the riley rock report – Details, episodes & analysis

Drummer Georgia Hubley turns 66 on February 9, a convenient excuse to plug a favorite covers album that vies with the best. Fakebook's map points every which-way but weak, done respectfully but without pretense or caution, and shared like a favorite quilt. I wrote it up for the Phoenix in 1990, before used records stores started to feel nostalgic…

PEOPLE STILL COMPLAIN that they "can't understand pop lyrics," another way of asserting that Tin Pan Alley lounge-bar standards will forever outclass that noisy rock and roll. Not so. What the nay-sayers overlook is rock's song catalog, which is not only sturdy but flexible and overripe for singers to raid.

Most acts use cover records to kill time (Todd Rundgren's Faithful), pay respects (Metallica's Garage Days Revisited), or tout range (Siouxsie and the Banshees' Through the Looking Glass), instead of refurbishing guilty pleasures that send you gushing back to the source and digging out your Flamin' Groovies collection. But the thesis behind Yo La Tengo's insinuating summer sleeper Fakebook is that even stooge records (like The Flying Burrito Brothers’ 3rd) have silver linings. Even some of the album's original electric haunts (like "Barnaby, Hardly Working") go down as hushed revelations. Fakebook is a soft-focus record that reveals its edge in dark whispers. Georgia Hubley never uses more than brushes on her snare and cymbal, Ira Kaplan strums a rather stiff acoustic six-string, and Dave Schramm places his bittersweet steel-guitar touches with the care of acupuncture needles.

Rock liberated the singer (Dylan, Hendrix, Rotten), and as Kaplan shows, you don't have to be a crooner to master the soft touch. Kaplan's wobbly self-consciousness imbues these songs with just the right inward momentum. It's as if they set out to make a record-length version of "Alyda," the gentle ebb-and-sway duet that made last year's President Yo La Tengo such a knowing dialogue between electric fallout and acoustic repose.

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Like any former rock critic, Kaplan has a record jones, and his vinyl pancakes don't just sit there. Kaplan is such a Mets fan that he named his group (which also includes Al Greller on upright bass) in honor of the team's original shortstop, Elio Chacón, who yelped out "Yo la tengo!" ("I got it!") every time he went after a pop-up. To confront the critic-wannabe cynicism, Kaplan plugged in and retooled himself into a guitar hero of fierce proportions. Just listen to "Orange Song" on the newly available CD of President Yo La Tengo/New Wave Hot Dog, which includes their 1987 single "The Asparagus Song" backed with Neil Young's "For the Turnstiles."

Hubley has such a natural way with a song that it's clear Kaplan's sponging vocal ideas off of her—rock critic marries female drummer and learns how to sing.

Yo La Tengo shows have always been known for pushing past this nice Jewish boy's intellect and heading straight for Dante's playground. And live, the band excel with covers, which are often textbook-snoot: Bob Dylan's "I Threw It All Away," Neil Young's "Turnstiles," and Lou Reed's "It’s Alright (The Way That You Live)." Each a map for how non-singers can inform outré lyrics, they also model rock's un-hedging credo of mood over meaning. Fakebook combines arguments: Kaplan adopts an unassuming, non-singer delivery style that makes you sit up and listen, and he's put together a set of songs that sound like instant classics. Not only does Kaplan's drummer wife, Hubley, sing more on this record (on Kaplan's "What Comes Next?" and NRBQ's "What Can I Say?"), but some of the best moments come during their duets. And Hubley does more than give Kaplan something steady to work off: She has such a natural way with a song that it's clear he's sponging vocal ideas off of her—rock critic marries female drummer and learns how to sing.

On paper, you have to give Kaplan's taste the benefit of the doubt; he'll do a song by Cat Stevens if he likes it ("Here Comes My Baby," a hit for the Tremeloes in the '60s). And he redeems the home-made credulousness of "Speeding Motorcycle" by Daniel Johnston (Seattle's Jonathan Richman, only simpler). But when you hear Ray Davies' "Oklahoma, U.S.A.," you'll swear you've heard it before and pray that it's on your Kinks Kronicles. (It's not.) For frat hazing, there's "Emulsified," a "Monster Mash" clone by the Mighty Cravers that turns its source into as essential a collection as Nuggets (the At the Party compilation, on Candy Records). And "Yellow Sarong" will lead you to raid your friends' stash for anything by The Scene Is Now.

