Culturespill

Steve Earle

Few albums illustrate the dangers of an intersection between politics and art more profoundly than Steve Earle’s The Revolution Starts Now. Earle, a pioneer of so called “alt-country,” busted out of a stint in prison for drug and firearm charges to send his career soaring with a ferocious, spare comeback album called Train-A-Comin’ in 1995, scoring himself a Grammy the following year. Not bad for a guy who, only months prior, couldn’t shake his taste for heroin and called a cage home. A disciple of the legendary Townes Van Zandt, Earle’s brand of country ditched the women-and-whiskey cliches of old Nashville and replaced it not with the painfully unlistenable bullshit that town’s major studios crank out now–you know, riding a cowboy to save a horse and the Honky Tonk Ba Donky Donk (Hank Williams winces in his grave)–but rather with a new attitude and something different to say, fusing country with a rap sheet and a bad attitude that sold as well on Broadway as it did on Music Row.

Then came the Bush administration, and, as is the case with many of us, something snapped. Albums like Jerusalem and the aforementioned Revolution preached more than they played, delivering lectures laid over music about the policies of the F.C.C. and war without end. These positions are all perfectly commendable, and they happen to coincide with mine. But with some exceptions (the blistering “Amerika V 6.0,” for instance) both the music and the message were compromised–the calm of the painter’s palette chucked for the fire of the pulpit–and the result is often a crude and condescending misfortune.

Steve Earle: “Oxycontin Blues,” Washington Square Serenade (2007)

Thankfully, Revolution Starts Now offers just enough redeeming moments to spare it from the utter failure it might have been, but the problem was that Earle had spent so many years demonstrating that he was capable of so much more than this, both as a composer and a writer. The politics are not the problem–and certainly not with me; I’m as lefty as lefty gets–the problem is that the many convenient and tossed-off details indulged throughout Revolution illustrate the risks any songwriter runs when appropriating their chosen craft for the purposes of political statement. The songs betray an otherwise prolific imagination, as Earle’s constant geography lesson — Baghdad, Basra, Kandahar –confine Revolution Starts Now to a much smaller range of ideas and emotions than Earle usually settles for, exactly the risk any songwriter takes when they know what they want to say before they even put a single word to paper. That’s probably what Milan Kundera meant when she said that “to be a writer doesn’t mean to preach a truth; it means to discover a truth.” Earle knows this, and that’s why Revolution was as surprising as it was disappointing, and a stark contrast to the brilliant return to form on last year’s Washington Square Serenade.

Works like Guitar Town, Copperhead Road and especially Transcendental Blues defied categorization with the broadness of their moods, sounds and ambitions; Revolution, by contrast, could quite easily be billed as Steve Earle’s “Iraq album.” It starts off familiarly enough: the distinctive thump and twang of the bellicose title track recalls past glories such as “NYC,” “Tanneytown” and “I Feel Alright,” and the instrumentation on the talking song, “Warrior” or the eloquent “I Thought You Should Know” are stirring enough, but so much of the album languishes in a sea of uninspired arrangements that wallow in over-written political invective. Clumsy and mawkish portraits such as the story of “Bobby” who “Left behind a pretty young wife and a baby girl / A stack of overdue bills and went off to save the world” really take away from the profound sentiments of such Earle staples as “Lonelier Than This” or “Christmas in Washington.” And remarks such as “yours for the motherfuckin’ revolution” or “Fuck the FCC / Fuck the CIA”–however justified they may be (and they are) probably do more to discredit those who speak out against the unspeakable and costly hubris of the Bush II era. It’s not that Earle’s political material isn’t true–it most certainly is true, and those who wish to argue with the man ought to do it to his face at their own risk–it’s that albums like Jerusalem and Revolution simply sell the man’s talents short, cornering his voice into merely a single aspect of its expression.

Steve Earle: “Tanneytown,” El Corazon (2000)

Not surprisingly, Earle becomes far more articulate when he separates the politics from the art. “Comin’ Around” and “I Thought You Should Know,” conveying moving portraits of scorned lovers overcoming their fear to give it another try, are easily Revolution’s finest moments, warm stories that look past the cliches to find the compassion, as authentic as they are anthemic. Clearly, songwriters who wear their politics on their sleeve walk a difficult balance. That Earle’s more recent Washington Square Serenade is so much more powerful–and so wholly absent of the kind of posturing described above–ought to serve as an instructive admonishment to younger songwriters who mistake art for a platform. Sometimes it can work–somehow Allen Ginsberg pulled it off fifty years ago, and even though Reagan didn’t quite get it, so did Springsteen in 1984–but if such a balance isn’t struck often, it’s because it can hardly be struck at all.

