META-REVIEWS: Thin Lizzy, Neil Diamond

META-REVIEWS is where I take a huge, well-known album, but which I’ve not previously listened to, and review it. Sometimes I take liberties with the concept, but the key idea is, there’s something to be understood, and I’m out to understand it.

David B. Lyons is one of the four people responsible for the Beyond Yacht Rock podcast, which followed from being one of the people responsible for popularizing the term “yacht rock” via a Channel 101 series.

Over the course of Beyond Yacht Rock, it was clear that Dave’s tastes were broad and hardly centered on yacht rock. His absolute favorites - I think I’m characterizing correctly - were Thin Lizzy and Neil Diamond. This of course makes no sense whatsoever, and is precisely the kind of thing I was destined to try and understand.

The Yacht Rock guys play an outsized role in my thinking about several things: not just music, but also the idea of growing up in the Midwest as part of a late cohort of Generation X. I of course grew up in Rockford. They were all from different parts of Michigan. It’s not coincidence that when I went looking for all of the answers to the world, I went to Night Moves. I would expect them to go to Heaven Tonight.

Dave may well read this and think I’m a lunatic. He’d be right.

Thin Lizzy

Jailbreak (Vertigo / Mercury, 1976)

Jailbreak gets at the heart of what these META-REVIEWS were intended to be. Here’s an album deeply in the canon. Multiple songs still get classic rock radio play. But the canon is often arbitrary. Did these guys just have a couple good songs, or what? What made them different from some other band of the same vintage with multiple songs in the canon? A lot of us went through high school and bought Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd albums. Well, nobody in Winnebago bought a Thin Lizzy album in 1993. Yeah, we all heard “Jailbreak” plenty of times on WXRX. But I don’t think any of us ever really sat down and listened to it, and certainly not the whole damn album.

So I’m here to tell all of my former classmates: We were robbed! This is the album we should all have been listening to. We shouldn’t have been holding a birthday party for Jim Morrison, we should have been holding one for Phil Lynott. My god, at one point I bought a used copy of Hotel California. If we were going to embrace classic rock, big-arse guitars, and all of that rock star madness, why were we futzing around with Aerosmith? We could all have just been listening to Thin Lizzy.

If at this point you’re totally lost because Thin Lizzy is nothing more than a historical name to you, here’s an extremely brief background. Phil Lynott’s mother was Irish and his father was from Guyana. Phil was sent at a young age to live with his grandparents in Dublin. He was in multiple bands, forming Thin Lizzy in 1969. By the time of Jailbreak they were a four piece, sonically led by dueling heavy guitars, fronted by a skinny Black man with a bass and a huge afro.

There are multiple documentaries about Phil Lynott and Thin Lizzy. There’s a trove of writing out there. I’m not remotely equipped to try and expand on Thin Lizzy’s relevance. The idea that this was the biggest band out of Ireland in the 1970s when The Troubles were very much ongoing is fascinating, but I don’t have much grasp on the context. What I can do, though, is listen to their biggest, most important album, and try to understand what so many of us have missed out on.

Rock and roll can be big, and it can be loud, and it can be hard, and it can be heavy, but those are not all the same thing. By the late ‘90s there was a lot of music out there which was way heavier than what had come before it, but it wasn’t necessarily big or hard. Contrast some sort of dumb nu-metal with an originator of hard rock like Cream and it can be very disorienting.

Jailbreak cuts through a lot of that nonsense. You crank the stereo to 11, listen to “Emerald”, and everything else gets blown away. There’s also a lack of pomp to it all. A song like “Warriors”, in Led Zeppelin’s hands, might have been twice as long. Here it’s a hard-hitting, fully realized rock song, one which needn’t linger to make its point.

The album opens with “Jailbreak”, which means it opens with that chord. It’s a declaration of intent. Is there another opening second in rock which exceeds it? Maybe we should have caught wise, sat down and figued it all out.

“Jailbreak” has it all. There’s at least the veneer of menace - after all, this is a jailbreak we’re talking about. As the song goes on, the guitars alternately crunch and shred. The protagonist warns an unspecified girl not to be around, but later beckons “you, good looking female”. Is this guy a hero? An anti-hero? So much can be read into the song if that’s where you want to go with it.

Somewhat to my surprise, much of the album isn’t so hard-hitting. “Romeo And The Lonely Girl”, for example, even with a loud guitar interlude, is classic storytelling, centered around Lynott’s vocals. It’s even more evident on “Fight Or Fall”, which is as close as this album gets to a ballad. Hard rock bands often have vocalists reliant on being loud, on nearly yelling. That’s not the case here. The mythical Lynott was much more than just a fascinating-looking front man. He could hold things down without hystrionics.

