Happy Birthday @troutcircs !
My friend plok is apparently Officially Old today (I don’t know how old, but those were his words) and has decided that for a birthday present he wants people to post YouTube videos of songs he asks for on their blogs. From me he asked for this – Gimme A Pig’s Foot And A Bottle Of Beer by Bessie Smith.
Interestingly, I’d always liked this track but never looked up who the backing band were. Turns out it’s a pretty stellar line-up – Buck Washington (piano). Frank Newton (cornet), Benny Goodman (clarinet), Jack Teagarden (trombone), Chu Berry (sax) and Billy Taylor (bass). It’s a shame the recording is so muddy, because this is so different from the music Goodman or Teagarden would normally play I wish I could make out their lines better (Goodman is one of the major influences on my own melodic thinking), but the only instruments that can be heard with any clarity are Washington and Newton (playing in a style very obviously influenced by Louis Armstrong).
The Monkees, Manchester Apollo May 14 2011
The Monkees (and my elbow)
I bought tickets to this show a couple of months back, knowing I’d either want to celebrate winning the AV referendum, or need cheering up after losing the AV referendum. As turns out, it’s done a good enough job of cheering me up I think I’m ready to get back to blogging.
I was sat in Row E, which I didn’t realise until I got in was actually the second row, next to possibly the most enthusiastic people in the world – two women in their twenties who looked like stereotypical Goths but spent the pre-show talking to each other about which of the two reunion albums – Pool It! or Justus – was better, and who squealed every time Peter Tork did anything, and their enthusiasm was catching. (When they saw where they were sitting, one of them said “YES! We’re going to get extreme Tork!”)
For those of you wanting to listen along at home, by the way, I’ve created a playlist of all the songs they played.
The show was a strange mix of two completely different styles. On the one hand, the setlist itself was of a type familiar to me from shows by Brian Wilson, Arthur Lee and so on – you do twenty or so obscure album tracks to please the die-hard fans, then you have an interval, after which you perform your most famous ‘classic album’ in full, and then finish with a ton of hits. This is usually the kind of thing that is done by Serious Musos and involves much stroking of beards and furrowing of brows at the Importance of the Serious Artist on stage.
But everything else about the show was showbiz razzle-dazzle, of a kind I very rarely go and see but can certainly appreciate – costume changes, physical comedy, giant video screens, dance routines – the sort of attention to putting on a show and actually entertaining the audience who’ve paid fifty quid to see you that very, very few people bother with. The end result was something that came out equal parts The Goodies and Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds tours, and will I think have pleased both the MOJO-reading crowd and the grannies wanting to relive their teenage crushes.
They also seemed to be desperate to prove themselves as multi-instrumentalists – possibly still hurt by the jibes at them for not playing on their first two albums (a criticism that can be raised for *every* American band of the 60s to a greater or lesser extent, from the Byrds to the Mothers Of Invention). Micky spent pretty much every song where he wasn’t the lead singer behind one of the two drum kits (one with the Monkees logo, the other with ‘DRUM’ written on it a la Head) and strummed an acoustic guitar on a few other songs, Davy played acoustic on a few songs, and Peter played keyboard, guitar, banjo and French horn.
In fact Peter Tork was the revelation of the show. He was a little rusty still on some of his instrumental parts (some slightly stiff banjo picking on What Am I Doing Hanging Round and a single very slightly flatted note on his French horn solo on Shades Of Gray), which can presumably be explained by the fact that he’s spent ten years ostentatiously *NOT* being a Monkee, and the band apparently only had three days’ rehearsal before the tour started – I’m sure those problems will be completely ironed out by the middle of next week – but his dancing and over-emoting facial expressions reminded me of nothing so much as Harpo Marx ( I know of no higher praise). And the absence of Mike Nesmith meant that Tork got to sing Nesmith’s lead vocals, meaning he had a decent share of the spotlight (Tork rarely sang leads on the records).
Davy was about as you’d expect – the showbiz song and dance man with a joke for every occasion, an all-round entertainer of a type they don’t really make any more. You could easily imagine Davy in another life as Ernie Wise or someone (again a compliment). As I get older I have more and more time for this kind of old-school entertainer, as I have less time for ‘authentic’ rock posing, though Davy’s still never going to be my favourite Monkee (a view shared by the women next to me, who before the show were discussing the dilemmas faced when you come to songs like Star Collector – “but it’s great… but it’s Davy! But it’s great… but it’s Davy!”)
And Micky is one of the great rock vocalists of all time – seriously. The only performer I’ve seen live who was as strong a singer was Arthur Lee, who is of course sadly no longer with us. I’ve seen some extraordinarily good singers in my time (Jeff Buckley, Al Green, Robert Plant) but Micky is at least the equal of all of those, as well as being a great performer. To an extent he was saving his voice for his lead parts – on songs where he wasn’t singing lead, his parts were doubled (and sometimes covered) by a keyboard player who sounded scarily like him – but when he did sing lead (on sixteen songs, so we’re not talking about him being lazy) he was astounding.
Before the show, the PA played cover versions of Monkees songs, ranging from the obvious (the Association doing Come On In, Nilsson’s Daddy’s Song) to the obscure (what sounded like a Japanese indie band) to the plain odd (a slow string arrangement of Your Auntie Grizelda which I can only presume was incidental music for the Monkees TV show or something) – along with, for some reason, Davy Jones’ cover version of McCartney’s Man We Was Lonely.
