The Beatles - Abbey Road - and in the end

OK, confession time.  Growing up, I couldn't stand the Beatles.  I am just young enough to not remember the excitement of the impending arrival of a new album from the Fab Four, and yet they were ever-present.  I remember their two greatest hits collections coming out (the so-called Red and Blue albums).  Their music rang out in steady streams from every radio.  How boring.  The final straw was probably a kid (who I didn't care for) who collected Beatles stuff and would not shut up about them.  Yawn.  Today, I wish I had my musical act together in elementary school like he did, but at the time...not so much.

The difficulty judging their body of work is obvious: how can one understand the Beatles in the context of a popular music that was utterly transformed by their appearance on the scene?  You can't consider their work outside the mainstream that absorbed everything it could from them and still can't really compare. 

What hyperbole doesn't understate their cultural impact?  One simply cannot hear the Beatles with fresh ears.

With all of this in mind, Abbey Road perfectly summarizes their art and craft.  In a catalog of milestone songs, performances and especially albums, their final statement reaches the pinnacle.  The experiments of song-craft from albums like Revolver and Rubber Soul and production from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band have been fully mastered and assimilated here.

The songs touch on nostalgic early rock and roll and tin pan alley, heavy metal and blue-eyed soul. The production shows off the instantly recognizable individual voices and instrumental contributions as part of a more sophisticated whole.  The band plays with a loose professionalism and joy of spirit despite the sophisticated production.

The album leads off with Come Together, perhaps the heaviest track in their catalog.  Because feels like a final homage to the Beach Boys, their long time rivals from across the pond, with beautiful and startling harmonies.  Something, George's finest song, would become a legitimate standard which none other than Frank Sinatra described as "the greatest love song of the last fifty years".  Ringo contributes the wonderful Octopus's Garden. 

Side two of the original album (yes kids, we used to have to turn them over) consists of a perfect medley of songs we all know by heart but few could name culminating in The End, a perfect statement of the Beatles purpose and worldview.  And finally, Her Majesty, the hidden track on the LP as if we all needed to hear a little joke to lighten the mood after all was said and done.

Let It Be would arrive in record stores the following spring.  But despite some great songs, the Phil Spector sound, uneven material and venomous acrimony on display in the accompanying documentary all felt like a cash-in by Capital Records executives. 


Today Let It Be feels like a sad coda, but in the true chronology of their recording career the Beatles, who had shown us all what could be accomplished if we only believed, had saved their best for last. 

John Zorn - Naked City - John Zorn in a nutshell, and it's a tight fit.

John Zorn, while virtually unknown to the public at large, has built an astonishing body of work over the past thirty odd years.  He has performed or composed the music on over four hundred CD's.  He plays astonishing saxophone and builds bands for his various projects from some of the world's finest talent.  His works include extensive recordings in a vast array of genres - jazz, classical, avant-garde, rock, hardcore metal, world, surf, holiday, klezmer and soundtracks from art films to cartoons.
 
His work flows from an American tradition most closely from Duke Ellington and Carl Stalling.  Like Ellington he is extraordinarily prolific and composes for specific groups of musicians, building works around the individual sounds of his players.  Like Stalling's Warner Brothers cartoon soundtracks he composed cut & paste works with elements of popular culture, classical and jazz all mashed together.

In February of 1990 Zorn had not yet achieved legendary status.  Most considered him a free-jazz sax player in the NYC underground scene, if they considered him at all.  His recordings included Japanese influenced works and well received tributes to Ornette Coleman and Ennio Morricone.

I found Naked City because of the band.  John Zorn - sax, Wayne Horowitz - piano, Fred Frith - bass, Joey Baron - drums, Bill Frisell - guitar (more about him on a future post) and Yamataka Eye - vocals.  This underground super-group could go in any direction at any time.

In Naked City we find a clear encapsulation of John Zorn's past and future ideas.  And a startling number of them are crammed into fifty-three and a half minutes.  It's all here: the film music, free jazz, and  hardcore rock emerge from the noisy onslaught.  Even the provocative cover graphics foreshadowed his future design esthetic.

