Smash Fantastic

35-for-35: 1987 – “Where The Streets Have No Name” by U2

November 7, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]On September 24th. I found myself on stage in front of thousands of people, guitar held aloft beside my head, thrashing The Edge’s signature two-bar riff from the chorus of “Where The Streets Have No Name” while silently screaming with happiness.

As impressive and stadium-filling as many of U2’s epic early anthems are, when you break them down at the musical level you find that there’s very little there. Like, practically nothing. This song is pretty much a eighth-note bassline entirely of roots and a handful of chiming mid-neck electric guitar notes with a delay. Bono and Larry Mullen, Jr. do all the heavy lifting, and it’s not even all that heavy.

That’s fascinating to me, because I think this song sounds nothing less than majestic.

I discovered the simple bones beneath this epic song this summer as we prepared to play the first day finish line of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society’s City to Shore bike ride. My cover band Smash Fantastic had been invited back to play after missing 2015 due to a hurricane that never really came.

where-the-streets-have-no-name We had one problem – our lead singer, Ashley, would be at the happiest place on Earth during the show. She had even though about our charity gig while booking her Disney vacation, but was working from the later date of the previous year’s race.

Playing for the MS even is a cause that’s meaningful to me on several levels, so I didn’t want to pass up the chance to play and had Ashley’s blessing to perform without her. Yet, we couldn’t do that without a rocking female lead singer. Jake and I both sing lead on a significant portion of Smash Fantastic songs, they weren’t enough to fill a two hour gig – and, even if they were, they’d leave out tons of our most-popular tunes.

Enter by BFF and long-time collaborator, Gina. We had done covers on many occasions as Arcati Crisis, including once as a wedding band. Plus, Gina is a karaoke veteran who occasionally fronted a rock band for holiday dinners at her old job. While she wasn’t going to be tackling any Kelly Clarkson, the Smash classic rock rep is right up her alley.

With Gina’s came the assumption that we’d be learning a U2 song. There’s just something about Bono’s overdramatic delivery and not-quite tenor voice that maps perfectly onto Gina’s voice, but we never had the excuse to exploit that as Arcati Crisis. Gina, Jake, Zina, and I kicked around a few choices, and decided that this would be the most-appropriate to celebrate finishing between 25 and 90 miles of bike riding.

I wanna run, I want to hide
I wanna tear down the walls
That hold me inside.
I wanna reach out
And touch the flame
Where the streets have no name.

the-joshua-tree-u2 There was much charting and mapping to get the song set for our first go at rehearsal. It was almost too simple for us to make work – so few notes create the overall tonality that one minor misstep sends the song spinning into something unfamiliar. Yet, once we got past counting issues, those simple pieces snapped together perfectly. Suddenly, we were creating that majestic sound.

We rehearsed it only three more times before the show; there was really nothing else to do other than count.

I wanna feel sunlight on my face.
I see the dust-cloud
Disappear without a trace.
I wanna take shelter
From the poison rain
Where the streets have no name

On stage on a gray, windswept September day we rolled out of the second chorus and into the refrain and I had my guitar held up high beside my head as I kept up the machine-gun strum of The Edge’s riff while mouthing the lyrics along with Gina as a way to choke back my tears.

The city’s a flood, and our love turns to rust.
We’re beaten and blown by the wind
Trampled in dust.
I’ll show you a place
High on a desert plain
Where the streets have no name

We’re still building and burning down love
Burning down love.
And when I go there I go there with you
(It’s all I can do)

For five minutes on September 24th, that majesty belonged to us.

Track-by-Track: Lady Gaga’s Joanne – “Million Reasons” (Track 07)

October 25, 2016 by krisis

I’ll be dissecting Joanne song by song every day until November, which will bring a monster month of daily music and comics content with it.

“Million Reasons” isn’t a country song or a pop song. It’s not an anything song. It’s simply a great song. It imagines a world where Lady Gaga could topple Adele from her throne as world’s most-signature balladeer if she choose, not only because she has the pipes for it, but because she’s a damn good songwriter.

Imagine that for a moment. What if, instead of an acoustic, country-tinged pop LP, Gaga released a straight up ballads disc with just one or two upbeat tracks the way that Adele has in 21 and 25. Gaga doesn’t linger on her ballads, but they’ve all been standouts – “Brown Eyes,” “Speechless,” “Dope,” and “Till It Happens to You.”

Until this point “Speechless” was the crown jewel of that collection, a meticulously crafted classic rock song that easily references The Beatles and Elton John. It wasn’t a huge hit. Having played it many times over with Ashley (it was sort of the reason we even got together in the first place), I think that’s because it’s just too complex compared to the ballads of today. People want a simple song with repetitive chords and a simple melody, a la “Hello.”

Welcome to “A Million Reasons,” a ballad so intent on communicating its hook that it repeats it three to five times in each verse, frequently emphasized with a single plain harmony part. I was singing along with the harmony before I even hit the first chorus.

