Pop with a Shotgun

2009-06-07T03:19:00.000-07:00

THE WINSTONS
Color Him Father
The title song — a soothing, sunny single about the strong arms of the perfect Big Daddy — is one of the nicest things left us by 1969, but it certainly didn't augur for an exciting soul romp of a follow-up LP. The Winstons were an integrated (black and white) band of professional pickers and blowers whose credentials included stints behind Otis Redding and the Impressions, and like most (all?) highly qualified sidemen they were short on eccentricity. The sole near-exception is an instrumental, "Amen, Brother," with a modest drum break that is supposedly the most sampled piece of music in rap and hip-hop, and is said to have, of itself, spawned whole subgenres. But mostly the Winstons purvey light soul for Reno tourists, with positive messaging and sticky nostalgia ("I've Gotta Be Me," "Days of Sand and Shovels"). On the upswing from schmaltz, they manage an "Everyday People" that is square enough to recall the California Poppy Pickers covering "Back in the USSR," but fast enough to be not-bad; and a "Birds of a Feather" that bubblegums the Joe South original and winds up besting it, simply by easing up on the echo-chamber effect. But it's long reach, short gain; these guys left it all on the 45.

P. F. SLOAN
Anthology
Sloan — singer-songwriter, Dylan with a cotton-candy afro — wrote some of the choicest pop melody of the mid-60s ("You Baby," "Can I Get to Know You Better," "Where Were You When I Needed You") as well as that well-intended growl and stupefying #1 "Eve of Destruction." He was also the uncredited voice of the early Grass Roots, which started out as an in-name-only entity fronting for Sloan's demos; his is the weak voice on version 1 of "Where Were You." The main reason for spending an hour with this anthology is to hear working versions of the handful of songs later recrafted as Roots tracks, particularly "Melody for You."

TONY OWENS
“I Got Soul”
Dark obscurity from that history-turning year of 1966, a slamming, sinister tempo and high-pitched guitar backstrokes that sound like flicks of a razor. A logical pursuit of the rhythmic implications of "Harlem Shuffle," only bigger and scarier, a statement from the Godfather that makes Bob & Earl sound like errand boys. Altogether one of the most arresting soul vignettes ever to slide through the cracks of common knowledge; makes the having of soul sound like slow, sexy murder.

SLIM HARPO
“I've Got My Finger on Your Trigger”
Another hot and dangerous find: panicked-but-precise drum-horn cacophony, a rough double entendre confusing (or conflating) foreplay with gunplay, Harpo voices it like Boss Dynamite, and it fades in less than two minutes. Leaves you licking your fingers. 1970.

2008-03-09T03:23:00.000-07:00

JOE JACKSON
Rain
It’s less important to call it the best Elvis Costello album Elvis Costello never made than to say it is a coming back (not a “comeback”) by someone who has been threatening for a good two decades to go off into an ether of arty tinklings and overelaborate wordage, art-song crossed with poetry-lounge. Jackson's voice, always underrated, has its sour edge back, and its manic capability. The writing is Costelloesque, with songs like “Too Tough” and “Invisible Man” that are built on solid chordal foundations and elegant paths from verse to chorus; lyrics are smart and scannable without being distracting. Half the tracks don’t sustain their initial good riff or melodious promise, but the other half do.

MANDO DAIO
Never Seen the Light of Day
They are Swedish, but this sounds to me like a shake on the fierce Irish reel-rock that Shane McGowan and others brought o’er in the '80s of the last century. It’s pop in nature, but that doesn’t mean it’s a soft drink: there’s enough fizz to cauterize your throat, or your ears. Pogues sell out? Or non-Pogues buy in? Whichever, it has tunes and a galloping rhythmic unity, a lot of force and humor in the vocals and guts in the playing.

TED NUGENT
“Journey to the Center of the Mind”
A remake, to be found on his recent Love Grenade LP, alongside such devilishly droll titles as “Girl Scout Cookies” and “Bridge Over Troubled Daughters.” The 1968 original by the Amboy Dukes was Ted’s first (and, unless he uses his famous crossbow to kill Bigfoot, probably last) moment of historical noteworthiness, and on this blaring, bollixed redundancy he does all he can to make you want to hear it again, while making you wonder how he got it right the first time. Maybe it was the band; maybe it was the drugs they were doing and he wasn’t.

RAY DAVIES
Working Man’s Café
Davies has always been one of the few pop stars for whom one could feel any appreciable personal warmth. Not that his ego was of insignificant size, or his person irreproachable, but his musical persona bespoke a fine vulnerability combined with resilience, an acceptance of absurdity, and an insistence on the importance of small, forgotten things — not just virgins and village greens, but the average person’s average defeats. His was a compassion that skirted mawkishness: “A Long Way from Home,” “Oklahoma USA,” “The Way Love Used to Be,” “Don’t Forget to Dance.” How could you not feel for him, and imagine he felt for you?

One of many possible obverses to that is that Davies can be as musically annoying in his own way as any elder statesman with the financial and historical license to go on indulging his weaknesses forever. If Neil Young’s peculiar irritation is to squawk ‘n’ rawk over a paucity of ideas, Ray’s is to serve up echt-honky tonk stylings around observational witticisms that are neither as sly nor as oblique as you might like them to be.

That describes a good half of Working Man’s Café, though the better half of the equation is what you get up front. A barnstorming opener, “Vietnam Cowboys,” tracks the globalization and cross-pollination of junk food and junk culture with war and recession — plant closings in Cleveland connected to sweatshops in Cambodia in a kind of economic-military butterfly effect. It’s not subtle, but it is rocking, with a pirate-size hook. “You’re Asking Me” calls up classic Kinks, not as mirrored memory but as immediate effect. The verbal noise for most of the album is just fine, a fling of word porridge from which emerge quick pictures of characters like the man with the “perfect mullet hanging down his back.”

The album’s slow crash comes in the form of songs that go silly, or just start stupid and stay that way. “The Voodoo Walk” coalesces from a swampy riff stolen from “Run Through the Jungle” to a thick mass of pop-type blustering, neither vitally messy nor piquantly shaped but only sloppy, a watery mudpie of sound. “Peace in Our Time” is not the great Elvis Costello song but a bombastic plea for personal and global forgiveness. “One More Time” reiterates the right (that is, Left) opinions, fixing them in the wrong (that is, plywood-dull) music. We get the point intended, if not the pleasure.

Final score, Working Man’s Café leads us to expect a good deal more than we get. And the lack of a single heartbreaker hurts.

LEVON HELM
Dirt Farmer
Ray Davies all but invented a kind of pop song — a combination of a point of view and a sound: listening to Brit-poppers from the Jam to Arctic Monkeys, we snap our fingers time and again and say “Ah! Kinky.” Levon Helm, meanwhile, didn’t invent anything, he comes out of a tradition — an earth-folk tradition which, as drummer and vocalist for the Band, he helped extend into the rock era. Unlike Ray Davies, whom we judge on how well he does Ray Davies material, Helm will stand or fall by how hardily he tests the tradition he inherits.

Were it not discredited by association with certain manifestations of art rock and the singer-songwriter phenomenon, “song cycle” would be the term to apply to Dirt Farmer. Not to say its songs all sound alike, or even that they all feel alike. But there’s a cohesiveness that runs far deeper than lyrical continuity. Levon anchors the good band — playing drums, guitar and mandolin — on songs he learned as a boy in Arkansas, alongside new compositions in that style. Among the traditionals are the Stanley Brothers’ “False Hearted Lover Blues”; “Single Girl, Married Girl,” a Helm solo from the days of the Canadian Squires; and “Little Birds,” which Levon learned from his father and performed at the Band’s earliest concerts.

There’s the sensation here of music being extracted from hearty chests and old throats; of overall effort, musicians pulling a sound out, pushing a picture forth. Not like torture, but like it costs something (as it well might, given that Helm is a recent survivor of throat cancer); yet it sounds organic, as hard-grown and rough to the touch as bark. Most songs have a droning rhythm, insistent and low to the ground, with a minimum of syncopation or embellishment. Much of it sounds like it could have been recorded concurrent with the Band’s second album: both have that log-cabin flame flicker, that nostalgia for pioneer stoicism, and the backup vocals of Amy Helm and Teresa Williams echo Helm’s deceased co-vocalists Rick Danko and Richard Manuel.

With a few (quite successful) exceptions, Dirt Farmer songs don’t bounce or stride, they move purposefully on beats weighted by massed percussion and thickened by a moaning fiddle. Most seem pitched a key or two past Helm’s most comfortable range; he is always reaching, straining. But the pull is powerful, the strain dramatic; and the tension stays high. “A Robbery,” a song about Frank and Jesse James, has the simple, forceful line, We will burn your train . . . your damned express car, and Helm puts it over as few still singing really could.

Then there’s “Anna Lee,” in the middle of which Helm’s voice seems to breaks through layers of time, travail, cancer, and the musical-mythic associations we are likely to bring to it — and turns into something else. Namely, the voice of an 80-year-old man, a grandfather, say, dressed in Sunday suit, standing on the main street of an unremembered town 150 years ago.

As much as anything, I like the way in “Calvary” he sings down to they ground.

STRANDED — The Countdown (19)

The Best of Sam Cooke (RCA). Starting out with producer-arrangers Luigi & Luigi, former gospelier Cooke spent the late ‘50s and early ‘60s writing the first testaments of the higher soul to come: smart and versatile, with lots of charm and production value, not averse to crossing over for some nightclub sweetening. Cooke’s sense of high-school romance imagined, innovatively, that black and white teenagers had much in common (Motown would soon take up that commercial flag). As a singer he built a style out of long smooth lines embellished by little clusters of detail notes at the ends, a style that would be heard in a whole legion of singers to follow, both black (Otis Redding, Al Green) and white (Rod Stewart, Steve Perry). The Best of Sam Cooke is pure and miraculous, not a bum number on it. The highs remain airily, ineffably high (“Cupid,” “Wonderful World,” “Only Sixteen”); the back-and-forth between Cooke and Lou Rawls on “Bring it on Home to Me” is a soul milestone; and the dance tunes actually put you in a party frame of mind. And then there are the oddities. The gap between “Chain Gang”’s lyrics and its suave delivery is too broad to be countenanced by the rational mind. Similarly, the version of “Summertime” comes from a weird imaginative province that is part Hollywood and part inexplicable vision, with Cooke’s sweatless white-shirt croon spreading over a simple guitar pattern and counterpoised against a haunting female holler, a spirit signal coming from far across the fields. 1957-1962 / 1962.
——. “Another Saturday Night” (RCA). A funny tale of social damnation, and Cooke takes it seriously enough to make it credible. (Sadly, though, for this and the following entry — plus such beauties as “Good Times” and “That’s Where it’s At” — you need to supplant the classic Best of with the definitive 1986 anthology The Man and His Music.) 1963.
——. “A Change is Gonna Come” (RCA). The strings at the opening pour down like slow-motion sheets of rain in a dream, and surge at the end like a thunderous omen. Hard not hear to hear it that way today, or in 1965; clearly, it was made in the spirit of prophecy. There have been many versions of the song by many artists, including talents as estimable as Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan. Beside the original, they mean nothing. 1965.

ALICE COOPER, “Eighteen” (Warner Bros.) The essential statement of antisocial ennui and existential crunge from the forefathers that punk would never acknowledge. It should be comical by now, but no: it’s too straight-on, too hardheaded and guileless for laughs — the thick-skulled, beer-guzzling Midwestern factory boy gets his chance to speak, and he says nothing, he says it all. 1971.

ELVIS COSTELLO, My Aim is True (Columbia). The first strike of the young punk genius, they said. The heroic malcontent’s manifesto against soul-free modernity, they said. Since the first play, it has sounded to me pinched, fussy, and irritating, a series of little tantrums. I’ve never grown to like it — except for “Welcome to the Working Week” and “Watching the Detectives,” which I loved instantly. 1977.
——. & THE ATTRACTIONS, This Years Model (Columbia). Close enough to a great rock album to pass for one — that organ dripping with mercurochrome, that furious beat, that ferocity of a brilliant punk at his sharpest moment of perception and expression, when all evils are clear and liars lose their powers of invisibility. What’s missing is love: that is, the real, living thing, or its ghost, or its promise, or its devastating absence. To be truly great, an album like a novel or movie needs a sense of what our lives are all about, and, just as no atheist may deny that God exists for some, no misanthrope can presume to show us to ourselves without confronting love as reality or myth. Costello did that — in full, with melodies, the right band and the right producer — on his third album, Armed Forces. Despite hard competition from several later releases (King of America, Mighty Like a Rose, All This Useless Beauty, the Costello-Nieve EP box set), that still strikes me as his definitive work. 1978.

COUNTRY JOE & THE FISH, “Bass Strings” / “Section 43” (Rag Baby). Creepy-crawly post-folk, high-psych nightdreams. Haunted by organ and hollowed through with harmonica, they were made to accompany, or perhaps inspire, dark acidy slitherings in Bay Area ballrooms. First released as two-thirds of an EP that was the Fish’s second release, both songs were rerecorded for their first album, but in their low-rent, small-studio, limited-release form they are more sinuous, more elegant, more on the historic spot. (By the way, I don’t know what “Section 43” refers to, unless it is the part of the US Criminal Code which permits corporal punishment of children by their parents; the song, an instrumental, isn’t giving up any secrets. Anyway, here is outtake footage of the Fish performing it at the Monterey Pop Festival.) 1966.

2008-02-10T18:59:00.000-08:00

PJ HARVEY
White Chalk
34 minutes long, almost entirely based on minimal piano figures (an instrument Harvey had only just learned to play). The music is wreathed in a chill feel of cold English country, and the lyrics are reminiscent of Sylvia Plath: “The Piano” has a Daddy rattling keys in the doorway, and a Mommy who is “trying to leave.” Throughout, you see Plath’s empty kitchen and gas stove. Harvey’s leads echo down long hallways, and there are ghosts on backup.

A creepy, insinuating little caprice of an album, tops in the 2007 genre of ethereal female folk-rock discoveries that included Cathy Davey’s Tales of Silversleeve, Carina Round’s Slow Motion Addict, and Stephanie Dosen’s A Lily for the Spectre.

RINGO STARR
Liverpool 8
You don’t have to love the Beatles to make it halfway through this, though it would help. But if you do love them, there’s no way you’ll find Ringo’s second consecutive non-embarrassment (after 1992’s Time Takes Time) empty of pleasure. That’s after you get past the title song, a guided tour of Fab nostalgia spots whose grope at grandeur is more than canceled out by a rack of execrable rhymes (“Played Butlin’s camp with my friend Ror-ree / It was good for him, it was great for me”). Rewatching the Anthology DVD a few weeks ago, I was struck again by Ringo’s modest wit, his forthrightness, his poise; “Liverpool 8” strikes me only as a measure of the unaccountable things people will do in the name of nostalgia. Destiny was calling, I just couldn’t stick around — it’s okay for someone writing on the Beatles to say that, but not the Beatle himself.

There is only one unredeemable song (“If it’s Love That You Want”); the rest nestle nicely enough into a comfort zone that is plush and narrow. Producer Dave Stewart can play a Beatles cliché just like ringing a bell: the record ripples with familiar Studio One touches — orchestra clamor, backwards talk, flanged vocals, sitars buzzing in a vacuum, elfin voices and odd squiggles in every vacant crack. As for Ringo’s singing, age works its wonders on even so indifferent an instrument as his: if his voice is no longer as jaunty as it was circa 1972, it has accrued a patina of yearning that sounds just right. (Or maybe he’s only yearning to hit the note.) Ringo handles the minimal demands without great strain; on a slightly more demanding song, like the pretty, pseudo-Mexican “Pasodobles” (echoing flamenco guitar solo and all), Stewart must mix Ringo’s vocal down, ever downward, until it is pretty much just another layer of sound.

So it’s a nice piece of work. Its force of artistry won’t shake the world or even topple a trashcan, but Liverpool 8 is probably every bit as good as it can be. Which is not the empty praise it might appear: can we say the same of the last albums by, oh I don’t know, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, or Paul McCartney?

OK GO
“Here it Goes Again”
This was discovered sometime last fall. Hipsters no doubt know something more about this band than do I, who am known in the nabe as the Anti-Hipster or the Hipster Killer. But as much as I love the video posted below — check it out, you won’t be sorry — I was surprised to find that the song itself, perfectly videoless, was logging heavy time in my iPod earphones as I strode the streets of my fair city. It has clever lyrics, a great pop tune, and a band dynamic tending to the harder edge of the early British Invasion spectrum. But what really lodges the damn delightful thing deep in your sound-hole is that off-key no or oh or oh no or whatever it is that punctuates the refrain like damp smacks on a cheap piece of tin. These boys have the feel of one-hit wonders, but what a hit, what a bang-on hit.

STRANDED — The Countdown (18)

CLEFTONES, “Heart and Soul” (Gee). Pure adolescent goodness, and it gets an extra point for adorning the sock-hop in American Graffiti. 1961.

JIMMY CLIFF, “Vietnam” (A&M). Sweet, sad, needful at the time, not so much now. 1970.
——. The Harder They Come (Mango). As a consumer, I was always peeved by the rip-off of repeating two tracks (“You Can Get it if You Really Want” and the title song). But other than that it’s utterly without flaw. Like a lot of people, I fell in love with reggae from this record. 1972.

COASTERS, Their Greatest Recordings — The Early Years (Atco). The Coasters’ great sides — written and produced by Leiber and Stoller, but brought to something bigger than life by the agile, gleeful voices of the singers themselves — were straight off the funny pages and the serial screen, full of radio melodrama and sitcom silliness. Their genius as a music-making collective was to discover how wonderful such things could be when taken out of their contexts and placed in that of a rock record, with caffeinated beats and a sax that always sounded like a junkman blowing his nose. They told the most absurd stories in the most absurd voices, traveled the globe on worn-out shoe leather, and chased golden idols and exotic femmes like a troupe of Indiana Joneses from the South Side of Chicago. Every time they turned around, they bumped into trouble; but their pluck and their humor got them through. From “Searchin’” to “Along Came Jones,” “Yakety Yak” to “Charlie Brown,” “Down in Mexico” to “Little Egypt,” from Cell Block #9 to Smokey Joe’s Cafe, this is great, great stuff, a treasury of American humor and bubbling stewpot of post-war pop culture. 1955-1961 / 1971.
——. “What About Us” / “Run Red Run” (Atco). In the years since Marcus noted these two sides in Mystery Train as encoded racial satire and revenge scenario (A-side a tragicomic tale of have and have-not, B-side a tall tale about a monkey turning tables on its master), it’s been impossible to hear them any other way. That’s perhaps because there is no other way to hear them; it’s perhaps because there is no need. “Run Red Run” in particular is a perfect little construction of fantasy and fear wrapped up as mere fable: Uncle Remus rocks out. Run, Red, Run, ‘cause he’s got your gun / And he’s aimin’ it at your head — boogedy, boogedy, boogedy! Nothing very funny about that. 1959.

EDDIE COCHRAN, “Summertime Blues” (Liberty). It’s hard to say which is finer about this affectionate piece of teen dissent — the perfect summertime sound of it, just slightly reverberant, as if it were echoing through the lot at Mel’s Drive-In; or the way this kid who knows his life isn’t actually that bad petitions both Congress and the United Nations to get behind his grievance. For a would-be anarchist-hedonist-punk, he seems to have paid attention in civics class. This is the kind of protest music I like best of all: rack it with “School Days” and “Dancing in the Street.” 1958.

COMMODORES, “Machine Gun” (Motown). One of those great ‘70s instrumentals you heard all the time on the radio and never caught the name of. (Others: “Love’s Theme,” “TSOP,” “Frankenstein.”) I like it, but it’s hard not to wince a bit at it today, if only because the musical mimics behind “That 70s Show” have so cleverly plundered push-button grooves like this for their between-scene interludes. 1974.

CONTOURS, “Do You Love Me” (Gordy). I seem to remember disliking this long before Dirty Dancing came along to render it officially and eternally unlistenable. Hard to say what’s not there, or what’s there and shouldn’t be: it’s got punch, delight, a certain glee factor. I ought to love it. I don’t. (Though it does get a half-point for bringing what may have been the first false fade to Top 40 radio. Does “Strawberry Fields” have some of its genesis here?) 1962.
——. “First I Look at the Purse” (Gordy). A witty Smokey Robinson number that was done up in more fervent style by J Geils Band on their first LP. (Though it does get a half-point for being a very early avatar of the pure Motown sound.) Sorry, Contours: looks like it’s the kiss-off. 1962.

EARPLUG
After today, I plan to post most of my Beatle-related jottings over at a new blog I’m building with some friends, which we call Hey Dullblog. It had its origin in the flurries of emails that used to fly between us when a new or unusual Beatle story came over the wires, or when one of us wanted to share a Fab enthusiasm with the others. Now we’re posting on our enthusiasms, giving links to Beatle stories, opinionizing ad hoc, commemorating meaningful anniversaries, stumping each other with our Never-Ending Beatles Trivia Quiz Challenge, etc. We’ve got dispatches coming from both coasts, and at least two boroughs of New York! And we’re only a couple of weeks old.

My friend and the blog’s administrator, Mike Gerber — author of the Barry Trotter parody series, as well as Freshman (2006), a novel about a “fictional” Ivy League university, so funny I urinated on the first Yale alumnus I saw — has just posted a brilliant rumination on the recent passing of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It contains some bold and convincing suggestions about the role that benign little fellow may have played at a troubled point in the history of the Beatles, and of one Beatle in particular.

Those who don’t like others to have opinions, let alone express them, should stay the fuck away, thank you very much. Everyone else, though, is most cordially invited.

2008-01-14T19:34:00.000-08:00

MADONNA
"The Beat Goes On"
A teaser from her November-slated album, computer-programmed in collaboration with Pharell. Kudos to Madonna in her race (to the death?) to stay ahead of the pop-tart brigade, but her contemporaneity fetish comes a cropper here: it announces itself from blip one as a piece of oppressive nothingness, as pleasurable as a rice-cake diet in a time of drought. I begin to hate it when Madonna prefaces an outbreak of ping-ponging robo-blips with the deadpan command: "Instrumentation." Among the things Madonna should never attempt again: rapping (remember that bit in "Vogue"?), or anything approximating an ironic tone. An artist who has made thin vocal technique and canny soullessness work in her favor should never try to sound as if she had no soul; in the deathless words of Jake LaMotta, "It defeats its own purpose."

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
"Radio Nowhere"
I wrote this a little over two years ago:

Craziness, color, recklessness, astonishment, not just outrage but outrageousness — that's what I want from Bruce Springsteen, as I want them from any artist. . . . You might say I'm asking the wrong things of the wrong person, and you'd be right — but you wouldn't have been back when Born to Run came out, or Nebraska. Springsteen needn't dye his hair yellow, or release an album of Dadaist verse shouted over industrial noise. Craziness comes in all colors, hot pink or olive drab, and an artist can astonish us by the simplest, most unassuming of means. That's what artists do.

"Radio Nowhere," the single from Springsteen's upcoming LP, is probably the closest he will ever come to taking advice from me. It's hardly industrial, but it is noisy; hardly Dada, but the rhymes rain down fast. It's the lament of an emotional Luddite inveighing against the lack of soul in our web-wired, satellite-spinning globe. He doesn't hate technology, just the way we substitute interface for interaction; to dramatize, his voice punches through a layer of not-quite-static, the backing a fast crunchy rock with distortion elements. (When was Springsteen ever distorted?)

As commentary, the single is cranky and predictable; as a noise, it's damned good. But I think what's most exciting about "Radio Nowhere" is that it reinvents that American night Springsteen has, in his best music and deepest soul, always inhabited. It's the great unending American night that is always hot even in winter, alive with voices even when there's no one around, whose sky always crackles with music and whose breezes smell of gasoline and chance. Born to Run came out of that night; Nebraska dissolved into it. His latter-day records have taken place in a dim twilight in a tired living room, expressing an intermediate funk full of borrowed voices and stale despair. "Radio Nowhere" gets him off the couch, into the car, into the dark, into the American night. We'll see if the album has the guts to stay there.

DEREK McCORMACK
The Haunted Hillbilly
This was found yesterday, near the back of an overstacked shelf in a hole-in-the-wall used bookstore on Broadway. It had a guitar-playing skeleton on the front and said this on the back:

STEP RIGHT UP!
A year ago he was the Star of the
GRAND OLE OPRY.
King of Country & Western.
And now? He can't play. He can't sing.
Hear his pitiful pleas!
Quiver to his Yellow Yodels!
What's he so scared of?
What reduced him to this sorrowful state?
A VAMPIRE!
A blood-drinking, soul-sucking fiend.
VAMPIRES LIVE!
See what they do to mortal men!
Step right up and feast your eyes on
THE WRECK WE CALL
THE HAUNTED
HILLBILLY!

All that come-on, plus an encomium inside from queer shock novelist Dennis Cooper, and Canadian critic Bert Archer saying "McCormack's an evil little blessing." It was autographed by the author. And there it was hidden in a dusty hole, peeking out at me, asking only five bucks.

Could you resist this thing? Me neither.

It's a novella that takes only as long to read as it takes to dream a bad dream; I read it in the dusk hour between sundown and blinding dark. The setting is Nashville, you're not certain when, but you'd guess late '40s, early '50s. The hero — no, the victim — is a gifted young country singer named Hank. Hank is married to a woman named Audrey, who sews his first suit and sends him looking for a shirt worthy of her stitchery. The narrator — all-seeing, all-consuming, all-perverse — is Mr. Nudie, a Nashville haberdasher catering to the Grand Ole Opry elite, who makes flamboyant stage suits replete with spangles, glasswork, rhinestones, sequins, and stylized depictions of country-associated objects (cacti, trains, guitars). The haberdasher spots the singer, and begins not only dressing him but owning him: taking pieces of his flesh and soul, and destroying those around him. You see, Nudie is a vampire, in fact a gay vampire, and possession is his game.

The book's style, suitable to its content, is stripped not just to the bone, but to the marrow. ("Hank steps out. A gasp goes up. His suit's starry. Spotlights bend off his blazer. He sings his song. The one on his suit. About being blue.") And if those character names sound familiar ... yes, there was a real country singer named Hank. His last name was Williams, and his first wife was named Audrey, and he was brilliant, a once-in-a-century changer and shaper of his form. Hank Williams died from too many pills at the age of 29, looking pale and skeletal in the dark rear seat of a limo on his way to a show. They say his corpse looked almost as if it had been emptied of blood. But he looked that way alive, too.

And yes, there is a real Mr. Nudie. Or was: he died April of last year. Nudie Cohn, born in Kiev, Russia, made suits for everyone from Roy Rogers to Buck Owens, Jon Voight (Midnight Cowboy) to Robert Redford (The Electric Horseman), the Sons of the Pioneers to the Flying Burrito Brothers. He made Elvis's gold lame suit — the one worn by the King on Elvis's Golden Records, Vol. 2, as if precisely to substantiate the record's timeless headline: 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong!

The Haunted Hillbilly is a conflation of fact and fiction. Just enough of the facts are misplaced, or displaced, to prevent exact correlation with the principals' received biographies, and so to leave holes, or open graves, in the spaces between known realities. For instance, Nudie had a wife named Bobbie; there is a woman named Bobbie in The Haunted Hillbilly, but she is Hank's girl. Hank Williams died in Oak Hill, West Virginia; the book's Hank never escapes Nashville. Hank's nemesis throughout the story is Ernest Tubb, the "Texas Troubadour," a real person, an Opry favorite — but not, so far as I know, the insanely treacherous figure depicted here. The book ends with Nudie, still on the prowl, finding and fixing on a new boy, a new idol, a new tailor's dummy (or "judy") for his rhinestone designs: a boy who says his name is Johnny Horton. Johnny Horton who had a number of hits, became a country superstar, and married Hank Williams's first wife Audrey before meeting a premature death in 1960.

The book's spookiness is in its conflations. Its Nashville is a graveyard, done up in All Souls' colors, in which ghouls and live ones, clean facts and gross fantasies copulate. Hank Williams's depleted corpse, Nudie's outrageous clothes (made partly, McCormack reckons, from such materiel as human bone fragments), and even Robert Johnson's satanic bargain (the pop myth of the sold soul) are part of the grim procession. Nudie's evil accomplice is named "Dr. Wertham," and that can be nothing but a reference to the once-famed Dr. Fredric Wertham, innovative social psychologist, opponent of grisly EC comic books, and author of the notorious anti-comics jeremiad Seduction of the Innocent (1954). Not least of the shades haunting the story is that of Spade Cooley, Hollywood cowboy, grinning bandleader, and purveyor of watered-down, radio-friendly Western swing who, beset by paranoid delusions, in 1961 tortured and beat his wife to death as his daughter watched. Judging from his crimes and his photos, Cooley had a lot more vampire in him than either Hank Williams or Nudie Cohn. (For that whole story, see the relevant chapter in Nick Tosches's Country, or see here. Note further that Cooley was pardoned by California Governor Ronald Reagan only a few years into his sentence, presumably for sentimental reasons — one old Hollywood hand taking pity on another.)

What you have here — and it is worth picking up if found peeking from a high shelf, asking only five dollars and an hour's attention — is some kind of demon fetus pickled in a jar of Southern moonshine, the malformed spawn of Rosemary's Baby and King Death.

GLEN CAMPBELL
"It's Only Make Believe"
Glen was another of Nudie Cohn's clients, and gave the old man his unofficial benedictory with "Rhinestone Cowboy." Well, feh on that Glen Campbell. My Glen Campell is the one who shone for a few brief years (say, 1966-70) as a pop singer backed by his fellow Wrecking Crew members; who made Gentle on My Mind (1967), an album that has been a favorite since I was knee-high to a tree stump; who sang an uncredited lead on the priceless Sagittarius single "My World Fell Down" (the sole slick studio anomaly on Nuggets); and who ended his days of greatness with this piece of operatic agony, the totality of which proves his instinctive genius as a pop singer.

Positioned, oddly enough, as the opener to The Glen Campbell Goodtime Album (1970), Campbell's "Make Believe" towers over even Conway Twitty's spectacular 1958 original. The huge production is less Spector's Hollywood than M-G-M's; there is a clarity and separation, a stage-show detail to the arranging that Spector never went for. It verges on bombast, in fact it is bombast, but Campbell's voice gives it pain, drama, and desire. The thing is, his voice was objectively so limited: strained at the top register, thin in the middle. But on material that mattered to him, it was unrelentingly passionate, full of emotional aspiration. It was the sound of an ordinary man reaching for grandeur, of Joe Buck before the mirror, singing his pain, expressing fearlessly.

"It's Only Make Believe" is the perfect song for Campbell — as "You're My World" and "Crying" were perfect side-enders to Gentle on My Mind. The song is built as a struggle, a climb: the melody leads the singer inward and upward, each chord raising the stakes on the last, to deposit him at the climax of each verse at a new peak of wanting and not-having. Campbell fights to stay on top of the orchestration, on top of the song; fights to give his emotions primacy over the noise, to assert his identity over the desolation the lyrics promise. Hal Blaine said Glen had a sixth sense for how to make great pop records. He proves it here, by upping the ante on Conway Twitty in at least three ways. First, the song's orchestration and activity grow denser, more dramatic, with each verse. Second, Campbell gives the song an all-important key change — thus pitching himself in the last verse against an even stiffer struggle, his ordinary voice against even more extraordinary demands. Lastly, he makes the climax out of a single note: MY only prayer will be. Unlike Twitty, Campbell gives melisma to that note, bending it upward over the melody, hurling it atop the tumult. At that moment, the singer could either go down forever, or take every honor in the universe. Campbell gives the moment its due. It's the last bit of gut he's got to give, his last chance to beat the song and stand tall. He does it. The song ends on a burst of ecstasy, as if trumpeting the ordinary man's unexpected heroism.

A devastating, exhilarating moment: a note to break the heart, and explode the spirit. So I say it is proof of Glen Campbell's greatness. Of deep feeling, of love, of passion, of a reach for beauty to the exclusion — if only for that moment — of anything else in the world; to the exclusion of the world itself. What more we could want from a pop record, I can't guess.

ED SANDERS
Beer Cans on the Moon
And then there's Ed. The offensive discarded consumer objects of the title can say nothing worse about the travesties perpetrated on nature by man than this album of godawful hippie broadsides. By the author of The Family, no less.

ZODIAC
Directed by David Fincher
For those unfamiliar with the case (serial killings, Bay Area, late '60s-early '70s), probably pretty boring; for those who have read the Robert Graysmith book, it ranges from the fascinating to the frustrating. The best scenes and deadliest scares come in the first hour, from which point momentum and shape dribble down to an ending that snatches back a saving shred of horror from the broad black vanishing pool of a two-and-a-half-hour sit. Fincher is some kind of diabolical genius, part hateful and part possessed: his creations (Seven, Fight Club) are sparing of love, but they combine sensual disgust and chic misanthropy with a delight in movement, montage, and music. His good films are like chilled corpses animated from within by excited, unsettled spirits that push the cold skin outward, rattle the bones, convulse the limbs, promise restoration and redemption to a world painted in cadaver colors.

The use of music is occasionally remarkable. Fincher doesn't cheat: the songs are all period-appropriate, and there is nothing that wouldn't have issued from a Bay Area car radio tuned to the Top 40 in 1969, with an occasional side-dial to early album-oriented FM. A lot of the jazz and extended rock standards (not to mention David Shire's original score) run from effective atmosphere to unobtrusive wallpaper, but at least two musical juxtapositions merit mentioning. The opening sequence begins with Independence Day fireworks and ends with blasts of gunfire on Lover's Lane; musically, it begins with Three Dog Night's "Easy to Be Hard" (How can people have no feelings), and ends with Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" (Here comes the roly-poly man singing songs of love). Set against these events, the plaintive plea of the first and fearful tremor of the second speak with more clarity, terror, and implication than they ever have before — and certainly more than they ever wanted.

Not since the Turtles' "Happy Together" ended Adaptation has an ordinary song, heard so often it is no longer heard, been so infused with new emotional capability. So reanimated, if you will, with excited, unsettled spirits.

2008-01-14T00:07:00.000-08:00

BILL JUSTIS
“Tamouré”
Crude, widescreen Hawaiianisms from some musical coalescence to which Sun Records saxophonist Justis lent at least his name, if not his talent — his precise musical contribution is difficult to divine. This 1963 hit (#1 in Australia) might have served handsomely as soundtrack schmear if cheap Honolulu romances had ever composed a subgenre on the order of gladiator films. I have an unaccountable weakness for this flavor of pre-Beatles cheese, so find it not wholly unredeemed by its own grossness; but suffice to say, it's neither raunchy nor "Raunchy." Rockers, move on.

BRITNEY SPEARS
Blackout
Anger without passion, pathos without heart, one rigidly-held attitude per song. Vocals that clearly were phoned in on a BlackBerry; tracks that sound constructed of the techno-crud that collects in the crannies of an outmoded hard drive. It's shooting fish in a barrel to belittle this. But there are a lot of fish in the American barrel, and they've been stinking up the place too long. If Blackout helps to end rather than extend one of the many pointless pop careers currently cluttering our consciousness, its value and importance will be secure.

STRANDED — The Countdown (17)

Backtrack (4)

FAY ADAMS, “Shake a Hand” (Herald). I still think I like Paul McCartney's version better, but there's no reason to trust the objectivity of that judgment. Besides, his is a rock version and does nothing to cancel out the original, which is heavy R&B, a hard charge of piano, sax, and drums. Herding all ahead is an Adams voice that is declamatory and powerful yet sounds on the verge of cracking at any moment from the weight of some ambiguous sorrow, as if she knew life would never fulfill even the simple ideal of this one song. Kudos as well to the deep-chested male vocalist who backs her up — the sound of moral support. Any deserted island could use that. 1953.

ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND, Eat a Peach (Capricorn). The blue air of "Melissa" is sweet and fresh, but the album is twice as long as it needs to be. And why would they even conceive of a "Mountain Jam" agglomerated around the motif of an especially irritating Donovan song? Give me "Ramblin' Man" and, as a highway-driving son of the Middle West, I'll be happy. 1972.

JESSIE BELVIN, “Goodnight My Love” (Modern). You can hear Belvin in nearly every smooth male soul singer who came after him, from Sam Cooke to Luther Vandross: rich enunciations and silken lines, no strain, all exertion implied in the weighting of selected phrases, dips into low register, etc. He is bliss to listen to, and the record itself is deep romance and essential '50s gorgeousness, up there with "Goodnight Sweetheart Goodnight" and "It's All in the Game." 1956.

BUSTER BROWN, “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby” (Fire). There's a great opening to this, a sloppy guitar and (I think) harmonica and Buster Brown hooting. It comes from a distance, the distance of age and bad sound; the band is in the corner of a field house, playing a dance at a black college long ago. The record tantalizes for a few seconds. Then it rollicks and rolls on out before it seems to have climaxed. The record is a good time, a fine time. But it fades as it should be peaking. Then you need to hear it again to see if you missed the peak — was it that subtle, did pleasure smuggle it past you? No. You were right the first time: a good time and a quick fade. The memory is enough. 1960.

Now, where were we . . .

The Clash (CBS / UK). It's been well over a year since I did a Stranded entry, and could it be because I have been groping through the ins and outs, ups and downs of my days — and my dreams! — for some delicate, non-tendentious way of saying I simply don't like the sound of Joe Strummer's voice? It doesn't state the case to say that the Clash's best music is on London Calling, because there are other songs one would not want to be without ("Should I Stay or Should I Go," "Rock the Casbah"). But none of them are on the debut album, one of those classics-by-acclamation which I've tried and failed to make yield even a coin's worth of the riches it has heaped upon the generation of listeners before me. 1977.
——. “Complete Control” (CBS / UK). The Clash's early songs sound tin-thin to me, long on rage and short on musical realization; the band bangs away and never once shows me the stars, shines a light on me, gets inside my ear or up my ass or deep into any other vulnerable opening. As for Strummer, many believe he had a pure and essential rock and roll sound. He always sounded to me like he was choking on charred hamburger. It's hardly inconceivable that the two could be the same, but not in this case. 1977.

Fab Revelation #24
The guitar sound of Billy Swan's "I Can Help" — which always reminded me of fanning one's hand along the fish-gill vent-flaps of a metal radiator — may be an unconscious cop from "The Ballad of John and Yoko."

Greatest Record Ever?
"If I Were Your Woman," Gladys Knight & The Pips

2007-07-27T14:24:00.001-07:00

Music can wait a few hours. Roll with me here:

1) Right now I'm reading The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood by the film critic David Thomson. It may be a great book, I'm not yet certain, but I do know that no one could have written it but Thomson — the divine Thomson who brings a scholar's rigor, a poet's language, a fan's delight, a doomsayer's doom, and a dreamer's vision to bear on what is now more than a century of American film history. He relishes scandal, appraises bodies, and anatomizes familiar works (Chinatown) and careers (Fritz Lang) only to rebuild them as marvelous sinuous, autonomous things with hidden agendas and sinister subcurrents. Through it all he runs the numbers (attendance, tickets, population, dollars, dollars after inflation) and somehow works the bottom-line mechanics, industry nut and financial bolt right into his otherwise ethereal apprehensions of art and image, mask and meaning. The book is an intellectual twister, a sensual pleasure. Nearly every page is giving me something to rethink, showing me something to resee, offering something I can use, tipping a long row of memory dominoes I didn't know was there.

2) When I moved to New York from Iowa in 1993 I lived in a bare room in a youth hostel on Claremont at 122nd Street, right across Riverside Drive from Grant's tomb. I didn't have much in the way of home entertainment beyond a six-inch television and a miniature boombox. On the TV I would watch "Late Night with David Letterman" (he moved to CBS that very fall) and "Conan O'Brien" (his first season) into the night. In those days I slept well without the aid of Ambien, and so woke early enough most mornings to turn on the boombox and hear the tag-end of "The Alison Steele Show."

Alison Steele, who was known as "The Nightbird," was a legend of New York radio. She had been on WNEW, the town's foremost "progressive" station; in 1989 she moved to the classic-rock WXRK ("K-Rock," they called it), which is where I discovered her. She had one of those lovely, vaguely smoky movie star's voices (more Lauren Bacall than Ellen Barkin), and a caressing way with the microphone. She would unspin sentences so grandiose — about sailing over the stars, commanding time and space — that no voice but hers could free them of camp, let alone render them genuinely transporting. Listening to her in the dark morning, sunrise only a suggestion of blue light over the Harlem projects, you could so easily fantasy that she was lying next to you that moment, doing the show for you alone.

Come fly with me, she said. Supposedly Jimi Hendrix wrote "Night Bird Flying" for her. She died of cancer in 1995, just two years after I came to town, and was eulogized in the Times and elsewhere with the fondness and fascination she had clearly earned long before I made her fleeting but unforgettable acquaintance.

