Born to Lose, Dying to Win

The annual music issue of the Oxford American is a pretty reliably good read, and the accompanying mix CD is usually equally excellent. I’ve gotten turned on to a few groups that ended up becoming favorite obsessions – My Morning Jacket and Esther Phillips in particular - as a result of their inclusion in the OA music issue. This year’s no different. Among the great tracks included this year are Big Star’s "Stroke It Noel," We the People’s "She Does Everything for Me," The NuGrape Twins’ "I Got Your Ice Cold NuGrape," and Townes Van Zandt’s "Nothin’" – and the essay on the NuGrape Twins is well worth sinking into. I was already familiar with all those. As a result of this mix I'll have to reconsider Drivin' 'n' Cryin' too (an entertaining essay addresses the question of apostrophe abuse in band names). I may even have to go ahead and track down some records by Bob Dorough, the guy behind School House Rock. But what came as a real revelation was this track by Gary Stewart. I guess this was Stewart’s hit. And it’s pretty catchy, with that winning country mix of self-pity and self-destruction. If you didn't already, this'll make you want to drink some cheap whiskey.

"Single Again" - Gary Stewart

Starched White Shirts, Buttoned at the Neck

With the success of Brokeback Mountain last year, a lot was made of the gay cowboy. It didn’t take much reflection to reveal that Western films – filled as they were with chaps-wearing, gun-toting and leather-obsessed cow rustlers and horse wranglers – were, in fact, gay all along, as many have noted. But then again, the case could be made that just about every movie genre has its homoerotic elements. Ever seen Smoky and the Bandit?

But what about the gay country singer? There are fewer paradigms there. For the ladies, Patsy Cline was embraced as a sort of lesbian icon; Loretta Lynne had her candid feminism of the people ("Rated X" and "The Pill"); and then there’s Dolly Parton ... shhh, don't tell anybody. For the dudes, that leaves Randy Travis, who, it turns out, was from Marshville, NC, not far from where I sort of grew up. Rumor always had it that Travis, who, like Parton, married his manager who happens to be quite a bit older than him, was gay. I suspect that Nashville is sort of like Hollywood in the 50s (and today) in that there are probably loads of stars that everyone knows are gay, but who still have to maintain their hetero image in order to keep their fans. You have to really see the cover of the record No Holding Back (I still can't seem to post images), from which comes the great, sappy song "He Walked on Water." There's a lot of gay semiotics at work. The muscle-T, the jeans, the stance, the general equestrian scenario. I remember raising my opinion of Robert Christgau when I read a short piece in which he praised "He Walked on Water." This song is basically about a kid who idealized his old toothless great-grandfather. Aside from the lines of the opening verse: "He wore starched white shirts, buttoned at the neck/And he's sit in the shade and watch the chickens peck/His teeth were gone, but what the heck/" there are some other choice ones (Travis didn't write it, BTW), like "He could handle a rope and he was good with a gun/And my mama's daddy was his oldest son." Travis, whose voice can dip and puff and get all bowels-of-the-earth deep, is the only real heir to George Jones.

"He Walked On Water" -- Randy Travis

I pretty much failed as I tried to come up with some other gay country stars. Turns out there's plenty of gay-bashing country, but that's a whole different deal. Here's one, sort of. From the still mind-blowing Song-Poem Anthology that came out in 2003, this is "I Lost My Girl to an Argentinian Cowboy" -- just savor the lyrics on this one.

"I Lost My Girl to an Argentinian Cowboy" - Artist unknown

Finally, here's two from old Hag. Merle Haggard makes a condescending little chuckle when he talks about the "two kinds of fairies" in "My Own Kind of Hat." He has perplexing distinct emphatic taxonomies. It's sort of a question for Magritte or Sartre or someone, but what does it mean to wear your own kind of hat?

And I know this is a stretch, but I thought I could yoke "Rainbow Stew" to this theme. You know, rainbows. This is Merle at his obnoxious best -- a complete curmudgeon, railing against idealistic environmentalists, yet somehow revealing the idiocy of a do-nothing attitude. An added bonus: fake live crowd sounds and an E Street Band-style sax solo. Free bubble up.

"My Own Kind of Hat" -- Merle Haggard

"Rainbow Stew" -- Merle Haggard


"Here's a quarter, call someone who cares": a tangential rumination
For me, the song "He Walked On Water" will always evoke the summer of 1990. There's a "game" you'd sometimes see at truck stops and arcades, at least down south you would, it consists of two tiers that are basically covered in quarters. One of the shelves slowly pushes in a few inches at regular intervals, compressing and reconfiguring the quarters on the bottom tier, nudging them toward an overhang that will dump whatever quarters fall off into a basin that the player can retrieve. A well-placed quarter, dropped carefully into the gap created by the moving shelf can, when the shelf comes back to push it toward the ledge, cause a few dollars worth of coins to drop off into the bin. It always looks like 10 or 12 quarters are dangling, ready to drop, and that's how you get roped in. This was a summer during which I worked at the lesbian cafe/bookstore and basically survived by eating my meals of cheese melted bagels and tempeh and avocado sandwiches during my shifts, or else making big pots of lentils with our housemates. There were some dumpster-diving friends who'd sometimes drop off loads of bananas or day-old bread. Somehow, during this poverty, we got on a cheap-skate gambling kick -- we'd flip quarters, dollars, there was a famous flip for one-hundred dollars. When my friend Andy lost, he decided to pay my other friend Chris off in pennies. So Andy went to the bank and got $100 in penny rolls and we spilled them out on Chris' floor. Seemed funny at the time. Mostly just strikes me as obnoxious now. Anyway, Andy, who was an untapped songwriting/outsider art genius, was also big into the "quarter game" at the arcade. I remember that the game had the a little metal plaque that said "Redemption Game" on it, which also struck us as hilarious. After trying to figure out the key to causing a big pay-off of quarters to drop, Andy eventually settled on the superior-fire-power approach. This entailed getting $20 or so worth of quarters and then frantically trying to jam all of the quarters through the coin-sized slot during the brief time between when the moving shelves pulled back and pushed forth. You only had a few seconds. Anyway, it wasn't foolproof, but if you were lucky you might get around $30 or $35 worth of quarters to drop when you used this approach. That was a big $10 or $12 profit. But you could just as easily get only $4 back. A big loss of $16 to chumps like us. Anyway, it was at this arcade that I remember hearing, Randy Travis' "He Walked on the Water" on what you'd now call the hot new country station. I seem to remember Patty Loveless's "Timber, I'm Falling in Love" being big then too. Anyway, Andy (he was known to everyone as Anj) in his absurdist brilliance latched on to the general melody and a sort of mumbled transliteration of the lyrics. He would routinely sing his version of the chorus, taking "If the story is told, only heavn knows," and turning it into something like "If the story is told, on his briss-preyster rolls." And he could do it with the right earnest twang and dip. This really was funny. As further proof of Anj's gifts, in high school art class he spent an entire semester working on a single drawing, using a ruler and dozens of pencils sharpened to a needle point. He called the drawing "The Molecule of Insanity" -- it was like some sort of op-art outsider-art depiction of an infinitely complex crystal, with thousands of super-straight lines creating crazy convex and concave spikes, completely abandoning the rules of perspective. His art teacher wasn't sure if she should let him continue on such an obsessive project, but he stuck to it diligently and I believe he was given credit in the end. Another of Anj's homespun dadaist efforts was to paper the wall of his bedroom using the small gold foil papers that came with each box of Player's cigarettes. Anj, a big time smoker, saved hundreds and hundreds of the papers and used them to spell out a shiny "PLAYERS" on the wall above his bed.

