Metaphysical California: Jenny Lewis, The Voyager

Jenny Lewis in 2006

A friend who knows more about rock music, including the unglamorous business of music, than I do admitted that she didn't know The Voyager album.  Released in 2014, this laid-back yet challenging indie-pop album by Jenny Lewis suggests a 21st-century film noir.  It's a satisfying meta-movie set to a groovy soundtrack by a self-deprecating hipster.  Lewis is an artist who's unafraid to get personal, even confessional, in her candor.  The Voyager is her long-awaited masterpiece.

At times this ten-track record suggests the disciplined soul of Beach Boys wunderkind Brian Wilson.  It follows in the footsteps of Fleetwood Mac in its 1977 heyday.  Jenny Lewis is the aesthetic heir of the Laurel Canyon '70s scene.   Singer-songwriters such as Joni Mitchell & Neil Young thrived in that environment.  The Voyager is a shimmering collection of introspective songs, a brilliant collaboration with producers Ryan Adams & Mike Viola.

As the similarly gifted Neko Case, Cat Power & Aimee Mann do on their best records, Lewis takes the listener on a trip to aural Nirvana, traveling through a landscape populated by lonely people.  There's "a john gettin' a hand-job on the balcony below."  She rests at a cosmic motel where "you'd better hide the weed 'cause the maid is at the door."  Lewis moves gracefully from acid-tongued resentment ("Just One of the Guys") to a restless dream-reverie ("The Voyager").

Indeed, on the title track Lewis offers a world-weary, yet stoical, deadpan mantra for aspiring fellow escape-artists in search of Paradise Lost:

Jenny Lewis, The Voyager (2014) - cover artwork

The voyager's in every boy and girl

if you wanna get to heaven get out of this world . . .

You're the voyager! I'm the voyager!

Whether it's performed live, broadcast or commercially recorded, good music is angelic & generous.  As novelist Rick Moody puts it in his masterful book of essays, Celestial Music & Other Adventures in Listening (2012):  "Music has soul."  Moody goes on to expand his thesis with an intriguing argument, albeit rather awkwardly phrased:

"Why music, then?  Because when we sing it and play it, we are not only imitating the things that are, but we are [also] praising the things that are, and praising is good, and you find it, too, in almost any account of heaven.  The angels sing their praises, and when we sing, according to, among other, the Levites, we are imitating the angels." [- p. 280, italics mine]

Moody laments the loss of vulnerability in contemporary popular music, as exemplified in Otis Redding's riveting live performance of the Memphis soul hit "Try a Little Tenderness" at the Monterey Pop Festival (June 1967).  "Longing, and compassion, and tenderness are heavenly, and they make you better than you otherwise were."

Jenny Lewis's songs are rife with melancholy longing & melodic tenderness.  Her recordings have always felt intimate.  She's a clever, compassionate & bemused artist.  Other musicians respect her skills, as evidenced by the notable guest artists who appear on her albums.  Benjamin Gibbard (Death cab for Cutie) performs on Rabbit Fur Coat.  Benmont Tench (of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers) & the Watson Twins play on The Voyager.  Beck & Ryan Adams also perform on The Voyager.

Lewis is keen to project an attractive media image in her CD artwork.  The Voyager, for example, features a booklet of photos of Lewis posing in sunny weather wearing a pastel rainbow jumpsuit.  Even when issuing work with other musicians, she's a self-confident artist who wears her heart on her sleeve.

Jenny Lewis, in fact, reveals a genius for collaboration.  Her first major group, alt-county indie-rockers Rilo Kiley (1998-2011) issued several good records & toured regularly.  Signed as a solo artist by Conor Oberst to the Team Love label in 2004, Lewis put out the poignant Rabbit Fur Coat album (2006), featuring the gorgeously harmonizing Watson Twins, Chandra & Leigh.  More recently, she made the intriguing Jenny & Johnny album I'm Having Fun Now (2010), a project shared with her romantic & artistic partner Johnathan Rice.

Ironically, this California-based angel arrived via Sin City.  Born Jennifer Diane Lewis in Las Vegas to show-biz parents in January 1976, Lewis was a child actress.  Her film work ranges from a comic pre-teen role in Troop Beverly Hills (1989) to a dramatic role at age 21 in Pleasantville (1998).   Lewis has a family legacy to build on:  her singing mother Linda & a Harmonica Gang member father Eddie Gordon instilled ambition in Jenny.  Fortunately for Lewis's fans, her Ma & Pa apparently encouraged their precocious redheaded girl's considerable talents early on.

