The Orchestral: The Who, “Sparks” (1969)

It’s odd to think of a hundred people in formal wear as a finger-crooking hooker, but the chance to play with an orchestra has indeed led many a poor rocker astray.  The edge, the drive, the naked accountability of rock cannot survive the oversized committee treatment, awash in strings, pulled under in a tidal version of rhythm.

Why would a rocker want to mess with an orchestra?  Because it’s BIG.  But the objective isn’t necessarily big sound.  Thanks to amps and effects, a single rock guitarist already gets the biggest sound ever heard.  What is wanted is a big gesture.  Now I admit there is something impressive in the cultural status-grabbing gesture of assembling the most expensive kind of ensemble and joining a centuries-long, prestigious tradition of music-making, though I doubt whether this is age- or attitude-appropriate for rockers (except as a prank).  But I contend that a more important big gesture is available inside the design of orchestral music.

As a popular commodity, rock is usually subject to the contradiction that its rebellions and adventures must resolve into a few verses and choruses and maybe a bridge, all clocking in between two and five minutes.  Its wildest gestures—screams, lyrical nonsequiturs, cymbal crashes, reverb-crazed guitar licks—are, in that way, tightly circumscribed.  So how can we really blast off when we always know exactly when and how our journey will shortly end?

This is where orchestral music as we know it has a decisive advantage, especially since the Romantics loosened the bonds of Classical style.  It can take whatever time it wants to go anywhere and do anything.  I know that “orchestral” normally means including a lot of voices and parts to make a full-seeming arrangement.  I’ll call this “orchestral-1.”  But I want to talk about an associated quality I’ll call “orchestral-2”:  the open future of the music we let our big orchestras play.

Pete Townshend seems to me the preeminent orchestral-2 genius of rock, because as a player and composer he was driven to make the biggest possible gesture in this longitudinal dimension of going —  anywhere, somewhere perhaps distant and surprising, but without sacrificing any rock qualities at all.  His rock orchestra is just the power trio of guitar, bass, and drums.  His rock opus is never less hook-filled and radio-friendly than the 2:30 ditties in the hit parade.

Townsend gained fame with The Who for big gestures in playing his guitar, windmilling his right arm on power chords and smashing the guitar afterwards.  Behavioral hooks!  At the same time he was making big compositional gestures like writing a “rock opera,” Tommy, that took The Who an hour and fifteen minutes to play at one go (roughly the length of an entire act of a traditional opera).  Tommy is not merely a double-album’s worth of songs.  It is a journey, both in the sense that Tommy’s story unfolds through an arc and in the sense that the music launches out for parts unknown.  I can put my finger on at least one place in Tommy where the music does this immediately, as a primal rock hook.  It’s in the instrumental section called “Sparks.”  “Sparks” can be heard as a component of the Tommy whole, or as a free-floating portion of instrumental bridge music that could carry you from wherever to wherever.  But I hear it as the setting of a tremendous event.

The “Sparks” hook exploits a kind of dialogue between guitar chords and timpani-like drum licks that had already been heard all over the hit single “I Can See For Miles” (1967).  That a rock drum part can be moved so far away from its backbeat responsibility and into dramatic fanfare—that, in germ, is the Townshendian formula for an orchestral-2 rock that is fully compelling in each four-beat unit but invitational and suspenseful at the same time, making us feel like seeing for miles.

In this orchestration, the dynamics of the drums are more exposed, hence more significant.  They can say particular things, responding and anticipating, while never ceasing to whip us forward.  In comparison, the power chords of the guitar are often more for force and less for interest, in fact more like a conventional drum part; but often they too are provocatively unbound.

The “Sparks” hook arrives around 5:30 in the Live at Leeds performance of “Amazing Journey/Sparks.”  (I refer to the Live at Leeds version by the power trio, rather than the studio version which actually uses timpani—a bit of an “orchestral” touch in the more literal sense, and more questionable by rock standards.)[1]  Townshend has been cycling through the lovely chords of “Amazing Journey,” getting a slightly unmoored effect—this is a mini-journey through chord progression possibilities, not exactly Tristan und Isolde but not ordinary rock riffing either—and has just unleashed the urgent section that goes in variations on this pattern:

Guitar: Bum! bum!…………………………..Bum!  bum bum bum bum bum

Drums: ……………..Badabadabadabum!

Then, in the prime orchestral-2 hook between 5:30 and 5:40, Townshend’s chords start stabbing upward freely, unpredictably, polytonally (implying different keys that make a tangy juxtaposition with the home key).  There are lots of descending notes and drops in intensity to make a drama out of this reaching, and a pathos:  can we do this, will this take us somewhere?  There is no telling!  At least we know we’re along for a bigger ride than a finite pop song provides, even though, conveniently enough, we’re being given just a pop song-sized segment of the ride (the studio “Sparks” is a 2:43 track) and the whole effect is packed into this hook-moment.

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[1] In an interview available at repertoirerecords.com, Townshend said he resisted using a real orchestra for Tommy.  —The “Sparks” hook arrives in the studio version at around 2:37 (“Remastered” edition) or 1:34 (“Deluxe”).

Diction Hooks: Guided By Voices, “Pivotal Film” (2001)

diction. 1. Choice and use of words in speech or writing.  (American Heritage Dictionary)

A main reason I find myself wanting to listen again to a Guided By Voices track, “Pivotal Film,” is that it has an outstanding word hook at 0:50 and 1:40:  “transparent”.  Lifted up at the culmination of a grand VI-VII-I chord progression, it’s the first word in the phrase “transparent scenes shifting.”  You don’t register that phrase as such, because the song’s stream of words is very broken-up—or rather, you do register the sense of it at some level because you know the song is about a “pivotal film,” something hip and insubstantial, yet you’re left very free to pump your own possible meanings into the word.  A whole measure is cleared out before it and after it.

