Masquerade is directly/clearly implicated in the the <mask> theme:
a false show or appearance
Two weeks back, I was going to write up Please Mr Postman as part of our Wait/Don't Wait theme, and toyed with at least mentioning the Carpenters' version. Which curiously came out with their version of This Masquerade as the B-side of the record. Funny how things come around.
You know the story line: it's a couple that is going through a masquerade, pretending they are still in love, when actually they are just too far away from being close together.
Despite the fact that George Benson made the best charting of the known versions, the song really belongs to Leon Russell: his voice is just right for it. It's the only song on Benson's Breezin' album that has vocals.
Russell's Carney was perhaps his best. I would choose Me and Baby Jane as my favorite - something like it's about Janis? But - the album cover, the pesona that Leon was projecting at that time - they seem to fit both the Carney and the Masquerade image.
O, shame the poor wag who suggested the name of the album was a suggestion to the band. Cripes, they aren't that ugly, are they? Hardly Slipknot territory, or the Straitjackets, both those bands clearly victims to the horror of looks only their mothers could love.
(OK, I accept the above may not even be the same line-up as for Masque, and who would? But it is an awkward cantilever to my introduction of an anecdote. Back when my brother was at Uni in the late 60s, and Manfred Mann, as in the then incarnation of his eponymous band, was always riding high in the charts, he too employed on of those natty beard without 'tache numbers. And specs. One day, at Glasgow's Central station, he was shouted at by two girls: "ooo, look it's Manfred." And then they ran off. That's it.)
Manfred Mann, the band, had a pretty damn fine career, littering the charts with singles and getting a rare accolade from Bob Dylan, who had suggested they did the best versions of his songs. (To be fair, have you heard the original of Mighty Quinn?) Having exhausted initial vocalist Paul Jones, who moved onto worlds bluer, and then Mike D'Abo to songs poppier, Mann ditched the band, bar drummer Mike Hutt, for the singularly unsuccessful Manfred Mann Chapter Three. The rest of the band had meanwhile largely found a home in the brief burst of joy of McGuinness Flint. You would think that would be that for the South African piano player.
However, against the odds, Mann bounced back. Always more a jazz noodler than teen delight, prog rock was just the vista his vision required, and the Earthband plunged, fully formed, into the charts with a cover, this time of a 'new' Dylan, one Bruce Springsteen. The song? Blinded by the Light, that perhaps the only part of the lyric discernible to young boys intent on singing along.
Masque was astonishingly their thirteenth (!!) album, and the last ahead of a temporary hiatus, between 1987 and 1996. Unsurprisingly, as is the way of all all warhorses, he pulls a version of the band around to this day. But Masque was the first to really catch my ear. Having been a huge fan of the Nice and ELP, where Keith Emerson would fuse classical pomp with rock, Mann too liked to weld these opposites, his ambition having always been to put out a rock version of Gustav Holst's The Planets Suite. Annoyingly the executors of Holst's estate continued to put a block on this, as they had when the idea was first aired to them years earlier. So only one track, the opener and single, Joybringer, gets the direct lift and a composing credit for Gustav, with other tracks merely alluding to occasional planets, and hints of their musical inspiration. (In fact, Jupiter/Joybringer had had a first lick of paint back in 1973, when Mann first came up with the idea, released as a non album single.) Planets Schmanets, on side two, probably sums up Mann's opinion of the executors. Confusingly, interspersed there are songs with credits to sources as disparate as Horace Silver, Paul Weller and Michael Murphey. It makes for quite a milky way of influences, all in all. If you can keep up the canter between styles, it is well worth the ride, perhaps also explaining the title, each "masque" being applied as the band skip from the classics to 1940s big band jazz to synth pop to singer-songwriter staples. Phew!
Here are the two versions of Joybringer, 1973, above, and 1985, below, for comparison.
A few years back, we did an “Unusual Collaborations” theme, and had Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets been working together back then, it would have seemed to fit right in. But what is more surprising is that their collaboration actually has worked so well and so seamlessly.
Lowe, of course, has proven to be an incredible musical chameleon. He’s done pub rock, punk, new wave, power pop, country, roots music, standards, holiday music and more. He’s a songwriter, a producer, a singer, a leader, a sideman, and instrumentalist. Los Straitjackets, since their formation in the late 1980s, have been an instrumental band playing rockabilly influenced surf-rock. But beyond the quality of their music, what most people know about Los Straitjackets, if they know anything about Lost Straitjackets, is that they perform in Mexican wrestling masks. Why, you ask? Apparently, they wore them at their first gig, and the crowd loved it, so they just kept doing it.
A few years back, Lowe was performing shows focusing on his more country crooner songs, but after the death of drummer Bobby Irwin in 2015, he broke up that band. When Lowe wanted to tour behind his holiday album, his record company suggested label mates Los Straitjackets as a touring band. Eventually, Lowe insisted that the band play his songs as if they were their own, and he’d just fit in. This collaboration allowed Lowe to pull out some of his old rockers again for subsequent tours, and they have released a bunch of songs together. And in 2017, Los Straitjackets released an instrumental album of Lowe covers, entitled, What's So Funny About Peace, Love And Los Straitjackets.
I got to see them perform together last year at the great Tarrytown Music Hall, and it was a great show. The video above, of the whole show was taken by someone in the audience (not me), and you can see how it was structured—A set with Lowe leading the masked Los Straitjackets, a set with just the band, ending with a Lowe cover, and another set together. For the encore, the band returned first, playing tribute to their fellow masked man, Batman, before Lowe rejoined, and then a final encore of a solo Lowe covering his friend Elvis Costello.
So, apparently Gloria Estefan (I'm not sure if she brought the Miami Sound Machine with her on this) has re-recorded "Get on Your Feet" as "Put On Your Mask."
That's good to hear. Even if it's a silly pop song and wedding reception staple, if it gets people to stop politicizing a virus and actually act as if they care about others, I applaud the effort.
I'm not a fan of the MSS (those in the know, know...), but I'm grateful to anyone with a platform who is willing to advocate for good practice, common sense, and most of all, admonishing others to show concern and care for others. And to take responsibility and do their part. There will be a time in our future where we look back on these days, and we will be asked what we did to help, what our role was. And for those who can't answer that question without concrete evidence of contributing to the cause of the cure, or worse, can show nothing more than a few social media posts that help them brag about their strident political hobbyism, I do hope you can get it together and start being part of the solution. If nothing else, listen to Ms. Estefan, and Put on your Mask!