Then the backing band came on, and over a five minute montage of clips from the band’s career, played a medley of bits from maybe a dozen songs, before Davy, Micky and Peter came on. The backing band (guitar, bass, drums, two keyboardists (one of whom doubled on sax and flute) and three horn players (one of whom doubled on percussion)) were all extremely good, and thankfully mostly free of the 80s slickness audible in some of the recordings of earlier reunion tours.
I’ll reproduce the setlist below, along with relevant comments:
I’m A Believer Micky ended this with “thank you Liverpool!” – I’m still not sure if this was a joke or not.
Mary Mary introduced as ‘a Mike Nesmith tune’, the only time Nesmith got mentioned during the show
The Girl I Knew Somewhere
She Hangs Out
Randy Scouse Git/Alternate Title Micky’s scat singing here was great, sounding like Louis Jordan.
Your Auntie Grizelda the girls next to me screamed at this. I never in my life thought I’d hear two goths in their twenties screaming with lust because a nearly-70-year-old man who looks like Catweazle was doing a silly dance and singing a comedy song. Peter stuck in the line from Head “I’d like a glass of cold gravy with a hair in it” into the scat section.
It’s Nice To Be With You Sung in front of a backdrop of Davy from the 60s. Davy – “I used to be a heartthrob, now I’m a coronary”.
I Don’t Think You Know Me Sung by Peter, whose facial expressions on this were priceless.
Look Out Here Comes Tomorrow At the end, where Davy says “Mary, I love you, Sandra, I love you too”, instead he said “Mary, I love you, Sandra, you love Mary… it’s a new world”
Words
Cuddly Toy
Papa Gene’s Blues Sung by Peter.
Listen To The Band Sung by all three in unison, all strumming acoustic guitars, with an extended instrumental break to introduce the backing band members. Davy had to keep looking at his fingers.
That Was Then, This Is Now Performed with photos of the band as children projected behind them. Micky and Davy were joking to each other about these off-mic, and Davy said something that made Micky laugh so much he was still laughing half-way through the next song.
All Of Your Toys
Hard To Believe
What Am I Doin’ Hangin’ Round Peter sang and played banjo
Sometime In The Morning
Valleri – this was *much* better live than on the record.
No Time – all three took a verse each on this.
We’ll Be Back In A Minute – the music that they used to end the first half of each TV episode led into the interval, during which we saw various 60s vintage commercials by the band, for Kellogg’s cereals, Yardley aftershave and Kool-Aid.
The second half started with the full, long trailer for Head, including the full Ditty Diego War Chant (which I was *very* surprised they kept in) before the band came out and played every song on the Head album while the relevant sections of the film played behind them.
Circle Sky Sung by all three in unison. This was the only song whose video footage was edited, to cut out the shots of Nesmith singing lead.
Can You Dig It When it was announced before the start of the tour that Davy Jones’ wife (who’s a dancer half his age) would be taking part in the show, a massive uproar rose up on the various Monkees fan fora, saying that she’d wreck it. This turns out to have been pure Yoko Ono Syndrome (the unfounded belief among fans of a male musician that that musician’s wife must in all cases be evil and talentless. QV Linda McCartney, Gail Zappa, Melinda Wilson, Courtney Love). In this case she performed a belly-dance to match the ones being projected behind the band from the film, and in so far as I’m any judge, she did so perfectly well. She certainly added to, rather than detracted from, the show.
As We Go Along
Long Title: Do I Have To Do This All Over Again? Peter sang lead.
Porpoise Song The long version with the extended outro. Micky sang Davy’s part as well as his own, as Davy was offstage getting changed.
Daddy’s Song Davy and his wife, in black and white outfits, recreated the dance routine from the film. Davy looked *absolutely exhausted* at the end of this, and out of breath, but managed to keep a smile on.
For Pete’s Sake Sung by Peter rather than Micky.
When Love Comes Knocking At Your Door
She
A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You
Shades of Gray Peter played the French horn. He also ruffled Davy’s hair on the last ‘only shades of gray’.
Last Train To Clarksville
Goin’ Down Micky made this *slightly* easier on himself by changing some of the phrasing to allow more room to breathe, but it’s still an astonishingly difficult song to sing and he pulled it off tremendously. This was the song everyone talked about as they were leaving.
I Wanna Be Free Davy missed the first line of this.
Saturday’s Child
Someday Man Wonderful to hear these two.
I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone
Daydream Believer Peter told the security guards off for not singing along with the rest of us, after which one of them did some half-hearted arm-waving.
ENCORE:
Peter Percival Patterson’s Pet Pig Porky – Peter had to shut Micky up so he could do this.
Pleasant Valley Sunday Micky sounded *astonishing* on this.
I’m A Believer a shortened version with no second verse.
Given the band’s fractious history – roughly speaking they have a reunion tour once every decade, at the start of which they’re best friends, but by the end they hate each other’s guts and won’t speak to each other for ten years – and their age (they’re all in their mid-late 60s now) this is almost certainly the last chance you’ll get to see them live, and you should take it. For all the jokes about ‘the prefab four’ and so on, they are simultaneously the last of the old-style variety performers *and* a band with a catalogue of great songs any three other bands would kill for.
For those of you who can view Flash, here’s two Youtube videos of last night’s show:
I’m off tomorrow to see Van Dyke Parks in London, which will be equally great but in a very different way. I’ll post a review of that on my return, and then get back to my much-postponed Seven Soldiers posts, now I’m physically and mentally well enough to handle them. Thanks for your patience.
