John Lennon would've been seventy today, but you probably already know that. It's a major media event around the world. He's been dead for nearly thirty years, and that's longer than he was active as a musician and a songwriter. He was only forty when he died from gunshot wounds inflicted on him by a crazed fan, but you probably already know that too. For me and people my age, too young to remember Kennedy's assassination and the ensuing craziness of that very decade that Lennon is most associated with, it's a moment we'll never forget. At least I won't, and I can only speak for myself. He's best known as a member of The Beatles, but in his solo career, as spotty and short as it was (it includes a five year break from recording), he wrote more great songs than most songwriters could hope for in a lifetime. He was prolific and the good far outweighs the bad. Below, are some of his songs performed by other artists, and a few by him. All but one are from his solo career. The exception being "The Ballad of John and Yoko," and although it is a Beatles song, it does mark the beginning of Lennon's departure from the Beatles.
Now this here’s the first piece I learned how to play when I was a little boy: it’s called the "Big Fat Mama with the Meat Shakin’ On Her Bone.”
So begins Devil Down Records’ inaugural release, Come and Found You Gone: Mississippi Fred McDowell: The Bill Ferris Recordings. Immediately, we are transported back to a night in August, 1967, when Blues scholar Bill Ferris brought together McDowell, friend and cohort, Napoleon Strickland, and Fred’s wife, Annie Mae McDowell, into the home of an “unidentified musician” for a night of recording, drinking, and good, loose fun.
Then again, one could almost call the few opening minutes of this gathering breezy. Three of the first four tracks feature easily identifiable songs of McDowell and his grab bag of traditional tunes, including “Big Fat Mama,” “Shake ‘em On Down” and “Baby Please Don’t Go,” respectively. They come and go with a swift familiarity that McDowell seems almost eager to get behind him. Not until we’re introduced to the fourth track, “Find My Suitcase,” does the mood shift into something a little more focused, if not truly demonstrative of McDowell’s usual prowess and finesse as a bottleneck guitar player. He had always stressed his need for a “feeling” to accompany his playing and singing, and, to my ears, I can’t say that I hear that special confluence of the emotional and the physical until he sort of cat-walks into “Find My Suitcase.” The vamp starts off in a slow, slithering manner until, just a few bars in, the combination of melody and rhythm seems to leap into his voice and send us, the listeners, into a grinning fit of head-bobbing (in my case, also hand-clapping) joy. Up to this point it’s easily the most fluid and loaded number yet. It sounds as though he’s warmed up now; perhaps the whiskey’s starting to hit, and his “feeling” arrives in the amalgamated and masterful way any fan of Mississippi Fred McDowell has come to know and love.
He performs solo throughout the first seven numbers before our “unidentified musician” takes the vocal on “Dream I Went to the UN.” Strickland follows with a hot solo harp piece called “The Boogie.” McDowell then accompanies the homeowner on a wandering version of “Little Red Rooster” before we move right into the spiritual mood of the evening, beginning with “Get Right Church,” which is far and away the most somber but moving moment on the CD. McDowell delivers a weary and sad opening, but the others, as though prompted by the tone, take up the call and deliver a mesmerized, "slain in the spirit” performance. The melody is ominous and fearful, indicative of some great underlying menace that can only be relieved by a collective rising of voice and faith. It also instigates a pivotal shift in the entire recording: only now is everyone truly involved; they are engaged in a purpose. The tenor of the evening has switched to a collective outpouring of voices and emotions that hadn’t yet been exposed. Now we hear Mae’s beautiful punctuations as well as Strickland’s and the homeowner’s presence driving the overall performances into a realized recording. It’s not that any fun is gone. It’s just that they’re all in tune with one another, and the ensuing tracks that take us into the end of Come And Found You Gone find a special accent and grace. A track called “Dialogue” (No. 13) gives the recording some additional potency. It features some testy, marital back-and-forth between Mae and Fred that the homeowner has to subdue with a very diplomatic “You’re singing fine” to Mae. It signifies a high point in the group’s general demeanor. They’re all ready, animated--- this is a party after all--- and the banter flying about the room is quick and sharp. The track keeps rolling on for another minute and a half while Fred plucks and tunes, getting ready for the next number. But Mae isn’t giving in. She ribs and taunts Fred like she wants some of the spotlight, too. It’s a great little moment in the CD that reinforces the sense of being in a very particular time and place.
