I don’t want to be left out, an exile from the mainstream of what’s being discussed in that other music world. so I went on an expedition and checked out Mariah’s “#Beautiful” (a duet with R&B guy Miguel), Beyonce’s “Back To Black” (with Andre 3000, from the soundtrack of The Great Gatsby), and “Neurotic Society (Compulsory Mix)” by Ms Lauryn Hill (you have to call her that, I was told when I was one of a cavalcade of A&R people sent unarmed into battle to try and get some music from her, and became another casualty of her withering scorn and unresponsiveness). Back to the future! To those days when Sony Music was selling skillions of albums by these artists, and someday I’ll get around to telling some stories about the executives who insisted — this I swear — that “Crazy In Love,” “Honey” and “Doo Wop (That Thing)” were not hit records, not even close, and that anyone who argued otherwise was deluded. Just in case you think that all, or even most, record company people know something about music.

But I digress, and not accidentally, because each of these new singles (we still call them singles, right? or just “new tracks”?) is in its own way mystifying to me. I don’t even mean that I don’t like them, although I don’t, but that I literally don’t understand them. I can’t figure out what’s going on, or what’s supposed to be going on. There are fragments of melodies involved (not so much in Ms Hill’s case), and words sung or spoken in English, but they’re not songs exactly, they’re ideas sketched out but not developed. “Neurotic Society” comes with its own warning label from the artist, saying that in a more perfect universe where her income taxes were paid and she wasn’t facing prison time, this recording probably wouldn’t be released (hence the “Compulsory Mix” subtitle), and the caveats are in order: she’s saying a lot of stuff about how messed up the world is, and I caught a line about “Mack The Knife” and James Dean, but it’s a defiantly unmusical thing. She’s angry, and is fond of the word “paradigm,” this much I know.

Not, however, as fond as Mariah is of the word “beautiful.” For the first minute or so Miguel is out there singing the verses on his own over a sexy old-school guitar lick, and then enter Mimi, and it all flattens out into a repetitive groove that isn’t uncatchy. but feels like an improvised “top-line” built around the word “beautiful” rather than a worked-out song (“top-line” – sometimes with a dash, sometimes not — is new industry-speak for what used to be called “lyrics and melody,” except the track has already been produced, which is backwards, I think, but that’s how things are done). Mariah is a presence on the track, certainly, but she isn’t doing a lot of singing. As for Beyonce and Andre 3000’s version of “Back To Black,” I don’t know: I’m sort of with Amy Winehouse’s dad on this one; it feels unnecessary, although maybe it works better in Baz Luhrmann’s movie. On its own, it’s sort of lifeless. Not only is Winehouse’s better, so is Ronnie Spector’s, frayed voice and all. Beyonce’s is simply a throwaway soundtrack cover, and if the movie fizzles, it’ll be quickly forgotten.

But you know what? In my quest to keep up on what’s new and happening, I found another track from The Great Gatsby soundtrack that I’ve had on repeat: Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful.” It’s a languorous mood piece, with Del Rey’s customary Kim Novak-in-Vertigo trance-vocals, and surprise, it may be the best thing she’s done since “Video Games” made her a sort-of-star. She’s always referenced Nancy Sinatra as a template, and here’s where that makes sense: there’s a (modernized) touch of Billy Strange and Lee Hazlewood in the production, and an actual hook, and it all works. It may not win any summer-single sweepstakes — it’s far too drugged-out and woozy for that — but if this is where Del Rey is headed, I’m in.

Meanwhile, over in Raleigh, North Carolina a couple of days earlier, Bob Dylan played a set that included “Things Have Changed,” “High Water (For Charlie Patton),” “Thunder On The Mountain,” “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” “Love Sick,” and “Early Roman Kings,” all from the last two decades, plus “Visions of Johanna,” “Ballad of A Thin Man,” “Tangled Up In Blue”…you get the idea. You could argue (and I would) that the Dylan repertoire from the ‘60s and into the ‘70s is richer than The Stones’, but that’s a discussion over beer and pretzels, and all I want to point out is that night after night, Dylan is drawing on an insanely deep catalog of songs, that he trusts his fans not to revolt if on a given night he decides to skip over “Like A Rolling Stone” or “Blowin’ In The Wind” or “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” that he’s brought along up-and-coming band Dawes as his opening act, and that with Ticketmaster fees, top price for his show is $58.35, around 1/10th of the highest-priced Stones ticket. And still for under a hundred bucks, you can see Bob Dylan this summer with Wilco and My Morning Jacket.