Perhaps the real problem is selfishness and our fetisization of individual freedoms, which is really just giving into our narcissism and indulging our worst instincts of self-satisfaction. Or self-satisfaction. We're a civilization of self-pleasers bent on achieving our individual mandates, regardless of the presence, needs/desires, or hopes of others. Don't believe me: drive a little too slowly in the fast lane.
I know not everyone is awful, but the world sure does seem to be full of assholes who equate happiness to achieving their individual happiness at the expense of others. Or those who believe in conspiracy theories because the bullshit is more interesting, or rather more easy to understand, than the reasoned out and rational truth.
I know I'm generalizing, and most of us are good people, all suffering from the same anxieties and pursuing the same satisfaction of the same basic needs, namely to be happy, safe, loved, and that our default mode is not really selfishness. But, it's really hard to believe in the best of us when I see so much of the worst of us in almost everything we do.
Freedom shouldn't be about making yourself happy or indulging in your own needs without regard for the rest; it's about coexisting with others and doing right by others so they do right by you. That's the golden rule, in so many words. It's a simple concept--do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. I've been hearing it since I was a kid, and it's the one lesson I'm thankful for having been subjected to an awful 10+plus years of Catholic school. I wish I knew how to teach it to everyone...
OK, moralizing--DONE.
Music?
Masks?
Cool.
Gives me a reason to write about Seattle's original grunge pioneers, the progenitors of the scene and the sound, far better than Mudhoney and some of the other noise/scratch rock outfits that get bigger billing.
Screaming Trees--a blues outfit that knew how to channel the metal gods that smiled down upon Seattle in those glorious days of the late 80's into the early 90's and gave us the blessed new anvil pounding symphony from Vulcan's blacksmithery, otherwise known as Grunge. I argue they were the inventors of what became most indicative of what the grunge sound is: metal and classic rock, with a healthy dose of the blues. These sounds are most evident on anything by Screaming Trees, and they are at their best when the sound it somehow comfortable slipping into multiple timelines.
Screaming Trees hit a major radio blast with their single "Nearly Lost You" and their biggest commercial success, Sweet Oblivion. But Screaming Trees are a band that were a small blip on a big screen that deserve a much deeper listen. Led by Mark Lanegan, who in other times might have been a sage meant to be rediscovered and worshiped long after he was done, Screaming Trees were, to me, quintessential grunge: heavy, heavy rock, played in homage to the giants of blues and doom that came before them, channeling a vibe that spoke of darkness, but resounded with downtuned guitars and what might have been the real and true heavy metal thunder. But, they had pop sensibilities, too, and the sweetness filtered through heavy doses of drugs and getting lost in the woods gave them a sound that was unique. Screaming Trees had potential to grow into something a lot more interesting, had they given themselves the room and time to explore and hadn't been sidetracked by extra-curricular activities. Like so many of the Seattle bands, they were potential cut down well before their prime, ruined and dissipated and finished long before they had reached their potential. There is a good catalog here, full of promise and a lot of sonic what-might-have-been. Screaming Trees deserve a serious and enthusiastic listen. Too bad it didn't get past the excess.
Say no to drugs.
Be kind to your neighbor.
Wear your mask.
Oh, yeah: the song..."Girl Behind the Mask" is from 1987's Even If And Especially When, on the venerable SST label. It's a silly bit of pseudo-psychedelic rock. A love song about a mysterious girl.
I wonder how we might end up thinking about masks, given the metaphorical weight they've carried for so long, compared to essential importance we now give to donning one. Masks used to be something to hide behind on nights and times given over to wanton fun and celebrations. Or when robbing a bank. Or doing some downhill skiing. Now, it's all about saving a life, yours or your neighbors.
The girl behind the mask? The world behind the mask. I hope. Until we get through this. Look out for your neighbor; be responsible; take care of your fellow human being. Let's get through this. We are all responsible.
By now you know the score, I type the theme into search on my i-tunes and snarf up anything applicable. Mask wasn't so great, masque slightly better, but nothing that grabbed me or enough. Maybe if I do a second post. So it was to synonyms I sauntered, learning a bit along the way.
No, me neither, I had no idea the sort of mask as above is actually called a domino. Sure, no use against the virus, and pretty damn poor as a disguise, but it is what is is. Very popular in the Venetian Carnival, it seems, whereby folk could get up to all sorts of malarkey, being entirely unrecognisable to one and all, as they spread, no doubt, a good deal more than aerosol droplets.
Damn right, it's Sir George (Ivan) Morrison at the front, with Domino, his exuberant paean to inscrutability, the meaning, as ever, as clear as murk. If you don't believe me, go check out the lyrics. They are unlikely to be about the board game beloved of the old and simple, so who's to say there isn't some mystical reference to masking up. Cos' Van is always mystical, or was 1980 to about 2000. Now he's just plain grouchy. But, back then, this track from 1970's His Band and the Street Choir, he was on fire, the musicianship and sassy play exemplary. (I read the song was actually a tribute to New Orleans legend, Fats Domino, exquisitely proving my point about it being nothing to do with dominoes. How could you possibly line up 1000 Fats Dominoes and see them tumble as anything wholesome to watch.)
Those nice boys from Squeeze provide our next tribute to limited disguise. In their later days, as glory began to dissipate, this is a fairly typical construction of their very well put together magpie pilfering of styles, built to carry the vocal and lyrical chicanery of Tillbrook and Difford. The title track from 1998 album, Domino. Here there is a mention of tumbling pieces, presumably in reference to the amount of drinking going on, itself another staple of their storybook songs. They play on to this day, I'm pleased to say, perhaps more heritage now than cutting edge, but all power to that.
The Big O, then, and a cat called Domino. Another reference to the big fella from N'Awlins, actually and really called (Antoine Dominique) Domino? I think not, the feline being the factor here, as many a cat has markings evoking a domino. None of this hipster slang, man, as those cats in the Cramps can confirm. From when Orbison was just amongst a cluster of rockabilly rebels trying to catch the crown of the King (Creole), perhaps that is why it seems so reminiscent.
I don't actually think much of this song, a slimmer effort, Domino Dancing, by the sometimes wonderful Pet Shop Boys. Picking up on the Squeeze song, this again has the masked revellers all falling down as the absinthe hits. (Probably beer in the Squeeze world, but I can't quite ever see the PSB with anything quite so common.)
