#music

As you get older, more and more entire bands will be gone. The Band entered that realm last year with the death of leader Robbie Robertson, and it's been 10 years without any original Ramones on this earthly plane. Now only the original keyboardist Irmin Schmidt remains from the classic lineup of Can.

Damo Suzuki, as the legend goes, was discovered by a recently-singerless Can as a busker and joined the same day.

When they asked me to sing, I never thought that I’d stay with this band or be invited to make recordings of LPs, I never had such a dream.

A guy who left Japan on a whim the day after his 18th birthday, he barely spoke German at the time and wasn't particularly great at English either. He had a dream of being a cartoonist, and felt that the hippies around him in '68 were trend-following egoists rather than true free spirits. Can, however, were a different story:

Everybody in the band is quite special. And they had different interests in music. Jaki was free jazz, Irmin [Schmidt] was a conductor of an orchestra, Holger [worked with] Stockhausen and Michael [Karoli] was a young rock guitarist. And I was a hippie! So five totally different people with five different directions. With the chemistry, naturally it came together. That’s why it’s quite timeless music.

He left after three stone-cold, monumentally influential and still-relevant albums at 23 to become a Jehovah's Witness. But it seems like it was a pattern for him to not be a joiner, and though he considered himself a Christian until he died, he left that organization after a couple years as well.

He spent a lot of time touring with random musicians and not rehearsing, preferring spontaneity — and getting away with such insanity because he was Damo Suzuki. I was lucky enough to see him around 20 years ago with a Boston band called Cul de Sac and he was still a magical performer.

Safe journeys to wherever you're going now, Damo.

It seems so recently that YMO’s Yukihiro Takahashi passed, and now we lose another of the great trio, and probably the one who is most well-known internationally outside of the group. Ryuichi Sakamoto was not only the heartthrob of the band, he had an extremely prolific solo output (his most recent release came out in January), collaborated with rad people like David Sylvian, Fennesz, Alva Noto, and Iggy Pop, and has even won an Oscar for scoring The Last Emperor (and probably deserved another for The Revenant but was ruled ineligible for dumb reasons).

This article, titled “Music Sounds the Way it Does Because of Ryuichi Sakamoto”, is a great read but if you don't feel like taking the time, just trust the title. The man lived in the future but was grounded in organic and acoustic sounds, especially the piano. He will be monumentally missed.

Here is his beautiful collab with David Sylvian, “World Citizen (I Won’t Be Disappointed).”

Are these the only posts I write anymore? Talk about a legend right here, Burt Bacharach shuffled off at 94. I have to say that's a good run.

The man, along with Hal David turned complex, jazz-derived chords and combinations into sublime, accessible pop. He collaborated with Elvis Costello and of course Dionne Warwick, among others, and inspired not just easy-listening mellow cats, but a huge range of artists that included Arthur Lee and his proto-punk band Love.

A true titan of music. Rest well and thanks for the music.

This one is a little late. But here's a guy who was the vocalist and drummer of the legendary Yellow Magic Orchestra, and then — like his other two bandmates — went on to an almost equally-legendary solo discography. Like Bowie, Peter Gabriel, and Robert Fripp, Takahashi is a big inspiration on everything I do that involves "songs" or "musicality." He never strayed away from pop or accessibility, but always kept it a little left-of-center.

Here's an insanely 80s video for the title track of my favorite of his, Murdered By The Music.

If the memes and jokes are to be believed, 2022 wasn't any more of a picnic than any year since the pandemic started. Or since 2015 maybe. Or the century. Or eternity maybe. But truly, we did lose some real ones in the music world.

If you haven't heard of any of these folks, I suggest you check them out. There's a lot of great art here.

