The Pleasure and Pain of 1969

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod's Battery Dies, Part 15
Fairport Convention, Unhalfbricking and Liege & Lief

In the middle 1960s, American musicians like Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn had a pioneering idea: why not play traditional folk singer-songwriter tunes with a pronounced rock backbeat? This made American folk-rockers into international superstars, but for some reason, British musicians hesitated to follow suit. Fairport Convention, founded in 1967 and named for the house where they first rehearsed, jumped into the resulting void. But in 1969, their sound suddenly changed.

At the beginning of the year, they basically played Americana. Their Greenwich Village sound attracted a small but loyal audience to London folk clubs, but their albums and 45s didn’t chart. New female vocalist Sandy Denny, already semi-legendary on the British folk circuit, sang in Judy Collins’ vocal range. However, she wanted to record music more distinctly British than American. And the band, somewhat adrift, was (mostly) willing to accommodate her.

Fairport Convention cranked out a remarkable three full LPs in 1969. Their first with Denny, What We Did On Our Holidays, is mostly of historical interest. But with their second, Unhalfbricking, they took British music by storm. It’s somewhat silly to call their sound “mature,” as most band members were only nineteen and twenty years old; bassist Ashley Hutchings was downright elderly, at twenty-four. Yet they sported a weathered, old-soul sound.

This album includes three Bob Dylan compositions, taken from his Basement Tapes. Dylan overtly influenced Fairport, who included multiple Dylan covers in their live sets. However, Dylan’s reciprocal openness means that he unlocked his demo vault to them, allowing them to record three songs that hadn’t had mainstream releases yet: “Percy’s Song,” “Million Dollar Bash,” and “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” (recorded in French, as an in-joke).

Unhalfbricking opens with guitarist Richard Thompson’s first songwriting credit, “Genesis Hall.” Now a living legend among folkies, Thompson, twenty years old, was just coming into his own as both a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist; on this track, he plays dulcimer, then as now an unusual instrument in mainstream music. Swinging straight into a Dylan song, then Sandy Denny’s “Autopsy,” then the traditional “A Sailor’s Life,” Side A was deeply melancholy.

Side B includes Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” which she’d already recorded as a solo singer-songwriter single, and would later re-record as a bluegrass with the Strawbs. It’s now a recognized classic, and this is probably her most famous version. Another Thompson composition, and two Dylans, finishes the set. This album straddles the divide between American folk-rock, which was already established, and British folk-rock, which they were just creating.

Before the album dropped, however, Fairport’s touring bus suffered a catastrophic road accident, killing drummer Martin Lamble, aged only nineteen, and injuring every other member. The band went into a months-long hiatus; before its release, Unhalfbricking already memorialized a band which no longer existed. The late-1960s milieu, however, demanded immediate action. Rather than breaking up, Fairport reconvened with Liege & Lief.

Fairport Convention in late 1969

Partway through Unhalfbricking, Fairport’s most staunchly American member, London-born Ian Matthews, quit to record Americanized folk-rock. (His covers of Steve White and Jackson Browne are legendary.) Liege & Lief thus reflects Sandy Denny’s aggressively British inspirations. Unlike Unhalfbricking, which includes only one “Trad. Arr.” song, this album has five, with only three new compositions. Traditional stemwinders like “The Deserter” and “Tam Lin” reflect this album’s backbone.

However, the track which most thoroughly reflects Liege & Lief is the traditional “Matty Groves,” a Northern English murder ballad from the 1600s. Anybody who says metal is the darkest music, has clearly never heard a British murder ballad. This song’s grim, fatalistic lyric, in which pleasure always contains karmic payback, suggests a band blaming itself for Martin Lamble’s death. Played in a traditional style, this song includes a long, self-flagellating hard-rock tail.

Liege & Lief is much darker and more pessimistic than Unhalfbricking. Songs like “The Deserter,” in which the title character receives a pardon on condition that he returns to service, suggest that every respite carries its resulting doom. But it’s also a musically ambitious album. Fiddler Dave Swarbrick, a guest contributor on Unhalfbricking, becomes a full member, and his love of minor keys gives every track an almost epoch-making orchestral depth.

After recording Liege & Lief, Sandy Denny quit, and the band never reclaimed this level of success. Their best songwriters eventually drifted away, and a vestigial group now tours the nostalgia circuit. But these two albums, which bookend the ways 1969 began with unprecedented optimism, and ended in bleak resignation, are a memorial to a classic band, and a year like no other.

Nathaniel Rateliff's Old-School Blues Reunion

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part 14
Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats

In the summer of 2015, an unexpected track hit American airwaves, a song with a capella stanzas that sounded like a traditional Gospel choir. Audiences who didn’t listen to lyrics too closely could’ve been forgiven for snapping their fingers and humming along, thinking they were hearing something from an earlier era of American music history. At least, until the musically loaded chorus, where the featured vocalist suddenly shouted “Son of a bitch! Gimme a drink!”

Nathaniel Rateliff paid his dues on the Denver music circuit, where he became a local headliner while polishing his songwriting chops. He tried his hand, at various times, with straight-ahead rock music, more sober folk content, and carefully arranged chamber rock. He finally received success when he organized the Night Sweats, a more upbeat combo focusing on a retro Memphis soul sound. But, like their platinum-scoring breakout single, their sound often conceals much deeper sadness.

That lead single, “S.O.B.,” propelled Rateliff’s ensemble into national awareness, perhaps because Rateliff’s ragged but tuneful vocals reflected the then-current mix of disappointment and optimism based on the culture and economy. Rateliff never sounds anything but soulful, but he also sings with a distinct burr in his voice, possibly reflecting his having worked as a carpenter and a loading dock operator while perfecting his style. This man knew the sounds of existential disappointment.

Audiences primed by that single, however, were undoubtedly surprised by the album. Rateliff’s actual sound was less Tom Waits, more Otis Redding, salted with a broad tour of American musical history. Stops in Memphis, Chicago, New Orleans, and the Piedmont gave his album a tenor that spoke to everyone, equally, at the same time. His mix of blues, folk, and rock offered crossover appeal, and he succeeded at an age other musicians are preparing to retire.

The opening track, “I Need Never Get Old,” is built like a standard blues-rocker, but supplemented with an unexpected brass section that offers a depth of sound missing from others of its kind. It’s the kind of spitfire that Chess Records would’ve released around 1954, hoping to capture an elusive White audience. So it comes as something of a surprise when it transitions into the second song, “Howling at Nothing,” a somber epic of loneliness.

Nathaniel Rateliff (center, bearded) & the Night Sweats

This pattern obtains throughout the album: one muscular rocker, followed by an introspective folkie number. “S.O.B.” swings directly into “Wasting Time,” a slower piece with heavy steel guitar, which sounds like something Jim Croce would’ve recorded at his peak. But even at its most melancholy, this album’s sound remains bolstered by the spring-loaded boom of hollow-bodied electric guitars. Rateliff’s complex, layered arrangements definitely play for grown-up attention in an otherwise youth-dominated music market.

Rateliff’s most unexpected track, late on the album, is “Shake.” Where the other songs sound like early proto-rock’n’roll, this track sounds like the kind of music White record labels rush-released to counter rock’s sensual appeal. It combines bluesy guitar with a percussion line influenced by North African folk music, not unlike when White companies tried floating Cuban and other Caribbean music. The lyrics, however, have a sexual frankness Desi Arnaz could’ve only obliquely hinted at.

Arguably, this reflects the entire album: musically, much of it sounds like it could’ve been recorded fifty or sixty years ago. But lyrically, it’s definitely current, and its themes reflect many of the realities of adulthood. Rateliff’s narrative voice enjoys the autonomy that growing up offers, but he isn’t immune to maturity’s disappointments. Conjoining songs like “Thank You,” about enjoying having a grown-up relationship, with “Look It Here,” where he has to beg for recognition, emphasizes this.