New Book – The Beach Boys On CD vol 1: 1961 – 1969 and Lulu Sale
My new book is now out from Lulu.com . As always, I’ve not yet received a proof copy, so caveat emptor for a couple of days. Ebook versions will be available from Amazon (Kindle) and Smashwords (ePub) from tomorrow night. I’ll update the ‘my books’ page then. The PDF version is currently available from Lulu.
Cover:
Between 1961 and 1969 the Beach Boys made nineteen albums, including some of the best music ever recorded – and some not so good.
In this book, Andrew Hickey looks at this music track by track, analysing every song that Brian, Carl, Dennis, Mike, Al, Bruce and David recorded and released during that time period.
From early surf and car classics like 409 to sophisticated masterpieces like Time To Get Alone, in this book you’ll learn how they were recorded, why they work the way they do, and which albums to buy if you want to hear a great band at their best.
As always, if you buy this book and enjoy it, PLEASE tell your friends. I’m not a big publisher and have literally no marketing budget – the only way anyone will get to hear about this is if you tell people.
Coincidentally, just as I was about to click publish here, Lulu have announced that for the next five days you can get 20% off any order (up to a maximum saving of £250) by entering the code HOPUK305 at checkout. So why not try some of my other books, or those by Andrew Rilstone, Simon Bucher-Jones, Lawrence Burton or my uncle?
And on a different note…
I’ve been busy lately. As well as this blog (and the books I’m hoping will come out of the essays from it – the first of three Beach Boys books will be out some time this month), I’ve also been working full time, trying to pull together PEP! 3 (I’ve got great material from Plok, David A and Richard F, but nothing else to work with – everyone else I’ve asked to contribute has had too many problems (that is NOT a dig at anyone, before anyone gets paranoid. I KNOW how hard these things can be)), working on a proposal for a novel, and working on a super-sekrit project of Plok’s.
And I’ve also-also been planning my first solo album.
It’s a baroque pop album, it’ll probably take at least the rest of the year to do, and it’ll be a proper Roy Wood style “write the songs, play all the instruments, sing everything, drive the van and make the sandwiches” solo album.
Here’s a little fragment – the first minute or so of a longer piece I’m working on, almost as an exercise. As I’ve been writing the Beach Boys book I’ve been noticing more and more of the techniques Brian Wilson used, and this is me piling in as many as I can of the Smile-era tricks into one minute or so of harpsichord, timpani, ‘cello and cor anglais.
(I’ve just dumped the raw MIDI to MP3 here – the actual finished album will have a proper sound font used, not this cheap tinny stuff).
Let me know what you think.Smile.
Beefheart
I suppose the saddest thing about Captain Beefheart’s death – which in many ways must have come as a relief after his decades of suffering with MS – is the BBC’s obituary of him. It stresses his ‘influence’, but talks about musicians like Oasis or Franz Ferdinand, who have absolutely nothing in common with him.
Even those artists who sound, at times, quite like Beefheart – for example Tom Waits – aren’t really influenced by him. He had an absolutely unique aesthetic – he’d actually thought out, in detail, what he did and didn’t want to do, and then very *very* rarely compromised that. While he came from the LA 60s rock scene – his first album, Safe As Milk sounds as much like the Monkees or Love as it does people like Howlin’ Wolf to whom Beefheart is usually compared – he soon abandoned any pretence at making ‘rock’ or ‘pop’ music, in favour of making *his* music.
Beefheart is actually less original than his music sounds, but he was one of the great imaginative *synthesists* of all time, putting together the timbre of Chicago blues with the tonalities and rhythms of Ornette Coleman, and adding beat poetry on top. He was often accused by collaborators of being a plagiarist, but it’s notable that none of them have produced anything of anywhere near the same calibre without him – he almost certainly *did* take elements of his musicians’ work, just as he took elements of Coleman and Varese and Willie Dixon, but the result was one of the most idiosyncratic, individual bodies of work in music.
Anyone who was *really* ‘influenced’ by Beefheart would be finding their own aesthetic, as different from Beefheart’s as his was from the mainstream. But it’s a lot harder to sit down and actually think out your music from first principles, throwing out anything that doesn’t fit, than it is just to do what everyone else does.
He will be missed.
eMusic Alternatives?
I’ve often raved about eMusic.com, a subscription-based MP3 site. I’ve discovered literally thousands of great albums through it over the years, and have had nothing but good things to say about it. I’ve got music from there ranging from bands like Vampire Weekend to Benny Goodman, by way of Captain Beefheart, Candypants, Sun Ra, Kristian Hoffman and Hank Williams. However, that’s changed. They used to be purely an indie-label site, but last year they got Sony on board, and last month they also got Universal. That’s fine as far as it goes – more music is good – but it’s led to three changes in the last month:
1) The price per track has increased dramatically. This is OK for me, as I’m grandfathered in to the point where I get them for three price-rises ago’s price, but it’s not a good sign long-term.
2) They’ve changed the rules. You used to be able to re-download stuff you’d previously purchased – now you have to re-buy it. This is especially annoying for me as I lost a huge chunk of my music about six months ago in a hard disc failure, and still have about twenty albums I’d not re-downloaded. They also lied on their forums and said the rule hadn’t changed. It has.
3) The changes to their contracts with the labels have led to a load of major-indies (Beggar’s Banquet and Matador among others) leaving.
