Skip to content

Posts from the ‘Rock music’ Category

Apr 18

The Ballad of Dennis Hopper

If anyone contained multitudes, it was surely Dennis Hopper. Wild and crazy guy, but also a proper artist. Incarnated the simmering potential of the ’50s, the multicoloured dream of the ’60s, the long scream of the ’70s, and the all-over-the-place uncertainty of the ’80s.

All those movies: not just Rebel Without a Cause, Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now and Blue Velvet but The Trip, The American Friend and Rumble Fish. And the folie de grandeur of The Last Movie. Married to Michelle Phillips for eight days and to Daria Halprin, co-star of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, for a little longer. Great photographer, too (he spent so much time with a camera around his neck that his friend nicknamed him “the tourist”). No wonder Mike Scott decided to make a Waterboys album about him.

I took Life, Death and Dennis Hopper on a road trip last weekend and it kept me entertained and fascinated all the way there and back. Its 25 tracks form a mosaic of a life that began in Dodge City, Kansas in 1936 and ended in Venice, California in 2010. “Kansas”, the opening track, is bookended by the sound of a street parade and a departing steam train: the song itself, sung and co-written by Steve Earle, with just the singer’s guitar and Mickey Raphael’s harmonica, is like something from Nebraska‘s country cousin.

Then Scott enters to sing “Hollywood ’55” — the story of Hopper’s arrival in Movieland — against a finger-snapping beatnik swing and we’re into a sequence of snapshots set to era-adjacent music. “Live in the Moment”, about making it, rolls on Mitch Ryder’s Detroit Wheels. “Andy”, referencing his friendship with Warhol, is a smooth uptown pop mix settling somewhere between Broadway and Hollywood & Vine. “The Tourist”, about Hopper and his camera documenting the short life of hippie dream, could be the Strawberry Alarm Clock or H. P. Lovecraft imitating the Jefferson Airplane. “Riding Down to Mardi Gras”, in which Hopper and Peter Fonda make Easy Rider, is a fine piece of outlaw country-rock. And so on, all the way to “Golf, They Say”, a funny song about the late-life experience of Willie Nelson teaching Hopper to swing a club.

But it’s not just a kind of jukebox musical. There are brief interludes — notably five short impressionistic instrumental pieces of contrasting styles and hues, each dedicated to one of Hopper’s five wives — and a couple of recitatives, one a description of the 1967 Monterey Festival in an English posh-hippie voice, the other a parody of an American TV news report of his death.

The two finest individual tracks are the hard-slugging, thick-textured “Ten Years Gone”, referring to Hopper’s lost decade and closing with a passage spoken by Bruce Springsteen, and “Letter From an Unknown Girlfriend”, a painfully stark voice-and-piano ballad in slow waltz time sung and played by Fiona Apple. They’re followed by a snatch of aural hallucination called “Rock Bottom”, evoking the years Hopper spent in the abyss, and then the gorgeous, achingly redemptive “I Don’t Know How I Made It”, somewhat like the Blue Nile covering Blonde on Blonde.

As Scott suggests, you can listen to the tracks indvidually or in any order, but it’s really made to be heard from start to finish, although not in any burdensome or dutiful way. Congratulations to him and his guests and his co-writers and fellow Waterboys, including Paul Brown, James Hallawell, Aongus Ralston, Ralph Salmins and Greg Morrow. It’s a brave thing, executed with flair and imagination.

* The Waterboys’ Life, Death and Dennis Hopper is out now on Sun Records.

Apr 5

3 Comments

Stories old and new

“That was a young man’s song,” Paul Brady said as the applause began to fade at the Bush Hall last night. He’d just sung “Nothing But the Same Old Story”, written at the start of the 1980s to inhabit the world of a narrator who’d arrived in London from Ireland as a teenager looking for work and confronted by hostility in the time of the Troubles: “Living under suspicion / Putting up with the hatred and fear in their eyes…” It’s a song of resistance, one to drink and dance and cry to, and although only a few weeks from turning 78, Brady invested it with all its original innocence and rage.

This was the second of his two nights in Shepherd’s Bush, and he talked a little about how, arriving from Ireland as a member of a folk quartet called the Johnstons in 1969, they’d settled into a flat close by. He spoke fondly of how he’d learned from traditional musicians at pub sessions in west and north London.

I hadn’t seen him live since a gig at the Half Moon in Putney in 1981, when I was blown away by the material from his second solo album, Hard Station. Since then he’s had great success as a songwriter, his work recorded by Bonnie Raitt, Tina Turner and others. But today you can put him on stage alone with a guitar, a mandolin and a keyboard, and it’s the same old storyteller, now with a bit more of a growl but with wit and warmth and enough edge to lift you from your seat.

