Andrew Marvell once wrote, “How vainly men themselves amaze/ To win the palm, the oak, or bays.” Way back in the 17th Century, Marvell mocked our craving for trinkets of recognition. That poets knew about the masturbatory pointlessness of awards centuries before it was possible to listen to Christopher Cross speaks to their awesome powers of insight.
But even an awards skeptic would have to be impressed by the nominees in the Album of the Year Category at the 27th Grammy Awards, held all the way back in 1985. The Album of the Year is usually a blah category even by Grammy standards, but for one magic year it was almost completely filled with albums that remain listenable decades later.
Take, for instance, Tina Turner’s Private Dancer. The Grammys have always loved to gin up a comeback narrative, but this is a rare case where the comeback album is good enough that people at Tina Turner shows in 1985 would have wanted to hear the new stuff. Private Dancer isn’t all-killer, no-filler, and “What’s Love Got to Do with It” is a little slower and less interesting than I remembered, but honestly, it doesn’t matter. When Turner hits the chorus she tears a hole through the damn thing, and reminds us that she, unlike everyone else on Earth, is Tina Turner. It would have been a perfectly acceptable winner, particularly relative to the history of the award.
Even bigger on the radio that year was Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA. There is obviously a fair amount of silliness here--”Glory Days” could profitably be cut by 2 minutes or possibly altogether, there’s synths on top of synths layered with synths, and Bruce and Courtney Cox set back the art of dance by fifteen years. But if you’re inclined to like Springsteen even a little, you’re likely to enjoy everything here, and it’s hard to imagine an album better constructed to play to the top row at the Meadowlands. There have only been a few times in pop history when music this white and this popular was also this good. All these years later, I’m still surprised it didn’t win.
Perhaps an even better pop assemblage was Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual. I’ve given it a few spins in recent weeks to refresh my memory, and side one is perfect--three heartbreak songs, each with a different approach to the theme, balanced against an explosion of pure joy (“Money Changes Everything”; “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”; “When You Were Mine”; “Time After Time”). Lauper delivers them in her trademark combination of New Wave theatricality, food court populism, and Northeastern girl group attitude. If I had a time machine which could be used only for the purpose of casting a ballot for the 1985 Grammys (“do not pass Go; do not kill baby Hitler”), it would pain me not to vote for She’s So Unusual. It’s still such a fun record.
But alas, I can’t cast a hypothetical vote for Lauper, because once upon a time a man named Prince glided across the earth. Purple Rain contains a killer opening track (“Let’s Go Crazy”), an epic closing track (“Purple Rain”), one of the greatest pop songs of all time (“When Doves Cry”), and the song that inspired Tipper Gore to found the PMRC (“Darling Nikki”). “When Doves Cry” somehow didn’t get nominated for Song of the Year, but that’s only a minor snub, because it should have earned Prince the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Purple Rain isn’t the consensus best Prince album, but that’s the nature of the Grammys (of the three people mentioned above, only Lauper was at her creative peak). Purple Rain is Prince at his most colossal. At every single moment he’s going for it. If awards are to be given to rock albums, surely this--almost entirely reaching the crazy ambition to write a genre-spanning album that is both deeply personal and yet somehow also aimed at everyone--is the thing to be crowned.
This summer, I watched the Springfield, MO music documentary The Center of Nowhere, which was a lovingly-made
bit of boosterism that included some genuinely cool interviews and historical
footage. It was pleasant, if a bit sad, to watch it in a year when I can’t get
back to Springfield for the usual occasions. I found after watching the film that
I was immediately assembling my own list of my favorite songs by Springfield
bands. And so, after a few months of hemming, hawing, and typing, I have
assembled a list of my ten favorite songs of Springfield, MO.It would be much more fun to drive down to
the Ozarks, catch up with friends, and argue about this stuff over a whiskey or
four, but I guess a blog post will have to do for now.
The number of years since I moved away from Springfield at
age 18 far exceeds the number of years that I lived there when I was growing up.
Listening to music from the Ozarks has long been a way to feel connected to a
place that still means a lot to me, even if that place seems to the rest of the
world like a backwater.
I hope that the following list will be taken in the spirit
intended, which is as one music fan’s love letter to the town where
he grew up. I have no more authority than anyone else to make such a list, and
far less authority than some people. So think of it as a mixtape as much as a
ranking. And I always scribbled way too many liner notes on mixtapes.
Okay, some caveats and clarifications:
*I make no claims to this list being definitive. If you care
about Springfield music, your mileage will almost certainly vary, and that’s a
wonderful thing.
*I’ve listened to a lot of stuff from Springfield over the
years, but as I said, I haven’t actually lived there full-time since 1995. So I
don’t necessarily know all the new bands, and what I do know is inflected by the
recommendations of friends. Brett Miller and Jenny Edwards in particular have
pointed me to a lot of good stuff, though neither of them bear any blame for my
deficiencies of taste.
*There’s obviously the question of how to define “songs of
Springfield.” I’m defining it to mean songs written and performed by artists
associated primarily or exclusively with Springfield or its immediate environs.
There are obviously other ways one could do this. A list of nationally known
artists who spent some small portion of their career performing or recording in
Springfield might lean heavily to Brenda Lee, the Carter Family, or Robbie
Fulks; a list of songs written by Springfieldians but made famous by national
artists would give you “Danger Zone,” “The Letter,” and “Always on My Mind.”
But my list is about songs that are of, by, and to a great extent for
Springfieldians.
*I am the age I am, and like anyone I’m partial to the music
of my teens and twenties. In my case, this means the 90’s and 00’s. I also have
my own genre preferences. I particularly enjoy Americana performed by
smartasses and indie rock performed by dorks. I like hooks. I mistrust
virtuosity. All of that is reflected here.
*This is a Springfield list. Not a 417 list. There’s no
Branson. No Knobbers. No Shojis. Anything located within five miles of a
fucking wax museum is out. That said, I did consider including the “Fire in the Hole” theme song.
*Okay, that’s enough throat-clearing. Here’s my list: The EG
Revue’s Ten Favorite Songs of Springfield, MO.
