Lee Hazlewood’s first LP under his own name, ‘Trouble is a Lonesome Town’ in a sense functions as a chronologically incompatible bridge between the (ineffably wonderful) International Submarine Band sessions he oversaw a few years later and the far more louche / urban MGM albums that established his recording persona for good towards the end of the decade.

Lee’s eccentricities were already getting the better of him here though, and, for reasons best known to himself, he decided to corral his songs together into a sort of proto-concept album, with each track preceded by a ramblin’ spoken word introduction concerning the simple-minded populace of an isolated town named ‘Trouble’ (allegedly based on Hazlewood's own birthplace in Mannford, Oklahoma).

Unfortunately, these introductions – sometimes almost as long as the flawlessly concise songs they’re introducing – are fairly tedious, containing little of the dry wit and off-hand pessimism evidenced in the compositions themselves, and instead hewing toward a kind of cloying Lake-Wobegon-Days coziness. They’re good for one listen at best, and if subsequently scanning through them to get to the good bits on my mp3 player proves a bit of a pain, getting up every two and a half minutes to jog the needle on the original LP must have been absolutely infuriating - one good reason perhaps why ‘Trouble..’ faded into obscurity and Lee exited his deal with Mercury post-haste.

This, needless to say, is a shame, because when you do get to the songs on ‘Trouble..’, they are almost all excellent – disarmingly simple, two minute / three chord country songs that sound so instantly catchy and familiar, you’re amazed no one had written them before. Performed with tight, minimal backing and just enough off-kilter strangeness to keep you on your toes, the breeziness of the tunes and the cartoonish simplicity of the lyrics as ever plays trojan horse to the weird darkness beneath.

As an opener, ‘Long Black Train’verily owns the concept of writing a song entitled ‘Long Black Train’, Hazlewood’s voice crawling snake-like across the title just as beautifully as you might hope as the rhythm section walks the dog behind him; “ninety-nine years, is what he’ll get / I bet it feels like a hundred to Jim”. Yes, one track in on his debut album and I’m already far-gone in thrall to Hazlewoodism.

‘Son of a Gun’, ‘Run, Boy, Run’ and ‘Six Feet of Chain’ are all just as good – happy, laidback sketches of death and sex, imprisonment and criminality that see no reason to break the rhyme scheme or outstay their welcome. Hopefully I’m not just saying this due to the synchronicitous song title, but it’s easy to imagine The Vaselines playing this one a lot as they threw together the off-hand magic of tunes like ‘Ride Me Rory’; a similarly timeless, unhurried feel is very much in evidence.

I suppose it stands to reason that Johnny Cash was a big influence on the kind of style Hazlewood was gunning for here, and, given the Man in Black’s penchant for scooping up catchy, novelty country songs by the dozen during the ‘60s, it’s surprising that his people weren’t on the phone to Hazlewood’s publishers PDQ after this album’s release. (Hell, this stuff’s even in the right key, ferchrissake.) In a different world, I’d bet Cash could have ridden any of these numbers to the top of the charts, perhaps sending Lee’s career off on a rather different path in the process. As it is though, maybe JC, like most everyone else, just couldn’t be bothered to get through the spoken word bits. He was a busy man, after all. Pills to take, prisons to visit and all that.

Well, c’est la vie. Maybe in that world we’d never have gotten ‘Cowboy in Sweden’, or Nancy &  Lee, or ‘Requiem for an Almost Lady’. By plotting his own course straight to the land of the strange, Lee remained his own man, and… that’s the only it could be, I’m sure he’d agree, even if his bank balance didn’t.


I hear that at some point this year, there’s a sorta ‘cover album’ emerging on which various tedious indie-rock types re-record ‘Trouble is a Lonesome Town’ – a good idea actually I think, as these songs have tons of mileage left in ‘em (frankly, every band in the world could benefit from covering one). Details yonder.

Meanwhile, a resissue of the original with a ton of bonus tracks can currently be gotten from Light In The Attic.

