Had my music-listening and drug-taking behaviors not been well established before the advent of Massive Attack and the subsequent solo career of Tricky, my initial thoughts on listening to Tricky’s new album, Knowle West Boy, might run deeper than recalling episodes of cheesy cable spy and con game shows, like USA’s ’90s knockoff, La Femme Nikita, and the more recent AMC series Hustle. Of course the use of trip-hop soundtracks on such shows is an outgrowth of the music’s use in stylish, gritty action films, like Face/Off and Snatch. Those fictional London two-bit cons and thugs, in particular, are all about multi-cultural cross-pollination, harsh urban landscapes, witty asides, and an underlying sense of chill.
As I work to hear this album with the figurative tv turned off, the underlying rhythms and subtly jarring sound collages are pretty cool apart from the image of a wiseass Cockney guy and some modern-day Emma Peel. Chances are, you’ve been listening to this stuff with the tv off for some time. Surely the music of Tricky prepared some of you for the coming of M.I.A. For instance, the insistent “Veronika” and “Baligaga”, from Knowle West Boy, now make sense to these old ears, having come in through the back door. Also, after all these years, a track like “Council Estate” fills in some of the gaps in my musical and drug-taking experiences, making me think that Tricky’s working off ideas first established by The Specials, on their proto-chill second album, More Specials. I can dig that. Frequently, the singing and influx of rock guitar posturing reminds me of Terrence Trent D’Arby, who despite his self-generated bombast put out a couple of cool albums.
Shit, I’ve missed so much over the years that I can’t tell if Tricky’s new album is outdated or ahead of some retro ’90s curve. Somehow, as our Presidential campaign kicks off with a collection of cutting-edge and retro candidates ready to square off, this music sounds more appropriate than it otherwise might.
Along with Dionne Warwick, the late-60s hits by Glen Campbell represent, in my memory, the best of the failed aspirations of middle-class America. I still see those albums sitting in front of the huge, wooden stereo consoles in our neighborhood, resting on plush, burnt-orange carpeting. Some elongated sculpture of a conquistador on a horse decorates one end of the console. A reproduction of some painting by one of the Dutch Masters is centered over the stereo; it matches the colors of the heavy velour drapes and couch. “Gavleston”, “Witcheta Lineman”, and “By the Time I Get to Pheonix” made vaguely country music safe for those of us on the more urban coasts–East Coast city dwellers and California dreamers alike. Campbell was pretty cool and sophisticated for a guy playing twangy guitar tunes. As some of us grew into rock nerds, leaving behind the fractured dreams of middle America circa 1968, there were unexpected depths of Campbell to plunder, such as his work as a session man for The Beach Boys and his role as mouthpiece to the surprising cult of Jimmy Webb, Songwriter. It was these after-the-fact revelations that kept the increasingly irrelevant Campbell on the right side of “cool,” despite the cheesy career apex of “Rhinestone Cowboy”, the rough-and-tumble Tanya Tucker years, the coke slide, and the more-recent Jesus-friendly infomercials. When I first heard of this album – a good 24 hours before it showed up in my mailbox – I thought, “Oh man, another Rick Rubin reclamation project! What’s he going to do next, produce a ‘cool’ comeback album for Vicki Lawrence?” (Turns out it’s not a Rick Rubin production, but the brainchild of Julian Raymond, who’s produced Roseanne Cash and The Wallflowers, among others.) After a few minutes I thought, this is Glen Campbell, we have a history together. So I pushed Play and got down to the business of sharing my thoughts, feelings, and other observations.
Adding new meaning to “lineman.”
“Sing”: Campbell’s tenor rises above the alt-adult contemporary fare of this modern-day wall of sound, complete with a skipping drum beat, orchestration, and the insistent plucking of a banjo. Turns out this is a song by Travis, a band I’ve heard of but have never passed judgement on. Do they do, like, iPod ads or something?
“Walls”: I know this song. Is it by someone I don’t typically like? Campbell’s delivery has a way of making me drop my defenses. His performances carry no baggage, have no agenda. He expresses nothing but love and joy for his material, and it’s contagious. OK, I peeked: this is a Tom Petty song. I haven’t been “duped” into digging, like, an REO Speedwagon song.
“Angel Dream”: Here’s another loping Tom Petty cover. This is what we call a nice cover: nothing earth-shattering but completely professional, befitting the studio cat that a young Campbell once was. If this is where this album’s heading, it’s a dignified comeback album we’ve got cooking.