I doubt that the word “transparent” has been used in many rock songs.  I’m willing to declare that its moment of supreme glory comes in “Pivotal Film.”  But this starts me thinking more generally about choices of non-obvious, non-emotive words as hooks.

There was a time when a word like “transparent” simply couldn’t appear in a rock song, or indeed in any sort of popular song (except in what used to be called a novelty song, with a lot of cute rhyming).  One heard only the most banal short words of lowest-common-denominator English or larky no-content words like “Be-Bop-A-Lula.”  The reason is obvious.  A popular song is supposed to be an emotional ride and a meeting place either for recognizing common experience (as in so-called folk music) or for dancing.  It’s no time to perform an intellectual act, even to contemplate the semantics of a word like “transparent,” the point of which is not (ironically in this case) immediately clear.

And then there came a time when there was nothing surprising at all in a Squeeze song with “quintessence” as its title and chorus hook (“In Quintessence,” 1981).  A rock audience was now ready to enjoy non-obvious, non-emotive words.  What had happened?

Bob Dylan usually gets the lion’s share of credit for popularizing more literate lyrics in the early 1960s, but at that stage he wasn’t making rock hooks with words like “transparent.”  He was using a bigger lexicon in balladeer mode; the effects of his word choices were poetic, not musical.  As of 1965, though, something more rocking has started.  “Like a Rolling Stone” has lustily singable words balanced between abstraction and practicality, the kinds of words that are the pleasure pavilions in ordinary sentences:  “no direction home,” “like a complete unknown.”  In 1965 we can also get a kick out of “satisfaction,” “information,” and “imagination” in The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.”  In 1966, Dylan’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie” has a delightful “obviously” and “fortunately.”  By 1967, Jimi Hendrix makes “experienced” and “depression” sound cool on Are You Experienced?, and the Beatles sing enjoyably of “suburban skies” in “Penny Lane” and “kaleidoscope eyes” in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”  (Before 1967 is over we will hear “semolina pilchard” climbing up the Eiffel Tower in “I Am the Walrus,” which is scarcely more meaningful than “be-bop-a-lula.”  Extremes meet.)

There are three key variables here, the lines for all of them jumping up by 1967 on a graph of rock word hook characteristics:

1.  Number of syllables.  Three- and four-syllable hook words are desirable.  Or even five:  “[doing the best things so] conservatively” in The Kinks’ “A Well Respected Man” (1965), “penitentiary” in “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” Carly Simon’s “Anticipation” (1971).

2.  Abstraction.  More abstract words leave you more free to specify their meaning, not just like “love” that you attach to your Bobby or Susie but like “experienced” that you could attach to your favorite album or novel just as well as to your landmark drug or sex experience.

3.  Artistic authority.  More unusual words signify that the artist is free in lordly sovereignty and Olympian perspicacity to choose what to say.  In co-performing the song you enjoy the excellent position the artist is in.

This last aspect is crucial for the category of word choice hooks.  The musical event in these cases doesn’t consist just of vowels and consonants playing together with beat and pitch.  The song-speaker has made a certain discursive move.  What is arresting, gratifying, possibly even perplexing about that move feeds into the musical lift and jangle of the song.  When Robert Pollard sings “transparent” in “Pivotal Film” at the summit of a VI-VII-I ascent, he is surveying vistas all around, realizing the power and loneliness of seeing through everything—the superior word he uses confirms the superior vantage point of the disillusioned culture critic—while he remains physically sure of himself and happy in the song’s stately, emphatic DUN-duh-DUN-duh groove.

One more example:  a great diction hook in hard rock is Skin singing “intellectualize” with ferocious funk in “[Don’t] Intellectualize My Blackness” by Skunk Anansie.  The acid of a shrieked “-ize” word perfectly advances the song’s agenda of cultural-political critique and uppitiness.  It makes that “revolution” and “constitution” stuff in The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Who sound tame.  And it has more syllables.

diction. 2. Degree of clarity and distinctness of pronunciation in speech or singing; enunciation.

For my money, the most delightful overpronouncing is by Johnny Rotten in the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy In The UK”:  “I yam an an-ar-chist-uh!”  He’s climbed to the top of the tree and now he’s giving the rest of us monkeys what for.

My choice for most delightful underpronouncer is Caleb Followill in Kings of Leon’s “Molly’s Chambers”:   “Molly’s chambers gonna change your mind” (heard as “Molly sham’a’ gon’ chan’ yo’ min’”).   This is mud-scudding on your butt, as egalitarian as it gets.

ADDENDUM to 1.

True story:  In 1976 an A&R man in Nashville objected to “unencumbered” in the first line of my song “Demon Rum”—my big juicy opening word hook!  (“When I’m alone and unencumbered/By a balance in the bank . . .”)  What if I could have told him that Bob Seger would use “unencumbered” ten years later in “Like a Rock,” a song that would sell a million Chevy trucks?

From Chaos to Cosmos (and back): Steppenwolf, “Magic Carpet Ride” (1968)

The significance of all these [alchemical] rituals seems abundantly clear:  to do something well, or to remake a living integrity menaced by sickness, it is first necessary to go back ad originem, then to repeat the cosmogony.
—Mircea Eliade [1]

Some songs are recorded with chaotic-sounding prologues, like the deranged electronic gear effect at the beginning of Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride.”  This makes us wait and hunger for what will count as a truer beginning of the song, adding to the delight when the song really launches.  Also it’s sort of a theological teaser:  you can hear it staging the song’s creation as a miracle, like the creation or restorative re-creation of the universe.  (Artist as God; God as artist.)

“Magic Carpet Ride” start

A symphony orchestra routinely gets this effect in its tuning-up period right before a concert (mimicked by Pearl Jam at the start of “Last Exit”).

If the point of a chaotic prologue is to set up a contrast with the sweetly ordered song to follow, can the chaos be a hook in itself?  Haven’t we just defined it more as an anti-hook?  It would be a good trick indeed to create an anti-hook that we long to hear for itself.  I think “Magic Carpet Ride” pulls this off:  once we learn to recognize the opening squawk, it becomes a pretty great hook.  Even after it has grabbed us with its own Gestalt it keeps on stalking the other side of the chaos/cosmos boundary from the sleek machine of the song’s verse/chorus.

