Conversation Series - Part Three

And now...the third and final installment of our Conversation Series with the Incomparable Ross K!

RossNation:

For all the kids reading at home, what Ross is really saying is “Stay in School. Follow Your Dreams. You, Children, Are the Future.”

Here’s the thing: where we went to school was particularly weird. Half the student body used it as a pre-professional finishing school, a place to work on your handshake, a country club with a handsome library. Then there were the kids who actually used that library, intellectually-curious but often misguided types. And these are exactly the kids the professors FEED ON. Education, at best, can give you the tools to develop ideas. But ideas, in that particular environment, are as welcome as anthrax in the mailroom. I kept wondering why the second-rate students kept getting the first-rate grades in college. It wasn’t until Junior year that I realized my professors just wanted my papers to say the things we’d already said in class. It honestly didn’t even occur to me. I always thought, “Okay, we went there…where else can I go? Can I go deeper? Can I take that futher?” But in undergrad, that’s just not what most teachers want. They want seven pages of their lecture handed back to them, so they know you went to class and didn’t sleep every day. And that’s really about it.

That said, I think I got a great education in college and I wouldn’t change it. It’s just something I had to actively seek out.

What I really learned in college was that Tri-Delts are sometimes worth the trouble. Bada-bing!

Relatedly…Cate Blanchett? Are you sure you understand this question? I remember Stephanie Seymore in the GNR videos, and I remember her being a Victoria’s Secret supermodel at the time. Cate Blanchett is physically frightening. If she showed up at a video shoot and I caught her in the wrong light, I’d throw a bat at her and run the fastest mile of my life. Next you’ll tell me you own a swimsuit calendar of Judie Dench. I have to move on…

I should’ve qualified the Most Underrated question. I guess the best way to define “underrated” is the disparity between the quality of the band’s work and their actual, tangible impact (mainstream popularity and success). Your statement, “if they’re TRULY obscure, if no one at all knows them, it’s probably because they’re not good enough to be rated” is dead-on and something I’ve often argued. A buddy of mine maintains that the greatest rock band on the planet is probably unknown. I think popularity is at least an indication of relevance. In that way, you can’t be great and truly obscure. No prog-techno outfit of seventeen year-old Romanian girls is better than the Beatles. And they’re not gonna be…

But I digress. I’m picking Big Star and I’ll tell you why. First, you might be going “Who is Big Star?” Well, exactly. But second of all, I’d argue that their first album (#1 Record) is as good a debut as any rock band has ever released, and their second/last record (Radio City) is maybe even better. Big Star was a band from Memphis in the early 70’s, led by Alex Chilton of The Boxtops. They specialized in uber-accessible Brit-pop and infused it with Memphis-style soul and blues-rock. They were an insanely good band with an insanely bad label that got them no radio play, no distribution, and limited press (although what reviews existed were predictably glowing). The label went essentially bankrupt and the band, discouraged and defeated, broke up. One of the members died a few years later in a car crash, preventing any future albums. And that was that. They’ve directly influenced R.E.M, Gin Blossoms, Weezer, Counting Crows, Teenage Fanclub, The Posies, Sub-Pop founders Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt, on and on and on—and those are the folks who talk about them constantly in press. A thousand bands were indirectly influenced by “Thirteen,” which might have been the first emo song. I can’t think of any other band that made music that great that your average person has simply never heard of and maybe never will. They’re the only band I’ve ever heard who had Beatles-level greatness, but never became remotely famous.

Finally…if you could have any pop singer’s voice, who would you take (this is not limited to rock singers)? Why didn’t you name me your most admired songwriter of all-time? And maybe the biggest question…

Every 15 years or so, rock redefines itself and completely alters the pop-cultural landscape. It happened in the early 60’s, (British invasion) mid-late 70’s (punk), early 90’s (grunge)…are we due for the next huge thing? And what will it be? And, since these things usually come from the active musical scene of one city…what is that city? What’s the next Seattle? Who’s the next Cobain?

I give you the last word, sir. Or the last eight-thousand.

You know who I am,
MILAM

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Christoph:

I suppose you’d fill a video with a different orange-tanned Maxim-cover wank for every month of the year. I see there is no talking to you on this subject. Obviously your intelligence is extremely low, Radioactive Man #1 is worth more than your life please exit the store.

