Culturespill

Rocky Frisco

“People will always consume musical Twinkies, but only the real stuff can satisfy a genuine hunger. When your lover leaves and hits the bed of somebody you know, Twinkies won’t save your life.” — Rocky Frisco

It is no piece of hyperbole to say that the story of Rock ‘N Roll’s birth cannot be fully told without mention of the great Rocky Frisco–one of the reasons why he factors into Peter Guralnick’s bestselling book about Elvis Presley, The Last Train to Memphis. Frisco has served as pianist to some of rock’s most lauded visionaries, such as the great and hugely influential J.J. Cale, whom the likes of Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler and Richard Thompson credit as a pivotal influence. Frisco and Cale were high school buddies in the mid 1950s, and Frisco has played in Cale’s band throughout his life. And he has one hell of a story to tell–costly run-ins with crooked record company fat cats, the night he bought Chuck Berry a bottle of whiskey and watched him down the whole damned thing before duckwalking across the stage, a 7-day bike ride from Tulsa to Texas to interview Elvis that left him burnt to a crisp in the deadly southern sun, racing a Morris Mini in the Canadian Grand Prix, running for office in Tulsa, starring in Disney movies with Dave Matthews–you name it, this guy’s been there, done that. It is not possible to overstate how thrilled we are to present to you our exclusive interview with this rock ‘n roll renegade, the one and only Rocky Frisco, a man whose grace and humility belie the kind of resume any lesser man would boast of.

Culturespill: You’ve been in and around the music business for quite some time, sitting in with Flash Terry’s band and playing your earliest gigs with J.J. Cale as part of Gene Crose’s band in the late 1950s. You’ve subsequently played with an amazing host of other acts over the years—Eric Clapton, Widespread Panic, Leon Russell, Clyde Stacy, Garth Brooks’s sister (with the Betsy Smittle Band), Johnny Lee Wills (just to name a few.) Who among these many bands and artists was/is the most fun for you to play with?

Rocky: I never played with Leon Russell. I met him as Russell Bridges once when Doug Cunningham brought him to one of my dances at the YWCA in Tulsa. Leon was 14 at the time. The most fun has definitely been with the Cale Band since I rejoined them in 1994. John took me on my first trip to England and the rest of Europe in 1994, something I had always wanted to do. I have been back a number of times since then. I thoroughly enjoy playing with the three Tulsa Bands I work with these days. Tom Skinner is a genius Oklahoma singer-songwriter and his Wednesday Night Science Project is packed with incredible musicians. Tom started Garth Brooks in the business some years ago as his rhythm guitarist. On Thursday nights, I play with Higher Education at McNelly’s Irish Pub upstairs. HE includes Dustin Pittley and Jesse Aycock, two unbelievably good young singer-songwriter-guitarists. Either of them could walk onstage and play with Knopfler or Clapton although they are in their middle 20’s. The band also includes David White, one of the best Bass players I have ever worked with, me on piano and a list of different drummers, most usually, Dylan Aycock, Jesse’s brother. Dylan and Jesse’s dad, Scott Aycock is co-host of Folk Salad, a local radio show that features many local artists. Scott is also a great songwriter whose CDs I have played on. Sundays find me playing with the host band at the Tulsa Sunday Blues Jam; the Kevin Phariss Blues Band is the old Flash Terry Band. Kevin was Flash’s band manager and second guitarist. Scott Santee was Flash’s sound man and he is now our lead guitar and main vocalist. He’s one of the best lead players in Tulsa, but he is known for his self-effacing humor, so few people realize exactly how good he is. He’s famous for ending each song with “I wrote that song.” Harry Williams was Flash’s drummer for many years and we are lucky to have him with us. Harry is in the Oklahoma Blues Hall of Fame. I was inducted into the Hall just this year. Our present Bass player is Tiny Davis, a Tulsa music legend in his own right. The lineup is completed by Mike Winebrenner on Sax and Iona Gilliam on vocals. Iona is not only a wonderful singer, she is incredibly good-looking and charismatic. One other group I’m excited to be working with is “Li’l Tee.” Tee is Teresa Gross, a tiny little lady with an enormous voice and great charm. The band consists of Tee, me on piano and Bob Withrow on Guitar. I put Bob in my alltime top ten guitarists list. He plays with great skill and finesse. Bob and I played in the Mickey Crocker Band some years back when Warren Haynes sat in with us for one summer.

