Johnathan and James

So John Lennon's still dead, and Jim Morrison was born on this day millions of years ago and managed to accidentally top himself in the bathtub at age 27.  Two rockers whose fans ascribe the word "genius" to in many circles.  I don't, though I do enjoy what both dudes did during their lifetimes.

I was only eight years old when Lennon died.  Having not yet gotten into his work or The Beatles', I can't say that it had any effect on me that I can recall.  The first time I can actually remember thinking about John's death was when "Nobody Told Me" was released posthumously on Milk and Honey.  I enjoyed the song a lot (still do) and remember hearing it in my mom's car on the radio one day and thinking to myself how Lennon was no longer around and what a shame it was.  No, the Lennon I "grew up with" in the '80s was Julian and his tunes on Valotte.  That brings back another memory of watching a special of his on Showtime or something at the time and him playing his dad's "Day Tripper" during a live segment and my mom commenting on the fact.

After getting into The Beatles in earnest during my middle school years, the first solo Lennon album I bought was Shaved Fish.  I remember buying it in some shitty record store in a mall down in Florida and the cashier looking at another cashier and going "Look at this...Shaved Fish?!" as if I was bringing back the bubonic plague or something.  Maybe it was because she had never heard of the album and thought it was a weird title, but I got the feeling she was chastising me.  It didn't matter.  I recall putting it in my Walkman for the first time and listening and thinking, "Man, John Lennon really liked echo on everything."

As for Jim Morrison and The Doors, I've always had a love/hate thing for him and the group.  I own all the band's albums featuring Morrison and absolutely love the L.A. Woman album.  But I've always cringed at how the fans - both young and old - just ascribe that whole "genius" tag to Jimbo.  I wouldn't deem any of his lyrical skills or drug and/or alcohol-infused bravado "genius," but these are the same people (at least the younger of the ilk) who say the same lame thing about Kurt Cobain. 

To me, Morrison was an entertainer who happened to be fronting this nice little rock combo.  Sure, he sung of darker themes and breaking on through and all that stuff, but it was the mid '60s, baby, and it was the newest thing under the sun.  I will say that I find The Doors' music to be the most enjoyable to come out of the west coast at that time, certainly much better than all the hippie nonsense wafting out of San Francisco at the time.  That whole peace and love trip seemed better served under Jim's death trip vibe than taken seriously as a recourse for society's ills.  Jim often threw the word bullshit around.  Was he aware of his own?  Maybe, but by the time his gut and beard had fully blossomed and his voice was a shadow of its former glory, The Doors became less mythological and more earthbound.  It started on Morrison Hotel and made its logical conclusion on the blues-drenched L.A. Woman.

I recently watched the new documentary on the band called When You're Strange and felt that it lacked the visceral action and groove of Oliver Stone's maligned The Doors.  Though the new film allows the story to be told through archival clips of the band, Stone's flick made the group all seem larger than life.  After seeing it, you couldn't help but want to hear some of the band's tracks and learn more, no matter how much of it was or wasn't sensationalized.  The new film just feels like a plain vanilla examination of the group.  The drama distilled into something less frenzied.

Anyway, another anniversary comes and goes for these two.  Lennon's work has all been remastered and reissued yet again, and The Doors had their groovy 40th Anniversary mixes issued not too long ago.  The music remains vital.  The messages contained therein may or may not be as urgent depending on who you are and where your tastes lie.  To me, "Imagine" was the apex of Lennon's naivete towards the whole "Peace, brother!" message he and Yoko had cultivated since 1968.  To millions of others, though, it remains a song of hope.  Personally, I always found tracks like "Mother" to be a little more convincing.

Paul McCartney's '70s Wilderness

Poor Paulie McCartney. The guy hasn't been able to buy a hit single in what seems like ages. Not that it matters to him or his fans, but I remember the days when you'd hear a new Macca tune on the radio and it'd be a hit. I suppose the last time I really recall that happening for him was when he released Flowers in the Dirt and managed to score pretty well with "My Brave Face," "This One," "Put It There," and "Figure of Eight."  Then he kind of slid into a mediocre phase that his harshest critics had always accused him of peddling.

