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The art of redecoration

December 16, 2009 @ 5:02 pm

NO SONG IS SET IN STONE. Sometimes, just sometimes, the original, no matter how successful, distinctive or divine, can be matched, even trumped. The heaven is in the detail. A more imaginative arrangement, a contrasting tempo, a more heartfelt delivery, a more expressive voice, a guitar where a piano once reigned. The difference need not be vast, but difference there must assuredly be.

Whether it’s Wendy/Walter Carlos dishing up electronic Beethoven, Keith Emerson microwaving Mussorgsky, Mark E Smith ransacking Lost In Music for its inner punk, Roxy Music depriving In The Midnight Hour of any vestige of soul or The Band and The Who vying for the roughest, rockiest version of Marvin Gaye’s Baby Don’t You Do It, the history of popular music has been littered with cover versions good, bad and plug ugly. Here are some of the most inspired…

1. Gonna Take A Miracle – Laura Nyro and Labelle

As generous a donor of hits (Three Dog Night, The Fifth Dimension, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Barbra Streisand) as she was a sensitive and creative interpreter, Ms Nyro was in a class of one. Her versions of Walk On By, On The Roof, Come Get These Memories, Dedicated To The One I Love, Stevie Wonder’s Creepin’ and Smokey Robinson’s Sexy Mama and Ooh Baby Baby all refreshed parts that the originals, for all their undoubted qualities, didn’t know existed. Abetted and enhanced by the richly complementary lungs of Patti Labelle, her 1971 covers album, Gonna Take A Miracle, was as good as that tarnished genre gets, most notably on The Bells – a gorgeous revival of The Originals’ hit, co-authored by Marvin Gaye – and this tearjerking title track, a minor 1965 charter for The Royalettes and another plaintive lament liable to reduce grown men to gibbering, simpering wrecks. White girls really can sing the blues.

2. I’m So Proud/Ooh Baby Baby/La La La Means I Love You – Todd Rundgren

This medley from A Wizard, A True Star lacks nothing in sweet soul chutzpah. Paying homage to Curtis, Smokey and Thom Bell in turn, it would have been incongruous on an album full of psychedelic allsorts had it not been preceded in the running order by Todd’s own delicious Sometimes I Don’t Know What To Feel. Fairly faithful renditions rather than dramatic reinterpretations, albeit with a synthesised twist, all three showcase a sorely underrated voice that knows no bounds and offers even fewer hints of its owner’s white suburban roots.

3. When You Walk In The Room – Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band

Available only on bootleg, this take on the Jackie De Shannon-penned Searchers gem retains the jangly, McGuinn-inspiring Mike Pender guitar intro while adding further layers in the shape of The Boss’s urgent vocals, a suitably slower pace and a more romantic and resonant outlook.

4. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue – Them

When they were living in Woodstock, the way his then-wife Janet “Brown-Eyed Girl” Planet tells it, Van Morrison spent an unhealthy amount of time outside Bob Dylan’s nearby home but was too intimidated to knock at the door. “Van fully intended to become Dylan’s best friend, but the whole time we were there they never met,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1998. “Every time we’d drive past Dylan’s house – Van didn’t drive, I did – Van would just stare wistfully out the window at the gravel road leading to Dylan’s place. He thought Dylan was the only contemporary worthy of his attention. But back then, Bob just wasn’t interested in him.” The two would eventually join forces for a BBC documentary, and share a stage in The Last Waltz, but their most meaningful and lasting connection came via this song, as proud and daring a Dylan cover as any before or since. The one area in which Van inarguably has the edge is his singing, and never did he emphasise this as convincingly as he does here.

5. Walk Away Renee – Rickie Lee Jones

How do you cover a cover? Just like this. The Left Banke posted the original poppy 1966 hit, whereupon The Four Tops, according to received wisdom, soon cut the definitive version, but it took a woman to fully unwrap the bittersweetness, not to mention the ambivalent sexuality. Extracted from her largely-live 1983 album, Girl At Her Volcano, Rickie pulls it down a rhythmic notch, takes on Levi Stubbs and wins.

6. Betcha By Golly, Wow – Prince

The Stylistics’ run of luxuriant Philly hits in the 1970s owed much to Russell Thompkins Jr’s falsetto, still more to Thom Bell’s songs and lush production, though they were never better than on Bacharach and David’s You’ll Never Get To Heaven (If You Break My Heart). This 1971 charter occupied the same sublime terrain but Thompkins’ tenor was a Nutrasweet too far for some, allowing The Artist Then Known As Squiggle to cap it on his cruelly-neglected 1996 triple-CD, Emancipation. Ironically, on the same recording’s regrettable attempt at La-La Means I Love You, he actually out-shrieks Thompkins, but this sumptuous reading amply compensates.