Audiences periodically feel drawn to music from another era, usually during a time when social values are changing from gung-ho optimism to existential disappointment. Creedence Clearwater Revival at the end of the 1960s, for instance, or the Squirrel Nut Zippers in the middle 1990s, repackaged sounds from a prior generation and made them new and contemporary. Nathaniel Rateliff speaks to that same audience motivation, and probably for the same reason, as 2015 was pretty disappointing.

Sadly, Rateliff still hasn’t found Top-40 success. “S.O.B.” and several follow-up singles topped the Adult Album Alternative charts, suggesting he quickly found a full-grown audience eager for more complex sounds. Like Rateliff, who was pushing forty when he had his first hit, his audience probably feels alienated from the present. We aren’t necessarily running from the world; we just aren’t fooled by its pretty promises. The commercial mainstream will never quite have a place for us.

The Transforming Journey of Tom Waits

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part 13
Tom Waits, Mule Variations

Despite his outsized influence in America’s singer-songwriter community, Tom Waits hasn’t been particularly productive throughout his career. He regularly goes five or more years between albums (at this writing, he hasn’t released any new content since 2011). At times he’s gone over a decade between tours. His singles generally don’t chart. And when he does record, his works are so eclectic, they’re impossible to market and seldom find an audience.

This, Waits’ best-selling album, won him his second Grammy award, for Best Contemporary Folk Album. On first consideration, this seems an unlikely category. The album begins with “Big In Japan,” a prime example of Waits’ screaming-and-hollering style he perfected in the late 1970s. Most lyrics on this album have a sidelong, beatnik jazz style, and the instruments have a lo-fi sound more common to indie rock than anything folk oriented.

Yet I’d contend this album captures the folk ethos perfectly. Waits picks sounds that have entered the American cultural consciousness from various genres, and have become part of our shared experience as a people. From these elements he creates a collage of distorted sound and off-kilter lyrics that reflects we, the audience, back at ourselves, just mangled enough to remind us how crooked we are, below the surface.

Designed to fill an entire CD, a feat most singer-songwriters still avoid, this album sprawls across the influences that Waits has used throughout his career. “Georgia Lee” and “”House Where Nobody Lives” have the slow-moving gait of classic country blues, while “Get Behind the Mule” and “Cold Water” have a harsher edge, a desire, seemingly, to reprimand the listener. The shift of influences seems designed to keep us back-footed.

Other tracks don’t fit genre molds as easily. “What’s He Building?” is a strange prose poem with a background reminiscent of a horror film scored by Mike Oldfield. “Black Market Baby” and “Filipino Box Spring Hog” don’t sound like any established market niche, more like wall-to-wall sonic chaos captured near closing time at a bar where a band has stopped caring what the audience thinks. Waits never stops being musical, but frenzy often overcomes harmony.

Tom Waits

Like most Waits albums, this one produced only one retail single, “Hold On.” This song more resembles the romantic baritone Waits tried to emulate in his earliest albums, which he eventually dropped. Is he deliberately trying to create something radio-friendly, to trick listeners into buying something they don’t anticipate? Perhaps. Or he’s channeling his inner San Diego middle-class youth, and the studio thought the single might sell.

Fans argue about how to interpret “Chocolate Jesus,” the track Waits famously performed on Letterman. Is Waits being deliberately sacrilegious? Is he disparaging Christianity? Waits has been notoriously elusive and contradictory about his spiritual roots. However, in light of this album’s closing track, the rip-roaring barrelhouse gospel sing-a-long “Come On Up To the House,” I’m inclined to suspect “Chocolate Jesus” reflects ambiguity about commercialized Christian trappings, not Christianity itself.

Waits didn’t assemble a studio band for this album. Instead, he employs an all-star ensemble of rotating guest artists, including Charlie Musselwhite, Les Claypool, John Hammond, and Marc Ribot. Most songs involve fewer musicians than you might expect; the dynamic sound arises from the energy of the playing, not the number of instruments being played. Waits uses multitracking far less than most contemporary artists. The result is austere, but frenetic.

Taken together, the album’s various tracks create a sonic landscape as uneven as any national park. We careen through the categories of American music, never allowed to settle on one genre long enough to get comfortable. We reach this album’s final, percussive chords, confused about where we’ve been, but confident we’ve taken a journey. The experience has certainly changed Waits, and probably us too. And we’re ready to go again.

Various record labels keep releasing Waits, but always struggle to market his genre-resistant compositions. Upon release, this album did moderately well, despite lacking support. Rolling Stone gave it three stars on initial release, but apparently changed their minds later, granting four-and-a-half stars in their later album guide, and deeming this one of the 500 most important albums ever released. Which reflects Waits’ usual reception: initial confusion, followed by acclaim.

Not everyone likes Tom Waits. His coarse voice and eclectic style often discourage new listeners. But audiences willing to persevere will find Waits an experience they revisit time and again. This album rewards multiple listening, and provides unexpected insight beneath its layers. And it is folk music, because it’s about its audience’s experience.

The Biggest Rock Stars in Nashville

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part 12
The Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo

Critics sometimes floated the Byrds as America’s answer to the British Invasion, especially the Beatles, and this wasn’t completely unfair. They gave songwriters Bob Dylan (“Mr. Tambourine Man”) and Pete Seeger (“Turn! Turn! Turn!”) their first number-one chart hits. They pioneered the folk-rock, psychedelia, and moody singer-songwriter genres. So when their sixth album dropped in 1968, fans probably expected more of the same.

Yet this album swerves so seriously from anything that came before, it gave listeners audio whiplash. Critics loved the album, then and now, and it had a terrific influence on other musicians, but audiences didn’t know how to interpret a serious rock band’s careen into another genre, one often regarded as at war with rock. Music historians occasionally call this the birth of “country rock,” but by any serious standards, it’s a full-on country music album.

This album opens with “You Ain’t Going Nowhere,” a Bob Dylan composition from the Basement Tapes. But this arrangement, layered with steel guitars and twangy electric lead, sounds little like either a Bleeker Street folk club or Roger McGuinn’s distinctive jangly Rickenbacker 12-string. Fans couldn’t comprehend what they’d heard. Despite Dylan’s famous non-linear lyrics, this tune sonically would’ve fit nicely on most AM country radio back then.

By 1968, the Byrds were down to only two original members. David Crosby had found another home singing close harmonies, while Gene Clark had become a solo singer-songwriter, critically lauded but commercially mediocre. Original drummer Michael Clarke had become a session musician, and would never regain his prior fame. Only lead singer McGuinn and bassist Chris Hillman remained. Desperate to record, they hired Hillman’s cousin Kevin Kelly on percussion.

Most significant, however, they hired Gram Parsons as guitarist. McGuinn considered him a sideman for a planned one-disc history of American music. Parsons, however, had a passion for country music dating from when a friend played him a George Jones record years earlier. He found a kindred spirit in Chris Hillman, whose music career began by picking mandolin in various bluegrass outfits. Teaming up, Parsons and Hillman lobbied successfully for a serious country record.

Besides two Dylan tracks, this album includes one each by the Louvin Brothers, Merle Haggard, and Woody Guthrie. McGuinn and Hillman composed no original tracks for this album; despite being award-winning musicians, even at the Byrds’ height, they didn’t write much, trusting Clark and Crosby for original material. However, they include two Parsons compositions: “One Hundred Years From Now,” a concert barn-burner, and Parsons’ trademark song, “Hickory Wind.”

The Byrds in 1968 (l-r: Kevin Kelly, Roger McGuinn, Gram Parsons, Chris Hillman)

Parsons’ love of George Jones drives the sound. It has a rough-hewn fifties honky-tonk texture, but the rhythm section of Chris Hillman and Kevin Kelly gives the band a well-defined low end much like the “Bakersfield Sound,” pioneered by Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, that was contemporaneously transforming country music. This complexity does borrow heavily from rock music, but little resembles later country rockers like Lynyrd Skynyrd or Marshall Tucker.

The Byrds’ longstanding fans regarded this diversion as too extreme. Rock-and-rollers saw country music as reactionary music for white trash, while country fans considered the Byrds ignorable long-haired hippies. The album died on arrival. However, as often happens when something artistic breaks new ground, much of the reaction simply reflected discomfort with something too new and different. Once forgotten, this album now has influential cult following.

