Ghost’s version of the Albigensian Heresy surfaced in 2010 when the band’s first album, Opus Eponymous, cut through the underworld of the Scandinavian metal scene with a sense of bold purpose. Beyond the psycho-religious trappings, their riffs ‘n rhythms were precise and catapulting, leavened with a sense of harmony as inventive as Blue Oyster Cult and not sparing the crunching horror show of Iron Maiden or Helloween. Their newest release, Infestissumam, brings them to the Jerusalem that is Nashville, where they recorded with producer Nick Raskulinecz; and as the band approached their venue for this night’s human sacrifice in San Francisco, I made contact through the ether with a Nameless Ghoul — who, if I’m not mistaken, did sound a lot like Papa Emeritus II.

If the first record is about prophesizing the Antichrist, and the second heralding arrival, it seems to mirror your own movement as a band, now undertaking your first headlining U.S. tour and a major label album release.

I never thought of it like that, but that would make sense. Obviously for a band that was for quite some time considered a hype, or by many as a fluke, what we have managed to do is announce ourselves to the world with this record.

This may be a chicken-or-egg question, but which came first, the band or the theatrical concept?

Myself and the other guys are musicians, and we’ve been in several groups together in the past. And while being together in another band, Ghost started when I played a riff to everybody else. I said that this is probably the most heavy metal riff that has ever existed. Then I showed them the opening riff to “Stand By Him.” When the chorus came to me, it haunted my dreams. Every time I picked up the guitar, I ended up playing that progression, and when I fit the words in, it seemed to cry out for a Satanically-oriented lyric. This was in 2006. When we came up with the name Ghost, it seemed only natural to build on the foundation of this heavy imagery. Within that concept we were able to combine our love of horror films, and of course, the traditions of Scandinavian metal.

The shock-horror lyrics, the celebration of devil worship, the guttural vocals and massed slabs of guitar — they’re practically part of Swedish folklore now. The complex overlay of vocal harmonies and the predominance of the keyboards seems to broaden your appeal.

I think on the new record we’re not stepping away from it, but trying to expand on the classical themes of where we come from. When we began we were in an embryonic state, without knowing anyone was listening. Now we seem to be growing along with our audience’s expectations of what we are capable of.

There is a definitely a different feel to this new album than the first. It seems more expansive and inclusive. When you went into the studio with producer Nick Raskulinecz, what kinds of goals did you have in mind, ways in which you hoped the music would develop and grow?

All the songs on the new album, with the exception of “Ghuleh,” were written and demoed in 2011. We knew pretty well what we wanted to do, and going to Nashville was a way in which we could feel a sense of dislocation, of being outsiders. It was almost as if you were a Star Wars fanatic going to a Star Trek convention. Being so out of sync with the city left us to our own devices, like we were on an alien planet, and I think in some ways it pushed us farther out, allowed us to take chances we might not otherwise have were we in our homeland. We are certainly not a country band.

I’d surely agree. In fact, one might say you’re the Anticountry. Speaking of which, how much does the religious imagery you use reflect your own beliefs? Is it more of a theatrical concept, or do you spiritually believe in the dark side?

Let’s put it this way. My whole upbringing was within the extreme metal scene, where diabolical imagery is a way of communicating alienation and otherness. I have been a fan of music like that ever since I was 10, 11. That whole language, that whole way of thinking comes very natural to me. You can view it from different angles, and with Ghost we are attempting to fashion an aesthetic work of art, reflecting the artistic entertainment values of a Biblical linear anti-Christian Satanism. From a personal point of view, we are basically making a mockery of linear religion because it’s such a simplified way of looking at divinity. I think of philosophy and theology as so much grander.

It does seem that your staging and presentation is more for spectacle than hardcore devil worship. No one thought that Alice Cooper was really cutting heads off babies after the show; or that Black Sabbath was drinking the blood of virgins. What are some of the bands you take inspiration from?

We’re influenced by everything ranging from classic rock to the extreme underground metal bands of the ’80s to film scores to the grandeur of emotional harmonic music; that combination gives us a lot of freedom to move our music and staging anywhere. We don’t want to be confined to being any one thing.

So can we expect a Papa Emeritus III with the next album?

Well, I can’t reveal the future. Anything can happen in the antichurch, as within the church itself. In the days of the Avignon schism, back in the 14th century, there were once three Popes fighting for the right to lead the church, excommunicating each other. And that was before the Borgias. There may be a bloody war of succession to come.

The night before we spoke, I had watched transfixed as the Wailers played Max’s Kansas City, opening for Bruce Springsteen. Not that it was an unusual billing for Max’s: A week later Iggy Pop would headline three midnight performances; in mid-August Tim Buckley was scheduled; coming attractions included the New York Dolls and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.

The Wailers fit right into this spatial mix. It was their first time in New York, and they brought with them the harbingers of a reggae poised to become a world music, breaking out of its West Indian shantytown stylee. After years of transmuting American pop songs into the characteristic loping rhythms of Caribbean music, a beat off-centered and on-kiltered, the cultural exchange was beginning to flow upriver: Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites,” Johnny Nash’s version of Bob’s “Stir It Up,” Paul Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion,” the soundtrack to The Harder They Come. Infused with a sense of destiny, preaching the apocalyptic tenants of Rastafarian poetics, the sacrament of ganja amid lofty Biblical invocations, this was music ready to ignite.

Catch A Fire was the Wailers’ calling card. They were no strangers to recording, with a lengthy career dating back to 1963, when they made their debut under Leslie Kong’s aegis, and then worked with ska-master Clement Dodds, and through to the inimitable Lee Perry. If there is anyone responsible for turning the group from a harmony trio (Bob, Bunny Livingstone and Peter Tosh) into a more expansive mode, it’s Perry. “Scratch” was on the verge of losing himself in the welter of effect and reverberation that made his later dub-work so hallucinatory. But he administered tuff-love to the Wailers by tightening their rhythm section, a turnabout that became fair play when the Wailers hired the backbone of Perry’s Upsetters rhythm section, the brothers Barrett, Aston and Carlton, masters of the one-drop bass drum.

Chris Blackwell, who ran Island Records, had lived a hybrid life. He grew in Jamaica in wealthy circumstances (his family was in the rum business), and was aware of the bubbling-under sounds emanating from Jamaica. He founded his record label in 1962, and had leased early Wailers singles. Though his label was primarily known for its rock acts, from Traffic to Roxy Music, he had broad tastes (Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop” was one of his early hits in Britain and America), and instinctively understood the global possibilities of the infectious riddim of Jamaica. He was an investor in the movie The Harder They Come, had partnered with Trojan Records at one point, and saw in Bob’s songwriting ability and forward-looking acumen and charisma the only performer who might take the music to another, more international level. He even leased the early Wailers singles. His opportunity came when the Wailers found themselves stranded in London after a proposed European tour had fallen apart. He paid for their air fare home, and advanced the capital to record in Kingston. Then the group returned to England to complete the masters.

As co-producer on Catch A Fire, Blackwell suggested touches to make the album more appealing to non-reggae ears and seductive to non-reggae radio programmers. He enlisted studio musicians — Wayne Perkins, a Muscle Shoals regular, whose lead guitar lines bring a taste of southern-rock to the album opener “Concrete Jungle” and the long-form “Stir It Up,” which also features “Rabbit” Bundrick adding synthesizer and keyboard touches — and overdubbed them on the tapes Bob had recorded in Jamaica. Released in April of 1973, the album was acclaimed in the rock press, scraping the bottom of the Top 200 in America, serving its purpose to alert the world of reggae’s approaching firestorm.

Catch A Fire also marked a turning point in the evolution of the Wailers. The album is credited to the group, but Marley’s increasing preeminence in their stage show and his dominance as the group’s chief songwriter inevitably led to more emphasis being placed on his leadership role. Bunny would leave the original trio soon after, preferring to return to Jamaica and not tour, and though Peter Tosh writes two of the album’s best songs — “400 Years” and “Stop That Train” — his own solo career would soon inevitably be underway. Bob might have been increasingly drawn to the mystic groundations of Rastafarianism, but the album still offers such pop-ish material as “Baby We’ve Got A Date (Rock It Baby)” and “Kinky Reggae.”

When I spoke to him at the Chelsea, he was already shifting into the rhetoric of revolution and salvation that would, as the ’70s progressed, make him a spokesman for unity and spiritual transcendence and cultural brotherhood. Drawing deeply on a spliff, he preached the word to me, an eager congregant. “Take off your face, and strip down y’old self, and see who you is, that is who you really is. Rasta. We can’t pretend. I a Rasta. I live…”

And so he does, his message resounding, in this future prophesized by the burning bush that is Catch A Fire.

His every note bears a hand-stamp of tone and bend, Marshall amps shuddering to keep up with his sonic overload. Snapshots of work-in-progress are mingled with the sheer joy of playing. Despite the fact that Hendrix owns the spotlight, the hook of the album is collaboration — his readying to take a step into his next music, the one that we can only tantalizingly hear in these tracks. The sounds he would have made for the next 40 years, and then some.

