Masterpiece: Raising Hell

[Today: Rap arrives...]

It must have been either fall of 1986 or spring of ’87, but it was a beautiful afternoon. School was out for the day and a few friends and I congregated at Bobby’s house to (read sarcastically) studiously avoid trouble as best we could. At some point during our partying… er, studying… Bobby busted out an acapella rap of most of the title track from Run-DMC’s Raising Hell. It’s not an easy rhyme to knock out off the top of your head, but it sounded awesome, and it was the moment when I realized that rap was for real. Previously, rap (as Hip-Hop was then called in Oregon) was seen as a fad – something that would fade away after a few years, not unlike Disco. But Raising Hell made it clear that this music was here to stay.

Raising Hell is an album that represented the best of the old school of Hip-Hop, while looking toward the future spaces that the genre would occupy. First the old-school: these are mostly skeletal beats, with little of the overt sampling that would come to dominate Hip-Hop. The rhymes are tough, but the threat of violence is nil, cursing is at a minimum, and even the put-downs are more like jokes on your friends than out-and-out insults. “Today you won a ticket to see Dr. J”? Definitely old school. But if the structure and subject matter are vintage, many other aspects of this album were way ahead of their time: the big marketing crossover (‘My Adidas’), the collaboration with rockers (Aerosmith on ‘Walk This Way’) and most importantly, their super-professional approach to their craft. Run-DMC expected their music to live up to the best songs of the day, considered themselves rockstars (their previous album was titled King Of Rock) and shot for the moon.

And they hit it. This was by far the biggest hit album in the young history of Hip-Hop – in ‘Walk This Way’ it featured the first rap song to go Top 5 on the pop chart and the first rap video to hit regular rotation on MTV. Raising Hell was produced by a 22 year old wunderkind named Rick Rubin, who was living in his NYU dorm room at the time this album was made. Rubin knew what kind of sound he was after: “Early Hip-Hop songs were often 10 minutes long, with no chorus,” he told Rolling Stone. “I tried to get the tracks more like rock songs because that’s what I grew up with.”

But for a kid in Springfield, OR, the most impressive achievements on Raising Hell weren’t ‘Walk This Way’ or ‘My Adidas’ – it was songs like ‘Proud To Be Black’, ‘It’s Tricky’ and ‘Peter Piper’. ‘Proud To Be Black’ is strong and dignified without getting militant, ‘It’s Tricky’ speaks to the art and skill involved in rap music, and ‘Peter Piper’ proved that great Hip-Hop was as lasting as nursery rhymes. Raising Hell opened my eyes and ears…

Listen: Raising Hell

Listen: Peter Piper

Listen: You Be Illin’

Doubleshot Tuesday: The Rocking Chair Album/Nighthawks At The Diner

[Today: Razor blades, whiskey & gravel...]

Two gravel-throated crooners, for your Tuesday evening entertainment…

Listen: Intro [Tom Waits]

Listen: Eggs And Sausage (In A Cadillac With Susan Michelson) [Tom Waits]

Listen: Putnam County [Tom Waits]

Listen: Spoonful [Howlin' Wolf]

Listen: Back Door Man [Howlin' Wolf]

Listen: Goin’ Down Slow [Howlin' Wolf]

Buried Treasure: The Record

[Today: Hide the women and children...]

When Punk first appeared in the mid-70s, its adherents were considered vile, cretinous sociopaths just a level or two above the criminally insane. The public perception of and reaction to Punk was based partly on fashion like spiked mohawks and safety pins stuck in flesh, but the music itself could be pretty abrasive as well. However, with the added perspective of a few decades, it’s clear that not all punks were created equal: bands like The Jam and the Undertones sound positively musical in retrospect, and even The Sex Pistols’ combative brand of Punk comes off as finely tuned hard rock. Regardless, it’s a fact that most punks were actually thoughtful, intelligent people with perfectly good vocabularies and generally respectable parents.

Of course, some punks were pretty nasty critters, and bands like the Dead Boys and Germs did their very best to live down to the genre’s neanderthal stereotypes. But longtime musician Lee Ving wasn’t impressed with either the chops or the confrontation being brought by the first generation of LA punks, so he formed his own band. “What I really liked about [Punk] was the audience!” Ving told the Riverfront Times. “The band starts playing, and the audience starts jumping up and down and bashing the living daylights out of each other! With Punk you could say whatever you want, play whatever you want and give the audience a hard time if you wanted to. I thought, ‘Wow, this is great.’ So that’s what inspired me to start the Fear thing.” With Fear, Ving would take Punk to its most extreme conclusion, and inspire the hardcore movement. An avowed conservative, he had little trouble provoking his audiences past the point of violence.

“Rankling people wasn’t strange to us,” he admits. “It was definitely a part of what we wanted to do. We weren’t looking to just rankle straight bank workers; we were looking at the Punk audience itself as a prime target. We had enemies everywhere we went. Promoters… got shit for booking us. Some people thought we were sayin’ shit for shock value, some thought it was for humor value; others bought it, hook, line, and sinker.” What they were buying was a savage blend of politics, irony and obscenity, with Ving’s lyrics and vocals disguising a talented group of musicians. Too many people took songs like ‘Let’s Have A War’ and ‘I Love Livin’ In The City’ at face value, refusing to acknowledge their inherent mockery of Punk and missing out on some excellent music in the process.

