THE CDS: Syd Barrett

I’ve only got one Syd Barrett solo CD: The Madcap Laughs (1970).  The other one is called Barrett.  Both albums were released in 1970, though Madcap sessions began shortly after Barrett ceased to record with Pink Floyd, in 1968.  Both albums were released together, by the time I was aware of them in the wake of the huge success of Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and the sudden interest in all things Floyd, as a double album set.  I was about equally familiar with both since I had them on a cassette together and probably still do somewhere, but I always preferred Madcap because it's more dicey.

Syd, as you all no doubt know, was the inspired composer for the early Pink Floyd (“Arnold Layne”;“See Emily Play”; “Bike”; “The Gnome”; “Flaming”; “Jugband Blues”), as well as a legendary performer known for his idiosyncratic approach to all he did, particularly his guitar-playing.  His contribution to Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), the band’s debut, assures him a place in the front ranks of the annals of psychedelic pop.  But psychedelia was a short-lived phase, even if, to my mind, a delightful one, and when it came time for the Floyd to record their second album, only slightly less psychedelic, Syd was more or less undependable.  Instability having to do with (take your pick): those genetic problems we blame everything on these days; or the hallucinogens he was so fond of and the psychosis the same have a tendency to bring on in impressionable types; or the nature of genius (or pressures of fame) as being a burdensome gift that can cause massive hemorrhages of other aspects of the psyche (a familiar, heroizing tale whereby madness is the sign of true genius, etc.).

How out there did Syd get anyway?  I have no way of knowing, but something along the lines of Withnail and I seems suggested by the stories told; judging by this record, he was in some region where the usual conventions of professionalism were no longer a functioning concern.  But does that make the album amateurish?  Not quite.  It’s a bit like therapy, it’s a bit like a vanity project, but it’s also the kind of thing that cements the notion of Syd as utterly unique in all his plaintive oddity.  There are songs on here that I wouldn’t want any other way: “Terrapin,” “Octopus,” “Dark Globe,” “Here I Go,” “Late Night,” and the lovely melancholic setting to music of James Joyce’s poem “Golden Hair.”  But there are other places where better stuff wouldn’t hurt.  According to what I’ve read, the sessions were a chore for those working with Syd due to his way of going about it, and when his former band mates Gilmour and Waters stepped in to help they did so in a bit of a rush, being busy guys with a band and all.  Anyway, Syd is Syd and no one else is or was.  He died in 2006.

 

Please, please, please lift a hand
I'm only a person

with Eskimo chain
I tattooed my brain all the way...
Won't you miss me?
Wouldn't you miss me at all?

--Syd Barrett, “Dark Globe”

THE CDS: The Band

The Band -- Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson -- were a major musical entity of the ‘60s and early ‘70s that it took me awhile to get around to really listening to. I knew them as the guys who did the original version of 'The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down' which sometimes got airplay, but more often Joan Baez’s cover of it was heard. The first song of theirs I remember on Top 40 was 'Life is a Carnival,' and for awhile, when I was about 12, I contemplated getting the album (Cahoots, 1971, their fourth) because they covered a Dylan song, 'When I Paint My Masterpiece.' In fact, the main claim to fame of The Band was as the guys who backed Dylan on his legendary 'Dylan goes electric' tour. But them days was long gone. Until...

1974, and Dylan was on the road again, with The Band. This still didn’t make me a fan of theirs; I begrudged them their space on Before the Flood, the live album from the tour. Their music struck me at the time as a throwback to rockabilly, a version of Americana I had no real interest -- Brit Invasion brat that I was -- in embracing. My Dylan was the hipster Dylan of the ‘65-‘66 period, not the old folky. And whatever that legendary early tour (in ‘66) with Dylan sounded like (still hadn’t heard the bootlegs at this point), the revamped Dylan/The Band alliance gave us a Dylan ready to do some hog-calling, caterwauling all over the place. It took some getting used to.

