The C.A. Quintet: Trip Thru Hell (1968)

(Candy Floss [orig] / Sundazed [reissue])

RECOMMENDED

Undoubtedly one of the most bizarre discoveries that the psychedelic revival of the late '70s failed to uncover, this album is truly steeped in all of the extremeties of late '60s rock music, for better and worse. Alternately giddy, inspired, unlistenable, and boring, it comes off as a sort of Midwestern White Light / White Heat, proving like that album that San Francisco had no monopoly on testing the extremes of druggy, kitchen-sink pop & roll.

The band displays a sly self-confidence throughout the record that makes it easy to forget how fringe and amateur they were. Although the influence seeping in from California is obvious, they sound more contemporary than most of the psychedelic bands of the day (even giving an advance nod to indie with the cheerful "Underground Music"), from their goofily over-the-top album cover to the gothic gloom & doom of the individual songs, which are easily as bleak and intense as anything that Jim Morrison or Lou Reed were coming up with. The most apt comparison may be to Arthur Lee, whose often apocalyptic declarations and versatile, theatrical vocals come into play here, but one wonders if the C.A. Quintet had ever even heard Love (or the Velvets, for that matter).

The record opens with its worst cut, "part one" of the title track, a tiresome though studio-virtuostic instrumental that stretches on with meaningless menace for nine minutes. Things get more intriguing after that. Songs like "Cold Spider" and "Smooth as Silk" fuse the glee-club vocals of the Free Design and the jangle of the Byrds with incongrous horns and an unsettlingly ever-changing mood. A song like "Colorado Mourning" that opens with pretty distance becomes a (delightfully) wrenching dirge. The only missteps are the douchey and very 1968 guitar workouts peppered all over the record, which are not manic enough to be fun and too seasoned not to be dull.

The C.A. Quintet was approaching something prophetic and new, although they never quite got there. You can get a fuller picture with the bonus cuts Sundazed included on their long-awaited reissue of the album. Non-album singles include the priceless (and slightly country-infected) "Bury Me in a Marijuana Field," possibly the all-time statement of purpose for psych, and an inexplicably amazing cover of the Motown classic "Mickey's Monkey." If the disc doesn't equal or even approach the ample skills of the Mothers of Invention or the Doors or the Dead, it's certainly smarter than all three. If it doesn't have the Velvet Underground's imagination, it's at least an album of boys having a blast and testing the limits in a similarly creative way. And if it doesn't become a regular habit for you, at least Trip Thru Hell is -- without question -- unforgettable.

Chatham County Line: Wildwood (2010)

(Yep Roc)

RECOMMENDED

This stylish, gifted band is one of my favorite examples to cite of the weird ways in which great music can come to one's attention. About two years ago, I was spinning records at a bar and was on an alt-country kick with Old Crow, Old 97's, the Avett Brothers, and Whiskeytown; a girl who'd been playing pool and very clearly dug the genre requested something from Chatham County Line. I confessed I'd never heard them; she was amazed and said I needed to. I wrote it down and looked it up, got their albums Route 23 and IV, and immediately became a fan -- dark, theatrical, but sly, they had a terrifically evocative sound and songs to back it up, plus the near-perfect vocals of frontman Dave Wilson (vaguely suggestive of Roger McGuinn at his friendliest). It was a pleasant surprise last week when I suddenly discovered that they were to release a new album on the 13th.

Disregarding Old Crow Medicine Show's dogged pursual of bluegrass purity, Chatham County Line is the only current band I'm aware of with what seems like an actual determination to test how far the aesthetic and temperament of alt-country can go. I feel the Avetts (with whom they share North Carolina roots), for reasons I hope to explain in a future post, were scaracely "alt" to begin with. Old 97's, for my money one of the finest bands in all rock & roll, abandoned the form one record into a major label deal. But CCL are identifiably "alternative" the way that Iron & Wine is, as much as Iron & Wine's records may sound like lilting folk music. For the Line, as much as they may love it, country is a style, a means to an end, and they are as obsessed with their sound and its conjuring of a wall of beauty as Kevin Shields. Discovered by Chris Stamey from the dB's (compare Old Crow, discovered by Doc Watson), the band writes witty, modern-sounding songs that cherry-pick the liberal heart's favorite aspects of country -- all the death and heartbreak and class struggle but little of the God-and-country -- and pepper their lyrics with self-deprecating humor and cultured sarcasm, attempting constantly to gently push a reluctant country music into a new century. I don't mean it as an insult to country to say that the attention to detail here is rare for the genre, nor do I mean to suggest that attention to detail is automatically a good thing. But by the time of IV, their music was so brilliantly calculated and so achingly beautiful it felt as though they could go no further.

In truth, outside of a few instrumental augmentations (piano!), they really haven't, and their extraordinary previous album IV remains their greatest to date (in other words, get it first), but they have recorded possibly the most straightforwardly gorgeous album of the year. You may only remember a couple of the songs after they're over, but you will never want to turn the disc off while it's on. Wildwood expands on IV mostly in the sense that it adds a noticeable sheen to which some purists will object, but I like it; the record is enveloping, full of inviting and homegrown delicacy, like some lost '70s Neil Young project only with prettier vocals. If Chatham County Line sacrifice anything at all in authenticity, the sheer and hypnotic pleasure of their music compensates entirely.



The title track (embedded above) ably sets the stage for what's to follow. Stark lyrics collide with wintry harmonies and an incongrously spacious sound, full of music-hall echo and an effective (if very studio-generated) hint of backwoods menace. To boot, the explicit reference to a line in a previous cut ("Nowhere to Sleep," the opening track of Route 23 and probably my favorite CCL song) points toward further winking ironies throughout the album. (One song consists solely of quotes from rock and pop hits of the past, like a lyrical version of Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet's "16 Encores.") This could even well be a nod to the Avetts, who sequel the pleading "If It's the Beaches" with the cynical "I Would Be Sad," the latter reflective of new confidence and maturity as much as pessimism. The same could be said for "Wildwood" as it looks back with a snort on earlier convictions, but unlike the Avett Brothers, Chatham County Line sound more determined than ever to make their alternative bluegrass an uncompromised, universal product.

You can find a certain surprising honesty here as well. Wilson tackles a number of subjects other alt-countryites are unlikely ever to sing about. "Alone in New York," outwardly a straightforward ballad about getting the blues in a crowd full of strangers, plays almost as a blunt repudiation of the light NPR-program-bumper lifestyle (and Starbuck's promotional synergy) to which so many folkie indie rockers now owe their living. But he and his band know they fit the profile -- here with their calmness, their reluctance to show excessive emotion even set against the mournful lyric. I disagree with Chuck Klosterman's complaints of the alt-country community being a consortium of fakery, but a song like "Porcelain Doll" does conjure up his vision of the slick, the intellectual, the upper-rung, not too many miles away from the chuckling Prairie Home Companion audience and admittedly a longshot from the populism of (in my opinion, creatively bankrupt) mainstream country. Not that it's a bad song, just that it leaves no mystery about which world Chatham County Line is in and which they're not. Oh, and there's a song called "Ghost of Woody Guthrie," which is about exactly that.

But two tracks stand well apart and may suggest the sound of the next record. In contrast with the "big" sound of the rest of the album, "Crop Comes In" reins it all in for a much more natural and less sterile "band" sound, consciously built with space to breathe rather than just fill, albeit with still surprisingly slick production values. (But then, it may be hard not to sound slick with today's technology; perhaps the labored poser move these days would be an attempt to "age" the sound, to replicate the wobbly tape of the past. I'm not sure.) The album's best track by a relative longshot is the extraordinary "Blue Jay Way" (not a Beatles cover, to my initial disappointment), a delicate, hauntingly sparse and beautiful Appalachian waltz. Dave Wilson has never sounded so fragile and passionate, and the band's instruments have never been put in service of a piece so atmospheric and moving. And though absent of aggression, it has that integral grit in its vocals and raw texture, thereby in fact taking their music someplace heretofore unimagined without abandoning their niche, no Rick Rubin production required. Entirely separated from any of this, though, the song is still a treasure, a work of purest loveliness, sadness, pleasure.