Everything else I’m putting on this list is at least ten
years old. I really like both of these songs, but I haven’t yet had the chance to
burn out on them and then come back later, which is always the biggest test.
So, they get placed in a #10 tie, which will probably strike me as far too low
or high a few years from now.
Izabel Crane on “Spring Fed River” continues the long tradition
of Springfield artists revisiting gospel in other genres. It’s a baptism song
of a sort, but a decidedly secular one. I could imagine Isabel Crane gaining an
audience beyond Springfield. Certainly anyone who likes Gillian Welch ought to give this a listen.
Dragon Inn 3’s Double
Line is one of my favorite albums of the last couple years. Philip Dickey
of Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin near-fame (more on them later) went
out and recruited a band of vocal ringers, and they recorded some synthed-out Crockett-and-Tubbs
jams. “Bad Boy” is the best thing the 1980’s have given to Springfield since
Charlie Spoonhour.
It’s possible that Matt Netzer, who sings on this one, is a
good enough friend that I should exclude Honky Tonk Chateau from consideration.
But on the other hand, this song’s great, so I’m rolling with it. Also, I
didn’t really know Matt yet when this album came out, so I first experienced it
as “a thing I bought at CD Warehouse”[1]
rather than “a thing I bought at my friend’s album release show,” which seems
an important distinction.[2]
There was plenty of hard-driving grain belt rock coming out
of the Show-Me State right around the turn of the century, and this song is a
fine example of the form. I’m not entirely sure what the song is about beyond
“relationship troubles” and “driving,” but what other topics do you really
need?
The subtext of this list is whiteness. This is a very white
list of artists, and while some of that is due to the limitations of my own listening
interests, it is also a reflection of the fact that Springfield is one of the
whitest cities in the US. Springfield was 89 percent white in the 2010 census, and
remarkably enough, that means the city is much more diverse than it was when I grew
up there during the 80’s and 90’s. The musical genres to which Springfield has
made its biggest contributions reflect those demographics: country, rockabilly,
folk rock, roots rock, bluegrass, alt-country, indie. We haven’t made a dent on
the polka charts, but give it time.
Both of these songs are about white privilege and law
enforcement. In “No Sir,” Big Smith’s Mark Bilyeu writes about an anxious
traffic stop in Oklahoma, where he definitely doesn’t want his car searched.
But in the end, he doesn’t have much to worry about. The fact of the matter is
that “The only words in Spanish/ On Highway 44/ Say ‘Checkpoint straight
ahead’/ So you know who they’re lookin’ for.” The young white protagonist is
able to “wriggle through the net” of the justice system, free to pursue a
career performing hillbilly music, well-aware that people who don’t look like him
might not have fared so well.
The Skeletons are even more blunt in their rewrite of a
Leadbelly classic: “Thirty days in the workhouse,/ Don’t you shed no tears./ If
I’d been a black man/ They’d a’ give me thirty years.” It’s “don’t you shed no
tears” that makes this one sting. Lou Whitney was willing to lean into unlikable
narrators, and it’s plenty revealing that the speaker assumes we would shed
tears for the slap on the wrist given to a white shitheel but not for the
thirty years given to a black man. The Skeletons tended to play this song with
a manic, unhinged intensity, whereas Big Smith’s take on the same basic topic
in “No Sir” is mournful. But perhaps manic and mournful is an appropriate set
of responses to an American reality that sits at the intersection of tragedy
and insanity.
6. Someone Still
Loves You Boris Yeltsin, “Sink/Let It Sway” (2010)
SSLYBY is my favorite Springfield band by a pretty wide
margin. They were attuned to the blog-rockin’ 00’s in a way that gave them a
small-but-devoted audience well beyond Missouri, but they’ve always sounded to
me like a band from the Ozarks in the same way that Big Star or REM or the Elephant
6 bands sound like they’re from the South. They don’t play it up, but it’s in
there.
“Sink/Let It Sway” is one of Yeltsin’s catchiest songs, and
a real showcase for what a great guitar sound they had. And while it’s true
that “Best Music Video from Springfield” is a fairly slim category, the Point Break tribute filmed for this song
is without rival.
I’ve always remembered this song as a fun little
quick-hitter of 90’s alterna-pop, but listening to stuff for this list, it
jumps out to me how much “He Fixes Things” sounds like the Skeletons: it’s got
driving growly guitars and tight drums, it’s hooky, it’s unafraid of being a
little silly, and it’s not a second longer than it needs to be.[3]
Much of the best music out of Springfield has been willing to indulge in not
just humor but corniness (Springfield ain’t Branson, but it ain’t far from
Branson). “He fixes things but he broke my heart” seems at first glance like it
ought to be the chorus of an AM country song, but it works delightfully as a
90’s rock song.
This song always reminds me of that era when downtown was
nothing but Nonna’s, the antique stores, the DMV, and the weirdos. Every time I
get back to Springfield, it seems more and more impossible that such a time
ever existed.
It’s fun to imagine the reaction of some University Heights
father walking past his daughter’s room, just a few months before she graduates
as part of Parkview’s first senior class, and overhearing her listen to this growly
rockabilly record. “Linda,” declares the paterfamilias, “if this boy takes
these kinds of liberties with English grammar, what other liberties might he
take?”
I hope Linda was done being grounded in time to join her
fellow Lassies at the sock hop.
“Bop-a-Lena” was a bigger hit for Self (and “I’m Sorry,”
which he wrote for Brenda Lee, was a way
bigger hit), but to these ears, “Ain’t I’m a Dog” is the A-side.
Alright, time for some honesty that might anger some
Springfieldians: I kinda hate the Daredevils. “If You Wanna Get to Heaven” is
boring. “It’ll Shine When It Shines” is saccharine. “Chicken Train” makes me
want to go full Belushi on a mouth harp.
But then there’s “Jackie Blue.”
“Jackie Blue” is so good, y’all. “Jackie Blue” sounds like
someone raised on Ozarks church music discovering cocaine, malaise, and women
who like cocaine.[4] No
matter how good your stereo is, “Jackie Blue” always sounds like a tinny
speaker nailed to a utility pole at Hydra-Slide. It sounds like denim cutoffs
and root beer at the Fair. It sounds like a lifeguard at Fassnight Pool who’s
more worried about her tan than her job.