The end result of this is that when I search on there now for, say, Linus Of Hollywood, whose music I’ve bought from there in the past, I get directed to Frankie Goes To Hollywood instead. My reason for using eMusic in the first place was that it made it easy to get music that I couldn’t find anywhere else, and relatively inexpensively. Now, I can actually find more of what I want at Amazon (which is absolutely bizarre given that I have relatively niche tastes), and while Amazon is moderately more expensive, it doesn’t require a monthly subscription fee.
So I’m quitting eMusic, sadly, but I wonder if anyone knows of any sites that are like eMusic used to be? I’d very much like to keep buying independent music from independent sites, and not just switch to buying everything from Amazon – I don’t like monopolies. I know about Spotify, obviously, and CDBaby, and plan to continue using both, but does anyone know of a site where you can buy MP3s by, say, Joanna Newsom, the Now People, Lionel Hampton, Frank Sidebottom and Mark Bacino (to name five people whose music I bought from there at random)?
If not, there’s a real gap in the market – if not for a site like eMusic, at least for a decent Amazon storefront to point people to stuff that eMusic used to specialise in…
New 8tracks playlist – Albums Of The Year 2010
I’ve now downloaded and listened to my penultimate eMusic set for the year, so given that I won’t have enough time to absorb next month’s in time to make a reasonable judgement, I thought I’d do my Albums Of The Year now. If nothing else doing it this year will give some googlejuice to the post, which will in turn hopefully bring some attention to these artists, many of whom are very obscure.
My criteria for this are simple – the album goes on here if either I’ve obsessed over it and listened to it repeatedly (even if I didn’t think it was very good at first) or if I’ve not listened to it as much but have listened enough to know it will one day be a favourite.
The only album to be released this year that I haven’t listened to but think I might include is Joanna Newsom’s new one. It’s not on eMusic, and I use that for pretty much all my new music these days. I’ll get it one day.
I’ve created an 8tracks.com playlist, containing my two favourite tracks from each of these albums (8tracks is a legit streaming service and pays royalties) here . Take a listen and let me know what you think, and if you like them I’ve included links to the eMusic pages for most of the albums.
EDIT Didn’t embed properly, but you can get to it here.
1) Kristian Hoffman – Fop (emusic link)
Kristian Hoffman’s last album, &, which I wrote about here, is a very strong candidate for best album of the last decade, and while I’m not sure Fop is of quite that quality, it’s definitely the album of the year.
Hoffman writes about religion, politics, sexuality and the intersections of the three from the perspective of a gay, liberal (in the USian sense) sceptic, but manages to avoid polemic – there’s nothing as strident and obvious as Dear God or Tramp The Dirt Down. Rather, he’s one of the most subtle, moving lyricists I know of.
Those two songs are not chosen at random though – Hoffman is a unique talent, but XTC and Elvis Costello are two of the reference points I would point to to give some idea of his music. The others, though, would be Queen, ELO, Sparks, The Kinks, 20s revivalists like Janet Klein, Rufus Wainwright, Candypants (and the rest of that LA powerpop set of musicians, especially the Wondermints), Corn Mo, Van Dyke Parks, Stephen Sondheim, Abbey Road era Beatles…
Basically if you like witty lyrics, a glam feel, a sense of fun, intricate arrangements and strong melodies, that manages to do bombast while still showing restraint where necessary, buy Fop – straight after you buy &.
The two songs I’ve chosen from Fop are Imaginary Friend, which starts out as a foxtrot with fairly accurate 20s-style instrumentation before going into a gigantic Queen big ballad chorus, about the solace that can be gained from religion even when the religion in question is controlled by people with less than benign motives. Hey Little Jesus on the other hand is a fantastic strutting rocker, a 50s pastiche melody (with more than a touch of Stupid Cupid to it) about the crucifixion, from the perspective of someone taunting Jesus, with a wonderful arrangement, far more subtle than it first sounds (a harpsichord, hammond organ and steel guitar solo, just for starters, and the string part is wonderfully detailed).
2) Blake Jones & The Trike Shop – The Underground Garden (emusic link)
Some might accuse me of bias here, because Blake is a friend of mine, and guested on my last EP. He’s also, though, a wonderfully talented songwriter and performer who gave the single most impressive live performance I’ve ever seen when he and the band played the Love Apple Cafe in Bradford to an audience of less than ten paying customers but still played an hour of everything from Zappa pastiche to a performance of Harlem Nocturne on the theremin. His songwriting is astounding, reminiscent of Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney and Harry Nilsson – but *ACTUALLY* reminiscent of them, not just copying their musical and lyrical tics in a pale imitation. Rather, he’s doing the same thing as them. While the two selections I’ve chosen here don’t show it, as well, his music is also remarkably varied, showing influences as varied as Dick Dale, Frank Zappa, old horror films and the Beach Boys, often in the same song.
Sing Along is my personal favourite of the songs on the new album – the lines “sometimes I wonder why my friends they all still play guitar/It’s not like they’re in line to be rock stars/There must be some kind of belief in a better world/Where we can strum and smile and get the girl” got to me especially. And Christmas Sale is a nice attack on the people who complain about the “War On Christmas” – “Your money don’t say feed the poor/And your courthouse won’t say blessed are the merciful/And your fences don’t say love your neighbour now/But you’re mad ’cause Macy’s won’t call it a Christmas sale…”
3) The Asphalt Orchestra – Asphalt Orchestra (emusic link)
The Asphalt Orchestra are a marching band from New York, but one that plays fiendishly complex jazz and art-rock covers. Their debut album features pieces by Stew & Heidi Rodewald, Charles Mingus, Bjork, Frank Zappa and Goran Bregović among others, and they just recorded a single with David Byrne. They make very good skronking noises indeed.
