Midweek/Weekend Music Break

Midweek Music Break: The Animals, “The House of the Rising Sun”

March 28, 2012 by John 10 Comments

[Image: The Animals (original image doctored up by Jude Kane and found on Freakoutville Xpress). And they looked like such nice boys…]

To get it out of the way right up front: no house in New Orleans called the “Rising Sun” ever existed.* Or rather, more precisely: never definitively, and no one establishment. Furthermore, it may or may not have been a brothel, which is fitting… because to find one in the song’s house of the rising sun we have to read between the lines, nudging that meaning into place with the words draped over it. (Not that we have to nudge too hard.)

I was surprised to learn that it began life as a folk song, first recorded (as far as we know) in 1934 by a Clarence “Tom” Ashley, in a version alternatively titled “Risin’ Sun Blues.” (Wikipedia does its usual brisk, reliably good job in documenting the song’s performance history, and outlines the several theories about the real (or otherwise) house in question.) My surprise is 100% Boomer-centric: You mean history happened at some time other than my own?!? Inconceivable! But yes, Eric Burdon and the Animals were pretty far down in the chronological list of performers. Nevertheless, they did succeed in putting their stamp on it; I doubt that I’m the only one who knew it first, and presumably always, as the vehicle for Eric Burdon’s howling vocals and that maddeningly relentless guitar. (The latter can likely induce motion sickness in sensitive individuals.)

To get back to the real (or otherwise) house of the title: it’s been claimed, variously, to have been a brothel, maybe a proto-casino or prison, dating back as early as 1821. That site was excavated by archaeologists within the last few years, which turned up evidence that it in fact may have been a bordello, or at least a house where “gentlemen” could “relax.”

The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, back in 2003, ran this letter on the issue:

Fact: It’s Been the Ruin of Many a Poor Myth

As a reference librarian for many years specializing in local history and lore, as well as a long-time fan of The Animals and that group’s rendition of “House of the Rising Sun,” I was very interested in Chris Rose’s Jan. 12 article, “The rising son.” I have made a study of the history of prostitution in New Orleans and have often confronted the perennial question, “Where is the House of the Rising Sun?” without finding a satisfactory answer. Although it is generally assumed that the singer is referring to a brothel, there is actually nothing in the lyrics that indicate that the “house” is a brothel. Many knowledgeable persons have conjectured that a better case can be made for either a gambling hall or a prison; however, to paraphrase Freud: sometimes lyrics are just lyrics.

After having discussed the “rising sun,” a popular decorative device, with a colleague who has just completed her doctoral work on the history of prostitution in New Orleans and a historian who has written about Shreveport’s red-light district, as well as being personally familiar with a number of general works on the “oldest profession,” there is no evidence or even a mention of the use of a rising sun as a universally recognized symbol of prostitution.

In examining property records for 826-832 St. Louis Street and numerous other resources on prominent pre-Storyville madams and prostitution in the Crescent City, I find it interesting, too, that any reference at all to the “notorious” House of the Rising Sun is conspicuously missing. Public records simply don’t confirm it.

Pamela D. Arceneaux

(“Sometimes lyrics are just lyrics”: love it. That whooshing you hear is a collective sigh of relief of from a thousand songwriters.)

If you’re interested in the definitive answers to the song’s mysteries, you might find them in Ted Anthony’s 2007 book, Chasing the Rising Sun [Amazon / Google Books]. Disclaimer: I haven’t read it myself! However, he does include this little item towards the end of the book (from “January 27, 1821, on page two of a New Orleans newspaper called the Louisiana Gazette“):

Rising Sun
Hotel,
Conti Street,
Nearly Opposite the State Bank.

The undersigned inform their friends and the public that they have bought out the interest of JOHN HULL & CO. in the above establishment. No pains or expence will be spared by the new proprietors to give general satisfaction, and maintain the character of giving the best entertainment, which this house has enjoyed for twenty years past.

Gentlemen may here rely upon finding attentive Servants. The bar will be supplied with genuine good Liquors; and at the Table, the fare will be of the best the market or the season will afford.

The business will be carried on under the firm of L.S. Hotchkiss & Co.
Jan.27

“Attentive Servants”; “general satisfaction” and “best entertainment”… Mmm-hmm.

[Below, click Play button to begin The House of the Rising Sun. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:24 long.]

