Blue Monday

Lately I’ve had the third Steely Dan album, Pretzel Logic, in heavy rotation on the car stereo. It’s my favorite Steely Dan record, even though it doesn’t have my favorite Steely Dan songs: “My Old School,” “Black Friday” and “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” are elsewhere in the catalogue. But Pretzel Logic is the record that turned me into a jazzbo. Not only does the album feature a perfectly acceptable version of Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” that sent me off to buy my first Duke collection, but there’s a song that name-checks Charlie Parker, and the piano riff that supports “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” was copped from Horace Silver’s “Song For My Father.” For a teenager in suburban New Jersey in the 1970s, Pretzel Logic was like a friendly clerk at a good record store offering tips on where to start some jazz exploration.

The title tune is a slow blues vamp supporting lyrics that bring to mind Bob Dylan in one of his playfully surrealistic modes:

I have never met Napoleon
But I plan to find the time
I have never met Napoleon
But I plan to find the time
‘Cause he looks so fine upon that hill
They tell me he was lonely, he’s lonely still
Those days are gone forever
Over a long time ago, oh yeah

Maybe it’s the cover photo of a pretzel vendor on a snowy day, but Pretzel Logic plays in my mind as the most New Yawkish of the Steely Dan canon. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen subsequently tipped their sound toward Los Angeles and the cocktail lounge end of the jazz spectrum. I know there are lots of people who consider Aja the perfect Steely Dan record, but the first three albums — Can’t Buy a Thrill, Countdown to Ecstacy and Pretzel Logic — are the ones I still play.

Blue Monday

The last time I heard David Bromberg was back in my bright college days, when a few of my friends were quite taken with his “Bullfrog Blues,” the kind of endless shaggy-dog joke song that is amusing the first two times you hear it. After that . . . I dunno, but after the fourth go-round I began to wonder if “Bullfrog Blues” hadn’t been the sound Charles Whitman heard in his head while he was picking off pedestrians from the top of the Texas Tower. That wasn’t the only Bromberg song I heard, of course, but for all his impeccable musicianship and wide-ranging tastes, there was just something about Bromberg that made keeping up with his records a little less than a matter of life or death.

Are you still with me? Well, forget everything I just said. I went to Bromberg’s show at the Count Basie Theater on a windy, slushy Friday night, and I emerged from the concert ready to buy every single David Bromberg CD I could lay hands on. One of the highlights of a show filled with highlights was his solo performance of Bob Dylan’s “It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” and while the clip above isn’t from the Count Basie show, it’s very much in the spirit of the performance.

(And as long as I’m talking about this past weekend’s great show, let me sing the praises of the Count Basie Theater, a grand old space with superb acoustics. How nice that it’s named after a real musician instead of succumbing to the same corporate crapification that afflicts us with the Izod Arena, the Kaopectate Arts Center and the Centrum Silver Center. All right, I made up those last two names. They aren’t real. Not yet, anyway.)

The single biggest change in Bromberg’s sound is, quite simply, his voice. He’s finally got one. In the past, Bromberg vied with Leo Kottke for the title of Folk Musician Whose Singing Is Most Like To Make You Realize Bob Dylan’s Voice Isn’t All That Bad. Well, Dylan should have followed Bromberg’s example and taken some serious voice lessons. Not only can Bromberg sing, but his voice now has that chest-bursting fullness B.B. King can still deliver on nights when he’s in front of an audience that wants to hear some real music instead of just bask in the aura of An Authentic Blues Legend. On the second number of the evening, the jokey blues “I’ll Take You Back,” Bromberg was truly belting it out, and several times during the show he hit high notes that would have been a couple of stratospheres beyond his reach when he was about a third of his present age.

“Ecelctic” has always been the default setting for any attempt to describe Bromberg, and eclectic the show certainly was: a bit of bluegrass, a bit of Irish folk, a bit of country and a bit of N’awlins, all seasoning hefty servings of blues. All of it was played with elegant virtuosity and welcome flashes of wit, and by the time the show closed with Dr. John’s “Such a Night,” I could say that this had been a truly satisfying and engaging show.

Sad news

Jim Jones, Pere Ubu guitarist and longtime pillar of the Cleveland music scene, has died. This site has news items and performance clips, including Pere Ubu’s appearance on David Letterman’s show.

