I never got to see the late Paul Bley perform, but several times in the late 70s, I did get to see his by-then ex-wife, Carla Bley, who had previously composed Bley's signature Ida Lupino.
With their narrative and almost cinematic compositions, Carla Bley's records still sound more like rock records to me than jazz. An album like 1979's Musique Mechanique was not a big leap for fans of prog-rock bands like early Genesis and Yes, or for those accustomed to the big-band arrangements of Frank Zappa. Her compositions from this period were fairly simple rhythmically, often based on 4/4 marches - no complicated jazz drumming to confound the audience - and her soloists may not have conjured the nuanced emotions of the finest jazz, but the solos were loud and brash and suitably epic. In other words, just the thing that rock audiences ate up.
When Carla Bley and Her Very Large Band played Boston's Paradise Theater, a rock club, the audience treated them like rock stars, enthusiastically calling out the names of soloists ("Windo!") and dancing in their seats (this was when rock clubs still followed the cabaret model of seating the audience at tables with a two-drink minimum).
Bley's most famous composition is probably the more adventurous and avant-garde Escalator Over The Hill, an operatic magnum opus that sprawls over three bizarre discs that she composed with the Canadian drummer Paul Haines. Another rock connection: Paul Haines' daughter, Emily, would later go on and become the songwriter and lead singer for the Toronto band Metric.
Prior to 2005, I was listening to a lot of new music - new at least to me - through all of the outlets available on the internet, including, yes, Napster, as well as other file-sharing platforms. But by and large, up to that time I was looking, or listening, backwards, downloading albums from the past which I had missed out on during their initial release and exploring a lot of 1990s German electronica, Goa trance, Claude Challe's Buddha Bar anthologies, The Residents, free jazz, etc.
But in 2005, as the indie rock renaissance began to emerge, I started for the first time in nearly a decade to listen to current releases. The bands that first got my attention were Bloc Party, Spoon, and Black Mountain, and listening to those bands was like a gateway to new music, which led me to Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, and others.
The Canadian band Metric also had a profound influence on me at the time. Their music was sufficiently accessible as to encourage me to give them a serious listen, and on further exploration rewarded me with an appreciation of Emily Haines' virtuosic vocals and intelligent lyrics. Haines makes it sound easy - that's a large part of her talent - but you don't realize how tricky some of those lines are until you try and sing along with them (that's probably also the reason that other bands tend not to cover Metric songs). Without doubt, Metric were one of my favorites, and when I finally started going out to hear live bands again, they were one of the first shows I saw.
Live It Out, Metric's second album, was my 2005 intro to the band, but it didn't take me long to download a copy of 2003's Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?, which is probably my favorite Metric album to this day. By the time Grow Up and Blow Away was released in 2007, I thought the band could do no wrong, not realizing that the album was actually written and recorded in 2001 and not released until six years later and that I was listening to old, not new, Metric. Still, my admiration for the band continued with 2009's Fantasies.
However, although a few songs from 2012's Synthetica still sounded like vintage Metric and I tried really hard to like the album, overall I found it uninspiring. Something was missing, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. Since then, I've listened to a stream of their latest album, Pagans In Vegas, and was severely disappointed by the apparent decline in the band's songwriting and performance. Unlike with past recordings, there's simply nothing on the album that I personally find appealing or interesting.
I still enjoy the earlier Metric albums, so it's not like my taste has changed since 2005, which is definitely a possibility. Some listeners to some bands become attached to the early albums and then later reject anything new by those bands simply because it's not the same old songs to which they've grown attached. I've experienced that in my youth, when it might take me a year or so to come to accept a new album by one of my classic rock favorites, simply because their earlier songs had become so mythologized in my mind that anything else sounded like heresy. That may be what's happened to me with Metric, but I doubt it as I still enjoy other current bands (Animal Collective, Silver Mt. Zion) who've gone through far more radical transformations in their sound since my 2005 "awakening" and first discovery of their music
Or maybe, just maybe, it's not me but it's Metric that has changed. Their eyes may now be on a different horizon that they were from 2001 to 2009, and the sound they're after now is not what it was then. If that's the case, their perceived decline is not a failure on their part but merely a change of direction. And if so, I wish them luck (who am I to tell an artist how to pursue their art?) but won't be following along, instead enjoying vintage songs like Dead Disco.
2010: we're finally getting to the modern era. Also, he needs to start thinking about how he's going to wrap up and conclude this 35-year autobiographical retrospective of the years 1979 to 2014. With all the talk of incarnations and the living dead, an appropriate climax might be to end all this by ending all this, a live webcast of his own suicide, but that ain't going to happen. No way, so don't count on it.
He didn't get west of the Mississippi once in 2010, and he wound up leaving the company that had sent him to Portland in the first place and began working for a local, Atlanta firm.
He was finally listening to modern music again in 2010 and not to the nostalgic or obscure recordings of the past available for free downloading on the Internet. He even took the next logical step and attended his first concert since that banal Norah Jones set in the bourgeois confines of Chastain Park back in 2003. It had been seven years and he was 56 years old.
Baby steps: the first concert attended after that long, long hiatus was not what he would have picked for his return, but one selected by a woman he had been dating. That brief relationship ended sometime between the purchase of the tickets and the show itself (in fact, the total relationship didn't last too much longer). In any event, he wound up going alone out to the remote Gwinnett Civic Center to see England's Muse.
