These Last Strands of Man In Me

They’re laying off a shit load of humans at the work place. We’re all meditating on our dispensability. It’s like corporate zen. People are playing the game of trying to figure out who will go first – pairs of peers congregate outside (the water cooler’s no longer safe, and, plus, they’ve stopped providing us with coffee, so there’s less of a reason to be there), whispering, some teary-eyed, some giddy from the whole facing-the-firing-squad-concentrates-the-mind effect. It’s like the opposite of fantasy sports leagues. Nightmare employment league. Who would you throw overboard? The rodent-like mind takes over, and the gnawing and clawing survival instinct starts to do shameful things. But I’m trying not to feast on carrion comfort. Like G. M. Hopkins says, “my chaff might fly.” It’s all in the wind.

“The Wind” – The Diablos

“Ill Wind”- Lee Morgan

DIARY OF THE DAMNED

I'm two years, nine weeks and fives days from turning 40. I seriously re-wrenched the back injury I sustained from an Olympics-worthy agony of defeat moment while trying to (ahem) snowboard over New Year's. Apparently we're about to witness Great Depression II: Wraith of Khan and my 1 year old wants to wear flip flops in 20 degree cold. Of course this all means I've now become a full-on devotee of Doom Metal.

Now, this is a genre I barely knew existed until a year ago when I saw the Japanese practitioners, BORIS, but it was a nearly instant conversion experience. Allow me to quote from a 2006 New York Times article about Doom Metal to get across the general idea:

The music was unbelievably loud — so loud, in fact, that the sound waves made your rib cage vibrate like a stereo cabinet and your teeth literally rattle in their sockets — but the effect was somehow more meditative than violent. The overall experience was not unlike listening to an Indian raga in the middle of an earthquake.

In other words, it's like a yogic spa treatment in black Satan t-shirts. I had originally planned on getting expansive on this subject, but no amount of fancy words is going to open this portal for you. Just check your local listings and try radiating yourself in the therapeutic effects of extreme volume (but DO wear earplugs). Plus, there's some of the most ambitious, creative, thoughtful, experimental, highly-orchestrated and dare I say "progressive" music being made under the guise of "metal." Almost all of it can be categorized as "psychedelic" and, in fact, cannabis is a preferred supplement to the affair. Incidentally, a lot of the practitioners happen to be people (including some gals!) approaching my age and even beyond. A friend recently described himself as "imploding gracefully," and this is pretty much the soundtrack for that. It's the natural maturation of the Black Sabbath sound and I compare it to the evolution of comic books into graphic novels. But again, I've said too much already.

The recorded version of this music is utterly inadequate and a mere vapor of the live experience. But check out Southern Lord Recordings to get the flavor and plenty of free samples. Here's some choice doom, including the first song I ever heard live from BORIS, which gives you the general idea of what happened to me:

[Ed. Note: For the last week I've had the wrong link on this first track, thereby misdirecting dear readers to the wrong doom. If anybody's reading this, retry "Farewell" and experience what I was actually talking about. It's impressive!]


Farewell - BORIS

The Driver - Earth

Orosborous - Earth

PLAY LOUD

Don’t Doom Your Life To Death

I semi-squandered much of my weekend. My laptop fried out last summer, and on it were a bunch of music files, many MP3s converted from old vinyl for the purposes of sharing with the digital peoples. Luckily, I had been in the habit of burning mix CDs of all the blogarbage I’d been accumulating. Only thing was – over the years, these discs were growing more and more unplayable on the temperamental (read: mental) CD players we have in our kitchen and in the living room. And since I’d only scrawled cryptic names on the discs and never actually made proper playlists, I never quite knew which disc had that righteous Thin Lizzy track and which had the overdriven transfer of that Merle Haggard song. So I spent much of yesterday re-ripping some of this stuff from the discs, and then manually going through the unlabeled tracks and renaming them. It was a big time-consuming data-dump, a file-storage reclamation worm hole. But there were a lot of gems I’d forgotten about. And I read in the NYT today that digital data storage/transfer/management is a new career line.

