There isn't always time to write long on a subject and besides sometimes all it needs is a small note of recognition. Some days it's recognizing that there aren't many things to add but a quick response, a retort, or a nod in the direction of the film, piece of music, or book. These items make up a number of things of this nature that I placed on Facebook since 2012, where I treated this form of social media as an ongoing salon that cultivated people with similar interests. Plus it kept the ideas flowing. Sometimes I'd start with a small Facebook item and it would grow into a larger piece for an article. Many times it would simply stop at a glance. Here are the finished notes and glances and the dates they ran.
2012
***
For years, I used to end up in long conversations with cab drivers trying to take me home. It would sometimes take hours to arrive there. Once in St. Louis, I almost missed a train to Kansas City because I was in a long discussion with a local cabbie about the Nation of Islam. On another occasion, I unwittingly worried my girlfriend to death when a normally 15-minute drive in the middle of the night turned into a 3-hour epic when the driver (who had turned off the meter) wished to discuss the Velvet Revolution in his native country. But there was one time when my quick ride home was curtailed by a song on the driver's radio. While listening to John Valentyn's The Blues Scene on CJRT-FM, the track "Insane Asylum" by Willie Dixon and Koko Taylor suddenly came on. While I recognized the melody as one of my favourite jazz tracks ("St. James Infirmary"), the delivery was something else again. As Dixon laments the trip to see his emotionally destroyed girlfriend, Koko Taylor follows up with a method performance that stops you in your tracks. Only Lonnie Mack's "Why," with his blood-curdling scream at the end, has the capacity to raise the hairs on my arm as this track does. For what seemed like days, the cab driver and I sat stunned outside my apartment - waiting - until it finally ended. As I stepped out onto the sidewalk, with the driver giving me a quick wave as he pulled away, I realized that I'd forgot to pay him. He also didn't ask.
Nick Cohen in StandPoint has provided the most incisive review of Salmon Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton that I've read so far. He correctly compares the tenor of the fatwa and its moral and political consequences to the Dreyfus Affair. "The Rushdie Affair became the Dreyfus Affair of our age because it revealed how, when faced with such extreme provocation, ordinary political categories collapse," Cohen writes. "Whatever your opinions, if you supported Rushdie, you supported the freedom to write, read and publish what you liked, even when (I would say especially when) books were being burned and death threats issued not in some far away and forgettable dictatorship but in your own land...The enemies of Dreyfus said that they must keep an innocent man in prison to protect the collective honour of the French army and French state. The enemies of Rushdie said that the Ayatollah Khomeini's incitement to murder was understandable or excusable because it protected the collective honour of Muslims. No one who professed a belief in freedom of conscience and thought could hesitate for a moment before taking Rushdie's side. As it turned out, those who shouted the loudest hesitated the longest." In response to the Rushdie affair, Cohen is as damnably critical of the political right as he is of the left. "[To the Right], Rushdie was a highbrow scrounger, a champagne socialist, who collected his royalties while milking the public purse," Cohen asserts. "When a snide Prince Charles joined the hostile chorus, Ian McEwan said that His Royal Highness's security cost far more than Rushdie's even though the prince 'had never written anything worth reading.'"
Since Cohen comes from the left, however, his critique of their response stings even more. "Rushdie writes of how he was criticised from the Left by Germaine Greer, John Berger and John le Carré, whom I never thought of as left-wing, but I suppose is, if leftism is only anti-Americanism," Cohen writes. "Rushdie's sister Sameen understood how left-liberal thought was going wrong from the outset. 'For a generation the politics of ethnic minorities in Britain had been secular and socialist,' she said. 'The fatwa was the mosques' way of destroying that project and getting religion back into the driving seat.' Cohen provides a clearly argued psychological perspective on why some progressives chose to collude with such reactionary forces: "Just as the enemies of Dreyfus anticipated fascism, the left-wing intellectuals who went for Rushdie in 1989 anticipated a future when many on the Left would be happy to go along with reactionary and obscurantist forces as long as they were anti-Western." A smart and sober read.
Jefferson Airplane's Volunteers (1969), an album as confused and conflicted in its politics as the era was itself, tries to reach for utopian generosity ("We Can Be Together") only to tell us to get up against the wall while declaring that "all your private property is targets for your enemy." (Does that include their own? Nobody dares say.) The album is a mixed up, passionate attempt to effect change (even if it trips over its own dogma). Yet the record still delivers protean pleasures. It's hard not to feel the hopes of a new world coming in the soaring voices that conclude "Wooden Ships" (which renders the CSN version negligible) while one equally winces over the doggerel of the title track. "Good Shepherd," which guitarist Jorma Kaukonen adapted from an early 19th century spiritual hymn written by the Methodist Reverend John Adam Granade called "Let Thy Kingdom, Blessed Savior," might be the album's strongest track. Like The Band's "The Weight,' which was also about an obligation to community, "Good Shepherd" makes claims that (in retrospect) couldn't be kept. But there is honesty in the asking and one can feel the faint desperate sense of counter-culture dissolution breathing under its surface.
I'm normally not one impressed by songs that serve as obvious epitaphs - especially when performed by artists who know their end is near. But Johnny Cash's cover of Trent Reznor's "Hurt" cuts and draws blood with the precision of a chainsaw and without a trace of vanity. Reznor's original version with Nine Inch Nails imagines the ravages of addiction while Cash actually shows it. Offering no apologies, while waiting to see if salvation or damnation is at hand, Cash (in the video) is crowded by memories of a past that offers him no answers.
When he once sang Thomas A. Dorsey's "(There'll Be) Peace in the Valley," Cash gave consideration to the line "and I'll be changed from the creature that I am." "Hurt" defines the turf of that change. You can imagine Trent Reznor backing out of the room saying, "Take it, it's your's man."
-- November 17/12
***
Joni Mitchell draws on the intimacy of Nina Simone's version of Rodgers and Hart's "Little Girl Blue" (which also begins on piano with a Christmas tune) to tell a tale of independence that doesn't so much have a destination in mind, but rather a sense of place that's only uncovered in the journey. While her feet would indeed learn to fly, the ground was never certain beneath her. Don Quixote had his windmills while Mitchell had the road in which to tilt forward. Those fascinating elliptical tales of romantic entanglement and creative struggles that followed Blue (1971) might just have started right here on that "River."
In the early Sixties, Miles Davis replied to the gauntlet thrown down by the free jazz innovations of Ornette Coleman by putting together what was arguably his finest group. And they produced what many believe (including myself) to be Miles Davis's best music. The Guardian jazz critic John Fordham also agrees. Here's why: “Their solos were fresh and original, and their individual styles fused with a spontaneous fluency that was simply astonishing,” Fordham wrote in 2010. “The quintet’s method came to be dubbed ‘time, no changes’ because of their emphasis on strong rhythmic grooves without the dictatorial patterns of song-form chords. At times they veered close to free-improvisation, but the pieces were as thrilling and hypnotically sensuous as anything the band’s open-minded leader had recorded before.”
The quintet featured Davis on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums. In the years between 1964 and 1968, with the exciting and startling albums, E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Sorcerer and Miles in the Sky (which pointed the way to In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew), they tore through the fabric of the music at the same speed Jean-Luc Godard shredded traditional film narrative. Here they perform "'Round Midnight" from a 1967 concert in Stockholm.
Most of us came to the sitar (if we responded at all) through George Harrison on The Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" from Rubber Soul. But the real master of the instrument was Ravi Shankar, who would later teach and befriend Harrison. Shankar sadly died today at 92. It was perhaps enough that I drove my parents crazy with all the rock and roll I played when I was a teenager. But when I also started listening to Indian classical music, I was immediately banished to a crawl space in the basement with a set of headphones. If I were to pick a highlight from his astonishing career, where his music was experienced as a breathing language, or a communion with forces beyond comprehension, it was at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 where he performed "Dhun (Dadra and Fast Teental)." Even Jimi Hendrix couldn't top this.
While some have a taste for Love Potion #9 (not bad, not bad), I head right for The Four Deuces' "WPLJ" (White Port Lemon Juice). The Four Deuces were an American R&B vocal quartet, formed by Luther McDaniel in the mid-1950s in Salinas, California. The band was made up of a group of army friends originally schooled in gospel music. But they very quickly turned to rhythm and blues.This catchy 1956 record, with its sexually elusive suggestions of just what White Port Lemon Juice will do for you, received deserved wide radio airplay and later even became the jingle for the renowned wine producer, Italian Swiss Colony.
But few turned the record over to hear one of the spookiest murder songs about sexual jealousy ever written, "Here Lies My Love," performed by "Mr. Undertaker." With a melody as foreboding as "St. James Infirmary," Luther seems to be preparing his own grave as he sings about the one his former loved is now lying in. ("Here lies love/In a grave caused by jealousy/Hate was a pall bearer/And on the tombstone was written misery"). I don't hear any wine producers calling for this one.
-- December 18/12
2013
Where Travis Bickle meets Otis Redding.
Forget the later Blood Sweat and Tears lead by the highly professional voice of David Clayton Thomas. Their first album, helmed by Al Kooper, is the best work they came up with. The record is as idiosyncratic as their sound, with cryptic songs like "The Modern Adventures of Plato, Diogenes and Freud," the psychedelic jazz of "House in the Country," and the intelligent pop of "I Can't Quit Her," Randy Newman's "Just One Smile" and Harry Nilsson's "Without Her." They even carried over the urban sound of Kooper's Blues Project in "I Love You More Than You Ever Know." With its mixture of parody (Kooper's invoking Joplin in his scream of 'alright') and earnest soul, it should have been a hit. I certainly can't resist a song where the singer, desperate to hold his lover, cries, "I could be President of General Motors, baby."
Despite the fractious relations within The Byrds in 1968, where co-founder David Crosby was given the hook, The Notorious Byrd Brothers still remains one of more beautifully poignant of their records. There is a faint sense of loss all over this album, but without the group ever once expressing regret for having borne such aching desire. From Carole King's "Goin' Back" to "Wasn't Born to Follow" (used in Easy Rider), The Notorious Byrd Brothers affectionately waves goodbye to hippie utopianism, but not without first claiming the romanticism they once embraced. You can hear the full weight of that romanticism, too, in the shimmering harmonies of "Get to You."
We all know how surly Lou Reed often gets with the press. But on his 1978 live double-album, Take No Prisoners, he enters into open war with his audience. But it doesn't stop there. Recorded at The Bottom Line, the track list of songs, which include "Sweet Jane," "Street Hassle" and "Walk on the Wild Side," might suggest a jukebox of career highlights except that Reed (in the spirit of Dylan) makes each familiar song so unrecognizable that he doesn't give the listener the comfort of familiarity. The Velvet Underground's gorgeous "Pale Blue Eyes," for instance, becomes a pale imitation of its former self. Sometimes Reed even digresses into raps, asides, and attacks on critics (in particular Robert Christgau). There are no overdubs to clean up wrong notes, either, creating the impression of a bootleg. But the cover art tells the true story. If Reed took out the trash on Rock 'n' Roll Animal, he puts it all back on stage in Take No Prisoners. Lenny Bruce once told the audience that he was going to piss on them and Frank Zappa later asked, "Didja get any onya?" Lou doesn't ask.
An astonishing record - still - 43 years later. As Donald Brackett said in his book Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos: "Recorded between April and July 1969, this breathtaking roller coaster of human feelings manages to maintain an uncanny stillness and calm at the center of its maniacally beating acidic heart." That 'acidic heart' processed the blues that were then Mac's foundation into a rejection of the spoils the music brought the group. Songs are splintered into fragments and breathtaking jams drift into doomed textures. Then Play On ultimately plays itself out. While the songs are shared among the band, from Danny Kirwan's spirited "Coming Your Way" to Mick Fleetwood's "Fighting for Madge," Then Play On is recalled most for co-founder Peter Green, about to abandon his band, on the beautifully schizoid, "Oh Well," which begins as a hard, cutting blues and then morphs into a delicately wistful madrigal's ballad. In the early section of the song, Green prepares the ground for Kurt Cobain who would return the negation years later ("Oh well...nevermind") in "Smells Like Teen Spirit." While Green would find comfort in the madrigal's flute, Cobain tragically chose the gun.
While many are familiar with Crazy Horse as Neil Young's Band of Brothers when he tours, many are not familiar with the band's 1971 eponymous solo record. Led by the late songwriter Danny Whitten, who would soon after die from a heroin overdose, Crazy Horse doesn't have a weak track on it. Backed by Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums, the group had an all-star cast featuring Ry Cooder, Nils Lofgren and Jack Nitzsche. Whether singing about premature ejaculation (Nitzsche's "Gone Dead Train" which was first sung with unheard power by Randy Newman in the film Performance), the pursuit of dope ("Downtown"), or the desolation of romantic rejection ("I Don't Want to Talk About It"), Crazy Horse leaves a residue of lost possibility even as it delivers the unapologetic pleasures of pure pop. "I Don't Want to Talk About It," no doubt a warning sign, is the best example of both.
John Huston's film, Freud (1962) was a fascinating failure and featured a miscast Montgomery Clift as the pioneering psychoanalyst. (Only Gregory Peck as Ahab in Huston's Moby Dick could be considered more inappropriate and ridiculous.) But Jerry Goldsmith's score is a whole other matter. Drawing from the 20th Century serialist school of atonal music (with a key nod to Bartok), he deftly applies it to the Romantic period of 19th Century Vienna. All the while, demonstrating that it was the modern period of music that mirrored the psychological turmoil that Freud was uncovering and not the music of the period of his life. Goldsmith's eerie and riveting score proves that film music isn't just about capturing the outer world. The inner world is just as essential. (For those with very keen ears, you might spot a section here that was lifted and used in Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien. And not to the amusement of Goldsmith who was the composer of both films.)
Despite the clashing egos brought on by teaming the remnants of Cream (Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker) and Traffic (Steve Winwood), Blind Faith wasn't a bad band. And their one and only album boasted some pretty good songs, including the wistful ballad "Can't Find My Way Home," the rousing Buddy Holly cover, "Well All Right," and Clapton's modest confessional "Presence of the Lord." With the exception of Ginger Baker's endless "Do What You Like" (do you have to?), Blind Faith suffered the collapse of their expectations rather than the weight of a bad effort. "Sea of Joy" might indeed speak for both those failed expectations and the desire to live up to them. Winwood's singing was never more forceful and more passionate than it is here in their concert in Hyde Park. "Sea of Joy" is a song that speaks of setting sail and beating all odds. While the ship could just as easily be the Titanic, Steve Winwood never sounded more proud as he goes down with the ship.
-- March 27/13
***
2012
***
For years, I used to end up in long conversations with cab drivers trying to take me home. It would sometimes take hours to arrive there. Once in St. Louis, I almost missed a train to Kansas City because I was in a long discussion with a local cabbie about the Nation of Islam. On another occasion, I unwittingly worried my girlfriend to death when a normally 15-minute drive in the middle of the night turned into a 3-hour epic when the driver (who had turned off the meter) wished to discuss the Velvet Revolution in his native country. But there was one time when my quick ride home was curtailed by a song on the driver's radio. While listening to John Valentyn's The Blues Scene on CJRT-FM, the track "Insane Asylum" by Willie Dixon and Koko Taylor suddenly came on. While I recognized the melody as one of my favourite jazz tracks ("St. James Infirmary"), the delivery was something else again. As Dixon laments the trip to see his emotionally destroyed girlfriend, Koko Taylor follows up with a method performance that stops you in your tracks. Only Lonnie Mack's "Why," with his blood-curdling scream at the end, has the capacity to raise the hairs on my arm as this track does. For what seemed like days, the cab driver and I sat stunned outside my apartment - waiting - until it finally ended. As I stepped out onto the sidewalk, with the driver giving me a quick wave as he pulled away, I realized that I'd forgot to pay him. He also didn't ask.
Ray Davies spent an entire career chronicling the many ways he couldn't fit in. Sometimes it would manifest itself in dismissing the culture that he rejected ("Dedicated Follower of Fashion"); or in bearing witness to the wistful longings invoked by watching lovers from a distance ("Waterloo Sunset"), or wishing his way into a past that no longer made huge demands on who he had to be ("The Village Green Preservation Society"). The Kinks basically built their huge following on a self-awareness that, while you could never find acceptance in the world, your outsider status built for you the perfect perch in which to cleverly heap your scorn upon that world. But "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" is, to borrow a title from one of The Kinks' best albums, something else. Released as the B-side to their 1966 single "Sunny Afternoon," a catchy dirge that mocks the mundane pressures of the monied classes, "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" gets right to the heart of the scorn brought on by feeling set apart. And it cuts with a razor's swiftness. But it also does it without the safety blanket of that perch to preach from. His brother, Dave Davies, sings it with a bold defiance, splitting the world into a comfortable them-vs-us battleground, but the song offers no comfort to the singer in recognizing that reality. "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" is one of the hardest bits of rock in The Kinks' vast catalogue of discontent, but it's also the most nakedly revealing. Ray Davies' anger in the song towards a world that has rejected him is suddenly inseparable from his deeper pain of having never found a suitable place for himself in it.
