summer drive
I went on a long car trip 3 weeks ago, and decided I’d use the endless hours through our nation’s monotonous deserts and garish summits to catch up with some album-format music. In what is now called the old days (“remember, this was before cell phones,” people of my vintage are always saying, or “there was at that time no Internet”; do young people really imagine that these technologies co-existed with landlines and blaxploitation horror and UHF stations?), Kurd Lasswitz and Jorge Luis Borges wrote speculatively of universal libraries containing not just every book written but every book that possibly could be written, given x alphabetical letters and y maximum page length.
With a few provisions, the future has arrived, and picture me in it, please, a dashing Mad Max in my sleek climate-controlled Camry, able to leap 600 miles in a single day, trigger finger on my superweapon, Spotify. One of the provisions separating this potential Utopia from an actual one is that the attention span of the future-dweller has radically shortened. Another is that the library has so far proved galactic, not universal; but if your tastes run to the mainstream and the current, Spotify will provide you near-100% satisfaction. Even a fellow like me, whose music interests skew heavily to the aged, the obscure, and the dead, can summon into being around 70% of his idle discographic whims.
Oh, and one more provision: music content providers, previously called musicians, will henceforth need to use ever-more-wily means to buy food.
My thoughts flitted around, as they are wont to, ridiculously and randomly. I thought I’d try getting some of them into sentence shape, many days ex post facto. It’s tough but it’s salubrious, figuring out what you think. Writing maketh an exact man, said Bacon, or rather wrote Bacon. Amid many hours of podcasts and phone calls, here is what I listened to, in order:
Earl Scruggs Revue
Joni Mitchell
Dan Crary
John Hiatt
Levon Helm
Ron Sexsmith
Tim Krekel
Denzel Curry
Manuel Galban
Kacey Musgraves
Millie Jackson
Dave Evans
Logan Ledger
Shelby Lynne
Billy Yates
Sun Ra
Johnny Carson
George Carlin
“5” Royales
Paul Carrack
The Men They Couldn’t Hang
John Kirby
Norman Blake
Bruce Molsky
Mal Waldron
Sierra Hull
Ole Belle Reed
Martha Carson
Mattie, Marthie, and Minnie
Jean Chapel
Merle Haggard
Delmore Brothers
Big Three Trio
Dolly Parton
Almost none of this was music I’d heard before. About half the artists I had never heard except for four or five songs. However, almost all the names were easily familiar to me and close to my comfort zone. I dug down into my staked territory, depth over breadth.
Earlier this year I was driving through Maryland with a friend who told me how mortified she was when Spotify coughed up a playlist tailored for her, all Tom Waits and Lou Reed et cetera. Yikes! Rockism. She was mortified not at Spotify but at herself. The algorithmic gotcha accurately reflected her recent consumption, and she adjusted the dial straight away.
Nothing shameful about Messrs. Waits or Reed, please understand. But by not boring down deeper you’re missing out on all the rich underground streams composer-performers like that drink from. In our world, a couple hundred celebrated millionaires are perched atop a hundred thousand raggedy-ass nobodies. Besides poorer and obscurer, the latter artists tend to be: blacker, more regionally specific, differently risk-averse (one behavioral distortion comes from wanting the prize, another from wanting to keep it), less explicitly “self-expressive.” Music takes you places. The farther back you go in time, the more your settled opinions can meet resistance. “Lesser-known” doesn’t amount to “better,” but it comes close enough that you want to set a limit on the portion of your listening hours spent in the land of the obvious.
Like my friend, I saw my lazy habits advertised when, at the start of day two, I read down what I listened to on the first day. That’s the section of the list from Earl Scruggs to Tim Krekel, and it’s why, starting at Denzel, the names get a touch more heterogeneous, less writer-singery, less likely to feature a banjo. I mean -- Joni Mitchell, Dan Crary, John Hiatt -- sweet Jesus, get me a walker and a wife named Karen and mash up a plate of peas.
I won’t go item by item down the list, I’ll just focus on some of the names that inspired some memorable or weird or strong-seeming thoughts. A few blind spots to which I’m going to confess might make you incredulous. Who on earth hasn’t heard Joni Mitchell records? Me. Also, if you object to some of my criticisms of highly respected figures, please consider that they can take the knocks, and so can you. If you can’t, get your own blog and knock my records why don’t you.
I’m putting a link to a Spotify playlist at the bottom of the text, in case you want to hear some of what I’m discussing. Not everything on the list or in the essayistic rambling is on the playlist, and I also added in a couple more songs for variety and in the case of Sierra Hull, a little context.
JONI MITCHELL
The album I picked is called Clouds, and I picked her second release so as to find her not at a steady clip but not fresh out of the gate either. She and I have a mutual friend who makes high claims for her music, and so I thought I’d challenge my belief, based on four or five radio hits, that this was sophisticated 1970s music that, like Steely Dan or James Taylor, was just not up my street. Spending 37 minutes in her head did ease my mind and raise my opinion. The fault-finding apparatus falters before such an individualist: her chords are thoughtful and fresh, and her voice is beautiful. It ranges easily over registers, and the relatively thin middle of her chest voice, which seems equally with her floaty head voice to define her sound, drills into my skull very pleasurably.
I never focus on lyrics very much, especially at first listen. If I had I’d probably have enjoyed Clouds less -- inside the pages of a sensitive young woman’s diary in the Nixon era is not where I’d like to be. After enjoying Joni’s record, I understood that my love of Judee Sill’s music has been inadequately contextualized. Judee’s writing is killer, and individualistic as well, but her sad bio and her lower visibility also work in her favor for a music nerd like me. Now that I’ve heard Clouds, it’s hard for me to imagine Judee without Joni just behind her on the timeline.