Maybe as folks lose their jobs they have more free time to fiddle around with all the digital clutter accumulating. That’s one of the points touched on at the end of a recent story by Ann Powers in the LA Times. The piece is, on the surface, a review of new music by Animal Collective, Bon Iver and recent stuff by the Fleet Foxes, but it’s also a meditation on the pack-it-in paradigm and an exploration of how technology can aid the effort to just burrow down in some creaky cabin and explore the wind-blown corridors of the mind. Powers cites a recent column from Arthur Magazine in which the writer speculated that the economic slow-down would bring about a beneficial slow-down in all kinds of psychic metabolisms. As liquidity firms up, so too does the frantic flow of time. We’ll all have a chance to chill, and grow shit once we get fired and the banking networks and international commerce just totally shits the bed. Time to take up needlework and gardening. Have a summer-long clam bake in PEI. Remember how to be all Quaker-like, quiet with yourself. I hope so.

In the meantime, with the stimulus plan needing a nudge, this bit of man-on-the-street economic philosophy from Swamp Dogg seems particularly apt. As he says, “there’s just a little time left.” I posted this one in the early days here, but it was a short-lived link, and I thought it warranted a re-up. Plus, end-times rants never get old.

“There’s Just a Little Time Left” – Swamp Dogg

Winter Tracks

The Bottom Line - Big Audio Dynamite
Too Much Time - Captain Beefheart
So Much Better - Benji Hughes
Milk Train - Jefferson Airplane
Death Valley - BORIS
Let's Duet - John C. Reilly & Angela Correa
Madman - The Jayhawks
Have You Seen the Stars Tonight - Paul Kanter & Jefferson Starship
The Sinking Belle - sunnO))) & Boris featuring Jesse Sykes
Visions - Super Fox
Mobile Blue - Mickey Newbury
Mary Skeffington - Olivia Newton-John
Cocaine Lights - Phosphorescent
Minsmere Sphagnum/Medeival Seinese Acid Blues - Bevis Frond
1 Hour 1/2 Ago - Rain Parade
Satori Pt. II - Flower Travelin' Band
Blue Water - Percy Sledge

DOWNLOAD WINTER TRAX

Free and Clear

I just learned about Jimmie Spheeris, in a quest for dusty unexplored corners of Soft Rock wilderness (cursory web searches failed to even find a Wikipedia page – the true proof of obscurity). My brother gave me Tom Moon’s “One Thousand Recordings You Should Hear Before You Die” and Moon gushes nice about Spheeris. There’s a lot of muskrat love flowing through this music. Spheeris was something like the male Joni Mitchell, writing tender art-folk complete suspect clarinet glissandos tootling through the mix. It’s nature-love music. These others come to mind: Carole King, Bread, Gary Snyder, James, Walt Whitman, John Phillips, America, Charles Wright, Chicago, John Denver, even Nick Drake (sort of a sunny, gay, Cali incarnation). (I think I just heard a line that said “Isn’t it sublime to lay you’re your load… This planet is a’swellin’ like a salty summer melon.”!!) Further web exploration indicates he may have been a Scientologist, which I kind of dig, and which may explain everything. Spheeris died in 1984. Get this for a dangerous confluence: he toured opening for the Moody Blues AND the Jeff Beck Group. He recorded with Chick Corea AND Jackson Brown. Potent.

These are from 1971’s Isle of View.

“Seeds of Spring” – Jimmie Spheeris


“I Am the Mercury” – Jimmie Spheeris

Negative Certainty

Initially when planning the post about honorifics and songs about “Ladies,” I’d intended, as an aside, to include Neil Young’s “Borrowed Tune” off of Tonight’s the Night. “I’m singing this borrowed tune I took from the Rolling Stones,” he sings. The tune he borrowed was the one from “Lady Jane.” I guess the irony had never occurred to me that Neil Young came out and acknowledged that he’d jacked a melody from Mick and Keith, and he got away with it. Others haven’t been so lucky – like the Verve, not that they didn’t have it coming. The Stones weren’t always so up-front about their appropriations, not that they needed to be. They swiped what they liked, and if they could get away without paying royalties, they would. They certainly weren’t going to say, “I’m singing this song I borrowed from Slim Harpo.” But they sure did know what to steal, what to borrow and what to artfully model their work after. And some people outdid Jagger/Richards at their game. Chris Farlowe, at least, seems to have launched his career by covering the Stones.

I’ve been having something of a snowy sort out here this weekend. Muffins in the oven. Bunch a CDs in the rotation platter. I dug out an old Mojo Stones compilation and was struck by how awesome Farlowe’s cover of “Think” was. Then, all chance-like, I stumbled on this great Shuggie Otis tune and was reminded that Otis had allegedly been invited to audition for the vacant seat as guitarist in the Stones after Mick Taylor left the group. Evidently Otis decided to pass.

