Corporate FM: A Film by Kevin McKinney and Jill McKeever

The depth of my experience with and feeling for popular music, especially rock ‘n’ roll, combined with reasonable skills as a writer, gives me a modest confidence when I share my opinions about music with you. I have been a life-long fan of cinema, but the range and intensity of my experiences film just aren't that remarkable. I by no means consider myself a film critic. I'm just a reasonably bright guy who likes movies.What follows makes no attempt to be a film review. It is an endorsement.

Sunday afternoon I saw Kevin McKinney and Jill McKeever's  documentary Corporate FM. In the interest of full disclosure, I play a small part in the film; I am among those interviewed. Working with Kevin and Jill I had a fairly strong sense of both their talents and objectives. And I felt confident that this film would be worth seeing. More than worth seeing, Corporate FM makes an entertaining and important statement.

Corporate FM concerns the corporate takeover of the people’s airwaves as expedited by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, legislation that allowed corporations to own several stations in a given market - market hegemony that had previously been forbidden by the law. The film succinctly chronicles the legislative folly that cleared the way for this assault on communities and free speech.


As someone who in some ways had tuned out commercial radio even before Clear Channel and their ilk turned it into pablum, I wasn’t certain how the filmmaker's eulogy for the likes of KLZR in Lawrence, Kansas would play. After all, there are plenty of us who found college, community and public radio superior, and perhaps sufficient to our radio needs. But Corporate FM  illuminates the ways which commercial FM’s demise effects us all, even if you're the kind of underground sort who thinks that the ascendance of bands like R.E.M., U2, Pearl Jam or Smashing Pumpkins, impossible without commercial rock stations, was inconsequential culturally.  


What McKinney and McKeever do so well is place the devouring of FM radio by corporate interests in the larger context of a political economy gone mad. Corporate media giants like Cumulus, and the aforementioned Clear Channel, have replaced local voices, often from varying political perspectives, with national, consistently conservative, voices. The result is the advent of a corporate Pravda or Izvestia of the airwaves. As a kid who grew up with something called the Fairness Doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine), this is remarkable indeed. Seventy percent or more of all opinion reflected on commercial radio in 2012 is not only conservative, but radically so. And it goes unchallenged in the closed circle of corporate FM.

Of course, in the process of eliminating local and dissenting voices and creating ever-narrower music playlists, Clear Channel and Cumulus eliminated thousands of radio jobs, replacing local disc jockeys, program and music directors, reporters and other station personnel. The impact on local businesses has been profound as well, as the majority lack the financial resources and access to marketing dollars that corporate advertisers take for granted.

As McKinney puts it, they eschewed Michael Moore’s ambush journalish, exemplified by Moore’s chasing down GM’s ‘Roger’ in Roger and Me or Charlton Heston for Bowling in Columbine, in favor of letting the film function as blatantly partisan, a polemic told as both love story and lament through the eyes of those closest to it, many of whom may not have thought in particularly political terms prior to the experience, but who bear witness now. These are folks whose politics may not have been particularly anti-corporate, but they've been radicalized by brutal experience.


In summary, far beyond what the disappearance of a radio station may mean to a local music scene or the career development of individual artists, this is a story about what corporate behemoths, whose profitability is based on the anti-social imperatives of capital equity firms, can do to communities. And ultimately about putting corporate ‘freedom’ in front of the people’s.


I feared that the film's emphasis on regional events, especially the sad saga of Lawrence's KLZR, might provide too narrow, too provincial a focus. That fear was unfounded. The locals who testify state their cases effectively, and the universal resonance of this regional history is clear. In other words, they tell a bigger story and do it more persuasively than I anticipated.

My testimony doesn’t do justice to the film, frankly. What I would like for you take away from my remarks is simple, however. “Corporate FM” is a story worth absorbing. It's already been recognized locally, having won the award  for Best Heartland Documentary Feature from the AMC Theatres Kansas City FilmFest 2012. Like a great local band it deserves a wider audience.

You should see it if given the opportunity. 

If you have a few bucks chip in to their Kickstarter fund: (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/898777756/corporate-fm-the-feature-film?ref=email).

I’ll be back to music soon. Look for a piece on Lee Bains III and the Glory Fire’s album There is a Bomb in Gilead in the next day or two.

Spiritualized - Sweet Heart Sweet Light (Fat Possum Records)

The drone and rush of Spacemen 3 was dark, dirty fun. Like the Jesus and Mary Chain they brought a dash of demi-monde cool to the synth-pop Eighties. When they broke up, guitarist Jason Pierce initiated a new project called Spiritualized, a band who didn’t reject Spacemen’s ethos, but certainly gave it grander dimensions. 