Culturespill: Among the many fascinating anecdotes available on your website, rockyfrisco.com, is the revelation that, during basic training with the U.S. Army in Fort Polk, Louisiana, your commanding officer would sneak you off base to play in local bars and, of course, earn him some free drinks. What are your fondest memories of those days?

Rocky: The Army Basic Training was very difficult. Fort Polk in the summertime was unbearably hot and recruits fainting from the heat was not unusual. The best part of the illicit bar visits was that some of them had A/C. I was small and thin and I’m still proud of completing the training.

That’s Rocky Frisco on the Keyboards with Eric Clapton and J.J. Cale (In Shades & Hat)

Culturespill: You also express particular gratitude for having gotten to play with Flash Terry—both back in the day and at his Tulsa Music Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2003. Just how big a presence was Flash in Tulsa, and what made you so proud to play with him?

Rocky: Flash was responsible for integrating the Tulsa music scene. He invited me to come and sing some songs at his home club in the Greenwood section of town, the Famingo Lounge. We had a deal: I would come and be the white boy at the jam session on Tuesday nights and I would win second prize, eleven dollars. You know, if you adjust for inflation, that was a lot more than I make now, playing in Tulsa clubs, and the gasoline was 20 cents a gallon then. As time passed, other white Tulsa musicians began to come to the jam. I have no doubt that Flash’s influence was a big part of the development of the Tulsa Sound, so, in a way, Flash influenced Eric Clapton and Leon Russell and JJ Cale. Flash died in 2004, one year after being inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame, and we all miss him. He was once quoted by the Tulsa World newspaper with the best compliment anybody ever gave me in print, when he said I was the most “colorblind” musician he ever met. That may have been partly based on the night one of the guys at the Flamingo asked me if he could dance with my date, a little beauty named “Foxy” Baker.” I said, “Don’t ask me; ask her.” After that, I was one of the family there. In 1957, Tulsa was a very segregated city.

Culturespill: Was rock ‘n roll able to do anything to alleviate that racial tension?

Rocky: Very definitely it helped a lot. Tulsa is the city where America’s worst
racially-based massacre happened back in 1921. Rock and Blues Music were
the strongest influences toward integration and cross-racial friendship
here in the 1950’s.

Culturespill: Another fascinating anecdote you reveal is that, upon touring with Clyde Stacy in Toronto in 1958, you crossed paths with such stars as The Everly Brothers, Jackie Wilson, Chuck Berry, Frankie Avalon, and Jimmy Rodgers. What stories or memories stick with you the most about your encounters with those legends?

Rocky: The ones I got to be friends with were Jimmie Rodgers, Frankie Avalon, the Everlies and George Hamilton IV, all really nice guys. I once got Chuck a bottle of whiskey when he played in Tulsa back when we still had Prohibition (repealed in 1958). He chugged the whole half-pint and then went out and duckwalked across the stage. I wouldn’t have been able to even stand up.

Culturespill: Would you mind recounting for us the “infamous bike-ride to Texas” and your “interview with Elvis” in 1958, when you were known as “Rocky Curtis”?