If all the references to the "other" North Carolina coffeehouse country band seem superfluous, I apologize; such comparisons are inevitable as I eagerly track the progress of both groups through the years. I find myself curious about where Chatham County Line will take their act next; they sound interested in big things, if not destined for them. I don't think they have an eye toward trying to become national roots-rock heroes. I don't think they want to adhere to a formula either. I think they may be onto something, something vaguely new, with the way this bluegrass passes forth at times into a kind of aural soundscape -- but that's only mildly touched on here. And we needn't worry too much about it yet. It's rare that you capture a functioning band in this moment when writing new songs and recording them is enough to keep the planet's attention and their own. Let's enjoy it.

The "5" Royales: Complete King Masters (1954-60)

(bootleg)

!!A+ COMPILATION!!

The breadth and scope of excellent popular music is overwhelming. Amidst all the new discs I've digested this year, young and older people making vital and interesting and fun material, discoveries from the past never cease spewing forth. I've been vaguely aware of the "5" Royales for a long time but categorized them as doo wop, or low-tier early R&B, and the authors of the legendary "Dedicated to the One I Love." I knew there was a cultish passion for them among some record collectors. But I didn't know what I was in for when I put on this two-disc set yesterday morning.

The group doesn't get more than a passing mention in any book I own, but their influence on artists as disparate as James Brown (who supposedly modeled his Famous Flames on the "5" Royales) and Eric Clapton is widely noted. They began in the mid-'40s as a gospel group called the Royal Suns Quintet, switching to R&B and changing their name to the Royals when they began recording. When two other groups called the Royals -- one to remain such and the other the Detroit combo that would become the Midnighters -- became competition, they added an "e" and a "'5,'" the quotation marks around the latter signifying the fact that there often were six men in the group.

The question of what makes the "5" Royales unusual in the context of so many rhythm-gospel hybrids of the early 1950s is pared down simply enough to the prescene of guitarist and songwriter Lowman Pauling. They were not the only group to enchance doo wop with jump blues or to play secular music like it was sacred. But they may have been the only group to accompany those velvet, edgy harmonies with orgasmic bursts of screaming electric guitar, guitar crazed and exciting enough to compete not just with the obvious descendents Steve Cropper and Jimi Hendrix but Dave Davies and Lou Reed. I'm not one for guitar heroes, but I've just found one. Unknowingly laying sounds of disparate eras on an equal plane, the "5" Royales become a self-contained portrait of passionately sung and played popular music. It does them a disservice to label them any aforementioned subgenre: this is rock & roll, in some respects the invention-in-progress of it. In other words, this music is hot... and as hot now as ever.

My first exposure came a few weeks ago with the ghostly, wrenching "Don't Let It Be in Vain":



Opening with stark clicks and bass like Marvin Gaye's later magical voodoo "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," the song proceeds with haunting hums and anguished singing from Eugene Tanner, followed swiftly by Pauling not so much playing the guitar as ceding control to it, the track erupting to emotional meltdown in slow motion. There's a multitude of ingenious rhythm and blues from the late '50s, but little of it can be said to sound like nothing else, before or since. "Don't Let It Be in Vain" sounds like a supernatural dance, a spellbindingly alien message from death's door... and an infectious one at that.

Imagine my pride upon acquiring the larger package of hits (51 in all!) to discover that this innovative, restlessly creative pure rock & roll band hail from my home state, Winston-Salem to be precise, where they join John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Doc Watson, George Clinton, Thelonious Monk, Elizabeth Cotten, Ben E. King, Clyde McPhatter, Earl Scruggs, etc. in the hallowed hall of great North Carolina musicians we should learn about in school and don't (but you bet your ass we learn who Jesse Helms is, and please tell me why he's more important). I decided I'd take a bit of advantage of my profession and its access to myriad local information databases and do a bit of research. I was sobered by the one real nugget I uncovered, but we'll come to that.

The early cuts on this disc (roughly the first ten), though excellent in their own right and a significant part of R&B history, are not really the point. King wasn't even the group's first label. For Apollo, they recorded a series of sides designed to compete with the then-big guns of what could easily be termed secular gospel, such as the Orioles. But these cuts still cook, and in the future I intend to track down a compilation of them (and their gospel recordings as the Royal Sons as well). Hits on the Apollo label included "Baby Don't Do It," "Crazy, Crazy, Crazy," "Help Me Somebody," and "Too Much Lovin'," all of which I'll try to talk more about in the near future.

But with the move to King in 1955, a gradual transformation began to take hold into an assured, muscular, distinct group, undercutting the easy trends. The two and a half hours of music here fly by as if in a stock car, most of the songs barely two minutes, all of them tossing and running through hooks, inventions, and quirks in seconds like they're nothing, backgrounding the typically flawless harmonies. It isn't even easy to explain what all this leads to; it isn't proto-soul because it's an end in itself, and there is too much going on here that transcends every genre except, as mentioned, the very idea of rock & roll. The "5" Royales, and Lowman Pauling in particular, use sophisticated methods that seem far more familiar today than they must have in the late 1950s to achieve a primal catharsis. These often stunning 45's seem less locked in time than perfectly preserved as eccentric, prophetic masterstrokes.

The narrative of rock & roll supposedly boils down to an entrance of more literate and considered, less earthy and arguably less naturally elegant language ("I'm like a one eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store" becomes "Sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble" in hardly a decade), followed by the increasingly labored hard edge that leads us down the unpalatable path to "Classic Rock." But the "5" Royales skip steps in this "evolution" the way punkers and college-rock bands someday would, marrying the simple beauty of pure rock & roll form with a delightful urge to make more noise than the neighbors, to bang the drums harder, to pluck and slam and fuck the guitar strings in ever stranger and more otherworldly ways. It's astonishingly brave for a group that began as holy congregation-thrillers to break the mannered mold into making the stodgiest reach up and cover their ears, as many of these sinful platters assuredly did, reaching their ambitions above their peers, parallel to the uncharted territory of Holly, Berry, Penniman, etc.

The Big Names of early rock & roll may all have had more innovation between them, but I doubt any aside from Buddy Holly sound as contemporary and knowing today as the "5" Royales; that's not to say they did it on purpose, at least not in the best-is-never-enough sense Holly did, but it just so happens they predicted the angular sounds that would make kids and adults squirm twenty years in the future (rendering the "crazy guitar" scene in Back to the Future all the more ironic; much of what Michael J. Fox does there is far less extreme and untraditional than Pauling's style). Put simply, the experience of hearing harmonies like this colliding with the hard edge and passionate musicianship is really powerful. What's fascinating to me is that the "5" Royales' unprejudiced, all-encompassing barrier-free sensibility comes off now like an older brother of the material Janelle Monae, Erykah Badu, and Sharon Jones release today: classisist soul approached from the restless, rebellious angle of alternative rock.

The market has never been any more equipped for dogged invention in soul than it is in rock; of course certain stalwarts rise to the top (Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder) and some just make art of every lame thing they're given (Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin), but the mastering of the oblique, the vague, the snake-for-the-jugular for which rock bands usually have a certain economic freedom was the stock in trade of practically no one in R&B until George Clinton and Prince came along. Smokey Robinson might well have been an exception, but more as a writer than a performer. I have no way of knowing how much control the "5" Royales had over their output -- presumably more than most groups, with a composer in tow, but still at the mercy of Apollo then King for what ended up on their releases. But listening to these songs now, they sound like artistic vanguards. And that's really all that matters.

