Before his appointment in 2004 as Panama’s Minister of Tourism, singer/songwriter/actor/lawyer/politician Rubén Blades reigned as the heir apparent to salsa king Willie Colón, producing a thoroughly modern melange of salsa, Central American nueva canción and Cuban nueva trova infused with politically charged lyrics inspired in part by the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. “Decisiones” opens Blades’ stunningly polyrhythmic magnum opus Buscando América (Searching For America). Each of the song’s three stanzas meticulously details the kind of impossibly heartbreaking, horrifying and tragic moral choices that everyday people face with heroic regularity. “Decisions, every day,” Blades cries for the unwed mother, the cuckolded husband, the unrepentant drunk, “Decisions, everything costs.” Backed by the precise, supple musicianship of the seven-member Seis del Solar, Blades’ gorgeous clarion vocals soar and rise above it all like a prophet’s in the wilderness.
Back in the early ‘80s, Maria McKee, as lead singer of legendary country punks Lone Justice, was the Joan of Arc of the L.A. underground. An achingly adorable bottle-blonde supernova, McKee, then still in her teens, radiated charisma like shockwaves from a sonic boom, her sweet and monumental voice every bit as astonishing as Linda Ronstadt’s or Dolly Parton’s in their heydays. Each dumbstruck critic and salivating industry wheel who caught her showcases at local dives like the Music Machine or Club Lingerie knew they were witnessing a nascent pop goddess. Then, however, life happened. Lone Justice’s two LPs largely saddled McKee’s mustang soul with AOR mediocrity in anticipation of a breakthrough that never quite arrived. Solo albums followed, each more haphazardly promoted than the last. It’s a minor miracle that McKee even survived this death by a thousand cuts. That she was able to carve transcendence out of such heartbreak is something profoundly holy: “Life Is Sweet” (and its wordless orchestral coda, “Afterlife”), presents McKee’s rapturous, deeply affectionate paean to the world’s beautiful losers, a virtual misfit manifesto for all us beaten-down dreamers of dreams.
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.
“Kiss and Say Goodbye” could easily stand as the manifesto artistico of Damn Fine Day. Up until their 1975 self-titled debut album, Canadian sisters/chanteuses Kate & Anna McGarrigle served as a cherished secret wellspring of songs, covered by Linda Ronstadt, Maria Muldaur, Emmylou Harris and others. “Kiss and Say Goodbye,” written by Kate (mother of Rufus and Martha Wainwright, by the way), sweetly, meticulously dreams of not just a damn fine day, but the Perfect Day: meet at the airport, catch a film from gay Paree, grab dinner for two in some eastside rendezvous, walk around the block hand in hand, and kiss ’til your mouth gets numb. Backed by a crack studio band featuring Lowell George on guitar and Bobby Keys on saxophone, the McGarrigles’ joyously warbling harmonies paint the everyday contours of domestic and romantic bliss with wit, sophistication, and a dash of sarcasm to leaven the mix. It ain’t easy to swing on a star and catch moonbeams in a jar, but that’s the McGarrigles’ metier artistique.
Tracy Nelson’s sweet, pure, utterly incandescent voice has proven to be one of the great hidden treasures of the rock era. Sexual and spiritual all in one breath, the unhurried elegance of Nelson’s music, both with the band Mother Earth and solo, created an island of calm transcendence amidst the often frantic and silly San Francisco hippie era. “Tennessee Blues” (written by Abbeville, Louisiana’s Bobby Charles, who also penned “See You Later, Alligator” for Bill Haley and the Comets) takes up where 1969’s magnificent Tracy Nelson Country LP left off, presenting an unapologetically earthy and passionate paean to the deep satisfactions of leading a simple life, living with the animals, making a joyful noise, and feeling the fertile soil beneath your bare feet. Nelson deserves to be mentioned in the same class as Janis Joplin, Linda Thompson and Sandy Denny. She’s an absolute gem, and overdue for rediscovery.
It speaks volumes about Aretha Franklin–whom we celebrate today on her 68th birthday–that even God couldn’t turn her down. (For you wee bairns out there, that’s “God” as in “Clapton is God,” the anonymous graffiti first scribbled on London’s Islington Tube Station’s walls in 1965.) Eric Clapton is credited with “guitar obbligato” on “Good to Me as I Am to You,” the soul-deep, slow-cooked blues moan (co-written by Franklin and then-husband Ted White) from 1968’s Lady Soul LP, yet he’s no more (or less) a hired gun than Tom Cogbill (whose conversational bass lines cut a calm counterpart to the singer’s increasingly frenzied vocals), or the all-star horn section (as airtight as James Brown’s Famous Flames, and as wise as a Greek chorus). Make no mistake, “Good to Me as I Am to You” is all Aretha: begging and demanding within the space of a single note, flirting with chaos at the edge of tonal control, uncompromising, undeniable, and, for nearly seven decades, absolutely unequalled.
