Whit's Blog / 1000 Recordings

3 more than an M80

After a couple days of working with my friends' suggestions for a playlist for an upcoming trip, I returned to 1000 Recordings tonight with M83. One endearing thing about a Moby concert I saw about four years ago was that he referred, wryly, to his songs in succession as "yet another anthemic techno song" and "yet another" and "yet another" and so forth. It's true -- techno slides toward the anthemic. I listened to M83 with a sense that I was traveling parallel slopes, one down, one up, frequently in the music.

With thanks to jm3 via flickr for the embeddable image.

There was a Portishead sort of gloomy shadow but it was balanced by an Oldfield kind of crescendic (look that up in your Funk & Wagnall's) swirl at the same time. I liked the way it worked. It felt good. I WORKED HARDER AND HARDER. And I was glad, too, because I had just skipped across a new Flo Rida single with vocoder -- can someone please tweet @KanyeWest and tell him he has a lot to answer for this year? -- and it was good to get back to that Laurie Anderson/Mike Oldield proper vocodage. I miss Radiohead. I want more Radiohead.

Tight Bludge

Been listening to The Modern Lovers. It's captivating, because I read Moon's explanation that these were the seeds of punk, that the recordings represent a sort of garage-hip experiment that serve as a foundation for the anger-driven punk that came shortly after.

Painted wall and ceiling
Originally uploaded by Cordelia Roberts

There's not much anger here, even in "Pablo Picasso," which I learned from the Repo Man soundtrack, mostly because the word we all know is in it was in it. I'm listening now to the Bowie version of "Pablo Picasso," which sounds rattly and haphazard after The Modern Lovers -- not because it is, but because their studio original is perfectly driven and solid.I have to say, "I'm Straight" is as heartbreaking as any given stalker song I can think of -- and let's face it, they usually are. Sort of. Hmm -- better leave that there and move on.

I did some punk earlier in this listening progress, and liked what I heard, again -- much more accessible than it had been when I was younger and trying to sort things out. The Modern Lovers sounds, again, like a treasure I wish someone had told me about before. The truth is, though, that without the perspective, I wouldn't have known what i was hearing or what to interpret. It's disaffected bludge, and not that far off some of the punk-driven rock we heard 10 and 20 years after.

But! Moon recommends that one follow it with Talking Heads '77, which i did, and then the few records later of Remain In Light, and things begin to make more sense. We can hear the conflation of art rock with punk -- what brings us to the Mars Volta, which I'll get back to shortly, and the hammer of punk mixed with the Heads' axe sounds much more meaningful. It also elevates Harrison's status in the Heads' shriek factor, because Harrison was in the Modern Lovers and, presumably, brought his rhythmic, atonal (that's not what I mean), bullethead organ (that's what I mean) from the Modern Lovers to the Heads.

Remain in Light brings Adrian Belew in, and the strange fanged will-o-the-wisps he fires into the mix start to drag the Heads, or him, into a much stranger place where things get weirder very fast, and then you get all kinds of things going rightly wrong at once. So now I get the Modern Lovers, and the Heads. It all makes sense. 

Laid her burden down

(Image via ILIGHT on flickr)

Today was the first day I really listened to Odetta, I admit. It is a rare case of a recording that I have to have put in place from a historical perspective before I can fully appreciate it. I tried listening a ways back, when I was coursing through 1000 Recordings' gospel and blues, and turned away after the first few tracks on the record. This time, with Odetta's passage, I stuck with the record. It seemed to me that the first few tracks are more formally presented -- measured, studio-centric, calm and frankly unthreatening. It's almost as if she's establishing her credentials, setting herself apart specifically and carefully from "race music." Or, if not setting herself apart from it, providing the proof that her interpretation of music is mature and not to be seen as sloppy or unschooled.

Just a few tracks in, though, "Another Man Done Gone" shares the tune and unsettling, searching rhythm with "Baby Please Don't Go," the spectacularly popular song that John Lee Hooker ultimately established in the public consciousness. She claps solidly and bravely. It's clear she's drawing on folk tradition. By the time she's jubilantly strummed her fierce way through the record to "God's Gonna Cut You Down," which I knew only from Moby's version, she's letting her passion show through into her voice, and she's established her formal mastery of the folk form. That track, as the first track, would have created a much looser record, much more frightening for a traditionalist used to conventional music.

Placing this in the context of the civil rights movement makes perfect sense. Now I understand her power: A crossover artist with what was, then, largely unprecedented social impact.