Rocky: Actually “Rocky Curtiss.” I took that last name from the Curtiss Wright Aircraft Company, where my father was once a test pilot. I was working for radio station KOME in 1958 (stood for Kovering Oklahoma’s Magic Empire) when the station manager and I concocted the publicity stunt. I pedalled a Schwinn bike from Tulsa to Killeen, Texas, to do the interview. It took me seven days of cloudless skies and Summer heat to get there. We didn’t know beans about sunscreen or skin cancer back then. I was burned really badly; some of the scars didn’t fade for years. Elvis was charming and friendly. He had hired a Photographer to come from Temple to shoot pictures of us together, one of the most thoughtful gestures I ever experienced. In the days before the interview, I spent some afternoons with Gladys, eating cookies and listening to stories about Elvis when he was a baby. She was a wonderful woman and a great mother. Gladys died about three months later and I have always thought that was when Elvis lost his life’s anchor. She didn’t care about the money or the fame; she just wanted her boy to be happy and stay right with God.

Rocky Frisco Performing His Song “Pursuit of Happiness”

Culturespill: You’ve mentioned in our correspondence leading up to this interview that J.J. Cale is a unique friend and the finest person you’ve ever worked with in the business. Would you mind elaborating?

Rocky: John is 100% genuine. He has always been, from the first time I met him. He was the coolest guy in Central High School, because he completely didn’t care about such things. He told me that fame just limits your choices. He said, “Elton John can’t go to the Burger King.” He once said that the bane of being famous is that drunk people want to tell you their life story. “I really love your song, Magnolia; it changed my whole life; it reminds me of the time my sister had the gout and her husband left her and . . .”

Culturespill: One of the lingering narratives surrounding Cale’s illustrative career is that some of his own best-known songs tend to be associated not with him, but with Eric Clapton, who turned Cale’s “Cocaine” and “After Midnight” into huge hits. Some people like to suggest that Cale, consequently, fails to get the credit he deserves and is overshadowed by his more famous contemporaries. But judging from his recent work with Clapton on The Road to Escondido, Cale himself seems to enjoy a great relationship with Clapton and doesn’t much mind being, in a sense, the man behind the music. In your long experience with J.J., can you discuss how Cale responds to his comparative lack of commercial success over the years?

Rocky: Maybe a lack of personal fame, which is changing now that “Escondido” has paired him with Eric, but as far as money is concerned, he has done very well. I think he likes it that way. He drives rusty old pickups and wears jeans or fishing clothes, even at our most prominant gigs. I wear some pretty fancy threads on the gigs. One fan asked me on the 04 tour, “Aren’t you overdressed for a Cale Concert?” I told him, “This is what I wear when I mow the lawn.”

Culturespill: You played on J.J. Cale’s excellent 2004 album, To Tulsa and Back, which was his first since 1996’s Guitar Man. Songs like “Stone River,” “The Problem” and “Homeless” delivered quite a bit more political statement than I ever recall hearing on a J.J. Cale album. What encouraged J.J. to head back to the studio after the long lay-off, and what inspired the album’s more political material?

Rocky: John genuinely cares about people and the health of our planet. I was really impressed by his courage in making those statements in such a repressive, unamerican period of time, when our government has turned rogue and our “leaders” are mass-murdering war-criminals.

Culturespill: You yourself have demonstrated a rather active political conscience in your life, contributing to the 1977 nuclear protest album For Our Children: The Black Fox Blues, and even running for office in Tulsa. Can you elaborate on your life as a political activist—what inspired you to use your musical talents as a means of political message, what motivated you to run for office yourself, etc.?

Rocky: The deal with Black Fox was that it wasn’t just a nuclear power plant, but that the design was an experimental “thought exercise” the designers were appalled to see being actually built. Carrie Dickerson’s legal battle with the power company brought out the “Reed Report,” showing that the original designers had resigned their lucrative jobs to protest the plan to actually build it. Thanks to Carrie, we stopped the plant. My latest run for office convinced me it’s a waste. I doubt you can fix anything through politics when politics is the source of all of the problems. When Ron Paul was mostly ignored by the mainstream media, I gave up on politics. None of the other candidates, including the two present ones, even came close to Paul’s integrity. I strongly disagreed with many of his positions, but saw that he was the only one who could be trusted to honor his oath of office.