Almost every morning, to fill in the minute before the end of her show and the start of the next, Alison Steele would play the Beatles' "Flying": a two-minute instrumental from the Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack, a deadpan Mellotronism, a piece of marshmallow. Steele would deliver the morning's final benedictions and vocal nuzzlings over the music, kiss you goodbye before leaving you to your day. And the first time I heard her play her show out with it, a faint but decisive thonk!! sounded in my skull. The sound came from a small paragraph I'd never forgotten, hidden in the center of a book I've mentioned before on this blog — The Beatles Forever by Nicholas Schaffner:

Although few would file it under the Beatles' Great Works, "Flying" has received more radio exposure than all but a handful of their songs. For countless disc jockeys soon discovered in this ethereal, infectious theme an ideal way to fill up those awkward odd moments before the hourly news: because there were no words, it didn't seem rude to chatter at the same time, or to phase it out mid-song.

Nicholas Schaffner grew up in New York; he mentions New York radio many times in The Beatles Forever. There can be no doubt he listened to Alison Steele. He died in 1991, just two years before I came to town and might have been able to ask him to confirm this, but I have always gone on the assumption that he wrote the above in reference to Alison Steele's show. And therefore that I am, in this way, connected on the fine thin strands of an utterly insignificant Beatles song to two of my favorite pop music people — though the three of us just missed meeting each other on the great stage of possibility that is New York City.

3) Coming right after Alison Steele on K-Rock was, yes, the dreaded, infamous, miraculous, despair-banishing and soul-sustaining "Howard Stern Show." I became somewhat of a huge Howard fan in those days; even today, when I never listen to him (got no satellite radio), I have tenderness for the memories, many of which are logged on the cassette tapes I made of his show between, my liner notes tell me, September 1993 and November 1994.

One of Stern's regulars among the "Wack Pack" of obsessive fans, besotted freaks and system-screwing busybodies was one Captain Jenks (a pseudonym, Jenks said, taken from the real name of his Army C.O.). Jenks would phone up TV and radio shows ("Sonya Live," "Larry King," "Home Shopping"), bullshit his way past the screeners and onto the air with a fake voice (often feminine) and convincing line of happy talk, and then — securely within the eye and/or ear of an unsuspecting audience — insert a shouted advertisement for Howard Stern's penis! or Bababooey!

Funny? I'm laughing this second.

Jenks would tape his media pranks and replay them the next day on the Stern show. These plays were invariably highlights of the day's broadcast, accompanied by much infectious gaiety from Howard and his crew. But Jenks often referred to the hapless hosts he'd pranked by a word I didn't recognize — it sounded like "schwants." As in, "Here's the schwants I fooled last night."

Oh, well, the talk flew so fast I didn't have time to be troubled by a word I didn't know and was probably part of some Sternian inner language known only to listeners of longer standing than myself. "Schwants" went into that bulging mental envelope containing all the references I hadn't gotten and never would.

Where it rested undisturbed for 14 years.

4) Just yesterday, reading page 172 of The Whole Equation, I saw this, regarding the career of James Cagney:

However, he complained bitterly about the cheapness and the violence of the films, and he used his kid brother Bill (who was as tough and foul-mouthed as the on-screen Jimmy we "know") to go in and browbeat Warners, especially Jack Warner, for whom the Cagney brothers kept the nickname "The Shvontz" (the prick).

What a lovely thonk!! that was! What an invisible if modest load off! Jenks was saying "prick" all those times! Larry King = shvontz = prick. Yes. I will buy that: the whole equation. What sense it made, what delicious sense — and there is no sense so delicious as retroactive sense.

5) See how memory works? A sudden, unexpected explanation of a misheard word from long ago reminds me of dark-hour radio delights I hadn't thought of in years. Alison Steele and Nicholas Schaffner, "Flying" and Captain Janks; a bare room on the border of Harlem in 1993; and people I'd have liked to meet and never will.

Time to reset those memory dominoes.

2007-07-15T19:00:00.000-07:00

The following is a talk I delivered at the Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota at Minneapolis, last March 26. It was part of a three-day symposium called "Highway 61 Revisited: Dylan's Road from Minnesota to the World," organized by my good friend, the unpretentious academic, proud daughter of the lakeland, and all-round righteous rock chick Colleen Sheehy. The conference — which pulled together dozens of speakers, including pretty much everyone of note who has ever expressed thought on the subject of Bob Dylan — was a monumental effort of coordination, dedication, and (Dylanesque word) desire on Colleen's part. All the thanks she received before, during, and after those three days in Minneapolis were inadequate to repay her efforts. We all got to see some great speakers, engage in some lively talk, eat at fine Dinkytown noodleries, and breathe the magic air that swoops regularly off the storied Mississippi.

So: the thing below. It is, I hope, noisome without being noxious. And let me add that my talk had the honor of being name-checked in both Time magazine and the St. Paul Pioneer Press blurbs on the conference; and that despite my dissemblings I was accused, quite correctly, of having coined the title for the precise purpose of seeing it name-checked in such prestigious annals as Time magazine and the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

I found out the other day this will not be included in the anthology that is to be derived from the conference. No surprise or shame in that rejection: out of the approximately 50 talks and other performances delivered, I'm certain the editors had no end of winnowing to do. But since the paper is now a free agent and unlikely to be welcomed anywhere but here, I bequeath to you my Constant Reader this poison gift, this toxic waste of an inspiration.

— Yr Blogger

HOTTER THAN A CROTCH
Bob Dylan at the Borderline of Sleaze

In November of 1972, Bob Dylan went to Durango, Mexico to play a small part in Sam Peckinpah’s Western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The production was cursed by all the expected crises, but there was one element on the set that no one saw coming. Peckinpah’s biographer, David Weddle, writes that, “The topsoil of Durango was permeated with animal manure that dried up, blew around with the fine silicone dust, and lodged in people’s lungs, causing chronic pulmonary infections.” One of the film’s stars, James Coburn, said that in Durango, “It was really cold and damp, there was wind, and a thousand years of horseshit floating around in the air.”

You believe it. Pat Garrett is a Western that has difficulty breathing. But it does breathe; and much of its beauty is in the labor of that life-sustaining repetition, the desire to breathe deeply and exhale soberly, to absorb sleaze and return humor, feeling, judgment. It’s as if the movie has decided that to embrace sleaze is one way of not just staying alive but being alive in a world of shit.

All the birds are singin' in the mornin' trees
but the birds are not singin' for me
My man did meet with a flirt on the street
gave him a case of VD

I begged him to look up a doctor and go
It broke out all over his skin
But he rubbed hisself with some dark drugstore salve
and he said it's not the VD

I been in the Army and the Merchant Marines
my dear wife long enough to know
Those little hot rashes that burn on my skin
are not the VD I'm sure

Almost from the beginning, Bob Dylan had his own line on sleaze. It’s found in that border region of overlap between body and history, sex and disease, erotic and diabolic. At irregular intervals along that border may be found the Mexican films of Luis Buñuel and the middle albums of the Rolling Stones; Abel Ferrera’s Bad Lieutenant and the demo version of Liz Phair’s “Flower”; the novels of Jim Thompson and the psychology of Melanie Klein; PJ Harvey’s first album and Hans Bellmer’s dolls; the Chicago blues of Howlin’ Wolf and the Naked City photos of Weegee. Or the song that gave this talk its title — “Tough Mama” from the Planet Waves album, recorded just months after Dylan returned from Durango, with horseshit still in his lungs.

Silver angel
With the badge of the lonesome road sewed in your sleeve
I'd be grateful if this gold ring you'd receive

Today on the countryside it was hotter than a crotch
I stood alone upon the ridge and all I did was watch

Sweet goddess
Must be time to carve another notch

Call me one-dimensional, but I can’t think of anything but intercourse hearing this song. In the lyrics primarily, of course, but also in the music, the varieties of energy within a single verse. It’s quite phallic how the first chords make a lunging action, then acquiesce to a rhythm that’s very bump-and-grind, very frictional, which is worked over in another line towards its release in a head-back, arms-out, orgasmic declaration of romantic release, vagina worship — “dark beauty,” “sweet goddess,” “silver angel” — then left hanging by an organ solo that’s like a sweet post-coital whistling in the dark, as the sheets dry and transcendence becomes memory.

I'm crestfallen
A world of illusions at my door
I ain't a-haulin' any of my lambs to the marketplace anymore

Prison walls are crumblin' there is no end in sight
I gained some recognition but I lost my appetite

Dark beauty
Meet me at the border late tonight

The Planet Waves album, when first released, had a set of handwritten sleevenotes that were removed from later pressings. In them, Dylan encourages any connection one cares to make between the situational sleaze of a song like “Tough Mama” and the proximate sleaze of the world outside. These notes — which read like a dirtier version of those noir vignettes that open each episode of “Theme Time Radio Hour” — describe “furious gals with garters and smeared lips on barstools that stank from sweating pussy . . . space guys off duty with big dicks and duck tails, all wired up and voting for Eisenhower.” Can’t you just hear Ellen Barkin speaking those words? It's nighttime in the big city . . .

I’ve always resisted the judgment that Dylan’s primary importance was as a poet. That implies something way too housebroken. As Monty Python had it, “Poets are both clean and warm / and most are far above the norm / Whether here or on the roam / have a poet in every home!” Dylan’s true poetics was a convergence of verbiage and voice which, at least as much as any grimy Kerouacian attitude, preferred to make itself unwelcome in the home. And as a public artist, Dylan would make himself most unwelcome not by his versifying — which from an early point drew the acclaim as well as the disdain of the most respectable poets — but largely by means of his voice.

“A dog with its leg caught on barbed wire,” said Mitch Jayne of the Dillards, and no one has ever quite gotten it better, for those who hate the voice and those who love it. One proof of the intractability of that voice is that, despite its infinite subtleties and sorrows, despite the fact that it forced new ears upon even those unwilling to listen, there is nothing like a popular acceptance that Dylan is a greater singer than, say, Christina Aguilera, the guy from Coldplay, or whatever unborn fetus is destined to win “American Idol” in the year 2027. To this day, that skanky, scrofulous Dylan voice, his basic unit of sound, has never become acceptable, never ceased being the butt of easy jokes and the one impression even non-impressionists can adequately fake.

So it’s worth remembering that Dylan’s “real” voice, his “original” voice, delivered in whispers back in Hibbing, was not the rusty, witty, punky, pointy voice of Highway 61 Revisited but a mellow voice, a ballad voice, as round and consistent as a bowl of pudding. When people who still remembered that voice heard Nashville Skyline, they invariably said, “That’s him.”

Except it wasn’t, really. What we are at first is not necessarily what we are. Obviously Dylan sang that way at first because that was his ‘50s model. Just as obviously, he then harshened his voice because that was the quickest way of imitating the blues and folk singers he discovered later on. Less obvious, maybe, is why he then pushed harshness beyond imitation into innovation, the voice into realms of raspiness undared by any white singing idol in living memory, and by precious few of the blues and folk masters he’d taken off from.

Could it be that Dylan scoured his voice to such a frictive texture because he knew that was the only sound appropriate to his apprehension of things, his harsh and excited, raunchy and humorous take on America? His suspicion that the country was rank with mendacity and rife with pockets of possibility waiting to be picked? That to thrive in America was to navigate rivers of sleaze and valleys of darkness, seeking not the centers but the borders, always the borders?

When you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Eastertime too
And your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through
Don't put on any airs when you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue
They got some hungry women there
and they really make a mess outta you

Aside from an aberrational domesticated phase or two, Dylan is an artist of the border. That’s what he sings about, that’s where he sings from. Within that, I’d like to posit — for my own sleazy purposes — a binary metaphor: Tijuana Bob, and Las Vegas Bob.

There are plenty of Tijuanas in Bob Dylan’s past, rough, elemental places where extremes are experienced, glimpses gotten, fantasies and satires hatched — and they all go by different names. Places like Hibbing — “way up by the Canadian border,” as Dylan said on the back of his first album. There’s Highway 61, which runs along the Mississippi, symbolic dividing line in American music and American life. There’s Brownsville, which as a Dylan border town stands, Stephen Scobie says, “between the various realms of history, fiction and myth.” There are the “border towns of despair” mentioned in the song “Dignity,” and the Juarez that witnesses the bacchanal of “Tom Thumb’s Blues.” There’s “Santa Fe,” a minor Basement Tape and one of my favorite Dylan songs, a dream of a border rendezvous as full of mumbled, made-up lyrics as “I’m Not There,” and as jaunty with the freedom of escape as “I’m Not There” is heavy with the guilt of escape. There’s also Highway 61 Revisited the album, which — in its obsession with homelessness, roads, junkyards, jailhouses, God, prostitutes, romantic salvation, Mexican debauch, and flamenco guitar — is Dylan’s own Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, his gringo-south-of-the-border story.

Later on Dylan left this Tijuana of the mind, or lost sight of it, and found himself, for a time, in Las Vegas — a very different kind of border town, with its own very different style. Among those places that exist both on the map and between the various realms of history, fiction and myth, Tijuana is where hunger goes to get fed — while Las Vegas is where prosperity goes to get fat.

Once I had a pony her name was Lucifer
I had a pony her name was Lucifer
She broke her leg and needed shooting
I swear it hurt me more than it could of hurted her

Sometimes I wonder what's going on with Miss X
Sometimes I wonder what's going on with Miss X
You know she got such a sweet disposition
I never know what the poor girl's gonna do to me next

∞∞∞∞∞

All right I'll take a chance
I will fall in love with you
If I'm a fool you can have the night
You can have the morning too

Can you cook and sew make flowers grow
Do you understand my pain?
Are you willing to risk it all
or is your love in vain?

The Street-Legal album is Bob Dylan in his first full flush of Las Vegas style. Lots of sex and glitz and wrenching climax, it’s a sausage grinder of entertainment. For better or worse — and you just heard some of both — Dylan comes across on this album as one sleazy S.O.B. “New Pony” is good sleaze: good riff, good arrangement, it’s got a pulse and doesn’t forget the listener has one too. “Is Your Love in Vain” is the worst kind of sleaze, not body but ego-oriented, not dynamic interaction but static spectacle, the phoniness of which makes every revelation suspect, every offering a taking in disguise. Don’t be fooled: when Dylan sings about his pain, he’s really singing about his penis.

Now Michael Gray figures, and I agree, that Street-Legal is a proto-Christian album. He also says that “Every song deals with love’s betrayal, with Dylan’s being betrayed like Christ, and, head on, with the need to abandon woman’s love.” So this sleaze factor is, for Dylan, something new: a convergence, somewhere past the borderline of absurdity, of showbiz, messianic religion, and the self-pity of the noble cocksman — Bob Dylan stars as Elvis Presley playing Dean Martin in a porno-musical version of The Last Temptation of Christ. In the Elvis tradition, there is much sex; in the Dino tradition, much sexism. Like Elvis, Dylan, whatever his avowed submission to an Almighty, is, on this stage, truly Lord of all he surveys. And like Dino, he is also a drunk in love with his own lugubriousness.

What’s missing from the sleaze of Street-Legal? What ingredient does sleaze need to stay alive, to keep flowing, feeling something, meaning something? Innocence, I would say — a sense of innocence. Of delight, of laughter, of thrills — thrills that are not cheap, but precious indeed. Often, what we regard as sleaze is only an image of innocence corrupted. The corruption contains the innocence, and vice versa. When one echoes against the other in a certain way, the walls of memory shake, and sleaze attains to the full grace of art.

If you’ve seen Atom Egoyan’s movie Exotica, you’ve seen this idea in action. A dancer at an upscale strip club wears a schoolgirl’s uniform. A well-dressed man returns night after night to stare at her performance. It turns out the stripper, as a teenager, used to sit the man’s daughter, who’s now dead. Each night the dancer and her watcher are living out a lurid burlesque of innocence, a masochistic playlet wherein sleaze determines costume and setting, and pain preys on memory.

Sleaze as a fact of life and harbinger of death runs throughout post-World War II American art like a polluted river through a factory town — tainting and transforming film, fiction, canvas, musical noise. Sleaze is kept alive and flowing sometimes by pain, sometimes by pleasure — but always by the memory of purity and wholeness it presumes, violates, reacts to in some way, the excitement and beauteous simplicity of what was — somewhere back there, back in a time none of us remembers but imagine we do. In this way, the bombastic sleaze of the old, fat Elvis is redeemed by the breakneck sleaze of the young, sexy Elvis — and all the lecherous lumbering of Street-Legal by the innocent lewdness of a minor Basement song — like this:

Take a look at me baby
(Just take a look at me baby)
I'm your teenage prayer
(You know I'm your teenage prayer baby)
Take a look at me baby
(Take a look over here baby)
I'm your teenage prayer
(I'm your teenage hair)
When it's cloudy all the time
All you gotta do is say you're mine girl
(Ohhh — )
I'll come runnin' to you anywhere
(Ohhh-ohhh-ohhh-ohhh)
Ah yeah oh you know I will
Take a look at me baby
I'm your teenage prehhhhhhhhh-ehhhhhhh

There’s something ineffable about the little exhalation at the end of that — the little ahhh — and about Robbie Robertson’s repeated ad-lib, “I’m your teenage hair.” Dylan laughs every time he says it: what could be sillier, more senseless, more innocent than that? Yet that’s the whole of adolescent sex, and it could fit on a high school ring: I am your teenage hair. The secret hidden in that perfect absurdity is this — that what turns into sleaze as we age remains the stuff of discovery for kids: the first thrill, the breathless grope, the life-changing experience. Meet me at the border late tonight, Dylan will say six years and a lifetime later to complete that circuit, consummate that come-on — but he’s older now. He’s been to Durango, he’s crossed the borderline of sleaze more than once, and the enticements are altogether darker, richer, more complicated than they were back in the basement.

Clearly it can be said that sleaze, like cholesterol, comes in “good” and “bad” forms. What’s the difference? Well, the bad, like “Is Your Love in Vain,” is essentially inert. It doesn’t happen, it merely congeals. Whereas the good kind always flows — and always takes you with it. It can take you out, like “Tough Mama”; can take you down, like “Tom Thumb’s Blues”; can take you inside, like “I’m Your Teenage Prayer.”

And, if used in a certain way, invested with a certain intent, it can even take you back — far, far back.

In 1949, Bob Dylan’s future hero, Woody Guthrie, writes a collection of songs for the U.S. Public Health Service, which is on the move against the post-war spread of venereal disease. Among Guthrie’s titles are “VD City”; “VD Avenue”; “VD Day”; “VD Gunner”; “VD Blues”; “VD Seaman’s Letter”; “VD Waltz”; and “A Child of VD.” 11 years later, Bob Dylan leaves Minnesota and lands in Greenwich Village, then returns with a bushel of songs — among them Guthrie’s clap cycle, bestowed on him by Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, who describes them as “those old VD songs by Woody that nobody wanted the young kids to know.”

On December 22, 1961, in the apartment of Bonnie Beecher right here in Minneapolis, Dylan records some of those songs. By far the most vivid, in text and performance, is “VD City.”

Well you've seen your bright visions of glory
where love built your cities on high
I've just seen the cold dark dungeons
where the victims of syphilis cry

They're called to the cities of sorrow
to confess all the wrong things they done
Their teardrops are meet weep much louder
then the cities blown down by the bombs

There's a street named for every disease here
Syph Alley and Clap Avenue
And the whores and the pimps and their victims
all pass on the curb from our view

Once young once healthy and happy
now a whirlpool of raving insane
Cause here in this wild VD City
nobody knows you by name

Your eyes are too festered to see here
Your body is rotten by sores
Every wind stands full of lost faces
Human wrecks pile the stairs and the doors

Must you pay your way to this city
with an hour of passion and vice
I pray that I'll not see your face here
where the millions now burn in this fire

“VD City” could be seen as a moralistic trace of the original syphilitic’s lament, “The Unfortunate Rake,” and its descendent songs of madness and physical waste: “Streets of Laredo,” “St. James Infirmary,” “The Dying Crapshooter’s Blues,” “Insane Asylum.” But “VD City,” though it begins as pious public-service verse, ends as pure apocalyptic poetry, Guthrie’s imaginative embrace of holocaust and damnation; and while extending an ancient tradition of hellish visions from Revelations to Milton to Goya, it’s also very much post-world war, its rhetoric of atrocity touching, if not containing, the burning bodies of Hiroshima, the human piles of Dachau.

“VD City” was another name — maybe the first — for what Bob Dylan would later call “Desolation Row,” or “the border towns of despair”; “venereal disease” a less metaphorical term for “hard rain,” “idiot wind,” “highway blues,” “Memphis Blues,” “subterranean homesick blues,” “Tom Thumb’s blues,” the barren East Texas blues no one sang like Blind Willie McTell. The blues of collapse, corruption, perfidy; visionary blues that discern the fate of nations in the ruin of bodies — or for that matter, the smell of pussy in a vote for Eisenhower. From Guthrie to Dylan we go from the specific to the symbolic, the clinical to the impressionistic. But in each the scale is panoramic, the complaint a truly social disease, each man or woman a victim or witness, the conspiracy of history no longer hidden or even a conspiracy because everyone is in on it.

In cultivating his own sense of sleaze — along with his feel for loveliness, yearning, redemption, what are thought of as the higher desires — Dylan was turning over the topsoil that covered such connections, feeling the seedy truth beneath ordinary encounters — between individual and community, President and polity, Time magazine and time itself. His lyrics caught symbols in the sediment, and his dog-on-barbed-wire voice was likewise a filter of that filth, the sleazy sound of the Great Underneath.

Every major artist is that filter, that distiller of other worlds. Each one comes, in some way, to know the presence and to breathe the fumes of a thousand years of horseshit. That happens when the elements of sleaze are not despised but remade as expressive shades to evoke a congeries of sensations, experiences, nightmares traveling back and forth in time. That’s when sleaze flows, becomes a river carrying the artist and his listener across borders of emotion, metaphor, and flesh.

Bob Dylan got to this knowledge faster and straighter than most, by luring and crafting an innovative ugliness, a transformative impurity out of whatever truths he’d suspected back in the borderland of Hibbing, whatever escapes and fatalities he’d witnessed along Highway 61, standing alone upon the ridge, watching the river flow — river of sleaze, river of death, river of life.

Thank you.

2007-07-08T01:52:00.000-07:00

IAN HUNTER
Shrunken Heads
Hunter, whom I had the pleasure of seeing live a couple of Saturday nights ago, is in a unique class of performer: he centers a stage with the look and noise of a rock star, but weighs in with none of the arrogance. He was humorous, commanding, in roaring voice, a lot of fun. Not a shred of gut was spared in the delivery. Hunter's daughter and Mick Ronson's son came on at the end for the "Dudes" chorus, and Iggy Pop, with long bleach-blond hair, was snake-dancing in the "Reserved" balcony. Hunter looked, from the floor about 50 feet out anyway, just like he did in 1975 — or, at worst, 1983. Eternal shades, big blond blow-frizz undiminished, not a pound of paunch or any restraint of age on him. He hit the Mott classics (which I love) and solo favorites (which I mostly don't), but at least half of what he played came from his new album, and it all sounded great: well-built, left-of-mainstream rock songs of feeling and humor and observation.

But they call it "live" for a reason: sometimes a band onstage grips with two fists a feeling and ferocity it was lucky to hook with two fingers in a carpeted studio. That seemed to be the syndrome in play as I listened to Shrunken Heads with the live, crowd- and mic-drenched versions still crashing in memory. The album, the permanent document of those songs that sounded so brash and big in concert, is a piece of largely blah rock, with odd encrusted gems flinting among songs which set their limits early and stick to them. You get a few of the half-ironic Hunter shout-alongs (like "Cleveland Rocks" and "Once Bitten, Twice Shy") which, now as much as then, smack of cheese. You get, even worse, repeated dips in the shallow pool of soft rock, instrumentations worthy of Norah Jones, grooves for geezers.

It gets frustrating around the midpoint when you realize the album will probably never achieve its breakout, that it will not stun or jar you out of a fairly comfortable region of the familiarly irritating. That's when you start looking around to gather ye rosebuds while ye may: the grand chording on the verse to "When the World was Round," the album's best song, if also its least surprising; the "shrunken head" metaphor, simple, elegantly gruesome, which seems to cover all the agents of mediocrity, venality, and hypocrisy abroad in our world; the love and guts behind a post-hurricane song ("How's Your House") that is, as well as a vision of Hell, an uptempo piano roll full of near-joking lines and a laughing finish; or the title and funny lines of "I Am What I Hated When I Was Young," a raucous piece of banjo corn.

Hard to say "studio-safe" without sounding snotty or dismissive — because I loved Ian onstage that Saturday night. Oh well, it's not the end of the world. Just of an album.

MAGGIE BELL
Queen of the Night
Bell began as the main vocalist for British rockers Stone the Crows, but she truly notched her initials on rock history by backing up (or fighting with) Rod Stewart on "Every Picture Tells a Story." This 1974 solo album is noble soul-rock hysterics and sensual smoke, not terribly unpleasing, but not invariably funky, either: the material is hit-or-miss and grooves wobble. Bell has the true scratch in her throat but she can't do much to sex up songs that have been arranged with all the raunch of the "Tonight Show" band's commercial-break transitions. Notable, though, for an early version of "We Had it All," a Jagger-Richards song which the Stones didn't record for several years, until the Emotional Rescue sessions — though, with Keith singing, they did it better.

THE MIKE CURB CONGREGATION
“More Than Ever (Nixon Theme Song)"
"Nixon Now (Nixon Rally Song)”
Mike Curb had his first hit in the early '60s with a jingle for Honda scooters. In 1969, year of the constipated apocalypse, he was appointed head of MGM Records, after the movie company had decided for about 10 minutes it would be hip to have a pop label. While there, he promoted a clean-jeans, sta-prest, family-friendly collective image that was epitomized by flagship acts like the Cowsills — which move necessitated him releasing the Mothers of Invention and Velvet Underground from their contracts with Verve, an MGM subsidiary.

Around this time Curb formed his Congregation: suitably pious title for a cacophonous choir that was like the Ray Conniff Singers with bangs, or the Mormon Tabernacle with a middle-class twitch in its hip. "Burning Bridges" was their decidedly unholy hit, from the 1970 Clint Eastwood-Telly Savalas-Donald Sutherland-Don Rickles-Carroll O'Connor — enough already, it was a Dirty Dozen rip-off — Kelly's Heroes. (Disappointed lately in the intensity of your nightmares? Try watching this steaming two-and-a-half-hour heap of tank vomit and Howitzer flop.)

Having conquered the music world, Curb — encouraged, apparently, by California governor Ronald Reagan — sought entry into the political sphere. His first move in this direction was to write and produce, under the Congregation banner, campaign songs for the 1972 reelection campaign of another California son, Richard Nixon. The songs, along with Nixon's winning personality, were just the ticket. Curb ran for Lieutenant Governor of California and won. From 1979 to 1983, he acted as de facto governor in the absence of Jerry Brown, who — rather unconscionably, in the circumstances — spent more time running for President than tending to state affairs. In 1980, in between redrafting Brown's orders and vetoing his legislation, Curb found time to write and produce Ronald Reagan's campaign song. Key losses in California state politics evidently deterred him from pursuing further triumphs in the public sector. Today he has a country-music empire in Nashville and a NASCAR sponsorship. He is one version of the American dream.

But — so was Richard Nixon.

RALPH "SOUL" JACKSON
“Sunshine of Your Love”
In case you didn't know, his middle name tells you where to file this piece of mid-line not-badness. Notable mainly for two conspicuous lyric changes, both geared away from romantic abstraction and toward physical specificity. In the first, Give you my dull surprise becomes Give you my big surprise, natch. In the second, the word "tears" is replaced with the word "sheets" — as in I'll be with you when my sheets have dried up —

IRMA THOMAS
“We Won't Be in Your Way Anymore”
Yet another lost classic shakes loose from the riffled pages of this great lady's long history. A little 1970 soul heartbreak and ain't you fulla shit action for those long smoky midnight hours.

ELVIS PRESLEY
The "Lost" Album
And lost it might have stayed, without tragedy. All that merits mention in this collection — recorded in Nashville in 1963 for a non-movie-soundtrack LP never issued, though some tracks appeared as B-sides and album filler — is "It Hurts Me," a surging ballad nearly worthy of "Any Way You Want Me," with a lovely tacky piano obliggato. The balance is taken by boggy blues and pseudo-sex. Elvis's version of "Memphis, Tennessee" doesn't have anything like the guts of his later "Promised Land," though not because of the vocal (engaged but not excited) so much as a peculiarly enervated guitar riff — which of course is one of the riffs, one that even I can play competently, and that any studio pro, let alone a real live Nashville cat, should be able to slice into like a fisherman fileting a trout.

THE FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS
The Flight of the Conchords (HBO)
At my mother's suggestion, we just watched the first three episodes of this musical sitcom. A New Zealand duo, Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, perform pop parodies and oddball diversions while trying to score gigs and stay alive somewhere in the concrete wilds of Brooklyn. (Or is it Queens?) The deadpan comedy scenes (an incompetent manager, a single obsessed fan) are amusing enough, but the music videos that occasionally (but never arbitrarily) break up and into the action are the real bacon on the plate: an inspired parody of "what's wrong with the world today" songs, about people lying on the street with heads cut off and forks stuck in their legs; an absolutely ridiculous sci-fi thing involving cardboard-box spaceman suits; an "I'm not crying" brain-twister attributing ocular moisture to allergy, sweat, dust particles, rain, every imaginable cause except that you don't love me no more.

TFOTC's music is not quite like anything, except that it evokes rap, soul, techno, and whatever else it needs to; I could compare it to They Might Be Giants, except the Conchords didn't make me want to puncture my eardrums with a pencil.

Something so odd and beguiling cannot live forever. It may not live a season. But it's living now, right there on your TV every week. If you have cable. Which some people don't. That's the thing about pop culture. It takes money. Unless you want to steal it. Which some people do. But I'm not here to judge anyone. Except the musicians.

Fab Revelation #537
That virtually the whole of Oasis's worthy career sprang from a single tight and polished tap of pop musicality: "And Your Bird Can Sing." And that as well as Oasis have done what they've done over their 15-year career, the Beatles not only did it better but did it in two minutes.

That Curb Congregation ordeal reminded me of what might be the

Greatest Record Ever?
"Shenandoah," the Mormon Tabernacle Choir

No kidding: watch the end credits of Oliver Stone's Nixon if you doubt it.

2007-06-20T02:28:00.000-07:00

PAUL McCARTNEY
Memory Almost Full
Seeing Paul on the new iTunes commercial, high-stepping with ukelele to the opening verse of "Dance Tonight," is a shot of fizz in anyone's flat day. Sadly — predictably? — the full track, leading off his new collection, starts to pall right where the TV slice ends. And the other tracks hustle up behind it like clever public-school lads: each a scruffy jostler in loose tie and flapping shirt-tail, bright, fashionably deshabille, destined for a high-paying job and a home in the suburbs. So it is largely the same McCartney album we've been hearing for three decades now, tricked at the corners and tinted on the margins with grape-flavored synth chew or orange-crush guitar. Paul accesses again his bottomless reservoir of songs that are felt without being moving, that are smart without being intelligent, that are perfect without being remotely exhilarating.

The sequencing is unassailable, though. The best tracks come near the end, and they are nearly good enough to make you want to reassess their precursors. "End of the End" is an ideally self-contained heartbreak ballad in the McCartney line that once ran from "Yesterday" and "For No One" to "One of These Days" and "Here Today," and then pretty much stopped: a sad little song about the death of something — a love, a partner, a hope; or in this case, the death that comes for us all. Perfection achieves grace, love finds form, feeling runs warm and red.

Even better, and certainly larger, is "House of Wax," a big sinister string-and-piano-powered melodrama of the kind it sometimes seems only Paul McCartney has ever been able to write to full effect — and then only as a solo artist. I think of "Dear Friend," "Back Seat of My Car," Ringo's "Six O'Clock," the live "Maybe I'm Amazed," "Tug of War," and (especially) "Love in Song": soaring songs full of terror and thunder, Paul's backyard idylls shunned for music of broad skies, frenetic facility blown out upon an aural landscape more dangerous, thrilling, and suited to the size of the gift that wants so badly to fill it — and, at times like this, does. "House of Wax," like those others, is a countryside of fear you will gladly walk again and again for the rest of your life.

THE WHITE STRIPES
Icky Thump
Again Jack and Meg produce a noisome slag-heap of fat chording, car-crunching rhythm stomp, and snake-long lyric lines that force poor Jack to his last desperate breath. Get Behind Me, Satan was so damn good — their best since their first, and you can ease right on past that dry sagging Elephant, whatta turd — and Jack's side project with the Raconteurs was such a smacking shot of pop 'n' pepper that I can't imagine how he, she or they could push the accumulated thrill quotient of 2006 any higher, other than by the rather obvious route of doing the same good things so much better they become new.

Icky Thump ain't what it ain't. It is what it is. And what it is, often, is aimless, a shambolistic, incantatory expedition into Nopointland. But there are enough jolts, echoes, and rocks to the head to warn your finger away from the shitcan this button. "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do What You're Told)" stutters along on rich rockist block chords; "300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues" has some breathless lines of word-dirt slopping over their metrical limits. "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn" and "St. Andrew" are folk ballads thumped and droned on false bagpipes and slack-skinned drums, the latter song twisted and swirled with retro Indianisms, a la Beatles '67. Meanwhile "Conquest" fingers flamenco and "Rag and Bones" gives us more of what we all really want — Meg's flat, kissable voice pulling back against Jack's self-infatuated faux-Negroid blues delusions.

The remainder runs down on acoustic diddles and outhouse blues, authentic and ordinary. Suggestions for next time: less thump, more icky?

BRYAN FERRY
Dylanesque
UNKNOWN ARTIST
Dylan Hears a Who
It is well-known that Ferry gave us one of the best Dylan covers in "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," from "These Foolish Things" (1973); that he did a not-bad "Baby Blue" on his Frantic album of a few years ago; and that his voice, indifferently deployed, can devolve from high sleaze and sensual rapture to rancid pink icing. Dylanesque achieves only the latter effect. Washy arrangements meet uncertain commitment, and result in the paralysis of an admiration that cannot work itself into enthusiasm. It is overkill, anyway, dreadful overkill: the man who wrote the likes of "Re-make/Re-model," "Psalm," "Both Ends Burning," and "More Than This" has no need to devote an entire album's worth of lazy phrasing and jelly-legged side-swaying to the songs of any composer other than himself.

There's nothing here nearly as touching or surprising as Ferry's take on "Blue Hawaii," which capped the season premiere of HBO's Big Love: a version that was fun without being kitschy, dreamy without being kitschy, self-knowing without being — you get it. Dylanesque, in contrast, plays it solemn and goes down weak: bad news when the highlight is a bad song that has produced only bad covers ("Make You Feel My Love").

Dylan Hears a Who went around a few months ago: a bizarrely conceived, strikingly executed hoax that had a Dylan soundalike (with preternaturally precise Hawksian backing, flying organ and all) delivering Dr. Seuss stories in settings either directly or indirectly evocative of Late Acoustic or Early Electric Dylan songs. Then it was eighty-sixed, inevitably and correctly, I suppose, by a cease-and-desist order direct from the estate of Theodore Geisel, better known as the Dr. himself.

One pushed "Play" on this oddity without expecting much: the web crawls with little Rich Littles who think they sound like someone famous. Maybe they do, to dogs. But this guy had the goods. There was one technical complaint: the Blonde on Blonde-styled, forced-off-the-back-of-the-tongue vocals were too closely miked and breathy, as if recorded through a transistor radio, and then left unmixed to float disembodied over the flawlessly stewed instrumentation. But as a whole it seemed fascinating; the mimicry alone sustained a first, amazed listening. This mystery man (it was a man, right?) had his line on Dylan's rhythm — knew how to push the parody without sacrificing the musical integrity. You felt you could listen to these songs for pleasure.

The second listening proved you wrong. The laugh quotient dropped from high to huh? The seven-minute, regulation-Dylan-size epics, at first winding and labyrinthine, were now wheezing and laborious. It wasn't really bad the second time around — the formal excellence still shone through — but the primary musical pleasures wore off that fast, and the wonderful Seussian poetry that raised a full crop or two of American kids (my crop among them, Seuss and Spock being our generation's common doctors) was, needless to confirm, quite lost in the labor.

No matter. It was a great job of fakery, unexpected and delightful, and now it belongs to the ages. The last time I checked (10 seconds ago), the Dylan Hears a Who website was still shuttered behind a plain white screen bearing only the forlorn legend: "At the request of Dr. Seuss Enterprises, L.P., this site has been retired. Thanks for your interest." I have my copy, complete with album art (an impeccable mock of Dylan's Columbia albums of 1965-66), and no one will get it away from me. The songs can probably still be found somewhere on the Internet, that vast range where every dead buffalo someday finds a home to roam. (Here is "Dylan" doing Green Eggs and Ham, still available through the invaluable WFMU.)

But more poetically, I'd like to think Dylan/Seuss now resides in the great pop-hoax graveyard, where it shares chuckles and Buds with the Masked Marauders and Milli Vanilli. (Hey, they earned it too.)

EARPLUG
Another recent flaming-pie vision ended with Mickey Mouse, dressed as the Sorcerer's Apprentice, squeaking in his sternest voice, "You don't plug your friends' achievements enough." So with that horror foremost in mind, I ask you to take a look at my friend Tim Joyce's new on-line magazine The Tennis Phile. Tim's been writing about tennis for years now, covering the US Open and such, and he's just mounted his first issue. If you're into little-yellow-ball-bouncing between twinned titans of endurance on Queens clay or English grass, go to the Phile to read analysis of the looming Wimbledon tournament from some of the sharpest tennis commentators around, plus — hey! — an idle piece of brain-cleaning contributed by your blogger.

What is this sports-related plug doing on a music blog? Well, hit the switch, pull the lever, click the link, and you'll see in a flash.

"That was what we medical professionals call a lull"

2007-06-12T19:06:00.000-07:00

THE RAYS
“Elevator Operator”
A crash was heard in '58 . . . Energetic, paripatetic, a sheer breathless drop to Macy's basement. The Rays are famous for "Silhouettes," one of the great doo wop delights — and, if you believe John Lennon, a distant inspiration for the Beatles' "No Reply"! But this is vocal-group comedy from the stratosphere, the greatest record the Coasters never made. Poached from a '70s UK comp called Jukebox at Eric's.

BORUK
“To Know Him is to Love Him”
An early '70s outsider with a home-taping shtick: well-known pop songs play obliviously on a Fisher Price picnic-player somewhere to the rear while the artist emits his world-poetic vapors so close to the Panasonic microphone you can smell his schizo pheromones. In a two-minute helping, Boruk can take you away — to a weirdo loser's stain-ridden suburban living room; over the course of an album (see here for the proof) he loses his kiwi tang and becomes just another banana.

Take a whiff (Teddy Bears in italics):

To know know know him is to love love love him
And I do (and I do and I, and I do and I do and I do)

"To know him — is to luuuuv him. Knowledge is the fear of Gahhhd. Knowledge is a mental picture, corresponding to the actual thing. Knowledge is limited by a peculiar . . . spatial-temporal . . . huuuman perspective. Knowledge is behavioral control. What’s it to you?"

Whyyyyyy —

"Adam knew Eve, and begat man John and the family king, as Peter found a celibate church, the miracle of TV’s mirror. Dad’s old-fashioned, Judeo-Christian, Greco-Romahn, conscious Skinnerism. Root, radical, nightmare seer. Truth, science, feeling, dear. And it is so inscribed in the book of the Teddy Bears’ gold disc. To know know know him, amehhhn, is to love, love, love him, agehhhhn. And I do — and I do. There you fly, is away.

Uh-piss-tuh-molla-gee."

And I do and I — and I do and I — and I do and I . . .

CAT POWER
“Paths of Victory”
Not a recent find but a long-standing haunter. Not the best version of the timeless-seeming Dylan anthem (which could be either a parody of high-stepping, flag-waving Independence Day ditties or the real thing), but it can stand, or slouch, beside any other on offer. Mainly it will not let me go because in Power's haggard, past-hope, seen-everything, let's-tell-this-lie-one-more-time rendition, it is the perfect end music to the Henry Fonda documentary that runs continually in my head.

"Aw, my visions never come true"

Along about a year ago (was it?!?!) I troubled to record for you a vision that came to me on a flaming pie: that "The Sopranos" would end its last episode with Tony dying in Carmela's arms and that "Poor Side of Town" would be the last song. Well, David Chase's therapist was evidently on another track altogether because the last song was, as you may know, Journey's "Don't Stop Believing." And no one was killed — or at any rate, no one was shown being killed.

I don't know how viewers are taking it back home in flyoverland, but in New York the finale has been slammed as at best a letdown, and at worst a disgrace. I.e., not enough whackin' goin' on. The Post is all pissy, fitting for the bathroom sheet it is, with its voice-of-the-blue-to-white-collar-working-stiff-who-just-wants-some-good-wholesome-blood-guts-star-fucking-cop-sucking-moral-high-horsing-NYU student-suicide-picturing get-off material for the morning commute. The other prints fall in line with the Post verdict that "The Sopranos" let its fans down.

