Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Michael Jackson - HIStory - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE - Book I

Here’s a really good remembrance of Michael Jackson from a guy who was involved in creating this album: Michael Jackson at the Hit Factory.  Random quotes:

One morning MJ came in with a new song he had written overnight. We called in a guitar player, and Michael sang every note of every chord to him. “here’s the first chord first note, second note, third note. Here’s the second chord first note, second note, third note”, etc., etc. We then witnessed him giving the most heartfelt and profound vocal performance, live in the control room through an SM57.

He would sing us an entire string arrangement, every part. Steve Porcaro once told me he witnessed MJ doing that with the string section in the room. Had it all in his head, harmony and everything. Not just little eight bar loop ideas. he would actually sing the entire arrangement into a micro-cassette recorder complete with stops and fills.

At one point Michael was angry at one of the producers on the project because he was treating everyone terribly. Rather than create a scene or fire the guy, Michael called him to his office/lounge and one of the security guys threw a pie in his face. No further action was needed … . .

If you can enjoy the style of music, taken outside of the context of the intensely artificial newsscape built around him, it’s an incredible work of mankind, a product of a huge number of people focused on one goal, working intently without rest to achieve it, like Star Wars or the Statue of Liberty.

If you can’t enjoy the music, or can’t ignore the context, then it’s just “wacky Jackson” or whatever.

Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band - Outer South

(listen to it on NPR’s “Exclusive First Listen”)

I keep catching myself wanting to dislike the Dylan/Beatles/Allman Brothers mishmash of this album, but I can’t, it’s such a great sprawling piece of positivity.

I love the Austin City Limits songwriters-in-the-round episode with Oberst and M. Wood (is that is name?) and a couple others - the guy from My Morning Jacket, I think.  I only watch it in my mind, though - for some reason I recorded over my VHS of it.  I think I succumbed to the same impulse to dislike - where does that come from?

Generally speaking, this kind of classic rock reconstruction strikes me as like the Annie’s brand of organic macaroni and cheese you can buy these days in the grocery store.  Delicious, but cognitively dissonant.  Don’t they risk enshrining rock and roll in the same kind of cultural straightjacket jazz occupies in mainstream culture?

In some respect, of course, the idea that Wynton Marsalis has ruined jazz is a myth.  Norah Jones, for example, in her role as the Shania Twain of jazz, clearly shows that people are still unbound by proscriptive jazz doctrines, and there are plenty of jazz innovators in between segments on All Things Considered - although even jazz too freaky for ATC is feeling rather cemented in place.  Really, though, the progress of pieces of culture from fringe to mainstream to relic is not undeniably a bad thing, much less any one person’s fault.

But if a given collection of ideas is like a person, every time a band does something because that’s the way the Rolling Stones would’ve done it is one more step towards rock and roll’s retirement.

This album and Bill Callahan’s Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle are a couple of great-sounding new albums coming out of Texas. This one was recorded at some kind of awesome pleasure palace near El Paso - Sonic Ranch Studios.  Check out their “adobe studio”.  That’s just one of five studios and three houses on the site.  It’s kind of ridiculous.  I guess the results speak for themselves.  It ain’t Blind Willie Johnson!