The Monkees defined what pop music was all about, something to have and to hold and to cherish. A part of our youth and a part of why we are alive. To have fun! We bought their records, we saw them play and we (well some of us) screamed with hysteria at the mere sight of them on a stage. It wasn’t just Beatle Mania back then there was a mania that erupted whenever there was something we adored. Pop music enriched our lives, it did make us happy. When that signature tune rang out, “Hey, hey we’re The Monkees’  we just knew we were in for a fun time. The Monkees made us happy, they made everyone happy. And now the sweetest Monkee of them all Davy Jones has passed and a little piece of our past has….passed. That happiness is now tinged with a little sadness and the most wonderful of memories.

There is no possible reason or logic to how a twenty two year old man could be able to make a record as fundamentally brilliant as Astral Weeks. Yet Van Morrison did. How anyone so young could craft a piece of artistic magnificence such as this bewilders me. Yet Van Morrison did.  You would really need life’s rich pastures to have ploughed a little over you to write something as spiritually uplifting and artistically complete as this. Yet Van Morrison didn’t. On the contrary, the making of this was his exodus from youth and ascension to maturity. Had I been in any position of influence I would have knighted him without question. If there was a throne to be had, he should rightly have claimed it. You’re right, I like this record.

For someone to even come close to lyrical perfection is inconceivable. From the first notes of the title track of Astral Weeks Van Morrison seduces you, you fall in love before the first chorus chimes. In his own words, ‘Didn’t I come to bring you a brand new sense of wonder’

‘If I ventured in the slipstream. Between the viaducts of your dream.

Where immobile steel rims crack. And the ditch in the back roads stop.

Could you find me? Would you kiss-a-my-eyes                                                                                           

To lay me down. In silence easy

To be born again. To be born again.

No one sings like that. No one will ever sing like that. But enough of my glowing accolade for the man and this music, let’s look at some of the documented facts, embellished more abundantly in Wikipedia and various other scribblings. This is a record that had a massive impact on us mere mortals and changed the way a lot of us looked at music. It most certainly had an effect on us that has allowed it to last for so long. This shivered our spine and touched our soul. It made us smile while we shed a tear. It moved us more than music should, it is magnificence personified. It’s Picasso and Rembrandt, Mozart and Chopin. It’s everything you love and long to hold. To be born again indeed.

Astral Weeks was the second solo album by Van Morrison, recorded in New York  and released in November 1968. To this day, it remains in an unclassifiable music genre and has been described variously as hypnotic, meditative, and as possessing a unique musical power. It has been compared to French impressionism and mystical Celtic poetry.( Wikipedia)  ”This is music of such enigmatic beauty that thirty-five years after its release, Astral Weeks still defies easy, admiring description.’ ( Rolling Stone…. though replace thirty five with forty four years since it’s release)

I am particularly fond of this poetic analysis of the title track.’ The most wonderful essay about this album can be found here. I think it’ll help you get closer to the creative and mystical mind of the very young man who made Astral Weeks. I’m convinced that even Van couldn’t explain what some of these songs mean, as he opened up to let the mystic flow into him. He escaped all boundaries and made a timeless work about yearning and coming of age, about sex and death, acceptance and love. I’d put it up against some of the greatest poetry or prose we have. Once in a while over his career Van has touched something like this again, but rarely. St. Dominic’s Preview had some, Veedon Fleece had a lot, but never did he, nor anyone in this era, equal the beauty and enigma that is found in Astral Weeks. ‘

And most incredible of all, Van Morrison’s description of Astral Weeks from an unreported source and an interview he did in 2009

“You have to understand something,…A lot of this … there was no choice. I was totally broke. So I didn’t have time to sit around pondering or thinking all this through. It was just done on a basic pure survival level. I did what I had to do.”

If you love music it’s only natural to want to turn people on to something that you hold so close and hope they feel the same sense of appreciation. It’s a very personal record and one worth sharing. You want them to fall in love. The pleasure I get from the look on people’s faces when they hear it for the first time, that look that needs no words of accompaniment.  A look that says, thank you for introducing me to this. Why would you not want to share something that has given you so much pleasure. Unless maybe it was your wife.

