Music – Page 43 – Rock Salted

Lou Reed – The Bells

Lou Reed – The Bells Arista AB 4229 (1979)

Named after the Edgar A. Poe poem, The Bells is a cerebral album with a soft touch — unlike so much of Reed’s other work.

The way Reed recorded The Bells (with a quickly defunct technology) definitely sounds like something from the 1970s. It sounds like it has an inbred echo. Hearing it feels a bit like sonic vertigo, if vertigo was a pleasant feeling. The album does open itself up, though, after you get a sense of it.

“I Want to Boogie with You” has the old time sentimentality of Springsteen but more depth. Reed recants stories of family life. He doesn’t feel compelled to make it a pretty picture though. The dysfunctional “Stupid Man” or the vaguely autobiographical “Families” mark the arrival of a changed songwriter. On “Families,” he shakily cries “momma” as Lou Reed brings his struggles for transcendence to new contexts. He still had a passion of old fashion rock and roll, but was tackling that with a renewed energy. This makes up-tempo rockers like “With You” a natural environment for Reed, as well as for his band that previously backed Alice Cooper.

Reed’s lyrics over the years changed contexts but always retained core themes. His music, however, varied widely. The Bells teams Reed with the legendary Don Cherry, who co-wrote “All Through the Night.” Cherry is quite effective playing with a Harmon mute on “City Lights,” a tribute to Charlie Chaplin. The irrepressibly charming trumpet toots recall so well Chaplin’s Little Tramp. The lyrics, “Don’t these city lights/ bring us together?” are very worthy of being called Chaplinesque. The improvisational closer, “The Bells,” wants to be wrong, to fail, but Cherry turns out a baffling, lingering success of a song in just a few notes. Cherry always did play well in a rock context, as was certainly clear a few years later playing with his stepdaughter Neneh for Rip, Rig & Panic.

“Disco Mystic” with only two words worth of lyrics is sharp commentary on the vacuousness of the genre, even if disco commentary (good or bad) is of marginal interest. Fortunately, the plain groove of the song will never fade away.

The Bells is dense in sound and content. The whole thing is legitimate. It’s ambitious. Despite years of writing, recording, and performing Lou Reed still uncovers a wealth of inspiration. The album jacket too, with Reed gazing away from his reflection in a mirror, is a fine indication what might be his least indulgent work.

Odetta – Odetta Sings Dylan

Odetta – Odetta Sings Dylan RCA Victor LSP-3324 (1965)

When Odetta covers these Dylan songs, she seems to make extra effort to change the songs around and, especially, sing everything to completely new rhythms and phrasings. It gets very, very tedious. She’s also very theatrical in her vocals. What it reminds me of is singing songs in school or church when I was a small child. In school there would always be some teacher who considered herself a good singer, and would sing loudly, and sometimes a box of instruments, like an “african fish” (it was kind of like a wooden washboard with a stick dragged across ribs on the side to make a rhythmic, percussive sound) would be brought out for accompaniment. Similar things happened in church, though there was usually a skilled organist for accompaniment. In either case the showy, self-important manner of singing louder and more prominently than everybody else was the key. That’s what this recalls to me. That, and amateur theater productions my mom was in when I was young, when she would take me and my brother to rehearsals. I think I’m reminded of those times from childhood because this music feels like what you give to children because it’s safe, or whatever, and the kids just don’t relate and get bored immediately. It’s like a gravely mistaken kind of pandering that turns out to be more about imposing the performer on the listener than trying to flatter the listener.

“Weird Al” Yankovic – The Essential “Weird Al” Yankovic

“Weird Al” Yankovic – The Essential “Weird Al” Yankovic Legacy 88697-58543-2 (2009)

Weird Al has forged a career much longer than anyone would have guessed when he first started making parody songs in conjunction with the Dr. Demento radio show. The essential character of his music has been to appeal to individuals, mostly young men, whose aspirations and expectations extend beyond their realistic chances for social advancement in life. He appeals to people with more time and (pop) cultural interests than money, whose lives tend to be dominated by people and forces outside their control — his career tracks pretty closely a time when a gap expanded between worker productivity and real compensation and his popularity came when the gap proved to be a real long-term trend (plus his biggest commercial successes were after the 2007-08 financial crash around the time this collection was released). His humor tends to play on an awareness of the base and trifling nature of consumer pop culture. It kind of stops there though. He winks with his audience in making fun of trashy mass media artifacts, all the while resigning himself to the dictates of that mass media and all its whims. Al’s music kind of resigns itself to the pop culture ghetto, and in many respects breeds dependency on it.