Since Cohen comes from the left, however, his critique of their response stings even more. "Rushdie writes of how he was criticised from the Left by Germaine Greer, John Berger and John le Carré, whom I never thought of as left-wing, but I suppose is, if leftism is only anti-Americanism," Cohen writes. "Rushdie's sister Sameen understood how left-liberal thought was going wrong from the outset. 'For a generation the politics of ethnic minorities in Britain had been secular and socialist,' she said. 'The fatwa was the mosques' way of destroying that project and getting religion back into the driving seat.' Cohen provides a clearly argued psychological perspective on why some progressives chose to collude with such reactionary forces: "Just as the enemies of Dreyfus anticipated fascism, the left-wing intellectuals who went for Rushdie in 1989 anticipated a future when many on the Left would be happy to go along with reactionary and obscurantist forces as long as they were anti-Western." A smart and sober read.
Jefferson Airplane's Volunteers (1969), an album as confused and conflicted in its politics as the era was itself, tries to reach for utopian generosity ("We Can Be Together") only to tell us to get up against the wall while declaring that "all your private property is targets for your enemy." (Does that include their own? Nobody dares say.) The album is a mixed up, passionate attempt to effect change (even if it trips over its own dogma). Yet the record still delivers protean pleasures. It's hard not to feel the hopes of a new world coming in the soaring voices that conclude "Wooden Ships" (which renders the CSN version negligible) while one equally winces over the doggerel of the title track. "Good Shepherd," which guitarist Jorma Kaukonen adapted from an early 19th century spiritual hymn written by the Methodist Reverend John Adam Granade called "Let Thy Kingdom, Blessed Savior," might be the album's strongest track. Like The Band's "The Weight,' which was also about an obligation to community, "Good Shepherd" makes claims that (in retrospect) couldn't be kept. But there is honesty in the asking and one can feel the faint desperate sense of counter-culture dissolution breathing under its surface.
I'm normally not one impressed by songs that serve as obvious epitaphs - especially when performed by artists who know their end is near. But Johnny Cash's cover of Trent Reznor's "Hurt" cuts and draws blood with the precision of a chainsaw and without a trace of vanity. Reznor's original version with Nine Inch Nails imagines the ravages of addiction while Cash actually shows it. Offering no apologies, while waiting to see if salvation or damnation is at hand, Cash (in the video) is crowded by memories of a past that offers him no answers.
When he once sang Thomas A. Dorsey's "(There'll Be) Peace in the Valley," Cash gave consideration to the line "and I'll be changed from the creature that I am." "Hurt" defines the turf of that change. You can imagine Trent Reznor backing out of the room saying, "Take it, it's your's man."
-- November 17/12
***
Joni Mitchell draws on the intimacy of Nina Simone's version of Rodgers and Hart's "Little Girl Blue" (which also begins on piano with a Christmas tune) to tell a tale of independence that doesn't so much have a destination in mind, but rather a sense of place that's only uncovered in the journey. While her feet would indeed learn to fly, the ground was never certain beneath her. Don Quixote had his windmills while Mitchell had the road in which to tilt forward. Those fascinating elliptical tales of romantic entanglement and creative struggles that followed Blue (1971) might just have started right here on that "River."
The quintet featured Davis on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums. In the years between 1964 and 1968, with the exciting and startling albums, E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Sorcerer and Miles in the Sky (which pointed the way to In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew), they tore through the fabric of the music at the same speed Jean-Luc Godard shredded traditional film narrative. Here they perform "'Round Midnight" from a 1967 concert in Stockholm.
Most of us came to the sitar (if we responded at all) through George Harrison on The Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" from Rubber Soul. But the real master of the instrument was Ravi Shankar, who would later teach and befriend Harrison. Shankar sadly died today at 92. It was perhaps enough that I drove my parents crazy with all the rock and roll I played when I was a teenager. But when I also started listening to Indian classical music, I was immediately banished to a crawl space in the basement with a set of headphones. If I were to pick a highlight from his astonishing career, where his music was experienced as a breathing language, or a communion with forces beyond comprehension, it was at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 where he performed "Dhun (Dadra and Fast Teental)." Even Jimi Hendrix couldn't top this.
While some have a taste for Love Potion #9 (not bad, not bad), I head right for The Four Deuces' "WPLJ" (White Port Lemon Juice). The Four Deuces were an American R&B vocal quartet, formed by Luther McDaniel in the mid-1950s in Salinas, California. The band was made up of a group of army friends originally schooled in gospel music. But they very quickly turned to rhythm and blues.This catchy 1956 record, with its sexually elusive suggestions of just what White Port Lemon Juice will do for you, received deserved wide radio airplay and later even became the jingle for the renowned wine producer, Italian Swiss Colony.
But few turned the record over to hear one of the spookiest murder songs about sexual jealousy ever written, "Here Lies My Love," performed by "Mr. Undertaker." With a melody as foreboding as "St. James Infirmary," Luther seems to be preparing his own grave as he sings about the one his former loved is now lying in. ("Here lies love/In a grave caused by jealousy/Hate was a pall bearer/And on the tombstone was written misery"). I don't hear any wine producers calling for this one.
-- December 18/12
2013
Where Travis Bickle meets Otis Redding.
Forget the later Blood Sweat and Tears lead by the highly professional voice of David Clayton Thomas. Their first album, helmed by Al Kooper, is the best work they came up with. The record is as idiosyncratic as their sound, with cryptic songs like "The Modern Adventures of Plato, Diogenes and Freud," the psychedelic jazz of "House in the Country," and the intelligent pop of "I Can't Quit Her," Randy Newman's "Just One Smile" and Harry Nilsson's "Without Her." They even carried over the urban sound of Kooper's Blues Project in "I Love You More Than You Ever Know." With its mixture of parody (Kooper's invoking Joplin in his scream of 'alright') and earnest soul, it should have been a hit. I certainly can't resist a song where the singer, desperate to hold his lover, cries, "I could be President of General Motors, baby."
-- March 13/13
***
John Huston's film, Freud (1962) was a fascinating failure and featured a miscast Montgomery Clift as the pioneering psychoanalyst. (Only Gregory Peck as Ahab in Huston's Moby Dick could be considered more inappropriate and ridiculous.) But Jerry Goldsmith's score is a whole other matter. Drawing from the 20th Century serialist school of atonal music (with a key nod to Bartok), he deftly applies it to the Romantic period of 19th Century Vienna. All the while, demonstrating that it was the modern period of music that mirrored the psychological turmoil that Freud was uncovering and not the music of the period of his life. Goldsmith's eerie and riveting score proves that film music isn't just about capturing the outer world. The inner world is just as essential. (For those with very keen ears, you might spot a section here that was lifted and used in Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien. And not to the amusement of Goldsmith who was the composer of both films.)
Despite the clashing egos brought on by teaming the remnants of Cream (Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker) and Traffic (Steve Winwood), Blind Faith wasn't a bad band. And their one and only album boasted some pretty good songs, including the wistful ballad "Can't Find My Way Home," the rousing Buddy Holly cover, "Well All Right," and Clapton's modest confessional "Presence of the Lord." With the exception of Ginger Baker's endless "Do What You Like" (do you have to?), Blind Faith suffered the collapse of their expectations rather than the weight of a bad effort. "Sea of Joy" might indeed speak for both those failed expectations and the desire to live up to them. Winwood's singing was never more forceful and more passionate than it is here in their concert in Hyde Park. "Sea of Joy" is a song that speaks of setting sail and beating all odds. While the ship could just as easily be the Titanic, Steve Winwood never sounded more proud as he goes down with the ship.
-- March 27/13
***
In the 1997 film My Son, the Fanatic, based on a Hanif Kureishi short story, Parvez (Om Puri) is a Pakistani-born taxi driver and secular Muslim. His family life takes an unexpected downturn, however, when his son Farid (Akbar Kurtha) converts to fundamentalist Islam. Parts of the picture play like the reverse of the familiar story of the teenager faced with intolerant parents and so turns to music for comfort. In My Son, The Fanatic, it's Parvez who heads to the basement because of his intolerant son to find refuge playing his favourite R&B records. One of those tracks happens to be Percy Mayfield's sumptuous 1950 song, "Please Send Me Someone to Love" ("Heaven please send to all mankind/Understanding and peace of mind/And if it's not asking too much/Please send me someone to love"), which stayed perched on the black music charts for 27 weeks. Director Udayan Prasad takes this soft and pleading ballad, written four years before the United States Supreme Court would outlaw racial segregation in schools, and turns it into a secular prayer.
Lou Reed and John Cale's remarkable Songs for Drella, a song cycle portrait of their former mentor, is a touching tribute to the late painter and film-maker. Reed and Cale, a fractious pair even on a good day, hadn't spoken to one another for years until Warhol's memorial service at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York on April 1, 1987. It was painter Julian Schnabel who suggested they create a memorial piece for Warhol. So they set about writing songs that told Warhol's story, and in early January 1989, Cale and Reed, despite their troubled friendship, recorded the album. Songs for Drella (a nickname contraction of Dracula and Cinderella) has a loving delicacy ("Style it Takes"), features honest self-examination ("It Wasn't Me"), a periodic defiance ("Work"), and sometimes, even a jolting and blistering unapologetic anger ("I Believe"). It's as if Reed and Cale could bring Warhol to life only when they finally faced each other and settled their scores. From the grave, Andy Warhol found a memorable way on Songs for Drella to make them brothers again. Cinematographer Ed Lachman caught that spirit in a stunning live performance, but without an audience, on December 4–5, 1989 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Never released on DVD, it's hard to find this show except on video tape. A faded transfer of Lachman's gorgeous work though has made an appearance on YouTube which, at least, gives you a sense of the alchemy of the experience.
Jazz pianist George Duke sadly died this past month from chronic lymphocytic leukemia. With a long career associated with violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, Canonball Adderley and The Don Ellis Orchestra, he also played with Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention in the early Seventies. On "Cleetus Awreetus-Awrightus," from The Grand Wazoo (1972), Duke turns the instrumental into a cartoon jamboree – part Carl Stalling and part Keystone Cops. It's a wildly paced tune that takes its title from the zany short story Zappa concocted in the album's liner notes. "Cleetus Awreetus-Awrightus" might be the shortest track on this album of big band jazz, but it contains a multitude of musical ideas and fragments. For one, Duke plays a maniacal solo on a honky-tonk piano that evokes car chases out of Mack Sennett comedies. After Ernie Watts plays a stuttering sax solo that sounds like a quick series of sneezes, Zappa, Duke, and a woman identified as "Chunky" sing the tune in a la-la-la chorus, like happy drunks closing a bar.
-- August 14/13
***
My Sweet Ford
The great bass-baritone Norman Treigle sang sacred songs like an alchemist raising the dead. Therefore it's not surprising that his dramatic specialty was playing characters in torment (it's his voice in a performance of Mefistofele that sends Bruce Wayne and his parents fleeing the theatre in Batman Begins). Not long after his debut in Faust in 1974, Treigle died of an overdoes of sleeping pills. Described as a chronic insomniac, you can hear in his bottomless voice the terror of never finding rest.
Okkervil River's new album, The Silver Gymnasium, is a concept record that looks to back to 1986 and its subject is lead-singer Will Sheff's home-town of Meriden, New Hampshire. But this is no nostalgia trip. The record might be conceived as a tribute to the spirit of pre-adolescence and the title is taken from the Charles Lewis Silver Memorial Gymnasium at Meriden's Kimball Union Academy (which just happens to be the boarding school that Sheff attended), but its observations are as sly as Steely Dan's "My Old School." The opening track, "It Was My Season," gets the album off to the kind of promising start that "Lido Pier Suicide Car" and the catchy and catch-in-the-throat tune "Stay Young" later fulfils.
When an Israeli friend of mine got married a few summers ago, she was trying to think of a unique version of “Hava Nagila” to play after the traditional breaking of the glass. Without hesitation, I told her the most original version I knew was Dick Dale & His Del-Tones’ surf-rock arrangement from the mid-'60s.
Although Dale became an amateur surfer in Los Angeles, he was actually born in Massachusetts to a Lebanese father and Polish mother. Although I suspected that there probably wasn't much of a surfing legacy there, another friend (with tongue-in-cheek) asserted otherwise in an e-mail. "On a historical note, regarding Poland and surfers, perhaps you have made a slight oversight here? Have you not heard of the (in)famous Minsker Boys? There is strong historical evidence that they were a Jewish group of surfers from the city of Minsk. Usually part of Poland but slurped up by Russia during The Partition of Poland. According to the cultural lore that I've heard, they surfed the Black Sea in the earlier part of the 20th century in home-made (by their mothers of course) water-proof clothing with layers of chicken fat for warmth. The image that the Minsker Boys evokes certainly flies in the face of traditional Eastern European Jewish stereotypes." Who would have guessed?
In any case, Dale developed an interest once his family relocated to Orange County, California (where there are more Republicans than surfers). Dale's musical influences were Middle Eastern which he would integrate into what became his frenzied guitar style. (His uncle was apparently a virtuoso oud player.) Most contemporary audiences became familiar with his work when Quentin Tarantino used Dale’s cover of “Misirlou” in the opening credits of Pulp Fiction (1994). His playing style with its quick machine gun attack was far removed from the twanging reverb developed by contemporary Duane Eddy. The liner notes from one of his collections explains his approach quite eloquently:
“While he is primarily known for introducing the use of guitar reverb that would give the guitar a ‘wet’ sound, which has since become a staple of surf music, it was Dale's tremolo picking that was his trademark. Since Dale was left-handed he was initially forced to play a right-handed model, much like Jimi Hendrix would do a few years later. However, he did so without restringing the guitar, leading him to effectively play the guitar upside-down (while Hendrix would restring his guitar) and often plays by reaching over the fretboard rather than wrap his fingers up from underneath. Even after he acquired a proper left-handed guitar, Dale continued to use his reverse stringing. Dale is also noted for playing his percussive, heavy bending style while using what are, for most guitarists, extremely heavy gauge string sets.” That percussive rhythm also set him apart from other surf rockers and guitar driven instrumentalists like The Ventures. After playing Dick Dale to my friend, she excitedly found her “masterpiece” for the wedding. "The Bubbies will jump up and take notice," she remarked. Apparently, they did.
Deborah Harry co-wrote with Nigel Harrison this playfully menacing song after one of her ex-boyfriends began stalking her. He likely thought twice after hearing it. Nobody could make a growl sound both seductive and foreboding as Harry does here. Riding a sound that many great Sixties girl groups rode to convey their heartaches, Blondie playfully (like a cat with a mouse) turns the tables on the victim of love scenario.
-- October 13/13
2014
When Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood abandoned Jeff Beck for the Small Faces, they brought a tougher sound to a group which had in previous years been tied to psychedelic pop ("Itchycoo Park," "Ogden's Nut Gone Flake") with vocalist Steve Marriott at the helm. Their debut album with Stewart and Wood, First Step (1970), was also their best. They brought an explosive jolt to Dylan's "Wicked Messenger" and resurrected the spirit of Sam Cooke in "Devotion." Ronnie Lane's whimsical spiritualism found an ideal rustic home in the British folk roots of "Stone" while Ron Wood demonstrated just how imaginative a guitarist he was when revisiting "Plynth (Water Down the Drain)," a song he and Stewart recorded on their last outing with Jeff Beck (Beck-Ola).
Called "Around the Plynth (Water Down the Drain)" here, the song confronts death with verve and defiance - taking full stock and offering no excuses. Wood's slide guitar panning from right to left resembles a bat scooting across a belfry in a desperate to escape its fate. Stewart improves on his performance from the original, too, riding the streaking guitar lines as if he were a surfer steadying a wave, and turning this sea shanty into a breathless exercise in giving testimony. If Ron Wood's guitar playing with the Stones seems only to compliment Keith Richards' style, "Around the Plynth" can serve to remind you that there are more tools in Ron Wood's tool bag than he often cares to reveal. As for Stewart, this voice and its urgency vacated the building a long time ago.
Never one lazy about trying new ways of recording and performing, Neil Young has put together a new album of old songs, A Letter Home, produced in a refurbished 1947 Voice-O-Graph recording booth. With lo-fi production by Jack White, Young creates his own Time Out of Mind experience by going back to the music that was part of his formative years. Here he faithfully and reverently performs Bert Jansch's 1965 "Needle of Death," an anti-drug song that contains of the same topical blatancy of Young's own later "The Needle and the Damage Done." But if you listen closely to the melody, you'll hear the skeleton key to his 1974 epic "Ambulance Blues" (from On the Beach), a song whose topicality – the folk era, the music haunts of Toronto, Nixon, Watergate and Patty Hearst – is transcended by Young collapsing the seductive allure of nostalgia into the simple phrase: "There's nothing like a friend who tells you that you're just pissing in the wind."
