Music – Page 24

How (Not) to (Dis)Connect

June 22, 2012 by John 2 Comments

[Image: “Superman” (strip #220 January 16, 1944), by Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster.
Click to enlarge; see the whole page here.]

From whiskey river:

I go to a pub and talk to another man. He is experienced deeply part of the time, and shallowly another part of the time, depending on the quality of my consciousness. If I am very conscious, meeting him can be an experience comparable to great music or even an earthquake; if I am in the usual shallow state, he barely “makes an impression.” If I am practicing alertness and neurological self-criticism, I may observe that I am only experiencing him part of the time, and that part of the time I am not-tuning-in but drifting off to my favorite “Real” Universe and editing out at the ear-drum much of what he is saying. Often, the “Real” Universe hypnotizes me sufficiently that, while I “hear” what he says, I have no idea of the way he says it or what he means to convey.

(Robert Anton Wilson [source])

…and:

Adage

When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.

It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.

A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.

No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.

(Billy Collins [source])

[Read more…]

Potpourri, June 18 (2012 ed.)

June 18, 2012 by John 1 Comment

[What I saw on Google’s home page today. (Almost certainly, YOU did NOT.) You rock, Google.]

On this day in history: The US declared war on Great Britain in 1812, initiating the War of 1812. So glad we got that out of our system, finally. (Well, declaring war on them, anyway. We’re still working on being satisfied with everybody else — although by now it feels absurd to add, “Give us time.”)

Speaking of the (more-or-less) British: Also, Canadian actress Linda Thorson was born on this day, in 1947. Thorson’s biggest career splash (well, so far) was her role as Tara King on the British light-action TV series The Avengers. (That’s her over there at the right, hamming it up with series co-star Patrick Macnee (who played John Steed).) Tara King replaced the outgoing Emma Peel (Diana Rigg). Mentioning (or remembering) Emma Peel still induces heart flutters among men of a certain age, but, alas for Ms. Thorson, mentioning (or remembering) Tara King has relatively no effect among that audience. Not her fault, I think. Those were very tough leather boots to fill.

The problem, honestly, was rooted in the character, not the actress. Audiences had been teased for years by the playfully flirtatious yet respectful on-screen relationship between her predecessor and Steed. In Tara King, the series producers opted for a sexy-cute character, nothing at all like Mrs. Peel’s sexy-dangerous. (And Patrick Macnee had obviously been given the message, too: Don’t just waggle your charming eyebrows and smirk your charming smirk. Hit on her, man!) Mrs. Peel had seemed like a step forward for women as action heroes; Tara King seemed to have wandered onto the set from the typing pool on a 1950s-era sitcom. [Read more…]

I Have Found It (or Maybe I Haven’t)

June 15, 2012 by John Leave a Comment

[For more about the video, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Discovering the selfless nature doesn’t have a monumental “Eureka!” quality. It is more like being continually perplexed, the way we feel when we’re looking for the car keys we’re so sure are in our pocket, or when the supermarket’s being renovated and what we need has moved to a different aisle each time we go shopping. That experience of being somewhat dumbfounded is the beginning of wisdom. We’re beginning to see through our ignorance — the everyday vigil we sustain to confirm that we exist in some permanent way. We look at our mind and see that it is a fluid situation, and we look at the world and see that it is a fluid situation. Our expectation of permanence is confounded.

(Sakyong Mipham [source])

…and:

The Poet with His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need anymore of that sound.

So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

(Mary Oliver [source])

[Read more…]

Choose Your Armor Carefully

June 8, 2012 by John 14 Comments

[Note: an abbreviated whiskey river Fridays post today, since I’m out of town. Normal blogcasting (whatever “normal” means) will resume tomorrow. This includes tracking down primary sources for the quotations, per my usual practice on Fridays.]

[Image: Urban Security Suit, designed by Tim Smit of Nieuwe Heren. For more information,
see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

No one lives his life.

Disguised since childhood,
haphazardly assembled
from voices and fears and little pleasures,

We come of age as masks.
Our true face never speaks.

Somewhere there must be storehouses
where all these lives are laid away
like suits of armor or old carriages
or clothes hanging limply on the walls.

Maybe all paths lead there,
to the repository of unlived things.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God)

…and:

It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armor themselves against wonder.

(Leonard Cohen)

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Dr. John, “Iko Iko”

June 6, 2012 by John 3 Comments

At the time this post goes up, The Missus and I will be in or awfully darned close to New Orleans. For an occasion like this, who could be better to Midweek-Music-Break with than Dr. John — practically the latter-day musical voice of the Crescent City?

