.
In the mornin' when you rise . . .
Are you thinkin' of telephones, and managers,
And where you got to be at noon?
You are living a reality I left years ago
It quite nearly killed me.
In the long run it will make you cry.
Make you crazy and old before your time.
So said Stephen Stills in ‘You Don’t Have To Cry’, in 1970, giving an impression of someone who’s well sorted, tuned in, turned on, dropped out and living a different reality. No more Affluenza for Mr Laid Back L.A. - Christ, he even had time to cry:
And the difference between me and you
I won't argue right or wrong,
But I have time to cry, my baby
You don't have to cry,
I said cry my baby, you don't have to cry
I said cry my baby, you don't have to cry
In reality this new wave of migrant songsters and sophisticates who moved into L.A., mostly in and around Laurel Canyon, were as obsessed with fame, recognition, happiness, ego gratification, status, money, power and acclaim as anyone else - which isn’t to say that CSNY and the other bands and singer/songwriters didn’t turn out some excellent music from time to time, because they certainly did.
They just weren’t as good as they thought they were, in most cases, and many of them certainly lost their muse, their focus and their inspiration (the counterculture!) in a haze of excess, idleness, hedonism, angst, petty squabbling, and, of course, the heavy use of narcotics, especially coke.
The collective values of the Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock generation had initially generated a sense of unbridled optimism, but the shooting of students at Ohio State and the murder that took place at the Stones’ Altamont concert created a sense of deep foreboding. Concerts were supposed to be fun. College campuses were supposed to be places of peace, love and protest.
The Manson murders in L.A. pretty much shook the rock fraternity to its core, and if such horrors were what drugs and madness could do to people who considered themselves part of an enlightened movement to change the world for the better, what hope was there after all?
Besides which, the brilliant Joni Mitchell was writing songs for her wonderful Blue album that spoke of her own jealousy and greed - so if even the gifted and somewhat saintly Joni could acknowledge these destructive emotions, then where did that leave the rest of them?
Pretty much with the Eagles, ‘country rock’, cowboy fantasies and songs of escapism that demonstrated a complete disengagement from politics. At that point The Eagles were the ultimate corporate rock band, and the L.A. scene had gone from hippie utopianism to the corporatisation of rock in the name of massive profits for all concerned, including legions of smart managers and lawyers.
The increasing use of heroin and speed, as well as shitloads of coke, coincided with increases in greed, anger and cynicism - a far cry from the days of Californian love and peace in low-rent communes. Increasingly there were security guards amongst the hangers-on, and even the clubs where the bands hung out became exclusive to the celebrities and high rollers.
Those who were there at the time recall the rise in self-centred craziness, and the darkness of mounting despair and alienation. The ‘emotional landscape’ had turned very bleak indeed.
Friday night’s repeated BBC4 documentary, HOTEL CALIFORNIA: LA FROM THE BYRDS TO THE EAGLES (Chris Wilson, 2007) offered a decent enough run through the history of the music business in LA, but made some strange omissions in its erratic little journey, such as no mention of The Doors or Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, who were LA-based megastars and surely impossible to ignore. Maybe Mr Wilson couldn’t get hold of any decent archive film of them.
BBC4’s mammoth evening of music on Friday was pretty engrossing, and a pure joy for not having your head invaded by a single bloody irritating advertisement. BBC4 itself is a pretty interesting phenomenon.
"There are lots of different ways of being intelligent or serious. There are things that are easily recognisable as television with a serious purpose, such as The Proms or world cinema. But other things are just as valuable. Last week we ran a fantastic programme called Hotel California which featured music from The Byrds to The Eagles. It was about music but it was also about culture, social history, politics, the feeling of the time. Our audience adored that."
So said the channel’s controller, Janice Hadlow, in an interview in the Indy last year: Welcome To The Sanctuary.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/bbc4--welcome-to-the-sanctuary-433125.html
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“There’s a big difference between knowing what’s going on and physically doing something to change it.” - Graham Nash
The main focus of Friday evening on BBC4 was, of course, Neil Young, and what emerged from the hour-long documentary, ‘Don’t Be Denied’, was that NY was always a serious and committed musician, who didn’t give a shit about his image, or cashing in on fame by relentlessly recycling his back catalogue. He was even prepared to alienate audiences by following his muse and performing the music that was currently filling him with passion, even if they were turned off by it and clamored for the ‘hits’. He insisted on speaking of meaningful things. In order to sing something he always needed to feel it. He didn’t give a damn whether his records were commercial or not.
It was Neil Young, of course, who wrote ‘Ohio’ for CSNY in response to the National Guard killing the students - magnificently accusatory and polemical, and how many other artists can claim they made any kind of effort to “speak out against the madness”?
