Hate Mail - The Tantrum Continues

1. I don't make any claim to be a writer.  I'm a blogger who has been in music for well over half a century.   I pretty much write the way I talk and think. 

2.  A writer, no matter how well he may write is still quite able to write ignorantly about music and they do, frequently.   If Wood wrote as well as S. J. Perleman (the apex of New Yorker writers) or Marilynne Robinson, the greatest living American writer, it still wouldn't give what he said about the art of drumming more credibility than what people who are in the business of drumming or the musicians they work with say.  Especially not a writer who is writing about pop music to revisit his reactions to music as a fantasizing 10-year-old or a hack whose personality has never developed past the age of 12 and who seems to be incapable of distinguishing between what is true and what he wishes were true because it would be easier for him that way.  

3.  I suspect I've heard all of Mitch Mitchell's recordings with Jimi Hendrix which were issued, one of my brothers was a big fan as were a number of my friends.   I never owned one of those albums or heard him live, mostly because I didn't go to rock concerts after the first one I went to, the audience were a bunch of jerks and I valued my hearing too much to make it a habit.  Despite the effect that studio recording can have on evaluating performing abilities, it's clear that he was quite a skilled musician.  I doubt Jimi Hendrix would have played with him if he hadn't been. "Are You Experienced," alone, shows he had more of a range than Moon.   "Fire", for example.  I listened to it right before I wrote this, probably for the first time in more than thirty years.  While I think the comparison with Elvin Jones is a bit far fetched (despite what Hendrix said, Mitchell was no Elvin Jones) he is clearly a far better technician and musician than Moon generally was.  

Do you know what the word "syncopation" means?  Do you know it when you hear it?   

4.   Once I heard the real blues  I didn't have much use for rock which is what is left over once you take everything interesting out of the blues.  Rock is what happens to the blues when it is dumbed down for a bourgeois audience.  I know that will hurt feelings but I don't lie about music.  When I heard jazz there was no going back to the pale, pale imitation.  If Elvin Jones had chosen to play rock he would have been the greatest rock drummer there ever was.  Moon's "rock power" is nothing to Jones' or, for that matter, Max Roach's musical power.  I would suspect the reason that Jones didn't go for the more lucrative form was that it wasn't interesting enough to contain his interest.   It certainly couldn't have contained his genius, though it could have imprisoned it until he couldn't have stood it any longer.  

Now, if you don't stop bothering me, I'll revisit exactly one year ago when you had a tantrum about "Dancing in the Street" proving you have no ability to imagine black kids going out and having a dance party without intent to riot, accusing such known "militants" as Marvin Gaye, Ivy Jo Hunter and Martha Reeves of inciting violence when they were writing and singing a party song for kids who wanted to have innocent fun.   Really, that old myth about the "hidden message" of "Dancing in the Street" comes from the same mentality that produces the right wing cabloid attitudes that all black youth are rightly presumed dangerous and to blame for what comes to them.  Such crap is one of the results of having professional pop-culture critics without anything better to say and nothing in their heads except their ill informed prejudices.  

Update:  Elvin Jones had the ear, the knowledge, the technical ability and the inventive genius to have played any genre of music he chose to pursue. Keith Moon didn't, he could never have been a top ranked jazz musician BECAUSE HE DIDN'T HAVE THE CHOPS FOR THAT ANY MORE THAN KENNY G DOES.  

Really, some non-musicians don't have the first clue about what it takes to play that well.   Including lots of critics.