At the Edge of Town / A Song for Richard Manuel

April 2, 2024 by 11 Comments

Every April I think about Richard Manuel, born on April 3, 1943, in Stratford, Ontario. I still remember where I was in March 1986, when I heard that he had taken his own life — the magazine art department of The Observer newspaper. I remember feeling unmoored for days, which seems too much of a reaction for someone I hadn’t met or known personally, but The Band had been such an important musical influence on my life. They were my equivalent of another generation’s Louis Armstrong or Hank Williams or Charlie Parker. When Sam and Ann Charters came through London on their way to live in Sweden in 1971, Sam had brought me five of his favourite albums as a gift. One of them was Music From Big Pink. He sat me down (I was fifteen at the time) and played me his favourite song, Richard’s “In A Station”. It sounded like nothing else I’d ever heard. It still sounds like nothing else I’ve ever heard.

Richard was one of my favourite singers, songwriters and drummers. He wrote incandescent, sui generis songs for The Band — “Whispering Pines”, “When You Awake”, “Sleeping”, “We Can Talk About It Now”, and “Lonesome Susie” — as well as putting the funereal music to Bob Dylan’s lyrics for “Tears of Rage”. There’s a lot of great writing about Richard’s extraordinary qualities, and a quick web search turns most of them up — or you can go to Jan Hoiberg’s excellent site on The Band, its history, songs and members. (https://theband.hiof.no/about_this_site.html)

I wrote this song in the 2010s, a meditation on his tragic death, which happened at a time when the Robbie Robertson-less group were touring places that were, in reality, beneath them. When I came to the point in the song where there’s usually a solo, I remembered a lovely version of “Georgia On My Mind” that my pal Mark had worked on as he figured out how to record in Garageband, and I dropped the mp3 in the track. The song was a favourite of Richard’s (highlighting his love of Ray Charles), to which I added the sound of a disinterested supper club. So here’s my song for Richard, that Stratford star, because there “must be some way to repay you / Out of all the good you gave…”

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Sunday, March 10th, 2024

March 9, 2024 by 2 Comments

{ONE} A RAINY NIGHT IN SOHO
Crossing from a Mayfair private view into Soho, I put the airpods in and hit play, and DJ Shadow is thrown up by the randomiser that is Shuffle. It’s “Midnight in a Perfect World” and it is indeed perfect, for this moment, in this imperfect world. I find myself slouching along in time to its wonderful backbeat as I walk through St Anne’s Court to the Elizabeth Line Tottenham Court Road entrance — TfL missed a trick in not calling it TCR [Soho]. Walking in the rain in London at night never loses its appeal.

{TWO} THE RESISTANCE OF POP MUSIC, PT 1
I keep waiting for Pop to Eat Itself, as the most brilliantly named group of the Eighties would have it, but Pop doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and it’s a driver or important component, in many of the new series and movies on Netflix or Apple or Terrestrial TV. For me, All of Us Strangers has the most evocative use of a single song. Nothing we’ve watched recently was as poignant, melancholy, and controlled as Andrew Haigh’s film. There’s no weakness, and the extraordinary performances of Claire Foy and Jamie Bell are so quiet and nuanced that you catch your breath as their story with their [now] adult son plays out. The film has its theme song, and it’s perfect — the Pet Shop Boys “West End Girls”* with its talk of “too many shadows, whispering voices”, and although it tracks club dancing, its melancholy is worn on its sleeve. And the original video had Tennant’s partner in PSB, Chris Lowe, as a ghostly figure in the street scenes…

* I’d forgotten the verse, “We’ve got no future / we’ve got no past / here today, built to last / In every city, in every nation / from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station.” (The Finland Station in Leningrad is the place where Lenin got off the train on the night of April 3, 1917, to take charge of the Russian revolution), but if anyone’s going to put that in a pure Pop hit it’d be Neil Tennant, no?

{THREE} FILM 2024
I had watched Claire Foy and Andrew Haigh talking about All of Us Strangers (if you’ve seen it, you’ll understand the difficulty) at Mark Kermode’s MK3D show at the BFI on the South Bank. As I had designed the slides for Mark’s show, I’d popped backstage to say hi. It was an interesting Green Room — Claire Foy and Andrew Haigh; Mahalia Belo (director) and Alice Birch (writer, from a novel by Megan Hunter) of The End We Start From, which features an excellent, panicky score by Anna Meredith and a standout performance from Jodie Comer; Jane Giles and Ali Catterall with their film, Scala!!!, about the King’s Cross Cinema and the extraordinarily diverse programming that inspired future generations of filmmakers and musicians; and Jerskin Fendrix, composer of the exceptional Poor Things soundtrack.

{FOUR} THE RESISTANCE OF POP MUSIC, PT 2
Mark Kermode: “Yorgos Lanthimos said he just knew from listening to your album (Winterreise — it came out in 2020, tagged as Indie Pop by Apple Music) that you could do the soundtrack. He said he played the album to Emma Stone and she said that when she heard it, it was like everything exploded, your head exploded into music, which I thought was a fabulous description. But it’s a really big thing to be asked to score a major motion picture straight out the gate. Did you know that you could do it?”
Jerskin: “I spend a lot of time not going to the cinema — I’m sure you might be more familiar with it, but it was an odd mental thing, just being in the studio by myself, already being isolated by lockdown, and thinking everything I’m doing right now is going to end up in a colossal environment in a lot of places in the world. The mental gymnastics of that was sort of impossible…”
Mark: “The score is right at the heart of the film — I think it would be quite easy for the film to be emotionally alienating and I talked to Yorgos and we agreed on this point — what you need is an emotional, visceral reaction. I’m just astonished that it’s your first film. It’s like you were always ready to do this.”
Jerskin: “I think it was very lucky that it was this exact film, this exact project, with this exact director, because my background up until that point had been pop music. I think there’s a level of emotion, and a level of hyper-exaggerated emotion that you can play with in pop song writing, which in most other art forms verges on the cloying.”
Mark: “What was the first pop record you ever bought?”
Jerskin: “The first pop record I remember listening to was The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle by Bruce Springsteen”.
Mark: “Wow! My first one was Alvin Stardust, “Jealous Mind!”