Also percolating in the wintry mix was this record by Dolorean. I’m down with dolore. And they keep true to their name. The record is called You Can’t Win, a title that deserves awards for its simple truth. Dolorean are definite miserablists, but that’s part of the up-lift. There’s something comforting about the negative certitudes of songs like “You Can’t Win” and “You Don’t Want to Know.”


“Think” – Chris Farlowe


“Knowing (That You Want Him)”- Shuggie Otis


“You Can’t Win” – Dolorean


“You Don’t Want to Know”- Dolorean

Reflections, Ruminations, Regurgitations

Greetings, friends! (Sorry, I just couldn't resist). It's been a wild and wooly time, hasn't it, and I suppose it must be 2009. Yes, it sure is, quite so. I think I've joined the legions of Slow Bloggers (there was an article about it in the NYT recently--I'm forever seeking legitimacy)... So what did I learn, musically speaking, in the past year? Well, for starters, I got "turned on" to Terry Reid (by listening to the soundtrack to The Devil's Rejects, oddly enough), and boy, am I glad that he didn't become the lead singer for Led Zeppelin! (It was better for everyone involved, I'd say). This song is so damn beautiful it almost makes me cry. (I'm comfortable enough in my putative manhood to say that).
Brave Awakening--Terry Reid



I know, I know, I'm a little slow to see things sometimes, but I've finally come to realize the brilliance of ELO. This song is just about perfect, pop-wise. They out-Bee Gee the Bee Gees, if I may coin a phrase (sorry, Lefty!) But, you know.
Strange Magic--ELO











Oh, and by the way, had I mentioned how great AC/DC is? were? am? I'm talking about the Bon Scott years, of course. Fucking brilliant, my friends.
Problem Child--AC/DC

And my favorite song of 2008? This one, okay? It's, well, really good. Just go with it. (Nitpickers: The album was released in 2007, yes, but the single didn't come out until January of last year. So there).

Don't Stop the Music--Rihanna

Many Fat Men Listened

I ended 2008 with a feat of holiday gluttony – all three meals on New Year’s Eve consisted of sausage. A chorizo and egg taco for breakfast, a spicy Italian sausage grinder for lunch, and kielbasa for dinner. It was unintended, but I can still take pride in it. The end of the year and the end of the holidays is a time to reflect on overdoing it, overeating, overdrinking. When it comes to eating, I like to think that I can sometimes pack it in – not like Jim Harrison or A.J. Liebling, but still, I can compete with most quahogs. The Times ran a piece yesterday about the alleged eating prowess of Diamond Jim Brady, and it contained this hopeful bit of information:

“The stomach … is simply the digestive system’s holding tank — ‘a receptacle equipped with the intelligence to meter out molecules to the intestine at a prescribed rate.’ While the intestine can’t handle an overload of molecules, the stomach, a highly elastic organ, can be gradually enlarged, via progressive overeating, to hold more and more food.”

So there’s something – stomach expansion – to look forward to for 2009. And here’s something more, a reminder from some mystic Canadians. The words are by Leonard Cohen and the music is by Buffy Sainte-Marie. It’s the first track off the record Illuminations, which has Buffy in full witchy-woman mode on the cover. The record also includes an “electronic score by Michael Czajkowski: realizes at the electronic studio of N.Y.U. School of the Arts. .. synthesized from the Buffy’s voice and guitar.” Let’s hope Buffy and Lenny were on to something, god is alive, magic is afoot.

“God is Alive, Magic is Afoot” – Buffy Sainte-Marie

PUT THIS IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT: HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Whelp, here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore, ringing in the yuletide and gettin' our dradle on, Kwanzaa stizz. Longtime readers of THE DRIFTWOOD SINGERS PRESENT know what that means: the return of the best compilation of vinyl rips this side of the Euphrates, SNAP, CRACKLE & POP. Believe it or not, we're up to VOLUME SIX, and this one's a doozy, chock full of moldy old pop gems of yesteryear, each lovingly transmogrified to zeros and ones from the original diamond-tipped stylus entering an inscribed modulated spiral groove on a specially-lathed disc of polyvinyl chloride (sounds dirty, doesn't it?). All said, you can't go wrong at the price of free.

