May 3, 2010

“Drill, baby, drill! Yee-haaawww!” Aren't we clever?!

So now America knows what can happen when our dependence on an ever-dwindling supply of crude oil overrides that anachronistic notion called common sense. We’ve got pictures and everything, which not only helps, but is a virtual necessity in a country where the vast majority of people feel all is well as long as they can wolf down a 3,700 calorie entrée at the Olive Garden, then congeal in front of their big fucking flat screen TV in their big fucking comfy living room.

We love our kids and our college football team and our all-terrain vehicles, don't we? And, oh boy, didn’t the choir sound so beautiful at church on Sunday morning?! But if we have to roll the dice on the continuing functionality of this wonderful world that the good Lord made for us in order to maintain our degree of unearned comfort, well then, that’s how it goes. Nothin’ lasts forever.

                                                ***

I wish there were better words than “selfishness” and “stupidity” to describe such a mindset, but I’ve been digging through the thesaurus and I’ll be damned if I can find anything. It’s obscene selfishness and stupidity that may or may not grow a bit tempered now that we’ve had a look at what a little miscalculation can do to an exceedingly fragile world.

At long last, BP has supplied us with a literal industrial-strength wake-up call, one that, I’d like to think, will stand as our ecological 9-11, the moment when we had our arrogance rammed in our face and we finally had to take a long, hard look at how we live our lives. But we all know what 9-11 did to put the breaks on rampant U.S. arrogance, don’t we? It actually generated the pinhead Crown Prince of arrogance, and we’re still paying for it.

Well, the time has come for the Chosen Ones - remember, God is on our side - to realize that, yes, even with that cool laptop and that state-of-the-art gas grill out on the deck, they, too, will eventually be dead and buried, and the world has to go on spinning once they’re gone.

That world will likely contain their adult children, and their grandkids, and their great-grandkids. Or if they haven’t reproduced, maybe it's enough to say it’ll be inhabited by other human beings who will undoubtedly want to experience something resembling joy and a sense of security, rather than merely surviving on what’s left. Those people will have love they'll want to share, too. But they won’t get very far with it if the currently quivering hulk of Western Civilization finally collapses from unbridled neglect.

I’m sure there are readers who are chuckling at that crazy, over-excited notion, which is exactly the problem. We have to teach ourselves to think beyond not just next Wednesday or Thursday, but beyond our own existence. Because we owe it to mankind.

Let’s take a good look at the pictures I mentioned— this is the hell BP has wrought on the southeastern coast of the United States. And the flow of oil, regardless of whether anyone can truly determine how to plug it up, is still in its infancy. No one’s ever really considered the possibility of this happening, you see...at least no one who wasn’t raking in billions of dollars from business as usual. And now they’re the ones who have fix it.

Here’s the beach at Port Fourchon, Louisiana. Note the hazmat swimwear.

This is the beach near Venice, Louisiana.

Here’s a heron that’s about to die at Barataria Bay.

And here’s a Northern Gannet that’s already lost its battle at Grand Isle Beach.

Scenes like this are spread throughout the spill area, with no end in sight, and they’ll be repeated thousands of times over before coverage of the BP spill has resided. But that won’t mean for a second that the ramifications of this tragedy will be a thing of the past. We’re stuck with it for a long, long time. The human suffering will be equal to that of the wildlife, even if you’re not one of the humans who’s getting directly nailed by it at the moment.

                                                ***

President Obama, lest we forget - and believe me when I tell you I’m not going to - performed a complete 180 from his previously held ideals and signed off on offshore drilling just weeks before this catastrophe occurred, and new drilling permits are still being handed out like candy while southern Louisiana slowly grows crucified for our sins. This disaster didn’t all happen just a few weeks ago. The cumulative effect of big business being given free reign on our environment is a tragedy that’s been fostered by this country for years on end, with greased-palm glad-handing coming from both sides of the political isle.

Obama will be left holding the bag now, just as he was left holding the bag for Bush’s dirty war and Bush’s mangled economy. But when he gave more offshore drilling the high sign, he joined the daisy chain of fault; he certainly wasn’t stopping it. And now he better roll some heads or pay up in the next election, even if his aim in allowing the drilling to expand was to set up some other sort of energy-related political power play. It's too dangerous a gamble, seeing how this is the only environment we have.