DAN CRARY
The dates on the albums are hard to make sense of on Spotify, some correct and some way off. Dan’s Bluegrass Guitar record is labeled 2005, but it came out in the early 1970s. The likeness of the tempos gets wearying after 4 or 5 songs, and there are more interesting fiddlers to listen to at album length than Lonnie Peerce, but it’s always a blast to hear Dan play a fiddle tune. A minute element of his prowess is his thrilling skill at speed-diving from notes way up the neck to notes down at the bottom of the guitar’s range, which, for reasons I don’t understand, is mechanically harder than moving in the opposite direction.
JOHN HIATT
I started thinking about Shane Keister just out of LA, while listening to the Scruggs record. I’ve always loved Shane’s style, without having bothered to check out many of the records on which he’s performed, Scruggs and Hiatt being two rather dissimilar touchstones. In the 1970s Shane had a very attention-getting way with the piano. It was almost wildly energetic (cocaine, maybe?), yet precise and compositionally premeditated. It had the church in it. He was also interested in the Moogs and odder little keyboards of the era.
So I drifted over to John Hiatt’s Spotify page. I used to thumb his first two records, Hangin’ Around The Observatory and Overcoats, in the record stores, without ever reaching for my wallet. I probably feared that my love of All of A Sudden and Riding With The King might be damaged by exposure to his fledgling apprentice work. All these years later, I thought I may as well stick a toe in. I got halfway through Observatory (stopping short of “Wild-Eyed Gypsies,” a title that gives you something of the flavor of this phase in his evolution) and thought, I get it, enough. Youthful spirit and a set of definite skills don’t add up to an original voice, or compensate for the lack of it. An original voice, as we who have tried to attain one should know, isn’t exactly an easy goal to reach. Looking at John’s discography drives that fact soberly home: nine or ten years to find his groove, not much commercial payback until his eighth record. Who gets seven tries anymore? Well, anyone who was paying attention, 40 years back, could tell that John had crazy talents and was getting himself to the goalpost, if a little slowly or asymptotically (too big a crush on Elvis Costello was one thing that hobbled him).
John’s show at Cabaret Metro in Chicago in, I think, 1985 remains one of the most powerful shows I’ve seen. His keyboardist, a white guy who wasn’t Shane Keister, sat stage right at a big creaky B3, seated on a bench that looked like somebody’s grandma’s. There’s nothing clever I can say about how the music made its effect on me; it was grooving and loud, the playing had a unitary focus that likely came from respect for the material, the players had plain clothes and unaffected behavior, the songs were of course well-crafted and emotional, and that’s really all there was to it.
Back on Spotify, I put on a recent record of John’s, wondering how he had evolved since the mid-1990s. The style he landed on with Bring the Family in 1987, whatever its other attributes, seemed great for aging into. Music evocative of wide fields and lost times, lyrics crammed with notes on coarse experience. Disappointment, loss, surmounted challenges, and sneaky little pleasures. Is that good enough language to get me three cents a word at a 1980s alternative periodical? In the hotel room, later that night, I somehow went down a hole that ended at the first issue of SPIN magazine, where a writer called Glenn O’Brien wrote this about John’s seventh album, Warming Up To The Ice Age:
“Hiatt has natural brown hair in a normal-citizen style and he’s white and wears a regular black suit and a regular white shirt and he plays a black Gretsch guitar. From that you can almost tell he’s okay. He plays non-trendy, smart rock ‘n’ roll. He’s new wave in the sense that ceased being applied to music when it started being applied to overcoats.”
It’s hard to overstate how much I hate this sort of music writing, including that I could spend the rest of the pandemic trying in vain to tease meaning out of the last sentence. The review’s most fundamental failing is to foreground the writer’s persona so self-servingly, in relation to the object supposedly under discussion. That, by the way, was a widely-shared failing in the 1980s, when rock music writers were still in thrall to the mediocre Lester Bangs, the inspiring Nick Tosches, and a couple other people who were themselves in thrall to the 1960s new journalists -- a general cesspool of thralldom and mediocrity which now lies mercifully buried. Besides honoring his literary lineage with his auto-focus, Mr. O’Brien works roughly from the following playbook of antecedent and consequent: 1) Hello, I’m Glenn, here in my professional capacity with 2) some sentences designed to draw you into my arch worldview, including that 3) I approve of this music and the person who made it, which 4) entitles you, as secret generational sharer of my worldview, wink wink, to approve of it in turn. What a lot of junk to be rid of, what a lot of bullshit.
It seems a short jump from Why should I care what someone named Glenn O’Brien has to say about John Fucking Hiatt? to Why should I care what Robbie Fulks has to say about J.F.H.?, particularly given that there are no ultimately correct opinions about aesthetics. But I’m going to give a perspective that’s a little more informed, and moreover I’ll be so kind as to put it into English. Whether or not I strike you as equal in arrogance to Glenn, what I write will have more clarity, evidence, and falsifiability.
The opinion of the fellow craftsman isn’t the be-all end-all but it does carry weight. Somewhere around 1997 I was gabbing with a Nashville-based songwriter friend. Hiatt’s Walk On record was recently out, and we were listening to it in my living room. “Cry love?” my friend said, reading the words disbelievingly off the artwork. “Cry love, cry love? The tears of an angel? The tears of a dove? Come on! This is terrible!” Hiatt’s reputation was established in my mind, and I must have appeared taken aback by this wizard-bashing, because my friend doubled down. “Love, dove, of, love -- Jesus, man! This is terrible! No creativity, no meaning, just one dumb rhyme and vapid cliché after the next. He may be John Hiatt, but he has to make some effort!” Harsh collegial criticism! So much better than stylish irreverence.
All right, time for the velvet hammer. Listening to John’s 2014 Terms of My Surrender record, you wouldn’t know that he knew very much about songwriting at all, much less is the same man who came up with melodically precise beauties like “Pink Bedroom,” “She Loves The Jerk,” and “She Don’t Love Nobody,” or pieces verging on transcendence and profundity, like “Have A Little Faith In Me.” His more recent melodies are content-free, and his lyrics -- for once I was listening to them -- are even worse. The first song on the record begins:
A friend of mine said, “A long time comin’, been a long time gone”
Stood right here, whispered in my ear, “All the love gone wrong”
I’ve been living my life like a howling wind, and I can’t put out this flame...
