Category: Music

The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Parlophone PCS 7027 (1967)

A good album, no more.  Who cares about this stuff when The Beach Boys outdid it a million times over with…Smiley Smile.  Yeah, I did just say that. William S. Burroughs once wrote that the function of art is to remind us of what we know and what we don’t know that we know.  Well, an album like Sgt. Pepper’s, about the mid-20th century white middle class experience, is a bit unnecessary, at least for me, because it’s aimed at perhaps the most (over-)documented cultural demographic that has ever existed on the face of the earth.

Love – Forever Changes

Forever Changes

Love – Forever Changes Elektra EKS 74013 (1967)

Forever Changes is probably the single greatest statement in rock and roll on the unanticipated dark side of the whole yippie/hippie thing of the late 1960s and early 70s.  Hunter S. Thompson wrote about “the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait” for anyone who took Dr. Timothy Leary’s “turn on, tune in, drop out” consciousness expansion ideals too seriously.  And it is from about that perspective that Forever Changes resides.  Much of the lyrical content conjures up a process of reflection and expanding self-awareness.  But it’s in the context of recognizing that with all the great possibilities in life there come a lot of obstacles and disappointments.  Funkadelic had an album a few years later titled Free Your Mind… and Your Ass Will Follow.  Well, in between freeing your mind and everything else falls a lot of stuff.  Heavy stuff.  So what of all the others who haven’t freed their minds, and the difficult possibility that those people (actively or not) stand in the way of anything further?  Grim and meat-hook possibilities indeed.

Part of what makes this album unique is that Love was an unlikely band to have made it.  The songs are drenched in orchestrated strings and laced through with latin and Euro-classical-tinged acoustic guitar.  Earlier Love recordings like “¡Que Vida!” from Da Capo hint at it, but most of the group’s best material to this point was in the vein of garage rock (“Seven & Seven Is”, “My Little Red Book”) or psychedelia (“Stephanie Knows Who”, “She Comes in Colors”).  And that makes the kind of naive sense of bewilderment so pervasive here as convincing as it is.

There is something timeless in this too.  The immediate context was the Vietnam war era, but three or four decades later couldn’t the lyrics “they’re locking them up today/ they’re throwing away the key/ I wonder who it’ll be tomorrow/ you or me?” from “The Red Telephone” refer just as well, and more literally, to Guantanamo Bay almost four decades later?  And that’s just it.  The complexities and difficulties of life that consume Forever Changes are ones that still linger.  They touch on things deep and vast.

Of course, the unmatched blend of optimism and loneliness of Bryan MacLean‘s “Alone Again Or” makes it basically a perfect song.  But then the same greatness can be attributed to the epic “You Set the Scene”, which is the summation of everything that precedes it.  Arthur Lee sings “and for every happy hello/ there will be goodbye”, but later reiterates “and I face each day with a smile.”  The tensions, contradictions, wonder and cautious acceptance that permeates the song is the same feeling that carries the rest of the album.  That song is also a great example of how so much of the album makes a contemplative, searching state of mind so palpable.  Even if the music deals with the downsides of the cultural artifacts it considers, in the end it still finds them worthwhile.  Nothing good comes without hard work and struggle!

I have wavered in my appreciation for this album over the years.  I loved it at first, but then changed my opinion and thought it lightweight and superficial for a while.  But I came back around, and I think for good.  This is the real deal.  Whenever I come back to it, I’m more impressed than before.

If you have no sense of wonder, or just can’t see anything in yippie/hippie culture, this album probably won’t hold interest for you.  But for you, I am sorry, for you have missed out.  This album has rightfully earned a place among those few and rarefied that are worthy of a lifetime of listening, and that can actually re-frame your whole point of reference as a listener.

Johnny Cash – Ride This Train

Ride This Train

Johnny Cash – Ride This Train Columbia CS 8255 (1960)

When Cash signed to Columbia, one of his two initial requests was to do a concept album (the other being to do a gospel album).  Ride This Train is a concept album built around stories and songs about American working people of the Nineteenth Century, the places they called home, and their exploits and travails.  The album features spoken narrations by Cash set to sounds of an old coal-powered steam train interspersed among songs with generally spare, acoustic musical accompaniment.  The approach is modeled on the format of old radio shows.  Cash is acting.  Looking back over 50 years later, the closest equivalent would be the radio variety show A Prairie Home Companion, with a lot less emphasis on comedy.  As these kinds of albums go, this one ain’t all bad.  The stories are kind of intriguing and all of the songs are very nice, though Cash may have done a little better with the same basic format on Sings the Ballads of the True West.  Here, he stretches a bit far in trying to portray some sort of authentic aura of the old west, lapsing into the role of amateur archivist or anthropologist. This is far from essential Cash and will be enjoyed most by established fans and listeners interested in something along the lines of musical theater.