Jerskin then went on to detail his recent love for Carly Rae Jepson’s album Emotion — “Every song has this incredible core”. I checked — it does have all the elements that are present in Jerskin’s own album, and the Poor Things soundtrack — sparkling synth hooks, woozy atmospherics and all sorts of sounds used as beats and percussion without being drums, as well as on-the-nose pop melodies. I ended up talking to Jerskin after the show about Bruce, The Wild etc… and the song that he feels combined everything he loves about Pop Music in all its unabashed brilliance, “Jungleland” (from Born to Run). We also talked pitch-bending (you’ll know if you’ve seen Poor Things), and I ended by wishing him luck for the Oscars, for which his soundtrack has been nominated. How incredible is that? First Soundtrack, first Oscar Nom…

{FIVE} AND THE OSCAR GOES TO…
For Best Original Soundtrack, I think that the Academy will probably give it to Robbie Robertson for his work over four decades with Martin Scorsese. Killers of the Flower Moon is a really powerful soundtrack, full of bluesy foreboding, deep, rough sonics, heartbeats, and overdriven slide guitar. It also has one final send-off of a song, ”Still Standing”, poignant and moving as sung by an eighty-year-old Robertson, sounding as full of piss and vinegar as he did as a sixteen-year-old sending shards of guitar around Ronnie Hawkins as he sang “Who Do You Love.” [Update: I was wrong, Oppenheimer won, soundtrack by the brilliant Ludwig Göransson.]

{EXTRA} SHOALS’ SOUL
I was reminded of James & Bobby Purify’s wonderful track by a nice interview with Dan Penn in The Guardian this week by my friend Garth Cartwright. “I’m Your Puppet” was the only song cut at Muscle Shoals by James and Bobby (their record label sent them to Moman’s American Studio in Memphis for their follow-up), but I’ve always had a soft spot for the song, mainly for its rolling melody line, sitting atop a lovely chord progression. The Guardian piece was timed to the release of a great album that Dan cut on Bobby Purify in 2005 that is only now seeing the light of day: The Inside Track on Bobby Purify (The Last Music Company). It consists of Dan’s heartfelt demos, followed by the album itself. Find it, buy it, support real soul music. 

When we recorded half our first album in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Mark and I were in thrall to Southern Soul (our more Northern and Western influences being Prince, Ray Charles and Bobby Womack). The classic songs of Penn, Spooner Oldham, Chips Moman, Eddie Hinton, Donnie Fritts and others were really important to us, from “Dark End of the Street” to “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”. The weeks we spent there were among our best musical memories, warmed by the fantastic hospitality and talent of all at Muscle Shoals Sound. 

A few years later, our career in the dumpster, I asked Mark to add piano and bass to a version I had started recording as a gift for a friend’s wedding [long story]. I can’t sing like the great Purify cousins, so I opted for a cooler, slightly swampier version with a dobro lick replacing the lovely xylophone on the original. I love Mark’s playing here — he has the South in his veins! — with his elegant take on Floyd Cramer’s country piano stylings. Enjoy…

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To the memory of Alexei Navalny

February 18, 2024 by 4 Comments

“Joe Hill ain’t dead,” he says to me,
“Joe Hill ain’t never died…
Where working men are out on strike
Joe Hill is at their side,
Joe Hill is at their side.”

Listening to Alexei Sayle’s Desert Island Discs a while back, it was interesting to me that he chose “Joe Hill” as one of his eight discs, recalling that it was performed at his mother’s funeral. I first heard “Joe Hill” on the Woodstock soundtrack, sung by Joan Baez. Never a great admirer of her precise and pure voice, I nevertheless loved the song. I next heard it in the 1971 Bo Widerberg film biopic, for which guitarist Stefan Grossman did the score. When I listen to it sung, usually as a folk ballad, I always think it’s too sweet — and the version by Baez played on DID was a Nashville studio recording, with a prominent and syrupy pedal steel part. I recorded it a few years ago with the aim of making an angry industrial version, piston-driven and distorted. At one point I felt it needed a rap section and cast around for someone that may fit the bill. My friend Mark put me in touch with painter and wordsmith Nathan Detroit, who, with no real brief from me, came up with something he calls Cyborging — an abstract and impressionistic flow of words. Sounded great to me, so one afternoon we recorded it. Here it is. Play it loud.

“I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” was a poem, originally, written by Alfred Hayes (1911-1985), a British-born screenwriter, television writer, novelist and poet. It was set to music by folk singer and arranger Earl Robinson. The song became a popular labour anthem and was recorded by Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez, among others.