7. Alabama Song (Whisky Bar) – The Doors

Kurt Weill wasn’t half a clever bustard, cloaking Bertolt Brecht’s prickly subjects in tunes of purest gold, which perhaps explains why most of the more individualistic postwar singers have had a dart at his enduring Weimar Republican ditties. Bobby Darin and Sting (live) both pulled off vivid stabs at Mack the Knife, while Lost in the Stars – The Music of Kurt Weill featured Lou Reed’s cracking September Song and Stan Ridgway’s typically idiosyncratic Cannon Song. Best of the lot, though, remains this drinking song from The Doors’ swaggering debut, wherein Ray Manzarek’s jaunty fairground-organ accompaniment and John Densmore’s military drumming prove the perfect foil for Jim Morrison’s worldly, understated vocals. “Oh show me the way to the next whisky bar…” – the boy knew all too well whereof he sang.

8. Somewhere – Tom Waits

Has any musical invited so many interpretations by rock royalty as West Side Story? Yes and Todd Rundgren both proffered adventurous and convincing re-reads of Something’s Coming, but Uncle Tom takes the honours with this rare dive into the treacherous waters of melancholy. A gravel-paved road to romantic Utopia that can be relied upon to fill the most resistant throat with a brick-sized lump.

9. Take Me To The River – Talking Heads

Al Green wrote and performed it first, and Springsteen sneaked a snaky verse into a swaggering version of Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out on his rousing 2000 E Street Band reunion album, Live in New York City, but the Heads’ first UK hit is the killer, still as fresh, funky and irreverent now as it was three decades ago.

10. Young, Gifted And Black – Bob and Marcia

Nina Simone penned and recorded this peerless rallying-cry at the height of the Civil Rights movement, but the jauntier, reggaefied reinvention by the Jamaican duo – which, perversely, became a skinhead anthem as it climbed the UK charts in 1970 – contained the one element Nina’s statelier rendition omitted: joy. Sacrilegious as it may be, the instrumental B-side, piano to the fore, stands testimony to the sheer universal melodicism of it all.

MENTIONED IN DISPATCHES

Turn, Turn, Turn – The Byrds
Mama Told Me Not To Come – Three Dog Night
Stoney End – Barbra Streisand
Say You Don’t Mind – Colin Blunstone
So You Wanna Be A Rock’n’Roll Star – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
Sexy Mama – Laura Nyro
The Fever – Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes
Because The Night – Patti Smith
Don’t Do It – The Band
We Can Work It Out – Stevie Wonder
Go Now – The Moody Blues
(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman – Aretha Franklin
In A Silent Way – Weather Report
Sail On Sailor – Man

Beyond The Sea – Bobby Darin
Light My Fire – Jose Feliciano

California Dreamin’ – Jose Feliciano

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I’ve Got Me Own Bit To Do

Author: Rob Steen

October 1, 2009 @ 5:27 pm

ALL THE WAY UP TO ELEVEN, eh? Pah. Here’s Twelve Sumptuous Solos, an unabashed six-gun salute to virtuosity, dexterity, judiciousness, hand-ear coordination and plain old good taste.

1. Clarence Clemons – Jungleland (Bruce Springsteen and the E St Band – Born To Run)

It took dozens of takes and 16 hours to satisfy Bruce, but boy, was all that rejection worthwhile. The Boss may have written the words, but it’s the Big Man and his mellifluous sax that enable you to smell the streets, see the blood, feel the hope and live the tragedy. “It opened up a lot of channels between Bruce and I,” recounted Clarence. A brass symphony for the ages.

2. Carlos Santana – Song of the Wind (Santana – Caravanserai)

James Marshall Hendrix apart, has any guitarist ever been so integral to a band’s sound and very being? Not from where these ears are sitting. Virtually every Santana track is a series of samba-ised solos by this most pleasant of pluckers, but SOTW is the one that engraved itself on this particular neck of the woods. Sustaining and sustainable, the ultimate showcase for a born show-off who once told me he was proud to have been responsible for the untold (wanted) pregnancies inspired by Samba Pa Ti. As well he ought.

3. Mick Taylor – Time Waits For No-One (Rolling Stones – It’s Only Rock ‘n’Roll)

Harshly neglected, the Stones’ sweetest strummer performed a more than passable impression of primetime Carlos on Sticky Fingers (Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’), then went the full Monty here. Climbing and subsiding again and again, each and every note hits the back of the net with Ronaldoesque precision.

4. Dicky Betts – Blue Sky (The Allman Brothers – Eat A Peach)
Santana’s Southern-fried, countryfied doppelganger (how both adore those tingling high notes). Dixie Dicky at his most majestically laid-back.

