A fellow musician mentioned the other night

that it's a bad idea for musicians to "listen with their eyes."

What he meant was that when we decide how creative or talented or worthy of respect a musician is on the basis of their received recognition by an audience or their image among connoisseurs, we make bad decisions. The only true way to know what you hear in the music is to listen to the music.

I like the way he put this. It's true for musicians, but it is also true for poets, readers of novels, sports fans, theater folks, painters, voters -- anybody who needs to have the clearest take they can manage on someone's contribution.

This isn't always easy. Sometimes huge popularity is -- wrongly -- a signal to us that someone is a hack. And sometimes obscurity is damn well deserved. It's all subjective, of course, but it's still complicated.

Take the hugely successful 1960s/70s rock band Grand Funk Railroad. They were a spectacular sensation among teenagers who wanted their music loud, brash, self-righteous, and infused with pot smoke. (I know. I was there.) Writers who "knew" music (a timelessly common condition among critics who know how to listen but not how to play) trashed GFR in print with bloody fury. And they were often right. Frontman Mark Farner did suck as a guitarist and was largely full of shit as a writhing, shirtless, pseudo-philosophical rock poet. The band did play to counterculture teenybopper clichés. Producer Terry Knight was in fact a slickster whose GFR album cover concepts and band marketing rivaled the product packaging of Alka Seltzer and Shake & Bake.

But Grand Funk Railroad rocked its ass off -- mostly because monster bassist Mel Schacher and drummer Don Brewer were among the first big-time white rhythm section players to understand a basic foundation of black R&B: when you synchronize the bass line with the bass drum, you get the funk. You create the gut thump. Go back and listen to vintage GFR, and you'll hear a white band that picked up on part of the seismic essence of James Brown and other funk pioneers. These white boys heard the underlying real shit, and they rendered it well enough in coliseums to drive thousands of bodies into a frenzy. Sure, like a lot of groups, they had help from ganja, acid, and Madison Avenue. But Grand Funk Railroad was and always will be a classic ass-kicking band, no matter how many armchair virtuosos cursed them in reviews of their albums and concerts.

That is why, when I listen to musicians who I believe thoroughly suck, I try -- sometimes successfully, sometimes not -- to listen beneath that for something I need to hear. And it's why some musicians, far more accomplished than I, try to do the same thing when they listen to me.