With some of the eclecticism of Al Kooper, Steve Winwood over his long career has embraced R&B with The Spencer Davis Group ("Gimme Some Lovin,' I'm a Man"), psychedelia and jazz fusion with Traffic ("Paper Sun," "Glad"), synth pop in the Eighties ("Higher Love"), without ever losing the rich soul in his sound. In this delicate and recent rendering of the traditional folk song, "John Barleycorn Must Die," the title track of a 1970 Traffic album, Winwood brings a beautifully wistful contemplation to its ancient sound. But as he crisply picks the guitar notes between the verses, his face seems to be also contemplating the absence of his late bandmates Chris Wood (flute) and Jim Capaldi (percussion and supporting vocal) as he fills the space they've left in the room.
Former McCoy's guitarist Rick Derringer and Texas bluesman Johnny Winter (who died on July 16th at the age of 70) teamed up in 1970 to create one of the most driving and soulful rock records of the Seventies (Johnny Winter And) – one that critic Robert Christgau compared favourably to Clapton's LP Layla. And he isn't wrong. Like Layla, Johnny Winter And mixes metal blues hybrids ("Guess I'll Go Away"), choice ballads like the cover of Traffic's "No Time to Live," and fine R&B soul like "Let the Music Play." While the album was more noted for its cheeky hit "Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo," it's "Let the Music Play" with the song's faint echo of Johnny Ace, that is most affecting.
-- July 19/14
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Tom Verlaine's elegiac epic "Words From the Front" (from the 1982 album of the same title) unfolds as if a series of newly discovered WWI letters from the front are being read after they've been found in some attic lingering in a box piled away with other long, lost items. Verlaine initially reads the letters with that familiar and flat American stoicism while his guitar delivers the urgency that his voice seems to lack. But, by the end, as the letters begin to rain terror and uncertainty, his voice reaches the same pitch as his guitar until the sheets of lava from the concluding solo bring the war home.
One very early morning, I went into Jet Fuel, one of my favourite coffee shop haunts in Toronto, and they were playing Marvin Gaye's infectiously sexy 1977 single, "Got to Give it Up," where for ten minutes Gaye provided his own response to the growing disco music scene (much to the chagrin of Motown even though the song justly topped three different Billboard charts). What was particularly fun that day in Jet Fuel was watching the baristas making their lattes in sway to the music as the customers shifted their hips sensually around the person in line that they passed. No dance floor ever looked so appealing. No coffee shop looked so appetizing. As Frank Zappa would say, just use your imagination.
-- November 14/14
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Film director Carlos Saura has made many dazzling dance pictures before, from Carmen (1983) to Flamenco (1995), but Iberia (2005) may be his most erotic work. Using a studio outfitted with minimalist backdrops of scrims, curtains and mirrors, Saura adapts sections of composer Isaac Albeniz's "Iberia" suite for a number of the biggest stars in the Spanish dance and music world to perform. Yet like Jonathan Demme in Stop Making Sense (1984), Saura makes us conscious of the artifice he's creating, letting us see the cameras, the lights, and the recording equipment, only then to employ the magic of performance to evaporate the artifice. Saura isn't content just capturing that alchemy, though, he goes further inside the process of performance art itself and, while using expressionistic techniques, reaches the purest essence of dance to create a fully realized expression of love for the sensuality of movement.
As an early birthday present to myself, I gathered up Bob Dylan & The Band's The Complete Basement Tapes and I heartily recommend this expensive, yet expansive, collection over the two-disc primer which is also available. The tracks on the two-disc set may give you some of the best songs, but on the expanded edition you can hear the full process of an informal master class – with plenty of good ribald jokes included. Dylan brings his folk, blues, country and American songbook background to the basement of Big Pink in West Saugerties, New York, where a mostly Canadian bar band known as The Hawks (and later dubbed The Band) would with miraculous ease quickly transform these tracks (which critic Greil Marcus said ranged from the confessional to the bawdy house) into a gathering of true community and fellowship.
Unlike the 1975 CBS release, which gathered some of the basement songs plus including some very fine Band demos, the sound is rich and clean of the overdubs sprinkled on the Seventies set. There's such intimacy in the sound that you can feel the air in the room and hear the intent behind each strum. Since The Basement Tapes were never meant to be an album what you are listening to is an evolution of songs being composed and developed, where artists are finding a tone, or "killing time" as Robbie Robertson of The Band once called these sessions. But you quickly discover that there's no clock to kill, no studio to close, no label to sell it, and no deadline to keep – only total freedom to create music. Woody Guthrie once said he composed his songs out of the air, but Dylan and The Band give theirs back to the air. Whether it's the astonishing "I'm Not There," a song being created as its being sung, the playfully cryptic "Lo and Behold," the dark, deep well of "This Wheel's on Fire," or the down home humour of "Get Your Rocks Off," The Complete Basement Tapes is a spirit and a feeling long gone from popular music. But its recent release provides some twisting road maps to finding its recovery.
-- December 26/14
2015
It would be tempting to call Hampton Sides' Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History (Doubleday Anchor) a thriller – as many did in their reviews – but that assessment doesn't come close to describing its power. His 2011 account of the events leading up to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, its investigation, and the assassin's escape and eventual capture, is what Sides calls a requiem for an era that's passed. But Hellhound on His Trail also opens up room for a more unnerving and contemporary context – a context that in the Obama era is unshakable even if the events he depicts happened almost fifty years ago. Borrowing his title from Robert Johnson's haunting "Hellhound on my Trail" (but written in the mood of "If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day"), Sides illuminates the country that Johnson mapped out in his songs, a land that Greil Marcus called in his essay on Johnson in Mystery Train, "a world without salvation, redemption, or rest." It's a book where an assassin, James Earl Ray, passes (as most assassins do) into anonymity. He becomes a construct who continually recreates himself in a country that invites its citizens to do just that – only to eventually step into the light and snuff out a prophetic voice, a man who made demands on his country to live up to its founding ideals.
Sides deliberately borrows the fictional style of historian Shelby Foote who "employ[ed] the novelist's methods without his license." But unlike, for instance, the documentary films of Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War) that aestheticize reality, Sides enhances and enlarges the drama instead and makes the familiar seem strange, the obvious feel more mysterious, and the events of 1968 more vividly real and heartbreaking. Creating a number of narrative paths that begin with James Earl Ray (as alias Eric Starvo Galt) breaking out of a Missouri prison in 1967 that runs parallel to Martin Luther King, Jr. breaking with President Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War and planning a Poor People's March on Washington, Sides sets up a convergence that paves a road to King's inevitable and tragic death in Memphis. Yet even as we know the events to happen are inescapable and that history will change irrevocably that year, you're always at war with the chapters, with time itself, and with your desire to step back into history to alter its pull. Sides doesn't flinch from that pull either. Like a great detective, he realizes that looking for clues can uncover yet more mysteries, so he thankfully doesn't succumb to the helpless paranoia and safety of conspiracy theories, or take refuge in irony. Hellhound on His Trail takes stock of loss, and like Robert Johnson watching his baby's train disappear in the distance in "Love in Vain," considers its cost.
The T.A.M.I. Show in 1964, which packed the biggest names in rock 'n' roll, pop and soul at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, featured The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, James Brown, Marvin Gaye and Leslie Gore, who died this week at 68. Nobody got to the wounded, yet dedicated, heart of the jilted girlfriend quite like Gore. Whether she claimed every right to weep at her own party when boyfriend Johnny set his sights on Judy ("It's My Party") and even getting her own back in the song's sequel ("Judy's Turn to Cry"), Gore kept her dignity. Though many gravitate to "You Don't Own Me," an anthem that leaves little room for ambiguity, I prefer the ambiguous "Maybe I Know." Once again, Gore has been the victim of a cheating boyfriend, but you'd never know it from the buoyancy of her performance. She sees past her boyfriend's infidelities, perhaps even looking through to the fears that drive him desperately into the arms of other women when she is the one he truly loves. Here on The T.A.M.I. Show, introduced by Jan & Dean, Gore sings her tale of romantic woe with sheer confidence without once succumbing to the song's inherent masochism.
Critic John Corcelli described Rosanne Cash's 2014 album The River and The Thread rightly as "a beautiful, unadorned album that is more than just a traveler's diary. It’s a geographic and spiritual road map." Although that road is personal, the path it opens up takes in worlds of experience, both past and present, that cuts to the wounded and rootless sources of country music. "The Long Way Home" could be about Rosanne Cash's own life, about what she calls "excursions back to yourself." But it could just as easily be about the listener's life suddenly being uncorked and revealed, or maybe even the ghostly sound of someone forever lost to you becoming once again a voice in your ear.
While I love the pop side of Nat King Cole with songs like "Mona Lisa" and "Ramblin' Rose," I have a deeper affection for the earlier jazz combo of The Nat King Cole Trio. This sharp and tight band not only demonstrated how nimble Nat could be on the keyboards, but the unsung guitarist Oscar Moore (who deserves honorable mention along with Django and Les Paul) provided some breathtaking fills. This footage from Clint Eastwood's documentary, Piano Blues, shows the group live in action on "Better to be By Yourself" where they make quick work of this track just as The Rolling Stones would do years later with Larry Williams's "She Said Yeah!" As Ray Charles says in the end, "That's really tasty stuff."
Apart from Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry, with his after hours lounge crooning, did a number of popular songbook albums (These Foolish Things, Another Time, Another Place) that brought out the underlying reverence that resides in camp - even when it involved songs that seemed too sacred to parody. In that spirit, any pop song could be game, a torch to light up, which is why (with Ferry) The Beach Boys' "Don't Worry Baby" could snuggle comfortably next to The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" without pause. His 1993 album, Taxi, which was largely passed over by critics and listeners, was another matter. Taking on Screamin' Jay Hawkins' (or Nina Simone's) "I Put a Spell On You," or Carole King and Gerry Goffin's "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," Doris Troy's "Just One Look," and the gospel standard "Amazing Grace," this wasn't another genial plunge into kitsch fetish. On Taxi, Ferry with a sublime empathy feels his way into the sources of pop magic, and a song's ability to hook us and forever stay in our mind. By cleverly avoiding the familiar hooks in each tune, he actually finds new roads into the timeless source of their drawing power. With guitarist Robin Trower providing beguiling clothes lines that link the verses, Ferry glides into the melodies and lets their shimmering alchemy become reborn.
In David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (1988), Jeremy Irons plays doctors who are twin brothers suffering through symbiosis. The cold, clinical study of their neurosis by Cronenberg may show the precision of a scientist, but the picture desperately needed the lyricism of a poet. One look at their terrifying gynecological equipment also sent my girlfriend into profound disbelief telling me that no woman she knew would let those implements within five feet of her.
But sometimes within frustrating movies there lies, as David Churchill used to remind me, mini-masterpieces. For me, the scene I still can't get out of my head from Dead Ringers is the one where the brothers share a dance with a woman to the strains of The Five Satins' timeless Fifties doo-wop number, "In the Still of the Nite." At the time I reviewed the picture, I tried to explain why this scene mattered to me more than any other in the picture - but I couldn't find the right words. The movie, at that moment, seemed to pull me into an inchoate sense of how beautifully dreamy pop songs can provide - as it does for the three dancers holding each other close - a connectedness that becomes as ephemeral as the momentary pleasure offered by the song itself. That's as close as I got.
So I was very happy when recently reading Greil Marcus's lively and probing The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (which includes "In the Still of the Nite" as one of those songs) that he also remembered its use in Dead Ringers. In an interview he did with Bomb Magazine, I think he found the words that eluded me and still continue to. "The fact that David Cronenberg used the Five Satins’ 'In the Still of the Night' for a scene in Dead Ringers doesn't say anything definitive about that song. It’s a testament to the suggestiveness of the song, the way it can add to and take away from things, the way it can dramatize what people want, what they can never have, and what they've lost." That was it exactly. And that scene has never lost its hold.
-- February 19/15
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In Steven Knight's Locke (2014), Tom Hardy plays Ivan Locke, a construction foreman who, the day before he must supervise a large concrete pour in Birmingham, learns that a colleague with whom he had a one-night stand with seven months earlier has gone into premature labour with their baby. Despite his huge job responsibilities and his wife and children still awaiting him at home, he decides to drive to London to be with the woman carrying his child.
From the moment Hardy makes a crucial turn in his car onto a highway of his choice, he never veers from its destination despite the demands over the phone from all the important people in his life. For just over 80 minutes, as we stay focused almost entirely in close-up on Hardy's face, he remains steadfast and glued to the road, as if it were a lifeline pulling him towards a liberation that comes at a price. While he fields a never ending series of desperate phone calls, and hears voices that compete with the ones already in his head, Hardy sustains a tightrope act not easy for an actor to pull off in such a minimal dramatic concept. Yet he finds a way to enlarge the confined space of the vehicle by drawing us into his battle with larger worlds outside that car: one world which has defined him, one that has harnessed him, and another that holds a mystery for which there is still no easy conclusion.
I know it's generally acknowledged that Tommy is The Who's masterpiece, and I do like some of its songs, but I've never been able to cozy up to its grandiloquent themes of divinity that grows out of sadism and masochism. ("I Can't Explain" and "The Kids are Alright" were, for me, much more concise and convincing expressions of alienation and adolescent frustration.) On the other hand, Quadrophenia, despite its own unwieldiness, has always touched a chord in me despite its flaws. Perhaps I found myself stirred more easily to Pete Townshend's ambivalent struggles on this epic album because he not only gets to the roots of what The Who were always all about to him, but in that sojourn, he also speaks to those listeners for whom the band always mattered. The record is essentially about one artist and the group he projected his own fractured ego on. And his exploration of that subject finds a fuller, more passionate expression here. Quadrophenia has passages that are actually quite moving. In particular, in the record's climax, "Love, Reign O'er Me," singer Roger Daltry not only takes the desperate romanticism of Townshend's words and makes them his own, he seems to reach into the depths of where his partner may have sometimes feared to tread.
-- March 15/15
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Brett Morgen's new picture, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (which showed at the Toronto Hot Docs Festival and premieres in a few days on American HBO), isn't about taming the inherent violence in rock, it's about what happens when that rebellion becomes inverted and artistic danger ultimately claims the artist. In telling the story of Kurt Cobain, the boyish looking co-founder of Nirvana, Morgen uses an assortment of material from the personal archives of the Cobain family – including Cobain's scrapbook drawings, diary entries, tape compilations and memoirs – to provide an in-depth portrait of his life and work. While Morgen strips away the romantic myths of the suffering artist, he gets at the deeper wounds of a great artist who lives out the suffering in his life until he can't sustain it anymore in his work. Even if, in life, Cobain parodies the Fifties image of the bland suburban American family, his home movies with partner Courtney Love, where they frolic and nod out on heroin, are a horror show Sid-and-Nancy sit-com. Critic Howard Hampton once called Kurt Cobain "a self-assassinating pop star," Mark David Chapman and John Lennon rolled into one, and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck provides us with the clues to that paradoxical dilemma. If the pop stars of the past once sought and desired fame and success, Cobain grew up in an age of skepticism where fame and success were not to be trusted. Morgen's picture gives us a troubling view of an artist whose deeper need to slash his canvases doesn't come from a simple desire to destroy himself, but from a more primal terror of finding no model to build that canvas on.
Back in 1967, Chess Records teamed up Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters to make The Super, Super Blues Band. Although it was largely dismissed as a novelty record, I loved the verbal sparring, the cutting, the boasts and the dares that these very distinct giants toss across the studio floor to each other. The terrific song selection even comes to define the qualities of each performer. Where Howlin' Wolf owns "Little Red Rooster," Bo Diddley sounds hopeless as if he wouldn't know the rooster if it crowed in his face. But when Diddley offers up his playful cock-of-the-walk "Diddley Daddy," both Wolf and Waters begin waving white flags. The good natured camaraderie gives each singer room to shine and the space to back off when needed. No knockout punches, but some good hooks get thrown.
Most folks know this track by Blondie. In the original, by the LA pop band The Nerves, singer/guitarist Jack Lee certainly sounds put out, and he's surely annoyed and upset that he's been left high and dry by his girl. But you can't escape the impression that she could keep him hanging there forever. In Blondie's stronger cover, singer Deborah Harry tears into the song with such vengeance that the guy who jilted her had best left town.
Playing live in Norway in 1964, pianist Jaki Byard, bassist Charles Mingus, trumpeter Johnny Coles, tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, drummer Dannie Richmond and bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy (before being honored with his memorial barbecue) take us through Duke Ellington's "Take the 'A' Train." In his dazzling solo, Dolphy takes the train down tracks still under construction. My friend Donald Brackett once told me that the main issue he had with Ken Burns's Jazz documentary was that it framed Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as the revered masters who overshadowed their progeny. Brackett said he would have preferred starting the series with Charlie Parker and then looking back to explore Armstrong and Ellington as his antecedents before looking ahead to where jazz may have gone in their wake. This performance perhaps provides the skeleton key to the door Brackett was opening.
-- May 2/15
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When Nico (who died on this date back in 1988) sang "All Tomorrow's Parties" on the Velvet Underground's debut album, she was the ideal vocalist for it. If songwriter Lou Reed had sung it, he would have likely sounded put out by "Thursday's child" becoming "Sunday's clown" when she had no sharp threads to wear. But Nico's flattened voice, as if she willfully drove all the colour out of it, tells you that not only were tomorrow's parties out of her grasp, but yesterday's gatherings were no laughing matter either.
