Living Proof

If all goes well ("if" being the operative word here) I will be signing a book contract within the next month or so and spending virtually every free moment of my late summer and fall working on a book about Bruce Springsteen. It could all fall through, so I'd rather not reveal any details at this point, but it's also exciting, and it looks very promising. The preliminary discussions with the publisher have gone well. I like them, and they appear to like me. We'll see what happens.

I don't know Bruce Springsteen. I met him very briefly, a long time ago, and shook his hand. He's spoken precisely two words to me: "Thanks, man." But like a lot of obsessive Bruce fans, I feel like I know him, and his songs have connected in ways that go deep down, and that consistently remind me of important truths about what it means to be a man, and alive to my family, and the town I live in, and the world I live in. I think he's the best and most important songwriter of my generation.

I'd have a difficult time naming my favorite Bruce Springsteen song. So maybe I should write a book about a bunch of them. That would be nice. Bruce has been a lot of things -- romantic hoodrat in a leather jacket, rock 'n roll icon, folk protest singer. And husband and father. So I'm not sure if this one is my favorite, but it's the best damn gospel song of the '90s, even if Bruce doesn't know it, and it's way, way up there in the Springsteen stratosphere:

Well now on a summer night in a dusky room
Come a little piece of the Lord's undying light
Crying like he swallowed the fiery moon
In his mother's arms it was all the beauty I could take
Like the missing words to some prayer that I could never make
In a world so hard and dirty so fouled and confused
Searching for a little bit of God's mercy
I found living proof

I put my heart and soul I put 'em high upon a shelf
Right next to the faith the faith that I'd lost in myself
I went down into the desert city
Just tryin' so hard to shed my skin
I crawled deep into some kind of darkness
Lookin' to burn out every trace of who I'd been
You do some sad sad things baby
When it's you you 're tryin' to lose
You do some sad and hurtful things
I've seen living proof

You shot through my anger and rage
To show me my prison was just an open cage
There were no keys no guards
Just one frightened man and some old shadows for bars

Well now all that's sure on the boulevard
Is that life is just a house of cards
As fragile as each and every breath
Of this boy sleepin' in our bed
Tonight let's lie beneath the eaves
Just a close band of happy thieves
And when that train comes we'll get on board
And steal what we can from the treasures of the Lord
It's been a long long drought baby
Tonight the rain's pourin' down on our roof
Looking for a little bit of God's mercy
I found living proof
-- Bruce Springsteen, "Living Proof"

That's from a 1992 album called Lucky Town, which was a critical and commercial bust. Many people view it as Bruce's worst album. But I'm a better human being every time I listen to that song. Sometimes this faith business strikes me as absurd. I'm just one screwed up guy living on a planet of six billion people on one of the more obscure stars off in a corner of an inconceivably vast universe. I feel pretty insignificant, and I need all the mercy I can get. And I've seen living proof, too. I can't wait to write about that song, and many others, in more detail.

Stay Positive

Tiny little text etched into her neck it said
"Jesus lived and died for all your sins."
She's got blue black ink and it's scratched into her lower back.
It said: "Damn right I'll rise again."
Yeah, damn right you'll rise again.
-- The Hold Steady, "Your Little Hoodrat Friend"

That's Hold Steady lead singer/songwriter Craig Finn with a fan named Bruce.

The first single from the upcoming (July 15th) Hold Steady album Stay Positive can be found right here. To say that this is my most anticipated album of the year would not be hyperbole. It would be true.

And, in what may be a sign of the impending apocalypse, I will be writing about Craig Finn and this album in an upcoming issue of Christianity Today Magazine. I tried to warn them. This band writes about drug abuse, casual sex, and Catholic guilt, pretty much in equal measure. But it's the Catholic guilt that stays with me. Except this is an evangelical Protestant magazine. Wish me luck.

McCain Predicts Iraq War to be Over by 2013

Right here. Inspiring, isn't it? There's a goal the country can really rally around.