It's time for me to confess that this compilation is a bootleg. Most "5" Royales material is out of print now, but if you can find it, Rhino's Monkey Hips and Rice anthology contains much of what's here, although it's deleted and trading at Amazon for a hefty $54. Thus I recommend Googling the name of this package to find out how to get it, and then I equally recommend buying MP3s as soon as they're legally available, because this legacy matters. But you need to hear it, so do what you gotta. If you must listen to just a portion of this, make it the second half. Treasures aplenty on the first, but the highlights here are too numerous to even keep in your head.

Take "Think," to start with, soon to be regurgitated by James Brown and thus written into soul music history. Rhythmically, it's grinding R&B of its era, but the arrangement (and recording) is subtle, winding, slinking and charming along propulsively. And it's the vocal (I believe it's by Eugene Tanner) that sticks with you: frayed, aching, struggling, spontaneous. This is the beautiful sound of working men, ordinary people paid to create, as conscious of the space between the noises they make as of the noises themselves.



Superficially, "Monkey Hips and Rice" suggests the semi-comic Leiber/Stoller hits popularized by the Coasters, but the smoky, adventurous, jazzy production sinks us into more sinister and unfamiliar territory, tossing us into a vaguely dangerous swamp. The lyrics thematically call to mind the grossout antics of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, but the music is sheer black magic, heart-filling sexy evil transcending novelty -- music for kinks.

Perhaps the most purely innovative "5" Royales tune is "The Slummer The Slum," which is reputed (by Dave Marsh, at least) to contain the first-ever deliberate use of guitar feedback, predating "I Feel Fine" by six years. The song opens as an invasion, Tanner confronting you backed by his cronies at a relentless pace, like one of the gangs in West Side Story, but they haven't even begun their side of the battle until Pauling's guitar explodes forty seconds in with the kind of axe poetry you'd expect on a garage rock record... it's that insane, that left-field but strangely logical, that pure and perfect. Like some rockabilly tyrant, Tanner sounds breathless after a minute and the band seemingly deliberately loses shape around him, everything centering around the buildup to a second direct-line-to-"Sister Ray" guitar solo. And remember, this song was released in 1958.



If you need one song to most vividly appreciate Pauling's guitar theatrics, take a gander at "Say It," another stuttering groove, this one with particularly grand lyrics (almost Smokeyesque), centered around the concise soloing that leaps out of the speakers, particularly at the almost avant garde closing runout. Equipped with an extra-long strap, Pauling used to hold his guitar close to the ground for comic effect, but this is serious business -- more emotional and certainly more fitting in context than the work of a hundred later "guitar Gods." The final seconds are sheer shimmering transcendence.

The single that ensured Pauling's place in history as a composer deserves its legend. "Dedicated to the One I Love" is top-drawer, confident romantic pop, famous unfortunately in large part because of a dire cover version by the Mamas and the Papas (itself derived from a competently soulful Shirelles rendition), who squeeze every ounce of life and sex and mystery out of it (as they did just as offensively with the Beatles' "I Call Your Name"). The original is bright and thumping, with wonderfully tricky playing by Pauling behind all the most sweeping lines. It's fitting, though, that the song was resurrected in the late '60s, because it is as complex in melody, lyricism, rhythm as anything the California bands were then crafting. The song builds and recedes in a variety of unconventional ways, almost a two-minute series of tiny movements. More commercial than most of the best cuts on this collection, it is a pleasure to listen to.



But it's truly criminal to describe at length just a tenth of the songs here. They are all worthy of further investigation, bumping, discussion, dancing.

After the "5" Royales disbanded, facing an indifferent marketplace, in 1965, Lowman Pauling was unable to properly enjoy the breadth of his influence. Sadly, he died relatively unknown, working as a night watchman. We've heard the story a million times about brilliant black musicians of his day and many days earlier. But somehow, this recently-penned discovery I made in a small Winston-Salem newspaper today brings it achingly home for me:

R&B music pioneer Lowman Pauling has son, mother here
by Scott Sexton, Winston-Salem Journal

Aug. 2--Hardly anybody knows it, but a small treasure trove of music history sits in a modest house across the street from the Winston-Salem Preparatory Academy.

A man named Lowman Pauling once lived there. His namesake son lives in the house now, helping take care of his ailing mother. Sweating life's details -- seeing that she makes it to her dialysis appointments is primary among them -- is a priority now, but the realities of everyday living don't stop Pauling from breaking into a wide grin when he gets the chance to talk about his father's often-overlooked place in music history.

Lowman Pauling was a pioneer in 1950s rhythm and blues. He played guitar, performed in a group that started in Winston-Salem called the "5" Royales, and wrote a long list of songs. Notable among them is "Dedicated to the One I Love," a song that climbed the pop charts when covered by the Shirelles in 1961, and again in 1967 for the Mamas and Papas.

"James Brown, Chuck Berry ... Daddy was just as good or better," Pauling said. "Daddy could really play. He really was something."

Lowman Pauling, the father, grew up in Winston-Salem in the area around Trade Street. He started playing guitar when he was young, his son said, and began his musical journey performing gospel with his brothers.

Only the most dedicated music fans might remember the name Lowman Pauling these days. Even at the peak of his skills, Pauling perhaps didn't get the acclaim due a man of his talents.

His credits include "Think," an R&B hit recorded in 1961 by Brown -- not Aretha Franklin's smash hit -- "Baby Don't Do It" and "Help Me Somebody," both of which were R&B hits in 1953.

"Unfortunately, that happened to a lot of black artists back in those days," Pauling said. "Sometimes they didn't get the credit due them, and sometimes the labels cheated them out of royalties."

But that's history. These days, Pauling enjoys those rare times, which are growing fewer and fewer as the years zip by, when somebody recognizes the achievements of the man whose name he shares. He keeps mementoes around, and the entry foyer to the house is lined with frames holding some of the more precious ones.

A print depicting the famous Apollo Theater, the members of the "5" Royales and their signatures holds a prominent spot. Just below that is a proclamation signed by former Mayor Martha Wood and members of the Winston-Salem Board of Aldermen presented when a street was named in honor of the "5" Royales.

A stack of identical dark-blue cardboard envelopes contains matching certificates commemorating broadcast milestones -- starting with 1 million broadcast performances of "Dedicated to the One I Love."

"How many are we up to now, Darryl, 4 million?" asked Ellise Pauling, using the middle name her son is mostly known by.

"Yes, Mom, I think that's right," he replied, tearing himself away from his trip through the past to tend to the present.

It must be pretty cool to flip on a radio and hear a song that your dad wrote, huh?

"Winston-Salem State used to have a DJ on Sundays who used to play some of his music pretty consistently," Pauling said. "But other than that, you don't hear it much. But, yes, it does make you feel good."

Rather than dwell on physical tributes that can be seen and read, Pauling prefers the intangible, hard-to-define portion of his father's legacy. Books, magazines and quickie online biographies and histories note that legendary artists such as Brown, described as the "hardest-working man in show business," and rock legend Eric Clapton have cited Lowman Pauling as an influence.

"James Brown and the Famous Flames, they patterned their act after my father," Pauling said. "The "5" Royales were doing those kinds of (dance) moves before they were."

He laughed at the suggestion that maybe one day his father would get more attention if by some chance a wave of renewed interest in classic R&B came along. Only 52, he smiled and started to offer a variation of the familiar "these kids today" lament before steering the conversation back to his father.

