Category: Video

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Music Uncategorized Video Writing

Wake up, make tea, write songs, repeat

Last night I used an iTunes card I got for my birthday (thanks, Katie and Elizabeth!) to watch the first half of the documentary on the Eagles. It’s really good. I like them a lot, but even if you don’t, it’s fascinating to see how music brought them together and fame broke them apart. My favorite moment was Glenn Frey talking about his early days in Los Angeles, when he and roommate JD Souther lived above Jackson Browne. None of them had made it yet — Browne’s place wasn’t even an official apartment, just a cubbyhole in a basement in Echo Park. But he already knew the secret to success — not just at writing, but pretty much anything else.

Here’s Frey:

We slept late in those days, except around 9 in the morning, I’d hear Jackson Browne’s teapot going off with the whistle in the distance, and then I’d hear him playing piano. I didn’t really know how to write songs. I knew I WANTED to write songs, but I didn’t know exactly … you just wait around for inspiration, you know, what was the deal?

I learned through Jackson’s ceiling and my floor exactly how to write songs. Because Jackson would get up and he’d play the first verse and first chorus, and he’d play it 20 times until he had it just the way he wanted, and then there’d be silence, and then I’d hear the teapot go off again. It’d be quiet for 10 or 20 minutes. Then I’d hear him start to play again, and there was a second verse, so then he’d work on the second verse — he’d play it 20 times — and then he’d go back to the top of the song and play the first verse, the first chorus and the second verse another 20 times, until he was really comfortable with it, and, you know, change a word here or there.

And I’m up there going, So that’s how you do it. Elbow grease. You know, time. Thought. Persistence.

After I wrote all that down, I remembered Bill Simmons wrote an opus on the documentary a few months back. It’s worth checking out, too.

Simmons is right, by the way: That’s a beautifully done scene — a little gem of storytelling. (It doesn’t hurt when Glenn Frey is your narrator.)

Anyway: Elbow grease. Time. Thought. Persistence. If you want to write, that’ll get you a long way there.

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Music Video

The great Billy Powell

Sometimes your iPod knows things before you do. Last night I had it on shuffle for a couple of hours and it kept coming back to Lynyrd Skynyrd. Then I got home this afternoon and found out that Billy Powell died.

John Updike died yesterday. He was an amazing writer and deserved all the front-page obits. But when I look at the thing honestly I know that Billy Powell has meant more to my life than John Updike ever has.

If you think about Lynyrd Skynyrd at all, you probably don’t think about the piano player. They had Ronnie Van Zant out front and three guitars behind him. The band started out without a piano player; Powell was their roadie. The story goes that one night in Skynyrd’s early days, as they were setting up to play a high school prom, Powell sat down at the piano and played an intro to “Free Bird.” Van Zant heard it and put him in the band right there.

In our house, growing up, there was nothing but country music. When I was 10 I could have told you every one of Charley Pride’s hits but maybe only one or two of the Beatles’. Somewhere in there we went to visit one of my cousins. She must have been in her early 20s then — old enough to have her own apartment — and she smoked and wore cutoffs and had the first Skynyrd album on her stereo. I stared at those longhairs on the album cover and listened to the music and my life changed right there. I didn’t acquire great musical taste on the spot (some of my friends might say I never acquired it) but at that moment I knew there was a bigger world of music than I had ever imagined, dangerous and fun and beautiful and irresistible.

A lot of postmodern Southern boys are conflicted about Lynyrd Skynyrd. They used to hang a giant Confederate flag at the back of the stage, and they defended George Wallace, and they would no-show concerts or show up too strung out to play. That first album came out in 1973, and if you’ve read this far you probably know that Van Zant and two other band members died in a plane crash in 1977. Less than five good years. A new version with some of the old members (including Powell) formed in 1987, and still plays today, but to me that band doesn’t count.

I don’t know how to reconcile the flag and the drugs and all the other stuff with the beauty and power of the music. I’m not sure you’re even supposed to reconcile things when it comes to art. In the end you love what you love. All I know is that I love Lynyrd Skynyrd and I love to hear Billy Powell play.

You don’t even see him in this clip — the camera crew can’t seem to find him — but about halfway through it comes time for his solo and you sure enough hear him. Billy Powell versus three guitars turns out to be a fair fight. This, y’all, was one hell of a rock and roll band.