But enough of that.  Let's go back to the early '70s after The Beatles called it quits and Paul demanded that his first solo album be released before Let It Be.  It retrospect it makes sense in a backhanded way towards McCartney.  Let It Be was hardly a high note of the Fabs, but it was certainly more interesting than most of McCartney.  So John and Paul battled it out through tunes back and forth, culminating in Macca putting a picture of two beetles screwing on the back of his second LP Ram and dropping lyrical references to the misery in "Dear Boy" and "Too Many People."  Lennon attacked back with "How Do You Sleep?" on his own Imagine.

Fuck the Beatles, we got to rock!

Yes so the ex-Beatles were having a field day with their pissing contest.  Meanwhile, Paul decided to form a new band, christened it Wings and took the group a-touring in a little van across the English countryside, making surprise appearances at various colleges and the like.  Exciting stuff, to be sure, but music-wise McCartney crapped out the weird and loose Wild Life as Wings' debut.  Even stranger, the album managed to get all the way to #10 on the charts.  Back then, Paul could release absolute junk and it would sell because the fans were so rabid for the product.

How dare you bust Paulie for pot!  Now let's go make an album.

I really hated Wild Life for a period in my life.  As I've gotten older, though, I enjoy it quite a bit.  "Mumbo" might not be anything than a loosey goosey soundcheck, but it rocks harder than anything Paul does these days.  The pot-infused cover of "Love is Strange" is pleasant, and "Some People Never Know" is a lost classic.  Linda got to debut her vocals on the slight "I Am Your Singer," but even at this point Wings managed to create its own sound.  As the band got better, you always knew when you were listening to a Wings track on the radio.  So that's already in place.  Paul even managed to find the time to sing a kind song to Lennon entitled "Dear Friend."

Adding Paul's name first made the music sell like hotcakes!

After the album was released and met a scathing reception, Paul expressed disappointment that he had recorded it so fast (apparently he did so because he had read where Dylan had done his latest LP in a really short amount of time), but he also thought maybe the public at large didn't realize it was his band.  So for the next release, the wonderful Red Rose Speedway, the band became "Paul McCartney and Wings."  Hopefully after all these years, Paul has realized that it was the overall quality of Wild Life that let the folks down, and not that they didn't know who recorded it.

Red Rose Speedway has always been overlooked in the Macca canon.  It spawned the gooey and forgettable hit "My Love," but it also contains some of Paul's best stuff pre-Band on the Run superstardom.  The opening "Big Barn Bed" perfects the Wings vocal harmony formula and rocks well.  "One More Kiss" is a cross between English country and the old style stuff that Paul was so fond of and recreated himself in tracks like "Honey Pie."  "Little Lamb Dragonfly" is a lovely, slightly surreal piece of work.  And my absolute favorite is the gorgeous "When the Night."  At times Red Rose Speedway may seem slight, but it also features McCartney doing a sort of last grasp on the old experimental Beatles formula that was still fresh at the time.  Hell, Henry McCullough's guitar playing is worth it alone, even on "My Love" where his solo is the best thing about the whole song.

The album was a good primer for what was to follow.  It put Paul back in a larger spotlight, and even led him to do such things as the "James Paul McCartney" TV special which featured some tunes from the LP amongst other numbers.  Probably the most unfortunate thing to come from all this, though, was Paul and Linda's joint decision to start sporting mullets, a choice that they wouldn't change until around the time of London Town.  I suppose one could accuse Bowie of setting the trend, but I would rather think it was the sweet, sweet dank that the McCartneys were ingesting at a sizable rate at the time.

Ah mullet, much later.

