Frank Kogan

I hate the term "alternative," but that doesn't mean I get to dismiss other people's use of it.

When Christopher Weingarten sent his list of potential acts for Spin's '60s alternative roundup, I wrote back that they should get rid of the Velvets, Stooges, and Leonard Cohen and put Vanilla Fudge, Rare Earth, and Iron Butterfly in their stead. Was trying to rescue both the list and Velvets-Stooges-Cohen from respectability, I guess. Nonetheless I volunteered to write about the Velvets and Stooges, and the Holy Modal Rounders. Got two of the three. [UPDATE: The links below take me to the intro to the list but I can't find a way to get to the list itself or the write-ups – including my write-ups. This makes me angry, though I don't know what went wrong at Spin's end, or what's at fault. Anyhow, at the bottom of this post I've pasted in what I wrote, and I've pasted the entire list in the comments.] [UPDATING THE UPDATE: There is a way to get to the blurbs, as they've been rescued by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. I explain down in the comments. In the meantime, I've put the usable links in brackets right beneath the two failed links below.]

http://www.spin.com/articles/best-100-albums-1960s-sixties-alternative-list/?slide=98

http://www.spin.com/articles/best-100-albums-1960s-sixties-alternative-list/?slide=64

[UPDATE: Use these instead:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150310090636/http://spin.com/articles/best-100-albums-1960s-sixties-alternative-list/?slide=64

https://web.archive.org/web/20130401055230/http://www.spin.com/articles/best-100-albums-1960s-sixties-alternative-list?slide=98 END UPDATE]

"Mobile Line"


I also unsuccessfully proposed the following:

--He 5 Merry Christmas Psychedelic Sound
--Lee Jung Hwa with Shin Joong Hyun and the Donkeys No/Spring Rain
--Shin Joong Hyun Beautiful Rivers And Mountains (but is a compilation that crosses decade boundaries)
--20 Heavy Hits, an advertised-on-TV album put out by Crystal Corporation, with tracks by the Impressions, Tommy James & The Shondells, Strawberry Alarm Clark, Len Barry, Janis Joplin, The Intruders, The Ohio Express, The Who, Ricardo Ray, The 1910 Fruitgum Company, The Turtles, The Amboy Dukes, The Happenings, The Lemon Pipers, and Sonny & Cher
--Nazz
--Nazz Nazz (but I said that Nazz would need some writer other than me)
--The Best Of The Chocolate Watchband
--The Swinging World Of Johnny Rios And The Us 4 Nuevo Boog-A-Loos
--Grace Slick & The Great Society

( Concrete toes and pigeons' feet )

[UPDATE: Don't remember what I embedded below and it's been deleted from YouTube. So I'm choosing one now, one of the two I quote directly in my blurb.]

"Heroin"


[UPDATE: Here are the blurbs:

#37

The Holy Modal Rounders – The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders (Elektra, 1968)
Part of New York City's urban folk bohemia, the Rounders heard in rockabilly and old rural string bands a vision of new music. On this, their fourth album, the styles were still mostly from the rural south of the 1920s, with added garage blues and scraps and bits from rags and barrelhouse and the American songbook (such as the melody but not the words to "Three cheers for the red, white, and blue"). But each instrument played its own accents and unique curlicues, not in direct support of the main melody or the singer (whose mic is always set to "soft"). Imagine a number of people wandering into a room and simultaneously telling their individually varied stories, while never losing touch with what the others are saying. The effect isn't dreamy or diffuse but slightly crazed, as everyone seems to be listening to notes just out of earshot, and every sound can potentially drive the wagon off various cliffs in any direction. FRANK KOGAN

#3

The Velvet Underground & Nico – The Velvet Underground & Nico (Verve, 1967)
It's a convention of drug songs as much as love songs that if you say you don't care, you do care. But a line like, "When the smack begins to flow and I really don't care anymore" does glorify self-destruction, as a rebuke to senators and society, to niceness and complacency. Choose to choose, choose to go. While Simon & Garfunkel hit big with similarly death-obsessed lyrics, the Velvets brought the conversation to eye level, skillfully precise ("up three flights of stairs," "twenty-six dollars in my hand"). The music matches, feels as sick and dirty as the protagonists. But the drones and unison pounding are a frame for cascades of notes and syllables that are as virtuoso as Diddley and doo-wop without announcing themselves as such. So the whole thing's got a lilt and a dance, solace for the broken people. F.K.

Because Spin lost or killed the list, I've posted it in the comments. And while I justifiably chided it in this post for how socially constricted it is, I'll also say that (1) Christopher and I probably have pretty similar nervous systems, and (2) if people – such as me, even now – were to go through and listen to what they didn't know from it, they'd learn a lot.

END UPDATE]

( Footnotes )

Just posted this on the ilX Rolling Music Writers' Thread in response to some unthought-through statements from Matos and Weingarten:

I doubt that someone who hasn't "earned" the right to use the first person has earned the right to bore us with adjectives and genre designations either. Someone who falls asleep at my use of the first person isn't interested in my ideas anyway, whether I'm in the first person or not. To go back to my analogy [upthread], the phrase "guitar band" is a red flag for me these days, indicating that I'm likely to dislike what I hear. But the problem isn't with guitars themselves; guitars don't kill music, musicians kill music, and if you had the same guys playing keyboards or xylophones they'd probably be just as dreary. "Electric guitar" meant electric excitement in '66, it means drudgery now. But there's plenty of electric guitar excitement in music today - great stuttering Keith Richards-style guitar chords at the start of Martina McBride's "Wrong Baby Wrong Baby Wrong," for instance - it just doesn't usually come packaged with "guitar band" on the label.

( red flag )

h/t petronia

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Tom's been posting on both his Tumblrs about "opinion leaders," his questions seeming to be: to what extent are there such creatures; do those outfits who claim to have the special ability to identify opinion leaders actually know what they're doing; and where these creatures have apparently been identified, is there any special value in trying to influence them in particular (influencing the influential, as it were)? I've been posting on the comment threads, and Dave chimed in on his own Tumblr.

I may or may not swoop into the subject from my own angle, but first I have a question for dubdobdee:

Tom entitles one of his posts "Now I know why Mark S hated the word so much." I replied with this:

Except "influence" as you've been using it here and in Blackbeard is exactly how Mark thinks it should be used, to reference actual power in the world. What Mark was objecting to was the unearned authority of "The [New Band] cite a range of influences from the Velvet Underground to the Fall," or "[Supposedly Valuable Rock Critic] has influenced everybody from Chuck Eddy to Tom Ewing." So what you guys are (and Mark is) trying to understand is who has power and what actual influence/resistance it engenders etc., whereas what Mark is objecting to is the attempt to borrow power by invocation and proxy.

So Mark, is this a good representation of your ideas?

( links )