__high notes

SALON CONTRIBUTORS ANSWER THE QUESTION: WHAT WAS YOUR MOST SIGNIFICANT MUSICAL MOMENT OF 1997?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BY CYNTHIA JOYCE | It's hard to summon feelings of nostalgia for a memory that still surrounds you, and in a year when music fans lost more heroes than they found (see: Laura Nyro, Fela Kuti) and lesser artists gained more credit than they deserved (see: Hanson), a top 10 list seems like an empty and static way to close it. Sure, it's easy enough to decide what the year's Important Releases were -- we've been covering them all year -- but what was the music that kept critics on their feet through too many opening bands, that kept them writing way past deadline in the hopes that they might convey a little bit of the passion they felt when they finally heard what they'd been waiting for?

We asked more than 25 writers and critics -- most of them Salon contributors, some of them writers whose musical tastes we were curious about -- what was their most significant musical moment of 1997. And when it was all said and done -- when the last word was in on the Spice Girls (they're just fun, dammit), and the last chapped hands stopped wringing over whether or not the Lilith Fair represented real progress for women, and the old folks proved they've still got it while the young folks screamed that they still wanted it -- the year wasn't remembered by these writers for its new releases, but for the personal epiphanies they inspired. For Gavin McNett, it was seeing Sleater-Kinney precursor Joan Jett dyked out in a New Jersey dive. For "Naked" author David Sedaris, it was watching doctors perform an autopsy of a 72-year-old while listening to heavy metal music. For Michelle Goldberg, it was attending the Lilith Fair -- and liking it. And for "High Fidelity" author Nick Hornby, it was appreciating how hard it is for good music to get any attention at all.

Reading through this collection of anecdotes, perhaps what is most interesting is that all of these writers -- some of whom, by their own admission, have grown a little jaded and weary at year's end -- still have heroes and idols who they're willing to stand behind. And not just because they're Important, but because their music moved them.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WHAT WAS YOUR MOST MUSICALLY SIGNIFICANT MOMENT OF 1997?

David Sedaris, author of "Naked" and "Holidays on Ice" (Little Brown):

I was at a medical examiner's office doing research for a magazine article I was working on, and they let me put on scrubs and watch an autopsy. What struck me was the music. The only fights the medical examiners ever have is over the radio -- it's just this little clock radio that's covered with blood. A 72-year-old man came in, and he was autopsied during a heavy metal mini-set, which included songs by Jethro Tull, Lez Zeppelin and Suzi Quatro. And then another doctor came in and changed the radio station. His case was a 22-year-old kid who had heavy metal tatooed all over what was left of his face. And he was autopsied to Kenny G and Toni Braxton. It just didn't seem fair.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Gavin McNett, Salon contributor:

Think of it: With the riches of two cities spread before me -- with New York's great, grimy treasure pit lying northwards and all the attractions of Philadelphia glittering on the southern horizon -- the closest I came this year to living the rock moment was in a steaming armpit of a Jersey stringtown bar.

If you're from here, you'll know the place I mean. It's a roadhouse off the legendary Highway 9 -- the one that's decorated with bad frescoes of Twisted Sister, Alice Cooper and a bunch of other, similar personages. Even if you're not from here, you probably know this place pretty well. It's the sort of heavy metal dive where crowds of blue-collar white kids used to go to be flattened by mass consumer culture -- just like blue-collar kids of all races now go to hip-hop shows. It's the club from Wayne's World, gone to seed.

So Joan Jett comes out. She's dyked-out like mad, with a blonde Eddie Cochrane 'do and a latex tank-top. She roars through some hits. Her band is an oiled, black machine -- tighter than anything I've seen in months, and louder than hell. They plow into the Replacements' "Androgynous." The crowd -- 40ish, mustachioed Jersey dudes, the occasional biker, big-hair chicks, people like that; not a queer-positive kinda crowd at all -- is CHEERING at all of this, like it's a huge, liberating relief for them to see a girl kicking ass and messing with gender boundaries and being all tough and assertive and all those things. And I'm thinking: Someone like Sleater-Kinney could never have pulled that off. 'Cause Sleater-Kinney (and Sexpod, the show's openers) have a certain archness about them. They'd sooner laugh at an ugly, mustachioed Jersey schmuck than laugh with him. But we're all schmucks of some variety or another, and if a seedy Jersey metal-bar crowd can put out for Joan Jett in a latex baby-dyke outfit, singing about queer power with a "The Goddess is Dancing" sticker on her guitar, then I have nothing arch to say this time, 'cause they were a worthier audience than I've ever been in my life.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Jim DeRogatis, author of "Kaleidescope Eyes: Psychedelic Rock from the '60s to the '90s" (Citadel Underground Series, 1996):

I am sitting on the floor with my wife and two musically obsessed buddies, who've been kind enough to traipse over one snowy evening bearing a couple of CD boomboxes and a 12-pack of Sam Adams (special Christmas brew, naturally) in order to experience the multi-disc set "Zaireeka" as its authors, the Flaming Lips, intended: the four CDs playing simultaneously, roughly synchronized by my count of "1-2-3-play!" blasting at us at a suitably rocking volume from four corners of the living room. The music is weird and wonderful, slippery and silly (no surprise, this being the Lips), and while I'm not altogether convinced that this is the radically different audio experience that the band has hyped it as, I do have to laugh at the hoops we've jumped through just to listen to a damn record. Who the hell listens to recorded music with friends anymore, post-Walkman and Discman? But the Lips have made us do it this way (even if you owned four CD players, you couldn't start 'em all at once); they've made us feel a little bit of community stemming from a tiny piece of plastic. Fun? Sure. Significant? Seems like a mighty high-falutin' word for it, but then I can't recall the last album that's done that for me.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Sarah Vowell, Salon's "Sound Salvation" columnist:

In 1997, I considered changing my answering machine message from it's usual banal greeting, "Hi. This is Sarah." to the more appropriate "Frank Sinatra Deathwatch. Leave your hearsay at the beep." Write one story in which you implore your broadcast media colleagues to avoid playing the second-rate "My Way" when Old Blue Eyes finally calls it quits (as I did), and your answering machine becomes a kind of Psychic Friends Network for doomy swingers nationwide. Let's just say that if Frank was in the hospital as often as the messages proclaimed, he wouldn't need a house anymore.