5. Duane Allman – Loan Me A Dime (Boz Scaggs – Boz Scaggs)

In Memory of Elizabeth Reed and Whipping Post are commonly touted as the apogee of Duane’s work with the Allmans, yet he saved much of his best for his gigs as a sessioneer, most notably on Laura Nyro’s Map To The Treasure, Wilson Pickett’s rendition of Hey Jude and, above all, this slow-burning, resistance-searing blues.

6. Ray Manzarek – Hyacinth House (The Doors – LA Woman)

He was at his most distinctive and creative when allowed to stretch out – Light My Fire, The End, When The Music’s Over, Riders On The Storm – but this underrated nugget finds that organ tripping light and fantastic. Short, sweet and shamefully irresistible.

7. Jeff Labes – Autumn Song (Van Morrison – Hardnose The Highway)

Labes’ ivory-tinkling was a feature of Morrison’s most fruitful period, as heard to optimum rollicking effect on It’s Too Late To Stop Now, but Cul de Sac (Veedon Fleece), Moondance and this oft-scorned gem illustrated his delicate side. Prettier than pink, lighter than a feather on the Atkins Diet.

8. Jack Schroer – Moondance (Van Morrison – Moondance)
The soundtrack to a million seductions (at a conservative estimate), most vividly the Jenny Agutter shower scene in An American Werewolf In London. Labes’s delectable pianissimo in the middle gives way to Schroer’s raunchy alto, et voila: an instant passport to carnal delight.

9. Denny Dias – Your Gold Teeth II (Steely Dan – Katy Lied)

Industry gossip has it that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are the hardest-to-please taskmasters in popular music history, which probably explains why they drew so many wondrous solos from their elite hired hands, most famously Larry Carlton (Kid Charlemagne), Elliott Randall (Reeling In The Years) and Jay Graydon (Peg). The prime slices of fretwork, though, were the work of original band member Dias, whose remarkable doodling on Aja was trumped by this Wes Montgomery-fuelled trip to jazz heaven. “Holy fuuuuck!” exclaims Fagen on a studio outtake, then emits an indecipherable grunt that can only be classified as orgasmic.

10. Michael Leonhart – Almost Gothic (Steely Dan – Two Against Nature)
As the years wore on, so horns edged ahead of guitars in Becker and Fagen’s affections, culminating in Chris Potter’s near-interminable four-minute tenor blast on Two Against Nature’s West of Hollywood. Phil Woods’s alto tootling on Dr Wu is rightly lionized, yet the bittersweet trumpet interlude to this unlikely love song, succinct, serene and sublime, was even more bodacious.

11. Todd Rundgren – The Last Ride (Todd Rundgren – Todd)
Stately, almost funereal, yet apt to tingle the stoutest spine. Running the gamut from howling metal to yowling cat but with a melodic core, this is Hendrix for those who admire Jimi but aren’t terribly fond of his music.

12. Novi Novog – Losin’ End (The Doobie Brothers – Takin’ It To The Streets)
Bar Geoff Richardson’s luminous stint with Caravan, the History of Violas in Rock is not a conspicuous one. All the more reason, then, to discover this well-concealed, terminally unhip humdinger. Novi’s bowing decorated Purple Rain and Raspberry Beret, she’s played with Michael Jackson, Madonna, Tangerine Dream and even Spinal Tap, but I knew none of that until I checked her CV last week. Had this slow-motion hoedown been her sole contribution to our enrichment, it would have been way more than ample.

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Seismic shifts and the art of career suicide

Author: Rob Steen

September 11, 2009 @ 9:44 pm

Great Leaps for Musickind

“I’m thinking of a change of direction.” Those are the words record companies dread most. Creative artists may feel duty-bound to progress in some way, shape or form but, more often than not, that’s the last thing their followers want. They want more of the same, time after time after time. So, by and large, the artists carry on ploughing much the same tried and trusted furrow. Those who defy this convention risk never seeing their creation hit the racks. Take Paddy McAloon, who began work on what became Prefab Sprout’s Let’s Change The World With Music in 1992 but had to wait until this month to see it released.

Yet sometimes, just sometimes, those who dare win, the forces of lightness and maverickness prevail and the fruits of that change of direction reach the public domain. The product of that inspirational, often vaingloriously courageous venture may represent the biggest step forward since some clever clogs decided it might be profitable to sell pre-sliced bread. In due course, it may invade hearts and minds. It may, conversely, bamboozle and alienate, the upshot career suicide. Call it arrogant, couldn’t-give-a-damn-ness; call it deaf, dumb and blind faith; call it a con; call it genuine prescience. Whatever the backstory, whatever lay beyond, here’s this month’s XI…

Biggest, Bravest and/or Best Stylistic Shifts

Bob Dylan – Bringing It All Back Home to Highway 61 Revisited

Farewell folk and quirkiness, come on down electricity and voice-of-a-generation.

