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Thursday, April 03, 2008
QIDRECHINNA (I AM DESTINED TO LOVE)
Abdel Gadir Salim
Blues in Khartoum
Institute Du Monde Afrique : 1999
[Buy It]
YA WANNA BUY A BUNNY?
Spike Jones and His City Slickers
1949
Available on : Greatest Hits!!!
RCA : 1999
[Buy It]
PINBALL WIZARD
Elton John
Tommy: The Soundtrack
Universal : 1975
[Buy It]
VALENTINE AND GARUDA
Frank Black and the Catholics
Black Letter Days
Spin Art : 2002
[Buy It]
YOU'RE THE REASON OUR KIDS ARE UGLY
Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn
1978
Available on : The Definitive Selection
MCA Nashville : 2005
[Buy It]
SEE THE BIG MAN CRY
Charlie Louvin
1965
Available on : Greatest Hits
Import : 2004
[Buy It]
When I was seven, I went through my parents' records and played all of them. It was a pretty standard mid-seventies set: Beatles, Beach Boys, Supremes, James Taylor, Carole King, West Side Story, maybe one or two Jimi Hendrix records. I remember sitting cross-legged in the living room and listening to Smokey Robinson.
I am using this memory as a shield against sentimentality.
Today is my older son's seventh birthday. Last week, my younger son turned four. My wife and I will throw them parties, take pictures, wish they had fewer toys: the usual. It's strange to have kids, especially kids who are becoming people, and it is also the most natural thing in the world.
I am using this truism as a shield against sentimentality.
There are few memories that still survive from 1973, when I turned four; even 1976, when I turned seven, is mostly a blur of Jimmy Carter's gigantic teeth and TV commercials celebrating the bicentennial, principally through low rates on car loans. Still, I remember clearly the first time I heard Jim Croce's "One Less Set of Footsteps," when I was the age of my younger son, and how frightened I was. I also remember hearing the Ohio Players' "Love Rollercoaster" in 1975, when it was all over the radio, and trying to get the blinds on one of the front windows to move in sync with the guitar part. So I don't want to underestimate the degree to which my sons, even if they're not identifying themselves by the music they like, are identifying music that they like. My younger son seems, so far, to favor soundtrack music and classical music, neither of which made a tremendous impression on my older son when he was that age. When we watch movies, my younger son will start humming the score and say, "I like this music." Later on, he will hum it again. My older son prefers songs with simple melodies and complicated lyrics. He repeats the lyrics to himself later. The earliest examples of this, which date from when he was two or even younger, are Ian Dury's "Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll," Captain Beefheart's "Tropical Hot Dog Night," Frank Black's "Valentine and Garuda," and the Rolling Stones "Let It Bleed." I'd be playing them at home or in the car and he'd perk up, and ask me what they were, and smile, and laugh, and ask for them again. There are enough exceptions, of course, that these cease to be rules. The younger one got completely hooked on the Hives' "Tick Tick Boom." The older one loves Buddy Holly. The younger one has, for the last twenty nights in a row, forced me to put him to bed with a copy of "Born in the U.S.A." playing in an old cassette machine that is very similar to the one I had in 1976. The older one, at three, choreographed a modern dance set to Elton John's version of "Pinball Wizard." He later taught it to the younger one, who added a few flourishes of his own. Both of them worship Michael Jackson and AC/DC and Spike Jones, which only means that they are part of the human race. And both of them are obsessed to the point of joy with "Qidrechinna," a song by the Sudanese pop singer Abdel Gadir Salim.
Soon they will get older, will cease to experience that joy, or else they will conceal that joy from me and my wife. That day's not too far off. Until then, they're little, and their appetite for the world is large, and so I'm going to wish them a happy birthday by posting a quartet of songs that they love, and then a pair of songs that they don't know. Both are country songs, because it's a genre they don't particularly like, and I am a sadist. I am using sadism as a shield against sentimentality. One of them is Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty's "You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly," which distills the chaos of domestic bliss into low comedy. Besides that, all of our kids took after your part of our family anyway.
Oh they did, huh? What about the one's that's bald?
Well, I guess you might say they took after me. I am using low comedy as a shield against sentimentality.
The other is Charlie Louvin's "See the Big Man Cry," in which a man spies on his estranged wife and the child who does not even know him. Many married men have imagined circumstances that would separate them from their wives--falling in love with others, losing the war of attrition against boredom and self-hatred. But being separated from children is an atrocity, and Louvin mines it for maximum horror: I followed them to the pet shop window the little boy stopped to see
He looked up at her said if I had a daddy he'd buy that puppy for me
See the big man cry mama that's what I heard him say
See the big man cry mama he looks like his heart will break I am using horror as a shield against sentimentality.
I am not, as you will notice, posting Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle," though I will admit that Verities and Balderdash, the album on which the song originally appeared, was one of the records in my parents' collection, and that I probably took it out and played it once or twice. I am not posting it because, well, I am still holding the shield against sentimentality, though it's quaking a little bit when I think of my sons, littler than I ever remember being, dancing around the living room to "Pinball Wizard."Labels: ben, country, rock
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, February 28, 2008
YOU WON'T SEE ME
The Beatles
Rubber Soul
Capitol : 1965
[Buy It]
OFF THE HOOK
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones Now!
Decca : 1964
[Buy It]
TELL HIM I'M NOT HOME
Chuck Jackson
I Don't Want to Cry
Wand : 1965
Available on The Very Best of Chuck Jackson 1961-1967
Varese : 1997
[Buy It]
BIGGEST FOOL IN TOWN
Gorgeous George
Stax : 1965
Available on: The Complete Stax/Volt Singles: 1959-1968
Atlantic : 1991
[Buy It]
YOUR PHONE'S OFF THE HOOK, BUT YOU'RE NOT
X
Los Angeles
Slash : 1980
[Buy It]
HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE
The Nerves
Nerves EP
Bomp: 1976
Available on: D.i.Y. Come Out & Play : American Power Pop 1975-1978
Rhino : 1993
[Buy It]
ANSWERING MACHINE
The Replacements
Let It Be
Twin-Tone : 1984
[Buy It]
I hate the telephone. It's fine for taking care of business or making contact in a more personal mode than e-mail. I doubt that when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone he had any idea the type of misery it could create in personal matters. The telephone is an idiotic and torturous enemy to the lonely or obsessive. These songs all predate cell phones, e-mail and text messaging, which further complicate matters. I don't even have a land line anymore - just a cell phone. I'm always there, whether I want to be or not. Presence can be painful when you want to be absent, and even worse is absence when you want to be present.
Most of these songs deal with that dynamic in on one form or another. Paul McCartney wrote "You Won't See Me" after having his phone calls ignored by girlfriend Jane Asher. Her line is always "engaged" - the English really have a way with words. Mick Jagger, too, gets only "an engaged tone." He figures it's off the hook or maybe she's ill or sleeping, until he's heading off into paranoia. Why won't she talk to him? He's Mick Jagger for Chrissake! Even The Beatles and Stones are getting dissed.
Chuck Jackson's really got it bad. Every time he calls his girlfriend, someone else answers and he hears her in the background saying "Tell him I'm not home." The telephone has turned Gorgeous George into the biggest fool in town, and he's had enough. And from the sound of things, George doesn't seem like someone you'd wanna fuck with.
"You're Phone's Off The Hook, But You're Not" is a great title and a great line that I once used on a girlfriend when, after a terrible conversation in my apartment, she said the first part ('cause it was) and without missing a beat, I responded "But you're not!" "What did you say?" "Oh, nothing." Jack Lee from the Nerves is "in the phone booth - it's the one across the hall," but guess what? She won't answer and he's hanging on the telephone. He's gonna let it ring off the wall. He can't control himself. It's a common reaction to being ignored.
