B-Sides the Point

What a band or artist leaves off an album is often as telling as what's on it. In some cases, Bob Dylan being the most obvious example, the exclusion of  songs shows them to be a questionable judge of their own material. In others, it's a window into what was going on with them behind the scenes. It's in this area that Fleetwood Mac and the song Silver Springs comes to mind.

Originally recorded for the album Rumours, Silver Springs was relegated to the B-side of the single Go Your Own Way. As such it got some airplay but didn't really enter public consciousness until it was included on the groups 1997 reunion album The Dance. By that time, though, the song had been rehabilitated which is to say it had lost its edge, referred to simply as a great old song. It is a great old song, but what makes it such a great song is somewhat lacking in the more recent recording.

Music writer Greil Marcus once described Fleetwood Mac as "Fleetwood Mac is subverting the music from the inside out, very much like one of John le Carre's moles - who, planted in the heart of the establishment, does not begin his secret campaign of sabotage and betrayal until everyone has gotten used to him and takes him for granted." To some extent, the decision to leave Silver Springs off of Rumours feels like a part of that campaign, even if some sources say it was driven by time limits on vinyl LPs, because the song seemed to cut a little too close. Like much of what actually made it on Rumours, Silver Springs is yet another portrayal of the soap opera that was the band's collective personal life but, even more so than Go Your Own Way or Secondhand News, it radiates hurt.
Nowhere is this more apparent than when the song should be winding down. About 45 seconds from the end, Stevie Nicks' voice starts ramping up, egged on by Buckingham's guitar. Then, about 30 seconds from the end, she lets loose. "I'll follow you down to the sound of my voice that haunts you." it's not so much the words, which are borderline nonsense like many of her lyrics, it's all in the delivery. It's one of those cases where, if you can't tell how much she's hurting, you're just not listening.

The more recent live recording just doesn't have the same intensity, but that was probably inevitable. It's unlikely the band could have continued without them being able to put past resentment behind them, something demonstrated by the long periods where Buckingham and Nicks were both absent. In a sense it's nice that this group of talented people could do that. At the same time, there is a feeling of something lost. Rather than a mole hidden in plain sight out of John le Carre, the current incarnation of Fleetwood Mac is more like the Soviet agents in the BBC miniseries Sleepers who've lived in England so long that they no longer have any desire to fulfill their original mission.

Then again, maybe Marcus had it all wrong and all the group wanted to do was make some quality pop music. As long as we still have the old recordings, we can construct any idea of them that we want.

Beyond Mortal Men

Comic books have shown us funerals (premature though they may have been) for superheroes that were beloved. What about a funeral for one that was hated? A modest example follows. If you like it, let me know. There's more where this came from.
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The scene wasn't what Roger expected, but, then again, what had he expected? True, the deceased was one of the best known "mystery men" of the post-war era, but did he really expect a church full of gaudy costumes? Before his inner voice could answer, an external one interrupted the internal debate.

"It's always fascinated me," said Kevin, "That our kind only ever seems to come together for funerals."

"It's almost like a costume party in reverse," Roger thought aloud, as they stared down the aisle of looking for an open pew among the somber faces.

"I wouldn't say it's that much fun." The older man paused to take another look. "Still, I wouldn't mind having this size crowd when I go."

"I noticed that. I didn't think that many people liked Alden Groves."

"More than you'd think, I bet." They made their way about halfway down the aisle and took their seats, pausing only for a cursory display of Catholicism. "I'd guess a lot of them are here for the same reason we are."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, it's a chance to close out a rather unpleasant chapter of our collective past, maybe let go of some old resentments."

"Did you have any particular resentments towards him?"

"No, my resentments were pretty general. I thought his actions were reprehensible by any honest standard of decency, and...well, I'm just thankful that more people didn't get infected by his poison."

"I've always been curious about his reasons for doing it. His actions weren't so different from a lot of other people's back then."

There was something hard in Kevin's eyes when he responded, not anything angry just hard. "A lot of people got suckered in back then, even named names, but had the decency to feel bad about it later. If Groves felt any remorse, he never showed it. As for decency...," he started but let his words trail off with his thoughts.