Are there other great initial-chaos hooks?

In the “Foxey Lady” prologue, Jimi Hendrix’s guitar sketches chaos but quickly turns into a screaming incoming missile that nails the song’s T minus zero, by implication nailing the lady as well.  The chaos is not the hook.

An interestingly debatable chaos hook starts the Beatles’ fast version of “Revolution.”  John’s raw-toned guitar and Paul’s scream evoke walls falling down.  But the guitar lick is so regular and the scream has such a familiar rock ‘n’ roll profile that we easily hear these four measures as a conventional juicy hook.  We can choose to hear them either way, actually, or get hung up in the choice:  “count me out—in” as John sings later, apropos revolution.  (Compare the false start and studio clatter in the slow “Revolution” on the White Album, an early example of what would become a popular prologue strategy.)

A final honorable mention:  even if it won’t spontaneously replay in your imagination like my other examples will, the groaning guitars and thumping drums prologue of “Misunderstood” by Wilco is thematically tremendous, I submit, because similar unsonglike material erupts again at key points in the song—a hint at 1:40, a big dose at 3:00, and then a complete takeover from 4:50 on, like the graded series of shark appearances in Jaws.  “Misunderstood” is about finding holes in your life, your connections to home and friends having become disconnections.  Cosmos fought chaos and chaos won.

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[1] Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, trans. Stephen Corrin (New York:  Harper & Row, 1971), p. 162.

Nifting: Booker T. & the MGs, “Green Onions” (1962)

The premise of this discussion is going to be that there are times when the best word to express your appreciation of a high point in music is “nifty.”  But it’s far from clear that we all mean the same thing by “nifty,” or even that there’s a quality of niftiness to refer to.  My quixotic goal is to show that “nifty” is not, as you may have thought, just a throwaway word for a passing mild delight in whatever, but a pointer to an important aesthetic ideal that musicians often pursue, with pervasive effects on popular music.  If you grant me niftiness, I will show further that rock niftiness especially shines in instrumentals.

The first time I remember a bull’s-eye feeling with “nifty” was in enthusing with a friend many years ago about Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony.  Our eyes lit up.  “Nifty” was the word for it.  But what were we saying?  I think we meant that compared to the turgid, grandiose, intricate, arcane, or grotesque qualities that an early twentieth century symphony might be expected to have, the Classical Symphony was brisk, clear, fun, and elegant.  Kind of like a latter-day blast of Mr. Nifty himself (as I now think of him), Josef Haydn.

But there was something surprising to me at the time (in my sad ignorance of Haydn and Mozart) in responding to a symphony as nifty.  My home base was elsewhere.  What would I have offered as an obvious example?  Why, something like “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” or the theme of The Rockford Files, or, if my attention were turned to rock, “Something’s Got A Hold Of My Toe” by Traffic, or “Jessica” by the Allman Brothers (“Jessica,” not “Little Martha”).  Or—of course! —“Green Onions” by Booker T. and the MGs, or “Cissy Strut” by the Meters.  Probably not a vocal number, despite a heavily nifty Beatles catalog resulting from Paul McCartney’s almost relentless niftiness.  An instrumental.  But why probably an instrumental, and what exactly is the quality I’m tuning into?

Let me try for a sharper definition.  In my first attempt, “brisk, clear, fun, and elegant,” the element that sticks out to me most mysteriously is “fun.”  The kind of fun we are talking about, it seems to me, is the unexpectedly ingratiating.  Of course music just is a happy blend of surprise and comfort in the structured instreaming of sound, and yet, on top of that basic tour de force in all musical process, there’s always room to maneuver for particular effects.  In the case of nifty music, one jumps with pleasure from a mildly rule-breaking move—like strange intervals or wacky repetition in the melody, or a faster turn or jump cut in the chord progression, or a beat advanced or delayed in the rhythm—while other elements in the music continually assure your comfort, all in a well-lit place as it were, and you feel a sort of glow about how the whole thing is being managed.  Emphasis on the management:  unlike “cool,” which nowadays indicates a happy expansion of the horizon of pleasure in whatever manner, “nifty” has definitely been pulled off by someone.  Someone has ingratiated, and it is pleasingly unexpected that they have done so.  You can be amused by their clever-yet-not-overbearing proposal and comfortably share in the virtuosity required for their performance.  Emotion isn’t completely suppressed, but you get a vacation from being dragged around by it.

Perhaps we can spot the rise of niftiness in the historical stream of American popular music.  I see it in the early nineteenth century headwaters in a fiddle tune like “Arkansas Traveler” or, in much the same vein, “Turkey in the Straw.”  This is how a piece of music can stand out as delightful in other than a lovely or grand or passionate way, with a “lively” wide-interval jumping melody, full of neat little gestures, in the tradition of Celtic jigs and reels.

“Turkey In The Straw” by The Wigglers

It’s commonly observed that “Turkey in the Straw” embodies both a British-American heritage of lively melody and an African-American heritage of lively syncopated rhythm—

The beat:     1……..and……2…..and…..3……and…..4…..and……

The notes:   Tur..-.KEY…..in….the…STRAW

—although it’s hard to say exactly what each influence contributes to this concocted “blackface” music.[1]

The very idea of a tune is already a resort to the nifty, but some genres court niftiness more.  Ragtime is devoted to the nifty; jazz is very nifty, and bebop is niftiness run wild.  There will be some niftiness in just about any hook, since “ingratiating unexpectedness” covers a lot of what hookiness is.  In fact, the vocabulary of musical composition and performance massively reflects the pursuit of niftiness, if we take into account everything on the order of drum fills, melodic ornamentation, and key modulation.  This leads me to conclude that Niftiness is a force in popular music as pervasive as the Stomp and Swerve that have been so well explained by David Wondrich.[2]

Songs with singing and lyrics tend to carry too much emotional ballast to be nifty.  A nifty instrumental often makes a point of taking you where a vocalist couldn’t.  Indeed, a rock instrumental had better try to be nifty, since there is no other aesthetic maximum to go for that can stay within the vein of rock except the sublime (well represented by Santana’s “Soul Sacrifice” or King Crimson’s “VROOM”).

