Josh Rutner

editor, indexer, saxophonist, etc.

Episode 24: Sweetheart (Dan Reeder, 2006)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

"He's good; you gotta give him that… He was good, but let it go… I love Bach, but come on you guys."

So says Dan Reeder, the Nuremberg-based, Louisiana-born and Southern California-bred painter, instrument builder, and musician, explaining the source frustration of his gently reactionary song, Bach is dead and gone, which appears on his 2006 release, Sweetheart. That German attitude that Bach is the beginning and end of all music. Get over it, the guy’s dead. The proof? Well, for one, he doesn’t answer email. Also, if you saw him, he’s just a pile of bones. Reeder’s not denying the man’s compositional greatness, singing, “While he was still living, he was one fast gun / I said let’s right some motets, he was already done.

Reeder seems most comfortable with short forms—vignettes. Of the 16 songs on this album, only three fall beyond the three-minute mark. The lead-off track, Waiting for my cappuccino—an incredibly funny peek into the mind of a soft-spoken man who is pissed off that his drink order has been flat forgotten—is only half a minute long. But so much drama—albeit the internal drama sparked by normalcy—is packed into those 34 seconds.

Reeder claims not to be a poet, and that may very well be true, but throughout Sweetheart, there are lines that are such beautifully eloquent and powerfully resonant readings of the everyday, that I just want to pluck them out and bottle ‘em. Perhaps he’s a poet and doesn’t even know he is one.

What’s so great about Reeder, though, is that despite this gift of lyrical vividness, he’s extremely comfortable downshifting into “hup getalong doggie / little doggie getalong”s in his “Cowboy Song” and child-like “hey batter batter batter hey batter hey”s in “I drink beer.” He’s also happy to take a tiny snippet of a lyric, such as “All my money is gone,” and just shuttling it back and forth through the warp c(h)ords, and producing in the end an unexpectedly colorful cloth. The variations appear at the seams, when he inserts a “2, 3, 4” or “Tell it to the landlord,” or “Dance to the music.” Is it campfire singalong music? Perhaps, but it’s maybe more situationally at home at home, performed in a sleeping child’s bedroom. Rolling at the level of a lullaby after-party.   

Reeder was aware that he could sing, but there was a problem: he’s got a very quiet voice. He loves vocal harmonies but if he sings with others, he can't be heard. And “then came the Pentium processor,” he explains, “and that made it possible for me to sing barbershop harmony with myself and country gospel harmony with myself." Problem solved.

He sings all the parts, plays all the instruments—that, oh yeah, he makes—and records and mixes the records himself. Why does he prefer to work alone? For one, musicians are hard to deal with. They come with “thick air,” as Reeder puts it, translating from the German equivalent. “Bands are terrible.”

Among the plentiful honest-to-goodness sweetness that warm’s this record’s heart, you hear, sprinkled throughout, Reeder’s completely matter-of-fact potty-mouth. (Note the classic “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” warning invading the cover art, which, incidentally, features a full-headed bier stein linoleum cut created by his then nine-year-old daughter.) While he does name-check certain parts of the female anatomy written on a men’s room wall, a certain type of heaven that may not be ample enough to go around, and a certain onanistic activity Cowboys may or may not partake in—all of which, while I personally take no issue with, I am, to paraphrase Frank Zappa, circumlocuting at this present time in order to get this text on the radio—Reeder’s tender delivery of these so-called “explicit” words betray no wink or expletive-deleted-eating-grin. If “explicitness” be the soul of songwriting, write on, I say.

The album ends with a cover of Procol Harum’s 1967 debut single, “A whiter shade of pale,” seemingly tailor-made for Reeder. "It's maybe my favorite song of all time," he says. “I just wanted to see if I could do it.” He plays the introductory and transitional melody vulnerably and heartbreakingly on his harmonica. It’s not a flawless take, but all the better. He defended inexactitude when talking about the second tune on the album, an instrumental called “Just a tune,” saying, “Playing it better woulda made it worse.”

OK, OK, but how are we, the listener, to reconcile the fact that the introductory melody and harmonic progression of “A whiter shade of pale” is lifted directly from the grave of that old dead-and-gone pile o’ bones, J. S. Bach? “OK, you win,” Reeder admits. “See? I'm a jackass.” 

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week. 

 

Episode 23: Sound & Color (Alabama Shakes, 2015)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said / The recent buds relax and spread / Their greenness is a kind of grief

So begins Philip Larkin’s 1967 poem “The Trees,” which digs deep into the nature of cycles.

Following four years on the heels of their first release, entitled Boys & Girls, the four-piece outfit called Alabama Shakes, which draws up their complex and multi-hued sound from their roots, is relaxing and spreading—coming into leaf—with their 2015 album, Sound and Color.

The band’s numerous influences are at once interleaved and kneaded into each other—masked. Lead singer and guitarist Brittany Howard focuses her energy on being herself, but almost out of necessity. You’ll never be your influences—don’t worry about that—so get in there and soak up their goodness. The way painters might find their way into their self by throwing themselves into copying the old masters. Howard acknowledges this conscious individuality through breaking-off from her influences while, albeit coyly, denying even a desire to copy, saying, “I don’t want to copy Aretha because I can’t sing like Aretha. I don’t want to copy James Brown because I can’t sing like James Brown.” Elsewhere she says “as much as I’m inspired by Bjork, I can’t be Bjork.” She shrugs off comparisons to Janis Joplin as too easy, saying that “people hear a powerful female singer in a rock and roll band and they say, ‘Janis Joplin.’” The old masters may not be copied outright herein, but boy are they ever allowed to bubble up to the surface. Howard sums things up nicely: “Everyone is paying homage to everybody… There’s no way to be original. All you can do is put yourself into it and do the best you can.”

Larkin’s poem continues:

Is it that they are born again / And we grow old? No, they die too, / Their yearly trick of looking new / Is written down in rings of grain.

Howard grew up listening to gritty golden oldies on the radio in her grandmother’s kitchen. That lineage is beautifully threaded through the the song “Miss You,” not missing out on the grit that she brings to the mic. Nothing dainty here.

For all of the album’s boisterous distortionary outbursts, insistent inverted-ska beats, and grungy guitars—and maybe even because of it—what strikes and pleases me most about Sound and Color is its spacious quiet corners. Breakdowns that pit single line against single line, drum grooves that draw power from their missing pieces, vocals that tug at your ears with their quietude. Howard noted a change between the first two records in the form of appreciating the space, “and the ability to let the listener have time to think about what you’re doing and not just being bombarded by all of the instruments.”

The album begins with the pair of vibes and bass, in a sonic space otherwise quiet enough that you can hear the whir of the vibraphone’s motor. The full string section that sneaks in, mid-arrangement, earns its keep by not just appearing as a token texture, polyester and pedestrian as string arrangements can so often be on pop records, but by providing a plenary range of sound and color.

There is a compositional care throughout the record, successfully resisting the urge to lean on mindless-strumming backing arrangements or overindulge in unnecessary cuts-and-pastes. The third song on the album, “Dunes,” is one of many great examples. Refreshing harmonies, detailed attention to tempo, a thoughtfully repetitive bendy-bendy guitar solo, and the slowly building, slowly receding, Beatlesesque, Ringo-ish drum-fill–filled long-fade ending.

For me, the peak of subtle brilliance on the record is the seamless shift from the duple groove set up for a whole minute on the song “Gemini” into triple, when the voice enters. D’Angelo peeks through the super-laid-back delivery and parallel vocal harmony.

Never settling too long in a particular mode, Alabama Shakes’ highly-fragmented songforms command your attention by never letting you settle in too cozily. Beats don and doff masks, instrumentation tags in and out, distortion skrims lift and fall. The shape-shifting itself is a masterclass in the thinness of the line between the grooves of rooted then and fresh now.

Larkin concludes his poem:

Yet still the unresting castles thresh / In fullgrown thickness every May. / Last year is dead, they seem to say. / Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week. 

 

Episode 22: Pandemonium Shadow Show (Harry Nilsson, 1967)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

Harry Nilsson was really something else. He basked in late '60s tropes, but with the subtlety and control of one ahead of his time, or at least, not tied down to the style. The style both worked for him, and worked for him.

His second release, 1967’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, was originally intended to be titled Something Wicked This Way Comes (pulled of course from the cover of Ray Bradbury’s 1962 novel), but when legal friction pushed that title aside, Nilsson settled instead on a phrase from inside the same text, the name of the traveling carnival: Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show.  

"Ten Little Indians," the first song, which follows a brief introduction of Nilsson spoofily leading the rings, mis-barking the title as “Shandamanium Shadow Poe” and having a good laugh about it, is a grown-up count-down song, moved-along each successive verse by the transgression of biblical commandments. The arrangement grows in orchestrational intensity as the Little Indians are taken down one by one, with the one exception being the break after number five—reminiscent of the “five golden rings” breather in the middle of the otherwise monotonous 12 days of Christmas song. In Nilsson’s break-down, the electric piano continues, by its lonesome, its gentle pulsing of eighth notes, after two measures modulating without fanfare before a final set of bink bink bink bink bink bink bink binks. The drums and brass return to finish the job.

Number rhymes continue in the album’s melancholic second song, called “1941,” which tells of a child born, a father walking out, the son growing up, running off with the circus and having his own son, whom he then abandons in the same manner as his father did him. The final line of the song poses the question, what will happen to this youngest boy when the circus comes to town? 

The lyric was semi-autobiographical for Nilsson, who was born in 1941, on Father’s day, no less, inspired by Nilsson’s own father’s absence, long-believed by the children to be due to death in the war, but later revealed to be merely a plain and simple abandonment by a man still alive and well. As for the circus-as-hideaway for the runaway, that too was likely gleaned from Nilsson’s family history: his grandparents had been trapeze artists in an act called “Nilsson’s Aerial Ballet.”

Indeed, the theme of “the circus” tents a good deal of the album, not only in the bebloopered ringleader intro and the densely propped cover art, but in the ringling and tingling accompanimental arrangements throughout, most expertly given good weight via tightly stacked brass and tightly tuned drum by composer-arranger George Tipton.

The other major cluster of stars in Pandemonium Shadow Show’s constellation is The Beatles, of whom Nilsson was an unabashed fanboy. Upon first meeting George Harrison, at Harrison’s LA house on Blue Jay Way, Nilsson recalls seeing him at the far end of his pool, in a white, windblown robe, replete with beard and long hair, looking like “Christ with a camcorder.” It turned out the feelings of admiration were mutual, with the Beatles heartily singing Nilsson’s praises to the press and even trying to poach him from his label at the time, RCA. Nilsson would go on to do a ton of work with Ringo Starr as well as John Lennon, whose eventual murder would hit him particularly hard, pushing him to fiercely take up the cause of gun control, a cause which Nilsson would continue to champion through to the end of his own life.