He entwines easily with his rhythm section, whether it be the straightforward and propulsive Buddy Miles, whose mighty whack on the snare goes with his insistent right foot; or Mitch Mitchell, always the most airy and spatial of drummers, skittering around the kit. Hendrix mostly relies on his old army buddy Billy Cox to underpin the bass, when he’s not assuming the low frequencies himself. Others who drop by are Steven Stills, saxophonist Lonnie Youngblood and members of assemblages that he is exploring new textures with, especially his percussive Woodstock “band,” Gypsy Sun and Rainbows. The level of commitment in the studio is high, and no matter whom he’s interacting with, Jimi doesn’t change so much as usher the chosen players into his spatial universe.

Some of it is remarkably straightforward, caught before the afterthoughts of overdubbing. “Earth Blues,” which leads off the album, can be heard in more fleshed-out form on Rainbow Bridge, with Mitch Mitchell replacing Miles on drums, but I prefer this no-frills alternate take where the psychic interplay between the Band of Gypsies can be felt as they prepare for their Fillmore East New Year’s Eve extravaganza. The trio had been recording since the previous May (1969), and two blues-drenched cuts — “Hear My Train A-Coming” and Elmore James’s “Bleeding Heart” — show Jimi’s vision of what might be done with blues’ traditional formalisms. As always, the focus is on his truly inspired guitar playing, and his solos range free, filled with quick-draw tangents and asides, losing themselves in the passion of the moment.

Sometimes the seams show. “Let Me Move You” is a showcase for Lonnie Youngblood, but the results are somewhat perfunctory, especially given what someone like Sly Stone was doing with the concept of funkification. Hendrix, however, plays through with rhythmic confidence and grits-and-cheese chop-chording. “Izabella,” with the Gypsy Sun ensemble, is more assured, a stepping-stone to the Band of Gypsys version that would be captured a year later. “Crash Landing,” another early idea-in-the-making (later to provide the dominant riff of “Freedom,”) was previously heard only in a severely post-overdubbed version; but here, with original instrumentalists Rocky Isaac (of the Cherry People) on drums, an unknown organist, and the ever-reliable and underrated Cox on bass, comes as close as any of Hendrix’s compositions to crossing the funkadelic line. The well-developed “Inside Out” — with Jimi’s guitar lines doubled and himself on bass — is an instrumental overlaid with the whirligig sound of a Leslie speaker in full rotation. Add the contemplative “Villanova Junction Blues” for Hendrix at his most serene, and, yes, People, Hell and Angels is a listenable and fascinating tour of Jimi’s thought processes in the last years of his life.

There will always be debate on how these tracks would have been finalized had Hendrix lived, and the worthiness of what, in the end, were takes that were discarded for one reason or another, or posthumously embellished. But as the years recede, even Hendrix’s toss-aways take on added significance, and in truth, sometimes more polished productions are not as revealing of his magic as these moments when he is at his most vulnerable, stepping out from his persona into his great unknown, to see what might be revealed.

A fascinating tour of Jimi's thought processes in the last years of his life

Out of a foreshortened lifeline and a relatively small body of work, it seems there is no end to the many miracles wrought by Jimi Hendrix to feed our insatiable hunger to hear every lick he played. For someone who did his fair share of burning the candle at both ends, as well as in the middle, he never lost sight of his work ethic and fascination with music’s byways — ceaselessly experimenting, recording and jamming with his peers. With People, Hell and Angels, there is still more to discover, savor and put in the context of his time on this Earth.

Despite the fact that Hendrix owns the spotlight, the hook of the album is collaboration — his readying to take a step into his next music, the one that we can only tantalizingly hear in these tracks. He entwines easily with his rhythm section, whether it be the straightforward and propulsive Buddy Miles, whose mighty whack on the snare goes with his insistent right foot; or Mitch Mitchell, always the most airy and spatial of drummers, skittering around the kit. Hendrix mostly relies on his old army buddy Billy Cox to underpin the bass, when he’s not assuming the low frequencies himself. Others who drop by are Steven Stills, saxophonist Lonnie Youngblood, and his percussive Woodstock “band,” Gypsy Sun and Rainbows. No matter whom he’s interacting with, Jimi doesn’t change so much as usher the chosen players into his spatial universe.

Some of it is remarkably straightforward and at other times the seams show, but People, Hell and Angels is a listenable and fascinating tour of Jimi’s thought processes in the last years of his life.

January 22, 2013: Sendai, Japan

I am sitting in Gas Panic, just off Shibuya Square in Tokyo, having an Asahi and toasting my return to Japan. The basement bar is loud with American hip-hop. I can feel the disorienting cross-cultural currents from the 14-hour plane journey, plus the time it takes to get from Nagoya Airport, and the five minutes walk from our nearby hotel. But here I be, at the beginning of a two-week Japanese tour for Patti Smith and Her Band, with a bonus beat of Seoul to cap our Asian adventure.

I was last here in 2009, when we journeyed to the summer festival that is Fujirock, and before that in 2003, when our band circuited the island. There were previous visits — a solo show in Tokyo in 1989 backed by guitarist Go Ohgami, whose album I produced in the mid ’80s; a record release by Feed, another Japanese band who availed themselves of my studio encouragement in 2001; our debut Patti tour in 1997; and more Fujirocking in 2001 and 2005 — but the fascination that this country holds for me is deep and abiding. My father worked for the Japanese megacorporation Mitsui in the 1960s, and early on I became intrigued by the artistic sensibility of this fascinating country, from the manga and anime that takes “cartoon” storytelling to new heights, to the ritualistic ceremonials of tea and sake, to the spirituality of Zen’s sense of oneness with the universe.

After a day of acclimatization, we take the train north to Sendai. In March of 2011, the epicenter of the Great East Japan Earthquake, the most powerful in Japanese seismographic history (9.0!), and the resulting tsunami devastated the eastern shoreline on an imaginable scale. A half hour’s drive from Sendai shows a bleak landscape devoid of, well, anything. This closest metropolis has had to show remarkable resiliency in the face of catastrophe. The disaster inspired our song “Fuji-San,” and by starting our tour here, not a usual stopover for visiting American musicians, we hope to pay tribute to the indomitable spirit of those faced with the task of rebuilding and commemorating. Yuki, the wife of our tour manager Andrew, sets up a booth to accept donations and raffle off a band drum-head, and we donate our show’s proceeds to benefit a local orphanage. A small gesture, perhaps, but one that encompasses the Japanese bow of respect and honor, as the rising sun begins a day anew.

January 23-24, 2013: Tokyo, Japan

Two nights, two shows, two very different venues. Though one doesn’t want to stretch an obvious touristic parallel, this is very much like the capital itself. Tokyo is a dizzying metropolis, pretty much newly constructed after the Earthquake of 1923 and the cataclysm that was the Second World War, brimming with population and chaotic motion and flashing signage and loudspeakers urging commerce; and yet, there is an underlying sense of tradition and calming order. No one jaywalks, patiently waiting until a light turns green even if no traffic is in sight, and ritual courtesies are adhered to with decorum and politeness.

So it is in our performance spaces. Shibuya Ax, on Tuesday, proffers a rowdy stand-up audience that crowd-surfs and jostles each other in time to the music; Wednesday’s Orchard Hall is seated, and though the attendees attentively stand in place through most of the show, there is little stage-rushing or mayhem. As a special bonus, as much for us as the crowd, we’re joined by Noguzo, a ceremonial taiko drummer, accentuating the sonic booms of “Fuji-San.” Afterward, our backstage is graced with Sheena and the Rokkets, one of the longest-lived bands in Japan. I must say Sheena and lead guitarist Makoto don’t look a day older than when they first appeared on the scene in 1978, full of a belief in rock ‘n’ roll’s transformative power. Seeing them reaffirms my own kneel at the shrine of feedback.

And then a day at liberty. I wonder where to start my roam, debating between the gizmo-tron and gadgetorium that is the “Electric City” of the Akihabara district; or Harajuku’s pop-culturati shopping labyrinths. I choose the latter, and soon find myself wandering the lanes of Takeshita Street, marveling at the many niches of fashion on display — here’s a punk store delivered whole from 1977, alongside a shop where Victorian meets Goth meets X-Rated fairy tale. On the four floors of Kiddyland, there are trinkets galore, amid displays devoted to favorite cartoon characters. Speaking of which, I note the disappearance of the Beatles-only emporium that was here the last time I visited, and its replacement by many devoted to K-pop and J-pop idol singers of the moment.

But that doesn’t mean music’s charm is entirely transitory, beholden to the short attention span of generational allegiance. That evening, I am graciously invited to visit the home of our promoter rep in Japan, Shinichi “Chris” Kurisawa. We had been talking about old ska records on the train, and now — a true connoisseur — he is ready to spin some of his rarities for our mutual delectation. He drops the needle on one of his two turntables, sends it through a vintage Ampex tube amplifier to a single mono 15″ speaker; and let the sound system begin. Our journey takes us through Jamaican masters like virtuoso guitarist Ernest Ranglin and the horned geniuses of Roland Alphonso and Don Drummond, moving us effortlessly into soul and blues (here comes Fenton Robinson!). Enhanced by copious cups of shochu, the potato-based distillation that seems to split the difference between sake and vodka, a good time is had by all.