The Beatles – Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to The Beatles

As daring as it gets. First they learned how to use the studio, then they learned how to exploit it to maximum effect, confounding all expectations of the ground a single recording could cover.

Van Morrison – Blowin’ Your Mind to Astral Weeks to Moondance

From raw ‘n’ rocky r’n’b to sax-infused Celtic soul via string bass-driven recherché de temps perdu – the ultimate maverick’s hat-trick.

Yes – Time And A Word to The Yes Album

You could hear everything from the Beach Boys and The Beatles to The Big Country and Bonanza on TAAW, even a captivatingly kooky Buffalo Springfield cover. Next thing you knew, they were inventing prog rock at its most melodically epic.

Todd Rundgren – Something/Anything? to A Wizard, A True Star

First came a potted history of popular music complete with Motown beat and Zappaesque sensibility that spawned two hit singles and seemed destined to transform Todd into Godd. Cue a rather different sort of jamboree bag, full of acid drops, speed metal candies, proto-electro-pop, a sweet-soul medley to highlight the brilliance of his own forays into such territory, and barely a sniff of continuity. Genius as commercial suicide.

Neil Young – Harvest to Time Fades Away

A full-frontal assault on the singer-songwriter/nascent AOR market followed by a ragged live recording of patchy new stuff whose crown jewel, “Don’t Be Denied”, would endure as rallying-cry and career summation.

David Bowie – Station To Station to Low

There were scintillas of hints of things to come – the chugging start to the title track, the danceable loopiness of TVC15 – but nothing that remotely prepared The Dame’s courtiers for the industrial light and magic that fuelled the start of his Berlin trilogy, let alone the gloriously hypnotic, vocal-free Germanic doodlings that took up the entire second side – a self-contained world of trippy wonder which may well have been jointly to blame, alongside Philip Glass’s film soundtracks, for the brief heyday of New Age music. So good, our Dave would even get away with following Heroes with Lodger.

Joni Mitchell – Court and Spark to Hissing of Summer Lawns

No more confessionals. No more pandering. Joni becomes a guitar hero, attacks mankind, doesn’t have much time for womankind either, and makes an album that horrified thousands, still defies genre-fication and confirmed its creator as an artistic freedom fighter par excellence.

Talking Heads – Fear of Music to Remain In Light

Clever angular post-punk begets funky forerunner of post-disco dance music. The last truly original “rock album”.

The Teardrop Explodes – Kilamanjaro to Wilder

Top of the Pops contenders to widescreen wall-of-sounders and premature oblivion. Wilder (was a title ever so apt?) was the most overlooked album of the Eighties.

Radiohead – OK Computer to Kid A

“Hey guys, I’ve had a really cool idea. Let’s follow our worldwide breakthrough smash with something so fantastic, so outrageous, so out there, we’ll never have trouble with groupies again…”

Reserves

Blur – The Great Escape to Blur

Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Searching For The Young Soul Rebels to Too-Rye-Ay

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Fabbest Track One Side Ones

Author: Rob Steen

August 25, 2009 @ 3:24 pm

In flagrant contravention of all-known rules of the list game, and in the spirit of Sunday’s really rather wonderful Ashes triumph, here’s my XI of the Week –

Fabbest Track 1 Side 1s

Todd Rundgren – I Saw The Light
He wanted to do it like they did at Motown and put the single first. So he did, igniting an album, Something/Anything?, that would serve as both encyclopedia of Pop Past and preview of Pop Future. Smokey meets the Fab Four in the Brill Building elevator. Used magnificently in the Farrellys’ fantabuloso bowling pic Kingpin.

June & The Exit Wounds – How Much I Really Loved You
Bittersweet but never sour: the best tune to bathe these ears in the 14 years separating Prince’s “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World” and the Fleet Foxes’ wondrous maiden CD. Todd Fletcher (the lousy cod-band name was his brief nom de plume) worshipped at the Todd-is-Godd altar and donated generously to the Get Well Brian fund – and boy, it shows. From the spangly intro onwards the opener to the delicious but scandalously ignored A Little More Haven Hamilton Please would by no means have been out of place on Something/Anything? yet somehow it still sounded remarkably fresh and frisky on its release in 1999. The boy shoulda bin a contender.

Bruce Springsteen – Thunder Road
Piano and mouth-organ evoke a saloon on a quiet day in Dodge City. In the corner sits the wannabe Boss, nursing a beer, badly smitten but tiring of Asbury Park. One slow-motion chuck of the kitchen sink later and you’ve just sat through an entire movie. It’s a town for losers/I’m pulling out of here to win: has there ever been a firmer statement of intent by a scrawny guitarist bent on universal affection?

Led Zeppelin – Black Dog
Hey, hey MAMA!

Steely Dan – Bodhisattva
Don ‘n’ Walt shake a tailfeather as they go all rockabilly. Never would they sound so young and joyous again.