Rocky with Elvis Presley

Culturespill: We share an affinity for Ron Paul, and your statement that our government “has turned rogue” also resonates loudly with me. In your view, how does today’s political climate compare to, say, the days of Vietnam, JFK, LBJ or Nixon? Is one any worse than the other? How so?

Rocky: I think it’s all worse now, since the President doesn’t even pretend to
act within the law. John Adams said the USA is a nation of laws, rather
than men. That’s obviously no longer even partly true. The present day
America is a nation ruled by powerful outlaws who break the law with
impunity, but require absolute obedience from the citizens. We no longer
have a legal government, but rather the latest of a long line of outlaws
who have hijacked the Ship of State.

Culturespill: You seem to have become disillusioned with the political process, partly because of your experience running for office. At the time when you say you returned to rock ‘n roll and never looked back in 1969, there was a genuine belief that music was capable of changing the world–a spirit Neil Young carried on with his “Living With War” album a couple years ago. I think of anthems like “Ohio,” “Fortunate Son,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Is music capable of provoking change?

Rocky: I’m saying this with only the tip of my tongue in my cheek, but I think
the only thing that has the capability of changing this world, so
polluted by citizens who are shallow, lost and stupid, is The Return of
Christ and that this Christ will not be the storybook Jesus the churches
pretend to follow, but rather the Lord of the Storm, the God of the
Elephants and Whales and Zebras. Recall the bumper sticker that said,
“Jesus is coming soon, and boy is He pissed!”

Culturespill: Your own long-standing relationship with the music business has undergone quite a few evolutions over the years. Most notably, you “retired” from the business in disgust after losing thousands in royalties to a corrupt A & R man in the 1960s. Would you mind recounting that episode and why you dropped out of the scene for a while after that?

Rocky: I was working very hard to support myself, my wife and two kids when I found out that the Columbia Records guy in charge of my account had embezzled around $45,000 from the account. He had been giving the band members money every Christmas to keep quiet about it, but one of the guys had a strong conscience and sent me $500 one Christmas and told me what was going on. Before I could do anything about it the guy from Columbia died. I’m not sorry I quit playing in disgust, since I spent that time in basic electronic research and racing MGs and Mini Coopers, activities that enriched my life immeasurably.

Culturespill: Is the music business any more or less corrupt now than it was back then? How, in your view, has the industry changed over the years?

Rocky: It’s the same old corrupt money-grubbing sewer, with fancy new clothes.

Culturespill: You say that in 1969, you quit your regular job, grew your hair long “and started playing rock ‘n roll again and never looked back.” What brought you back to the music business at that time, and why did you, as you say, “never look back”?

Rocky: I was doing most of the actual work for an IBM machine leasing company in Tulsa, maintaining the equipment of my own account and also the account of an inept bumbler who couldn’t fix a bicycle bell, let alone an IBM machine. When the boss was kicked upstairs, they made the bumbler the new manager. When I raised hell with them, they explained that they couldn’t give me the management job. “Who would fix the machines?” I told them they still had that problem, since I was quitting. I never again worked for “The Man.”

Rocky as “Rocky Curtiss” in a Publicity Photo

Culturespill: Other artists from your generation—such as Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and even Leonard Cohen—are enjoying amazing popularity and success in the 21^st century. What is it, do you think, that keeps people coming in droves to see these guys live after all these years and, at least in Dylan’s case, buy their new albums by the millions?

Rocky: Their music is written from the heart, not from the wallet. People will always consume musical Twinkies, but only the real stuff can satisfy a genuine hunger. When your lover leaves and hits the bed of somebody you know, Twinkies won’t save your life.

Culturespill: Now I’m going to put you on the spot, Rocky: Who is the greatest guitarist of your generation?