On this album, Nilsson covers Lennon’s “You Can’t Do That,” but within his, what you might call, “conglomarrangement,” he references, usually subtly in multi-tracked backing vocals, as many as twenty other Beatles songs. He concludes his take with a Liverpudlian-tinged singing of the phrase, “Strawberry Beatles forevah.” Total fanboy.

As if quoting tens of Beatles songs within a Beatles song didn’t sufficiently message that Nilsson is fond of the lovable lads, he goes on to cover "She’s Leaving Home"—fitting in quite nicely with the runaway children theme introduced in “1941.” He doesn’t particularly stray from the original’s melody or arrangement, but he does make it his own through Tipton’s sensitive and sparkling brass orchestration and Nilsson’s at-once technichal, tightly-controlled and artsy, loosy-goosey vocal delivery.

A favorite of mine on the record is the Tom Jonesy show piece, “There Will Never Be Another.” Set in a syncopated 5/4 and accompanied not by drums but by two tambourines as percussion, the tune pulls the powerful rips of brass in the backing arrangement together with Nilsson’s expertly executed baroque ornamentation. Carefree exactitude.

Christ with a camcorder, there is some great stuff on this record. Give it a spin.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week. 

Episode 21: Three Feet High and Rising (De La Soul, 1989)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

“Peace and tranquility is now resumed under a DAISY like condition! De La Soul has now entered your MIND, BODY, and SOUL. Sit back, take a luuden, and everything will be Dan Stuckie. For this is a DAISY AGE.”

So concludes the comic adventures of De La Soul within the liner notes of their 1989 landmark album, Three Feet High and Rising. Without even hearing a lick of sound, the notes—and, of course, the eye-poppingly day-glow-bright daisy-filled cover art—give you an idea of what means these three young artists use to bring their art to the world: positive vibes, and private language; humor, wit, and satire. De La Soul consists of three: you’ve got Posdnous (a.k.a, Plug One, soppin’ up sound; favorite food: Twizzlers), Trugoy the Dove (a.k.a., Plug Two, a pioneer of a phrase called talk, who enjoys to eat yogurt enough to use it as the basis of his nickname), and P.A. System Pasemaker MASE (a.k.a, Plug Three, a man Making A Soul Effort, whose favorite food and beverage both is ketchup).

Don’t be fooled by the peace-sign and daisy imagery: these guys aren’t hippies—a point that seemed to require constant reiteration by the group: it’s “pure Plug Bull,” they say. “We can have a psychedelic sound in some of our cuts, but we are not psychedelic rappers and we are not hippies. We are not hippies.” They’re simply peaceful guys who like to wear peace signs in their hair. And the acronym DA.I.S.Y.—a description of their production—stands for Da Inner Sound Y’all. So: daisies.

One thing to keep in mind while listening to the freewheeling and hijinx-filled Three Feet High and Rising is that an album like this—piled high with layer upon layer of samples—simply couldn’t be widely released today, in our very un-DAISY age, thick as it is with legal precedent for weighty suits against so-called intellectual property theft. In 1989, particularly within hip-hop—which wasn’t yet the commercially blockbusting genre that it is today and therefore under the radar—young artists were able to use sampled beats, hooks, effects, etc., to get their musical ideas from brain to speakers quickly, efficiently, and—importantly—cheaply.

For a record like this one, which was released on Tommy Boy Records—an imprint with solid distribution due to their relationship with Warner Brothers—you’d’ve wanted to clear the larger, more obvious sampled chunks, often via one-time lump-sum agreements with the original artist—and Tommy Boy did that—but common sense dictated that it was absurd or at least unnecessary to clear every chopped-up, pitch-shifted, tweaked sample that appeared only as a momentary texture. The late '80s / early '90s was a beautifully creative time that provided fertile—and comparatively non-litigious—soil in which sample-rich and incredibly important albums like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, A Tribe Called Quest’s Low End Theory, and, of course, De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising, were able to grow. In Shunryu Suzuki’s 1970 book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, we are reminded that, “‘pulling out the weeds we give nourishment to the plant.’ We pull the weeds and bury them near the plant to give it nourishment.” Similarly, De La Soul dug through crates—not least those of their parents’ suburban Long Island record collections—and pulled forgotten or neglected wax by the roots to cut up and bury in their tracks, nourishing them.

In 1991, Three Feet High and Rising hit a snag when a pair of turtles smelled green. Let me explain.

Two former members of the '60s rock band The Turtles decided to sue De La for their uncredited use of a modified sample from the band’s song “You Showed Me”—a song, which, by the way, they didn’t write—in the 1 minute and 12 second interstitial track called “Transmitting Live from Mars,” which is as close to a throwaway track as could be, featuring, besides the the shifted organ and strings from the Turtles record, sampled and scratched audio from a French language instructional album. $1.7 million dollars ought to cover it, the two former-Turtles thought, offering at one point the option of collaborating with De La Soul on a track as a way of making the lawsuit go away. No thank you, masked men.

Tommy Boy Records, producer Prince Paul, and the trio took their De La Lumps and pressed onward, but the precedent had been set—the label and band settled out of court—and the artistic process of digging crates and creating first and asking questions later started taking a back seat to pre-production meetings with lawyers, talking about who they might want to avoid sampling.    

There are innuendos aplenty appearing through Three Feet High and Rising: Jennies, Jimmies, Buddies, and so on. The De La lexicographicalandscape runs deep and wide, and the coded language allows the group to operate on multiple planes. The liner’s comic strip shows a Walter Cronkite-looking gentleman with a finger waggling in the air and a talk-bubble overhead that states, “This album does not contain explicit lyrics. But the thought is EROTIC.”

De La Soul had a knack for sample-stacking, often using pitch-shifting when needed to best nest one inside or rest one atop another. In the 70-plus samples employed on Three Feet High and Rising, they pulled not only from the “classics,” as it were—I’m talking James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” and “Funky President” of course; talkin’ Parliament and Sly and the Family Stone—but also more left-field cuts (and here I mean tracks by artists who tended to skew more toward white demographics) like Kraftwerks “Trans Europe Express,” Steely Dan’s “Peg,” Hall and Oates’ “I Can’t Go For That,” and, not least, the track from which the album title was lifted, Johnny Cash’s “Five Feet High and Rising.” And then there’s the sample of a Richard Pryor stand-up bit in the track “Cool Breeze on the Rocks,” that of the French language instruction on “Transmitting Live from Mars,” and, a forever-fave of mine, Bob Dorough’s hit from Schoolhouse Rock, “Three is the Magic Number” sampled on “The Magic Number.” This is pastiche to a T.

“Pastiche is a violation of decorum, a mixture of unrelated elements, like the humble macaroni pie or pasticcio that gave it its name,” wrote Wendy Steiner, in her 1995 book called The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism. “Pastiche is democratically diverse and tolerant of inconsistency. It is the clownish face on social justice, a joke with deep seriousness.”

One of my favorite things about this album is how, despite that vast and dense mix of elements, the album is tied so tightly together, lyrically, and conceptually. From the title we are pulled into “The Magic Number,” which is three of course. On track 12, “Tread Water,” we meet, among others, Mr. Monkey, whose problem is that his bananas are ripe but with his bandaged climbing hand he can’t reach them, at their height of three feet. The trio helps by elevating Mr Monkey through the sound of De La (the “score” of which he picks up at the “Native store,” referring to the collective called “Native Tongues” De La Soul founded around 1988 along with Jungle Brothers and Tribe Called Quest. Both the Jungle Brothers and Q-Tip from Tribe Called Quest would make guest appearances on track 18, “Buddy.” 

Track 6, “Jenifa Taught Me (Derwin’s Revenge),” contains a sample of Liberace (of all people) playing “Chopsticks,” interesting because it’s only the sample of the elementary element of Liberace’s version of the song—the part that "any Derwin" could do. It’s about the layering of existing material with its own hidden stories that’s exciting. “Little Derwin’s got something to show us that Jenny could never do.” And Liberace makes a grand reappearance at the start of track 16, called “Plug Tunin' (Last Chance to Comprehend),” with a spoken-word sample taken from his patter introducing that previously sampled version of “Chopsticks.”

In track 9, “Eye Know,” Trugoy raps about losing all those other “Jennies” he reckoned with, and that this time the Magic Number is two, "‘cause it takes two, not three to seduce." Which brings us back to The Magic Number.

Paths like this one criss-cross the 24 tracks on the record and triangulate trios around the icositetragon—the day-glow yellow center of a daisy of your choice.

In its way, Three Feet High and Rising functions as a sort of commonplace book for the young men of De La Soul and their clever mentor, producer Prince Paul—a bibliaudiography. What strikes me most about the album is the pure and present joy. About the project, Posdnous would recall, “It was a capsule of our innocence; I can hear four individuals who didn’t give a damn about the rules and just went in and had a good time.”

De La Soul’s newest record, their ninth, titled And the Anonymous Nobody, is set to be released later this month.

It largely avoids samples.  

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week. 

Episode 20: Roxy & Elsewhere (Frank Zappa and The Mothers, 1974)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

All right, who wants to dance to the "Bebop Tango"? Rick, Jane, Carl? Lana? Brenda? Step right up. Oh this here? This is bebop, even though you think it doesn’t sound like that. Link your mind with the mind of George Duke. When he plays those funny fast little notes, twitch around and have a good time. And not too adagio!

In Frank Zappa’s powerhouse, live-with-overdubs recording from late 1974 called Roxy and Elsewhere, we’re treated to a wide range of signature Zappa compositional and performance features, including air-tight rhythmic and melodic virtuosity, loose-and-jammy solos, whirling masses of wild improvisation that suddenly snap back to attention like one of those collapsing thumb-push toys; and then there are the wacky skits, the golden-voiced and sesquipedalian introductory and narrational remarks, the stylistic parodies, and, yes, even some audience participation in the form of twitching around to funny fast little notes.

Frank Zappa had a way of pushing great culture into the ears and minds of his listeners. On the LP notes of his early 1968 album We’re Only in it for the Money, for instance, he beseeches the listener to hold off on spinning the final track—called "The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny"—until they’ve gone and read Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony.” (Instructions, by the way, that I followed to the letter when I first enjoyed the album.)

