The Tallest Man on Earth – There’s No Leaving Now Dead Oceans DOC068 (2012)
Wow, this guy really wants to re-create the feel of Dylan‘s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
Tag: Folk
Joan Baez – Day After Tomorrow
Joan Baez – Day After Tomorrow Razor & Tie RTADV830022 (2008)
On Day After Tomorrow, Steve Earle records Joan Baez the same way he would Townes Van Zandt. And it works! I can’t say I’ve paid much attention to Baez’s career for the preceding few decades, but she sounds as good as ever. Well, to qualify that, if you like her vibrato-heavy, rather shrill vocals from the early 1960s, then this may not appeal to you. But if you want to hear her in a more somber setting, not too far off from the way Johnny Cash made a comeback for American records in the 1990s, then this is for you. I’ve always respected Baez more for her moral fiber than her recorded music. This one and Diamonds & Rust are changing my mind though.
Nico – Chelsea Girl
Nico – Chelsea Girl Elektra V6-5032 (1967)
Nico’s Chelsea Girl is an overlooked classic. While certainly a product of the 60s folk movement, this album stands apart from the gritty yet welcoming humanity of the usual folk-rock. It instead cascades through personal trials of someone out of step with the multitudes. The album focuses on the wonder and feeling of experiencing a time without answers. What makes it so unique is the album’s ability to fit within a much larger scheme. Chelsea Girl plays its part magnificently.
A model in Europe, Nico (born Christa Päffgen) managed to get a part in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). In the U.S., she studied at the Actor’s Studio as a classmate of Marilyn Monroe. Nico also fell in with the Andy Warhol Factory crowd. As a Warhol “superstar” she appeared in movies like The Chelsea Girls (1966) and **** (1967). Warhol was eager to promote Nico’s singing career by pushing her into a role with The Velvet Underground. Nico provided another sonic texture to the Velvets, who changed music forever with their new urban musical experiments. The interpersonal dissonance she created in the group only permitted a short stay. The Velvets were not a backing band and Nico wanted to be a solo star–like Bob Dylan.
Chelsea Girl is a fantastic debut album, through the combined efforts of many. Nico sings “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” which Bob Dylan wrote for her (but first recorded by Judy Collins). Lou Reed, John Cale, and Sterling Morrison from the Velvet Underground provided five songs between them and perform on a number of the tracks. Jackson Browne wrote three songs. Browne also plays guitar on the album, having played behind Nico at live shows (alternating with other guitarists like Tim Buckley, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Tim Hardin). Renowned producer Tom Wilson pulls the far-reaching aspirations of Chelsea Girl together. The soft strings and flute arranged by Larry Fallon add just enough sweet beauty to the songs. Wilson precisely matches every sound against Nico’s voice. While Chelsea Girl‘s orchestral chamber folk tracks certain currents in the New York folk music scene at the time, there is an apolitical melancholy to it that other vaguely similar examples lack.
A voice takes this album to new places. Virgin ears, however, may take a moment to adjust. Nico sings with an icy drone that seems to pull all parts of the chromatic scale into just one tone. She is not only guileless, but she seems positively incapable of guile in her voice. Her English isn’t clean, almost like a low Germanic rumble. The music is isolated. Often tragic, the album echoes a lasting wisdom in its bleak messages. The deepest beauty of the music is its cerebral, existential intrigue. Yet, the calm arrangements make the album still accessible. Chelsea Girl has the same peaceful acceptance of a tragic world found in John Coltrane’s last recordings from about the same time.
The title song flows with a cool but sweet melody, narrating a insider’s look into Warhol’s “Chelsea Girls.” “I’ll Keep It with Mine” has the atmospheric pop qualities you expect from a Dylan song, but seems even prettier after the title track. “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” falls together perfectly as a metaphor for the entire album. It would never work without Nico’s emotional detachment though. The deep, unsentimental searching in her voice has never been duplicated. Perhaps the most noted songs on the album are “The Fairest of the Seasons” and “These Days.” You actually have to appreciate the rarity of such pure statements. She may not have a dazzling range, to put it mildly, but Nico had a powerful ability to make moving music.
Chelsea Girl in a way expands on her very first recordings made with Brian Jones, Jimmy Page, and Andrew Loog Oldham. This album did have a heavy influence by producer Tom Wilson and the rumor is that neither Nico nor the Velvet Underground crowd liked the results. She certainly never made music even remotely similar again. Her next few albums established Nico as a goth queen whose music bore more from 20th-century classical than any kind of rock and roll. Only “It Was a Pleasure Then” hints at her later work, and even then only slightly.