[audio:houseofrisingsun_theanimals.mp3|titles=’The House of the Rising Sun’|artists=The Animals]

[Lyrics]

One interesting thing about the song’s lyrics over time: they’ve switched genders. Early versions were often sung by women, about the ruination not of “poor boys” but “poor girls.” I don’t want to guess what it says about our culture — even in the “enlightened” world of 1960s rock — that in the song’s most successful version the real victims of such places can be found among the patrons.

_______________________________

* Well, as it happens, there is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun: it’s a bed-and-breakfast (apparently quite nice) which opened its doors in 1999. (WARNING: Before following that link, you should know that the song will start playing, unbidden and fairly loudly; it took me a while to find the little audio-control widget which controls it, but it’s over in the left-hand sidebar, close to the top.) Their site includes a good page of information on the various legends about the “real” (or otherwise) Rising Sun, and the song which commemorates it. And I had to laugh when I read this:

We named our former bed & breakfast the “House of the Rising Sun” for the obvious reason… the way the song starts. What else could we call it… “Dunroamin”?

I’m not sure what they mean by “former” — as far as I can tell, it’s getting along just fine — but you’ve gotta give credit to business owners who poke fun at their own naked commercial moxie. :)

The Calm at the Core of Disorder

March 23, 2012 by John 2 Comments

[Lyrics]

[Video: “Saints & Liars,” by Pony Boy. See the note at the foot of this post for more information.]

From whiskey river:

There is tremendous power in unearthing, in recognizing distracted, scattered mind, the mind which would rather be anywhere but here, and spending some time there, with that mind. Rather than being an anonymous voice from the dark bossing you around, scattered mind is someone you can sit down and hang out with.

(Jusan Ed Brown)

…and:

A Settlement

Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned
into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come
up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their
curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come
home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow,
happiness, music, ambition.

And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to
go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of
this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.

* * *

Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you

for everything.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

It’s all a show, a deception. Your urges scream and bluster at you; they cajole; they coax; they threaten; but they really carry no stick at all. You give in out of habit. You give in because you never really bother to look beyond the threat. It is all empty back there. There is only one way to learn this lesson, though. The words on this page won’t do it. But look within and watch the stuff coming up — restlessness, anxiety, impatience, pain — just watch it come up and don’t get involved. Much to your surprise, it will simply go away. It rises, it passes away. As simple as that. There is another word for self-discipline. It is patience.

(Henepola Gunaratana [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Collins H. Driggs (on the Novachord), “Estudiantina,” and… Beer

March 21, 2012 by John 13 Comments

[The Novachord, closed and open (click either photo for an enlargement); both photos per Wikipedia]

When you grew up in the US during a certain window of time (and maybe in certain geographic areas, within certain socioeconomic strata), the culture you could absorb from the adult world was this weird amalgam of past and present. The mass media hadn’t quite figured out what “mass media” might mean. Television still felt like an extravagance. Pop-culture artifacts from the early decades of the 20th century could still be found lying around in basements and attics, waiting for (re)discovery by kids with maybe a little too much time on their hands.

One such sort of artifact in our household was 78rpm record albums. I have no idea from which side of the family most of these things might have come to us — or, rather, to the cardboard boxes in the second-floor “storage room” and in dark back corners of the basement. If they were Big Band-related, odds were good that they’d arrived trailing in Dad’s wake. But the others…?

We had a couple of records by Arthur Godfrey, for instance, including one on which he and a would-be comic country-singin’ group sang an embarrassing number called “Slap Her Down Again, Paw.” (That was the refrain, in a narrative about an adolescent girl who’d stayed out later than her parents allowed — but finally came in at sunrise.)

And we also had a collection of recordings on a musical instrument called the Novachord.

Like the Mellotron (covered here in a Midweek Music Break some time ago), the Novachord was an experimental keyboard instrument straddling the analog/digital divide. Wikipedia says only about a thousand were manufactured by Hammond (the organ company) between 1939 and 1942; production lapsed during World War II because of the shortage of parts, and never resumed afterwards because, apparently, the thing just hadn’t caught on anyway.

I don’t ever remember Mom or Dad playing the Novachord records on the family hi-fi (or later, stereo). But I listened to them myself, for some reason, and often enough that one song really lodged in my head. The label identified it as “Estudiantina,” a waltz by a composer named Émile Waldteufel. Although (as Wikipedia says) Waldteufel is considered a French composer, he was born in Strasbourg — as German a city as a French city may be, right down to the geography. (And his surname is German, meaning — I love this — forest devil.)