Friends in Los Angeles were all giddy about being able to catch the Stones’ warm-up show at the small Echoplex venue, and I know what a kick it is to watch Keith and Charlie up close, and I’d have wanted to be there as well, because they are, after all, the Rolling Stones. Yet even in that joint, where they could’ve done anything, tried out older songs that hadn’t done in a while, gone a little deeper, the highlight seems to be that they took “Little Queenie” out of their pocket for the first time in a really long time, so we’re at the historic juncture where the Stones doing a Chuck Berry cover is an event. I hope it was a fun three minutes, because then it was back to the hits.

It’s not for me to tell the Rolling Stones what to do, but I’m going to anyway. Play theaters for a week, like Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers are doing in NYC at the Beacon this month, make each night a unique thing, a bunch of blues and rock & roll covers one night, then a ’70’s Stones Night, or a night devoted to Aftermath or Some Girls or Exile On Main St, an online request night. Schlep guests on stage like The Allman Brothers Band does during their Beacon residencies (The Stones are already doing that: Gwen Stefani and Keith Urban cameo’d at the Staples). Charge a few hundred bucks a ticket if you like. I realize that the Stones can’t do what Dylan does. For one thing, Dylan has actually made albums in the ‘90s and in this century that are worth listening to, so there’s that advantage of having great material that isn’t at least four decades old. Still, there are ways the Stones could honor their legacy that don’t involve asking their aging fans to pony up one more time to hear the classic-rock staples. “Start Me Up,” for real? “It’s Only Rock and Roll”? That’s just predictable, and lazy. What if, just at the next gig, instead of singing “Happy,” Keith sang “Burn Your Playhouse Down” — the duet he recorded with George Jones — with Keith Urban? I’d pay good money to see that.

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And he writes about almost all of his major songs in the book, in great detail, so it’s an essential read. It’s has everything that was missing from Carole King’s memoir: an examination of a body of work, a look into the studio, into the intricacies of how the collaboration with Hal David actually functioned from song to song, Bacharach’s manic attention to what other people might consider minutiae. He had to become a producer, because as a writer, he kept hearing things that were wrong: he was annoyed that Gene McDaniels’ “Tower of Strength” was cut at too fast a tempo, he complained about the mastering on Jerry Butler’s “Make It Easy On Yourself”, he thought Brook Benton was “a real pain in the ass” and couldn’t sing the right notes on “A House Is Not A Home”: he needed total control.

And even once he became a huge deal, he’d bristle when one of his songs was mishandled in the studio. He’s no fan of Sonny Bono’s production of Cher’s version of ‘Alfie,” and he points out that Love plays the wrong chords on their take on “My Little Red Book.” Anyone Who Had A Heart has tales of multiple takes, artists bravely attempting to navigate those whiplash changes and hat-size tempos. Singing a Bacharach melody is like trying to juggle and eat pizza at the same time, and even veteran Broadway singer Jerry Orbach struggled with the complexity of “Promises, Promises.” When a singer like Dionne Warwick or Dusty Springfield or Karen Carpenter (or more recently, Rumer) tackles Bacharach-David material, they create the illusion that these songs are so singable. Welcome to karaoke suicide mission.

There’s all that inside-baseball, but there are also some revelations and bits of gossip, like the time Sinatra hung up on Bacharach when he was a little slow in committing to a date to start a proposed Frank-Burt album, the financial fracas that broke up David and Bacharach during the catastrophic Lost Horizon project, Warwick’s irrational possessiveness (and her hesitance to turn over the “That’s What Friends Are For” proceeds to charity, because didn’t she just do the pro bono thing on “We Are The World”? How giving is she expected to be?), the disappointment when “Alfie” lost the Oscar for Best Original Song to “Born Free” (and we can see now how that turned out: one became a modern standard, the other forgotten schmaltz).

