For this year's bonus day, I thought I'd go heavy. Really heavy. I still remember the very first time I heard Soundgarden. It was 1990, and my very good friend Sissel had come home after spending a year in Marietta, Georgia, where her father had worked during a sabbatical. She brought home three CDs that I really liked: Primus' Sailing the Seas of Cheese, Ministry's In The Land of Rape and Honey, and Soundgarden's Louder Than Love. While all these three albums had an impact, Soundgarden left the most lasting mark with me. I remember sitting in the den in the basement of my parents' house as Sissel brought out the CDs, and the song Hands All Over really blew me away!
In 1991, one of the albums I was most eagerly anticipating was Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger, and it did not disappoint. If it hadn't been for U2's spectacular Achtung Baby!, it would easily have been my pick for album of the year (and what a year that was, with Nirvana's Nevermind and Pearl Jam's Ten also being released). At this point in their career, Soundgarden was seen as part of the grunge movement and lumped in with the other band from the Seattle scene; however, all three bands were clearly different - with geography as the only common denominator at this point in their career (the connection between Pearl Jam and Soundgarden can be traced to the Temple of the Dog project, but they were clearly different from Nirvana).
I purchased Badmotorfinger on cassette, and it was on very heavy rotation when I went to England that year - I can distinctly remember listening to it taking the tube around London on my way to St. Ives (I believe I already talked a little bit about that trip). For me, the highlight of the album is also the longest song, a sludgy and heavy song called Slaves and Bulldozers.
It's the end of February, and I am already pretty certain that the three best albums of the year have been released. I am, of course, open for more great albums - after all, there are rumors that Tool will release another album - but what a start to the year. One album I haven't talked much about belongs to my favorite band, Motorpsycho of Trondheim, Norway. Here Be Monsters is the album, and it is their definitive album of the new millennium so far. I think they have done a lot of really good work in the 21st century so far, but their albums have been hits and misses - and sometimes pretty uneven. However, with Here Be Monsters, there isn't a single weak spot. Spin Spin Spin is the only cover song on the album - and it took some getting used to - but I now see how it fits in with the whole.
I could pick any track off the album, but the one I chose is the monster finale: Big Black Dog. Please listen - and buy the album. I know that is something people don't do as much as they used to now that so much music can be found on streaming services, but buying music is the best way to continually support the artists and ensuring new music coming.
"And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make." 15 perfect words, finishing the proper part of Abbey Road - however, they were followed by Her Majesty, a funny little novelty song that on the surface seems completely misplaced, yet it really exemplifies everything The Beatles was all about - always a balance between the playful and the heavier material. Abbey Road was the last album The Beatles recorded, but it was released 1969, the year before Let It Be. The year before the best band ever officially called it quits.
The Beatles was a huge part of the soundtrack of my childhood. How could they not be? I was born in 1972, and my parents were both pretty interested in music (although not obsessed, like me). Their teenage years had been shaped by The Beatles, and from I became aware that there was a band called The Beatles, I was always hoping they would get together again. Of course, that all changed in 1980, when John Lennon was shot dead outside the Dakota Building in New York City. I still remember that day.
In my earlier years, I was obsessed with the singles of the first half of their career, when they were "just" a spectacular rock and roll band, playing cover songs as well as really raucous self-penned songs, such as She Loves You, Please Please Me, and Help! My aunt Anicken had a box set of all the albums they released, and even though I borrowed it and listened to it in my early teenage years, I still focused on their earlier work. When I approached my 20s, my good friends Svein and Vegard played Two Of Us from Let It Be for me without telling me who I was listening to, and I guessed Simon and Garfunkel - all while knowing and acknowledging The Beatles as possibly the best band ever.
As I have grown older and hopefully matured a little, I have a very different view of The Beatles and their music. When they released a box set of all the remastered albums in 2009, I was pretty quick to make sure I had a copy, and the music has been played through and through many a time. One part that gets to me every time I play it is the end of Abbey Road. The whole of side 2 is really a medley, but it is the last trio of songs in that medley - the three immediately preceding Her Majesty - that really brings out tears of joy and goosebumps every time. Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End is a perfect trio of songs in my mind. It even includes a drum solo by Ringo and dueling guitar solos between John, Paul, and George. It doesn't get much better than that.