Not that the album doesn’t have its share of hystrionics. “Warriors” is outright psychedelic, a spiraling, slashing guitar romp. It’s a slightly more challenging song, the kind of thing that doesn’t land in the canon unless you’re Zeppelin or Floyd. But it could have, and probably should have. And “Emerald”… more on that below.

I made a conscious decision here to listen to the album on its own, just filling in some biographical detail. I intend to watch one of the documentaries and read up more. But in this case I wanted to consider the music on its own. I have been reticent about throwing out what seemed like a lazy comparison to Hendrix. After Hendrix, who besides Lynott was so prominent as a Black man in rock ‘n’ roll through the ‘70s? But on “Warriors” in particular, Hendrix the singer is clearly being channeled. And, yes, it turns out that Hendrix was Lynott’s hero. But you didn’t need to know that to hear it.

The penultimate song is “Cowboy Song”, which I swear I’ve never heard on the radio, and for the life of me I can’t figure out how that’s possible. Absolutely everything is in here. This could be the template for classic rock. It’s eminently ridiculous - these guys are Irish, after all, singing about being real cowboys - and all the more glorious for it. Lynott’s voice is full of bravado one moment, tender and pleading the next. Who couldn’t fall for this? I imagine the whole thing as being the theme song to many young people’s lives in the mid-’70s. I can picture the song blasting across a crowd of 100,000 people like it was nothing.

And then the album ends with “Emerald”. This is triumphant guitar rock at its biggest and greatest. Thin Lizzy was not just Phil Lynott, and here as much as anywhere you most clearly here how dynamic this band could be. The interplay between guitarists Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson is everything you could hope for on a guitar-centered rock song. A song which can feel so epic, but still clock in at 4:04, is no mean feat.

Have you ever gone around to your friends and asked, if you could see any band, at any time, who would it be? And there are so many great possible answers to that question. Well, you need to add “Thin Lizzy, 1976” to the list of answers.

Jailbreak is not a perfect album, but is arguably well-served by that. There are things going on here which feel rushed, a little unscripted, and perhaps all the more vital for it. All of those classic rock albums I started buying on CD in the mid-90s are mostly gone from my shelves. But had someone turned me on to Jailbreak, I think it would have been formative, and would still be there. And as pointless as buying CDs may seem these days, this is the first album I’ve listened to as part of this META-REVIEWS silliness where I think, damn, I should really own this today.

As a side note: I’ve been sitting on this review, trying to finish it for a couple weeks. Bizarrely, last weekend, Pitchfork put out their own review of it. I’ll read it after I send this out to you all. I didn’t want to be influenced by what some “proper music critic” thinks… but I’m mighty curious as to how similar our takes are.

Now, though, we move on from the epic guitar rock to something quite a bit different. Or is it?

Neil Diamond

Hot August Night (MCA, 1972)

So... well… ahem.

If you go looking online you’ll find plenty of commentary about the album cover. It is, erm, kind of right out there to behold.

I mean. This was 1972. This was the ultimate middle of the road guy, right? What on earth?

Bear with me here:

In 1986, a couple of amateur filmmakers took video cameras to an arena parking lot in suburban Maryland. That night, Judas Priest and Dokken played at the arena, and the filmmakers were there to capture footage of the fans. Heavy Metal Parking Lot is a deserving cult classic, an absolutely fascinating slice of American life in 1986. Long hair, spandex, beer… in a word, freaks.

11 years later, they returned to the parking lot and did it all again. This time, though, the concert was Neil Diamond. And the people in the parking lot were much bigger freaks. Neil Diamond Parking Lot was included in a DVD reissue of Heavy Metal Parking Lot, and I first saw it circa 2006. I knew Neil Diamond was a big deal, but I was totally perplexed by the depth of devotion caught on film. Wasn’t he just this middle of the road guy? And we’re not talking Frank Sinatra here, right?

I was of course well-acquainted with much of his music, because he was an oldies staple by the early 90s; because he wrote multiple of the Monkees’ big hits; and because of Urge Overkill’s cover of “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon”. None of this however explained very much. Several years later when Eric Bachmann included a cover of “Solitary Man” on the Crooked Fingers EP Reservoir Songs, I suppose my interest was a little more piqued. But still. Neil Diamond. Right?

Now, of course, there was another cultural touchpoint: Neil Diamond’s appearance in The Last Waltz. Was he cool in the ‘70s and I never realized it? Or was he the least cool person that The Band invited? He was still just this middle of the road guy, right? How exactly did he wind up as part of all that?

As a young lad I had much more of a chip on my shoulder about things like “popular entertainment” and especially “pop music”. Neil Diamond, well, I suppose to the extent I thought about him critically at all, I imagine I just thought of him as music for middle aged squares. The overwhelming evidence - his actual music - did nothing to convince me otherwise.