Finally, Paul Westerberg takes us to the eighties version of no reply: the answering machine. Remember those? No call waiting. No voicemail. A machine and a tape. "How do say goodnight to an answering machine" he asks.
How do you say I love you to an answering Machine?
-by Ted BarronLabels: indie, power-pop, rock, soul, ted barron
posted by James
LINK |
Thursday, January 10, 2008
CRYING FOR ATTENTION
Graham Parker
Another Grey Area
Arista : 1982
[Buy It]
IGNORE ME
The Gas
Single
Polydor : 1980
[Out Of Print]
LOVE AIN'T NO TOY
Yvonne Fair
The Bitch Is Black
Motown : 1975
[Out Of Print]
WHAT AM I WORTH
Dave Alvin
King of California
Hightone : 1994
[Buy It]
Over the holidays I was watching a show on cable and noticed that a character had the same name as a woman I used to know, and not just the same name but the same exact name: first, middle, last. That got me thinking about the woman, and the talks we used to have, and specifically one of the last talks we had, in which she told me that I didn't pay her enough attention.
That fateful conversation is one of the only things about her that I remember clearly. We were sitting in her apartment, which was just off the campus of the college she attended. Some friends of mine had been in town that night, and we had all gone to dinner. The wine she drank at dinner, and the glass or two she tacked on back at the apartment, had made her expansive, and over the course of the evening she navigated through all the things she liked to discuss: clothes, sex, art, whether all duty was unconditional, Guns 'N' Roses, Aeschylus. She was at once profoundly brainy and prodigiously trivial, and if it wasn't a calculated philosophy, it should have been. I thought we were headed for the bed, but she pulled up short and told me that I had hurt her feelings during dinner. "You ignored me," she said. "I need you to pay attention to me more than you do."
I laughed it off. She was being ridiculous and I said so. I was paying attention to her at dinner and if she couldn't see that, it was her fault. She said it was okay and that she wasn't upset and I, a fool, believed her. A few weeks after that, we weren't dating anymore -- did I mention that we were dating? -- and then a few months after that, we weren't friends anymore.
Her memory, or at least my memory of her, is inseparable from the music I played when I spent time with her. "Crying for Attention" has, like many Graham Parker songs, made itself known by degrees. Back then, it was just another decent track on a solid but unspectacular record--not Squeezing Out Sparks, not even Stick to Me. But every time the knottiness of unrequited love has tightened around me, I have come back to this particular song, and especially to the deceptive calm in the vocals and the midtempo arrangement:What's the matter?
Well there is no need to flatter
How do I get you to take notice?
Do I have to break and shatter?
When I feel that I am driven
Over the edge where it's all hidden
I hang my head and hit a table or a chair
I know my place--I just can't stay there
I'm not crying for attention baby
I'm not crying for attention baby
I'm not crying for attention
I'm screaming to be heard
Everybody's listening but you
It's your loving example I need to receive
I need more than a handful -- give it to me
Hey sometimes everybody has to be the center of attraction
But I never expect any satisfaction
And I'm not crying I'm not crying I'm not crying
Not crying for attention In my situation, it was a woman who wanted my attention, and who was brave enough to tell me so. In Parker's song, it's a man who wants the attention, and not just the sex he's getting (more than a handful). For me, the song turns on one line in particular: "I know my place--I just can't stay there." What's important is that the tendered offer isn't enough. Desire is by definition aspirational. If she had quoted that line to me, it might have done the trick. Instead, she was straightforward, and she suffered for it, and then I suffered.
What this brief autopsy excludes is an answer to the main question: Did I ignore her? Well, yes, probably. I had just come out of a relationship that meant more to me than she did, though she was more beautiful and more willing than the other woman. I was still a little ashamed that things with the woman I loved more hadn't worked out, and that hampered my ability to really try things with her. Strangely, I remember walking around with her feeling like I was the one being ignored, even though she was reaching for my hand. I felt like she was unable to sense something essential about me. I didn't know "Ignore Me," by the Gas, then, which is a shame, because it has an irresistible chorus that I could have shouted at her when we fought, which was often, as well as a perfectly inverted perspective that makes ignoring seem like an elevated form of paying attention. Instead, I told her the truth, which is that I didn't agree that there was a problem and that if there was I was sorry because I simply didn't think I could do any better.
Nobody likes to hear this. Yvonne Fair was a singer with James Brown who recorded the original version of what would one day be "I Got You (I Feel Good)," and in the seventies became a rising solo artist for a time. Her most important solo recording, "The Bitch Is Black," was a collaboration with Norman Whitfield and, from a distance of three decades, stands as one of the best funk diva albums of the time, far better than similar albums from Claudia Lennear or Marie "Queenie" Lyons. "Love Ain't No Toy" is one of the best of a set of consistently strong songs, and it plays like vintage Betty Davis, as reconceived by a woman who can actually sing:I don't know what your friends call you
When you're out in the street
Romeo or Casanova
To me you ain't nothing but a low-down cheat This is a song about cheating, not ignoring. Maybe Yvonne Fair thinks ignoring would have been better. I don't. I have said that the conversation about how I ignored her--the woman I was dating, not Yvonne Fair--was one of the last. That's somewhat misleading. It had happened before that, many times, and it happened even after we broke up: she would call me and say that she was thinking of me but that she couldn't understand exactly what went wrong. Had she been too needy? Had I been conflicted? I couldn't answer, not then. Even after a few years, after a few more tries with a few more women, I had no real idea. Eventually, though, it came to me. The problem wasn't that I was ignoring her. The problem was that I was capable of ignoring her. If she had been the right person -- or even one of the right people -- I would not have and could not have made her feel alienated. I could have made her feel angry or sad or given her a (metaphorical) whack across the face with a (metaphorical) rolled-up newspaper of recrimination. But ignoring someone and making them feel needy in the process -- as if the very attempt to connect is monstrous -- is the one emotional sin that is irreconcilable with love, not even big-L Love, but anything close. The way I feel, looking backwards, is that I may have been a jackass for making her feel needy, and also that I was blameless. There was nothing I could do because I was not correctly positioned.
There was no song that I knew that could explain that to me, not well. Then, years later, I bought Dave Alvin's King of California. Alvin, of course, was the songwriter behind the Blasters, who I never liked quite as much as I thought I should have. When he became a solo artist, his vocals waterlogged him further. But on King of California, which is filled with stripped-down, shuffling versions of old and new songs, he evolved from artlessness to a style that was wise, warm, and colloquial. Best of all, in two cases he set his nearly voice against beautiful female counterpoint. The duet with Syd Straw on George Jones's "What Am I Worth" was, and is, my favorite. Both singers articulate the desire to be valued by the other, with the result being perfect romantic equipoise. But it's not just desire -- it's ontological desperation:I don't know why you're making me cry
Honey, won't you give me a clue
What am I worth on God's great earth
If I don't mean nothing to you
I might get sent to be president
I'm sure I could do it for you
They would feature my face all over the place
For all the good thing I do
I might get my name in the hall of fame
Or even in the book of Who's Who
But what am I worth on God's great earth
If I don't mean nothin' to you
What am I worth here on earth
Darling, if I can't have you
I just can't find no peace of mind
With anything that I do That's how it should be -- how it has to be. Attention is the only currency in active relationships. It should be asked for, even demanded, without a second's uncertainty. If you don't feel good about asking for someone else's attention, then you're not standing in the right stream. People who say that they have lots of space between them must only mean that they have translated hands-on (or eyes-on) attention to a different kind of attendance. If there's no real presence, then there's real absence, which is why this woman and I broke up, and why I don't remember very much about her other than what I have related here, and why there is a greater chance of my seeing the TV show with the woman with the same name than there is of my talking to the real woman with the real name again.Labels: ben, rock, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
SENTIMENTAL FOOL
Roxy Music
Siren
Virgin:1975
[Buy It]
DREAMS NEVER END
New Order
Movement
Qwest:1981
[Buy It]
O.K., THIS IS THE POPE
Tones on Tail
Burning Skies 12"
Situation Two:1983
[Buy It]
MOTHER OF PEARL
Roxy Music
Concerto
Burning Airlines:2001
[Buy It]
If I had actually been deflowered by the saxophone player of Roxy Music when I was fourteen, how different would this story be? It was 1983 and, thanks to first-generation MTV and my sister's friend Ruthie (she would later reappear in our lives calling herself "Rutina," and even later still, the classic "Ruth"), who picked up a copy of "Avalon" for me in Harvard Square, I was listening to a lot of late, not-so-great Roxy Music on my crappy one-piece stereo console. Music was my life then, almost literally; I woke up to it before school, fell asleep by it at night, studied -- not so well -- with my favorite records on the turntable and lavished what little money I had to spend on imports and 12" singles in their thicker plastic sleeves, the extra layer of protection promising an experience that would cut right to the soul. I was certain that I had one, even if I didn't bother with the metaphysics -- where my soul resided, what substance was it made of, whether my soul was everlasting, etc. All I knew was that it throbbed sometimes, and that it had throbbed most often for a girl named Tori, who cut her hair in a bob, threw parties at her house and listened to "Wham!" with an irony that was beyond her years. (Some version of the Tori who I kissed in a bedroom that was already too small for her imagination is now married to Dennis Hopper and referred to as a "political activist" in Hollywood.) I knew from the beginning that she would break my heart - it happened with some squalid business under the banquet table at her junior prom - and afterwards I would console myself by listening to certain songs over and over again. One of the songs was "Sentimental Fool" by Roxy Music.Surely you cannot be leading me on?
Well if that's so, however can I love again?
How could I believe again?
Sentimental fool.
Knowing that your fate is cruel.
You ought to forget it. My best friend in high school was named Michael and we both had a secret that everyone knew but no one ever talked about. Michael's father had died suddenly in a car accident a few years before I met him, lending he and his brothers the aura that comes with having survived the unthinkable. It was something like grace, and something like a living death. I was being raised by two mothers in a fringe suburb across a highway overpass from the campus of the private boys' school where I went, lending me the aura, I understand now, of the probable faggot. I didn't make it easier by listening to bands like Roxy Music and wearing an earring in one ear, but I also didn't care what the bow-legged hockey players and their hangers-on thought of me. As long as they weren't snickering behind me as we filed into chapel and saying, just loud enough for me to hear, "Tori didn't even fuck him, fucking faggot."
Michael and I took the T into Boston every Saturday to go record shopping at the original Newbury Comics or play instruments in all of the music stores in the neighborhood. I am certain that we talked about music, dissecting the tracks of New Order's "Movement" for the moments that made them genius, or expressing hope that Tones on Tail would fulfill the promise of Bauhaus. But what I remember most about those weekends, now, is the silence. A silence over the record bins, a silence on the bus, a silence as we looked out the windows on the commuter train. When we got back to Michael's house we would repair to his bedroom and listen to the records, commenting every now and then on a lyric or some finer point of the production, and when the listening was done and there was nothing else to say we would fall silent again.
Was that silence filled with everything we knew about each other but never mentioned out loud? Everything that made us feel wary or somehow set apart from the others? (I have watched enough episodes of Freaks & Geeks to know that everyone stuck in high school feels that way.) Was the music we loved so much a part of who we were that we needed a break between each track of our conversation - a deeper groove for the needle to fall into before it rose to meet the next song, the next progression in our friendship?
When Michael's father had died the family sold their house - the biggest, brightest white mansion I had ever seen, with a circular drive and a tall wooden fence - and built a new, contemporary home on an adjacent lot. From the window of Michael's bedroom, where we listened to the records that we bought, you could see his family's former house in all its splendor. What was it like? I wondered while our records played, trying not to glance out the window too obviously. Was it hard to look outside your bedroom and see the life you'd lived before? The life that had been taken away for no reason? I don't know why I couldn't wait for the side of the record to end and ask Michael in those words. Maybe I was worried that it would disrupt the silent pact that we seemed to have made - or maybe I was just scared of what he would try and find out about my own unmentioned life when his turn came.
The first novel that I ever wrote, when I was nineteen, was set in Michael's house. Don't ask me what it's called now or what it was about, other than the silence and that view - I don't remember. It came within a hair's breadth of getting published when I was still an undergraduate. (The manuscript and letters from my agent at the time are stored away in my mother's attic.) Ever since then I have learned to make my peace with the unresolved ending.The rhythm of love
It must go on
Can't stop.
The beat of your heart
Is like a drum
Will it stop? Before I return to the backstage deflowering that didn't happen on May 27, 1983, a word of explanation. (And an offering to those readers of Moistworks who feel that there isn't enough music in some of the music writing found here.) I have been listening to a lot of Roxy Music lately on my iPod and the crappy stereo console I plug it into, although this time I am listening to the live quasi-bootleg "Concerto," most of which was recorded in Denver in 1979. This was after Bryan Ferry had won his power-struggle with Brian Eno and the wizard in a feather boa left the band, but it was before Roxy Music got lost in the studio and became a mechanism for burnishing Bryan Ferry's romantic image - they still sound like a band with a living pulse and not background music for retail. I got my copy of "Concerto" from a good friend who is particularly generous with his music files, and just to confirm that things do change for the better, this friend and I talk freely and often about politics, movies, books, birth, death, marriage, divorce, travel, food, work, family, the future and bands.
I saw Roxy Music play live for the first and only time - on the eve of the band's breakup - at the Walter Brown Arena in Boston. It was the first concert of many that I would go to while I was addling myself with music to survive high-school, and it was also the first of many that I would go to with my friend Michael. The Walter Brown Arena was more commonly filled with rabid B.U. hockey fans, and I found it exhilarating to see the place taken over by so many men - boys, really - wearing trench coats, open tuxedo shirts and eye-liner. Most of the girls, as I remember it, had made every effort to resemble the thin, spectral models from Roxy Music's album covers, although given that it was Boston and the social order among misfits was always a little confused, there were also girls with tall orange Mohawks, studded leather jackets and fists smeared angrily with crosses drawn in permanent black marker. It was hard not to envy them a rebellion that was so ecumenical in its rejection of the beauty standard.
When the lights came up and Roxy Music opened with "The Main Thing" from "Avalon" we left our seats and went down to the floor to get closer to the stage. I truly believed, in every filament of my fourteen-year-old nervous system, as we nudged our way through a polite New Romantic crowd to the front, that I was about to be transformed. A band that I had been listening to on my stereo for months was just a few yards away, playing songs I knew by heart - every one of them. The PA was louder than anything I'd ever heard, the lights onstage were blinding, the smoke machines were pumping out sweet-smelling mystery to set the mood, and Bryan Ferry, the weary romantic hero, was playing his role with the detachment of a serial seducer. The spell was nearly complete, and I nodded my head to keep the beat and let the experience wash over me. Hey, I kept on telling myself. That's Roxy Music. That's Roxy Fucking Music.
