EASY LISTENING ISN’T SOFT

It Means the Music Does the Work

By Don Overcast

I had a drunken thought the other night, which is how certain useful ideas arrive after respectable society has gone home and the furniture has stopped judging you.

Easy Listening doesn’t mean soft. It means easy to listen to.

This occurred to me while the Eagles were playing.

Naturally.

Because if there is one band that has spent half a century being punished for making extremely difficult things sound suspiciously effortless, it is the Eagles.

People hear the phrase easy listening and immediately smell beige carpeting.

They picture Mantovani. String sections. A doctor’s office in 1978. A fern next to a smoked-glass coffee table. Music that has voluntarily surrendered all sharp objects at reception.

That is one historical form of Easy Listening.

It is not the idea itself.

Because ease is not a sound.

Ease is a relationship between the music and the listener.

And once you realize that, an enormous section of the record store has been filed incorrectly.

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THE EAGLES WILL DRIVE

Put on “One of These Nights.”

There is nothing particularly soft about that record.

Listen to the bass.

That thing is prowling around downstairs carrying burglary tools.

The guitars shimmer and slash. The harmonies have been stacked with the structural precision of a suspension bridge. The rhythm section knows exactly where every molecule belongs. The record is full of lust, nocturnal dread, uncertainty and enough Los Angeles darkness to make you check the rearview mirror twice.

Yet listening to it is effortless.

Why?

Because the Eagles have already suffered for you.

Every decision has been made.

Every transition has been sanded.

Every harmony has been worried over.

Every guitar entrance has been measured against the moon.

They do not hand the listener a box of parts and say, Good luck.

They say:

You sit there. We’ve got the steering wheel.

That, friends, is Easy Listening.

The difficulty is enormous.

You simply aren't asked to carry it.

This distinction matters because somewhere along the way we began confusing difficulty with virtue.

If a record makes you work, people assume it must contain more ideas. If a record immediately welcomes you, somebody eventually accuses it of being shallow.

Nonsense.

A suspension bridge is not less impressive because I don't have to understand civil engineering before crossing it.

Sometimes mastery means showing your work.

Sometimes mastery means making the work disappear.

The Eagles were magnificent at disappearance.

They hid the machinery behind polished walnut paneling.

You notice the road.

You notice the night.

You notice somebody beside you whom you probably shouldn't trust.

You don't notice the screws.

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THE BAND HAS ALREADY LIT THE STOVE

The Band accomplishes something similar using completely different materials.

They don't sound polished in the Eagles sense. They sound inhabited.

Put on Stage Fright.

“The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show.” “Daniel and the Sacred Harp.” “The Rumor.”

The songs seem to have existed before anybody recorded them.

You don't picture musicians constructing arrangements.

You picture a building.

Somebody's been living there for years.

There are boots by the door. Soup on the stove. A photograph whose subject nobody remembers. A floorboard makes a sound around two in the morning and everybody agrees not to investigate.

That's another kind of ease.

The Band doesn't remove strangeness.

They domesticate it.

They invite ghosts into the kitchen and give them coffee.

You enter the music and immediately understand that the world has rules, even if nobody has bothered to explain those rules to you.

That's what great listening music does.

It establishes gravity quickly.

You don't have to ask where the ground is.

The Band makes the song feel like the ground was already there.

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THE DOORS UPHOLSTER DOOM

Then there are the Doors.

The Doors should be impossible Easy Listening.

Everything about them sounds troublesome on paper.

Organ.

Poetry.

Oedipal murder.

Whiskey.

German cabaret.

California death cult atmosphere.

A singer who frequently sounds like he has just learned something disturbing about the moon.

Yet put on L.A. Woman.

“The Changeling.”

“Love Her Madly.”

“Been Down So Long.”

“Cars Hiss by My Window.”

The damn thing moves.

The Doors understood something important about darkness:

you can make doom comfortable.

Not safe.

Comfortable.

There is a difference.

Ray Manzarek gives you somewhere to sit. John Densmore keeps the room breathing. Robby Krieger opens side doors in the architecture. Morrison stalks around saying things that would normally make you quietly alert security.

And somehow you stay.

The Doors upholster doom.

They give the abyss good acoustics.

That is Easy Listening too.

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HENDRIX DOES NOT MAKE YOU WATCH HIM WORK

And Hendrix.

Good God.

Hendrix may be one of the greatest examples of difficult music made easy.

There are guitar players who want you to know how hard something is.