To be sure, he did not consider Muse to be one of those cool, new indie bands that he had been discovering, but he did have to say this for Muse - they put on a pretty spectacular show. He was as indifferent to their songs then as he is now, but their light show and stagecraft were pretty amazing, with just about every special effect in the book thrown out there at one point or another. Lasers, video projections, stages rising on scissor scaffolds, eyeball balloons falling from the ceiling - Muse didn't miss a trick. LA shoegazers Silversun Pickups opened, so that was cool.
He'd love to report that the first band he saw was somebody like Animal Collective or The Decemberists, but oh, sweet irony of life, things don't always play out that way. Given the sheer spectacle of the Muse show, however, it was a pretty fantastic welcome back.
A few weeks later, he saw Noveller, Girl In A Coma, and Xiu Xiu at The Drunken Unicorn. Then Spoon and Deerhunter at The Tabernacle, followed by Owen Pallet at The Earl. The Morning Benders (before they became Pop, Etc.) and Broken Bells at Center Stage. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros at Variety Playhouse. The Watson Twins at Smith's Olde Bar. Then came the first Rocktober - Black Mountain at The Earl, Menomena at Variety Playhouse, Metric at The Tabernacle, Thievery Corporation and Massive Attack at The Fox, and Vetiver and Dawes at Smith's Olde Bar, all in one month.
When he had turned 40 back in the 90s, he felt a little awkward going to shows. He didn't fit in with the young kids at the alternative music venues, but he was still young enough that it looked like he was trying, albeit unsuccessfully. In the 2000s, as he turned 50, he thought that he would look downright strange among the teens and 20-somethings in the clubs, and maybe even like some sort of dirty old man preying, or trying to prey, on the young women. Or young men. But by 2010, at the age of 56, he didn't care anymore what others thought and besides, he looked so much older and out of place, it never even crossed anyone's mind that he would be there for any purpose other than listening to the bands, if he was even noticed at all. Mostly, it was like he was invisible, and he could pass right through the audience without even registering on anyone's radar screen.
By the end of the year, he was hooked on hearing live music again. 2010 was the year he finally returned to his self.
As previously foreshadowed, the idea was placed in his head back in the 90s to eventually move to the Pacific Northwest. Inception. But he never pursued that impulse and instead remained settled in the Southeast, first buying a condo and then later a house in Atlanta, and settling into a career serving clients along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts.
He had started working for a new firm at the beginning of 2007, and one day toward the middle of the year, the owner of the company walked into his office unannounced and made him an offer: they had a large project that needed his help over in Portland, Oregon, and would he be willing to go out there for a couple of months and help out? He was told that his skill set, such as it was, would make a good addition to the Portland office, and if it all worked out and everyone in the office got along, there was even the potential to permanently relocate out to Portland.
Even though the original vision was to move to somewhere near the Puget Sound in Washington State, in a startlingly short amount of time he found himself over in Portland, living in a Pearl District corporate condominium, working on the large Oregon project, meeting the office's Northwestern clients, and getting along quite well with the staff in Portland. By the end of the year, an offer was made to relocate to Oregon, and they even offered to let him move to the Seattle office instead, if that was his preference. But by that time, he had already tasted enough of the Portland experience to choose Oregon over Washington. All he had to do was sell the house in Atlanta.
All this was just before the 2008 collapse of the real estate market.
In other news, the Toronto band Metric finally released the album Grow Up and Blow Away in 2007 Even though the album had originally been recorded in 2001, it was still one of his favorites of that year.
Let's see now, what happened in 2005? He visited his sister in San Francisco and came down with a case of the flu that he thought was going to kill him (it didn't). He led several hikes up to the North Georgia mountains for the Zen Center and he spent a lot of that summer working at a large petroleum refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi until Hurricane Katrina came along and pretty much shut that whole project down.
He finally ended - for good this time - the on-again, off-again relationship with the girlfriend he had traveled with and feuded with back in 2003 and 2004, and by that point he had came to consider his lovers not as life partners or potential life partners but more as pleasant companions for whatever particular incarnation he was experiencing at that time.
He had spent a lot of 2005 downloading box sets of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He had amassed the complete discographies of The Orb, Orbital, and Underworld, as well as the bizarre avant-garde music of The Residents. He was collecting electronica by prolific German composer Pete Namlook and the numerous Buddha Bar chill-out CDs by French producer Claude Challe.
The most significant musical event of 2005 happened for him late in the year. One winter morning, he saw an on-line post titled "Best Albums of 1995" and to his surprise realized that he didn't recognize the names of any of the bands. Spoon? Bloc Party? Black Mountain? Metric? Who were these guys? He hadn't heard of any of them, and yet the poster was saying these were the best albums of the year.
Caught up in downloading all of that increasingly obscure or vintage music from the internet and listening to whatever KCRW happened to be playing that week, had he really fallen so out of touch with current music that he had zero name recognition with the best new bands of the year?
It was a wake-up call, what an alcoholic might call a moment of clarity. He downloaded all four albums and found that he really liked them all, a lot, but especially Spoon, who's Gimme Fiction stands out to to him now as the best of that bunch of the best.
But more importantly, he realized that even though it was readily available for free downloading on the internet, he needed to stop focusing so much on obscure, collector's item records, and start listening to contemporary music again. There was a lot going on, and it was sounding pretty good.
He got busy looking for earlier recordings by those particular bands and simultaneously started seeking out new sources of new music. It didn't take him long to rediscover his old forgotten friend, WRAS Album 88, who were playing this new indie rock on a regular basis.
Speaking of Spoon, here's their latest song, from their forthcoming They Want My Soul:
