Jul 052011
 

Dear Robbie,

First of all, Happy Birthday! I was planning to write you today regardless, but when I logged onto my e-mail this morning there was a message from Wolfgang’s Vault saluting you on this, your 68th birthday. I wish I knew where to send you a card, but this open letter I’m posting here on Rock Town Hall will have to do.

As old friends and regulars to the Halls of Rock know, I’ve been fascinated by The Band since childhood, when my relatively hippie uncle gave me your second, self-titled lp and let me listen to your band’s other albums on the 8-track player in his bedroom. He would regale me with tales of having seen you guys in concert many times over, ranking your musicianship among that of his other favorite artists: James Brown, Traffic, and Joe Cocker’s Leon Russell–led band. My uncle’s dark, exotically scented room was a wizard’s den of learning and exploration. Your albums were sacred relics.

I’d spend so many years gazing at the photos in the gatefold sleeve of that self-titled album that I felt I knew my way around what I’d learn years later was Sammy Davis Jr.’s pool house. And your facial hair and clothes, in sepia tone no less! I couldn’t wait to grow up and sprout whiskers. What was cool, too, through the lense of my middle-class, Italian-American family, was that you sported all that cool facial hair while not overstepping the bounds of stylishly long hair. Most of you were capable of cleaning up and looking stylishly hip, unlike the incorrigible freaks of the Jefferson Airplane, for instance.

Most importantly, of course, was the music. The fact that you fit the Goatee Rock standards of an Italian-American household in the late-’60s was convenient, but the wavy hair nipping at your oversized shirt collars wouldn’t have meant a thing if your music didn’t have that swing. As I gazed as the credits for your second album one thing that was unavoidable was how much you, Robbie, contributed. You’re listed as playing just about every instrument under the sun! Your bandmates play multiple instruments, but only your credits require a paragraph’s worth of space! You were the man, Robbie. I learned this as a boy, before I caught the sports bug, and the lesson was driven home when I rediscovered your music through The Last Waltz, just at the moment when my dreams of a professional baseball career were evaporating.

Damn, you cleaned up as well as would be expected for that film! Levon and Rick looked good, too, but there was no doubt who was the Bandleader. Levon was the team MVP, but you still wore the C. After the second viewing of The Last Waltz when it came out in the theaters I started saving money for a Fender Strat. I couldn’t find a gold one, like what you played in the movie, but a year later I’d saved enough money to buy a blonde Strat with a black pickguard. It would have to do. My friends and I were starting a band, and I began writing songs with an eye toward claiming the captaincy. With every half-assed song I wrote I had one eye on the C. I was too lazy to properly learn how to play guitar let alone learn multiple instruments, but that didn’t stop me from trying to pick up as many credits as possible. Backing vocals and percussion? Check. Slide guitar? Got it! Overdubbed second bass part coming out of a solo? I’m ready, if you need me! Hold a note on the organ through a few measures? I’ve got a forefinger!

I was all over your career following The Last Waltz, Robbie. Shoot, I paid to see your directorial/acting debut in Carny. I remember it not being bad, despite not being able to remember a thing about the movie. I think I spent the entire film imagining you and my favorite director, Martin Scorsese, being connected at the hip in future years for a run of cinematic masterpieces that would incorporate not only your music but appearances by The Clash. Didn’t they make a cameo in some film you and Marty worked on? I remember reading about their coming appearance and expecting a lot more. That’s OK, I told myself, there’s more to come from this meeting of the minds!

Continue reading »

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Apr 272011
 

Although this is nowhere near as much to deal with as what we dealt with last time, I found this clip a bit…challenging. Maybe part of it has to do with being a fan of The Band and never considering “It Makes No Difference” to lend itself to a solo dance performance. I eventually came to terms with it. How about you?

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Apr 192011
 

Dashing!