Personally, I hope he keeps making speeches like this. Now if only he could add "McCain Predicts Recession/Depression Over by 2018" and "McCain Pledges to Cap Gas Prices at $11/Gallon" to the mix.

Money

That's a money tree. I'd like to plant one in my back yard. It needs to bear fruit. Immediately.

I find myself in the ridiculous position of complaining about money. Why? Because I have a good job that pays me well, I have a part-time job that doesn't pay well (music writing), but that pays something, and my wife has a good job that pays her well. Together we ought to be able to, say, make the mortgage payment, which is not an extravagant one.

But it's increasingly difficult. The biggest variable here is two kids in college at the same time. As in we will spend approximately $42,000 in 2008 to send the kids to school. They are not going to fancy private schools. They are going to state schools. And I'm looking at 2009 and I don't know how we're going to do it. They have one and three years to go, respectively. We saved what we could. And now that's gone.

There are never-ending, unrelenting demands and requests for money. Some of them -- bills of all kinds, cars breaking down, various parts of our house falling apart -- we can't ignore. Some of them are are legitimate requests from good people who represent good causes we'd like to help. And we can't. Because we have no money.

And I find myself increasingly frustrated. I don't want my life to be driven by money. This is not how I want to live. I want to be generous. But I work for an employer who keeps finding novel and creative excuses not to increase my salary, in spite of stellar performance reviews. I look at the price of gas, which has doubled since I started working for that employer, and the price of food, which has risen by more than 60% since I started working for that employer, and the price of everything else, particularly the price of education, which has skyrocketed. And for the life of me I don't understand how I'm supposed to do this. I'm using all my vacation days this year speaking about music at various universities and conferences. You know why? To earn money. I enjoy it on some levels, but one thing it is not: a vacation. It's a lot of hard work. And I can't earn nearly enough to compensate. We're losing ground, rapidly.

I know, I know. It could be a lot worse. And it could be. I know that. I'm thankful for my 1.5 jobs, and for Kate's job. But it's stressful, and we're going backwards. I'm thinking about using the techniques I saw when I lived in the ghetto: use all your spare cash to play the lottery, and buy the kids a bag of Cheetos for dinner.

Mogwai -- Young Team

Chemikal Underground Records is reissuing Mogwai's debut album Young Team on May 26th, with the requisite remastering, extended liner notes, and bonus disc featuring live tracks and outtakes.

I have a love/hate relationship with Mogwai. The whole from-a-whisper-to-an-ear-splitting-shriek approach of post-rock is sounding a little tired to my ears these days, and Mogwai hasn't done much to keep my interest over their past couple albums. But give credit where it's due. Young Team arrived in 1997, at the very forefront of the post-rock movement, and heavily distorted guitars had never sounded so unspeakably lovely and grating, often within the same song. Quiet, pastoral piano interludes are punctuated by shards of sheer noise, scraps of found conversation float in and out of the mix, and the guitars simply sound massive; no more so than in the newly remastered version of the album. The overhaul was needed, and this album sounds fabulous.

This is a highlight of '90s music, and if you missed it in '97, now would be a great time to discover the pleasure and the pain that is Mogwai.

The Gospel According to Jethro Tull

Between 1971 and 1973 Jethro Tull released three albums – Aqualung, Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play. Those albums made me question everything. They were a bad influence. My mom, if she were alive, would probably tell you that those albums turned me into a cynical atheist druggie. And she’d be at least partly right.

In 1971 I was in tenth grade. Having persuaded my parents to let me quit the Catholic schools that I had attended for eight years, but unable to convince them to allow me to drop my religious affiliation altogether, I was unwillingly escorted to weekly Catholic CCD classes. CCD stood for Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, which was a high-falutin’ term for high school education classes for Catholic kids who didn’t attend Catholic high schools. And I couldn’t escape. Every Sunday evening my dad dropped me off at Greg and Terri’s house. And I and a group of my friends spent two hours getting educated. And how.