January 26-27, 2013: Nagoya/Kanazawa, Japan

The bullet train takes us west from Tokyo. Out the window, Mt. Fuji gazes majestically upon us. There is progressively more snow on the ground. We are heading into Japan’s hinterlands. Nagoya is the fourth largest city here on the main island, home to one of the most impressive castles I’ve ever seen; and Kanazawa, on the west coast bordering the sea, has a similarly ancient feudal feel, though the main building has had to be painstakingly restored time and again following devastating fires in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But we don’t have much time on this trip to explore ancient Japan, since almost upon arrival in each town it’s showtime. The weekend means our concert starts early in the evening. We’re onstage by 6 p.m., off by 7:30, and at dinner in a nearby restaurant having chicken wings (Nagoya’s specialty) or slices of the freshest sashimi (Kanazawa) by 8. The early performance and the fact that Club Quattro in Nagoya is on the 8th floor of a department store only adds to our sense of dislocation. Not that the audience seems to mind. These are some of our most responsive crowds, only too willing to call-and-response the refrain of “Fuji-san” back at us as we scale that immortal mount in song.

January 28, 2013: Osaka, Japan

Entering the world of Japanese popular music is like opening the gateway to an alternative universe. I wander the overflowing aisles of Tower Records (still the major outlet here, with branches in many cities) and gaze at the myriad of singers, bands, idols and anti-idols. Every genre and moment in time seems to be represented. The sheer quantity and variety humbles not only my own inclination to figure out who’s who and where’s-the-hits, but makes me again rue the one-way street that is our cross-talk with other musical cultures. Everywhere I go in Japan, I hear English-speaking hits of many eras: I am listening to Fleetwood Mac in a sukiyaki restaurant at breakfast, shopping to disco familiars in a mall, or entering a collector’s store which specializes in American oldies (I find a copy of Jim Bakus’s “Delicious,” and because it’s one of my all-time favorite records I can’t resist buying it in such an exotic locale) knowing that except for the occasional “novelty,” none of the bands on display here could be touring America in the same manner that we are in Japan.

I don’t have to wonder, for instance, what Yeti vs. Cromagnon sounds like, since they resemble the Heartbreakers circa 1977 in their black leather jackets and guitarist’s yellow Les Paul Junior, just like the one Johnny Thunders played. Or the Neatbeats, who release vintage “mono” recordings that echo classic Brit Invasion groups. There’s lots of punk and home-grown reggae, and a ’90s revival underway with bands like Guitar Wolf, the Blue Hearts, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant, Number Girl and Bloodthirsty Butchers the subject of catalog highlights. Two groups that pique my interest are Blankey Jet City, who broke up in 2000 only to recently reform; and the more mod-ish Bawdies, whose 2012 hit single “Rock Me Baby” about says it all in the Japanese resurrection of classic retro sound.

But even these traditional guitar-wielding bands pale in the overwhelming multitudinous that is J-pop, which presents a vast array of girl/boy groups that dance, sing and partake of the latest fashion and digital technology to create hits that are viral, colorful and transitory in the most ingratiating way. The textures are futuristic, the production techniques state-of-the-art (the sound is future-now), and despite the lack of deeper meanings, they present a riot of motion and beguiling come-hither.

Of the girl groups, AKB48 is the largest, both in size (there are 48 members on stage, and another 39 “trainees”) and popularity. Conceived in the Akihabara electronics district of Tokyo, as much cheerleading squad as dance troupe, their intricate choreography and chant-along singles have spawned many sound-alikes in other cities: there are similar assemblages in Nagoya (SKE48), Osaka (NMB48), Fukuoka (HKT48), and even outside Japan, in Jakarta (JKT48), Taipei (TPE48), Shanghai (SNH48). One has to love pop’s ability to procreate. There is heated discussion in the newspapers about whether the chastity clause in the girl’s contracts that prohibits them from dating is legal, but this is hardly scandalous or even revolutionary in the world of manufactured teen appeal.

In the midst of all this, I find my own mash-up of idolatry. BABYMETAL are three ‘tween girls who perform in front of a skeleton-costumed band, doling out slabs of metallic genre signifiers: slashing guitars and crunching riffs and rat-a-tat bass drumming, skull-crushing readymades lightened by bridges that sing-song and dance routines that spin at a dizzying pace. Yeah, I know: I’m being manipulated by someone’s idea of savvy marketing. But hey, isn’t that the point?

January 30, 2013: Hiroshima, Japan

How can you imagine? And then you’re here.

There is the river, one of six that course through this city. As we walk solemnly over its bridge toward the Peace Museum, staring at the skeletal remains of what is now called the Atomic Dome in the distance, a sense of déjà vu permeates the air. The horrific scenes and their shock waves have been seared into collective memory. To know that this city was the first to witness warfare at its most destructive, to think of the poor souls caught in the inferno and ash, jumping into this river that flows so gently now, to understand that this entire vista was once reduced to rubble and ruin, is to once again shudder at mankind’s penchant for annihilation. In war, there is no moral absolution. No matter the cause, it is the innocents who suffer.

There in the museum are the scorched remains of a schoolgirl’s uniform. A watch stopped at 8:15 a.m. on an August morning. A little boy’s transit card, scorched and torn. The happenstance of weather, knowing that had there been cloud cover over Hiroshima on that sixth day of the eighth month in 1945, the target might have been nearby Kokura. Not that it matters. The Earth was about to enter the Atomic Age, wherever the chosen spot.

That night, as we play, the ghosts are dancing.

I wake early the next morning. Looking out my hotel window, off to the left, I can see where Ground Zero — directly over Shima Hospital, now rebuilt — was and ever will be. But if I look to my right, there is the soccer field of Fukuromachi Elementary School, where children are kicking a ball, surrounded by a city that has been grown from scratch over the ruins, an archeological layer of generational rebirth and remembrance.

January 31-February 2, 2013: Fukuoka, Japan/Seoul, Korea

The body of water that takes us from one country to another is called the Sea of Japan on one side, and the East Sea on the other. Crossing it changes the channel of pop from J to K, and these days that does imply a difference. Has the balance of power in hit-making shifted? With the success of PSY’s “Gangnam Style” has come an interest in all things Korean, and I’m about to see its neighborhood up close — or, as close as you can over a visit that lasts less than 48 hours.

The last show in Japan is in Fukuoka, on the shore of Kyushu, the most southerly of Japan’s islands. We’ve been here before, and perhaps will again, with a sold-out crowd at Drum Logos, and a final toast to our Japanese promoters.

The flight to Seoul takes about an hour and a half, the same time it takes to drive from the airport to our hotel on the outskirts of Gangnam. The neighborhood, once you get off the large eight-lane avenues replete with all your well-known western chains, contains a plethora of restaurants and bars on its back streets. Since it’s pouring rain on arrival, I take refuge in a nearby mall, which could be a shopping plaza anywhere in the world. Fleeing in haste, I find the small barbeque restaurant on a side street in the shadow of the massive Seven Luck casino that initiated me into the local grilling customs the last time we visited.

I get my indoctrination into K-Pop much as the rest of Korea’s inhabitants, through glittery television shows which feature the acts cavorting in rapid succession. On this night, Music Bank provides a confectioner’s dreamworld, beginning with the current number one chart song, “Shower of Tears,” performed by Bae Chi Gi featuring Ailee. From its guitar introduction, which paraphrases “St. James Infirmary,” Bae Chi Gi’s rapping (“I should have known in the end that your selfish heart wanted a different fluttering”) and Ailee’s plaintive vocal chorus, I am intrigued by the mélange of influence and its easy translation to my own western ears. In fact, discerning any hints of traditional Korean modes and scales is impossible. Welcome to the world.

Crayon Pop sing-songs “Bing Bing,” 2Yoon hoe-downs with “24-7,” the Dolls (not the New York) count their “9 Muses,” and Sistar 19 channel their inner J-Lo with “Gone Not Around Any Longer.” These are girl groups; the boy groups are similarly coiffed and bust-a-move energetic, rotating singers and personas: Boyfriend’s “I Yah,” Infinite H’s “Special Girl,” while Jeong Hyung Don’s “GangBuk Dandy” bears some passing resemblance in vocal register and approach to PSY.

It’s hard to say how K-Pop will play outside of the Asian market. In some ways, its lightweight gossamer (there are no references to hard clubbing or coital hi-jinx) and language barrier will mean it will have to adapt, and perhaps change its very nature, to succeed. PSY himself might be another here-today, gone-the-way-of-the-Pony tomorrow (there are similarities in the dance step). That said, these songs are appealing. Fighting it out for the top spot on Music Bank is Girls’ Generation, with the theatrical “Paparazzi,” whose video references “Singing In The Rain,” of all things; they hold the current number two song in Korea, the addictive “I Got A Boy.” They have signed a U.S. deal with Interscope, and if the Pussycat Dolls can have a chart hit, why not this KoreAmerican dance squad?

But for my musical mojo, the triumph of CN Blue, a four-piece guitar band that — shock horror! — is playing their instruments and singing live on this television countdown, and whose “I’m Sorry” wins the night’s competition hands-down. It’s perhaps a pointer that the K-Pop phenomenon won’t be as cookie-cutter as might be intimated. And when Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine come visit backstage at our show, themselves beginning a far-east tour and celebrating the release of their much-anticipated new album, I begin to fantasize what this sort of cross-pollination might do for Korea’s embrace and assimilation of UnPop.

On the way home, I have my own cultural potpourri courtesy of inflight entertainment. I watch a Chinese language detective film called The Bullet Vanishes set in the 1920s; a black-and-white documentary of Arthur Rubinstein playing a concert in Moscow in 1964 that leans heavily on Chopin; and The Master.