What we as individual "Sopranos" watchers may have been expecting from the finale is one thing; but what were we all wanting? In a word, massacre. We didn't just want to see Phil Leotardo shot, and hear his head crushed as his grandchildren giggled and a schoolboy vomited — though that wasn't bad. We wanted to see Tony get gunned, at the very least — no, not just gunned, shredded by AK-47, stabbed by Bowie, beheaded: what else befits the large tragic hero? We wanted to see A.J. succeed in killing himself, preferably in some gruesome way. Wanted to see Meadow get caught in the crossfire, that lustrous Italian-American skin scarred and split by her father's burning metal. We wanted to see Carmela go down in a blaze of bullets, standing, staggering, falling by her man as they held the Soprano fort one last time against alla you lousy bastids. We wanted, in the manner of catharsis-seeking, blood-drinking audiences from the Greeks till now, to see a panorama of gore; a tapestry of issues, ideas, and emotions spattered in body matter; all human complexities, irresolvable agonies, and undramatic non-endings blown to a more or less agreeable, forgettable eternity.

Well, we wanted Bonnie and Clyde. And David Chase, perverse, analysis-seeking prick, wouldn't give it.

What did he give? He gave an ending that I may not remember on my deathbed with utter clarity, but which I don't believe I'll forget in its whole strokes. It was too tense, the sadness too active, the inevitability too impossible. Each piece of the final cell — family members, man at the bar, young couple in the booth, two teenage boys swinging in at the very end — entered the nucleus of the show's last minute like an active particle, each just so random, unknowing, alive. Once the particles began to revolve and bounce and converge, once the nucleus heated and the scene pulsed with THIS IS IT, you knew you weren't going to see the moment of impact. You knew the thing would end in darkness and dissatisfaction and that the whole would stick somewhere in the throat, that it would not go down blood-easy.

And it was too ordinary to be easy: it had the pure dumb tension of the ordinary. The conversation was mundane (do you remember a word that was exchanged?), the business with the parallel parking was flinty and irritating as, well, hubcap on asphalt, and even the use of — yep — that last, last song contributed to a sense of No, this can't be it, this can't be all, don't let this be the end! Where is the tapestry, the matter, the torn bodies of the amphitheatre?

Ah, Journey, hmm, well — interesting choice. The lyrics slot right in (they are the credo of the family, the show's version of the deteriorating mob — of America?), but you weren't listening to the lyrics any more than you were absorbing the subtleties and felicities of the humdrum, moment-filling dialogue. "Don't Stop Believing" is shit, and it is important to make that distinction even while admitting that the record is a great one — that it has hooks the size of skyscrapers, that there is glamour and thrill, allness and utterness and a great swipe of the absolute to every shit note of it. "Poor Side of Town," whatever your blogger's preference, would have been, by comparison, a purely literary choice. Redolent of Sinatra, velour anterooms in Copa-styled nightspots, a Pinot Grigio of sentiment. The same old Mob; and romance, all romance. But Journey had something I think worked better, and was certainly more unexpected, less easy to snatch: drama. Drama is now. Sentiment is then: "Poor Side of Town" is something that has already happened. It is the thin, impeccable taste of wine, a memory. "Don't Stop Believing," in all its glitter and shit and fat frenzy, happens, each time it plays, right this second.

So did the last minute we will ever see of "The Sopranos." Whatever it was or failed to be, it was a hot, hurtful minute of television that was happening right this second. Maybe I'm only working backward to build a notion in my head, but I don't think Tony, Carmela, Meadow or A.J. were ever as real, as fleshly, as near to life and death as they were in that last minute.

Well done. Arrivaderci, Sopranos. Now get in your graves.

2007-02-11T17:00:00.000-08:00

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Absolute Obscurities of the ‘70s, Vol. 2
From “Black Superman in Zaire” (Johnny Wakelin) to “Rockabilly Rebel” (Matchbox), from “I Love to Love” (Tina Charles) to “Can You Feel the Force” (The Real Thing), from disco and glam to reggae and revivalist tripe, 19 distillations of the decade’s worst hunches and dumbest tangents. Title to the contrary, these were all hits of some magnitude, somewhere, for some space of time, though you’d descend into margarine seas of flaking paper to retrieve the details. Surprise delights there are, though, in the form of the Nolans’ “I’m in the Mood for Dancing” and Smokie’s “Living Next Door to Alice.”

BONE THUGS N HARMONY feat. AKON
"I Tried"
The hook in this ghetto lament is a sad, soulful drag on the refrain that pushes the whole past lyrics that would otherwise seem too straightforwardly self-pitying ("I tried so hard, can't seem to get away from misery . . . Always be a victim of these streets"). Pounding from chord to chord on heavy bass and synthetic hand claps, weary strings over the top, the hook pulls you in immediately, holds you throughout, and proves for the 15 millionth time that music can put over a truth that words can't. That, plus Akon is one of the more companionable voices in hip-hop right now, and the Thugs rap fast and fluent enough to make the sob story a dark shifting feeling, rather than a melodramatic tableau you have to stare dumbly at.

ADVERTISING JINGLES
Advertising Jingles
1978 Britpoppery that was unsuccessful enough at first try to have merited some kind of cult rebirth at millennium time. Punchy bandwork and sharp harmonies are abundant, but these only push the annoyance quotient of songs that are so cute they don't cut, so busy they don't land, overstuffed with quirks, and doused in a pop sense that is less juicy than fruity. Generic proximity to Squeeze, Split Enz, and early Elvis Costello doesn't help, any more than the memory of fresh bananas makes you want to eat rotten ones. Good enough to be rediscovered, bad enough to be reforgotten.

THE CAULFIELDS
"Devil's Diary"
Speaking of Elvis Costello, this track from the otherwise unmemorable Whirligig (1995) is as note-perfect a rip of Armed Forces-era E.C. as the Knickerbockers' "Lies" was of the Beatles, or Mouse's "Public Execution" of Dylan. Coincidentally or not, the song's lyrical tag-line is "I'm bigger than Jesus now."

AVRIL LAVIGNE
"Girlfriend"
And speaking of pop that misses its broad mark, here's a further helping of clamorous brattitude from the perpetrator of "Sk8er Boi" and other pee-wee punk anthems that have sent my ears shrieking in the other direction. Heralding Avril's upcoming album — and a blessing that's certain to be — this single is every bit as self-aware as we'd expect from a meta-savvy teeny icon of now: insults hurled at the titular girl ("She's, like, so whatever") are softened and mirrored by unsubtle digs at the singer's own obnoxious self ("I'm the motherfuckin' princess"). You'd say it's irony, but irony shouted tends to blow itself out; to paraphrase the Who, it's only teenage self-parody.

I get what Lavigne is up to here: I have a brain cell. In fact, I have two.

THE PIPETTES
We Are the Pipettes
Now, if you want true life-giving girl-sass, here’s the place to go. This came out last summer, twinned with the single “Your Kisses Are Wasted on Me,” and it’d been an age or so since we heard teen queens who bratted so winningly. Where have the Pipettes been all my life? Probably back there being the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, the Go Go’s, Shampoo, and the Spice Girls in their better moments.

THE SHINS
Wincing the Night Away
Third album from smart-but-not-clever, gifted-but-not-precocious Portland poppers wins listener on melodies that hang just right, felicitous instro-touches out of the British bag, and vocals that value engagement over irony. You can listen to the lyrics but you don't have to. Runs out of steam towards the end, but don't we all occasionally? Highlights: "Australia," "Phantom Limbs," "Turn on Me."

MILLIE JACKSON
Live & Uncensored
“I been telling everybody’s business, it’s time I told mine,” says the queen of raunch to kick off this marathon 1979 set of hard R&B in gold lamé. And elsewhere, “This goddamn disco shit kill a old bitch like me, boy.” You don’t call the talk Jackson talks between tracks “patter”; “assault and battery” would be closer. The character theme throughout is Millie the miffed, ragging and ranking on some faithless fool of a man — except for “The Soaps,” an extended comic attack on daytime dramas and the black women who stare at them all day long.

For the culture vultures in the crowd, there’s a contrapuntal classical number called “Phuck You,” elaborate japery on those who hide their Millie Jackson records and display their Beethoven. Also found are versions of then-current aggro hits from Whiteboyland like “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” (Rod Stewart), “Hold the Line” (Toto), and “Just When I Needed You Most” (Randy Vanwarmer). Pretty phucking phunny, on the whole.

HAMILTON CAMP
Paths of Victory
I remember this guy from the '70s, when he was an actor in TV sitcoms. (He did a great rap as Del Murdock, polyester owner of a hopeless stereo shop where Johnny Fever did a remote broadcast in "WKRP.") Come to find out years later he was a middle-tier name in the folk revival, had performed with Bob Gibson and others under the name Bob Camp, and done his own Elektra album in 1964.

It's all brisk and puffed up, noble-chested deliveries from that noble-chested revivalist-commercialist moment; all ringing energies and world-charging intentions. And it flirts with being unbearable before growing on you. Some element in Camp's singing, something very like mild derangement, keeps things uncertain; most songs are robbed by arrangement and performance of dull beauty and frozen in a bitter shine. Among the many Dylan covers is a "Walkin' Down the Line" with double-tracked vocal that, rather than exploiting the song's jaunty, friendly melody (a la Dylan's own demo, or the Dillards' Live...Almost!!! version), goes for bitter harmonic points and a quality of bug-eyed fixation. A major aid is the double bass of Red Mitchell, thumping relentlessly and faithfully like Andre the Giant in The Princess Bride, anchoring the songs to earth.

DOLLY PARTON
Hello, I’m Dolly
Country goodness from 1967: sweet as pie, crisp and brief as breeze. She puts over the jokes (“Dumb Blonde,” “I Don’t Wanna Throw Rice”) and does justice to the heartbreakers (“I Wasted My Tears,” “I’ve Lived My Life”). As faked up and phonied down as her productions have been over the years, Dolly herself couldn’t deliver a graceless or unfelt note. As Ricky Gervais put it in "The Office," “And people think she’s just a pair of tits.”

RAY LaMONTAGNE
Till the Sun Turns Black
This bizarre folk-soul shouter deserves more space, but suffice to say he is someone to watch just now, and this is the most interesting new album I heard in the last few months of 2006. I didn't even know what a departure it was from his previous work: eclectic, textural, humorous, and shape-changing where the predecessor, 2005's Trouble, had been straight-on and earnest. Don't know why I didn't list the last song, "Within You" — the best post-Beatles Beatle anthem I've heard in years, a long slow climactic fader, how "Hey Jude" might have sounded if John wrote it — among my "Revelations" of 2006. Maybe I didn't believe it was all there. But it is.

EMINEM feat. CASHIS
"Jimmy Crack Corn"
The disses fly again in Em's latest single. One crew ranking another. As an underdog, Mathers is a genius. As a thug, he's as waxy, flat and stupid as the rest of them. Cashis raps like mud flows. The orchestra sounds real mean. Everyone's got a dick. And I don't care.

ELVIS PRESLEY
Let Yourself Go!
Elvis' Greatest Shit!!
An Afternoon in the Garden
Adios: The Final Performance
Having Fun with Elvis On Stage
Cut Me and I Bleed: The Other Side of Elvis
Somewhere among his many fever blisters of visionary fury, Lester Bangs recorded the (no doubt widespread) fantasy of splitting open Elvis's fat, drug-enriched corpse to reveal the roiling pharmacopoeia within, and gleefully ingesting the chemical-visceral stew in a vile burlesque of transubstantiation.

There are plenty of releases, official and unofficial, that allow the curious to come as near as possible to doing pretty much that. Generally they catch Elvis in less than guarded moments: singing, talking, performing for an audience or just communicating to a few in a studio. Ungainly, inglorious moments of drug, blubber and blood; unheroic, ungracious, un-American fugues of extreme profanity, anger, irreverence. Just as every metaphor worth using has two uses — to catch a dream, and apprehend a horror — every form and version of the star-spangled Elvis has its dark double.

On the fan-friendly, estate-official side — edited and equalized, airbrushed and windblown, stamped "approved" by Graceland Global Industries Consolidated or whatever it's called — there are such forays into spontaneity as the recent Let Yourself Go! The Making of "Elvis" — The '68 Comeback Special, which not only supplements the original Elvis TV Special soundtrack but telescopes the many bootleg discs of rehearsals from the Burbank sessions that preceded the legendary broadcast. Elvis starts out with a remarkably bold and bloodthirsty take on "Trouble" that dissolves in laughter and the star inexplicably commanding, "Get that dog outta here." Following are many startups and breakdowns, blurps and bleeps from the control room, and an ongoing underlayer of listener frustration as Elvis's dramatic, committed vocals, recorded in pieces for edit purposes, are continually hacked off at the climax.

Let Yourself Go! features some mild cussing and anti-hero infamies ("Are you horrr-neee tonight," Elvis hums between takes) among repeated tosses at vaguely cornball TV-special production fodder (“Little Egypt,” “Saved”). Its twilight counterpart would be something like Elvis' Greatest Shit!!, whose centerpiece is an outtake of “I Can’t Help Falling in Love” ended with a testy “shit” and "hot damn tamale" from Elvis. Otherwise it is a grossly funny document steeped in waste and vomit and disbelief. I.e., songs from Elvis’s movies: “There's No Room to Rhumba in a Sportscar,” “Yoga is as Yoga Does,” “Songs of the Shrimp,” “The Bullfighter was a Lady,” “He's Your Uncle Not Your Dad,” “Dominic the Impotent Bull,” “Queenie Wahine's Papaya,” “Do the Clambake.” The TV special's modest ball of corn thus grows to horrific, planetary dimensions, multiplied as in the fevers of a hallucinogenic sequence out of “The Simpsons.”

Elvis's last run of real godhead, before the effects of overindulgence manifested in his appearance and performance, may have been his shows at New York's Madison Square Garden in June 1972 — one of which is captured in full on An Afternoon in the Garden (1997). Robert Christgau and Jon Landau wrote powerful pieces about the transport of seeing Elvis in full flame at the Garden, cape flying and legs thrusting; George Harrison had a sweet moment somewhere in the Anthology extras, describing meeting Elvis backstage, cringing like a lower creature before this towering, high-collared monument to rock and roll manhood. (In the concerts, Elvis lightly rewrote "Never Been to Spain" to fit his own Fab-challenged trajectory through the '60s: "But I kinda like the Beatles / So I headed to Las Vegas — ")

It’s a big show to listen to, with its own apotheosis of Olympian glitz — a crew of professionals raising professionalism to heroic heights — but there’s more than a dollop of the fakery that replaced drama with bombast and helped make Elvis a joke. And truth to speak, Elvis the hot-blooded, full-throated Garden god is actually no more committed to his mission of entertainment than the near-dead sea-creature who liquefied the stage of Indianapolis’s Market Square Arena on June 26, 1977. This is the show captured on Adios: The Final Performance, a decent audience recording of a legendary moment of popular mortification: Elvis glazed, sweating, bulbous, beyond reclamation or excuse, unwittingly posing for all the photos that will be flashed worldwide less than two months later, when he is dead and every commentator will sagely nod, “Look — you could see it coming.”

"Oh, Jesus," you can hear an audience member cry as lights beam and anticipation builds, and Also Spake Zarathustra grips the crowd.

No one with a heart can hate Elvis. You have to feel affection even when he is basting in his own sad juices, flopping and flubbing and hugging death. Even when, from the Indianapolis stage, he drug-mumbles his lyrics and repeatedly transmits the patented Presleyan Well, well, well like a sick whale moaning beneath great waves of delighted laughter. Because he's still giving it all he's got — as little as that may be — and he is doing it behind the nearest any star has ever come to the Janus face of man and god. Was there ever a god who was less assuming, at least in public, more of a human?

Listen to those awful nautical moans from Indianapolis, repeated to the point of a trope. Listen to him slur, "What is today, Monday?" ("Sunday!" is the mass response.) Listen to the trivial stage blabber he expended on all the identical audiences. In The Worst Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time: A Fan's Guide to the Stuff You Love to Hate! — love to love that exclamation mark! — Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell ranked Having Fun with Elvis on Stage (1974) as the, yes indeed, #1 worst album in the genre's then-nearly-50-year-history. That placed it much higher, therefore much lower, than such mutant fetuses as Travolta Fever and Joey Bishop Sings Country Western.

Well, it's not that bad. Granted that the two sides' worth of Kingly chatter and patter, water-gulps and air-kisses feature nary a lick of music, but there's Afternoon and others for that. Having Fun consists entirely of clips of a jovial demigod interacting with his female worshippers, making fun of himself, of them, of the whole crazy relationship, and generally behaving as if everyone in the house — himself not least of all — were, get this, average, ordinary human beings. You could say that was a lie (this is Elvis!), and you could say that was the most radical and affirmative onstage attitude for a megastar to adopt at a time when art-rock spectacle and arena-rock bombast were becoming the norm.

Having Fun is very much a G-rated version of the kind of thing you get on the arrestingly titled bootleg Cut Me and I Bleed, apparently a collection of every Presley swear ever caught on tape, including some reruns from Greatest Shit!!. It begins with Elvis reading "a poem that I wrote" to what sounds like a gaggle of typically sycophantic Memphis Mafiosi:

As I awoke this morning, when all sweet things are born,
A robin perched on my windowsill to greet the coming dawn.
He sang a song so sweetly, and paused for a moment's lull.
I gently raised the window, and crushed its fucking skull.

(That poem was making the rounds when I was a kid. I don't know who wrote it, but it weren't Elvis.)

"Fucking skull" sets the tone, and Bleed bleeds it. The irony, or surprise, or payoff, to this pageant of profanity is that while it ostensibly shows Elvis screwing up and goofing off, it also features some of the strongest vocalizing of his career. "A Hundred Years from Now," before it falls apart, has a startlingly beautiful, boyish vocal, full of breeze and hilltop, as if Elvis were Huck Finn again and the Colonel, the Army, the Mafia, and Hollywood had never happened. There are staggering versions of "Hurt" and "Stranger in My Own Home Town," the latter a particularly vociferous take, as an angry Elvis departs the text and charges forth into improvised obscenity.

For the wind-up, we go live to Las Vegas. Gearing up for a big number, Elvis acknowledges shouts of love from the crowd. Then a high-pitched cry, tossed upward into the brief silence like a rotten lettuce:

"I hatecha, Elvis!"

"Fuck you," the King answers without a pause. The crowd is joyous. And applause, deep applause, leads into a rousing "American Trilogy."

Metaphor, thy name is Elvis.

But following that is something called "Drug Dialogue," and an infamous tirade it is. Recorded September 2, 1974 — the last night of a two-week stand at the Vegas Hilton — it finds Elvis fulminating over a recent gossip item insinuating he was a junkie. Fully transcribed, though lacking the King's savage cadence, his homicidal essence:

"Well, I was — you know, in this day and time you can't even get sick. You are strung out. Well by God I'll tell you something friend I have never been strung out in my life, except on music. [applause]

"When I got sick here in the hotel, I got sick here that one night, I had 102 temperature, they wouldn't let me perform . . . From three different sources I heard, I was strung out on heroin. I swear to God, hotel employees, Jack . . . bellboys . . . freaks that carry your luggage up to the room . . . people working around, you know, talking, maids . . . And I was sick, I was — you know, I was getting — had a doctor, had the flu, got over it one day and it was all right.

"But all across this town, I was — I was strung out. So I told 'em earlier and don't you get offended, ladies and gentlemen, I'm talking to somebody else. If I find or hear the individual that has said that about me, I'm gonna break your goddamn neck you son of a bitch. [applause] That is dangerous, that is damaging to myself, to my little daughter, to my father, to my friends, my doctor, to everybody in my relationship with you, my relationship with you up here on the stage it is dangerous I will pull your goddamn tongue out BY THE ROOTS!! [applause]

"Thank you very much — anyway. How many of you saw the movie Blue Hawaii?"

And that’s no metaphor I can grab.

2007-02-07T01:07:00.000-08:00

* * * MARGINALIA * * *

I've just been listening, again, to the Brooklyn Bridge. No, not the group that hit it big in '69 with that tottering monument of yellowing marshmallow, "The Worst That Could Happen," but the storied edifice itself: span of dreams, transmitter of a siren call that drew the likes of Whitman, Crane, Wolfe, and, to descend a few notches, William Styron.

The bridge and its once-ago sounds were brought to mind by this communication from the letters column of the latest New-York Ghost:

"You know what your 'paper' really needs? ¶ A 'Bridge Columnist.' ¶ Every respectable periodical has one. ¶ But I suggest a slightly different approach: Instead of writing about a boring old card game, your Bridge Columnist would write about bridges. ¶ Bridge news, bridge lore, 'fun facts' about bridges, emerging trends in structural engineering, etc. ¶ Your Bridge Columnist would cover all the regional crossings, from Tappan A — to Tappan Zee. ¶ (But not the Brooklyn Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge is a cliché. A cliché notable for its imposing masonry and soaring Gothic arches. Some 27 lives were lost during the construction of this cliché.) ¶ (Disclosure: When he [sic] first arrived from the Old Country, I purchased the Brooklyn Bridge for an undisclosed sum.) ¶ In addition, the Bridge Columnist would cover important bridge openings and ribbon-cuttings worldwide, as well as the international bridge festival every summer in Spoleto." — George Macondo, East Winsome, Brooklyn

That chafed a bit. There are clichés and there are facts of life, and the Brooklyn Bridge is demonstrably the latter. I've walked across it on several occasions, the last being one winter ago, just before the close of 2005, when for a few days New York's subway workers were on strike and many thousands of us hoofed and hitched miles to work on three of the coldest days of the year. I've walked the bridge in darkness and light, cold and heat, sun and cloud, and will attest that there is nothing clichéd about the Brooklyn Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge postcard, maybe; not the thing itself.

For the edification and enjoyment of aspiring bridge columnists everywhere, I'd point out this posting, from last summer, at WFMU's Beware of the Blog blog:

One of the great lost sound effects of the New York area was the sound the Brooklyn Bridge used to make before its corrugated metallic roadway was replaced with a standard concrete surface. The bridge generated a constant multi-layered drone that rose and fell according to the speed, number and weight of the cars driving on it. Fortunately, Wendy Mae Chambers recorded the sounds and issued it on a single back in 1982. Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo was also a fan of the Brooklyn Bridge drone and he recorded this tribute to it, which came out on the late great audio cassette magazine, Tellus, Volume 10.

The Ranaldo piece is a tuneless strumming with doom dynamics and a spoken narrative doused in gasoline fumes and the mundanity of the road. Sounds like Jandek on the celestial megaphone; it builds and multiplies in thickness, the thrum of a massive cable spanning shores, each echo another winding twine — before splitting off into a mortified moaning a la Lygeti's Atmospheres. Ar-tee. The Chambers recording, though, is the real deal, less freaky but more fascinating, if only for its innocence: the bridge has no sense of drama, it only resonates upon what it is given, the raw unending reverberations of chance. You can hear the wind, a meditative om, our old familiar the banshee, or a dozen other varieties and grades of wail, uncountable essences of wind and wire, traffic and atmosphere, sky and machine.

Try listening to this only once. Try not to imagine the final fate and last sensations of the 27 who died (most of their names are here), wonder if their lives truly were lost in the construction of a cliché, and start thinking about where and when you can fit a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge into your life.

BAD MOOD MUSIC (Pt. 1)

2007-01-31T02:57:00.000-08:00

I remember when I finally capitulated to “Roseanne.” For years it had been one of the most popular shows on TV and I’d hated it. Around early 1995, I was in a deep dark valley of indecision and quandary, personal odyssey-wise. I watched a rerun — the episode about Dan and Roseanne’s frantic, frustrated efforts to get their taxes turned in on April 15th — and suddenly a show that had always been as welcome as piss in my Cornflakes felt as warm and useful as a sympathetic friend. The Conner family's bad moods and toxic humors poured over and neutralized mine, like Alka-Seltzer on an angry stomach. It wasn’t that I was better off than the Conners, who came from a place and lived a life very like my own; it was that they were as bad off as me. And as well off, if you see what I mean. I.e., we’re all in the shit sometimes, and you have to laugh.

These musicians have made me laugh just lately, the first privately, the second out loud.

39 CLOCKS
Subnarcotic
It says something about the listener’s persistently vile and useless mood when this kind of weird shit fits it so well — and even manages to wear some of the vileness away.

These 39 Clocks are Dada agitators in the form of lithe, affectless Germans: think Deiter of “Sprockets” on a thick dose of Benadryl, doing his mechano-dance in an Expressionist go-go cage over the floor of an arts board-sponsored Happening in a Berlin basement c. 1981.

Google gives me scheiss on the band, but I derive that Subnarcotic, from 1982, is their second album. The record jacket shows pictures of the band members. Two play guitars and keyboards and sing; they call themselves J.G. 39 and C.H. 39.

The third member runs the drum machine. He has no name. He is a huge ant.

Some class this as “garage neo-psych.” Why not. I might call it futuristic acid-rain noir soundtrack. Fine but what does it sound like, Mr. Smarty-Britches? There is much redolent of Bowie’s Berlin phase, and even more Velvets influence. In fact those VU fans who are not closet folk-rockers ought to dig this record most of all.

No stinting on the avant-garde here. Beats are beat up and textures are invariably raw. Noises shoot through holes like snakes. “Heat of Violence” sets the bad mood: a dissonant funkwad with what sounds like two or three of those plastic keyboard harmonica-hooters blowing from the middle of a ball of chicken wire and tumbleweed, someone scraping large metal files against the outside, the ant-handled drum machine clicking away nearby. A voice, a subnarcotic drone. Come the Supergeek.

“Psychotic Louie Louie”: not as good as the Kingsmen’s version, but better than the USC Marching Band’s, not to mention Frank Zappa’s.

“Past Tense Hope & Instant Fears On 42nd Street” (great title) sounds awfully like White Light Velvets, lots of that scrapey guitar and “96 Tears” organ. “The Man bee-hind the mahhhsk.” Drama worthy of "Lux Radio Hour."

A couple selections (“Virtuous Girl,” “Three Floors Down”) flirt with being straight tracks, or at least crooked in precedented ways, conventional beats and digestible riffs. But some radical impulse yanks every revisionist gesture back into an indeterminate tunnel with sharp plastic objects flying and many tricks on the ear. On “Rainy Night Insanities,” suddenly, from out of a pleasing and metronomic Dada drone, a flute flies pure and true on an ellipsis to your ear, which welcomes it tenderly. But the flute turns to a violin and begins to saw bone. You’ve been had. Fuckers.

I enjoyed this album, oddly. Had a nice 41 minutes with 39 Clocks. They sound toxic but they're only insecure.

Suggested for temporary wastoids, fans of ironic meltdown, or those who think Lou Reed and Marlene Dietrich would make a great mashup.

VOICEDUDE
Wang Chung vs. Johnny Cash
Ah yes and speaking of which, I say how is the mashup faring these days? About the same, which means not as well. Back in aught-two or 'three, it was new, to most of us anyway, and its newness carried half its charge. The freakish combinations (Nirvana and Destiny's Child still being the best push-button example) are still there to be made, serendipities to be mined, but the novelty has worn off. The mashup, however well done, has a tired aroma around it now, the dull air of a once-brilliant trick too many have figured out how to do. We're on to other things by now, even if we don't know what they are.

That's harsh and fickle judgment on a fad that was so thrilling so recently, but hey, this is pop culture. If you want longevity, watch "General Hospital."

Still, though, one of the many skillful mash-plates of the anonymous Voicedude has stuck with bubblegum tenacity to the bottom of my shoe. A devilishly clever mutation of "Ring of Fire" and "Dance Hall Days," it places a simulacrum of stolid old Johnny Cash amid a disco-ball stage revue and makes of him a masterful deadpan comedian.

Right away you're laughing. Those familiar beats and guitar strokes upon one of the loathsomest and most recognizable of '80s pop hits. And those goddamn tootling horns! But the vocal is not Chung's but the tangy, twangy cowboy Cash, riding in on the rim of a metallic echo: Ah fell for ya lahk a chahld . . . Ohhhhh, but the fire went wahld. Ah fell into a burnin' ring of fahr, I went down, down, down — And the "Ring of Fire" bullfight horns wind up and around the dance hall toot. The parts fit: there are no wince-making incompatibilities of key or tempo, each song gives the other room to move around within it, maintaining its face but changing costume with each new movement of the mash. It is suspenseful, delightful, and above all fucking funny.

For the middle section, Jack Hues, the Wang Chung vocalist, comes up front to mince his dopey lines. Cash's rejoinders ring down as if from some spectral godhead:

So take your baby by the wrist

The taste of love is sweet

And in her mouth an amethyst

when hearts like ours meet

And in her eyes two sapphires blue

I fell for you like a child

And you need her and she needs you

Oh, but the fire went wild

Each of Hues's snotty, brittle enunciations is met by Cash's downcast mouth and profundo deliveries, which have never sounded twangier, more theatrical: his every "burn" boings like a springing sound effect in a Warner Brothers cartoon. All this against the mud-hump of that awful Chung hookiness, suddenly more lovable than loathsome.

Somewhat like 39 Clocks, this six-minute piece is dark, discordant, rhythmic, angled, and anti-pop; and it can seem, the first time through anyway, almost interminable. Yet it works as pop always works, a wet and wild tonic on dried-out canyons of the mind, a pursuit of the new and the exciting and the just right through tape-yards of experiment and clashing noise. What of the use of preexisting personalities, autonomous entities as unwilling subjects in the experiment? Not being much of a Cash fan, I can't say whether the Man in Black is mocked or diminished by his use here: I just enjoy the tickling of this marvelous contrast. "Dance Hall Days," meanwhile, is neither diminished nor enlarged by its cooptation. Serene and stupid as a stone, it will never be cracked.

The best thing about Voicedude's mutant masterpiece, though, may be its title.

Haven’t you guessed yet?

“Wang of Fire.”

You have to laugh.

2006-12-30T02:55:00.000-08:00

DAVID LYNCH, LAURA DERN & NINA SIMONE
Inland Empire
Somehow chronology has been reversed, not in fiction but in this, our real world: I can't get over feeling that Inland Empire should have come out five years before Mulholland Drive, not five after. It's like the giant block of granite from which Lynch chiseled his masterwork. The themes are the same -- women exploited, brutalized, left for garbage along a Hollywood street -- and the narrative could very well be, like the earlier picture's, the revenge-and-deliverance fantasy of a woman passing out of one world and into the next. But rather than a logical progression of chipping down, we see what now looks like the earlier picture's classical form being scarred and bloated by the piling and plastering on of extranea, pointless repetitions, failed inspirations, tropes for dopes.

And like a giant block of granite, the film is impermeable, unliftable, and will crack your skull if you bang your brain against it long enough. It would be spiteful to deny its unearthliness, and mere genius worship to deny its dreadfulness. I was with it pretty much all the way for the first thirty minutes. The second thirty, I held tight, one hand gripping Laura Dern and the other my faith that Lynch would pull it out. The next hour was grim struggle, and the rest was like surviving a gulag. Of course Lynch and Dern know and want that -- precisely that. They sought and fought to make Inland Empire that good and that bad, that tantalizing and that punishing. No joke is allowed to be simply, tersely funny, no beautiful moment is allowed to expire peacefully and leave its shapely wisp behind. Everything is dragged, stretched, flayed, labored, killed. Then it is kicked, and kicked, and kicked.

It's that horrible. Which is not to say that it won't get better with time.

The music:

Forget the moronic "Loco-Motion" dance 'n' sync: it's unworthy of any audience that had to pay to get in. It's also unworthy of Lynch, who as a visionary musichead created the Radiator Lady's "Heaven" song, set Julee Cruise against blue velvet, gave Angelo Badalamenti steady work, and lifted Mulholland Drive into bubblegum paradise with a sudden cut from modern madness to beehive hairdos, sparkly microphones, and an interracial group of malt-shoppe shooby-woppers miming Linda Scott's "I Told Every Little Star." (Mama, what chills from that.)

What you cannot forget are Inland Empire's end credits, which transpire in what is either the happiest whorehouse in creation or some after-life group home for abused women. You will not learn from me what the scene is, except to say that it explodes into something so exuberant that it virtually justifies on its own the skull-cracking of the previous three hours; that it involves a lip-sync to Nina Simone's outrageous, epic, all-over-the-place "Sinner Man" (a last clue to the movie's rather simple themes); and that finally David Lynch allows his smile to shine all over the amazing display, just as Laura Dern's smile beams from the center of it.

REVELATIONS 2006; or, There is Nothing Except for The Night

2006-12-27T02:52:00.000-08:00

Discoveries of the past year, never to be forgotten.

SKEETER DAVIS
"My Last Date (With You)"
Now, Skeeter is undeniable to me. Look at her classics: "I Can't Stay Mad at You," "The End of the World," "Silver Threads and Golden Needles," "I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know." But this I had never heard before a few weeks ago. The title tipped me to its provenance: Nashville pianist Floyd Cramer's instrumental hit of 1960, "Last Date," which I'd long regarded as a pretty, plaintive tune. Skeeter's version, done the following year, had largely the same backing track, the unmistakable Cramerian tinklings mixed a bit lower, the previously voiceless lines now filled in with lyrics standard for the time and therefore ineffably touching.

It was the middle section that did me clear in. Two bars of piano trill and sweet strings. Skeeter speaks: I know we had a quarrel, but all sweethearts do. And Skeeter sings: I gave my love to prove to you, that I would always love you and be true-oo-oo --

(That's a tautology. Yes. I know.)

I could be the fool that I am and try to describe the exquisite hand that sound placed around my heart, the pain I felt as it tightened; or I could let the memory hang. For now, I will let it hang.

This was my musical find of 2006. It might be yours of 2007. Have your Kleenex ready, or a beer to cry in.

VAN MORRISON
"Once in a Blue Moon"
"Little Village"
Both of these come from the 2003 LP What's Wrong With This Picture?, otherwise an agreeable moosh. Only these two songs take you beyond the jazz club or the cognac lounge -- one, flying blue over the moon of the title, the other, shivering in your warmth below the shadow of an Alp (back in the 1920s, before Hitler, or centuries earlier than that, just before Mark Twain's mysterious stranger appeared in an Austrian hamlet). Morrison, who has always seemed such a tight and testy presence, a hard-balled bunch of muscles and nerves, can, when he closes his eyes, glide vocally with a grace beyond compare. When he kicks that leg, watch out; when the horns are flying behind him and his guitar ace of the moment is seconding every emotion, his music has a lift, a loft, an essence of clouds, speed, stars. Each of these songs is so open-hearted and high-reaching, so evocative, you would forego the place it evokes just to stay in the song forever.

THE RACONTEURS
Broken Boy Soldiers
Just a great half-hour-long pop record. That's all.

KT TUNSTALL
"Other Side of the World"
I've read that Tunstall doesn't appreciate comparisons with Dido, to whom she bears no small musical resemblance. This may bespeak ambition but it may also be misbegotten, since Dido has wrought two great albums to Tunstall's none, and the best thing KT does on Eye to the Telescope is this faultless piece of Dido-esque tuneage: great dynamics and song construction, melody that can't miss, a hint of smoke in the breeze of the voice.

SONNY HOPSON & Various Artists
Original 1969 AM Radio Broadcast
A mighty chunk of show from the boss jock of black Philadephia radio, back in the no doubt exhilarating days of funk, fists, and Frank Rizzo. The music pounds and rolls, and Sonny stops the platters only long enough to extol a car dealer or Soul Fashion Boutique. An ad for a Philly night-spot promises endless enticements under spinning lights, tonight at The Sex-ex-ex-ex Ma-chine-chine-chine-chine!!! (If I remember right, the place was called The Sex Machine.) Those who hate capitalism, bell bottoms, basslines, sleazy ads, and every other manifestation of pop culture for carnivores will feel like they're being hit with a brick for an hour. For you and me, though, it's all pleasure, no pain, a night flight through dark purple skies over a neon-lit city where everyone below is having hot steamy S-E-X.

NIK COHN
"Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night"
Have you ever read this? Did you ever feel you needed to? I waited so long because A) I couldn't find it reprinted anywhere, B) I was not a particular fan of Saturday Night Fever, and C) I knew it was pretty much all fabricated -- even though Cohn ran it (in New York magazine in 1975) as journalism. Finally read it because A) it turned up in a Cohn anthology called Ball the Wall, and B) why not?

Turns out it is nothing like the movie. Nothing. It is grim and frightening and deadly serious, without so much as a pass at class commentary or sex comedy or popcorn drama. It is stylized and unreal, no one talks quite the way these people talk, yet not a word feels false. The story is comprised of mythic moves and blade-quick evocations of scene; its canvas is black velvet and distant red and blue lights, the deep darkness of Brooklyn parks and playgrounds and littered streets at three in the morning, after clubs have closed and the drunken boys and screeching girls are looking for the night's last round of "fun."

I don't know what kind of research Cohn did to get this, but evidently he was going for something more universal than parochial. He reached back for the tribal rites he knew best: those of the London Mods circa 1963-64. "Tony and the Faces [John Travolta's King Disco dancer and his boys] are actually mods in everything -- except for the dances. In fact, I even borrowed the name Faces from the days when The Who started in England. . . . I substituted the same values, the same ambition -- or I should say, lack of ambition. The basic feeling is the same -- that there is nothing except for The Night."

BILLY STEWART
"Why (Do I Love You So)"
He didn't live long, he didn't record much, but much of what he did record was at the known soul limit of weirdness, wildness, dramatic tumult and ambiguously-sexed alienness. If "Summertime" was one of those records that seems to appear from nowhere, having punched its own opening in reality, his sessions beyond it pretty much laid down the laws that neoclassical soul would take as writ, beginning in 1968 with the Delfonics and the Intruders: high and crying male voices, strings massed in waterfalls of silk, silver sprays of guitar shooting outward. This '67 record, almost blindingly exultant, may be Big Billy's summa, his audition for admission to the final Hall of Fame. If there is a Heaven and he is not running the whole show by now, I don't want in.

FAIRPORT CONVENTION
"Dear Landlord"
This turned up as a bonus track on the CD reissue of Unhalfbricking. The best song on John Wesley Harding gets better under the rougher, rockier fists of Fairport, Sandy Denny singing it the way she always sang Dylan songs -- like they were just good songs.

They should have released "Si Tu Dois Partir" as a single with this as the B-side. They didn't. Ah, but how different might our lives be if they had?

CRAIG SELIGMAN
Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me
Not a music book but a writing book, and therefore it doesn't really belong here; yet as an experience it fits with these others. Seligman has an utterly companionable voice and, enviably, no desire to be cryptic: you're sitting in a bar, or strolling in a park, he's doing all the talking, and you don't mind doing the listening. It's so pleasant, so brisk and enlivening that it can also breed a kind of resentment in a fellow critic. It's the kind of book that is so easy to read you assume it must have been that easy to write; and you start to wonder, beneath your enjoyment, why this guy gets a New York Times "Notable Books" mention for writing something so transparent, so straight-in and guileless. Why am I not feeling Seligman's sweat on my brow? You begin to be convinced that if you'd thought of this book, you could have written it.

But you didn't, and you couldn't. So you realize that, close the book, and say Thank you.

THE WALKMEN
"Lost in Boston"
They came back among us to sing a song about sailors getting drunk and screaming across the Common during Fleet Week, rain and mud on their shiny shoes, a hundred thousand blinking lights, and returned indie rock to something bloody, livid, and joyful. Then the song ended, The Killers released their new album, and the genre went back to sucking.

WORLD PARTY
"I Thought You Were a Spy"
And this is why.

MICHAEL ALMEREYDA (writer & director)
William Eggleston in the Real World
In a few weeks we'll be making our first trip to Memphis. So we watched with particular interest this 2005 documentary about Eggleston, the photographer-eccentric who has made Memphis his home for many years, and whose boldly colored, intensely vibrant, flawlessly composed shots of bottles, plants, cars, empty lots, sloping roofs, shadows on walls, and the profiles and backs of people with baroque hairstyles have been taken mostly in and around the city where Elvis, Martin Luther King, and Arthur Lee died.

Eggleston has at least a couple of solid rock and roll connections: one of his photos adorned the cover of Radio City (1974), Big Star's second album; and in the mid-80s he did a series of photos inside Graceland, making all its tacky gold and gaudy velvet fairly vibrate in the frame, like shots from the chambers of a tomb whose king was imprisoned within but still alive, who had just a second ago stepped out of the shot, leaving his presence behind.

Well anyway, early in the film Eggleston -- a mumbling nonentity of a man, shuffling and self-absorbed, though it may be partly an act, you know those artistic types -- was seeking bandages in a Kentucky drugstore, asking the druggist's counsel; and over the loudspeaker was playing, bless the music of chance, "Love Me Tender." Nice. Elvis; Memphis; druggist, help me, I'm hurt. Tenderness. Nice.

