Lyrical Wax: Chain Reaction

The wider culture saw her, largely, in cameos. She’s there behind sister Aretha in The Blues Brothers, presumably having to run through take after take after take (Aretha was terrible at lip-syncing). She’s there in David Ritz’s book, which portrays her warmly and airily discusses her sexuality.

Still, Carolyn Franklin is one of my “if I can just get one person to listen … “ artists. She wrote and sang on some of the great songs of the 20th century, but even many soul fans would have a hard time picking her out of a line-up.

Not blessed with the voice or presence of Aretha – partly because no one was but the woman herself — she was nonetheless an exquisite songwriter, for herself and others, and a great backing vocalist. She wrote the exultant Angel, which namechecks her, and in her sister’s hands (or at least her lungs) starts soft as a kiss and ends wild as a brush-fire. Plus there’s the devastating Ain’t No Way, and the swooning Baby, Baby, Baby.

She produced five albums of her own, of which Chain Reaction is the second, softening the edges of her thumping debut Baby Dynamite. She is clearly a formidable band leader (or at least someone involved is) – the ensemble wrings every drop of soul out of the material.

Indeed, sometimes they must – it’s tough to hear, say, her serviceable job on the roiling Goin In Circles and not imagine Aretha shaking the joint to splinters. But wasn’t that always the problem? Aretha Franklin may loom over ever soul singer of her era, but no one had to deal with (and inevitably suffer from) so direct a comparison.

Still, Franklin’s relatively low-key approach means she matches her sister in one facet – she too sounds like she’s never lost sight of what it is to live a normal life. And so her sprightly and upright version of Put A Little Love In Your Heart bests both Jackie DeShannon and Al Green, Don’t Wake Me Up In The Morning Michael with its gospel organ and swirling strings, feels lived and bittersweet. The driving title track, the expansive Right On, her brassy, bright-eyed take on Everybody’s Talkin’ all land as they should.

Everything great about the album converges on I Ain’t Got to Love Nobody Else; the flock of gospel voices clattering into one another, those filthy horns, that centered, intelligent presence at the core. It may be a perfect soul song, a place where (as I wrote in another context) stomping gospel meets aching blues meets earthy, loose-limbed groove. It’s so soulful it makes you wince. 

There’s a temptation to feel sorry for Carolyn – she never once cracked the top 20 and died of breast cancer at only 43. But there’s something about her story that rejects your pity – as she was dying, for instance, she quietly completed a bachelor of arts.

“Once she found out, she said she wasn’t going to let herself ponder it. She was one of the bravest persons we’ve ever seen,” said her sister Erma at the time.

So, in the spirit of Carolyn’s clear and unfussy vocals, let’s not overstate it or understate it. Chain Reaction has good material and great interpretations throughout. Like a lot of her work, it’s a modest but sure soul classic.

***

A little note to email subscribers — make sure you follow the links through to the website to listen to excerpts of the record, they don’t show up in the email.

Permanent records and the life of objects

“Ingi,

For being around when I need you,

Steph”

It’s a brisk but tender note, unfurling in a flowing but tightly curled script. The formality of “dear”, “always”, and “love” are absent, presumably because they are unnecessary.

It sits as a wonky paragraph in the corner of the back of my copy of Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence. It’s an album I don’t recall buying, but I suspect I picked it up at the Record Finder in Fremantle, and I suspect it was reasonably cheap, being the kind of “basic history of pop music in the 20th century” crowd-pleaser I will invariably chuck on the pile if it’s not too pricey. If it was cheap, I got a bargain; playing it as I write, I can report it’s in pretty flawless condition.

The frisson I get from wondering who Ingi and Steph are, what their relationship was, when that note was written and how it came to be in the Record Finder is something that I suspect will be familiar to anyone with a slight addiction to the second hand, particularly the cultural second hand.  

It’s there too in the illegible essay notes scrawled in pencil at the margins of an old copy of As I Lay Dying. Or – and maybe this only happened in the small towns I grew up, where there was usually no video store, but a general store with a single shelf of truly randomly selected titles – the sagging, warped quality of an old VHS that had been paused too many times. Little hints at the life the object lead before it came into yours.