All in all I feel I have made a sound and sturdy case for my thesis. No more will you think of the Lone Ranger without remembering his mask and its name.
Quickly before signing off, time again to return to the Belfast Gypsy and his imagery. Sticking to his theme, here is another in the same vein. And this his time truly about Kemosabe.
I think it's safe to say that the visual image most people conjure of the joker is some variation of the classic Batman archenemy - pretty much what the cover of the Steve Miller Band's 1973 album of the same name depicts.
You've got to drill down to the fifth page of a google search for the term <joker> before you can get out links to the movies and reach the Mirriam-Webster definition of the generic term, which is what I was looking for. Looking for because I suspicion that the popular association with the Batman character is relatively recent. The first entry at M-W.com is "a person given to joking". The second is what I was looking for: "a playing card ..". And that is what I suspect would have been the popular visual association up until a few decades ago. Granted, the associated image from a deck of cards is what most of us would term a "jester".
Jester or Joker, Batman or Steve Miller, all "mask up" (Miller's covering and the KISS images that you are familiar with are pretty muchly contemporaneous) You can dig deeper here: there is a Wikipedia category labelled <Masked Musicians> with 114 entries as I write.
We are also aware of the "classical" Greek theater masks, and that's about as far back as written records of their use go. No small number of articles in publications such as Psychology Today look at the masks we all wear, knowingly or not, without actually "putting" them on. When Oscar Wilde said "Be yourself; everyone else is taken.", he was referencing this use of masks - pretending to be something/someone you are not in the face of society.
But this isn't a blog about states of mind - unless you want to consider that music is in fact a state of mind. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to enjoy and consider Steve Miller's Joker. I had been listening to a fair amount of Steve Miller before The Joker. Songs like
Space Cowboy, from Brave New World
and Song for Our Ancestors, from Sailor
I seem to recollect that Joker was a breakout piece for the Steve Miller Band, a trend that continued for a few years after with the similarly well-received Fly Like an Eagle and Abracadabra. The lyrics of The Joker get at the stuff of Oscar Wilde and Pychology Today: a life of many facets. Maurice, the space cowboy, grinner, lover, sinner, joker, smoker, midnight toker. The lyrics also include a "nonce word" [a coined word]: pompatus, as in
'Cause I speak of the pompatus of love.
And there is a Wikipedia article about how that all probably came about.
The list of on-time members of the band include Boz Scaggs, Nicky Hopkins, Les Dudek among another 20 or so that I confess don't mean as much to me. And that is undoubtedly my loss, but one that I can correct somewhere down the road.
You’re probably sick of reading how I learned something interesting in researching my post, but this time, I learned four interesting things. And what better way to spend the continued COVID-19 life slowdown than learning three interesting things about music, right?
First, if you asked me who was older, Andy Summers, former guitarist for The Police, or Robert Fripp, King Crimson guitarist, I probably would have said Fripp. Mostly because he’s been pretty famous since the late 1960s, is generally categorized as being a prog-rocker and usually wears suits these days, while Summers became famous as the guitarist in a punk band in the late 70s-early 80s. But that’s wrong. Summers is 77 (!), while Fripp is 74. I think I knew that Summers played in Soft Machine, and with other bands before The Police, but I guess his time in that band made me think he was younger than he is (Sting is 68 and Stewart Copeland is 67. Henry Padovani, The Police’s original guitarist (!), is also 67.)
The second thing that I learned is that Summers and Fripp first met in the early 1960s, when Summers’ band, Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band, was the regular entertainment at the Bournemouth Majestic Hotel when Fripp was attending Bournemouth College. And when Zoot Money moved to London, Fripp’s band, the Majestic Dance Orchestra, replaced them at the hotel. The Majestic was a Jewish hotel, and the Majestic Dance Orchestra occasionally played weddings and bar mitzvahs. (Interesting thing number three!)
Apparently, the two incredible, but different, guitar players remained friends.
We’ll get to the fourth interesting thing soon.
In 1981 and 1982, when both men had time between their Police and Crimson obligations, they met to jam together, and those sessions ultimately resulted in an album of 13 instrumentals entitled, I Advance Masked. To my ears, much of the album, and particularly the title track, displays some similarity to the interlocking guitar work that Fripp was doing with Adrian Belew in the recently reformed King Crimson, except that Summers and Belew’s styles are very different, so it didn’t sound exactly like Crimson.
Not being a guitarist, or really a musician of any sort, I’ll let Summers describe how his and Fripp’s styles were different:
We’re still pretty much polar opposites in our playing. Robert over the years has gone down one line, the polyrhythmic single-line approach, and he’s brought it to a degree of perfection where he can improvise on it and play it like no other guitarist in the world. His strengths are playing the sort of fuzz solo, very quirky and very rhythmic. I’m classically-trained, came up playing pop and blues (Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band, Soft Machine, Animals, etc.), a regular rock soloist in many ways. It’s hard, but it clicks. Robert gives the music a spine, he’s the masculine element, and I probably represent the feminine side of the duo, but out of it a whole new personality emerges. It’s a beautiful form of alchemy.
The song, remarkably, also spawned a very bad video:
So, what’s the fourth thing?
The title of the song and album was derived from something that none other than René Descartes once wrote in a diary, and which supposedly became the second most famous thing he ever said (although I admit to never having heard it before): “larvatus prodeo,” which sounds like a Harry Potter spell, but means, “masked, I advance.” Apparently, it relates to how Descartes had to disguise his true self to succeed.
OK—there’s a fifth thing I learned, although it isn’t as interesting as the other stuff. On the DGM Live website, the official site for Fripp/Crimson and related projects (and projekcts), Fripp often publishes a daily diary, and since March, he occasionally titles them “I Advance Masked,” and includes a picture of him in a mask. Here’s one recent example.
Dylan's <Can't Wait> went through various gestations before appearing on Time Out of Mind. There was a gospel version, a "Pink Floyd" version, and a country version. From SongFacts: Engineer Mark Howard recalled to Mojo Magazine July 2010: "Dan wanted to get back to the gospel version of 'Can't Wait' we cut in Oxnard. We cut three or four different versions and named every take. The 'Pink Floyd' version's quite psychedelic and the 'Rag Doll' version is country rock. Bob's like, 'I don't wanna hear this song any more, we got a version down.' Dan was trying to get to the original. " The Tell Tale Signs album includes 2 unreleased versions of the song.
