I think today needs to start with a caveat: This is not about The Eagles. This is about Alice Cooper - and more specifically the band Alice Cooper.
When I was 8, I discovered Kiss. I knew about them before then, but didn't like them because of all of the make-up and blood = it wasn't my thing. But then I found the album Unmasked in my cousin Ingrid's record collection, and for some reason, the opening chords of Is That You? flipped the switch in my brain and I was hooked. Completely hooked.
I wasn't the only one that was hooked. My best childhood friend, Geir, who lived just across the courtyard from the townhome I grew up in, had also discovered them, and we began devouring everything we could read and listen to about and by them. There was a bag of mixed candy, Stjerneposen (the star bag), that included Kiss collector cards, and boy, did we collect those cards. I actually didn't care much for the candy (but my sister did, so it all went to good use), but I wanted those cards to collect. And music magazines had pictures and posters of Kiss - and they all ended up on my wall. But the main thing for me was still the music.
Where Geir's dad worked, there was another guy whose name escapes me, who told Geir that if he liked Kiss, he should check out this other guy, a Mr. Alice Cooper. In order to help him out, he made Geir a mixtape, and that mixtape started a new musical relationship. After finding out that Alice Cooper had done the whole rock and make up and huge stage show before Kiss, we were both awestruck - and the music was awesome. I am trying to remember what was on the tape - I am thinking Billion Dollar Babies, Love It To Death, Killer was definitely there (Under My Wheels and Be My Lover, I remember that for sure), so was From The Inside, and maybe even Welcome To My Nightmare.
What I didn't yet know at this point was that there really was two Alice Cooper entities, Alice Cooper the band and Alice Cooper the solo artist. I have just started reading the book Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs!:My Adventures In The Alice Cooper Group by Dennis Dunaway, who played bass in the band until Alice decided he wanted to go solo with 1975s Welcome To My Nightmare, and I am very excited about this book because I believe that for 2-3 years, from 1971-1973, they were an absolutely fabulous rock band that didn't record a single throwaway song. I wish I could include Muscle of Love in that as well - but to me, that sounds like an album of throwaways, and far from the quality of the middle four albums in their discography: Love it to Death, Killer, School's Out, and Billion Dollar Babies should all be albums in any 70s rock record collection.
So today, let's remember the band Alice Cooper, with Vincent Furnier (aka Alice Cooper) on vocals, Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce on guitar, Dennis Dunaway on bass, and Neal Smith on drums. I can't think of a better way of remembering them as a unit than the song Desperado from the fantastic Killer album, released in 1971, the year before I was born.
And on the 17th day he rested. I think it is time to really just sit back and relax and listen to the song that opened a very classic album from 1967: The Velvet Underground and Nico. The Velvet Underground was a very artsy musical collective. Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Moe Tucker. Lou Reed was a great rock and roll poet (heck, any kind of poet), NYC born and bred; John Cale came from Wales to study classical music and brought a very different musical sentiment to the table; and Sterling Morrison on guitar and Moe Tucker on drums rounded out the classic Velvet lineup. For their first album, they also brought in German Nico to sing, and her voice seems to fit the music perfectly.
I am no VU historian, and I was a late comer to Velvet Underground - I was well into my 30s before I truly appreciated them. Don't get me wrong, I had heard them before, and thought I liked them - but I didn't listen to the full debut album until I was in my 30s. Please listen to the lyrics - I find them slightly unsettling and a great contrast to the serenity of the melody - which in turn makes it the perfect opener to the album. I have a feeling I will revisit this album later this year - but that is still to be determined. But for now, sit back and enjoy this Sunday morning.
