Category Archives: Music

More Than a Meme: Revisiting the 1986 Guitar Classic ‘Crossroads’

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If you play guitar, and spend any amount of time online, it seems like the 1986 movie Crossroads, will eventually find you. Whether it’s a gif of the epic showdown between Steve Vai and Ralph Macchio, or some joke about the movie comparing it to Karate Kid, it feels a bit inevitable.

Yet somehow, even though I’ve been a musician in some form or another since elementary school, I’d never seen it. But it was free to watch on Tubi so I decided to give it a shot.

Boy oh boy, I was not disappointed.

It might be pretty easy take one look at Ralph Macchio’s dated hairstyle, and the ridiculous swagger he seems to infuse into his every movement during the beginning of the film, and dismiss Crossroads as just a weird artifact from an even weirder time (aka the 80’s). Ry Cooder, who wrote the film’s award winning soundtrack, has said the film “went down the tubes” and Wikipedia says the film only grossed 5.8 million which probably did not cover the cost of making it.

But once the film actually gets going, it ends up being quite enjoyable.

Joe Seneca’s character, Willie Brown, toes a hard line between wise old blues master, and cunning con artist. Until the last third of the movie we’re never really sure if things are as he says they are.

The myth and legend surrounding ‘The Blues’ has always been an interest of mine, so it was impossible not to get swept away the story. Macchio’s Eugene ‘Lightning Boy’ Martone makes an easy audience stand in, also fascinated with the blues and somehow able to track down the infamous Willie Brown, who (in the movie) traveled with legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson.

In college I read a biography of Robert Johnson for a class (but now that I look for it on my shelf I can’t find it). I thought it was very interesting how this film imagined his life, and how they incorporated the crossroads legend into it.

In reality, Robert’s life as a traveling blues musician likely meant that long stretches of time might pass between when he had first arrived in a town, and when he might come back. Blues musician Son House remembered Johnson as a little boy who was a competent harmonica player, but embarrassingly bad at guitar. When House heard him next, likely about two years later, Johnson had acquired a more mature sound, likely from studying with Isaiah “Ike” Zimmerman.

And at the time, playing secular music in opposition to liturgical music, already meant that you had sold your soul to the devil. It is not hard to see how, after not seeing Johnson for so long and him returning with such skill, made the legend that he had gone to the crossroads to sell his soul for guitar mastery. Johnson’s song “Crossroad“, though never mentioning the devil in the lyrics, probably encouraged the myth, as did his song “Hellhound on My Trail“.

While Willie Brown is mentioned in Johnson’s lyrics, and played guitar on a few of Johnson’s recordings, I haven’t seen anything that points to them traveling together. It seems that Willie Brown’s character is probably more based on Johnny Shines, who traveled with Johnson from 1935 to 1937.

But these artistic licenses just bring the story together into a more cohesive whole.

Only one scene sort of took me out of the film and that was when Jami Gertz’s character, Frances, (slight spoiler) leaves to continue her own journey out to L.A. Machio standing in the pouring rain looking so depressed really just seemed a bit over the top to me, despite the whole vibe of the movie being a bit overdone. And that it’s this event that gives “lightning boy” the sorrow he needs to really become a bluesman just felt a bit bad. Like her whole character was just to move that one plot forward? Maybe it’s technically not a fridge, but it has that feeling.

Give Crossroads a Watch?

Ultimately, I’d say yes. Whether you’re a guitarist/musician or not, the film has a certain fun to it, and though I had a few critiques, it holds up pretty well (despite being almost 40 years old!).

If you ARE a guitarist or musician, then I’d say it’s absolutely homework. Even if just to help you better understand all the memes!

That’s all I have this week! Has anyone watched this movie before? What was your favorite part? Do you listen to much blues? Who’s your favorite blues musician? As always, please leave your thoughts in the comments. I look forward to talking about this one!

Until next time!

I’ve Read 500 Books! Let’s Celebrate With a Review of Andrew Ford’s The Shortest History of Music

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According to Goodreads, I’ve read 500 books!

I’m only at 450 posts on the blog, so somewhere along the way I must have missed some lol (also not all my posts here are about books so I’ve really missed some lol).

Anyway, The Shortest History of Music… by Andrew Ford has been on my radar since I finished The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs back in June of this year. My library system had a copy which I checked out right away, and then just sort of held onto it for like five months . . . Ooops.

