Foreigner, Little River Band, Foghat, and other Great Cover Bands

My buddy Aaron is a big classic rock guy, and he and I have long discussed the idea of bands being brands that should theoretically go on forever. Steve Howe is the only guy left in Yes? So what! Keep playing, and in ten years, twenty years, and beyond, the Yes name can continue to put on good shows long after Howe is gone. After all, we can still hear Beethoven’s Fifth performed – why shouldn’t we continue to hear “Close to the Edge”?

I’ve never been as comfortable with this logic, and even Aaron is hitting his limit. He said to me this morning, “We cheer for people who have meant something to us along the way. When I see these bands, I don’t even know who I’m cheering for anymore.”

It’s a legitimate point. For example, Foreigner is on their farewell tour, and there are literally no foreigners left in Foreigner! Not a one. It’s a cover band. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being in a cover band – I’ve been in several over the years – and there’s nothing wrong with paying to see a cover band of music you enjoy, but there is something wrong with Foreigner advertising itself as Foreigner. They should call themselves “The Official Foreigner Tribute Band” or something similar – musicians who are performing under the Foreigner banner as sanctioned by Mick Jones, or whomever owns the band name.

When “Starship Featuring Mickey Thomas” is advertised, you know what you’re getting: you’re getting Mickey Thomas and a bunch of good musicians backing him up. You’re not expecting to see Grace Slick and Marty Balin.

By contrast, should Little River Band be advertising itself as Little River Band? If so, by what logic? There’s not one member in this band from their heyday. As my friend said, “Who am I cheering for?” Or Foghat – the only guy left is drummer Roger Earl, not exactly the guy people came to see when Foghat was selling out concert venues in the 70s. If they want to call themselves “Foghat Featuring Roger Earl” or something along those lines, that’s good by me.

If you’re willing to shell out $60 for a really good cover band, there’s no harm in that, but you should know that you’re shelling out cash for a cover band and not be duped into thinking that there’s anything authentic about the product. There will of course come the day when all of the original people associated with all of the bands from the 70s and 80s are long gone, by which point it will be obvious what we’re getting, but even then, I would like things to be labeled properly. Then again, the Count Basie Orchestra continues to play four decades after Count Basie’s death, and I don’t think anyone attending those shows feels shortchanged, so what do I know?

For me personally, it’s hard to get excited about listening to music that none of the performers on stage had anything to do with. But the alternative is to have the music die over time, and that’s not such an enviable ending. It’s a tricky balance. I do hope that in a hundred years someone can see “Close to the Edge” performed live; I just hope it’s not advertised as Yes.

Music vs Lyrics

In episode 10 of our podcast 1000 Greatest Misses, Christopher Grey and I discuss music and lyrics, and whether one is more important when falling in love with a composition.  I concluded that with some exceptions, music is most important to me, and that as long as a lyric isn’t overtly lame (“Hey baby let’s go out tonight, Hey baby, I’m feeling alright”) a good melody will carry the tune to the finish line for me.  But a lyric that’s embarrassingly bad will often ruin an otherwise good song.

A few weeks ago, John McWhorter of the New York Times reviewed an upcoming book called Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers and Other Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan, and concluded that the book “is a reminder that one can be massively fulfilled by language one doesn’t fully comprehend.”  I love this summation because it perfectly captures my sentiment for a band like Yes, whose lyrics are complete nonsense to me, but that still manage to be profoundly evocative.

Consider a song most everyone knows: “Roundabout.”  The lyric of the chorus is:

In and around the lake
Mountains come out of the sky
And they stand there

Nothing crazy there. Kind of poetic, maybe.  But nothing overtly comprehensible.  Now imagine if singer Jon Anderson had instead leaned on rock and roll’s worst lyrical instincts and composed the following over the same melody:

I’ve got to see you, babe
You know you’re all I crave
In the evening

Not exactly what I’m looking for in a song! And surely “Roundabout” wouldn’t be a classic if its lyrics were such garbage. It’s the same reason why a band like The Babys are hard for me to listen to. An otherwise competent song like “Every Time I Think of You” isn’t helped when John Waite sings:

People say a love like ours will surely pass
But I know a love like ours will last and last

Ugh, who farted, right? And the Babys actually outsourced this tune, written by Jack Conrad and Ray Kennedy. You’d think someone could have come up with a better lyric. Terrible.

