Bad Apple: …In The Life Of Chris Gaines

[Today: Garth Brooks plays make-believe...]

I’m the sort that will drive three blocks out of the way to avoid a gruesome traffic accident because I don’t want to gawk at other people’s suffering or be scarred by roadside carnage. But I’m also the sort who will go out of the way to pay $1.99 for a trainwreck of an album so that I can plumb the depths of awful and report the results on my blog. If Garth Brooks lay bleeding by the side of the road, I’d do the right thing and get help, but once he decided to take on the alter-ego Chris Gaines and pretend to be an alterna-rocker, you better believe I’m going to pay my nickels to point and laugh. On that score, …In The Life Of Chris Gaines represents a deliciously well-spent $1.99.

This 1999 release was the pre-soundtrack (whatever that means) to a movie called The Lamb that was to be about fictional rocker Chris Gaines. Ostensibly, this album was conceived as a device to prep Brooks’ considerable audience for the movie, which tellingly was never made (although he did film a VH1 Behind The Music about Gaines). Viewed cynically, this could be taken as his attempt to crossover into rock without risking his own brand name. Coming as it did on the heels of his disastrous tryout with the San Diego Padres, this album led more than a few armchair psychologists to speculate on his state of mind at the time. One thing is certain – Brooks hit a major league curveball much more credibly than he imitates a bad-boy rocker.

Amazingly, this album sent three singles into the Billboard charts, including Top 5 hit ‘Lost In You’ – Brooks’ only Top 40 pop single. [My only reaction here is to shake my head in knowing acceptance of the stuff that finds its way to the top of the charts.] Even more amazingly, despite selling more than two million copies (!), this was a drastic failure for an artist accustomed to selling comfortably into eight figures. His core audience was bewildered by his low-budget Anthony Keidis makeover, and true rock fans weren’t buying it.

This music mostly reminds me of the obligatory sucky ballads that appeared on almost every hard rock album of the late-80′s and early-90′s. Filed under unintentionally hilarious is ‘Right Now’, a truly bizarre amalgamation of The Youngbloods’ 60′s anthem ‘Get Together’ and stiff white-boy robo-rap. But I have to applaud Garth Brooks for being freaky enough to do the nuclear zag – this is clearly not Ropin’ The Wind II, and that in itself makes me like him more than when I doled out my hard-earned nickels…

Magic Moment: Ryan Adams Unplugged

Ryan Adams plays ‘Oh My Sweet Carolina’ from his 2000 solo debut Heartbreaker, acoustic and unaccompanied, place and date unknown…

Buried Treasure: Meet Red Meat

[Today: Taking out the trash in Nashville...]

Founded in a garage in San Francisco’s Mission District in 1993, Red Meat sound like nothing else coming out of either a garage or the Mission. They specialize in serious country music with a razor sharp lyrical edge that borders on satire and skewers the pickup truck/gun rack/cowboy hat stereotypes that crowd the genre. The group features five “expatriate Midwesterners” who were heavily influenced by honky tonk music, the Bakersfield Sound and 60′s and 70′s rock. “Back when we started, nobody was playing this kind of music at all”, explains band member Smelley Kelley. “We’d go into a bar, play our set, and win over these rockers and punk kids. Now it’s become a lot more normal to see a country band in a Bay Area bar.”

It’s easy to file Red Meat under Country, but their 1997 debut Meet Red Meat is entertaining and often laugh-out-loud funny, which isn’t exactly a hallmark of country music. Lead songwriter Scott Young turns his lacerating wit loose on a trailer full of country cliches, creating a cowboy in search of a girl named Lolita to match the tattoo on his arm, an ode to an oscillating three speed fan, and a 90-second kick in the funny bone about bombing in Nashville with lyrics like this:

I thought I’d make a big splash, be a big smash in Nashville
But I needed some cash now I’m slingin’ some hash
At the end of my shift I’ll take out the trash in Nashville

No group with song titles like ‘Girl With The Biggest Hair’ and ‘Inner Redneck’ is going to take itself too seriously, but Red Meat is no novelty act – they’ve got enough honky tonk chops that they’ve backed country legends Buck Owens and Wanda Jackson. And their oft-hilarious songs are balanced with some straightforward country offerings (one of these, ‘Texas Texas’ went Top 5 in France). Fittingly for a hardcore country band from the urban heart of San Francisco, Red Meat makes music that is smart, funny, interesting and absolutely, totally unique…

Listen: Nashville Fantasy

Listen: 12 Inch 3 Speed Oscillating Fan

Listen: Inner Redneck

Listen: Texas Texas

Masterpiece: I’m A Lonesome Fugitive

[Today: The wit and wisdom of Merle Haggard...]

