On The Fence: White Christmas

THUMBS UP: Happy holidays!

THUMBS DOWN: Bah humbug!

[Are you feeling more Ebeneezer Scrooge than Jimmy Stewart? Either way, best wishes to you and yours...]

Listen: White Christmas

Doubleshot Tuesday: The Bristol Sessions/Wild Style

[Today: Big Bangs...]

Country music and hip-hop were both up-from-the-people musical movements, with country springing from the rural splendor of the Appalachians in the 1920s and hip-hop forming in the urban wasteland of the South Bronx of the 1970s. It’s difficult to come up with two genres that are less alike, but Country and Hip-Hop share one wrinkle: both had their formative geniuses captured on wax, totally unpasteurized, right before both forms of music blew up coast-to-coast.

The Bristol Sessions was the work of an industry scout named Ralph Peer, who set up shop in Bristol, VA over a couple of weekends in the summer of 1927 with the intention of recording the finest examples of “hillbilly” music. Bristol was a thriving city of 32,000 located on the Virginia/Tennessee border and at the crux of several railroads, making it a strategically sound spot to attract mountain musicians. Peer put out word through the local newspaper and ended up discovering a treasure trove of artists, including The Carter Family – A.P., Maybelle and Sara Carter – who would become the first family of country music. “They look[ed] like hillbillies. But as soon as I heard Sara’s voice, that was it. I knew it was going to be wonderful,” Peer recalled. During these sessions he also discovered the great Jimmie Rodgers, as well as Ernest Stoneman. In all he recorded 67 sides by 19 different acts, and the songs he captured would form the backbone of what would become country music. None less than Johnny Cash has said that “These recordings in Bristol… are the single most important event in the history of country music.”

Wild Style was a 1983 motion picture that served as a de-facto documentary of the fledgling hip-hop scene. Sure, it had some Hollywood story lines sunk into it, but it featured real rappers and graffiti artists, playing characters loosely based on themselves. The movie’s soundtrack is a goldmine of early hip-hop, a sound that wasn’t largely captured on tape because the artists involved felt like it was a spontaneous music that wasn’t meant to be recorded. Rappers like Busy Bee and Grandmaster Caz deserve to be better remembered by modern music fans – they are every bit the pioneers to their genre that A.P. Carter and Jimmie Rodgers were to country. Unfortunately, their best moments were left to the ether, so the physical proof of their brilliance is pretty thin, but Wild Style is evidence enough. With its snippets of b-boy and graffiti artist chatter, this album has been sampled by a Who’s Who of rappers, including Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, Beastie Boys and Jurassic 5.

The Bristol Sessions was recorded four years after the recognized birth of country music, while Wild Style was laid down roughly five years after the advent of hip-hop. Both are remarkable documents of the popular birth of a distinctly American music…

Listen: The Soldier’s Sweetheart [Jimmie Rodgers - The Bristol Sessions]

Listen: South Bronx Subway Rap [Grandmaster Caz - Wild Style]

Listen: Single Girl, Married Girl [Carter Family - The Bristol Sessions]

Listen: Stoop Rap [Double Trouble - Wild Style]

Masterpiece: 1928 Sessions

[Today: The bottom of the Blues...]

It’s easy enough to look at the Blues and see a music rooted in pain and suffering. If you focus exclusively on the story lines of the songs or the whiskey in the voices, that’s probably a fair enough takeaway. But when you get beneath those surfaces it’s easy to see that at its bottom, this is life affirming music. It feels funny to be a white kid from Oregon writing about the Blues, but I grew up around blue collar folks – much of my family and many of our neighbors plied their trade in the local lumber mills – so I knew people who left a little piece of themselves at their jobs every day. You’d see dads trudging home at 5pm, looking battered by another day on the green chain, and if that didn’t double your resolve to work harder on your homework you were just plain crazy or dumb enough to deserve what was coming.

Work that hard demands good times, and my relatives and neighbors were good people to unwind with. Gregarious, quick-witted and able with a story, they could drink and laugh and tell tall tales with the best of them. My impression was that if work was determined to squeeze the life out these people, they were equally determined to squeeze the life out of their free time. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger – has there ever been more insidious false advertising than that? A more truthful version would be that what doesn’t kill you makes you REALLY appreciate not having something try to kill you (not as catchy or uplifting, I know).

When Mississippi John Hurt sings about laying his burden down, his voice has a carefree lilt that sounds more like someone punching the time clock on Friday evening than someone cashing in their chips. Hurt’s voice could swing from pure joy to the deep sadness of a man who saw his promising music career crippled by the Great Depression and put on hold for more than 30 years. Whether or not he had been rediscovered in the early 60s, his musical legacy was long ago sealed by the dozen pre-Depression Okeh recordings compiled on 1928 Sessions.