Van Morrison – Astral Weeks
Blues meets jazz meets folk meets Mozart: the ultimate fusion and still utterly unique. The racy bass, the dancing guitar, the darting flute, the shimmering strings, that misty Irish glade of a voice, at once knowing and yearning. Oh yes, and the Most Poetic First Verse Ev-ah: If I ventured in the slipstream/Between the viaducts of your dream…

Bob Dylan – Like A Rolling Stone
A rallying-cry for a generation. More powerful than a turbo-charged cannonball covered in poison-tipped spikes.

The Doors – Break On Through
They may not have had a bassist but Jim and the boys still knew how to kick bottom. Has a debut ever kicked off this thrillingly, this winningly? Not from where these ears are sitting – unless it’s…

Rickie Lee Jones – Chuck E’s In Love

Or…

REM – Radio Free Europe

Or, come to think of it…

Aimee Mann – I Should Have Known

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Pretzel Logic Revisited

Author: Rob Steen

March 27, 2009 @ 8:02 pm

Thirty-five years ago this month, Pretzel Logic, the album that alerted the world beyond LA and NYC to the thrillingly unpigeonholeable sound of Steely Dan, the hepcat bepop double-act Ian Dury would later thank for creating “the most upful music I know”, was released. To listen to it now is to be reminded how vehemently I disagreed with the euphoria that greeted it in my universe, the one presided over with dictatorial authority by Melody Maker, NME and Sounds.

Admittedly, this reaction may well have sprung from a trusty geyser of indignation, that sense of superiority a fan has over critics and members of the great unwashed who catch up on their precious idols without having supported them through the thin times. “So, you’ve finally got into ’em, eh? Took yer bleedin’ time, you Johnny Come Extremely Latelys. Think this one’s good? Hah! You haven’t lived, mate. You should hear the earlier, funnier ones. Infinitely better.” Pretzel logic? As in twisted, right?

The 16-year-old me found Pretzel Logic a severe, even savage disappointment after the one-two punch of Can’t Buy A Thrill and Countdown To Ecstasy. (And yes, England’s cricketers were in the Caribbean then, too. Given that they won the final Test to share the Test series against the odds, thrills and ecstasy were somewhat easier to find than they are now.)

After half a dozen listens – most of them competing with the radio commentary from Trinidad as Tony Greig’s newly-discovered off-breaks sent the West Indies spiralling to defeat – only “Parker’s Band” and the title track came anywhere near penetrating the steel ring of Smurfs guarding my pleasure zones. Plenty of blues, sure, but where was the rock? Where was the groove? Where was the bebop bravura of “Bodhisattva”, the irresistible salsa-esque shuffle of “Do It Again”? Look at all those skimpy two- and three-minute songs? Where were all those delicious extended solos? Why use a wah-wah guitar to ape a trumpet when you could just use a…trumpet? “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” was turgid as well as a darker shade of opaque. “Through With Buzz” and “Monkey In Your Soul” were a marginally lighter shade of awful. What in blazes were Don and Walt doing rewriting a Christmas carol (even after three and a half decades I still can’t quite decide between God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and In The Bleak Midwinter) and calling it “Charlie Freak”? And what in the name of Charlie and John were they doing with all those damned horns?

More important was The Guitar Situation (The Dan, after all, were the ultimate guitar band: from Mark Knopfler to Sammy Cahn’s son, they all wanted to join the gang). How come the sudden obsession with pedal steel? Why all those country licks? What was that thing kick-starting “With A Gun” and “Any Major Dude Will Tell You”? An acoustic, you say? Wimps.

The confusion, bordering on anxiety, was heightened by repeated examinations of the sleeve. Both were in the band pic on the gatefold, true, but where were Denny Dias and The Skunk on the skeletal credits? Not for a couple of years did the truth reach these ears: of the band I would see at The Rainbow a few weeks later, the only members to play on the album were the guv’nors, Fagen and Becker.

Dias would later describe his bosses as “one person with two brains – they finished each other’s sentences”. They had just become Woody and Allen, ringmasters and control freaks, their acts a repertory company chockful of the finest technicians, the guest stars direct from the gods. For Diane Keaton read Larry Carlton; for Mia Farrow read Chuck Rainey; for Judy Davis read Bernard “Pretty” Purdie; for Leonardo di Caprio, Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem read Victor Feldman, Phil Woods and Wayne Shorter. Steely Dan, the band as opposed to the brand, were no more. At 16, betrayals of that order hurt bad, real bad. Fortunately, we also forgive our heroes quicker.

