Bob Dylan To Headline Seattle's Bumbershoot Fest?

According to a report published in the new issue of Rolling Stone, the headline acts for the 40th anniversary of Seattle's annual Labor Day Bumbershoot Music And Arts Festival are set, and if the leaked report is to be believed, the lineup for this year is a doozy.

Although festival promoters One Reel are not set to officially reveal the lineup until Tuesday, the "leak" from this past Friday indicates the lineup to be arguably the strongest in the festival's 40 year history. So how's this for starters — Bob Dylan, Hole, Mary J. Blige, and Weezer?

One Reel has offered no comment to the report, despite receiving numerous inquiries from the press. Music legend Dylan last played Seattle in October 2009 when he performed back to back shows at Seattle's Wamu Theatre and the much smaller Moore Theatre.

So, on the one hand you have a report coming from a source no less credible than Rolling Stone. However, previously leaked reports from past years about Bumbershoot have proven to be false or at least premature as often as they have not. Earlier this year, rumors circulated widely in Seattle that recently reunited hometown heroes Soundgarden would be the headliners for this years festival.

Long considered the granddaddy of Seattle music festivals, Bumbershoot takes place each year over Labor Day weekend at the Seattle Center, and features a wide variety of artists and performers from every corner of the arts and entertainment world — from music to comedy to performance art. The festival also places an emphasis on locally based Northwest artists in addition to the big national headline acts.

This years Bumbershoot festival takes place from September 4-6, with tickets priced between $40. - $110. Tickets go on sale Tuesday June 1, which is also when the complete lineup will be officially announced.

This article was first published as Bob Dylan To Headline Seattle's Bumbershoot Fest? at Blogcritics Magazine.

Its Curfew Breaking Boss Time!



Coming soon to a DVD store near you.

The Jayhawks And Their Burritos Bunkhouse Should Have Been Eagles Huge

Music Review: The Jayhawks - The Jayhawks (a.k.a. The Bunkhouse Album)

The Jayhawks are one of those bands that people only seem to have figured out later.

Much like the Raspberries and Big Star (who the Jayhawks, none too coincidentally, paid tribute to in a song of the same name) later paved the way for the power-pop of bands like Cheap Trick, the Jayhawks were instrumental in the development of the alt-country genre which has long since been popularized by the likes of Wilco.

Sometimes it sucks to be pioneers though.

Just ask the Ramones — who if most of them were even still alive today, would love to be cashing Green Day royalty checks I'm sure. The bottom line, is that while the Jayhawks were still around, they more or less fell into the exact same sort of commercial netherworld as Big Star did.

To put it in simple terms, the Jayhawks were a "critics band." While they did enjoy a modest degree of commercial success, the fact is that they should have been Eagles huge.

Anchored by the gorgeous Everly Brothers like harmonies of principal songwriters Mark Olson and Gary Louris, the Jayhawks didn't just wear their primary influences like Gram Parsons and Neil Young proudly on their sleeves — they also brought it into the future.

On albums like their twin nineties masterpieces Hollywood Town Hall and Tomorrow The Green Grass, the Jayhawks melded jangly Byrds-like guitars, Flying Burrito Brothers country twang, and the sort of simple, yet descriptive songwriting worthy of Robbie Robertson's most memorable work with the Band, to create masterful pictures of Americana worthy of Norman Rockwell.

Like I said, the Jayhawks should have been Eagles huge. Alas, it was however not meant to be.

Long before the band found a modest but devoted following first on the indie label Twin/Tone, and later on Rick Rubin's Def American Recordings, the Jayhawks made a little record in 1986 that has long since attained mythical status amongst their fans. The Bunkhouse Album, as it has since come to be known, was funded completely by the band and then manager Charlie Pine. 2000 copies of the album were pressed on makeshift label Bunkhouse Records (hence the title), before the album disappeared into both obscurity and legend.

Until now, anyway.

When last years excellent Jayhawks Anthology resurrected Bunkhouse tracks like "Falling Star," it was probably inevitable that the album itself would once again see the light of day — and here it is. Newly reissued by the folks at Lost Highway, The Bunkhouse Album reveals the Jayhawks to be a diamond in the rough.

