Roy Orbison - Oh Pretty Woman

Roy Orbison and Friends - A Black and White Night

Still in the throes of examining so not posting much. Listening is mainly to the radio as I mark, though I have heard some exciting recent music like Neneh Cherry and The Thing's The Cherry Thing, but more on that another time.

Tonight I dipped into the A Black and White Night programme just as they were playing out on Orbison's classic song Oh Pretty Woman. There's nothing I need to say about how great this really is. I just wanted to observe I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard this: in my big sister's bedroom in Norfolk, Nebraska, and I was a 10 or 11 old kid and I thought then, immediately, that this was an amazing song.

Guitarist James Burton plays some superb licks on the televised recording from 1988, ably assisted by Bruce Springsteen.

It was in Norfolk Nebraska where my big sister and one of her tough boyfriends stole my dad's car one night - a beautiful Chrysler - and they had to take me along for our illicit ride because I used the money collected from my paper-round that night to pay for the gasoline. I don't think I heard Oh Pretty Woman on the car radio but it would have been a cool song playing as we glided up and down the hills on the long straight road I recall our cruising across that night.

Pearl Jam, Isle of Wight, 23rd June, 2012

Prostitution

Baudelaire has written how we all prostitute ourselves at some time in our lives, so if you subscribe to Sky you will be able to watch Pearl Jam live at the Isle of Wight tonight on SkyArts1 and be in good company. I bought my council house too back in 1987, but I think my links to Thatcher and Murdoch are tenuous enough to be completely overwritten by a lifelong love of great music and a principled stand on most important matters in my life.

Pearl Jam's Summer Solstice

whatever you dream on this night will come to pass

Shakespeare obviously didn't drive homeward from Manchester to the West Country today in torrential rain. Nor did he light the multi-fuel stove once home or put the heating on to 'celebrate' the summer solstice [I've always recognised this on the 21st June, though some say the 20th].

Outside it is still not completely dark at 9.47pm as I type, but hardly the bright of the longest summer's day as here in England we have an illumination of grey.

Thank goodness I saw Pearl Jam yesterday to bring a ray of light to the Northern Solstice. Much more secure and memorable than dreaming.

Pearl Jam - Manchester Arena, 20th June, 2012

Pearl Jam - Manchester Arena, 20th June, 2012

As an American resident in England for over 40 years, I have both an English and an American voice, and the former will occasionally exercise control over the latter, for example in preventing my ever saying the word awesome to describe a meal I have just eaten, or a view just seen, or a nap just taken - choosing instead words more precise and meaningful - and indeed the title of this blog, for anyone who hasn't noticed, takes pleasure in poking fun at that particular American superlative for anything better than bad, but after seeing Pearl Jam last night in Manchester, there is only one word that will do, though I will prefix it with an adjective I regularly use, accepting its attributing function is now linguistically international as a pre-modifier:

fucking awesome!!!

And in the momentary spirit of my laissez-faire attitude to communication, note the naive over-use of the exclamation mark too. You can see that I just don't care!!!

There's not much more to be said now either, that word for this exceptional moment sufficing to characterise this exceptional live performance. I've seen Pearl Jam only three times across their two decades of existence: at the Wembley Arena in the mid nineties, at Cardiff in 2000, and last night in Manchester. This was, without doubt, the best of the three. Launching their European tour, the band was fresh and exuberant; the sound quality was superb - even for those of us listening with the gods - and Eddie Vedder was in brilliant voice and evident happy spirits.

Before the concert began, my daughter and I were discussing the price of tickets these days - not complaining about last night's in particular because it was Pearl Jam [!], but simply observing how expensive it has become over the years to see the 'big' acts. Soon after this anticipation-filler, the band came on and the lights dimmed to deep blue and the opening song Release filled the stadium with its beauty, Vedder's vocal in awesome control. When finished, my daughter and I turned to one another and said the ticket price was worth that one song alone. And we meant it.

The two and a half hour set was stunning. The performance finished on a second encore of five songs, the final three being Jeremy, Alive, and music-affirming Rockin' In The Free World. For that by now familiar Neil Young closer, the lights came up in the stadium and everyone was on their feet singing and dancing. It was a party atmosphere where crowd and band coalesced in the moment that makes live music so precious, especially on this one night with Pearl Jam.