Besides core band members, this album includes contributions from several veteran Nashville session musicians, including Earl P. Ball, Jaydee Maness, and Clarence White. (White would later become a band member after Parsons quit.) This complex, layered sound gives the album a legitimate country music vibe. Ten to twenty years after this album’s release, its influence was clearly audible in most Nashville country music.

Despite Parsons’ influence, Columbia Records discovered at the eleventh hour that a contract with a prior band prevented them using Parsons’ vocals. Roger McGuinn rushed into the studio and re-recorded six songs Parsons had already sung, mimicking Parsons’ style. On the Louvins’ “The Christian Life,” this sounds almost like parody, like McGuinn held country music at arm’s length. By “Hickory Wind,” however, he’d found, and embraced, Parsons’ voice.

This album basically consigned the Byrds to permanent “cult” status; they never regained mainstream prominence. But it marked a seismic shift; less than ten years after its release, groups like the Ozark Mountain Daredevils and Pure Prairie League had Hot-100 hits, while Waylon Jennings covered rock gods like Neil Young. Two warring genres began collaborating, and it happened right here. Music would never be the same.

The Mythical Cowboy Rides Again

1001 Recordings To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part 11
Willie Nelson, Red Headed Stranger

A strange, off-kilter recording barnstormed country music’s airwaves in 1975: “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” a nearly thirty-year-old song that, somehow, nobody had ever heard of. Roy Acuff and Hank Williams, among others, had recorded the song, without having a hit. Yet somehow, amid the countrypolitan excesses and slick Chet Atkins-produced fluff of the 1970s, a strange, nasally voice that seemingly couldn’t find the beat, turned this forgotten gem into a certifiable phenomenon.

Despite being a lucrative, if largely unknown, songwriter, Willie Nelson based his eighteenth studio album around two songs written by other people: “The Tale of the Red-Headed Stranger,” a factory-written story song from the 1950s, and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” He constructed a story linking these songs together, and recorded the resulting album in just two days. Nobody, Nelson least of all, expected the album to become a hit.

An itinerant cowboy preacher returns home one wind-battered evening to find his wife with another man. Battered by rage, the preacher slays them both, then leaves his life behind. Wandering the horse-and-buggy Wild West, his name and old life forgotten, he struggles with his belief that God has turned His back. Before long, he faces the imminent possibility that he’ll never love anything again, and lose his soul.

The wandering cowboy, the vengeful apostate preacher, the doomed lover adrift in an almost entirely male world: Nelson managed to capture almost every important country music boilerplate while also creating a piece of classic Jungian mythology. The struggles of faith and identity, while wandering in a wilderness hellscape, transcend country music. Nelson calls his failed hero “The Preacher,” but he could be Orpheus or Sir Lancelot. Maybe once, he was.

Nelson had been on country music’s scene for fifteen years without making a name outside Nashville’s Music Row headquarters. He’d written classic songs for Patsy Cline (“Crazy”) and Faron Young (“Hello Walls”), but apart from his sinecure at Austin’s Armadillo World Headquarters, he had no status as a musician. With his polyester slacks and demure manner, Rolling Stone writer Chet Flippo supposedly mistook him for an insurance salesman.

Willie Nelson, around the time he
released Red Headed Stranger

For decades, audiences failed to embrace Nelson’s idiosyncratic voice. Then as now, he often sang ahead of or behind the rhythm, reminding us the literal origins of the term “offbeat.” His jangly nylon-string guitar often overwhelmed his demo recordings. Nelson prepared himself for an unglamorous career in country music’s equivalent to Tin Pan Alley, writing songs that others would make famous, his own voice consigned to demos only studios heard.

Struggling for an anchor on what he suspected might be an anchor, he found the answer in a song. Nelson reports that he’d long sung “The Tale of the Red-Headed Stranger” to his children as a lullaby. His then-wife, Connie Koepke, suggested he turn that into an album. Creating a series of linking songs, and a few instrumentals, Nelson turned one song into a Louis L’Amour-like epic of American rootlessness.

Columbia Records let Nelson bring his live band into the studio, an unusual move in Nashville then and now. For all its homespun ideals, many fans don’t realize how tightly controlled and orchestrated much country music actually is. Despite a handful of famous singer-songwriters like Dolly Parton and Kris Kristofferson, country musicians overwhelmingly don’t write their own songs; even fewer play their own instruments.

In contrast to this, Nelson composed this album half-spontaneously, improvising lyrics into a tape recorder while accompanying himself on guitar. The album is approximately half original, half organized around already common Nashville songs. Despite his lackadaisical sound, Nelson also proved himself an accomplished organizer, rehearsing his live band thoroughly before recording began. According to accounts published later, this album took less than two days of studio time.

Nelson also benefited from fortunate timing. Released just as the “outlaw country” movement began, Nelson had a personal champion in Waylon Jennings. When studio executives balked at Nelson’s stripped-down sound and lack of orchestration, Jennings aggressively pitched this album to radio stations, critics, and fans. Apparently, country fans agreed. The album went to number one and was certified gold the next year, remarkably speedy for country back then.

Too bad other musicians didn’t heed Nelson’s call. While the then-dominant “countrypolitan” sound continued its heavily orchestrated direction, and outlaw country became electrified and pop-friendly, even Willie himself couldn’t maintain that austerity; his 1980s recordings were themselves slickly produced. But for one brief moment in 1975, amids slick disco and dancing queens, Willie produced something authentic, something bigger than himself.

Just Another Beatnik Teacher Comedian

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part 10
Taylor Mali, Conviction

You’ve probably already read Taylor Mali’s poetry without realizing it. His centerpiece poem, “What Teachers Make,” has circulated online since the heyday of e-mail trees and webrings, frequently bowdlerized. But Mali, who paid his dues on New York’s poetry slam circuit, never wrote his poetry for book readers; he’s always been a performer first. Perhaps that’s why he’s released more audio recordings than books. Or maybe it’s because he’s a top-range performer.

Chicago poet Marc Smith invented Poetry Slam, but if you attend any modern slam and listen to the sarcastic humor and rapid-fire patter that tends to win, most slammers clearly want to be Taylor Mali. This album, compiling live presentations of his most significant work, reveals why. Several poems on this recording also appear in his book What Learning Leaves, but Mali has a compelling presence as a performer that you can only savvy when you hear his voice.

Audiences listening to performance poets ask two important questions: Is the poetry any good? And does the performer carry the work effectively? As a poet, Taylor Mali writes in an easygoing vernacular style. He doesn’t use the inscrutable metaphors and weird juxtapositions favored by MFA programs and awards panels. Though he certainly uses heightened language, his verse nevertheless has a plain-English conversational quality that doesn’t require a postgraduate degree to follow.

His poetic structure comes across in titles like “Falling In Love Is Like Owning a Dog,” or “Silver-Lined Heart.” Like Mali’s verse itself, these titles involve metaphors which have depth, but don’t require unpacking. We understand what they mean, though as Mali investigates them further, we increasingly understand what he means by them. As poetry, they aren’t difficult, but they reward the audience’s willingness to follow Mali on a nuanced inner journey.

In performance poetry circles, Mali sometimes gets stereotyped as a poet who writes about his teaching career. Considering the widespread influence of “What Teachers Make” (included on this collection), this isn’t unfair. But only five out of twenty-three poems on this album, including one hidden track, are about teaching. Four are about being a poet, four are about his father, and four are by other poets, featuring Mali as a member of the performance ensemble.

Taylor Mali

Mali has a distinctive baritone voice, accentuated by his performance style, which we could generously describe as “in on the joke.” He avoids common poetry slam affectations of offbeat pauses and strange, syncopated emphases. He doesn’t fear to laugh, just slightly, at his own jokes, especially on willfully humorous poems like “I Could Be a Poet” or “Totally Like Whatever.” His performance feels like a friend, inviting you to share the passionate hobby he’s spent years perfecting.