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Wednesday, 20th December

December 20, 2023 by 5 Comments

Season’s Greetings & a Christmas Song | All the best to all Five Things readers — I’m going to get back into posting more regularly in 2024, promise. In the meantime, a few days out from the 25th, here’s this year’s Christmas song. It’s that old chestnut, “Winter Wonderland”, which was written in 1934 by Felix Bernard and lyricist Richard Bernhard Smith. Smith, a native of Honesdale, Pennsylvania, was inspired to write the lyrics after seeing Honesdale’s Central Park covered in snow while being treated for tuberculosis in the West Mountain Sanitarium in Scranton. Due to its seasonal theme, it is often regarded as a Christmas song. The lyrics are about a couple’s romance during the winter season. A later version, printed in 1947, included a new children’s lyric that transformed it from a romantic winter interlude to a seasonal song about playing in the snow. The snowman mentioned in the song’s bridge was changed from a minister to a circus clown, and the coup

My version kicks off with a 24-year-old Ken Colyer playing “Winter Wonderland” in New Orleans on 24 February 1953, between his stint in the Parish Prison and his deportation from Ellis Island. Ken: “It’s a pleasant pop song from some years back — I remembered it for some reason…” So settle back and hear a blizzard of guitars take you back to Honesdale, Pennsylvania…

Previous Christmas songs…

Four Christmas Songs
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Thursday, August 22rd | Six Robbie Robertson Songs & Performances for the ages

August 23, 2023 by 4 Comments

{ONE} RONNIE HAWKINS, THE LAST WALTZ | “COME ON ROBBIE, LET’S TAKE A LITTLE WALK…”
Robbie still has to count Ronnie in … but the sound of his newly-bronzed Stratocaster summons up the rowdy rockabilly that Ronnie Hawkins traded in. “I didn’t know whether it would be a bad idea, but I decided to have the Stratocaster bronzed. It was a bit tricky, you know, finding somebody to do that. One of the road manager guys said, There’s a place where they bronze baby shoes. He did some research, took it, brought it back, and it was bronze. I thought, Wow — it does look beautiful. They put it all back together again. I played it, and it sounded unlike any guitar I had ever played. Then, when I stood up and put on the strap, I realised it weighed more.

I tried it out in the rehearsals for the Last Waltz and it started to feel right to me, and I was quite drawn to the tonality of it. There was a little bit more… it was just a sharper tone, with more metal involved. It grabbed right onto the notes, making them sting, in a way, and have a nice sustain to it as well…” Well, there’s a whole life on the rockabilly road in Ronnie’s performance, topped with his glorious scream, and Robbie becomes eighteen again, the six-days-on-the road, “blowing down the backroads headin’ south” boy, taking lessons from Fred Carter Jr. and Roy Buchanan and trying to be the loudest, flashiest guitar player on the circuit.

{TWO} BOB DYLAN’S HOTEL ROOM, GLASGOW | “I CAN’T LEAVE HER BEHIND…”
Robbie Robertson jamming with Bob Dylan at the Station Hotel, Glasgow, on a day off between concerts, 18th May 1966. One of Dylan’s song sketches from a time when he’d try out melodies, often having an almost medieval feel, with dummy or half-formed words (most famously on “I’m Not There” on the Basement recordings the next year). How good would this have sounded on Blonde On Blonde? 

“I’m not getting the bridge,” says Robbie, as he tries to read Bob’s mind… “That’s it, that’s it”, says Bob. Towards the end, as the song coalesces, hear how Robertson became one of the great structural guitarists of the pop age, learning how to play behind singers, how to structure the textures, the hills and valleys of songs, and when to drop in sweet grace notes, or play a fill that knits two parts together.

{THREE} OLD, OLD WOODSTOCK | “KING HARVEST (HAS SURELY COME)”
Everyone’s seen this performance, shot in what is now John and Jan Cuneo’s house, but was Robbie’s studio back then. Maybe no songwriter outside of Fleetwood Mac has written so many songs directed at their bandmates as Robbie Robertson has — “Stage Fright”, “Where Do We Go From Here?” Forbidden Fruit,” but here, as the second album is finished and all is well in the Band world, this film shows their characters and connection beautifully.

Barney Hoskyns, in his excellent book on The Band, Across The Great Divide, wrote: “Corn in the fields / Listen to the rice when the wind blows ‘cross the water / King Harvest has surely come…” It was the first of three marvellous images that Levon intoned as prefaces to Richard’s verses — just part of the song’s intricate structure, which involved several time changes and suspensions. “The chord progression was a little bit complex”, says Robbie. ‘There’s a sifty feeling we were trying to get, which was subtle and bold at the same time.’ Just as ‘sifty’ were the sounds the band attained for each instrument. With John Simon playing an electric piano through the same black box Robbie had used on “Tears Of Rage,” Garth’s Lowrey shimmered away in the background, and Robbie made tiny Telecaster incisions off to one side. “This was the new way of dealing with the guitar,” Robbie says. “Leaving out a lot of stuff and just waiting till the last second and then playing the thing in just the nick of time. It was an approach to playing where it’s so delicate, the opposite of the “in your face” playing that I used to do.” After the final verse, Robbie played a solo so intense it was frightening. “It’s like you have to hold your breath while playing these kinds of solos,” he says. “You can’t breathe, or you’ll throw yourself off.”

“Tempo sounds slow, John”, Levon drawls to their producer, John Simon, at the end. Sounds perfect to me.

{FOUR} I SAW IT AT THE MOVIES | “WONDERFUL REMARK”
A Van Morrison song and performance from the soundtrack of Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, produced by Robertson.

Robbie’s tremolo’d guitar comes in halfway through the song, playing along with Richard Tee’s glorious piano and then re-appears shuddering, swooping and stinging, taking out the song as Van moans, “I sighed a million sighs / I told a million lies / to myself / To myself / Baby, to myself…” It’s some of the most “Robbie” playing on record.

{FIVE} DOWN SOUTH IN NEW ORLEANS | “SECRETS OF STORYVILLE”

“Tipitina’s at 1:00 a.m. A sound so loud it seemed to suck the air out of your lungs. George Porter Jr., formerly of the Meters, also a sideman on Robbie Robertson’s album Storyville, was playing up there beneath a giant picture of Professor Longhair, playing funky stuff with four horns under smoke that swirled in cones of colored light. Nervous people, wall to wall, danced to the nervous licks from a bottleneck guitar. A man in a donkey mask danced for a moment in an orange light and then was swallowed by the primordial, protoplasmic crowd. A miasma of smoke and sweat rose to the faint lights. A soprano saxophone wailed old Coltrane, set to rhythm & blues. 