"It's good to bear witness to life's blessings, big and small," critic and author Mikal Gilmore writes. "One blessing for me was being in the audience at the taping for Frank Sinatra's 80th Birthday Tribute, in December 1995." On that occasion, titled Sinatra: 80 Years My Way, Gilmore heard and witnessed Bob Dylan pay tribute to the singer with his own "Restless Farewell" almost twenty years before Dylan would record an album of standards (Shadows in the Night) that Sinatra had himself perfected into a distinctly romantic style with a sexiness borne out of both heartbreak and despair. (In his long career, Frank Sinatra played out the role of the lonely guy at the bar, nursing his glass of scotch, and then imparting a lasting story of regret to you alone. In doing so, Sinatra could keep alive a slight flicker of romantic desire, hushed yearning or grievous moment that became more deeply intoxicating with every line he sang.)
"Restless Farewell," which Dylan wrote and first released on his 1963 The Times They Are a-Changin', an album introduced with unmistakable prescience into the world right in the aftermath of the assassination of JFK, took its cue from the traditional 16th Century ballad "The Parting Glass," which is often sung at the end of a gathering of friends. On this night, Dylan's quiet plaintive voice obliterated the sentimental bluster of a track like Paul Anka's "My Way" which Sinatra turned into a signature song late in his career. When Dylan sings, "Oh ev’ry foe that ever I faced/The cause was there before we came/And ev’ry cause that ever I fought/I fought it full without regret or shame/But the dark does die/As the curtain is drawn and somebody’s eyes/Must meet the dawn/And if I see the day/I’d only have to stay/So I’ll bid farewell in the night and be gone," he delivers a measured and moving account of life's victories and defeats which gets thoughtfully rendered without a shred of masochism or despair. It might be the best happy birthday song anyone of Sinatra's stature ever received in concert and he might have known it would be, too. After all, he requested it.
The best pop songs always leave a pang that can echo through the decades whenever you hear it. For me, Rick Nelson's 1961 "Hello Mary Lou" (written by the incomparable Gene Pitney) has a number of lasting pangs beginning with that opening cowbell which provides a confident swagger riding under the grain of Nelson's joyful voice. "Hello Mary Lou" captures perfectly that bright optimism of first love with a series of lightning bolt impressions that later get emphasized by James Burton's dazzling guitar break.That solo would for Burton trace its own line to Elvis where "Suspicious Minds" came to reflect the other side of the coin to the innocence of "Hello Mary Lou." John Fogerty, whose nobody's fool, would come up with Burton influenced riffs his entire career. But when he tried to copy "Hello Mary Lou" on CCR's final record, Mardis Gras, he came a cropper.
-- September 6/15
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Raymond Chandler once wrote that "Americans, having the most complex civilization the world has seen, still like to think of themselves as plain people. In other words they like to think the comic-strip artist is a better draftsman than Leonardo – just because he is a comic-strip artist and the comic strip is for plain people." He went on a few paragraphs later to further define the American voice as "flat, toneless, and tiresome." The plain, the flat, the toneless and the tiresome come fully and deliberately to fruition in this odd rarity by The Crazy Teens called "Crazy Date," an unnervingly funny piece of deadpan rockabilly from the late Fifties I first heard – fittingly enough – on an Oxford American Magazine CD.
Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who died New Year's Day, had a sure gift for turning the screen into a large and expansive canvas and making you feel keenly aware of your peripheral vision. Through his eyes, the beauty of the rural landscape in Deliverance could also appear largely mysterious and as foreboding as nature itself. The rain and snow in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which emerged delicately like droplets of paint dotting the screen, coloured the mood of Robert Altman's frontier village as if it were conjured up in the clouds. The steel town of The Deer Hunter, which cast long, dark shadows, seemed to cocoon and dwarf the characters in their parochial values. The nightscape of Close Encounters gave full credence to the child's imagination where you were convinced that magical moments could light the sky; just as in Blow Out, the rainy drizzle of Philadelphia created a moral chill where the city became, as critic Michael Sragow once wrote, "snuggled up in sin." Here in this YouTube post defines the genius of Vilmos Zsigmond in less than three minutes.
-- January 29/16
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It's not a surprising irony in the late Sixties and early Seventies, just as many Americans were feeling like unwitting spiritual exiles and no longer wishing to be part of their own country, that many movie-makers began impassioned quests to find it. The results could be as powerfully masochistic as Easy Rider (1969) with its strain of pop religiosity which featured its hippie heroes romantically doomed to crucifixion by the power structure. The outcome could be as ambivalent as John Schlesinger's 1969 Midnight Cowboy (which loved its lost heroes but strangely shared no empathy for the country that produced them). The sojourn could also have the operatic sweep and depth of The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974) which embraced the tidal pull of the nation along with the very elements that would come to corrupt it. Regardless of the quality of films – from Alice's Restaurant to Nashville – movies were committed to taking the pulse of a country in decline and in distress.
In the epic striving of Jan Troell's The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972), recently released by the Criterion Collection in their full Swedish versions and immaculately restored on Blu-ray, the director takes in America as an untested promise, or a fever dream that brings forth deliverance. Based on Vilhelm Moberg's epic four-volume novels which account the long journey of Swedish farming families to settlements in Minnesota in 1850, Troell captures in a largely naturalistic style for over six hours both the cost and renewal of that promise without embellishing the hopes of those making the quest, or romanticizing the claims of the new land (which the farmers discover is stolen land from the Sioux). Troell, who shoots, edits and directs his own movies, removes our awareness of film language as if the camera were a portal in which to comprehend a lost period of realism. When he focuses on the life and marriage of Karl Oskar (Max Von Sydow) and Kristina (Liv Ullmann), featuring two actors whose iconic definitions through their work with Ingmar Bergman couldn't be more recognizable, Troell clears a path for both performers to shed that skin and to embellish their work with fresh character etchings. Those nuances not only reveal how the arduous journey tests that marriage, but also the many ways it fulfills it. The marriage between the settlers and their environment, where nature is both unforgiving and inviting, is equally a test of endurance and purpose. That Jan Troell has been an invisible giant on the cinematic landscape – despite the enduring depth of later works like Flight of the Eagle (1982), Hamsun (1996), As White as in Snow (2001) and Everlasting Moments (2008) – may well be due to his gift of letting the story dictate the style rather than imposing his style on it.
"The Weight" is a moral parable. It's a song is about a search for community, a quest for comfort, a place to find comradeship and to set down roots to lessen the burden of what the singer is carrying – but with no guarantee of being relieved of it. The key to this song is that there are many singers present in the performance – not just one – just as there is a cast of characters in 'The Weight' who deepen the riddle. Aretha's voice carries those voices alone and rings that story from rooftops where those communities might not only hear, but rejoice. Yet the song wouldn't be complete without the singeing accompaniment of Duane Allman on slide guitar which rings like the peeling of bells from those rooftops. “The sound of his slide was well suited to her tone; their interplay was a conversation,” Duane's daughter,Galadrielle, writes in Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father (Spiegel & Grau, 2014). “Duane was confident enough to echo the feeling and richness of her voice.” Duane Allman not only echoes it – he completes it.
Jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, who makes Wynton Marsalis break out in hives, is an urban impressionist who builds structurally on the current of improvisation right at the heart of the music. But unlike Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, whose 'free jazz' experiments were driven by the powerful emotional drives of the artists themselves, Taylor's work (especially on the 1966 album, Unit Structures) can seem almost cerebral by comparison. But speaking in different tongues – musically as in literature – can still bring forth appealing narrative colours as this portion of "Enter, Evening (Soft Line Structure)" does for me.
Jazz critic Gary Giddens puts it this way: "Taylor is almost like a tabula rasa in the sense that listeners read into him whatever they happen to know about music...A lot of bad teachers steered students away from [James] Joyce by telling them that they couldn’t read Joyce until they had read everything from Homer to Vico and all of the previous Joyce works to get to Ulysses. You could spend a lifetime just doing all the preparation and then you are supposed to carry around a thousand pages of footnotes. What pleasure is there in that? But, just take Ulysses on vacation with nothing else and you will find out how truly pleasurable Joyce can be, as long as you don’t expect to get every single line. Listeners have that same expectation of Taylor, that listening to him will take a tremendous amount of work. It is when you put your defenses down and let yourself respond to the music that you can really learn to love it."
In his highly readable book, Zappa and Jazz (Matador, 2015), Geoff Wills takes up one of many paradoxical arguments when discussing the work of American composer Frank Zappa. Despite Zappa's protestations that he didn't care for jazz – the music, the musicians and the jazz establishment – his music is filled with jazz influences and musicians who were schooled in the genre. Wills (along with being a former musician and is a clinical psychologist) delves with depth and clarity into the jazz influences that fed the stream of Zappa's work right from the beginning of his musical life. Wills not only knows the jazz canon (even making a sharp and bold comparison late in the book between the career of Stan Kenton and Zappa's), he calls out Zappa's disingenuousness by marking the music he clearly must have known and liked. So where did this oddly dismissive attitude come from? Wills links it to Zappa's anti-establishment stance which marked him an outsider trying to prove that he could do better than those who rejected him. But by nursing only that one persuasive argument is where the book also misses the larger point: Wills' reverence for jazz (and even Zappa's own music) evades the satire that fuels it. If jazz, according to Zappa, smelled funny, Wills doesn't end up uncorking the aroma of the joke.
By actually combining serious contemporary music with rock, jazz, and social and political satire, Zappa created a unique and sophisticated form of musical comedy by integrating into the canon of 20th-Century music the scabrous wit of comedian Lenny Bruce and added to it the irreverent clowning of Spike Jones. His body of work, both solo and with his band, The Mothers of Invention, presented musical history through the kaleidoscopic lens of social satire, and then he turned it into farce. Curious for a psychologist, Wills skirts Zappa's absurdism and spends more time chronicling his jazz influences rather than providing the critical analysis that would reveal its satirical intent. He's quite precise at showing us what the music is doing, but not in going deeper into how and why. Zappa and Jazz is at its best and most engaging and lively when Wills illuminates his argument by weaving together in each chapter interviews with alumni and session musicians who articulate Zappa's musical depth as well as revealing much of their own. For a quick read, Zappa and Jazz has a dense intelligence that nevertheless seeps through its own earnestness.
When The Shirelles first covered "Dedicated to the One I Love" in 1960, originally written and recorded by The '5' Royales in the early Fifties, it was a joyous testimony and performed with as much verve on the subject of long distance love as The Beatles' "All My Loving" would supply a few years later. The Mamas and the Papas would also record it in 1967, but Michelle Phillips would sing the opening lines in a soft and tremulous voice that suggested the loneliness that often hides under desire. When Mama Cass and the others finally join behind her in the coming verses, that darkest hour before dawn quickly becomes bright with sunshine and the song soars with an unbridled optimism that never forgets the desolate place it started from.
-- March 27/16
***
Looking as androgynous and funky as Little Richard in Jimi Hendrix's duds, Prince wrote music that was sexually charged, playfully lewd and enthusiastically impudent. In other words, he was precisely the tonic the Eighties needed. "Prince is bad," Johnny 'Guitar' Watson once remarked. "It's like seeing Sly [Stone], James Brown and Jimi Hendrix all at once." Right at a time when sex was again becoming a mortal sin, Prince turned sex into a quest for salvation. His album, Dirty Mind (1980), was a blissfully torrid celebration of eroticism. His band, both racially and sexually integrated, was supercharged, just as Sly & the Family Stone had been before them. Also like Sly, Prince mixed musical genres which caused mass confusion at radio stations that couldn't decide whether he was R&B or rock. By the time his third album, 1999, came out in 1982, however, it didn't seem to matter. The infectiously coy "Little Red Corvette" shot into the American Top 10. Thanks to MTV and the video culture it bred, Prince became the first black crossover artist (along with Michael Jackson) to help broaden the network's musical palette.
At the height of his success in 1984, Prince made his movie debut in the R-rated Purple Rain. James Dean had made his astonishing debut in East of Eden almost thirty years earlier, playing a misunderstood loner. Prince (calling himself 'the Kid'), followed the same pattern, portraying a moody, struggling artist. Purple Rain mythologized his status in the pop world, and one song from its soundtrack ("Darling Nikki") generated the type of controversy that captured the attention of Mary Elizabeth 'Tipper' Gore. She was so horrified when her young daughter bought the record with a song about a guy who meets a woman masturbating with a magazine that she helped launch the PMRC in order to toilet train pop performers. So in both memory and tribute to the artist known as Prince, it seems fitting to send him off with one of what Gore would call the "Filthy Fifteen" songs which launched the censorious body that Frank Zappa, Dee Snyder and John Denver stood before Congress to fight.
The six-part miniseries adaptation of John le Carré's The Night Manager was the most gripping six hours of television I've seen in some time. Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) is the night manager at a luxury hotel in Cairo. But when a woman who trusts him with information involving Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), a billionaire British businessman who is also an international arms dealer, she is murdered due to his careless trust. In time, he gets recruited by an intelligence agent, Angela Burr (Olivia Colman), to infiltrate Roper's inner circle while also discovering that Roper has discomforting ties to Her Majesty’s government. Once Pine starts developing feelings for Roper’s mistress, Jed (Elizabeth Debicki), his desire to atone for his earlier mistake puts the mission at risk.
Although the 1993 novel was set in Central America, director Susanne Bier (Brothers, After the Wedding) and screenwriter David Farr have now placed it in the Middle East during the Arab Spring. Yet even with the changes (including a dramatic reversal on the ending), the themes of guilt and redemption come closer to Graham Greene than le Carré. Hugh Laurie's Roper, a curdled Harry Lime, is the kind of obscenity who calmly and cynically stares out into the ills of the world and finds justification for profiting from human misery while simultaneously causing it. By contrast, Hiddleston's Pine has the cool British reserve that covers a multitude of impulses. Elizabeth Debicki's delectable Jed becomes part of both Pine's hidden appetites and his need to find forgiveness. Despite the thrills, though, The Night Manager doesn't achieve the complexity of other le Carré adaptations like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The Russia House, The Tailor of Panama, or the more recent version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Bier doesn't reflect on (or parse through) the political nuances, but instead puts her foot on the accelerator and keeps the dramatic thrills coming. In the end, The Night Manager is an entertaining and satisfying melodrama.
What you hear in the electricity of Donovan's 1968 "Hurdy Gurdy Man" is just as foreboding as what you can hear in the "gentle" acoustic guitars on The Beatles' White Album. Donovan tells of the Hurdy Gurdy Man singing songs of love, but the mood he conveys isn't all that loving. His tune may have been inspired by the Maharishi Yogi (as many tracks on the White Album were), but the abiding spirit on the record could just as easily be Charles Manson – the shadow Maharishi. Donovan composed a song that was less a celebration of spiritual renewal than a harbinger of bad tidings. "Hurdy Gurdy Man" held warning signs of utopian instincts turning destructive just as his "Season of the Witch" had also done in 1966. The hidden dread of "Hurdy Gurdy Man" wouldn't bloom though until many years later. Director David Fincher, in his 2007 masterpiece Zodiac, used the song to underscore the first attacks of the Zodiac serial killer in San Francisco. On the anniversary of the birth of the United States, in the former locale of the Summer of Love, the Zodiac brutally struck two lovers in a parking lot as "Hurdy Gurdy Man" played on the radio. And all of this was a mere month before Manson down in LA would hear The Beatles' White Album as his own call to carnage.
The danger of trying to recreate an old familiar pop sound is constructing an echo chamber in which to fetishisize your nostalgia for it. That's not a problem for the LA neo soul/indie pop band Fitz and The Tantrums. Formed in 2008, singer Michael Fitzpatrick purchased an old Conn electronic organ and the notes of what became "Breakin' the Chains of Love" soon came pouring out. It wasn't long before he contacted his old school friend, saxophonist James King, who then recommended both drummer John Wicks and singer Noelle Scaggs. After Wicks brought in keyboardist Jeremy Ruzumna and bass player Joseph Karnes, the song didn't trap the players in the past but opened a door for the past to infiltrate the present. "It was literally like five phone calls, one rehearsal, and we could have played a show that night," Fitzpatrick recalled. After hearing the song come up on the shuffle of my playlist to create a bright space in my day on one grey afternoon, I believe him.
-- May 25/16
***
Comedian Lenny Bruce, who died fifty years ago, once wrote, "People should be taught what is, not what should be. All my humour is based on destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing in the breadline – right back of J. Edgar Hoover." I was first introduced to Bruce in 1970 while in high school where we were learning 'what should be.' Standing around in gym after class, where getting hassled by hyper-masculine athletic jocks comprised 'what is,' a long haired soul who appeared equally big and intimidating named Tony Sloggett handed me a book –The Essential Lenny Bruce – and said, "You might like this." Then he walked away.
