John Mellencamp: Sprinting to the Finish

When John Mellencamp strikes the opening licks of a song, you know he's got you. He hits a musical nerve, opens a vein of nostalgia and salts it with irony, sarcasm and social commentary.
It is all on display during this summer's tour and on his exquisite new album with Carlene Carter, "Sad Clowns & Hillbillies."

He's put together a Show Band that is tighter than a tick and he marches it through his impressive hit parade with a precision that would make James Brown proud.  He begins in a bluesy country style with Lawless Times that showcases his aged-to-mellow gravel road voice. The musical path wanders smoothly from Small Town to Robert Johnson's Stones in My Passway.

But the crowd goes crazy when he turns the bend into Check it Out (all we've learned about living) and Jack and Diane(oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of livin' is gone), the latter as an acoustic take with an audience singalong.

From there, it was onto another dreamer's tale off the new album. Grandview is Jack's story plus forty as he woos his girl with promises of a brand new double-wide trailer:
We could slide it on in there, honey
We can chock those wheels real good
I want it sittin' nice and level

He showcased two other new songs, My Soul's Got Wings and Easy Target, both arranged with more of a rock tempo than the country sound on the CD, lest the fans get fidgety while waiting for their favorites.

They came next,  after a beautiful piano and violin overture to Scarecrow: Paper in Fire, Crumbling Down, The Authority Song and Pink Houses (ain't that America... Cause the simple man, baby, pays the thrills, the bills and the pills that kill).

Mellencamp recently chain smoked his way through an interview with Jane Pauley on CBS in which he talked about reaching 65.
"I can see the finish line from here," he said. "I only have so many summers left and I intend not to waste them being old."

On stage he talked about how he and a long time band mate have decided to rest by only taking a lot of naps during the day. "I don't want the newspapers to say John Mellencamp died in his sleep."

Then he took us all back to those days

When a smoke was a smoke
And groovin' was groovin'
And dancin' meant everything
We we're young and we were improvin'

John Mellencamp, for one, still is--and still lighting musical fuses.

Frightened Rabbit Wins The Race

We started the usual summer concert season in an unusual venue (DC's 9:30 Club) with an unusual audience (millennials) watching a band with an unusual name.
Frightened Rabbit may be the best up and coming rock band  you never heard of. Rest assured that many fans on the other side of the generation gap have, as the band has been selling out concerts from Boston to DC, and been on festival bills in Sonoma, Houston and Hyde Park, London.

Their U.S. swing in May was in support of their fifth album, Painting of a Panic Attack, whose title captures the complex psychological pathways of their songs. Those pathways are filled with twists and turns and a musical surprise around every hedgerow.
Rabbit's lyrics are introspective questions about how to cope with life and love but at this point, their teenage angst and fatalism have given way to a knowing world weariness, tinged by optimism. Founder and front man, Scott Hutchison, weaves some dark and torturous stories that somehow find a ray of hope at the end of the musical road.

Blood Under the Bridge
It's just blood under the bridge, and it's alright, it's alright...
I found the way to make the best of a flaw
And realize it's not the end,
It's just an uncomfortable pause.

Die Like A Rich Boy
I'll be Shakespeare's moonstruck king
We can lose our minds at the top of the hill
We burn cash and carry a decadent flame
Way into the night and beyond the grave.

Juxtaposed with these serious essays are rocket bursts of music from four guitars, drums and keyboards that have been playing together long enough to be polished without losing the fun of performing live. Hutchison keeps the audience entertained between songs with wisecracks about forgetting mates birthdays and how they're glad they did not move to California (from Glasgow, Scotland) because their songs would be "all happy and full of vitamins."

While their live show was a raucous, bouncing bar band romp, their studio CD comes across as a smooth, sophisticated production with an intensity that often delivers a wall of sound.

It's the words surfing in behind that sound which give Frightened Rabbit a lasting musical impact.  They capture the emotional push-pull of their generation and do it with a great back beat.

Get Out
I'm a worshiper, a zealot king, cursed, a devotee
Of the heady golden dance she does
She's an uncut drug...
I saw a glimmer in the dark and now I know
She won't get out of my heart, she won't.