Zappa also wanted his audiences to know about 20th-century composers like Edgar Varèse, for example, not just by mentioning Varèse’s name in liner notes and in interviews, but by pulling those timbral and rhythmic influences into his own compositions, providing for those “stubbornly conditioned ears” of the public an intermediary stepping stone to perhaps some day get to the kernel of the real deal.

In The Real Frank Zappa Book, Zappa’s autobiography of sorts, he wrote about two modes of composition he flits between: “the ‘musically uncompromising boy-is-this-ever-hard-to-play’ category,” and the other category—”songs in which the ‘intrigue’ resides in the lyrics, rather than the music.” You get some great moments of unyielding musical complexity, at breakneck tempos, no less; and such intrigue! Penguins in Bondage, badinage about the smoking of a high school diploma stuffed with a gym sock, and an expression of highest regard for the campy cheapness of monster movies—cheaper the better.

In the middle of the instrumental romp entitled "Echidna's Arf (Of You)," Zappa draws attention to percussionist Ruth Underwood, claiming that the whole time she has been thinking, “What can I possibly do that will amaze everyone?” It brings to mind for me another protean and, indeed, protein-ly titled Zappa album, Uncle Meat, from 1969, in which Ian Underwood (Ruth’s then husband), tells the listener of his first meeting with Zappa, his audition for the band, when Zappa asked him: “What can you do that’s fantastic?”

Go check out Roxy and Elsewhere, and then, when you love what you hear, hunt down a copy of the concert film of same, entitled Roxy: The Moviefinally released after all this time in October of last year. If nothing else, take Zappa’s advice to heart: If you can do something fantastic, whip it out.

Oh, and register to vote.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

 

Episode 19: Whitney Houston (Whitney Houston, 1985)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

“Background singers: Ask for them by name.” The joke, attributed to David Letterman points to the fact that backup singers are functional, serving at the pleasure of the lead voice, almost by definition, nameless. So it’s not every day that back-up singers make their way upstage those “twenty feet” and become household names.

One notable exception is Whitney Houston, whose singing career began backing up artists like Chaka Khan—you can hear her on the 1978 mega-hit, “I’m Every Woman”—and Jermaine Jackson and Lou Rawls.

It was Clive Davis, who first saw her perform in 1983, who championed her and drove her solo career as a musician to its initial heights. At Columbia Records, Davis built a stellar record in the 1960s and 1970s, helping to sign, among others, Bruce Springsteen, Janis Joplin, Billy Joel, Earth, Wind, & Fire, and Aerosmith. As the story goes, he was fired from CBS Records when he hosted his son’s Bar Mitzvah on the company dime, but he bounced back, taking business—and any future Bar Mitzvah funding responsibility—into his own hands, founding Arista Records, and signing a slew of great artists, including Barry Manilow (an early cash cow for Arista), Aretha Franklin (who happens to be Whitney Houston’s godmother) and Dionne Warwick (who happens to be her cousin).

It took two years to make Whitney Houston, her formally self-titled introductory record—her follow-up, in 1987, titled the foreshortened and colloquial, Whitney, signaled her ubiquity and popularity. She and the public were on a first-name basis now. Davis spared no expense on Whitney Houston, with Arista eventually spending over $400,000 against a $200,000 budget, which, at the time, was a lot for an unknown artist. And just imagine the Bar Mitzvah bash you could host with that kinda money.

Houston was blessed with an incredibly powerful voice and a humble demeanor, both honed growing up in the church. At the time of Whitney Houston’s release, she was 21 years, and many of the songs of the album embraced and accentuated her youth—especially in the power-pop “How Will I Know,” with its childlike “If he loves me, if he loves me not” breakdown and its questioning of a mother-figure who "knows about these things" (and here it might be interesting to note that Whitney's actual mother-figure, her mother, Cissy, was singing backup on the track) as well as the head-bobbingly popping “Someone For Me,” which explicitly places Houston in the role of shy teenage girl getting her love-legs underneath her. This squeaky-clean “boy of my dreams” lyrical content and puffy production, however, isn’t able to pull her off her mature and polished delivery. Houston had pipes.  

It wasn’t all bubble-gum and trapper-keepers, though. Songs like “Saving All My Love For You” and “Greatest Love of All,” both of which became huge hits, delved into more adult themes of love and self-love. Funnily, in a July 1985 Ann Landers advice column, responding to a letter from a self-described “Eastern Liberal Square in Delaware” who is just terrified that the lyrics of her children’s music "encourage violence, promotes sexual promiscuity, and is extremely provocative," Landers lists “You Give Good Love” as an example (along with seven others) of sexually provocative, “trashy songs.”

(A quick note for those quick to jump down Landers’ throat, she did go on to say that while she doesn’t particularly care for the titles (nor the lyrics within the songs she may or may not have heard), there’s nothing really to be done. “Delaware,” in essence, should slow her roll. “Parents are always appalled at the music their teens listen to, but somehow the majority of teens manage to grow up OK, and some of them even become ‘Eastern liberals.’” Sick burn, Landers.)

While the lyrics of “You Give Good Love” are hardly sexually explicit, the music video for is, I admit, most definitely suggestive, or at least ham-handedly aiming for suggestiveness in the way that '80s music videos seemed somehow to perfect. Shall we dive in and give “You Give Good Love” a good hard look?

The video’s dramatic narrative follows an unexplained videographer in a patronless—I want to say… restaurant? after closing? as he gazes—both through the camera lens and (suggestively!) with his peeking, naughtily open eye around it—at the singer in the venue, played by Houston, who is outfitted (suggestively!) in a belted hot-pink unitard and backed-up by two spookily-lit backing singers. The very first sequence involves a tight close-up of Mr Videographer slowly—dare I say, suggestively—pushing his lens into the camera’s opening. Around a minute-thirty in, the cameraman’s head slowly tilts from his shouldered equipment so that both of his eyes can smile at her, and then the camera—our camera—cuts to an extreme and oh-so-suggestive close-up of the singer’s hands gently caressing the mic stand. Shots like these ping pong back and forth throughout: eyes, lips, hands, eyes, smile, lips. It’s hard to tell at this point if it’s just the very '80s-ness of the whole production that makes me see these moves as so comically ridiculous. But just wait, the suggestiveness takes a back seat to true ridiculousness once the kitchen staff gets involved.

Unable to cook at a time like this, the chef—creepily barechested beneath his open white coat, and glistening with sweat—comes out, removes his hat out of reverence, and gazes. Then his creepy sous-chef joins him, and they both leer and smile and disgustingly dip their fingers into the gruel the sous-chef was preparing—presumably for no customers—and, you know, suggestively taste it. (Blech.)

At three and a half minutes in, a third member of the kitchen staff has joined his colleagues and the sexual aggression has turned into a pitiful display of side-to-side dancing to the beat. It was at this moment that I remembered another music video of that time to feature not only a surfeit of aggressive sexual objectification within a restaurant, but an awkwardly dancing and wholly unsanitary kitchen staff. It was 1983’s “Hi, How Ya Doin’” by Kenny G on—what else?—Clive Davis’s Arista Records. That track, off his second record, G Force, which was more or less the general public’s introduction to Kenny G with its chart-reaching success, was produced by the now-legendary synthesizer guru and producer, Kashif. Any guesses on who produced Houston’s “You Give Good Love” a few years later? Mm hm. May the circle be unbroken. You all get an A. Class dismissed.

Modulations are sprinkled throughout the songs on the record—modulations being the shifting from one key center to another within the same song, usually producing a marked-if-mild euphoria of refreshed arrival, not back home per se, but back home after Extreme Makeover: Home Edition completes its work—the same but different. One might even say that Houston’s genre-jumps on Whitney Houston show off the same character-inhabiting talents she displayed in her teenage career as a fashion model.

Indeed, the vocal range revealed in the songs—the quiet-fire R&B “You Give Good Love,” the jazz-tinted “Saving All My Love For You,” the pop-tarty “How Will I Know,” the broad, nearly-Broadway “Hold Me”—is mirrored in the wildly varied cover art photography across the singles: “You Give Good Love,” borrowing the regal, earthtone-infused album cover proper; “Thinking About You,” a tightly cropped black-and-white headshot set against a cold and angular geometric background; “How Will I Know,” which is chockablock with 80s teen fashion and graphic design; and the pair of “All At Once” and “Saving All My Love For You,” both featuring Houston draped in black, straight-faced and strong-as-hell as she wades in the ocean with—you guessed it—a horse. I’ve always said, If you’re gonna spend a chunk of your $400,000 album budget on a day at the beach with a horse, you might as well squeeze two covers out of the shoot. But in all seriousness, what comes through in all of the cover photos and, importantly, in all of the songs, is her dignity, intact—see the song “Greatest Love of All” for details—no small feat for a young woman being groomed by a label to take the world by storm.

Taken as a whole, Whitney Houston (the record) does a great job of marking a moment in time—pulling as it does into one album stylistic elements that were taking hold in the early 80s—but also marking the arrival of Whitney Houston (the artist) onto the world stage, implicitly stating, “You will remember my name.”

And we did.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

 

Episode 18: Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway, 1972)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

When Nina Simone introduced her tune “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” to the packed house at the Philharmonic Hall in 1969, she said: “It is not addressed to white people primarily. Though it does not put you down in any way—it simply ignores you. For my people need all the inspiration and love that they can get.”

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the idea of rebuking self-censure and instilling self-love in African-Americans was coalescing. Steve Biko, anti-Apartheid activist and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, would later refer to his slogan, “Black is beautiful,” as saying to a person: “Man, you are OK as you are. Begin to look upon yourself as a human being.” And this cultural movement was greatly catalyzed by black musicians at the time. The summer of 1968 brought James Brown’s single, “Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud”; 1970 brought the aforementioned Nina Simone recording of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” a deep and gospel-influenced cover of which would be released later that same year by Donny Hathaway. It was covered again in 1972 by Aretha Franklin on her album Young, Gifted and Black, the same year she would release her live, full-on gospel record, Amazing Grace.

1972 also saw the release of Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway’s plainly-titled duet record, Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway—this week’s Album of the Week—which featured the song “Be Real Black For Me,” a grooving love song illustrating not only romantic love between people, but a love for the black body itself.