“Green Onions” makes a lovely, deceptively simple introduction to musicians being nifty.  To describe it I need a verb, “to nift.”  The implied triplets in its shuffle groove (a feel of 1-and-and-2-and-and- under the 1-and-2-and-) are nifting at you from the very start; you join in the nifting when you snap your fingers on the pleasingly unexpected 2 and 4 beats instead of the 1 and 3, or simply when you enjoy Al Jackson hitting the snare drum on 2 and 4 sharper than expected and a tiny bit late, swingingly.  Then Steve Cropper nifts the rhythm guitar part by chopping that chord on 4-and-AND just before each next measure starts, putting top spin on the groove.  Then Booker T. nifts the expected melody by hitting second notes of his figures on 1-and-AND instead of 2.  These guys are nifting left and right so that the pleasure of the groove is continually renewed.

“Green Onions”

Isn’t nifting what we all do whenever we see a way to ingratiate ourselves with a mildly unexpected move?  Don’t we nift like mad in the early phases of friendship and courtship?  Musical nifting models for us this crucial skill.  It’s better than we are, but not imposingly so.

Apparently no one knows for sure where the word “nifty” came from, but one theory that fits the earliest known uses in print is that it slangs “magnificent.”  In Mark Twain’s Roughing It, arrangements for Buck Fanshaw’s funeral are set forth in these terms:  “He was always nifty himself, and so you bet you his funeral ain’t going to be no slouch—solid silver door‑plate on his coffin, six plumes on the hearse” [3].  In a stirring article titled “Nifty, Hefty, Natty, Snappy” in American Speech, Klara Collitz showed how the semantics of the word had developed as of 1927.  “Nifty” could then shift or hover between the “magnificent,” the conspicuously stylin’, on the one side, and the “natty,” the tidy, easy-to-get-along-with, on the other.[4]  Today we still can enjoy both of those potential meanings, or lean or plunge in one direction or the other, when we say “nifty.”  But we mainly tend to think of niftiness as more friendly than magnificent—smile-evoking rather than awe-inspiring—and as more dynamic than natty.  I think we are homing in on a true distinct hot spot of meaning with a discipline of its own, not just some other attraction, like magnificence or neatness, set at a funny angle.

Behold, then, the substance of the nifty!   How better enter into it than snapping or clapping or dancing to “Green Onions”?[5]

A Nifty Mix and Nifty, Advanced

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[1]  See Peter van der Merwe, Origins of the Popular Style (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 79-82.

[2] David Wondrich, Stomp and Swerve.  American Music Gets Hot 1843-1924 (Chicago:  A Cappella, 2003).

[3] Mark Twain, “Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral” (from Roughing It), in The Signet Classic Book of Mark Twain’s Short Stories (New York:  Signet, 1985), p. 92.

[4] Klara Hechtenberg Collitz, “Nifty, Hefty, Natty, Snappy,” American Speech 3 (December 1927), pp. 119-128.

[5] For the higher reaches of the rock nifty, some would point to progressive rock and fusion works of the 1970s—the instrumental parts of Yes and King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer (but this tends more to the grand) or Jeff Beck.  Some would point you to exponents of progressive string band music like Bela Fleck or Mike Marshall (but this blurs with bluegrass on one side and jazz on the other).  Some would champion The Police, who won two Grammys for instrumentals (“Regatta de Blanc” and “Behind My Camel”).  I would point to the first four albums by the Dixie Dregs.

Being in the Midst: Sly & the Family Stone, “Stand!” (1969)

Can I discuss the tremendous riff at the end of “Stand!” by Sly and the Family Stone without reaching for ecstatic climaxes on adjectives like “popping” and “ass-kicking”?  That is my challenge.

Some art compositions are exceptionally, imperiously strong:  the Pantheon in Rome, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the third movement of Mozart’s 40^th symphony.  They cannot be brooked.  They have no soft edges or implicit extra space to play with.  They play with us, not vice versa.

“Stand!”, a good rock song with nice, uplifting lyrics about courage and finding yourself, shifts gears into greatness in its “Na na na na na na na na na na” coda.  It’s one of those commanding designs, and a great opportunity to ask how a work works that way.

What in general makes an artwork interesting, I think, is that it takes up  some problematic set of elements that are in play with and against each other.   What catches our fancy is a sort of puzzle-solving exercise, exploring how we might be able to fit these forms and feelings together, or admiring how a work handles its problem.   But a truly commanding work has glaringly, thunderously solved its problem, and you would insult it by calling it “interesting.”  Your role now is just to say Yeah!  Your privilege is to climb aboard and go for another ride.

I think we have a sense of the importance of these commanding works because even though they have definitely solved their problems, their problems are big ones.   For crying out loud, the Pantheon combines the rectangle and triangle of the classical temple front (already a formidable solution in its own right) with a sphere for its main space and roof!

The problem in “Stand!”’s coda is not as visible as the problem of the Pantheon, but I know it’s in there, by hypothesis.   Let’s consider the elements that are assembled, starting with a two-measure cycle.   (One could argue that we feel just one dominant measure of four fairly slow beats, but for convenience I’ll treat this big measure as a pair of quicker measures.)

1.  The basic 4/4 beat.  Think of each beat with its “and,” that is, as two eighth notes; thus each measure consists of four pairs of eighth notes, a 2-2-2-2 pattern constantly underlined by tambourine and cowbell.