Bee Gees: 50 Years of Great Hooks

The BeeGees First album has a place of honor in my collection because it is still fun to listen to and it confirms a couple of my personal theories. One is that first albums from a group are always the best. And second, that 1967 was the greatest year ever for rock and roll.

Perhaps I was smitten by the haunting lyrics of New York Mining Disaster 1941 (In the event of something happening to me...) or the anthemic sounds of To Love Somebody (You don't know what it's like...) that led to the powerful hook of the title phrase. Or maybe it was that their lyrics seemed more cerebral than their competitors in the British Invasion. Like Chad and Jeremy the word pictures made me feel as if I lived just around the corner from Carnaby Street and it was nearly tea time with Uncle Albert.

Those thoughts seem quaint in light of the super stardom that followed twelve years when Robert Stigwood asked them to write some songs for a John Travolta movie. That later period of history was served up in spades last Sunday on the CBS Grammy special honoring Barry, Robin, Maurice and in a backhanded way, little brother, Andy.

Even the Waring Blender processing that Grammy and CBS have taken to excess (glitz, celebrities, dancers, light shows) could not overwhelm the song writing genius of the Brothers Gibb. Unfortunately the show gave short shrift to the historic footage of The Rattlesnakes as teeny boppers in matching outfits in order to showcase people once nominated for a Grammy trying to imitate the sibling harmonies and showmanship of the originals.

Keith Urban did a creditable solo only to be let down by the sound mix on the crescendo line of To Love Somebody.  John Legend pulled off How Can You Mend a Broken Heart thanks in part to a sweet harmonica from Stevie Wonder. (How can you keep the rain from falling? How can you stop the sun from shining? What makes the world go round?). And the surprising a capella version of
Too Much Heaven from the Pentatonix was a treat.

As for the rest of hit parade, I preferred the real BeeGees who were captured for PBS cameras during the Las Vegas special in 1997, "One Night Only," which is on DVD and will no doubt be resurrected for future fund-raising weeks.

Travolta looked ageless on stage in his white sport coat and his anecdote about how the BeeGees came up with five songs during a weekend at a French chalet was charming. Each of those songs became a number one hit off the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack that was the biggest seller of all-time until Thriller bumped it off.

The mega single of the album, Staying Alive, has usually had a brassy, disco production and overdubbed chorus that all but drowned out the words. Now that the song has become a two word philosophy it is worth hearing the lyrics:

Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin'
And we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive...
Life goin' nowhere. Somebody help me, yeah
Stayin alive

That epic hook seems to have its origins in the mine shaft first envisioned in 1967.

Have you seen my wife, Mr. Jones?
Do you know what's like on the outside
Don't go talking too loud, you'll cause a landslide, Mr. Jones.

Patsy Cline: A Pioneer Voice

While the national media attention was focused on the passing of Chuck Berry, PBS was showcasing another music legend who changed the way we listen. "When Patsy Cline Was Crazy" is a combination of a traditional rags to riches story and some amazing video footage reminding us who paved the way for a generation of female performers.

Most of all, it brings back a voice that was powerful enough to cut through the static of AM radio, tinny jukeboxes and grainy television. If she had today's technology delivering her songs, the Sirens of Homer's Odyssey would have wilted with envy.

As Rhiannon Giddons reminds us, you always know that's a Patsy song.  Most of us know of her and her music but few know about her. This documentary from The American Masters series (pbs.org) narrated by Roseanne Cash, goes a long way to fill in the picture.

She started singing in bars and clubs while in high school, endured jobs washing Greyhound buses and drug store clerking before she got gigs with Roy Clark and Jimmy Dean. Her first record contract paid a pittance and stuck her recording the lousy songs the boss had the rights for.

Her big break came in 1957 when she appeared on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts debuting "Walking After Midnight." As Arthur drawled, "Don't go away Patsy honey...you done won this."
That earned her $10,000 and forced the company to rush the song into stores where it became her first hit.

By then, Patsy had given up the Dale Evans cowgirl outfits with lots of fringe (made by her mother) for the kind of cocktail dresses seen on television variety shows. She was Nashville's response to Elvis and rock and roll and the shift paid off.

