Blue Monday

Maybe like me, you never heard of Adam Fulara. Now, like me, you can say you heard from him.

How Blue (Monday) can you get?

Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn

Aside from Motown maestro James Jamerson, it would be hard to name an electric bass player who had more impact on rock, soul, and R&B than Donald “Duck” Dunn, who just died at the age of 70 after playing two shows in Tokyo.

That’s Dunn playing the unstoppable bass line on “I Can’t Turn You Loose.” When he re-teamed with Steve Cropper for the Blues Brothers backup band, John Belushi and Dan Akroyd made it the opening theme of their concerts.

I always thought the sound effects at the beginning of “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” were unnecessary: Dunn’s tidal bass line conveys the setting perfectly. Not that it keeps the song from being an all-timer:

(Scary) Blue Monday

“The only strings that hold me here/Are tangled up around the pier/And so a secret kiss/Brings madness with the bliss/And I will think of this/When I’m dead and in my grave/Set me adrift/I’m lost over there/But I must be insane/To go on skating on your name/And by tracing it twice I fell through the ice/Of Alice/There’s only Alice.”

Tom Waits wrote the Alice songs for a 1992 stage play directed by Robert Wilson, and for the next decade they were available only as bootlegs in various configurations.  I haven’t seen the play, but I was delighted with the 2002 release of the songs. As much as I love Tom Waits’ music and growling, sardonic stage persona (I speak as someone who’s been buying every new Waits album since the Nighthawks at the Diner era), I sometimes get tired of the whole carny barker routine. The Alice songs have none of that posturing. This is the great overlooked Waits album — tender, spooky, full of longing and a sense of loss — and “Alice” is the great overlooked Waits song.

Shortly after the CD came out, I was playing it in the living room and Dances With Mermaids (then about eight) came in to listen with me. After a while, she said, “Daddy, this music is scaring me.” Smart kid. It scares me, too, when it isn’t doing a lot of other things besides.

Blue (Howlin’) Monday

My one glimpse of blues guitarist Hubert Sumlin in action was an unexpected pleasure — he appeared onstage during Elvis Costello’s 2005 performance at the Beacon Theatre in New York, and the two performed “Hidden Charms” with the widest possible grins on their faces. It was already a sensational concert, but it was elevated even further by their obvious pleasure in each other’s company and musicianship. The above clip was made only a few weeks ago in Montclair, so Sumlin was clearly making a habit of it.

Sumlin, who just died at the age of 80, was right-hand man to the larger-than-life Howlin’ Wolf, who for obvious reasons tended to suck up all the attention in any room. But you can glimpse him at work in some of these clips.

I hope Sumlin got the chance to see himself played by Albert Jones in the 2005 film Cadillac Records. That’s the formidable Eamonn Walker playing Wolf.

Blue Monday (African flower edition)

In the early 1960s, Duke Ellington found himself between recording contracts, and decided to capitalize on it by working with some of the young turks who were redefining jazz. His album with John Coltrane produced one sublime track (their beautiful version of “In a Sentimental Mood”) but was undercut by the fact that Coltrane was playing with Ellington’s regular sidemen. There was no such problem when Ellington went into the studio with Charles Mingus and Max Roach,  two iconoclasts who loved Duke’s music but were equally determined to keep him on his toes every minute. (That Mingus had been fired from Ellington’s orchestra, years earlier, after he got into a brawl with Juan Tizol no doubt added a whole layer of subtext.) Not all of the tension was directed at Ellington: at one point, the legendarily combative Mingus grew so angry with Roach that he packed up his bass and headed for the elevator, and only came back after Duke spent some time smoothing his feathers.

The album that resulted, Money Jungle (1962), is a tense, often combative sounding record loaded with remarkable music, but not exactly easy listening. Except, that is, for “Fleurette Africaine,” an Ellington tune that qualifies as virtually spontaneous composition. According to Duke, he prepped Mingus and Roach by describing an image of a flower standing alone in a forest. Mingus closed his eyes and came up with the fluttering bass line that opens the song, and Roach improvised subtle but emphatic accompaniment. The tune’s a wonder, and the performance is a career standout for all three musicians. It’s certainly one of my all-time favorite Ellington compositions.

