Monday, January 29, 2007
Saturday, January 27, 2007
The 33 1/3 Series
You’ve probably seen these ever-so-cute little volumes in record stores and bookstores, or maybe in friends’ houses; each one is by a single author about a single album, and there are now, I believe, a few dozen of them out.
I’ve read three of them: The Abba: Gold one by Elizabeth Vincentelli, the Love: Forever Changes one by Andrew Hultkrans, and the Velvet Underground and Nico one by Joe Harvard. I came upon them completely arbitrarily. Well, actually, a combination of chance and fate: I read these three because I am what my grandfather would have called a schnorer, aka a cheapskate (approximately), and I encountered each of these in remainder sections of New York bookstores I frequent. I love all the records, though.
My conclusion, based on this schnorer’s sample: these books are wildly inconsistent in quality.
The Abba book starts strong, discussing the oddness of selecting a Greatest Hits’ compilation for this series, which is supposedly devoted to the great masterworks of the LP format—albums like Sgt. Pepper, Blue, Thriller, and any number of ELO records. The riches of some bands simply can’t be appreciated in that format, Vincentelli (who writes for multiple publications, like the Village Voice) points out; there are simply certain bands that most people encounter through the greatest hits’ format, and in such cases the usually maligned “Best Of” format takes on a life of its own. But after making this point early on, V slides into, basically, reportorial description of each song and its accompanying promotional video.
Unfortunately, Andrew Hultkrans, author of the Love: Forever Changes book, starts with a paean to one of his undergraduate teachers, Sacvan Bercovitch, a big muckity-muck in American Studies at Harvard. In numerous books, Bercovitch writes compellingly about how American political and cultural discourse quashes radicalism by favoring prophetic forms like the jeremiad, with its endless fixation on renewal and rebirth, over critiques that address current, historically conditioned social and political conflicts. That’s admittedly a very thumbnail, perhaps pinky-nail, account of his argument. It’s still better than Hultkrans’s misunderstanding, though, which is that Bercovitch’s point is that Americans “have a responsibility to think in prophetic terms.” Ouch! Then he goes on to celebrate how Arthur Lee, the brilliant leader of this intensely original and weird San Francisco band from the late sixties, fits into this vaunted American tradition. Ooof!
(Interjection: If you’ve never heard the album Forever Changes go out and purchase or steal it now!)
This objection may seem like my nitpicky defensiveness about my field of scholarly interest. But this misreading by Hultkrans, described as "former editor of Bookforum," underwrites and undermines the book as a whole. It sets the stage for a long series of esoteric platitudes about Lee’s lyrics: in other words, to do exactly the sort of thing acvan Bercovitch critiques. I’m not just making a kind of loose, reflexive Marxist point here; in so much journalistic and academic writing about rock, jazz, and hip hop, romanticizing the band as part of a prophetic tradition so often works to allow the critic to avoid the challenge of writing about the material of music, which is sound.
The pleasant surprise (as my father once diplomatically described learning of my mother’s pregnancy with me) here is Joe Harvard. As the most famous underground rock band of all time, the Velvets have a tendency to generate the same kind of romantic generalizations that dominate the Love book. Yet Harvard, who is not a professional writer (he owns Fort Apache studio in Cambridge), and who does not tell us whether or not he attended Harvard, is lucid, and funny, and clearly aware of the problem of writing about rock insightfully. He’s read his stuff, and issues correctives to a lot of misinformation in other books about the Velvets.
There’s a lot of attention to the studio, as you’d expect, and it’s pleasantly surprising that Harvard is able to do so much with an album recorded in a couple of days. I think the edge he has on many other writers is that he simply understands what it’s like to work as a member of a band. I think it’s a consequence of this, too, that he upends the notion that Lou Reed and John Cale were the only important forces in the band. “The Velvets were a band in the truest sense,” he writes, extending this sense out to Sterling Morrison, Mo Tucker, Nico, and others, including Andy Warhol. (I agree that a “band”’s borders often extend outward beyond the musicians who play onstage or in recording sessions).
