Quote of the Day (Peter Frampton, on Musicians With Longevity)

“People who have longevity in music are usually the ones who never think they’re that special, so they keep pushing the envelope, listening, and learning more. I'll never be as good as I want to be, because the goal posts are always moving. If a player ever starts to think they're hot s—t and stops trying to improve themselves, it's curtains, or stagnation at the very least. But my friend and yours, B. B. King, was the most humble man, till the day he died.”— English-American rock ‘n’ roll guitarist and singer-songwriter Peter Frampton with Alan Light, Do You Feel Like I Do?: A Memoir (2020)

B.B. King would find a kindred spirit, I firmly believe, in Peter Frampton. Few entertainers have known his level of fame as a teen idol after the release of his multiplatinum album Frampton Comes Alive in the mid-Seventies. 

But few have reacted with as much modesty and gratitude after his richly deserved election to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame last month.

There was a time when I would have gagged on that phrase “richly deserved.” I had purchased and enjoyed Frampton Comes Alive, but been deeply disappointed with his solo follow, I’m in You, as well as with his participation in a film project I still regard as sacrilegious, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

To his credit, Frampton has acknowledged these creative mistakes, along with the substance abuse that put his career and life at risk for a long time. He rededicated himself to his work and reminded listeners why, ever since his days with Humble Pie, he became one of the elite rock ‘n’ roll guitarists.

Memoirs can be a fraught genre, filled at times with artful trimming and deception, but Frampton’s strikes me as one written by a musician who takes pride in his work and the friends he’s made along the way without yielding to overweening ego. In short, he seems as likable as they come.

Fans naturally value skill in performers, but honesty, humility and thankfulness can be in far shorter supply. These latter qualities shine as brightly with Frampton as the prowess with the “talk box” that made him a music-industry phenomenon nearly a half-century ago.

(For further information on the inflammatory muscle disease through which Frampton has persevered over the last half-dozen years, inclusion body myositis (IBM), see this July 2020 post from the Myositis Association blog.)

(Photo of Frampton performing at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale, FL, taken on Sept. 26, 2006, by Carl Lender)

Quote of the Day (John Fogerty, on What Buddy Holly Meant to Him and Others)

“I just want to tell you what Buddy Holly meant to me. I was twelve years old, and I was working at a beach resort, and that voice and guitar came up over the PA. I went out and bought ‘That'll Be the Day,’ started learning the words. A few months later, I bought the album, and that album set a course in musical history…. There was a group pictured on the cover… and it was the first time you saw a group in rock ‘n roll. I thought, ‘I'm gonna have a group.’ Over in Liverpool, the same thing was going on with four other guys. They named their group the Beatles because Buddy Holly's group was called the Crickets. In 1963, these four guys chose to end their great song ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ with the little syncopation Buddy Holly used in the chorus after the solo. Well, about twenty years later, a kid was writing a song about how it feels to be back [Fogerty’s ‘Centerfield’], and he ended his song with the same riff--came from the same place.”— John Fogerty, speech inducting Buddy Holly in the first class of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, Jan. 23, 1986

Considering that his life was cut tragically short in a plane crash at age 23, it’s hard to believe that Charles Hardin Holley was born 80 years ago today in Lubbock, Texas. But it’s even harder to believe that Buddy Holly, as singer, guitarist, songwriter, and producer, created a musical legend and legacy in a recording career that lasted only about 18 months—songs covered, on vinyl or in concert, not just by The Beatles and Creedence Clearwater Revival, but also by the Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, Linda Ronstadt, The Grateful Dead, and Bruce Springsteen, to name just a few: “That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue,” “Oh Boy!”, “It’s So Easy,” “Heartbeat,” “Everyday,” and “Rave On.”

Listen and marvel at a catalog that will “Not Fade Away.”

This Day in Rock History (Birth of Bill Graham, Legendary Promoter)

Jan. 8, 1931— Wolodia Grajonca, better known more than three decades later in his adopted country as rock concert promoter and artist manager Bill Graham, was born in Berlin.

