(This post originally appeared on my other blog Strawberry Flats, which was dedicated to my love of roots music.)
Here’s the January installment of Gone Pickin’, a monthly top ten of albums, singles, DVDs, live gigs, and an mp3 or two or three.
1. Payday
No song sums up the life of Payday’s Maury Dann, a second-tier country star forever fucked up and forever on the road, better than Waylon Jennings’ “Pick Up the Tempo” — Some people are saying that time/ Will take care of people like me/ That I’m living too fast/ And they say I can’t last much longer. This makes sense, considering Peter Guralnick, in his book Lost Highway, claimed actor Rip Torn based a good chunk of the character on a pre-stardom Waylon. Over the course of a single day Dann guzzles booze, pops pills, tokes a few joints, fights then fires his guitarist, bangs three groupies, smacks his soon-to-be ex-wife, kills a man and finally dies of a heart attack while driving his limo across a landscape that reminds him of his childhood (he left the farm when he was just 12). Despite all this, Torn makes this depraved fucker really quite sympathetic — sad even. As Jennings sings later on in “Pick Up the Tempo” — I’m wild and I’m mean/ I’m creatin’ a scene, I’m goin’ crazy/ I’m good and I’m bad/ And I’m happy and sad and I’m lazy. That’s Maury Dann.
2. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom
Speaking of Peter Guralnick, I’m halfway into his 430-page Sweet Soul Music, and I’m experiencing my first full-blown obsession with southern soul. I already own plenty of James Brown and Sam Cooke and Otis Redding. But now I’m into the story and all its wild characters: Dan Penn, Al Bell, Duck Dunn, Spooner Oldham and so on. It’s truly mind blowing to learn just how small and mom-n-pop operations like Stax and FAME originally were. Imagine a tiny room of folks above a drugstore in some dead-end, nowheresville town changing the course of pop music history. That’s essentially the story over and over, from Muscle Shoals to Macon (Memphis is kinda-sorta the exception). Now that I live in the South (although many call Asheville “Appalachia”) I need to take the requisite road trip to visit all these places. In fact, Sweet Soul Music has really been helping me acclimate to my new home.
3. Blue Pine Trees
Unicorn were basically the UK’s answer to New Riders of the Purple Sage. For the uninitiated, NRPS started in 1969, when most of the Grateful Dead (Garcia was obsessed with pedal steel at the time) hooked up with old folkie pal John “Marmaduke” Dawson and started a dreamy, psychedelic country-rock outfit. Over in England, just a couple years later, Floyd’s David Gilmour pulled a Garcia: He bought a pedal steel and started sitting in with this band Unicorn. While the output is a little more British folk-rock, a little more Iain Matthews, Blue Pine Trees, the band’s second album, is laid back sunshine rock. It floats above the waves just as convincingly as anything from New Riders. “Wish I was a beach boy/ On the California coast/ Wearing nothing but a smile,” sings Kenny Baker on the track “Autumn Wine.”
4. The Alpha Band
Sometime last year I was researching Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue and learned of the Alpha Band. Growing out of the tour’s ashes, the group consisted of Steven Soles, David Mansfield and T-Bone Burnett (who allegedly turned Dylan on to Christ.) I bought their debut album (they released three LPs) but absolutely despised the thing and quickly filed it away — until this month, when recently acquired records from D. Charles Speer and Coach Fingers had me dusting it off. First off, The Alpha Band sounds great these days. Secondly, I now understand why I gave this album a second shot. All three bands share a love for quirky roots pop, a cross between beatnik New York and earthy folk-rock. The Alpha Band was really quite edgy for being on Arista in 1976. Although their vocals and lyrics, a combination of Burnett and Soles, sounds very Desire-era Dylan, the group’s nervy grooves, proto-new wave reverb and funky basslines feel as if it they couldn’t have existed before the arrival of the Police and maybe even the Feelies. Yet they did.
5. Golden Hotel – The Silver Wilderness
Thanks to Aquarius Records in San Francisco I now own a copy of Golden Hotel’s The Silver Wilderness, a damn near impossible to find CD originally released in 2002, I believe. Golden Hotel consisted of Sidney Alexis Lindner and his brother Michael Cayce. Sidney went on to form the indie outfit Hotel Alexis, while Cayce teamed up with Glenn Donaldson (Skygreen Leopards, Thuja) in a group called Flying Canyon, a lumbering beast that nailed the melancholy and damaged beauty of vintage West Coast folk-rock. It’s still too soon for me to really review the album, but early impressions say it’s more Sidney than Cayce (who took his own life last year). Outside of “Palisade,” rambling country-folk, The Silver Wilderness deals in the kind of introspective, bedroom music (part-GBV, part-Moviola) found on Hotel Alexis’ two excellent albums: Goliath, I’m On Your Side and The Shining Example Is Lying On The Floor. Although the cult of the troubled underground artist will undoubtedly grow around Cayce in coming years, Sidney always sounds much more delicate, emotional and difficult, really. Having said all that, the song I posted below, “All My Girls Are Singing,” boasts a nifty fusion of indie murk and laidback, neo-Crazy Horse guitar interplay.
6. Waylon Jennings, live in ’74
YouTube is packed with vintage Waylon, and I can’t stop watching it. His band, the Waylors, absolutely rocked in the mid ’70s. Talk about primitive minimalism — they embodied the concept. Plus, they looked like a bunch of hairy boogie rockers, just check out this clip (sorry, embedding was disabled) from Willie Nelson’s 2nd Annual 4th Of July Picnic in 1974. As the band picks up steam, pay close attention to the drummer. He’s a thud rocker in disguise. Oh, and what color.