I mustn't finish without commenting on McCready's brilliant guitar playing throughout the night, and of course the band's entire excellence, but as ever for me and so many it was Eddie Vedder's dominant, and certainly last night, fresh vocal that made this concert the word-I-don't-need-to-use-again experience it was. Exclamation marks.

Joe Zawinul – Zawinul, [1971]

I Dig, Do You?

I was delighted to get a vinyl copy of this on Saturday, though I didn’t know the album. Miles Davis’ hipster liner notes were enough to swing the purchase for me, mentioning, as he does, Herbie with the echoplex. That’s Hancock of course. Davis’ narrative reflects the cool ethos of the time, his closing eulogy being In order to write this type of music, you have to be ‘free inside of yourself’ and be Josef Zawinul with two beige kids, a black wife, two pianos, from Vienna, a Cancer and “Cliché-Free”.

It’s a mix of contemporary, sprawling jazz with Zawinul and Hancock on electric piano and some fine trumpet from Woody Shaw on the first track, and there are elegant, shorter pieces like In A Silent Way which I gather, in my continued musical education, is a rather famous composition. The soprano sax of Earl Turbington is caressed with a variety of background effects that signal 70s’ early experimentation with electronics.

The album opens with Doctor Honoris Causa, and the notes beneath the track read Dedicated to Herbie Hancock for his Honorary Doctorate at Grinnell University in Des Moines, Iowa, and I like that as I was born in Omaha, Nebraska which literally backs on to this twin town where my Uncle Glenn lived. Connections. Bill Bryson also famously wrote I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to. I lived in a small town in Iowa for a while so have some empathy.

I love the album’s closing track Arrival In New York at 1 minute and 59 seconds [which is a very precise timing!]. It is a brilliant horn, effects and percussive recreation of Joe Zawinul’s first impressions of New York when he arrived here as a boy on a ship from France.

As Miles encourages with his hip imperative verb: Dig it. I do. And only £4.99. 

Nils Lofgren - Damaged Goods

Glorious Goods

Guitar god, hired gun, axeman - of the three I suspect the first label wouldn't trip off most tongues, but it would mine. Seen perhaps mostly as Springsteen sideman, that would not do justice to the distinctive guitar style upon which Lofgren has built his musical career. His songwriting may not top popular charts, but it is consistently good, and his voice is another distinctive feature if an acquired taste. It is always the guitar that excels. Lofgren rarely rips it up, and it is the control of dancing across harmonics and taming feedback for its glorious releases that delights constantly.

Just wanted to say this as I listen to this tenth studio album from 1995. As I write, the guitar is being reined in and out on Here For You - not the strongest song, but as ever enhanced by the guitar playing - and the earlier track Only Five Minutes is a fine one with complementary soprano saxophone by Branford Marsalis. This album does contain the great Lofgren song Black Books, always a live favourite.

Tower of Babel

A good friend suggested I might like to write a poem on his theme Tower of Babel so I have and here it is. Haven't got a clue what it means, but that seemed appropriate:

And Done

that sound of many sounds could just be inside

your head or my head

he said you said i said

                                      as if either matters when such

noise is made by so many morons

- and do you think you

hear the moronic ahead of my aural radar -

i could say fuck you in many languages but wouldn’t

stack them to detract and diminish any one salient,

resonant and crystal-clear vocal directing

he said you said i said

perhaps they all said the same at the same time the

same things that we are saying now

as if it matters when all is said

The Beach Boys – That’s Why God Made The Radio

Waving Goodbye To The Waves

Firmly hooked into the Beach Boys’ glorious pop past, this album reflects both the narratives and beautiful harmonies of that time. There is, thankfully, no attempt to update the template so there’s no rap or scratch or sampling or other inverted anachronisms, though I will comment on its other anachronistic tendencies anon. After the sonic reminder of the precision of their harmonies with nothing but this harmonising in the opening Think About The Days, second and title track That’s Why God Made The Radio is an adamant hypothesis for a deity I do not recognise, but after listening I’m prepared to twiddle the spiritual knobs invoked by its heavenly sound. I’ve read commentators call the music on this album unimaginative and slick and I think the latter adjective at least perfectly sums up the perfection. Would anyone really be expecting anything remarkably different to what we know, especially of Brian Wilson over recent years? To have this much of an echo of the Beach Boys’ familiar sound seems generous enough in the circumstances.