To download the official CD cover, specially designed by professional designer Dewey Dell, you can can click

>> HERE <<

THEN! You can download all 24 songs in a ZIP file by clicking

>> HERE <<

Your humble (and generally humiliated) editors Mr. Poncho & Lefty spent months and years coming up with this stuff in consultation with Dewey Dell, JP Mystery, Frankie Lee and a secret star chamber of trogs chained to a radiator in a sub-basement in Minnesota. I, Lefty, was the final arbiter, mainly because nobody else would do it and Mr. Poncho is too deeply ensconced in the R&D lab, developing the next generation of DRIFTWOOD SINGERS and lovingly naming each one after a late 60s rock icon (welcome to the club, Keith!). Soon there will be more of us than there is vinyl to collect, listen to and ponder ponderously. Until then, here is what you'll find inside the latest edition of SNAP, CRACKLE & POP:

Good Times - The Persuasions (Street Corner Symphony, 1972)
Get Out of Denver - Bob Seger (Seven, 1974)
Don't Think Twice It's All Right - John Anderson (I Just Came Home to Count the Memories, 1982)
Fool Me - Joe South (Joe South, 1971)
Why Keep Breaking My Heart - Nina Simone (Wild Is the Wind, 1966)
Geno - Dexys Midnight Runners (Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, 1980)
Out of the Question - Gilbert O'Sullivan (Back to Front, 1972)
In Terms of Two - Chicago (Chicago VI, 1973)
The Good Love - Percy Sledge (I'll Be Your Everything, 1974)
When I Write the Book - Rockpile (Seconds of Pleasure, 1980)
Satin Sheets – Jeanne Pruett (Satin Sheets, 1973)
Rapid Fire - The Commodores (Motown Instrumentals, 1978)
Let's Go Get Stoned - Ray Charles (Crying Time, 1966)
Come Again? Toucan – Grace Slick (Manhole, 1974)
I Need You So - Freddy Fender (Rock'n'Country, 1976)
Back in My Arms - Robert Palmer (Pressure Drop, 1975)
Joe - Dusty Springfield (A Brand New Me, 1970)
This Flight Tonight - Nazareth (Loud'n'Proud, 1974)
Come On Over - Bee Gees (Main Course, 1975)
Running Back - Thin Lizzy (Jailbreak, 1976)
Robot - The Mighty Sparrow (Pussy Cat Party, 1979)
White Winter Hymnal - Fleet Foxes (Fleet Foxes, 2008)
Mole in the Ground - Pete Seeger (Birds, Beasts, Bugs & Bigger Fishes, 1955)
American Trilogy - Elvis Presley (Aloha from Hawaii Via Satellite, 1973)

PLAY IT LOUD.

Lefty's TOP TEN ALBUMS in the Year of Our Lord 2008

1. Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes

2. Ponytail, Ice Cream Spiritual!

3. Benji Hughes, A Love Extreme

4. Girl Talk, Feed the Animals

5. Karl Blau, AM

6. Jamie Lidell, Jim

7. Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit, The Very Best

8. Erykah Badu, New Amerykah, Pt. 1: 4th World War

9. The Hold Steady, Stay Positive

10. Pinataland, Songs for the Forgotten Future, Vol. 2

Given the annoying constraint of choosing only music made or released this calendar year -- an increasingly irrelevant category, the whole "present day" thing -- here they are, all ten. I'd like to have thrown in Bobby Charles, BORIS, Panda Bear, early Bob Seger, the 2007 Blitzen Trapper album and Robert Palmer's 1976 album Pressure Drop. But alas ...

Fleet Foxes is #1 simply because I kept putting it on the turntable and enjoying it immensely every time, especially "White Winter Hymnal," over and over again (easily the best song of the year).

Listen to it >> HERE << .

Ponytail, who I'm currently in love with, is the distilled essence of everything I love about rock and roll, Captain Beefheart as an exploding cigar that explodes into psychedelic confetti and punk estrogen and Walt Whitman run through a RAT distortion pedal with amps on 11.

LISTEN to "Celebrate the Body Electric (It Came from an Angel)".

Girl Talk is the best thing you can hear in a moving vehicle, period end of story don't argue. Also, he makes me realize I can love dirty rap music if it has Rick Springfield on it.

LISTEN: "Here's the Thing".

Benji Hughes is L-O-V-E and he's not afraid to let it show and also he's from Charlotte, NC, and he's not afraid to let that show either (maybe they're connected?).

LISTEN to "All You've Got to Do is Fall in Love with Me."