The simplicity and beauty of the tune seems to attract at least as many musicians as Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” with equally mixed results. I rather like this guitar duo treatment on YouTube:

On the opposite end of the scale is this treatment by Gary Burton and Pat Metheny. Both men have their fans, but this version is way too ornate for my tastes:

This version by the amusingly named Trio De Janeiro hath charms to soothe the savage beast:

But in the end, I prefer the simpler approach, whether from Duke or any other interpreter:

Columbus Day the Newman way

Blue (Independence Day) Monday

This version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” isn’t as widely known as the one from the Woodstock festival, but it’s every bit as awesome in its own right. Better still, the cameraman (and the director) had the sense to focus as often as possible on what Jimi Hendrix is doing to the guitar. One of my biggest beefs with the Woodstock film is that Michael Wadleigh kept the camera on the man’s face instead of his hands.

Mould breaker

Since Husker Du almost never put band pictures on its album covers, and the record label’s publicity photos neglected to identify the individual members, my Eighties self spent some time poring over the occasional publicity shots, wondering which member of the trio was the guitarist producing that awe-inspiring racket. That Eighties self concluded it was probably not that guy with the handlebar ‘stache. Something about him said “drummer.” It must be that intense-looking guy with the long, wavy hair. Yep, he definitely fit my preconceptions of how a godlike guitarist should look. Certainly not that doughy little schlub off to the side — he had “bass player” written all over him. Not him. No siree.

I quickly learned how wrong I was, and when I got my first and only look at Husker Du in person — Livingston Gym, Piscataway, concert tinnitus for miles — I watched Mould at work and had my epiphany. The sincerity police have always had it wrong: rock and roll was never about who you really were, but who you really wanted to be. And pudgy, sweaty Bob Mould, slashing away at a Flying-V guitar that would have looked more appropriate in the hands of some poofy-haired glitter rocker, was the principle made flesh. With that ax in his hands, he was a monster.

According to his bandmates, Mould was also a monster when he wasn’t holding a guitar, which was part of the reason Husker Du fissioned in 1988, leaving behind the kind of catalogue that can only be achieved by inspired workaholics. And in the quarter-century since the breakup, as Husker Du’s influence has been certified by an army of noisy progeny, Mould has gone solo, done a stint as leader of the short-lived band Sugar, dabbled in electronica, certified himself as a gay man of the bear variety, buffed up in a serious way, and resumed touring as a solo performer. But odds are that the people who want to read his new memoir See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody do so because of that string of albums, EPs, and concerts that were the loudest, most definitive “no” to Reaganism the Eighties had to offer apart from Bruce Springsteen.

Count me among them. Though I think Mould’s work with Sugar is undervalued — if I had to choose, I’d keep Beaster over Mould’s share of the songs on Warehouse: Songs and Stories — none of it offers the creative high-wire act that makes New Day Rising, portions of Zen Arcade and later Copper Blue fresh and exciting after two decades. And very little of his solo work plays to his strengths, aside from a song here and there.

The first warning to people like me comes right at the first page of the book, which opens not with some anecdote about amphetamine-fried gigs in reeking clubs, but Mould and his partner getting into a pissing match with some functionary at a clothing-optional resort. Rock and roll! Throughout See a Little Light, Mould reminds us that he’s left Husker Du behind him with the regularity of Big Ben tolling away the hours. True, and good for him, but fans will want to read the book for tidbits like this:

In the beginning, our shows had the up-surf and elemental punk rock feel: simple, stupid lyrics that rhymed and maybe didn’t mean a lot, but were funny and punk. Then, as the months went on, another side to the band’s sound emerged, a slower, darker droning feel. A lot of that was my doing, and one huge inspiration was Joy Division’s album Unknown Pleasures. You come across only a handful of records in a lifetime that have that immediate impact, where you never forget the sound. It gets embedded in your cellular structure, and it seeps into the work you create. Joy Division’s music was sad and poetic, and I felt we needed to add those elements to the mix. I also played chiming guitar parts that were influenced by early Cure, and a warped and warbling sound inspired by Keith Levene of Public Image Ltd (PiL). Another band that inspired us was Pere Ubu. The three of us went to see them play twice in one evening at the Walker Art Center in 1979. We sat in the front row for both shows, and after the second, we walked onstage and chatted with the band. We didn’t want to sound like Pere Ubu, but they showed us how a band could have a unique sound and an unusual, less than glamorous look, and still succeed in every way that was important to us.

