Tag: Tom Waits

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Roy Orbison: “A Black and White Night”

Roy Orbison has one of the three or four truly great voices of rock’n’roll. In 1988, just a year or so before he died of a heart attack at 52 (December 6, 1988), he recorded a tribute concert to himself called “A Black and White Night”.

You may wonder, what on earth do I mean by “to himself”. I mean that the project was financed, managed, and controlled by Orbison’s production company. It was “directed” by Tony Mitchell, a gentleman from my home town, Kitchener, Ontario. But Orbison had final cut and control of the film.

This is not the same kind of film as the one we got when Marty Scorcese directed the greatest rock’n’roll film of all time “The Last Waltz” with The Band (some would argue “Stop Making Sense” with the Talking Heads).

There is no rational artistic reason why it’s in black and white, and this video is a poster child for why some people believe in the principle of artistic economy, which is, if you don’t have any ideas at all about what you are doing with the camera (or mic, or paintbrush, or keyboard), replace artistry with volume or quantity. Go up to 11. Or, In this case, have the camera swoop back and forth and up and down and left and right and in and out, for no reason whatsoever other than to make it appear that you are doing something with the camera to make this production visually interesting.

There are moments when the musicians appear to be out of sync. There are even moments where they appear to be hamming it up. Could be that an editor dumped in a few shots taken out of sequence just for effect. Or there were dubs.

“A Black & White Night” is well recorded. Too well-recorded. I am convinced it was dubbed, though every effort appears to have been made to make it appear to be a live recording. You would think that nowadays it would be easy to find out the truth: it’s not. I’ve been searching the internet and all I can find it indirect references to it and drippy, adoring reviews by slavish worshippers of Roy Orbison.

Let’s keep that straight: I am an admirer of Orbison but here it is: Orbison is a truly great but one-dimensional romanticist whose work has limited importance. He was the master of the paranoid, masochistic, break-up song, in which the pain of the loss is elevated to a near hysterical embrace of spiritual and emotional suffering.

You might be surprised that this mode can only go so far.

Only the lonely
Know the way I feel tonight

Yes, those opening lines, the black suit, the sunglasses– truly magnificent.

But a lot of his early success may well have been due to arranger Fred Foster at Monument Records (where Orbison recorded from 1959 to 1965). After Foster left, Orbison rarely charted, until his return during the nostalgia craze in the 1980’s.

But, like Elvis and Michael Jackson, he was a pop star, and never more than that, and he doesn’t belong in the category of the truly visionary, brilliant minds that made rock music worth paying attention to, and made it more relevant and interesting than any other musical style in the past fifty years.

People who tell you the contrary just want to believe that a facile adoration of the sound of a voice is just as valid as an intelligent grasp of the fundamentals of music and idiom and lyric and melody and arrangement in terms of judging a musical performance.

Obscure note: like Elvis, Roy Orbison died on the toilet.

You really should see the performance of “Crying”, in Spanish, in David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”.

The handful of truly great voices in rock’n’roll:

Roy Orbison
Judith Durham (The Seekers)
Jim Morrison (The Doors)
Jennifer Warnes
Aretha Franklin
Janis Joplin
Van Morrison

Burton Cummings

And a bigger handful of extraordinary voices:

Judy Collins
Elvis Presley
Art Garfunkel
Tom Waits
Susan Jacks
Reverend Al Green
James Brown
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

Over-rated Voices:

Freddie Mercury
Kate Bush
Roger Daltrey
Linda Ronstadt
K. D. Lang
Bruce Springsteen

Why over-rated?

A great singer puts his or her voice into the service of the music, not into the service of the singer’s ego, K.D. Lang.  Roger Daltrey has a big voice, but he’s not really a particularly good singer. Linda Ronstadt: ditto: she gets louder and softer and louder again. She wails.  Listen to her version of “Different Drum” and then listen to Susan Jacks’ version: that’s the difference between wailing and singing.  Kate Bush is a diva: fabulous voice, and a show-off.  Burton Cummings has a great voice and he can sing, but never covered anything really super interesting. One imagines that if he did, the limitations would reveal themselves. Freddie Mercury can never be forgiven for “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

Don’t even get me started:

Whitney Houston (whine)
Michael Jackson (grunt, falsetto, grunt)

No Longer Qualified

Almost all recent singers, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Katie Perry, Britney Spears, Kesha, Lil Wayne, Nicky Minaj, Ariana Grande, and so on and so on, use Autotune.  They are cheating.  And does Autotune really make them sound better?  No, it doesn’t.  It just speeds up the recording process and takes out the obvious flubs.

Some of these artists claim that autotune is an artistic component of “their sound”.  Oh yes, and EPO is an integral part of Lance Armstrong’s “ride”.

Great Songwriters and their voices

Bob Dylan is actually a pretty good vocalist on his earlier albums, up to “Blood on the Tracks” and “Desire”.  Singing isn’t just about pitch: there’s phrasing and intonation and rhythm.  Around “Saved” his voice went into the tank and I don’t think any one around him ever summoned the courage to tell him the truth.  His voice is cosmetically in the class of Tom Waits but he’s not nearly as judicious with it’s use.