2.  Polyrhythm #1: superimposed on the 2-2-2-2, a syncopated bass figure in the pattern 3-2-2-1, doubled by the lead guitar:

“Stand” coda, first 2 measures

As a result of the squeezing down of rhythmic intervals from 3 to 2 to 1, that fifth note, the return to the C, comes splatting out of the end of the preceding measure like toothpaste out of a tube.[1]

(By the way, the three-tick interval between the first and second notes feints in the direction of a different kind of polyrhythm, a triplet—3 beats over 2 beats—which doesn’t actually happen, nor does a repetition of groups of 3.  But you kind of felt it might.)

3.  After an opening statement of Polyrhythm #1 twice through two measures, we sing “Stand!” right on beat 3 to reassert the 2-2-2-2 duple organization against the 3-2-2-1.

4.  Then comes the “Na na na,” which adds another level of rhythmic organization by extending its melodic arc over the middle part of an eight-measure unit:

“Stand!” coda, next 9 measures

The “Na Na Na” brings three new rhythmic effects:

(a) We now have a major alternation between the busier measures 3 through 5 and the emptier measures around them.  The 3 through 5 unit, meanwhile, has a rhythm of its own in the relative straightness of measure 4 compared with 3 and 5.  Thus the thick-thin-thick of the smaller unit reflects, inverted, the thin-thick-thin of the larger.

(b) We have a surprising feeling that every single “Na” is on an upbeat, simply because we start the whole “Na” sequence one beat late and this shift throws the normal boom-pah emphasis pattern for a loop.  If you’re conducting this part with your hand, your hand keeps jerking upward now throughout Measures 3 and 4, never down.  As a result, this section is stomping, juking, and levitating all at the same time.

(c) Finally, we now have Polyrhythm #3, a gentle settling-down triplet feeling as the last three “Nas” impose a 3-3-2 division on Measure 5.  Note how complex Measures 3 and 5 have gotten, while still remaining marvelously clear.

4.  Starting the next time through, the voicelike organ screams C and A on beats 2 and 4 in every second measure to reassert the 2-2-2-2 structure in the other way than singing “Stand!” on beat 3 in the first measure has been doing; thus we are pitting against each other these two ways of pitting 2-2-2-2 back against 3-2-2-1.  Counting from the boomp at the beginning of Measure 1, these two moves together make a 4-6-4-2 pattern in Measures 1 and 2 of the larger 8-measure unit—a simple syncopation, delaying the second beat two ticks (6 instead of 4) and paying them back at the end of the cycle (2 instead of 4).

Enough of the diagramming already.   Obviously “Stand!” is intricate.   What makes it so cogent?

Formally, one more important thing to note about the design is that the music has a powerful foreground-background structure, the foreground ingredients being the juking bass line and the levitating “Na na na.”  All the other complexity supports this featured drama of two bold figures.

But there remains the question of why these figures seem especially meaningful.  The Pantheon seems meaningful because the sphere adds a cosmic, geometrically eerie dimension to a familiar temple form.  I think the counterpart over-the-top element of “Stand!” is the “Na na nas.”  Their rhythmic displacement creates an unexpectedly rewarding position for whoever sings along (and with the wide-open nah-nah-nah “lyric,” no one has any reason not to sing along).  It’s a position of being elsewhere than where the constraints of the song’s structure are being enforced.  Earlier I called it a levitation, thinking of its upward force, but it also has a sideways force that puts us out to one side of the song like a nose-thumbing critic (the taunting meaning of nah-nah-nah).  Melodically, it has an up-and-down, sinuously playful shape, expressing a freedom like that of a kid under the grown-ups’ table or even a baby kicking in the womb (the primal burbling of na-na-na).  With so much else going on all around us, we get to make our own move in the middle of it all.  That freedom is the solved problem of the work.

Sly and the Family Stone are one of the best bands ever to embody a “family” ideal of uniting different yet complementary personalities in one collective.  Their classic identity statement along these lines is “Dance to the Music,” where each voice gets an introduction.  To listen to them is to join them, to be drawn into their fold.  Singing “na na na” at the end of “Stand!” is a supremely intense yet effortless way to experience that.  The Family Stone is the kind of cosmos in which one can kick up and be free.

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[1] One can hear a squeezing out of the first note in this bass figure, too, as the bass player goes up to the C from a B grace note.  So I could have written the notes as B-C-C-C-Bb-C and measured the ticks as 1-2-2-2-1.  But the rhythm guitar plays the first C straight and on 1, reinforcing the 3-2-2-1 structure, and the alternative 1-2-2-2-1 structure remains subliminal.

Rock Hope: The Long Ryders, “I Had a Dream” (1984)

Rocking, as such, doesn’t really have a thrust.  The beat is always fundamentally just bashing.

That pointless bashing is rich with potential, obviously.  Various sorts of song use it with variously compelling results.  I bet one could write all of rock criticism on the premise that rocking gets drawn into larger worlds of meaning when it gets connected to ideas and values on a higher cognitive level.  Nevertheless, I want to say that a real rock song hits some nail on the head by drawing its theme right out of the beat dynamo, showing with complete visceral conviction “This is what rocking means now.”

Here is a case:  the Long Ryders’ “I Had a Dream” is a real rock song, and an unusual one, because its violent beating bursts out as the insistence of genuine optimistic hope—just the sort of theme one would have expected to swoop down from poetic or political heights above, looking for a little musical cooperation.  In “I Had a Dream,” the beat isn’t borrowed to be the vehicle of a higher faith, it makes the faith, or at least a place where the faith is inescapable.

Here is how the event is staged:  we’re hit first with a loud but rather all-purpose Byrdsy guitar and drum attack in part A of the verse.  The singer starts a frustrated plea for friendship:  “I tried so hard to explain . . . but you’ll never listen, you just turn your head.”

“I Had A Dream” A

In verse part B the beat lets up almost entirely to allow a reconsideration of where we might be heading:  “I had a dream last night . . . everybody was laughing, nobody was fighting . . . still some hope in sight,” drawing us outside of the driven now, preparing us to reenter the present in a better way.