Sometimes, as in the gorgeous “Wheel of Heartbreak” and “The Long Goodbye”, he seemed like the most accomplished of adult rockers. During “Mother and Son” and “Follow On” (“a dark song that ended up in a butter commercial”) I started thinking that maybe what he was was a modern chansonnier, in the mould of Léo Ferré or Julien Clerc. And then there were the traditional songs that harked back to his time with the Johnstons and Planxty: the brilliant mandolin work on “The Jolly Soldier”, the sheer historical weight beneath the lilt of “Arthur McBride”.

The shows were arranged to greet the release of Paul Brady: The Archive, a four-CD, 63-track set of demos, one-off collaborations (with Dolores O’Riordan, Cara Dillon and Carole King, for example), interesting alternative versions of most of his best-known songs, and other fascinating bits and pieces, copiously illustrated with tickets, posters, photos and newspaper cuttings.

Curiously, the first two CDs begin with two songs that he didn’t write, both from the 1960s, which express polar opposites of the spirit of the time. One is the lovely hippie anthem “Get Together”, written by the American musician best known as Dino Valenti and containing a line I’ve never wanted to get out of my head: “We are but a moment’s sunlight / Fading in the grass.” Brady recorded it in 1999 for a set of songs associated with Greenwich Village in the ’60s, and his is a beautiful version, which he reprised last night. The other is “Gimme Shelter”, a song of a very different complexion: his treatment, recorded in 2009 with Bob Thiele Jr’s Forest Rangers for a TV series, Sons of Anarchy, loses nothing by comparison with the Stones’ original.

Those are among the many treasures in the box set. I’m still absorbing it, but I can say that the version of “Paddy’s Lamentation” for voice, piano, tin whistle and military drums, recorded in Dublin in 1980 for a long-vanished compilation album, might alone be worth the 50 quid.

Brady came back for an encore last night and of course it was “The Lakes of Pontchartrain”, the song he recorded in 1978 on his first solo album, Welcome Here Kind Stranger, and which he later taught to Bob Dylan. It’s a traditional song, but it’s his really, and The Archive has a fine version in Gaelic, translated by Prionnsias O’Maonaigh: “Bruach Loch Pontchartrain”.

Last night he sang it in English and gestured to us to sing the last two lines of the final verse with him, acappella: “So fare thee well my bonny o’ girl l’ll never see no more / But I’ll ne’er forget your kindness and the cottage by the shore…” Every heart melted, all over again.

* Paul Brady: The Archive is released by The Last Music Company: http://www.lastmusic.co.uk

Mar 25

1 Comment

Portrait of the artists

Bryan Ferry might have made a career for himself as a painter or ceramicist, and he had a go at both. Instead he chose music. But everything he’s done since has been about being an artist in a very particular sense. Roxy Music worked best when seen as an art project: “Re-make / Re-model”, “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”. The same could be said of his solo work: the readymades of These Foolish Things, the more-than-homage of Dylanesque, the ’30s glide and swoon of As Time Goes By, the brazen charm of The Jazz Age, the wintry covers of “Back to Black” and “Johnny and Mary”.

I’ve been thinking about that while listening to his latest release, Loose Talk, created in partnership with the poet and painter Amelia Barratt, which is immediately interesting because it’s a collaboration between artists at very different stages of their careers (she is in her thirties, he will be 80 in September). It’s also the first Ferry album on which someone else is responsible for the words and their delivery.

He’s a great assembler of words himself, of course, as his collected Lyrics underlined when it was published by Chatto & Windus three years ago, but it’s often been a painful business for him. I remember stories from the ’70s of his then-manager, the department store heir Mark Fenwick, sitting in an armchair sighing and tapping his fingers like an exam invigilator while Bryan struggled to carve out the words of the final verse to the last song for a new album, its release date already postponed by a record company impatient for product.

Loose Talk is an album in which Barratt reads eleven of her poems to Ferry’s musical settings, some using material set aside from his earlier projects. It would be flippant — and wrong — to suggest that he’s solved a problem by delegating the job of providing the words to a collaborator. It’s a legitimate artistic project, from both perspectives.

Barratt is a slender young woman with the sort of looks Cecil Beaton captured in his photographs of the pre-war Bright Young Things. Her voice is quiet, reserved, unemphatic. It’s a voice you might overhear amid the gush and babble at a party — a gallery opening or a book launch, perhaps — and look around to discover its source.