It’s dead-simple I vi IV V chord progression is as common as rain, and inverts itself for the chorus. It’s mostly built on one piano and one acoustic guitar, to the point that I hardly remember if any other instruments enter. It’s relatable – not about dope, but about just wanting to trust.

Head stuck in a cycle I look off and I stare
It’s like that I’ve stopped breathing But completely aware

There’s barely the hint of country here, maybe in Gaga’s inflection on “if I had a highway” on the verse and “try” and “worn out” in the chorus. Mostly she sounds authentically like herself. No put on pop voice, not the monotone of “Dope” or the weird throatiness of “Speechless,” and none of the rasp of “Joanne.”

This is all her, and it’s great. It is, without question, amongst Lady Gaga’s chief achievements in songwriting, if not her best.

Cover songs or originals – which are easier to play?

July 17, 2016 by krisis

We held an unusual rehearsal in our dining room today – three hours of running through the Smash Fantastic cover song repertoire, but as fronted by my Arcati Crisis co-writer and BFF Gina.

An incredibly rare, one-of-a-kind shot of the first time Gina and I performed music together on stage (also the first time I sang solo in public!) This was in 1997 at Masterman, peforming “Sharks Can’t Sleep” by Tracy Bonham. From left to right: me, Joanna, Lucy, and Gina.

The strange arrangement is the result of being asked to play a big benefit show during a week where Ashley will be on vacation. It’s a fun show and we love donating our time to it, so Ashley gave her blessing for us to play it with a fill-in vocalist.

Despite you all knowing Gina primarily for her amazing songwriting and intuitive harmony vocals, she is an awesome interpreter and karaoke veteran. It helps that the rest of the band – Jake, Zina, and I – is the same for both Smash Fantastic and Arcati Crisis.

It was a rollicking rehearsal full of surprises – for example, after over 20 years of friendship I found out that Gina loves “Because The Night” as much as I do, but she does not quite know how to sing Queen’s “Somebody To Love.” We also played a rare pair of our own “Holy Grail” and “Better” with Gina on vocals but not on guitars!

The most interesting part for me was the conversation while we packed up. As we were coiling wires, Gina mentioned off-handedly that she found getting the cover songs right to be much more challenging than playing in an original band.

That took me by surprise! Gina is a confident, experienced singer – I would never expect she would be stressed by cover songs. In fact, I invited her to fill in because I thought she’d find singing two hours of covers a relief in comparison to the stress of shredding through our own songs. However, her reasoning resonated: when you’re covering a song, there’s an existing standard to be held to. As great an interpreter as you may be, you’ve got to get the lyrics right and hit the expected high notes before people will even begin to consider if your performance is any good.

I know that’s the reality, but I’ve never considered it that way. For me, cover songs are a fun vacation from the intense challenge of playing original music.

With cover songs, you simply have to capture the spirit of a song people know well. While Jake tends to hew closely to the real basslines of songs, Zina and I approximate their drum fills and guitar riffs. It’s about verisimilitude. If you give a crowd a hint of the real thing, they don’t notice all the elements you leave out.

That works in our favor on songs for which we can’t quite assemble all the elements of a recording, but it also works in our favor – our covers of “Bang Bang” and “Uptown Funk” dress up the more bare originals considerably with additional passing chords, while even on a classic like “The Way You Make Me Feel” Jake has installed a more propulsive bassline that is only implied in the original.

The first time Gina and I played guitar together in front of people! This was in 1998 at Masterman, playing U2’s “With Or Without You” for the departing senior class. Psychedelic water damage courtesy of my Sophomore year apartment.

By contrast, playing originals is terrifying! The only context the audience has are the notes coming from the stage. There is no earned good will or existing song that will put a smile on their face. And, even when you’re in top shape with a set of good songs, it’s impossible to know when they’re good enough.

It’s like doing yoga – you can always challenge yourself to sink deeper into a pose. I have songs that are nearly 20 years old that I still haven’t mastered playing; I found extra harmony on one just a few weeks ago that makes it sound more like itself than it ever has before.

Gina doesn’t have that anxiety. To her, an original song is something entirely under her control not only to interpret, but to shape and transform. The entire point of the thing is that it belongs to you and it might continue to evolve. That’s nothing to be afraid of – it’s a joy.

I was so intrigued that as best-friends and co-writers Gina and I could differ on this point, but it explains a lot about our relative comfort over the years as performers. There’s no disputing that I’m more vivid and energetically myself on stage in Smash Fantastic, just as Gina is obviously transfixing in Arcati Crisis when she settles into playing an original like “Song for Mrs. Schroeder.”

It will be an interesting eight weeks of getting 30 songs ready for this cover gig, but I think I’m even more intrigued by what Gina and I will know about ourselves afterward when we turn our attention back to originals for the first time in three years.