Your choice for Most Underrated is clearly much better thought-out than mine and quite instructive. You definitely appear to advantage before your fans here. I had never heard of Big Star, but now I am eager to, provided I can do it for free on copies burned by you. As an honorable mention, I’d like to suggest Doctor Hook, an ironic country band from the ‘70s who did “On the Cover of the Rolling Stone,” the show-biz ditty you sometimes hear on Bob and Tom in the Morning. Hop on Youtube and look for their videos for a memory-jog on just how funny they were versus how known or appreciated they are.

But, excuse me, Gin Blossoms? For shame, Doc! I say, man, I was going to challenge you to a duel for comparing Cate Blanchett to Judi Dench, but then you mentioned Gin Blossoms in a conversation about music. As Doctor Johnson said of a woman’s preaching, “It is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs:
it is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Come, let us have no more of this.

If I could have any pop singer’s voice, I’d probably take Sam Moore’s of Sam and Dave. Sam and Dave are the guys on the eight-track in The Blues Brothers. Sam is the one who sounds like a better singer.

My most admired songwriter of all time is J. S. Bach. Get outta me.

This last question is a tricky one: my gut feeling is that I don’t see there being another Cobain or another Seattle because rock is losing its boundaries and fan-base and leaking energy into other genres. I realize that conditions were similar before the last sea-change in that rock’s having fallen into the hands of smiling cheerleaders wearing make-up caused the backlash and that rock’s now having fallen into the hands of sighing, pouting, fainting emo-nancies wearing make-up could cause a similar backlash. However, part of me wants to ask who would even notice a rebirth of rock when BET and VH1 play more music videos than MTV, when the McRap wrongly called hip-hop has curdled everything into a shitty soup and Music Television plays only dating shows, before I tell myself that that’s why we need it more than ever.

Chris, I can only read minds a certain number of hours each day before becoming indisposed and having to lie down with a cool cloth on my forehead, and telling the future is pert-near beyond my abilities. I do think that whatever the next big thing is, it won’t be rock.

Conversation Series - Part Two

Here now, Part Two of My Conversation Series with Ross K:

Rossinator,

I give you an inch and you takes 10,000 words. I’ll see that and raise it. Soooo much to say…

Um, The Vines? Are you sure you remember which ones they were? The “garage rock” revival in 2001 (The Strokes, The Hives, The White Stripes, The Vines, Kings of Leon) gave us something to root for, but it played out the wrong way. The Hives and The Vines don’t really exist anymore—at least not in any relevant way—and The Strokes have been on B+ autopilot since the first record. The White Stripes, on the other hand, have proven to be so much more than a retro-garage-rock outfit and the Kings torched that whole idea a year ago.

Here’s mine:
1) John Bonham (Led Zeppelin)
2) Keith Moon (The Who)
3) Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Queens of the Stone Age)
4) Jack Irons (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam)
5) Mitch Mitchell (Jimi Hendrix Experience)

Now…

I’ve never played drums and don’t ACTUALLY know what I’m talking about. But my prerequisites are essentially the same as yours, and there’s the list. Admittedly, I’ve never listened to Rush once in my life, so I’ll take a pass on that. I think Jack Irons’ work with Pearl Jam (No Code and Yield) is some of my favorite rock drumming of all time, and merited inclusion. My only listed honorable mention is, obviously RINGO STARR.

Better question: where do you come down on Ringo? Is he, as Lester Bangs rudely put it, “incompetent,” or is he a vastly underrated song-servant? “Ticket to Ride” alone is enough to put me in the latter camp. I’ll give Ringo propers all day long. His malapropisms also gave us some great lines: “hard day’s night,” “tomorrow never knows,” etc. He was AT LEAST twice the poet Paul was.

You’re right—Nashville is bulimic. But I’d argue the motivations are different. To me, it’s not the embarrassment of talent-riches that you’re depicting. I rarely go to other local shows and feel discouraged about my own work—partly because it’s a generally positive community, and partly because I don’t hear that many good songs around town. There are a ton of remarkable musicians, but they’re all imported and exported anyway; they might be “in” Nashville, but they’re not “of” Nashville. I’d say that the passivity and blasé attitude in the scene is less about the frequency of incredible performances, and more about laziness. It’s not so much that there’s so much greatness that folks aren’t easily impressed—it’s that nobody really cares enough to be impressed in the first place.

Let’s go further—if Nashville is a rapidly aging girl with low self-esteem and a pattern of bulimia, Memphis is…what? I’ll call her a formerly gorgeous debutante with oppressively high self-esteem, long past her prime, now a mother of five, and her looks never recovered. She’s still wearing halter tops and standing next to the bowling alley jukebox. If only she wanted to look like something else, she might get back into shape and re-establish her beauty. But, for now, she’s eating at DBo’s three times a day and re-dying her hair…but her daughters are already pretty. And Louisville? A pre-teen from the other side of the tracks with unconventionally pretty features and an awkward, gangly frame? In six years she might be a supermodel, or she might just be frightening?

