Busker Days: "Never Again", The Human Condition

There's been a busker dry spell recently.  A few new faces coming and going but no new regulars.  What with the recession maybe the goodwill (i.e. dollar bills) has run thin.  But if you are a busker what else is there to do? Go back to work?  Nah!  The good news is, my very low expectations were blown out of the water yesterday.  A four piece string band was playing at Montgomery station (!) and it sounded good.  There were two guitars, one being parlor size, a mandolin and a stand-up bass, no less, and the vocals were harmonizing nicely.  Have you ever heard Old Crow Medicine Show?  It was kind of like that: aggressive old-timey roots sound with compelling song construction and lyrics.

 
At this point, if you are wondering whether I risked the ire of my wife, currently waiting with two little kids at a dinner party in the East Bay, and walked up to them to see if they were keen on being recorded, well, stop wondering.  The band in question are SF locals The Human Condition and the first song I recorded is an original composition Never Again.  I hope they come on down again.  They were good!

Here's their website if you want more info.  They are playing on St. Patrick's day at the Hotel Utah Saloon.  I'm going if I can.

Song of the Week: Gram Parsons - A Song For You

"Jesus built a ship to sing a song to." At least that's the way Gram Parsons sees life. It's one of those curious lines from a song that just sticks out to me as being so quizzically beautiful that it makes me smile with wonderment every time I hear it.

This week's installment of Song of the Week is filled with those type of lines. The song is A Song For You from Gram Parsons' first solo album, GP, released in January of 1973. In my humble opinion, the song is the standout on the more than solid album. 

Gram Parsons, like all good musicians who died far too young, has become a bit of a legend. The stories of his multi-million dollar upbringing, his exploits, his death at the tender age of 26 and his bizarre burial have been overstated too many times and I won't bother to repeat them here. If you want to read about that, just go to our friend, señor wiki. What's important here is that Parsons had a major influence on the evolution of music. You need not look any farther than Wilco, Calexico, Whiskeytown or the Jayhawks to see his direct influence. Long story short, Gram Parsons is often credited with creating "country rock" through his groundbreaking work in the International Submarine Band, his stint in The Byrds, his formation of the band The Flying Burrito Brothers with fellow Byrds Alumnus, Chris Hillman, and, of course, Parsons' two solo albums. In fact, he probably gets too much credit, but I digress.

Let's get back to our Song of the Week, A Song for You. The song is simple as could be. This does not succeed because of the stellar musicianship -- which includes James Burton of Elvis Presley fame, Emmylou Harris and Barry Tashian of the Remains fame -- but because of the sincerity of Gram Parsons himself. Parsons was gifted with a sweet voice and the ability to paint a different color on your front door with his lyrics. I always get a sense that his songs are deeply personal but shared with a larger audience as a tool to articulate what he can't say to the real intended recipient: "I loved you everyday, and now I'm leaving. And I can see the sorrow in your eyes. I hope you know a lot more than you are believing, just so the Sun don't hurt you when you cry."

I'm going to cut it off here, and just ask you to stop and really listen to all the lyrics in this song. Pay particular note to how and when Emmylou Harris harmonizes with Parsons, bringing importance to some lines more than others, and how Parsons' voice wavers under the strain of his words.

Song of the Week: "So Long Cruel World", Blanche

The construction of a song is a fascinating thing to deconstruct. I'm not sure that makes any sense but I'll forge on. When one pull's most rock songs apart that person is left with a musical skeleton that generally fits into two broad categories: blues construction or folk construction. Very often the two are the same so even this broad framework is too narrow. So, what, other than the lyrics, defines the character of a song? What makes one song a soul song and the next a blues number? One a country number, the other version a rockabilly number. Often it's the musical festoons, baubles or trinkets that define a song. In other words, it's the little things. Take The Rolling Stones' Satisfaction as an example. Again, we're setting aside the lyrics. The song, at it's heart is 4 chords. Simple as could be. But it's that famous "riff" that everyone humms. The little 3-note blues riff re-imagined from countless Jimmy Reed shuffles. But it's also that 5-beat drum break. And it's those dipped in reverb guitar fills Keith Richards slips between each verse line. Each of those things are as important as the lyrics at making the song more than just a blues based construction.