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS ON, as is so often the way when one reconnects with memories, the good bits of Pretzel Logic sound even better and the bad a tad more tolerable. True, I still dislike “Through With Buzz” with a vehemence no other Becker/Fagen composition remotely approaches, mostly because of those ghastly strings and because Fagen’s “dry white whine” of a voice (c. Nick Kent) for once falls the wrong side of the line separating coy from fey, but those electric piano trills are really rather gorgeous. “Monkey In Your Soul”, moreover, oozes with a skin-tight funkiness even the JBs might have envied. Similarly, re-hearing the way Fagen sets a gentle piano against arguably his tenderest vocal invests “Rikki…” with an emotional depth unusual in pop hits of the period, let alone a love(ish) song totally devoid of nudges and winks.

The passage of time, armed with technological advances, can also heal prejudices. Back in March ’74 I had about 100 albums on my exposed-concrete bedroom floor but the only one featuring so much as a burp of brass was Dark Side of the Moon; not for another month would I buy Moondance. Which is why, now, the swashbuckling guitar-and-horns swordplay on “Night By Night” sounds even more inspired on my iPod than it did on my proudly mono gramophone. Ditto the black-streaked joie de vivre of the shamelessly Nashvillian “With A Gun”.

“Parker’s Band” rocks incredibly hard for a tribute to a jazz king, powered by a drum riff capable of launching a nuclear warhead and coda’ed by a rip-roaring battle of the saxes. The guitar solo on “Pretzel Logic”, blues-fuelled and graceful, sounds even more sinuous and sensual. Drums and piano entwine on “Charlie Freak”, giving Don and Walt’s most melancholic tune a deceptively upbeat veneer, but who noticed all those Yuletide bells, much less that snaky, kazoo-like synth? And if “Barrytown” isn’t at one and the same time The Greatest Tune George Gershwin Never Wrote and The Greatest Song Never To Soundtrack A David Lynch Movie, then Dan is assuredly not your man.

THE UPSHOT of this sudden splurge of revisiting (I’ve played it six times in its entirety today, and “Charlie Freak” and “Barrytown” 10 times apiece) is that Pretzel Logic has finally shifted from bottom on my personal Dan Mk I League table (only five tracks made my “Steeliest” playlist), thus trading places with The Royal Scam. Never again would The Dan sound so economical, so jaunty, so adept at sidestepping genre-fication. Never again would Don and Walt deploy a full-time band, much less a pedal steel. Never again would their songs sound so innocent, so young. Not a big pity, just a small one.

I’m not one to look behind

I know that times must change

But over there in Barrytown

They do things very strange

They don’t do things all that different in Don ‘n’ Walt Town.

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The Fine Art of Croweing

Author: Rob Steen

March 9, 2009 @ 2:40 am

There have been, to my almost certain knowledge, only three world-famous Crowes: Russell the actor, his cousin Martin, New Zealand’s greatest batsman and the shamefully uncredited inspiration for cricket’s Twenty20 revolution, and Cameron the rock hack-turned-bigshot film director. Of these, the last is the least appreciated, so let’s make amends forthwith.

I’ve just watched the wacky but endlessly soulful and criminally-neglected Elizabethtown for the second time. The first time I saw it my teenage daughter was next to me, ensuring a welcome bonding session. This time it offered a touch of serendipity: one of the stars is Susan Sarandon, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a rather wonderful girl I’d met the previous evening. As with all the Cameron Crowe films I’ve seen, it celebrates the upside of humanity: freedom of expression, respect for individuality, resilience, families, friends, forgiveness and love. And the enduring wonder of music.

No modern director, not even Martin Scorsese, celebrates the mood-changing, life-affirming power of song quite like the Rolling Stone alumnus. Marty tips his titfer to acts that forged their legends in the Sixties – Van Morrison, The Stones, Smokey – and cranks up the volume; Cammy (one day we’ll learn to love him enough to excuse such over-familiarity) flies the Seventies flag, rummaging through his tattered review copies and turning the dial down to five. Except, that is, when the band mime the bejesus out of “Free Bird” in Elizabethtown while a stuffed white bird descends from the ceiling and bursts into flames. A rather ham-fisted homage to Lynyrd Skynyrd, granted, but, as with all things Crowe, unflinchingly heartfelt.

Conjoined by time and place (the early Seventies), the guestlist for Almost Famous comes on like a Proustian rush with added quirks to shatter preconceptions: Yes do “Your Move”, their prettiest tune and least proggy turn; the Beach Boys do “Feel Flows”, their one and only dart at psychedelic acid-prog; The Who do “Underture” (yes, yes, I know it was recorded in the Sixties, but it blazed the trail to Who’s Next and Quadrophenia), which means no Rog. Crowe even achieves the not inconsiderable feat of reminding us that Elton John used to be considerably more than a self-mocking variety act, using his and Bernie Taupin’s songs with an aptness and a guileless affection that would be cool if it weren’t so irretrievably unhip.