Pierce has woven strands of Velvet Underground ‘rush and on my run’ thrust, lysergic propulsion (think 13^th Floor Elevators, and yes, even Pink Floyd), the epic pop pretensions of Phil Spector, and American gospel sounds throughout Spiritualized’s twenty-year history. The band’s apotheosis, Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space, a classic statement of Pierce’s vision was released in 1997. Subsequent releases have to varying degrees retreated from or refined that classic. Good records, all of them in my estimation, but nothing stunning 

 

After 2008’s Songs in A and E, Pierce revisited Ladies and Gentleman, mounting extravagant live productions of the album. Immersed in his own classic and moved by audience response, Pierce determined that any new release from Spiritualized had to meet that standard. With Sweet Heart Sweet Light his mission is accomplished. It embraces Ladies and Gentlemen, but deepens and matures its sensibility. 

Where some of the band’s recordings hid behind a patina of noise and attitude, Sweet Heart is transparently detailed, achieving a clarity of pop production that would flatter halcyon period Beach Boys or the Beatles circa Magical Mystery Tour. 

With Pierce undergoing chemotherapy as treatment for liver disease, most of the basic tracks for Sweet Heart were cut in his home studio with a core quartet of Pierce, guitarist/bassist Tony Foster, keyboardist Tom Edwards, and drummer Kevin Bales. Pierce then convened sessions in Iceland (for orchestration) and Los Angeles (backing vocals). 

Dr. John - Locked Down (Nonesuch)

Every music lover has moments of revelation. I still recall vividly the first time I heard the Animals riveting (yes, it was riveting – I know it’s the critical cliché to end all critical clichés, and I don’t care) take on the American folk chestnut “House of the Rising Sun.” It was playing on the car radio. I made my mom leave the car running as we pulled into a parking space in front of my bro’s jewelry store in downtown Lawrence. Never in my sweet, short life had I heard anything like it. I was a pre-teen. My exposure to black music was limited to Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte; suffice to say Charley Patton wasn’t playing on WHB. The Animals’ singer, Eric Burdon, was from Newcastle, England, but that voice, and its amazing conviction and intensity stemmed from his adoration of the American blues tradition. I didn’t even know it yet, but I was hooked.

The mise en scene of “House of the Rising Sun” was New Orleans. When you’re a white bread kid in the sixth grade from Kansas your impressions of New Orleans came from Al Hirt and Pete Fountain (okay, Louis Armstrong might cross your radar occasionally, but almost as a novelty). That’s what you saw on television. No knock on those dudes, but they represented a commercialized, somewhat sanitized version of the music of New Orleans. That sound occasionally seeped into the pop mainstream of the Sixties. Fats Domino may have been past his chart prime, but songs like “Iko Iko” by the Dixie Cups and the odd hit from Lee Dorsey (especially “Working in a Coal Mine”) gave a hint what was cooking in the Big Easy. Aaron Neville had a hit with “Tell It Like It Is” but its rhythm n’ blues sound was not especially Nawlins-centric.

For me, another revelatory moment was the first time I heard Dr. John – on a short-lived Kansas City underground FM station called KCJC. The tune was “Mama Roux” if I recall correctly. I’d never heard anything quite like it. Heck, most of America hadn’t. The gumbo of styles, representative of New Orleans, that became available to anyone receptive to it in the Seventies, was still underground culturally in 1968. The Meters first album didn’t drop until 1969. Professor Longhair, after recording for several labels in the Fifties with marginal commercial results, was working as a janitor throughout most of the Sixties. The aforementioned chart hits by Dorsey, Neville and the Dixie Cups only hinted at what was going on in the diverse neighborhoods of the Crescent City. 

 Dr. John, the Night Tripper was a persona created by a Los Angeles based New Orleans ex-pat named Mac Rebennack. Rebennack had played on many recordings as a very young man in New Orleans. He moved on to Los Angeles where he was a go-to session man between 1963 and 1968.

As Dr. John, Rebennack combined the full simmering roux of New Orleans sounds (sanctified church music and Saturday night grind) and mixed them shrewdly and affectingly with the psychedelic wail of the emerging counterculture. Three similarly themed albums cementing the Dr. John cult followed the debut record (Dr. John, the Night Tripper - the album that included “Mama Roux”). Rebennack followed those first four releases with Gumbo, an excellent session that paid homage to hometown piano heroes like Professor Longhair and James Booker, produced by fellow New Orleans legend, Allen Toussaint.