I was especially impressed by his sustained attention to Warhol. Most rock writing on the Velvets tends to write him off as, basically, a financial sponsor. More generous critics say he had the insight to give the band space to do what it wanted. One sometimes gets the feeling that there’s simply too much weirdness, queerness, and effeteness surrounding Warhol and the Factory for these writers to deal with. But Harvard talks about Warhol’s careful role in surrounding the band with technical people who would maintain the grunginess and perversity that he loved in their sound, and that fit so well with his own work, especially in the mid-sixties when the Factory was in full swing and he had gone headlong into avant-garde film. As Harvard puts it:
"It was Warhol's comment that the band should just rehearse onstage [much in the same way he viewed filmmaking] that helped push them toward their flights of improvised daring. He suggested that Reed write or make changes to "Femme Fatale," "I'll Be Your Mirror," "All Tomorrow's Parties," and "Sunday Morning". . . Were it not for Warhol, of course, Nico would never have joined the band, and that in itself gives him a colossal role in the sound on the first album. "(51)
Or, more generally:
"Warhol did precisely what a great producer should: he achieved an effective translation of the sound the band heard in their heads on to tape, and then he got it out into the world in tact."
The point is that even though he didn't know the first thing about twiddling the buttons on the console, Warhol skillfully produced the conditions that gave rise to the album--and its sound.
I’ve read three of them: The Abba: Gold one by Elizabeth Vincentelli, the Love: Forever Changes one by Andrew Hultkrans, and the Velvet Underground and Nico one by Joe Harvard. I came upon them completely arbitrarily. Well, actually, a combination of chance and fate: I read these three because I am what my grandfather would have called a schnorer, aka a cheapskate (approximately), and I encountered each of these in remainder sections of New York bookstores I frequent. I love all the records, though.
My conclusion, based on this schnorer’s sample: these books are wildly inconsistent in quality.
The Abba book starts strong, discussing the oddness of selecting a Greatest Hits’ compilation for this series, which is supposedly devoted to the great masterworks of the LP format—albums like Sgt. Pepper, Blue, Thriller, and any number of ELO records. The riches of some bands simply can’t be appreciated in that format, Vincentelli (who writes for multiple publications, like the Village Voice) points out; there are simply certain bands that most people encounter through the greatest hits’ format, and in such cases the usually maligned “Best Of” format takes on a life of its own. But after making this point early on, V slides into, basically, reportorial description of each song and its accompanying promotional video.
Unfortunately, Andrew Hultkrans, author of the Love: Forever Changes book, starts with a paean to one of his undergraduate teachers, Sacvan Bercovitch, a big muckity-muck in American Studies at Harvard. In numerous books, Bercovitch writes compellingly about how American political and cultural discourse quashes radicalism by favoring prophetic forms like the jeremiad, with its endless fixation on renewal and rebirth, over critiques that address current, historically conditioned social and political conflicts. That’s admittedly a very thumbnail, perhaps pinky-nail, account of his argument. It’s still better than Hultkrans’s misunderstanding, though, which is that Bercovitch’s point is that Americans “have a responsibility to think in prophetic terms.” Ouch! Then he goes on to celebrate how Arthur Lee, the brilliant leader of this intensely original and weird San Francisco band from the late sixties, fits into this vaunted American tradition. Ooof!
(Interjection: If you’ve never heard the album Forever Changes go out and purchase or steal it now!)
This objection may seem like my nitpicky defensiveness about my field of scholarly interest. But this misreading by Hultkrans, described as "former editor of Bookforum," underwrites and undermines the book as a whole. It sets the stage for a long series of esoteric platitudes about Lee’s lyrics: in other words, to do exactly the sort of thing acvan Bercovitch critiques. I’m not just making a kind of loose, reflexive Marxist point here; in so much journalistic and academic writing about rock, jazz, and hip hop, romanticizing the band as part of a prophetic tradition so often works to allow the critic to avoid the challenge of writing about the material of music, which is sound.
The pleasant surprise (as my father once diplomatically described learning of my mother’s pregnancy with me) here is Joe Harvard. As the most famous underground rock band of all time, the Velvets have a tendency to generate the same kind of romantic generalizations that dominate the Love book. Yet Harvard, who is not a professional writer (he owns Fort Apache studio in Cambridge), and who does not tell us whether or not he attended Harvard, is lucid, and funny, and clearly aware of the problem of writing about rock insightfully. He’s read his stuff, and issues correctives to a lot of misinformation in other books about the Velvets.
