Your Song Changed My Life: From Jimmy Page to St. Vincent, Smokey Robinson to Hozier, Thirty-Five Beloved Artists on Their Journey and the Music That Inspired It

216 Pages·2016·2.46 MB·English

by  Boilen

DEDICATION
For all the musicians inspiring life and imagination through this invisible art we
call music. You spark ideas, shake the norm—and have completely changed my
life.
Thank you.
And with much love to JULIAN, MAY, and BUZZY.
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
JIMMY PAGE
CARRIE BROWNSTEIN
SMOKEY ROBINSON
DAVID BYRNE
ST. VINCENT
JEFF TWEEDY
JAMES BLAKE
COLIN MELOY
TREY ANASTASIO
JENNY LEWIS
DAVE GROHL
CAT STEVENS
STURGILL SIMPSON
JUSTIN VERNON
CAT POWER
JACKSON BROWNE
MICHAEL STIPE
PHILIP GLASS
JÓNSI
ÁSGEIR
HOZIER
REGINA CARTER
ASAF AVIDAN
VALERIE JUNE
CONOR OBERST
COURTNEY BARNETT
POKEY LAFARGE
KATE TEMPEST
IAN MACKAYE
LUCINDA WILLIAMS
JOSH RITTER
CHRIS THILE
LEON BRIDGES
SHARON VAN ETTEN
FANTASTIC NEGRITO
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
I’ve had this love for music a long time now. This is me and my record player in Brooklyn, New York,
circa 1956. Courtesy Roy Boilen
INTRODUCTION
It’s August 15, 1965, and a cool summer night as I look toward the glowing
lights of Shea Stadium about ten miles north of me, imagining, no, wishing I was
with The Beatles. I’m twelve years old and sitting on my stoop in Queens, New
York, holding a Westinghouse transistor radio to my ear. The radio cost me five
dollars and a label from a bottle of Listerine. It is tuned to WMCA, my favorite
AM station (FM barely exists at this point). Less than two years ago, on the day
after Christmas, WMCA played “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” becoming the first
New York station to play The Beatles. The night of the Shea Stadium show, I
struggle to imagine what a concert there would be like. It is the first rock and roll
concert to ever be held at a major stadium. Approximately fifty-six thousand
people attend, including my next-door neighbor; the show sold out in seventeen
minutes (mind you, there’s no Internet).
I read the news the next day and see the black-and-white footage on TV the
following night—the screams drown out the band, the meager sound system no
competition for the level of noise produced by thousands of adoring fans, who
faint with passion, their hormones raging as they shout the names of their
favorites—John, Paul, George, and even Ringo. It’s a monumental event, and
one that will eventually pave the way for the sort of arena shows we’ll take for
granted fifty years later.
I loved, loved, The Beatles, and if I could turn back the clock to any one
night and be someplace, it would be Shea Stadium on that night.
My love for The Beatles began alongside America’s love for The Beatles,
first with their songs on the radio and then with the newscast of their arrival at
the newly renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport, a few miles from my
house. President Kennedy was shot eleven weeks before they came to America,
and I don’t believe it’s a stretch to say that our news media was happy to have
something to celebrate after so much darkness. On February 9, 1964, two out of
every five Americans turned on their black-and-white televisions to watch The
Ed Sullivan Show. The Beatles’ appearance had been booked three months
earlier, at which point no one in America knew them and their songs had never
played on American radio—in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to name any British
act with a popular song on the U.S. charts then—but by the time they arrived in
New York, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had shot to number one. Credit their
brilliant strategist and manager, Brian Epstein, and their sound, of course. I sat in
front of the television with my mom, dad, and thirteen-year-old sister, May, and
thought it was the most thrilling music my ten-year-old ears had ever heard. The
Beatles were vibrant and young, none older than twenty-three, and on that night
our screens filled with rock and roll, a departure for the normally tame variety
show, which often featured Broadway singers, acrobats, comedians, and a
magician doing a saltshaker trick.
Punk is often credited with shaking up the music world, while we tend to
view the British Invasion—the wave of British bands that followed in the foot-
stomping steps of The Beatles—as cute and adorable. But everything about
music changed after those Brits arrived. Sales of records and record players hit
all-time highs, much of the teenage world bought guitars, and your next-door
neighbor’s garage was as likely to house a budding band as an Oldsmobile. In
1958, guitar sales in the U.S. totaled approximately three hundred thousand; by
1965, barely one year into the British Invasion, that number had exploded to one
and a half million. The guitar replaced the piano as the main instrument in
popular music. My sister and I took lessons—me with the intent to learn all The
Beatles’ songs. I struggled with the instrument, and my teacher later told my
mom that I had no musical ability. I was crushed. Instead, I spun 45s endlessly in
my bedroom, pretended to be a DJ, created secret make-believe pop charts, and
fell deeply in love with music. When I wasn’t in school, I always carried two
items: my trusty transistor radio and a stickball bat. I lived for baseball and
records. At night, I hid my radio under my pillow and listened to either New
York Yankees games or rock and roll. My friends were The Zombies, The
Kinks, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Beau Brummels, The Beach Boys,
The Byrds, The Yardbirds, and so many others. I bought my first album, Meet
The Beatles, at the radio and television repair shop at the local shopping center
in Lindenwood, and often walked all the way to the Times Square department
store to purchase my 45s.
I was raised in a middle-class family in a working-class neighborhood that
consisted mostly of Italians and Jews. I was the latter. My dad, Roy Boilen, sold
frozen meat and frozen food and the freezers to store them in. My mom, Buzzy,