I also note, in my attempt to work out when Steph shared her message, that the original pressings of Sounds of Silence (released January, 1966) contained an error – misspelling the song “Anji” as “Angie”, and incorrectly attributing it to Bert Jansch rather than Davey Graham – that was corrected on subsequent re-issues. My copy, Ingi’s copy, has that error.

So many of my records do this. Say, my copy of With The Beatles – the Australian edition, with happier images of The Beatles, and the title in pink lettering. In a young-looking hand  – faux-neat, spaced and clear and deliberate like one would use in a high school essay  – someone has written the word ‘John’, underlined for emphasis. Does the writer mean to indicate their favourite Beatle, or is it a “do not nick this record” note of ownership?

How did my copy of Gratitude by Earth Wind and Fire make it from Corso Italia in Catania (as indicated by a sticker on the cover) to a Queenscliff secondhand store? For the matter, what was a German language copy of the score to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen* doing in the same rack?

The record becomes an intersection, carrying the historical context of its content, of the people who once owned it, and the physical history of the individual object itself.

And, because of course everything is now, the effect is amplified by lockdown – records acting as Joan Didion’s thwarted hope for her notebook:

open it up and there it will all be, forgotten accounts with accumulated interest, paid passage back to world out there.

My father had a friend who owned a copy of James Taylor’s Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon that a skip on the track “Isn’t It Nice To Be Home Again” – it would skip a ridiculous number of times (isn’t it nice, isn’t it nice, isn’t it nice) before the needle would flit back into the groove and the song would proceed. Only this friend would know when the jump was coming. It was a party trick of sorts, he would sing along, and 9 or 13 or 18 “isn’t it nice”s later he’d sing “to be home again” and so would James Taylor, a brief and singular duet.

Which is why I love – if it doesn’t destroy the listening experience – the physical degradation of old records. The popping sound that briefly intrudes and, for a just a bar or two, syncs so as to form a counter rhythm in on the title track of Diana Ross and the Supremes Love Child makes it a unique version —  it only happens like that on my copy. Well, Greg’s copy.

His name is written in all caps. Except for strident, deep grooves at the end of the arms of the E and the terminal of the R, it fades back into the ocean blue of the sleeve, alongside the track listing, the old Tamla Motown logo, and a perfect circle around where the record lives — an imprint on and of the life of the object, reliable as the rings of a tree.

***

With apologies to Susanna Moore

*The story of why I knew the instant I saw Die Aubenteuer Des Baron Munchhausen that it must be mine is a subject for a future post.

Gordon Koang Unity

Gordon Koang is one of four million people displaced by the civil war in South Sudan, a country that has barely known a moment’s peace in its decade of existence. In late 2013 the president Salva Kiir (who belongs to the predominant Dinka tribe) accused his deputy (a Nuer) of planning a coup, throwing the country into ethnic violence. Koang is Nuer (easily spotted by the tracks of scars that run across their forehead, a traditional facial marking). Neither his status as a celebrity, nor his disability (he’s been blind since birth) offered any protection. His bank account was emptied, his house bulldozed. He and his family fled to Uganda.  

The next year, he and his cousin, percussionist and ever present companion Paul Biel were in Australia for a series of concerts and took the wrenching decision that they could not return to South Sudan. They applied for refugee status. He now lives in the Suburbs of Melbourne. He has not seen his wife and six children for five years.

I tell you all this only because it brings into sharper relief what is already clear on first listen – Unity, Koang’s eleventh album and first since arriving in Australia and hooking up with Melbourne’s Music in Exile label, simply glows with optimism, hope, and love.  

He’s more a storyteller than a poet, so on the opening Asylum Seeker, over shuffling, shuddering rhythms, he deals with the simply drudgery and fear of waiting, in some cases years, to be approved for a protection visa, in direct, factual, tender terms.

The bouncing, gold-flecked Stand Up (Clap Your Hands), the centrepiece of Koang’s exultant live shows (“We love you, audience” is a key line) — is probably the best showcase for his limpid playing of the Thom, a boxy metallic lyre, somewhere between a harp and a banjo, which glows and clangs in equal measure, rhythm and melody melded.

