Folk – Page 6 – Rock Salted

Jandek – Put My Dream on This Planet

Jandek – Put My Dream on This Planet Corwood 0767 (2000)

No one probably expected Jandek to release an a cappella album. But then again no one expected Jandek to still exist by the year 2000, still anonymously selling albums out of a post office box. All signs point to a lot of this being recorded on a dictaphone. “I Need Your Life” adds to the intrigue with some rhythmic embellishment made possible by cutting out the sound on the recording periodically — a counterpart to Steve Reich‘s legendary “Come Out” perhaps. “It’s Your House” references the debut of The Units (a/k/a Jandek) with repeated intonations of “I’m ready for the house.” The vocals at times use little affected gimmicks that do liven this up quite a bit. If you expect this to be a tedious affair, think again. It’s anything but that. Of course, this assumes that the listener is grounded in the nature of what Jandek so often does with atonal blues. Basically, Jandek achieves here just with voice what was achieved on the early quintessentially Jandek-ian acoustic guitar albums.

Neil Diamond – 12 Songs

Neil Diamond – 12 Songs American Recordings 8-2876-77508-2 (2005)

People seem to have this bizarre faith in producer Rick Rubin, like he can waltz in and “save” the career of any aging star fading into obscurity with declining sales. Not so. Take 12 Songs for instance. Unlike the American Recordings series with Johnny Cash or on Electric by The Cult, Rubin is all wrong for Neil Diamond. Cash’s biggest asset was that voice, which in spite of its age could still captivate with its gravelly power. Cash also could command with that voice, and stripped down settings put that voice on a pedestal — like Paul Robeson‘s recordings accompanied by only Lawrence Brown on piano. Diamond, however, was always at his best with a very smooth and nuanced bombast. Well, all that is gone here. Nothing left to see or hear, just a fish out of water. Rubin would have been much better served looking back to his breakthrough work with The Cult, where he — again — stripped down the production but at the same time preserved some (OK, amped up) of the ridiculously fun machismo. Rubin may have dumped what was weighing Neil Diamond down in adult contemporary purgatory, but he also threw out most of what makes Diamond likeable in the first place — that swagger! Final conclusion: a swing and a miss.

Bob Dylan’s Greenwich Village: Sounds From the Scene in 1961

Various Artists – Bob Dylan’s Greenwich Village: Sounds From the Scene in 1961 Chrome Dreams CDCD5074 (2011)

Although it’s become fashionable for certain contrarian Millennials to bash Bob Dylan as “talentless” or make some other snarky comment about him, attempting to position themselves as distinctly beyond whatever he represented, almost anyone with a pulse knows him as one of the major icons of 20th Century pop music. So, this collection is an attempt to portray the sounds already circulating in his slice of New York City in 1961 when he first arrived fresh-faced from Minnesota and tried to make it as a musician. There is a lot of music packed into these two discs. But some themes draw themselves out. From this evidence, the urban folk revival seemed a lot like an attempt to find authenticity. It was a break from the big, orchestrated pop and jazz that dominated commercial music of the 1950s. It had a do-it-yourself quality. These were much the same impulses that spawned punk rock in the following decade. Though, in hindsight, many of the white musicians in the movement were, quite frankly, too uptight and inhibited to make really great lasting recordings–punk proved more lasting more often. Compare some of the afro-american blues represented here, like that from Lonnie Johnson, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, there is a stark contrast in authenticity. So the “new” folkies often failed, but in their failure they took a step in the right direction. Dylan landed in the middle of all this, and there’s no doubt the ways he took influence. Indeed, this collection makes a few choice selections of songs that Dylan liberally borrowed from to make his own songs like “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” (“Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone)”), “Ballad of Hollis Brown” (“Pretty Polly”), and “Restless Farewell” (“The Parting Glass”). Dylan soared above his influences, at least most of them. Greenwich Village in the early ’60s was an incubator, but it also had a local, provincial and slightly closeted nature that was as much a limitation as the key to new breakthroughs. Anyone wanting to understand the roots of Bob Dylan and, maybe more importantly, to understand the cultural catapult that sent him onward an upward to write things like “The Times They are A-Changin’, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Tombstone Blues,” “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and all the others will find a treasure trove here.

David Bowie – David Bowie [Space Oddity]

David Bowie – David Bowie Philips SBL 7912 (1969)

David Bowie’s career underwent something of a sea change between his debut and his sophomore album — curiously, both self-titled. On the debut, he charted a path firmly in line with prim and proper British folk pop, albeit with an intelligent wit and alacrity. For this, his second album, he switches sides and turns toward the counter-culture (just look at the changes in hairstyles on the album covers!), with a far more modern sound rooted in the folk-rock of Donovan and the like. Yet this album is listenable only about once, with lots of stilted, half-formed songs and rather under-developed performances. The hints of pure rock on “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed” and elsewhere proved to be the way forward for Bowie. He would go further in that direction with his next effort, The Man Who Sold the World.

David Bowie – David Bowie

David Bowie – David Bowie Deram SML 1007 (1967)

A period piece, for sure. But with its naïve, playful, tame approach to poppy British (very British) folk, it has a certain amount of charm. These days, most listeners are Bowie fanatics wanting to puzzle at how his sophisticated sensibility can just barely peek out from behind this seemly impenetrable shell of conformist pop music.