Before videotape the only way to preserve live television was by filming the monitors to make kinescopes and these are the highlights of the documentary. "A Church, A Courtroom, Then Goodbye," "Three Cigarettes and an Ashtray," and "I Fall To Pieces" are priceless performances that still sound heart-wrenching half a century later. As Reba McIntire admits, no matter how hard others try, "you just can't do it like Patsy."

There are other interviews paying tribute to Patsy as a scrapper, a trailblazer and someone who could do six shows a day for weeks at time in Vegas. Everyone from Willie Nelson ("Crazy" was named the #1 jukebox hit of all time) to Leann Rimes and Kacey Musgraves acknowledges their debt to Patsy.

Just as she hit it big, it all ended tragically in a plane crash in Tennessee in 1963, a month before "Sweet Dreams (of you)" was released. Twenty-five thousand fans lined the streets of Winchester, Va., during her funeral. They have been buying her music ever since.

The "Greatest Hits" album is  the longest charting record of all-time and has sold more than 10 million copies.  Each song has become a standard. Patsy Cline set the musical bar very high.

John Lennon's Legal Legacy

It is hard to imagine anything more valuable than John Lennon's musical achievements but to thousands of immigrants currently ensnared in the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol nets, it may be a court case he pursued and won more than four decades ago.

As our memories of how John and Yoko battled against the Nixon Administration have dimmed, a new book has arrived to remind us how corrupt politicians can threaten the Constitution, how individuals can fight back and how the legal system can actually deliver justice.

The story of John Lennon vs. The USA has been covered before on film and in print but there is nothing as riveting and cogent as the inside story told by his attorney, Leon Wildes, in a new memoir from the publishing imprint of the American Bar Association.

It is full of delicious historical ironies, scary parallels and inside gossip. It began in 1971 when Lennon agreed to attend a rally and concert in Ann Arbor on behalf of a radical writer and musician John Sinclair. Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis and Bobby Seale were on the bill. Also attending were FBI agents who produced a 26-page report that got immediate circulation in field offices and the Justice Department. With a nudge from Sen. Strom Thurmond, John and Yoko became prime targets in the conspiracy against the anti-war movement. The plan to keep them from attending protests at the Republican National Convention in Miami in 1972 was simple and arbitrary: deny an extension of their temporary visas.

The Lennons wanted to stay, not to protest, but to continue their search for Yoko's daughter whose father had violated repeated custody orders and absconded with Kyoko. John, of course, was still making music and managing other Apple Records projects. His visa's Achilles Heel was a guilty plea on a cannabis oil charge in England (which has its own backstory).

They turned for help to Leon Wildes, a man who says he did not know who John Lennon was but he knew a helluva lot about immigration laws. They couldn't have picked a better guide down the rabbit hole of a parallel quasi-legal system (under the sole discretion of the U.S. Attorney General !) which has its own set of rules, its own system of appointed "judges" and its own arcane appeals process.

The trail winds through a fascinating Freedom of Information lawsuit, oral arguments at the U.S. Courtof Appeals, a clever public relations campaign, the birth of Sean Lennon  and some enduring legal precedents.

Wildes' breakthrough came when he discovered the Immigration Service had created an unofficial category to handle visa violators whom the agency did not want to deport for humanitarian reasons, in some cases despite felony records. These were called "non-priority cases," because the agency was willing to let them be ignored. Wildes found and analyzed more than 1,800 of these shadowy cases.
They became the basis for his arguments that the Lennons had been denied this status for political reasons, yet another Watergate tentacle.

In addition to describing how new legal protections were created, Wildes reveals how whip-smart Yoko was in anticipating the government's strategy against them, what a devoted family man John was and how his family has coped without him. It is a profile in courage worth remembering.

The Beach Boys Still Get Around

It’s Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show

Pack up the babies and grab the old ladies

And everyone goes, ‘cause everyone knows

Brother Love’s show

The only group on the Kennedy Center stage that has played longer than the Beach Boys was the National Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1931; but they were more than willing to share the stage with the kids from California.

At least this version of the band was still acting like teenagers (and making the audience feel the same)  while they were celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the Pet Sounds album.

