Bob Dylan Dance Party

by Kirk Woodward

[I imagine by now that most readers of Rick On Theater know that my friend Kirk Woodward is my go-to guest blogger for anything musical.  Most ROTters also probably know that Kirk’s a longtime and staunch fan of Bob Dylan.  Those two factoids should explain why this post exists on this blog.  Plus the fact that he went to a Dylan concert, the Never Ending Tour at the Upper West Side’s Beacon Theatre from 23 November to 6 December, a few days before Thanksgiving.

[I post Kirk’s reports and discussions of music—there have been quite a few on ROT since I started it almost 11 years ago—because, one, I could never cover musical subjects on my own; I’m entirely ignorant about music.  Two, I always learn something from his writing about the subject.  He not only understands music as an art form, but her knows the performers and their musicianship so he can talk about how they did whatever he heard. 

[That’s what he’s done here, vis à vis Bob Dylan.  Trust me: you’ll gain something from reading his account of the Dylan experience.]

I would go to more concerts if they were as good as the Bob Dylan concert I attended on Tuesday, November 26, 2019, at the Beacon Theater, toward the beginning of a two week residency by Dylan at that theater.

“Good,” not perfect. From where I sat – far back in the upper balcony – Dylan’s vocals were often overwhelmed by the volume of sound from his band. I realize that so many rock concerts do this same thing – that artists whose words are central to their performances often can’t be understood because the overall sound is too loud, and because the lower tones – drums, bass guitar – seem to be the sound operator’s favorites.

Booming sound hardly helps one understand the lyrics sung by Dylan, who is no model of understandability to start with. One gets used to that, though, and I found my ears adjusted – somewhat – as the concert went on. For all I know, the sound was clearer downstairs anyway; I couldn’t say.

In compensation for any trouble understanding his words, Dylan was in terrific voice. His years of recording and singing in concert songs associated with Frank Sinatra seem to be over, but the residue is a clearer voice and much more connection between singer and audience.

For several years Dylan sounded like he had ravaged his vocal chords (smoking? drinking?), and many of us assumed we would be hearing mostly growls from him for the rest of his concert and recording career. As usual, he fooled us. He does that sort of thing. Last year and this, he sings, firmly and securely; his phrasing is excellent, and he seems able to get just about any vocal effect he wants.

Part of the fun of attending multiple Dylan concerts is noticing what has changed from previous ones. His tight, muscular band is usually more or less consistent (Charlie Sexton on guitar, Tony Garnier on bass, Donnie Heron on steel guitar and violin), but Bob Britt, on rhythm guitar, is new this tour, and Matt Chamberlin on drums is a major addition, with a sure, clean style and sturdy support for Dylan’s vocals.

Other novelties and oddities from the concert:

On stage behind the band were three mannequins, two female and one male, in evening dress, and on several locations on stage were white busts of a woman I couldn’t identify from my distance from the stage.

Dylan played a spinet piano instead of a grand.

Only one band member (the bass player) wore a hat.

Last concert, a friend of mine expressed the fervent wish that Dylan would play just one song the way he did it on the record. At this concert he did, substantially, on “Highway 61,” and close enough on “Ballad of a Thin Man.”

Instrumentally, there was more emphasis than before on the violin, which accompanied Dylan on five songs to great effect.

When he left the piano and sang (and sometimes played harmonica, fine as usual) at center stage, he usually backed up until he was surrounded by the musicians, and sang facing “stage right,” as though someone were in the wings of the stage. I gather he’s been doing that this tour. There’s always something.

Dylan played electric guitar twice during the concert. I have not seen him touch a guitar in years; piano has been his instrument, and he’s gotten secure with it. I haven’t read or heard anything authoritative about why he largely abandoned the guitar; anyway, it’s back in limited use. I’ve never thought Dylan was much of an electric guitar player, but at the Beacon he sounded at least adequate, if maybe a bit tentative.

In a band where the musicians seldom have much opportunity to shine individually, Charlie Sexton was applauded for a strenuous guitar solo, and Matt Chamberlain had a drum solo! Really! I was there!

And Dylan introduced the band! It’s been a while since I saw him do that. He sounded cheerful and enthusiastic as he introduced each member. Surprise! One can go to concerts for years and not hear him speak, as opposed to sing, a word.

Those are the sorts of things that fascinate Dylan fans.

Basically, the concert’s song list could be divided into two kinds of songs, affecting ballads, and rockers. Among the former, the highlights for me were “Lenny Bruce,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” and “Girl From the North Country,” all sung from the piano with reduced accompaniment by the band. Dylan sang those three songs simply and effectively, and the audience seemed to feel those were among the most satisfying moments of the show; I certainly did.

On several other numbers, though, the band just wailed. It was quite a sight to see Dylan standing at the piano, pounding it for all the world like Jerry Lee Lewis – one halfway expected him to lift his leg and start banging the piano with his foot.

On one number, with a traditional rock ‘n’ roll arrangement, Charlie Sexton actually played the melody of the old Moonglows song “Sincerely” (1954, written by Harvey Fuqua and Alan Freed) as the instrumental break.

Dylan, of course, has always been securely connected to the past where music is concerned. It is universally recognized that his knowledge of popular music of all kinds, particularly what’s called “American roots music,” is encyclopedic. I have always felt that he saw his task as one of bringing the values of more obscure folk music and poetry onto the “big stage.”

He continues to make that happen; he’s been doing it a long time. Before the concert I talked with a man who heard him sing in 1961. It was at a folk music club in Greenwich Village, and a very young Bob Dylan sang a couple of songs during an “open mike” evening. He was just warming up.

[My introduction to "Dylan" goes back a pretty long way.  (Both Kirk and I are older than Rock ’n’ Roll.)  I put the singer-songwriter’s name  in quotation marks like that because it wasn’t actually the man himself, but someone who sang one of his songs, which I’d never heard before.

[I don’t remember a lot of the details (like I said, I’m older than R ’n’ R), but it must have been sometime in 1965, probably the summer.  My folks had moved to Bad Godesberg, the home of our embassy to Germany, by that time (my dad had been transferred to the embassy from another post in the spring) and the event took place in someone’s embassy-compound apartment.  

[I don’t remember whose apartment it was or why we gathered there.  I assume whoever the embassy staffer was, she or he had a teenaged son or daughter (I don’t know why, but for some reason I remember a girl) who’d invited a bunch of other embassy brats like me to the home for an evening—there was a small crowd of us, all teens and maybe some college-aged kids as well. 

[I remember sitting around in the living room, listening to a guy sing as he accompanied himself on guitar.  What I recall as the last song was “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” the Dylan song that wasn’t released until the previous year and hadn’t gotten to Europe yet—or, at least, not to my ears.  As I remember the impromptu rock concert, none of us had heard the song—or, I imagine, anything like it.

[I don’t remember who the singer was—for all I know, he became a famous folk-rocker (or maybe he already was and I just didn’t know him).  I assume he wasn’t an official State Department sponsee because, if he had been, my dad would have been his host because Dad was the Cultural Attaché; it would have been his gig!  

[I may have known Dylan’s name by then, or I may not yet.  I just don’t remember.  After my brother and I moved to Germany in 1963, I only went back to the States once, in the spring of ’64 to visit colleges (and the New York World’s Fair with my grandmother!), and American culture didn’t get to Europe in those days until after a gap of maybe six months or longer.  (My American schoolmates in Switzerland mobbed my brother and me when we got there because we’d been “home” more recently than most of them and we knew the songs and dances that had been current when we left that summer!  We were the cultural heralds, so to speak.)  

[So this was my first impression of “Dylan”—by proxy, but nonetheless striking.  Not as avid as Kirk’s, perhaps, but I went on to become a fan, too.]