Browse any number of music forums and message boards around the web sometime and search for threads related to The White Stripes. Invariably you will find a growing chorus of fans who fell in love with the post-punk sublimity of De Stijl and, to a lesser extent, the breakthrough White Blood Cells, only to be almost entirely alienated by the rotten egg they laid in 2003 with the muddled catastrophe of Elephant. Now with Icky Thump living up only to the first word of its title with the occasional exception (the title track among them), it seems as if the momentary streak of brilliance they offered on Get Behind Me Satan–a wild and stunningly successful departure from the tired recipe of previous albums–was merely a passing tease.

It’s surely no surprise that their major-label debut–Icky Thump–interrupted what Satan foreshadowed: a stretching of the band’s creative boundaries that left them to explore as broad a range of possibilities as ever before. In keeping with the kind of anxieties that accompany major-label debuts by established bands (as in Death Cab’s pitiful Plans, their first LP for Atlantic), Icky Thump sounded like the timid product of sessions in which the band tried their damnedest to sound like the band their label wanted–and so the album went in two different directions at once, with one foot on the beaten path of all the band had done before and the other in the more eccentric arrangements Jack White showcased on Get Behind Me Satan.

Satan qualifies as a rock ‘n roll landmark and is at once the band’s most daring and accessible piece of work–and if you think that’s an easy balance to strike, you try it, tough guy. But of all the band’s 6 albums, one stands alone as the turning point that we didn’t have the hindsight to see for what it was at the time: 2003’s Elephant, a total crapper of an album from start to finish that rivals only the more recent Icky Thump in indulgence and unlistenability.

After firmly establishing themselves as the undisputed rock ‘n roll resurrection by 2003, The White Stripes answered their growing frenzy of devotees with one dud of an album. A band that, just a year prior, was universally hailed as a much-welcome throwback to a sound long dead, the stripped down guitar/drums duo from Detroit seemed about as interested in fanning the flames of their growing fame as a 25-year-old Neil Young. “That album put me in the middle of the road, so I headed for the ditch,” Young, who followed up 1972’s monumental Harvest with the deliberately inaccessible Time Fades Away in 1973, explained years later. Young has since called it his worst album and, to this day, has refused to release it on CD (it remains a vinyl-only collector’s gem.) It seems that the White Stripes are up to much of the same thing on the careless, uninspired and puerile albums Elephant and Icky Thump.

The White Stripes: “Blue Orchid,” Get Behind Me Satan (2005)

What were addictive and delightfully anachronistic rockers on De Stijl and White Blood Cells have given way to a drab collections of clunkers that sound more like sloppy, half-baked demos and outtakes. Taut, muscular collections doused in blues and grit such as De Stijl demonstrated a mammoth potential, rekindling the hopes of long-time subscribers to the “rock is dead” mantra. The orgasmic cacophony that emerged from Meg White’s sizzling drums and Jack White’s guitar and uncanny wail produced a sound that resounded with improbable richness and fervor. It was hardly unfamiliar but still, somehow, distinctive. From gorgeous rock ballads like “Same Boy You’ve Always Known” to raucous jams like “Fell In Love With A Girl” or the brain-searing “Let’s Build A Home,” Meg and Jack White, knowingly or not, had taken the fate of rock ‘n roll into their hands.

Beginning with an unlikely bass line complimented by Meg’s angry, thumping drums, Elephant serves as a mighty tease. Just as it seems that The Stripes had at last discovered a sound of even deeper texture and richness without compromising their essential minimalism, the album unfolds into so much noise and nonsense. Song after song rings hollow, as Jack’s lazy guitar simply mimes old motions while the downright irreverent snap of Meg’s drumming is conspicuously dormant. A shrieking, murky chorus ruins the aimless “There’s Just No Home For You Here,” while “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” sounds, at best, like an anemic stepchild to superior ballads from past albums, such as “Union Forever” and “The Same Boy You’ve Always Known.”

Perhaps Elephant’s most egregious moment comes on the pseudo-poetic “In The Cold Cold Night,” on which Meg White sounds entirely foolish, lending a self-conscious and timid croon to lines so juvenile as to be the stuff of bad teen angst poetry:

I saw you standing on the corner,On the edge of a burning light,

I saw you standing on the corner,

Come to me again in the cold cold night…

“I don’t care what other people say, I’m gonna love you anyway,” she continues to the plucking of a guitar lick that sounds like a ragged attempt at nailing down a Harry Mancini riff.

The White Stripes: “Well it’s True That We Love One Another,” Elephant (2003)

As with most rock ‘n roll mishaps, though, a few gems emerge from the rubble of an unfortunate album. The explosive “Seven Nation Army” resounds with such energy and purpose as to seem like the work of another band altogether. The mean-eyed “The Hardest Button to Button” would crack an indulgent smile from the mouth of any AC/DC die-hard, and a flicker of soul ignites the piano-drenched “I Want To Be The Boy”–a sound the band would extend to such astonishing effect on Get Behind Me Satan.