It’s finally starting to warm up, so I should have no business thinking about scarves for the next few months, but Robbie Robertson is showing up in the rock press to promote his new, certainly terrible album, and I’m finding myself thinking about the promise held by the silk scarf he wore in The Last Waltz.

I can’t stand wearing a scarf, even in freezing cold weather. They make my neck sweat and itch. I can’t get them to stay on my neck and shoulders. Within a few minutes of trying to wear a scarf I’m bugged that I can’t zip or button up my coat properly, and next thing I know one end of the scarf has slipped down and is practically dragging on the ground.

When it’s really cold out my wife tells me I should wear a scarf. When I was a kid my Mom used to tell me to wear a scarf, too. I don’t get that cold, especially around my neck. Most fashionable accessories we cover in our ongoing series on Rock’s Unfulfilled Fashion Ideas are not regularly recommended by both wives and mothers, but the Rock ‘n Roll Scarf had the dashing mastermind behind The Band as an advocate. Continue reading »

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Apr 072011
 

The Rock Town Hall Mailbag has been left unattended for too long, but following are a few messages of particular interest.

Josh Wilker, author of Cardboard Gods, who recently took time to chat with us about baseball cards and rock ‘n roll, took to heart a Townsperson’s subsequent pince nez regarding a reference to “the first album by the Band” when Wilker obviously meant to refer to their second album! He wrote me offlist and asked that I share his mea culpa.

Man, I cannot believe I referred in the interview to the Band’s second album as “the first album by the Band.” I deserve to be, to quote a line from the actual first album, “tarred and feathered.” It is a deeply troubling comment on my frazzled mental state and deteriorating cognitive faculties that I would make this mistake. I don’t know why it happened. I must be turning much sooner than scheduled into a version of my beloved grandfather near his end, when he walked into rooms carrying his oxygen tank and, with widening eyes, said, “Now, damnit, why in the Sam Hill did I come in here?” I am a huge fan of The Band, who have been an intimate part of my life since even before I collected baseball cards. I’ve leaned on their music all my life, read whatever I can get my hands on about them (“Across the Great Divide” and “This Wheel’s on Fire” and “Invisible Republic”), had the luck to see Garth Hudson play at the Bottom Line, detoured on a rare trip back east to try to see Levon in his Midnight Ramble (it got cancelled at the last minute, unfortunately), blah blah blah—and now I realize I’m sounding even more like some blowhard poser trying to defend his legitimacy. Fuck! It is as if I misspelled Yastrzemski. I can’t believe I did that. I may need to go away for awhile to “rest.” If you see fit to share this moaning with the Rock Town Hall community, that’d be okay with me—maybe it’d even convince a fellow Band fan or two that I’m a fumbling dolt rather than a dispassionately superficial douche.

Anyway, thanks for listening, and thanks again for the interview!

– Josh

Don’t sweat it, Josh. This happens to the most obsessive of us. You are a better man for this experience.

Townsman chergeuvara sent in the following links for my enjoyment and education. These may be of interest to you, as well, but caution punk rockers: some myths are about to be exploded. Continue reading »

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Mar 292011
 

Paperback edition of Josh Wilker's Cardboard Gods

One day last year I was paging through an issue of Entertainment Weekly when I arrived at a spread they run every few issues, containing about 4 pages of gift ideas. It’s the sort of seemingly paid marketing/alluring editorial hybrid feature that typically bugs me, but EW does it so well. It’s rare that I don’t read that section without briefly considering purchasing some fancy electronics item that feeds into my deep sense of nostalgia. The people who put together that section have a remarkable knack for knowing what feeds the emptiness of a middle-aged, middle-class man’s consumer life. How I miss the days of being so excited over the release of a new Elvis Costello record that I was once willing to follow my friend’s idea of breaking into his friend’s parents’ extremely permissive house to listen to our new purchase over a bone, I think to myself. Next thing I know I’m seeing if I can justify dropping $299 on an mp3 player/clock radio that’s in the form of a Close ‘N Play phonograph.

