Lessons learned from Beck and Clapton

Rolling Stone has just published a very good interview with guitarists Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, amazingly the first time they've been interviewed together despite tasting stardom in the early 1960s.

Two guitar legends in the mid-60s, and looking a bit shaggy behind the earsI'm stunned this is the first time these two have sat down for an interview, given their close ties in The Yardbirds, blues-rock supergroups in the late 1960s and '70s and their general reputations as two of the best, if not the best, guitarists of all time. Both are co-headlining a brief tour, which sadly won't make it to the West Coast.

Rolling Stone offers a glimpse of David Fricke's interview online, but has reserved the juice for the print edition. If you're a fan of their music or musicianship in general, it's worth the $5.

I've always been a fan of Beck, whose mastery of blues, hard rock and jazz, and to a lesser extent rockabilly, is mind blowing. That inability to focus on one genre  -- or what All Music Guide describes as the "haphazard way he approached his career" -- was a double-edged sword. He's a god among musicians but his commercial success pales next to Clapton.

Clapton, on the other hand, had never won me over. His playing was soulful and technically brilliant, but he was often a jerk and tended to deliver a lot of half-ass performances. One of the worst concerts I've ever attended was a Clapton show (thankfully opener Robert Randolph ensured the evening wasn't a total waste).

But the Rolling Stone interview captures a remorseful side of Clapton, one who regrets some of his decisions and streak of laziness in the 1990s. Clapton comes across as sympathetic, almost as if the tour and growing fondness for Beck is waking a sleeping lion. Let's hope so. It's be great to hear Clapton polish a somewhat tarnished legacy.

The key takeaway for me, however, was a passage describing Beck's work ethic. Beck's public image is one of a man who can't decide whether to play the guitar or restore old cars (he once jokingly said he recorded a new album simply because he needed money for a new band saw). But as Fricke notes, "He still practices for long periods every day, when he's not on tour or in the garage -- working on chords, melodic phrases and fingerpicking exercises.

" 'I fnd it inexcusable not to get up and play,' Beck explains, 'especially now with big shows coming up. I've got a guitar on every sofa, leaning up against walls, telling me, 'Don't forget what's about to happen.' That's the way it's been for 35 years.' "

I admire people who still have passion for the hard work that creates greatness. Anyone who's seen Beck's new DVD "Live at Ronnie Scott's" is blown away by his masterful mix of detail and flash. Author Malcolm Gladwell suggested in his book "Outliers" that anyone can be great at something if they put in 10,000 hours of practice. His key example was The Beatles played multiple live shows nightly for two years before they hit it big. And so while it's amazing that after nearly 50 years in the business, one of the all-time greats still finds the passion -- and the need -- to work on the basics, it's a lesson we all can take to heart.

Update on Thursday, February 18, 2010 at 8:14 AM by Logan Molen

OK, the Clapton karma appears to be fleeting.

After posting this take last night, I was reading The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, and ran across two reviews of the Beck-Clapton concert in London (yep, both have rock writers who know their stuff).

Both the WSJ review and the FT review noted that Clapton seemed distant and unmotivated while Beck was energized. Maybe it's a matter of Beck still feeling like he'll always be David, not Goliath.

Gotta “stick” up for my fellow drummers

Soundcheck has a semi-lame/semi-enjoyable “Smackdown” on drummers, subtitled “Heart of the Band ... Or Butt of the Joke?”

As a former drummer, you can guess which side of the debate I’m on. Don’t get me started about guitarists who think “11” is a starting point or lead singers who think they’re all that (Charlie Watts reputedly punched out Mick Jagger after Mick introduced him as “my drummer”; Watts was said to have replied, “No, you’re my singer”).

The "Smackdown" at its core taps into a perception that’s more real than you think, as evidenced by many of the 80+ comments, but ultimately devolves into hackneyed -- but still funny -- jokes that every musician (particularly thin-skinned guitarists) have told over the years:

Q: What do you call someone who hangs out with musicians?
A: A drummer!Legendary Spinal Tap drummer Mick Shrimpton, the ultimate amalgam of drummer jokes

Q: What happened when the bass player locked the keys in the van?
A: It took all day to get the drummer out!