But then you’ll get words that are kind of lame but are backed up by such a terrific groove, that it hardly matters what’s being said. I think of a song like “New Sensation” by INXS.  I dig this song despite its lyrics:

Live, baby, live
Now that the day is over
I got a new sensation
Mm, perfect moments
That's so impossible to refuse

Somehow, this works for me. I can’t explain it, and I certainly can’t defend it. But I really like the song.

Of course, the best result is the perfect marriage of music and lyrics, an alchemy that’s rarely achieved, but when it happens it can move me to my core, and it’s why I admire artists like Jackson Brown, Randy Newman, Bruce Springsteen, Rickie Lee Jones, Paul Simon, etc. When Jones sings “And I can hear him
In every footstep's passing sigh/He goes crazy these nights/Watching heartbeats go by” or when Springsteen sings “There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away/They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets”…well, damn. I’m all in. Tears, every time.

For my own compositions, just as I try to avoid musical clichés, I try to avoid pedestrian lyrics. Occasionally, I hit the mark, combining melody, harmony, groove and words that convey an emotion together that could never be achieved by their separate parts.

The beauty of song.

MEMORY AND MUSIC TIME TRAVEL

If you’re human you undoubtedly know about the fallibility of memory, how even our most-assured recollections can be put into question or proven entirely false upon further examination.  It’s reassuring then to discover that at least in some cases, my first-hand memory is spot on and confirmable. For someone who loves music and has a penchant for nostalgia (guilty as charged) the miracle of technology allows me to listen back to concerts I attended long ago. And it turns out that at least some of my memory is intact.

I recall that on October 9, 1982, during Rush’s opening song “Spirit of Radio,” vocalist Geddy Lee sang “One likes to believe in the freedom of baseball,” substituting for the word ”music” in honor of the Milwaukee Brewers victory over the Angels in game four of the ALCS earlier that afternoon. I remember it. And now I can validate it, because the entire concert is available on YouTube. When the crowd screams, my fourteen-year-old self is there, unaware that forty years later he’ll be able to access his own applause. Remarkable.

Once I discovered this defining show from my youth, I turned to other concerts from long ago, and it turns out that there are at least seven shows that I attended from 1982-1986 available for streaming. (note: I find that YouTube regularly scrubs live recordings from its vault, and the Genesis concert link is already defunct. Bummer! A new Google search can often lead to an operational link):

Rush, October 9, 1982 (https://youtu.be/xgIhhNabk10)
Genesis, November 10, 1983 (link no longer working)
Yes, March 10, 1984 (https://archive.org/details/Yes_90125_1984-03-10-AnotherTownAndOneMoreShow-Milwaukee)
Bruce Springsteen, July 12, 1984 (https://www.guitars101.com/threads/bruce-springsteen-alpine-valley-music-theater-east-troy-wi-july-12-1984.678215/)
Elton John, September 9, 1984 (https://youtu.be/G51mCqcd_r0)
Tom Petty, June 23, 1985 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNviPMup2wA)
Rush, March 24, 1986 (https://youtu.be/M4kyxrp4N1E)

Before YouTube deleted the recording, I was able to confirm that during the Genesis show in 1983, Mike Rutherford had to sit out a good chunk of the song “That’s All” because of technical difficulties, and that the singer Phil Collins encouraged the audience to plug their ears and repeat the phrase, “Masturbation will not make me deaf.”

For the Yes concert in 1984, I distinctly recall Tony Rabin accidentally adding harmony vocals to a verse of the song “Hearts” (the “Many moons cascade one river…” section) quickly dropping out when realizing his mistake, and he and bassist Chris Squire cracking up as a result. I’m listening to the concert now, and…there it is! The blunder!

The guy who posted the Elton John concert calls it, “Elton John, Stoned in Alpine Valley” and includes this description: “Although there are some contenders for this, I still consider this Elton’s most drug-fueled show.” And now I can listen to his drug-fueled performance as if Elton’s sobriety is still a decade on the horizon. (It’s also fun to think that this was supposed to be his “final American tour.” The dude’s most recent farewell tour has been going on for over four years!)

I also appreciate that my memory of setlists is sometimes more accurate than what I can find on websites that archive such things. For Supertramp’s 1983 concert from Alpine Valley, Wisconsin, I reviewed the entry on setlist.fm and immediately knew it wasn’t correct because I remembered the band performing “Waiting So Long” and “Child of Vision.” Sure enough, I just checked the notes I wrote after the show, and both of these tunes were played. Unfortunately, I can’t find any recordings on-line of the Wisconsin show or any other shows with a similar setlist. The Internet has its limitations.