There was the flurry of messages when the editor of a certain New York-ish magazine was so convinced the man was at death's door she required her employees to wear beepers one weekend in order to hurry back to the office to put together a tribute rush-job if needed. There's the story of the Sinatra impersonator who became increasingly irate when his CBS profile didn't air because the show's producers wanted to air the segment post-mortem. But I wasn't totally convinced of the power of the media death wish until the online version of the Chicago Tribune posted Sinatra's obit for a full two hours with the date o' death marked, "Fill in the Blank." Well. Unless Sinatra's as unfortunate as his old pal Dean Martin (who died last year between Christmas and New Year's, after every year-end issue had gone to press), it was all for naught. Fill this in the blank: The man's a rock. A rock, I tell ya.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Nick Hornby, author, "High Fidelity," Salon contributor:

A lot of pleasure -- Ben Folds with strings at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, the Ron Sexsmith and Teenage Fanclub albums -- but significance is hard to come by in row G or a browser rack. The most beautiful piece of music I heard this year was a two-minute cue for "Our Boy," a harrowing BBC film starring Ray Winstone about a couple who lose a kid in a hit-and-run accident. Shortly after the funeral, Winstone's character, still wearing his suit, sees a group of kids playing football; he offers to go in goal, and spends an oblivious few minutes rolling round in the mud. It's an exquisite scene, and over the top of it my friends Neill McColl and Boo Hewerdine produced a correspondingly exquisite and bottomlessly empathetic piece of piano music. Here's the significance: The BBC executives didn't like the score, and they removed it, and no one will ever hear it. Another reminder, if you needed one, that great music has to fight its way through a lot of cloth ears before it reaches us, and that we should be eternally grateful that we ever get to listen to anything which is delicate and oblique and doesn't come wearing a Union Jack bikini.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Rennie Sparks, member of the Chicago band the Handsome Family, Salon contributor:

What was my most musically significant moment of 1997? Discovering Elton John on three TV channels at once and realizing that nobody gives a damn that "English Rose" and "Candle in the Wind" were penned by another man -- Bernie Taupin. At year's end, Elton John (who used a TelePrompTer to sing the lyrics to "Candle in the Wind 1997" at Diana's funeral) has been busy selling out London's Wembley Arena, shooting a cameo for the Spice Girls movie and preparing for knighthood. Meanwhile, Taupin is scheduled to play New Year's Eve with his side band, the Farmdogs, at an Italian restaurant in Los Angeles. Somebody send him a teddy bear, please.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Roni Sarig, Salon contributor:

I hate the thought that I'm turning into one of those boring "things-just-aren't-what-they-used-to-be" kind of people. I don't think I am, really, but this year's hip-hop repeatedly had me tempted to fall into that kind of nostalgia: First, there was the sound of Redman lagging behind the beat on his cover of "Rapper's Delight." The man sounds like he just can't keep up. A sign of our current skills-deficient era in rap? (A significant aside: Flipping through CDs at the local record store, I heard a teenage girl ask the guy behind the counter if they carry "Rapper's Delight." He asks if she wants the original or the cover. A bit thrown off, she says, "Oh, um, the original. You know, the one with Redman.")

And then comes Rakim, back from the '80s, with a great album that rubs his superior rhyme skills in the face of most younger rappers. And then it all starts to make sense when I see Puff Daddy reminiscing about "the good old days" on an MTV promo. He's talking about way back ... in 1989!? But then I hear an album like "Latyrx," by young Bay Area rappers Lateef and Lyrics Born, and I realize great rapping still exists -- just not on the pop charts.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Sean Elder, Salon contributor, editor of Total NY:

About eight years ago, I was visiting my friend Randall Koral in Paris; he wanted to have a dinner party to introduce me to his expat friends, music writers mostly. There was Jill Pearlman, a rock writer who split her time between there and New York; Mike Schwerin, the jazz critic from the International Herald-Tribune; and Nick Kent, the legendary NME writer who had played bass with the Sex Pistols (before being assaulted by Sid Vicious), inspired the opening to Elvis Costello's "Waiting for the End of the World" and had finally left London to avoid the drug life of his evil companions (read: Keith Richards and company). Problem was, Randy didn't cook, and after foolishly offering to make Mexican food (you find the fixings for enchiladas in Paris), I spent the evening rolling tortillas as he paraded the writers past me. I saw Nick -- a big-beaked Brit of very unParisian height -- for a nanosecond, and never got to hear any of those great stories.

Until now. Kent's best work is collected in "The Dark Stuff" (Da Capo Press, 1995) and is the single best volume of rock writing I've seen since "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung." Kent, in fact, was a disciple of Lester Bangs, and learned from him the art of going deeper and yes, darker: Profiled within are the dark princes of rock, mad dogs and anguish-men: Brian Wilson, Iggy Pop, Syd Barrett, Brian Jones -- the list goes on. Best of all, Kent revises his own work and revisits his old subjects (Costello, for one, admits his songs didn't make sense because he was hiding his marital infidelities in his lyrics -- shades of "Norwegian Wood"!). It also contains the best description of Shane McGowan I've ever seen: "He has a rare talent for mixing the Byronic with the moronic." How like rock.