Many people encountering Taylor Mali for the first time comment upon his humor. If your high school English was anything like mine, the emphasis on somber tone and portentous themes left you feeling glum. Poetry slam, by its structure, discourages this attitude: because audiences have liberty to boo performers off the stage, performance poets learn to engage the audience’s humor and curiosity. Mali has taken this tendency further than most poets, and become a role model for others.

I'm less keen on Mali’s group pieces, especially two written by Celena Glenn. As the ensemble basically sings acapella behind the poet, Glenn’s voice doesn't carry, and the poetry disappears in a distracting soundscape. This recording also features two poems written by Mali but performed by other poets. They suffer from some lack of direction: one has flat affect, while the other weirdly over-accentuates the poetic foot. I could really have done without these tracks.

But when Mali performs his own work, he shows himself truly a rich artist. His poems run the gamut between  joy, confusion, laughter, grief, and more. Poems like "Labeling Keys," "Voice of America V/O," and "The Sole Bass" put the lie to the slander that slam poetry is shallow and ephemeral: they aren’t Walt Whitman, but they exist on many layers at once and demand just as much contemplation as the poetry you studied in school.

As a reviewer, I’ve grown weary of saying a particular item I’m reviewing isn't for everyone. That certainly isn't the case here. This CD will appeal to a diverse audience whose only criterion is open-mindedness. Like most poetry slams, this album has uneven moments, especially toward the middle of the evening, but overall this may be one of the few poetry collections in many houses that doesn't just sit on a shelf gathering dust.

That Beatles Parody You Didn't Know You Needed

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 22
Eric Idle (writer/director), The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part Nine
The Rutles, The Rutles

Sometime in the early 1960s, a mop-topped quartet of British musicians took the world by storm. No, not that one. This quartet gained international fame almost overnight, fame for which they proved supremely unprepared. The Rutles, so-named because they began as a one-off sketch on Eric Idle’s show Rutland Television Weekend, hit so close to the Beatles’ actual history that Paul and Ringo supposedly couldn’t watch the finished show.

Eric Idle has a history of weak, uninspiring choices following his Monty Python years. But this one choice probably rescued his name from premature anonymity. Teaming with Neil Innes, who wrote some of Monty Python’s funniest musical segments; Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels; and a selection of top-quality British session musicians, Idle managed to create a band that both honored the Beatles, and challenged Beatlemania’s continuing cult-like adoration.

Emerging from the Cavern Rutland, the band found an unlikely champion in a middle-aged tradesman who didn’t understand music at all. A series of ham-handed business arrangements makes the Rutles a lucrative proposition for record producers, merchandisers, and filmmakers—but the Rutles themselves get ripped off, seeing tiny percentages of the money made off their names. It doesn’t take long before drugs and infighting threaten to overtake the band.

The parallels with the actual Beatles are more than slight. The sudden rise, global popularity, and massive flame-out mirror the Beatles’ trajectory point-for-point. Ringo Starr reported having difficulty watching the finished mockumentary, which hit too close to home, and Paul McCartney had a frosty response. John Lennon, however, called it hilarious, and George Harrison contributed to the production, even appearing onscreen. (The next year, Harrison co-produced Life of Brian.)

Neil Innes’ compositions, most supposedly written during a two-week hot streak in 1977, sound so close to the Beatles, they scarcely count as parody. Early tracks like “Goose-Step Mama” and “Hold My Hand,” mimic the Beatles’ early, American-influenced rock-and-rollers. Later tracks venture into nostalgia with “Doubleback Alley,” psychedelia on “Piggy in the Middle,” and rootless anger on “Get Up and Go.” The soundtrack plays like an unironic Beatles retrospective.

This earnest, ambitious musical texture, available as a separate album for those who appreciate its artistry, contrasts with Idle’s glib tone tone. Idle, who plays both a Rutle and the video host, guides viewers through the Rutles’ tumultuous arc, which we watch with pained awareness of where everything will end. Though Christopher Guest’s Spinal Tap is often credited with starting the “mockumentary” fad, Idle pioneered the format five years prior.

Idle’s characters show glib self-awareness, often speaking directly into the camera: they know they’re in a documentary, and probably know where they’re headed. Interviews with the Rutles’ purported contemporaries, including Mick Jagger and Paul Simon, indicate a deep appreciation of the band’s art, but also an awareness that the group was ultimately doomed. With a “knew-it-all-along” shrug, witnesses describe a ship setting sail with its decks already on fire.

The Rutles, from left: Neil Innes, Ricky Fataar, Eric Idle, and John Halsey

Of the actors playing the Rutles, only Idle (who lip-synchs his vocals) and Innes have significant speaking lines. The other band members, bassist Ricky Fataar and drummer John Halsey, speak little; they were hired primarily as musicians. Fataar cut two albums and toured extensively with the Beach Boys, while Halsey was a regular session musician for Lou Reed, Joe Cocker, and Joan Armatrading. Their musical bona fides are unimpeachable.

As stated above, the audience already understands where the Rutles’ trajectory is headed. While happy lyrics and playfully inventive composition keeps Rutlemania fans distracted, the band’s internal dissensions become increasingly visible. As they work less closely, the band’s art starts suffering, and they begin displaying embarrassing, sprawling pseudo-creativity. It becomes clear the band members need one another, but can’t stand each other.

Eventually, we already know, the band splinters. Some members return to the anonymity from which they originated, while others keep trying to produce art, but remain haunted by their past. Asked directly whether the Rutles will ever get back together, Mick Jagger, looking like a man caught with his pants around his ankles, gasps: “I hope not.” So do we, because they’re worth more as a memory than a living force.

Idle and Innes, plus part-time contributors George Harrison and Michael Palin, infuse the Rutles story with fast, Python-esque humor. But it’s the comedy of a perfectly choreographed train wreck. We almost feel guilty taking pleasure in watching the Rutles self-destruct. Yet the Rutles’ tragedy is so woven into our cultural consciousness, we need that laughter, just to understand the depths of our own pain.

The Avett Brothers: Rocking That Old Indie Hillbilly Sound

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part Seven
The Avett Brothers, I and Love and You

Country music became mainstream in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as “rock” music increasingly favored power chords and screaming vocals. Audiences who loved melody and tunefulness found country appealing, especially as the FCC opened new FM frequencies, and country became available in cities, in lifelike stereophonic sound. But like any field suddenly flush with success, country paid a price, audible whenever programmers flood our ears with slick, urbanized “bro country” and formulaic drinkin’ songs.

The Avett Brothers famously began as a revisionist bluegrass outfit, but drifted into acoustic indie folk rock. They even highlight their transition in the first two tracks on this, their major-label debut album. After the ascending piano-driven title track launches the disc, the banjo lick on the second song, “January Wedding,” sounds old but not tired. Probably influenced by the millennial bluegrass revival, and the O Brother soundtrack, the Avetts lovingly burnish restored antique sounds.

But the lyrics further this theme. The alienation from self, the leaving home, in “I and Love and You,” contrasts with the ironic love lyrics in “January Wedding,” where the narrator laments that when he met his girl, she was “sick like Audrey Hepburn.” Ooh, harsh. This album turns on themes of alienation, loss, and disappointment. The self-flagellating lyrics remind listeners how much the narrator, who may or may not be alternating vocalists Seth and Scott Avett, hates himself.

On “Tin Man,” the singer calls himself “warm as a stone” and sings about how much he misses “the feelin’ of feelin’.” That message of feeling dead inside has country resonances going back to Roy Acuff and Kitty Wells. Yet the mildly twangy instrumentation seems to parody the sound of today’s egregiously self-serious Kontemporary Kountry, suggesting the message is actually ironic, a secret joke we get because we don’t just receive music passively, we’re active, thoughtful listeners.

I grew up enjoying artists like Gordon Lightfoot and Carole King, musicians who disregarded advertizing niches and made music that sounded good, regardless of marketability. The Avett Brothers signal their continuity with that tradition, sometimes blatantly, as in songs like “Ten Thousand Words,” which launches with an intro so reminiscent of James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” that, when another song starts, it brutally grabs your attention.