Ferris’s intention was clear: to capture a great musician in a casual, down-home environment. All the material is performed acoustically, and throughout the CD we can hear the room itself, the air, and in quieter numbers the soft penetration of background talk. All of these elements produce a very intimate recording. Sadly, though, some of the songs’ performances fall short or flat. One of McDowell’s many attributes is his ability to create tension. His mastery of melody and rhythm, for which there are few equals, usually has time to be developed and carried through his performances. In Come And Found You Gone many songs sound truncated, rushed, or are cut off too soon, which could be a case of something perhaps a little too intimate. One could chalk this up to a tendency among many posthumous recordings, in which, for the sake of showcasing an early or less polished performance, a listener is allowed to hear a different or less-cured approach to a song or batch of songs. I wonder if the project was compromised by a limited recording value or if McDowell himself just began to grow a little distracted, bored or tired.
Don’t get me wrong--- a lack of industry polish is also a very welcome thing. I would think that this recording is only being released now because bigger, established labels may have passed on it. Not a shame at all, I say. It’s out now, and Devil Down's founder, Reed Turchi, should be commended for it. A captured night of tape in McDowell’s hometown of Como, Mississippi should demand the attention of a new and old fans alike. Unfortunately, for all the CD’s attention to the region’s invaluable musical legacy and traditions, the underlying anthropological aim to this CD is more a credit to the region and its customs than it is to a night of decent Fred McDowell recordings. A collection of photos within the CD package artfully displays the environment of The Hills (an area in northeastern Mississippi that McDowell both lived in and in whose musical traditions he was a product of), and liner notes supplied by Ferris, Luther Dickinson, and “eminent French blues scholar Vincent Joos” are by turns elegiac and informed pieces of a package intended to not only entertain but to educate its listeners as well.
At first I was a bit distracted by this. I thought, What should a live recording be but a document in and of itself? A live recording should effectively conjure a singular spirit whose existence takes its shape and sound from a body of music. As such, further listening and reading encouraged me to appreciate the effort Turchi has taken to release this recording. He’s obviously a very knowledgeable and avid fan of Fred McDowell, and he has commandeered three other astute fans to help him elaborate and present a labor of love. But I can’t help asking myself: Are there better, more resounding McDowell recordings in the world? Yes. Even so, I really don’t think Come and Found You Gone was meant to be presented as the very best. It is, above all, an evocation of a humble night in which listeners are invited to participate in an integral and enriching grasp of the Blues. We get all of the fundamental ingredients: the pain, the fear, the anguish; alternatively all the fun, humor, and abandon to be found in the Blues. This record is a friendly and highly respectful homage to a person whose status resides in a pantheon reserved for only the finest and most revered Blues artists of all time.
Lester Young's post-war recordings have been widely disputed among historians and jazzbos as being sub-par or lacking the punch of his earlier recordings as a soloist with Basie's big and small bands. I've never quite understood this. "What happened?" you may ask. Well, life happened, and as an artist this is clearly reflected in his work.
Here are the facts:
Lester Young, a touring musician in his prime, at the age of thirty-five was pretty much plucked off the bandstand during a three month engagement at a club in Watts by an undercover agent in a Zoot Suit, and forced to enlist in the Army in the waning days of World War II. Lester--who in addition to being past the prime age of a soldier, was a chronic alcoholic, epileptic and syphilitic, spoke in a strange tone and language of his own design, walked on tippy-toes and was by nature a pacifist--was clearly not fit to serve in the Army.
Uncle Sam and the draft board thought otherwise.
After injuring himself during assault training and spending a short time in an Army hospital, Lester was examined by an Army psychologist, who deemed him to be in a "constitutional psychopathic state manifested by drug addiction (marijauna, barbituates), chronic alcoholism and nomadism" In short, he a was a touring Jazz musician, and in this case, an eccentric genius who was on a very short list of the greatest soloists in American music.
Things, however, went from bad to worse and after a series of events, Lester was court-martialed and spent the duration of WWII in detention barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and eventually in the deep south at Camp Gordon in Georgia, another place which he clearly was not fit to be.
Dave Gelly writes in his excellent book, Being Prez: The Life and Music of Lester Young, "He rarely spoke about it, beyond describing it as 'one mad nightmare.' One can only imagine what torture it was for him, a soft, slow moving man, condemned to a world where everyone shouted and all movement had to be at the double. It is said he was beaten up on several occasions, either by white guards or black fellow- prisoners." Lester was incarcerated until late 1945, and upon release came out swinging, yet, a changed man. He returned to Los Angeles, where he began recording again for Philo/Aladdin and eventually in the early fifties for Mercury, under the supervision of Norman Granz.
