The ABCs of Pop Music, 2009 -- Anvil, Boyle and Cohen

The ABCs of Pop Music, 2009 -- Anvil, Boyle and Cohen

By Steven Rosen
(This first appeared in Cincinnati CityBeat, May 6, 2009)

Can film (including, defining the term broadly, Internet videos) save popular music from its commercial destruction? Three recent and vastly disparate examples — Anvil, Susan Boyle and Leonard Cohen — give hope.

If you haven’t heard of Anvil yet, it’s because the hit documentary about this middle-aged Canadian Metal band — Anvil! The Story of Anvil — is just reaching Cincinnati (it opens Friday at the Esquire Theatre).

It’s the story of a marginally successful (at best) Rock act that has been trying to make it big for some 30 years. (The band, supported by VH1-Classics in the wake of the film’s strong reception elsewhere, will perform and answer questions after a midnight Saturday screening at the Esquire).

The movie, directed by Sacha Gervasi, is being received as an inspirational, non-satiric riff on This Is Spinal Tap. Michael Moore has called it “the best documentary I’ve seen in years.” Anvil’s two principal members, high-school friends Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner, began playing together in Toronto back in 1973.

The band always had its fans — just not enough of them. Metallica’s Lars Ulrich and Guns N’ Roses’ Slash are in the movie providing testimonials. But as the documentary has picked up steam, it has revived Anvil’s career in the process.

This is just what the Pop-music industry needs now. A collection of hundreds of niche interests that too rarely overlap, it has had trouble breaking new acts that can become big enough to support the cost of making them successful. The two primary problems are that consumers prefer downloading individual songs rather than buying full CDs — the real moneymaker for record companies — and the big commercial radio stations fear risk, so their play lists are suffocatingly narrow and reactionary.

The best chance for beating those odds is to have an act that’s young and beautiful. Really young, like Miley Cyrus and Jonas Brothers young, so that their core audi ence will be too financially immature to care about spending (their parents’) $15-plus on a new CD. And these acts nimbly use TV, Internet and movies to market themselves.

Now, some of the older (and comparatively less beautiful) acts are learning to use the same tools of the trade. They might not ever rival the Teen Pop acts in degree of superstardom, but they’re finding a way to break through the logjam of older acts with nowhere to go.

Anvil’s story bears a slight similarity with that of fellow Canadian Leonard Cohen. Although he has long had international success as a revered singersongwriter and poet, his influence has always outweighed his sales and airplay. But a 2006 documentary about him, Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, built up his profile to the point the 74-year-old Cohen is currently touring to ecstatic audiences at such venues as New York’s Beacon Theatre, California’s Coachella International Music and Art Festival and Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre. In fact, he and Paul McCartney were Coachella’s elder statesmen this year.

Susan Boyle, of course, is a far different case. Her voice, with its stunningly powerful range and clarity, is more Celine Dion-like than Rock & Roll-ish. But in some ways her still-developing success story is much the same. She has been the recipient of the Internet’s capability to show film and TV clips on demand, thus making an end run around the tyrannies of youth-culture control of cable channels and radio stations.

At age 48, the Scottish woman has never really had any job, much less a career in Pop music. She’s mostly devoted herself to caring for her aged mother, who died in 2007. And there are plenty of reasons to suggest she wouldn’t be on the verge of superstardom as a singer, as she now is, had she pursued such a career through traditional means.

With her dowdy (to be polite) looks, she’s not easy to market in a bathing suit or magazine spread. She wasn’t even a likely successful candidate for Britain’s Got Talent, the reality show featuring sharptongued Simon Cowell as a judge and producer.

Although older than Boyle (he’s 49), Cowell’s obsession with physical appearance as the be-all of celebrityhood made it seem Boyle was being set up for his ridicule. He likes to do that every once in awhile on American Idol, to juice up ratings.

If that was supposed to be game plan, her singing of Les Miserables’ “I Dreamed a Dream” on April 11 transcended it. Boyle’s performance made a point — beauty in music is aural, not visual, and a beautiful voice makes the singer beautiful just for possessing it. Visible Measures, which surveys Internet use, reports that 170 million people worldwide have viewed the online video of her Britain’s Got Talent performance as of April 27.

Before this year is over, maybe Anvil, Boyle and Cohen could share a triple-bill somewhere. If there’s a stadium large enough, that is.