Q: What did the drummer get on his IQ test?
A: Drool!

Q: What’s the difference between a drum solo and a broken vacuum cleaner?
A: A broken vacuum cleaner doesn't suck!

I actually agree with the last one. Maybe it’s because I never learned to solo, but even when I watched the best, there’s nothing worse than a drum solo.

If you're a musician, you've heard all those jokes, and probably, like me, substituted other words like “guitarists” in retelling them. Example: How do you get a guitarist to shut up? Put sheet music in front of them.

Exactly.


The magic of Greil Marcus

Reading Experiencing Greil Marcus can be exhilarating on one end and exceedingly frustrating on the other. I’ve found his books and essays on rock ‘n’ roll and off-the-narrow histories of America hit and miss, yet I can say that there’s probably no greater influence on my life as a journalist and music fan.

PopMatters has posted a long look at Marcus’ work titled “Risk and Equilibrium: The Impact of Greil Marcus” that starts out:

“Few if any American cultural historians take the great deep American Breath like Greil Marcus. It’s theGreil Marcus breath of Whitman, of Ginsberg, of Little Richard and Dylan and Aretha Franklin—in scope and risk, at least, if not their artistry or forms. Best known for his opinions on American popular music, Marcus’ own brand of artistry has always revealed a remarkable breadth of knowledge and a more important desire to find connections between disparate, even wholly disconnected voices. As storyteller, his frequent digressions deepen the plot; as critic, he combines academics with street-level description and a gift for conjuring scenes; as historian, he’s a brilliant synthesist.”

I was a teen-ager growing up in Fresno when I first discovered Marcus writing about rock and punk in New West magazine. It was there that I first read about English punks The Clash, whose debut album hinted of great things to come in music, and whose sound and messages framed much of my youth (and whose influence on popular music continues today). It’s an album that continues to inspire me nearly 35 years later, and I’ve wondered what might have happened had I not stumbled across that Marcus column and decided to trust this Bay area writer of whom I knew nothing. Perhaps fate would have had me still locked in on a classic rock station, calling in to request “Long, Long Way From Home.” Instead The Clash, Buzzcocks and other punks inspired me to learn how to play drums, join a couple of punk and rock bands, and passionately pursue a lifelong love of music of all genres.

Marcus wrote with such zeal and authority, and seemed to look at life just a little bit differently. “Mystery Train” raised the bar for rock journalism and “Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century” did the same for art history, somehow managing to surround odd but fascinating vignettes about alternative scenes and political thought with the history of The Sex Pistols. It’s written in a unique style that’s only deepened over the years, making Marcus' books ever challenging, yet all the more rewarding for those who invest the effort.

It’s interesting that while Marcus is best known as a critic, PopMatters’ Robert Loss recognizes that Marcus himself acknowledged the fine line between challenging artists and squashing creativity by the force of a bully pulpit, as noted in this 2001 interview:

“If you look at art criticism from the forties on and the whole notion of flatness as a value in painting, certain critics decided that painting should be this way, so they went looking for artists who either exemplified what they were looking for or who were reading what these critics were saying and were doing what they were told to do because they knew they’d get good reviews and their paintings would sell. It’s corrupt intellectually and it’s corrupt commercially.”

Indeed. And yet he continues, hoping to stay above the fray.

"A NewLiterary History of America" is Greil Marcus' latest bookMarcus has teamed up with Harvard professor Werner Sollors to deliver a new anthology titled “A New Literary History of America.” PopMatters’ Loss takes a stab at an overview, writing:

"Among the more surprising entries are essays on Alcoholic Anonymous, the Winchester rifle and pro football. Such choices are defended in the volume’s Introduction as evidence of “how one got across what he or she meant to say to his or her fellow citizens”, a cut-throat whatever-it-takes methodology that shouldn’t seem surprising in today’s America. Basing their selections around voices which spoke in public of something new, or spoke in a new way about something old (and borrowed and yes, blue), and then charting the trajectories of those voices—how far they carried, and to whom—Marcus and Sollors emphasize the imperative outbursts of a country seeking to define itself, to know itself, after the fact of its invention.”

Sounds inviting and daunting to me. I feel like I need a couple weeks of training to prepare for the adventure. I think I'm up for the challenge.