Rocky: In which genre? See what I mean? Would it be Chet Atkins or Billy Grammer? Eric or Knopfler or Jeff Beck? I recall Stirling Moss once saying that the greatest racing driver of all time probably never saw a racing car, was maybe born with the reflexes and ability, but lived his (or her) entire life in the outback somewhere. One of the finest guitarists I have ever worked with, Bob Withrow, is practically unknown outside the local music scene. Who can say what other great guitarists are virtually unknown? As far as influence over other great guitarists, I have to say Cale is unmatched.

Culturespill: You’ve also dabbled in film, Rocky, starring in the 2003 Disney remake of Where The Red Fern Grows, among other projects. Can you elaborate on your interest in movies? Are they as much fun for you as playing music?

Rocky: One aspect of acting in films is the people you meet. Dave Matthews was in “Fern” and he’s a very nice guy. My stint as a crowd extra in “UHF” allowed me to meet Weird Al, one of my heroes, and the great Billy Barty. My dream is to have a speaking part in a production with Billy Bob Thornton, the greatest actor/filmmaker alive. It’s a different kind of fun, since you don’t get to see the finished product until months later. The music is right now.

Culturespill: You mention an interest in working with Billly Bob Thornton and praise his work in film. I’m sure you also know about this involvement in music. I was struck by his love of Warren Zevon; Thornton played on the album Zevon recorded as he knew he was dying of cancer, sadly passing away just shortly after its release. I wonder if you have any thoughts on the work of Zevon, yet another unsung genius who never really got his due as a songwriter?

Rocky: I’m not really familiar with Warren’s songs, except for “Carmelita,”
which is a favorite of mine. I know the song from hearing Brad Absher
and Steve Pryor do it.

I think the lack of commercial success Warren suffered was because most
Artist and Repertoire Agents, with a few notable exceptions, are shallow
fools.

Culturespill: In yet another of your many lives, you were a racer—driving a Morris Mini in the preliminary races for the 1967 Canadian Grand Prix. Since you’ve also repaired Mini Coopers in your spare time, I’m curious: any thoughts about the new Mini Coopers that BMW put out on the market in the past few years?

Rocky: The BMW “Mini” is charming and small, but it’s not really a Mini. I have a 1967 Cooper S on my driveway that I rebuilt in 1998 with a 1990’s bodyshell, so it has rollup windows and the big rear window. The reshell means it’s not a concourse car or true collector’s item, but it has a factory racing engine built by Adrian Goodenough for the Sebring 24 hour race years ago. I met Adrian a few years ago when I was in England and he identified the parts used in the engine. The little beast will do an honest 132 mph on a cool day. The BMW car is 16 inches longer, a foot wider and higher and it weighs 1000 pounds more than a real Mini, so it’s not anywhere near as fast or maneuverable as the Austin-Morriss car. I still wouldn’t mind having one for highway travel.

Culturespill: Are there any newer or up-and-coming bands/artists that either you or J.J. enjoy? Anyone you’d like to recommend?

Rocky: Can’t speak for Cale, but the artists I like the best and think will be
very large in the future are Dustin Pittsley and Jesse Aycock in the
Blues-Rock genre, Rachel Stacey in country and England’s Lata Gouveia in
the folk and pop categories.

Culturespill: Thanks so much for graciously allowing us some of your time, Rocky.

Rocky: Thanks for giving me a chance to; it was fun.