Also, Jerry Stiller was a joke. I was asking about FEMALE video co-stars. I’ll take Megan Fox because, uh, she seems smart.

If you learned one thing in college, what was it? What single songwriter do you admire the most? And what’s your pick for rock’s all-time Most Underrated Band?

Back in off-white,
Milam

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Mr. Milam,

I don’t think Ringo incompetent; quite to the contrary. He IS a selfless song-servant, but that’s something I’ve only begun to understand and value recently. When you ask about favorite drummers, my answer is more geared toward the music I liked when I played only drums and nothing else, and was more exclusively interested in drums than in the rest of a band. You must understand that I was never into the Beatles as a teenager, when I started playing drums. I’ve only learned to appreciate them recently as I’ve studied music more thoroughly and become interested in songwriting and melodic instruments. Ringo is a songwriter’s dream, because he doesn’t step on your song. He lets the songwriter’s ego go unchallenged by the interests of the drummer, who is often the biggest affront to it. To one way of thinking, Ringo did the best thing he could do, which was stay out of the way of some great songwriters by playing as sparingly and inconspicuously as he could, with the deadest possible drum sounds. In many ways it’s a much greater challenge to stay solid in the background and be a soldier sacrificing for the rest of the band than it is to go off all the time. But the only beat he ever played that fired me up is the crash-fest at the end of Revolver (one of my favorite albums), “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

If Louisville were a girl, it would be a sixteen-year-old wannabe indie groupie with different streaks of dye in her hair who tries to initiate contact with older boys by coming up and asking for a cigarette. The kind of girl Lois Griffin was talking about when she told Chris, “Remember to find a girl who smokes. If she smokes, she pokes.” That girl who flirts with rebelliousness and attention-seeking, but inwardly craves strong limits and leadership she can respect, who wants to play out both scripts at the same time, being strong and being weak, writing her own life and leaving it up to somebody else, being free and alone and being fettered and taken care of. And who ultimately ends up pregnant in her early twenties, living an unrealized life thereafter. But this is before that part. Like a teenager, Louisville isn’t sure what its models are or what it wants to become. It has several options to choose from and hasn’t decided yet; it’s a splinter of several kinds of cities, still deciding what kind of city it wants to be and how it wants to be regarded by everybody else.

There’s a Broadway stage dancer named Susan LaMontagne who’s a sex bomb. Ideally I would feature her in my music video. Since you say you need a celebrity, however, and no one knows who Susan LaMontagne is, I would happily feature Cate Blanchett. Bear in mind, analogously, how well it worked when Axl Rose put Stephanie Seymour in those videos.

I probably admire J. S. Bach the most, because he wrote 1100 pieces of music that are all brilliant, timeless, and either stirring, soothing or rumination-friendly, and in a wide range of instrumentation—masses, solo keyboard, you name it. I sense, however, that you mean within the realm of douche bags with acoustic guitars and journals. As far as recent, pop-music type songwriters…Woody Guthrie, Jimmie Rodgers, Ledbelly. Although they were bad to their families, I admire their courage.

Rock's Most Underrated Band…underrated by fans, musicians, by critics? This is a difficult question, because all the people we’re talking about are going to be famous regardless if they’re any good at all, and if they’re TRULY obscure, if no one at all knows them, it’s probably because they’re not good enough to be rated. I’d say the Allman Brothers, and I’m not even a rabid fan of theirs. I say underrated because I believe they get no crossover: I think that they’re stuck with a small-but-loyal jam-band cult following, and everybody else just hears “Ramblin’ Man” on the radio once a week and thinks nothing more of them. The surviving members still tour their hearts out constantly, and they’ve been playing in some incarnation or other for the better part of forty years, so I know they’re an extremely hard-working band, and you do hear about them, but I don’t know who else their fans might be besides…budding blues/jam-band guitar players. Another band I think of similarly is ZZ Top, who have been putting out album after album for a jillion years but don’t seem to show up in commercials or movies (except that “Tush” was in Dazed and Confused), they just tour the planet like clockwork and have “Legs,” “Sharp Dressed Man” and “Gimme All Your Lovin’” played on classic rock radio every day of the world.