A few songs into the show, with my eyes pinned mostly to Bryan Ferry or to the college girl with the ripped T-shirt dancing like a diving bell nearby (I saw her everywhere that year - I still see her in my mind's eye, summoned by certain songs, and she looks like a version of Tori that I never knew), I noticed that Andy Mackay, the band's tall and fluid saxophone player, was staring at me. It seemed so unlikely and anomalous that at first I let it pass; but as the show went on and the hockey rink grew smaller, sweatier and more intimate, his staring grew more insistent, even playful at times, and I stared back without acknowledging the strangeness of it all, thinking, well, that I was at a concert for the first time and this must be the thing to do. I remember feeling embarrassed by the attention, a deeper than usual flush rising on my cheeks, and I looked around expecting Michael and all of the other people standing near us in the crowd to have noticed what was going on. But they were watching the show in varying states of boredom and ecstasy, and I found myself alone with Andy Mackay and his desire. It made me feel special, it made me feel weird, and when he continued staring at me through the set list, even finding me between notes when he played long lilting solos on the oboe, I turned away from him and watched the rest of the band instead. Every boy by the age of fourteen has encountered the look of implicit invitation in a grown man's eyes, and for some unfulfilled reason, on the night of May 27, 1983, I received an invitation from the saxophone player for Roxy Music.
That's it. I hope it's not a letdown. You can argue that what I just described was a dream or a projection, but I was there that night, and I know what passed between us. It was one more thing that I never talked about with my best friend Michael - I didn't mention how I felt the whole way back to his house, although I was troubled - one more experience that owes its birth, and its persistence over time, to music.
Later, as I grew up, I would see bands closer to their peak and end a thrilling night with exactly who I wanted to at a late-night party or in a sleeping bag in someone's basement, intoxicated by the warm body I was so into I had it memorized - scars, freckles, blisters, the ghost of a hickey on her neck from the last time we'd been together. I couldn't even remember the feeling of heartbreak. It was then that I understood why Andy Mackay had done nothing wrong - nothing wrong at all - by picking me out of the crowd and inviting me to let him fuck me when I was fourteen.
Does that make me a sentimental fool?
. . . . . . . . . .
Benjamin Anastas is the author of An Underachiever's Diary and The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's DisappearanceLabels: benjamin anastas, rock
posted by Alex
LINK |
Thursday, December 06, 2007
CAN U KEEP A SECRET
De La Soul
3 Feet High and Rising
Tommy Boy : 1989
[Buy It]
I HAVE A SECRET
Half Japanese
Sing No Evil
Drag City : 1984
[Buy It]
SECRET LOVE
Billy Stewart
1967
Available on : 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection
MCA : 2000
[Buy It]
YOUR SECRET'S SAFE WITH ME
Robert Cray Band
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
Mercury : 1988
[Buy It]
THE SECRET
Slapp Happy
1973
Acnalbasac Noom
Recommended : 1980
[Buy It]
MY DIRTY SECRET IS A DIVINE DILEMMA
Banner Barbados
2005
Demo
Years ago, I was dating a woman in another city west of here. One day, we woke up, got dressed, and went to get coffee. She had her head down in the coffee steam, more so than usual. Then she raised her gaze to meet mine. "I have to tell you something," she said.
I would like to freeze that moment. It was the dead of winter in the Midwest. Freezing the moment's easy. She was about to tell me a secret. I had a number of thoughts, all at once. First, I was excited. It seemed like a step forward for us. Then I was curious whether I could guess her secret in the few seconds before she revealed it to me. I think that I preferred that I be able to do so, both to soften the blow and to prevent our relationship from being exposed as the kind of relationship that needed a boost in intimacy. Then I foresuffered a feeling of anticlimax. She would tell me whatever it was and I would receive it and process it and then what? We'd finish our coffee? We'd go back home? I'd worry about what other secrets lay beneath the surface? A black curtain would fall down over the world?
She told me the secret. I won't say what it was. It belonged to the class of things that young people early in a relationship believe they should tell their partners. Maybe it was that she had slept with someone else. Maybe it was that her father was an alcoholic. Maybe it was that she had a strange habit of taking the hair that collected in the shower drain and putting it into her mouth. Maybe it was that she once masturbated on a train. Maybe it was that she stole money from a roommate at camp and blamed the theft on another girl. Like I said, I won't say. What I will say is my reaction to her secret exactly echoed the thoughts I had just before she revealed it. I was excited, then I was comforted that my internal guess had been roughly accurate, then I was disappointed. She had told me something about herself that wasn't exactly interesting, except in the sense that I hadn't known it a minute earlier. Now what?
This is not the only kind of secret, obviously. There are secrets you can tell about others without their consent. In the late eighties and early nineties, there was a boomlet of stories outing gay celebrities. I was in college then, and at least a few friends (whether straight, gay, or getting there) had strong opinions about the propriety of exposing someone else's innermost secrets. De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, which was released the same year that Michelangelo Signorile founded Out magazine, stages a trivial version of that same process:Paul has dandruff
Posdnuos has a lot of dandruff
Mase has big fat dandruff
Trugoy has dandruff
Everybody in the world, you have dandruff Homosexuality has a sizeable soial charge. Dandruff, less so. The most common secret in pop music, is the one that directly precedes a relationship: secret love. There's Ron Sexsmith's "Secret Heart," The Miracles' "I Love You Secretly," and Half Japanese's "I Have a Secret," in which Jad Fair's yowls out his heart's deepest desires:Someone sent you roses, Karen.
Yeah that's twice this week, isn't it, Karen?
You're a lucky girl, Karen.
To have someone who cares about you so much, Karen.
Karen has a secret admirer. And I have a secret.
Karen has a secret admirer. And I have a secret too.
And my secret is you. We can all agree that this is a noble and even majestic secret: just listen to Billy Stewart's "Secret Love," a remake of an earlier Doris Day hit, and just as exuberant and idiosyncratic as Stewart's cover of George and Ira Gershwin's "Summertime." The kind of secret under consideration here, the kind that can emerge with a frisson early in a relationship, is different. Think of something minor, shameful, purely personal. At the beginning of the piece, when I listed the possible secrets revealed by my girlfriend in another city, I included chewing on hair from the shower drain grate. Those are the kids of secrets I mean -- bad habits and fetishes, the revelation of which might temporarily make a new lover feel closer. Think of them as dandruff on the inside. What reason is there to share those things? None, I think. They should not be served up. No one wants to eat that dish.
Sometimes secrets are presented, and sometimes they are extracted. Here's a secret: the story I told at the beginning of the piece, about my girlfriend in a city west of here, isn't exactly true. Everything in the story--the way she lowered her face into the coffee steam, the way she raised her head to meet my gaze--happened, but something else happened before that. I pushed a half of a muffin across my plate, sighed heavily, and said, "Tell me a secret." I was pushed into this decision by sex and high spirits, and by the fear that followed immediately upon those high spirits. I thought I might lose this woman if I didn't seal the seams of our very new relationship. So I asked her for a secret.
Six months later, we weren't dating any more. The secret she told me didn't seal our fate, but the impulse that led me to ask for it may have. Asking for a secret in such a flagrant manner appears to be a gesture of intimacy, when in fact it is nothing of the sort. A secret that is requested or presented plainly is a form of currency. It appears to carry the value stamped on its face when in fact it's worth far less. It's a bond that hasn't matured.
When you have a secret, what do you do with it? You either tell it all over town or you keep it safe, like a seed inside of your heart. But dark seeds flower into dark blossoms. In Robert Cray's "Your Secret's Safe With Me," a man who has been coveting a woman across the way watches in horror as she betrays her boyfriend with a new lover. Though the production is slicker than on Cray's breakthrough, Strong Persuader, the song plants both feet firmly in the Memphis soul that has increasingly become his calling card:Baby you should keep your bedroom shades pulled down
I can see right in; I've seen you in that black nightgown
I've seen you with your lover when your man is out of town
But don't worry, babe, your secret's safe with me
I'm very very jealous, weeks of wanting you
I never made a move. I never dreamed you'd be untrue.