I sat in a coffee shop and gulped the book down, reading Herb Alpert’s recollection of “This Guy’s In Love With You,” Elvis Costello telling the story of “God Give Me Strength” and Painted From Memory, Paul Jones from Manfred Mann remembering at least nineteen takes of “My Little Red Book” (and how much trouble the rest of the band had with the chords): throughout the book, these participants pop up with anecdotes and angles of their own, fleshing out Bacharach’s narrative. The personal messiness in his marriage to Angie Dickinson isn’t, to me, as fascinating as the fact that she helped get him his first film-soundtrack gig for What’s New Pussycat?, and then walked him through how the whole movie scoring process worked.

Another thing I didn’t know: Bacharach and David cut “Walk On By” and “Anyone Who Had A Heart” with Dionne at the same session, and then “argued about which song to release first.” After “Anyone Who Had A Heart” hit, Florence Greenberg, who ran Scepter Records, still wasn’t sold on “Walk On By,” so she stuck it on the B-side of another single, “Any Old Time Of Day.” As Bacharach tells it, “Murray The K played both sides on his radio show in New York, and then asked his listeners to vote on which one they liked better.” On such events do the wheels of pop history turn.

The problem with Fleetwood Mac 2013 isn’t that the band is slack or uninspired — those rock songs from Fleetwood Mac, Rumours and Tusk crackle (“Go Your Own Way” is one of the best singles of the ’70s), and Nicks still twirls girlishly on the spacier songs, and Buckingham squeezes out sparks on guitar — but that there’s a central character missing. Without Christine McVie, there’s nothing to bring the band down to earth, no calming moments, no soulfulness, really, and no “Over My Head” or “Say You Love Me” (or “You Make Lovin’ Fun,” or “Over & Over”). Everyone loves Stevie Nicks — the young women jump out of their seats and sing along with every note of “Landslide” and Rhiannon,” songs that they hold close to their hearts — but she was the third-best writer in the group, and on the numbers where she isn’t throwing ambivalent darts at her guitarist, she can be a bit much, slinking around the stage in her wardrobe of scarves.

A couple of nights later at City Winery, Rickie Lee Jones faced an audience similarly inclined: they came to reminisce, primarily, although they paid homage by buying the new CD (of cover songs, it should be noted) at the merch table. Jones’ impressive debut album came out in 1979, the same year as Tusk, on the same label, and it’s probably a safe bet that not a small number of the post-boomers at both shows own Rickie Lee Jones and at least Rumours, if not its complicated follow-up. Backed by a guitarist and a cellist, Jones tossed off her hit “Chuck E’s In Love” early on in the set — get that out of the way — and eventually made her way to the piano where she locked into “Living It Up” and “We Belong Together,” two songs from her second album Pirates, and that was where the show lifted off. She wasn’t bound by the original arrangements, and couldn’t have recreated them under those musical conditions anyway, so she found the centers of them, and re-sculpted them. But what if there were a new album of new songs? Would the audience get fidgety? That’s part of the trap. The Devil You Know(nice title) visits The Stones, Tim Hardin, Donovan, Neil Young, “St. James Infirmary,” so she could throw a few of those into the set without disrupting the flow, but this new generation of oldies artists also wants to stay vital, and how do they manage that?

For a few minutes, everyone was saying how good the new David Bowie album is, and they’re right, but I listened to it once, just to check in, was pleased that it shows some vitality, and then filed it away (not literally, since I didn’t purchase a hard copy, but mentally). If he does tour, how much of it could he get away with, in arenas where people are paying hundreds of dollars to see him? He’s not alone. What if Tom Petty album put out an album of new songs before storming the Beacon Theater for a week, and used those shows to hype it? And it doesn’t matter so much whether Tempest, Psychedelic Pill, Wrecking Ball and Old Ideas are ok, disappointing or great Dylan, Young, Springsteen and Cohen albums: they aren’t going to convert many new fans, and if there are new fans to be made, each of those artists has at least ten albums that are more essential entry points. I’m seeing a lot of pre-publicity for new Elton John and Rod Stewart albums, each being called a return to form, or something like that, but honestly, does anyone believe that either is going to deserve to sit alongside Tumbleweed Connectionor Never A Dull Moment? Or that it’s going to mean much if, by some bolts of inspiration, they do? We all know which Elton and Rod songs are going to get people on their feet at Madison Square Garden.