So many forms of human expression; so little time.

Cartoon-based music is often discounted, overshadowed by surreal characters and sound-effects (this despite a long history of amazing orchestrations, like the ones Carl Stallings and Raymond Scott composed for Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies). What’s often overlooked is the fact that the animated medium can encourage both experimentation and avant arrangement like few others.

“We don’t approach them as cartoon songs,” says Andy Paley, who both co-produced and wrote the music for SpongeBob. “A good song is a good song, and it doesn’t matter if a cartoon character sings it.” His more immediate role model might be the timeless melodies sung by Disney characters – “Someday My Prince Will Come” from Snow White stands out – but his approach is enhanced by his love of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson. Paley has worked with both; he was produced by Spector when he was in the Paley Brothers, a ’70s duo with a distinctly pop edge; and later he worked with Wilson on his solo comeback album; he’s also collaborated with such timeless artists as Madonna (on the Dick Tracy soundtrack) and Jerry Lee Lewis. Also, he has a fine taste in novelty records. (Let’s put it this way: he was the first person to play me the Shaggs.)

But Andy’s first love is the glorious soundscapes created by Phil and Brian in their golden era. “Phil’s records are not just about echo,” he explains. “That’s a cliché about him. It’s more the layering of textures.” The same could be said of Brian Wilson, especially the works-in-progress on display in The Smile Sessions. A self-professed Beach Boys “freak,” Paley spent long hours untangling these sounds and learning how to make them; this album reflects that sense of care and obsession.

He first began creating music for SpongeBob with the 2006 song “Best Day Ever,” which focused on that jaunty never-say-squish optimism that is our hero’s stock-in-trade. His lyricist and co-conspirator is Tom Kenny – the music aficionado who voices Mr. Bob – and their teamwork is infectious. All the characters on the famed Nickelodeon series have very specific characters and personalities – the lovable and dimmish bulb Patrick Star(fish), the Krusty Krab that is Eugene Krebs, the ill-tempered Squidward and Sandy Cheeks, a squirrel who lives in an underwater dome – and their distinctive personas give each tune on this album its own spin cycle. That said, it’s not hard to hear these songs outside the realm of Bikini Bottom: the lyrics tend toward the universal, and could be sung by any artist – and hopefully will be in the future.

Different genres provide distinct settings for each track. Sandy does the Cotton-Eyed Joe to “Ho Ho Hoedown,” which not only name-checks Waylon and Willie and Flaco and Sir Doug, but also spotlights Jeremy Wakefield on non-pedal steel, giving the track a western swing flavor not seen since the heyday of Bob Wills and Spade Cooley. “Christmas Is Mine” takes Plankton’s abrasive Napoleon complex and places it against the grain of a pastoral setting reminiscent of the Carpenters, featuring Corky Hale (whose orchestral harp flourishings also decorated records by Billie Holiday and Liberace). “Wet Wet Christmas” is street-corner R&B doowop; “Hot Fruitcake” is nutty as…; Patrick is dazzled by the tinsel and the wrapping in “Pretty Ribbons and Bows,” underscored by a psychedelic garage-rock riff and electric guitar solo played by Jonathan Richman. (Gazing at the tree, he exclaims, “That star on top is blowing my mind!”)

The various elements of the project began to gather under the mistletoe a couple of years back when Paley and Kelly came up with “Don’t Be A Jerk (It’s Christmas).” In that song, SpongeBob hopes to have everyone remember the spirit of the holiday; “Christmas Eve Jitters,” a stomping slice of honky-tonk rockabilly featuring Big Al Anderson from NRBQ, thematically recalls A Christmas Story, that cinematic holiday perennial that embodies the fraught anticipation of the holiday.

The album’s most moving moment – and strongest contender for Christmas standard – is “Snowflakes,” in which a wistful SpongeBob looks out his window to a world covered in crystal-white and sings atop a swirling wonderland that recalls the Brian Wilson of “Wind Chimes” and “Vegetables.” Hale’s harp shimmers and sweeps and Tommy Morgan, who also supplied the bass harmonica on “Good Vibrations,” adds extra resonance. Paley is able to pick from some of the best and most creative studio musicians in the Hollywood area (guitarist James Burton and ex-Wrecking crew member Nino Tempo also appear) and the cumulative effect is far beyond mere cartoon music. Maybe that’s the secret. “Because it’s SpongeBob,” says Andy, “we can make records like this, that are very authentic and sound like they come from another era, to resurrect musical style that shouldn’t be forgotten.”

But the best is saved for last, an in-joke so obscure that even compulsive cognoscenti will throw their hands (or fins) in the air in amazement. Both Phil Spector’s classic A Christmas Gift For You and the Beach Boys’ Christmas Album end with small personal messages directed at the listener. When Dennis Wilson says, “If you’re happening to be listening to this record now,” in his closing remarks on the latter, he stumbles on the word “happening,” pronouncing it “Hap-happening.” When SpongeBob closes out his album, he also adds the extra “hap.” A little extra holiday treat for the true music aficionado.

Chet Baker’s name in jazz and popular lore is usually accompanied by the word “tragic,” the sordid circumstances and personal unraveling of his relationships shadowing his career much as a brush-stroke rhythm section would keep time behind his interpretation of song. Yet the voluminous body of work and the reverence which accompanies his artistic output shows that doomed romanticism has its continual appeal; and to Baker’s credit, his music reveals unsparing pain and shattered beauty like no other. At odds with himself, each note seems chosen with a care that he could not lavish on his own being, or those around him: his family, his fellow musicians, his audience.

In some ways it came too easy. With his good looks, his ability to hear music even as he could not read it, and his embodiment of the hip, laid-back sheen of ’50s West Coast cool jazz after the frantic be-bop explosion of the late ’40s, he knew how to hold his instrument – which was himself. Later in the decade would come James Dean and Elvis, each broodingly sculptured, each bearing their hallmarks of the ’50s slow boil. Chet seemed star-crossed from the beginning, chosen by Charlie Parker to accompany him on a California visit documented on the 1952 Bird and Chet at the Tradewinds. After this virtual benediction, Chet embarked on a partnership with Gerry Mulligan, and their earliest recordings (The Complete Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker – The Original Sessions 1952-1953) moved away from heated soloing to an emphasis on melody and studied nonchalance. At one of their first recording dates, for Fantasy Records in September of 1952, they cut a version of the “Carioca,” two Mulligan originals shrewdly dedicated to local disc jockeys (“Line for Lyons” and “Bark For Barksdale”), and a standard, “My Funny Valentine,” which centered around Baker’s quiescent delivery. They had not played the Rodgers-Hart composition before, and Chet’s instinct was to stick close to the tune as written, which proved prescient.

His and Mulligan’s personalities were soon at war, neither willing to be a sideman to the other. Still, Chet had found his calling card, and after he established his own Quartet with Russ Freeman on piano for Don Bock’s Pacific Jazz label, he took a chance to record with orchestral accompaniment. The success of Chet Baker with Strings led him even further from jazz’s penchant for deconstruction; in February of 1954, he began to sing. The resulting and deservedly classic 10-inch record was simply titled Chet Baker Sings, and his smoldering way with a ballad, especially “My Funny Valentine,” made him a heartthrob, the jazz equivalent of a teen idol. Helped along by William Claxton’s photographs of a moody Baker in an undershirt clutching his trumpet, the record far outsold its Downbeat demographic. Baker was an anointed star, white and ready for prime-time success. But though suffused in chiaroscuro light by Claxton’s lens and the whispered intimacy of a Neumann microphone, the inner Chet was a roiling mass of contradiction, enhanced by the drug addiction that was considered de rigueur as part of the mid-century jazz lifestyle.

It began falling apart for him almost immediately. Touring incessantly, recording albums of varying qualities, he seemed uncertain whether to devote himself to advancing his jazz credentials or catering to his new audience of adoring femmes. When he met Dick Twardzik in Boston, it seemed as if Chet might be able to have both. The young pianist was a challenging and harmonically complex musician, and Baker took to him instantly, adding him to the quartet he would take to Europe in the fall of 1955. But Twardzik hardly lasted a month on that tour before succumbing to a drug overdose. A few days later, Baker would record the songs that make up Chet Baker in Paris, and set forth on his own horrific descent into a whirlpool of drugs, jail, missed opportunities and wasted lives. Let’s Get Lost, as Bruce Weber’s worshipful film titles it, captures Chet’s junky conniving even as he makes his mournful trumpet bemoan his fates and complicity in his own downfall.

There were still more than 30 years yet to come in Baker’s life and discography, and often it’s hard to tell when he was able to rise above his personal travails to connect with his inner muse. There were many collaborations with his peers – outstanding are The Route with Art Pepper, another who wore his track marks on his sleeve; the 1956 Chet Baker and Crew which attempted to inject a bit of East Coast edge with tracks like “Chippyin’;” Chet Baker In New York, surrounding him with New York boppers; and Baby Breeze, a 1965 effort that moved him away from behind-the-beat tempos and gave him a strong instrumental foundation, especially provocative in the vocals. “You’re Mine, You” set him alongside Kenny Burrell’s chordal guitar magic, and he negotiated the emotions with aplomb.