The two tracks I’ve chosen here are Zomby Woof, a cover of the Zappa track from Over-Nite Sensation, and Carlton, a specially composed piece by Stew & Heidi of the Negro Problem (which is how I first heard about them), which sounds like TV theme music, but in a good way (Tilt will know what I mean).
4) Imagined Village – Empire And Love (emusic link)
The Imagined Village are a ‘supergroup’ of sorts, a loose collective of musicians brought together by Simon Emerson of Afro-Celt Sound System in an attempt to reinterpret the English folk tradition in a way that incorporates elements of all the different cultures in the UK today – partly as a gigantic “fuck you” to Dickibegyourpardonnick Griffin, who tried to link traditional folk to the Bastard Nazi Party. (Incidentally, apparently Dickibegyourpardonnick is in hospital at the moment, with suspected kidney stones. Apparently they can be very painful…).
Their first album, a few years ago, was interesting but suffered from too many cooks – it featured Paul Weller, Billy Bragg, Benjamin Zephaniah… basically everyone who anyone who read the Guardian in the 80s likes, and so was a bit amorphous. This one, on the other hand, while still featuring a large backing band with English and Indian traditional instruments mixed with electronic music, limits the vocals to folkies Martin & Eliza Carthy and Chris Wood.
The two songs I’ve chosen here are Space Girl, an old Ewan MacColl song about the dangers of copping off with a spaceman, and Scarborough Fair.
5) Roky Erickson – True Love Cast Out All Evil (emusic)
This was the real surprise here. For those who don’t know, Roky Erickson was the leader of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, a seminal mid-60s psych-rock group, but was arrested for marijuana possession, took an insanity plea, and unfortunately, because of the state of psychiatric medicine in the late 60s, became severely mentally ill. His music since then has had moments of power, but has been for the most part best judged as ‘outsider music’.
This new album, though… it’s still clearly the work of an ill man, but for the first time in decades he’s working with musicians who are sympathetic to his songs, and a producer who knows what he’s doing. The result is something close to Skip Spence’s Oar, The Beach Boys Love You, or Syd Barret’s early solo work, rather than to Wesley Willis or someone. Still the work of a fractured psyche, but one with the tools to express himself properly.
The two songs I’ve chosen are the first two from the album. Devotional Number One is deliberately recorded in the style of a field recording, and features the best vocals I’ve ever heard from Erickson. The organ coming in on the line “Jesus is not a hallucinogenic mushroom” sends shivers down my spine. Ain’t Blues Too Sad is a short alt-country song, and the difference in vocals is astounding – Erickson sounds like a totally different singer here, but an equally good one. And anyone with any knowledge of his personal history will be moved to tears by the line “Electricity hammered me through my head, til nothin’ at all is backward instead”.
This is raw, harsh music, borne out of immense torment, but still beautiful.
6) Al Jardine – A Postcard From California
I wrote about this here, but in brief this is a Beach Boys reunion album in all but name, featuring the full band on one track and Brian WIlson and David Marks on several, and better than any Beach Boys album since 1979′s LA (Light Album). That still doesn’t make it great, but it’s surprising what a grower this one is – a lovely, pleasant, relaxing album, that has absolutely no ambitions other than to be nice background music, but fulfils that ambition admirably.
The two tracks I’ve chosen are Looking Down The Coast, the most interesting song on the album, if overproduced – a miniature suite originally dating back to the late 70s, and a remake of Jardine’s old Beach Boys song California Saga, done as a duet with Neil Young, and also featuring Crosby & Stills, Jardine’s son Matt, and a sampled Brian Wilson. They’re probably the most representative tracks from the album, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
7) Eliza Carthy & Norma Waterson – Gift (emusic)
Emusic lists this as being an Eliza Carthy solo album, but it’s definitely a mother-and-daughter collaboration – Emusic just seem to randomly label albums by the members of the Waterson/Carthy family, but that’s fine, because they’re all worth getting. Singer Norma Waterson and her daughter, vocalist/fiddler Eliza Carthy are two of the greatest interpreters of traditional English music alive, though they occasionally venture into other territory.
While this album is mostly folk, the two tracks I’ve chosen aren’t. The first is a medley of the 20s song Ukulele Lady and the old Amen Corner song If Paradise Is Half As Nice, while the second, Prairie Lullaby, is a solo vocal by Eliza Carthy backed by Martin Simpson on banjo. When I say this version stacks up well against the versions by Jimmie Rodgers and Mike Nesmith, you’ll know what high esteem I hold it in.
8) Brian Wilson – Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin
I wrote about this here and my opinion pretty much stands – this is a fundamentally flawed album. But it’s a fundamentally flawed album by one of the great creative forces of modern popular music, interpreting music by one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century.
