked his head up once in a while like on Funkadelic’s The Electric Spanking Of War Babies in 1981, but then he would disappear again.

He made his first public appearance in nearly 20 years on the Grammy Awards telecast in 2006. The even was a tribute to Sly & The Family Stone that included, incongruously, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith, American Idol contestant Fantasia and soul revivalist phenom Joss Stone. In the middle of the tribute, members of the original Family Stone came on stage started playing “I Want To Take You Higher.” At Tyler’s beckoning, Stone strutted on stage with a 12-inch high mohawk hairstyle. He took his place behind a keyboard at center stage, sang for about 90 seconds waved and disappeared. He has also shown up in the audience at gigs performed by his younger sister Vet. There is always chatter of a comeback.

But with There’s a riot goin’ on, Sly Stone created a new vocabulary. The Temptations, in particular, would take up this sound and create several hits with it, including “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” and “Cloud Nine,” albeit in sanitized versions. The sound would resurface in the O’Jays’ “For The Love Of Money” and “Backstabbers.” And Curtis Mayfield would adopt his version of it in “Freddie’s Dead” and “Superfly.” But none would ever catch up with Sly. And no one has yet.