In my eyes, there never has been a better band than The Beatles. Yes, my favorite band is still Motorpsycho, but they pale next to the four young men from Liverpool. Unfortunately there is no good version of this medley on YouTube, so I am cheating and showing Paul McCartney's touring band, led by Sir Paul, in a very inspired performance. I have seen several recordings of this band, and I am convinced this is the best band he has had since The Beatles - and you can often see how they inspire him. This recording is from 2013, when Sir Paul was 71 years old - and he plays the ass off of most younger performers these days. Hats off to him and his touring band for this fantastic version of Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End at the Tokyo Dome in Japan.
So we are home - and I go back to work... I am worn out, so this will be short today, but the song I feel like playing, I play just because I like the song and the title. Dream Theater was a band I first heard when their very first album, When Dream an Day Unite, was released and I picked it up as one of my weekly borrowed LPs from Rockin', a great record store that no longer is with us in Trondheim. I could hear the Rush inspirations very clearly on that album, and I really enjoyed it. I remember taping it and playing it over and over again, especially the instrumental The Ytse Jam (Majesty, their first band name spelled backwards).
The Dream Theater on that record had Charlie Dominici on vocals and Kevin Moore on keyboards, along with what for a long time was their very stable core (and founding trio) of John Myung on bass, John Petrucci on guitar, and Mike Portnoy on drums. Dominici was replaced by James LaBrie - and then Derek Sherinian replaced Kevin Moore before being replaced with Jordan Rudess in 1999. I had lost track of them = finding their music to be technical, but not appealing emotionally, or so I thought. I rediscovered them again in the early 2000s, when all of their line-up changes appeared to be over and they were a stable band. I found their music online and liked it enough that I ended up revisiting all their releases - and purchasing all of them - and I have followed them since. I thought they had their ups and downs in the early 2000s, but Black Clouds and Silver Linings from 2009 really found them back in excellent shape.
Then they dropped the bombshell that Mike Portnoy was leaving. Portnoy is a spectacular drummer, but more importantly for Dream Theater fans was the fact that he always had been the voice of the band to the public and kept insanely high levels of fan interaction. His struggles with alcoholism were well documented, and his personality is larger than life, and when he wanted to take a break, it may appear that the rest of the band jumped at the chance to replace him instead. I don't know the story, and I am not enough of a fanboy to really care all that much, but I liked him, and he is out of the band.
After Portnoy's departure, they found a great replacement in Mike Mangini, but to me, the music has not been as good. To me, it is falling back into the space between the two great albums Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence and Black Clouds and Silver Linings, which really wasn't all that interesting. To me, the music of Dream Theater is at its best when they mix the technical with the melodic - if they overemphasize one over the other, the results are meh. Their melodies often lean towards clichés, and their technical music sounds technical for the sake of being technical, which I really don't care much for at all. Their latest album, The Astonishing, is a concept album with a plot that seems like a carbon copy of Rush's 2112 as music has been outlawed, with character names that are so transparently unoriginal that they become completely laughable (how about evil emperor Nafarius and his daughter princess Faythe, who has a pure soul that once heard real music and who falls in love with a musician named Gabriel). Of course, Faythe gets killed by a mistake, and of course Gabriel brings her back to life with song... I can barely bear to listen to it at all, which I hate to admit...
Today's song, Home, is the sixth scene from the album I still think is their masterpiece: Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From A Memory. It had the line-up that I think is their best, and it tells a story, albeit a slightly hard to track one, and is a continuation from a song off their second album, Images and Words, which also was a very solid album (come to think of it, they appear to work in spurts, with a couple of great albums followed by a lull of slightly boring ones). The song takes a long time to build, with Arabic tinged sounds and scales (I have to admit that I have a great liking to the Arabic scales when used right). There is a lot going on in this song, and it is long, but it is very worth it listening through it in its entirety. When they reached the melodic lines in the chorus, it doesn't matter how many times I have heard it before - the goosebumps show up!
I don't really need to look too far for reasons to play Steven Wilson, and today's plan of events made the choice really easy: Chris is supposed to be discharged, and we will Drive Home. Drive Home is a song from the fantastic album The Raven That Refused To Sing, which was released in 2013. It was engineered by none other than Alan Parsons of Alan Parsons Project fame - as well as having worked with Pink Floyd on The Dark Side Of The Moon. My favorite track from the album was also released as an EP with an accompanying music video that is as haunting as the song. Talk will not do this song justice - here is Steven Wilson with Drive Home.
