The unlikely advocate

You know, maybe there should be an IQ requirement for a handgun licence. And for being a school principal. And for having an office.

Many thanks

To Paul Goode, who fixed my archives. He may not be a dab hand with iTunes, but he's one hell of a problem-solver.

Jesus, that's loud

Scotland, meet Christian rock. Christian rock, meet Scotland.

Incidentally, if anyone has any insight into why the archive pages on the sidebar are coming up as HTML files, I'd very much appreciate it.

Out of stock

Stephen Hunter has a beautiful piece in today's Washington Post about U.S. Repeating Arms' decision to stop manufacturing Winchester rifles. In addition to being an unusually deft film critic, Hunter's a certified gun nut, perhaps the only guy in America who can parse Colin Farrell films as expertly as that famous photo of Elian Gonzales being confronted by a fed.

Here's an excerpt:

How light it is, how quick to the shoulder, how pointable! It begs to come to the eye. It swiftly finds what's called the natural point of aim, the perfect equipoise between its own grace and its shooter's talent. There, it wants to be fired. It's knobless and trim yet hardly streamlined. It hails proudly from the pre-streamlined world. No ergonomic study went into its design, only the sound trial and error of Yankee genius that finally found the ideal form.

It's weirdly squarish, yet like other classic guns, it boasts an orchestration of lines of unusual harmony, which somehow seem to soothe the eye. The Colt Peacemaker revolver, the Tommy gun and the Luger have the same effect; all are instantly known and knowable. They have a design charisma that transcends their actual usage in the real world.

A couple recent record reviews

From the Post's "Lost Tracks: Good CDs We Overlooked Last Year" series:

Amadou & Mariam (honest, Mom, it looked a bit better in print!)

Lake Trout

The Tao of Rod

Melissa R. from Richmond writes in to say: "Hey, I'm lovin' reading about Franz Ferdinard and other happening acts, but how about writing about some good ol' fashioned rock and or roll? You know, the hairy chestnuts of wildness?" Hey Missy, read on!

Well, at one time, you've got it, and then you lose it, and it's gone for ever. —Sickboy, Trainspotting

My friend Jason has done some amazing work trying to turn this particular critical saw inside out--you know, the one that holds that most artists are only good for their first record or so, that early work always trumps that which comes later, that the siren call of mansions in Brentwood and second wives with huge plastic knockers drowns out the muse's plaint.

Jason and his friend Britt came up with an alternate way of looking at music called the Advanced Theory, which holds that true genius in rock music often can't be appreciated by those of us transfixed by an artist's early work. When Lou Reed does an album of songs about Edgar Allan Poe, the theory goes, it's not because he's running on fumes. He has Advanced, and it is our job to try to catch up to him.

I love that theory. It has holes, sure, many pointed out by my man Rob Sheffield, who wonders how it explains the Outfield. The thing is, the Advanced Theory can't explain everything.

Which brings us to Rod Stewart.

Despite enjoying many of Stewart's radio hits, I never credited him with having anything to lose, as it were. He's always seemed content to be an amiable buffoon, a cartoon lothario who'd recently settled into a lucrative senescence croaking out second-rate versions of Cole Porter songs. I wished him well but wasn't interested.

Moreover, Rod's pink-satin-blouse period is still fresh in many people's minds, and someone in the comments section of this blog recently noted he was quite upset at Stewart for "mauling" (his word) a Tom Waits song. I sympathize with these objections.

A couple months ago, I was talking with a friend who advised me to check out Stewart's early Mercury records. I still hadn't gotten around to doing so until just before Thanksgiving, when the missus was away and I was totally unable to set my own schedule. I'd find myself eating chips and salsa at all hours, watching movies at times previously alien to me (there's a 2 a.m.?).

One night I watched Rushmore to see whether I'd still like it. At the end of the movie there's a dance scene where everything gets resolved to the tune of the Face's "Ooh La La." Rod, I thought. Rod was in that band.

The next day I went to Plan 9, bought a Faces greatest-hits and puzzled at the confusing price points of Rod Stewart reissues. Some of the reissues of his Mercury records were $5.99 (I bought those) and others were $18.99 in the store and around eight bucks on iTunes. I opted for a combination of the two approaches and bought Smiler and Never a Dull Moment in physical form, and The Rod Stewart Album, Gasoline Alley and Every Picture Tells a Story online.

The problem with the iTunes approach, I quickly learned, is that you miss out on inner-sleeve photos like this:


Or Never a Dull Moment's stylized cover, which shows Rod plonked in an elegant chair he may just have woken up in, with a "How the fuck did I get to Brussels?" look on his face.