Overall, however, the once formidable White Stripes seem to have morphed into a joke that few others are cool enough to get. “Just say Jack do you adore me,” Meg slurs on the silly, throwaway tune recorded with punk-rocker Holly Golightly, “It’s True That We Love One Another.” “Well I really would Holly but love really bores me” Jack answers. Judging from the remarkably listless Elephant, one wonders whether the music, too, bores poor Jack.

Icky Thump and Elephant are the modern-day equivalents of Goat’s Head Soup and It’s Only Rock ‘N Roll, two underwhelming albums the Stones slapped together in the stunned aftermath of Exile on Main Street, that enduring masterpiece they released in 1972. Only fleeting glimpses of The Stones’ genius emerged from that point on–a tight tune somewhere on Tattoo You or a surprising sign of grit on more recent rock-outs like “Gunface” or “Dangerous Beauty.” If it’s true that history repeats itself, it’s a safe bet to expect only fleeting glimpses of brilliance from The Stripes going forward, yet another now-legendary rock band we once so trustingly relied on for an escape from the mindless doldrums of FM radio.

The Rolling Stones: “Gunface,” Bridges to Babylon (1997)

Anyone who’s lived enough knows that hindsight’s got a bad habit of separating the bullshit from the real thing. Few things illustrate this truth more clearly than revisiting Eric Clapton’s Me and Mr. Johnson four years later. It will be apparent to most who’ve given the album a second chance since its release in march of 2004 that listening to it is about as riveting an experience as listening to a second coat of paint dry on your mother’s bathroom wall. It exudes about as much passion for its material as the corporate executives who’ve been cashing in on Clapton’s deplorable laurel-resting for decades. And though Clapton’s role in defining rock ‘n roll and introducing the work of many blues legends to the larger audiences they so richly deserved cannot be denied, it’s about time to call the old buzzard’s bluff: this ain’t no blues man.

This is “blues” for people who thought Blink 182 was “punk.” That’s probably the reason why, working in the music department at a Barnes & Noble when this drivel hit stores, I watched a succession of soccer moms and burned-out Floyd fans cough up their kids’ gas money to hear Eric Clapton’s ridiculously over-hyped disaster of a “blues” album. “One thing the blues ain’t,” Stephen Stills admonished a fan in the audience on the classic live album Four Way Street, “is funny.” The way he said it, it sounded as if Stills was perfectly prepared to slit the poor bastard’s throat with his pick if he dared utter another sound; coming from the guy who jumped Elvis Costello in an Ohio bar amid a fit of rage after Costello called Ray Charles “a blind, ignorant nigger,” the threat of physical violence was entirely real.

(In defense of Costello’s remark, for which he scheduled a press conference to apologize, Salon writes that “There’s no evidence that Costello was a racist — he’d been active in Rock Against Racism before it was fashionable and was too smart in any event to let it show if he was — but he was being as stupid, reckless and out of control as any of the broken-down ’60s stars his energy, brains and invective were supposed to be an antidote for.”)

Another thing the blues “ain’t,” though, is comforting–or at least that’s the way the genre’s founding fathers intended it to be. That’s why it’s the very last genre you should be able to listen to on your way to soccer practice with a legion of snot-nosed kids packed in the back of your SUV. Not because it is explicit–for that is merely controversial–but because real blues is the musical equivalent of a razor to the wrist. A well-delivered blues track, such as Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on my Trail,” should leave you no more settled than a track from Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate. And if you’ve listened to either Johnson’s song or Cohen’s album, you know what exactly what I mean. Clapton’s album, by contrast, plays like the soundtrack of a walk through the sandbox on Sunday afternoon with a fistful of birthday balloons and clown paint cracking on your chin in the sun. It is, to put it simply, much too polite a record for the blues.

Robert Johnson

It is nothing less than a travesty that Clapton is continually allowed to pass himself off as a blues man when his days as an edgy and innovative guitarist hell-bent on making the blues cool again are so far behind him now as to be the stuff of urban legend. It has been a long time since Clapton was a no-name strapping on his guitar for another session with the Yardbirds, and his recent recordings prove that he has forgotten what it was that brought him to pick up a guitar as a kid. He fails to understand that mere competence does not constitute “Blues” music. Blues comes from within, from a depth in the gut that’s been hollowed out by the kind of real-life suffering that brought the original blues masters — whose genius was not rewarded by millions of dollars in royalties, but by an occasional burst of applause by the roadside — to their chosen craft.