Then came that phase, as high school began to come to an end, and as the forces of the ‘70s -- funk and disco, namely -- began to suck my will to live, and glam and prog were mostly kaput, when the only thing to do was return to the ‘60s. So I did, even reading a friend’s old copies of Rolling Stone from those fabled days. And there was Ralph Gleason touting the wonders of those first two albums by The Band, Music from Big Pink (1968) and The Band (1969), which I dutifully acquired and gradually began to enjoy. Already, in 1975, the long bootlegged collaborations of Dylan and The Band, set in the house known as Big Pink, had been partially released, cleaned-up and almost commercial quality, as The Basement Tapes. The capper to this incremental interest was Martin Scorsese’s rousing film of The Band’s farewell concert, The Last Waltz, on Thanksgiving, 1977, released to theaters in 1978.

Seeing The Band play live on the big screen confirmed a few things: they weren’t glamour boys, to be sure, but they were extremely able musicians whose interplay was simply great fun as music. This important element of their music had been somewhat lost, I felt, in their studio recordings. The sound of those first two albums already sounded dated and inadequate by the late ‘70s (after all those pristine prog recordings, and in comparison to the likes of Steely Dan where mulit-tracking of perfect studio performances was the ne plus ultra), but it was also the fact that The Band were just better when playing live. This is what gave so much charm to The Basement Tapes, the loose, ‘sit-in and see what happens’ feel to it all. The Band are better the more ramschackle it is.

Of course, in The Last Waltz, they’re all on their best behavior and there are many definitive deliveries on view: 'Stage Fright,' 'The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down,' 'Up on Cripple Creek,' 'It Makes No Difference.' But I still don’t have that on CD. What I do have instead is the double CD release of what had been a double album in ‘72: Rock of Ages. The CD has extra tracks, including four songs with Dylan who showed up to cap the encore of the second night’s show, New Year's Eve, as 1971 became 1972, at Madison Square Garden.

Rock of Ages may be the best album by The Band; they were at their peak during that two night stand, and you can find there all the manifest qualities that made the sound of The Band unmistakable: Levon’s throaty delivery, always so full of vitality, and his crisp, precise drumming; Danko’s tremulous warble, so vulnerable and comical, and his floppy bass lines; Robbie’s needle-like lead guitar punctuations; Garth’s roomy, cathedral-like organ tones; Manuel’s piercing falsetto on 'I Shall Be Released' and his barroom-swagger baritone on 'The Shape I’m In' with his honkytonkin’ electric piano.

Having achieved an Americana -- interesting, considering that all but Helm are from Canada -- that is unique, their music seems more and more to exist in a timeless realm of its own. Sure, it’s the great era of the ‘60s/’70s when rock’n’roll still existed and when it was about musicians making music together more than anything else, but the themes and sounds of their best songs inhabit a world that was already old by then, what the music critic Greil Marcus calls 'Old Weird America,' that time when there was a real culture of the land, when town life wasn’t so homogenized, where idiosyncracies of place abounded. A song like 'The Weight,' maybe their best-known song, captures it all: the play-it-close-to-the-chest utterances of folk wisdom, with about equal measures of wit and dread.

Hats off to The Band!

The CDs: Badfinger

Take a look at these guys: the carefully coiffed hair of the post-Beatles pop-rock band. Badfinger were under the wing of the former mop tops from the get-go. Their first hit was a McCartney composition: ‘Come and Get It.’ And they were signed to Apple Records. On the only album of theirs I own, 1972's Straight Up, George Harrison produces 4 of the 12 tracks and adds his trademark All Things Must Pass era slide to the hit single ‘Day After Day.’ Harrison was supposed to do the whole thing but had to split to help save Bangla Desh, so in the end early ‘70s hit-meister Todd Rundgren took the helm. On the re-mastered CD, six of the tracks are also presented in versions produced by The Beatles’ sound engineer Geoff Emerick.

