A Selection From Harry Reid's Ipod

                                        The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch--Brian Eno

That's the Way It Is

[REVISED!]

Every couple of years, I return to the question of whether there's such a thing as a musical "canon," a hierarchy in pop history. It's not fashionable to believe so, what with alternate pop realities going on around the world while we soaked in the Western supremacy of our Beatles and Dylan. We ignored Chinese Nuggets. But I realized recently that I personally do have a basis for how I view Greatness with a capital G: through the prism of biography.

For me, the best and greatest artists have a narrative arc to their lives that organizes and illuminates their catalog, a great mythology that transcends the ephemeral nature of pop music altogether. Case in point: the Beach Boys. Think about it: A sensitive child-like prodigy and his brothers are controlled by an abusive patriarch until the boys throw off the shackles of the 50s and embrace the freedom of the age; when they finally ditch the God/Dad figure, they find themselves lost in the haze of modernity, fighting among themselves, Eden corrupted, God dead, the man-child abandoned to his achingly lonely sand box. The choral work of lost boys in America. You can trace the story through the music, almost song by song. As a bonkers Brian Wilson said in the amazing mid-80s documentary, The Beach Boys: An American Band, "I mean, we started out as little babies. And we grew up into men. And that's a dramatic story."

Maybe it's simply that the more you know about an artist, the deeper the music becomes. And maybe it's simply that subconsciously -- or collective-unconsciously -- I relate to the tales of naive white males brought to their knees by fate and experience. Oh do I! But whatever: for my money, there's no American myth as powerful as the Elvis story. And that story really reaches the apex of its power, the full catastrophe, in the later period, the "fat Elvis" times, especially in this album, That's the Way It Is, from 1970.

This isn't quite the tragic aftermath of irrelevance, but the moment when the aftermath of irrelevance is falling over Elvis Presley like a shadow, portending the end. Our mythic hero begins to grapple seriously with the weight of what he's become (and the weight he's about to become), what he can and cannot be, the fun house mirror of himself warping and stretching over him like a ghoul. Think of it: the man never wrote his own music. So he had to take the songs made famous by the new guard in pop culture -- the Beatles, the Dylan -- and figure out how not just to cover them, but to conquer them. It's Don Quixote versus a windmill.

Elvis didn't necessarily see the futile tragedy in this, but the sweaty, heaving effort he puts into defeating a song like "You've Lost That Loving Feeling," a song made famous by the Righteous Brothers a full five years before he got to it, is so intense and funny and overwrought and entertaining, it's way, WAY more personal than the originals could ever be. Here's a man fighting at every note to keep from turning into a marble statue.

And when he finally gives in to his own unfurling grandeur, the bombast of his own stardom taking flight, it doesn't matter if he's a joke or if he's irrelevant. Because he's finally just accepted himself. He doesn't care. He's free. The walls are closing in, the doors are shutting, the cement is hardening, the end is near -- and the man keeps singing! That's the moment when these songs kill you. And I defy you to listen to them and not come away just a little bit moved by how powerful they are. Even "You've Lost that Loving Feeling," which has no right to be better than the original, is simply amazing for the important reason that he's trying to make it better because it's all he's got left.

"Baby, I'd get down on my knees for you -- if this suit wasn't too tight!" That's an comic lyric he adds to his version, echoed by his backup singers, The Sweet Inspirations (Aretha's former group). This is a song that fits into a years-long epic narrative, not just a single moment. That added level of personal biography takes the music to a new level, let's the lyric "you've lost that loving feeling" double down on what it's saying. YOU, O public, have lost your love for me. And this is how I feel about it. "Listen to me! I'm talking to you!" he sings. His performance is a gauntlet thrown down and the tragic weight of the gauntlet at once: That's the way it is.

"You've Lost that Loving Feeling" - Elvis Presley

"Just Pretend" - Elvis Presley

"I Can't Help Believin'" - Elvis Presley

[ORIGINAL POST]

Everybody here knows I'm a big fan of the 1970s "Fat" Elvis, so lemme cut to the chase: I hadn't realized how deep my fascination was going to run until Dave W. dropped the boxed set, "Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The Essential 70s Masters," on me. It's a massive, devastating, moving, triumphant, tragic, funny, oddly experimental and seriously surprising listening experience. If you're not ready to embrace the Big E, a bunch of bloggy words won't necessarily help sell you, though I'd highly, HIGHLY recommend the second volume of Peter Guralnick's biography, "Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley," which covers these final, shocking years. Anyway, these two tracks floored me. Big, lush, strangely subtle American country-soul music. His voice is flawed and human and doesn't bleed into caricature -- or rather, he's grappling courageously with caricature, trying to forge gold out of sequins, country out of Vegas. It's amazing and beautiful -- and not just meta-soulful, but actually, really. As Dave points out, few were more committed to a song and a performance than this fella.


