STL 123.4 The Vikstrom Interlude

 This is post number 123, part 4, about the band's 5th studio album, titled Chapter VI. How many points is that in Yahtzee? Chapter VI  is a beautiful name for any even somewhat Spinal Tappish band's fifth album, but to be fair they did have a double live album with Messiah that I'm skipping.  This is the only album featuring Thomas Vikstrom on vocals, and I hate it. 

Maybe it's at this point I should stop and say that despite all the time I've put into this project, Candlemass isn't my kind of band. I mean, obviously I like some of the things they've done, and some of the attributes of their sound are profoundly appealing But as I'm coming to understand it, the epic doom they are inextricably associated with is in essence in the overlap of the true, the actual, the good doom (i.e., basements dank with bong fumes) and a shinier power metal sound (blowdryers and stadium dreams). This album, as I'll elaborate on, falls too far to the latter, uninteresting, end of the spectrum. 

The other thing that I hope would go without saying is that I'd like these to be more than "reaction video" criticism.  If you look up "Candlemass reaction video" on Youtube, you'll find out what hip hop fans, goth girls, and self-appointed Christians think of the band's music. (And as I mentioned before, a vocal coach.) Even though I'm not putting in much research time, I do spend time with the music (not as implied by how long this is taking to finish though!) and in writing these.... reviews? essays? indulgent utterances?

Now, to return to my first point, this really isn't the kind of thing I like. There's glam riffs, there's soaring synth solos (that are actually kind of cool), and there's a singer who is histrionic and never mentions demons (the latter being a Leif problem, but still). One problem with the songwriting on this album is the implication that other, presumably real,  humans exist. This is most problematic in most prominently in "Julie Laughs No More." The lyrics invoke fairy tales, but in a metaphorical way. Very undoom.  

Listening this album in the wake of white nationalist insurrection in the nation's capitol was not the most woke thing I could have done. Now, Candlemass have never been associated with the deplorable elements of metal, but then I come to "Where the Runes Still Speak"  (sounding little bit like the good stuff, with the riff and keyboard textures) and this bit about "my blood.. calling from Asaland" put me on high alert. The appropriation of things Nordic by racists is both predictable and nauseating, and perhaps a topic I should expand on elsewhere. But then the idea that this is really about something else is cast aside with "I am the moongod/who dwelleth among the dead" and everything's ok. 

Now, to return to my second point, I feel some kind of obligation to do this right, even though no one is paying me for this and very, very few people will read it.  I see my due diligence as the following: listen through once to get the lay of the land, listen again reading lyrics,  listen at least 2 more times roaming the northern forests.  (That's really not enough, but see point one.) I couldn't quite get to that final run through though. 

What did I learn? Maybe trying to break a glass with your voice twice in the same chorus isn't the right move in certain situations. 

There's only one album to rank. It comes in last.  

STL 123.3: The coming of Messiah and Messiah's coming back

Note: There are errors of fact in the following. I will address them in the next installment. It is highly likely there are errors of execution in the writing too. I will correct those if I ever notice them.

Messiah Marcolin is the lead singer on four Candlemass albums: Nightfall (1987), Ancient Dreams (1988), Tales of Creation (1989), and Candlemass (2005).  I know that Messiah is not his birth name and I learned from a vocal coach on Youtube that he is good at "vowel modification." And that's is all I know about him, except sometimes he performs dressed like a monk. Which is so metal. 

Candlemass is a good way to illustrate the adjectival possibilities of 'metal,' above and beyond the crunchy riffs. "So metal" can be a sincere or ironic description--sometimes both at the same time. Dressing up like a monk in concert at once channels the medieval ethos of the songs while being, well, LARPing. A bleak dour landscape photographed in black and white can both channel the sublime while being a bit much at the same time. And a Swedish band that keeps chugging away at essentially the same sound for 35 years, well....

So anyway, back to dressing like a monk. As I implied above, Nightfall (1987) goes fully medieval. Epicus, due to the "The Sorcerer" and "Black Stone Weilder" sees to me more like a generic fantasy world which is therefore quasi-medival, but this album goes further by bringing in more explicitly Christian (and therefore Satanic) reference points. The prelude track "Gothic Stone" (really an into for ""The Well of Souls") is a good metaphor for the sound of this album. It sounds like a cathedral made out of ballads, marches, and dirges. There are 10 songs listed, but counting the short "Gothic Stone" and exit track "Black Candles," four are instrumentals, including a cover of Chopin's "Funeral March" and "The Codex Gigas," a tribute to a Bible with a giant picture of the devil, prominently featuring the tritone (he said, semi-confidently. The tri-tone is the sequence of notes featured in the song "Black Sabbath" which sounded so evil it was banned by the medieval church.) That's a few too many, but the remaining songs are solid and compare favorably with the six songs on the debut. ("Compare favorably with" doesn't mean "better than" does it? I just mean they fit in with earlier set, though nothing approaches "Solitude.") You do hear Messiah singing the hell out of these songs, particularly his band-debut "Well of Souls" a little ditty about a priest guarding a hellmouth. The other songs on the first side, "At the Gallows End" and "Samarithan," are also stand outs, and both fit the semi-ballad, semi-drinking song quasi-medievalism that I mentioned above. Side two is a bit of a let down for me. People seem to like "Bewitched," but the "You are bewitched" refrain is a cloying irritant. Still, that song, about music possessing its listeners totally is 'so metal,' though the most metal moment of the album is the aforementioned Chopin cover, which seems inevitable by the very existence of the epic doom genre. 

The least metal thing about both Nightfall  and Ancient Dreams might be the cover art. Both albums are adorned by landscapes by 19th century American painter, Thomas Cole. Nobody ever looked at anything by a Hudson River school painter and thought, "that's so metal," except apparently the boys in Candlemass. Both paintings are from the same series. The Nightfall painting shows a spirit departing the body of a man in a boat. The other is nearly the same lake setting, with the boat on the other side and the hazy outline of the gilded city of Heaven in the sky above. The similar artwork gives the impression that Ancient Dreams  is more of the same. That isn't wrong--it's following a similar path but perhaps heading a bit into the power metal direction. I notice the guitar solos more on this one (as Swedish metallers from the 80s you know they're down with Yngwie), some of which are actually fast. (Remember, this is doom. Doom is slow.)  I feel that they are considering a change in sound without really undertaking one. Like Nightfall, side two has some low points, but these are much lower. Check these lyrics from the title track: Chase the horizons, catch the illusion/ Remember the child within/There's no tomorrow just sadness and sorrow/Hold on to the ancient dreams." Then if that isn't bad enough, it goes on to list "Great kings and tyrants, unicorns and elf lords/Devils and demons, dungeons and dragons/Phoenix is rising up from the ashes of the wind." Despite the explicit fantasy trappings, I'd argue this isn't adjectivally very metal, mostly cause it doesn't believe in itself. The most metal moment of the album is in fact Messiah's pronunciation of "Father" as "Fahder" in "Darkness in Paradise"--and at the beginning of the very next song. 

There are a few ways you can sketch out the general progression of a band's development in stages. One way might be discovering your sound, exploring and developing it, establishing it, and perfecting it, at which point you can refine, repeat, or fizzle out. Thanks to the demos included on the reissues of these albums, I'd say that the discovery phase predates Epicus, which establishes the epic doom sound. If Nightfall perfects with the kind of operatic lead singer Leif envisioned, Ancient Dreams only varies the sound slightly. You might think then that the fourth Candlemas album in four years, Tales of Creation, goes back to the same well (of souls) one time too many. After all, it allegedly dusts a concept Leif had been working on before the debut and even re-records the song "Under the Oak" from the first album. Nonetheless, I kind of like the album. There's some killer riffs and no annoying songs for the first time since Epicus. But the only standout song is the aforementioned "Under the Oak" redux, and there are a few too many spoken word parts (with and without demonic distortions). It's probably true that they were out of ideas, since the band more or less split after that. (*Not exactly true, as I might get into next time (if I remember).) And, because this is a thing I'm doing, the most metal moment of Tales is the title, "Through the Infinitive Halls of Death."

As I'll discuss later, Leif kept the band name alive for a few albums with entirely different line ups. But this line up returned with 2005's eponymous Candlemass. You see the parallel with Johan's return--after a hiatus, the band returns with a prior singer. While Johan was away from the band for 32 years and the band on a break for seven, Messiah's return restarting the band after six years, the singer himself having been gone for 15. "Black Dwarf," as the lead off track, is an awesome way to announce that you're back. It sounds like Candlemass--atmospheric entry, crunchy riff, imprecise supernatural lyrics--but also somehow new (the "power metal" sound I hear in the Lowe albums, including the vocal cadence (weirdly) starts to appear. The producer is in Hammerfall, a power metal band). There's some new depth to Messiah's voice, the lyrics, about an evil black dwarf, I guess, are on point but still unexpected, and it sounds. so. good. It leads right into "Seven Silver Keys," with its ascending, grasping chorus countering the typically down tuned, ponderous riff. On through songs with names like "Assassin of Light" and about things like Copernicus resisting the church, it in the classic metal mold with a slightly updated sound. (Not too updated--I can imagine it was a great joy for people who'd been missing Candlemass during the hiatus.) It's actually the one I knew the best before embarking on this project, since I'd had the CD installed in my car for a time. Despite that, I'm having trouble formulating a "take" on it.  It has a good fresh energy but goes on a bit too long. You also have to ask yourself, seeing it is a reunion album following a decade and a half after having apparently run short on ideas, did the world need this? But maybe that's the most metal thing of all. 

Is ranking metal? You betcha. My gut says

1. Nightfall
2. Candlemass
3. Tales of Creation
4. Ancient Dreams

That apparently prioritizes (slight) innovation, represented by Nightfall, over (highly relative) perfection of craft of Tales but puts competence (Tales) over embarrassment (moments of Dreams). Or something.  What ever it means, I'll probably not listen to any of them from beginning to end again, except probably Nightfall.

STL 123.2: Candlemass cont'd: the Lowe era ("blessed are the children of doom")

 In continuing my singer-centric assessment of Candlemass, I was faced with an interesting procedural choice. Since Johan was the first and is the latest lead singer, I could either move forward to Messiah or backwards to Robert Lowe (not that one). I chose to step back to the trio of albums with Lowe to keep myself from falling into conventional narratives about old bands with new singers. Namely, "bold new direction," "pointless continuation," (similar to "desperate for cash" and "let's play the casino circuit") and "can't really tell the difference" aka "simple repetition."

Robert Lowe, of Solitude Aeturnus, is the kind of “good singer” venerated in certain metal circles--the kind vocal coaches do reaction videos to and say nice things about their technique. I'm pretty sure he is the first non-Scandi member of the band, and coming from the only other 'big' epic doom band I would tend to see him as a hired gun--the kind of singer Leif would have loved to snag for Epicus.

The best of this lot is easily The Grey King (2007). After an acoustic "Prologue," it really starts to burn with "Emporer of the Void." It seems to be a concept album about, well, the king of "the great islands of grey," whoever that would be. The theme is lost power, but there's no power lost in them tasty riffs and compact psuedo-psych solos. Lowe serves as narrator of this suite of first-person songs, and he does have a nice range of expression--not just all balls-out wailing but a range of vocalizations included some tasteful multi-tracking and bitten off, snarled lines, along with soaring melody and sustain. (Since I don't have the technical knowledge or even a vocal coach's reaction to crib off of, that's all just... words, really.)

Even though there's a native English speaker singing, Leif apparently remains the only lyricist. There's something off throughout--maybe going for an updated approach or something? That really shouldn't matter, as metal generally isn't noted for sophisticated word play. But there is one misstep that really annoyed me the first few listens that I never have been able to get over. The final song repeats its title as a refrain: "Embracing the Styx" (sounding a lot like the much earlier "You are bewitched," it so happens.) Evoking the river of death seems on point and the right kind of coloration for doom. Unfortunately, it sounds exactly like "embracing the sticks," which is what I thought it was for the first several listens--an absurdly awkward image. Even after I saw the written song title I thought "you can't embrace a river," though that's kind of the point, as in this final song the king opens his wrists so the blood might mingle with the water. It turns out that this is a strong track, but my early misapprehension continues to mar my appreciation of it.

Next comes Death Magic Doom (2009). This is a little more power-metal than The Grey King and a lot more so than Epicus. There’s a little swagger in it, the barest hint of groove/nu metal (i.e., gruve metal--Lowe even says, “we’re gonna groove” in the opener, “If I Ever Die.”) That non-hit is immediately followed by the tolling of a funeral bell over a slow downtuned, ultra-Sabbathy riff in “The Hammer of Doom,” thus establishing the dominant mode. We see other standby motifs, like the sea monster in "Demon of the Deep." This album ends with a track repeated from a live set. This song, "Lucifer Rising," is actually the Candlemass song I have heard more than any other, because I added it to my 13 Songs for Satan playlist. It praises the dark lord in a Dio-esque Egyptian setting and features the beatitude, "blessed are the children of doom." There is an effect called "simple repetition" that shows that, all else being equal, people like songs they've heard more often better. That was true for a long time with me and this song, but to tell the truth the super-repetition within the song itself has finally gotten to me. It repeats the chorus "Lucifer, Lucifer, Lucifer Rising" (that's the whole chorus) 20 times in a sub-4 minute song. 

By contrast, the first track of Psalms for the Dead (2012), "Prophet," repeats the title 13 times in 6 minutes, and that seems like a lot! This record feels like they're continuing the doom/power-metal balance, though they introduce an element I don’t normally associate with the band at all--humor. 

There's a cheesy 50's horror movie woo-oo-oo effect on "The Sound of Dying Demons," and while the narrative of "Dancing of the Temple of the Mad Queen Bee)" is told in apparent earnestness, I have to imagine there's humorous intent. And while it's not exactly humor, "Killing of the Sun" quotes "Iron Man" while the lyrics of "Siren Song" invokes the "gallows pole" (rhyming it with "the sirens will suck on your soul" which, I think, is humorous(?)). "Siren Song" has some jamming keyboard too.

The last track, "Black as Time," deserves some attention if for no other reason than it was the final Candlemass song from 2012 to 2019.  It starts with a basic ticking clock other an ersatz Monty Python monologue about the duplicitousness of Time--"it does not give a shit... Time is death." After almost two minutes of this, we get back to a fast-paced gallop resolving itself into a bludgeoning "TIME IS BLACK" refrain. Then a short bass solo leads into a long guitar solo before the return of the ooky-spooky 50s horror keyboard effect from "Dying Demons." We go back to the monologue--Time is the master of Doom! for a bit, before going on to the bridge and back, to "TIME IS BLACK--BLACK AS THE SUN--TIME IS BLACK--BLACK AS TIME--BLACK AS TIME" fading under the return of the tick tock. And then it's over--the song, the album, Lowe's run, and, for a while, Candlemass itself. 
The tone of this track reflects the perplexing tone of the record as a whole--it would seem to be funny, but rendered so sincerely you wind up questioning yourself. 

So I wrote this as a chronology, but in the end decided the actual ranking is 

1. The King of the Grey Islands
2. Psalms for the Dead
3. Death Magic Doom

King is the only one I'm likely to listen to again, and the only one to even remotely contend with Epicus. 

Curio: Favorite Singers, Rock Idiom

I scribbled out a list of my favorite "rock" singers quite some time ago, and it has just been sitting around. I don't know what I mean by "rock," except for not Kiri Te Kanawa or Ella Fitzgerald. 

