The Velvet Underground - 1969: The Velvet Underground Live

1969: The Velvet Underground Live  Mercury SRM-2-7504 


Recorded 1969 Released 1974 

Waiting For My Man
Lisa Says
What Goes On
Sweet Jane
We're Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together
Femme Fatale
New Age
Rock And Roll
Beginning To See The Light
Ocean
Pale Blue Eyes
Heroin
Some Kinda Love
Over You
Sweet Bonnie Brown/It's Just Too Much
White Light/White Heat
I'll Be Your Mirror

...captures neatly the often-overlooked ability of the group to rock out gracefully without compromising its music or attitudes (Billy Altman)

At 17, I was haunted by the Velvet Underground.
It's a long story.  Less than a year prior was when I started reading a lot of rock writing; because I was becoming a rock geek.  And it was hard to hear much outside of the usual AOR crap on the radio back then (okay, still is, I suppose).  And I was becoming aware of a whole world of rock and roll that I wasn't hearing.  And a name that kept coming up was The Velvet Underground.  And I read Ellen Willis' essay on them in Stranded, and somehow I just yearned to hear them (because the best rock writing makes us want to go out and listen to the music).  But all I knew of them was that they were from New York in the 60's, and Lou Reed had gotten his start with them.  And all I knew of him was that he did "Walk On The Wild Side", which was an okay song, but not a fave.  Oh and I once saw him on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert and found him pretty boring.

But I was haunted by The Velvet Underground.
And I took to staring at their albums in stores (when they had them) and wondering intently what they really sounded like, and trying to imagine what they really sounded like.  And I just had to know.

So on a summer day, the first Saturday after school left out - the 11th grade over at last! - I took my little saved-up allowance and rode the bus to Palo Alto, a town some 10 or so miles from mine, to little hole-in-the-wall Recycled Records, and I spent my hard-earned $7 and change on the big green double album with the sleazy cover.   And I took it home.  And, trepidatiously, I put it on.

Don't you hate it when someone gives you some bullshit line about how a record "changed their life"?  I mean, ferchrissake, you must not have had much of a life.

I guess I didn't.  I mean, I was just a 17-year-old misfit no-hoper.  And the record changed my life.

To a 17-year-old kid whose concept of a rock concert was some big arena event with lasers and video and sound blasting into the stratosphere, the sound of a band playing in a tiny bar (which is pretty much what The End Of Cole Avenue and The Matrix were, I believe) was something truly new.  And to 17 year-old still making the run from bombastic 80's arena rock and only just discovering burning 80's hardcore teen angst, the sound of a band playing intimate, serious, lyrical, and incredibly mature (for rock and roll, but really by any standard) songs about adult subject matter (and I don't just mean the sex-and-drugs shock - all of the Velvets songs were far more adult than adolescent in tone) was more than an eye-opener - it was a total mind-fuck.

I was shocked by this album as I was shocked by every Velvets album I ever heard, each in a different way.  What shocked me about 1969 was that it was a glimpse of a whole rock and roll world I knew nothing of - never even imagined; that it opened possibilities in the music and lyrics I'd never dreamed of.  But what shocked me most of all, I think, was that I loved it.  Instantly.  As I recall, I knew within a few bars of "Waiting For My Man" that I was onto something.  That this group was not overrated.  That this was real.  Real like nothing I'd ever heard before.  1969  became the soundtrack to the summer of 1983 for me (it would be a couple months before I'd pick up the Banana album - and even that didn't entirely displace it, though it was an a-bomb to the brain just as much as 1969, if not more).  It got to the point where I was actually forbidding myself to listen to it, for fear of over-familiarity ruining it for me.