Jenny Lewis continues to take advantage of visual platforms.  In 2014, for example, she contributed an exclusive track, "Completely Not Me" (a collaboration with Rostam Batmanglji of Vampire Weekend), to that semi-feminist HBO show Girls.  Indeed, Jenny Lewis plays well with others.  She covered the Traveling Wilburys' "Handle with Care" in collaboration with M. Ward, circa 2006.  She appeared as a guest artist on Brandon Flowers's album Flamingo (2010).  And she sang a lovely duet with Elvis Costello on CBS's Late Show with David Letterman in 2011, when her Acid Tongue CD came out.

Throughout her nearly 20-year music career, she has demonstrated how to make sound-art that's catchy & yet gets deep.  Put simply, The Voyager rings true.  It's a fascinating document, one artist's take on loss & yearning.  A memorable portrait of our era, a time after "the Twin Towers fell / and it all went to hell."

A love-letter to Madison: culinary delights, mad music & an ethnic festival

Many Wisconsinites have no clue what a gem their state capital has become.  I confirmed my appreciation for Madison during a recent five-day sojourn (May 14-19).  Now, after a Memorial Day afternoon spent drinking in Racine at a weird backyard concert-cum-foodfest for the over-60 crowd - ironically, next door to the former home of Victor DeLorenzo’s (the Violent Femmes) parents on Markridge Circle - I felt like many former Madison residents who reside here in (what used to be called) the Belle City:  as though I’d been exiled from the Land of Oz for some unfathomable Kafkaesque reason.  

The cover bands that host John hired for this geriatric gathering in Mt. Pleasant were serviceable.  A duo called Mississippi Blue played songs by Bob Dylan (“Visions of Johanna”), Jackson Browne (“Running on Empty,” at my request), Steve Earle,  the Eagles et al.  Milwaukee’s Freddy & the Cruisers, a tight 4-piece oldies band featuring a great female drummer who owns a groovy customized 1959 Morris Minor work-van to haul her kit.  As much as I dug talking with the musicians, I met just one interesting person in the audience, a bearded boy who interned for Will Allen’s inner-city Milwaukee community-garden project in 2010.  

By contrast with the vitality I’d observed in Madison, the holiday scene in Racine was on life-support.  In one case, almost literally.  As I approached to get a brat, the geezer tending the dual grills appeared to be stroking out.  I could not rouse him from his glazed unconsciousness as he slumped in a lawn chair.  “It’s only 12:15 and already there’s one fatality,” I thought.  But I’m glad to report that the glazed gent recovered; he did not die at his duty-station beside the sizzling meat after all.  

Meanwhile, I prefer to recall my extended weekend in Oz (i.e Madison).  Arriving on Wednesday afternoon, I met my friend Tony (aka Sky), a state office worker, at his westside home.  We walked his border-collie Dylan in a rustic neighborhood woods with freshly sculpted mountain-bike trails (Rocky Bluff, just north of Hoyt Park).  Then we settled in for refreshments on the sunny deck of his nicely landscaped backyard.  

Sky & I have known each other since 1966, our first grade at St. Edward’s elementary school in Racine.  We remained friends throughout Catholic high school (St. Catherine’s), but lost touch, reconnecting after Sky’s post-Peace Corps move to Madison in the late 1990s.  I’ve lived in the liberating mini-metropolis of “Madtown” several times since my undergraduate days at the University of Wisconsin (1980-86).  I even served for eight months as an Assistant City Attorney there in 2001.  (Prosecuting traffic & underage-drinking cases proved too stressful - yet, paradoxically, too mundane - for me.)   

My mission for the next five days was twofold:  (1) to sample Madison’s delicious & diverse mid-May cultural offerings; and (2) to find a female lover.  (I’ve been involuntarily celibate for so long now that my condoms have expired.)  I regret to report that I failed to achieve my second goal, despite heroic attempts at dancing, flirty conversation & smoldering eye-meets.  I did, however, succeed at savoring the essence of this city of colleges, music-clubs & interesting restaurants built upon an isthmus straddling Lakes Mendota & Monona.  

