Whit's Blog / 1000 Recordings

Southern Rocks

I've spent the last two weeks buried in Southern Rock selections from 1000 Recordings. That's included Lucinda Williams, The Band (OK, most of them are Canadian, but they do have Levon Helm, and furthermore they sing The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down like they mean it), Derek and the Dominoes, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Steve Earle, The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and ZZ Top.

Let me make something clear. If the South should rise again -- which I think we can all agree would be a really bad idea, for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which is The Varsity chili-cheese dog incident -- then ZZ Top will have to play the anthem, because 'most all the other candidates would be sitting around with their feet swinging off the back of the pick-up truck and wondering if they could stay awake until they started selling beer again Sunday afternoon. (Which they could, because Southerners like myself put the "mo" in "motivate," and don't youse forget it.)

What I will say about these most memorable recordings, these historic recordings, in Southern Rock, is that I think we can all applaud the natural death of the jamfest. When I was in high school? I TOTALLY DID NOT GET THE ALLMAN BROTHERS. I used to do a fabulous imitation of the Allman Brothers' classic rendition of "Whipping Post," in which I would scream "TIED" and then wait, like, a day, and then scream "TO THE WHIPPING POST." And then I would wait, probably, a week, and then I would suddenly start screaming "OH LORD I FEEL" and then I would wait for winter to go by, and then I would scream "OH LORD I FEEL" and then spring would pass, and the corn would be a foot high, and then I would scream "OH LORD I FEEL LIKE I'M DYING." At which point I would slash my naked chest with a broken bourbon bottle and pass out. Which was, on balance and across the board, a very good thing.

But now that I am grown up, I have the perspective of a half-finished life (rather more than that, barring some sort of liver ex machina, as the Greeks say), and I can tell you that from this more mature perspective, I TOTALLY DO NOT GET THE ALLMAN BROTHERS. In point of fact, if you listen to Layla (and other hummana hummana), then listen to this Allman Brothers record that Moon recommends, what you hear is the difference between celebrity jam music and tight, solid music that we can all listen to and grasp for its excellence and purity. Or Bonnie Raitt. Bonnie Raitt, on her worst day -- on the day when she gets up and has a psychotic episode in which she imagines herself to be the place where I burned my arm on the heating element under the sandwich table on the back line at Hardee's, which you can still kind of see if you hold my arm the right way, that makes me look weird and like I am flagging a cab in the sewer; you see it on my arm, that is, because the Hardee's is gone -- on that day, Bonnie Raitt still kicks the Allmans in the head with her pointed boot.

Southern Rock, in fact, I will say this: Southern Rock is meant to sound sloppy, and lax, and slaphappy. And some of it -- let's say, The Allman Brothers record here -- is in fact, sloppy. It may be talent? But it is sloppy, flappity, unsmart and self-indulgent. And some of it is artfully, perfectly, slickly sloppy and about as random as a Clash rocker's haircut.

I have listened to "Free Bird" more in the last two weeks than I had in any two weeks since 1978. After doing that, I have come away with a depth of respect for those particular wild-eyed Southern boys than I had when I was younger and had not applied myself to meaningful, intelligent hero worship. I have heard Bonnie Raitt delightfully try on a wide variety of styles on this early record, long before the moment when I heard her in Applebee's and could tell she was who she was with just a few slide guitar notes, and that was fun, too. And you can't say enough about Creedence -- no one can -- and the way that k-Tel commercial on afternoon TV made us feel like we'd missed something, because Lord knows we had, in fact, missed something very important indeed. You know? Not sure I got the Steve Earle thing. Steve Earle -- great voice, interesting stuff. Not a Huge Fan.

Allow me to take a moment now and just say it again: Z. Z. Top.

I saw ZZ Top at the Norfolk Scope. I think. It was either the Scope or William and Mary Hall. (It seems unlikely that King William and Queen Mary foresaw ZZ Top, but then who could, really?) It was their Paginator tour, I think, or maybe it was the In-Sink-Erator tour. The one with the keychain. (Did you feel bad for the kids who got that keychain? Heaven knows I did.) ZZ Top ripped it open. I remember we got, like, 12 people from the front. (This was back when you counted how many people you got from the front. As in, "Dude! We were 12 people from the front! My eardrums changed color!" I was, like, 18 people from the front when Aerosmith reunited. This was, at the time, like being the third person into McCrory's on the day after Thanksgiving.)

The discipline, and the history, and the clarity that Top (did you call them "Top"? We called them "Top" -- like they lived around the corner and were a kid you called by his last name, because that was just how we rolled, us and "Top") brought to music, and probably still do, was marvelous. They were Southern Rock, even though -- That's Right -- they were from Texas. There was this precision-ground THING going on. It sounded like the world was on fire. I remember, still, right now, what it sounded like. It sounded like electric slop, but was straight, tight, chords on chords on chords. It was perfect Southern Rock.

Y'all oughta listen to La Grange again. As Moon says, it was a riff they lifted off of John Lee Hooker, and it was tight like a bottle cap. Open it up and let it fizz. (How many "z's" in fizz?)

Field Trip

I have been listening to a great deal of soul, and I find that very strange indeed, because I did not care much for soul when I was first introduced to it. The thing is that the kid who turned me onto soul was a preacher's kid, and he sat in the back of Algebra class, and he was rude and crass and also immensely appealing as a Charon into real life, although that was mostly not because of the positively quadratic porn that the teacher took away from him one day.

When he was not spitting his four removable teeth at his close friend, who sat unfortunately on my other side and therefore slightly out of reach of the mouth-flung teeth and the spittle that inevitably followed and preceded them, he would sometimes hold forth on things he liked. One of these things was, in fact, funk.

He explained to me that what I needed to was listen to more Earth Wind & Fire. And so I bought the best of Earth Wind, & Fire when I got a gift certificate to Peaches Records & Tapes, which was way the heck out on Broad Street in what is probably now the inner city of Richmond. (Ampersands were all the rage. It was 1979.)

I listened. And I thought perhaps I had bought the wrong record. It was unimaginable that this would be the Great Music he was talking about all the time. (Now, mind you, I am now listening to a singularly and intentionally filthy and numbskull single by a BAND called Peaches titled "**** the Pain Away." So my standards have rather fallen.)

Now, today, I have been listening again, thanks to the 1000 recordings book. Nor have I settled in Earth Wind & Fire, or taken refuge in Ray Charles and refused to come out. I have listened to Erykah Badu, which is possibly the finest soul I have heard made since 1980 (Michael Jackson set aside for study purposes), and Ruth Brown, and Aretha, lord, Aretha, who still takes paint right off the computer where it was baked on by little elves somewhere. The Jackson Five, and The Supremes, and Etta James, the greatest underrated singer the world has ever known. Les Nubians. Did everyone know about Les Nubians but me? Could someone, perhaps, get for me a witness? OK, straight up, I hear that it's an uneven record, but when they hit, wow. And War, and Minnie Riperton.

I have cut through a deep stretch of meadow and it is flat magnificent to reconnect with this tradition. What a pleasure, what a delight, what a deep rich history, so brief and so textured.

Then I lucked into a field trip!

I happened to click on a new release on my music subscription provider, and was delivered to some fascinating work, what's now called "blue-eyed soul," and which I think should simply be called "soul," as I believe that funk sees no color. Or, perhaps, it would be better to say that funk sees every color, all the time, all day long and all night. In any event, Nikki Costa is deeply, and effectively, informed by all the stripes of funk and soul and R&B that I have been listening to for weeks. She is young -- so young! -- and on her third record. I went to a mall to hear her, at a mall in the chilly hinterlands of Foxborough, a mall in the development around the gargantuan stadium where the Pats play, where they served bourbon in plastic cups. (Be careful ordering bourbon in the North: The nice bartender lady tried to bring me Southern Comfort. I nearly struck the bottle from her hand.)

Costa was tight, sharp, and generously fierce. She brought seven musicians -- seven! -- and when they weren't enough she sat down and played drums herself while the regular drummer worked harder still. The trombone player, lord have mercy, she played like Hades in a test tube. It's one of those things where you say, hey, I bet all the trombone players would like to play like that, and then she hit about the third solo of the night, and she about threw out her elbow swinging, and it sounded fantastic, this foot-stomping, hammer-and-tongs trombone, the kind of thing that they DID NOT TEACH IN MARCHING BAND. We are talking here about a transformative tromboning strategy.

I was delighted. We are ALL delighted. The musicians -- did I say there were seven? seven musicians IN A MALL STOREFRONT? -- the musicians were universally smash tight, and Costa herself was on, mugging and grinding and shouting and howling down into a sparse front without nearly enough people in it, and I swear, it was first class. She had control; she had the willingness to climb way out on the limb and try to break it, she hit her squeals right where she aimed them. She rocked back and forth, and giggled, and she pumped up her people and brought out their best. She was a consummate, as they say, show woman, mostly in her own material but also in a fine if blurry cover of The White Stripes' "The Denial Twist" (at least that's where I know it from).

The biggest joy, though, without question, was to hear Etta, and Janis, and all of them, tearing into it with such heart, coming out her mouth like a skull out a zombie. (Hmm, perhaps not the very best analogy available. It's a long post. Why are you still reading it?)  What luck live music is. No performance can really be in the 1000 -- not until it's over. But it's always, always worth going on a field trip.

Elegies and more elegies

When I first started listening to rock, Rod Stewart's voice already sounded affected, gender-neutral and ridiculous. By the MTV era, when I started to buy myself records, he seemed absurd, a has-been. It took Alex's mid-1980s suggestion of the work that Stewart had done with Jeff Beck, on Truth and Beck-Ola, to hear it fresh, without the glam and the comeback haircut and the self-deprecation that seemed like so much pandering. The last few days, I've been listening to Every Picture Tells A Story, and it's been a lovely reminder of Stewart's relative youth, when he sounded a little like Janis Joplin and a LOT like Cat Stevens, at least to my ear. All these singers had that sort of determinedly hoarse, gentle or belty  (sell it! sell it!) sound, and it interests me that they sort of clustered then, in the early 1970s, reinterpreting what it meant to be a pop singer. What I am hearing, I guess, is a kind of ur-Tom Waits, the idea that the blues singers like Billie and Son House had made so clear in that genre -- the voice doesn't need to be liquid to be lovely.

"Maggie May" is still a charming song, no matter how hackneyed it may sound, now. Listen to it again, make believe you never heard it before, and you'll hear Stewart all over again.

Banish Nostalgia

The other night, at the end of the evening, I started listening to Tea for the Tillerman, in the dark. Joe came in, awake and not so much awake, and got in my bed, and asked when I was going to go to sleep. So, feeling all "Cat's the the Cradle" and the silver spoon, I got in bed too. And I didn't get back to Stevens for a few nights. I've been wandering around in some mighty different stuff at my uncle's suggestion and it's been fun. But tonight I came back to Stevens.

First off: I don't care what he's done since. Stevens is a musician, or at least he was (and is again, the clerk at the local video store tells me), and I am not in the religion or the religion subdivision business. Stevens made music. I used to like it, when I was a teenager and looking for someone to help me feel whole. And it turns out, that all these years gone, I still like the music. A little I felt like I was in the old Ford Escort or, before, the VW Rabbit, but not entirely. (Well, now he's playing "Father and Son" -- I'm not made of stone.)

It's lovely to find the music lasts for me. I remember teachers sneering, or quizzical, asking "Do you REALLY think Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin will last like Mozart?" I remember arguing, yes, this song, but maybe not that one. I remember doing a paper on Mussorgsky and his work, and reflecting that not all of his songs were immortal. I remember saying: We don't know.

Stevens won't last forever, either. He'll peel off when Croce and James Taylor are still audible. Joe probably won't find Stevens in his copy of 1000 Recordings, umpteenth edition, which I hope to buy for him some day. But it's lovely work, precious to hear, and to apply myself to now. I'm more complicated than this music (and so is Yusuf Islam, I hear), and it's wonderful to have the stone to touch again.

[Adding later: Now I remember, too -- I just listened to the first part of this record. Tape. Probably more tape than record. Still like it -- but mostly the first part.]

Whip that axe

Via Tom Moon himself.

Aja

I'll never be able to write anything that touches this brilliant work. It's like perfect aliens reverse-engineered jazz and extruded the results once then plunged into the sun, satisfied, the happy last of their decadent race.

Synthesis

Over the weekend, while Joe slipped in and out of real fever dreams (he got up to 103 at one point -- the kid runs hot), I slipped in and out of my own, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, the first LP I ever listened to front to back on headphones. I remember sitting and listening to it absolutely all the way, breathing through my mouth with nerves when I flipped the record, as it was (of course) a friend's Dad's stereo, back when the mere existence of two speakers demanded respect -- and the size of the speakers was a a strong indicator of their value.

In fact, I touched the record this time off and on for a week, listening to it for the first time when I saw Rick Wright was dead, then again on the way back from a conference in Los Angeles. I still marvel at the stellar power of "The Great Gig In The Sky," smirk at "Money" (which was what passed for profundity before I had a driver's license), and sit flat on the ground for "Eclipse" and "Breathe" and "Brain Damage." What I wonder at now is that this ever sounded iconoclastic or "bad" (that's "bad" meaning "good"), that it ever seemed like something the good kids wouldn't pick. This is is tame now, and consequently, maybe, more accessible in its most meaningful layers. The lyrics and the samples are more affecting now, drifting up from the time capsule. It's a lovely, sweet document from the vault, a gentle bit of unremarkable poetry from the pens of gentle men who found themselves with a vast stage and a vaster audience.

What it led me back to, via the book, was Tangerine Dream's Rubycon, which I remember buying in a stack of records from Plan 9, along with whatever else was there. I suspect Rubycon had a good review from Dave Marsh, on whom I relied for much of my selections, thanks to a guide my parents had bought me. I liked a fair amount of Tangerine Dream, but not this, if memory serves -- I think I found it "bloodless space music," to quote from memory Marsh's review of Jean-Michel Jarre. And listening to it now, what I hear is much more compelling, but also much weirder. There's a sameness to the layers of sound, an undifferentiated sort of metamorphed thick ambery syrup. It's like there was much more difference when the tracks were laid down, but then they were fused, and now we can only tell there are different tracks because we can see them, but they sound the same. Or we can't see the difference, but we can hear it.

Rubycon doesn't even have the decency to be a concept album -- it's two tracks, Side One and Side Two, and there's no more sense to the division than among the four dual tracks of a stereo 8-track. It's a compelling loop, though, and I found myself treating it like a long walk -- the kind where you're walking a familiar trail and thinking, "right, I remember this bend -- around it is that hill, no, wait, around this bend is the hill, or maybe the next bend, or the one after that, there it is, the hil -- wow, this is a pretty walk." I listened six or seven times in the weekend, which is probably more times than I ever listened to the record when I owned it (bet I didn't get 10 cents for it when I finally let it go -- ebay where wert thy sting?).

Like and Because

Brazilian pop is cool like the cool you feel on sunburn when you slip into the shade of a dune. There's the warmth, this time, there underneath the sudden sweet chill that's only there on the surface. I've been listening to Elis Regina's "Como & porque" for a few cycles, and I'm enchanted as always by the ripply, blissful Brazilian pop sound from the era at hand.

Hey, Punk

On the clock tonight.

Damn Right, I Got Blues

I have spent the last two days bouncing around in a few of the 1000 that are focused on blues, following the suggested paths that Moon provides, touching ground at Blind Willie Johnson, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Son House, Robert Johnson, Howling Wolf, the Reverend Gary Davis ("Reverend" is part of his name on my music subscription service, as if he were born a preacher), Sister Rosetta Tharpe. All of it started when I stepped in the Blues river at John Lee Hooker and starting wading.

I don't listen to this stuff. It's not that i don't like it -- it's that it all sounds THE SAME. Until you listen to it side-by-side, that is. Then, gradually, textures emerge. The axis of sound quality is not to be underplayed -- I'm delighted that a scholar can collect innovative power from a recording that sounds like a 45-rpm record retrieved from a gravel pit, but I can't. The more clear the production, the better off I am.

Which is what happened when I smashed into Son House "singing" "John the Revelator," which I could then compare to Blind Willie Johnson singing the same song, and which I could compare to House's earlier work as presented on the recording Moon suggests. That earlier work -- and presumably he sang "John the Revelator" then too, but it's not on the specific recording suggested is presumably even less schooled and so, perhaps, more raw and fierce, but less textured in the ear and so less convincing. Whereas "John the Revelator" is like the Book of Revelations balled up and drenched in gasoline and hawked at the wall.

Not every track captivated me in all these collections, and I listened to many of them many times. But Son House is a name I have heard, and now I know why. I have been listening to people play, and now that I am in and listening to this deeply, I am beginning to realize how it is all connected, all pulled together in a tradition. I was just now hearing Blind Willie Johnson play "The Rain Don't Fall On Me" while I got on the phone to talk to someone about a reservation, and when I got off, I heard myself whistling "Peggy Sue" between my teeth. I realized, belatedly, that i was being shown the connection -- that the rhythms of this Delta blues, that this extremely deep, genuine roots music was not very far at all from Holly's work. That Holly, the dork of tutti dorks, was more than onto something -- that he was a Brubeck of rock, capable of seeing things -- or hearing them -- with a new ear.

And the House. My word. What you've heard on O Brother Where Art Thou -- the tracks with the greatest prowess, the muscle in "O, Death" -- it's all there in the House. It's all there in these masterful, ragged, grinding explications of angst and need. (You probably thought, "Good Morning, Little School Girl" was kinda racy. Once you hear Fred McDowell sing it, chances are you are just going to home school your daughters until they're, like, 40.)

Everything in this work, in these works, is richly delivered. The oldest are the most amazing, because you know they're happening in makeshift studios, in shacks and plastered buildings, without that sense we have now -- that Music From Big Pink feeling -- that this is the Big Chance. Here, in these oldest recordings, the sense is that what's being saved is precious, but there couldn't have been any sense that it was anything like singing to a room of 100 people, or 200 people, or for a night with a woman (or women) or in a church of 1000 or aon a Harlem streetcorner on a Saturday afternoon. But, lord, how deep they run.