Meaty music features for the many jades and fewer noobs (about older artists mostly, though not always)(well they all are now, though some weren't at the time),.originally published in Charlotte Creative Loafing, now posted here---mostly, but not absolutely always---from the most recent (Jan. '07), back to the innocent first (Aug. '05). A few tweaks for sake of added info, clarity and compulsion.
Monday, January 3, 2022
When You Wish Upon Big Star
When You Wish Upon Big Star
Thirty years on, seminal Southern power-pop kings are ready for their close-up
By Don Allred
(an edit was published autumn 2005)
In the mid-to-late 60s, Memphis teen Alex Chilton’s afterschool job was recording raspy, rootsy Top 40 pop-rock with the Box Tops, following producer-songwriter Dan Penn’s instructions to the letter, also “The Letter,” their biggest, and/or most famous hit. On others, A-list session players sometimes stood in for Chilton/s fellow Box Tops, who had to learn and, in effect, cover those ghostplayed BT tracks, as any club band might—so they did it, and toured, their more dogged efforts hopefully staying close enough to the records,if lacking taken-for-granted polish of Penn’s studio pros (who didn't have to deal with being jerked around by older guys: biz lizards to the Tops, including shady and/or hapless characters beyond the gleaming studio machine.)
Chilton took his next band, Big Star, in a surprisingly spacier, still catchy direction, like his peer Stevie Winwood going from being the soul-rockin' prodigy of Spencer Davis Group to floatier Traffic. Although fun, rootsy genre exercises could pop up again in Chilton’s subsequent solo career-of-sorts, Memphis was a small musical world, still, and Big Star zigzagged around Penn’s turf, even as Chilton worried (in at least one supposed-to-be promotional radio interview, caught on bootlegged tape) about being so influenced by Todd Rundgren, who had gone from playing the blooze with Woody’s Truck Stop, to the para-as-post-Beatles psych-pop revelation of “Open My Eyes,” with The Nazz, while the Box Tops were still slogging for the suits (also making good records with Mr. Penn and other savants, it should be said).
Big Star’s name, like the group, was cocky and wry, following dreams and the sign above a chain grocery store across the street from their strip mall studio, the equally well-named Ardent. This time, the resident elders trained all band members to use the studio, instead of just using them. As documented in Rob Jovanovic’s unavoidably Behind The Music-tending Big Star bio, this added to the creative and other friction of a headstrong, innovative-in-the-making crew, with all that drama under the hood, as late-adolescent woes, foes, and bros rose to the occasion–-also to the posthumous glory of “September Gurls,” as thrillingly killed by The Bangles a decade later, proving that BS did too have commercial potential. Ditto “In The Street,” when it became late-'90s-spawned That '70s Show’s theme song, though as less amazingly covered by Todd Griffin, later Cheap Trick: teens again, calling out, "W-i-i-sh, w-e-e, h-a-a-a-d, a joint, s-o-o b-a-a-ad." (Big Star’s blue glider ballad "Thirteen," known to some as T7S couple Eric and Donna's theme, was heard in several episodes, including the very last one, aw-w-w.)
Meanwhile, back in the offscreen 70s, what the heck: the guys in Big Star named their first album #1 Record.
More or less "released" in 1972, #1 Record mainly existed as promotional copies sent to record reviewers, the hippest of whom couldn’t get enough of its spill and spin of sweet and salty ear munchies. Radio City and Third/Sister Lovers, released in 1974 and 1978 respectively, cemented Big Star's cult status and took it further in that direction each time. Third... was down to Chilton and BS drummer-singer Jody Stephenson (yes, they were dating sisters), assisted by Memphis music’s Merlin, Jim Dickinson, and a swirling circle of friends, though light and shadow of expanding, contracting original songs and appropriate covers, like The Kinks’ rousing “Til The End of the Day” and The Velvet Underground’s immaculate “Femme Fatale,” with spare, poignant guitar inflections provided by Booker T and The MGs’ Steve Cropper. Indeed, this Big Star’s moody, mobile, signature style, spacious and enclosed, with strings occasionally slipping through, and bootleg tapes sometimes releasing themselves from the basement, makes Third/Sister Lovers seem like a big old worn-but-still-elegant Bluff City granny house in headphones orbit.
