I'm shocked to discover that I have hardly written about Mogwai in the 46 years I've been writing this blog. And yet, I can't think one one musical act that has soundtracked my life more than Mogwai in the past 10-15 years. In New York City subways, on Metro North, in desultory moments at home on the couch, on interminable airplane trips to Texas and California, at airport lounges in La Guardia and Houston and LAX, in bed late at night---it was always Mogwai.
I don't want to get into a long historical disquisition about Mogwai here. You can find the history of the band on the tubes of the internets, but what I will say is that their music has a deep deep deep deep reverberation in my psyche. Not all of it. Some of it is distant, remote, muddled. But most of it is so deeply lined, spliced, layered on my psychic being that words fail me. That sweet spot between melancholia and absolute loud fucking insane volume--that's where Mogwai resides. In order to truly experience the futility of life you have to experience its volume as the jet engine roar of the loudest guitar in the world feedbacks its rotary spinning clownsound into the ear drums of your soul.
This time that is upon me, this week, this month, this year, I feel strongly will be a time of departures. Of exits. Of retreats. I feel it in my bones. It may happen this fall. This song, introduced to me sometime in 1988 soundtrack a kind of exit too.
I don't know anything about the background to the song but all the poets and all the bards of yore could not have distilled better the poetry of departure than simply: "I will cry, when you go away."
Every so often I'll discover some new demo from Pete Townshend that he wrote in the early '70s, one he never released at the time, one consigned to Disc 7 of some massive box set from the 2010s that no one bought. Some brilliant piece of tossed off pop, something that lesser songwriters would have killed to have written, but for Townshend, it was nothing, just something forgotten and never released.
Here's 'There's a Fortune in Those Hills,' a parable about an old man's delusions of something better just beyond the horizon. The chord sequences are so beautiful, you forget to breathe as it moves to the next one -- just gorgeous. The arrangements hark back to a lot of the countryfied sensibilities that he seemed to have embraced in that period. Guitar twang and all that. As with all his demos, he plays all the instruments.
I feel such a deep melancholia when the bridge comes on.
B.E.R. is a 'band' in the sense that a random group of studio musicians can be a 'band.' In 2005, a dude named Carl Burnett was assigned the task to come up with eighties-sounding song for the Warner Brothers in-house music library to use for any show that needed something like that in the background. Eventually in 2013-14, Burnett and two other dudes, Frank Enea and William J. Regan sharpened up the original song and produced a track called "The Night Begins to Shine." To identify themselves, they just referred to their 'band' by the acronym B.E.R. after their last names.
In 2014, the producer of the animated (and lest I say brilliant) TV show Teen Titans Go!, was looking for an '80s-themed song for an episode called "Slumber Party" and he used dug into the Warner Brothers library and used 10 seconds of "The Night Begins to Shine." Soon (the next season), the song became a favorite of one of the Teen Titans, Cyborg and the song blew up on YouTube. Next thing you know, the song charted up to number 23 on the national Billboards Top 100. Teen Titans Go! then did a four-episode arc on the song. Warner Brothers released a whole ep of songs by B.E.R. Famous people like Fall Out Boy and CeeLo Green did covers.
It's a brilliant song that veers on the right side of parody. Honestly it's better than any of the shlock that Asia, Survivor, Toto, or GTR came up with in the '80s. Bit it's also a cool thing that Burnett, Enea, and Regan get to be famous for 15 minutes (and hopefully make some bank) despite being anonymous muzak makers for Warner Brothers.
Today, on my birthday, I am listening to the Long Season album by Fishmans, the Japanese band who specialized in a uniquely original mix of dub, electronics, pop, found sounds, and who knows what. The principal genius behind the band, Shinji Sato, unexpectedly passed away in March 1999, right after the release of Long Season (originally released in October 1998), so the music has now been forever suffused with a pall of what-might-have-been. By Long Season, the band was clearly at the peak of its powers, having released a series of absolutely stellar albums. But Long Season was the unexpected apotheosis of that trajectory--four musical movements arranged sequentially that take you on a short journey into the world of reverie. For a largely instrumental piece, the music is neither ponderous nor sombre -- there's a kind of elusive joy in it, but even without knowledge of lead author Sato's death, there's something about the four-chord structure that undergirds the track that feels ... weary. A joy of weariness, if you will. The sun shines bright in the song but imagine a trip across your city in car, your window open to sights and sounds and smells as neighborhoods pass in languid succession. Moments of experience are forgotten the moment you experience them. Nostalgia for the present. Perfect for a birthday....
If you'd like to dig deeper in the Fishmans universe, there is a great writeup at Pitchfork on Long Season here. In addition, someone at reddit has put together the most insane repository of Fishmans audio and video here.