Bob and Ringo

by Kirk Woodward

[Following shortly on “Frankie,” his report on a recent Frankie Valli concert appearance (posted on 16 November), my friend Kirk Woodward is back on Rick On Theater with a new post on a couple of rock ’n’ roll oldies.  This time it’s folk-rock icon Bob Dylan and former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr.  As regular ROTters will know, Kirk is a long-time fan of both Dylan and the Beatles; he’s previously written on both for this blog: “Bob Dylan, Performance Artist,” posted on 8 January 2011; “Bob Dylan at Woodstock – And a New Album,” 14 November 2012; “The Beatles And Me,” 7 October 2010; “The Beatles Box,” 30 September 2012; “The Beatles Diary,” 8 January 2013; “The Beatles’ Influence,” 13 July 2015; and “Now, Live, The Non-Beatles,” 27 September 2016.  As I’ve frequently said of Kirk’s contributions to ROT, his accounts of these musical experiences are informed both by his personal responses and his background and knowledge of music and performance.  I am beyond delighted to share Kirk’s thoughts with ROTters and I know you will find edifying notions here.  ~Rick]

Since I recently wrote on this blog about a sterling Frankie Valli concert I saw in November 2017, I may as well report on two other shows I saw in the same month, both involving older performers, although neither are as old as Valli, who is 83 (he was born in 1934). Both are close, though – Bob Dylan is 76 (born in 1941), and Ringo Starr is 77 (born in 1940). Both are known quantities, first making their musical marks in the early 1960s. Both remain remarkable performers today.

Of the two, Bob Dylan is the more mercurial. On the one hand, he is an established figure in the world of music, to the point where he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. On the other hand, he remains unpredictable, as demonstrated by his response to receiving the Nobel Prize: he remained invisible for days, finally released a statement saying the award left him “speechless,” did not travel to Stockholm to receive the award, and delivered his acceptance speech, which the prize rules require in order to receive the cash award, two months after the deadline, in the form of a recorded speech accompanied by music.

His Nobel experience may be taken as a model for nearly everything he does. It is not just that he does not meet expectations; he scorns them, defies them, dares the rest of the world to follow him through any amount of curious behavior.

For some of us who saw one of his five concerts at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan during the week of November 13-17, 2017, the biggest example of Dylan’s unpredictable behavior, among many possible choices, involves his voice.

Beginning around the time of the release of his celebrated album Time Out of Mind (1997), and intensifying by the time the album Modern Times (2006) was released, Dylan’s voice noticeably thickened, contracted in range, and took on a gravelly sound.

Many, including me, assumed that the years had taken their toll on his vocal equipment, and we did our best to enjoy what was worthwhile in Dylan’s new sound. I don’t regard purity of tone as the only standard for a singer.

Years ago I heard the cabaret singer Mabel Mercer (1900-1984) at a period when she literally had lost the ability to sing – she could only speak the lyrics of her songs. (I have read that her singing voice later somewhat returned.) I remember her  renditions of songs as among the best I have ever heard, with versions of “Send In the Clowns” and “Being Green” that stick with me to this day – and at that time she couldn’t sing a note.

So I accepted Dylan’s hoarse later voice, and was stunned at the recent Beacon concert to hear him not only sing, but sing as tunefully and clearly as he has in decades, and with greater range – occasionally singing relatively high notes in an easy semi-falsetto.

What in the world? How did he clear up his sound so well? Will he keep singing this way? One never knows with Dylan, but there’s the possibility that his rugged voice of recent years was another of the many constructs out of which he has built his public persona.

Many “stars,” it appears, seem to have a mysterious ability to shape their environments. There is a tape of a Dick Cavett TV interview with the actress Katherine Hepburn (1907-2003), who Cavett says at the beginning of the tape had been uncertain whether she wanted to be on the show at all.

Cavett asked the staff to begin taping as soon as Hepburn arrived in the studio. What we see on the tape is Hepburn immediately taking charge of the show, ordering the cameras into different locations, moving furniture around, and generally dominating the whole scene without concern for who is “in charge.” She was.

Along the same lines, I talked once with a man who had encountered Dylan on a New York street and spoke to him briefly. The man told me that as people began to notice that Bob Dylan was right there among them, and a crowd began to gather, Dylan somehow maneuvered his position so that the man was a shield between the other people and Dylan. Then, he said, he looked around and Dylan had disappeared.

That story, which I have no reason to doubt, is consistent with everything we know about Dylan’s performing life. He “shapes the environment” of both his music and his personality as the public experiences it. (I have no idea what he is like in private life.)

The issue is not what he is communicating – I am not at all doubting the genuineness of his interests and his love for his art – but how he presents it. He so seldom does the expected that some have referred to him as “perverse.”

There is another way to look at what Dylan does, of course, and that is to see him as someone who wants his audience to pay attention – to be alert, to participate in what he’s doing, to share with him the experience of encountering the world the way he sees it. To accomplish this, perhaps, he specializes in doing the unexpected, or, to put it another way, to doing what he wants instead of what people want him to do.

In his remarkable autobiography Chronicles Volume One (Simon and Schuster, 2004), Dylan drops hints that he consciously engineers his persona. For example,  he writes, “If you didn’t have some kind of trick, you’d come off with an invisible presence, which wasn’t good.” He’s specifically talking about what he learned from watching the singer Richie Havens, but the comment certainly seems to have larger implications.

In Chronicles (a book well worth anyone’s time to read) Dylan also talks about his exposure to the famous off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera (which opened in 1954, and then returned in 1955 for 2,707 performances), with music by Kurt Weill (1900-1950) and book and lyrics by Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), translated by Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964).

Dylan devotes five pages of his book to the effect the work had on him, especially the song “Pirate Jenny.” It is tempting to link Dylan with Brecht’s famous theories about drama as an instrument for shaking an audience out of its usual expectations and making it think (often referred to in English, somewhat inaccurately, as the “alienation effect”). Dylan’s many personae and his varied approaches to his music certainly seem to call Brecht’s approach to mind.

Dylan is notorious, in particular, for recasting his songs into rhythms, melody lines, and even harmonies, that barely resemble those of the original recordings. My friend at the Beacon concert said, “I wish that he’d sing just one line of “Blowing In the Wind” the way he wrote it! That’s all I want – just one line!”

I understand that request, but I think I also understand that Dylan seems to be saying, “Why should I sing a song in the way it sounded on its recording? I’ve already done that!” Another friend of mine feels that Dylan shows disrespect for his own songs. I see that situation in exactly the opposite way – it seems to me that Dylan respects his songs so much that he believes they can exist in many forms different from their original style. That approach is also part of the folk song tradition that (among other traditions) has influenced his writing.

In any case, the effect is to make a Dylan admirer approach each of his concerts wondering what kind of Dylan we’ll get this time – in other words, an alert, interested audience, an active rather than a passive audience.

Having said all that, as a matter of fact there may be a simpler reason that Dylan is singing better than we’ve heard him in a long time: in the last few years he has released three albums of music from what is often called “the great American songbook,” “standards” of popular music, many of them most famously recorded by Frank Sinatra (whom Dylan knew slightly, and greatly admired).

When you hear Dylan sing these songs (for example, at the Beacon, “Once Upon and Time” and “Autumn Leaves,” among others), you certainly know it’s Bob Dylan singing them; but he sings the songs simply and with feeling. He sings them. Perhaps that activity has spilled over into the way he performs his own songs.

In any case, the concert I saw was a huge success, with one high point followed by another. In recent years Dylan has completely stopped playing the guitar, and at the Beacon he didn’t play the harmonica either. Instead he either sang the standards while holding a microphone stand like Sinatra or Elvis might have done, or he sang from the piano, often standing up while playing, pounding on it like Jerry Lee Lewis. When he first started playing piano in his concerts, his playing was unobtrusive and tentative. Now it’s boisterous – a vigorous lead instrument.

Dylan, of course, caused a huge musical upheaval in the 1960s: he opened a new world of lyric writing by showing that words to songs could be personal to an individual,  a window into a specific person’s mind. (He was helped in this by the fact that he is in many ways not just a lyricist but a poet, a fact that his Nobel Prize surely acknowledges.) Everyone who has written popular music since then, including the Beatles, rappers, and everyone else, has benefited from the revolution he caused.