Karl Blau makes music so organic and introverted and gauzy and wobbly that you feel stoned even when you're not stoned, which is very pleasurable to hear, especially when you're baked.

LISTEN to "Stream."

I know not everyone can sign on for white man soul stylings, but if you can listen to "Another Day" by Jamie Lidell and not get an instant mood lift, then I must ask: what's wrong with you, pops?

I'll admit, Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit is the cheap way out: everything that's cool in the indie blog coolplex, but remixed as African music, featuring European production team Radioclit and Malawian-born, London-based singer Esau Mwamwaya.

Download the entire album for FREE right >> HERE << .

Erykah Badu channels the spirit of Rev. Jeremiah Wright with stoned-out-of-her-gourd, nutbag freak funk. Timely! The Roy Ayers sample on groove #1, "Amerykahn Promise," is just about as mack as you can get. You can hear the original 1977 sample, "American Promise," by Roy Ayers >> HERE <<.

LISTEN to "Amerykahn Promise."

This is the year I came around to the Hold Steady in a big way, even though everyone else decided Stay Positive wasn't as good as the last one and I was late to the party (still, you can't argue with these lyrics: "it was back in the day back when things were way different/when the Youth of Today and the early Seven Seconds/taught me some of life's most valuable lessons").

LISTEN AND WATCH this fan-made montage to "Stay Positive" right >> HERE << .

Pinataland aren't just any band -- they're friends of mine! Ironically, that makes my judgment on them even clearer, not cloudier. Their 2008 album wasn't given nearly enough publicity or appreciation or, for that matter, exultation and hosannas, so I herewith rectify that error by telling you that they're marvelous. And sui generis. And just plain old generous. Also: melodic, brainy, old-timey and new-timey at the same timey.

You can LISTEN >> HERE << .

[Editor's note: Previously, TV on the Radio's Dear Science was posted as No. 10. I liked the album, but I didn't love it. Though it certainly has pioneering soundz and arrangements, the record lacked emotional resonance for me. They're Tin Men compared to Benji Hughes. Still, I'm giving them the bonus track, No. 11, as a consolation prize for being so popular.]

The Honor System

Rock and roll likes to wear its debased status proudly. Fantasies of class imbalance play out in sartorial themes. The Stones are always singing about their torn and frayed coats, how tattered they are. Derelict characters flaunt their thread-bare scenarios. Stained overcoats, ripped jeans. The apotheosis of scuzz. I don’t have the feminist/Freudian firepower to totally excavate this idea, but there’s some kind of connection between thwarted worship of a pure feminine archetype and self-immolating male dissipation exemplified by shoddy duds. The pale white idol is put on a pedestal. The “drunken vagabond” croons after her. Chivalric wet dreams. I read that the Guardian stopped using honorifics last year in their official style guide. It’s something we miss out on here in the states – bogus titles, land-based systems of respect and unjustified privilege. Lords and ladies.(Pictured, "The Lady and the Monkey").

“Lady Geneveve” – The Kinks

“Lady Eleanor” - Lindisfarne

“Lady Jane” – Rolling Stones

Three Is the Luckiest Number That You've Ever Heard

1. My pal Hector and I were discussing how both our wives indoctrinated us in 1970s light rock, starting with Olivia Newton-John and ELO. As lifelong music snobs, we'd shunned this music for years, but our Achilles Heel, it turned out, was a childhood attachment to Grease, which secretly inculcated us in ONJ and served as the gateway drug to Xanadu and ELO. As we learned about l-o-v-e, of course, we gravitated to music made for adults, stuff with a certain romantic and progressive/feminine emotionality, i.e. willowy women and bearded men in satin and denim who sang about feelings, nothing more than feelings. I've covered some of this in previous posts, how certain childhood touchstones direct our personal tastes and how certain 70s artists (Bee Gees) erased sexual and racial barriers in ways that probably made Barack Obama inevitable. (Yeah, you read me right: I just said that the Bee Gees made Barack Obama possible.)

And so: Robert Palmer, a member in good standing of the late 70s soft rock industrial complex. After his two-dimensional 80s outings, he's probably nobody's idea of a visionary or even an interesting person. And yet his 70s blue-eyed R&B period is full of unexpected pleasures and subterranean connections, the godfather to modern blue-eyed belters Jamie Lidell and Robin Thicke. On his second LP, Pressure Drop from 1976, he's got members of Little Feat and The Meters laying down some of the tightest funk grooves ever put on tape, with Palmer as the suave band leader cum sex symbol. This is music that speaks more to the body than the mind, but that's not a fault, it's the point. The result, in this household, is presently napping in her crib.