This is very bad news, at the outset. There’s no defined scenario to get lost in, the grammar is unproductively vague, and the rhymes (here/ear, gone/wrong) are middle-school. When are we going to get out of the weeds and onto some pathway of beauty, structure, and meaning? Never. We never will. Here are a few dismaying lines and phrases that follow:
All this time we’ve been turning, turning like a screw, down roads of silver and gold
Livin’ my life like a lonesome whistle blowin’/Now I can’t turn back
Your work is never done/I see you there in that silver blue air...
It hardly bears saying that Howlin’ Wolf wouldn’t have indited, or settled for, “turning like a screw down roads,” nor Bob Dylan, nor W.C. Handy, nor any other blues-tradition wordsmith, white or black or rich or poor, with a reputation behind or in front of him. (“I don’t even try,” he once prophetically boasted.) I allude again to the lucky few hundred, perched atop a hundred-odd thousand. Every one of us, standing atop or stood upon, is obligated to exert himself harder than this. Here is an artist I’ve admired and learned much from. But if I heard this stuff about living like a wind, alternated with living like a whistle, at an open-mic night, I’d roll my eyes discreetly and head to the patio with a beer, closing the door tightly behind me.
DENZEL CURRY
This was a very welcome palate-cleanser after a glut of fragile delicacies and have-a-toke-and-let’s-get-a-groove-going music the day previous. Denzel’s TA1300 album opens:
Welcome to the darker side of taboo
All I got is permanent scars and tattoos
Take another step in the path that you choose
Make a bad choice in your path then you lose
Though this is a little less impressive and forceful on paper than in a vocal delivery, you can tell that we’re back in that happy place of smart rhymes and sharply drawn dramatic stakes. The drama particularizes and tightens:
I knew you wasn’t normal ever since the age of nine
I heard you were molested when you hit the age of five
So in a sense I sensed that all your innocence had died
You swallowing all of your pride, won’t let anybody inside
As you cry me a thousand lakes on my shoulder blade
I say, Everything’s gonna be OK
A few songs later comes “Sumo”:
Anybody wanna B.E.T.?
Man y’all n#@&*s can’t see me
Outta my league, you Pee-wee
Pocket too big, Rikishi
All right, I won’t pretend I know what the hell “Rikishi” is, but the Pee-wee line made me laugh out loud. It doesn’t kill me as hard on the page here, but listening to this stuff is like having baseballs thrown at your face from 6 directions at once. I like the way hiphop bangs furiously on the skull, and I love the way it maintains the value of cleverness in rhyme within popular music -- a much-appreciated reaction to something of a market failure. But, all in all, I was born too early. Hiphop is a hell of a load on the old neurochemistry after 30 minutes. It’s not only trying to keep up with the word flow, it’s the non-human timefeel, which has metastasized across modern music in a way that bothers me. As Sarah Silverman said, I feel like a computer is yelling at me.
MANUEL GALBAN
Blue Cha Cha is easy on the ears but not totally compelling.
KACEY MUSGRAVES
Speaking of born too early, “Haven’t been early since ’88” is the second line on this record by a songwriter who, naturally, is 32 years old. Bang! Dexterity! Wit! And a good sort of pull-quote for reviewers and fans alike. Deft wordplay though striking is no badge of artistic merit; can you set that little gemstone into the ring of songcraft, can you deliver with your own voice, can you come up with 12 more? Can you contrive to (and afford to) line up the specialized mechanics, to get you at the wheel of a vehicle that glides out of the lot and across the country?
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. From the first few seconds, I was overwhelmed by the level of inter-departmental accomplishment on Golden Hour. I’m guessing a lot of you already know this record. I went public with my appreciation of “the mix” as I listened -- one hand on the wheel, one on my Dick Tracy device. A Twitter-woman responded, “I wish I could truly understand what this means,” adding that she simply liked the music, regardless.
It’s true that the word “mix” has acquired a cloudy and quasi-religious overlay, but most of the time, in ordinary and non-bullshit conversation, there’s really not much of a gulf in meaning between “I like the music” and “I like the mix.” Therefore, saying this or that about “the mix” is often a bullshit move; but I use the word deliberately here, because the sound recording details strike me as absolutely crucial to the radiant effect of the record. I also think it’s useful, by the way, to keep in mind that the separable aesthetic concerns contained in or suggested by the term “mix” -- tones/EQs of the elements in a recording, relative volumes of the elements, balance, atmospherics -- didn’t suddenly spring into being in the late 1960s, when multitrack recording became standard and the work of mixing and unifying multiple tracks became a bigger (more options, more decisions, more time and money) and routinely self-contained segment of record production. After all, Bell Labs came before the Beatles; engineers thought about things like microphone placement on Roy Acuff sessions; musicians in porkpie hats thought about things like the shape of the sound produced by their instruments and mouths, where to be in the room, and how loud to aim for in relation to the broad picture.
On Kacey’s record -- and I’ll put it in layman’s words, not out of condescension but because that’s actually my angle -- the drums sound upfront and powerful, and the individual instruments are easy to distinguish. Crucially, the vocal floats effortlessly on top of all that, and is a pleasure to absorb, like fluffy cake. To get each piece loud-sounding, distinguishable but not attention-getting, and in balance with the others -- it doesn’t just happen; the word “mix” could just as accurately apply to the human and quantum domains: the complex blend of science, art, experience, and dumb luck that come into play.
Your ears aren’t in the least confused in responding to Golden Hour -- it’s been made with some knowledge of how your ears function -- but you do have some listening choices if you care to use them: you can focus on the whole, or you can listen to the qualities of any single piece. (How the bass sounds, I can’t really say, given that it’s an iPhone and little car speakers.) The one thing I don’t think you could easily do is ignore the vocal. Who (that wasn’t there) knows how this pretty design was achieved. Of course, the fact that they had these great songs and voice to wrap the design around didn’t hurt matters.