Revolutions don’t come along that often, so Dylan has replaced revolution with revelation. Each appearance is a revelation of what a singer/instrumentalist/songwriter can accomplish, and a look at the possibilities of the human spirit as well – a spirit that may well at times be cranky, individualistic, even, well, perverse.

Ringo Starr also participated in a revolution, the revolution that happened musically, culturally, and perhaps even politically as the Beatles – hugely influenced by Dylan – transformed popular music, in some ways taking Dylan’s insights and presenting them in a more accessible way than Dylan has.

Since 1989, Ringo, long past his Beatle days, and his All-Starr Band have toured widely, with Ringo showcasing a changing series of outstanding musicians from the 1960s and 1970s, and recently of the 1980s. The round-robin format of his shows gives each musician a chance to be showcased, and allows all of them to stretch out musically.

The current band has been together for five years, and includes singer-songwriter Todd Rundgren, keyboardist Gregg Rolie (from the bands Santana and Journey), guitarist Steve Lukather (from Toto), bassist Richard Page (from Mr. Mister), woodwind player Warren Ham (from Bloodrock and Kansas) and drummer Gregg Bissonette, plus of course Ringo, also on drums. 

I saw the last show of their 2017 tour at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, New Jersey. It is not revolutionary, but it is definitely a revelation of how well a rock group can work together. The members seem to genuinely enjoy playing together (and I have heard anecdotally as well that that is so). 

Ringo continues to be a splendid host on stage, relaxed and funny, singing well, drumming (as I read someone say) impeccably, and reminding us of some points we ought to remember: that older folks can accomplish great things; that music can inspire, excite, stimulate, enliven; and that happiness is not only worthwhile but sometimes achievable. Perhaps those things are revolutionary after all.

Frankie

by Kirk Woodward

[I hadn’t expected Kirk to return to Rick On Theater so soon after making such a terrific contribution as “The Red Letter Plays, Continued” (1 November), my friend’s “continuation” of my reportage on the Signature Theatre Company’s revivals of Suzan-Lori Parks’s two Scarlet Letter-inspired plays, In the Blood and Fucking A.  (My reports were posted on 12 and 17 October, respectively.)  But, lo and behold, here he is again with a consideration of Frankie Valli in concert—some 55 years after he fronted The Four Seasons (as chronicled in the recent juke box stage musical Jersey Boys and the 2014 film adaptation).  In “Frankie,” Kirk focuses on Valli’s musicality, his singing and his stage presence.  It’s not so much a review as a personal appreciation from a long-time fan—though Kirk sees Valli’s flaws as a performer as well as his many strengths and assets.  Like all of Kirk’s posts on ROT, “Frankie” reveals some profound points about rock and pop performance and the effects of longevity on our veteran musical performers.]

Enjoy ‘em while we’ve got ‘em . . . .

Sometimes an appearance by a performer comes with a question. Lawrence Olivier had memory trouble for a while – would that keep him from remembering his lines in The Merchant of Venice? Richard Burton had back trouble – would that make him less effective in the revival of Private Lives? Any numbers of singers have had substance abuse and behavioral problems – will they show up for their concerts? Will they be late? Will they be able to perform?

When I saw the singer Frankie Valli at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey, on November 3, 2017, the question – one could sense that the audience had it in mind – was: would Valli be able to sing the piercing falsetto notes that he sang on the famous Four Seasons recordings of the 1960’s and 1970’s? Valli is, after all, 83 years old.

The answer, to the great relief of those of us who were there, is yes, he can.

There were several aspects of the concert that can be identified as concessions to age. For one thing, in the glory days of the Four Seasons, there were four singers, including Valli, some of whom also played instruments, and all of whom did dance steps.

Since the 1970’s, Valli has toured as “Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons,” with four other singers (Todd  Furnier, Brian Brigham, Brandon Brigham, and Landon Beard, according to Wikipedia), none of them original Seasons, backing him up vocally, and doing the Temptations-derived dance moves that Valli doesn’t do any more. (He did essay a couple of cautious choreographed movements late in the show.)

I am pretty certain as well that the keys of the songs have been lowered, so that Valli’s high notes don’t have to be quite as high any more as they used to be. If I’m correct about this, however, the use of the lower keys is nevertheless not particularly distracting

Most importantly, Valli paces his concert (about an hour and a half long) well, particularly in regard to the spectacular notes of some of the songs. By my count he did not sing anything using falsetto until the third number, and then only sparingly – the songs are sequenced so he doesn’t have to.

Little by little, the falsetto sections get longer, until he is really belting them out in “Stay,” after which he said, the night I was there, “I think I hurt myself on that one.” By the end of the show, when the big hits (and terrific songs) like “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Bye Bye Baby,” and “Let’s Hang On” make their appearance, his high notes are strong. A stunning demonstration of this was an a cappella (that is, unaccompanied) verse of “Sherry,” sung by only Valli and the Four Seasons to brilliant effect.

I learned from an actor, Jarrod Spector, who played a remarkable “Frankie Valli” in the musical Jersey Boys (which ran on Broadway from 2005 through 2017), that Valli advised him not to hit the falsetto notes too hard – to take it easy on them, not try to bellow each one. Valli clearly takes his own advice – he seems barely to open his mouth, which indicates that he is not overworking his vocal equipment. This may have something to do with why it has stayed in good shape for so long.

For that matter, Valli is by no means just a high note singer. His “regular” singing voice is notable – the listener can recognize it anywhere by its mix of clarity and growl. He would be a distinctive singer of popular songs if that were all the voice he had. The novelty of the high falsetto tones, of course, set the group apart from others, as did Brian Wilson’s pure falsetto tones for the Beach Boys. But Valli would probably have found a career path anyway…

Maybe in Las Vegas. He has acknowledged that his idol was Frank Sinatra. A good deal of his present show has a Vegas feel about it, a night club feel – although I suspect that some of the items that feel that way were added for the appearances of his concerts on Broadway in 2012, 2016, and 2017, particularly a sentimental film segment over a song called “Harmony” I hadn’t previously heard.

I have always loved the songs the Four Seasons recorded. For a long time I had to defend this opinion, but the task has gotten easier since the massive success of Jersey Boys. The fact is that the music of the Four Seasons has always occupied an odd space between Las Vegas style entertainment, doo wop singing, novelty acts, and rock. To specify:

Las Vegas style entertainment

I felt this both times I saw the original group, in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1964, I noted in my journal that “to my surprise [I was already a fan of their records], I didn’t like them at all,” which I believe I wrote because I thought they had a “night club” rather than a “rock” feel to their performance. I was more specific when, after the second time I saw them, in 1967, I wrote:

Last night, Friday, Patti and I saw the Four Seasons give a good show at the Convention Center. No other groups; they played two halves, with intermission. Their humor low, poor – about underwear, hernias, etc.

I considered that kind of humor to be typical of Las Vegas style entertainment of the time, like the Rat Pack. To be fair, I did continue in the journal:

Sound and songs fine – I was impressed by the quality of their material, like “Bye Bye Baby,” “Don’t Think Twice” [!], “Candy Girl,” “Don’t Worry About Me,” “Tell It To the Rain,” and especially “Let’s Hang On.”

Doo wop

From the beginning the Four Seasons used a typical doo wop lineup of four singers, with one a tenor voice (Valli), one a bass, and so on.

Novelty acts

Valli’s super-distinctive falsetto provided an irresistible and essentially unique “hook” for the songs the group sang.

Rock

My definition of that genre, when I first saw them, was I’m sure restrictive, and I believe many rock critics also had the problem of thinking the Four Seasons weren’t pure rockers – which they weren’t. But heard in concert, for example when I saw them, their songs, well, rock.

Valli’s audiences respond to him. At the November 3 concert, the crowd was mostly on the older side – a friend said she felt like she was at Lourdes! But its loyalty was rewarded. He seems to inspire personal loyalty too – his musical director, the flamboyant and distinctive keyboard player Robby Robinson, has worked with Valli for forty years, and the night I saw the show, Joe Long, who was the group’s first major replacement (from 1965 through 1973 according to Wikipedia), was in the house and Valli introduced him from the stage.