The World’s Greatest Music Collection

Yours for a mere $3 million.

Breaking the Mould

Personally, I prefer Bob Mould in a band setting: with Husker Du or Sugar, to be exact. His solo records don’t do much for me, beyond a song or two, and that remains the case with his new one, District Line. Mould may want to reinvent himself in the confessional singer-songwriter mold of, say, Neil Young (whose Harvest Moon has been cited by Mould more than once), but Mould has none of Young’s gift for melody. Even in the Husker Du days, the real popcraft usually fell to the drummer, Grant Hart. Mould is the go-to guy for power, texture and riffage, and his chosen career direction plays to none of those strengths.

But this profile of Mould in the Guardian is one of the better articles I’ve read this week, and it contains the revelation (revelation to me, anyway) that Mould decided to try something really new at the end of the Nineties:

A wrestling fan since childhood, in September 1999 he took a job as a scriptwriter for Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling franchise. There followed a seven-month schedule of travelling and stress unlike anything he’d endured before, as Mould’s role extended beyond merely deciding who Hulk Hogan was pissed off with that week.

“The show would go live and I’m sitting behind a curtain as the liaison between the wrestlers and the production people, telling the referee on a wireless earpiece how to direct traffic in the ring so we can make our commercial breaks. I’m doing this for three hours, with explosions, people yelling and bleeding - chaos! It’s a different Broadway show every night.”

After playing “New Day Rising” for several years, Mould must have found it a breeze to be scripting wrestling matches.

That thing you Du!

Oh, what the hell. Let’s make it a Husker Du kind of day.

When I lived in Jersey City in 1980s, I frequently commuted home via the Pulaski Skyway, traversing miles of hellishly ugly industrial landscape, with a Husker CD blasting away on the old Alpine. Now that I’m talking about the Skyway a couple of times a week during readings for my book, I’ve started craving the old Minneapolis Wall of Sound once again:

Husker Du’s 1985 album New Day Rising is pure up from the word go — or, more accurately, the first pounding of the drums on the title track. I once read that Robert Palmer (the Armani-clad singer, not the music writer) often did a cover version of “New Day Rising” as a concert encore. I can’t even imagine.

From there, the band immediately leaps into “The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill” and “I Apologize,” making for a combination punch as unforgettable as the opening tracks of . . . oh, A Hard Day’s Night, for instance. Grant Hart’s songwriting was never stronger than it was on this album, and there are some killer lines in “The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill.”

She’s got a big room and it’s always a mess
Worn out shoes and a worn out dress
A worn out smile that she’ll wear some more
And a worn out welcome mat by her door

The next few numbers are fine, but they work best as the lead-in to “Celebrated Summer” — one of Bob Mould’s finest songs, and a tune I have to play as often as possible during the opening weeks of June.

Love and hate was in the air, like pollen from a flower
Somewhere in April time, they add another hour

I guess I’d better think up a way to spend my time
Just when I’m ready to sit inside, it’s summer time
Should I go fishing or get a friend to hang around
It’s back to summer, back to basics, hang around

Getting drunk out on the beach, or playing in a band
And getting out of school meant getting out of hand

Was this your celebrated summer? Was that your celebrated summer?

They weren’t a band for everybody, but they were definitely a band for me.

Blue Monday

To call J.J. Cale a master of understatement hardly begins to touch on the tightly reined-in quality of his music. Personally, I find a little of his stuff goes a very long way, but he’s built up a tremendous following over the decades, and his admirers include Eric Clapton, whose covers of Cale standards like “After Midnight” and “Cocaine” are among the highlights of his career. The two just won a Grammy for their collaboration, The Road to Escondido, so here’s a Cale performance that I think displays his low-key approach in its best light.

The Gimli groove

As much as I like Scandinavian music, I hadn’t heard of ethno group Hedningarna, until PZ Myers highlighted it in a recent post. The occasion was a welcome English translation of the group’s lyrics for “Drafur and Gildur,” a song from the fourth album:

Suddenly roaring and screeching
Trolls come running from the woods
Drafur muses to himself
“Time for some axercise!”