The song, while formatted as a private conversation between two lovers, is clearly addressed to the “black public sphere.” “You don't have to wear false charms,” Hathaway sings. In Flack’s line about her partner’s hair being “soft and crinkly,” she implicitly denies the chemical hair straighteners and relaxers that had been so popular as tool of assimilation, and reaffirms natural black beauty. Flack’s own majestic afro was on display in the image of her and Hathaway inside the fold of the LP jacket, and it nearly overtook the album cover of her 1971 release, Quiet Fire, the typographic design accentuating—halo-like—her hair’s round contour. Hathaway, for his part, preferred to wear hats, stating once in college, “I can't play unless I have my ‘sky’ on my head.”

An Atlantic Records advertisement for the recording that appeared in JET magazine in 1972 featured quotations from Flack and Hathaway about each other, which both sold the record as a true mutual admiration society—two accomplished performers who actually love each other singing love songs—but also, importantly, signaled to JET readers the pair’s dedication to the black-is-beautiful movement—Flack saying of Hathaway that listening to him is a “totally black religious experience,” and Hathaway saying of Flack that she “is unique. She has classical soul. She's black, beautiful, talented, trained, and qualified to be where she is.”

The second track on the album is a version of Carole King’s song, “You’ve Got a Friend,” which was released as the album’s first single on May 29, 1971, which, as it happens, is the exact date that James Taylor’s version of the song came out. Yet another version of “You’ve Got a Friend” appeared on Aretha Franklin’s aforementioned Amazing Grace record, a year later. It wasn’t the only non-tradition song to make an appearance on that record—Franklin also included a tune by Marvin Gaye—but its placement, as a medley with the gospel pearl “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” is compelling. Franklin had, of course, in the late 1960s, had a hit with King’s composition “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” so an inclusion of another one by the composer certainly makes sense, but the practice of peppering gospel records with pop songs, and, indeed, adding straight gospel songs to pop records was a bold and powerful statement, and one that more and more artists at this time were willing to make.

On Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway—which, speaking of Aretha Franklin, also featured a bouncy, country-fied version of “Baby I Love You,” from Franklin’s late-1960s repertoire—we find for example an utterly unstoppable version of the traditional gospel tune, “Come Ye Disconsolate.” Both Flack and Hathaway had included traditional or modern gospel tunes on their previous solo recordings, so it wasn’t a ground-breaking move for either at the time, but something about the two of them singing together, particularly at the song’s climax, skyrockets this performance to another realm. The tempo is achingly slow, and the spare accompaniment of Hathaway on piano, Flack on organ, and the superlative Chuck Rainey on bass, helps to show off Flack and Hathaway's powerful and ethereal individual and interlocking vocals. No false charms are worn around this tune: a pure signal from God’s lips to your ears.

Both Flack and Hathaway’s roots are in the church: Flack the daughter of a church organist, and Hathaway a child prodigy, who achieved notoriety in St Louis circles at the age of three, when he was billed as “Donny Pitts, the nation’s youngest gospel singer.” The two met while attending Howard University.

The album is full of slow-jams, which is just fine by me—I could listen to these two sing at slow tempos all day every day—but it was the slightly more uptempo “Where is the Love?,” the album’s third single, that would eventually take over the airwaves, boosted in large part due to Flack’s growing popularity, with her version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” originally released on her first record, First Take, being featured in a romantic scene in Clint Eastwood’s 1971 directorial debut, Play Misty for Me, netting her the Grammy for Record and Song of the Year for 1972.

One of the most strikingly emotional songs on the album is the standard, “For All We Know,” which Hathaway sings solo, accompanied by Flack’s sensitive piano. The song tells us to hold fast to the ones we love, for though tomorrow was made for some, tomorrow may never come, for all we know. It is a particularly heavy message given Hathaway’s young death at 33, which came but seven years after the release of this album, when, on a cold January night, he plunged fifteen floors from a New York hotel window.

The medical examiner determined that his death was a suicide, claiming, among other things that “adults don’t fall out of windows. Children might fall out of windows, but not adults.” Hathaway’s friends, including Flack—who was with him up to a couple hours before his death—while fully acknowledging Hathaway’s intermittent but very real “low, low points of depression,” disagreed, claiming his spirits were high that evening, and noting his eccentric habit of leaning out of high windows and full-throatedly singing and preaching for the world, or at least for the birds and the wind—something for which he’d apparently been removed from hotels in the past.

“We come and go like the ripples of a stream.”

Regardless of whether his fall was intentional or accidental, Hathaway would be remembered for his music.

His final note on “For All We Know” flutters away with 40 seconds remaining in the track. Strings, Hubert Laws’ flute, and Flack’s piano build to a final climax, hinting at a conclusion—but it’s not yet the end. Flack comes back in for a final word, quietly resolving the chord, as the strings play a funereal root.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

 

Episode 17: Sleep With One Eye Open (Chris Thile & Michael Daves, 2011)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

"What is tradition?" Max Frisch asked within his 1954 book, I'm Not Stiller. "I thought it meant tackling the problems of one's own day with the same courage one's forefathers brought to bear on theirs."

Chris Thile and Michael Daves—singing pickers both—who met in 2005 at a jam session, and whose 2011 duet album, Sleep with One Eye Open, documents their chemistry and telepathy—acknowledge this idea of bringing to bear such fire and innovation to their own conception of quote-”traditional” bluegrass music. Thile talks of breaking out of the mold of the musical archivist who simply "swaps tales about the golden days" while Daves seeks to disrupt the spotless veneer of respectability that he believes has enveloped modern bluegrass as a backlash against a questionable vision of it as some "hayseed, backward, redneck thing." He doesn't believe either to be a helpful view and prefers not to dress the genre up at all—in overalls or Sunday best. "I'd rather take it and destroy things with it," he says.

At first overthinking what they might do on this album, they eventually decided to just record what they do best: they'd show up, play traditional tunes, and be spontaneous about it.  So they booked time at Jack White's studio, stepped up to a single vintage RCA77 ribbon mic, faced off, and commenced to destroy.  

Bluegrass is a modern tradition, coming into its own in the mid-1940s, when Bill Monroe and others were blowing audiences away in part with their virtuosic picking at breakneck tempos. Daves, looking to help contextualize the genre, likes to point out that bebop was developing around the same time. And, in fact, bluegrass and bebop share, among other things, a love of the line. The long line. Steady streams of eighth-notes whose internal rhythmic pops contain the conception itself. "Everybody's a drummer." 

You can hear that barn-burning speed in their version of one of bluegrass' more well-known tunes, the traditional "Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms." The point of course is that it's a relaxed speed. When you hear Charlie Parker or Oscar Peterson, for example, you're not particularly anxious because you're pretty confident that they're gonna stick the landings. Same here. It’s makes you forget that these are prohibitive tempos for John Q. Human bluegrass player.

Within the bluegrass tradition, there is lineage of "brother duets"—The Monroe Brothers, The Stanley Brothers, The Louvin Brothers—and Thile and Daves continue this tradition, albeit as brothers from other mothers. The Louvin Brothers—another guitar/mandolin duo—in particular are a favorite of the pair. On this record, we're treated to "You're Running Wild," a gently off-balance tune that the Louvins popularized.

Daves' tenor is highlighted in their version of "Cry, Cry Darling." Cranking out full-voice high-Cs with abandon, he channels the tenors of the past against Thile's melody.

More than anything, you feel in these 16 essentially live tracks an excitement for making music together. Thile and Daves are a great pairing—fearless and fun-loving—and the tradition, whatever form it takes, should be glad to have them.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

 

Episode 16: Five Leaves Left (Nick Drake, 1969)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

Nick Drake was 26 years old when, in 1974, after having suffered for years with depression, his mother found him dead in his room—a self-administered overdose of the antidepressant he had been taking being the cause. His mother would later heartbreakingly comment that the first thing she saw was “his long, long legs." I can’t imagine. Such helpless legfullness. Her young son had sadly found, in the end, a truly troubled cure for his troubled mind. 

By that time, Drake had released only three albums, none of which was a commercial success, each selling in the low thousands. He was apprehensive, to say the least, about performing live—a lack of stage presence coupled with minutes-long breaks between songs to re-tune his guitar into one of the many non-traditional tunings he used to produce the chords he produced, didn't help matters. He much preferred the solitude of the studio. Or the home.

It would take nearly 20 more years of gentle, organic growth for his legacy to firmly take root and his talents to be affirmed by the wider public.  

1969's Five Leaves Left, his first album, is an intimate studio affair, full (perhaps overfull at times) with orchestral arrangements to complement Drake's deft and laser-accurate, finger-style guitar playing. He had had Randy Newman on the brain, imagining the lush orchestrations. After an initial failed attempt with Richard Hewson—the then House Arranger for Apple Records, who had, among other things, done the string arrangements for the first James Taylor record—Drake recommended his Cambridge chum, Robert Kirby, whose work would eventually turn around the at-first skeptical producer, Joe Boyd. 

Drake's singing style is direct, cello-like in its resonance. When a vibrato appears, it is subtle, perhaps not even there. In many ways, his voice and style strike me as reminiscent of the great bossa nova singer Joao Gilberto. Reserved, but filled with potential energy. On re-listening this past week, I noticed for the first time a tendency Drake has to close off the “M”s and “N”s at the ends of words quickly, so that rather than holding out a long vowel at the end of a phrase, he is able to hold out a closed-mouthed hum whenever possible. This habit both helps to draw out the string-like instrumental quality of his voice, and, perhaps, illustrates his symptomatic unconscious preference to keep his mouth closed. 

When an artist kills himself so young, producing so precious few albums, it's tempting and convenient to read deeply into all his lyrics and see all his performance tics through the blue-colored glasses of his depression, seeking clues and confirmation. In Drake's case, however, one doesn't have to dig as deeply as unconscious humming: he wore his world-weariness on the sleeves of his records. The head of A&R for Drake’s label remembers, “we saw it coming, we just shrugged our shoulders and thought well, that wasn’t unexpected.” 

Eschewing for the most part songs about love or other people generally, he was besotted with poetic images of nature: oceans, shores, rivers, skies, and sun; flying birds, flying people, flying light, and flying time. 

As a reader in English literature at Cambridge for a spell—including the time of the Five Leaves Left sessions—it makes sense that references to some of those readings would have make appearances. 

While Melody Maker's review in posited that "All smokers will recognize the meaning of the title” as referring to the "five paper left" warning near the end of a packet of Rizla cigarette papers, it seems likelier to me—or rather, I’d like more to believe and it seems reasonable—that the reference was at least in part to O'Henry’s short story "The Last Leaf," about a young artist, dying of pneumonia, watching the ivy leaves fall off the vine: "They're falling faster now,” she says to her best friend watching over her. “Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to count them. But now it's easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now." Then she tells her friend, "when the last one falls I must go too." 