John Belushi was Fear’s #1 fan, and bargained to get them into the musical slot on Saturday Night Live on Halloween in 1981. But when the audience (including Belushi) erupted in violent slam-dancing, producer Lorne Michaels pulled the plug on their performance. It was a perfect Fear moment: musical anarchy that was most definitely not ready for prime time…

Listen: I Love Livin’ In The City

Listen: Let’s Have A War

Masterpiece: Back In Black

[Today: The bell tolls...]

In the early morning hours of February 19th, 1980, Bon Scott succumbed to acute alcohol poisoning while asleep in the passenger’s seat of a car parked in East Dulwich, London. AC/DC was hard at work on the follow-up to their commercial breakthrough Highway To Hell when their lead singer drank himself to death, and there was little thought that the band would continue, let alone finish the album in question. Scott’s death was one of the cruelest blows in the history of rock – the man who sang about what a long way to the top it was (if you wanted to rock & roll) had his band just a few steps from the top of the mountain when he died. Ronald Belford Scott wasn’t just the voice of AC/DC, he was the heart and soul of the band and the driving force behind their transformation from a glam rock-styled outfit into one of the hardest rocking bands to ever plug into a stack of amps.

The remaining members were shell-shocked by his death and had given no thought to their future plans, when at his funeral, Bon’s father approached them and encouraged them to go on. “You’ve got to find someone else, you know that,” he told them. “Whatever you do, don’t stop.” Guitarists and brothers Angus and Malcolm Young began making music with one another, as a way to cut the pain, and eventually started rehearsing lead singers. After a number of less-than-thrilling auditions, they remembered a singer named Brian Johnson, with a band called Geordie, that Scott had once gushed about. Johnson, a huge AC/DC fan, knew all of the band’s songs inside and out, and passed his audition with flying colors. As Malcolm Young told Mojo last year, “We went, ‘Fucking hell, this guy is cutting the mustard.’”

And how. Johnson is more of a screamer than a singer, and his heavy metal howl perfectly fits the mood of the album. Recorded in the Bahamas for tax purposes, these sessions took place while a hurricane was battering the island and a machete-wielding maniac was on the prowl outside the studios. Back In Black works equally well as a hard rocking ode to a fallen comrade, and a life-affirming yowl from the edge of the grave. “FORGET THE HEARSE CUZ I’LL NEVER DIE!”, Johnson bellows on the title track. ‘Hells Bells’ and ‘Have A Drink On Me’ eulogize Scott, but in broad enough terms that the former has become the standard track for baseball closers, and the latter remains a barroom favorite. Songs like ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ and ‘Shoot To Thrill’ were logical extensions of the places that Scott had gone lyrically, and album-closer ‘Rock And Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution’ is a fierce statement of purpose.

Back In Black was driven by grief and fear and adrenaline, and after entering the US charts at #187, it eventually climbed all the way to the top, and never… stopped… selling. It recently passed 50 million sold, second all-time only to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. This album is a standard of our times. It affirms that rock and roll will never die, and Bon Scott lives on…

Listen: Back In Black

Listen: Rock And Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution

Doubleshot Tuesday: Listen Without Prejudice/Kiss Each Other Clean

[Today: The changeling...]

I recently picked up Iron & Wine’s latest album, Kiss Each Other Clean, and while I wasn’t immediately blown away, like I was by its predecessor The Shepherd’s Dog, I plan on giving it several more spins before coming to any final conclusions. But one thing that did grab my attention was that in a few places, Sam Beam (the artist behind the Iron & Wine name) sounds quite a bit like George Michael. How a freak folk artist from the 00s ended up sounding like a pop crooner from the 80s and 90s is a mystery to me – enough that I had to dig up a George Michael album to confirm the comparison.

It’s worth taking a few minutes to explain why I have George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice in my record collection. Not because I have anything against him — I actually think he’s one of the more interesting characters of the last few decades, and I’m delighted that Iron & Wine, of all artists, has finally given me a chance to reflect on his music — but because Listen Without Prejudice was released in 1990, which might just be the absolute low point for LP sales in the US. I have an ironclad rule that I buy ANY records I find that were released between 1989 and 1994, because those LPs might be among the rarest modern releases on vinyl. Demand was then so low for the format that any LP released during those years couldn’t have been pressed in numbers exceeding 5,000.

So when I saw Listen Without Prejudice at a local flea market for one dollar, I jumped all over it, and then filed it away, thinking it’d be ages before it ever actually hit the turntable. And then I listened to the new Iron & Wine, and found myself pulling LWP out of the stacks and dropping the needle. One listen confirmed that parts of Kiss Each Other Clean actually do sound like George Michael, but it also reminded me that ‘Freedom’ really is a unique and smartly constructed song.