Myself ... Nashville Skyline was the best of his albums. Maybe Blonde on Blonde rates next. I really liked Slow Train Coming, too. Time Out of Mind? Welp ... I guess I had kind of tired of Dylan by then. Lots to say, but lots of the same. *yawn* . Rolling Stone labels this period starting around the 1980s as Dylan "casting about for a purpose". More recently, he has more purpose: "world-weary ... hard boiled ... talk[ing] about truths in unambiguous terms".
<Can't Wait> is from back before the millenium. Like much about Dylan, the lyrics and more have been dissected both for the greater meaning and for insight into the "bard's" frame of mind. Examined line for line, word for word, because ... he speaks for us all. As he has done since the 60's.
But <Can't Wait> on Time Out of Mind is world-weary. It's blues in a minor key - somewhat uncommon - and the effect enhances the sense of gray desperation that Dylan vocals bring to life:
I left my life with you somewhere back there along the line
I thought somehow that I would be spared this fate
But I don’t know how much longer I can wait
(The version at the top appears to be pretty faithful to the Time Out of Mind version)
<Can't Wait> on Tell Tale Signs carries a different feel. (The version below appears to be rendered in this style)
And if you haven't yet listened to this, you might enjoy the hard boiled commentary of Murder Most Foul this past spring. Lengthy, but filled with references that - to a 60+ person of American heritage - were filled with emotions (not facts?) I could relate to.
Sooooo tired, tired of waiting...... Yes, my macbook has relapsed and I now spend, again, most of my days watching the spinning beachball of death. Something must be done, but, whilst I await funds, something has to give. And what better than a bit of Raymond Douglas. I have had a strange old life with the Kinks and with Ray Davies. (Raymond Douglas Davies, yep?) So brilliant and innovative in the 60s into 70s, yet now so, well, c'mon. And all you return to form critics can just stop wasting my money.
Tired of Waiting For You (1964)
So, since when was rock'n'roll a life long career? Wasn't it always a "when are you going to get a proper job", with, now, all these old age pensioners still trying to prove their parents wrong. Yet still I want them to succeed to produce some latter day lodestone of brilliance. Overlook my insouciance, tho', it a product, also, of the beast that begat the issue. I mean, FFS, what am I doing, at damn near 64, still listening to pop music? And searching for truth in doing so?
Days (1968)
It isn't as if I'm not grateful. Most of my memories are coated in a soundtrack of their time. It is easier to evoke those days through song than substance, a short cut to having to wrack the braincells into any accurate reportage. The sepia tints of nostalgia can then cut through the realities best discarded.
The Village Green Preservation Society (1969)
OK, that probably takes it too far, but, thinking a little longer, maybe not: I can remember this list of archaic and rose-tinted list of disappearing/disappeared onetime every day norms. With wry smiles aplenty. Is it asking too much of a songwriter to do other than reflect of their own experience? And maybe why Ray had to look elsewhere, the constrictions of an olde england, resolutely still in black and white, a barrier to progress. Shock, horror, this song, below, defiantly in the style of his classics, came out in 2017, a paean to his new home. (Sure, the Kinks are long gone, any long promised/hinted/awaited as tenuous as ever.)
Americana (2017)
I feel I have shot myself in the foot, the old bugger still has it after all, against all the odds. Looks like I need to hang on here after all. Cut to predictable end piece.
Purchase "I'm Waiting for the Man," by The Velvet Underground The Velvet Underground have always been a challenging band for me. They seem to be able to run the full spectrum: some songs are amazing, fully realized compositions reflective of musical roots and innovative of a new sound; other efforts sound like a band that is a strange, post-pop, kitchen sink style experiment in style and mode, more aligned to kitsch than actual art. There's no separation for me from the Andy Warhol psuedo-stylistc, anything-can-be-art approach. I'm sure there's more to the VU than sound, and that's probably the point I'm missing. But, experimentation and boundary pushing should still sound consistent. And sometimes it sounds good; at other times, it is experimental, at best. And a bit of a put on. The pretension of it can be baffling. Like people who rhapsodize over Warhol's soup cans or Marilyn Monroe portraits. Not my thing, but then, art is pure subjectivity. That Warhol vibe that colors VU's work runs two ways. It can be bad, just really artless and hard to take. But, it can be sleazy, tainted with something a little baffling and a little leary-making. And that's when it's most enjoyable, and reflective of the actual vibe that grew up around Warhol's New York scene, that of misfits, genderbent oddballs, hustlers and street creatures. It was that dark bohemia that rarely saw the light of day that VU touched on in their sketchy, dirty sound, same as a certain cadre of writers who used theme and subject matter to make a notable shift in post-modern literature. Works like Kerouac's On The Road, Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, or on a visual plane, Robert Frank's The Americans, shifted artistic expression toward a morefocused look at the underbelly of society--that which had always existed but was never really given the spotlight in serious work. The down and out loser was celebrated, and the vivid portrayal of the dark, dirty taboo created a new, dark modernism. The tableau in the works are made from the junkies, trans and cross-dressing street angels, hustlers, thieves, the kind of folks that didn't really exist for most, at least not in the real world. And certainly, none of these types had ever taken on the role of protagonist, or been in a position to earn the reader or viewer's empathy. Transgressive work, very much including the VU's music, was an examination of the darker life, about the edge of experience, the evil things that happened out there, but never touched, nor sullied, most people's lives. The kind of stuff that took place only in godless Gomorrah's like New York City. Listening to it, say in the confines of the neat, clean and safe American suburbs, was akin to sneaking a look at porn: titaliting, dirty and done under cover with the fear of being caught. These are the kind of works that invoke Puritanical reactions in our society, where worry over the perverse leads to outrage. But there is beauty in the brutality and a strange dignity that is earned by the lowlife when the listener and the reader get an insight into their strange and singular humanity. A good summation comes from Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn. The book is the literary equivalent of a walk through hell, and the appeal of transgressive art can best summed up as thus: "Sometimes we have the absolute certainty there's something inside us that's so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won't be able to stand looking at it. But it's when we're willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel." While the genius of Kerouac's On the Road was the fact that it was one of the earliest attempts at elevating the lowest kind of folks to exalted position of literary hero, the Velvet Underground is probably among the first pop/rock outfits to celebrate similar deviants in art made for mass consumption. And I'm sure their music was a little shocking, the same way Kerouac and his Beat kin scandalized polite sensibilities with tales of drugs and debauchery. Lou Reed made an entire career out bringing people face to face with the strange demons of