Prison sentences, hard labor and truck driving are the stuff of fiction for most country singers, but Merle Haggard has lived a life that is genuinely reflected in his music. His family relocated to Bakersfield, CA to escape the Oklahoma dust bowls of the Great Depression, and his father died when he was just 9 years old. He soon embarked on a life of petty crime, menial jobs and riding the rails, and by the time he was in his early-30′s, he’d done several stints in reformatories and prisons. In fact, he was in the audience for three of Johnny Cash’s performances at San Quentin, and those shows helped convince him to turn his life around and get serious about music.

His music reflected the so-called Bakersfield Sound, a rough-edged version of country music that featured Fender Telecaster in addition to pedal steel or more traditional country guitars. Developed by Buck Owens, the Bakersfield Sound eventually became a strain of the Outlaw movement in country music, and Haggard became its leading face. “I don’t know if you could call my music cowboy music,” he told Rolling Stone in 1968. “I don’t sing about horses. I call it country music, or American music. It’s one of the only musics that began with our nation.”

Whatever you choose to call the music, Haggard does it right. He has scored a remarkable 38 #1 hits in a career that landed him on the cover of Time magazine in 1977 and earned him a spot in the Country Music Hall Of Fame. His first #1 was the title track to his 1967 album, I’m A Lonesome Fugitive. This was Haggard’s fourth album, and it finds him rounding his sound into shape. Here his band The Strangers are augmented by legendary session guitarists James Burton and Glen Campbell, and while it’s far from the over-polished product that Nashville was creating at the same time, it’s a tight set of 12 songs that reflect the wit and wisdom of the down and out.

Haggard the songwriter swings between tragedy and comedy, touching on bad love, lean bank accounts and long prison sentences. But Haggard the singer never plays for sympathy, and seems to find humor in places where others find tears. With a rich, careworn voice and a name that even a screenwriter couldn’t come up with, Merle Haggard made music for the back roads and stout souls of America – music that was much bigger than Bakersfield.

Listen: I’m A Lonesome Fugitive

Listen: Life In Prison

Listen: Someone Told My Story

Doubleshot Tuesday: Suicide/Nebraska

[Today: Darkness on the edge of town...]

During my middle school and high school years, friends and I enjoyed renting horror movies to try and scare the beejeesus out of ourselves. Friday The 13th (Parts 1 through whatever), Nightmare On Elm Street and Halloween were just three of the many, many titles we rented in the pursuit of cheap cinematic thrills (and speaking of cheap, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘s lo-fi terror resembled punk rock in that its supposed limitation – in this case amateurish cinematography – was actually its strength. But more on that later…).

Those movies were gory fun, and they never really bothered me too much. What did stick with me and haunt my thoughts were films like A Clockwork Orange, Bladerunner and The Day After – motion pictures that imagined a not-too-distant future where society has crumbled into a shell of itself. Maybe it’s just me, but being attacked with a chainsaw seems so farfetched as to be fiction, while a decaying world seems horribly inevitable.

Those two brands of fright are musically represented by Suicide’s self-titled 1977 debut and Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 minimalist masterpiece Nebraska. Suicide was a 1970′s NYC punk duo – singer Alan Vega and keyboardist Martin Rev – known for physically and musically assaulting slack-jawed audiences. Their 10-minute opus ‘Frankie Teardrop’ is a terrifying glimpse into cold-blooded murder. Twenty-year old Frankie can’t make ends meet at the factory and he’s being evicted from his home. So he buys a gun and shoots his wife and 6-month old baby before turning the gun on himself and going straight to hell. All of this is punctuated by Vega’s yelping, yowling and manic babbling.