But much like TSHotD felt like a sort of intro course you might take in college, so too was Shortest History of Music a pretty broad spectrum of musical topics crammed into a neat 221 pages. I was lucky enough to be able to take a few music history courses back in college, covering Classical Music, World Music, and Jazz, Blues, Pop and Rock History (interestingly the jazz and blues history courses were in my English dept classes), but I was a music undergrad a little over a decade ago now, so I was very curious to find out how my own knowledge would stack up, and to find out what “the kids” are learning these days.

Turns out, quite a bit.

The subtitle for this book is: “From Bone Flutes to Synthesizers, Hildegard of Bingen to Beyonce — 5,000 Years of Instrument and Song“

That is quite a bit of time to sum up, and Ford approaches the task from a few viewpoints:

  • its cultural impact (the tradition of music),
  • its form (notation and technique)
  • its economic impact (sale of music)
  • its elevation (modernism)
  • its capture (recording tech)

If you’ve noticed this list looks quite a bit like Ford’s table of contents, you’d be on to something. I basically just tried to put that table of contents into my own words after reading the book. Obviously the description of the section on modernity is a bit weak, but that is more just a failure of my ability to contextualize it, not the writing itself. If anything, Ford writes one of the most insightful definitions of Modernism I’ve read yet:

“. . . excitement for the new tempered with nostalgia for what is lost.” pg 189.

Ford is writing here about a piece called ‘Piano Burning’. The score for this piece instructs the performer to light a piano on fire, and to play whatever they want until they can no longer play the piano. Ford notes that the composer Annea Lockwood, has described stagings of the piece tended to “begin in a carnival atmosphere but would invariably end with the audience falling quiet to listen to gentle crackles of the fire, as though in mourning for the instrument.”

I certainly did not learn about that in music school.

I also quite enjoyed this book’s assertion that:

“Operas tend to change composers. The dramatic imperative, the need to tell a story, to communicate dialogue to an audience: These are useful distractions, and artists are most themselves when they are least self-conscious.” pg 160.

This line is in reference to Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde in which the composer had begun experimenting with a unique approach to chromatic harmony. What I love about the line, is that it seems to hint at the same conclusion I reached towards the end of Part 1 of my review of The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. The best music, the music that survives, tells a story.

Focused as he was on telling the story, Wagner’s craft was allowed to flourish in the background, uninhibited by the normal forms or ‘rules’ music is ‘meant’ to follow. The music that was made was the music that best suited the tale.

I spent a long time thinking about how this works in reverse as well. When writing, is there a kind of musical imperative that seeps into story? In poetry, it would seem the answer is obviously yes, but how about in just prose?

This post is getting a bit long so I’ll quickly just list a few other high points of the book and some things I’d like to research further because I’ve finished this book (and of course I do have one criticism).

Mostly, I think this book does a pretty good job of pulling from a broad spectrum of musical experience. Within its pages we learn about musical traditions from all over the world, whether it be sixth century Chinese guquin, or fifteenth century Spanish vihuela. A big swing I think this book attempts to take is in closing the gender gap in Classical music. More traditional music history texts focus on the men (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven etc.) while ignoring the women. This book allows for a wider view, including names like Fanny Mendelssohn, Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi, Harriet Wainwright and Pauline Viardot. I was particularly interested to learn about — from genres outside of classical music — Piedmont blues musician Elizabeth Cotten, and gospel guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

My only real critique of this text, is that — even though the book purportedly wants to go in the opposite direction — the parts of this book that felt more well researched and nuanced in their arguments were the parts of the book that talked about classical music. Ford spends about a paragraph on almost all of rock’n’roll, and doesn’t really talk about Hip Hop at all aside from mentioning how popular it is. It would seem that if it is one of the most popular forms of music of all time, it would warrant a bigger chunk of the book.

Give ‘The Shortest History of Music’ a Read?

Despite my one criticism, I’d say yes. Ford’s writing is extremely readable, and this author has a great sense for how to weave many smaller compelling stories into one — 5,000 year old — narrative. Ford’s insights into capital M Modernity, and the importance of storytelling in music really resonated with me. Also there were about a thousand things I noted down to google later.

Even with a (IMHO) solid background in music history, I found that The Shortest History of Music still had quite a bit to teach me, and I genuinely hope that THIS is the text colleges will begin using for music courses. It seems up-to-date in its information and research, and posits a wide view of scholarship on the subject.

That’s all I have for this week. Has anyone read this one before? What are your favorite genres of music? Your favorite songs? Do you have any favorite stories that incorporate music? Or any music you feel tells a great story?