We were trying to hide in the shadows beside the stage “to avoid any foolish thing that might happen,” as Robbie had put it. But the band began what Robbie called “this ferocious funk thing,” and then Porter went up to the microphone and looked over in our direction, saying with a sly smile: “Robbie? You wanna get some of this?” It was such a cool way of putting it. It was practically irresistible on its own. But then it was Nick Wechsler, Robbie’s manager, who did it. He had gotten up behind Robbie, and he was pushing him like a tugboat, pushing, pushing through the crowd, and there was nowhere else to go. Robbie later told me: “The appeal of it was that it was just this unknown ferocious funk that evolved. When I went up there, I didn’t know what they were playing.”

When Robbie pushed past Paula and me to get to the stage, we didn’t know what he was doing. Robbie rarely sat in, but there he was, climbing the stage, and the guitar player handed him the instrument as the crowd erupted with sustained Indian cries. It was as if a dam had burst, and sound flowed out, transforming itself into “Iko Iko,” the national anthem of New Orleans funk. Paula and I were absorbed into the crowd, and then we were dancing, Dominique was dancing, and the notes from Robbie’s guitar were unfurling like bolts of coloured fabric tossed into the wind.” — From a great Laurence Gonzales article, “Secrets of Storyville”, Men’s Journal, 1993

Here’s “Go Back To Your Woods”, a song from the album co-written with Bruce Hornsby — hear Robbie backed by the Meters, with George Porter on bass and some incantations from a couple of Parade Chiefs. There are some brilliant things on Storyville — “Soap Box Preacher”, ”Night Parade”, and ”Breakin’ the Rules” (with its great opening line, “I tried to reach you, on Valentines Day” and Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan on vocals).

{SIX} RECITING LOU REED | “SOMEWHERE (DIRTY BLVD.)”
Lang Lang’s extraordinary merging of Bernstein and Sondheim’s “Somewhere” and Lou Reed’s “Dirty Blvd.” If you remember “Somewhere Down the Crazy River,” then it makes perfect sense. It’s amazing, ten and a half minutes of pianistics, bombastic percussion, “Somewhere” sung by Lisa Fischer, and “Dirty Blvd” spoken by Robertson. One of America’s iconic songs of hope balanced by one of Lou’s greatest songs about lives lived in poverty and trauma.

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Five Things, Saturday, August 5th

August 4, 2023 by 4 Comments

THE INTRO
Now we’re all getting fully signed up to the future — it’s Philip K. Dick’s world after all, we just live in it — this week, Five Things touches on A.I., a spooked and possessed Marvin Gaye song, a world of music newly discovered, a video that is so French it should be required viewing at Customs and an extraordinary guitar modification. The saddest news was the passing of Sinead O’Connor. I thought back to a performance of the song every news broadcaster defaulted to this week [“Nothing Compares to You“] in 2012, where I tried to convey just how extraordinary her voice was… and Philip Watson sent me this astonishing performance of “Danny Boy.”

{ONE} THE DYLAN-A.I. INTERFACE
I don’t join things, generally — I’m not very clubbable. The only two clubs I’ve ever been a member of are the Levon Helm Fanclub and Fred’s (an Eighties Soho Club I somehow designed the identity for). But there I was at the Dylan discussion group with a Bob-inspired bottle of wine. I had bought it from Dina, our excellent local wine store, and it was made by Joe Jefferies, a man apparently at “the militant end of the natural wine world.” Originally from Warwickshire, he’s now in the Languedoc and producing wines from volcanic soils (100% Carignan in this one, if you’re asking), and he’d named one 2021 vintage, “Where black is the colour, where none is the number”. Seemed like a good wine for the pre-discussion supper. So, a quiz with the wine as the prize, and I hit on asking Chat GPT to write a review of one of the songs we were discussing — “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?“ The first attempt was poor — bland and full of signature A.I. terms. Then I thought I’d ask for a review in the style of Lester Bangs (figuring it would add personality).

It added Lester’s rather dismal and critical view of Bob just enough to make the game (I handed round print-outs, first to guess the author won the prize) last for a little while as suggestions were thrown around and out. Finally, Alan peered up from the murk (our table in Soho House West was very dimly lit) and said,”It’s Chat GBT!”. And as he doesn’t drink, the wine went to Mick.
Postscript: I think A.I. had something to do with this weirdness that I found when looking for Dylan pictures on Getty Images: I know Aaron Rapoport’s originals, and they didn’t look like this…

{TWO} THE DEEPEST SOUL
There are still things to discover, Part One:
“Piece of Clay” by Marvin Gaye [hear it in the Music Player on the right].
I don’t know how I found this track, but it comes from the unreleased follow-up to What’s Going On, which was to be titled You’re The Man. Written by Gloria Jones and Pam Sawyer, it’s a brilliant piece of work — and the rough-hewn quality, where the edges haven’t quite been burnished off, make you think it could be a demo. “Father! Stop criticizing your son / Mother please leave your daughters alone / Don’t you see that’s what wrong with the world today / Everybody wants somebody to be their own piece of clay…” As sung by Gaye, that opening line is especially painful.

According to the Apple Music liner notes, “underperformance of the title track ahead of the album’s release, coupled with disagreements the singer is said to have had with the label about the project’s direction, led to the entire thing being shelved, leaving most of the songs to subsequently trickle out as bonus cuts packaged with reissues, compilations, and box sets. The official release [in 2019] of You’re The Man, then, is a time capsule — a portrait of an artist at the top of his game, but also one torn between the socially conscious anthems of What’s Going On and the superman lover he’d embody on 1973’s Let’s Get It On.”