Aretha Franklin is a force of Nature, a gift from God. Her fierce, joyous, ferociously sexual voice encompasses gospel, blues, pop and jazz, effortlessly leaping from growling lows to glass-shattering highs in pitch-perfect two-octave bounds. From her 1967 Atlantic Records debut, across five albums (four Top 5) and nine singles (eight Top Ten), and through the summer of 1968 (when Time magazine honored her as the first Black woman on its cover), Franklin soared to the summit of American popular culture, her sweet, smiling visage among the most recognizable Black faces in the country alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Bill Cosby and Harry Belafonte. Franklin’s apocalyptic “Respect” (a #1 hit in 1967) alone inspired more Black Pride and perked up more white ears than a month of marches and sit-ins. In the midst of all this, opening Side Two of Aretha Now, her fourth LP, awaits the subtle gem, “You’re A Sweet, Sweet Man.” Riding atop drummer Roger Hawkins’ spare, funky back-beat, Franklin settles effortlessly into a no-nonsense, soul-deep groove, her electrifying moans and spine-chilling swoops sending sugar to her lover as the Sweet Inspirations lay down some honey in the background.
But first, a little hip history: Jamaican rocksteady, the short-lived transition twixt ska and reggae, might be the only musical genre birthed by weather–specifically, heat. As the tale is told, the rude boys who packed the ghettos of Trenchtown and Riverton City during the oppressive Kingston summer of 1966 deemed it too damn hot to skank full-throttle to the then-ranking ska rhythms; to keep a cool head, they shuffled half-speed. So, with his keen ear tuned to such clubland goings-on, Desmond Dekker, protege of legendary manager/producer Leslie Kong, decided he’d better get the rudies what they really want. During a decade-long hit-making career, Dekker, leading his harmony trio the Aces, not only produced 1967’s indelible rocksteady classic, “007 (Shanty Town)”; but also 1968’s monumental “Israelites,” reggae’s first international chart topper; plus several such tough and tender tunes as 1965’s “This Woman.” Driven by honking horn triplets, the Aces’ calls-and-responses and Dekker’s full-throated and suspiciously joyous clarion call, “This Woman” sends warning to watch your step around a certain Jezebel whom the singer seems to know perhaps a little too well.
Back in the Spring of 1953, Ray Charles, history’s undisputed “Genius of Soul,” languished little-noticed, an undistinguished jazz/blues crooner, a minor-league Nat “King” Cole. Still 18 months in the future lay his titanic “I’ve Got a Woman,” for which Charles would recontextualize the sanctified cry of such Gospel growlers as the Five Blind Boys and Professor Alex Bradford–replacing, as it were, the “Lord, Lord”s with “baby, baby”s–thus almost single-handedly birthing Soul music. That May 17, however, Charles’ new boss, Atlantic Records’ co-founder Ahmet Ertegun, working on a hunch, called his then-unproven 22-year-old pianist into a New York recording studio to take a whack at a little boogie-woogie ditty Ertegun had penned called “Mess Around.” Truth be told, the tune’s not much more than a riff with wheels, but, Boy Howdy, do Charles and band goose the damned thing, four to the floor, like Rat Fink revving a chopped deuce coupe on jet fuel. It’s real, real gone, man. For most R&B stars of the era, “Mess Around” would stand as a career high-water mark. Amazingly, Brother Ray was just warming up.