Labels: album reviews, country, Lee Hazlewood

Right. Let’s get this this thing back on track, with some words on my favourite LP of the year thus far (ok, so it was released late 2012, but I doubt many copies crossed the pond prior to the new year, so let’s not split hairs).

I’ve long been meaning to find the time / words / impetus to write a big overview on Cheater Slicks, a band whose work has crept up on me slowly over the past few years, making a bit of a dent in my heart & soul in the process.

Never the “FIRST LISTEN = AWESOME” proposition their ‘90s record companies may have wished for, Cheater Slicks is more the kind of thing you need to let sink in gradually. Impatient listeners, hitting up early albums like ‘Destination Lonely’ (’92) or ‘Don’t Like You (’95), may have written them off as just a competent garage-punk band, lurking somewhere between Mudhoney and Jon Spencer, and moved on. But keep listening, delve deeper, plough forward through the discography, and one grey day when your spirits hit the same Venn diagram as theirs, you’ll get it.

Having doggedly stuck it out for decades in the face of general critical and audience indifference, the group’s siege mentality has (in purely musical terms at least) done them a world of good, allowing them to hone their craft and bolster their defenses with a general spirit of non-damn-giving that seems to make their output stronger and more immovable as time goes on, to the extent that ‘..Grape’ strikes me as about the best record they’ve ever made (well, best one I've HEARD anyway - still some gaps to cover in my collection).

What they do is blues essentially – not in form, but in feeling; the blues of a frustrated, unremarkable middle-aged man, stuck in the rain in some shithole city. It’s a tough gig, but it’s an honest one, and Cheater Slicks have been covering their chosen beat for so long, they can pull you along for the ride with a rare mixture of monolithic brute force and great subtlety that makes for truly affecting rock music.

Since I’ve evoked the “frustrated ugly man” demographic, let us please stress that Cheater Slicks are coming at it from a rather different angle, and those understandably wary of such conjurations should not be unduly put off. Not for them the belligerent, self-conscious machismo of a group like Pissed Jeans, nor the try-hard hurdy-gurdying of your nearest plague of Birthday Party disciples. In fact, even to mention this stuff in the same breath as our heroes seems a horribly crass misstep, just as a few spins of ‘Reality is a Grape’ tends to make any music betraying even the slightest hint of artifice sound like a bad joke in comparison. But we’ve got to clear the air.

So let’s start again. Dana Hatch’s usually rather strident drumming takes a back seat on ‘..Grape’, perhaps a reflection of the long-term health problems that put the band on hold for a few years prior to this album (a circumstance that also perhaps contributes to the hefty emotional whack these songs carry). Whilst he keeps time though, Tom & David Shannon’s guitars achieve what I think veteran rock/noise listeners should be able to recognise as singular heights of unlikely beauty. Long-time dons of low key / non-showy axe magic, these guys have a better understanding of what makes an electric guitar ring true and hit the right synapses than, well… you or I, for a start. Straight out of the gate, this is one of the heaviest Slicks records I’ve heard to date. The familiar Velvets/Crazy Horse strum-drifts and cracked tremolo leads of their best late ‘90s work, though still present amid the foundations, are swiftly overtaken by an arms race of successive pedal-drops, building up a palette of tummy-rumbling low-end, nasty thug/trash low-mid compression and ear damaging treble that creates a mighty wall of knotty speaker-blare, occasionally even pushing toward Les Rallizes Denudes levels of full-spectrum blow-out.

Within this racket though, thought and tenderness is ever in evidence. What these guys are working with here is over two decades of musical interplay, twenty-something years of learning to express themselves through the means of heavily processed strings and wood, of learning to carry us with them rather than simply assaulting us, of channeling all excess back into the song.

It may seem odd to wax so lyrical about lumbering temper tantrums like ‘Love Ordeal’ and ‘Psychic Toll’, but just listen to those riffs hammer down and point me toward a new band who can bring guts like this to the party, who can wring the neck of good taste with quite so much impassioned discontent. And moving on from everyday frustrations, there is at points a nigh-on apocalyptic feel going on here too, with Hatch and Tom S. bellowing through ‘Jesus Christ’ and, uh, ‘Apocalypse’ like grizzled sergeants calling their men to safety under heavy fire, polluted rivers parting as the band attain a kind of urban white man’s gospel.