The intro sounds like it was recorded in a church, an organ laying a carpet under a distorted slide guitar, very Duane Allman at Muscle Shoals, pushing the needles into the red before two drum hits and a crash cymbal silences it. Marvin sings the first line, then doubles his vocal like Al Green. Gospel piano drives the melody into the title line, so beautifully weighted by Marvin. A syncopated bass pushes into the second verse as Marvin heats up. The guitar comes back in, adding blues to the Southern Soul of the song. Then we’re into the middle eight — a call and response with the backing singers, joined by a horn section; it’s as if the entire congregation have picked up instruments. Suddenly, on the phrase love, not hate, everything drops out, bar the drums and bass as Marvin soars; then, from the back of the church, the fuzzed guitar creeps in, taking us all to a classic gospel ending and down into the fade. 

{THREE} THE LIFE OF REILLY
There are still things to discover, Part Two: The Durutti Column.
Reading the excellent Conquest of the Useless [on Substack], I was sent to a Guardian article by Daniel Dylan Wray on Vini Reilly and the music of the Durutti Column. How did I miss them all those years ago — the music is simply glorious. The first song I hear is “Otis”, referenced in the article.

Reilly is dismissive about his own music — “When I listen back to it, it’s boring,” he says. “It’s done. I’ve already expressed everything I needed to when I was playing it.” I tell him that a colleague told me they wanted the 1989 track “Otis” playing at their funeral. “Give him my apologies,” he laughs before downplaying the beauty of the track, in which sparkling guitar swirls around dreamy vocal samples from Tracy Chapman and Otis Redding. “It was just messing about.” 

It is four minutes of heaven. YouTube decides next up is a live performance, “Jacqueline”, with drumming from Bruce Mitchell. I only knew of Bruce as a member of Alberto Y Los Trios Paranois, the art-rock-satire-band, but his duet with Reilly is wonderful, his red brushes flying over the kit in perfect sync with Vini’s guitar and keyboards, his palpable enjoyment wonderful to watch.

{FOUR} THE WAY TO THE NEXT WHISKY BAR…
This was the most extraordinary thing I saw in the week that Jane Birkin passed on. From Off the Fence, the newsletter of The Fence magazine: “Let’s celebrate all that is best in Gallic culture with this amazing video from 1988, which shows a children’s choir decked in full Serge Gainsbourg regalia — whiskies and cigarettes in hand — regale Gainsbourg himself with one of his songs as the Frenchman weeps with emotion. One to warm your stony hearts!”

On a TV appearance toward the end of his life, he was surprised by a choir of children (Les Petits Chanteurs d’Asnières) in full Gainsbourg regalia — black jacket, grey wig, sunglasses, whisky, cigarette, unshaven. They’re singing Serge’s “J’e suis venu te dire que je m’en vais” (“I came to tell you that I’m leaving”) but they’ve changed it to “On est venu te dire qu’on t’aime bien” (We came to tell you that we like you).

{FIVE} THE A-Z OF THE B
Did you know Gene Parsons fitted a Clarence White/Gene Parsons B-Bender to a 1964 Gibson Dove acoustic guitar? I didn’t. Mind blown. Check this out. Nathaniel Murphy, who is playing it, is an Englishman in Chicago, and a fine guitarist.

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Monday, June 26th

June 26, 2023 by 6 Comments

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
— T. S. Eliot, East Coker

{ONE} BILLIE’S HOUSE: EASY LIVING?

Billie Holiday’s townhouse came up for sale last year. It wasn’t her townhouse — she had an apartment (#1B) on one of its seven floors — but we’re dealing with estate agents here. That’s one posing by the staircase. “We are privileged to introduce 26 WEST 87, the esteemed home where Jazz legend Billie Holiday once lived. She was a resident until her death in 1959. While living in the apartment, she released one of her most famous albums, Lady in Satin. This historically significant home, adjacent to Central Park and the Reservoir, was built in early 1900 and has been meticulously restored and optimized with modern technology while preserving the classical detailing. The impressive Media Room boasts wallpaper designed by Lenny Kravitz”. They’re not kidding. Way to go, Len. Recently reduced to $12,250,000 from $13,995,000. A saving of nearly $2 million. What are you waiting for?

{TWO} TOM’S HOUSE: “As I went out one morning / To breathe the air around Tom Paine’s…”

To Lewes, for Michael Gray’s talk on Bob’s Greatest Rejected Album Tracks accompanied by Mick Gold. As we were driving down, I was recommending to Mick the music documentary Born In Chicago, co-written by Joel Selvin and directed by Bob Sarles and John Anderson, which tells the story of the young white musicians who became fascinated with the blues played on the South Side of Chicago — between the coffee shops and the bars, the young disciples (among them Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, Nick Gravenites, Charley Musslewhite and Steve Miller) started mixing with the bluesmen and kickstarted a whole genre of sixties music. Mick then told us about being at the University of Sussex in 1966 and going to a gig by the Butterfield Blues Band at the Town Hall in Lewes with his camera — that’s one of his shots, of Butter, Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop, below. Mick then left university and started working as a photographer (he toured with Pink Floyd, Dr Feelgood, and photographed Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, The Band, Reed, Cale and Nico, Elton, The Grateful Dead, Patti Smith… the list goes on) before changing horses in midstream to become a documentary filmmaker. It was my second small road trip with Mick — the first was to Canterbury for dinner with the same Michael Gray. I look forward to the next one.

Michael Gray’s talk was great — full of striking linkages, subtle studies and playful theories, and to hear performances of songs like “Moonshiner”, “Mama You Bin on My Mind”, “Angelina” and “Too Late” played on a really big sound system was wonderful. And special thanks to Michael B for his amazing hospitality (and for Parkrun!)

{THREE} ELVIS’S PLANE In the desert at Roswell for 40 years, Elvis’s 1962 Lockheed 1329 JetStar. Sold for $260,000. No engines.

{FOUR} ELVIS’S TICKET, CIGAR, KEY & HAIR There was more Elvis memorabilia in the latest Julien’s auction. These are my favourites…

{FIVE} MY COUSIN’S SONS… I’m so thrilled that the family music line continues, and I’m even more thrilled that I really like the music both Brett and Taylor are involved in. My cousins Nickie and Julie emigrated to Canada in the early sixties with my aunt and uncle and grew up in Mississauga, Ontario. With their own families, they moved — Nickie to LA and Julie to Calgary. Nickie and Doug’s son Brett played in the indie scene around Silverlake, I think, and became Best Coast’s tour bass player before moving to Nashville to work there. He is currently playing bass with Caitlin Rose, who visited London after a long hiatus.

The gig we saw at Hackney’s Earth was terrific. Her voice was direct and emotional, her stage manner beguiling, and the band could switch from Harvest-era Neil Young through (almost) straight-ahead Country to ambient American music with ease. The audience reaction was appropriately fervent — they’d waited a long time. There was an unexpected cover: “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody”, a beautiful song that I knew from Bonnie Raitt’s version. Highlights from Caitlin’s own pen were “Getting it Right”, “Blameless”, “Pink Champagne”, “Own Side”, and an acoustic encore of “Sinful Wishing Well”. Brett was also the tour manager and driver, and it’s always sobering to see the amount of hard work and commitment that goes into touring a continent and putting on shows. When we expressed amazement at the distances Brett was driving, all he’d say was that if you lived in Nashville and needed something from Ikea it was a round trip of 200 miles. And that it was no problem.
Julie and David’s son Taylor formed a band at school in Calgary, Braids, and moved to Montreal where Canada’s independent music scene was gestating. We’ve followed them since their first gigs here in 2011 (where we were their London hotel). They’ve also not played here for a while now, and their latest tour saw a string quartet added to their electronica palette. Their London date at Kings Hall was magnificent. The trio — Taylor on synths, bass and who knows what, Austin on drums and vocals, Raphaelle on vocals, keyboards and guitar — layered and tweaked and intensified their sonic textures, creating cathedrals of sound and enveloping their faithful audience, who gave them a riotous response. It’s always fun to reconnect the family after these gigs. I just wish we all lived closer…

{AND FINALLY} WAINWRIGHT’S WONDER I’ve always been a little immune to the ornate charms of Rufus Wainwright, but I really like his new album, Folkocracy, where he takes the elemental melodies of the folk canon and embellishes them with just enough left turns to remake them as songs that feel part of today’s landscape. I’ve also been resistant to the charms of John Legend, but the version of Peggy Seeger’s “Heading for Home” they duet on is rather marvellous. It starts like a Copeland Western or an Alfred Newman film score before an acoustic trio (Madison Cunningham on guitar, David Piltch on string bass and Patrick Sauber playing banjo) pulls it back into the folk tradition. It plays out beautifully; their voices pepper (Legend) and salt (Wainwright)…

The rest of the album takes in songs by John Phillips and Neil Young (Wainwright was part of Echo in the Canyon, a muddled and unsuccessful documentary about the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters) as well as “traditionals” like “Arthur McBride”, “Wild Mountain Thyme” and “Shenandoah”. Guests include Chaka Khan (beautiful), Van Dyke Parks (Van Dykesy) and various siblings and relatives, and the whole thing is pulled together by Mitchell Froom. Oh, and there’s a fascinating arrangement of a Moondog song, “High on a Rocky Ledge”, where Blake Mills provides a guitar orchestra behind Wainwright’s duet with David Byrne.

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“I Think I’m Going Back…” Five pieces of music that moved me in 2022

January 3, 2023 by 9 Comments

Son Little / Like Neptune
It’s as if Shuggie Otis walked into a recording studio in the middle of a nodded-out Sly Stone session and found Bruce Langhorne in the corner making his sound tapestries for Dennis Hopper’s The Hired Hand. It sounds like the 60s, now, as modern as tomorrow, as old as yesterday. I bought ten copies to give to friends I thought might like it. It’s that good.

Aimee Mann / Queens of the Summer Hotel 
Asked by Barbara Broccoli to write a musical based on Suzanne Keyser’s astonishing memoir, Girl Interrupted, Mann delivered something that was simultaneously beautiful, funny and heartbreaking. The music didn’t lose Mann’s very particular melodic sensibility while still convincing as being Off-Broadway bound. Powered by piano and double bass and Paul Bryan’s glorious string arrangements, the songs swirl and swoon and spotlight the deeper, creepy undercurrents of the story. The lyrics were non-pareil, conjuring episodes and anecdotes into smart verses and punchy choruses. One song, “Suicide is Murder”, contains the greatest lyrics I heard this year. If it doesn’t reach The Great White Way, then no matter. It’s 40 minutes of shimmering perfection, doing justice to a unique book.

Alison Russell / Outside Child [May 2021, sent to me by T.C. this year]
Awful subject matter exorcised through sublime French Americana, with her clarinet and banjo as a thread that draws the narrative on. Written by Russell and JT Nero, her partner, it’s recorded [mostly] live in Nashville and beautifully produced and mixed by Dan Knobler. Her fluid and beautiful voice takes the listener from childhood in Montreal to motherhood in Nashville. I can’t improve on Joe Henry’s words: “Outside Child draws water from the dark well of a violent past. Though iron-hard in their concerns, the songs themselves are exultant: exercising haunted dreamlike clean bedsheets snapped and hung out into broad daylight, and with the romantic poet’s lust for living and audacity of endurance. This music, no less –– no less –– is a triumph: a courageous work, burnished and bright; unspeakably beautiful as she sings the unspeakable.”

Harry Styles / “As it Was”
My favourite working music was, hands down, Harry’s House. It’s light and free, full of affection and glide. Plentiful earworms and, like bronze-dye pasta’s way with a sauce, just enough roughness to delicately catch your ear without fully distracting. Top of the pops was the single “As it Was”, which I must have played 200 times and still love. It filled the same place in the summer as Lorde’s Solar [“Lead the boys and girls onto the beaches / Come one, come all, I’ll tell you my secrets / I’m kinda like a prettier Jesus…”] did last year. I originally listened to Harry because I was intrigued that he’d hired Sarah Jones as his live drummer — I figured that showed he had good taste. I had seen her playing with Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip at the RFH, where he supported Lonnie Holley and was hypnotised by her drumming. While his acting appearances have been all-around awful, his way with a pop tune and his choice of collaborators has been impeccable.

Bryan Ferry / “Where or When” [As Time Goes By, 1999]
Found in a junkshop, Ferry’s Jazz Age album uses a fine group of musicians arranged by pianist Colin Good. I don’t remember hearing Rodgers and Hart’s beautiful song before I put this CD on, which seems mad, as it’s one of the most-covered songs in the GAS. It’s a gorgeous meditation on Deja Vu from Babes in Arms, a 1937 musical which also gave the crooners of the day “Lady is a Tramp”, “I Wish I Were in Love Again”, “My Funny Valentine”. Some hit rate… I obviously went and listened to 25 versions, including the hit by Dion and the Belmonts’ (written about as the last chapter of Bob’s bizarre Philosophy of Modern Song), but none of them touched me like Ferry’s. It creeps in on the back of an ondes martenot played by the brilliant Cynthia Millar; as Bob says, “the swirling dreamlike quality of Rodgers’ tune gives the listener a feeling of time as mysterious and complex as anything by Stephen Hawking”. The ondes, somewhat like a keyboard-based theremin, give an uncanny and sensual air to the melody. Ferry takes the song gently in his cupped hands and sings it in a bruised whisper, hushingly alighting on the melody, encapsulating the gauzy reverie of the lyric. Beautiful.

* The ondes Martenot [“Martenot waves”] is an early electronic musical instrument. It is played with a keyboard or by moving a ring along a wire, creating “wavering” sounds similar to a theremin. It was invented in 1928 by the French inventor Maurice Martenot. Martenot was inspired by the accidental overlaps of tones between military radio oscillators and wanted to create an instrument with the expressiveness of the cello.

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Christmas Song/2022

December 24, 2022 by 5 Comments

This year’s offering is a version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane in 1943 for the film, Meet Me in St. Louis.

It first appeared in a scene in which a family is troubled by plans to move to New York City, leaving behind their beloved home in St. Louis. In a scene on Christmas Eve, Judy Garland’s character, Esther, sings the song to cheer up her despondent five-year-old sister, played by Margaret O’Brien. When presented with the original draft lyric, Garland, her co-star Tom Drake and director Vincente Minnelli criticized the song as depressing and asked Martin to change the lyrics. 

Though he initially resisted, Martin made several changes to make the song more upbeat. As Martin tells it, he initially baulked at changing the words. “They said, ‘It’s so dreadfully sad.’ I said, ‘I thought the girls were supposed to be sad in that scene.’ They said, ‘Well, not that sad.’ And Judy was saying, ‘If I sing that to that sweet little Margaret O’Brien, they’ll think I’m a monster!’ And she was quite right, but it took me a long time to get over my pride. Finally, Tom Drake [the young male lead], a friend, convinced me. He said, ‘You stupid son of a b—-! You’re gonna foul up your life if you don’t write another verse of that song!’”

In 1957, Frank Sinatra asked Martin to revise the line, “Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” He told Martin, “The name of my album is A Jolly Christmas. Do you think you could jolly up that line for me?” Martin’s new line was “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.”

So, what I’ve done here is cast a pall over the Holiday Season. Sorry about that. However, it does have a more hopeful-sounding coda where I try to lift the gloom. On that note, all good Christmas wishes to all who follow Five Things, wherever you are in this world. In 2023, I’m going to post every two weeks. I won’t, however, be changing the name to Five Things I Saw and Heard this Fortnight…

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Vagabond Shoes: New York Snapshots, August 3rd

August 3, 2022 by 6 Comments

There was music in the air during the five days we spent in New York at the beginning of July. But first, a visit to Manchester in 1964, courtesy of our friend Rick. He and Liney had taken us to a favourite dive bar (the 169 Bar) on the Lower East Side. It has a leopard-print pool table — that may be all you need to know. We had a great conversation with the bartender, Dakota, about Ross Macdonald, who he was re-reading and had decided was the apex of the knight errant-as-detective genre started by Hammett and carried on by Chandler. Macdonald’s a favourite of mine, so I was willing to entertain this point of view. Rick mentioned a favourite Dion song, “Your Own Back Yard”, about kicking booze and drugs. I say there was a great letter from Dion in the Lou Reed exhibition (see below) and note to listen to the track when I can. I find it on Born to Be with You and a nice live version from Dion’s post-doo-wop career as a Greenwich Village folkster, which I send to Rick. Here’s his story, featuring what may be Britain’s finest street name…