Listening, I had the thought that seldom if ever since the commercial era of the majestic Ms. Shania Twain had a record coming out of Nashville seduced my bodily transmitters so completely. I started clicking around on the phone to find out more, there among the Colorado mountains. I was tossed off the interstate for a spell, by wildfires, and enjoyed being thrust more deeply into the landscapes and the thrill of negotiating gravel-road switchbacks while googling. Turns out the producers are Daniel Tashian, son of the legendary Barry and Holly, and a gent named Ian Fitchuk, who -- bingo! -- played on Shania records. Evidently he paid attention.
Back home, two weeks later, I replayed the record, this time with my wife in the car. Experiencing it through her ears, I could tell before she said a word that it wasn’t her thing, that she wasn’t bowled over as I had been. My wife doesn’t go for what you might describe as sensitive-woman art. Under her influence, I began rethinking the reaction I’d had previously. But when a jaundiced opinion from without starts coloring our own honestly formed outlooks, what are we but lemmings? No, I’m sticking with: This is a really strong piece of work.
MILLIE JACKSON
If you haven’t caught up with Caught Up!, it’s a set of songs divided by the narrative point of view of the other woman and that of the wronged wife. I have a large soft spot in my heart for Millie, not just because she’s such a dynamic singer, but because there’s vision and audacity across her long career (concept LPs, arresting artwork including a photo of Millie sitting pants-down on a toilet, rapping well in advance of Sugarhill Gang), she has a raunchy sense of humor, and she likes country. Come on, she is country, let’s not thoughtlessly use that word in its usual racially specific way just because of how the industry happened to play out.
Millie’s voice is tricky. When she’s in a low alto range, she sounds like that’s where she belongs. As little as one octave up from there, she reminds you of Mavis, breaking up into phlegmy static and hitting her ceiling on control -- then suddenly she’s an octave above that, flying easy as a bird.
Sometimes I listen to music on small regional labels from 60 or 70 years back, and, for all the underdog love I instinctively have, start to entertain contrarian thoughts. Is smaller always better; do lower budgets necessarily help? Is this rough playing anything like an identifiable, individual style? How would more competent and experienced players change my impression of the music? Could I tell a Bullet record from a King record in a blind test, a Roulette from a Vee-Jay? Without knowing who the singer was, I couldn’t. Little companies don’t correlate to uniquely great music any more than big companies do. As Gene Kelly said, “MGM? That was a sign hanging over a lot where we worked.” The quality issues from the workers; when a label has a built-in stable of players, that’s a quality, that’s a sound. Whatever particulates were in the water in Detroit or Memphis, whatever the vision and fascinating personality quirks of the founders, it was the house players at Motown and Stax (not to forget the songwriters) that added consistent value to those labels.
The history of Spring Records is likely very interesting, but Caught Up sails on the work of the Muscle Shoals house band -- Barry Beckett, David Hood, Roger Hawkins, Jimmy Johnson. You can hear that by 1974 these guys are playing like multiple limbs of one body with one mind.
Millie drips with savvy attitude. In a later-life interview, she remarks:
“I was the poor people’s queen. I didn’t sell records to bougies. It was the poor people who bought my music. The women who bought Diana Ross did not buy Millie Jackson. The people in the projects understood me. I was down and dirty. I told you like it was.”
In case you missed her earth-shaking take on “If Loving You Is Wrong,” here’s an small excerpt from her spoken-word piece in the middle, which she claims was extemporaneous (“None of it was planned...what came up, came out!”):
“There's a good side to being in love with a married man, and I like it, 'cause you see, when you're going with a married man, he can come over two or three times a week and give you a little bit. That means you're two up on the wife already, 'cause once you marry one, you don't get it but once a week. Another sweet thing is, on payday, he can come over and give you a little bread and I like that. But the sweetest thing about the whole situation is the fact that when you go to the laundromat, you don't have to wash nobody's funky drawers but your own -- and I like it like that!”
I admit that underdog love figures heavily in my music appreciation, and sometimes needs correcting for. But just about anytime a strong-willed person with a rude act gets into the music business and makes a small fortune by doing the exact thing that all the smart businesspeople insist can’t be done...I’m in!
DAVE EVANS
A black lady born in Thomson, Georgia in 1944, meaning Millie, comes into the world with very little luck working in her favor. A banjo-playing cracker born in southern Ohio in 1950 could have, I’m willing to consider, even less. Anyway, terrific music and bone-chilling, incredible singing.
LOGAN LEDGER
Logan is my friend and I was delighted to work on some songs for his debut record. (They didn’t make the cut this time, but there’s always record #2.) His vocal instrument is crystal-pure and laser-sure, and the songs are tailored, or at least selected, to allow it to splash its suppleness, range and interpretive skill fairly freely across the arrangements. The sound is the sum of Dennis Crouch, Jay Bellerose, Russ Pahl, and Marc Ribot -- a meld of LA, NYC, and Nashville. I think Logan is now in rather a delicate position, comparable to k.d. lang’s after her first release (regardless of whether her first release had been her first record or, counterfactually, her second) -- how to follow up such a uniquely created sound environment and proceed with the career flexibility he will want. These are such specific players. Not a bad problem to have, for now.
SHELBY LYNNE
It’s been a long time since I heard any of Shelby’s early stuff, back when she had Johnny Whitaker hair and a cabaret-singer brand; and I hadn’t heard anything from the last 15 years either. Crazy how many years you can miss in the career of someone who means something to you. I went for a few songs from the early 1990s, followed by the first half of Just A Little Lovin’ from 2008. The comparison brought to light a stark difference in the way Nashville and LA musicians dress up a song, the way the industries and cultures intertwine in those two cities. On Shelby’s early records, like so many records issuing from Nashville since the late 1950s, you hear this thought inaugurating the project (they say “project” a lot there): Let’s get some of the best players and writers in town, roll up our sleeves, and get to it! That workaround pronoun, “it,” is the beginning of the trouble, for it steers thoughtlessly past the hard work of taking artist personality -- the fundamental, ineffable, and actual “it” -- into account. The default work methods continue, at a more granular level, in the tracking: fiddle fills verse one, steel on chorus. Stay away from the lyrics. Keep the story development clear and the pace moving. Let’s make a great one!