Her verses are not song lyrics: they’re poems, allusive and enigmatic and unresolved, filled with fleeting exchanges that hint at narrative but yield impressions rather than stories, occasionally threaded with contemporary images: “Wasting her time / she’s flipping channels with the remote control” or “My sneakers now washed / hang by their laces.” When combined with Ferry’s music, they take us to familiar territory: “She’s one to watch” is the first line of a track called “Stand Near Me”, a prime Ferry opening if I ever heard one, while “Pictures on a Wall” provides a neon-splashed groove that might have come from any Ferry session from Horoscope/Mamouna in the early ’90s to Avonmore in 2014.

There are decayed pianos being played in abandoned ballrooms, a mood that Ferry has explored with and without Roxy Music. Often the accompanying cadences descend with slow, muted elegance: the echoing piano on “Florist”, the bass on “Orchestra”. That’s another Ferry signature.

Barratt’s poems work for me, mostly, because her delivery sounds like a modern way of speaking and sometimes she produces a sketch whose images and emotions provide a satisfying coherence. “Florist” has an intriguing arc and a moment of piercing disquiet: “Imagine one day / he comes to me and says / There is nothing more I want than this / He gestures to the tulips / that look out from a bucket, bunched / in the passenger seat of the van / To his apron / To his diary with nothing in / and I say / That’s perfectly fine / Perfectly alright / Perfectly without the need to tell me all the time.”

There are some familiar names in the credits — the guitarists Neil Hubbard and Ollie Thompson, the bassists Neil Jason and Alan Spenner, the drummers Paul Thompson and Andy Newmark — but their individual presences are never noticeable: these tracks are stripped back to form a watchful background. The most assertive music comes in the final piece, the title track, where Barratt’s economical verses are accompanied by a subdued but baleful 12-bar blues, somewhat in the manner of “Let’s Stick Together”, Ferry’s 1976 solo hit.

Ferry’s own voice is allowed to peep through two or three times as a kind of palimpsest, probably leftover guide vocals from the demos, notably on “Orchestra”, where the atmospherics are at their most languid and dream-like. But in this collaboration he’s found another way to extend his expressive reach. It’s the latest episode in a long life full of interesting creative decisions. Another twist in an artist’s career.

* Loose Talk by Amelia Barratt and Bryan Ferry is out on Dene Jesmond Records on March 28. The photograph of Ferry and Barrett was taken in Los Angeles by Albert Sanchez.

Feb 4

6 Comments

Riding with John Hiatt

In his heyday, John Hiatt wrote songs about cars and girls with a fine wit and a firm grasp of rock and roll essentials. On the eve of the Grammy awards last Saturday night, the Americana Music Association organised a celebration of his career at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. I read about it in Bob Lefsetz’s newsletter, and wished very much that I’d been there.

The evening began with various luminaries performing a selection of Hiatt’s songs: Lyle Lovett (“Train to Birmingham”), Michael McDonald (“Have a Little Faith in Me”), Joe Bonamassa (“Perfectly Good Guitar”), Tom Morello (“The River Knows Your Name”), Cedric Burnside (“Icy Blue Heart”), Joe Henry (“The Way We Make a Broken Heart”), Hiatt’s daughter Lilly singing “You Must Go”, and various members of Little Feat — Bill Payne, Fred Tackett and Kenny Gradney — doing “Slow Turning”. Los Lobos presented one of their own songs, “Down by the Riverbed”, to the recording of which Hiatt had contributed vocals. Maggie Rose sang “Riding with the King”, one of the best of the many songs inspired by Elvis Presley.

Then Hiatt himself took the stage, singing “Memphis in the Meantime”, “Across the Borderline”, and — with Brandy Clark — “Thing Called Love”, the song that gave Bonnie Raitt a top 10 hit in 1989. I’m guessing that its inclusion on her five-million-selling Nick of Time probably earned its composer more than the rest of his copyrights put together.

When I first saw Hiatt, it was at the Apollo Victoria in 1980. He was a member of Ry Cooder’s Radio Silents, stepping into the spotlight to give a memorable rendering of O. V. Wright’s R&B drama “Eight Men and Four Women”. The next time was in 1992 with Little Village — a short-lived supergroup comprising Hiatt, Cooder, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner — at Hammersmith Odeon, where their repertoire included “Don’t Think About Her When You’re Trying to Drive”, Hiatt and Cooder’s great heartbreak ballad.

In between times, he’d made a bunch of solo albums, of which the best received was 1987’s Bring the Family, which established the template for Little Village and included memorable songs: “Memphis in the Meantime”, “Have a Little Faith in Me” and “Lipstick Sunset”. It was the first of his four albums for A&M, and the second of them, Slow Turning, released in 1988, remains for me one of the very finest albums of that decade. Maybe it’s even one of the last great albums of classic guitar-led rock and roll with roots firmly planted in Chuck Berry and Hank Williams.