The Essential Lenny Bruce was a collection of this equal opportunity offender's best routines and many of them made me laugh – if not uneasily – because they didn't exactly provide comfort for my own views. At times, they weren't entirely understandable, either. In satirizing the straight world, Bruce employed both the argon of the hip and (since he was Jewish) Yiddish. Many of the hip words were pretty clear, but Yiddish was way out of my league. That left me chasing down the only Jewish guy I knew at my school, the straight arrow Mel Raskin, who was also a daily victim of the thugs in gym class. I'm still trying to imagine what must have been going through his mind as I followed him down the street asking things like, "Mel, what does shtup and putz mean?" (Mel has since, in a twisted irony known only to God, become a radio broadcaster of Oshawa Generals hockey games.)
When Bruce began to build his reputation as the "King of the Sick Comics," he took on everyone – from the Pope to Jimmy Hoffa. When he was a guest on Hugh Hefner's after-hours TV talk show, Playboy Penthouse, he did a television first – he blew his nose on camera. Bruce satirized and tested the prudishness of the audience. His daring wasn't in the romantic portrait Dustin Hoffman provided in Bob Fosse's Lenny (1974), where he was seen as the misunderstood rebel, but in his fearless approach of all that was sacred – even to liberals – and combining with that the performer's fervor in getting a rise out of the audience. We were as much the butt of his jokes as we were participants in them. One such example, which was one of the first routines I read in The Essential Lenny Bruce, was his outrageous "Christ and Moses" below in The Carnegie Hall Concert.
When I bought my first Pioneer stereo system in 1974 (which, by the way, still works and plays my vinyl in the bedroom/den), the clerk offered me a free record if I bought it. He first handed me an album of those prog rock yodelers, Focus, but I passed perhaps feeling more parochial that day. He then reached for Lou Reed's Berlin, but the opening track had me wanting to open my veins (which was likely Lou's point). Then I spotted this album by Leadbelly hidden in a rack in the corner. I only knew his work from countless covers of "Goodnight Irene," Creedence Clearwater's "The Midnight Special" and "Rock Island Line." His serene face on the cover painting where he appeared lost in the notes coming forth from his strummed guitar simply captivated me. So did the record when I got it home. It was called Huddie Ledbetter's Best...His Guitar...His Voice...His Piano on Capitol Records and I couldn't stop playing it for days. The track that most got my attention was a piano rag that streaked by at under three minutes in both its vocal and instrumental versions. Given that Leadbelly knew some pretty horrific nightmares in some of his songs (such as "In the Pines") from his days in prison, "Eagle Rock Rag" was the sound of chains snapping.
There are some songs that get forever identified with a moment in time. The La's' infectious 1990 hit "There She Goes" (which I could easily imagine covered by R.E.M.) calls back a moment on CBC Radio's Prime Time when we were doing an interview with the darkly sexy Amanda Donohoe (The Lair of the White Worm). After Geoff Pevere finished the interview with her, I accompanied Donohoe from the studio out to the car with her publicist. And I never heard the end of it from fellow producer Greig Dymond who teased me saying, "Yeah, Courrier, just like you always follow Rob Wilson (our advert critic) out to his car." When the item finally ran on the show, music producer Dianne Collins was looking for a song to follow the Donohoe interview. When she heard the tale of my peripatetic adventure into the parking lot, this is what she chose.
One of my favourite contemporary artists, St. Vincent, began her music career with the Polyphonic Spree. In a sense, that group name helps describe her talents as a composer and performer. If you heard her cover of John Lennon's "Dig a Pony," she creates a counter-melody on the guitar that answers and sometimes jabs back at the song's sentiments as she sings it. "I like when things come out of nowhere and blindside you a little bit," she once said describing the unpredictable nature of her work. "I think any person who gets panic attacks or has an anxiety disorder can understand how things can all of a sudden turn very quickly. I think I'm sublimating that into the music." You can hear elements of that sublimation In "Cruel," from her 2011 album Strange Mercy, where anything seems possible. (In the video for "Cruel," she is kidnapped by a motherless family and forced to be a wife in the family and ultimately buried alive.) St. Vincent has said that she listens every day to David Bowie's wildly discordant "It's No Game (Part One)" from Scary Monsters. Upon reflection, that might just be the perfect skeleton key used to open up her own songs.
While there are many who feel that Heaven's Gate is some misunderstood masterpiece, or a flawed visionary work, the picture I saw back in 1981 remains an amorphous mess – in short, megalomania on the march. Its ambition and epic sweep was always dramatically thin despite director Michael Cimino's keen eye for detail. Critic Michael Sragow wrote in Rolling Stone that Heaven's Gate "subverts not only movie history – filching images from films as different as McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Dovzhenko's Earth – but also American history, rendering meaningless the Johnson County War of 1892...Heaven's Gate reduces the conflict to entrenched cattlemen bullying ragged, starving immigrant-settlers who look as if they got off the boat and walked West." An episode of political injustice ended up being inflated into an American catastrophe.
Much of Heaven's Gate's current stature, I think, is due to an acceptance of its themes – a crude quasi-Marxist view that the lower classes are always fated to be destroyed by the ruling class and also its hangover of post-Sixties guilt over the failure of the American promise. That failed promise though could also be interpreted as a lamentation over the death of American independent cinema in the Seventies which both Stars Wars and Heaven's Gate ironically finished off in their own different ways. But since I'm prone to not speak ill of the dead (Micheal Cimino passed away recently), I'd like to add that his best instincts were reserved for David Mansfield's elegiac score. While the spectral beauty of Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography cocooned the characters and trapped them in foggy introspection, Mansfield's poignant melodies matched the vast landscape with its spacious beauty and opened up a possible dream of the country that the characters both fought and failed to preserve.
While most fans of this unbridled comedian can easily quote the lyrics to his "Springtime for Hitler," or chortle like kids in a schoolyard over his farting-around-the-campfire scene in Blazing Saddles, I draw attention instead to his Spanish Inquisition number from History of the World, Part One as his most inspired – and offensive – musical number. Brooks appears as the Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada ("Ya can't Torquemada anything!"), who sings and dances as he tortures Jews while cheerfully invoking the elaborate and kaleidoscopic patterns of Busby Berkeley (even drawing on the stylized aquatic ballet of Esther Williams – only this time with swimming nuns). Shrewdly playing the role of the untrustworthy narrator, Brooks deftly draws the connection between Jewish persecution and their ultimate contribution to musical theatre in America.
In his book The Haunted Smile, Lawrence J. Epstein talks about Jewish comedy as if it were perched at the edge of an abyss. "Their stage style is tinged with sadness," Epstein writes. "It is haunted by the Jewish past, by the deep strains in American Jewish life to be strained – the desire to be accepted and the concern for a culture disappearing – by the centuries of Jewish life too frequently interrupted by hate, and by the knowledge that too often for Jewish audiences a laugh masked a shudder." The shudder is so evident in Brooks's outrageous satirical piece that many Jews are horribly offended by it. But that's what gives it such vitality.
Tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler (who celebrates his 80th birthday this year) once said of his 1964 album, Spiritual Unity, that the band wasn't really playing together. "We were listening to each other," he remarked. Maybe that's why – despite the title – unity is arrived at through a process of dialogue that's filled with tension and counterpoint. Whether anyone else cared to listen was up to the ears of the beholder. One thing I do know, it was music of this nature that got me and my stereo banished to the basement by my parents. No dialogue.
-- August 9/16
***
This altered version of Dolly Parton's "Jolene" has been making the rounds for some time now. No wonder. Parton's 1973 hit was about the fear of another woman taking her man away. But played at a slower speed, "Jolene" is an entirely different song. Where Parton sounds perfectly capable of handling herself, and you never doubt her victory in the end, a listen to the 45 at 33rpm reveals a much more mournful track full of fear and dread. But that's not all. The change in speed also changes the meaning of the song and the relationship at stake. You might also swear that you stumbled upon some lost track by Jesse Colin Young. When you go back to Dolly Parton, at the song's proper speed, a new listen yields something closer to Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Even though it was the psychedelic numbers (fine as they are) like "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit" that got all the attention, tracks like "Comin' Back to Me" and "Today" were the secret heart of The Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow. "Today" might be the most beautiful ballad Marty Balin ever sung. With an opening guitar line suggestive of Jerry Garcia's for The Grateful Dead's cover of Bonnie Dobson's "Morning Dew," "Today" might be something of a sequel.
“Morning Dew” was an early Sixties protest song conceived at a time when folk music was attempting to change the world from one that threatened to turn to rubble into something new and egalitarian in spirit. The song is framed through a conversation, but is it between a parent and child, or is it two lovers? Who really knows? Who really cares? At the time, the exquisite darkness of "Morning Dew" laid clues that we could be facing a nuclear holocaust, but heard today, the singer could just as easily be describing global warming. The song is essentially a mystery novel waiting for someone to solve it. It was as if, just by singing it, you could unlock the door to its bottomless mysteries. Many have tried. All we do know is that there is nothing left of the world – but how and why it got to this state remains a secret. Unlike those many anti-war songs that dozens of people lined up to sing, as if signing up for a different kind of army, “Morning Dew” doesn't offer a clear message about what to sign on for. It opens a door.
"Today" might be heard as a song about the day after "Morning Dew," when out of all the destruction new beginnings are claimed and affirmations get earned. "Today" make you feel that the world might not truly end because the singer is certain that he won't let it.
I've always had profoundly mixed feelings about Patti Smith. Sometimes I've thought that the self-consciousness of her art tied her to platitudes rather than releasing her into the wind. And, yet, she can still fly when she lets those primal instincts loose like a runaway subway train. On her single, "Dancing Barefoot," from Wave, she doesn't try to categorize the sensation of being carried away by love, but gives in to its scarier implications of possession. In this staggering performance, the tension between freedom and bondage is not only palpable, it is realized.
In light of Fidel Castro's recent passing, I began thinking back to my first listen to Cuban and Latin American music from the ridiculously campy – but delightfully loopy – 1969 Hollywood bio, Che!, with fiery Jack Palance (!) as Fidel and Omar Sharif (!!), with his liquid peepers, as Che Guevara. The revolution itself is played out by director Richard Fleischer as some kind of hothouse romantic melodrama where Palance and Sharif continually fight for the camera's attention in the Sierra Maestra (while Batista waits off screen to be deposed). Eventually they move from the mountains and into the bedrooms of Havana at night for government briefings, Palance muttering often, "You know, sometimes, Che, I just don't understand you." They stop short of lighting each other's cigars. But the Lalo Schifrin score is no joke; it stayed with me while I was convulsing with laughter at just about everything else. There's a nice mix of Argentinian folk melodies and Cuban jazz plus some gorgeous Flamenco guitar that ultimately paints a musical portrait of romantic hopes doomed by hubris and political ruthlessness.
Eric Dolphy's solo stab at Walter Gross and Jack Lawrence's standard "Tenderly" on his 1960 album, Far Cry, addresses with both wistful abandon and aching warmth the fleeting nature of love and compassion. Sarah Vaughn most famously took "Tenderly" to the top of the charts, but everyone from Pat Boone to Amy Winehouse wrapped their lips around images of trembling trees tenderly embracing the breeze as a couple fall in love. There are no words in Dolphy's version, only his alto sax painting impressionistic images of a shore being kissed by the sea as if he were a lonely bird hovering over the romantic idyll. And just like that bird, as the scene vanishes from sight, you can hear him flapping away into the night.
-- December 11/16
If there was one songwriter in rock 'n roll who had an endless gift for memorable (and enjoyable) anthems it was Chuck Berry, who died recently in his home at the age of 90. Whether it was his pledge of allegiance in "Rock and Roll Music," his testament to roots in "Back in the U.S.A.," or the happily defiant "Roll Over Beethoven," Berry was the supreme storyteller, rock's Johnny Appleseed, a smooth talker and a smooth walker. Born in St. Louis, Berry drew his musical influences from a variety of genres. The swagger of "You Can't Catch Me" is unthinkable without Louis Jordan. The bravado of "Little Queenie" would have been right at home in the tough urban blues of Muddy Waters. "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" might have been a country music dream imagined by Bob Willis and the Playboys. His lesser-known "Havana Moon" has the swooning balladry of Nat King Cole (and it inspired Richard Berry's "Louie Louie").
I got to see Chuck Berry live only once at a Toronto International Film Festival party at Casa Loma for Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride in 1987. Taylor Hackford's concert picture tribute to Chuck Berry, Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, had also premiered that evening at the Festival. Berry turned up at the party and took command of the stage with a young local band that was noodling along, playing back-up to the noise of people getting food and schmoozing. My friend and colleague, Andrew Dowler, saw Berry head for the stage, got my attention, and we ran right up front and claimed a table. Berry asked the band if they knew any of his numbers and luckily the lead guitarist seemed schooled in Chuck. They kicked off with "Little Queenie," and then followed with "Roll Over Beethoven." When that guitarist hit the solo, which Berry handed him gracefully, the kid looked to the sky and I thought he was dreaming of the day he could tell his children about the night he soloed for Chuck Berry. Maybe he already has.
You'd think the power of Jimi Hendrix's 1968 cover of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" would have been diminished long ago by overkill - either on the radio, or in movies, where it became a familiar signpost in any drama about the end of the Sixties. (Only The Rolling Stones's "Gimme Shelter" offers adequate competition.) But perhaps because the meaning of "All Along the Watchtower" seems bottomless and Hendrix treats the track as if it were some incendiary manifesto appropriate to any age, nothing can possibly kill it. "All Along the Watchtower" cleverly plays with the idea of time and chronology, which maybe doesn't hurt the tune's chances. But from the moment Dave Mason's acoustic guitar chimes in along with Brian Jones's vibraslap percussion, sounding like horse's hoofs storming the gates, Hendrix tells this story of troubling days ahead as if it were a prophecy. Dylan's version may come across as a suggestive warning. but Hendrix seems swallowed up by the apocalypse and the electric guitars are like swooping birds gathering up his broken body. What makes "All Along the Watchtower" timeless is that, unlike most topical music, where fingers point at current targets, this tune draws on the past, is aware of the present, and dreads the future.
Lou Reed and John Cale's remarkable Songs for Drella, a song cycle portrait of their former mentor, is a touching tribute to the late painter and film-maker. Reed and Cale, a fractious pair even on a good day, hadn't spoken to one another for years until Warhol's memorial service at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York on April 1, 1987. It was painter Julian Schnabel who suggested they create a memorial piece for Warhol. So they set about writing songs that told Warhol's story, and in early January 1989, Cale and Reed, despite their troubled friendship, recorded the album. Songs for Drella (a nickname contraction of Dracula and Cinderella) has a loving delicacy ("Style it Takes"), features honest self-examination ("It Wasn't Me"), a periodic defiance ("Work"), and sometimes, even a jolting and blistering unapologetic anger ("I Believe"). It's as if Reed and Cale could bring Warhol to life only when they finally faced each other and settled their scores. From the grave, Andy Warhol found a memorable way on Songs for Drella to make them brothers again. Cinematographer Ed Lachman caught that spirit in a stunning live performance, but without an audience, on December 4–5, 1989 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Never released on DVD, it's hard to find this show except on video tape. A faded transfer of Lachman's gorgeous work though has made an appearance on YouTube which, at least, gives you a sense of the alchemy of the experience.
Jazz pianist George Duke sadly died this past month from chronic lymphocytic leukemia. With a long career associated with violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, Canonball Adderley and The Don Ellis Orchestra, he also played with Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention in the early Seventies. On "Cleetus Awreetus-Awrightus," from The Grand Wazoo (1972), Duke turns the instrumental into a cartoon jamboree – part Carl Stalling and part Keystone Cops. It's a wildly paced tune that takes its title from the zany short story Zappa concocted in the album's liner notes. "Cleetus Awreetus-Awrightus" might be the shortest track on this album of big band jazz, but it contains a multitude of musical ideas and fragments. For one, Duke plays a maniacal solo on a honky-tonk piano that evokes car chases out of Mack Sennett comedies. After Ernie Watts plays a stuttering sax solo that sounds like a quick series of sneezes, Zappa, Duke, and a woman identified as "Chunky" sing the tune in a la-la-la chorus, like happy drunks closing a bar.
-- August 14/13
***
My Sweet Ford
The great bass-baritone Norman Treigle sang sacred songs like an alchemist raising the dead. Therefore it's not surprising that his dramatic specialty was playing characters in torment (it's his voice in a performance of Mefistofele that sends Bruce Wayne and his parents fleeing the theatre in Batman Begins). Not long after his debut in Faust in 1974, Treigle died of an overdoes of sleeping pills. Described as a chronic insomniac, you can hear in his bottomless voice the terror of never finding rest.
Okkervil River's new album, The Silver Gymnasium, is a concept record that looks to back to 1986 and its subject is lead-singer Will Sheff's home-town of Meriden, New Hampshire. But this is no nostalgia trip. The record might be conceived as a tribute to the spirit of pre-adolescence and the title is taken from the Charles Lewis Silver Memorial Gymnasium at Meriden's Kimball Union Academy (which just happens to be the boarding school that Sheff attended), but its observations are as sly as Steely Dan's "My Old School." The opening track, "It Was My Season," gets the album off to the kind of promising start that "Lido Pier Suicide Car" and the catchy and catch-in-the-throat tune "Stay Young" later fulfils.
