Videos by American Songwriter
Gary Calamar
You Are What You Listen To.
A delight. This is music made by man who famously loves music, and that love is infectious. This is sonically dimensional – all groove, vocals, beautifully intricate tracks, propulsion and fun. A beloved radio personality here in Los Angeles, he’s always been adventurous with his tastes, while showing a healthy respect for tradition and artistry. Now comes his own music, and it’s exciting to hear. “Giddy” is an ode to joy, but not profound transcendent joy, more of that fun, goofy happiness best exemplified by the title, a diddy to being giddy. Built on a few intertwining riffs – sparked by good Latino horns and a deliciously ripe melody that is all about major chords sometimes dipping into minor – it’s like Jules Shear and Brian Wilson hand in hand. Layers and layers of rich vocals paint the picture with broad strokes drenched in rich reverb that would make John Lennon smile. To write any song that is about being happy is a challenge, but to balance it all on giddy is even tougher. Yet this is pure and right. “I can see you went to Yale but that doesn’t make you any smarter than me,” he righteously pronounces.
“The Last Revolution” is a song for all longtime music fans, for all hopeful cynics. It’s for those raised and nourished by our big collections of LPs and on the knowledge that music history unfolded right in our fingertips, in our bedrooms, and that what we experienced it through Dylan and the Beatles and the Stones and the rest of the momentous and the revolutionary. It’s a song that leads us to the logical conclusion that if music could change this profoundly, and impact the culture of our society so powerfully, that it could happen again. It gives us a real hope, when the world doesn’t, that it could contain a promise of a better world, on the day after the hard rain fell. It finds him in the basement with his turn-table and cassette tapes, admittedly “swayed by the public opinion.”
“She’s So Mid-Century” is a delightfully detailed ode to a lady with her timely feet planted firmly in the recent past, still doing speed, smoking cigarettes, reading Kerouac, all connecting us swiftly, as does the music, to these baby days of rock and roll. The drum track harkens back to when real drummers sat behind giant trap sets and played too much, but in their effusiveness ideally matched the expanded linguistics. You can see Keith Moon bashing away inside of this – his hair tossed, his big grin flashing. “Minimum Day,” written and sung with his daughter Zoe Calamar, is about the need to simplify, to get off the grid if only for a few minutes. Sung in low pedal tones similar to Leonard Cohen, and distanced with humor like Groucho and Woody Allen: “I swore I would never join a record club that would have somebody like me as a member.” “Back Door Man” is about getting in, and intentionally echoes Willie Dixon via The Doors and other back door men, with a great power-pop progression which would have fit perfectly on any of those first Elvis Costello albums. Both thematic and fun, it’s about the fundamentals of rock and roll – the beauty of E major to A major (everyone’s first guitar kiss). And which leads up that hidden stairway, the one only insiders and hipsters get to know, the eternal escape from convention, from the lines of pedestrians and civilians waiting, to the party within the party. It’s the secret to happiness in L.A., not where to go, or when, but how best to get in.
This is a delightful collection of music, and a great gift for music fans from a guy who’s been musically generous for many years. I look forward to what’s next.
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