It’s difficult to think of another tune that’s such a mea culpa from artist to audience. As a member of Wham!, Michael was one of the poster boys of MTV during the 80s, but here he apologizes for selling out his talents for the prospect of fame, and promises to be more true to his gifts in the future. It hardly sounds like the makings of a big hit, but ‘Freedom’ is undeniable. The fact that the Iron & Wine track that most sounds like Michael is called ‘Glad Man Singing’, and comes off like a response to ‘Freedom’ only heightens my suspicion that something’s happening here.

Perhaps even more odd is Kiss Each Other Clean’s final track, ‘Your Fake Name Is Good Enough For Me’. It’s a poppy, very Iron & Wine thing for about half the song, before it shifts into a dark dirge and Beam disappears into a phone booth, only to reappear as Maynard from Tool. Maybe my ears are playing tricks on me, but with his latest album, Sam Beam seems to be shape-shifting…

Listen: Glad Man Singing [Iron & Wine]

Listen: Freedom [George Michael]

Listen: Your Fake Name Is Good Enough For Me [Iron & Wine]

Sleeve Notes: Rhapsody In White

“Disco deserved a better name, a beautiful name because it was a beautiful art form. It made the consumer beautiful. The consumer was the star,” said Barry White. But Disco was also democratizing in the fact that it made guys like Barry White – rotund romeos in velour leisure suits – into stars as well. There is no photographer listed on the back of Rhapsody In White, but Larry Nunes is credited as ‘Spiritual Adviser’ while White himself is credited with ‘Art Concept’. This album spawned two major Disco hits; ‘Love’s Theme’, which went to the top of the Billboard pop charts, and ‘You’re The First, The Last, My Everything’, which made it to #2. White was originally planning on recording under the name White Heat before being persuaded to use his given name. This 1974 album with The Love Unlimited Orchestra (a real 40-piece orchestra) was his debut and one of the first mile markers of Disco…

Weekend Playlist

“My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it, was all for my audience.” ~ Cab Calloway

Iron & Wine | Kiss Each Other Clean

George Michael | Listen Without Prejudice

Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros | Streetcore

The Upstroke | Porno Groove: The Sound Of 70′s Adult Films

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers | Mojo

Dan Auerbach | Keep It Hid

Ben Harper | Fight For Your Mind

Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros | Up From Below

Buena Vista Social Club | At Carnegie Hall

Los Lobos | Tin Can Trust

Led Zeppelin | Houses Of The Holy

Various Artists | Jackie Brown Soundtrack

Various Monks | Gregorian Chants

Lord Sitar | Lord Sitar

The Artist Who Shall Not Be Named | Avalon Sunset

Michelle Shocked | Captain Swing

Cab Calloway | Hi De Ho Man

Mazzy Star | So Tonight That I Might See

Prince | 1999

Black Heat | No Time To Burn

Grant Green | Idle Moments

Buried Treasure: It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best

[Today: The wounded bird...]

Karen Dalton knew pain. She was a late-60s Greenwich Village folkie by way of Boulder, CO, and no less than the great Fred Neil called her “the greatest female singer I’ve ever heard.” She sings like a wounded bird, each note cracking under the weight of enormous suffering. There’s something so plain and raw in her voice that anything she sings instantly becomes the blues – a broken, Billie Holiday-style blues that comes from a place beyond hope. Like a latter-day Holiday, her voice is all texture, and her choice of covers only underscores the heartbreak within it.

Her debut, It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best, was recorded at The Record Plant in New York City in 1969. She would make just one more album before drifting into an itinerant, hand-to-mouth lifestyle that consisted of booze, hard drugs, extreme poverty and erratic behavior. According to Brian James Barr’s liner notes to the 2009 reissue, “By most every account, Karen Dalton shot up with a dirty needle sometime in the 80s and died of complications from AIDS in 1993.” Her landlord burned all of her belongings out of fear of infection, including tapes of home recordings that she had safely guarded through decades of hard living.

Her bad end is foreshadowed all over It’s So Hard To Tell…, in covers of Fred Neil’s ‘Little Bit Of Rain’ and ‘Blues On The Ceiling’, Jelly Roll Morton’s ‘Sweet Substitute’, Leadbelly’s ‘Down On The Street (Don’t You Follow Me Down)’, and the standard ‘It Hurts Me Too’. Dalton plays her longneck banjo and sings with just sparse, acoustic accompaniment, and the recording is so intimate and soul-baring that you feel like you could drown in her tears. This side of Patsy Cline and Billie Holiday, I can think of no other artist that I’d rather reach out to through time and space and offer a great big hug…

Listen: Little Bit Of Rain

Listen: Sweet Substitute

Masterpiece: The Best Of John Fahey 1959-1977

[Today: The buzzard blues...]

John Fahey picked the buzzard’s blues,

a natural, stark guitar music that clangs of

bare bones, like a carcass picked clean

a rock on a beach, desolate waves crashing

again and again, over and over and

Fahey’s notes come like the grim reaper,

inevitable undeniable pure beautiful cold…

Listen: Sunflower River Blues

Listen: When The Spring Time Comes Again

Magic Moment: Heavy Traffic

Traffic and Steve Winwood play ’40,000 Headmen’ during a 1968 appearance on Dudley Moore and Peter Cook’s TV show Goodbye Again…