Leave your thoughts in the comments. I’m looking forward to talking about this one!

Until next time . . .

My Other Hobby: A Musical Tribute to Jerry Garcia for #Blaugust 2025

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Well, it’s the third week of #Blaugust, and I have a vague notion that it is during his part of the month that we begin talking about other things we do besides blogging. I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog (most notably in last Blaugust’s What I Do To Stay Creative post) that I’m learning a bit of guitar.

Some folks reading this blog may also know that I’m a bit of a Grateful Dead fan. At this point, I’m decades into my fascination with their music, the details of which have been briefly documented in my Secrets of Fennario post. Since last Saturday (August 9th, 2025) marked 30 years since founder/guitarist Jerry Garcia passed away, I decided to do a little tribute, and play one of my favorite Dead tunes for everyone.

Here’s how it went. Enjoy!

Any Dead Heads on the blog? What should I cover next? Any Jerry Garcia inspirations or even memories related to this amazing music? Leave your thoughts and stories in the comments. I love talking about this!

Until next week . . .

Secrets of Fennario: A Review of ‘The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics’ (Pt.1)

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During my 2024 End of Year Book Tag I mentioned I’d like to review some Grateful Dead literature here on the blog, so here I am, making good on that . . . sorta.

As I sat down to read through David Dodd’s massive (512 pages) The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics I was shocked to see just how large The Dead’s repertoire really was. As best I could count, there are 184 songs in the table of contents which Dodd cites as “original lyrics written for the Grateful Dead”, or “traditional tunes and covers . . . {which} play a large part in giving context to the other songs.”

I’ve seen sources online which claim the Dead have played somewhere around 450 unique tunes in the course of 30 years. Given how long it’s taken me to learn passable versions of just 3 songs on the guitar, these numbers are definitely bending my mind.

In any case, all that this means is that I’ll be tackling the review in parts, and as I ponder what to write about for part 1 (roughly the first 100 or so pages of the book), it occurs to me that these posts will probably end up being less and less about the actual book itself — which is incredible in its detail and comprehensiveness — as time goes on, and more about the tunes annotated within.

My method for going through this gargantuan list is pretty simple. Listen to each song and read the lyrics as it plays, then go back and read the annotations. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that The Dead did not always stick to the same lyrics during performances and of course the song lengths can vary substantially from concert to concert. Mostly, I’ve tried to combat this by finding either the “album version” or (if possible) some kind of recording of the first known performance, both of which are usually listed in the annotations.

And since it just feels like the thing to do, I’ll preface the rest of this post with just a little history of my own journey with the Grateful Dead’s music, so we’re starting from the same point (I promise it will be brief . . . ish).

I first remember hearing the Grateful Dead while jamming with a friend I met in my UNIV100 class my first year of college. He burned a CD for me of his “greatest hits” which I enjoyed often, but didn’t really think much about throughout the rest of my college career. After I had graduated, another friend and I got to talking (likely at a party) about some other songs of theirs which I had never heard.

During that part of my career, I had to complete some fairly rote tasks during the early part of my day, and so I had long hours during which I was technically working, but mostly just abusing my free Spotify account. At my friend’s recommendation, I explored (what I thought was) a lot of the Dead’s catalog (other memorable listens during that time were anything Daft Punk or LCD Soundsystem). By the time that work ended up getting automated, I had moved on to a new job, and had a playlist of about 18 songs which I considered my “Dead Favorites”, and this set list sorta became my whole knowledge of the Grateful Dead for many years until I watched Amazon Prime’s documentary, Long Strange Trip, somewhere around when it came out in 2017.

I should also mention that I did manage to see Dead and Co. at Bonaroo in (I think) 2016 which was its own sort of crisis because up until that point, I had no idea that John Mayer played with them and while I have accepted this fact now, it was pretty hard to reconcile in the moment hahah.

All of this to say, up until I’d watched Long Strange Trip, I had enjoyed The Grateful Dead’s music, but knew virtually nothing about their history. Even after watching all six parts of the miniseries (at this point several times), it can still be a little hard to keep a timeline straight, and even who is in the band at any given moment seems fluid enough to cause some confusion (see John Mayer crisis from earlier hahah).

Wanting, but not knowing where to turn for an “official” history, The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics seemed as good a place as any to start my attempt to firm up the narrative. After 100 or so pages, results are mixed, but it has opened my eyes to just how many artists, writers, poets and musicians the Dead were in contact with even at just the start of their career (I’m somewhere in 1969; the books starts in 1965).