On the closer Te Ke Mi Thile Ji Kuoth Nhial — which adds jazz piano chords to the mix, to startling and gorgeous effect – Koang sings to his absent family, including a five-year-old daughter he has never met, across worlds, across literal lifetimes: “We will not lose you, and you will not lose us”.

Aesthetically the album is a fairly organic melding of synths, organs, guitar-drums-bass, with Koang’s Thom and Biel’s percussion, a collision of several countries’ idea of pop music. The tracks lock into a groove and then ramble and meander till the groove is exhausted — there’s a sense that the live set has simply been transposed to the studio.

A little is lost in that transition, only because it couldn’t be otherwise, but not much. The reason for this is in what the record does preserve – by removing the sense of community that propels his live shows, it allows us to focus in on Koang himself; a man possessing quite remarkable capacity for love. And, on that account, the true guts it takes to maintain hope.

Lyrical Wax: The Wichita Train Whistle Sings

There is an illustrative sequence early in Head – the bizarre, acidic (in more ways than one) movie The Monkees made after they started insisting on playing their own instruments and the sitcom they were created to star in was cancelled. The band perform Mike Nesmith’s fire breathing Circle Sky on a revolving stage. The fans ecstatic screams, mixed with footage from the Vietnam war, are curdled into howls of horror. After the performance the band turn into mannequins and are set upon and torn to shreds by the crowd.

Like most of the film, it deals with their fame with a level of horror and revulsion The Beatles may have felt, but never revealed (at least until John Lennon started running his mouth to Jann Wenner).

The other members of the group came to regard the film as variously a murder by the producers ready to drop them, or a suicide by the group itself. Nesmith simply thought the film was “inevitable”.

Nesmith has an paradoxical place in history – the smart, ambitious Monkee, the most aggressive in pushing the sitcom actors towards being a legitimate band. He struck you as eccentric rather than whacky and he could really write – his songs had interesting tempo shifts, good hooks, and his Texan twang doesn’t sound like anything else you’d describe as bubblegum.

He spent a lot of money quitting the Monkees in 1970, and always seemed slightly removed from the whole thing – look at his screen test; he seems faintly annoyed to be there, as though he hadn’t cleared his whole day to audition for a sitcom.

He had comfortably the most successful post-group career, releasing well regarded (if commercially underwhelming) solo work, and eventually becoming a pioneering producer of music videos. But up to 2016 he was still joining them for the odd nostalgia gig, for reasons that I don’t think were 100 per cent about money.

His sort-of first solo album, The Wichita Train Whistle Sings fits all of this, a combination of hubris, indulgence and genuine artistry, or at least yearning for it. Faced with an unexpected tax bill, Nesmith figured he’d rather spend the money on album and write it off than give it to the government. He got The Wrecking Crew together to record a collection of instrumental versions of the songs he’d written for the Monkees over an extremely boozy and well-catered weekend in November 1967, the year that The Monkees outsold The Beatles and The Stones.

It’s the height of 60s kitsch; both in reimagining pop hits as brassy standards (so popular at the time), and its grandiose excess. Everything that’s good about it peaks on the opener Nine Times Blue – a Bach Style Organ flourish melding into a bouncing breakbeat propelling along the glowing trumpets.

Then Halfway through, the tempo shifts, an almost country-meets-highlife style guitar riff slides in, a Brazilian cuica drum starts hooting, and the whole thing is suddenly something else.

At other times it’s almost lounge music, but it’s too weird, too ragged to fade politely into the background. I suspect it’s a nightmare to listen to stoned (ironically, I guess) – you’d never quite put your finger on why it was faintly stressing you out. It’s Vegas, but Hunter S Thompson’s Vegas.

And while apparently the bar was an open one, booze is not the first intoxicant this record reeks of – there’s a certain manic energy underlying proceedings which conjures the image of lots of intense eye contact and chewed lips and people saying things like “we run this fucking town”.

It’s faintly crazed at times, often to the detriment of the songs – Tapioca Tundra, a frail, odd and lovely melody, is accosted and harried by its surroundings, while the spritely Papa Gene’s Blues feels sluggish and weighed down, as does the Circus-music take on You Just May Be the One. And the way every single track eventually collapses into itself becomes wearing.

But also … it’s kind of fucking great. Every time it feels like the whole quaking structure will tip over, you get a release like Don’t you cry: a joyous cacophony of horns and banjo and bells, looking at the tune from every angle like a kid with a new toy.