Given all that, maybe it should not surprise that “Estudiantina” — certainly as rendered by the Novachord, in the hands of someone named Collins H. Driggs — has so much a lilting, oomp-pa-pah beer-hall quality:

Maybe the main reason why this performance struck me with such force was that I recognized the tune well before I heard it from the Novachord recording — and even then, when I must’ve been only ten or twelve years old or so, I recognized it for an unlikely reason: it provided the melody to the advertising jingle for (yes!) a Germanic-sounding brand of beer, Rheingold. That’s Miss Rheingold* of 1949 in the ad over there on the right. I can almost hear “Estudiantina” tootling from her concertina, which perhaps sounded much like the Novachord: thin, reedy, and rather, well, burbly. I can even almost hear her singing the jingle — whose words, indeed, included the announcement: My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer…!

Background: When I set out a couple days ago on this general topic, for no reason that I can put my finger on, I had exactly two facts at my disposal:

The word “Novachord.”
The remembered connection between that old 78rpm record, and the Rheingold jingle.

I certainly couldn’t remember the song title, “Estudiantina.” And I don’t think I’d ever even registered the name of Émile Waldteufel.

But as I continued to think about the recording, I vaguely remembered that the overall album title coupled Novachord somehow with the word magic. It wasn’t Novachord Magic… nor The Magical Novachord… it was… was… was it The Magic of the Novachord?

And folks, I wanna tell you: I just about fell out of my chair when a quick check of Google led me to that very album on iTunes.

I love the Internet.

________________________

* The very first Miss Rheingold, in 1940, was Jinx Falkenburg. (I might have been able to invent that name, but I’d never have had the nerve to use it in a story. Too implausible.) Her autobiography, Jinx, came out in 1951, but apparently went out of print long ago. (Hers, I’d wager, is a potential best-selling story in search of the right biographer or filmmaker, especially in our beautiful-celebrity culture.) There are many pictures of her online (and yes, Jinx appears to have been something of a minx), but one of my favorites is the one at the right. She is here not signing the accordion, as it appears. She’s signing a short snorter. You can be forgiven for not knowing what a short snorter is; according to the site of The Short Snorter Project (where I found the photo), it is:

…a banknote which was signed by various persons traveling together or meeting up at different events and records who was met. The tradition was started by bush pilots in Alaska in the 1920’s and subsequently spread through the growth of military and commercial aviation. If you signed a short snorter and that person could not produce it upon request, they owed you a dollar or a drink (a “short snort”, aviation and alcohol do not mix!).

Did I say, I love the Internet?

Midweek Music Break: The Essex, “Easier Said Than Done”

March 14, 2012 by John 3 Comments

In 1961, a couple of US Marines stationed in Okinawa — Rodney Taylor and Walter Vickers — formed a vocal duo with the slightly odd name “The Essex.” Shortly thereafter, they were reassigned to Camp LeJeune in North Carolina; there, they added a couple of their fellow leathernecks, Billy Hill and Rudolph Johnson. They even encountered a woman Marine performing in the base club for non-commissioned officers; they liked the way her voice sounded, and convinced her to join their act.

Still on active duty, the quartet (Johnson left after a few months) set out to polish their routines, eventually recording a demo tape of ballads to send around to the big-name labels. Roulette Records expressed interest in recording them — they’d have to audition, of course, but if that went well… Except for one thing: what song to audition with? The problem, see, was that Roulette specifically asked for something a little snappier than the ballads on the demo.

Vickers had a friend, William Linton, who worked in the base communications office. Linton claimed to be a songwriter, so they asked: Could he come up with something suitable for their audition? Together with another friend, Larry Huff, Linton cobbled together a short little thing called “Easier Said Than Done.”

At the audition, as it happened, they didn’t perform “Easier Said Than Done.” (The group themselves didn’t much care for it, in fact.) The Roulette producers liked their sound nonetheless, and agreed to release their first single, called “Are You Going My Way?” For the flip side of the single, they requested — yes — “Easier Said Than Done.” But now The Essex had another problem: although they’d recorded fragments of the song, they’d never recorded a full-length version — even just a couple minutes long, the bare minimum for a 45rpm recording.

Out of the editing room emerged the “B” side, spliced together from multiple takes and pieces into a single, barely-two-minutes-plus chunk… And that pastiche, maybe needless to say, quickly swept the record’s “A” side into oblivion.

“Easier Said Than Done” is one of my favorite oldies, for its sheer crackling energy. No wonder it’s got that energy: the rhythm, Linton maintained, came from that of a teletype machine in the office. I also love the way the lyrics — mostly monosyllables — fit so well into every little niche of the music, and Humes’s delivery taps them into place there. Yet I think it’s also got one of the most disappointing finishes of any oldie. Before I knew the above story about the splicing-and-cutting, I’d always thought it sounded like the songwriters, exhausted by what came before, had simply run out of gas on the last line.