You might’ve heard that Otis Redding, as well as several members of his backing band, the Bar-Kays, died in the shallow waters of misty Lake Monona on December 10, 1967.  The tragedy was due to a mysteriously doomed flight (cause:  officially undetermined) from Cleveland.  Sadly, it’s true - there was one survivor & six victims.  For more details, see:  http://host.madison.com/news/local/doug_moe/doug-moe-years-later-questions-still-remain-over-otis-redding/article_c4101fa0-4236-11e2-b870-0019bb2963f4.html.

But at least those legendary recording artists gave their lives for a good cause:  they were bringing hot soul music up from Memphis and sharing it with the many Stax/Volt fans awaiting their arrival at the Factory on Gorham Street in Madison, anticipating the charismatic Redding acting as a sort of tall black swivel-hipped Santa Claus.  You can watch his riveting perspiration-soaked performance at the Monterey Pop Festival (June 1967) in a documentary film of that name. 

So now it’s Wednesday evening on State Street, downtown Madison during graduation week.  Model-hot young folks are strolling past everywhere you look.  Sky & I head for the Orpheum Theater, a vast vaudeville house turned ornate movie palace turned occasional music hall, to catch Neko Case & her band in concert.  She did not disappoint her adoring fans, delivering a solid soulful performance of her many brilliant songs (e.g. “Margaret vs. Pauline” & “This Tornado Loves You”).  

Backed by four middle-aged white guys (maybe there’s hope for me after all) plus harmony vocalist Kelly Hogan, who proudly announced that she lives in Evansville (Wisconsin/USA) Case delivered the musical goods - as well as some funny lines of banter.  The only sour note was struck by some moron yelling “Fight harder & show us you love us!” in a belabored allusion to the title of Case’s 2013 album The Worst Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You.  Neko graciously ignored the wiseass remark.

Suddenly it’s the weekend.  My pal Dave, unfortunately, is too tired from teaching high school all week to go out on Friday.  The evening before, Dave & I dined on carne asada & a Bad Breath Burger, washed down with refreshing Lake Louie pilsener beer, at the Weary Traveler gastro-pub, located next to a tattoo parlor & Star Liquor at 1201 Willy Street.  So I venture out solo, guided by the ample music listings in Isthmus:  there are 40 venues in metro Madison featuring live shows that Friday.  

My first stop:  Bandung, an appealing Indonesian restaurant & bar at the foot of Williamson (aka Willy) Street - next door to Madcity Music Exchange, where I’d traded eight vinyl jazz & hip-hop albums for $7.00 that afternoon.  Located within a stone’s throw of Lake Monona & a mere kilometer from the site of the famous citizens’ 2011 Rotunda Revolt against Gov. Scott Walker’s evil Act 10 (gutting most civil-servants’ hard-won union rights) inside Wisconsin’s historic domed 1900-era limestone state capitol, Bandung offered two musical acts that night.

The first band was called the Oudists, an exotic trio of oud-player, hand-drummer & a woman singing in Arabic, rendered even weirder by a pair of 40-something blonde Caucasian-American ladies belly-dancing.  The headliner stunned me:  a duo from the larger Brazilian-music group Samba Novistas, featuring Rio de Janeiro native Anapaula Strader on vocals (alto) & Madison native Jeff Alexander on a sensitive tropical-wood acoustic guitar.  (A pair of amateur guest percussionists barely enhanced the sound.)

I felt privileged to be among the dozen patrons digging this swinging samba duo's melancholy yet lively repertoire of Brazilian songs, originals (in English as well as Portugese) & covers, including Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”  Anapaula may have botched Bob’s lyrics, but her emotional interpretation of that resigned dirge was spot-on.  Jeff & I shared some medicinal herb on the patio after the gig (marijuana was decriminalized decades ago in enlightened Madison:  you’re legally allowed to possess up to one ounce at home).

Saturday in nearby Stoughton (Wisconsin/USA), a Norman Rockwell-esque town of 13,000 souls, it was Syttende Mai.  The 17th of May is a national holiday in Norway & Stoughton is rotten with beautiful blonde Norwegian-Americans.  On this date in 1814, Norway ratified its first constitution, cementing independence from Denmark.  Dave, his elderly but still fun parents I checked out the local Edvard Grieg (male) Chorus, some gorgeous pieces of rosemaling, a folk-art style of painting on practical wood products) & a craft fair.  We sampled tasty Swedish meatballs & ate some lefse, a simple tasty pastry, in a 1930-era Art deco-style armory, at a benefit for the local Norwegian Dancers.