So, yeah, the sound of Badfinger on Staight Up is as close to The Beatles as you can get at the time. At times, particularly with some of the vocals sporting the husky tone of McCartney’s singing in the later Beatles’ releases, and with the harmonies modelled on the Fab Four, you can almost believe you’re hearing demos of unreleased Beatles material.

Why demos? Because Badfinger never manages the full panoply of The Beatles sound; if you compare this record to Abbey Road, Straight Up is a bit thin. There’s none of the heaviness that The Beatles, largely due to Lennon, mustered for every album. The musical ideas here are serviceable, and what they did rather well, in 1972, is sound just reminiscent enough to give an extra poignancy to radio songs like ‘Baby Blue’ and ‘Day After Day,’ 45s that were part of my transition to early ‘teens. The songs have a certain melancholy grandeur I always liked, and still do: ‘looking out of my lonely room / day after day.’ It’s in the ringing sound of the voices and bright guitars chiming so well together.

Hearing the hits in situ with the other tracks, when I first got this CD a few years back (in the beginning of my ‘relive the ‘70s period'), was a bit revelatory. The whole record is satisfyingly listenable, even if --- to sustain my listening -- I have to accept the CD as an album of the period, in a way I don’t for those albums of earlier eras that manage to convince of their intrinsic worth decade after decade. A song like ‘Name of the Game’ is an exceptionable track, standing out because of its anthemic tone. But too much of the stuff tends to blend into a vaguely Beatlesque sound that, one feels, the band simply congratulated themselves on attaining.

After all, this was the early period after The Beatles went their separate ways, and many were still pining for some type of musical reunion. Badfinger, of course, didn’t have the skills to be heir apparents, but they did have enough of the sound to make them, briefly, ‘the poor man’s version.’ At some of the stronger moments on this record, one might believe they could emerge from that founding shadow, but if they dropped the Beatleisms, what would they be? The Joey Molland tunes, as opposed to those by Beatlesque Pete Ham, suggest a kind of lighter Bad Company. And who needs that?

In any case, there they remain: remembrancers of that time when everyone wanted to be The Beatles, except The Beatles themselves.

THE CDS: BabyShambles

In the best tradition of Nero -- "he fiddled while Rome burned" -- I'm going to talk about music while debate about the debate rages, while the presidential candidates compare bracelets, while the Dow Jones drops and rallies and drops and whatever, while the bailout efforts continue and my own bank gets the kiss of life from a bigger bank. I mean, ever since the days when The Stones asked "what can a poor boy do, 'cept sing for a rock'n'roll band?" it's been axiomatic with me that rock is the medium, if not "of the people," then of the people who can remain cooly detached from whatever shit-storm is currently appalling the pundits.

And since I haven't written about rock in awhile, I'll go back to my alphabetical CD list and see what's up next...

BabyShambles

Not unfitting. Peter Doherty, if anyone is, is currently rock's resident "bad boy" and even now is tabloid fodder: "a coked-up pansy who spends his nights in flights of fancy" (as "La Belle et la Bête" has it). I know of his existence, apart from his crack-smoking with super model Kate Moss, because my daughter became a big fan of The Libertines back in her art school days, and passed along to me the two gritty albums that band, led by Doherty and his bandmate Carl Barât, released in 2002 and 2004. Doherty -- doing that old "too wasted to make the gig" schtick -- was soon on the outs with his bandmates, or incarcerated, or in rehab, or something -- and so that band dispersed. Doherty went solo with the 2005 album Down in Albion which is the only disc of BabyShambles I possess, though my daughter was kind enough to lay some Doherty demos on me which were released in the chaotic interim between Libertines' end and BabyShambles' beginning (the latter was supposed to be a "side project" that became the main project once Doherty was no longer a Libertine . . . band member, he may very well still be a libertine).

