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

May 17, 2010

There was a gossip section article in Monday’s edition of “The Daily News” concerning the recording of R&B songstress Jennifer Hudson’s new album, which I normally wouldn’t care about in the least. But this piece of reportage so succinctly illustrates what’s wrong with modern popular culture I feel like I should say something about it. I do, after all, write about popular culture, although, until just a few seconds ago, I don’t think I’ve ever had a reason to type the name “Jennifer Hudson.”

According to the article, Hudson - who made her name on "American Idol," then won an Oscar for being big-boned and better than Beyoncé in “Dream Girls” - was giving a gaggle of industry types a sneak listen to a batch of songs that were set for release on her upcoming would-be spectacular diggity-wow-wow cd. But things didn’t go as expected. During the party, the listeners seemed less than enthralled with Hudson’s new offering to the Gods, which was comprised of fast-moving dance tracks of the Lady Gaga and Rihanna variety.

The music's tone reportedly came as an extreme surprise to everyone at the event, even though the tracks were produced by a guy named Rich Harrison, who was behind exactly the same sort of stuff when it was released by the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Mary J. Blige, and Beyoncé. “The consensus ,” as “The Daily News” source reported, “was the songs were so not J. Hud.” (Yeah. He called her J. Hud. “Jennifer Hudson” is very hard to say when you’re completely full of shit.)

So the general feeling was that the tunes weren’t the sort of thing people expect of Hudson, even though her entire output at this point in her career, if you ignore the “Dream Girls” soundtrack, is a grand total of 13 songs. That’s one more than a dozen, for those of you who aren’t mathematically inclined.

                                                ***

The reserved response to her new music threw Hudson – and, you can bet, her “people” - off guard. They were looking for stomping and cheering, but instead got only finger sandwiches and sipping. Still, why Hudson should care if a random group of people in a single room didn’t dig what they were hearing is beyond me.

I’d like to believe the music they were listening to was driven by what Jennifer Hudson was feeling during the period when she created it. She put her heart and soul into it, and, when she was done, she had a chunk of her new album in the can. She was just being nice enough to let a few interested people hear it in advance.

I’d like to believe that, but it appears I’d be wrong if I did. In the wake of the listening party, rather than giving everyone a hearty “fuck you, and don’t forget to throw your cups in the trash on the way out,” Hudson reportedly ran back to the studio and started recording new tunes that were more in keeping with her previous work…which is to say, she learned not to surprise unimaginative people, and will no longer be brazen enough to reveal other sides of her personality in her music. That’ll show ‘em, by God.

As Hudson herself quickly Tweeted after the non-response, she’s now "In the studio recording with Harvey Mason! Ryan Tedder & Rich Harrison came up with some heat. We gon' kill the game come September, y'all."

The “game”, then, is pandering to expectations as heartily as possible in order to sell a shitload of cd’s. It’s important to note, however, that Hudson, who obviously didn’t invent pandering, is so willing to send a missive out to her fans saying she’s finally putting her back into the Big Pander. Boy, won’t it be exciting if she manages to sell the crap out of a bunch of overblown gestures and makes a pile of money with them?! Isn’t that, after all, why we listen to music?

Well...no. Not me, and hopefully not you either.

                                                ***

Depending on the crowd, I still occasionally get viewed by younger people as an old-timer who thinks all the great albums were made between 1964 and 1980, and everything else is tainted by my no longer being a part of the industry’s youthful target audience. But that badly misperceives where I’m coming from.

As I repeatedly said about movies when I wrote reviews for CNN, it’s not a matter of how lousy the offerings are, it’s a matter of the audience standing there and begging to be abused by corporate monoliths, then gobbling up their test-marketed garbage, which in turn encourages the creation of even more garbage. Sooner or later, the audience is asking for it, and the musicians, vocalists, and (if it’s movies) actors, have to fork it over.