But as decades passed, Chet’s unreliability and sense of scam increased exponentially. He retreated within himself. In the mid ’70s, I went to a small cellar jazz club on West 86th Street called Stryker’s to see him. There, with a bare minimum of notes, hardly breathing through his horn, he made every inflection count, drawing from his tortured soul the mea culpa of his many transgressions.

He lived until 1988, and on My Favourite Songs: The Last Great Concert attests, recorded only two weeks before his death falling from an Amsterdam hotel room, he once again proved his paradox. The concert had been arranged by a North German Broadcasting producer, Kurt Giese, with a hope of celebrating Chet Baker with Strings. Baker hardly showed for rehearsal, and when he did, his erratic performance was met with trepidation. But on the night of April 29, in the city of Hannover, he seemed inspired, in control of his trumpet and his well-worn voice. The version of “My Funny Valentine” is especially poignant, given its place in Baker’s legend, and Chet pours all of his inner contradictions into its unfolding. “Stay, little Valentine, stay…” And though he couldn’t, the bittersweet legacy that he left us remains still – a heart pierced by an arrow, evoking the pain and transcendence of love.

His last will and a fine testament

Waylon knew. He wasn’t getting any younger and his body was starting to let him down. He’d been on and off the road over the past few years, even sold the bus, and now the doctor had told him that he better take a break from a life he’d always traveled. He was feeling restless. One night in 1999, he went over to his pedal steel guitar player’s house and told Robby Turner to press record. “I’m going to put a few things down,” he said. And so he did, leaving us with Goin’ Down Rockin’, his last will and a fine testament.

Like Jennings himself, the album is stylistically diverse and spiritually unified. The original tracks consisted of just Waylon’s guitar and voice, with Turner accompanying on bass, but these bare bones have since been accessorized by sympathetic musicians who shared many good times with Waylon in his career, among them drummer Richie Albright (the four-on-the-floor timekeeper of the Waylors), Reggie Young and Tony Joe White. Finished by his friends, as he would’ve wanted.

Waylon himself picked the songs, infused with his belief in music’s emotional deliverance, and the hard-fought battles he waged standing up for the right to play his songs his own way. It might have made him an “outlaw” in the eyes of the Nashville establishment, but the uncompromising stance gives his body of work a resonance that has not dimmed with his passing 10 years ago. If anything, as a moral compass and honky-tonk high-water mark, his legacy shines ever brighter.

It’s hard to listen to his lyrics without a sense of hindsight, eavesdropping on a man who’s ruminating on where he’s been, and whether he’s lived up to his own ideals. “Spent a little time in trouble/ But I do have my ways,” he confesses in the title cut, and delivers a paean to the love of his life, Jessi Colter, in the achingly beautiful “Belle of the Ball.” The Cajun stylings of “Wrong Road to Nashville” take one back to Waylon’s first recording, a version of “Jole Blon” produced by Buddy Holly. And then, of course, there’s “Never Say Die.”

The album’s centerpiece is “I Do Believe,” where the Jennings credo is set forth honestly and directly. When I had the honorable privilege of helping him write his autobiography, Jennings chose its words to bring his legendary tale to epiphany. This wellspring of inner faith – “In my own way I’m a believer” – beyond the strictures of organized religion or mythology tells more than anything of why he was able to illuminate “that inner spirit that keeps us strong.”

I miss you, Hoss, but hearing your voice, first or Last, is to have you by my side, in the room with me, letting me know that things’ll be all right as long as we keep singing your song.

The pop impulse behind the psychic light show

“Definitions define limit.” I first read this aphorism of Mayo Thompson’s on the back of the debut Red Crayola album in 1967, and promptly adopted it as one of the guiding touchstones of my life. The music I found within that album was a conglomeration of “Free-form Freak-out” provided by half-a-hundred communal folk called the Familiar Ugly, banging around on home-brewed instruments and merging toward strange psychedelic rave-ups, much like what the Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd was improvising into jams, and what later groups like the Spaceman Three and My Bloody Valentine would extend into lysergically influenced song-form.

The recent re-release of the Crayola’s initial album, with bonus remixes of the original freak-outs, occasions a listen to the pop impulse behind the psychic light show. The founding members – Thompson, Steve Cunningham and drummer Frederick Barthelme (brother of Donald) – were art students at the University of St. Thomas, familiar with the avant-garde and conceptual thinkers. Yet they believed in the visceral power of music – “the liberty of feeling, distinct from intent, affirms the musical process,” Cunningham wrote. Surely the sense of generational take-off is imagined in “Hurricane Fighter Plane,” with Roky Erikson on organ, or the modal drone of “War Sucks,” with its blunt, anti-militaristic message. The songs morph into freeform jams, and then rise from the pandemonium. It’s a seamless transition of anything-goes, and it positioned the Red Crayola (later Krayola) as further ahead of their far-out time than could be imagined. Thompson would later find a home with Cleveland avatars Pere Ubu, but would keep the Crayola brand going with experimental and unsettling albums that even today seem futuristic.

Strong on his steadfast virtues as a songwriter and raconteur

After a long road to renown, John Hiatt knows who he is, and so do we. Mystic Pinball, his 21st album, is strong on his steadfast virtues as both a songwriter and a raconteur. His voice might have a bit more grizzle in its sizzle, his sense of humor can lead toward the macabre and his appreciation of loss profound in its understanding. But his dogged sense of purpose and need to make music remains omnipresent.

His bedrock resilience aside, Hiatt has a way of capturing thoughts and catchphrases to create those revelatory moments that make a song universal. “Perfectly Good Guitar,” his 1993 take on a metaphysical rock ritual, recalls both Abraham’s Biblical dilemma as well as those sacrifices made in the service of art. I was riding around and spinning the radio dial in the year 2000 when “What Do We Do Now?” from his Crossing Muddy Waters came over the airwaves and into my heart.

On Pinball, he captures a similar fatalistic feeling of a relationship-on-the-rails with “I Just Don’t Know What To Say,” then follows it with the heart-on-sleeve “I Know How To Lose You,” and un-amplifies it with the delicate “No Wicked Grin.” There are raucous, Stonesy rompers like “Bite Marks,” which showcases guitarist Doug Lancio and the rhythm section of bassist Patrick O’ Hearn and drummer Kenneth Blevins, gothic tales of revenge and murder in “It All Comes Back Someday” and “Wood Chipper,” and rockin’ field hollers like “We’re Alright Now.” In other words, Mystic Pinball is your typical Hiatt album, meat ‘n taters with a side of blues.

Wavering, haunting highlights from a prolific Bollywood singer

I can visualize her in the recording studio, barefoot in front of the microphone where she has stood so many thousands of times, singing songs that will emanate from the mouths of others. Her voice is a wavering trill, haunting and syllabling in a language I will never understand, and yet speaks to me in a tongue that touches my very soul. This seduction of emotion is the golden articulation of Lata Mangeshkar, the Queen of Indian vocalese.

To be honest, I know nothing of where these songs and the movies in which they starred emanate. I hardly can tell one from another, or highlight them from the vast discography of Mangeshkar, created over more than half a century, which is probably only exceeded in recorded output by her younger sister, Asha Bhosle. The composers, the directors who hired her to voice-over their Bollywood productions, the traditions and subtleties and inner world of these compositions – that’s a mystery to me, as well as it might be to you. Yet the lack of context and musical understanding allows me to concentrate on the purity of her singing, the literal sound of her voice, and the scales and modes it dances about like the scenes it was meant to enhance, dropped from heaven into the cinematic musicals that have become the hallmark of Indian film.

Amid percussion that clatters and strings that swoop, the songs are alternately coy and forthright, a mating dance enacted to provide innuendo and consummation within the chaste romantic interplays of Bollywood – to be suggestive without breaking the bounds of propriety. Instead of a kiss, love scenes rely on the penetrating glance, the intimate gesture, and Mangeshkar’s role is to provide the sutra of kama. “No heroine feels she has arrived until Lataji sings for her,” is an oft-repeated testimonial to her stature, as one listen to “Aap Kahen Aur Ham Na Aaye” will show you why.

The last time I saw Joe was in full band flight at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, lunging and spitting at the microphone and leading the charge of his young Mescaleros with a fist-clenched ferocity. The music touched on rockabilly, reggae and classic rock ‘n’ roll – all the grand rolling r’s of the genres he loved – and after, backstage, I watched him surrounded by his crew of New York misfits and miscreants and misses, clustered around because he was them, and me as well, going over to give him a hug and a shared embrace, battle-hardened warriors of the Two Sevens Clash, when rebel musics took on Babylon, as they did these 35 years past, and will always again.

To look at the legacy of the Clash is to appreciate the idealism of rock in action. Incredibly prolific, reveling in their own ambitions and electric energies, they wielded a social conscience that harnessed the violence and contradictions inherent in the glory that is punk rock at its most confrontational. Believing in music’s possibilities for self-invention and inspiration, their offer of hope and rejuvenation stood in direct opposition to punk’s nihilism and penchant for self-destruction.

As a musician, John Graham Mellor came of age in the 101′ers, a pub-rock combo that immediately preceded the upheavals of punk. He might have stayed in revival mode – pub rock, in the form of Dr. Feelgood and, especially, the chop-shop chords of guitarist Wilko Johnson, was all about a return to roots. But the oncoming of punk, whatever form it took, with its sense of renewal and wiping the slate clean of the excesses of the past, gave Joe an opportunity to make a fresh start. More, he took readily to the political implications of the music, its’ embrace of an Us vs. Them class struggle, its revolutionary fervor and crash-and-burn ideology.

