Author: Syd Fablo

The Temptations – In a Mellow Mood

In a Mellow Mood

The Temptations – In a Mellow Mood Gordy GLPS-924 (1967)

Instead of soul music, as expected, The Temptations in a Mellow Mood finds the group delivering an orchestrated pop/showtunes album.  Although it is clearly a crass attempt to find new audiences, and occasionally it achieves little more than marketing bluster, this does succeed in its aims.  Basically, this is a Sammy Davis, Jr. album, or a Robert Goulet one.  If that’s not the kind of album you’ll accept from The Temptations, then this one is best skipped over.  There are an assortment of arrangers on board (Oliver Nelson among them), which leads to an uneven feel.  More lead vocals from David Ruffin, as he delivers on “What Now My Love?,” would have helped the album further.

Karen Dalton – In My Own Time

In My Own Time

Karen Dalton – In My Own Time Just Sunshine PAS 6008 (1971)

Harvey Brooks brought Dalton to the studio with a very professional studio band and recorded her singing a selection of contemporary songs.  Brooks’ band plays in the warm style of a lot of folk-rock and East Coast singer-songwriter stuff of the day.  But the thing is, the whole band sounds thrilled to be performing with the unknown Dalton.  Rather than just her usual, limited repertoire of acoustic rural folk — though a version of her signature “Katie Cruel” is here, along with the traditional folk tune “Same Old Man,” the performances reminiscent of her posthumously-released demo and live recordings — she’s mostly performing something akin to a “top of the pops” panoply of soul, rock and blues.

At the risk of sounding like a new-age cliché, Karen Dalton’s voice and her music more generally are life-affirming.  Her voice is inimitable, with its constant cracking and slightly swallowed warble her phrasing is staccato and unusually shifting even as she sings as smoothly as she can.  In a way, she is someone with a voice that in every manner seems antithetical to everything that commercial music is about.  And yet, it is as endearing and irrevocable as any in music.  People compare her to Billie Holiday, with good reason!  There is something irrepressible in her style.  The opener, “Something on Your Mind,” is one of the highlights, on an album without any obvious weak points.  She sings, against a relentless, almost severe bass guitar strum, tangly, vexatious electric guitar, some cautious steel guitar and the timidly melancholy histrionics of a bowed violin, “You can’t make it without ever even try___in’ / something’s on your mind isn’t it?,” and her voice cracks irretrievably amid the word “trying”.   This is as perfect a moment in music as the fragile human condition can offer.  Full of failure, epic simplicity, confused and earnest hope, and, still, a yearning for connection and understanding.  The song takes in the simple pleasures that come while looking to grasp what is on this someone else’s mind, an unstated, enigmatic something outside oneself.  If the album ended there, it would already be something.

Up second is a soul song, “When a Man Loves a Woman.”  There is steel guitar mixed with conventional R&B horns, and a vocal accent developed well outside city limits.  Karen’s voice is clipped and cracking again.  She’s singing a song completely outside her range, or so it seems, because she winds up making a rather daring argument for forgetting the idea of “range” entirely, and accepting every attempt to communicate on one’s own terms.  The next song, “In My Own Dream,” has a walking groove on bass with a thundering piano, and a more sleepy, hushed vocal from Dalton, punctuated by quickened vibrato embellishments.  Another punchy soul number, “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You),” with a disorganized “gang” vocal chorus from the band, interrupts what otherwise was almost becoming a gloomier patch in the album, before the second side take on a more country-inflected repose, once again broken up by an R&B number (“One Night of Love”).  If the second side of the record is more sedate than the first, “Are You Leaving for the Country?” is an excellent closer.  Dalton was part of New York City’s Greenwich Village folk scene for a while in the early 1960s, but left for a more subsistence existence, living outside Boulder, Colorado in a mountain shack for a time.  So this idea of a connection to something outside urban life, with its brisk pace and endless fads, held a strong influence on her life, which did not depend on the city.  And yet, the format of In My Own Time pairs Dalton with the trappings of contemporary pop music, from bustling music centers.  She is engaged with something different, a musical backdrop that is commonplace yet originating from someplace outside her own cultural background.

This is an album that is like an old friend visiting, someone who has no reason to put on appearances.  Karen Dalton sings with no ambitions of any kind of fame.  This is a bit like politics.

“The major problem — one of the major problems, for there are several — one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

“To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

“To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”  ― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

The solution in Adams’ novel is to make somebody rule the universe without them consciously choosing to do so.  Dalton may not be unaware of what she was doing in the recording studio, but she was coaxed there to a degree.  As a result her attitude is shorn of the hangups that hold back many singers concerned with being famous, or simply within to forcefully impose themselves on listeners.

Without a doubt, In My Own Time is an album listeners will likely either love or hate.  For those who bother to love it, chances are it will remain a special experience bringing out warm, familiar feelings with each repeated listen.

