Masterpiece: The Complete Hank Williams

[Today: Going down that lost highway...]

In the early morning hours of New Year’s Day 1953, Hank Williams died in the back of a long black Cadillac during an overnight drive from Knoxville, TN to a show in Canton, OH. His 17-year old chauffeur discovered his rigid body during a stop at a gas station in Oak Hill, WV – drawing the curtain on one of the most influential careers in all of music. Fittingly, his death at age 29 was as dark, epic, and legendary as the songs that made him famous.

The Complete Hank Williams collects 225 songs over 10 discs. 53 of these tracks were previously unreleased, and the wealth of great music included here is simply astounding. However, this set also proves that Williams wasn’t a bulletproof artist – his duets with his first wife Audrey are dreadful, and there are plenty of them. The woman couldn’t sing a lick and bullied her way into his act, but that doesn’t make it right. Also curious was his decision to release songs under the pseudonym ‘Luke The Drifter’ – a singing, story-telling cowboy who sounded a lot like… Hank Williams! But regardless of a few odd artistic moves, Hiram King Williams’ case for the title of World’s Greatest Songwriter is a good one, and all the evidence is compiled here.

Songs such as ‘Lost Highway’ ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ and ‘(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle’ drew upon the troubles of his own life. Unhappily married and in constant back pain, he abused alcohol and pills, and transmuted his experiences into the songs that formed the foundation of modern country music. Of his songwriting method, Williams famously said “If a song can’t be written in 20 minutes, it ain’t worth writing.” While his music was often haunted, Williams could also cut loose with good time, honky tonk boogie like ‘Settin’ The Woods On Fire’ or ‘Hey Good Lookin”. Even material like ‘Jambalaya’ – which might have been reduced to novelty in lesser hands – was a perfectly executed, three-minute slice of down-home fun.

But Williams’ signature tune might be the last song he ever recorded – ‘I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive’. Using his Jimmie Rodgers-influenced quaver, he lets loose a desperate cry from the edge of the grave. He may have inspired legions of country musicians, but in this one tune it’s easy to see his connection to others who have turned chaos and anguish into high art, and artists such as John Lennon, Johnny Rotten, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards and Jim Morrison owe more than a passing debt to this country legend.

Listen: Lost Highway

Listen: (I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle

Listen: Settin’ The Woods On Fire

Listen: I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive

Storytellers – The Cover Art

Here’s the cover art for one of my recent mixes, Storytellers. The music on this mix is pretty dark – I counted something like eight songs in a row on disc one that involve death in one form or another. I’m not sure if that reflects on the subject of storytelling songs in general, or just my own tastes, but it’s definitely the mood here.

This mix also brought up the question of what exactly constitutes a storytelling song. The P questioned two songs in particular – Harry McClintock’s ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ and Tom Waits’ ‘Putnam County’ – and while those songs don’t travel the usual A to B trajectory of your typical story, they nonetheless set a particular mood in a way that would fit within any literary journal.

I labeled this set Volume 1 and Volume 2, leaving the door open for the dreaded, inevitable sequel. Here’s the cover art:

[Here's a detail from the front...]

[Here's the front gatefold...]

[Here's the first inside gatefold...]

[Here's the second inside gatefold...]

[Here's the third inside gatefold...]

[Here's the back...]

[And here's the setlist...]

*** VOLUME ONE – “FRYING DOWN IN HELL” ***

The Movie * Jim Morrison
The Road Goes On Forever * Robert Earl Keen
King Of California * Dave Alvin
Ballad Of Billy And Oscar * James Luther Dickinson
Tangled Up In Blue (Live) * Bob Dylan
Welcome To The Boomtown * David & David
Me And My Uncle * Dino Valente
Matty Groves * Fairport Convention
Richard Cory (Alternate Version) * Them
Me And Jesus The Pimp In A ’79 Granada Last Night * The Coup
Gloria * Patti Smith
Brother Louie * Stories
Vx Fx Dx * Michelle Shocked
Tribute * Tenacious D
Satan Gave Me A Taco * Beck

*** VOLUME TWO – “THE WILD BUNCH” ***

Big Rock Candy Mountain * Harry McClintock
Pretty Boy Floyd * Woody Guthrie
The Red Headed Stranger * Willie Nelson
Sam Stone * John Prine
Drive On (Alternate Lyrics) * Johnny Cash
Ellis Unit One * Steve Earle
Highway Patrolman * Bruce Springsteen
Putnam County * Tom Waits
Everything’s Okay * Luke The Drifter
Alcohol And Pills * Fred Eaglesmith
Billy From The Hills * Greg Brown
The Devil Went Down To Georgia * The Charlie Daniels Band
You Don’t Mess Around With Jim * Jim Croce
Dirty Blvd. * Lou Reed
Have You Seen Bruce Richard Reynolds? * Alabama 3

Five Good Books

Chances are, the MUSIC section of your local bookstore is stuffed to the gills with books you’ve never heard of. In an effort to break that stalemate, here are five good reads that I’ve recently enjoyed, and recommend without hesitation:

So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star | by Jacob Slichter – The ex-drummer for Semisonic (I hadn’t heard of them either), Slichter recounts his group’s crawl through the slime pit of the music industry. Part Catch-22, part Spinal Tap, this hilarious memoir reveals the bufoonery that runs rampant in every corner of the industry, and acts as a first-rate primer on why the music business finds itself in the dumps. Chapter 7, entitled ‘The Band Looks Stunning’, details the group’s efforts to shoot a video for MTV, and reduced me to a puddle of laughter. This book absolutely, positively needs to be turned into a feature film.

Telling passage: “In the autograph booth after a show, it wasn’t unusual for a fan to smile and say, ‘Hey, I threw that bottle at you!’”

Love Is A Mix Tape | by Rob Sheffield – Using a box of mix tapes and a pile of memories, Sheffield tells the story of Renee, his late-wife who died in his arms after only five years of marriage. This story of love lost is so vividly and heart-achingly rendered that by its end you’ll feel like you knew this girl, and you’ll miss her too.

Telling passage: “I was lucky I got to be her guy for awhile.”

One Train Later | by Andy Summers – The title refers to a chance encounter on the metro with Stewart Copeland during the formation of The Police (one train later, and he may not have been in the band), but this musical autobiography covers Summers’ entire journey through music. Charming, self-effacing, and funny, Summers tells his story with a joy that’s contagious.

Telling passage: “I begin having expensive cloaks and trousers made in places like Thea Porter. One of my more memorable pieces is a stunning bell-sleeved wizard’s coat in brilliant reds and greens with gold stitching around the cuffs. I play onstage with this beautiful coat, feeling like Merlin. We all want to feel like wizards now, have magical powers, transform and subvert people’s minds. The coat helps.”

Black Monk Time | by Thomas Edward Shaw and Anita Klemke – Shaw isn’t the most gifted writer, but his story is so good that it hardly matters. As the bass player for pre-punk heroes The Monks, he had a front-row seat for the creation of their volcanic sound and strange look, and their many trials with the music industry. In spite of a healthy following in Europe, the group released just one album before their label dropped them and they broke up. This musical autobiography isn’t just stranger than fiction – it also rocks a lot harder.

Telling passage: “The idea that Americans were dying for a questionable reason was the catalyst that had caused us to sing ‘Monk Time’. It was a screaming incomprehension caused by the growing suspicion that a government may not reflect the real interests of its people.”

Egotrip’s Book Of Rap Lists | by various authors – Featuring hundreds of lists that cover every facet of hip-hop past and present, this book is a must-have for anyone with even a glimmer of interest in the genre.

Telling passage: [From 'Sir Mix-A-Lot's 10 Signs That You're Being Player Hated] “2. You drive a Benz. You love soul food. The four niggas standin’ in the doorway at the restaurant key your shit while you’re eatin’.”

*****

And one very discouraging read:

The 100 Best Selling Albums Of The 90s | by various authors – Viewed strictly through the prism of record sales, the 90′s looks like a cataclysmic stew of Rap-Metal, bad Country, boy bands, and Hootie & The Blowfish. Of the Top 20 selling albums of that decade, only Metallica’s self-titled “black album” (#12) and Pearl Jam’s Ten (#18) have endured artistically – the rest will make you hold your nose. If you keep the 90′s close to your heart musically, run screaming from this one.

Telling passage: [From Garth Brooks' Ropin' The Wind, the #9 selling album of the decade] “Garth Brooks was a great admirer of Billy Joel. The inclusion of ‘Shameless’, on Ropin’ The Wind illuminates the links between the two artists’ brand of blue collar balladry, as well as illustrating Brooks’ easy ability to straddle the country-pop divide.”

Doubleshot Tuesday: The Sounds Of Science/Solid Gold Hits

[Today: Word to MCA...]