In Almost Famous, the growing schisms on the tour bus are briefly healed by a slowly-building chorus of “Tiny Dancer” guaranteed to inject a mountain-sized lump into all but the most cynical throats. In Elizabethtown we get “My Father’s Gun”, not once but twice. As the central song in a movie whose plot revolves around a dead father and his suicidal son, this is far from excessive. Yet what makes it resonate is not so much the rousing nature of Taupin’s lyrics, Elt’s gospelly vocal or even the majestic piano lines that drive the whole stirring enchilada along, but the fact that Crowe brazenly, perhaps recklessly, allows the song to compete with both action and dialogue. Eventually, gloriously, the song wins. And no-one loses.

In Jerry Maguire, the canvas runs the generational gamut as the big boys jostle for elbow room – Elvis v His Bobness v Macca v Bruce v Neil v Pete T – and the girls – Aimee Mann, Rickie Lee Jones – compete for airspace. Elizabethtown digs deeper and wider – Tom Petty (with and without Les Heartbreakers), the Flying Burrito Brothers, Henry Mancini, Loudon Wainwright and, best of all, Lindsey Buckingham doing an acoustic “Big Love” that sacrifices the exhilaration of the Big Mac original for something slower, more panoramic and, yes, way more beautiful.

Not that Crowe is wholly resistant to original scores. Whenever something tender or plaintive is required in Almost Famous and Elizabethtown, up pops a shimmering instrumental motif courtesy of his far from ungifted old lady, Nancy Wilson. The impact is only heightened by the knowledge that this was the woman who once pioneered the power ballad with her sister in the widely unlamented Heart.

Only one question remains: given that John Hughes did the Eighties a passable degree of justice, who will fly the flag for the Nineties? My money’s on Danny Boyle. For now, let’s just give thanks for – and some belated due to – the exceedingly honourable Mr Nancy Wilson.

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Overtures and beginnings

Author: Rob Steen

March 4, 2009 @ 6:10 pm

THOSE OPENING BARS: the shop window with a difference, the musical equivalent of the intro to a newspaper story. As a rule, they hint, at the very least, at what is to come. Occasionally – the gentle piano overture to Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road”; the Beatles-at-Shea racket that introduces Elvis Costello’s “A Man Out Of Time” – they bowl you a googly. Either way, they make or break a song. If those rumbling drums or blasting horns or tinkled ivories don’t grab you by the lapels, defying you not to check out the rest, the day is lost.

So, with the very minimum of further ado, here is your starter for 10:

1. I Want You Back – Jackson 5
It may have been the voices, dance-steps and cute all-for-oneness that did it for Motown, but it was the sheer imagination and verve of that guitar-bass-strings backdrop that seduced a pre-teen in suburban London. Did any band ever announce itself with such musical bravura?

2. It’s A Shame – The Motown Spinners
Forget Chuck, Carlos and Stevie Ray; never mind Eric, Jimi or Jimmy: the sweet, stately, helplessly funky electric lead figure that ushers in a song Stevie Wonder somehow saw fit to give away remains THE most uplifting slab of wordless soul imaginable.

3. Wedding Bell Blues – Laura Nyro
Doo-doo-do-do-da-doo-doo, doo-da-doo-da-doo…the Bronx Bronte built an entire career out of this Grade 1 Piano riff, but who’s complaining when it trips the light fantastic with such soulfully gay abandon?

4. The Song Remains The Same – Led Zeppelin
In which James Page, deep in his double-necked Gibson heyday, revs up as never before or since: a Harley Davidson fuelled by a few gallons of uncut coke.

5. Good Times – Chic
The overture that drove the entire symphony and kick-started The Golden Age of Disco. The very definition of funky, defy-you-not-to-dance, stone-cold genius.

6. Walk On By – Dionne Warwick
That sombre, funereal beat. Those plucked, heartbroken strings. Did packaging ever anticipate contents with quite such moving accuracy?

7. Born To Run – Bruce Springsteen
Has a drummer ever presided so imperiously over a song as Max Weinberg did here? Slashing chords and a shamelessly Spectoresque arrangement complete the prelude with everything, kitchen sink and kitsch included, but it’s the way the man on the stool ignites the explosion that leaves you breathless. The Boss didn’t call him “Mighty Max” for nothing.

8. Wichita Lineman – Glen Campbell
Oh, that doh-doh-doh-dee-doh bass; oh, those sun-scraping strings. Peers despised Jimmy Webb because he made millions flogging his songs to the ageing and unhip. The true source of envy was a 24-carat soul and an ear for visual soundscapes that served as a welcome antidote to the cold, delusory flawlessness of Ansell Adams. Hear those cables hum.

9. Lipstick Vogue – Elvis Costello and The Attractions
Wherein Pete Thomas confirms himself as London’s answer to Mighty Max, powering and propelling one of EC’s nastiest ditties with six seconds of pure energy.