I’m pretty goddamn certain, though, regardless of what kind of tough-talk is currently being bandied about in Washington, that the most intense comeuppance BP’s pretty obviously criminal executives will get for this is a photogenic tongue-lashing before congress. Then a company that made a cool $16-billion last year will be fined a couple hundred mill and be allowed to proceed unhindered. See the “crackdown” on Wall Street for the most recent example.

                                                ***

So the lesson to take away from all this, if we’re capable of learning a lesson at all, is we need an alternative source of energy. We need an alternative source of energy. Let me shout it if you’re selectively deaf— WE NEED AN ALTERNATIVE SOURCE OF ENERGY!!

Anyone who thinks we can keep digging and romping and stomping and shooting and bombing like a bunch of technologically advanced cavemen and it’ll garner us anything more than a stay of execution is kidding himself. I personally could live with several thousand fewer weapons of mass destruction (yeah, I know for certain we have them) if we can dedicate the money saved to allowing the earth several thousand more years of nurturing life. As I often say, I have no idea if someone’s looking down on us from above, but if there is a God, you can bet your fat ass he’s pissed, and He’s not going to be particularly impressed with your clogged arteries and black Amex card when you meet Him.

                                                ***

Here’s a couple more pictures for you. This is my son.

And this is my daughter.

Do you know where your kids are? Do you know what their existence will be like in 30 years? Do you even care, or are you too busy looking the other way while our inbred selfishness allows their world to waste away?

But you know me. I'm just some bleeding heart liberal. Maybe you'll get it if Sarah Palin makes up a catchy slogan for you, or if they have "What Have We Done?" night on "American Idol."

Paul Tatara

May 31, 2010

I didn’t watch all that many Disney cartoons when I was a kid, not that I was dead set against them. I was simply more in tune with Droopy’s monotone drolleries than with high-falutin’ Oscar-grabs full of painstakingly rendered displays of “beauty” and “magic.” Even today, I can’t imagine choosing Cinderella over the mean dog’s eyes bugging out when a stick of dynamite blows up under his ass, and if you can pancake-flatten a character with a steamroller, I say go for it. Later for gasping at how convincing the dew drops look on the flora.

My mom, though, would occasionally regale me with her childhood memory of seeing “Pinocchio” in an ornate Cleveland movie palace back in the '40s. As the years wore on, she repeatedly returned to the memory of that scene where Pinocchio and Geppetto are trapped inside the whale’s belly, and the whale delivers an aria that makes his massive tonsils jiggle. Mom must have mentioned this in passing at least 30 times while I was growing up, so, when “Pinocchio” was re-released in 1984, I promised her I’d take her to see it during my college Christmas break.

We saw it a couple weeks later, and, I have to say, it was fun to experience the movie on a big screen. But that whale, who definitely swallows Pinocchio and Geppetto, never sang a goddamn note. He didn’t even clear his throat like he was planning to sing. He was just, you know, a whale. A plot device.

For several years, I assumed Mom made the whole whale-tonsil thing up out of thin air. But I’ve since discovered she was earnestly mis-remembering a 1946 animated short called “Willie the Operatic Whale,” which very much does not contain a wooden puppet who transforms into a little boy then runs around with a top hat-wearing cricket...although there’s a woman in north Alabama who might try tell you otherwise.

                                                ***

Actually, I had the same sort of experience with a movie myself. Incredibly enough, it pertained to my first-ever viewing of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” in October of 1979. My recollection, however, was eventually vindicated.

I had known that Coppola and his crew were trapped in some kind of horrible, money-sucking production vortex out in the Philippines while shooting “Apocalypse Now,” and that critics who had already seen the picture were at odds over whether it was a masterpiece or a conceptual failure boasting several brilliant, free-standing sequences and an almost unheard-of degree of technical skill. So, anxious to cast our own judgment, my friends and I excitedly hopped in the car and made a beeline for the Madison Theater in Huntsville, AL the night the movie opened.

As I recalled that apocalyptic evening over the ensuing decades, we managed to slip into the theater while we assumed the credits would be rolling at the end of the previous showing, and were flattened by what we were seeing and hearing. Rather than a mere roll call of technicians’ names and maybe a song playing in the background, we were transfixed by an acid-fueled rendering of some kind of jungle compound bursting into flames.

