by Steve Almond
(Presto Chango) I Am Now a Rock Critic
I will remind the gentle reader that I was nineteen at the time of this review. I did not know who Bob Dylan was. I had no technical training as a musician—if you don’t count the Sosoyev years, which you shouldn’t. Had I been quizzed on the meaning of the word glissando I would have answered (with some confidence, I’m afraid) “a type of fancy ice cream.” Not to be confused with vibrato, which was a gynecological instrument. And yet, as far as the readers of the Peninsula Times Tribune were concerned, I was a professional critic.
If this sounds absurd, consider the proposition that greeted me when I arrived at the El Paso Times two years later, fresh from college. Would I like to be the paper’s music critic? Of course I would. It was like being handed a license without having to take any exams, a license that granted me front-row tickets to all the big concerts, and phone interviews during which I could indulge in the fantasy that, for example, Edie Brickell and I really were pals, based on our intense twenty-minute tête-à-tête, and that she really meant it when she urged me to stop by her trailer “to say hey,” and that if things went well in her trailer—which they very well might, thanks to my dazzling prose and chestal pelt—we would wind up engaged in a sweaty duet on top of an amp, an indiscretion she’d obviously try to write off as a fling except that she’d be unable to forget that tall, virile music critic from the West Texas town of El Paso, meaning more breathy phone calls, more visits, an eventual leak to the press, and a clandestine elopement captured by People magazine. As it is, Brickell wound up married to Paul Simon, a man much shorter than myself.
Also: I was suddenly up to my eyeballs in free music. I could call any record company on earth and direct them to send me an album. The only downside—and it was a rather large downside—involved El Paso’s unique geography, which can be best captured by the sign that greeted me as I drove into town for the first time:
EL PASO 11
SAN ANTONIO 592
Which is to say, El Paso is located in a rather remote part of the world from the American perspective, one very few concert promoters book, unless they work with country or heavy metal stars. Because El Paso is on the border with Mexico, a good number of Latin music acts also came to town, in particular Menudo, whom I reviewed three times. (If you have ever tried to make time with a grown woman by offering her a front-row seat to a Menudo concert, I propose we start a support group.)
Every year or so I got to review a band I liked, such as R.E.M. or Concrete Blonde or Steve Earle. But for the most part I was writing about Winger and Alabama and Reba McEntire and Vixen and Poison and George Strait, whom I reviewed four times, making me the only Jew (that I know of) to have his work excerpted in The George Strait Newsletter.
The coolest band I ever got to review was Los Tigres Del Norte. Los Tigres was considered a norteña band, norteña being that jaunty, synthesized stuff that blares from the storefront speakers of border towns. But Los Tigres played everything: waltzes, boleros, cumbias, and their songs were really short stories about immigration and drug trafficking, about the desperation of living in a poor country hard up against a rich one. I can remember sitting high in the bleachers of the El Paso County Coliseum, amid the viejos swigging from dented flasks, as down below five thousand couples danced, the women beaming in pink and green dresses, twirling like bright ribbons around their shy mustached men.
I should mention, mostly for the sake of my own embarrassment, that I was called upon to review many other genres about which I knew next to nothing, such as jazz and classical, the latter including a young harpist whom I inevitably compared to Harpo Marx. My central concern as a critic wasn’t the music, but the mechanics of hitting my deadline. Specifically, would the Radio Shack TRS-80 upon which I worked crash before I could attach it to the “modem.” This was a giant rubber phone cuff that somehow whisked the words from my portable computer to the newsroom. It all seemed quite magical back in 1989.
Did it ever occur to me to learn more about music? Not really. Technical expertise could be established by using a word such as “polyrhythms” from time to time, but it wasn’t required. I worked for a Gannett paper. The whole point was to write at a fifth-grade level.
The Rock Crit Paradox
Am I making excuses for being such a lazy and frankly suckass reviewer in El Paso? Yes. But I was also, in my own frankly suckass way, up against an ontological dilemma: the description of one sort of language (physical, auditory, intuitive) by another (abstract, intellectual, symbolic).
Talented critics can, of course, describe music with sonic precision. Take, for example, this passage from Sasha Frere-Jones’s review of the Canadian singer Feist in The New Yorker, a magazine I keep stored in my bathroom for research purposes:
The song is built around Feist’s vigorous acoustic-guitar strum: she plays like a street busker, strong on the downstroke and evenly loud. A three-note motif on a glockenspiel and an organ runs through the song, softening the forward motion of the guitar. In a short chorus, the guitar stops and Feist sings harmony with herself: “Ooh, I’ll be the one who’ll break my heart, I’ll be the one to hold the gun.” Then Gonzales plays a rising and falling two-note ostinato on the piano, subtly coloring the song. The accretion of felicitous musical details is typical of the album’s smart, unfussy arrangements.
Frere-Jones is certainly not messing around. He covers instrumentation, performance style, and lyrical content. True, he risks losing those of us who are musical dolts, but it certainly didn’t kill me to look up the word ostinato, which means “a musical phrase persistently repeated at the same pitch” and which I plan to incorporate into every discussion I have for the next ten years. The real problem here is emotional. The prose, for all its technical fidelity, conveys almost nothing about what the music feels like.