10. When You Walk In The Room – The Searchers
A lesson in the art of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Byrds not only ripped off the opening bass plod for Eight Miles High but also fearlessly nicked that rippling, pre-tape-loop of a riff to turbo-charge their pre-Gram Parsons oeuvre. At least Lee Mavers, as a fellow Scouser, had an inalienable right to steal it for There She Goes.

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Astral regrets

Author: Rob Steen

@ 9:50 am

“DON’T BOTHER.” The owner of Octave in Lewes High Street, my ever-so-friendly local record store (sincere apologies if that sounds as if I’m gloating over my good fortune in having such a thing), was unequivocal. Which was exactly what I wanted to hear. My favourite album by one of my most cherished musicians, rendered live from Hollywood, 40 years after its extraordinary birth? I’d rather spend the money on secondhand socks.

Don’t get me wrong. For this listener, Astral Weeks remains not merely Van Morrison’s most inspirational and inspiring threequarters of an hour. An accidental fusion of folk, blues and jazz, Belfast and the Mississippi – only the studio clock prevented Morrison, unthinkably, from diluting the contributions of Modern Jazz Quartet duo drummer Connie Kay and bassist Richard Davis – it also remains one of the few unique recordings in the history of popular song. From the stand-up bass-acoustic guitar-swishy-drum overture to that wondrous opening line – “If I venture in the slipstream/Through the viaduct of your dreams” – right down to the hauntingly sudden, suitably deathly halt of “Slim Slow Slider”, it still sounds as fresh and rich and daring as it did when I first heard it five years after its release.

I also yield to no man in my love and admiration for Morrison’s first decade as a solo act. His first eight studio albums (Blowin’ Your Mind included) were all crackers to varying degrees – how many can legitimately claim that sort of feat? There were two stone-cold classics (Astral Weeks and Moondance), three works that almost matched them (St Dominic’s Preview, Hardnose The Highway and Veedon Fleece) and two more (His Band And The Street Choir and Tupelo Honey) for which the vast majority of songwriters would have willingly exchanged their soul. Amid all this, he also served up It’s Too Late To Stop Now, the single greatest justification for the invention of the live album. So far, so wonderful.

Unfortunately, the past 30 years have been considerably less fruitful. Admittedly, maintaining that sort of pace, in qualitative as well as quantitative terms, was always going to be next to impossible – ask Bob and Joni, his two main rivals for the World Heavyweight Songwriting Championship belt. All the same, it would be stretching the bounds of decency and compassion beyond endurance not to admit that, bar “Common One”, “Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart” and parts of “Days Like This”, those subsequent records, flowing all too freely, have left me cold, drained as they were of everything bar professionalism, self-caricature and vitriol.

Forever at odds with the media, the music business and pretty much everything modern life has to offer, his public persona, reinforced by all those lyrical shots at “Big Time Operators”, has been that of the prototype Grumpy Old Man. The sense of someone content to take the paycheque and waddle through the motions has been impossible to avoid. Like Woody Allen, he has become more prolific with the years; and just as Woody has pretty much forgotten how to make us laugh, so Van has lost his capacity to rouse. Unlike Woody, who has at least made some enjoyable and interesting films while at least attempting to break new ground – the same can be said of Messrs Dylan, Mitchell and Young – he has run out of things to say and hence favours repetition over invention.

Which is why I gave up on him about half a dozen albums back. And why I gave only a semi-moment’s thought to attending that performance of Astral Weeks in Hollywood late last year. Tempting as it was to imagine seeing him play songs I’d given up hope of ever hearing live, it was far easier to envisage a show devoid of genuine feeling. Granted, I’ve read any number of favourable reviews of the recording, but there are only so many times a hero can disappoint and dismay.

None of this detracts, though, from the bottom line: I still listen to Van Morrison as much as I do to anyone (with the possible exception of Todd Rundgren). He fits so many moods. If I want joy, I put on “Wild Night” or “Jackie Wilson Said” or “Straight To Your Heart Like A Cannonball”. If I want despair, I plump for “TB Sheets” or “Slim Slow Slider”. If I want to hear this most expressive, resonant and thrillingly unique of voices at its most expressive, resonant and thrilling, I flip on “Madame George” or “You Don’t Pull No Punches” or the live versions of “Caravan” and “Wild Children”. If I want to jazz things up, it’s “Moondance”, “Green”, “Snow In St Anselmo” or “I Will Be There”. Or if, as is more often the case these days, I simply want serene, ineffable beauty, it’s “Fair Play” or “Autumn Song” or “Listen To The Lion” or “Ballerina”.

So thankyou, Van, for all your gifts, which I will appreciate so long as my ears continue to function, but no thanks, I won’t be investing in your latest bit of product. Sorry, but some risks are simply too great.

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