On Saturday night, back in Madison, Dave & I plus a few friends caught VO5, a disco-era costumed curiosity, on the UW Memorial Union Terrace.  Drinking a pitcher of local craft beer with a friends on the comfortably packed terrace was pleasant, but the throbbing music impeded our conversation.  So I joined the crowd of ecstatic dancers instead, eventually dancing with Lulu - an immigrant from Mexico City - and her knockout Spanish friend to covers of ABBA, the Bee Gees & other disco-era hits.  My body & soul both got a revitalizing workout under the stars.

Sunday brought the WORT-FM (listener-sponsored idiosyncratic "community radio") Block Party at a new location.  Thanks to a few whiny neighbors on Doty Street, the party had to be moved from its usual perfect shady spot on the block alongside WORT’s studios.  Jim Goronson & the Madison Homebrewers & Tasters Guild slogan, No Crap on Tap, was still credible.  I drank a Grumpy Troll (Mt. Horeb. WI) Belsconsin, compliments of the enigmatic yet generous Johna Roth, who was visiting from Portland.  I chatted with friends & stood in the sunshine outside my old workplace (Office of the City Attorney).  The music was mostly mediocre, but the weather was spectacular.  To cap off a perfect afternoon, the kind lady who owns the Banzo falafel food-truck shared some yummy hummus & warm pita bread with me.

Returning to Racine was a downer after my adventures in metropolitan Madison.  But I’m trying to make the best of it here until my next visit to Wisconsin’s fantastic capital.  If you’re still skeptical, go see for yourself how amazing Madison can be in the warm months.  You will not be disappointed, unless you're already dead inside.

[© 2014 by J.C. Mrazek]

Jews Who Rock, a no-jive turkey & shelter from the storm: my weird day in metro Milwaukee

Before I get to the Jews Who Rock exhibit, I have to mention a few odd phenomena that crossed my path yesterday in metropolitan Milwaukee.  While hunting for the new ReThreads (a clothing swap-store) on East Capitol Drive in tony Shorewood, I spotted a wild turkey behaving in a fairly civilized manner outside the Wells Fargo bank on Oakland Avenue.  I swear that I did not hallucinate or otherwise imagine any of this surreal tale.

The preening cock stood over three-and-a-half feet tall & he was all business.  He let passersby know, by economical body language alone (rarely making so much as a peep), that he was not a bird to be messed with.  Some teen girls out on lunch break from Shorewood High School gave that no-jive turkey a wide berth as they scuttled past, shrieking and giggling.  I didn’t spot a single cop or animal-control officer anywhere.  

In New Orleans or Key West such a sight wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow.  But this was Shorewood, residential base to mostly wealthy whitefolk & the hometown of ultra-square US Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist.  It’s the kind of inner-suburb where yoga-panted 30-something MILFs perambulate their pampered progeny past Russian-Jewish immigrants' shops to the nearest fancy cafe in high-performance strollers.  So I smiled, silently applauding that rogue fowl’s territorial attitude.  The turkey’s apparent contempt (shades of Neko Case’s animal-rights anthem “People Got a Lotta Nerve”) as he observed the passing parade of vehicles & boutique shoppers certainly suited my mood. 

My laptop wasn’t charging, so I drove to the Apple store at nearby Bayshore Mall in Glendale at around noon.  A pretty blonde greeter referred me to Asher, a wispy ginger-bearded sub-manager.  This tall, skinny dude informed me that the next available appointment with one of their “geniuses” was at 4:30.  Well, I didn’t need a genius to tell me that Apple Inc. and its arrogant minions didn’t give a shit about my eBay-bought iBook and its short-circuiting adapter cord.  So I split, arriving at a Colectivo cafe in the old water-system pump-house near the McKinley Marina for a salad and some people-watching in the downpour.

Afterwards, I stopped by the Jewish Museum of Milwaukee (est. 2008) to check out a new exhibit I’d just read about in the Shepherd Express, latest publisher of my freelance journalism.  On display through August 10th, Jews Who Rock is a single-room exhibit about Jews who helped make pop music & rock ‘n’ roll cool over the past six decades.  Go ahead:  try to imagine how vacuous contemporary music might’ve become if Jews hadn’t written such songs as “Jailhouse Rock” (by Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller) or “It’s Too Late” (by Carole King).  