These late recordings, in my opinion, (as unpopular as that may be) are some of the most beautiful things ever committed to wax, and especially in his ballads, in particularly, "These Foolish Things" for Aladdin and "Polka Dots and Moonbeams," for Mercury (featured below) there's a far greater emotional depth than in his earlier recordings. They are among the few things in music that can actually bring me to tears, and are the recordings of a man embarking on a difficult and final decade of a life lived in music. It's the last stop for a mature and seasoned artist, whose life is slowly slipping away from him. By the end of the fifties he'll be dead.
August 27th was the 101st anniversary of Lester Young's birth.
Aside from the usual harassment that comes to my inbox daily from publicists, bloggers, special new acts with myspace pages, and eletro-DJ dudes from faraway places like Estonia and Omaha asking me to be a shill for things I couldn't possibly be interested in, I've been getting a number of emails from friends and actual readers of this blog asking me where the hell I've been.
Well, sometimes a man just needs to (as today's artist in spotlight, Gene Autry, would say) drift along with the tumbling tumbleweeds. Well, you get my drift, and, for now, I'm back in the saddle again. So, I come out of hiding today and offer you two of the greatest cowboy records ever made.
Friend of Fluville and Fat Possum recording artist Sonny Smith (Sonny & The Sunsets) has an exciting new project called 100 Records. Sonny is a past contributor here at the Boogie Woogie Flu, and a multi-talented artist who conceived this art project, in which he asked 100 artists to pick from song titles of then still unwritten material, come up with band names, and design 7" 45 record sleeves for the fake bands. Sonny then recorded 100 songs and built a jukebox to play them. Last year Sonny asked me to design one of these sleeves, and it is pictured here below with the track he recorded, which can best be described as what the Velvet Underground would sound like if they played surf music. The show, opened in San Francisco at Gallery 16 and moved to the Okay Mountain Gallery in Austin, Texas. It is currently in Brooklyn at Cinders Gallery (103 Havemeyer Street, Brooklyn NY), and will open tomorrow night August 12th (and will run through September 5th) starting with a performance by Sonny at 7PM. There will be an after party at Gordon Bennett Bar (109 South 6th Street, Brooklyn NY) starting at 10:30, and yours truly will be spinning real 45s til they kick us out. Please come, we'd love to see you all there.
Alex stuck his finger down his throat and gagged, showing me that’s how much he hated Memphis. We laughed about it. He didn’t like me much either (something I wrote perhaps, or his interpretation of my horoscope charts), but that didn’t mean we couldn’t laugh together, and it didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy Memphis. He’d recently boarded a flight for a European tour, and the movie showing was The Firm, shot in Memphis—he gagged again. Memphis was a cloak that was hard to shake.
Alex Chilton became a public figure at the age of 16 when, not long after he’d first seen the inside of a recording studio, a song from that session became a 1967 #1 worldwide hit, “The Letter” by the Box Tops. At that impressionable age he became a product packaged and sold, considerable talent yielding considerable profits—for the manager and not the artist. Soon, the monkey walked away from the organ grinder to do his own thing.
His thing: He channeled the future by capturing the underground zeitgeist, three times in the 1970s alone—an audience for the clean pop of the first two Big Star Records caught up to the music a decade after it was made; the third Big Star album was nihilistic and beautiful (hello Elliot Smith and the ‘90s); the shambolic Like Flies on Sherbert deemed hip the wealth and diversity of Americana roots while becoming a punk rock classic. The art of these efforts has become canonized, but the financial return was—again—basically nil. So the monkey bit the hand that fed the banana and cut its own path.
Instead of profit, he was assigned prophecy. But the Replacements only got it half right in their tribute song. Children by the million might have screamed for Alex Chilton, but he’d never have come running. Waves of admiration and love were an assault, and he was scornful of those who needed to make more of his songs than he did. His lifelong interest in astrology makes sense: What is colder, more beautiful, more distant than the stars? Astrology is the province of the seeker, not the sought.