In fact, back in 2004-2005 Doherty's "other project" was mainly unreleased demo stuff, much of it on the internet. I'm not sure how all this stands right now. The Libertines never had much U.S. presence anyway, and BabyShambles seems even more a U.K.-only phenomenon. A year ago, BabyShambles released their second album, Shotter's Nation (2007), but I still haven't tracked it down. So, what I've got to say pertains mainly to Down in Albion.

I will say this: Doherty, to me, was the more interesting of the two Libertines singer/composers, but, like other great song-writing duos that might spring to mind, I think he's better working in that duo format. But obviously, it's up to an individual artist to decide if he really is a collaborator or not. Because Barât/Doherty didn't last that long, this album didn't give me quite the sense of a falling-off as when Strummer/Jones went their separate ways (Jones, by the way, produced both Libertines albums as well as BabyShambles' debut -- the irony there is that I would liken Doherty to Strummer and Barât to Jones), and, if anything, Doherty solo is more "Clash-like" than even The Libertines were, which was quite a bit. But it's also the fact that Barât seemed more the pop stylist and Doherty more the ... romantic spirit? In any case, The Libertines albums always featured a few songs that stood out more than the rest -- and those tended to be heavy on the Doherty. On BabyShambles, I guess it's the Libertines-like numbers that still stand-out from the rest, for me.

My favorite track is "Albion" though I still may prefer the solo acoustic demo to the BabyShambles version. In either case, it's a good example of what Doherty does well: it's so dissolute, but as a show of strength. I mean, if you're pretty much wasted all the time, you're pretty vulnerable, but on the other hand, you're also not really accountable. So the song makes you feel that hopping a tram to "anywhere in Albion" is a suitable means of escape, and, if you're in love, or have enough stuff with you, well, maybe it is. See, I did say this was romantic. The other track, kinda the flip side of the lyrical pining on "Albion" is "Fuck Forever" -- because if you're wasted all the time you might also be horny all the time and hopping a bird might just be a suitable means of escape. And it's easy enough to hear, in the "I'll fuck forever, if you don't mind" chorus, "I'm fucked forever" -- which seems to be the modus vivendi of our man Doherty.

Anyway, musically Doherty is able to channel lots of good, hard Brit pop into his songs: early Kinks have a way of coming to mind, as do The Faces, as do almost-falling-apart bands like The Stooges and The New York Dolls, as do catchy punk acts like The Pogues and The Clash. So, if you've been missing that kind of thing (and God knows we could always use more of it), then Doherty's shambles is as likely a place to find it as anywhere, baby. Further note: one reason my daughter looked to The Libertines as the saviors of rock was because of the prevalence of bands like The Strokes at the time. In other words, where that stuff seemed, if catchy, rather pallid and erstaz, The Libertines had more bite, more balls and ... more drugs? In any case, I'm still intrigued by Doherty and BabyShambles' 2007 single "Delivery" keeps his cred.

How can you choose between death and glory?
Happy endings, no, they never bored me
Happy endings, they still don't bore me
But they, they have a way
They have a way to make you pay
And to make you toe the line
Sever the ties
Because I'm so clever
But clever ain't wise
--Peter Doherty, "Fuck Forever" (2005)

THE CDS: The Arcade Fire

When The Arcade Fire's debut album made numerous Best of 2004 lists, I got a bit interested. But why? Probably I liked the band's name and the album's title, Funeral. Maybe it just seemed to suit the mood of the moment. My daughter got the CD and, not all that impressed with it, passed it along to me. I have to say that it still hasn't fully sunk in; or, put another way, there are some stand-out songs I love, the rest just seem to blend together without a lot of distinction. On the plus side, that means that the album has an overall sound that it sustains well -- it's lush, layered, dark at times, but with uplift that has emotional urgency. I'd agree that "Rebellion (Lies)" is one of the best songs of 2004 -- and that's partly because of its insistent drum rhythm that is much less present on the rest of the album. The song grabs you and you stay hooked. And the somewhat strangled voice of the singer Win Butler is very effective on that track, so much so that I've gotten chills when hearing the song by chance somewhere -- the "it's that song" recognition which tells you a track has gotten through. I"m also very partial to the moody, swirling sound of "Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)" and I like the way the voice, in its plaintive articulations, is right out front. Of the other songs, the opening, "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" is convincing enough while I'm hearing it, but it doesn't live on in my mind to the same degree as those other two. In fact, when listening to the rest of the songs on the album, I seem to keep waiting for the two I like.