Falling leaves also appear in the album’s second tune, “River Man,” in which Drake sings of a “Betty” who “Said she had a word to say / 'bout things today / And fallen leaves.”

On the album cover of Five Leaves Left, Drake, like the artist in "The Last Leaf," looks out a window of a walk-up onto green leaves, but the knowing half-smile in his eyes might tell us that perhaps all isn’t yet lost—that he’s leafed through to the O’Henrian twist at end of the story.

Perhaps the most potent potential literary reference is the song "Fruit Tree," a meditation on fame. Drake’s song begins, “Fame is but a fruit tree / so very unsound / it can never flourish / 'til its stock is in the ground”—a crashingly stunning metaphor, and one which I have to imagine he borrowed and expanded from Jonathan Swift in his first major prose work, A Tale of A Tub, sarcastically subtitled, “written for the universal improvement of mankind, long desired.” Here’s what Swift wrote:

“I have a strong inclination, before I leave the world, to taste a blessing which we mysterious writers can seldom reach, till we have gotten into our graves: whether it is, that fame, being a fruit grafted on the body, can hardly grown, and much less ripen, till the stock is in the earth: or, whether she be a bird of prey, and is lured, among the rest, to pursue after the scent of a carcass: or whether she conceives her trumpet sounds best and farthest, when she stands on a tomb, by the advantage of a rising ground, and the echo of a hollow vault.”

Swift’s book was a parody; Drake’s song, in light of what would happen just a few years later, was most serious. His fame, as he and Swift both darkly predicted, did eventually flourish, and ripen, years after his death.

Go and check him out. 

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

Episode 15: W H O K I L L (tUnE-yArDs, 2011)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

W H O K I L L, the second album from Merrill Garbus as tUnE-yArDs, begins with a brief recording of her grandmother introducing her as a performer when she was a toddler—a moment, for a child, in which all attention is on them, and the ways of the world, revolving though they may be around her tiny head, are as other as other can be. But the sample is swiftly cut off by a propulsive beat—and we're off. Sleep tight, kiddo; the adults are going to talk now.

Those drums aren't coming from a traditional drum set but from Garbus' makeshift high/low, two-drum set-up. Bass and snare—a boom of the heel of the hand against the snap of a pencil on a lunchroom table. Find a video of Garbus performing as tUnE-yArDs and you'll more than likely see her standing behind two microphones—one to catch sounds for looping—flanked on her right and left by floor tom and snare, playing the two drums with arms wide open, as opposed to the cross-armed compactness of a sitting set-player. There's something about that image—high and low, playing against each other, rarely hitting at the same time and kept at arm’s length, but connected by a central puppet master and, aggregated, producing a complete and stirring image—that seems, to me at least, apt for tUnE-yArDs. A muted metaphor.

The beat in this lead-off track—a wry indictment of America entitled "My Country"—is soon joined by two of Garbus’ voices sung in hocket—a further illustration of voices worlds apart drawn together. Hocket is the musical practice of orchestrating a single melody between two or more voices. In this case, "Garbus One" sings only up-beats, and "Garbus Two" only down. The effect is magical and seductive from the outside, but, speaking as someone who's attempted this type of singing in the past, it's quite difficult to appreciate the aggregate beauty when you're in it. Sometimes the only way to stay on track is to ignore the other voices altogether.

"My Country" tears at the seams of the "American Dream" with lines like, "Your love it drags me down into the underground / My country bleeding me / I will not stay in your arms." It brings to mind for me David Byrne’s 1997 stab at dressing-down America through anthropomorphizing her—his song "Miss America," in which the narrating character, infatuated with this country-cum-supermodel in the manner of a teenage fan, professes his love but notes that she has wicked ways and secrets to be kept, like, for instance, how tall she is without her platform shoes. In Garbus' "My Country," she too latches onto this idea that America has dark secrets she is repressing, but she takes it a step further, screaming, "With my eyes open how can I be happy?" and whispering, "The worst thing about living a lie is just wondering when they'll find out."

Throughout W H O K I L L, Garbus addresses serious social issues but always with a nod of acknowledgment to the complexities of being a white Connecticutian who moved to Oakland via Montreal, and who incorporates a good deal of African musical elements into her music, singing about gentrification and cultural appropriation.

"I'm more comfortable with questions than with answers,” she says. “Which is why, [in the song Gangsta,] it's ‘What's a boy to do?’ rather than ‘Look at this dude who thinks he's a gangster.’ It's not even a judgment. Who am I to assess the situation and know what it's like to walk in those shoes?"

One of the most overtly political songs is "Doorstep": She sings, sing-songy—almost disturbingly happy-go-luckily, given the subject matter—"Don't tell me the cops are right in a wrong like this / ‘Cause policemen shot my baby as he crossed over my doorstep." The song was directly inspired by the case of Oscar Grant, a young, unarmed African-American man shot and killed by a police officer on an Oakland BART platform on New Year’s Day, 2009.

"I saw what was happening in the community and tried to grasp it from some kind of personal perspective,” Garbus recalls. “I found the distance between the human experience of that event and the way it was processed by the system horrifying."

There is a similar disconnect in the way she sets such a set of lyrics to a bouncy, doo-woppy groove in a major key. But the truth, as ever, will out: the pleasant melody is mottled with intentionally out-of-key notes. Toward the end of the song, the tick-ticking of her sticks on rims signals the marking of time as she sings: "How many gone before you listen to the cries?" Not "how long," but "how many gone." Time marked with bodies. Those ticks bleed into the off-camera sounds of a ticking clock proper at the start of "You Yes You," which changes tack—if sarcastically—by reframing the question to begin with the optimistic, “Now that everything’s gonna be OK, now that everything is gonna be all right...”

After laying all this serious "bizness" on the listener, there is, in the penultimate song, "Wolly Wolly Gong," a feint toward pleasantly lulling us to sleep, reassuring us, like a parent does to a child, that the coming morning will fix and undo wrongs, that all will be well. "For your sleep is guard 'gainst the cold and hard, a soft shroud of safety in a world gone wrong," she sings. Like many lullabies, however, listen close and you’ll notice the violent underbelly. “Rockabye baby in the treetop”—for the moment, anyway. Boughs break and babies fall. The final words of “Wolly Wolly Gong” pose the question, "When you fall what happens when you're landing?"

There’s an often-quoted retort by Prince Richard in Anthony Harvey’s 1968 film version of The Lion in Winter in response to Prince Geoffrey’s claim that it doesn’t matter the way one falls down. Richard, who is determined to provide no satisfaction to the approaching King, and certainly will not beg, says, “When the fall is all there is, it matters.”

It seems inevitable that we fall and and it’s nigh-impossible to imagine a return to any sort of prelapsarian bliss—if there even exists such a “time before the fall”—so the best we can do, perhaps, is pay attention, and do what we can while we’re landing.

It matters, after all. 

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

 

Episode 14: Career Moves (Loudon Wainwright III, 1993)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

“My songs are written to be performed, mostly,” explains Loudon Wainwright III in a 2014 interview. “I mean, I do make records from time to time, but I'm always thinking about if something is gonna work in a show.”

His catalogue is bursting with great songs and his lyrics come to my mind often. It's easy enough to be reminded of Wainwright's material what with the incredibly wide scope of topics he has written about over his long career. On this collection alone—his 1993 live album called Career Moves—he hits on love, sex, divorce, loneliness; swimming, spelling errors, tipping, drugs; Elvis, privilege, touring; unhappy holidays, unhappy birthdays, unhappy anniversaries. And that barely scratches the surface.

Career Moves, which was released to celebrate, as he puts it, “twenty-five years of earning a damn good living on the periphery of the music business,” begins with a driving, nearly manic song about life on the road. Not about some idyllic fantasy road life, but his experience, specifically his experience as an aging performer with a dedicated but modest following.

“Runnin' through airports at 43's OK for OJ but it's not for me, with a hernia, a bad back, and a bum knee and a guitar out on the road…”

He comically compares his humble travel conditions to the lush accommodations and full support staff of people like Willie Nelson, about whom he sing-speaks sarcastically, “well, Willie deserves it, he's a big ol' star!”

But Wainwright plugs away as ever, playing solo shows—occasionally joined by a friend or two, as he is on this record—relying on his wits, his songwriting chops, and his presence of mind on stage to loop into the show any in-the-moment incidents, rather than ignore or repress them.

About three and a half minutes into “Road Ode,” for example, he notices that his frenzied strumming has caused his low E-string to go flat. No matter. He pauses, quickly brings it up to pitch as the audience laughs, and gets on with it, but not before briefly commenting, “It's folk music, ya know, you can do that.” And remember, this track is the lead-off. There's no shying away or attempting to fold it deep into the album. These chance happenings, which, in a studio session, would surely be scrubbed away in post or simply be avoided by picking another take, are the things that seem to sustain Loudon's life on the road, and, it would seem, have from the very start of his career.

While his studio albums are lovely, replete as they are with backing bands and tidy arrangements, it's the live records—spare, mostly just him and his guitar, and his audience—that get me. There are some musicians that are so effective by themselves that adding a full band—no matter how competent the players—can detract and weigh them down.

Wainwright is one of those rare performers who can be completely and convincingly straight-faced and sincere, and then, often within a single song, land perfectly-placed jokes. Like a good eulogy, sincerity and seriousness doesn't preclude humor. See for example, the song Thanksgiving on this record, which presents all those complicated feelings about family re-gatherings later in life. In the midst of such an auspicious meal, he prays to Lord that if argues with a loved one, “please make me the winner”

For a fine example of the reverse—where you are knocked for a loop by the pealing of a serious bell at the end of a humorous, almost throwaway novelty song, check out “Tanya's Twirls”—about Tanya Harding—from his 2003 live album, So Damn Happy.

Loudon explains his combining of the solemn and the silly in an interview, noting that, “if you get people laughing, they're disarmed to a certain degree and they're listening and really engag[ed]… and you can slip one past them too.”