We Can Make the Morning - Elvis Presley

I'm Leavin' - Elvis Presley

Yep, It's That Time of Year Again: SNAP, CRACKLE & POP, VOLUME 7

I love vinyl record albums -- a LOT. But when you're approaching 40, it starts to get a little embarrassing, doesn't it? It's like, dude, get a job and raise your frickin' children stedda taking up shelf space and piping off about Gilbert O'Sullivan, will ya? Believe me, I know. But to paraphrase Woody Allen trying to justify his affair with Soon-Yi, the ear wants what the ear wants. So here's what mine wanted this year, more or less: an assortment of crackly old vinyl tracks pulled from hither and yon, from stray stacks on sidewalks in Brooklyn and crusty old smoke-stained street vendors, from a Chinese woman in an upstate Amish village, a salvage warehouse in Queens, Gimme Gimme Records in the East Village and eBay after my itchy clicker finger followed some foolish fancy. Mr. Poncho delivered a couple gems, especially the Charlie Rich track, which may be the best on this the seventh annual Snap, Crackle & Pop. There was a vague attempt at a recessionary vibe and, curiously, the year 1972 seemed to keep popping up, but there's really no rhyme or reason to the selection, except that in the case of each and every song, a needle bit into a vinyl groove and beautiful analog sound came out (before promptly being converted to crappy mp3). What's sort of pathetic and hilarious is how much of the year I spend thinking about this mix, hustling to find something lovely or amusing or just soulful to hear. It gives form and shape to the pursuit, I guess, a circuitous road and a destination. Anyway, here it is. Hope you dig it.

You can download and print out the CD cover by clicking

>> HERE <<<

Then download all 22 songs by clicking

>> HERE <<

Here's what you'll find:

Street People - Bobby Charles (Bobby Charles, 1972)
Lost Paraguayos -Rod Stewart (Never a Dull Moment, 1972)
God Help the Girl - God Help the Girl (God Help the Girl, 2009)
Break Your Promise - The Delfonics (The Delfonics Super Hits, 1972)
Running Close Behind You - Dion (Suite for Late Summer, 1972)
Let Me Kiss Ya - Nick Lowe (Nick the Knife, 1982)
Yellow Star - Donovan (Essence to Essence, 1973)
Juste Quelques Flocons Qui Tombent - Antione (Je Reprends La Route Demain, 1965)
Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye -Freddy Fender (Before the Next Teardrop Falls, 1975)
Work to Make It Work - Robert Palmer (Pressure Drop, 1976)
Just A Gigolo - Thelonious Monk (Thelonious Monk Trio, 1954)
Bird of the World - Bill Fox (1996)
Dixieland Delight - Alabama (The Closer You Get ..., 1983)
He Was Too Good to Me - Nina Simone (At The Village Gate, 1962)
Sandy - The Hollies (Another Night, 1975)
I Don't Believe in Miracles - Colin Blunstone (I Don't Believe in Miracles, 1982)
Milk Train - Jefferson Airplane (Long John Silver, 1972)
For Your Precious Love - Aaron Neville (Orchid in the Storm, 1986)
Patches - Jerry Reed (The Man With the Golden Thumb, 1982)
Come to Me - The Travel Agency (The Travel Agency, 1968)
I've Lost My Heart to You - Charlie Rich (Lost Weekend, 1960)
Thank You for the Party - Bugatti & Musker (The Dukes, 1982)

HAPPY HOLIDAYS.

Blah Blah Blah Top Ten of 2009 (Minus Four)

I listened to more new music this year than I have in a long while. Not sure why. A new phase. Obama. End of the World. But even so, music made by people under 40 (or for that matter, living people) still constituted only about 15% of the music in my life. Most of it was still crackly old jazz and soul albums. I only supply this Top Six list out of some misguided need to tell people I still care about social conventions and hierarchies and 20th Century magazine year-end roundups and, generally speaking, other human beings. I'll supply mp3 downloads if requested, but you can easily find any of this stuff at elbo.ws.

1. Dirty Projectors "Bitte Orca" - I could just as easily put the Bill Callahan or Girls album here, but in the tussle between supreme ambition and uncanny intimacy, I'm tilting slightly toward the former. This sounds like what would happen if Yes came from Senegal, were born in 1990 and tried making music that a girl might like. This record surprises again and again and manages to just avoid feeling suffocatingly indie and rockist. I shook my head in disbelief through the entire thing and, crucially, still do. It's a huge achievement, especially for people who love listening to entire records on headphones.

