TOM PETTY, THE MASSES AND ME

I went to Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night to see Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, with Buddy Guy opening up; if you want to read my more formal review of the show, which was excellent, it's over here.

I've seen a bunch of concerts at Madison Square Garden over the years—Dio, Radiohead (twice), Coldplay, Iron Maiden (also twice), Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Nine Inch Nails, AC/DC, Bob Seger, Metallica, Mötley Crüe...a surprising number of shows in all, considering how ambivalent I am about the whole arena experience.

Some of the music I listen to is really popular; I have a shit-ton of classic rock in my iPod, along with a bunch of classic hip-hop, loads of big-name metal bands, et cetera, et cetera. Some of it's not popular at all. This has never really concerned me—I don't spend much time thinking about whether other people like the stuff I like. (This is very different from thinking about why I don't like stuff lots of other people do like, which I do all the time.) When I write a review, for example, there's an element of the utilitarian "consumer guide" to it, but I'm not really trying to convince other people that they should buy the album in question, even if I write that way sometimes. I'm just saying that I think it's good, and trying to explain why in some kind of coherent way while avoiding masturbatory theoretical bullshit.

Because of my lack of interest in music's relative popularity, the atmosphere of a massive arena show, with thousands of people screaming and singing along, doesn't really have much effect on me one way or the other. I don't care that all these people standing around me like Iron Maiden as much as I do; I just care that Iron Maiden is one of the best live acts in music, that they put on a fantastic, well-paced, consistently entertaining show. Sometimes, though, it can provide an element of surprise that's fun.

At the Tom Petty show, for example, I was surprised to see people singing along with such fervor to slow songs like "Free Fallin'" and "Learning to Fly." I like "Free Fallin'" a lot, that first verse is an absolute killer, but I'm a much bigger fan of some of Petty's earlier, meaner songs. He's got a real talent for creating evocative, minimalist images. Think of the first two lines of the song he opened the set with, "Listen to Her Heart": "You think you're gonna take her away/With your money and your cocaine." You know exactly who that guy is. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker would have devoted a whole song to painting that asshole's portrait; Petty conjures him and dismisses him in two lines.

I like that side of Tom Petty more than the jangly balladry that inspires girls to sing along and hug their boyfriends at his concerts. And/but watching that audience reaction made me think mine was a minority opinion. It reminded me that Tom Petty hasn't been that snarling guy for quite a few years now (though he still transforms into him from time to time, like on "It's Good to Be King" or "I Should Have Known It"). And that you can probably sell more albums and concert tickets by making girls hug their guys than by making guys pump their fists and snarl.

But here's my point: I think I could have enjoyed that concert just as much had none of those people been there. They weren't an important part of my aesthetic experience. And I'm wondering whether I'm alone on this one, whether the feeling of being surrounded by fellow Tom Petty fans enhances the experience for other people in some major way. And I'm trying to figure out when I started feeling this way, because it wasn't always the case. I used to like mingling with crowds, especially when that meant getting into a sweaty moshpit. Now I'm old(er), and my legs hurt if I stand up for two hours at a show, so I'm much more likely to go to something big enough (in an arena, say) that there's a seat there for me to flop back down into when things get boring (and every show gets boring at some point). A thing like the Summer Slaughter Tour, which features eleven or twelve death metal bands in a row, many of which I like a lot, but is held in a tiny sweatbox of a club with no seats and starts at three in the afternoon? You can forget about that bullshit.

Still, pure physical discomfort isn't what makes me so unconcerned with being part of a crowd. It's something larger, something I can't put my finger on yet, and/but it's something that's making me re-evaluate rock music as a whole. Because for a lot of people, the idea of rock (and pop) as communal experience carries a lot of weight. Someone whose preference is for solitary listening seems to be in some way "doing it wrong," or having an "incomplete" understanding/experience of the music. I'm not convinced. In fact, I think rock music may be best experienced in focused solitude. Because it's not part of a total package—it's not just the sonic component of an evening that depends on beer, lust and air thick with sweat to be complete. The music is enough all on its own, for me anyway.

PRINCE, AC/DC AND BOB LEFSETZ

Ha, ha, Prince said he doesn't like the Internet. Whadda maroon. Whaddan ignoranimus.

"(What's next, is he going to rail against telephones and automobiles? Or tell us to stop using cell phones?)"