Greg and Terri were English teachers at my high school. They were husband and wife. They had a last name, but we weren’t supposed to refer to them by their last name. They were Greg and Terri, and they were probably all of about 24 or 25 years old themselves, and they were the leaders of our little band of nomadic spiritual searchers, which was called TAG, which was short for Talk About God. Very hip. And we did talk about God. We also smoked pot with Greg and Terri, which sometimes made us philosophical, sometimes silly, and usually we would put on Jethro Tull’s Aqualung album and ponder the total heaviosity of it all.

And Aqualung quickly achieved total heaviosity for all of us. This is what Ian Anderson sang:

When I was young and they packed me off to school
and taught me how not to play the game,
I didn't mind if they groomed me for success,
or if they said that I was a fool.
So I left there in the morning
with their God tucked underneath my arm --
their half-assed smiles and the book of rules.
So I asked this God a questionand by way of firm reply,
He said -- I'm not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays.
So to my old headmaster (and to anyone who cares):
before I'm through I'd like to say my prayers --
I don't believe you:
you had the whole damn thing all wrong --
He's not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays.
Well you can excomunicate me on my way to Sunday school
and have all the bishops harmonize these lines --
how do you dare tell me that I'm my Father's son
when that was just an accident of Birth.
I'd rather look around me -- compose a better song
`cos that's the honest measure of my worth.
In your pomp and all your glory you're a poorer man than me,
as you lick the boots of death born out of fear.
I don't believe you:
you had the whole damn thing all wrong --
He's not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays.

We would listen to that, and then Terri would look up from her stoned reverie and pronounce, “Okay, Talk about God!” One could argue, perhaps somewhat convincingly, that this was perhaps not the kind of spiritual fodder that was likely to produce holiness and reverence. But we ran with it, and had some relatively unconnected, lethargic conversations about how God was seen in nature, you know, in a beautiful sunset, and how God wasn’t about form and pomp and circumstance and all that boring bourgeois shit (Greg and Terri being the kind of people you could say “shit” around), but was rather really into freedom and, you know, love and beauty.

Greg and Terri would nod approvingly and smile. It was a happy time.

So by my junior year I was a big fan of the TAG group. That was the year Thick as a Brick came out, and Thick as a Brick was the mother of all rock albums, a forty-five minute magnum opus, a genuine concept album that consisted of, dig this, one song that had like multiple suites. It was symphonic. It was breathtaking. It was about God only knows what. Naturally, it was prime fodder for our TAG discussions.

In truth, although we all knew that Thick as a Brick was a concept album, none of us could ever quite figure out the concept. It started out like this:

Really don't mind if you sit this one out.
My words but a whisper – your deafness a shout
I may make you feel but I can't make you think.
Your sperm's in the gutter - your love's in the sink.
So you ride yourselves over the fields
and you make all your animal deals
and your wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick.

We thought that line about sperm was some pretty daring shit, and concluded that God would probably approve. But beyond that we really weren’t sure what to make of lines like “So where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?” We researched Biggles, looking for the esoteric clues that had been hidden from us all these years by the stuffy, bourgeois clergy.This was The DaVinci Code of its day. Nothing. Biggles appeared to be a made-up name. Nevertheless, we continued to listen to Thick as a Brick, pretty much every week, and we contemplated its anti-war message (that much we were pretty sure of), and considered how much God hated the U.S. presence in Vietnam.

TAG, Year 3, was the year of A Passion Play, the most overtly religious statement from Jethro Tull yet. Greg told us that it was about hell, which seemed reasonable since the word “hell” appeared in the lyrics about 47 times. So we contemplated this rock ‘n roll version of Dante’s Inferno (Greg and Terri again coming to the rescue and reminding us that in addition to their theological insights, they were also English teachers). Ian Anderson sang:

Flee the icy Lucifer. Oh he's an awful fellow!
What a mistake! I didn't take a feather from his pillow.
Here's the everlasting rub: neither am I good or bad.
I'd give up my halo for a horn and the horn for the hat I once had.

