Month: April 2015

Father John Misty – I Love You, Honeybear

I Love You, Honeybear

Father John Misty – I Love You, Honeybear Sub Pop SP 1115 (2015)

Arrogant music for arrogant people.

While there are good moments on I Love You, Honeybear, this is music with a definite mean streak and a rather disingenuous, condescending approach to songcraft.  First, the songs.  The lyrics are blunt, delivered without much poetic lyricism, almost like a monologue.  They are deeply cynical, and frequently sarcastic.  Big words and references to current events are littered about, but there isn’t much behind them.  They are used to contextualize the music, place it in front of people who pay attention to such things, but it doesn’t really run with any of those concepts.  It is a rather self-conscious attempt to seem “with it”.  (Also, some of the song titles parody famous old songs).  Much of the time, though, things veer into misanthropic diatribes.  This is were the music becomes arrogant.  The words of the songs constantly put down posers and the falsehoods of mass culture.  But, really, this is just a device to try to place the singer above it.  He constantly takes a superior and derisive tone toward the objects of his scorn (and every song has something to complain about!).  And this is why the music is disingenuous.  It pretends to be above the subjects being trashed, and yet also depends upon them because it needs something to belittle, to assert superiority over.  Occasionally, it works to a point.  The opening lines to “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment” are “Oh, I just love the kind of woman who can walk over a man / I mean like a god damn marching band.”  Seems like a feminist anthem, right?  Well, the song soon enough devolves into put downs like “I wonder if she even knows what that word means.”  It returns to the singer explaining how people adore him and how stupidly this other character acts.  This is emblematic of the whole album, which pretends to point out the failings of the world only to seize upon those failings for self-aggrandizement.

Lyrics aside, the instrumental music can be engaging, at times.  Building from a base of contemporary “indie” folk, there are plenty of touches that look back to acid rock and psychedelic folk of the past, mostly of the 1960s and early 1970s.  The record is well-produced, and it has a good command of all the elements of the past called up to service.  Embellished layers and short, shifting resolutions can be catchy, like the driving, distorted electric guitar and pounding piano at the end of “The Ideal Husband” or the smoothly burning guitar soloing on “When You’re Smiling and Astride Me” and “Strange Encounter.”  But the songs that are hardly more than an acoustic guitar and maybe a piano for accompaniment are a drag.  And the singer (Josh Tillman) doesn’t have a particularly memorable tone of voice.  The most interesting parts of this album would have been put to better use elsewhere, with an entirely different lyricist and singer.

Sly and The Family Stone – Ain’t But the One Way

Ain't But the One Way

Sly and The Family Stone – Ain’t But the One Way Warner Bros. 23700-1 (1982)

An album that really had more potential than Sly’s previous few efforts, though it still ends up lacking.  Snappier horn charts and backing vocals would have gone a long way.  Side one hints at early Prince.  The side two opener “Who in the Funk Do You Think You Are” features a guitar riff echoed by ZZ Top‘s “Sharp Dressed Man“.  It would have been interesting if Sly had expanded upon the short but intriguing “Sylvester”, the one completely unguarded moment when he musters a revealing sense of dejected nostalgia.  A whole album like that song might have really been a breakthrough.  Instead this is more like Sly’s 70s coke hangover.  Still, I would throw “L.O.V.I.N.U.” and “Sylvester” on a best-of disc and not feel bad about it for a second.

Merle Haggard – Back to the Barrooms

Back to the Barrooms

Merle Haggard – Back to the Barrooms MCA MCA-5139 (1980)

Merle Haggard had something of a career renaissance in the early 1980s (plus another in the early 2000s).  There was a popular duet album with Willie Nelson, Pancho & Lefty (1982), that resonated with the “urban cowboy” set.  But it started with Back to the Barrooms.  He doesn’t touch the political subject matter that made him notorious a decade before (The Fightin’ Side of Me, Okie From Muskogee).  Instead, there are a lot of hard drinking songs, just like in the earliest part of his career (Swinging Doors and the Bottle Let Me Down).  But his sound is much different than the early days.  There are strings, a saxophone, and a generally lighter touch in both his vocals and the musical accompaniment.  This recalls old-fashioned honky tonk — with plenty of single-string solos and Travis-picking on guitar, bouncing country walks on the bass, and echoes of barrel-house strides on the piano — but it also ponders what to do with electronic processing in the studio while remaining authentic country music.  It isn’t quite “urban cowboy” yet, because the balance between urbane synthesizer-driven easy listening pop and gruff rural twang leans too much to the latter.  But this isn’t dated (like many Chips Moman productions from this era: Flyin’ Shoes, Always on My Mind, Rainbow).  It is perfectly comfortable in its sound.