the dark side and never more poetically than in "Walk on the Wild Side,"from 1972's Transformer. He also celebrates that bohemian life in another track on the album, "I'm so Free", a gleeful declaration of allegiance to a life lived outside the careful margins. And while "Walk of the Wild Side" and "I'm so Free" are poetic and free-floating, VU's 1967 "Waiting for the Man" is far darker, much more forward and in your face in its theme and subject. Decidedly loose and funky, documentarian rather than metaphorical, the song is the quintessential transgressive poetic experience. The song moves along at a propulsive clip largely due to the barreling piano roll. It's a bit of a barhouse singalong, with the dithering, jangly guitar and simple pound-down drums. An upbeat and oddly celebratory tune, it's certainly not the VU's only song explicitly about drugs, but it's certainly their happiest one. It's got a White Stripes sense of drive and almost anti-rhythm, which speaks to how influential this strange song would go on to become. And more for it's eccentricity than technical value, Rolling Stone ranked it as number 159 out of their 500 greatest rock songs of all times. It's probably helped by the fact that Nico doesn't chomp her vocals over top of it, like she did to ruinous effect on "Femme Fatale" and others...But, that's just an opinion. I'm going to avoid editorializing about the content. It seems a little more fun to look at the trivia of the song.David Bowie loved the song and according to my research, he and his band covered it it before it was even released. The story of the song takes place in Harlem, New York City. And like the Ramones' "53 & 3rd", "I'm Waiting for the Man" has a specific geographical context: Lexington Avenue and 125th Street. You can visit! There's plenty of history to the track; it holds an esteemed place in rock history, as does the band itself. Puzzling out the good from bad, in a lot of ways, makes the song, and the VU themselves, more interesting. The song itself, like any good piece of art, contextualizes experience for the audience, places them close in the experience by delivering the instinct and the visceral sense without the actual danger. It makes sense without having to be real. That's good art, I suppose. Maybe it's a warning when Reed sings that he feels, "Feel sick and dirty/more dead than alive/I'm waiting for my man." He had his share of struggles and came out on the better side. I don't suppose he meant to glorify anything here--just to elevate the experience into something that made sense of it. Good song, regardless. Note: I referenced Keith Rawson's 2013 article for litreactor.com, "There is No Bottom, There is Only the Abyss: A Hubert Selby Jr Primer" researching this post. https://litreactor.com/columns/there-is-no-bottom-there-is-only-the-abyss-a-hubert-selby-jr-primer. The Selby quote from Last Exit to Brooklyn was quoted in his article.
Ron's sweet voice and vulnerable innocent persona has most observers having him better not waiting for anything. Or at least not for anything better, his songs always redolent of disappointment and deprecation. And that's the cheerful ones. So is this lyric a sense of realisation or an acceptance of the inevitable let-down? A bit of both, that sinking realisation that love has gone sour, perhaps just as you were thinking about something else for a moment. As in, take your eye off the ball for a second and, pfff, it's gone, his hope being that, if you wait long enough, somehow it will come back into view. Hmmm, we know that outcome, don't we?
I'm a big fan of ol' Ron, always have been, through the thin and thin of his career. No, that's a tad harsh, but he's never seemed able to get that great big breakthrough, despite the acclaim of many of his peers, on the arrival of theirs. Elvis Costello has always been his biggest yay-sayer, but others have been not slow to sing his praises. Fellow Canadian k.d. lang included him on her tribute to canadian songwriters, Hymns of the 37th Parallel, and how many others ever got to sing with Leonard Cohen? Critics often tumble praise his way but the public have never followed to make him much more than a niche favourite. With his big hangdog face, like a lovelorn potato, his looks may never have catapulted him into stardom, but Elvis C is hardly any oil painting either. He has made no secret of his struggles maintaining a career and the effects on his mood, life and relationships: in the wonderful documentary, Love Shines, made in 2010, this aspect is certainly not brushed away.
His songs have a delightful charm. Deceptively simple, they carry largely on guitar or piano, and often little more, with his yearning voice always shimmering above, sometimes redolent of Roy Orbison, tragedy closer to triumph in minor chord lamentations of love's labours lost. You sense, whatever else, he just has to sing, to keep on singing. If his near twenty recordings aren't enough and, like me, are a covers lover, you could do a whole lot worse than check out his youtube channel. Did I say Roy Orbison?
I first caught him, last century, in a special showcase at Ronnie Scott's Club in Birmingham, UK, now long gone. Part of a tour to promote his first full release, the eponymous Ron Sexsmith, it was a double header with the similarly "new" Dar Williams, taking turns as to who would play first. It was marvellous, each nailing a place in my tastes and on my shelves, each lasting to this day. Like Costello, I would rave about him to friends and family, but to little shared enthusiasm. I think I bought his first few releases until a change of producer skewed his style, to my ears any way. Thereafter I kept an ear out, spotting him mingling with the stars: Chris Martin, Ray Davies, if never quite joining their leagues. Round about the aforementioned doco, made during the making of Long Player Late Bloomer, a then mooted last ditch for world domination, helmed by big money producer Bob Rock, I formally rejoined team Ron. And it was/is a superlative record, if surprisingly using added autotune: surely the point of Ron's famously wobbly voice is that it is famously wobbly? It didn't go platinum, but it did sell a fair few, enabling him to keep going, with another album dropping every other year or so, right up until this years Hermitage. I had been due to revisit my acquaintance with his live show back in April, but, yep, like everything else, C-19 killed that until November. All willing.
No personal story, no long history lesson, no political discussion today. Just a short discussion about a fine song, Guy Clark’s “Desperados Waiting For A Train.” (I mentioned this song a few years ago in a piece on Clark’s “Homegrown Tomatoes," but it’s worth its own post.)
As someone who backed into “country” music through alt-country/Americana/roots/folk music, I first became aware of the great songwriter Guy Clark from covers, particularly this version on Nanci Griffith’s 1998 release, Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back To Bountiful). On that album, Griffith performed the song with Clark, Jerry Jeff Walker, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Eric Taylor. In fact, before Clark released a version, on 1975’s Old No.1, it had already been covered by Walker, Rita Coolidge, David Allan Coe and Tom Rush. And before Griffith’s version was released, it had been covered by Slim Pickens and probably most famously, The Highwaymen (Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson, some pretty fine songwriters in their own right). And there have been many other covers released and performed, including by Earle, on his recent tribute to Clark, and Jason Isbell, who performed the song at Guy Clark's induction into the 2015 Austin City Limits hall of fame ceremony. Which is just to say that many, many great musicians and songwriters have felt the song worthy of recognition.