“I Had A Dream” B

We do this twice; the suspense about the better way grows.  Then in the final resumption of the verse structure the drums re-enter differently, in crescendo, pounding on a door—the door being the stubborn listener but also the whole deal of life—passionately wanting the door to open, knowing the door must open, not knowing yet how the door can be made to open, wanting what’s on the other side without knowing what it is and wanting it partly because we don’t know what it is (since we repudiate inertia), clamoring for the future even though the one thing sure about it is that it holds our demise (“no one knows what they’ll leave when they’re through,” we’ve been reminded), our insurgent optimism charm-powered by the timeless dream we accessed in verse part B.

“I Had A Dream” C

The lyrics speak of hope, to be sure, and the rocking hope moment wouldn’t happen if they didn’t.  On paper it’s a relatively preachy song.  But the flesh-energy of rock does the hoping that counts.  The beat takes over.  It makes me talk about a door the words never mentioned; and you have to be there to find this out.

How God Rocks: Maria Muldaur, “As An Eagle Stirreth In Her Nest” (1976)

Rock ‘n’ roll has something in common with believing in God as a Parent:  the point of it is to be a kid in the right way (i.e. not regressive, naïve, or stupidly conceited).  This isn’t easy.  Youthfulness often plays as spontaneous fun, but there’s a problem in the implied if not actual presence of someone else you depend on, someone more established than you are.  How do you relate to that?  Well, happy and loving and grateful is nice—the obvious emotional prescription for “gospel music”—and yet, as Martin Luther noted, the peccable kid can’t help but hate the superior Parent.[1] To be young is to be subject to infinite disapproval from above and to resent being in that position.   Could gospel music ever whip its optimism into an honest fury about being a young screw-up in a world of unending punishments?

It would have to draw on rock—rock spirit, if not rock instrumentation.  We have a great example in Maria Muldaur’s recording of “As An Eagle Stirreth in Her Nest,” originally written by W. H. Brewster in a black church tradition of preaching on Deuteronomy 32.11.  (Aretha Franklin’s father C. L. delivered one of these sermons.)  Developing the idea that the Creator, like an eagly parent, pushes creatures around to educate them and bring them into their own, Brewster’s song claims that even World Wars are episodes in our divine education.   What a concept!  From the prophet’s God-side point of view, it appears that we humans need a whole lot of pushing!  But from where we sit, battered and dazed, our eternal Pusher might seem extremely pushy.

Muldaur manages to be furious about this at all levels, in all ways.  She seethes with the prophet’s impatience with human thoughtlessness and evil, she vehemently dares us not to admit that our catastrophes are divine judgments, and at the same time she plaintively, scornfully voices (as a booming male preacher never could) the complaint of us kids for whom all this history is so unfair, never asked for, never negotiated.  But she keeps that second fury channeled and subordinate.  This is still a genuine gospel song, righteous and optimistic.   It just has an extra semi-hidden energy.  Muldaur’s girlish voice lurks in low, blue notes, a cobra swaying side to side, ready to strike us with Truth—and also playing a cobra game like a kid, thrilling in fear of that Snake.

“As An Eagle”

What’s the rhythm of cities falling?  What’s the chord in war?  It’s the very thing believers are asked to put their practical trust in, divine Providence:  “God shook the nations.”  “God stirs the world.  “God stirs up the dead.”  If God does rock that way, “As An Eagle” is how faith rocks.

But this is not the only possibility.  “As An Eagle’s” fierce father-oriented view of the relation with God differs utterly from another great rocking approach to the subject in “It’s Love” by King’s X, where there’s no history, no intention, no fault—“There’s a ship on the ocean, but I can’t decide if I like it”—there’s only Love, “that holds it all together, and the same will let it go,” a motherly God on whose bosom we mystically lie, centered in a radiant wordless chorus.[2]

“It’s Love”

Is that better?

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[1] “Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience.  I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction.  I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly . . . I was angry with God . . .” Preface to 1545 edition of Luther’s works, in Luther’s Works, Vol. 34, ed. Lewis W. Spitz (St. Louis:  Concordia, 1960), pp. 336-337.

[2] For which precedent can be found in Friedrich Schleiermacher:  “I lie on the bosom of the infinite world”—On Religion [1799], trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 113.

Essence of Punk: Flatt & Scruggs, “Earl’s Breakdown” (1951)

[Creem's] point of view was vulgar, belligerent, often less respectful to rock’s major institutions . . . with the result that all of us—and especially me—were frequently assaulted with the epithet:  “You are such a punk.”  I decided this insult would be better construed as a compliment . . . in order to emphasize our delight in rock’s essential barbarism.
—Dave Marsh [1]

“Punk” is a bad thing.  A punk is a loser—not just underendowed but a self-defeater—an ugly, skinny kid, probably carrying a nasty little weapon like a switchblade, someone you wouldn’t trust with anything.  “Punk” isn’t “spunk”; a punk may be a savage, but not the noble kind.

Do you disagree?  I admit “punk” is a word very variously used.  But I want to remind you of a deep provocation in what the great punks themselves meant:  not to stir us up as spunky rebels, but to make us sick.

Given this premise, I was shocked when I heard myself shout “What a punk!” while listening to my new-bought CD The Essential Earl Scruggs. Scruggs is a legendary banjo player and Grand Ole Opry type best known for playing on the “Beverly Hillbillies” theme song, not usually considered a milestone of radical music.  I was checking out his Essentials because I love bluegrass in general and the folk-festival staple “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” in particular.  But I ran into something unexpected on Track 12 of Disc 1, “Earl’s Breakdown,” recorded in 1951 in Flatt and Scruggs’ first set for Columbia Records.  An amazingly ugly note bursts out in the middle of a lick, something like the sound of a string breaking, a major clam.  Scruggs does it on purpose by manually detuning the string.  Breaking down indeed!