7. Don Covay & the Jefferson Lemon Blues Band
In 1969 soul-blues master Don Covay (“Mercy Mercy, “Chain of Fools”) put together the Jefferson Lemon Blues Band, which released The House of Blue Lights. According to the original liner notes, written by one Carol Troy, the record was Covay’s attempt to “capture both R&B and underground audiences at once” (not unlike Bo Diddley’s The Black Gladiator and Muddy Waters with Electric Mud). Employing a retro-vintage production (total faux-juke joint), Covay crafted a blues-rock masterpiece that stings as viciously as the Stones’ Beggars Banquet, as well as anything from Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac. There’s even some straight-up funk (“Shut Your Mouth”). The highlight, however, is the title track, split into two parts, featuring blood-curdling howls, a sitar and/or tamboura. Just awesome.
8. Same Train, A Different Time: Merle Haggard Sings the Great Songs of Jimmie Rodgers
Between 1967 and ’69 Haggard released I’m a Lonesome Fugitive, Branded Man, Sing Me Back Home, The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde, Mama Tried, Pride In What I Am, A Portrait of…, Okie From Muskogee and Same Train, A Different Time. That’s nine classic albums in three years. Goddamn. What a streak. By 2008 Haggard is not only acknowledged as a country icon; he’s commonly considered a foundation of California country-rock, just as vital to its development as the Byrds and Buck Owens. I most often return to Same Train, A Different Time. From beginning to end it’s his most consistently California-sounding album. It captures the dust, the desert, the ocean and all the vast expanses in between. It’s also dreamy; Haggard’s band ripples like hazy atmosphere. Entire songs float across the stereo-scape like massive clouds, only to breakdown into shimmering vapor. I’m convinced Gram Parsons was obsessed with this record more than any other from his idol, simply check out that Dobro.
9. Grateful Dead
Each month I latch on to a different Grateful Dead album, be it studio, live, Dick’s Pick, whatever. This month it’s been Grateful Dead (a.k.a “Skull & Roses,” a.k.a. “Skullfuck”), a double live album from 1971, featuring just Jerry, Lesh, Weir, Pig Pen and Kreutzmann (no Hart). Garcia once said of the record: “It’s us, man… we’re like a regular shoot-em-up saloon band.” Indeed, this is bar/country rock beefed-up with riff-heavy, post-CCR jamming. The band is totally locked in. As Neil would achieve on 1973′s Time Fades Away, the Dead nailed the perfect mixture of technical skill and American-bred primitivism (and it’s at the intersection of the two, where rock and roll always thrives). Garcia and Hunter also give us one of the Dead’s all-time greats, “Wharf Rat;” the band’s loping, almost inverted rhythm is a stunner, proving just how well the band could fit their more out there tricks into fairly concise pop songs.
10. Golden Smog – “Without a Struggle”
Over the last year I’ve revisited the midwest country-rock scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s: the Jayhawks, Golden Smog and Uncle Tupelo (I still have never heard Run Westy Run). Most of their records have aged wonderfully (especially the Jayhawks’ 1992 slab of awesomeness Hollywood Town Hall). Outside of Oakley Hall, the Sadies and D. Charles Speer, nobody nowadays rocks like these bands — like they grew up, worshipping Neil Young & Crazy Horse, the Byrds, Doug Sahm, the Dead, etc. Arthur-friendly indie bands like Ladyhawk and MV & EE with the Golden/Bummer Road pay lip service to early ’70s rural rock, buy they sound too distant, as if they’re merely flirting with a tradition they’ve never taken into their hearts and really loved. I will give MV & EE credit for at least modeling their band after the live versions of Crazy Horse, the Dead and most of all Royal Trux (whom they flat-out rip-off). Although the duo aren’t good songwriters, they attempt to stretch out and get loose in ways the Jayhawks and Uncle Tupelo never did. Those bands, in contrast, always had the tradition’s chops and skills (the harmonies of the Jayhawks’ Mark Olson and Gary Louris were rock’s best since the early Eagles), but they never broke out of the pop-song format to get their freaky jam-on. This had to do with the times, most probably. These bands were all comprised of ex-punks who must’ve hated the hippie/jam band thing, even though it’s half of the tradition’s double-helix. As a result, most of these midwest country-rockers have always had problems with rethinking formula. Instead of challenging country-rock protocol with groove research, they almost always fell back on post-Petty adult contemporary or flaccid power pop. Golden Smog, featuring members from all these midwest outfits, have been dealing with this issue for several releases now. Last year’s Blood on the Slacks EP is no different. Most of the eight tracks sound like Ryan Adams’ Starbucks rock or nth-generation Brit pop (of course, Louris could sing Mein Kampf and still sound great). The two exceptions are the neo-American Beauty “Without a Struggle” and an acoustic cover of Dinosaur Jr.’s “Tarpit.” These tunes are just great front porch country-rock from dudes who have been doing this since their teens. Some of those Arthur bands should be taking notes.
Albany, New York, is a lot like Cleveland: dilapidated, stained with rust, and covered in snow during the winter. Of course, the little burg hasn’t produced the kind of earthshaking music C-Town has, but over the years it has had its share of underground weirdos. The four punks in Suzy Wong & the Honkeys lurk just outside Albany’s city limits. We have no clue why their moniker pairs a fictional Hong Kong hooker and a circa-1973 pejorative for white folks; it probably has something to do with their we-don’t-give-a-flying-crap nihilism. According to the band, somebody is “always bleeding, intoxicated, or has a bench warrant against them.”