By the early 80s, what Jovanovic calls "the Winston-Salem gang" ---including the dB's Will Rigby and Peter Holsapple, and Let's Active's Mitch Easter---may well have turned Easlter's garage production clients R.E.M. on to the music of Alex Chilton and company, even before they heard The Bangles' hit. R.E.M. talked them up in interviews, may have encore-covered them sometimes, and, after a couple of decades solo—which included interrupting his dishwashing gigs for the one-off Live In London, backed by members of UK indie post-Big Star stars Soft Boys and equally compatible punk guitarist Knox of the Vibrators, also tours of bars, and producing, recording, touring with The Replacements, among other things)(The 'Mats later caroled,"Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton")---Mr. C. suddenly agreed to a Big Star "reunion" performance. The lineup included original drummer/singer/songwriter Jody Stephens and new Seattle recruits Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow, guitarist and bassist, respectively, of the Posies. As heard on Columbia, Live at Missouri University 4-25-93, the concert heavies up the classic power-pop, while keeping it crisp and pop enough to be chased with Big Star stimulants T. Rex (“Baby Strange”), ditto T. Rundgren (“Slut”).
And now, a mere 12 years later, Chilton brings us the same Big Star 2.0’s studio platter of 12 all-new tracks, In Space (adding a calf, though no doubt not a capper, to their span of reissues and previously unreleases on ever-faithful Rykodisc). It's a disc on which lightweight-to-high-generic qualities seem deliberate and sometimes witty, as if the band is saying, "Hello, fellow collectors! We too are influenced by Big Star!" But my favorites sound more like chillin' Chilton's better solo joints. The very classical "Aria Largo" gets tortured by an electric guitar, one careful note at a time. "Love Revolution" sounds like a long-haired Carolina beach band covering Archie Bell & The Drells' "Tighten Up." "Do You Wanna Make It" conjures a big, fat, drunk chick, with a boombox, doing the bump to The Kinks. Yes, baby's got bass, and there's a Big Star tattooed on it.
Once again, Big Star shines where the sun don't, 'cause after all, they're stars of the underground. Presently, Big Star's touring plans are also underground, courtesy of Mr. Chilton, who steadfastly remained in his New Orleans home 'til Katrina came calling. Chilton's also-reformed Box Tops may have to re-schedule, too. Latter-day Big Stars Auer and Stringfellow continue to play with their other band, the Posies (which are slated for a Sept. 25 show at Chapel Hill's Local 506). Typically, as Jovanovic makes clear in Big Star's saga, post-airlift Chilton's rumored to be in a place he refuses to name (but was recently reported to be a refugee star of the Astrodome).
Big Star is now slated to play live dates in December; check Pollstar.org for updates. In Space was released on Rykodisc Sept. 27. Jovanovic's book is currently in bookstores and available online.
BIG STAR: The Short Life, Painful Death, and Unexpected Resurrection of the Kings of Power Pop
By Rob Jovanovic (Chicago Review Press, 333 pages, $15.95)
In Space
Big Star (Rykodisc)
(Rob J.'s book has since been Revised and Updated, it says here--for deeper dives into the music of Big Star and Chilton, check the ongoing explorations of Omnivore Records, also several discussions, often involving long-time Chilton listener and Nashville Scene writer Edd Hurt, on these ilxor.com threads (linked)
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
Funny how the night moves
Bob Seger, at the speed of a silver mullet
By Don Allred
"Everything I do is just a little wrong,
Everyday for me is the same,
Everyone I know is getting' in my face,
And I only got myself to blame."
That's Bob Seger, just before declaring (with a little swagger) that he's about to "Wreck This Heart," the first track on Face The Promise, his first album of all-new material since 1995's It's A Mystery. As on that album, Seger's pissed. But this new set is not divided into confrontational social commentary versus near-greeting-card verses about the joys of family life. No, Face The Promise is a richer mix, emotionally and sonically. At 61, Seger knows there's enough blame to go around, and for what. But he also knows how far knowing that will get you, so "Wreck This Heart," for instance, is less about self-recrimination than it is a pretext to cut loose, via guitars, bass and drums. Yet there's no macho nostalgia either. That's right: Bob Seger, of all people, is not doing nostalgia anymore.
Well, not much. But it's basically a familiar approach, and he can't help invoking comparisons, mostly favorable. Although, Face The Promise does have a few tamer examples of his patented medium-speed numbers, not quite ballads: "Seger mediums," he calls them. As he once admitted, "They were a challenge to write, now they've become formulaic."