While Nico never went beyond underground status as a singer, the present time would have been kinder to her. She did influence plenty of alt-folk like Tim Buckley and Nick Drake. Never truly understood on its own terms, but the success of latter-day alt-folk artists and the inclusion of some of her songs on The Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack show the world eventually readied itself for the sound of Chelsea Girl. Personal problems and drug additions aside, a model like Nico could have gone far in the realm of music videos as well. She was closely involved with many of the greatest artists of the last century, and her legacy certainly belongs with them.
Paul Robeson – On My Journey
Paul Robeson – On My Journey: Paul Robeson’s Independent Recordings Smithsonian Folkways SFW CD 40178 (2007)
These were recordings made in the 1950s when Robeson was blacklisted during the cold war McCarthy witch hunt era. He started his own label Othello Records and offered recordings on a subscription basis by way of the newspaper Freedom that he contributed to during that time. His longtime arranger, accompanist and collaborator Lawrence Brown had largely stopped working with Robeson following a 1949 concert in Peekskill, NY in which an angry mob of idiots attacked the stage (to which Robeson responded in later concerts by surrounding himself on stage with unionists as bodyguards/bouncers, like his own Red Guards). Instead, pianist Alan Booth is present on most of these recordings. Booth was a competent pianist, but he didn’t have the deep connection that Brown had with Robeson. To complicate matters, any musicians that worked with Robeson during this time risked having their union card revoked (so much for unions supporting the working man), and even studios that gave Robeson recording time faced FBI harassment. Under those circumstances, the mere existence of these recordings is impressive. Yet, overall, they aren’t quite as good as Robeson’s earlier Columbia recordings. There are still very fine performances here, like the stunning and resolute “Bear the Burden in the Heat of the Day” and “On Mah Journey Now, Mount Zion.” There are fairly extensive and interesting liner notes with this release though, and a few tracks were previously unreleased.
Richard & Linda Thompson – I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight
Richard & Linda Thompson – I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight Island ILPS-9266 (1974)
I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight is a landmark of British folk-rock, and a real treasure from the 1970s. After leaving Fairport Convention and attempting a solo career with limited success, guitarist Richard Thompson met and married vocalist Linda Peters and the two began working together professionally. The duo’s debut album is a wonderful extension of various currents in British folk music of the prior decade. That Richard was a singular talent on guitar was already established. But Linda’s voice filled out the duo’s sound in a way that becomes quite apparent on listening to Richard’s solo work before and since by way of comparison. Someone once described legendary gospel and soul singer Mavis Staples as possessing a voice that was powerful yet uniquely de-sexualized — something that is unfortunately rarely accepted among female singers. Linda also has something of that same quality in her voice. With a warm and home-y tone, she had excellent command of vibrato and subtle rhythmic phrasing. Richard’s fretwork is excellent as always, with mesmerizing solos littered all across the album. But it’s the rich instrumental backdrop and superb songwriting here that make this album so endearing. Unlike so much folk music that relies exclusively on acoustic instruments in drab and unstimulating arrangements, the Thompsons are backed with a rhythm section and an assortment of colorful sounds and textures, from unsettling double-tracked vocals and punchy horns on the title track and a warm electric keyboard on “Down Where the Drunkards Roll,” to a somber concertina on “Withered and Died” and sonorous guitar reverb on “The Calvary Cross.”
All the aforementioned factors would make for a very good album. It is the songs, though, that put this into another category entirely. Many are portraits of lifestyles, if you will, often on the fringes of society. “Down Where the Drunkards Roll,” for instance, evokes an old-fashioned vision of a community of outcasts like the criminals around docks and ports that Jean Genet immortalized in his autobiographical novel Journal du voleur [The Thief’s Journal]. Tales of loss and loneliness in “Withered and Died” and “Has He Got a Friend for Me” strike tender, sympathetic chords. “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” is the most rousing tune here, recounting the pent-up desire for adventure and unbridled energy lurking in the hearts of nearly everyone caught in the cycle of the working week. Similar sentiments are echoed in “We Sing Hallelujah” and “When I Get to the Border.” “The Little Beggar Girl” is quintessentially British folk music, revealing hints of the sort of rhythms and connivances that once inhabited Chaucer‘s medieval book The Canterbury Tales. A much bleaker vision of those notions is found in “The End of the Rainbow.” Concluding the album, “The Great Valerio” tells of adulation for and ambiguous emotional impulses to emulate a circus tightrope walker — a metaphor Richard would return to in his later solo career (“Walking on a Wire”).
