Rock – Page 23 – Rock Salted

Patti Smith Group – Easter

Patti Smith Group – Easter Arista AB 4171 (1978)

Here is an album that has always underwhelmed me. Coming on the heels of the transcendent and Earth-shattering Horses and its worthy (if sometimes neglected) follow-up Radio Ethiopia, Easter is something of a let down. For one, Patti just doesn’t sing well. Take “Because the Night.” With stronger, more impassioned vocals it could have been something special. Then there is the pretentious and cringe-inducing stab at world music influences on “Ghost Dance.” These kinds of missteps are all over Easter. There surely are good moments too. “Babelogue/Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger” is Patti at her best, and it’s one of her great moments on any album. But that song is not the norm here. Patti’s earliest work was really poetry set to music, but then, at some point, she transitioned — at least for the most part — to writing “songs” in the conventional sense. This is perhaps a subtle thing to grasp in listening to her music, but it is noticeable. Easter revels in a few too many Doors-like psychedelic blues jams and doesn’t feature enough of Patti’s righteous poetic monologues — the kind of thing that made her stand out from everyone else. In terms of writing songs, the well had run a bit dry after Radio Ethiopia (“Space Monkey,” really?) and better attempts lay ahead. The somewhat weaker material might be forgiven if Patti sang the stuff more confidently, but she doesn’t. That is the main reason this one usually just sits on my shelf collecting dust.

The Stooges – Fun House

The Stooges – Fun House Elektra EKS 74071 (1970)

This album kicks you where it hurts and begs you to like it.

The songs speak for themselves. “Down on the street,” with its bluesy bass vamp, is one of the best album openers you can find. Titles like “loose,” “t.v. eye” (twat vibe eye), and “dirt” are not songs for your mother. The album progressively cuts loose as side two ends. “1970,” a reprise of “1969” from their first album, shows dramatic changes in one year’s time. Steven Mackay comes in on sax, with solos outside almost anything previously heard in rock.

While none of these songs have radio appeal, most stretching out for four to seven minutes, this is one of those rare perfect albums. It seems to capture the craziness of a Stooges show. If you aren’t provoked, shocked, or insulted you must be in a coma. This music represents a side of America most people choose to ignore or refuse to acknowledge. The nihilistic lyrics succinctly codify urban disillusionment circa 1970.

Fun House is intuitive music, not some academic experiment. The sound is untouched. Ron and Scott Asheton bash out scathing but fluid noise on their instruments. Iggy Pop’s vocals ooze through the murk, often bursting into powerful screams. Almost like a trance, the Stooges smash ahead without regard for technique or tradition.

Despite being the most powerful and trashy album ever made, Fun House holds up well next to Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane. Iggy Pop had a jazz ideal in mind without knowing how his band would get there. In a way, the Stooges’ nominal lack of technical prowess allowed them to do what hindered even some jazz greats. Don’t assume lack of skill lessens incredible talent, because technical skill is irrelevant to the musical statement. On that point, many of the same riffs repeat throughout the album. All rock and roll repeats the same riff structures anyway. The Stooges simply use an honest approach that makes no excuses. 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions later proved that the Stooges refined the songs from a loose live set, to a concentrated statement of their identity.

Recorded on a visit to Los Angeles, Fun House was the Stooges’ last chance to record something that would sell. The title, Fun House, comes from the old Ann Arbor frat house the MC5 and Stooges used as a commune for rock and roll freaks. The record, of course, did not generate sales and the band broke up (luckily, the Stooges re-formed to later record Raw Power). Producer Don Gallucci deserves credit for not leaving any signs he worked on this album. Only the band’s raw energy comes through. Any overdubs are brilliantly concealed, creating an energetic and totally improvised feeling. In contrast, the Stooges’ great debut album, produced by John Cale of The Velvet Underground, sounds at times more like a collaboration with Cale than a pure Stooges effort.

Fun House is trash achieved. It plays like a soundtrack to high school shop class. Young punks who cruise main streets each night, all over the country, have this music in mind if not on their stereo. All three Stooges albums are classics, but this rises to the top as the purest documentation of their existence. It is simultaneously a raw statement of sex/drugs/rock’n’roll and a fluid masterpiece of experimentation. Like it or not, this is one kind of American culture at its finest.