I could write more, maybe I will. But right now there’s some music I need to listen to. I bet you wish you were here, sweet thing.

http://youtu.be/2QzDWIOUnM0

There were a good few of us from that era that did it proud though, we LOVED making a living out of a hobby. It isn’t hard to get up in the morning when you love your job. There was no such thing as Monday morning…… Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, bring it on. Midday or Midnight, we were there. We believed in the dream because we made the dream a reality. Back then if someone gave me a great record to promote I felt it my duty to tell others, and what an honor that was. I couldn’t wait to run round the country and in to every radio station and enthuse. My belief became their belief and fortunately I had people just as receptive in radio and television, they wanted good tunes and I had a multitude of them! If you got a record on the radio you had a very good chance of having a hit. You made a difference, you felt you’d played your part in that act’s success. Success that was driven by pride.

Let’s go back to Elvis, to The Beatles to a whole host of relevant exciting bands and artists that got everyone on the same playing field. We all needed music in our lives because it enriched all of our  lives. It made them happy, it made us happy. It sent them to work happy it sent them in to relationships happy. It got them paid and it got them laid.

The music industry today is an endless debate. They sit in conferences all over the world passing judgement on themselves and assume they are innocent until proven guilty. What more proof do they need, music doesn’t sell anymore. Drive around any major city in the world and try and find a record store.  And as for the suburbs, forget it, they are the new endangered species. In fact make that extinct. You got it wrong music industry for so long now and you’re still getting it wrong. The biggest artist from the last two decades is Adele. She had nothing to do with a record company, the quality of voice and song alone took her to the top all over the world and the public embraced her. Add to that one talented person who was her mentor and you have the success story of the century. A record company would have styled and modeled her in to something they could market and screwed up a career all at the same time. She did OK without their guidance. How important it is for creative people to understand how to work together, how you develop an artist and how you plant the seed of a career. It is something that is very dear to my heart, something I prided myself on and something I will continue to discuss in future blogs.

But for now music industry, ‘You’re just somebody that I used to know.’

So much of the ‘love generation’ was to do with the music we were listening to, music to make us feel good, music we shared with one another. And it transcended all genres, you could like some of it or you could like all of it but you rarely liked none of it. Whilst we still had the lyrical genius of Dylan, the rock heroics of Hendrix and Zeppelin we also had the sweet soul music of Otis Redding and  Wilson Pickett.

Definition says that in general, baby boomers are associated with a rejection or redefinition of traditional values. As a group, they claimed to be the healthiest, and wealthiest generation to that time, and amongst the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time. Optimism was the name of the game. Why when everything was going so right could you ever foresee anything going wrong? One feature of Boomers was that they tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort and the change they were bringing about. They had fun, fun, fun til their daddy took the T Bird away.

Music changed and with it too the next generation, the boomers had boomed and the new breed had different values and a totally different outlook on life. The heady days of the sixties morphed in to a fairly more low key seventies. Nothing could last forever and the summer of love could never be replicated.

So many of those bands from that era stood the test of time and shaped our pop culture. The Beatles, The Stones, Dylan, Led Zeppelin, The Pink Floyd. The true rock stars are the ones who make a difference, who influence people. For ever.

http://youtu.be/EOaHOZeSsRc

I didn’t watch the funeral but I felt I was there.

Let’ s backtrack a little. In the day my ex wife Nancy calls me and asks me what I think Kevin Costner will say at the funeral and will I be watching it. ‘I’m not interested and no,’ I offer by way of an answer, secretly hoping I can discuss the predicted rain and should I dare risk a bike ride. The day goes by and, as expected the televised funeral happens. Everybody in the world has seen it except me. Last night I go out and have a really nice evening, none of which involved talking about Whitney Houston. You know the one, a few beers and normal chat…..well maybe not because heard at the bar and in the restaurant people were talking about the funeral. I come home and, being of that acceptable age I was ready to nod off. I’ll just check Facebook, I thought and see if anyone has posted any cool music videos, had some funny episodes of life etc.

Bad move. I may  not have seen any news coverage, watched any television but social networking takes no prisoners. I now know more than I ever needed to know about the funeral. I went to bed later than expected after engaging in a few back and forth comments on my friend Richard’s post about…….

Fifty three posts later I did finally climb in to bed.

I wake up this morning at 4.10am, my friend Sally sends me an instant message, ‘Are you going to write a blog about Whitney’s funeral?’ She tells me stuff I don’t need to know, she prompts a reaction. More about the media and social networking than anything about who/what Whitney Houston meant. I mean this must be the most blogged subject since… yesterdays blogs about Whitney. So after 45 minutes back and forth I get an email from my ex Liz in the UK. Subject: ‘Did I watch Whitney Houston’s funeral.’ I get a note from Sally in Portugal again. By now I am cyber  swearing at Liz as she is telling me about the funeral, the one I didn’t see, didn’t want to see and now feel I was attended. She uses the word, ‘real.’ She felt it was very real. I’m going slightly mad, I react , I send another note. I’m talking about my observations, from a distance but still feeling like I was at the church in New Jersey.