2. Bill Callahan "Sometimes I Wish I Were an Eagle" - Completely strange and original, yet as warm and comforting as a Navajo blanket sewn by Neil Young. The lyrics are as like abstract poetry held in a glass of water in the sunlight; sounds like: Gen-X getting serious as a heart attack. And it's recorded so beautifully, with such depth and dimension and breadth, it makes other "folk" albums feel 2D. How about this: It's the "Avatar" of indie folk. Go find "Too Many Birds" and see what I mean.

3. Girls "Album" - I try really hard not to get caught up in Pitchfork's buzz making, but if the shoe fits, wear it. This album is extraordinarily beautiful and lushly emotional. Sounds like: a bisexual skateboarder runaway who's never heard anything but quivery 50s doo wop ballads. Imagine if Jonathan Richman and Antony were smashed together in a particle collider and then outfitted by American Apparel. I'm STILL obsessing on it. Go find "Hellhole Ratrace" and sit and listen to it.

4. Flaming Lips "Embroyonic" - I'll always have a soft spot for psychedelic music, especially raw, garage-y, Nugget-y, Floyd-y primitive freakouts that seek to shock your stoned mind with vision maps and vortex revelations and revealed mind hearts. It's as old as the hills, this stuff, but much harder to do than it appears, and most people fail. Like some epic Stan Brakhage film, this record just expands and and ripples and curves and confounds and implodes just right. It felt like the last two albums were cotton candy meant to lure the new generation into a sweat lodge. Ka-POW! Again, headphone heaven.

5. The Clientele "Bonfires on the Heath" - My fascination with this band may be peculiar to me, but I love their smooth-as-silk, wispy-as-Monet, airy-as-autumn 60s sound so. The well-tempered drums and deceptively plangent, interwoven guitars, the whispered poetry of it all. The best word I can use to describe everything about the Clientele is "leafy." If ferns had audio, they'd sound like the Clientele.

6. Sunn O))) "Monoliths & Dimensions" - Saying you love this record is like saying you love a forbidding mountain off in a cold distance. It's utterly abstract, but the fascination is so profound and lingering, like you're being shown an unexplored valley full of ghosts and ledges that leads, circuitously, to everything Alex Ross wants you to like, like modern classical and Mahler. I kept listening and listening, simultaneously amused by how boneheaded the whole thing really is, and awed by how wonderful it is that boneheadedness can actually take you to interesting places like this. Isn't that what Sabbath taught us?

See the People Run and Gather, Something High Has Caught Their Eye

I stumbled on Jim Sullivan, streaming on dinky speakers on my laptop. It's shaggy music, with one toe water-logged in the rippling, sometimes scum-topped, pool of soul-folk -- some damaged DNA shared by Van Morrison, Joe South and maybe even Mac Davis. The other toe, I don't know. It's an adult portion. Sullivan sings in places with that wonderful self-limiting effect used by people like George Jones, it's like applying a volume pedal to your vocals, so that the signal sort of swells and then fades, with a weird tapered curve. The energetic strumming brings to mind Gordon Lightfoot. There's promiscuous harpsichord and strings poking through in places. There's something almost heavy metal about this tune, "Johnny." And Sullivan's singing here reminds me of Ozzy and Ian Anderson. This record, U.F.O., sounds very Blind Faith-ish. The drumming is jazzy, but in that British, overzealous way -- getting busy with the triplets -- that turns from cool to menacing. And the groove starts to come unhinged in places. There's upright bass lurking, not saying much, but shadowing the whole affair. And then the creepy Bobbie Gentry strings come in, adding negative energy to the vocal lines, ballast to the airy subject. Turns out that Jim Sullivan has some major ties to titans of rock and pop. He played on a Walker Brothers record. Get this, he played on "Itchycoo Park" by the Small Faces, he played on "Ferry Across the Mersey" by Gerry and the Pacemakers. Played on Vashti Bunyan tracks. Friends with Tom Jones and Elvis Presley. Got Jim Marshall to make amps. Dude looks like Meher Baba. Evidently Sullivan appears in the commune scene (one of my favorites) in Easy Rider.



"Johnny" - Jim Sullivan

"Roll Back the Time" -- Jim Sullivan

Just Let Go of Your Mind

The first step is admitting you have a problem. There's also a step involving the realization that you don't have control. I just reached the step where I find some scrap of music on my iPod and I don't know where it came from (I have this feeling that Lefty may have dropped it on me, or maybe even posted it here already) or who it is, and I have to accept that it's the abiding mystery -- and the vaporous otherworldly shapes that form between my ears when I put this music on: the assertive tambourine, the lush-and-lumpy horns, the billowing backwards shit, the funky drummer business put to the service of soulful sap-rising psychedelic soft pop -- that keeps blowing sparks off the dusty coals.