One day a book recommendation caught my eye, an actual, affordable hardcover book. Maybe it was part of one of these marketing-driven spreads or maybe it was part of the book reviews section—after you’ve read EW for a while it’s easy to lose all distinctions between marketing and editorial. Whatever. The book was called Cardboard Gods, by someone named Josh Wilker. The review read, in part:

A baseball-loving loner deciphers his complicated childhood through his old box of trading cards. . . . Wilker’s book is as nostalgically intoxicating as the gum that sweetened his card-collecting youth. [Grade:] A —Entertainment Weekly

There was no need for excruciating self-analysis and consideration of this item’s ability to fill The Void. I put a big lower corner dog ear on that page of the magazine (ie, my “important point to revisit” dog ear rather than the smaller placeholder one at the upper corner of where I left off reading) preparation for my next trip to the “library.” I re-read the review a few more times, each time getting more excited at the prospect of revisiting my own life as a baseball card collector, solitary baseball board-game player (and more importantly, manager and league commissioner), and generally desperate kid who was in need of the power provided by the sport’s over-arching history and frequent periods of anticipation (ie, what non-baseball lovers call “all the boring parts”). A couple of days later, without hesitation, I picked up a copy of Cardboard Gods and proceeded to tear through it, cover to cover, in the course of a weekend.

The book was everything I could have imagined, with color reproductions of a mid-’70s–era baseball card kicking off each chapter’s meditation on what that player’s card meant in the lovingly dysfunctional childhood world of its author. It was so much fun to tap into another kid’s relationship and chew on life’s inner meanings while contemplating baseball cards of the likes of Rudy Meoli, Mike Kekich, and Mike Cosgrove (no, not that one). This wasn’t some thumbsucking attempt by Wilker to explain away his life according to an in-vogue branch of pop psychology or the agenda of a “special interests” group, as is too-often the case these days. This book was nice and messy—and truly personal, the way we were more comfortable being in the Do Your Own Thing 1970s. In the words of fully satisfied moviegoers of my youth, I laughed and I cried.

Soon after reading the book I found Wilker’s Cardboard Gods blog and became a regular visitor there. I wrote him a gushing e-mail and over the course of a few e-mail exchanges learned that he was also a music obsessive. Baseball: check. Music: check. Good egg? Highly likely! A few weeks ago I read that Cardboard Gods was being released in paperback. I wrote Wilker and asked if he’d consent to a Rock Town Hall interview that would attempt to further bridge the relationship between baseball and music and their roles in the predominantly male means of sharing personal information. Good egg that he is, Wilker was all for this chat. If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend checking out Carboard Gods, both in book and blog form. Batter up!

RTH: The Cardboard Gods blog preceded your book, right? (I was late to the party, learning of your book before being directed to the blog.) Was there a turning point in writing the blog that you realized you actually could organize a full-blown memoir through the prism of your card collection?

Josh Wilker: For most of my adult life I have been on the lookout for things that might develop into a book, a habit that has almost always crushed the life out of whatever it is that might have otherwise developed organically if I just gave it some space to grow. And I started the blog as an anti-book in a way, since I’d just finished several years working on a novel that I wasn’t able to sell and I was a little discouraged and just trying to have some fun. That said, I think I had the feeling almost immediately, like a tug on the end of a line, that there was something going on with the baseball cards, but I consciously tried to put thoughts of a book aside for a while and just have fun and go wherever the cards wanted to go.

RTH: Baseball in the mid- to late-’70s, like the world of your childhood, experienced a latent period of counterculture-rooted self-awareness. As a boy were there certain players who best represented your family’s new world? Were there other players you felt represented the “square” world your family was leaving?

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Feb 112011
 

Will Your Mystery Date Be a Dream or a Dud?