Anyway, here’s 1963’s “Easier Said Than Done,” by The Essex. The teletype rhythm — close to the actual sound — is in the insistent background duh-duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh (bass? rhythm guitar?) playing behind the other instruments and vocals.

[Lyrics]

The Essex didn’t hang around together for more than a couple of years before their military schedules forced them to head in different directions. And after “Easier Said Than Done,” their sales pretty much spiraled downhill; that hit had sat comfortably at Billboard’s #1 slot for two weeks, but their next best-seller, “A Walkin’ Miracle,” made it –briefly, a couple months later — only to #12. (A 1995 “Best of” compilation somehow pulled together a couple dozen songs, but I don’t recognize any of the others; of the 24, five are identified on the back of the album as “previously unissued tracks.”) Anita Humes attempted a solo career, but that never really came together, either.

Only one other song I know of includes a background like this one: a so-called “Light Classical” piece, 1950’s “The Typewriter Song,” which literally uses that “instrument” with an orchestra of more conventional ones. (Its composer, Leroy Anderson, also composed “The Syncopated Clock,” the Christmas hit “Sleigh Ride,” and other just-short-of-novelty pieces.) Here’s the Boston Pops and a brief version of “The Typewriter Song,” YouTubed over images of… well, you can probably guess:

Midweek Music Break: Louis Armstrong, “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York”

March 7, 2012 by John 3 Comments

Louis Armstrong’s public persona so often seemed so happy-go-lucky, so ingratiating, that the song “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York” — from the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess — seems to fit him like a glove. It comes across as a bouncy, jaunty tease. Without the context of the surrounding plot, here’s what we hear: a gentleman with a sly sense of humor is kidding a lady friend of his. If she’ll only come away with him to the big city, he seems to say, their life will be perfect: he’ll spoil her with finery, they’ll strut and smile and be happy in their “swellest mansion.” The very arrangement, and Armstrong’s solos, bespeak flirtatious temptation. And if this rendition of the song included Bess’s response, we could read it, too, as a funny, scornful toss-of-the-head, shaking-an-index-finger refusal:

You low, crawlin’ hound! Get away from my door, I tells
You, leave it, you rattlesnake. Dat’s what you is,
A rattlesnake!

[Below, click Play button to begin There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:56 long.]

[audio:theresaboatdatsleavinsoon_louisarmstrong.mp3|titles=’There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York’|artists=Louis Armstrong + Ella Fitzgerald]

[Lyrics]

Great, right? You can almost see the high life and the sheer fun this couple would have out on the town…

But in context with the actual storyline, the situation is bleaker: Bess has lost two of the men closest to her — the first, Crown, a brute murdered by the second, Porgy, who gets led away by police for questioning. In despair, she’s visited by an acquaintance named Sportin’ Life: a dope dealer, who offers her some “happy dust” as a way out of her misery. And then he tells her that she and he, Sportin’ Life, could make for New York and have a big life — a boat’s leavin’ soon! After all, he beguiles her, Porgy is probably going to be put away for years…

And even then, given that last stanza, we might think, Good for her! for her turning that hound, that rattlesnake away from her door.

But that’s not the end of the story: ultimately, Bess succumbs to Sportin’ Life’s temptation. She takes the drug, and she does go away with him — to a future, we are given to understand, of rather greater ugliness than the one Sportin’ Life has painted for her.

As it happens, Porgy is jailed for only a few days; unaware of the drama that’s unfolded in his absence, he returns to Catfish Row to take up life (as he imagines) with Bess. Here’s the scene from the end of DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novel Porgy, on which the opera is based. He confronts Maria, a mutual friend, regarding Bess’s whereabouts. In this version of the story, Bess has yielded not to “happy dust” but simple booze, and she’s been “ganged” by a half-dozen men not to New York but to Savannah, the nearest city. (Note that the dialect is written in a version of English tinged with coastal South-Carolina Gullah.)

“Where’s Bess? Tell me, quick, where’s Bess ?”

…Maria tried to speak, but her voice refused to do her bidding. She covered her face with her hands, and her throat worked convulsively.

Porgy clutched her wrist. “Tell me,” he commanded. “Tell me, now.”

“De mens all carry she away on de ribber boat,” she sobbed. “Dey leabe word fuh me dat dey goin’ tek she all de way tuh Sawannah, an’ keep she dey. Den Serena, she tek de chile, an’ say she is goin’ gib um er Christian raisin’.”