He performed parody songs but also wrote original comedy songs. Those who like Weird Al best always express a fondness for his originals. Some of this songs are more medleys of popular songs, done in a novelty manner. Take “Polka on 45” (from his second album In 3D). He does a medley of mostly pop/rock songs played as polkas with his accordion. This sort of mashup of the “hip”, contemporary pop with passé and all-to-ethnic polka might be compared to some of Robert Mapplethorpe‘s photography, or other such “high” art, but no one does. Al gets a laugh from the incongruity of throwing the different styles together that normally appeal to mutually exclusive audiences who listen to certain genres of music to separate themselves from the other genres, obliterating those attempts at social distinction. “One More Minute” (from his third, and maybe best album Dare to Be Stupid) is a retro rock/doo-wop romantic put-down tune in the style of The Mothers of Invention (like “Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder” from Freak Out!), but pushed to absurdist extremes in its lyrical exaggerations.

Over time, Al kind of got formulaic. That isn’t to say his music ever got bad. But the early material was something a little new. There were no guarantees that it would be popular, any more than a passing fad. Al’s kind of self-aware musical irony was a way to normalize and humanize the vacuousness of pop culture. Over time, that seemed less daring and more of a favor to the institutions of the music industry. There are many stories of celebrity musicians being proud that Weird Al parodied one of their songs. That sort of confirms Al’s insider status. This was the same problem the pop/punk band DEVO faced.

Weird Al is kind of a great musician for kids to listen to, because his self-awareness provides good lessons for young people. Yet adults should, in theory, kind of move on to deeper, more informed critiques of pop culture. That isn’t to say this music can’t be enjoyed by grown-ups. It can. This collection, which was selected by Al himself, if nothing else proves how good Al’s band was, how astute his awareness of the nuances of pop culture was (including which songs were worth parodying), and how his broad humor managed to avoid quickly dated jokes based on easily-forgotten current events. This particular collection isn’t exhaustive, and it omits multiple albums. But it still makes a decent introduction to his career.

The Incredible String Band – The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter

The Incredible String Band – The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter Elektra EKS 74021 (1968)

Imagine a hippie commune in the late 1960s. What music is being played? Maybe something like The Incredible String Band (ISB)?

There are a few things that mark basic political differences. One of the most fundamental is respect for traditions of inequality versus change in the direction of egalitarianism. This is the best way to look at ISB. There should be no doubt that they fall on the side of change. But they argue for change by playing all sorts of traditional music.

The vocals tend to sound completely improvised — with Robin Williamson especially, but with Mike Heron too. It is like they just read the words off a page and came up with whatever melody they could, on the spot. That impression gives way to carefully harmonized choruses. That of course gives lie to the idea that this is all haphazard. The instrumentation is eclectic, to the extreme. One minute there are references to Indian classical music, another to christian hymns. The epic “A Very Cellular Song” epitomizes the jumps between styles — one prominent segment is a rendition of the Bahamian hymn “I Bid You Goodnight (The Christian’s Good-Night).” It is obvious how the jumps place all the pieces on an equal footing, subverting the sort of rigid hierarchies that go with any one sort of musical tradition. So a strange thing emerges. This is music simultaneously drawing from tradition and subverting it. There is no hint of irony in the use of the traditional elements. Yet there is no doubt that ISB repurpose those traditional forms for entirely different ends.

The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter is one of the band’s most well-regarded albums. But this also came along in 1968, just as it seemed like the counterculture was going to transform the world. ISB played Woodstock the following year — in an off performance. Of all the hippie-dippy music made in that era, this album is one that really pulls it all together wonderfully.