"Daddy died in 1973," he said. "He's been gone a long time."

Still, he says with considerable pride that his father is scheduled in September to get a spot in the new N.C. Music Hall of Fame in Kannapolis, alongside the likes of jazz greats John Coltrane (High Point) and Thelonius Monk (Rocky Mount), country star Randy Travis (Marshville) and bluegrass icon Earl Scruggs (Flint Hill).

Of even greater personal importance, though, is a small change Pauling has noticed in his 16-year-old son, who has taken up the guitar.

"Everybody used to call him "D.D." but now he goes by Lowman," Pauling said. "He insists that people call him that instead."

A living legacy is the very best kind.

In The Trouble with Harry, a film made not long before the "5" Royales began to make their best records for King, Alfred Hitchcock and his screenwriter John Michael Hayes make the argument that the artist is the savior of the common people, perhaps even that s/he is the only uncommon person and is faced with the unenviable task of helping the restof us straighten ourselves out. It's sometimes alarming how rarely we are given the chance to return the favor. Of course Little Richard and Chuck Berry can afford to eat more than jelly bread sandwiches, and they deserve that, but what about the hundreds of others equally gifted looking out the window as the most skilled, savvy talents rise to the top? I can't tell Lowman Pauling how special his music still sounds in 2010. It's a fact of life, but when something is so vital it feels like it sprang from the earth so much more recently than four generations ago, it's painfully hard to believe. Go listen to this music and revel in it.

Flying Lotus: Cosmogramma (2010)

(Warp)

[2019 note: On revisiting stuff for my decade-end projects, I heard this again and found that my taste for jabbing experimental collage music of this sort has expanded greatly, helped along by how much I've admired some of FlyLo's subsequent work. I'm upgrading this to RECOMMENDED but allowing the original, more neutral review below to stand as originally posted. Thanks.]

Admitting no prior awareness of Flying Lotus, I have to admit this record wasn't at all what I expected. I read interviews with him and expected something more... overt? And certainly more accessible. Instead, we have a remarkably subtle disc here. As we've already mentioned here, I used to consider myself sort of an electronica aficionado, but I couldn't help finding the skittering first third-to-half of this to be pedestrian, even generic. But I left it on anyway, and eventually found noises that were ever more delicious passing through the landscapes; at times, the techno-jazz experimentation is sublime, the rhythms and trickery hypnotic and enveloping.

Reflecting on this now, I start to wonder how much my behavior during the listen affected my opinion. All through the first six or seven tracks, my cat was being particularly antsy, running all over the dining room and jumping on top of things, and as the clippy little chirps banged their way tentatively through the room I felt too pensive to see much beauty in it all. Things calmed down after that and I set to work on some project on the computer that required some level of concentration, no longer moving around the room much, and suddenly what Flying Lotus was driving at fell into place. I may be liable for my lack of unadulterated enthusiasm here.

With that said, two important notes: people who come to this, as people tend to in cases like this, to hear Thom Yorke's cameo are likely be dejected and will sit this in the proverbial pile with Drugstore and UNKLE; and more importantly, though the pleasures to be found here are likely worth it for many, the uglier moments are not ugly in a way I find ingratiating. They're just ugly, and kind of maddening. My cat agrees.

Joanna Newsom: Have One on Me (2010)

(Drag City)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

You know why I think the White Album is the Beatles' best work? Because it's like the aural equivalent to Frederick Olmstead's landscape architecture (Central Park, Biltmore Mansion, World's Colombian Exposition; read Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, possibly the greatest book of the last decade, to learn about him) -- it's overwhelming, huge, and it only reveals itself with time. It is too much to process at once, and too good to appreciate immediately. Full of nooks and crannies and secrets and weird winding alleyways, it's sprawling but precise. Its precision is designed to look messy and cathartic, because the album is long -- incredibly long; 30 songs, over 90 minutes, more than twice as long as any other Beatles LP -- by necessity. It's a massive thing to tackle because that's the way it had to be, born of the near-total lack of synchronicity between the four band members at that time. Instead of compromising, they let it all out, and the result barely hangs together and is awe-inspiringly wonderful.

I'm a minimalist by nature. I think most pop songs should be shorter than they are. I think movies should almost never exceed 109 minutes, and really think Freaks and Dumbo had the right idea by barely hitting an hour. Some people say this is because I have a pathetically short attention span, but I don't even remember who those people are. The thing is, Joanna Newsom's new album appeals to me despite its audacious length (a triple album, it's roughly 33 minutes longer than the Beatles' opus) because every second of it is measured, emotional, crucial, needed... sometimes funny, sometimes weird, sometimes sad, always thoroughly compelling. I let Kubrick get away with his long movies because Kubrick is someone who you're willing to give your attention to for three hours, regardless of what he's talking about. Joanna Newsom is the same, but she's not giving you an endurance test here; you're not allowed to complain that Have One on Me is too long. It isn't even the heavy workload that all that Beatles pop bliss was. It's designed to be taken slowly. It might be more accurately described as a trilogy of albums than as a single triple album. It could fit on two discs but Newsom would rather you let this wash over you so you can build your relationship slowly. And she's not in a hurry for you to realize it just might be a masterpiece. But I've spent three months with it now: It just might be a masterpiece.

Conceptually brilliant, the record's divisions become clearer over time. From the time I've spent with the lyric booklet I think I can work out that it (often loosely and/or metaphorically) covers the beginning, middle, and end of a relationship that's fraught with fear and doubt from the beginning. But I work better with feels and musical ideas than with lyrical themes, so I've come to think of LP1 as the pop record, LP2 as the folk record, LP3 as the psychedelic record. I don't mean to suggest that the three are each a stand-alone product, because they refer back to one another in ways it make take us all years to realize, the way Pet Sounds and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea did. But I think this is the way to explore the album: to take on each record as its own work, get to know it, and move onward, thus giving the final full listen the same sense of journey I still get from the White Album and the only other exceptionally good triple album I can think of, 69 Love Songs and Sandinista!. (Sorry, All Things Must Pass.)

We did give the record a cursory listen when we finally got our hands on the set and the pleasures were frequent, but flew by too quickly to catch or concentrate on. So it has to be noted: As background music, Have One on Me does not work. It doesn't work all that well in the car either, at least until you know it really well. I will concede the immediacy of The Milk Eyed Mender is mostly faded, and you have to work a bit more than you did to find the stark, effortless beauty of Ys (the slightly strained seriousness and pretension of which have also receded, thankfully)... but you don't have to work to love the album, it's just a different animal and needs to be heard differently than you expect or it might appear. It's a quiet, detailed, intricate recording and it needs your full attention to be adequately appreciated. And it is never boring, but before you know the songs, two straight hours is a bit much and not the revelation reviews like this might lead you to expect. Take some time with disc one when you don't have anything else competing for your attention. Ready? Good, now let's talk about it.

***

The very first sound you hear on Have One on Me is Newsom's voice, and it marks a departure out of the gate. Newsom's singing was altered permanently by a vocal cord injury during her promotion of Ys; she now sings lower and slightly more "conventionally," though hardly in the obscene American Idol manner the word might imply. But if you think this might rob her voice of some of its distinctive personality, worry not -- it doesn't, and if anything her singing is now more expressive and varied than ever before, occasionally calling to mind Billie Holiday as much as Joni Mitchell. As if to match the new tones of her vocals, the songs have become subtler, more sophisticated, the compositions tighter and more adventurous and surprising, lacking the (however appealing) ramble-ons of the previous record. "Easy" is a conceptual rather than visceral opener. Longish and tricky and slow, it documents a bed occupied by a couple at the eye of the hurricane, peace and oblivion with the constant threat of passing time and looming conflict just beyond the bedroom door. The slow crawl forth of a string quartet precedes Newsom's piano, returning at last after its Ys hiatus, and cinematic arrangement. Already the song structure is warped, but seen in the light of the album "Easy" is downright conventional, its repeated parts clear and obvious, its tempo only slightly wavering back and forth for its six minutes.