As quoted on Wikipedia, here’s Dr. John’s description of today’s selection:

The song was written and recorded back in the early 1950s by a New Orleans singer named James Crawford [JES: photo at right] who worked under the name of Sugar Boy & the Cane Cutters… Also in the group were Professor Longhair on piano, Jake Myles, Big Boy Myles, Irv Bannister on guitar, and Eugene ‘Bones’ Jones on drums. The group was also known as the Chipaka Shaweez. The song was originally called “Jockamo,” and it has a lot of Creole patois in it. Jockamo means “jester” in the old myth. It is Mardi Gras music, and the Shaweez was one of many Mardi Gras groups who dressed up in far out Indian costumes and came on as Indian tribes. The tribes used to hang out on Claiborne Avenue and used to get juiced up there getting ready to perform and “second line” in their own special style during Mardi Gras. That’s dead and gone because there’s a freeway where those grounds used to be. The tribes were like social clubs who lived all year for Mardi Gras, getting their costumes together. Many of them were musicians, gamblers, hustlers and pimps.

(Regarding that “second line” reference: you might want to refer back to a post from about a year ago, on Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Down Home Girl”; it uses the phrase, in a context which I completely misunderstood… until Froog set me straight in a comment.)

The spelling of the word “Iko” seems consistent across various interpretations of the lyrics. More troublesome is “Jockamo,” which sometimes appears that way, sometimes as “Jockomo,” sometimes with and sometimes without hyphens… I don’t know what’s right.

We are, however, considering eating at Wednesday night at a restaurant in the Uptown district of New Orleans, called… Jacques Imo’s. Clever, wot?

[Lyrics (in a transcription which doesn’t quite correspond with Dr. John’s rendition above)]

“Iko Iko” also provided the ’60s girl group The Dixie Cups (“Chapel of Love”) with a minor hit, in 1965:

[Below, click Play button to begin Iko Iko. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:04 long.]

[audio:ikoiko_dixiecups.mp3|titles=’Iko Iko’|artists=The Dixie Cups]

Wikipedia, again, on the way this recording came together:

[Group member] Barbara Hawkins had heard her grandmother sing the song… “We were just clowning around with it during a session using drumsticks on ashtrays. We didn’t realize that Jerry and Mike had the tapes running”. Leiber and Stoller overdubbed a bassline and percussion, and released it. It was The Dixie Cups’ fifth and last hit.

One kind soul has posted a rare (?) clip of The Dixie Cups performing “Iko Iko” on a TV show… yes, complete with clicky-clicky drumsticks.

Caught by Surprise

May 25, 2012 by John 4 Comments

[Image: a key (and classic) moment in Fritz Lang’s 1931 thriller, M: the murderer, played by Peter Lorre, learns he’s a (literally) marked man.]

From whiskey river:

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

(Milan Kundera [source])

…and:

When It Comes

Any time. Now. The next minute.
Years from today. You lean forward
and wait. You relax, but you don’t forget.

Someone plans an elaborate party
with a banquet, dancing, even fireworks
when feasting is over. You look at them:

All those years when you searched the world
like a ferret, these never happened — your marriage,
your family, prayers, curses. Only dreams.

A vacuum has opened everywhere. Cities,
armies, those chairs ranked in the great
hall for the audience — there isn’t anyone.

Like a shutter the sky opens and closes
and the show is over. The next act
will deny that anything ever happened.

Your hand falls open. It is empty. It never
held a knife, a flower, gold,
or love, or now. Lean closer—

Listen to me: there isn’t any hand.

(William Stafford [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Deana Carter, “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”

May 23, 2012 by John 4 Comments

[Image: Deana Carter, circa 1995]

A bit of urban folklore which I sort of remember (and sort of don’t) from years ago, regarding a difference between the sexes: Boys roll; girls fold. The rolling-and-folding in question was (supposedly) of paper programs for events like football games, concerts, and church services. (I may have mixed up the verbs and subjects — I can see it either way — but I think I’ve got it right.) Whether or not the folklore is true is almost beside the point: it’s so simply expressed, and it’s such a… such an interesting — outright weird — idea, that we instinctively feel it should be true.

Another such formulation I’ve heard has probably a bit more common experience behind it, and it’s certainly got the popular-songwriter vote sewn up: Guys use love to get sex; women use sex to get love. Because, y’know, guys are lying heels and women are shameless vamps; as soon as either side gets what they want, they show their true colors.