The cast of characters ranges from Fifties deejay & payola mastermind Alan Freed to the multi-talented Barbra Streisand, who sang in her Brooklyn high-school choir with Barry Manilow.  There are nods to characters like the intermittently insane Warren Zevon, whose Pa was reputedly a Jewish gangster in LA, his Ma a Mormon (so under Jewish law, I reckon he’s no Jew at all).  Then there’s the entrepreneurial Jann Wenner, founding publisher of Rolling Stone (est. 1967) & benefactor to the gentile - but rarely genteel - Hunter S. Thompson, a gonzo journalist & self-mythologizer with rock ‘n’ roll attitude to burn.  

I cannot recommend the Jews Who Rock exhibit, if only because the museum charges adults $6 & it just ain’t worth the price of admission.  Besides, it consists mainly of predictable texts on bowling-league-sized plaques, plus some safe photographs & a few souvenir records.  Unsurprisingly, it was organized by a generic entity called “National Exhibitions & Archives, LLC.”  

Instead of paying, I emulated Al Kooper, a non-observant Jew whose display of chutzpah in May 1965 at the Columbia Records studio in New York City when Bob Dylan recorded “Like a Rolling Stone” is deservedly legendary.  Kooper finagled his way into the musicians’ room & managed to come up with an organ part that Dylan dug & made the key riff of that breakthrough song.  Yet Kooper had rarely even played keyboards before.  Less impressively, I talked my way into the Jewish Museum by offering to blog about this exhibit in lieu of paying admission.  It worked, folks, and I don’t feel a shred of guilt about the deal.

I did, however, learn something new.  Namely, that Madison-based jazz-piano master Ben Sidran (formerly of the Steve Miller Band) was, like me, raised in Racine.  Ben was born in Chicago, whereas I was born in Heidelberg (Germany), exactly twelve years after Jackson Browne met the world in that lovely town - since 1945 the HQ of the US Army in Europe.  My favorite photo in the Jews Who Rock exhibit shows Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth) circa 1964, holding an acoustic guitar at a table, seated across from Allen Ginsberg & (a guy who appears to be goy novelist) Ken Kesey with a blonde boy on his lap.  

There’s a box of puffed-rice cereal at Ginsberg’s elbow, a nice mundane touch.  Dylan looks bemused & beatific, a Beat trickster’s apprentice, a persona he frequently adopted in public before the pressures of fame drove him underground in ‘66.  The museum’s permanent exhibit is fine, if you’re fascinated by the history of Jews in Milwaukee (Golda Meir et al.).  Just know in advance that it goes on & on, like a garrulous Jewish mother (or even mine) urging you to eat the chicken soup, lest you catch a cold in this awful weather we’re having.  At least the Jews Who Rock display is presented in a well-lit room.  

Check out this ethnic niche museum if you need a break from the Summerfest crowds.  The Jewish Museum of Milwaukee, located at 1360 N. Prospect Avenue, is within walking distance of that (now all-too corporate) music festival’s beer-soaked grounds along Lake Michigan.  Bonus trivia question:  Which member of the J. Geils Band was not Jewish?  (Answer:  Mr. Geils himself!  Peter Wolf, the group’s gifted cantor - I mean, singer - hails from Boston.)

Finally, a few hours later, I was typing an e-mail at the Racine Public Library (RPL) when a young lady’s voice ordered everyone to take shelter in the basement.  A tornado warning had been issued for the Belle City & the renovated RPL has an entire wall of plate-glass facing the great lake.  As a result, a few dozen patrons - mostly women and children - hung out in the bowels of the RPL, awaiting either the all-clear or our moment of doom.  I kept humming "This Tornado Loves You" by Neko Case to amuse myself.  

It ended well, of course, and I left bearing two mint-condition albums of show-tunes by Noel Coward and Kurt Weill (another Jew), compliments of the generous Friends of the Library.  I survived the meteorological - as well as the zoological - weirdness of a thunderstorm-damaged afternoon in southeastern Wisconsin.  But I can’t help but wonder how that poor turkey’s doing.

Meanwhile, groovy Jews like Neil Diamond, Mark Knopfler (Dire Straits), Kinky Friedman (& his Texas Jewboys), Susanna Hoffs (the Bangles), Paul & Carly Simon just keep on rockin’ in the free world.  I remain eternally grateful to them as well as to their (presumably Jewish) agents & managers. 