When an Israeli friend of mine got married a few summers ago, she was trying to think of a unique version of “Hava Nagila” to play after the traditional breaking of the glass. Without hesitation, I told her the most original version I knew was Dick Dale & His Del-Tones’ surf-rock arrangement from the mid-'60s.
Although Dale became an amateur surfer in Los Angeles, he was actually born in Massachusetts to a Lebanese father and Polish mother. Although I suspected that there probably wasn't much of a surfing legacy there, another friend (with tongue-in-cheek) asserted otherwise in an e-mail. "On a historical note, regarding Poland and surfers, perhaps you have made a slight oversight here? Have you not heard of the (in)famous Minsker Boys? There is strong historical evidence that they were a Jewish group of surfers from the city of Minsk. Usually part of Poland but slurped up by Russia during The Partition of Poland. According to the cultural lore that I've heard, they surfed the Black Sea in the earlier part of the 20th century in home-made (by their mothers of course) water-proof clothing with layers of chicken fat for warmth. The image that the Minsker Boys evokes certainly flies in the face of traditional Eastern European Jewish stereotypes." Who would have guessed?
In any case, Dale developed an interest once his family relocated to Orange County, California (where there are more Republicans than surfers). Dale's musical influences were Middle Eastern which he would integrate into what became his frenzied guitar style. (His uncle was apparently a virtuoso oud player.) Most contemporary audiences became familiar with his work when Quentin Tarantino used Dale’s cover of “Misirlou” in the opening credits of Pulp Fiction (1994). His playing style with its quick machine gun attack was far removed from the twanging reverb developed by contemporary Duane Eddy. The liner notes from one of his collections explains his approach quite eloquently:
“While he is primarily known for introducing the use of guitar reverb that would give the guitar a ‘wet’ sound, which has since become a staple of surf music, it was Dale's tremolo picking that was his trademark. Since Dale was left-handed he was initially forced to play a right-handed model, much like Jimi Hendrix would do a few years later. However, he did so without restringing the guitar, leading him to effectively play the guitar upside-down (while Hendrix would restring his guitar) and often plays by reaching over the fretboard rather than wrap his fingers up from underneath. Even after he acquired a proper left-handed guitar, Dale continued to use his reverse stringing. Dale is also noted for playing his percussive, heavy bending style while using what are, for most guitarists, extremely heavy gauge string sets.” That percussive rhythm also set him apart from other surf rockers and guitar driven instrumentalists like The Ventures. After playing Dick Dale to my friend, she excitedly found her “masterpiece” for the wedding. "The Bubbies will jump up and take notice," she remarked. Apparently, they did.
Deborah Harry co-wrote with Nigel Harrison this playfully menacing song after one of her ex-boyfriends began stalking her. He likely thought twice after hearing it. Nobody could make a growl sound both seductive and foreboding as Harry does here. Riding a sound that many great Sixties girl groups rode to convey their heartaches, Blondie playfully (like a cat with a mouse) turns the tables on the victim of love scenario.
-- October 13/13
2014
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| Poe Boy Blues |
Called "Around the Plynth (Water Down the Drain)" here, the song confronts death with verve and defiance - taking full stock and offering no excuses. Wood's slide guitar panning from right to left resembles a bat scooting across a belfry in a desperate to escape its fate. Stewart improves on his performance from the original, too, riding the streaking guitar lines as if he were a surfer steadying a wave, and turning this sea shanty into a breathless exercise in giving testimony. If Ron Wood's guitar playing with the Stones seems only to compliment Keith Richards' style, "Around the Plynth" can serve to remind you that there are more tools in Ron Wood's tool bag than he often cares to reveal. As for Stewart, this voice and its urgency vacated the building a long time ago.
Never one lazy about trying new ways of recording and performing, Neil Young has put together a new album of old songs, A Letter Home, produced in a refurbished 1947 Voice-O-Graph recording booth. With lo-fi production by Jack White, Young creates his own Time Out of Mind experience by going back to the music that was part of his formative years. Here he faithfully and reverently performs Bert Jansch's 1965 "Needle of Death," an anti-drug song that contains of the same topical blatancy of Young's own later "The Needle and the Damage Done." But if you listen closely to the melody, you'll hear the skeleton key to his 1974 epic "Ambulance Blues" (from On the Beach), a song whose topicality – the folk era, the music haunts of Toronto, Nixon, Watergate and Patty Hearst – is transcended by Young collapsing the seductive allure of nostalgia into the simple phrase: "There's nothing like a friend who tells you that you're just pissing in the wind."
Former McCoy's guitarist Rick Derringer and Texas bluesman Johnny Winter (who died on July 16th at the age of 70) teamed up in 1970 to create one of the most driving and soulful rock records of the Seventies (Johnny Winter And) – one that critic Robert Christgau compared favourably to Clapton's LP Layla. And he isn't wrong. Like Layla, Johnny Winter And mixes metal blues hybrids ("Guess I'll Go Away"), choice ballads like the cover of Traffic's "No Time to Live," and fine R&B soul like "Let the Music Play." While the album was more noted for its cheeky hit "Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo," it's "Let the Music Play" with the song's faint echo of Johnny Ace, that is most affecting.
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| For Akira Kurosawa. |
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Tom Verlaine's elegiac epic "Words From the Front" (from the 1982 album of the same title) unfolds as if a series of newly discovered WWI letters from the front are being read after they've been found in some attic lingering in a box piled away with other long, lost items. Verlaine initially reads the letters with that familiar and flat American stoicism while his guitar delivers the urgency that his voice seems to lack. But, by the end, as the letters begin to rain terror and uncertainty, his voice reaches the same pitch as his guitar until the sheets of lava from the concluding solo bring the war home.
One very early morning, I went into Jet Fuel, one of my favourite coffee shop haunts in Toronto, and they were playing Marvin Gaye's infectiously sexy 1977 single, "Got to Give it Up," where for ten minutes Gaye provided his own response to the growing disco music scene (much to the chagrin of Motown even though the song justly topped three different Billboard charts). What was particularly fun that day in Jet Fuel was watching the baristas making their lattes in sway to the music as the customers shifted their hips sensually around the person in line that they passed. No dance floor ever looked so appealing. No coffee shop looked so appetizing. As Frank Zappa would say, just use your imagination.
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| A Saucerful of Secrets |
-- November 14/14
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Film director Carlos Saura has made many dazzling dance pictures before, from Carmen (1983) to Flamenco (1995), but Iberia (2005) may be his most erotic work. Using a studio outfitted with minimalist backdrops of scrims, curtains and mirrors, Saura adapts sections of composer Isaac Albeniz's "Iberia" suite for a number of the biggest stars in the Spanish dance and music world to perform. Yet like Jonathan Demme in Stop Making Sense (1984), Saura makes us conscious of the artifice he's creating, letting us see the cameras, the lights, and the recording equipment, only then to employ the magic of performance to evaporate the artifice. Saura isn't content just capturing that alchemy, though, he goes further inside the process of performance art itself and, while using expressionistic techniques, reaches the purest essence of dance to create a fully realized expression of love for the sensuality of movement.
As an early birthday present to myself, I gathered up Bob Dylan & The Band's The Complete Basement Tapes and I heartily recommend this expensive, yet expansive, collection over the two-disc primer which is also available. The tracks on the two-disc set may give you some of the best songs, but on the expanded edition you can hear the full process of an informal master class – with plenty of good ribald jokes included. Dylan brings his folk, blues, country and American songbook background to the basement of Big Pink in West Saugerties, New York, where a mostly Canadian bar band known as The Hawks (and later dubbed The Band) would with miraculous ease quickly transform these tracks (which critic Greil Marcus said ranged from the confessional to the bawdy house) into a gathering of true community and fellowship.
Unlike the 1975 CBS release, which gathered some of the basement songs plus including some very fine Band demos, the sound is rich and clean of the overdubs sprinkled on the Seventies set. There's such intimacy in the sound that you can feel the air in the room and hear the intent behind each strum. Since The Basement Tapes were never meant to be an album what you are listening to is an evolution of songs being composed and developed, where artists are finding a tone, or "killing time" as Robbie Robertson of The Band once called these sessions. But you quickly discover that there's no clock to kill, no studio to close, no label to sell it, and no deadline to keep – only total freedom to create music. Woody Guthrie once said he composed his songs out of the air, but Dylan and The Band give theirs back to the air. Whether it's the astonishing "I'm Not There," a song being created as its being sung, the playfully cryptic "Lo and Behold," the dark, deep well of "This Wheel's on Fire," or the down home humour of "Get Your Rocks Off," The Complete Basement Tapes is a spirit and a feeling long gone from popular music. But its recent release provides some twisting road maps to finding its recovery.
-- December 26/14
2015
It would be tempting to call Hampton Sides' Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History (Doubleday Anchor) a thriller – as many did in their reviews – but that assessment doesn't come close to describing its power. His 2011 account of the events leading up to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, its investigation, and the assassin's escape and eventual capture, is what Sides calls a requiem for an era that's passed. But Hellhound on His Trail also opens up room for a more unnerving and contemporary context – a context that in the Obama era is unshakable even if the events he depicts happened almost fifty years ago. Borrowing his title from Robert Johnson's haunting "Hellhound on my Trail" (but written in the mood of "If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day"), Sides illuminates the country that Johnson mapped out in his songs, a land that Greil Marcus called in his essay on Johnson in Mystery Train, "a world without salvation, redemption, or rest." It's a book where an assassin, James Earl Ray, passes (as most assassins do) into anonymity. He becomes a construct who continually recreates himself in a country that invites its citizens to do just that – only to eventually step into the light and snuff out a prophetic voice, a man who made demands on his country to live up to its founding ideals.
Sides deliberately borrows the fictional style of historian Shelby Foote who "employ[ed] the novelist's methods without his license." But unlike, for instance, the documentary films of Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War) that aestheticize reality, Sides enhances and enlarges the drama instead and makes the familiar seem strange, the obvious feel more mysterious, and the events of 1968 more vividly real and heartbreaking. Creating a number of narrative paths that begin with James Earl Ray (as alias Eric Starvo Galt) breaking out of a Missouri prison in 1967 that runs parallel to Martin Luther King, Jr. breaking with President Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War and planning a Poor People's March on Washington, Sides sets up a convergence that paves a road to King's inevitable and tragic death in Memphis. Yet even as we know the events to happen are inescapable and that history will change irrevocably that year, you're always at war with the chapters, with time itself, and with your desire to step back into history to alter its pull. Sides doesn't flinch from that pull either. Like a great detective, he realizes that looking for clues can uncover yet more mysteries, so he thankfully doesn't succumb to the helpless paranoia and safety of conspiracy theories, or take refuge in irony. Hellhound on His Trail takes stock of loss, and like Robert Johnson watching his baby's train disappear in the distance in "Love in Vain," considers its cost.
The T.A.M.I. Show in 1964, which packed the biggest names in rock 'n' roll, pop and soul at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, featured The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, James Brown, Marvin Gaye and Leslie Gore, who died this week at 68. Nobody got to the wounded, yet dedicated, heart of the jilted girlfriend quite like Gore. Whether she claimed every right to weep at her own party when boyfriend Johnny set his sights on Judy ("It's My Party") and even getting her own back in the song's sequel ("Judy's Turn to Cry"), Gore kept her dignity. Though many gravitate to "You Don't Own Me," an anthem that leaves little room for ambiguity, I prefer the ambiguous "Maybe I Know." Once again, Gore has been the victim of a cheating boyfriend, but you'd never know it from the buoyancy of her performance. She sees past her boyfriend's infidelities, perhaps even looking through to the fears that drive him desperately into the arms of other women when she is the one he truly loves. Here on The T.A.M.I. Show, introduced by Jan & Dean, Gore sings her tale of romantic woe with sheer confidence without once succumbing to the song's inherent masochism.
Critic John Corcelli described Rosanne Cash's 2014 album The River and The Thread rightly as "a beautiful, unadorned album that is more than just a traveler's diary. It’s a geographic and spiritual road map." Although that road is personal, the path it opens up takes in worlds of experience, both past and present, that cuts to the wounded and rootless sources of country music. "The Long Way Home" could be about Rosanne Cash's own life, about what she calls "excursions back to yourself." But it could just as easily be about the listener's life suddenly being uncorked and revealed, or maybe even the ghostly sound of someone forever lost to you becoming once again a voice in your ear.
While I love the pop side of Nat King Cole with songs like "Mona Lisa" and "Ramblin' Rose," I have a deeper affection for the earlier jazz combo of The Nat King Cole Trio. This sharp and tight band not only demonstrated how nimble Nat could be on the keyboards, but the unsung guitarist Oscar Moore (who deserves honorable mention along with Django and Les Paul) provided some breathtaking fills. This footage from Clint Eastwood's documentary, Piano Blues, shows the group live in action on "Better to be By Yourself" where they make quick work of this track just as The Rolling Stones would do years later with Larry Williams's "She Said Yeah!" As Ray Charles says in the end, "That's really tasty stuff."
Apart from Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry, with his after hours lounge crooning, did a number of popular songbook albums (These Foolish Things, Another Time, Another Place) that brought out the underlying reverence that resides in camp - even when it involved songs that seemed too sacred to parody. In that spirit, any pop song could be game, a torch to light up, which is why (with Ferry) The Beach Boys' "Don't Worry Baby" could snuggle comfortably next to The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" without pause. His 1993 album, Taxi, which was largely passed over by critics and listeners, was another matter. Taking on Screamin' Jay Hawkins' (or Nina Simone's) "I Put a Spell On You," or Carole King and Gerry Goffin's "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," Doris Troy's "Just One Look," and the gospel standard "Amazing Grace," this wasn't another genial plunge into kitsch fetish. On Taxi, Ferry with a sublime empathy feels his way into the sources of pop magic, and a song's ability to hook us and forever stay in our mind. By cleverly avoiding the familiar hooks in each tune, he actually finds new roads into the timeless source of their drawing power. With guitarist Robin Trower providing beguiling clothes lines that link the verses, Ferry glides into the melodies and lets their shimmering alchemy become reborn.
In David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (1988), Jeremy Irons plays doctors who are twin brothers suffering through symbiosis. The cold, clinical study of their neurosis by Cronenberg may show the precision of a scientist, but the picture desperately needed the lyricism of a poet. One look at their terrifying gynecological equipment also sent my girlfriend into profound disbelief telling me that no woman she knew would let those implements within five feet of her.
But sometimes within frustrating movies there lies, as David Churchill used to remind me, mini-masterpieces. For me, the scene I still can't get out of my head from Dead Ringers is the one where the brothers share a dance with a woman to the strains of The Five Satins' timeless Fifties doo-wop number, "In the Still of the Nite." At the time I reviewed the picture, I tried to explain why this scene mattered to me more than any other in the picture - but I couldn't find the right words. The movie, at that moment, seemed to pull me into an inchoate sense of how beautifully dreamy pop songs can provide - as it does for the three dancers holding each other close - a connectedness that becomes as ephemeral as the momentary pleasure offered by the song itself. That's as close as I got.
So I was very happy when recently reading Greil Marcus's lively and probing The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (which includes "In the Still of the Nite" as one of those songs) that he also remembered its use in Dead Ringers. In an interview he did with Bomb Magazine, I think he found the words that eluded me and still continue to. "The fact that David Cronenberg used the Five Satins’ 'In the Still of the Night' for a scene in Dead Ringers doesn't say anything definitive about that song. It’s a testament to the suggestiveness of the song, the way it can add to and take away from things, the way it can dramatize what people want, what they can never have, and what they've lost." That was it exactly. And that scene has never lost its hold.
-- February 19/15
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In Steven Knight's Locke (2014), Tom Hardy plays Ivan Locke, a construction foreman who, the day before he must supervise a large concrete pour in Birmingham, learns that a colleague with whom he had a one-night stand with seven months earlier has gone into premature labour with their baby. Despite his huge job responsibilities and his wife and children still awaiting him at home, he decides to drive to London to be with the woman carrying his child.
From the moment Hardy makes a crucial turn in his car onto a highway of his choice, he never veers from its destination despite the demands over the phone from all the important people in his life. For just over 80 minutes, as we stay focused almost entirely in close-up on Hardy's face, he remains steadfast and glued to the road, as if it were a lifeline pulling him towards a liberation that comes at a price. While he fields a never ending series of desperate phone calls, and hears voices that compete with the ones already in his head, Hardy sustains a tightrope act not easy for an actor to pull off in such a minimal dramatic concept. Yet he finds a way to enlarge the confined space of the vehicle by drawing us into his battle with larger worlds outside that car: one world which has defined him, one that has harnessed him, and another that holds a mystery for which there is still no easy conclusion.