But Newsom wastes no time tripping onward into surrealism and head-spinning aural restlessness with the title track, some bit of business about Lola Montez and the "Spider Dance" that she claims is about public female exploration of sexuality. The words evoke Wonderland, or Medieval Europe, but the startling fact here is the music, with breathlessly moves from delicate folk to hopping, marching clap-alongs and orchestral soundscapes and one entirely new melody after another, one sudden shift in tone, style, and production after another -- over eleven minutes of secrets and revelations. "Have One on Me" (the "one" seemingly being a poisoned drink from a trusted fellow human; you're welcome) is appropriately named, setting as it does the stage: cryptic but weirdly perfect lyrics, and wildly unpredictable, hushed, intensely felt. As soon as you've resigned yourself to the odd beauty of one moment, another comes careening around the corner. It could be at least a dozen songs... all of them memorable.

For act the third, another left turn, here into simplest folk with brevity. "'81" finds Newsom and her harp singing (more beautifully than ever before) about a solo walk through the Garden of Eden -- the title is a numerical homonym, the lyrics in fact referring to "AD 1" -- but the voice aches with seductive loss. Her melody is infinitely persuasive, but the way she lives in every word, it doesn't even need to be. With "I believe in innocence, little darling / I believe in everyone," time could stop, and she achieves this as easily in under four minutes as she just did in almost twelve. But that's the thing: She always gets there on this album, and she always knows just how long to stick to it.

My first of five nominees for The Song of the Album follows. "Good Intentions Paving Company" is atypically literal, less atypically personal, sad, and witty ("How I say to you 'Honey, just open your heart' / When I have trouble even opening a honey jar"). The song seems to be about travelling a long distance for a lover and experiencing the gradual law of diminishing returns on the other's end with repeat trips. She sings of wanting her man to pull over the car and hold her, and of torturing herself over complex relationship details during flights from far away, surrounded by vastness and weighed down with a heart full of same. Extraordinarily catchy and involved, the piano-driven "ooh ooh"-filled highlight flexes Newsom's more conventional compositional muscles. The bridge and verses are obvious here, but she still plays with structure enough that the return of the backing vocals six minutes in is cause for joy... like a familiar landmark on a highway. The track is simply stunning in ways previously unexplored from Newsom.

With its melancholy "in your arms" refrain, "No Provenance" could be born of the same week of writing as "Good Intentions Paving Company"; it certainly seems to reflect similar structural and lyrical ideas, and sequels it neatly in the lineup. You're less likely to hum "No Provenance" a few days later, and if anything this song leaves one wanting more, retaining its subtletly throughout. It is meant to be heard carefully, to have its pangs of doubt weighed and understood. Magical, jazzy forms and careful intimacy sharpen the blade. Newsom's production places her harp in the center but the emphasis -- particularly as the song progresses -- is on the complementary instrumentation, and most of all on her voice, which continues to discover new shades and tones heretofore unimagined.

Nominee for Song of the Album #2 is "Baby Birch," -- a lullaby like the later "Esme," only this child was never born -- the purest and most persuasive pop song of Newsom's career to date, albeit slow and fiery and nine minutes. But the song's spare sound (harp and vocal only until the stirring conclusion) and elegantly concise melody give Newsom the opportunity to approach soul -- soul of the highest, most seemingly supernatural and permanent variety, like Sam Cooke singing "Tennessee Waltz" or Aretha Franklin on "Do Right Woman" -- in her vocal, which is so effortlessly gorgeous (but hardened, even angry, always bursting with feeling) it could make you weep. There simply aren't many people alive at any given time who can sing like this, much less than can write and play like this simultaneously. Somewhere buried in this magical, pure, brilliantly considered moment is five decades of the right things in rock & roll, and this is what maturity should sound like. And then the rest of the band comes in and seems to drive the song to altogether different waters. You will not hear a more moving song this year. (And if only you could see her play it live, folks, the way we did first; try to.)

So that's Record One. What do you think? Listen again, come up with insights undoubtedly better than mine. Spend time with it. Put it on shuffle, whatever, doesn't matter. If you have the vinyl -- which is mastered fabulously -- leave that on your table for a while. Don't move on until you feel acquainted with these six songs. It won't take long.

***

Interlude #1:

In the last week of March, Amber and I saw Joanna Newsom at the Carolina Theatre in Durham. For a venue of its rather substantial size, the theater offered an intimate and highly comfortable, hushed, elegant surrounding for the sharing of one's art with a thousand or two while allowing each forged connection to seem immediate.

We had the odd experience of hearing many of these songs live before in any other context, as we'd been unable to locate the record and I had steered clear of leaks. This did not rob them of their immediacy. She played most of the first record and touched on the others after opening solo with the morbidly friendly "On a Good Day." And "Baby Birch" jutted out like the glorious lament that it is, its frayed emotions shimmering. Her band crafted a gigantic sound, and her rapport with them was palpable when she joked about not knowing whether her harp was in tune or not. It was a night of beautiful, passionate music played by someone at the top of her game. People spend lives obsessing over the great rock & roll of the past; this is happening right now, art and personality and invention of the highest order. Go see her!

***

And I assume you are now ready for Record Two. It's this one that may have the most in common with Newsom's first couple of albums, but that does not make it significantly less a revelation. And the woman greeting us with "On a Good Day" has grown considerably older since The Milk Eyed Mender with its many sprightly morsels. The song is barbed, wicked, deceptive as it reflexes back on its own optimism: She's saying hello on a nice day, but the clarity makes the imminent end (of love? a state of mind? the world?) too obvious not to lend a sense of doom. Her celebratory cooing segues into mourning as she shakes her head at the choices you've made that keep you far from her "love for you." All this is explored in under two minutes, lending any additional credibility (if needed) to the more rambling tracks: Newsom knows when economy is necessary, and keeps this heavenly, sobering beauty quick and cutting.

As on the first LP, the second cut travels into storytelling and metaphor. "You and Me, Bess" is a complete seven-minute opus about a girl put to death for stealing a horse. Newsom explores something new here -- menace. (Listen to the brass.) Instead of gentle strokes at her harp, here she seems to pound at it in broad, workmanlike gestures as though chopping a tree. The connections to the title track are inescapable -- a woman serving her own interests, inciting awe and rage, and our heroine here must then pay the price. In composition, this song is more grounded than "Have One on Me," but it compensates in its increasingly full, claustrophobic production, placing the listener in the oven, or the gallows, closely recalling (perhaps intentionally) Leonard Cohen's ethereal "Joan of Arc," replete with beautiful la-la choruses.

And closing Side Three is my Nominee #3 for the Song of the Album. "In California" has folks from all over falling over themselves with Joni Mitchell comparisons, and these are not inappropriate; for me, this is more a mark of how dramatically Newsom's voice has changed than anything (listen to this and "Peach, Plum, Pear" side by side). I find this to be a microcosm of the feel of the album, even more so than the title track because its words are more direct. Musically, it's one beautiful and brief passage or refrain after another. Vocally, Newsom continues to startle and amaze with her readings, which seem so blatantly capable of rendering banalities sublime that she could easily get away with being a far less inspiring lyricist than she is. But I have a feeling -- backed up because the song is directly reprised in about an hour -- that the story being told in "In California" is in many ways the story of the album as a whole, repeating its themes of relationships in unfamiliar territory as heard in "Good Intentions Paving Company," here rendered less confusing and far more submerging and sad, the sound of a person sinking... slowly, very slowly. The gradual transformation (rather than rapid changeover) of the song to the boisterous menace and then anguished cry it becomes is as galvanizing as anything pop music can bring us. And yet again, you want every section to stretch on longer than it does; after eight minutes, you are still left longing for more, more of everything.