Over the last thirty-some years the Dr. has kept active. As a solo artist he’s responsible for twenty-eight albums. Not bad for a guy who hasn’t had a hit in forty years (1973’s “Right Place, Wrong Time”) and who fought a junk habit until the late Eighties, as I understand it. There’s good music throughout that twenty-eight record catalog; but nothing quite as unique or captivating as those early records – until Locked Down.

Chains of Love - Strange Grey Days (Manimal Vinyl)

“Chains of Love” is a song title. I know that there are songs by Ryan Adams and Erasure by that title. I could be wrong, but I’m guessing that the naming of Vancouver’s Chains of Love had nothing to do with either of those.


On the other hand the phrase ‘chains of love’ is repeated frequently in the song “Chains,” written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King.  It was a pretty big hit in 1962 for the Cookies. And, oh yeah, some group called the Beatles covered it on their debut album. From listening to the Chains of Love I would guess that they’ve heard Goffin and King’s tune.

The girl-group sounds of the Sixties are an oft-present influence on today’s younger musicians. And why not - it was insanely catchy, melodic music, and while it sometimes reflected more demure and submissive feminine postures, it was in its very presentation and power assertively female. As such it has become a vital resource for many young women musicians fifty years removed from the sound’s beginnings.

Perhaps most remarkable about the Chains of Love sound is that it is a modernization of the girl-group idiom without a specific agenda. Where La Sera and Frankie Rose dive back into Fifties Patti Page-isms, the Dum Dum Girls pursue an Eighties noise-punk sheen, and Cults incorporate beat box, machine music, all Chains of Love do is sound like a rock band – a rock band with a glorified demo for an album called Strange Grey Days.

The rough recording quality is not without charm, although it does shortchange the band’s most potent asset, singer Nathalia Pizarro in the mix. But even in that it succeeds in exuding a real band ethos instead of placing Pizarro apart from or ahead of the band. 


In 1969, the critical consensus was that in order for Janis Joplin to ascend to the blues-soul pantheon she needed to ditch the idiosyncratic, psychedelic blues of the Big Brother and the Holding Company. All well and good, except that with a backing band, rather than a band, her sound was generic, creating a mismatch with her more dramatically personal qualities.

The Sixties rock chops of Chains of Love are evident from the “Time of the Season” drop beat, syncopated kick off of “He’s Leaving (with me).” Here, the production ethos reminds of Tim Presley’s band White Fence - all Sixties homage, but part bedroom d.i.y. nonchalance. Striking as Pizarro's near- (Ronnie) Spectorian pipes are, she sounds, and Chains of Love sound most striking when she harmonizes with guitarist Rebecca Marie Law Gray. Between them they evoke the full complement of  Sixties female vocalists, from icons like Mary Weiss to thrilling one-hit wonders like Diane Renay. They’re sweetly aggressive on the declarative “All the Time,” guitarist (and producer) Felix Fung spinning off a stinging solo worthy of vintage Mike Bloomfield, as the band rages shades of Blondie and the Attractions.

The Men - Open Your Heart (Sacred Bones)

The Men are men (well, you never know) from Brooklyn. And unlike your average twenty-somethings from Gotham’s most populous borough they don’t sound like lapsed graduate students trying to justify their career choice to their parents by claiming their new album is a master’s thesis on some obscure aesthetic strategy. Shit, no. They sound like a damned rock band. This is rock as bedrock – elemental, dedicated to the proposition that every dumb ass that queried “is rock dead?” should be hit with a sledgehammer - as if Little Richard could ever die. I’ve heard Leave Home (yes, borrowed from the Ramones, paragons of college rock sophistication). I haven’t heard their earliest music. Their new album Open Your Heart represents gravitation toward what the average rock fan might call listenable. Take that, hipsters! 

But really, they don’t sound like they give two shits. Which always makes for great rock and roll. Ya think the Stones agonized over how Beggars Banquet would be received by an audience taught to anticipate lysergic spew? Hell, no. And by God, Open Your Heart is a sort of Beggars for a generation raised on racket. Oh, I’ve heard little college-rocker journalists bring up Husker Du and Black Flag and SST and Homestead and Dischord labels and whatever else. I guess. But mostly I hear the swirling missionary positions of everyone from the Stooges to Jane’s Addiction (and a certain kinship with Icarus Line). And of course the noise monkey grooving of everyone from Spaceman 3 to Sonic Youth to - I dunno, the Swans? 