There were no halfway measures for Joe, such was his commitment to the music. He was a believer, and the more the Clash took up their opposition against the music establishment, an artistic call to arms that gave their music a high-minded sense of purpose, the more they catalyzed and proselytized; and the more their renown spread. Strummer, who had gotten his stage name from the vigorous way he scrubbed “Johnny B. Goode” on the ukulele in the London subway as a busker, could be alternately articulate and overwrought. In the Clash’s triangle of guitars, Mick Jones would become the musical adventurer, appropriating any worldbeat genres that came into his questing range, the slice-and-dice that would result in such sprawling masterworks as London Calling and Sandinista!; Paul Simonon, besides providing bedrock bass underpinnings, helped create their look, as befits the visual artist he is today, beginning with his own chiseled instrument; Joe was appointed Clash spokesman.

There was nothing pristine about the Clash’s debut album, all rabble-rousing anthems with Joe’s vocals shouted down the awaiting gullet of a microphone, guitars bristling with aggression and tension and tube overload, and lyrics that seem all too eager to storm the barricades. They grow up in “Garageland”; they have no “Career Opportunities”; they want a “White Riot” of their own. In America, the emphasis of punk was on cultural revolution. In England, the social and political situation came to the fore, and so did a more rigid sense of style and subculture, the arcane rituals of spitting on performers, pogo-ing, donning black motorcycle jackets and bondage trousers.

The Clash were often unfairly criticized for side-stepping the strictures put upon them by the parochial punk community, adding rap or even “pop” into their mixage. Joe was aware of the inherent paradox of being in a band that advocated freedom, even as he had to continually fight to maintain his independence and sense of purpose.

For me, all this comes together in “White Man In Hammersmith Palais,” Joe’s telling tale of a night he spent at a reggae show in which the performers seemed bent on showboating in a way that negated the revolutionary power of Jamaican song stylee. Reggae, another music built on resistance and ritual (“Pass the duchy to de left hand side”) was the soundtrack for punk’s spiritual transformation, proclaiming an underclass Rastafarian creed at once alien and yet all too alluring to those seeking to overthrow – at least metaphorically – the oppressor. More, he looks into his own mirror at his pale skin, an outsider and perhaps even an usurper, and questions his own place in the equation: “You think it’s funny?/ Turning rebellion into money.”

Throughout the subsequent history of the Clash, up to and including their slot at Shea Stadium opening the Who, and only a shortest time later, Joe wandering England as a street singer with the remnants of the Clash (none of the original members) by his side, he would feel these opposing forces at work (and play), the extremes of celebrity and artistry, and his desperate attempt to reconcile both in the words of a song.

It’s Joe’s post-Clash career that I find most endearing these days, when the Strummer persona that he’d created found outlet in film, such as his sterling turn in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, and as he followed his own heartfelt inclinations. He sang with the Pogues and was a BBC disc jockey with a program appropriately titled London Calling. The Mescaleros kept the clattery feel of the Clash’s surround-sound, and the albums he made with them have a respectful integrity, acknowledging the gifts of music that allowed him such a rollercoaster ride.

But it’s “Know Your Rights” that I will be playing when I celebrate what would have been Joe’s 60th birthday this year, when I take a moment to raise the flag and salute a fallen comrade. “You have the right not to be killed,” he proclaims, and I wish it were true for him as well, since there was so much more to come, including, perhaps, a reunion with his brothers-in-arms, and a consequent storming of the battlements. I can hear his voice at full throttle, the strangled shout that always seemed on the verge of shredding his vocal cords; the conscience, the loose cannon, the oversoul of the Clash.

In some ways, the year is when the last vestiges of the free-for-all ’60s are declared done, or at least ready for revival. I can’t speak for everybody, only my personal taste and agenda, but a shortlist of my faves of the year, chosen randomly with no sense of critical responsibility, show where my leanings were.

It was a debut year for Roxy Music, Blue Oyster Cult, Big Star and Lou Reed as a solo artist (later in the year, Transformer would solidify his unique urbanity, containing the unlikely hit single of “Walk On The Wild Side”). Taking hard rock ever further out on a limb was Alice Cooper with School’s Out, the Rolling Stones and their Exile on Main Street, Deep Purple’s Machine Head, Black Sabbath‘s Vol. IV, and Budgie’s Squawk. The soundtrack to The Harder They Come, featuring Jimmy Cliff, prophetically introduced reggae into the worldwide arena. Some sentimental highlights include Eric Andersen’s Blue River, the Kinks’ Everybody’s In Show-Biz, Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book, and the lightning-strike of home town friends and comradely band rivals Looking Glass, whose “Brandy” went to No. 1 on the pop charts as the summer crested.

I was toiling away in the dog days of that summer, shuffling and seguing the varied tracks that would make up a double-disc anthology that Elektra Records, in the persona of Jac Holzman, had asked me to gather. Much like this look over my shoulder, I was retrospecting a time which seemed in 1972 to belong to another world; and yet was young enough in era that I had lived through it myself, as eyewitness and earwitness. History once removed.

My brief, according to Jac, was to gather those cuts on albums that had one stand-out track (I’ve always thought he had just gotten one of the first cassette recorders, and was making his own mix tapes, winnowing his record collection). In my spin, it allowed me to gather those groups that had formed in Americain the wake of the Beatles’ tsunami, and pick those that seemed to embody a new sense of possibility sparked by the English Invasion. The sea-change was dramatic, as the aspirations of the street-corner harmony group was replaced by the garage band, and rock’s renewable life-source was once again given a jolt of current. The term garage bands came after the fact, as if to emphasize their domestic untutored roots and untrammeled desire; but really, at a remove of five years, I only knew that these were great records, regardless of genre purity, and the fact that it uncovered a sliver of rock’s many gene pools was because, for me, it was nearest at hand. I had played in a band called the Zoo, had a nom de tune of Link Cromwell from a folk-protest single my uncle, Larry Kusik, had cooked up with an ex-member of the Fireflies (“You Were Mine”), and though we never came up with any original material, surely learned our trade doing four sets a night of cover versions that enlivened many a college fraternity house or swim club.

With Elektra’s encouragement, I got to re-enact my parabola of ’60s transition from British Invasion to acid-rock of the Fillmore variety, beginning with the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” (we dressed in animal skins), and ending with the paisley’d Zoo sitting cross-legged on the floor raga-ing “My Generation.” When it came time to assemble the chosen tracks, a game of chance often dictated by licensing rights and shattered dreams along the wayside, the world in which Nuggets: Original Artyfacts of the First Psychedelic Era essentially re-appeared was one in which its virtues seemed to be in short supply, when the edge and the off-balance and the desperation of desire needed a new formulation. The word “punk” was in the air, and 1972, I recall, was also the year of the New York Dolls, and their imagining of rock ‘n’ roll’s perfect shape-shiftings (though their album wouldn’t be released until the following year); the Stooges had crafted much of Raw Power, the Flamin’ Groovies were in London keeping the flame alive, and glitter-rock was in the air.

In thinking about Nuggets, as I’m often inclined to do, since those who listened have bought me a beer many times over these ruby-flected years, I am surprised that it managed to encapsulate a moment in time without getting too protective of its parameters, partially because I was making it up as I went along, and hadn’t figured out a way to fuck it up. Many of the 27 songs on that initial volume stretch garage-rock beyond the considerable tune-up benefits of owning a car. There is symphonic studio production (Sagittarius‘s “My World Fell Down”), Brill Building songsmiths (Third Rail‘s “Run Run Run,” the Strangeloves‘ “Night Time”), and of course, one-shot wonders galore: The Seeds‘ “Pushin’ Too Hard” (actually their point-and-shoot glory encompasses four albums of grandiosity), the double-or-nothing of “Talk Talk” (the Music Machine) and “Liar Liar” (the Castaways), the Blues Magoos‘ version of “Tobacco Road” contrasting with the Blues Project‘s “No Time Like The Right Time,” the howl of the 13th Floor Elevators‘ “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” and then the scratch of guitar strings going haywire with the Count Five‘s “Psychotic Reaction.” These are great records, regardless of what your listening post is, and that was really my only imperative; not really an album for collectors, who as they have proved, are quite capable of mining their own gold-dust.

Today such an assemblage might be called a playlist, as if you came over to my apartment in 1972, when the index cards were on the floor and I was spinning the Chocolate Watch Band into…hmmm…”Farmer John?” I had the opening side figured out. Gotta lead off with the Electric Prunes‘ “I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night” ’cause that backward vibrato is the sound of that moment in time. True pitch-shifting. The Standells‘ “Dirty Water” lets you catch the coast-to-coast continental drift, the west of Los Angeles singing about the east of Boston. “Oh, you’re my home…” The Knickerbockers to solidify the British roots of where all these bands were inspired. And so we’re on our way…

It may be strange to be writing about 1972 through the prism of the mid ’60s, but that is when it started to become clear to me that the ’70s were at hand, in all their Taxi Driver splendor (“You talking to me?”), the generations about to begat, and so too until today, when I write this with the counterweight of time’s passage. Still, as ever, you need a great hook-laden song that gets inside you and doesn’t let go; and in this cornucopia that is our modern playlist, sometimes the finding is the important part.