Of course, this is kind of a middle class rebellion. It escapes oppression by turning to simple folk musics, an approach summarized as “people wanting to scale back in order to live more balanced lives[.]” This sort of presupposes the means to break away and create a separate space for this kind of rebellion and escapism. One reason that the music has an experimental feel that suits the music so well is that the experiments provide “useful models for things that could then be generalized in altered conditions.”

In some ways the follow-up Wee Tam & The Big Huge is a more likable album — perhaps more epic too. But this is still a great one, from a time when it seemed like a real possibility that the world would really, really change and the good guys might lead that charge. It may be anachronistic today. Forty years later that hippie commune — more likely an entirely new one, because that one from the 1960s didn’t survive — would probably be playing the more dystopian psychedelic folk of an outfit like Sunburned Hand of the Man. Yet ISB is still a shining example of how positive and hopeful music can be that reflects a totally alternative outlook on the world. Maybe that has lost favor but it is still a compelling vision on its own terms.

“Weird Al” Yankovic – Mandatory Fun

“Weird Al” Yankovic – Mandatory Fun RCA 88843-09375-2 (2014)

“Weird Al” Yankovic is kind of a cheerleader for capitalism. The cover and liner notes of Mandatory Fun utilize communist kitsch imagery, but that is only to underscore that Al puts himself on the side of the capitalists. In a way, the title “Mandatory Fun” implies authoritarianism — long associated with communist regimes during the cold war (when Al grew up) — though (perhaps unintentionally) it now connotes both the command to “enjoy” at the heart of modern times in the capitalist world and the competitive imperative to have a faculty with pop culture to seem aware and cultured. Al himself even noted that the title refers to “an oxymoron that I’ve always been amused by. It’s used a lot in corporate retreats and, I’m told, in the military.” References to business, corporate and marketing jargon reach a pinnacle in “Mission Statement” (recalling the frankly superior satire on the 1998 episode “Joshua” of the defunct TV show “Space Ghost Coast to Coast,” with a tune reminiscent of Crosby, Stills & Nash folk-rock). But you might notice the absence of any parodies of socialist realist music on the album — Al doesn’t seem familiar with that music or the cultural forces behind it.

This music tries to use rapport building to win over its audience. Take Al’s use of the accordion. He plays the instrument precisely because it is considered passé in dominant culture. So he plays it anyway, ironically. This way the audience gets to be in on the joke, so-to-speak. They are privileged to know that it is not the accepted instrumentation in an era of guitars (still) and electronics. They can enjoy transgressing the silent injunction regarding the “proper” instrumentation for pop music.

Yankovic’s early work is fantastic, at its best. It still holds up decades later. And through the years he has continually proven to be an astute and dedicated observer of popular culture, translating those observations into ironically witty musical comedy songs. Many of his songs are parodies, but some are originals. Sometimes the originals are the best ones, like “Sports Song” here, which skewers the vapid, substanceless “us vs. them” hoopla around the big business of sports. His vocals are set against the sorts of marching band “fight song” music today reserved for collegiate football (and sometimes basketball) games. Al’s take on sports seems implicitly centered around (American) football, though the way he approaches the mainstream sports culture it hardly seems different from pro wrestling “sports entertainment” with aggressively flamboyant announcers and good guys vs. heels in the ring.

In an episode of the cable TV show “The Big Interview” featuring Yankovic, host Dan Rather commented that Al’s music (and associated comedy) is very good-natured. This is an easy position to adopt because Al is not really opposed to the status quo. He jests about the nature of present society, but he never challenges it. The way he goes about that appeals to the least successful participants in the rat race. It’s a bid for knowing moral superiority for people who probably aren’t succeeding on other — especially economic and political — terms. He caters to an underclass that doesn’t want to admit it is an underclass. With the decline of the power of working people in an age of austerity politics it kind of makes sense that Al’s career has only grown through the years. Mandatory Fun was the best-selling album of his long career, earning critical praise and awards as well.