Scott Severin & The Milton Burlesque – Birdhouse Obbligato (self-released)

Scott Severin knocked around the New York music scene for years, somehow winding up in Omaha sometime in the past decade. I don’t pretend to know his biography, but if his music is any indication he’s a grown up punk rocker with plenty of Clash, Dylan, Ochs, Waits, Cave, Zevon, Springsteen (his words, actually) in his collection. He recorded a forty-something debut called Unknown Rider upon settling in Omaha, a record I’ve yet to hear. Scott and I were introduced through a mutual friend and I asked him to send a copy of his second release Birdhouse Obbligato when it became available.

Glad I did. Severin’s work honors his mentors and most of it merits same breath mention. “Birdhouse” (the song, but not quite title track) has a Weill-ian menace that reminds me of Steve Wynn’s “My Old Haunts.” Actually, there’s a more general kinship between Severin’s work and Wynn’s. Severin’s delivery has the incantatory rhythms of Allen Ginsberg, but his vocal timbre and range remind me of Eric Anderson (think “I Shall Go Unbounded” more than “Blue River”), something in his enunciation too. “ And “Birdhouse’s” ‘sins that even Satan don’t allow’ suggests Nick Cave’s netherworld.

In the faded romance chronicle of “The Edge is Gone” and on ‘I Won’t Get on the Plane” I hear something of Richard Hell’s Kentucky by way of Lower East Side drawl. “Plane” and “I Don’t Know” would also sound right at home in the revived New York Dolls repertoire, especially the latter with it’s jaded Stones drive. “Even Jesus” links the Christian savior with Everyman, suggesting that like Johnny Thunders “even Jesus was born to lose.”

John Wesley Coleman III - The Last Donkey Show (Goner Records)

The enigma that is John Wesley Coleman III … ah, never mind. Enigma, my ass. I don’t know that much about the guy, that’s all. Let’s see, he’s from Texas. He plays in a band called the Golden Boys – don’t know much about them either. He records for the Memphis mavericks at the Goner Records label and had a previous album on the label called The Bad Lady Goes to Jail. I have it. It’s pretty good. But I don’t remember all that much about it … too. Got it on the shelf, where records that I like go (unlike the ones that suck). But I’m going to remember his new record a lot better. It’s called The Last Donkey Show and I’ll remember it because I like it more. I’ve been listening to it a lot. And because I’m writing this damn review.

Coleman is a rock ‘n’ roll junkman. His mind works like a radio receiver that gets random transmissions from the last five decades of rock and country music. Recorded in Oakland, CA and Coleman’s native Texas, Donkey Show is produced by Greg Ashley of the Gris Gris, who’s worked with bands like the Impediments and is clearly Coleman’s kindred spirit.

Coleman is expressive, poetic in a junkman’s way – mostly he comes up with an idea or an image and lets it roll. It works. “There’s a woman looking for me in the dark; she won’t leave me alone” he sings on “My Grave.” It’s sung to a tune that borrows a tad from Roky Erickson’s “Starry Eyes” with an arrangement that calls to mind the Sir Douglas Quintet, Swingin’ Medallions and the Attractions. Coleman likes the sublime sounds of vintage electric keyboards like the Farfisa and Vox Continental, sounds at once majestic and cheesy. That sound predominates on the title cut and “Virgin Mary Queen.” The former kicks off with a ‘dearly beloved’ organ intro, turning into prom-rock with a Ringo back beat, Coleman singing like a charbroiled Peter Perrett; on “Virgin” Coleman engages his inner Iggy, but mixes him with a touch of Kris Kristofferson. With its Flannery O’Connor ambience “Virgin” sounds like the aural equivalent of a William Eggleston photograph, full of that mysterious mix of the banal and the incredible that characterizes the southern American psychic landscape.

Plimsouls - Beach Town Confidential (Alive Records)

 Peter Case of the Plimsouls never cared much for the power-pop label. And while the Plimsouls were contemporaries with bands lumped into the punk category the band never self-identified as punk. Of course among their late Seventies/early Eighties peers in the Los Angeles scene there were bands as diverse as X, the Zeros, the Dils, the Germs, and the Alley Cats – all of whom were categorized as punk, only begging the question: what is punk anyway? And its corollary: who cares?