Best wishes and good health to Beastie Boy Adam Yauch (aka MCA), who disclosed last week that he has cancer in one of his salivary glands. The good news is that this rare form of cancer has a relatively low fatality rate, and Yauch was diagnosed early. In a video posted on the Beastie Boys’ website, he explained that “It’s a little bit of a setback, it’s a pain in the ass, but this is something that’s very treatable, and in most cases they’re able to completely get rid of it and people don’t have continuing problems with it… so that’s what’s up.” Get well Yauch – many fingers are crossed for your speedy recovery…

Listen: Bodhisattva Vow

Listen: Flowin’ Prose

*****

*****

See also…

A Dozen Great Beastie Boys Songs
The Secret History Of Beastie Boys – The Cover Art

Eat ‘Em & Smile

At some point in the recent past The P and I happened to find ourselves at a seafood restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina. Each spot at every table in this particular restaurant was marked by a small plaque commemorating a celebrity who had eaten there. When I looked down at my place at our table, here’s what I saw:

Insert your own clam jokes below…

Cover Artist: Tom Wilkes (1939-2009)

Album cover photographer and designer Tom Wilkes passed away on June 28th at the age of 69. His name was unfamiliar to me, but he was responsible for some of the most iconic album covers of the rock era. He’s best known for designing the poster for the Monterey Pop Festival and photographing Janis Joplin for the cover of her album Pearl, just hours before her death. But his cover designs for The Stones’ Beggars Banquet and Neil Young’s Harvest are brilliant pieces of pop art that will stand the test of time, and his visual style always seemed custom fit to the mood of the music within.

Here are a dozen of my favorite album covers designed and/or photographed by Wilkes…

Captain Beefheart | Safe As Milk (1968)

The Rolling Stones | Beggars Banquet (1968)

Spirit | The Family That Plays Together (1968)

The Flying Burrito Brothers | The Gilded Palace Of Sin (1969)

George Harrison | All Things Must Pass (1970)

Leon Russell | Leon Russell (1970)

Delaney & Bonnie & Friends | On Tour With Eric Clapton (1970)

John Prine | John Prine (1971)

Janis Joplin | Pearl (1971)

Dr. John | Dr. John’s Gumbo (1972)

George Carlin | FM & AM (1972)

Neil Young | Harvest (1972)

Magic Moment: Minutemen Unplugged

Minutemen lead singer D. Boon died in an automobile accident in December of 1985, and his premature death was one of the great musical losses of the 80′s. His band provided a post-punk feast of wildly varying styles, with a healthy dose of politics, sociology, philosophy, and humor thrown in for good measure. Here he runs down his group’s history and his love of punk rock – in an acoustic setting, no less…

Masterpiece: London Calling

[Today: Redrawing the boundaries of Punk...]

London Calling upped the ante considerably on what a punk album could be, and in the process provided the final fissure in a genre that was about to crack into a thousand pieces. Coming as it did during a time when lesser punk bands were forced to walk the plank for such transgressions as playing their instruments well, exploring other genres, and generally rocking out, London Calling was a fearless exploration of sounds and ideas. The album art was a stylistic nod to Elvis Presley’s 1956 RCA debut, and the music within provided a living link to the greased up Rock & Roll of the 1950′s.

Here The Clash dip into many different musical styles, from reggae (‘Rudie Can’t Fail’) to rockabilly (‘Brand New Cadillac’) and beyond, and explores far-flung topics such as anti-racism (‘Clampdown’), Montgomery Clift (‘The Right Profile’), fidelity (‘Train In Vain’), existentialism (‘Lost In The Supermarket’), and of course, the apocalypse (‘Four Horseman’ and the title track). Producer Guy Stevens had a first-take-is-good-enough philosophy and was known to bust up studio furniture to get the band in the proper mood to play. That rough intensity, along with the band’s revolutionary zeal, drives the album through its breadth of sound and depth of ideas, making this a super-charged gallop through the history of rock.

With 19 tracks spread over two LPs, this sprawling, ambitious album reached far beyond where punk had ever attempted to go before. These songs proved that the fire of punk needn’t be fueled by small-minded, two-chord simplicity, and the genre never really snapped back to the narrow boundaries that had previously defined it. The Clash were the thinking man’s punk group and also the rock fan’s punk group, and those crossovers made them the object of punk suspicion and scorn. But nearly three decades later, London Calling stands as a slice of pure rock & roll rebellion that helped redeem the artistic ambitions of the very punks that sneered at it on release.