Istanbul (Not Constantinople) They Might Be Giants
Label: Elektra
Released: 1990
Today’s improbable history lesson comes courtesy of Johns Flansburgh and Linnell, a.k.a. They Might Be Giants, those lovable lyrical über-dweebs who make Bill Nye the Science Guy look like Bill Blass. You marveled as they solved the burning musical mystery, “Why Does the Sun Shine? (The Sun Is a Mass of Incandescent Gas).” You huzzahed when they chronicled the forgotton history of President “James K. Polk,” the “Napoleon of the stump.” Now, hold onto your fez as our heroes tackle the hottest etymological question of the 10th Century: why “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”? Answer: “Every gal in Constantinople lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople, so if you’ve a date in Constantinople, she’ll be waiting in Istanbul.” Got that? If not, don’t sweat it. Just lean back and dig the hyper-speed nuevo-klezmer rhythms, snake-charmer violin and the Two Johns’ eloquently educational elocution. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
Back in the mid-1940s, Bob Wills, the King of Western Swing, and his incomparable band of city slickers, the Texas Playboys, stood at their creative apex, and were searching for new worlds to conquer. Packing their unprecedented musical gumbo of country, pop, blues, jazz, mariachi and Dixieland into their saddle bags, they rode into Oakland, California’s Tiffany Music Corporation and recorded 150 transcriptions intended to be marketed as syndicated radio programs to stations across the Southwest. The shows never sold, but they left an inspired legacy of some of the hardest-swinging Texas tunes this side of ZZ Top. “Fat Boy Rag” roared to life as the band jammed in the studio on May 20, 1946. Powered by a choogling jump-blues rhythm, barrelhouse piano runs, white-hot fiddling and Lester “Junior” Barnard’s ferocious, near-manic guitar picking (”Ugly! Yeah!,” Wills exclaims in the background), “Fat Boy Rag,” even 60 years after it was recorded, could make a deacon turn to drinking.
“Blow what you feel–anything! Play the thought, the idea in your mind… Break away from the convention and stagnation–escape!”–Ornette Coleman, 1960. When saxophone colossus and jazz prophet Ornette Coleman titled his third Atlantic LP This Is Our Music, it wasn’t an explanation, it was an exclamation: This is our music! Recorded during three fervent and fertile sessions in the summer of 1960 (with Coleman on plastic alto sax, Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, and Ed Blackwell on drums), This Is Our Music (and its landmark follow-up, Free Jazz), shucked off all remaining shackles of musical convention to capture the essence of pure emotion. On the LP’s slyly-named “Humpty Dumpty,” a tart and tasty swinging workout, the quartet joyfully scrambles the harmolodic ovum by shattering its shell into glistening splinters of sound, putting its poor namesake back together into a greater whole by breaking him completely to pieces.
Brazilian Tropicalia cofounder (with Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil), self-proclaimed “cultural cannibal,” and inveterate experimental prankster Tom Zé managed to trump even himself with his supremely strange proto-industrial instrumental track “Toc.” Originally released on Zé’s 1976 LP Estudando O Samba LP, “Toc” features Zé’s trademark pin-prick guitar, nattering percussion, and honking horns, uniquely accompanied by an instrument of Zé’s own invention: a precariously balanced wooden cabinet shelved with blenders, vacuum cleaners, floor polishers, and other home appliances wired to a “keyboard” constructed of doorbells that rang the machines off and on. If Martha Stewart were to drop acid before whipping up some yummy key-lime empanadas, it might sound something like this.
Roger McGuinn may have been the first rocker to imagine a jet engine’s turbocharged whine as the ultimate musical instrument, but it wasn’t until Hüsker Dü came screaming out of Minneapolis that anyone fully captured the essence of standing on the tarmac as a squadron of F-18 Hornets powered full-throttle into the wild blue yonder. Warehouse: Songs And Stories marked the Hüskers’ final assault on young America’s eardrums, and its presence is mighty and fearsome. Armed with only a guitar, a bass, and drums, Hüsker Dü was the loudest band on Earth, and by Warehouse, they had chiseled their roar down to its essence—a razor-sharp, filling-rattling aural behemoth. “Charity, Chastity, Prudence, And Hope,” might be the gritty tale of four metaphorically named women rooting through dumpsters for castoff treasures. Or it might be an allegory of sin and redemption. Either way, pure sound has never been so liberating.
Cornershop’s When I Was Born For The 7th Time, the breakthrough LP from Punjabi hip-hop bhangra B-boy Tjinder Singh and his band of merry sahibs, proved that occasionally there is something new under the sun. The album’s instrumental interlude “Butter The Soul” (not to be confused with Isaac Hayes’ Hot Buttered Soul) is car-crash funk for the Now Generation. Centered around the gleefully warped, stop-and-go, turntable deconstruction of the first few whistling notes of the theme song from Leave It To Beaver (of all things), “Butter The Soul” lurches slipperily atop an understated on-the-one drumbeat, backed by twangy rubber-band guitar, some intermittent sitar drone, and a couple of stoned “ah-yeahs” from the peanut gallery. If it’s possible to perform a song sideways, “Butter The Soul” is the proof.