In 2009, m’lady and I were in Northern Ireland. We rented a cottage. To the best of my memory, the cottage had no television, only a tape deck. And there were a handful of cassettes, but the only one that was of even remote interest to us was a live Neil Diamond album (not Hot August Night of course - then I wouldn’t be able to review it now!) The tape was goofed up so I had to use the pencil method to fix it. The result was that we were chilling in a wood cottage somewhere outside of Ballydoyle, listening to “Solitary Man” and “Red Red Wine”.

In 2012, we even went - on her birthday! - to see Neil Diamond at the arena. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have dreamt of doing that five years earlier. This was 40 years after Hot August Night, mind you, but the man was still the consummate performer. It didn’t feel like an oldies revue or anything like that. Frankly, I’m not sure what it felt like. I’ve seen plenty of arena shows, but I’ve never seen another performer in a category like that.

The Beyond Yacht Rock episode came years later. That’s when I first saw this album cover. And when it started to come together.

Neil Diamond has released 37 studio albums (!) and sold more than 100,000,000 albums worldwide (!!!) and if not for his retirement due to Parkinson’s and the pandemic, I imagine he’d still be out there. He’ll still be selling millions after he’s gone.

He has no single breakthrough album, but Hot August Night is as good a benchmark as any: double platinum in the U.S., and decuple platinum in Australia (that means 10x !) This was the period where, best as I can tell, he was at the absolute height of his powers; pretty much all of his most famous songs are present, and he was clearly already a well-honed performer. And he still had all that hair.

Up to this point I’ve written a hell of a lot about Neil Diamond without actually noting anything about the music on this album. Well, my approach here is almost exactly the opposite from how I approached Jailbreak. There I wanted to consider the album on its own. Here, I’m interested in sort of the abstract notion of an album as something other than a singular statement, as more of a snapshot of a phenomenon. Maybe this is a silly way to go, but you’re reading it, aren’t you?

The concert album Hot August Night is entirely culled from one show, part of a ten night stand at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. What I imagine is a completely rapt audience, their every emotional chords being played with as though a cat would play with a ball of yarn. It’s like a marionette show in reverse, where the audience are the puppers.

Is something mysterious happening here? Maybe not. As a songwriter, Diamond is more lyrical than the typical popsmith. There’s less reliance on meaty hooks and more use of softer turns of phrase. As a performer, he figured out how to expand upon all of this, creating what might ostensibly be background music, except it’s designed to force you to pay attention.

Here’s a fascinating biographical nugget: Neil Diamond was an NYU student in pre-med, there on a fencing scholarship of all things; he was even part of the 1960 NCAA championship fencing team. Well, why wouldn’t the attributes necessary to be a champion fencer translate to being a champion songwriter and performer? Balance, strength, control, precision. Listen to this concert, and all of those elements are present.

There’s another thing pervading his music: an unmistakable sense of optimism. Think about his biggest hits: these are mostly happy songs, delivered in an upbeat manner, coupled with a certain gravitas his voice provides. He doesn’t hang out way over yonder in a minor key. Even when he does go there - “Solitary Man” for example - there’s a resilience in the delivery.

A lot of those adjectives dance around what I think must be the key one: Neil Diamond is a remarkably masculine singer. Really, we are talking Frank Sinatra here after all, perhaps with not quite the same level of gravitas, but as arguably a more talented songwriter, and maybe even a more relatable figure. Sinatra was the Chairman of the Board - a powerful but distant kind of figure. Diamond was “the Jewish Elvis” - really, I can’t make that one up - but I didn’t even know that until I started writing this up. I’d never heard a nickname at all. I mean, he was already named Diamond. How do you top that? He didn’t need to represent anything.

So what you have here is a man who is at once very handsome, very approachable, very sensitive, very masculine; but he’s also an AM radio popsmith. Can you get sex in the mix? Well, yes, yes you can. It was there all along. I wouldn’t say it was coded, exactly, but for those of us who grew up thinking of these songs as oldies from the day they were recorded, there sure wasn’t any semblance of anything cool or sexy going on. But we just didn’t get it. Ten years on from Hot August Night, Neil Diamond was still remarkably viable, still releasing platinum albums. The hair had long since been cut, the denim suit retired, but he was hardly an oldies act. He’d simply honed the act, moved on to another level of sophistication.

If you listen closely enough to this performance, there’s an added element, most notable as we get closer to the end of the show. He’s practically growling by the time he gets to “Cracklin’ Rosie”. The way he’s straining his voice in “Holly Holly” makes him sound even more masculine. He’s not merely toying with the audience anymore, he’s dragging them around. But it’s still Neil Diamond, there’s still that even keel to it all. The idea that he started off as a songwriter and not a performer himself is hard to fathom when you listen to some of this.