Now picture Lou Reed entering a kosher version of Rock & Roll Heaven, where he gets to jam with fellow Jews such as Jeffrey Hyman, aka Joey Ramone (the Ramones), Buddhist convert & bassist/rapper Adam Yauch (the Beastie Boys) or Milwaukee’s own Howie Epstein, bassist with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers as well as a session player on many famous records.  Oy, play!

Square Music Hurts the Hip

We’re Square, We’re There - Get Used to It!

by Joseph Crawford Mrazek

While observing a dozen people, from teenaged to oldaged, stiffly going through the motions of square dancing at the Sister Bay Village Hall barn dance on Saturday (July 31st), I had an epiphany: the music that moves most listeners is so hopelessly unhip. Why do audiences prefer square sentimental tunes to more interesting original songs? Is it simply a matter of bad taste being commonplace? Or is there something more elusive and complex behind this troubling phenomenon?

Although the Door County Folk Alliance musicians onstage at the quaint stone bayside venue nearly outnumbered the square dancers that evening, folk and country music used to move millions of Americans. Among the first popular radio programs heard nationwide were the WLS Barn Dance from Chicago and the Grand Ol’ Opry, broadcast by Nashville’s WSM. Both of those popular-music shows started in the 1920s; the Opry can still be heard, now worldwide via the Internet and satellite radio. The nuns at St. Edward’s Grade School in Racine even bothered to initiate us aspiring rock-n-rollers into the mysteries of allemand-left and doe-see-doe in the early 1970s.

I gained some insight into the general preference for square music at a Fish Creek restaurant on that same Saturday night. On an outdoor stage beside the firepit at Gibraltar Grill, a tall grayhaired acoustic guitarist and mediocre singer with the odd stage name “Cookee” captivated a gathering of diners and drinkers. His repertoire, comprised entirely of Top 40 hits from the 1960s and the John Denver songbook, was pretty dull stuff. Moreover, this weirdly compelling entertainer (real name: Gary Coquoz) was a visual parody of middle-class, middle-aged summer tourist - i.e. Jimmy Buffett fan - style: Hawaiian print shirt, white cargo shorts, sneakers and a yellow headband. Yet, despite his cheesy baritone and corny stage patter, Cookee charmed even a jaded amateur critic like me. How’d he pull that off?

Well, I suppose he understands intuitively how music creates a temporary community out of an assembly of distracted strangers. Cookee made the audience part of his act with teasing asides and singalong choruses. He embodied the essence of effective communication: good storytelling. He fed our craving for humor, emotion and wisdom like Jesus Christ dispensing loaves, fishes and beatitudes to the multitudes. But the grizzled mustachioed troubadour Cookee, who hails from the mountain town of Leadville, Colorado, accomplished his minor miracle without invoking an original lyric or even a single note of his own invention. Nevertheless, his tip jar attracted dollars like an evangelist’s collection basket.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I love a good cover song as much as the next guy. I was thrilled, for example, when Adam Mackintosh perfomed John Lennon’s “I’m Only Sleeping” last week at Harborside Park in Ephraim. Then again, that semi-psychedelic ode to indolence remains a hip song, despite the passage of 44 years since Lennon recorded it on The Beatle’s Revolver album. Even so, I reserve my greatest respect for musicians who write their own excellent material. Unfortunately, few songwriters approach what Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley and Joni Mitchell managed to accomplish in their heyday.

Retro-chic combos playing jazz and jump-blues from the Truman era - including Shout Sister Shout, a fine Michigan-based ensemble that performed at the Peg Egan PAC in Egg Harbor on Sunday (August 1st) - have their place. But rock ‘n’ roll gradually made such sounds obsolete to most contemporary ears. The resurgence of interest among young music fans in bluegrass and other old-timey sounds is more a faux-nostalgia driven fad than a trend with commercial or artistic staying power. Hip hop can also be politically and aesthetically challenging, but it has mostly degenerated into stale ghetto cliches and empty dance beats.

Sadly, nowadays the masses go for lamer stuff than the rock and soul music that I grew up with in the ‘60s. Music buyers and concertgoers flock to such vacuous pop stars as the earnestly square Taylor Swift and the artificially hip Lady Gaga, neglecting brilliant accessible artists such as Wilco and Neko Case. If the marketplace of culture reflects the times, then we seem stuck in a sterile (albeit sometimes lyrically dirty) era. It’s true that the musical analog of comfort food can be nourishing. Among my own guilty pleasures I count Abba and The Bee Gees. And I certainly would not impose fine sonic cuisine on ears unable to appreciate it.