I should know. I’m still looking…

This overdubbing-in-hindsight has always been scoffed at; witness the brouhaha over Buddy Holly’s last recordings, or the re-imaginings of Jimi Hendrix’s final studio sessions. But there is little to think that the finished songs that Joey would never finish himself could sound markedly different than what has been assembled here. He always played with his local brethren and compatriots, whether jamming on a late night stage somewhere in the East Village, walking the short distance from his apartment overlooking Third Avenue, or rooting bands on from the sidelines, a tall gangling presence back by the bar often joined by another tall, gangling presence — me. That’s the first memory that comes to mind when I think of Joey, somewhere in the ’90s, in Coney Island High, watching Question Mark and the Mysterians.

I had known the Ramones early on, about the time they got on the CBGB stage; and of the four or five bands playing the joint at the time, they appeared fully conceived — short, elemental and purposefully dumb songs, clothed in sneakers, ripped jeans and Wild One jackets. They just had to learn how to keep up with their head-rush momentum. This reductive rock ‘n’ roll only brought things back to square one, the moment where it all begins again, which is the starting point for any musical regeneration. The Ramones got better and better at wielding their blunt object. The point-and-shoot aspect of the songs never changed. It is no wonder that they would become the template of punk, so simple an idea: eight on the floor, guitar and bass, split in half for the drumbeat, four to the bar. Press go.

But that was punk, and Joey, with his Forest Hills romanticism, somewhat like another neighborhood boy, Paul Simon, was beset by a heartbeat romantic streak. The Ramones (Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny) could be like the Three Stooges — or four, counting Shemp, who would be a stand-in for Tommy — but only Joey could duet with Ronnie Spector, and celebrate Christmas with her. It’s this that made the Ramones more than a one-note mantra; that gave them heart, and soul.

There’s no better way to start an afterlife record then with those words in mind. Taking guitar-and-voice demos and ideas that were just being born and amplifying them is one thing; finding the spirit and keeping the flame burning is another. The provenance of this record is tangled in the usual manner of such restorations, depending on who Joey was working with at any given time, but somehow the assembled cast of characters shapeshifts to make room for everyone he creatively intermingled with. There are collaborations with New York war vets like Daniel Rey, Jean Beauvoir, Ritchie Stotts, and Andy Shernoff; guest appearances by Bun.E. Carlos, Holly Beth Vincent, Joan Jett and Handsome Dick; and brought to fruition by the understanding touch of Joey’s brother, Mickey Leigh, and the venerable Ed Stasium. Ed, who recorded the Ramones in their hey-ho day, gives the album the crunch-and-punch that Joey thrived on, capturing his right jab to the air as he clenched the microphone stand with the other. Stasium brings his considerable sonic ear to the production — as a producer, he has worked with Living Color and Soul Asylum to define their guitar onslaughts — along with a gift for harmony and hook that frames Joey’s distinctive epiglottal warbles. And as ever, it is lovely to hear Jeff Hyman’s Ramonic voice, an accent all his own. One of the pleasures of this album is the feeling like you’re eavesdropping on the creative process, when the song is becoming, and Joey’s learning how to sing it, until there’s no more left to sing.

That’s when his friends come visit. My turn comes in a hotel room overlooking the Hudson. Ed has set up the Tools and a well-positioned microphone. The track is “New York City,” Joey’s paean to his hometown, and I’m one of a gang vocal that includes Little Steven, Handsome Dick and Genya Raven. I’m wishing I had a handle for a name; but then, like Joey, we all adopt our identities when we take up the sacred mantle of rock transformation.

Joey name-checks all the clubs of that Manhattan moment — “the Cat Club, Pyramid, Limelight, Paul’s Lounge, Save the Robots.” It’s a measure of my own longevity that I can pinpoint the exact era in which the song was written: middle ’80s. The venues may be gone, as is Joey, but we got a theme song to sing: “I like it in this city, in this New York City…”

I’m doubling my part when I look out the window, high up over the metropolis that Joey, in his curious way, made his own, and now represents all over the world, wherever the flag of rock’s ever-steadfast virtues is flying. A ghostly visitation, perhaps, but I’ll take the seance, and the reassurance of immortality it gifts us.

“I’ll Be Your Mirror,” she sang on the first Velvet Underground album, which was Lou Reed’s look in his own mirror — or was it a mirror looking into Lou? You never know — which is exactly what Andy Warhol thought when he paired Nico with a reluctant V.U. to construct his own hall of mirrors. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable needed a chanteuse, and Nico’s moda beauty, her model’s distancing and her nightmarish upbringing in WWII Germany, her blondness as contrasted with the chiaroscuro of the Velvets, fomented a state of creative frisson that Warhol, and even the band, found useful in creating their demimonde.

She would hardly be with the Velvets long — only three songs on their first album are led by her, all of them classics, including “Femme Fatale” and the funereal march of “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” But Nico was too distinctive a voice, and too compelling a presence not to make her way beyond Max’s back room. Her first solo album, Chelsea Girl, cloaked her in strings and flutes, much to her dismay, though the pastoral feel only enhanced the skewed superstars that lived in the title cut; covers like Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine” and three Jackson Browne songs, including “These Days,” brought out the melancholia she wore as a cloak.

That the settings of Chelsea Girl were not the way she envisioned her music was made clear by her second album, The Marble Index. Produced by John Cale, the album created swirls of storm-tossed sound around her Circe-like figure — the “Frozen Borderlines” where ships run aground and men go mad. She continued to move deeper and darker with Desertshore, another avant meisterwork that flirted with the precipice of impending desolation, particularly in “Janitor of Lunacy.” With her harmonium in the forefront, the effect was as much haunted house as haunted soul. In 1974, she recorded a mournful cover of The End, and an accompanying album. By then, the imagery of the music was beginning to overtake the muse; she became addicted to drugs, and though she continued to tour (I recall a particularly harrowing 1981 concert at the Squat Theater in Manhattan), and even record, she was exorcising demons as much as playing them. Ironically, her death came inadvertently, the result of a bicycle fall inIbiza, on July 18, 1988.

Despite the fact that she remains an ultimate cult artist, her influence has been far-reaching. A godmother of Goth, as well as influencing the musical paths of such as Kate Bush, Bjork and Siouxsie, her many astral projections can be heard in other madchens more contemporary, if not in actuality, at least in spirituality.

Chelsea Wolfe plumbs the inner reaches of those afterhours between night’s end and dawn’s promise in Apokalypsis, with an approach as much dark metal as performance art. With her pale features and long black hair reminiscent of The Ring‘s prophetic doomsayers, her dirgelike songs are both ethereal and spooky. The band surrounding her are sensitive to her mood swings, and the feel of this, her second album, is assured and confident, especially in “Tracks (Tall Bodies)” and “Mer.”

School of Seven Bells‘ Ghostory is more like Chelsea Girl, its portents of alienation and glacial loss swathed in synth textures that momentum with the poppy dance tempos and ethereal choral pads of ’80s new wave. “What do you expect?” wonders Alejandra Deheza in “Love Play” to Benjamin Curtis’s manipulation of the electronica. The combination is arctic chill, an ice cap Nico roamed like the great polar explorers.

EMA who, when she was Erika Anderson, was a member of the LA group Gowns, has the same crystalline neo-realism as Nico, the conviction that she lives and breathes where she creates. Past Life Martyred Saints is unabashedly frontal, sparing nothing in the way of harbingers. In “California,” she transplants herself from her childhood hometown ofSioux Falls to the Golden State. “Coda” has the feel of old-time shape-note singing; the calming “Breakfast” gives way to the raucous howl of “Butterfly Knife.”

The imaginative arrangements on Julia Holter‘s Ekstasis — harpsichords and vocoded harmonies — create an off-balancing act. “In The Same Room” and “Fur Felix” have a quasi-psychotropic air that leaves a waft of dream in their wake, and Holter’s voice maintains its wonderlandish quality throughout.

All of this imagining a la Nico has been occasioned by the appearance of her final concert on the eMusic site. Fata Morgana was recorded in then-West Berlin on June 6, 1988. The event took place in a planetarium, which accounts for the long stretches of meditative harmonium and interjections by Nico’s backing band, the Faction (whose pianist James Young would later write a candid account of their touring), of material composed especially for the occasion. It’s especially fitting that on this date, six weeks before she passed into the eye of the universe, Nico looked up at the planetarium dome and saw the moon, her doppelganger, eclipse itself in the wonder of the heavens, and become one with the stars.

Underappreciated slices of rock history

Usually when the word “rarity” is emblazoned on an album of golden-era rock ‘n’ roll, the expectation is that it will be full of collector classics unearthed from deep in the vaults of doo-wop and rockabilly. But herein is a collection of an even more arguably scarce, underappreciated slice of rock history: the teenage love-struck song, shorn of sophistication and heralding innocence and starry eyes. I have a streak of the romantic meself, and came to this collection searching for Carl Dobkin Jr.’s “My Heart Is an Open Book,” which I intended to sing at the recent World Book Night. But in scrolling through the assembled tracks, I was pleasured to find many of my personal favorites, capturing an aw-shucks sensibility that reflected my own sense of wonder during the hormonal growth spurts of adolescence.

