When I suggested “Higher” to my guitar instructor, he scoffed. Our arrangement was that I could pick a song to learn (as opposed to having one assigned), only if it supplemented the sight-reading, theory, or scalar focus of our lessons. Radio rock, with the exception of Metallica (pre-Black) and the Foo Fighters (anything from The Colour and the Shape), was verboten.

But when my instructor saw the pull-off in the opening hook for “Higher,” he changed his mind. At first, he didn’t believe that guitarist Mark Tremonti was playing it as transcribed: It required the guitarist to simultaneously make a bar chord at the 7th fret using the first finger (drop-D tuning) while completing a pull-off (on the notoriously fickle G string) that stretched all the way to the 12th fret and required the pinkie and ring fingers. If this makes no sense to you, just imagine having to stretch your fingers much farther apart than feels natural, and doing something elegant with them like that.

In essence, this one musical line changed my instructor’s opinion about Creed, a tough sell considering that very few technically proficient guitarists have anything nice to say about contemporary radio rock. But for many, many people, no convincing was or is necessary. I played “Higher” at parties through college, and the response was always one of warm recognition.

Human Clay is a platinum album, which explains why most people recognize–like, even–the riff from “Higher.” Millions of people bought the album, from which we can extrapolate that many, many people like the album. Is an encomium for a widely purchased album that defined an era of radio rock necessary?

No. Based on sales, longevity, and concert attendance, Creed is actually an overrated band, it’s just not rated by the select tribe of paid music critics whose job is to play taste police.

In Chronic City, the new novel by Jonathan Lethem, the character Perkus Tooth observes that “[r]ock critics gather for purposes of mutual consolation, though they’d never call it that. They believe they’re experts.”

One music writer telling his colleagues that Creed is better than we realize, or, as Ron Rosenbaum argued in January, that Billy Joel is not as good as the millions of people who buy his albums think he is, appears at first glance to be a deviation from the consoling we do so frequently: Talking up indie acts, poorly selling albums, and obscure deep cuts, and bemoaning the bad taste of the masses while railing against the labels that keep them fed and stupid. Yet defending Creed isn’t a break from that; it’s condescension disguised as counter-intuition, and in its own way, a mirror that reflects the impotence of the average music critic: Creed didn’t need Slate in its corner 10 years ago, and it doesn’t need Slate now.

Ironically, Weiner’s piece has been widely reviled by his target audience: people who consider themselves experts. In fact, it’s spawned its own twitter meme. Bloggers with “great taste” have dismissed Weiner’s argument wholesale, and have sworn to hate Creed even more now that one of their own has dared to save the band from their very tiny, very dull pitchforks.

And that, people, is destined to be the exercise’s only value: It reveals the massive divide between what the idiots want and what the smarties want, and the utter futility of suggesting to the latter group that the former is ever correct.

On Thursday August 6, longtime D.C. soul singer Eddie Daye passed away at age 78.  Back in 2002, I wrote a feature  piece on him for the Washington City Paper.  I had  heard that he had been ill recently and was in the hospital but  have not yet been able to get any other specifics on the cause of death, or his funeral, that is scheduled for Wednesday.  I had last seen Eddie in the audience at the Bluebird Blues and Soul Festival  at Prince Georges Community College last September.  As I will be out of town for most of the next two weeks beginning tomorrow, I am posting this now.

As detailed in my article, I first saw Eddie, who had been vocalizing in DC since the late 1940s and had his own record label, perform in the 1980s at the now defunct Gold Room  in Northeast DC.  Subsequently I saw Eddie and his late wife, Denise,  perform together numerous times at Gee’s 4400 Club, then located in Brentwood, Md., off of Rhode Island Avenue just near the DC line, and at Chuck & Billy’s Lounge on Georgia Avenue NW.  This dapper gentleman (usually in a suit although not in the photo from an outdoor show above) and his wife were always so friendly to everyone (and they always wanted to make sure that me and my friends, their youngest and uh palest fans, felt comfortable).  In more recent years Eddie’s song “Sexy Senior Citizen (I’m not a dirty old man, I’m just a)” got some airplay on WPFW’s Saturday programming, though some DC residents and a handful of British and European record collectors on Ebay know him best for his vocals with the Four Bars in the ‘50s and ‘60s.  While those online and crate-digging fans may cherish copies of his obscure singles (some of which have been reissued on cd), I will just keep my memories of those fun late nights out seeing him sing bluesy soul and my conversations with him about his musical career and his take on 50 plus years of r’n’b history.  While there were frequently  special guest vocalists joining he and his wife onstage in the ‘80s and ‘90s, this  pleasant guy with the deep voice was always the star of the show. 