I do acknowledge the unsettling anachronism of 70 year olds singing about ‘digging’ summer vacation, cruising in their cars, going steady, good vibrations and summer weather and other whitewashed teenage dreams from a past that was never this innocently utopian anyway, but in many ways that’s the fun of the album: its happy reconstruction of a world by old guys who know better but still sing it so prettily. Even the do bee do bee dos seem somehow acceptable when wrapped in the California sun and Pacific coast namechecks, and our recent British heatwave has given this some aural Anglo-credibility. Today’s rain hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm either, and when the guys sing in Shelter - I’ll give you shelter and keep you warm – my listening accepts in full this musical architecture.

The album’s firmer grasp on reality does, however, get revealed at the end. The final three tracks have a sound and focus that feels more genuinely self-aware and mature. Tenth From There To Back Again presents some of the most exquisite harmonies on the album, followed even more beautifully by Pacific Coast Highway where the yearning to go home is perhaps more than a geographical location. Then final track Summer’s Gone is achingly melancholic in the most obvious of Beach Boy metaphors where summer fun and all its memories of youth fade into the song’s ending with a haunting sound of waves crashing goodbye on the shore, just after the closing line and dream about our yesterdays.

Kaya Street - Harry Birch

Hammock Heaven

Where Hot Dub Bikini Party intuited sizzling summers and lively alfresco partying [reviewed 18th March, 2011], this latest release Kaya Street from Harry Birch – driving force of that former reggae-infused band – suggests lounging in warm summer hammocks to absorb and enjoy in peaceful repose, not that the lyrical preoccupations confine themselves to fretless narratives, as here lost love and missed opportunity provides an edge just like that hammock’s occasional precarious swing.

It’s a natural inclination to listen for influence and/or echo in music that captures your attention, and by way of providing some overall complimentary context I do hear Devendra Banhart at times in the sweet simplicity of some songs, the tone of a Paolo Nutini in Harry’s fine vocal – a welcome focus on this album’s 13 tracks – and the noticeable move from reggae rhythms to generic African guitar riffs, these often cascading delightfully around the melodies.

Opener This City immediately features those African guitar cascades and the pleasing harmonies heard on many songs. Second How Much Longer? puts the vocal to the centre and highlights the gentle falsetto that Harry employs throughout the album. Fourth Morning is a pretty song full of folk credentials that slowly rises to an emotional height and is then eased out on violin strains and guitar, perhaps a little long in its journey. And when I say ‘pretty’ I do mean to stress its sweet attraction.

Fifth You Should Have Been Mine opens with brash saxophone to poke us out of the pretty lull of the former, the vocal again rising to falsetto peaks to perhaps empathise with the heightened emotions of the title’s lament. Sixth He’s Not The One has us pondering in the comforting caress of our aural hammock if there is real or imagined loss in the triplet of lovelorn storytelling completed by seventh The Fool. Eighth Sway provides more saxophone from R. Beavis [I would have liked Christian names – even Harry is H. Birch] and this dances enticingly in the background amongst the harmonies that open the song as well as Harry’s strong vocal that follows. This is a genuine grower. Listen here: http://kayastreet.bandcamp.com/track/sway

Ninth The Border is my favourite. It has catchy guitar work and an equally catchy but simple melody, and is predominantly acoustic guitar and solo vocal that I imagine is great to hear live. J. Mansfield provides pleasing violin strains, presumably multi-tracked, to close the song. Tenth Never Enough opens with a continuation of the violins as well as the by now signature vocal falsetto breaks.

Eleventh Low returns us to a Bikini reprise with its opening reggae sax riff which shifts to Booker T and then back to reggae roots, supported with echoing guitar. On a grey Jubilee day with a nation entertained by a flotilla of fleeting royal patriotism, I was better entertained by the empathising - but hopefully equally fleeting in respect of the weather – penultimate track Summer’s Over. The album ends on Brother, an almost secret track that fades in from an apparent distance and seems to stay there in a background, Harry’s fragile falsetto suggesting something from afar, and it is this gentle breath of a song and singing that in many ways characterises the whole album, though I trust I have also reflected its other confidence, especially in the African rhythms [or as tagged at http://kayastreet.bandcamp.com/ - afro pop  alternative  soul  folk  indie  raggae  soul  Exeter ] of Harry Birch’s fine guitar playing and songwriting as well as distinctive singing.

