Magic Moment: Ernest Tubb Walks The Floor

The Texas Troubadour sings his best known song during a 1961 television appearance…

Sleeve Notes: Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs

Joni Mitchell called it starmaker machinery and Billy Joel claimed it was just a fantasy, and not the real thing, and both got it right. So much of the music industry is about selling an image, and always has been. From murder ballads about Stagolee (or Stack-o-Lee, or…) to the supernatural blues of Robert Johnson, to the souped up R&B of Ike Turner and Chuck Berry, to the outlaw fables of Johnny Cash and Marty Robbins, to the shimmer and fire of Elvis and Jerry Lee, to the fab-ness of the Beatles, to the drugs and free love of Woodstock, to the satanic debauchery of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Kiss, to the dancefloor freedom of Disco, to the androgynous sexuality of Boy George, Annie Lennox, Madonna and Prince, to the leggy models in ZZ Top videos and the g-string clad butt-shakers in hip-hop videos, there’s always some kind of fantasy lurking beneath the music. It might be death, sex, money, fame, freedom, or less mundane spoils, but it’s usually there. If you’re looking for a connective thread that ties together every kind of music over the last hundred years or so, you could do a lot worse than that…

Buried Treasure: Treasures Untold – The Early Recordings Of Lefty Frizzell

[Today: Good times and pretty girls...]

“That was courtin’ music for my folks.” My lifelong best friend Bobby shared that in a text a few months back, and it immediately sparked my interest in William Orville “Lefty” Frizzell. Bobby’s parents, Joe & Jean, were like a second set of parents to me, and by the time we were in grade school they were in their late 40s (practically old people!), so the idea of them courtin’ is interesting for me in its own right. Discovering some of the music they kicked up their heels to? Priceless.

But Lefty Frizzell didn’t need the Joe & Jean Evans Good Housekeeping Seal Of Approval to feel validated – he’s a Country Music Hall Of Famer who enjoyed a steady string of hits from the early 50s until the mid-70s. He’s generally credited with polishing up the music of the Honky Tonks and bringing it to a wider audience. By way of explaining his slurred singing style, Lefty said “I’m not really a lazy guy, but I get tired of holding high notes for a long time. Instead of straining, I just let it roll down and it feels good to me.”

That attitude came through in the music – in addition to his relaxed drawl, Frizzell’s songs all came with a smile that gave them a lighter edge than your typical Country single. In stark contrast to “the high lonesome sound” of Bill Monroe, the plaintive yodel of Jimmie Rodgers, the dark death wishes of Hank Williams, and the solemn timbre of Ernest Tubb, Frizzell made music that pointed towards good times and pretty girls – perfect courtin’ music. That upbeat style helped Lefty to four Top Ten Country hits at the same time in October of 1951 – a feat that wouldn’t be repeated on any chart until The Beatles did it more than a decade later.

Frizzell’s style was a primary influence on the next generation of country singers, as artists like Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson took a page out of his playbook. Of Lefty, the great George Jones said that “He was so different, you know. My lord, he’d take a word and twist it around and the way he’d do that phrasin’, that just tore me up.” The proof of Frizzell’s unique genius is captured on Treasures Untold: The Early Recordings Of Lefty Frizzell. This 1980 Rounder Records compilation brings together music (some previously unreleased) from his hottest stretch, 1950-53. Songs like ‘How Long Will It Take (To Stop Loving You)’ and ‘Shine, Shave, Shower (It’s Saturday)’ still sound completely unique in the annals of Country Music. And if you listen closely, you might even hear the sound of young people falling in love…

Listen: How Long Will It Take (To Stop Loving You)

Listen: Shine, Shave, Shower (It’s Saturday)

Masterpiece: I Am What I Am

[Today: The method singer...]

He’s been called The Original Punk for his drunken antics and The Greatest Voice In Country for his tear-stained vocals; nicknamed Possum for the shape of his face and No-Show Jones for his habit of skipping concert dates. George Jones was influenced by Roy Acuff, Hank Williams, & Lefty Frizzell, and as a young man it took him some time to find his own singing voice. In a key turning point early in his career, his producer, Pappy Daily, asked him, “George, you’ve sung like Roy Acuff, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams and Bill Monroe. Can you sing like George Jones?”

He could, and singing like George Jones led him to more than 100 hit songs. He specialized in ballads about love lost and honkey tonk numbers about hard drinking, and sang like every word was being wrung directly from his heart. That might be due to his ample experience with broken marriages (he’s on wife #4) and the bottle. A legendary alcoholic, he famously drove a riding lawnmower 8 miles to a bar, after having the keys to every vehicle in sight taken from him (this was in the days when raging bouts of alcoholism led to good stories instead of treatment programs).

