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.

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.

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.