In addition to all the factors I’ve listed here, part of Valli’s appeal, these days, is that performing at his time of his life gives him a kind of gallantry. He is not a “warm” personality on stage. But he is a courageous one to go out at his age and sing vocally daunting music the way he does, and to sing it well. At the concert I heard, his voice got stronger with each song, and he sang with grit and determination. One can hardly ask for more. Long may he wave.

Lady Gaga and 'Once'

by Kirk Woodward

[Once again, my friend Kirk chimes in with an interesting contribution to ROT, this time covering two topics in tandem.  He saw the Broadway production of Once on a recent evening and also a performance by Lady Gaga, one of her concerts for the closing of the Roseland Ballroom in midtown Manhattan.  Kirk wrote on this blog about Lady Gaga before, in “Lady Gaga: Artist for Our Time,” 1 November 2011, though this is the first he’s seen her perform live.] 

I lived in New York City through most of the 1970s; then I moved to New Jersey, and since then it’s an event for me when I’m in Manhattan at night. I tend to forget what a marvelous place it is once the sun has gone down. The lights, the varied range of people, the availability of something different to do on every block . . . . It’s an exciting city, almost a living state of mind.

It wasn’t always that way, of course. Someone asked me the other day if it was the same when I lived there, and of course it wasn’t at all. When my friend asked me the question, we were walking down Ninth Avenue in the evening. In the 1970s I wouldn’t have done that on a bet. I also wouldn’t have done it without the company of a squad of police. Things have changed, though. The rents plummet; the artists move in; everyone else moves in; the rents go up. It’s the Great Circle of (City) Life.

I happened to be in the city several nights in a row during the first week of April of this year, and had two real New York experiences: I went to the noisiest event of my time in the city, and the quietest.

The quietest was the last fifteen minutes or so of the musical Once, currently playing at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. Once opened on Broadway on March 18, 2012, so it’s been running a little over two years. It received eleven Tony Award nominations, and won eight of them, including the award for Best Musical.

The reviews were also excellent. Ben Brantley of the New York Times reviewed the show when it first opened at the New York Theater Workshop in 2011, and seemed to be focused more on the movie of the same name (2006) that the musical was based on, adding somewhat sarcastically that the musical was “steeped in wise and folksy observations about committing to love and taking chances.”

When Once opened on Broadway, however, Brantley wrote that “what is essentially the same production feels as vital and surprising as the early spring that has crept up on Manhattan” – an observation that strikes me as wise and folksy. Anyway, he liked it.

I didn't know a thing about Once when I went to the theater to see it, except that I'd read it was a “bittersweet love story.” That's correct, if limited. It's set in Dublin and is about an Irish singer-songwriter who's having no success at all – basically singing in pubs and on the street, when he can – and a Czech immigrant girl who sees potential in him, connects him with a record producer, and eventually sends him off to the United States to rekindle an earlier relationship and presumably to make his fortune.

It's a musical in which the songs are all “performed” as part of the story – nobody exactly just bursts into song; instead they sing for plot reasons. It has a small cast, just the two leads and eleven others who both play instruments and sing, and also play roles in the story. Cristin Milioti and Steve Kazee originated the roles of the Girl and Guy, the leads; the current leads are Joanna Christie and Paul Alexander Nolan, both wonderful.

The songs, some from the movie and some composed for the show (both written by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová), are Irish flavored and infectious. There’s a unit set, a half-circle Irish bar that makes you wish it were just around the corner from where you live, and the show invites you to come onstage before the performance or during intermission and have a drink. It seems like a natural thing to do.

So what was the incredibly quiet experience? Most Broadway musical hits are noisy, and they progress over the course of the evening to really noisy. This show went the opposite way. A great deal of it is boisterous, but it also provides a number of moments of simple human responses that are striking, like the slowly dawning realization on the face of the owner of the bar (played by Paul Whitty) that, despite his fantasies, he’s never been the one for the Girl and never will be. It’s a sad, sweet, true moment of the kind you don’t necessarily expect to experience in a Tony winning musical hit.

And at the end of the play, as the characters began to go their separate ways, you can hear a pin drop in the auditorium. The truthfulness and believability of the story wins the audience over completely, and it’s almost as though the spectators are afraid to interrupt the mood, not for themselves but for the characters’ sakes.

That’s my “quiet” experience – in a place I would not have expected it. And the noisy one? I went to the Roseland Ballroom, the famous dance hall on 52nd Street in Manhattan, to see one of my favorite performers in person for the first time.

The current Roseland is the second one; the first was a block south, built in 1919 and torn down in 1956, after hosting a spectrum of events like marathon dancing, weddings, and appearances by (among others) the orchestras of Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Chick Webb, often nationally broadcast on radio.

The new hall was originally an ice skating rink, then a roller rink, then a ballroom, then a disco, and it has struggled to survive as entertainment fashions have changed. Now it’s slated to be torn down and replaced by luxury apartments (illustrating the Great Circle of City Life again). To close the hall in style, the redoubtable Lady Gaga (née Stefani Germanotta) was brought in for seven concerts between March 28 and April 7, 2014.

Roseland is, or was, depending on when you read this (I’ll stay in the present tense), a big rectangular room, mostly painted black, with a balcony running around a main floor that can hold 3,500 people standing if there’s nothing else on it. For Gaga’s shows a stage was erected at one end, with a huge red curtain in front.

All seven of her shows there sold out, and she also took an audience from the David Letterman show over and did some numbers for them one afternoon. Letterman’s studio is right across the street from Roseland, the old Ed Sullivan Theater where the Beatles made their famous TV appearances on his show. New York!

The audience for Lady Gaga’s concert, the night I was there, seemed to me to be mostly people in their twenties and thirties. There were some Gaga look-alikes, both men and women, and the mood was festive and noisy. It was a standing event – no seats, except a few on the balcony.

Standing events can be tough on the feet, and on the spirit. If the room is crowded, you can’t move; getting another drink or going to the bathroom is practically warfare. Two times people asked me to back up and give them more room, but I couldn’t. Once a couple of belligerent guys pushed and shoved their way through the crowd; that was irritating, but it did reduce the tedium of waiting.

I arrived around 7:30 PM for an 8:00 PM show, which cut down the potential standing time some; a few years ago I stood for two hours before a similar concert by Bob Dylan (not at Roseland), which I wrote about on this blog. I had a good view then, but an equally good view this time; I ended up the equivalent of about eight rows from the stage, and I managed to maneuver to one side of the really tall guy in front of me.

The opening act, from about 8 to 8:30, was Lady Starlight (née Colleen Martin), an old pal of Gaga’s from the days when they did a sort of stripper-vaudeville-performance art act together in the East Village area of Manhattan. It’s lovely of Gaga to give work to her friend and mentor (Starlight is older than Gaga), but – well, here’s what Starlight did: she stood at the console of a Roland sound machine, programmed beats and sounds that blasted at volumes so high they literally shook the room, and bopped along to the bone-crushing vibrations with a sort of idiotic grin. For half an hour.

Performance art is structurally a kind of practical joke. I suppose I wasn’t in the mood, because Lady Starlight’s act drove me almost out of my mind. First I tried to endure it. Then I hated it. Then I bitterly regretted the time I’d lost and would never get back again. Then I wanted to shoot her – no one would have heard the gun. A very New York scene, I thought.

She stopped finally, ending – incidentally – that “noisiest experience” that I referred to earlier. (Gaga’s volume was nothing compared to Starlight’s.) Then followed an idle half hour of standing around, then the huge red curtain dropped to the ground and was carried off and Lady Gaga appeared, on a sort of perch above the stage, posing and playing a slow, expanded version of her song “Born This Way.”

She wore a huge, messy blonde wig that made her look a little like Dolly Parton peering out of the mouth of a lion. She talked, when she spoke to the audience, which was often, in a sort of baby-talk Marilyn Monroe voice that she adopted for the whole show (her natural speaking voice is exactly like that of Fran Drescher of The Nanny). When she came down onto the stage floor, she began with a couple of Madonna-like numbers with dancers, at high (though not the highest!) volume.