The songs are all about conflict.  It is personal conflict.  What makes the album so compelling is that it is a battle the singer has with himself.  He has temptations, failings, and he knows it.  He has his petty excuses, without stooping to make them out to be anything more than that.  Depression and substance abuse loom large.  Nevertheless, there are really no scapegoats.

The songs oscillate between ways of recounting heartbreak and such, finding each one incomplete but also without hypocritically denouncing the last with the next perspective.  The music orbits something that just can’t be conveyed directly.  One the one hand, there is some sympathy for the classic working class belief that family is important, more so than career, wealth or acclaim.  And (American) families start with romantic relationships.  On the other hand, there is the emptiness of career and fame (much like Loretta Lynn‘s early career song “Success,” with the line: “success has made a failure of our home”).  Songs like “Leonard” hit on this — the song is about Tommy Collins, but much of it could be about Hag’s own downward spirals and rehabilitations too.  The emptiness, though, is a reflection of how ordinary fame seems, that when achieved it has none of the revelatory, transformative qualities presumed beforehand.  What we have is a framing of personal conflict that really perfectly suits Haggard at this point in his life.  Yes, he had success, but what of it?  Is it true that you can “never go home”?  There are number of books that deal with people from working class backgrounds going into academia (This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class, Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class, etc.).  Some of the stories in them are remarkably like what emerges from Haggard’s Back to the Barrooms.  He is conflicted about his roots, and the milieu of musical celebrity status.  Some of the best bits — like “I Don’t Want to Sober Up Tonight” or “Can’t Break the Habit” — are when he just says, “I don’t want to act like things are alright / And I don’t want to change just to make you think I’m happy / And that’s my right, I don’t want to sober up tonight.”  This is the tension not just about resisting alcoholism, literally, but also about not wanting to totally give up on your humble roots when you “upclass” to a different social strata.  Haggard knows what success is about, and he doesn’t see a place for himself in the “perfect” world of a 1980s country music star.  But the modern touches and crooning suggest that he isn’t ready or willing to just go back to his old way of singing, before his biggest successes, to his pre-fame roots.  He looks back to the past, which isn’t simply duplicated, but re-enacted with an awareness of more than just the past.  He can’t unlearn everything that came in between.

Haggard always had a softer side, and his voice was remarkably versatile.  He may have been a pioneer of the Bakersfield Sound, blending rock influences into country, but he could sing tender ballads to match any country crooner.  The opener “Misery and Gin” is one of the best examples of what this whole album offers.  Haggard’s voice opens the song with smooth crooning, going to a higher pitch than some country singers could, with a little bit of vibrato.  But he opens the vibrato up a bit, and he swoops down to a kind of sing-speak rumble.  He starts some lines perfectly sweetly (“..to myself” and “but any foo___ol can tell”), then he mixes in clipped, accented pronunciations (“ta-night” not “tonight,” “sittin’ with all my friends” not “sitting with all of my friends,” a hard emphasis on the “HON” and “TON” in the line about “this honky tonk heaven”) and quickly runs through some of the lyrics (“…really makes you…”) like a sly afterthought.  It’s like he goes from being (almost) a sweet pop crooner in the style of Bing Crosby to one of his musical heroes, the “singing brakeman” Jimmie Rodgers.  If Haggard hadn’t gone beyond his “roots” he would have had no credibility to convey the gap between them and the kind of distant sophistication that goes with poppier and slightly more urban music that was commercially successful at the time.  Paradoxically, this is what makes the music authentically personal, by conveying the divided convictions of a guy shifting between two different positions that are too different to be synthesized and who inhabits the no-man’s land between them.