In his book Songbook, Nick Hornby explains why he hasn’t listened to ‘Frankie Teardrop’ in decades. “Me, I need no convincing that life is scary. I’m forty-four, and it has got quite scary enough already – I don’t need anyone trying to jolt me out of my complacency.” I understand that point of view, but real life is so littered with things to worry about that a song like ‘Frankie Teardrop’ feels like a refreshing tonic. “Hey, my problems are nothing,” is the feeling I get after listening to it. Like a horror flick, it’s so over the top that it’s impossible to take very seriously or carry around for long.

I’d be interested to find out what Hornby thinks of Springsteen’s Nebraksa, because in my estimation it’s a far scarier album than Suicide. Where Vega and Rev let loose with cartoonish violence, Springsteen tells understated stories of a society going to ruin, and reflects on some of the souls getting lost along the way. The undercurrent of doom and despair is strong, and it’s easy to get sucked into. Springsteen is a big fan of Suicide, and their music informed Nebraska. ‘State Trooper’ is more or less Part II of ‘Frankie Teardrop’, while his ‘Johnny 99′ could easily be linked to their ‘Johnny’. The Boss has played several Suicide songs in concert, including a notable version of ‘Dream Baby Dream’. An odd coupling to be sure, but even stranger is that Springsteen’s version of darkness on the edge of town is the one that really gives me chills…

Listen: Frankie Teardrop [Suicide]

Listen: State Trooper [Bruce Springsteen]

Listen: Johnny [Suicide]

Listen: Johnny 99 [Bruce Springsteen]

Stuck In My Head: Fudge Pudge

I love mix tapes, and I have a few friends who know how to put them together. My pal Arlo Chingaderas recently sent me his second mix of semi-forgotten hip-hop treasures, this one entitled The Golden Age Of Rap Mix (1988-1994). The first function of any great mix is introducing the listener to new songs, while organizing them into a cohesive flow that makes the whole better than its sterling parts. Arlo’s got this trick down cold – his mixes are always full of jeep-bumpers, and batting in the five hole on his latest is Organized Konfusion’s standout ‘Fudge Pudge’.

Here’s how Oliver Wang describes the song in his essential book Classic Material: The Hip-Hop Album Guide:

Paralleling the robust, bluesy bounce of ‘Fudge Pudge,’ Prince Po introduces the group’s creative treatise by augmenting his normal rhyming cadence with a dazzling array of seamless tricks: singing old soul riffs, busting out sound effects, mimicking the outgoing message of an answering machine, and, incredibly, crumbling the lyric sheet of an unsatisfying stanza only to start anew with another. This was Organized Konfusion’s modus operandi: each line was its own instrument valve to be blown through and played intrinsically to – and not, as is so often the case, independently of – the music.

I couldn’t say it better, so I won’t even try. Just press play…

Listen: Fudge Pudge

Weekend Playlist

“Where else but in America could a person own a Rolls Royce, an Eldorado, Mark IV, Mercedes limousine, an estate in Long Island, an apartment in Hollywood and still be considered a failure? Well, you’re looking at and listening to him.” ~ Jerry Williams Jr. aka Swamp Dogg

Buzzcocks | A Different Kind Of Tension

Lou Reed, John Cale & Nico | Le Bataclan ’72

Herbie Hancock | Future Shock

Esther Phillips | Burnin’: Live At Freddie Jett’s Pied Piper, L.A.

Mickey Newbury | ‘Frisco Mabel Joy

The Flying Burrito Brothers | Burrito Deluxe

Tim Buckley | Lorca

Swamp Dogg | Have You Heard This Story??

The Doors | Other Voices

Ray Barretto | Acid

M. Ward | Hold Time

Blue Mitchell | Blue’s Moods

Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers | Like Someone In Love

Faces | Long Player

Neutral Milk Hotel | In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

Motörhead | Bomber

Dr. Feelgood | Stupidity

Bill Withers | Still Bill

Skull Snaps | Skull Snaps

Black Heat | Black Heat

Video Break: Collarbone

Fujiya & Miyagi >> Collarbone. This one’s for Saturdays…

Bad Apple: Other Voices

[Today: When the music's over...]

