Belated bimonthly roundup of the music playing in my head, March/April Edition.

I'm thankful to you for reading.

There have been 12,787 posts since October, 2004, and while I try to write about topics with some measure of resonance apart from the prerequisites of my own inner world, the blog still functions as a diary at least part of the time. Writing about music probably isn't why you check in, and that's fine. It's something I do for me.

That said, I'm almost a month late in fulfilling my self-directed mandate to regularly summarize the music I've been enjoying, preferably at two-month intervals.

Following is a video sampler of the CDs purchased in March and April. They appear in no particular order, because I'm not organized enough to manage things like chronology.

The Vaccines … Combat Sports

The Decemberists … I’ll Be Your Girl

The Len Price 3 … Nobody Knows

Neon Waltz … Strange Hymns

Gumba Fire: Bubblegum Soul & Synth-Boogie in 1980s South Africa

The Charlatans …Tellin’ Stories (1997)

The Charlatans … Modern Nature (2015)

Travis ... Where You Stand (2013)

Of these, Combat Sports is my favorite, with the three-year-old Modern Nature finishing second. Both proved to be ear worms, and Combat Sports probably will place highly in the year's end Top-Something list. The songs are short, snappy and melodic, with traces of the Kaiser Chiefs.

One of my goals for the year in music, 2018, is to relax and allow myself to follow the passing butterfly. New releases were of spotty interest for me in March and April, so I did something I rarely do and indulged in a few "classic rock" tangents and digressions.

---

The 20th anniversary of Bring It On, the first album released by the British band Gomez, came on April 13. I celebrated by listening to all of Gomez' albums. After an extended seven-year hiatus, it seems the group might be going back into the studios. This makes me happy.

Another anniversary (the 40th) of Van Halen's debut album in 1978 had me thinking, and it appears my position has evolved. I wasn't a fan of the band's David Lee Roth era, which ended in 1985. However, I liked Van Hagar. Now, with greater distance, I can see how groundbreaking and revolutionary the early material really was; not just Eddie's guitar, but the sound and attitude, too.

To be sure, Sammy Hagar -- he's 70 years old now -- remains a rock and roll everyman, and an enduring performer to be appreciated. As for Van Halen's mercifully brief third aggregation, my annual listen to the horrid Van Halen III has confirmed that after 20 years, it hasn't gotten any better.

In early April, I accompanied my wife to her appointment for dental work, taking along a book and enjoying a couple of hours of reading.

Unfortunately, the Sirius channel of choice in the waiting room was devoted entirely to Top 40 hit songs of the 1970s, like "Afternoon Delight" and "The Night Chicago Died." Several Bee Gees songs also were aired; at the dentist, as during high school, this band was inescapable. I subsequently retreated to YouTube to give a few Bee Gees hits a second listen.

It's hard to do, but if you can ignore the clothes and wash the palate clean of pop culture at the time and focus on the music, it's far better than I ever thought. The singing, songwriting and production are stellar. Pop music after the Beatles seldom witnessed such an epic, unholy roll as the Bee Gees enjoyed at the band's peak. Here's my favorite song, which was released in 1975 just before the tsunami. You never heard the lovely bridge on the radio; it got chopped.

"Play some Skynyrd," crooned John Eddie back in '03, and of course he was referring to "Free Bird" and "Sweet Home Alabama," among other memorable songs from Lynyrd Skynyrd's heyday in the 70s. Everyone knows about the plane crash in 1977, which put a premature end to the juggernaut, killing singer and principal songwriter Ronnie Van Zant.

Lynyrd Skynyrd later reformed, and has been on the road as a working band for decades, stocked by an ever shrinking number of plane crash survivors until now only guitarist Gary Rossington remains. Nothing against the reconstituted Skynyrd, which in its second life became something the same and yet far different, because it's hard to imagine Ronnie Van Zant devolving into parody, like Charlie Daniels.

This prompts a question: exactly what is Lynyrd Skynyrd, and at what point does it cease being so? The farewell tour is underway, and along with the many other summer touring announcements coming in March and April, another rabbit hole opens.

---

Lindsey Buckingham's departure from Fleetwood Mac may or may not be noticed by a majority of the ticket-buying fillers of arena seats, but for the pundit class, it ignited all sorts of commentary along the lines of when, if at all, an aging band's replacement parts render it no longer original enough to pass muster.

The discussion is interesting, and ultimately ridiculous. Obsessive true believers like me always have been outnumbered 10-1 or greater by casual thrill-seekers, and so it will remain forever more. In music, you're whatever you say you are, until people stop paying you. Then it changes.