Concert Review: The Flatlanders and Jenny Scheinman

Flatlanders in the Bluegrass State
Southgate House, Newport, Ky.
4-21-09

BY STEVEN ROSEN

In the decades since the 1972 release of their first recording - one which few people outside the band's Texas home even knew existed at the time - the Flatlanders have gone from a band to a legend to a band again and on to their current state: A state of grace.

As alt-country/Americana, especially the rootsy, twangy, plaintive Texas variety, has essentially become the new folk-rock, only more enduring, the Flatlanders - Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock - can take a fair portion of credit for pioneering it. And they no longer have to explain to everyone outside Texas what their music should be called and why they should have an audience.

They've got that audience now - and the response to their new album, Hills and Valleys (New West), shows that. It's the third since the Flatlanders, who broke up in favor of solo careers shortly after the first album, reunited in the late 1990s. At the funky ballroom known as the Southgate House in Newport, Ky., just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, the large, older crowd knew the music well and the comfort level was high. (It helps that a local radio station, WNKU, plays Americana.)

And the three fit and vibrant sixtysomething Flatlanders, backed by three other musicians, including wonderfully empathetic guitarist Rob Gjersoe, performed with a relaxed feeling of nothing to prove. They were completely in synch with each other - sharing verses on individual songs - and their audience. Even when Gilmore flubbed the start of a line, as he did twice, the recovery was so graceful that it was a tribute to their synergy.

Hancock and Gilmore played acoustic guitars; Ely switched from one to an electric. After opening with several older songs, highlighted by exquisite harmony singing on Hancock's "Julia," Ely introduced the new group-written "Homeland Refugee" as a tale of "reverse Dust Bowl migration." With a vividly detailed populist narrative, and with Ely's voice filled with a ruggedly bittersweet, tough loneliness that conjured the image of sparks from a campfire rising into cold-night air, this is probably Hills and Valleys' best song. Ely sang with authority. When he got to the lines, "there's some refugees from Mexico/Behind an abandoned Texico/We nod and smile/It's clear we're all the same," you couldn't help thinking, "Woody Guthrie lives!"

But a close second best song would be the plainspoken yet poetic "Thank God For the Road," rooted in country-rock tunefulness and sung well by Hancock in his deep and homespun voice. Hancock's gift for lyrical beauty and kindness, cut with a trace of sorrow, was also evident in the group's trading-verses performance of his "If You Were a Bluebird."

Gilmore, whose high voice has an almost-otherworldly warble, took lead on the romantic "No Way I'll Never Need You." He dedicated it to his "spiritual adviser" - his wife. That was a nice touch, since Gilmore once put his career on hold to live near an actual spiritual adviser - a religious guru - in Denver.

Toward the set's end, the three did a revved-up, honky-tonk version of one of their earliest classics, Gilmore's "Dallas." Continuing their tribute to Texas, they also covered Townes Van Zandt's "White Freight Liner Blues" and - during one of the two encores - the hilariously raucous, religion-spoofing "Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy" by Terry Allen, their fellow West Texas native Terry Allen.

It's great to have the Flatlanders out there and active. They're a living and still-vital showcase for what's great about Texas - not just musically, but also politically, as evident in their humane lyrics. Considering that the Lone Star State has recently given us the worst president ever and an extremist current governor who implies that succession might be good, Texas (and America) needs the Flatlanders more than ever as an antidote.

***


Meanwhile, Jenny Scheinman could be a major Americana star, if her stunning performance opening for the Flatlanders is any indication. If so, she'll be a most unusual one. She's a classically trained violinist, part of the Brooklyn New Music scene, who has recorded with Bill Frisell and has her own instrumental albums leading a group that plays contemporary classical music.

But she also loves roots music and has performed with Norah Jones, and has a personable voice capable of subtle jazzy inflections as well as folk honesty. It's especially effective on ballads with slowly developing, twisty melodies.

She's also a heck of a visual presence. Almost six feet tall and model thin, she wore a halter-style red mini-dress with long black cowboy boots. Playing violin and mandolin, with guitar support from Gjersoe, she performed songs from her recent singer-songwriter album (just called Jenny Scheinman) as well as some others, including a haunting dream about Rodney Crowell called "Just a Child" and her new "Houston," a song with the road-trip imagery and melodic gorgeousness of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix."