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Posts from the ‘Country music’ Category

Oct 22

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Around John Prine

One night in January 1985 Bonnie Raitt was joined on the stage at the Arie Crown Theatre in Chicago by John Prine. They sang Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery”, which had first been heard on his debut album in 1971 and which Raitt had covered on her 1975 album Streetlights.

Raitt takes the first verse — “I am an old woman, named after my mother / My old man is another child that’s grown old / If dreams were thunder and lightnin’ was desire / This old house would’ve burnt down a long time ago.” Prine joins in as they sing the chorus in unison, an octave apart: “Send me an angel that flies from Montgomery / Make me a poster of an old rodeo / Just give me one thing that I can hold on to / To believe in this livin’ is just a hard way to go.”

So far, so lovely, so resonant. But then the magic happens. Raitt steps back and merges into her band as Prine starts the second verse alone, his parched, papery, barely-there voice only just holding on to the melody: “When I was a young girl, I had me a cowboy / He weren’t much to look at, just a free-ramblin’ man / But that was a long time, and no matter how I tried / Those years just flow by like a broken-down dam.”

It’s a song full of mystery and allusion cloaked in the mundane, and the gender-switch somehow gives it an extra layer of — what? — rubbed-raw pathos? humdrum tragedy? Don’t ask me to explain. It’s there. The audience in the Arie Crown Theatre recognises it as soon as Prine starts singing, and so will you. For me, his singing of those first words creates one of the most electrifying musical moments I know.

Raitt finishes it off with the third verse: “Well there’s flies in the kitchen, I can hear ’em, they’re buzzin’ / And I ain’t done nothin’ since I woke up today / How the hell can a person go to work in the morning / Come home in the evening and have nothing to say.” What a masterpiece of the songwriter’s craft.

Anyway, I’ve just been listening to Prine’s last album. Called The Tree of Forgiveness, it was released in 2018, two years before his death in the first month of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although it joins Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker and David Bowie’s blackstar as a work conceived in the shadow of an impending exit, its mood is cheerful and thoughtful and intimate and infinitely congenial and sometimes mordantly humorous. Every one of the 10 tracks, produced by Dave Cobb at RCA in Nashville, has something to commend it.

I’ve also been reading Tom Piazza’s just-published Living in the Present with John Prine. A musician and author of many well received books on such subjects as Alan Lomax, New Orleans and the bluegrass musician Jimmy Martin, Piazza met Prine only two years before his death, while writing a piece on the singer-songwriter for the Oxford American magazine.

They got on so well that Prine invited Piazza to help him write his autobiography. They spent time in each other’s company at Prine’s homes in Nashville, Tennessee and Gulfport, Florida, going to restaurants, driving around in Prine’s prized 1977 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, playing songs to each other and together. They had time for only two sessions with a recording machine before Prine died; not enough for the kind of book they had planned but enough for Piazza to write this warm, affectionate sketch of the singer-songwriter in his last years, reminiscing and enjoying the love and respect of those close to him.

Late in the book there are some vivid memories of encounters with Cowboy Jack Clement, Johnny Cash, Chet Atkins and, most surprisingly, Phil Spector, with whom Prine wrote a song called “God Only Knows”, which appears on the final album. There’s quite a lot of talk about guitars, too. Piazza writes with a sensitivity to mood, an observant eye and an easy grace that make this not just a singularly enjoyable book but the best possible way of remembering its subject.

* Tom Piazza’s Living in the Present with John Prine is published by Omnibus Press. Prine’s The Tree of Forgiveness is on Oh Boy Records. The version of “Angel from Montgomery” described here was included in The Bonnie Raitt Collection, released in 1990 on Warner Brothers.

Jul 31

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Randy Meisner 1946-2023

The first time I noticed Randy Meisner’s name was when Rick Nelson released his first album with the Stone Canyon Band, recorded live at the Troubadour in LA in 1969 and released the following year. Meisner was the band’s bass guitarist and sang harmonies. Nelson was trying to update himself, shedding the “y” at the end of his first name and embracing the arrival of country rock in an attempt to put some distance between the teen idol of “Poor Little Fool” and his adult self. The Troubadour album included signposts for his desired new direction in the shape of his versions of three Bob Dylan songs, including a particularly creditable version of “I Shall Be Released”. It also had a lovely version of Eric Anderson’s “Violets of Dawn”, a song completely redolent of its era, with Meisner contributing fluid bass lines and high harmonies.

When Nelson was putting the band together, Meisner — who had just left Poco after a brief stay — brought in the lead guitarist, Allen Kemp, and the drummer, Pat Shanahan, from another of his earlier bands, the Poor. The veteran steel guitarist Tom Brumley, a former member of Buck Owens’ Buckaroos, completed the line-up. Meisner was no longer there by the time their second studio album, Rudy the Fifth, was released in late 1971, containing a song he’d co-written with Kemp. He’d become a founder member of the Eagles, with whom he stayed until 1978, not always happily. He died last week, aged 77, and the final years were not easy ones, as Adam Sweeting recounts in an obituary of him in the Guardian. If you’d asked Randy Meisner to identify his finest hour, I don’t imagine “Violets of Dawn” would have crossed his mind. But it still sounds sweet.

Nov 1

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Dylan 1980-85

While reading an interview with the filmmaker Jesse Dylan in the (London) Times last week, one quote caught my eye. The interviewer asked him about the continued productivity of his father, who is now in his ninth decade. Jesse replied that his dad wasn’t trying to outdo himself. “He’s just thinking, ‘Should I paint a picture today? Should I write a song?'”

It reminded me of of my own reaction to visiting the Musée Picasso in Paris a few years ago and realising how wonderful it must have been to be him, to get up in the morning and think, “Shall I paint a picture today? Shall I paint a few plates? Shall I make a bull’s head out of a pair of bicycle handlebars or a guitar out of a matchbox and some rubber bands?”

That’s not the only point of comparison between the two, for sure. But Dylan transforms farm implements into sculpture and photographs into paintings with the same unstoppable desire to make stuff. He’s not expecting everything he creates to be the equal of “Desolation Row”, just as Picasso didn’t think a painted soup dish needed to be a rival to the Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Jesse Dylan’s remark might have helped me to make a different kind of sense of the latest volume of the Bootleg Series, titled Springtime in New York and assembled from recordings made in the first half of the 1980s. This was a period that included Shot of Love, Infidels and Empire Burlesque, and most of the tracks on the deluxe five-CD version of the new release are outtakes from those sessions, in Los Angeles as well as New York, plus material from various tour rehearsals and a couple of live tracks (“Enough Is Enough” from Slane Castle in 1984 and “License to Kill” from the same year’s David Letterman show).

There are works of genius here, the two takes of “Too Late” and its eventual metamorphosis into “Foot of Pride” being the prime exhibit, showing Dylan functioning in 1983 at the peak of his powers, creating something that only his imagination could have produced, working away at its shape and structure and detail and angle of attack (and then still not being satisfied enough to put it on the relevant album). “New Danville Girl” has long been loved by bootleggers as a prototype of what would become, 18 months later, the epic “Brownsville Girl”, featuring a friendlier arrangement and more modest production but lacking some of the final version’s finer points. “Let’s Keep It Between Us” is a Dylan song recorded by Bonnie Raitt in 1982 and here performed two years earlier as a confiding southern soul ballad, with wonderful B3 interjections from Willie Smith.

By and large, however, this is an assembly of lesser material. Unlike The Cutting Edge or More Blood, More Tracks, it’s not the sort of compilation that enables the dedicated student to make a close scrutiny of Dylan’s working method over a tightly defined period of time. It’s a whole lot looser than that, and variable in quality. You don’t necessarily need Dylan’s versions of “Fever”, “I Wish It Would Rain”, “Green, Green Grass of Home”, “Abraham, Martin and John” or “Sweet Caroline” — or Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me To Do”, which isn’t noticeably better than those performed by a hundred young British R&B bands in the mid-’60s (including my own). You might, of course, need his gorgeous version of Willie Nelson’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground”. But what all of them do is remind us of what Dylan’s backing musicians often say, that he knows a very large number of songs — and if you’re in his band, you have to be ready to play them, at least in rehearsals.

Taken together with the outtakes of songs like “Blind Willie McTell”, “Jokerman”, “I and I”, “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight”, “Sweetheart Like You”, “Tight Connection to My Heart”, “Seeing the Real You at Last” and “Dark Eyes”, some of them pleasingly devoid of the production touches added to the versions released on the original albums, they made me think of what it might be like if Bob Dylan turned up in your village with his band, rented the parish hall and spent an evening entertaining the locals. It wouldn’t be a show. It wouldn’t be for posterity. Nobody would be taking notes or keeping score. There might be false starts and missteps and re-runs. There would certainly be some things that didn’t work quite as well as others. Playing these five discs end to end, flattening out the artistic highs and lows, allowing the kaleidoscope of Dylan’s approach to American music to form and disperse and reform, you get a sense of how much fun that would be.

* Bob Dylan’s Springtime in New York: The Bootleg Series 1980-85 is out now in various formats and configurations on the Columbia Legacy label. The photograph of Dylan in New York is from one of the booklets that come with the deluxe version and was taken by Lynn Goldsmith.

Sep 30

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Bob Moore 1932-2021

The bassist Bob Moore, a member of Nashville’s legendary A-team of studio musicians, has died at the age of 88. He played on some of my favourite pop records of the 1960s, but to be honest I’m not sure that I ever noticed the bass on any of them. That’s how good he was.

As a boy he had a shoeshine stand on a street corner close to the rear entrance of the Ryman Suditorium, home of the Grand Ole Opry, and he got his start after putting a regular five-cent polish on the cowboy boots of Ernest Tubb’s bassist, Jack Drake, who gave him informal lessons. His break came in his early teens when the great pianist and producer Owen Bradley called him in for his first session.

He wasn’t a James Jamerson or a Bootsy Collins, in the sense that he became famous for changing the role of the bass in popular music. But here are some of the hits on which he played: Patsy Cline’s “Crazy”, “Walkin’ After Midnight” and “I Fall to Pieces”. Elvis Presley’s “(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame”, “All Shook Up” and “Return to Sender”. Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely”, “Running Scared” and “Dream Baby”. Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man”. Don Gibson’s “Sea of Heartbreak”. Jim Reeves’ “He’ll Have to Go”. Leroy Van Dyke’s “Walk On By”. Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin On”. Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia”. Floyd Cramer’s “Last Date”. Marty Robbins’s “El Paso”. Conway Twitty’s “It’s Only Make Believe”. Brenda Lee’s “Sweet Nothings”. Claude King’s “Wolverton Mountain”. George Jones’s “She Still Thinks I Care” and “He Stopped Loving Her Today”. Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley PTA”.

Some people, Moore once said, can play a hundred notes a second without making a contribution. Another person can play the one note that makes a better record. It’s not hard to guess in which category he belonged.

Aug 22

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RIP Don Everly

After a decade of estrangement, the Everly Brothers chose the Royal Albert Hall in London as the venue for their historic reunion concert on September 22, 1983. It was an unforgettable evening, all tensions seemingly resolved as the harmonies soared once again on all those great hits of the ’50s and ’60s. Phil died in 2014, aged 74. Now Don has gone, too, at 84. Here’s how I reported the reunion concert in The Times, with a wonderful photograph by Nobby Clark.

Dec 8

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Back on Highway 61

Generally speaking, I prefer Bob Dylan to make his own cover versions, just the way he’s been doing for the best part of 60 years. There are maybe not even a dozen exceptions, mostly the obvious ones: Presley’s “Tomorrow is a Long Time”, Jimi’s “Watchtower”, Stevie’s “Blowing in the Wind”, the Fairports’ “Si tu dois partir”, Ferry’s “Hard Rain”, Betty LaVette’s “Things Have Changed”. But now there’s a definite addition to the list: Dave Alvin’s version of “Highway 61 Revisited”, a highlight of From an Old Guitar, his new album of rare and unreleased stuff.

To be honest, I haven’t followed the career of the singer/guitarist from Downey, California who started out at the very end of the ’70s with the Blasters and more recently led bands known variously as the Guilty Ones and the Guilty Women. My bad, as the young people say. From an Old Guitar is full of great stuff, drawing on country, blues, R&B and, in Lil Hardin Armstrong’s “Perdido Street Blues”, old-time jazz, with other songs from Mickey Newbury, Earl Hooker, Doug Sahm and Marty Robbins.

Dylan’s parable is set to a low-riding shuffle beat, the layered guitars of Alvin and Greg Leisz howling, nudging and screeching from multiple perspectives as the magnificent verses are recited in appropriately biblical tones. Alvin’s voice is one that wears its bruises, scars and calluses lightly, weighting and timing every line perfectly, drawing out the dark humour, simultaneously absurdist and apocalyptic. The video is well assembled and cut, particularly the chase towards the end between a hot rod and a Highway Patrol car on a two-lane blacktop.

My other favourite is a song called “Peace”, credited to Willie Dixon. It bears no resemblance to a song of the same name that gave the title to a 1971 Dixon album, but it carries the hallmarks of the composer of “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “The Seventh Son”. The buried hook — the thing that makes we want to listen to it again, straight away — is a funky little chorded figure from Joe Terry’s electric piano: peeping through two or three times, it seems to want to take the song in a different direction before thinking better of it and withdrawing.

I can happily listen to this album from start to finish, and then over again. Even better, I imagine, would be to wander into some bar or other — Dingwalls, perhaps, or the old Tramps on 15th Street in NYC — and drink a beer or two while listening to Alvin and his band working their way through the whole thing. One day, maybe. But whatever, that “Highway 61” is going to stick around.

* Dave Alvin’s From an Old Guitar is out now on the Yep Roc label.

Oct 16

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Bill Frisell at Cadogan Hall

BillSolo_Adjusted

“If somebody makes a so-called mistake,” Bill Frisell says near the end of the promotional film for his new album, “that can be the most beautiful thing that happens all night, if everybody’s open to what that sound is and embraces it and makes it sound good. If everyone’s watching out for each other and everyone feels like they can take a risk, it gives the music a chance to keep going and evolving.”

Last night at Cadogan Hall it was his turn to flub an ending, the mistake quickly finessed by his three colleagues — the singer Petra Haden, the cellist Hank Roberts and the bass guitarist Luke Bergman — with grace and smiles. And right there was the humanity of any music in which Frisell has a hand.

His mission to demonstrate and explore the consanguinity of all forms of American vernacular music — from Charles Ives to Thelonious Monk, from Hank Williams to Henry Mancini, from Muddy Waters to the Beach Boys — was accomplished many years ago, but with Harmony, the title of his first album on the Blue Note label, it seems to have reached another peak. The empathy, flexibility and modesty of this quartet make it an ideal vehicle for another exercise in creative juxtaposition.

The concert began quietly, with Haden’s beautifully plain voice enunciating the wandering, wordless, childlike line of Frisell’s “Everywhere”. The first high point came with Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times”, on which Roberts and Bergman joined Haden in the sort of three-part Appalachian harmonies guaranteed to strike instantly at a special place in the emotions. There was a wholehearted ovation for that. “Lush Life”, fiendishly difficult to sing, was another highlight; also included in last year’s solo concert at the same venue and on Epistrophy, his recent live duo album with the bassist Thomas Morgan, Billy Strayhorn’s great ballad is clearly a preoccupation, and its intense chromaticism brought out the Jim Hall influence in Frisell’s work on his double-cutaway semi-acoustic instrument.

There was an interesting recasting of “On the Street Where You Live” (from My Fair Lady) and a lovely harmonised version of the traditional “Red River Valley”, interspersed with little instrumental pieces making sparing use of the guitarist’s loops and effects. The set ended with a segue from Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” into David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, rendered in full and apparently without ironic intent. For an encore, demanded with fervent enthusiasm, they returned to stand at the microphones and deliver “We Shall Overcome”, inviting us to join in; well, at least now they know what English hymn-singing sounds like.

It was a mystery that, for the latest project from this great musician, a hall which was packed for his solo appearance a year ago should be so thinly populated last night. Perhaps the concert was badly advertised. The album is not yet out, which probably didn’t help. But anyone who wasn’t there missed a quietly remarkable night.

* Harmony is out on November 1. Epistrophy was released by ECM earlier this year. The photograph of Bill Frisell is by Monica Frisell.

Oct 12

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Seeing ‘Western Stars’

Western Stars

“This is my 19th album,” Bruce Springsteen says towards the beginning of the film Western Stars, “and I’m still writing songs about cars.” But then he excuses himself by explaining how cars can become a metaphor for all kinds of things, including travelling without getting anywhere.

Western Stars is a performance film, but much more than that. Recorded over two days in front of a small audience in the hayloft of the 19th century wooden barn on his property in New Jersey, it features the 13 songs from the recent album of the same name, played by around 30 musicians: a basic band of various guitars, keyboards, bass and drums, plus two trumpets, two French horns, a string orchestra of violins, violas and cellos, and four or five female backing singers, discreetly directed by the album’s orchestrator, Rob Mathes.

There are a few differences from the album versions, but the sound of Bob Clearmountain’s mix is so close to the lush Californian warmth of the original recordings that I found myself frequently checking for signs that the musicians were miming. An inability to spot anyone playing the glockenspiel part on “Drive Fast” provided the only evidence that post-production work had been undertaken.

Having seen the trailer, I worried in advance that the film — directed by Springsteen with his long-term collaborator Thom Zimny — would include too much footage of wild ponies cantering in slow-motion through desert landscapes beneath spectacular open skies, close-ups of silver and turquoise jewellery on weathered hands, and El Camino pick-ups raising dust on long, lonesome dirt roads. There’s some of that, particularly in the early sequences, but the visual clichés recede as more serious matters come to the fore in what Springsteen calls “interstitial material”, the snatches of home movies and found footage with voiceovers in which he introduces the songs and reflects on their themes of life, love, loss and longing.

On the face of it, the songs on Western Stars aren’t about Springsteen. One protagonist is a stuntman, another a fading movie actor. But, as he said during a Q&A session that followed the screening I attended this morning, “When I write a song in character, it’s a way of exploring your own life and struggles.”

After feeling initially indifferent towards much of the album, it came as a surprise to discover how rewardingly the film illuminates their qualities, both via Springsteen’s commentary and the performances. “Sleepy Joe’s Café” was a song I quite disliked until seeing it contextualised in a social setting. “Somewhere North of Nashville” acquires greater depth. “Stones”, sung as a duet with Patti Scialfa, his wife of 30 years, is now almost unbearably moving in its evocation of the undercurrents of a long marriage. (“I should have had Patti on the record,” Springsteen said during the Q&A.)

The songs I already liked gain a new lustre. “Moonlight Motel” adds a couple more shades of gorgeous soul-weariness. The soaring “There Goes My Miracle” is introduced with a rumination on “losing the best thing you ever had — the perfect formula for a pop song.” Or maybe it was “the formula for a perfect pop song”, which it is. Watching the string players tear into it with such joy, I thought of how I’ve always believed the special E Street secret is making every person in the audience feel as though they’re up on stage, playing in the band, sharing that special exhilaration; this lot made me wish I’d carried on with violin lessons.

* This weekend’s London Film Festival screenings of Western Stars are sold out. It will be in cinemas around the UK on October 28, three days after the release of the soundtrack album.

Sep 4

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Lucinda Williams in London

Lucinda Williams 1It had been an enjoyable enough concert for the first 40 minutes or so, but when Lucinda Williams dismissed her band and introduced “The Ghosts of Highway 20”, the mood of the evening deepened. “I’ve been filled with the need when I’ve sung this song lately to say that not everybody from the South is a bad person,” the woman brought up in Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas told the crowd at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. They knew what she was getting at.

Delivering the title track of her most recent album alone with an acoustic guitar, she managed to surpass the fine recorded version, which featured the entwined lead guitars of Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz. Somehow she found a lilt within the song that added an emotional dimension. It introduced the evening’s satisfying central section, which included the exquisite “Over Time”, from the 2003 album World Without Tears; it had, she said with pride, been covered by Willie Nelson (here’s their duet version), and in London the band found a lovely gliding gait.

Earlier she had talked a bit about how, when her long career began to take off, she was criticised for writing too many dark and gloomy songs. So it was amusing that, when she did lift the tempo to a rockabilly shuffle late in the concert, it accompanied a song (also from the last album) called “Bitter Memory”. And it’s true that the bleakness in her raw voice might not be what you want all the time. But sometimes she can confront a distressing subject such as her late father’s Alzheimer’s disease (in “If My Love Could Kill”) and make it not just painful but uplifting.

Another of last night’s highlights was “Sweet Old World”, the title track of a 1992 album which she has re-recorded in its entirety for release next month on her own label. It features the band with which she is touring: Stuart Mathis on guitar, David Sutton on bass guitar and Butch Norton on drums. They’re a capable unit, and Norton in particular is a fine colourist and energiser, but to me it was interesting how the evening lit up each time the music reached for something beyond the generic shuffle and boogie of the old roadhouse beside the two-lane blacktop.

Oct 9

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Don Henley’s Cass County

Don Henley - Publicity Shot #2 (Credit Danny Clinch)During one of the interviews given to promote his new solo album, Don Henley mentioned that he writes poetry. When his voice gives out, he said, that’s probably what he’ll turn to. This would have been no surprise to admirers of “The Boys of Summer”, his solo hit from 1984, which has an opening verse whose perfect cadences seem to come complete with punctuation: “Nobody on the road, nobody on the beach. I feel it in the air: the summer’s out of reach. Empty lake, empty streets; the sun goes down alone. I’m driving by your house though I know you’re not home.”

It’s a great pop song, of course, with a dark undertow — just like many of the best Eagles songs, from “Hotel California” to “King of Hollywood”. In the Eagles’ world, no pleasure was ever unmixed. The same trait also marked out the best products of Henley’s solo career, including the four great songs from The End of the Innocence, his third solo album: “The Last Worthless Evening”, “New York Minute”, “The Heart of the Matter” and the title track. These were songs that had something to say about the human experience back in 1989 and have lost none of their truth and resonance.

His new album, Cass County, contains many outstanding moments, beginning with the opening track, Tift Merritt’s “Bramble Rose”, a gorgeous slow waltz with a killer chord change, in which Henley takes the first verse, Miranda Lambert the second, and Mick Jagger — in his “Wild Horses” mode — the third. It’s one you can play over and over again, just waiting for that change, which Henley brings out more effectively than Merritt did on her excellent original version in 2002 (clue: listen for the words “a bramble rose”).

The album arrived on a Saturday morning. I put it on while I was having breakfast and ended up playing it all the way through three times, non-stop. Among the other notable tracks are Jesse Lee Kincaid’s “She Sang Hymns Out of Tune”, a favourite from the Dillards’ Wheatstraw Suite album back in 1968; the rocking “That Old Flame”, with a great lyric on which he’s joined by the wonderful Martina McBride; and Jesse Winchester’s ever-lovely “The Brand New Tennessee Waltz”. Merle Haggard and Dolly Parton are among the album’s other participants.

On these songs, the poetry isn’t in the words. It’s in Henley’s voice. That sound of bruised longing is one we know so well,  immediately evoking good and bad times and the complex feelings that went with them. Whatever he had back then, he’s hung on to it.

* Cass County is out now on Capitol Records. The photograph of Don Henley was taken by Danny Clinch.

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