Take Robert Johnson, for example: he grew up in squalid poverty and worked as a sharecropper as a boy, his first child was stillborn and his first wife died during labor, his next wife suffered a breakdown and also died young, he himself was a victim of near-blindness and, finally, he was poisoned to death at the age of 27. Maybe that’s the kind of shit that Robert was fixing for the night he sold his soul to the devil in Rosedale, Mississippi, but that doesn’t mean it was easy to live with. Or take Muddy Waters, who never sold his soul to the devil, but grew up under the care of his grandmother because his mother died when he was five years-old (the age at which he began to teach himself harmonica, beating on a can of kerosene to get a feel for rhythm.) He worked as a sharecropper at the Stoval Plantation and lived in a shoddy wooden cabin about the size of a matchbox, somehow scrounging together enough in wages to buy his first guitar at 17.

The Cabin Muddy Waters Lived in As A Boy

The idea behind Blues music upon its birth was that the artist had to HAVE the blues to sing the Blues. Clapton’s lackluster performance on Me and Mr. Johnson–as on so many of his past records–further demonstrates that he is too far removed from that state of the soul to make real music. My disgust with the album has nothing to do with “purism” or a lack of grittiness. I’ll take a clean sound if it’s got soul. I’m talking about modern blues masters like Charlie Musslewhite, John Hammond or even Tom Waits. Clapton, by contrast, compounds weak performances with vocal deliveries that sound as though the man is slipping into a coma as he sings.

I’m sorry, but a guy who puts out albums with liner notes that include catalogs of his own merchandise is the last guy on earth who ought to be cutting blues records. Clapton has made it clear that the tremendous celebrity status he engendered as a young man was so unappealing to him that he is willing to release decades worth of diluted, subpar blues/rock, which he has done. He has proven to be a rather powerful enemy of his own reputation, and has subsequently forgotten how to bring his soul to the microphone. If anybody ought to be keeping his hands off those Robert Johnson records, it’s Eric Clapton. If you want to know what Johnson sounded like, stick with the original tunes and hunt down the stuff that Muddy was listening to while he worked with his bare hands in the fields of Mississippi to save enough for that first guitar: Blind Lemon Jefferson, Tampa Red, Lonnie Johnson or The Mississippi Sheiks.

Image of a Tom Petty T-Shirt, Courtesy of Vintage T-Shirt Store

“I’ve already passed on so much money I don’t worry about it anymore.”
– Tom Petty

We’ve all been there at one time or another: the local artsy coffee joint where the proprietors gather signatures for petitions to legalize hemp, serve organic soy-milk cappuccinos in “Friends Don’t Let Friends go to Starbucks” mugs, and house “open mike” events where, as Leonard Cohen puts it in a song, “all the lousy little poets come around trying to sound like Charlie Manson” as an audience of six-and-a-half timidly munch on a feast of macrobiotic brownies. It’s where the pseudo-punks come to be seen with their hair carefully greased into a towering cascade of freshly shaped spikes, and you wonder how many hours they spent studying themselves in the mirror to appear so carefully disheveled as they curl up with their lattes and laptops and still, somehow, count themselves among the countercultural (without even the vaguest sense of irony.) I can’t help the feeling that, if he were still around, Joey Ramone would also see something just a bit mutually exclusive between punk rock and wifi connections.

There’s something else that the indie coffee joint houses: impassioned popularity contests in which a gaggle of 17-year-olds demonstrate the magnitude of their hipness by declaring profound affection for as many obscure bands as they can name–usually with as much conviction as they can muster, however insincere the whole spectacle may be. Back when I spent many nights a week at one of these places because it was just up the block from my apartment, the “in” bands to name-drop were acts like Deadboy & The Elephant Men, Apples in the Stereo, and Death Cab For Cutie (before your mother listened to them.)

Tom Petty: “Something in the Air”
(Check out Ringo on drums at 0:49)

I guess you can call it a cultural revolving door, whereby you rebel against one culture by conforming to another–and these gatherings of indie hipsters, pseudo-punks and the disciples of Emo Nation happily clamor along in a desperate search for identity at an age when, more often than not, you figure out who you are by figuring out who others want you to be.

Though the courage to be ourselves tends to come later, it doesn’t come to everyone–when you think about it, actually, it hardly comes to any of us. I know I’m no priest of pure authenticity–are you? The point is that, in those rare moments when we permit the discomfort of total honesty with ourselves, we realize that we’re all sellouts in one way or another, each and every one of us, and that this is a totally unavoidable circumstance of human nature.

As Daphne Carr so astutely points out in a great LA Weekly piece on Tom Petty, this is exactly the reason why the fictional “Eddie” in Tom Petty’s “Into the Great Wide Open” busts into a tattoo shop in L.A. to acquire his own insignia of rebellion, “only to find a girl ‘with a tattoo too’” (a brilliant piece of word play, the more I think about it.) It’s natural to wonder why all the rebells before you look the same as you peak over your book in that hip cafe tonight, but if you think you yourself have never been among them–one of the many crestfallen Eddies in the middle of an L.A. tattoo parlor trying to get a clue–you’re lying to yourself.