Stumping the Machine

Remember back in the ‘90s when chessmaster Gary Kasparov tied with the IBM monster chess computer Big Blue in a series of high-profile matches? I read an interview with Kasparov in which he explained his approach to stumping the super machine. Since Big Blue could map out some ridiculously huge number of possible future moves and scenario, Kasparov concluded that only way he could beat the supercomputer was to inject some nonsensical noise into his playing. He messed with Big Blue’s silicon mind by randomly doing a few moves that made no sense.

I was reminded of Kasparov’s strategy while messing around with the http://www.pandora.com/ radio site. If you’ve not used the streaming radio intelligent jukebox, you should. No matter how encyclopedic your knowledge is, the machine is likely to come up with some interesting recommendations. Pandora was featured in a recent NYT story. The company has a staff of music experts listening to and notating thousands of songs. The way it works is you type in your favorite groups or songs and the computer searches Pandora’s "music genome project" to come up with similar material. If you like Music Machine, the computer might play some similarly noisy psych garage, or it might veer toward some blues boogie rock.

So I tried to blow the mind of the machine by entering the Louvin Brothers, Duke Ellington and Blue Cheer, curious to see if the software would locate some sort of happy middle ground between the three of them, maybe I’d get some Bob Wills or some Kinky Friedman. I didn’t know. Though I did get turned on to the worthy Canadian band Bent Wind, I realized that the Pandora software isn’t operating on a Big Blue level of artificial intelligence. For the most part the selections alternate between obvious bluegrass, country gospel influenced stuff and jazz with a focus on big bands. It wasn’t as advanced as I hoped, but Pandora does point towards a future in which nerdy hipster geeks will subversively point the masses away from pedestrian tastes and toward more interesting and obscure choices. It’s like the musical equivalent of the way that Starbucks, Pottery Barn, Target and Old Navy have, in their own little ways, chipped away at what was once the gloriously bad popular tastes in this country.

But in the meantime, here’s to obscurantism. I don’t expect you’ll find any of these tracks on Pandora. You might even have a hard time finding them on Amazon. But don’t be confused, just because it’s hard to find doesn’t mean it’s good. Brush!? is like one of the rarest records around, I’m told. It took a few years just for the folks who released this one to track down the vinyl, which was originally released on some obscure Japanese label. It’s sloppy and lumpy Japanese prog kraut psych weirdness, with dabbling detours into raga, country rock and free jazz. It reminds me some of this track, "I’m Hiding My Nightengale" by Margareta Juvan and Can. I found this on what I assume to be a bootleg Kraut sampler I bought at Kim’s Underground 10 years ago or so. And, while we’re wallowing in the obscure, here’s some early 80s Brazilian post-punk from the sampler Nao Wave, which came out last year.


"Grey Hound Bus" - Brush!?

"I’m Hiding My Nightengale" -- Margareta Juvan and Can

"La Fora Pode Ate Morrer" - Ira!

Hall & Oates and the Damage Done

White soul. Some say it's an oxymoron. But don't get locked in a prison of attitude and cliche, my brothers and sisters. While British electronica white person Jamie Lidell has been accused of being a bad karaoke act, I think there's something serious here to be contended with, a real intimacy with funk nuance. The man's a lover, not a hater. His clearest antecedent is early Robert Palmer, before the mannequin videos and cut-out-bin hits, back when RP had a crack backup band made up of members of the Meters and Little Feat. Lidell is usually his own one-man band, pumping out the bleeps, blips and bloopity-blop from a deck of electro-gadgets, but here he's got real live people sampling the spirit of early Prince, Marvin Gay, Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding, all the classic stankonia, like a tastemaster who happens to have very, very passable pipes and an uncannily slinky groove. He's what Justin Timberlake might sound like if he was his own producer, had never set foot in LA and could also sing (as it stands, Timberlake is more like a hood ornament for Timbaland).

How to explain the umbrella, I have no idea.

What's the Use - Jamie Lidell

When I Come Back Around - Jamie Lidell

Multiply - Jamie Lidell

Game of Fools - Jamie Lidell

Some People Can Do What They Like - Robert Palmer

Postscript: Oh hell. I guess I gotta to raise the stakes with Robin Thicke, since the man's got a new album out in October. You can sample it here. I suggest you listen closely to the lyrics of his forthcoming hit "Wanna Love U Girl." Thicke is turning out to be the white man's R. Kelly. Hopefully he can catch a break with Timberlake dominating the tiny patch of popular real estate reserved for oxymoron music.

Postscript II: That this exists needs to be shouted from the rooftops: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Darryl Hall & John Oates, Part One.

Here Comes Pride Up the Back Stretch, Sweet Jesus

I’ve long had some kind of deep resentment toward Yo La Tengo. I never quite knew what it was. Throughout the 90s I was right there with your Pavement, your Guided By Voices, your Jesus Lizard, your Palace Brothers, your Stereolab, but I never could sign on for YLT. It’s not like I ever spent much time listening to them, but whenever I heard them I always found it bloodless. Well, if the 21st century is about anything, it’s about expanding our sympathetic capacities. And I’ve found myself recently having to accept that YLT’s new record is brilliant. For one thing, there’s the title – I’m Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass. That’s something Gordon Lish would probably be proud of. And then there’s this track, "The Race is On Again," with its beautiful murky vocal counterpoint. It reminds me a little of Teenage Fanclub’s "I Know the World'll Be Ok." (Doubtful, depends on the meaning of the word "world.")

And speaking of expanding our sympathetic capacity, consider "New Potato Caboose" as an exercise. This is from Anthem of the Sun, the Dead's trippy second album. It's funny, Dead heads like to dismiss the Dead's studio albums, and I always thought Anthem of the Sun was an impenatrable wank, but I heard some of it the other night on the ride home from a Chinese restaurant. I've really grown to love the Dead's bogus Medieval stuff -- "St. Stephen," "Rosemary" and "Dark Star." This fits right in. Arthur Magazine ran a piece about which of the Dead's records were acceptable. It was an interesting discussion. I've come to dig bits and pieces of all the studio albums through Blues for Allah, and if I'm feeling expansive I might even speak out in defense of that gay stoner disco shit on Shakedown Street. Well, while we're at it, "Althea" off Go to Heaven is pretty unimpeachable. So, I'm ruined, basically.