The Rolling Stones – Emotional Rescue

The Rolling Stones – Emotional Rescue Rolling Stones Records CUN 39111 (1980)

Like Black and Blue, this is one of those Stones albums that lacks any certifiable “hits” but is nonetheless pretty decent all the way through, for the most part. It’s rather light fare, vaguely bluesy rock with little undercurrents of disco, ska/reggae, and punk circulating throughout. Probably not the first Stones album that comes to mind and yet this has to be near the top of the second tier in their catalog. I do rather like “Let Me Go” and “Dance (Part 1).” This one has grown on me through the years and it is one of the better later period Stones albums. Oh, why not say it, “Let Me Go” deserves to be considered up their with the band’s best songs too.

Walt Mink – Bareback Ride

Walt Mink – Bareback Ride Caroline CAROL 1737-2 (1993)

Solid 90s alternative rock. Reminiscent of Smashing Pumpkins, Matthew Sweet, and that sort of thing. Good guitar. But thing is, these kinds of records grew on trees back then. Also, John Kimbrough‘s vocals — super nerdy like They Might Be Giants or The Dead Milkmen — just…don’t work. It was really the lack of an effective vocalist that kept these guys an underground phenomenon.

John Cale – Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood

John Cale – Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood Double Six Recordings DS047 (2012)

It’s 2012 and both John Cale and Bob Dylan have new albums What do they have to offer? On Tempest, Dylan is operating in old man mode. He’s interested in a time-worn kind of songwriting, that could have very well passed for something written decades ago — even before Dylan’s career began in the early 1960s. It’s updated, a little. But the key is that he’s not really interested in what is happening around him in the music world. His style exists on its own, carried as long (or as short) as that takes him. As it turns out, it finds him stuttering, with some stellar tunes (like “Duquesne Whistle”) and some that are much less than that. In all Dylan is largely back on his bad habit of lazy blues riffing (what he really cemented with World Gone Wrong). And there you have it. Dylan remains Dylan, a sometimes insightful but always unshakable and inscrutable curmudgeon.

Cale’s approach could hardly be more different. As usual, his lyrics are sly, a little bit witty, with clever and intelligent themes but often fumble about short of a poet’s touch. But what stands out is his clear intent to sound contemporary. He has auto-tuned vocals that could easily have come from the latest R&B/hip-hop/dance hit. He’s pretty competent, and not for a second does he seem to lack an understanding of contemporary pop. Though he never seems to really, really love what he’s offering here. At times, there are hints of some of his old songs from the 70s like “Mary Lou,” seamlessly re-purposed, though by the same token it’s also hard not to think of them being re-used in place of an original hook. In the end, this is a continuation of the interest in modern musical production methods that began with Hobo Sapiens, though Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood, despite always being eminently listenable, lacks the pathos, the silly humor and personal feel of that former achievement (which has held up quite well almost a decade later). It may be a reality of making the songs more amenable to live performance. Despite some stellar support Cale has struggled to make the Hobo Sapiens songs work in concert.

Dylan may be less than a year older than Cale, but on this evidence they seem to inhabit different worlds. It’s a wonderful thing to find musicians still active after all these years having the freedom to take such divergent paths. Neither really delivers at his best. For Dylan, he soars and he sinks, and the sum total is an uneven affair that is best taken in only select doses. For Cale, he rides an even keel, and even gains some momentum across the album, but you probably won’t find any of his tunes stuck in your head.

Suicide – Suicide

Suicide – Suicide Red Star RS 1 (1977)

Displaying a very technical glee, inanimate synthesizers churn out their obvious products while hands and mouths force the onslaught. Suicide could provoke almost any audience to drop all the piss they sloshed in with. A Suicide show likely and intentionally would cause a riot (one documented on the flexidisc 23 Minutes Over Brussels). Hearing them live used involve real mortal danger. Lester Bangs once quoted Alan Vega shouting back at the audience, “What’re you all fuckin’ booin’ for? You’re all gonna die.” The grand mess this suggests wasn’t one Suicide created but one they were cleaning up. Like the poet Arthur Rimbaud suggested, Suicide used pain to become voyants.