There weren’t any credits at all, just seven or eight minutes of hallucinatory footage - all searing yellows, oranges, and reds - accompanied by a troubled angelic chorus, tribal drums, and occasional squalls of Hendrix-style electronic feedback. I sat there with my jaw hanging open, completely enveloped by whatever the hell it was I was seeing. By the time the hallucination ended and simply faded to black, I felt like I had already watched a visionary piece of filmmaking.

Then, after a couple trailers for upcoming pictures that seemed exceptionally anemic given the circumstances, I watched “Apocalypse Now.” Imagine having no clue that there’s a helicopter attack or a Do Lung Bridge sequence in the movie, then sitting in a darkened auditorium with the images exploding in front of you, and Walter Murch’s astonishing sound design rolling around in a swirl of auditory hyper-load. It remains one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever experienced in a movie theater.

At this point in my life, I can find a lot of flaws in “Apocalypse Now,” most of them having to do with a script that seems glued together with pretentious spit and a dream. But there are still sequences in the movie that boggle my mind.

There's a moment in the "Beatles Anthology" video where Paul McCartney is talking about the rather commonly-voiced opinion that the White Album would have been a lot stronger had it only been honed down to a single record, instead of being released as a messy two-record set with several dispensable tracks, and the Cute One finally says, “But come on— it’s the bloody Beatles’ White Album!” Well, “Apocalypse Now” might be something of a mess, too, but come on— it’s bloody Francis Ford Coppola’s ”Apocalypse Now”! Sure, it’s fun to imagine what could have been, but I’m just fine living with the disarray.

                                                ***

Anyway, over the next several years, I easily saw “Apocalypse Now” fifteen or twenty times, in the theater, on videotape, and on broadcast television, and not once did it close with a phantasmagorical carpet bombing.

When I worked behind the counter at the legendary New York video pit-stop, Kim’s Video, in the early 1990s, I asked practically every film geek I talked to (including the jazz saxophonist-actor John Lurie, who was a regular) if he or she had ever seen what I saw, and they all looked at me like I was cracked. “Apocalypse Now,” they’d say, ends with feint jungle music and credits appearing and disappearing down in the corner of a black screen, or sometimes it’s just a black screen with no credits. But it certainly isn’t anything to talk about.

Still, whenever I had a chance to watch the picture in a different format, I’d hold my breath at the end, hoping to re-experience that magic night from 1979. But no luck. All I got was credits. There came a point where I really felt I had imagined it, that my little adventure in mind-blowing light and sound was nothing more than a singing whale’s jiggly tonsil. We Tataras, after all, are known for our fertile imaginations, so maybe I created the sequence in my subconscious out of my initial shock over the movie as a whole. It didn’t seem likely, but that was the only answer I had for myself.

Then, the Gods smiled on Paul Tatara. In 1999, Paramount released a remastered, widescreen dvd of “Apocalypse Now” that included a bonus segment called “destruction of Kurtz compound,” and, if you wanted, you could watch its 6-minutes with audio commentary from Coppola! So here it is, with St. Francis himself explaining how and why he made me feel like I was possibly losing my mind, but just for a couple of decades.

Essentially, then, “Apocalypse Now” is flawed because Coppola couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say with the movie, and I only got to see this sequence in a theater one dreamlike time because he didn’t want people to think he was saying something he wasn’t saying, so he withdrew the picture and cut it out. And then no one could figure out what he was saying anyway!

Come on, though— this is better than any movie I saw last year. If only today’s filmmakers, including Coppola himself, were cranking out pictures with this kind of dispensable footage! Those very special directors’ cut dvd’s might actually be worth the money.

Paul Tatara

May 27, 2010

Unless you’re deaf, you’re probably aware that there’s a newly-remastered version of the Rolling Stones’ listing, disheveled masterpiece, “Exile on Main St.,” now available for re-re-re-purchase…or, just to maintain that alluring outlaw edge, illegal downloading. Either way, it’s worth the effort, but I personally think Mick and Keith have enough fucking money, much of which used to belong to you, me, and everybody we know.

This isn’t a matter of wiping the grime off a fresco only to discover it looked better when it was filthy, by the way, which was my initial fear when I heard what the Stones were up to with “Exile.” Although the album was partially and famously recorded in the dank basement of a rented mansion in the south of France, the cleaned up tapes display a great deal of extra pop and crack; Charlie Watts’ drums, in particular, ring with more swinging urgency than ever before, and it only adds to the experience.