Some days I just want to rock out. Now, I am no teenager anymore, so there really is no jumping up and down or headbanging - it's more a rhythmic movement of the head, involuntary foot tapping, and some movements of arms and wrists that may seem spastic, but that really are my subdued way of playing air drums. Or, if I am in the shower, you can probably hear me playing my torso like a drum set - although my time behind the drum set is probably marked by a slightly lacking inner metronome, but more then enough passion to make up for it (no wonder that I fathered two percussionists).
I really like rhythm. I like all the strange kinds of rhythms, such as odd time signatures and polyrhythms, but I also like just a straight up groove, one where the drummer locks in a rhythm that the bass (primarily) and guitar player just follow because it is so infectious. And today's song is built on that kind of a groove, although this groove comes to us from the rainforests of Brazil through the slums of Belo Horizonte, one of the host cities of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, which is where Sepultura is from.
The song Ratamahatta is sung in Portugese, so I don't have to worry about the lyrics being too bad since I initially don't understand them. However, a quick search reveals that it is about the social inequalities so often seen in Brazil, and Belo Horizonte is not an exception, as it has its slum quarters (favelas), which are heavily featured in the song. They included David Silveria on this track, and he is the one responsible for the traditional Brazilian percussion that you can hear. Igor Cavalero is on drums, with his brother Max on vocals, helped by guest Carlinhos Brown. Andreas Kisser on guitar and Paolho Jr on bass round out the culprits of this recording. Please enter Sepultura's Brazil, heavenly groovy. Warning: This song can cause involuntary body movements...
It's funny now that I look at it how this blog mirrors my musical whimsies - and also shows even me how much I really lean on music to get me through everything. Yesterday, we got the great news that the invasive cancer, which is what they really are worried about, was only 2 mm, so they don't need to do anything more than what they already had done - no chemo needed - and radiation was already ruled out. So my tears finally came - and they were joyful tears It was the relief of all the worry an concern I had carried with me, so the dam finally broke when it could break.
To celebrate, I went to my favorite record store, which only is three blocks from the hospital. Vertigo Music is a great place to visit, so I did. I was looking for King Crimson's USA, and as I found it, I also found Robert Fripp's solo album Exposure. I picked both of them up, and as I was waiting for my Chinese food (I was done with hospital food for a little bit), I noticed that one of the songs on the album was Here Comes The Flood. I knew it as a Peter Gabriel song from his first solo album, where Robert Fripp played guitar, and sure enough, Peter Gabriel on piano and vocals and Fripp on Frippertronics created a haunting version of the song. It is diametrically opposite to the massive arrangement on the original version, but not quite as stripped down as the first version I heard, which was on the compilation album Shaking the Tree released in 1990. That is the version that still brings tears to my eyes, so it was the perfect song to find yesterday, and the perfect song to play today.
Today's song is really describing the feeling I have had being with Chris in the hospital through this battle with breast cancer. It is not my fight directly - as a matter of fact, I don't feel like I am fighting at all - but I do feel like I am supporting the troops as much as I can. The bottom line is that no matter what I do here, there are things that are completely out of my control - so all I can do is control my reactions to them. I was lucky enough not to be there when she first had breast cancer, so I wasn't there for her near-death experience or hemorrhaging eyes. I am also blessed with many very positive experiences with hospitals, so for me a hospital is a place where you go to get better and not a place where you go to die - or at least almost die.
I also have a great deal of trust in science, and by extension in doctors and nurses and that they know what they are doing. It doesn't mean that I'm not critical, but it does mean that I operate with the assumption that they are trying to do what's best for their patients, which in turn means that they are trying to help Chris as best as they can. That also means that when doctors tell us that they are confident things are going well, I focus on that. It doesn't mean that I don't hear the other side, but I don't believe that anyone is helped by always assuming and expecting the worst.
However, even with all this trust in medicine and science, I still worry. And the sinking feeling you get when you are told that your loved one has to go in for a second pretty major surgery in just as many days is captured with perfection by today's song. It is breathtakingly beautiful in all its deceptive simplicity, because while the chord progression is simple, the song has so many layers to it that make it worth hearing again and again and again.
Back in 1970, archetypical Californian David Crosby from The Byrds, Texan Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield fame, and Englishman Graham Nash from The Hollies had perfected three part harmonies in the supergroup Crosby, Stills, and Nash. When Canadian Neil Young, who had played with Stills in Buffalo Springfield, teamed up with them for their second album, the name was changed to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and the album was called Deja Vu. The album is spectacular, but in my eyes, nothing beats this little song written by a Canadian from North Ontario, mr. Neil Young. Please enjoy, here is CSNY with Helpless!