His sense of engagement (and enragement) with what’s happening in the real world burns as brightly today as it did back in the days of the Vietnam protests, as has resulted in him setting up a website, a sort of anti-CNN, anti-Fox news/magazine site, called Living With War Today - LWW.
http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/index.html
On the site read the following article and prepare to be scared, very scared:
MY HOLIDAY WITH JOHN McCAIN
As you read it Mr Young will serenade you with ‘Let’s Impeach The President’.
Alternatively you can enjoy the video version:
http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/lwwvideos/letsimpeach_wm.html
The Restless Consumer has been around for some time and is a fantastic song, and is set to a brilliant video at:
http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/lwwvideos/therestlessconsumer_wm.html
where you can also download it for free.
You can also catch it on U-Tube:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=IEA7wcxjJvw
Includes great images of a silent, smiling Dick Cheney. Pure evil.
Sample lyric:
Don't need no ad machine
Telling me what I need
Don't need no Madison Avenue War
Don't need no more boxes I can see
Covered in flags but I can't see them on TV
Don't need no more lies
Don't need no more lies
Don't need no more lies
Don't need no more lies
The restless consumer flies
Around the world each day
With such an appetite for taste and grace
People from around the world
Need someone to listen
We're starving and dying from our disease
We need your medicine
How do you pay for war
And leave us dyin' ?
When you could do so much more
You're not even tryin'.
Read the rest here:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/neilyoung/therestlessconsumer.html
It’s hard to imagine anyone feeling more passionate or trying to do more than NY has been doing to combat what the White House has been up to these many years.
Here’s a short video of Neil and the band laying down the track in the studio:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=LWI1Wzu-7NE
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To try to raise some anti-war feeling in the USA in 2006 Neil decided to reform CSNY and take the band out on the road, literally in buses, to perform across the nation. The documentary of the tour, CSNY Déjà Vu, was also screened on Friday, and was pretty arresting stuff.
Was is naivety on the part of the band or was it deliberately provocative to sell tickets to their concerts without advertising the fact that the evening would effectively be an anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-Republican rally? Maybe the Republican-voting punters were just too stupid to realise that the whole point of the tour was to rally people against the ‘war on terror’.
There were some stunning shots of Bushites going into a state of total melt-down when the band launched into songs like Let’s Impeach The President. Those good old boys, and their good ladies, wanted to inflict some terrible violence on the band members, but were mostly reduced to yelling, raising the finger, and walking out, ranting and raving. Said one young woman to the camera, following a volley of expletives from her partner, “It was a little political”. Y’all.
But as someone else wrote in a review, “What a rarity - a concert that sent you home thinking, feeling and rocking.”
Here’s the trailer:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GBxrCY980f4&NR=1
http://www.csny-dejavu.com/
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There’s one of the best-ever covers on Private Eye this week - a real classic:
CORFU! WHAT A STINKER!
http://www.private-eye.co.uk/covers.php?showme=1222&
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Joy and laughter seem to me to be the vital ingredients for a life well lived, and of spiritual intelligence, and though they’re not always on tap, they ought to be accessible at frequent intervals. The question is, what gives joy, what raises our spirits, what produces laughter?
This has been quite a week for Russell Brand, and true to form his column in the sport section of The Guardian yesterday was brilliant. On the surface, not a word about what’s been happening to him personally, even though he begins with this paragraph,
“What a palaver! In a season that I'd already judged to be utterly barmy we have seen another week so hysterical and incomprehensible that I'm beginning to wonder if our country is in the grips of a cosmic fever.”
He then writes about crazy things happening in the world of football, and he concludes,
“In these rare displays, these athletic requiems, the player and the game issue an elation that I've struggled to find in a cathedral or a Caravaggio, so we endure the drab, rain-spattered Sundays, the financial indiscretions, the scandals and the heartbreak because instinctively we know that within this sport there is the potential for grace and redemption and incredible beauty. No matter how insane things become or how far from the truth we are led by histrionics and lies, the truly, objectively beautiful remains untainted.”
By some wonderful coincidence the second series of “Russell Brand’s Ponderland” began on Channel 4 last Thursday, and predictably there were critics who sneered at it and pronounced it unfunny. Like the Guardian’s, for example,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2008/oct/31/russell-brand-channel4
(check out the variety of readers’ comments at the end of the article, including a pathetic response to these responses by the author of the piece.)
This first episode had him pondering the subject of pets, and he showed a series of clips of total nutters who did things like keep a lion in a garage, dye doves in primary colours, put up with regular assaults from their ‘pet’ dogs and ponies, and at the other extreme have sex with their pets.
This kind of thing is priceless, and had me in tears of laughter. Try to catch it on the C4 website.
Other subjects coming up in series 2 are families, education and class.
If you could do with a quick chuckle or two then try these clips from series 1:
http://www.channel4.com/video/russell-brands-ponderland/
And on Google Video, the whole of the programme on science:
http://www.channel4.com/video/russell-brands-ponderland/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2008/nov/01/russell-brand This week’s column.
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