I like their singing better than their music: Sarah McLachlan Ronnie James Dio Paul Rogers Bob Seger Macy Gray 

Their singing makes their music better: Al Green Otis Redding Van Morrison Dusty Springfield Rod Stewart 

"Featured female vocalists": Beth Orton Beth Gibbons Tori Amos Chan Marshall 

Three-in-one: Levon Helm Richard Manuel Rick Danko 

Interesting limitations Tom Waits Bob Dylan 

And then there's Chuck D Frank Sinatra Ella Nina Simone Charlie Rich Emmylou Harris Gillian Welch Kelly Willis Sandy Denny Aretha Franklin Axl Rose Tracy Thorne Marvin Gaye Freddie Mercury 

STL #123.1: Ambassadors of Doom

 If I realized I'd be returning from the dead, so to speak, with post #123, I might have planned something more... sequential. But doom metal goes with the resurrection theme at least. Long story short, I've decided to break my silence with an idea that strikes me as stupid and beautiful--ranking the albums of the Swedish epic doom band Candlemass by singer. While I do find this a beautifully stupid idea, I'm having trouble explaining the appeal. I hope I'll figure it along the way, so by the time you get to the end of this I will figure out what I actually have to say.

123.1 If you want a history of Candlemass, go to Wikipedia and then Encylopedia Metallum. There, you'll learn Johan Langquist was the first singer for the band (with Epicus Doomicus Metallicus in 1986) and has returned to become the latest (with Door to Doom in 2019).  This is kind of like Paul Dianno coming back to front Iron Maiden after all these year, provided that the first Maiden albums had been stone classics which Number of the Beast, Piece of Mind and the rest just didn't live up to. 

Pitting these two against each other is not a fair fight. Epicus is unassailable. That first album is a genre-establishing classic. There were a few bands who based their sound on Black Sabbath already, but the great innovation of bassist and mastermind Lars Edling was to cross seventies Sabbath with eighties Sabbath. (That sounds like a bullshit statement to me. I'm not sure if it's supportable or even what it means.) Lars couldn't find the singer who had the sound for his vision (apparently he is a singer himself, of too limited range). Johan was hired as a guest musician and given a few weeks to learn the songs. (Is there another album in metal, or rock or pop for that matter, which lists both the lead singer and lead guitarist as guests? Makes you wonder what "lead" means!) Compared to his replacements (we will get them later, of course), Johan does have some technical limitations, and his voice is awash with echoes and layering in Epicus. He's not at all bad, and I think the record would have been just fine if they'd just let him sing. Instead (and like Dianno, mentioned above), he is limited singer asked to sing in an opera (Also like Dianno, he was replaced by a succession of more technically proficient singers.)

There are many bands who never live up to their first album, but Candlemass never lived up to their first song, "Solitude." The initial vocal line is doubled and echoed, but Johan imbues real sense of desperation and death-love into the suicidal lyrics. The “Earth to earth” bridge gets me every time, the riff, oh my dark lord the riff, by long-time member Mappe Bjorkman, is one of the heaviest in existence.  In “Demon’s Gate” the initial cheesy vocal effects (and lyrics: the distorted demon vocals say Beyond all nightmares I met my fate/an ancient passage surrounded by hate") and the heavy synth are forgiven once you get to the riff and those blasting, jackhammer drums. The song includes the first explicit use of the word "doom": "The place is cursed by the hands of doom." A little later on, it tries a little bass and drums break before one of the many pick-slides on the album and before it ends, the Arabic textures return in a guitar solo and so do the distorted demon vox end. The next song, “Crysal Ball” doubles down on the cheesy lyrics, with the couplet "Gaze into the crystal, see what it tells/It can bring you all fortune, do you so well."  Leif is, I believe, responsible for all Candlemass lyrics, and they often sound like they were written by a Swedish teen pulling Cs in English who's obsessed with the Monster Manual.  (I assume this was the case.) The lyrics tend to be a mishmash of a light variety of Satanism and mythology (the river Styx shows up alot). They mostly just set the mood for doom, but sometimes stumble into something interesting. “Black Stone Wielder” invents, I guess, a dark figure with a black stone that functions as the opposite of the Star of Bethlehem. I guess. As long as lyricist Lars can avoid embarrassment, populate the songs with wizards and devils, and occasionally throw in a cool sounding line like “The Devil gives and evil takes,” he is doing his job.

As a head-to-head matchup, Door hasn’t a chance. It’s a good record though. Johann’s vocals are controlled throughout this album. I lack the technical knowledge to be any more specific, but his singing seems held in. He doesn’t reach too far and so he doesn’t fall on his face--like the more subdued aspects of Ian Gillian.  Although it reunites three members from the debut (Langquist, Eiflung, and rhythm guitarist Mappe Bjorkman), Candlemass has updated their sound over the years--the galloping rhythm and choir vocals in “Splendor Demon Majesty” suggest the influence of power metal, as does the clanky anvil percussion in the second track, “Under the Ocean.”  But as far as doomy maneuvers go, getting Tony Iommi to do a guest solo is about as good as you can do. That solo, on the crushing “Astorolus,” starts underwater and emerges like a giant octopus from underwater, pulling sailors from the decks of their ships.  