Accounts (often weepy) of evidence for that general truism — and the sense of betrayal which follows — may litter the pop-music landscape. But I can’t think of another song* with a premise quite like today’s Midweek Music Break selection, the title track from Deana Carter‘s debut album; it sings not of heartbreak, but of annoyance at a partner far too boneheaded to know the rules of the game, let alone to play along:

[Lyrics]

I’m definitely not a fan of the video for the song; if I’d seen it before hearing the song, you’d probably never be reading this post. From all evidence, Deana Carter is a very good-looking woman, with something of Naomi Watts about her. But in that video, she shines not at all as an actress. She’s dressed and made up — and acts — way too cutesy (almost winking), as though we need her help to get the joke. (And if we still don’t get it, at least we’ll think she’s adorable.) At any rate, she treats the role that way right up until the closing shot. Finally, in that moment, she seems to become the narrator, at last capturing a genuine sense of disbelief in her own naivete (and yes, the guy’s ignorance).

The song does make me wonder about the counterpart from a male point of view… Maybe just, “I said that I loved you, for this?”

___________________

* Nominees gratefully received, though!

Midweek Music Break: David Byrne and Brian Eno, “Home”

May 16, 2012 by John 9 Comments

Several of Running After My Hat‘s regular commenthood are overhauling what “home” means to them:

Nance — and Mr. Mature, of course — are caught up in readying their house for a (dearly longed-for) sale. Marta — amongst writing a flash-fiction story every day this month, and competitive skating, and teaching, and the gods know what else — has moved with her family into their first house, with all the attendant packing and unpacking, inspections, signings of documents, painting, arranging and re-arranging, and re-assessment of what counts (and how much). And in a turn almost unimaginable, at least to me — having followed his blog for four years — Brit ex-pat Froog prepares to leave China altogether, bound for… Lithuania? Uruguay? parts unknown (but presumably with no shortage of watering holes)?

From At Home: A Short History of Private Life, by Bill Bryson:

Houses are amazingly complex repositories. What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world — whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over — eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment — they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes. So the history of household life isn’t just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be, but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has happened. Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.

From Brian Eno, writing on davidbyrne.com (speaking of 2008’s Everything That Happens Will Happen Today album):

This record was born as a dinner conversation. While dining in New York with David and some other friends, I mentioned that I had accumulated a lot of music, which, despite my intentions, I had never formed into songs. David volunteered to give them a try…

Upon starting this project, we quickly realized we were making something like electronic gospel, music in which singing becomes the central event, but whose sonic landscapes are atypical of such vocal-centered tracks.

David Byrne himself adds:

The challenge was more emotional than technical: to write simple, heartfelt tunes without drawing on cliché. The results, in many cases, are uplifting, hopeful, and positive, even though some lyrics describe cars exploding, war, and similarly dark scenarios.

These songs have elements of our previous work — no surprise there — but something new has emerged here as well. Where does the sanguine and heartening tone come from, particularly in these troubled times? …some of my lyrics and melodies were a response to what I sensed lay buried in the music. My task was to bring forth into language what was originally non-verbal. In the end, we have made something together that neither of us could have made on our own.

This particular number, I think, doesn’t fall quite into the “electronic gospel” genre. There’s a nearly martial, rolling-snare-drum effect which plays well behind Byrne’s vocals, and that voice verges on strident. But the lyrics speak of both the universal and the deeply personal meanings of home. Especially when the song is overlaid (as here) by dozens of still photos of dozens of types of houses, it’s easy to imagine an utterly different performance: solo, acoustic, nothing at all electronic — a plucked string fastened at one end in the present day and at the other, deep in history.

[Lyrics]

Midweek Music Break: Cowboy Junkies, “Angels in the Wilderness”

May 9, 2012 by John 6 Comments

[Image: Cowboy Junkies (from top: Alan Anton, bass; Margo Timmins, vocals; Peter Timmins, drums; and Michael Timmins, guitar)]

Cowboy Junkies was the first band I ever listened two who’d been dubbed “alt”-anything. (It may have been alt-country, but I’m pretty sure it was plain old alternative rock.) This made me feel all, y’know, not quite dangerous, more like adventurous — life on the edge! — because I tend toward the plain-brown-wrapper end of most spectra. For starters, I couldn’t imagine ever talking to anyone I knew about a band with the word “junkies” in its name. My family and friends would wonder with whom I’d been hanging out.