"Good evening," says Lou Reed, his voice gentle and soft.  This was the creepy, leather-clad dude from those solo albums I so often stared at (when I got tired of staring at Velvets albums)?  He sounds pretty normal.  "We're the Velvet Undrground."  And after some idle chit-chat about football, they dig into a loping, grooving version of "Waiting For My Man".  As Altman says, it loses none of its power for being taken at a walk, not a run.  "Lisa Says", all longing and lonely, giving way to barbershop/doo wop interlude before slamming back in to a final chorus.  Then "What Goes On", with its demonic organ courtesy of the ever-underrated Doug Yule.  The hypnotic groove they did so well.  "Sweet Jane" - the slow version, heavenly wine and roses.  "Real Good Time Together" - what a funny song for a band with such a forbidding image.  It used to surprise me that I would put it on to hear that song - but I did.  "Femme Fatale" - a foreboding bit of garage rock and roll (one of the few times they did sound like a normal rock and roll band - I mean that as a compliment), snotty Stones attitude - "see the way she walks, hear the way she talks ... she's just a little tease".  And then the very strange "New Age", a song that mystified me then and still does now.  Lou's best singing, perhaps ever.  "Over the bridge we go"... I always used to imagine a couple walking through some elegant park at night, walking across a curved bridge over a small river or stream, lit by moonlight and streetlamps.  Very romantic and evocative.  I just liked the way he sings about making it with Frank and Nancy (a reference which went over my head at the time).  "Rock and Roll", her life was saved by - Moe's cymbals and cowbell crashing and ringing away.  "Beginning To See The Light", the record REM spent their career trying to make.  

Side Three was the long side.  "Ocean", pure head music, flowing over you - the music and the rhythm of both song and lyrics suggestive of gentle waves.  "Pale Blue Eyes", Lou's greatest love song, and the infamous "Heroin".  Stripped of Cale's viola and the feedback shriek, the song depends on itself and Lou's intense delivery for its power.  On the surface the performance may be more sedate - emotionally its just as/even more powerful.  Sterling Morrison and Clinton Heylin have complained that 1969 is too sedate, that it's not representative of the band.  I call BS.  One of the greatest things about the Velvets is that underneath the atomic-age roar of "Sister Ray" is the gentle folkie doo-wop of "I'll Be Your Mirror".  One of the other greatest things about the Velvets is that under the gentle folkie doo-wop of "I'll Be Your Mirror"is the atomic-age roar of "Sister Ray".  Side Four was always the odd side - a little more doo-wop and straight rock and roll ("Over You", "Sweet Bonnie Brown"), a sweet take on "Mirror" with (my brother) Doug on vocals, an extra-slinky, tough "Some Kinda Love", and 8.5 minutes of "White Light/White Heat", the set's one balls-out rocker.  All groove and drive, Sterl and Lou trading white-hot licks, until the finale, where Lou calls out "higher", and they bludgeon the tune to death.  The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" was a big record for me a year or so before this one.  "Won't Get Fooled" is all build-up - after the first time you mostly listen for the climax - Moon's turns across the toms, Roger's scream - "White Light/White Heat" (which clocks in at the same time as "Won't Get Fooled") is almost the same deal - you listen  for the climax.

They say you never forget your first love, right?  1969 was my first Velvets album and therefore my first favorite Velvets album.  As their studio albums made their way into my collection it would be edged aside.  I haven't listened to it that often in the last ... god, twenty-plus years (interestingly, the Velvets album I listen to the most anymore is Loaded).  But anytime I do I still find myself thinking "damn!  this is good!" 

Derek and the Dominos - Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs

Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs  Atco SD-2-704 


Released 1970

I Looked Away
Bell Bottom Blues
Keep On Growing
Nobody Knows You When You're Down     And Out
I Am Yours
Anyday
Key To The Highway
Tell The Truth
Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad?
Have You Ever Loved A Woman
Little Wing
It's Too Late
Layla
Thorn Tree In The Garden

“I’d heard the tapes of Music From Big Pink by The Band and I thought, this is what I want to play not extended solos and maestro bullshit but just good funky songs.” (Eric Clapton)

Can we get the usual crap out of the way?

I've heard Layla discussed in one of three ways, ever: in terms of Clapton's love life; his shared heroin addiction with Duane Allman; and of course, guitar heroics. Great albums are not about the personal lives or failures of the artists - not really.  And if all Layla had going for it was shit-hot guitar playing (which it admittedly has in spades), its legend would be barely earned.  Layla has much more going for it than hot licks.

The funny and fascinating thing about it is, Layla is cut from a very similar cloth as Clapton's later solo albums.  In a way.  I mean, its a gumbo of blues, soul, mid-tempo rock. Not much different from  from what he would pursue throughout the 70's until his conversion to an MOR rocker in the Reagan years.

Except, Layla is entirely different. And the key is not so much in the band's hot chops, but in the pure firepower they bring to every moment.  Only five of the songs are even remotely fast, and those are basically uptempo shuffles.  A couple of ballads, a couple extended (very) slow blues workouts, and a few midtempo shuffles.  That's it.  In the wrong hands, this could have been an exercise in 70's mellow blech-rock.  It was in the right hands.