Imagine my surprise when I see you loving someone new
Don't worry, babe, your secret's safe with me. The cases where shared secrets lead to happiness are surprisingly rare and often precious. Slapp Happy's "The Secret," a Peter Blegvad/Anthony Moore composition sung prettily by Dagmar Krause, is a strange little gem of a pop song about the intimacy that's forged by holding onto something for someone else:Strike a light
He's making my days into night
Mercury man does everything he can
And my only plan is to keep his secret secret Banner Barbados, a band from Seattle that made a splash online a few years ago with a Velvet Undergroundish song called "Since You Caught My Eye," had a second standout single that speeds through a Stonesy riff into jangly, organ-driven mayhem that conflates theological and romantic revelation. It's an appropriate place to conclude, because the song gives away the real secret: that God is in the details. About a year ago, a friend of mine was dating two men. One of them screwed his courage up and, over drinks, asked her for a secret. I think she complied with the hair-chewing thing. The other one never raised the issue of secrets. He put in his time, made lots of small talk, noticed things about her, and eventually knew her well enough that the secrets were superfluous. The goal is not to deliver or receive secrets on demand, but to get them as part of a steady flow, to know another person rather than another person's secrets.Labels: ben, rock, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, November 29, 2007
WHO LOVES THE SUN
The Velvet Underground
Loaded
Warner : 1970
[Buy It]
WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN
Van Morrison
Veedon Fleece
Polydor : 1974
[Buy It]
WHO WOULD YOU FUCK
Ghostface Killah
Supreme Clientele
Sony : 2000
[Buy It]
WHO TOOK THE MERRY OUT OF CHRISTMAS
Staple Singers
1970
Available on : The Complete Stax-Volt Soul Singles, Vol. 2: 1968-1971
Stax : 1993
[Buy It]
WHO SLAPPED JOHN
Gene Vincent
1956
Available on : The Road Is Rocky: Complete Studio Masters 1956-1971
Bear Family : 2005
[Buy It]
WHO SHOT SAM
George Jones
1959
Available on : Cup of Loneliness: The Classic Mercury Years
Polygram : 1994
[Buy It]
WHO DONE IT?
Harry Nilsson
Nilsson
BMG : 1977
[Buy It]
WHO THREW THE WHISKEY IN THE WELL
Wynonie Harris
1944
Available on : Big Band, Blues & Boogie: Roots Of Rock 'N' Roll, Vol. 1
President : 2003
[Buy It]
I KNOW WHO THREW THE WHISKEY IN THE WELL
Bull Moose Jackson
1946
Available on : Greatest Hits: My Big Ten Inch
King : 1994
[Buy It]
I had guests over at my house this week, including some I didn't know very well, and I had to decide where to set my level of curiosity. Pitch it too low and people feel neglected. Pitch it too high and they feel scrutinized. I think I worked it out, but it's a struggle for me and always has been, not because I find it hard to ask questions, but I find it hard to stop once I've started. Maybe it's curiosity, or a mix of curiosity and boredom, but it's always been that way. As a kid, I dressed up as Sherlock Holmes for Halloween, and that authorized me to look at things closely, squint, and then ask a number of inappropriate questions. (Some years, when the nearby adults got lazy or my dad didn't have a spare pipe, I was a cat burglar, and I imagined that I was committing crimes that Sherlock Holmes would have to solve the following year.)
For these reasons, I've always been drawn to question songs. There are all kinds of inquiries, from "Where did our love go?" to "When will I be loved?" but I prefer who songs. Not Who songs, but "who" songs, though "Who are you?" is both. Who made who? Who do you love? Who says a funk band can't play rock? Who knows where the time goes? Some of those who songs are the jumping-off point for broader inquiries. The Velvet Underground's "Who Loves the Sun," which is a kind of pessimistic response to "Here Comes the Sun," features what might be Doug Yule's best lead vocal, which isn't saying much. But "Who Was That Masked Man" features what might be Van Morrison's best lead vocal, which is saying much:Oh ain't it lonely
When you're livin' with a gun
Well you can't slow down and you can't turn 'round
And you can't trust anyone The title comes from the Long Ranger and possibly from Lenny Bruce, but the song comes from somewhere far stranger. It's on Veedon Fleece, Morrison's strangest and most elemental album, which was written and recorded (quickly) after his divorce from Janet Planet. Morrison uses a mournful falsetto, which is a vocal approach that he didn't employ often in his earliest records and almost certainly can't employ anymore. It's eerily effective here, where Morrison contemplates the value of stardom, not to mention identity itself, and comes down on the fence:When the ghost comes round at midnight
Well you both can have some fun
He can drive you mad, he can make you sad
He can keep you from the sun
When they take him down, he'll be both safe and sound
And the hand does fit the glove
And no matter what they tell you,
There's good and evil in everyone Question songs don't have to be ontological. Some are specific challenges, like Bill Withers' "Who is He (And What is He To You)," in which romantic doubt hardens into jealous certainty. (The song, complete with its unforgettable central eight-note clusters--four up, four down--later received a lesbian makeover from Me'Shell Ndegéocello.) Some are games, like the overlong Ghostface skit that rates potential bedmates: Lil' Kim or Foxxy Brown? Lady of Rage or Rah Digga? Janet or Chrissy? And still others are polemics: The Staple Singers' "Who Took The Merry Out of Christmas," which is a kind of unholy holy cross between "Inner City Blues" and "Be With Me Jesus."
Then there are the who songs that pose true mysteries. The first one takes us all the way back to 1956. Gene Vincent was already well along the road to rockabilly immortality, thanks in no small part to the guitar of Cliff Gallup, when he recorded "Who Slapped John." In the song, there's a party. There's a question of relations. And then there's a crime, sort of:Well I heard John say, "Man, she's my gal"
I heard another say, "Man, she my pal"
Well John jumped up, then he screamed
"Well, she's my gal, man, and that I mean"
Well, who-who, who slapped John?
Who-who, who slapped John?
Baby, who slapped John when the lights went low-oh?
Who-who, who slapped John? Three years after the lights went low-oh, George Jones co-wrote and recorded "Who Shot Sam." It's an echo of and possibly even an answer record to "Who Slapped John," but it's also connected to the folk tradition of complex story-songs that would later reach its apogee/nadir with Bob Dylan's "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts"--the Jones song counts among its characters Sammy Samson, Silly Milly, Flirty Mirty, the police chief, the judge, and the narrator. There's also a lyric that might be cryptically filthy:We met Silly Milly, everything was all right
Her eyes started rollin', we shoulda went a-bowlin'
Wham-bam, who shot Sam, my-my "Who Shot Sam" is mentioned in the opening line of Elvis Costello's "Motel Matches," in 1979. Within two years Costello would be covering and performing with Jones.
"Who Slapped John" and "Who Shot Sam" remain unsolved. And in the end, they're minor crimes, mere party (or roadhouse) mayhem. Neither has the production values or the narrative drive of Harry Nilsson's "Who Done It?" Nilsson had already recorded a murder mystery, of sorts, with "Ten Little Indians," and "Who Done It?" revives the calypso stylings of "Coconut" for a closed-door manor-house case that's straight out of Agatha Christie. The song is from the underrated album "Knnillssonn," whose double-exposure cover image doubles its doubled typography, and it's pushed along by a lovely, confusing string part that sounds like a sample in a hip-hop song. Nilsson's vocals are not as angelic as they once were; rupturing his vocals cords while making "Pussy Cats" with John Lennon had taken care of that. But it's a committed performance, if you mean commitment to irony. There are Smythes, Sloans, Chopin (a snatch of the Piano Sonata No. 2, "pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you"), and a superb alibi from Nilsson's narrator ("I was in Colorado, having breakfast, with a nun!") In the end, like much of Nilsson's best work, it's a high-level novelty record, and all the more personal for its impersonality.