Despite Newsom's choice of a triad division, there is a stark and seemingly deliberate change in tone at the halfway point of Have One on Me... it becomes an even more intricate and more difficult album, the melodies more subtle, the production less intrusive, the arrangments more obtuse. Even more than the first nine cuts, the final nine demand to be listened to very carefully. Most of the songs before this point could work equally well out of context. With two exceptions (and your mileage may vary), these songs rely intently on one another. At the opening of Side Four, Joanna announces "I was tired of being drunk / With my face cracked like a joke." "Jackrabbits" -- only Newsom and her harp -- is the most deliberately paced song of the album, but one of its most purely beautiful: When she feels like it, Newsom falls into a "tell you that I can love you again... love you again" chorus of shattering vulnerability; it sounds like a difficult to confession or conclusion to make, a tortuous song to allow oneself to sing. This builds onto its languid perfection until the casual atmosphere becomes as pointed, hushed, elegant as all that's already been revealed to us.

The same confessional tone, vocals in the center, a quiet and direct communication that builds into a shouting, leads us into the lengthy, fiery "Go Long." Lyrically, Newsom goes for the jugular, consciously artless and accusatory: "You think you can just stop when you're ready for change / Who will take care of you when you're old and dying?"... (Note the Lennonesque rhyme avoidance there.) Musically, it's a thing of complex beauty, harp and strings crafting a baroque wintry landscape that envelops the listener... but for the duration, all is not well. "You have done harm," she tells us.

My fourth nominee for the greatest Have One on Me cut has been my favorite for some time now, "Occident," and I've lived with it long enough now to believe it may be the record's greatest moment. It's a strange choice in a way because it is among the most conventional songs of the album, few wild tempo changes and aural tricks. It is strongest for me precisely because it is so subtle, carrying the same beauty that passes so divinely through so much of this magical record, here muted and explored carefully, slowly. It helps to know the album's other secrets. Having seen all that she and her music can do, when she hits that one special two-note piano lick on "Occident," it is heartplay. Her vocal is more ragged here as well, unpolished passion cutting through all the guarded witticisms and poetry of Newsom's confoundingly impressive 2010 lyrics (the lovely turns of phrase come too fast to capture in the proverbial bucket: "slow heart, congregate") -- every time her voice cracks and tears, it seems like a secret's being revealed. Her ability to sound like a different person from song to song is startling -- the impatient, commanding, world-worn lady here ("What in the world are we waiting for?") a stranger to the optimist and poet of "'81," the wide-eyed secret hope buried in the honey-jar heart of "Good Intentions" now "so tired of the guessing game." But as wrapped up as you could be in wonderings about all this despair, what emerges above all is that bloody piano, its effortless wisdom and comfort, a perfect evocation of the beating heart amidst all the miserable doorways life requires us to pass through on our way to wherever. I know she's telling a story here, I feel and sense it and someday I'll try to know for sure, but oh, that piano. (And these 5.5 minutes seem achingly short, still.)

Record Two will take longer, especially side two. But affix yourself to it and its bittersweet charms and you will find the incredible feeling of a great work revealing itself to you.

***

Interlude #2:

It was, for me at least, a worthwhile rock & roll moment for whatever pantheon I end up creating someday of same, the ones that actually happened to me that wouldn't seem really rock & roll to the Cleveland museum crowd but that's what rock & roll is, goddammit. That would be seeing the 3-LP package of Have One on Me on vinyl at the Joanna Newsom show for $25 and scrambling to go find an ATM that would take my card so we could run back and buy it. We ended up entering a Marriott to get the cash and ran along the streets of Durham so we could have this elusive record and drive home with it, no longer waiting for one outlet or another to re-fulfill its orders.

I'm not a romanticist about physical media; I download music all the time. I even illegally downloaded this album after we bought the record because unlike many modern LPs, it isn't packaged with a digital version. But I do not believe you can replace the feeling of running through a city to buy a record and then opening it up and perusing the contents and putting the needle on it any more than you can replace the feeling of experiencing something actually new like a Joanna Newsom album by playing your Who LPs every day for the rest of your life. The past may be fertile with revelation but there is no element of participating more divinely rewarding than to become a participant in your own culture, to find the excitement and rolling revealing shades in something that's really new, that's happening now, that will come to your neighborhood next week if you're lucky. Celebrate the golden age by all means, but don't let your own golden age pass by. Every day is something immense.

***

There's no question that the third disc of Have One on Me embodies a concentration of its most difficult moments. By now Newsom assumes you are invested enough to go out on a limb. But the first track is pure bliss: "Soft as Chalk," the last of my nominees for the album's best song, sounds at first blush like a tender love song but, knowing this lady, is probably something far different and far more. No matter; its winding beauty approaches Kate Bush rambles, a stirring and entirely unexpected piano solo cutting through everything. And still this is more pop music, more assured and accessible than likely anything on Newsom's first two albums. Perhaps nowhere else is her evolution so tangible. To listen to this and not be moved in some way would seem quite a challenge.

The confidence mentioned above is key, because as the record moves to its conclusion, the guard Newsom let down earlier on seems to raise itself again. Her emotions do not fray on "Esme" the way they did on "Occident," even though the song itself seems equally sad (a lullaby, it seems, for a young girl) and its arrangement (back to harp-only) more demanding. It's as though the time of mourning has already passes into resignation, as though she is writing and singing of the distant past. On the "kindness prevails" refrain, her newfound soulfulness is commanding instead of vulnerable.

"Autumn" reintroduces Newsom as the virtuostic composer of Ys, in a slightly more bite-sized 8:01. The inevitable practictioners of the "entire album at once" stunt mentioned early in this blog post will begin to lose patience here. The similarities in arrangment to "Esme" immediatly prior may mask the ample personality of the lyric and vocal. The feeling in proper mindset is of being transported. There was a time when middle America left home in droves to pick up songs evoking something so vague and ethereal as leaves falling (see Roger Williams' #1 hit "Autumn Leaves"). Newsom lets out more than one (calculated) anguished cry as she did in "In California," but the tentatively hopefuly horizon that still guided has given way to a lonely dreamscape, a once-beloved place rediscovered dead.

You could be forgiven for forgetting instantly about all the staggering melodies witnessed thus far when confronted with "Ribbon Bows," a song that in every classisist sense I can fathom is just about perfect. Lyrically, I contend this to be her best work so far, documenting and interweaving many kinds of drifting and summing it all up with the tirelessly witty "I take my doggone god to task." But more than ever, even with her harp accompanied by stereo glories, she sounds alone. (If you're looking for verification that you will love Have One on Me, I recommend downloading this track.)

The penultimate cut, "Kingfisher," probably is the most reminiscent (on all three discs) to the previous album, the audacious and delicate stunt Y's, and will be memorized and dissected by many in a similar fashion, including but not limited to those who will be driven to encyclopedias and mythology readers by its progressive trappings, the very title alluding to myth. But as for me, I think this is more than anything a continuation of the prior track's God and love questions, its winding and confusing narrative relatable both to love driven away and God brought in for questioning. Note that musically, the song (like others on disc three) repeats a motif or two from "In California." Although the lyrics are lovely to read and the melody memorable, the performance seems slightly labored, the ideas long-winded and not as personable as are the average for Have One on Me, and I would unquestionably name it as the song I've fallen in love with least. But I'm still glad it's there.