Yesterday's post really made me travel down memory lane - and I realize that I started listening to Heavyrockmagasinet while I was in sixth grade as well. Taking the time to sit and write some of this out really leads to a very interesting perspective of my life, and I am certainly making new connections myself. And, let's face it, this blog is really written for me. As a matter of fact, writing a blog like this is really the epitome of egocentrism, narcissism, and navel-gazing. The truth is that I could have done this quietly - just writing like this for myself throughout the year - but I fear that I would have quit before I even started (now that almost happened anyway - just look at the time stamp for the January 1 post). But now, by tricking myself into believing I have an audience, I am feeling slightly more compelled to publish something every day than I would be if I was the only audience. But I digress - in a good way though, just to let whomever reads this know that I am not actually conceited enough that I think this has any kind of importance or significance to anyone but me... And that was yet another digression...
So, back to Heavyrockmagasinet. The reason I started listening to it was really to prove my dad wrong. He did not agree that I liked hard rock and heavy metal, but pointed out that I only liked Kiss. If you had seen my bedroom wall at that time, you would know that he was right. The Donald Duck wallpaper (I miss that now) was covered with Kiss posters and pictures. However, there was no way that I'd ever admit to that, so I found Heavyrockmagasinet and started listening to it, not as much to broaden my musical palette, but to prove my dad wrong. The thing is, it really did broaden my musical palette. Gustav Alfheim and Stein Vannebo were the hosts, and their command of hard rock and heavy metal was second to none. Thanks to them I discovered the classic hard rock bands, discovered some newer music (the pre hair-metal bands), and also discovered some of the more obscure early metal bands, such as the wonderful Sir Lord Baltimore. The song that found its way to one of my early mixtapes was Kingdom Come.
I really had hoped that I would have a song about a mixtape I could put in here, because that is really what this project is all about. As I stated on January 1, my goal is to bring you one new song every day - and hopefully tell you something more about me with each song. That way I hope this blog really lives up to its tagline: The music of my life - or my life in music. The entries from 2016 should really be the soundtrack to my life. That soundtrack would be something like my ultimate mixtape.
I have set some rules for myself - but not too many, and please don't hold me to them.
The songs need to be meaningful to me
The songs need to be triggering a post - although I will let the posts trigger my songs as well
I need to own the songs myself (they are a part of my personal record collection)
The songs I share are officially released versions
#4 is by far the most difficult to follow for me, as YouTube is filled with audience recordings that often are far more interesting than studio recordings or officially released live recordings, which often include overdubs and are not representative of what the band truly is capable of on stage. Also, I won't always have personal anecdotes to share, so I have to take brief breathers from time to time with respect to how much I put out there.
All that being said, the song that represents my ultimate mixtape today is a song I originally had on one of my less planned and more "accidental" mixtape. Back in 1984, the Cosby Show was on TV at home, but I also had a radio show to listen to. Every Saturday night (or early evening, to be precise), the radio show Heavyrockmagasinet aired. And every Saturday, I made sure I had a tape with at least some blank space in the radio/tape deck. On one of my first mixtapes like this, I distinctly remember having the song Paranoid by Black Sabbath (I am thinking it might still be around somewhere in my parents' basement. This last year, the song Paranoid showed up on a new release - but this time by Kylesa, a sludge metal band from Savannah, Georgia I discovered right around the same time I discovered Baroness. If you wonder what sludge metal is all about, just remember the tempo of Black Sabbath's Paranoid - and then compare that to this:
I am really very excited that I have started reading a lot again. I spent a lot of time over break with my nose in books, and my reading list is long - but I am making dents in it. My taste in books is wide ranging, which may not necessarily be reflected on this list, but that might also be because I have spent time reading books I had missed in earlier years. I really like fiction, so that is the list I really will focus on here - although there is one more book from the year that I need to mention, so I will start with that.
Nadia Bolz-Weber is a Lutheran pastor in a with a rough background. She started The House for all Sinners and Saints, which really started as a church for people who didn't belong in Denver, Colorado - and she started sharing a little bit more about her self in her book Pastrix - and then she published Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People in 2015 (she has a third book out as well about watching televangelists for 24 hours straight, but I have not been too interested in that). As a devout non-believer (how is that for an oxymoron), I was very surprised to find how much of Accidental Saints resonated with me. The majority of the book is really about grace, which is a concept I really hadn't understood before - but there is some clarity to it now. But for me, there were some very important life lessons in the book, and it had a very profound impact on me this fall. To me, it was the book that connected my head with my heart.