You can download the entire A side of the LP HERE, wherein you'll hear:

Give Me an Inch
Work to Make It Work
Back In My Arms (<-- fantastic)
River Boat
Pressure Drop

[Duly noted: Robert Christgau, who detests Palmer, was compelled to improve his grade of Addictions, Vol. 1 because his wife really likes him -- kind of says it all, no?]

2. Until now, I never really liked The Bad Plus. For me, their jazz-nerd deconstruction of "Iron Man" is really interesting and clever, but a tad studious and inside-jokey, like two protractors and an abacus making fun of a moss-covered stone. "Ha!" What they've lacked, for me, is emotional resonance and a certain lyricism. But on their latest record, For All I Care, they've brought in a relatively unknown singer named Wendy Lewis and injected something lyrical and, importantly, feminine. It's still a very "cool" sounding album and there's plenty of pomo jazz-boy quantum mechanics going on, but the excellent cover choices (Bee Gees, Roger Miller) and the need to stifle it and let the singer sing have penned in the Bad Plus's more obtuse impulses. And Lewis's singing style never gets too mawkish, although she's not afraid to let a note croon when it needs to. For my money, this Yes cover is one of the best things to happen this year:

Long Distance Runaround - The Bad Plus

3. The crooked path between cabaret and rock is a treacherous one because the chances of falling into the adult contemporary ditch are very high. You may be surprised to hear this, but a master of threading the needle is k.d. lang, who I've only discovered in the last year. Her vocal presence is unbelievably warm and potent. Like The Bad Plus, she has a smart ear for good songs and, crucially, exquisite taste in arrangements and production quality. Her 1988 countripolitan album Shadowland is one of the best sounding albums produced in the last 20 years. And I discovered this cover, below, over the summer while trolling the CD collection of the hippie parents of a friend of mine. It's from 1997's Drag.

The Air That I Breathe - k.d. lang

My Sad-Eyed Lady of the Shoe Store

As a writer of magazine profiles, one thing you're constantly asking is: What is the motivation of the protagonist? We know what he or she did, but why did he or she do it? But the same question also applies when you're writing about yourself. As in:

But why am I writing about Boz Scaggs?

Story: During summers in my college years I worked in a shoe store in Maine and one time I ended up holding the foot of Dan Quayle's wife Marilyn in my hand while two secret service agents hovered nearby. This was while her husband was still VP under Bush Sr. and I was putting different sized pumps on her. "How's that feel?" I'd ask, squeezing her toe. I also put a shoe on Julius Irving once. Size 14 boat shoes or something. Anyway, the assistant manager of this shoe store was a middle-aged blond who smoked those skinny Silk cigarettes for women and appeared, with her tired eyes, bad skin and heavy makeup, to have spent her twenties partying too much with the boys and now found herself 40-something and single. I was this college dork who after reading Dostoevsky thought he'd just invented existentialism, so we were world's apart. But she had a certain sad soulfulness to her and she loved music, so we always smoked cigarettes by the dumpster out back and talked about what we heard on WBLM, 102.9. It was vaguely flirty. So one day, as I was gassing on about the Grateful Dead or some "acid rock" shit I was listening to (as a result of my then-fascination with "drugs"), she said her favorite music was Bonnie Raitt and Boz Scaggs. And I'll never forget my response: "Ack! Kerplewy! Ugh! Boz SCAGGS? Ew. No way. Blech." (Raitt's "Something to Talk About" was a huge hit that summer, so that was just a non-starter.)

But here's the truth: I couldn't have picked a Boz Scaggs song out of a lineup. Not even the hit, "Lowdown." I was just being a blowhard and she was speaking her heart. In retrospect I feel really awful about it and wish I could take it back, tell her I'm sorry and I really hope she found love and happiness in her life. Because I really LIKE Bonnie Raitt and Boz Scaggs now.

I tell this story to set up the premise for why I like Boz Scaggs: low expectations. Ever since I asserted my ill-informed opinion that summer (based on my absolute certainty that I could not like the same music as this sad-eyed lady of the shoe store), I basically wrote off Boz Scaggs and just knew that if and when I finally heard him I'd absolutely hate his guts. But around the same time that I was discovering Philly soul from the 70s, I tripped upon Silk Degrees in a junk shop near my house and decided to give it a spin. See, by the time you're my age, 37, you've been wrong about so many things you just figure, 'What the hell, maybe I was wrong about this, too.' And it turned out I was wrong. At least relative to this falsely established opinion, which I'd used as a wedge issue in some early music nerd throw-down with a shoe store assistant manager.