"You've clearly thought a lot about this."

"It comes with age, when you realize that the arguments that divided you will never be settled." For a moment, it seemed like word and thought would trail off again but quickly came back into focus for him. "You'll find out for yourself eventually."

"Lately, I've been thinking it'll be sooner rather than later for me."

"You shouldn't let yourself think that way." There was genuine sympathy in the older man's eyes.

"I've been wondering if it's time to call it a day." Roger somehow managed to sound earnest and unconvinced at the same time.

"What do your knees tell you?"

"That it's a good thing I took up yoga in the seventies, but there's more to it...."

"Roger, when it's the right choice, it'll feel right, and you won't have to wonder." He paused for a moment when he saw the doors being shut then turned back to Roger. "Don't try to fit a round peg on a square hole. Trust me, there are lots of people willing to do that for you. Now hush, they're starting."

Shaking All Over

As much as I'm in favor of interstate commerce, I would appreciate it if California would not export their earthquakes to the East Coast. At the very least, we need some common sense limits on the magnitude of quake, maybe 4.9 on the Richter Scale.

Over Due

Is there any phrase more likely to be followed by a disrespectful comment than "with all due respect"? I've never heard anyone use that phrase as a preface to validating another person's actions or opinions. Because it's typically a polite way to tell someone they're acting foolishly, I've always assumed the phrase to be British in origin, a manifestation of their traditionally polite (or, if you prefer, somewhat buttoned-up) national character. I wonder sometimes what sort of equivalents might exist in other languages then ask myself if that's a silly train of thought. With all due respect, it might be.

Careful What You Wish For, Michele!

Michelle Bachmann is at it again. By it, I mean using highly selective data points that eleminate vital context for political gain. The latest (at least that I've heard of) involves her proclamation that if she's President of the United States, we'll go back to having gas under $2/gallon. Because for lies to work, they have to have at least a superficial grounding in reality, Bachmann points out that average gas prices have nearly doubled from the $1.79 level at work when Barack Obama took office.

What she neglects to mention is that prices had actually been very close to current levels before Obama was elected and only came down as a result of the worldwide economic downturn. Putting aside the general lack of specifics about how her hypothetical administration would achieve this goal, the unavoidable truth at work here is that gas prices are driven largely by crude oil prices and those prices generally go down only when demand is lower as occurs during an economic slowdown.

Someone who's cynical about the notion of President Bachmann might observe that this means Bachmann is telling potential voters that if they make her President the economy will collapse, whichwould be a shocking bit of honesty from a presidential candidate of any major party. That is, of course, a cheap shot. I think I'll take it anyway.

Now, That's How You Do a Failure!

Texas Governor (and 2012 Republic Presidential Candidate) Rick Perry would probably be among the first to tell you that the 2009 Recovery Act (aka "the economic stimulus package") was a failure. He would, however, probably be the last to tell you how much his state benefited from that supposed failure.

According to a recent article in the Atlantic, the national Conference of State Legislatures reported that Texas was able to fill 97% of their budget deficit for the fiscal years 2010 and 2011 by using money from the Recovery Act. In dollar terms, Texas used $6.4 Billion (yes, with a "B") to help plug a $6.6 Billion hole in their finances.

There's a reasonable debate to be had that the Recovery Act wasn't as successful as it should have been, but that reasonable debate is never going to happen when its loudest critics are also among its largest beneficiaries. I'll stop short of calling Perry a liar, but things like this leave little room for doubt that he's a Grade A hypocrite.

The Obvious Files (Volume 2)

Dear A$$hole Bus Driver,

Please pardon the overly familiar form of address. I didn't have a chance to get your proper name while you were busy nearly running me over with your Route 79 Metrobus as I was legally crossing Georgia Avenue (at the intersection with Wayne Avenue) shortly before 1:30 this afternoon.

At the risk of stating the obvious, drivers are not just supposed to yield to pedestrians, they're required to do so. The fact that you're handling several tons of bus, against which my internal organs wouldn't stand much of a chance, does not lessen your responsibility to follow that most simple of road rules, it actually heightens that duty to the public.