The received wisdom is that older rock and pop artists still possessing the clout and back catalog to fill venues are referred to as "legacy" or "heritage" acts; few fans attend their shows for the purpose of hearing what they've recorded lately, but expect to hear the hits. Because the business model has been flipped, and performance is the money-maker, the hits are what these audiences are sure to hear.

The subtleties quickly become immersed in contradiction. To even casual fan, Buckingham and Stevie Nicks might seem integral to Fleetwood Mac, and yet the band began as a hardcore blues outfit featuring guitarist Peter Green, and it has taken a variety of shapes with various musicians before (and since) Buckingham and Nick first joined.

And, Buckingham left once before.

There are no original members in the band Blood, Sweat & Tears, currently touring with American Idol contestant Bo Bice as vocalist in the job made famous by David Clayton-Thomas. However, Clayton-Thomas wasn't the band's original singer; he came aboard after the group's debut release.

Former singer Clayton-Thomas is 76 years of age and Bice is 43, and therein lies an important lesson, because it comes down to money, as in any business, and if many musical aggregations can plausibly say it's all about the style of music paying customers want, and the songs they want to hear, then it's of less importance who performs it.

Granted, there are on-off talents that cannot be replaced, like Jimi Hendrix, but at the same time, if people will turn out to hear passable renditions, then capitalism will provide them.

Accordingly, tribute bands have changed the world. Journey famously plucked singer Arnel Pineda from the Philippines via the internet. Current Chicago tenor Neil Donnell, the guy singing Peter Cetera's and Jason Scheff's songs, was a member of a Chicago tribute band in Canada.

KISS speaks of keeping the band alive with no original members at all, and Robert Lamm of Chicago confided similar thoughts to a journalist, and if this makes no sense to you, allow me to observe that in the past few years, I've seen multiple shows by the Glenn Miller Orchestra and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, neither of which might possibly have "original" members any younger than about 95 years of age.

Miller famously died in WWII, and neither Dorsey brother made it to the 1960s, and yet there's nothing stopping musicians fresh out of college, as well as older players happy to have a regular gig, from performing Swing Era arrangements. The precise experience may not be the same. If you close your eyes, it's also not tremendously different. Symphony orchestras have been doing it since Beethoven was still alive.

As age-depleted rock legacy bands and their tribute bands become one and the same, the chief considerations are legalities: who retains the rights?

Once the lawyers are happy, it's all about selling tickets.

---

Another musical post from April, and the previous roundup:

Apologies for this rock-pop digression into my British musical tastes.

Roger's Year in Music, 2018: The onset of a bimonthly roundup of the music playing in my head (January/February).

ON THE AVENUES: The musical year 2012 (part two).

ON THE AVENUES: The musical year 2012 (part two).

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Purportedly, this second segment of my annual review of music was supposed to be devoted to listings of classical, world music and jazz, as intended to illustrate the sublime well-roundedness of my artistic taste.

This time around, you’ll have to take my word for it, because no new ground was broken in the year recently passed. There was stasis. So it goes. It remains a matter of overt pride and personal enrichment for me that all types of music can be enthralling at any given time, in a certain place, and according to variable moods.

For example, at some undisclosed point each year on a Saturday, I switch on WUOL-90.5 and listen to an opera broadcast from the Met. It doesn’t even matter which opera it is, because I don’t know enough about the genre to be selective. If nothing else, it helps to keep the Marx Brothers satire alive.

Elsewhere, my favorite classical works – medieval music, Smetana, chamber works, Shostakovich – are revisited regularly. These come from my own CD collection, and also via WUOL, for which I am thankful, and need to get back to supporting with some real money in 2013.

My world travel schedule has taken a hiatus in recent years, but music from the remainder of the planet still features regularly on my play list. I browse Internet radio stations and YouTube, delve into the CD collection, and make pairings: Fado for a Port night, or Dengue Fever with Asian cuisine. In fact, the Cambodian-American band’s documentary, “Sleepwalking Through the Mekong,” was a 2012 milestone, and I regret coming to it so tardily.

And then there are my first true loves, jazz and swing, the prototypically American musical styles I literally was raised to appreciate. Alas, I have been profligate of late. In 2012, the death of Dave Brubeck probably served as the only reminder of jazz for many observers of the Lady Gaga cohort, and while sad, it’s not unexpected. Perhaps 2013 finally will be the year when I muster the necessary organization to wire the WCTU Reading Room at Bank Street Brewhouse for sound, and begin devoting certain nights entirely to jazz. Or samba. Perhaps Handel or Borodin.

After all, we need listenable diversity.

---

Last week I reviewed the list of my favorite pop/rock recordings of 2012. One release was purposefully omitted, because while influential in its limited time, I suspect it won’t stand the ultimate test of shelf life, in the sense of music worth returning to again and again. However, I might yet be wrong, and that’s why it’s time to talk a bit about Van Halen.