Alex Chilton’s career in song is a testament to his seeking, to his eye for precise detail, his adventuresome ear, his empathetic heart. In a few lines he could chillingly evoke the angst and maelstrom of young adulthood, touching strangers in a personal way (their responses leading to his notorious friction with admirers). He could be a sweetheart as often, and less notoriously, than the contrarian. His mind remained curious all his life, making its own way through politics, the humanities, and sciences with the same zeal he mined R&B, country, classical and all music. He was never predictable, and kept his audience on its guard. In the same late-night late-1970s radio appearance when he sang Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”—years, of course, before Whitney Houston made a career out of it, he also broke into a filthy racist ballad. His songs were not unlike William Eggleston’s photographs—crisp, saturated, and composed, with an underlying menace, with a throat-aching wistfulness.
Alex was as complicated as Memphis itself. XL Chitterlings, my favorite of his stage names, stole Wilhelm Reich books from the Memphis Public Library because he said no one checked them out, and he gave them to people whom he thought would appreciate them. When a friend heard him explain his world view, he chided him, “You're right Alex, the world is wrong.” Telling me about this later, Alex added “And, hell. I believe that. The world is wrong, I am right.”
To the end, he did it his way. Apparently he’d been feeling bad for several days, but not so bad he couldn’t refuse advice to visit the doctor. Dead at 59, the loss magnified by its abruptness, this meteoric musician is stilled but his great recordings live on. The eulogies will too, much to his likely irritation.
A couple of Wednesdays ago, I got off the train on the lower west side and started walking towards Gary's Chop Shop, a recording studio where my friend, Nicholas Hill, hosts and records a show called the Radio Free Song Club. I chose my path carefully, avoiding crowds outside bars. It wasn't any ordinary Wednesday. It was March 17th, Saint Patrick's Day, and the streets of New York were overflowing with inebriated revelers, mostly of non-Irish descent, celebrating their alcoholism.
But that's not the point.
As I approached Hudson Street, my phone rang. It was my old friend, Jared, who calls infrequently, and told me he had some bad news. "Alex Chilton died," he said. I didn't believe him. "Are you sure?" I asked. In this age where information flies around so quickly and sometimes incorrectly, it just didn't seem right. He said it was confirmed by the local Memphis paper. I thanked him for calling to let me know, and still didn't quite believe it. It's funny, because neither of us could say we were friends with Alex, but still, it was the kind of thing that people who were affected by his music would be compelled to share with one another.
When I got upstairs to the studio, I don't think I even said hello, only "Alex Chilton died." It was still breaking news and I had to consult Google to be sure. Everyone assembled there were also in disbelief. I checked, and indeed, it was true. The Radio Free Song Club is a loose conglomeration of songwriters, all of whom have been affected by his music, either directly or indirectly. For that evening's taping, the scheduled phone interview was with Peter Holsapple, who was a friend of Alex's, and also recorded with him. Peter had accompanied some fellow North Carolinians on a pilgrimage to meet Alex and Chris Bell in Memphis in 1978 that was chronicled at this blog a few years ago. Nick wanted to be sure that Peter already knew before the call, so we we checked a certain social networking site where the deaths of many are first publicized by the ubiquitous R.I.P. status updates.
Peter knew.
Still processing the loss of his friend, he had this to say: "It's hard to say how much Alex influenced me and a generation of people to pick up guitars ... you hear him in so many songs, and especially recently ... and I'm just grateful that the mythology of Big Star, that he kind of fought against for years, finally kind of seems to have won out, and people realize what a superb band they were and are ... he will be missed."
The special guests for the March 17th taping were Beth Orton and Sam Amidon. They walked in and we shared the news. Sam said he knew Alex's early Big Star song "Thirteen," and I went to work looking up the lyrics on the internet. Beth and Sam worked out a version, accompanied by the more than able house band of Dave Schramm and David Mansfield, and recorded it in one take. None of the assembled musicians had ever played this song together. It's exceptionally beautiful and was recorded only hours after Alex's death. You can hear it HERE.
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To a lot of people, Alex Chilton was "that guy from Big Star" or "the singer in the Box Tops." He was, of course, a lot more than that. Some, first learned of him from Paul Westerberg's song, "Alex Chilton" on the Replacements' 1987 record, Pleased To Meet Me, recorded in Memphis with producer Jim Dickinson - who also died prematurely this past year. Dickinson collaborated with Chilton on his two most important records: Sister Lovers and Like Flies onSherbert. They are records that are both dark and full of light at the same time - the sound of things falling apart and settling into a beautiful mess.