There’s a lot of attention to the studio, as you’d expect, and it’s pleasantly surprising that Harvard is able to do so much with an album recorded in a couple of days. I think the edge he has on many other writers is that he simply understands what it’s like to work as a member of a band. I think it’s a consequence of this, too, that he upends the notion that Lou Reed and John Cale were the only important forces in the band. “The Velvets were a band in the truest sense,” he writes, extending this sense out to Sterling Morrison, Mo Tucker, Nico, and others, including Andy Warhol. (I agree that a “band”’s borders often extend outward beyond the musicians who play onstage or in recording sessions).
I was especially impressed by his sustained attention to Warhol. Most rock writing on the Velvets tends to write him off as, basically, a financial sponsor. More generous critics say he had the insight to give the band space to do what it wanted. One sometimes gets the feeling that there’s simply too much weirdness, queerness, and effeteness surrounding Warhol and the Factory for these writers to deal with. But Harvard talks about Warhol’s careful role in surrounding the band with technical people who would maintain the grunginess and perversity that he loved in their sound, and that fit so well with his own work, especially in the mid-sixties when the Factory was in full swing and he had gone headlong into avant-garde film. As Harvard puts it:
"It was Warhol's comment that the band should just rehearse onstage [much in the same way he viewed filmmaking] that helped push them toward their flights of improvised daring. He suggested that Reed write or make changes to "Femme Fatale," "I'll Be Your Mirror," "All Tomorrow's Parties," and "Sunday Morning". . . Were it not for Warhol, of course, Nico would never have joined the band, and that in itself gives him a colossal role in the sound on the first album. "(51)
Or, more generally:
"Warhol did precisely what a great producer should: he achieved an effective translation of the sound the band heard in their heads on to tape, and then he got it out into the world in tact."
The point is that even though he didn't know the first thing about twiddling the buttons on the console, Warhol skillfully produced the conditions that gave rise to the album--and its sound.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
I Wanna Destroy You
One record about which I blanked while straining to come up with my “Top” list for 2006 is Destroyer, Destroyer’s Rubies. This is a record by Dan Bejar, who essentially comprises the entire band, and moonlights with the New Pornographers. I don’t think I’ve ever loved and hated a record so much, and I mean in a more real sense than what saying I have a “love-hate relationship” with it would suggest. I love it and hate it at exactly the same time. The lyrics, dense with references, are so damned cloying; he definitely has claimed a place in the “I’m So Clever” school of lyricists. Consider:
Those who love Zeppelin will eventually betray Floyd,
I cast off those couplets in honor of the void.
So of course, you find yourself trying to catch all of the references; indeed a lot of the problem here is that what’s bad about it is also what’s good about it. Actually, as I listen now, it kind of reminds me of the once revolutionary rapping style of Rakim. And as I listen now, a half second later, it reminds me of Robin Hitchcock, and I can’t really stand any Robin Hitchcock besides a couple of Soft Boys songs, esp. “I Wanna Destroy You.” I do love the crisp, dry production; the guitar sound is so clean and immediate. But. . . well, you get the picture.
Bejar reminds me of this certain type of friend who’s so f-ing brilliant and voluble and unable to control it that s/he's great to be around but if you ever have to, say, spend two hours in a car with him (or her), you want to kill her (or him).
Now I need to go watch some TV before I die of TV deprivation.
Those who love Zeppelin will eventually betray Floyd,
I cast off those couplets in honor of the void.
So of course, you find yourself trying to catch all of the references; indeed a lot of the problem here is that what’s bad about it is also what’s good about it. Actually, as I listen now, it kind of reminds me of the once revolutionary rapping style of Rakim. And as I listen now, a half second later, it reminds me of Robin Hitchcock, and I can’t really stand any Robin Hitchcock besides a couple of Soft Boys songs, esp. “I Wanna Destroy You.” I do love the crisp, dry production; the guitar sound is so clean and immediate. But. . . well, you get the picture.
Bejar reminds me of this certain type of friend who’s so f-ing brilliant and voluble and unable to control it that s/he's great to be around but if you ever have to, say, spend two hours in a car with him (or her), you want to kill her (or him).
Now I need to go watch some TV before I die of TV deprivation.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
video part 2
If you liked the video link from yesterday (now available, thanks to alchemisty, in your regular everyday pushbutton link mode), you should look at this one too. It picks up from where the other one leaves off, literally, with them eating fish and chips on the set and going through the song again, with their mouths full.
This was posted on Youtube by someone with a very cool blog about sixties pop, with a lot of content on Asian singers and groups.