The first troll is hoping
To bash Drafur’s legs to pulp
This ambition is thwarted
When his head takes leave of his neck

More and more trolls appear
Drafur wishes they would just go away
Trolls have tiny brains
But there are too many of them

Suddenly the trolls’ luck turns
And hope springs in Drafur’s heart
Through a scarlet mist
He spies Gildur kicking troll ass

You can read the rest here. You know you want to.

Blue Monday

When the Rolling Stones paid their first visit to the United States, they arrived as dyed-in-the-wool blues purists. They made a point of visiting the Chicago headquarters of Chess Records — where Brian Jones made a pest of himself asking if Willie Dixon would be coming in — and recording tracks in its studio, including “2120 South Michigan Avenue,” an instrumental named after the address of the Chess office. And when the Stones were booked to appear on the TV show Shindig, they made a bit of television history by demanding, and getting, the assurance that one of their idols, Howlin’ Wolf, would appear as well.

At the time, Howlin’ Wolf — aka Chester Arthur Burnett — was doing just fine, financially. A canny businessman with simple tastes and a wife who managed his books with an eagle eye, Wolf earned enough in royalties and concert fees to pay his musicians extremely well, even giving them health insurance. Unlike his in-law Sonny Boy Williamson, who drank and gambled away money as it came in, Wolf always knew which side his bread was buttered on: starting out, he recorded simultanously for two different labels, and made so much money that when he decided to quit the South and head for the big time in Chicago, he did so in his own car instead of a train — no small point of pride. So when the Stones brought him onto Shindig in 1965, the gesture was one of respect for a key influence, rather than a bunch of white guys doing a favor for an over-the-hill bluesman.

Listen to Wolf performing “How Many More Years,” the 1951 tune that was his first hit, and tell me if he sounds over the hill. Always an imposing physical presence, Wolf took on an extra dimension of intensity when he sang, and though he’s easily twice the age of anyone in his audience, Wolf looks like he take on the whole room single-handed. The overly busy camera work (which focuses on the backsides of the seated young women as often as Wolf) obscures the fact that the Stones made a point of sitting in a circle at his feet as he sang. Considering that the Stones were already competing with the Beatles as the young lords of rock and roll, this was a remarkable gesture, and Wolf never forgot it.

A full deck of ‘Jokerman’

Great song, great video. Instead of the standard face-shots and lip-synching, the video concentrates on illustrating the wealth of mythological and classical allusions in the lyrics. The overwhelming majority of videos diminish the underlying songs, turning them into nothing more than soundtracks for junky little movies. This one actually points the way to a better understanding of one of Bob Dylan’s more enigmatic epics, one that repays continued attention.

A rocked-out version of “Jokerman” was the highlight of Dylan’s first-ever appearance on David Letterman’s show in 1984. His Bobness had brought together some young, tough-sounding L.A. musicians for a number of private sessions. They quickly learned that backing up Bob Dylan is not a job for the faint of heart. For the first of the three numbers, Dylan decided he wanted Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Don’t Start Me Talking,” which they hadn’t even rehearsed. Fortunately, the musicians had grown up on the New York Dolls version of the song, and they acquitted themselves quite well:For the next segment, Dylan picked “License to Kill,” one of the crankiest numbers on a pretty cranky album:

But for sheer audacity, the stripped-down version of “Jokerman” stands as one of the great Dylan deconstructions of his own music. I love the interplay Dylan arranged on the album version — the impeccable smoothness of Sly and Robbie on the rhythm section, the blend of Mark Knopfler and Mick Taylor on guitars — but this “Jokerman” points the way down a promising road Dylan ought to have taken, but didn’t:

All the kerfuffle towards the end of the song happened because Dylan wanted to do a harmonica solo and found the only available harp was in the wrong key. A suitable instrument was finally located, and a classic Dylan performance — all the better for the element of near-disaster — careered to a close.

According to Clinton Heylin’s biography Behind the Shades, Dylan was prevailed upon to abandon his punk backup and hire a bunch of pros for the same year’s tour of Europe. The not terribly interesting results were released on Real Live, which vies with Dylan and the Dead for the title of crappiest concert album in the Dylan catalogue. Oh well. The Eighties were not a great decade for Bob Dylan, and such compulsive second-guessing of his initial good instincts was a big part of the reason why.