Still, the “bonus” cuts in which Mick laid new vocals over previously forgotten rhythm tracks are about as appealing as putting ketchup on a 40 year-old hamburger, with the condiment being a preservative-laden variation on the original squished and drippy tomato. I’ve seen Jagger describe this unholy process on TV about 50 different times in the past week, and he seems blissfully unaware that he pissed on his own legacy by doing it, which is not quite the same as the old Stones, who once got arrested for pissing on a gas station wall.

You get the feeling today’s Mick doesn’t spend a lot of time running around the house looking for his misplaced harmonica. Maybe Dylan still does, but not the Monkey Man. He’s got a meeting with his accountant, and then he’s got that 8 o’clock blow job to tend to.

                                                ***

So there’s no keeping a good exile down, and “Exile on Main St.” remains one of the greatest rock & roll albums ever made, a two (vinyl) disc collection so bedraggled, tawdry, ridiculous, and, finally merciful, it’ll stand up to repeated listening until the day they finally put me in that cold, cold ground.

"Exile on Main St." – Radio Ad

Jagger, back when he was still capable of making insightful comments, once called “Exile” the hangover after the ‘60s, or something like that. I don’t remember the exact quote. But this album sounds like a mere hangover only when the participants don’t seem wasted beyond repair, which isn’t often.

A lot of the songs weren’t recorded by “the Rolling Stones” at all, but by anybody laying around who knew how to play an instrument, with Mick doing the singing and Keith and Mick Taylor throwing out building-block riffs. I mean, there aren’t too many tracks that sound driven by a big pot of black coffee. Jagger’s vocal on “Sweet Virginia,” as great as it is, appears to have been recorded seconds before he scampered off for a barf.

"Sweet Virginia"

Rocking tracks, of course, abound, but I’d argue that none of them rock harder than “Rip This Joint,” which suggests Chuck Berry on a drunk with his head bursting into flames. Frankly, I don’t think the Stones have ever rocked harder than this, not on any cut on any album. And the lyrics are pointless enough to become almost profound through the back door.

"Rip This Joint"

Mama said yes, Papa said no,
Make up you mind 'cause I gotta go
Gonna raise hell at the Union Hall
Drive myself right over the wall

Wham, Bham, Birmingham, Alabam' don't give a damn
Little Rock, and I'm fit to drop
Ah, let it rock!

I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, outside of some crazy cat substance abuser making a Berry-style cross-country trek. But I’ll be damned if “Blowing in the Wind” has anything on that one. And listen to Nicky Hopkins on that barrelhouse piano! Holy shit. That’s what you call getting the message across through “feel.”

                                                ***

Once again, we’re dealing with a record here that really doesn’t have a bad cut, although the circumstances under which it was recorded occasionally allowed for too much wandering and too little focus. That sloppiness is camouflaged by sheer rocking muscle, so the more overtly tender songs tend to get ignored when “Exile on Main St.” is discussed.

But “Sweet Black Angel,” a folkie ode to the American radical feminist, Communist, and Black Panthers supporter, Angela Davis, is a real standout, with a descending melody that pulls genuine pathos from the Stones’ allegiance to a (at the time; she was later found innocent) potential murderer. In short, Davis, who had been an assistant professor of philosophy at UCLA, was accused of giving guns to some Panthers who abducted and killed a federal judge in a misguided attempt to keep one of their members out of prison. Davis made a break for it, but was captured by the FBI and was awaiting trial when the Stones were recording “Exile.”

Someone had taped a picture of Davis on the wall of the studio, and Jagger was moved to write a song about her. Note the inflection of the shackled African-Americans who came before Davis, and that the dreaded “N-word” appears in the lyrics, but as an expression of how many Americans viewed the Panthers.

Apparently, neither the Panthers nor Davis were offended, since no one ever took Jagger or any other Stones to task for it. Jagger’s intent, and high regard for black culture, seemed pretty obvious to anyone who ever paid any attention to him. Surely, the Panthers - who, like a good many ‘70s radicals, were vigorous self-romanticizers - played a 45 of “Street Fighting Man” on occasion.