He leaves the stage, comes back for the encore, and begins “I Am… I Said”. I noticed an interesting quality to the arrangement here. This is a song where the original album version may as well be definitional to “lite rock” - I swear it makes me think I’m sitting in the lobby of a chiropractor’s office in 1989 while my stepmom is getting her subluxations addressed. But live, there’s something just a little bit more going on, and not just with Diamond’s delivery. It’s uncompressed. It doesn’t run the danger of leaving you feeling cold. It might not quite be what we think of as rock ‘n’ roll, but it’s not Sinatra either.

Hot August Night might best be understood as a snapshot of pop music itself taken to a particular excess. This was 1972, the year that Nixon resoundingly won reelection. There is no whiff of the political Sixties in play here. But the album, reflected by its cover, is a clear continuation of the non-overtly-political Sixties, a cohort which had to some extent abandoned “change” while nevertheless going all in on “change”. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that Neil Diamond was somehow a subversive genius, and maybe it’s not quite accurate to say that he was at all threatening to the dominant paradigm. But if he was no threat, then perhaps that says less about him than it does about how much the paradigm had already changed.

I still believe that a lot of what passes for “pop music” is utterly disposable, essentially manufactured in a lab, the musical equivalent of “natural flavors”, of heavily processed comfort foods. Now, if it so happens that a cracker with 40 ingredients is your favorite food, maybe it’s hats off to the creator. But does that make the creator a chef? Is that even a proper distinction?

And so what of Tin Pan Alley, of the Brill Building, of the likes of Leiber and Stoller? What about their collaborators, the pop groups of the early ‘60s? Or, on a different path, the songwriting factories out of Nashville, and the singers who cashed in? This wasn’t all just processed sugar, right? This was real music, right? It just had a different way of coming about than the dudes banging away in the garage until they could string some chords together. Is it necessarily less authentic? What does that even mean?

I think what makes Neil Diamond so fascinating is that he wasn’t some kind of calculation. He didn’t have to put on airs. It’s easy to imagine record executives tripping over themselves trying to figure out how to create the next Neil Diamond. It’s also understandable if you don’t associate schmaltziness - and there’s plenty of that to go around with these songs - with gravitas, and just can’t reconcile the two. But that’s what he pulled off. And for many years following Hot August Night, women were swooning their way in and out of the arena.

The last track of the album, “Soolaimon / Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show”, is a spiraling, epic finale which, weird a statement though it might be, sells me on why Neil Diamond wound up on stage as part of The Last Waltz. I’m strangely reminded of the Rolling Thunder Revue, to the point where I almost wonder if this isn’t what Bob Dylan had in mind. This is no simple pop music, and in the end you’re left thinking none of the rest of it was either.

Distilled over time, it’s perhaps inevitable that a kid would just hear the AM Gold of it all. But Neil Diamond was - and will ever be - a most incredible thing: a gigantic rock star who just doesn’t happen to play rock music. Who was a bigger star than Sinatra? Ahh, but he wasn’t exactly a rock star - those didn’t exist yet. I think of the very weird arguments about who “should” be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I actually see Neil Diamond as a key transitional figure in that argument. If it were the Rock Music Hall of Fame, I couldn’t imagine putting Neil Diamond in there. But I can’t imagine having a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame without Neil Diamond. And once you parse that difference, all of the weird crap counter-arguments about rappers or jazz players or whatever… all that should melt away. Of course Michael Jackson is there. Of course Whitney Houston is there. Of course Tupac Shakur is there.

Truly, what screams rock and roll more than the album cover for Hot August Night?

And here finally is where I come full circle. Jailbreak and Hot August Night have seemingly nothing in common musically. It’s a little hard to imagine how Thin Lizzy and Neil Diamond would be someone’s favorite artists - perhaps even more hard to imagine if the same person’s favorite music is punk rock. But these two albums both exude rock and roll, from the album covers down to the final notes. Yes, they take extremely different ways to get there, but they actually share more in common than you might think. There’s an epic quality to both. The sound is big, but not always big. There’s a lot of masculinity, but also a lot of tenderness. They’re both very serious at times, but a little goofy at others. They both feature strikingly handsome singers. They both involve a lot of hair.

Thin Lizzy might rock too hard for your tastes. Neil Diamond might not rock hard enough. But if you get the idea that rock and roll is not a monolithic endeavor; that it is the essential cultural form of the modern world, in all of its grandeur, all of its inconsistency, all of its hypocrisy; that its limits have been pushed for a long time and continue to be pushed today; that Joan Jett singing “I Love Rock and Roll” and Billy Joel singing “It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me” can be understood as complementary and contradictory sentiments all at the same time; well, take it from me: these albums both epitomize rock and roll. Long live rock and roll.