Early in 2012, there was much fanfare when the group announced a new album, the band’s first since 1984 (both the year and the title) with original singer David Lee Roth, and a tour to follow. I skipped the cash outlay for the tour date in Louisville and bought the CD instead. Interestingly, there was little truly “new” material therein. Rather, the songs were assembled largely from leftover, unused or discarded demos from the heyday of Van Halen during the Reagan Administration, newly recorded for the digital age.

For three weeks straight, I listened to Van Halen’s comeback CD. It made such a profound impression that when I started writing these musical columns in December, I couldn’t even remember the album’s title. Forced to scan the rack for a look see, it came back to me: “A Different Kind of Truth.”

The album isn’t entirely bad, although I’d be guilty of damning Van Halen with faint praise if I were to call it the “best” since the band’s last album with Sammy Hagar in 1993.

Gary Cherone, where have you gone?

There is formulaic filler, reminding the listener of why certain songs were omitted in the first place, but there also are moments of bliss and excellence, as when the lumbering leviathan belatedly gets rolling during Eddie Van Halen’s inspired, throwback solos on the song “Blood and Fire.” Thus was the air guitar duly enabled, back when we were sweaty and utterly shameless.

Eddie still has it, but David Lee’s voice isn’t at all the same, even if he’s crafty like a vaudevillian and adept at concealing vastly reduced range. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the single most noticeable absence is that of former band member Michael Anthony, ingloriously booted by the conspiratorial brothers to make room for Eddie’s son Wolfgang. “A Different Kind of Truth” proves definitively that Anthony’s backing vocals always were an integral part of the band’s sound. Without them, something vital is missing.

So, why will Van Halen still be a memorable presence for me whenever I think back on music in 2012, even if the new album was so-so, and in spite of missing them live? It’s precisely because it compelled me to return to the archive, and to listen again to those first five albums from the band’s original incarnation.

I liked the Van Hagar era, too, but indeed, there was a time when Roth prancing in spandex, screaming, and a grinning Eddie with his axe, shredding, meant quite a lot for the rock oeuvre as a whole. After finishing those five timeless albums, the new release seemed utterly irrelevant. And so collectively we age, gracefully or otherwise.

---

These intense musical dalliances and re-immersions are hallmarks of my year I music. It always happens. In 2012, there was Van Halen, the “pop” period of Genesis, wonderful recaps of King Crimson and Soft Machine, and two Blu-ray/CD purchases to close the year: Led Zeppelin’s “Celebration Day” (the 2007 London reunion show with Jason Bonham on drums) and “Hungarian Rhapsody” by Queen, a concert from 1986 in Budapest.

In the days of my youth … it never could be said that I was a Led Zeppelin fan. It may have been a cultural phenomenon, given that the pot smokers in my school milieu steered toward Zepp, while the drinkers listened to the Stones and the Who. Whatever the case, the band’s performance as elder statesmen is quite compelling. Listen to Robert Plant as a lion in winter, wisely reinterpreting his own rock singer legacy, not as a shouter, but as a craftsman.

To view the very epitome of the now-discredited stadium rock genre, rewind to 1986 and revel in the excess as Queen plays the soccer stadium in Budapest, with every movie camera in the entirety of Communist-era Hungary assembled to capture the rare spectacle of a Western concert behind the Iron Curtain.

The film, unreleased until now, is an essential gem, capturing the late, lamented Freddie Mercury and his band mates at their post-Live Aid pinnacle, with interspersed footage of Queen as bemused tourists that chills me to the bone, so redolent of the mood in Budapest just one year later, when I purchased a ticket for $7 and saw Genesis on the very same stage.

As much as seeing Genesis meant to me at the time, after seeing the Queen film these many years later, I’d have happily swapped Phil Collins for Mercury. He was a one-off. Then again, so are we all.

Radio, someone still loves you. But that’s a tale for another time.

Wrong photo, guys.

In the top right-hand corner of the Sunday Tribune's "Spectrum" section, there’s a photo of Sammy Hagar.

For the uninitiated, Hagar was the singer for the rock band Van Halen from 1984 through about 1996, replacing original vocalist David Lee Roth.

Hagar’s photo is meant to draw attention to an article inside that charts the considerable success of the current Van Halen reunion tour.

That’d be the tour with David Lee Roth singing, and without Sammy Hagar involved in any way. In fact, Hagar’s name is not mentioned in the article itself, and it is clearly noted that during the ongoing tour, no songs from after 1984 are being played, just the ones that Diamond Dave originally sang prior to that date.

Somehow this reminds me of the inexplicable tendency of newspapers to do things like run a banner headline naming a savage criminal, then prominently display a photo of the police officer who arrested him.

The devil's in the details, guys.