Venerdì 5 Mar 2010, 11:06
To a certain degree we are all music snobs, aren’t we? So, the music snob in me tells me to get my damn tags right (as chance would have it, there is also a last.fm group that goes by that name). And before any music snob (including the one inside of me that I tried to kill several times but in vain…) thinks I don’t care too much for Noel Redding, Steve Nieve and Nils Lofgren, I will explain what causes my (everybody’s?) trouble with tagging the backing bands of famous “solo” artists.
As I dug deeper into the discography of Neil Young I figured out that some albums are credited to Neil Young (i.e. After the Gold Rush, On the Beach) and others to Neil Young & Crazy Horse (i.e. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Zuma). So far, so good. On Harvest, Neil Young is accompanied by a band that Young would name The Stray Gators. So why is Harvest not credited to Neil Young with The Stray Gators?! Furthermore, American Stars ‘n Bars and Comes a Time are credited to Neil Young but feature several songs that were recorded with Crazy Horse.
An even more problematic case is Elvis Costello & the Attractions, or Elvis Costello & the Imposters for that matter. This Year’s Model is recorded by Elvis Costello with the Attractions and as far as I’m informed some pressings credit the album to Elvis Costello, others to Elvis Costello & the Attractions. Wikipedia suggests that it is an Attractions album since it was recorded with the Thomases and Steve Nieve. But so is Brutal Youth and I have found no source that would credit this as an album by Elvis Costello & the Attractions. Furthermore, the song New Amsterdam is from the Attractions album Get Happy!!, but the single is an Elvis Costello solo release. I also have a problem with When I Was Cruel and Cruel Smile, the latter being an album of outtakes and alternate versions of the former album’s songs. Still, the former album is an Elvis Costello solo release, the latter says Elvis Costello & the Imposters on its cover.
I also struggle with Bruce Springsteen versus Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band although up until now I tagged the live albums as with the E Street Band and all studio albums as the Bosses solo releases. I can imagine having similar trouble with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Frank Zappa versus The Mothers of Invention as I am just discovering their music.
For now, I’m undecided how to handle this problem. I am strongly opting for tagging everything as Neil Young and Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen and so on and so forth, thereby neglecting the contributions of important musicians in the backing bands of those artists (that I do care is obvious given the fact that I spent this thirty minutes writing on a subject such as this, right?). In the end, would anyone care to tag Blonde on Blonde as a Bob Dylan & The Band album?! But then again, what about the cases where it seems to be obvious such as Frank Black versus Frank Black and the Catholics, Jimi Hendrix vs. The Jimi Hendrix Experience? I wouldn’t want to tag Electric Ladyland as an album by Jimi Hendrix as an solo artist.
A benefit of tagging everything that Declan Patrick MacManus ever touched is that I have a precise overview which songs and albums I prefer over others (as last.fm is kindly transforming our listening habits into charts, hooray!). The best would be, I reckon, to stop listening to all these nerdy artists from the past and dedicate myself to Hannah Montana (or would Miley Cyrus be more accurate? Damn!)