"Sweet Black Angel"

Got a sweet black angel
Got a pin-up girl
Got a sweet black angel
Up upon my wall
Well, she ain't no singer
And she ain't no star
But she sure talk good
And she move so fast

Free de sweet black slave
Free de sweet black slave
Free de sweet black slave
Free de sweet black slave

John Lennon, who also wrote a song about Davis during his “Look— I bought some fatigues at the Army-Navy store” radical rich-guy phase, couldn’t touch what Jagger accomplished here. Even though it’s pretty well hidden among the assorted tumbling dice, “Sweet Black Angel” might be my favorite track on “Exile on Main St.”

                                                ***

Before I close, I want to address something that always comes into play when people contemplate “Exile.” Hard drugs, not just pot and pills, were free-flowing during the album’s creation, and a lot of listeners like to spin that sort of thing into “Whooo-hoooo rock & roll!” when too many performers - and fans of performers - back in the day were waking up dead for their indulgence.

It’s not without reason that, for the past four decades, the Stones have successfully squelched the official release of “Cocksucker Blues,” Robert Frank’s raw, fly-on-the-wall documentary of their 1972 American tour in support of “Exile on Main St.” But Wall of Paul…um…has access, so let’s take a look at all the fun Richards and his partners in needles were having while Jagger and his more consistently lucid band mates were trying to hold everything together on the road.

There might be stupider things to do than getting yourself hooked on heroin as a symbol of your soul-deep hipness, but I’d be hard pressed to name them, and I’m always leery of the concept of artists who are supposedly more in touch with our shared heartbeat because they’re fucked up.

The miracle of “Exile on Main St.” should be the music itself, but that gets trumped by the fact that Richards - between the smack, the coke, the speed, and the Rebel Yell - didn’t keel over while it was being made. Bass player Bill Wyman got so tired of Richards’ exiles from existence he doesn’t appear on most of the album, and he and Keith didn’t bury the hatchet over the sessions until many years later.

Charlie Parker was convinced his genius would have burned even brighter were it not for the monkey on his back. Music fans should pause and reflect on what could have been for the Rolling Stones, had Richards been clean when the band still wanted to make records rather than simply sell them. If you care about great rock & roll as deeply as I do, you have to realize that we missed out on a lot.

Paul Tatara

May 25, 2010

Some time in the late 1970s, a young musician named Marshall Crenshaw made a desperate bid to escape his native Detroit by auditioning for the part of John Lennon in a traveling production of the faux-Beatles extravaganza known as “Beatlemania.” After receiving a crash course in all things Beatles from the show's producers, Crenshaw finally won the role, and then had to endure a solid year of being wildly cheered for looking and sounding like somebody other than himself.

By all accounts, Crenshaw was a credible enough Lennon, but it didn’t take him long to realize he needed to find a musical identity of his own or else be driven insane. So he purchased a four-track tape recorder and, whenever there was a break from the tour and he was back in Detroit, he made demos of his own songs. But they weren’t the sorts of tunes other struggling songwriters were recording on the cusp of the glossy '80s.

“Around '73,” Crenshaw later said in an interview, “I just stopped listening to the radio and just became immersed, listening to old 45s from the '50s and early '60s. It seemed to me that there was more immediacy in those records than the stuff that was on the radio at that time."

Crenshaw’s tunes rode on a wave of starry-eyed lyrics, although the romanticism was more often than not undercut by an Elvis Costello-like strain of barbed sarcasm. Or maybe he was just a wise-ass Smokey Robinson. Either way, he had trouble writing completely committed “love” songs, and the fissure was both amusing and fascinating.

Here’s one of the demos he recorded when he finally got his act together, “You’re My Favorite Waste of Time.” Note his already fully-developed flair for vaguely melancholic, minor chord-driven melodies.

"You're My Favorite Waste of Time"

With captivating work like that coming from his bedroom, it’s no wonder record labels were soon clamoring for Crenshaw’s services. I can remember reading about him in “Rolling Stone” magazine long before I’d heard a single note of his music, and just the description of what he was doing, which included references to Buddy Holly and Phil Spector, got me excited. I was, after all, the only 16 year-old kid in north Alabama who listened to the Ronettes while he got ready for school.

Soon after signing with Warner Bros. Records, Crenshaw entered the Record Plant in New York City with his drummer-brother, Robert, and a superb bass player named Chris Donato, and proceeded to cut one of the coolest, most insanely catchy debut albums since the Beatles initially please-pleased the world. I, for one, flipped when I first heard it. I can clearly remember listening to it on a set of headphones while lying in bed at night, marveling at the melodies, in particular, and at Crenshaw’s remarkable ability to sound old-fashioned and absolutely modern at the same time.