This is all just a very long winded intro to our Song of the Week, So Long Cruel World by genre defying Detroit-based band, Blanche. If you know Blanche at all, you probably know them because the main dude, singer and songwriter, Dan John Miller, aptly portrayed the stoic Luther Perkins in the film, I Walk The Line. 

2004 witnessed the release of Blanche's first album, If We Can't Trust the Doctors. It's an interesting stew of bluegrass, country, punk and surf all mixed together into a dark cauldron. In the middle of the album is our maudlin little song (as most of theirs are) entitled So Long Cruel World. It's a prime example, in my estimation, of a song that soars because of it's musical arrangement (festoons?) more than the structure itself. Opening with antimelodic pedal steel, a simple jazzy little bass riff played by Tracee Miller (married to Dan) on a Framus Star Bass (very similar to the one I used to play, by the way!) brings the song into whatever structure it might pretend to have. A simple banjo riff joins as the ethereal pedal steel falls into a melodic riff. Then Dan Miller ads a guitar riff worthy of a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western which twangs us into the whoa-is-me vocals. The band continues to add elements and riffs that lay on top of each other and skitter over the beats like a goony bird trying to stick a landing. There is little to no central musical framework. In between all of this - and it is in-between and not "over it" --  Dan Miller's hillbilly inflected vocals dramatizing one's suicidal yearnings are importantly backed up by the detached vocals of Tracee in a back and forth reminiscent of the work done in the early 80's by John Doe and Exene Cervenka. 

In the end the lack of structure and the lack of genre (who's in charge here anyway?) to the song is what I think makes the song so interesting. It's not for everybody, I'll admit that. But give the song a few listens and tell me if it doesn't become a way-homer for you.

Remembering the "5" Royales

"Life can never be exactly like we want it to be"

So begins the bridge of Dedicated to the One I Love, a song that is familiar to most listeners from two different but equally popular hit recordings, by the Shirelles in 1961, and the Mamas and the Papas in '67. Both versions are likable enough examples of the quality girl group and LA harmony-pop proffered by those groups, but neither ever impressed me as anything beyond a typical example of Sixties pop fare.

A few years ago I read an interview with the great Steve Cropper, Telecaster master of Booker T and the MGs. When the inevitable "Who influenced your guitar playing?" question was asked, the Colonel was eager to say he basically took his whole early style from a guy named Lowman Pauling, who had played with a group called the "5" Royales back in the Fifties. Well, before long I had tracked down an out of print low budget cd release of the "5" Royales 1957 album called "Dedicated to You." This prize was worth the eight bucks it cost me for the cover alone, which featured four of the red tuxedo jacketed quintet falling like dominos away from the front and center figure of Mr. Lowman Pauling, who practically lunged toward the camera proudly cradling his TV-yellow Gibson Les Paul Special. This was his group.

The "5" Royales hailed from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The quotation marks around the "5" in their name have at times been attributed to an early dispute with another similarly named group, but it has also been suggested that there were actually six members of the group for a time, requiring the winking quotation marks. Formed in the early Fifties, their initial gospel-influenced doo-wop style occasionally featured saxophone on instrumental breaks. Lowman Pauling sang bass and quickly emerged as a songwriter. This formula yielded moderate success on the R&B charts. But by the time they made the"Dedicated to You" album for King Records in 1957, Lowman Pauling had brought his guitar to the forefront of the group's sound. As it turned out, this phase of the group peaked on that record, and the centerpiece of the new style was a song penned by Mr. Pauling and Ralph Bass: Dedicated to the One I Love. My familiarity with the hit versions of the song did nothing to prepare me for the first listen to the original. The words and the melody, even the harmonies, were in place, but threaded through the whole song was a raw and determined lead guitar that seemed at once completely at odds with the song as I knew it and quite riveting. So this was what Steve Cropper was talking about. The overdriven, obviously cranked tube amp, the aggressive attack, and best of all, the pause at the beginning of the solo, where you can almost feel Pauling take in a breath and dive in; well this is why I collect music. The album features that guitar sound on most of the tracks, which also include Think another Lowman Pauling original that would later be a hit for James Brown. It's not that Pauling's style was particularly complex, or even original. Echoes of T-Bone Walker and Guitar Slim, among others, are clearly there, but the audacity of the playing in the context of a pop-vocal group (as opposed to a blues setting) goes a long way to explaining why I dig this record so much. Apart from the album itself, the best example of Pauling's fierce guitar style is the single, The Slummer the Slum, (great title, incomprehensible song, beautifully distorted guitar sound), which is found on various collections of the group's work.

