Bobby Rock

The Bobby Rock Newsletter #92 (1-7-23) - A Performance of a Lifetime

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Hey Everyone - 

Welcome back to another edition as we take a few more steps into 2023! Thanks for being here. We have a nice range of things covered today. But first, there are a few cool video links in this one, and we’ve made them super easy to navigate. Simply click on any vid link, and you will instantaneously wind up looking at the exact same version of this Newsletter in our archive—except that you can play the vids without having to click away. Try it… it’s pretty cool!

Let’s jump:

• A Performance of a Lifetime: What does a random 70s hit, from a lesser-known “yacht rock” band called Starbuck, have to do with capturing magic in the studio? Lend me your ear...
  
  
• Pure Genius: That’s all you can really say about one of America’s greatest writers, Emily Dickinson. Lend me your mind…
  
  
• Into as of Late: Cauliflower Crust Pizza. Yes, it rocks. Lend me your pallet!

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My “performance of a lifetime?" I think not. But a lot of fun, nonetheless, as I spontaneously solo on my kid’s first drum set (complete with play-along loops) Christmas morning: a gift from (my sister) Aunt Pam and Uncle Joe.

We all turn into children
on Christmas morning!

And no, he’s not here yet… but he’s already acquiring quite the collection of musical instruments!

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A Performance of a Lifetime

Back in the old days (pre-2000), we used to record to tape exclusively. This is known as analog recording and there was simply no alternative. All records were generally recorded on thick, expensive rolls of 2” tape, which spun round-and-round on big tape machines. Yes, you could still edit takes, “punch in” on performances, and perform a variety of magic tricks to get a take or mix where you wanted it. 

A typical scene from a "two-inch" room

However, a good, clean, inspired performance was always the desired outcome, especially for drum tracks. Hell, if the drummer could nail a good pass from start to finish, it would not only save everyone a lot of time, but you would arguably have something really special on your hands: a complete, live performance with that coveted live feel. This was a magical thing… especially to us die-hards who took a lot of pride in our musicianship. In fact, there were many occasions in the early days where we (the producer, artist, and me) would allow for a few imperfections to remain as-is on a take for the sake of having that complete, original pass. 

In retrospect, it seems like most of the records I did back then had at least one or more tracks on them that were unaltered passes, although, at this point, I would struggle to recall exactly which ones they were. In the end, would this have really mattered to the listener who, with rare exception, wouldn’t even know they were hearing a one-take pass? Probably not. But we would know, and it was always a wondrous thing to carry around in your back pocket, knowing that the “lightning” was captured and, in a sense, immortalized. And certainly, I can still recall a few of these stardust performances and am glad these tracks exist in the world. (More on these another time.)

Which leads us to...

A Marimba Solo From Hell!

Not long ago, at around 1:00 AM, I was pushing my cart through the produce section of a Ralph’s grocery store here in LA. An old-school 70’s “yacht rock” tune started playing through the store system. I remembered this one from when it came out in ’76: “Moonlight Feels Right.” I even remembered the band's name: Starbuck. Not that I was ever a fan, per se, but the song was a harmless and welcomed harkening back to my youth, which made it an acceptable soundtrack to my evaluation of the mangos and avocados in that moment. And then, the marimba solo kicked in. Holy shit, I thought. This motherfucker is ballin’. And man was he (or she) ever. I remembered that this tune had a marimba solo in it (probably one of the only top 40 Billboard hits in pop history that did), but I didn’t remember it being so slammin’. 

My first guess was that it was someone like Emil Richards, a legendary LA session percussionist from the era, on the track. Later that night, I went down the Google rabbit hole to find out. And what a rabbit hole it was!

First, it was not Emil Richards, but rather, one of his students: a former child actor, dancer, drummer, and bad-ass marimba player, Bo Wagner: also a full-on member of Starbuck. The most intriguing part of this find? This blazing-ass, perfectly-executed solo was recorded in one single start-to-finish take!

As the story goes (and has been confirmed through multiple sources), Bo was set up in the studio and ready to track, so they sent playback to his headphones. Bo, thinking it was just a test run to get the sound together, went ahead and improvised a solo, off-the-cuff. After the take, he said something like, “Okay, I think I have a pretty good idea of where to go with this. Let’s try one.”

It was then he was informed that the tape had been rolling through the initial pass and he was all done. The take was perfection!

Sure enough, after they all listened to the playback, everyone agreed it was pretty much as good as it could get, so they moved on. And there it was… The Performance of a Lifetime, still alive and well, and playing at a Ralph’s in Burbank, California, nearly 50 years into the future. Scope it! (Solo kicks in at 1:51)

Obviously, this Midnight Special footage was lip-synched, but at least you can hear the original one-take performance and see our boy giving his best shot at replicating it under the circumstances. Bad-assery, any way you slice it… and especially with the jumpsuit! The man was a professional, through and through.

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Why do I find all of this live performance capture stuff so novel? Well, to understand how today’s digital recording goes down across virtually every genre, is to understand how truly rare an actual start-to-finish “performance” on record has become these days. In the cut-and-paste, multiple-take and comped, digitally-edited and often-quantized world of modern recording, the sheer opportunity for someone to deliver a complete, one-take performance would be rare, and not likely even on the radar of most engineers or producers. It’s not how things are typically done these days, for the most part. (Certainly, there are still many exceptions, especially in the jazz world, thank God.) So, to hear a capture of some real live playing… well... it’s just good for the soul. And it’s part of what got me so jacked-up about music in the early days. You would listen to a record to hear great musicians playing together, often “live” in the studio. What a concept!