* The photo is by Ron Weinstock of the In a Blue Mood blog (many of his photos are on Flickr).

CNN, Associated Press, and the Los Angeles Times have confirmed that Michael Jackson has died. He was 50 years old. Damn.

This past weekend, we learned that former Washington City Paper music critic Rickey Wright had died. I put together a tribute of sorts made from Wright’s blog posts and WCP pieces, tributes from friends and colleagues and family.

On Saturday afternoon, I had the fortune of talking with Nicole Arthur. Arthur served as Washington City Paper’s Arts Editor in 1994 and 1995. It was around that time that Wright began reviewing records for us. This was a time when people wanted to be rock critics, when there was space for such writing, when there was competition to review the big records. And Wright reviewed his share of the big records.

But Arthur was more than just an editor to Wright. She was a friend. The two had struck up a friendship in the ’80s. Of course, it started over music.

On Sunday, Arthur e-mailed me some of her many memories of Wright:

“I met Rickey in Richmond, Va., in 1987. I had written a record review for VCU’s student newspaper, which I’m pretty sure was the first thing I ever wrote for publication, and he wrote me a fan letter. He had already graduated at that point, and he was working at Peaches Records & Tapes. We met soon thereafter and were fast friends; I think it was our shared reverence for Love’s “Forever Changes” that sealed the deal. But back to that fan letter — turns out it was completely in character. Rickey had an amazing generosity of spirit; he constantly encouraged other writers and he was a tireless cheerleader for his friends. If you happened to fall into both categories, you were very lucky indeed.

Unlike most critics, Rickey was not a music snob. He would gladly discuss Nick Drake for hours (and it would be hours — he *loved* to talk), but he would just as gladly discuss Def Leppard. He never wrote anything off because it was “uncool.” I once complained about my daughter listening to the Wiggles, and he leapt to their defense: “They’re a classic four-piece pop combo!” This is not to say that he was not discriminating, he was. He once wrote a John Mayer review so brutal, the story goes, that Mayer cited it in interviews as an example of his being eviscerated by the press.

Rickey was a master of the soon-to-be-lost art of making mix tapes; he had a great instinct for implausible-seeming combinations that somehow complemented one another. I’m looking at the list of artists on one of the tapes he made me — the Raspberries, Professor Longhair, Love and Rockets, Roger Miller, Prince, Roseanne Cash. And it’s amazing; I’ve been listening to it for 20 years.”

Former Washington City Paper music critic Rickey Wright is dead.  Wright passed away at 4:31 p.m. on February 19 in Seattle after suffering from a series of small strokes. At the time of his death, he was working on a book about John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Wright was probably one of the most prolific talents the Washington City Paper has ever had perhaps on par with Jenkins, and the great, beloved Joel S. I never met Wright but I was around when he was around in the mid-to-late ’90s. I marveled at the fact that he could write on just about any band or genre and not appear to sweat it. (Most of us sweat it).

Wright’s prose was effortless and to the point. He didn’t mess around with silly metaphors. Nor did he make you feel stupid (he never loaded his pieces with arcane references to deep cuts, alternate Replacements b-sides, etc.). He just wrote and wrote.

“He was a save-your-ass kind of writer,” recalls former Washington City Paper Arts Editor Glenn Dixon. “If someone didn’t come through, and there were constantly people who didn’t come through, Rickey would do the job. He’d write it well. He’d get it in on time—always. He was never without ideas and he could cover any kind of music. I can’t tell you how rare that is. I’m really sorry.”

Wright penned pieces on everything from Travolta to Ben Lee to all of pop music in 1997 to Metallica and Soundgarden to R.E.M. to Charles Mingus to Johnny Cash to Led Zep to Curtis Mayfield and Millie Jackson to Luna and Teenage Fanclub to Wesley Willis to British ska to all of ’90s rock to G. Love to Boston to the Shangri-Las to the Replacements. Wright’s final posting on his Facebook page was a list of his 12 favorite Beatles covers; he included two remakes of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”

Idolator had this to say about Wright’s passing:

“Wright was an editor for Amazon for some time (that job brought him to Seattle), and his work appeared in publications like USA Today, the Village Voice, Blender, Harp, and the Seattle Weekly. He also won the 1999 Rhino Music Aptitude Test, a fact that seems somewhat trivial at first glance, but if you’ve actually seen the test or some of the people who have failed it miserably, you realize what a testament to his musical knowledge that accolade really is.”