 The music breathes and growls like an urban monster.  And the band locks into groove after groove on original tracks like the swinging New Orleans jazz of The Latin Quarter or the covers of classic crime film themes from The Pink Panther, James Bond and Chinatown.  They shift on a dime with aural blasts of metallic violence between the more familiar songs.  Each player absolutely shines for a few bars then falls back into the collective flow before emerging again.

Despite the clear influences and the distinct body of work from the individual players, Naked City sounds like nothing that ever came before or really since.  Loud and aggressive, the music jumps from genre to genre.  It literally sounds like the soundtrack to a modern cartoon set in the heart of  the most cosmopolitan city in the world.  Danger lurks around every turn as well as incredible musicianship and laugh out loud musical jokes.

This all sounds like a studio created work, pasted together to form a sonic noir thrill ride.  But we have proof that this incredible band actually produced this music on stage at the Knitting Factory when a  live album was released twelve years later.  Recorded in 1989, the set-list is very close to the previously released album, but each work has a unique feel and charm of it's own.  Like hearing the first Naked City album refracted in a fun-house mirror, bent and distorted but completely recognizable.

U2 - Achtung Baby - a good place to start ... over

Achtung Baby scared me.  U2 set an impossibly high bar with The Joshua Tree in 1987.  That album arrived in the spring of my junior year in college and provided the soundtrack for my senior year and beyond.  It represented the pinnacle of an esthetic the band had carefully cultivated for years - austere, monumental and panoramic.  A huge record in every way, The Joshua Tree only grew in scope and influence.  The songs were anthemic propelled by a forceful rhythmic drive; with echo drenched guitars and earnest vocals.  The whole record seemed to be played from the top of a mountain or at least a building.

Their follow-up, the album and film Rattle And Hum released the following year failed to reach the impossible expectations set by the hype machine and context of their previous work.  Overblown described it perfectly as earnest began to feel more like pompous.  While The Joshua Tree exuded American imagery, both the Rattle And Hum movie and album engaged the country in a much more clumsy fashion.  Bob Dylan and B.B. King made guest appearances.  Billie Holiday and John Coltrane were name-dropped.  The album wasn’t exactly bad, but it certainly failed to live up to what their audience had come to expect.  

Then for two years the critics bashed on the band.  Bono compared U2 to the Beatles with the expected result a chorus of critical and popular catcalls.  Word arrived that the band holed-up in Berlin and that the next record would reflect their new-found love of the club scene and dance music.  U2.  Dance music.  Uh-oh.  Even the name of the new album inspired fear.  U2 desperately needed a fresh start.

When Achtung Baby was released, I lived in a small apartment in a little village in rural Japan.  In those days, before the internet and completely isolated in a way hard to relate to today, I waited. 

 For weeks I looked forward to the release of the new U2 album.  When the day finally arrived, I drove my two cylinder mini car forty five minutes to the nearest city as the shop near us did not carry new releases.

The album could not have been more different than The Joshua Tree.  Gone were the wide angle black and white American desert vistas and majestic anthems. Achtung Baby’s cover featured a barrage of garish images from all over the world and like these images, the music felt more saturated, intimate and immediate.    

 Adam Clayton aptly described the opening of Zoo Station as "the Edge chopping down the Joshua Tree."  Every track is bookended by strange otherworldly sounds.  On the up-tempo tracks like The Fly and Mysterious Ways the rhythm section finds a funky groove we never would have expected.  The lyrics, like the music, are not anthems.  Bono sings about the personal, intimate and cynical details of relationships from an often callous perspective.  Earnest preaching has been replaced by an almost ugly casual honesty on songs like Until The End Of The World and Ultraviolet.

I listened to it so much that I literally wore out my fancy ten disc cd player, but that's another story. 

 

In hindsight, the album does extend from the bands previous work.  The lyrics reflect a consideration of the politics of truthfulness.  The songs are propelled by the incredible rhythm sections and the guitar effects bring them to life.  

Just like the band's finest work before and since. 

U2 had worked their way out of the trap and charted a new direction for the future and in the process recorded something completely thrilling: a perfect launching point for the years ahead. 

U2 would make other great records, but they have yet to top this scary masterpiece.