But not as many limitations as memory itself. Hell, I attended a Jimmy Buffett concert with my future wife and brother-in-law in 1993, and until one of them mentioned it to me a few years ago I had no recollection of even having been there! Worse, I’ll have a discussion with a friend today and forget the contents by the day’s end. A few weeks ago I was trying to recall the name of the actress “Carey Mulligan” and it eluded me. This morning I spoke to my mom, a nurse of over four decades, and she had trouble accessing the word “autoimmune.”

I’m looking forward to the day when physicians are able to employ a defrag of our internal hard drives, allowing us to access memories accurately and quickly like Jeopardy champions. But until then, most of us will have to muddle on through life knowing that while a portion of our recollections have some truth to them, many fall in a gray area somewhere between truth and fiction.

How gray?

Say it with me Fletch fans.

Charcoal.

Deceptive Downbeats (reprised)

On Adam Neely’s latest video (fantastic, as always), he discusses something called “post-facto metric ambiguity,” a fancy term that I’ve written about previously, albeit under a different term: deceptive downbeats. It’s a way to describe a musical passage – often at the beginning of a piece – that’s difficult to rhythmically understand until a downbeat is established. I love this stuff, and there are a bunch of tunes that trip me up even after I know the “correct” way of hearing them. Neely addressed the intro to The Beatles’ classic, “Drive My Car,” and it’s one of many examples one can turn to. I definitely recommend Adam’s video (and his channel in general) and have copied below my original blog on the subject matter, written almost exactly ten years ago.

Deceptive Downbeats (a musical observation)

February 02, 2012

When listening to music, there’s nothing quite so satisfying as a surprise: a harmony that doesn’t resolve as expected, a lyric that takes a comedic twist or a melody that jumps an odd interval away.

What excites me the most (and what lays to rest any question of my geekdom) is a rhythm that doesn’t change time signatures, but that still manages to fake the listener out, intentionally or not, by calling the downbeat into question. In this scenario, what you initially hear as the “one” beat you come to find is someplace else entirely, and your ears are left to add or subtract a beat or a half a beat in order to get back in synch with a song, like dancing to a CD that skips and having to make an adjustment before you step on your partner’s toes.

My favorite example occurs in the Yes song, “Yours is no Disgrace."  For over three decades I’ve never failed to hear the first chord as landing on the “and” of four in a 4/4 measure.  Give a listen:

I hear the song as: 

But once the band kicks in, it sounds like Yes has subtracted a beat, inserting a measure of 3/4 instead of 4/4 (and with Yes, this is an entirely plausible proposition). In truth, the time signature remains constant for this part of the song, but my ears hear the downbeat incorrectly. The first note lands on the “and” of one, not four:

Even with this knowledge, I still hear the rhythm the way I always have, and after thirty years (note: now forty!), I guess I kind of like it that way.

Another example is Sting’s “Ghost Story.” This song starts similarly, with an instrumental passage absent an obvious count-in.  But even when Sting’s voice enters, the downbeat is in question:

I’ve always heard first note coming on beat two of a 4/4 measure: 

But as soon as Sting sings “Another winter comes, his icy fingers creep,” a half a beat is added, and it become clear that all along the initial note of each phrase had in fact landed on the “and” of one:

Sting uses this deceptive tactic often, though I suspect in his mind there’s nothing deceptive about it since he hears the downbeat where it should be, and there are probably many listeners who hear it correctly right off the bat. But to me, my faulty instincts add to the pleasure of the song, providing just enough jolt to keep things interesting.

AN ADDENDUM: I was going to add a “part two” to this idea many years ago and never did, but there are a few more examples I can think of off the top of my head:

The piano that begins the outro of Supertramp’s “Crime of the Century.”
The intro to “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones.
The intro to “Fortress Around Your Heart” by Sting.

Great stuff! Shoot me a message if you’ve got some other examples.

Music Geek-Out Moments

Goodness gracious, it’s been a heck of a long time since my last entry.  The longest in fact since I started this nonsense over a decade ago.  I keep mentally writing the beginnings of blogs, but for reasons that probably have something to do with the exhaustion of living through a pandemic and an election simultaneously, I haven’t been able to pull the trigger.  That ends today.  I’ve got a bunch of things to write about, but since it’s been a while I’ve decided to ease back in with a bit of music-nerd nostalgia.