The fourteen tracks on this album certainly don't have the same sort of gorgeous studio sheen as a masterpiece like Hollywood Town Hall does. But the recording is nonetheless remarkably bright and crisp sounding. It also spotlights the Jayhawks playing things much closer to the vest of their country roots. The Bunkhouse Album is a lot more country than it is anything resembling "alt." Think more Burritos, and less Band here.

The album kicks off with "Falling Star" (which also showed up on the Jayhawks Anthology last year). Here, the gorgeous Everly Brothers inspired harmonies of Olson and Louris are matched note for note by Louris' crazy guitar picking, and some very sweet pedal steel by Cal Hand, in what amounts to a modern country shuffle. The duo also does such a number channeling the harmonies of the Everly Brothers here its downright spooky.

These same beautiful harmonies show up again on "Let The Last Night Be The Longest (Lonesome Memory)," although this time it's within the context of a sped-up country two-step that recalls Johnny Cash's "Ring Of Fire," only played in something like double time.

Lyrically, the Jayhawks embrace saints and sinners alike in songs like "The Liquor Store Came First" (what honest to goodness country album is complete without a drinking song?), and the gospel-tinged "King of Kings" where country twang meets holy roller rapture in the chorus "people get ready, to meet the King of Kings."

The pop sensibilities which would manifest themselves more fully on later albums like Hollywood Town Hall are also in full evidence here though, most notably on "Let the Critics Wonder." Here, Louris conjures the beautiful guitar jangling of the Byrds' Roger McGuinn, as Olson more or less bites the hand that would later feed him in lines like "don't the critics know what it's all about?".

More than anything, The Bunkhouse Album is an inside glimpse into the pure countrified roots of the Minneapolis based band who would later come to define the modern alt-country genre as we know it today, on such pastoral masterpieces as Tomorrow The Green Grass.

Last I heard, there were some rumblings of a Jayhawks reunion. One can only hope. No, they were never quite Eagles huge. But they damn well should have been.

This article was first published as Music Review: The Jayhawks - The Jayhawks (a.k.a. The Bunkhouse Album) at Blogcritics Magazine

New Neil Young Book: Shakey's Got Some Competition

Book Review: Neil Young: Long May You Run: The Illustrated History by Daniel Durchholz & Gary Graff

Although Jimmy McDonough's semi-official biography Shakey isn't in any danger of losing its position as the definitive account on the life and career of Neil Young anytime soon, there's a new arrival in the neighborhood that may be ready to challenge that classic for bragging rights.

Daniel Durchholz and Gary Graff's Long May You Run: The Illustrated History may not break any new ground in terms of telling the actual Neil Young story. But it does tell it well, and is often an easier, or at least more compact read than the opus that is Shakey.

Where McDonough's nearly 800 page book goes into painstaking detail about virtually every aspect of Neil Young's life from his childhood in Canada right up to about the time of that book's 2003 publish date, Long May You Run instead compresses most of these same points into a quicker, more easily digested 200 or so pages. Yet, even with the significant reduction in length, little is missed here.

But the thing which really sets this book apart from Shakey — or any other Neil Young book for that matter — are the pictures. In boasting that it is the first fully illustrated Neil Young biography, Long May You Run lives up to that claim, and then some.

Beautiful, full-color photographs from every phase of Neil Young's five decade career — many of them never before seen — leap off of every single page. In between the actual story, there are also hundreds of photos of ticket stubs, concert posters, rare foreign singles and albums, and other memorabilia. This package is just beautifully put together, and the sort of collectible in itself that any fan is sure to recognize as an instant keeper.

Neil Young's story has of course been told many times before, probably most successfully in the aforementioned Shakey. But in both condensing that story, and telling it in simpler, easier to read language here, the authors bring a fresh perspective to it that makes this book seem like reading it all for the first time.

All of the major points are covered too — from Buffalo Springfield to Crosby Stills Nash & Young to Crazy Horse and the Stray Gators, and from the deaths of Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry through the "ditch trilogy," the so-called "lost eighties," the battles with David Geffen, his comeback as the "godfather of grunge" in the nineties and more.