That's a quote from, who else, Bob Lefsetz. Going for the thuddingly obvious non-insight as always. "You can't stop progress. Change happens. And it's not good for everyone. Sure, it's hard being an artist and getting paid in the Internet era, but that doesn't mean you should become a Luddite and sign off. It's not necessary to utilize Foursquare, but when you rail against Twitter and other new media you just look like a square. So, keep up to date with technology, or shut up!"

But did Prince rail against Twitter and other new media? No. What he actually said (or what the reporter remembers him saying—the story specified that no recording devices, or even handwritten notes, were permitted) was, "The internet's completely over. I don't see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won't pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can't get it. The internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you."

There are several components to that statement; some I agree with, some I don't.

"The internet's completely over" = clearly not true. Hard to understand in what sense he even meant it.

"I don't see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won't pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can't get it" = He's got a fair point here. Should he be expecting to get paid up front, like an old-fashioned label deal? No, probably not. But maybe he's the kind of artist who could make a deal like that with iTunes, or the Amazon MP3 store. After all, this is a guy who repeatedly fought with his label because they wouldn't let him release music at the rate he produced it. Clearly, if he could sort out a payment scheme that satisfied him, he'd probably be firing songs at the public like a musical version of the Deep Horizon well.

"The internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated" = he's right about MTV, but the comparison between the two isn't a valid one, obviously, because the Internet isn't a single thing, it's a conduit. Rhetorically and possibly mentally, he's confusing individual websites with the web that hosts them.

"Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you" = here's the nub. See, Prince is not just a cranky, semi-reclusive artist. He's also a religious fanatic, and I believe part of his aversion to information technology is in some way Bible-based. And there's no arguing with fanatics. So don't bother.

While you're laughing at Prince for turning his back on the Internet, though, remember AC/DC. You can't get their music on iTunes, eMusic, or at the Amazon MP3 store. But they've been selling out stadiums and arenas across the planet for two straight years in support of their first album in eight years, and the soundtrack to one of the biggest movies of 2010 was composed exclusively of their songs. So is there a way to have, or at least sustain, a career without the Internet? You bet there is.

THIS WEEK IN CLEVELAND

Fatalist Attraction
Entombed lead a new wave of old-school Swedish metal

Ask your average music fan to name the most important and influential group to ever come out of Sweden and the answer will be Abba. Ask a metalhead the same question, and he'll tell you about Entombed. Daniel Ekeroth — author of the obsessive, passionate, and personal genre history Swedish Death Metal — says, "The Scandinavian metal scene would never have exploded without them. They changed everything. They were way ahead of any other Swedish band around 1990, with better songs, better sound, and above all, they were much better musicians than the rest."

That about covers it. The band formed in 1987 as Nihilist, blending Discharge's raging punk with Motörhead's speed-crazed metal with a side of distinctive distorted guitar tone. Rejecting the crisp, martial discipline of U.S. death-metal bands like Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse, they pioneered a looser, more groove-oriented sound known as "death 'n' roll." After splitting with bassist Johnny Hedlund, who soon formed Unleashed, they changed their name to Entombed and released 1990's Left Hand Path.

The album created a sensation throughout the worldwide metal community almost as soon as it was released. Its raw power and ferocious intensity were most apparent in Lars-Göran Petrov's gravelly, roaring vocals. Instead of the guttural grunts and blood-gargling sounds of other death-metal singers, Petrov came at the listener like an enraged bear. And behind him, the band straight-up rocked, attracting listeners from across the global underground, a fan base that remains united to this day. As the frontman points out, "If we play festivals around Europe, there are punks and death-metal people, everyone just headbanging to it. It's good to connect those different people to each other."

Last month marked the 20th anniversary of Left Hand Path, but unlike Slayer and Megadeth — who are co-headlining a tour and playing their 1990 releases, Seasons in the Abyss and Rust in Peace, front-to-back — Entombed aren't planning any elaborate celebrations. "It actually just passed by us somehow," laughs Petrov.

They'd rather look forward. Though peers like Grave and Dismember quickly emulated their style — creating the impression that, like AC/DC or the Ramones, every album is more or less the same — Entombed tweaked their sound quite a bit over the years. Uprising (from 2000) threw some bluesy riffs and rock grooves into the sonic stew, 2001's Morning Star was sweeping and epic, and 2003's Inferno had a punky edge and a deliberately rough mix. The group has also covered songs by a wide range of bands (Venom, Kiss, Hüsker Dü, Alice Cooper, Stiff Little Fingers, and Bob Dylan, to name a few) that can be heard on 2002's two-CD Sons of Satan Praise the Lord.