Frankly, this isn’t Al’s best. Much of its commercial success comes from timing. Yet it’s not a bad album either. It has always helped that his longtime backing band is pretty great. Plus when Al parodies songs that are pretty good to start with (like the “Tacky” parody of Pharrell‘s “Happy”) you get most of the benefits of the original song. But Al has not expanded his palette much in decades.

Herbie Hancock – Mwandishi

Herbie Hancock – Mwandishi Warner Bros. WS 1898 (1971)

Herbie Hancock dove into the fusion movement with his Mwandishi sextet on the albums Mwandishi, Crossings and Sextant. In a way, the group was under the influence of Miles Davis, always operating in sight of Davis’ classic Bitches Brew. That should come as no surprise given the Davis alumni represented in Hancock’s group. The sound of Mwandishi is reminiscent of early Weather Report, another Davis-related group. But if one thing distinguishes the approach of Hancock’s sextet, it’s the way they adapt the equal shares improvisational techniques of The Modern Jazz Quartet to the fusion era. There is a balance and equality in the performances of all the players, without orderly rounds of solos that divide the group into soloists and accompaniment. Players comment, add coloring, and drift away almost as they please. There are hints of the popular funk Hancock’s Head Hunters group would pursue a few years down the road, but those appear just in snippets that arise only to subside amidst the modulating soundscapes. More so than in the Modern Jazz Quartet’s era though, there is a looseness in the song structures. The freedoms of the new thing of the 1960s had been internalized to the point where Mwandishi sounds comfortable without linear song progression. One complaint some may have is the almost troubling closeness of some of this to new age music — a complaint also frequently leveled at Weather Report. That is probably unfair, given that the similarities are mostly superficial. In all, this may not quite be a landmark of the fusion era, but it is another good example of how the early fusion era seemed endlessly creative in ways the later fusion era often did not.

Coleman Hawkins – The Hawk Flies High

Coleman Hawkins – The Hawk Flies High Riverside RLP 12-233 (1957)

Compares favorably with a lot of other well-known hard bop albums of the day: Walkin’, Thelonious Monk / Sonny Rollins, etc. Coleman Hawkins (whose nicknames included “Hawk” and “Bean”) was the guy credited with establishing the saxophone as a primary instrument in jazz. Over the years he updated his style, or, as the Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings would have it, kept pace with changing styles without really updating. In hard bop mode, his music has a distinctly slower tempo than some younger players who first came up in the bop era. The Hawk Flies High is a good album for someone new to jazz. It has enough of those qualities that fit the stereotype of a smoke-filled 1950s nightclub to satisfy preconceived notions of a novice latter-day jazz listener.

Arthur Russell – Calling Out of Context

Arthur Russell – Calling Out of Context Rough Trade RTRADCD161 (2004)

Overlooked disco maverick Arthur Russell left large amounts of material unreleased at his death in 1992. Calling Out of Context pulls together songs from an unreleased album (tentatively titled Corn — though a later archival released titled Corn had entirely different contents), and some works-in-progress from the later part of Russell’s life. Confident in his eccentricities, Russell still cultivates enough dance mojo to blanket the nation under a groove. This was a different kind of groove though. Disco and dance could be different. Arthur Russell made it different.

Dinosaur – You’re Living All Over Me

Dinosaur [Jr.] – You’re Living All Over Me SST 130 (1987)

A classic of 1980s rock. When I want music for the slacker in me, it’s either You’re Living All Over Me or Flipper‘s Album: Generic Flipper — the former for the harmless, cute type and the latter for a more depraved and comical type. J Mascis‘ guitar + vocals = the shit. Other than the Lou Barlow clinker “Poledo” (thankfully it’s last) this is about perfect.

Bill Dixon – Papyrus, Volume 1

Bill Dixon With Tony Oxley – Papyrus, Volume 1 Soul Note 121308-2 (1999)

Dixon employs a very conversational style here. He plays at a pace that lets things unfold very slowly, as if there is no rush to get anywhere in particular. Tony Oxley provides a more inquisitive reaction to Dixon’s statements, as if always asking, “Tell me more.” Count this among Dixon’s better late-career albums.