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ON THE COVER | NEWS & VIEWS | SHORT STORIES December 20, 2007
The Rubberneckers live at the Logger Bar
This show reminded me why I try not to go to shows at bars. Came home from work, tired. Took a shower and ate to replenish my energy. Then I went to Mosgo’s to see Ash Reiter (Feist, Rilo Kiley-ish, singer songwriter from Santa Cruz). The show started at 7:30 p.m. and served coffee. My energy and spirits were high. It ended at around 9 and Reiter hung out with the small but agreeable audience. After that it was time to head out to the Logger Bar to catch The Rubbernecker’s last show in their home bar. When I arrived at around 9:45 p.m., the opening band, Universalia Jane, hadn’t even started yet (the show was advertised as starting “9:30ish”). When the band did play I was pleased with what I heard. Universalia Jane creates surprisingly large dramatic sound in relation to the minimal instrumentation overall band — just keys, vocals and drums. Jane Williams plays keyboard with fervor and belts out lyrics with conviction, her voice ranging from high to low in a single line. As fun as they were it wasn’t dancing/drinking music, and they were an opening band that played for about an hour. Next was Deric Mendes’ new experimental indie rock band, Tanuki, named after a Japanese raccoon dog. The music was soothing and Mendes’ vocals ethereal, which is not what I needed at 11 p.m. As much as I liked the magical music it was getting harder and harder to stay awake. I was also fighting off a cold and it was getting painful to stand. Finally around midnight the Rubberneckers took the stage with luster and authority. People start dancing and the place livened up. It was fairly crowded, but there was still room to breathe, which surprised me. The Rubberneckers’ last show at the Logger Bar is well ... “kinda a big deal.” Now, to clear up some confusion, technically The Rubberneckers aren’t breaking up. Drummer Brendan Otto reported that the band is going on an “extended hiatus, indefinable in its length.” They don’t plan on never playing together again, but their bass player, Burton Hollister, is moving to Thailand, where he is originally from. So until he moves back The Rubberneckers are taking a break. The hiatus will leave a hole in our scene. There aren’t many bands that just make you wanna dance like they do. You can’t really hear the words because they are all slurred together, but you know they are about drinking. The music is fast and fun and the crowd is always into it. Apart from the ungodly hour at which they started playing and the horrendous state of my throat and feet, the moment those cow-punks took the stage I wanted to order a beer and dance my cares away. Unfortunately, common sense got the better of me and I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it home if I gave in to that route completely. Now I’m sitting in a pile of tissues, coughing up my lungs and struggling to breathe — but it was worth it. — Melody Stone, soon to graduate from HSU’s journalism program.
“Nothing in the annals of musical scandal — from the first night of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ to the release of the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the U.K. — rivals the ruckus that greeted [Arnold] Schoenberg early in his career.” From any other critic, that statement might sound like an exaggeration, but Alex Ross never pronounces anything in The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century without a convincing case. We all know the reaction to the Sex Pistols. Here is Ross’s description of May 29, 1913, opening night of “Rite of Spring.” “Howls of discontent went up from the boxes, where the wealthiest on-lookers sat. Immediately, the aesthetes in the balconies and the standing room howled back. There were overtones of class warfare in the proceedings. The combative composer Florent Schmitt was heard to yell either ‘Shut up, bitches of the seizième!’ or ‘Down with the whores of the seizième!’—a provocation of the grandes dames of the sixteen arrondissement.” But as Ross points out, “the bedlam on the avenue Montaigne was a typical Parisian affair, of a kind that took place once or twice a year.” In fact Parisians took quite quickly to Stravinsky’s atonal masterpiece. Where Schoenberg is different from Stravinsky — and yes, the Sex Pistols — is that people in the know, critics, composers, even Schoenberg’s friends and mentors had a very difficult time accepting his provocative dissonance. That would change. By mid-career, Schoenberg would be considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. Still, he was not above gestures of petulance that verged on the Johnny Rotten-esque. The first time Schoenberg received massive adulation from an audience, he took his sweet time walking out to the podium, then “bowed to the musicians but turned his back on the