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The book’s central figure, and collaborator, is Dick Cami — son-in-law of mob guy Johnny “Futto” Biello — who was given the Peppermint Lounge to operate and was as surprised as anyone when the crowds started to show up to shimmy to Joey Dee’s combo, crammed onto the tiny dance floor, while the young, pre-Spector Ronettes shook their stuff as the club’s in-house twist ensemble. Then the action cuts to Miami Beach, where The Beatles want to meet Twist originator Hank Ballard (he’s less than enthused), Clay turns up with his date Dee Dee Sharp (“Mashed Potato Time”), Frank Sinatra throws a nightclub chair off a balcony, Jayne Mansfield shows John Lennon her breasts, Nat King Cole sits in on keyboards with a twist band. It’s like a big pop-culture circus imagined by Martin Scorsese, and you can see why it was first developed as a movie idea: these are terrific scenes that capture that period between Kennedy’s inauguration and Beatlemania, when part of the culture was hanging on to its highballs at the Fontainebleau Hotel and the kids were turning on the radio and tuning intoAmerican Bandstand and Chubby Checker became, for a moment, Psy.

Bandstand was YouTube, “The Twist” was “Gangham Style,” and “Let’s Twist Again” became the first Pop Song Sequel: “Let’s Twist again, like we did last summer,” Checker suggested. “Do you remember when things were really hummin’?,” as though the events of a mere twelve months ago were already in the deep past and it was time to resurrect them. Things went really fast. The Twist didn’t last too long, and didn’t leave much of value behind. A few classic oldies (“Twist and Shout,” Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ The Night Away,” maybe Gary U.S. Bonds’ “Dear Lady Twist,” and if you want to tack on The Contours’ “Do You Love Me,” where the newly-acquired ability to do the Twist bestows on the singer potential desirability, and The Marvelettes’ “Twistin’ Postman,” go ahead), and some vintage film clips, and the distinction of kicking off the whole dancing-apart thing (says Chubby, although the Cha-Cha-Cha and the Stroll didn’t have much body contact). It’s sad to read the last chapter of Peppermint Twist, where Checker doesn’t seem to grasp what happened, why he isn’t given credit for, as he sees it, revolutionizing the culture.

It wasn’t about him, although he was the most visible practitioner of the Art of Twisting, the star of those two movies shown on Antenna the other night (Joey Dee also turned up in a film, Hey Let’s Twist, which is maybe infinitesimally better than the Checkers). His recording of “The Twist” was a faithful cover of the original by Hank Ballard and The Midnighters (down to the Ballardesque “eee-yah!” vocal punctuation) and became a hit mainly due to the promotional efforts of Dick Clark, and there were a couple of other Checker Twist hits (“Let’s Twist Again,” “Slow Twistin’” with Dee Dee), but the fad that started in 1960 had petered out by the time 1962 was over. Twist Culture eventually evolved into Go-Go Culture (a transition chronicled in Peppermint Twist), and there weren’t that many artifacts of the Twist Age that survived. Everyone in the mob and the music industry simply moved on to the next profitable things: what did they care if it was Ska, or Bossa Nova, or the British Invasion? You go where the customers are; that’s what pop is about, catching a ride on what’s now. The Twist was a moment when everything became silly (sitcoms and variety shows quickly pounced on it as comedy fodder), and it had to fizzle. There is a famous film clip of The Beatles at the Peppermint Lounge with Murray The K, Ringo out on the dance floor with one of the club’s dancers, and it’s like everyone is saying, enough with that, that was fun, now let’s go, we’ve got stuff to do.

