Blues – Page 2 – Rock Salted

John Fahey – Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You

John Fahey – Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You: The Fonotone Years [1958-1965] Dust-to-Digital DTD-21 (2011)

A collection of material recorded for Joe Bussard‘s Fonotone label in Fahey’s early years. Fonotone billed itself as the last label issuing records in the old 78 RPM format. There is a documentary about Bussard, a well-known vintage record collector, were he mentions buying old 78s off people and paying them a “fair price,” in other words he attempts an apology for paying these folks far less than what he thought the records were worth. Anyway, as recounted in the opening interview on this set, Fahey would go over to Bussard’s place and Bussard would give him booze and let him take records from his pile of duplicates. This was enough incentive for Fahey to swing by and cut the recordings collected here.

Compared to Fahey’s recordings on his own Takoma label, most of these Fonotone ones are more traditional blues and folk, without the more experimental edge Fahey elsewhere explored. One thing that should probably be pointed out is that some of these were released under an alias, and Fahey does some kind of “voice acting” that is best described as racist minstrelsy. Aside from that, though, the guitar playing is quite good on almost all the cuts.

Things sort of modernize a bit to resemble Fahey’s Takoma recordings on some of the 1962 cuts. However, compared to the Takoma recordings some of these sound like only rehearsals. Some terrible vocals and accompaniment also appear. The more modern material from 1962 onward takes on a noticeably darker emotional tone. The last disc, recorded mostly in 1965, is the best. Fahey had grown tremendously as a guitarist, and he was now playing in his own unique, distinct style.

Loren MazzaCane Connors – Night Through: Singles and Collected Works 1976-2004

Loren MazzaCane Connors – Night Through: Singles and Collected Works 1976-2004 Family Vineyard FV36 (2006)

There is something rather amazing about the work of Loren Connors. To the casual observer, the collection Night Through might seem like nothing more than than home recordings of solo guitar noodling. But given a fair listen, it becomes apparent from this evidence that Connors achieved something that might seem impossible in his era: a completely unique style of guitar playing. A blurb by Susan Sontag on the back of a paperback copy of Jean Genet‘s Notre-Dames des Fleurs [Our Lady of the Flowers] proclaims that “Only a handful of twentieth-century writers, such as Kafka and Proust, have as important, as authoritative, as irrevocable a voice and style.” Connors is a bit like Genet. His sound is irrevocable. The work of both masters too is in touch with fringe elements of society, by conscious choice. With Connors, he is an electric guitarist (mostly) who seems to have bypassed most of the influence of rock and instead drawn inspiration primarily from pre-war acoustic blues and gospel. His music is quite untouched by identifiable trends in contemporaneous folk, blues, rock or jazz. It might also be said that there is a resigned acceptance of the categorically un-commercial nature of the music, something inexorably linked to a kind of meager, isolated existence (whether by choice or not). This, by way of contrast, lends credence to what Petronius revealed in his Satyricon of ancient Roman times that the art of the rich, in its typical grotesque extravagance, is so often intolerable. In his improvised blues-based songs, Connors uses a wide and lethargic vibrato that is his primary mode of expression (compare “Stimmung“). Almost everything is slow and sparse, with a dark, haunting, dirge-like quality shot through with the occasional bolt of anthemic consonance. If ever this music feels crude and frayed, by the mores of the rich at least, it never fails to be anything short of captivating.

Bob Dylan – World Gone Wrong

Bob Dylan – World Gone Wrong Columbia CK 57590 (1993)

Although no one could have guessed it at the time, World Gone Wrong in a large part set the tone for much of the rest of Dylan’s career. His albums from Time Out of Mind until his late-career switch of a standards crooner — especially Together Through Life — rely heavily on an electrified version of the simple blues forms that coalesced here. This just doesn’t work as well as the folk styled Good as I Been to You though, even if this one is engineered much better. These are grim tunes, stripped of the deeply weird and unpredictable elements of that prior collection of folk. Playing the blues Dylan tends to sound lazy. “Delia” is still nice.

I may be in the minority, but I think this is no better (or worse) than what you could hear from a street musician busking with old blues and folk tunes. It’s one of those albums that kind of drifts by without taking any big chances, without opening up and risking exposing vulnerabilities. Instead it pares down the thematic range to almost a monotone. But it plays into expectations. So in perfunctory fashion it delivers what it advertises. That seems to be why “Dylan bores” like this album. And it fulfilled Dylan’s existing contract to Columbia with minimal effort on his part. Moving on then…

Nina Simone

Nina Simone was an enigma. She is often described as a jazz singer. She wasn’t one of consequence. Stack her next to an actual jazz singer and this becomes pretty clear. She developed a reputation as an artist with moral integrity. Yet that reputation wears thin when looking at how many misguided concessions to pop fads are littered all through her recording career. Much is made of her bitter break from Euro-classical music early in life. Denied entry to a conservatory (The Curtis Institute of Music) as a pianist, she turned to singing in lounges. Little of her piano playing impresses on her own recordings, though it can be effective in accompaniment. But when you hear her voice on a good recording, she definitely had something special. Singing may not have been her desire, but it was her great talent. Sometimes talents choose their medium, rather than the other way around. She was often at her best when adding a rough blues or gospel or jazz inflection to burningly austere chamber pop songs. She was sort of a gothic shadow cast from commercial pop. It was the tone of her voice that embodied a palpable sense of anger that drove so much of it. Close listening doesn’t reveal much clarity in her rhythmic phrasing, her control of vibrato, her pitch range, or even her use of melisma. All that aside, she had the power to deliver songs as if saying, with a firm scowl, “I will sing this song and I will make you remember it.” The single-minded resolve to put her own identity into her music is fiercely determined. This makes the greatest impression on the material that resists that approach. When she worked with jazzy orchestral backing, as was a prevailing style for a time during her long career, the resistance to her identity could be too much. When she played straight blues or even militant soul and R&B, there was nothing really working against her identity to put up any challenge. She reversed her formula and added formal pop technique to rougher electric soul and R&B, and it came across as a reflection of her limitations rather than her positive talent.

What follows is a long yet incomplete set of brief reviews of her albums. This is limited to what I’ve heard, which does not include anything from her time with Colpix Records. Continue reading “Nina Simone”