This is music made by a Canadian teenager in the late '60s. The record was re-issued in 2001.

"Fly" - J.K. & Co.

"Christine" - J.K. & Co.

This Is Not Only A Test

      Today I am reminded of the famous Herman Melville quote:  "To produce a mighty blog, you must choose a mighty theme."  Done and done.  I didn't get on the bus until it was down the road a ways, but I'm enjoying the ride.  Thanks, boys.

Part One

     Now that the pleasantries are out of the way, let's get down to brass

tacks.  Every so often I like to perform a test on myself (no, not that kind, silly!).  It's quite simple:  I listen to the Billy Joel song "Uptown Girl", and try to register my reactions in a brutally honest fashion.  I did this a year or so ago--well, I should say that I attempted to, but I just couldn't bear it for more than, I dunno, 45 seconds or so.  Last night I tried again, and lo and behold, I was able to listen to it all the way through.  Granted, I periodically burst out laughing every few bars, but the fact remains that I listened to the whole song.  You may be wondering (and well you should): Why would someone do such a thing?  And what does it all mean?  Well, I've been wondering that myself.  I admit that I've crossed many a line in the last few years:  the Huey Lewis line, the REO Speedwagon line, the Foreigner line.  (You get the picture).  And when you realize that you no longer have any shame (or at least possess very little), naturally your thoughts turn to Billy Joel.  "But wait!"  I can hear you saying.  "This is madness!  Is there no limit?  Is there not a line that shall never be crossed?!?"   Okay, whoa--calm down... I believe there is, or at least I hope so.  I do this in the spirit of fearless research into the deepest recesses of human consciousness.  Future generations will benefit, I assure you.  [An aside:  I just reread Lefty's post on BJ (still can't get over that ankle watch), and recommend his take on the issue].  Okay, I admit that I also listened to "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)", without many feelings of revulsion.  It made me realize something:  The only Billy Joel album that ever crossed the threshold of the family home (if memory serves) was one that one of my older sisters borrowed from a friend, and I'm pretty sure I heard that song being played a few times when I was a wee lad.  (I've been blessed--and I use that term unironically--with four older siblings who all had positive influences on the formation of my musical tastes).  So I'm thinking there must by some sort of subconscious--oops, not anymore!--deep-rooted Billy Joel aversion dating back years, simply because none of my siblings ever bought one of his albums.  Quite the revelation, I know.  So where does this leave me, or any of us?  It's hard to say.  I still don't really understand why I now enjoy listening to certain songs that I used to sneer at when I was a high schooler.  Maybe it's just the fact that the shame/cool factor has slowly whithered away.  Some might say I'm the better for it.  I'm not sure.  Anyway, go ahead and do the "Uptown Girl" test--it's fun, and the results are always interesting!  (And hey, "Movin' Out" isn't so bad, really...)  (Uh-oh...)...  (I almost forgot--check this clip out--it still cracks me up every time...)

Uptown Girl--Billy Joel

Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)--Billy Joel

Part Two

     We decided to take a different route, and ended up driving through a small town called Graniteville.  We passed some old factories that looked like they had been dormant for a while, and rows of small, tidy houses that were probably built for the no-longer-working factory workers.  We crossed a canal and some railroad tracks, and saw a few nice old houses.  We found out later that there had been a terrible accident there a few years ago, something involving railroad cars and chlorine.  That didn't stop us from driving back through a few days later, though.  After a few miles we happened upon an old junk store.  It was really a classic, straight out of central casting.  Old black guy sitting in a chair on the side, staring.  A ton of mostly useless stuff.  I asked the lady who ran the place if there were any records, and she pointed me in the right direction.  Like a junkie desperate for another fix, I started pawing though the musty, dusty stacks of vinyl, and soon that old familiar feeling started to set in.  It's sort of like nausea, or maybe nausea is just one component of the over-all feeling.  You could say it's existential, I suppose.  (But who would want to?)  It's partly due to the physical sensations--the dimness, the dust.  But there's also that feeling of pointlessness, and the thought "Am I really that much of a loser?" never fails to creep into the brain.  Sometimes, there's really nothing, not even a funny album cover, and that's pretty depressing.  But then sometimes, like this time, you find a record like the Raspberries' first one, and all those thoughts of loserdom vanish.  I had known about the Raspberries for a while, Eric Carmen, etc., but I never listened to them before.  More importantly, I never knew that this album had a scratch 'n sniff sticker on the front.  You heard me right.  How cool is that?  Yes, I scratched, and I sniffed, and there it was--I could still smell the scent of raspberries (or at least, manufactured raspberry aroma).  Sometimes the album jacket is more interesting than the music inside.  It reminds me of the Hargus "Pig" Robbins album I found one time--it's got Braille on it.  Him being a blind pianist and all.