But Seger's always been ready to teach us, on his recordings and in his overall career, about the trickiness of adapting, the need to remain unsettled. His earliest known songs bear this out, as collected on The Singles 1966-1967, a quickly deleted, or aborted, but still findable, Capitol Records release, or promo. Seger's first single, "East Side Story," is about the inevitable rise and fall of a novice thief, who brags about his ability to deal with soft, rich folks. The song stomps along in the face of doom, punk enough. Attitude is less predictably employed in his second single, "Ballad Of The Yellow Berets." In effect, its gleeful delivery is as much a takeoff on Sgt. Barry Sadler's solemnly monotonous original, "Ballad Of The Green Berets," as it is on the "yellow" mid-60s Vietnam War protestors. But then the third single, "Persecution Smith," shows up, and Seger's music seems to take a great leap forward, forcibly enough.
"Persecution Smith" speeds along, like Bob Dylan's contemporaneous "Subterranean Homesick Blues." The antique folk-rock style is still startling: the song, like its protagonist, jangles along, in a stiff, rusty, but tireless way. Smith is a compulsively radical reactionary, the embodiment of entropy, but human enough to torture himself and everybody else he can reach. The crudeness of the song makes young Seger's vision more unsettling, more believable: "Persecution Smith" is just plain old, and getting older all the time. "He's here, he's there, he's everywhere" seems more true than corny, in this case, because Smith infiltrates everything, like dust.
This kind of dust forms the covering question mark in the title of the fourth single, "2 + 2=?" In "East Side Story," the fallen bad boy's girlfriend cried, because he died like she knew he would. In this song, the girl cries because her boy dies in a war, that "she just doesn't understand." No political commentary is included, she's just left alone in the kind of dust that covers any answers or assumptions once taken for granted.
In 1971, Seger released Mongrel, about the adventures of a long-haired misfit, determined to strut his stuff in the grey face of conformity. "You can call me Lucifer, if you think you should, but I know I'm good!" Yet such cockiness has to deal with killjoys, the ones who are "Leanin' On My Dream," in which the narrator finally joins the protestors, when he gets his own draft notice. "Lord, you shoulda heard me scream!" He doesn't claim to be any better than the "Yellow Berets," and he's no less stubborn than the vicious reactionaries in "Looking Back": "Too many people lookin' back!"
Although "Looking Back" was recorded along with the tracks that appeared on Mongrel, it first appeared as a stray single. Its LP debut was on Seger's 1976 concert album, Live Bullet, the commercial breakthrough of which really was a case of too many people looking back. That's where he became a merchant of rock nostalgia, and something of an addict, though his masterpiece, Night Moves, appeared the same year. It addressed the craving for nostalgia, tracing the dusty, creeping awareness of age. From getting a kick out of remembering "workin' on our night moves," to waking up and thinking, "Ain't it funny how the night moves," which needs no question mark, because it's a feeling the singer already knows too well.
As you probably know too well, he (and possibly you, and certainly I) indulged his mix of autumnal (yet sufficiently rocking) insight and mere mush for many a year, many a multi-platinum record. It's A Mystery only went gold, but Seger kept trying to make another album of (even sharper) social commentary, because he became a father at forty-seven. While that was his self-stated reason for "retiring," to take care of his kids, he's got a lot to sort out and sing about, to his family, to himself, to whoever listens. He's got a new song about war: "No More" is the title, and the point. He sounds, not necessarily older than on most of Face The Promise, but weary. He's tired of having to sing about war; he remembers previous occasions all too well. And that's a cure for nostalgia: a good strong memory.
Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band Play Charlotte Bobcats Arena, with Steve Azar; Jan 16; 7:30; $65; www.charlottebobcatsarena.com.
a longer, maybe better version of this one: http://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html
Symptoms ov life:
Sepultura still digs for fire
By Don Allred
Dec. 6, 2006
Sepultura, whose name means "grave," is a death metal band,
founded in mid-80s Belo Horizonte, "Beautiful Horizon," surrounded by the mountains of Southeastern Brazil. This was a carefully planned community, and later an oft-cited example of industrial urban sprawl (but still kinda pretty). Appropriately messed-up with such rockin' roots, Sepultura was inspired to move to even sprawlier, massively industrialized São Paulo, the biggest city in the Southern Hemisphere. Population estimates swirl around 12 million or so---it's a little hard to tell, with mitigating factors like AIDS, drugs, environmental pollution, gang warfare, traffic, and cops (not necessarily in that order).
founded in mid-80s Belo Horizonte, "Beautiful Horizon," surrounded by the mountains of Southeastern Brazil. This was a carefully planned community, and later an oft-cited example of industrial urban sprawl (but still kinda pretty). Appropriately messed-up with such rockin' roots, Sepultura was inspired to move to even sprawlier, massively industrialized São Paulo, the biggest city in the Southern Hemisphere. Population estimates swirl around 12 million or so---it's a little hard to tell, with mitigating factors like AIDS, drugs, environmental pollution, gang warfare, traffic, and cops (not necessarily in that order).