So I found myself wondering: If I didn’t know who she was, would I even think she was any good? Then about four numbers in, I realized I was dancing and grinning from ear to ear, and it occurred to me that I was having a wonderful time. Gaga is an extraordinary singer, with a big sound, big range, and the ability to change from mood to mood at will, turning on a dime. (In the lower registers she sounds something like Bette Midler, who can do the same thing.) Her keyboard playing – there was a lot of it – is also excellent. (She’s a classically trained pianist.)

And she’s endearing, even in her fairly frequent bouts of self-admiration. Part of the reason is that she’s really not a typical star type at all. She’s short and kind of fireplug built, and not particularly pretty in a conventional sense, except that her face is mobile and she can make it look like nearly anything she wants. She’s also not a great dancer – but really, does she have to do everything as well as it can be done? She works hard to move well (and she had major hip surgery just over a year ago).

But she really, really relates to her audience, who ate it up. And she works hard, uses everything she has, has ideas for everything (whether they work or not), and in general packs about a dozen shows into one. At one point she climbed on a ladder onto the balcony, and back down again, backwards, while singing at full volume. I wouldn’t try that, particularly in a show, under any circumstances, and she was wearing heels. She wasn’t particularly graceful doing it, but I thought the moment perfectly expressed her determination to make everything she does into something more than a little special. 

She played both familiar and new songs, approaching her hits in creative ways and demonstrating again, if it needs proving, her superior musicianship. (I actually heard somebody say afterwards, “She sang well, but she didn’t do her best-known songs.” I have no idea what that person heard – half the show was made up of hits.)

My favorite moment in the concert: Gaga was performing at a little set that looked like a subway car, built on the main balcony, singing and playing the keyboard while surrounded by audience members standing practically on top of her. She was in the middle of a fine slow version of her song “You and I,” very soulful, just piano and vocal, when all of a sudden she stopped and said to somebody nearby, “Are you taking a selfie? . . . Selfies are taking over the world!” Then she returned to the song. A charming moment.

And here’s what I thought was the most revealing and truthful moment of the concert: at the end of the show, she staged her curtain call like the show was a play. She and the dancers lined up, held hands, and as they say in the theater, “took the bow off her” – bowed when she bowed. Then the dancers moved upstage, the musicians came down to the front, formed the same kind of line with her and held hands, and bowed. Just like it was the end of a Broadway show . . . .

And it was a show in more than one sense, because Gaga is at heart a performance artist, like Lady Starlight except not unendurable. Her show is an act – except the act is her. This is complicated, aesthetically speaking – I thought of the lines from the Beatles song “Penny Lane”:

Though she feels as if she’s in a play

She is anyway.

But because Gaga is so talented and shares so much of herself, it’s a delight. I had a ball (at Roseland Ballroom!), tired feet and all. I would do it again, even if I had to stand. It was that much fun.

[Kirk observes that Lady Gaga is a performance artist, so ROT-readers may recall that I posted an article on this blog about the history and structures of performance art in . . . well, “Performance Art,” 7 and 10 November 2013.]

An Experiment in Reviewing – Popular Songs

by Kirk Woodward

[My friend and frequent guest-blogger, Kirk Woodward, has submitted a new article that combines two of his special interests: review-writing and popular music. Alongside his long-time interest in the work of Bob Dylan and the Beatles, about which he’s written in the past for ROT, Kirk has been a fan of the classic pop group the Beach Boys since the 1960s, so he naturally checked out their new album, That’s Why God Made the Radio, but instead of writing a review of the recording itself, Kirk’s taken the tack of reviewing the reviews, in particular, one from the British newspaper The Guardian, long renowned for its arts coverage. As you’ll read, Kirk has some objections about the ways in which arts reviewers, in particular, pop and rock ’n’ roll music writers, ply their trades. I know you’ll find this an interesting and provocative take on the practice of music reviewing—and you’ll get Kirk’s assessment of the Beach Boys and their new output as well. ~Rick]

It used to be said that everyone in New York City had a play in a back pocket. Nowadays everyone in New York City, and everywhere else, is a reviewer. Numerous websites invite anyone – really, anyone – to write an allegedly critical opinion of anything and publish it on the web. There is even a word now, “trolling,” for the sort of reviewer who routinely posts insulting “reviews” for the pleasure of attacking people’s work, no matter what it is or what it may be worth.

This cheerful process of people with no accomplishments giving their uninformed opinion on a work that, in many cases, took years of difficult creation, often seems like a harmless enough spectacle, until something or someone we like is reviewed, like (as someone remarked about Bertolt Brecht’s appearance before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee) a zookeeper being examined by a committee of apes. When we actually know something about a work, or even, worse yet, care about it, the process may not seem so harmless.

I wrote about principles of reviewing in a book called The Art of Writing Reviews (available at Lulu.com). In this article I’d like to apply ideas from that book to a particular situation – in fact, to a particular CD, a recently released recording by the Beach Boys called That’s Why God Made the Radio (referred to from now on in this piece as Radio).

Because the album was released in conjunction with a reunion tour by the band to celebrate its fiftieth (well, fifty-first – they began working together in 1961) anniversary as a musical group, the album (people of my generation call them “albums”) has received considerable attention. In its first week of sales it charted at #3 on the Billboard sales chart, the highest an album by the group has ever placed in its first week of release.

I want to approach the reviewing of the album from a methodological point of view, but, as will be seen, it’s not irrelevant to give my personal opinion of the album right off the bat: I think it’s a wonderful recording, outstanding in many ways. Note, please: that’s not a review, it’s an opinion. It’s how I feel. Reviews must do more than just report whether the reviewer likes the work at hand or not.

Or must they? Let’s think about that, using as a basis for discussing the album, which I will now describe for those who haven’t heard it. First, a description of the album: it is divided thematically into three sections: Prologue (three songs), Summer (five songs), and Fall (four songs). (These are my divisions, not anything identified on the recording.)

The Prologue begins with a haunting, melancholy duet between voices and piano reminiscent of the French composer Erik Satie, called “Think About the Days,” setting up a theme of looking to the past. This theme is amplified in the next song, the rocking, majestic title number “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” written over insistent triplets (think of the old song “Silhouettes”) and full of chord changes difficult enough that I still haven’t been able to completely map them out on the piano.

The last song in what I’m calling the Prologue is almost the opposite of its predecessor: “Isn’t It Time” uses for rhythm a deliberate four-four beat; for instrumentation, a ukulele (plus guitar, percussion, and bass); and for vocals, as close to a doo-wop sound as the Beach Boys get.

The Summer section begins and ends with what one might think of as songs typically representative of the Beach Boys, “Spring Vacation” and “Beaches in Mind,” the latter preceded by the equally sun-oriented number “Daybreak Over the Ocean.” None of the songs in the section, however, have the typical “Beach Boy sound” of the famous recordings of the sixties. “Spring Vacation” begins with a relaxed, swinging groove that makes its leisurely way into a driving chorus, one of many songs on the album that start relatively calmly and move into an irresistible last section. So, for example, does “The Private Life of Bill and Sue,” which is Caribbean flavored and practically leaps from the verses that set up the story, to a multi-layered chorus that begs to be danced to. “Shelter,” which follows, matches a sweet lyric to a slightly Mexican sound. “Daybreak Over the Ocean” is a dreamy up-tempo ballad, and “Beaches In Mind” is a loose rocker with an emphatic chorus.

The third section of the album, which I’ve called “Fall,” begins with a mid-tempo song called “Strange World” that sets up the theme of unsettledness that fills the rest of the album, a theme continued in “From There to Back Again,” featuring a sensational vocal by the seventy-year old Al Jardine, who also supplies jaunty whistling. The song is actually a sort of mini-suite, with a kaleidoscopic section of fragments at the end that further disconnect the listener from the earlier summer theme. Next, another massed vocal chorus, reminiscent of the one that opens the album, introduces “Pacific Coast Highway,” a deeply melancholy song about getting on the road and leaving. Finally, “Summer’s Gone,” a lonely song of resignation, leads to the sound of the ocean, and the album ends.