We close with the saddest mystery of all. "Who Threw The Whiskey In the Well?" is credited to Wynonie Harris, though in fact the song was originally released by Lucky Millinder and his Orchestra, with Harris as a vocalist. The song became a big R&B hit, and Harris, who was not restricted by Millinder's recording contract, went off to seek his fortune as a solo artist. In addition to producing that solo career (which yielded such immortal hits as "Mr. Blues Jumped The Rabbit," "Bloodshot Eyes," and "Good Rockin' Tonight"), the song produced an answer record by Bull Moose Jackson, who had replaced Harris in Millinder's orchestra. So who did throw the whiskey in the well? Find out yourself. No need to ruin a good mystery.Labels: ben, rock, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
THANKSGIVING
Loudon Wainwright III
Career Moves
Virgin : 1993
[Buy It]
THANKSGIVING DAY
Ray Davies
Other People's Lives
V2 : 2006
[Buy It]
ALMOST THANKSGIVING DAY
Graham Parker
Your Country
Bloodshot : 2004
[Buy It]
BE THANKFUL FOR WHAT YOU GOT
Massive Attack
Blue Lines
Virgin : 1991
[Buy It]
THANK YOU LORD
Horace Andy
1973
Available on : Feel Good All Over: Anthology
Sanctuary Trojan : 2002
[Buy It]
STUFFY TURKEY
Thelonious Monk
It's Monk's Time
CBS : 1964
[Buy It]
COLD TURKEY
The Godfathers
Hit By Hit
Link : 1986
[Buy It]
Sometimes, there's a long table. Sometimes, there's a large table. Sometimes, there's a small table. Three old men sit around it, eating. Someone prefers the white meat. Someone else prefers the dark meat. Someone else waits for the wishbone. All three carve.
The room is warm. Someone cracks a window to let the air in. There's a song coming from a car out on the street. There's a young man in the car bobbing his head back and forth. There's a young woman in the front seat next to him. The young man and the young woman kiss.
"Diamond in the back," someone says.
"This isn't the original," someone else says. "The singer's different."
They listen. It isn't the original. The singer's different. The car pulls away. Someone closes the window. Someone else begins to hum the song, and then to hum another song. Someone else taps out a beat on a glass with a spoon. The tapping stops. It is dark outside the window. The room is white with silence.
Someone leaves the room to make a call. Someone else can hear him making the call. The call is as warm as the room. "Thanks for coming by the other day," someone says. "I was very happy to see you. I don't always remember to tell you how great you are."
Someone comes back into the room. Someone else leaves to make a call. The call is as cold as the air that came into the room. "Thanks a lot," someone says. "I can't say that I'm surprised. Listen, I need to go."
Someone comes back into the room. Someone else leaves to make a call. "You don't have to thank me," someone says. "Being kind to you isn't a burden. Eventually you'll see what you mean to me."
Someone comes back into the room. Someone sits. Someone else sits. Someone stands up and opens the window again. Someone else thinks he hears another song. Someone else can't hear a thing. The window is closed again. Someone slides back from the table. Someone else angles his chair to the side. Someone else stretches and sighs. All three leave.Labels: ben, rock, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, November 16, 2007
LA LA LA LIES
The Who
The Who Sings My Generation
MCA : 1965
[Buy It]
IT'S NOT TRUE
The Who
The Who Sings My Generation
MCA : 1965
[Buy It]
DON'T YOU LIE TO ME
Chuck Berry
New Juke Box Hits
Chess : 1961
[Buy It]
LOVE IS THE LIE THAT YOU BELIEVE
Boyce Day
Love Is the Lie That You Believe
Black Fly : 2003
[Buy It]
WHITE LIES
Grin
1+1
Sony : 1972
[Buy It]
LITTLE GIRL LIES
Blondie
Blondie
Private Stock : 1976
[Buy It]
EVERYBODY IS A FUCKING LIAR (DEMO)
The Posies
1995
Available on : At Least, At Last
Not Lame : 2000
[Buy It]
THE LIAR
Rev. Isaiah Shelton
1927
Available on : Goodbye, Babylon
Dust-To-Digital : 2003
[Buy It]
This week someone lied to me. The lie was not huge, but it was not tiny, either. It made me angry. No, angry is an understatement. It made me livid. I won't shame the person further by revealing the details of the lie. Let's just say that it was a shortsighted, cowardly, selfish, blockheaded, foolish, and destructive thing to do. The air eventually cleared, but for a little while, the stink of the lie was on everything. I don't really like lies. I really don't like them. You could even say that I overreact to them. Once, years ago, a guy I worked with brought a plate of cookies to the office. Another woman came by, picked one up, and took a bite out of it. They were raisin, not chocolate-chip, and she was done with them. She put the bitten cookie back. The guy returned. "Hey," he said. "Who took a bite of this cookie?"
"Ben did," the woman said. "I saw him."
"You did!" I said.
"Don't get so angry," she said. "It's nothing to worry about. It's just a cookie. He doesn't care if you took a bite out of it."
"I don't," the man said.
"Fine," I said. "But I didn't. She did." I pointed at her. I raised my voice above appropriate office volume. I was not in my right mind. But I was right.
My inability to handle other people's lies may seem paradoxical, or maybe even hypocritical, because I'm a fiction writer. But like most fiction writers, I will insist that every event in every story in every book I have published is true. Or rather, just because they're not technically true doesn't mean that they are lies. If I write a story about a man who sleeps with a woman and is then banished to the moon, I may not be writing nonfiction, as such, but I am not lying. People come to fiction with an understanding that the stories have truth in them. Sometimes the truth is even greater than in nonfiction, because fiction frees us up to talk about things we couldn't address directly. We can confess our feelings for others, our fears about moving through the world, our insecurities and superstitions.
Rock music has less tolerance for lying. At some level, of course, rock music is built on lies: white British kids pretending to be black American bluesmen and R&B shouters. But that's imposture rather than deception. Truth--or at the very least, the appearance of truth--is at the center of rock music. Partly, this is because many (most?) rock songs are about love and about ego, and those are the two substances most likely to combust when a lie is introduced. Take the Who's "La La La Lies." Like most early Who, there's a tension in the song between the boyish, almost tame vocals (not to mention Nicky Hopkins' jaunty piano) and the epochal drums and guitar--the Moon/Townshend's eruption after the second chorus pushes the song rudely past pop into rock. The lies under consideration here are pretty vague, which probably means that they're pretty specific:I don't insist that you feel bad
I just want to see you smile
Don't ever think you made me mad
I didn't listen to your lies A few songs later, "It's Not True" sharpens the focus: here there are specific rumors that need to be debunked:I haven't got eleven kids
I weren't born in Baghdad
I'm not half-Chinese either
And I didn't kill my dad The Who wasn't the only foundational rock act to demonstrate a preoccupation with dishonesty. Chuck Berry, four years earlier, had reworked Tampa Red's 1940 blues "Don't Lie to Me," speeding up the tempo and using a tricky shuffle beat (I think it's Fred Below drumming) but keeping many of the lyrics:There's two kinds of people that I just can't stand
Well that's a lying woman and a cheating man
Don't lie to me
'Cause that makes me mad and I get shook up as a man can be Getting shook up in this fashion is unpleasant, and not just for the person who's being lied to: a verse later, Berry explains that the lies make him "evil as a man can be." The Rolling Stones took a crack at the song in 1964, and they reordered the choruses, getting evil before they got all shook up. It's all a question of where the lie's effect eventually lands.