The album’s solid backing band includes the slide guitarist Sonny Landreth, and there isn’t a weak song among the dozen tracks. In the fast-moving “Tennessee Plates”, Hiatt joyfully channels Berry’s gift for storytelling and wry humour, while “Drive South” is the sort of song that makes you want to put the top down and step on the gas. “Trudy and Dave” is a great little story about a couple, their baby, a pistol and a laundromat. In “Georgia Rae”, he even gets away with serenading his infant daughter.

Best of all, “Icy Blue Heart” is a beautiful ballad with one of the great barroom lyrics: “She came on to him like a slow-movin’ cold front / His beer was warmer than the look in her eyes / She sat on a stool / He said, ‘What do you want?’ / She said, ‘Give me a love that don’t freeze up inside.'” But the singer knows all too well what will happen next, when he turns a heart “that’s been frozen for years / into a river of tears.” The metaphor is sustained through every line.

Hiatt has released 15 solo albums since Slow Turning. Some of them include fine songs, like “Perfectly Good Guitar” “Terms of My Surrender”, and “The Most Unoriginal Sin” (which opens thus: “What there was left of us / Was covered in dust and thick skin / A half-eaten apple / The whole Sistine Chapel / Painted on the head of a pin”), and fine musicians, including Doug Lancio, currently playing guitar in Bob Dylan’s touring band, and the brothers Luther and Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars. On the most recent, Leftover Feelings, released in 2021, he shares the spotlight with the dobro genius Jerry Douglas.

His albums are always worth hearing, because he’s a fine craftsman steeped in the blues, country music and bluegrass. But Slow Turning is a pinnacle, one that never gets old.

* The photo of John Hiatt, taken by Jack Spencer, is from the cover of his album The Open Road, released on the New West label in 2010. There’s a nice piece on Hiatt by my old colleague Neil Morton here: https://www.herecomesthesong.com/post/2017/08/22/john-hiatt-the-goners-the-most-unoriginal-sin

Jan 17

4 Comments

The Bob look

In her 2008 memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time, Suze Rotolo described how Bob Dylan, her boyfriend between 1961 and 1964, developed his look. Apparently it was Dave Van Ronk, a slightly older Greenwich Village folkie, who urged the 21-year-old Dylan to start paying attention to his image.

In Rotolo’s words: “Such things might have been talked about in jest, but in truth they were taken quite seriously. Much time was spent in front of the mirror trying on one wrinkled article of clothing after another, until it all came together to look as if Bob had just gotten up and thrown something on. Image meant everything. Folk music was taking hold of a generation and it was important to get it right, including the look — be authentic, be cool, and have something to say.”

The result was the transfixing sight of Dylan and Rotolo wrapped around each other on the cover of Freewheelin’ in 1963. If you were, say, 16 years old at the time, Don Hunstein’s shot of the couple on Jones Street in Greenwich Village opened up a whole world, and his suede jacket, denim shirt, jeans and boots seemed to offer an easy way in. If you could get hold of them, that is. And now, just six decades later, the Financial Times is telling you how. What you see above is a guide, published in its HTSI (How to Spent It) magazine, showing you to how to look like Bob Dylan.

It’s pegged to the release of A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s film of Dylan’s life between 1961 and 1965, and it made me laugh quite a lot, for several reasons. The polka-dot shirt they recommend is black and white, which is how it looked in the monochrome photos from the soundcheck at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965; the real thing was green and white — and it was actually a blouse rather than a shirt (the film gets that right). And have you ever seen Dylan in white loafers, never mind 700-quid ones by Manolo Blahnik? The black leather blazer they recommend retails at £4,270. Mine cost a fiver in 1964 from the harmonica player in our band, who was skint at the time and needed rent money. I wish I still had it.

But it’s not just a matter of looking like Bob Dylan. You can try to sound like him, too. The rock critic of The Times went off to the vocal coach who did such good work with Timothée Chalamet in order to try and achieve that distinctive nasal whine. Again it sent me back to 1964 and sitting in my bedroom, strumming an acoustic guitar acquired very cheaply from a girl called Celia and bellowing the words of “The Times They Are A-Changin'” loud enough for my blameless parents to hear: “Come mothers and fathers throughout the land / And don’t criticise what you can’t understand / Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command…”

That was in real time. So was the £5 leather jacket. It was all part of growing up and finding out who you were, and it seems weird now to watch people turn it into a novelty, however good the cause.

As it happens, I enjoyed A Complete Unknown a lot, with only a very few reservations. When Chalamet-as-Dylan sings “The Times They Are A-Changin'” to a festival crowd, Mangold orchestrates the audience’s response in a way that precisely evokes how it felt to experience that song in 1964, with all the emotion of realising that it spoke for you. It was a relief to come out of the screening with the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to be explaining to younger people that it really wasn’t like that at all. Mostly, it was.