Go All The Way--The Raspberries

     I also found this Ambrosia album, which I hadn't even realized I wanted.  I love the lame high-school-art-class-psychedelia cover.

It was 1975, but they didn't care!  Perhaps psychedelic art never goes out of style, for some people.  Apparently these guys all played on an Alan Parsons record.  So there you go.  The one hit is "Holdin' On To Yesterday", which I believe is the perfect tune for this here blog.  For isn't that what we're all doing?  Holding on to the music of yesterday,  in a vain attempt to [fill in the blank]?

(Come to think of it, I can't believe that no-one's ever written about the Raspberries or Ambrosia on this blog.  Strange).  Besides those two albums, I also found a Hall & Oates record--the one with "Kiss On My List" and "You Make My Dreams" (a must-have, in other words); The Best of Freddy Fender (which features a picture of him with a huge fake cactus between his legs); and something called Les Baxter's Jungle Jazz.  The beat goes on.

Holdin' On To Yesterday--Ambrosia

TIME OUT OF MIND

Here's a Driftwood statistic worth noting: this site's authors have made five children since we began four years ago on Nov. 1, 2005, at 8:45 p.m.

A lot has happened, but perennial themes tell a story: controlled spoilage, the curdling of tastes, aesthetic relativity, the world-weary shrug one eventually adopts in the face of overwhelming evidence that things probably aren't going to get much better than they are right now. You'd think we would have quit by now.

But always, eventually, somewhere in the hidden folds of the crow's feet of a leathery gaze into the sunburst desertscape of our spiritual condition, we find reasons for joy and hope. In records, albums, songs, melodies, beats, lyrics, riffs, barbaric yawps, fay whispers, harmonic convergences, thunderous licks, melted time signatures, all manner of stoned philosophy, rough mixes, ripples of phaser and dollops of wah-wah, sonic wizardry of pretty much every stripe and stipple. If there's a sparkle in the groove, we'll fish it out. We're as moved by an epic failed attempt as by the soulful note perfectly struck.

As people, we grow ever more barnacled and bloated, what with jobs and kids and mortgages (gulp), untethered from a long-lost center that didn't hold and was never destined to hold. We need stronger liquor now, it's true. A revelation: people our age, Gen-X, have realized we're finally just a subset of the Baby Boomers, our cultural circuit-board built to believe we were extending the 20th Century narrative on some inevitable arc to somewhere (over the rainbow?), never suspecting we'd just end up digitizing the whole human drama and folding it all into an archival box for a flattened, airless age. End of History and all that. We're still a bit stunned that it turned out this way, aren't we? I think that's what The Driftwood Singers has always been about: for us, old LPs and quasi-salvageable bygone pop isn't just the flotsam and jetsam of a faded generation, it's a flotation device to keep us from going under the waves. We collect them like scrap metal for some kind of floating junkyard paradise where we can hang out and talk shit, drink bourbon and eat beans around a fire when the rest has turned to Waterworld. Inside a grain of sand, a universe: here's ours. A little reefer in a hand-rolled cigarette, settle in for the gauzy journey to the stereo, the blue-green glow, the first shocking notes, the quivering vocal, the tremolo guitar trembling between the speakers like a shimmering sun, the enveloping rapture of a musical moment.

It'll do in a pinch. Here's to four more years ...

Divine Daze of Deathless Delight - Donovan

Yellow Sun - Donovan

Modern Love

1.) It's hard to believe, but the rate of retro exploitation has sped up so fast that it's now acceptable to cop Pavement records, as if new listeners were too young to actually pick up on it. This either signifies that I am officially ancient or history is folding in on itself so fast that 2012 will indeed herald the end of the world. Never had I imagined a day when my own generation's music would become source material for boutique replicators. Then I heard this band Cymbals Eat Guitars, which sounds so much like Pavement I'm almost convinced Stephen Malkmus invented these guys in his basement in some kind of a cloning experiment gone haywire. I sound like I'm complaining, but it's actually pretty amazing!

Tunguska - Cymbals Eat Guitars

2.) Lefty is presently loving two albums: the new Flaming Lips, Embryonic, which is so heavy with deep-dish psychedelia it's basically an ode to the impending legalization of pot in California; and the new Clientele album, Bonfires on the Heath. These records are great for entirely different reasons, the first for undermining all expectations, the Clientele for continuing to sound exactly like they always have, like the Byrds, the Zombies and the Left Banke were poured in a vat of green cough syrup, which you drank before falling asleep in a park in suburban England. It's perfect.