Songs in the back half continue the updated “doom but new” sound.  “Death Wheel” has a nice bridge and lovely, two part guitar solo that ends with a fuzz second part accompanied by-- flute?  “Black Trinity” carries on in the tradition of ‘devil shit is so cool’ shared by “Splendor Demo Majesty” and, you'd be forgiven for thinking, most Candlemass songs. The evil trinity is referred to as  “the ambassadors of doom,” which just about explains the continuing existence of this band. The purpose of Candlemass is to doom. Not only are they the self-appointed “ambassadors of doom,” but they live in “The House of Doom” (the title of the penultimate track, which presumably has the Door to Doom on the front--painted black) and belong to the “club of doom” (in the the finale, “The Omega Circle.”) By the end of this album, I feel like I’ve had enough, and in fact, apart from “Under the Ocean” and “Astorolus,” I’m unlikely to listen to this album much again.

Next time, I'll step back one singer (or forward four) and consider the three albums with Robert Lowe.

STL #101: No Dylanologist II

A month or so ago, I posted "No Dylanologist I" in honor of Bob Dylan's 70th birthday. The title was a syntactic inversion that actually sounded good in the draft version, but came out as clumsy as a song writer groping for a rhyme.  What it means is that I have not pursued Dylan as a subject with anything like the assiduity of some of his most dedicated amateur or academic aficionados. Nevertheless, I did just finish a book about his album Highway 61 Revisited, which as it happens is not the first book about him or his work that I've read, so I suppose I know something about his music. Given that he also figured in many of Ellen Willis's essays in the collection Out of the Vinyl Deeps that I also recently finished, I thought I might come back to Dylan as lens to talk about music writing, rather than dig any deeper into his music as such. So it looks like I'm no Dylanologist, again.

I hedged on whether to say "music writing" or "writing about music" above. The whole activity is fraught, from the name onward. "Music writing," because of its very laxity, is more encompassing than "writing about music." Much music writing is not necessarily about music, but about the production of or personalities behind the music, or of the cultural or social contexts of the music. Writing about music as such can fall into several traps. Think of an axis with two poles,  descriptive and interpretive. Now imagine a perpendicular axis ranging from technical or impressionistic. Technical description or interpretation of music is beyond my capabilities to write or to fully understand. I'm stuck in the camp of pure impressionism--the subjective response to the music, to what it makes me feel or think of. This is the heart of criticism, but can lead to writing that is murky at best and solipsistic at worst.

With popular music, especially in the case of a songwriter like Dylan, there's a further split between talking about music or talking about lyrics. With some technical prowess, one might talk about the relationship of words and music, but in the case of Dylan the words have always been paramount. (The lyrics have been published without music on several occasions.) I number myself among ham-handed lyrical exegete of song lyrics, that often resort to gobbling quotations into the vague engines of interpretive prose. Here's a snippet from Mark Polizzotti''s Highway 61 Revisited stays away from the worst of this, though he does have a penchant for lyrical allusion--more than one ending is called as  a "restless farewell." Polizzotti's short book on Highway 61 Revisited is in the attractive 33 1/3 series. Each book in this series pays tribute a classic album in one way or another. A variety of approaches are used, including fictional, descriptive reporting, and subjective impressionism. Polizzotti's book is largely descriptive of immediate context of the music's production and of the music itself (doing a nice job with the latter). As mentioned, he does some lyrical interpretation, mostly in identifying who the various songs may have been addressed to. In doing so, he makes Dylan's songs all seem like diatribes, like complaints against sundry individuals. That's true to an extent, but misses some of the songs' richness.

With popular music, you're probably better of working with context--how the work of the artist positions itself within a subculture, say, or how the culture at large reads it. The organization of Ellen Willis's gives us some guidance here: after an opening section of straightforward aesthetic criticism, there's a section on the context of fandom, one on the sixties, one of feminism, one called "The Navigator" that includes economic and geographic perspectives, and one that engages social class. Not that this was planned; this book collects columns from the 60s and 70s responding to what was actually going on in the world of pop music at the time.  Willis, the first pop music critic of The New Yorker, wrote about a now fairly predictable swath of classic rock through early punk--Dylan, Velvets, CCR, Janis Joplin, New York Dolls. She was the first to notice Dylan's manipulation of his own persona--the artist providing context for himself.  Between Polizzotti and especially Willis, I've come to understand Dylan much more as a man of his times, responding to his audience's responses to him as much as anything. That's not just self-obsession, since it invokes an underlying struggling for self-determination that was reaching a new high pitch in the 60s.

Good music writing is out there. I always read the current pop critic in The New Yorker, Sasha Frere Jones, and I read Matthew Perpetua's great Fluxblog on a regular basis too. There's still a lot of bad music writing too, but you can find that on your own. Since I'm not liable to be on the subject of writing about Dylan again anytime soon, I thought I might mention a couple of other titles worth looking at. First, there's Greil Marcus's Old Weird America. This, in Marcus's rhapsodic prose, traces the lineage between Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and The Basement Tapes. Anyone interested in Dylan should also read his memoirs, Chronicles. The first section, on the early sixties, is especially interesting for thinking about his folk period in a beat context.