For some reason the later sides cut by the "5" Royales tended to tone down Pauling's guitar playing, and by the mid Sixties they had faded in the wake of the new soul styles from Atlantic, Motown and Stax. Legend has it that at some point a down-on-his-luck Lowman Pauling sold his interest in Dedicated to the One I Love for a few hundred dollars. At any rate, by the early Seventies he was basically forgotten and worked as a custodian in a Brooklyn synagogue. It was there that he suffered a fatal seizure on the day after Christmas, 1973. He was 47.

Song of the Week: The Violent Femmes - Country Death Song

Some songs just stay with you like syphilis. No matter how hard you want it to go away, it stays and persists. It festers and rattles around the brain and won't go away no matter how hard you wish. That is the case for me with this installment of Song of the Week.

The song is by Milwaukee, Wisconsin's Violent Femmes, a truly original group who wove some heavy threads through the mosaic of independent music in the 1980's. If they had only recorded that one, first album, they would be legendary enough. It's a fantastic album from groove one to groove last. But the Femmes continued to produce and continued to put out remarkable music. In 1984, the year after their self-titled debut took over the college radio stations without mercy, the threesome put out a surprising sophomore effort entitled Hallowed Ground. 

When this record came out I was working at a record store in Davis, California called Barney's. I put the album on our famous vertical turntable and headed for the bins to file records. It became instantly clear to me that this was not just a resuscitation of the debut. Here the band of teenagers (or maybe they were 20 at this time) expanded the music landscape to incorporate abstract jazz (Black Girls) and Appalachian bluegrass. Religious imagery of death, salvation and redemption stiff armed the college listener. Before the side was out, I was informed that I could not play the record anymore. The record had -- in less than 5 songs -- offended a lesbian coworker, an African American coworker and an Atheist coworker and had garnered an official complaint from a customer. Pretty impressive, huh?

I think you'll see why from our Song of the Week. The song is Country Death Song, the first song on the criminally underrated album. A traditional "ump-pah" beat is importantly colored by minor-key banjo work from Tony Trischka to create an Appalachian folk song mystique. Gordon Gano sings in the first-person narrative as a father who is pushed by famine and isolation to, as he says in the second verse, "start making plans to kill my own kind." Immediately it becomes all to clear as to the depth of his depravity as we listen uncomfortably as he coaxes his youngest daughter to the door late at night: "Come little daughter, I will carry the lanterns/We'll go out tonight, we'll go to the caverns. We'll go out tonight, we'll go to the caves. So kiss your mother goodnight and remember that God saves."

The daughter is blissfully ignorant as to her fate. We are not so lucky. And there-in lies the tension. We are helpless to stop the licentious father and unravel his insanely gruesome demonstration of love. "You know your papa loves you, good children go to heaven." Gano gives us no quarter as he makes abundantly clear what happens as he sings with a cross-eyed whisper. Only the two-note bass riff and a snare drum played with brushes by Victor DeLorenzo provide us any cover.  

"I gave her a push, I gave her a shove. I pushed with all my might, I pushed with all my love. I threw my child into a bottomless pit. She was screaming as she fell, but I never heard her hit."

As we are left to make sense of the unpleasantness in our ears, the repetitive polka beat gives way to a mad crush of chaotic music led by the beautiful acoustic bass work of Brian Ritchie.

Gano returns with the most beautifully acrid line of the song. A song that puts teen angst in it's rightful place: "Don't speak to me of lovers with a broken heart. You wanna know what can really tear you apart? I'm going out to the barn, will I never stop the pain?"

Ain't nothing for a man to do but sit around and drink.