Today's blog is back to music again. Since Chris still appears to be doing well, I was going to look for a deep track from a band that I was lucky enough to catch as they were rising to superstardom. I had a friend in high school, Rune Sandnes, who had a very cool musical taste, and he introduced me to a couple of bands that I either hadn't really heard of or only knew one song from. The band I had heard one song from was Australian band Midnight Oil, whose song Beds Are Burning was a song I really liked, but I didn't know anything more from them. He had quite a bit of their music, and it was really, really good. The other band that I hadn't heard of (now, please bear in mind that this was probably in 1989, and they had yet to lose their religion) was a band that sonically explored a somewhat similar landscape as Midnight Oil, and they were called R.E.M. I remember him letting me listen to Green, and I really liked it a lot - so much that I was eagerly awaiting their next album, which happened to be Out Of Time, and all of a sudden they were a household name.
I wasn't a superfan in any way, shape, or form, but I found them very interesting and I really liked them, so when Out Of Time was released, I was liking the accoustic sound - and I was happy for them as they gained more and more popularity. However, as some of the songs got overplayed, I lost my interest a little - although I picked up all their next three albums: Automatic For The People, Monster, and New Adventures in Hi-Fi - and then Bill Berry left and I had grown somewhat disenchanted with them. However, around the time of Monster, I worked at Studentradioen in Bergen, and they received a lot of CDs for air play, and one of them was the single for Bang and Blame, and it had a live version of Country Feedback on it. I also had friends in the US who had been to see R.E.M. on their Monster tour (with Sonic Youth as support - now that would have been quite the show) who told me about the song, and so I really didn't discover it until 1996, about 5 years after it was released.
The melody is haunting - I read somewhere that the title really is more descriptive of the sound of the song than linked to the lyrics, and I can completely see that. As with so many of R.E.M's songs, the lyrics appear to be pretty stream of consciousness based with very vivid imagery throughout. The music and lyrics go incredibly well together, so well that when Michael Stipe sings "It's crazy what you could have had - I need this," I shiver and feel the goosebumps rise as his intensity increases through the song. It is hidden towards the end on Out Of Time, quite a bit after Radio Song, Losing My Religion and Shiny Happy People - but man, is this a great song...
Today is a day of gratitude. After having had two major surgeries in two days (Wednesday and Thursday), yesterday was a much needed day of recovery for Christine. Although it was just the first of a long series of days in the healing and recovery, the fact that there was peace and calm with everyone, from medical staff to family as well as Chris herself, was a great relief, and I ended up going home last night to spend the night in my own bed.
Waking up rested today really made me feel incredibly grateful, and today's song will reflect that. I would like to thank Dawn, Chris' sister, for simply being amazing. She stayed with Chris last night, which allowed me to go home and rest up a little without feeling too guilty (I still don't like being away from her for long while she is in the ICU, but knowing she has someone there really made it possible). Chris' mom has also been there throughout everything, which really has been a great support as well.
I'm also very grateful for having Chris' kids, Andrew, Samantha, and Sarah, and their families in my life. They have stood by their mother's side through all of this, and while I am positive they have been scared out of their minds because of the brush Chris had with death ten years ago, when she first had breast cancer, they have been incredibly supportive. The rest of Chris' family have also been incredibly supportive, from her niece Laila and nephew Nabeel, who had the opportunity of being there in person, to everyone who have been staying in touch with us throughout the hairy days - and I truly believe those days are behind us. I would also like to thank the two youngest people stopping by for bringing big smiles to Chris' face: granddaughter Emma and great niece Lilliana.
Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends, whether you know Chris or not, for the incredible support you have shown both of us. For anyone ever doubting that Facebook can be a powerful tool used for good, I can tell you that it indeed can. I have seen and felt the support from both near and far, and I love you all back!
So before this gets all too sappy and sounding like a bad Oscar acceptance speech, I should talk about the music of today as well... I cannot claim to be a fan of Fairport Convention, although I do like them a lot. However, I am a huge fan of Richard Thompson, and since his music career started with FC, I have developed an interest in their early work. The first Richard Thompson album I owned was the retrospective Watching The Dark, a 3 CD set that included 3 Fairport songs: Genesis Hall, A Sailor's Life, and Now Be Thankful, which is today's song. Now Be Thankful is sung by Dave Swarbrick, who also cowrote it with Richard Thompson. To me, it is about gratitude in the face of extreme adversity, although there are many ways to interpret the lyrics... From 1970's edition of Fairport Convention, here is Now Be Thankful.