Rod Stewart joined the Faces, previously the Small Faces, after he'd had some success with Jeff Beck's band, and Steve Marriot had left the Small Faces to form Humble Pie with Peter Frampton. The arrangement couldn't have been more precarious--Stewart had also recently signed a solo deal. The problem with this was that his solo work almost immediately eclipsed the Faces'; Rod's music was popular with "normal" people, not necessarily the type of hard-core rock fan who went in for the Faces' boozy, sweaty performances. Though the Faces had a couple of minor hits, nothing they produced touched the success of Rod's 1971 No. 1 hit "Maggie May" (from the frankly flawless "Every Picture Tells a Story") or the next year's "You Wear It Well."

If you're wondering whether you're finally mature enough to allow yourself to enjoy blues-rock, the Faces' greatest hits is a good test of your resolve. I dig it despite my deep-seated antipathy to that genre, and not just because "Ooh La La" is such a great song (sung by guitarist Ron Wood, incidentally). There are moments that Rod & Co. come off as total badasses, like "Bad 'n' Ruin," which nips at Zeppelin's heels, or "Sweet Lady Mary," which may have been an attempt to ape Rod's folk-rocky solo stuff, but is a pretty nice song anyway.

Rod's first album, called The Rod Stewart Album in the U.S. and An Old Raincoat Won't Ever Let You Down (I believe that's a condom reference, so it's probably not Advanced) in the U.K., is a better showcase for Stewart's persona, the working-class boy elevated to toffdom through this crazy business of music. It opens with a rangy cover of the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man," which is striking in its lack of irony. One gets the sense Stewart identified strongly enough with the chorus--"What can a poor boy do, 'cept to sing for a rock'n'roll band"--that it seemed like almost autobiographical. Interestingly, the song only begins to resemble the Stones' version a minute and a half before its end, after a false ending. Then there's a totally ridiculous bass-guitar solo that lasts for what feels like two minutes, a Jesus Christ Superstar–style piano/drums breakdown and...a fadeout. I like to think that somewhere there's a version of this that goes on for another thirty minutes, but that's what box sets are for.

The most famous song on The Rod Stewart Album is "Handbags and Gladrags," which was the theme for The Office, and its lyrics nicely encapsulate Rod's W1-by-way-of-N11 sensibilities as he takes aim at a newly minted middle-class layabout. "I heard that you missed school today," he fairly shrieks at the end, "so I suggest you just throw them all away: The handbags and the gladrags that your poor old grandad had to sweat to buy."

There's no small irony in this--Rod's dad was a butcher, and he himself probably rarely came home with blood on his shoes. But, and this is I think key to understanding a lot of British music from the era, he probably worked just as hard as his old man. Rod may have busied himself banging every aspiring model in go-go boots the world over in his downtime, but between his solo LPs and the Faces', he made ten studio albums between 1969 and 1974. Even crazier, most of them are really good. All this while the Faces wore a groove in stages all over the world through epic, constant touring.

1970's Gasoline Alley is probably the closest Rod's and the Faces' careers came to converging, stylistically. Both feature a lot of gritty, tough-guy sentiment, and Ron Wood played most of the badass guitar parts on both of them. After Rod's 1971 solo album Every Picture Tells a Story, however, the Faces were hopelessly playing catchup, writing songs like "Sweet Lady Mary" that mimicked Rod's huge hit "Maggie May" (not that he was above doing the same--"You Wear It Well," from 1972's Never a Dull Moment, and "Farewell," from 1974's Smiler, showed a man unafraid of repeating himself).

That said, Every Picture Tells a Story is darn near perfect, from its jet-setting title track to its so-ridiculously-unselfconscious-that-it-somehow-comes-out awesome cover of the Temptations' "(I Know) I'm Losing You." Who the hell needs Rare Earth when Rod's around?

Aprés this album, goes the crit line, the deluge, the devolution to the mushy Rod of today, more concerned with the trappings of stardom than the talent that got him there. I don't buy it. Because as undeniably awesome as these early Mercury records are, they evince the same aesthetic that Rod Stewart carried to his later work--give the people what they want, tour like hell, work for it, baby. It goes back to that same work ethic, infused with a healthy panto/music hall sensibility that makes not just Rod but a lot of British music endearing. In his striped pants, frilly collars, affected "Scotsness"--oh hell, let's look at that picture again.