He mines his life, and particularly his family life, for material, but it's complicated, of course. Clearly the familial dysfunction feeds his work—on this album the big family hits are “Five Years Old,” “Your Mother & I,” and “Unhappy Anniversary”—but, by some sort of negative feedback loop, his work, which had for so long provided cover for him to be away from his kids as they grew up, fed the dysfunction, and how. Martha Wainwright, Loudon's youngest daughter with Kate McGarrigle, and a wonderful singer-songwriter herself, would recall him telling her, in her late teenage years, that letting her and her brother Rufus go was necessary in order to “be Loudon Wainwright.” Of course, Martha is more often quoted as saying that Loudon is a man who wrote songs about his children instead of raising them. So there's that.

The album's final arc is made up of four songs of epic proportions, any of which could itself stand as a testament to Wainwright's songwriting prowess: “April Fool's Day Morn,” dedicated to his mother, who was in the crowd during the recording; “The Man Who Couldn't Cry,” which would eventually be covered by Johnny Cash on his 1994 album, American Recordings; “The Acid Song,” about, well, let's say a “group trip”; and finally “Tip That Waitress,” a gentle and sympathetic look at workers the food service industry—a “plea for gratuity,” as he calls it.

Loudon, now nearly 70, is still out on the road and sounds as good as ever. Go and hear him if you can.

He also still makes records from time to time.

I'm Josh Rutner, and that's your album of the week.

Episode 13: The Way Out (The Books, 2010)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

Where we perceive a chain of events, Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History sees “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The past may be dead, but it’s far from gone, and from the dusty shelves and cement floors of thrift shops and garage sales, forgotten relics scream to be rediscovered.

Paul De Jong and Nick Zammuto, collectively known as The Books, wade through that incomprehensibly large pile of history, and pull flotsam from the pile in the form of recordings-on-the-margin—and the margins of history are wide indeed—building a library of sounds to-be—or not-to-be—incorporated, as-is or in manipulated form, into the collages they create, in an effort to move the culture forward by shuffling the past.

 "Your being merges with the garbage / and you become one with it."

If the idea of listening to “sample-based music” seems beyond you—that there’s no way you could hang with it—consider for a moment the ease with which you might listen to and enjoy the soundtrack to old Warner Brothers cartoons, with all their swirling tempos and crammed-together genres and ridiculous musical quotations and such. String orchestras mingle with ratchets, kazoos, and whiz-whistles. It’s more avant garde than you think, but so long as we tie it to the visual, it goes down smooth. A spoonful of sugar, and all that. It’s a gentle mental hop from that music to the music on The Way Out, the fourth and final recording by The Books, released in 2010. Call it “a soundtrack for a film that doesn’t exist.”

What differentiates the music of The Books from cartoon music, however (besides the lack of visuals and the preponderance of self-help and meditation samples), is that the layering is horizontal rather than vertical. Whereas the soundtrack of a Bugs Bunny short cuts speedily from genre-to-genre, tempo-to-tempo, and key to shining key, The Books’ tracks tends to be grounded with a pulse—a consistent groove, often laid down by Zammuto—upon and against which the fluttering, unexpected rhythms of spoken word and other recorded b-roll can float or sting.

You may never know what's coming next in the stream of samples, but you can at least file away each moment as having either played along with, played against, or completely ignored, the pulse.

It's appropriate that the 22-second track entitled “A Wonderful Phrase By Gandhi,” which contains an unadorned recording of—you guessed it—a wonderful phrase by Gandhi, references "a living power," underlying the constant change in the world, that "is changeless; that holds all together." Life's powerful pulse.

There's also an element of the uncanny in The Way Out, and a fine line is repeated crossed between the disturbing and the hilarious—the frightening and the invigorating. The two tracks that most clearly bob about that line are “A Cold Freezin' Night,” which uses as its main sampled material recordings taken from Tiger Talkboys—those early 90s handheld variable-speed cassette players-slash-recorders, and “Thirty Incoming,” which samples messages pulled from a single, anonymous answering-machine tape found in a thrift store. Both tracks are eerie and voyeuristic, but they are also endearing and sympathetic.

Unlike today, where social media—that worldwide depository for The Personal—soaks up and sends out our selfles as quickly as we create them, the time of the Talkboy localized creative output to one's house, or neighborhood: you wanna share the cool noises you made? Invite your friends over.

It's amazing how listening with open ears to an album like this, so full of disparate elements that melt into each other and challenge your brain to make everything fit under the rubric of "music," can, in a way, train you to notice, say, the way a honking horn or screaming toddler or construction noise can interact with and even add value to the Music-with-a-capital-M you might be listening to in your headphones, walking down the street. And, in an ideal world, it might even open you up to hearing, for example, how the interaction of your whirring and clacking washing machine with your partner's incessant mindless tapping, too, can be musical, and therefore interesting, rather than boring or bothersome.

Our backs may be turned to the skyward-growing debris pile of history, but albums like The Way Out, which challenge us to dip into that past and use scraps to shape our future: that's some sort of progress worth turning around for.

I'm Josh Rutner, and that's your album of the week.

Episode 12: Takin' My Time (Bonnie Raitt, 1973)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

It's true, Bonnie Raitt has written and recorded her own songs, but her strength lies more in the her work as an interpreter and a guitarist. On her third solo record, Takin’ My Time, released in 1973, we are treated to a diverse collection of covers, each included, she says, because they say exactly what she feels.

“Let Me In,” the roisterous third track on the album, and a hit for the Sensations in 1962, begins with sounds of the recording studio, and then rips into its oom-pa two-beat with the residual sounds of laughter and merriment hanging on through the first verse. The sturdy tuba work from bassist Freebo, the contrapuntal horn improvisations, and the overdubbed “wee-oo” backing vocals help to sustain that party-you-want-to-be-a-part-of feel to the end.

“Wah She Go Do,” composed and performed originally by Calypso Rose on her album Splish Splash, is a strong, pro-woman, even feminist Calypso statement that stands in sharp contrast to the male-dominated Calypso scene of her time, in which songs so often objectified, degraded, and denigrated women in their lyrics. In this song, the female narrator sings about wives and their husbands who mistreat them, prescribing the having of an “outside man,” or, hell, two, as a way of getting respect. The song was surely presented to Raitt by Van Dyke Parks, who, in addition to adapting the arrangement, playing piano, and singing backup on her version, is also credited for “inspiration” on the track.

The injunction to women to stand up for themselves found in “Wa She Go Do” is also reflected, if less prescriptively, in the album’s opening track, a cover of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ 1965 hit, “You’ve Been in Love Too Long.” The final verse tells us, “When his wrong looks right, though he always treats you bad / You find little excuses for all the sadness and abuses.”

It’s unfortunate that there’s not more guitar playing from Raitt on the record, but she does show off her solid bottleneck technique on the medley of two tunes by her mentor, Mississippi Fred McDowell, “Write me a Few of Your Lines” and “Kokomo Blues,” which took the place on the record of the duet with McDowell that never came to be.

The album ends gloomily but stunningly with “Guilty,” a song by Randy Newman that Raitt had heard in producer Michael Cuscuna’s apartment before Newman had officially recorded it. It is, as many Newman tunes can be, brutal, yet laid over an almost “You know I just can't stand myself / It takes a whole lot of medicine / For me to pretend to be somebody else.” 

As Raitt would say, introducing this song at a show performed in New York City shortly after the Takin' My Time sessions, “If you don’t think this is the blues, I don’t know why you’re here.” 

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

Episode 11 (a very special accidental reprise of Ep. 2!): Face Value (Phil Collins, 1981)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

Face Value, Phil Collins’ 1981 debut solo album, opens, improbably, with an epic, five minute and thirty-six second “In the Air Tonight.” You wait patiently, to the point where most pop songs would already have ended, for a “drop,” as it were. At three minutes in, you are briefly smacked over the head with “well I remember” to remind you to stick with him here. This thing is gonna pay off. And 40 seconds later, you hear it: that elegantly simple drum fill that left impressions—via number-two pencils cum drum sticks—on the car seats in front of countless kids growing up in the ’80s.

Once the peak is reached, it hangs there for a bit, and then, slowly, the knobs turn toward zero: nearly a full minute of fade-out.

Collins by this time had already toured the world many times over and made a name for himself as the drummer and later lead vocalist of Genesis. By 1979, he was talking publicly about making a stylistically-varied solo record that could contain long stretches of “mood.” But it wasn’t until he experienced a “personal tidal wave,” in the form of a divorce, that he took some time away from Genesis, holed up in his house, and wrote and recorded the tracks that would become the basis of Face Value.

After the coolly restrained, metronomic drum machine accompaniment of the opening song, a well-warranted organicism and punch is introduced, bolstered by Alphonso Johnson on bass, who makes the next two tracks: the gently off-kilter “This Must Be Love,” and the borrowed Genesis gem, “Behind the Lines,” which Collins speeds up 30% from the original and boosts into overdrive with the addition of the EWF Horns.

The pair of tunes that follows, acting more as story and epilogue than two separate songs, introduce the theatrical into Face Value. "The Roof is Leaking" fades in with crickets that remain in the background throughout the song as sonic scenery, supporting the tale of a poor and desperate family battling the cold winter and holding out for spring. The opening musical figure of "The Roof is Leaking," played by Eric Clapton's slide guitar, becomes the basis of "Droned,” the wordless, Indian-influenced tune that follows.

Track 6, “Hand in Hand,” brings the drum machine back into play, at first undergirding the children's choir, bass, drums, and horns, but gives way as the tune becomes an all-stops-pulled showcase for Collins' drum set and the EWF horns, foregrounding what might normally have been supportive rhythmic horn lines.

In a 1981 interview, Collins described “Hand in Hand” as “basically like ‘Who Dat Man?’,” the lively if ultimately problematic Marx Brothers song from their 1937 film, A Day at the Races, which sees Harpo, as Gabriel, skipping through a town and attracting—Pied Piper-like—a crowd of kids that builds behind him as he blows his penny whistle. It's less a musical comparison than a conceptual one: "Innocence and children,” says Collins, bluntly. (Incidentally, his boosterism for the Marx Brothers continued the following year in a much more overt fashion when he released his second album, entitled "Hello, I Must Be Going!")

The album’s most vulnerable and barebones statement is the brief "You Know What I Mean," with Collins on voice and piano accompanied beautifully by strings. The lyrics tell of a brokenhearted man imploring his ex-lover not to re-enter his life, to leave him alone so he can put the pieces of himself back together—a clear allusion to Collins’ divorce. One can hear this song, perhaps, as a prologue and companion to his mega-hit to come, "Against All Odds," which would be released three years later and would present an alternate version of dealing with love lost.