As far as radio airplay is concerned, this is the biggest rock
song ever recorded by a Springfield band. And so the Daredevils’ smoothest
contribution to the freaky 70’s lands at #3 on this list, which was also its
peak position on the Billboard Hot 100.
2. Someone Still Loves
You Boris Yeltsin, “Think I Wanna Die” (2008)
Back when SSLYBY still played shows it seemed like the crowd
mostly got excited about the more anthemic stuff, but for me “Think I Wanna
Die” is their greatest hit. Lyrically, it has quite a bit of fun wearing a
Morrissey mask. Musically, it’s a sidewinder—it spins and darts and hesitates
and builds, hooky as hell the whole time.
The line where they apologize for being twee cracks me up. Most
of the music on this list is more than a little chicken-fried, and when SSLYBY
came along one of the many delightful things about them was that they were
perfectly willing to be the least dangerous band in Springfield. Which in this
case extends not just to being twee, but apologizing for it.
Springfield is the birthplace of Route 66. That isn’t a
marketing slogan, by the way. It is literally true that some guys sat down in a
hotel in Springfield in the 1920’s to select a number for the Chicago-to-LA
highway. And so, the top song on this list almost has to be a car song.
“Trans-Am” is an upbeat song, but there’s also some darkness
here. The speaker longs for a Trans-Am, but does not actually have one. The
second verse is about the shoddiness of American cars, and the third is about
registering for the draft, which adds a note of urgency to what is ultimately a
carpe diem song.“Ride around while you
still can,” we are told by a band called The Skeletons. And how do you say
carpe diem in the Queen City of the Ozarks' English? By emphasizing“car,” of course.
Everybody now: T-R-A-N-S-A-M!!!
[1] It
was disc #20510 in the CD Warehouse file cabinet, per the “Disc at Counter” sticker
I still have on my copy.
[2]
Speaking of things your friends made, thanks for reading this blog!
[3] Skeletons
frontman Lou Whitney has an engineering credit on the album. Of course, he
probably has an engineering credit on like 70 percent of the rock albums made
in Springfield from 1980 to 2010.
[4] I
should note that I have no proof of what substances the Daredevils were
actually into. On the other hand, they were a popular rock band in the 70’s. I
just opened to a random page in Supe Granda’s autobiography (which actually
exists) where he talks about touring with The Steve Miller Band and The Flying
Burrito Brothers. On the next page I turned to he talks about transporting “fresh
green buds” direct from a farm in the Ozarks to the A&R Department of his
record label. I’m done researching.
This is the first of a series of essays discussing things I have actually liked about the year 2020.
Back on April 8, I took a walk on an eerily quiet night, and
then I wrote the following:
In years to come, there will be poems and movies and novels
and songs about these weeks, but if they don’t at some point try to evoke that
silence, they won’t be capturing the truth of this moment, which has not
shocked us with explosions or rubble, but has pressed down like a smothering
pillow.
It’s tempting in reading that to wish that I’d cut
everything after “moment,” since violence and anger became the news of the
day just a few weeks later. But I think I was right that the heavy silence of
early April is as much a part of the truth of this year as the incendiary
summer and ominous autumn that will probably dominate historical memory.
Surprisingly, though, it took only eight days for me to hear
a new song that answered my hope for something that would “evoke that silence.”
The Mountain Goats’ album Songs for Pierre Chuvin, which came out in
mid-April, is a big deal if you happen to be a fan of John Darnielle, who effectively
is the band. For the first several years of the Mountain Goats’ existence, Darnielle
recorded all of his material solo on a Panasonic boombox, culminating in the
2002 lo-fi masterpiece All Hail West
Texas. After that album, though, the boombox got put away and Darnielle
began recording with a full band. Plenty of the full-band material is good, and
a little of it is great, but if you got into Darnielle’s songwriting through
the scratchy, warts-and-all sound of those early albums, the Mountain Goats
with a rhythm section and studio engineers wasn’t quite the same, even if
Darnielle’s major themes remained constant: hope despitesadness; troubledgrubbyteenagers; spectacularlyfailed marriages; everydaybeauty.
Like the rest of us, Darnielle had to stay home beginning in
mid-March, and he used this as an opportunity to get out the old boombox. He wrote
and recorded a song a day based on a book by the French historian Pierre
Chuvin called A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, which according to its blurb at Harvard University Press is “a history of the triumph of Christianity in the Roman
Empire as told from the perspective of the defeated: the adherents of the
mysteries, cults, and philosophies that dominated Greco-Roman culture.”
Honestly, that’s about all you need to know to get the gist of the album. I’m sure
there are nuances you could pick up by reading the book, but a couplet like “Me and my pagan crew/ We will deal with you,” or, in a very different register,
“Return the peace you took from me/ Give me back my community” pretty well
speaks for itself.
So, yeah, it’s a concept album. Moreover it’s a concept
album about the last of the ancient Roman pagans. If this sounds Rush-level
dorky it probably is, but Darnielle is able to use this concept to create
something remarkably moving. These are small songs about enormous loss. They
are quiet, meditative, and almost reticent in their accounts of state-sponsored
violence being used to stifle a culture of inestimable richness. They are songs
about powerful Christians ruining everything. They make a lot of sense in 2020.
My favorite song on the album, which is also my favorite
song I’ve heard anywhere this year, is the closer “Exegetic Chains.”[1]
“Favorite” isn’t exactly the right word—it’s more that I haven’t heard another
song that does a better job of sounding the way that 2020 feels. It is muffled
and repetitive, centered on a few spare chords. There’s a lot of “space” in the
recording, as they say. Darnielle singing is restrained, almost sotto voce, like he wants to make sure he’s
heard but not overheard.
The singing style fits the theme of hidden messages that
fills the verses. Darnielle sings about echoes of old myths you can find “in
the shadows on the ground beneath the trees”; secrets whispered in city
squares; or the warmth inside the “panasonic hum” of the song itself. The title
“Exegetic Chains” gives us some clue as to what he’s up to with all this cryptic
evocation of things cryptic, since exegesis is the act of critical
interpretation or explication—we’re being asked, in a sense, to parse mysteries.