Johnny Cash – Songs of Our Soil

Songs of Our Soil

Johnny Cash – Songs of Our Soil Columbia CS 8148 (1959)

Songs of Our Soil was an important album in developing the sound of most of Johnny Cash’s albums of the following decade.  The Fabulous Johnny Cash had mostly continued with the same reverb-laden minimalist country with a rock-inflected beat and emphasis on love songs as on Sings the Songs That Made Him Famous.  But here the guitar is less loud, and things like a piano feature on occasion too.  Backing vocals by The Jordanaires are frequent.  Cash’s voice is a little more distinct and prominent.  Reverb and twang are quietly diminished.  The result is something a little more folk than country sounding, with a sophistication more palatable to pop audiences.  This seemed to arise from a time when Cash’s overt attempts at success had already been made, and having used up those commercial ideas he tended to just kind of go with the flow in more eclectic settings — a bit like small-scale Nashville versions of the great Los Angeles “Wrecking Crew” recordings from the 1960s.  The homegrown character of a guy who managed to maintain a successful music career through the rest of his life on “his” terms still shines through in an effortless kind of way.  It all works pretty well.  Cash does seem just a little stiff in places though, and some listeners don’t seem to care for the backing vocals.  But when in later years he swapped the male backing vocals for female ones from his future wife June Carter and members of The Carter Family, things settled into the form that worked so well on many albums to come.

When it comes to the songs, a lot deal with death, but more importantly they conjure up Americana themes a lot like the view of pre-industrial America later featured in the film Days of Heaven.  Cash avoids too many romance songs and manages to focus on farm and country life without any hint of rural naiveté.  This might be called the first concept album he did, though the concept is pretty mild.  The opener “Drink to Me” is an adaptation of the old English song “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes” (which was based on a 1616 poem by Ben Jonson derived from Greek verses by Philostratus).  On the posthumously-released Personal File Cash revealed that it was the first song he ever performed publicly, for a high school event.  It also was the song the little owlet Owl Jolson didn’t want to sing in the classic 1936 Merrie Melodies cartoon by Tex Avery “I Love to Singa.”  “I Want to Go Home” is also an adaptation, of “The John B. Sails,” which would be performed with greater success by The Beach Boys as “Sloop John B” on Pet Sounds a few years later.

Most listeners will probably want to head to other Cash recordings first, and come back to this if they like his early 60s material to see how he arrived there.  This one is still pretty welcoming, suitable for repeat listens, and really one of the more durable albums of Cash’s whole career.  It isn’t just an offering from the “Johnny Cash” persona.  It comes closer to revealing the guy who created the persona of “Johnny Cash” than anything else to this point, and even much of what came later.

Johnny Cash – Johnny Cash With His Hot and Blue Guitar

Johnny Cash With His Hot and Blue Guitar

Johnny Cash – Johnny Cash With His Hot and Blue Guitar Sun LP-1220 (1957)

Johnny Cash was an artist who sort of arrived with all his major talents intact right from the beginning.  His music evolved and changed over time, for sure.  But his velvety bass-baritone voice and endearing brand of time-worn country wisdom are all in full effect on this, his first full-length LP.  Being the early days of the LP format, this material wasn’t strictly recorded for the LP and many of these songs were previously released as singles.  They were recorded between May 1955 and August of 1957.  Cash plays with guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant, the original Tennessee Two.  It’s a very spare and minimalist sound, which lets Cash’s inimitable voice take the spotlight.  Perkins was a guitarist of pretty limited means.  He really couldn’t play much more than a simple boom-chicka-boom rhythm, without any complex solos to speak of.  He does a lot of the typical country strumming, alternating between low notes and high notes in the style of Maybelle Carter.  But it’s iconic.  Perkins was the perfect guitarist to support Cash.  His playing has a little bit of rock influence, but that just provides a little, subtly energetic, minimally urban counterpoint to Cash’s traditional country leanings.  The other key aspect of the sound of this record is the reverb.  Like much of the music recorded at the legendary Sun Studios in Memphis Tennessee, the reverb drenches the music in seductive, politely dangerous charisma.