I pick up my cell, I frantically text my dear friend Annie in Orlando. I’m screaming at her to call me. She responds instantly, I think she feels I was about to commit a crime. Worse I share my feelings why I’m madder than she even thinks I am and about how I have been up for four hours, had an agenda, a bunch of things to do and I why I am way behind schedule because everybody iOS talking to me about Whitney Houston. So we talk about Whitney’s Houston’s funeral and I become further behind schedule.

And now I’m writing a blog about the last twelve hours and the only thing I am not discussing is the fact I did not dream about Whitney Houston’s funeral cos I didn’t watch it even though I was there…..

Forgive me, I have some things to do but tomorrow is another day. I have some observations and some comments I’d like to share but I really need to sit down and then get maybe some work done. Facebook today we are not friends. People, don’t call me, text me or e-mail me, it could get ugly. And if you come round please understand if I scream, jump on top of you and beat you to the ground before you even your mouth. I know what you want.

And I wasn’t interested but curiosity killed this cat.

She reigned supreme throughout the 80′s and into the mid 90′s. Whitney Houston’s record sales of close on 200 million are quite staggering when you think she released only seven albums in those twenty two years.She was a true superstar but after achieving that staggering success things began to change and a gradual decline went in to free fall. Most will blame her marriage to Bobby Brown in 1992 as the beginning of the end but who knows where it all began. Personally I think it came from within, Bobby might not have been the right person but they certainly loved one another. Love hurts, love scars.

Whitney Houston had demons, she could never handle not being a superstar. The Queen had lost her crown and the decline was public and painful. Even the industry power that is Clive Davis and all the talent and money he threw at her was to prove to no avail. Whitney Houston’s final decade was a never ending dance with the devil. Her death is as tragic as that of Michael Jackson. Too many similarities of fame, fortune and then the slow slide down where people just aren’t as interested in you. No one is there when you are no longer making them money, they have moved on to their new star. The music industry is no safe haven when this happens. I’ve written less than complimentary blogs about Whitney Houston over the years, emotional outbursts first and foremost as a music fan. They were spawned from Clive Davis’ obsession with her and the vast amount of money he was investing in an artist who had clearly passed her sell by date. Not a personal vendetta just me saying the million dollars he’d spent trying to kickstart her career could have been better spent nurturing new talent and have done more to save an industry in decline. He clearly knew there was more to it than that and was doing what he could to save an artist sliding rapidly into self destruction. He was giving her some purpose as she had lost ability to deal with what was happening to herself. The drugs and erratic behavior were becoming more the norm and Whitney Houston was being forced to wash her dirty laundry in public. She had become a shadow of her former self. She didn’t even look like herself anymore. The person everyone had loved had gone. I cannot imagine what Clive Davis is going through right now. Whitney Houston was like a daughter to him, probably the closest he has been to any one artist in his long and illustrious career.

Another tragic, sad and lonely tale of a superstar falling from grace. No one teaches you how to handle fame in the music business which means not a soul is there to save you from the slide to ‘relative’ commercial obscurity. You crash and burn and it isn’t pretty. Whitney Houston fell from a very high place, the biggest female artist we’re ever likely to see, it just wont happen again. She slid off her throne and was forced to watch Beyonce, Rhianna etc leapfrog over her  in the popularity stakes. She wasn’t ever really able to handle that and her only way of dealing with it was her path to self destruction. And finally when the voice could no longer handle the damage that had been inflicted upon it I suppose the will to live went with it.

I’m writing this while there is still no cause of death or no official statement other than she was found dead. I wonder if anyone was there when Whitney Houston died?

Think Marilyn Monroe, think Michael Jackson and now think Whitney Houston, gone but never forgotten. All in that safe haven no one could give them here. And tragically there will be more.

At the beginning of the month I was invited to open a series of tribute concerts to honor David Bowie’s birthday. A cornucopia of bands all doing covers of their favorite Bowie songs culminating with local Tampa Bay heroes Barely Pink finishing off the show with Ziggy Stardust in it’s entirety. As I prepared my talk I became excited at rediscovering just how David Bowie’s influence on me then was just as strong now. I was older and I could understand, I had something to compare Ziggy Stardust to…but I couldn’t. There just isn’t anything that touches it for it’s originality, it’s danger and it’s utter razzmatazz.