It's not jazz standards that are dead, it's lounge bars. And if people do still want to go out and hear the old tunes, these are the ones they'd rather hear, even if they've never heard them before. Fakebook isn't just an album for fans, like Joan Jett's The Hit List. It's a record about fandom that sends you packing to the used record store.

the tunes we carry

https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/the-february-thang-riley-rock-booth/pl.u-Xy3JfZYgZMz

Visit the new playlists page, with monthly custom threads and archival anomalies, including: a Willie Nelson Stardust Deluxe that sews up all the old stuff nicely, a Beck roundelay that lives up to his haircut, and more…

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* From the archives: Jimi Hendrix Meets the BBC, Peter Carlin nails Springsteen to the cross, and the Simpsons transcend their worst prophecies…

* Coming soon: Peter Richardson’s new book, Brand New Beat, on the history of Rolling Stone Magazine

* riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link

Musicologists have avoided Dylan longer than most other academics, in part because of how folk culture enters intellectual frames only gradually. Academics also need to invent new terms to deal with vernacular speech and how recorded sound differs from written notation. I took aim at this in Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary (1992): “Bob Dylan’s voice can crook emotion the way a prism refracts light…” to contrast against the “written” studio ethic the Beatles developed at Abbey Road (in my first book, Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary, 1988). Guitarist and theory professor Steven Rings has now bridged more of this gap in What Did You Hear? from University of Chicago Press.

Tim Riley: Well, Steven, what a wonderful book. Man, do I love this book. It’s so valuable, it’s so interesting, and I’m so taken with it. The first things I wanted to mention were that I just love this analysis of “I Believe in You,” the gospel song, and the high notes that he can’t hit with each pass. And then he finally hits the high note and it’s very satisfying. And then you’re left to wonder, well, is that all just for show? Just really a wonderful, wonderful reading of that song.

Steven Rings: Oh, thank you.

Tim Riley: And then I love the way you write about “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met),” and then you go to the live version of it, and then that is the first thing he says to the audience when he gets heckled. Oh my God, that is just a bullseye. How have we never noticed that before? I mean, that’s just really, really great.

[I’m curious about] what your specialty was as a young music theorist, what you focused on, and how you arrived at the University of Chicago, all of [00:01:00] that. So, the pre-history here.

Steven Rings: So, my prehistory… I grew up in Minnesota, though not Bob Dylan’s Minnesota. I grew up in the southeastern part of the state. It’s really a different world. I grew up in the Scandinavian, Lutheran Minnesota. I’ve learned a lot about Hibbing, in the Iron Range, over the course of this. There’s this wonderful book by Dave Engel about his background in Hibbing, and all the ethnic groups that came to work in the mines up there, and it’s a different world. But in any case, Bob Dylan was everywhere as I was growing up.

I was a guitar player early on. I also played piano as a little kid, like, dutifully did my piano lessons, but it was the guitar that I really took off with around age 10, played in a lot of bands, and that kind of thing.

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But then I switched to classical guitar in my teens, [00:02:00] and that’s what my first career was. I did an undergraduate degree in that, and then I taught in Portugal for a little while.

So, that was my kind of, I mean, in the music world, people would sometimes say legit, that was my legit phase. But then I developed a hand injury in the late ‘90s, and that ended my performing career.

So, I pivoted into academia. I always knew that I had a knack for music theory, and decided to pursue that. I went to one of the programs that’s the conservative home of American music theory, which is Yale, and ended up doing a first book that was very technical, mathematical music theory. But I always wanted to return to my pop music roots.

I had been a Bob Dylan fan for a long time, and really felt that as a research project it would scratch [00:03:00] an itch. I just wanted to spend time with the music, and now that I’d gotten my first book out the door, I could choose a little more what I was spending time with.

