Tuesday, September 30, 2003
The Essential Willie Nelson (2 CDs) - Found it on sale and thought I'd give it a shot. To my surprise, I was delighted with many of the earlier songs, but I can't stand the later stuff--disc 2 is a suckfest of ballads. The highlights of Disc 1 for me include: Hello Walls, Funny How Time Slips Away (gorgeous and haunting!), I Never Cared For You*, The Party's Over, & Me and Paul (outstanding). These are among the best songs I know. The first couple of these songs are very dated--that 50s sound with the corny backup singers, but somehow, to me, they're sublime. In the beginning, Nelson's style was nicely understated--none of that wide vibrato he adopted later. A high school math teacher of mine used to sing The Party's Over after timed exams, and I never knew where it came from until now. Nelson's rendition of Crazy, a song he wrote, is fine, but we have Patsy's, and even the songwriter can't approach her version.
(*Lyrically, I Never Cared for You is similar in formula, and makes an interesting comparison with, a recent Dolly Parton song, The Grass is Blue.)
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Speaking of 60s music, a friend pointed this out to me today--oh, dear. That's just wrong. Apparently a brave soul she works with admitted to once owning one of their albums. Props to him.
I was in a record store a few weeks ago and heard some fabulous 60s music that sounded uncannily like The Beatles. Not so much a clone sound as an intelligent and talented mining of the vein opened up by the Beatles. (Um, that's a mining metaphor, not a drug one...) I asked what it was but misheard, and later I found myself unable to hunt it down. Luckily a few weeks later I spotted a review and found out the CD I'd heard in store was Pieces by The Millenium, a 60s group which is reputed to have been unfairly passed over for fame. Their album Begin, appropriately enough, is said to be the place to start, but just you try to find a copy to purchase. I couldn't, not after searching every store in town and a dozen online. Pieces was hard enough to track down (the copy I'd heard in the record store that day wasn't for sale), so I settled for that collection, glad to get something. It's good mellow 60s music, and I really like it, though there's more variety to the album than my first brief exposure led me to expect. I've since noticed that someone seems to be re-issuing solo albums (on CD, of course) by various members of the band, and I don't know if they did originally, but now the album artwork all matches in a pleasing way, aesthetically--one that invites consumer collecting. Curt Boettcher is said to be the big name in this scene, and it was a new one to me. An interesting bit of knowledge. I like the idea of rummaging for the lesser-known 60s music, as the sounds of the day are fantastic but are hard to hear afresh.
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Just finished reading Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2002, and, just like the first two editions, it was excellent. I eagerly look forward to 2003.
This year's editor was author Jonathan Lethem. As usual, the spectrum was wide, covering jazz, country, and pop/rock, including hip-hop. (No classical, though. Too bad.) Standouts include: a Top 100 of L.A. songs; an article on "Dylanology"; appreciations of Armstrong, Radiohead, the Beatles; an insightful appraisal of N*E*R*D; a funny and thoughtful history of the power ballad; and powerful profiles of lounge icon Korla Pandit, Ralph Stanley, Roky Erickson, Jay-Z, and Anita O'Day. Hell, the rest of it was good, too. (The only clunker was a lame series of online posts by a bunch of wankers arguing over the importance of The Strokes. A good topic but not handled well. Nick Hornby's inclusion of online writing in the 2001 ed. was far better.) Frequent touchstones: Dylan, The Beatles, Neil Young, O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Ramones, CBGB, Parker, Davis, Ellington, Armstrong, Chuck Berry. No surprises there.
The book made me want to check out many, many albums and acts. (I'll be checking out the leads from the Radiohead piece soonest, since I'm so in love with their recent work.) Here are a few:
- Talking Heads' Remain in Light
- PiL's Flowers of Romance and Metal Box
- Faust
- Pink Floyd's Meddle
- The Ramones
- Sammi Smith's version of "Help me Make it Through the Night"; and Keely Smith
- Anita O'Day, esp. her performance in the jazz concert doc. (on DVD), Jazz on a Summer's Day
- The Stanley Bros.
- Earl Scruggs
- Jay-Z
- N*E*R*D
- As much of Steve Erickson's L.A. top 100 as possible
Another one is Television's Marquee Moon, which I just borrowed and am listening to for the first time. I like it, but I have one comment off the bat: this vocal style reminds me of Patti Smith and the Violent Femmes' Gordon Gano.
And, a last observation. I found it interesting, in these times of political paranoia about gay marriage, that in two of these pieces we learn that the subjects, after having been abandoned or failed by their parents, were taken in and cared for by gay men. The first, "Soljas," is about a young would-be rapper in New Orleans, and the second is a biographical tidbit about Sammi Smith.
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
Two new books on music sound really interesting:
- The Sound and the Fury : 40 years of Classic Rock Journalism: A Rock's Back Pages Reader by Barney Hoskins
- Songcatchers: In Search of the World's Music by Mickey Hart & K.M. Kostyal
The first collects pieces about seminal rock events from the British Invasion to Monterey Pops, Altamont, etc. And the second is supposed to be a reader-friendly overview of the history of song collecting--those workers who go out into the field and record folk music of all kinds before it disappears. Cool!