There isn’t much in the way of liner notes with this album, and no mention of the man in the leather pants. No We miss you Lizard King! or Goodbye Mr. Mojo Risin’ or Sorry Jim, we needed to make the rent, so we decided to record an album under The Doors’ name even though it bears little resemblance to the music that made us famous. This was released in October of 1971, just three months after Jim Morrison died in a Paris bathtub at age 27, felled by internal organs that had lived in dog years. Predictably, the vocals here are thin, if sometimes passable. Musically, Other Voices isn’t bad (it’s easily the best album featured in this category, and the only one I can imagine listening to again voluntarily), but it’s a tough sell as Doors product.

It’s admirable that Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore soldiered on after losing one of the most charismatic frontmen in rock history, but it was foolhardy to release this album under The Doors name. Sure, it has three-quarters of the original band, but no matter how good the music (and in places it’s surprisingly good), without Jim Morrison this just isn’t the same group, and to continue under that name is a form of fraud. Admittedly I’m a hard-liner on this point, and annoyed by bands who play off a brand name by surrounding one or two original members with hired guns while passing themselves off as the real deal. My college roommate Tim and I have enjoyed lengthy debates about whether Pink Floyd sans Roger Waters is really Pink Floyd (I say absolutely not, he says yes). Anyway, had this band re-christened themselves The Windows or some other non-Doors handle, I might be able to get behind this album.

That said, about half of it is un-redeemable junk that Morrison would have laughed out of the studio (here’s looking at you ‘Variety Is The Spice Of Life’ and ‘I’m Horny, I’m Stoned’). Album opener ‘In The Eye Of The Sun’ has thin vocals, little substance and the kind of tacked-on ending that screams We didn’t know how to end this one, so we just kind of added a vaudeville, ba-doomp-boomp finish. ‘Wandering Musician’ feels both amateur and meandering, although it’s highly unlikely that it was conceived as a literal concept piece.

On the good side of the ledger, ‘Ships With Sails’ is a fantastic piece of music that features some tasty flamenco-style guitar, decent vocals, and a nice analogy about love’s trials (“Well you ask how much I love you/Why do ships with sails love the wind?” are two good lines in this one). ‘Hang On To Your Life’ is suitably far out, and ‘Tightrope Ride’ isn’t great, but at least nods to the tilted actuarial tables for unhinged rock stars, calling out Brian Jones and alluding to a certain Dionysian Drunkard who used to sing about lighting fires and riding on the storm. The name of his band is on the tip of my tongue…

Buried Treasure: Killing Joke

[Today: Facing down the Kraken...]

Listening to Killing Joke is like facing down the Kraken or some other terrifying mythical creature of doom. Lead singer and keyboardist Jeremy “Jaz” Coleman roars throughout like a beast fueled by hatred. As he told NME in 1982, “If you look at Killing Joke as a group of animals making their own noise and exposing themselves, that’s the way to take [it]. The violence that Killin’ Joke is about is not violence on the immediate level but the mass violence, the violence bubbling underneath your feet, the violence of nature throwing up… and we become that violence.”

That violence is splashed all over their 1980 debut – a black mixture of jittery guitars, pounding drums, swirling synthesizer, and Coleman’s doomsday hollering. Killing Joke may sound like a horror movie, but there’s no question they took this stuff seriously. Coleman, guitarist Kevin “Geordie” Walker and bassist Martin “Youth” Glover moved to Iceland in early 1982 to avoid the coming apocalypse. In what must rate as one of the truly unheralded Spinal Tap moments in rock history, they moved back to London later that year when it became clear that the end was not nigh.

But it’s understandable why this group would run for the hills. In their music, darkness has long since fallen, and the freaks have come out to rape and pillage and quench some bloodlust. Killing Joke have used appropriately disturbing imagery to go with their music, and some of that earned them suspicion of fascism (back when this was a real designation, and not some generic political insult). But this band wasn’t marching in step with anyone else, either politically or musically. Their sound betrays few influences, but they helped ignite both goth and industrial music, and bands from Nine Inch Nails to Tool to Jane’s Addiction have cited them as essential inspiration.

Sure, it’s dark in there. But sometimes it’s good to stare into the abyss and see what yells back…

Listen: Wardance

Listen: The Wait

Listen: Requiem

[Special thanks to Juliana Cobb for passing this album my way...]