Google “1980s pop music” and you’ll discover an often horrifying litany of cheesy MTV videos, dopey drum-machine DOR, and women with ridiculous manes of teased hair wearing bustiers outside their blouses. Just beyond the mainstream, however, where the pools and eddies of artistic creativity whirl and roil, the decade proved a watershed of sorts for girls with guitars. Lucinda Williams, Sam Phillips, Rosanne Cash, Kirsty MacColl, Nanci Griffith, Tish Hinojosa, Sara Hickman, and many others, each staked out their own unique and personal musical oasis amidst a cacophony of dinky English synth bands and sharkskin-suited fashion victims. Scottish singer/songwriter Eddi Reader, after breaking into the business as a backup singer for the Gang of Four, co-founded Fairground Attraction (”Perfect”), released 10 solo albums, and in 2006 was awarded an MBE. “Wonderful Lie,” is archetypical Reader: lithe and lively, punctuated by a melancholy yet celebratory accordion drone swirling around Reader’s rich, resonant vocals, insisting on the bittersweet futility of losing yourself to love.
I’m so glad that before Judee Sill climbed aboard her enchanted sky machine, she left us her exquisite music. Saying “singer-songwriter” or “Laurel Canyon Sound” just doesn’t do her the justice she deserves. Judee was a true original. And, sadly, folks didn’t discover until far too late. Heck , I didn’t – but once I heard her, I felt like so many things from that time period finally came together. Take “The Kiss” – the 2nd song on her 2nd album. It is about as perfect as a song can be. Romantic imagery abounds and her ethereal double tracked vocal almost feels like two lovers professing their undying devotion to each other. Add in her arrangement and orchestration and this song should be a given for every “what song should I use for my wedding?” list. Am I gushing – maybe selling it too much? Listen. Love. There’s a reason bands like Fleet Foxes are covering her now. She’s magic.
Peter, Paul and Mary’s reading of “Too Much Of Nothing” became the first of Bob Dylan’s Big Pink compositions to crack Billboard’s Hot 100. What’s striking about the trio’s performance is the very distinct tone coloration they give the verses and chorus. While the former have a bouncy, country-folk quality, the latter is marked by an ethereal, atmospheric, almost-Beatlesque treatment. The common thread running through both is Peter, Paul and Mary’s trademark harmonies, which help heighten the visceral intensity of Dylan’s appreciation of—and fascination with—Old Testament wisdom, particularly as evidenced in the lines “It’s all been done before, it’s all been written in the book/But when it’s too much of nothin,’ nobody should look.”
When Ochs decided to “go electric” in 1967 it was with an eclectic vision that owed as much to classic pop as rock ’n’ roll. The songs on Pleasures Of The Harbor were less political and more poetic than his Elektra Records work, with the exception of “Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends,” a sarcastic protest song that became a surprise pop hit, and “The Party,” a cinematic look at a shindig thrown by rich liberals for their revolutionary friends. The air of “The Party” is bristling with resentment and misunderstanding, and Ochs investigates the inner demons of the mingling starlets, black power advocates, and scene makers with a contemptuous humor that spares no one, including himself. It may sound dated today, but it captures a unique moment in time with deadly insight.
For somebody who gets around as much as Jack Elliott it comes as a surprise to learn that he has only ever made it to New Orleans once. This trip, however, inspired one of his finest recordings. An air of wistful, stoned nostalgia graces this talking blues (“greens”) as Jack regales us with a typically rambling account of his memorable trip. It took place in 1953 and involved an encounter with a three-legged cat and an “ex-ballet dancer” with whom Jack danced naked around a banana tree in the rain. As this exquisitely evoked paean to the city that care forgot appears to taper away in a slow fade of hypnotic fingerpicking, Jack unexpectedly checks back in, singing the immortal lines, “Did you ever stand and shiver . . . just because you were looking at a river?” This is one of his very few credited compositions. It’s a shame he hasn’t written more.