On Shelby’s 2008 record, you can hear quite different thoughts, more like open-ended questions, an approach that throws light on why (forgive my geographic chauvinism) singer-writers love working here. What kind of a record do we want to make? What tools will help to set the desired mood? Where can I not play? Just A Little Lovin’ provides qualities I can’t remember ever hearing on a commercial Nashville record -- empty space, unvarying trancelike repetition, playing that is egoless and unimposing.
I’m doing a little strawmanning here. Modern-day Nashville has any number of young players who can find a non-showy space in an arrangement. Further, it’s hard to argue much with great playing, I mean the kind of cartoon-crazy, farm-bred prodigy chops that Nashville abounds in and in LA are pretty rare. But the model that has a producer telling an artist, “You relax and sing, honey, and we’ll take care of the rest of the details” is so wrong for so many artists, especially one as self-determined and outside the pack as Shelby.
JOHNNY CARSON
Somehow, back in the 1960s, a man called Larry Wilde, described in Wikipedia as a standup comedian and motivational speaker and now still kicking at 92, got access to the top comedy people of the era and recorded long interviews with them that focused unjokingly on the fine points of their craft. Jack Benny, Woody Allen, Shelley Berman, Dick Gregory, Ed Wynn -- a truly amazing assortment of icons, and all on Spotify for any who care to plow through. It’s plowing because you have to be more interested in it than I am to make it through any of these in a single listening -- and I’m interested! -- and because Wilde’s audio persona, though not grating or overbearing, is Gimpel The Fool meets Max Eastman.
Somewhere, sometime, to someone, Johnny Carson must have revealed a fully human personality. It doesn’t happen here. Throughout this repetitive interview, he manages, as he did on the Tonight Show, to be on-point and sincere-sounding without unbuttoning either brain or heart. But here and there he does disgorge some nuggets. His experience of ad libbing, for example -- sometimes he thinks through the words a second or two in advance of saying them, other times he just hears them come out, with no conscious understanding of the process that preceded the joke. He puts a strong point on the idea of “pre-conditioning,” the store of goodwill that a well-known performer has entering the room. He repeatedly abjures “tags,” meaning slice-and-dice labels stuck on performers. It’s melancholy to think that most of the men he cites in 1968 as universally acknowledged masters of the craft, such as Jack Benny and Red Skelton, are people no one laughs much at anymore, if they’re remembered at all. What makes something funny in year x and unfunny in year x-plus-50 (or, these days, x-plus-5)? A question that’s not explored here, but clearly, since many buildings from the 18th century remain beautiful and standing, the construction of comedy isn’t like the construction of physical matter.
GEORGE CARLIN
My first-hand impressions of Carlin as a writer and performer came, across many years, from “Hippy Dippy Weatherman” on the Dr. Demento show, Carson appearances, the premiere episode of NBC’s Saturday Night, and a 1980s standup special or two. Seemed like more than enough on which to base an opinion, which was -- see “Mitchell, Joni, longstanding opinion on” -- the skills were obvious but it wasn’t really my thing, and the chord that it struck in Sixties people was harder to hear after 1975 or so. But one day recently I was texting with a friend in comedy, who said he thought Carlin and Pryor were the two untouchables of the era. No surprise on Pryor, but I was immediately interested in the idea that re-appraising George could be worthwhile.
My friend linked me to the LP Occupation: Foole, from 1971. It only took a few minutes for me to be transported into the magic land of opinion-revision. George has got it all on this record. Over-the-top vocal talent (accents, impressions, warp-speed tongue), going-too-far comedy, lowbrow comedy, rambling stream-of-consciousness interludes, improvisation, snatches of honest autobiography. It’s a killer package, and it’s funny that between him and Louis CK on the historical timeline (not that Louis has Carlin’s voice-manipulating thing) there’s no one -- no one who toggles freely between high (God) and low (farts), takes deadly aim at social taboos, and uses standup comedy not just for laughs but as a vehicle for discursive, open-ended philosophical adventure.
Since I liked Occupation: Foole so completely, I checked in on Toledo Window Box, George’s next release. Though decent, it made me suspect that ole George’s stay at the peak of Everest may have been brief.
Incidentally, I learned on the “Carson Show” podcast the next day, from the director of the 1970s late-night “Tomorrow” show, that Carlin had asked to come on the show to discuss his habit of being gonzo on marihuana in performance. He had seen John Lennon’s “Tomorrow” appearance, which focused on Lennon’s extradition order due to possession. The Carlin episode didn’t come to be, since the director was advised by higher-ups at NBC that airing it would end Carlin’s career. Great anecdote. Anyway, as someone who has been made mentally dazed by marihuana and has observed without pleasure the same effect in others, I’d be fascinated to know how George’s usage of the drug intersected with his professional arc. All George’s mannerisms and discernible mental states, from all the performances I know of, most especially Occupation: Foole, show him in complete control of body and mind.
“5 ROYALES
More state pride for North Carolina. The Winston-Salem sometimes-quintet sometimes sextet is truly the most multifaceted of all the great R&B vocal groups, with two classic singers in husky-voiced Johnny Tanner (“Think”) and his thin-timbred brother Gene (“Dedicated To The One I Love”). The Royales also boasted a triple-threat genius in Lowman Pauling, who sang bass, wrote most of the group’s finest songs, and played killer electric guitar (Les Paul with distinctive attack and often distortion). I wish there more recordings around of their earlier gospel incarnation, called the Royal Sons Quintet. But I was also curious about their 1960s stuff. (Their commercial time was late-1950s and they disbanded in 1965.)