In truth, I don’t remember. I may have first heard of the Junkies from a magazine, Rolling Stone maybe, in a review of their great Trinity Session album. (I’ve featured one song from that album here, a good while ago, as one of the selections in the first What’s in a Song post, about “Blue Moon.”)

Well, whatever the circumstances in which they first crossed my radar screen, Cowboy Junkies have continued for around twenty-five years to crank out whatever music they want to make, and to tour widely in its support. And they still consist of the same four members (two brothers, a sister, and a childhood friend). Most recently, they challenged themselves: write, produce, and release a series of four interconnected albums… in eighteen months. It actually took them a couple-three months longer than that, but the final piece of the Nomad Series, the album called Wilderness, finally dropped a few weeks ago.

Here’s one number from the new release, which (to me) feels very comfortably both familiar and, yes, alternative.

[Below, click Play button to begin Angels in the Wilderness. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:42 long.]

[audio:angelsinthewilderness_cowboyjunkies.mp3|titles=’Angels in the Wildernss’|artists=Cowboy Junkies]

[Lyrics]

If you’re a Cowboy Junkies fan, you’ll almost certainly want to see their Tiny Desk Concert recorded at the NPR offices recently. It’s a fourteen-plus-minute session, featuring both “Angels in the Wilderness” and “Fairytale” from the new album, bracketing the one number which has come closest to a hit for them, from that Trinity Session album: “Misguided Angel.”

Midweek Music Break: Water Liars, “Dog Eaten”

May 2, 2012 by John 2 Comments

[Image(s): Water Liars. You’d never imagine that a couple of guys who look like this would
write, play, and sing so sweetly, would you?]

I don’t know how the duo who call themselves Water Liars came up with that name. I do know, however, that it’s the title of the first story in a collection by the late Mississippi writer Barry Hannah, 1978’s Airships. You can read the story here or here; briefly, it’s a first-person narrative of a man who’s come to the sudden awareness that he was not his wife’s, y’know, first. (In short order, he remembers that she wasn’t his, either — but he seems to dismiss this little dissonant factoid with ease, not to say convenience.)

Before coming together as Water Liars, the two guys — Justin Kinkel-Schuster and Andrew Bryant — had been performing alone or with other bands. For their first album, Phantom Limb, they just sort of shut themselves away in a room in a small Mississippi town, with a single microphone, their instruments, and a handful of songs. Among them, the lovely, haunting “Dog Eaten”:

Lyrics (if anyone can fill in the gap for me, I’d be grateful!):

Dog Eaten
(by Water Liars)

The smallest hours of the morning,
When I was busy dreaming
Of tender-hearted girls
And the world without end
Forever and ever amen

My father was quietly takin’
The money I was makin’
From the dog-eaten wallet
He gave me that year

Our blood is our own but it does what it pleases and there
Ain’t much more to say
I’m alive on the highway
Dead on arrival and that’s no way to live this life

We lay on a Mexican blanket
~~[…inaudible…]~~ by a carillon and some roses
And I was an owl’s ghost
And died on the side of the road

She laid her head on my shoulder
She nibbled on my ear lobe
And that was about all

My blood was my own, it done what it pleased to, and there
Ain’t much more to say
I’m alive on the highway
Dead on arrivin’ and that’s no way to live this life

Whether or not Water Liars intended the connection, it’s not hard to trace a dotted line from Hannah’s story of broken, childish illusions to the sorry tale told by this song’s protagonist.

____________________________

P.S. From a good interview at No Depression (the speaker is Andrew Bryant):

Lately, my biggest influences have been writers. We all love music of all kinds. That’s should go without saying. But I’ve been really into stories and poetry lately. My favorite writer at the moment is a Mississippi writer named Barry Hannah. He wrote this book called Airships and it really shook me. He did his own thing, and he did from his gut. I’d never read anything like it.

I guess the connection between the band’s name and Hannah’s story isn’t so coincidental!

Update 2012-05-05: I’ve received a genial email from one of the members of Water Liars to “de-mystify a couple areas you touched on.” First up was a clarification of the lyrics (I’ve made that correction above). Second, no need to wonder further about the band’s name:

…we did in fact name ourselves after Barry Hannah’s “Water Liars”. It’s one of the best book-opening stories of all time, not to mention one of our favorite stories in one of our favorite books by one of our favorite writers of all time.

Thanks, Pete!