Rod then, like Rod now, is more the spiritual heir of George Formby than he is of Long John Baldry, or whatever blues-rock deity you prefer. He's whatever you want him to be. Always was.

Uh-oh

I just turned Status Quo's 12 Gold Bars waaaaay down.

Come back, Mr. Jaws, all is forgiven

A few years ago, I was at an anniversary party in Belgium (I lead an impossibly rich and varied life). The event was rather advanced, culturally, from the "Brueghel table"--food such as one would see in a painting by the Flemish painter--to the fact that we had to drag the elderly couple with whom we were staying off the dancefloor at 4 a.m.

But the thing I remember most about this party is the music. The DJ played novelty song after novelty song, classics like "Macarena" complemented by newcomers like Las Ketchup's "The Ketchup Song" and the Euro campfire sing-along that I only know by lyrics, not title: "The Pizza Hut / The Pizza Hut / Kentucky Fried Chicken and the Pizza Hut / McDoooonalds / McDooooonalds / Kentucky Fried Chicken and the Pizza Hut."

All of these songs had an accompanying dance, and everyone present (besides me) seemed to know them, whether line-dancing for "Achy Breaky Heart" or flapping their tucked arms and wiggling their bums for the "Chicken Dance." I was deeply impressed by the way these tunes seemed to cut across class and age lines, and how my wife's British relatives knew most of them (the ones in English, anyway) as well as their continental cousins.

In this week's Washington City Paper, Dave Nuttycombe asks a question that desperately needed asking: Whatever became of the American novelty hit? In it he talks to Dr. Demento, ponders whether Afroman's "Because I Got High" counts and arrives at an interesting theory:

The loss of the novelty song that everyone can simply, unironically love is but one more example of the vanishing common ground in our common culture. Even if much of that commonality was in fact illusory, it was still a worthy goal—e pluribus unum and all that. Today, separated into our various niches and special-interest groups, everybody’s laughing at; few are laughing with. An intentionally stupid novelty ditty could be a real uniter, even if we all agree to hate it passionately.

I think there's something to this; every time I go to Europe (see: impossibly rich and varied life, above), I'm struck by the common sensiblity that runs through even incredibly striated societies such as, say, Britain's, when it comes to pop culture. But Britain's culture bears very little resemblance to Sweden's or France's or Poland's or Germany's, and yet Crazy Frog's "Axel F" (which began life as a mobile phone ringtone) was a No. 1 hit in all those countries this year. It sold bupkus here.

Maybe Nuttycombe's right, and novelty songs serve as rare nexuses of taste even across that splintered landscape, where people don't even speak the same language. Perhaps the Cheeky Girls unlock a European sensibility that transcends those barriers and reminds everyone that the EU has a future after all. What that says about the U.S., though, is sort of depressing.

Slow train coming

This summer, I took the train to Philadelphia. My seat was roomy, the bathrooms were convenient and you can't beat the view.

The only downside? It took five hours to travel the 90 miles from Richmond to D.C.

During the trip, I overheard a conductor telling one irate passenger that CSX owns the rail lines on which Amtrak travels in Virginia, and that corporation, not Amtrak, sets speed limits, which are lower in the summertime.

Today I had to go to Washington for a meeting and didn't want to take the Chinatown bus, which gets back to Richmond pretty late. So I bit the bullet and got a train ticket. This morning's train wasn't too bad by Amtrak standards, just 15 minutes late, but tonight I didn't get back home until nearly an hour past the scheduled time.

Which got me thinking. A few years ago, airlines started incorporating regular delays into their schedules, which had the happy effect of making passengers feel like they were getting in early when things went smoother than usual. So, for example, afternoon flights from LaGuardia (once among the worst offenders) dropped way down on the government's list of frequently delayed flights—because the airlines were more realistic about when passengers would actually arrive.

So why doesn't Amtrak, whose on-time percentage in Virginia must hover around 50 percent, factor persistent delays into its schedules? I'm guessing it's because a three-hour trip to Washington doesn't seem like much of an alternative to driving, or taking the bus, or if you're really milking your expense account, flying. But I like taking the train, and I'd probably do it more if I had some realistic idea of when to ask the missus to pick me up. (She was S-T-E-A-M-E-D after waiting an hour in the parking lot of the Staples Mill station with Junior asleep in the back.)

Amtrak may not have a lot of control over its destiny these days, but something tells me it could probably work out schedules that are more than wishful thinking. That's assuming, of course, that its employees could find a few spare hours here and there to work on the problem.

Almost home

Hogmanay