"I don't know if there's a dirtier, not uglier, dirtier business,” Graham said in a 1971 interview included in The Smith Tapes: Lost Interviews with Rock Stars & Icons 1969-1972, edited by Ezra Bookstein (2015). “I don’t know if any business has more shady characters in it. Maybe the underworld, which I don’t see.”

He may have found his business dirty, but few brought so much bluster and balancing flair and idealism to his. If anyone could survive dirtiness, even ugliness, it was the Jewish youth nicknamed “Wolfgang.” He had walked across Europe, all 55 ricket-stricken pounds of him, to escape the Nazis, then been shipped across the Atlantic with other children. His sister didn’t survive the passage, while his mother ended up dying in Auschwitz. Then, once in the United States, he had to adapt to a foster family.

That experience as a Holocaust survivor was seared into Graham’s consciousness for the rest of his life. Particularly in the 1980s, he became involved in a number of causes. His leadership of protests against Ronald Reagan’s plans to visit Bitburg cemetery in Germany, the final resting place of dozens of SS officers, led to his San Francisco office being firebombed. Rock fans were more generally aware, however, of the massive benefit concerts he organized in that decade, including Live Aid, two Amnesty International tours, and the 1987 Soviet-American Peace Concert in Moscow.

Alternately altruistic and abrasive, Graham was described by actor Peter Coyote as a cross between Mother Teresa and Al Capone. He first became immersed in the promotional game in organizing fundraisers for Coyote’s San Francisco Mime Troupe, where appearances by the Jefferson Airplane clued Graham into the vast potential of the Bay Area’s burgeoning musical scene.

He had no trouble mixing and matching musicians and other performers of different styles: rock stars, say, coupled with Miles Davis and the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. What he did have trouble with was stars who were spoiled, lacking roots, professionalism and respect for their audiences. Consequently, he was not shy in telling off musicians whose drug habits undermined their performances—what critic Robert Christgau called “his exhibitionistic hostility, his epithets, his profane intolerance of inefficiency.”

Graham had already received an education about the public through an earlier job as a waiter in the Catskills, where he couldn’t escape noticing “the atrocities of the Concord dining room,” and how its patrons would stuff their napkins to take up to their rooms, “and you learn about people and tastes and mannerisms and dealing with the people, [and] you ain’t gonna learn it in no college.”

Without Graham, would anyone have heard of the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company? Perhaps, but with his organizational genius he made sure these San Francisco counterculture musicians reached a larger audience sooner than they might have done in the hands of someone else.

Major venues were also an important part of Graham’s legend—e.g., the Fillmore West and East, the Winterland—as well as his self-admitted “adrenaline” and micro-management of the smallest details of the concert experience, including clean bathrooms.

Appropriately for someone who lived a high-flying but other-centered life, Graham died in a 1991 helicopter crash following a visit to musician Huey Lewis, whom he had just persuaded to perform in a benefit for victims of the 1991 Oakland Hills wildfire. A year later, the promoter was posthumously inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in the “Non-Performer” category.

Quote of the Day (Bono, on The Boss and His ‘Alternate Mythology’)

“Bruce [Springsteen] has played every bar in the USA, and every stadium. Credibility? You couldn't have more, unless you were dead. But Bruce Springsteen, you always knew, was not gonna die stupid. He didn't buy the mythology that screwed so many people. Instead, he created an alternate mythology—one where ordinary lives became extraordinary and heroic.”—U2 lead singer Bono, induction speech for Bruce Springsteen into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, March 15, 1999

It’s hard to believe that 15 years have passed since Bruce Springsteen entered the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. It’s even harder to believe, though, that The Boss’ acceptance speech—long, loose, vigorous and wild, like his first couple of albums—could be topped by the man introducing him. It takes an Irishman to come up with such a masterpiece of Joycean stream of consciousness—by turns hilarious, quietly melancholic, poetic, filled with hosannas to the beauty of women (Springsteen’s mom and wife) and the vision of one man, singing of  “dreams [that] were still out there, but after loss and defeat. They had to be braver, not just bigger.”

