Salon.com > Ira Robbins

Record reviews: Who needs them?

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 22:00:00 +0000

I could be wrong, but – adding together a decade of Trouser Press magazine, five Trouser Press Record Guides and a whole lot of freelance writing -- I may have reviewed as many albums as any American rock critic this side of Bob Christgau. From adroit to inept, I’ve offered my full faith and credit to a small percentage of them, attacked some (with the fierce indignation generally reserved for orphan-robbers, World Series goats and career criminals) and juggled the rest. I suppose I’ve shared a few valuable insights, but no doubt just as often I’ve come up empty, papering over ambivalence with utilitarian description.

How often was I right? Even if we can stipulate that there is a “right,” it’s hard to say, since the inconstancy of life synchs unreliably with value judgments that have been frozen in time. What was on the money in 1978 may seem horribly naïve in 1988 and condescending by 2008. Plus, a critic continues to hear and learn long after committing an appraisal to print, and that both alters the context and expands culture’s possibilities. When it comes to records that no longer live clearly in my memory, even going back for a refresher listen promises only a slim chance of summoning up enough sense of who I was and what I knew at the time to extrapolate what I was feeling when I wrote what I did.

When he was cruel

Tue, 30 Apr 2002 19:00:00 +0000

Mick Jagger had a point when he announced "it's the singer not the song" -- the young Rolling Stones were perfectly content to beg, borrow and steal material their charisma machine could strut to. The songs of Bob Dylan, which at first were his career, are now reshaped nightly in performance by an artful renderer. And as a singer, Paul McCartney has never been anything but the lucky sod who gets first crack at all of Paul McCartney's compositions.

Elvis Costello has to have it both ways. He's a true singer-songwriter who respects both ends of that hyphen. For years, live and on record, this overachieving dynamo of lyrical and melodic invention took pains to serve up his bitter words with the choler of the freshly wounded. Later, when he outgrew rock to face the setting sun of pop gone by, he looked up Burt Bacharach to author a songbook of standards all his own. He didn't stop there. Without renouncing the excesses of his past, Elvis has become a subtle master of virtually any genre he fancies singing.

And life flows on

Mon, 03 Dec 2001 14:30:00 +0000

He could have been Charles Dickens' idea of a rock star, a dry-witted gentleman whose faith, and fate, left him isolated but satisfied, living his own way, rejecting society's expectations and expecting precious little of the world other than to be left alone with his money. And what was the chance of that? There's an arrogance to believing in one's right to exist, and George Harrison clearly didn't give a fig for others' opinions of him. ("Think for Yourself" he sang on "Rubber Soul," having previously offered "Don't Bother Me" and "You Like Me Too Much." He later attacked egotism head-on in "I Me Mine," mockingly attaching the same title to a pricey book of lyrics, autobiography and commentary he first published in 1979.) He never took the rock star bait -- where was the indulgent rich-and-famous lifestyle, the carefully contrived image, the corporate marketing department, the affairs with young actresses? Other than nutty recluses, drug burnouts and Greta Garbo, few artists of his stature have gone about their business with so little fanfare.

Brian Wilson, card-carrying genius

Tue, 10 Apr 2001 19:00:00 +0000

At the Brian Wilson tribute concert in New York in March, a short film explained that Wilson had lived his whole life in fear and casually mentioned his "untreated mental illness." A parade of pop music scholars -- led by host Chazz Palminteri, who said that he both heard and liked the Beach Boys' records as a youth in the Bronx 'hood, and including Beatles producer Sir George Martin, '60s survivor Dennis Hopper, Rod Stewart survivor Rachel Hunter and '70s romantic Cameron Crowe -- delivered familiar pieties about Wilson's groundbreaking work more than 30 years ago. Were Dean Martin roasts ever this harsh?

As tributes go, this concert staged for television -- TNT will broadcast some of it on that most Beach Boys-like (not to mention James Watt-est) of days, the Fourth of July -- primarily succeeded in making Wilson seem less than the genius so many enthusiastically proclaimed him to be.

Links on the chain

Tue, 19 Sep 2000 19:00:00 +0000

It's August 1965. The Beatles are set to perform at Shea Stadium, but I'm stuck at summer camp in upstate New York, a few miles from the farm that would later host Woodstock. I'm sitting under a big oak tree with an equally outsized acoustic guitar. I'm learning to stretch my 11-year-old fingers into the awkward shape of a G chord from the camp's music counselor, a college student orphaned a decade earlier when the government executed his parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for leaking atomic secrets to the Russians. In the lyrics of Phil Ochs, we were building another link on the chain.