Silver Trembling Hands - Flaming Lips

Wonder Who We Are - The Clientele

3.) Mr. Poncho pointed me to the music of Ernie Graham, which seems to merge Bobby "Santa Claus" Dylan with Bobby "I live in a trailer on the Bayou" Charles. More acurately, it sounds like Ernie rolled up the year 1971 in a Zig Zag and smoked it.

So Lonely - Ernie Graham

4.) I'm not sure if I'll be the first to observe this, but Julian Casablanca may be the first of Gen-Y's retro-refurbishers to mine Eddie Money. Watch his much ballyhooed appearance on the Tonight Show and then compare:



(Can't really touch Eddie though, right? Casablanca needs a touch more Rodney Dangerfield to pull it off; JC's drummer is working some outer borough retard magic though.)

5.) Somebody dropped this track on me a few months ago and it keeps coming up in my shuffle. It's getting under my skin, slowly.

Modern Love - The Last Town Chorus

Ain't No Velvet Glove

As I mentioned, my brother dropped by the other week. He had his external hard drive. There was a lot of data dumpage going on. I retrieved some tidbits from the memory banks. I'm still excavating and unpacking. This was one of those tracks that I remembered from a mixed tape. It got played over and over. Etched in. Intaglio of the air. Wax print on the brain folds. Sonic seepage. There was so much transpiring in so little real time. Southern-fried tabla. Synth squiggles, muskrat sounds, circuit-board didgeridoo. Cornmeal drone. And the lyrics: "milquetoasted love." I could never sign on fully for the heavy-lidded beach music vibe of Little Feat, and Lowell George's Zappa connection always seemed like as much of an indictment as a point of pride. Bonnie Raitt's rec means more to me. This is one of those songs that point to all kinds of frightful possibilities.

"Kiss It Off" - Little Feat

Take Your Pick

You Better Run--Pat Benatar

You Better Run--Dorothy Love Coates & the Original Gospel Harmonettes

You Better Run--Iggy & the Stooges

All Bets Are Off

I Give Up, Why Can't They?

I had one of those mystical communions with this song, years ago. In a piny subdivision, watching a video documentary about the band. Maybe having smoked some weed. Probably. The tuneful summing up. The strange uplifting hopelessness.
DJ Bonebreak was one of the great drummers. Muscular and crisp and driving, without ever being showy or too spastic.
Shocking how much John Doe and Exene sound like Grace Slick and Marty Balin. Billy Zoom was like a robot god inhabiting a punk greaser.
Shocking, too, how much this sounds like a lost track from the cast recording of Hair.
The title always seemed like the best, most sound punk rock advice you could ever get. The So-Cal name-checking is so "positive scene."
X was exploring the punk/hippie symbiosis/continuum long before it was sanctioned. They were like some deformed Platonic ideal of a band.
Did you know Exene was married to Viggo Mortensen?
Weird.

My brother stopped in last night. Down from Quebec. He got out the external hard drive and did a major excavation/plundering from my music files. I did the same. Found this, and many other nostalgic nuggets.

"I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" - X

Dap This

     Last night my dear wife and I went to see Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings.  I happened to stumble upon this cd a while back, and we both liked it a lot.  Then she was on Austin City Limits, and pretty much tore it up live.  So it was a must-see situation.  (Plus it was free!  And it was on our anniversary!)  Charles Walker and the Dynamites opened (I guess it was an and the kind of evening).  Mr. Walker is a veteran soul artist who's been recording since the '60s, and he's having a late-career resurgence backed by a bunch of young Nashville musicians.  He's pretty amazing.  Sharon Jones was great too--she's probably only, what, five feet two, but she has this incredible energy, and her band is tight and funky as hell.  At one point in her show she has to take her shoes off so she can really, truly get down--I mean, she just goes off in this paroxysm of stomping, shaking soul dancing.  It's a sight to behold.  The (mostly white) crowd was way into it.  (One could probably write a dissertation about old-school funk & soul bands and the makeup of their audiences, but I won't go into that here).  I'll just say it was a great night of music here in Music City.  Sharon Jones is a force of nature, my friends.  You should see her live if you ever get the chance.

100 Days, 100 Nights--Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

Answer Me--Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

Visions of Bacharach

[EDITOR'S NOTE: THERE USED TO BE A PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN SHORE HERE, BUT THE LAW CAME AND TOLD US TO TAKE IT DOWN. WE DID, GLADLY. HERE THEN IS A LINK TO THE PHOTO WE REFERENCE IN THE FOLLOWING POST.]