Because Clapton/Whitlock/Gordon/Radle attack the music with the same kind of fervor as any punk band. On the fast ones, you can hear them racing, falling over each other, sounding like they're teetering on the edge of chaos, but never falling over.  On the slow ones, you can hear them burn.  That same intensity, directed into a slow rumble, guitars aching.  And Allman?  He sails and sings with the strings over it all, a bird in flight.- you can hear the last notes of his song as the title track fades.  Meanwhile, Clapton sings like a madman.  Never a distinctive or particularly strong vocalist, he makes up for it by just plain cutting loose.  This is as much a singer's album as a guitar hero's.  He pushes the limits of his range, then past it, wailing "I'm such a loooooooooooooonely man," begging, voices stretched and pushed again and again -  "I don't wanna faaaaade away", 'believe in meeeee, like I believe in yoooooo", the frantic whooping over the last verses of "Layla."  Clapton and Whitlock's voices mesh, clash, veer off, come back, wrestle with one another, egg each other on.  It's a Big Pink style approach (see quote above), but backed by harder hitting music than the former Hawks would care to muster.

 The music is marked by a uncontrollable joy - even on the slowest, saddest songs you can hear the band just plain getting off on the music, each other, their shared creation.  Layla wasn't cut live in the studio - but it sounds like it.  The songs themselves are plainspoken.  Simple lyrics, sparse imagery.  Nothing flashy.  Declarations of love, desire, longing.  One aspect of its greatness is that Layla, stripped of pretensions, gets better with age.  The simple beauty and truth of it rings much louder when you, the listener, know the joys of love, the pain of loss.   To gladly crawl across the floor for her.  To get down on your knees.  To see her smile, any day.

Poor Clapton.  He never let himself get this close to the edge again.  Perhaps it scared him, what he saw there.  Perhaps it was just too painful.  He settled for pleasant rather than risk transcendent.  The loss was ours, and his.

Keith Richards - Talk Is Cheap

Talk Is Cheap  Virgin 209 265-630

Released 1988

Big Enough
Take It So Hard
Struggle
I Could Have Stood You Up
Make No Mistake
You Don't Move Me
How I Wish
Rockawhile
Whip It Up
Locked Away
It Means A Lot

Richards's first solo album is a masterpiece of underachievement. He does nothing more or less than what he's always done on Stones records, slicing and dicing classic blues and Berryesque motifs into junkyard-dog guitar growls, singing in a shaky tortured-tonsil yelp that makes Jagger sound like Metropolitan Opera material. Half of the songs are really just licks and skeletal chord changes cribbed from the Rolling Stones' riff manual and jammed into sing-along shape... Admittedly short on ambition, the album – written and produced by Richards and drummer Steve Jordan – is deliciously long on grooves like the lazily swinging Rockawhile and the overtly Stonesy Whip It Up... A little ambition would have gone a long way, though... (David Fricke, Rolling Stone)

Time changes everything, don't it?  It's 2013, and Talk Is Cheap is twenty-five years old. 

Put it in perspective.  25 years before Talk Is Cheap, 1963: early that year, Charlie and Bill joined the Stones.  By the end of the year they had released their first two, nearly-forgotten (and forgettable) singles.  Perspective.

What did Talk Is Cheap bode?  A revitalized Stones?  A new, post-Stones career for Keith that would eclipse ol' Mick artistically and commercially? 

In the end, what was it?  "An all-too-simple pleasure, great grooves in search of a vital purpose," Rolling Stone called it, "loosely arranged, casually executed and at times downright sloppy [it] wouldn't even pass muster as a demo."  Admit it - you were hoping for Exile On Main Street - Part Two.  You know you were.

Keef solo turned out to be a footnote.  I have good memories of his two tour stops in the Bay Area in `88 and `92.  But it's been 21 years since we've heard from the Winos (perspective: in 1992 Sticky Fingers was 21 year old).  