Which leads us to ... Brewer and Shipley. I don't know what came over me the other day at the record store. I just felt it. These were the guys who brought us "One Toke Over the Line, Sweet Jesus," so consider it an act of mercy that it's this track under consideration today. Finding the beauty in B&S reminds me of that scene in The Life of Milarepa where the before taking in Milarepa, the young aspirant, the wise old master first makes the acolyte built a stone castle on a distant hilltop. Then, when the construction is complete, the master orders Milarepa to tear it down and return the stones to their original place. The master then tells Milarepa to rebuild elsewhere. It's an endurance test. It may be a worthless exercise, but we're stronger when it's through. Think of the insipid flute as a boulder on your shoulder.

(I still can't seem to upload pictures on Blogger, so you'll just have to imagine the great shot of Brewer and Shipley, with too-tight pants, hippie-swirl combovers, lavish mustaches and a white fedora.) [Editor: I've done what I can. Black cowboy hat will have to do.]

"The Race is on Again" - Yo La Tengo

"New Potato Caboose" - Grateful Dead

"Ruby on the Morning" - Brewer and Shipley

I'm OK/You're OK

Just about every British rocker of note has, at one time or another, fatally romanticized life in rural America, whether that means idealizing gritty blues joints or getting all cornpone bucolic about life in the country. That’s how you get Mick Jagger’s lame southern accent --"I’m down in Virginia with your cousin Lou" (though some suspect he was just trying to compete with Gram Parsons for Keef’s affection). Or Elton John’s "Country Comfort" (I cherish the thought of Elton and Bernie Taupin chipping in to help some Granny mending her barn.). As with most things, the Kinks had a little more sense. When they went country, they did it via London's bombed-out blue-collar outer fringes.

Muswell Hillbillies is generally pegged as either the beginning of a long slow decline for the Kinks, or maybe as the last gasp of semi-good stuff from the gang. From there it was more music hall nostalgia, brass-heavy silly concept albums and live filler. It wasn't long before Ray Davies was putting beer cans on his head on stage and announcing that he was fucking sick of it all. He'd had it up to there. People often cite "20th Century Man" and "Alcohol" as the songs of interest from Muswell, but I've always loved "Oklahoma USA." It's got a beautiful chorus, but what's great about it is the weird self-aware displaced longing for a Hollywood version of country life in America. It's all Rogers and Hammerstein-induced. It's got the dreamy tinsel town obsession that would show up in "Celluloid Heroes," but instead of getting maudlin about vanished fame, the pathos is soaked up by the sad sacks who trudge through life fantasizing about living in a movie. I've never really known what Ray Davies might mean by the line "If life's for living, what's living for?", but it strikes me as horribly sad all the same.

Ideally I'd be able to offer a version of the Sons of the Pioneers' majestic "The Everlasting Hills of Oklahoma" to go along with this and make it an official OK post.

"Oklahoma USA" -- The Kinks

Marie Provost Did Not Look Her Best

I've become a full-on convert to Nick Lowe's 1978 masterpiece Pure Pop For Now People, an LP that could just as well have been called Pure Pop for Future People. Lowe's ability to meld cheeky irony and effervescent melodies was well ahead of its time. The aim of his wit is true: When David Bowie came out with the album Low in 1977, Lowe put out an EP the same year called Bowi. He also sang a song making fun of the Bay City Rollers in the style of the Bay City Rollers. His friend Elvis Costello borrowed a lot from his sensibility, especially how he inhabits all kinds of pop forms mainly to tell jokes and spin literate yarns. But you can tell he just loves pop, too. It's a pre-Ween schematic.
All of which is to direct you to "Marie Provost," a song about a silent screen star gone to seed (see photo, left) who overdoses on quaaludes in her apartment and is later discovered half-eaten by her pet dachshund. Try turning that tale into a power pop hook! And yet just listen to the opening and feel the sensation. It never felt so good to chuckle so blackly.

Marie Provost - Nick Lowe

From the previous post, see also:

Tonight - Nick Lowe

The Ballad of Billy Parham

This summer, when I wasn't reading Cormac McCarthy novels, I was flipping through LPs in the musty records shops of upstate New York. What happened is I started dreaming up a soundtrack for some amalgamated film interpretation of Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and No Country For Old Men. The only real guiding thoughts were border-themed imagery, maybe some laconic, slow-drip mood music for the image of a horsebacked rider slumped on a blood-red horizon, crushed by the existential largeness of the sky, appearing and disappearing in the heat vapors. Tejas. Guns. Death. Blood oaths. Long, hot, empty travel and wandering weirdos in burnt-out adobe villages. And, of course, Mexico. As time went on, I developed more liberal interpretations of what exactly this Cormac-inspired film might be and what music I could use for it. You could consider them suggested tunes for whatever the Coen Brothers might be cooking up for No Country for Old Men. Or perhaps we play them like mini-music videos over lush and dramatic static shots between scenes, a la Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves.

For starters, I like the idea of coopting the theme music from a previous Western soundtrack. Cormac lifts Faulkner, we lift Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. The tambourine gives us the opening shot of distant spurs on a widescreen desert.

Main Theme (Billy) - Bob Dylan

This is where our rangy 16-year-old protagonist is leaving his home in Tennessee, setting out on his Mexico quest. What's both great and stupid about Charlie Daniels is encapsulated in this line: We were both so happy just being together, like a possum in the woods. Think about that. "We" were a "possum." And, of course, a "possum in the woods" is "happy being together." Huh? (Wait, maybe he's the "possum" and she's the "woods"? Ew.)

Franklin Limestone - Charlie Daniels Band

Our protaganist--I like Billy Parham, from The Crossing--is already getting homesick. So he remembers his favorite Elton John song. Except, he hears it in his head as Rod Stewart. And Ron Wood starts singing this limey-sounding harmony at minute 2:38. Also, for some reason, it sounds like it was recorded on a wax cylinder. Maybe it's the heat.

"Country Comforts" - Rod Stewart

After a few days, he's out on the long, hot plains, heading across "Tejas," the name of this ZZ Top album, circa '76. What I love about this is the sloooow, tear-drop slide solo over the frantic riffage that just kind of gets at something true about Texas: mellow and easy on top, speed-freaky and fucked up under neath.