Willie Nelson – Heroes

Rollin' and Smokin' With Ol' Willie

Another aural treadmill traverse tonight, this time striding with the quintessential Country rhythms of Willie Nelson’s recent, glorious album Heroes. At 79, Willie is still crooning out the most sublime songs with a little bit of outlaw sensibility here and there [Roll Me Up] and with classic Country melody. Synonym son Lukas offers support throughout – and it is a more dynamic duo than when Willie supports on his boy’s albums – and there is further help provided by the likes of Merle Haggard, Snoop Dog [with smoking proclivities rather than any Country affiliations], Kris Kristofferson, Jamey Johnson, Sheryl Crow, Ray Price and others.

Opener A Horse Called Music is a gorgeous cowboy lament with Merle Haggard, and next Roll Me Up [and smoke me before I die] keeps the proceedings lively and irreverent. There is a clutch of beautiful lovelorn songs, like third That’s All There Is To The Song. Fourth No Place To Fly is another painful love confession and the father/son singing of the Nelsons resonates with the varying experience of loss and how to tug us along with the sorryful narrative. This is followed by the two again on Every Time He Drinks He Thinks of Her [but every morning her memory fades away], so more from the heartache of such familiar themes.

Sixth track Tom Wait’s Come On Up To The House, sung as a superb Country gospel, sees Crow providing emotive female vocal support, and it might have been endorphins aroused by the brisk walking [my back is too fucked to run anymore] but I had goose bumps listening to this on full volume to drown out the treadmill’s noisy swirl. Pearl Jam’s Just Breathe sits more comfortably within this whole album than on its own, but I struggle with the cover of Coldplay’s The Scientist, but that is largely down to my antipathy to their latter work. But with lines like Come on back Jesus and pick up John Wayne on the way from Come On Back Jesus, the Country ideology is, thankfully, the predominant feature of this wonderful album.

Joe Bonamassa - Driving Towards the Daylight

Briefly Examining the Blues

Exam work has been demanding and listening to music has been constrained, or more correctly has been restricted to the radio. But I listened today to most of Bonamassa's 13th album release Driving Towards the Daylight on an early evening treadmill escape from online standardising, moderating wayward marking, phone calls to guide and support, listening to scripts being read aloud, and pursuing my own prime marking load.

It's another great album from a great artist. His superb guitar work is surely beyond question. I used to enjoy his Planet Rock radio programme where he talked knowingly about the influence on his playing of other great guitarists and how he would always illustrate by playing perfectly in the style of his then focus. He possesses the true artist's gifts of instinct and work ethic.

There isn't time to review the album and you should just make sure you listen to it if you like soaring rock blues. There are covers of Howlin' Wolf and Robert Johnson - hardly a surprise - but also Tom Waits. In mentioning his expert knack of fully knowing and emulating great guitar styles, Joe delivers a fine echoing tribute to Gary Moore with the ballad A Place In My Heart that so clearly takes Parisian Walkways as its emotive model.

Child of God - Cormac McCarthy

More Travels With Cormac

I’ve just started reading The Crossing, second in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. Those following this blog will know I started reading his work with No Country for Old Men, and then All The Pretty Horses. I have written about the wonderful, lengthy compound sentence structures he uses in that latter novel mentioned, and he continues with these in The Crossing.

I am writing now briefly about Child of God, his novella that I have just finished. In looking for a copy of a cover to post with this, I read that the book was written in 1974 [I hadn’t looked when I read!]. Shows how stupid I am: I perceived of him as a modern writer, in a recent time sense, not the literary one of which he clearly is ‘modern’. It must have been prompted by a sense of the recent movie of NCFOM, and The Road, which I haven’t yet read. And ATPH was written in 1992. It hadn’t struck me that he had started writing and was published in the sixties. And I have only really taken note of him this year. Astonishing.

