Tim Sire 9 25330-1
Released 1985
Hold My Life
I'll Buy
Kiss Me On The Bus
Dose Of Thunder
Waitress In The Sky
Swingin Party
Bastards Of Young
Lay It Down Clown
Left Of The Dial
Little Mascara
Here Comes A Regular
Is it possible to point to the moment life starts? I can: the first seven seconds of "Bastards Of Young." First that guitar, then that Howl. Rewind. Play. The guitar and then the Howl again. I felt like I was being born. (Casey Greig, actor, quoted in The Replacements: All Over But The Shouting)
Clang - Clang! Two chords ringing out, sustained ala Townshend, like two doors exploding open as an audience pours out of the theater exit. Ecstatic fans leaving a great rock and roll show? Or a terrorized crowd fleeing a fire? Could be either. With The Replacements, and this is one of their grandest qualities, it was usually both.
Years of watching Paul Westerberg have led me to perceive him as possibly the greatest neurotic ever to emerge from popular music - the Adrian Monk of rock and roll. His lyrics are devoid of macho posturing or even swagger. He has no confidence in anything other than his ability to fail. "Down on all fives," he shouts, "lemme crawl." So he crawls, muttering (shouting?) to himself. "Hold my life," he asks (demands?) as the music charges forward drunkenly around him, "because I just might lose it." The music keeps building as he staggers to his feet, lurches forward, still muttering, bits and pieces, holding on with both hands, stretching the syllables out, as Bob Stinson steers the song to its conclusion with a downward-spiraling raga-like guitar figure. Stinson never sounded more out of control here (and on the rest of the album as well), his guitar like a bucking bronco, barely under his control, tearing out of his grasp and dragging him along behind it.
"Hold My Life" isn't the best track but it's the most unique, the least traditional, and a great way to kick off an album. Side one's a mess after that. Two misfires anchored by two little gems - "Kiss Me On The Bus," a loping bit of Replacements-billy elevated by Westerberg's songwriting. PW is practically the only songwriter of his time and place who really understood the history of rock and roll: that it embraced more than just rebellion and noise but also smoochy romance and slow dancing. He's also one of the only songwriters of his time and place who wasn't afraid to write about sex. Thus the horny adolescent burns for his standoffish paramour. "Ooooh if ya knew how I felt now," he moans, "you wouldn't act so adult now." It's right up there with the Everly Brothers. Meanwhile, "Waitress in the Sky" rewrites Johnny Rivers' "Mountain of Love" into a snotty putdown of a snooty stewardess ("garbageman, janitor and you, my dear"). And one major classic, their first ballad that wasn't tongue in-cheek (okay, "Within Your Reach" - I'll buy that and its just as good if not better a song - but let me have my hyperbole anyway, willya?). Sounding slightly like one of the odd little soft songs from R.E.M.'s Murmur, but with a solid groove to it. It's a paean to fear and lack of self-worth ("If being strong's your kind, I need help here with this feather"), to embracing the role of the hopeless loser once and for all. It's very defiance lies in its lack of defiance. Sonny Bono's response was to "why do they all laugh at me?" Westerberg's seems to be "go ahead and laugh. I'll laugh with you."
This was the Mats sell-out album, according to many. On a major label (Reprise), "slickly" produced (and badly, ex-Ramone Tommy Erdelyi mixed the songs too flat and too thin, to their detriment. Had the album had more of Let It Be's rumble, it would have been better), "promoted" with videos (extended jokes by the band that did little for them commercially, but cemented their rep as nose-thumbers extraordinaire). It was where Westerberg began to accept the inevitable, and try to deliver an album that was mostly the kind of solid songs those of us who'd been paying attention knew he was capable of, rather than cramming it full of jokes and pisstakes and fucked-up covers with the occasional glint of genius peeking through. Thus the charges of sell-out; the jokes and pisstakes and fucked-up covers were supposed to be an artistic statement, after all. True enough. But one the Mats had already made. It was time to prove it. Or not. And, Westerberg being Westerberg, he tried both. Thus the album is burdened with some loud, punky throwaways. Dumping "Dose Of Thunder" or "I'll Buy" or "Lay It Down Clown" for the Alex Chilton-produced demo of "Nowhere Is My Home" (released the following year on the UK EP Boink!) or either of the original takes of "Can't Hardly Wait" (both on CD reissues of Tim) would have been a far wiser decision. But wise decisions were, after all, the antithesis of the Mats.