crowd.” It’s hard for us to imagine an era where people took classical music this seriously. But the attention composers received less than a century ago was not all that different from the A-list pop stars of today. The fall and rise of Schoenberg is just a tiny slice of a story in a book that seems to condense about 10 encyclopaedias of music into 500 riveting pages (not including close to 100 pages of notes, recommended recordings and indexes). What will strike anyone who reads this is how early the major composers heard historical forces that were impossible to see. Consider this pronouncement by Antonin Dvorak after a visit to the U.S. in 1893: “I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.” Much of The Rest Is Noise is the story of how this happened. Alongside the story of Europe’s most renowned composers is the story of black composers who where shut out of the musical establishment, others who rejected it and who eventually seized it and reshaped it. Ross travels from the golden age of Strauss, Mahler and Wagner, through the mid-century struggles of composers — American, European, black and white, classical, jazz and pretty much everything else. He takes this story all the way to the minimalism of John Cage and Public Enemy, and then loops back calling Welcome to the Terrordome the “Rite of Spring” of black America. Early into The Rest Is Noise, I felt like I was reading a book I had been waiting for all my life. This is not a book concerned with making classical music easy, understandable or interesting (although it does all those things). This is a book that makes classical music relevant. It does exactly what it promises to do, translates the music of the last century into a fascinating, complex symphony of historical forces. It is quite simply a masterpiece about masterpieces. — Juliet Waters, Montreal Mirror
Dirt Farmer Levon Helm, drummer and one of the vocalists with The Band, has ended his musical dormancy with Dirt Farmer, his first album of new material in 15 years. It marks a return to the southern roots that his former band encapsulated so well. This is Helm’s first album since he beat throat cancer, and the first thing you notice is that his voice, though it has lost just a little of the power, still maintains the soulfulness that made it so recognizable. Helm’s voice is unique, capturing a weary but indomitable spirit. It sounds as if it just walked 20 miles only to come home to an ailing wife and a foreclosure on the farm; yet tomorrow the voice will get up and do the same thing again. It is the voice that built and established one of the greatest bands in American music. The Band came up through music’s minor leagues before establishing themselves as a formidable act in their own right. They started out as The Hawks, an appropriately named backup band for rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, before taking their act “solo.” Subsequently, Bob Dylan “discovered” them, and they played as his backing band for the legendary 1965 tour where he went electric. The Band’s public exposure and songwriting skill increased from spending so much time around Dylan. The osmosis is evident on their landmark debut album Music From Big Pink. Released in 1968, Big Pink unleashed a sound unheard in pop music until that point. Helm and company created a unique fusion of folk, blues and soul among a hodgepodge of other genres that set the framework for scores of imitators to this day. “The Weight,” the most famous song on the album, captures the breadth of their influence. Aretha Franklin, and gospel heavyweights The Staple Singers, country legend John Denver and Dylan, himself, have recorded covers of it. Though Robbie Robertson was the chief songwriter of The Band, Helm was the group’s backbone, which is most apparent in their ageless 1969 self-titled album, which features their iconic song, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” driven by Helm’s patient, driving drumbeat and authentic vocals. The Dirt Farmer record covers songs like “The Mountain” and “The Girl I Left Behind,” which, when Helm is done with them, could both pass as B-sides from “Up On Cripple Creek.” He also shows his old-time country chops on several songs, including one of the album’s highlights, “Poor Old Dirt Farmer.” While nothing on the record is tantamount in quality to The Band’s best-known songs, it demonstrates the passion Helm brought to the tunes that helped elevate The Band to “immortal” status. That passion makes this record worth hearing, if only just to experience the continuation of a living legend. It’s clear others agree: The album has been nominated for a Grammy for “Best Traditional Folk Album.” — Rob Hamilton, Jackson Free Press ON THE COVER | NEWS & VIEWS | SHORT STORIES Comments? Write a letter!
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The Rubberneckers
The Rest is Noise: Listening to The Twentieth Century