Beta Testing

154. BOBBY WOMACK & PEACE, "Across 110th Street"
Written by J. J. Johnson & Bobby Womack
United Artists 196 1973 Billboard # 56

The release of Watchmen is reminding me about the pros and cons of soundtrack sampling--not just featuring music on a soundtrack, but using music on a soundtrack that's already been recorded for a different purpose.

Seriously, I don't mean to scapegoat Watchmen. (Not yet. I haven't seen it yet. I've only heard similarly comic-versed friends see it and shriek in horror.) But I have listened to the soundtrack album, which struck me as fairly unimaginative. Each song, as in "Forrest Gump," simply cues the audience via nostalgic association for a specific reaction to a scene.

If you're going to reuse music that's been recorded elsewhere and do it right, it needs to provide counterpoint, not double the melody. The most famous US pop example of this may be Martin Scorsese's use of "Layla" over the montage of mafia hits in Goodfellas. "But it's an elegy," the director disingenuously insisted. Still, you have to admit that playing an elegy for lost love over a sequence of dead bodies of criminals provides an interesting disjunction.

Which brings us, finally, to "Across 110th Street." To begin with, it's as beautiful a title song as blaxploitation cinema produced in the 1970s, so much so that I'm surprised that Marsh missed it in his original accounting of the period. But what brings me to address it here is Quentin Tarantino's reuse of the song in Jackie Brown (1997).

Yes, the film is an homage to blaxploitation cinema, right down to the casting of Pam Grier, the queen of blaxploitation, as the title character. The truth is, though, that Tarantino has never gotten credit for this, this best film, even down to the genius of this specific repurposing of a song.

Yes, this song was played over the credits of another film, almost a quarter of a century before--but the passage of time is very much the point here. The "day-to-day fight" Womack sings of has been going on for Grier's character for almost 25 years, and it shows. That magnifies the song, makes it bigger, extends its implications. Reusing the song in this specific case doesn't just tie the film to earlier blaxpolitation films. It legitimately asks what would have happened to the characters who had the wits to survive those earlier works. Okay, they survived that environment. Would they have thrived? By taking it down to the middle ages of the characters, the song isn't just reified--it's complicated.

Rocking Large and the 11th Hour

49. AEROSMITH, "Dream On"
Produced by Adrian Barber; written by Steven Tyler
Columbia 45894 1973 Billboard: # 59
Columbia 10278 1976 Billboard: # 6

I'm always surprised when I find the occasional old reference to Aerosmith as a "heavy metal" band. In what way were they heavy? Okay, like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and a number of other rock bands that started in the early 70s, they prominently featured loud guitars and were explicitly based in the electric blues--but so were the Stooges, and I wouldn't call them metal either. Loud guitars and being based in the blues pretty much covers everything in rock except folk-rock. I also refuse to use the term "classic rock" (except as a last-ditch label for this posting, of course) since it is a bit of a cop-out. "70s rock" would probably be more honest.

Actually, the best term might be "arena rock." I know Aerosmith has played gigs in small clubs, but it's honestly hard to imagine it. This kind of rock and roll is about large gestures and epic moments, the kind of bathetic onstage display that could play to tens of thousands of people even before you could count on the jumbotron to show you the band's specific facial expressions and subtle body movements. Aerosmith probably moved more product in the late 80s and early 90s, but their aesthetic seems firmly rooted in the 70s. That was the moment when rock went Large, the moment that so many punks felt the desperate need to ironize.

And nothing demonstrates the Largeness (as opposed to the Heaviness) of this particular moment in rock history than the tradition of the Power Ballad. While Zeppelin's Plant and Page may have grown to despise "Stairway to Heaven," Steve Tyler and Joe Perry still love playing "Dream On." The single has charted twice and been significantly rerecorded by Aerosmith once (in an influential orchestral arrangement by the late Michael Kamen). Each time, the song seems to get . . . well, bigger. This was Aerosmith's first single to crack the Hot 100, but it charted again three years later, peaking much higher. Even more signficant, the later, higher-charting version is longer: in 1973, single lasts 3 minutes and 25 seconds; in 1976, it lasts 4 minutes and 28 seconds.

On first hearing, "Dream On" may not sound like that remarkable a song. Not only are the lyrics generic enough to almost qualify as phylogeneric, but Perry's guitar work here isn't nearly as flashy as it usually is. This is a song best listened to at 3am while you're still in high school, even if (like Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road," written the following year) this is a young man's song about growing old. It's a quiet, solitary, even pensive song, and yet it seems made for a mass singalong, probably two numbers before the bows and encores.

In musical theatre, they'd call this an "11th hour number," and that's actually my point in this posting: in its heyday. arena rock was musical theatre. It didn't play like jazz or punk, finding a vibe and seeing where it leads. Arena rock purposefully used--and at its best, still uses--a variety of musical tempi and colors to take its listeners on a two-hour emotional journey. "Heaviness" was only one of those colors. Sentiment such as we find in this song was another.

Some have compared such concerts to religious services, but I think it's more accurate to view them in terms of the Poetics of tragedy that Aristotle evolved a century after the fact to explain why he thought Sophocles' plays worked and Euripides' didn't. As with the original audiences attending Sophocles' plays, the Aerosmith fan knows the story already, he knows where it comes and where it goes, but he needs to wallow in it. For a fan, such concerts help the listener achieve what Aristotle called catharsis, which can be translated from the Greek as either the "purification" or the "purging" of unwanted emotions.

As Aristotle would probably agree if pressed, such things should be done in moderation. Even too much Sophocles can be unhealthy for the soul. Sometimes, though, you just need the occasional plate of carb-loaded comfort food, and then you can go back to eating healthy.

A Word or Two about "Downtown Bands"

880. NEW YORK DOLLS, "Personality Crisis"
Produced by David Krebs, Steve Leber, Paul Nelson & Sylvain Sylvain; written by David Johansen & Johnny Thunders
1973 Did not make pop charts

881. LIVING COLOUR, "Cult Of Personality "
Produced by Mick Jagger & Ed Stasium; written by Living Colour
Epic 68611 1989 Billboard: # 13

"Downtown bands"--I've used the phrase at least once, and I probably should explain it before I get too much further. As far as I can tell, the phrase is specific to New York City. Bands that played Providence, for example, would never be referred to in that way, because in Providence a small club like Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel is in the same part of town as a big indoor arena like The Dunk. Both venues are "downtown," so the phrase is meaningless there. In New York, though, especially back when the Nokia was still a huge movie theatre called the Loews Astor Plaza and Bond's was only intermittently open, the big shows were in midtown, usually at the Garden, and the small clubs were all "downtown."

As my namechecks would suggest, the phrase's peak usage was probably limited in time as well, mostly to the 70s and 80s, maybe a little into the 90s. It reflects, not just a geogaphical or demographic distinction, but a cultural one as well: a two-tiered vision of the local music scene, not quite an avant garde, more of an ersatz bohemia, centered most famously around CBGBs but also around other Village venues like Kenny's Castaways or even a little further north to the late, lamented Max's Kansas City. There was a certain reverse snob appeal to these venues, the idea being that the smaller the club was, the better (or more "authentic" the show) would be. In point of fact, quite a number of acts that later played arenas started out in clubs like this, but if you wanted bragging rights among the cool kids, you had to say you saw those bands in a small club first.

Did downtown bands actually sound any different, though? I don't know. Here are tracks from two exemplary downtown bands, both off their first albums, and the only telling aspect of their sound is how clean it isn't. Instruments and vocals are falling all over each other here. There's no real attempt to separate out each element so that we can hear the lyrics and parts distinctly. It's more like listening to Louis Armstrong playing fills in King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band than listening to the carefully crafted (if still improvisational) sonic architecture of the Hot 5s and 7s.

Indeed, one could argue that the downtown rock scene was to New York in the 1970s and 1980s what transplanted New Orleans jazz was to Chicago in the 1920s. More precisely, if we can move beyond Armstrong, downtown bands were to both New York and popular music in the 1970s what bebop combos were in the 1940s: an escape valve for an artform that had moved from cult to mainstream in too short a time for its diehard fans to fully absorb the shock. This is no knock on the mainstream pop forms of those eras--as you can probably tell, I'm very fond of arena rock and I'm as likely to listen to swing as I am to bebop--but rock was going through an identity crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, just as jazz was in the 1940s and 1950s. In both cases, the two-tiered performance system allowed the connoisseurs a listening space of their own, even if some of us still liked sampling both kinds of performance.

If this means, however, that around about 2020 some restaurants are going to start serving "punk brunch" on Sundays . . . well, that's where I draw the line.