DB's Song of the Day (day 334): "WALTZ" (1991) Mekons

Another month bites the dust. The penultimate for 2014. Here come the final days.

Yesterday’s birthday girl, Sally Timms, is one of the key ingredients of the Mekons’ sound. Whether singing lead, as she does on today’s song, or back-up, Timms adds a distinctive soulfulness to the proceedings. She can sound ethereal, tough, wistful, resigned, lovelorn. On “Waltz” she delivers a particularly elliptical lyric with a cool ardor.

The song is second-to-last on The Curse of the Mekons. Curse is one of the band’s best, full of potshots at the state of affairs in the world at large, not least the recent “death of socialism” that came with the fall of the former Soviet Union. The album finds the Mekons contemplating their own errors as well as those of the times in general, and “Waltz” seems a kind of commentary on the moribund nature of something—whether a relationship or a career. “The graveyard scene looks fine / The skull has all the best lines” always appealed to me as a neat summation of a kind of “late in the day” look at where we are. The refrain “And you won’t ever come home now / You won’t ever come home”—sung with a sense of mournful resignation—seems to sum up an estrangement that will never be repaired.

Elsewhere are intriguing details like “The sea turns black with robot’s blood / A terrible beauty is born.” Echoing Yeats’ lines—“Things are changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born”—about the Easter Rebellion in Dublin in 1916, the lines suggest some kind of uprising of robots against their masters, or perhaps a massacre of robots that are used for unnamed purposes. “A pair of giant’s hands / Sinks into the sand” recalls something like Ozymandias and a figure of supposed power now undone. “Tear out the family silver / To pay off the stooges we hired,” besides being comical in such a stately delivery, indicates a once proud lineage fallen on hard times, hiring stooges and having to pawn heirlooms to pay for illegal acts. And doesn’t that sound like a lot of things one could think of with regard to various governments, ransoming the future—legacy—for the sake of nefarious practices to maintain power in the present?

There’s also the interesting parallel that comes after the identical lines “Lovely assassin” (which plays into the hired hit man aspect of the song), in which someone—the assassin—is dressed as a lifeguard watching others drown, and dressed as a fireman starts a fire (which may recall the antithetical relation of fireman to fire in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451). Such matters seem an ironic commentary on those who we might expect to protect us from doom playing into the murderous atmosphere here. In other words, it’s a song that finds figures for the darkling feeling we might find ourselves experiencing as, initially, the old Cold War came to an end—and, with it, “history” in some formulations—and a brave new world got under way.

Today, the song stands as a tribute to Timms’ role in the Mekons—such sensitive vocals would no doubt elude other singers in the band—and as a grimly sardonic end to the second-to-last month of 2014.

DB's Song of the Day (day 333): "ALL THINGS MUST PASS" (1970) George Harrison

Today is the anniversary of the death of original Beatle George Harrison, who died in 2001, yet another bummer aspect of that year. Harrison’s final album, Brainwashed, was released posthumously the following year, and a fine final album it is. But for today I’m going back to his first major release—the landmark album All Things Must Pass, which was hugely successful even though it consisted of three vinyl LPs in its original incarnation. The fact that, in the year The Beatles were officially Quitsville, Harrison’s album boasted three disks was perceived as a telling fact of his tenure with the Fabs. Lennon/McCartney suppressed him in favor of their own compositions so that, when their stars began to fade in the early Seventies, it was time for George to come on strong. And he did.

All Things Must Pass created, with that lyrical slide that Harrison plays on many of its songs, a “George Harrison sound,” aided by maverick producer Phil Spector. I can’t hear tracks from the album without thinking about two things: how great the “wall of sound” approach suits Harrison at that time, and how great are some of the friends who are sitting in on the record, like Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Gary Brooker, Ringo Starr, Alan White, Ginger Baker, Phil Collins, and Dave Mason, to say nothing of the guys who joined with Clapton to become Derek and the Dominoes. It’s an album poised not only to announce how much talent Harrison has, but also to promote the idea of session men and great collaborators over the old tried-and-true factor—largely more perceived than actual—of a “band of brothers” recording album after album together. Harrison leads off the album with a collaboration with Bob Dylan, and that sets the tone for major guest stars. Lennon/McCartney? How about Harrison/Dylan? And along the way, the album establishes what might be called a late Beatles sound, since Let It Be was also produced, very controversially, by Spector, as was Lennon's “Instant Karma.”

There are a handful of songs on the album that vie for the spot of being the song chosen to represent the record as well as Harrison’s solo efforts, but rather than radio songs such as “What is Life” (I owned the 45 of that) and “My Sweet Lord,” I chose to go with the title track because, of course, it suits the notion of ending that was not only apropos at the time—it was impossible to hear that title and not think of the recently kaput band that had seemed to own the era—but is also apropos for a life’s end assessment, to say nothing of the various stages of one’s own life and activities. Whatever you’ve been up to, pilgrim, it ain’t gonna last forever.

And that’s pretty much the mood of Harrison’s song. Except that it’s also committed—as Harrison songs tended to be at the time—to philosophical reflection on how things change, whether bad or good. Nothing, either way, remains the same. “Sunrise doesn’t last all morning / A cloudburst doesn’t last all day / Seems my love is up and has left you with no warning / It’s not always going to be this gray.” The point, it seems, is that change is good, even if you’re the type who would rather live in perpetual sunrise. But that line about “my love”—getting up early and hitting the road unexpectedly—personalizes the Hallmark nature of these reflections. While you’re thinking about how impermanent conditions can be, here’s something else that might just up and go. Love. And life.