The other part was that I wanted to write about something that I figured academic music theory would have very little ready to say about. Bob Dylan doesn’t use very many harmonies, forms are pretty straightforward, and so on.

And yet, there is so much richness, and so much complexity, in this music of a different kind, that has to do with performative idiosyncrasy, performative inconsistency, all of these things that I talk about in the introduction to the book. And you know, to be honest, early on I felt like, wow, why did I set myself this challenge?

I found it really hard to grapple with at first, and to think about [00:04:00] how to engage his music. But by the time the book was finished, I was cutting enormous amounts of things, cutting chapters, I had so much more to say. So, it almost strikes me as kind of comical that early on I was, like, oh, how do I even engage this? I ended up having so much to say.

I say this with a caveat: I think some of these things are quite deliberate. I think others are not. I think there are a lot of things that show that this is just his musical way of being. He’s a very, very experimental musician. And I don’t mean that in the sense of post-war avant garde. I mean it in the sense that experiment is just his thing, and a lot of experiments go sideways and sometimes you hit gold with them. And so, I think sometimes it’s much more a question of trying something out and seeing what sticks.

Tim Riley: Well, I’ve read a lot in this space, and music theorists really do have trouble with this aesthetic. I think you do a really good job of describing the challenge and then providing lots of visual and oral examples as the evidence of what you’re talking about, and how you’re making sense of it.

I’m really curious how the music theory people embrace this book, ‘cause in my lifetime (and my background is classical [00:05:00] piano), when I was going to school there was just high and low culture. And high people just did not have any patience for low culture. In my lifetime, I have seen those distinctions largely evaporate. Now, people like us can teach this material at the college level, and it’s entirely respectable. It was not respectable 40 years ago, 50 years ago. And I think there’s been a lot of challenge for exactly how to do it.

I’ve always thought [Twilight of the Gods musicologist] Wilfred Millers was funny, when he says that the E major chord at the end of Sgt. Pepper is reminiscent of [Gustav] Mahler’s E Major chord at the end of his Fourth Symphony. And I was a young buck, but I was really tough on Christopher Ricks for writing a book about Dylan that did not mention Woody Guthrie [Visions of Sin, 2004]. This just seemed to me, like, how is that possible? And yet, he’s full of insight. He’s full of really interesting textual analysis. You can’t write him [00:06:00] off, but it’s just from such a completely different plane.

So, I’m curious how you think about it. The way I try to explain it to my students is that we have two very strong traditions: We have a written tradition, and we have an oral tradition. And most of academia was obsessed with the written tradition for the longest time. Now, we’re seeing this oral tradition.

It has landed mostly in ethnomusicology departments. However, you see political scientists engage with rock studies. You see literary people engage in rock studies. So, there’s a number of different portals, and it’s sort of like we’re waiting for it to land, you know?

Jazz is interesting because jazz combines the two. Sometimes it starts as oral, and it winds up getting written down. Other times, you’re using a lead sheet and that’s the starting point.

Steven Rings: Or in the swing era, it’s usually elaborate charts, and so on.

Tim Riley: Right. [00:07:00] I find your approach really persuasive and convincing.

Steven Rings: Thank you. In answer to your question, the book is sort of just out, so I only have a hint of how music theorists are reacting to it. Music theory as an academic discipline has been in a moment of reckoning since 2020, and is in the process of reorienting from a highly textualist classical music paradigm, to a paradigm where non-notated traditions are central. At this point, the most work is being produced in popular music…

more

* What Did You Hear? The Music of Bob Dylan, by Steven Rings (Chicago University Press, 2025)

* Scott Warmuth: on Chronicles, Vol. I, and “borrowing”….

* University of Chicago, Department of Music

* Just Like Bob Zimmerman’s Blues: Dylan in Minnesota, by Dave Engel (Amherst, 1997)

Motown’s Back Pages

"Ross was a space oddity, an outlier, and so became the natural object of others’ lust and disgust ('b***h-goddess'). She was the only Motown star you could imagine dancing with fellow freak Groucho Marx, her snaky shape in mid-frug just as semiotically recognizable as his cigar,” Devin McKinney in "The Motown Story: The First Decade, or A Star Is Born," American Music Perspectives, Vol. 4, No. 1, SPECIAL ISSUE: MOTOWN, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025 (Tim Riley, issue editor). With more from Riley, Olivia Davis, Kit O’Toole, and Ben Greenman.