But whatever it is I get from those two songs was enough to make me pick up the band's second album Neon Bible (2007). I've had it a few months now and it's much the same story: a few tracks always rivet my attention while others just sail on past. When I make the effort to listen carefully I find much I like on this record. The band has a definite sound and presence that I associate with the old prog-rock era, tempered by an ear for '80s hooks. In other words, it's a mix that I should respond to! The unusual instrumentation (including string and orchestral arrangements, a choir, a pipe organ, a harp), the denseness of the sound, the literate lyrics (it's always fun to hear Québécois inserted in a song: "Run from the memory / Je nage, mais les sons me suivent"), and the sense of impending doom. What's not to like? I have the sense that if I were 13-17 years old, this album might well blow my mind. Which is to say (not that I'm old and jaded, mind you) that the appeal of earnest, urgent rock music is always aimed at a younger demographic, primarily.

The songs on Neon Bible that I really like to hear are (again the opener) "Black Mirror," "Windowsill," and "My Body is a Cage." But in listening just now before writing this, I found that "Keep the Car Running" and "Intervention" (with its "working for the church while your family dies" hook) gave me some of the same sense of emotional crux that I'm starting to recognize as an Arcade Fire trait: it's not exactly uplift as one expects from a typical hook, but rather a kind of spike in anxiety. Odd. The main body of the album: "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations," "Ocean of Noise," and "The Well and the Lighthouse" all had interesting changes and "(Antichrist Television Blues)" is a tour de force treatment of some kind of psychic breakdown involving little girls as televangelists. In general, I think it's a better, more mature album than the debut.

The Arcade Fire interests me, but I don't know that I could ever really be "a fan" of its particular overwrought sound and its somewhat heavy-handed self-importance. All the same, I think they've established themselves as songwriters and musicians consistently thoughtful, heartfelt and imaginative to merit attention from me (minimal as that might be) but, more importantly, from the younger generation. I think of them as boding well for the musical generation born in late '70s, early '80s -- though perhaps their appeal to critics and to professorial types like me doesn't necessarily translate into being the cutting edge of rock at present (whatever that might be).

My body is a cage
We take what we're given
Just because you've forgotten
that don't mean you're forgiven
--The Arcade Fire, "My Body is a Cage" (2007)

THE CDS: LAURIE ANDERSON

I’ve been reading a lot about the art world in the early ‘80s recently, so it’s fitting that Laurie Anderson, performance artist and sometime recording artist whose spoken word song “O Superman” was an improbable #1 hit in the U.K. in 1981, should come up now. In the summer of ‘82, Big Science seemed to illuminate the possibility of a real rapport between art and popular music, or, put another way, Anderson’s work, on vinyl, became a kind of symptom of that confluence: it seemed to both build on and comment on the sense of an “avant-garde” of rock music, a trajectory that runs from Andy Warhol’s collaboration with the Velvet Underground to the deliberate fetishizing (I guess the art critics would call it a simulation) of the New York Dolls’ glam to the punk sloppiness of The Ramones and the oracular guitar of Tom Verlaine and the gutter-Rimbaud posturings of Patti Smith to RISD dropouts Talking Heads and their characteristic danceable minimalism, produced by ambient music savant and studio wizard Brian Eno. In the art scene of the time, there were occasionally events where punk or new wave found its way into gallery spaces, and, with this record by Anderson, avant-garde performance found its way onto turntables generally devoted to rock rather than the likes of Philip Glass or John Cage. It was a crossover disc, in other words.