The songs here are great.  They include Cash’s first hit, “Cry! Cry! Cry!,” a Hank Williams tune, “(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle,” and a song probably written by Charles Noell about a 1902 train wreck, “The Wreck of the Old ’97.”  “I Walk the Line” was a song Cash liked to say was his best, and it’s hard to argue.  Another of his most famous compositions, “Folsom Prison Blues,” was written after Cash saw the film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison while in the U.S. Air Force stationed in Germany.  He pretty liberally borrowed the melody and lyrical structure of Gordon Jenkins‘ “Crescent City Blues” (part of “The Second Dream – The Conductor” from Gordon Jenkins’ Seven Dreams (A Musical Fantasy)), and paid Jenkins in the 1970s for what he borrowed.  He also adapted the famous line “I shot a man in Reno/just to watch him die” from Jimmie Rodgers‘ “Blue Yodel (T for Texas)“: “I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma/just to see her jump and fall.”  (Rodgers’ song in turn was a pastiche drawn from numerous sources). But Cash’s song is superior to any of its reference points.  “I Was There When It Happened” is a country gospel number.  Cash wanted to perform gospel music from the beginning, but opportunities were limited to record it in the early days.  It would remain a factor in his music for his entire career.

What made Cash so special is damn hard to put your finger on.  He sang about a lot of the ordinary aspects of life: work, travel, liberty, death, religion.  He did do romance and love songs, but a lot less than many other famous singers.  When he did do them, they weren’t anything like the hyper-sexualized fare that came to dominate rock music.  There was a connection to the “old weird America” that Greil Marcus described with respect to Harry Smith’s iconic Anthology of American Folk Music.  Cash’s songwriting, as well as his song selection, tended to emphasize an “ordinary” individual’s reaction to extreme situations: being confined to prison, natural disasters, threats to making a living, and so on.  He confronted these situations with varied amounts of humor, lament, determination, dignity and enthusiasm.  Yeah, Cash could take these situations and make them fun and funny.  But that’s just the way his music reflected how human being sometimes deal with stress and tragedy, and what they aspire to in the best of times.

Cash only stayed at Sun Records for about three years.  Sun continued to release his recordings for years after he left, in part because Cash left for a bigger label before his Sun contract was finished, forcing him to do a few contract-fulfillment recording sessions after he announced his departure.  Although this album sounds unmistakably of its time, it doesn’t really sound “dated” at all, in the sense of losing its appeal to modern audiences.  This is one of the essential Cash albums.  There is not a bad track on the whole thing.

Goodbye, Babylon

Goodbye Babylon

Various Artists – Goodbye, Babylon Dust-to-Digital DTD-01 (2003)

It simply isn’t possible to consider the history of American music in any sort of objective, comprehensive way without considering its religious music.  As the liner notes quite astutely put it, despite at lot of rhetoric about freedom of religion, the United States has always been a predominantly christian nation of a decidedly protestant variety.  What freedom there was manifested itself primarily in the ability of the evangelical movement, epitomized by the pentecostal (or “sanctified”) movement, to lend itself to musical expression in a completely open-ended fashion.  And left to their own devices, these religious movements did indeed construct their own vocabularies of musical texts and performance styles.  It is hard not to be amazed at the music here.

Many of the greatest american folk recordings are here.  From Blind Roosevelt Graves & Brother‘s “Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind on Jesus)” and “I’ll Be Rested (When the Roll is Called)”, The Carter Family‘s “River of Jordan” and “Keep on the Sunny Side”, Rev. Sister Mary Nelson‘s “Judgment”, and other gems like Rev. Gary Davis‘ “I Belong to the Band – Hallelujah!”.  Now, many of these songs have already entered the canon through previous compilations like Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Music and John Fahey‘s American Primitive, Vol. 1: Raw Pre-War Gospel.  But this is still perhaps one of the most ambitious gospel box sets yet assembled.

The focus here is on the earliest American religious recordings of the 20th Century, up through the 1940s.  The recordings included actually stretch into the 1960s, but those later recordings are exclusively those that recreate the styles of much earlier times.  So despite the massive size of this set, it bears mentioning that the scope is rather specific.  The modernization of gospel is only implied, most notably by way of tracks from The Silver Leaf Quartette of Norfolk and The Trumpeteers.  The Soul Stirrers, The Swan Silvertones, The Dixie Hummingbirds, and many others of the very greatest gospel acts are mentioned only in the liner notes, and are not represented by any song selections.  One oddity here that shouldn’t be overlooked is that this collection is integrated, intermixing white religious songs with black gospel, which certainly does not make for a historically accurate account.  That said, the set’s only other real faults are the triviality and superficiality of some of the liner notes, the tendency toward a mere historical curiosity value of the last disc of sermons, and the over-reliance on rather marginal country gospel songs to round out the collection.