Fred Neil only cut three proper albums in his career, but he had an immense influence on the folk scene of the early ’60s, inspiring Tim Hardin, Hoyt Axton, Bob Gibson, and Bob Dylan, to name just a few. He teamed up briefly with Vince Martin in 1964 to cut Tear Down The Walls, and both the album and the title track became early folk hits. “Tear Down The Walls” has all the earmarks of a classic Neil track: chiming 12-string guitar, passionate but low-key vocals, and a melody that instantly embeds itself in your mind. Neil’s combination of folk and gospel imagery, and his belief in the power of song to change the world, makes this almost forgotten tune a soaring anthem to peace, love, and universal brotherhood. Martin and Neil put the icing on the cake with their powerful harmonies.
The playwright Anton Chekhov insisted that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them. And much like in one of his plays, The Roches are three sisters looking for meaning in the modern world. This super-cool closer from their third release adds album producer Robert Fripp and his King Crimson bandmates Tony Levin and Bill Bruford. The Roches handle the acoustic side of things. Their vocal acrobatics and trademark harmonies sit perfectly atop the electric soundscape generated by their guest trio in what almost feels like a perfect mash-up created decades before such a thing existed. Folk-prog, anyone? Suzzy-tronics? Well, whatever you want to call it, it works. Perfectly.
Is this a song about a go-go dancer or just some girl dancing at a bar? It’s hard to say, but I’d like to think that “Ambitious Anna” is a beautiful and simple little ditty about a man who wants to go home with a stripper. Or maybe it’s about Anna Karina, swaying in front of a jukebox in Band Of Outsiders or some other Godard film. It isn’t easy to find much information about David Blue, and his music has only recently become available again. Back when his early albums first came out, he was dismissed by critics as a Dylan sound-alike, even though Blue was already a folk singer in Greenwich Village when he met and befriended Dylan in the early ’60s. Later he toured as a member of Bob’s Rolling Thunder Revue and made a couple of respectable turns as an actor.
After their self-titled debut in 1966, The Incredible String Band was reduced to a duo with the departure of Clive Palmer. Robin Williamson and Mike Heron moved further afield from the music of the British Isles, creating a blend that embraced everything from Eastern mysticism to American jazz, Mediterranean island opium-infused reveries and folk styles from around the globe. “First Girl I Loved” is the beautiful confluence of autobiography and universality. Williamson’s song references his own life (“Me rushing around Britain with a guitar, making love to people that I didn’t even like to see”), but perfectly captures the innocence of anyone’s first love. His own experiences turn a listener inward to the phantom quality of memories that float through the intervening years in all of our lives.
Maria Muldaur’s love affair with American roots music went public with 1974’s Waitress In A Donut Shop, which danced between delicate folk, swing jazz, and tough-girl barroom blues. Clarence Ashley’s “Honey Babe Blues” is straight-ahead “old-timey” acoustic blues, brought to vivid life with David Lindley’s slide guitar and with flat-picking as pure as Blue Ridge mountain spring water by the masters of the plectrum, Doc Watson and his son Merle (that’s Doc imploring Muldaur to “sing it, gal, sing it”). In fact, Muldaur tells us, she first absorbed the song when Doc and Clarence picked it in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse in the early ’60s. “It was one of the first tunes I learned to sing and play on the fiddle,” she says, “back when I was a young beatnik babe falling in love with all kinds of old-timey and Appalachian music.”
Little in this world can be as affecting as the right song at the right time, especially when it finds you through a perfect scene matched with the perfect score. “My Life”’s placement in Harmony Korine’s 2007 Mister Lonely hit with a force I hadn’t felt from a new film (read: not something from the early/mid-’70s, when music supervision set standards yet to be surpassed) since Nico’s “These Days” destroyed the collective mind in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums back in ’01. I wasn’t 100 percent on what I’d just seen, but the song had stuck. I played it constantly for the weeks to follow and found my admiration for the film itself growing exponentially with each spin. Feelings on the film aside, I remain forever indebted to Mr. Korine for leading me to one of the most exquisitely written and executed three and a half minutes I’d ever heard. Thank you, Harmony.