Producer Jon Tiven also tried to record Alex in 1975 in another attempt at capturing the mayhem that was midtown Memphis. He was duly treated as a carpetbagger, and arrived to find Chilton unable to play guitar - his arm was broken. The sessions went on, regardless, and produced a few minor masterpieces, and several other things that probably should have never seen the light of day.
I probably saw Alex Chilton play about twenty times. He was, at times, brilliant, and other times just half-assed. Alex was as good as anyone when he felt like it. Talking to a musician friend of mine who also knew him, I suggested that Alex was a guy who just didn't give it a shit. He corrected me, "No, Chilton was a contrarian." The more I think about it the more I think it's a pretty accurate picture of a guy who did whatever he felt like, especially if it was contrary to what others expected him to do. God bless him, he made a career out of it, and re-invented himself continually while always staying true to his ideals. He would have made a fine aging New Orleans bluesman.
The first time I actually saw him play, was also on a Wednesday night, at Folk City's Music forDozens - shows for three bucks booked by a pre-Yo La Tengo, Ira Kaplan. I was awestruck. Alex was embarking on a new phase of his career, and had (I think) yet to release Fuedalist Tarts, where he covered Slim Harpo, Willie Tee, and Carla Thomas. For me, and a generation of younger post-punks, we learned about a lot of music from Chilton. His records from the 80s have some songwriting by him, but are mostly flavored by his excellent skill as a song-finder. So were his shows. An incredibly talented songwriter (he could rhyme "Flakier" with "Tammy Baker") and a musician who could effortlessly play nearly anything, including Bach and Jazz standards. He approached songs from an astoundingly democratic position, and was at ease in covering "Volare" (in Italian), as well as K.C. and the Sunshine Band, Jimmy C. Newman, Brenton Wood, Porter Wagoner, Troy Shondell, The Velvet Underground, Frank Sinatra, The Seeds, Guitar Slim, Ronnie and The Daytonas, The Carter Family, The Troggs, Sir Mack Rice, Loudon Wainwright III, Carole King, Ernest Tubb, The Beach Boys, or "Disco Lady" by Johnnie Taylor.
The last time I saw him play, he was also booked by Ira Kaplan, at one of Yo La Tengo's 2007 Hanukkah shows at Maxwell's. I felt lucky, because when buying tickets for these shows, no one knows who the special guest is gonna be on any given night during the eight-night stand. I met Alex a few times over the years, photographed him, made small talk, smoked a joint with him (as most people that spent any time around him did) and after the show with Yo La Tengo, talked to him about sending some photographs that I had made of him. I asked him for his email address. He said he didn't have one, and that he'd never used a computer in his life. He may have been pulling my leg, but I kind of believed him. I took my notebook out of my bag and handed him a pen, and he wrote down his home address in New Orleans. We talked a little bit about New Orleans, and how he had gone "missing" during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Friends tried to persuade him to flee with them to Memphis, but he stayed behind giving them his car. For about a week, no one knew if he was dead or alive. He survived, and was eventually air lifted from his house in Treme. In the Replacements' song, "Alex Chilton," Westerberg sang a line that probably never sat well with Alex, "If he died in Memphis, then that'd be cool, babe."
He didn't.
On March 17th, 2010, while cutting his lawn, he suffered a heart attack and died en route to the hospital in New Orleans, the city that he called home for nearly half of his life. Thanks for the music, Alex.
A few years back, I was talking to a friend of mine about Neil Young's guitar playing, and he said: "You've gotta be really good to play that badly." I knew exactly what he meant. The same can be said for singers who scream-- the best ones are great singers to begin with. Look no further than James Brown. In my opinion, there's no greater screamer in American music of recent years than Greg Cartwright, who happens to be a great singer as well.
By the photograph and title of this post, you may have thought you were gonna get some of Marty Robbins' Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs. Sorry, that's not the case. Cartwright, a veteran of several seminal Memphis punk bands, was fronting the Reigning Sound (with whom he has since relocated to Asheville NC), when the Toronto band The Deadly Snakes came through town and asked him to produce their second record, I'm Not Your Soldier Anymore. Cartwright, not only produced it, but played and sang with the band, most notably on a track called "West Texas Sound." I'm not exactly sure what this song is about, but I get, and it's riveting, forceful, and driving punk rock. Below, is the said track, as well as some other excellent examples of Cartwright's vocal prowess, including two versions of "If You Can't Give Me Everything," screamed and then sung.