One figure who was mentioned in Long Strange Trip but had remained somewhat enigmatic to me over the course of my listening, was lyricist Robert Hunter. As it is an annotated book of lyrics, it only makes sense that he would play a part in the work. He’s written the forward for the 50th Anniversary Edition (2005) and I really enjoyed getting to hear from him about the band and his viewpoint on various events (he has a recently published “lost” manuscript (with a forward by John Mayer no less) which I’m excited to read called The Silver Snarling Trumpet). However, I love that he mostly remains out of the conversation when it comes to his lyrics, letting author David Dodd derive whatever allusions he can, and leaving interpretation of the lyrics up to the fans themselves.

As for the annotations themselves, I’m massively impressed by the thorough job Dodd has done on these lyrics. It is easy to tell that this was a labor of love for Dodd, and I am continually amazed at the careful way in which these annotations were completed. No reference is too small, no allusion too obvious.

Though it can be somewhat bizarre at points as one moment you’ll be reading a deep and insightful history of symbology related to roses, and the next page an actual recipe for a kind of cake. But weirdly, it kind of works. I’ve found I don’t really need a note for a lot of the more literary references (things like the Chesire cat which shows up in a lot of songs), but am thankful for the notes when it comes to things like “a Buck Dancer’s choice”, which is apparently a catch all for various types of dances from 1880’s.

Also, a revelation for me was that many places like Fennario (from The Dire Wolf) and St. Angel (from Black Peter) — neither of which are real places — make up a kind of mythical geography original to Grateful Dead songs (for this effect in reverse, see Classic Rock Connection, a post I wrote on allusions to Grateful Dead music in GRRM’s Game of Thrones). I’ve always thought that one of the Grateful Dead’s most unique and inspiring qualities was their ability to tell stories through their music. I’m even more excited to think that ability goes one level deeper into actual worldbuilding . . .

I’ll wrap up this long strange post with one more note about stories. This book is chock full of them. Whether it’s a few brief lines about guitarist Bob Weir throwing a water balloon at a cop, or accidental lyricist John Phillips who improvised the words to Me and My Uncle during a “tequila night” and had no recollection of the song until he started receiving royalty checks in the mail, the book is filled with a thousand little gems which form a kind of Grateful Dead anthology that builds to so much more than just a bunch of lyrics to a bunch of tunes.

One set of annotations, for Morning Dew by Bonnie Dobson (which The Dead covered often), gave the inspiration of the song as:

“. . . a gathering of friends, and toward the end of the evening a discussion had ensued about the possibilities and the outcome of a nuclear war . . . It took the form of a conversation between the last man and woman — postapocalypse — one trying to comfort the other while knowing there’s absolutely nothing left.” pg 33.

I know I had heard the Dead’s take on this song before, but I don’t know that the lyrics had sunk in.

Walk me out in the morning dew, my honey
Walk me out in the morning dew, today
Can’t walk you out in the morning dew, my honey
I can’t walk you out in the morning dew today

If you’re up for having a full mental breakdown, change the first words to something about going to the movies, or the even the grocery store, and you’ll realize that we’ve already lived a version of this song. After nearly 50 years, it could be just as easily about the lockdown during Covid as it is about a nuclear attack.

I want to save something to write about for the next part, and don’t want to end the post on a downer, so I’ll finish with the insight I took from this experience which goes back to the quality of The Dead’s storytelling which I mentioned above. People wonder what it is about The Dead’s music that has built such zealous fan base (which seems to be having a resurgence) which keeps renewing itself generation after generation, and all I can think of is that it’s the adaptability of their story telling. I had a kind of experience during Morning Dew, but most if not all of their songs tell stories in this way. Stories which we can imagine ourselves in, even if we’re years away from what they’re supposedly “about”.

Give The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics a read?

As a long time fan of their music, of course I’m going to say yes. And if you’re already a fan, I think it will be a great way to deepen that connection. For any who aren’t fans already, or unsure what they think, it could be a way to experience something different. I’ll admit there are quite a few Dead songs that are bordering on unlistenable, but the ones that are great become so much more so with this book in hand. Dodd does an incredible job detailing the allusions, references, stories and meanings behind these lyrics. And even though I’m just a hundred pages in, it has already been something of a transformative experience.

That’s all I have for you this week. Any Dead Heads reading this blog? What’s you’re favorite tune? Any personal stories you want to share about the music? Anyone NOT a fan of the Dead reading? Would love to hear your thoughts as well!

Post em in the comments! Until next time!