It’s somewhat unfair that this is frequently described as a dark and depressing album. Aside from “The End of the Rainbow” and “Withered and Died,” this music doesn’t adopt a particularly pessimistic outlook on life. Instead it reflects an almost existential search for meaning, and on close inspection reveals a sense of camaraderie in facing rather universal toils for love and acceptance, told in each song through the microcosms of unique character studies. The emotional range of the album may not be apparent immediately, but it’s there awaiting discovery.
The Thompsons made other great music, but I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight is undoubtedly their best, one for the ages.
Leonard Cohen – Live at the Isle of Wight 1970
Leonard Cohen – Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 Legacy 88697 57067 2 (2009)
The third Isle of Wight music festival in 1970 was something of a disaster, with riotous gate-crashers disrupting many of the performances and with the stage and instruments being lit on fire. Leonard Cohen, appearing with his band “The Army”, was featured toward the end of the festival. He achieved what other performers had failed to do: to calm and captivate the unruly crowd. “Let’s sing another song boys; this one has grown old and bitter.”
This recording (CD + DVD) captures his performances admirably. Cohen wasn’t the most refined musician around. He didn’t play guitar particularly well, and despite having an unmistakable voice he wasn’t the best of singers. But this “Army” in 1970 (assembled by and featuring producer Bob Johnston) was arguably the best band he ever performed with. The era when schmaltz crept into his music was still a few years off. While the schlock of his later years bothers me a lot less than most listeners, there is no denying that Cohen’s bands often leave a lot to be desired. With a few exceptions (Sharon Robinson, Jennifer Warnes), Cohen often surrounded himself with performers that would otherwise be playing for a sparse, disinterested crowd at the Holiday Inn’s Sunday brunch. Yet, what some of the interviews on this DVD sketch out is the portrait of a guy who maybe wasn’t all that concerned with posterity. He opted to be a decent guy on a personal level who supported his friends rather than becoming a cutthroat entrepreneur seeking only the finest performances with no sense of loyalty. “But I have many friends, and some of them are with me.”
The Isle of Wight concert came shortly before the release of Cohen’s best album, Songs of Love and Hate. He offers a few songs from that album, but mostly featured are songs from his first two albums. Cohen is really a one-of-a-kind songwriter. He is every bit the equal of a Bob Dylan or Townes Van Zandt as a lyricist, with the imagery and wordplay of Dylan intact but with the dark and harrowing personal focus of Van Zandt too. Though he came up at the tail end of the urban folk movement, and was around through the whole singer-songwriter movement, he never quite fit the stereotype of any of those kinds of performers. The wisdom in his words is a rare thing. Even listening to his songs for the 1000th time, there is always something in the juxtaposition of his words and themes that comes out to surprise. You always get the sense that Cohen just could see the world with clearer eyes, and could put across the trying aspects of life with an alacrity and charm that made it all seem so comfortable: “like a drunk in some old midnight choir.”
This might be the best live Cohen album available. Sure, we all know the timing of this release has quite a bit to do with Cohen going broken not long before. But there is no compromise in this music. “It’s time that we began to laugh, and cry, and cry, and laugh about it all again.”
Sun Kil Moon – Benji
Sun Kil Moon – Benji Caldo Verde Records CVCD029 (2014)
Take the most self-absorbed, navel-gazing singer/songwriter you can think of, combine with an “outsider” folk musician who revels in tuneless warbling, then add a hint of alt-country twang (“alt” because it appeals to the middle class more than the working class). Result: *meh*. On Benji, Mark Kozelek basically offers nearly stream-of consciousness nostalgic monologues set to repetitive guitar strumming. Has this guy not heard of “social media” web sites? Perhaps you have heard the saying, “like singing the phone book”? Well, this album is pretty much like singing a bunch of obnoxious personal commentaries off a glorified internet message board. Guess what? Everybody comes from somewhere. Everybody has a personal history. What is missing here is any sort of indication as to why an audience should want to listen to this person’s drivel. Well, this isn’t that terrible. There is at least some sort of attempt to be open and honest, in a slightly cheeky way.
Neil Young – A Letter Home
Neil Young – A Letter Home Third Man TMR-245 (2014)
Neil Young has continued to zig and zag in his later career. That is the best thing about him. The obvious gimmick of A Letter Home is that it was recorded with an antique amusement park recording booth more than 60 years old, one never intended in the first instance to produce “professional” quality recordings. With it, Young records an introduction to his deceased mother and then plays songs of famous songwriters he admires–all ones from eras after that of the recording booth. The equipment provides a way to focus attention on the performances. The lack of fidelity, the gaps and clicks and pops, they all impress upon the listener that not everything is captured. The recording is a partial document. But the vintage equipment doesn’t allow a conscious selection and control of the final product to the degree assumed by contemporary standards. The creates the possibility for the audience to wonder what it is really about. At that point, with the audience properly oriented, Young delivers some rather wonderful performances. Gordon Lightfoot‘s “If You Could Read My Mind” is the least predictable, and best, of them. Some Willie Nelson songs, particularly “On the Road Again,” fail to impress to the same degree. At its finest, A Letter Home has Neil Young not on a pedestal, but somebody hacking away with the sort of materials and technological residues available to anyone else, making a mark only so much and so far as his talents alone permit. IT would seem they can take him quite a way indeed.
Bob Dylan – John Wesley Harding
Bob Dylan – John Wesley Harding Columbia CS 9604 (1967)
After the enormous success of Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan had his motorcycle accident and he retreated from the public eye. He wouldn’t put on a public concert for a few more years, and it would be about eight years before he toured again. After exploring rootsier music in private with The Band in recording The Basement Tapes demos, he made something of a break with the studio recordings of John Wesley Harding. In what would come to characterize a lot of Dylan’s later recordings, there is something of a search for peace and solitude in this music, as opposed to the brash and bold approaches of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. He turned away from what listeners might have expected. Now Dylan was exploring myth and historical curiosities of the American Old West — just after the Summer of Love found the counterculture exploring entirely new social relations. The album title is about Texas gunfighter John Wesley Hardin (Dylan changed the spelling here). The entire album is something of a return to more traditional folk music, but with a significant change from Dylan’s earliest albums. This album was recorded with a backing band, and the drums of Kenny Buttrey and bass of Charlie McCoy propel the music forward. If any of Dylan’s albums deserve the description “folk-rock” he so disliked, it’s probably this one. Recorded entirely in Nashville, Dylan’s vocals are noticeably stronger than on so many of his recordings. His nasal whine and mumbled grunts are held in check.
The songs tend to be good, even if some are content to merely lock into a simple groove. “All Along the Watchtower” is a song usurped by Jimi Hendrix for an incendiary cover version on next year’s Electric Ladyland. Although the version by Hendrix is iconic, Dylan’s original version is still vital. Dylan’s version has a pressing weariness that is completely different from the ominous desperation of the electrified Hendrix version (which tends to be used in almost every Hollywood Vietnam War movie).
While perhaps not as immediately ear-catching to the newcomer as the last few albums, John Wesley Harding remains among Dylan’s best albums. I’ve played this album numerous times around others and they ask what it is, because few seem to immediately recognize this as Dylan (or at least seem unsure about it) but generally are drawn to like it.
Paul Robeson – The Peace Arch Concerts
Paul Robeson – The Peace Arch Concerts Folk Era FE1442CD (1998)
Paul Robeson had his passport revoked by the U.S. State Dept. in the 1950s. This was illegal, as courts later found. On top of that, President Truman signed an executive order that prevented him from traveling to Canada. Normally American citizens could travel to Canada without a passport (* this long-standing practice was ended during the so-called “war on terror” in the 2000s). The grounds for all this was that Robeson was supposed to be some kind of a threat during wartime. “Wartime” you ask? Supposedly, the Korean War. But there was no declaration of war with respect to Korea, so it wasn’t a “war” as far as the U.S. Government is concerned, so the actions against Robeson were illegal — not to mention completely spurious.
When prevented from traveling to a scheduled concert in Canada, Robeson set up on in a park on U.S. soil, standing feet from the border, and sang for a broadcast across the border. That was 1952. He came back again three more times for similar cross-border concerts. Recordings were made and released by the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. This comp — released in honor of the 100th anniversary of Robeson’s birth — collects the 1952 and 1953 performances. The one from ’52 is by far the best of the two. Though what’s interesting is that not all of the ’52 concert seems to be present here, as I Came to Sing (recorded at that concert) included “Water Boy” which is omitted here.