After a decade that spewed forth everything from prog-rock to Malibu singer-songwriters to disco, all the above were rock ‘n’ roll bands. Their shared commitment was to high-energy performance and direct, concise songs. And if energy and succinct songs were the criteria, few bands did it better than the Plimsouls. Their sub-genre inspirations ranged from Merseybeat to rhythm ‘n’ blues to freak-beat. I suppose they got the power-pop label laid on them because they had raw drive (power) and they didn’t sound like unskilled, unschooled half-asses (pop). So, there you go.

They had all the classic elements necessary for rock stardom (songs, looks, etc.), except the Seventies shifted that celestial alignment (see prog-rock, Malibu, disco …) forever. The dream of a universal rock language, the one that cemented the popularity and the legacies of everyone from the Beatle and Stones to the Kinks and the Who had already collapsed into a tower of FM-babble by the time that Big Star, the Flamin’ Groovies and the New York Dolls had all (relatively speaking) flopped.

Beth Jeans Houghton & The Hooves of Destiny - Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose (Mute Records)

 People who don’t think like critics sometimes assail them for their obsessions with comparison and reference. They make a point, a marginal one, but a point. If the search for a box to put an artist’s work in sabotages the ability or desire to hear the work itself for what it is – Houston, we have a problem. As someone whose mind works critically my beef is more with people with cloth ears who make facile comparisons based on limited experience, shitty taste or received information … so there. I also don't think the wrestling between Apollonian and Dionysian impulses requires a winner, just a good match. 

 Okay, that preface was provoked by my experience with Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose, the debut full-length album from a twenty-one year old artist from Newcastle, England named Beth Jeans Houghton. She and her band the Hooves of Destiny make music that forces you to hear it on its own terms. Comparisons I’ve read of Houghton’s music to artists like Nico and Laura Marling left me wondering if I was listening to the same record. Houghton's soprano, by turns breathy, piercing, sweet is an altogether different instrument compared to Nico or Marling's altos. Nor are her songwriting and arranging tendencies especially similar. Another frequent comparison, to Joni Mitchell, makes some sense. And that presented a bit of a conundrum because I’m not much of Joni Mitchell fan, and I really enjoy YTCN. Proving only that art I’m not nuts about can inspire art I dig.

Cate Le Bon - Cyrk (The Control Group)

The palette of Me Oh My, the debut from Cate Le Bon, was stark and to the point. Its appealing, if rudimentary, production values allowed the songs to speak for themselves, and they ranged from the whimsical (“Sad Sad Feet”) to the apocalyptic (“Terror of the Man”). For her follow up, Cryk, the Welsh born singer-songwriter adds layers of instrumental texture and embellishment, making her austere and sturdy songs even more transfixing. Ultimately, though, it’s her sheer self-possession as a singer that makes it hard to divert your attention, rather like the aural equivalent of not being able to take your figurative eyes off of someone.

Much has been made of the Nico influence, so let’s consider that. First, Le Bon’s vocal range is higher; her dynamic range more extreme, and her reliance on and comfort with harmonization are greater (including plenty of self-harmonization). Where the comparison works is with respect to a shared melancholy affect, a certain precise diction (rooted in English perhaps being a second language – Le Bon is also a Welsh speaker), and a tendency to enter and accent just behind the beat. The specter of the Velvet Underground also extends to Le Bon’s musical sensibility. It’s the sound of loud, bright guitars and dissonant keyboards parts, as well as a certain rhythmic lurch, you can hear it in the galloping syncopation of the album’s opening track “Falcon Eyed,” with its “Sister Ray” lurch.

But this is a post-Velvet vision distinctly informed by Le Bon’s roots in Welsh music and culture (and after all, John Cale was a fellow Welshman). Her art just sounds rooted in the Welsh culture. You’d almost have to have visited Wales to understand. It’s something to do with their mixture of hospitality and reserve, welcoming and insularity, the way some greet you warmly in English one moment only to switch languages conspicuously when entering conversation with a nearby friend. I love the Welsh. Part of my bloodline is Welsh. It’s a fascinating place, and some of the best Welsh artists (Super Furry Animals, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci … Cate Le Bon) have a natural Welsh aura that somehow conveys the country’s curious cross between the connected and the remote. Le Bon first came to prominence as Gruff Rhys’s collaborator on the Neon Neon project. Recorded in Wales and featuring an all, or almost all, Welsh cast, including Meilyr Jones and Gwion Llewellyn from the excellent, if little known, band Race Horses, Cyrk is a distillation of that national sensibility, told through the eyes of a very individual and bohemian female artist.