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* Coming soon: all the lists, and Cameron Crowe write a memoir, again, and Peter Richardson’s forthcoming Brand New Beat, on the history of Rolling Stone Magazine

* Don’t forget the archives: more on Dylan, the regrettable Philosophy of Song, and Love and Theft; how the Brahms piano concertos saved the symphony (on Andras Schiff); and sixty years of one-hit wonders with author Sarah Hill.

* riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link

Two years ago, this Woody Guthrie piece ran on his birthday (July 14, 1912) to boost awareness and renew anti-fascist history. Given Biden’s “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” moment, Guthrie imparts yet more wisdom: beware cynicism, the right’s lethal stealth tactic. And lo, our first rerun…

John Bonham (1948-1980) would have turned 76 at the end of this month (May 31). As a drummer he had chops beyond his years, and ears as big as any Page riff. When I covered Led Zeppelin’s mandatory box set release in 1990, it changed how I heard all those albums…

When I spoke with Jewell about her lucid and engaging history of college radio, my Covid case had grown pronounced enough that it bled straight onto the tape. She makes a smooth narrator, though, so the few places I do croak through you can hear just how ill I felt. I started by asking her what kind of history she teaches at Fitchburg State outside Boston…

Academic presses now fixing holes and taking risks where giants stutter, and the rest of us await the Big Leap Forward in long-form digital narrative…

The quote that leaps out at me now comes from a violinist, who requested anonymity: “He tries very hard with Mozart and Haydn… But he doesn’t know the meaning of the word elegant. He doesn’t have classical ideas about sound. Elegance and charm—he doesn’t know from that. That’s a terrible thing to say, and I feel bad saying it, because he hired me. It’s not like he’s not trying; he’s just barking up the wrong tree, looking for answers in the wrong places.” So note how that New York Times “essential recordings” list lacks core repertoire. I couldn’t get through his Brahms First and never tried the other three. The Haydn and Mozart escaped release. Beethoven, perhaps, gave him more to grab onto, but when people remarked on the Greatest Ozawa performances they’d say mention Schönberg, Bartok, or Stravinsky.

Watching an episode of Black Mirror ("Fifteen Million Merits," 2011), I looked up the song that Jessica Brown Findlay sang (“Anyone Who Knows What Love Is”), and reeled back to find Randy Newman’s name next to Jeannie Seally. I started going through discogs.com and finding a buried history of tracks he’d written for others during his long apprenticeship before landing his own record deal in 1968. Many of these, including a baller like “I Think It’s Goin to Rain Today,” took hold long before he started singing his own material and “Sail Away” wound up in Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train. Three years ago, Randy Newman wrote a PSA for KPCC, his local radio station. He turns 80 on November 30.

You feel flattered watching Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film, and not just because you catch a contact high from her adoring audience. In a field of immaculate divas and country popsters, Swift creates her own rainbow fingernail category: rural Pennsylvania prom queen sets her diary to song with a charmed charisma and a singer’s dance moves. A lot of rivals now circle her career’s new gravity. As Taffy Brodesser-Akner put it in her New York Times Magazine profile, at a Swift concert “the night is sparkling and young love is amazing.”

The master guitarist Ali Farka Touré died in 2006 at the age of 67, widely praised for developing an “African desert blues,” woven from his Malian roots. This Earthworks domestic debut rode the Graceland world music wave alongside Salif Keita. He probably made his highest-profile album with Talking Timbuktu in 1994 with Ry Cooder. This US debut lingers with more meditative swagger, and when this ran in the Boston Phoenix in 1989, I chanced upon him at the Jazz & Heritage Festival in New Orleans. The music’s intimacy cast a surreal spell. He would have turned 83 on October 31.