They don’t write ‘em like that anymore. Well, this was heavy stuff indeed, hats and feather pillows and nasty old B.L. Zebub himself, and we had a ripping good time dissecting the theological implications. Greg had also located a seemingly endless supply of Acapulco Gold, which helped set the mood.

And that was my high school religious education. I went off to college as a full-blown atheist, ready to argue at the drop of a hat (bishop’s miter or otherwise) with any foolish, naïve Christian who crossed my path. A few years later, having begun to understand my own inability to fix my fucked-up life, I played Aqualung again. Ian Anderson sang “I don’t believe you, you had the whole damn thing all wrong/He’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays” and it sounded completely different. This time it actually sounded like it might have something to do with my life. I don’t know what happened to Greg and Terri. I never saw them again.

Gamma Slamma

Here's the full press release for Paste at the Gamma Awards.

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Paste Magazine Takes Top Honors at 2008 Gamma Awards

Paste Wins Second Consecutive Grand GAMMA Award, 5 Gold Awards, 2 Silver Awards, 2 Bronze Awards

-- Decatur, GA (May 9, 2008) – Paste magazine took home top honors for the second consecutive year, “The Grand GAMMA Award,” along with nine other awards, at the 19th Annual GAMMA Awards. The GAMMA Awards are put on by MAGS, the Magazine Association of the Southeast, to recognize excellence in magazines based in the region. Paste’s impressive showing at the GAMMA Awards comes on the heels of their 3rd consecutive PLUG Award win for “Magazine of the Year,” their Eddie Award for “Best Entertainment Magazine” and their recent nomination for a National Magazine Award.

“We are both thrilled and humbled that our colleagues at MAGS have bestowed upon us such a broad range of honors,” said Paste Editor-In-Chief Josh Jackson. “From our content and design to our expanded offerings on the web, we’ve been working hard in many areas to make Paste even better. To be recognized in all of these areas only fuels our passion to keep going.”

Paste’s honors at the 2008 GAMMAs include:

Grand GAMMA Award - Magazine of the Year
Gold - Best Website
Gold - Best Cover (Modest Mouse)
Gold - Best Feature (Trumpet Child)
Gold - Best Single Issue (Can Rock Save the World?)
Gold - General Excellence
Silver - Best Series (Can Rock Save the World?)
Silver - Best Essay (Can Rock Save the World? – Josh Jackson and Tim Regan-Porter)
Bronze - Best Essay (Bob Dylan – Andy Whitman)
Bronze - Best Feature (Greg Graffin – Steve Olson)
Honorary Mention – Best Feature (Lori McKenna – Josh Jackson)

“Paste achieves what so many publications aspire to," a judge noted. "It manages to be edgy without being alienating , and opinionated without being snobby." For more information, or to speak with a representative from Paste, please contact: amy@rosengrouppr.com or 212-255-8455 x 237.

Paste Magazine is the fastest growing independently published entertainment magazine in the country. Called “the best among American music titles” by The Wall Street Journal, a 2008 National Magazine Award nominee and recently named "Magazine of the Year" at the 2008 PLUG Independent Music Awards for the third year in a row, Paste provides thoughtful analysis on the best in film, books and other aspects of popular (and alternative) culture. Paste is the premier magazine for people who still enjoy discovering new music, prize substance and songcraft over fads and manufactured attitude, and appreciate quality music in whatever genre it might inhabit. Now in their sixth year, Paste has grown quickly with international distribution in over 12 countries. Paste is available on newsstands all over the U.S. and Canada.

Ratings Creep

Andy Gibb, I salute you.

It’s Monday, it’s raining, and that may be influencing my mood. But here’s the deal. I’m checking out metacritic.com, a wonderful music resource that compiles thousands of reviews of recently released albums and then assigns each album a composite rating based on the average review score for that album. And I’m noticing that every album released and reviewed this year falls somewhere between 50 (Average) and 87 (Very Good). I find reviewer comments like “a great disappointment” and “a major step backward” for albums that are rated “65” and “71” respectively. And I don’t get it.