The collection Catch That Teardrop filled me in. I suppose the repertoire here shows a little falling-off, but man, the performances are as fine as ever, and it does sadden me to think of groups like this getting killed off to make room for the Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds. The highly hyperactive bass guitar lines on the first song, “Talk About My Woman,” put me in mind of the novelty of the instrument and the new possibilities it opened up for what goes on down there at the bottom of the song. Bass guitar hadn’t been on recordings for ten years yet when “Talk About A Woman” came out in 1962. Suddenly people’s ears are hearing frantic and fluid underpinnings that were physically impossible to execute (therefore never conceived and never missed) on a double bass, a tuba, or organ pedals. A lead-guitar mentality has invaded an austere domain, there’s a madman in the monastery!
It also occurred to me that tenor sax, which plays a dominant role on these 1960s records, may have had a period of waning in 1960s popular music, between for instance the Coasters and the era-defining solos and trademarks of mid-1970s hits such as “Born To Run,” “Baker Street” and “Still Crazy After All These Years.” Is there a missing term, does anyone know, between King Curtis and Bobby Keyes? Also, is there any wailing sax in the popular music of the last 35 years or so?
Oh, and has “Rock And Roll Music,” source of the coinage “wailing sax,” ever been recorded with a sax?!
PAUL CARRACK
I decided to take a break from the novel and luxuriate in an intimately known favorite. Suburban Voodoo offered me most of what scant joy I experienced in my 19th year, and has remained a sentimental milestone. These things are worth re-appraising every ten or twenty years, though, and it’s coming up on 40, incredibly. It was no surprise that I could see a bit more clearly into the gears of the machine than I could back in college. The players -- Martin Belmont, James Eller, Bobby Irwin, and Carrack -- sound like they were at a magic crossroads of historical awareness and youthful vigor in the year 1982. Thirty is evidently where it all comes together. Experience and energy intersect so as to grant you once-in-a-lifetime superskills. Loving American soul but not so obsessively that you can’t distill it with some personal humor. Designing exacting and elaborate arrangements, but playing them with as much grace as if this time was the first time.
This is the kind of record that sounds as though people went away overnight leaving things in place for the next day. A small group of men, playing an instrument apiece and sounding very consistent. My guess is that it was tracked in 5 or 6 days (which would be fairly fast given the detailwork in the arrangements). Then organ overdubs, and one or two days of backing vocal pads. Carrack’s voice is still thrilling to hear, both on old recordings and now. His singing is singularly ill-suited to pitch correction, I believe. In place of the melismas that most professional singers deliver, he glides over small distances with a casual blur that evokes poetic, Zeno-esque infinity. I discerned a couple just-off-center notes, wonderful little flaws that stand out more in our current insane era than they did in 1982, to my ears at least.
I still don’t like the one song I didn’t like then, “Call Me Tonight.” And I must say that the record’s shriek-of-the-mutilated EQ and clattery intensity began to weary my droopy old ears before the album was done. Headbanging days are done.
MAL WALDRON
Now here’s a mystical master! Waldron’s pianistic power mystifies me a little, because the road to his power runs through strategies that are opposite to those of many masters. His touch doesn’t sound refined, elegant, easygoing, or effortless -- not primarily it doesn’t; it sounds cool, watchful, reined-in, like the leash from brain to fingers is tight, as it were. The self-monitoring is scrupulous. There’s a lot of repetition, including repetitions of phrases that in themselves don’t always seem that fresh (“In order to be very clear in my mind where I am going I have to repeat it,” he said in an interview with The Nation.) There’s a strong awareness of sensibilities two generations and more behind him. I’m not a jazz player needless to say, but I know that this putting-your-money-where-your-mouth-is is rare and hard to achieve in bluegrass music, where there’s a lot of professed admiration for, say, Lester Flatt, or Benny Martin, or Josh Graves, and yet no one sounds like they’re seriously using those ideas to form a living style. If anyone really sounded like that, they’d sound crazy!
I think an embrace of the artistic past -- not just historical curiosity but an openness to simplicity and repetition, a humility before the ancestors and a willingness to bridge the distance of decades in order to take on the ideas and environmental influences of the dead -- relates, in Mal’s case, to the black consciousness of his era. 1917 to 1925 saw the birth of Mingus, Monk, Parker, Waldron, and John Lewis, all of whom seem/sound to me to have heroic arms outstretched linking the world of Jelly Roll Morton to that of John Coltrane. None of these men leapfrogged self-confidently over the blues, but instead put their bodies and minds in its service. They found a way, against the odds and often at much cost and sacrifice, to balance needs that were unlike and often in conflict: innovating, honoring the past, displaying individual DNA amply but not obnoxiously, earning global respect, and -- ta-da! --making money.
I picked Mal’s 1966 All Alone album since I had never heard him that way, only backing Billie Holiday or Eric Dolphy or leading small groups. Also because I was morbidly curious as to how he sounded directly after his breakdown and shock treatments. His incarceration destroyed his piano knowledge, which he regained over years by memorizing and transcribing recorded piano playing -- including, wildly, yet sensibly, his own. The pre-breakdown The Quest is a record full of thrilling and unique music that is hard to turn away from. The post-breakdown All Alone sounds to me like a slightly warier version of the same guy. He’s ensconced in a minor-key world, and plays as though fascinated by its fundamental elements, flatted thirds and sevenths and fifths, hitting them with precision and, as I said, repeating non-showy phrases whenever he feels like it. In fact his style is so non-showy that you’re 9 or 10 minutes in before you hear anything explicitly crowd-pleasing -- a speedy passage, a dissonant cluster. Suddenly I pictured myself walking past a building in (of all places) Malmo, Sweden, and hearing this piano playing as it escaped gently from a high window where a talented student was practicing. That may sound condescending or back-handed, but it’s intended as an admiring tribute to a player who made sure, as he progressed in the industry and grew his reputation, not to sacrifice the holy spark of the amateur.