As the years go by, I think less and less of Bruce Springsteen as a vocalist the more I hear him.  Even when I go back to “Born to Run”, I find it harder and harder to overlook his limitations. His voice is not really much prettier than early Dylan’s, but Dylan is far more interesting, in phrasing, intonation; sometimes a good sneer can come in handy.

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A Saint in Every Dream

And they all pretend they’re orphans and their memory’s like a train
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away
And the things you can’t remember tell the things you can’t forget
That history puts a saint in every dream
(“Time”, Tom Waits)

A great phrase in a great lyric comes to mind as readily as a lovely image you remember from a distant place of important events in your life. In this case: “history puts a saint in every dream”. I’ve wondered for years what exactly that means.

It’s not the kind of line you sing while hanging upside down, wet, on a trapeze dripping over those awestruck young women who all seemed, in their faces, to be screaming “I want to be her!” It’s something you overhear in a bar, over the smell of urine and stale beer, and the rumble of streetcars or trains, and the dismal cuckold of useless tears.

I think it means that what we don’t remember–that we are not conscious of– constantly intrudes on our interpretation of past events, especially when our memory of those events is suspect.

History is written by the victors, of course, including the emotional victors, and we typically interpret events in light of the prejudices adopted afterwards. Most of us probably remember that the Americans entered the war against Germany to stop them from killing Jews. They did not– they entered because Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Germany happened to be allied with Japan. Most of us probably remember a kind thing or two about someone who later treated us shabbily.

Only a few years before Pearl Harbor, Great Britain had negotiated a great peace with Hitler and Nazi rallies were held in Madison Square Gardens. A few years later, Stalin became our best friend, our comrade, until he too had to be reanimated. America supported Bin Laden when he took on the Soviets– we know how that ended.

But “history puts a saint in every dream”.

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The Inauguration and the Fake String Quartet

I just read that the lovely little quartet that performed “Air and Simple Gifts” at Barack Obama’s inauguration faked it. You watched the lovely musicians, elegant, focused, rising to the occasion– you thought. But the music you heard came from a recording that had been made a few days earlier. They finger-synched. They had ear-pieces so they could hear the recording, and then they put on a performance, but the performance was not musical: it was acting.

I am always amazed at the rationales given for cheating. The Chinese said that the little singer was not pretty enough to dance and the Olympics were too important to allow ugliness into the stadium. The people in charge of the inauguration said it was too cold to play, and too important an event to take a chance something going wrong, and allow any musical ugliness’s into the mall.

Even Pavarotti, at a performance in Italy a few years ago, cheated because he had a cold and didn’t want to disappoint his fans. Never mind the people who were disappointed to find out that even Pavarotti is a fake.

I hope most people immediately see through these lies. When we watch a brilliant musician perform, we are impressed precisely because it is difficult to do, and because of the dynamic connection between performer and audience responding to each other in the moment. So someone who successfully performs, live, deserves our respect. Others only want you to believe that they performed live. They want the same applause and respect. They bow and bow and bow– what’s the matter with you? What do you mean “cheating”? I just didn’t want to disappoint my fans.  I say, fuck you.

If it wasn’t fakery of the highest order, why were they trying to make it look like they were performing live? Why not just stand there and bow?

And why on earth, if they were so concerned about the cold, didn’t they just perform live in the White House — in the Oval Office– and then broadcast it to the huge screens on the mall? At a moment of crisis and change, demanding the highest level of inspiration for the American people, Obama’s people cheated. They pretended they could do something they didn’t believe they could really do.

They put on a show loaded with symbolism meaning nothing.

Well, I refuse to give in to this bullshit that someone it is reasonable and good and fair to cheat in public performances.  It is absolutely possible to perform live or to simply do something else if you don’t want to be honest.

[2022-05-09: they did for music what Obama did for progressive politics — faked it.]

The faked musical performance music wasn’t the only thing about the inauguration I didn’t like. The rows of guards dressed in grey overcoats lining the streets called to mind nothing so much as a police state. Rick Warren was boring. Obama’s speech was disappointing– merely “very good” instead of great. The poet played it entirely, decisively, antiseptically safe.

Diane Feinstein was good. She looked like she was having fun up there. I have never liked patriotic hymns of any sort, so Aretha Franklin’s song didn’t move me. The only other part of the inauguration I really liked was the benediction by Rev. Joseph Lawry, who at least put on a little funk and passion and sounded cheerfully unceremonious.

More Fakes: 2011-04

Did you like the tap-dancing in “Riverdance”? The sound was faked. The producers triumphantly chortled: nobody cares.

Turns out that Greg Mortenson (Three Cups of Tea) is also a fake, according to “60 Minutes”. The stories he tells in his books and repeats in person, about getting lost on K2, and being kidnapped by the Taliban. False.

Bitter Dobsonites

If you check the James Dobson website, you’ll find that there are at least a few patriotic bible-believing Americans who are so bitter and self-serving that they are unwilling to acknowledge, even on inauguration day, the historic importance of America’s first black president.

Dobson’s proxies, instead, attacked Obama for employing several Clinton-era appointees.

Why on earth choose John Williams, most famous for the theme of “Star Wars”, to compose a piece for this historic inauguration? In his favor, he is American, living, and successful. But were the best parts of the composition the pieces he lifted from Aaron Copland? I would have preferred Tom Waits myself, but that’s just me.