Of the two tracks I’ve chosen here, I’ve Got Plenty O’ Nothin’ is a showcase for Paul Mertens, Wilson’s principal collaborator on the album, who provides the various lead harmonica parts. But the clanking, banjo-driven arrangement calls back both to Wilson’s own Smile and to the ‘hot jazz’ early arrangement of Rhapsody In Blue, and makes this easily the most successful track on the album. Someone To Watch Over Me, on the other hand, is the most ‘Wilsonesque’ track – while one can, again, question how much input he had into the arrangement (which sounds like someone trying to be Brian Wilson, rather than like Brian Wilson), the subject matter is so close to Wilson’s other work that this still sounds the most heartfelt track on the album.
9) Jeremy Messersmith – The Reluctant Graveyard (pay-what-you-like download)
I only discovered Messersmith this year, but my wife’s known about him for ages – he’s from her home state, Minnesota, and very popular on their NPR affiliate. He seems to be popular in ‘geek’ circles too – he seems to have done a song about Star Wars or something, and gets webcomic artists to design his T-shirts. Don’t let that put you off, though, there’s some genuinely good stuff here. Unfortunately, all the comparisons I can come up with are people like Elliot Smith or the Eels, and he’s not really very like that either. I don’t want to put people off, so just listen.
The two songs I’ve chosen here are John Dillinger’s Eyes, a Big Star-esque powerpop song about John Dillinger, and John The Determinist, a chamber-pop song about determinism, with a nice string backing (obviously going for an Eleanor Rigby feel).
10) Mark Bacino – Queen’s English (emusic)
This is actually the kind of music I criticised earlier, in that this album sounds exactly like a Harry Nilsson album. I could honestly believe that Bacino has never heard an album other than Pandemonium Shadow Show, Aerial Ballet and maybe, maybe, Nilsson sings Newman. Maybe.
But the music sounds so exactly like those albums that it’s hardly fair to criticise him for it – because I like Nilsson, and this really is like having another prime-era Nilsson album.
Of the two songs I’ve chosen here, Happy sounds like a Harry Nilsson song, while Middle Town is the least Nilssonesque song on the album, sounding closer to Squeeze or Marshall Crenshaw.
Bubbling under – Thom Hell – All Good Things (sounds like 70s soft rock crossed with the Beach Boys – for fans of ELO and LA-period BBs, but a little derivative) Heaven Is Whenever – The Hold Steady (they’re missing Franz Nicolay’s keyboards), Apples In Stereo – Travellers In Time And Space (sounds like every other Apples In Stereo album, which means it’s great but breaking no new ground). Belle & Sebastian Write About Love (sounds like every other Belle & Sebastian album, which means it’s pretty good but breaking no new ground)
Spotify playlist: John Lennon
You’d have thought that after spending much of the last month finishing writing a book on the Beatles which required listening and relistening to every track they ever recorded multiple times, that I’d have had enough John Lennon for a while. And you’d be right. But then, a day after I finished my book and got it published, Lennon’s solo catalogue showed up on Spotify.
Lennon’s solo work gets a bad press these days, and his critical stock is very low. To some extent it’s justified – albums like Double Fantasy and Some Time In New York City would be weak by any standards, let alone when you know they’re the work of someone who could come up with songs like A Day In The Life, Strawberry Fields Forever or Happiness Is A Warm Gun.
But far more of it’s an over-reaction to the way that in the aftermath of his death, Lennon became the Great Untouchable in the eyes of that generation of rock critics, his every note perfection itself. And on top of that, for quite understandable reasons Yoko Ono has maintained a tight grip on Lennon’s public image, presenting St John The Martyr, Who Died For Peace. Frankly, I’d probably be doing something similar in her position – had I seen my spouse shot dead in front of me, I’d probably want to make sure everyone thought as well as possible of them, and not want to dwell on their faults.
But of course, naturally, then people find out about the man’s real faults (and he had some tremendous faults – he was at times a horrible person), presume that his public image now is how he presented himself in life, and conclude he was a horrible hypocrite, and let that judgement reflect on their view of his music.
But of course Lennon was neither a saint nor Satan, and nor did he ever claim to be either. He was, rather, someone who by instinct was an unpleasant, vicious, mysoginistic, near-psychopath, albeit one who was very charming, bright and funny. But he was someone who *didn’t want to be that way* and tried to change. Nobody desires peace quite as much as someone whose every instinct is telling him to go for the throat, and has seen where that gets you. Nobody is as sincere a feminist as a repentant former wife-beater.
And that complexity fuelled his music. While outside books like Ray Coleman’s hagiography nobody would claim Lennon was as good post-Beatles as during the 60s, and very few people would seriously argue his inspiration didn’t drop off, at the same time he *was* still one of the two or three greatest songwriters of his generation, and probably *the* greatest vocalist. Cutting this complex man down to the banality of Imagine and a load of songs about how much he loved his wife misses the point.
So I’ve put together this playlist of my personal favourite Lennon solo tracks. Listening to the new remasters via Spotify, they’re not the best mastering I’ve heard of this material – there’s a sheen to them I don’t like, and there’s even more reverb here than on the original recordings, which were already reverb-heavy thanks to Lennon’s desire to cover up his voice and Phil Spector’s obsession with echo. But I’m still glad to have Lennon’s music on Spotify, and I hope that when his critical reputation settles down, it will be higher than it is right now (though still not at the “Angela and John Sinclair are masterpieces” levels of the early 80s).
Well (Baby Please Don’t Go) is a live version of an old blues track by the Olympics, performed onstage live with Frank Zappa and the Mothers Of Invention (the “Flo & Eddie” line-up – this was actually recorded on the second of the two shows that became the Filmore East June 1971 album). In general, I prefer the mix of this show that Zappa put out on the Playground Psychotics album to the version on Some Time In New York City, but on this track I prefer Phil Spector’s mix, just because the massive reverb works so well with Zappa’s astonishing guitar solo.