And standing dead centre toward the end of side one, ‘Hold On to Your Soul’, where all this comes together, the kind of track it’s difficult to even consider approaching with words. Let’s just say that when things are looking black in the near future, when I’m walking to some supermarket in the dark wondering if I can be bothered to put one foot in front of the other, I know what I’ll be reaching for on my mp3 player. If I hear any piece of music this year that better reminds me of the reasons why I became so fixated on the strange magic of men manipulating guitars and speaker cabinets in the first place, that better reaffirms for me of the reasons why I should still make the effort, I’ll be very surprised.

In short: Cheater Slicks exposes fake-ass bullshit in seconds. If you are a person who likes rock music, and if you find yourself somewhat alienated by the state much of it has been reduced to since the turn of the century, be bold and grab the affirming flames where you can.

---

Buy the LP (in the USA) from Columbus Discount here.

Get the mp3s from UK Amazon (like I did) here.

Visit Cheater Slicks on Tumblr here.

Labels: album reviews, Cheater Slicks

“When these critics purport to write about a record, they are really writing, ‘Me, me, me… What about ME?!?’ And because they are actually propagating themselves, they resent performers and groups with any personality or character of their own. This competition with the subject is perfectly logical from their perspective. These critics see themselves as artists in their own right; their writing needs a clean slate on which to project, a tabula rosa. Just as a lead guitar player wants a steady backbeat over which to ‘shred,’ the critic celebrates the performers and groups who will provide a clean, tidy soil bed in which their word-seeds can sprout – groups and singers whose personas won’t overpower the writer’s own voice.

Therefore they reward formalistic, inoffensive, dull, pretentiously unpretentious groups who ‘rock’ with a studied indifference, who try too hard to not try too hard, who compose a kind of indefinable muddle sometimes described as ‘indie-rock.’ The groups the critics celebrate, though middle class and usually college educated, are not intellectual or poetic, nor are they threatening in any way. Their style is varsity casual; they’re smart enough to be bland and unassuming, and they are attractive in the sense that they received the right nutrients when they were young during their unremarkable but privileged upbringing.

Their type of music isn’t necessarily ‘bad’. In fact, it might even be ‘good’ in some sort of way. But it is typically unassuming, introverted, unexciting, dealing in mawkish emotionalism better left on daytime television, inscrutable in a manner which betrays cowardice on the part of the ‘artist,’ and is often state-subsidized by the government of its country of origin, whether it be Canada, France or Sweden.”



“Because of the critic’s starring role in the music scene, he or she is concerned with maintaining decorum. If Little Richard were appearing on the scene nowadays, he would arouse the ire of the critics, who would resent his humour, his costumes, his showmanship, and the Dada content of his songs. The Same goes for Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry and The Beatles. The critic would dismiss these as comic or novelty acts, not to be taken seriously, as opposed to, say, the tedious and highly regarded Sigur Ros and Radiohead.

Of course, Little Richard isn’t appearing on the scene now. He is an institutionalized favorite, beloved by critics. Why is he so beloved by them? Because of his ‘otherness’ and his irrelevance. In music, personality is only forgiven if the performer is firmly ensconced in the ‘other’ category, or if they are retired or dead. If he/she is irrelevant or a completely exotic quantity, he/she is granted a right to showmanship, personality, stage name, and even political expression. But that is simply not acceptable for the contemporary domestic artist.”



“The artist is expected to be a silent partner and unannounced extension of faceless authority; one more brand name alongside Stand & Poors, the NASDAQ, the New York Times, Merchant Ivory, Proctor & Gamble, Monsanto and the MoMA. Sting, Bon Iver, and Vampire Weekend fit right in. This policy is propagated via the critic, who feels him or herself trapped by the void. For the official rock critic, the modern group represents ‘fashion’ or ‘art,’ whereas ‘other’ music is ‘costume’ or ‘craft,’ somehow authentic and outside of critique.”