Tom Petty: “Any sort of injustice just outraged me.”

The presumption behind the scene described above appears to be this: You’re either an indie rock hipster or an establishment tool, a comprehensive rebuke of any conceivable gray area that reminds me of Dubya’s “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” creed. It’s the same ethic that caused a friend of mine who introduced me to some of the greatest indie bands I’ve ever heard to scoff disdainfully the minute I indulged a craving for–GASP!–Tom Petty in his presence.

Though a minor share of guilt has accompanied my moments with the music of Tom Petty ever since, it’s a pleasure I pursue without shame to this day. Why? Well, it’s like Jessica Grabert wrote in a piece for Blend Music recently: “juxtaposing Tom Petty’s voice with Mike Campbell’s guitar rifts is like having sex between Egyptian cotton sheets—it may not be the most technically astounding collaboration, but it sure fucking feels good.” It’s not possible to put it any better than that; and anyway, all the guilt in the world wouldn’t do a thing to temper my belief that, contrary to the now-revered indie label’s name, we don’t always have to “Kill Rock Stars.” Well, not all of them, anyway.

It’s easy to overlook the human being in a guy when he takes the laser-lit stage of a half time show at the Super Bowl as a crowd of young people–desperate to be looked at and wholly indifferent the music of Tom Petty–crowd around to perform their most sincere fits of adoration before a glittering frenzy of TV cameras. And it’s just as easy for those kids at the cafe–or my indie-rockin’ friend–to spew chants of “sellout” on their way to another laptop-’n latte love-in with their cadre of poster punks and Emo clowns, all of them desperate to belong by pretending that they couldn’t care less about belonging anywhere at all–no, honest they don’t. I swear!

Petty, notorious for a longstanding anti-corporate bias that has brought upon numerous lawsuits and a mysterious blaze at his house ignited by a still-unidentified arsonist, took a lot of heat for appearing at the Super Bowl this year, an event sponsored by Bridgestone Tires, which hires children at a Liberian factory where the environment is destroyed and workers’ rights are non-existent. For many it was an easy excuse to pan Petty as a “sellout.” But those who would do so–like those kids in search of themselves at the cafe around the corner–unfairly dismiss one of the greatest stories rock ‘n roll has to tell.

Tom Petty: “Swingin’,” Echo (1999)

Growing up as poor as a stray dog in Gainesville, FL, Petty traded in his slingshot for a stack of Elvis LPs after a personal encounter with Presley that left him star-struck in awe, and later defied his deeply abusive father, who berated him severely for being “a mild-mannered kid who was interested in the arts” (read “queer”), by “driving up in a van full of Florida stoners onto Sunset Boulevard in 1974, cruising for labels“–a 3,000 mile road trip from his Florida hometown. It was only after Petty struck it rich, of course, that his Dad–by most accounts an outright monster–suddenly embraced the rock ‘n roll he claimed to despise for so many years, “which really sort of insulted me,” petty explains in a scene from Peter Bogdanovich’s fascinating documentary about the band, 2007’s Runnin’ Down A Dream.

It’s no wonder Petty found it insulting that his father, a man who swung with closed fists at his mother and offered much of the same to his brother Bruce whenever he tried to come bewteen Tom and the latest ass-whoopin’ his father had to hand down, suddenly found the entirety of his ego invested in his son’s success. “He was just crazy,” Tom explains in the film, “he would give me pretty good beatings most of my life . . . the house could erupt into a fist fight” at any moment.

In a particularly stirring connection, the film establishes a long line of rock legends who, like Petty, either lost their mothers young or had abusive fathers. It really is amazing how many have been treated to one or both of those pleasantries–Bono, Larry Mullen, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Madonna, Aretha Franklin, Sinead O’Connor–you name them, they’ve dealt with it. As someone says of Petty in the film, “You don’t get to where he got to from where he started out unless you have something to prove to somebody who’s not listening to you.”

Tom Petty & Playboy Records

This tragic combo of a lost mother and monstrous father is the peculiar fuel that both filled Petty with an irate drive for success–”I just turned my anger into ambition,” he says–as well as a disdain for the compromises that ambition requires. We’re talking about the guy who turned down his friend Stevie Nicks’s request to join the band because “there are no girls in the Heartbreakers,” who took his own label to court when they sold out to MCA and tried to dump him in their lap without his consent, then sued his new label for upping the price of his then-upcoming album Hard Promises by applying a $1 “Superstar Pricing” hike, as the company called it–exactly the reason you saw petty tearing a dollar bill in half on the cover of Rolling Stone back then.