In bands that that have two main co-authors, I've always reflexively gravitated to one or the other. There's no logic behind these affinities. I suppose some of it might be something as shallow as how they look, or something they once said in an interview. Perhaps it's something about who I perceive to be the underrated one in the relationship. So here goes:
- Morrissey/Johnny Marr: I think this was generally equal early on, but at some point, Morrissey's various shenanigans ensured the decline of his status, but I think also, as an amateur guitarist, I had always felt awed by Marr, and this awe has only grown over the years, given his all-around good-natured public persona. Morrissey was undoubtedly a true original, a genius, if you will, for the aesthetic he conjured out of discarded British culture of the '60s. But...I lean very heavily towards Marr for reasons that I cannot explain entirely even though his solo career has been mostly pedestrian.
- John Lennon/Paul McCartney: This is a hard one and although Lennon was in the ascendance for a long time, I would have to grant them exactly equal levels of occupation in my psyche.
- Donald Fagen/Walter Becker: Definitely Becker, the more cynical fucked up bitch who seems to have written "Haitian Divorce" and "Time out of Mind," not to mention "Book of Liars." Also, in interviews, Becker seems to be the more biting and entropic one. Walter Becker, king of the fucked up '70s.
- Mick Jagger/Keith Richards: I have a controversial take on this since my affinity is to Jagger -- yes, I know, shocking! Look, I love Keith and his golden riffs, but I find he's a bit mumbly and incoherent, and there's something a bit trad-blues about Keith. On the other hand, there's something oddly interesting about Jagger's total disinterest in wallowing in nostalgia/myth-making by writing a memoir. Also his desperation in the '80s to sound contemporary with those awful solo albums -- there's something admirable about that. Also he wrote the riff to "Brown Sugar" which guarantees a seat at the table.
- Elton John/Bernie Taupin: Bernie strikes me as being a bit weird, and Elton John wrote some of the greatest pop music this side of Smokie Robinson, so I am giving this to Elton.
- Joe Strummer/Mick Jones: Strummer by far. I really can't stand the way Jones sings with that faux-earnestness, although I admire his guitar-playing chops and I think he wrote "Complete Control" and "Stay Free," two killer tracks, and I do love Big Audio Dynamite, at least the first album, and no, "Lost in the Supermarket" was actually written by Strummer completely.
- Jimmy Page/Robert Plant: This is a hard one as I think Jimmy Page is a beautiful guitar player but Plant seems a bit more adventurous, unpredictable, a live wire, he was, after all, the one who got Steve Fucking Albini to produce the one and only post-Zeppelin album Plant did with Page. So I think I'll give the slight edge to Plant on this.
- Carole King/Gerry Goffin: I think this is clearly Carole.
- Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoller: I don't know enough about what each did to make an informed decision on this, but they did write some good shit!
- Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff: I also don't know enough about their individual contributions so I'll just say, both.
- Isaac Hayes/David Porter: Same as above, some brilliant singles in the '60s, but I guess Isaac Hayes is more name-friendly to me because of Shaft and stuff.
- Nile Rodgers/Bernard Edwards: Ooh, this is a hard one, they were both such geniuses, Bernie gets the nod for the killer bass lines, Nile for the killer guitar, who can really say?
- Don Henley/Glen Frey: Definitely Henley although they both suck so horribly as to almost destroy this listing like a supernova of cringe personalities exploding into a galaxy of boomer worlds.
- Rick Davies/Rodger Hodgson: Rick Davies, although it's clear that Hodgson wrote way more good songs than Davies. So why Davies? See below:
Rick Davies died recently. Now, no one cares about Supertramp. Every other band in the world (including Slipknot, apparently!) has been resurrected from critical oblivion but this will never happen to Supertramp. There will be no Sunday morning review on Pitchfork of a Supertramp album to remind us of their singular brilliance. AOR slop has consigned them to the black hole of '70s music. Unremembered, not even important to be made fun of, occasionally invoked by a 60-year old white man at a bar who has had a few too many drinks.
But let me make a futile and embarrassing case for Supertramp, especially their classic '70s run from 1974 to 1979. Those four albums--Crime of the Century (1974), Crisis? What Crisis (1975), Even the Quietest Moments (1977), and Breakfast in America (1979)--are really fabulous. They inhabit this weird space of producing smart pop (think 10cc), with touches of prog rock (vanilla Genesis), but handled with slightly iconoclastic sensibilities that none of their contemporaries had. That iconoclasm--bordering on nihilism--packaged in slick '70s rock vibes, puts them in a slightly different category than, say, more vanilla '70s rock bands.
Their best album, with ten bangers, is Crime of the Century which balances Davies' iconoclasm with Hodgson's hippie curiosity perfectly. I could write a lot about this album but I'll just post the final and title track which is a monumental achievement in minimalist drama. I have no idea what it's about but Hodgson turns in a brilliant guitar solo. But it's primarily a Rick Davies song -- he sings the crap out of it.