The common denominator is a loose, live feel that Petrov says is a main goal. "We try to do it as good as we can, but you have to have that live feeling," he says. "If you record something in one take and it sounds good and it doesn't have to be perfect, then we just leave it that way. There's nothing wrong with being perfectionist, but it loses the spontaneity."

The only misstep Entombed ever made is 1998's Same Difference. At the suggestion of their new record company, they steered into an alternative-rock direction, with Petrov adopting a clean singing voice, and guitarists Alex Hellid and Uffe Cederlund cutting way back on their distortion. "We had a record label that wanted to try new things, and we're always open to new stuff," he says. "But I think it was too much astray from what we wanted. I wasn't too comfortable recording that."

Entombed haven't released an album since 2007's Serpent Saints — The Ten Amendments. The band isn't even seriously planning one at the moment, but Petrov says it's got some new songs. "We just gotta put them together," he says. "We don't want to rush and just put out an album because we have to. It's just a matter of sitting down, putting [the songs] together, and recording it. We go once or twice a week to rehearse, but we mostly rehearse old songs. But once we have time, we will sit down and concentrate on the new songs."

These days, there are young bands explicitly modeling themselves on Entombed's pioneering Scandinavian death-metal sound — like California's Fatalist, who even use the same font Entombed uses for their logo. Petrov knows about the youngsters, and it makes him laugh. "It is exactly the logo," he says. "I think it's great. Somebody's taking over — they're following in our footsteps. We have some bands here in Sweden that are holding the flag for old school. It's the new wave of Swedish old school."

HIGH ON FIRE POLISHES ITS METAL WEAPONRY

[From the SF Weekly.]

Oakland's (and possibly Earth's) heaviest band, High on Fire, is ready for its close-up. The trio's fifth studio album, Snakes for the Divine, is its first for the E1 label after several years on highly regarded metal imprint Relapse. The musicians also worked with a real producer for the first time in years.

On Snakes, the band's sound was shaped by Greg Fidelmann, who has worked on such high-profile metal discs as Metallica's Death Magnetic and Slayer's World Painted Blood. "He's actually a producer producer," says guitarist and vocalist Matt Pike, contrasting Fidelmann with Steve Albini and Jack Endino, who worked on 2005's Blessed Black Wings and 2007's Death Is This Communion respectively. "Greg's a lot more hands-on."

The result is High on Fire's cleanest, most accessible album to date. Of course, the members keep their trademarks. Pike's vocals are a hoarse roar somewhere between Motörhead's Lemmy and the Melvins' Buzz Osborne with throat polyps, and the rhythm section of bassist Jeff Matz and drummer Des Kensel thunders like an avalanche. But each instrument occupies its own space, with room for subtle ornamentation. And Pike's guitar, one of the fiercest and most punishing axes in modern metal, has moments of surprising clarity. Indeed, from the album's first few moments, it's obvious this is a new stage in High on Fire's evolution — even if the title track begins with a high-pitched, buzzing riff that's naggingly similar to AC/DC's "Thunderstruck."

Pike laughs and owns up to the borrowing. "Not intentionally, but yeah, I kinda lifted a little bit of that," he says. "I thought it was so cool, and it's such a fun thing to play."

For the rest of its eight-minute running time, the song is a vintage High on Fire gallop, riffs landing like body blows from a 9-foot-tall steroid abuser. The album is jammed with the band's longest and most punishing songs (five pass the six-minute mark, and two run more than eight minutes). It also offers greater variation from the High on Fire crew. "How Dark We Pray" and "Bastard Samurai" are slower than anything the band has recorded since its 2000 debut, The Art of Self-Defense. "Every now and then it's good to slow down some," Pike acknowledges. "Jeff and I had a really wide span of tempos."

Pike is busy preparing for the band's first headlining U.S. tour in several years. "The way our management and booking agents are, they want us opening constantly," he says genially. Indeed, the group has been the first act of choice on Megadeth's 2008 Gigantour outing and on the recent Dethklok and Mastodon co-headlining tour, but Pike would like the chance to play for an hour straight for a change.

He'd also like to play fresh material this time out. "I'm two-thirds of the way through learning all of 'em so I can play and sing 'em live," he says of the new songs. "We're still working out the quirks. But by the time March rolls around, I'm pretty confident everybody will have their end of things in order."