Sepultura has never stopped writing about such local, everyday atrocities. Chaos A.D. and Roots Bloody Roots found their way to a whole, real world of hurt. Like the exiled, wandering, score-settling late-medieval poet Dante Alighieri, Sepultura spotted a lot of familiar faces in Hell. Not so surprising that their new album, Dante XXI, shares some themes with Dante's Divine Comedy, though Sepultura's lyricists – singer Derrick Green, who came to DC as a voracious African American teen in Cleveland, and the equally on-point guitarist Andreas Kisser – never try to imitate Dante's verse. (Green and Kisser may feel like exiles from Credibility Island, since the dramatic departure of Sepultura's co-founders, brothers Max and Igor Cavalera.)(Also, though he's always rough and ready with a tune, Green has even been charged by some keepers ov the metal flame with being a rapper, gasp.)
Sepultura's 2003 release, Roorback, brought a sardonically swinging, slippery dynamic to songs that otherwise might've seemed too preachy and stiff. On Dante XXI, the slipperiness penetrates the material more deeply. A handclap backbeat provides a parody of gospel music, while a faintly sarcastic choir seeps into the headphones, like a whiff of gas. Brittle, hollow-pinging sounds flicker like a migraine around roaring, down-tuned guitar and bass. Horns and cellos appear, like polyps, in the murky center of the mix. At other times, the horns seem to lead the hunt, or circle overhead, like searchlights. Cellos may also mourn or brood, or turn as harsh and dry as the guitars usually are.
Other sounds, including those of words, get lost and reappear in new guises, new nuances. "Dark Wood Of Error" is dense but never too congested – the song and the album are always well-paced, like Dante's own journey through all shades of darkness and light. The narrator/singer's "I" rails at a "you" that sometimes seems like a distorted, mercurial image of himself. The "error" is straightforwardly admitted to be fear, seen as evidence of weakness and a sinful lack of faith in one's own better nature.
But also, the error of another "you" (sometimes "them") is so monstrously faithless, so compulsively fraudulent – promising salvation, law and order, everything – that mortal fear morphs into moral outrage and locks into a vicious power struggle with the forces of greedy oppression. (Did I mention it's a metal album?)
Eventually, in "City of Dis," a distinction is attempted between the steadfast heretic who, as Dante put it, "seems to hold all Hell in disrespect," and the overheated hero and/or villain, who snarls like a cornered B-movie gangster in "False." This antihero's stances and attitudes fuse in meltdown, despite declarations like "Your mask will soon fall, I will be free from this grave where you lie." The song takes place in "Molebolge" (Dante's "Malebolge" or "Bad Purse" for very bad pennies aka filthy, greedy souls). "End of Hell," Derrick Green abruptly announces, skipping Dante's frozen ninth ring, the quicker to land in Purgatory.
If the protagonist can stand to be alone, there's a chance things will get better.
If so, his reward is the "Crown and Miter" of faith found in himself, and so he can give up the power struggle: "Powerless! What does that mean? Who has control over everything? I had to have compassion, to understand that I have to give." But it still sounds pretty ominous. Sepultura might have noticed that although Dante earned and rewarded himself with a heavenly vision at the end of his Divine Comedy, he died soon after finishing it. The band sounds determined to sail its underground river as long as they can, seeing by the light of Hell or Heaven or whatever's at hand.
Sepultura plays Tremont Music Hall, with Sworn Enemy, Diecast, Suicide Silence; Dec. 6; 7:30 p.m.; $18-$20; www.tremontmusichall.com.
