Green Day – ¡Uno!

¡Uno!

Green Day – ¡Uno! Reprise 531973-2 (2012)

This is an unexpectedly good album.  Sure, it’s Green Day, so don’t come for poetic lyrics, but do look for lots of derivative songwriting.  “Carpe Diem” borrows heavily from David Bowie & Queen‘s “Under Pressure,” and aside from the usual Clash influences (“Kill the DJ” is like Sandinista!-era Clash or Destiny Street-era Voidoids) there are influences from The Platters to The Guess Who.  Yet, it delivers one catchy, melodic pop punk song after the next.  Superficial teen angst is what these guys know and do best.  I’ll take this over American Idiot any day.

Gil Scott-Heron – Pieces of a Man

Pieces of a Man

Gil Scott-Heron – Pieces of a Man Flying Dutchman FD-10143 (1971)

Fortunately Gil Scott-Heron never held back the power of his words. He was not afraid to knock you down right off with a left hook. His initial blow leaves you a bit vulnerable to his messages for which you would otherwise guard against. But these are defensive tactics meant to assuage the theft of his humanity. He brings you in to a place rough seas have yet to engulf.

Gil Scott-Heron talks about redemption but not in simple assumptions. He deeply reasons it through, complete with all the unpleasant but unavoidable consequences. Drug abuse told through the eyes of an addict, revolution as hard work.

This album was the beginning of a long collaboration with Brian Jackson. The great Ron Carter also appears on bass, proving that great musicians can make great pop music or anything else they want. Together with producer Bob Thiele, these musicians reject perfectionism. This disc sounds like it came from the early 1970s, with a funky, jazzy backing an sing-speak raps over the top. It is worth the effort to hear this as more than a novelty from time capsule.  Gil had a wit that was sharp, incisive and generous.  He rarely gets his due as one of the great poets of rock and roll. This semi-autobiographical masterwork — it doesn’t have to be flawless to be that — isn’t the whole story. Pieces of a Man is Gil Scott-Heron’s gathering of the remains of what could have been.

Grateful Dead – Crimson, White & Indigo

Crimson, White & Indigo: July 7 1989, JFK Stadium, Philadelphia

Grateful Dead – Crimson, White & Indigo: July 7 1989, JFK Stadium, Philadelphia Rhino GRA2-6015 (2010)

The 1980s were not kind to the Dead.  It was a time of one terrible album after another.  This live set recorded in 1989 does something to improve the era’s reputation.  First off, we get piano instead of synthesizer, and it it makes all the difference.  Plus, selections from the 80s albums sound better than the studio counterparts generally.  And although Bob Weir had long ago given up trying to sing well, he’s less annoying here than usual.  This probably won’t win over a lot of new deadheads, but it’s a surprisingly decent offering for the era.

Christos Tsiolkas – Greek Tragedy

Link to an article by Christos Tsiolkas:

“Greek Tragedy: Former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis on Greece’s Economic Crisis”

Bonus links: “The Defeat of Europe” (“Whatever one thinks of our government, this episode will go down in European history as the moment when official Europe, using institutions and methods that no treaty legitimised (the Eurogroup, the Euro Summit, the threat of eviction from the eurozone), dealt a major blow to the ideal of an ever-closer democratic union. Greece capitulated, but it is Europe that was defeated.”) and “Europe’s Big Banks are Fueling the Continent’s Far-Right Fascists”

Johnny Cash – John R. Cash

John R. Cash

Johnny Cash – John R. Cash Columbia KC-33370 (1975)

When Johnny Cash’s popularity sagged in the mid-1970s, his label Columbia stepped in to guide the recording process.  Someone from the label picked out some popular songs, ran them by Cash to see which ones he would record, then went out and recorded all the instrumentals and simply had Cash sing over the top of the finished package.  It was a very conscious effort to make Cash seem “relevant”, from the picture on the album cover of Cash with longer hair and a denim jacket to a warm, muted sound that fairly drips with the ambiance of huge American-made cars, faux-leather chairs, shag carpeting, dim yellow lighting, and other accoutrements of a time when the glory days of the American working man were starting to crumble.  Cash practically disowned this album as a sell-out on his part.  Yet, dated or not, this is a fair and listenable effort.  It helps that there are lots of good songs, and the mellowness makes it a decent period piece.  This may not be representative of anything else in Cash’s large catalog, but it isn’t nearly as bad as some would have it.

Johnny Cash – Look at Them Beans

Look at Them Beans

Johnny Cash – Look at Them Beans Columbia KC 33814 (1975)

A ho-hum affair.  There aren’t any real duds, but nothing to particularly impress either.  The best is probably the rollicking “I Hardly Ever Sing Beer Drinking Songs,” which comes across something like a warm-up for his minor comeback novelty hit “One Piece at a Time” of the following year.  By 1975, Cash was fairly consistently recording in a more contemporary style rather than the folky and frequently acoustic style established with Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.  This new sound often had a kind of Texas barrelhouse or Bakersfield Sound flavor that seemed like a reaction to the Outlaw Country movement and the likes of Jerry Reed.  Elsewhere string arrangements are common.  A few tracks have a horn section, which seems to neither add a lot nor take anything away, it just sort of changes things up in a Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass sort of way.  This is not the Cash album anyone is likely to reach for first, though fans will probably enjoy it well enough once its playing.  He would go on to make quite a few more albums similar to this in varying degrees.

Johnny Cash – One Piece at a Time

One Piece at a Time

Johnny Cash and The Tennessee Three – One Piece at a Time Columbia KC 34193 (1976)

After a few years without any significant chart success, Cash had a mild comeback with One Piece at a Time and its title track single.  The album features a mixture of ballads and bouncy, novelty-inflected, up-tempo numbers.  Easily the best thing here is the title track, a rollicking tale of an auto worker pilfering parts to assemble his dream automobile, only to have things go comically awry.  It’s the best known Cash single of the 1970s, and for good reason.  The piano riff was lifted from somewhere else, though the source eludes me at the moment.  Overall, this one is decent if a little bland.  Sort of a top of the third tier Cash album.

Johnny Cash – A Believer Sings the Truth

A Believer Sings the Truth

Johnny Cash – A Believer Sings the Truth Cachet Records CL 3-9001 (1979)

A relatively unknown album in some ways.  It is perhaps the most eclectic one Johnny Cash ever recorded.  Stylistically it’s all over the place.  Jo-El Sonnier is on the sessions and his vaguely New Orleans second-line/Dixieland styled “I’ve Got Jesus in My Soul,” complete with a clarinet solo and brass band chorus, is something unusual for Cash.  There is a version of Sister Rosetta Tharpe‘s “There Are Strange Things Happening Everyday” that’s decent too.  In his first autobiography, Man in Black, Cash told about going to a Tharpe concert in the early Sixties, as his amphetamine addiction grew.  “Oh Come, Angel Band” is the song most frequently included on compilations.  The horns, boogie-woogie piano, and contemporary backing vocals make this album unlike most others from Cash.  In a way, it seems a little like he was taking cues from what Elvis had been up to earlier in the decade (Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite, etc.), or maybe even what Bob Dylan was trying to do around this same time (Street-Legal, At Budokan).  Anyway, A Believer Sings the Truth isn’t gonna convince anyone of Cash’s talents if you haven’t heard him in better form elsewhere.  But this one finds him stretching and finding some success with many different approaches.  It holds up fairly well.  It’s too bad he didn’t record any secular albums the same way around this time, because it does seem like producers killed a lot of his albums back then.  Oh, and here’s a spoiler.  “The Greatest Cowboy of Them All” is god.  God is the greatest cowboy of them all.