My Dad brought up the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame concert to me over the weekend, completely unapologetic in his fondness for the proceedings. “You know me,” he said, “I don’t know anything about today’s music, so I like it when those old guys get together and do those old classics.”We laughed at how my Mom thought the audience was yelling “Boo!” when Lou Reed came out on stage.
I praised how Iggy and the Stooges are now in the HOF while questioning why Abba should even be allowed it.
I told my Dad about Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello.
You read that right.
It was my Dad who asked about him. “Who was that guitarist playing with Springsteen?”
“Tom Morello. He’s in Rage Against The Machine.”
“Man, he is good!” my Dad admired. “I don’t know any of his stuff. Is it worth anything? What is ‘Rage Against The Machine’ like?”
“They’re this lefty revolutionary heavy rock band. They’re pretty full of themselves.” I explained.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” I continued, “I don’t know what to think of a band that encourages everyone to ‘rage’ against corporations while signing a contract with Sony, one of the planet’s biggest corporations.”
I went on to explain my whole thing about Abba and the Hall, which I’ll revisit now.
I’ve got no quarrel with Abba, in fact, I kind of like them. Oh sure, I was a kid when they were making hits in the late 70’s and I had an opinion about them then too. You see, I was a big “disco sucks” kid, which was really just a way to align myself with some of the older, rocker kids in the neighborhood. I didn’t have anything against disco, but it took a few years to admit that.
Fast forward to Abba Gold. The radio station got a copy of it and since we didn’t play Abba anyway, I got to take the disc home.
Feeling a bit nostalgic, I put the disc in and pressed play. For over an hour, I was able to recite song lyrics that I hadn’t heard in well over a decade. Song titles that I didn’t recognize sudden became familiar the moment I heard the song. Even in hatred, Abba had successfully planted their music into my head where they took up permanent residence. You have to admire a band that can do that.
But the thing I discovered about Abba was within their arrangements. They sounded unique and I’ve yet to find another band that is comparable to the way in which their songs were arranged.
It’s because they seldom used traditional R&B arrangements in their records, one of the primary ingredients of rock and roll. Listen closely and you’ll hear similarities with European classical music but very little in terms of the two basic ingredients of modern-era pop hits: R&B and C&W.
As a result, Abba belongs nowhere in the halls of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame because they don’t fulfill a basic necessity of that honor: rock.
It looks like Iggy is finally on the way in, even though it’s a bunch of shit that they’ll make it after Ashton died.
Kiss is stirring up interest, but before they even touch that band, the Hall needs Alice Cooper in.
And as always, not even a peep about Rush.
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame concert? It may have pleased my Dad to no end, but for me it looked like a bunch of phoned in performances by a few artists who haven’t tried hard in quite a while. It was a spectacle of entitlement, a set list by people who looked like half the milestone was getting signatures on the performance contracts.
Someone needs to tell Billy Joel to shut the fuck up. For real, the dude hasn’t written a new tune in years (and that classical shit doesn’t count either, dude. You and I both know that’s only your ego talking, that the dude who started in a silly hard rock duo called Attila has no place tinkling the ivories on classic gas), hasn’t written a decent album since Glass Houses (sorry, The Nylon Curtain sounds like it was written by overdramatic college freshman who probably got his ass beat by a few rubbernecks from Allentown) and who’s penned three of the worst songs ever written in the past 50 years (“We Didn’t Start The Fire,” “Leave A Tender Moment Alone,” and “All About Soul”).
Fuck you, Billy Joel. Nice one on letting your (then) old lady paint your album cover. Did you look at that thing before you sent it off to the art department at Columbia?
Anyways, the Hall of Fame is a joke, the concert sucked, and Billy Joel’s a douchebag.
3 comments:
'does your mother know' kind of rocks!
RATM, full of themselves...hmmm. I'll bet you they've never played nice for Sony, no matter what. Plus, if you want to get a message across to the masses--as I assume they did--which was a better vehicle Sony or SubPop?
Regarding Billy Joel, I dig The Nylon Curtain's "Laura", but yeah that album is pretty over the top and not in a good way. Also, DeVitto's is just one side of the story. (I've never heard anything good or bad about Joel's business dealings with his associates, except that he was very bad at hiring the right people to handle his affairs. It doesn't absolve him of possibly being a scumbag regarding money, of course.)
Regardless, I sincerely doubt he did not make good money with Joel during the 30 years he drummed for him. Musicians at that level and playing for huge mainstream artists--which Joel was, if not chart-wise, definitely in terms of his concert fee, for almost the entirety of DeVitto's stint--rake in a couple of grand a night. And DeVitto did it for 3 decades.
Oh, and are we supposed to feel sorry for him because he's a session musician now? I'd be surprised if he wasn't making three times the $400-$500 per day an established but faceless drummer makes. Not enough? Tighten your belt, homes. There's plenty of people who were richer than you ever were taking the subway now.
I guess he blew his cash, lost it to Madoff, or whatever. But my question is, what royalties is he supposed to be getting from Joel? For his performances on the albums? That's Columbia's responsibility, if he was indeed an actual band member who signed with Columbia alongside Joel. Otherwise, he was owed a fee as a hired gun, but not royalties, unless he and Joel had some sort of separate deal.
Finally, if DeVitto co-wrote any of that stuff--I don't recall seeing his name anywhere among the writing credits on Joel's records--he should be getting his money from the publisher of the songs, not Billy Joel. Smells like sour grapes, but hey, you never know.
(And yes, I would bang Alexa Ray.)
What message does RATM convey? I suppose the same kind of lefty revolutionary shit that sensative crackers in college try to emulate. And hey, I was one of 'em so I can make fun of 'em now. I've always viewed the band with a sense of mistrust-some of it stemming from the label but most of it just out of cynical contempt and suspicion that the band wasn't as revolutionary as their bio kit would have you believe. I mean Marello worked for Alan Cranston, so the US Government seems to work for him when it's paying the bills.
And Joel is a douche, I can feel it. Liberty's suit is completely unfounded and the whole thing reeks of him just trying to fuck with Joel for letting him go. Liberty probably viewed Joel as his permanent meal ticket and felt safe that his position would always be there. But the rumour is that Liberty was an active part of Joel's intervention for alcoholism. Afterwards, Joel had a chance to absorb some of Liberty's comments and decided that he didn't like his drummer getting close to his personal issues. Fair enough, but it's still a shitty thing to fire him.
And remember when Joel wrote that classical piece (he "retired" from the pop business after River Of Dreams because he's better than pop music) a few years ago? That itself should demonstrate what a dick the guy is. I would have some amount of tolerance for him if he'd only remembered his place in music snd been appreciative of what pop music has provided him.
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