But the movie's weird sense of music continued, snippets piling up to the point I had to start scribbling a list. Behind one scene Charlie Rich's "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" played on a nearby turntable; and then it skipped, and as Eggleston sat hunched over his colored pencils, oblivious, the skip threatened to go on forever: --to see the most beautiful girl, that walked--that walked--that walked--that walked--that walked--that walked--that walked--that walked--that walked--that walked--that walked--that walked--that walked--that walked--that walked--that walked--

There was footage shot by Eggleston with a prehistoric video camera in Memphis in 1974, around the time Big Star came to him for his cover shot of a fire-red ceiling, lone light bulb and perpendicular white wires. Eggleston's trick as a videographer is to get the camera as far up the noses and into the pores of his friends and family as he can. Faces loom bloodless and shiny. "You're a posing asshole, Eggleston," one friend says, humorlessly. "A mirror would be better." The music playing in the room is Cat Stevens, "The Wind."

The movie ends and the credits come up. Roy Orbison is singing a song from his last album, 1989's Mystery Girl, a beautiful Orbisonesque song called -- hey! -- "In the Real World." Extra-sibilant sssss's on the quiet intro, as if Roy has removed his bridgework and is singing tooth to gum. Then the band kicks in, that full, tragic Orbison sound. End credits, white over black. So beautiful. It would be enough for the film to end there.

But it doesn't. Credits end and we cut to video of Eggleston the elder, with his eyes closed. We watch; the music continues. We realize Eggleston is listening to the Orbison song we've been hearing: it is being played for him by a friend, a friend we've seen earlier in the film ranting about cancer, and who, we've been told, is now dead, though not from cancer. Eggleston listens to Orbison, fellow adoptee of Memphis, who made his first great sides at Sun Studios; Eggleston listens, eyes shut tight.

"So beautiful," he says. He's hearing this for the first time. He appreciates; he knows. "So beautiful."

It would be enough for the film to end there. But it doesn't.

Eggleston and his dead friend start to talk about how lucky they are. How lucky we are, to be alive.

That's it, Eggleston says. You said it, right there.

No, the dead friend insists, no, no, no. We're lucky to be alive now.

Why -- ?

Because they didn't have Roy Orbison in the Middle Ages.

Insert any name you like there. As of 2:52 a.m., Wednesday, December 27, 2006, standing on the verge of who knows what, I could as easily insert any of the names listed above. Or that of James Brown.

Like the dead friend said, We're lucky to be alive now.

2006-11-13T01:06:00.000-08:00

THE BEATLES
Love (EP sampler)
A promotional foretaste of the LP to come November 21, billed as more or less the soundtrack to the Beatle-themed show Cirque du Soleil has been running in Las Vegas for the last few months. Arghhhh! said a few of us back when that news was heard: even if it was George's idea originally, why not set the still-mighty Beatle machine humming on a worthy project? Why not refurbish and reissue Let it Be to theaters and DVD? Why not do up the Shea and Budokan films? Why not a DVD of restored Beatle TV shots and performance videos? And where are the remasters of the original LPs we've been so long promised? (Imagine the bonus material they could boast.) Why waste publicity, resources, and time installing this paisley elephant in Siegfried and Roy's old house, thereby shutting out the benighted millions who can't or don't care to spend thousands flying to Scam City to see an arty trapeze act?

Ah, who cares. Besides, judging from the four-song sample platter, Love will be as fat, flavorful and flowing over as a Christmas goose. To accompany the circus show, George Martin and his son Giles have combined and mixed Beatle songs together for amazing effects and composite sensations. In the blast are newly overdubbed sound effects, outtake segments, and studio talk. Parts of different songs are looped and faded, stacked and spread against parts of others, so that familiar motifs reemerge like old friends wearing new clothes. “Lady Madonna” starts with thunder, lightens into laughter and general giddy chaos, incorporating unreleased instrumental segments and morphing at its climax in and out of the “Hey Bulldog” guitar solo. On "Octopus's Garden" Ringo sings his nautical idyll against the tres Hollywood backing of "Good Night," along with various other showy throwings. More focused but less adventurous is a restyling of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" which lades George's solo outtake with an unnecessary, albeit authentically Martinesque string arrangement -- the strings providing more thick syrup than savory sauce, a la “Yesterday” and “Eleanor Rigby.”

The killer, as you might expect, is “Strawberry Fields," a song that reaches out morbidly, miraculously, no matter the rendition. Martin streams an early Lennon solo demo, heavily echoed, into an early full-band version remixed for heavier bottom and harder pulse, climactically seguing into "Pepper" trumpets and "Penny Lane" blue-sky sighs and "Piggies" harpsichord, air-raid siren and "Hello Goodbye" campfire chant.

So Love, far from being a waste of Apple's or our time, sees the Beatle legacy being subjected to a necessary debauch, a salutary stretching -- though not unusually, the Beatle estate and its artisans are a few years behind the times. Mashup bandits have of course been mangling Beatle tracks for years -- since before The Grey Album in fact -- and some of us amateur twiddlers have spent many hours and blank discs soundscaping (or -scraping) our Beatle catalogs, with variable results (see Men and Horses, Hoops and Garters, the three-volume Relativity Cadenza and Fab Forgeries series, or the BRG Abbey Road remix). But the Martin-Apple excursion, while it pursues the same ideas, is far denser sonically, with a layering well beyond the ken of we monitor-bound pretenders with our click-and-drag sound files, our fistful of wires, our trusty power strip. Not to mention that Martin pere and fils have stacks of outtakes still unheard even by seasoned collectors -- we who yet again mistakenly assumed that our Beatle appetites had been sated, our gear ears accustomed.

All demerits noted and grumbles groused, I can’t wait to hear the whole thing.

U2 and GREEN DAY
"The Saints Are Coming"
Speaking of Abbey Road, this Hurricane Katrina benefit single -- one of two new songs tacked to the tail of the upcoming U2 shekel-shifter, U218 Singles -- was recorded there, under the production of Rick Rubin. Bono needs to work up a few new vocal tricks, and the Green Day guy sounds like he's trying not to be noticed. (I'll go back to not noticing him.) Taking off from "House of the Rising Sun," the record shames its source by being sufficiently banal to pass for terrible.

* * * Marginalia * * *
Cirque du Soleil may not be a rock and roll circus, but at least Paul and Ringo didn't hand their souls over to Twyla Tharp, whose new Dylan show on Broadway is, in the words of a friend who saw a preview, "the worst thing that's ever been put on a stage in the history of mankind." Apparently Tharp's genius divined that "Like a Rolling Stone" should be accompanied by -- good lord yes, a bunch of dancing doofuses rolling big gray medicine balls from wing to wing. Like a rolling . . . stone. Get it?

HAUNTED SONGS FOR ALL HALLOW'S EVE

2006-10-31T03:21:00.000-08:00

In a pioneering collaborative cross-post with my demon brother over at The Face at the Window, I offer here a selection of songs that have unnerved, unhinged, disjointed, disturbed, and/or flat-out frightened me over the past year and in years past.

Happy Halloween — hope y’all find some sweet candy in your bags, heh-heh.

1. “She Moved Through the Fair,” artist unknown
Few folk songs have been recorded as often as this one. Folkies love it because it smells of the ancient, while New Agers love it for its affirmation of life after death and love, or at least romance, everlasting. Certainly every musician with a drop of Irish blood has taken the lance to it: versions exist by John McCormack, Elvis Costello, Van Morrison, Sinead O’Connor and The Chieftains, Loreena McKennitt, and so on. The modern lyrics were written by Padraic Colum, poet, novelist, dramatist, and folklorist of Eire, and the tune, by Herbert Hughes, was based on a fiddle air collected in Donegal in 1909; but some form of the song surely dates back to Medieval times and beyond.

Perhaps the best-known version to rock and roll ears — and the style-setter for most later covers — is by Fairport Convention; sung by the late Sandy Denny, it’s on their second album, What We Did on Our Holidays (1969). Denny’s version was based on a precursor by Anne Briggs, and Briggs got it from locally famed Irish banjoist and “traveling singer” Margaret Barry (1917-90). Barry, who had been singing the piece for decades in various long and short versions, can be credited with keeping it alive until modern pop had a chance to discover it. Her sharp, bloody rendition is heard on the Rounder compilation I Sang Through the Fairs, containing songs and memories recorded in discussion with Alan Lomax in 1953.

A bit of web-trawling will reveal any number of versions posted by musicians on the various state-fair and city-jamboree circuits. Few are unlistenable. Listed here is one of the simpler versions I turned up: a single twice-echoing pipe of wood, blowing improvisatory variations on the song’s basic lines. I don’t remember who recorded this, and I can’t rediscover where I found it; but I can hear the piper’s breath draw up sharp and nervous between each long, long phrase. It feels like he’s right here with me. It’s an invocation of the night and whatever might be waiting to come out.

2. “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky,” The Ramrods
Somewhere out in the American West, as if in response to the Irish pipe, skies darken and apparitions appear.

This song’s author, Stan Jones, grew up on the prairie and recalled the old cowboy’s warning to reckless boys: Look into the sky, and you can see the ghost herd. Be careful out here, or you’ll join it one day. On his 34th birthday, at his home in Death Valley, Jones wrote a song that sounded as old as the ghosts it imagined.

Since then it’s been a favorite of old cowboy stars, nightclub crooners, and garage bands alike, done by Roy Rogers and Spike Jones, Johnny Cash and Peggy Lee, Burl Ives and REM. The Ramrods’ instrumental was the big hit version of the rock era, reaching the Top 30 in February 1961. The snap and beat of the band sound like surf, but the voices that fly over and streak past — whip-snapping cowpokes, a wailing woman — are the sound of that thundering herd, that mythic mass of spirits.

3. “Devil Got My Woman,” Skip James
A small Midwestern town. A man sits on a corner. He plays the guitar, thumps his heel down below for a subtle pulse, and cries high. His cry hangs on the gray afternoon wind for five minutes’ time. He sings about the devil, and about a woman. You know I’d rather be the devil, than to be that woman now. Maybe ten people walk by in those five minutes. One passerby slows, double-takes the shut-eyed singer, stops to listen. Then gets scared, looks at the sky, and hurries on.

By the end of the song, it has turned to night. There’s no sound but the wind and a rusty weathervane turning somewhere above. The man packs up his guitar, walks off, and is never seen again.

Note: I specify the latter-day remake, from the 1968 LP of the same title, over the 1931 Grafton recording.

4. “Phantom 309,” Red Sovine
Headlights on the highway, coming around the turn. Sovine, king of the trucker’s ballad, here reverses the legend of the phantom hitchhiker — the wandering ghost, usually a girl, who flags a ride with some unsuspecting motorist in the hope of finding her way home. In Sovine’s version, it’s the hitchhiker-narrator who is the innocent. Down on his luck, he snares a ride with trucker Big Joe, who takes him up the road to a diner and tosses him a dime for coffee. When he tries to cash it in, explaining where he got it, It got deathly quiet . . . and the waiter’s face got kinda white.

Turns out Big Joe took a fatal skid some time back: he twisted his wheel and went to his death rather than collide with a school bus.

5. “Sally Go 'Round the Roses,” The Jaynetts
“Spookiest and most exotic of all girl group discs,” Dave Marsh called this, placing it #377th in The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made (1989). Your blogger wouldn’t argue.

The song, Marsh says, “operates as a metaphor, but its message is as murky as week-old gossip. Superficially, Sally’s friends are just warning her against going downtown, because there she’ll find the ‘the saddest thing in the whole wide world,’ her baby with another girl. But the mix and arrangement and the odd metaphor of the endlessly repeated chorus (‘Sally, go ‘round the roses / They won’t tell your secret’) lend the entire production an ominous air, as if some deeper tale waits to be told.

“A quarter century later, after endless spins, it’s no closer to being revealed.”

6. “Johnny Remember Me,” John Leyton
The galloping rhythm, the windy echo, the dead girl wailing in the treetops. It’s all Joe Meek: poor mad, brilliant, dead Joe Meek. And it has the power to make you think of Wuthering Heights. Or Goethe’s The Erl-King. Or “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”

I first heard this song January 21, 2001, at the Walter Reade Theater in New York, while watching a seldom-screened two-part BBC documentary called The Brian Epstein Story. That was a strange, strange night: I met someone who was a ghost, or might as well have been. I’ve got witnesses.

I wrote about it once. To be continued . . .

7. “Hope There's Someone,” Antony & The Johnsons
If you’re feeling life is too scary to be lived, don’t listen to this. It might convince you you’re right.

8. “Don't Fear the Reaper,” Blüe Oyster Cult
Poison-flavored bubblegum. It’s a joke, some would say not even a good one: “proto-Jehovah’s witness crap,” Marsh called it, “that doesn’t scare (or convince) anybody.” Anybody but me and a few million others. No kid who grew up white, Midwestern, and radio-fixated in the 1970s is without some feeling about this record. You hate it or you love it, or you just shiver when you hear it. It’s like the line from The Usual Suspects: “I don’t believe in God, but I’m scared of him.” I don’t believe in this record, but I’m scared of it.

9. “Naked In The Afternoon,” Jandek
Loathsome schizo wanders the impeccable rooms of his suburban Houston home and plots gruesome acts, turns them into twanging, dissonant, tuneless, endless songs. Scares hell out of anyone who has sense enough to not listen to too much of it at once.

10. “Who Do You Love,” Ronnie Hawkins
Bo Diddley wrote the lyrics, and they’re lyrics that white would-be badasses like Jim Morrison and George Thorogood have never tired of trying to live up to, earn the right to understand. But what’s to understand? This is the rock and roll graveyard, more vivid than any psychobilly extravagance, subtler than Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, no “Monster Mash” sitcom. This is the Devil coming through. He’s horny, hustling, setting fires, spreading evil.

I walked 47 miles of barbedwire, use a cobrasnake for a necktie
Got a brandnew house by the roadside made from rattlesnake hide
Got a brandnew chimney made on top made from a human skull

Bo Diddley’s original has a haze on it, an aural thickness, an unreality: all that tremelo on his rectangular guitar and cheap amplifier makes the graveyard night fat, soft, surreal, a convocation of Epicurean demons. Ronnie Hawkins, gripped by something — maybe an evil mood, maybe the white would-be badass’s drive to outfrighten the frightener — gets closer to something really raw, really scarred.

I got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind
I lived long enough and I ain’t scared a dyin’

This is the only record on my list of ghastlies that is sexy and scary both — and probably the only one that wants to be both. That makes it perverse. And that perversity wins Ronnie the right to say he understands, to claim that he has gone all the way there and returned to tell the story, that he reached his hand into the very fires of the deepest pit and will show you the burn.

The night was black and the moon was blue
And down the alley an icewagon flew
Bump was hit lord and somebody screamed
You should a heard just what I seen

This song features one of the great unanswerable non-sequiturs in modern art, up there with I am the Walrus and Mein Feuhrer, I can walk!! And Hawkins does justice to it — to Bo Diddley’s greatest line, his greatest rock and roll idea, an idea that has no right to be scary but nonetheless is:

Who do you love?

11. “Long Long Long,” The Beatles
God, this is so quiet. So, so, so quiet. As a kid I couldn’t hear it: getting my head next to the speaker to hear the words, catch the little noises, was an experiment in fear. Because I knew the song was going to rear up, that it was coming to get me. First in the middle eight, So many years I was searching — one of the simplest and most powerful stretches of music and lyric George Harrison ever wrote — and finally at the climax, when haunted electronics surge upward from the wires and circuits like buried evil at the end of Five Million Years to Earth, and George opens his mouth to release a sound so unearthly, so —

Possibly the scariest song on what is certainly the scariest rock and roll album there is.

12. “Banshee,” Henry Cowell
We’ve heard many imitations and apprehensions of the banshee up to now: ghost riders, spirit lovers. Here she speaks for herself in extended shrieks and low drawn-out groans, with composer Henry Cowell as medium. Set amid the futurisms and constructivisms of the 1958 Folkways LP Sounds of New Music — which features such avant-garde curios as Soviet symphonies for power station and steel foundry — this piece of primitive horror protrudes like a gnarled finger. Cowell manually batters and caresses the exposed strings of a grand piano: “By scratching, plucking, pounding and sweeping the strings and taking full advantage of the strings’ sympathetic vibrations,” the liner notes read, “the composer has perfectly evoked the Banshee of Irish and Scottish folklore, the female spirit whose wailings forewarn families of the approaching death of a member.”

13. “Venus In Furs,” The Velvet Underground
Me + this song + a dark room = never in a million years.

14. “The Long Black Veil,” Lefty Frizzell
The song is a natural ghost story, a piece of commercially canny pop that came out a fully-formed myth: like “Ghost Riders,” it could have been written a century before it was copyrighted. Frizzell’s original version, a hit in 1959, is still preferable to any other. It’s the only one that serves the song’s ghostliness, rather than its sense of biblical justice (Johnny Cash) or its ain’t-that-tough-shit bluesiness (the Band). Frizzell never goes above or below a pitch and energy that are dazed, oddly serene, the crooning equivalent of a whisper, as if he truly is the ghost he claims to be. Behind him, a dobro cries: the banshee is loose again. Stories like this — this must be where banshees come from.

15. “I Wonder As I Wander,” John Jacob Niles
You may have first heard Niles, as I did, only about a year ago — in No Direction Home, the half-baked Martin Scorsese/“American Masters” Dylan documentary. You may have felt, as I did, electrified and terrified at the too-brief bit of Niles’ long-ago television rendition of his song “Go ‘Way from My Window,” the key image of which Dylan purloined. You may have experienced the Niles wail as a sudden hot quiver in your nerve center, and felt, as I did for just a second, that no one had ever made a sound remotely so frightening. You may have felt, as I did, that you’d never felt fear before that moment. You may then have rushed, as I did, to hear more by this man.

You may never forget, as I will not, the sound of the voice I wonder the sound as I of the banshee wandahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

16. “She Moved Through the Fair,” Menya Wolfe
Did I remind you up front that this song is a ghost story?

My young love said to me, my mother won't mind
and my father won't slight you for your lack of kind
And she laid her hand on me, and this she did say
Oh, it will not be long, love, till our wedding day

I’ve been hearing this song as long I can remember, but about a year ago I became obsessed with it. I trolled the net and the record catalogs to grab every version I could find. I found Anne Briggs’, and Margaret Barry’s, and many others. A few were good, most were okay, many were interchangeable — same drone, same bonnie lass enunciating cold and clear across an Irish spring.

Then I clicked a link and found myself in a very strange place.

A woman was singing, accompanied by a harp. The voice was that of a trained professional, deliberate, crystalline, almost unnaturally high — not in pitch but in ethereal location: it seemed to be of the sky, not merely aimed at it. The harp rang, well, like a harp. But it was the raw sound, over and above the musician’s technique, that transfixed and transported me. I guessed the piece had to date from the 1920s, or even earlier: clearly the recording had been subjected to many audio strippings and sandings, many rounds of noise reduction. And here it was, whittled down to some exquisite essence of sound, some spirit of music — primitive, without physicality, without body. It was all air, feeling, light, atmosphere. I swore I even heard the twittering of birds over the music. It sounded, I’m not entirely embarrassed to say, like music made by an angel.

Well, I’m an atheist, so angels scare me. I sat there bewildered, trembling, not believing. Nonetheless I did some back-clicking and got to the source of the thing.

What I found was a website devoted to a Toronto woman named Menya Wolfe. From the photos and news stories collected by the friends who’d built the site, I learned something of her life. She’d been a musician, archeologist, and artist. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996, she had begun an e-mail support group for cancer patients to share information and experiences — a common enough thing now, but not then. The group grew to a membership of 700.

Menya Wolfe began treatment for her illness, which was of an especially rare and inflammatory type.

And she went away from me and moved through the fair
and fondly I watched her move here and move there
And then she went onward, just one star awake
like the swan in the evening moves over the lake

The recordings posted at Menya’s site are, like “She Moved Through the Fair,” of a classical-folk stripe, and include other ghostly or macabre songs like “House Carpenter” and “Two Corbies” (aka “The Twa Corbies” or “The Three Ravens,” an ancient Scottish ballad representing the dialogue between predator birds as they prepare to dine on the remains of a fallen knight — we used to sing that in grade school). But these songs were recorded years before Menya got sick; in fact, her husband Pete Bevin writes, she “sang and played these pieces in 1990 for a friend who, ironically, was dying of breast cancer at the time.” There is nothing of foreshadowing, depression, or self-pity about the recordings; they are clear, sweet, and haunting, as if utterly innocent of tragedy. They’re available for download, and they comprise something almost too painful to hear.

The recordings, Bevin says, were made on a boombox in Menya’s basement, and are “the only surviving recording of her work.”

Last night she came to me, my dead love came in
So softly she came that her feet made no din
And she laid her hand on me, and this she did say
Oh, it will not be long, love, till our wedding day

Menya Wolfe died February 13, 2001, age 36.

EIGHT DAYS A WEEK IS NOT ENOUGH

2006-10-29T03:22:00.000-08:00

SUNDAY
"Sunday Morning," The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground and Nico (Verve 1967)

"First off, let me admit something.
I lost my virginity to the Velvet Underground's 'Sunday Morning.'"

— Ben Blackwell, 2004

MONDAY
"Blue Monday," Fats Domino
Single (Imperial 1956)
This is Fats Domino (Imperial 1957)

'FATS' DOMINO
MISSING IN NEW ORLEANS
Thursday, September 01, 2005
By Roger Friedman (Fox News)

Before NBC, MTV or anyone else puts on a telethon to help victims of Hurricane Katrina, they might want to explore some ancillary issues. To wit: New Orleans is a city famous for its famous musicians, but many of them are missing. Missing with a capital M.

To begin with, one of the city’s most important legends, Antoine "Fats" Domino, has not been heard from since Monday afternoon. Domino’s rollicking boogie-woogie piano and deep soul voice are not only part of the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame but responsible for dozens of hits like "Blue Monday," “Ain’t That a Shame,” “Blueberry Hill” and “I’m Walking (Yes, Indeed, I’m Talking).”

Domino, 76, lives with his wife Rosemary and daughter in a three-story pink-roofed house in New Orleans’ 9th ward, which is now under water.

TUESDAY
"Tuesday Afternoon," The Moody Blues
Days of Future Passed (Deram 1967)

"I sat down in a field, smoked a funny African cigarette, and that song just came out.
It was a Tuesday afternoon."

— Justin Hayward

WEDNESDAY
"Half of Wednesday," We the People
Single (1966)
Mirror of Our Minds (Sundazed 1998)

"Half of Wednesday's good
It's just the way it should
If you would love me"

THURSDAY
"Jersey Thursday," Donovan
Fairy Tale (Pye 1965)

Night brought on its purple cloak of velvet to the sky
and the girls were wheeling spinning on Jersey Thursday

I'd really like to see someone explain this one!! — "beepstreetbiscuit"

i have no fucking clue but this is a great song none the less.
i dont think you can explain half of DL's lyrics he wrote some weird shit
— "jtucker7"

This is defiantly one of my favorite donovan songs as well as my one of my first. I think he probobly wrote this song appreciating the sunset in a dirty city, jersey most likely on a thursday. The music itself gives an excellent mood for this contrast between beuaty(sunset) and filth(city streets gulls broken glass). — "J___P"

fan responses from SongMeanings

FRIDAY
"Friday I’m in Love," The Cure
Wish (Chrysalis 1992)

"Written in 15 minutes one sunny Friday afternoon outside 'The Boat Inn,' Oxford, England 1992 in an attempt to encapsulate the delicious feeling that is expectation."

— Robert Smith

SATURDAY
"Whatever Happened to Saturday Night?" Buffalo Springfield
Unfinished demo, 1967
Buffalo Springfield Box Set (Rhino 2001)

Spoke to her yesterday, couldn't think of much to say
She said that by the winter, she'd be gone

SUNDAY
"Sunday Will Never Be the Same," Spanky and Our Gang
Spanky and Our Gang (Mercury 1967)

A Christian is a man who feels
Repentence on a Sunday
For what he did on Saturday
And is going to do on Monday.

— Thomas Ybarra

MORE ODDS 'N' SODS FROM THE UNSORTED FILE

2006-10-21T04:18:00.000-07:00

THE ARROWS
"I Love Rock & Roll"
The story is that Joan Jett, touring the UK with the Runaways in '75, saw the Arrows perform this on a pop show and held onto the memory. Four years later she recorded her first cover version with ex-Sex Pistols Steve Jones and Paul Cook; three years after that, Joan and the Blackhearts redid it as a stadium cheer and scored big. It was loud, obnoxious, and overplayed, but at least it was loud and obnoxious. The original struggles merely to be bad. You can see the band making its arena-size phallus moves, following the diagram on the floor; the sneer in Alan Merrill's vocal is about as convincing as Eddie Haskell's charm, and nowhere near as entertaining. T. Rex without the nuance. Glam in a Can.

ARCADE FIRE
"Brazil"
I didn't like the Funeral LP as much as age-based recording-industry demography probably believes I should have, but this beguiles my guile. Terry Gilliam is to blame for the 1939 Ary Barroso song burrowing out a little place in my heart, and I was delighted years ago when an offhand Beatle busk turned up on a Get Back boot. Arcade Fire's version is country gentle, straight-faced if not exactly strait-laced, and buttressed by what sounds like the phantom of a string section from the grand ballroom of a seaside resort. It builds on its suppressed passion, its contained urgency; when Win Butler hits the final high note and fades away, it is unexpectedly moving, releasing. That the record lingers for several sweet seconds after that, on the echo of a distant piano -- evoking the end of The Shining -- is icing.

BABY JANE HOLZER
"Rapunzel"
The former Jane Brookenfeld -- socialite, model, Warhol Factory habitue -- recorded this circa 1965. Musically it's Lesley Gore lite, girl-group style done up in orange plastic, too campy to be catchy. B.J. sings about as well as Al Gore thunders, though she does achieve a true spooky growl at the climax of her dramatic spoken passage: "And I felt the hand of DOOOOM!" Meanwhile the "prince," who rescues the heroine and chimes in at key points, sounds less like a fairy-tale hero than one of Andy's lonesome cowboys, if you know what I mean. Will novelty weirdness never cease?

THE HOLLYWOOD JILLS
"He Makes Me So Mad"
Minor tick-mark in the girl-group annals; passable, but they sound more miffed than mad. In fact, someone pour some coffee down these girls: sounds as if they stayed out late last night and left all their sass in the sack.

MUNGO JERRY
"Lady Rose"
"In the Summertime" is one of those almost-irritating songs it's impossible to dislike. It fills you with thoughts and images of whatever you have found silly and lovable, days or people or quacking ducks; songs can and do commit far worse crimes than that. This follow-up hit, also from '71, is better not because it's "better" -- Ray Dorset's vocalese the same, junk-band instrumentation the same, clodhopping tempo the same -- but because its tune is sufficiently tuneful and repetitive to erase the irritation aspect and clinch the lovability factor. Just a tidy, spiffy ode to Lady Rose. Well done.

Factoid: the band named itself after one of the mischievous hairballs in T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Hey, at least they didn't call themselves "Rum Tum Tugger." Or write a musical about cats. God, that would be dreadful, wouldn't it.

ALBERT HAMMOND
"I Don't Wanna Die in an Air Disaster"
Admit it, the title alone makes you curious. Hammond was a singer-songwriter, and boy oh boy did words matter to him: you could tell that by the way he rhymed California and warn ya. (Randy Newman would surely give one of his Oscars to have coupled those assonances.) The lyrics are a statement of what you might call ironic hedonism: the singer wants to climb into the clouds but not die on a plane; drive his car fast, but not perish in a pile-up; live forever but not grow old. This is about the point where lyrics stop being worth the trouble.

Lyrically and musically it sounds remarkably like a Paul Simon think piece, from his high alienation days: a perfect Bookends outtake. With the Simon and Garfunkel sides it also shares a canny production style, with enough eerie touches (dark strings, corny-creepy backing vocals) to tack it to your brain. I haven't decided if I like it or not. But I can't throw it away just yet.

THE CHEERFUL EARFULS
"The Drag - Number One"
Theme music for the slowest drag race in the world. Dirty sax, clean guitar, with ahhhhing vocalists spreading Turtle Wax over a shiny finish. The Earfuls were from Evanston, Illinois, and must have recorded this around 1960; my source reckons "that would make it pre-date surf-inspired hot rod music. Hmmm maybe this is the first hot rod themed instrumental." Found it here -- the MP3 link will be dead by now, but Crudster's commentary is worth a check.

FATS DOMINO
"Just a Lonely Man"
The B-side to "Who Cares," dating from 1963 and Fats's ABC tenure, has the basics for a good minor, memorable side. The vocal is strong, riding the easy-rolling but relentless melody like a pasha rides an elephant, and there's a fetching female chorus. The small band swings. But the horns phony it up: played clean and arranged square, they push the simple New Orleans soul number into the middle of the market and keep it from going classic. But it could've been a contender.

THE RUBETTES
"If You've Got the Time"
Bearing no resemblance to the glam band's great ABBA-sounding hit, "Sugar Baby Love," this '75 B-side is Metamucil-flavored country-rock: a softer Brinsley Schwarz, a British Eagles.

PUSSYCAT
"If You Ever Come to Amsterdam"
Shades of "Deep Purple" -- and, now that you mention it, "Brazil" -- to this vanilla Euro-ballad. Pussycat, for the record, were a seven-member group from the Netherlands who had a minor UK hit ("Mississippi") in 1977 and never splashed thereafter outside their own Nordic climes. This is pure puff pastry, evoking snowy chalets and big-budget mid-60s clean-sex romps in European locales: mint-fresh production, melody all rounded and sweeping, wholesome female lead (wearing fur boots and a white snowsuit, surely). There's a bit of whistling, a bit of accordion. It's large and white and pillow-soft. It rings in my ears and puts my head in another place. Sometimes even bland has a flow, even vanilla has a flavor.

THE RAY CONNIFF SINGERS
"Singing the Blues"
More whistling! Ray's crewcut fellas and starch-skirted gals, jiving daintily on their choral risers, make chirp and merriment out of the Guy Mitchell hit. Some people hate this sort of thing. Not me.

VICKY LEANDROS
"Theo, Wir Fahr'n Nach Lodz"
You get this MP3, along with more info on the hottie who recorded it, at WFMU's "Beware of the Blog" blog. Apparently this stentorian farm-folk was a Top 10 hit in Germany in 1973; and while it's as much fun as an asphalt trampoline, it's worth mentioning here just for WFMU's translation of the main lyric line: Theo, I am bored on this farm - please, let's go to the big exciting city of Lodz, Poland! You rise old murmeltier, before I the patience lose.

Taking his cue from Miss Vicky, this young murmeltier will now rise, before you the patience lose.

* * *

But I will leave you with a grace note:

Last week, while nodding off in a Midwestern airport, I was mentally screening the scene in David Lynch's Lost Highway where Bill Pullman meets a white-faced Robert Blake at a party. You remember this. Blake assures the doubtful Pullman that they've met once before, at the latter's house. In fact, Blake says, he's at Pullman's house. Right now.

That's fuckin' crazy, Pullman says. So Blake takes out a phone. Hands it to Pullman. Says, Call me.

Yeah, you remember this.

What you may or may not remember is that Lynch backgrounds the party with a jazz version of the chestnut "Spooky," by Classics IV: an obvious enough reference to the spookiness of the scene. But throughout the song runs a sample -- a sighing female voice "la-la-la-la"ing to a sinister descending melody. For years I've been trying to place that sample: Where have I heard that?

Suddenly, as my head drooped in the airport, it came to me: the sample was from a 1965 P.J. Proby record. Now I think Proby (Nik Cohn to the contrary!) was a ridiculous singer, a thickly frosted and grossly decorated cake without the cake. But the record sampled was one of the few things of his I liked, and I've always had it around, on a mix tape or an MP3 player.

Eureka! To nail an elusive memory can be one of the most satisfying things in life. So I smiled. And wondered, What was that song called again?

My head snapped up. My eyes shot open.

The song

I'm there right now.

was called

Call me.

"Just Call and I'll Be There."

Man, oh, man, as Kyle MacLachlan whispered in Blue Velvet. Don't tell me David Lynch doesn't know his music.

2006-10-04T22:05:00.000-07:00

WOLF PARADE
Apologies to the Queen Mary
Like the White Stripes run through a lot of other drum-heavy guitar groups, with some electronicoid bleeps and blips. The first song has an arresting beat, the second a teasing refrain (“I don’t like the modern world” — answer to Jonathan Richman, more than 30 years later?), and there is a worthy multi-minute excursion into doom and dissonance (“Dinner Bells”). In between are slush-ponds of nothing special, through which the dutiful listener logs yet another near-hour of ankle-deep trudging time.

VARIOUS ARTISTS
The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice
Audio companion to the book. Among the themes are American atavism, women and violence, states of freedom and fear. Among the expressive forms are noir monologue and ballads of stabbing down by the riverside, nationalist piety and documentary truth moment, punk from the Pacific Northwest and punk from the Sunset Strip. All pieces — song, dialogue, transitional montage — find implications of doom in the most unlikely vernacular sources, and as a whole, it jars one’s sense of emotional proportion until the Fleetwoods’ Gary Troxel saying "Tee-hee" before a rehearsal take of “Come Softly to Me” sounds infinitely more unsettling than the suicidal punk avatar Peter Laughner insisting it will be fun the day he dies young.

BABY WOODROSE
Baby Woodrose Blows Your Mind
A contemporary Danish group that sounds so much like a mid-‘60s garage band that they might have fooled me if I hadn’t cued up the disc myself. Spiritual cameos from Love, the Yardbirds, and others; diggably raunchy and generally boss. For anyone planning a next-generation Nuggets, “Everything is Gonna Be All Right” is the pick.

YOKO ONO
Open Your Box
I didn’t feel like springing for any Yoko box set or Arts Council-approved compilation designed to reclaim her artistic legitimacy for the museum elite. So this is a personalized concoction of her B-sides and choice LP tracks, all interspersed with snippets from an audio-verite thing called “Cough Piece,” recorded in Tokyo in 1963 — a half-hour-long low din of city sound coming in through a window, with odd recurrent clickings and, yes, you guessed it, Yoko coughing. (What was she thinking? What was I?)

The better tracks hail from the 1971-73 period of Elephants Memory and New York noise, the unholy clatter of radical chic and enclave politics and bandwagon-jumping — the sound of which I like a bit more than most people think advisable. But it’s blaring, uneasy, obnoxious, dizzyingly close, like a subway missing your head by inches (“Midsummer New York,” “Move on Fast”). Beyond that lie two little surprises, pieces of astonishing beauty: “Listen, Listen (The Snow is Falling),” undiscovered B-side to “Happy Xmas (War is Over),” a lush and drifting meditation more than worthy of its famous partner; and “Mrs. Lennon,” a haunting minor-key piano ballad whose melody, as I mentioned some time back re Alex Chilton and Rammstein, was stolen pretty much entire — it would hold up in any court — by those artists.

STRANDED — The Countdown (16)

RAY CHARLES. Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music (ABC-Paramount). Sayeth Brother Nik Cohn upon Brother Ray Charles in Rock from the Beginning, 1969:

“He signed up with the great commercial complex of ABC-Paramount and promptly had all his natural force smothered in great wads of candy floss. In 1962, he committed virtual hara-kiri by cutting a slop country ‘n’ western ballad, ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You,’ complete with strings and background choir. Predictably, it sold upward of two million and was followed by sundry other abortions in the same style. But apart from being lousy, they were bad long-term commercial policy, alienating him from his blues public and leaving him without any stable following.”

It’s taken this Charles listener a long time to overcome the revulsion once instilled by such vigorous dismissal. Not that Cohn was ever my guru (well, maybe just that one summer), but he was attractively absolute in his judgments. It was hard to hear past his punkish contempt for Hollywood crap, or gainsay his predator’s nose for the sell-out. (Why did rockist criticism take charge, all those years ago? Because it had better writers.) Forget that as “long-term commercial policy,” Charles’s ventures into not just country but jazz, hip-hop, Broadway balladry and MOR proved remarkably prescient and remunerative far past the steady soldiering of those artists who limited themselves to pleasuring none but the “blues public.”

But I digress. One’s ears ought to grow outward, not in, and gradually or suddenly they will admit of pleasures that younger ears were inclined or programmed to resist. Such with this album (and to a lesser degree its 1963 successor, MSIC&WM, Vol. 2). The thing fascinates because it is neither very “modern” (strings, chorale, overflow of feeling are from a bygone Tinseltown era, redolent of nothing so much as Cabin in the Sky or Song of the South), nor by any comfortable stretch of the imagination “country & western” (songs yes, treatments no). Yet, as mix and mood, it is so far past modern as to be futuristic. Such queer sensuality in the scrape of Charles’s voice against the velveteen settings of Marty Paich and other Hollywood sound designers. Such unfamiliar contours of feeling in the voice as it wanders, alternately mystified, jubilant, and fearful, among the lush and rippling orchestral folds, the whole as raw as scarred skin, and as soft as clouds.

“You Don’t Know Me” in particular is a little death, every time I hear it. When Ray Charles wept, the world wept. 1962.

——. Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul (ABC-Paramount). The lessening of intensity here is due to either weaker material or the thinning of novelty as Charles’s voice is again placed beneath various flossy or jaunty or trivial pop-orchestra arcs. (Presumably this very album rests among the abortions referenced by Cohn above.) I wouldn’t pack the thing — but then could I really do without “That Lucky Ol’ Sun,” which, true to Marcus’s mark, is indeed a masterpiece, as terribly, deeply saddening as anything one can recall hearing, enough to send one staggering, suicidal, into the ocean? No, I wouldn’t pack it. I couldn’t. 1963.

——. “I Don’t Need No Doctor” (ABC-Paramount). Co-written by Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, it is a fast, brassy butt-thumper with big horns and big balls. I give it an 85. It goes to the island all right — but mainly because I love the B-side, “Please Say You’re Fooling,” a big beauteous ballad in the “You Don’t Know That Lucky Ol’ Sun” vein. Good grief! Ray Charles! How many times can you break my heart before it breaks for good? 1966.

——. A 25th Anniversary in Show Business Salute to Ray Charles (ABC). From earliest Atlantic sides to late ABC stabs at modern sounds in different modes, Charles’s career as collated here has the grandeur and glamour of epic film, the span and space and even the themes (social climbing, cultural synthesis, big sex) of the great popular novel. I think now of those Tolstoys I haven’t read but have sworn myself to one day. They are great, the question is how they are great; and the question calls for immersion, study, a willingness to be taken by a vision, carried off by a mind. I have heard this music but have not heard it enough: have not heard into it. I am willing to spend the necessary days and nights on this project, especially if I may append to this anthology a recording it inexplicably elides: 1959's "Come Rain or Come Shine," a grace-flavored epiphany of soul-jazz, as peace-bestowing as it is disturbing. 1953-1971 / 1971.

CHIFFONS, “One Fine Day” (Laurie). “Beautiful” is not enough. A record like this is the blessed day, the happy life, the everlasting love, the horizon unwinding. End to all worry, delight unceasing. Not beauty, blissfulness; not a Top 40 pop shot, but the face of forever. Hype, you say? Fuck you. 1963.

CHI-LITES, Greatest Hits (Brunswick). “Oh Girl,” oh great great thing, is the greatest thing they did and probably the only thing they ever did that will inarguably linger as a melodic strand in the poisoned air of the post-apocalypse. But everything else around it is tuneful, heartfelt, airily performed and spaciously produced — and importantly, generously conceived. Eugene Record, who died July 22 of last year, had a conception of manhood (emotionally vulnerable, politically alert, imaginatively inclined, an equal in quest of an equal) that, were it to reappear now, would stand even bolder than it did in its time. 1969-1972/1972.

CLAUDINE CLARK, “Party Lights” (Chancellor). Another pre-Beatles one-off whose latent nightmare potential (like that of “My Boyfriend’s Back,” “Wipeout,” and others to come) was sliced open forever by Scorpio Rising — wherein it accompanied some sort of crypto-queer biker orgy, mimed sodomy and all. Clark's hysteria is there for all to hear, but Anger repotted and repainted it in blood red and midnight blue, made the singer's frustrated outbursts into demonic shrieks, her party into a black mass. Is this a woman singing, a man playing a woman, or a banshee beyond sex? And is it a knock against the record that it takes a sensational visual component to bring it to complete screaming life? All I know is that before I saw Anger, I didn't like this record; but in the years since, I've never passed up a chance to hear it. 1962.

DAVE CLARK FIVE, “Catch Us if You Can” (Epic). Wielders of the air-hammer beat, the DC5 got it exactly right exactly twice: "Because," a disarmingly plain ballad, pretty and phlegmatic; and this, the theme song to their sole film (worth seeing). It’s hook upon hook, with a massed group voice and stark acoustic chords promising explosive release, drum fill and flying refrain delivering it. The harmonica break is one of the best Beatle rips ever ripped. 1965.

DEE CLARK, “Raindrops” (Vee-Jay). Ah, yes: one of my favorites. It was on Vol. 5 of Radio Oldies, a series of homemade cassettes I compiled throughout the ‘80s of songs torn by cheap recorders off the local weekend nostalgia show. The tapes were abrasive collages, without a moment’s silence or the merest gesture at cohesion of theme or style. Records fell in the order they were spun, lead-ins were missing from songs picked up late, senseless fragments of DJ patter and station jingle wriggled from the cuts like disembodied fingers, endings were brutally axed as the next song crashed onto the stage and erased all memory of its predecessor. Artists were from all across the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, mismatched and cross-mated just as they would have been on the fantasy radio of once upon a time.