This was Suicide’s first album (as opposed to their second album of the same title), recorded in three hours plus mixing time. They had already been performing occasionally over the years in New York. Around ’77 they were fixtures at Max’s Kansas City and the Mercer Arts Center, with some appearances at the “highbrow” CBGB’s. Their influence reached countless bands. Knockoffs may have been more popular, but Suicide was always by far the best.

Martin Rev and Alan Vega, together known as the band/performance art outfit Suicide, had an aggressive, uncompromising attitude. The synthetic sounds mapped personal detours from free jazz and visual arts. Purified angst dribbled out of their few musical machines, collectively dubbed “instrument”. No guitars.

This minimalist approach can evoke a rockabilly snarl in a pristine conceptual stasis with each outbust from Vega. Every delicate melodic statement has a force its own. The power becomes obvious early with “Ghost Rider” and “Rocket USA.” The songs put Rev and Vega’s elegant violence provocatively up front. “Cheree” and “Girl” have Vega’s moaning tuned to a frequency probably outlawed in most states.

Rev and Vega were linked to the streets. That put them on the level of New Yorkers like Thelonious Monk. While committed entirely to sophisticated pursuits, the proximity of the hunger and cold kept their music visceral.

“Frankie Teardrop” was the duo’s signature tune. A song more frightening than a dry read of Hubert Selby, Jr. This contrasts with distracting sideshow tactics. Suicide weren’t con men since they did not lie. They held an essence. Attuning ears to that essence beautifully reveals the solid values driving them. The clarity of their music was necessary to keep it true. Intricacy remained, undiluted.

Suicide anticipate a primitive future more glorious the convoluted one still known today. They make sure “punk” is always associated with confrontation. Suicide clears enough space to remember the forgotten innate beauties relegated to rediscovery among fetid piles of documents, glass, and flesh. Suicide seemed to enter a trance state to convey this from their end. A little bloodshed on the other end is inevitable. They teach fearless listening. It is incalculably more dangerous not to listen.

Suicide is as freaky as it has to be. It is also very cool and surprisingly easy to like. Apparently venom never spoils.

Father John Misty – I Love You, Honeybear

Father John Misty – I Love You, Honeybear Sub Pop SP 1115 (2015)

Arrogant music for arrogant people.

While there are good moments on I Love You, Honeybear, this is music with a definite mean streak and a rather disingenuous, condescending approach to songcraft. First, the songs. The lyrics are blunt, delivered without much poetic lyricism, almost like a monologue. They are deeply cynical, and frequently sarcastic. Big words and references to current events are littered about, but there isn’t much behind them. They are used to contextualize the music, place it in front of people who pay attention to such things, but it doesn’t really run with any of those concepts. It is a rather self-conscious attempt to seem “with it”. (Also, some of the song titles parody famous old songs). Much of the time, though, things veer into misanthropic diatribes. This is were the music becomes arrogant. The words of the songs constantly put down posers and the falsehoods of mass culture. But, really, this is just a device to try to place the singer above it. He constantly takes a superior and derisive tone toward the objects of his scorn (and every song has something to complain about!). And this is why the music is disingenuous. It pretends to be above the subjects being trashed, and yet also depends upon them because it needs something to belittle, to assert superiority over. Occasionally, it works to a point. The opening lines to “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment” are “Oh, I just love the kind of woman who can walk over a man / I mean like a god damn marching band.” Seems like a feminist anthem, right? Well, the song soon enough devolves into put downs like “I wonder if she even knows what that word means.” It returns to the singer explaining how people adore him and how stupidly this other character acts. This is emblematic of the whole album, which pretends to point out the failings of the world only to seize upon those failings for self-aggrandizement.