But the cool thing is that, 25 years on, Talk Is Cheap still sounds pretty good.  And, despite, or perhaps because of, its bare-bones simplicity and minimal songwriting, its more consistent as an album than anything his main career band has done around it or for many years prior. I was listening to it at the office yesterday.  I ended up slapping it into the car CD player for the ride home.  Whomping funk bass that kicks off "Big Enough."  The bump`n'grind, slashed chords of "Take It So Hard,"the relentless drive of "Struggle," "Could Have Stood You Up"'s joyful boogie-woogie swagger, "Make No Mistake"'s Al Green choked horns, the Willie Mitchell groove, the way Sarah Dash's smooth, sultry voice blends with Keef's ragged, cracked croak ("your lips ... melting into mine..." the Stones were/are often dirty, but it took Keef to come up with real adult eros) (throughout the album, he eschews Mick's usual adolescent horn-dogginess for more mature shades of lust and longing), "You Don't Move Me" ominous, relentless hypnotic acoustic guitar strum as he shames his enemy (Mick or whoever it may be): "you better kill the light/you're giving us all a fright".  The lyrics are all dashed-off catchphrases, simple rhymes hung on the riffs like clothes to dry.  The words become beats, licks.  "How I Wish" is rock-solid Cali pop/rock.  "Locked Away" a fine Cajun-spiced ballad.  It all comes down with "It Means A Lot", all grind and rattling, broken-bottle chords, rumbling along with that air of finality that all good album-closers have.  

Listening to it today, I find Talk Is Cheap a first-rate album of rootsy, groove-oriented music, made by a master; the best aspects of it come off as almost effortless - its the sound of guys who knew exactly what they want to do, and exactly how to do it.   It's dark, sexy, you can dance to it, good driving or fucking music.  Not too shabby for a footnote.

The Byrds - Fifth Dimension

Fifth Dimension  (Columbia CS 9349) 

Released 1966

5 D (Fifth Dimension)
Wild Mountain Thyme
Mr. Spaceman
I See You
What's Happening?!?!
I Come And Stand At Every Door
Eight Miles High
Hey Joe (Where You Gonna Go)
Captain Soul
John Riley
2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)

When I met Lou Reed in 1969, the only guitarist he would say anything positive about was McGuinn.  When "Eight Miles High" had just come out he saw them in a club in the Village.  He was thinking along the same lines too.  He was listening to Ornette Coleman (Robert Quine)

It's funny, people think this one's a letdown.  
Maybe because it breaks the mold of albums one and two so radically.  There's a not a Dylan song in sight.  And the folk numbers have a certain perfunctory quality to them.  Well, some do.  

It has been said that FD is the sound of The Byrds, stranded by the departure of main songsmith Gene Clark, short on material and filling the spaces with whatever they could come up with.  I say they're wrong. Wrong, do you hear?!

Mr. Tambourine Man and Turn! Turn! Turn! were at times lovely little gems, Beatle-ized sixties folk, heavy on the Dylan, given full breadth by Roger McGuinn's surprising guitar.  Fifth Dimension, on the other hand, shows The Byrds simply blowing their "folk rock" limitations right out of the galaxy.  It is McGuinn unleashed.  In the end, it's a total mindfuck of a record.

It starts off Byrdsy enough.  A swaying, sea-chantey melody and a wistful vocal.  But listen: McGuinn sings not of social injustice or love lost and found, or even Biblical musings or mystical street musicians.  "Oh how is it that I could come out to here," he asks,  "and be still floating?"  It's a somewhat odd way to kick off an album.  But this was the beginning of the age of the album as album, and it is perfect.  "All my two dimensional boundaries were gone I had lost to them badly" McGuinn tells us, as he elucidates his journey to the center of the mind.  It sets the theme, the tone and the story to come.  It articulates what I just said above.  McGuinn's been someplace exciting since we last spoke.  He wants to tell us about it.  He wants to take us there.  And we will ride the music.

"Wild Mountain Thyme", then, is closer to familiar territory, a trad arr learnt off the Clancy Brothers, et al, and given Byrds treatment.  But it is tossed off with an easy mastery, the same kind of mastery The Beatles, Byrds role models, had shown in their 65-era recordings. It is not a throwaway.  In fact, its one of their finest moments; the strings melding with the guitars into a symphonic wave that pulls the whole song to its climax.  For my money it may be their most fully-realized expression of space age folk music.   "Mr. Spaceman," a light-hearted romp, McGuinn's stab at SETI.  Heard today, it makes me think of the opening scenes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  I wonder if Speilberg is a Byrds fan?

"Spaceman" serves as a nice bridge to the brain-melt that follows.  "I See You" is amateurish free-association lyrics (so what?) over thrilling jazz-rock chords.  There's a lot of that going around 65/66.  The Byrds have it down, but this is only a sketch.  "What's Happening?!?!" takes it even farther,  parsing jazz moves with sinuous raga-rock, McGuinn playing straight from the opium den.  "I Come And Stand At Every Door" ends side one on a mournful psychedelic buzz, an atomic age ghost story I've always found both moving and slightly chilling.  