Some records are timeless. Others have an appeal because they could only have been produced in an era that is long gone. Witchita goes a step further — it could only have been produced by Mike Nesmith over a weekend in November 1967 – the pop idol desperate to be taken seriously, willing and able to blow 50 grand on an arty indulgence rather than give it to the taxman.

More than half the tracks have something exultant, something genuinely grand on them, and the record just keeps bunching itself up and collapsing all over again. For better and for worse, there’s nothing much else like it.

Bookmarks September

An early and supplementary Bookmarks this month, making a desperate attempt to mop up a bunch of music that came and went in 2020, and meant something to me that I was too glum to record.

Back when I reviewed The New Abnormal, I described The Strokes as the perfect group for adolescents trying to maintain some cool, some distance, in the face of new emotions they neither understood nor desired. For Bright Eyes, another turn of the century guitar group making a return this year, the appeal was the direct opposite. In Conor Oberst’s quivering toddler voice, his emotional directness, there was enough genuine insight and intelligence, pretension and self-involvement, to envelope any brainy, restless and self-involved young depressive. They’re back, the tunes are still good and committed and livelier than ever. Oberst’s love of soundscapes is undiminished and if his insights don’t seems as revelatory as they once did, maybe that’s because neither he nor his audience are as young nor restless as they once were.

Sex is, obviously, one of pop music’s great subjects, but it’s only when you hear a record like Kehlani’s sinewy, writhing R&B It was good until it wasn’t do you realise how limited the predominant depictions – sex as fantasy, sex as power, sex as point scoring – can really be. Kehlani deals with sex as reality, as it’s experienced by most of us – as pleasure, sadness, need and love and a mess. Or, as she puts it “Goddamn I wanna undress you, I wanna impress you … I want to undo the things I said before”.

Music is my everything sums up everything good and bad about Blu and Exiles’ Miles – it’s bright and melodic and intelligent and candid. But it’s also far too long, a bit too tasteful, and mistakes endless autobiography for genuine insight.

Maybe simple effortless execution from Beyonce simply doesn’t merit much attention at this point, but her verse on Megan Thee Stallion’s Savage Remix deserved more credit.

Talking about I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you in my last post reminded me of Think it Over, from Lou Reed’s Growing up in Public, another of my favourite songs about love, for similar reasons.

RTJ4‘s place as the album of the year is probably assured. One of those rare records that arrive with a sense of the times in its bones, so that when Killer Mike gasps “I can’t breathe”, a referrence to the murder of an unarmed black man at the hands of the police that happened in 2014 recorded in 2019, it had returned in taunting echoes by the time RTJ4 was released. The effect is aesthetic as much as lyrical – the album fans out from Yankee and the Brave’s machine gun snare intro, outward in all directions like a riot.

One of the most maddening things about this fucking nonsense earlier this year from the UK Guardian’s music editor is not just that his take – joking or not – on the most culturally and commercially important genre of the last 25 years would have been cliched, shallow, incurious in a white guy’s shitty 1993 stand up set. It’s that he’s in the UK, and appears not to have listened to – among all the other great hip hop the UK produces — Stormzy’s Heavy Is The Head from which I include the limpid, driving Handsome.

Dispatches right from the edge: Rough and Rowdy Ways and Blonde on the Tracks

Today, and tomorrow, and yesterday too, the flowers are dying, like all things do.

I’m straining the memory here, but there’s an anecdote from volume eight of Bob Dylan’s bootleg series, where Dylan concedes his lack of excitement about Oh Mercy, the last and comfortably the strongest of his decidedly spotty 80s output. The real sonic revolution, he had concluded, was now elsewhere, in the pioneering hip hop of NWA and De La Soul*.

It’s striking then that Oh Mercy is the last “modern” record he ever did. With Daniel Lanois’  production bringing that same expansive sheen he brought to U2 and Peter Gabriel, it sounds like other stuff you might hear on the radio in 1989.

After this came two volumes of folk covers, the cusp of eternity record Time out of Mind. Since the turn of the century — dead on 9/11, to be exact — he’s been out on the trail, operating largely in tunes and forms that could have been written in the time of Bessie Smith or earlier.