Patti Smith Group – Easter

Easter

Patti Smith Group – Easter Arista AB 4171 (1978)

Here is an album that has always underwhelmed me.  Coming on the heels of the transcendent and Earth-shattering Horses and its worthy (if sometimes neglected) follow-up Radio Ethiopia, Easter is something of a let down.  For one, Patti just doesn’t sing well.  Take “Because the Night.”  With stronger, more impassioned vocals it could have been something special.  Then there is the pretentious and cringe-inducing stab at world music influences on “Ghost Dance.”  These kinds of missteps are all over Easter.  There surely are good moments too.  “Babelogue/Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger” is Patti at her best, and it’s one of her great moments on any album.  But that song is not the norm here.  Patti’s earliest work was really poetry set to music, but then, at some point, she transitioned — at least for the most part — to writing “songs” in the conventional sense.  This is perhaps a subtle thing to grasp in listening to her music, but it is noticeable.  Easter revels in a few too many Doors-like psychedelic blues jams and doesn’t feature enough of Patti’s righteous poetic monologues — the kind of thing that made her stand out from everyone else.  In terms of writing songs, the well had run a bit dry after Radio Ethiopia (“Space Monkey,” really?) and better attempts lay ahead.  The somewhat weaker material might be forgiven if Patti sang the stuff more confidently, but she doesn’t.  That is the main reason this one usually just sits on my shelf collecting dust.

Sweet Honey in the Rock – The Other Side

The Other Side

Sweet Honey in the Rock – The Other Side Flying Fish Records FF 70366 (1985)

Good vocals.  I can’t help but think this music feels a bit sterile though.  There is no doubt that this is the kind of group that performs primarily to cultural centers, civic centers, and other venues that have certain unstated rules of decorum and a presupposed deference in regard to artistic merit.  What I mean is that it’s the performers who are largely deciding what is meritorious and challenging rather than the audience, which is probably not very familiar with or critical when it comes to the type of music presented.  In other words, this is for musical tourists.  The format for this album seems similar to other albums by the group: about 1/3 gospel music, about 1/2 political/protest music, and the rest sort-of “world”, indigenous music adaptations.  The highlight for me is their version of Woody Guthrie‘s “Deportees”.  The rest had no effect on me.

NOVA – The Great Math Mystery

NOVA: The Great Math Mystery (April 2015)

PBS

Director: Dan McCabe and Richard Reisz

“The Great Math Mystery,” an episode of the long-running PBS science show Nova, is in essence an analysis of mathematics and analytic philosophy.  In the program, about 99% of the show consists of people from the analytic philosophical school talking about math, plus one token representative from the Continental Philosophy school (Stephen Wolfram) and a few comments by analytic philosophy people about the Continental Philosophy view.  What this show desperately needed was a dose of the “fairness doctrine” by giving something closer to 50% of the airtime to the Continental view.  Ideally, Alain Badiou would have been featured, because he is perhaps the most well-known living philosopher to argue about the nature of mathematics from outside the caste of “working mathematicians”. Count this episode among the many that PBS airs that is a polemic disguised as an even-handed treatment.

The Stooges – Fun House

Fun House

The Stooges – Fun House Elektra EKS 74071 (1970)

This album kicks you where it hurts and begs you to like it.

The songs speak for themselves. “Down on the street,” with its bluesy bass vamp, is one of the best album openers you can find. Titles like “loose,” “t.v. eye” (twat vibe eye), and “dirt” are not songs for your mother. The album progressively cuts loose as side two ends.  “1970,” a reprise of “1969” from their first album, shows dramatic changes in one year’s time. Steven Mackay comes in on sax, with solos outside almost anything previously heard in rock.

While none of these songs have radio appeal, most stretching out for four to seven minutes, this is one of those rare perfect albums. It seems to capture the craziness of a Stooges show. If you aren’t provoked, shocked, or insulted you must be in a coma. This music represents a side of America most people choose to ignore or refuse to acknowledge. The nihilistic lyrics succinctly codify urban disillusionment circa 1970.

Fun House is intuitive music, not some academic experiment. The sound is untouched.  Ron and Scott Asheton bash out scathing but fluid noise on their instruments. Iggy Pop’s vocals ooze through the murk, often bursting into powerful screams. Almost like a trance, the Stooges smash ahead without regard for technique or tradition.

Despite being the most powerful and trashy album ever made, Fun House holds up well next to Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane. Iggy Pop had a jazz ideal in mind without knowing how his band would get there. In a way, the Stooges’ nominal lack of technical prowess allowed them to do what hindered even some jazz greats. Don’t assume lack of skill lessens incredible talent, because technical skill is irrelevant to the musical statement. On that point, many of the same riffs repeat throughout the album. All rock and roll repeats the same riff structures anyway. The Stooges simply use an honest approach that makes no excuses.  1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions later proved that the Stooges refined the songs from a loose live set, to a concentrated statement of their identity.

Recorded on a visit to Los Angeles, Fun House was the Stooges’ last chance to record something that would sell. The title, Fun House, comes from the old Ann Arbor frat house the MC5 and Stooges used as a commune for rock and roll freaks. The record, of course, did not generate sales and the band broke up (luckily, the Stooges re-formed to later record Raw Power). Producer Don Gallucci deserves credit for not leaving any signs he worked on this album.  Only the band’s raw energy comes through. Any overdubs are brilliantly concealed, creating an energetic and totally improvised feeling. In contrast, the Stooges’ great debut album, produced by John Cale of The Velvet Underground, sounds at times more like a collaboration with Cale than a pure Stooges effort.

Fun House is trash achieved. It plays like a soundtrack to high school shop class. Young punks who cruise main streets each night, all over the country, have this music in mind if not on their stereo. All three Stooges albums are classics, but this rises to the top as the purest documentation of their existence.  It is simultaneously a raw statement of sex/drugs/rock’n’roll and a fluid masterpiece of experimentation. Like it or not, this is one kind of American culture at its finest.