Jan 8

20 Comments

Island Records: The Greatcoat Years

No record label has ever had its history subjected to the sort of minutely detailed scrutiny on show in the first two volumes of Neil Storey’s The Island Book of Records, the second of which was published just before Christmas. The initial volume examined the label’s earliest years, 1959-68, from the family background of its founder, Chris Blackwell, to the breakthrough into the new rock mainstream with the debuts of Traffic, Jethro Tull and Fairport Convention. The new one deals with just two years, 1969 and 1970. Their successors will, I gather, each focus on a single year**.

The format is that of an LP-size hardback of considerable heft (432 pages of high-grade paper in case of the new one), an oral history with testimony from participants and interested bystanders lavishly illustrated with photos, sleeve artwork, press cuttings, documents, ads and other ephemera. What 1969-70 means is loads of background (and foreground) material beginning with Steve Winwood’s involvement in Blind Faith and ending with King Crimson’s third album, Lizard. Among those featuring heavily are Spooky Tooth, Free and Mott the Hoople, three classic early Island rock bands whose largely student and mostly male following tended to sport ex-army greatcoats, along with plimsolls, loon pants and cheesecloth shirts.

You get their stories in jigsaw form, pieced together with great diligence in mostly bite-sized chunks of testimony. A good example is the treatment of Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left: the producer Joe Boyd, the engineer John Wood, the bass player Danny Thompson, the guitarist Richard Thompson and the arranger Robert Kirby help describe its making, while Blackwell and his Island colleagues David Betteridge, Tim Clark, Bob Bell and Barry Partlow and the record shop owners John Clare and Eugene Manzi try to explain why it didn’t sell. (When Boyd sold his Witchseason production company to Blackwell in the ’70, it was with the stipulation in the contract that Drake’s three albums should never be deleted.) Others providing testimony include Gabrielle Drake, Nick’s sister, and Victoria Ormsby-Gore, a well connected friend.

There’s too much stuff here for me to begin to do it justice, but the riches include the triumph of King Crimson’s first album, helped by the fact that their two managers, David Enthoven and John Gaydon, were, like Blackwell, Old Harrovians; the debut album by Quintessence, a quintessentially Island band (i.e. Notting Hill hippies) that it turns out nobody in the company really seemed to like; the Fotheringay debacle, which derailed Sandy Denny’s career; the emergence of two ex-Alan Bown Set singers, Jess Roden and Robert Palmer, respectively with Bronco and Vinegar Joe; and the huge success of Cat Stevens, reinvented as a singer-songwriter with Tea for the Tillerman, and of Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Alongside epochal releases like Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die and Fairport’s Unhalfbricking and Liege & Lief, the book features such bit-part players as Dr Strangely Strange (“a poor man’s Incredible String Band”), Blodwyn Pig and McDonald & Giles (respectively offshoots of Jethro Tull and King Crimson), and White Noise’s somewhat prophetic An Electric Storm, which seemed to typify Island’s propensity, in the early days, for backing weird stuff. Nothing is neglected, including the hugely popular and influential compilations, particularly what might be called the greatcoat anthologies: You Can All Join In, Nice Enough to Eat and Bumpers.

The two years covered by this volume pivot around the move from offices on Oxford Street to a former Congregational church on Basing Street in Notting Hill, converted around the time of the First World War into a factory making dressmakers’ showroom busts and wax figures for Madame Tussaud’s. Blackwell bought it and, with the aid of the acoustic engineer Michael Glickman and the studio technician Dick Swettenham, set about converting into a headquarters that incorporated not just offices for the label’s staff but two studios, No 1 on the ground floor, capable of accommodating 80 musicians, and the more intimate No 2 in the basement. This was where a bunch of talented young engineers set to work with Helios 16-track desks and Studer two-inch tape machines, and we hear from some of those hitherto best known as names the bottom of the list of album credits: Brian Humphries, Phill Brown, Richard Digby-Smith (“Diga”) and Phil Ault.

This was a turning point. Basing Street became a creative hub, a 24-hour hang-out, the office business conducted at round tables seating executives and secretaries in a non-hierarchical environment. Guy Stevens, the former DJ at the Scene Club in Ham Yard, for whom Blackwell had created the Sue label, was a maverick A&R presence, introducing Ian Hunter to a bunch of guys from Hereford and giving them the name Mott the Hoople. Lucky Gordon was the resident chef.