Other non-fiction books I read from 2015 are mainly rock autobiographies, such as Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band, Elvis Costello's great Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, and Duff McKagan's How to Be a Man. I found Kim Gordon to be too busy with name dropping and laced with bitterness towards Thurston Moore to be truly compelling - and while I was expecting the bitterness, it still was a turn-off for me. Yes, what he did were the actions of a scumbag - but I think a little bit more distance to it before publishing it in book form may have changed the view on the earlier years in the relationship. Elvis Costello jumps around, but still weaves a great web of his many ups and downs, focusing more on music than anything else - and I found it refreshing that he didn't go for juicy details, but rather kept it very gentlemanly. Duff McKagan is a great writer whose autobiography It's So Easy and Other Lies is a great rock biography - one of the best I have read - so that I liked How to Be a Man was no surprise.
On a very different note, I am really liking Humble Before The Void: Western Science Meets Tibetan Buddhism by Chris Impey, although I haven't finished it yet. You can add Sindre Kartvedt's DumDumBoys: En Vill En about the Norwegian rock legends in DumDum Boys and the essay collection Supersonic Scientists about Motorpsycho, which is edited by Marius Lien to the list of books of 2015 that I haven't quite completed yet (and there is more I haven't read yet - curse you and your reviews, NPR)
Now, on to the fiction side of things; here are my favorite books of 2015 (that I have read so far)
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (originally published in 2013, but in the US in 2015)
What She Knew by Gilly Macmillan
Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum
Blod På Snø (Blood On Snow) by Jo Nesbø
Splinter the Silence by Val McDermid
Honorable mention:
The Harvest Man by Alex Grecian
The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz
I would like to add, for those wondering, that I did read a book from 2015 that didn't make the list, and that surprised me. I really like Denise Mina, but I did not think that Blood Salt Water was anything special. It was a good enough book not to just put it down before finishing it, but for the first time ever, I really didn't care much about her characters - there wasn't much there. Splinter the Silence was the complete opposite. Val McDermid really shone in her character studies, and the book was a lot more about moving her characters forward than it was about the plot itself. Jo Nesbø was much lighter than he is in his books about Harry Hole, but there was still a darkness and a sadness to the fabulous Blood On Snow.
However, for me, fiction in 2015 was all about women. All top 3 novels were written by women and featured women as leading characters. Anna in Hausfrau is a fish out of water as an American living in Switzerland, although I am not so sure she wouldn't be a fish out of water anywhere. Her life is really a series of events where others make decisions for her - and she just goes along with whatever happens. We hear from conversations with her psychoanalyst - and the questions asked there really help frame the rest of the novel. The one key question she asks her paychoanalyst is, "Not choosing. Is that still a choice?" That to me encapsulates the entire novel, which to me was spellbinding.
Rachel in What She Knew is dealing with the abduction (and possibly murder) of her son. Some of her actions are motivated by what she sees taking charge, but to the surroundings is seen very differently. I see parallels to Gone Girl in some of the more procedural parts of the book, where people are not necessarily acting the way we as the public expect them to, and that creates tension.
And then, finally we have Rachel (again) in The Girl on the Train. She is a mess, which is one of the greatest literary devices I have read. She drinks. A lot. And she is a voyeur in the sense that she finds a couple that she observes on her train ride in to London. And she has a hard time getting over her ex leaving her for another woman (same as with Rachel in What She Knew). And, most importantly, as a reader, you can't trust her (don't worry, these are not spoilers - I wouldn't do that).
Thinking about Rachel in The Girl on the Train, there is only one song that really fits, in my eyes - but I have two versions of it to share. The song is Gonna Get Close To You and it was initially written and recorded by Dalbello from her great album whomanfoursays (1984), but I discovered it when it was covered by Queensrÿche on their Rage for Order (1986). The song changes quite dramatically based on the male or female point of view, so I included both here...