Back in the summer of 1988, when Wisconsin rockers BoDeans’ co-singer/songwriters Sammy Llanas and Kurt Neumann were scratching out the songs for what would become Home, the Midwest was dangerously parched, trapped in the midst of a killer months-long drought. So it’s no surprise that Home is dripping with water: Rain, rivers, drinks, tears—the record sweats and staggers with images of desperate people trying to drown their troubles, or wash them away. In fact, the band almost called it Rain Dance. “Beautiful Rain” is the album’s heart, a farmer’s dark and menacing plea for a miracle from the skies personified by Llanas’ sandpaper-on-glass vocals, Neumann’s stormy, skirling guitar lines and guest-drummer Kenny Aronoff’s thunderous drumming. Later that September, the rains finally came.
Two years before their all-bluegrass LP The Mountain, Steve Earle and The Del McCoury Band parked in a Nashville studio, tightened up their strings, rosined up their bows, and cut “I Still Carry You Around,” an Earle-penned breakdown that sounds as if it could have fallen out of the chest pocket of Bill Monroe’s Nudie suit back in 1935. Bluegrass is deceptively simple music; the best of the genre manages to sound both as loose as a coal miner on payday and as tight as a preacher’s Sunday collar. Earle and band nail it to the floor in exactly two minutes and 45 seconds. Of course, being a Steve Earle original, the lyrics bemoan a love lost, never to return, and never to be forgotten. But with a performance this joyous, you gotta believe the heart will endure.
Just as you can discover a lot about a man by the company he keeps, you can catch a glimpse of the hidden soul of a musician by the songs he covers. Cole Porter’s dreamy, melancholy ballad “Everytime We Say Goodbye,” as performed by John Coltrane and his early ’60s Quartet, showcases ’Trane at his most reflective and romantic. Along with the solo-tenor workout “I Want to Talk About You” (by Billy Eckstein) and the soprano juggernaut “My Favorite Things” (by Rodgers & Hammerstein), “Everytime We Say Goodbye” remained a pillar of the Quartet’s live set throughout Coltrane’s far-too-brief life. The studio version (originally released on the My Favorite Things LP), is a gentle spring shower in contrast to the sheets of hard rain for which Coltrane is best known, a gift of a secret shared among friends.
Nestled unobtrusively at the tail end of Side One of Van Morrison’s quietly intense Beautiful Vision LP stands “Cleaning Windows,” one of the oddest and most endearing paeans to music and the spirit of Van the Man’s long, strange journey into the mystic. Morrison must have enjoyed a good chuckle when his muse dropped the unlikely image of a window cleaner as spiritual seeker; he’s just a happy workingman in his prime, keeping the view clear. Against a sprightly, loping backbeat, Morrison sounds almost giddy as he calls on the ghosts of Jimmy Rogers, Leadbelly, Jack Kerouac, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, all the while watching the skies for signs. There are more intense and more bizarre tunes in Morrison’s canon, but not many as joyous and carefree as this one.
A veiled threat insinuated through a clenched smile, “Listening Wind,” the penultimate track on Talking Heads’ turbo-charged Afrofunk masterstroke Remain In Light, may appear misplaced among such incendiary, propulsive power-grooves as “Once In A Lifetime,” “Crosseyed And Painless,” and “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On).” Opening with the tick-tick-tocking of wooden drums, “Listening Wind” signals a secret message broadcast across a silent desert, its gently crying guitars and David Byrne’s haunted moan hinting at trouble just beyond the horizon. Even so, it’s a jolt to realize that the song is quietly sketching one man’s acts of terror (“Mojique plants devices in the free trade zone”), ignited by a venomous mix of imperialism and hopelessness. “Listening Wind” was written more than two decades prior to 9/11, yet Mojique’s hopeful, horrible dream to “drive them away, drive them away” now feels like a prophecy ignored.
If, as John Lennon once said, “The blues is a chair,” then Victoria Williams’ music is a rickety old rocker, strapped to the top of the cab of a rusty pickup truck hightailing it straight for the Promised Land. Loose is Williams’ first LP following her devastating 1992 multiple sclerosis diagnosis. There are those who, standing face-to-face with the hooded specter of their own mortality, would curl up and disappear. Williams, however, invited the bony bastard to a hoedown. And she corralled a passel of her friends to join her, including Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner, R.E.M.’s Mike Mills and Peter Buck, the Jayhawks’ Mark Olson and Gary Louris, plus Van Dyke Parks. Williams tapped Parks for the string arrangements for “Polish Those Shoes,” a glorious mini-symphony celebrating all the truly wonderful little things in life that no stupid disease can ever take away from you.