{ONE} A LEVEL BLUES. It’s getting late, but I’ve just listened to the 1971 Dion Bitter End album. Like a Proustian madeleine, it exploded memories. Specifically, Dion’s lovely version of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Don’t Start Me Talkin”: The Twisted Wheel, Brazennose Street, Manchester, maybe 1964, Saturday night; I’d climbed out of my bedroom window to hitchhike into the city centre for the Saturday-night all-nighter — Spencer Davis Group (with Stevie Winwood) and Sonny Boy Williamson. Around 2 a.m. I found myself randomly sitting at the bar (bar — cokes only, which I could hardly afford; when we were thirsty, we used to go across the street on pass-outs to a pub that stayed open all night and was flexible about age laws) next to Sonny Boy Williamson. He was hunched over a coke next to an impossibly glamorous girlfriend in a cheetah-style coat. What I noticed was his beautiful long graceful fingers, and I could hardly speak, awe-struck. We muttered for minutes, and he wandered off to the stage, unimpressed. Then he played (backed by the Spencer Davis Group), and somehow he’d got drunk (must have had his own bottle), so with those lovely long fingers, he beckoned my friend John Lancaster (a wonderful man I used to discuss TS Eliot with and who had the sweetest of all possible girlfriends who worked on a perfume counter in Lewis’s on Market Street, where, about that time, I saw Bobby Charlton buying furniture with his new wife) on stage to support him, and he proceeded to give us a lifetime memory. Those long fingers I shall never forget. And though those all-nighters screwed up my A levels, they made my life. As a friend of mine at the time said when we were rousted by the cops and asked what was going on after an Otis Redding concert: “Otis, man!”

Ricky, plaque, Evan on drums with Frank

{TWO} AS AMERICAN AS MUSIC GETS. We spent the day of July 4 at the best possible place in New York — the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona — on his birthday!* We were greeted by the irrepressible Ricky Riccardi (the Director of Research Collections), seen here holding his Grammy for best album liner notes (for an Armstrong release last year). He’s also holding some original photos of Louis playing a concert in New Orleans in 1952 that were sent to my dad when he edited the British jazz magazine Eureka, which I wanted to donate to the museum. The Armstrong House is about to get a beautiful contemporary museum building opposite so that it can properly display its collections. The big band of the brilliant Evan Sherman played, red beans and rice were served, and the garden concert ended with a pulsating version of “What’s Going On”, sung by trombonist Frank Lacy, in a style reminiscent of the great Ted Hawkins. The house is as it was when the Armstrongs lived in it, and Harvey gave us a brilliant tour. It’s a testament to Lucille’s extraordinary embrace of Louis and his talent — she found the house in the borough where she was raised and gave it to a man who had never had a real home, who had lived mostly in hotels. It was not just a place to rest his head with hers, but a whole community he became a fundamental part of. You can learn lessons about how to live from this modest house and, in Louis’ case, how to turn the love given to you by millions of people outwards, back into the world. It’s there, in Louis and Lucille’s voices as you walk around their house and in all of Louis’ music.

Klein’s designs are top; the page-turning cleverness

{THREE} EINE KLEIN FOTOMUSIK. I always hear music when I look at William Klein’s photos, often something close to a Bernard Herrmann film soundtrack, or a particularly percussive opera, or, in the case of his Moscow photos, a bevy of cimbaloms… pleased to have been in NYC when such a good selection of his work was on show at the International Center of Photography on the Lower East Side. Klein wears his talent lightly, skipping between disciplines while keeping his vision of seething life intact. The show is beautifully staged, with wall-sized prints and clever digital page-turning video tables so you can see his books about cities (which he also designed).

Moscow Book; Fashion; Little Richard; self-portrait

{FOUR} LOU REED: CAUGHT BETWEEN THE TWISTED STARS. New York Public Library at Lincoln Centre. If you are a huge Lou Reed/VU fan, this exhibition of his Archive will blow your mind. As a moderate Lou-O-Phile, it was still stunning. Guitars, lyrics, letters, painting, videos, ephemera, and, just for the completist, a couple of pairs of Lou’s Views, a collaboration with an Italian spectacle designer — the lenses flip up, so Lou wouldn’t have to take his glasses off to read. I love that Mo Tucker called him “Honeybun”… It runs til March 2023. Highly recommended.

{FIVE} PJ CLARKE’S JUKEBOX. Another Rick and Liney pick, it’s an oasis of brick in a desert of glass and steel in midtown; this unreconstructed bar has a unique layout. The men’s restroom is four feet behind the patrons sitting at the counter. Some might call this lazy. Among its rather beautiful original fittings from the 1880s sits a 70s jukebox, with this playlist of the top hits from 1971.** Johnny Mercer wrote “One for My Baby” on a bar napkin here, and Buddy Holly proposed to María Elena Santiago at this 3rd Avenue watering hole five hours after they met. “The Lost Weekend” was written by a regular, Charles Jackson, and a young Frank Sinatra regularly closed the place down at Table #20. The bar wears its history lightly, and the food and the staff are fantastic. We didn’t notice how intense the sun was outside as we looked doorwards from our table, but as we left, we realised that we were witnessing Manhattanhenge, where the setting sun lines up with the crosstown grid, usually twice a summer. It was some walk back to our hotel drenched in this amazing light.

*According to Louis, he was born on July 4, 1900, but records located a couple of decades after his passing found that it was August 4, 1901.

** Three Dog Night were famous for picking great songs by hip songwriters and doing hit-parade-friendly versions (Nilsson’s “One”, Randy Newman’s “Mama Told Me Not to Come”, Laura Nyro’s “Eli’s Coming”, usually with a good dose of Wurlitzer electric piano). Van Dyke Parks gave them their name: on cold nights, Aboriginal Australians would customarily sleep in a hole in the ground while embracing a dingo, a native species of wild dog. On colder nights, they would sleep with two dogs, and if the night were freezing, it was a “three dog night”.

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