This was posted on Youtube by someone with a very cool blog about sixties pop, with a lot of content on Asian singers and groups.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Oh, and. . .
I found this adorable, surprisingly ironic pre-Sgt. Pepper video that I'd never seen before.
We Love You Beatles (Oh, Yes, We Do)
Personally, I have to rate the blog a success thus far; because of it, I’ve already gotten back in touch with a couple of friends, been virtually leered at, sparked some interest in Alice Coltrane, and provoked the claim that the Beatles stole everything from the Monkees. (Incidentally, I am a big Monkees fan). So I’m glad to have gotten in on this whole internet thing while it’s still on the ground floor. (Here I allude to the late-90s Simpsons episode in which Homer decides he needs to start a dotcom, and at one point looks up from one of many books on the topic piled before him to exclaim, “Wow, they have the internet on _computers_ now!!”)
A recurring theme in responses to yesterday’s first post is the role the Beatles played in people’s childhood imaginaries, and the people bringing this up cross boundaries of gender, straight/queer, generation, and probably numerous other, less articulated lines of difference. What’s interesting about this to me is not any homiletic suggestion that the Beatles bring us all together, above our differences; it’s how different each of these relationships no doubt were, and all the different things they might have done for those involved. I would hazard to guess that sexuality and, less abstractly, sexual feelings played a role in the vast majority of these childhood experiences; also that these feelings involved some highly complicated and titillatingly tangled web of desires and identifications illegible to standard categories of sexuality, and different in each case. I remember reading one of the Hernandez brothers (of Love and Rockets fame—the comic book, not the 80s band) say in an interview a long time ago that when someone would put on a Beatles record when he was a little kid, he would feel that he had to leave the house, because the sheer amount of feeling it generated in his small body, however pleasurable, was simply unbearable. That struck a loud chord with me. As an expert in repression, I don’t have many memories of childhood sexuality or autoeroticism. But I do remember that when the Beatles were playing, I would feel my body in a way that I never had before. It was like the inside of my body suddenly became real, all at once took on depth. And I’m talking about being five or six here (among the many great advantages of having much older sisters is being initiated into good music at a young age). I also remember that the most intense moments of this feeling came in response to the vocal harmonies. Hmmmm. . .
A recurring theme in responses to yesterday’s first post is the role the Beatles played in people’s childhood imaginaries, and the people bringing this up cross boundaries of gender, straight/queer, generation, and probably numerous other, less articulated lines of difference. What’s interesting about this to me is not any homiletic suggestion that the Beatles bring us all together, above our differences; it’s how different each of these relationships no doubt were, and all the different things they might have done for those involved. I would hazard to guess that sexuality and, less abstractly, sexual feelings played a role in the vast majority of these childhood experiences; also that these feelings involved some highly complicated and titillatingly tangled web of desires and identifications illegible to standard categories of sexuality, and different in each case. I remember reading one of the Hernandez brothers (of Love and Rockets fame—the comic book, not the 80s band) say in an interview a long time ago that when someone would put on a Beatles record when he was a little kid, he would feel that he had to leave the house, because the sheer amount of feeling it generated in his small body, however pleasurable, was simply unbearable. That struck a loud chord with me. As an expert in repression, I don’t have many memories of childhood sexuality or autoeroticism. But I do remember that when the Beatles were playing, I would feel my body in a way that I never had before. It was like the inside of my body suddenly became real, all at once took on depth. And I’m talking about being five or six here (among the many great advantages of having much older sisters is being initiated into good music at a young age). I also remember that the most intense moments of this feeling came in response to the vocal harmonies. Hmmmm. . .
Friday, January 19, 2007
A Top Something List for 2006
Goodbye, 2006. No really, it's really time for you to leave now. A couple of days was fine, a week I could even understand, but three? We both need to get back to our lives. And don't call me for awhile either.
-Silver Jews, “O Captain! My Captain!” live at Webster Hall, March; “Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed” (The opening lines of this song: “Where does an animal sleep when the ground is wet?/Cows in the barnyard, chickens in the farmer’s Corvette/Sometimes a pony, sometimes a pony, sometimes a pony gets depressed.” I finally do think Dave Berman is brilliant).