When I grew up rock music was about rebels, it was about excitement and creating mayhem. It was something your mother would never like and your father would cast stones at. We were never meant to grow up this way, rebels don’t fit, they never will but they never want to anyway. They do it their way, they are the misfits of society and they change people lives. I didn’t have age on my side then, I just embraced it for what it was. At eighteen I was smitten, forty years later I haven’t seen anything fit to lace those iconic red boots. Ziggy changed our lives in a way no other ever will. I almost feel qualified to pass judgement, I loved him as a fan but had no idea my entire life would be surrounded by rock, pop and everything in between. I’d no idea my job was to become my hobby. I’ve seen literally thousands of acts pass along the decades of my life but nothing compares. I have never been rocked in a way that makes me think anyone could roll Bowie away.

I’ve been lucky all my life. Back in 1972 I was blessed beyond belief by witnessing one of the greatest stories rock has ever told, the birth, adolescence and death of the magnificent Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.  At the time I was 18 and already way too excited with rock music and the many delights it had already brought me. I’d experienced Hendrix, got dazed and confused  with Led Zeppelin and meddled with The Pink Floyd. David Bowie was different.

Bowie had been around a while but was never one to be content with obscurity. He was never the type to be content with second best. He never had any doubts, he knew he was destined for stardom but wanted it on his own terms. He had actually said he’d be a millionaire by the time he was thirty and he was. David Bowie is influenced by the books he reads, the pictures he paints and the music he makes. David Bowie was always a genius, always pushing out ,the epitome of a rock star. Music afforded him his every indulgence. He just about invented the word.

Ziggy Stardust  changed the way we looked at rock stars and how we listened to music. It grabbed you buy the throat, it forced you to pay attention. At the time of Ziggy’s birth, Bowie was nobody. He’d been around for years and apart from Space Oddity being a hit, everything else he’d put his mind to had failed. When David Bowie’s alter ego first set foot onstage he was the complete star way before we made him one.

So what now? Next week’s show will be lambs to the slaughter if they don’t show a rapid increase in viewers but the reality is where will that audience come from? If they didn’t want the first why would they watch the second?

We live in age where people’s attention is minimal. Everything moves so quickly that in some people’s minds Simon might be last years thing. Once you fall from grace it becomes doubly hard to regain your throne again, at least not quickly. It’s going to be a very difficult time for the boy Cowell and very damaging to his image. Moving away from American Idol was right but I think the real winners were American Idol. They changed and Simon didn’t. They revamped the show and it worked, they didn’t replace Simon they replaced the whole look and feel. Simon and Paula sat side by side is ten years old, we’ve seen it all before.

There’s more but I’m waiting until tomorrow’s show…

I never met Clarence Clemons but he was that larger than life character you felt you knew. At every Springsteen gig I ever attended you’d hear The Big Man’s saxophone fill every inch of the stadium and the higher notes probably traveled even further to some downtown smoky bar. He was such an integral part of, not only the band but Bruce’s life too. It was very simple, he met him in a bar in New Jersey, they hung out and he never left. Until now. Those are always the greatest love stories, the ones where you just ignite from the first moment together and you feel that this time it’s going to last. Clarence was a powerhouse of a performer, Bruce knew that, we all did. Clarence Clemons never allowed Bruce a night off, he’d force him to be on top of his game. Bruce was more than capable but Clarence took him to the pinnacle of excellence, the point of perfection. The classic cover of Born to Run where Bruce just leans on the big man says it all. ‘We’re in it for the long haul, man’

He was there for every moment with Springsteen. He would glance over  with his sax gripped firmly to his mouth and you could see the elation all over his face. Here was a guy with the best job in the world, and that stage was his world. To be loved and appreciated from the leader of the greatest live band we’ll probably ever see was everything to him. People talk of U2, the glitz and the glamor and the sheer enormity of the spectacle but it’s isn’t Bruce Springsteen and the E Steet Band. And it never will be.

Every music fan will be sharing the same grief. Lady Ga Ga is utterly devastated, Clarence’s swansong was a guest appearance on her latest single, Edge of glory. Indeed, Born to run and now laid to rest Clarence. Your train was bound for glory the moment you climbed aboard.