I visited Basing Street quite a lot during those early years, sometimes interviewing various people and other times just hanging out, occasionally in the studios. The buzz was terrific. It was, I suppose, a perfect example of hip capitalism in action. Nothing so perfect lasts for ever, but in this volume of his epic and invaluable series — expensive but, to those with an interest, worth every penny — Neil Storey catches it in glorious ascent.

* The Island Book of Records Vol 2: 1969-70, edited by Neil Storey, is published by Manchester University Press / Hidden Masters (£85)

** Not quite right. Apparently Vol 3 (out in the spring of ’26, all being well) will deal with 1971-72. Vol 4 is 1973-76, Vol 5 is probably 1977-79, and Vol 6 could be 1980-83. Neil Storey says he has always thought of the series as consisting of 10 to 12 volumes, so we’ll see.

Nov 28

3 Comments

Andy Paley 1951-2024

The first time I heard Andy Paley’s name was when my New York friends Richard and Lisa Robinson gave me a copy of the first album by a group called the Sidewinders in 1972. It had been produced by their friend — soon to be mine, too — Lenny Kaye. It was on RCA, where Richard had taken a job as an A&R man.

“Listen to the song called ‘Rendezvous’,” Lisa and Richard told me. I did. I loved it. A sweet slice of early power-pop, inspired by the girl groups of the ’60s. Easy to imagine with a full Wall of Sound production and a Darlene Love vocal. It sounded like a hit, but it wasn’t. Anyway, it’s still in my head today.

A year or so later, Andy came to see me at Island Records in Hammersmith, where I was in A&R. It was just a social call, but he left me with two things: an impression of the charming, very handsome young man he was, and a C60 cassette on which he’d put some of his favourite stuff, as a gift.

I’ve still got it somewhere, but the track that I had to get on vinyl became one of my all-time three favourite girl-group records: the Inspirations’ “What Am I Gonna Do With You (Hey Baby)”, written by Russ Titelman and Gerry Goffin. (And don’t tell me that the Chiffons’ version was better, or the Fleetwoods’, or Skeeter Davis’s, or Lesley Gore’s, or even Carole King’s lovely demo, because you’re wrong.)

The Sidewinders didn’t happen, and Andy just missed being a teenbopper sensation with his brother Jonathan in the Paley Brothers, but he went on to do lots of things in the music business, including working with Jonathan Richman and writing songs for Jerry Lee Lewis and Madonna. But probably the most important contribution he made was to Brian Wilson’s return to action in 1988. Andy and Brian became close, and together they wrote and co-produced some of the songs on the comeback album (Brian Wilson, Sire Records). You can hear the pop sensibility they shared on “Meet Me in My Dreams Tonight” and “Night Time”.

Andy died of cancer last week at his home in Vermont. He was 73. Lenny went up to see him in the last hours. Andy wasn’t conscious, but Lenny sang to him. Among the songs he sang was “Rendezvous”.

* The photo of Andy Paley was taken at CBGB in 1977. I’m afraid I’m unable to credit the photographer.

Nov 23

8 Comments

A box of Fudge

Vanilla Fudge, London 1967: Mark Stein, Carmine Appice, Vinnie Martell & Tim Bogert

The first Vanilla Fudge album saved me a lot of time. I loved it, but afterwards I didn’t want or need to listen to anybody who might have been influenced by it. So no heavy metal, no pomp rock, not ever. Their elaborate, slowed-down rearrangements of other people’s classics (“Ticket to Ride”, “People Get Ready”, “She’s Not There”, “Bang Bang”, “You Keep Me Hanging On”, “Take Me For a Little While” and “Eleanor Rigby”), shaped and guided by the ephemeral genius of their producer, George “Shadow” Morton, were enough in themselves to satisfy my limited appetite for bombast.

But there was much more to Vanilla Fudge than that. Everything the Long Island quartet did, particularly in the vocal department, was infused with the strain of East Coast blue-eyed soul exemplified by New Jersey’s Young Rascals, their principal influences (along with all the British invasion bands). They had a great lead singer in Mark Stein, and the other three members contributed fully to their soulful harmonies (particularly on Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready”).

They were good players, too. Stein was as effective an exponent of the Hammond B3 as Stevie Winwood, while the guitarist Vinnie Martell, the bassist Tim Bogert and the drummer Carmine Appice all had the chops to contribute to the multi-section arrangements and to sustain the solo passages featured in the 20-minute-plus “Break Song”, a highlight of their live act.

I bought that first album and went to Leicester in early October 1967, hoping to see them at the De Montfort Hall on a bill with Traffic (then a three-down after the departure of Dave Mason), Keith West and Tomorrow, and (yes, really) the Flowerpot Men. But they’d cancelled their appearance — illness, I believe — and I had to wait a few weeks to see them at Nottingham University. I wasn’t disappointed: they were impressively dynamic and highly exciting.