• Terry Hall. The last one of the year to go that I noticed, the Specials singer was a big loss to my musical history.
• Keith Levine. I was a little late to PiL, but so many of the guitarists I admire, like Daniel Ash, owe a ton to him. His work on Metal Box still blows me away.
• D.H. Peligro. An incredible drummer for one of the greats in hardcore, and one of the few and the proud who proved that punk wasn't just white guys and Bad Brains.
• Jerry Lee Lewis. What can you say about the Killer that hasn't been said? Not the original wild man of rock and roll, but an early trash fire who paved the way for many more. Still energizing to listen to.
• Pharaoh Sanders. One of the few jazz guys I really get into. Truly expanding stuff.
• Andy Fletcher. Depeche Mode was an early expansion into electronic music for me, and probably half the known universe too.
• Mark Lanegan. One of those guys who seemed to court death for a long time before they finally hooked up. A great lyricist and so unsung in the world of Seattle music.
• Rachel Nagy. I think I only saw the Detroit Cobras once when I lived there, but they were legendary. Too young, and I still haven't heard what happened.
• Vangelis. I was never a huge fan, but it's safe to say in hindsight he's one of the people who introduced me to electronic music. Maybe Jarre had more influence on me, but only because he came later — and because Vangelis's "Chariots of Fire" was so omnipresent.
• Lamont Dozier, Dennis Waterman, Ken Williams. You might not know these names. Look them up. That's a lot of firepower lost. These are guys with both art and craft, guys whose results are very difficult to argue with.
• Klaus Schulze. Up until relatively recently, I knew him mostly from the first Tangerine Dream album and Ash Ra Tempel, but even that'd be enough to cement him in my mind as one of the greats. But then there's Timewind, Angst, and a billion other releases. A master.
• The big hoedown in the sky. Country was hit hard in '22. C.W. McCall might've been a one-hit wonder ("Convoy") but it was a monster and it always makes me think of my uncle who knew every word and maybe still does. Then Mickey Gilly, Naomi Judd, and Loretta Lynn? All pioneers and legends.
• Classic rock radio. Dan McCafferty of Nazareth, Wilko Johnson of Dr. Feelgood, Christine McVee, Meat Loaf. Can't say I'm necessarily a fan of any of them, but their stature was undeniable. And of course, there's Meat's masterful performance in Fight Club.
• Coolio. It's fucking Coolio. How is Coolio gone?
• Taylor Hawkins. The Foos are not one of my favorites either, but it sure seems to me that he was loved by pretty much everyone who came across him.
• The lords of the synth. This year we lost both John Appleton, the inventor of the Synclavier, and Dave Smith, the man behind Sequential Circuits and one half of the pair responsible for MIDI.
• Ronnie Spector. Between her and Lamont Dozier both leaving the building, a massive chunk of Motown is gone. No disrespect to Diana Ross but Ronnie was always my favorite.
• Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise. This is some serious garmonbozia. Angelo had a good run at least, but I was hoping to hear more from him.
• Mimi Parker. Saved the hardest for last. I truly don't know what to say about this one. So here's a video.

I feel like I've been posting a lot of these RIP things lately. The Specials were, in hindsight a big deal for me. Ska was a sound that was punk-approved. And other than hip-hop, it was the first music I got into on my own that wasn't "loud guitar music." That certainly opened up the way for so many of the things I love, from James Brown to Autechre. Arguably the only band more important for my branching-out was Joy Division.

And I can't get enough of watching them play in their heyday. They looked impossibly cool, a wild mass of energy and high pants cuffs. And there was Terry Hall at the center, totally serious and almost menacing while chaos erupted.

The guy had a terrible life story with great pain in his childhood, but he translated that into a great thoughtfulness and empathy for the less fortunate in the Thatcher era. It was through him that the great contrast of the Specials — fun Jamaican-inspired music with black-humor or straight-up dark punk lyrics — manifested, and without him they've been only half of their glory.

Instead of a classic Special song, here's the video for "Our Lips Are Sealed," which Hall cowrote, and in which he looks like Robert Smith.

Not much else to say. An iconic voice inextricably tied to something I love, though her feelings on that were mixed.