The weird mess that was Todd Rundgren and Utopia

Back in my high school years, circa grade 10, I found myself getting knee-deep in the music of Todd Rundgren.  At the time, Todd was one of my faves.  His lyrics seemed to speak to a lot of my silly teenage angst and his quasi-religious (or whatever you wanna call it) treks fit the open-minded/open-ended opinions I had on such stuff.  However, his band Utopia was a harder sell for my ears.

Not that that was strange, really.  Utopia was never a band that quite fit.  And not in the Velvet Underground or Big Star sort of way.  Utopia's biggest problem was that since it was Todd's baby, its formula would constantly change from album to album, much like Rundgren's solo work.  But Todd doing something different each time out in a solo manner was more intriguing than having to slog through Utopia's myriad changes.

In the beginning, Utopia had a shitload of dudes in it.

Look, you can chalk the first bit of confusion up to the fact that it was the '70s when the band debuted (1974) and listening to the prog rock mess of Todd Rundgren's Utopia is still a challenge for most.  Personally, I still enjoy the epic side-long "The Ikon" (clocking in at just a shade over 30 minutes), mainly for Todd's wacko guitar work on it.  The goofy lyrics leave a lot to be desired, but Rundgren manages to weave some pop sensibilities into his trip.  The rest of the album (the first side) is a drag.  "Utopia Theme" is a chore. "Freak Parade" is a mess, and the short "Freedom Fighters" is mired in the kind of craptastic noodle-headed comic book philosophies that bogged down a lot of the slightly more "progressive" artists at the time.  Utopia was no Rush.

The second version of Utopia during the goofy RA phase.

The first version of the group with its too many members squeaked out a crummy live album after that, featuring one decent tune that was marred by leftover hippie nonsense ("The Wheel").  After no one bothered to care about that LP, Rundgren pared the band down to a quartet and shat out the cosmic slop known as RA.  The band dressed in bad Egyptian attire on the album's sleeve and managed to turn out a couple decent tunes ("Communion with the Sun" and "Jealousy") and then managed to mess up most of side two with the boring "Singring and the Glass Guitar (an Electrified Fairy Tale)."  Again, Utopia was no Rush, whose own 2112 pretty much set the benchmark for this kind of thing.  So Todd reconfigured what Utopia was all about again and came up with a new formula.

 

Oops!  Wrong audience.

1978's Oops! Wrong Planet was a step in a more pop-oriented direction.  The only thing leftover from the prog crap was the giant pyramid that Todd would scale during live shows featured on the front cover.  There were no epic tunes this time, just regular-length tracks.  My fave of the bunch has always been "Windows" featuring vocals by keyboardist Roger Powell.  This is where you'll also find the not very tough "Love in Action" and the overrated "Love is the Answer."  "Trapped" and "Crazy Lady Blue" were fine and overall the album was better than its predecessors on the whole, but that really wasn't saying a lot.

New decade, new duds, same sales.

So the '80s dawned and Todd was faring better with his solo stuff as usual.  Utopia trotted out Adventures in Utopia in 1980 and scored a "minor" (something like #65 if memory serves correct) hit with "Set Me Free" sung by bassist Kasim Sulton.  But there were better songs, like Todd's New Wave ballad "Second Nature," the fantastic "You Make Me Crazy" with vocals by drummer John Wilcox, and the silly "Shot in the Dark."  At this point it seemed like the band was humping the comic book ideas completely with songs like "Last of the New Wave Riders."  Fans will note that on the LP and subsequent reissues that the album was a supposed soundtrack for a TV special that never aired, with each of the tracks coming from a different episode.  To my knowledge an actual series was never produced and the "concept" was just that.  Weak sauce.

Well, anything's better than the Egyptian garb.

But making a slight dent in the pop charts wasn't satisfying enough for Todd, so next up we got the Beatles send-up Deface the Music which actually had some killer pop tunes on it, but sold like dead rats on a buffet as it was released around the time John Lennon was killed and no one couldn't have cared less.  But it is worth checking out, especially if you're a Beatles fan, though it doesn't come close to the fun of the first Rutles LP.  Not to be deterred, the band reconvened and spat out Swing to the Right, a collection of tunes inspired by Reaganomics and all that stuff some of you kids may remember.