Jennifer Hudson doesn’t know if she’s simply a young woman with a big voice or a true artist because, when all is said and done, her goal is to sell as many cd’s as possible and pack arenas at $130 a pop. That’s the modern musical art form, not the creation of a cohesive, moving statement by the person whose name is emblazoned on the cover of the cd.

                                                ***

This is Van Morrison’s 1967 album, “Astral Weeks.” You undoubtedly know who Morrison is, and maybe you’re even a fan to one degree or another. But you may not know about “Astral Weeks.” It was voted the #2 rock album of all time by “Mojo” magazine in 1995, and “Rolling Stone” ranked it #19 in 2003. That doesn’t make it either the #2 or #19 most significant album of all time, whatever that’s supposed to mean. It does suggest, though, that there’s something particularly gripping going on with “Astral Weeks,” since thousands of music lovers are still hugely enthusiastic about it some 40 years after it was originally released.

There’s a moody, organic beauty to “Astral Weeks,” a feeling that the music is pouring out of a naturally flowing stream of consciousness shared by Morrison and a group of superb, closely interacting musicians, most of whom were jazz artists who had no idea what the famously withdrawn Morrison was even shooting for. Nobody at Morrison’s record label really wanted him to record “Astral Weeks,” though, because his previous single was the undemanding, super-catchy “Brown Eyed Girl,” which became an enormous hit the previous summer. And, boy, wouldn’t it be great if he could come up with a “Brown Eyed Girl, Part Two!”

“Brown Eyed Girl”

That Morrison had vastly different plans, that he was feeling something stirring in his musical soul and, with almost ridiculous ambition, set out to orchestrate it, runs wholly counter to what performers like Hudson - and that would include a significant chunk of the most popular performers on earth - do when they record albums.

Morrison wrote and arranged the songs on “Astral Weeks” by himself, then, due to extreme budget limitations, recorded it in three days, churning cellos and all. And he wound up with a record that sounds like it grew out of the ground, or was plucked from the air when it passed by during an eternal echo. It’s one of the most mysterious, strangely moving albums ever put to tape.

"Sweet Thing"

The famous, self-consciously insane rock critic, Lester Bangs, once glowed over the album with these lines: "Van Morrison was twenty-two or twenty-three years old when he made this record; there are lifetimes behind it. What ‘Astral Weeks’ deals in are not facts but truths. ‘Astral Weeks,’ insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend."

Any bets on whether that’s what Jennifer Hudson will end up with?

                                                ***

I’m not saying Hudson should aim to make an artistic statement as profound as the one found in the grooves – yes, they were grooves once - of “Astral Weeks.” I’m not even saying you’re guaranteed to like “Astral Weeks;” it’s a uniquely challenging album that simply may not be your cup of tea. But I’m trying to illustrate what I, personally, look for when I delve deeply into our popular culture, and I know from the reader responses I’ve received over the years that there are others out there like me.

There are still terrific, human-sounding albums being made these days. But the machinery of the industry has grown so overwhelming, the performers you’re most likely to encounter, if you don’t dig and dig and dig, might as well be recording their music in cubicles. They’re clock-punchers with fleet fingers and memorable voices, but clock-punchers nonetheless.

When I carry on about my favorite recording artists, I may sound like the old guy who quit loving music when Reagan was president. But I’m just yearning for the days when major stars, whether you’re talking about the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Sly Stone, Lou Reed, Stevie Wonder, The Clash, Marvin Gaye, or piles of others, were allowed to go for it, to break down the barriers of their stardom and actually reach for the brass ring— to try to deliver a piece of work that speaks about the times in which they live, or to illuminate the concepts that drive them as human beings.

I want to know who that guy is playing that guitar, or who that woman is singing that song. And I don’t give a flying fuck how many records they sell, just as I couldn’t care less how much a movie has made at the box office. Why the hell should I?

                                                ***

Oh, by the way— “Astral Weeks” didn’t go gold until 2001, 33 years after it was released, and Van Morrison is not exactly hurting for cash at the moment. Significant careers should be able to survive an album or two that not everyone wants to listen to. If music labels won’t allow those albums to be made, and the artists themselves don’t stand up and insist that they’re making them, do we really have nothing left to look forward to but careful insignificance?