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Why The Eagles? Most of their best early songs were at least partially Souther’s, they didn’t come up with anything that was an improvement (or even a novel spin) on what’d been done by The Byrds on Sweetheart of the Rodeo or The Flying Burrito Brothers on The Gilded Palace of Sin, or Buffalo Springfield, or Crosby, Stills and Nash on their debut (and once Neil Young came on board, they had the Eagles lapped in every conceivable category), or Little Feat, and their Big Statement, Hotel California, may have some representative-of-an-era cache, but it also isn’t very good, except for “New Kid In Town,” a song with a smidgen of Roy Orbison-Everly Brothers mystery that I’m going to lay at the feet of J.D. Souther.

Are the Eagles anyone’s favorite band? I’ve been writing about, arguing about, discussing pop music for at least as long as they’ve been in existence, and I’ve never heard anyone make an impassioned case for them, heard an affectionate defense. No one ever talks about their warmth, or humor (except those who find “Hotel California” unintentionally funny, all that smug “decadence” and the dopey word games), or urgency. The most anyone can say is that they have “good songs,” enough to fill the biggest-selling Greatest Hits album ever and then some, and that’s not nothing (I certainly understand the appeal of their balladly things like “Lyin’ Eyes,” “Take It To The Limit” and the lovely “I Can’t Tell You Why”), but I don’t think they have as many good songs as — some L.A. groups more or less at random — Bread, The Association, The Turtles, groups that are probably in no one’s pantheon, and when you go up a few notches to Fleetwood Mac, The Beach Boys, Love, The Byrds, I don’t think it’s even a fair fight. I also think Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt made more lasting contributions (without Linda rescuing the song, “Desperado” is merely a decent LP track; without Jackson starting to write “Take It Easy,” the group’s debut album doesn’t have a kick-off single).

We didn’t take them seriously in the ‘70s, not nearly as seriously as they took themselves (that’s a high hurdle to get over). All the rock writers I knew would trade in their promo copies of Eagles albums. Maybe we found it difficult to give them a break because they came across as arrogant and smug — so did Lou Reed, to be fair — but they made themselves such conspicuous targets, and even artists like Gram Parsons and David Crosby couldn’t resist taking shots. And this new doc does them no favors: all of part two is devoted to the solo years and the run-up to the inevitable reunion, and there is simply nothing compelling about it (except that David Geffen rightly calls Henley out for being a chronic malcontent: Geffen’s not known for understatement or restraint, but that’s an exceedingly polite term, considering). A super-popular band breaks up at the height of its super-popularity and decides after some time that the potential to make big money outweighs the residual rancor: alert the media!! Hit records, band dissension, bad behavior (although the worst of the alleged behavior isn’t even alluded to), reconciliation and commercial redemption. You’ve seen this before, many times. Why are we seeing it again? Frey and Henley aren’t Mick and Keith, or the surviving Zeps, or Pete and Roger, or Brian and Mike, or Lindsey and Stevie. In a rare moment of self-awareness, Henley mentions that one rock critic accused the Eagles of “loitering on stage,” and I’d accuse the band of loitering a good part of the time in the studio as well. As subjects of a more than three-hour documentary, they’re guilty of another non-moving violation.

Buddy Holly’s fatal winter voyage was a devastating blow to rock & roll, certainly, and you could argue that his loss made it easier for boys like Frankie Avalon to get in the door, and no one would say that’s a good thing. I do like Bobby Vee, but I can see why rock historians point to him and say: see, that’s what happens when a vacuum is created; the understudy steps in, and it’s not the same. I might counter that with: ok, fine, but on The Beatles’ audition tape for Decca, they did Bobby Vee’s “Take Good Care Of My Baby” along with Buddy Holly’s “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” (and “Searchin’” and “Three Cool Cats” by Leiber & Stoller, and “To Know Him Is To Love Him” by Spector, and “Money” by Berry Gordy). A good song is a good song, and if Lennon & McCartney could bow in the direction of Bobby Vee through Goffin & King, who am I to call them dupes? I don’t know this for sure, but I kind of suspect that The Beatles didn’t see their mission as bringing rock and roll back from the dead, but as coming up with hit songs like Gerry Goffin and Carole King and the other writers who wrote for The Shirelles (there are two Shirelles covers on their debut album).