Joni Mitchell – Blue

Joni Mitchell – Blue Reprise MS 2038 (1971)

Blue tends to be cited as one of Joni Mitchell’s best albums, if not her very best. This is difficult to understand. She has better albums: Ladies of the Canyon, Court and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Her vocals are a little shrill here too. That’s not to say that this is a bad album, by no means, but in a larger context it falls short. What is interesting is how the songwriting makes Blue sort of emblematic of the failures of the post-1968 hippie culture. With introspection providing almost hermetic boundaries, the endless navel-gazing wallows in newly-permitted formal freedoms to “live your own life” without really challenging structural constraints or, more to the point, the people who set the ground rules and contours of those permitted freedoms. In other words, this sets up the failure to truly have self-determination and re-make the world in a new way. There is an element of settling for positive but (relatively) small concessions that in the long term further dependence on the forces of misery granting those concessions. The problem, of course, is that none of this is recognized in Mitchell’s songs. They have a satisfaction that implies the job is done and all there is left is to get on with life outside of the problems others create. But it doesn’t work that way. Maybe Mitchell’s true self is paradoxically creating and participating in the situations and relationships she (rightly) sees as unfulfilling and hurtful? It’s the same troubling short-sightedness that plagues things like Jack Kerouac books — Dharma Bums especially. So you “get away.” Then what? You might say this confuses the starting line with the finish line.

Bob Dylan – Planet Waves

Bob Dylan – Planet Waves Asylum 7E-1003 (1974)

Planet Waves was a return to more stripped-down folk music, like John Wesley Harding. Dylan is backed by The Band. While this was his most commercially successful album to date, it has not aged particularly well. Harbingers of things to come were the rather shoddy under-production and unenthusiastic performances. A kind of laziness in the recording process made its first appearance here (setting aside Self Portrait). This album did mark a thematic shift, with a mixture of nostalgic yearning (“Forever Young,” “On a Night Like This,” “You Angel You”) on the one hand, and rolling anger and melancholy (“Going, Going, Gone,” “Dirge”) on the other. There are definitely a lot of songs that seem to reference Dylan’s marriage, which was headed for divorce in a few years.

Like a lot of other 1970s Dylan albums, Planet Waves has some fairly good songwriting, even if the songwriting falls short of the best Dylan was capable of. But he just doesn’t find the right “sound” most of the time. Some describe the problem as the songs being half-formed. It’s also a matter of over-producing the record to compensate for a lack of engagement with the material up front. Anyway, this one feels disappointing because it is so immediately apparent that this could have been a really good record. Sadly it ends up being a somewhat mediocre one. At its best, this comes across as a warm-up for the following year’s bitter and angry classic Blood on the Tracks.

Bob Dylan – Self Portrait

Bob Dylan – Self Portrait Columbia C2X 30050 (1970)

Now’s here’s a Bob Dylan album that is decidedly half-baked. Dylan himself has shrugged it off as a joke on his over-eager fans, meant to deflate their expectations of him. But it’s hard to believe much of what Dylan says about himself and his work. Looking at this sprawling double-LP, it distinctly looks like about four different projects crammed together. Some of the songs seem to carry forward the country sounds of Nashville Skyline, with an old-timey focus that also echoes John Wesley Harding. Other songs seem almost like demos for his upcoming New Morning album, with smooth yet elaborate sounds that fit into the ongoing California singer-songwriter movement. There also are some poorly recorded live tracks from Dylan’s appearance headlining the 1969 Isle of Wight festival. Lastly, some of the songs seem to chart an alternate path from New Morning by presenting an orchestrated version of more traditional folk music (kind of like Pete Seeger with strings, horns and backing singers). Through it all, there are many cover songs, and the relatively few new compositions feature almost no lyrics–typically just repeating a few short verses or even lacking any words at all.

This album was poorly received. One possible explanation is that this was really something of a vault-clearing, odds-and-ends collection of demos, outtakes and leftover live recordings, but was marketed as just another new Dylan album. The result was a mismatch of expectations–intended or not. Maybe no one could have expected the reaction, because those kinds of vault-clearing albums weren’t exactly commonplace in rock and pop music yet, though there certainly were precedents in jazz, for instance.

The best material here is scattered and all over the place. To find the modicum of decent material you have to slog through a lot of what seem like half-finished songs, boring and uninspired–like “Days of 49,” which could almost have been a John Wesley Harding reject. “All the Tired Horses” is nice because its one of the more successful songs here that breaks from what Dylan has done elsewhere. A few other songs like “Alberta #1” and “Wigwam” are decent too. Listening to this end-to-end is something much more like work than pleasure. Most listeners will want to ignore this one entirely.

Bob Dylan – Good As I Been to You

Bob Dylan – Good As I Been to You Columbia CK 53200 (1992)

This one edged out Empire Burlesque and Knocked Out Loaded as having the most horrible album cover to grace a Bob Dylan album — was the cover photo taken right after Dylan woke up in a homeless shelter? Nonetheless, this collection of solo renditions of traditional folk songs works quite well. Dylan is surprisingly invested in the material. The selection of songs is good, like a page out of the Carter Family songbook or Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (and “Frankie & Albert” the opener is best known for appearing on the Anthology as “Frankie,” performed by Mississippi John Hurt, though Lead Belly recorded it as “Frankie and Albert” too). This was the right time in his career to make this album too. He had a lifetime of listening to folk music to pick just the right ones to record, and with the benefit of advancing years he can perform them simply and faithfully and still sound convincing. It might not be a major achievement, but Dylan would not ever make another album better than this for the rest of his career.

Elizabeth Cotten – Folksongs and Instrumentals With Guitar

Elizabeth Cotten – Folksongs and Instrumentals With Guitar Folkways FG 3526 (1958)

Elizabeth Cotten was an excellent guitar player, and a self-taught one. Her playing seemed to completely be free of ego. Even when she plays complex ragtime tunes like Blind Blake, there is no flashiness. This is the sort of music people make even when no one else is listening. While it may be hard to imagine her singing being any worse, it doesn’t detract from the album at all because her vocals are so obviously heartfelt and genuine. This album has a homespun quality to it, and is something worth revisiting often.