Mayberry After Dark
And They'll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning:
Nickel Creek's l'il pilgrims progress, cope, burn, chill
By Don Allred
Oct. 11, 2006http://clclt.com/charlotte/and-theyll-sweep-out-the-ashes-in-the-morning/Content?oid=2141149
Nickel Creek's self-titled Sugar Hill debut in 2000 was a vivid mix of youngblood joy and anxiety running through bluegrass. Raised conservatively -- but in Southern California -- the trio were prodigies living near prodigals, singing: "My greatest fear will be that you will crash and burn, and I won't feel your fire, I'm hung up on that wire."
Nickel Creek's wires included those on the mandolin, banjo and bouzouki of Chris Thile, then 19 (he's the tallest, and most excitable-sounding); the fiddle of Sara Watkins, at 18; the guitar of her brother Sean, who was 23; and the little-but-wiry vocals of all, who have performed and recorded together since childhood. On their very first album, 1993's Little Cowpoke, the band featured the traditional (and Hollywood) Western stylings of Chris, age 12; Sara, 11; and Sean, 15. (Be sure to request that era's "I'm an Old Cowhand," when they come to town.)
The 2000 release went gold, which is unusual for bluegrass, but so is the trio's music. Not so much the classical and jazz elements; those are fairly typical of progressive bluegrass. The young Nickels already had a strikingly personal point of view. Songs like "A Lighthouse's Tale" were early glimpses of their take on the world's beauty and wreckage, between the sea and the mountains, home and the freeway. Nickel Creek also sounded like they were ready to hit the road, Jack. There was one potential problem they were taking with them.
"Look at my girlfriend, isn't she pretty?" Chris asked, shakily, clutching his mandolin and staring down into its "face" for CMT's cameras, in late 2001. "I don't wanna boyfriend!" Sara laughingly answered a nosy reporter in the same mini-documentary, while still sounding like she meant it. Nickel Creek's energies seemed entirely focused on their music, and the resulting nervous edge was smoothed out by producer Alison Krauss, who brought the atmospheric sound of her own successful bluegrass-pop albums to the trio's work. The blend was distinctive, which may well be why Nickel Creek ended up in Billboard's Country Top Twenty in 2002.
On their second album, 2002's This Side, there were coded, subdued indications that Nickel Creek's (very) private lives were getting more complicated. But This Side's subtleties became hard to listen to, as Krauss' cautious approach gradually made the music more predictable. The group's new Why Should the Fire Die? (Sugar Hill) sports more versatile producers, Eric Valentine and Tony Berg, who make the dark moments seem dramatic now. The numbing down of This Side is receding.
On Fire, the Nickels sound like they've been easing into the kind of places they once could only enter via the stage door. And they've kept up with their homework. The disc's first single, "When in Rome," doesn't fiddle around except in the musical sense, as Sara's sweet, snake-charmer strings chime around Chris's calls: "Hey, those books you gave us look good on the shelves at home, and they'll burn warm in the fireplace, Teacher, when in Rome. Grab a blanket, sister, we'll make smoke signals, bring in some new blood, it feels like we're alone."
There are also plenty of candlelight confessions, which underscore what seems to be a more direct lyrical tack. Some boasting about what bad li'l pilgrims they are surfaces, as each Nickel contributes to the songwriting and takes turns singing lead. The only consistently disappointing track is Sara's wispy version of Dylan's "Tomorrow Is A Long Time." Brief instrumentals provide refreshment, while adding momentum. And "Doubting Thomas" is a confession so mature it's inspiring, especially since it leads to the breakthrough of the title song, in which love and doubt aren't just risked and endured, but embraced. If you can grow up to that point, then indeed, why should the fire die?
Nickel Creek plays at Ovens Auditorium, with opener Leona Naess, on October 13 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $24.50-$29.50. Call 704-522-6500 or go to www.musictoday.com.
The World's A Mess, It's In Their Kiss
X is still ready to cross your heart
By Don Allred
Aug. 23, 2006
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Los Angeles, 1976: rockabilly genius guitarist Billy Zoom and bar band bassist/Beat Generation fan John Doe decide to form a band. The duo's inspired by the "classic rock & roll music and kind of funny, sick lyrics" Zoom says he's found on the Ramones' self-titled debut album. 1977: Doe attends the Beyond Baroque poetry workshop and meets Exene Cervenka. He wants to use her poems as lyrics, but she doesn't trust him alone with them, so she joins the band. The pair finds a way to sing together, wailing in slippery-rail harmony. 1978: jazz-schooled drummer DJ Bonebrake joins, and the band, X, proves to be an intersection of insight and sheer flash. Both can be found in words and music alike, as their Aug. 23 show at Tremont will no doubt demonstrate.