In summarizing the album I’ve tried to do briefly what any review should first do: come to terms with what the work under consideration is, before beginning to make judgments about it. I’ve tried to describe as best I can what the album is trying to do, what its intention is. I should add to that picture that the album also wants to present the well-known Beach Boy harmonies in as many facets as possible, and it does: the variety and quality of vocal writing in the album is not to be matched, as far as I’m concerned.

Now, how has the album been reviewed? Many reviews have been favorable. However, a distressing number have focused on a few themes:

The Beach Boys are old. Reviewers, apparently, never get old, and so they are able to spend time talking about the fact that other people age. One sees, perhaps, the news value in pointing out that a group with “boys” in its name has an average age of around seventy. What, however, does that fact have to do with the work at hand? A reviewer shouldn’t be reviewing the Great Circle of Life, but the album.

As I was working on this piece, my daughter played for me a CD of aggressive, minimalist rock by a band she had seen. I assumed the members of the band were kids. Not at all, she said, they were considerably closer to my age!

So the question is, what would we think of the work if we didn’t know biographical facts about the artists? I think it’s always worthwhile to try as far as possible to approach a work by familiar artists as though we didn’t know anything about them. The mental exertion involved in approaching a piece in that way can be huge, but the alternative is critical laziness. It’s easy to describe how old someone is – it’s less easy to describe the work they’ve done.

And related is a second theme often cited in reviews of Radio:

The Beach Boys have spent years suing each other. Again, true in part, but what in the world does that have to do with a new album? It exists. Is it worth listening to or not? Or should we hope they sue each other some more so we can hear them testifying in court? And is that a reviewer’s business?

The Beach Boys often write dopey lyrics. This complaint doesn’t point to subject matter, but to what used to be called infelicity of phrasing. (Beach Boy songs come from many writers, the most prominent being group members Brian Wilson, one of the greatest rock composers, and Mike Love, who tends to specialize more in lyrics. The other major writer on Radio is its producer, Joe Thomas.) It’s true that sometimes the various writers for the Beach Boys create wonky lyrics, like everyone else. Sometimes they write lovely lyrics. In “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” I really don’t like the rhyme

It’s paradise when I
Lift up my antennae

which reminds me too much of bugs. On the other hand, the next lines of the song seem to me to redeem the verse:

Receiving your signal
Like a prayer
Like a prayer

The larger point is this: a reviewer may not demonstrate the allegedly inferior quality of a popular song lyric by quoting it. Lyrics are meant to be sung, and only make sense in the context of a song. “A wop bop a loo bop a bop bam boom” is a brilliant lyric in the song ”Tutti Frutti,” no matter how it looks on the printed page.

The “Summer” songs are trivial; the “Fall” songs are profound. Here we come to an issue of more significance than the previous ones. There is substantial critical opinion – completely wrongheaded, in my opinion – that “serious” work is better than “light” work.

Think, for example, of Academy Awards for Best Picture. When Annie Hall won that award, it was an astonishing event, because the Motion Picture Academy consistently ignores comedy and rewards turgid spectacles that practically announce themselves as “important.” The same phenomenon can be seen in other fields of art, and certainly in popular music.

The Beach Boys have spent much of their careers taking light subjects (the sun, the beach, surfing, and so on) and presenting them with overwhelming imagination and beauty. Yet they are only accorded major recognition when they furrow their brows and announce that life can be sad. (The group has never won a Grammy award, and Brian Wilson only won for a piece called “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” that was voted Best Rock Instrumental Performance although there clearly are voices on it.)

The idea that “serious” work is more valuable than “light” work is a prejudice and a critical evasion, nothing more. It will not bear examination on its own. The best reviewers do not fall for the notion. The treatment for such prejudices is to remember the three questions that Goethe said a critic (and a reviewer) must always ask about a work of art – in this order:

1. What does it try to do?
2. Does it do it?
3. Is it worth doing?

Here, for an example that illustrates all these points, in a negative way, is a review of Radio from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/may/31/beach-boys-thats-why-review. It was written by Alexis Petridis on 31 May 2012:

It’s easy to be sceptical about the Beach Boy’s reunion. Indeed, if you look at the messageboards, diehard fans seem the most distrustful of the lot, which figures: for all the warmth and open-heartedness of the band’s best music, if there’s one thing being a Beach Boys fan teaches you, it’s scepticism. There are only so many times you can be told Brian Wilson has been restored to full physical and mental health, the better to make himself and a lot of other people a great deal of money, before you develop what the Clash called a “bullshit detector”, and Beach Boys fans have been told that on a regular basis – and with a great deal of evidence to the contrary – for the last 36 years.

Anyone looking to the music itself to check for signs of cynicism need only turn to “Spring Vacation”. It opens with a verse in which Mike Love claims to be “living the dream … cruisin’ the town, diggin’ the scene”. The Beach Boys’ music has often involved a suspension of disbelief – all those songs depicting a perfect, gilded California youth, written by a man whose own youth had been mired in physical and mental abuse – but this seems to push unreality to its limit. You find yourself wondering why on earth a 71-year-old would be cruisin’ the town and diggin’ the scene: perhaps he’s plannin’ on askin’ them to keep the noise down so an old man can get some rest. Then it moves on to the subject of the reunion itself: “We’re back together, easy money,” he sings, as indeed you might if, after years of playing fairgrounds and casinos, you found yourself shifting $70m [£45m] of concert tickets simply by hooking up with the cousin you have spent most of the last 20 years suing. “All I can say is, we’re havin’ a blast!” he offers, which isn’t what a recent profile in Newsweek – depicting Brian Wilson “in various stages of distress” on stage with the band – suggested.

If the lyrics are disingenuous, the song itself isn’t up to much, the music slick but unremarkable. The first two-thirds of the album passes in similarly ho-hum style, notwithstanding the wordless introduction, “Think About the Days”, which is beautiful. The title track is a decent pastiche of Wilson in his prime, its cascading chorus equal parts “Kiss Me Baby” and John Barry’s “Theme from Midnight Cowboy”; “The Private Life of Bill and Sue”, however, a satire on reality TV, makes you want to curl up and die of embarrassment.

But just as you’re about to dismiss the album entirely, something extraordinary happens. The final three tracks – “From There to Back Again”, “Pacific Coast Highway” and “Summer’s Gone” – form a kind of suite that is easily the best thing Brian Wilson has put his name to in the last 30 years. Episodic, occasionally lapsing into silence, filled with shifts in tempo, the melodies impossibly beautiful, it takes the melancholy at the heart of Wilson’s greatest work – from “Pet Sounds” to “Til I Die” – and repurposes it. In contrast to the rest of the album, which relies on creaky nostalgia, it concerns itself with ageing (“sunlight’s fading and there’s not much to say”, sings Wilson on “Pacific Coast Highway”), death and the Beach Boys’ legacy. “Our dreams hold on for those who still have more to say . . . it’s time to go,” offers “Summer’s Gone”, undercutting all the gung-ho, we’re-havin’-a-blast guff that comes before it in the same way the wistful, autumnal intro to ”California Girls” seemed at odds with that song’s sunkissed lechery. Wilson’s vocals sound engaged with the subject, which seems faintly incredible given that on every other recent record he’s made, he’s sounded like a man forced at gunpoint to read his lyrics off a broken autocue.

For all its flaws, That’s Why God Made the Radio is an infinitely better way for the Beach Boys’ story to end than their last album of new recordings, 1992’s disastrous country outing Stars and Stripes Vol. 1, or indeed the last album that bore their name – Mike Love, Bruce Johnston & David Marks of the Beach Boys salute NASCAR – on which the trio rerecorded old hits for the benefit of a chain of US petrol stations. Exquisite beauty nestles alongside stuff that’s wildly misjudged, painful honesty alongside the constant burnishing of a myth about youth and sunshine and a California that everyone stopped believing years ago, the whole thing wrapped in stories of non-existent fraternity, harmony and good vibrations: it’s the Beach Boys in a nutshell. Perhaps without realising it, That’s Why God Made the Radio tells you almost everything you need to know about America’s Favourite Band.