To the extent that numeric/star ratings are used, they ought to serve as convenient shorthand for prospective music buyers. If I’m reading a review, I want to know whether an album is worth purchasing. And I rely on these ratings to provide at least a handy guide to what might be worthwhile. But if the worst album is “Average,” and if the vast majority of albums are “Good” or “Very Good,” then I wonder what value these ratings actually serve. Maybe I’m in the minority, but I think most albums are average, a small minority of them outright suck, a few more are bad to mediocre, a few of them are very good, and a very rare few are exceptionally good, even masterpieces. In other words, I operate assuming that the Bell Curve is a fairly accurate model of the distribution of musical quality. It’s simply not helpful when 80 percent or more of the albums released are deemed to be “pretty good.”

To that end, let me note the dearth of 1- and 2-star reviews. I don’t know if critics are afraid to say that a given album isn’t very good. I don’t know if critics don’t bother to review the genuinely crappy albums. I don’t know what the reasons are. But I can assure you that I hear my share of 1- and 2-star albums, and that well over half the albums I hear are simply nondescript blahfests, recapitulating lyrical cliches and overcooked musical motifs that have already been done a million times. It’s time to resurrect the 1- and 2-star review and restore it to its rightful place in the critical universe. Maybe too many critics have been reading and believing those PR releases that accompany the albums.

Nelsonville Arts and Music Festival

You can have your Coachellas, your Bonaroos, your Austin City Limits Festivals. And you can swelter with 200,000 other people if you want to, and sit half a mile from the stage and watch a Jumbotron screen and pretend like you're having a musical epiphany.

Me? I'm heading to the hills this weekend for the Nelsonville Arts and Music Festival, a nice, cozy three-day celebration of, well, arts and music, where you can get right up next to the stage and hang out with the musicians afterward if you want to.

That's the Avett Brothers pictured above. They're probably the big-name headliners of the festival (along with Akron/Family and Bettye LaVette). See? I told you. But in my world those folks are some pretty great musicians, and the prospect of seeing them along with a couple dozen more artists who roughly conform to the Alt-country/folk/bluegrass template makes me really happy. There'll be Tommy Ramone, who used to be in The Ramones, playing punk bluegrass. There'll be Southeast Engine, by far my favorite semi-local band, and the best under-the-radar indie rock band I bet you've never heard. There'll be Justin Townes Earle, whose dad Steve did him no favors by dubbing him "Townes" and passing along his last name. But Justin does just great on his own, and I'm looking forward to hearing his old-time honky tonk music.

I'm going to pick up my daughter Rachel at Ohio University, eat some great Indian food (because what's a great country/folk/bluegrass festival without a little Lamb Vindaloo?), and then head up to Nelsonville for some father/daughter bonding time, yee haw. I'm looking forward to it.

Burma/Myanmar

A friend of mine, Denes House, wrote yesterday:

There is no tragedy so horrible that governmental corruption can't make it worse. The tragedy of Myanmar is not that Western nations don't care about the poor or those devastated by natural disasters. We've given! We're ready to go! The tragedy of Myanmar is that the world's poorest nations are governed by the world's most dangerous thugs. And that's not a freakish coincidence. Pray for Myanmar. But pray that God would bring down the vicious dictators who would turn tragedy into holocaust through their inaction and paranoid grip on power.

Amid reports that more than 100,000 people may have lost their lives in last weekend's cyclone comes today's disheartening news that the first United Nations humanitarian aid flights have been turned away by the government of Myanmar. According to the U.N., they won't try again. The world is ready to respond, and respond generously. But you can't distribute food and medicine and safe drinking water if the government confiscates it on the runway. And that is what has happened.

So screw the government. Here is one way you can still help to keep people alive. Please read the post "Calling All Churches" at my friend John's site. I will certainly vouch for John's integrity, his heart for southeast Asia in general and the orphans of southeast Asia in particular, and for his ability to connect with the people who can actually do something and make a difference in this desperate situation. The contact information is included in John 's post. Please be generous. Thank you.