For me the title track has always been the standout. I have fond memories of one night when the night shift at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, myself included, were sitting around drinking and whatever, and my friend Paul Herman set up speakers (they must’ve been on hand from some lecture earlier in the evening) on the huge Frank Furness-designed staircase and blasted “Big Science.” It sounded incredibly eerie in that big echoey museum space. Anderson’s spoken voice modulates so minimally but effectively between lines of a kind of “readymade” or “found” conversational mode to lines that are clichés but seem cryptic mantras, to lines that carry implications of the kind of art criticism as anthropology that was in the air at the time and in the slogans Barbara Kruger affixed to photos or that Jenny Holzer put on T-shirts or in Times Square. Add to that the strand wolf howling and a drum track that would be at home on Peter Gabriel’s Security (which arrived in the fall) and you’ve got a hypnotic, timely tour de force that never stands still long enough to let you decide its scene or setting or occasion.

Golden cities, golden towns

And long cars in long lines

And great big signs

And they all say

Alleluia

Yo-de-lay-hee-hoo

Every man for himself

Since I was also a participant in the Philly poetry scene at the time, I was also mightily impressed by how Anderson was able to create a very simple sonic backdrop in “O Superman” (a looped voice hitting the same note over and over together with lots of musical or rhythmic effects, none of which could be called the basis for a tune) while on top of this is a voice that seems childlike, and for that very reason slightly mad, or a more robotic, “treated” voice that sounds sinister and disconcerting.

And the voice said:
Well you don’t know me
But I know you
And I’ve got a message

To give to you:

Here come the planes.

The album mainly stands on these two tracks, but there are moments in other tracks that still leap out at me, sometimes more effective for their non sequitur status or as lines that seem to drop into place with a kind of forceful inevitability, such as the “all in favor say aye” in “Big Science” or “So pay me what you owe me” in “Example #22.” The opening track, “From the Air” features a kind of gleeful paranoia about being trapped on a plane that certainly hasn’t lost any of its resonance in our even more paranoid-about-planes era. All in all, the album could be considered “a novelty,” but because it unites things I cared so much about in 1982 -- spoken word performance, “avant-garde rock,” and ideas about art -- with trenchant glimpses of the “passionate aloofness” of so much of the art of the ‘80s, I give it a more central place in the decentered world of the commodity-art object that we were all so ineluctably stumbling through.

This is the time
And this is the record

Of the time
–Laurie Anderson, “From the Air” (1982)

THE CDS: The Allman Brothers Band

The town in Delaware I come from is just north of the Mason-Dixon line, but the bulk of the state is below it. And I associate the white-boys blues of this Southern clan with what is not so affectionately known, by us Nawthunuhs, as "slower Delaware," which is where my dad's folks were from. In other words, much as I might like to deny it, I have to admit there's some of this music in my blood. I don't mean I'd like to deny the Allmans per se, I just mean that when I do find myself caught up in their music, I'm aware that it's due to what Hunter S. Thompson would call "an atavistic fondness" for the blues as they emerged from the racial crucible of the Deep South. So one day in Cutler's in New Haven I saw a used copy of The Allman Brothers Band Greatest Hits and picked it up, the only CD I have by them.

What resonates with me from those days when Duane Allman, one of the best, walked the earth is not only the stirrings of '70s Classic Rock, which is what this music lives on as, but something more rooted, some kind of fabled domain that might only be, yet again, the glimpse of the child I was when I could float away on "Melissa" or "Blue Sky" as pure distillations of the summer in suburbs that could still fitfully recall their past lives as farmland. I mention those two songs, from 1972's Eat a Peach, as probably the earliest Allman tracks that I can recall hearing, along with the zippy instrumental "Jessica" from Brothers and Sisters (1973)-- all songs of the mellow Allmans as fronted by Dickie Betts.