Side two is where things come together. Except for nearly blowing it with "Lay It Down Clown", a noisy bit of Faces-meets-punk that falls apart on its own tuneless-ness (and is nearly saved by some extra-sloppy, Woody-like slide guitar), its perfect. Kicking it off with "Bastards Of Young." Stinson's anthemic guitar figure mating with Westerberg's strangled scream. Some compared it with "My Generation," but I think "Won't Get Fooled Again" may be the better match. Where Townshend lamented a generation that had failed to live up to its ideals, here the Mats lament a generation with no ideals to live up to. The crash-and-feedback outro to the song makes the Who analogy complete.
Then, after the accident of "Lay It Down Clown," comes the barrage. A bit of studio noise, the hum of an amp, and, echoing in the background, you can hear Westerberg say, "okay." And the band rushes in with a wave of crashing, thrilling power chords, (again, Who-like in their grandeur), and Westy begins to weave his tale. Or pieces of a tale. Images and impressions: sweet Georgia breezes, a voice fading into the night on the radio. That "okay," it says everything. "This is it," it tells us, "this is the last act, the finale ... one more and we're gonna go." The song says the rest. As it fades into "Little Mascara," a mocking, smirking yet somehow compassionate, in its own smartass way, of a lonely, too-young housewife and mom left behind by "all you ever wanted - someone ma'd be scared of." All she's lost is a little mascara, he tells her as consolation.
"Here Comes A Regular," possibly the greatest barfly song ever penned. Probably the saddest song in the Mats canon. I've always thought of it as the flip-side of "Where Everybody Knows Your Name", the song from Cheers. Rather than a warm embrace, it offers the chilly imagery of fall fading to winter ("summer's passed, it's too late to cut the grass"), and a lonely night of drinking, in a room full of familiar faces who are actually strangers, gives way ("First the lights, then the collar goes up, and the wind begins to blow...
First the glass, then the leaves that pass, then comes the snow...") all left as our narrator, too aware to not be disgusted with himself, too inert to actually do anything about, resigns himself to his fate. "Ain't much to rake anyway in the fall," he says to himself as he walks into the night, alone, as always, and a string synthesizer deep in the mix plays a wistful-sounding refrain. It is a song about endings. Not new beginnings. Just endings.
L.A. Woman (EKS 75011)
Released 1971
The Changeling
Love Her Madly
Been Down So Long
Cars Hiss By My Window
L.A. Woman
L'America
Hyacinth House
Crawling King Snake
The WASP (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)
Riders On The Storm
The Doors Workshop is now Forbidden, a restaurant, bar and lounge that taunts pedestrians with $14 plates of tapas. Should you be looking for it, you'll notice a fake-gold plaque memorializing the place as "the site of the Doors Workshop, where L.A. Woman was recorded and mixed." It's a shallow grave to the moment when the psychedelic era turned sepia — a final barbaric winter before everything got worse. Myths and memories mutate, swamps get drained, but the blues just get older. (Jeff Weiss, L.A. Weekly, Jan 2012)
It is summer, 1979,and I am 13 years old. It is a very hot night. We're having a heatwave that's lasted many days. The kind of night that the heat will keep you up till the wee wee hours. The kind of night you pray for rain. But I do not believe in prayer. The radio is tuned to a local AOR station. I am learning the Mysteries of Rock. But AOR is not quite AOR yet. The deejays still have some freedom to play with their programming. For a little while longer (within a year, that will all have changed). Tonight the deej is praying for rain. He plays The Who's "Love Reign O'er Me," and all of Side 3 of Electric Ladyland (the "rain" suite, as I will always think of it, henceforth). And then he intros a song by The Doors.
I know little of The Doors. It is 1979. But I know that Jim Morrison is hot, sexy, and dead. I know from the face glowering from the cover of No One Here Gets Out Alive, which sits prominently in every best-seller stack that I pass. I know the excerpts from same that ran in Rolling Stone, another touchstone in the Mysteries. I know this Morrison is a Dangerous Character, out of control, a troublemaker, his face, bearded and sinister, winks at me from the pages. The radio makes a sound of thunder, and rain. The song is different. It is long and slow and quiet. It is late nights. From that night on, I will always associate The Doors with long, hot summer nights....