The title track is sequenced second.  Its placement after “Misery and Gin” is telling of a pull to return to some sort of earlier state, just as the third track “Make-Up and Faded Blue Jeans,” trading riffs of slick, jazzy electric guitar and light, ’80s soft rock saxophone, returns back to an idea of an urbanized lifestyle that is a requirement to succeed as a professional musician — even as the lyrics speak about relapse and faltering at maintaining a mere image of urban sophistication.  “Back to the Barrooms” has a much more solid “country” foundation than the opener.  Yet if placed side-by-side with an early Haggard classic (“Please Mr. D.J.,” “Mama Tried,” “Swinging Doors”), the formal similarities in song structure give way to pronounced differences in Hag’s phrasing — he’s holding notes longer, leaving less space between verses, and softening the delivery to avoid the harder rhythmic attack of the past.  And the electric guitar and compressed tone of the drums’ sound embrace musical technology (something profoundly urban almost as a matter of course) in a way totally alien to his 1960s and early 70s work.  His earlier recordings tended to use prominent electric guitars to emphasize a sturdy toughness on more rocking, up-tempo numbers (“Workin’ Man Blues,” “I’m Bringin’ Home Good News,” “The Fightin’ Side of Me”), and relied more heavily on acoustic instrumentation to support tender, sensitive ballads (“I Started Loving You Again,” “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am,” “Silver Wings,” and even “If We Make It Through December”).  Here, he’s using (then) state-of-the-art technologies to expand upon the ballads and crooning.  This is a surprising — and surprisingly effective — reversal of expectations.

There are a lot of reasons to dismiss an album like this.  But there are more reasons to dig in and appreciate it as an inspired confluence of supple commercial ambition, gruff obstinance and autobiographical connection.  Much of the album takes on multiple layers of meaning.  It inscribes the hesitations and burdens of stardom with longing for the past and resigned acceptance of how that past was jettisoned along the way.  Haggard always was at his best when his music was straight from the gut and personal.  Yet he rarely sounded so consistently wise and vulnerable at the same time as he does here.  Back to the Barrooms is a portrait of Haggard as neither a graceful success nor a simple nobody, but rather as somebody in an elusive middle ground scrambling to finding meaning in that place of limbo.

Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Live 1975

The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Live 1975 - The Rolling Thunder Revue

Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Live 1975 – The Rolling Thunder Revue Legacy C2K 87047 (2002)

When Bob Dylan embarked on his “Rolling Thunder Revue” in 1975, it was part of his creative renaissance.  It was his second wind after a hum-drum few years at the dawn of the 1970s.  The revue traveled by train and included a laundry list of friends and collaborators, new and old.  Before The Bootleg Series Vol. 5, Hard Rain had already been released documenting the tour.  But Hard Rain was tired and disappointing.  Here, Dylan sounds desperate, in the sense of being urged to go on.

This one opens with a blazing “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” (a song debuted on Nashville Skyline).  It then drifts into a few rather dated reworkings of old songs.  Dylan’s backing band may feature a lot of big names, but they play a kind of music that often suffers from the worst excesses of the era: ornate guitar wankery, hollow, tinny and effect-laden engineering, and a full and claustrophobic sound that lacks space.  They are basically just self-indulgent hippie jams.  But the end of disc one turns to folk.  This highlights much of what was missing on Hard Rain and much of what came next in Dylan’s career.  He started as a folkie, and he was a good one!  He then went electric, which was what launched him to superstardom.  His contentious concerts of that era would feature some acoustic folk and also electric rock.  His albums of that era mostly did this too.  Later though, particularly from the late 1970s onward, everything was more or less electric.  He was far less successful in a purely rock setting.  For whatever reason, there was only so much rock music that Dylan could put out at one time.  It could be — let’s not forget — that when Dylan went electric it was before the modern rock era.  It was only about a decade out from Elvis and other early rock that was not strictly urban.  As that kind of stuff was left behind, Dylan didn’t adapt particularly well.  Maybe folk seemed equally of the past at times (he did return to it though).  But a set like The Bootleg Series Vol. 5 includes the right amount of folk.  It’s some of the most consistent material here.  For instance, there’s a great “Tangled Up in Blue” here (maybe better than the studio version).  The set wraps with more electric material at the end of disc two.  The last few electric songs work better on average than much of disc one, settling into a sound comparable to contemporary Grateful Dead.  The second disc also features a lot of songs from the not-yet-released Desire, and the whole band seems engaged with the new material.

There is something hard in this music.  It looks back more than forward.  It is like a reaction to the 1960s.  Not everything had gone as planned.  Dylan couldn’t have anticipated his celebrity status.  He probably wouldn’t have expected his career to start slipping in the 70s.  What makes this interesting in how it tries to avoid defeat.  But in doing that you can sense that much more than before the possibility of defeat looms larger in Dylan’s consciousness.  This was it though.  Desire, released a few months later, would be the last truly relevant Dylan album.

[One note about the packaging here.  I checked this out from my library, so something might have been missing from the box, but there appears to be no listing of recording dates or personnel for each song.  Presumably, this is culled from multiple concerts.  It’s quite impossible to tell though.]