Overall the album covers a ton of ground—which is not totally unexpected for an initial solo release, where an artist wants to show off all sides of themselves—but it is masterfully sequenced, guiding the listener through multi-song arcs, often assisted by cross-fades to further the notion of continuity.

The final track, The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows," is the album's only cover (not counting the Genesis tune, of course)—actually, if you want to get technical, the final 30 seconds of the album, as a treat for those who stick around for the ends of fades, has Collins singing the first stanza of Harold Arlen’s "Over the Rainbow" a cappella... But, to the Beatles:—It was not intended as an homage to John Lennon, who was shot dead in front of his apartment building just two months before Face Value's release. The track was recorded, mixed, and in the can over a year before that. So why a Beatles tune? “It’s basically a nudge in the ribs," Collins would explain, "saying, If you think this is nice, go back to the original, listen to that, because, you know, you missed this 20 years ago.”

Well, in case you guys missed Face Value 34 years ago, consider your ribs nudged.

I'm Josh Rutner, and that's your album of the week.  

Episode 10: Thrill of the Arts (Vulfpeck, 2015)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

There are moments of resonance that you sense listening to Vulfpeck. Feelings of familiarity that invite you to relax, knowing you're in good hands. To call them cliches might be misleading, yet there’s a reason that cliches are cliches. Sometimes they just sound so damn satisfying, you're best to leave them alone. Vulfpeck places you right smack dab in the middle of head-bobbing territory and sprinkles just enough micro-subversions throughout—not to knock you off balance, but to get your body rocking. 

After a run of five six-track EPs, Vulfpeck's 2015 release, Thrill of the Arts, appears as a glorious full-length offering, both establishing and expanding the group's aesthetic, pulling into the Vulf-fold featured singers who blend seamlessly into the backing-band foundation. This is feel-good funk. Sweet funk. Call it “The Gospel of ‘I Want You Back,’” that Jackson 5 song that holds so many secrets to creating grin-inducing music.

What separates Vulfpeck from other modem funk bands who, like them, who have studied tradition to the point where novelty and preciousness recede into a background of earnestness and joy, is their injection of humor and the absurd. Hilarious post-production overlays duck in and crack you up—and while you might think such “interruptions” would take you out of the groove, nope: the levity only opens you up to more of the good stuff. Basketball net-swooshing, dog-barkings, a chipmonk’d backing choir—bring it on. Even the most outlandishtrack of all—a comically absurdguided meditation—can actually relax you. It’s this marriage of craft with wild irreverence that makes these tracks pop. It’s actually surprising we don’t see this type of thing more often. In the words of Dutch pianist Misha Mengleberg, “People go pissing one moment and have deep philosophical thoughts the next. Or maybe both at the same time.”

The third track, for example, “Funky Duck,” provides a thumbnail sketch of a contemporary on-the-scene uber-hipster. He’s a sort of modern-day Killer Joe, only instead of playing the horses, jingling coinage, and wearing neatly-pressed double-breasted form-fitted pin-striped suits, the Funky Duck is a self-aware, Ovaltine-drinking, and funky—oh so funky—duck. The vocals, by past Vulf-collaborator Antwaun Stanley, are powerful and confident, and includes a hook that is so catchy, but, as Vulfpeck leader and multi-instrumentalist Jack Stratton says, “you can't sing—it's too difficult.” There is the slightest whisper of parody, but it's so well crafted and presented with such sincerity and respect, that it's no joke. It takes a deep seriousness to be this hilarious, and a ton of work to appear so effortless.

Another vocal track, “Game Winner,” featuring Charles Jones, takes seriously the idea of underpinning a love song with a sports metaphor. There is no wink to the microphone, and that's what makes it so wonderful. Clear overtones of groups like the Delfonics can be heard in the arrangement, mingling with melodies plucked from ’80s and early-’90s R&B to create a track that is, well, you know, a slam dunk. 

Without a doubt, there is a relaxed, live vibe to Vulfpeck's tracks, but a clear-headed compositional concision reigns. As a band that functions without a singer most of the time, it's an important skill. The danger of instrumental overindulgence is always lurking. So they get in, kill it, and get the hell outta there. Thank you masked man.

The playing is top-notch, the performances are great, the lyrics are strong; but beyond all that, the music sounds so good. Stratton, who mixes all of Vulfpeck's tracks (in addition to creating and editing their videos, and handling all of the business aspects) brings an understanding of production that puts to shame many of the waveform-gobbling, compressed-to-death pop music you might hear on whatever today's equivalent of radio is. In fact, Stratton even co-created a real-live compressor plugin—called the Vulf Compressor, of course—that sounds as good as any on the market today.

If you’ve ever seen a Vulfpeck video on Youtube, you’ll have heard, in its introductory seconds, a brief harmonic progression that seems to contain within it the whole Vulf universe. It’s hard to explain, but it functions as an audio calling card or logotype. You can hear it evoked in three different places on this album: at the start of the supremely listenable Christmas tune, “Christmas in LA,” during the aforementioned guided meditation track, and at the very end of the album opener, “Welcome to Vulf Records,” which acts, like all great overtures should, to survey the whole plot of land and plant seeds of what's to come. I get excited every time I hear that progression, and I can’t wait to hear it more and more as Vulfpeck progresses.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

 

Episode 9: Love is Overtaking Me (Arthur Russell, 2008)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

In May of this year, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts announced it had acquired the archives of Arthur Russell, that shy but insistent and ever-prolific composer-singer-cellist-producer who helped shape the New York downtown scene in the 1970s, in part through his work as the Musical Director of The Kitchen, pulling together into one venue so-called minimalist music, New Wave, folk, and avant garde multi-media performances—along with more unclassifiable things.

Russell himself was a musical polyglot, contributing discretely—and, often, discreetly—to, among others, the avant-garde, new wave, and disco scenes. The Russell archives include, according to the NYTimes’ Ben Ratliff, “a thousand-or-so reels, cassettes, DATs, Beta, and VHS tapes with hundreds of hours of unreleased and probably unreleasable material, representing how Russell made his work.” Such an archive, made public, is a huge boon for fans of Russell, who was process-obsessed and always on the hunt for new sounds. There will be much to wade through.

Since 2004, the record label called Audika Records has been working with Tom Lee, Russell’s long-time partner and the executor of his estate, to lovingly pore over those hundreds of hours of material to curate compilation albums that help bring to light the breadth of Russell’s work. Unlike Franz Kafka or Virgil, who coyly requested of others that their manuscripts be burned upon their death—and, the fact that they didn’t just quietly toss them into a fire themselves speaks to the reluctant wink that might’ve accompanied such requests—Russell did no such thing, reveling as he did in the open and and the unfinished form. In fact, according to Lee, much of the material left behind consists of songs that Russell wanted to release, “but nobody would put ‘em out.”

This week we focus on the 2008 Audika compilation called Love is Overtaking Me, a bringing-together of some of Russell’s more straight-forward song forms recorded in the long stretch between 1974 and 1990, up to two years before his death. It’s a twenty-one-track journey through homemade demos and fully-produced, full-band studio efforts. The stetson that the Iowa-native wears on the cover photograph—arms crossed, three-quarter profile in front of a field—foreshadows the touch of country that seeps into and out of some tunes. The most obvious is the cowboy-campfire waltz that opens the album, “Close My Eyes.” The song that follows, an actual, traditional cowboy song, “Goodbye Old Paint”—Old Paint being the name of a horse—might very well have been too on the nose, but Russell’s arrangement throws one for a proper loop with its Indian tambura drone and trotting tabla, and its clarinet, flute, and strings leaning heavier on raga than lasso.

The accessibility of the grooves and genre-work on this collection has been given the hairy eyeball by some critics who privilege Russell’s more “penetrating and demanding” work, but the privileging itself is antithetical to Russell's flat-and-wide, horizontally-interconnected underground networks approach. Indeed, if anything, it would be accessibility that was to be privileged in Russell’s work. He aimed to liquefy raw material to where concert music and popular song can criss cross. “In bubble-gum music the notion of pure sound is not a philosophy but rather a reality,” he said in a 1977 interview. “In this respect, bubble-gum preceded the avant garde.”

The tenth track, “Eli,” a economical-and-sweet vignette about—on the surface at least—an underappreciated dog, is the only track on the compilation that foregrounds Russell’s cello. Unlike much of his cello-and-voice work, this brief song employs no echo effects. In the 2008 documentary Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, we get to see and hear grainy footage of Russell performing “Eli,” alone with his cello in a modest venue on a wooden chair, drawing with his bowed double-stops the “ee” and “eye” vowel-sounds of the dog’s name as he sings it. It’s really something else.

A favorite of mine on the album is “Janine,” a moebius-strip of a form, half-twisted and eating its tail, in a small-scale way implementing his idea of creating musical structures that would allow listeners to “plug out and then plug back in again without losing anything essential.” The form cycles around and around but its asymmetry breathes life into each go-round.

Two years before writer Tim Lawrence published his biography of Russell entitled Hold On To Your Dreams, he published a really great monograph in the performance studies journal Liminalitites, called "Connecting with the Cosmic: Arthur Russell, Rhizomatic Musicianship, and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–92." In it, he outlines concept of such rhizomatic musicianship, that is, musicianship that “moves repeatedly toward making lateral, non-hierarchical sounds and connections.” Lawrence quotes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s 1980 book, A Thousand Plateaus, which establishes a context for his rhizome riffing. “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines,” they wrote. “The fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction ‘and… and… and…’”

With the wide-ranging Audika compilations already available and, soon—perhaps in a year, says the NYPL—the freshly-digitized audio from the Russell archives made available for online streaming, we have before us a beautiful opportunity to find our own paths through Russell’s “ever-anding,” and, to be inspired to “and” ourselves, again and again and again.

I’m Josh Rutner, and, that’s your album of the week.

Episode 8: There's No Place Like America Today (Curtis Mayfield, 1975)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

Curtis Mayfield's 1975 album, There’s No Place Like America Today, opens with “Billy Jack,” a song depressingly au courant in its subject matter, detailing as it does the almost matter-of-fact gunning down of a black man. "Don't get me wrong, the man is gone," we hear Mayfield sing plaintively, "but it's a wonder he lived this long."

Hard times indeed.

Mayfield details the harsh inequities of American life through funky melancholy. "Seasons Change," which follows "Billy Jack," and begins with nearly 20 seconds of a lone, funereal church bell, bespeaks the arrival of political and social winter that brings with it "scars that scare you to remember" and asks how anyone can survive, so weak and vulnerable, in such conditions. The message he advances here, and throughout the album, is to take strength and comfort in yourself; look inward, "'cause the world is cold and everybody's bold, and there's no one else."