Clark had the ability that some great writers, and not only songwriters, have of being able to economically create an entire world, and entire characters, with no wasted words. (On the same album, Griffith also covered Richard Thompson and Woody Guthrie, who have that same talent.) I’m jealous as hell. In less than five minutes, the song tells the story of the relationship between a boy and an old man, and you can feel the love they felt for each other, and the respect that the boy had for the man, an old school oil worker, who seemed to the boy like he was from an old western. And one day, the boy realizes that the man is old, and dying, and the metaphorical train comes to take him away. Two lives in about four and a half minutes of brilliance. I don’t know if the song is studied in songwriting classes, but it should be.
It’s a true story. Clark wrote it about his grandmother’s boyfriend, who stayed at the hotel that she ran in a small Texas town. You can read more about it here.
In 1998, when Griffith released her album, she appeared with all of the guys (including Guy) who sang with her on David Letterman’s show. And since readers of my work here know I’m a huge Letterman fan, and a huge fan of the song, here’s a video:
It seems fitting that I follow up <Follow the Sun> with <Waiting for the Sun>. Enough of the Beatles for now, and this isn't really about the song of that name, but rather the album. There's so much on the Doors' third album to cover that I'm going for a full album this time around. The song appeared on a later album.
I grew up on the Doors's albums - they were heavy rotation at the pre-teen parties I attended (that would be 7th and 8th grade). Strange Days was a little too strange. More than one critic has noted that Strange Days leaves the impression that it is populated with the leftovers of Morrision's lyrics writings that weren't used on the first album. True. Critics also note that is has more continuity that the first album. Not sure I agree.
But 1968's Waiting for the Sun, much like the first Doors album seems to me to have a lot of organizational continuity to it: for me and my friends, it was easy and natural to let the album play one track after the next without having to pick up the needle and move the arm over an inch or so. (Needle? Arm? Track? We're talking about 33 1/3 RPMs on a turntable at a Junior High dance - not the stuff that did Morrison in at age 27 although the parallels bear some interest.)
You may not take the approach that Morrison's father is said to have done, advising his son to drop aspirations of making a living as a[n untalented] musician. By this third album, the Doors had become mostly all about their lead *singer, although there are several pieces/places where it's more recitation than singing (My Wild Love is knee slapping and Morrison-style poetry chant; Five to One is only slightly more "musical" and The Unknown Soldier starts off with similar style)
Hello, I Love You was the main chart topper, and Spanish Caravan showcases the guitar talents of Robbie Krieger. Being, as I said, an album that I tended to listen to without lifting the tone arm, the rest of the songs are tight displays of the Doors at their studio finest (although it couldn't have been easy work with Morrison in whatever condition he had devolved to). My picks for a song typical of this work:
*yeah, it's not the real thing, but it's pretty good (doors alive)
Looking back or looking forward. There's something about the human condition that goes like : "the grass is always greener on the other side". My co-horts here have referenced both directions: looking forward to a time of live music, looking back to a time before for the guidance and wisdom of those who came before us.
There's a rather extensive "play-by-play" of the history of <I'll Follow the Sun> at beatlesebooks.com and more at their sister site thebeatlessongbysong.com - both of them worth the few minutes you'd spend perusing them.
For my second Beatles post in a month, it need be the theme that carries this: Forward, as in better days ahead (as in 'getting better all the time') or, possibly, moving on. Actually, the song's lyrics appear open to interpretation as to for whom the future looks better and who is moving on. Is it the singer leaving for better days or is it the girl who's going to know in the end that times were better with him. The lengthy beatlesebooks article makes the remark that you probably shouldn't dig too deep for meaning from a song that was, after all, written by a 16-year-old McCartney.
For the final 1964 recording, the original lyrics ‘Well, don’t leave me alone, I need you now hurry and follow me my dear’ were replaced with 'and now the time has come ...'. How does this color our interpretations of the lyric meanings? The words 'I need you' and 'follow me' only seem to muddy the overall message: who's looking forward to a better day for who? As for following the sun, it would seem pretty indisputable that (a) the sun is a symbol for the day ahead/future - especially if you set out to follow it - and (b) sun is better than rain - something to look forward to (when the rain comes ...). Chalk the mud up to the lyrics skills of a 16 year old?
Most Beatles songs at the time were pretty much R&B with little room for a more melodic, more romantic musical style. And that is certainly true of the original version of the song from 4 years before the version you probably know. The tempo of the 1960 recording is much more in keeping with the R&B persona they thought they needed to project to keep their fans. And my two sources note that even a year later, their next "melodic" piece, Yesterday, was initially released in the US before the UK - again aiming not to alienate the R&B-expectent fan base.
The one thing that I’m most looking forward to when it becomes possible again, not surprisingly, is going to see live music. At the end of the year, when I do my family holiday letter, I’m always struck by the number of live shows that I’ve been too, but this year will be different. My last live show was Richard Thompson at Symphony Space in NY in early February, and since then I’ve seen a bunch of live streams, which have their benefits, but there’s nothing like live music.
When I thought about this theme, my first thought was “Let There Be Rock,” by the Drive-By Truckers. But I’ve written about them so much, I thought, enough already. (Although “What It Means,” from American Band really hits home right now, I’m just sayin’). So, I turned to the blogger’s best friend, Google, to find songs about live music, and one that popped up was The Band’s “The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show,” from their Stage Fright album.
Now, to be clear, that song is about a minstrel or medicine show, and although these shows often included live music, I am emphatically not interested in seeing a minstrel show, but stay with me—it will make sense eventually. Minstrelsy was, remarkably, the most popular form of entertainment in the United States during the 1800s and early 1900s, until they were supplanted by vaudeville. Minstrel shows were, initially, white performers, in black face, portraying an exaggerated negative stereotype of blacks, and were undoubtedly racist. Later, black performers themselves pretended to be whites in blackface, but still pandered to the same racist stereotypes. To quote Rhiannon Giddens, “minstrelsy was terrible.” That quote is from one of the live streams I watched recently, sponsored by Carnegie Hall, featuring Giddens and her partner Francesco Turrisi, discussing minstrelsy, its roots, and more, including way too much information about the tambourine, and they performed a few great songs. Watch it here, for the historical background.