Ned Raggett wrote up a nice obit. Fred Mills has a tribute to Wright in Blurt. Matos has a deeply personal post on Wright as well. Here’s a portion of what Matos had to say:

“Rickey passed away this afternoon at 4:31. Last week he’d had a stroke–apparently more than one, all small, over a period of time–and went to the hospital for treatment. He had surgery and underwent another stroke on the table; he spent most of his final week in a coma. Our friend Rachel and I visited him yesterday. It was not as awful as I’d feared it might be: he still looked like himself, which was encouraging even if everyone knew he wasn’t going to make it. It’s hard not to second-guess how much of this I should be saying, mainly because Rickey was the kind of person who deserves whatever honor you can give him, especially in passing. I’ve seldom known a kinder person, or a better listener, or anyone more enthusiastic about music or film or whatever–and even better, his enthusiasm was catching. When I’m excited about something I yell without meaning to, or just become obnoxious about it. Rickey never did that. He didn’t have to.”

If you’d like to read more of Wright in his own words, you can check out his blog.

Wright’s last blog post had been a hopeful one. It is dated Feb. 4. It was about Obama. He titled it “I love my president.” This is what he had to say He uses the post to print a quote from Obama:

“In the past few days, I’ve heard criticisms that this [stimulus] plan is somehow wanting, and these criticisms echo the very same failed economic theories that led us into this crisis in the first place . . . I reject those theories. And so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.”

There is an obit from his former employer the Virginian-Pilot:

“‘He had quite a following when he was here and was influential in the local music scene,’ said former Pilot writer Earl Swift. ‘I’ve never known anyone with a more encyclopedic knowledge of music.’”

There is still lots more from his friends and fellow critics. Here’s a really personal recollection of Wright (I’m just quoting a small portion; you should really read the entire entry):

“Rickey used to literally rock and roll. He never stopped moving. Either his leg was always tapping or he’d rock back and forth in his chair like a baby trying to comfort himself. He had a repertoire of postures. Always leaning forward with his hand on his thigh, fingers pointed in and elbow pointed out. He used his hands when he talked, flipping his palms upward in a gesture of offering.

Rickey always looked cool. He was a rock critic and looked the part. He always had a good haircut. He always wore the cool black ankle boots with the pointed toes. He knew how to wear a suit. He walked on his toes a bit which sort of accentuated his little belly. He always had just the right rock ‘n’ roll button on his bag or his jacket.

Rickey loved his cats, Chet and Kettle. When Chet was sick, he went through tremendous lengths and expense to try to keep him alive. When Kettle ran away, he consulted a pet psychic to find her, and found her. He used to talk about what a good soul Chet had and how you could see it in the little cat’s big eyes….

Rickey and I only ever talked about two things: music and love. Our last conversation was about the latter. It occurred around the beginning of January….”

And finally, a message from Wright’s aunt. She had sent out an e-mail to his friends breaking the news of his death. She writes:

“This loss is tragic. Fortunately, Rickey was able to pursue and achieve his dreams. His interest in music was evident from a very early age and has always continued, unabated. His presence in so many lives has been uniquely meaningful and has brought joy to many.

I believe sincerely that we should celebrate his life. Rickey would like that. So, I’m going to turn on some music and think of Rickey and smile.

Take care.
Deborah (Rickey’s aunt)”

DCist reports that Gypsy Eyes Records‘ owners, Kalani Tifford, Josh Read, and Nick Pimentel, sent a missive to its artists yesterday announcing that the label is ending its just-over-two-year run.

Given the climate I mentioned above, the closure doesn’t come as a great shock; Leitko wrote last month that sales and publicity for Gypsy Eyes had been meager, and that they had pinned much of their financial hope on licensing fees — not a good sign. Meantime an already slow business had already stalled, with the website announcing no forthcoming releases and not even any news updates since August (save for an ad for a free show at Comet Ping Pong on Inauguration Night).

If it’s not shocking, however, it’s still sad. Gypsy Eyes’ commercial failure was directly proportionate to its creative success, from the folky DC singer-songwriters Vandaveer and Mikal Evans to the rock weirdness of The Apes. Here’s hoping they’ll all find a new outlet for their great music.