SIERRA HULL
I filled with gladness from the very the start of this record. It’s far ahead of Secrets, Sierra’s 2008 record, which I liked but which in my view was too solidly staked to stylistic ground broken by Alison Krauss 20 years earlier. In a real sense Miss Hull has travelled farther these last 10 years than she did her first 18 -- and of course that was the period in which she went from diapers to the most accomplished young mandolinist in Nashville. Her latest release, 25 Trips, is crammed with startling rhythmic and dynamic inventions -- crammed with ideas, ideas that didn’t simply float into the room, ideas that are the rewards of committed engagement with fellow players and with music far from her nominal specialty.
People my age, as I’ve noticed from gossiping with them, can get confused by these younger players. Do they play “bluegrass” in any sense, or are they just fucking around with creative-writing-workshop songs and talent-competition speed chops? A loaded question! There is indeed some kind of line that runs from the hard-hitting wood-splitting Monroe Brothers, through the smoother second generation, and thence to the ecstatic free-soloing newgrassers, and ultimately to...now. But the line is twisting and hard to define, and the endpoint sounds so little like point A that using one name for all this seems bound to produce little but confusion.
That you can lose sight of musicality and communicative value in the almighty quest for speed is obviously true; but hearing this point made repeatedly by musicians getting too old to keep up also makes you suspicious. Maybe we’re just fading, envious cranks? Safer to say, most of us north-of-50 types have a very hazy idea of the kind of music that’s influencing young acoustic players these days, and so should be careful not to criticize their music for failing to achieve what it’s not trying to.
OLA BELLE REED
I checked in on her 1972 Rounder record. Her vocal range is masculine and her songwriting is deep and ecumenical. A bias that needs correcting, including in myself, can sometimes creep into listening: All that person did was live hard then open her mouth, all the recordist did was throw up a microphone, and so on. As profound as the effect on the listener may be, the mechanics are obvious, simple, unyielding to analysis, and not all that relevant to artists with subtler minds and vaster resources. For some reason I recall a letter someone wrote to No Depression magazine about an anthology record in the early 2000s: “Of course Norman Blake made a fine-sounding Norman Blake song,” she said, contrasting him against artists that seemed to her more original and experimental. “That’s what Norman Blake does.” Like milk from a cow.
Something about this is true, but it’s not the patronizing dismissal. All of us in music should aspire to become the kinds of people that receive and transmit tone and rhythm and some specifics about our ancestry, without seeming to calculate, without straining lustfully toward “originality” -- an idolatry of our age. The humility we learn will, among other benefits, inoculate us against the assumption that impressive outcomes from previous technological periods resulted from less intelligence, labor, or skill. The vocal on Ole Belle’s record is as about as well-balanced against the instrumentation as Kacey’s is on her record, and, without further information, a good default assumption about both women’s writing is that the behind-the-curtain inspiration and editing drew on like proportions of feeling, experience, luck, and labor.
It hadn’t occurred to me that “Rosewood Casket” is the template for Wynn Stewart’s “Wishful Thinking.”
MARTHA CARSON
MATTIE, MARTHIE, AND MINNIE
JEAN CHAPEL
The young mandolinist Scott Gates tipped me off to some 1944 Charlie Monroe radio recordings, and I became instantly curious about the banjoist in the group, Helen Osborne, since it was good playing by someone I hadn’t heard of, and a woman. A few minutes’ googling led me to a fascinating piece by Mike Seeger, “In Praise of Banjo Picking Women.” Seeger surveys documentary evidence from the 19th century, and audio recordings from the 20th, to give a thumbnail semi-speculative sketch of the banjo’s journey from a handmade African tool to a mainstay of white hillbilly commerce. His account of lady banjoists winds through Elizabeth Cotton and Hattie Stoneman, into the radio era with Cousin Emmy and Lily Mae Ledford, and into wartime with Mattie O’Neal and Ms. Osborne, also known as Katy Hill.
The confusion within the story of “Mattie, Marthie, and Minnie” is hinted at in Mike’s sentence that begins: “Jean Chapel (Mattie O’Neal), one of the Amburgey (Amber) sisters from Neon, Kentucky...” Hillbillymusic.com offers an admirably detailed history of the sisters. If you care to pore over it, you can learn about their efforts to escape poverty via music, their years of fitful progress and setback, their many goofy name changes, and the various genre nooks they got snagged by. After reading Seeger’s piece I wanted to hear Opal Amburgey a/k/a “Mattie” play the banjo, and thanks to the excellent Internet I quickly lighted upon “You Can’t Live With ‘Em (And You Can’t Live Without ‘Em” b/w “Tennessee Memories” on youtube. (The video title and the sung lyrics are “we can’t live...” but the King label reads “you.”) Rockin’ clawhammer! And a cool song, in the direction of Maddox Brothers hair-down humor -- it doesn’t get all the way to that Maddox looseness, but there’s definitely enough charisma and strict-rehearsed talent to make you yearn for more recorded work, which evidently doesn’t exist.
Irene Amburgey a/k/a Marthie a/k/a Martha Carson (probably a/k/a either Martha or Irene plus Roberts or Cossé, the surnames of her two husbands) has been a figure of interest to me for a few reasons. Her duets with James Roberts (he plays an A model mandolin, she plays a Martin whose body size I can’t tell from the grainy photos and her comparative size) are outstanding. Her big song “Satisfied” is of course a classic, and a few others that have crossed my ears like “I Bowed Down” are yet wilder and hipper. Finally, I’ll be honest, she’s pageant-grade as far as looks.
A major downside of Spotify is that it offers no information about what you’re hearing -- players, producer, publisher, lyrics -- and the little that it does show -- year of release -- has a capricious relation to reality, to put it kindly. Martha is represented by one album, titled Satisfied And Other Greats. It’s in large part an upsetting display of a vocalist flailing against intervals, pitch, and easy-read confidence. When is it from? Sometimes you hear Chet Atkins playing in his rocking 1950s style, and sometimes you hear close-up drumming that indicates a later year and hence a remake. Was she ill during a few of these sessions? Or have I misjudged her talent based on duo singing, a couple solid recordings, and an attractive timbre? Where’s Deke Dickerson when you need him?
