editor@dirtylinen.com
Premature aging
It's a small point, I grant you, but Graham Nash might not care to be reminded too often that he's 56 this year, let alone having Lahri Bond add six more years to his age in his review of The Hollies' Archive Alive CD in Issue #76 (page 48). I mean, how would you feel??
- Josh Blinder (Silver Spring, MD) (via e-mail)
Life is a cabaret...
In the generally favorable review (issue #77) of the Josh White CD Free and Equal Blues, one comment brought me up short: "...criticized as a cabaret performer and to an extent justly so..." The nerve of the man! While other blues singers were barely getting by in low paying jobs he was making money as a cabaret performer. To think he was uppity enough to extend his talent to something other than blues. I guess Josh just didn't know his place.
- Jay Smith (Jacksonville, FL)
What is prog/rock?
I forgot how flummoxed I was when I read Lahri Bond's article on Renaissance in the June/July issue (#76) until the latest issue arrived. The new issue has nothing to do with it, it just reminded me to write. When I read the statement "In the cold light of the approaching millennium... the music of only one band has stood the test of time - Renaissance," well, I had to check the cover and make sure it wasn't the April issue. Then I thought, "Jayzuz! Is he serious?" I mean it might seem a fair statement if you compare Renaissance to Gentle Giant, Greenslade (whoever they were) and Jade Warrior, but get real luv, you mentioned Yes, Genesis and King Crimson in there as well.
Whatever prog/rock was, Fripp & Co had nothing to do with it, sartorily (sic) or musically. I am not even sure Renaissance did, for that matter. Renaissance was dead as a door nail the moment Bowie took the stage. And stayed dead. And remains dead. If prog/rock was about bombast and pretension, what the cold light of the approaching millennium displays is that Rennie had b & p in spades. There is perhaps no more boring an English singer than Haslam. I defy anyone to hum a Ren-tune without putting themselves to sleep.
At the end of the 60's, Fripp and his colleagues were walking on stage doing what Trane had finished with. And from that point on, especially from that point when Crim expressed a certain tension between Fripp & Bruford, the music itself had absolutely nothing to do with any direction in any other discipline. Fripp, Bruford and their current batterie of colleagues chase whatever Trane was chasing, they look dead in the eye that same silence that Miles was trying to frame (Miles was never about the notes), attempting a double trio as Ornette attempted a double quartet, upending the 20th Century structure like Bela or Ekki, not so that they can sound like they had music lessons, but because this music will not release them. Why else would you hole yourself up in West Virginia and reinvent tuning? Their tunes ain't easy to hum either, but you're not likely to bore yourself to death. You're quite likely to find yourself reconsidering a lot, and not all about music... but ya gotta be there, and it requires a certain level of responsibility on your part. Renaissance was all about self-congratulation for sticking with an English Studies major (these days its folklore studies).
About the only thing Renfolk have bequeathed this sorry globe is a sorrier lot of pretentious singer song writers with half baked neo classical notions of the worst ilk. Bond, Lahri Bond, needs an editor. Quick. That article was a howl, and yer near as nuts for publishing it.
It's all talk, elephant talk.
- Pól Ó Dubhthaigh (Phoenixville, PA)
This is from Dirty Linen #78
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