Scruggs’ note

The banjo’s sound in general is already so brash and sour that it’s only borderline-acceptable in musical society; it’s the guest at the party that makes the rest of the instruments nervous.  It must be kept within bounds, used for rhythm chords or else, on what might be called the car-racing side of bluegrass, given its own little fast lane for pickin’ à la Scruggs.  We learn to accept the sound and forget what a punk the banjo itself is.  But then Scruggs violently reminds us with his punk note.  (Gene Krupa does something like that for the drums with his shocking snare strike in “Sing, Sing, Sing.”)

Of course the Scruggs note is really nothing more than a downward bend, just one of the tricky licks a slick picker would pick, and it sounds smoothly integrated when I hear it again on some of his later essentials.  To tell you the truth, it sounds okay now on “Earl’s Breakdown.”  The punk moment has passed.

So?  Did I have a point?

According to Dave Marsh, who influentially embraced the label “punk rock,” for a rock ‘n’ roll lover the alternative to “punkish behavior” is “acting like a dignified asshole.”[2]  I admit it seems unpunkishly pretentious to sit around connoisseuring punk.  (Where would that be headed?  Would we try to determine whether Johnny Rotten or Patti Smith is the better punk vocalist by rating each one for Vitriol, Irreverence, Nonchalance, Nauseating Tunelessness, and Falling-Apartness?)  Above all, punk is an event.  As Pete Townsend said, “what immediately strikes you [in listening to the Sex Pistols] is that this is actually happening . . . It’s like somebody saying, ‘The Germans are coming! And there’s no way we’re gonna stop ‘em.’”[3]  This is an event in which you are skewered.

Beyond being immediately threatened by the punk musician’s act, however, you still get to decide, on reflection, what kind of gesture that act is.  You get to organize your response and pursue your thoughts.

I don’t regret calling Scruggs a punk in “Earl’s Breakdown.”  I know it’s only a single odd note, not a massive assault on convention, but I know I felt skewered when I heard it.  More important, this sets me wondering about relationships of styles—in this case, the relationship between the more aggressive manifestations of “old-time music,” including bluegrass, and rock (and their supporting cultures).

To construe an essence is to convene a community of things, to get on board with something, to share with someone.  The bluegrass genre was created by other bands copying the sound of the late 40s Bill Monroe line-up that included Scruggs.  Rock in its most definitive form grew out of young British guitarists sharing the blues with African-Americans, starting bands in the early 1960s with names like “Blues Inc.” and “The Blues Syndicate”—it depended on the essence, theme, and affinity of blues.  So too with punk later.  As ridiculous as the notion of an “essence of punk” is, an enormous amount has been said about it (google and see).  And you know where you can find your paradigm instance:  the needling essence of Johnny Rotten is available on a Sex Pistols recording like Chanel No. 5 is available in a bottle.

But you can listen for it in 1951, too, on a larger scale of community.

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[1] Dave Marsh column in Creem, May 1971, quoted by Jim DeRogatis in Let It Blurt (New York: Broadway Books, 2000), p. 119.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Quoted by Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces:  A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 1.

What Silence Says: U2, “Seconds” (1983)

For never shall this be forcibly maintained, that things that are not are, but you must hold back your thought from this way of enquiry… —Parmenides[1]

Silence is impossible.  Deaf people who have never heard sound know that information available to other people is not available to them, but they can’t recognize the absence of sound as such.  For the rest of us, sound is inescapable.  John Cage went into an anechoic chamber at Harvard to listen to silence and instead heard two hums in his body, one from his nervous system and one from his blood circulation.[2]

On the other hand, without relative silence there can be no sonic event—no beginning or ending of a note, no breathing in a beat.  Silence is indispensable.  Some pop music furiously denies this principle by ladling on overlapping thick layers of sound in a dance-groove or industrial roar format that implies no beginning or end.  But any music that really got rid of silence would lose all identifiable character.  As a reminder of this universal truth it’s good to listen to a sharply articulated track like The Zombies’ “Time Of The Season,” shot through and through with tasty little silences, a piece of Swiss cheese in comparison with the omnipresent Velveeta on contemporary pop radio.

A truly distinct silence hook would be a segment of a song in which we’re conscious that nothing is being played and there’s something to relish in that interruption.  How might that happen?

The big silence we’re most likely to encounter in a rock piece is not an acoustical event so much as a kinesthetic one—a stop for several beats, enough to create suspense but not enough to throw a song off track.  The silent second measure of “Manic Depression” by Jimi Hendrix sounds at first like an anxious hesitation before the song takes its plunge; when that opening sequence repeats later, we realize that the cleared-out second measure makes a nice space for shouts and drum fills.  The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” stops for two great beats to gather itself before its final dash to the finish.  “Strange Brew” by Cream stops near the end for a four-beat measure which at first, before we learn to count it out, strikes us as a false ending, pulling our leg.  “Time And Time Again,” one of the Smithereens’ niftiest songs, contains a full four-beat measure of silence twice, each time at the pivot from verse to chorus, which makes it a structural part of the song rather than a one-off stunt.  (It’s an anti-fanfare heralding the line “Time and time again . . .”)  Jane’s Addiction does the same thing in “Stop,” and so does Busta Rhymes in “Break Ya Neck.” Taking advantage of our knowledge of blues structure, Chris Thile gets away with two empty measures at the turnaround of each verse in the a cappella section of his recording of “If The Sea Was Whiskey.”

Besides challenging us to count out the beat, how otherwise might a silence hook be meaningful?

There is silence that the edges of musical sound seem to want to flood into, like water into a pan pushed down in the sink.  The “Good Vibrations” break, shimmering with reverb from the last sound preceding it, has this receptacle-power.[3]

There is silence that seems to push the edges of sound back, like a high-pressure center pushing away clouds.  The fierce stop in “Stop” is like this.

There is silence that settles into its place in a discourse and helps frame it all together.  The stop measure in “Time and Time Again” is intelligible and reassuring in this way.

There is breathing-spell silence that lets you recover from a bombardment of stimuli, as in the hectically rapped “Break Ya Neck.”