If you’re really into music you can probably identify a few times in your life when you connected with a fellow music lover on a visceral or intellectual level.  You met someone who “gets you” or “gets it.”  In my museum of recollection, I could probably find dozens of worthy events to exhibit, but allow me to share just two with you today.  They’re nothing earth-shattering, but they’ve stayed with me all these years and I get a kick out of them.

Alpine Valley Music Center parking lot (i.e., a big grass field), East Troy, Wisconsin, probably in 1989 or thereabouts. 

I walked with my friends from the field packed with cars where people had spent the previous hour tailgating to the gate entrance to see Elvis Costello or Rush or Billy Joel.  (Or maybe Jimmy Buffet?  I didn’t have many Alpine Valley concerts left in me – my last time there was in 1991.)  For some reason I was explaining to my friend that although I was excited to see whomever we were there to see, that I would love, just LOVE, to see Yes on stage and have them announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, ’The Gates of Delirium.’”  Well, you would  have thought I’d just announced that Jon Anderson himself was walking behind me, because some nutjob (as in, fellow music-nerd nutjob) in cutoff jeans and a t-shirt turned toward me and shouted “Oh my God!  Yes!”  He ran toward me and literally – I’m not making this up – knelt down in front of me and prostrated himself in mock adulation.  “I bow to the altar of Yes.”  When he righted himself, his right knee was badly bloodied – he’d knelt down on broken glass!  A little remnant from someone’s tailgating a little too hard with glass bottles.  The bloodied fan looked down to examine his knee and said, “Ah well, Yes is worth it.”  We spent the next five minutes or so avoiding going to our seats and instead exchanging our thoughts on Yes, who at the time were either on hiatus or completely defunct.  I shared my opinion of the non-Jon Anderson album Drama, and we both agreed that it was good but that it shouldn’t have been called Yes.  (I’ve since changed my mind about that.  I believe that not only is it Yes, but it’s among the band’s best six albums).  We wished each other a good evening, but I’m sure we also wished that we were seeing a different band, like being stuck on a date when the woman you really want is on the dance floor with another guy. 

Fortunately, I got to see Yes five more times after this interaction, and they played “Gates of Delirium” at two of those concerts.  They even brought out “Machine Messiah” and “Tempus Fugit” from Drama on one of those tours.  I imagine that my bloody-kneed Yes friend was at some of these shows front and center.

A gas station in western Wisconsin off of Highway 94, en route from Milwaukee to Minneapolis, probably in 1992 or 1993. 

Minnesota may border Wisconsin, but going back and forth between Milwaukee, where my family lived, and the University of Minnesota, where I was in grad school, was getting mighty old.   I found that I’d regularly have to pull over at a rest stop north of Wisconsin Dells and take a 20-minute snooze just to stay awake.  It didn’t help that I couldn’t make it all the way on one tank of gas in my Toyota Tercel, so more time was wasted having to fill up along the journey.  On one such stop, I filled up my tank and walked in to pay the cashier (automated pumps weren’t a thing yet, or at least not at this station), a young guy with dark, long curly hair and a black t-shirt.  While I was waiting for the transaction to be completed, I noticed a song playing on the radio playing next to him, and the music bounced around in my brain for a bit, jump-starting old synapses in need of a good lube job.  I titled my head, nonplussed, certain that I was about to make a fool of myself, but I tentatively proceeded.  “That isn’t…is that Michael Schenker?”  The cashier froze, looked at me in eye with no emotion whatsoever, and then in one fluid motion, opened the till, took out a bill and slapped it down on the counter in front of me, as if he were jubilantly showing his winning straight-flush over an opponent’s full house.  “That, my friend, deserves a dollar!”

I’d gotten it right.  I wasn’t a fan of Michael Schenker.  I wasn’t even aware of him, really, but I remembered a song that had gotten a bit of radio play on WQFM back in 1981, and since my older brother had purchased it (the vinyl record is now in my possession), the album cover and name were somehow stamped on my brain.  Why I was able to remember this, and not, say, the name of a woman seconds after introducing herself to me, was a question better left to that great DJ up in the sky.

But damn, I was proud of that one.

So there you are.  Two geek-out moments.  I hope there are many, many more, but of course these types of interactions that make life richer aren’t possible in 2020.  Here’s hoping in 2021.  In the meantime, I’m going to get cracking at writing another blog entry.  Stay well out there!