Deep sobs stopped Maria’s voice. For a while she sat there, her face buried in her hands. But Porgy had nothing to say. When she finally raised her head and looked at him, she was surprised at what she saw. The keen autumn sun flooded boldly through the entrance and bathed the drooping form of the goat, the ridiculous wagon, and the bent figure of the man in hard, satirical radiance. In its revealing light, Maria saw that Porgy was an old man. The early tension that had characterized him, the mellow mood that he had known for one eventful summer, both had gone; and in their place she saw a face that sagged wearily, and the eyes of age lit only by a faint reminiscent glow from suns and moons that had looked into them, and had already dropped down the west.

She looked until she could bear the sight no longer; then she stumbled into her shop and closed the door, leaving Porgy and the goat alone in an irony of morning sunlight.

Not exactly what we’d expect to follow on from this perky musical sample, hmm?

The idea of escaping with someone else has appealed to songwriters for decades. To get a taste, find a Web site which lets you search song titles — or search your own music player — for titles containing the simple word away. Here’s Norah Jones, not doing the saucy-temptation thing but just beseeching you, heartsplittingly, to come away with me…:

Midweek Music Break: Jim James/The New Multitudes, “Talking Empty Bed Blues”

February 29, 2012 by John 3 Comments

I posted a few months ago about a recent project, led by Bob Dylan, to record the “lost notebooks” of Hank Williams. It so happens that 2012 marks the centennial of the birth of another great songwriter (and Dylan hero), Woodie Guthrie; and a new album, The New Multitudes, has just been released, of Guthrie’s lyrics which were never set to music. His daughter Nora, who heads up the Woody Guthrie Foundation, has been inviting contemporary performers for years to prowl around in his ample unpublished archives. (In 1998 and 2002, it was Billy Bragg and Wilco doing the honors, for Mermaid Avenue, Vol I and II.) This time around she’s tapped four indie-neo-folkies for the task.

Unplugged from the loop as I usually am, three of the singer-songwriters were otherwise unknown to me: Jay Farrar (who normally performs with Son Volt), Anders Parker (Varnaline), and Will Johnson (Centro-Matic). (Apparently the project began as a Farrar solo project.) As for the fourth, I sorta-kinda recognized his name, billed as Yim Yames, in its own right. But without question I recognized his regular band’s name, My Morning Jacket. (You may recall their “Circuital,” featured here last May: reverb-heavy, pounding-rhythmic, and graced with a nearly static video of — as it happens — a so-called “magic eye tube.”

The reason I hadn’t quite remembered Yim Yames’s name is that it’s the quasi-pseudonym/alter ego of MMJ’s front man, Jim James. No one seems to know why he chose this or any other any pseudonym. A conversation at a Pearl Jam (!) fan forum suggests that he did it on a lark; other references I saw, while not explaining it exactly, say that he uses it to distinguish his solo work (as here) from the stuff he does with his regular bands, MMJ and Monsters of Folk.

Crazy artistes…

Anyway, one of James’s lead performances on the Guthrie album is the one below, of “Talking Empty Bed Blues.” (He’s looking rather David Crosby-esque in the video.) It offers a lovely, surprise segue from haunting solo-acoustic-and-vocal to stirring, anthemic group harmonies, and back again:

Lyrics here. Among the behind-the-scenes audio notes posted at SoundCloud for the album, though, is one from James on why the lyrics spoke to him.

Midweek Music Break: The Playmates, “Beep Beep”

February 22, 2012 by John 8 Comments

I’ve been thinking for a while of doing theme-type Midweek Music Breaks for a little variety, such as one on car music: songs about cars. As opposed to conventional “road trip” music, I mean, or songs by groups named after cars (like The Fleetwoods, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and, uh, The Cars). I may still do that one. But in the meantime… It’s a busy week, and this silly song was wobbling at the top of the car-music stack.

Yesterday I paid a brief routine visit to my audiologist’s office. The two-year warranty on my current hearing aids is up next month, and we wanted to send them into the manufacturer for one last checkup and tuning while they’re still covered. As always on such occasions, I went into her office with two aids, and came out shortly afterward with one — a loaner. And as always on such occasions, for the next week or so my audio world will flatten into monaural.