I know it's generally acknowledged that Tommy is The Who's masterpiece, and I do like some of its songs, but I've never been able to cozy up to its grandiloquent themes of divinity that grows out of sadism and masochism. ("I Can't Explain" and "The Kids are Alright" were, for me, much more concise and convincing expressions of alienation and adolescent frustration.) On the other hand, Quadrophenia, despite its own unwieldiness, has always touched a chord in me despite its flaws. Perhaps I found myself stirred more easily to Pete Townshend's ambivalent struggles on this epic album because he not only gets to the roots of what The Who were always all about to him, but in that sojourn, he also speaks to those listeners for whom the band always mattered. The record is essentially about one artist and the group he projected his own fractured ego on. And his exploration of that subject finds a fuller, more passionate expression here. Quadrophenia has passages that are actually quite moving. In particular, in the record's climax, "Love, Reign O'er Me," singer Roger Daltry not only takes the desperate romanticism of Townshend's words and makes them his own, he seems to reach into the depths of where his partner may have sometimes feared to tread.
-- March 15/15
***
Back in 1967, Chess Records teamed up Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters to make The Super, Super Blues Band. Although it was largely dismissed as a novelty record, I loved the verbal sparring, the cutting, the boasts and the dares that these very distinct giants toss across the studio floor to each other. The terrific song selection even comes to define the qualities of each performer. Where Howlin' Wolf owns "Little Red Rooster," Bo Diddley sounds hopeless as if he wouldn't know the rooster if it crowed in his face. But when Diddley offers up his playful cock-of-the-walk "Diddley Daddy," both Wolf and Waters begin waving white flags. The good natured camaraderie gives each singer room to shine and the space to back off when needed. No knockout punches, but some good hooks get thrown.
Most folks know this track by Blondie. In the original, by the LA pop band The Nerves, singer/guitarist Jack Lee certainly sounds put out, and he's surely annoyed and upset that he's been left high and dry by his girl. But you can't escape the impression that she could keep him hanging there forever. In Blondie's stronger cover, singer Deborah Harry tears into the song with such vengeance that the guy who jilted her had best left town.
Playing live in Norway in 1964, pianist Jaki Byard, bassist Charles Mingus, trumpeter Johnny Coles, tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, drummer Dannie Richmond and bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy (before being honored with his memorial barbecue) take us through Duke Ellington's "Take the 'A' Train." In his dazzling solo, Dolphy takes the train down tracks still under construction. My friend Donald Brackett once told me that the main issue he had with Ken Burns's Jazz documentary was that it framed Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as the revered masters who overshadowed their progeny. Brackett said he would have preferred starting the series with Charlie Parker and then looking back to explore Armstrong and Ellington as his antecedents before looking ahead to where jazz may have gone in their wake. This performance perhaps provides the skeleton key to the door Brackett was opening.
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| A Streetcar Named Abiding |
-- May 2/15
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When Nico (who died on this date back in 1988) sang "All Tomorrow's Parties" on the Velvet Underground's debut album, she was the ideal vocalist for it. If songwriter Lou Reed had sung it, he would have likely sounded put out by "Thursday's child" becoming "Sunday's clown" when she had no sharp threads to wear. But Nico's flattened voice, as if she willfully drove all the colour out of it, tells you that not only were tomorrow's parties out of her grasp, but yesterday's gatherings were no laughing matter either.
"It's good to bear witness to life's blessings, big and small," critic and author Mikal Gilmore writes. "One blessing for me was being in the audience at the taping for Frank Sinatra's 80th Birthday Tribute, in December 1995." On that occasion, titled Sinatra: 80 Years My Way, Gilmore heard and witnessed Bob Dylan pay tribute to the singer with his own "Restless Farewell" almost twenty years before Dylan would record an album of standards (Shadows in the Night) that Sinatra had himself perfected into a distinctly romantic style with a sexiness borne out of both heartbreak and despair. (In his long career, Frank Sinatra played out the role of the lonely guy at the bar, nursing his glass of scotch, and then imparting a lasting story of regret to you alone. In doing so, Sinatra could keep alive a slight flicker of romantic desire, hushed yearning or grievous moment that became more deeply intoxicating with every line he sang.)
"Restless Farewell," which Dylan wrote and first released on his 1963 The Times They Are a-Changin', an album introduced with unmistakable prescience into the world right in the aftermath of the assassination of JFK, took its cue from the traditional 16th Century ballad "The Parting Glass," which is often sung at the end of a gathering of friends. On this night, Dylan's quiet plaintive voice obliterated the sentimental bluster of a track like Paul Anka's "My Way" which Sinatra turned into a signature song late in his career. When Dylan sings, "Oh ev’ry foe that ever I faced/The cause was there before we came/And ev’ry cause that ever I fought/I fought it full without regret or shame/But the dark does die/As the curtain is drawn and somebody’s eyes/Must meet the dawn/And if I see the day/I’d only have to stay/So I’ll bid farewell in the night and be gone," he delivers a measured and moving account of life's victories and defeats which gets thoughtfully rendered without a shred of masochism or despair. It might be the best happy birthday song anyone of Sinatra's stature ever received in concert and he might have known it would be, too. After all, he requested it.
The best pop songs always leave a pang that can echo through the decades whenever you hear it. For me, Rick Nelson's 1961 "Hello Mary Lou" (written by the incomparable Gene Pitney) has a number of lasting pangs beginning with that opening cowbell which provides a confident swagger riding under the grain of Nelson's joyful voice. "Hello Mary Lou" captures perfectly that bright optimism of first love with a series of lightning bolt impressions that later get emphasized by James Burton's dazzling guitar break.That solo would for Burton trace its own line to Elvis where "Suspicious Minds" came to reflect the other side of the coin to the innocence of "Hello Mary Lou." John Fogerty, whose nobody's fool, would come up with Burton influenced riffs his entire career. But when he tried to copy "Hello Mary Lou" on CCR's final record, Mardis Gras, he came a cropper.
-- September 6/15
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Raymond Chandler once wrote that "Americans, having the most complex civilization the world has seen, still like to think of themselves as plain people. In other words they like to think the comic-strip artist is a better draftsman than Leonardo – just because he is a comic-strip artist and the comic strip is for plain people." He went on a few paragraphs later to further define the American voice as "flat, toneless, and tiresome." The plain, the flat, the toneless and the tiresome come fully and deliberately to fruition in this odd rarity by The Crazy Teens called "Crazy Date," an unnervingly funny piece of deadpan rockabilly from the late Fifties I first heard – fittingly enough – on an Oxford American Magazine CD.
-- January 29/16
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In the epic striving of Jan Troell's The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972), recently released by the Criterion Collection in their full Swedish versions and immaculately restored on Blu-ray, the director takes in America as an untested promise, or a fever dream that brings forth deliverance. Based on Vilhelm Moberg's epic four-volume novels which account the long journey of Swedish farming families to settlements in Minnesota in 1850, Troell captures in a largely naturalistic style for over six hours both the cost and renewal of that promise without embellishing the hopes of those making the quest, or romanticizing the claims of the new land (which the farmers discover is stolen land from the Sioux). Troell, who shoots, edits and directs his own movies, removes our awareness of film language as if the camera were a portal in which to comprehend a lost period of realism. When he focuses on the life and marriage of Karl Oskar (Max Von Sydow) and Kristina (Liv Ullmann), featuring two actors whose iconic definitions through their work with Ingmar Bergman couldn't be more recognizable, Troell clears a path for both performers to shed that skin and to embellish their work with fresh character etchings. Those nuances not only reveal how the arduous journey tests that marriage, but also the many ways it fulfills it. The marriage between the settlers and their environment, where nature is both unforgiving and inviting, is equally a test of endurance and purpose. That Jan Troell has been an invisible giant on the cinematic landscape – despite the enduring depth of later works like Flight of the Eagle (1982), Hamsun (1996), As White as in Snow (2001) and Everlasting Moments (2008) – may well be due to his gift of letting the story dictate the style rather than imposing his style on it.
"The Weight" is a moral parable. It's a song is about a search for community, a quest for comfort, a place to find comradeship and to set down roots to lessen the burden of what the singer is carrying – but with no guarantee of being relieved of it. The key to this song is that there are many singers present in the performance – not just one – just as there is a cast of characters in 'The Weight' who deepen the riddle. Aretha's voice carries those voices alone and rings that story from rooftops where those communities might not only hear, but rejoice. Yet the song wouldn't be complete without the singeing accompaniment of Duane Allman on slide guitar which rings like the peeling of bells from those rooftops. “The sound of his slide was well suited to her tone; their interplay was a conversation,” Duane's daughter,Galadrielle, writes in Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father (Spiegel & Grau, 2014). “Duane was confident enough to echo the feeling and richness of her voice.” Duane Allman not only echoes it – he completes it.
Jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, who makes Wynton Marsalis break out in hives, is an urban impressionist who builds structurally on the current of improvisation right at the heart of the music. But unlike Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, whose 'free jazz' experiments were driven by the powerful emotional drives of the artists themselves, Taylor's work (especially on the 1966 album, Unit Structures) can seem almost cerebral by comparison. But speaking in different tongues – musically as in literature – can still bring forth appealing narrative colours as this portion of "Enter, Evening (Soft Line Structure)" does for me.
Jazz critic Gary Giddens puts it this way: "Taylor is almost like a tabula rasa in the sense that listeners read into him whatever they happen to know about music...A lot of bad teachers steered students away from [James] Joyce by telling them that they couldn’t read Joyce until they had read everything from Homer to Vico and all of the previous Joyce works to get to Ulysses. You could spend a lifetime just doing all the preparation and then you are supposed to carry around a thousand pages of footnotes. What pleasure is there in that? But, just take Ulysses on vacation with nothing else and you will find out how truly pleasurable Joyce can be, as long as you don’t expect to get every single line. Listeners have that same expectation of Taylor, that listening to him will take a tremendous amount of work. It is when you put your defenses down and let yourself respond to the music that you can really learn to love it."
In his highly readable book, Zappa and Jazz (Matador, 2015), Geoff Wills takes up one of many paradoxical arguments when discussing the work of American composer Frank Zappa. Despite Zappa's protestations that he didn't care for jazz – the music, the musicians and the jazz establishment – his music is filled with jazz influences and musicians who were schooled in the genre. Wills (along with being a former musician and is a clinical psychologist) delves with depth and clarity into the jazz influences that fed the stream of Zappa's work right from the beginning of his musical life. Wills not only knows the jazz canon (even making a sharp and bold comparison late in the book between the career of Stan Kenton and Zappa's), he calls out Zappa's disingenuousness by marking the music he clearly must have known and liked. So where did this oddly dismissive attitude come from? Wills links it to Zappa's anti-establishment stance which marked him an outsider trying to prove that he could do better than those who rejected him. But by nursing only that one persuasive argument is where the book also misses the larger point: Wills' reverence for jazz (and even Zappa's own music) evades the satire that fuels it. If jazz, according to Zappa, smelled funny, Wills doesn't end up uncorking the aroma of the joke.
By actually combining serious contemporary music with rock, jazz, and social and political satire, Zappa created a unique and sophisticated form of musical comedy by integrating into the canon of 20th-Century music the scabrous wit of comedian Lenny Bruce and added to it the irreverent clowning of Spike Jones. His body of work, both solo and with his band, The Mothers of Invention, presented musical history through the kaleidoscopic lens of social satire, and then he turned it into farce. Curious for a psychologist, Wills skirts Zappa's absurdism and spends more time chronicling his jazz influences rather than providing the critical analysis that would reveal its satirical intent. He's quite precise at showing us what the music is doing, but not in going deeper into how and why. Zappa and Jazz is at its best and most engaging and lively when Wills illuminates his argument by weaving together in each chapter interviews with alumni and session musicians who articulate Zappa's musical depth as well as revealing much of their own. For a quick read, Zappa and Jazz has a dense intelligence that nevertheless seeps through its own earnestness.
When The Shirelles first covered "Dedicated to the One I Love" in 1960, originally written and recorded by The '5' Royales in the early Fifties, it was a joyous testimony and performed with as much verve on the subject of long distance love as The Beatles' "All My Loving" would supply a few years later. The Mamas and the Papas would also record it in 1967, but Michelle Phillips would sing the opening lines in a soft and tremulous voice that suggested the loneliness that often hides under desire. When Mama Cass and the others finally join behind her in the coming verses, that darkest hour before dawn quickly becomes bright with sunshine and the song soars with an unbridled optimism that never forgets the desolate place it started from.
-- March 27/16
***
Looking as androgynous and funky as Little Richard in Jimi Hendrix's duds, Prince wrote music that was sexually charged, playfully lewd and enthusiastically impudent. In other words, he was precisely the tonic the Eighties needed. "Prince is bad," Johnny 'Guitar' Watson once remarked. "It's like seeing Sly [Stone], James Brown and Jimi Hendrix all at once." Right at a time when sex was again becoming a mortal sin, Prince turned sex into a quest for salvation. His album, Dirty Mind (1980), was a blissfully torrid celebration of eroticism. His band, both racially and sexually integrated, was supercharged, just as Sly & the Family Stone had been before them. Also like Sly, Prince mixed musical genres which caused mass confusion at radio stations that couldn't decide whether he was R&B or rock. By the time his third album, 1999, came out in 1982, however, it didn't seem to matter. The infectiously coy "Little Red Corvette" shot into the American Top 10. Thanks to MTV and the video culture it bred, Prince became the first black crossover artist (along with Michael Jackson) to help broaden the network's musical palette.
At the height of his success in 1984, Prince made his movie debut in the R-rated Purple Rain. James Dean had made his astonishing debut in East of Eden almost thirty years earlier, playing a misunderstood loner. Prince (calling himself 'the Kid'), followed the same pattern, portraying a moody, struggling artist. Purple Rain mythologized his status in the pop world, and one song from its soundtrack ("Darling Nikki") generated the type of controversy that captured the attention of Mary Elizabeth 'Tipper' Gore. She was so horrified when her young daughter bought the record with a song about a guy who meets a woman masturbating with a magazine that she helped launch the PMRC in order to toilet train pop performers. So in both memory and tribute to the artist known as Prince, it seems fitting to send him off with one of what Gore would call the "Filthy Fifteen" songs which launched the censorious body that Frank Zappa, Dee Snyder and John Denver stood before Congress to fight.
The six-part miniseries adaptation of John le Carré's The Night Manager was the most gripping six hours of television I've seen in some time. Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) is the night manager at a luxury hotel in Cairo. But when a woman who trusts him with information involving Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), a billionaire British businessman who is also an international arms dealer, she is murdered due to his careless trust. In time, he gets recruited by an intelligence agent, Angela Burr (Olivia Colman), to infiltrate Roper's inner circle while also discovering that Roper has discomforting ties to Her Majesty’s government. Once Pine starts developing feelings for Roper’s mistress, Jed (Elizabeth Debicki), his desire to atone for his earlier mistake puts the mission at risk.
Although the 1993 novel was set in Central America, director Susanne Bier (Brothers, After the Wedding) and screenwriter David Farr have now placed it in the Middle East during the Arab Spring. Yet even with the changes (including a dramatic reversal on the ending), the themes of guilt and redemption come closer to Graham Greene than le Carré. Hugh Laurie's Roper, a curdled Harry Lime, is the kind of obscenity who calmly and cynically stares out into the ills of the world and finds justification for profiting from human misery while simultaneously causing it. By contrast, Hiddleston's Pine has the cool British reserve that covers a multitude of impulses. Elizabeth Debicki's delectable Jed becomes part of both Pine's hidden appetites and his need to find forgiveness. Despite the thrills, though, The Night Manager doesn't achieve the complexity of other le Carré adaptations like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The Russia House, The Tailor of Panama, or the more recent version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Bier doesn't reflect on (or parse through) the political nuances, but instead puts her foot on the accelerator and keeps the dramatic thrills coming. In the end, The Night Manager is an entertaining and satisfying melodrama.
What you hear in the electricity of Donovan's 1968 "Hurdy Gurdy Man" is just as foreboding as what you can hear in the "gentle" acoustic guitars on The Beatles' White Album. Donovan tells of the Hurdy Gurdy Man singing songs of love, but the mood he conveys isn't all that loving. His tune may have been inspired by the Maharishi Yogi (as many tracks on the White Album were), but the abiding spirit on the record could just as easily be Charles Manson – the shadow Maharishi. Donovan composed a song that was less a celebration of spiritual renewal than a harbinger of bad tidings. "Hurdy Gurdy Man" held warning signs of utopian instincts turning destructive just as his "Season of the Witch" had also done in 1966. The hidden dread of "Hurdy Gurdy Man" wouldn't bloom though until many years later. Director David Fincher, in his 2007 masterpiece Zodiac, used the song to underscore the first attacks of the Zodiac serial killer in San Francisco. On the anniversary of the birth of the United States, in the former locale of the Summer of Love, the Zodiac brutally struck two lovers in a parking lot as "Hurdy Gurdy Man" played on the radio. And all of this was a mere month before Manson down in LA would hear The Beatles' White Album as his own call to carnage.
The danger of trying to recreate an old familiar pop sound is constructing an echo chamber in which to fetishisize your nostalgia for it. That's not a problem for the LA neo soul/indie pop band Fitz and The Tantrums. Formed in 2008, singer Michael Fitzpatrick purchased an old Conn electronic organ and the notes of what became "Breakin' the Chains of Love" soon came pouring out. It wasn't long before he contacted his old school friend, saxophonist James King, who then recommended both drummer John Wicks and singer Noelle Scaggs. After Wicks brought in keyboardist Jeremy Ruzumna and bass player Joseph Karnes, the song didn't trap the players in the past but opened a door for the past to infiltrate the present. "It was literally like five phone calls, one rehearsal, and we could have played a show that night," Fitzpatrick recalled. After hearing the song come up on the shuffle of my playlist to create a bright space in my day on one grey afternoon, I believe him.
