I hear you singing in the wires

Glenn Campbell died last week after a long, public, and heroic struggle with Alzheimers. Not to speak ill of the dead, but his style of smooth country pop never moved me much, even though I could hear that he was really good at it. I like rougher-edged country: Give me mama socking it to the Harper Valley PTA, give me a complaint about shoes that don’t fit, and forget those Rhinestone Cowboys. But one of his minor hits was different. “Wichita Lineman” played his bland, flawless tenor and a string section against a high-pitched guitar riff that was almost a drone, and ended up with three minutes full of tension and melancholy. It’s a perfect song. Here, listen:

So for those three minutes of pleasure and heartbreak, thank you, Glenn Campbell.
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p.s.  I’ve often wondered if another great song about Wichita, Soul Coughing’s “True Dreams of Wichita,” was sort of a tribute to “Wichita Lineman.” What do you think?

p.p.s. Renee told me about Cassandra Wilson’s version of “Wichita Lineman,” which is just as beautiful and entirely different. I’m listening to it over and over right now, and can’t come up with words to describe it aside from playthisagainagainagainagainagain, so I’ll just leave it here for you in case you can come up with something better than that to say.

Localities – Go Go

The big hits and the big performers are loved worldwide. Michael Jackson had fans in every country that knew pop music. The same was true, is true for that matter, of the Beatles. The fact that pop reaches to the biggest possible audiences sometimes erases the fact that there are intensely local bands and styles of music that don’t get much play outside a few hundred mile radius.

One of those is the funk form go-go. It’s a DC* thing, reaching a little into Maryland and Virginia, but that’s about it. It started in the 1960s – 1970s and is still around. It’s a drum-heavy (congas) dance/good time music Here’s an amateur concert video from 2009 with the Godfather of Go-go, Chuck Brown.

It’s a perfect hot weather music; get loose, get out there and dance.

*Jersey person that I am, I only know about it because of Spike Lee’s School Daze, which introduced me to the song “Da Butt” which was written for the movie.

Performance, Art – Laurie Anderson

Pop music, any music, falls under the category of performance. It doesn’t exist without being performed or having been performed and recorded. Performance Art is something else, but there was one artist whose performance art lived in the pop music world for a while.

Anderson wasn’t the first. That honor goes to the tragically under-rated Yoko Ono. She was a force in the art world when she hooked up with Lennon. Their collaborations, especially with the Plastic Ono Band were experimental, confessional, and intended for more than the downtown audiences that Ono had been working in front of for years.

POB was a crossover act and a deliberate one. Anderson crosses over too, but it takes a bunch longer*.  But first, there’s “Oh Superman” from her debut album, Big Science.

“Oh Superman has some characteristic Anderson touches, the synthesized voice, lyrics that place it right in the time (answering machines were just getting widely used in the 80s), American idiom, a slightly menacing figure, discontinuity. The lyrics move between the intimate (Mom) and the political. The B side of the 12” was “Walk the Dog” which talks about trees (“and they were wooden trees”) and Dolly Parton and dogs.

“Walk the Dog” is much more art performance than “Oh Superman” and much funnier too.

Anderson did a huge show in the 1980’s, USA I-IV. It’s a hugely ambitious work, with slides, dance, mime, and Anderson using a vocoder that pitches her voice down a couple of octaves. I’ve always thought of that voice as the man within. Anderson deploys it as that slightly pompous, self-satisfied voice of the patriarchy.

What is this huge work about? It’s about ideas of home, about relationships, about nationalism, about aliens, about art, about language (It’s where she coins the phrase, “Language is a virus.”)

It’s also about performance. What made it feel like art was the self-consciousness, the deliberate awkwardness, the intentional lack of pop polish. Those are staples of authenticity now, and their conscious choice is another metalevel of pop and cultural artifice.

USA I-IV is Anderson’s magnum opus, She’s been releasing albums at intervals since the 80s. Mister Heartbreak, Home of the Brave, Strange Angels, Bright Red, Life on a String, Homeland.  All of them walk that bright line between art and pop.

Ending with “Sharkey’s Night” from Mister Heartbreak, just for William Burrough’s voice.

*Probably because she wasn’t married to John Lennon. 😉

The Original and The Cover: TFW When They Are Both Good

For a few months after Prince’s passing I listened to his songs everyday    On most days during the late spring and summer of last year this meant cranking up his hits from the 80s.  I wasn’t as aware of his work from the last 10+ years of his life, so I also decided to take a listen to many of those songs that I had missed.

