Tommy and Keef

New sparks from a couple of old favorites

Hello… is this thing on?

Yes, it is I, your humble Jagged Time Lapse host, now safely returned from several weeks in the savage wilderness known as “final manuscript deadline”.

I am pleased to report that I was able to complete and submit the manuscript for Now You’re One Of Us: The Incredible Story of Redd Kross more or less on time, and that my not-easy-to-please agent has already pronounced it as “fucking fantastic”. Hopefully my editor will feel the same — but unless he’s absolutely horrified by what Jeff and Steven McDonald and I cooked up together, the book will most likely be out in October. Also, there’s a new Redd Kross album on the way; I can’t offer up any specific details yet (that’s for the McDonalds to do), but I can say that it’s absolutely killer. And we’ll hopefully be seeing Andrew Reich’s fantastic Redd Kross documentary Born Innocent in wider distribution at some point later this year, as well. Year of the Kross, anyone?

A mountain of other stuff has piled up for me in the last few weeks, but I’ve been jonesing to kick Jagged Time Lapse back into gear. First of all, I would like to welcome all the new folks who have subscribed to this newsletter while I was gone. (And likewise thank all the writers from other Substacks who have recommended this one to their readers, as I’ve been seeing a lot of folks showing up here on your say-so’s.)

Second, I’d like alert you newcomers to the fact that, for a mere five bucks a month, you can (and will!) have full access to the JTL Archive, which (along with over a hundred still-fresh free entries) contains such paid-only posts as interviews with various music legends, chapters from my adolescent musical memoir in progress, and my occasional musings on a certain rumor about Rod Stewart.

Paid JTL subscribers will also be able to read all the latest entries in these veins as they appear in your inbox (as they indeed will be doing again shortly) AND you’ll also be able to listen to every full episode of CROSSED CHANNELS, the podcast I’ve been doing with my friend, fellow author and equally damaged music obsessive Tony Fletcher. We are just about to record another one, which will be out next week, but here’s our most recent episode:

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God Save The Sex Pistols

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In the immortal words of Chico Marx, atsa pretty good deal, eh Boss? Whaddya say?

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As stressful and grueling as deadlines can be, there’s something really satisfying about being completely consumed in that final push, where every waking moment (and some of your sleeping ones) are completely devoted to the project at hand. My girlfriend — who absolutely saved the day in my darkest hour by bringing me an eggplant parm and chocolate pudding when I had about 48 hours left and wasn’t sure how I was going to make it to the finish line — asked me if there was such a thing as “writer’s high,” a la “runner’s high”. I’d venture to say that a similar release of endorphins does occur in these intense stretches, though perhaps “writer’s derangement” may be a better way of putting it.

The downside, of course, is that you have to put the blinders on at these moments and avoid distraction as much as possible. (Fiona Gibson knows all too well what I’m talking about.) But a couple of music-related developments did manage to briefly distract me last week from my task at hand…

One was the arrival on my doorstep of the Abbey Road half-speed master edition of The Who’s Tommy LP. Its existence isn’t exactly breaking news, as it has been out since July 2022, and I remember a friend whose taste (and ears) I generally trust raving about it at the time of its release. But as this edition originally dropped at a time when I was a) downsizing my record collection in preparation for my move to New York, and b) more or less broke, buying it had not been an option. But in early February, I was over on Discogs hunting down a few stray releases from the Redd Kross catalog that had heretofore eluded me, and noticed that the seller I was purchasing them from was also offering this edition of Tommy at a very nice price. So I bit, figuring that it would be easy enough to sell if it wasn’t actually “all that”.

I’m generally skeptical when it comes to classic albums being updated or upgraded — I would usually rather hear a really nice vinyl copy of the original pressing than a remastered and/or remixed version from twenty to sixty years later, because the updated versions inevitably sound to me more “of” the era in which they were updated, and thus fail to transport me back to the era in which they were originally released. Which, as I’ve noted in my original mission statement for this Substack, is kind of a big thing for me.

Fr’instance, every remastered version that I’ve heard of Who’s Next has sounded really clean and organized, with every instrument and vocal politely sitting in its assigned seat. The music is still really powerful (it’s still Who’s Next, fer chrissakes), yet it lacks the oomph and organic weirdness that I can hear on the original pressings, where the instruments and vocals unexpectedly punch in and out of the mix in all parts of the stereo spectrum. The original pressing sounds raw, organic and almost terrifyingly alive, especially on headphones; you can practically hear Pete Townshend’s stress and sweat as he tries to steer these precious surviving remnants of his beloved and embattled Lifehouse project into port.

(Tony and I discussed this very issue on the second episode of CROSSED CHANNELS, where the recent Ed Stasium remix of Tim, The Replacements’ 1985 major label debut, came up for debate.)

Tommy, however, is the lone album from The Who’s classic 1965-1973 period that I’ve always had a real problem getting into. Part of it is that I’ve always had difficulty disassociating the record from the pungent air of hippie idiocy that has long surrounded it. As a Who fan who belatedly became obsessed with the band via both their aggressive mod-era singles and Quadrophenia’s moving “goodbye to all that” look at that same mod era, I found their rock opera about a pinball-playing cult messiah kind of embarrassing, and felt equally embarrassed by the American audiences who somehow gravitated to that album en masse after completely ignoring most of their singles and the brilliant Sell Out. (“But maaan, they played Tommy at Woodstock, maaan — right as the sun was coming up, maaan!” Yeah, I know. Ugh.)

