Cahiers du Musique

There are many tragedies in the world of music. Mozart dying young and penniless, buried in a common grave. Billie Holliday ignominiously handcuffed to her deathbed, charged with drug possession. The shockingly overpopulated Forever 27 Club. But few stories in pop music are as full of woe as the tale of the Welsh group that came to define power pop, Badfinger. The first band signed to The Beatles' Apple Records, they seemed destined for pop greatness — if not outright picking up right where the Fab Four left off — but mismanagement, deceit, and plain old bad luck scuttled all their aspirations. Within an eight year period between 1975 and 1983, the songwriting duo of Ham/Evans, the central creative forces in the band, had both committed suicide. Their deaths were blamed on a convenient combination of despondency over their lack of mainstream success and their sense of betrayal by record companies and managers who had swindled them out of their earnings, but a careful analysis o...

Welcome to my recurring monthly feature, the cleverly titled "Months of Garcia." In each installment, I'll pick a month of Jerry Garcia's career at random and listen to all the shows, across all his various bands, and write up my thoughts about the various highlights, lowlights, etc. At the end of each entry, I'll reveal the month randomly selected for the next edition. You get the idea. This first entry's randomly chosen month is January 1978, an impressively busy month for Garcia, with 13 Grateful Dead shows over the span of 26 days, most of which are well above average in enjoy-ability, if not in creativity. The Itinerary 1/6/78 Swing Auditorium, San Bernardino, CA 1/7/78 Golden Hall - San Diego Community Concourse, San Diego, CA 1/8/78 Golden Hall - San Diego Community Concourse, San Diego, CA 1/10/78 Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, CA 1/11/78 Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, CA 1/13/78 Arlington Theatre, Santa Barbara, CA 1/14/78...

HALLELUJAH! Parliament-Funkadelic is one of those groups that's earned a legendary reputation but also feels strangely underappreciated. Immeasurably influential and respected, yet not given the same serious consideration as other luminaries in popular music. The reasons for this oversight are complex and veiled. In our view, Parliament-Funkadelic's contributions to the musical canon through their originality, audacity, and prolificacy, are virtually unrivaled. Before digging in, any conversation about Parliament-Funkadelic must begin by untangling what to a funk neophyte must seem like a convoluted web of names and personalities. Definition of P-Funk In 1956, George Clinton founded the doo-wop group, The Parliaments, in Plainfield, New Jersey. They had little to moderate success through the '50s and early '60s, and it wasn't until Jimi Hendrix burst on the scene in the US during the Summer of Love, 1967, that George Clinton truly began to find his voic...

As I mention in the inaugural post of this site, of all the arguments, debates, comparisons, and ripostes in Deadheadland, the most fundamental of these always comes down to what is the Dead's best year. Of the thirty years to choose from, the most serious candidates usually come down to every year within their golden period ('68-'74) and 1977. Sometimes 1978 might creep up in there as well. But really, rarely if ever will you find a Deadhead whose favourite year comes from the Reagan or Clinton decades. In my younger and slightly more foolish years, I limited my Grateful Dead experience to the '60s and '70s. I had myself convinced through no real watchfulness or evidence that by the '80s and '90s the Dead had become a drugged-out caricature of themselves, and I didn't want to endure the ignominy of Jerry forgetting entire verses of lyrics or having his guitar turned down because he couldn't keep up. The cumulative effect of my prejudice is ...

The Ronettes What kind of music blog would this be if we didn't even give our two cents on the greatest pop songs? A strange and backwards one, that's what kind. I'm more than okay with strange but backwards is a dealbreaker for me. It is a quality I cannot tolerate in others or myself. I took a slightly different take on the usual music list. It isn't numerical, but hierarchically grouped  under Greek mythological inspired headings. I do single out the most perfect song, but as the title of this piece explicitly states, this list is limited to songs since 1950. Perhaps a future post will focus on 1890-1949. But for now, to the business at hand. To me, a perfect pop song must fulfill three criteria: Superior production quality relative to the time-period. It's got to sound really good. This also implies it's going to be recorded at a major studio. That's just how it goes.  Themes and lyrics that focus on love, youth, freedom, subversion, def...

(Jonathan Daniels) When I hear people use the phrasing of how music is the soundtrack of their lives, I do not judge them for employing empty platitudes. In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a more sincere and accurate statement. Music is the sound of our emotions, and there is a song out there for just about every emotion we are capable of feeling. Love. The grandest emotion of them all. From the first caveman's lullaby, we've been singing about love — its indescribable joys represented in music from every culture and country in the world.  As we regrettably know, too often love goes wrong. Necessity is the mother of invention, and so the breakup song was created. But there are special cases when love goes wrong because the other person is, crudely put, an asshole. These cases call for not just a mere breakup song, but a song that convincingly expresses the singer's displeasure with the behavior of his or her partner. I call this the takedown song. The...