Bob Dylan’s recording career is replete with tragic omissions that might have turned mediocre albums into masterpieces–and sometimes at the least likely points of his career. In a fit of indulgent self-pity amid his now-infamous period of artistic oblivion in the 1980s, Dylan willfully refused to release some of the greatest songs he ever recorded–songs that might have established the 1980s as one of the most peculiarly fertile moments in his creative life. Many Dylan dorks (myself included) know that he kept from the public such sublimities as “Blind Willie McTell and “Foot of Pride,” recorded during the sessions for 1983’s Infidels with Mark Knopfler on guitar. He similarly refused to allow the great “Series of Dreams” to be included on 1989’s Oh Mercy–despite producer Daniel Lanois’s impassioned arguments to the contrary–taking the attitude that one more Bob Dylan song really doesn’t matter much in the scheme of things, a callous indifference that lends credence to one of two possibilities: 1.) artists really aren’t great judges of their own work, or 2.) Dylan struggled mightily to overcome the deliberate destruction of his reputation that he began after becoming disgusted with his fame in the late 1960s, a disgust that produced Self Portrait in 1969, probably the most famous “fuck you” album ever made (right up there with Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and Neil Young’s Everybody’s Rockin’).

It was a disgust that Dylan transformed into a concerted and enduring project of public self-destruction. In Chronicles, Vol. 1, Dylan describes going to such lengths as pouring bottles of liquor over his head and wandering around in public wreaking of alcohol to perpetuate the myth that he was little more than a hopeless and washed-up drunk, an artifact of a dead era to be swept under the unclean rug of American culture. In that fabulously written–if occasionally strange–memoir, we also watch Dylan wince on a car ride with Band guitarist R0obbie Robertson as Robbie asks Dylan where he will “take the whole scene,” never considering for a minute whether Dylan had any interest in being nominated Cultural Czar of the world–he clearly did not; and that, more than anything, is exactly the disdainful reluctance that contributed to so many mediocre albums Dylan produced in the wake of his creative renaissance in the 1960s. The music sucked because he wanted it to suck. He wanted to be left alone, and damaging his own reputation as persistently as he did with garbage like Down in the Groove offered him the most likely path to that desired infamy.

Throughout the book he recalls time and again a feeling that the world really did not need another Bob Dylan song, a conviction that made it rather difficult for him to turn what he called “pieces of songs” into the full-fledged comeback album they became in 1997: the brilliant Time out of Mind. Only when he saw fans thirty years his junior sing along to “Love Sick” and “Cold Irons Bound” did he realize that, yes, the world really did need more Bob Dylan songs. More to the point–the world craved them, helping Dylan rediscover an inspiration he’d left behind so long ago.

Some say that the Oh Mercy and Infidels omissions were ultimately of little consequence, because they were eventually released on the 3-disc Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 in 1991. That, of course, is totally beside the point: not only did the electric version of “Blind Willie” never see the light of day, but the withholding of these tracks kept two decent albums from ranking among his very finest at exactly the moment in his career when the world had damn-near left him for dead (and perhaps with good reason.) You only get one chance to make a masterpiece; many great bands fail to produce even one. But to hold one in your hands and send it down the trash-shoot is both inconceivable and tragic.

Bob Dylan: “Band of the Hand,” Band of the Hand (1986)

But the Infidels and Oh Mercy outtakes are merely the better-known instances of this sad pattern in Dylan’s creative life. Other work is scattered across bootlegs, obscure soundtracks and tribute albums–work which proves that, contrary to popular belief, Dylan was still operating on all cylinders in his creative dark ages from the late 1970s and through the 80s–he just didn’t want anyone to know that. Until Columbia Records decides to avail the world of these performances, a full understanding of why Dylan’s name is engraved in the American consciousness is impossible. Just listen to the work he recorded with the Traveling Wilburys–particularly “Tweeter and the Monkey Man”–and tell me he was washed up in the late 80s. To the contrary, the man remained in full possession of his faculties throughout that period, but he chose instead to take a torch to his reputation and stand by watching while it burned.

“Band of the Hand,” a track recorded for a forgotten movie of the same name from 1986, is a devastating tune produced by Tom Petty that Dylan recorded around his Knocked Out Loaded period–it is, predictably, a million times more powerful than anything that unfortunate album offers, and yet it only saw the light of day on the soundtrack to a film nobody remembers. His early-80s masterpiece, “Caribbean Wind” is, in its original form, quite simply one of the best songs the man ever put to tape. But he murdered it later on with Joan Baez and released that pathetic byproduct on Biograph after trying–and failing–to redo the song long after the fire that produced it had faded.