One small thing I remember is the way Stein, while holding a particularly dramatic note with his right hand, occasionally threw his left arm up, his hand open and fingers spread — a seemingly spontaneous gesture of exultant emphasis. From an essay by Mark Powell that accompanies the nine CDs of Where Is My Mind?, a box set he’s compiled of the Fudge’s recordings for Atlantic’s Atco subsidiary between 1967-69, I learn that this became Stein’s signature. It must have been a good one, because it certainly made an impression on me.

During that month-long visit to the UK, their audience at the Speakeasy, then becoming London’s leading rock and roll hangout, included Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, P. P. Arnold and Alan Price. In a formal concert at the Savile Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, they shared the bill with the Who. After returning home, in early December they played the Convention Hall in Asbury Park, and I’d love to know if Bruce Springsteen and Steve Van Zandt were there, because there’s a little bit of Vanilla Fudge in the E Street Band.

The box set includes mono and stereo versions of their first two albums, three more studio albums from that period (Renaissance, Near the Beginning and Rock & Roll), and two discs of live recordings from the Fillmore West in San Francisco on December 31, 1968, plus various bonus tracks, including edited 45s. The live stuff corresponds very closely to my memory of seeing them.

What’s most fascinating, though, is a chance to reassess their disastrous second album, The Beat Goes On. Devised and constructed by Shadow Morton seemingly as a survey of the entire history of Western music, built around the Sonny Bono song which had been a hit for Sonny and Cher, the album is a mosaic of music and voices incorporating the band’s capsule renderings of Mozart and Beethoven as well as ragtime, swing, Elvis and the Beatles, plus snatches of historic speeches from the archives: Roosevelt, Churchill, JFK and so on. Hugely ambitious, divided into four portentously announced “phases”,.it flopped for the simple reason that, as Stein tells Powell, there was nothing on it that could be played by AM radio, and the hip FM stations — happy to take a chance on the unorthodox — had yet to begin to exert their influence.

“We should have released The Beat Goes On eight albums down the line,” Stein says. He’s right. Although the subsequent studio albums still sound respectable, containing fine applications of their trademarked cover-version formula to “Season of the Witch” (on Renaissance) and “Shotgun” and “Some Velvet Morning” (on Near the Beginning), the band never regained the momentum established by their debut album and its hit single, “You Keep Me Hanging On”, which reached the US top 10 and the UK top 20.

For just over 50 quid, which is what I paid for it at Sister Ray in Soho, the box set is excellent value. I’m particularly glad to have the confirmation of their quality as a live band from a concert in which they performed “Like a Rolling Stone” as well as their established favourites to a hallucinogenically enhanced Fillmore West audience celebrating the arrival of 1969. “That was an incredible night,” Stein says. “The whole place was tripping out.”

And they’re still touring, with Stein, Martell and Appice joined by Pete Bremy, replacing Bogert, who died three years ago. If they came this way again, I’d go to see them, if only to witness Stein flinging his arm high as “She’s Not There” or “Bang Bang” reach their many climaxes. Vanilla Fudge did just one thing, really, but it was worth doing and they did it brilliantly.

* Vanilla Fudge’s Where Is My Mind? The Atco Recordings 1967-69 is released on Esoteric Recordings via Cherry Red.

Nov 15

11 Comments

Rougher and rowdier (take 2)

So many people told me how much they’d loved the first of Bob Dylan’s three nights in London this week that, having written a rather grumpy response to his performance in Nottingham last Friday, I went on the secondary market to buy tickets for the third and final night, also the last show of the 2023-24 edition of the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour.

The most telling words came in an email from the historian David Kynaston, who expressed “a powerful sense of gratitude that here I was seeing him at the Albert Hall in 2024, some 55 years after he’d been a speck in the distance at the Isle of Wight, and with all sorts of thoughts about the intervening years – the ups and downs of his different phases, how they rhymed or didn’t rhyme with my own life, his constant presence in one’s interior landscape – coursing through my mind.”

His constant presence in one’s interior landscape. That did it for me. And because I thought it might help give me a different perspective, this time I left my notebook and pen at home, setting aside the working habit of a lifetime.

Buying those tickets turned out to be the year’s best decision. In the warm and dignified surroundings of the Albert Hall, almost everything I found frustrating about the Nottingham show, rooted in a sonic harshness, was smoothed away. The sound was perfect, the vocals were clear and perfectly balanced against the instruments, Dylan’s piano-playing was always relevant to the song, he made each note of every harmonica solo count, and in the moody lighting of those old tungsten lamps the musicians clustered around him as if they were playing together in someone’s front room.