I felt from that first listen that the record was a rock & roll classic, and, over the past couple of decades, it’s surely stood the test of time.

                                                ***

The story goes that Lou Reed named his final album with the Velvet Underground “Loaded” because, as he saw it, it was loaded with possible hits. Marshall Crenshaw could have named his eponymous debut the same thing, for the same reason.

Unfortunately for Crenshaw (and for Reed, for that matter), the American public’s musical tastes had skewed mightily toward horse crap while he was still digging The Good Stuff, so he only managed a very minor chart appearance in the form of a bouncy little number called “Someday, Someway,” which also received some airplay when it was released by the rockabilly revivalist, Robert Gordon. All the other “hits” would be enjoyed only by the relative handful of people who purchased the album.

Everything on “Marshall Crenshaw” is great— and I mean every single song. The weakest track would have to be a cover of an old Arthur Alexander tune called “Soldier of Love,” but even that serves as mortar between Crenshaw’s concepts of rock & roll past and present. You can tell the guy singing and playing the guitar on this album is also a music fan, much in the same way you can detect Bruce Springsteen’s fanatacism on “Born to Run.”

There’s a joyous sense of creation in the air, as if Crenshaw is celebrating his chance to join the lineage of great American pop. And he throws in lots of lyrical hints that rock & roll is a lifeline you can cling to when the real world is simply too much to bear. This, obviously, is a man who’s bought a few records in his time.

Years earlier, Crenshaw’s co-producer on the project, Richard Gottehrer, was a songwriter who penned such AM-radio classics as “My Boyfriend’s Back” and “I Want Candy,” so he knew full-well where the artist was coming from (Gottehrer would hit the financial jackpot soon after working with Crenshaw by producing the Go-Go’s gazillion-selling debut, “Beauty and the Beat.”)

“Marshall Crenshaw”’s bright, bouncy sound is elemental to its appeal. The arrangements are never overly busy, so you can pick individual instruments out of the mix if you want to focus, for instance, on one of Donato’s bubbling bass lines or Robert Crenshaw’s pistol-crack backbeat. The only thing that could conceivably be viewed as a bauble is the occasional ringing of a glockenspiel. Beyond that, it’s handclaps and high harmony supporting a series of gorgeous, seemingly effortless melodies.

                                                ***

As I already said, there are no duds here. It’s tough to choose just a couple of tracks for new listeners to hear, but anything I pick is guaranteed to convey the album’s dazzling effervescence. Let’s start with “She Can’t Dance,” which paints a portrait of the exact sort of swinging-ponytail girl you can imagine young Marshall pining for, and probably not getting, in high school.

"She Can’t Dance"

There’s nothing especially intricate going on here, at least not on first listen. Pay closer attention, though, and you’ll notice the minimalist perfection of Crenshaw’s guitar chords— he’s laying down a bed of bouncing electricity to support the vocals, and the rest of the trio simply drives the thing along with boundless energy. Why kids at the time weren’t assigning number judgments to this on “American Bandstand” remains quite beyond my understanding. Was it really not as worthy as Styx and Joe Walsh?

Next up is “Cynical Girl,” which is arguably the key song on the album and as close to an anthem as you’ll find in the Marshall Crenshaw oeuvre. An hilarious ode to abhorring the abundant garbage everyone else embraces, it once again sounds like it could have been recorded in 1956 or the day after tomorrow, although the weary lyrics are something of a dead giveaway.

"Cynical Girl"

Well I'm goin' out
I'm goin' out lookin' for a cynical girl
Who's got no use for the real world
I'm lookin' for a cynical girl

I'll be lost in love
And havin' some fun with my cynical girl
Who'll have no use for the real world
I'm lookin' for a cynical girl

In an interview with “Magnet” magazine last summer, Crenshaw said of the song, “I had the music first. That’s how it always works. As far as the words go, I remember having to go to court to pay a traffic ticket, and the words kinda popped into my head all at once. The meat of the song is where it says, ‘I hate TV,’ which is an oddball thing to say in a rock ‘n’ roll song. Whenever I get an idea like that, that’s almost too stupid to put in a song, I always put it in. The thing about the girl is really window-dressing. At that time, I despised about 60 percent of mass culture. Now, it’s up to about 90.”