So now for the ex post facto justification of Boz Scaggs: For the same reason I love late '7os Bee Gees, the way they blew up their pop hooks with Harold Melvin/Teddy Pendergrast/Billy Paul-style R&B grooves, I kind of loved Boz Scaggs' smoove groove, the sleek and slinky polish. And his lyrics really are better than average, sort of worldly wise -- like he'd partied a lot in his twenties, messed around with the wrong women and was looking for the love that would finally end the lonely years. See, it was adult and romantic and sexy and truly existential in a way that only people who had lived a little could truly get. It's a feel you don't necessarily understand when you're 22 and frying your cerebellum on acid rock. With Scaggs, the romance is right there in the title of his 1976 album, Slow Dancer, which came out right before he broke big with Silk Degrees and the hit "Lowdown." There's some poetry on the back of the LP and when I read it, I just can't help thinking of the secret dreams of a middle-aged blond smoking Silks out by the dumpster behind the shoe store:

i committed today.
bought some shoes
what a luxury also to
comment on my work 3
years ago slow dancer
is an image i grew up
with johnny helped me
learn to sing this is an
attitude like walking
doing the old left right
a few secrets hear some
romance a nod to some
old idols some idle lovers
some idle lovers

november 1976

And then the other day I was reading that before the producers of Saturday Night Fever hired the Bee Gees to pen the soundtrack, they were using Boz Scaggs numbers as the fill-in music. Makes sense. Listen, I'm not saying these are the greatest songs ever made. They're not. But if you're feeling lonely tonight, if you've seen a few things, a little too much, they might just surprise you.

You Make It So Hard (To Say No) - Boz Scaggs (from Slow Dancer)

There is Someone Else - Boz Scaggs (from Slow Dancer)

Georgia - Boz Scaggs (from Silk Degrees)

And why not, it's fucking great:

"Lowdown" - Boz Scaggs

The Enigma of Joe South

I just read Joan Didion and Daryl Pinckney’s meditations about the meaning of the Obama victory in the New York Review of Books.

Joan Didion’s comments about the worrying implications of the “irony-free zone” surrounding Obama are worth stewing over for a bit. Didion has chronicled a lot of complex cultural and political change in America, never flinching from the troubling truth.

Speaking of troubling truths and zones of irony, I’m still not sure what zone Joe South is operating in for me. Probably trans-ironic, definitely post-, possibly bi-ironic. Not just plain old, that’s for sure. I’m definitely projecting some unreasonable hopes and expectations onto Joe South. I keep wanting him to be more than he is, and I keep being incapable of gauging whatever it is that he has been. From his record covers he looks out like a cross between Jeff Bridges and Brian Wilson, blessed-out, possibly cantankerous, maybe wasted.

Joe South’s records are almost worth buying for the merits of their liner notes alone. Lefty already expounded on this earlier. Here are a few lines from the back of “So the Seeds Are Growing”:

"Joe South is the sort of person who personifies his times and makes them beautiful.
Joe South is the sort of person who has seen the pain, the rage, the possibilities.
Joe South is the sort of person who has captured the passing moments of a world that’s changing every instant."

And, so, on the one hand, you come to this music looking for so much. What you get, on the surface, is somewhere in the Engelbert Humperdink/B.J. Thomas/Mac Davis zone. But, then you keep listening and looking, and you find something. Maybe it’s there. Maybe not. Check out the dobro slide, which is something like an overdriven kazoo, at the start of “Revolution of Love.” And the feverish string and horn arrangement ups the anticipation. There’s also a kinship to Lee Hazelwood and Bobby Gentry, a little Elvis, if the King was an acid casualty. Raspy soul singing. Reverb-heavy hand-claps. Hyper bass lines try to approximate grooviness with sheer pep. Funky cymbal pattern, heavy on the bell of the ride. It’s swampy. Not without cornmeal chunks. As he says, “The past is gone.”


“Revolution of Love” – Joe South

Life is Just Mythical

Lefty asked for this one special. I posted a slightly crappier version of this here nearly three years ago, along with some whisper singing from Burundi and an unusual bit of early sampling from Joni Mitchell off of Hissing of Summer Lawns. Links are all dead now.

