My Encounter with the Genuine Article: Musician Jody Raffoul

It didn't take Ashlee Simpson being caught-out lip synching on Saturday Night Live or the lame-o TV show Making the Band's cast of crybabies vying for a spot in the wretched "O-Town" to make me cynical about contemporary music. I have always been innately repelled by fakes, phonies, posers and frauds. In the video The Doors: Live in Europe 1968 Grace Slick quotes Keith Richards on the subject of poseurs, "Shave, and go home." No, music videos alone have been enough to sour me on contemporary music. This wasted, abused artform is the Grand Bandwagon where most musicians show themselves "being different... like everyone else," turning the spiritual experience that music truly is into something shat out by McWal-Mart.

But there are moments when my path crosses that of a Genuine Article. Like the day I first heard Lou Reed's song "Vicious," or U2's "Pride (In the Name of Love)." Hearing The Who's "Baba O'Reilly" for the first time. Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On?" Van Morrison's "St. Domick's Preview." Or, when I first listened to Sam Cooke's supernova performance on his album Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Club. Or, the time when I worked in a stockroom in the Devonshire Mall and heard a girl named Sarah singing some throwaway line from her favorite song. She didn't know anyone was listening, and I couldn't believe what I was hearing. The Genuine Article. More than talent, more than a gift, even. Passion -- the bullseye of one's soul struck like a powerchord on Pete Townsend's guitar.

Last night I had the pleasure and privlege to see another Genuine Article perform. His name is Jody Raffoul, and he's got a sound that comes straight out of the left ventricle of classic rock 'n' roll. After eighteen years of show-by-show, city-by-city dues-paying, Jody Raffoul has released his latest album Like A Star.

The melodies and musicianship on this album caught my interest immediately, but hearing Jody's astonishing vocals stopped me in my tracks. Where voices like this come from, I don't know, but Bono has one, as does Smokey Robinson and Roger Daltrey.

Known for his acoustic performances, Jody's backing band provides him with a spare, stripped-down sound that strikes the bone on each album cut.

The tempos shift from song to song on Like a Star, weaving a mood and feel of great depth and complexity. From the flat-out addictive rock hooks of "Light of Day" and "Feel For You," to the meditative "Dreamer" and the soulful "Ten Times," Jody Raffoul's latest CD delivers a pile-driver rock performance.

On so many albums there can be such disparity between the "hit" tracks and those simply taking up space to fill out a CD (Sammy Hagar's I Never Said Goodbye comes to mind with its two great hits "Give to Live" and "Eagles Fly" and the ground sausage filler that rounds out the rest of the album). No such disparity exists on Like a Star. The music moves from the compulsively listenable "Light of Day" (which is currently enjoying quite a lot of radio play) to the soulful "Ten Times" through a highly personal landscape not unlike John Lennon's Milk and Honey.

Jody's cover of Jeff Lynne's "I Can't Get it Out of My Head" is one of those classic renditions where the musician paying homage injects a performance with so much of his own feel that he takes partial ownership of the song. Joe Cocker's cover of the Beatles' "With a Little a Help From My Friends" comes to mind as another such moment in music.

The track "Take Me Under" begins with a bluesy feel that quickly flowers into something with a psuedo-Beatles tang to it, but morphs into a solid pop chorus. Quite a musical feat, and clearly the work of a gifted artist simply following where a song leads him. During a conversation I had with Jody before his performance in Windsor, Ontario's Fidel's, he said that he only really hit his stride as a vocalist when a producer suggested to him, "Don't sing so much like a singer." Stripped of affectation, Jody's vocals are possessed of the unadorned energy of a natural singer. His meditative song "I Feel For You" is one of the strongest vocal performances on the album.

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Having stayed at Fidel's much longer than I intended, I left the club after Jody performed a stellar version of The Who's "The Seeker." As I stepped out the door into the cold night, Jody launched into Bad Company's "Shooting Star." I stood there on the damp sidewalk, breath pluming before me, just listening... For whatever reason, I'm not much of a Bad Company fan, but Jody's cover of that song had it flexing and speaking in ways I had never considered before.

In a music scene cluttered by phonies and wannabes, Jody Raffoul is a Genuine Article in the mold of Pete Townsend, Bruce Springsteen, and Jimmy Barnes.