The thing about loneliness is that everybody is lonely differently, in their own way. Which is either, a) why it's called loneliness to begin with, or b) doubly lonely, when you think about it, or c) both. It's like when a song comes on the radio and you're suddenly filled with the sweetest reverie for a bygone moment and the person you're with says, "I hate this song."

By now I've accepted that I'm alone in certain things. And one of those is my continuing fascination with the instrumental albums of Burt Bacharach. I just found a copy of Make It Easy on Yourself from 1969. Upon first listen, a lot of people, Dewey Dell included, immediately reject what they're hearing. The 1960s "period" sound strikes people first and usually blots out any further consideration. That's fair. It sounds like muzak or something your parents once heard in a hotel lobby in Vegas.

But bear with me.

What begins to happen when I listen for a while, with imagination, even meditation, is that I can start to feel like I'm walking in a museum of pop gestures, a melodic Pop Art exhibit with huge canvases of glockenspiel and trumpet and tremolo surf guitar. That probably sounds like an "ironic" experience, Warhol lite. And occasionally it is. But sometimes a revelation can happen when a mellow horn line or a leisurely piano melody suddenly bonds with a personal association, like an image seen in a musical Rorschach: a green vacuum cleaner being run over an orange carpet by a brunette in curlers in a cool, sunless room, white curtains, a Hawaii Five-O re-run in the background; the brightly-lit popcorn maker at Sears; a sea-green counter at a Woolworth's diner on a winter afternoon; the silhouette of a man in a long burgundy Buick driving at dusk across a flat landscape in warm 35 millimeter. I'm reminded of the photographs of Stephen Shore, the Warhol acolyte, who drove around America in the 1960s and 70s taking pictures of hotel rooms and empty parking lots (see above, Room 110, Holiday Inn, Brainerd, MI, July 11, 1973).

When you let this music sit like a still life, without received judgment, the inspired images can have an oddly emotional tincture, the distillation of some faded American loneliness, like a recovered memory belonging to someone else, but no less sad for that. And maybe sadder. The real irony of this music is not in its cliches, but in the embedded human sympathy that's somehow revealed in these faceless orchestral vistas. I start to imagine Burt Bacharach as the loneliest man who ever lived while making these songs. Because nothing in the music is about him, personally. He's utterly solitary with a full studio orchestra, painting these lush and gleaming landscapes. And we can see ourselves in them, lost in time.

[Editor's Note: links to these songs were taken off to satisfy copyright warnings.]

She's Gone Away - Burt Bacharach

The Guy's In Love With You - Burt Bacharach (Listen for Bacharach humming along to the melody

Pacific Coast Highway - Burt Bacharach

Scottish Georgics

These days, my life, my anxieties, my hopes, my whole scene, could be summed up, or put in place, or undermined by its own essence, with any number of vaguely agricultural get-up-and-go aphorisms. The early bird gets the worm. You reap what you sow. The sun also rises. Make hay while the sun shines. Ecclesiastes. Etc. It's either birds, worms, seeds, sun or hay. Throw in a little "Muck is the mother of the mealbag" and you've got it covered. Shit be elemental.

But talk of shit and talk of sun and talk of hay always makes me think back to the characters I spent time with on farms. Ernst Larson, Buck, Kenny. Dudes who whose proximity to the life force seemed to place them farther from actual civilization. Hoisting grease guns, getting augers and hoppers and silos all lined up. Birthing calves. Weening. Putting up fence. Standing in fucking frigid and fetid water with rats scurrying around, trying to hack into a frozen pile of silage. More than anything, bailing hay. It was hellish. Infernal. All itchy and rashy on your arms, shirt soaked with sweat. Blowing beats of sweat off your nose. Bailing twine tearing through your fingers. These guys seemed powered by some kind of mute masochistic energy. They'd work until their hands, lungs, muscles, backs, brains and skin were just shot. Then they'd get up and do it again. They wanted to see you pass out from heat stroke so they could laugh at your college-boy ass.

I remember Kenny sneering and offering what to him was the harshest put-town he could make of the wealthy wanna-be farm-boy son of the wealthy businessman owner of the farm. "The sun's not his blood," he said.

There's a lot to be learned from putting up hay, aside from the lessons of the punishing labor required. You really do have to act when conditions are right. It's a shit load of work at a time when everyone else is vacationing, but you're stacking away loads of stored-up energy. You've got to cut it, you got to let it dry, rake it, bail it. It's like the feeling of stacking cord wood while the weather is still hot in September. You're so in touch with the seasons and the cycles that you practically want to just stop speaking altogether. The sun is your blood.