The band's first single, 1978's "Adult Books" (on the Dangerhouse label), is the ripe embryo of all Xstory. Cervenka yowls (and Doe chants): "Many, many guys and girls, all real beauties. Everybody's making a stab, they hurt themselves. Singles rule the world, feeding on fresh blood." Not exactly Oscar Wilde, but the droll drawl of their delivery suggests a twisted version of an old comedy routine, about Southern hicks, fresh off the bus -- like Homer & Jethro taking a walk on the wild side. Doe and Cervenka (late of Hairspray-era Baltimore and St. Augustine respectively, after both knocked around the boondocks with their folks) (Zoom was a cornhusker, Bonebrake is the band's only native Hollyweirdo) marvel at "all real beauties," rather than sneering in the stereotypically punk manner. Cervenka exclaims, "They're all in a line! Like adult books?! I don't understand!" But to us hard old city folk, it's a familiar sight: wasted youth, lined up for the taking, stuffed full of bad ideas and pulp fiction fever---cheap at twice the price, I tells ya!
The last verse is about a girl who finally gives in to a sadistic date, which seems to save her, because "he just goes for that special girl, who says no." This final twist is a b-movie gimmick for a b-side song, but it's still jarring, no matter how many times I listen. The a-side of that single, "Los Angeles," became the title song of X's first album, on the indie Slash label. Los Angeles wasn't recorded and released until 1980, three years after X began writing and performing. But by that time, they'd built on all the notions behind "Adult Books," editing songs with transitions meant to startle listeners into becoming more aware of how they're being "edited" by manipulators of greed and fear.
Just as that last sentence suggests, Los Angeles is an album about what "they" do -- until its last track, which tops the tumult of the third-person songs, by confessing, "The World's a Mess, It's In Our Kiss." Accompanied by the happy, trashy organ of former Doors keyboardist/longtime X producer Ray Manzarek, X is ready to dance this mess around, as the B-52s would put it.
Wild Gift (1981), X's second album, develops from "The World's" breakthrough, and "our" even becomes "my," though songs about the married life of Doe and Cervenka re-mix the funky details, so as not to reveal too much, or drive all the cool single people away. Things aren't so violent here, except for self-torture and a bit of mental revenge. For instance, on "White Girl," Doe moans about his attraction to a neighbor, and Cervenka keeps reminding him, "She's 19," sounding reproachful, then taunting, and then suggestive, stirring the mix of guilt and desire around and around (talk about your devil's food).
X's next album, 1982's Under The Big Black Sun, was its first for a major label, Elektra, where the band stayed until 1988, when it went on hiatus. Although X had maintained its high standards through the fourth album, More Fun In The New World (1983), it still wasn't selling many albums. X was too idiosyncratic, too arty and too rowdy for increasingly polarized hardcore punks and new wave popsters of the Big '80s. Billy Zoom left, but they all got back together to tour in 1998. Many of its best songs come roaring through 2005's Live In Los Angeles (Shout! Factory).
Also in 2005, Doe, Cervenka and Bonebrake reconvened their proto-alt-country side project, the Knitters, which also includes founding Blaster /sometime X lead guitarist/growler-songwriter Dave Alvin, for The Modern Sounds of the Knitters, a playfully soulful set on Rounder. Doe's recent Yep Roc releases, Forever Hasn't Happened Yet and For The Best Of Us, are his best solo work ever, as sleepless ballads and wellspring rockers continue to spin their way through worlds, messes and kisses.
X, the Rollins Band and the Riverboat Gamblers play the Tremont Music Hall; Aug. 23; 8pm; $25.00. www.tremontmusichall.com.
I Let my Mind Wander : Willie's Way
By Don Allred
July 25, 2006
http://clclt.com/charlotte/i-let-my-mind-wander/Content?oid=2145165
I let my mind wander, and what did it do?
It just kept right on going,
Until it got back to you.
− Willie Nelson, "I Let My Mind Wander," (ca. 1960)
On his new release, You Don't Know Me: The Songs Of Cindy Walker (Lost Highway), Willie Nelson starts out with "Bubbles In My Beer," a song he's been singing since he was a teenaged roadhouse journeyman in the 1940s, already wandering out of his tiny Hill Country hometown of Abbott, TX.