What I learned in college is that college can make many people smaller instead of bigger if they let it institutionalize them. I don’t want to be a part of its culture of over-specialization, where people feel forced into getting a doctorate in one microscopically small and irrelevant field of study and just teaching that to similarly trapped-feeling people for the rest of their lives. It leads to intellectual and creative death for the doctoral candidates/teachers and encourages professor-worship in students who then waste away in unremarkable, unoriginal adherence to trends to please everybody around them instead of pursuing their own interests and passions. There are a lot of lost kids in Arts and Sciences who seem to want to become artists, who want to transform, to live bigger, less ordinary lives. If you want to be an artist, if you want to live a bold, noble, enriched life, you won’t do it by staying in school, you’ve got to out and just start TRYING to do it. A boat is safe in a harbor, but that’s not what boats are for.

Colleges are the ones who institutionalized literary criticism as a job and an industry, and because colleges are havens for critics, they actually put criticism ahead of literature in their teaching. What this does is eliminate the enjoyment a curious, creative person gets from reading stories and displaces it with snobbery. College can take frustrated artists and knead them into bitter critics who can only teach doubt and censure. These are creative people who want to range and wander, but they no longer trust themselves.

I also learned that college has gained too much power over family dynamics and parenting styles. College as a racket and industry manipulates parents and children needlessly into debt, and is not for everybody. It might not be right for you, but you probably won’t see that till you have student loans to pay off.

More to the point about professors…they often want a guarantee on receiving the deference people give to leaders without the uncertainty and risk of exercising enough leadership to earn that special treatment. Feel me? A friend of mine who's a writer studied leadership and group dynamics and always has sharp things to say about this; I'm really speaking in her terms there.

I end things abruptly,
RK

Conversation Series - Part One

I know him from the deserted library we called college, you know him from his 3,000 word blog comments, the man with the encyclopedic knowledge of genealogy and the mountain dulcimer, the man from Louisville but of an entirely different planet…ladies, gents….I present to you Ross K!

In addition to being an avid blog-reader, Ross is an accomplished drummer and songwriter and one of my favorite people (even though he doesn’t listen to Bob Freaking Zimmerdylan). One day I was reading an email from Ross—we’d been talking back and forth about music for a couple of months—and a blog was inspired. I thought it might be fun to have a conversation series with another musician, talk about music, argue about boxing, and see what happens. Here now is Part One in our Three Part Conversation Series with the One and Only Ross K:

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Rosstopher Killebrew,

Thoughts while wondering if Barack Obama isn’t so much black as mocha…

I went to a whole concert of music the other night and the feller onstage sang an entire song in falsetto. At first I thought, “well, he’s a sensitive songer and singwriter and the falsetto comes with the territory.” But then it occurred to me: freaking everybody sings in falsetto these days. The Fray. Daniel Powter. Aqualung. Keane. Matt Kearney. Augustana. It’s a veritable murderer’s row—or suicide row, depending on how much you like their music. And while I’d gladly make this a broader issue of decaying manhood in our society (guys singing like girls and such), I really just blame Coldplay. Granted, I got a flat Coke yesterday and blamed Coldplay. I blame Coldplay for most of my annoyances and the world’s troubles. I’m fairly certain (but have no way of proving it) that Coldplay is somehow indirectly tied to Al Qaeda and is using their particular brand of piano-based atmospherics and saccharine journal-lyrics to lull our armed forces into huggy-loving-times somewhere in the caverns of Afghanistan. If Pat Freaking Buchanan ran for President under a platform of a War on Coldplay, I’d find the means to vote for him twice.

But seriously, at what point did the good bands go away? Why are all the men on the radio singing like girls? And are record companies really looking for falsetto in potential breakout acts? Do they reject potential singles that don’t go an octave up during the chorus? What the hell is happening here?

Also…

If you could pick any current celebrity to be in your music video (ala Enrique and Anna Kournikova), who would it be? I’d go with Jerry Stiller.

Who are your five favorite rock drummers?

If Nashville was a girl, would she be anorexic or bulimic? I maintain that she would have one lazy eye.

I’ll be down in the basement mixing up the medicine….(that’s a Dylan line, you human wasteland).

Subterranean,
Mi Llamo Mi-lamo

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Chris:

You have not listed the most grievous and abhorred offender, James Blunt, although one can’t call him rock. Gender in pop music is actually quite a fascinating subject. People like David Bowie, Annie Lennox, Freddie Mercury and Prince have played with androgyny of voice and appearance to great effect, and you can look at so many glam rockers and pimps who wear make-up, spandex and feathers yet whose masculinity is seen as unreproachable.