And listen, I’m far from anti-digital. I think there is a multitude of innovations and logistical advantages associated with the digital platforms, and some remarkable music being created these days. I’m a fan of all kinds of technologies and recognize that there is real artistry going down, every day, in the digital world. Still… I feel the timelessness and rarity of an exceptional recorded performance should always be acknowledged and appreciated. That’s all. 

Which leads us rather indirectly to another brand of greatness...

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Pure Genius

Emily Dickinson is one of the most revered poets in American history. She led a reclusive, enigmatic life at her family’s estate in 19th-century New England, seldom ever leaving her home through most of her adulthood. And yet, her writings burn with an intellect and soulfulness that would suggest she traversed the globe, nonstop, satiating herself with life experiences that would make Hemingway or Bukowski blush! Still, she only published seven (or was it ten?) poems during her lifetime, and these were penned anonymously.

Yes… the same ol’ pic of our girl… 

because this is one of the only known pictures of her!

After Dickinson passed on in 1886, her sister, Livinia, famously discovered in Emily’s bedroom what would become a treasure chest of American literature: nearly 1800 original poems or “poetic fragments,” the latter of which were penned on various-sized scraps of paper, envelopes, or even baking chocolate wrappers. But much of this discovered work had already been cobbled together by Emily herself in homemade “booklets” known as fascicles: single sheets of blank paper that had been folded in half to form four consecutive pages. 

Dickinson’s posthumous publishing journey—which her sister spearheaded (even though, oddly, Emily never left any instruction for anyone to do so)—is a whole other complex and somewhat contentious story that is still resolving today. But just know that her 40 fascicles are often still referenced, by number, to categorize her work. And it is in fascicle #26 where, perhaps, my favorite gem of Dickinson's genius resides. This piece, often titled by its opening line, was written during the summer of 1863, exactly 100 years before I was born. Dig...

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

For—put them side by side—

The one the other will contain

With ease—and you—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—

For—hold them—Blue to Blue—

The one the other will absorb—

As sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—

For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—

And they will differ—if they do—

As Syllable from Sound—

Emily Dickinson, c. 1863

Fuck! That’s some heavy-duty writing. And it’s heavy-duty because, to me, reading it is so visceral. (In fact, I like to read this poem over and over again, like a mantra or a prayer. Daaaaamn!) Personally, I feel a profound resonance of Truth with every word, even though—like most great poetry—a spacious ambiguity exists within the words to allow for a generous latitude in interpretation. 

This piece is also a profound personal reflection for her, I feel, given the general theme: that the mind is infinitely larger in scale than anything in our physical world, thus offering insight into her jaw-dropping intelligence—even though she had little experience of our physical world beyond her limited excursions around Amherst. As professor Cynthia Wolff put it, "The absence of activity in her life is matched by the phenomenal activity of her intellect.” In other words, it was clear to Dickinson that the vastness of her mind could offer her all the crackling firepower she would ever need to fuel her inspiring and visionary writing... extensive travel and life experience be damned!

Oh, and check out her infamous, whacky punctuation! It’s odd, but it’s how she rolled… using punctuation and line breaks in a way that was not only very specific in dictating cadence, but that also presented her work, in some instances, as a sort of visual art to support her prose. (This would be a constant source of controversy, even after she passed, as publishers—including the one from the above excerpt—would often impose editorial variations on her work for clarity in punctuation... in this case, opting to use em dashes where she had placed periods.) Scope out the original paper with which she penned this piece (from the Amherst Collection):

Crazy cool, right?

And now, we gotta go full-circle back around to our theme today. Although we don’t generally think about writing as a performance art, weren’t most of Dickinson’s writings likely "one-take" affairs? And couldn’t it be assumed that, at times, this brilliance just poured forth from the ethers as she struggled to capture it? It’s probably impossible to know for sure, but given her propensity for jotting shit down on random scraps of paper throughout the day while housekeeping... well, I think her process might best be encapsulated by the words of Dan Chiasson, from a 2016 article in the New Yorker:

"...the makeshift nature of the scraps gives us a vivid idea of what composition must have felt like for a woman whose thoughts raced far ahead of her ability to capture them. Who knows how many of Dickinson’s lines were forgotten before the poet had a chance to write them down? Her idiosyncratic punctuation sometimes feels like triage for the emergency conditions of her muse. Her dashes stand for all the nonessential and time-taking aspects of syntax: she is a process poet even in her finished drafts, preserving the urgency of composition. The poems often detail their own state of evanescence…"

Amen!

I know that, just like music or art, writing is a very personal thing in how it hits each of us, and I don’t expect all of you to jump out of your skin over the words of Dickinson—let alone the music of Coltrane, or the art of Kandinsky—like it does to me. However, I think the unique processes, and particular life circumstances, experiences, and conditions, by which any “master of their realm” creates greatness, should have universal interest and appeal to all of us who are striving for our own version of the same.

If you're so inclined, here's a six-minute PBS report on a 2017 museum exhibit featuring some Dickinson artifacts, that will also shed a bit more light on her unique journey:

And now, let’s go out with some pizza!

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Cauliflower Crust Pizza, Anyone?

Kids, I know what you’re thinking, because I probably thought the same thing. And hey, I love cauliflower, and I love pizza crust... but in my mind, never the twain shall meet. But if you run across this Tattooed Chef masterpiece in the freezer section of your fave market, give it a shot: it is insanely delicious!

The crust has an exquisite texture… crisp and light. And those two non-dairy cheeses are as rich and creamy as you could hope for. This is a real treat for anyone, non-vegans included. And while not exactly health food, your arteries will appreciate this choice over standard-issue meat-and-cheese-style pizza.

PS. I believe this brand has other vegan pizzas, but I haven’t tried them yet. I have tried their cauliflower rice for stir-fries, and it kicks ass, as well!

Bon appétit...

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Thanks again, everybody. Connect next week!

Until then,

BR

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