Discography - Week #2

And now we're moving on to Week 2 of the Discography project, and we'll be hard pressed to top the first week.

Dave Wallace

The Monkees, Valleri

Huh?  First off, the Monkees are not a guilty pleasure.  They made a startling number of great songs (whether they actually played the instruments on them or not), and Micky Dolenz is one of the most under-rated singers ever.  Stepping Stone is another song of theirs that could easily make this list for me.  With that said, I adore Valleri.  The vaguely Middle-Eastern flavored guitar line, the surging horns, the killer chorus.  Legend has it that the guitar line was played by Frank Zappa, but the recent documentary, The Wrecking Crew, clarified that it was legendary session guitarist Tommy Tedesco.  (Great doc by the way.)

Gary Beatrice

Prince, 1999

I haven't paid much attention to his recent music, but I still find it very sad to think about a world that does not include Prince. His music, his look, the whole package was intoxicating, and most of it sounds and looks every bit as great as it did when he recorded it. For my money, Prince's best is the first single to bring him massive crossover success 1999.
Life is just a party and parties aren't meant to last. Prince has passed but his music is eternal.

Gary Scudder

Elvis Presley, Kentucky Rain

Yes, it definitely appears to be a week of odd change-ups (sort of the Discography version of the 46 mph eephus pitch that Clayton Kershaw threw last week).  It's odd for me because, in the category of Voice of the 20th Century, I always come down on the side of Sinatra vs. Presley.  And, doubtless, some Sinatra song will appear this year, and then Gary Beatrice will kindly and patiently explain to me why 1950s cool Sinatra is better than Big Band Frank.  That said, my mother passed away last weekend and I guess this counts as my homage to her, a huge Elvis Presley fan.  I am sure she would have preferred Can't Help Falling in Love, but I have to live with this choice.  Actually, I've always liked this song, which may be just a Midwestern thing (which may also explain my early love of Winesburg, Ohio or The Magnificent Ambersons) or it may speak to my almost magnetic attraction to sad songs, especially attractive if they feature desolation.

Bob Craigmile

Peter Frampton, Do You Feel Like We Do

I don’t really understand why I have such a connection to this album except that it came at a formative period (16 years old!) and it has such exceptional music.  I’ve literally had dreams of playing his stuff on stage with him.  Hearing it always seems to make me happy.

From the opening intro and the bright and happy guitar work on the first track (“Something’s Happening”) to “Do you feel…” it’s all there emotionally.  Perfectly timed for adolescence (and adolescents) you have the up-tempo-yet-crunchy guitar and singing, and the fluttery prettiness of “Penny for your thoughts”(which every boy should have tried to learn, but instead wasted their time on “Stairway…”).

Frampton’s guitar playing has always been criminally underrated.  His sense of playfulness and melody put him up there with McCartney or Clapton.  Whoever created voice tubes for guitar should write him a check due to “Do you feel like we do”.

His use of echo/reverb is still a thing of wonder to me in relistening.  The band with him is also tight as hell, and now some of them have passed on to the great gig in the sky (wink).  Frampton cut his chops as a literal kid in Humble Pie and he later became such a mega star that he was kind of the template for “washed up rock star” by 1985.

It’s a shame that he was given, and took, such bad advice.  And yes, I did see the Sgt. Pepper’s movie when it came out;  I blame Jeff Brede.

Dave Kelley

The Clash, Clampdown

"Raise a toast to St. Joe Strummer.  I think he may have been our only decent teacher"  The Hold Steady "Constructive Summer"

While that is a great song, it is not my week three selection.  In a song partially about going to a crappy high school in the early eighties, The Hold Steady give an homage to one of the two main songwriters for The Clash.

My choice for week three is "Clampdown" off of what I think has to be on the shortlist for greatest record of the rock era "London Calling".  Strummer and Mick Jones were perfect songwriting partners.  Strummer brought the anger, intensity, and passion while Jones brought great musicality and pop sensibilities.  For proof of that I would offer "Train in Vain" by Jones which is just a perfect three and a half minute pop single.

With all of the craziness taking place at Donald Trump rallies, not to mention in many other parts of the world like Yemen, Russia, and fill in the blank, I think Clampdown is amazingly relevant today.  Sadly there has never been nor there will be a time when it is not relevant somewhere.

"No man born with a living soul can be working for the clampdown."

"We will teach our twisted speech

 to the young believers.

We will train our blue eyed men

to be young believers."

But you grow up, and you calm down and

you're working for the clampdown.

You start wearing blue and brown,

and you're working for the clampdown."

The lyrics posted above are taken out of order but are representative of the themes.  At the end of the song, Strummer chants some of the places where "The Clampdown" was taking place at the time it was written.  The make-up of the list may have changed some, but it is longer than ever today.  There is a great Townes Van Zant song called "Lungs".  Steve Earle once said if that song doesn't scare the shit out of you, you are not paying attention.  I would say the exact same thing about my choice for this week. 

Jack Schultz

Dave Mills

Brad Mehldau, Lithium (by Nirvana)

It’s only the second week of this fine endeavor, and I’m already finding ways to cheat. My choice today is a twofer, and I’m going to sneak in a third (albeit nonmusical) artist as well – James Baldwin. To appreciate my musical selection here, I highly recommend that you read his short story “Sonny’s Blues.” Here’s a link: http://swcta.net/moore/files/2012/02/sonnysblues.pdf

For me, that story displays exactly what’s so wonderful about the song choice I’ve shared here, in which Brad Mehldau improvises a post-bop jazz version of Nirvana’s Lithium. Late in Baldwin’s story, the narrator says this:

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.