The Avett Brothers' core lineup, from left: Seth Avett,
Joe Kwon, Bob Crawford, and Scott Avett

Their ecumenical musical influence increases in the McCartney-ish shuffle of “And It Spread” or the Motown backbeat in “Kick Drum Heart,” though it never overwhelms the band’s distinct musical identity. Heritage, for this band, represents a buffet, from which they sample omnivorously. Country audiences, familiar with how their genre currently appropriates influences from hard rock and hip-hop, may find this approach comforting… or possibly disorienting. Depending on whether you resist the sudden shifts, or accept them.

That same faux-country sound recurs on “It Goes On and On” and “Laundry Room,” suggesting the Avetts recognize their own hillbilly roots, while standing outside that heritage. Use of instruments like kazoo and musical saw play with this duality. But simultaneously, they play with—and subvert—indie rock conventions throughout this album. This continues a tradition much beloved in the “alternative” community, a sly awareness that the featured artist both relies upon, and resists, the record label.

The Avetts accomplish this, partly, by crafting arrangements that radio programmers will never smoothly incorporate into any genre playlist. “Ill With Want” and “The Perfect Space” both feature austere piano-and-string-bass arrangements that complement their lonely, isolated themes. But the latter track features jarring hard rock transitions, ensuring we can’t rest in their sound like a hammock, or phase them out like elevator music. It also ribs an industry dependent on (and hamstrung by) convenient marketing labels.

Finally, the album concludes with the song “Incomplete and Insecure,” where the singer laments that “I haven't finished a thing since I started my life, don't feel much like starting now.” In fact, he laments this over and over, like a Jesuit wailing “mea maxima culpa.” Yet from award-winning artists known for their musicianship and their stage presence, we know it’s fake, a lampshaded display of irony. By closing on this, they declare their position, both inside and outside the music establishment.

The Avett Brothers demand an attentive, engaged audience, and music buyers have happily given them that. They’ve parleyed the momentum from this album into three further major-label releases, several mass media subsidiary sales, and three Grammy nominations. Well, that’s mainstream success; clearly the establishment tweaks them back. The circle of life continues. And because we love their albums, but mock insidership, that means we’re Avett Brothers, too.

A Goddess's Guide to Folk Rock Stardom

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part Seven
Ani DiFranco, Living In Clip

Ani DiFranco gained attention for her DIY music ethos in the 1990s, as probably the most successful musician to found her own label and release her own albums. That’s how I first encountered her. In the final fifteen years when record sales still mattered, her ability to control her own sound, marketing, and image control made her legendary. Frequently, this forward-thinking creative control overshadowed how profound her music actually was.

This recording showcases DiFranco’s uncompromising musicianship. Recorded over the previous two years, these songs display a performer notorious for her assertion that she lived to play before a live audience. Her ability to respond to audience energy, and the audience’s willingness to answer her cues, show a reciprocal relationship between both sides of the divide. Her intensely autobiographical lyrics clearly touch listeners through their immediate intimacy.

Though famous for her entrepreneurial ethic, DiFranco’s music was equally ambitious, a mix of acoustic austerity with indie rock drive. Though she never got much radio play, lacking connections to distribute payola, occasional songs like “32 Flavors” or “Untouchable Face” got airplay from radio programmers rebelling against the then-nascent ClearChannel monopolism. Her independence apparently rubbed off on gung-ho individualists, college students, and other freethinkers.

She certainly conveys this independence in her live recordings. Though self-identified as a folksinger (and in frequent rotation of venues like FolkAlley.com), her style combines folk introspection with punk clarity. She drives her own sound with just her voice and guitar, backed mostly by a rhythm section. She doesn’t invest in ornamentation or ensemble complexity—with exceptions, as she does front the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra on two tracks.

Ani DiFranco

But mostly, she carries her own weight onstage. She plays with a modified clawhammer strum, the same basic style used by Bob Dylan and John Lennon. (In interviews around this time, she described teaching herself guitar with a Beatles songbook.) Her evident love of playing comes across when she doesn’t stop strumming during stage banter. And banter she does: she uses a Lenny Bruce-style conversational rapport to establish, and respond to, her audience’s desires.

Despite her acoustic folk roots, DiFranco shows herself comfortable with innovation. Tracks like “Not So Soft” or “The Slant” utilize a hip-hop recitative style which punctuates her lyrical urgency. On other tracks, like “Sorry I Am” or “Fire Door,” she allows her sound operator to loop her vocals, permitting her to harmonize with herself, in a style other acoustic artists wouldn’t embrace for a decade after this album’s release.

DiFranco has often been the most vocal and strenuous critic of her own studio recordings, describing them as “sterile” or worse, despite serving as her own producer and arranger. This is often unfair, as anyone who’s heard albums like 1996’s Dilate can attest; she’s a masterful stylist who uses studio effects without overusing them. However, even her best studio recordings do have a certain lack of immediacy about them.

Not so this recording. Her mostly acoustic performances, with session drummer Andy Stochansky and bassist Sara Lee, showcase her power as a live performer. In an essay reprinted in the Utne Reader in 2002, DiFranco admitted she mostly made albums to publicize her live tours, largely the opposite of the then-accepted music business standard. She invested studio time to justify her passion for playing before a live audience.

Despite her personal lyrics, her writing is often intensely political too. DiFranco, an admitted pansexual agnostic, adopted opinions too liberal even for most mainline progressives back then, embracing her sexual inclusivity on songs like “Adam and Eve,” and confessing gender-based personal traumas with “Letter to a John” and “Tiptoe.” She was too aggressive even for most feminists: at her 1990s peak, she declined Lilith Fair, though she could’ve headlined, calling it too timid.
This landmark album pushed DiFranco into mainstream consciousness, drawing listeners’ attention to her muscular, unapologetic live performances. She dared audiences to join her introspective journey, and that largely self-selecting audience followed. Her mainstream acceptance followed, including larger venues and ten Grammy nominations in ten years. Though never a superstar, this album ushered in DiFranco’s moment of greatest artistic and commercial triumph.

DiFranco’s particular stretch of the 1990s produced several iconic women singer-songwriters, from fresh-faced ingenues like Fiona Apple to seasoned geniuses like Tori Amos. Like them, DiFranco saw her commercial star marginalized by the artistically anodyne stylings of the middle 2000s, and she’s returned to headlining the specialized circuit she once loved. She’s probably better for it. These pre-fame recordings display an artist most comfortable with intimacy and vision.

First of the Texas Troubadours

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part Six
Townes Van Zandt, Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas

Townes Van Zandt was a notoriously unreliable performer. Before his death in 1997, audiences reported he had only two modes: an unbelievable clarity and rapport with the audience, coupled with sublime lyrical sensitivity, or an absolute drunken mess. Throughout his career, his attempts to numb his bipolar disorder with substances always undermined his performance persona. But for four nights at a Houston dive-bar in 1973, he produced something unmatched in the history of Texas music.

Country music fans may remember Townes Van Zandt as author of such classics as “Pancho and Lefty,” “If I Needed You,” and “White Freight Liner Blues.” He produced six albums in five years between 1968 and 1973, often working at a feverish pace made possible only by mental illness and cocaine. His songs bespoke a bleak pessimism that, paradoxically, gave his cultish fans great hope that they weren’t suffering alone. He became an underground legend.

As this prolific period wound down, Van Zandt played four shows at the Old Quarter, a venue co-owned by his friend and bandmate Rex Bell. Producer Earl Willis recorded these shows on a portable four-track system, apparently for posterity, never intending to release them. However, Van Zandt descended into a creative dry spell, corresponding, probably not coincidentally, with a healthy new relationship. Without his malaise, and the drugs, he lost much of his creative motivation.

The recordings feature Van Zandt, alone on stage with just his guitar, uncharacteristically sober and receptive to his audience. The recording, chosen from Willis’ crude recordings, involves such concert business as announcements about where to find the cigarette machines, and apologies for the broken air conditioning. But it also includes some of the most tender and insightful recordings a damaged genius ever put forward. The austere arrangements and clinking background emphasize Van Zandt’s lyrical complexity.