But perhaps no album more thoroughly illustrates this unfortunate mishandling of Dylan’s most inspired recordings than 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Dozens of tracks were recorded for the album, and while only a fraction made the cut and some of those songs went on to define his legacy (”Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” or “Blowin’ in the Wind”) a score of absolutely devastating acoustic blues numbers–tracks that foreshadow an early and growing affinity for rock ‘n roll–was tossed to a scrap heap of genius that would grow over the decades. We’re proud to offer a few glimpses of those gems here. Check out these unreleased cuts from the Freewheelin’ sessions, material that Dylan’s label bafflingly allows to languish in the vaults while releasing one inconsequential live set after another (like the 1964 Halloween concert which, compared to the Freewheelin’ outtakes, is an utter bore.) Sadly, the only way to get your hands on this stuff is if you’re lucky enough to live near an indie record shop somewhere in a large city (like NYC) that carries bootlegs (also remember that ebay is your friend.) Click on any of the titles below to hear for yourself . . .

Hero Blues (includes a false start)

Goin’ Down to New Orleans

Witchita

Baby Please Don’t Go

Quit Your Lowdown Ways

That’s Alright Mama (with full band)

Watcha Gonna Do (includes a false start)

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.

by Sara Mrozinski

In 2006 Jack White broke my heart. He released an unsatisfying album with a newly formed side-project of friends and crowned the endeavor “what he has always wanted to do”. It seemed nothing but an abandonment of Meg and a half-hearted attempt at proof of self worth. Jack said himself that he would be nothing musically without Meg, that it was her childlike hammering that made each bluesy chord of his cohesive. So then, why Jack do you wish to dilute your talent with superfluous accompaniments and banal verses? The single “Steady As She Goes” was mildly catchy at most while the album as a whole fell short of the Whitelicious masterpiece we were accustomed to. It pretty much sucked. Just when all hope was surely lost, Icky Thump was born and life was good again.

Needless to say, I was more than skeptical of the newest Raconteurs project. I accept and love that Jack White is a man of many escapades, including plastic camera and speaker manufacture, collaboration with the Gods (Loretta Lynn and Bob Dylan), cell phone protestation, and home movies of snoring band mates (sorry Meg). With the exception of the premier Raconteurs album, he hits all these ventures out of the park. Therefore, I gave him an open, yet highly analytical second chance.

Raconteurs: “Salute Your Solution”

Consolers of the Lonely, HOT DAMN! I’m sorry my lord for ever doubting your ability. I grabble at your feet in repentance! The Kinks got busy with Icky Thump and conceived Consolers of the Lonely, plain and simple. This album delivers Jack White’s signature raw energy viciously burned with blistering horns and riffs to rival Zeppelin. The band let the album speak for itself, doing zero promotion and allowing the content to leak on iTunes and the like. Bravo boys. White and company have created radio-soluble tunes capable of pushing facileness overboard. So long Linkin Park and Flobots! This album is a must for summer and pairs perfectly with open-windowed driving. After all of Jack White’s eccentric pursuits, he again proves his tireless ability to win my applause.

Rock on Raconteurs!

After a forty-year run as the master of Mellow, not much has changed on Planet Donovan. It is 2004, and the wisdom is still as abundant as the weed. Poets in berets still blow saxes in the coffeehouse at night, and flowers still don heads of bushy hair in the crowd. The man himself may be a little older now, but that doesn’t mean that he’s not coming on:

If I was your lover I’d take you to the sky
If you are feeling low I will make you high
Let me be your lover baby I will be your beau

This is not exactly the language of a man taking his social security check to the bank on the way to the golf course. In fact, Beat Café is an album that delivers the urgency and freshness one might expect from the debut album of a 20-something nobody, no less a 60-something flower-child of the original Woodstock generation.