I don’t think I need to repeat the points I made earlier, particularly the point that for the writer, “serious is better.” What I do want to highlight is how much of the article’s evaluation of the album is opinion without criteria, or with criteria dubious at best. For example, Petridis slams “Spring Vacation” for being unseemly for a singer in his seventies. Are we then reviewing a musician’s age and not the music? Does it matter that one of the Beach Boys, Al Jardine, sounds like he’s maybe twenty years old? To paraphrase the old baseball pitcher Satchel Paige, how old would the Beach Boys be if we didn’t know how old they were?

Aside from the point about ageism, what criteria is Petridis using to criticize a song that glorifies the singer’s supposed way of living? He criticizes “Spring Vacation” for the singer’s attitude; does he use the same criteria to criticize rap musicians who brag about their prowess and their popularity, whether their claims are true or false? I’m guessing he does not. And why is “Bill and Sue” an embarrassment? Because it’s a satire on reality TV? That’s the only clue Petridis gives us. What are the criteria involved in that judgment?

I understand and in a way even admire the way Petridis has structured his review. He wants to tell a story to keep his readers’ attention, so he forms a dramatic narrative out of the album and out of what he knows about its participants. He succeeds in his intention, too. He does write an article that holds the attention. However, he is not really reviewing. He is storytelling. His narrative takes the place of the job of critical evaluation.

And I sympathize with his approach, because there simply is not time or space enough in the life of a regular music reviewer to follow Goethe’s three steps for every song he writes about. Radio contains a dozen songs. Hundreds of thousands of new songs are released every year. Petridis has five paragraphs in which to write about an album. There’s no way that math works out for a reviewer.

But we must be aware of what we’re reading. Opinions and reviews are not the same. Particularly where songs are concerned, but in other fields of art as well, we need to take reviewers and their opinions with a grain of salt, realize what they can do and what they can’t, and resolve to make our judgments based on best principles, and for ourselves.

[Kirk provided the URL for Lulu, the publisher of his book, The Art of Writing Reviews (well worth reading, by the way), but I also want to point out that I posted a four-part commentary on the book on ROT which readers of this blog might also enjoy. “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward,” Parts 1 through 4, was posted on 4, 8, 11, and 14 November 2009. “The Beatles and Me,” a reminiscence by Kirk, was posted on ROT on 7 October 2010; and “Bob Dylan, Performance Artist,” Kirk’s discussion of a Dylan concert, was posted on 8 January 2011.]

The Jukebox Musical

By Kirk Woodward

[As I noted in my introduction to “Theatrical and Popular Songs,” Kirk has some very strong credentials in the fields of music, composition, and musical theater. After discussing the differences between songs written for the stage and songs written for the popular market, he has turned his ear to the relatively recent phenomenon, the jukebox musical. I’m pleased to share with ROT readers Kirk’s thoughts on this burgeoning theater form. Their scores may have been the soundtracks of our lives—but have their reincarnations left the same impressions on our cultural memories? Read on, music lover—and remember that I have confessed on ROT that I myself am “A Broadway Baby” (22 September 2010)—and see if Kirk reaches any conclusion on that question. ~Rick]

I have previously written in this blog (“Theatrical and Popular Songs,” 2 October) about the difference between what I call character-based songwriting, which one tends to find in songs written for the stage, and lyric songwriting, which one tends to find more in what we call popular song. One reason that subject interests me is the large number of “jukebox musicals” currently appearing in theaters. We may define the jukebox musical for the moment as a musical with a score made up of songs that were not originally written for the show and in fact not for the theater at all – in other words, “popular” songs, which doesn’t mean that people don’t like theater songs, but simply refers to songs that were not originally written for the theater.

A definition of the jukebox musical could just as easily include songs written for other shows, but in this article I want to consider, among other things, whether the difference between character-based and lyric songs contributes to the success or failure of the jukebox musicals that include them. So I'm excluding as jukebox musicals shows with songs that by definition are already theatrical in nature, because they were originally written for the stage and presumably belong there.

Looking for evidence to prove my thesis, I consulted a list on Wikipedia under the heading “Jukebox Musical” to see how various examples of the jukebox musical have fared. The list is extensive but presents some issues. It excludes, as I do here, musicals made up of songs written for other musicals, like Stephen Sondheim's Marry Me A Little and various compilations of George Gershwin's songs, many of which were created for the stage in the first place.

Wikipedia’s list also for the most part rules out revues – that is, usually it includes only shows that have a story line. So Beatlemania and Rain, which have no plot, aren’t included. But for some reason the list does include Thriller – Live, which bills itself as a "spectacular [Michael Jackson] concert," demonstrating I suppose that even Wikipedia isn’t perfect.

The list also includes Ain’t Misbehavin’ and Smokey Joe’s Cafe, both song collections and neither with a plot. To be honest, I would be tempted to include those two shows as jukebox musicals despite my criteria, because the songs in both are so character-based that one feels there must be whole stories behind them, even if those stories aren't told. But I won’t. Still, the fact is that the idea of the revue lurks behind all jukebox musicals. That's a major part of their appeal – that the audience knows it's going to hear a compilation of a number of songs it likes.

Can we determine the reasons for success or failure of jukebox musicals, using Wikipedia’s list? A number of factors make generalizations difficult. In the first place, without access to bank accounts, it's difficult to tell how some of these shows really did, beyond the obvious successes (Mamma Mia!, Moving Out, Jersey Boys) and obvious failures (Route 66, The Onion Seller, Hot Feet, Our House). I probably don’t know enough about the indications of success for shows that have apparently had only British runs (Boogie Nights, We Will Rock You, Tonight's The Night, Daddy Cool) or Mexican (Hoy No Me Puedo Levantar, Besame Mucho).

Some jukebox musicals have run off-Broadway (Forever Plaid, Return to the Forbidden Planet), where expenses are lower, including a number not listed by Wikipedia that presumably have veered toward revue or concert, typically with a light veneer of biography included (music of, among others, Patsy Cline, the Mamas and the Papas, John Denver, Patty Griffin, and Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier). Some may have failed financially in New York and gone on to make money in community and educational theater productions

KEYS TO SUCCESS

One thing Wikipedia’s list shows for certain is that an increasing number of jukebox musicals have been produced. From 1975 to 1990, it lists seven jukebox musicals. From 1990 to 2000, there were five. From 2000 until today, there have been forty-two. Why this increase in the number of jukebox musicals? Four reasons strike me as particularly likely.

First, on Broadway as in other areas, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Producers notice what seems to work and what doesn't. Of the twelve jukebox musicals between 1975 and 2000, by my count at least six were successful enough to make investors glad they'd put money in them. That fact certainly grabbed producers' attention. By Broadway standards the 50% success rate during that period was staggeringly high. Investors in Mamma Mia! essentially hit the lottery.

The second reason for the increase in the jukebox musical phenomenon, related to the first, is that by 1990 the population which had grown up with the music of the sixties, seventies, and eighties was established and successful enough to start going to Broadway shows. Baby boomers had the capital to afford rather expensive theater tickets. Ancillary proof for this idea is the Green Day musical American Idiot. That band first worked together in the late 1980s; the show based on its music didn't open until 2010, at which point presumably its audience could afford to see a show on Broadway.

The third reason is that culturally speaking, music has been an important part of the lives of the people who are now attending Broadway shows – as important, I'd say, as film. What's more, music, like film, is so to speak a pre-digested source for later work – bands and singers already have their fans – and producers love that fact, because it's already been proven that people are interested in the contents of the shows. I have written in this blog, for example, about my love for the music of the Beatles (“The Beatles and Me,” 7 October 2010). I could therefore be expected to want to see musicals featuring their music.