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Music Obama Video

The president and the queen

We watched the inauguration today with some of our new international friends, and one of them surprised us all — he had never heard of Aretha Franklin.

It was a good lesson. Our country is so important, and our culture pushes so deep into every corner of the world, that we forget not everyone knows everything about us. There are lots of people around the globe who live rich and fulfilling lives despite never having heard of the Dallas Cowboys or “30 Rock” or Stephen King.

Having said that, our lives would all be richer with more Aretha in them.

As soon as CNN called the election for Obama, I suspect Aretha started expecting the call from the White House. She was the only possible choice to sing at the inauguration for the first black president. If Ray Charles had been alive, maybe. James Brown… too many troubles there at the end. Al Green… almost, but not quite.

I could write a million words about Aretha, but all I’ll say for now is that no one has ever been better at making music that stayed out all Saturday night and still went to church on Sunday morning.

It’s going to be an interesting four years. A new president, and a country that just elected a new president, both need a lot of strong character traits. It probably doesn’t hurt if one of them is soul.

God bless America and let the Queen of Soul take us home.

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Movies Music Video

“Once” more

(Found on YouTube: a camera-phone video from Friday night’s show)

Some of you know about my obsession with the movie “Once.” It’s really not a healthy thing. I’ve seen the movie four or five times now, listened to the soundtrack probably 100 times, watched all the DVD extras, read way too many interviews with the stars. This is all time I could have spent working out or cutting the grass or maybe reading the philosophy I now have as homework for one of my classes. Maybe by now I would have been able to understand John Stuart Mill. Probably not.

The couple at the heart of “Once” — Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova — were playing in concert up here, so of course we went. The show was at the Boston University hockey arena — not exactly the perfect venue for soul-searching acoustic music — but when you have a hit movie and 5,000 people want to see you, a hockey arena it is.

Hansard is the frontman for the Irish band The Frames, who were onstage about half the time and closed the show with their signature song, “Fitzcarraldo.” A few people hollered out requests for Frames songs. But most of us came to see Hansard and Irglova. A beefy guy in a Red Sox cap three rows in front of us kept screaming for “The Hill” — Irglova’s heartwrenching piano ballad about a woman who feels invisible to her lover. It was like watching a dockworker beg Barry Manilow to play “Mandy.”

But when you strip away the beefy guy and the hockey arena and everything else, you’re left with two people making music. This is why “Once” hit me so hard. It’s not just a story with music in it, it’s a story ABOUT music, why it means so much to people, why people are willing to sacrifice so much for it — fixing vacuum cleaners to pay the bills or playing in the street all day for tourists who never throw you a dime.

(One of my ironclad rules to live by is this: Always pay the street musician. This turns out to be a problem here in Cambridge, where at any given moment in Harvard Square there are roughly 642 street musicians.)

It turns out that Hansard and Irglova were walking around Boston the afternoon of the show and ran into a street musician. It also turned out that the guy was coming to the show. So — you know what comes next, right? — halfway through the show they invited the guy up on stage to do one of his songs. (You know you’re in Boston when… the street musician has a Web site.)

Hansard was a busker himself in Dublin, back when he was a teenager, and he still plays the beat-up acoustic guitar he had back then — it has jagged holes where the pick guard should be. He plays it hard. But he can also play it slow and pretty — usually when he’s singing with his partner in music and in life.

“Falling Slowly” won an Oscar for Hansard and Irglova — they had the best moment in the Oscar show, where Irglova got cut off trying to give her speech and they brought her back after the commercial. They’re both professional musicians now, making serious money, but they give off the feeling that they’re still scrambling — Hansard was proud to announce that he had shopped the Boston thrift stores and paid 3 bucks for his shirt.

Sting isn’t a real person to me — he’s such a star that he’s somehow other than human. Prince, the same way. Even Springsteen, even though he tries harder than anyone to prove that beneath it all he’s a regular guy.

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova still feel like real people. Maybe it’s just because we’re catching them at the right time. But maybe it’s because they’re just as surprised as we are at the moments when we find our gifts, and the moments when we fall in love.

They played “Falling Slowly” early in the set Friday night, and when their voices came together you had to imagine that they heard what we heard, that no matter whether it was love or friendship or whatever, once they made one voice out of two, they had to be together.