Songbook Read Free Page B

Look at, say, Blue , by Joni Mitchell. Well, I did, hard, and I didn’t trust it. You could easily imagine a bad song called ‘My Old Man’ (not least because my dad liked a song called ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’) or ‘Little Green’ (not least because my dad liked a song called ‘Little Green Apples’); and God knows you couldn’t tell whether the record was any good by listening to the fucking thing. But the songs on Black Sabbath’s album Paranoid , for example, were solid, dependable, immediately indicative of quality. How could there be a bad song called ‘Iron Man’, or ‘War Pigs’, or – my cup ranneth over – ‘Rat Salad’?
    So for me, learning to love quieter songs – country, soul and folk songs, ballads sung by women and played on the piano or the viola or some damned thing, songs with harmonies and titles like ‘Carey’ (because who with a pair of ears that work doesn’t love Blue ?) – is not about getting older, but about acquiring a musical confidence, an ability to judge for myself. Sometimes it seems that, with each passing year, a layer of grungy guitar has been scraped away, until eventually I have reached the stage where I can, I hope, tell a good George Jones song from a bad one. Songs undressed like that, without a stitch of Stratocaster on them, are scary – you have to work them out for yourself.
    And then, once you are able to do that, you become as lazy and as afraid of your own judgement as you were when you were fourteen. How do you tell whether a CD is any good? You look for evidence of quiet good taste, is how. You look for a moody black-and-white cover, evidence of violas, maybe a guest appearance from someone classy, some ironic song titles, a sticker with a quote taken from a review in Mojo or a broadsheet newspaper, perhaps a couple of references somewhere to literature or cinema. And, of course, you stop listening to music made by shrieking, leather-trousered, shaggy-haired men altogether. Because how are you supposed to know whether it’s any good or not, when it’s played that loud, by people apparently so hostile to the aesthetics of understated modernity?
    I discovered, some time during the last few years, that my musical diet was light on carbohydrates, and that the rock riff is nutritionally essential – especially in cars and on book tours, when you need something quick and cheap to get you through a long day. Nirvana, The Bends and The Chemical Brothers restimulated my appetite, but only Led Zeppelin could satisfy it; in fact, if I ever had to hum a blues-metal riff to a puzzled alien, I’d choose Zeppelin’s ‘Heartbreaker’, from Led Zeppelin II . I’m not sure that me going ‘DANG DANG DANG DANG DA-DA-DANG, DA-DA-DA-DA-DADANG DANG DA-DA-DANG’ would enlighten him especially, but I’d feel that I’d done as good a job as the circumstances allowed. Even written down like that (albeit with upper-case assistance), it seems to me that the glorious, imbecilic loudness of the track is conveyed effectively and unambiguously. Read it again. See? It rocks.
    The thing I like most about rediscovering Led Zeppelin – and listening to The Chemical Brothers, and The Bends – is that they can no longer be comfortably accommodated into my life. So much of what you consume when you get older is about accommodation: I have kids, and neighbours, and a partner who could quite happily never hear another blues-metal riff or block-rockin’ beat in her life; I have less time, less tolerance for bullshit, more interest in good taste, more confidence in my own judgement. The culture with which I surround myself is a reflection of my personality and the circumstances of my life, which is in part how it should be. In learning to do that, however, things get lost, too, and one of the things that got lost – along with a taste for, I don’t