Holding Something Back

What makes good music good music

One in an occasional series 

The first season of AMC's Halt and Catch Fire tells the story of how Cardiff Electric, a fictional Dallas-based tech firm, reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS to produce their own IBM clone—a thinly disguised and highly fictionalized version of the real-life story of how Compaq wrested away IBM's PC monopoly in the '80s. The show has a cast of delightfully fucked-up characters and, for those of us old enough to remember the '80s, it stands as a period piece that does a good job of capturing the zeitgeist without becoming cliché. There's a charming sequence in the second episode where the staff of Cardiff realize that they're all about to become incredibly rich. Hardware engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) is seen driving home in his beat-up compact car, banging on the steering wheel and singing at the top of his lungs with Boz Skaggs' Lido Shuffle. A few scenes later, after the staff of Cardiff learn that many of them are at significant risk of going to prison for violating IBM's copyright, Clark is back in his car. As he starts the motor Lido Shuffle is heard again, starting somewhere in the middle (presumably because the song is on a tape in the car's cassette deck and, well, that's how cassettes work), and with a look of utter defeat he turns the music off.

After seeing this episode, I added the song to one of my playlists. Up-tempo and infectious as hell, it's a remarkable bit of songwriting and recording. The rhythm section comps crisply, and the reeds and brass add just the right amount of punch. And then at 1:57, for four bars that lead into the second repetition of the hook, something special happens. A Moog synthesizer, in eighth note triplets, arpeggiates the chord changes. It's subtle, but the effect is to push the listener right over the edge. If you weren't physically moving to the music before, this small enhancement to the groove has sealed the deal.

A more effective—if not as well known—use of this technique occurs in a particular live recording of Donavon Frankenreiter's Move by Yourself. From the beginning, the drummer, with forceful snare hits on two and four, and the bass, with a syncopated pseudo-walking style, establish that this song is going to have a hard groove. The rhythm guitar comps in the right channel with mostly splashy chords while the lead guitar in the left channel is content to play some chromatic riffs so gently as to almost go unnoticed. The hook, with its longer comping from bass and guitar and a steady but not overbearing kick drum on all four beats, gives us a short break before the groove resumes again. An eight-bar crescendo in the lead guitar's chromatic riffs at 2:04 foreshadows that the second verse will not be like the first. As the vocal begins the second verse at 2:22, the lead guitar erupts into a loud and highly syncopated augmentation of the rhythm section's comping. The groove, so carefully established in the first verse, has now reached a frenzy the listener didn't think possible, culminating in a couple of sublime drum fills that lead into the second go at the hook.

While it's nice to be surprised, and while it's nice to have music that builds to something (back in my college days, one of our favorite things to play was a concert band transcription of Elsa's Procession to the Cathedral from Wagner's Lohengrin), what really makes these recordings stand out is that in both cases we hear a band that is eminently in control. They don't give us everything the first time through because they don't have to give us everything the first time through; they hold back because they can afford to hold back. These musicians are letting us know that even at less than a hundred percent, they can put down an impressive groove. We're reminded, in ways that might be hard to hear the first couple times, just how good music can get.