Child of God is a brilliantly and at times beautifully written story of the disgusting and despicable Lester Ballard, a man-thing who roams and ruts and routs around the hill country of East Tennessee. I’m not sure that there is a classic tension in what we as readers feel about this nasty protagonist, who is never even an anti-hero, and who never seeks our forgiveness or understanding either consciously or otherwise. I don’t believe McCarthy does. Ballard’s isolation both socially and physically in the story isn’t compromised by any authorial hand-holding. You must read this to experience the degradation for yourselves. The only one of two palliatives I can offer is that there are moments of humour. But they don’t last long.

The other is the writing style. At times, this sickening story is expressed so poetically that this could provide the only chance of being serenaded to some kind of empathy, but it is never about a Macbeth who is given salvation and redemption though a heightened language. There are many styles too, from vivid description to first person vernacular by unidentified speakers. Near the end, the sheriff and his deputy think and express themselves as templates for the Sheriff in No Country for Old Men. Here, fairly randomly, are two poetic narrations: the first about fireworks –

High above their upturned faces it burst, sprays of glycerine flaring across the night, trailing down the sky in loosely falling ribbons of hot spectra soon burnt to naught. Another went up, a long whishing sound, fishtailing aloft. In the bloom of its opening you could see like its shadow the image of the rocket gone before, the puff of black smoke and ashen trails arcing out and down like huge and dark medusa squatting in the sky

 and the second, hounds attacking a boar –

Ballard watched this ballet tilt and swirl and churn mud up through the snow and watched the lovely blood there in its holograph of battle, spray burst from a ruptured lung, the dark heart’s blood, pinwheel and pirouette, until shots rang and all was done

There are countless more, some where the poetry is more lyrically in tune with the qualities being described, others even more antithetical in the grotesque juxtapositions of beautiful language and horrific events/situations. In this respect, there is schizophrenia in the reading, and I highly recommend the madness.

Joe Deninzon and Stratospheerius - The Next World

Se Ven Ties

Sev en ties / Se ven ties: three syllables, or three sounds – I suppose this makes it apt as a mantra. A music mantra. Music does not need to evoke the sound of the seventies to win my favour, but it can. Or invoke the sound of the seventies.

The violin as rock lead instrument is a seventies speciality, and I have addressed this elsewhere so will not return to details now. New York band Joe Deninzon and Stratospheerius has a lot of the seventies in its sound, not least the electrified violin of the band’s leader, but there is also bluegrass and folk – which is quite timeless – that dances around with the progressive and fusion layers. The violin Joe uses has seven strings: se ven / sev en.

Joe plays all the strings with virtuoso variation, and he sings. It is an excellent band and the album’s eleven tracks are all fine songs. Two great instrumental tracks are Ballad for Ding Bang and Road Rage, the first with melancholic moments that lead to an electric end, and the second plugged into the grid from the start. There is obviously a hint of Curved Air here and there, but that is an inevitable consequence of the precursor echo. There are many other progressive ricochets, as well as a tinge of West Coast in occasional harmonies. 7 out of Seven.

Seventies Again

BBC Sounds of the 70s 2

Another slice of seventies nostalgia on tonight's BBC Sounds of the 70s 2, and if you missed it, chase it down with a snorter or two on iplayer. A mainly live set of archive footage apart from the two mimed Top of the Pops selections that bookend this fine blast from the past:

Alice Cooper
The Faces
Nazareth
Bad Company
AC/DC
Thin Lizzy
Whitesnake
Black Sabbath

Monophonics - In Your Brain

Summer Soul Symmetry

Today was a suggestion of summer with the warmth and sun - sounds enough, but May's grey length has cast a long shadow of doubt - but other good shadows have been thrown by this energising light of hope for at least one more week of the same to remind us we don't live at one of the Poles, and Monophonics, who hail from the San Francisco Bay Area, cast their own sunny sense of something special, this time the psychedelic and sweet soul/funk of the seventies so that listening to their latest release In Your Brain does just that: gets inside the head and mixes sounds of old soul and summers gone to provide a template for tomorrow. There's A Riot Going On they sing and things are hotting up finally.

Robin Gibb

Sad to hear of the news of Robin Gibb's death.