“Daylight is good at always arriving at the right time.” There’s another of those homilies that seems awfully pat when cited like that, but in Harrison’s delivery—this is the guy who brought you “the world goes on within you and without you” where “without” means both “outside” and “sans” you—keeps this almost tongue-in-cheek. Harrison could get a bit overstated with his Krishna-inspired truisms and so forth. Some critics pilloried some of Living in a Material World (1973)—the other one of his I’m partial to—for being a bit too self-congratulatory in that regard, and its true that album takes that line more seriously and self-purposively than All Things. But Harrison generally has a way of making his attempts to tap the font of wisdom seem rather humble and self-effacing. It’s all about trying to live within a positive perspective, first and foremost, with a belief that how you think affects what is. “Mind over matter” in a spiritual rather than material sense. And I’m generally able to listen to Harrison in that spirit. He also possessed a sense of humor that kept him from being smug or pompous or pretentious. Whatever he believed about his ultimate fate, he was able to see “George Harrison” as no big deal. And that’s refreshing.

His singing voice too is unmistakeable, particularly as it developed post-Beatles. It tended to be higher and occasionally almost ethereal. On All Things there’s a tone to the whole that veers between high spirits and spiritual highs, and that makes it a complex album and a relief from John and Paul who tended to make their respective mates—Yoko and Linda—the be-all and end-all of their seeking. And that could be much more vapid than even the most fortune cookie version of “Eastern mysticism.”

So here’s to George, the “quiet Beatle.”  All things must pass / All things must pass away. But some remain longer than others.

DB's Song of the Day (day 332): "HERE IT COMES" (2003) The Brian Jonestown Massacre

This post is showing up late, call it holiday glut. So why not go with a song from a band where I came late to the party. The Brian Jonestown Massacre formed its rep in the mid-to-late Nineties, particularly with an album like Their Satanic Majesties Second Request (1996) which built on “rip-offs” or “pastiches” of prominent Brit Invasion bands of the mid-Sixties. The singer and main songwriter, who more or less is The BJM these days, Anton Newcombe, seems to have fixated early on the sound of early psychedelia and the morph of white R&B toward drug “scene” music that took place in landmark albums like Between the Buttons (1967) and the first VU album that same year, and Donovan’s druggier moments, 1966-67, along with, of course, the mind-bending Beatles tunes of 1965-66.

And all that stuff is mother’s milk to me. So I was primed to dig BJM when Jim, a former student, was insistent that I needed to know this stuff. He gave me a comp of Anton gems up to that point (2003), and together we saw the man and his crew live—for free—in the back of BAR in New Haven in spring of 2004. By then Dig!, the film about BJM’s feud with The Dandy Warhols (perhaps an even cleverer name than the Brian Jonestown Massacre) was out and Newcombe seemed to be attracting some media buzz. So, yeah, I was a late-comer, but I really liked And This is Our Music with its use of drone and the kind of organ-playing accents of glum strumming I thought ended forever c. 1970. And the show? It was like death by Rickenbacker. I think there were six of them total. What a way to go.

Newcombe brought it all back home in a big way, not least on today’s song. “Here It Comes” doesn’t really need much in the way of a hook or even in the way of a chorus. All it needs to fill me with a kind of melancholic ecstasy is that little surge when Newcombe’s vocal draws out “oh oh oh, here it co-omes.” Because what seems to be “coming” at that moment is the entire history of psychedelic rock and its evolution into something even more psychosis-ridden in these “loathsome latter years.” Newcombe, to give him all due credit, is both heartfelt and a little tongue-in-cheek about the music he is aping so effectively. I say “heartfelt” because I believe he believes that music should never have stopped sounding this way. The bands who first created such sounds should’ve stayed there and not evolved into whatever came after. And I say “tongue-in-cheek” because I have to believe he’s self-conscious enough to know that this particular aesthetic is well beyond a “rearguard action.” More than flying a freak flag, the guy is tending a wasted flame. Unless of course you think he’s beating a dead horse.

I’ll never say so. That horse never became thoroughly moribund for yours truly, and I got a big kick from Newcombe and company’s efforts to keep the time when Brian Jones walked the earth contemporary with the 21st century. It’s a thankless task, mostly, but dammit, someone’s got to do it.

The lyrics are coy too, giving us just enough to feel the rebel without a contract sitch in all its dragging glory: “Old mom and dad / Couldn’t believe / They made me so mad / I just had to leave.” If that doesn’t give you the main points of the eternal generational battle, then what more do you need?  Or how about “Lying in bed / Talking to you / The things that you said / Well, none of its true.” There we have the skewering of the pillow talk heart-to-heart where our hero must beg to differ. Or what about the middle verse: “Went to the Man / Took my decree / Said ‘please understand / I’ve got be me, sir.’” Might as well be Mick’n’Keith’n’Brian facing the drug bust blues.

Ah, those were the days. Anton Newcombe—born in 1967—somehow remembers, even if you don’t.