-The Raconteurs, “My Baby’s on the Level”
-Tanztheater Wuppetal Pina Bausch at BAM, December
-Bob Dylan, Modern Times
-Robert Pollard, I Can’t Believe Gus Still Loves Everything I Do
-Belle and Sebastian, Us Neither
-Stephen Malkmus, vocals on live cuts, bonus disc, reissue of Pavement's Wowee Zowee: “Come on, Jonathan Yardley?????”
-M. Fix, “Song of the Chicken Fair” and “Weighted Air”
-Polar Bear Parade, “Baby Bohemian” and “Might Be Right”
-Bruce Springsteen, “Telling Off Soledad O’Brien”
-Jimmy Carter, “Telling Off Pro-Occupation Hacks”
BTW, I reset the comments thingy so everyone can do it now.
-Silver Jews, “O Captain! My Captain!” live at Webster Hall, March; “Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed” (The opening lines of this song: “Where does an animal sleep when the ground is wet?/Cows in the barnyard, chickens in the farmer’s Corvette/Sometimes a pony, sometimes a pony, sometimes a pony gets depressed.” I finally do think Dave Berman is brilliant).
-The Raconteurs, “My Baby’s on the Level”
-Tanztheater Wuppetal Pina Bausch at BAM, December
-Bob Dylan, Modern Times
-Robert Pollard, I Can’t Believe Gus Still Loves Everything I Do
-Belle and Sebastian, Us Neither
-Stephen Malkmus, vocals on live cuts, bonus disc, reissue of Pavement's Wowee Zowee: “Come on, Jonathan Yardley?????”
-M. Fix, “Song of the Chicken Fair” and “Weighted Air”
-Polar Bear Parade, “Baby Bohemian” and “Might Be Right”
-Bruce Springsteen, “Telling Off Soledad O’Brien”
-Jimmy Carter, “Telling Off Pro-Occupation Hacks”
BTW, I reset the comments thingy so everyone can do it now.
Read The Beatles
So, I’ve been reading Bob Spitz’s Beatles biography, The Beatles, which just came out in paper. I’ve basically been continuously reading books about the Beatles since I was about eleven years old; I well remember being not far from that age and waiting for months and months for my turn with the local branch library’s copy of Hunter Davies’s authorized biography. Nerddom is hot these days, as you’ll notice if you ever check out a “hip” internet dating site like nerve.com, but all you hipster nerds are poseurs as far as I’m concerned: how many of you have your first experience of *recalling a library book* etched permanently into your brain? I didn't think so. At the same time, there are plenty of Beatles books I haven’t read, especially more “serious” ones like Mark Hertsgaard’s, which from the reviews and publicity (I should try to be fair to the author when I’ve not read the book) sound like tired and facile accounts of sixties cultural history, and “America’s loss of innocence” for which the Beatles compensated, two months after JFK’s assassination, etc, blah, blah, we can all write this book in our sleep, and now it’s time to say good night.
Spitz’s biography came out last year with a lot of hoopla, and I can say it is good. Its goodness stems directly from its heft—almost 1000 pages. To produce such a tome Spitz emphasizes detail over either half-assed cultural critique or fan-oriented mythologization. As I was sitting in the bathtub this morning, when, incidentally, I conceived this blog (wasn't wearing a condom--let that be a lesson), I was thinking, the reason this book is good is because it’s more like a literary biography. After that moment of delusional thinking passed I realized that in fact it’s better, i.e. less single-mindedly hagiographical, than 95% of literary biographies. For even many of those literary biographies that deal with the nitty-gritty of their subject’s life do so in a way that treats his or her faults and pecadillos as important on an epic scale—which to me is not only dully repetitive, but signals the biographer’s anxiety about convincing us his or her book was worth writing. But Spitz, buried in detail, makes, for instance, John Lennon’s hideous treatment of his first wife Cynthia seem just as banal and routine as it no doubt was—not the “dark side” of his burning fires of genius, for instance. My only major complaint about the book is that it doesn’t seem to treat the recording process with any particular care or focus; for instance, it mentions when they first started overdubbing vocal tracks (recording the songs for With the Beatles) and leaves it there. But for that topic I’m looking forward to one day having the time to read Geoff Emerick’s Here, There, and Everywhere, which also came out last year.