If you start collecting songs about lying and liars, you'll find that there are a million, and that all of them are good. Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, but it's not a lie. Big Star's "Don't Lie to Me," which isn't the same song as the Tampa Red/Berry composition, is the hardest-rocking three minutes the band ever put on record. Jackie Wilson's "Stop Lying" preaches cold, hard emotional truth underneath a cotton-candy arrangement of horns, chimes, and backup vocals. There are songs about the romantic benefits of untruth, like Fleetwood Mac's aerodynamic "Little Lies." There are songs about its drawbacks, like Asha Puthli's erotically vengeful "Lies." There are songs with deception woven into the plot, like Pedro the Lion's "Bad Diary Days." There are broader political settings, like John Lennon's "Gimme Some Truth." There are manifestos, like the Castaways' Liar Liar" and the Sex Pistols' "Liar." If anyone ever lies to you, you're not going to have to look far for a mix tape.
Some of the best songs are the subtler ones. Boyce Day's "Love is the Lie that You Believe" catalogs various types of deception, and concludes that self-deception is sometimes the only thing that can start the engine of the heart:You can tell me that the world is flat
I don't think I'm going to fall for that
At the end of the rainbow a pot of gold
Well that's a story that leave me cold
You can tell me all about Santa Claus
The Fountain of Youth and the Wizard of Oz
I don't believe God took the form of a dove
So how come I believe in love? Self-deception of a different sort is the prime mover in "White Lies." Grin was the band led by Nils Lofgren, who was a teenage veteran of Neil Young's band and went on to play guitar for the E Street Band. "White Lies" is a massive hit that was only a cult hit, complete with angelic harmonies, a punch-it-out chorus, and a thrilling false ending, but the message is tricky. Lofgren seems to be warning a woman not to spread the rumor that he loves her, but he seems to be lying mostly to himself:They'll see where but I fear I traveled here alone 'cause of you
Think I may be daydreamin' baby but I know I know what I still don't mean to you
While I try, while I try, while I try, don't start tellin
White lies, you better talk it over
White lies, everywhere I go I'm hearin'
White lies
Tellin' everybody that I love you And Blondie's "Little Girl Lies" is a girl-group update that puts straightforward carnality where euphemism used to be:She loves you right now, so don't close your eyes
She'll be talking and laughing with six other guys
Flirtatious and cute, she'll take you the route
Telling little girl lies
He loves her so much, he don't wanna lose her
And there's no other girl he likes to ball better
But he's busy tonight, "We'll make it tomorrow"
He's telling his little girl lies Most of these songs are about lying in love. That may be at the root of the Posies' "Everybody is a Fucking Liar," but the band widens the scope considerably:Just as God in his his infinite infancy thinks he's in control
That's when God in his infinite infamy decides to damn our souls
Let's throw it all in
And think of places to back up and begin
To build something higher
'Cause everybody is a fucking liar The Rev. Isaiah Shelton believes in a somewhat different relationship between truth and God. The song is a driving R&B number beneath the gospel -- it provided the melody for Ray Charles's "Leave My Woman Alone" -- but when you're talking about something as serious as lying, it's better to end on a comic note. I once dated a woman who insisted that the funniest lyric in pop music came in Nine Inch Nails' "Terrible Lie," when Trent Reznor, after lamenting the meaninglessness of existence, raged to the Lord above, "Hey God, I think you owe me a great big apology." She had a mental picture of Reznor standing beneath a stormy sky, shaking his fist furiously, as if God had wrongfully accused him of taking a bite out of a cookie. "A great big apology!" she said. "Can you even believe it?" She started laughing every time she thought about it. I don't exactly remember why we broke up, but I know it wasn't because of a lie, and that's why I remember her fondly.Labels: ben, rock
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, September 06, 2007
BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD
 Video
Peter Murphy w/ Trent Reznor and TV On The Radio
Live on DC-101 FM
6/13/2006
CUTS YOU UP
Video
Peter Murphy
Deep
Beggars UK : 1990
THINGS TO REMEMBER
Peter Murphy w/ Mercan Dede
Dust
Metropolis Records : 2002
A brief holdover from our week of conversions:
Bauhaus' Peter Murphy grew up Irish-Catholic, became a goth godhead, and then converted to Islamic Sufism in the early 90s. I know next to nothing of Bauhaus, Goths or Irish-Caths, but I know enough of Peter Murphy to know that Sufism makes a great fit - being Islam's most mystic and pretentious order.Labels: James, rock
posted by James
LINK |
Friday, August 17, 2007
NERVOUS MAN NERVOUS
Big Jay McNeely
1953
Available on : The King R&B Box Set
King : 1996
[Buy it]
I'M SO GLAD
Skip James
Today!
Vanguard : 1964
[Buy it]
I'M SO GLAD
Iggy & The Stooges
1973
Available on : Wild Love: The Detroit Rehearsals and More
Bomp : 2001
[Buy it]
SO GLAD
Howlin' Wolf
1956
Available on : Ain't Gonna Be Your Dog
Universal : 1994
[Buy it]
SO GLAD
Fats Domino
1963
Available on : Out of New Orleans
Bear Family : 1993
[Buy it]
HAPPY BOYS HAPPY
Small Faces
Small Faces
Immediate : 1967
[Buy it]
Big Jay McNeely was a jazz saxophonist in the late forties before he headed off for the riskier, raunchier world of R&B. He hit number one on the R&B charts with the instrumental "Deacon's Hop" in 1949 and was quickly crowned king of the "honking sax" style. More hits followed, including "Nervous Man Nervous," and after retiring from the music business in the early sixties, McNeely enjoyed a comeback in the eighties and nineties. (There's one story, possibly apocryphal, about how he was playing at the Quasimodo Club in West Berlin the night the Berlin Wall came down, and how the German press called him "the modern Joshua" for blowing down the wall.)
I mention McNeely because he was on my mind yesterday, when my older son, who is six, went on a field trip with his summer camp. It's not the first field trip. He has been to Coney Island, to the Staten Island Children's Museum. He's been bowling. I have lost track of all the trips, in fact. Maybe one time they went to Belmont Park and each were given $10 to bet? But then, Wednesday night, I came home and saw the announcement sitting on the counter. It said "Rye Playland."
I had a strange reaction to it. I became nervous and even afraid. The fear wasn't severe, and I'm not even sure it was my own. It may have been an echo of my wife's--she gets that way more often, and she was standing nearby, giving off high levels of Afraidiation. Whatever the reason, I got a little anxious. Partly this was because Rye Playland is further than the other places he's gone. Partly this was because I remembered that earlier this year, a 21-year-old woman was killed in an accident involving the Mind Scrambler, and that the news reports of that death made mention of an earlier death, from 2004, of a young girl. But the rational part of my mind got to the fearful part in a hurry and smothered it with a blanket. Two accidents in four years is sad, but is it a high rate? How many people go through the park in a year? Besides, little kids aren't going on the Mind Scrambler.
The fear, which was ridiculous, receded while I was awake. When I was asleep, it surged. I dreamed that I was with my family in an apartment somewhere. We were leaving to go outside. My wife and younger son went out the door, but my older son wouldn't listen. He went into the bathroom. I followed him in, ready to yell, and found him standing in the middle of the bathroom, staring upward at dozens of fresh corpses hung by meathooks from the ceiling. I woke up immediately. Not comforting at all. I have already written about the idea of fear, but I should add that I'm rarely fearful. When I was a kid, I liked climbing up to the roof and walking around, or going to the top of the tallest tree. Every once in a while, I'd fall the entire height of the thing. It scraped me up, but it didn't scare me. Once, some years ago, before 9/11, my wife and I were flying from Miami to New York and had horrendous turbulence that lasted almost an hour. The woman behind me was screaming "Jesus, no!" for about twenty minutes. It put me off flying for a year but it went away.