The first thing to say is that I have some movies I still want to see that were released in 2015. Ex Machina is one I have high expectations to but have yet to watch - and Creed is another one. That means that this list is very incomplete. Also, I have chosen to include a documentary that was not shown in the movie theaters, but that was shown on HBO - simply because it is that good. I also know there are other documentaries I want to see but have not yet seen, such as Spymasters. With those caveats out of the way, here are my top 10 movies of 2015:
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens
Ant Man
Inside Out
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
Going Clear:Scientology and the Prison of Belief
Trainwreck
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation
Spectre
I fully expect the last two movies to be replaced with movies like Ex Machina, Spotlight, Creed, and The Big Short - but I am ok with this list. I have really enjoyed movies that have been highly influenced by comic books, whether they are direct adaptations (Ant Man, Avengers) or with a very comic book quality (Mad Max, Star Wars). And, to celebrate that Star Wars is back, here is a slightly different version of the Star Wars Theme:
Suddenly, you were gone From all the lives you left your mark upon
Afterimage - Lyrics by Neil Peart
Rush, Grace Under Pressure (1983)
In my lifetime, there have been a few deaths of musicians and stars that really have impacted me. I wasn't old enough to truly appreciate the impact of Elvis, but I distinctly remember hearing about his death in 1977 (we were on summer vacation in a cabin in Ytteråsen). The same can be said about John Lennon's death in 1980. Through the 80s, I also remember the deaths of Phil Lynnott and Cliff Burton, but they were not as impactful on me as Frank Zappa in 1993 or George Harrison in 2001. And now David Bowie's dead. Gone. No more. And I think it's hitting me in a very big way.
If I were to list the 3 most impactful bands/artists for me, the list would be as follows (in no particular order):
The Beatles
David Bowie
Motorpsycho
I've already shared what little I remember about starting to listen to David Bowie - and that he always has been there with me since I first started listening to him. An example of this is that when I in high school got a chance to borrow a 4-track recorder, one of the songs I played around with recording was his Cat People (Putting Out Fire). No, it wasn't very good - but it was very much fun, and it really says something about his influence on me.
A few years later, I was trying to study music education at Høyskolen i Bergen (Bergen University College), and we had to choose a classroom instrument to learn. Since I already knew how to play the guitar, I picked the piano, and the song I started working on was none other than Space Oddity. In many ways it is a quintessential Bowie song. He plays around with the key signature (C major) by introducing a D major chord in the verse and a E major chord in the chorus. Then he adds a bridge that includes a Bb major chord - and it all really works. I had great fun trying to work it out in very rudimentary piano style (my skills are not really that great), but my teacher did not know the song.
I discovered David Bowie at an interesting point in his career. I still consider Let's Dance a solid album - and I still listen to it - but that is more than I can say about his next two albums, Tonight and Never Let Me Down. After these two albums, he decided to stop his solo work and become just a part of a band. This band, Tin Machine really knocked my socks off. I still remember Svein Ola Sjøvold dropping the needle on Heaven's In Here on their first album in the Radio Ung studio, goading me to identify the singer. I couldn't. Looking back, it seems ridiculous that I couldn't identify him, but I was steeped in hard rock and heavy metal at the time, and David Bowie was supposed to be pop, so it didn't connect. I loved the first Tin Machine album. I wasn't as crazy about the second one, appropriately called Tin Machine II, when it first came out - but it has grown on me. The live album Oy Vey Baby was the last album they released, because Bowie was on to new things.
And that is really what I have liked about him throughout his career. I have not liked all of his albums, and Black Tie, White Noise (1993), which was his next album at this point is an album I still struggle with (OK, let's just admit it, I really can't listen to it...). But he was exploring new things again, and he was very daringly creative = and that album was the next step towards two of my favorite Bowie albums, especially of the second half of his career: Outside (Part 1 of the Nathan Adler Diaries - although it remains the only part) from 1995 and Earthling from 1997. Looking back at it, it seems like he mastered the sonic landscapes he was exploring on Black Tie, White Noise and was able to place his very distinctive musical style with them on Outside and Earthling. Brian Eno was back as he had been in Berlin on Outside, and Reeves Gabrels' very innovative guitar is very present on both that and Earthling. And I was so very back loving his music with these two albums.