Side two is the A-bomb.  Bass lines stalking up on you, not even trying to hide.  Bursts of shimmering guitar, explosions of musical color.  People didn't think "Eight Miles High" was about drugs because of the lyrics, but because of the lysergic sounds.  If this wasn't what a trip felt like, it should have been.  I was once working out in a 24 Hour Fitness, late at night.  Usually they're blasting hip-hop or top forty in there, but this night, the guy had an oldies station on (cool).  And he had it cranked to nightclub level volume.  And "Eight Miles High" came on.   The music seemed to descend upon me, like a mothership landing, sparkling psychedelic musical rain falling all around me.  Make no mistake about it - if The Byrds had never made another good record besides "Eight Miles High", or never made another record period, they would still have earned their place in rock and roll Valhalla with this one.  I can't imagine what it sounded like to hear it the first time in `66.

(Note: "Eight Miles High" was recorded January/released March 1966 (16 days before I myself was released, as a matter of fact).  Revolver was recorded in April.  Was somebody listening?)

Anything would be an anti-climax after "Eight Miles High".  Too bad Crosby had to insist on tossing off a totally perfunctory "Hey Joe", apparently to placate the fat(head)(boy).  It has nothing on The Leaves, or even Love's version, not to mention Hendrix or Patti's.  All great albums have their duds.  A shame they didn't bag it in favor of the headlong rush of "You Know My Rider", which say in the can till The Byrds Box Set, and is far superior.

The rest of the album may be minor, but its all pleasurable.  And, in a way, it makes sense.  "EMH" is a tough, make that impossible, act to follow.  So "Captain Soul," an r&b riff, may not be a Byrds classic, but its a nice, even tough-sounding bit of blues (for a band about as blues-less as you can get!).  "John Riley" is another trad arr not even close to "Wild Mountain Thyme", but still nicely handled if slightly rushed sounding.  And the closing "Lear Jet Song" - 2:12 of cockpit/air traffic controller talk over a vamping instrumental and a chant.  Minor, but very nice.

The great rock and roll albums are often more than the sum of their parts.  Even in a case like Fifth Dimension, where the essential-ity of the songs clearly drops (after hitting an all-time high), it is the story that is told that matters.  As "The Lear Jet Song" eases us back to earth from the heavens, we know we've been told a great one.

The Beatles - Please Please Me

Please Please Me  (Parlophone PMC 1202)

Released 1963


I Saw Her Standing There
Misery
Anna (Go To Him)
Chains
Boys
Ask Me Why
Please Please Me
Love Me Do
P.S. I Love You
Baby It's You
Do You Want To Know A Secret
A Taste Of Honey
There's A Place
Twist And Shout



Buddy Holly.  Chuck Berry.  Heard it all before, Brian.  Guitars.  On their way out, Brian.  (fictitious record executive in the 1980 film, "Birth of the Beatles")

I never thought he said fuck, but it did sort of sound like it, didn't it?  More importantly, what a great way to kick off the first song on your first album.  Even better that the song that kicks off that first album is one thrilling ride.  The great albums always let you know you're getting into something special within their first few seconds. Wham!  If you'd never heard the group before, that opening 2:54 would let you know instantly you were into something good. Greil Marcus once referred to the Beatles as practicing "rock group dynamics so fluid and intelligent that for years they made nearly everything else on the radio sound faintly stupid."  That concept is hard to articulate, but listen here and you can hear it. Paul's fluid, melodic and inventive bass (he's the most underrated bass player in rock), Ringo's in the pocket rapid-fire drums, George's razor-sharp licks and the way all of the above coalesces together.  It's breathtaking.  And it rocks.  I challenge you to sit on your ass when Please Please Me kicks off.  I dare you.  I double-dog dare you.

Amazing to me now is how fully-formed they sound.  In those just under three minutes, you can hear almost every card The Beatles had to play.  This is not because The Beatles didn't have a full hand - it's because "I Saw Her Standing There" is that loaded.  A hologram of their music.