As a bonus, there are also numerous sidebars sandwiched in-between the chapters that focus on Neil Young's numerous unreleased albums, his often contentious relationship with CSN&Y, his collaborators, and even the various women in his life. A number of Young's musical peers also chime in with their own thoughts (including a lengthy letter of praise from Aerosmith's Joe Perry).

One of these sidebars even deals with Neil's sometimes strange relationship with Shakey author McDonough, who went from being his official biographer to suing the artist just to get the book out. Seems Neil Young can sometimes be a rather difficult guy to deal with.

Long May You Run also brings the Neil Young story up to the present day — as much as that is even possible with a mad scientist as wildly prolific as Young. An extensive (and again, beautifully illustrated) discography in the back section of the book brings things right up to last year's Dreamin' Man Live CD, and of course the massive Archives set.

With Long May You Run, Daniel Durchholz and Gary Graff have managed to pull off the rather impressive trick of adding new dimensions to the already well documented public account of Neil Young's volatile, mercurial, and often misunderstood musical genius.

Oh yeah, and the pictures are pretty awesome too.

This article was first published as Book Review: Neil Young: Long May You Run: The Illustrated History by Daniel Durchholz & Gary Graff at Blogcritics Magazine

My Love/Hate Relationship With Bono And U2

About a week ago, I got an e-mail from a colleague of mine at Blogcritics offering me his tickets to U2's upcoming June show in Seattle at Qwest Field. As in free, no strings attached...

Hot Damn!

To say I was absolutely thrilled at this quite unexpected turn of good fortune would be something close to the understatement of the year.

U2 is a band that I love passionately, and as far as big stadium extravaganzas go, they put on a show like nobody else out there. One thing is absolutely for sure though — they have certainly come a long way from the band I saw in 1983 at Seattle's Paramount Theatre, or even the band I saw at California's US Festival the very next day (I was already on a plane to L.A. before U2 had played their second encore in Seattle).

What I remember most about those back-to-back shows I caught on the 1983 War tour was that, much like Bruce Springsteen in the early days, this was a band that was all about making an intimate connection with its audience — and that they succeeded at this (rather wildly I might add) — beyond all reasonable expectation.

In the confines of Seattle's 3000 seat Paramount Theatre, this was most demonstrated when Bono allowed the crowd to carry him on his back, long before anyone had ever heard of anything like moshing or crowd surfing.

At the US Festival, playing before 300,000 people in a God-forsaken dust bowl desert setting in the middle of what I remember as a scorching hot day, what stands out is Bono's death-defying climb to the top of a stage that was several stories high (at least) to hoist the white flag of surrender during "Electric Co."

It was one of those awesome concert moments you quite simply never forget.



In all of my years of attending thousands of rock concerts by everyone from Hendrix to Springsteen, I've seen more than my share of wild stuff.

But that one will forever stand out in my memory. I've never seen a rock performer, not before or since, literally risk his life to deliver whatever his message might have been — which I might add that despite the heroics involved, is one that I am still quite sure was mostly lost on the largely stoned, dehydrated masses that day in the freaking, absolutely scorching desert.

Oh yeah, and there was also that damn mullet.

We won't go there here. But looking back now, it was a rather spectacularly silly looking one. The point is, that whatever it was that Bono was trying to say that day out there in the Southern California desert — and I'm still not exactly sure what it was — he felt it important enough to risk life and limb to climb a sky-high P.A. tower to make it.

Right then and there, I knew that U2 was going to be one of the great ones.

I have since seen them several times over the years. There was the big stadium show I saw in Anaheim during the Zoo TV tour during the era of the first Bush presidency, with its big screen images of random news broadcasts. I thought the rafters were going to come straight off of their rims that night, as much as they shook during "Where The Streets Have No Name". It was an amazing thing to see.

And there was also the spectacularly staged spectacle of the Vertigo tour five years ago. But here is where the rub starts to come in...

The thing that got U2 to the big dance in the first place, at least in my mind, is that these guys — more than just about anybody outside of Springsteen and the E Street Band — have always positioned themselves as this wonderfully populist band. U2's message, aside from the brief misstep of the nineties PopMart period — has always been consistent. They have always been the band of the people.