I've long said the Doors discography was bookends. Six albums. First and sixth great; second and fifth weaker but still good, middle two duds. If you put it on a graph it would look like a smile. Say what you will; there aren't too many bands/artists whose last album is probably their best. They were done when they made this album. You can hear it. They were tired. It's been a long night, and the bar is closing down. And the band is playing one last, bone-weary set for the remaining drunks and hangers-on. Because they're tired, and running low on ideas, and no one's listening, they go back to the blues. And because they're done, and no one's listening, they can tell the truth
I had money ... I had none but I never been so broke that I couldn't leave town...
and in the blues and the truth they find that one last flash, that one last moment to reach for, and take, inspiration, power, music
I'm a changeling .... see me change...
By now shaman Jim was gone. Look at the cover. John Densmore looks nervous and scared. Is it that uncertain future his band faces? Look at Morrison. In the past he was always front and center. Now he crouches down in the lower right. Bloated and bearded and bleary. His demonically-handsome features sinking into booze flab and dissipation. Was it only four years ago? Only the demonic remains.
Don't ya love her as she's walkin' out the door ... like she did one thousand times before
Once upon a time (was it only four years ago?) he would've gone after her. Once upon a time she never would've wanted to leave. But that handsome stud she hooked up with has let himself turn into a fat, drunken old slob. And he's too tired to get up. So he'll just hum to himself
All your love is gone ... so sing a lonely song... of a deep blue dream ...
Towards the end, Morrison once said The Doors were essentially a blues band. I don't entirely buy that (he could just as easily have said they were a cocktail lounge jazz band; it would have been almost, or just, as true). But they could stomp a blues as well as any white boy (and stomping is what most white rockers have done with the blues, at their best, since day one)
I said WAR-DEN! WAR-DEN! WAR-DEN! ... Won't you break your lock and key
He's beginning to rouse now, like a sleeping snake, starting to uncoil itself (I suspect Jimbo would have liked that metaphor. Or at least been amused by it)
BABY! BABY! BABY! ... won't you get down on your knees
and he's getting hungry. The fact that he doesn't sound much different from any riled-up belligerent drunk who's just woken to find himself in the tank doesn't diminish it one bit. In fact it makes perfect sense.
So having nothing better to do, he lays back and listens to traffic. "Windows started tremblin',
with a sonic boom ..." he observes, adding an extra "boom", for no particular reason other than that it clearly belongs there.
A cold girl'll kill you ... in a darkened room
The band has been warming up so far. Their energy has risen, kundalini-like. It's time to pick things up. A shattering chord rings out. Discordant. Startling. The music starts to build behind it. The bass picks up, a running, surf-like figure. Robbie picks off some bent notes. 1 .... 2 .... 3... the band starts to groove hard.
Morrison comes up out of his chair. Like James Brown, pulling himself to his feet one last time, to shout please please PLEASE. He is mush-mouthed, unintelligible. The words come out in a rush, a slurred mumble/shout. Only bits and pieces are clear. Little shards of imagery; "about an hour ago," "which way the wind blow,""Hollywood bungalow," "lucky little lady,""City of Night". The groove gets harder. We are driving fast now, through the City of Night
Drive thru your suburbs, into your blues, into your blues...
Like the other Morrison, he repeats himself, taking a line over and over, worrying it, playing with it; into your blues. The groove gets lighter, more playful
I see your hair is burnin'
Hills are filled with fire
If they say I never loved you
You know they are a liar
The groove gets harder
Drivin' down your freeways
Midnite alleys roam
Cops in cars, the topless bars
Never saw a woman...
So alone, so alone
This is Chandler's L.A. Dark and seedy and too warm and hazy
Motel Money Murder Madness ... change the mood from glad to sadness
We round the corner, the car slows down, the journey is ending. Time to stomp again
Mr. Mojo Risin', Mr. Mojo Risin'
He shouts again and again ... and again. The music builds. A tribal stomp. And then swings back in. Circular motion. The serpent eats its own tail.
Side one is the warm up (and, like most of the great rock and roll albums, L.A. Woman definitely has sides). The band is cooking now. "L'America" is an older, wiser version of the music of the earlier Doors albums. Mysterioso organ and acid-hazed visions.