Granted, everyone knew "One Way Out" because it was a gem of the doin' what you shouldn't, hearty partying era and the radio loved it. Same with "Ain't Wastin' Time No More" and "Midnight Rider," but I can't say that either had made complete inroads into my psyche -- radio play just being too haphazard. It wasn't till I started hanging out with my older brother Tom in those end of high school days in the late '70s that the kind of immersion occurred that leaves me forever chilled by Betts' frenetic slide on "Ain't Wastin'" and convinced by the desperado pose of Gregg's vocals on "Rider."

It was also then that the darker, meaner Duane-driven Allmans crept into my cranium as evidenced on the two stand-out tracks from the band's eponymous debut album in 1969: "Dreams" and "Whipping Post." On these two tracks Duane's playing is revelatory, as in, revealing untold riches in the instrument. The songs were written by Gregg who bellows the words with his trademark wounded hoarse cry of longtime suffering that made all us suburban white boys believers, for a spell, in Suthrun blues and its mystique -- "Lord help me, baby, or this will surely be the end of me" ("Dreams"). "Post" partakes of that world of the blues in which love is the cruellest obsession imaginable -- misogynist, yes, but . . . though the woman is heartless ("now she's with one of my goodtime buddies, and they're drinkin' in some crosstown bar"), the singer knows it's his own weakness that's to blame. Which "weakness" becomes -- in the apotheosis that Duane's guitar creates in the final climax -- almost Christ-like in the sense that being "tied to the whipping post" is being nailed to the cross of what Joyce calls one's own "cruelfiction," crucified, as it were, by a desire, a passion that just won't stop.

Then there's "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" which is so stately and elegant, with a cool that becomes hot in the solo, that at times it could almost be Santana, which is to say that guitar gods were the main game c. 1970. To be young then was, for my money, to have a sense of music as the province of virtuoso musicianship -- as it was for my mother when she hearkens back to the days when Benny Goodman was alive and playing. Here's to Duane's fabled fingers, to Dickie's dexterous digits!

I drown myself in sorrow
When I look at what you've done
But nothing seems to change
The bad times stay the same
And I can't go on
--Gregg Allman, "Whipping Post" (1969)

THE CDS: RYAN ADAMS

I don’t really know much about Ryan Adams or his music -- I picked up this, his most recent I believe, used at Cutler’s one day because his name came up in an email from my old friend Tim Gilfillan, who was a touchstone for lots of music I acquired in the ‘80s. Just one of those lucky confluences of a sudden curiosity and the means to satisfy it. Am I satisfied? Not certain.

Easy Tiger (2007) is a kind of “easy listening country” for the most part, with occasional jabs into something a little more rough (“Halloweenhead” -- one of my favorites here: “head full of tricks and treats / places where junkies meet / and it leads me through these streets at night / that’s alright, I just watch, I don’t go inside”). At times there’s a little bit of what I like so much about Paul Westerberg: good grasp of melody, but not too pop, not too hook-driven, and the kind of “I wear my bruised heart on my sleeve” lyrics of the troubadour in dour times, striving to keep his head above the sentimental schmaltz and the ersatz rock posturing that plague so many songwriters. Adams teeters on the verge of both, a little too much at times, at least on this record, which (I believe) arrives as a kind of “cleaned-up act” in the annals of Adams, so that we can almost believe this is country as any good ol’ bad boy might practice it (Willie Nelson comes to mind, in songs like “Tears of Gold” or “Pearls on a String” -- the latter very effective with the banjo, y’know). None of it’s bad, some of it’s a bit forgettable. In fact, my project of walking, verbally, through my CD collection was halted by the fact that this is the second entry, alphabetically, and I don’t even now have that firm a grasp on it.