What these songs reveal is a guitarist of the highest order, a gifted storyteller, and wise soul. Hurt delivered his music with a ray of sunshine, and even murder ballads like ‘Frankie’ and ‘Stack O’ Lee Blues’ come off as good stories rather than bone-chilling narratives. In John Fahey’s liner notes to the CD re-release of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, he opines that “‘Frankie’ is… probably the best guitar recording ever. Rumor has it that when this piece was played for Segovia, he couldn’t believe there were not two guitars at work.”

Hurt’s own take was that “The Blues ain’t nothin’ but a good woman on your mind.” Clearly, for this great bluesman, life was hard, but the music came down to something good…

Listen: Stack O’Lee Blues

Listen: Frankie

Listen: Avalon Blues

Buried Treasure: His Best

[Today: The transformation of Rice Miller...]

I pity those who believe the Blues can be reduced to a set of chords and guitar tunings. I expect these people think a drawing of a house is the same as a Frank Lloyd Wright structure or iambic pentameter equals the works of Robert Frost. But then again, the history of the Blues has become a series of stereotypical signifiers: sharecropping, deals with the devil, juke joints stretching from Mississippi to Chicago, Chess Records, hard liquor and bloody deaths. Aleck “Rice” Miller’s life conformed to the broad picture of the Blues, but his music reveals the life and humor that beat beneath the cliches.

Miller was born in either the late-1800s or early-1900s – his true date of birth, like much of his personal history, is shrouded in half-truths, semi-truths and tall tales. He grew up a sharecropper’s son in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi under conditions brutal enough that he later refused to discuss them. In the 1930s, he set out as a traveling musician, and began to develop his own personal style and stage presence. By the early ’40s, he was hired to play the King Biscuit Time radio show on KFFA in Helena, Montana. And it was here that Miller made his deal with the devil – the radio station manager swiped the name ‘Sonny Boy Williamson’ from an established blues star and re-christened Miller with the name, in a bizarre but effective move to increase ratings.

Miller neither looked nor sounded like Williamson, but in a pre-connected era it was an easy enough ruse to pull off. Sadly, he had all the tools to become a great bluesman and didn’t need any cheap stunts to get there. He was a gifted harmonica player and pleasingly gruff singer, but Williamson really shined as a songwriter. His songs reflected his life, and as such they were full of cheap women, cheaper booze and tough scrapes. These stories of town gossip and jealous husbands might seem quaint on paper, but bubbling beneath the surface of this music is poison and violence and death, and surprisingly enough a fair share of winks and smiles. The songs collected on His Best chronicles the best output of his Chess Records years, 1955-1964.

Williamson’s genius for the blues is reflected in two songs that were later covered by major rock bands. ‘Bring It On Home’ (Led Zeppelin) and ‘One Way Out’ (Allman Brothers) are the Blues at their best, and provide a potent glimpse of the stuff that inspired the hard rockers of the early-70s. Buddy Guy, who plays guitar on much of this album, said that “Sonny Boy used to tell me ‘They don’t make men like me anymore.’” They don’t make Blues like this anymore, either…

Listen: Bring It On Home

Listen: One Way Out

Listen: Fattening Frogs For Snakes

Buried Treasure: Connected

[Today: Hand-made hip-hop...]

Stereo MC’s were a pioneering British Hip-Hop group, and not just because they connected the word ‘British’ with the word ‘Hip-Hop’. The true measure of their innovation is found in eight words on the back jacket of their 1991 album Connected: “Produced, written and performed by the Stereo MC’s”. By the early 90s, Hip-Hop had become synonymous with samples (James Brown and P-Funk samples, to be specific), but Rob Birch and Nick ‘The Head’ Hallam got a funky drummer, hired a horn section and female backup singers, and made some real live music that happened to sound a lot like Hip-Hop. This album features three short samples, but otherwise consists of nothing but organic, man-made music, rather than the typical pastiche of pre-recorded drum breaks.

Connected was a huge hit in the UK, spawning four Top 20 singles on that side of the pond and hitting #2 on the UK album charts. Stereo MC’s would pave the way for a host of British artists like Fatboy Slim, Prodigy and The Streets. But in the US (where this album’s title track also went Top 20), they were something closer to a one-hit wonder, or B-Boy British curiosity. In one sense they were one-hit wonders – after touring relentlessly for a few years behind this album, Birch and Hallam felt burned out and creatively juiced, so they shut the group down for nearly a decade in favor of lucrative remixing work.

“I think we felt slightly out of step with what was going on,” Hallam told Mojo. “It wasn’t intentional, and I’m not saying we were geniuses or anything like that. But somehow, the combination of what we were doing was what other people started doing a considerable time later.” With its blend of new age positivity, can-do spirit, fresh horns, and clean production, Connected was ahead of its time, but still feels timeless…

Listen: Step It Up

Listen: Ground Level

Listen: Everything

Masterpiece: Paul’s Boutique

[Today: Hip-hop's crazy quilt...]