STL #100: Objects of Fascination and Agents of Revelation

It has taken 8 years to complete 100 posts; that's only a little more than a post a month. With my rededication to daily writing, I hope that I can return a bit closer to my weekly rate. In any case, I have decided to mark the occasion by writing in my favorite form: the list. Following is a varied list of things, mostly works of art but a few ideas or lifestyle accoutrements,  I've become familiar with during the life span of STL.  Some of these things I've written about, but most I haven't. The most significant thing I've noticed in compiling this list is that the books are all of my own choosing: I haven't been assigned a reading list this whole time. This list might be seen as a memoir of the last 8 years of my life, but then again that might be pushing it. I'll add a bit more commentary after the list.

1. Absu, "Ye Uttuku Spells"
2. Belgian ales
3. Charles Olson, Maximus Poems
4. William Gaddis, The Recognitions
5. Jack Green's Fire the Bastards
6. Kill Bill
7. Graham Greene, The Comedians
8. Guy Davenport, Tatlin!
9. Albert Ayler, Spiritual Unity
10. Reality-based politics
11. Jens Lekman, “A Postcard to Nina”
12. Eddie Campbell, How to be an Artist
13. "Lying In Bed On A Summer Morning," by Carl Rakosi
14. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
15. Deep Red
16. Halloween
17. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
18. Millennium Actress
19. Lost in Translation
20. Etre et Avoir
21. The Sopranos
22. The Wire
23. William Bronk
24. Watchmen, reluctantly
25. Seven Soldiers of Victory
26. Hendrick’s Gin
27. In the American Tree
28. Cy Twombly, Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor)
29. Bread crumb eggs
30. George Simenon
31. Django Reinhardt
32. Freaks and Geeks
33. My So-Called Life
34. Carson, NOX
35. Lee Ann Brown, Polyverse
36. Fiery Furnaces, Rehearsing My Choir
37. Tori Amos, From the Choirgirl Hotel
38. Something Said
39. Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man, Out of Season
40. Joanna Newsom, Milk Eyed Mender
41. Sleater Kinney, One Beat
42. His Dark Materials
43. Battle Royale
44. John Cheever's Collected Short Stories
45. American Elf
46. Black Riders
47. Robert Duncan, "Opening of the Field"
48. Gilbert Godfery in The Aristocrats [2005]
49. Goodbye Dragon Inn
50. Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41
51. Team America
52. The singularity
53. Tender Buttons
54. The Pound Era
55. Three Places in New England
56. Alban Berg, Violin Concerto
57. Matt Fraction, Casanova
58. The New American Poetry 1945-1960
59. The Hold Steady, Separation Sunday
60. Immortal All Shall Fall
61. Deathspell Omega Chaining the Katcheon
62. Wardruna
63. Girl Talk, All Night
64. Lair of the Minotaur, "Let's Kill These Motherfuckers"
65. Dope throne
66. Modern Life Is War “D.E.A.D.R.A.M.O.N.E.S.”
67. Mountain Goats “This Year”
68. Benji Hughes Love Extreme
69. Heartless Bastards, The Mountain
70. Opeth, Blackwater Park
71. Josephine Foster, Hazel Eyes I Will Follow
72. Cat Power The Greatest
73. No Thanks! Anthology
74. Haydn, Symphony 88
75. Robyn “Be Mine”
76. Spoon “Back to the Life"
77. Arcade Fire, Funeral
78. Dirty Weekend 
79. Old Boy
80. The Rothko Chapel
81. “Appalachian Spring”
82. Audition
83. Enter the Void
84. Y The Last Man
85. Marcel Dzama
86. Battlestar Galactica
87. John Porcellino, King Cat
88. Can These Bones Live?
89. Wicker Man
90. Blow Up
91. King Lear (Russian film)
92. Mozart, Symphony 40
93. Brandenberg Concertos
94. Garth Merenghi's Dark Place
95. The Grey Album
96. Community
97. Song of Ice and Fire
98. Siraccha and Earl Grey Ice Cream
99. O Paon

A few explanations are in order. With the exception of a few pieces of classical music, everything on this list is from the second half of the twentieth century or later. That is where my interests drive me, but as I was drawing up the list I made a conscious decision to make it this way to relieve me of the obligation to include things because I felt I should. Tom Jones, some Shakespeare plays, Milton, and other things I read for the first time in the last eight years might otherwise be on here. I felt that by keeping them off would cut away pretense and help me perhaps discover more of my true inclinations.  

Each work of art on this list was chosen because it keeps drawing me back in one way or another, offering more each time I revisit it. Some of the films (namely, Audition and Enter the Void) keep their claim on my psyche, but I doubt I will ever summon up the resolve to watch them again. What the works offer is different is each case: the goofy comedy of Garth Marenghi sounds different chords than Ed Dahlberg's jeremiad Can These Bones Live?. Dahlberg I'm sure would be mortified to be keeping company with much of this list--I notice that I trend lowbrow in much of my tastes. Looking over the list, I don't feel I can make any grand pronouncements, nor do I even understand why I include half a dozen foodstuffs and only two works of visual art. As with everything I write, this turns up more questions. Here's to the next 100 opportunities to figure out the answers.