He opens with “Pancho and Lefty,” his then-current single, about a Mexican bandit’s betrayal. Both Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson had hits with this track, but both embroidered it with radio-friendly flourishes highlighting their own celebrity. Van Zandt, playing solo, keeps focus on his lyrics, a mournful exploration of the forces with make a criminal into a folk hero. The idea that we need heroes only after they're dead is poignant, coming from Van Zandt.

Townes Van Zandt

This track list reads like Van Zandt’s Greatest Hits. He plays several of his classics, like “Rex’s Blues” or “Tecumseh Valley,” with the unornamented authenticity of somebody producing work he loves. Between his own classics, Van Zandt also includes tracks by artists who influenced him, like Merle Travis, Bo Diddley, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. This remarkably inclusive set of influences goes heavily toward explaining Van Zandt’s unusual style, quirky songwriting, and widespread fandom outside genre circles.

Part-time fans and corporate executives long classed Townes Van Zandt as country music. This isn’t entirely unfair, considering how many of his songs have been covered by artists like Don Williams and Steve Earle. But like many artists most immediately impacted by his music, including Lyle Lovett and Gillian Welch, he fit poorly into country’s mold. The distinctive mix of country, folk, blues, and other roots genres has some fans speaking of just-plain “Texas Music.”

Because of its essential austerity, this album provides insights into not only Van Zandt’s influences, but also his artistic vision. His classic studio albums were larded with Nashville sidemen and sophisticated productions, presumably to create chart hits. But this overhandling not only produced no radio-friendly singles, it frequently pointed up Van Zandt’s weaknesses as a vocalist. Like Bob Dylan, Van Zandt had a vision, but wasn’t a pretty singer. What he had, was insight.

Van Zandt’s production team released this album in 1977, four years after it was recorded, five years after his last studio album. Basically, he needed the money. Though he’d pulled some songwriter’s royalties from cover versions, his period of happy inactivity left him functionally penniless. Van Zandt released only one studio album between 1972 and 1987. Unfortunately, his eventual return to the studio would result in more overproduced pablum, presumably to capitalize on increasing name recognition.

Standing between his career bookends, this album, the most stripped and honest he’d ever record, highlights not only Van Zandt’s artistry, but also the way he created a pinch-point of Texas music. Though others blended the state’s reach of country, blues, and folk before him, Van Zandt coupled that with raw poetry few peers ever approached. Without the studio crutch, this album makes plain his stylistic vision, and keeps his music alive for coming generations.

Folk Circuit Foot Soldiers

1001 Albums To Listen To Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part Five
Wolfstone, Year of the Dog

Now that the Celtic folk music revival of the 1990s is barely remembered, it’s hard to comprehend that people ever argued whether the Pogues or the Chieftains, the Waterboys or Loreena McKennitt, was the superior artist. Contemporary or traditional? Electric or acoustic? Into this verbal jousting came Wolfstone, a band from Inverness, whose name reflected an undiluted mixture of traditional and rock elements similar to, but quite unlike, anything that came before. Or, unfortunately, since.

This was the band’s fifth album—though they disavowed their first two releases, making this their actual third. With this recording, they finally made the complete jump from a dancehall band to an actual mass-media presence. By formally consolidating their drummer and abandoning sequenced loops, they shed their former recordings’ late-Eighties sound, fully incorporating the crashing, organic sound of wood striking goatskin. With their embrace of full band, but rejection of Riverdance niceness, they peaked.

Wolfstone had a continually rotating membership; they exhausted more drummers than Spinal Tap. However, their best work centered on a quartet of guitarist Ivan Drever, fiddler Duncan Chisholm, guitarist Stuart Eaglesham, and his brother, keyboardist Struan Eaglesham. Drever also wrote most of their best songs, some with Chisolm. Their mix of acoustic and electric instruments, melding folk and rock styles, creates an integrated sound that, rather than blending two styles, creates one their wholly own.

Saying they have “rock stylings” could be misleading. Some of their tracks show influences of late-Eighties commercial hard rock, driven by percussive chords and a synthesizer foundation. Others have a quieter, more atmospheric edge reminiscent of acts like the Cocteau Twins or Dream Academy. Either way, their sound was already displaced, a heritage structure that belonged to a prior time. Like the folk music they liberally sampled, their rock was a holdover from another era.

The band’s fondness for circular rhythms and percussive backbeats reflect its heritage, paying its dues on the “Highlands and Islands” dance-hall circuit. Though their lyrical content ranges from Scottish history to America’s present to Norse mythology, they remain rooted to a sound designed for dancing. Their clear, synth-driven chord progressions and sing-along choruses cut audibly through surrounding noise; even this decades-old recording sounds piercing enough for house parties and driving around with the windows down.

Guitarist Duncan Chisholm and fiddler Ivan Drever
playing live at Wolfstone's mid-1990s peak

Beyond a doubt, this is a political album. It opens with a track, “Holy Ground,” about the suffering caused by violence in Northern Ireland. They also include “Brave Foot Soldiers,” about the struggle for Scottish independence, and “Braes of Sutherland,” a lament by a Scotsman evicted from his homeland during the Foreclosures. Only one song, “The Sea King,” doesn’t have political themes. Loosely adapted from an Orkney folk poem, it eulogizes a fallen islands conquerer.

American audiences will particularly appreciate the song “White Gown,” about one’s refusal to bow before racism and bigotry. Purportedly, Wolfstone, who enjoyed a semi-permanent status on America’s folk festival circuit in the early 1990s, discovered they had played a concert within driving distance of a Klan rally. Horrified, they wrote a song about standing straight and unbroken, even unto death. With the newly visible resurgence of organized bigotry in America, this couldn’t be more timely.

Besides the five songs, this album also includes four instrumental medleys. All four mix traditional folk melodies with original compositions, though the original tunes, composed by the band’s instrumentalists, have distinctly traditional roots. These are essentially dance-hall folk tunes bolstered with an electronic backbeat, permitting either Riverdance-ish traditional jigs or more contemporary, unplanned dancing. The closing track, “Dinners Set,” particularly resembles the theme for some revisionist fantasy epic, ending the album on a high note.

Don’t mistake this album for something new. Recorded when the Internet barely existed, in a studio that maxed out at sixteen tracks, and sold primarily by mail-order and merch table, this album belongs securely in its time. In the hangover from the Reagan-Thatcher generation, Wolfstone, like other bands of their times, had a squeaky-clean sound and earnest lyrical thrust that squarely reflect their era. Despite politically charged hard edges, this album remains aggressively, soberly nice.

Sadly, this album and its follow-up, The Half Tail, about northern Scotland’s continuing economic decline, saw the band at its peak. After this, Wolfstone struggled to clear its contractual obligations, while two members of its central quartet left to pursue side projects. They cranked out two sub-par albums and a best-of collection before going into hiatus. Currently, a ghost of Wolfstone tours Scotland, occasionally self-releasing albums. Like the Beatles, this sound belongs to its time.

The Dramady of the Sixties, in Two Acts

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part Four
The Firesign Theatre, Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers

George Leroy Tirebiter hasn’t left his Los Angeles apartment in years. Desperately lonely, and unable to order takeout, he turns on the television, to find some of his classic films from his child star days running the all-night block. As Tirebiter watches his own face, he regresses through the years, and his life at different ages melds together into an unending dream sequence of hopes, joys, and sudden disillusionment.

Calling the Firesign Theatre’s classic third album “comedy” is somewhat misleading. This hour-long impressionistic play doesn’t much resemble the Firesigns’ vinyl-record comedy contemporaries, like George Carlin or Bill Cosby. There’s no storytelling, only the ghost of a narrative through-line, and most importantly, no cues from the laugh track to what’s funny. It’s an immersive experience, like a fever dream following too much chili and Sonoran sticky icky.