Got this from fellow record nerds. The sad news came this morning via e-mail from two geeks. One sent his regrets that he’d have put to Lux Interior and the Cramps in his list of shows he blew off and will never get the chance to make up. The Cramps. Joe Henderson. Dennis Brown.

The press release:

“For Immediate Release:
February 4, 2009

Lux Interior, lead singer of The Cramps, passed away this morning due to an existing  heart  condition  at Glendale Memorial Hospital in Glendale, California at 4:30 AM PST today. Lux has been an inspiration and influence to millions of artists and fans around the world. He and wife Poison Ivy’s contributions with The Cramps have had an immeasurable impact on modern music. The Cramps emerged from the original New York punk scene of CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, with a singular sound and iconography. Their distinct take on rockabilly and surf along with their midnight movie imagery reminded us all just how exciting, dangerous, vital and sexy rock and roll should be and has spawned entire subcultures. Lux was a fearless frontman who transformed every  stage  he stepped on into a place of passion, abandon, and true freedom. He is a rare icon who will be missed dearly. The family requests that you respect their privacy during this difficult time.”

So who did you blow off before their death?

On Tuesday, November 18, 2008, Chick Hall Sr. passed away. He was a musician of enormous talent and a humble man.

Chick Hall Sr. was a country-jazz guitar virtuoso who made Armed Forces Radio records with Glenn Miller. Around 1953, he began playing with his own band, the Chick Hall Trio. After playing for a few years at the Surf Club, on Bladensburg Road in Colmar Manor, Chick decided that he’d like to make the club his musical home, and so he bought the place in 1955 and began playing there 6 nights a week.

The Surf Club transitioned from Jazz to Country Music, and many of the country greats visited, including Jim Reeves and Lefty Frizzell. Patsy Cline sang her heart out at the Surf Club. Jimmy Dean, Roy Clark, Charlie Daniels, dropped by to jam. It was around this time that the Colmar Manor/Cottage City area was in it’s heyday, with numerous clubs such as the Crossroads, Rusty Cabins (which turned into Burt Motley’s), the Dixie Pig, Angelo’s, the Wheel, and Basin Street, mostly all offering live music 7 days a week. There was always a party going on.

Things change gradually. Chick got married early on and had two sons – Chick, Jr. and Chris. In 1975, a developer made a good offer on the Surf Club, so Chick sold the club property, and built another one up the street at 4711 Kenilworth Ave (at the corner of Kenilworth Ave and Crittendon Street), He is survived by his wife of 67 or so years, and his kids Chick and Chris.

Ever the bearer of bad news, I’d like to alert BPB readers to another rock ‘n roll fatality: This time it’s Merl Saunders, who passed away last Friday at the age of 74. Complications from a stroke sidelined him in 2002, effectively ending a remarkable career that included luminous collaborations with Miles Davis, B.B. King, Mike Bloomfield, and Jerry Garcia. His keyboard stylings combined an earthy rhythm-and-blues approach with a jazz aesthetic and, in the early 90s, a surprisingly unregrettable foray into New Age-style fusion.

For anyone interested in the remarkable, decades-long, “let’s make David Grisman jealous” collaboration between Saunders and Garcia, check out the Legion of Mary sessions and the Keystone concerts. Of special note: Saunders’ fat, swirly Hammond on Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street” (below, from the Keystone). Troppo largo, perhaps, but a textural improvement over the already lovely Kooper-era original.

For years, whether in print or on the web, adoring City Paper readers have hearkened to the mellifluous prose of D.C.’s Dave McKenna—his rhapsodic treatment of Pop Warner football, his scherzo-like political musings, his epic riffs on the Dan Synder perplex.

Turns out he’s not the only D. Mac around.

On Saturday, jazz geeks learned that Dave McKenna, the great Massachusetts ballad-boogie pianist, had died of lung cancer at the age of 78. In its obit, the New York Times included a nice encomium on his instrumental approach:

That style, rooted in the jazz piano tradition of an earlier era, was built around powerful bass lines, elegantly voiced chords and a loving approach to melodies, especially those of the Tin Pan Alley standards that were the foundation of his vast repertory. He liked to spin out long medleys united by a theme, like famous and obscure songs with “You,” “Stars” or “Spring” in the title.

“I don’t know if I qualify as a bona fide jazz guy,” he once said. “I play saloon piano. I like to stay close to the melody.”

See for yourself in the video below (”Serenade in Blue”). Touching stuff, but not exactly the musical equivalent of eviscerating Lou Dobbs.