It’s remarkable that after so much hard living and so many hit singles, Jones created his finest album well into his third decade of making music. 1980′s I Am What I Am certainly contains his signature tune – ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’. The simple story of a man who carries the love of his late wife an old flame to his own grave, in Jones’ hands it became an epic tale of true love and heartbreak. Like much of his best work, I Am What I Am concerns itself with love’s wounds and their liquid solution. But rather than sounding sterile, the super-clean production of this album allowed Jones to put that lethal voice center stage.

Riding the momentum of his biggest hit, this became the most successful album of his long career. ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’ was the CMA Song Of The Year and Single Of The Year, and earned Jones honors for Male Vocalist Of The Year, as well as the Grammy™ for Best Male Country Vocal Performance for 1980. Additionally, I Am What I Am became his first gold record. Jones still tours, playing between 60 and 90 shows each year. Asked late last year about retiring, he told NPR that “I don’t know what I’d do with myself. We don’t wanna lay down and give up just ’cause we’re old. Young people think we’re crazy. Oh, one morning you’ll wake up and look in the mirror like I did and say, ‘What the devil happened? Whoo! Where did it go, oh, Lordy!’”

Listen: He Stopped Loving Her Today

Listen: If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will)

Doubleshot Tuesday: I Have A Dream/Imagine

[Today: Dreamers...]

Martin Luther King Jr and John Lennon both asked us to dream. Each looked ahead to a brighter future, where a better, more peaceful, and just side of ourselves would be revealed. Whether or not we’ve fulfilled any of their hopes remains open to interpretation, but to the degree that their words still move us, it seems we’ve got some work left to do.

On Friday afternoon, as I was heading out to a three day weekend, I received a company-wide e-mail from my boss about of the true meaning of MLK Day: “Martin Luther King’s life reminds us that we all have the power to do the good and right thing,” he wrote. “We all have the power to change the world for the better.” [This was without a doubt the second coolest vacation send-off in history, right behind Ms. Ginny Stroud, who sent her class in Dazed & Confused off for the summer with this doozy: "Okay guys, one more thing, this summer when you're being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don't forget what you're celebrating, and that's the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn't want to pay their taxes."]

So I dug out my MLK LPs and listened to some of his speeches about the importance of non-violent resistance and the fires raging in Mississippi. I thought about my boss’ words and read the text of an MLK speech that he included in his e-mail, about forgiving one’s enemies. “A persistent civil war rages within all of our lives,” Dr. King wrote, and I thought about that. Over a delicious stack of banana walnut pancakes, I wondered how I could make the world a better place. Walking among the redwoods, I thought about seeing the good in my enemies. I didn’t make much progress on either front, but decided that these are lofty undertakings that require more than a three day weekend.

I also took a few minutes to listen to John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, which puts forth the idea of a world without possessions or barriers between people – “a brotherhood of man” as he called it. ‘Imagine’ is a byproduct of a school of thought called wish fulfillment, which posits that something can’t take shape until it’s imagined. So in order to get the ball rolling on world peace, Lennon staged “Bed-Ins” for peace with Yoko Ono and wrote songs about an ideal world.

So I spent part of my weekend wondering how one begins bringing John Lennon’s ideas to life, and how one becomes an agent for the kind of justice that Dr King spoke about. And then I wondered how two men with such peaceful visions for the world could both be laid low by assassins’ bullets. And I finally decided that some days, the best way to honor the dead isn’t by computing the calculus of world peace, but by fully enjoying those banana walnut pancakes and really taking in the scent of the forest…

Listen: I Have A Dream [Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.]

Listen: Imagine [John Lennon]

Sleeve Notes: In Search Of Freedom

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, ‘My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.’

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”

~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in Washington, DC, on August 28, 1963

Magic Moment: Corazones Y Huesos

Paul Simon plays a lovely version of the title track from his forgotten 1983 album Hearts And Bones. This clip is from July 1991 in Spain, and features handy Spanish subtitles. Corazones y huesos…

Video Break: Super-Sonic

Brian Jonestown Massacre >> Super-Sonic. This one’s for cool proofreaders…

Sleeve Notes: America Eats Its Young

I wish this post didn’t need to be written. I wish Christina Green was still going on 10 years old, and still President of the student body of her elementary school. I wish Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords was tending to government business instead of fighting for her life in the intensive care ward of a hospital. And above all, I wish a disturbed young man hadn’t taken an automatic weapon to the parking lot of a Safeway – where Giffords was greeting her constituents – and opened fire, killing 6 people and wounding more than a dozen others.