I took a trip down to L'America, to trade some beads for a pint of gold
It could have come from Waiting For the Sun. Or even The Soft Parade. Yet their is a wink in his voice. Morrison has finally come to accept how fundamentally full of shit he is. And to revel in it
C'mon people, don't ya look so down
You know the rain man's comin' ta town
Change the weather, change your luck
And then he'll teach ya how ta...find yourself
It's a blues trick. A good one, too.
Like the gentle rain
Like the gentle rain that falls
in two lines, he's smoked The Celebration of the Lizard, blown away all its pretense and hokum, with two lines that manage to make something as simple as "gentle rain" sound vaguely sinister. You can laugh at Morrison ... he would, in fact, encourage you to do so. But, as Lester Bangs noted, he felt the chill, and lived it.
Every great rock and roll album has its duds. But the duds on every great rock and roll album are redeemed by .. something. "I see the bathroom is clear," he intones on "Hyacinth House," (dud in question), daring you not to see that he's pulling your leg. But then
Why did you throw the Jack of Hearts away?
It was the only card in the deck that I had left to play
Those words may sum up the whole album. They may be the best he ever penned. This is all I have left, he seems to be saying, throughout the night. I will give it to you. And then I will go. But the journey is not over yet. The music turns ominous. Morrison still has something to share. "I wanna tell you 'bout Texas Radio and the Big Beat," he intones, "it comes out of the Virginia swamps, cool and slow with plenty of precision, with a back beat narrow and hard to master." It is a very hot night. We're having a heatwave that's lasted many days. The kind of night that the heat will keep you up till the wee wee hours. The kind of night you pray for rain. We are going to the Undiscovered Country. "This is the land where the Pharaoh died," he tells us. "Out here on the perimeter there are no stars, out here we is stoned - immaculate."
The band is winding their way around the blues, John's beat is all authority, Robbie's guitar figures scale the music, like climbing a pyramid
I'll tell you this
No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn
And then the night is ending. The music is ending. The Doors are ending. But there is one last tale to tell. The energy is spent. Morrison will lower himself back into his chair. He will clutch the microphone one last time. The band eases in. There is no hurry now. The heatwave has broken. The rain is coming. A sound of thunder in the distance. "Into this world we're thrown," Morrison observes, "like a dog without a bone."
There's a killer on the road ... his brain is squirmin' like a toad
Is this the same killer who awoke before dawn (was it only four years ago?), put his boots on and chose a face from the ancient gallery?
If you give this man a ride sweet memory will die
We are warned. The sixties, too, are over. This is a dangerous place. It's not like we haven't been telling you that, The Doors might be saying. The song is long. It meanders. Ray's cocktail-lounge keyboards ride a lazy, late-night groove. Robbie's guitar slithers through the song like a (crawling, king) snake. Morrison is awake now. Clear-eyed. He hasn't sounded this lucid all night. For a moment it is the clean-shaven, slender Lizard King again. His words are the most pared-down, tersest we have ever heard from him. Ever will hear from him.
Riders on the storm ... riders on the storm...
And the music peters out, slowly. And the band quietly leaves. The few patrons gather their things and wander out into the night. The chairs are on the table.
It is November, 2012. It is cold out, but in here it is a very hot night. We're having a heatwave that's lasted many days. The kind of night that the heat will keep you up till the wee wee hours. The kind of night you pray for rain. I believe in prayer. The stereo makes a sound of thunder, and rain.
Love It To Death (WS-1883)
Released 1971
Caught In A Dream
I'm Eighteen
Long Way To Go
Black Juju
Is It My Body
Hallowed Be My Name
Second Coming
Ballad Of Dwight Frye
Sun Arise
It came on the radio in the late afternoon and from the first note it was right: Alice Cooper bringing it all back home again. God it's beautiful it is the most reassuring thing that has happened in this year of the Taylor Family..(.John Mendelsohn)
I bought this album when I was 13, laboring over my choice for what seemed like hours, between this and Alice Cooper Goes To Hell. Or maybe a Who album. I'm glad I made the choice that I did (I got Goes To Hell, and the Who album - all of `em - later. Much later, actually). But Love It To Death scared the shit out of me.