No song on Have One on Me matches the explicit "Does Not Suffice" for lyrical straightforwardness; the song is unequivocally about the breakup of the relationship in "Easy," "Good Intentions," "In California" (which it directly reprises; the entire melody is a continuation), and various others. As many have pointed out, "Easy" and "No Provenance" are also referenced in the lyric; there are more than likely other quotes that the internet has yet to notice. The final minutes of Have One on Me are a wrenching document of the last moments of a relationship, personal enough to be slightly difficult to listen to; the lines that lend the song its title are, in fact, eerily familar to me and I imagine to anyone who has ever broken up or been broken up with. By calling up the previous snapshots we've witnessed and topping them with an atypically fragile vocal, Newsom calls to mind the falling apart of a life slowly built, purpose and regret pushing her in equal measure and opposite directions. "Everywhere I tried to love you," she mourns, "is yours again and only yours." She fades away into echo and the increasingly powerful drums and strings overtake her.

***

Whether Joanna Newsom's third album will turn out to be her grandest statement is impossible to say this early. As broad in scope and crazily ambitious as the record might seem, it is also decidedly grounded and subtle, becoming (musically, at least) more textured and vague as it goes on. This makes it less difficult to imagine how she will follow it. But one thing seems certain to me: she will continue to surprise, restlessly and relentlessly. And in the meantime, she's given us something that is a modern marvel to be treasured, in all its weight and artful shine.

Gene Vincent: Best Of (1956-63)

(EMI)

This isn't the cover art for the CD I have; I can't seem to find that artwork on the Net but this'll do, as it ties in with something I talk about below. There's another disc called The Screaming End, and one called Dance to the Bop, as well as the two-disc set pictured. All seem to be pretty solid collections.

!!!A+ COMPILATION!!!

Gene Vincent was never a huge star. He just changed everything. To hear these violent, raucous songs with their earth-shaking rhythms and ringing, relentless guitars is to hear the stage being set for a great percentage of the best pop music that has been released in his wake. This isn't mere rockabilly; this is the recording of life, and the invention of a world. At least as much as Buddy Holly, Vincent fired the shot heard round the world, especially in England. If Holly sang to the heavens, Cochran to the gut, Vincent sounds as though he is staring straight into you, speaking and snarling at you across a space of fifty years which feel like nothing much.

With his band the Blue Caps, Vincent built on the country music scene in Norfolk and hopped and skipped over the competition. A demo coaxed along by a local talent scout and DJ landed a contract with Capitol Records. Vincent's charisma as a frontman is undeniable, but the Caps were very much a band. The records would count for little to nothing without the astoundingly inventive guitarist Cliff Gallup, to whose widow every British guitarist of the ensuing decades owes a royalty check.

Vincent's only U.S. hit is "Be-Bop-a-Lula," a strutting, confident, pure-sex slow burner of the first order. It was widely mistaken for Elvis because it's practically a cover of the idea of Elvis, like what Mr. Presley would have sounded like if he was as lecherous and dangerously horny as the Christos and clueless parents falsely claimed he was. And Vincent would matter if this really was the extent of his recorded legacy. The song's defiance, lyrically and musically, captures the essential noise of rock & roll rebellion at its early peak. The thoughts and desires come too fast for Vincent to articulate, and that's where we get the roll in rock & roll, and that's how we get the authorities in a tizzy. Even today, the song is scandalous, palpably rising the temperature in any room where you hear it, especially at night.

Despite no further major hits existing, the classics on this disc come from right and left thereafter for the next hour-plus. He's got the audacity to open "Woman Love" with a post-coital chuckle, all swagger and cigarette dust before he settles into singing about fucking and, yes, laughing about it. "Race with the Devil" identifies Vincent's lone actual competition and recalls Chuck Berry's first few singles, capturing cars and Satan with redneck intensity, thereby defining rockabilly forever.

My favorite Vincent track is probably "Who Slapped John?" which lit the room up when I used to play it at 1AM on Saturdays at the Soapbox. From its first electrifying seconds, it's rock & roll the way people who loved it rapturously -- and the way moral guardians who hated it furiously -- wrote about it, the way you'd imagine it if you'd never heard it but had someone describe it to you. To this day, it's maybe the most frequently ripped off song in Gene V.'s catalog; as recently as 2006, my favorite modern band, Yo La Tengo, rewrote it as "Watch Out for Me, Ronnie," but pick any decent rock & roll outfit and they've either covered this or done their own revision. But I could make an equally strong case for "Blue Jean Baby," which is quintessential; it opens as a stark, sweet-nothings ballad and ends up encompassing garage, rockabilly, R&B, and even military marching music. Does any '50s recording more brilliantly cover the kitchen-sink snowballing basics of what this music was, and would become? These two songs are as exciting as anything recorded by the brighter stars of Presley, Cochran, Perkins, even Holly, inevitably bettered only by Berry, Penniman, Bo ("Cat Man" is a Diddley remake), and Ray Charles, but what isn't? Such wild transitions are frequent on the disc. The songs are well-crafted and endlessly surprising; "Bop Street" opens with a Bo Diddleyesque skit before evolving into a curiously yearning Gene croon and finally skittering along into big-beat territory, relentless and psychotic as ever.

Rock & roll this solid can be exhausting. These songs were meant to be heard on 45s, and loud. I mean loud, seriously loud. I recommend sampling the comp a bit at a time. I'm not fucking around when I say this sheer insanity can become oppressive after a while. I am not a "new music sucks" guy but there's not been anything recorded that pounds and screams at you as wildly as this. Every bit of punk and metal that practictioners think is so damn ugly and powerful pales in comparison. "Hold Me, Hug Me, Rock Me" barely has any shape, just an unstoppable pushing forward with orgasmic force. Listen to the way Gene can barely let every word take shape, listen to the way you can hear the walls in the room melting. The band can barely keep up with him, he can barely keep his breath or keep up with the Caps, and so it goes -- replete with guitar solos that make Dave Davies sound like Les Paul -- and that goddamn pounding for two and half minutes and then it just stops and leaves you there. Out of fucking control. But no brute, Vincent could show equal aplomb on a sophisticated (though still lightning-energized) number like "Double Talkin' Baby," with its keen guitar tricks and measured rhythmic perfection. Or display gleeful intelligence and a command of his own abilities with the absolutely delightful delivery of his "Pink Thunderbird" boasts, which stands surprisingly well with similar ideas Bo Diddley was working up at the time.

Rob Sheffield said once that all great songs are either fast or sad, and that's why ballads are usually a sticking point for me from the great rockers. Gene Vincent is different, and this may be one of his most significant attributes, one that lets him stand apart from his peers. His ballads are as exciting as his rockers. His vocal on "Should I Ever Fall in Love Again" displays the same red-hot passion and testosterone -- controlled insanity -- you hear on "Brand New Beat." On "Wear My Ring," he puts Elvis' crooning to shame; whether from precision or attraction or loudness, he has a personable quality you trust -- he sounds like an actual human, not the distant creature Presley became. The best slow one is "Jezebel," a Western-flavored bit of nonsense that Vincent works magic on to create melodramatic misterioso magic, followed by "Wedding Bells (Are Breakin' Up That Old Gang of Mine)," which ably applies a macho aesthetic and sentiment to the sweeter side of Vincent's vocal virtuosity. No sentimentality here, just the sound of freakshow youth: he'd rather fuck than marry, and with pipes like this guy's, presumably he did a lot of the former.