Except when in the car, I almost always listen to music via headphones placed over my hearing aids, which are behind-the-ear models. Selecting the headphones involved some careful searching: (a) Obviously, earplug-style headphones are out. (b) If the headphones enclose the aids too fully, you get whistling feedback. (c) Regardless of design or size, if the headphones are too tight, they squash the tops of the ears (very uncomfortably) against the aids. The ones I use both at work and at home are made by Sennheiser, and fit all three criteria admirably. (Especially the ones at home, which include a volume-control dial on the cord.)

This sometimes leaves me feeling nostalgic for the days when everyone’s musical listening, if not their hearing, was so flattened. A time of high-fidelity sound, if that. Of refrigerators made in only one color — white. Of black-and-white television. Of car manufacturers no longer, today, in business. And of cars themselves, when the only sort of transmission available was the manual sort…

The Playmates released their one really noticeable hit in 1958. Not that it was a huge hit, for reasons which will become obvious: it got only as far as #20. But few people who’ve heard it have ever forgotten it. It’s a novelty song, a two- to three-minute joke, really — a number which doesn’t bear up under repeated listens, unless you’re trying to parse out the lyrics. (The Playmates’ seriousness about their art may perhaps be judged by the group’s first name: The Nitwits.) Worse, it’s even an esoteric joke, requiring that the listener know how to operate a standard three-speed transmission. Consequently, it never acquired a later life as a children’s song (like anything by The Chipmunks, for instance).

Aside from the joke, it demonstrates one other feature vaguely of interest: a musical technique called accelerando — a melody whose tempo gradually increases. (You won’t have to listen for long to to that opening ploddddding rhythm.)

[Below, click Play button to begin Beep Beep. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:47 long.]

[audio:beepbeep_theplaymates.mp3|titles=’Beep Beep’|artists=ArtistName]

[Lyrics]

(A casual, “I once knew a guy who claimed”-style anecdote on this page claims that the song’s story line came from an actual event, but I haven’t found any independent verification.)

I had three friends who drove used first- or second-generation Ramblers. (The body bolts on one of them had become loosened and/or sheared off; when the brakes were applied, the upper frame, including the passenger compartment, continued moving forward for a split-second longer than the wheels and undercarriage.) It’s fair to say — at least of those three cars — that any Cadillac driver would indeed be startled to find himself in a race with one.

Hard to imagine a song like “Beep Beep”‘s ever having been played as dance music, but maybe it happened. In an infinite universe, after all, there’s plenty of room for the merely improbable…

________________________

P.S. Yes, I know — only a week since the Ciara Sidine post. From the sublime to the ridiculous!

Midweek Music Break: Ciara Sidine, “Take Me Down”

February 15, 2012 by John 12 Comments

[Image: “Ciara and Conor [Brady], acoustic set, Shadow Road Shining launch at Sugar Club, Dublin,
13 May 2011″ (from her FB page)]

The [mostly imaginary] scene: Dublin, Ireland, in the offices of a large publishing firm, sometime in the still young twenty-first century. An experienced, highly respected editor sits looking dreamily out a window of her office. Only in her 30s, she’s done the successful-professional thing and she’s also the mother of small children. She has no desire to give up those things. And yet… and yet…

From the streets below, voices whisper to her. A few moments pass. Then she realizes: they’re not speaking but singing softly, some from half a world away and some just a few blocks distant, many of them muted by the passing of decades and others still very young…

From Ciara Sidine’s Facebook page, on her influences:

I am inspired by the beautiful vocals and at times ground-breaking recordings of Emmylou Harris, by the raw vocal energy and gut-wrenching lyrics of Lucinda Williams, by the braveness and vulnerability of Beth Gibbons and the rare and ethereal sound of Portishead. The voice of Elvis Costello never ceases to make me want to lie down and surrender to its beautiful calling.

Listening to the voice of Dolores Keane always made me feel that something true and unalterable was unfolding. From Mary Black came something equally true, pure in tone and melody; from Sinead O’Connor something otherworldly, at once raw, honest, violent and soothing. From Bob Geldof, ass-kicking, rocking music that put its money where its mouth was. I’m inspired by the folk revival from the fifties on, by blues and country. Hearing Hank Williams’s voice is like a fresh awakening every time. Van Morrison speaks directly to the soul, finds his groove there and works his spell. Let the healing begin.

Johnny Cash, well I can barely even go there. His voice brings me to a different place, and it is his later American recordings that I most often revisit and find myself at home in, almost akin to being a child in those warm sing-song evenings where the night was infinite possibility and song was a democracy all of its own. Johnny’s voice reminds me of rolling thunder — rumbling, spine-tingling, exciting. How close is the lightning to where you’re standing?