Johnny Ferguson’s “Angela Jones” and Mike Clifford’s “Close To Kathy” are perfect examples of yearning at its most aorta-breaking; George Hamilton IV’s “A Rose And A Baby Ruth” is as ghostly as Edd “Kookie” Byrnes jive-talk (“Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb”) is groovy; one-hit wonders (Dickie Lee, Donnie Brooks) mingle with celebrities from other mediums (Sal Mineo, Richard Chamberlain). Clever novelties abound: Buzz Clifford’s “Baby Sitting Boogie” matches wits with Tommy Faceda’s “High School U.S.A.,” which attempted to chronicle every high school region by releasing 28 different versions — this is the “national” version. The pop touches from a production standpoint are charming and accomplished, as in Tony Orlando’s “Bless You,” featuring swirling strings, chirpy background vocals, a pitching-woo sung from a predominantly male viewpoint, promising steadfast eternal devotion to a girl presumably crinoline’d, pony-tailed, thinking about just how far she should go at the after the Spring Fling. Just about a nickel a track as I figure it.

A feral take on transgressive rock 'n' roll

The Ghost Wolves, a stripped-down guitar/drums duo from Austin, Texas, have a feral take on transgressive rock ‘n’ roll. Carley Wolf works the distorto strings and Jonathan Konya pounds away at the skins, equal parts garage-a-billy and blues a la howling canine. They even have the dog to prove it: Carley’s father began breeding wolf hybrids more than 30 years ago, and a pet on the head of Winter, a 125-pound Arctic mixed breed that travels with them, shows that their pack is not only loyal but capable of a good nuzzle in the muzzle. One particular slide solo of Carley’s from their recent SXSW show scratched me behind the ears, wagged my tail, and made me chase a ball. The pair tour relentlessly, showing a joy in the turn-it-up that evokes the visceral virtues of rock at its most raw and elemental: “Curl Up and Dye,” the flat-out bash of “Snake and Jake Shake,” the hypnotic “First Love.” Hell, I even bought the T-shirt.

Celebrating two decades of inspirational power and charisma

Like our divided souls, the separation between church and state — for pop music, that would be gospel and secular — is often crossed. So it was when an unidentified “Male Quartette” held a “Camp Jubilee Meeting” on the aptly-titled Little Wonder Records in 1910 and used the words “rock n’ rollin’” in their sermonizing; so it was when Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin ferried across the River Jordan and into the pop charts; and so it is today, when I am side stage at a gospel shout-out in Cleveland featuring Kirk Franklin, courtesy of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s induction week.

He’s not an imposing figure, but he packs a lot of dynamo into his deliverin’-the-word preacher’s stance. He doesn’t so much sing as exhorts, accompanied by tightly wound dancing and driving his backing band — a full complement of muscular bass and drums, male and female back-up singers — into ever more ecstatic grooves, akin to a soul revue. From my point on the compass, he could testify with James Brown or Prince, all no stranger to fire-and-brimstone.

But the key to Franklin is salvation. His early life — and he shares it freely with the audience when he enters the stage — was brutal. Abandoned by his mother, his grandmother encouraged his love of music, and held watch for him while he went through difficult times as a teenager. By 1990 he had seen the light, in more ways than one, and two years later founded the Family, a choir that gained him his first recording contract. The breakthrough came in 1995, and to celebrate two decades of leading his testifying clan, Sony Legacy has assembled this Essential two-disc set, beginning with Kirk’s first recordings for the GospoCentric label. “Silver and Gold,” “Speak to Me” and the epic “Family Worship Medley” herald his debut album’s inspirational power, his charisma and staunch belief in the healing power of song elevating him as well as his willing audience. Highlights on this compilation include a 2005 duet with Stevie Wonder (“Why”), his Nu Nation incarnation which brought more R&B seasonings to his loaves-and-fishes recipe, and a most recent cut from his newest release, “Hello Fear.” Live in Cleveland, he made me a believer, and begat the revelations of this Essential collection.

Symphonic metal band fully realizes all the tangents of their sound

Ah, the great dualities that make us both human and immortal: heads/tails, heaven/hell, male/female, life/death. And then there’s Anwynn, a self-confessed “symphonic” metal band from Belgium fronted by the enmeshing opposites of Amandine’s womanly mezzo-operatics and the manly paleolithic grindcore of Bouc. Embellishing a sense of medieval, two doors down from goth, the guitarists, led by Jukka and Walkace (this band is on a first-name basis) wear kilts and drink from a horn, and the rest of their caravan — Astrid (keyboards), Vincent (bass) and Florent (drums) — create an orchestral sense of grandeur and magnificence, whether the textures are fortissimo or pianoforte.

Forbidden Songs is their first proper album, after two EPs, and the gestation has given Anwynn the benefit of fully realizing all tangents of their sound, played with great confidence and surety, pummeling when it puts the hammer down, yet with a grace that allows Amandine her own frequency spectrum. Some cuts are especially philharmonic — “Cum Cantici Veniunt” as it morphs into “Free”; some do the Celtic jig (“Across The 7 Seas”) or are hypnotically relentless (“No Victory”). There’s even a power ballad, “Lost In Avalon,” a duet between an ivory tower princess and hobgoblin which strays dangerously close to the land of Faerie before Amandine unleashes her Valkyrie battle cry and the guitars launch into mortal combat. Magnificat.

Soon he was called away for another take. When we returned to the table, he sat down only to discover it was the same old busted chair. He stood up, grabbed the back and flung it behind him, across the room, where it bounced off the wall in a shattered heap. “We won’t have that one to worry about anymore,” he said in that low-down rumble of a voice.

In the years since he passed from us, John R. Cash’s legend has never seemed more burnished. Of all his generation – or generations, since he rode shotgun on the many twists and turns that encompass the last half of the 20th century, from the birth of rock ‘n’ roll and its enshrinement to the fount of country, with its un-urban roots in the Carter Family (into whom he would marry) and healing solace – he stands ever more towering and relevant, an artisan who takes full measure and then asks you to measure up to him. Cash’s sense of integrity, his workingman spirit, his embodiment of the trials and temptations and ultimate resurrections of this life on Earth, resonates and congregates. If he’s usually depicted as a brimstone preacher, a Man in Black who, like his counterpart in the corral, Clint Eastwood, weighs his own moral scales of justice, his story also has an arc of belief as it learns how to believe, tracing that journey with hard-won song.

He grew from the archetypal creation myth of dirt-poor, in Dyas County, Arkansas, as the Depression was deepening on February 26, 1932. He might have stayed there forever, cropping the share into ever smaller pieces, but the Korean War offered him a chance to enlist in the Air Force. Stationed in Germany, he had time to learn the guitar, and wrote “Folsom Prison Blues.” When he returned to the U.S.in the mid ’50s, he settled in Memphiswhere he sold appliances and took up with guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant, the Tennessee Two. With Sun Records literally down the street, they hoped to be noticed by Sam Phillips, especially since their instrumentation was the same as Elvis before he added a drummer. But Cash’s version of rockabilly was less echoed than staccato-ed, with Perkins tick-tocka-tick riding the bottom strings and Grant providing propulsion. His sepulchral voice and haunting compositions underscore the tension of wanting to sing gospel, yet making his way in the hardscrabble world of pop music: the balancing act that is “I Walk the Line.”

His early records, and those he would make forColumbiawhen he moved on from Sun in 1959, are hardly classifiable, though instantly recognizable, like the shape notes that herald his opening show benediction: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” He sang the canon of country starting from “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” onwards, but he always slipped outside its confines, as when he added Mariachi horns to “Ring of Fire,” his biggest hit. Whether the tall tale of “A Boy Named Sue,” his passion play reading of “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” or the white-lines travelogue of “I’ve Been Everywhere,” there was no question of who was singing. It was unmistakably him, and became hymn.

Despite his outlaw image, which would provide a rallying cry, template and inspiration for Nashville’s more ornery souls, especially in the 1970s when a back-to-Luckenbach basics swept over Music City, Cash was an intensely religious man, all the more for his own personal upheavals. His marriage to June Carter in 1968 signified a newfound grace, and his television show, premiering in 1969, allowed him to bestow that grace on his fellow performers, showcasing such as Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Derek and the Dominoes, and many others who crossed musical boundaries freely.

Celebrating what would have been John’s 80th birthday this February, Sony/Legacy has gone to church with the latest in its acclaimed Bootleg series. Those behind the mining of the Cashian vaults are two knowledgeable and caring archivists and historians – Gregg Geller and Steve Berkowitz; the current set, The Soul of Truth, the fourth, centers on Cash’s religious songs, and is comprehensive and revelatory in the mode of earlier Bootleg entries. The first, Personal File, is Johnny at his most stark, featuring nearly 50 of Cash’s private recordings of himself, singing into the mirror of faith and trial and tradition and his own wry sense of humor, “Galway Gal” to “If Jesus Ever Loved A Woman” to the yarn-spinning of “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”

It’s the kind of minimalist setting Rick Rubin would provide for Johnny beginning in 1993, continuing to the last days of his life. He finds within Cash’s weathered features and graveled voice the age-old gothic retributes of mountain balladry, staring down mortality in a magisterial reading of Trent Reznor’s “Hurt,” or an equally surprising choice, Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus,” from American IV: The Man Comes Around. The fifth volume, A Hundred Highways, was completed posthumously, with the judgment day field holler of “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” and the last song he penned, the chilling prophecy of “Like The 309,” a foreshadow of the passage awaiting.