What I hear, listening to Please Please Me, is the amazing mix, the lightning in a bottle that was The Beatles.  Skill.  Absolute mastery as musicians - never flashy, always tasteful, and always immaculate - and at the same time, never lacking an iota of depth or feeliing.  They had the emotion, the passion, the feel that every raw roots and punk-rocker strives for and they could play and sing brilliantly by any standard. Not only had they mastered the playing, they'd mastered the genres.  Listen to Please Please Me and you hear a band who've assimilated rockabilly, soul, r&b, doo-wop, fifties and sixties pop, folk music, girl groups, Buddy Holly, the Everly brothers, Motown, Arthur Alexander and showtunes - the whole of popular music of their era - and brewed these forms into a single, identifiable style that is always completely their own.  The earliest Beatles records (i.e. this one and a handful of contemporaneous singles) do not show a band in their childhood.  This is a fully-formed, mature artistic unit at the height of their powers.  That they would not only evolve beyond this, but so far beyond this, is the truly amazing part.

Swinging right into "Misery," something of a Buddy Holly/Everly Brothers pastiche - yet (again) wholly their own.  And then Arthur Alexander's "Anna," a bittersweet lost-love kissoff ballad (Alexander must have been popular in the UK - The Stones covered him, too).  This was John's first moment in the sun.  Paul, George and Ringo were the outstanding musicians.  John's great gift (aside from songwriting and challenging the status quo) was as a singer.  He had a good, not conventionally pretty, but more accessible than, say, Dylan, singing voice.  But it was passion that he brought to it.  He may not be able to cut Arthur Alexander here, but he can hold his own - the depth of feeling is all there.  It's one of Alexander's best songs and one of Lennon's best performances.   "Chains" is George's first moment, "Boys" Ringo's.  Both are minor girl-group numbers (though "Chains" was, I believe, a hit for The Cookies).  They show both the breadth of the Fab Four's reach for repertoire.  More importantly, they show how they could make a song their own.  "Chains" is pure rockabilly, driven by George's steely guitar.  "Boys" is more of the same, only downer, dirtier, and hitting even harder, riding on the massive beat.  Ringo slams the music home, driving it forward.  His muted, underplayed vocal somehow only brings the power of the beat even more into focus.   "Ask Me Why" is a minor, very standard romantic number with good lyric rhymes - even their throwaways were always polished - and a nice Buddy Hollyesque vocal.  It only sets the stage for the title track.  "Please Please Me" is where they really hit their stride - Buddy Holly lyric cues ("I don't want to sound complaining but you know there's always rain in my heart"), but it's the call and response - Come On (Come On)... Come On (Come on) ... Come On (Come On)...! Come On (COME ON)!!! - that give the song its power, roaring it forward like a speeding train.

"Love Me Do" is a minor fab four number that mostly gets by on its considerable charm (like most minor Beatles songs).  It has a nice Everly Bros meets Jimmy Reed feel. "P.S. I Love You" is similarly minor but has nice harmony vocals.  "Baby It's You" is the Smokey Robinson song and, like "Anna", Lennon gives it his all in deeply felt vocal.  It shows again how The Beatles, one of the whitest rock bands imaginable, could adapt pure soul to their own idiom, giving it their own sound and sheen, without sacrificing depth of feeling.  Lennon's vox here and on "Anna" are some of the finest he would ever turn in, yet without any of the histrionics he would later bring in his post-Beatles music.  With the Beatles, less was always more.

"Do You Want To Know A Secret" is another small number, very much in the mode of some of Buddy Holly's slighter, sweeter songs.  Again, it gets by mostly on charm.  "A Taste Of Honey," cribbed from the film of the same name.  On the surface, a sop to middlebrow fans who wanted showtunes.  Look deeper.  A folk melody - the sort of the thing the Beatles always integrated, assimilated into their music (just as they did everything else) while still making it distinctly their own (just as they did everything else).

The album's been getting soft for a while now, but "There's A Place" shifts it back into gear.  A shimmering, incandescent number, it anticipates the more sophisticated songwriting of A Hard Day's Night and beyond, and the musical waves of The Byrds with its ringing, symphonic guitars (a generations worth of jangly pop bands in the 80's would strive for this sound - and miss).

With great albums, you know when the end has come.  Here you know it when the band kicks into "Twist and Shout", another soul thumper they made their own - so much so that few remember the Isley Bros original (much less the Top Notes).  No reason they should.  The Isley's version was a throwaway.  The Beatles' - a last stand. With the band riding another powerhouse Ringo beat (the rhythm kicks so hard you don't even notice the song is actually pretty slow-tempo) and Lennon cutting loose with a spoon-size shredded vocal (the next time someone complains about singer with less-than-pretty voices being unable to sing, slap this on) as they tear up each chord, each lick, each drumroll, building up to the mounting series of "aaaaaah -aaaaaaaah-AAAAAAAH-AAAAAAAWOW!"'s that drive the chorus back into the verse time and again.  When they slam into the final crash of drums`n'chords, you know you've heard something final.