Joni still reveals something fresh and lasting in every new recording, and I don’t think there’s anyone to whom I owe more in terms of inspiration. When I listen to the immediacy and singularity of records she made well over forty years ago, every strum, every chord, every harmony still goes straight to the heart.

Every generation thinks it has reinvented the world, but we only have to listen to the music of the fifties and sixties to know that our hold over any such notion is at best tenuous. What unfolds from the rock ‘n’ roll revolution has all manner of inventiveness. But rock ‘n’ roll paved the way. And its way too was paved, by roots, gospel, jazz, blues, country. It just comes around again, anew. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings make the best case for this of any contemporary performers I can think of and they, too, inspire me.

That’s quite a bit of ambition wrapped up there, hmm? But she did more than dream. She did it. Her debut album, Shadow Road Shining, came out last year to great acclaim, and you can find echoes of all those voices — and all their poetry — in every song.

Here’s “Take Me Down”:

[Below, click Play button to begin Take Me Down. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:30 long.]

[audio:takemedown_ciarasidine.mp3|titles=’Take Me Down’|artists=Ciara Sidine]

[Lyrics]

I don’t know if she’s still editing, or plans to return to it (if indeed she has left). But the verbal dexterity is all there on open display, not just in her songs’ lyrics but in such of her prose as I’ve succeeded in digging up. Here’s an excerpt from her Web site:

At the moment, I feel that to be Irish is to have just emerged from your teenage-hood, having wrecked your parents’ gaff in a massive drug-fuelled party. Great fun, no one’s arguing, but they’re due back any minute, and you’ve woken up to an almighty hangover and an unbright future. The beautiful chick/dude from last night is nowhere to be found. Tomorrow you’re about to discover that you failed the leaving. There’s a queue stretching around the corner for a Mac-job. It’s time to sink or swim.

There’s always choice, always possibility. Maybe I’ll write a song about that.

An almighty hangover and an unbright future… You failed the leaving. It takes a real writer’s confidence with the English language — and in her choices — to fashion such cadences.

Update (2012-02-15, 2:00pm): See Froog’s comment, below, for a bit of a balloon-puncturing about one of those presumptively imaginative phrases.

Midweek Music Break: Hayes Carll, “Another Like You”

February 8, 2012 by John 1 Comment

Thanks to all the new(ish) music I’ve been listening to over the last couple years, I’ve found myself a fan of a genre I didn’t even know existed. It’s sort of a loose super-genre, actually: Americana or “roots music,” incorporating elements of bluegrass, folk, country/western, blues, rock… The instrumentation and arrangement lean acoustic-wards, and often feature odd or surprising juxtapositions of sounds and traditions; a band might include banjos and saxophones, for instance, or a fiddle played lying across the seated performer’s legs, like a dulcimer. In other cases it’s just a singer-songwriter and a guitar or honky-tonk piano…

It’s probably easier to describe the opposite of roots music — the stuff which falls outside the Venn diagram. Among the exclusions: techno-electronic dance sounds, bubblegum-pop production values, things metal (as opposed to things wood), sampling and remixing of other artists’ work.

I’d never even heard the name “Hayes Carll” until a couple months ago, when his “Another Like You” topped American Songwriter‘s list of the best 50 songs of 2011. I mean, just look at the top ten to see some of the company he’s keeping: Drive-By Truckers, Wilco, Gillian Welch, Tom Waits…!

You can get a pretty good sense of what to expect (and what not to expect) from him just by glancing at the photo topping this post. His music seems to fall generally into the country/western valley of the roots landscape. On the other hand, his new album straddles categories like they don’t exist. From his Web site:

Fiery rock, twangy country, pensive folk and even a touch of gospel comprise KMAG YOYO‘s sonic palette… Rather than enter the studio with a batch of completed material, Carll and his band picked up where they’d left off onstage — jamming on riffs they’d developed on the road. “I wanted to challenge myself musically,” says Carll, “and see if I could capture that live dynamic. A lot of the songs came with the music first, with the music calling the lyrics.” After completing the instrumental tracks with the band, Carll set to work, his witty wordplay matching the temper of the instrumentation.

That album title, pronounced kay-mag yo-yo, is (says the site) a military acronym (in the same sense, I guess, as snafu). It stands for Kiss my ass, guys. You’re on your own. And its sense is captured in the title track, which tells the story of a disillusioned American soldier in Afghanistan. (The album itself has been well-received. The one review which most stands out in my mind is the one from about a year ago at No Depression.)