I don’t know about you, but any band that attends a Pere Ubu concert and thinks “role model” is okay in my book. And never in a million years would I have connected Joy Division with the early Husker sound. That’s why you follow artists — they always lead you to interesting places.

I thought Robert Christgau’s review in yesterday’s NYTBR was a tad harsh, but he was dead right on how Mould’s continuing anger at his old bandmates keeps him from delving into what made classic Husker Du so riveting and groundbreaking. After two discs of tyro work, the band hit its stride with the Metal Circus EP and the ambitious Zen Arcade double album, then achieved liftoff with New Day Rising, Flip Your Wig, and the underrated Candy Apple Gray. Mould’s guitar, with its torrents of molten noise, was the centerpiece of the sound, but Grant Hart’s drumming — light on its feet, emphasizing cymbals and snares over the bass pedal — pushed the songs without making them overly heavy, which would have happened with a more John Bonham-style player. Any judgments on Greg Norton’s bass playing will have to await the efforts of sonic archaeologists, or a team of ace engineers assigned to remix and extract the band’s catalogue from SST’s substandard production.

But just when you might have been inclined to dismiss them as noise merchants, the Huskers delivered the other half of their one-two punch: songwriting. Both Mould and Hart were budding masters of the form, and throughout the band’s sonic assault, great lines would surface like pieces of wreckage. The menacing riff of “The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill” turned out to disguise one of the great oddball love songs of the Eighties, and the pounding chords of “I Apologize” accompanied a domestic drama about a couple unable to get past their anger at each other. And then there was “Celebrated Summer,” an ode to warm weather that could only have been written by a man who grew up in upstate New York and went to college in Minnesota.

There are flashes of insight within Mould’s recollections of the Husker days, some of them inadvertently revealing. Reading how Mould and Hart used their privileged positions as songwriters to reduce Norton’s share of the band proceeds reminds me of the acrimony between Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm, and confirms that disputes over songwriting credits have killed more good bands than music-biz accounting.

What made the initial Sugar album, Copper Blue, was that it sounded like a progression from Husker Du, rather than the denial that animated Workbook and Black Sheets of Rain, Mould’s two post-Husker works. Copper Blue and its successor, the darker and crazier Beaster, bring together more great melodies and riffs than any of his solo records before or since. Mould is far more revealing in the way he examines Sugar’s short existence, and deals himself some appropriate knocks for the weakness of the valedictory album, File Under: Easy Listening, and the subsequent breakup.

Oddly enough, See a Little Light may ultimately be more interesting to people who know nothing of either Husker Du or Sugar, but want to know if there is life for gay men after fifty. For Mould, the answer is a big neon-colored yes: having evaded the ravages of HIV and gotten some money in the bank, Mould is having the best time of his life. Late in the book he acknowledges that his shift to a more personal songwriting style has reduced his mass appeal, and here I must (sadly) agree. The man deserves his peace and quiet, but it is his racket that I value most, and apparently there will no more of that except in concert when he drops some of his older songs into the mix. Good for him, but as for me, I expect that when I want to read up again on Bob Mould, I’ll turn to the third person Our Band Could Be Your Life rather than the first person See a Little Light. When Neil Young sings about having slain his demons, he sounds like a man who remembers every blow and how it felt. Bob Mould simply sounds like a man who’s happy to be rid of the whole mess.

Bobness Day

Radio station WBAI is catering to your Bob Dylan needs today with a daylong Bobfest. What more do you need to know?