Yes, I know that's dirty pool bringing the public into the conversation, especially when we haven't been properly introduced, but last I checked you are a public employee. Bearing that in mind, I'm sure I speak for many when I say it would be nice if you would, in the future, avoid trying to kill and/or injure the people who ultimately pay your salary. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,
Don

Stock Market Plunger (The Obvious Files, Volume 1)

Dear News Media,

If it's not too much trouble, would you please stop using words like "plunge" to describe relatively modest stock market declines? A 5.6% drop in the Dow-Jones Industrial Average of the kind reported on the front page of today's Washington Post (and many other outlets) is not a plunge. Yes a 635 point decline is bad, no it is not in any way a desirable occurrence, but call it what is without needlessly stoking people's anxieties.

I grant you that the point drop in raw numbers is larger than the 508 point decline of the October 19th 1987 stock market crash, but even that doesn't justify the terminology because stocks were trading at much lower levels then. Prior to the 1987 crash, the historical peak of the Dow-Jones Industrial Average had been 2722 in August of that year and had been trending down since that peak. The October 19th drop from 2246 to 1738 was a decline of just over 22%.

Let's recap. A 22% drop is a crash. A decline of less than 6% is no more a crash than the previous day's 4% increase meant that the Dow "skyrocketed". These things require perspective, and that's something that's been in short supply lately. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,
Don

Poor Standards

I don't think anyone was really surprised that the political train-wreck of the debt-ceiling negotiations led to a downgrade of the United States' credit rating. We'll start to see the effects of this move several hours from now when Asian financial markets open. Here in the US, most of the reaction has consisted of people from one political party blaming people in the other. A notable exception is former Clinton administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.

In an article published on the website UK Progressive, Reich makes a case that, based on their past actions, S&P had no business making any judgments about how creditworthy we are. Reich notes that if we as a country pay our bills and are likely to do so in the future, then we're a good credit risk and other metrics, such as debt to GDP, are none of their business. He goes on to point out that the irony of their actions when their relative inaction prior to the 2008 financial sector meltdown is a large contributing factor to our current level of debt.

Reich noted "Until the eve of the collapse S&P gave triple-A ratings to some of the Street’s riskiest packages of mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations. Had S&P done its job and warned investors how much risk Wall Street was taking on, the housing and debt bubbles wouldn’t have become so large – and their bursts wouldn’t have brought down much of the economy. You and I and other taxpayers wouldn’t have had to bail out Wall Street; millions of Americans would now be working now instead of collecting unemployment insurance; the government wouldn’t have had to inject the economy with a massive stimulus to save millions of other jobs; and far more tax revenue would now be pouring into the Treasury from individuals and businesses doing better than they are now. In other words, had Standard & Poor’s done its job over the last decade, today’s budget deficit would be far smaller and the nation’s future debt wouldn’t look so menacing."

While the current administration has been critical of S&P's methodology, no one has called them out in the way Reich has. To what extent that's a function of politics or simply not wanting to antagonize the other rating agencies is hard to say. Either way, I'm left wishing that common sense like Reich's was in greater supply.

www.2.0

It seems appropriate somehow that it was thanks to the worldwide web that I know today is the 20th birthday of the worldwide web. We've come a long way from ARPAnet, but distance isn't always synonymous with progress. Some would say that the web's main contribution has been to make paranoid theories, porn and political invective easier to find, and it's hard to refute that if you spend any time looking at twitter. Of course, the underlying fact here is that pretty much all technology is amoral. It's only the uses that are good or evil. Personally, I just wish people would make the effort to spell better.

The Square Root of Elvis Costello?

Sometimes as a fan of a particular artist, there are things you know about them that are simply there and only come into full focus many years later. Among the most famous comments Costello ever put on record was in an early interview where he said main motivations were revenge and guilt.

Listening to the song God Give Me Strength today finally made that quote something more than an abstract fact of his biography. The key moment is the lyric, "Maybe I was washed out like a lip-print on a shirt. See I'm only human, I want him to hurt."