Dee Clark was scrunched in and sang his golden moment between Gladys Knight’s “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” and Conway Twitty’s “It’s Only Make Believe.”

Cassette in my deck, darkness all around, I would spend after-midnight hours cruising the farmland, taking county roads out of town and following highways back: no aim, no future, no plan of escape. But singing "Raindrops" made it all right for two and a half minutes. Uncertainty, loneliness, an emotion (something like despair) that you could never quite let yourself feel: all ran through your frightened nerves and came out your mouth as you sang these words — and you knew that somehow, you'd honor the song and find a way out. Dee Clark, personal saviour. 1961.

2006-09-25T15:20:00.000-07:00

"1966 Nebraska Projection"

2006-09-20T02:08:00.000-07:00

SPACEMEN 3
The Perfect Prescription
A few years ago, courtesy of that fab documentary DIG!, I discovered Brian Jonestown Massacre and gobbled all the free music off their website like a kid stuffing himself on Halloween night. Somewhere I heard that Spacemen 3 -- a three-man Warwickshire outfit of the '80s, pioneers of what might be called space-trance, or maybe drone 'n' moan -- were among the few, very few, influences directly acknowledged by BJM fuehrer Anton Newcombe. You can see why -- and you can marvel at Newcombe’s uncharacteristic candor: almost every musical noise he ever made, particularly on his early albums, is right here. The acoustic guitar fixed on an alternating current between two seventh chords, with an electric running ragas above; vocals like far-distant echoes in a hash fantasy; compulsive references to “Jesus” and whatnot -- the whole of it drenched in a white popster’s conception of exotically wasted Orientalism: perfect for darkened ballrooms, swaying girls in headbands, and a return of the Joshua Light Show.

It’s fantastic, i.e.

The Perfect Prescription (1987) is, according to Wiki, “generally considered their masterpiece.” I won’t fight it.

SEAN LENNON
Into the Sun
Friendly Fire
Sean’s face, in case you’d never noticed, is a perfect genetic composite of his parents’. But his voice and talent are clearly the computerized spawn of a hologram and a touch-tone phone, filtering in from a near-future in which the necessity of talent has been replaced, finally and completely, by the privileges of celebrity birth.

Not a single vocal phrase, guitar line, or percussive gesture scores impact in a passel of interchangeable popisms, tropicalia, jazz doodles, and lounge-lite (lounge-lite?!?). These are two of the dullest, dumbest albums I have ever heard, as humanly dynamic and aesthetically thrilling as Tupperware. They make Julian sound like Johnny Rotten. They give “soporific” a bad name. I could eat a copy of The Beatles’ Second Album and shit better music than this. Insert your own belaboring joke here. Just leave me out of it.

THE NEW YORK DOLLS
One Day it Will Please Us to Remember Even This
SCISSOR SISTERS
Ta Dah
Pass the lewds.

CLEARLAKE
Lido
Forward into the past: piqued and prodded by their most proximitous platter, Amber (revisit the archives), I tracked back to this three-years-earlier offering and found it even more strikingly supple and confoundingly catchy. Kinky melody, Brit-centric voicings, and spacious soundscaping variantly reminiscent of Small Faces mod-psych and Brian Wilson dream-weave. Lots of snazz in the presentation, and just enough attitude to drive it all over.

Most surprising to me is that the LP’s top track, “I Want to Live in a Dream” (also noted back in the archives), is found to be more appealing, rather than less, in its de-Christmasized version: remove the sleigh bells and recess the voice a bit in the mix, and what you are left with is not a seasonal novelty but a statement of desperate oblivion and tragic escapism: an inadvertent anthem, I sometimes think, for myself and many others of my over-convenienced generation. The words demand notice by social psychologists and aging X'ers alike:

I'm a lazy good-for-nothing
maybe, but I do know one thing
I know what I want from my life
I want to live in a dream

I don't want to have to worry
about little things like money
I want the world to take care of me
I want to live in a dream

I want to live in a dream
I want to live in a dream
I suppose the real world is OK
but I'd much rather make my own up any day

I'd wish for a nice existence
one with no hard work, for instance
I'm sorry but I really can't be bothered
I want to live in a dream

Greatest Record Ever?
"Killing Floor," Howlin' Wolf

STRANDED -- The Countdown (15)

CLARENCE CARTER, “Patches” (Atlantic). Ex-heavyweight champ George Foreman once said of growing up in Houston's brutal Fifth Ward, "We was po'. We didn't have enough money to be poor -- we was just po'." That one joke says more about a tough black childhood than this dreadful mess of stereotypical grits. The music is horrible too. If you need Clarence Carter, take "Slip Away" instead. 1970.

CELLOS, “Rang Tang Ding Dong (I Am the Japanese Sandman)” (Apollo). More '50s doo-wop race-baiting -- is this shaping up as a subgenre? (We've already dealt with the Cadets' "Stranded in the Jungle," and we haven't even gotten to the Coasters.) A matter of taste, these things, and this isn't mine. 1957.

GENE CHANDLER, “Duke of Earl” (Vee-Jay). Mythic more than musical genius, despite Chandler's admirable lack of shame or restraint upon assuring us that nothing can stop him now, 'cause he's the you-know-who: he sings it like it's real. So it becomes real -- at least for those few bars. The myths that take hold of our hearts may start as jokes, but they're not played out as jokes; there's got to be something at risk, even if it's merely the deluded self-image of one preening stud.

While I wouldn't make a point of packing this for the island, it would wind up there anyway, since it seems to be included on every "Oldies But Goodies" anthology ever assembled.

Associated memory: the prostitute Steve Martin picks up in The Man With Two Brains, whom he must (for complicated reasons) poison, and who for no reason beyond happy idiocy sings the Chandler song while changing into her teddy. Sings it, that is, in a Bronx accent. Duke--Duke--Duke--Duke of Oil, Duke--Duke--Duke of Oil, Duke--Duke--Duke of Oil . . . Over and over, until Martin is happy to kill her. 1962.

CHANTAYS, “Pipeline” (Downey/Dot). There's not a noise on this that isn't an essential rock sound: that guitar line, whose tangy vibrations define not just surf style but reach forward and back in musical space to implicate spaghetti western, Hawaiian, Chuck Berry, rockabilly; that mad voice, which could be an obnoxious surfer dude or a cackling Death (Thanatos can assume infinite forms); and that incessant end-of-the-world drum thunder, which seems to command the fiercest beat without ever actually finding a beat. Some records were meant to be. Others simply are. 1963.

The Chantels (End). Listen to them, look at them, think about them: they don't exist. They can't. They are a group of teenage girls from the Bronx who named themselves after a Catholic school and recorded their great work in a church. Those are facts, and the church, for all I know, still stands up there, a few miles away from me in the northeastern borough: if I lean out my Brooklyn window I might hear it in the night. Those are facts, but the Chantels are all echo and their lead singer, Arlene Smith, is all cry. Echo answers cry across cathedral wood and stained glass, watched in awe by immobile saints and a bleeding Christ.

It's been said that the Chantels' producer, George Goldner, terrorized Arlene Smith to make her realize that hers was the greatest voice in pop music. He made her weep, made her cower, made her shake, so as to get the fear into her voice. And not even that good story accounts for the voice. No theory of human psychology or logic of emotional extortion gets behind the hurt, the rapture that goes beyond joy so that it returns to hurt, the first hurt of life, and makes every feeling a shade of pain.

I've many times said, to whomever I could make listen, that "Maybe" could be the greatest record ever made. It drives all breath from your chest, all but a whimper and sorrow from your throat. Your eyes see nothing you can describe.

Listen to them, look at them, think about them. Can you imagine what I mean when I say they don't exist, never existed, cannot exist? 1959.

2006-09-17T18:00:00.000-07:00

Ah, bless the vaults and those who crawl through them so we don’t have to.

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Phil’s Spectre: A Wall of Soundalikes
Phil’s Spectre II: Another Wall of Soundalikes
“Phil Spector did not produce any of the tracks on this CD,” runs the disclaimer to one of these, “yet they all sound as if he did, or might have.” Fair enough: if Spector’s lesser products tend to be the sonic equal of pig vomit on a silver platter, the imitative rips of his acolytes and plunderers are surprisingly listenable. The moral of the story would seem to be that when genius fails, it always sounds worse than when mediocrity succeeds. Which should give the rest of us hope.

So: the Spector-sparked, Gold Star-spangled moments of such unheard-ofs and never-remembereds as Ray Raymond, Kane and Abel, the Goodies, Noreen Corcoran, the Fantastic Vantastics, and the Dreamlovers, and upward from dark obscurity to the bright light of stardom as incarnated in the Supremes, Sonny and Cher, Gene Pitney, the Righteous Brothers, and the Four Tops. Among the producers, arrangers, and writers are somebodies like Jack Nitzsche, Nino Tempo, Holland/Dozier/Holland, Van McCoy, and David Gates; and relative nobodies like Peter Antell, James Holvay, Jerry Ross, and Marty Cooper. Somebody or nobody, obscurity or superstar, they all sound amazingly, nay staggeringly similar to their common avatar. I used to think, back about 1984, that the Alan Parsons Project’s “Don’t Answer Me” was the most flawless Spector ape ever crafted. Was I wrong -- Parsons would come in maybe 15th behind some of these others. In the aggregate, Spectres I and II are proof either that A) Spector’s genius was among the easiest things in the world to figure out and copy -- far easier, say, than the formula for Coke; or that B) the ‘60s were so musically enchanted that brilliance fell as indiscriminately as rain upon the land, and even mediocrities were blessed with the temporary vision to produce records that, though in their day they passed unknown, would one day prove magical to the few.

Demonstrating that sequels can sometimes be worth it, Spectre II is actually the better of the two compilations; to list its highlights would be, virtually, to transcribe the tracklist. From the Beach Boys’ “I Do” (an absurdly youthful, moving, long-unreleased Brian Wilson production, previously wasted on the Castells) to Timmy & The Persianetts’ “Timmy Boy” (an attempted steal of Spector’s “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” thunder which outthunders the original); from the Victorians’ “Climb Every Mountain” (the Sound of Music standard straitjacketed and elevated by an arrangement utterly derivative of the Spector-Crystals “He Hit Me [It Felt Like a Kiss]") to Reparata & The Delrons’ “I’m Nobody’s Baby Now” (just a great, great, beautiful track in its own right); from Dobie Gray’s “No Room to Cry” (an angular clarification of Spector’s modernist potential) to Ruby & The Romantics’ “Your Baby Doesn’t Love You Anymore” (worlds away from the minimalist burble and sudsy organ of “Our Day Will Come”), the collection is full of gold. Some is of the fools’ variety, some is undeniably genuine. The worst any of it will do is turn your finger green.

Spectre II also contains at least one Bizarro Supremo demanding of mention: “Bobby’s Come a Long, Long Way,” by a group called Eight Feet, released on Columbia in 1966. It was co-written and co-produced by none but Al Kooper, who’d already backed Bob Dylan for “Like a Rolling Stone” and Forest Hills and was in line for Blonde on Blonde duty. Kooper describes “Bobby” as a product of “cross-pollination -- a girl group record, very Spector and Nitzsche-influenced, with the subject matter being Bob Dylan”: that is, Dylan’s journey from imaginary tramp to innovative lyricist, and from folkie to rockie. It’s not a great record, just an unusually shimmering and improbable novelty stab, and only slightly less absurd if you don’t know who it’s about. With a meaningful guitar / On a road that seems so far / Bobby’s come a long, long way . . . You can imagine the rest. On second thought -- no, you can’t.

Spectre I runs a slightly less surprising line of stars and knock-offs (most of them superfine nonetheless), though there are worthy obscurities in the form of “On the Spanish Side” by the Corsairs and Landy McNeil; “You’re So Fine” by Dorothy Berry; “Missin’ My Baby” by Clydie King; and “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” by Hale & The Hushabyes. And it does lead off with a glorious unedited stereo version of a Jack Nitzsche-arranged, Dick Glasser-produced vinyl titan, ‘64 vintage, which inspires the same question every single time I hear it: Is this truly -- could it possibly be -- is it just imaginably conceivable that it factually IS -- the

Greatest Record Ever?
“When You Walk in the Room,” Jackie De Shannon

2006-08-22T22:06:00.000-07:00

THE KORGIS
“Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime”
“If I Had You”
Watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind again lately, I was reminded -- via the deliberately dull, dragging, dispirited Beck version that played over the credits -- how much I used to love the Korgis’ original, a hit in late 1980. Dreamy synthesizer ode, languid, tragically limp, pure marshmallow, lyrics that grew more cryptic the more you tried to make sense of them. I.e., everything the first Rolling Stone Record Guide taught us to despise as unreal. It wasn’t rock, certainly not by the rockist measures just then becoming normative; it wasn’t chewy and ballsy and hard-hitting. Korgis et al epitomized all music that was implicitly -- let’s call a spade a spade -- faggy and dickless. (Far worse than even disco to the homophobic rockist, since disco was at least steeped in acceptable blackness.)

But guess what? You grow up and discover that the kid version of you knew more than you used to think it did. Kid version knew that not only reality is real. Our insides are there too, and pain in the heart hurts a lot longer than a punch in the face. And so “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” hurts a lot worse today, and a lot better, than -- random contrast -- Tom Petty’s “Refugee.”

One thing more: I remember hearing the song on the porch on a late-summer day that wasn’t quite cloudy, wasn’t quite sun. One of those weather-music memories you enjoy revisiting; a moment you can imagine being happy inside forever.

So I cracked my knuckles and dug up the 45, played it six times straight, unholy scratches and all, and realized I didn’t know krap about the Korgis. Hit some keyboard strokes and knew the truth. I won’t go into all I gleaned -- there is a top-flight Wikipedia entry for that. Point is that all this idle memoring led me to “If I Had You,” a fluffy Korgi toy I’d never played with, but instantly bounced into the arms of. From its opening of tingling bells and trilling guitar, through its placid but huge acoustic chording to its rising-sun bottleneck notes, it’s a heaven-blended admixture of ABBA, Badfinger, post-Beatles George and Ringo, Nick Lowe’s first album, and pretty much every good, poppy one-shot from the early to mid-1970s.

Thank you, Charlie Kaufman. I might not have discovered this song if not for you.

And somewhere, the ghost of RSRG issues a mighty gag.

BOB DYLAN
Modern Times
Already, grapevinery has planted the perception that Dylan’s latest is meant to make a trilogy with his last two from the studio, Time Out of Mind (1997) and “Love and Theft” (2001). If it’s true, this trilogy business, the new album leans closer to its nearer neighbor (low-key Americana, poky rhythms, river-rat snarl) than its nearly decade-distant one (purple clouds and dark atmospheres, theatrical gestures of a dramatic old man).

Time Out of Mind was not, as comeback hype had it, the end of the world or even of music as we knew it, but it outclassed any all-new Dylan album in recent memory by having not just one tune for the ages, but three or four. Modern Times lacks a single great lament, a single undeniable time-stopping rocker, a single anything that might force people to reprogram and reburn their personal Best of Bob Dylan discs. Lyrical themes are familiar, with epiphanies of wisdom, acceptance, mortality etc. in abundance. But musically, Modern Times doesn’t venture any territory as testing and painful as “Not Dark Yet,” any horizon as long as “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven.” Dylan doesn’t sound like he’s having sex anymore, either, so there’s nothing as slithery and skanky as “I Can’t Wait.”

Shock: the album isn’t a shocker. It’s minor, not Time Out of Mind’s long night on a haunted estate but a diddle in a dim courtyard. You’d like a rainstorm but you better be content with a puddle -- albeit a big one that takes over an hour to cross. Proficient musicianship, vest-close vocalisms, squarish melodies that never break right or bolt the horizon. Nothing wild or upsetting. Shock. Now that’s harsh on the two better songs, “Thunder on the Mountain” and “Workingman’s Blues 2,” but surrounded by such softness they are destined to remain with me as “Love and Theft”’s “High Water” remains with me: quite memorably the album’s best song, but one I somehow never get around to hearing again. Can I really scoop five minutes from my life to search out a song that was, after all, only the preferable member of a pretty dull cohort?

Dylan has produced himself here, and he does a perfectly nice job, full of tweaks and clarities and vaguely Lanoisian cushions. But he needs Danny’s smoky langor and swampy brood to make elegies and heartbreakers of these songs. Emotionally it's all moosh, more or less, placid moods and modest inspirations. Nothing wraps itself shroudlike around the mind. Nothing steals in to snatch the heart. It doesn’t even sound that personal: I’m convinced there’s more of Dylan in his “Theme Time Radio Hour” narrations and playlists -- more sense of the man, what flares his nostril and raises his eyebrow, what’s in his heart, head, eyes, ears, and yes, his wizened testicles -- than there is here.

I know what you’re thinking: Bitch, bitch, bitch. What do you want from this man?

Well: I want a sorrow that will last a lifetime (“Not Dark Yet”). I want to smile and cry at the old hobo’s dreamy twirl (“Dixie”). I want a song to creep up from the side, tie my wrists, and dangle me in space (“Love Sick” from the ‘98 Grammy Awards). I want a piece of the rock apocalypse (“Cold Irons Bound” from Masked and Anonymous).

What do I want from Dylan? I want inspiration every time out. I want dazzlement, delirium, desire, death. I want to be shocked for real.

BOB DYLAN with Cynthia Gooding
Folksingers Choice
Meanwhile, back there at the dawn of a career, in a little booth down the long corridor of days, Dylan sits for an hour with New York radio host and folksinger Gooding. You can see a Dylan song coming out of the encounter, as the two go over songs, spin yarns, exchange flirtations. (I almost said “repeat quotations.”) Gooding laughs sensuously at young Bobby’s jokes and gets his bushwa flowing; he is dewy sweet, charming, responsive to her attentions. Good clean fun. I wonder if they got it on.

THE MONTCLAIRS
Dreaming Out of Season
They were a vocal group from East St. Louis, one of the best smooth-soul outfits to ever lay a track, and they never so much as broke the R&B Top 30. Yet there’s not a song on this reissue of their one (1972) album that isn’t a masterpiece of neoclassical soul. It belongs on the changer with all the million-selling, multi-charting titans of the genre: Delfonics, Stylistics, Chi-Lites, Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes. The title track and “Prelude to a Heartbreak” are all-time greats; “Just Can’t Get Away” is a near-psychedelicism that works. There’s a disco bumper and several blood-enriching ballads: for my money it’s a better album than Back Stabbers.

But it’s got an added intensity and aural grain that set it apart from the Philly standard. Lead singer Phil Perry is not just heart-on-sleeve, he’s tonsils-on-collar. And the guys in back are unusually assertive for supporting players: even when they hum or go oooohhh, they do it emphatically, almost desperately. The ubiquitous strings come close to screaming, and rough production maintains the grain. All components feel heightened and just slightly raw.

Thus was a genre created and left to die: neoclassical soul verite.

APPLE
An Apple a Day
Not-bad late ‘60s pop from a here-yesterday-gone-today outfit. Pure Oxford Street psychedelia, UK all the way. Not bad, I say, but on its way to the sticky and oversweet, like cider gone ripe. Play it safe.

GNARLS BARKLEY
St. Elsewhere
It’s a fizzy concoction, but is it great pop? It’s indescribable, but is it irresistible? It’s a hit, but is it a phenomenon?

THE CHOIR
Choir Practice
Eric Carmen’s first group. Cleveland Beatles. Punchy drums, beaucoup Rickenbacker. A few numbers catch, while most drop down the Big Black Funnel of Lost Songs. The sole essential is “It’s Cold Outside,” power pop perfection from ‘66 -- redone, incidentally, by Stiv Bators in the high punk years, with absolute attitude and no love. Put on the Choir’s version and the spell is instant: the callow sorrow of the vocal, the melodic momentum of the chorus, the radio-savvy compression of the sound. And now it’s cold outside, they sing in all their youth, and that chill you feel is not winter on your neck but pure pop grabbing your happy gland.

THE WAILERS
Tall Cool One
Not the Wailers you first think of, but an early ‘60s Seattle outfit, contemporary to the Kingsmen and the Raiders. Good rough nightclub sound, bar-band sound, full of chunks and thunks. Gets monotonous, though. Drink beer while it plays. Have friends over. Throw a party. Everyone get smashed. Then it sounds just right.

Someone should make a horror movie about those early ‘60s Pacific Northwest groups. (Or have they?) Bands like the Nomads, the Frantics, the Incredible Kings, the Vandals, the Castells, the Canadian VIPs. Some of them were wild indeed, judging by the three volumes of the Northwest Killers punk anthology I’ve heard.

They dressed clean -- but played dirty.

They came out of the woods -- and took over a state.

It was said that when their amps began to buzz, even Bigfoot fled in terror.

They were called the Northwest Killers. And their music was MURDER.

MAURICE AND MAC
“You Left the Water Running”
Composed by Dan Penn, Rick Hall, and Oscar Franks, it was first done in 1966 by Billy Young, and soon after recorded by the two monsters of Memphis soul, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding. (The latter’s version, cut at Muscle Shoals as a demo for the former, wasn’t released until 1976, and then in a badly pressed, promo-only limited edition. On pages 602-3 of The Heart of Rock & Soul, Dave Marsh modestly details how he saved the remaining promos from being destroyed and the recording, presumably, lost forever.)

Redding did a really, really nice job on the song, scratchy and sad. Fronted by a laconic count-in and with an acoustic guitar up in the mix, his version sounds like what might exemplify a soul version of Rubber Soul. (There’s an Escher drawing in there somewhere . . . And besides, maybe The Dock of the Bay was that album.) Wilson, though modeling Redding, did something typical with it -- lots of hah’s and other patented grunts. There was also an instrumental version by Booker T. & The MG’s that sounded like soulful cocktail jazz, and Jamaican reggae star Ken Boothe gave it a cool spin, late ‘60s time.

But none of them outdid Billy Young, whose version is available at Brown Eyed Handsome Man. Establishing the song’s logical middle ground, he hit it halfway between Redding’s hurt and Pickett’s arrogance: sang as if he didn’t take his emotions too seriously, but felt someone ought to. Great horn blurts and the busy-bodying of an unknown second vocalist put the points on a great piece of lost soul.

Maurice McAlister and and McLaurin Green, though, covering the song at Muscle Shoals in ‘68, did outdo Billy -- by taking off from him. They do it up as a real duet, with interplay that never quits. Production-wise the tune is tweaked into ideal form, with tempo just slightly slowed from the original and energy building by the verse. M & M are all male camaraderie, the emotional comity of beer buddies at closing time. Their thousand-and-one calls, responses, and interjections are completely spontaneous, yet have the accidental perfection of little destinies.

They shout up the alley and holler through the house and raise a general ruckus. They have fun, these two, such fun as humans have only a few times in life. It’s so goddamn boisterous you could bust. Then the climax kicks, all drum and horn and shout of Yeah! and Whoa! and Hoah! and You left! The record is gone then, just plain gone, and finally you do bust, you grin dizzily to think anything could be that wonderful.

2006-08-07T18:41:00.000-07:00

JACK NITZSCHE & VARIOUS ARTISTS
Hearing is Believing: The Jack Nitzsche Story 1962-1979
Nitzsche was best known as arranger and foil to Phil Spector during the great Wall of Sound days, and then as auxiliary member of and shadow mover behind Crazy Horse and Neil Young’s Stray Gators. He played piano on the Rolling Stones’ “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” and arranged Buffalo Springfield’s “Expecting to Fly”; he penned classical suites and masterminded soundtracks to films as diverse as Performance, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Cruising. But even if, like me, you thought you knew something about Jack Nitzsche -- producer, arranger, composer, crackpot genius, woman-assaulting drug fiend, all-around pop studio pinch-hitter and mystery man -- you’ll never cease being surprised at the scope of the recordings he was involved with. Not all of them great or even good, some just surprising.

For instance, I didn’t know or had never really registered that:

Nitzsche did the strings on “Castles Made of Sand” (1963), one of my favorite Stevie Wonder records, and in fact had his hands in several Hollywood-recorded Motown sides of the period;

or that he arranged and conducted the backing on Doris Day’s “Move Over Darling,” theme to the ‘63 movie of the same name starring Doris and James Garner (I love that song, especially the Tracy Ullman version [hmm, that’s the third time I’ve mentioned a Tracy cover on this blog as being better than the original]);

or that he was somehow in on Carole King’s 1966 solo release, “A Road to Nowhere” -- a dark monument, a bone-shivering track -- which seems to have been, in arrangement and overall dynamics, virtually a demo for the roughly contemporaneous and utterly horrific version included here, by Judy (“Queen of the Beatniks”) Henske;

or that he was responsible for the strings behind the James Gang’s “Ashes, the Rain and I,” from their great Rides Again album;

or that he’d produced Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks, represented on this anthology by the anti-abortion tearjerker “You Can’t Be Too Strong.”

For Neil Young, Nitzsche wrote “String Quartet at Whiskey Boot Hill,” and did the symphonic arrangements that gave the otherwise honey-flavored Harvest its bitter edge. (He also had an affair with, and later physically assaulted, Young’s one-time wife, the actress Carrie Snodgress; charged with attempted rape, he pled down to lesser crimes. Nitzsche and Snodgress remained friends. Read Jimmy McDonough's Young biography Shakey for that convoluted tale.)

Spector, typical for a genius, downplayed the influence or even uniqueness of his supposed amanuensis in the composition of Spectorsound. You get that story in this Nitzsche obituary, written by Richard Williams, first and finest anatomizer of the super-producer's method. (Nik Cohn was better on Spector’s madness.) But Nitzsche had a sound of his own, and if you listen to Spector it’s well in there. The earlier Nitzsche productions, pure Hollywood pop, are often centered around muscular, heroic guitar tones -- single-string plucks that thrum like a beefier Duane Eddy -- tricky percussive syncopations, and unashamedly romantic strings. Things go haywire a bit later in the ‘60s, when Nitzsche was wont to work his webs in service of freakniks and plain mediocrities like Bob Lind, P.J. Proby, Garry Bonner, Lou Christie, and Tim Buckley. It can be painful to hear plangent and progressive pop textures straining to animate dead, albeit eccentric, lumps of hyper-emotional art-song.

This anthology shines an introductory light on the darker alcoves of the Nitzsche mansion, but aside from the 1962 instrumental hit "The Lonely Surfer," it offers none of his solo work (he did several albums under his own name). Nor does it get into the Spector or Young work at all. As for Crazy Horse, at least a taste of their magnificent first album -- say "Gone Dead Train," hauled over from the Performance track, or Nitzsche’s own vocal showcase, “Crow Jane Lady” -- would have been welcome. A note in the booklet indicates some of this work was "unavailable" for inclusion, but career anthologies were invented to span those gaps. This guy was singular and deserves, how would the jailhouse lawyer phrase it, FULL AND PROPER REPRESENTATION.

Separated At Birth?

Jack Nitzsche & Robert Christgau

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Trojan Rocksteady Box Set
Mid-'60s rocksteady -- cooler and more dignified than ska, its pixilated forerunner, less political or passionate than the classic reggae that followed it -- agglomerated in the shanty towns of Kingston and was the favored gliding music of the often antisocial rude boys. But for the most part rocksteady itself was not rude, it was gentle as breeze, or, at its extreme, merely ebullient. It was Jamaican Motown crossed with Jamaican doo wop. Sunshine music to shine over tin roofs and muddy streets. Alton Ellis, the Melodians, Derrick Harriott, the Paragons. "Just Tell Me" by Toots & The Maytals. So beautiful.

Many of the best songs, chiefly clustered on Disc 1, seem derived to greater or lesser degrees from contemporary American soul. Harriott's "The Loser," so sweet and limpid it wants to melt in your very ear, sports a chorus directly evocative of Billy Stewart's "Sitting in the Park." Elsewhere the Federals' "Shocking Love" is straight tribute, in all but name, to Smokey Robinson.

But there are strange bits galore, like covers of "To Sir with Love" and "The Shadow of Your Smile" that actually work. (Work as what? you just might ask. You're right to ask.) Lee Perry creeps in toward the end, forecasting his '70s ascendancy into outer dub space, promising I am the Ah-venger / You'll never get away from me. There's also a bliss-bringing instrumental by Ike Bennett & The Crystalites titled "Illya Kurayaka." Instantly familiar, it holds your head in place long enough for your head to realize that it is, in fact, the theme from A Summer Place. Can you help but smile? You think of Kingston and the slum of Trenchtown. Therrrrrrrrre's a summer plaaaaaaaaaaace . . .

Ah yes. Ah, blow breeze, blow, blow over shanty town.

BUCK OWENS
Bridge Over Troubled Water
Now that he's dead, you see a lot of people scrambling to suggest, without actually saying it, that oh yes, they've been Buck Owens fans just for years. Not me. For all those years he was to me, as to many of us, merely the guy who stood next to Roy Clark on "Hee Haw." He was the one who wasn't a virtuoso guitarist. Who didn't guest star on "The Odd Couple." Who laughed like a loon at every cornpone witticism and was vaguely thought to have been a singer of the lowest notoriety, back before TV came along.

Look how wrong you can be, especially when you take the tube as your text. Maybe 15 years ago, performing due diligence as a Beatlephile, I listened to "Act Naturally." And durn if I didn't like it better than the Fabs' whacking, wayward go at honky tonk. It had an acoustic bounce you couldn't resist. Buck was a singer of confidence and generous throat, supreme commander of the hillbilly blues: any fool could hear that. Other songs were heard here, heard there. Things were read. It developed that Owens was truly respected in his realm. People who knew far more than myself knew all about him.

So an Owens expert I'm not, but I've gotten a few albums and while I've not liked them all equally I've begun to get an elliptical sense of what he had going for him, and how unusual that was. How much I'd rather be listening to him than to Toby Keith -- or for that matter to R. Kelly. Eventually you learn how much you have yet to learn.

So here we are with the present case:

This 1971 Owens LP almost overdoses on echo, but it skirts clamor to catch beauty. Its stated raison d'etre was to demonstrate that representative works by the most respectably relevant of modern pop composers were really just country songs in disguise. So Owens covers inevitable picks by inevitable penmen (Dylan, Donovan, Simon) but pours country hickory all over them, insisting, for instance, on changing “Homeward Bound"'s escaping to exscaping -- a pleasurable vocal irritant that Elton John might once have envied. Nothing is sung straight, but nothing is sung ironically either. Owens, his pianist, a skating-rink organ, and a really powerful echo box turn “Love Minus Zero,” already one of Dylan’s prettiest songs, into a controlled rhapsody on the properties of love as felt in a dazed, post-coital dream.

His "Bridge Over Troubled Water" does not hack Art Garfunkel's, and doesn't try. Going the opposite direction, it scales the epic down to verse and chorus, wastes no wax on intro or outro, and goes straight to a big, big sound. The backing is countrypolitan with real pop muscles, but of course it wouldn't work if you couldn't buy the voice. Buck Owens was matched only by George Jones in the boldness of his overemphasizing: almost every line bulges with melisma to magnify woe, sympathy, a general burgeoning of emotion. "When you're weeeeeeeeeeeary, feelin' smaahhhhhlll, when tears are iiiihhhhhhn -- yourrrrrreyes . . . "

That's about where you surrender your defenses -- if, like me, you're a sucker for well-turned melodrama and a voice that dares to rattle the stars.

JAH WOBBLE, JAKI LIEBEZEIT, HOLGER CZUKAY
How Much Are They?
An EP from 1981, pairing the Public Image bassist Wobble with drummer Liebezeit and producer-bassist Czukay of Krautrock godfathers Can. It's post-PiL skeleto-funk, with warehouse-district ambiance and industrial warmth, punched through by steel-girder guitar noise. In place of the screeching or moaning Lydon voice is Wobble's distant incantation, dazed and distracted. Funky and scary all in all, and very much in the grain of its moment, that post-punk moment when art-school fops with sharp guitars and disco beats came back to reclaim the cutting edge and paint the UK gunmetal grey as a land of dead souls and smoking ruins. It stands with the best of that style (PiL itself), particularly "Twilight World" which is like the Specials' "Ghost Town" stripped of pop pleasure and humor -- nothing left but a beat, a nightmare organ, and the sense of walking freakshow streets after hours in a town of tall buildings and concrete canyons that echo all night long.

WHAT WE DID ON OUR HOLIDAYS

2006-08-07T15:56:00.000-07:00

These are the first two paragraphs of Ken Townsend's introduction to The Beatles Recording Sessions: The Official Abbey Road Studio Session Notes 1962-1970 by Mark Lewisohn. Townsend is (or was in 1988, date of the book's publication) the general manager at Abbey Road Studios.

"Picture yourself as a motorist driving down Abbey Road, a quiet northwest London suburb when suddenly in the pouring rain you are confronted by a strange sight. In front of you standing on a zebra crossing are four tourists, one minus shoes and socks, being photographed by some poor bowler-hatted city gent holding an umbrella looking for all the world as though he has been hijacked especially for the occasion.

"This is no rare event. Come rain, hail or shine, never a day goes by when one does not rush to the window following the screech of brakes to witness a similar sight. Why you ask yourself, some twenty years on from the time the Beatles used this same zebra crossing for their album cover, should there still be so much interest? Why also should our mail at Abbey Road Studios contain so many letters asking for information about the Beatles, and why should we have to paint over all the Beatles-related graffiti on our front wall every six months?"

Imagine for a moment the wondrous pentimento that must exist beneath these many, many layers of white paint: at least three decades' worth of scribblings and scrawlings, Magic Marker and Pilot Pen inscriptions from every reach of the planet; names, initials, dates, dedications, recordings of lives and deaths, loves and losses, curses and wishes. So note the fan graffiti recorded here. It'll be gone soon.

London, June 25, 2006

2006-08-02T02:28:00.000-07:00

SCISSOR SISTERS
"Don't Feel Like Dancing"
Had to let you in on this one, fellow babies. You may remember these glamour pusses if you eardrummed their 2004 debut, which you should have if you care about keeping gayness alive in pop music -- not for the P.C. angel points but for the sheer mascara-spattered, fuck-yer-fuckholeness of it, New York Dolls, remember those girls? -- or about bass-popping, piano-comping mashups of young Elton, high Roxy, middle Gibb, and maybe some sugar-blasted ELO while we're at it. A sheer heart attack, that album, especially "Laura" and "Take Your Mama" (to the gay bar!).

And so, teasing and tarting for upcoming Album II, is the first single, already out in the UK but unavailable in the US until August 15 (whatever you say, record company). Recently leaked, or spurted, onto the nefarious, rapacious, all-consuming www, this is a hot shot of Mondo Disco Wacko. Piano, bass, falsetto, skinny golden synthesizer plumes shooting limpid jets o' love. It's more than beat and Studio 54 atmosphere, though. The chord progressions are witty and surprising, the whole is ironic yet undeniable: the '70s in aspic, but the aspic throbs and tastes like banana-grape bubblegum.

So it's not a radical advance over the debut, but these campers don't care about the Eno aspect of classic glam. They don't care to paint soundscapes or chill out the Ritalyn generation like Radiohead. They just wanna fuck. Oh, and dance. (That title is not to be trusted.)

And yes, like many of you, I went around saying "disco sucks" back in the day. Some of it did. But this isn't disco. It's -- something else . . .

2006-07-31T18:56:00.000-07:00

STRANDED -- The Countdown (14)

Stranded, that is, for a whole day with Captain Beefheart.

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART AND HIS MAGIC BAND, Mirror Man (Buddah). My heart doesn’t exactly belong to the Beefy one, but I give him all credit for being a visionary, an honest-to-John, irony-free wackadoo who howls at a moon only he can see but who also knows enough about music to love doo wop. Marcus picks the plum off this album: “Tarotplane,” track one. Blues and R&B in a sexfrugmindmash, the most convincing white soul snarl ever heard shouldering against enthrallingly monotonous outre elements: a voice turns into a saxophone turns into a harmonica turns into a bagpipe. Or does it . . . ? "Tarotplane" does boogie, it sure does roll right out for an epic 20 minutes. But the rest -- save a sweet stretch of psychedelic guitar magic over the last half of “Kandy Korn” -- is more of the same, only less novel each time: primitive rhythm without elaboration, furious dry rub without needed climax.

(It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some campfire music on the island, something to hear while beating animal skins and circle-dancing, praying for mercy from the gods of storm and madness. But over the Captain for that purpose, I'd nominate those lovable East Village slobs the Godz. “Hmm, so that’s the Godz,” Greil Marcus is supposed to have said once. We might need separate campfires.)

To take Mirror Man to any island, even the self-service island at your local filling station, you’d have to really love the blues. You’d have to find it a bottomless repository of human wisdom and aspiration, success and failure, sin and grace, the highest and lowest we might reach in these transient skins. Which it may be. Which it may very well be. Recorded 1965 / released 1973.

Note: With the release of The Mirror Man Sessions in 1990 it became known that this material was recorded, not in 1965 as was first believed, but in late ‘67 or early ‘68. It was intended for a half-live, half-studio LP called It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper, which never came.

----. “Diddy Wah Diddy” (A&M). This is always grouped with the great mid-'60s garage singles (and is found in that capacity on the first Nuggets box, expanded from the 2-LP set). But this makes even the best of its smoggy, froggy, droogy competition -- Shadows of Knight, Count Five, Music Machine -- sound like poseurs impersonating the true grandfather of flunk rock. That doesn’t make this a better record than say “Psychotic Reaction” or “Talk Talk,” but it does make it more of a monstrosity, less of a novelty. 1966.

----. Trout Mask Replica (Straight). Ever have a dream about a naked little reptile-man, a flesh-covered Black Lagoon Creature with solid pink eyes and a quivering pink webbed head, crawling out of your toilet dripping and snarling, hungry and smacking, belching and squealing, on the prowl, and you see it coming but don’t know how to kill it, and it gets between you and the escape door and traps you in the bedroom, and the dream ends with you screaming and gurgling in the corner as the thing crawls up your uncovered torso and snakes its ghastly tongue all the way down your throat so it can pull out your spine and chomp it like corn on the cob?

Well, this album is nothing like that. It’s more like sitting at the door of a junkyard outhouse near a Los Angeles off-ramp with two o’clock sun tanning the hide of your face, slapping a clammy fish on the down-side of a white plastic drum that once held caustic rock salt, while a toothless messianic mental patient stomps his twine-tied boot, drools philosophy, pukes poetry, and growls at your earhole thinkin’ he’s a bluesman. Except that in his awful phlegm-hacking, syphilis-minded way he really is a bluesman, and you slap that fish harder because you’re scared what he’ll do if you quit. And an enraged, mangy dog is straining its chain a few feet away, and you’re parched and sick from the stench with nothing to drink. And the crazy man's even crazier friends are coming over with their "toys."

You don’t know if you’ll last through to nightfall. 1969.

2006-07-25T00:35:00.000-07:00

CISCO HOUSTON
The Cisco Special!
I Ain’t Got No Home
Passing Through
Years go by and you finally, sometimes, get around to things. Pictures you remember seeing in sixth grade are just as sharp in your 40-year-old mind as they were on the page of a book back when. Things circle around, not obsessions but memories, things you never let go of or that never let go of you.

I saw a picture of Cisco Houston in a book a long time ago, a book on folk music for young readers. Somewhere between the unnerving studio portrait of Leadbelly glaring over his huge 12-string and the promo shot of Bob Dylan scowling while modeling a Fender bass (!?) was the shot of Cisco at some foggy outdoor folk festival. Pencil mustache and windbreaker, cigarette, very good-looking. Errol Flynn type, a pirate, or an adventurer like Frank Buck. Or a hero of the Hollywood musical like Howard Keel or Gordon McRae. He didn’t look like a folk singer, or like he’d ever been sidekick to Woody Guthrie (evidently his main fame): Cisco Houston looked like he’d have the sidekick.

He’d died fairly young, the book said, of cancer in 1961.

I didn’t see his name very often over the years and when I did, he was written of with respect and without enthusiasm. The rock generation loved Guthrie and revered Leadbelly but Houston was a footnote. He hadn’t written his own music but had glommed onto Woody’s. He wasn’t rough-hewn or mentally unstable or a Depression icon, hadn’t killed anyone or been in prison or made a microphone feed back. He was known as Guthrie’s bumming buddy and popular interpreter: he seemed without any other identity. A minor figure. But Cisco Houston stayed in my mind, the way mysterious, good-looking, prematurely dead people often stay in your mind.

So I read a website and hunted up some old albums and burned a homemade compilation from scavenged tracks and figured I’d finally set this Houston thing to rest. Or wake it up, either one. The site, Cisco Houston's Home, is rich with photos and quotes and has a brief but informative biography by Mark Eastman. It filled me in on where Houston had come from, where he’d gone, who he’d been with, and what he’d done. He’d gone, been with, and done plenty. He'd hit the road early and stayed on it. He was a logger, farm worker, hitchhiker, merchant marine, saloon singer, actor on stage, radio and TV. He'd bummed all over the country and sailed to distant lands.