I also went to Itunes a couple of days ago to listen to samples of the Smithereens new full-length cover of Meet the Beatles, which was written up in the Sunday Times last weekend. I always seem to be a sucker for those Arts and Leisure features—another recent one was responsible for my purchase of the Cirque de Soleil Beatles show CD, which is another topic altogether. Anyway, listening to the samples was enough to counter the effect of the paper of record. For as much as I’m interested in copies, revisions, and reconceptualizations of the idea of originality (as well as karaoke and cover versions more specifically), it was just not pleasing to hear what’s really a pretty run-of-the-mill male rock vocalist singing in the “place” where the voice of the best white male pop-rock singer ever—John Lennon—had once been. All I could hear was the absent grain of John’s voice.
Other:
-The new Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin is gorgeous; I just saw it in “the flesh” for the first time yesterday. Funnily, they made it look like a McSweeney's book! Then I realized, oh yeah, this (i.e. mid-late 19th-century publishing aesthetics) is where McSweeney’s got all its tricks.
-The semester starts on Monday. I’m resisting the temptation to analyze my decision to start a blog three days before the semester starts.
-I have not sufficiently marked the death of Alice Coltrane (to myself, or to others). But in the past ten years I’ve listened to her records more than John’s, largely because of the title cut on Journey to Satchidananda, with that superbly groovy bass riff, and the beautiful textures of the middle eastern instruments, etc. I haven't read any obituaries, so I can't comment on how she's being memorialized, and to what degree it's simply as "John Coltrane's wife." But there's a way that her work speaks more directly to the present--to styles like electronica's repetitious grooves and various forms of ambient music.
Spitz’s biography came out last year with a lot of hoopla, and I can say it is good. Its goodness stems directly from its heft—almost 1000 pages. To produce such a tome Spitz emphasizes detail over either half-assed cultural critique or fan-oriented mythologization. As I was sitting in the bathtub this morning, when, incidentally, I conceived this blog (wasn't wearing a condom--let that be a lesson), I was thinking, the reason this book is good is because it’s more like a literary biography. After that moment of delusional thinking passed I realized that in fact it’s better, i.e. less single-mindedly hagiographical, than 95% of literary biographies. For even many of those literary biographies that deal with the nitty-gritty of their subject’s life do so in a way that treats his or her faults and pecadillos as important on an epic scale—which to me is not only dully repetitive, but signals the biographer’s anxiety about convincing us his or her book was worth writing. But Spitz, buried in detail, makes, for instance, John Lennon’s hideous treatment of his first wife Cynthia seem just as banal and routine as it no doubt was—not the “dark side” of his burning fires of genius, for instance. My only major complaint about the book is that it doesn’t seem to treat the recording process with any particular care or focus; for instance, it mentions when they first started overdubbing vocal tracks (recording the songs for With the Beatles) and leaves it there. But for that topic I’m looking forward to one day having the time to read Geoff Emerick’s Here, There, and Everywhere, which also came out last year.
I also went to Itunes a couple of days ago to listen to samples of the Smithereens new full-length cover of Meet the Beatles, which was written up in the Sunday Times last weekend. I always seem to be a sucker for those Arts and Leisure features—another recent one was responsible for my purchase of the Cirque de Soleil Beatles show CD, which is another topic altogether. Anyway, listening to the samples was enough to counter the effect of the paper of record. For as much as I’m interested in copies, revisions, and reconceptualizations of the idea of originality (as well as karaoke and cover versions more specifically), it was just not pleasing to hear what’s really a pretty run-of-the-mill male rock vocalist singing in the “place” where the voice of the best white male pop-rock singer ever—John Lennon—had once been. All I could hear was the absent grain of John’s voice.
Other:
-The new Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin is gorgeous; I just saw it in “the flesh” for the first time yesterday. Funnily, they made it look like a McSweeney's book! Then I realized, oh yeah, this (i.e. mid-late 19th-century publishing aesthetics) is where McSweeney’s got all its tricks.
-The semester starts on Monday. I’m resisting the temptation to analyze my decision to start a blog three days before the semester starts.
-I have not sufficiently marked the death of Alice Coltrane (to myself, or to others). But in the past ten years I’ve listened to her records more than John’s, largely because of the title cut on Journey to Satchidananda, with that superbly groovy bass riff, and the beautiful textures of the middle eastern instruments, etc. I haven't read any obituaries, so I can't comment on how she's being memorialized, and to what degree it's simply as "John Coltrane's wife." But there's a way that her work speaks more directly to the present--to styles like electronica's repetitious grooves and various forms of ambient music.
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