Considering that I’ve been a fan of The Band since my uncle turned me onto them when I was a little boy, I was surprised to learn during our Artists Who Have Dabbled in Production for Other Artists thread that Robbie Robertson produced the debut album by someone named Hirth Martinez. I’ve tracked down a lot of Band-related albums, including that Neil Diamond exercise in pomposity, Beautiful Noise, but I’d never heard of this Martinez cat. Thanks to Townsman BigSteve, I’m now enjoying Martinez’ first two albums, the 1975 Robertson-produced Hirth From Earth and Big Bright Street, a 1977 album produced by Band engineer/arranger John Simon.

I’m still trying to get my head around who Martinez is. What little information I find on him on the Web starts with split reports of him having been “discovered” by either Robertson or Bob Dylan. Most likely he existed before either of those well-know musicians threw their support behind him, but you know how this stuff goes. As I told BigSteve after my initial spins of these albums, I thought his music sounded like “Van Dyke Parks if he didn’t suck, or Ry Cooder if he had half a voice.” I later saw that Parks had played on at least one of his albums.

As I said in the Mystery Date piece, the song I chose, “Be Everything” was not as characteristic of most of the songs on Hirth From Earth. I simply liked it and thought it had its own ephemeral feel. However, the album does have an unusual span of influences. Producer Robertson and engineer/arranger Simon are strongly in evidence here, on “Comin’ Round the Moon.” Garth Hudson also plays on these albums along with a cast of top-flight session players.

[audio:https://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/05_Comin_Round_the_Moon.mp3|titles=Hirth Martinez, “Comin’ Round the Moon”]

Across the two albums BigSteve turned me onto, Martinez has about as many short songs as Guided By Voices. From second album, here’s one that’s caught my ear, “Cold and Silver Moment”…after the jump! Continue reading »

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Apr 022009
 

In honor of my having watched The Last Waltz for what may have been the 100th time after happening upon it during a flip of channels this evening, I felt like revisiting this breakthrough analysis, if I do say so myself. Among the thousands of things I love about The Last Waltz is Scorcese’s keen eye for rock porn interplay. Does any other rock film allow for as many voyeuristic views of hot musician-on-musician action?

This post initially appeared 6/18/07.

Surely you know the game Rock, Paper, Scissors. You probably know it better than I do. Scissors cut paper, paper covers rock, rock smashes scissors. Using the following clip from The Last Waltz, I’ll ask you to play a similar game I like to call Licks, Faces, Feel. In this game, feel exposes faces, faces amplify licks, and licks always feel good.*

I’m going to ask you to watch the following performance of “Further On Up the Road”, featuring a guitar dual between Eric Clapton and Robbie Robertson of The Band, and I’m going to ask you to analyze this video clip, at first, at least three ways:

  • With the sound OFF and your eyes fixed on the screen
  • With the sound ON and your eyes fixed on the screen
  • With the sound ON and your eyes closed

To keep a fresh perspective, I suggest getting up and walking around for a few minutes between each initial round of analysis.

While analyzing the video with the sound OFF and your eyes fixed on the screen, note the points at which one guitarist outshines the other in terms of his use of rock soloing faces.

While analyzing the video with the sound ON and your eyes fixed on the screen, note the points when one guitarist’s licks clearly outshine those of his opponent.

While analyzing the video with the sound ON and your eyes closed, make note of the points at which one guitarist’s feel is hitting on all cylinders.

Finally, watch the video again with the sound on. Spread your notes in front of you and assess the points at which one guitarist’s move is countered, either simultaneously or in the following solo, by another move. For instance, see if there are points at which one guitarist’s licks are countered by the other man’s faces (advantage faces). Or, perhaps, you will see a segment in which one man’s faces are exposed as cheap ploys by the other man’s feel. Or, of course, one man’s fine sense of feel will be negated by the other man’s impeccable licks. There may be times in the performance when the artists reach a draw.

Keep score and report your scores to the Hall!

*Please note that Clapton and Robertson are controlled for both Look and Gear.

NEW! Mr. Moderator weighs in with his official scoring of the dual. Continue reading »

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