One thing he does is allow the audience to see the music’s working processes. Nowadays he has a set-list that seldom varies, but last night there was an unusually strong sensation of being invited in to watch and hear decisions being made on the fly, in the moment.

At times it had the delicacy of chamber music. “Key West” — a song whose setting he’s played around with throughout the tour — was particularly exquisite in that respect. So was “Mother of Muses”. The new arrangements of “All Along the Watchtower” and “Desolation Row” came into much clearer focus. The music ebbed and flowed with freshness and grace. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” and “False Prophet” located the Chicago blues sound so fundamental to Dylan’s feelings about how a band should be organised. The spare treatment of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” was heartstopping. The closing “Every Grain of Sand” was a serene benediction.

Without his refusal to be consistent or predictable, he wouldn’t be what he is. But last night he drew us in, and I think most people there would have felt unusually close to him. If I really was seeing him for the last time, it ended with seeing him at his best.

Nov 9

11 Comments

Rougher and rowdier (take 1)

Almost as soon as Bob Dylan and his musicians emerged on to the half-darkened stage of the Motorpoint Arena last night, a jangle of discordant electric guitars made me uneasy. It turned out that the discordance was chiefly coming from the guitar of Dylan himself, who was already sitting at his piano bench, with his back turned to the audience. Within a few seconds that jangle had somehow formed itself into the opening of “All Along the Watchtower”, the first of the 17 songs — nine of them from Rough and Rowdy Ways — he’d give us.

For me, it was a strange concert from several perspectives. It was certainly far from the poised, concentrated, finely detailed performance he’d presented at the same venue in Nottingham two years earlier, which had been a measurable level up even from the two fine shows I’d seen him give at the London Palladium a week before that. Quite often I found myself thinking we were back in the ’90s, when the thing I seemed to say most frequently after one of his concerts, while defending him to sceptics, was, “Well, they’re his songs, he can do what he likes with them.”

Another early warning sign: he repeated the first verse of “Watchtower”, meaning that the song no longer ended with “Two riders were approaching / The wind began to howl” — among the most effective closing lines in popular music — but with “None of us along the line / Know what any of it is worth.” I have no better idea of why he’d choose to do that than of why he’d rearrange a full-band version of “Desolation Row” to the galloping tom-tom beat of “Johnny, Remember Me” or decide to extend the same song with a meaningless piano solo.

The sound was much worse than two years earlier in the same hall. It was louder and harsher, and yet somehow less powerful, and with a much more distracting echo on the voice. Sometimes I flinched involuntarily when he put exaggerated emphasis on a particular syllable, as he so often does. The harmonica, which appeared on several songs, had mislaid its customary poignancy and what he played on it was, unusually, not particularly interesting, even on the closing “Every Grain of Sand”.

His current modus operandi is to start many songs — “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”, for instance — standing near the back of the stage, singing into a handheld microphone. After a verse or two he advances to the baby grand piano, leans over it, and sings another verse or two, reading from the book of lyrics resting on top of the instrument. So far, so good. But then he sits down and clogs up the music by adding his wilful and often wayward piano-playing to the guitar interplay of Bob Britt and Doug Lancio. There’s no finesse in his keyboard contribution this time round, which is another contrast with 2022. It’s a form of interference, which of course may be what he’s after.

“My Own Version of You” closed with a chaotic ending that suggested that this was the first time they’d played it, rather than the two-hundred-and-twenty-somethingth. “To Be Alone With You” was such a mess that I couldn’t help thinking, “What on earth does he imagine he’s doing?” The drumming of “the great Jim Keltner” — as Dylan quite justifiably introduced him — never seemed as well integrated into the band as that of his precedessor in 2022, Charley Drayton, or George Receli from further back.

During the boogie of “Watching the River Flow” it was tempting to conclude rather irritably that the Shadow Blasters, Dylan’s first band, probably sounded better doing something similar at the Hibbing High School talent contest in 1957. For the first time in 59 years of going to see him on a fairly regular basis, I felt that I could have left my seat, gone to buy a beer, and returned without having missed anything important.

Of course that’s not true. There were moments of grace, mostly when the instrumentation was reduced to voice and piano, as in “Key West”, or voice and guitars, as in “Mother of Muses”. The first two verses of “Made Up My Mind” were lovely, as were the out of tempo bits of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, delivered against Tony Garnier’s bowed bass. By the time Dylan got to “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”, the penultimate item on the set list, he was singing beautifully, with clarity and marvellous timing.

Every time you see him now, you think it might be the last. So this one wasn’t great. But that doesn’t really matter, even if there aren’t any more. Time past, time present: lucky to have it at all, all of it.

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »