Remembering Mats Roden

When I moved back to Nashville back in 1983, WRVU had become the beacon of all that was cool.  I discovered many great bands on this station and made some life-long friends in the process.

            One of the bands I distinctly remember hearing on WRVU for the first time was Birmingham’s the Primitons– and they were a revelation to me: killer guitars, powerful drums matched with almost angelic  vocals and intelligent lyrics.  Later I saw a picture of the band for the first time and I couldn’t put it all together.  For the most part, they looked like your typical early 1980’s outfit except for the one guy who looked like an angry giant biker.  I was later to learn that this was the source of those beautiful vocals and monster guitar riffs: Mats Roden – a Swede somehow transplanted to Birmingham, Alabama.

            I don’t remember how I got to know these guys – there was Mats, drummer extraordinaire Lief Bondarenko and a non‑performing lyricist Stephanie Truelove-Wright together with an apparently  rotating cast of bass players.  Seemingly, they did everything right.  They were produced by Mitch Easter, recorded a Left Banke cover, had a record on Throbbing Lobster – this all seemed like success to me at the time; yet they didn’t make it.

            Early in my legal career I tried to shop the band for a new deal  to no avail.  I still have my pitch letters – (man, was I earnest).  I stayed in touch with Mats and sometime in 1990 or 1991 he sent me a tape that blew my mind.  He and Lief had formed a new band called the Sugar La La’s – it seemed like some kind of Birmingham super group and featured a brilliant and charismatic singer  named Carole Griffin.  The music was complex, exotic, slightly decadent and celebratory; songs like “Free Love” and “Everybody Hates Me,” and “You Must Die”.  The stage show was even better.  Mats kept the biker boots but often dressed in drag.  Carole was mesmerizing and the band was supported by a trave

ling entourage of cross-dressing lunatics – all from Birmingham, Alabama.

            I rarely trust my commercial instincts but I knew this band could get a record deal.  In short order they showcased for publishers and record companies, got a good publishing deal, turned down a major label while holding out for a better offer and then … broke up.  Carole, the singer, quit the band.  They tried to replace her but she was irreplaceable.

            I was heart-broken.  Rarely had I worked with a group this great or a songwriter/musician as talented as Mats.  The band was cool enough to reunite to play my wedding in 1993 but essentially they were done.  As the years passed I would go back and listen to both the Primitons and the Sugar La La’s and try to figure out why neither band succeeded.  Mats would call periodically and update me on new projects but nothing ever seemed to pan out.  A few years ago he suffered a stroke.  I never knew the details and although he still remained in touch,  I don’t think that Mats was prepared to deal with the music industry in the 21^st century.  I think I irritated him during  our last email exchange because I hadn’t listened to something he had sent me.  A couple of weeks ago I saw on Facebook that Mats had died in his sleep.

            I was neither shocked nor surprised but I was immensely saddened by the fact that only a small portion of the world got to experience his immense creativity and talent.  A couple of years ago a label called Arena Rock Recording Company re‑issued all of the Primitons’ recordings digitally for the first time.  If you want to know what was really good in the 1980’s, check this out.  I wish someone would release the Sugar La La’s recordings.  Mats was one‑of‑a‑kind.

Let us Now Praise the Boy King Of Tokyo

I can’t remember the exact year I actually met Bill Lloyd but I remember that I heard him before I met him.  Vanderbilt’s radio station played his song “Feeling the Elephant” often.  Having just moved back to Nashville to begin a career in entertainment law, I took this as a good sign.  Nashville was producing power pop – with great lyrics and lots of guitars and I was in the right place.

                I finally met Bill through my dear friend Mary Divney.  For some reason we ended up at Bill’s apartment and I admired his record collection – just like my own, only on steroids.  Since that time I cannot tell you the number of artists Bill has introduced me to or increased my appreciation of (the Beach Boys for starters). 

