DIS-CONCERTING
IT has become almost common practice in critical circles to measure popular music, especially rock, by visual as well as musical standards. This is hardly surprising, for it be came a necessity just as soon as the trappings of burlesque, the circus sideshow, and worse began to overshadow the musical aspects of many rock acts. Showbizzy production numbers-dancing teeth, live chickens, dismembered baby dolls, and all-were essential to the candle-brief career of Alice Cooper, for example, and they are now being echoed in the bad-copy shenanigans of such successors as Kiss and Parliament/Funkadelic. And we probably haven't even seen the end of it more televised rock concerts and the coming of large-screen TV projectors in clubs and bars can be counted on to keep the fashion going for at least a little while longer.
Meanwhile, performers whose music is good enough to seize your whole attention through the ears without any distracting visual bait are getting pretty rare. Gordon Light foot is one of them. A long string of recordings (his latest, "Summertime Dream," received an Honorable Mention in STEREO RE VIEW'S Record of the Year Awards last month) attests to the unvarying high quality of his music and his performances of it. His voice and his guitar are all this troubadour has needed since the early Sixties to command the respectful attention of his always sold-out houses. And that's all he needed the night I heard him in the newly refurbished Avery Fisher Hall at New York's Lincoln Center last November-that and a little electrified back-up group to beef up the sound of his acoustic guitar. He's a bit beefier himself these days, but then he's a whole lot looser too; he chatted comfortably with his fans be tween oldies such as If You Could Read My Mind and newer songs such as The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
It is, when you sit down and think about it, surprising that such a simple kind of presentation can work at all, but then Lightfoot is an exception, his showmanship of a subtly personal kind not many can muster. We need showmanship, of course; a performance that is totally lacking in it can bore us just as quickly as one that is composed of nothing else. All other things being equal, the flick of a nicely timed blood-red spotlight just at the high point of a familiar song can be as exciting as the wonderfully unexpected new guitar riff that accompanies it.
What is needed for the best of all concert worlds is a balance between the artistic sub stance-in this case the music-and the effective, glamorous, yes, even gimmicky manner of its presentation. The successful artists of any time are those most skilled in attaining that balance. It is a skill that comes mostly from experience, but you needn't necessarily be as old an old-timer as, say, Bing Crosby to have picked it up. Such relative youngsters as the Who have it. So do the Stones, Wings, El ton John, and Bruce Springsteen.
Patti Smith almost has it. In a recent appearance at the Bottom Line (which she dubbed the "AM" of New York clubs, CBGB's and Max's being examples of "FM") she was gut-level powerful, easily establishing an aura of camaraderie with her tough-kid rap, moving into white-hot treatments of Jolene and Redondo Beach, and uninhibitedly using the audience's food-and-drink-littered tables like a stripper's runway. It was theatrical and it was exciting, and had she been able to sustain that momentum and build on it from song to song it would have been devastating.
Instead, she noodled around between numbers, chatted, played with the sound equipment, and generally dissipated the energy she had so effectively built up before.
-------- GORDON LIGHTFOOT: respectful attention
John Denver--if you are ready for a really mighty change of subject--has it too. His musicianship is impeccable, his voice excellent, and although his too-sweet tunes and down home sentiments lack the grit I need in my aural diet, I can't fault his showmanship. A sold-out pair of concerts at New York's Madison Square Garden late last fall found him arena-center each night atop a little wedding-cake stage with his band spread out one tier below him. Through the evening I began to realize that Denver was turning ve-e-ery slowly so that he faced each part of the audience for an equal amount of time. The platform he was standing on was motorized, going through the 360 degrees so slowly that movement was not visible. Thoughtful, effective, and probably very expensive. Add to this a perfectly paced selection of his fans' favorites new and old (including some from his most recent album), excellent-no, fabulous-lighting, and you had a tight, fumble-free little show that left the crowd delighted and satisfied despite the fact that Denver (contrary to usual pop practice) sings no encores.
Contrast that display of balanced professionalism with another concert I went to shortly after: a legendary super-group, one I've loved for years despite its waxing and waning popularity; the long-awaited return of a much-missed founding member of the group; a stage set extravagantly rigged with palm trees, a sand-colored floor to suggest a beach, and a sixty-foot-long sloop strung with multicolored lights to flash and throb with the beat. Nothing but good vibrations, a setup for a perfect concert evening, right? Wrong. If, as a kid, you ever wanted-really wanted-a chemistry set for your birthday, and you got this package of exactly the right size and shape only to find that it contained sox and underwear, then you may have some idea of my disappointment. What I wanted in this case was the Beach Boys; what I got was . . . well, underwear.
Management-type VIP's on hand assured me that the Boys were merely having a Bad Night, but I still feel like spitting. They were all having tantrums, it seemed, which hardly holds with the old show-biz dictum about smiling though your heart is breaking. Things started off with a few old favorites (Wouldn't It Be Nice and like that), but everything fell apart about twenty minutes in. Harmonies crumbled, Mike Love seemed to be taunting the returning Brian Wilson who, at the piano, was being treated (live!) to a neck massage ad ministered by his personal roadie. Later, Dennis Wilson stalked off stage in a huff, no explanation. He returned later to help pull the show together, but by then it was too late for me. Two brand-new songs by Brian were poorly received, and somehow even the spirited last segment of classics (Heroes and Villains, Good Vibrations, and Surfin' U.S.A. among them) failed to revive my spirits.
Maybe their new studio album will be different; at least I'll get a chance to really hear those new songs of Brian's. And then there's that promised solo album by Dennis. . . .
* * * Editor's Note: Steve Simels, sometime proprietor of this column of pop-music commentary, has moved on to the fresh woods and new pastures of television writing, but he will continue to alarm and enlighten us all with his salty opinions in the monthly review section.
Also see:
GOING ON RECORD, JAMES GOODFRIEND