Hushed and haunted, Beat Café plays like a long, seductive whisper from somewhere within the listener’s consciousness - a knowing and familiar voice spreading the rumor that utopia is not something that happens in the external world, but rather within the self. It is a sunrise of the soul; a placid and breezy terrain the mind brings you to when the gates of its imagination are unlocked. “Gonna do all the things I’ve never done before, gonna get myself together somehow,” Donovan sings on the downright wicked “The Question.” Many of these new tunes expand upon the kind of optimism with which Donovan managed to pit himself against that brooding, bitter and more famous American counterpart, Bob Dylan.

Donovan: “Season of the Witch”

Unlike Donovan’s last album - the spare but alluring Sutras produced by Rick Rubin for American Recordings in 1996 - Beat Café explodes into a varied and distinctive musical brew. Danny Thompson’s bass playing is worthy of Apollo’s crown, and the legendary Jim Keltner turns in a surprisingly hip performance on drums and percussion, managing to keep up with Donovan as he slips in and out of beat after groovy beat.

Whereas Rubin seemed to make a Rick Rubin record of Sutras - mired as it was in his minimalist approach - John Chelew allows for the making of a Donovan record this time around. Chelew, whose resume includes work with John Hiatt and Richard Thompson, proves a more sympathetic cohort throughout this musically fascinating project, even lending a hand on keyboards throughout the set. The atmosphere is much more relaxed and suggests that the artist was allowed to breathe freely during these sessions.

The only resemblance between this latest album and Sutras is the mystic airiness of Donovan’s lyrics, an eastern spiritualism cloaked in the psychedelic lexicon Donovan continues to employ. “You yin my yang / I’ll yang your yin,” he directs on “Yin My Yang.” For an album as overtly conscious of its heritage as this one, it seems almost obligatory that Donovan would nod to Oar, Alexander “Skip” Spence’s masterpiece of psychedelic folk/rock from 1969. “I could use me some yin for my yang,” Spence sings on his “Dixie Peach Promenade (yin for yang),” “that would make everything alright.” Spence’s work is not only a direct echo of Donovan’s “Yin My Yang,” but of the entire universe Beat Café evokes - from its “beatnik café” where “the reefer blow” to the time and place where “there’ll be music in the air/flowers in your hair/life without a care.”

But where the nostalgic lyrics retread familiar territory, the music reinvents an artist in his fifth decade as a performer. The beautifully brittle “Shambala” closes the album with a moving dream of yearning, escape and resignation:

Take me home back to Shambala
where peaceful rivers flow
Take me home back to Shambala
Where seeds of love they sow

The appropriately titled “Whirlwind” - a song that wins the “coolest groove of the year” award - is dark and sly enough to suffice as the soundtrack for a land-falling hurricane. Most startling, though, is Donovan’s impassioned cover of the folk standard, “The Cuckoo” which, amid so many interpretations of the well-traveled song, ranks as one of the most commanding and memorable.

Really, though, only Donovan’s own smooth voice manages to outdo Danny Thompson’s pervasive double bass, which thumps and groans through every minute of the album, lending a jazzy depth to the distinctly international sound Donovan achieves here. Thompson raises “The Question” into a kind of frenetic street march through “the darkest hour of night,” while abrupt solos on “Love floats” or the instant classic, “Poorman’s Sunshine,” fuse these songs with the spontaneity of a particularly inspired demo. It bears mentioning that Donovan tosses some killer guitar licks of his own into the mix, most notably on the deliciously fiendish title track.

After following up a prolific period of creativity in the 70s with two decades of piercing silence, the release of a new Donovan album is unlikely enough. That the man would emerge out of nowhere with the coolest album of the year nearly forty years after his debut is nothing short of astonishing. Beat Café is further proof that something incredible happened in the decade of assassinations, flowers and weather factions, and the story is still far from over.