The spare production and understated arrangements, like Mayfield's airy falsetto delivery itself, are deceptive. There are multitudes contained within these album walls and relistens reveal and reward. “I try to choose a lyric that is understood by all," Mayfield said, "but hip enough for those who want to get into something a little deeper.”

The album's cover art depicts, in muted colors, a line of individuals on a city sidewalk, each wearing a heavy coat and most toting bag, basket, or bucket, presumably in line for a handout. All of them are black.

The picture’s resonance is fully felt when one takes in the ironically situated, massive, full-color billboard directly behind the line of people, proclaiming, in an exuberant brush script font, the album’s title, “There’s No Place Like America Today,” accompanied by an image of a smiling and self-satisfied white family riding along in their shiny blue car.

The painted image was adapted from a near identical Margaret Bourke-White photograph taken in 1937 in Kentucky, in the aftermath of the Great Ohio River Flood.

Bourke-White would later say, "Sometimes I come away from what I am photographing sick at heart, with the faces of people in pain etched as sharply in my mind as my negatives. But I go back because I feel it is my place to make such pictures. Utter truth is essential, and that is what stirs me when I look through the camera."

Viewed without its original context, in 1975, this album's cover art told a contemporary tale of two cities that was pithy, clear-eyed and, in the end, one that was just as utterly true as Bourke-White's original photograph, taken nearly four decade earlier. So too is Curtis Mayfield's music eerily current and true 40 years after its release, easily mapped onto America Today.

I'm Josh Rutner, and that's your album of the week.

Episode 7: Bright Sunny South (Sam Amidon, 2013)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

There’s something about the directness of Irish folk songs that appeals to me—not just the straightforward, vibrato-less vocal tone, but the matter-of-fact and deadpan presentation with which you might hear someone sing about, say, a man about to be hanged, or threats to break legs or cut off heads. A mouth of ivy, a heart of holly... and beat not around that green green bush.

While the dark lyrical content on Sam Amidon’s Bright Sunny South stops short of broken limbs and beheadings—well, there is a gallows theme in the song “Streets of Derry,” though, and spoiler alert for “Streets of Derry,” bucking tradition, it actually turns out just fine—anyway, while the lyrics herein don’t overly dark, that spare, unadorned vocal style I love so much is alive and well in Amidon.

You can hear it in the title track, a tale of a young man heading off to war, musket shoulder'd and sword belt'd, bidding farewell to his family and imploring them not to weep. All sentimentality is boiled off and just the sentiment remains. The poetry of the lines, sung well and plain, gives you everything you need and more.

He’s singing with an “inside voice,” so to speak, not just in the sense of quietude and gentleness, but in the sense of an avowed interiority. Where Amidon breaks from this mode most fully on the album—busting out his wailing “outside voice”—is, appropriately enough, on the song “As I Roved Out,” played here in duo with drummer Chris Vatalaro.

Presentation aside, this song too is not without its own share of interiority, telling the story of a brokenhearted man who happens to spy the girl who did the breaking, and then wallows in his sadness, wishing to the Lord that he'd never been born. Sure, the trampled grass will rise and bloom again, he thinks to himself. But love? It’s a killing thing. “Did you ever feel such pain?” The end.

Amidon is serious about tradition, and he has a great handle on digging up and interpreting old tunes, but he is quick to shake off any notion of being a folk purist, peppering the slew of reworked traditional tunes on this album with a pair of what you might gingerly call “modern folk melodies” by Mariah Carey and Tim McGraw.

In the album's notes, Amidon calls Bright Sunny South a sculpture garden of personal relics that he's collected over the years. I encourage you to stroll around the grounds and enjoy. There are, within this record, more gems than you can shake a shillelagh at.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

Episode 6: At Newport (Reverend Gary Davis, 1967)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

The 1965 Newport Folk Festival was the site of Bob Dylan’s fabled performance that ruptured the folk scene—so the story goes—with his newfangled electric guitars and such. But there was another performer playing the festival that selfsame summer day who, uncontroversially and drawing no ire—just doing his thing—completely tore the walls down: a fiery-fingered guitarist and singer whom Dylan himself, not four years earlier, had daydreamed was the ideal person to preside over his wedding ceremony should he marry—a nearly seventy year old blind Baptist minister by the name of Reverend Gary Davis.

At the time of this performance, released originally in 1967 as At Newport and re-released with two bonus tracks in 2001, Davis had only recently been introduced to wider American audiences, swept up to record starting in the mid '50s by the waves of folk revivalism after two decades living in virtual obscurity in Harlem, busking on the streets and preaching to storefront congregations; honing his powerful voice and sharpening his prodigious picking style.

At Newport opens with a thunderous, thundering rendition of "Samson and Delilah," one of his best-known songsone he’d at least partially learned from a 1927 Blind Willie Johnson 78. As with many of Davis’ versions of older songs, though, his joyful guitar arrangements popped with an unmatched bounce and vitality.

The fourth track on the album, "Twelve Sticks," also lengthily known as "The Boy Was Kissing the Girl (And Playing Guitar at the Same Time)," here played on a 12-string, was another staple in Davis’ repertoire, aimed not only at showing off his ridiculous time and harmonic sense, but also his signature move of tapping out tunes with just his left hand while his right beat out rhythms on the body of the guitar, or, as the alternate title suggests, while his right arm wrapped around the body of a girl, as her mother’s head was turned away.

Throughout the album, Davis accompanies himself in a way that is unbelievably fresh and powerful, even 50 years later, commenting on his vocal with buoyant, complementary, and often complex counter-lines, sometimes providing, with thumb and forefinger alone, such a full background that you’d swear—as he did, when he first heard the sound of a guitar as small child—there was a full band by his side.

On the track “I’ve Done All My Singing For My Lord,” Davis accompanies himself masterfully with harmonica and stomping foot, pulling out of thin air a deeper-than-you-can-imagine zydeco groove as he damn-near overpowers the close microphone, shouting through false teeth real truth about dedicating his life to his god.

I leave you with one of my favorite tracks on the record, an instrumental called “Buck Dance” —“a tune he’d play when he wanted soup,” recalled a former student—which leaves *me* grinning like an idiot every time I hear it.

I'm Josh Rutner, and that's your album of the week.

 

Episode 5: Emergency Ward! (Nina Simone, 1972)

Subscribe via iTunesPlayerFMFacebookTwitter

It’s 1971 at the Fort Dix army base. The impassioned crowd has grown impatient, and who could blame them?  

“We want Nina! We want Nina!,” they chant.

“Nobody has taught us any patience,” Nina Simone laments in song, 6 minutes and 45 seconds into her nearly 19-minute cover version of George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord." But of course by this moment, in this room there is nothing but patience: all within earshot hang on her words, and she leads by example, taking her sweet time.

Both the audience and the inhabitants of the crowded stage—packed with members from the Bethany Baptist Church Junior Choir of South Jamaica, New York—are dead silent, thrilling to Simone's sublime piano and improvised interleaving of themes from both "My Sweet Lord" and the David Nelson poem "Today is a Killer” before she brings the band and choir back for another round.

In a lovely bit of text-painting, each time the lyric "but it takes so long" is sung, the groove is suspended, the choir holds, and all wait—longer than you'd think—until, when she’s ready, Simone cues everyone in again with “my lord”—BAM.

Patience, patience, patience.

Simone had been including cover songs on her recordings from the beginning—her first hit being a version of George Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy" in 1958. On the nine records she made for RCA between 1967 and 1974—with this album, Emergency Ward!, being the penultimate—one finds an astonishing breadth of covers, including many songs by her contemporaries. Along with Bob Dylan—four of whose tunes she'd released between 1969 and 1971—George Harrison was a main wellspring of material for her in the early 1970s. Two of his songs appeared on Emergency Ward! alone, and his Beatles hit "Here Comes the Sun," was the title track on her previous record.  

Harrison's original version of "My Sweet Lord" featured the "Hare Krishna" mantra alongside the gospel-y "hallelujahs." The “Hare” of the chant, according to one interpretation, represents an alternate name of Vishnu, translated as "he who removes illusion."

In Simone's covers of pop songs, on this record and elsewhere, she has a fourth-wall-breaking penchant for disabusing songs of their illusions, often by interjecting allusions to her own feelings about the words. In the third and final track on the original pressing of Emergency Ward!—a quiet but fiery version of Harrison's "Isn't It a Pity"she approaches Harrison’s lyric "and because of all their tears their eyes can't hope to see the beauty that surrounds them." But Simone turns the "theirs" into "ours" before interrupting herself to sing "though I don't think it's applicable to me." Then she does it again the second time around, adding, "that's not quite true." Hell, even her subconscious can't contain itself, slipping up and redirecting as she sings: "Because we cried so much our eyes can–can't hope to see." 

She also appends Harrison’s “we’re all the same” with “we’re all guilty.”

In "Let It Be Me,” the bonus track that concludes the re-released album Simone and her brother Sam Waymon sing together, "Say that you love me only," after which she comments, "not quite, but almost."

Simone takes the songs she loves and tells her truth with them by folding their lyrics back on themselves, and by considering those lyrics in the moment to ensure that what she is singing is the truth, however much it might complicate or contradict the intended meaning of the song. 

Back at Fort Dix, the second of the three break-downs within the "My Sweet Lord"/”Today is a Killer” medley provides a space for a more substantial reading of the poem, with all its talk of the grimy realities of the day. The combination of these two pieces itself draws back the veil of pop sentimentality. By nesting  the gritty poem within the frame of "My Sweet Lord," written as it was with the gospel gem "Oh Happy Day" as its inspirational foundation, Simone doubles down on the idea that the Lord is refusing to show his face to those in need, and, like it or not, it's gonna be a while before he does.

This idea is played out most clearly in the final moments, which find Simone wailing "WHO ARE YOU LORD? YOU… ARE A KILLER," followed immediately by the choir's full-throated interjection of "Hallelujah!." The tag is powerful and glorious enough as it is, but, as it turns out, they were holding back. Thank patience you held out, because suddenly you're lifted to the heavens when the rest of the choir joins in for a final iteration of the chord.

Do yourself a favor and exercise the patience Simone claimed was so lacking—even back in the 1970s—and go listen to Emergency Ward! in its entirety. Then go on and check out the rest of Nina Simone’s catalog. 

It'd be a pity not to.

I'm Josh Rutner, and that's your album of the week.