The Test Tube and the Scale

  Nostalgia is the sometimes overpowering need to recreate the details of a lost, temporal Utopia through fantasy, and then impose those details onto our current reality. At its best, musical nostalgia is an attempt at capturing the spirit of the music it is reviving while conveying it in a recognizably contemporary style. Hall and Oates sneak into rhythm and blues by way of a Whites Only rear entrance, bringing with them an assortment of instrumentation and production values that move them towards the niche marketable non-genre specific category of mid-seventies rock that also gave us the Alan Parsons Band’s “I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You,” Toto’s “Georgy Porgy,” Boz Scaggs’ “Lowdown,” David Bowie’s “Right” and “Fascination,” the bulk of the Steely Dan catalog, and Joni Mitchell’s “Help Me”; innovative works of funky pop sophistication that, to sympathetic ears, still resonate with vitality and adult clarity. Back Together Again easily transcends nostalgia’s novelty-song-like lim...

The intimation of danger that starts Back Stabbers is thrilling in a uniquely American way because it excites our taste for modern tension. Like the intro to Gimme Shelter, it not only portends the threat of menace to come, but it extends the reach of the song’s themes. After a lead guitar plays the song’s key melody, a swell of strings arises, repeating the melody and goading our sympathies. Back Stabbers is a master work of urban treachery and domestic paranoia that its producers, the legendary and influential Gamble and Huff, scaled to address the national crises: the winding down of the Vietnam War and its associated horrors, the emergence at home of a brutal and sadistic media darling, the serial killer, Watergate, escalating racial and social injustices.    Despite the O’Jays tapping into and confirming our shared capacity for betrayal, the combined singing voices of Eddie Levert, Walter Williams, and William Powell determinedly create the illusion that, in the presence ...

  The best of two outstanding tracks from the second LP by Jamestown, New York’s 10,000 Maniacs. The band was comprised of six members whose sense of professionalism when I saw them perform live in Dallas in 1985 took me by surprise. The personas the band presented to its audience was self-serious in a way meant to impose distance between themselves and us. It’s likely the band was uncomfortable playing a conventional stage show made up of borrowed poses and aped gestures from a tradition already thirty years or so old. Nevertheless, the musicians and Natalie Merchant herself generated a memorable excitement that convinced everyone inside of that small, Deep Ellum concert space that human unpredictability is as much a function of order and focus as it is of humor and passion. Inspired spontaneity gives Back O’ The Moon’s repeated plays their longevity and vim. The song snapshots that brief period in our lives when we choose between disabuse of the illusions from childhood mythology...