To paraphrase Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is to a dying industry?”

Paul Tatara

May 13, 2010

Until this past week, the last time you saw Lawrence Taylor, the former New York Giants All-World linebacker wild man and a member in good standing of the Pro Football Hall Fame, he was a stumbling, fumbling contestant on ABC-TV’s hit inexplicability show, “Dancing with the Stars.”

Or, at least, that’s the last time you saw Taylor if your significant other actually watches this stuff, which mine does. If, on the other hand, you don’t know from “Dancing with the Stars,” you can probably recall one of Taylor’s post-football court appearances, which featured such groovy charges as crack possession and twice trying to buy cocaine from undercover cops.

Or maybe you saw the 2003 “60 Minutes” interview in which Taylor told Mike Wallace he used to send prostitutes to opponents’ hotel rooms the night before big games in order to wear them out (the players, not the prostitutes.) He also, just because it’s fun to know, told Wallace he used to submit his teammates’ urine when he had to participate in league-ordered drug tests. How, I wonder, do you broach the subject of wanting someone’s piss?

In 2003, Taylor said, "L.T. died a long time ago, and I don't miss him at all...all that's left is Lawrence Taylor." Now, though, Lawrence Taylor has deftly combined two of L.T.’s favorite pastimes into one kick-ass reemergence on the ever-popular celebrity police blotter scene.

No, he hasn’t danced a badly timed rumba with a drug dealer, at least not as far as I know. But he has been arrested at a New Jersey hotel, where he allegedly raped a 16 year-old prostitute. Even in Jersey that kind of thing can get you into trouble.

New York sports fans, who are notoriously forgiving when it comes to assholes in their stadiums, both on the turf and seated around it, have been twisting their brains like street vendor pretzels for the past several days, trying to convince themselves what L.T. allegedly did with that kid at the hotel isn’t as bad as it first seems. If you think about it, all the mountain-like man did was force himself on a cowering teenager who was in the room solely because a pimp slapped her around for refusing to go. It’s not like he killed somebody. Plus, it sounds like he was...um...set up. Sort of.

Just to give you an idea how far you can get by being a beloved sports figure in New York City, the very girl Taylor is accused of raping said this to “The Daily News” yesterday, and why she was talking to “The Daily News” is anybody’s guess: "I was a huge Giant fan," she said, "and I used to look up to him." She added, "I don't want to ruin his reputation," despite what happened in the hotel room. "After all," she said, "He's in the Hall of Fame and he won two Super Bowls.” (My astounded italics.)

Really? That’s a fair trade-off? Really?

Taylor has her delivered on a platter to a hotel room in New Jersey, he rapes her, then gives her $300, the bulk of which she undoubtedly had to hand to the pimp who earlier slapped her around. And she doesn't want to ruin Taylor's reputation because HE’S IN THE HALL OF FAME AND HE WON TWO SUPER BOWLS?? Did she forget he once appeared as himself on "The Sopranos?"

This girl is a victim, and her head surely must have been in a bad, bad place even before she entered that hotel room. But if that isn’t the atomic bomb quote of the year, I don’t know what is.

Taylor’s defense in all this, now that he’s tried the “she didn’t look 16” angle, which means not a bit of difference in a court of law and nobody believed anyway, is that he never touched the girl. That’s right— he simply masturbated while she was in the room, which is several steps removed from both the rape charge and the graphic testimony the girl delivered to the cops when Taylor was first arrested.

So, yeah. Taylor paid $300 for an underage hooker who was forced into the act through an ass-kicking from her pimp. But all he did was jack off while she was there, man. Then, undoubtedly, he lectured her on the dangers of possibly getting raped in exactly that situation, braided her hair for her, and packed her a sandwich in a Hello Kitty lunch box before she left.

Forget “where have you gone Joe DiMaggio.” I’d settle for “where have you gone Sonny Liston.”

Paul Tatara