Much of this he’d done by the age of 25. At 25 I was debating whether to come out of the basement.

The music? Agile, tune-oriented, self-confident, imperturbable, above all smooth. At worst it’s plain dull, the New Deal equivalent of slick-ass L.A. country rock circa 1974, with just that depth of passion. But Cisco Houston had experience behind him, tolerable taste in material (solid standards, very little novelty effluvia), and the sense to opt mostly for bare accompaniment, little beyond acoustic guitar and bass -- a few songs have distant flute, harmonica, or minimal vocal-group backing and that’s it. Spareness of setting often has the effect in Houston of alienating and chilling vocal deliveries that would otherwise be Hollywood hokum.

Passing Through is my homemade CD, hits and misses drawn from here and there in the first flush of hearing this deep voice sing logging songs and union songs and rambling songs from what seems long, long ago. Of the two other titles, both recorded for Vanguard during Houston’s folk-revival rediscovery, The Cisco Special! (1959) is less impressive, but there are surprises and subtleties hidden in its shallow dales.

Houston recorded the songs on I Ain’t Got No Home (including the sorrowful title song, Guthrie's chilling "East Texas Red," and a version of Leadbelly’s “In the Pines”) only weeks before his death. He knew it was his last go-round and though objectively that shouldn’t matter to us -- the music is good or it isn’t -- it’s undeniable that impending mortality cast shadows over his customary cheer, gave a somewhat more husked-out quality to his old straight tones. Plus he's singing mostly songs about death: murder, suicide, fantasies of eternal release. But all sung pure, true, concert-hall proper. So it’s not quite a trip through death’s dark night, but every artist’s personality has its underside and Houston’s was a forward-staring stoicism that can conjure pictures of Gary Cooper suffering and striding towards high noon: Gary Cooper who died, also from cancer, a mere two weeks after Cisco Houston.

"If you know my situation, which is a matter of weeks, of months at the outside, before the wheel runs off . . . well, nobody likes to run out of time. But it's not nearly the tragedy of Hiroshima or the millions of people blown to hell in the war, that could have been avoided. These are real
tragedies . . . "
-- Cisco Houston, quoted in Sing Out!, November-December 1961

Listeners, especially those with an aversion to square-shaped pre-Beatle musicalities, have always been and likely always will be put off by Houston’s voice: clear, clean, slick, professional. He is pleased with his hobo mimicry, his theatrical enunciation. He sings bad-ass lyrics in the gentlest baritone Broadway never stole. When he sings I was feelin’ kinda mean, I shot a deppity down, there is no leaping the ironic distance between text and expression. To the rock- or even pop-oriented ear, it croons false feeling.

But Cisco had his talent and if you’re patient, talent like a nocturnal animal always emerges. Listen to that voice long enough and the warmth has a way of rising. The professionalisms come to seem a way not of faking feeling but of faking out the listener, so that sadness and wonderment are the echo of what you'd thought was just an easy, simple time. That might not mean a thrill-ride for the modern pop fan. But any person who thinks thrills are the whole of life is a good 15 to 30 years younger than me and has some surprises ahead.

Halfway into Side 1 of Special!, “Old Smoky” (as in "On Top Of") may elicit, at first, the smallest of inward groans. The voice is just too manly and forthright, the song too familiar. The feeling is fulsome. It’s all surface. But the groan dissipates as the song continues. Listen into it. Cisco warms the lyric, warms your ear, and it doesn’t even take that long. What started slick turns sad. What felt fake now seems merely a particularly formal mode of human expression. It’s a certain man talking a certain way. And suddenly he’s reached the last line. You don’t want it to be the last line, you want a bit more. You don’t get more, so you want to track back, isolate the effect or moment when something changed, discover how Houston got you to the point of caring and wondering. How like a master illusionist he dissolved the wooden center of a perfectly staged, immaculately platformed performance, so that the song’s mystery vibrates subtly and briefly down a hollow you never saw coming. And you’ll never know why, says that last line, an enticement, a promise, an eternal farewell.

2006-07-17T17:05:00.000-07:00

THE WALKMEN
A Hundred Miles Off
(part 2 of 2)
The last notes of the last song just buzzed down and drifted away, and no, yesterday wasn't a mirage, wasn't any trick of the light or sham of the afternoon. This is a terrific record, one to be kept on the easy-to-reach shelf.

Other listening on a 97º day off

Highlights of the early Beatles, 1962-63: regenerative roughage for the soul and body, reminder that every overstatement as to their greatness falls short of stating the true case;

a few Gary Puckett hits (hey, they stand up at least as well as, say, the Fugs);

and a couple of deep-soul anthologies, of which there have been so blessedly many these past few years: all crammed with near-hits and never-weres from fan enclaves and enclosed markets from Southern California to Southern Louisiana, all dripping with revelation of regional brilliance. Such fervor in the singing; such invention and reach in the arranging; such wallop in the musicianship. Barely a track doesn't ring, resonate, thrill. How is it these songs weren't enormous hits? That names like Bettye LeVette, Maurice and Mac, Bessie Banks, and Jean Wells go largely unrecognized by any but those in the deep-soul nut bowl? More on this later: time has come to make one's oblations to Our Lady of the Lost Masterpiece, and dig into some serious obscurities.

Walkmen, Beatles, lost soul, and sure why not, even "Lady Willpower." With music like that, you begin to think you don't need friends.

2006-07-16T18:38:00.000-07:00

THE WALKMEN
A Hundred Miles Off
(part 1 of 2)
“Rod Stewart imitating Dylan, backed by Coldplay, all of them drunk,” was my wife’e estimate, just a little while ago, of singer Hamilton Leithauser and the aging boy-rockers who back him in this weirdo unit. She asked the name of the band. I said the Walkmen. She said where had she heard of them before? I said a few years ago our friend Tim had been lent their 2002 album Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone by Tom, a guy who was then a supervisor at the office where Tim and I work. Tim had liked the song “We’ve Been Had.” He’d passed that to me. I’d liked it too, and wound up putting it on the wedding CD Tim asked me to make when he and Stella got married.

“Ah,” said my wife. “This is their new album,” I said. “Yay,” she said. “You don’t like it?” I asked. She shook her head. “I’m thinking it’s -- interesting,” I said. “That’s better than boring.”

Then the phone rang, and I paused the CD. My wife handled the call. After that, I hit pause and the CD started up again. Something had changed. “Lost in Boston” was the song and it had a great careening, railing guitar part stretching it upward again and again at the same painful angle. There was a hurtle to the whole glittering mess, just a flashy, funny forward fly. I was loving that guitar and the desperate singer, his cry of existential blotto, and these clicked with elements I'd lifted to in the previous songs -- a fatal energy barely catching the edge of discipline in songs that had their own tight logic. I realized that maybe this was the rarest of rarities, the American indie band with a sound, an identity, a disgust for the solemn coexisting with a desire for the epic. The album was now, to my hearing, decisively wild and fabulous.

I told my wife that the Amazon reviewer had said Dylan backed by Joy Division -- a band she likes a lot. She said, “Yeah, a couple of those really did!” And then, referring to the music, “This has gotten a lot better.”

Another phone call. We’re on pause again.

2006-07-15T19:40:00.000-07:00

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival 1970
JIMI HENDRIX
Blue Wild Angel: Live at the Isle of Wight
JETHRO TULL
Nothing is Easy: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970
THE WHO
Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970
It’s not to be held against the Message to Love soundtrack that it is only the movie’s glorified echo, rather than a righteous, full-bodied experience in and of itself. Some of the music stands up (“Nights in White Satin”), some of it is decidedly less impressive when divorced from the image (the Doors’ bit). Just as your Eiffel Tower snow-dome is not Paris but a souvenir of Paris, this is not the movie but its tie-in. C’est la vie.

The individual releases suggest how good the music heard at the Isle of Wight that year was. Tull, who despite being uniformly dull on wax have never been bad in a movie (their “Song for Jeffrey” in the Rock and Roll Circus bid fair to roast the Stones’ chestnuts, and they were the opening act), do a fantastic set. I’m not his fan-club president, but I do dig the spectacle and sound of Ian Anderson playing the suave-voiced goblin, his bathrobe flipping, his flute-stick waving, his scalp-fur flying. Whatever else Anderson is, he’s a rocker.

That Hendrix can be so blah and yet so brilliant beggars belief. I dunno about you but I ain’t came yet. There, I just came, thank you goodnight. The Who aren’t that offhand with their brilliance. They work at it, contributing a typically heroic two discs’ worth of mod classics stretched out and gouged up for the hippie set, plus forward-looking philosophizings on the order of “Naked Eye,” plus Tommy in its elephantine entirety. I can never boost the Who unequivocally because of my artistic “issues” with Townshend (Pete and I will have to get together and hash it all out someday), but damn if they didn’t sweat for their suburban mansions.

Now for all I know, the Murray Lerner documentary whose 1996 release -- after many years of lapsed funds, false starts, and failed closures -- spurred this glut of Wight-based dollar-makers was a stacked deck. Maybe the “last of the great rock festivals” wasn’t really that awful, that muddy and shitty down in the pit, that overrun with hateful hippies, mindless ideologues, foaming hounds, and self-consuming violence. (Then again, maybe it was: not only is Lerner’s evidence hard to gainsay, but the contemporary reporting in Rolling Stone pretty much bears it out.)

The point is not how true the film was or wasn’t. Ask any of the 600,000 who were there what the truth was and each will say different. The point is that Lerner, obviously a caring and scrupulous observer as well as an uncommonly sensitive documentarian and canny judge of music, imparted to the festival a grandeur, meaning, and depth it didn’t possess as it was happening but does now -- now that time has passed and history is the forum. Message to Love is a great film, a prismatic horror house and emotional twister, with some of the greatest music you’ve ever heard from an almost unbelievable concatenation of artists. Among live rock films it fully deserves triple-billing with Gimme Shelter and Woodstock. But where the first of those was disgusting and the second dizzying, Message was saddening -- as beatified and beautiful, elegant and elegiac as it sought to be.

MISS MARY
Hey Blue!
As twee and fleet and inoffensive as a frisbee. As gripping, too.

AGNES CHAN
“You Are 21, I Am 16”
For an instructive contrast with the previous entry, give this a stream for proof that twee can be deep, sweet can be sad, and adolescent can be timeless. I’ve been punching it up regularly for a week. The first time I didn’t believe it. The second time I believed it. The third time I choked right up.

It’s got me enchanted. It’s got me stupid. I don’t care what you think.

Actually, I do.

Most Mystifying Anthology Find of Recent Weeks
America, “A Horse With No Name,” Track 3 on . . . Disco Hits of the ‘80s?

Greatest Record Ever?
Either "Desolation Row" or "Santa Fe," Bob Dylan. (Two songs about the same place?)

I'm coming out (don't shoot!)
It's time to drop the phony charade and own my identity. No, my name isn't Declan MacManus.

My name is Lester Bangs.

2006-07-04T12:00:00.000-07:00

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Compiled by Matthew Derby and Brandon Stosuy
Famous Shovels in Twain: The 2006 Music Issue Compilation CD

Our breezy listening this Independence Morning has been this dark and swirly disc, whose Mylar-sleeved reality stiffens the inner page of The Believer's annual music issue (on newsstands now).

The featured artists are all young, mostly Western-world, fringey-freaky sorts. A few are known, but none is a household name -- unless that household be in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Capitol Hill, Seattle, or wherever the next locus of hipness will turn out to be (Cincinnati? Helena? Council Bluffs?). The disc announces its weirdness from track one, "The Blue Sun" by Think About Life, a surging folkie dirge with an artificial bird-call obliggato and the catching line, Maggots, maggots will crawl inside your lungs. Other highlights include Stephen O'Malley's "Laya" (bracing, twisted feedback atmospherics); "Box of Cedar" by Marissa Nadler and Orion Rigel Dommisse (I prefer it to anything by the Baez or McGarrigle sisters, only partly because they pronounce it "see-dar"); and The National's "Minor Star of Rome" (nice guitar webbing and synthetic tambourine, plus the best song title on the disc).

The standout is undoubtedly Calexico's "Throwing Daggers," an impromptu rehearsal number recorded on live two-track in Tuscon. Dominated end to end by a damp, slapping drum part, it starts so low you can't hear it, with lyrics so obscure-mundane you don't listen. Still it goes on, grows from a mumbled crap-scrap to a substantial piece of something, and then, stunningly, transformingly, at the very moment of the song's natural, intrinsic climax, comes the freight train that, according to the annotation, runs by the recording venue: Calexico knew it was coming, but not at that moment. The train whistles in, whines up, wails, shrieks, roars fearsomely past. Things go quiet again, damp slap and mumble, the thing fades. Pause. Whew.

The freight train peaking one track, the Argentinian birds hollering and hooting around another, the wind through still another, the plain old room-tone and life-sound on home-recorded demos throughout: Famous Shovels in Twain has an all-pervading sense of the natural, or at least outside, world. It's surprising and is consistent in giving the unexpected; even the bad tracks, and there are a few, are bad in unexpected ways. And for that invisible cherry on top, there is a hidden track, an unlisted #16. Sounds like a calliope tune played somehow backwards -- then it is taken over by a sudden convulsive bubbling, burbling, and tingling: musical equivalent of exactly that thrum that runs through one's body before an uncontrollable vomit.

Sometimes music is that precise. Sometimes the bowels know what the brain doesn't.

You could do dumber things with your $10 than to spend it on this mag. In addition to the life-enhancing CD, it brings you:

1) Rich Cohen's marvelous piece on the song "My Way," its highways and byways, those who've eaten it up and spat it out ("It plugs into the self-pity people can feel when they are on the other side of something big.");

2) analyses by Frederick Woolverton, Ph.D., of famous love-song duets and what they tell us about the emotional circuitry of real relationships ("[Marvin Gaye] is acting clueless; he's into denial. [Mary Wells] is based in emotional reality.");

3) Nick Hornby's monthly commentary, as usual both companionable and trenchant, on "Stuff I've Been Reading" (get the book too);

4) A funny "Brief History of Rock Music" by Paul Collins;

5) Greil Marcus and Don DeLillo discussing Dylan (though it's more like a Beckett dialogue between Man and Void, as only one of these writers has anything interesting to say on the subject); and

6) Gustavio Turner's "Schema: Ends of Innocence," a three-page picto-verbal graphamacallit with crudely air-brushed headshots and print so eye-screwingly minute it could come from Boswell's Life of Johnson, tracing the delicate interplay of Voltaire and Juba Rhythm, Bo Diddley and Peter Sellers, Malcolm McLaren and Corey Feldman, all resulting in the pre-millennial Superbaby known as Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy."

Tangential factoid, courtesy of BBC News Online's Helen Briggs:

A bizarre neurological syndrome, in which patients are unable to control the actions of one of their own hands, is helping scientists to understand the basis of free will. Patients with the phenomenon, known as anarchic hand, behave as if they have two streams of consciousness, or two separate wills, which compete with each other. This may lead to one hand "arguing" with the other, for example in choosing which television channel to watch or what to eat.

Neurologists believe there are regions in the human brain that regulate actions driven by inner will while inhibiting actions triggered by the environment. . . . When these areas are damaged, for example by a stroke or head injury, the person is left at the mercy of environmental triggers and their actions do not match their will.

It raises the question, "how free is our free will?" said Sergio Della Salla, Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Aberdeen, UK. "It seems to demonstrate that self-ownership of actions can be separated from awareness of actions. Anarchic hand patients seem to be aware of the actions of their anarchic hand but they disown them."

Only about 40 cases of the condition have ever been documented.

"Anarchic hand syndrome" has come to be known in some quarters as "Strangelove syndrome."

And in others as "having a Hitler fit."

No, I made that last one up.

Bonus track
And as a super-extra, hidden-hidden addition to the Believer comp, I will add this irreplaceably touching, inexplicably spooky recording. It was found by accident some time ago. It was recorded over the telephone and is sung by someone named Farah. I used to have a friend by that name, and she was a singer. I asked her once if this was her voice, but she never got back to me about it. Then she moved and I'm not sure where she is now. It would be easy to find her but people move on.

Maybe there are two singing Farahs in the world; maybe this only sounds like someone I used to know.

"Angel"

2006-07-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

ARS NOVA
Ars Nova
1968 Medievalisms from New York lyre-pluckers. The playing (on forest-calling horns and a variety of antiquated string boxes, as well as standard rock instruments) is committed and precise; Ars Nova believe in what they’re doing, and they care enough to do it well. And unlike most art rock, the album has going for it a certain modesty and sense of proportion: the songs are brief and unburdened by any apparent conceptual connection. But they still aren’t very good, the vocals are void of eccentricity, and the project finally bogs down in the admittedly manful attempt to fuse archaic music with a standard late-’60s hippie critique of cops, fathers, and other plastic people.

TRAFFIC
John Barleycorn Must Die
Well, it's no Mr. Fantasy. “Glad” offers passable funk, but the title track, a drawn-out pastoral curse, is the only thing you’ll ever need to hear again. The Island Masters reissue, though, has among its bonus addenda a listenable piece of audio-verite: the band members backstage at the Fillmore East in 1970, psyching up for a show, laughing and talking, coming and going.

BOB DYLAN and A.J. WEBERMAN
Weberman Phone Calls
Speaking of audio-verite:

I once read a 1971 Rolling Stone article on the meshuggah antics of A.J. Weberman, Dylan freak and leader of something he called the Rock Liberation Front -- apparently a guerilla-style organization on the order of the Yippies, or the Weathermen without bombs, whose purpose was to free “the people’s music” of corporate bondage through public harassment of artists and executives. The article transcribed much of these famous calls, in which Weberman phoned Dylan to get approval on the text of an article he’d written for distribution to underground papers.

Dylan not only answered Weberman, but engaged him in lengthy discussion -- of things like paranoia and stardom and wealth, rock’s increasing corporatization, the political gestures of Johnny Cash, the relative merits of Dylan’s contemporaries, and Weberman’s peculiar interpretations of his idol’s work. (Which amounted to the revelation that Dylan was secretly a heroin-addicted capitalist pig who'd abandoned the fight for social reformation through song. A.J. insists at one point that New Morning, played backwards, says Don’t expose me. “Shit,” Dylan replies, stunned. “Why don’t you play Andy Williams backwards and see what that sounds like -- ”)

This is hot fudge for the voyeur in each of us. You’re crouched beside a toilet, like Gene Hackman in The Conversation, stealing in on other lives. You’re on a party line with a small but definite piece of pop history, and neither of the conversants knows you’re there. The voices are telephone-sharp, all hissing sybilance and explosive cross-talk. Dylan wavers between attack and appeasement, trying to understand, trying also to maintain some control over what passes for his image. Weberman does not let down for a second, he is a ceaseless stream of self-certain indictments and paranoid rationalizations.

It fascinates in the way only historical documents can. It gives insight -- into Weberman, into Dylan; into the fan, into the star; into all of us, maybe.

Like the film-critic discussion below, it's available here, at what continues to be, as I term it over in the sidebar links, “the best blogsite there’s ever been, ever.”

PEARL JAM
Pearl Jam
The world's most serious band attack the war and find a few short, sharp tunes. Has a garage modesty that might make it worth another listen somewhere down the road.

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Trap Door II
A brand-new compilation thingamybob built of acid-washed rock from the late hippie days. It showed up a few weeks ago trailing this description of underworld hype and excited buzz, which for all I know originated with the hypemixers and buzzmongers themselves, trying to fake us all out:

This new compilation from Dis-Joint (record label from the folks over at SF's world famous Groove Merchant record store) has been receiving some heavy pre-release hype. The subtitle here is "an international psychedelic mystery mix" and they've collected a batch of super rare, funky psychedelic rock from the late 60s/early 70s from all over the world. Keeping with that "mystery" theme, there is no tracklisting, no real info and a whole heap of undercover yap yap going on . . . We heard they sent out test presses to some of the top funk/psych collectors out there, all with individually unique covers, and the response has been overwhelmingly thumbs up . . .

The come-on is novel enough to hook you (all that mystery, ooooh) but the music doesn't come through. I'm not a deep enough connoisseur of this style to fill in any blanks or identify any artists, but I don't wonder why these obscurities are obscure: there is not one remarkable performance or haunting surprise. Far from being whacked-out or trippy beyond reason, it sounds mostly like half-hearted goofs from guys who once took 'shrooms in a college dorm. Granted, there is some spooky shit between tracks, odd Ward Cleaver voices intoning apparently senseless, decontextualized phrases -- but it's nothing you couldn't concoct yourself on an idle afternoon with a mixing program and a batch of sound-clips from Eisenhower-era educational films. Maybe Trap Door I was better.

JOHN KAY and The Sparrow
John Kay and The Sparrow
The wraparound-shaded, oddly stormtrooper-like Kay went on to form Steppenwolf, of course, and this 1966 configuration is that band’s embryo, featuring some of the same musicians. Kay’s identifiable take on blues-rock, guitar-based and low-throated, is already in place, and already dull. Interesting that, although Kay steered Steppenwolf away from anything that smacked (musically, if not lyrically) of the psychedelic, the sole standout song is a slow-melting psych sundae called “Chasin’ Shadows” (by Dennis Edmonton, who didn’t make it to Steppenwolf). Interesting, too, how the rest of this proves Kay had pretty much hit his limits before even scoring his first hit.

Greatest Record Ever?
"Nothing but a Heartache," The Flirtations

2006-07-01T18:39:00.000-07:00

SAY ANYTHING
. . . is a Real Boy
Baseball
Lead singer-writer Max Bemis has bipolar disorder, but you’d never know from his music he had anything worse than ants in the pants. Real Boy, first released in 2004 and recently reissued with a bonus disc of new material, is the kind of post-grunge white-boy aggression that sets my teeth on edge. Hooks are not hooks but more like those smooth white plastic tubes you hang bathtowels on. In place of passion is overenunciation and a glottal quiver. Listen to Bemis and his co-dorks sing the title word of “Woe”: with what love for their own emotive lips and all-clever tongues they draw and distend the phoneme until it has no emotional meaning, only ironic symbolism.

Though I have to say that, if it were a scrap turned up accidentally on some back-catalog indie compilation, “The Writhing South” might be worth a second listen. But only a second.

Baseball, the 2005 follower, is half as ambitious but just as irritating. “The Ocean Liner Incident 1” works up a decent head of steam, but most of the album is flailing emo rage, all shaking bangs and stomping sneakers, the kind of shit-fits it doesn’t take a bipolar to throw. My wife perked up at the first song, “Color Blind,” saying it was a subliminal rip from the Cure’s “10:15 Saturday Night.” Things went downhill from there.

BILLY STEWART
“Billy’s Heartache”
Before recording his great sides at Chess, Billy (“Fat Boy”) Stewart was a piano player. Discovered by Bo Diddley, signed briefly to Chess and briefly again to Okeh, he did this novelty nubbin in 1957. Pure pleasure; utter silliness, as clear and straight and unconcerned as an outer-space radio beam on a tropical night. It wasn’t a big hit, nor could it have been, at least in this world: its mix of doo wop form and calypso-cum-scat vocal, roasted crisp in the oven of Billy’s weird upper-octave voice, is not calculated to strike the mass chord. Is it calculated, then, to sound this weird? No, it couldn’t be -- this kind of weirdness isn’t planned, it only happens.

That's the Marquees doing the rah-pa-pa-do backup, and one of those Marquees is Marvin Gaye.

NEIL YOUNG
Living with War
It took three listens to finally, fully confirm how loud this album sucked, how badly it blew. That it was one of the worst things Young had done in a genius career full of best things and worst things. That yes it was indeed down there in the depths with Trans or Landing on Water. It came packaged as a cardboard box wrapped in plain brown paper, title stamped in black stenciling -- and that was appropriate, given that the goods inside were just that dumb and dimensionless, that repellently unengaging. By that third listen, not even the ghost of a doubt remained about how bad it was.

I don't like it when Neil does this sort of chunky, block-rock style: it's nothing new in the world, and it's not the return of anything good. But then, unlike most Neil fans, I detest "Rockin' in the Free World" and don't rate Everybody Knows This is Nowhere anywhere near the top.

Every song is Neil Young singing, barely, or more commonly blaring, over the heavy lumber of a four-square, straight-face rock march. On almost every song, Neil is accompanied by a choir -- black voices, white voices, presumably young and old alike, the True Collective Voice of America. This is an America I don't want to live in: the same America that gives me commercials that offer endless credit debt as proof of patriotism, that have always featured the True Collective Voice of America singing lines like Raise your hand, raise your hand if you're Sure! We're not truly this stupid mobby mass clapping and braying as one, we don't stand together in fields shilling for sodas or phone companies or fucking world peace.

The album's one memorable hook, embedded in “Roger and Out," is lifted from "Helpless," while another song sounds like “Freedom.” More specific than that about the material's pervading mediocrity and second-handedness I cannot be.

Don't need no more lies! is the album's catch-slogan, its rallying cry. Certainly we don't, and Young is expressing, forthrightly and without equivocation, what a lot of Americans have believed for some time, and others are slowly but surely waking up to. But merely yelping it over and over isn't doing an artist's job. The artist's job is to transform reality, turn over dirt, put a jack in the box, not just yelp a simplistic truth over and over.

Someone might say -- let's assume the straw man for a moment -- that beauty and art are beside the point just now. That the war is the thing, Bush is the issue, and anything a musician with social goals might offer that distracts from that awareness is compromise. I don't agree with our straw man. The only compromise an artist makes is when he allows issues to determine the limits of his expression. Would Stephen Colbert's slow roasting of Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April have been more effective if it had been less funny? Would anyone consider that Colbert had done his job as a political satirist if he had abrogated his first responsibility, which is to entertain?

And as for protest rock, I don't know . . . if Iraq is the new Vietnam, which it most assuredly is, this may be the return of an old pop debate: how "artistic" can rock which wants to change society, change minds, afford to be? I'm not certain that's a question artists should ever ask themselves, and I'm trying to verbalize something about how Living with War says what all us liberals believe but says it so baldly and stupidly that it's actually counterproductive in a way. It doesn't make me, as a supporter of its critique, feel better or stronger or angrier, or anything except headachey. Meanwhile, it’s certainly not going to turn anyone against Bush who hasn't already been tipped that way by a dead son, or a brain-damaged husband, or a dip into the Abu Ghraib photo gallery, or rising gasoline prices. Whereas a protest album that had some beauty and tragedy and whimsy, in addition to (or instead of) squawking anger and chunky dumb-ass power chords, would give us all some sense of what would be lost if the Bushies really took over the world -- which, according to the polls, they haven't quite managed to do yet.

The last track is the choir singing “America the Beautiful.” Almost inevitably, it reminded me of the end of The Deer Hunter, the Vietnam vets, their friends and lovers singing “God Bless America.” In 1978, it was a controversial ending -- God bless America indeed! How could the filmmakers sanction our Vietnam carnage with such a flag-waving affirmation? Bullshit. That ending had levels -- not to mention missing legs and bullet holes and catatonia and impotence and misery and absence and finally just helpless tears. It's difficult today to conceive that anyone could have taken it that straight: the absences are pretty much all you see, while affirmation dissolves in the empty chair, the silence that follows the singing.

Young’s “America the Beautiful," though, is just what it says. And it’s as dull and empty of real affirmation -- real nerves, real life, your life as a citizen, the life of your country -- as Kate Smith sounded to Americans of Young's generation. So it’s a fitting end, I must primly put it, for an album gripped to death and beyond by musical complacency, moral certainty, and just plain bad songs.

And now the news . . .

This is far from strictly musical, but it is the best laugh I’ve had in a while, and it does have a legitimate musical connection. Here is the story, courtesy of Reuters:

David Hasselhoff undergoes surgery
Fri Jun 30, 5:35 PM ET

LONDON - Former "Baywatch" star David Hasselhoff had surgery after severing a tendon in his right arm in an accident in a London gym bathroom, his spokeswoman said Friday.

The 53-year-old actor, who played lifeguard Mitch Buchannon on the TV beach drama for 11 years, was shaving at a gym in the Sanderson Hotel on Thursday when he hit his head on a chandelier, showering his arm with broken glass, his publicist, Judy Katz, said.

Doctors operated to repair the injury and Hasselhoff spent one night at St. Thomas' Hospital in central London, Katz said.

"He's fine," Katz said by phone from New York. "He's out of the hospital and will resume filming tomorrow."

Hasselhoff is working on an ad campaign for Pipex, a British internet company, she said.

He hit his head on a chandelier? While standing there shaving? And the chandelier exploded? With sufficient force to sever a tendon?

That’s the craziest explanation for a celebrity misadventure I’ve heard since the one about Winona Ryder researching a role by attempting to shoplift clothes. Or Eddie Murphy picking up a transvestite hooker because he wanted to give her a ride home. Or Michael Hutchence, lead singer of INXS, choking on his belt because he chose suicide rather than the more likely cause, a pursuit of the asphyxiation-heightened mega-orgasm. And there is your legitimate musical connection.

SIMON AND GARFUNKEL
Johns Hopkins University Live - 1966
I don’t hate Simon and Garfunkel -- in fact I love them, their limpid sorrows, their mysteries and delicacies, their early Tom Wilson-produced junk-pop for progressive high school seniors. But I’ve often hated Paul Simon, whose fussy lyrics and faux-intensity so clearly mark him as a Saul Bellow wannabe; who would drop Clive Davis in a second if William Shawn came calling; who began claiming later in life that he’s really a rocker at heart, a doo wop kid from Queens, but whose idea of rocking is to waggle his butt a little and sing “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” (Oy.)

Those who hate the whole Simon schmear will find all the justification they need right here. This bootleg (from an original FM broadcast) captures the turtlenecked duo just before they hit full-blown sensation status and were embraced by middlebrow worrywarts as telegenic weathervanes of changing times. Never a sterling live act, S&G needed Tom Wilson’s pop hand, and later Roy Halee’s cathedral slickness, to get across; the music as rendered here, just voice and guitar, is soft all over, no sharp points or dark pockets. Garfunkel, as many other live tapes from these years show, was far the funnier, friendlier of the pair, at least in his patter; while Simon, in compensation for his greater talent, was yoked with a pretentiousness all but atomic in its glare. While serving up a tepid rack of odes to the state of alienation -- all academy-friendly, literary references in place -- Simon digresses on Red Skelton’s lack of hipness and the lighting technician’s misguided choice of a red spot, all in an ersatz British enunciation that surely inspired one or two assassination fantasies even in this controlled liberal environment.

Oh yes, and there’s a teen-pop parody, thankfully unreleased elsewhere, called “Acne.” Not nearly as funny as Peter, Paul and Mary doing "Blue" on their In Concert album. Because I’m a teenage moron, is Simon's punchline. Better that than a post-adolescent windbag.

PETER & GORDON
Knight in Rusty Armour
In London for Tea
You can’t blame this twaddle on Swinging London: these boys had eyes and egos trained on Las Vegas -- and would have made a big hit there, had the Mafia solicited British Invaders to entertain at their hotels. Peter got lucky and was able to channel his crap-knack into James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt; Gordon became an actor. Killing time before finding their true stations, the duo recorded a couple of better-than-fine Invasion singles and fetching folk-poppers before giving in, circa 1966, to horns, strings, variety-show emotion, kitschy throwbacks and frosted-layer-cake contrivances. These two albums, '67 in vintage, protrude from that muck. "Lady Godiva" is the best of the style -- and we know how bad that was.

THE CHAMBERS BROTHERS
The Time Has Come
The Chambers were a gospel unit that played folk festivals in the early ‘60s and did a rather glum (and rightly rejected) vocal glide behind Bob Dylan’s first version of “Tombstone Blues.” Then they went drug-conscious and flower-clothed, and integrated colors and styles with a white, rock-schooled drummer. Their moment went almost as soon as it came -- but at least it came. The full 11 minutes of “Time Has Come Today” remain tense, surging, exciting, cumulative, climactic. It’s one of the few songs that haven’t been stripped clean by decades of overuse in those lazy ‘60s-summarizing montages of dancing hippies, gas-masked cops, and waving placards. (“Let’s Get Together” bit the dust long ago; “All Along the Watchtower” fights to survive.)

The rest is, at best, a chunky rock-funk amalgam that predicts Funkadelic; at worst, listenable psychedelic soul that outclasses Rotary Connection.

* * *

And finally today, a gift for the Elvisoids:

Japan's PM Koizumi imitates Elvis Presley while visiting Graceland

“Outside the gates, there were four men in Elvis suits . . . they were protesting . . . they said Japan was hunting whales for scientific
research . . . they wanted it to stop . . . and they were singing ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ . . . this was happening right in front of me . . .”

2006-06-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

Music, gawdammit, MUSIC!!!!!!
cried the Grenadier.
With blood on the glass and a ghost in the cellar.

Somewhere, there's a place for us . . .

2006-06-04T02:39:00.000-07:00

PAULINE KAEL / DWIGHT MACDONALD / JOHN SIMON
Film festival colloquy, 1963

This comes from this. To listen, scroll down to May 14, for the entry titled “When Film Critics Gather.”

The blogger's notes to these 73 minutes of singular audio -- explaining just who these critics were, why they were important, and why their cultural moment will not come again -- sum up the proceedings with more penetration and explanatory zest than I can muster, so I’ll suggest you read those for a fuller apprehension. These are my thoughts while listening:

I’m familiar with the work of all three critics, but Simon -- who has always sounded like Dracula reincarnated as a private-academy pedant -- is the only one whose voice I’d heard. So the others hit like cold fresh winds blowing through familiar rooms. Pauline Kael, despite hailing from California farm country, sounds forth in an apple-crisp Yankee intonation. Macdonald is poky but combative, the badge-wearing agitator in his autumn, the sharpest Old Leftie in the delicatessen: you hear the history of New York intellectual politics in his broadened vowels.

Of the three, Simon, I reluctantly admit, comes off best by far. His remarks are saucy, articulate, and pointed. Agree or disagree, he has the debater’s quick rhythms and coherence of mind; he is hyperconscious every instant of not just the question he has been asked and the separate thematic strands of his response, but audience, co-panelists, moderator, tape recorder, posterity. Macdonald comes second, by dint, I guess, of sheer dogged consistency: it's difficult to trap someone in a contradiction when they seem to have no contradictory -- or weird, or original, or interesting -- thoughts.

Kael, much the best writer, deepest feeler, and boldest critic of the bunch, doesn't have her best night. Though she does throw out one great phrase: “marvelous ambiguity and split in the content.” Critically speaking, whether in film, literature, or music, that's what you look for: that's the whole ball of wax.

She argues for the specificity of American experience where Simon and Macdonald, each for his own reason, fight the idea; Kael claims anyone who cares about an art form becomes an insider by accrual of knowledge and passion, while Simon and Macdonald argue the outsider (outside of Hollywood, that is) position.

Macdonald charms the troops by offering to resign his post when confronted with the lethal banality of his own prose.

Simon advances the poisonous certainty that the great Satyajit Ray’s films are “insulting to the Western mind." He doesn't state the implied correlative, that in their meagerness of narrative, shoddiness of technique, and inadequacy of intellection (as he sees it) they are or should be perfectly acceptable to the Eastern mind.

In the event, Simon’s consummate snob and Macdonald’s elitist populist find common cause throughout the discussion -- a spectacle as unlikely, and certainly as unappetizing, as the sexual congress of a lizard and a mandrill.

Outbreaks of applause and catcalls punctuate this robust and entertaining round of pugilistic persiflage. It's all brisk and enlivening. It’s also -- for one who fancies himself a critic and has worked for 20 years at becoming one -- depressing and a little nauseating. This sort of colloquy makes for witty, civilized sport, and would seem just the kind of brain-bran our clotted culture needs more of. But it's not that at all. It's a world-embracing sweep of ideas, some deep and some shallow, skimmed lightly and served as a kind of higher froth, a designer milkshake, with mutual contempt as thickener and flavoring.

This is the sound of what Simon in later years, shaking his head while smacking his lips, would call the “blood sport” of film criticism. ("When Film Critics Gather" = "When Animals Attack"?) This is the sound of those inane critical "feuds" that ate up a lot of the rest of the 1960s and the best energies of the best critics. This is the great Kael wasting so much of her precious early print-space in Film Quarterly and Partisan Review reprinting the comments of her competitors and belaboring their foolishly conventional judgments. This is the conception scene that results, some dark day distant, in Dale Peck.

This is the sound that is made when the critical personality lusts, even a little, after celebrity. That lust is very different from wanting your work to be read. It’s wanting your face to be known. Your verdict feared, your authority honored, your decrees executed. It’s about coteries and settling scores and being invited to parties, or not. It’s bullshit, and I spend a lot of my time resisting every urge to give in to it -- if the day should come that anyone offers.

So I thank these critics: listening to them has made that resistance a lot easier. For now.

STRANDED -- The Countdown (13)

Backtrack 3

BELMONTS, “Tell Me Why” (Sabrina). Definitive doo wop from the great olive-skinned angel toughs of Belmont Avenue: a jauntier, funkier, sax-saltier version of suburban letter-sweater whitebread style. Surprisingly fat sound for the time and the genre. I like it better every time I hear it. Was Dion burstingly proud, or secretly seething? 1961.

Now, where were we . . .

CADETS, “Stranded in the Jungle” (Modern). Cannibals and cauldrons, tribal drums and Tarzan yells — all cooked up by two black songwriters and charted by the black Cadets off an original by the black Jayhawks. As pure sound, a triumph of lo-fi atmospherics. As pop-art code, a notable sub-chapter in someone's history of ethnic transgression. (Racism or reclamation?) As narrative, an all-time goof. As music, you could get tired of it fast: Leiber and Stoller would have shortened it by at least a verse, and the Coasters would have demanded a faster tempo. 1956.

CADILLACS, “Speedo” (Josie). Is it "Speedo" or "Speedoo"? Or is Earl Carroll singing "Speed-ee-o," as he has always claimed? Why has no longhair disquisition on pop "poetry" ever referenced composer Esther Navarro's rhyme of "Earl" with "other folks's girls"? Is this Mister Earl any relation to the Duke of Earl, who appeared in Chicago seven years after Speedo's mysterious disappearance in Harlem? (Perhaps the Duke is the boyishly rapid Mister seven years cagier, with a new hustle and smoother delivery, a silk hat and sleazy charm, fantasies of nobility and omnipotence. Where's the DNA kit?) So the record itself is a pickled giblet, a dip of snuff, no bigger than your little finger. But the questions it raises can keep us up all night. 1955.

J.J. CALE, “Going Down” (Shelter). I'd call it "blues rock," except it doesn't have the blues and it doesn't rock. It sort of diddles. It definitely mumbles. "Wet shit"? No, that would be rude. 1973.

JOHN CALE, Vintage Violence (Columbia). The scary Welshman whose viola scraped "Venus in Furs" down to raw skin, and whose placid sensuality saved "The Gift" from being just another shaggy-drill story, avoids hellish precincts on his first solo album. Instead he fiddles banshee noises in the barn, pounds piano in the meadow, moons grandly over the big white clouds. Plays nice with Fairport Convention and the young Elton John, but stays on the other side of the barn, calling across for the echo. This is orchestral country pop with a sense of eternity and a striving for intimacy; the one comes through, while the other never does, quite. But failure is fascination: the record has the feel of stones and the taste of dirt, yet never seems to finally, fully touch down on earth. Down in the mud, giving everybody blood. "Charlemagne" is a highlight, and "Cloud" is one of the biggest, most beautiful productions you'll ever hear. 1970.

FREDDIE CANNON, “Palisades Park” (Swan). That roller-coaster organ goes to your adrenals like cotton candy goes to your cavities. The song is novelty genius (top the charts and plug a park), the production as modestly evocative of specific physical excitements as any you or I can name. And it's only a minute-fifty: it never has a chance to become irritating. (Evidence that it was unrepeatable: "Tallahassee Lassie," a follow-up contrived by mostly the same folks, is irritating at once.)

Freddie Cannon is Exhibit A in any argument that a guy doesn't have to be a great singer to sing something great. I remember seeing him on that awful syndicated show Sha Na Na had back in the '70s. Bare-chested, big-haired, over the hill, Freddie did his death-defying knee-bend and lightning-bolt finger-throw on the key pause ("when I fell in love -- bom-BOMP -- down at Palisades Park") with all the dedication and brio of a man who never stopped loving the song that made him a flash in the pan. (Or a man who stopped loving it long ago, but can still fake it really well.)

Written, as we all know, by Mr. "Gong Show" himself, Chuck Barris; for background, however fanciful, see Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (a fabulous movie, even if not a scene is true). For further research into the possibilities first implied by this record, see the Everly Brothers' "The Ferris Wheel," or the Beach Boys' "Amusement Parks USA," or Jan & Dean's "Carnival of Sound," or the Beatles' "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!," or Nick Lowe's "Rollers Show," or The Beach Boys Love You, or Richard and Linda Thompson's "Wall of Death," or Dire Straits' "Tunnel of Love," or Bruce Springsteen's "Tunnel of Love" . . . 1962.

