Xgau Sez: April, 2025

Essential pre-internet reference works, El Lay vs L.A., more music from the Great White North, de gustibus non disputandum est, roll over Beethoven, and party politics briefly considered.

Hi Bob, I wonder what some of your essential pre-internet reference works were. Back before Google, what books or resources did you keep around and refer to regularly as you wrote the Consumer Guide or long-form pieces—whether for genre history, artist catalog, music theory/terminology, chart information, or anything else? — Jay Thompson, Seattle

Joel Whitburn’s guides to the Billboard charts have always been valuable. I still keep them on my desk’s bookshelf, although I see that the unbound, stapled, pamphlet-style first edition without which I couldn’t have written the ‘70s CG book that made me slightly famous, is missing its first and final pages, so tattered it now starts with Avalon and ends with Welch. The Whitburn I still use is The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits. I also keep The Trouser Press Record Guide close at hand.

Why do you call it “El Lay?” — Lonnie, Boston

This New York chauvinist gibe was concocted by Village Voice fashion writer Blair Sabol. As an unbowed NYC chauvinist I couldn’t resist it but will note that this was well before the flowering of such (note spelling) L.A. punk-era bands as X, the Minutemen, L7, Black Flag, NOFX, and my special faves the Descendents. El Lay is or should I say was about the biz, which I always made room for as well despite my continuing skepticism about the Laurel Canyon folkie-virtuoso sensibility, which helped generate plenty of good music even so.

Why isn’t THE BAND on your list of great Canadian artists? Yes one of them, Levon Helm, was American but their formative years were playing in Toronto. Moreover, there’s something very Canadian about them, despite the fact that they’re sometimes classified as “Americana.” By the way, the late Garth Hudson was awarded the Order of Canada. — Lawrence Casse, Toronto

Pure oversight, obviously—an oversight reflecting the inconvenient fact that I’ve always respected them more than I’ve liked them, although I do have a dim memory of being surprised at how much I enjoyed hearing them after seeing a movie featuring them that’s also a dim memory. One reason is that I’ve never found even one of them a remarkable singer, another that I’ve never thought either their songwriting or their groove all that either. The only album of theirs I actively liked was never Consumer Guided, at least in part because it came out precisely when I was breaking up with Ellen Willis, an all too engrossing endeavor: 1969’s eponymous, as they like to say, The Band. If this answer hasn’t perturbed you I suggest you look over the Consumer Guide reviews they inspired. The corrective to this disinterest is Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train, where the Band plays a major role. After which you might take a look at Barney Hoskyns’s considerably less idyllic Woodstock book Small Town Talk. Not exactly a utopia, that town.

Why do you dislike progressive rock music so much when the genre has brought so much amazing music to my ears that I would have never heard in any other genre of music? There’s no way that music this beautiful and emotionally affecting can be bad. — Brent Dubroc, New Orleans

For starters, de gustibus non disputandum est. Like what you like. But prog is pretentious by proud self-definition and too often utterly devoid of anything I would call groove. If you actively enjoy its style of full-of-itself and have managed to reside in the Groove Capitol of the Universe without developing a deep-seated craving for groove itself, a peculiarity you clearly share with millions of others who prefer the technical skills of such prog drummers as Yes’s Bill Bruford, none other than Genesis’s Phil Collins, ELP’s Carl Palmer himself, and Lord help you Kansas’s Phil Ehart, enjoy if enjoyment is what that feeling is. This major Ziggy Modeliste fan would much rather feel his lungs expand as his mind taps its foot and his favorite person in the world dances around the dining room.

First of all I want to wish you a happy birthday—we share the same one [April 18, ed.]. I’ve been listening to a lot of classical music lately. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Vivaldi, and Haydn continue to get listening time. I know you don’t review many classical recordings. Still you clearly have knowledge of the music by your references in reviews of various artists such as Yes and Eric Carmen. Do you find yourself listening to any classical these days and if so what composers? — Nathaniel Lathy, Columbus, Ohio

I own a fair amount of classical music that came in the mail but just about never play it. I could say I like Stravinsky and Bach and Vivaldi and it would be true enough, but that’s memory at best, although when I took it upon myself to read Proust at 17 my professor, a terrific old poet named Ramon Guthrie, told our little seminar that Proust was inspired by Beethoven’s C sharp minor quartet, which I listened to on earphones in the library and liked so much I bought it as an adult and have even played it a few times.

Have you ever voted Republican in any presidential election? — Daniel, Satu Mare, Romania

Nope, but maybe for senator or something. In 1968 I did vote for at least one Republican councilman I recall, named Don Weeden. The basically anti-electoral Ellen Willis did too. Our councilman, whose name has slipped my mind, was a Jewish Democrat who’d been around for decades and was no progressive. Of course, that was in 1968, by which time Republican John Lindsay was the relatively progressive mayor. And in 2000 I voted for Nader rather than Gore, which in New York meant nothing in the electoral college but in Florida might well have provided Bush with his tiny margin of victory. In retrospect, I think the fame Nader earned for his considerable consumer-protection and environmental achievements went to his head the way even earned and principled fame so often does and as a result wrecked our electoral politics. And I will add that I can’t imagine how a Romanian could follow all this detail.