Yet it’s nevertheless constantly hilarious. Like their rough contemporaries, Monty Python, the Firesigns draw influence from the British Goon Show, newly syndicated for American radio during the hippie era. The overlap is unmistakable in their dry humor, very long set-ups that often discard conventional punchlines, and cast of thousands played by a very small ensemble. The humor is fast, kinetic, and arrestingly complex. It demands a thinking audience.

Tirebiter watches two movies, apparently at once—the implication is, he’s flipping between channels, a more laborious process in those pre-remote control days. In High School Madness, he plays an Archie Andrews-type giddy teenager, bouncing off walls with school spirit, who finds his entire school building missing on graduation day. In Parallel Hell, he plays a soldier trapped in a war (implicitly Korea, though never stated) that apparently never ends.

Interspersed among these movies, we get glimpses of the commercialized, sterile world Tirebiter now inhabits. The TV plugs The Howl of the Wolf Movie, a satire of all-night B-movie blocks, promising “honest stories of working people, as told by rich Hollywood stars.” Tirebiter sees himself, apparently from the future, on a This Is Your Life-type game show. And he watches a post-WWII commercial appeal for nationalized blandness, “Shoes For Industry.”

A promotional photo of the Firesign Theatre, from their record label.

Together, this jittery, hot-blooded mélànge of images drops us, boiling frog-style, into a world where everybody works but nobody cares about their product; where staying busy matters, but nothing is worth finishing; where wars continue so long that continuing becomes its own goal. Sound familiar? Isolated from his own accomplishments, valued only instrumentally, Tirebiter uses humor to retain his essential humanity in the City of Angels.

George Leroy Tirebiter was the name of a dog, adopted by students at USC as an unofficial campus mascot in 1946. His fondness for chasing cars got him killed in a hit-and-run in 1950, but his legend survives today. The characterization of Tirebiter on this album implies Bobby Driscoll, a child actor best remembered for voicing Disney’s Peter Pan. Driscoll tried, unsuccessfully, to transition into grown-up war films in the 1950s; he dies of a drug overdose in 1968, age 31.

This description, unfortunately, makes the album sound unremittingly bleak. Not so. For fans of Monty Python or Saturday Night Live, this excellent piece of long-form narrative comedy mixes ensemble slapstick with deep feeling and a surprisingly touching conclusion, for a form of audio-only comedy that one seldom hears anymore. Many people have claimed the Firesigns as an influence; far fewer, sadly, have tried to reproduce what they did.

The Firesigns love long titles. This album opens with a callback to their second album, How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All?, and this album’s conclusion opens their fourth album, I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus. The albums meld into  a rambling, hippie-era gestalt, salted with Beatles references, jibes at then-current politics (a robotic Richard Nixon—hardly a stretch), and more.

Unsurprisingly, the Firesigns are an inextricable part of their generation. Founded in the wake of the Sunset Strip riots, their basic ethic always involved poking powerful people in the eyes. This album, like their others from the late Sixties and early Seventies, reflect a terrible fear of encroaching institutional blandness. Those fears seemed comedic, almost science fictional, when this album debuted in 1970. They seem downright prophetic now.

As stated, this album requires a thinking audience. Because it touches on Tirebiter’s life at different stages, it’ll also reflect the life progress of its hearers; re-listening as you age is a rewarding experience. Its mix of glum themes with silver-tongued comedy zingers could help you see the world as never before.

Death of the British Invasion

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part 3
The Zombies, Odessey and Oracle

Official history records that the Zombies released two studio albums in the 1960s, but that’s deceptive. Their first LP, Begin Here (released in America as The Zombies), was a collection of singles, B-sides, demo recordings, and other sundries, compiled largely without the band’s aid. Slovenly management and no label support hobbled their art. By 1968, having released nothing but 45s, the Zombies were on the edge of dissolution.

The Zombies’ principal songwriters, keyboardist Rod Argent and bassist Chris White, composed their band’s first dedicated LP, Odessey and Oracle, secure in the knowledge that the band would shatter before the album’s release. The title’s spelling supposedly reflects a cover artist painter who didn’t check the paperwork before painting. The album debuted to indifferent reviews. Then the third and final single, “Time Of the Season,” became a world-dominating phenomenon.

Recorded at legendary Abbey Road Studios, just after The Beatles recorded Sgt. Pepper, this album definitely shows the Fab Four’s influences. But from the opening strains of “Care Of Cell 44,”, a letter from a man awaiting his lover’s anticipated release from prison, it’s clear the Zombies aren’t merely beholden to the Beatles’ influence. They’re creating something unique to themselves, possibly years ahead of the late British Invasion around them.

Without doubt, the Zombies were better technical musicians than the Beatles. A graduate of a cathedral music school, Argent in particular was capable of syncopated rhythms, difficult chord progressions, and offbeat time signatures that eluded Lennon and McCartney. Their baroque arrangements, now classic rock radio staples, went substantially unappreciated in their time. But they use them to maximum effect on this album.

But they weren’t just musically advanced. This album’s lyrical content took pre-Woodstock audiences completely by surprise. “Cell 44,” the album’s first single, mixes remarkably dark themes with hippie-era musical bounce, playing the irony for all it’s worth. The second single, “Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 1914),” combines images from war poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen into a bleak portrait of war’s innate horrors, predating most American Vietnam-era protest songs.

The original lineup of the Zombies

Both singles went nowhere, unfortunately. Album cuts like “I Want Her She Wants Me” and “Maybe After He’s Gone,” written in darkly funereal tones, didn’t attract hippie-era attention. And while occasional critics appreciated “A Rose For Emily,” based on the Faulkner story of the same title, and “Beechwood Park,” a masterwork of nostalgia, audiences in 1968 were unprepared for anything so dark. The stark, visionary musicianship went largely unheralded.

Only when “Time Of the Season” upended everything did the Zombies begin receiving the recognition they deserved. By then, however, it was too late. Broke and riven with managerial problems, the band splintered; most members left music, at least temporarily. Though unscrupulous promoters floated several fake Zombies lineups, the original band didn’t perform these songs live until 1990—and the survivors didn’t tour America with this music until 2015.

The dark themes, allusive lyrics, and musical sophistication probably didn’t suit their time. Despite Argent’s inarguably Sixties organ work, this album frequently has a sound more akin to 1973. The 1960s were substantially divided between the Beatles’ optimism, leading to an acrimonious breakup, and the Stones’ sullen teenage posturing, which has remained lucrative for over fifty years. The Sixties weren’t prepared for the Zombies’ subtle musicianship, or their lyrical ambiguity.

No songs on this album runs very long. The longest, “Cell 44,” approaches four minutes, and “Time Of the Season” hits three-and-a-half, but by contrast, these feel almost marathon-length. Few tracks exceed three minutes. Even with surprising time signature changes on tracks like “Brief Candles,” or the subtextual wrath of “Friends of Mine,” the sound sometimes feels circumscribed by the limits of a vinyl 45, probably imposed by the label.

Perhaps that says something there. Despite hip contemporary complaints about industrial interference in artistic integrity, recording has always been a struggle between music as art, and music as business. The Zombies shattered, not as some have claimed, because of artistic differences, but because management was indifferent to their vision. The Zombies has profound musical potential, but didn’t follow the pulse of their time very well.

Since its release, Odessey and Oracle has achieved cult status, mainly by word of mouth. Unlike most LPs of its generation, it remains available in its entirety, without being chopped into “Greatest Hits” confetti. Anyone listening, expecting happy hippie-era escapism, will find it as jarring as it must have seemed in 1968. For an oldie, this album maintains its harsh edge. Nearly fifty years later, it still bites.

Funeral Mass in the Key of Bowie

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part 2
David Bowie, Blackstar

It takes four minutes into this album’s title track before the beat drops. Think about that: the first song’s slow, lingering intro outlasts most Top-40 teenybopper singles. Throughout, the syncopated backbeat contrasts with a droning main line, a complete reversal of the usual pop composition structure. This serves two purposes: it presages the entire album’s contemplative, dirge-like structure. And it dares half-committed listeners to trust the artist or piss off.