“Times Like These”: Man, this song’s familiar and well constructed! There was always something refreshingly straightforward and good natured in the delivery of Campbell’s classic hits, which mixed the pride of country music with the optimism and hope of Southern California pop. This song has that combination in spades. Whaddaya know? It’s a Foo Fighters song! A lot of older dudes have been telling me there’s something to Grohl’s songs. It’s funny, this is the most like what I would have expected in an album presenting some producer’s version of a comebacking Campbell, as if Elvis Costello had been commissioned to write a song in the Jimmy Webb style. There may have been more to the singer than the song than revisionist hipsters would like to believe.
“These Days”: This song’s off to a lovely start. I’m afraid I’m falling in love with a song by an artist I’ve never much liked…Oh man, I’ve got to take a minute to let some tears flow. This is beautiful…I KNOW THIS SONG: it’s friggin’ Jackson Browne! Truth be told, this is one of the only songs by that guy that ever made the slightest impression on me, but hearing this preternaturally wise song through the voice of a guy who’s royally screwed up his life and lived to tell about it makes it really moving. I’m taken back to that huge, wooden stereo console; the burnt-orange carpet; and the aspirations represented by those conquistadore sculptures.
“Sadly Beautiful”: A Replacements cover. Much better, to my ears, than hearing it on a flagging Replacements album. Like the first few tracks, a “professional” cover.
Pleased to meet you, too.
“All I Want Is You”: Is this a U2 song or that horrible Rod Stewart song, “Forever Young”? It’s U2. As is often the case when I can get past the band’s stock digitally mystical production I’m impressed by how simple and direct the band’s music can be. I MUCH prefer hearing this song in Campbell’s plaintive voice than through the emotive Christ-worthy self-love of Bono.
Legendary Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler died yesterday at 91. How did I miss this news until now? How did it go unmentioned on Rock Town Hall until now?!?!
Wexler always seemed about as cool a cat as one cat could get. I loved the stories of him showing musicians how he wanted a rhythm played by coming out of the booth and doing some dance steps for the musicians to show them the groove he wanted. Recording sessions must have been beyond belief back then. Here’s a link to an excellent interview with him on Fresh Air in 2001. First Isaac, now Jerry. Well, at 91 you can’t say Wexler’s passing was unexpected. Dance on, man!
On “Hang On”, from Dr. Dog’s latest album, Fate, everyone’s favorite floppy-eared psychedelphians swing Tarzan-like from bearded, cut-out bin Beach Boys to cokehead-era Band, before doing a canonball in the Beatlesque bongwater. Come on in, the water’s lovely! The Dog always seem to front load their albums with these kind of multi-faceted tracks — part homage, part theft — which is right up my alley, and even though the singer’s reedy voice has more in common with Steve Forbert than Danko, I’m always excited to hear more.
A bit like The Byrds in their post-Gene Clark Everyone-Must-Grow-A-Beard Period, this charmingly rickety band is strong on backing vocals despite the lack of a distinctive lead vocalist. Guitarist Scott McMicken and bassist Toby Leaman share lead vocals, but frequently, as on the “The Breeze” and “From”, it’s the pillowy Abbey Road-cum-Surf’s Up backing vocals that take the lead, cueing the dynamic shifts of the arrangements. Neat trick!
This Dog knows lots of old tricks. “The Old Days”, for instance, hangs on a cool ostinato, building to a solo that would sound at home on Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. No small feat, that. However, the band’s preponderance of laid-back beats leaves me wanting that elusive “more.” On songs such as “The Ark” and the circular sing-along “Army of Ancients”, I’m waiting for that “goosebumps” moment, the point in the song where a vocal or lyric cuts to the core. Considering that Dr. Dog freely uses arrangement devices of The Band, for instance, I feel justified in seeking a couplet worthy of “This hill’s too steep to climb/And the days that remain ain’t worth a dime” in “Rockin’ Chair.” When Richard Manuel gets to that couplet, I know it’s coming, I know how it’s going to make me feel, yet it still seems as if that emotional wave has taken me by surprise. With Dr. Dog, when the tricks begin to wear thin (and tricks ALWAYS wear thin after a while, even with the best of magicians) I can just sit back and savor that peaceful easy feeling you get from the gentle, rustic psychedelia of “Uncovering The Old.” And yes, a fat piece of smoke helps.
Fate ends with the anthemic “My Friend”, featuring a kitchen-sink’s worth of swirling orchestration: sunbeam harmonies; kaleidoscopic gee-tars; and stomping, extended, oom-pah rhythms. The band take it right back to my “Doubleback Alley,” ending on a Rutles-worthy high note.
At one point last night, while standing behind home plate at Citizens Bank Park and watching the Philadelphia Phillies beat the Florida Marlins, I was suddenly overcome by a spell of Philly Pride. Cranky, old Ed King actually got misty as he looked out over the field, took in the sounds from the crowd, and remembered the franchise’s rare past glories and frequent letdowns. This is my team, I thought. My team’s lovely little ballpark. For better and for worse, my people.