"Pan Am Highway Blues" - ZZ Top

The synth riff on this B.W. Stevenson song is shocking and misguided in many ways, but it's also perfect for when Billy finds himself in a funky 80s music-video-style retro-futuristic Star Wars cantina scene that our pomo director has conjured up. Kind of like Sophia Coppola using 80s New Wave music for a movie about Marie Antoinette. I love the line, I'll be down at the station sipping coffee at the book rack. The back of the "Lost Feeling" LP shows the pages of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," with a pocket watch lying on them. Like G.W., perhaps fellow Texan B.W. had recently read some "Shakespeares."

"Down to the Station" - B.W. Stevenson

Rick Danko. He's kind of what you become at the end of a McCarthy novel: all burnt out from killing and drinking, having spent too many long, freezing nights by a desert fire with some creepy ex-priest speaking in tongues while poking the embers under the stars. This is from his 1977 solo album. Danko decided to spell "New Mexicoe" with an E. I guess that's the mescalin talking (or spelling).

"New Mexicoe" - Rick Danko

I used to listen to the Cowboy Junkies "WHITES OFF EARTH NOW!!" back in high school, so I was delighted to find the album again this summer. (Remember when everyone in college hated white people?) Here, Billy is extremely paranoid that some corrupt Mexican coppers are on his trail. Having crossed the border, he just saved a young Mexican girl from some violent manhandling and now he's trying to escape with her into the darkness by being real. Real. Quiet. Listen. (Yeah, I know it's a Springsteen song, but don't think about New Jersey.)

"State Trooper" - Cowboy Junkies

Billy's repressed romantic feelings are intimated but never articulated. He's too laconic and gentlemanly for that. The next day, he drops the young Mexican girl off in an encampment of wash women, where he eats some beans on tortillas before heading out. He says some kind words to her in Spanish and rides into the valley, south and west.

"Baby Please Don't Go" - Cowboy Junkies

This next song plays immediately after a hideous, ultraviolent murder scene in which Billy has witnessed 19 Comanches get scalped and an unfortunate Mexican railroad worker get his eyeballs sucked out by a psychotic Civil War soldier gone AWOL. Now the band of mercenary killers wants to party. Imagine this song playing over slo-mo images of scary-ass dudes shooting guns in the air and puking. You only use Nick Lowe for irony.

"Tonight" - Nick Lowe

After a few more days on the desert, our Billy meets another white man (who hasn't yet left the earth). Dude named Filbert. He's headed down to get a divorce from his shrewish wife, who is on his trail. He sings a song by firelight and the shadows flicker around his pocked cheeks (he looks vaguely like Burt Bacharach). A little comic relief.

"Mexican Divorce" - Ry Cooder

A month later, our hero/anti-hero comes across a caravan of freaks and meets another woman, a fishnet-clad circus performer from Juarez who's down on her luck and suggests they tie one on with a jug of Mexican wine. "Live a little, buddy," she says. In Spanish.

"Sip the Wine" - Rick Danko

I've already posted this last song before, but I need it for the movie. Billy is feeling the existential dread of being so long alone and in such a grim land of drifters, killers, lost souls, goons, carnival geeks and whores. After a bunch of really grim, tragic shit has happened--Filbert got his assed handed to him by a band of Apache--Billy has seen too much. He's gone to the ends of the earth looking for solace in a cruel world, ever wondering what happened to that Mexican gal, who came back to nurse him back to health during a long fever dream after he was shot in the stomach by the corrupt sheriff (then she ran off with Rick Danko). He also had to kill the ex-priest, who had tried to scalp him for some ransom money for horses Billy stole that originally belonged to his dad back in Franklin Limestone. Now he's back on his horse. Alone. The sky is crushing his tiny, heat-exhausted figure on a widescreen desert. The credits roll. Cue Bonnie Raitt.

"Too Long at the Fair" - Bonnie Raitt

FIN

My (Doomed) Morning Jacket Compilation CD

It can't be done. The dark forces that lie within will thwart your plans to make the perfect compilation CD of My Morning Jacket. What are these dark forces? Sony rootkits? iTunes? Fucked up store-bought CDs?

No. I think it's more than that. I think it's the supernatural MMJ Muse who says, "No, my son. Don't do it. You can't fit all their good songs onto one 80 minute CD. They have too many good songs, too many long songs. Don't even try. If you do try, then I will make sure tracks 11-13 will not rip correctly on your computer, nor play on your mortal car stereo."

That's the way it happened to me. I was inspired by their killer performance on Austin City Limits, and I took a shot at putting together a future greatest hits for MMJ. I put an emphasis on the newer rockers and the shorter acoustic-flavored numbers. I just wanted something that would sound good in the car, something I could share with friends who hadn't been introduced to the brilliance of MMJ.

Here's the song list, re-ripped and ready to roll:

1) Anytime
2) Off The Record
3) Gideon
4) Golden
5) One Big Holiday
6) Mahgeetah
7) X-Mas Curtain
8) Wordless Chorus
9) It Beats 4 U
10) Bermuda Highway
11) How Do You Know
12) Lowdown
13) Come Closer
14) They Ran

I know. The Tennessee Fire has been criminally under-represented, etc, etc. I'll have to get started on Volume II now. Wish me luck.

Miserablism, Canadian Elements, Acid-Damaged Chinoiserie, Time-Warp Face-Melting, and Italian Cantata Abuse

I’m breaking with the anachronic approach normally followed here. As Sam Beckett said, "No one really knows what an ostrich sees in the sand," or something like that. Anyway, here’s some new, recent and forthcoming stuff. All very good, go buy it.

Fading Trails is the new one by Jason Molina and Magnolia Electric Co. Parts of it were recorded by Steve Albini, if you care about stuff like that. But Molina is a master of miserablism, and even more saturated with despair is Molina’s new solo vinyl-only release Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go, from which come "It’s Easier Now" and "Alone With the Owl." It’s a beautiful downer. Like Antony and the Johnsons, this stuff can just make you weep and weep, or at least think about weeping. Molina’s songs are short and to the point, skeletal at times. Here he’s whittled his language down to a bare essence, with moonlight, ocean, owls, wolves and horizons populating the songs, giving them the elemental feel of myth. There’s a bit of the melody of "It’s Easier Now" that reminds me of the Carpenters’ "Superstar."

Richard Buckner is another bleak master. His voice has the craggy wind-blown, water-eroded feel of a barren cliff. The singing reminds me of Richard Thompson a little, there are those same micro-fluctuations of pitch on any given syllable, sort of a George Jones effect, via Jay Farrar. I’ve grown to appreciate the way the drums push the songs almost past the tempo where Buckner’s vocals seem to want to keep it. These are from his latest, Meadow. If I’m not mistaken, I remember reading that the guy spent some time in Alberta, which somehow seems to explain everything. The winds sure do blow lonely out there.