So, you think: Carll’s a political songwriter. Well, yes and no. In today’s Midweek Music Break selection, he paints a highly entertaining portrait of a hot romance born of hot disagreement between left and right. (With a surprise cameo at the end, featuring Mr. Left (even more pebbles-in-his-mouth than usual) and Ms. Right themselves — the poster children of political mismatches.)

[Lyrics]

Midweek Music Break: Pendyrus Male Choir, “Cwm Rhonnda”

February 1, 2012 by John 9 Comments

[Image: the valley of the Rhondda]

I’ve mentioned before that while writing Seems to Fit, I used a variety of musical playlists to put me in the proper frame of mind for a given chapter. The selections on the day’s playlist were among those which (so I imagined) would be favorites of the character most heavily featured in the section or chapter on which I was working at the time. Two characters, for instance, were World War II veterans, so (naturally) they listened regularly to Big Band/swing music… and so did I.

Actually, I took it further: one of the two preferred the smoooooth sound of Glenn Miller; the other, the more raucous Benny Goodman Orchestra. They argued about it periodically, one sarcastically, exasperatedly, and the other with gentle good humor.

Anyway, a handful of chapters scattered throughout recount the story of an eighteenth-century Welsh brewmaster named Emrys ap Rhys, and how he came to brew a particular ale which plays a significant part in S2F‘s storyline. Even Emrys had his own “My Music” sort of playlist, which may sound like a tall order… unless you know about the history of music in Wales.

Briefly, the Welsh love music, particularly choral music — and further particularly, choral music performed by men. The tradition goes back centuries, with much of the music composed and sung in the performers’ native Welsh language rather than English. As it happened, then, it wasn’t hard to build a good soundtrack for the Emrys chapters.

One tune in particular stands out.

“Cwm Rhondda” (Welsh for the Rhondda Valley, in South Wales — the Rhondda being a river there), like many tunes, isn’t in itself a song to be sung. It has no words of its own. Instead, the melody which goes by that name is used as a scaffold for the lyrics of a hymn: several hymns, in fact. Although the tune is sometimes described as the unofficial national anthem of Wales, the hymn has no lyrics of a typically national-anthemic sort. (Given the title, for instance, one might expect a praise song about Nature’s beauty on display in the countryside of South Wales.) Instead — at least in the versions I know of — the supplicant just asks God for help on his or her journeys through life and the world. Nowadays, the tune also underlies the chants of You’re not singing anymore! which erupt among Welsh fans, from time to time, when their football teams are on the field.*

(The specific circumstances calling forth this chant, apparently, are a form of Schadenfreude: delight in someone else’s troubles. If one’s culture encourages one to burst into song when things are going well, then a sudden turn in fortune tends to shut one up.)

My favorite writeup about “Cwm Rhondda” is the one on the h2g2 site. (This is the pre-Wikipedia and often much more informal online encyclopedia originally established by Douglas Adams as the Earthbound counterpart to the one described in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.) It’s tempting to quote the entire piece, but I’ll offer just this:

‘Cwm Rhondda’ is a belter of a hymn that defies one to sing it quietly… It is the very embodiment of hwyl, the Welsh love of homeland and of culture, and as such has come close to supplanting the official Welsh national anthem. This is especially the case at rugby ‘internationals’, where the faltering, bathetic, falsely-devout Land of My Fathers [JES: that’s the actual Welsh national anthem] is soon dispensed with in favour of something far more robust. England fans often respond with their own countermeasures, often the Negro spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, but soon buckle under the sonic onslaught of ‘huge gangs of tough, sinewy men… terrorising people with their close-harmony singing.’

Ha!

Anyway, here’s the Pendyrus Male Choir (Welsh-language version of their home page here), and “Cwm Rhondda”:

When the group hits and holds those high notes, it makes me wish I could join them in song. (Not a reaction I commonly have, which many people would consider a mercy of the gods deserving a hymn in its own right.)

Tracking down the lyrics to the above is complicated by my not recognizing spoken (let alone sung) Welsh. This page (about which I know pretty much nothing) suggests that it’s the hymn called “Lo, Between the Myrtles Standing,” which you can find in Welsh and English translation at Wikipedia.

(By the way, yes, I know: the tune “Cwm Rhondda” was actually composed in the early twentieth century, and thus would have been unknown to a real Emrys ap Rhys. So would his late-twentieth-century creator. :))

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* Videos of these mass outbursts constitute almost an entire sub-genre… and given the context (cellphone and other handheld video cameras; the natural rowdiness of crowds at sporting events; mass quantities of brew), their quality is, well, all over the map.