Released in mid-December of 1979, London Calling was both the last album of the 70′s and the first album of the 80′s – a great, solid bridge between two very different decades of music, and one of the very best albums ever recorded.

Listen: Revolution Rock

Listen: Clampdown

Listen: London Calling

Buried Treasure: Down By The Jetty

[Today: Dr. Feelgood has the prescription...]

Just prior to the explosion of punk rock in England there was a healthy scene known as “pub rock” that featured little-remembered but imaginatively-named bands such as Ducks Deluxe, Kilburn & The High Roads, and Eggs Over Easy. Pub Rock was a back-to-basics movement that was centered around the thrill of live performance, and primarily influenced by R&B and early rock & roll.

The most exciting of the pub rock outfits was a band from Canvey Island called Dr. Feelgood, who played their self-described “rivvum and blooze” with the all-out energy of the punk bands who would follow a few years later. Guitarist Wilko Johnson was a non-stop whirl of back-and-forth motion across the stage, propelled like a yo-yo by the music his band was making. Frontman Lee Brilleaux was a sweaty, besuited combination of retro-cool and timeless aggression, while bassist John B. Sparks and drummer The Big Figure held a solid bottom in spite of the chaos around them. They made four very good albums before Johnson left the band in 1977 over creative control issues. Their 1974 debut Down By The Jetty is their best album by a nose, and one of the better releases of that decade.

Their 1976 live album Stupidity went to #1 in the UK, but even before Johnson left the band, Dr. Feelgood was beginning to sound like a thing of the past next to the upcoming punk bands. Wilko Johnson explained the contrast to Sounds magazine in January of 1977: “Where we differ is that we’ve always had a lot of respect for the music we’re playing and have always been pretty knowledgeable about it and known what we were doing. The essence of punk music, on the other hand, is to be naive about what you’re doing… it seems that as long as you can put across that aggresssion and excitement it doesn’t matter what you fuckin’ play. Or how badly you play it.”

Listen: She Does It Right

Listen: Cheque Book

The Blame Game

Lately I’ve noticed a pernicious news-gathering trend that’s starting to get on my nerves. It’s become common practice for editorials to blame a host of problems on, well… everyone. Google the phrase “we’re all responsible” to find out just how much stuff the pundits think we’re all to blame for: the current financial crisis, the Iraq war, failing schools, random gun violence and much, much more.

This angle hit its low point with the recent death of Michael Jackson. The great Jeff Chang was just one of many writers to hang MJ’s personal problems on his audience, as if we’re all to blame for his descent into weirdness. Here’s the conclusion of Chang’s piece:

“But as an audience, we were insatiable and ruthless. Years later, after the satisfaction and ease of his 20s, after he had been broken by self-mutilation and bizarre scandal in his 30s, Michael Jackson would reveal a tragic, bathetic emptiness, pleading, “Have you seen my childhood?” By then, many of us had either turned away or turned on him. The transaction was done.

In the end, he lost even his voice, autotuned first by lawyers and other keepers of his dissipating wealth, consumed by Mickey Mouse-sounding paid-TV defenses and overproduced songs, before finally going silent forever. Time will restore the greatness of Michael Jackson’s artistry. May it also cause us some revulsion at our complicity in his fall as well.”

My question is this: How am I complicit in Michael Jackson’s fall? I bought a copy of Thriller as a 13-year old, watched his videos on MTV, and then ponied up for a dollar bin LP copy of Off The Wall. I fail to see how those actions put me on the hook for the poor decision-making of a spoiled, deranged adult. Chang’s logic is hard to follow, mainly because there is no logic behind his final assertion. American culture has simply become the boogeyman for any problem that’s too big to explain in 25 words or less, and I’m getting mighty tired of it.

The worst aspect of this kind of mindless blame game isn’t its blind guilt-by-association, but that it enables the very behavior it seeks to explain. By pointing the finger at ordinary citizens, the media is absolving real culprits such as Michael Jackson, George W. Bush, Wall Street bankers, gun manufacturers and others who harm regular people with their selfish actions.

So yes, my “transactions” with Michael Jackson were purely business, and then I got on with my life. It’s called commerce, and it happens all the time. Personally, I’m dreading the day that Mrs. Butterworth goes on an interstate killing spree, because I already know who’s responsible for it.