An hour after having gotten in tune with my city, I arrived home to read that one of Philly’s Great White Hopes of the early ’80s, Robert Hazard, had died. Damn, I had no idea the guy was even sick! Continue reading »
Almost forget about your anniversary and need to get your woman something fast? You won’t go wrong with this album. You know what they say about all the great singers: “So-and-so could sing the phone book and make it sound good!” On Lay It Down, Al Green’s continued return to secular recording, the reverend has ?uestlove and James Poyser behind the board and in the band – it’s not exactly the phone book he sings with such mastery but Hallmark-wortthy inspirational platitudes.
Be that as it may, the considerable strengths of this album, which also includes tastefully marketing-driven cameos by contemporary artists John Legend, Corrine Bailey Ray, and Anthony Hamilton, are Green’s voice and the comfortable arrangements in which that voice is set. Each track works off the classic template of Green’s Willie Mitchell-produced ’70s albums, most notably the title track, but in a way that skirts the common problem comebacking legends sometimes face when being slavishly produced by younger acolytes. ?uestlove’s warm, flat drums and Spanky Alford‘s jazzy guitar fills are mixed front and center in ways not often heard on contemporary albums (when’s the last time I’ve heard so many tasty guitar fills peeking out through an entire pop album), but the arrangements are more romantic and sweeping than Green’s more idiosyncratic work from the ’70s. On songs like “You’ve Got the Love I Need” and “Too Much” I imagine what Gamble and Huff might have done with Green after he’d run his initial course with Mitchell and before he departed the pop music world with The Belle Album.
For all that’s solid and right about this album, the one thing that’s not resonating with me is how placcid the lyrics are. The joy of a song like “Just For Me” is palpable. But then it’s 10 songs later, with Green still expressing nothing but complete content with the love of his life, and I might as well be sitting among the choir, singing the praises of the Lord. I don’t wish the man trouble and doubt, but as a listener I hope to hear a sense of questioning and discovery from the artist. At one point in the 1984 documentary, Gospel According to Al Green, a long conversation with the Rev. Al Green that is open to nothing but questioning and discovery, Green talks about his love and longing for God being much more satisfying for him to write and sing about than the love and longing he had for any woman in his pop star days. He’s sitting in his ’80s-era minister get-up as he says this, with a guitar in his lap. Then he starts playing one of his massive, ’70s pop hits – the kind he’d just dismissed, and you can’t help but wonder where the lines are drawn in this guy’s psyche. I get goosebumps just thinking of this half-remembered scene, but on Lay It Down, despite strong performances in all areas, there’s no sense of those zig-zagging lines, no goosebumps. To paraphrase that key line in “Belle,” “Oh, it’s secular Al records that I want, but it’s Green that I need.”
Hey, I remember reading about this band! This was Tom Petty‘s Gainesville, FL band before he was signed as a solo artist, putting Mudcrutch bandmates Mike Campbell (guitar) and Benmont Tench (keyboards) on the payroll. Last month saw the release of an honest-to-goodness Mudcrutch album, with guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh easing back into what must have been a 32-year interrupted dream. Meanwhile, the three who carried over to the Heartbreakers get a chance to cultivate their beards, get their garage band improv back on, and stray-with-permission from the endless open marriage that is the Heartbreakers.. As Campbell told The Boston Herald, “One of the problems with the Heartbreakers is too many hits…There’s very little room for spontaneity and discovery. This band is all about that. As a musician, that’s just a gift.”
Petty and his Heartbreakers buds have been showering lovers of well-crafted, old school rock ‘n roll radio with gifts for years, so they’re more than welcome to treat themselves to a quickly produced getaway with the old gang, but someone’s gotta listen to this album. Considering that Petty long ago fired Heartbreakers’ powerhouse drummer Stan Lynch; played bassist Ron Blair like a yo-yo; made solo albums, per se, without the Heartbreakers that were indistinguishable from the albums with his backing band; and got to mix it up with The Traveling Wilburys, it was hard to imagine how different the reunited Mudcrutch could sound with Petty on bass and two other guys replacing the members of the Heartbreakers with more tenuous grips on their jobs. Was this some elaborate plot to ditch Blair for a second time along with drummer Steve Ferrone and the band’s “Oliver”-turned-fulltime member, Scott Thurston? Was this a softball for director Peter Bogdanovich, who directed last year’s Petty and the Heartbreakers biography, Running Down a Dream, to develop a screenplay?
As I spun this thing the first couple of times, sure enough Mudcrutch sounded very much like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, with three key exceptions. Continue reading »
