Carlene Carter, Every Little Thing

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I’ve been listening to the new Brandy Clark album this week. Brandy is a country songwriter who has been trying to break as a performing artist. Her album 12 Songs I wrote about here a while back. The song Stripes is the kick ass fun number, but there’s lots of other good stuff on that album.

The new album has equally clever and direct songwriting, but it has some extra production patina and maybe some compressed audio to make it more contemporary radio friendly. Hard to argue with that. I’ll probably post about the song The Girl Next Door soon, since I’ve been playing it a ton.

But the funny thing about listening to Clark is that after a few songs play in the mix I get distracted and I start thinking about Carlene Carter.

Carter is the daughter of June Carter and her first husband Carl Smith. I’ve written about her here before. She has a big strong voice, and a terrific other voice as a songwriter. She was married to Nick Lowe for about ten years, and they made some terrific records together and others looking at each other. But the record that Brandy Clark pushed me toward is Little Love Letters, the 1993 record she made after Carter’s Lowe adventure was over.

It’s a terrific record, country in flavor and sentiment with a solid foundation of rock beat on the fast ones. Her constant collaborators here are Howie Epstein and Benmont Tench (both of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers), but she also writes a song with Bernie Taupin, and this one, Every Little Thing, with Al Anderson of NRBQ.

Is this a song of love, lust, or maybe something more unhinged?

Which reminds me of some other Every Little Thing songs.

The Police had this tune that kind of exposed them (or at least Gordon Sumner) as cheese balls. But the dysfunction of the narrator and the crazy calypso feel are for me irresistible. Yes, dismiss it as fodder, the video suggests the Police are just cranking out what they can, but at the same time it’s about a strong and creepy emotion that hasn’t been as well expressed since Every Breath You Take. Hmm. Or Don’t Stand So Close to Me. The Police were good at perversity, weren’t they?

And, of course, the Beatles have their own Every Little Thing.

The YouTube versions are all chopped up bootlegs, so not much pleasure in the listen, but there’s enough here to suggest that the Beatles too found in the expression Every Little Thing a bit of unhealthy obsession.

Maybe it’s the word Every that does it.

 

Oh The Times Square They are a Changing

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Diane and I are in New York for our vacation. Actually, I came to participate in the FSTA football draft, which is great as it means seeing so many friends from the fantasy sports world. The draft was part of the annual summer convention put on by the organization and since we both love visiting our most vibrant city so much, the convention was an easy excuse to plan an hiatus around.

One of the things I always do when I am in the Big Apple is stop by Rudy’s Music, on W. 48th street. Aside from just loving to look at guitars, Rudy’s always has, or had, a bunch of beautiful vintage axes that are more than wonderful to gawk at.

Over the years, I have purchased stuff there, too. Before boutique pedals were as readily available as they are today, I got my “King of the Brits” pedal and also my Fulltone “Choral Flange” at Rudy’s who always had easy access to such stuff when all Guitar Center would carry was BOSS (not knocking that company, in fact I use their digital tuners for all my setups).

Even more, I fell in love with Hofner basses at Rudy’s, playing one there, and then knowing that was my next purchase (Diane actually bought one for me as a present some years back and I do indeed love it to pieces).

So, this trip, first day of stumbling around mid-town, we met my cousin Richard at Virgil’s for lunch (another serious ritual, and if you like wings, Virgil’s has the best ones on the planet) and were walking around just soaking the city in when I suggested walking over to Rudy’s. Last year, I got a leather necklace there with a little carved guitar, and somewhere the guitar got lost, so I wanted to get a new one.

Much to my shock and dismay, Rudy’s was gone, and all that remained was an empty storefront. There is still the Rudy’s in Soho, functioning away, but no more mid-t0wn. So, at least to get in a guitar fix, I walked up the street to Manny’s, a music store possibly more famous than Rudy’s as that is where the Ramones hung and bought their gear, for example.

But Manny’s too was gone, again leaving an empty storefront in its wake.

I talked to a couple of people and asked what happened, and, well, the Times Square area is indeed undergoing a major renovation, and property is being snatched up, and Rudy’s and Manny’s were part of the toll of progress.

I understand this: the past will inevitably fall behind and become quaint (although nostalgia does often foster a comeback from falling out of favor) and outdated and dismissed in lieu of the next big relative thing. And, of course, profit will always sneak into the equation as well.

Anyway, for some reason, as I mused the loss of Manny’s and Rudy’s, I kept coming to this 1965 hit by the Trade Winds, New York’s a Lonely Town which essentially has nothing to do with any of this save the NYC locale, and perhaps the thoughts of things lost.

So, here it is. The song is kind of hoaky, but in a perfect 60’s way, I think.

The Dark End: Chip Moman has died.

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Chip Moman was a guitarist who got his start at Stax, then founded his own studio (American Sound Studio), and wrote, produced and/or played on an impressive body of work. You can read the NY Times obit here.

Moman wrote The Dark End of the Street with Dan Penn, and produced James Carr’s recording of it.

It’s one of my favorite songs.

Henry McCullough Has Passed.

