Category Archives: TVD’S LINER NOTES

Fifty years ago, singer-songwriter Stephen Bishop released his debut album Careless. It generated two hit singles—“Save It for a Rainy Day,” which reached the number twenty-two spot on the charts, and “On and On,” which climbed all the way to number eleven.

1976 marked the public recognition of a major new songwriting talent on the Los Angeles scene, with Bishop’s songs attracting attention from the likes of legends Art Garfunkel and Eric Clapton. Both of whom made guest appearances on Careless—along with Chaka Khan and the who’s-who of LA’s best studio instrumentalists of the ’70s: Lee Ritenour, Larry Carlton, and Jim Gordon.

Immediately, Bishop’s songwriterly reputation became one of quirky, wry humor, sensitive and intelligent depictions of romantic situations, and delicate character portraiture. The sonics were somewhat typical of the Southern California songwriter of the mid-1970s—acoustic guitar-driven, with gentle, emotional vocals. Bishop co-produced his debut with veteran Henry Lewy, who had worked with Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and CSNY.

The fiftieth-anniversary re-release of Careless arrived in stores last Friday, with the vinyl edition featuring two previously unreleased tracks from the album’s original sessions. But just one year ago, Bishop released his self-dubbed “Final Album” called Thimk. Like his debut, it featured a slew of guest artists, some of whom were on Careless—and an outside producer’s hand—this time, guitarist Marcus Eaton.

Before working with Bishop, Eaton’s best-remembered project was his ongoing collaboration with the late, great David Crosby, for whom he served as lead guitarist during some of Crosby’s last musical adventures. Eaton’s brother, A.J., directed the critically acclaimed (and Grammy-nominated) 2019 documentary on Crosby’s life, Remember My Name.

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“I had the opportunity to uncover and preserve rock’s important history, and to give the artform and its creators the long overdue respect they craved and deserved,” reflects founding Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig J. Inciardi, in his new book The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: The Outrageous, Definitive & Untold History. “Along the way, I collected stories, lots and lots of stories.”

And what unique, sometimes bizarre, stories they are. Inciardi details the early days of the Rock Hall’s beginnings, which go all the way back to a 1983 Pay-Per-View awards-show-concert-special on the Black Tie network, intended to celebrate the history of rock. To proceed with the broadcast, a corresponding organization needed to be founded, and thusly, with the help of industry heavies like Ahmet Ertegun (co-founder and president of Atlantic Records) and up-and-comers like Suzan Evans (legal adviser to the Black Tie Network), the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame organization was born.

The actual building structure, the museum itself, and its collections of rock artefacts did not yet exist. That’s where Inciardi’s role, as founding curator, comes into the tale, once Jann Wenner—also a hall co-founder —brings him on to become “the Indiana Jones of rock history” in 1991 and curate the collection.

The most fun readers will have with Inciardi’s book is journeying with him through all his madcap adventures to build the Hall’s collection and, in the process, hang out with the who’s who of rock stars. It does inspire the reader to reconsider and reflect upon what items—and therefore which moments associated with them—and ultimately which artists—make up the story of rock music. Granted, there is much subjectivity involved, but most can agree on the essential recognition deserved by key figures that goes beyond subjectivity.

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“I’m sorry if it sounds corny, or like typical middle-aged-white-guy bullshit, but that’s what happened to me,” writer Peter Ames Carlin reflects in his recently released Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run. “The music felt supernatural… and I’ve felt myself being drawn into the same spell countless times while listening to Born to Run…”

Carlin’s book centers on a single chapter in the ongoing saga-like novel of Bruce Springsteen’s musical life. Namely, the development and production of his career-defining album Born to Run, released in 1975. But it also just so happens to be the chapter that turns the whole story around, toward the direction of next-level limitless success, commercial and critical achievement. Carlin’s book depicts an abbreviated timeframe in Bruce’s history, but it simultaneously captures the essence of the complex Born to Run period and its entire impact and quality.

With this book, and by penning this story, Carlin is, in a sense, playing to the crowd, telling the tale’s best moments, the part that everyone, fans of Bruce’s and non-fans alike, would be interested in hearing. It depicts an artist on the rise, yet—much like the newly released Springsteen biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere—it simultaneously suggests that this same phenomenon, this exact trope, could fit the mold of any artist. This story could have happened with any creative.

Or could it have? Bruce Springsteen, patron saint of Freehold, New Jersey, partly poet, all rock-and-roller, and eternally introspective, is singularly perplexed by self-examination. Struggling to balance the seesaw between his working-class upbringing on one side and his unique cerebral genius on the other, at all times forced to confront these two selves and somehow make sense of them, to accept their truths.

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How does one write a biography of one of the most definitive, elusive, and ever-changing artists in the history of popular music? Perhaps, by abandoning any intention to include any straightforward, linear qualities that a so-called traditional biography might promise.

There have been countless books penned on the life, times, and music of Bob Dylan since he first burst onto the folk music scene of the early 1960s. There was Dylan’s own Chronicles, Volume One (2004), a seductively fascinating selected set of tales from his own life, and an arguably successful film by Todd Haynes called I’m Not There (2007), that depicted the wildly different phases of Bob Dylan’s life by casting wildly different actors for each version of Dylan—or each character inspired by him and his songs.

If any music writer and cultural critic should be well-suited to take on the task of composing a Bob Dylan biography, it would be Greil Marcus, who has in part made his name as an American critic by analyzing the work of Dylan. Marcus devoted an entire book to Bob Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes with Invisible Republic (1997), and this time seeks to create a Dylan biography of a kind with Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs.

But of course, Marcus’s book is so much more than just seven songs from Dylan’s illustrious canon spanning decades and several incarnations. Much like Marcus’s The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs (2014), the selected tracks are used as jumping off points to articulate a much larger cultural story about one million songs, those that came before Dylan’s existence, those that inspired his own work, and those that were inspired by his own.

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