In the USA we can all enjoy the smorgasbord of musical choices. It’s just too bad that most of us choose junk food. It makes pop-music radio so unpalatable for listeners with above-average taste. Maybe that’s why the Sony Walkman and the Apple iPod succeeded immediately: they made it possible for every person to be his or her own private DJ, hip or square.

Tribute bands: cultural parasites or well-meaning imposters?

Having just enjoyed a fine Simon and Garfunkel musical impersonation (called a "tribute" act in the biz) in Egg Harbor, I was puzzling over this question: Do such imitators constitute a parasitical scourge on culture or a deserved homage to great musical artists? It's a busy world of perpetual entertainment, so I'll brief.

Some, like tacky Beatles tribute band Rubber Soul, which I saw recently at a casino in Madison (Wis.), commit crimes against culture. I could devise no more fitting punishment for the likes of those insect-feeding clowns than the one they've already condemned themselves to: earning their bread by competing with the deafening din of slot machines being pulled by a thousand obese grannies. The Native Americans' revenge on the British Invasion perhaps.

Others, like Messrs. Swearingen and Beedle, keep fond musical memories alive. Nostalgia, after all, sells better among Baby Boomers than sex nowadays. Besides, since the real Simon and Garfunkel are on medical hiatus (instead of touring as planned this summer), what could A.J. and Jonathan possibly do that might hurt the eardrums of a harmless crowd of old folkies hungry for a memory-taste of the Sixties?

I only hope the Roy Orbison tribute act, booked to play the Door County Fair in Sturgeon Bay on August 4th, won't disappoint those who know and love that weird genius's music. If you go, you'll have to let me know. I'll be at the New Pornographers show at the Orpheum Theater in Madison that evening - ain't nothing uncreative or especially derivative about Neko Case and her Canadian gang!

Steve & Justin Townes Earle, critical darlings

Will Hermes, one of the critics polled by Nashville Scene (NS), a local weekly, had these kind & insightful things to say in NS's 10th Annual Country Music Critics Poll (see the Jan. 7th issue at www.nashvillescene.com) about two of my favorite Americana/country musicians:

"I loved the father/son symmetry of the Steve Earle/Justin Townes Earle records, which both spoke to tradition, albeit in different ways. Pops bowed to his own creative father on "Townes," with covers that played fast and loose stylistically (see Tom Morello's weirdly appropriate hip-hop noise guitar on "Lungs"); the kid played originals looking back to a still-earlier era while also covering The Replacements. These guys understand tradition is something to be both cherished and run up against." - Will Hermes, whose music journalism/criticism appears in the NY Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, Entertainment Weekly & The Village Voice as well as on National Public Radio.

Overall, Steve Earle finished 16th with "Townes" in the NS critics poll's list of the best country albums of 2009, while Justin Townes Earle's "Midnight at the Movies" got the #8 spot. JTE was also voted the #8 songwriter, ahead of Kris Kristofferson & Guy Clark, but behind Buddy & Julie Miller & even Taylor Swift. The talented Avett Brothers took 15th with their fine record "I and Love and You." Number one went to Miranda Lambert's "Revolution." Thankfully, the Americana sub-genre is embraced by Nashville Scene's editors as being "country," rather than relegating its artists to the margins - as some narrow-minded industry leaders seem to prefer.

Sadly, Neko Case didn't make the cut in either the album, the singles or the female vocalist categories. Apparently the 77 critics who participated in NS's poll think that Ms. Case's brilliant "Middle Cyclone" strayed too far from Americana/alt-country land into pop/rock territory. But at least they showed some wider awareness by choosing Elvis Costello's "Secret, Profane & Sugarcane" as the #11 country album of 2009. Maybe that's Elvis' reward for his many years of championing New Orleans roots music & the classic songs of George Jones & his traditional country ilk. Thankfully, such quirky & often neglected artists as Lyle Lovett & Loudon Wainwright III got nods in the NS poll as well.

NOTE: I'll give you a report on Justin Townes Earle's Jan. 27th show at Nashville's hip Mercy Lounge at Cannery Row as soon as I can.