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An English guitarist of great taste, who spent a lot of time around Paul McCartney and Wings, but also played the guitar solos at Woodstock for Joe Cocker when he turned With A Little Help From My Friends into a monster smash.

McCullough’s solo in this bit of MOR elevates it. I’m a fan of McCartney’s stuff, and I’m always happy to hear this, but less happy today that McCullough is gone.

Song of the Week – Revolution Blues, Neil Young

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IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED

Today’s post is on the final release of Neil Young’s Ditch Trilogy – On the Beach.

As you may recall, the first two albums in the trilogy dealt with the heroin overdose deaths of bandmate Danny Whitten and roadie/friend Bruce Berry. But despite preparing for highly anticipated tour with CSNY in 1974 (documented in a boxed set released in mid-2014) things still weren’t looking up in Young’s personal life.

He separated from his wife, actress Carrie Snodgrass, and learned that their son had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. He escaped to Malibu and began work on the paranoid sounding On the Beach. He was quoted as describing the album as “probably one of the most depressing records I’ve ever made.” Now that’s saying something, coming from “Don’t Let it Bring You Down” Neil.

For this album, Young asked some friends to help out. Rick Danko and Levon Helm, of The Band, contributed; as did Graham Nash and David Crosby. The album was recorded at LA’s Sunset Sound studio and was fueled by “honey slides” – a concoction of hash cakes soaked in honey. Young’s manager, Elliott Roberts, was quoted as saying honey slides were “way worse than heroin.”

It’s this druggy environment that produced today’s SotW, “Revolution Blues.”

On this track Young is at his most vicious, taking his suspicions of the LA star system he was retreating from to a terrifyingly scary place.

Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars,
But I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars.

Danko and Helm hold down the rhythm on this one, giving the song a little more funk than most of Young’s work.

In a 1975 interview with Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe, Young said “You got to keep changing. Shirts, old ladies, whatever. I’d rather keep changing and lose a lot of people along the way. If that’s the price, I’ll pay it. I don’t give a shit if my audience is a hundred or a hundred million. What sells and what I do are two completely different things.”

That just about summarizes his approach to the albums that make up the Ditch Trilogy. Confounding to fans upon their release, but regarded in the highest esteem with the benefit of 40 years hindsight.

Enjoy… until next week.

Everything Changes, Nothing Changes

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The most surprising aspect of our Spotify subscription is that Diane is crazy for it. She is admittedly not a music junkie like any of us here at the Remnants, in fact I asked what artists she followed and she promptly replied, “none.”

She just likes listening to playlists with high energy stuff she can work out to, and soul and funk from any era she can bop to while driving her car. But, I was surprised when she sent me a link to a song the other day, and I could not help but think of the song as analogous to other generations of horny post pubescent music junkies.

The first instance of song where boys are pleading for sex I could think of was the wonderful Good Golly Miss Molly by the one and only Little Richard, who was certainly clear about the whole sex/music thing in the fifties. This was at a time when saying words like “panties” were verboten on screen, for example, as shown in this clip from the Otto Preminger’s 1959 film, Anatomy of a Murder.

This clip of Richard, covering his tune, released in 1958, a year before Anatomy of a Murder came out, speaks for itself with respect to lyrical content, but this  clip was so perfect, as it is Richard live, playing for Muhammad Ali’s 50th birthday. And, well I have been thinking a lot about the loss of the great Ali as well as that of Prince, recently, and what a huge loss to our planet their spirits is.

The 60’s were not much better, and though this is indeed my favorite song by the Beach Boys, it is so lily-white in the Pat Boone’s cover of Little Richard’s Tutti Fruitti, sense, it makes my skin crawl. But, Brian Wilson could only hint at a time when “making love” still was kind of like Laurence Olivier suggesting the wooing of Joan Fontaine in Rebecca meant sweet talk behind a potted plant.

Here is the Beach Boys supporting that in the middle class white world very little changed over the 20 or so years between Rebecca and Don’t Worry Baby (which included that awful Boone shit in the middle of the time span). By the way, I love the song, but is this the worst “video” ever?

But, 50 years after Don’t Worry Baby, reality has struck and the world has simultaneously gone to hell in a hand basket, as witnessed by this song, by Strip Johnny, that popped up on Diane’s “Discover Weekly.” She heard it and  just had to share with me.

Truth is, I really like this last song a lot! Not as much as Little Richard, though. At least not just yet.

Kansas, Dust in the Wind

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My daughter is writing a research paper about the Dust Bowl. She was looking for a title, and I glibly suggested Dust In The Wind. She liked it. I hope she gets an A.

But that moment was a reason to listen to the tune, which I probably haven’t done in a really long time. But in all these years, I could sing the song, and certainly have.

Checking out the video tonight. It is cheesy, but the melody and starkness of the tune are unforgettable. Is abjectness a vibe? Apparently.

Does that make it a great song? The video tells me this is some sort of midwestern crazy fundamental evangelical nonsense. All these pictures are like those on the internet that promise me pictures that changed weddings, history, Woodstock.

But the tune is straightforward, and was a hit everywhere. Maybe it’s the great melody, with an idea that everyone finds inevitable. Hell yeah!

What I don’t hear is careerism. I hear Remnants who went big and hit one out. Cool!