However Nelson sang it then, he sounds pretty worn out now, confessing that he blew his chance at true love: "and the dreams I once dreamed are empty, as empty as the bubbles in my beer." The bright little bubbles in the music seem to mock his ol' man quiver. Actually, though, Nelson's own peculiar and subtle western-swing style creates a unified effect: The whole track is tight and bouncy as any bubble, yet it never bursts into mere cuteness or self-pity. It's a great combination of both.
Classic Willie, in other words -- at least in terms of his own early songwriting, like "Crazy" and "Hello Walls" -- hits for Patsy Cline and Faron Young, respectively -- which he'll likely perform at Verizon on July 28.
Effective contrast is something that Nelson may well have learned about from fellow Texan songwriter Cindy Walker, who died in March. On You Don't Know Me, Walker's songwriting demonstrates how to adapt to different mid-20th century country music fashions without sacrificing distinction. She's got style, in both senses of the word.
Although he evidently did get some early tips from Walker's songs, Nelson later took the misery and fun of "Bubbles In My Beer" to a new extreme for an emerging Nashville songwriter. In his early '60s song "I Just Can't Let You Say Goodbye," describing a spurned lover who finally turns violent, the lyrics are both startling, in a sneaky way, and yet reassuring, because the trickiness is like something in a screenplay. Not a movie -- it's a little more detached than that.
(Nelson may have been looking for a kind of novelty hit, the musical equivalent of trendy, Hitchcock heyday, cross-genre "psycho-westerns" like Paul Newman's Left-Handed Gun.)
Yet that detachment makes it more believable, ultimately: Here's the typical early Nelsonian brooding nerd character once again, still sitting in a honky-tonk and forever polishing the lines he'll (probably) never say to the woman who done him wrong.
In or out of honky-tonks, there are a lot of people like that. This one's got a palpably woman-shaped hole in him, which all the booze and all the music can't fill. But still, Nelson's got to try, and her absence and his need -- expressed in a vocal and guitar style that are conversational, spontaneous-seeming via expert timing -- are real enough to make for compelling listening. (Check out RCA's virtuoso 1966 set, Country Music Concert, later on CD as Willie Nelson Live.)
Nelson's early songs return, in a high-contrast reggae setting, on the 2005 Lost Highway collection Countryman. This album’s uneven; sometimes the vaulting grooves seem to romp obliviously all over his worn voice, not even mocking it, like those "Bubbles In My Beer" did.
More often, though, he and the other performers act out a mutual sense of righteous grievance. (It also helps that he covers two of the most reliable, vibrant 1970s reggae anthems: Jimmy Cliff's "Sitting Here In Limbo" and "The Harder They Come.") There's not too much leaning on rhetorical self-righteousness because the music, as written, arranged and performed, is too fluid to stand pat.
And of course, "On The Road Again" is his theme song; he seems to still thrive on touring. His new book, The Tao Of Willie (Gotham Press), is a reminder of his long-held belief in reincarnation, of the underlying balance between continuity and change.
It's this guiding -- but still restless -- sense of the connections underneath divisions (in time and space, music and society) that seem to keep Nelson going and inspired. He's not above working different angles: The 2002 "vigilante" duet with Toby Keith, "Beer For My Horses". on Keith's Unleashed, was followed in 2003 (while the Iraq War was still young) by the anti-war "Whatever Happened To Peace On Earth?" The pro-gay cover of Texan singer-songwriter Ned Sublette's "Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly" was released on Valentine's Day of this year.
Both of the latter tracks remain available only as iTunes downloads (the "Cowboys" is also a ringtone). But Nelson keeps taking chances, to whatever degree.
His 1973 LP, Phases And Stages (which has just been re-released as part of The Complete Atlantic Sessions on Rhino), could easily have been mere (rather than inspired) soap opera. Phases...could have turned off his newly acquired rock audience, which was developing a taste for rough-edged country: Nelson even uses some string arrangements, which he'd previously rejected when moving from the conservative Countrypolitan approach toward his hip Outlaw image. The strings, are effective though---warm ‘n’ eerie--- and the set is presented in a then-fashionable rock format: the concept album. It's about a couple who have broken up and are trying to adapt. Eventually, the woman is left back at the beginning: "I may be falling in love again, and if I lose or win, how will I know?" Maybe if she lets her mind wander just a little bit further.
Willie Nelson and John Fogerty play the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre; Friday, July 28, 7:30pm; Tickets are $53.50, $38.50 and $23.50.
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