This set should be considered like one volume of an encyclopedia of American music.  And even beyond the boundaries of North America.  In Terrence Malick‘s The Thin Red Line, a group of pacific islanders walk through their village singing a song.  Why do its harmonies sound so much like “Standing on the Promises” by The Tennessee Mountaineers?  That’s a big question, and not just in regard to a specific comparison between those two songs.  This set poses many big questions about that evolution and growth of modern music, and where things come together and diverge…

Patti Smith – Banga

Banga

Patti Smith – Banga Columbia 88697 22217 2 (2012)

Assured pop/rock music suits the mature Patti Smith.  After an increasingly disappointing string of albums for Columbia late in life, Banga is her strongest offering in a long, long time.  It simply tries, more successfully than the tediously nostalgic Twelve, the bland Gung Ho, or the inconsistent and forced Trampin’.  She is making music a little less aggressively “rocking” and more pleasantly and melodically poppy (with echoes of her late 1980s effort Dream of Life).

Frankly, Patti in her late 60s fronting raw punk rock would seem a bit out of place.  It is not the sort of thing someone her age can pull off, if for no other reason than it was a technique of the past and such a thing would only appeal to listeners stuck in the past.  Instead, she is crafting detailed, nuanced pop songs.  Everything she does here has precedent, not necessarily in her work, but in rock and pop generally.  She summons it.  She guides it.  She makes a case for the continued relevance of pleasant sounding rock music to open a channel with audiences.

Many of these songs are tributes, to fallen comrades or simply historical figures.  “Maria” (for the late actress Maria Schneider) builds gradually to some of the most prominent electric guitar work on the whole album.  The opener “Amerigo” is about Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer who is the namesake of America.  But the song is a meditation on how the New World has the capacity to change the European colonizers as much as they sought to conquer it.  “Tarkovsky (The Second Stop is Jupiter)” is for Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.  It has touches of cabaret jazz, wedded to psychedelic guitar and stark spoken word from Smith.  Bits of “Constantine’s Dream” seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to The Birthday Party‘s goth-rock staple “Junkyard.”

The best that Banga has to offer is a steady determination to keep going in the right direction.  That is, it doesn’t give in to complacent comforts of later life.  It doesn’t just toil away in the same way as before though.  Patti is still trying to adapt to circumstance.  This is her most inspiring quality.  She is a shining example of how there are ways to look at the world that bend through time but keep moving toward some kind of good and better world.

Neneh Cherry – Blank Project

Blank Project

Neneh Cherry – Blank Project Smalltown Supersound STS248 (2014)

Cherry’s first solo album in more than a decade has her inhabiting a completely different space.  Keiran Hebden (AKA Four Tet) produces.  This is largely a spare, cerebral IDM-style electronic album.  For the most part, Cherry sings against minimalist backing.  It is hardly more than a percussive backdrop at times (“Across the Water”).  There is a minor-key quality to much of it.  The songs are moody and despondent.  The tendency is towards drama, particularly from a perspective of trying to “get by” unscathed in a contemporary, affluent yet alienating urban environment.  This suits her voice, which is a little coarser and breathy than before.  It is also about testament.  The songs are a patchwork of little statements attesting to efforts to hold things together.  The best stuff is mostly in the first half of the album.  But the last half still holds some surprises.  “Everything” has droning keyboards against highly synthetic drums and a pulsing sound almost like a squeaky shaft of some industrial machine or an indistinct alarm or siren.  Cherry sings rhythmically, almost like a rapper.  Moments like those demonstrate her greatest strength: pulling together bits of lots of different genres.  She creates an aesthetic that welcomes them all.

The Byrds – Sweetheart of the Rodeo

Sweetheart of the Rodeo

The Byrds – Sweetheart of the Rodeo Columbia CS 9670  (1968)

Here’s a very well crafted album, free from any identifiable faults, that most listeners will probably like.  I tend to agree with Lester Bangs, providing context in a two-part review of The Stooges‘ Fun House for CREEM Magazine, that The Byrds and their ilk were really an obvious and direct electrified extension of acoustic folk of the early 1960s, and their attempts at genre crossover, like this album of country/rock, really presented a straightforward combination of the styles that would have inevitably been attempted by somebody at some point.  They take proven elements from country and rock and set them side-by-side.  The vocal harmonies sound like typical smooth, airy and Anglo-centric Byrds stuff, and the country material is all authentic twang.  But even if the Byrds rarely take any real chances, you can’t really argue with the craftsmanship here.  Tons of great old tunes and covers of contemporary country, folk and R&B too.  If you are going to do the obvious, you can’t make any mistakes, and on that score The Byrds really deliver.