Actually, the album has some really solid tunes on it and is worth delving into, even if it seems like a difficult listen at first.  Rundgren and pals were finally honing something approximating coherence here over an entire album.  "Shinola" is one of Todd's best and nastiest bits, and the New Wave/disco groove of "Fahrenheit 451" is tasty.  "Lysistrata" is the one Todd would trot out during solo gigs, and the cover of "For the Love of Money" is pretty damn good.

The band's best LP.  No one cared

Following this, the band and Rundgren split from the Bearsville label and started setting up shop on crummy indie imprints that no one ever heard of.  The first release, simply entitled Utopia is the band's best work, bar none.  The original LP featured 15 tracks across three sides of vinyl.  Here you had everything from the favorite "Feet Don't Fail Me Now" to "Princess of the Universe" to the terrific "Bad Little Actress" and "Hammer in My Heart."  The band nailed it dead on.  It should have been a hit, especially in the early '80s when it was issued, but like everything else the band did, it basically sank without a trace, known only by the band's fans.

Christ, let's just call it a day already.

The frustration of missing the public yet again began to take its toll and the last pair of Utopia albums, Oblivion and POV were rather depressing affairs.  I always preferred the former over the latter as it at least had stuff like "Too Much Water," "Love With a Thinker," "If I Didn't Try," and the oddball "Bring Me My Longbow."  It's actually not too bad, but suffers from a sort of over processed sound a lot of albums were punched through at the time.  POV, on the other hand, had the corny "Mated," the decent "Crybaby," and the goofy "Zen Machine."  Meh.

And then it was over.  Todd called it a day on the group.  The last offering was a "best of" compilation of the last three albums called Trivia, which featured two "new" tunes, the decent "Fix Your Gaze" and the ho-hum "Monument."  Years passed and in the early '90s the band got together briefly and released the live Redux '92: Live in Japan.  Again, only the hardcore cared, and again the band was put to rest.

It's hard to assess what Rundgren was going for with Utopia.  Aside from the great self-titled album, you could basically cherry pick ten tracks from most of the other albums and have everything you need to know about the group.  To my ears, there was always just something about the sound of the band that wasn't quite right.  Why Todd felt the need to have a regular band format crank out these albums when he would have been just as adept at doing them himself is worth pondering as well.  There are people who will swear by this group.  I love a lot of Todd's work, but honestly I find a lot of Utopia's tracks to just be pointless.  I suppose Todd did, too, after years of trying to make it work.

Blog pinger

You know I'd give you everything I've got for a little peace of mind.

So here it is.  A new blog.  A new step in the process of yours truly moving forward with the writing thing that he abandoned for a while.  Not that it truly mattered in the grand scheme of things, but I did miss doing it all.

Who am I?  You don't know?  That's OK, some days I don't, either.

Music critic (Fufkin, PopMatters, Bullz-Eye; my own trip known as "Echo From Esoterica" from 2001-2004), musician, writer, pop culture sponge.

So yeah, a reboot of sorts.  A dabbling in this and that, of something and nothing.  Who cares?  The kids get it for free via texting and push notifications.  Back in my day we still used typewriters.  Big deal, I know.  It doesn't exactly inspire OMFG, does it?  It's not supposed to, really.

I just turned 38 recently.  Wasn't I just 28, or 18?  Can't really remember 8, though I'm sure it was undoubtedly grand.  So much to recall but only I care. 

The blog as an egotistical landfill.  Everyone's got one, don'tcha know?  Some of 'em gain Importance!  You might even get featured on NPR where they'll talk about you in that weird, almost-stoned/sort of robotic not quite but pretty much monotone.  Weird.

I'm beginning to wonder if The Beatles are my favorite band of all time and not The Velvet Underground as I always proclaim them to be.  It's all tasty.