Consider the famous chord progression that Angus Young plays at the beginning of “Back in Black.” A good writer could tell us about those grinding, seismic chords, the distinct rhythm of their deployment, even that sly, arpeggiated little five-note lick that acts as a segue from one volley to the next. But those are just pale approximations of what it feels like to hear that intro, the squirt of sinister glee that makes most people—even decent religious folk—reach for their air guitar.
Now consider the rest of the song: the rhythmic structures (bassline, drums), Brian Johnson’s howling vocal, harmonic and tonal relationships, etc. But okay, let’s say you’ve taken your Rock Crit Steroids and you’re able to describe all these elements. How, then, do you convey the simultaneity of all that noise, the blissful riot of sound we experience as a singular thing (the song)? But okay, okay, let’s say you’ve taken your Rock Crit Steroids for years, you’re the Barry Bonds of Rock Crit, and so you manage to get this, too. You’d still be left with the Basic and Insoluble Crisis of Melody: words cannot be made into notes. And even if you somehow magically solved that crisis (which you couldn’t) you’d still be missing what it feels like for a particular fan to hear a particular song (let alone songs, let alone in concert) because this involves a collaboration between the music and the fan’s own needs: his or her own lust for joy, sorrow, power, rage, sex, and—oh what the hell—hope.
I know this from my time in the trenches, those hundreds of nights I spent with the kids who camped out overnight for tickets, or got scalped, the shy, tattered metalheads from Juárez who forked over a month’s salary for the chance to see Queensrÿche live. (Your global economy at work!) If you asked those kids to review the concert you’d get emphatic grunts. Rad! Killer! Which would be overstating the case, because their experience of the event wasn’t about words at all, but the annihilation of words, a fleeting return to primal self-expression when it was enough to bay like a wolf at the accretion of felicitous musical details.
The closest I came to grappling with the Rock Crit Paradox was at an MC Hammer concert. I stood beneath the stage watching Hammer twitch in his weird Sinbad jodhpurs while a battalion of dancers in identic
al Sinbad jodhpurs replicated his every twitch. Hammer barked lyrics about jewelry and torture. The melodies, sampled from bubblegum hits, affixed themselves to the artillery of drum machines. Lights popped and scrolled. Sparks vomited from some invisible portal. It was like watching an ad for a delicious soda that makes people want to commit murder. This was all quite clear to me. I’d even come up with a name for this soda.3 But then I looked at the people around me, there in the fifth row of the Pan Am Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico. They were all dancing wildly. Hooting at the sweaty-boobed flygirls and barking along with Hammer and (without even realizing it) mimicking little Hammerish flourishes: the frenetic Egyptian jazz hands and his mincing bucklestep. These people were plugged into a powerful communal experience. They didn’t look upon MC Hammer as a musical huckster, but an entertainer of the first rank and maybe even, in a sense, a prophet of self-assertion, proof that any man endowed with sufficient determination—no matter how meagerly endowed with talent—might gain trespass into the kingdom of fame. Yes, I was stoned.
Still, it was clear my fellow congregants were having a radically different experience from the assigned critic. So I wrote two reviews that night, which ran side by side the next morning: one from my perspective (i.e. one that cold-cocked Hammer) and one from the perspective of the fans (i.e. one that fellated Hammer). This struck me as perhaps the cleverest thing anyone on earth had ever done. Pleasantly, copies of the reviews don’t exist to contradict me.
A Brief, Not Entirely Hopeful Note for Aspiring Music Writers
It is certainly worth asking, amid this whinging, whether it is possible to write about music in a manner that doesn’t invite pity or derision. The answer is yes. Here’s a lovely paragraph I came across recently:
All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the Beale Street Blues while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.
How does one learn to write about music with such grace and precision? Easy! All you have to do is be F. Scott Fitzgerald writing The Great Gatsby.
Interlude:
Why Covering the Grammys Is Not as Glamorous as You May Have Been Led to Believe
It was this same year, 1989, that my editor sent me to cover the Grammys. I can’t remember the exact lie I told to induce this very poor editorial decision, but I’d be willing to bet that it involved implying that one or more of the nominees were from El Paso. George Michael, for instance. Eric Clapton, Frank Zappa, Sting, Iggy Pop. All native El Pasoans. Oh, and Taylor Dayne. She was actually born in Juárez.
By the time my editor got wise to my—what is it that we’re supposed to call lies these days? … Ah yes, my mis-statements—I was winging my way to L.A. My duties entitled me to press credentials, a commemorative Grammy Awards Tote Bag, and (as a bonus gift in this final year of the eighties) a vial of cocaine. Cell phones didn’t exist yet, so I had to use a pay phone to call every single person I knew and tell them I wouldn’t be available for the next few days because I was covering the Grammys.