For me, this applies to the frenzied urgency of a Nirvana show (wherein the wrecking of instruments and dismantling of the stage that inevitably ensues feels like release in the form of a final surrender to that “roar rising from the void,” an exhausted inability to control and shape it any longer). Baldwin’s narrator also captures the barely controlled fervor of improvisational jazz. For me, Mehldau is a master of imposing a highly complex order on the chaos that constantly threatens to overtake the order. He triumphs.

Mehldau is absurdly intelligent – his album liner notes feature heady critical interactions with thinkers and artists such as Goethe, Rilke, Kant, Emerson, Heidegger, Freud, and James Joyce (to pull examples only from the liner notes to his 2000 album Places ), he can improvise counterpoint compositions on the piano, and he can play completely different melodies in different rhythms simultaneously in the right and left hands. If you like what you hear here, you might like some of his other post-bop improvisations of recent non-jazz music, such as Nick Drake’s River Man, Radiohead’s Knives Out, or Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun.

Mike Kelly

Sturgill Simpson, In Bloom

“Spring is here again/Reproductive glands” 

Last night, I woke up at 3am nostalgic for the Omaha I used to live in.  In my vivid dream, two of my friends from high school were at a roadside bar (which was more like a swanky Chili’s) and I was walking in. They were walking out.  We went back inside, had a few drinks, etc.  You get the idea.   After Andrea gave me that hottest (but tonguelessly chaste) kiss, I woke up. 

Over the next hour, this song became the soundtrack to my lovingly wistful hour spent thinking clichéd thoughts about the urgency of being young, the possibilities associated with having a car and a fake ID and the ways that Jason Isbell taught us that “time moves slow when you’re 17 and then it picks up steam at 21.”  Nirvana’s version of “In Bloom” was emblematic of what it meant to be 13 in Nebraska, especially when you were in on the joke that was laughed at every time a new meathead kid bought a copy of Nevermind. He was the one who liked all those pretty songs, but didn’t know what they meant.   

The Omaha I miss isn’t the Omaha that’s currently there.  Out of the very few of us who are still around, Ryan is the only one who still lives east of 72^nd street. Everyone else has perfectly functional suburban lots way out in the places halfway to Lincoln.   The beauty of the land and of the people is even more opaque- it’s even harder to find it now than it was before. 

Omaha is a place where there are two ways to succeed (which is two more than most places mind you). A person can either succeed as a bootstrappy farm kid or immigrant whose pluck reifies the values we purport to have or you can be a person deemed capable enough to go anywhere else but chose to stay.  It’s not my town anymore, but then again, it hasn’t been for a long time. 

23 years later I’m lying awake at 3am thinking about the same people and the same song still works as a soundtrack.  The point of this post isn’t to wax nostalgic for my fleeting youth but to make an argument for the serendipitous power of cover songs to create a thinking experience for the listener that is consistent with how we evolve in the rest of our lives.  The past and present consistently blend up together to make new meaning from old thinking.  

What Sturgill Simpson does in the song and Matt Mahurin does in the art style strips the song of the raw emotional intensity of the original and replaces it with a more disorienting but still comfortable uncertainty about the way things are.  At 3 am, it seems like a metaphor.  At 1042  am, it seems like a cliché. 

Nirvana is never coming back, the Omaha of my youth is gone but the potential to see old things in new ways is an underrated, life-affirming quality that good music can bring us.     

Miranda Tavares

Grand Funk Railroad, (She's) Some Kind of Wonderful

There are so many reasons to love this song. It's classic. It's catchy. It has horns. But I'm picking it because it is my favorite love song. Love songs often tend toward sappy and saccharine or mournful and maudlin. I get the sad ones; love lost is a complex, infinite topic, a bottomless muse. The sappy ones, well, if you've heard maybe five, you've heard them all. But this song captures the real reason we're all, as a species, obsessed with love: when we have it, when it's going right, it brings us pure, wholly uncomplicated joy. This song isn't about planning overly grand romantic gestures, or comparing your significant other to a summer's day. It's just about being very, very happy.

I picked this version over the original version because Grand Funk Railroad did what you're supposed to do when you cover a song: take it to the next level, and make it your own. The original is a little slower, nowhere near as jaunty, and misses some of the happiness. And GFR added the horns. 

Nate Bell

500 Miles to Memphis, Six Foot Hole

This song is not the best song this band wrote, and there will likely be more selections to come from 500 MTM.  This local Cincinnati area band (Bethel, actually) introduced us to a whole new genre of music.  We listened to a short clip of 6 Foot Hole, and decided to see a show at the old Southgate House (now the Thompson House), on a night where 500 MTM was recording for a live album.  The ballroom was the venue, and it was packed, energetic, and had the feel of a large crowd of friends, friendly, relaxed, spanning a large age range and set of appearances, all there just to enjoy a good musical time.

I could say the crowd was electric, I can say the energy was palpable, but all those overused cliches don't really fit.  The show was pure, unadulterated fun.  From the moment the band walked onstage, to the Muppet Show theme song, we were hooked.  I fell in love with their "Cowpunk" genre---a definite Americana/country sensibility and vocal style, but musically very much hard rock with overtones of punk.  6 Foot Hole is a typical song about a band on the road, but the gritty guitar hook, the vocal phrasing, and the overall impression was the start to a intense musical affair that led us to Bands like Drive by Truckers, The Bottle Rockets and their ilk, but 500 MTM remains something a little different, modern, country, and nostalgic (in a sense that hearkens back to my hard rock/metal younger years).  The band has both matured and expanded, but a taste of that song left me wanting more....since then we must have seen the band a dozen times, and they never disappoint, from their very tight and controlled timing to their ever-emerging and interesting themes--sometimes dark, sometimes frivolous, but always accessible.  Just listen to that guitar hook in 6 Foot Hole and then follow them down the musical rabbit hole that exist somewhere in the empty rural sprawl of Bethel, Ohio. :)