Even Petty’s got to get a chuckle out of the irony that it’s a tire company his critics now point to in defense of their case against him as a “sellout.” It was, after all, another tire company (B.F. Goodrich) that he sued in 1987 for using a song that sounded conspicuously like Petty’s “Mary’s New Car” in a commercial–especially “conspicuous” since Petty had just taken a request from the company to use the song and asked them to kindly shove it up their asses. The case was “settled out of court.” In other words, the bastards paid up and shut up.

And if an artist’s relevance is measured by how many bands try to steal his shit, then Petty’s pretty fucking relevant. By now it’s not exactly news that The Red Hot Chili Peppers–on an album that captured the sound of a band totally out of ideas–pilfered the groove to “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” for their derivative hit “Dani California.” The Strokes, who were described playing Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels” with Ryan Adams during a Rolling Stone interview a few years back, admitted borrowing from “American Girl” for their hit “Last Nite.”

Tom Petty Covering “Asshole” by Beck

“That made me laugh out loud,” Petty says, “I was like, ‘OK, good for you.’ If someone took my song note for note and stole it maliciously, then maybe [I’d sue]. But I don’t believe in lawsuits much. I think there are enough frivolous lawsuits in this country without people fighting over pop songs.” In other words, he’s too old and rich to give a shit. But it’s worth keeping in mind, next time you think about sneering at a buddy who deigns to hold you hostage to a Petty tune, that he may be old and rich, but he’s got a hell of a story to tell, and was defending artistic integrity when all the younger bands you want to name were crawling their cribs in diapers.

It’s getting pretty clear that we’ve probably heard the last of the great John Hiatt albums. I’m not asking for another Bring the Family—records that great only grace our ears once every decade or two at best. And I’m not one of those close-minded dip shits that bitch every time his favorite band puts out a new album because “it’s not as good as the last one,” stubbornly resistant to an artist’s creative evolution. Lord knows an artist with Hiatt’s range offers something for everyone and their mother, as adept at the crooning twang of “I Can’t Wait” as he is at the lion’s-roar of rockers like “Something Wild”–to say nothing of his “I am the other Elvis Costello” days on early albums like Slug Line and Two-Bit Monster.

What I am saying, however, is that it’s been far too long since John sounded ready to abandon himself to the song, come what may, in the kind of blistering spontaneity we heard on the brilliant and rollicking Crossing Muddy Waters that scored him a Grammy nod in 2000. Hell, even The Tiki Bar is Open, for all its polish, still offered a sound that swung with two clenched fists. But, good God, Same Old Man? Master of Disaster? (album title or Freudian slip?) What’s happening to Mr. Hiatt is happening to some of America’s most prized and once-gritty songwriters, and it’s not entirely their fault, either.

It’s called “compression,” an alleged “technology” that is, ironically, doing more to set back the soul of rock n’ roll than it is to advance it. We’re told by the advocates of compression and digital recording technology that “Compression is used to bring down the highest peaks, above the threshold level, leaving the lower levels just as they were. After that the level is restored so that the peaks are the same level as they were to start with, but the overall dynamic range is reduced. The result is a much more controlled sound.” The problem, though—as albums like Hiatt’s Same Old Man or even Dylan’s Modern Times demonstrate rather painfully—is that this “controlled sound” makes for a profoundly boring listening experience, the result of a mastering process in which all instruments in the mix are compressed so that no one sound stands out over another—presumably to maintain the listener’s attention for a longer period of time as opposed to merely bearing the song until that killer guitar solo at 2:13.

John Hiatt & The Guilty Dogs: “Perfectly Good Guitar”

The result is an album full of tracks that sound more like extended yawns than songs. David Skolnik, a self-professed “audio nut” and “vinyl guy,” shares this experience with Hiatt’s 2005 album, Master of Disaster: “I had noticed the sound wasn’t very good– so I did the unthinkable and hit the tone controls on my best audio system. After a dramatic reduction of bass and well chosen treble spice, the album came to life–like the Hiatt I’ve known and loved for 20 years! What a difference,” he concluded, “this is a fine album.” Perhaps, but when you need to hit the “treble spice” and tone controls to hear that fine album hidden in the clutter, you know something’s gone horribly wrong.

This is what Dylan meant when he told Rolling Stone that “you fight that technology in all kinds of ways, but I don’t know anybody who’s made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really. You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static.” Exactly, Bob. Now maybe he got a little carried away with the whole ”no one’s made a decent record in the last 20 years” bit, but you can understand the frustration of a guy who is responsible for some of the most essential rock n’ roll ever put to tape, a balls-to-the-wall blues-rock sound he pioneered at a time when lo-fi was the only fi. There’s a reason why The Black Keys recorded Thickfreakness in 14 hours on a ¼-inch 8-track Tascam, and it wasn’t just for shits and giggles.