worked the phone, canvassing families and arranging appointments for my dad.
He traveled a lot and wasn’t home much during the week, but when he was, he
listened to big band music. Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Glenn Miller
made him happy. I recall visiting his parents’ house and listening to old 78s in
the basement. It is a world of music I came to appreciate only much later. My
mom loved show tunes and Barbra Streisand, music that I never came to
appreciate: to this day it drives me up the wall, though my sister recently
reminded me of my obsession as a six-year-old with the Broadway cast album
for Flower Drum Song.
Some time around 1965, my dad bought a fancy stereo sound system, with a
nice Scott FM tube receiver and some snazzy speakers, which I blew up about
five years later listening to the deep synthesizer music of Emerson, Lake &
Palmer at high volume. The year 1966 saw the evolution of FM radio, and that
too changed everything. DJs like Alison Steele, Rosko, and Scott Muni, among
others, started playing what they loved rather than music they were told to
program. For a kid like me, the shift from AM, with its low quality and
screaming commercials, to the low-key and high-quality sound of FM was mind-
blowing. I think it’s fair to assert that the development of FM was as
revolutionary to the world of music as the one we’ve seen in the twenty-first
century with the transition from CDs to digital downloads and now online
streaming. With the advent of FM, music that catered to particular tastes rather
than mass appeal had a home. It was the first time I heard The Velvet
Underground, and it was the beginning of “underground” music, later called
“alternative,” later called “indie.” The thread is long, but the aesthetic is the
same—music as art, not commodity.
By 1966 technology made the recording process more expressive and the
listening process more trippy (so did the drugs). Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling
Stone” (1965) and The Doors’ “Light My Fire” (1967) were short songs on the
AM dial, but twice as long and twice as interesting on FM. It was also a year of
mind-altering albums, including The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, The Beatles’
Revolver, Bob Dylan’s double album, Blonde on Blonde, The Mothers of
Invention’s Freak Out!, and The 13th Floor Elevators’ The Psychedelic Sound of
The 13th Floor Elevators. Albums began to have concepts; no longer were they
simply vehicles for hit songs. In fact, The Beatles released numerous hit singles
that didn’t even make it onto the UK editions of their albums, such as “We Can
Work It Out,” “Day Tripper,” “Penny Lane,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
In the summer of 1967, I went to my friend Alan’s house. He’d just returned
from the record store and played for me the most mind-boggling, beautiful
album I’d ever heard: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. If you’re not as
old as I am, it’s important to note that music had never sounded like this before.
Imagine growing up in a city and walking into a forest for the first time—that’s
what the experience of this album was like for me. We sat and listened to
swirling, unidentifiable sounds from India, vaudeville, the circus, the farm, the
classical concert hall, all otherworldly and newly created. We stared at the
colorful cover art, a collage of people, some real, some fictional, known and
unknown. The gatefold opened to a photograph of a band we recognized, but one
that was also deeply changed, adorned by beards, mustaches, and bright red,
green, pink, and blue, nearly Day-Glo military uniforms. Best of all, the lyrics
were printed on the back cover, something I’d never seen before, so we could
follow along word for word. It was an adventure, a journey, and—to steal a term
from the day—a trip. For me, the album’s closing track, “A Day in the Life,”
was the most startling of all. It’s a song that changed my life forever. The lyrics
are both straight storytelling and impressionism, pedestrian and poetic. It was
two completely different songs sonically melded into one, opening with John
Lennon’s simple strumming of an acoustic guitar as he tells a tale inspired by
two different newspaper articles, one about four thousand potholes to be repaired
on the streets of Blackburn in Lancashire, the other about the death of Tara
Browne, an heir to the Guinness brewery fortune, in a high-speed car crash.
He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They’d seen his face before
Nobody was really sure
If he was from the House of Lords.
The lyrics were the result of the important and often disputed collaboration
between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Lennon admitted that Paul added the
line “I’d love to turn you on” as a bit of a poke at the stiff-upper-lip British
establishment. And Paul also had a bit of tune he was working on that didn’t
have much to it and that somehow found its way into the song, almost as a
counterpoint to the poignant, impressionistic words sung by John. Paul sings:
Woke up, fell out of bed,
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup,
And looking up I noticed I was late.
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke,
Somebody spoke and I went into a dream.
But it’s the orchestral chaos that really takes this song to a whole new level.
It’s massive. It builds and builds, based on an idea producer George Martin
claims Lennon gave him. In All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Beatles
Release, Martin recounts the moment: “What I’d like to hear is a tremendous
buildup, from nothing up to something absolutely like the end of the world.”
Martin hired an orchestra and recorded them multiple times, then mixed it all
together, the equivalent of something like 160 musicians. That day, I left Alan’s
house floored, bought my own copy, and listened to it every day in whole or
parts for years. To this day, I am astounded at the progression of this band from
their first recordings in 1963 to what they accomplished by album number eight,