We've been big fans of Gerry Rafferty here. I'm not sure if the sun was his blood. But there was definitely something other than blood in there. That might be why he wound up at a London hospital being treated for liver problems last year. And then the story of his escape to Tuscany showed that the Scottish singer had a lot of sense. Maybe he'd stored up some energy years before and was getting the last laugh, living off his labors from earlier days.

This tune, "Jose," is off of Stealers Wheel's greatest hits. I love the fact that these guys were produced by Lieber and Stoller, doesn't make any sense, but I love it. This tune is in fact written by Joe Egan, the other half of the band. I'm officially on the lookout for Egan's 1979 solo debut, Back on the Road, if anyone spies any moldy vinyl by that name.

"Jose" is great for a number of reasons. It starts out with about three red herring instrumental blues-zombie parts, none of which actually make sense as lead-ins to the actual tune. And the song is really about how it's time to turn the hay. There's some hard-learned Scottish focus in there. Your life is a mess, but you got to get up and get to it.


"Jose" - Stealers Wheel

Say Uncle, Part Two: Here's Johnny!

     A while back I wrote this post about Uncle Bill, an old family friend (my parents just visited him and his wife in Germany, and they had a great time).  On a recent visit to NYC and VT, I found this record (I still have some in my old apartment in the city, where my brother and his wife reside) and it made me think of another uncle--Uncle Johnny, my mom's younger brother.  He was an erstwhile folk-singer back in the '60s and '70s--the kind that scoffed at Neil Young's success with "Heart of Gold".  More of an amateur ethno-musicologist, I guess.  He'd come up to visit us in his orange VW bus (which eventually caught fire somehow and burned up) and at some point he would haul out his hammered dulcimer--the big guns. He played guitar too, and wrote some pretty clever songs--there was one which gently lampooned the back-to-the-land types:

                         Marvin tills the soil, he's livin' naked out on the land

                         He only eats what he can grow, they call him Organo-Man

                         The strangest thing about Marvin is, I'll never understand

                         I saw him out just the other day with an ice-cream in his hand

     There was a time when Uncle Johnny was breeding Siamese cats, and he brought a couple with him.  One of them got so freaked out that it ran up in the rafters of our still-unfinished house and refused to come down.  So, we ended up with a pet Siamese cat by default.  In short, a real character:  Tall, with long black curly hair, glasses and eyes that always seemed to be bugging out of his head.  But a really good-hearted person.  He would always send us records at Christmas, and they were invariably by people we had never heard of--obscure folkies, primarily.  That's how we got the Joe Hickerson disc.  I'm not sure how it ended up at my brother's apartment.  (He gave us a couple of records by a guy named Ed Lipton, who did children's songs--"Fly, Hippopotamus, Fly" and "Jump, Elephant, Jump" are two song titles that spring to mind.  I don't think he ever experienced Raffi-type success).  

     My brother and I were always inclined to make fun of the music on the records Uncle Johnny sent us (then again, we were inclined to make fun of just about anything), but I eventually grew to like some of Joe Hickerson's stuff.  It probably requires growing up and becoming interested in music of the old, weird America.  Hickerson's delivery is a bit stilted--he really sounds like the folk scholar that he is--but there's something sort of charming about that.  Anyway, the songs don't suffer too much from it.  I like Rolling of the Stones in particular.  It has a really haunting melody and lyrics that leave you scratching your head (I'm pretty sure it's a Child ballad).  Shingling the Rum-Seller's Roof is funny--it's both an anti-alcohol tune and a good drinking song, and it's a metaphor I want to start using more often.  The record came out in 1976, on the Folkways label (appropriately enough).

Drive Dull Care Away--Joe Hickerson

Shingling the Rum-Seller's Roof--Joe Hickerson

Rolling of the Stones--Joe Hickerson

     

American Apparel

California Fleece Track Jacket - Price: $45

Barry Sunglass, Vintage Eyeware - Price: $55

Dixieland Delight - Alabama: Priceless.

(Mark Herndon, drums, 1983)

The Dream Lives On

I heard this track on WFMU the other day and was so bowled over I emailed the DJ, Todd-o-phonic Todd, who directed me to the source, the 1974 Hollies album Another Night (above). Just when you think you can't be surprised and delighted by another third-tier, off-track moldy-oldy, along comes the disco-era Graham Nash-less Hollies covering Bruce Springsteen. Prepare to be wowed, it's a major winner.

4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) - The Hollies

Hell Yeah, Part 2 (Massive Afro Edition)

[Hat tip: T-Ro]