As song after song unfolds on Same Old Man, John Hiatt’s latest offering, a painful fantasy enters the mind: what might this record have been had John been left to his own devices, allowed to strip each song down to nothing more than a solo acoustic performance recorded live in-studio with only a guitar and harmonica to cradle the guttural snarl of his immediately distinctive voice? What if, for once, John had tossed the band to the curb in a long-awaited realization of the power he commands when the excess is filtered from the substance (uh-hem, “Have A little Faith in Me,” “Learn How to Love You,” uh-hem)? With a record like Same Old Man, it’s clear that the vulnerability lurking beneath the surface of these new songs—mostly reflections on a 20-year marriage and entertaining memories from an even longer career—might have come to the fore, and we just might have had the album of John’s life on our hands. What a tragedy.

John Hiatt: “Cry Love,” Walk On (1995)

It truly pains me to make this argument about Hiatt’s more recent work, because few appreciate John’s neglected talents more than I do. I drove from Tampa to Nashville last year just to see John Hiatt do a brief opening set for the woeful Peter Frampton at a charity event (where, predictably, legions of burned-out Framptonites sat stone-eyed and baffled throughout a devastating solo performance by Hiatt, someone most of them had obviously never heard of before—one of many reasons why my girlfriend and I jetted out of there before Frampton took the stage with his prog-rock bullshit—at the Ryman Auditorium, of all places. Is nothing sacred?)

Hiatt’s life story is the stuff of an authenticity few songwriters can claim: his brother committed suicide, his father died when he was 11, his first wife also committed suicide (shortly after the birth of their daughter), and he spent his first night in Nashville sleeping under a park bench. He went on from there to spend nearly thirty years sleeping under another bench—this time the park bench of recognition—but this isn’t Leonard Cohen’s music scene anymore. As Tom Petty argues on his vicious The Last DJ album, fake breasts and a polished smile will sell better than a well-written song any day of the week. “Some angel whore that can learn a guitar lick / Heeeyyy, now that’s what I call muuuuzzziiiiiik!” Petty sneers on “Joe.” Hiatt is easily one of the most hard-nosed and unsung pioneers of what’s become known as “alt-country”—a sound Hiatt was making long before Steve Earle fused it with a rap sheet and boot spurs to make it cool.

Maybe it’s that same crowd of burned-own Framptonites who are currently bemoaning the loss of what they call John Hiatt’s “golden voice” on Same Old Man. “John has lost the golden voice,” someone called E.M. Witt whines in an amazon.com customer review, “his voice is gravelly and out of pitch at times.” (Oh, no! Gravelly? You mean it sounds like a real human being occasionally! Eeeww!!) And maybe it’s this crowd for whom the whole “compression” crave was fashioned. But anyone who comes to a John Hiatt record in pursuit of a “golden voice” should probably be directed to the bin of remaindered N-Synch CDs over in the corner instead.

John Hiatt: “Have A Little Faith in Me,” Bring the Family (1987)

We don’t ask John for golden voiced pop ditties—we ask him to be real, give it to us straight, and take no easy turns. His voice has always been gruff, and, until recently, so was his music–and that’s what made his records so great. The problem with Same Old Man is that it is boring, and that’s not entirely John’s fault–the culprit is the same thing Dylan complained about after releasing Modern Times–digital recording technology and its “compression” approach to mastering is sucking the life out of these songs; the result is an album that more closely resembles a fleeting drizzle in a cold empty park than a record.

It happened on Master of Disaster and it happens again here. It’s a downright travesty—and I mean that. Either John can’t hear it himself or he just isn’t speaking up. As the aforementioned “audio nut” David Skolnik suggests, “I don’t think John should have to suffer a let down of his public perception because of his tech people- he deserves better!” I wholeheartedly agree, but until Hiatt hands down the ass-whoopin’ those “tech people” have earned, the decline in that “public perception” may become precipitous.

The Spill on Hiatt’s new album, Same Old Man . . .

Associated Press: “Same Old Man ranks with the best music of Hiatt’s 34-year recording career . . . “

Glide Magazine: “Same Old Man may be the most accessible album of John Hiatt’s career . . .”

Thoughts of a Lime Monkey: “SAME OLD MAN is not a bad record, it’s just a poor Hiatt album . . . “

411 Mania: “Hiatt puts in another solid studio album, that sorrowfully won’t get much airplay . . . “

Bamboo Nation: “Same Old Man is absent any out-of-the-ballpark, radio-friendly singles, but the album is so consistently excellent as a whole that its culminative effect is a bit disconcerting at first . . . “

When you’re talking about an artist like Neil Young, whose muse suffers from the most acute schizophrenia any songwriter’s ever experienced—a countrified Pantera one minute and Tim Hardin the next–you don’t have to look too hard to find the criticism of pot-bellied goobers who tolerate only what they hear on one of those “classic rock” stations they turn up in their rusted trucks on the way to a beer pong tournament.