Of course, my first real memory of the whole Tommy thing is of some stoned dude named “Rhino” — one of the ever-changing cast of hippies who shared the crumbling old Victorian in Santa Monica’s Ocean Park neighborhood where my mom rented a room circa ‘74-’75 — hectoring my mom, sister and me while we were looking at the L.A. Free Press movie listings and deciding what to see that day. “You should go see Tommy, maaan,” Rhino kept saying, his eyes blissfully glazing over at the mere thought of it. “Maaan, I’d go anywhere to see Tommy.” (Yeah, fuck that, Rhino; we’re gonna go see Jaws.) So when it came time for me to actually listen to the album itself, my bullshit detector was already perhaps a little too finely tuned.

While I eventually just chalked up Tommy’s goofy lyrics and concept as simply being products of their times, the biggest barrier to my Tommy appreciation remained the album’s tame and muffled sound. In their prime, The Who were possibly the most dynamic and powerful rock band ever to trod a stage; and while that power didn’t always come through on their sixties recordings, especially once their manager Kit Lambert took over production duties, that power and dynamism seemed almost entirely absent from Tommy.

As bootlegs and (eventually) official releases of their 1969-71 tours would attest, the band's live versions of these songs kicked the living shit out of their recorded counterparts; and if I wanted to hear, say, “Sparks,” “Pinball Wizard” or “See Me, Feel Me” done right, I always had the Kids Are Alright soundtrack, the expanded edition of Live at Leeds or any number of decent-quality boots to accommodate my needs. I did buy an original US Decca pressing of Tommy about a dozen years back, hoping that I would experience some previously unheard magic in the grooves that the record’s many other editions had denied me; and the music did sound a little warmer and punchier, but not by much. The performances were obviously energetic and committed (again, it’s THE BLEEDIN’ ‘OO, INNIT?), but they still seemed largely obscured by a weird sonic fog.

Miles Showell is a mastering and lacquer cutting engineer who specializes in half-speed mastering, a process in which a master recording is cut to lacquer at literally half its original speed, so that the cutting machine records the sound using twice the usual space. This process is supposed to bring out frequencies and details that were already encoded in the original master, but which often get lost on the way to the pressing plant. Showell is an absolutely lovely chap — as I found out when I interviewed him for this 2018 Rolling Stone article about the Stones vinyl box set he’d just finished working on — but his work on the Abbey Road Half Speed Masters series is really controversial among hardcore vinyl aficionados. Many have accused him of making their favorite albums sound worse, and some simply view the whole ARHSM thing as cash-grab, yet another way to squeeze new commercial juice out of records that everyone has already bought multiple times.

I haven’t heard enough of Showell’s work to offer a definitive opinion on it — I thought the aforementioned Stones box sounded really good, but then I’ve never been as passionate about the sonic details of, say, Some Girls or Tattoo You as I would be about any classic Who album. But what he and mastering engineer Jon Astley have done with this half-speed master edition of Tommy is quite literally revelatory; the weird sonic fog has been completely eradicated from the music, yet none of the record sounds at all meddled with or like it has been subjected to any unnecessary 21st century juju.

For the very first time in my life, I’ve found my heartbeat actually racing with excitement while listening to this album, because now I can truly feel and hear the energy and intensity that the band is putting into it. The music is still tamer and more controlled than the way The Who delivered it onstage, of course; but now at least Tommy’s songs and performances sound to me like how they were probably meant to sound at the time. If you’re a Who fan, and especially you’re a Tommy fan, you really need to track down a copy of this one for yourself. And it looks like now I’m going to have to grab the ARHSM edition of Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy…

Speaking of the Stones, the other musical development that briefly pulled me out of the Redd Kross zone last week was the release — on video, at least — of Keith Richards’ new cover of The Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man”. While my immediate response was to snarkily wonder when exactly was the last time that Keith actually had to go uptown or anywhere else in search of drugs (surely they reliably came to him even before the Spanish Tony Sanchez days), his rendition completely won me over by the end of the first verse. The groove he and drummer Steve Jordan lay down together on it is just so damn sweet, the vibe is so relaxed and fun, and so what if Keith takes a few liberties with the original chords? He’s just putting his own stamp on a song that he clearly digs and relates to.

The Velvets/Stones intersection may seem odd to some, but Mick Jagger was a Velvets fan going back to the sixties, and — as my friend and colleague Tim Stegall points out — even claimed that “Stray Cat Blues” was the Stones’ interpretation of what the Velvets were doing. And one of my college bands used to do a medley of “I’m Waiting for the Man” and the Stones’ “When the Whip Comes Down,” both because the songs are pretty similar musically, and because, much like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, heroin addiction and male prostitution are two great tastes that taste great together.

Two things really struck me while watching the video and listening to Keith’s version (which was apparently cut for Light in the Attic’s forthcoming Lou Reed tribute album):

One, this is pretty much the lone Stones-related track of the last forty years (with the notable exception of Keith’s solo records, and their 2016 blues covers album Blue & Lonesome) where I didn’t have to try and somehow talk myself into liking it. It’s just straight-up good, no excuses or hyperbole necessary, and I’d dig it even without the endearing visuals of Keith puttering around in the studio and picking out appropriately “Keef”-sounding licks on a sweet array of axes.

Two, I really miss my Uncle John. He loved the Stones so much, especially Keith’s guitar playing, and I really wish he was still here to commiserate with me about this video, as we surely would have done if he hadn’t boogied off this mortal coil back in 2021. Like Keith, Uncle John was impossibly cool, and like him was also an impossibly skinny dude who developed a later-in-life pot belly; and there are a couple of brief moments in the video (3:05 to 3:11 and 3:14 to 3:16, to be exact) where Keith is grooving to the music, and his very physique, stance and movements are so profoundly “Uncle John” that I want to laugh and cry at the same time. Wherever you are now, Johnny, I hope they’ve got this video playing in the lounge.

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