Hearing Costello sing those lines and the way his voice wrenches every bit of anger and pain out of those words, it's clear that he understands the darker sides of human feelings. As much as I admire his wordplay and the craft that enables him to go from torch-songs to rock to bluegrass, that understanding is where his true greatness lies.

If You Repeat the Lie Often Enough...

Not long after today's debt-ceiling bill passed congress, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said the following with regard to the prospect of increasing tax revenue. "The American people agreed with us on the nature of the problem. They know the government didn't accumulate $14.3 trillion in debt because it didn't tax enough." By all accounts, McConnell is a bright guy and may even be a decent one (his rhetoric makes it hard to tell). In this case, though, he's not just wrong - he's lying.

The "American" people do in fact support increasing tax revenue in tandem with spending cuts. According to a poll conducted by CNN, not only do the majority of Americans disapprove of the deb-ceiling deal, 60% of those polled disapprove of the fact that the agreement does not include tax increases. I can only presume that the very astute McConnell is acting in the hope that if he repeats the lie often enough Americans will believe it.

Assuming this is indeed his plan, I'll conclude that he's as cynical as he is smart. Correspondingly, I'll take the  notion of him being a decent guy off the table - the same way he takes much needed revenue for infrastructure and other needs that affect average Americans off the table. Heaven help us if he becomes Senate Majority Leader.

Retail Karma

Despite the liquidation sales going on in their stores, Borders continues to post various updates on their Facebook page. This in turn spawns comments from a mix of fans, detractors and soon-to -be-former employees. As a former employee, the ones that particularly irritate me are those that imply that Borders demise represents some sort of karmic payback for supposedly driving all the independent bookstores out of business. That song was already old and tired when I worked for them in the mid-90s. It was a ridiculous and simplistic view then, and it's only gotten more so in intervening years.

First off, unless there was some super-secret corporate plan that was never shared outside the highest levels, Borders didn't set out to destroy independent bookstores. In its heyday, it was out to be the best bookstore possible - and it really was. In any case at the store level, we never viewed the independent bookstores as the enemy and didn't hesitate to call the store up the road, even if it was a Barnes and Noble (who was more likely to be viewed as the enemy). The bottom line was customer service, and it was something that the Borders of the 1990s succeeded at more so than a lot of other stores.

As many have observed, the nature of business is that the market evolves and if you don't evolve with it you're toast. That a once innovative company like Borders is now demonstrating that principle due to a failure to innovate effectively is certainly sad and ironic. Calling it karma, though, is deeply uninformed and hugely insensitive to the many people who once did their best to make Borders the best.

MTV and the Big 3-0

The path from Video Killed the Radio Star and Love Plus One to The Real World and Jersey Shore been a long and ugly road for MTV. Still, on the occasion of its 30th birthday, I'd rather praise MTV for what was so right about the early years than bury them with the crap that came later.

So much of my musical taste was molded by those early years when British post-punk/new-wave imports were all over their airwaves, mixing seamlessly with older artists like The Who, whose single You Better You Bet was one of the first 45s I ever bought. A lot of those acts never caught on and many disbanded before they could build anything more than a cult following in America.

Three decades after seeing the video for Town Called Malice, The Jam remains my favorite UK band of the period over the more popular Clash. They rocked nearly as hard with three people as The Clash did with four, and Paul Weller's song-writing was better. Of course, it hardly mattered back then because I loved the video for Rock the Casbah as well. I remember liking Marshall Crenshaw's only real hit Someday Someway when I first heard it, but seeing the video for Whenever You're on My Mind was what cemented him in my mind as an artist to watch..

In the case of Squeeze, I suspect the fan following that took root in America, fostered by videos like Black Coffee on Bed and the steady sales of Singles - 45's and Under they spawned, played a large part in their eventual reunion in the mid-80s. Even the one-hit wonders seemed better. Give me Just Got Lucky or Come On Eileen over just about anything on today's pop charts.

Of course, like most golden ages, it couldn't last. By the end of the 80s, MTV already seemed a bit tired. Even as striking videos like Losing My Religion were winning awards, the first season of The Real World wasn't far away. Oh well, we'll always have Rio.