(In case you are interested, here's a census of the list: 35 items can be classified as music, 18 as movies, 9 as poetry, 9 as fiction (therefore 18 as literature), 7 as comics, 7 as TV, 5 as criticism, 4 as comestibles, 3 as visual art, and 2 as concepts. The music breaks down as follows: 7 as metal, 6 as classical (including modern), 6 as folk (I can't bring myself to type "freak folk," but everything in this category is moody and eccentric, and with mostly acoustic instruments), 6 pop, 6 rock, 2 jazz, and 2 dj mashups.

STL #97: No Dylanologist I

I feel the need to note another huge gap in posting. Since I've again determined to begin a daily writing habit on my birthday last, I should resume a regular schedule on my lead up to STL #100.


Looking at a few of the many "10 Greatest Bob Dylan Songs" lists that appeared in recognition of the old man's 70th birthday, it is easy to discern the rules that govern them. You need one from early on, during his pure folk-singer incarnation; one from his Born Again or later, wizened minstrel, days; one or two from the decade prior to that (his first inward turn from John Wesley Harding through Blood on the Tracks (technically Street Legal)); and the lion's share from his major creative period from Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, including one that wasn't on an album (but may have shown up later on The Basement Tapes). In the broadest terms, then, you can think of his career in three stages, each stage lasting longer than the last: the folk period, the major period, and the late period. While the arc of his career is fascinating, especially his penchant for recreating himself contrary to his audience's expectations or desires, I don't particularly respond to either his folk days or his long bizarre descent. If his major period was wiped away, I don't think I'd pay much attention at all to the young singer or the older one.

My list, then, is as follows (in chronological order):

1. "Like a Rolling Stone":  I'm not including this because it's his most important song, defining and shaping a generation, but because of its complex structure and richness of meaning. I'm not crazy about his word collage explosions that really came to fore on Bringing It All Back Home. Like so many of those songs, it's hard to say exactly what this means, but that doesn't mean it means nothing. But beyond the words, this song's sound lets us know that it's creating a zeitgeist.
2. "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues"- My favorite first line, perhaps of any song ever: "When you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Easter-time too." It makes me eager to listen to the song everytime. Who's in Juarez, why are they there? Why is the fact of it being Easter time a complicating factor? The sense of the words evoke both a detailed personal story but also the sweep of a mythic one. The  sound of it alone states that this is a song that will have beautiful language, but the narcotic liquids (ells and arrs)  and long vowels of the first half of line are snapped awake by the sudden tees and short vowels of the second half tell us it won't be an insipid beauty.
3."One of Us Must Know"--I went into Blonde on Blonde for "Stuck Inside of Mobile..." and "Visions" but came out with this song. Dylan has so many songs that it's easy to forget or overlook one that didn't particularly shake things up, like this. I include it on this list as a marker of the provisionality of any list like this. While #1 and #6 will always be on my list, the whole 10 could take many different forms.
4. "Visions of Johanna"-- Maybe the most obscure song lyrically on this list.
5. "Lay Lady Lay"--Maybe the most straightforward song lyrically on this list
6. "Tangled Up In Blue"-- My favorite Dylan song and one of my all time favorites. No Dylanologist I, but there must be a ton of exegesis on this one. Every time I listen to it I hear something a little bit different-I just realized this time how the directions invoked in the go from heading back east to the memory of coming west and then going north and drifting south to New Orleans. Quite honestly, I could compose a top ten only of songs from Blood on the Tracks and Desire. "Idiot Wind," "Shelter From the Storm," "Sara," almost every song on either album. The other one on Blood on the Tracks that really gets me though is
7. "If You See Her Say Hello"-- Pretty much each song is the embodiment of the same open sound, the same lost-love theme, and the same swirling through time.  "Sun down, yellow moon/ I replay the past" might be a simplified statement of the album's theme, and this song has a beautiful and simple arrangement and one of his finest, most emotive vocal performances.
8. "Hurricane"--So the last song, chronologically, is actually the most like his early work. It's nothing if not a protest song. It's the long story of an injustice that ends with a call to action ("This is the story of the Hurricane/It won't be over until they clear his name"--which they did.) Again, I could pick other songs from Desire, but this first song captures the sound of the album and a number of images ("Ruben sits like Buddha in his ten foot cell") remain burned in my brain. Like its predecessor, Desire has a unified sound, but where Blood on the Tracks is like a novel or a set of finely wrought interlocking stories, Desire is an anthology of pulp fiction genre stories: crime, the boxer, the gangster, adventure in a foreign land, romance.

The final two that I am throwing in are songs of BD sung by others:
9. "I Shall Be Released" as performed by The Band.  I can't say definitively that this is his first real gospel song. But listening to it now, it's no surprise that he'd later identify himself as born again.
10. "Si Tu Dois Partir" (aka "If You've Got To Go, Go Now") as performed by Fairport Convention. This is a good one to go out on, methinks, if for now other reason than the simple lyric has been translated to French and the folk rock idiom transposed into a cajun reel. It reminds us that Dylan was a musician, not a poet. One thing he did was write a lot of great rock songs, not all of which changed the world.