CAPRIS, “There’s a Moon Out Tonight” (Planet/Old Town). The trouble with doo wop, like any genre with fairly limited expressive codes (reggae and punk being others), is that it's too easy to be proficient at it without being special: follow the template, plug in the upstroke or the attitude or the falsetto, and you've got yourself a song. Specialness calls for that dash of the unaccountable, of pure individual or collective identity asserting itself in a felicitous hiccup, a spontaneous howl, a chord slanted against conventional musicality. For a doo wop paradigm, experience the Marcels' bluesy, dissonant, avant-angled distortion of the Moonglows' ruler-straight plaint "Most of All."

The Capris now, they don't go in for that hoodoo talk. They are purists, choirboys, line-readers. Which means that nothing so base as personal expression sullies their purity. And also means that there's nothing special here beyond their voicing of the title phrase and its augmenting thought, Whoa-ho-ho-oooh -- and those aren't special enough. (Historical note: melodically, the bridge seems to rip off that of Ritchie Valens' "Donna": Oh darling, now that you're gone, I don't know what I'll do becomes Oh darling, where have you been, I have been longing for you all my life. Gotcha!) 1960.

Greatest Record Ever?
"The Nightingale," Julee Cruise

IT WAS 40 YEARS AGO TODAY

2006-05-27T07:00:00.000-07:00

Empire Pool, Wembley,
May 1, 1966

Royal Albert Hall,
May 27, 1966

The London morning is cold, the light white and blinding. Tom, an Englishman, chauffeurs a limousine along a circuitous path from John Lennon’s suburban Surrey home to Bob Dylan’s suite at the Mayfair Hotel on Stratton Street. The camera is wielded by documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, who is covering Dylan’s European tour for a projected ABC-TV special; sound is being recorded by Bobby Neuwirth, Dylan’s road manager and flunky. History does not record what Dylan and Lennon have been up to all night, nor what human wisdoms they’ve exchanged. But this small space is where the camera finds them at 7 o’clock on the morning of May 27, 1966, the very day of Dylan’s final performance at the Royal Albert Hall, which performance will also be the last of his current English tour. In the audience tonight, snug and shadowed in their VIP boxes, will be Lennon and George Harrison.

The limousine exchange is true Rashomon material: many writers have referenced the encounter over the years, and none have quite agreed on what is being shown. Bob Spitz, in Bob Dylan: A Biography, interprets Dylan’s description of Johnny Cash as a put-down, reads Lennon’s bemused regard as traumatized disgust, and describes a graphic vomiting climax to which only he, apparently, has been privy. Spitz also claims that Dylan is heavy into psychedelics by this point (doubtful—this is all booze) and that Lennon is still a year away from trying LSD for the first time. (Even though he’s in the midst of the Revolver sessions – had Spitz ever heard those songs?) All of which dubious claims are par for a biography whose acknowledgements thank Albert Goldman.

In a far-gone edition of Mystery Train, Greil Marcus said the scene showed Dylan and Lennon “fencing brutally,” which seems a bit strong. Michael Gray, in the upcoming Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, says it shows “Dylan so stoned that he’s about to throw up and Lennon, nervous as a racehorse and compensating for his nerves and the moment’s futility by keeping up a frenetic overly perky commentary.”

Jon Dolan, in Minneapolis’s City Pages, writes of the “excruciatingly long car ride” which “ends with Dylan hunched over, head in hands in a fit of sheer, beleaguered embarrassment, and Lennon over him yelling, ‘Pull yourself together, man! Chop chop money money!’ We're supposed to think this is ironic . . . But there's nothing ironic about Lennon's frustration; you wait for him to lean in and say, Listen, you little twerp, I gotta be in this thing too, so sit up and start making some Donovan jokes before these chumps run out of film.”

Under his nom de paranoid of The Blacklisted Journalist, the late Al Aronowitz – former New York Post reporter and pop-culture gadfly who introduced Dylan to the Beatles—contributes a hyperbolic report on the limo session, based on the bootleg film. Includes a unique paragraph on the vomiting controversy; valuable for personal insight into Dylan’s continual readiness to hurl.

Mark Lewisohn’s description, in The Complete Beatles Chronicle, goes like this, dodgy syntax and all: “Without a script and no apparent direction other than to be themselves, the piece was long, incoherent and incomprehensible, made worse by the fact that Dylan (and possibly John, too, though not as much) was clearly well under the influence of drugs. After muttering a lot of stoned gibberish Dylan suddenly announced that he felt ill and needed to puke. The car had reached Park Lane by this time and, presumably, he was able to perform this function in the privacy of his hotel suite.”

Asked by Jann Wenner in 1970 to describe the encounter, Lennon remembered mainly that he was “Frightened as hell.” It was his perception that the camera had caught him “blabbing off . . . commenting all the time, like you do when you’re very high and stoned.” I’m not aware that Dylan has ever commented publicly on the meeting.

The limousine exchange was cut to just a few seconds for inclusion in Eat the Document (1971), Dylan’s violently anti-linear hour-long record of the UK tour that ended in London that very night in May. Both Document and the uncut scene (about twenty minutes long) circulate on bootleg tapes. Here is my version of the encounter, based on intensive and repeated viewings of the uncut footage, and verbatim transcription of the most interesting dialogue.

Bob Dylan is all black and white. Eyes hidden behind black shades, he wears a black suitcoat over a white shirt buttoned to the throat; his face is strikingly pale under an unholy thicket of dark hair. His starkness stylizes him. The camera is close to his face – very close: Dylan looms upon it like a large gaunt spook. Visibly exhausted, palpably uncomfortable, he takes compulsive shallow puffs on a cigarette. One notices that the nails on his right hand are long and sharp. Occasionally he takes a slug from a bottle of Jack Daniels. That he is brutally stoned could not be more apparent.

Beside him, wedged into a corner of the limousine, is John Lennon, who wears blue-tinted glasses with matching blue suit and turtleneck. Next to Dylan’s pointy edges and raw bones he is serenity itself: skin a healthy shade, cheeks as round as the rims of his glasses, hair clean and lustrous. He consumes his cigarette in smooth motions, and stares at the camera through the smoke.

So Dylan muses out the window. “There’s the mighty Thames,” he says, pointing. “That’s what held Hitler back.”

“What?” Neuwirth laughs.

“The mighty Thames – yes. Winston Churchill said that. Ain’t that right, Tom?”

The chauffeur responds affirmatively but dispassionately.

“Ain’t that right, Tom!” Dylan warns.

“Yes, definitely,” Tom replies, more briskly. “Definitely right.”

But Dylan, smelling blood, wants a taste. “Tom,” he says, “I think I’m gonna turn you into Tyrone Power.”

It means nothing, this reference, and that’s all right; but to Lennon, “Tyrone Power” doesn’t quite make it. As a non-sequitur it doesn’t yield the secret sense that any good non-sequitur must. He gives Dylan a prompt. “Say that again, will you, Bob?”

“Tom?”

“Yes.”

“I think I’m gonna turn you into Ronald Colman.”

Ah – that nails it. Ronald Colman! “Much better,” Pennebaker agrees, from behind his camera. “Much better.”

On a free-associative roll, Dylan throws out a welter of names: Peetie Wheatstraw, Sleepy John Estes, Robert Johnson, J. Carroll Naish. Three country blues singers and an English character actor. Lennon, playing along, mentions Johnny Cash.

Dylan rises at the name. “I have Johnny Cash in my film.” He is excited. “You’ll shit, man.”

“Oh, really?”

“You’re gonna shit when you see it. You won’t believe this.”

“Hear that, kids,” Lennon cries at the camera, “John’s gonna shit again!”

“Ha. You know what he looks like, right, Johnny Cash? You spent much time around him?”

“No.”

“He moves great. He moves very – like that, man.” Dylan’s torso jerks forward as if seizing with mild epilepsy. He smiles and waves a hand at Pennebaker. “Hey, you gotta cut that part outta the film, man, ‘cause I really like him, he’s a nice cat. I mean like he moves like that, like all the good – all the good people, man, move like that – “ Dylan aborts his obscure explication of how Cash moves, and settles for a wave and greeting.

Lennon gives a thumbs-up, and sings the title line from Cash’s 1958 song “Big River.”

“Yeah,” Dylan says, “he’s all right, he’s in our film, he’s quite a . . .”

“He’s quite a guy, huh.”

“Quite a guy, John, really. Oh, man, how . . .” Dylan’s eyebrows work behind the impenetrable shades, trying to retrieve a memory, an image. “Oh, you should’ve been around last night, John, you should’ve – you should’ve been around last night. And tonight is – and tonight is a drag, man – “

“Really, Bob?” Lennon’s flat voice, against Dylan’s grueling struggle to express, makes the others laugh.

“Yeah,” Dylan says, “tonight is a drag.” He relents, laughs too. “I wish I could talk English, man.”

“Me too, Bobby.”

Lennon’s prompt agreement, not to mention his gratuitous use of the diminutive, is almost a put-down. But surprisingly, Dylan is a sport about it. He even creeps up on a compliment, before it slips away. “He can talk American, he can . . . talk . . . Hey, Tom.” The chauffer thought he was forgotten, safe. “You’ve heard me talk English, haven’t you now.”

“Yes.”

“Huh? I can’t never do it around John, though, ‘cause John’s such . . .”

A pause: what is it he wants to say? What is the finest encomium he can offer, and the subtlest challenge? Dylan leans in even closer to the camera, hides his mouth behind his hand, and says in a stage whisper:

“John’s such a great actor, man.”

Turning in his seat, away from the camera and toward Lennon, Dylan speaks secretively, conspiratorially, one professional to another.

“You said – you said – do you remember what you said to me when I played you those tapes?” Lennon mumbles; he can’t recall. “When I played you those tapes? I’ll tell you this – I’ll – I’ll tell you this later. I – I was just, I was just gonna say – “

“Say it now,” Lennon presses, curious.

“Oh. Remember you said to me, I played you this song and you said something about it’s gotta be in . . . I didn’t realize it at the time, Robbie told me. You said it’s gotta be in – in your – your song publishing company. What’s the name of it? What’s your, you know, your song publishing company – “

“Oh, the song pooblishin’ company – “

“What – yeah, what is the name of it.”

“Dick James?”

“No, no – is that it?”

“Mmm.”

“Dick James. That wasn’t the name I heard.”

“Northern Songs?”

“Right, that was it. Right, right, right, right. That I’d be on Northern Songs and I said what – I said, what’s Northern Songs. And then I was never told, man. I had to go out and find out.”

“Didn’t I tell you?” Lennon asks.

“No, man, you didn’t tell me.” Suddenly Dylan’s tone is hostile. Almost a cartoon of hurt feelings. It’s a put-on, another challenge. A new ball of absurdity is rolling. “You said this’d be on Northern Songs and it was, everybody, you know, told – you laughed, and Paul McCartney looked the other way, and Ringo – ”

Lennon senses what is afoot. He knows the game.

He breaks in: “Now, Mick Jagger looked down and this – ”

Dylan responds, picks up energy: “And Mick Jagger did something – ”

“ – balloon dropped out of his face – ”

“ – and shit through his nose – ”

“ – and Rob Roy leapt into the room with a big kilt on and said, ‘Hey Bobby, have you heard this one?!”

The whole car breaks up; Dylan too. By the universal rules of the put-on, the most unanswerable absurdity takes the prize. Lennon has sniffed the challenge and taken the round. He smiles.

Things are only warming up. Excitement prickles in confined air.

“Tell me,” Lennon says, “about the Mamas and Papas, Bob, I believe you’re backing them very bigly. I hear they’re great – ”

“I knew it would get to that. I knew it would get to that.” Dylan smiles, bares those feral teeth. He sees a small opening here.

“I believe you’re backing them.”

“Nah, you’re just interested in the big one – the big chick, right?” Dylan taunts, referring to Cass Elliot. Perhaps his spies have dispatched rumors of a crypto-fascination between Cass and Lennon which he can exploit.

Note: Three months later, at an August 28 press conference in Hollywood, Lennon is asked if he has ever met Cass. “Yes,” he says, “she’s great, and I’m seein’ her tonight.” At the Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967, the Mamas and Papas include the Beatles’ “I Call Your Name” in their closing-night set; Cass introduces it by saying, “There are a lot of rumors that my ex-amore, John Lennon, would be here tonight. I say ‘ex’ because I’ve never made it a practice to associate with men with hair on their faces.”

“You’re just interested in the big chick," Dylan persists. "She’s got a hold of you too.” There is laughter from Neuwirth and Pennebaker; Lennon grins into the upholstery, uncertain. Dylan pushes his advantage. “She’s got a hold of you too. She’s got a hold of everybody I know, every – everybody asks me the same thing and I know what they mean – ”

Lennon attempts a feeble diversion. “Do you know, uh – do you know, uh – do you know, uh – ”

“They’re terrible, man,” Dylan spits. “They’re no good.” You can taste the contempt as his guttural Midwestern drawl deforms good into something like Goethe.

John offers another name. Garbled, it sounds like Ral Donner, obscure Elvis disciple and one-hit wonder of years past (“You Don’t Know What You’ve Got [Until You Lose It],” number four in 1961 – pretty much the same title phrase Lennon would use on a song of his own, from the 1974 Walls and Bridges LP.)

“Who?” Dylan asks. “No. I only know the lesser-knowns.”

“Mmm.”

“No, sir.”

The briefest of lulls as both fall quiet. But the gloves remain up.

“Barry McGuire’s a great war hero,” Lennon says, apparently confusing the man who a year before had growled the million-selling pop polemic “Eve of Destruction” with Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler, recent owner of a freak number-one American hit, “The Ballad of the Green Berets.”

Dylan throws this tepid potato right back. “Barry McGuire, he’s a great friend of yours, I understand.”

“He, I – he met me through you, Bob, remember?” Dylan laughs: Lennon is no readier than he to claim McGuire’s suspect intimacy. “He’s your great buddy, Sergeant Barry.”

Back and forth it goes.

“So tell me about The Silkies.” There is a hint of smug behind Dylan’s smile. Probably he feels “The Silkies” are about as good as the Mamas and the Papas.

Note: The Silkie – no plural – a Seekers-like folk unit from the English university town of Hull, had had their sole chart success in September 1965 covering “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” a record produced by Lennon and McCartney, with an instrumental assist from Harrison. Their lovely, melancholy first album, though anchored by the hit, was composed almost entirely of Dylan songs.

Ha, ha – but Lennon is not biting. He grins enigmatically. “No,” he says, “I’m not telling ya about that.”

“Yeah, tell me about – ooh, I have a pain in my side. Tell me about this pain in my side.”

Suddenly Dylan is flagging. Everything seems to be catching up with him – the long night before, the too-bright light of the cold morning, the cigarettes and drink, this limousine ride with no end; all the amphetamines, all the racing, all the effort and tension of competing, of getting it up and keeping it up here in the hot whirling center of the pop universe. Retreating to his corner, he quizzes Pennebaker on technical matters relating to the documentary.

After this break between rounds he snaps his fingers, trying to remember where things left off.

“Barry McGuire, Bob – ”

“Barry McGuire, right.”

“You come in with that.”

“All right. Uh, Barry McGuire, uh . . . tells me he’s a good friend of yours.”

Lennon leans in close. “Well, I – I hate to say this about Barry, Bob – or, Bobby.”

“Ha-ha.”

“I hate to, but I don’t know him at all, personally at all. But he – I did have a letter from his manager saying he was very, very close to you, being on the sort of buzzum of the current, uh . . . folka-rocka boom. You know – ”

“Ha. Yes, yes, I know that – ”

“So that’s the first thing I did hear about Barry myself.”

“Yeah. But, uh, you, you’ve never really exchanged correspondence – you never – oh, oh, get those two lovers over there.”

The camera follows Dylan’s thumb out the window; it fails to catch the objects of his attention.

“You never, you never did, uh . . . as, you know, as somebody would ask you, right. You know, as one of your friends would ask you, you never did meet the chap.”

Lennon, a sphinx, stares at the camera.

With that, the encounter passes its peak. From there the film will roll on, there will be further jokes and talk and jibes, but it will all be unfocused, frictionless. Everyone is tired. Dylan, greasy-skinned and sick, opts out.

“Damn,” he groans, “I wanna go back home.”

Which is where this brief engagement between the two major rock and roll heads of the time pretty much ends: in a draw, with nothing resolved. No great consummation – just an ironic Liverpudlian crossing paths with a surly Minnesotan, the Scouse bog-dweller and the angel-headed hipster joking, cussing, jabbing, exchanging the small talk of weary travelers who have seen some of the same places.

Soon Neuwirth’s tape will expire, and the image will continue without sound to explain it. Dylan will remove his shades and squeeze his eyes as if seeking to drive them back into his skull; his lips will stop moving, and he will detach himself from conversation. Lennon will continue laughing and chatting with the others in the car.

These final postures are not accidental: each will stay this way for the rest of the decade. Dylan will retreat into himself, into privacy and his prerogatives as a youth-culture hero, following knotty paths up the country and into quasi-conservatism, growing patchy little weeds of playfulness and funk amid an overgrowth of artistic complacency and confusion. Lennon, for his part, will continue to engage; in fact he will pursue his obsession with engagement to new and far reaches of megalomaniac idealism and craven holy-foolishness. Dylan will go to sleep; Lennon will refuse to shut up.

But that’s the future. This is the morning of May 27, 1966. Tonight Dylan, backed by The Hawks, will play a typically magnificent show at the Albert Hall, and John and George will cheer him on, combating those few remaining hecklers and hard-line Marxists, those vanishing ghosts of anti-electricity.

Soon Dylan will return home to Woodstock, there to crash his cycle and begin a hibernation that will last a year and a half and from which he will emerge all but unrecognizable, still a wraith in black and white, but the black and white of an Old Western hermit.

Lennon will board a plane with the other Beatles, and descend once more into the maelstrom. Germany awaits; as do Japan and the Phillippines; as do the United States. Marcos, terror, Christ and the Klan.

The year of Dylan’s life is almost over. The year of Lennon’s has barely begun.

2006-05-21T03:26:00.000-07:00

* * * Marginalia * * *

This came the other day in an e-mail from a friend in Forest Hills:

The Feast of St. Joey

In case you haven't heard, Friday, May 19 is Joey Ramone's birthday, and for the sake of all New York (and possibly the world), we will be paying him the homage that his spirit so richly deserves.

It's not too late to get involved: We still need people to help carry the Joey giglio from Tompkins to CB's, to participate in the Zippy the Pinhead look-alike contest, and to bring gifts to appease the spirit of our favorite late punkrocker.

. . .

And why do we do this?

In the five long years since Joey Ramone left home, our city has been afflicted by grave misfortune: mass carnage, regional blackout, crippling strike, Republicans! Clearly something is amiss. That's why the Hungry March Band has decided to undertake the first ever Feast of St. Joey on his birthday.

Couldn't hoit.

STRANDED -- The Countdown (12)

BURNING SPEAR, Garvey’s Ghost (Mango). The dub twin to Spear’s Marcus Garvey, which despite its classic status strikes me as a rather dreary collection of doctrinaire recitatives. This is moderately more engaging: the dub mix gives it depth and echo, it's both more fun and more sinister, and the vocals are brief and occasional. I admire Marcus (Greil, not Garvey)'s formulation of this as “Jamaican surf music . . . slave ships are visible on the horizon.” But you could say that about so much ‘70s reggae — all sun, sand, splash, and politics, a beach party that became a protest rally, or vice versa — and this doesn’t have the abandon or wail or surf-equivalent spirit of Marley or Tosh or Toots. Or alternative Spear, for that matter: his 1974 Studio One LP Rocking Time, which I’m listening to this very instant, is a delight of rhythm, harmony, happy-sadness. The politics are implicit — but in pop music, aren’t those usually the best kind? 1976.

BUZZCOCKS, Spiral Scratch (New Hormones/UK). Four songs inspired by the Sex Pistols – inspired, that is, to burn off the social rage and glean the chart gold. I like the Buzzcocks a lot, because they’re fast, they can write a tune, the boredom pose is one they wear so happily (it snaps them out of their boredom), and I like watching my wife dance to them. But they basically had one song – and in its best incarnation it was called “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve Fallen in Love With).” That’s not on here, and that’s what I’d take to the island. 1977.

BYRDS, Mr. Tambourine Man (Columbia). Half of this, face it, is plug dull: flawless harmonies flying over flat tunes; a long, bad Dylan cover; a Jackie De Shannon sure-shot badly botched; and a Strangelove theme presumably included for that touch of humor – in denial of the obvious fact that the Byrds weren’t funny. But for a group with so little collective personality, the Byrds certainly invented something remarkable, and did it timelessly well. The beauty here is not so soft or evanescent as it sounds at first: it’s protected by the velvet armor of ringing guitar, cloaked in the warm fog of harmony. It’s stood up well all these years. The great songs (the title track, “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better,” “Bells of Rhymney,” “I Knew I’d Want You”) still sound tingling and rich and untouchably distant, as if played and sung by sad, manly ghosts reaching through a veil separating their world from ours. And that bum bass note on the last verse of “Spanish Harlem Incident” is a pop moment to be prized. 1965.

-----. Turn! Turn! Turn! (Columbia). The ratio of great to good to so-so remains the same, but every level moves up a notch. The middling songs achieve a higher middle, and even the repeated meager joke of the final song is not quite so meager – though that’s not a distinction worth making more than once. Gene Clark writes morose, contemplative originals, there are a few cold, sharp, no-nonsense throwaways, and the JFK-updated “He Was a Friend of Mine” — whatever ‘60s veterans may feel about its evasive sentimentality — achieves, like the best of the Byrds, the feel of real lamentation. Not to mention it has, like the first album, one of the loveliest jackets ever. 1965.

-----. “Eight Miles High” (Columbia). Helpful household hint: use this whenever you need to blast the effluvia of bad music from your mind – a poison-pill ad jingle, or heinously catchy teen-hit. The harmony, guitar, tempo, elusive lyric, frenetic climax – it sounds so unlike anything else that it effectively obliterates, for a key three minutes, the memory that other music exists. 1966.

-----. The Notorious Byrd Brothers (Columbia). The Byrds’ great album, I think, and one of the greatest pop albums there’ve been. It gathers in a moment of time – not just ‘60s time but a time in anyone’s life – between childhood and adulthood, a long hanging, reverberating moment of first feeling age and the true terrifying size of things. It lingers on violence, and songs end when characters disappear before your eyes into madness or fantasy. The sound is all vibrating steel, cold sunlight, the voices of angels and hum of machines. The Byrds always sounded like specters, invisible men, and never more so than here, when the words they sang reached the hardest for human emotion and straight contact. Sad. 1968.

TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT WHAT I THINK ABOUT MUSIC THIS WEEKEND

2006-05-13T14:59:00.000-07:00

"Sopranos" Death Watch Continues -- Viewer Fears Worst

Strange things have been going on with "The Sopranos" musically. Not only is this the best season they've had in the last three or so, but their song picks have been scratching the back of my brain, sneaking up from the rear. Last week's show had two moments:

1) Christopher, the recovering doper and alcoholic, is back on the needle, back in the bottle. He shoots up at the Feast of St. Someone, and his sludgy nodding is scored to Fred Neil's "Dolphins," from his 1966 debut album. Hadn't heard this version before, didn't like it, couldn't help wishing they'd used the Linda Ronstadt-Stone Poneys remake, which I love. But that would have been too beautiful, too much for the scene, all wrong. Christopher is on his way down the toilet, not out over the sea. Neil with his graceless voice was dumb, thick, and just right. Strange how such things work.

2) The sound, far behind a fairground scene as Tony happily hoisted a toddler, of Johnny & The Hurricanes' 1959 instrumental "Red River Rock." A great plastic hybrid track, mating of the cheesy hard-shell roller-rink organ with the grainiest prairie-pop favorite of yesteryear -- "Red River Valley," theme to The Grapes of Wrath, once rasped tunelessly and touchingly by Henry Fonda's Tom Joad as he waltzed with Ma in the migrant camp. Only thing funny about its "Sopranos" appearance was that I'd come across the song earlier that day on the Internet, hearing it for the first time in years, warming to it like a long-lost childhood friend. My wife heard it for the first time ever and thought it was lovable. So we snapped each other smiles when, a few hours later, there it was on the TV.

And what is that strand running back behind this "Sopranos" season with "The Three Bells"? By my count the Browns' lachrymal 1959 death ballad has surfaced twice now:

1) Over the young man whose mob-connected father died, leaving him with a garbage business he must unload, and suddenly beholden to Tony, Paulie, and who knows what other shadily-motivated sociopaths. The fellow likes to row, practicing his craft in a long placid canal that looks like it might run by Harvard but is probably only a brackish Jersey slime-line. We hear the first verse of "The Three Bells." There's a village hidden deep in the valley, among the pine trees half forlorn -- and there on a sunny morning, little Jimmy Brown was born. By the end of the episode, Paulie has shown up to break the young rower's shins.

2) Over Vito -- the mound-like Soprano functionary who, outed as gay, goes on the run -- as he first fled his home, feeling the heat creep in. He sat on a motor lodge bed, gun on the nightstand. We heard the second verse of "The Three Bells." There's a village hidden deep in the valley, beneath the mountains high above -- and there twenty years thereafter, Jimmy was to meet his love. Soon Vito will take refuge in a quaint New Hampshire village. He'll meet a butch biker who makes johnnycakes in a diner. They'll kiss.

If you know how "The Three Bells" ends, it's hard -- no, impossible -- not to see these two fleeting aural emanations as omens, the song itself as a harbinger of Death, a sad black-robed wraith out of Medieval drama or a Bergman movie. "The Three Bells" will be heard again before the season is over: of that I am certain. And when it gets to that last verse, well, something is going to happen.

* * *

Slighted Song Returns in Triumph -- Listener Offers Contrition

I was listening to the second installment of Bob Dylan's satellite-radio show yesterday, the one where he plays DJ and picks the platters. This week's theme was "Mother," appropriate with Mom's own day coming up. Among Dylan's selections was Jan Bradley's "Mama Didn't Lie," which I recently dismissed in my Stranded countdown thusly:

JAN BRADLEY, "Mama Didn't Lie" (Formal/Chess). Hmm, so that's what this is. There are those songs you realize, upon identifying them in later years, you've actually heard many times before, without ever quite knowing what they were: their distant memory rushes up to greet you. I love that feeling, and I like this record. It fits roughly into the girl-group lineage, but the fit is pretty rough: the backing thumps a bit harder than usual for the genre (Chess on the label might account for that). And Bradley's vocal, sweet-natured but implying a largeness of spirit, is closer to Martha Reeves than Shirley Alston. Doesn't quite make it to the island, though. 1963.

I must say, this crow tastes mighty fine. Because Marcus was right. And Dylan was right. And MacManus was wrong. "Mama Didn't Lie" is beautiful, is an all-timer, and indeed would grace anyone's island, office, yard, room, radio, or dream life.

Please, Jan, take me back.

* * *

Grizzled Bard Turned DJ Hits 'Em Where They Ain't -- Listener Reports Surprise, Delight

The Dylan shows are pretty phenomenal so far. Playlists have been inspired, and even the records I might not care for at another time are transformed by context into rare and special things: the country and blues and other roots genres grow new roots when planted side by side, out of their usual confining genre-anthology window-boxes. Dylan plays Buck Owens next to LL Cool J, Carter Family's "Keep on the Sunny Side" with Joe Jones' original version of the Riverias surf classic "California Sun."

Dylan's patter is that of a greasy, grinning griot who just enjoys telling stories and doesn't need too many facts gumming up the flow. Lots of that old Chronicles cod-mysticism, and I love it. In fact listening to the shows is not unlike reading Chronicles for the first time: even if, like me, you're not someone who eats all things Dylan with a stick, you have to fall back a bit at the man's ease, his experience, his agrarian funk, his innate connection with some essential and all but vanished form of American strangeness, and think, Christ, he can dee-jay too?

* * *

Musical Legends Enter Endless Sleep -- Listener Wishes Sweet Dreams

Speaking of Buck Owens, a tip of the Stetson to his recently departed spirit: March 24, he suffered a heart attack just hours after performing for fans at his own Crystal Palace club in Bakersfield, California, the town he often sang of, the nowhere he made into a somewhere. 'Cause all I have to do is act naturally.

And let an invisible rose fall for Gene Pitney, who died of natural causes April 5 in a hotel room in Cardiff, Wales. He had received a standing ovation after his performance at St. David's Hall the night before. Pitney was 65 and went in his sleep. I wanna love, love, love, love my life away with you.

2006-05-07T04:24:00.000-07:00

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN & THE E STREET BAND
Hammersmith Odeon, London '75
Easy to forget the underdog Springsteen was at first: what a scraggly, skinny scrounger he looked and sounded, how his very image stank of beer and butts. His poetry came off a starvation high, and his rock and roll was in that long noble foolish tradition of rock-like-there's-no-tomorrow: One day we'll make our compromises with job and law, but for these few years we'll live the myth.

His moment came around and he tore it open. From that opening poured no money, only delirium; no idolatry, only excitement; no responsibilities, only explosion. In that moment he was both the feted superstar and the anonymous club rat, living the myth and deferring the compromises. Behind him was a group that stomped on an angel cloud of ringing piano and sleigh bells. Hammersmith Odeon, London '75 is a straight and glorious route back to that moment.

Today he is the solid-bodied, soul-patched, gravel-pitched man of substance who places himself in obstinate and customarily dull opposition to whatever stream is main in the pop world. No longer the underdog, he sings in the underdog's stead. Against the momentness of before, he is centered and obliged. Means what he says, says what he means. Hand me down my walkin' stick. We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions is the latest expression of Springsteen's accruing gravity, the thickening of callow youth into solid citizenship.

Guess which image still flames? Which music still flies?

Recorded in three days on his New Jersey farm with New York musicians (all manner of folk instrumentation plus strings, horns, and chorus), We Shall Overcome consists of songs Springsteen learned from Pete Seeger versions. Most are given boisterous handling, are roughed around and banged on by a likably rowdy ensemble. A couple of ballads ("Shenandoah" and "Mrs. McGrath") are not un-moving. It all sounds right. And yet there is nothing remotely surprising to it. Nothing there that shouldn't be there, no element or attitude we couldn't have imagined fitting until the right visionary stuck it in sideways.

We Shall Overcome is better than Devils & Dust, but mainly because it is louder, not deeper or farther or higher. Springsteen, unlike Elvis Costello, has simply not made the punk's maturity interesting -- let alone thrilling or magical. His own songwriting has not evolved with the years, and to these populist standards he brings little but conviction. That's a lot more than nothing, and a lot less than enough. Additionally, it's gotten harder to ignore how false Springsteen's "folk" voice sounds -- how forced and external, as if he'd inserted a fishhook in his voice and were tugging it this way for a drawl, that way for a sneer. Nebraska caught him working his way into a country accent, an attempt at plains-states flatness, and it fit with his characters' ways of working themselves into their stories, as if they were unused to having attention paid to them. But on We Shall Overcome, his stuffing of Okie nasalities into the dirt farmer's lament is nearly as blatant, and just as predictable, as Melissa Etheridge slathering phony passion over a stalker-in-love lyric. Where he always ranged loose as a rocker and could send it sailing as a popper, Springsteen is in chains as a folkie. He's reduced to second-hand phrasing, a cupped-in-the-tongue mumble trading with a dry-gulch growl.

Springsteen is all the proof we need that it's not enough for an artist's heart to be in the right place. More important is that the sound be in the right place -- or in the wrong place at the right moment. Springsteen will dry up and blow away altogether if he tries to follow Dylan down the sexagenarian-folkie road. He eats roots and shits boredom. What kind of future is that for him? Or for us? This solid music, drawn from dust and addressed to the ages, will, I'm certain, be forgotten next month.

But 1975 will live on. The marathon London concert, November of that fateful year, Born to Run making its move on pop history, places him before a polite English crowd that waits until a song is safely finished before applauding, that will not blight a dramatic pause by shouting Mum, you naughty girl or I'm from Stepney! Though the E Street Band's piano-rich and rhythm-hard sound often conjures the specter of Dylan-Hawks '66, and many in the audience already know the Born to Run songs, you can believe this crowd has never quite met this spectacle before: this American runaway Chevrolet highway jukebox dream. Yet there's an inch-thick charge running through this performance that can make you need to urinate almost instantly. The night was clear and the moon was yellow and the leaves came tumbling down, Bruce sings to invoke the spirit in the night, and Max Weinberg rolls the drums like a ghost wind shivering the trees. It's only the beginning.

This yes-crying love-punk does new songs like oldies, lays into Mitch Ryder and Gary "U.S." Bonds as if he'd written their songs himself. He does Bo Diddley justice on "She's the One." Though Springsteen is heroic in remembering all those lyrics, his music kicks New Dylan claptrap to the curb: this is all pre-Beatles romance, Spector sonority, Dirt City grindhouse.

A second-generation rocker, Springsteen was among the first to be able to live out the styles he'd been given by Elvis and the Beatles and James Brown and Ronnie Spector -- but he was bold and loving and gifted enough to inhabit the rock and roll body itself, not just wear its clothes. He lived the myths he'd been given, and in the process made his own.

Myth lives and flies in this London concert, as it does in the other shows one can hear from Springsteen's early, legendary days (The Bottom Line in New York, The Main Point in Bryn Mawr, The Tower in Philadelphia). Bruce was so absolutely myth-besotted then. The rock and roll myths, that is, which ordinarily call for howls, or at least whoops. But Springsteen's vocal arsenal of the time, you realize listening to this, is equally rife with whispers and gasps, as if he were creeping up on those sleeping myths -- the phantom Chevy, the shredded graduation dress, the road leading out of town -- terrified to find that the myths he was once given are alive, they do exist. Terrified to realize they might rip him apart if he wakes them.

What choice is there? He is a rock and roll hero. He wakes those myths up. And he rips them apart.

1975 will live on.

Le TIGRE
From the Desk of Mr. Lady
This Island
It was a summer's day yesterday, one of the few really summery days we've had in Brooklyn this year, and the breeze was coming in the window and caressing my neck as I listened to This Island.

I first posted on Le Tigre a little while back, having been guiled by a motley array of tracks and not having done much research about who they were or where they came from. Transpires they're the project mainly of Kathleen Hanna, formerly of the riot-grrrl pioneers Bikini Kill. BK songs were, with odd exceptions, feedback squeal, white noise, three chords: punk. (One exception, "Outta Me," could almost have been a love song, even with that line, I remember the back of your hand.) But maybe the progression from hard punk to dance punk makes sense if we look back to John Rotten/Lydon: Le Tigre as Hanna's equivalent to the post-Pistols PiL. Same song, second verse.

Le Tigre retain a lot of BK's churning guitar, vocal distortion, and speak-singing in deracinated Valley Girl accents, but they've stuck their main style plug into an early 80s synth-pop jack. 2000's From the Desk, their sophomore effort, is a hard toss of sound montage and catchy rhythm. Its highlight may be "Get Off the Internet," but there's not a dull or undynamic moment in it.

This Island, from 2004 (Feminist Sweepstakes came between, and I'll fill in that blank later), is further post-punk obnoxion, lovable as fuck, sexy and mechanical at once, full on for body liberation without itself being very fleshy. It's a real pop album: the longest song is under four minutes. It's full of audio violence -- sirens, battering samples and programmed rhythms, abrasive beats that sound like the scraping of dry skin. Ranges from the return of Terry Bozzio and Missing Persons ("After Dark") to the invention of electro-soul ("Nanny Nanny Boo Boo"), from an anti-war protest collage ("New Kicks") to a teenage football shout ("TKO") that is clearly the millennial, illegitimate daughter of "We Got the Beat." This is what democracy looks like / This is what democracy sounds like they chant on one track, managing not to sound tedious or self-congratulatory at it. And speaking of early 80s, they do a version of "I'm So Excited" that may be less theoretically excited than the Pointer Sisters' original, but is certainly more listenable and therefore more practically exciting.

This Island is positive and puckish. It hits you with a bouncy hammer and smacks you with a rubber glove. It says I love you. It also says You make me sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick!!! Which, oddly enough, didn't conflict at all with the summer breeze caressing my neck.

* * * Marginalia * * *
Let us pause to wish well on the shade of June Pointer, who died from cancer April 11, surrounded by her sisters and other family. She'd been expelled from the group years ago for her recurrent drug habits, and the cancer claim sounds fishy to some, but that matters not at all now. To me she was, is and always will be one of the voices that gave us "Slow Hand," one of the sweetest records ever.

TRAVELING WILBURYS
TONY SHERIDAN & THE BEAT BROTHERS
RINGO STARR
"Nobody's Child"
The good-time supergroup (Harrison/Dylan/Lynne/Petty, minus the late Orbison) recorded the Cy Coben-Mel Foree country standard in 1990, as the title track of a charity album designed to raise funds for Romanian orphans. They did a touching heartfelt galumphing version that stuck close to the song's country roots, that dried out lyrics so maudlin they were beyond maudlin:

As I was slowly passing an orphan's home today
I stopped for just a little while to watch the children play
Alone a boy was standing and when I asked him why
He turned with eyes that could not see and he began to cry

Each of the grizzled star voices took its turn, and gave an old man's sadness to the obscenity of children's suffering.

In every town and village, there are places just like this
With rows and rows of children, babies in their cribs
They've long since stopped their crying as no one ever hears
And no one's there to notice them or take away their fears

I went back and listened again to the first version I'd heard -- Tony Sheridan's. He recorded it in Hamburg in June 1961, backed by the Beat Brothers, aka the Beatles. Sheridan was doing his best to sound like Elvis, and getting so far into the charade that he was kicking the lines, giving them jazz and sex and stroke, forgetting what they were about. The disparity was -- not immoral, exactly, only vaguely distasteful. Should you sing a song like this and sound like you're enjoying it?

No mammy's arms to hold me or soothe me when I cry
'Cause sometimes I feel so lonesome I wish that I could die
I'd walk the streets of heaven where all the blind can see
And just like all other kids there'd be a home for me

Memory trips a trigger: hadn't Ringo name-checked this tune in Volume 1 of The Beatles Anthology? Let us dig back in the archives . . . Ah, yes.

Ringo -- Richie Starkey of Dingle Dale, the only Beatle who grew up truly poor, who had nearly died twice from painful internal illnesses before leaving his teens, who spent so long in the hospital the second time that returning to school stopped being an option; Ringo who had never complained about his early deprivations or youthful traumas as a child of war and want and sickness, but always taken with humor and grace the gifts that fortune bestowed; Ringo the sad clown, wise lad, accidental sage -- "Nobody's Child" had been his song.

In 1994, aged 54, Ringo sits for the Anthology interview. "Everybody has their party piece in Liverpool," he says, remembering his boyhood. "You have to sing a song. My mother’s was 'Little Drummer Boy' she would sing to me. And I would sing 'Nobody’s Child' to her and she’d always cry. 'I’m nobody’s child, Mum.'”

Does he cry as he sings? No. Being Ringo, he laughs, at the ceaseless wonder of life, the resilience of children.

I'm nobody's child, I'm nobody's child
Just like a flower I'm growing wild
No mama's arms to hold me, no daddy there to smile
Nobody wants me, I'm nobody's child

CHAS McDEVITT SKIFFLE GROUP with NANCY WHISKEY
"Freight Train"
The song, by Elizabeth Cotten, is a folk standard, a soulful lament. And sung by a gaggle of white Brits in full '50s flourish, polished teeth and trimmed beards and pressed work-shirts, well-trained delivery and lip-balmed whistle, it is both catchy and haunting, pop-flavored and sorrowful.

STRANDED -- The Countdown (11)

Backtrack 2
JAMES BROWN. Live at the Apollo, Vols. 1 & 2 (King). 1 is more famous, but 2 is more the epic document of legend. The 1962 set is hardly lackluster, and features far more fervid interaction between Brown and a hotted-up Apollo crowd. But the sound is thin and the editing between tracks unduly clumsy. Stevie Wonder's 12-Year-Old Genius is its equal, in my ears. The later set, recorded in summer 1967, is a longer, fuller, more wrenching and pleasurable experience, with less audience presence but more talk from Brown, a duet with Marva Whitney on "Think," and the height of passion on “I Wanna Be Around.” Brown's music has stretched and tightened by now to its most innovative proportions: pre-maturity, pre-blaxploitation, pure stripped modernism. This is what his funk sounded like before anyone had caught up close enough to copy it, when there was literally nothing like it in the world. 1962 & 1968.

SOLOMON BURKE, “Cry to Me” (Atlantic). How could I have missed this? The soul sob is right down my street. This even sounds like a precursor of what I recently offered as a Greatest Record Ever? -- Smokey's "Don't Think it's Me," from five years later. The rhythmic plucks and pops of a string section here sound exactly like those on the later record, although Smokey does them bolder and harder, far more dramatically. But this is nice, real nice. 1962.