But then there’s the second word in the title: what’s going
on with these “chains”? One the one hand, a chain can be a series of connected links,
even connected historical links, as in the European transition from paganism to
Christianity.But chains are also
restraints. Indeed, in rock music, chains are almost never good things,
whether it be a “Chain Gang” or a “Chain of Fools” or “Battleship Chains” or
the chain that keeps Fleetwood Mac together.
Here’s what Darnielle does with the chain image in his
chorus:
Say your prayers to whomever you call out to in the night.
Keep the chains tight.
Make it through this year
If it kills us outright.
The line “keep the chains tight” comes right after a line
about saying your prayers in the night, in a spot where you would expect the
thing you hold tight to be a blanket or a loved one.
One way to read this is as violence or threat—presumably you would keep the
chains tight to control a prisoner, which is jarring in a song that
otherwise feels a bit ethereal. It could also be read as a directive to “keep
it together,” whether metaphorically as in keeping a family or community linked
together or literally as in keeping a mechanism or tool functioning.
Then the last two lines of the chorus are a tip of the cap
to Mountain Goats fans. Darnielle alludes to one of the band’s most popular songs, the
rousing sing-along “This Year,” which is basically “I Won’t Back Down” for white Gen Xers with literature degrees. In that song, written fifteen years ago, the
chorus is joyously defiant: “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.” Last
summer, when I was in a good deal of pain and taking more vicodin than would be
ideal, I listened to “This Year” a lot. But fast-forward to 2020, and in
“Exegetic Chains” the same words slightly rearranged read more as stoic than joyous, and
more cognizant of the possibility of absolute defeat.
“Exegetic Chains” is a song about fear, loneliness, and watching
an era end in calamity, which is as relevant to the 21st century as it was to the 5th.
But in the last line of the last verse, the speaker says that he is “headed
somewhere better if I have to crawl there on all fours.” Here’s hoping.
[1]
That title, to be sure, transcends Rush-level dorkiness to achieve Yes-level
dorkiness. Nevertheless, the song works.
A couple years ago, alt-country stalwart Robbie Fulks
announced that he was going to release a track-for-track cover of Bob Dylan’s
1978 album Street Legal. My immediate
reaction was: “But Street Legal
sucks. Its songs are rambling and pointless. It kicks off Dylan’s infamous lost
decade(s). It sucks.” Then I thought for a moment, looked up the track listing,
and realized that I had never actually listened to Street Legal. I’d heard a couple songs here and there, but I’d read
of the terribleness of the album so many times that I’d never bothered to
listen to the whole thing.
And seriously, critics savaged Street Legal. Robert Christgau, in a C+ Village Voice review, wrote “This divorcee sounds overripe, too in love with his own self-generated misery to break through the leaden tempos that oppress his melodies, devoid not just of humor but of lightness--unless, that is, he intends his Neil Diamond masquerade as a joke." Meanwhile, over in Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus was even
nastier, saying of the song “Is Your Love in Vain?” that “The man speaks to the woman like a sultan
checking out a promising servant girl for VD, and his tone is enough to make
her fake the pox if that’s what it takes to get away clean.” Also delightful is
this bit of faint praise from Marcus: “While most of the singing on Street
Legal...falls short of creepiness, it’s simply impossible to pay attention
to it for more than a couple of minutes at a time.” Indeed, Marcus’ review is
so scathing that Jann Wenner, who never encountered a celebrity ass he could leave
unkissed, issued a corrective positive review a month later.[1]
Listening to Street
Legal now, those reviews seem a bit harsh. I don’t think anyone would
mistake it for a top-shelf Dylan album, and if you’ve never delved into Dylan
this sure as shit isn’t the place to start. But it’s honestly pretty good. He
makes you wade through the whole thing to get to the best two songs, but the
penultimate “We Better Talk This Over” would be a solid Drive-By Truckers album
cut, and the closer “Where Are You Tonight (Journey Through Dark Heat)” is
almost good enough to justify its ridiculous title. Certainly it’s
quintessential Dylan: the organ cascades; there are some great turns of phrase;
and Bob sings like he decided to give a shit that day. What else you want? And
there is plenty of enjoyable stuff elsewhere on the album. “Changing of the
Guards” is a much better impersonation of mid-60’s Dylan than most performers
ever achieve; “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” is one of the more successful of
Dylan’s various attempts over the years at frontier atmospherics; and on “True
Love Tends to Forget” he tries to sound like Van Morrison, and it isn’t nearly
the disaster that it should be.
That said, it isn’t hard to hear what Christgau and Marcus
were reacting against. The album is very, very busy. Virtually every track
slathers on horns, keyboards, noodly guitar solos, and choruses of bluesy
ladies upon choruses of bluesy ladies. Jeremy Winograd claims that a big part
of the problem was that the mix on the original Street Legal vinyl pressing was incredibly muddy, and assuming that
he’s right, I can see how that would wreck the whole thing—on a twenty-first
century digital remaster, the band sounds pretty tight, and there’s a lot of
band to hear, so I’d hate to lose that.[2]
Even when it sounds good, though, Street Legal has some core issues with lyrical silliness that a
remaster isn’t going to fix. On “No Time to Think,” a substantial portion of
the lyrics boil down to everyone in the studio singing nouns as loudly as they
possibly can. “China Doll!/ Alcohol!/ Duality!/ Mortality!” A winner of the
Nobel Prize for Literature wrote that shit. Also, he wrote “Socialism!/
Hypnotism!/ Patriotism!/ Materialism!” I can keep going if you’d like, because
Dylan kept going for eight minutes and twenty seconds. There’s also a lot of
tortured feminine rhyme (e.g., “travel on” rhymed with “Babylon”—woof), and the
rhyme schemes tend to be a tad fussy by rock standards (there’s a lot of
aabccb). It was 1978, the triumphant moment of punk’s minimalist reaction to
the bloat of corporate rock, and here comes Dylan with a dog-eared rhyming dictionary
and a 27-piece band. It’s no wonder Christgau and Marcus hated it.