Not that those four minutes are wasted white noise. Bowie sings, in a manner reminiscent of Gregorian chant, about a strange ritual taking place “In the villa of Orman,” a mythological place where smiling and kneeling go hand-in-hand. The song explains little. But we don’t need much explanation; Bowie sounds clearly like he’s singing somebody’s death knell. No mystery whose. Throughout the album, Bowie is clearly scripting his own upcoming funeral procession.

In the wake of Bowie’s passing, you undoubtedly heard endless repetitions of clips from this album, especially the key images from the video for his track “Lazarus.” You know the one, the images of Bowie lying in a hospital gurney, eyes bandaged, buttons planted like pennies for the boatman. These images, and the sounds accompanying them, are reasonable approximations of this entire album, an exploration of a still-active mind trapped in a slowly failing body.

Like most serious contemporary recording artists, David Bowie often composed recent tracks with one eye oriented toward YouTube. Both advance videos for this album feature that bandaged man. But he exists in different contexts. In “Lazarus,” he’s visibly dying, while ghosts of his past identities, now emaciated and jerky, like withering wind-up men, surround his deathbed. He’s clearly struggling to put his past to rest, and not necessarily succeeding.

The other advance video single, “Blackstar,” features a strange funeral ritual, making explicit what’s only implied in the lyrics (“In the day of execution, only women kneel and smile”). Except the women, who have tails and apparently live under a permanent eclipse, are burying a skeleton in an Apollo astronaut suit. At the far end of his career, Bowie is apparently, at last, giving Major Tom the burial his career-launching single always denied.

Occasional Classic Rock Radio staples like “Space Oddity” or “Changes” notwithstanding, David Bowie’s music, in the main, has never been particularly approachable. He distrusted easy acclaim. Here, too, he buries tracks that could have earned him cheap radio airplay. Tracks like “Girl Loves Me” or “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” which could’ve been Modern Rock chart hits, Bowie chose instead to conceal as deep album cuts. Even dying, he didn’t want mere applause.

Despite shifting tones, and complicated lyrical themes, this album sounds like a piece. The lead instruments throughout appear to be saxophone and electric bass, bolstered by strings (probably on synthesizer) and a guitar so understated, it’s almost not there, giving this album overall a jazz-like sound. Maybe that’s the point. Like Miles Davis, this album has in inscrutable, Miles Davis-like texture that prevents listening with only one ear.

Like Miles, Bowie’s musical epiphanies happen between the notes. Sometimes that involves his explosive lyrics, like on tracks like “’Tis Pity She Was a Whore” or “Sue (or In a Season of Crime),” probably the only two songs where it’s possible to say they’re “about” something. Other lyrics—“Dollar Days” springs most immediately to mind, alongside the two singles—have less an object than a theme, which we uncover only by immersing ourselves in Bowie’s journey.

And what a journey. As “Blackstar” involves planning his own burial, “Sue” implies burying somebody else, a loved one who… what? With the references to x-rays and tests, I thought perhaps she was dying, an impression bolstered by references to kissing her face and pushing her beneath the weeds. But what’s this about having a son and atonement? Is Sue feeling guilty about an abortion? Then I realized, don’t read it linearly. It’s probably about a miscarriage.

That’s consistent with this album’s entire arc. Meaning comes incrementally, and I”m sure I haven’t savvied everything implicit in Bowie’s complicated lyrics. He struggles with imminent mortality, with facing a God he hasn’t pinned down. (Like George Harrison, Bowie’s lifelong spiritual struggle is heavily documented.) Bowie’s lyrics cite “heaven,” “the great I Am,” and other references to a God he doesn’t quite believe in.

This isn’t fun-time party music. It absolutely demands commitment to the journey. But listeners willing to participate will find an album that lingers, that changes your brain slowly, like Bowie, always evolving.

Why Aren't You Listening To Meg Myers?

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part One
Meg Myers, Daughter In The Choir and Make A Shadow

The first time I heard “Adelaide,” I stopped everything. I was cooking dinner at the time, and I admit, I burned the bacon. However, when Meg Myers’ voice, bold and resonant, forcibly contrasted itself to the introductory toy piano, I knew I’d begun hearing something revolutionary. As the percussion takes Myers’ side against the deceptively gentle piano, demonstrating Myers’ conflict with someone she only calls “boy,” she proved my initial opinion correct. She’s something new.

Recent years have seen the revival of breathy female vocal stylings so annoying, back in the 1990s, that it made my teeth hurt. When Selena Gomez or Carrie Underwood comes on the radio, I cringe, wishing they’d put more larynx, less lungs, into their vocals. Not that every female top-forty singer sounds wispy and girlish, but too many do. In “Adelaide,” Meg Myers sings with such full-throated bravado, I feel her singing in my chest.

Which made it doubly surprising when I purchased Myers’ debut EP, Daughter In the Choir, where “Adelaide” is track two. Track one, “Curbstomp,” has exactly that breathy style which annoys me from pop stars, and I cringed inwardly. Then, the second time through, I bothered listening to the lyrics:

I'm a sinner, I’m a liar
Want forgiveness, but I'm tired
I'm addicted to the fire
Let go, I'm ready for it
Let go, I’m ready

The lyrics, particularly coupled with Myers’ vocal tone, suggest a powerful woman who’s had the fight kicked out of her. Particularly since those last two lines, the song’s semi-refrain, sound very different: Myers’ beefier, more self-assured tone intrudes, though clouded through layers of distortion, like some nihilistic Jiminy Cricket. In a media environment where Strong Women are so ubiquitous that critics mock them, Meg Myers sounds different. She isn’t “Strong”; she just won’t be broken.

Among her many virtues, Meg Myers’ voice is so protean, she almost sounds like different artists on different songs. She uses this to remarkable effect. “Desire,” the first track and lead single from her second EP, Make a Shadow, mimics the breathy, besotted tone much loved by demure female pop stars. However, backed with a muscular, synth-driven backbeat and Myers’ frankly disturbing lyrics, she becomes the antimatter version of the crinkum-crankum songstresses she’s clearly mocking.

This reflects her general gist across her work.. “Heart Heart Head” starts softly, almost gently, though the music sounds less like a romantic ballad, more like a horror film soundtrack. By the end, Myers has ascended from gently husky lullaby, through gruff growling, into full-throated screams acidic enough to peel paint from metal. Her changing voice makes the superficially sweet lyrics, “You’re in my heart, you’re in my head,” a statement of undisguised animal terror.

We could apply such interpretations to every track, but more example will suffice. The song “Go” lets Myers use two voices in counterpoint. As her romance collapses, one voice timidly whispers: “Running away, running away.” Suddenly, the other, full-throated and brash, barks: “Go!” It becomes clear, these two voices represent one woman, and the pull between being good-girlish and being, well, herself. The song’s abrupt ending leaves us reeling—as, indeed, her romance leaves her.

I’ve seen Meg Myers in performance. She’s as dynamic and nervy as her songs imply. Not that she’s some fearless man-eater; as she sings songs of a woman asserting herself against the prissy roles society encourages in women, she looks terrified. But you quickly realize, she isn’t terrified of being judged. She’s terrified of the mighty power she’s discovered locked inside herself. She realizes, as if for the first time, that she could destroy you.

Myers is a fascinating performer. Watching her dance across the stage, between her guitarist and an electric cello player, I assumed she was improvising her moves. But Sarah beside me, who’d know, exclaimed: “She’s using belly dance moves!” Indeed, I quickly realized her moves were choreographed. One regional DJ observed that, where many alt-rock vocalists’ warm-ups involve slamming a beer, Myers actually does scales. Her passion is tightly controlled, which, if anything, makes her scarier.

Women’s roles come and go in rock music. Confident artists, from Wanda Jackson to Suzi Quatro to Aimee Mann, periodically assert themselves against the continuous thread of shrinking violets waiting for some man to complete them. Meg Myers is no shrinking violet. She has relationships, she loves men, but she won’t let them control her. The power in her songs asserts: I exist. Before you, without you, I exist. And nobody can take that away.