The thing is, I still think that they really believe that — all evidence to the contrary aside. Well, at least to a point anyway.

And by the way, if you expect me to start bitching about the concert prices for the 360 tour here, trust me, I'm not going there. Rather, the thing that bugs me most is that for all of Bono's efforts as a big-time player on the stage of world politics, he may have lost his connection to the common people he was once so desperate to connect with.

Ya' feel me here, Bono?

The same guy who once had enough blind trust to allow himself to be carried through a crowd of complete strangers at the 3000 seat Paramount in '83 — or to scale a several stories high scaffold at the US Festival back then — is these days spending as much time hob-nobbing with the proletariat like Bill Gates and the like, as he is glad-handing with us mere peasants and common folk.

Does it serve a greater good? Perhaps. The thing I fear most though, is that he has lost that connection with the people who got him there in the first place.

And then, there is also that whole Christian thing.

From U2's earliest days on out, the band has worn its collective Christianity on its sleeve (with the exception of noted hedonist Adam of course).

And, in appearance at least, they still do. Still, it doesn't take a genius to connect the dots between lines about "the victory Jesus won" on 1983's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and 2005's "Yahweh." Nor, to recognize the common thread of Edge's beautifully ringing guitar, which at the end of the day binds them together.

But then you get to the song, "One."

Earlier tonight, I went back and watched the DVD of U2's 2005 Vertigo tour from Chicago, and was particularly struck by the performance of that song. You see the thing is, as a Christian myself, I know a thing or two about biblical prophecy, and that's exactly why this performance disturbed me a little.

Don't get me wrong. I love the message expressed in this song about "one love" and all that wonderfully altruistic stuff. I really do.

But there is another point on this DVD, where a spectacular display of all these national flags come down, and the message is that all nations should come together as one. It's a beautiful sentiment. But it is also one that I'm quite sure Bono, as a professed Christian, knows all too well sets the stage for the end-time, one-world government prophesied in the Bible.

So am I going to go off into a wild side-tangent about things like the Rapture and the AntiChrist here? Nope, not at all. Fodder for another time and another place. I only point these things out in order to suggest two things:

One, that somewhere along the line Bono seems to have confused his spiritual beliefs with his larger political ambitions. And two, that in doing so, he is steadily distancing himself from the very sort of populism that got him to where he is now. This is where my love/hate relationship with the leader of the biggest rock band in the world really begins to kick in.

My only suggestion here is that it is food for thought, and that I am going strictly by the parameters of the same personal belief system that Bono himself established early on in the game. And that by all evidence, is one that he continues to subscribe to. Or, at least you'd think that he does, right?

These are the rules that Bono continues to play the game by. And they are the same rules that I, as a lowly, somewhat nerdy observer of all things rock and roll, have to likewise consider him by.

Make sense?

It's not like I don't already know that the heroes I grew up with — from Lennon, Dylan and Jagger on down — didn't have their own drug and sex addled faults. Not at all.

I completely recognize that. It's just that Bono and U2 set themselves a much higher standard from the git-go. And for whatever small place I hold in the much wider universe of rock and roll, I intend to hold them to that flame.

I am looking very forward to seeing U2 next month at Qwest, and am equally sure it will be an amazing show. Hell, it always is.

Just don't forget us little folks, okay Bono?

This article was first published as The Rockologist: My Love/Hate Relationship With Bono and U2 at Blogcritics Magazine

Are You Ready For Star Time? Vintage Live Otis From 1967

Music Review: Otis Redding - Live On The Sunset Strip

"Are you ready for Star Time?"

So asks the emcee at the beginning of Live On The Sunset Strip, a recently unearthed 2-CD collection of live performances capturing the incomparable Otis Redding at the peak of his powers in 1967, during an Easter weekend stand at the legendary L.A. showcase club the Whisky A Go-Go.

The same emcee then proceeds to rattle off a litany of songs from the man who brought you such hits as...well, you get the idea. They simply don't do it like this anymore, and it's a damn shame. Live On The Sunset Strip serves as an unforgettable reminder of just how it used to be done, though.