So all of this is to say that fear is foreign to me for the most part, and that I don't know what to do with it when it arrives. Work yesterday was smooth but the ice was thin. When my son got back from the dreaded Playland in one piece, with stories about candy and other kids and rides and candy -- a high percentage involved candy-- I was unpredictably glad. So glad that I went and tried to find a song to explain to myself how glad I was. What I found, for the most part, were songs by classic blues singers who decided to set aside their money trouble, girl trouble, health trouble, floods, death, and nobody's dirty business to celebrate life. They lay off of what Hubert Sumlin called "sad blues" and opt instead for what he called "glad blues." And that's the word they tend to use, "glad," instead of "happy," which makes sense -- happy can just happen to you, but glad is, generally, a result. Glad is how you feel when it turns out that the things you were worried about weren't worth worrying about. Glad has, either explicit or implied, an element of relief.
So how glad was I, according to the giants of glad blues? As glad as Skip James in "I'm So Glad," which was originally recorded in 1931, revisited by James after his rediscovery in the sixties, covered famously by Cream and somewhat less famously by Iggy and the Stooges. As glad as Howlin' Wolf in "So Glad," which was the B-side of "I Asked for Water." As glad as Muddy Waters in "I'm So Glad I'm Living" or Sleepy John Estes in "I Ain't Gonna Be Worried No More." I was as glad as all those songs, but I was exactly as glad as Fats Domino in "So Glad," a little-known but reliably irrepressible specimen of the classic New Orleans sound:
Well I'm so glad my baby's coming home
Don't know what to do
I'm so glad my baby's coming home
All of my troubles are through Labels: ben, blues, rock
posted by Ben
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Friday, August 10, 2007
BRAVE & STRONG
Sly and the Family Stone
There's a Riot Goin' On
Epic : 1971
[Buy it]
I'M NOT AFRAID TO DIE
Gillian Welch
Hell Among the Yearlings
Acony : 1998
[Buy it]
NOT AFRAID
Bizzy Bone
Alpha and Omega
Bungalo : 2004
[Buy it]
JEANNIE'S AFRAID OF THE DARK
Robbie Fulks
13 Hillbilly Giants
Bloodshot : 2001
[Buy it]
IS IT SCARY
Michael Jackson
Blood On The Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix
Sony : 1997
[Buy it]
THE FEAR
Pulp
This Is Hardcore
Island : 1998
[Buy it]
I was reading an article by Ron Paul recently, and that's the first time I have ever started a sentence like that. It wasn't as bad as I thought it might be. I might even do it again. I was reading an article by Ron Paul recently, and he was outlining his thoughts about fear:
While fear itself is not always the product of irrationality, once experienced it tends to lead away from reason, especially if the experience is extreme in duration or intensity. When people are fearful they tend to be willing to irrationally surrender their rights. As the end of these rather dense and prolix sentences--no political speechwriter would ever sign off on them, and that's part of their charm--he reveals the heart of his argument, which has to do with the way that fear can be used as a tool of political repression. Ron Paul's completely right about that, of course, and that's the first time I have ever started a sentence like that either. But if Ron Paul wasn't running for office, he'd be making a broader point, and a highly contentious one that that. Does fear lead away from reason, especially if the experience is extreme in duration or intensity, or does it lead to reason? Is fear irrational or is it the most rational aspect of humanity? I flipped a coin to find out. It landed on its edge.
Pop music is full of fear. Fear of Flying, Fear of a Black Planet, even Fear of Music. Songs that say they're about bravery, like Sly and the Family Stone's "Brave & Strong," are also about the absence of bravery:
Frightened faces to the wall
Can't you hear your mama call?
The brave and strong survive The big fear, of course, is the fear of death. This last week, it seemed to be everywhere. My wife has been planning her father's 85th birthday party, hoping that the Uninvited Guest doesn't show. A friend in her twenties was taken to the hospital, unexpectedly, for something that turned out to be nothing but had her family worried, briefly, that it might be everything. Another friend in her thirties told me, matter-of-factly, that she has been thinking of dying often. Or rather, she was thinking about dying once, often.
In all of these cases, I tried to kill off this fear of death. I told my wife that her father will be fine. I mean, who dies in their eighties? I sent cheery messages to my twentysomething friend. I told my thirtysomething friend that she can think of dying all she wants, so long as she's not afraid of it. "I'm not afraid of dying," I said, full of bluff. She said nothing. Her silence suggested that maybe claiming that you weren't afraid of death was in fact proof that you were afraid of death. It also suggested that the largest issues work by contraries. Silence just won't shut up sometimes. There are songs that also have something to say about this issue. In "I'm Not Afraid to Die," Gillian Welch finds solace in the inevitable:
Forget my sins upon the wind
My hobo soul will rise Bizzy Bone's "Not Afraid" takes a more nihilistic route to the same destination. So, two versions, one peaceful, one meaningless. What is there to fear? According to my thirtysomething friend, her fear involves being alone on her deathbed, with no company, no family, no solace. Oh, and caring about it, and not having any confidence that she'd go on to something better. That's bad.
It's strange that fear of death makes people feel so alone, because it's something shared by almost everyone. If you think thirty is young, what about "Jeannie's Afraid of the Dark," which Dolly Parton wrote and sang with Porter Wagoner on the 1968 duet album Just the Two Of Us. (The version here is a fairly faithful Robbie Fulks cover, though remaining fairly faithful involves preserving the almost unbearable five-hankie weepiness of the thing.) Jeannie's a little girl, afraid of the dark, and every night she runs to her parents' room so that she doesn't have to sleep alone. One day, her parents take her to the cemetery, and she makes a morbid (not to mention unhygienic) request -- that when she die she not be buried, because she won't be able to deal with the dark. Parents with kids this nervous should probably keep them away from the Paul Tillich books:
The first assertion about the nature of anxiety is this: anxiety is the state in which a being is aware of its possible nonbeing. The same statement, in a shorter form, would read: anxiety is the existential awareness of nonbeing...It is not the realization of universal transitoriness, not even the experience of the death of others, but the impression of these events on the always latent awareness of our own having to die that produces anxiety. So how to deal with these anxieties? Well, one way, weirdly, is to feel fear -- fear, that is, of other things, things that don't involve annihilation. In fact, other fears are life-affirming, because they require being. So be afraid of snakes. Be afraid of clowns. Be afraid of ghosts. (That's why fear of the dark has a special status, I think -- it's easy to forget that you exist.)
The other night I did a reading at a bookstore in the city. Afterwards, at a bar, I was talking to another writer whose husband is a film scholar who specializes in horror movies. I was asking what counts as the minimum requirement for a horror movie, as opposed to a scary movie. Does someone have to die? Does more than half of the audience have to scream? Does the film have to be aware of the entertainment value of its own capacity for producing fear? "There are books written about that," she said. I went on, asking her if werewolf movies were all about masturbation and vampire movies all about sex (there are books written about that, too, as it turns out), but the basic question was the one that stuck. What makes something a horror movie rather than a scary movie?
I brought the question with me back to music. What's scary? Fantomas? Scott Walker? Nico? Is bleakness scary? Is Ice Cube scary? Is rage scary? Is truth scary? And if many of those artists have recorded |
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