This isn’t just about falsetto. You’re not just talking about general androgyny of sound and appearance, its mixture with a certain effete malaise and sickness of the soul, general whining, but the MUSIC lacking a certain fire and conviction. We’re talking about ROCK here, and rock is better with machismo. I don’t know what evil demon created Coldplay, James Blunt, the heinous and reviled Nickelback, and others like them. I myself feel that rock fell off into its current slump in the late ‘nineties, with the advent of Korn and nu-metal as well as the Blink 182-styled nasal teens. One or two bands a year come out and restore my faith in things: Foo Fighters for sure; The Strokes and the Vines back when they first broke out, although I’ve been less impressed since; Queens of the Stone Age; Casket Salesmen; The Mars Volta at one time…

Chris, remember that juvenile and asexual non-rock has always existed. This is nothing new. There has always been a Herman’s Hermits for every Rolling Stones or Hendrix, a James Taylor for a Led Zeppelin, a Kajagoogoo, Men Without Hats and WHAM! for Guns n’ Roses and Motley Crue. And there was this entire era called doo-wop, where guys serenaded ideal, unattainable, and uninterested women exclusively in boyish falsetto voice, occasionally to haunting and memorable effect. Remember—there has always been heinous crap.

My favorite rock drummers? John Bonham (Led Zeppelin), Keith Moon (The Who), Neil Peart (Rush), Levon Helm (The Band) and Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Queens of the Stone Age). I look for big drum sounds, solid timing, some kind of inventive interaction with the other musicians (listening to accents and hooks and filling in, not just keeping square time), and the bonus of singing and helping out with songwriting. They have to have been part of a good band or bands and have a defensible career, a good-sized body of work.
And they have to be EXCITING. Holding down the pocket is great, but this isn’t funk or gospel or soul we’re talking about, it’s rock and roll. These people either have to take risks, make big splashes, be naturally charismatic or otherwise exciting to watch.

There are lots of honorable mentions: I always liked Mitch Mitchell (Jimi Hendrix Experience), but am less impressed with his time these days—he got a little ahead of himself and kept sloppy, inconsistent time, overplayed and rushed too much. I love Buddy Miles (Band of Gypsys), but mainly for his voice and less so for his drumming. John Densmore (The Doors) is cool, too, but also not always solid and not exciting and big enough, despite his listening and accompaniment skills and creative tone coloring. Charlie Watts (Rolling Stones) is cool, but again not quite big and dramatic and bad-ass enough and not always solid either. I like Alex Van Halen, but he hasn’t done anything that John Bonham and Ginger Baker (Cream, et al) didn’t do, and I feel like the same goes for Brad Wilk (Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave) and Stephen Drozd (Flaming Lips) even though I love the way they sound and feel. I’m not speaking to Drozd’s songwriting for Flaming Lips, just the drumming itself, and I love his heavily altered drum sounds. Stewart Copeland (The Police) and Chad Sexton (311) I always liked, but I don’t think they did anything on the drums (Copeland’s composing not included) that Neil Peart didn’t do already, and I like Rush better than The Police and 311. Matt Cameron (Soundgarden) and Danny Carey (Tool) are the deal, but they’re just not quite top five (I haven’t liked the direction Tool has gone in since…Undertow, sound and production-wise). Ditto Dave Lombardo (Slayer). He sounds like an avalanche, but he’s basically just a super-heavy Moon or Peart. And there’s only so much Slayer I can listen to in one sitting…

Nashville is BULIMIC. Does Nashville starve itself of talent and soul or does it gorge on them and then puke them up? The latter, I think. The city is glutted, not starved. Any night of the week, you have several groups to choose from who are all playing so well that you have to numb yourself to it so that you don’t become too discouraged at your lack of accomplishment next to them. This leads to nothing being good enough. You’ve seen stuff so great that nothing satisfies you. You then cut yourself off from the disappointment of not being able to recapture a golden moment. You just quit going to shows and eventually move someplace starved, so that music can become precious again. All kinds of mega-musicians live in Nashville and chill, but then go out on the road to do their real work. Interestingly, Nashville’s best shows then come not from the piles of musicians who live within walking distance, but from visiting bands on tour who come from someplace else, because all the stars who live there have to get out most of the year. Like a Roman emperor mid-orgy, vomiting to make room for more meat and wine, Nashville gluts itself and pukes people out every week.

Your choice of Jerry Stiller is genius, and I can’t beat it. (***Omitted rant about other MALE choices for his music-video starlet.)

Will this work? I'm having fun so far. Thanks for agreeing to do this.

Ross