Although many of these performances have surfaced in bits and pieces over the years and in various forms, Live On The Sunset Strip represents the first live document of Redding's 1967 stand at the Whisky to offer the last three sets in their complete chronological order. For fans of both Redding himself, and of the great, lost art of the original southern fried R&B/soul style revue, this is nothing short of a gold mine.

Today, Otis Redding is remembered primarily for his biggest hit, "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay" — a great ballad in its own right that has long since become a staple both on oldies radio and in karaoke bars. That song is nowhere to be found on this set — but there is actually good reason for that.

What is sometimes forgotten about the man who brought us that great ballad is that he was also arguably the most electrifying R&B/soul singer of his time.

At the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival for example, Otis is remembered by most who were either there or have since seen it on film, as one of the undisputed highlights of the legendary concert which also launched the careers of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. As Taj Mahal, whose band The Rising Sons opened the shows documented on Sunset Strip says, "Otis was it."

Here, backed by a ten piece band led by saxophonist Bob Holloway, Redding displays ample evidence of just why he was held in such high regard. Although there is some unavoidable song repetition in the setlists (owing to the back-to-back nature of the three shows captured), what is heard here is the pure funky grit of one of the great soul men of all time, backed by a band that is as tight as a well-oiled machine.

For anyone in doubt, all you have to do is give just one listen to these guys firing on all four cylinders during "I Can't Turn You Loose" to learn just who wrote the blueprint for all the great R&B revues which followed — a template that would later be lovingly imitated by the likes of the Blues Brothers. On the last set, there's also a great little sax solo that allows the rest of the horn section to shine. You'd never know this was the third time it had been played (at least) in as many days.

Towards the end of that same set, when Otis says they've run out of things to play, the band breaks out the crazy great covers. Beginning with the Beatles "A Hard Days Night" ("a song we've been itching to do," Otis explains), this hits a fiery climax with a smoldering ten minute version of James Brown's "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag." With its false starts and stops, Otis nearly out JBs the Godfather himself here.

Even on the Stones "Satisfaction," the Otis Redding Revue gives Mick and the boys a solid run for their money. The band also specializes in the sort of rapid fire, non-stop delivery that Bruce Springsteen would elevate to a high art with the E Street Band a decade later. These guys play it like they mean it.

All of the hits (well, almost all of them) are here too — albeit sometimes in triplicate — from "I've Been Loving You Too Long" to Redding's take on "Respect."

On the former, Redding walks the same fine line between the desires of the flesh and the joys of the spirit that lies at the very heart of all the great soul men. As carnal as Redding's aching, heart-wrenching pleas of "don't make me stop now" may be, the delivery comes from the same sort of rapturous place you might hear in a southern church on any given Sunday.

And when Otis sings lines like "I've been loving you forty long years, and I'll love you forty more," for that moment anyway, you know that he means it with every ounce of sweat coming off of his brow. It's the same sort of feeling he later captured to such great effect on "Try A Little Tenderness," shortly before he left this mortal plane for good.

Yup. They simply don't do it like this anymore. And it's a damn shame.

This article was first published as Music Review: Otis Redding - Live On The Sunset Strip at Blogcritics Magazine.

They're Hot, They're Sexy, And They're Dead

Book Review: Rock Shrines: Where the Myths Begin and the Stars Become Legends by Thomas H. Green

Nothing says rock and roll quite like dead rock stars. As crass or insensitive as this statement might seem, the fact remains that premature death has become as inextricably linked to rock and roll as the electric guitar.

Whether by pure accident, simple demand, or an even more distasteful form of commercial design, rock star deaths have also proven to be big business over the years. As the estates of such deceased artists as Elvis, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, and Michael Jackson demonstrate, it's not at all unusual for rock stars to become even bigger commercial properties in death than they were in life.

In the cases of Jimi Hendrix and Tupac Shakur for example, their recorded output in death has exceeded the amount of music they released during their actual lifetimes. To quote a famous magazine article on one such dead rock star subject, "they're hot, they're sexy, and they're dead."

Given the fact that dead rock stars remain such a hot commodity, a book like Thomas H. Green's Rock Shrines was probably inevitable. For many fans of these artists, pilgrimages to their grave sites and other such historical markers — like Elvis' Graceland Mansion and the Dakota Building (site of John Lennon's 1980 murder) — are a necessary, if perhaps ghoulish ritual.