“The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show” is based on Levon Helm’s memories of attending minstrel and medicine shows in his youth in Arkansas, and the name is derived from one of the shows, F. S. Wolcott's Original Rabbit's Foot Minstrels. As Giddens mentions in the video, the awful, racist minstrel shows co-opted black string band music (which is what Giddens’ band Carolina Chocolate Drops championed). In fact, the Wolcott troupe was originally Pat Chappelle's Rabbit's Foot Company, formed around the turn of the century. It was owned by a black man, and featured black performers. Chappelle’s Rabbit Foot Company was remarkably successful, played all over the country, and even had its own baseball team. The show included, among others, Ma Rainey, often known as the Mother of the Blues. But, although I’m not 100% certain, I’m pretty sure that this black owned and operated show used blackface—because that was how to make money in those days. And when Chappelle died in 1911 (and I don’t see any connection between him and Dave Chappelle), he was considered one of the wealthiest black residents of Jacksonville, Florida.
Chappelle’s wife remarried and sold the business to a white man, F.S. Wolcott, who eventually renamed the troupe. It appears that the performers remained black, and included Bessie Smith, Louis Jordan and a young Rufus Thomas. Based on this “window card,” it seems pretty clear that the Wolcott show also performed in blackface:
The show was sold again in 1950 and continued to perform until 1959 when changing times and tastes led to the show’s equipment being seized for nonpayment of taxes.
So, why would The Band write a song about a minstrel show that advanced negative stereotypes of blacks? And which refers to a musical ensemble named the “Klondike Klu Klux Steamboat Band?” My guess is simply that they (and the song, as usual, is credited to Robbie Robertson, but who knows who really should have gotten credit?) wanted to write a slice of life story about a particular place and time without making a value judgment—much like “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is a sympathetic song written from the traitor side. You can read some analysis of both songs, and others by The Band, here.
We’re in a time where people are (again) focusing on symbols of racism in the United States, and I admit that I’m delving deeper into issue of race and racism. People are marching. Statues are coming down, and there's actual bipartisan discussion about taking traitors' names off of military bases. White voice actors are stepping away from portraying characters of color. Amusement park rides are being re-themed. People are realizing that the confederate (no capital letter used on purpose) battle flag is a symbol of racism and treason, and even NASCAR and Mississippi have had to banish it. Numerous TV shows have removed episodes containing blackface, and allegations of wearing blackface have caused politicians and others to lose their jobs.
In times like this, mistakes are bound to be made (passive voice use intended), and unfortunately the opponents of change are seizing on the apparent mistakes (toppling a statue of Lincoln, for example) to discredit the movement. But the fact is that we are more openly debating these issues—and things are happening—which is a good thing. I’m sure that there are people who would argue that Pat Chappelle’s Rabbit Foot Company was a positive—a black owned, black run business that made its owner rich and exposed many people of all races to black music and culture. But despite the fact that some of the music was groundbreaking, and ultimately led to the type of music that I want to see live, that version of black culture was a distorted, negative one that helped to oppress black Americans. It was a shame that someone like Chappelle needed to reinforce those stereotypes to succeed. Let’s hope that this moment of reconsideration has a lasting positive effect, and doesn’t fade away, like the last wave of statue toppling and flag lowering in 2015. Or like Reconstruction.
And you thought this would be about me wanting to go to a concert.
Be careful what you wish for, isn't it? Looking forward is bedevilled with risk, the future never quite as cut and dried as the runes. If the past is another country, then the future should be another planet. (Why do my fingers always want to add 'or oblivion'?) This time last year I wonder how many of us were looking forward to what's happening now? But, sticking to the future forward interface, it is always to space our imaginations return, the final frontier even a bankrupting NASA can't take from our imaginations. For, if we are indeed living in interesting times, apropos the proverb/curse, surely we want even more interesting to look forward to. Or even, sometimes, less interesting.
Popular music is rammed with references to rocket filled skies, and there is often a coupling between the schlockier the band, the more garage-y the sounds, so higher still is the sky of their aspirations. I love a good old goofball thrash, always have, loving it all the more when spacesuits are donned over ripped jeans and leathers. Yes, I'm sorta thinking Ramones here, their lo-fi scuzz always a tonic. Now it may be that 3rd album, Rocket to Russia, was weapons grade over any galactic conquest, with Johnny no doubt a fan of nuking the commies, but I prefer to imagine the band sitting disconsolately awaiting blast off on a mission to Mars. (I guess Russia was the clue.....) Plus, they only ever did one overtly clairvoyant song, and that only looked forward a paltry four years. If indicative of many of our issues right about now.
Ramones: Planet Earth 1988
Not musically their finest moment, nor quite the mood I was aiming at, but, let's use that as a vantage point to vault over boring old guitars. Electronica, eh, all high-domed boffins with degrees in circuitry? Um, no, praise be, just as many grade school d.i.y. drop outs with drum machines and programmers as anywhere else. (Forgive my clumsy labelling here, no slights intended, of course I really know education and brains are no prerequisite to the making of music, nor even to each other, and brainlessness is no less common in mensa than densa.)
Apollo 440: Yo, Future
Apollo 440, above, provide a glorious old clatter, as punk a sound as anything on the early scene at CBGBs, let alone the UK year zero, the country from which they hail. One of the early adopters of this amalgam of dance music, rap and anything else lying around the streets, they started life a boggling 30 years ago. With some success, their sound was probably a template for the later hugeness of The Prodigy, who had started off as standard anarcho-squat crusty spiral tribers around the same sort of time, ahead of a cartoonish reinvention that tore the UK singles charts about. And a not so dissimilar sound. The song below less so, but showing their need also to boldly go.
Prodigy: Out of Space
But, returning to Apollo 440, whose pony had way more tricks than video-game garishness alone. Or film soundtracks, for that matter. Centred around brothers Howard and Trevor Gray, along with trusty cohort Noko, they have kept up a profile, whether producing their own music, re-mixing the music of others or just maintaining an episodic, if no less potent presence on the live and club circuit. With last studio output in 2012, I am sure I had recently spotted some live dates, since lost to coronavirus, and that I had been pencilling in. Anyhow, parallel to the clattering techno of Yo, Future, they could also produce much sleeker pieces, blending into styles reminiscent, by virtue of hindsight, of both Air and Alabama 3.
Apollo 440: Electra Glide in Blue
So, looking forward, the future. Where is it and how much, like every show, festival and tour of 2020, is postponed to 2021? God, I'm looking forward to 2021. Or is the future still what it used to be?