I can relate, Marshall. I can relate.

And for my final exhibit, I offer you, “Mary Anne,” a classic entry in the long rock & roll tradition of songs named after unapproachable girls. The protagonist, as always on “Marshall Crenshaw,” is trying to light the love flame, but the winds of disappointment keep blowing it out. And the object of his undeclared affection is in the same boat.

“You take a look around, and all you seem to see/Is bringing you down, as down as you can be/Go on and have a laugh/Go have a laugh on me/Go on and have a laugh at how bad it can be” is hardly the most hopeful lyric, but the soaring backing vocals and fragile melody coupled with the obvious yearning in Crenshaw’s voice move the tune into certifiably sad territory.

There’s mere disappointment and there’s genuine heartbreak, and this song hangs precariously on the cusp of the two. It’s a remarkably concise balancing act, clocking in at a radio-friendly two minutes and fifty-eight seconds, not that any deejays actually played it. But the lack of public acceptance doesn’t make this tune, or the rest of “Marshall Crenshaw,” any less of a masterpiece.

"Mary Anne"

It’s no exaggeration to say Buddy Holly couldn’t have done it any better himself. What a terrific, and terrifically moving, little song.

                                                ***

I intended to stop there, but what the hell. While we’re at it, let’s play the flip side.

One of my favorite “Marshall Crenshaw” tunes isn’t even on the album— it only appeared on the B-side of “Cynical Girl.” “Somebody Like You” was recorded with a little more muscle than the songs that ended up on the record. The sound is meatier, more modernistic, and the guitar solo punches a bit harder. It's more power pop than brilliantly retooled classicism.

"Somebody Like You" still appears to be an abandoned experiment, though; there are occasional dropouts and flutters in the left channel that suggest the tape somehow got crinkled or twisted. But the eye-rolling lyrics (“I cannot stand that noise you’re listening to/Why did I ever get involved with you?”) are wholly in keeping with the rest of the album, and the handclaps and “bop-bop” background vocals are to die for.

"Somebody Like You"

The crop of songs that encompass “Marshall Crenshaw” may not hold the secret to life, al a Springsteen or Lennon or the Band. But, almost 30 years later, they still hold the secret to the next three minutes while I’m listening to them, and, that, for me, defines great pop music. If I’m allowed to bring 15 albums to that mythical desert island everyone talks about, surely this one’s coming with me, and I’ll gladly sing along with it until I die of dehydration or scorpion stings.

                                                ***

Crenshaw has released many albums since 1982, and is a well-respected songsmith who still tours clubs around the country. But he’s somehow never recaptured the lightning of his debut release, at least not with such energetic, winning consistency. By now, more people probably know him as the guy who played Buddy Holly in the Richie Valens biopic, “La Bamba,” than as a great rock & roll artist. If you’re looking for a working definition of irony, that should suffice right there.

Back around 1993, my agent at the time needed a date to her old boyfriend’s wedding (they still knew and liked each other), so I agreed to put on a suit and tag along. The ex-beau worked for Columbia Records and, of course, knew a lot of people in the business. But I was still surprised to see that his buddy, Marshall Crenshaw, led the house band at the reception!

Crenshaw played a lot of obscure ‘60s hits, including a hefty handful by the Sir Douglas Quintet. This seemed dream-like enough, but I also noticed, sitting among the guests, a sassy-looking woman who smiled broadly while bopping her head to the music. It was Ronnie Spector, the lead singer of the Ronettes.

I don't believe our lives can really come to one complete circle. It’s more like a series of rough, circular doodles scrawled on a sheet of cosmic notebook paper by an unknowable force. I didn’t speak to either Crenshaw or Spector that evening. I thought it best that we simply share the moment and dig the music, just like we always had, albeit in different locations. There was more than enough connection in that to keep me happy, and other circles remained to be drawn. For a couple of hours, anyway, the joint was jumping, Crenshaw rocked out, and all seemed right with the world.

Download: “Marshall Crenshaw” (1982) by Marshall Crenshaw, in its entirety. Don't forget to tack on the bonus tracks, "You're My Favorite Waste of Time," "Somebody Like You," and "Whenever You're on My Mind." Then pop till you drop...wop-bop-wop-bop-ooh-ooh-ooh.

Paul Tatara