The Archie Bronson Outfit explodes generic expectations pretty successfully. The pow-wow beats, the ecstatic non-verbal vocal refrains, the gritty blues slidework, the generally freaked-out feel and the sort of acid-damaged chinoiserie all make me think of Captain Beefheart. But these guys are from London, they’ve been soaking in their art-school post-punk, too.

And while we’re at it, let’s throw one in from the forthcoming Akron/Family disc. Many bands grasp and grope toward the transcendent, but few actually grab hold of the beyond. Here Akron/Family – the bearded ones, the bird-watchers, the sea-chanty backing outfit -- conjure thrift store vision quests, liberal arts satori, they shed what few inhibitions may have remained, they get their Heidegger on. "Blessing Force" travels through worlds of Dark Star-like cosmic riffage, communal group-singing catharsis, Eno-ish egg-head pure realms, free-jazz face-blasting, hocketting pygmy festivities and into dark tunneling vortexes where matter, space and time warp.

And just to clean out the plumbing, we’ll conclude with a little bit of Ennio Morricone, from the two-CD set Crime and Dissonance that came out earlier this year on Ipecac.

"It's Easier Now" - Jason Molina

"Alone With the Owl" - Jason Molina

"Mile" - Richard Buckner

"Window" - Richard Buckner

"Kink" - The Archie Bronson Outfit

"Cuckoo" - The Archie Bronson Outfit

"Blessing Force" - Akron/Family

"Ricreazone Divertita" from Cuore di Mamma - Ennio Morricone

Sweet Cheese

It’s by no means scientific, but I’ve conducted a little inquiry, using the limited inventory of my brain, and I’ve concluded that Lou Reed’s "Wild Child" contains the best opening line of any song, ever:

"I was talking to Chuck in his Genghis Khan suit and his wizard’s hat."

I’m open to reconsidering this verdict, if any of you have any other contenders.
"Wild Child" comes from Lou’s largely disappointing solo debut after the demise of the Velvets. I think Lou holed up in Long Island to work on this one. For evidence of the general wrongheadedness of the record one need only learn that Rick Wakeman and Steve Howe play on it; members of Yes joining members of the Velvet Underground doesn’t make for rock supergroups, it makes for some forbidden depressing chemistry. The record has a number of at-the-time unreleased tunes – "The Ocean," "Lisa Says" and "I Can’t Stand It" – that the VU had already recorded much better versions of. Still, "Wild Child" is a master stroke of early 70s downtown New York late-night sociological reportage, with lines about theater auditions, organic soap, pills, racing cars, suicide and sweet cheese.

"Wild Child" – Lou Reed

On My Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: -
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -and gazed -but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.
– William Wordsworth


Here are some songs that, as it happens, have a sort of atmospheric, barometric cloud theme running through them. And a few other unrelated tangents are thrown in. Obviously, one could have included "Both Sides Now" and "Off My Cloud" and others, but that's not how we roll.

As Lefty mentioned a while back in his post about Audience, some bands have names that now elude easy detection in the Google Age. Type in “Audience” and, unless you know more about the band – a song, a band member, a record title or label – you’re not likely to have any luck tracking them down in the electro ether. Same with The United States of America, a late-60s avant-psychedelic group of grad students from LA. The band mixed an early ethnomusicological bent with a little John Cage-style uncertainty, electronic experimentation, and some “white collar conservative pointing his plastic finger at me”- variety hippie attitude. The record, recorded in 1967-68 for Columbia, was one of the label’s bigger flops. It was reissued on by Sundazed in 2004 with a bunch of bonus previously unreleased tracks. “Cloud Song” is just beautiful. It’s like futuristic lieder as composed for Woody Allen’s Sleeper. The other USA songs don’t have a cloud theme, but they’re worth a listen, too.

The Clientele are jazzy jangly sleepy English indie rockers. I saw them play in Northampton not too long ago. There may have been a dozen people there. Live, it’s clear that the guitarist has some serious sneaky jazz chops, with all kinds of crazy oddball augmented, nine, seven, diminished and whatever else chord voicings. “House on Fire” is one of the lovelier songs from The Violet Hour, an almost completely beautiful record. It’s hard to think of who to compare them to. Like My Morning Jacket, the Clientele go in for the majestic cathedrals of reverb, but there’s no sour mash. Instead it’s afternoon tea, crisps, some tobacco and perhaps a splash of scotch. At times the Clientele bring to mind early weird stuff by the Kinks. Like “See My Friends” “Strange Effect” and “Fancy.”

“Big Sky,” off of The Kinks are The Village Green Preservation Society, isn’t really about clouds. And it’s not even really about skies. It’s more about an aloof all-knowing god. I always loved the scatter-shot Beefheart-eque drum rolls on this one, the insistent high, one-note drone on the chorus, and the backing vocals.

And one more. “Charm (Over ‘Burundi Cloud’)” from Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s Possible Musics Fourth World Vol. I.

My laptop doesn't seem to be able to upload pictures to Blogger anymore. That's why I couldn't post cloud paintings by John Constable or a great picture of Chief Red Cloud. Anyone have any suggestions?


“Cloud Song” - The United States of America

“Where Is Yesterday” - The United States of America

“The American Metaphysical Circus” - The United States of America

“House on Fire” The Clientele

“Big Sky” - The Kinks

“Fancy” - The Kinks

“Charm (Over ‘Burundi Cloud’)” – Jon Hassell and Brian Eno

Beach Music

From Bruce Handy's New York Times review of Catch A Wave, The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, by Peter Ames Carlin:

But is there really anything “new,” as they say, to say about Wilson and the Beach Boys? Not really, at least on the evidence here — don’t go looking for revisionist theories about Al Jardine being the group’s real genius — though Carlin seems to have spoken to everyone close to Wilson who’s still alive, and some who aren’t. He has also dug up some illuminating new documents and recordings, transcripts of family squabbles, druggy parties and such, that flesh out the story more fully than earlier tellings did.

Well .... not so fast Mr. Handy. I'm not gonna go out on any limbs about Al Jardin, or Mike Love, but on listening to my double CD of Sunflower and Surf's Up I was surprised to realize that a few of my favorite tunes were by Carl or Dennis Wilson or maybe even Bruce Johnston. I had always approached these post-Smiley Smile records by more or less just listening to the tracks by Brian Wilson, but I'm learning now that that was a short-sighted approach. I know, serious Beach Boys fanatics have probably been through all this. But it took me a long time. The band had better luck with their next record, Surf's Up, which featured a few tracks from the abandoned Smile album. Bruce Johnston's "Disney Girls" and Carl's "Feel Flows" are from that one. [You can see Johnston perform "Disney Girls" solo on piano on the second volume of the Old Grey Whistle Test DVDs (far-inferior to the first). I don't understand why the BBC doesn't just released the entire series of this show instead of making questionable anthologizing decisions.]