Here’s what I figured would happen: I’d arrive at the Shrine Auditorium and there’d be this giant diamond-studded vacuum device which would suck me into the inner sanctum of The Music Industry, a softly lit pillow lounge sort of place where Prince and Springsteen would be jamming with the remaining Beatles and someone would hand me a drink and I’d get spun into the arms of Linda Ronstadt, who would be dressed in a mariachi garter-belt type ensemble and who would muss my hair in aroused proto-cougar fashion and reach into my back pocket and toss my reporter’s notebook away and laugh girlishly, then whisper into my ear that her “needs” would have to be met before she could go out and do her song, and by the way could Toni Tennille tag along?
In the event, I spent three hours standing in line outside the Shrine Auditorium, the wrong line it turned out, a line intended for those media with “floor credentials,” which explained why the others in line were so tan and nicely dressed and attractive, why they had monstrous heads and blinding teeth and hair that didn’t move: they were TV reporters. The situation was clarified by a kindly security official named DeWayne, who directed me to a second, much uglier line in the back of the building, located downwind from the septic outflow. Ah yes, the Shrine Auditorium’s anus.
The Shrine’s lower intestine awaited, a cavernous hall with folding tables and chairs and not quite enough outlets or phone jacks for the pack of unhappy print journalists who were—if our expression of collective bafflement was any indication—uncertain as to how we were supposed to view the Grammys. This mystery was solved when a green-jacketed official wheeled out a video screen. We would be watching the Grammys on TV.
It was a bit more dodgy than that, though, because we could hear a muffled version of the live performances from the main hall, then, after a seven-second tape delay, the broadcast version. Pretty much any song will drive you insane if staggered in this way, but none quite so quickly or convincingly as Metallica’s “One.”4
As members of the press, we were allowed to interview the winners in an officially licensed Grammys Holding Pen. But getting quotes meant we had to stop watching the broadcast, which was not an option, given that we had nothing upon which to predicate our panicky dispatches but the broadcast.
As a reminder, this was 1989. The most popular album in America was George Michael’s Faith. The second most popular album was the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. Rap music had just been recognized as a category and Kool Moe Dee celebrated by allowing someone not very kind to dress him in an electric blue ensemble, with bowtie. The sight of him was rivaled in sadness only by Sinéad O’Connor, who was forced to lip synch while gyrating anorexically in a halter top.
Was there drama? Yes. As it emerged, the two artists who dominated the night were Tracy Chapman and Bobby McFerrin (both El Paso natives!). Chapman had released a stark and lovely debut album that included “Fast Car,” a single I had played more than a year earlier on my college radio show. McFerrin’s claim to fame was the a cappella calypso “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Everyone had loved “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” for about a week, before realizing it made them want to puke.
Chapman won Best New Artist, Best Female Vocalist, and Best Folk Artist. She was up for all three major awards—Album, Record, and Song of the Year—and it seemed obvious to everyone (if by everyone, I can be taken to mean me) that she was going to sweep these. So I wrote my story predicated on this assumption, then began calling my friends from press row.
What happened next? I noticed the guy beside me, a loquacious correspondent for what he called “the majorest news magazine in entire Panama,” conducting a heated phone discussion in Spanish with his editor, during which he made many references to Bobi McFarrrrring, each preceded by what I assumed to be a colorful Panamanian curse word. I glanced at the TV monitor. There was Bobi, collecting the Grammy for Record of the Year. Then he won Song of the Year.
At this point, my phone began ringing. The chief copy editor wanted to know why (in the fuck) I had submitted a story identifying Tracy Chapman as the winner of these awards. I urged her to remain calm. Tracy Chapman was a shoo-in for Album of the Year. “Trust me,” I said. “I’m the music critic.”
Album of the Year went to George Michael’s Faith.
There is no need to revisit the ensuing editorial discussions. Instead, I’ll skip to the moment when—having been quietly excreted from Shrine Auditorium and driven lost for two hours around Los Angeles—I arrived at the apartment of my pal Mark, upon whose futon couch I was glamorously crashing. “What happened to you?” he asked.
Right.
The predictable thing at this point would be for me to assail the Grammys, to say something like, oh, for instance, “The Grammys are nothing more than some gigantic promotional machine for the music industry. They cater to a low intelle
ct and they feed the masses.” But it turns out that somebody already said this, namely Maynard James Keenan, the lead singer of the rock band Tool. It is probably worth noting that Tool has won three Grammys. Nonetheless, Mr. Keenan, you are right! The Grammys do cater to a low intellect and feed the masses. That’s why they exist. Mr. Keenan’s crucial error—I’m not counting his decision to name his band Tool—resides in his expectation that televised award shows reflect artistic merit. They exist to generate revenue. As such, they are potent expressions of the American spirit, nearly as potent as “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”
List #2
Ten Things You Can Say to Piss Off a Music Critic
Sonic Youth—are they the ones that do “Pass the Dutchie”?
People who don’t like Steve Miller should fucking move to Canada.
Jack Johnson is our generation’s Woody Guthrie.
Don’t you sometimes wish “Free Fallin’” were the national anthem?