His next trio of albums, Hours... (1999), Heathen (2002), and Reality (2003), are very solid David Bowie albums, which means that they are better than most other music released - but not necessarily my favorites (although Bring Me The Disco King, the final track on Reality, is a spectacular song - and there are other glimpses of true greatness as well). He then toured until he had a health scare in 2004 (and, as mentioned before, I did get to see him on that final tour), and then nothing. It was all quiet. There were pictures, such as one from the opening of his son Duncan's movie Moon, and there were sightings at art shows and exhibits - including his own work - but no music.
Not until 2013, when The Next Day was released. I really liked The Next Day, and I was incredibly excited when it was released, but not as excited as I was over Blackstar this last Friday. I am very thankful to Amazon.com for their Autorip feature, because I still don't have the physical copy of the album, but I have been listening to it since just after midnight Friday. I loved it from the beginning, and I am very glad I did, because it is so easy to get caught up in the whole "his final album" thing and that it was released just before his death - but it is such a great album. His vocals on the title track is haunting in a way that really is enhanced by the fact that he no longer is with us, and the jazziness throughout seems to me like he had reached yet another artistic peak.
In a world where too many people stay too long doing too much that ends up being crap, it is a huge relief to have a true artist like David Bowie. Like I said, I did not like everything he released, but I respect it all. I respect that he followed his artistic vision, and I have been incredibly lucky to have his artistic vision match my musical tastes on numerous occasions.
And then he really moved me. I still get goosebumps and chills from Life on Mars, all I need is the opening droning e-bow to start bopping my head to "Heroes", the first few chords of Crack City makes my entire body move, and the chanting that opens Blackstar fills me with mystery and wonder. There is so much more that can be said, but I fear that my words at this point are inadequate in conveying how I really feel.
I never met David Bowie. I never spoke a word to him. But still this one hurts. This one I will be grieving. Thank you, David Bowie, for filling my life not only with music, but with little wonders as well. You will be sorely missed.
It's taken a while... Although 11 days into the new year isn't really that long, I could have started earlier in 2015, but my #2 selection wasn't released until December 18... As usual, it is really hard to rank them individually, but I tried ranking my top 10. In reality, I am dead set on my favorite album being Chris Stapleton - and I think that #2-5 are better than #6-10, but I could easily change order within those groupings.
Chris Stapleton - Traveller
Baroness - Purple
Iron Maiden - The Book of Souls
Gavin Harrison - Cheating The Polygraph
Steven Wilson - Hand Cannot Erase
Motorpsycho - En Konsert for Folk
Flest
Faith No More - Sol Invictus
Torche - Restarter
Sunn O))) - Kannon
Kylesa - Exhausting Fire
After the first 10, there are 15 additional recordings that really deserve to be mentioned - they are all albums I really liked over the course of the year. I have listed them alphabetically - but there are no individual preferences here:
Alabama Shakes - Sound & Color
Chris Cornell - Higher Truth
Clutch - Psychic Warfare
Echolyn - I Heard You Listening
Steve Earle & The Dukes - Terraplane Elder - Lore
Elephant9 - Silver Mountain
Enslaved - In Times
Ghost BC - Meliora
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress
Robert Earl Keen - Happy Prisoner The Bluegrass Sessions
Otis Taylor - Hey Joe Opus Red Meat
Richard Thompson - Still
Steve Von Till - A Life Unto Itself
Chelsea Wolfe - Abyss
Since Chris Stapleton's Traveller reached the first place on my list, I really feel like I need to let him be represented again - and this is a very country country song, which he plays with in the lyrics. Here is Nobody To Blame.