America is awash in guns. It’s just far too easy for a deranged person to obtain an automatic weapon that is solely designed to kill people. The National Rifle Association has battled sensible gun control to the point where municipalities have to fight to pass regulations keeping guns out of schools and churches. Because gun control is a pipe dream in this country, nearly a million people die of gunshot wounds each decade, in a hail of gunfire that makes the old west seem quaint by comparison.

And so this week every slick gun lobbyist and NRA member has the blood of a 9 year old girl on their hands. Sensible gun regulation isn’t the same as wanting to get rid of every gun under under the sun, but you wouldn’t know it by the way the NRA approaches the topic. So until a bunch of gun-toting cowboys decide to take a long look in the mirror, the rest of us are stuck in a world where buying an automatic weapon is as difficult as picking up a bottle of mouthwash at the corner store. I wish it wasn’t so…

Listen: If You Don’t Like The Effects, Don’t Produce The Cause

Buried Treasure: The Film

[Today: The Wall comes to life...]

From at least 1980 on, it would be nearly impossible to get the members of Pink Floyd to agree on anything this side of Syd Barrett’s one time brilliance. But agree they did on at least one other item: Dark Side Of The Moon had absolutely nothing to do with The Wizard Of Oz, and any synchronicity between sound and picture was purely coincidence. Each denied it in his own way. Drummer Nick Mason said that “It’s absolute nonsense. It has nothing to do with The Wizard Of Oz. It was all based on The Sound Of Music.” Guitarist David Gilmour sounded more bitter: “Some guy with too much time on his hands had this idea of combining Wizard Of Oz with Dark Side Of The Moon.”

But urban legend is a fierce beast, and the idea that Dark Side is a hidden soundtrack to Wizard Of Oz persists to this day. Which is even more absurd because Pink Floyd actually hid an amazing soundtrack right in plain sight. Their album The Wall was released in 1979, while the movie didn’t hit the big screen until 1982. In that time, Roger Waters evolved the songs, and included a few more that didn’t make the album. The double-LP bootleg The Film compiles all of the music as it was used in the movie, complete with television dialogue, glass breaking (often) and Bob Geldof. With strings and Tom & Jerry cartoons and groupie dialogue, Waters added additional textures to these songs, making this feel like a more in-the-flesh experience than the studio album.

Because it’s the true soundtrack to the movie The Wall, this bootleg is ideally sequenced to tell the story of the jaded rock star Pink – a human wave of destruction who was formed by the loss of his father to WWII, an overbearing mother, soul-crushing school system and cheating wife. This version includes the critical song ‘When The Tigers Broke Free’, which recounts Pink’s father’s death at the Anzio Bridgehead and the correspondence informing the family of his death, a letter that was “signed in his majesty’s own rubber stamp.”

Nearly every song here is different from, and superior to, its studio version (‘Goodbye Cruel World’ is nearly identical, with the vocals perhaps mixed higher). ‘In The Flesh’ features Geldof’s vocals, the screaming and jostling of the crowd, and ends with a plane crashing into Pink’s dad (which forms the scream on the cover art above). ‘Another Brick In The Wall, Part 1′ has a honking bicycle horn, and the exchange between young Pink and the wrong dad in the park. ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ is both more acoustic and more menacing, with the sound of bombs dropping all around. ‘The Happiest Days Of Our Lives’ includes the sequence with Pink getting ridiculed by his teacher for writing poetry, along with the teacher’s scolding “WROOOOOOOOONG – DOITAGIN!” And so on…

In the completely different department, ‘What Shall We Do Now?’ is an extended, nastier version that dips into VD, broken homes, S&M and packing the attic full of money. Bob Geldof’s versions of ‘In The Flesh?’ and ‘In The Flesh’ are startling, while elevator music-like vignettes like ‘The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot’ are surreal companions to the soul-baring screams and breaking glass that lurk all around them.

Roger Waters was many things, including a perfectionist about his music. The chaotic sound effects used in the movie The Wall mesh surprisingly perfectly with these versions of the songs from the 1978 album of the same name. While it’s the true soundtrack to the movie, The Film is also a totally different, and in every way more spine-tingling, album than the The Wall. Who knows what happens if you sync it up with The Wizard Of Oz?

Listen: When The Tigers Broke Free [single version]

Listen: What Shall We Do Now?