Only Bono could understand that Springsteen, lean and hungry in post-Sixties America, was, like James Joyce in pre-independence Dublin, trying his strength “against the powers of the world.” That is because the vast geography of the human heart can be explored as much on the boardwalks of the Jersey Shore as on the streets of a history-haunted European capital.

Quote of the Day (Linda Ronstadt, on Music as ‘Dreaming in Sound’)

“The dream world of sleep and the dream world of music are not far apart. I often catch glimpses of one as I pass through a door to the other, like encountering a neighbor in the hallway going into the apartment next to one’s own. In the recording studio, I would often lie down to nap and wake up with harmony parts fully formed in my mind, ready to be recorded. I think of music as dreaming in sound.”—Linda Ronstadt, Simple Dreams (2013)

Congratulations to Linda Ronstadt on her long-delayed—but well-merited—election to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Also, please see my prior post following her announcement that she now has Parkinson’s Disease.)

Quote of the Day (Bob Dylan, on Roy Orbison’s ‘Olympian’ Range)

"He [Roy Orbison] could sound mean and nasty on one line and then sing in a falsetto like Frankie Valli in the next. With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business."—Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume 1 (2004)

Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run is a kind of summation of all his musical influences. But, in the 1975 LP’s eight songs, there is only one reference to these idols: “Roy Orbison singing for the lonely,/Hey, that’s me and I want you only,” he serenades the object of his desire in the album’s classic opening track, “Thunder Road.”

A dozen years later, inducting his hero into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Springsteen encapsulated the quicksilver quality he sought on the album that made his reputation: “I wanted to make a record with words like Bob Dylan that sounded like Phil Spector. But most of all, I wanted to sing like Roy Orbison.” 

It was a natural—indeed, inevitable—desire, as attested to by another artist who rose to prominence in the Seventies, Tom Waits: “When you were trying to make a girl fall in love with you, it took roses, the Ferris wheel and Roy Orbison."

Roy Orbison, who suffered a fatal heart attack at age 52 at his mother’s Hendersonville, TN home on this date 25 years ago, knew all about the desperation and exhilaration summoned by The Boss. They came not just from his thrilling, three-octave range, but from a career packed with success and heartbreak.

Between 1960 and 1964, Orbison recorded nine Top Ten hits. These and other songs of his from that time will probably play, and be covered, so long as rock 'n' roll continues to exist: “Only the Lonely,” “Running Scared,” “Blue Angel,” “Crying,” “Dream Baby,” “In Dreams,” “It’s Over,” and “Oh, Pretty Woman.”

Unlike so many American artists who went into eclipse after the British Invasion, his star only grew more luminous: On one appearance at a 1963 tour with The Beatles in the U.K., just as Beatlemania was gathering momentum, he did 14 encores before Paul, John, George and Ringo could even get on stage. 

(On Slate, Forrest Wickman had a marvelous post earlier this year on the friendship and creative competition that resulted when the solo artist and the rising young group shared the bill. In the succinct words of Ringo Starr: “It was terrible, following Roy. He’d slay them and they’d scream for more.”)

What brought a downshift in his career were not any failings of his own, but simply fate. What looked to be a good shift to MGM turned out to be unfortunate, as his new label wanted a certain number of albums produced, no matter the quality. 

Worse were searing personal losses: the 1966 death of wife Claudette in a motorcycle accident, followed two years later by the death of two of his three children when his home in Hendersonville burned to the ground.

At least by the time of his own death, Orbison was able to bask in renewed appreciation of his work. The following was occurring within the last few years before his demise:

*Induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame;

*David Lynch’s use of his music in the film Blue Velvet;

*A high-profile collaboration with Dylan, George Harrison, and Tom Petty in the supergroup, the Traveling Wilburys;

*New versions of his single “Crying” featuring Don McLean and K.D. Lang, in a Grammy-winning duet with Orbison himself;

*A magnificent concert (preserved on video as Roy Orbison and Friends–A Black and White Night Live), with appearances by Springsteen, Lang, Waits, Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt, Jennifer Warnes, T-Bone Burnette, Jackson Browne, and J. D. Souther;

*A recording of the CD Mystery Girl, which, when posthumously released in 1989, became the biggest- selling album of his career.