Opal Amburgey found some rock-and-roll success under the name Jean Chapel. I listened to a little of this after Martha. Same strange and husky timbre as her sister (all else aside, that timbre is an arresting positive!), and surer pitch, from the recorded evidence I heard.
MERLE HAGGARD
If you’re young and reading this, I might recommend you do what I did -- purposely avoid listening to all the records of your favorite people until later in life, so you’ll have a few safe “discoveries” stocked away. My blind spot on Merle’s enormous discography has always been the approximate 1975-1982 frame. In those years there was a lot of contemporary non-country that strongly hooked me, mainly British new wave and American rock-and-roll. By the time I got smart enough to become seriously interested in country, the mid-1980s, I focused on then-current stars, like Dwight Yoakam, and the historically august figures, which provided the most efficient educational platform. Meanwhile, the 1970s got right past me, and so did some great Merle music -- MCA Records, Clint Eastwood movies, the fading of Roy Nichols and the appearance of Clint Strong, the Leona Williams drama. I knew a dozen songs like “Footlights” and “It’s Been A Great Afternoon,” and loved them so much that I felt sure I was delaying some serious gratification. So it proved.
Back to the Barrooms is notable for its drumming: Larrie Londin, Jerry Kroon, and Bob Gallardo. Sadly, I don’t know who is who track-to-track. The close-mic’d intense grooves of “Can’t Break the Habit” and “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here And Drink” (and let’s credit Joe Osborn for completing the amazing rhythm section) make these songs’ power just undeniable. It’s easy to imagine the Strangers that participated in the sessions all raising their game in the presence of Larrie et al -- Norm Hamlet’s opening chords on “Misery and Gin” are some of the best pedal steel playing of his (or anyone’s) career. Reggie Young is another shot in the arm, and it’s wonderful to hear how he hints at Nichols’ phrasing, inserts his own eccentricities, and keeps his cool all at once. I suspect Reggie’s preference for the studio over the road contributed to the steady mental focus that his performances consistently show.
I should be ashamed to report, especially since I love Tommy Collins about as much as I do Merle, that I never listened to “Leonard” until last week. No surprise to say that it brought tears to my eyes and I had to pull over. This is writing that bowls you over with its lack of pretension. A dense (3:37 and no breaks), warts-and-all account of the talents and tribulations of a friend, Leonard Sipes a/k/a Tommy Collins (who knows, maybe his real name was Amburgey) with a modest public profile, the song is full of cover-preventative lines (“he wrote a lot of country songs for me”) and meta touches (“you’ll know which town I mean by the time I’m through,” “Somehow I had to write a song for old Tommy/If just to see the smiling faces in the band”). The privileging of the relatable over the autobiographically specific is solidly ingrained in country lyric-writing for clear reasons (reasons that aren’t discreditable simply because they align with commercial motive). The odd, intimate, and non-relatable details and subject matter that have insistently featured in the writing of the so-called outlaws have ended up as one of their most valuable contributions to the art. “Me and Paul”; “shot a man there in the head, but can’t talk too much about it”; “My name is Jerry Lee Lewis, come from Louisiana”; “we need some celery and a can of fake snow”; “It’ll all clear up in 11 months and 29 days”; “this song’s about the night they spent protecting you from me.” These aren’t exactly lyrics that plunge homo sapiens into a lukewarm bath of togetherness. Merle allowed the wild dogs of personal indulgence to roam unleashed through the forty-plus years of his writing. It’s the sort of writing that is a jolting antidote to blue eyes, pickup trucks, slammed doors, broken hearts, and other cut-and-paste depressants.
Then there’s “The Immigrant,” from I’m Always On A Mountain When I Fall. If your impression of Hag’s politics comes from the rabble-rousing of his first recorded decade or the where-the-hell-did-America-go grumbling of his last, you have to stop reading this and listen to “The Immigrant.” Not only is the point-of-view boldly anti-ideological, the rhymes are pretty astounding. The credited co-writer is Dave Kirby -- wonder exactly how he’s reflected here.
Save up some gold nuggets. You never know when you might be 57 and driving alone through the desert.
DELMORE BROTHERS
Of all the gut-tingling delights offered by music, one of the top in my book is hearing a flattop guitar pulled in close to a ribbon microphone, as part of a recording session in which mics weren’t dedicated to instruments one-to-one. For me it’s like when Cary Grant bursts into the frame and Ralph Bellamy and everyone else vanish into the background. I knew about 100 of the Delmores’ pre-1950s recordings but only 8 or 10 past that, so I got caught up. You can better appreciate their two voices in full on the later records -- there’s better gear, and they seem to be doing a bit more solo singing. “Mississippi Shore” is a song I wanted to learn at once upon hearing it, but I’m not sure what to do with the parts about pickaninnies and darkies.
BIG THREE TRIO
There’s not much of Willie Dixon’s cool launchpad trio on Spotify. Some of it is semi-controlled chaos but all of it has killer piano playing courtesy of Leonard Caston. I kept thinking about Willie performing forced cunnilingus on a fat prison guard. When he was 12 he spent a year at Ball Ground, a labor farm in Mississippi, as he recounts in his memoir, I Am The Blues. (Kind thanks to Robbie Gjersoe for texting me a link full of grotesqueries and brutalities.)
DOLLY PARTON
Dumb Blonde, her first record. Who is this close to finished at age 21? Witty wordplays, storylines hinging on compelling adult paradoxes, lyric structures and melodies hewing tightly to tradition but studded with the surprising little inventions and add-ons that extraordinarily fertile minds such as hers seem to manufacture with ease. And the pure voice -- and the humorous attitude -- and the good looks -- I mean, the whole package, fresh out of the backwoods. How the women of the Opry must have hated her!
Here’s the playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6Ejy3Z5hMLH2bqjKW3SLd5