#9 Dream is from Lennon’s other solo masterpiece (the first being Plastic Ono Band), Walls & Bridges. Lennon’s last great single, it’s actually a rewrite of Jimmy Cliff’s Many Rivers To Cross. Lennon had recently produced a rather poor Harry Nilsson album, Pussycats, on which Nilsson covered that song, and Lennon took the string melody he’d written for the backing track and used it as his vocal melody here.
The other song I’ve included here from Walls & Bridges is Nobody Loves You When You’re Down And Out. Originally written for Frank Sinatra (who turned it down), I *love* Lennon’s vocal here, the hesitant, croaking, laid back verses contrasting with the screamed “When I get up in the morning” section, and the way the backing track is mostly going for a lounge singer kind of feel, except that the horns do the occasional dissonant squawk and the strings are being faux-Oriental. The whole thing’s wonderfully put together, down to the way that the “ooh wee”s and “what it is”s that Sinatra would have ad-libbed are actually part of the lyric proper.
Gimme Some Truth from Imagine is actually the last Lennon/McCartney song to be recorded, though not credited as such. If you listen to the Get Back sessions, you can clearly hear McCartney singing the “no short-haired yellow-bellied” part (originally “No freaked-out narrow-minded son of Gary Cooper”) in his Little Richard voice, and studio chat referring to it as Paul’s bit of the song. It’s one of those things that once heard can’t be unheard – of course McCartney wrote that bit. George Harrison provides the great slide solo on here.
Woman Is The Nigger Of The World is the one real song worthy of the name on Some Time In New York City. Inspired by a quote by Irish revolutionary leader James Connoly, via Yoko Ono, this rock & roll waltz, musically very like some of the later Beatles material, is the perfect example of the zeal of the recent convert, and one of the greatest feminist songs of all time. “We insult her every day on TV/And wonder why she has no guts or confidence” “If she’s real, we say she’s trying to be a man/While putting her down we pretend that she is above us”. These may be obvious sentiments now, at least to that proportion of people who hold “the radical belief that women are human beings”, but in 1972 they were not especially widely-voiced sentiments.
And Lennon includes himself in his condemnation – every line is “we”, not “you” – he’s not preaching to other men from a better position, he’s a member of the patriarchy saying “this is what we’re doing”. But this would mean nothing were the music not so good, from the great sax part at the start to the end, where Lennon screams “we make her paint her face and dance!” over relentless, driving, horns and strings.
Crippled Inside is an almost-perfect track. An upbeat skiffle-flavoured 12-bar, with some lovely dobro work by George Harrison and some nice piano playing by Nicky Hopkins, it manages to turn what lyrically is a vicious put-down of person or persons unknown (probably McCartney, though as with many of Lennon’s attack songs he later admitted the lyrics seem aimed far more at himself than anyone else) into a jaunty country track.
Jealous Guy is one of Lennon’s best ballads, and one that I’m sure almost everyone can identify with. What’s amazing is that this started during the White Album sessions as Child Of Nature, with a totally different feel and different lyrics (“I’m just a child of nature/I don’t need much to set me free”) and still worked almost as well. One touch I particularly like is that he sings “thought that you was trying to hide” rather than you were. That little bit of vernacular Scouse sells the whole lyric as being honest.
Nobody Told Me is a wonderful little piece of nonsense (“There’s Nazis in the bathroom, just below the stairs”, “Everybody’s running and no one makes a move/Everyone’s a winner and no one seems to lose/There’s a little yellow idol to the north of Katmandu”) from the posthumous Milk And Honey album. Clearly a guide vocal, it’s entirely possible that had Lennon lived, he’d have added a much more polished, but much less fun, finished vocal. But as it is, his wit shines through here in a way it does all too little on his later recordings generally.
Grow Old With Me is a piano-and-beatbox demo of a song Lennon never got round to recording properly, and you can hear how even though he was only recording on a boombox for himself, he nevertheless still double-tracked his vocal to disguise what he thought were its flaws. Actually, it’s astonishing how different his voice is here – right at the top of his falsetto range, this sounds vocally like the Bonzo Dog Band track Piggy Bank Love. This song, one of my very favourites of his later tracks, was written in response to Ono writing the song “Let Me Count The Ways” – Ono’s song was based on a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, so Lennon wrote a song starting with a line by Robert Browning.
Look At Me is an acoustic track from Plastic Ono Band that was writen in Rishikesh when the Beatles went there in 1968, and is very much of a piece with other songs from that era that made the White Album, like Mother Nature’s Son and Julia, that are based around a finger-picking technique Donovan taught them while they were there.