Lyrics aside, the instrumental music can be engaging, at times. Building from a base of contemporary “indie” folk, there are plenty of touches that look back to acid rock and psychedelic folk of the past, mostly of the 1960s and early 1970s. The record is well-produced, and it has a good command of all the elements of the past called up to service. Embellished layers and short, shifting resolutions can be catchy, like the driving, distorted electric guitar and pounding piano at the end of “The Ideal Husband” or the smoothly burning guitar soloing on “When You’re Smiling and Astride Me” and “Strange Encounter.” But the songs that are hardly more than an acoustic guitar and maybe a piano for accompaniment are a drag. And the singer (Josh Tillman) doesn’t have a particularly memorable tone of voice. The most interesting parts of this album would have been put to better use elsewhere, with an entirely different lyricist and singer.

Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Live 1975

Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Live 1975 – The Rolling Thunder Revue Legacy C2K 87047 (2002)

When Bob Dylan embarked on his “Rolling Thunder Revue” in 1975, it was part of his creative renaissance. It was his second wind after a hum-drum few years at the dawn of the 1970s. The revue traveled by train and included a laundry list of friends and collaborators, new and old. Before The Bootleg Series Vol. 5, Hard Rain had already been released documenting the tour. But Hard Rain was tired and disappointing. Here, Dylan sounds desperate, in the sense of being urged to go on.

This one opens with a blazing “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” (a song debuted on Nashville Skyline). It then drifts into a few rather dated reworkings of old songs. Dylan’s backing band may feature a lot of big names, but they play a kind of music that often suffers from the worst excesses of the era: ornate guitar wankery, hollow, tinny and effect-laden engineering, and a full and claustrophobic sound that lacks space. They are basically just self-indulgent hippie jams. But the end of disc one turns to folk. This highlights much of what was missing on Hard Rain and much of what came next in Dylan’s career. He started as a folkie, and he was a good one! He then went electric, which was what launched him to superstardom. His contentious concerts of that era would feature some acoustic folk and also electric rock. His albums of that era mostly did this too. Later though, particularly from the late 1970s onward, everything was more or less electric. He was far less successful in a purely rock setting. For whatever reason, there was only so much rock music that Dylan could put out at one time. It could be — let’s not forget — that when Dylan went electric it was before the modern rock era. It was only about a decade out from Elvis and other early rock that was not strictly urban. As that kind of stuff was left behind, Dylan didn’t adapt particularly well. Maybe folk seemed equally of the past at times (he did return to it though). But a set like The Bootleg Series Vol. 5 includes the right amount of folk. It’s some of the most consistent material here. For instance, there’s a great “Tangled Up in Blue” here (maybe better than the studio version). The set wraps with more electric material at the end of disc two. The last few electric songs work better on average than much of disc one, settling into a sound comparable to contemporary Grateful Dead. The second disc also features a lot of songs from the not-yet-released Desire, and the whole band seems engaged with the new material.

There is something hard in this music. It looks back more than forward. It is like a reaction to the 1960s. Not everything had gone as planned. Dylan couldn’t have anticipated his celebrity status. He probably wouldn’t have expected his career to start slipping in the 70s. What makes this interesting in how it tries to avoid defeat. But in doing that you can sense that much more than before the possibility of defeat looms larger in Dylan’s consciousness. This was it though. Desire, released a few months later, would be the last truly relevant Dylan album.

[One note about the packaging here. I checked this out from my library, so something might have been missing from the box, but there appears to be no listing of recording dates or personnel for each song. Presumably, this is culled from multiple concerts. It’s quite impossible to tell though.]

Bob Dylan – At Budokan

Bob Dylan – At Budokan Columbia PC2 36067 (1979)

Count At Budokan among the group of most divisive albums in the Dylan catalog. Recorded in Japan on a 1978 tour, amidst sessions for Street-Legal, it finds Dylan making an attempt to develop a Vegas-style show with a horn section and backing singers. The template for this type of show is an Elvis Presley album like Elvis in Person at the International Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada and Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite. Like the former Elvis album, Dylan is doing new arrangements of his old hits. The problem here is mostly that flautist/saxophonist/etc. Steve Douglas is TERRIBLE! That flute is too loud and the sax is clichéd. And the band as whole is a little stiff. In hindsight, others have pointed out that shows from the tour in England were stronger and would have made for a better album. As it stands, one of this album’s biggest liabilities is that it’s far too long. At two discs, there’s a full disc worth of unnecessary reggae and easy listening mediocrity. That’s too bad, because some of this — “Maggie’s Farm,” “All I Really Want to Do,” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” — really sounds good in its new setting. And, hey, Dylan is actually trying to sing, and doing a decent job of it by his usual standards.

Elvis – Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis

Elvis – Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis RCA Victor CPL1-0606 (1974)

Anyone following Elvis’ career in the early 1970s will note the large number of live albums. Oh, there were studio albums too, even really good ones. But most of the studio albums came from just a few recording sessions, and some were bolstered with selected live material. This was the time of Elvis’ Vegas act. It’s worth putting that in more perspective though. The King hit it big in the 1950s, as the first rock and roll superstar. But as his star rose, and he started to get into the movies, he was drafted into the Army and spent a few years stationed in Germany before returning to a musical career. He recorded as soon as he got out of the Army, but attention soon shifted to the movies. He didn’t perform concerts. His albums were movie soundtracks, sometimes improbably including a good tune (“Viva Las Vegas”), but for the most part — Elvis openly admitted as much in his later years — they were terrible. But with his Hollywood career going strong, he was resting his voice. It did not suffer from years of hard touring. He also made no attempt to be relevant in the era of Beatlemania and the British Invasion. He suddenly came back with a late-60s TV special and his first new non-soundtrack album in what seemed like forever. And then he started a Vegas act. These career paths were unprecedented. There simply weren’t any rock superstars before Elvis, so no one knew what they would do as they got older. No rocker had ever made a “comeback” before. But he could do it in part because he semi-consciously took time off from a focus on music, and the lack of touring meant his voice was ready and waiting for the task. There also weren’t any rock and roll themed Vegas acts, which was given over largely to Rat Pack style crooners, Liberace-like spectacles, and non-musical acts, of course. The signature feature of Elvis’ show was that it became huge, in terms of having an enormous cast of musicians supporting him. He performed enormously complex arrangements of old hits and new songs. And he and manager Col. Tom Parker always seemed to find great songs to incorporate into the act that fit Elvis like a glove. The success of this style of show rested in large part on the tremendous amount of hard work that Elvis put into it. But keeping the show going, often with two shows a night, took a toll. Elvis notoriously had a growing drug dependency, one exacerbated by the pressures of the entertainment industry. Despite hugely successful stands at the International Hotel in Vegas, big shows at Madison Square Garden in New York City, and the first ever globally televised concert Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite, by 1973 he was collapsing and being hospitalized as a result of his failing health.

So then we arrive in 1974, when Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis was recorded March 20th at the Midsouth Coliseum. In 2004 a reissue of this album presented the entire concert, but the original album featured only an abridged selection of material from the show. The entire show followed more or less the same familiar formula as nearly all of Elvis’ concerts and live albums of the previous few years: commencing with “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (known as the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey), then right into “See See Rider”, with a medley of 50s hits in the middle and familiar tunes like “Polk Salad Annie,” “An American Trilogy,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and “Suspicious Minds” littered throughout. But what is most intriguing about this album is how it differs from the usual format of the previous few years. There is a big band, but not with an emphasis on a huge string orchestra. There are more intimate moments with Elvis singing just with a piano. He also does some gospel songs. Unlike most of Elvis’ live albums, the crowd is readily audible (though allegedly some audience noise is overdubbed). It does sound at times like the band, and Elvis, have tired some of playing the same songs yet again, the same way as always. But those concerns fade when listening to “Why Me Lord,” “How Great Thou Art” and “Help Me.” What is unfortunate is that there does not seem to be the same level of effort in expanding and evolving the act as there was a few years earlier. These are just minor adjustments meant to perpetuate the same successful formula.

This isn’t the best of Elvis’ live albums of his musical comeback. It’s still a good one, with elements of widespread appeal. It is best admired by fans who have heard his other material of the era and want something more that sets off in a similar direction with a few tweaks and slightly different material. It’s too bad Elvis couldn’t just retreat back to the movies and then emerge in the late 70s/early 80s backed by a punk-like trio…oh, you know it might have worked! Even Bob Dylan almost went with it in the early 80s.