                But all of this is kind of insignificant next to the fact that Bill has been a great friend for the past 25 years or more and I’ve had a rare vantage point to see his development as an artist and a song writer.  Bill has had a fascinating parallel career as a successful country song writer/artist and as an indie rock solo artist. The music that Bill has recorded with Foster & Lloyd is cool (and I think has developed an almost archetypal sound in country music) but for my money, its Bill’s solo albums (five proper albums plus scads of compilations, etc.) that set him apart.  I was always proud of the fact that my law partner and I were able to negotiate a “solo indie rock” exclusion into Foster  & Lloyd’s RCA recording agreement and that his first solo album came out about the same time as his major label country debut.

                Bill’s solo records have never really varied sonically over the years, and that’s a good thing: lots of guitars, drums and smart insightful lyrics. Part of the reason for this is that he’s used many of the same cast of characters on his records.

                Which brings us to the new album: “Boy King of Tokyo”.  The difference on this album is that Bill plays all of the instruments as well as handling all of the vocals.  This of course puts him in that unique camp of overachievers like Paul McCartney, Todd Rundgren and Emmit Rhodes.  It’s also astonishingly tight – you’d never know this was one guy.  The instrumentation does not detract from the quality of the songs.  “Boy King Tokyo” is a wry  bit of autobiography (dig the cover art), “The Best Record Ever Made” is a nice sequel to the earlier “Cool and Gone, “ and the songs “Let It Slide,” “Up in the Air” and “Where Nobody Cares at All” all feature that  rare combination of rock and roll sensibility and (God help me) maturity. 

                There’s a lot more here.  You need to own all of Bill’s records but if you don’t have them this is a good place to start.  The CD is available through Bill’s web site (billloydmusic.net) and through all the usual download sites.  Here’s to another 25 years of friendship and great records.

God Save WRVU

Typically in this, my little window to the world, I have been writing about legal and economic issues concerning the music and intellectual property industry. Today I want to narrow my focus on a radio station: Vanderbilt’s WRVU.

VSC (Vanderbilt Student Communications, Inc.), the governing body of Vanderbilt University’s student media, recently announced that it is considering moving the venerable radio station to an internet address and selling its broadcast band. The presumptive rationale is that data shows that a large number of college students only listen to radio on the internet.

I am not sure if the student population is relevant here. When I was an undergraduate at Vanderbilt, we routinely ignored the programming on WRVU, although the station did produce local luminary Fred Buc of Lightning 100 fame during that time. It was only after I graduated from Vanderbilt that I discovered the great service that the station offered the Nashville community. Over the past quarter of a century, I have enjoyed the station’s programming, from blues to bluegrass (“George the Bluegrass show”), from jazz to funk (thanks, Doyle), from honky-tonk (thanks, Heather) to politics (thanks Mary and Freddie), from Ken Berryhill (the world’s oldest country DJ) to 91 Jumps, the Friday morning R&B show (a staple of my listening diet).

I cannot begin to tell you how much new music I have been exposed to on 91 Rock. I first heard some of my oldest friends and clients on WRVU. Nashville first rock scene in the 1980’s would not have happened without WRVU. I was reminded the other day that a bunch of us young (at the time) local music biz types were instrumental in helping WRVU with benefit albums and concerts back in the day. I still discover great new and old music, local and otherwise, on the station.

The idea of listening to radio on the internet reminds me of ham radio enthusiasts using their hobby to dial in strange and wondrous lands. The data be damned. This data ignores most of us adults who, for better or worse, do most of our serious listening in the car while commuting and running errands throughout our day. To ignore such an important facet of the Nashville community seems to be an abdication of the station’s not-for-profit charter, and foolish for a university that already has a difficult time relating to the city at large. We always took WRVU for granted, but it may have been the university’s best ambassador to the Nashville community at large.

For what it’s worth, we should all take a minute to urge Vanderbilt Student Communications, Inc. to reconsider this intemperate move. The University is still soliciting public commentary at the bottom of the page of this link:

http://www.vandymedia.org/wrvu/