I have always been a fan of the music of the Bee Gees, and Robin's songwriting partnership with brothers Barry and Maurice is a significant part of that, as well as in the major contribution to the world of popular music this represents. Those who follow this blog will know I have a considerable fondness for harmony and ballads, and all-time favourites of mine are,

Massachusetts
Words
I've Gotta Get a Message To You
I Started a Joke
How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
How Deep Is Your Love

Robin's tremulous tenor/falsetto also made a massive contribution to the enduring quality of these great songs. Various commentators today have compared Robin and his brothers' songwriting partnership with Lennon and McCartney and I'll go along with that. Even the move to Disco, and to each their own.

Culinary Hit

Statistics

Taking a brief exam break, I think it is worth mentioning that my most 'popular' blog posting to date - if I am judging the number of site hits correctly [and it is simply noting the highest number next to a single posting as far as I can work out] - hasn't been one about music, which I could have reasonably hoped, or poetry, which would have been personally rewarding, but is instead my posting Taking The Biscuit. Whilst this mentions as a ruse the band Cracker, it is simply a reflection on American graham crackers and my discovery of their British equivalent, the digestive biscuit.

For breakfast this morning I had black pudding, fried egg and fried potatoes. Lunch will be fruit. Tonight I shall be eating a chicken curry.

Let's see what bites this gets.

State of Sass

Just listening to a greatest hits of Donna Summer. I was never a huge fan, but no one who likes music could ignore the impact and excellence of stunners like Love To Love You Baby, Could It Be Magic, and I Feel Love. Even more so State of Independance which has just played and I am now replaying with its rousing repetition of the anthemic melody. As she provided so much sexuality to synthesised sound, Summer is now surely singing in Sass Heaven. Amen.

Davis On Fornicating With Presidents

Not sure why this came up as a link on today's Guardian page [seems to be written in September 2011], but it did, and it is interesting, so here's a taster from that blog entry which one hopes is true

His explosive wit

Davis was a man of few words. When he did speak, his words often had a similar effect to a hand grenade being lobbed into the room. In 1987, he was invited to a White House dinner by Ronald Reagan. Few of the guests appeared to know who he was. During dinner, Nancy Reagan turned to him and asked what he'd done with his life to merit an invitation. Straight-faced, Davis replied: "Well, I've changed the course of music five or six times. What have you done except fuck the president?"

And here's the link if you wish to read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/sep/28/miles-davis-20-years

I am heavily into exam work at the moment and thus my own blog entries have ceased. No one seems to be sobbing into their empty aweless moments, so I will be returning when I do.

Cracker – Kerosene Hat

Collectively Chameleon

And now for the album itself – not one of the greats for me – yet in the early 90s this had enough heaviness to become a part of the rock renaissance I have been writing about recently: but it is more punk than grunge, the opening three tracks, including single Low, leaning loosely to the former.

What really appealed was the title track, a languid narrative with one of those obtuse storylines that pulls you into its uncertain depths, the guitar lick providing a balladic rock anchor,

How can I fly with these old doggy wings

While the magpie sings some shiny song?

Old corn face, row of teeth

She says sweetly to me in the elevator

Everything seems like a dream

And life's a scream

Here come old Kerosene Hat

With his ear flaps waxed, a-courting his girl

Come clattering in here on your old cloven skates

With that devilish spoon

Everything seems like a dream

And life's a scream

When you're submarine

So don't you bother me, death

With your leathery ways and your old chaise lounge

Wickerman's fence of leathery tyres

And the cook's gone bad, started several fires

Everything seems like a dream

When you're submarine

Head like a stream, she says softly to me

From the rattling chair

"Bring me a steak and my old pair of crows

My medicine lamp"

Everything seems like a dream

So life's a scream

This is followed by another folkrock song Take Me Down To The Infirmary with more lyrical as well as musical echoes of the past, here sounding like the Stones, if only marginally. Sweet Potato has the most rock street cred on the album, again aping TRS, if only partially. I Want Everything is an internal echo of Take Me Down... and reminds of Tom Petty, whilst Lonesome Johnny Blues further establishes its 70s qualifications as a countryrock outing with fiddle and pedal steel cameos. The poles of this album are reflected in tracks eleven and twelve, respectively punk pace in Let’s Go For A Ride and storytelling ballad in Loser, and it is this chameleon collectivism from a past sound that attracted particularly at the time, and entertains though doesn’t grip and hold tight today.