Rough and Rowdy Ways, his 39th, may be as elegant an expression of this last period as he’s produced.

The whole album emanates from its opener I Contain Multitudes, so delicate and perfectly realised a structure it feels at once as effortless as a breath and as deliberate as a maze. Like Mississippi or Nettie Moore before it, it feels like a final draft of a song he’s been writing since Buckets of Rain in 1975, finding some peace, even some amusement, in his place among the ruins.

“I’ll drink to the truth, the things we said.

I’ll drink to the man who shares your bed”

It enters, immediately, the conversation about the best songs Dylan has ever written. It is so good, in fact, it’s already produced a near perfect cover version.

Blonde on the Tracks Tennessee-Based Australian Emma Swift’s collection of Dylan covers has already been written about extremely well by Andrew Stafford – I can only agree with his observation that Swift’s album is a triumph partly because, while her pure, breathy voice is at the other end of the spectrum to Dylan’s increasingly gnarled growl, she grasps that the material’s power is all in the phrasing.

When she hits the line “I can change, I swear”, on You’re a Big Girl Now it’s with the understanding that the sentiment, by the time it becomes necessary, is almost never true. It’s as desperate and sad a thing as you can say to someone**.

Similarly, the way Swift holds back an extra breath between “I never really meant to do you” and “any harm”  on One Of Us Must Know expresses some extra layer of regret, to what, in its original, lands more as a guilty shrug.

Incidentally, Blonde on the Tracks will probably help you clarify which Dylan era you are most possessive towards; Swift’s arrangements of Blonde on Blonde era tracks struck me as appropriate, maybe even clearer expressions than the originals. Only on Simple Twist of Fate does her approach flag for me – her version swings and bounces, when in my view, the song should trudge, if it moves at all. But that’s partly because I can’t imagine anything from Blood on the Tracks sounding better than it does.

In my pre-bituary for John Prine, I wrote:

The quality of the music was that of a road stretching off to who knows where, and was melancholy and hopeful in the same way. The effect is doubled now that the world is shrinking into our living rooms, the bars are all closed and police are monitoring any travel beyond the local shops.

Dylan didn’t invent that quality by any means, but partly due to developing recording technology and partly due to the rollicking, soulful quality that was coming into popular music as Dylan went electric, he expanded it out, and made it a template for countless others.

And part of the comfort of these two albums, if one can call it that, is that Dylan has not come to the present, but the times, as ever, have come to him: Life has come to resemble a late era Dylan song. My current hometown has the feel of an outpost, ruins from a lost time, with the post-curfew trains rattling by empty of passengers, lone masked strangers doing resentful little figure 8s around one another on sparsely populated streets. The days stretching out like the thin grey clouds stretched to breaking point above the skyline and skeletal, leafless trees.

Thanks Christ, then, for these dispatches right from the edge, right from the end, from where all things lost are made good again.

*Help me out here people: It seems far too specific and clear a memory to have been completely invented, but I have to confess I’ve not been able to find any record of this.

** As a counterpoint this, I feel I should mention I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself To You on Rough and Rowdy Ways – which contains as nice a thing as I think you can say to someone:

“I’ve thought it all over, and I’ve thought it through. I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you”, which along with “I knew you’d say yes, I’m saying it too” is as factual, direct, tender and giddy as love ought to be.

Lyrical Wax: Ram

Ram, Paul McCartney‘s second solo album, was released to mediocre reviews in mid 1971. Equal parts pretentious and inconsequentially pretty, was the general tone. And certainly, especially compared to John Lennon‘s Utopianism-as-therapy on Imagine and George Harrison‘s masterpiece of frustrated ambition All Things Must Pass, Ram presents as a touch slight.

Maybe it’s just compared to what we now know was to come from Macca, or maybe the current world situation has built in me a high tolerance for the pretty and the inconsequential, but I kind of love it. All the worst impulses he had without the other Beatles to dirty proceedings up are present, but expressed as perfectly and as winningly as he ever managed.

The melodies are delicate, not saccharine, but intricate and lively; see the storm of harmonies billowing out of Dear Boy.