Guadalcanal Diary - Walking In The Shadow Of The Big Man

Walking In The Shadow Of The Big Man  (DB Records DB 73)

Released 1984


Trail Of Tears
Fire From Heaven
Sleepers Awake
Gilbert Takes The Wheel
Ghost On The Road
Watusi Rodeo
Why DoThe Heathen Rage?
Pillow Talk
Walking In The Shadow Of The Big Man (Part 1)
Kumbayah

We were walking through the square one day in Marietta.  It was the Fourth of July, and they were having a festival or something - a gospel group was singing something that sounded like "walking in the shadow of the big man" (John Poe, quoted in SPIN, 1985)

"Sun hangs low in the Western sky" shouts Murray Attaway, "I bow my head and I remember now - someone's lips pressed close to mine, her cool hand upon my brow."  The chords are crashing around him.

Guadalcanal Diary always made a lot out of African imagery.  The cover may depict a pair of Africans in some kind of ceremonial garb, but the music always evokes for me wide open plains - Texas?  The Veldt?  Maybe they're all the same ("Watusi Rodeo" would have it so).  The songs drip with Southern Gothic.  "Trail Of Tears," with its images of lonely war widows and weary soldiers ("Two girls wait at the railroad track/For their soldiers to come back/Knowing this will be their last") and figures of death recalls that old Twilight Zone episode about the Civil War dead parading past the house of a lonely widow.  It's as full of mystery as the centuries-old cowboy songs it evokes.    

Attaway was obsessed with ghosts and the realm of the spirit.  "Fire From Heaven" uses a mournful, Byrdsy stomp (emphasis on STOMP!) evokes loneliness and despair and the turning to higher powers ("All the power of heaven, no moon on nights like this").  The picture may never be clear, but its a bleak one.  "Sleepers Awake" is even more ominous, with its images of "dusty eyes" and its mournful tone.  The sun is going down.  No moon on nights like this.

A ringing guitar, more whomping drums and a stomping chorus, "Gilbert Takes the Wheel" an instrumental evocative of "Emotions" from Love's first album, may actually be my favorite track on the album.  Like all great rock records, it makes perfect sense, transitioning the eerie spirituality of "Sleepers" into the sordid ghost story of "Ghost On The Road", a surf-like tale of loss, death and ghosts, as a man cruises the highway, night after night, looking for the ghost of his lost love: "Driver never sleeps, engine never slows, they say he'll stop one day and look back to see a girl who waits by the bend".  

One side of ghosts and phantoms and dark religious imagery.  In the wrong hands this would all be potentially pretentious, but what makes it work is the band's overpowering roots/rockabilly/folk/surf attack.  Back in the day, people always compared Guadalcanal to R.E.M. (both Georgia, both jangly).  But, aside from some ringing chords and superficial vocal resemblance, there was no comparison.  GD had a sheer drive and power to their music  - Attaway's furiously strummed rhythm guitar driven by John Poe's whomping drums (one review called them "ridiculously overmixed", but I think they sound great).  Over it all the estimable Jeff Walls played lead guitar that would have done any band proud, and he and Attaway wrote better songs than the Athens crew ever dreamed of.  

Side two shows the band's other side.  GD was always possessed of a sly, often silly sense of humor their records never caught (for this, you had to see them live - they were an extraordinary live band).  "Watusi Rodeo", the story of a cowboy seized by a flying saucer and dropped off in Africa, where he now herds water buffalo, is pure psychobilly heaven.  "Why Do the Heathens Rage" is more of Attaway's strange religious obsession, and minor, except for the band's full-throttle delivery.  But "Pillow Talk", a kind of updated Everly Brothers song, the tale of a jealous man with a sleep-talking girlfriend who "mention(s) every guy in town but me" during her somnambulistic oratory, is a gem.  Another, lesser instro bridges "Pillow Talk" and the big finale.