Since I really became aware of Vincent, admittedly only a couple of years ago, I've thought of him as the beginning of white rock's tiny erotic wing (really, rock & roll sacrified sex when it became Rock and folks had to turn to their soul collections for anything attuned to the flesh; John Lennon might've been the last white rock singer with any in his approach), and because Vincent was a cripple, surrounded by boiz bouncing around on his stage (as described in this great blog post by The Hound) I ended up thinking of him a lot when I read the really explosive novel Everything Is Illuminated last year (if you've just seen the pretty decent movie with Elijah Wood, you gots no idea how good this fucker is). The book features a character with a gimp arm, fetishized by his innumerable lovers, whose attentions -- though humored -- baffle him. The weirdness of sexual power and attraction, the oblivious and effortless beauty of that same weirdness, you can define these things and so much more with a vocal inflection and a guitar strum. "Crazy legs, crazy legs, boppin' all over the floor."

Vincent outlived his friend Eddie Cochran -- they were in the same car crash that killed Cochran, a watershed event for several other reasons (clue: four young men from Liverpool) -- but still died young, and his legacy remained tied to "Be-Bop-a-Lula." But someone identified with those rollercoaster screams in "B-i-Bickey-Bi, Bo-Bo-Go," and that's why people are still playin' the guitar. The first time I think I ever heard of him beyond the Beatles' Hamburg cover of "Be-Bop-a-Lula" was in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll (I know you hate Rolling Stone and so do I, but this book -- the 1980 edition -- is terrific) when the following photo was labeled thusly:


(Found the pic on Myspace/Photobucket. Let me know if I pissed you off!)

Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, planting the flag at Iwo Jima. His music was secondhand, his guitar a battered prop. Who cared?

Certainly not me upon seeing this when I was 17. Whoever says image doesn't matter is a fool. I remember something churning inside me upon seeing that photo, very deep down in there, something that told me there were secrets unimaginable in these old records I'd glossed over in favor of the utter unimaginative shit I listened to at the time like Pearl Jam and Dave Matthews. All these things that seemed so big and inaccessible when you're sitting in chemistry class, universal things: FREEDOM and SEX and LIBERATION and rhythm and the bright lights tonight, all that shit. The music sounded like I wanted it to, like it never had before, because I could hear all those things in it. To this day, I don't think anything in all art shares that powerful basic core-of-humanity stuff the way rock & roll, specifically the rock & roll of the 1950s, does. And that picture of Vincent, accidentally iconic, accidentally beautiful, planted the seed for me years before I knew jack shit about his music.

The final cut here ("Lazy River") is another ballad but this one sounds distant, like it was recorded from the next room; Vincent seems to be singing to us from an entirely different world, his voice hovering above the sparse brushes and guitar. It's fun to imagine everything happening at once, the room wartorn from all the barriers broken, virgins willingly defiled, destruction and passion everywhere -- like a tornado hit. After thirty tracks of this madness, the band puts down their instruments and Gene wanders out with a smirk, leaving us all breathless and reeling.

Jeff Beck did some lameass Gene Vincent covers album that every freaking bio page on the web of GV mentions. Who gives a fuck about Jeff Beck. Gene Vincent could chew that loser up and spit him out.

Here is YouTube of Vincent and Blue Caps performing in 1958. Oh, yes.

The International Submarine Band: Safe at Home (1968)

(LHI Records)

RECOMMENDED

Narrative: A Harvard dropout named Gram Parsons decides to pursue music and ends up fronting a perpetually unlucky and indistinct psych-rock band, who are so completely un-celebrated their performance in a Roger Corman movie is overdubbed with someone else's noise, while the band that will give him his muscle and an assured career is already world-famous and achieving their peak in California. Somehow or another, two things happen: The band disintegrates after a couple of singles, and Parsons becomes enamored first of folk-rock and then of pure country music. And then, lightning strikes the world and history is made.

Safe at Home is best explained through its deceptions. Parsons' entire life reads as fiction, and his first group the International Submarine Band's lone album sets the stage. To begin with, it's not really an album by the International Submarine Band, the psych-rock band mentioned above, who splintered some months before its recording into the offshoot Flying Burrito Brothers, who enter the story much later. My understanding is that Parsons' various fixations (and perhaps he was not alone) were driving the band toward folk-rock well before the amicable split. Circumstances shifted around again and the upshot was finally that Parsons and buddy John Nuese were forced to assemble a new International Submarine Band on a moment's notice for LHI to record An Album, informed almost entirely by a country music obsession.

This is the result. Heralded as the invention of country rock, it arrives from the hands of accidental innovation. In and of themselves, a lot of these songs don't invent anything so much as they expand on an idea that already existed. Country is one of the foundations of rock & roll, and in 1968 those foundations were not so far away yet. Thus, it can be difficult now to hear the country in some of the rock songs, and the rock in some of the country songs. The one ingredient truly in place for Parsons' later records is his voice; despite some mishaps, it has all the poetry of Sweetheart and Grievous Angel. And the unflinching at something so desperately uncool as country music is a new phenomenon for 1968.

Personal: I'm a longtime Parsons fan but this album is new to me, and my opinion may be colored a bit by the way I discovered him, like so many others, via the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which was not just my introduction to him but the way I first explored anything resembling country music. What's always intrigued me about Rodeo is that it is very close to being pure country, but it still sounds like the Byrds, and there's still something barbed and beautiful and weird about it all in that very Byrdsy way. The Flying Burrito Bros. would infuse Parsons' songs with soul and power, and Parsons' solo records would attain an unexpected level of heartwrenching beauty. The International Submarine Band is his artistry at its most basic: a manifesto with the country and pop concepts still more or less separate. Maybe it's because these musicians weren't used to playing together, but this all seems just a tad too slick and competent. It's solid all right, but where's the tension, where's the bite?

The problem's illustrated most strongly by the two Johnny Cash covers, which come off as slightly lazy, and this is a great disappointment to me as I can't think of many things that excite me more in theory than hearing Gram sing "I Still Miss Someone." And the reading of "Folsom Prison Blues" seems fundamental, rote, bored, and lamely segues into Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right," a pairing that does neither song any great favor. The Jack Rhodes composition "A Satisfied Mind," already covered shortly before this by the Byrds and, recently, by Johnny Cash himself shortly before his death, is equally routine.

But no reason to carp. Not all the covers are weak. Parsons provides Merle Haggard's "I Must Be Somebody Else You've Known" with a reverential, passionate reading, and the band falls in line tightly behind him. Sun Records maven Jack Clement's "Miller's Cave" provides the ISB with the basis for their most convincing true country-rock hybrid of the record, a magnificent recording that deserves to stand with Parsons' greatest.

The LP begins beautifully, with the stunning Parsons original "Blue Eyes," which reveals him as some kind of maverick immediately on appearance. The triumph is twofold: in songwriting terms, he's already knocking out affecting Nashville music with the best of them; even the words perfectly capture the playful but genuine yearning of the best commercial country music from Hank Williams on down. It blends seamlessly with the covers, but lingers in the mind far longer, an auspicious signal of what was to come. Safe at Home's other peak has the opposite effect: with scarcely anything to do with country, "Luxury Liner" sticks out harshly, but its double track vocals, and wildly grinding sound prove a level of eclecticism Parsons would never entirely have a chance to explore. It is simply killer pop music.

We have, then, an extremely well-recorded album (seriously, the sonics are incredible) with an EP's worth of great music and plenty more good music. And maybe it did invent country rock. But it didn't make country rock matter. The Byrds would give Gram his megaphone to descend like some winged freak upon the world; the Byrds would pick all this beauty up and get it coated with grit and grease. Safe at Home is a fine record, but it's livelier as a piece of history -- in the context of what it preceded -- than as a listening experience. For this fan, anyway, Sweetheart of the Rodeo is the true beginning, but Safe at Home is essential for anyone with a love of this music and this mythology.