There won't ever come a day when I don't look back to Tom Petty for guidance and wisdom through strange days.
He was my first "favorite." My first identifiable idea of what rock n roll cool looked and sounded like; my first brag over the other kids I knew who thought Duran Duran was the shit; my first introduction to the strange forbidden fruits that all great rock songs promise; my first concert. Seriously: The July 1985 stop of the True Confessions tour at RFK Stadium in Washington, DC, with Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers was my first concert. Ever. I was in the 8th grade. My mom took me. I'll never feel that wonderful, free and new again.
When he died, the sadness lingered with me in a way that I didn't think was possible--how was I mourning with such a fevered, angry sadness for someone I never knew?
I still can't listen to Tom Petty without feeling something, no matter the song. I suppose that's the artists' ultimate wish--to make the listener quake, and to resonate, like an echo, a same sad echo, on and on. To keep being heard. And felt.
Petty's genius lies in his unique way of looking at the world--he saw the strange in the everyday and told stories that made sense, even when nothing did. His imagery and the language of his poetry were rarefied and steeped in the everyday experience. And the lens he saw the world through made great sense when he turned the view finder back to us to look through. A writer's true gift of the world is to let the reader (listener) see things the way they do. Petty let us listen in on his expansive view on the world, and the melody in that vision is a unique poetic oeuvre that has forever colored my own world.
"Time To Move On," from the enduring and ever newly experienceable album Wildflowers, was resonant, perhaps timeless itself, as soon as it was recorded. "Time To Move On " is an elegiac prayer to belief in the good that comes from moving on. It's a beautiful song that lends comfort in its firm and steadfast belief that something better is always ahead. "...it's time to move on, it's time to get going, what lies ahead, I have no way of knowing, while under my feet, grass is growing, it's time to move on, it's time to get going..." It's a reminder, told in Petty's deceptively simple verse, that the world is wide, and never defined by one simple moment. Great comfort in days such as we are living now..."time to move on."
That's the point of it, of life, wherever you are, the excitement and anticipation of a day yet to unfold, whether a definite day pinned on the calendar, or an arbitrary aspiration of a future different from the now. We call such days Lollo Rosso in my house, when we have had one and while we await one. Why? Italian lettuce, doncha know. Italian red lettuce. Red lettuce/red letters? (I know, I'll give you a moment to repair your sides.)
My i-pod is crammed with songs about shit days; it is the basis, arguably, for the entire genre of music, the blues. So where's the hope, the optimism? If we disregard that happy-go-lucky music is so often a happy clappy pap of little merit, let's, instead, celebrate when it isn't.
Better Days/Bobby Charles
Where better to start than the down-home charm of Bobby Charles? A southern swampy country soul man in the style of Dan Penn, he moved in all the right circles, if never quite making it in his own right. I was alerted to him a couple of decades ago, via a friend pointing me in the direction of his first and eponymous album, a slow burner that first dropped in 1972. An acolyte of the Band, he actually appears in their Scorsese-helmed "farewell" performance, The Last Waltz, if edited out for the cinema cut. Rick Danko, of said band, produced his debut, the rest of the group offering cameos, as did Dr John, whose then band later backed him in the Last Waltz. Here's quite a nice bio. Cut short, the album didn't sell and, though later a cult record to many a current mover and shaker, he quietly ploughed his furrow, with several more popping out of his home studio until his 2010 death. This song, the title song from his chronologically second, and best, album, Better Days, which actually took his death, 36 years later, to give it a formal release. What I hadn't, however, realised is that he was the author, as a much younger man, of both Bill Haley's See You Later, Alligator and almost the signature tune of Fats Domino, Walkin' to New Orleans. So maybe most of his better days were behind him, but the laidback drawl suggests he was never discounting the dream. The royalty checks possibly helped too.
(This is for the)Better Days/Band of Bees
Sticking with funky sounds, you could be mistaken for thinking this, vocal timbres apart, comes also from the Louisiana delta country, such are the distinctive keyboard burbles and understated guitar witterings. But you couldn't be much further wrong, with Band of Bees (or the Bees) coming from the UK's Isle of Wight, yes the festival one, and the record released in 2007. Like the rest of their work, a delightful summery breeze of slightly retro themes, allied with the trippier vocals of a "Madchester" influence, if you will, with more musical chops. Lovely, if with any new songs long overdue.
Better Days/Roseanne Cash (via Guy Clark)
Guy Clark is another wistful reference, maybe his name better known than his music. Certainly any fan of Steve Earle will be familiar with the name, given his recent tribute album thereto. Along with Townes Van Zandt, to whom Earle has also paid reverence, he was part of the nascent Texas scene of dusty troubadours that Earle always aspired to. Indeed, back in 1995, his career on the rise, Van Zandt's on the wane and Clark, well, pretty much where it always was, the three of them played a benefit together, recorded as Together at the Bluebird Cafe. The cause, of all things, was for the dental health of the dustbowl disenfranchised. Clark has always seemed a quiet and unassuming guy, who latterly kept an eye on the increasingly fragile Van Zandt, happier at home with his wife than endlessly promoting his hefty and respected repertoire. In 2011 a host of his friends and admirers put out a terrific two disc tribute, This Songs For Him; A Tribute to Guy Clark, The song above, as performed by Roseanne Cash, comes from that. Here's his own version. He died in 2016.
Better Days/Elliott Murphy
Another? Well, eschewing the Bruce song that this piece invites, have instead something occupying a similar territory. OK, you got me, I'm joshing with you, it IS the Bruce Springsteen song, if in a rootsier and acoustic format that bounces along with some considerable vim. And, rather than expectant of any better future, this celebrates that these are indeed now, already, better days. (Better than glory days? Hmmm..., I wonder.A: yes.) Murphy is another spectre on the sidelines, better name dropped than numbered amongst purchases. But he's well worth a punt, his easy going Long Island lope not a million miles removed from his more famous New Jersey neighbour, with whom he has often appeared and collaborated. Now a dedicated europhile, based in Paris, he has over 35 records to his name. Where to start? You could do a lot worse than his debut, 1973's Aquashow, released in the same week as Springsteen's debut, they both immediately grabbing the new Dylan tag so beloved of rock journalists. Last of the Rockstars gives a taste.
So let's agree, raise a glass, slainte mhor, to Bobby, Elliott, Guy and the Bees! Better days, bring 'em on!!
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