There is a calm, confiding silence that knows you can fill in information yourself or just wait, as in Chris Thile’s “If The Sea Was Whiskey.”

There is silence that sounds like a tooth taken off a larger rhythm gear.  That’s how “Manic Depression’s” second measure sounds.  (Is it a poignant absence of efficacy, a limping, or part of a sneakier efficacy, a skipping?  Keep listening and find out.)

There is silence that puzzles, making you wonder, like the false ending in “Strange Brew.”  (You can keep hearing it that way.)

There is silence that takes you ahead to whatever lies beyond the action now ended.   (You can hear the stop in “Strange Brew” that way too, as a visionary rather than false ending.)

There is silence that springs you free altogether, giving you what John Cage was after, “a way to change one’s mind.”[4] For this effect, more is required than a stop, which stays chained to the beat.  Consider the longer break—an intermission, one could call it—in the middle of “Seconds” by U2.

“Seconds” silence

Becalmed without music for eleven seconds, we can’t help wondering where we are.  Has the world ended?  (This is the song’s nuclear worry:  that some joker launches the missiles and we have only seconds to say goodbye.)   No; another possibility of silence is realized as we notice faint sounds of talk we can’t understand, like a whisper of what would be heard from the Other Side of our world if we could be perfectly still.  When we start barely hearing a field-recorded chant of military madness, “I want to be an airborne Ranger/I want to live the life of danger,” we have to ask, Are we hearing this old world’s power to rule us from behind all our scenes, even in silence?  (Now reconsider the moments when speaking voices leached through in the preceding verses.  What did that mean?)  The relative silence of this intermission is overdetermined now—or underdetermined, depending on how you look at it:  you have to find your own lifesaving relation to it, as U2 hopes, or perhaps not have a relation, which is Cage’s (non)aim:  “The essential meaning of silence is the giving up of intention.”[5]

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[1]. Parmenides, fragment 294 in G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2^nd ed. (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 248.

[2]. John Cage, Silence (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 8.  This discovery made him realize that he could compose a piece with no notes at all, the famous 4′ 33”, that nevertheless would be full of musical interest in any actual performance.

[3]. Since we listen to songs on albums, the silences between tracks can become meaningful.  Perhaps this intertrack silence hook is of the receptacle kind:  “And then there’s ‘Love You More,’ from the Buzzcocks compilation Singles Going Steady.  It stops, abruptly, brutally, with the line ‘Until the razor cuts.’  And then, before ‘Ever Fallen In Love’ arrives, there’s a yearning, anticipatory silence, possibly the most profound silence in rock ‘n’ roll” —Tim Footman, post of 7-5-07 on his blog Cultural Snow.

[4]. Cage, “Autobiographical Statement,” Southwest Review 76 (Winter 1991), pp. 59-76.

[5]. Cage at U. of Cincinnati in 1968, in Richard Kostelanetz, ed. Conversing with Cage (New York:  Limelight, 1988), p. 189.

When I’m a Young Dude: Mott the Hoople, “All The Young Dudes” (1972)

Whenever words and music are combined, it’s customary to treat the music as the more or less helpful servant of the words—and alas, many terrible songs have been composed in that way, words first and music as their accessory—but since sung words are often only partly understood, we’re often in a good position to see the words-music relation the other way around.  That is, we can see how words offer clues, sometimes helpful but rarely necessary, to the import of the music.  Sometimes no words are intelligible but the sheer fact that someone is singing in a certain way—or singing at all—draws us in to what the music is realizing musically.  And what the music gives you is something you could only partially understand through words anyway.

If this is not true, I do not know what to make of my experience of David Bowie’s song “All The Young Dudes” as recorded by Mott the Hoople.  The historical home of the song is 1972 and glam rock, but I think I first heard it well into the 1980’s—and was instantly brought into the fold of the young dudes, without knowing what a young dude is.

Searching for a parallel to shed light on how this sort of experience works, I remember an extraordinary encounter I once had with a baby spider monkey being raised by friends in Costa Rica.  The monkey came into my lap and within a few seconds turned me into its parent.  Now, I know that everyone has this sort of experience with human babies, and I have too, but the monkey was specially memorable for two reasons:  one, because such an unexpected transformation was involved—it wasn’t a matter of seeing the little monkey as a cute little quasi-baby, it was a matter of me becoming an adult spider monkey (and this is significant because I’ll never really know what it is to be a spider monkey)—and two, because I remember a specific complex action by which the young monkey worked that magic on me:  holding eye contact, it touched the sides of my face with its fingers, gingerly yet intently.

The chorus of “All The Young Dudes” makes a two-pronged move on me as well.  It holds me in a groove with the soaring tune of “All the young dudes/Carry the news” sung by charmingly callow, wistful voices on top of a stately chord progression.  But in the spaces and around the edges of this tune, Ian Hunter is addressing us—touching us with his vocal fingers—calling out “Hey, dudes!  Where are you?  Stand up!  I want to hear you!  I want to see you!”

“All The Young Dudes” chorus

The imperious enthusiasm of his call to the dudes makes me identify with him; then I wonder just how surprised we’ll be when the dudes show themselves in the space created by the invitation; I have the feeling that no matter how freaky they seem, it will be okay; this reassurance opens suppressed depths of curiosity about who I’ve been and who I’ll be, which leads me to imagine myself basking, all disclosed, in Ian Hunter’s acceptance—I want to be a dude too!—and completes the compelling circle.

So the song turns me into whoever is keening in the chorus and whoever Ian Hunter is talking to.  The verses, on the other hand, do nothing for me, except I’m marginally aware that lives are being described.  When I look up the lyrics I see they represent alienated youth, including gays.  For all I know, the word “dude” already pointed to a very specific demographic for Mott the Hoople’s British audience in 1972.  But the beauty of “dude” is that it means anyone anyhow—in this context, anyone anyhow as convened in the unspeakably optimistic tune of the chorus.