Rock Shrines is, for all intents and purposes, a fans guide to these very same locations. However, to call this book a mere Roadmap Of The Dead Rock Stars doesn't begin to do it the justice it deserves.

Using the theme of these dead rock star shrines as a launching point, Green — a British journalist whose work has appeared in Mixmag and Q Magazine — has actually assembled a visually striking historical overview of premature rock deaths that is highly detailed, yet also quite readable.

Each of the book's nearly two hundred individual entries is illustrated with beautiful photographs of both the stars and the shrines, along with a brief, but usually very complete composite of the artists work and impact in both life and death. What emerges from this is a picture often missed by a media eager to sensationalize the way many of these artists met their premature ends.

Not that the usually cited causes don't get coverage here — because they do. These include the already well-documented cases of drug overdoses (Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison), murder (Lennon, Shakur, Marvin Gaye) and suicide (Cobain, Ian Curtis), as well as the equally sensational crashes by land (Duane Allman, Marc Bolan), and air (Lynyrd Skynyrd, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Buddy Holly).

Where Rock Shrines rises above many similar books though, is by paying equal tribute to those who met their premature exits due to far more mundane causes, including prostate cancer (Frank Zappa, Johnny Ramone), heart disease (Joe Strummer, Roy Orbison), and brain cancer (Bob Marley).

In his narrative, Green also shies away from some of the more notorious posthumous controversies surrounding dead rock-star subjects like Sid Vicious, Elvis, and Kurt Cobain. There are no "Who Killed Kurt?" or "Elvis is Alive" speculations here. Somewhat more strangely though, he takes a similarly hands-off approach regarding the suspicious death of Brian Jones, even as evidence in recent years has raised questions about the official verdict on the death of the original Rolling Stone.

But getting back to the original theme of the book, Green does provide a most interesting map to those famous Rock Shrines. In addition to the grave sites and the mansions, these include such unlikely locations as the tree in London where Marc Bolan crashed his car; the hotel room in Sydney where INXS vocalist Michael Hutchence is said to have died from auto-erotic asphyxiation; and New York's famous Chelsea Hotel — where, among other things, Sid Vicious is believed to have murdered Nancy Spungen.

In addition to the hundreds of photographs here, there are also a number of plastic bags filled with memorabilia that are placed throughout the book. These include such items as the death certificates of Cobain, Bolan, and Dennis Wilson; original autopsy and medical examiner's reports for Elvis and Jim Morrison (along with Jimbo's Last Will and Testament); newspaper articles on Lennon and Hendrix from the day they died; handwritten lyrics from many of these same artists, and much more. Rock Shrines also features an introduction by noted author and former groupie extraordinaire Pamela Des Barres.

If this all seems a little creepy in places, that's because, well quite frankly, it is.

Nonetheless, this is also often fascinating stuff, even if morbidly so. Given the task at hand, the author has also done an admirable job of putting the information together in an informative, yet tasteful manner. Lavishly illustrated and eminently readable, Rock Shrines is a beautifully assembled book that is a must for any serious student of rock history.

This review was first published as Book Review: Rock Shrines: Where the Myths Begin and the Stars Become Legends by Thomas H. Green at Blogcritics Magazine.

The Women Who Have Rocked My World

They say that the voice of a woman can be enough to soothe both the savage beast in man, as well as serve as proverbial nails on a chalkboard.

Nowhere has this been more true over the years than in music. My own relationship with women in music over the years has been, well let's just say that as in life, it's been complicated.

The first time I can remember falling in love with a woman's voice was when as a pre-teen boy I first heard Grace Slick sing "White Rabbit" with the Jefferson Airplane. Even though I nary understood a thing that Grace was talking about with all her talk about pills that made you either larger or small, there was still something about her sweet, yet seductive voice that made me really want to fall down that particular rabbit hole.

Even so, I would grow to develop a certain love/hate relationship with the various women of rock over the years as I grew older. For every Janis Joplin or Aretha Franklin who were able to touch some unrealized yearning deep within my soul, or for every Ronnie Spector who was able to light the flame of innocent, unconditional romantic love — there would be those angry feminist singers who could just as quickly extinguish it.

This reached an apex in the nineties, during the era of the Cranberries, the Breeders, and especially Alanis Morisette — a singer whose songs more often than not left me wondering "hey, what'd I ever do to you?" than anything else.

Right around this time, I can remember going to an outdoor Neil Young show where The Pretenders were opening, and Chrissie Hynde — an artist whose toughness I always respected — going all ballistic on people barbecuing burgers, due to the "meat is murder" factor. I mean, it's a festival already! What the f...?

And then there was the Ani DeFranco show a friend dragged me out to, where me and him stood alone in a stadium full of angry feminists glaring menacingly at us. Never before or since have I gone to a concert where I felt more like the enemy than I did a mere spectator. I've been less scared as the lone white dude at an NWA show.

This was about the point I began asking myself "when did all these chicks get so damn angry?"

Thank God, that in between the angry feminism of the Anis and the Alanises — not to mention the empty trilling of the Mariahs and the Whitneys — there have still been some great female singers whose ability to soothe the soul have stood out from the rest.

These are great singers who understand implicitly that music works best as a comforter, rather than as a confronter.

A number of these amazing women come to mind right away, such as Sade — whose jazzy torch songs evoke a perfect mood of both longing and regret — and Annie Lennox, who just has an amazing voice period.

For me though, the female vocalists which left the deepest mark tend to fall into two categories, much as the females I tend to prefer in life do.

In category "A", we have the fiercely independent maverick, who also has the spirit of an angel. For me, there is no artist alive who epitomizes these qualities the way that Patti Smith does.



On the album Horses, and especially on extended tonal poems like her greatest song "Birdland," Patti effortlessly channels up both the spiritual and the profane in such a way as to take your head away to an entirely different sort of plane — at least if you are really listening. The fierce intellect and conviction Patti Smith brings to her work alone qualifies her as one of the true greats.

But when her unique vision is applied to an apocalyptic scenario like the one seen below in a scene from the short-lived TV series Millennium, it's as though every fear you ever had of the end of the world in your head was being split wide-open:



Speaking of great examples of music being wed to cinema, Angelo Badalamenti's soundtrack to David Lynch's TV cult-classic Twin Peaks is one of the best ever. But what was most key to this was the singularly angelic voice of Julee Cruise.

Lynch's hallucinatory vision of dark erotic danger in a small Northwestern town has often been imitated (most recently on ABC's Happy Town), but never equaled.

Perhaps the most key factor to this, was Cruise's haunting performance of the Twin Peaks theme, "Falling."

Set at closing time in the type of sleazy, smoke-filled lounge that no longer exists in these politically correct times, Cruise's rendering of this song suggests all of the possibilities, and all of the lingering erotic danger that exists in such a place as Twin Peaks.

As such, it conveys the moment perfectly.



Okay. So much for those women who appeal to the mind, and even to the soul. As for category "B," there are also those who appeal to the...well, you know...

When it comes to pure out and out eroticism, no one has ever communicated this as perfectly as Vanessa Daou did on her tragically slept on, Erica Jong-inspired album Zipless.

And this is the point where I guess I apologize for taking you through a personal mix-tape of my own fantasies.

But hell yeah. Damn, would I like to get with a girl like this:



On the other end of Vanessa Daou's pure sexuality, lies the innocent pre-"Cloudbusting" romanticism of Kate Bush. Before Kate got corrupted by the eighties New Wave of weird chicks like Lene Lovich, this was the "Dorothy in Oz" sort of girl every guy dreams of.

If there is any girl on God's green Earth I would love to be "alone on the stage tonight," with, it is the Kate Bush who is exclaiming "Wow! Wow! — Unbelievable!"



And then, of course, there are those girls who can simply sing their asses off. The first time I saw Annie Haslim perform with Renaissance, I swear to God I felt the air move when she hit those un-Godly five octave notes of hers:



Carole King — another female singer I respect by the way — once said she could make the earth move under my feet. And I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. Annie Haslim on the other hand did it simply by opening her mouth.

Now that's my kinda girl.

This article was first published as The Rockologist: The Women Who Have Rocked My World at Blogcritics Magazine.