STL #94: Evil or Divine

Ronnie James Dio died a little more than a month ago. He was 67, died of cancer, and is the first metal person to die from what is sort of old age. His passing was noted as expected in the media--the second singer Black Sabbath, he who introduced the devil horns into the metal world, fronting his own band in the 80's, etc. While to the casual follower of pop culture he was the guy who replaced Ozzy, to the metal world he was unto a god. (See Lars Ulrich's moving letter to Dio.)

Dio is an example of a the role of lead singers in the metal world. When Ritchie Blackmore hired him to be the lead singer in what was originally called "Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow," it clearly showed that the identity of a band was not necessarily derivative of the lead singer's personality. Tony Iommi must have been taking notes, because he hired Dio to replace the charismatic but unreliable Ozzy Osbourne a few years later. Band identities in metal are not linked to a line-up of players; in most bands, most of the players were replaceable. The singer, like any other member, was a hired gun, and could choose to leave or be fired in a corporate model. While this might seem to lead to a kind of facelessness or interchangeability, it also encourages competition and virtuosity--if you are good enough, you could rocket to the highest reaches. Dio was definitely good enough: nearly every fan debate on Dio vs Osbourne era Sabbath begins with the premise that Dio is one of the three or so best singers in metal. He might have felt miffed by lack of appreciation in his two previous bands, since he learned the key to job security after leaving Sabbath--if you name the band after yourself, they can never fire you. Both Rainbow and Black Sabbath carried on with other singers, though of course the band Dio never could.

As a sometime resident of the metal world, I knew him as a giant voiced, impassioned singer--he was what we call in that realm, "awesome". His voice was always what you would call "big" but not, as some recent commentators have said, "operatic." Unlike Rob Halford of Bruce Dickinson, he never used his pipes for sheer pyrotechnics. I've listened to a lot of his work lately, including his early band Elf and even some of his doo-wop stuff recorded as Ronnie and the Prophets, and he also had a sense of phrasing in service of the lyrics.His awesomeness can be demostrated in a relatively short playlist. I'd skip over his first 15 years and start it with "Man on the Silver Mountain" (1976) when he was the lead singer in Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow. Then "Heaven and Hell" (1980) from his first Black Sabbath album and "Mob Rules" from the second, and round it off with three from his band Dio: "Holy Diver" (1983), "Rainbow in the Dark" (1983) and "The Last in Line" (1984). This last song in particular has been a longtime fascination of mine. Emerging from the contemplative first minute, it is an example of the chiaroscuro technique beloved by classic metal--to go from light to dark, light to heavy, at a moment's notice. The moment of transformation, of waking up, occurs with one of the greatest high intensity screams of eighties metal is at the 53 second mark of "The Last in Line," when he kicks it up to 11: "We are coming... HOME!"

The lyrics of "The Last in Line" meant a lot to when inscribing them on the inside of my Pee-Chee at the age of 14, but I'm still moved by them now. Dio's work has a penchant for repeated imagery of an elemental variety: "We are fire, we are stone" that creates a sameness when bingeing on his music, but summons an archetypal mood in the moment. Sometimes this elemental imagery muddles into non sense, like in "Mob Rules": "If you play with fire, you'll burn your fingers, and lose ahold of the flame." In "The Last in Line," though, there is nary a false step. He flirts with incoherence in the second verse: "We are all born upon the cross/We're the throw before the toss"--what does that mean? But that moment of bafflement is washed aside, everytime I hear it, by the dynamic fall at the end of the line "You can release yourself but the only way to go is down."

The grandeur his voice perfectly suits his major theme the problematic search for the truth. This is present in all of the songs I mentioned above, and is the primary topic of "The Last in Line." Truth is the ultimate goal ("We search for the Truth, We could die upon the Truth") but it is never clear--we will not know until the Final Reckoning is "We're Evil or Divine." In this case, the search for truth is bound up with his other great lyrical theme, loyalty. In the song, he forms a community of the cast out and abject in the chorus--"We're the last in line." Watching online videos of performances, I saw a communal aspect (in the sense both of community and communion) of this song in particular. The crowd would come alive, joining in singing and throwing the horns with the master himself.

Dio explained that the devil horns were taught to him as by his superstitious Italian grandmother. Pointing out with the fingers down is a method of giving the evil eye, that is, of cursing an enemy. Held up, in the ubiquitous heavy metal salute, is a means of blocking the evil eye. So what is commonly viewed as Satan worship is actually a spell of protection. The horns are a unifier--gathered together, his people, the last in line, were protected, and learned the occult means to protect themselves (forbidden knowledge to be sure). There is a sense of allegiance in throwing the horns--you gain the protection and fellowship of a community, but don't succumb to the fellowship of Christianity and 'upstanding society' that has travestied itself so many times over.

When a public figure dies, the rest of us strive to make sense of what his or her life meant. Newspaper obituaries and fan tributes both recap the major events of the deceased and in varying degrees, make an argument about why he or she was important to the culture and society he or she departed. Though Dio made his impact in less than a decade's time, his longevity is part of his legacy. Tenacious D helped RJD experience a kind of revival in the last few years, through a novelty song about how RJD was too old to rock anymore, and should pass the torch on to Tenacious D. This is intended as joke of course--Jack Black couldn't hold a torch if there was one to offer, but it's true that at this Dio's flame will keep burning in all the rites he originated.