Read enough Rock History, and you’ll get the McLean Theory scribbled ad nauseam. Even if the expiration date varies (not everyone agrees that Feb. 3, 1959 was The Day The Music Died: some say it was when Elvis Presley was inducted into the Armed Forces, some when Chuck Berry got sent to the slammer, some when Little Richard found God, some when Jerry Lee Lewis got hitched to his child bride…pick your moment), it’s standard practice to pronounce The Music moribund for that half-decade before John, Paul, George and Ringo gave it CPR. I’m not one to minimize the excitement of the British Invasion. That week in February 1964 when The Rutles — I mean, The Beatles — captivated America was the beginning of a massive cultural youthquake, and just wait until a year from now when it’s the 50th Anniversary and you won’t be able to turn on your TV without seeing them land at the airport, sing “All My Lovin’” on the Sullivan show, twist with Murray The K at the Peppermint Lounge. The Beatles changed my life, for sure, and so, in a different way, did the late, great Buddy Holly (he was already late and great by the time I started buying records, but I do have a bunch of his original Coral and Brunswick 45’s). I just don’t think it diminishes their glow one bit to acknowledge that in those intervening years, rock and roll wasn’t dead: “Runaround Sue,” “Quarter To Three,” “Twist and Shout,” “Runaway,” “Walk Like A Man,” “Bring It On Home To Me,” “Shut Down,” “Baby Workout,” “Da Doo Ron Ron”…should I go on?

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Like, I was talking to someone earlier today about seeing The Lovin’ Spoonful and Cream (not on the same bill, alas) at Hunter College. He asked when this was, and in my brain it was: well, the shows were around the same time, and the Cream one was before Disraeli Gears but after the Murray the K Paramount Shows, so…fall of 1967, maybe? Except it wasn’t in 1967 at all, and it was way after The Lovin’ Spoonful show, so it had to be after Disraeli Gears, but somehow I’d conflated those two shows into the same period, maybe mixing Cream up with The Doors? Damn you, internet! Not that any of this matters: it isn’t like I’m assembling a definitive diary of Every Rock Show I Saw, 1966-1971, which would be impossible to construct even with the help of all those websites that list every date of every tour by bands I know I saw, and even if I could spend hours and hours of my time doing this detective work on, as the site would have it, All The Streets I Crossed, who would care and what purpose would it serve?

How’d I get into this? Oh, I was watching a Cream documentary the other night, about the recording of Disraeli Gears, and Eric Clapton was talking about where a specific guitar lick came from on “Tales of Brave Ulysses,” and he said how influenced his band (Cream) was by The Lovin’ Spoonful, and he by Zal Yanovsky’s (although he calls him Zanovsky) guitar playing specifically, and although I have spent how many hours of my life listening to both bands — and, as I mentioned, I thought I saw them both within a short period of time — it never would have occurred to me to draw a direct line (maybe a squiggly one) between Cream and The Lovin’ Spoonful even though Cream did a song called “Spoonful.” But of course there is: Cream could have done Sebastian’s “It’s Not Time Now,” the Spoonful could have done Cream’s “Sleepy Time Time,” and Cream’s “Wrapping Paper” has some of the Spoons’ relaxed old-timey thing, and I can hear Clapton or Jack Bruce singing “Wild About My Lovin’” or Sebastian singing “Outside Woman Blues.” The underlying nods to country blues are the same, but the bands come at the music from different angles. Of course Clapton took some of Zal’s “Summer In The City” licks for “Tales of Brave Ulysses”; I was thrown off by Eric’s wah-wah, and by Ginger Baker’s rolling drums, but there you go. I’m betting that if I dig enough, I’ll find somewhere in 1967 where Cream and The Lovin’ Spoonful ran into each other. When Cream came to NYC to play those first Paramount Shows? When they were downtown gigging at the Cafe A Go-Go? At Steve Paul’s Scene? Rock in the sixties wasn’t only about the streets we crossed, it was about where those roads intersected.