God is one of the most well-known songs here, the climax of the Plastic Ono Band album where, over “Love Letters” piano, Lennon throws away his past and all his beliefs, climaxing with “I just believe in me/Yoko and me/that’s reality”. This has been seen as the worst kind of navel-gazing solipsism, but in fact it’s Lennon trying to get away from his own past mistakes and his own worst attributes – Lennon was always looking for a father figure, a leader, whether that be Elvis or the Maharishi, and was disillusioned by all of them. And he was, after all, singing “I don’t believe in Beatles” while Ringo Starr was drumming behind him (and indeed ‘fifth Beatle’ Billy Preston was on piano, and Klaus Voorman, who played bass, was the cover designer for Revolver. For someone who wanted to leave the past and the Beatles behind he wasn’t doing a very good job)…
Mother, the opener of Plastic Ono Band is another song that comes in for criticism for being too self-centred. But while it is very obviously based in Lennon’s traumatic upbringing – and since when did it become a bad thing to draw on personal experiences to create art? – it was, as Lennon said when introducing it in his 1972 New York concert, “about 90% of all the parents”. While I am lucky enough to have had a relatively (all things considered) stable upbringing, those people I know who haven’t can identify *VERY* strongly with this song (about Lennon’s memory of being forced to choose which parent to stay with – the father who abandoned him, or the mother who left him to be brought up by her sister). And even I am utterly astonished by the feeling when Lennon screams “Mama don’t go, Daddy come home”. One of the truly great vocal performances of all time.
Working Class Hero is essentially a rewrite of Dylan’s Masters Of War. A lot of people misread this title as triumphalist, but in fact the song is not even about class, as such, but about the way society harms everybody – “then they expect you to pick a career/when you can’t even function you’re so full of fear”, “there’s room at the top they are telling you still/But first you must learn how to smile as you kill”.
Cold Turkey is one of the greatest singles ever made. The arrangement is one of the simplest ever – Ringo’s kit damped to the point where it’s almost a click track, Voorman’s bass low in the mix, leaving empty space for that vocal and Eric Clapton’s greatest guitar part ever. What’s fascinating is to compare this to the version on the Live Peace In Toronto album (with Clapton, Voorman, Alan “the one from Yes not the one from Oasis” White, and Yoko on extra screams), which is far rawer, faster and more primal than this one, and a near-perfect performance in itself (even though none of the band had heard the song til the plane trip over). But whereas that one was angry and exciting, this is tense and scary. What amazes me is that Clapton actually started taking heroin after recording this – what kind of fool makes a record like this and then thinks “That sounds like a good idea!”?
And finally, from Lennon’s Rock & Roll covers album we have Just Because, a Lloyd Price song that Lennon probably knew from Larry Williams’ version. This is mostly fun for Lennon’s intro and outro banter as “Doctor Winston O’Boogie”.
Brian Wilson’s New Album – Why People Turn To ‘Piracy’
Before I start, for those expecting PEP! today, I’m afraid I was so overwhelmed with fielding the response for my last post I’ve had to leave it til this weekend. That’ll teach you to actually read and like things I write. But to make up for that there’s two posts today – one on comics shortly, and then one on Brian Wilson’s new album later.
But this is just a rant about precisely why people turn to ‘piracy’.
I pay for the vast majority of the music I listen to, because I believe music deserves paying for. I subscribe to eMusic and pay for a Spotify subscription. I tend only to torrent bootlegs. But more and more I wonder why.
Take Brian Wilson’s new album. It comes out today – if you live in the USA. If you’re in the UK, you have to wait til September 6. Also, you can’t buy the ‘Super Premium Edition’ (autographed vinyl, plus CD and MP3/FLAC copies) if you’re anywhere outside the USA. I might have bought that – I like vinyl. But OK, it’s a limited thing, there’s probably enough USians to buy them all up.
However, I do have an American wife, and so I have access to an American debit card, which luckily had the $9.99 available to purchase the album in MP3/FLAC format direct from Brian Wilson’s site. So I have to jump through a few hoops, but I get a confirmation of my ‘advance purchase’ – I can download a single track ‘now’ and the rest of the album ‘on August 17′. Even though it is now August 17.
But to be fair, Brian Wilson’s site is based in California, where I bought it at about 5AM, so I download the single track, and come back at 5:30 PM my time, 9:30AM theirs – a reasonable time, you would have thought. Certainly at this point the album has been downloadable at Amazon for several hours, but foolishly I chose to buy direct from the artist rather than go through a middleman (a middleman which also requires me to install proprietary software, of which there isn’t a copy for my operating system version) – and Amazon also refuse to sell the album to me anyway because my IP address is in the UK.
So at 5:30 PM I click the link provided in my email receipt, to be informed that I have ‘exceeded my download limit’. This despite the fact that I have not yet downloaded the album at all. The Brianwilson.com forums are now full of people asking when they’ll be able to get the album that they’ve already paid for.
On the other hand, checking one of the major bittorrent sites shows a full copy of the album, at the same quality as is being offered on brianwilson.com , was uploaded ten days ago.
So by wanting to pay for this music – music created by a multimillionaire who doesn’t need the money nearly as much as I do – I’ve had to obtain a debit card registered in another country, be lied to by a website, pay $10 and make a complaint through an automated system – and I’ve still not actually got the music. Had I not been able to get access to a foreign card, I would have had to wait a further month before I could even start on that process.
When you make it *THIS MUCH MORE DIFFICULT* for people to give you money for your product than to get it illegally for free, you don’t *DESERVE* the money. Wilson has another album coming out next year, apparently. If it’s sold in the same way, through the company ‘Topspin’, I shall for the first time in my life torrent one of his legitimately-available recordings rather than buying it. Because I don’t appreciate being punished firstly for living outside the US, and then again for actually paying money for the product.
ETA – Minutes after writing this, I got a reply to my complaint, and can now download the music
ETA Again – the link to the FLAC version they sent me breaks at the 2MB point. The MP3 version is downloading, though…
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