I instantly loved Call My Name the first time I heard it, which was last summer.  The song won Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance at the 47th Annual Grammy Awards in 2005.  The song brought me back to something deep and passionate inside my own heart. I couldn’t help but feel moved listening to him sing about this well of love (and lust) towards his wife at the time. I just couldn’t stop listening to Call My Name:

As I kept rediscovering more of Prince’s oeuvre, I stumbled upon other artists I hadn’t heard of before. I eventually found Morgan James’ cover version of Call My Name.  I’m afraid Morgan James is seriously underrated.  She came out with this cover of Call My Name in 2014 on her album Hunter:

One aspect that I appreciate about this cover, is that Morgan interprets the song in a way that shows off her considerable vocal chops, while still respecting the emotional tone and depth of the original. To me, Call My Name is about a passionate expression of love and lust, in a full-bodied authentic aural embrace.  Morgan’s cover is not a smooth R&B groove like of the original, but it’s just as soulful and powerful in its own way. I think of the guitar solo in Morgan’s cover as a mini-Prince tribute in and of itself.  I find the solo reminiscent of Prince’s guitar work in his other songs, even though a guitar solo isn’t present in his original version of Call My Name.

What I also find poignant about Call My Name is the recognition of what was happening in the world at that time, namely the Iraq war and the U.S. federal government beginning a program to eavesdrop on American citizens.  From a 2005 NY Times article on the subject: “Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.”

To that end, these lyrics feel especially prescient for what was happening in the world in 2004 at the time of Musicology’s release:

I heard a voice on the news saying
People want to stop the war
If they had a love as sweet as you
They’d forget what they were fighting for
What’s the matter with the world today?
The land of the free, somebody lied
They can bug my phone and peep around my home
They’ll only see you and me making love inside

I just can’t stop writing songs about you
I love you so much

The lyrics don’t strike me as taking the Iraq war or possible authorizations to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens, any less seriously. What these lyrics remind me of is this: the challenge to continue loving passionately and deeply,  amid a world where great suffering, pain and strife swirl around us all.  Loving in the time of great social upheaval, is something I am thinking about a lot now as the Trump administration’s machinations whirl around us all,  along with present day armed conflicts throughout the globe.  These lyrics remind me of what it could possibly mean to carry on with one’s heart and body fully and completely, when the world is not free, and when war is everywhere.

 

La lucha continua, and so does the ukulele.

I’ve mentioned Faute de Mieux – my favorite one-person-band – here before but in case you forgot why I think this is such a cool project, here’s a link. And if you need a link to a couple of new Faute de Mieux songs, they are here and they are fabulous.

On the perfection of Help!

Here is how good Help! is. I started a catalog of all its imperfections. Halfway through the album, I had switched over from imperfections to affirmatively great moments, because there were so few of the former and so many of the latter that the wait time between subpar moments was too long to focus.

I’m not objective about this, of course. I couldn’t be. Help! was one of the cassettes on permanent rotation in the car when I was small (sharing space with Paul Simon’s Negotiations and Love Songs and James Taylor’s New Moon Shine). Screw objectivity. Could anybody be objective about the Beatles? Would you want them to?

So, with extreme subjectivity, here is what I found that was less than absolutely perfect about this album, beginning to end.

(1) “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” has a tambourine and flute. Actually, you know what? This is not a problem.

(2) The drums on “I Need You” start out kind of boring.

(3) The lyrics to “You Like Me Too Much” (written by George) are not my favorite: “You’ve tried before to leave me, but you haven’t got the nerve / To walk out and leave me lonely, which is all that I deserve / … / I will follow you and bring you back where you belong / ‘Cause I couldn’t really stand it, to admit that I was wrong.” I’m going to say this is not the healthiest relationship.

(4) “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” is a great late ’50s rock & roll song. However, “great late ’50s rock & roll song,” played as such, is still a steep drop-off from the rest of the album.

That’s all I’ve got. Contrast it with the great moments in each song: the surprising bassline in “Help!”, the percussion on “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl,” the harmonies in “The Night Before” and “Tell Me What You See” and, ok, on every track, really. Even “Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” with no harmonies, gets in on the outstanding vocal action with John Lennon shredding his voice in ecstacy.

That’s it. Those are the four three things wrong with this album. How good is it? You could take “Yesterday” off and it would still be good. I’m utterly predictable when it comes to songs in 3/4 and 6/8 signatures, but all the same, I vote that we give “Yesterday” a rest as our cultural emblem of regret–it’s served us well for over 50 years–and rotate in “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” for all-over melancholy. And never mind the past: “Ticket To Ride” is a glimpse into their future–with its 12-string guitar and faster-paced second half, it wouldn’t be out of place on the experimentation of Revolver. Nor is this the Lennon and McCartney Show: Ringo performs a feat of brilliant understatement by singing “Act Naturally” completely straightforwardly. None of the pathos is in his voice, which means all of it is in the words. His resignation makes the sentiments he expresses cut that much deeper.

Finally, there’s the song that has forever had my heart, “I’ve Just Seen A Face,” with its insistent downbeat as Paul declares: “Fallin’ / yes I am fallin’ / and she keeps callin’ / me back again.” The mix between the expected, true rhyme (callin’) and unexpected slant rhyme (again), between the straightforward (ending a phrase at the end of a line) and unusual (switching to carrying a phrase over to the next line) is delightful: a perfect pop line in a perfect pop song.