We learn from Keith Badman's exhaustive and comprehensive The Beach Boys, The Definiteive Dairy of America's Greatest Band on Stage and in the Studio, that Sunflower was the first Beach Boys record on which everyone shared production duties. After having initially been rejected by their record label in February 1970, it was reworked and eventually released in August, but Sunflower went on to be the worst-selling Beach Boys record to date. We also learn that during this time Mike Love, who had been following the instructions of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, had grown thin, weak and delusional from an extreme fasting regime (you'll notice that the awful "Student Demonstration Time" from Surf's Up is not inclulded as an example of the BB's unsung genius). As a result, Love had skipped out on a few performances, and Brian Wilson rejoined the band, briefly, for the first steady stage appearances with them since 1964 and the famous breakdown.

Surf's Up did far better than Sunflower, in terms both of sales and critical response, but it's a record about which the Beach Boys had some considerable regrets. In the 1990s, Brian Wilson said it was a "piece of shit."

I learned from Mojo that the surviving members of the Beach Boys put their famous differences and often litigious tendencies aside to gather this summer in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the release of Pet Sounds.When asked if the band had buried its hatchets, long-suffering but still plainly evil and gross Mike Love, a man who obviously hasn't benefited enough from all the meditation and fasting, pointed to his back and said "The hatchets are all buried here."

"Forever" - Beach Boys


"Disney Girls" - Beach Boys


"Feel Flows" - Beach Boys

Learning to Love the Bomb

If you can, try to recall the time, 20-something years ago. Before hip-hop was the dominant pop cultural force. Before Do the Right Thing. Before Yo! MTV Raps! Before the Beastie Boys. Before LL Cool J had a video. Before Run DMC’s Raising Hell. The direction of rap hadn’t been cemented. The Fat Boys and beat boxing were still where it was at. It was a moment, 1984 or so, when black music in America might have taken a drastically different turn. Instead of tough, street-minded, New York-centric MCs. There was an instant when go-go music -- a percussion-heavy, call-and-response party-chant music out of Washington DC -- had a chance at becoming the definining black good-time music. And there was no bigger go-go band than Trouble Funk.

I remember hearing Trouble Funk’s “Drop the Bomb” on WPEG in Charlotte, North Carolina. I must have been in 8th grade or something, and the first line, with the words “Drop the bomb on the white boy crew,” had actually almost frightened me. I didn’t know then about the bomb as metaphor for earth-shaking grooves. I just thought it was a threat of annihilation. But, even then, it sounded pretty damn good. This might be a song about obliterating me and my kind, but it was hard not to like it.

"Drop the bomb on the white boy crew ... White boy crew now whatcha gonna do?"

A few years earlier I had witnessed what you’d have to call a mini race riot on a bus on the way to our elementary school (we were bused across town from our largely white suburb to Marie G. Davis, an elementary school sandwiched between a large public housing project and a textile mill). Racial tensions had been brewing on the bus (#426) for a while. There was a newly opened, mostly black, small housing project not far from our neighborhood, and so our bus was theoretically integrated. But not really. About a third of the bus was black students from the housing project. They sat in the front, near the black bus driver, probably a high school student. And two thirds of the bus was white kids from the neighborhood. I can’t really remember how it got to the boiling point, but tensions basically erupted one morning when the driver told the kids on the bus to “kick that white boy’s ass” over some comment. It was certainly provoked, because we all had been expecting a fight. I had even brought a knife, a dull little jack knife, to school in anticipation of hostilities. But when a crowd, six or seven maybe, of black kids stormed back to our end of the bus and started whooping on the boy, I didn’t have the nerve to do anything with my little knife. And they really did beat his ass. When the little blast of violent energy passed, Tom Flack, that was his name, stood up, and he had a strange grey puncture wound under his eye, the skin around which had begun to puff up. Someone had stabbed him in the face with a pencil. It really was frightening. I think I may have cried when I was called to the principal’s office to recount the incident.

A year earlier, in fifth grade, I remember we used to bring in music for Friday afternoons. For the last 45 minutes of the day we'd play tunes on the dinky, brown, school-issue turntables. My friends and I brough in Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull and Frank Zappa (we had older brothers) and I remember some of the black kids brought in Sugarhill Gang. I think back on it is a valuable cultural exchange.

But when I heard Trouble Funk, it was just irrefutably funky, with laser-beam bass and zapping effects, heavy heavy percussion grooves, with what sound like Remo Roto-toms approximating some timbales, horns kick in, and the crowd is just going ape-shit and you can tell.

Trouble Funk and go-go music were largely subsumed by rap, which was more aggressive, drum-machine driven and boastful. But when I moved to Japan in 1985 I realized that go-go was huge in Tokyo. Soon I was hearing Trouble Funk samples showing up in Beastie Boys tunes.

"Drop the Bomb" is probably TF's pinnacle, but they had some other golden moments, too. "Pump Me Up," "Let's Get Small" and the Kraftwerkian "Trouble Funk Express" all get the party rocking.

For another alternate percussion-based possible universe, here's the confoundingly funky Timbalada from Brazil. They're not Olodum, the samba group that Paul Simon worked with, but Timbalada famously ripped off a Keith Haring-style body paint look for their cover art, and from the group came Carlinhos Brown, the king of Brazilian samba funk. I used to play the sordu in a samba group at Wesleyan and the bottom would always drop out of the party when we'd get to the little chopped-up slow triplet break after the choruses. It's one of those rare songs whose hook is a drum break.


Trouble Funk -- "Drop the Bomb"

Timbalada -- "Toque Do Timbaleiro"

The New Animists

It’s good that many of the folks making music today have figured out that sound doesn’t need to be allegorical, one-for-one, realistic in its depiction of the inner state. The kids have tapped into the sonic homeopathic magic. Sometimes quiet is explosive. More than the shrieking, the distortion pedal, the mimed anguish. The big noise can put you to sleep. Could we foresee, in 1994, that free jazz, avant noise, the blues and hippie folk would fuze in some future retro alchemy? No, we couldn’t. Here are two tastes of the new nature-worshiping, Leslie cabinet-spinning animism.

Jackie-O Motherfucker will usually be happy to funnel the unending analog fuzz into your ear. They'll go for the extended wank in a Live at Pompeii or Whitney Biennial insallation mode. But here they get the Native American spirituality out set it to an all-purpose old-time kernal about saddling up a pony. You can feel them conjuring the electicity, pulling weather from the air.