But it doesn't always work that way. I greatly enjoy the music of the Beach Boys, but nothing could have forced me to see Good Vibrations, where I must say I predicted that the songs were insufficiently character-based for the musical to succeed. Nor, for that matter, did I attend Beatlemania, Rain, or Lennon, my enthusiasm for the Beatles notwithstanding. A producer can’t count on enough people always liking someone’s music to make them go to hear the same music in Broadway setting, and I estimate that only a quarter of the jukebox musicals produced since 2000 have made money.

A fourth reason for the success of jukebox musicals is that they are often less expensive than a typical Broadway musical to produce. They frequently lend themselves to one flexible set and small casts, with a few actors playing multiple roles.

Nevertheless, based on what I can learn of the jukebox musicals on Wikipedia's list, I estimate that of the whole group from 1975 on, about one third have at least made their money back. In baseball .333 would be an excellent batting average. For Broadway producing it's also remarkably good. So one expects to see the trend for jukebox musicals continue. However, the bloom may be slightly off the rose where the form is concerned. As we can see, while more jukebox musicals have reached the stage, their rate of failure has also risen.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

One factor in the failure or success of jukebox musicals that I would like to point out is that certain titles may not appeal to a sufficiently broad Broadway audience. An article in the New York Times (Sunday, September 4, 2011) describes how the songwriter Jerry Leiber lobbied for the title Smokey Joe's Cafe although the song with that name is relatively obscure, because "it sounds like a title." He was right. In particular, the word "cafe" nicely pre-conditions the audience for the kind of show it's going to see. (The show ran for five years on Broadway.)

But some jukebox musicals have a weakness for titles that connect, not with the audience, but with the music in the show, and sometimes such a title doesn't tell the audience what it needs to know in order to make it want to see the musical. This may seem like a trivial point, but the title of any artistic work sets its tone, just as a person’s name does – which is presumably the reason the movies changed Marion Morrison’s name to John Wayne.

The jukebox musical The Night That Made America Famous takes its title from the Harry Chapin song "What Makes America Famous," but how good is that as a title? It seems to claim too much for the show, as though it were the most important thing in America, which it's almost certainly not. Forever Plaid is a cute title, but Winter Wonderettes, On The Record, and Hot Feet (believe it or not, the music of Earth, Wind and Fire) may be too cute for their own good. Having heard the title Honky Tonk Laundry, I don't feel the need to see the show at all – I feel like I've already seen it. And I don't feel the need to see The Andrews Brothers (featuring music of the Andrews Sisters) because I imagine I could write the show, just from the title.

A title associated with a song or group had better be a good one if the song or group isn't particularly well known. Life in a Nutshell, The Slide, The Onion Cellar, Daddy Cool – name that group! (In order, Barenaked Ladies, The Beautiful South, the Dresden Dolls, Boney M.) On the other hand, a title associated with a big name has a chance: Buddy – The Buddy Holly Story, a huge hit in England; Elvis, also in London; All Shook Up, Elvis again. Perhaps the lesson is to do a show about Elvis. Million Dollar Quartet, with Elvis as one of the quartet, gave 489 performances on Broadway from April 2010 to June 2011.

I would say that Rock of Ages is a near miss as a jukebox musical title – the show, featuring music of the 80's, has no religious connotations, making the title slightly misleading. However, the show has run for two years, so mine must be a minority opinion. Since I wasn't familiar with the band Green Day and its most famous album, I thought the title American Idiot was just rude. Also, perhaps some titles sound too familiar. Come Fly Away and Life Could Be A Dream might suggest songs that are too well worn, despite important names associated with them, like Twyla Tharp and Frank Sinatra.

Certainly titles are not the only reason that jukebox musicals fail. Books like The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway by William Goldman, and Second Act Trouble: Behind the Scenes at Broadway’s Big Bombs by Steven Suskin, give a reader a vivid picture of the difficulty of creating a successful musical under any circumstances. In particular, the “book” or script of a musical often determines whether it succeeds or fails, and the task of smoothly integrating previously unrelated songs in a coherent story can be a daunting one.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

So does the kind of song in a jukebox musical contribute to its success or failure? My idea is that the more "theatrical" a song is – by which I mean the more it's linked to specifics of character and situation, as opposed to "lyric," linked primarily to an inner state of mind – the better it will do in a musical. I elaborated on that distinction in my earlier piece and won't repeat the details now. But if a jukebox musical has a story – which, as I'm defining it, it has to – then it only makes sense that the closer a song can be linked to that story and its characters, the better it will work in the show. Sometimes there are difficulties. Here are a few examples of what I'm talking about.

Something new happened in popular songwriting when Bob Dylan opened the door for highly individual, internally focused song lyrics, drawing from inspirations including Woody Guthrie, the Beat poets, and Bertolt Brecht (who although a playwright was also a lyric poet). Obviously the range of Dylan's hundreds of songs is vast, so for a possibly unfair example I've chosen the first lines from my favorite Dylan song, a song from 1983 called "Jokerman:"

Standing on the water, casting your bread
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing.
Distant ships sailing into the mist
You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing.

These words describe a character, but they are still lyric, not character-based – the images are the thing. I admire Dylan enormously, and wrote about him in this blog (“Bob Dylan, Performance Artist,” 8 January), but I predicted the failure of the jukebox musical The Times They Are A-Changin' based on the nature of his lyrics. Although the emotions Dylan’s songs express are specific rather than generalized, his sensibility is that of a poet, not that of a character-based songwriter.

Twyla Tharp, who conceived, directed, and choreographed The Times They Are A-Changin’, undoubtedly felt she could work with such songs, but they are simply not theatrical, while the Billy Joel songs she used in Movin' Out are. One saw the same thing occur in the jukebox musical Baby, It's You!, built around the hits of the Shirelles and other musicians of the 60’s, which, again, are wonderful songs, but simply were not strong enough to carry much emotional weight in a musical, even if its book had been stronger than it was.

So I maintain that a jukebox musical with a score that does not meet the demands of the theatrical form may have serious problems – for example, The Times They Are A-Changin'; Good Vibrations; Baby, It's You!; Lennon. And I claim that jukebox musicals whose songs share the characteristics of songs written for the theater may have a better chance of substantial success – for example, Mamma Mia!, Jersey Boys, Movin' Out.

Have any jukebox musicals that lacked what I’m calling character-based songs done well? Certainly, especially if they’re about Elvis. If a group of songs are popular enough with the right audience, the show may succeed no matter what, which is why producers keep throwing the dice with them. But watch out.

One wonders how many other popular musicians have songbooks that have not yet been made into jukebox musicals, and who are essentially theatrical, rather than lyric, songwriters. Of course song catalogs can be recycled from jukebox musical to jukebox musical. Elvis, for one, seems to be an endlessly renewable resource.

My own candidate for a jukebox musical, once her core audience is old enough to go to Broadway shows, is Lady Gaga (now 25), whose songs (frequently written with collaborators) reveal her to be, like Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson (the composers behind ABBA whose songs are showcased so successfully in Mamma Mia!), essentially a character-based songwriter in (if one may put it this way) pop clothing. Her song “Hair,” for example, could easily fit in an “updated” version of Bye Bye Birdie – it’s a teenager girl’s lament about the restrictions her parents put on her:

Whenever I'm dressed cool my parents put up a fight,
And if I'm hot shot mom will cut my hair at night.
And in the morning I'm short of my identity
I scream, mom and dad, why can't I be who I want to be?

Of course it’s always possible that Gaga will decide to write a musical of her own someday. She’s familiar with the form – one of the high points of her career, she has said, was playing Adelaide in her high school's production of Guys and Dolls.

Producers will continue to hope that jukebox musicals will succeed because they are full of songs we already know and like. They should be cautioned, however, that unless those songs are character-based, there may be trouble ahead.

[I make no promises, but there may be more on this and related topics to come on ROT. Kirk himself may have more to contribute and I’m contemplating publishing an article on the other recent theatrical musical genre, the “movical”—a stage musical whose book is drawn from a movie like the current Sister Act and the coming Bonnie and Clyde. Keep an eye out!]