-- May 25/16
***
The Essential Lenny Bruce was a collection of this equal opportunity offender's best routines and many of them made me laugh – if not uneasily – because they didn't exactly provide comfort for my own views. At times, they weren't entirely understandable, either. In satirizing the straight world, Bruce employed both the argon of the hip and (since he was Jewish) Yiddish. Many of the hip words were pretty clear, but Yiddish was way out of my league. That left me chasing down the only Jewish guy I knew at my school, the straight arrow Mel Raskin, who was also a daily victim of the thugs in gym class. I'm still trying to imagine what must have been going through his mind as I followed him down the street asking things like, "Mel, what does shtup and putz mean?" (Mel has since, in a twisted irony known only to God, become a radio broadcaster of Oshawa Generals hockey games.)
When Bruce began to build his reputation as the "King of the Sick Comics," he took on everyone – from the Pope to Jimmy Hoffa. When he was a guest on Hugh Hefner's after-hours TV talk show, Playboy Penthouse, he did a television first – he blew his nose on camera. Bruce satirized and tested the prudishness of the audience. His daring wasn't in the romantic portrait Dustin Hoffman provided in Bob Fosse's Lenny (1974), where he was seen as the misunderstood rebel, but in his fearless approach of all that was sacred – even to liberals – and combining with that the performer's fervor in getting a rise out of the audience. We were as much the butt of his jokes as we were participants in them. One such example, which was one of the first routines I read in The Essential Lenny Bruce, was his outrageous "Christ and Moses" below in The Carnegie Hall Concert.
When I bought my first Pioneer stereo system in 1974 (which, by the way, still works and plays my vinyl in the bedroom/den), the clerk offered me a free record if I bought it. He first handed me an album of those prog rock yodelers, Focus, but I passed perhaps feeling more parochial that day. He then reached for Lou Reed's Berlin, but the opening track had me wanting to open my veins (which was likely Lou's point). Then I spotted this album by Leadbelly hidden in a rack in the corner. I only knew his work from countless covers of "Goodnight Irene," Creedence Clearwater's "The Midnight Special" and "Rock Island Line." His serene face on the cover painting where he appeared lost in the notes coming forth from his strummed guitar simply captivated me. So did the record when I got it home. It was called Huddie Ledbetter's Best...His Guitar...His Voice...His Piano on Capitol Records and I couldn't stop playing it for days. The track that most got my attention was a piano rag that streaked by at under three minutes in both its vocal and instrumental versions. Given that Leadbelly knew some pretty horrific nightmares in some of his songs (such as "In the Pines") from his days in prison, "Eagle Rock Rag" was the sound of chains snapping.
There are some songs that get forever identified with a moment in time. The La's' infectious 1990 hit "There She Goes" (which I could easily imagine covered by R.E.M.) calls back a moment on CBC Radio's Prime Time when we were doing an interview with the darkly sexy Amanda Donohoe (The Lair of the White Worm). After Geoff Pevere finished the interview with her, I accompanied Donohoe from the studio out to the car with her publicist. And I never heard the end of it from fellow producer Greig Dymond who teased me saying, "Yeah, Courrier, just like you always follow Rob Wilson (our advert critic) out to his car." When the item finally ran on the show, music producer Dianne Collins was looking for a song to follow the Donohoe interview. When she heard the tale of my peripatetic adventure into the parking lot, this is what she chose.
One of my favourite contemporary artists, St. Vincent, began her music career with the Polyphonic Spree. In a sense, that group name helps describe her talents as a composer and performer. If you heard her cover of John Lennon's "Dig a Pony," she creates a counter-melody on the guitar that answers and sometimes jabs back at the song's sentiments as she sings it. "I like when things come out of nowhere and blindside you a little bit," she once said describing the unpredictable nature of her work. "I think any person who gets panic attacks or has an anxiety disorder can understand how things can all of a sudden turn very quickly. I think I'm sublimating that into the music." You can hear elements of that sublimation In "Cruel," from her 2011 album Strange Mercy, where anything seems possible. (In the video for "Cruel," she is kidnapped by a motherless family and forced to be a wife in the family and ultimately buried alive.) St. Vincent has said that she listens every day to David Bowie's wildly discordant "It's No Game (Part One)" from Scary Monsters. Upon reflection, that might just be the perfect skeleton key used to open up her own songs.
While there are many who feel that Heaven's Gate is some misunderstood masterpiece, or a flawed visionary work, the picture I saw back in 1981 remains an amorphous mess – in short, megalomania on the march. Its ambition and epic sweep was always dramatically thin despite director Michael Cimino's keen eye for detail. Critic Michael Sragow wrote in Rolling Stone that Heaven's Gate "subverts not only movie history – filching images from films as different as McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Dovzhenko's Earth – but also American history, rendering meaningless the Johnson County War of 1892...Heaven's Gate reduces the conflict to entrenched cattlemen bullying ragged, starving immigrant-settlers who look as if they got off the boat and walked West." An episode of political injustice ended up being inflated into an American catastrophe.
Much of Heaven's Gate's current stature, I think, is due to an acceptance of its themes – a crude quasi-Marxist view that the lower classes are always fated to be destroyed by the ruling class and also its hangover of post-Sixties guilt over the failure of the American promise. That failed promise though could also be interpreted as a lamentation over the death of American independent cinema in the Seventies which both Stars Wars and Heaven's Gate ironically finished off in their own different ways. But since I'm prone to not speak ill of the dead (Micheal Cimino passed away recently), I'd like to add that his best instincts were reserved for David Mansfield's elegiac score. While the spectral beauty of Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography cocooned the characters and trapped them in foggy introspection, Mansfield's poignant melodies matched the vast landscape with its spacious beauty and opened up a possible dream of the country that the characters both fought and failed to preserve.
While most fans of this unbridled comedian can easily quote the lyrics to his "Springtime for Hitler," or chortle like kids in a schoolyard over his farting-around-the-campfire scene in Blazing Saddles, I draw attention instead to his Spanish Inquisition number from History of the World, Part One as his most inspired – and offensive – musical number. Brooks appears as the Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada ("Ya can't Torquemada anything!"), who sings and dances as he tortures Jews while cheerfully invoking the elaborate and kaleidoscopic patterns of Busby Berkeley (even drawing on the stylized aquatic ballet of Esther Williams – only this time with swimming nuns). Shrewdly playing the role of the untrustworthy narrator, Brooks deftly draws the connection between Jewish persecution and their ultimate contribution to musical theatre in America.
In his book The Haunted Smile, Lawrence J. Epstein talks about Jewish comedy as if it were perched at the edge of an abyss. "Their stage style is tinged with sadness," Epstein writes. "It is haunted by the Jewish past, by the deep strains in American Jewish life to be strained – the desire to be accepted and the concern for a culture disappearing – by the centuries of Jewish life too frequently interrupted by hate, and by the knowledge that too often for Jewish audiences a laugh masked a shudder." The shudder is so evident in Brooks's outrageous satirical piece that many Jews are horribly offended by it. But that's what gives it such vitality.
Tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler (who celebrates his 80th birthday this year) once said of his 1964 album, Spiritual Unity, that the band wasn't really playing together. "We were listening to each other," he remarked. Maybe that's why – despite the title – unity is arrived at through a process of dialogue that's filled with tension and counterpoint. Whether anyone else cared to listen was up to the ears of the beholder. One thing I do know, it was music of this nature that got me and my stereo banished to the basement by my parents. No dialogue.
-- August 9/16
***
This altered version of Dolly Parton's "Jolene" has been making the rounds for some time now. No wonder. Parton's 1973 hit was about the fear of another woman taking her man away. But played at a slower speed, "Jolene" is an entirely different song. Where Parton sounds perfectly capable of handling herself, and you never doubt her victory in the end, a listen to the 45 at 33rpm reveals a much more mournful track full of fear and dread. But that's not all. The change in speed also changes the meaning of the song and the relationship at stake. You might also swear that you stumbled upon some lost track by Jesse Colin Young. When you go back to Dolly Parton, at the song's proper speed, a new listen yields something closer to Alvin and the Chipmunks.
“Morning Dew” was an early Sixties protest song conceived at a time when folk music was attempting to change the world from one that threatened to turn to rubble into something new and egalitarian in spirit. The song is framed through a conversation, but is it between a parent and child, or is it two lovers? Who really knows? Who really cares? At the time, the exquisite darkness of "Morning Dew" laid clues that we could be facing a nuclear holocaust, but heard today, the singer could just as easily be describing global warming. The song is essentially a mystery novel waiting for someone to solve it. It was as if, just by singing it, you could unlock the door to its bottomless mysteries. Many have tried. All we do know is that there is nothing left of the world – but how and why it got to this state remains a secret. Unlike those many anti-war songs that dozens of people lined up to sing, as if signing up for a different kind of army, “Morning Dew” doesn't offer a clear message about what to sign on for. It opens a door.
"Today" might be heard as a song about the day after "Morning Dew," when out of all the destruction new beginnings are claimed and affirmations get earned. "Today" make you feel that the world might not truly end because the singer is certain that he won't let it.
-- November 3/16
***
On The Avalanches' "Because I'm Me," from their album, Wildflower, a young singer in a subway station imagines himself perhaps reborn as Frankie Lymon (before the tragedies and the heroin), or maybe even the young Michael Jackson at the time of "The Love You Save," and before long the whole glorious history of rhythm and blues comes together to back up his claim. Greig Dymond (co-author with Geoff Pevere of Mondo Canuck) says it best: "It's pure aural joy, featuring a non-stop torrent of retro samples with a heavy disco and R'n'B flavour. This is cut-and-paste genius on the same level as De La Soul, The KLF, and David Holmes. For me, the transcendent pop moment of the year comes at 1:49 on this track, when the horns and strings kick in full blast. It's been a tough year in so many ways – this song offers blissful, sweet relief."
***
On The Avalanches' "Because I'm Me," from their album, Wildflower, a young singer in a subway station imagines himself perhaps reborn as Frankie Lymon (before the tragedies and the heroin), or maybe even the young Michael Jackson at the time of "The Love You Save," and before long the whole glorious history of rhythm and blues comes together to back up his claim. Greig Dymond (co-author with Geoff Pevere of Mondo Canuck) says it best: "It's pure aural joy, featuring a non-stop torrent of retro samples with a heavy disco and R'n'B flavour. This is cut-and-paste genius on the same level as De La Soul, The KLF, and David Holmes. For me, the transcendent pop moment of the year comes at 1:49 on this track, when the horns and strings kick in full blast. It's been a tough year in so many ways – this song offers blissful, sweet relief."
Eric Dolphy's solo stab at Walter Gross and Jack Lawrence's standard "Tenderly" on his 1960 album, Far Cry, addresses with both wistful abandon and aching warmth the fleeting nature of love and compassion. Sarah Vaughn most famously took "Tenderly" to the top of the charts, but everyone from Pat Boone to Amy Winehouse wrapped their lips around images of trembling trees tenderly embracing the breeze as a couple fall in love. There are no words in Dolphy's version, only his alto sax painting impressionistic images of a shore being kissed by the sea as if he were a lonely bird hovering over the romantic idyll. And just like that bird, as the scene vanishes from sight, you can hear him flapping away into the night.
2017
I got to see Chuck Berry live only once at a Toronto International Film Festival party at Casa Loma for Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride in 1987. Taylor Hackford's concert picture tribute to Chuck Berry, Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, had also premiered that evening at the Festival. Berry turned up at the party and took command of the stage with a young local band that was noodling along, playing back-up to the noise of people getting food and schmoozing. My friend and colleague, Andrew Dowler, saw Berry head for the stage, got my attention, and we ran right up front and claimed a table. Berry asked the band if they knew any of his numbers and luckily the lead guitarist seemed schooled in Chuck. They kicked off with "Little Queenie," and then followed with "Roll Over Beethoven." When that guitarist hit the solo, which Berry handed him gracefully, the kid looked to the sky and I thought he was dreaming of the day he could tell his children about the night he soloed for Chuck Berry. Maybe he already has.
This traditional blues song has a long history and its full share of interpreters from The Grateful Dead to James Taylor ("Circle Around the Sun"), none better than Judy Roderick in a plaintive reading from her 1965 album, Woman Blue. Dating all the way back to Blind Lemon Jefferson's 1927 single, "Deceitful Brownskin Blues," the song originates (according to John and Alan Lomax in their 1934 book, American Ballads and Folk Songs) with an eighteen-year-old black girl who was in prison for murder. The first few stanzas belong to her while the Lomaxes added a number of verses taken from other sources (including the 1924 blues standard, "Trouble in Mind") and named it "Woman Blue." Most performers – including The Byrds, Hot Tuna and The Dead – do the song at such a clip that the singer comes across as boastful and defiant as if murder was never part of the equation. Even Joan Baez, who recorded it in 1960 but didn't include it on her Vanguard debut, makes the track sound like some totem of female empowerment. Judy Roderick, however, abandons any sense of false pride. She slowly feels her way into the story as if she's considered the crime that incarcerates her and can't shake the ghost of the lover she murdered. "Woman Blue (I Know You Rider)" isn't a swagger; rather her voice lingers on every syllable, tracing a ghost story that's all suggestion, both haunted and haunting. One listener once commented that Roderick puts the song in the grave. You could also say her interpretation is about climbing out of one.
Does humour belong in music? Of course it does. György Ligeti's violin concerto (which he dedicated to the violinist Saschko Gawriloff, who performed it with the Ensemble Modern in 1992) is a comic frenzy of colourful textures that blends Bulgarian dance rhythms and Hungarian folk melodies while also including some Renaissance seasoning. In this performance, conductor Simon Rattle (looking rattled) abandons the stage so that violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja can do the mash-up with the speed and skill of a Cuisinart. The music lifts her into a wild dance around the campfire as the orchestra briefly joins in with the jamboree until the conductor - either satisfied or fed up - puts out the flame in a puff of smoke.
-- April 4/17
***
In Aisling Walsh's beautifully cadenced Maudie, the story of Canadian folk artist, Maud Lewis (Sally Hawkins), we not only perceive in the purest sense the struggle of an outsider artist who achieves her independence, we also experience the more troubling path of acquiring dependency. Maudie is the story of a marriage between two independent outcasts. Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke) is a fishmonger whose hermitage is his protest against caring about anyone, so that no one can care about him. Maud comes into his life as a housekeeper but ends up building a home for them instead. Her independence from her insensitive family is her need to also connect to a larger world that her paintings provide a frame for. But rather than lay out this tale of a seemingly mismatched couple in explicit terms, Walsh allows the physicality of the actors to tell their story.
Maud may be crippled by juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, but her body becomes a willing tool of her desire to expand and her need to paint. Everett began life as an orphan and his body is a hulking shield of armour protecting him against anything that could make him care, or possibly connect to those who abandoned him. Over the course of the picture, Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, with very few lines of a dialogue, show such a rapt intuition in their rapport that it borders on telepathy. Their courtship – often times perceived in a series of shots of them walking and silhouetted across the skyline – is a pas de deux. While Hawkins hits notes of tender eccentricity, Hawke finds new chords that burrow deeper into the painful isolation often seen at a glance in the Depression-era photos of Walker Evans. If Hawkins and Hawke had given these performances on stage, they would have received a standing ovation. Aisling Walsh's Maudie, like its subject, is equally worthy of acclaim.
***
In Aisling Walsh's beautifully cadenced Maudie, the story of Canadian folk artist, Maud Lewis (Sally Hawkins), we not only perceive in the purest sense the struggle of an outsider artist who achieves her independence, we also experience the more troubling path of acquiring dependency. Maudie is the story of a marriage between two independent outcasts. Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke) is a fishmonger whose hermitage is his protest against caring about anyone, so that no one can care about him. Maud comes into his life as a housekeeper but ends up building a home for them instead. Her independence from her insensitive family is her need to also connect to a larger world that her paintings provide a frame for. But rather than lay out this tale of a seemingly mismatched couple in explicit terms, Walsh allows the physicality of the actors to tell their story.
Maud may be crippled by juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, but her body becomes a willing tool of her desire to expand and her need to paint. Everett began life as an orphan and his body is a hulking shield of armour protecting him against anything that could make him care, or possibly connect to those who abandoned him. Over the course of the picture, Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, with very few lines of a dialogue, show such a rapt intuition in their rapport that it borders on telepathy. Their courtship – often times perceived in a series of shots of them walking and silhouetted across the skyline – is a pas de deux. While Hawkins hits notes of tender eccentricity, Hawke finds new chords that burrow deeper into the painful isolation often seen at a glance in the Depression-era photos of Walker Evans. If Hawkins and Hawke had given these performances on stage, they would have received a standing ovation. Aisling Walsh's Maudie, like its subject, is equally worthy of acclaim.
-- July 29/17
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