*****
Given the album’s less-than-stellar critical and popular
legacy, Robbie Fulks’ decision to cover the entirety of Street Legal in a vinyl-only limited edition produced by Steve
Albini can only be construed as a passion project of absolute and possibly
ludicrous purity. It is one of the more uncareerist moves of an uncareerist
career, which has, since the mid-90’s, moved from a honky-tonk phase to a
countrypolitan phase to an austere folk phase. The “Oh Brother” phase a picker
as accomplished as Fulks could have embraced around 2001 was decidedly
eschewed, as he instead put out a self-released album of
frequently-keyboard-driven narrative experiments called Couples in Trouble (which alienated many of his several fans, and
is also, by the way, goddamn brilliant). Fulks has acquired a small group of
very devoted listeners, and doesn’t seem to be adding many more—when he plays
KC, it’s always the same 2/3-filled indoor Knuckleheads space, and I’m pretty
sure it’s always the same people (it appears he’s playing there June 18, btw,
so if anyone wants to hang out that night, that’s where I’ll be). The Venn
diagram overlap of “Robbie Fulks die-hards” and “people who are down for some late-70’s
Dylan” is no doubt a small group of bookish white midwesterners with
indifferent hair. We should stage a meet-up in a conference room at a Days Inn
outside St. Louis sometime—it would probably be fun.
It’s interesting to compare Fulks’ Street Legal cover album (which is called 16—more on that later) with the recent Old Crow Medicine Show cover
of Blonde on Blonde (which is called 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde, which is
what you’d call it if you wanted someone to buy it). The Old Crow album, to be
clear, is good. It’s a group of talented Americana musicians covering the
arguably-greatest album of rock’s probably-greatest songwriter, and they take
the task seriously and have a lot of fun with it. It’s also a very savvy move:
Old Crow is from Nashville, Dylan recorded Blonde
on Blonde in Nashville, and there’s a lot of new yuppie money running
around Nashville, so why not book the Ryman and scoop up some of that sweet
nostalgia cheddar?
Fulks’ 16 is a
considerably weirder record, and is perhaps inevitably less fun, inasmuch as nothing
on Street Legal is a cover-band layup
like “Rainy Day Women” or “Absolutely Sweet Marie.” But the Fulks album is much
more interesting, and not just because of the degree of difficulty. The opener,
“Changing of the Guards,” is one of the most beautiful, restrained recordings
of Fulks’ career, as Dylan’s horns and backup singers are replaced with an incredibly spare
arrangement. Making Dylan’s lyrics easier to
understand is arguably not to the song’s benefit—it seems to be about exotic
bazaars and virgin sacrifices or something? I don’t have the patience to go the
full Christopher Ricks on it, but Fulks’ recording is so pretty that
it doesn’t really matter.
Another highlight on 16
is “Baby, Stop Crying,” which was one of the songs most frequently
lambasted in the 1978 reviews of Street
Legal. The key difference is that Fulks is capable of delivering the line
“Baby, please stop crying” in a way that sounds like he cares about the
addressee and would like to help them be less sad, whereas when Dylan sings it,
he just sounds annoyed that someone is bothering him with their stupid fucking
feelings.[3]
Or, to be less harsh, Dylan wrote an excellent blue-eyed-soul song that he is
not well-suited to as a singer, but it happens to be right in Fulks’
wheelhouse. It’s not like it’s the first time a cover of a Dylan song has
trumped the original.
Fulks gets weirder elsewhere, notably on “Where Are You
Tonight,” but for the most part he tilts toward arrangements that are either
stripped to meditative quiet, or built on larger ensembles that owe a fair
amount to the originals. The quiet ones are definitely the highlights—they mine
something out of the songs that Dylan didn’t, and they’re also the most in line
with what Fulks’ own best material has sounded like over the past decade.
******
Fulks calls his album 16,
which on its face is kind of odd, though there are a couple interpretations
that come to mind. The first word of the first song on Street Legal is “sixteen,” so it could be that simple. More
significantly, Fulks was fifteen when Street
Legal came out, which means that he may well have been sixteen when he
really got to know it, or, if you want to get technical, Street Legal came out in Fulks’ sixteenth year.
On the back of the album sleeve for 16, Fulks writes the following about his listening habits in the
Seventies:
I had an intense relationship
with the records. Like a lot of teenagers, I’d save my money, travel a great
distance to a store that had perhaps 2000 records, choose a couple, and go home
and play them until memorized. Scarcity and mystery...and the artists played
into them. Certain ones seemed to invite you to connect with them, spiritually.
They adopted interesting masks; their recordings were replete with quirks,
mistakes, eccentricities, holes you could fill in yourself. Eventually, you
owned the music, since you were one of its creators.
That’s lovely. I think I understand what Fulks is getting
at, or at least I can remember that kind of intensive relationship to works of
art, which admittedly in my case was the relationship of an eventual scholar
and critic rather than an eventual artist. Still, obsessive attention is
obsessive attention.
By the time I was a teenager in the early Nineties, the
economics of music listening had not changed much. CD’s were the coin of the
realm rather than vinyl, but that just meant that the local record store maybe
had 4,000 of them rather than 2,000. You still had to save up, and the decision
to buy something was still fraught with risk. You went home and dug deep into
the weirdness of whatever you bought, because the alternative was leaving your
room. My own Street Legal—which is to
say a middling album by a great artist that I swam into neck deep—was Lou
Reed’s Magic and Loss, which happened
to come out when I was fifteen. This is not one of the Lou Reed albums esteemed
by history. Allmusic.com’s ratings put it well outside Reed’s top ten, as does
the Rolling Stone Album Guide, andChristgau’s review consists entirely of
a frowny-face emoji (and this at least a decade before Americans used the word
“emoji”). However, I had picked up the idea from somewhere that an aspiring
rock snob should know of Lou Reed, and Magic
and Loss was the album that was on sale at the Best Buy in Springfield in
1992, so I grabbed a copy.
And the thing is, when you’re fifteen and growing up on a
tree-lined street in southern Missouri, even mediocre Lou Reed sounds like it’s
being beamed in from another planet. It sounds like mean streets and weird
nights and big feelings shrugged off with a snarl of casual irony. Even Magic and Loss—an album that deals
mostly with chemotherapy—sounds like that if you never happen to have heard Transformer. So I think I get where
Fulks is coming from in his fixation on a Dylan album that you could only be
obsessed with if it entered your life at the ideal moment for such obsessions.
At the very least, I know what it’s like to be a hick teenager unaware of his
own drawl parsing the musical ramblings of a middle-aged northern Jew in an
attempt to figure out whatever the big something was that I very much suspected
they weren’t telling me about in school.
Thankfully, sixteen isn’t the last time a person can have a
musical revelation. There were many more to come for me, including the time in
college when I went to an alt-country festival primarily to see the Old 97’s
but stumbled upon a set performed by a gangly, verbose, Buck Owens-obsessed
smartass and thought, “This, apparently, is the thing for which I did not know
I had been waiting.” It’s wild to think that at this point I’ve been listening
to Robbie Fulks for more than half my life. He and I don’t seem all that old,
at least not to me, but there you have it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that
Fulks is my favorite singer/songwriter of the last 25 years (though he’s up
there), but he is the only singer/songwriter I can think of who has gone that
long without ever boring me. And being interesting for 25 years is a hell of an
accomplishment.
The Twentybens: Ben Celebrates the Best of the 2010's
Big Thief’s “Shark Smile” participates in a specific,
venerable tradition of alternative/college/indie/art-rock: the rambling,
incongruous, discordant, and even borderline off-putting instrumental intro
that precedes a catchy or even “pop” song recorded by artists who otherwise
courted an identity as “edgy” or “innovative.” “Sweet Jane”; “100%”; “Star Sign”;
“Cannonball”; “Texas Never Whispers”; “Corona”. That’s a killer mixtape right
there if you happen to dig the music of well-read white people who dress
poorly.
Now, obviously, there are differences of degree and even
kind in that list. The “Corona” intro is a quick hit of tension that releases
when the song kicks into gear. The intro to “Sweet Jane” is pleasantly boring.
The intro to “Star Sign” is unpleasantly boring at great length. And the intro
to “Texas Never Whispers” will cause you actual physical pain if you’re wearing
headphones. But in all of those cases, if you stick around, you get to hear one
of the catchier songs by the artist in question.
Perhaps this maneuver is done to signal seriousness—after all,
The Beatles never did rambling intros when they wanted to hold your hand, but once
they were serious artistes they couldn’t resist an occasional prelude. Or maybe bands just
want to punish the listener for having the audacity to skip right to the catchy
song.
The more recent example of Big Thief, though, makes me
consider another possibility specific to the streaming age, which is that the
discordant intro is a tactic to scare away any listener who would skip the song
after hearing the first five seconds on a Spotify playlist.[1]
A streaming service is certainly how I discovered this song—it’s really how I
discover any interesting music these days, since Brookside is not exactly the epicenter
of KC youth culture. Regardless, I’m glad I stuck around, because once “Shark
Smile” got past the intro, it sunk its teethinto
me as much as anything else I’ve heard this decade.[2]
At its core, it’s a lovers-in-a-car song. Closer inspection
of the lyrics reveals it to be a lovers-speeding-toward-death song which also
includes a vampire who might or might not be metaphorical. But I don’t know
that the lyrics matter much in their specifics beyond their ability to convey
in a few deft word-clouds the image of an object of desire flickering in the passing
headlights. The object of desire in this case seems to be someone named Evelyn.
She and the speaker are flooring it through the upper midwest. They smile; they
glance; they kiss; there’s a pile of money on the dashboard; there’s a wreck in
the final verse. Things lead, as they do, to a chorus, and that chorus, as in
any goodsongaboutdesire, is baldly straightforward: “She said oh baby take
me/ and I said oh baby take me too.” It isn’t Keats, but then again, Keats and
Fanny Brawne never drove around in a Nissan hatchback listening to Morrissey.
It’s a truism to say that rock music would never have
existed without sex, cars, death, sex in cars, death in cars, or sex and death
in cars.[3]
But most of the automotive-lust rock canon does a staggeringly poor job at conveying
the actual fraught hesitations and discomfiting upwellings of desire that
accompany the experience of being strongly attracted to someone who is sitting
next to you in the very small space of a vehicle. Meatloaf, Poison, Van Halen, Elastica,
R Kelly, Bob Seger—that’s a first pass at a sex-in-car rock canon, and while I like
several of those songs (even the Poison one!), and am morally appalled by a couple listed artists (not just R. Kelly!), there is not much effort in
those tracks to convey fraught hesitation. Springsteen at his very best can
pull it off—and Big Thief singer/songwriter Adrianne Lenker has mentioned Nebraskain particular as an influence
on “Shark Smile”—but Springsteen on Nebraska
is, in all the best ways, an outlier.
“Shark Smile” conveys lust and hesitation far more with its
instrumental tones than with its lyrics. The rhythm section in particular is
insistent but gentle all at once. A fairly strummy guitar asserts and then
withholds at various points before a more chaotic electric guitar line crescendos
to take the end of the song towards a concluding chaos that evokes, like any
tilting toward the sublime, lust and death inseparably. Lenker’s vocal
performance is by turns alien and caressing, whispery and growling. She has one
of those voices that is initially a bit off-putting in its lack of polish,
until she sinks her hooks in and suddenly the idea of listening to rock music
performed by a merely beautiful voice seems actively obscene. Put all the
elements of “Shark Smile” together, and it somehow sounds to this old guy’s
memory like being seventeen and driving around town, unsure of yourself and
overwhelmed by yourself, with no particular place to go.
The fatal conclusion of the song is a nice bit of
fragmentary melodrama. Bonnie and Clyde or Thelma and Louise come to mind, but
that doesn’t quite fit inasmuch as all four of those characters die, whereas the
narrator of “Shark Smile” seems to be alive to hear Evelyn’s last words (which
are, of course, the chorus). In this way, “Shark Smile” riffs on the much more
maudlin pop subgenre of songs about teen romance interrupted by vehicular
death, headlined by the likes of “Teen Angel” and “Last Kiss.” And say what you
will about “Teen Angel,” but it understands that teenage desire is so
terrifying, eruptive, overwhelming, and shameful that its enormity can only
find an objective correlative in the image of a sixteen-year-old girl getting
hit by a mother-fucking train.
I’ve thus far avoided dwelling on the fact
that “Shark Smile” is a song in which a woman sings about a woman, largely
because I didn’t want to come across as suggesting that the song’s apparent
queerness is what makes it interesting.[4]
Indeed, its queerness doesn’t make it
interesting, or at least it doesn’t make it novel—Tracy Chapman wrote a hit driving song thirty years ago. I also wanted to avoid getting all
male-gazey about it. But I will hazard that Lenker’s lyrical stew of same-sex
desire, outlaw imagery, and rural setting creates an air of reticence, stealth,
and even dread that is echoed in the steady drone of the guitar, and also in the
way that the framing dissonance of the song is at war with its catchiness.
At the end of the last sentence I talked myself into
liking the intro. What can I say? It’s a very good song. Perhaps the point of
close reading is to make ourselves like the things we don’t like about the
things we love.
[1] I
should note that Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker, who wrote the song, says that the
intro “foreshadow(s) the turmoil that happens in the song.” That’s clever, and
the part of me that believes that a rock song can be an urn well-wrought as any
Donne sonnet is willing to go there. However, the part of me that commutes to
Warrensburg usually wishes they’d just get to the first verse already. https://www.npr.org/2017/11/26/565921721/big-thiefs-shark-smile-is-a-rocking-road-song-ending-in-tragedy
[2]
One nice thing about blogging is that I don’t have to listen to the editor who
would rightly insist that I remove that pun.
[3] I
might be stretching the definition of “truism.”
[4]
All of this is assuming that “the speaker” of the song is a woman, which is by
no means a definitive reading.
10 x 10 x 10 x Ben: Ten Top 10's of the 2010's by Ben
Top Ten Years of the 2010’s
1. 2012
2. 2015
3. 2013
4. 2017
5. 2014
6. 2010
7. 2011
8. 2018
9. 2019
10. 2016
Top Ten Board Games
1. Terraforming Mars
2. Star Wars: Rebellion
3. Dice Throne
4. Spirit Island
5. Codenames
6. Pandemic: Legacy Season One
7. Mythic Battles: Pantheon
8. Scythe
9. City of the Big Shoulders: Chicago 1895
10. Tussie Mussie
Top Ten New Star Wars Characters
1. Jyn Erso
2. The Client
3. Poe Dameron
4. Kylo Ren
5. K-2SO
6. Rey
7. Cassian Andor
8. Finn
9. That Droid with Fleabag’s Voice
10. Maclunkey
Top Ten Kansas City Restaurants/Bars I Was Sad to See Close
1. Thomas
2. The Golden Ox
3. Plaza III
4. El Porton (the one that was way the hell out in JoCo)
5. Justus Drugstore
6. Crosstown Station
7. Holy Smoke BBQ
8. The Foundry
9. Boozefish
10. Fred P. Ott’s
Top Ten Toughest Losses by Sports Teams I Follow
1. Patriots 37 Chiefs 31 (OT) 1/20/19
2. Giants 3 Royals 2 10/29/14
3. Norfolk St. 86 Mizzou 84 3/17/12
4. Timbers 3 Sporting 2 11/29/18
5. Colts 45 Chiefs 441/4/14
6. Trinidad & Tobago 2 USA 110/10/17
7. Auburn 59 Mizzou 4212/7/13
8. Timbers 2 Sporting 2 (7-6 pks)10/29/15
9. Steelers 18 Chiefs 161/15/17
10. redacted 87 Mizzou 86 (OT) 2/25/12
Top Ten Courtney Barnett Songs
1. Elevator Operator
2. Avant-Gardener
3. Depreston
4. Pedestrian at Best
5. Charity
6. Debbie Downer
7. Three Packs a Day
8. Crippling Self-Doubt and a General Lack of Confidence
9. Everybody Here Hates You
10. Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party
Top Ten Most Popular Girl Names of the 2010’s Re-Ranked from
Best Name to Worst Name
1. Abigail
2. Emily
3. Mia
4. Isabella
5. Charlotte
6. Sophia
7. Olivia
8. Emma
9. Ava
10. Madison
Top Ten Concerts I Attended
1. Rex Hobart & the Misery Boys, impromptu memorial
concert for George Jones at Davey’s
2. Howard Iceberg Tribute at Crosstown Station
3. The Sawyers at Loose Mansion
4. Robbie Fulks at Knuckleheads when he was touring Upland Stories
5. Parquet Courts at The Granada
6. Sleater-Kinney at the Uptown
7. John Prine at the Midland
8. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin w/ The Grisly Hand
at old Record Bar
9. The Iron Question, the night they came to blows with the Davey’s
sound guy
10. Beck w/ Willie Nelson at the Starlight
Top Ten Mottos, Phrases, or Software Titles Deployed by the
University of Central Missouri That Could Also Be Names of Sci-Fi Robots or Slogans
of Dissident Political Groups
1. Choose Red
2. MOTR-CORE 42
3. S-RAM
4. TK-20
5. Opportunity in Action
6. Mo’s Maniacs
7. SLO
8. Curriculog
9. CHIDS
10. The Crossing
Top Ten Musical Numbers in Non-Musical TV Shows
1. “Misbehavin’” from The
Righteous Gemstones
2. The Hold Steady’s version of “The Bear and the Maiden
Fair” from Game of Thrones
3. “The Spirits of Christmas” from Bob’s Burgers
4. “Paper Boi” from Atlanta
5. Gale Boetticher’s cover of “Major Tom” on Breaking Bad
6. “Anything Goes in Florida” from Big Mouth
7. Work Hard or Die
Trying Girl from Bob’s Burgers
8. Cover of “The Never-Ending Story” from Stranger Things
9. “Make Bullying Kill Itself” from South Park
10. The Rock singing along to “Shake It Off” from Ballers
REM never put out a proper live album during the 1980’s or
1990’s, so while their deluxe album reissues of the past several years have
been transparent cash-grabs with a marketing bullseye fixed squarely on
forty-something white people, they have nevertheless filled the one obvious gap
in the band’s catalog by usually including an entire archival live show with
each album.[1]
The new Monster
re-release truly activates my nostalgia receptors, though, because the attached
25-song live disc was recorded a whopping six days after the one and only time
that I ever saw REM.
In late May of 1995, I was a couple weeks out of high
school. I remember it as an almost ludicrously idyllic summer, in spite of the
fact that I got mono at the end of it. I worked a couple shit jobs
(telemarketer; McDonald’s) but those were just way stations before I headed to college
in August. I was an REM fanboy dating a Cocteau Twins fangirl. I hung out with
a group of friends I’d mostly known since forever—the friend I met right after
the eighth grade was still “the new guy.” We played a lot of pool; we ate a lot
of junk food; we jostled for control of the stereo. We bantered and hoped that
any girls present would laugh. We developed a fascination with stealing traffic
cones. It still sticks in my head that all summer long, whenever I headed home
at some late warm quiet hour, if I happened to look up I would see Jupiter prominent
in the southern sky, silently watching as time flew off its spindle.
But for me, in 1995, the only pantheon that mattered was
Berry, Buck, Mills, and Stipe. REM simultaneously exploded and turtled in the
early 90’s, as they did not tour to support either of what turned out to be
their two biggest albums. My wife, who is a handful of years older than I am
(and who furthermore was a hip city girl rather than a lumbering hill person),
saw multiple REM shows while she was in high school in the late 80’s, but for
the 90’s kids who got roped in by “Losing My Religion,” there was some serious
pent-up demand for an REM tour. So my friends bought a bunch of tickets and we
plotted a road trip to Kansas City.
I know that the idea of car full of teenagers road-tripping
to a rock concert conjures images out of Dazed
and Confused, but that, I must report, was not us. Outside of some
low-grade vandalism, none of us ever got up to much in the way of hijinks. We
were excited to see opening act Sonic Youth, the band that played “Teenage
Riot,” but that was the extent of our interest in rioting. The only one of us
who hadn’t been on the debate team all the way through high school had played
Horace Vandergelder in the drama club’s production of Hello Dolly. We wouldn’t get deep into our particular token vices
(weed, whiskey, Criterion DVD’s, etc) until we got a bit older. And yes, we
were a pack of 18-year-old boys convinced of our own cleverness, so I’m sure we
were more than a little annoying—hell, we’re still pretty annoying—but we were
not exactly the “holy shit hide your daughters” brigade.
When I first gave it a listen a few weeks ago, I was not
quite prepared for how much the live disc on the Monster reissue would take me back to that night 24 years ago. I’m
also a bit surprised how well I remember the show (apparently my memory was
better before I started drinking). The show on the reissue is from Chicago, and
its setlist is pretty similar to the Kansas City show: the songs from Monster and the radio hits are all the
same, and then there’s some difference in the assortment of older non-singles.
“Try Not to Breathe” is what I remember as the
highlight of the KC show, stripped of its Automatic for the People stateliness in favor of Monster-era sturm-und-drang, so I was
bummed that it’s not on the Chicago set. But every other song I specifically
recall is here. Both sets opened with “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth,” because
once you’ve written the riff to “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth” why would you
open a show with anything else?
The disc on the reissue opens with three straight songs from
Monster, and you can tell that the
band is laser-focused on whatever glammed-out post-grunge demon-muse they were
chasing circa 1994. “Circus Envy”,which
I would not normally list as a favorite REM song, sounds absolutely amazing in
this live version. I’m not any kind of guitar gear nerd, so I have no idea what
Peter Buck is actually doing, but whatever it is, his guitar variously roars
and spits and sizzles while Michael Stipe growls and Mike Mills is, as he
always was, nothing less than one of the best harmony singers of the rock era.
The best stuff is by and large the deep cuts—certainly the
band seems more excited about playing them. “Country Feedback” is positioned
right after “Man on the Moon” to be the bathroom break dirge for all the
non-true-believers, but that doesn’t change the fact that it rules. It’s
followed by another excellent deep cut in “Monty Got a Raw Deal”, a song I
loved for years before I had any idea who Monty was or why he got a raw deal
(fwiw: Montgomery Clift; persecuted for his sexual orientation). When you’re a
teenager, though, you don’t really need to know why someone got a raw deal to
be able to dig a pissed-off rock song about it.
Also memorable is the version of “Orange Crush” included
here, which kicks all the ass on Earth. I need to check with Nick, but I
believe that is the correct musicological terminology.
Anyway, I remember that night in KC being a whale of a good
time. Sonic Youth opened and freaked out anyone who bought tickets because
they’d heard REM on the station that played Hootie. My friends and I bought
t-shirts in various shades of hideous early-90’s green that would soon be discontinued
as part of the Contract with America. We were well-centered in the
amphitheater, so the sound was good. I’d seen other shows before—Smashing
Pumpkins a year before was a notable highlight—but that was in Springfield
rather than KC, at a venue I associated primarily with the Sertoma Chili
Cook-Off, and Smashing Pumpkins weren’t REM. REM was the first time I’d seen a
concert with that many people, with that many lights, with that level of audio
equipment, and while it’s easy to dismiss all the trappings of a huge concert
as kinda hokey, there’s a reason people keep going. A few of my friends sat
down to protest the very existence of “Everybody Hurts,” and while I strongly
sympathize with that point of view, I couldn’t bring myself to openly
disrespect the band. They closed with “It’s the End of the World As We Know
It,” because once you’ve written the coda to that song why would you close a
show with anything else? We ate at Waffle House on the way home, as was the
custom at the time.
You know, of course, what happens next. My high school
friends and I all headed off to our various futures: new jobs, new schools, new
cities, new friends. We kept in touch, we fell out of touch, we got back in
touch, we meet up from time to time. REM, too, reached an ending that was also
a beginning—one more album with the original lineup, then Bill Berry left the
band, and their albums were never quite great anymore. At the same time, the
popular market for rock music turned to Limp Bizkit and Nickleback, the trends
in critic-approved music became less pastoral and rock-centric, and REM never
again mattered as much as they used to, to me or to the world. September, as
some old pop crooner once sang, was coming soon.
[1]
Fwiw, the live recordings I would most recommend are the ones attached to the Murmur, Green, and Monster
reissues.