Vivid But Only Translucent Genius

I listened a couple of times this morning to Rock Bottom, a solo album by Robert Wyatt. I spent years in my teens muddling around with the art rock musicians who had been active 10 years before, including the stellar line-up on the Wyatt record. I had a copy of the New Rock Record, essentially a print-out of a vast database of session musician and headliner work that allowed you to look up any musician and see all the records they had appeared on, and I went through it virtuoso by virtuoso. I particularly liked Steve Hunter, a guitarist whom I thought lost even to Google, but in fact who has a new record out!

All of that aside. What I'm trying to say (and doing rather more circuitously, even, than usual) is that there is a whole world of music in the small art-rock genre down there in the hole with this Wyatt record. I could listen to the genre frequently enough so that some of the playing in the tracks actually made me laugh, as I could perceive the wit in the playing (not in the lyrics, which I found generally to be heavy and unremarkable -- I referred to the spoken word segments as "a-------e sequences" -- but then, as I say, I was younger). That was heady stuff, but lonely in some ways, for a 17-year-old. It was a great way to spend the money I made at Hardee's, and selling ice cream.

(photo via Cromacom on flickr)

Listening to Rock Bottom took me back with much more age and intelligence than I had the first time, and so I didn't tap my foot impatiently, hoping for a hook. Instead, I tended this time to just sit and listen. I had to acknowledge that I don't have the patience for this work, any more, if I ever did. Or, at least, I don't think I do -- but on the other hand, I still love things like the Mars Volta and Emerson Lake and Palmer.

What I realize is that there was a time when rock and roll had an artistic side it now lacks, when it was possible just to be an artist and make artful, artistic rock. Not just Art Rock, mind you, but rock for the sake of its existence as a work of art. Did it sell? Well, Wyatt's record did, 1000 recordings says, and I don't doubt it. But this was 1974, and certainly it doesn't compare in memory to other work we heard from that year -- oh, say, Rock and Roll Animal, the Lou Reed live record on which Hunter worked. Such art music had to be recorded, of course, and the record companies weren't what you'd think of as non-profits, but they could sink a lot of art work in an ocean of profit and diligent A&R work and speculation. And you never knew when you'd find a knew Pink Floyd, even if -- and about this they could be patient, back then -- it took five or six records to have a major hit.

Now, Rock Bottom sounds lush and truly experimental, instead of just irritating, which is how I felt about Soft Machine stuff when I was so much younger. But I don't know: I guess I'm a pop music guy. As I said earlier, sometimes I Want Candy. (Maybe more often than I want to admit.)

Piracy

I remember in my freshman year at school that I was always the last kid awake. I used to have terrible insomnia, but in school I'm sure I didn't help matters by staying up until 2:00, then getting up at 7:00, then going to class, then sleeping again for four hours, and then going to another class. Perhaps the American Airlines gate clerk who had to wake me on the floor at SFO last night might have a choice word or two of her own to add.

(Photo via Jan Pie, on flickr.)

For whatever reason, anyway, I couldn't sleep at night very well. I remember when the heat would turn off for the night, and I would feel the last warmth through the radiator fade, and know it was going to be cold from then on. I had a speaker sitting next to my bed on my desk, and I would turn on music, softly, so that i could hear it. I would scrupulously turn the receiver to mono so that I wouldn't get the Wrong Channel. And then I would put in a CD instead of putting on an LP, because LPs just lasted about 25 minutes before you had to get up, where a CD might take you 70 minutes, if you were lucky.

I listened to Pirates a lot. It was cool, and it worked played really soft, so that when you were feeling melancholy -- it was freshman year; everyone felt melancholy, all the time -- you could listen really softly. Like I'm doing right now, with Joe asleep next door, my often-roommate as well as my son. I don't feel melancholy very often any more, because I'm grown up, and the world is a miracle worth seeing every day, filled with strange things like manga and music made from gongs, and Rickie Lee Jones. I've been luckier than I imagined I could be when I was imagining things all the way back then.

I thought I would live in a big old house with a porch on it. I thought I would be a reporter forever. I thought I would have a big office with shelves everywhere where I would keep the paper things that mattered to me. None of those things proved true.

Rickie Lee Jones still sounds like she's singing to me, though. (And not just me, of course.) I am so glad I live in the era of recorded music, when I can hear this kind of lilting, haunting song in the quiet whenever I want.

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.