Rodd Keith: I Died Today

Rodd Keith: I Died Today Rodd Keith: I Died Today (Tzadik)

review by David Greenberger

reprinted from Spin, December 1996

Rodd Keith (1937-1974) was a true music worker. He was a hired gun and he toiled in the trenches. Though he surely wasn't seeking the title in his lifetime, he is the veritable King of Send-Us-Your-Poem Songs. (In fact, it was called "song sharking" and he considered it a form of musical prostitution, knowing he was capable of much more.) Those familiar with the recent collections Beat of the Traps and Makers of Smooth Music already know the scenario, but for everyone else -- the majority of you -- a brief description is in order. Motivated by everything from visions over the prairie, to an unshakable belief in the hit-bound possibilities of the rhyming couplet they thought up while gazing into the water cooler at work that day, starry-eyed dreamers from across the land would send their lyric-wannabees (and about fifty bucks) to one of several enterprises which would advertise their service in the back of magazines. That service being, to turn your poem into a song.

I Died Today collects 26 songs bearing various combinations of Rodd Keith's (also known as Rod Rogers) music, arrangements, instrumental versatility, and singing. With the constraints of turning out upwards of thirty songs in an afternoon session, Keith and his studio musicians had to rely almost exclusively on first takes. What you hear in these songs are musicians trying to make proper use of their skills and creativity, while climbing through an absurdly narrow window.

Clearly Rodd Keith was in possession of a broad musical vocabulary. Invention and surprise can be found in almost every offering, though it's regretfully certain -- and he was no doubt well aware -- that many of his "clients" may not have gotten the subtleties and sophistication he employed. "I Dreamed Too Long Woke Up Too Late" and "First Comes The Rain" are masterful pop songs, with the lyrics not gumming up the works as they sometimes do (in their often charming and unintentionally humorous way). With a more reasonable time frame in which to mix the songs they'd be on equal footing with that week's Billboard charts. (You can bet they'd just set the levels once and let the day's work roll by while they'd step outside for coffee, air, or reality.)

Here was a musician going beyond what the job required, creating for the purest of reasons: for himself and the other players locked in a windowless studio for eight hours at a stretch. It's also a remarkable opportunity to hear people who could be your neighbors offering words they think should be songs. They're not exactly right about that, but in America, an entrepreneurial spirit flourished which was not about to tell them they were wrong. That Rodd Keith performed his job with such aplomb, for oftentimes deaf ears, is a testament to the man's indomitable musical spirit.