And while it’s a more “professional” effort than the homemade aesthetic of McCartney, which precedes it, Ram keeps the edges just raw enough, those edges that McCartney that would spend most of the rest of his career buffing until you could see your grimacing reflection in it.

But here, say, the stomping, banging-on-the-counter beat, combining with meandering Ukulele of Ram On the effect is cumulatively haunting.

And his collaborations with Linda were never better than the playful, sexy Long Haired Lady (“Well I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it, for some time … “)

Elsewhere, there’s a dull pang of bitterness that permeates a lot of the record. The other Beatles read all kinds of coded messages in the lyrics, and they were probably right.

Personally, the whole Too Many People/How Do You Sleep? axis bums me out; a near decade of magic, a rarely matched creative and charismatic chemistry, all reduced to stroppy millionaires trading letters stuffed with petty recriminations and perceived slights in public. I know in many ways it simply couldn’t have been otherwise. But I don’t have to like it, neither as artistic fuel, nor for whatever else it communicates about people and love and memory.

On the other hand, I’ll say this: that tone at least keeps McCartney’s tendency to the fanciful, the meaninglessly wacky, the maddeningly twee more or less under control. And where that fails – say Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey which somehow managed to be his first solo number 1, which may have taught him some bad lessons – there’s a melodic flourish (in this case the “hands across the water” refrain) to keep you interested.

McCartney, for better and for worse, is a craftsman, and while he’d write many more good songs (and handful of truly great songs); sonically and thematically, it never quite came together like this — he never sounded quite so good — again.

Briggs Always Was

Briggs Always Was: Who’d’ve thought in this, August 2020, we’d get the least explicitly political, or at least the least topical Briggs record yet.

Among the references to Wu Tang, Lu Kang, “straight to your dome like a sox hat”, Jim Carrey, Brando and Apocalypse Now, Uncle Fester and getting twisted off of that yak, there’s almost nothing, apart from the title maybe, that would send any of his Enchanted co-writers to Wikipedia.

But the beats are rich — sinewy chiming synths above roiling, churning bass. The flow diverse and assured — peaking on the trappy That’s Money — and the guests are well chosen. Go To War, rising and subsiding around Thelma Plum’s hook is probably the moment of the EP, the point at which everything good about it peaks.

Still, I’m looking forward to the album that COVID delayed, and not just because of the ways Always Was succeeds.

Justin Townes Earle

Vale Justin Townes Earle, who had for more than a decade, churned out one rock solid album after another.

It was gentle and melodic but insistent roots music, emanating from his lazy voice and lively guitar. His work bore scars — of a lonely childhood, of a reputed spate overdoses in his teens — but rarely bitterness. In combination, it worked its way a little further under your skin with each listen, and with each iteration — his last album, The Saint of Lost Causes may have been his best.

If you need a primer, or would just like an hour of his music (and I’d argue if you don’t need one, you should have the other) I hope the above will be some use.

Orville Peck: Show Pony

Orville Peck, the gay cowboy draped in a leathery, tasselled mask like a character in good-natured pornography directed by David Lynch, rings a lot of things—humour, beauty, poignancy, and yes, intrigue — from intersecting definitions of authenticity. He’s from the past, his persona a warped memory of a fifties paperback cover. Operating under the Peck pseudonym, he has revealed little to the public about himself except his sexuality and his country of origin (which is Canada, if you’re curious). To know anything more would spoil the effect.

Thus our only references points are his sound – a wide canyon-echo, surrounding that warm steady baritone like rolling fields either side a highway – his way with a hook — Summertime and Drive me, Crazy in particular erupt like summer storms – and his stories.  

Those are theatrical, sometimes verging on camp but always grounded in real feeling; say, the dialogue between two lonesome truckers over CB radio– ’Breaker-breaker, break hearts’ ‘ten-four, daddy-o’ or his re-imagining of Bobbie Gentry’s pioneering tale of hardship and sex-work Fancy.

And he successfully walks the line between having fun with his genre while never spilling over into parody — Legends Never Die, his duet with Shania Twain indulges slicks 90s radio friendly country rock tropes but never reads as anything other than sincere. It’s what makes Peck, in all his artifice, entirely authentic.

***apologies for the lack of a playlist/reliance on links — my blog is currently experiencing some maddening issues with embedding any kind of media. I’m working on it.