Brightblack Morning Light share the Indian know-how. Main dude's name is Nathan Shineywater, after all. And they've got tunes called "Everybody Daylight," "Fry Bread," "Star Blanket River Child," "All We Have Broken Shines," "Amber Canyon Magik," "Black Feather Wishes Rise," "Come Another Rain Down," and "We Share Our Blanket With the Owl." They perform with a dog on stage. They camp. Black Elk and Chief Seattle must be proud. The thing is, it's like oozing cough-syrup soul-funk. The Fender Rhodes speaks truth. They've got the deep geologic-time patience, waiting until something like minute 6 on one track before trotting out the spongy horns. You'd never think to call this freak folk. But I don't know what you'd come up with instead.

And, because I was driving in the car yesterday listening to Buffy St. Marie's version of Neil Young's "Helpless," and thinking how great it is, I thought I'd add this to my Music of Native Peoples set. I love the Ike-ette style backing vocals, the way she yips and jumps with the melody, the way the song becomes a little more panic-inducing. This comes from her best record, She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina. She's from Canada. She's backed by Crazy Horse. She was married to Jack Nietsche. And the lettering on the record is done by the same dude who did the lettering for Neil Young's Zuma and Tonight's the Night. So the connection is real.

Finally, something to listen to while you boil your yerba mate and nibble on some quinoa. Some rowdy native music from the mountains of Argentina. This is from a record called Argentina: The Trintonic Music of the North-West on the excellently strange UNESCO collection. Sort of like the Andean version of the Master Musicians of Jajouka.

Jackie-O Motherfucker -- "Hey, Mr. Sky"

Brightblack Morning Light -- "A River Could Be Loved"

Buffy St. Marie -- "Helpless"

Tritonic Music of Argentina's Northwest - "Toque Quebredeno"

- "Contrapunto" (A song for male and female voices)

Condiment Rock

I’ve never understood why the Latin Playboys are not more famous and more revered than they are. As superband sideprojects, they all had better, or more lucrative things to do, I guess. The Latin Playboys were two dudes from Los Lobos, David Hidalgo and Louie Perez, who teamed up with Tchad Blake and producer Mitchell Froom. It's true, their records weren't entirely coherent or consistent, but that was part of the charm.

The Latin Playboys were masters of the miniature, rarely making a tune over three minutes. They have that lurching, slightly creepy, funny-boot-wearing, hair-slicked-back, Tom Waits, Cuban-Chinese, loco polyglot thing going. They only made two records, both of which have some excellent moments. The music is Tex-Mex roots pastiche threaded with bits of woozy Bollywood synth strings, mambo/funk drum machine patterns, weird Jon Hasselly droning brass, bits of Beck-like mercado-mix, and then at moments it’s like Eric Clapton being blissfully drowned out by the music from a street festival in Juarez, and then they’ll drop in a little Carlos Castenada/Jim Morrison spoken-word vision-questing (you can skip that). It all gets slathered with an admirable layer of retardation.

These are some good ones. The bass line (which is basically all there is) on “Manifold de Amour” is just lovely. “Mustard” seems to be about mustard, one of the better condiments. I love the crippled Congolese guitar line, the clopping drum programming, the sawing fiddle and the flood of mellotron in the middle. “Viva la Raza” is a bonus.

The Latin Playboys – “Manifold de Amour”

The Latin Playboys - “Mustard”

The Latin Playboys - “Viva la Raza”

Wind Riders

As I’ve mentioned before, when I told my colleague Alan Bisbort about the old crusty vinyl, record-obsessive, music-dork blog, he was at the office the next week with a stack of musty old LPs that needed a listening to. Among the stash I’ve already posted tunes from the Beau Brummels, Dion, Lindesfarne, Loudon Wainwright III and the Amazing Blondel. But there were so many more oddities and gems that I decided I needed to do a quick clearing of the decks. Here are three more from the Alan Bisbort library.

The Exuma record took a few listens before a worthy tune jumped out at me. And this isn’t really a song. It’s more like a spirit-possession chant/vamp. Exuma is the Obeah Man. The liner notes say this:

“EXUMA – BEYOND THE UNIVERSE – A STAR THAT ONCE LIT MARS. RIDING THE WIND, KISSING THE SAND. WALK IN THE NIGHT WITH THE HOUGAMAN.”

This is gris-gris music, voodoo blues, tourist exotica and hokum all rolled up together. He one ups Dr. John, drops a little Taj Mahal, and even hints at that ecstatic and crazed mystic thing that Cat Stevens sometimes went for. There’s a track on the record called “Junkanoo,” which is an African-derived carnival-type New Year’s street festival in the Bahamas, it’s also a dance from Jamaica with possible ties to stilt and masked dance traditions from Sierra Leone. You can read more about Exuma at AMG.

Next is Pearls Before Swine, which was basically Tom Rapp and whoever joined him. On These Things Too Rapp sings a Dylan song and puts an Auden poem to music. The rhymes on "Man in the Tree" sound a little forced, but Rapp can hold his own next to any contemporary bearded mystic, new energy generation, batik-revivalist.

And then there's McGuinness Flint, third-tier British folk-rock stuff, with just enough Harry Nilsson-ism. This track sounds like some Preservation Act-era Kinks outtake, complete with stumbling lumpy drunk-sounding funereal marching band, undue odd-time sections and lyrics of the I-didn't-have-anything-to-write-about variety. Still, worth a few listens.

Exuma - "Dambala"

Pearls Before Swine - "Man in the Tree"

McGuinness Flint - "Lazy Afternoon"

The Grinding Water and the Gasping Wind

The internet is really just a device for pursuing one’s desires -- a faster, cheaper and easier way of getting what one wants. But often we don’t really know what we want. Or, rather, we don’t actually want what we want. Or, once we get what we want, we realize that we now want something completely different, something to cleanse our mouths of the lingering taste of the last satisfied longing. The supersession of symptoms. Dante knew all about it. Following your desire could, if all the conditions were right, lead you to the divine, but it was just as likely to get you chained to the burning lake, shouldering boulders for eternity, buried to your chest in molten lead, buffeted by the assailing winds because of an ever-changing heart.

So, if, like me, you ever think that your heart is telling you to go and track down that semi-obscure record of Carl Sandburg singing Flat Rock Ballads. Think on it some more. Or listen to these tracks first.

Sandburg, as you know, was a poet (“The fog comes/on little cat feet”), a Lincoln biographer, and a song-collecting folk archivist (“The American Songbag”). He was also, it turns out, a film critic.
In a recent New York Times review of a new anthology of early American film writing, Clive James said this about the man from Flat Rock:“Sandburg is unreadable today only because of the way he wrote. His prose was bad poetry, like his poetry.”

Durn. That’s cold.