Oddly enough, just the other week I interviewed John Kelly, the performance artist who channels Joni Mitchell in his show Paved Paradise. He’s bringing his show to Hartford in January.

In going to search for this track, I was struck with the almost scary realization that I have four Nazareth records on vinyl. I’m pretty sure this all stems from a mixed tape that Frankie Lee made for me years and years ago which opened up on one side with “Razmanaz.” And I’m also pretty sure that it was Frankie Lee’s sis who mentioned the Nazareth version of “This Flight Tonight” in one night of epic drinking. So it all comes together, family style.

After re-listening to this a few times, alls I can say is fuck Chinese Democracy. The Scots had it down. Dig the senseless reprise of the battering-ram rhythm and riff. Immigrant Song. Baracuda. Whatever. You can picture the guys in the front line – singer holding a mic stand, bassist and guitarist, all standing in a row, rocking sideways on the balls of their feet, in time, choreographed you might say, as the crowd loses it. Gaelic aerobics. Did you know that the Youngs – Angus and Malcolm, of AC/CD – were originally from Glasgow before the family relocated to Australia? Explains a lot.

“This Flight Tonight” – Nazareth

Back To Ohio

When they called the Buckeye State on election night, that was when we all knew it was over. Anyway you stacked it after that, the math was for Obama. So, be thankful for Ohio – Guided By Voices, Taft, Play-Doh, Bill Fox – it’s given us a lot. Add Blue Ash to the list. This one's for Lefty.

Power-pop fanatics already hold their debut, No More, No Less, one in high regard – naming it along with classics by Big Star, the Raspberries and Cheap Trick. There’s a little of whatever it was that made Mott the Hoople, Kiss and Motley Crue whatever it was they were. Maybe a kind of ingrown testosterone-thwarted glam androgyny, but with denim and bell bottoms instead of kabuki. Shades of steroidal power-playing evoke Blue Cheer and the Who. But Blue Ash – from Youngstown – released No More, No Less in 1973, a time when wankery and skin-tight buffoonery dominated rock music. Sticking to your guns about the glories of the three-minute song, tight harmonies, verse-chorus-werse, was kind of like preaching against free-market fundamentalism just a few years back. The record title -- No More, No Less -- is kind of a mission statement masquerading as a pithy chorus.

“Wasting My Time” – Blue Ash

The G Gnome Project

I’ve been cranking this new-ish Love As Laughter all weekend. It gets my vote for rock song of the year. These guys traffic in the semiotics of slackness, but then they pull a sucker-punch on you, turning around to give you massive, monolithic arena rock moments, artfully mussed up with just enough noise and mutter to make you think they can’t really mean it. This tune has one of those Rock and Roll take-offs that gets me playing the air drums every time. The way the drums come in would get my vote for the Drunk McArthur Grant. The two-beat kick serves as a rhythmic hook for the song, very Zeppelin III. But the southern-fried 4 a.m., sonic Robert Frank-isms are very much from the Sticky Fingers/Exile family of classic rock products. I get twinges of Moonlight Mile. The DNA map gets even more complicated when I start to hear connections to Third-Eye Blind, just in the shameless fist-pumping-ness of it all. They confuse the scent with I-don’t-give-a-fuck Pavement riffs, thrown in to lead the dogs down the wrong trail. There are lyrics about In-A-Godda-Da-Vida and chariots, and stars and melting snow, and sending for people to tend to you.

“Konny and Jim” – Love As Laughter

He's In

Let'em In - Billy Paul

And Then There Had Been Three

Today marks the third anniversary of the Driftwood Singers Present. And I’m filled with feelings--shame, guilt, pride, awe, shock, anger, intestinal distress. There have been a lot of lessons learned, primarily regarding Lindisfarne, the Bee Gees, Stealers Wheel, Karl Blau, Robin Thicke, Bob Welch. Continued pioneering of the taste-transgressing frontier. Stimulated aural receptors. Ever-receding horizons. Burn-out artists. Pop culture credit-default swaps.

This is from the new one by the Viking Moses, with the void-probingly evocative title of The Parts That Showed. This music gives me all the feelings. Aches. Moved to tears. Consult-your-doctor kind of stuff. Pluperfection.

“Life Empty Eyes” – the Viking Moses

Ooh, It Makes Me Wonder

But is it even close to being enough?

Seven Hundred Elves--Steeleye Span