Love It is a really radical album now. It was then, too. Perhaps not as much. Put on Side one and you're dealing with absolutely 100% high octane Detroit rock and roll (true, the Coop and his gang may have come from Arizona, and may have ended up in Hollywood soon enough after, but they ran on Motor City fuel, whether they planned to or not. Carpetbaggers they may have been, but the could still smoke The Frost). Stripped of psychedelic pretensions and tamed from the wild excess of the Five or the Stooges; they honed that Detroit punch to a lean machine, and then deployed it like a surgeon's knife. And when pure inspiration and pure rock`n'roll suss met, as they do head-on in "I'm Eighteen," their richly-deserved big hit, sandwiched between two fine though not necessarily essential slices of good r`n'r (yes, I have put on Love It just to hear those two songs - but not often), you can hear the heavens open.
Right there you have nine minutes and five seconds (I checked) of very fine rock`n'roll, Detroit rock`n'roll, bastard child of the Yardbirds/Stones/Who/Them and a thousand similarly-influenced garage bands that stormed and stumbled all over mid-sixties U.S.A. (see Nuggets and the Back From The Grave, and other series, for details - and, by-the-by, among those thousands were The Spiders, whose "Don't Blow Your Mind" can be heard on Back From The Grave Vol. 4, and who later metamorphosed into The Nazz, before renaming themselves Alice Cooper). Two good little songs with a flat-out classic between them. Perfect. It would make a nice three song single.
Then things get very quiet. And then, very slowly, you hear the drums coming towards you - dum-da-dum-dum ... (bongo roll) ... over and over again. The natives are restless tonight. And the organ, slowly rising in the mix as the drums get louder (closer), and then the band crashes in, with Alice shouting "bodieeeeeessssss" over and over again (was Johnny Rotten listening?) until the band moves into a dark, Doors-like groove, and Alice begins to spin his web. "...a melody black ... flowed out of my breath" he intones. The music is dark, pitch-black, and cold, like the grave he's singing about. Then into the very strange middle, as the music drops away, all except a clicking drum-pattern, like the ticking of a clock. "Bodies ... need ... rest ..." Alice croons, softly ... "sleep ... an eaaaaasy sleep...." and then, after a long and unsettling eternity, the drums begin to pound again, and the guitar to spin snaky lines, and then the band crashes in again and Alice is screaming, full of a venom that few others could conjure up (and even fewer could sound so much like they mean it, when they don't ... or maybe Alice meant it more than he lets on) "my evil is now! and I'm caught up in desire!" as the band tears into an assault that sounds like The Yardbirds jamming with The Doors, before it all comes to an abrupt and startling halt.
Rolling Stone called it the biggest bummer on the album. As a kid it scared me silly. Today I find it thrilling.
Side Two kicks off with their other (richly deserved) hit, "Is It My Body," a slinky bit of tough rock that's one of the sexiest things the Coop was ever associated with. Man, I miss Mike Bruce. Then "Hallowed Be My Name," presaging decades of punk attitude ("cursing the lovers, cursing the Bible") with its snarling, snotty vocal and tinny garage band attack. From there, things get even stranger, and darker. "Second Coming," with Alice as a fallen Jesus (or a deranged wanna-be savior?) "it would be nice to walk upon the water, to talk again to angels by my side" he sings over a pretty but ominous piano melody, until the band roars into another bit of Yardbirds-inspired drama. And then into the albums theatrical piece de resistance, the grand finale, "The Ballad of Dwight Frye," the story of a madman, and the things he did, and the things he saw. Alice has done a lot of variations on this idea over the years, but never more effectively, or chillingly, than here; "I saw a man that was choking there, I guess he couldn't breathe" he sneers, "said to myself this is very strange, I'm glad it wasn't me..." And then the men in white are coming for him again. "Dwight Frye" was the Coopers' epic, their "The End," their "Sister Ray."
The nightmare fades. Like the "Ave Maria" sequence in Fantasia, meant to banish the demons of "Night On Bald Mountain," a romp through Rolf Harris' obscure-in-America "Sun Arise," a would-be joyful song, and yet another Yardbirds rip. Yet, somehow it doesn't quite happen. The shadows the Coops conjured up don't dissipate so easily, and for all its jauntiness, "Sun Arise" still sounds loaded with menace.
So ... a little theatrical late-night horror-show dramatics and a lot of tough, Detroit rock`n'roll. For what more could one ask?