Greatest Record Ever?
"The Only Living Boy in New York," Simon & Garfunkel

2006-04-16T16:20:00.000-07:00

PARLIAMENT
Rhenium
George Clinton on the loose in acid land. This is a reissue, with slightly different tracklist, of Parliament's 1970 Osmium album -- from long before they became the outlet for GC's skank-chewing, doo doo-chasing, war baby-spanking sci-fi funkalisms. In this intermediate incarnation they were approximately Clinton's Detroit vocal group, The Parliaments (owner of a single hit, 1967's "(I Wanna) Testify"), after he freaked, rocked, and funked them out. In membership and style they overlap significantly with his other main agglomeration, Funkadelic; and while I love those early Funkadelic albums, Rhenium makes Maggot Brain and America Eats its Young sound straitjacketed. You can go woozy from the clash and mash of styles, the wrongness of the combinations, the rightness of the sound; not to mention the madness of the lyrics, their pungent sexuality and coarse but good-natured humor.

Few songs here fail to make an impression -- or leave a stain. “Little Ole Country Boy” humps pimp and hillbilly and makes a joke of both, far outclassing the country-western parodies the Rolling Stones were doing at the same time. “I Call My Baby Pussycat” exploits that word "pussy" ruthlessly and to the full. “My Automobile” is a full-group session with talk and vocal, comic sexual frustration bursting a '50s lyric: “All I want is a little kiss, all I want is a teeny-weeny hug” (don’t believe it). “Funky Woman," about a funky woman, is indecently funny (“She hung [her clothes] in the air / The air said this ain’t fair / She dried them in the sun / The sun began to run”). “Oh Lord, Why Lord/Prayer” is a moving anti-prejudice plaint sung, hummed, and finally wailed to the melody of Canon in D. The long, lovely outro, “The Silent Boatman," must be heard to be believed.

Rhenium sounds like it was cooked up, methamphetamine-style, in Clinton's basement, spilling out of glass tubes and bubbling beakers straight onto your turntable. All so weird and genre-bending it's a wonder they got away with it.

Did George Clinton take drugs? Did he inhale?

From Wikipedia: "Rhenium is a chemical element in the periodic table that has the symbol Re and atomic number 75. A silvery-white, rare, heavy, polyvalent transition metal, rhenium resembles manganese chemically and is used in some alloys. Rhenium is obtained as a by-product of molybdenum refinement and rhenium-molybdenum alloys are superconducting. This was the last naturally-occurring element to be discovered and belongs to the ten most expensive metals on Earth."

Transition metal . . . superconducting . . . naturally-occurring. That actually helps.

Cross-cultural factoid: Crow T. Robot on "Mystery Science Theater 3000" is made from molybdenum.

BELLE & SEBASTIAN
The Life Pursuit
Live at the Barbican Theatre 9/25/05
various cover versions
The first of these, the Scottish pop group's latest, gets a badly belated thumbs up from this once-besotted and still-watchful fan. Wacky, silly, catchy. I give it a 90. I'd say it's their best, only it's not what you'd call characteristic of what has always been their style. In place of a modest, intimate (sometimes even dry and nebbishy) production, where the rough edges always jutted out in just the right polite spots, here we have a pervading juiciness in the sound, and a just slightly deranged pursuit of pleasure for its own sake. Produced by UK pop maven Trevor Horn, who moistens, ripens, and fattens everything (bass, guitar, horn) to infectious effect. Full of chewy bubblegum and tasty bon-bons, with "Another Sunny Day" and "Sukie in the Graveyard" standing out as imperishable plums.

The Barbican show, recorded in London on my 39th birthday (thanks, guys!), is the 1996 If You're Feeling Sinister album in its entirety. That was my first B&S LP. Sentimental value here. And a good show.

Finally, cover versions collected in badly-recorded scraps from this corner and that include "Billy Jean" (Michael Jackson), "San Francisco" (Scott McKenzie), "Comment Te Dire Adieu" (François Hardy), "Final Day" (Young Marble Giants), "Here Comes the Sun" (Beatles), and "Everyday People" (Sly & The Family Stone). The first at least has considerable shock value: B&S's audience (probably largely white, college-age, emo-oriented) pick up the beat and recognize the tune, and the band goes on to do a creditable, non-ironic job of it. The others run from mediocre to fine: no revelations, no gems in the coal.

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Cinemaphonic: Soul Punch
A British collection of so-called "library music" -- generic tracks created to fit a particular musical style, written, recorded, and put in storage against the day one might be pulled from the stacks to serve as backing to some documentary or low-budget period drama. In this case the genre is early '70s funk, with a soupçon of jazz. The imitations (all by white UK composers, all recorded between 1970 and 1976) are not merely convincing pastiches but generally groovable in their own right -- if nowhere near as hardcore jolly as their presumable models. The guitar scratchings and bass bumpings are reinvigorated at regular intervals by fresh-air flute flutterings and Moog waftings.

SUFJAN STEVENS
Illinoise
He combines his own tuneful, community-choir anti-irony with a sense of American oddity and the layers of strangeness and practical mysticism that once made up American life (and still do, though we're too busy living it to see it). I want to like what Stevens does so badly I can taste it. (Tastes like gummy bears.) But in practice I find this precious and pointless. Not obsessive, but self-absorbed; as sensually scintillating as simulated woodgrain, and as flavorful as muselage. Out of 22 tracks, these are the ones I liked, though for what reasons I can't recall: “Chicago,” “To the Workers of the Rock River Valley Region, I Have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament,” and “The Seer’s Tower."

Everyone my age or younger in New York loves this. Or seems to. I don't get it. I want to, but I don't. An outcast once more. As lonesome George Gobel asked Johnny Carson, "Did you ever feel like the world's a tuxedo and you're a pair of brown shoes?" Only that will probably be the style next month.

THE CHILLS
Submarine Bells
Middling Brit-pop (actually from New Zealand) that slides down fast from its lead-off, the great "Heavenly Pop Hit."

CLEARLAKE
Amber
"I Want to Live in a Dream (remix)"
Great Brit-pop. Songs sound like other songs, but it's all a good song. As well as the melodies and the bells, they have the vocal arrogance and variety that the Chills lack, the flecks of snot across smooth surfaces that spell out P-E-R-S-O-N-A-L-I-T-Y. "Dream," originally from the 2003 Lido LP, is an all-time great track -- especially in its jingle-bell remix, which I was lucky enough to stumble over last Christmas.

NEKO CASE
Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
Strong as Neko Case is always strong: a clear, ringing vocal against a trebly guitar and waltz tempo. Spiritual ambience combining roadhouse ruefulness with open-mouthed moon-gazing. Modern American indie girl wanders through a Sergio Leone ghost town. Blacklisted and The Tigers Have Spoken were great from the very instant. This needs another listen.

PAUL McCARTNEY
Run Devil Run
It might take one more hand than I have to count the superstar oldies albums that have been disasters, wastes of time, half-baked potatoes. There have been maybe three that worked, and Paul McCartney has recorded two of them. The first was Choba B CCCP from back in '83, a Russian-only release that was finally let go to little notice on Western shores a few years later. In its original Soviet-flimsy paper jacket, nothing but Russian characters front and back, a distorted sideways image of a howling McCartney covered in Communist blood red, it was a genuinely weird and irreplaceable pop object. And the music gave up whatever strange, illicit, underground delights that cover promised. From Gershwin to Leadbelly, from "Summertime" to "That's All Right Mama," the record was fast, the sound mercurial, coming from a distance, impossible to hold, impossible not to feel. Covered with leathery echo, wearing its guitar sound like skintight jeans, it came across on hollow airwaves from some funky tin-can transmitter in the Siberian outback. It had that distance, that eeriness; it brought ghost rock back from the graveyard.

Run Devil Run is not that tight -- it could have lost 3-4 songs and gone leaner -- but it is just as exciting, and very nearly as weird. The song choices stick to High Fifties icons, but mine the second and third layer of Gene Vincent, Ricky Nelson, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, others I've barely heard of. There is a version of "Shake a Hand" that makes me desperate to locate the Fay Adams original -- could it possibly be as good? No word but "triumph" for what McCartney does vocally here, singing hormonal teenage rock in his 58th year. He sings like a boy who left home to travel the world, and returned full of experience but only 10 minutes older. A good half the time, he doesn't sing at all: he grinds a vocal into mulch at the middle of his throat, projecting it at top volume so that it sounds both liberated and agonized, the way it did on "She's a Woman" and "I'm Down" and "Helter Skelter." This joy is painful, but it's joy, unmistakable joy.

Give Paul a fistful of classic rock and, unlike, say, John Lennon and Phil Spector on the Rock and Roll sessions, he will know what the fuck to do with it. What else does he still know? is the open question. Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard was his nearest run at an all-original masterpiece in a long, long, long time, and there were near-tipping points where you felt it might thicken into tragedy, weighten into greatness. It was short on pretty ditties, never stopped to admire mere facility as a self-justifying virtue. But finally there was a lack of emotional focus and musical expansiveness, of transformative joy, a willingness to truly court chaos as a form of creation. You never left the back yard, and the back yard had its limits.

But I can never quite give up on Paul. He is and will always be a natural-born rocker, on the basis of both Run Devil Run and the version of "Helter Skelter" he delivered recently at the Grammy Awards. What else will he be? I don't know, but the bitch is that he still has it. Whatever "it" is.

AUDIOTRANSPARENT
Nevland
It's been a few months since this one passed through; "Give it a try," the guy said, and I did. All I remember is that it attempted the sinister and didn't reach it, wanted to be lovely and wasn't quite. And so, like many before and many to come, it passed through. Vaya con dios.

ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS
I Am a Bird Now
Listening to Antony's voice -- husky and smoky, but with feminine enunciation and a high cry on the tongue -- I know I've heard something like it before (Nina Simone is the only commonly agreed upon forerunner), but I'm damned if I can think what it is. He comes out of nowhere to embody and musicalize a world you always knew was there.

The first song, "Hope There's Someone," is almost too much to take. Antony sounds on the verge of crying every second. From a restrained piano ballad, the melodrama only just contained, it grows by layers into something like Grand Guignol: it stretches sideways and expands upward in a swirling, echoing dissonance of voices, haunted melodic moans. It settles back then, but too late: the scare is in you, the curse is on. Frightened, you venture forth into the album. A half-hour later, you come out shaken, blinking, stepping lightly.

Along with Simone, people invoke post-cabaret stylists and JT Leroy to describe this, to make it sound or scan like something we already know. Well, it really doesn't. But what did it make me think of? Instantly, it made me think of Ted Levine playing Buffalo Bill, the aspiring transsexual and serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs. Levine, a brilliant actor, put a human being inside that monster. It was the human being, not the monster, who painted his face and danced before his mirror, tucking away his penis and spreading his wings while singing to "Goodbye Horses" by Q Lazzarus. Antony sounds like that man, not the killer but the person, the sexually unclassified individual in a world with little use for such creatures. Antony is what Jame Gumb might have sounded like if he hadn't gone evil, if he'd become a creator instead of a destroyer.

I Am a Bird Now is a song cycle -- ach, dreaded term! but accurate -- about transformations. Escaping the mortal coil, the chain of life. A dream of rebirth into beauty and eternity at just the very point of death. Place it with Ovid, Sylvia Plath, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." The great ones.

Greatest Record Ever?
"Whenever You're on My Mind," Marshall Crenshaw

* * * Marginalia (but not really) * * *

2006-04-09T17:32:00.000-07:00

Finally got around to watching Coffee and Cigarettes, a series of Jim Jarmusch short stories filmed between 1986 and 2003: discrete segments, each a sit-down encounter between 2-3 individuals, each with its own title, each separated from the others by a length of black screen. Some hit (a segment with Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan; another with the White Stripes and a Tesla coil), some missed (Bill Murray with GZA and RZA of Wu-Tang Clan -- come on, there's more here than you showed us). But only one segment pissed me off: the one set in Memphis, with twins Joie Lee and Cinque Lee (Spike's siblings) claiming that Elvis stole his music from black men ("Ever heard of a man named Otis Blackwell? How about Junior Parker?"), and attributing to him a remark so casually, contemptibly racist that it must have come from the Albert Goldman book.

Jarmusch is credited with the screenplay, and the buck certainly stops with him, but I detected Spike Lee's heavy hand in this exchange. It's characteristic of his films to lunge after that kind of impulsive foolishness in the guise of exposing America's racist myths -- as he did months ago on "Real Time with Bill Maher," all but accusing the Bush White House of planning the failure of the Louisiana levee system to get rid of a few hundred pesky blacks. He got answered right back by Tucker Carlson, who was doing a not-bad-for-a-conservative job that night of acknowledging the rampant idiocies of the current administration in both New Orleans and Iraq. Angered, Carlson told Lee that it was that sort of crackpot conspiracy-mongering, void of not only factual back-up but intuitive sense (you needn't posit grand conspiracy when arrogance, ignorance, and pure princely let-them-eat-cakeism are sufficient to explain the horrible Bush botches), that would discourage millions of worried, uncommitted Americans from taking seriously any critique of the goverment in these areas. (Kanye West's "George Bush doesn't care about black people" not only spoke the truth of Katrina but spoke it straight, in words that will stick in the American mind for a long time.)

A little history, some of which I was inspired by the movie to discover for myself:

Otis Blackwell.

Otis Blackwell was an R&B singer-songwriter who wrote or co-wrote some of Elvis's early hits ("Don't Be Cruel," "All Shook Up," "Return to Sender"), as well as others of that era, equally mythic ("Fever," "Great Balls of Fire," "Breathless," "Handy Man"). According to Peter Guralnick, it's true that "Don't Be Cruel" reached Presley through the music-business chicanery that was standard at the time and usually redounded to the disfavor of black artists. Bottom line, to get it to Elvis, the song's writer would "have to give up half the publishing [to Presley's publishing company] and half the writer's share (to Elvis). As Otis Blackwell later said, 'I was told that I would have to make a deal' -- but there was little question that it was worth it." Blackwell got established as a top rock and R&B songwriter and made a million or three. When Elvis died in 1977, he released a tribute record, "The No. 1 King of Rock 'n' Roll." Blackwell died in 2002, a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

L to R: unidentified man, "Nappy" Brown, Junior Parker, Elvis Presley, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Memphis, about 1956. Photo by E.C. Withers.

As for Junior Parker, he was a blues harpist and bandleader recording for Sam Phillips and Sun Studios at the time Elvis arrived there. The implication of the film's dialogue is that Presley stole "Mystery Train" from Parker -- the song, certainly not the style, because Parker's version, predating Elvis's 1955 hit by two years, was utterly dissimilar, not rock & roll pretty much fully formed but a strange blend of proto-rock with straight and jump blues. (And, incidentally, not nearly as good as the Presley version.) Parker co-wrote "Mystery Train" with Phillips, and they purloined a good portion of the lyrics from "Worried Man Blues," recorded 20 years earlier by the Carter Family -- itself a folk song patched together from older verses that had been drifting around for who knows how long. "It was a folk song," Greil Marcus wrote (of the Carter song, and by extension of "Mystery Train" itself), "passed back and forth between the races, that in truth was older than anyone's memory."

The Coffee and Cigarettes Presley-bash put me in mind of the Public Enemy rhyme ("Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant shit to me you see / Straight up racist that sucker was / Simple and plain / Mother fuck him and John Wayne") that ran over the opening of Do the Right Thing. But there the charge was part of the flow, the attack, the provocation intended by the great piece of agit-prop that film was. It was music, and music is rhetoric; rhetoric is strong to the degree that it feels right, and in the summer of '89 it felt so right you could sense the earth grinding slightly on its core. You could objectively register the charge as bullshit in the knowledge that Elvis did as much as any white man of the post-World War II era to integrate American culture, American thought, American music and its previously segregated markets. But as Do the Right Thing bore in, rhetoric carried the day and you didn't argue. White America would be called to account, this rhyme promised, and its established exemplars of male heroism (Wayne the Indian-killer, Elvis the blues-robber) would be tossed in the trunk and taken for the ride. Sorry, Elvis, but it felt right.

Disclaim, disclaim: I'm far from an Elvis scholar. I'm not the tender of Elvis's eternal flame, and I don't know if he said what Coffee and Cigarettes says he said -- although I find it doubtful in the extreme. (As did a reporter for Jet magazine, who'd been sent out in 1957 to determine the truth, or even the plausibility, of the rumored comment. Read the last paragraph here for that story.) And I don't know that a dialogue exchange in a movie should be taken any less rhetorically than a confrontational rap lyric that runs on a movie soundtrack. (It may be worth noting, for whatever reason, that the "Memphis" segment also was shot in 1989.) But I do know that where the rhetoric played effortlessly in Do the Right Thing, here it scrapes against the filmic texture in every way. Further, I know enough to be careful around any liberal spokesperson who not only has spent the last 20 years making movies that are increasingly preachy, incoherent, overstuffed, and intellectually facile, but who forces me into even temporary league with the likes of Tucker Carlson.

Listen, this page was originally meant to be simon-pure of political intrigue or soapboxing. And henceforth will it ever be so, until I change my mind again.

Coffee and Cigarettes also had a pleasingly Beckettian encounter between Iggy Pop and Tom Waits, of all well-matched misfits, playing themselves, fencing delicately. It reminded me of what may be, in pop terms, the ultimate "coffee and cigarettes" encounter: the one between John Lennon and Bob Dylan, as filmed by D.A. Pennebaker. Stay tuned for more on that.

"What is the nature of your appeal?"

"I am the world of dreams, the Thousand Nights of Arabia, and I am all things at once, all heroes and all villains. I am the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the sneaky Doctor Strange, the secret Count Mordo, who flies by night, and the glamorous Mr Universe. I provide, and you may quote me on this, a teenage fulfillment of fantasy."

"In other words?"

"I fuck."

-- Nik Cohn, I Am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo (1967)

Greatest Record Ever?
"She's a Mystery to Me," Roy Orbison

ODDS 'N' SODS FROM THE UNSORTED FILE

2006-04-01T20:43:00.000-08:00

THE CHORDETTES
"Born to Be with You"
Hmm, I wondered, could this be the same tune that Leo Kottke did so earnestly and nicely in 1974 on his Ice Water album? Sure is, but it couldn't be more different. Kottke made a weird, galloping classic: he took the tempo fast, pasted in an endearingly inept Spanish guitar solo, and sang in a voice that was never deeper or browner or more incarnative of the true-hearted Middle American lug.

I don't know from the Chordettes except they also did "Mr. Sandman" and "Lollipop." This record, from 1956, is in that vein, but nowhere near as fun. The women sing in severely constrained meter, almost fascist unison: the "you" they're born to be with might be Hitler. You can take it straight or take it bent -- this could be the sound of Stepford wives about to burn out their circuits and hack at their masters. But I doubt it.

I BRUZI
"Massachusetts"
Italian crooner sticks close to the Bee Gees' then-recent hit version. Velvet-smooth, pudding-rich, the essence of late '60s cosmopolitan pop, that time and genre when Latin lovers and French fops were covering the latest Brit-hits and Motown sides in their own romantic tongues. A different kind of world beat, perhaps? (It went back the other way, too -- ever hear the Supremes, Beatles, Temptations, and Beach Boys rendering their classic hits in Italian and German?)

"This is very silly," says my wife as it plays. I think it couldn't be nicer.

JONATHAN KING
"City of Angels"
King was a self-styled all-around pop intellectual in the high Carnaby Street days. Melody Maker could always count on him for a salty, idol-baiting quote: Revolver, for instance, he regarded as "pseudo-intellectual rubbish." As a wunderkind record executive, he's credited with discovering Genesis, the Bay City Rollers, and 10cc. (In 2001 he was given seven years for his pedophiliac activities -- specifically, "buggery, attempted buggery and indecent assault." Karma?)

King's great hit and compilation standard was "Everyone's Gone to the Moon," surreal soft pop from 1965 whose lyrics seemed to depict Swinging London as a plague city whose pestilence was quaintness and fantasy and no end of ass-fattening soul candy. Everyone's gone to the moon, the message went in King's narcotized voice, and no one's left here on earth. "City of Angels" is from 1970, and in it King asks the Lord to return him to the titular location. Is this los angeles in California or in Heaven? Does the singer long to return from the moon? Once again King strikes nice soft notes on geography-based obliquity, easy-listening moods on the themes of physical and spiritual transience.

COZY POWELL
"Dance with the Devil"
Cozy (nee Colin) Powell was a highly-regarded drummer, a short-term sit-in with the powerhouses of lard-butt British art-rock and metal (Sabbath, Rainbow, Emerson and Lake, et al). This was his only record under his own name, and it made Top 3 UK in '73. Instrumental, of course, and percussion dominates. Its gimmick is to purloin for the organizing melody the main guitar line from Hendrix's acid collage "Third Stone from the Sun." Curious, might be fitting as a bonus or hidden track appended to Are You Experienced? Powell died in a car crash in 1998.

JOHNNY RAY
"Look Homeward, Angel"
Backed by the Ray Conniff Orchestra, Ray blares and broadcasts celestial melodrama in his peculiar voice, which combined the homely and the hysterical. It's not bad as Johnny Ray records go; unfortunately, projected follow-ups "Of Time and the River, "A Stone, A Leaf, A Door" and "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" came to naught. This was also a minor hit for the Monarchs in 1964.

THE SWEET INSPIRATIONS
"Sweet Inspiration"
Great pop-gospel from the group that started out backing up Wilson Pickett, The Drifters, Solomon Burke and Aretha Franklin (both before and during her great Atlantic years). Mostly a group vocal, but with a solo breakout in the middle from what could only be the throat of Cissy Houston, mother of Whitney. They sound amazingly alike. It's Whitney's best recorded performance ever, and she didn't even need to be there. Not that I take the remotest pleasure in her current rumored status as a toothless, crack-addicted shut-in. Released 1968.

TERRY JACKS
"Put the Bone In"
Get your mind out of the gutter: that's not a sexual reference. A woman asks her butcher to "put the bone in" the paper bag as a treat for her dog, who's been hit by a car. See? Not sexual. Wholesome.

My ass. The song's not sexual, but it is insane. Jacks, who led the creepy sugar-psych outfit the Poppy Family before branding his own name on history with "Seasons in the Sun," sings with the fixated overenunciation of the postal worker who blows his cork, the sheepish twang of the husband who dismembers his wife. This ditty, clocking in at about a minute and a half on the B-side of "Seasons," isn't quite freaky enough to show you hell, but it's definitely queer enough to put the bone in.

FRANCES GALL
"Deux Oiseaux"
French ye-ye girl from '65. The femme-voice is a manic flutter, a ping-pong ball bouncing in a popcorn popper, with a middle section so fleet and funny it pulls your cheeks out and up with invisible hooks. Listening to too much of this would be like replacing oxygen with helium, but as an impish ditty out of nowhere it can fill the Pez dispenser of your heart. The language barrier is beside the point: it would be this chirrupy and ridiculous if delivered in Bronxese or Latin. Such goddamn silliness in this world. Bless a world that can be as silly as this.

J. VINCENT EDWARD
"Do it All Over Again"
Slightly overweening teen-idol moves from 1968. Can't find out much about Edward, but he seems to have been posited as an earnest pretty boy, a Bobby Sherman type, who'd have appeared on variety shows and held his microphone stick with his fingertips. This was one of his few releases and might be taken as characteristic of what his niche would have been: fulsome vocalizing, music pushed uphill, Sisyphus-style, by middle-aged horn players in a Hollywood studio. But finally this musical boulder gains the weight to perch at its precipice of momentum, and the record gets to me a little bit: just a little bit.

"Is this early Meat Loaf?" says my wife as it plays. She's full of comments tonight.

Greatest Record Ever?
"Don't Think it's Me," Smokey Robinson & The Miracles

2006-03-25T03:22:00.000-08:00

A warning that will be of benefit to all those who venture past it:

The titles listed below are all "bad" records, technically and/or canonically: wayward in conception, inept in execution. By every standard erected in veneration of those artists broadly sanctioned as "good" -- Ray Charles, the Beatles, Moby Grape, Aretha Franklin, King Crimson, REM, Norah Jones, Kanye West -- they are overexplicit, overdramatic, overwrought, overdone. Their emotions are nothing that should divert the adult mind, their sounds are unpalatable to the quality-seeking ear. But I point them out on the simple logic that anyone who loves "good" records knows that "bad" records can sometimes be "good" -- just as "good" records can sometimes be "bad." (Fill in your own examples of each.)

Despite all the quote-marks above, no irony is intended.

BRUTE FORCE
"King of Fuh"
Too strange for words, too funny for obscurity. I quote from The Beatles Again? (1977), Walter J. Podrazik and Harry Castleman's sequel to their trailblazing uber-discography All Together Now:

In 1969 George Harrison assigned Apple's London office the seemingly innocuous task of releasing and promoting a single by his latest discovery, a twenty-year-old singer-songwriter from New York called Brute Force (a.k.a. Steven Friedland). The single was an original Brute Force composition, produced and recorded by the singer back in New York, and titled simply "The King of Fuh." The song told the story of a mythical king who ruled the kingdom of Fuh. It was the tale of a Fuh king, so to speak. EMI wanted no part of such a fantasy, and refused even to press the record, much less distribute it. Undaunted, Apple itself took on the task of sales and distribution, planning to stock mail order outlets and selected retail stores. DJ copies were even sent to the BBC, who naturally didn't give it any airplay. The distribution plan never really caught fire, and the disc quickly faded away. Brute Force and Apple then parted company. The tune did turn up again in 1971 in America on Brute Force's own label, though with a different flip-side ("Tapeworm of Love").

"King of Fuh," which I found at the heroic 365 Days project -- a jaw-dropping, gut-wrenching, mind-bending year's worth of outsider artifacts and junk-drawer unclassifieds -- is absurdly funny and boldly, if not cunningly, profane. Musically it's a piano-based ballad of the kind one might hear in a Holiday Inn, but fixed by a vocal self-possession in the face of absurdity that as much as anything marks the true musical outsider. (Though we who've trawled the weirdo music sites these recent years have discovered that Holiday Inn lounges are veritable havens for outsider purveyors of Wurlitzer dreams and plains-accented cocktail stylings.)

Brute Force is still around. His website records the activities of a clean old man who performs in Brooklyn clubs and looks to stage a Fuh king musical revue, still attempting to be "a force for good and joy in the world" despite the weight of repression and forces of censorship. Apparently his perversity, I mean perseverence, has paid off, since the title of his most memorable composition remains on the lips of free-speaking citizens worldwide. "Underground piracy, The Internet, and working in show business for the last 34 years have brought Brute Force into International recognition which the censor execs at Capitol and EMI refused to envision and attempt to produce 34 years ago." And you wonder why people don't worship bew-tay.

Was this an early, proto-Python instance of George Harrison's proclivity to comedic patronage?

What did the string players on this record think they were backing?

Why don't you visit Brute at his website and ask him? He'd love to hear from you.

LORI NORTON
"Nightmare"
That hiss of percussion, sounds like a looming cobra, tells you something is up: something familiar but different. Something more than. You thought "Leader of the Pack" was a mini-drama? This is the Shangri-Las turned upside down, pulled inside out, bitten by a snake, stuck with a knife.

Norton was a Brill Building songwriter who, along with her partner Pam Sawyer, penned for the likes of the Young Rascals. They fabricated a girl group called the Whyte Boots. Burton was in reality the only Boot, and this was her lone (1967) stab at a single. Stab. Get it? The singer confronts the girl who's been messing with her guy. Pulls a blade. The middle eight depicts a hellacious catfight: shouts, grunts, stabbing, death rattle -- actually more a series of sighs. The interloping female lies dead, even though "She didn't want to fight." What do I do? the singer frantically asks her cohorts, as sirens scream and the law bears down. Run! her girlfriends advise. Run! Run! RUN!!!

So the singer is no longer the forlorn, ruined survivor of a loved one's death. She is the murderess herself. Rather than an eternity of mourning, her curse is to be eternally on the run. Thus are the Shangri-Las inverted, or perverted, or simply remade as what they always secretly wanted to be, but couldn't be because they were nice girls from Queens: a vicious gang of killers and outlaws.

Get this from the snarky Brit at Bubblegum Machine, who's been posting obscure pop, soul, psych, and Euro-crap MP3's for a couple of years now -- each with its own wickedly funny off-hand commentary.

BRUCE HIRDLER
"Oh Lord (Please Forgive Me Now)"
"Bruce, seeking a record deal or redemption, reconstructs where he went wrong."

So write the annotators of The Incorrect Music Companion 2001, which gives this probably-early '70s obscurity a spot of honor. Compiled as a fund-raiser for the off-kilter New Jersey station WFMU, and co-curated by outsider maven Irwin Chusid, Companion was a forerunner of the later Songs in the Key of Z comps, released in conjunction with Chusid's book of the same title: a funny, sometimes frightening tour of a mental ward-cum-fringe festival. (Let us praise Chusid, who introduced most of us to not only the marginal babblings of lesser lights, but to the amazing Daniel Johnston and The Langley Schools Music Project, which is so scary-lovely it's hard to listen to.)

But the Incorrect annotators are off-base on this one. "Oh Lord" is a bleak anti-drug cautionary tale (singer does drugs, gets girlfriend hooked, she OD's) of the sort that rockists are bound to detest, because it goes artlessly to the point and takes a moralistic stance about it. So the lyrics are not great. But that only goes to reinforce my ever-hardening sense that we pay far too much attention to lyrics in this game. Why should mere words, their literal or literary sense, be allowed to mar a beautiful sound? Here the maudlin sentiments are set against a plushly acoustic folk-rock production and major-chord melody any writer would be proud to have concocted, as well as the loveliest harmonies I've encountered since that Everly Brothers box set. Hirdler's earnest delivery achieves, quite by nature, the kind of directness and sincerity that New Weird American folkies like Banhart, Stevens, and Ward strive for and often seem inordinately proud of having approximated.

A wonderment. It's on my iTunes as we speak and won't be leaving soon.

A Google search on Bruce Hirdler turns up nothing but this one song. I hope the Lord forgave him, even if the guardians of quality won't.

JOE MEEK
"Paper Boat" (demo)
Meek was the English record producer and songwriter who invented a sound and lost his mind. A closeted homosexual and paranoid schizophrenic, obsessed with tape manipulation and the occult, he was truly the mad scientist legend has made of Phil Spector. Born in the Gloucestershire countryside, he spent his boyhood on hilltops listening to the wind, fiddling with radio knobs and shortwave bands. He was a radio technician in the Air Force. Come the '50s, he worked his way into the burgeoning pop trade and got obsessed with Buddy Holly -- and then with Buddy Holly's ghost. In 1962, Meek wrote and produced John Leyton's "Johnny Remember Me": one of the great death discs ever, and a ghoulish phenomenon in England, sparking a minor wave of interest in reincarnation, seances, and spooks. The next year, "Telstar" (instrumental serenade to a communications satellite, and supposedly Margaret Thatcher's favorite record) was a worldwide #1 for his band the Tornadoes. Meek even scored a minor British Invasion success with the Honeycombs' infectious thumper "Have I the Right."

On the proceeds, he assembled a home studio at his top-floor flat in London's Holloway Road. Tape machines, mixing boards, echo boxes, and great coils of cable filled the cramped quarters. Meek would place his band in one room. Then he'd position his singer in the bathroom at the far end of the corridor. Somehow he got the bands to sound like bangers at an extraterrestrial Star-Club, and his marginally talented bathroom warblers to sound like dewy emissaries from distant planets. The Meek sound was thick with reverberation, dense with compression: cheesy and sloppy, far from nuanced, but eerie and tuneful, and every bit as distinctive in its way as the Spector sound.

Meek collected a stable of artists and continued to subvert the British pop charts with gloom and morbidity (Mike Berry's "Tribute to Buddy Holly," Glenda Collins's doomsday ballad "It's Hard to Believe It," straight death discs like Pamela Blue's "My Friend Bobby" and "North Wind" by Houston Wells & The Marksmen). But his paranoia grew with his profile. He was stressed by his closeted lifestyle and got busted once for soliciting sex from a man. Then a boy's body was found cut in two and dumped in suitcases behind an Ipswich hedge, and the police wanted to talk to Meek about it. He became certain his phone was tapped, and that a conspiracy existed among the London pop elite to deny him his rightful seat at the banquet. On February 2, 1967, Meek took a shotgun to his landlady, then killed himself.

Read The Legendary Joe Meek: The Telstar Man by John Repsch for the whole unbelievable story.

Put down in demo form, spliced and looped for repetition, "Paper Boat" (available at the great Comfort Stand site, track 23 on a CD's worth of demos and chatter from Holloway Road) is sung by Meek himself. He was famously tone-deaf, as you will hear, and a wailer to boot. But just as the Velvet Underground didn't need tuned guitars, Meek needn't hit the notes for dark magic to happen. His heart is fully in this. He is carrying himself away on an inner vision as he stands in his bathroom and sings about "the boy who loves me."

The sound is all hiss, crackle, splice and bum notes. The feel is lush, enchanted, and utterly unreal. Other than that, it's indescribable. You are drawn into a foggy vision of deep water and distant love. You're made to peer into a mirror on an exotic land of nightfall and romance. You would like it to go on. Then it's cut off dead.

2006-03-21T01:54:00.000-08:00

* * * Marginalia * * *
I had a vision after watching "The Sopranos" the other night that the last show would end with Tony dying in Carmela's arms, and that the last song of all would be "Poor Side of Town" by Johnny Rivers.

2006-03-19T02:54:00.000-08:00

MANFRED MANN
Pretty Flamingo
Skip this. The title song is all you need. Or want. Like that slab of turkey you discover at the back of the fridge, this might have been delicious if you'd found it a week earlier. But now it's gamy and ripe and growing its own mayonnaise. It could give you botulism. No joke.

HARRY BELAFONTE and BOB DYLAN
The Midnight Special Session
20 takes of Belafonte recording lead vocal for the title track to his 1961 RCA album, with Dylan providing harmonica choogles to the side. Hugo Montenegro produces. Interesting fly-on-wall document. The star is gentlemanly throughout, forgiving of Dylan's and others' mistakes, humorous about his own. Touching, the way he tries to put the scruffy, nervous young harp-blower at ease ("You wanna take your boots off?").

Supposedly Dylan quit the Belafonte sessions after this one track, fed up with the perfectionist tendencies of singer and producer. Still, he wrote some very warm and admiring comments about Belafonte in Chronicles, Volume One, and we can only imagine they're well-deserved.

The song itself is not bad, but not much of anything else either. Soft, light, polite: skiffle without a washboard, calypso without hiccups. Folk music for people who have their dungarees dry-cleaned.

HOLE
Celebrity Skin
I don't know what Courtney Love's current valuation is among the cognoscenti of cool (duh, probably not that high), but I was amazed at how good this was. Vastly preferable to Live Through This, for starters: there's no "Doll Parts," but the price we paid for that one classic was a remainder as exciting, albeit as genuine, as dirt. This is razor-sharp punk pop straight through, relentlessly catchy, energetic, well-seasoned. I declare a considerable lech for Melissa auf der Maur, and her big-bottom bass and dirty-angel backup vocals darken the proceedings nicely. Courtney does what she needs to do: sings snide and snotty in the garage-rock tradition, proud progeny of ? and Mouse and the guy from Syndicate of Sound. Ironically, or maybe not, she never sounds fake except when singing attitude words like “whore” and “grave."

For a bonus track, add Hole's contemporaneous Fleetwood Mac cover, "Gold Dust Woman." Listen. Burn.

REIGN GHOST
Reign Ghost
Self-serious psych circa '69. Dominated by sinister organ and voices that should have gotten out of the conservatory more. Often sounds like the original cast album of Hair. The Broadway cast, not the off-Broadway: there's a difference. And it's not a good one.

ARCTIC MONKEYS
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
Rowdy Sheffieldians serve notice, stake claim as NBT (next big thing). The music descends from Mod rock-R&B (Small Faces, Creation, etc. unto The Jam) with lots of funk and agitated stutter-stepping and oblique chording. The band is fine and fast and bar-band tight, no bush-beating on that score, and Alec Turner's got the cutest drunken burr in his scratchy voice. Not innovative, but plenty charged. It snatches you, holds you.

I liked this a lot the first time I heard it. The second time I was less impressed. So will it go on diminishing over time, or quietly enrich and roar back as a classic next decade? We'll see.

BOB MARLEY
Acoustic Sessions
The Rasta masta performs unplugged in various venues, from Stockholm in 1971 to Miami in 1980. Nothing here that's not nice to have engraved on magnetic tape, but it is, as they say, for completists only. The best stuff is in the middle, London 1977, where Marley joins the Sons of Jah for loose jams and demos around songs destined for the Exodus album.

FOTHERINGAY
Fotheringay
The sole album from the side group that Sandy Denny started up after leaving Fairport Convention. It might as well be Fairport: the men are stolid-voiced and solid-rocking, the feel is pastoral even when the beat is tough, and Denny contributes the best songwriting. (“Nothing More” is the high point, a classic piece of ghostliness.) There's also an interminable Dylan cover a la Fairport (“Gypsy Davey” in this case). Released 1970.

DION & THE BELMONTS
Together Again
I've had Dion on the brain a lot lately. Can't say why precisely, except that he's great. This album, issued on ABC Paramount in 1967, is a recent discovery -- I literally didn't know it existed two months ago -- and it blows my mind on the man all over again. Chronologically, it follows his last great hits after jumping from Ernie Maresca's Laurie label to Columbia ("Ruby Baby," "Donna the Prima Donna"), and just before his post-hippie comeback, the gorgeous, all but forgotten Dion (back on Laurie), which included such beauties as "Abraham, Martin and John," "Summer Fun Song," "Sonny Boy," "Sisters of Mercy," and an unlikely, ethereal revision of "Purple Haze."

From track number one, the pugnacious and tuneful "Mr. Moving Man" ("one beautiful record," Nik Cohn called it), to track last, the modest near-orchestralism "My Girl the Month of May," Together Again is woven of the kind of calm, unaggressive beauty you surrender to instantly, as if a primal need were being softly met. In that graced voice, his beautiful Belmonts dooing and wopping, Dion sings songs of love lost and wonders witnessed; and except for one or two tracks that don't land quite right, it's all lovely and pure. Superficially, it's refreshing, lightweight late '60s pop -- the kind of thing people my age are now discovering, or rediscovering, outside the strictures of Great Rock canonism and so-cheesy-it's-cool uber-dorkism, and correctly labeling sunshine pop. But actually, it has, in addition to refreshingness, guts and identity and odd strokes where you don't see them coming. It's sunshine pop, but sunshine at eight-thirty on a foggy Manhattan morning, just as summer is turning into autumn. Or spring into summer, depending on your mood.

And there is a level of heartbreak here for any listener who values what Dion has given. Together Again was recorded, I believe, when Dion was still addicted to heroin. He may have been sick and sweating while recording this, for all I know. Yet he sounds unsullied by any chemistry worse than that attendant to a broken heart, and energized by nothing but love's wondrous vagaries.

"Will I EVER Get Caught Up?!?!"

What do you do when you're behind in your self-imposed duties, and you're already afflicted with congenital lazy-assedness and general no-goodnik tendencies? If you're anything like me, you add another feature. All things must evolve or die, and Pop with a Shotgun is no different, I figure.

Along with the main section of mini-reviews, the Stranded countdowns, and the odd flap of Marginalia, I'm going to mark down, whenever the feeling strikes, the title of a song recently discovered or recalled that I seriously believe may be the greatest I've ever heard. The greatest. And that means the one. The one I'd select to the exclusion of all others if, in some fascist future, the cultural commissar deigned a limitation of one record per citizen-slash-economic unit. Or if, in an unimaginably bleak post-apocalypse, only one artifact could survive to sustain, Terminator-style, the hope of civilization's renewal.

Is that too much weight to place on one song? Probably.

It may be a song I've just heard for the first time. It may be one I first heard back in my mother's stomach. It may be a cool record. It may be clankingly uncool.

My first candidate:

Greatest Record Ever?
"True Faith," New Order

STRANDED -- The Countdown (10)

Backtrack 1
JAN BRADLEY, "Mama Didn't Lie" (Formal/Chess). Hmm, so that's what this is. There are those songs you realize, upon identifying them in later years, you've actually heard many times before, without ever quite knowing what they were: their distant memory rushes up to greet you. I love that feeling, and I like this record. It fits roughly into the girl-group lineage, but the fit is pretty rough: the backing thumps a bit harder than usual for the genre (Chess on the label might account for that). And Bradley's vocal, sweet-natured but implying a largeness of spirit, is closer to Martha Reeves than Shirley Alston. Doesn't quite make it to the island, though. 1963.

Now, where were we . . .
ERIC BURDON & THE ANIMALS, "Sky Pilot" (MGM). I can't say if Marcus means the edited single or the expansive album track, but on either one the chorus soars and the message grates. Can I pass on this? God knows it's better than "San Franciscan Nights" or "Monterey," but most things in this world are. 1968.

JOHNNY BURNETTE & THE ROCK 'N' ROLL TRIO, "Train Kept A-Rollin'" (Coral). Full of flash, none of it quite conventional for early rockabilly. The beat drags a half-notch off the genre norm, the solo goes to a thuggish, laconic guitar. Burnette's vocal is more manic than cocky. It's almost avant-garde. Makes Carl Perkins sound staid. Great outro chord, too. 1956.