Take this poor bastard’s attempt at criticism of Neil Young’s Reactor, the greatly misunderstood garage rock tutorial he put out with Crazy Horse in 1981, in an amazon.com customer review—typos preserved. “There is one song on it ‘T-Bone’ where he repeats the same lines over and over. That ain’t song writng,” he says, supporting it with the equally misguided assertion that you “Never see Bob Dylan write something like that. You know it stinks becasue I’ve never seen Neil play any of the songs from this album live,” he continues. The problem, of course, is that “Southern Pacific,” Reactor’s most recognizable single, is actually a mainstay in Neil Young’s live shows (I’ve got the bootlegs to prove it.) And when he does perform it live, the crowd always responds with a roar of familiarity.

This is just more of the entirely unfounded pretense with which so many close-minded fans fuel misinformed criticism. Reactor, like 2003’s brilliant Greendale, only asks that his audience expands their minds and tastes just enough to accommodate a muse whose range continues to widen despite age. While many of Neil’s peers languish in the dust of past triumphs, Neil is not afraid to indulge newer visions and look forward–both as an artist and as a man (For once, Rolling Stone got it right when they voted Greendale the #2 album of 2003 just behind Warren Zevon’s highly emotional swan-song, The Wind. At least someone still knows the sound of art when they hear it.)

Those who express disappointment in albums like Reactor or Greendale because they didn’t mail in yet another collection of “Neil Young-ish” singles the way Silver & Gold or Prairie Wind did were never fans in the first place. They crave merely a single patch in the quilt of Neil’s total artistic range. They are the morons shouting “Judas” at Dylan in 1965 whose hopeless anonymity is a fitting fate.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Southern Pacific

“That ain’t songwriting,” some say about tunes like Reactor’s epic “T-Bone” in which, yes, Neil howls “ain’t got no t-bone” for nearly 10 minutes, “Never see Bob Dylan write something like that.” Really? Let’s take these lines from Dylan’s song, “Wiggle Wiggle,” the opening track from his 1991 album, Under The Red Sky.

Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like satin and silk,
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a pail of milk,
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, rattle and shake,
Wiggle like a big fat snake.

Now, call me crazy, but I’m fairly certain that this fails to meet the aforementioned reviewer’s standards for “songwriting”. That is exactly the point: Neil Young’s Reactor is much-maligned for applying an aesthetic fraught with ruthless feedback and distortion to a weak selection of songs, but to object to Reactor on those grounds completely misses the point.

If this album’s flaws are more of the same-old Neil Young “flakiness”, it is the same “flakiness” that characterizes rock ‘n roll’s legacy–a legacy Neil Young defines as accurately on Reactor as on any other record. Reactor’s snotty abandon and feedback-laden indifference constitute the kind of temperament that great rock ‘n roll thrives on, and if it fails to conjure greatness on Reactor, then it is, at worst, a powerful tribute to the soul of rock music.

A boundless ambition pervades Reactor that is at once charming and confounding: the frenzied wail and shriek of “Shots“, the thumping, deceptively political railroad anthem, “Southern Pacific”, the 10 minutes of Neil Young shouting “ain’t got no t-bone!” amid Crazy Horse’s famous thrash-and-grind sound. These performances exemplify what is great about rock ‘n roll far more powerfully than any of those contrived classic rock anthems poisoning FM radio every day.

Neil Young: “Be The Rain,” Greendale

Reactor and, later, Greendale, are miraculous examples of a musical and lyrical ambition that refuses to give in to the ravages of time and age. If people would get a grip on their attention spans for long enough to engage with a story that lasts longer than the 3-minute FM radio single, the rewards are great. People who don’t have the capacity to do so need to toss their Neil records and listen to more chick-rock.

Take a chance on Reactor. Listen to something different, something that refuses to make friends, something too sincere to earn air time on any of America’s thousand shitty classic rock stations. Few experiences are more gratifying than getting weird looks from other drivers when you crank up this album on your car stereo at a red light with the windows down. It proves you’re listening to something that’s true. Reactor is the real thing: are you?

Special Treat: The excellent blog known as That’s Fucking Dynamite recently posted an mp3 for this killer and extremely rare Neil Young tune called “Sea of Madness,” which appears to be a live take from Neil’s appearance with CSN at the original Woodstock. Check it out here.

UPDATE (6-2-08): Here is yet another special treat, courtesy of Andrew Ronan–a live, solo acoustic performance of “Shots”–the song that would later appear on the Reactor album–performed here in a live set from 1978. It is an absolute must-hear. Download it here.