“Another of the critics’ jobs is to have an opinion about things they actually have no regard for or couldn’t care less about. This leads to annoyance on their part with regard to the records and groups they discuss. Their opinions are therefore contrived, conjured up in order to make a statement that addresses the perception of the thing in question, and not the actual thing. Perhaps they will perversely champion that which is unpopular, or vice versa. Or they may try to ‘break’ an unknown. But typically these writers will fastidiously maintain a status quo, an aesthetic which they feel reinforces an aspect of their equally contrived personal ‘identity’.”



“Rock n roll musicians tend to gravitate en masse towards some particular stylistic template. Critics do the same. Though there are many critics, they only have a few voices. The most common one is the ‘omniscient,’ who holds forth as if he/she were a deity on a mountaintop who’d incidentally seen all of humanity’s foibles transpire, including the entire back catalogue of whichever ‘artist’ they are discussing. As an astral being, they affect a tone of chiding condescension. Another is the ‘memoirist,’ who tells you a few incidental comments about the record while you learn oodles about their experience in traffic of their dinner of tikka masala. This is supposed to be refreshingly unpretentious. As opposed to an actual music enthusiast who is invested in the scene, none of these creatures can tell you what kind of music they like or why this does or doesn’t fit into their ideal. To do so would undermine their right to caprice.

The establishment critic is also aware of the role of money. Even on the ‘independent’ level, critical popularity is bought through a form of payola called ‘publicity’. Publicists are like farm league lobbyists. They are ‘connected’ people, usually ex-Conde Nast employees, who are hired to tell their acquaintances who work for periodicals or music blogs to write positive articles about the group which has paid them a fee. They control the way a group is written about too, as they distribute something called a ‘onesheet,’ written by the group’s record company, summarising the new record’s promo campaign with ‘bullet points’. This is why, whenever a group’s record ‘blows up,’ the articles you see written about it are uniformly similar. The Strokes, for example, were said by all press organs to evoke the Ramones and Television, despite no discernible similarity to either group. The extraordinary obedience of the press in following orders from the publicists shows how little many of the writers care, not only about the subjects they write about, but about music itself.

And this is understandable. Because music is not for everyone. Most people, in fact, shouldn’t listen to it. This isn’t meant as an insult to them, or as a way to question their decency or intellectual capacity. People who shouldn’t listen to music are often very competent at their jobs and may also be responsible pet owners. They should not, however, use the groups as a prop for their future career in journalism or as a way to generate ad revenue for their website. Listening to music won’t make one interesting, hip, in-the-know, or better than other people. All of these elitist conceits are common to the enthusiast and are undeniably a factor in listening to music, but ultimately it is music that must liberate one from such concerns.

Unfortunately, it is precisely those who shouldn’t listen to music who constitute the majority of its most influential critics. These people, the snarling dogs who enforce mediocrity through their vehemence, sneering, and know-it-all pretensions, resist music because to them it is an unfathomable, inscrutable riddle. They want to speak about it, hold forth on it, determine its future like a parched schoolteacher who crushes the spirit of the child because he too was crushed so long ago.

This type of critic resents organized sound just as a mole resents sight or the ostrich resents flight. But instead of just turning away, he has been taught that music is integral to a person’s sexuality, to their attractiveness, so he pushes forth in his nonsense elucidations, tracts designed to be read by other confused individuals who need an expert to explain the music to them. Yet music is like food or touch or modern banking – it defies explanation. Explanation or elucidation is an embarrassing redundancy which has no relation to the sensibility borne of the sound itself.”



"Super-Natural Strategies for Making a Rock n’ Roll Group" by Ian F. Svenonious is available now from Akashic Books, or can be found in the ‘popular music / how-to / occult’ section of all good bookshops.

This blog will return to limp on anew on an as-and-when basis, probably paying little heed to Mr. Svenonious’s sage counsel. Keep watching the skies.

Labels: auto-critique, books, Ian Svenonious