That tribute was to come later. First it was a greatest hits fest which included too many to list, including Surfin, Catch a Wave, Surfer Girl, Why Do Fools Fall in Love, California Girls, Little Deuce Coupe and I Get Around.

While some groups acknowledge their past, this one reveled in it with a video and light show that had film of Bruce Johnston actually surfing, Mike Love doing the Watusi, clips from every music show broadcast in the 60’s and enough bikini clad girls to fill several Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues. But the home movies (some of which matched the live singers with lip-synch from the original songs) contained enough self-deprecating humor and shared nostalgia that they seemed just another ride on the Beach Boys Roller Coaster.

The program called Love the “Captain” of this cruise which seemed appropriate as he led the band, sang harmony (he lets Jeffrey Foskett carry the lead vocals along with Brian Eichenburger) and joked with the audience and narrated the historical transitions.

The second set paid tribute to the Pet Sounds era with film of Carl Wilson singing on the screen above the live bands and Dennis Wilson also getting a solo bit.  Missing from the show was any tribute to Brian Wilson who travels with his own singers (and orchestra) in support of Smile. It was a subtle reminder of the Big Breakup that derailed the band just as they were doing their best work.

Caroline No, Sloop John B and Wouldn’t it Be Nice were done well and pleased the crowd. The show hit a speed bump when Mike brought out daughter Ambha for Warmth of the Sun and Bruce Johnston stumbled on Disney Girls, apparently unable to get his mic and earpiece working properly.

The Symphony was often drowned out by the band (playing in front of them) but their two marvelous overtures (Warmth of the Sun and In My Room) made me wish for an entire evening of the NSO’s take on the rich music that under girds the pop lyrics.

Love’s tribute to George Harrison, Pisces Brothers, was a wonderful surprise and showed he can still create new songs after all these years.

Music and memories are all that’s lost

Your songs are what go on and on.

The big finish had the crowd on its feet singing along with Kokomo, Help Me Rhonda (we didn’t need lyrics on the big screen for that, Mike) Good Vibrations,  and  Barbara Ann.  At the end we were having so much Fun, Fun, Fun, I had to break out my air guitar.

Boring Bob and Magic Mavis

It seems a shame you have to buy a ticket to Bob Dylan this summer to see Mavis

Staples but at least she is worth it.

Dylan’s never ending tour stopped at our nearby national park, Wolftrap, to show us  he is still up to his old tricks. Despite his opening number, “Things Have Changed,” he is still doing what he’s done for the couple of decades since I last saw him live. 

His band is tight and provides a wall of sound to which he adds his idea of barely intelligible narration.  It is as if he has become such a towering figure that all he needs to do is show up on set and read his lines, sounding more like Marlon Brando than the Frank Sinatra he is currently showcasing. One of the five Sinatra covers he essayed pretty much sums it up:

So let people wonder, let ‘em laugh, let ‘em frown

You know I’ll love you till the  moon’s upside down

Don’t you remember I was always your clown?

Why try to change me now.

It was Dylan’s old girlfriend, Mavis Staples who stole the show and our hearts with her smokey singing, her family anecdotes and wise-cracking with the audience. She began with a Staples Singers' call out, “If You’re Ready (Come and Go With Me).” We were and we did. After a cover of Talking Heads' “Slippery People,” she offered a brief mission statement:

 “I’m here to bring you some joy, some happiness, some inspiration and some positive vibrations.”  To do that she started with “Love and Trust,” which seemed painfully relevant to the week’s news.

The judge and the criminal, the sinner and the priest

Got something in common, bring ‘em all to their knees

Do what you can, do what you must

Everybody’s trying to find some love and trust.

Mopping her brow with a towel, she told us the next song was written by her father, Pop Staples for Selma in 1962.  Then she  had the audience side by side with her marching up Freedom’s Highway as she declared herself  “a soldier in this army of love marching for peace.” Her topical series wrapped with a richly nostalgic take on Buffalo Springfield’s  “For What It’s Worth.”

She closed with a rousing, extended version of the Staples Singers # l hit, “I’ll Take You There” which brought us to our feet clapping for the woman who proclaimed: “My Family has been “taking” you there for sixty-six years and I am not tired yet.”