"Links on the Chain," which I learned to sing (if not quite play) that summer, wasn't your typical protest song. While others attacked oppressive governments, laws that need changing and assorted social inequities, this one targeted the labor movement for abandoning its progressive principles. Ochs himself was not able to stay on course either, but his early work stands as a monument to those op-ed columnists of song, people who knew and believed things and made it their duty as soldiers of conscience to convince others. "Now it's only fair to ask you boys, which side are you on?" sang Ochs. He might as well have been challenging the whole artistic community around him.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury …

Mon, 10 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Among cultural historians, it has long been an article of faith that the '60s dream died in an ugly bar fight at Altamont Speedway in December 1969. Given the evidence, it's not a bad guess. After all, the Rolling Stones' well-intentioned fiasco proved that rock 'n' roll wasn't about good vibes and peace (man) and made it clear that the Woodstock nation was far better equipped to destroy itself than to take on any nebulous "establishment." Within a year, superstars would start overdosing like flies, the Beatles would sue one another and Don McLean would write "American Pie." How much more habeas corpus do you need?

As Freddy Krueger later observed, you can't kill something that's already dead. By the winter of '69, rock was already flat-lining. If the bad news had yet to reach the front lines -- and some might argue that it never has -- the monument to virile youth the Stones helped erect only a few years earlier was an edifice about to be wrecked.

Did Lester Bangs die in vain?

Tue, 04 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

There are two ways to recall Lester
Bangs -- if anyone outside a small
circle of friends still does -- and both
of them are accurate. The man boldly
called "America's Greatest Rock Critic"
in the subtitle of Jim DeRogatis' fine
biography, "Let It Blurt," is revealed
within its pages to be a clumsy
emotional mess, a difficult and unhappy
person equally allergic to bathing,
self-discipline and romantic stability. Whether clouded or aided by the
self-destructive habits that ultimately
led him to leave this world in a New
York apartment in 1982, Bangs was a man
whose writing talent was not always in
control or on display. Hell, even the
editor of "Psychotic Reactions and
Carburetor Dung," the 1987 anthology of
Bangs' work that is now the only place
to confront it, admits in his
introduction that "Lester often wrote
poorly, passively ... quoting lyrics
rather than saying what he thought."

Garageland

Tue, 19 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

On paper, the October 1982 pairing of the Clash and the Who at Shea Stadium in New York should have been historic. And maybe it was. In theory, the intergenerational punk invitational was a momentous relay, at which the once-fiery godfathers of alienated youth rock could pass the torch to their most eligible offspring. But the flame had already gone out, and the race was over long before soundcheck. What spectators in the stands saw was no climactic showdown but a dismal zombie dance of two once-great bands now fueled by success rather than inspiration. By the time the Clash and the Who were done pulverizing what was left of their punk ideals, the only thing that had been revealed was that self-delusion and crass hypocrisy can strike without regard to age.

Bowery boys

Tue, 20 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Nobody doesn't like the Ramones. They're as immortal as America's other band, the Beach Boys. Whatever punk became -- ruined canvases of Mohawked body art, hormone-fueled assholes battering each other senseless in mosh pits, uptight activists barking tuneless ideology to conformist converts, Nazis, anarchists, prim straight-edgers and proto-metal dorks sinking into the post-Sabbath sludge -- the Ramones remained its true nucleus.

In its original mid-'70s incarnation and expression, the quartet distilled the vapors of a free-floating rebel pop culture into a fundamental music. They intuitively found the common denominator of James Dean and Jan & Dean, the Standells and "The Munsters," Iggy and the Stooges and the Three Stooges, Marvel comics and model airplane glue. The roar that emerged from their high-speed blender was pure punk perfection.

Everything you need to know about the Ramones is in the brilliant essay by David Fricke included with Rhino's new two-CD compilation, "Hey Ho Let's Go!: The Ramones Anthology." But there's a bit more than you need to hear on the 58-song selection, which doesn't dig deep for rarities, rejects the band's entertaining 1994 covers album, "Acid Eaters," and leaves the live stuff to numerous other releases. "Hey Ho Let's Go!" pedals softly over, but does not outright deny, the potholes in a 20-year career that began with a perfectly launched rocket in 1976 and hit all sorts of bumps before ending with "Adios Amigos!" in 1995.

50,000,000 Backstreet Boys' fans can be wrong

Tue, 08 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

The battle for rock 'n' roll's soul started out as a straightforward tug of
war between god and the devil over the eternal fate of teenagers. Those sweat-drenched primal screamers of the '50s knew all about good and evil. They wiggled their whatsits to a thrusting beat and leered out of hi-fi radios in easily decipherable forni-code. The world wasn't quite ready for an all-out generation landslide, but what was shaking in the back seats of those four-wheeled shrines of postwar prosperity must have seemed -- reproductive evidence quite to the contrary -- like something Mom and Dad would never have done, and certainly wouldn't have sung about.

But those satanic verses sure did exist, and the proof comes tumbling out of Rhino Records' new "Loud, Fast, & Out of Control" box (subtitled "The Wild Sounds of '50s Rock") like silver dollars out of a slot machine. These four CDs are packed with chewy passion candies, bite-sized treats pungent with the urges of youth. This sentimental education holds proof of a dozen different truths (like the joys of sax and the fact that the devil does have the best tunes). The 104 tracks achieve a nearly unanimous standard of vigor and intensity, prodded by unhinged abandon or unmistakably bad intentions and nuanced into profundity by the artists' inscrutable mix of raw talent and dumb luck.