So it should start to be pretty clear that my musical tastes are pretty eclectic, to put it mildly. Some of it mirrors bands I have followed, while others mirror tastes of friends - and my interest in folk music from all around the world has been largely influenced by Thomas Ekrene with assistance from Johan Ludvig Brattås. The backstory for this interest is found under Radio Days: Resurrection - but the part I believe is missing is the fact that when I first moved to Bergen in January of 1995, the very first day in my student apartment I could hear the unmistakable guitar intro to La Grange by ZZ Top. I had no idea who lived next door, but I took La Grange as a good sign.
As I started working in Studentradioen - and more specifically as I started working with Thomas in Plog - I would frequently take one of the last busses home, and it turned out that Thomas was on the same bus. We walked separately - he had a gruff personality, and I had not yet established much of a rapport with him - and sat apart from one another on the bus, each listening to our own music. However, my jaw dropped when I saw that his key fit perfectly in the lock of the student apartment next to mine - the one that had played La Grange when I first moved in.
Eventually we started talking more, and we became friends, first and foremost united by a love for music, and he really started pushing his main drug: Richard Thompson. At first I was lukewarm, but I started warming up, and after I moved back to Trondheim for a while, he sent me a tape (or was it two) with some of his favorite Richard Thompson songs in good old-fashioned mixtape mode. And it worked... In addition to being one of the best guitar players I ever have heard (electric or acoustic), he is also a great songwriter. He has a very typical British dry humor, and his songs often appear depressive - but they are filled with very dark humor that you have to see through the grim depressive material. Add to that that he has written good old fashioned nidviser - very critical and satirical songs about living and real people - Madonna's Wedding about her renting a Scottish Castle to marry Guy Ritchie and Dear Janet Jackson about the infamous exposed nipple.\As one of the bonus tracks of his last album, Still, which came out last year, he wrote another song about an existing person, but since this person is a litigious current frontrunner for the Republican Party, the name was changed to Fergus Laing - but there is little doubt about who it is written...
To me, the most momentous musical happening of 2015 is one that I missed. July 1993, I was listening to NRK Radio's broadcast from Roskilde, and they featured a Norwegian band that I had heard of but not really listened to who, the band that would turn into a musical obsession - and a band whose inspirations really took me far in terms of exploring my own musical tastes. The band was the mighty Motorpsycho, who over the course of their 25 year long career has turned into quite the eclectic outfit - or misfit. As a matter of fact, they are so respected in Norway that there is a temporary exhibit dedicated to them at Rockheim, Norway's national museum for popular music in my hometown, Trondheim (which also is Motorpsycho's headquarters).
By October 2 that year, I had acquired all their CD releases up to that point, and I spent the evening at Studentersamfundet witnessing a tour de force of music that completely blew me away. I watched them take the audience through the poppy sounds of Nothing to Say and Giftland, completely controlling the audice, before they tested our willpower and dedication with a blistering version of Demon Box, the title track from that year's album (double vinyl but only single CD, with songs like Mountain left out). Luckily, the Mountain EP followed soon after the album, and by the time I discovered them, both were out.
I am guaranteeing that I will revisit Motorpsycho several times this year, so more will follow - but the event that I missed was an opportunity to see them play Demon Box in it's entirety. They did it four times: First at the Slottsfjell (Castle Mountain) festival in Tønsberg, Norway, in a concert that almost didn't happen at the top of the small mountain due to extreme wind. The next three times were at Rockheim as the Supersonic Scientists exhibit opened.
However, I have one Demon Box memory that no one can take away from me: The descent down Drivdalen (Driva Valley) from Oppdal toward Sunndalsøra. It was cold, and it was misty, and the song had just turned from the metal injections and the "I need you like I need gangrene" chorus to the spectacular noise mid-section. Descending into the wall of fog with the noise blaring through the speakers, all by myself, gave me chills and goosebumps that only a sensory assault of this magnitude could do. When I emerged on the other side of the fog and the song had turned into the happier territory of Babylon and Junior, I was spent. Thank you, Motorpsycho!