You can hear them sweating.

You can practically see the instructional DVD.

Hendrix rarely gives you that feeling.

Even when he is doing things that should make every guitarist within forty miles put the instrument back in its case, he doesn't sound like he's demonstrating technique.

He sounds like the technique became weather.

“Who Knows.”

“Machine Gun.”

“Power to Love.”

He isn't presenting guitar information.

He has simply altered the atmosphere.

This is why generations of thirteen-year-olds heard Hendrix and thought:

I WANT TO DO THAT.

They did not think:

I must first acquire a sophisticated understanding of intervallic improvisation, amplifier feedback dynamics and rhythmic displacement.

No.

They saw lightning come out of a guitar.

The impossible felt available.

That is an extraordinary form of generosity.

Hendrix makes impossible musicianship feel inevitable.

He builds you a spacecraft and neglects to mention that humans were not previously capable of flying it.

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AND THEN THERE’S BEEFHEART

Which brings us, regrettably, to Captain Beefheart.

Because every theory deserves one lunatic standing beside it with a wrench.

Surely Beefheart cannot be Easy Listening.

Surely Trout Mask Replica constitutes several federal violations of ease.

The first time many people hear Beefheart, they experience the understandable sensation that every member of the band has been given a different song and forbidden to discuss it.

Rhythms collide.

Guitars scrape against one another.

Words arrive wearing animal masks.

The blues has been dismantled and reassembled by people who received the original instructions through a storm drain.

Nothing is where sensible civilization left it.

And yet.

Listen long enough.

Something peculiar happens.

You stop asking.

You stop searching for the normal downbeat.

You stop wondering why the guitar is doing that.

You stop waiting for the music to return to civilization.

And eventually the apparent chaos begins behaving like landscape.

This is the Beefheart threshold.

Once crossed, the record no longer seems confused.

You were confused.

The music knew exactly where it was.

Beefheart says the same thing the Eagles do:

Don't worry. I've got this.

Unfortunately, what he has is a shopping cart with one square wheel being pushed across Mars while somebody recites a blues lyric backward through a radiator.

But he has it.

Follow him.

The desert is that way.

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THE LISTENER SHOULD NOT HAVE TO CARRY THE PIANO

So here is my proposed definition:

Easy Listening is not music without difficulty.

It is music that does not make the listener carry the difficulty.

That does not mean all challenging music fails.

Some music wants resistance.

Some music wants you to wrestle with it.

Some records are locked rooms and the lock is part of the pleasure.

Wonderful.

Keep those too.

But difficulty is not automatically depth, just as accessibility is not automatically compromise.

Sometimes the artist's job is to carry the piano upstairs before you arrive.

You walk into the room.

There it is.

You don't need to know how they got it there.

That's craft.

And once you understand Easy Listening this way, genres begin bleeding into one another beautifully.

Motörhead can be easy listening.

Ramones can be easy listening.

James Brown may be among the easiest listening ever recorded because the man organized rhythm so completely that your body understands the contract before your brain has read page one.

Certain free jazz can become easy listening once you stop demanding conventional roads.

Certain ambient music can be incredibly difficult listening if it leaves you stranded outside itself.

Volume doesn't decide.

Complexity doesn't decide.

Distortion doesn't decide.

The question is whether the music knows how to carry you.

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SO MUCH OF LIFE IS HARD

And perhaps that is why the phrase deserves rescuing.

Because there is something deeply humane hidden inside the idea of Easy Listening.

Life already asks enough.

Bills.

Traffic.

Jobs.

Illness.

Parents.

Children.

Bad news.

Machines demanding passwords.

Government forms apparently designed by Minotaurs.

The small administrative indignities of remaining alive.

Then somebody puts on a record.

For three minutes and forty-three seconds, the musicians carry something for you.

That is not trivial.

That is beautiful.

The Eagles do it with harmonies polished until they glow.

The Band makes it seem the song was growing behind the house before you arrived.

The Doors put velvet around the coffin.

Hendrix turns virtuosity into weather.

And Beefheart does it through a cracked mirror in the desert.

Different vehicles.

Same offer.

Sit down.

We’ve got this one.

And maybe that is all Easy Listening ever needed to mean.

Not music without danger.

Not music without darkness.

Not music without difficulty.

Just music generous enough to carry its own weight.

DON OVERCAST
CREASE
Filed under: Things We Put in the Wrong Record Bin 📻🥃