The Beastie Boys’ 1986 debut was the best-selling rap album of all-time to that point, so it seemed improbable that they would top it. Not to mention that they’d split with Def Jam Records over unpaid royalties, exiled themselves to California, and instantly alienated their new label, Capitol Records. A Sex Pistols-like stunt saw them storm through the label’s office and resulted in the group being accused of stealing an electric typewriter, of all things. Their sophomore effort was also literally years in the making, enhancing their appearance as snotty one-hit wonders.

“I realize we were supposed to come out with ‘Fight For Your Right To Party, Part Two’. Sorry to disappoint everyone,” said Mike D shortly after Paul’s Boutique was released. Amazingly, it initially was considered a disappointment because it didn’t have a hit single or sell especially well. Producers The Dust Brothers used a magical musical loom to weave together a super-dense tapestry of obscure 70s funk and pop culture samples, including moaning pornstars and an 8-track player firing to life. Because there was no antecedent for this sound, it isn’t surprising that many listeners were befuddled by this pop culture, sample-rific avalanche.

Fred Flintstone, Galileo, Chuck Woolery, JD Salinger, Louis Vitton, Sadaharu Oh, Raymond Burr, Charles Dickens, Alfred E Newman, Harry Truman, Phil Rizzuto, Cezanne, Dolomite, Geraldo Rivera, Jack Kerouac and Putney Swope all get called out. Scott Baio, Jimi Hendrix, AC/DC, The Bible, The Brady Bunch, Colonel Sanders and Jimmy Swaggert are referenced, along with everyday products like Fruit Stripe Gum and Goodyear Tires. Paul’s Boutique is such a massive pop culture repository that it’s got a whole drawer full of New York-centric references, including the Atlantic Antic, the Brooklyn House of D, Ed Koch, and the 6 Train. It’s an album that takes several hundred listens to get your head around.

Paul’s Boutique has plenty of six-shooters and swagger (naturally, with songs like ‘Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun’ and ‘Car Thief’) but also broadly hinted at the Beastie Boys’ coming maturity. “Racism is schism on a serious tip,” they offered on ‘…Barrel Of A Gun’, just one rhyme here that speaks out against knuckle-headed racism and misogyny. But mostly this is just a fly 70s party on happy dust. ‘Hey Ladies’ is hedonistic fun, and ‘Shake Your Rump’ explodes from the speakers. ‘Five Piece Chicken Dinner’ is absurdist theater, featuring a hyped-up Hee-Haw tune and a stern warning to get the hell away from the BBQ. ‘Shadrach’ is frantic flow, while album opener (and closer) ‘To All The Girls’ is a sly, horny nod to Elvis Presley’s ‘Girls, Girls, Girls!’

The cherry on top is ‘B-Boy Bouillabaisse’, a multi-part opus that connects bits of short rhymes and unfinished songs, and feels like being dragged through every dark corner of the five boroughs in the wee hours. After this, it seemed like the Beastie Boys could take you anywhere and everywhere at once, but when copyright laws changed shortly after this release, Paul’s Boutique became a one-time only, one-of-a-kind, hip-hop crazy quilt…

Listen: Hey Ladies

Listen: Car Thief

Listen: Shake Your Rump

The Risk Of Being Ridiculous

My friend Guy Maynard recently wrote a novel and it’s actually really good. I say “actually” because I’ve had some friends write novels that weren’t so good, and those conversations were never very much fun. So it was delightful to find myself genuinely enjoying Guy’s book, and even more fun trying to square the gentle, thoughtful person I know with the F-bomb dropping, rock-throwing, drug-taking, political militant who’s so richly described within these pages. In a nutshell: Maynard attended Boston University in the late-60s, and The Risk Of Being Ridiculous recounts his scrapes with angry riot cops, potent LSD, the Weathermen, free love and nearly every other trap door provided by that decade. He has couched the novel as a work of fiction, but the bio on the back jacket dovetails a little too closely with the story of Ben Tucker.

It’s a story that fits right in with other great books of a genre that includes The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, On The Road, and Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas. In other words, it’s a book about drugs, self-discovery, and the inherent conflict of personal growth. But as much as those topics interest me (some more than others), the reason I’m writing about The Risk Of Being Ridiculous is that it provided an infinitely valuable service for me. I was born in 1969, and even though I (like many) enjoy the music of that era, I obviously have no sense of the context in which it was consumed and appreciated. And for me, this is where Maynard’s book really shines.

Whether it’s hearing a Beatles song on the car radio during a moment of serious self-reflection, or dropping the needle on a Jefferson Airplane record in his overcrowded campus apartment, Maynard time and again draws a direct line between the music of his era and how it affected his life. As the current editor of Oregon Quarterly magazine, he undoubtedly has good reasons for obscuring whether or not he actually threw a rock through a police car window. But when he writes with such passion and precision about the undercurrent of music that flowed through those times, it’s a dead giveaway of the true identity of his protagonist. As George Clinton once said, you can’t fake the funk, and The Risk Of Being Ridiculous has the genuine funk of revolution, way up under its nails…