Two early favorites, “The Sun Also Sets” and “These Girls” have been joined by “I Taught Myself How to Grow Old” as a triumvirate of songs with enough guts to get at a certain malaise that overtakes all those who age in the service of the muses: “there it is, we are only one push from the nest / there it is, we are only one moment from death”; “but when they smile how can anyone feel bad / I get tired and I wanna go to bed / these girls are better off in my head”; “I taught myself how to grow / ‘til I was crooked on the outside, insides caved.” This is all offered with bright arrangements -- maybe at times too bright -- and a voice that is much prettier than Westerberg’s, able to hit a higher register that Adams seems to like as a means of approaching a touch of soul. And I think it’s that “white soul” infusion into the country stylings that makes this one a little hard to read, aurally, for me. And it’s in those layered background voices at times too: like this is meant to be on some radio in some coffeehouse where people who weathered various storms of becoming now softly graze together in the gathering twilight and feel vindicated because these tunes recall, enough somehow, some earlier glory of country-pop like, who knows, Glen Campbell -- honestly, sometimes “Galveston” isn’t far from the mix here. And that is maybe both charming and disheartening -- which I think is what “These Girls” is saying anyway...

And I toy with you
And you toy with me
Can you stop this please?
–Ryan Adams, “These Girls”

THE CDS: 33.3

It was 2000. You could still smoke in bars in CT. I was at the drinking person's establishment of downtown New Haven, Rudy's, to hear 33.3. My introduction to their music had been a few years previous when they were one of the many local bands opening for Yo La Tengo's concert in the courtyard of Pierson College. I don't remember who else played that day, but a band with an electric guitar (Brian Alfred), a drum kit (Steven Walls), a double bass (William Noland) and a cello (Dominique Davison) was the sort of the thing that would get my attention. It was a lovely afternoon that first time I heard them and the memory of it was enough to get me to Rudy's, for the first time ever. Subsequently Rudy's would become the site of post-Pynchon seminar drinks on three occasions, and in a sense 33.3 inaugurated that too. Ah, local bands. There are precious few in my CD collection, so it pleases me to be able to start this account of the latter with a few words about this music.

I have two discs by the band: 33.3 and 33.3 Plays Music. The second, for which the Rudy's show was a CD release party, includes a trumpet/trombone player (Joseph Grimm) as well. All the better: percussion, strings, brass, each with its distinct voice offered so melodic and pristine. On CD the tracks blend with one another so well it's hard to keep them straight; it's perfect coffee-shop background music: unobtrusive but inflected with the kind of rhythms and graceful transitions that stimulate forms of internal attention, like reading, writing, spacing out.

It's not spacey music though — I suppose if I had to characterize it I'd call it "architectural garden music." It makes me think of comfortable urban spaces -- plazas maybe, with landscaping and interesting styling in the stone and wood surfaces. It could also be perfect soundtrack music for that contemplative train ride the heroine of your alternative film takes somewhere in the third act. The song on right now, "The Odds," communicates, when the horn starts that clipped staccato sound at the end, the arrival after a long journey. And then it segues into one of my favorites, "An Open Letter to Buckminster Fuller," where the guitar and the cello complement each other so well, creating this lovely floating texture that then gets stirred a bit by the trombone . . . a feeling as of an incipient encounter just around the corner because those guitar lines are so perky, so clearly up for something, but still mellow, y'know, not at all desperate or distracted. At times I pick up traces of a sound I associate with Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass -- as on the fifth track, "Oval Cast as a Circle," where the tempo is just a little bit cha-cha and the horns, while never "hot," have some spice.

Probably my favorite is the concluding track: "An Evening in Park Slope." It's a slow crawl at first, tentative and still getting the lay of the land, but when the strings come in we feel an elegiac tension. It could say a lot about the light on brownstones perhaps, but it also says something about that kind of trip around the block in which the flow of a prolonged thought ebbs away like ripples in a pond, till you barely hear the instruments in their long fade.

In person, 33.3 was more dynamic. There was a lot more tension in the music, it seemed to grope more and to crescendo (drums in Rudy's make a big noise), not with abandon, but with the energy of a packed room the size of a double garage. I don't know if the band is still together, but I imagine that wherever I go and whatever I do, this music will stand for turn of the century New Haven on a November night. I'll drink to that.