2023-06-25 07:00:00
I was in the car with my kids, listening to the Beach Boys. I chose some of my favorite songs: “Wendy”, “Girl Don’t Tell Me”, “Let Him Run Wild”. But when I played “Wild Honey,” the guys cocked their heads. “Why did they launch that?” asked one of them. The main voice sounded strange to him. TRUE. Something wasn’t right.
Carl Wilson’s performance of that song is not your typical Beach Boys lead vocal. You can hear him struggling to hit notes, sometimes barely making it. There is vocal tension and unmistakable imperfections of intonation. But the Beach Boys, a famous vocal group, decided to go with that interpretation.
For me, it’s the imperfections that make that recording great. I was a teenager when I first heard it. It gave me the feeling I got from, say, Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” or the punk rock of Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ “Blank Generation.” Raw, not overly behaved, things that sounded like how I felt. Defective, but entirely alive. And surely the defects were where I saw myself reflected. They were recorded at a time when technology was not yet capable of making the type of corrections that can be made today. But my children grew up in a digital age, when corrections can and usually are made.
When the ability to achieve something closer to perfection—or correct an imperfection—is widely available, most people choose to correct it. Who doesn’t want to sound or look better?
But when music becomes too sanitized, listeners lose the opportunity to connect their imperfections with those of the music, the human traces that might otherwise reach the ear and bury themselves in the heart. The effect is the same when the exaggerated realities we find on social media leave people who feel their own unfiltered humanity at a distance, isolated.
I’m not suggesting an outright rejection of corrections, but I am advocating a more conscious balance.
I wouldn’t want to hear the Beatles’ debut or Stevie Wonder’s “Innervisions” corrected in the way I’m describing here. That would alter the moods, the meanings, the energy, the uneven rhythm and breath of things as we know them. Sometimes the drums speed up because of the emotion of a song, sometimes a singer’s tone drifts because that’s where the feeling takes them. If we had “corrected” it, the music would have moved further away from where we live.
There is a moment in popular music history that, for 40 years, has been one of the best examples of an artist choosing to leave a recording imperfect: Bruce Springsteen’s sixth album, “Nebraska.” It’s one of the great left turns in American music. Springsteen’s previous release, “The River,” was his first No. 1 album. He was on the verge of reaching superstar level. Instead, he released a recording too crude to be played on commercial rock stations.
Because? He told me in an interview for my book regarding the making of the album that he felt it mightn’t be “done better” and still manage to convey the turbulence he had captured. So he didn’t correct what he might have easily done.
Joel Selvin’s 1982 San Francisco Chronicle review of “Nebraska” is revealing: The album “is a raw document, rough edges intact and so intimately personal that it’s surprising he even played the tape for anyone else, much less release it as an album,” he wrote. It was a very positive review.
Many artists look to “Nebraska” to remember what it sounded like when a prominent artist, at the peak of his career, had stories to tell in songs that suffered when he tried to correct the recordings that conveyed those stories.
As Springsteen told me, “Every time we tried to make it better, we lost the characters.” The fragility of him, his humanity, the conflicts and problems of him: you mightn’t hear them when he was cleaning the recordings, not the way Springsteen wanted. So he released the album as is, flawed. It was recorded on a cheap cassette tape and mixed on a boombox that didn’t work well. And that’s what you heard.
When I was a teenager, it felt like “Nebraska” was telling me: you can do this. Steely Dan recordings didn’t have the same effect. The same with “Rosanna” by Toto and the soundtrack of “Carros de Fuego”. “Nebraska” was dirty and told scary stories. But she felt very close to the world in which she lived. It was a recording I listened to, and I never felt left out.
WARREN ZANES
THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: IMPORTING DATE: 2023-06-06 22:50:08
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