This new one has been sitting around a while also, while her label went through some restructuring — the usual corporate mishegas — but my guess is that when the new team was in place and had a listen, they figured. oh, she has a following, and they must like things about her that we don’t quite grasp, so let’s just put the thing on the schedule. Again, this is my guess, based on what I know about some of the people over there. Because there’s no contemporary commercial context for Fiona Apple except the context of Fiona Apple; her music is all angular and jagged in an almost-jazz way, and the emotion is raw and out front, and sometimes it sounds as though it was produced in a junkyard on old tossed-out kitchen appliances. Nothing about it is smooth or slick or pop-as-we-know-it, if that means “Call Me Maybe” — a very, very cute song with clear pop antecedents going back to Marcie Blaine and Shelley Fabares pining over Bobby or Johnny Angel, only more forward, like “here’s my number, idiot” — or any of the other girls (Katy, say) prancing around on the radio. The closest Fiona comes to pop-sex-metaphor is when she compares herself to a “Hot Knife,” but that song is constructed so non-pop: Fiona and her sister Maude Maggart spiral layer on layer of vocals over ominous tribal drums and fleeting shards of piano, making it one of the oddest girl-group records since The Tammys’ “Egyptian Shumba.”

The whole album (you can look up the title; it’s really long) is exciting because without meaning to be, I suppose, it’s defiant, and messy and complicated. It’s the best new album I’ve heard this year (confession: I don’t listen to that many new albums these days, but still…), and one of the few I’m going to keep going back to. Everyone who makes records is called an artist, and that’s more and more of a joke when so much music is processed through a rigid hit system — nothing intrinsically wrong with that; Motown was a hit system also — but Fiona Apple does what true artists do: fascinate, aggravate, draw you in and shake you up. She does anything she wants.

All three vocalists could make you weep, and then they could turn around and howl with joy. The Band could do Motown and Little Richard, give Dylan the best musical support he ever had, get people like Eric Clapton and George Harrison to seethe with envy, make Elton John and Richard Thompson and Rod Stewart rethink everything. Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson (alphabetically, because no one in that crew deserves top billing) were the best, if you can say that sort of thing. Who was better?

Now Rick, Richard and Levon are gone, which means all the voices are gone, which means one more link broken. Other people will play and sing The Band’s songs, but no one from The Band will, and that closes the door on that. I guess Robbie and Garth could find some other guys, but they’ve never shown any inclination to do so in all the years since The Last Waltz, so no reason to expect that now.

I bought tickets for Levon’s Ramble at the Ryman scheduled for a couple of weeks from now, and today I got an e-mail apologizing for the cancellation. I was so looking forward to going to seeing that on my Nashville trip (hell, it was pretty much the reason I booked the Nashville trip), and it saddens me that I didn’t get the chance to see him one more time. The first time was way way back, the first time The Band played the Fillmore East; I had seats up close, and watched them interact, and it wasn’t their most well-oiled set, but when they clicked, they made most other bands seem slack and immature. I caught them a number of times after that, New Year’s Eve at the Academy of Music during the Rock of Ages run, and with Bob Dylan at the Garden. And at Watkins Glen. The last time I saw Levon, Garth and Rick on stage was at the Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert in October 1992, where they played “When I Paint My Masterpiece.”

I’ve read a lot of touching obituaries on Levon, and this isn’t meant to be anything as comprehensive as that. You can read books on the importance of The Band, and you should. But I’ve been playing Levon’s music over the past few days; the other afternoon, I even dug out two of his solo albums, both of them titled Levon Helm, one on ABC, one on Capitol, and although neither one is anything like him in peak form, I simply felt like hearing Levon sing songs that I haven’t heard him sing over and over. It was a way of imagining that there’s a lot of unfamiliar Levon Helm music out there to discover. I guess I was trying to trick myself, but I don’t really need to do that; the music that I’ve listened to, and know deep in my bones, is music I’m never going to get tired of. Safe passage on the mystery train, Levon.