See, I never went to camp.  Never was a scout.  I bailed on Sunday school at the age of five.  So "Kumbayah" was unknown to me when I first heard this record at age 19.  Hilarious that I, even then a muso extraordinaire, should be unaware of a song seemingly everyone else in the friggin' country knows by heart.  Guess I missed out.  Anyway, starting from its choked-chord opening, "Kumbayah" builds into power chord paradise as the band hit the choruses harder and harder, the sheer drive of its sing-along catchiness and the power of the playing become overwhelming.  Recorded live, as they hit the "someone's shouting lord - KUM-BAY-AH!" verses you can hear the audience shouting back with greater and greater fervor at each turn.  I saw the band nearly half-a-dozen times in the 80's, and this was always their encore, and every time, even when we knew it was coming, it whipped the crowd into a near holy-roller fever (my favorite rendition included a mid-song segue into "Stayin' Alive" before roaring back into campire-land).  As an album closer, its genius.

Guadalcanal Diary made three more albums, this time for Elektra.  All were enjoyable but none captured the fever the way Walking, all dust and mad southern preachers and ghosts, did.  But they bought their into heaven with this one.

The Rolling Stones - Some Girls

Some Girls (COC 39108) 

Released 1978

Miss You

When The Whip Comes Down
Just My Imagination
Some Girls
Lies
Far Away Eyes
Respectable
Before They Make Me Run
Beast Of Burden
Shattered

With the awful, suspended longing of "Just My Imagination", the cosmic rush of "When the Whip Comes Down," and the sleazy, sweaty embrace of the title tune, a sexual tour of everything under the sun. - Greil Marcus

This is New York 70's music.  Honky sax, the sound of the Saturday Night Live band.  It's New York from the discoid kick-off to the Manhattan litany on "Shattered."  It's a New York as The Dolls or The Velvet Underground and Nico.  You could do a whole shelf full of New York albums.  This would be on it.

This is the comeback.    Only RnR was rock star glitzy.  Black and Blue was flailing and funked-out.  This is closer to the big city sleaze of Exile.  This is also the beginning of the Ron Wood era.  A pricklier, tighter, punky/funky sound.  The map for the next 8 years is here.  

It's New York in the late seventies.  And Mick's lonely.  To a slick disco beat (an "eerie" disco single as one reviewer called it), he longs for his old lay.  Friends call to cheer him up ("Hey, what's the matter man? Were gonna come around at twelve with some puerto rican girls that are just dyin to meet you. Were gonna bring a case of wine. Hey, lets go mess and fool around
you know, like we used to.").  It ain't working.  So he walks Central Park after dark, singing to himself.  The stage is set.  The whole album's about sex and longing.  

"When the Whip Comes Down" is all sex and NYC.  "Yeah I'm coming from fifty-third street and they spit on my face/Well I'm learning the ropes and I'm learning the trade/Well the east river truckers are churning with trash..." Mick once cited the Velvets as inspiration for "Stray Cat Blues," but this is more Lou Reed-y than anything he's ever written.  "Just My Imagination" was a gorgeous, string-laden suite by The Temptations.  Here Keith and Ron turn the strings into gnarly, gorgeous guitar licks while Mick manages to sound simultaneously sincere and smirking.  The "runaway runaway runaway run run run run run" fade-out may the last transcendent moment on a Stones record.  Then he takes it all away on the "sleazy, sweaty embrace of the title track," extolling the virtues of girls of every ethnicity he can think of and lamenting their unreasonable demands.  This was a new (high)(low) in smirking sleaze for Mick's persona, and the music backs him every step of the way.  

"Lies" is a throwaway, but "Far Away Eyes" is the last of the Stones great country songs (until "The Worst" shows up on Voodoo Lounge 16 years later).  That its pure pedal steel in cheek is only part of its charm.  The Bakersfield reference tells us Mick`n'Keith hadn't forgotten what they learned from Gram Parsons, or which side their cornbread is buttered on.  

"Respectable" - classic Chuck Berry rocker.  I used to rewind the tape just to hear the guitar windout Keith plays at the end.  "Before They Make Me Run", Keef's last great outlaw anthem (who cares if he got off with a slap on the wrist).  Also his best voal.  "Beast Of Burden", Mick pleads for love.  It's great vocal acting - he sounds utterly insincere and yet you can't imagine she'll turn him down.  Much like the rest of the Stones career - us fans keep letting them back in no matter how much they disappoint us, because, god forgive us, we still love them.  

And then it's back to the streets.  Go ahead, bite the big apple.  Don't mind the maggots.  This was their "punk" number, and it only showed that the Stones could master any rock and roll move they set their minds too.  It seemed like in high school everyone hated this one.  Me, I've always loved it.  Pure monoto-rock.  Jagged and hard and you could dance to it.

As an epilogue to Exile, not bad.