Well, Sandburg was known to pick up a guitar now and again, too (Bob Dylan famously paid a visit to Sandburg at Flat Rock back in 1964 – Sandburg had never heard of Dylan). I had this record, or my friend Chris had this record when we were housemates, and I remember being struck by the weirdness of two tracks – “Eating Goober Peas” and “The Doughnut Man.” (I was surprised to learn when interviewing the former Del Fuego and current children’s music sensation Dan Zanes, who was about to release a record of songs culled from the “American Songbag,”that Zanes had never heard of the “Flat Rock Ballads” record, so I figured it was fairly rare. And a Froogle search proved me right.) I’ve since learned that “Eating Goober Peas” was actually a song allegedly sung by Confederate soldiers during the Civil War (goober peas are peanuts, which served is rations for the troops); the song was also popularized by Burl Ives, and it’s practically like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” or “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” to some people. Whatever, I went to public school.

I used to drive past the exit for Flat Rock on I-26 probably once a month for several years, making trips between Asheville and Charlotte. I’d see the brown state-issued sign for the Carl Sandburg home. But I don’t get to make that trip these days. I decided I had to re-acquire Flat Rock Ballads. So, I got on the internelle and got it. Ten bucks, plus shipping, from a bookstore in Baltimore. As I recall, I parted with the record when I swapped it for a record of Wallace Stevens reading his poems. Or Chris traded, or something. As it turns out, I work in Hartford now, where Stevens lived and worked, and I drive past the places where he walked at lunch time or on his way to the office at the insurance firm.

When I had way too much free time and ample coffee-fueled creative urges, I used to make tape loops of snippets of Stevens reading, and I’d overdub some fake atonal chugging metal riffs played on a de-tuned acoustic guitar, mimicking the phrasing, rhythms and slight changes in pitch from the repeated poetry fragments. It was both a bad and brilliant idea. Kind of funny, kind of interesting and kind of like something an actual insane person would do.

I always loved “The Idea of Order at Key West.” It’s a poem, like many of Stevens’, about the reality of the imagination, of creativity, about how the world we make in our heads, in our songs, is as much a part of the world as the sea and the sun and the sky that inspire us. If you’ve got Audacity, I recommend nabbing a little bit of “It may be that in all her phrases stirred/The grinding water and the gasping wind” and making a loop. It keeps getting better, more darkly musical with each repetition.

I’d been planning to use the theme of “legumes” to unify this whole post. Peanuts are legumes, after all. Beans are legumes. That was to be the logic behind including Charlie Parker doing “Salt Peanuts” and Beans Hambone and El Morrow’s majestically weird “Beans” (also included is “Jimbo Jambo Land” by Shorty Godwin, both from the excellent two-disc set Good For What Ails You, a collection of music from the medicine shows on Old Hat records.) I’m sure there’s a whole record’s worth of legume songs. We’ll leave it to Bob Dylan and the folks at Theme Time Radio to explore.


Carl Sandburg – “Eating Goober Peas”


Carl Sanburg - “The Doughnut Man”


Wallace Stevens – “The Idea of Order at Key West


Beans Hambone and El Morrow - “Beans”


Shorty Godwin - “Jimbo Jambo Land”


Charlie Parker – “Salted Peanuts”

Giving Good Weight - More Reggae

As with most reggae, if you’re not sure what the song’s about, it’s always safe to assume that the subject is weed. That’s how it is with Burning Spear’s "Dry and Heavy." Probably something to do with weighing a bag of dope. Or maybe it’s about the weather. But then there’s a part about "school days." And another line sounds like "some of them have an electric ion." The lyrics really are a Rasta Rorschach – sometimes I think he’s singing something about a "tugboat," too. Who knows what to make of that? It’s all top-secret Marcus Garvey code-talking. It may be so eternally rewarding because of the chronic inscrutability.

Check for the aggressive asymmetric cowbell assault at the beginning, the doughy, extruded horn toots and the outsider-art vocal harmonies. The more I listen to the little snare roll that starts the track the more am I incapacitated by its brilliance.

Burning Spear -- "Dry and Heavy"

The Days of Wine and Vinyl

I sometimes like to pretend that a song recorded 30-odd years ago was actually recorded in the last six months. Given that so many freak folksters and retro-whozits sound so authentically like people you might have heard in 1972, the reverse can also be true, right? For instance: What if Bobby Charles were a 19-year-old indie folkster who posted "Small Town Talk" on MySpace five minutes ago? You'd probably be pretty impressed! You might also believe it. Something about the way the organ pulses and shadows the vocal melody almost sounds like the Beta Band to me.

The musical time-space illusion is doubly interesting considering Bobby Charles wasn't some runaway 60s moonbeam by the time he recorded this. He'd been rocking for 17 years, having penned the golden oldie "See You Later, Alligator," which became a hit for Bill Haley back in '58. But then the groovy times came and Bobby drifted invariably to Woodstock, New York, where he got in with the Band, specifically Rick Danko. Let's just say he spent some time in the hammock out back and whatever wasn't packed in tight when he arrived got packed in nice and tight. "Small Town Talk" was co-written by Danko with Dr. John on the organ and it has all the urgency of a sloth with a bong in its paws. I got this off a Warner Records compilation called The Days of Wine and Vinyl, a showcase of artists on the label and its smaller subsidiaries. This one is from the Bearsville label, which must have been for all the wandering rustics who showed up on Danko's door mat.

From this same comp, you can also try the MySpace mind trick with America's "Head and Heart." Again, the minimilist organ/guitar element gives it a quasi-modern sound, but the vocals are probably too 70s AM sweet and "Horse with No Name"-like to keep up the illusion for long. For some reason, none of the neo-folkies likes to sing quite as prettily as anybody in the 1968 to 1972 period. Why is that? It's like crystalline male harmonies are somehow bogus now. Or maybe just too much effort.

There's a few other gems off this compilation, each of interest for different reasons. I've promised to hold off on any expository blogging on Bonnie Raitt -- that's Dewey Dell territory -- but this tune, "Too Long at the Fair," should be absorbed and appreciated as a teaser to more sweet SoCal country-blues to come. Dewey, do your magic.

"Virginia Plain" is a sensational Roxy Music song, first heard by me on the soundtrack to the wrist-slashingly tragic Lars Von Trier film, Breaking the Waves. The whole thing quivers like a gay jelly fish with Elvis's severed hand inside it. I'm not sure why that image came to mind, but there it is. (Sorry for the sloppy editing at the end, that's 3 seconds of slide guitar by Norman Greenbaum, the "Spirit in the Sky" guy.)

Finally, this early David Bowie song, "Can't Help Thinking About Me," has a peculiar Kinks quality to it, perhaps because of the story-like lyrics, the sad tale of a guy who "blackened the family name." He never says what said name-blackening incident is -- drugs? gayness? playing drug-and-gay-promoting rock music on the Village Green? -- but he's getting booted into the cold, cruel world of glam rocking. You'd never ever mistake a guy who's feeling guilty about thinking about himself with anybody on MySpace, so don't bother pretending this isn't from the 1966.