No, it is, of course, grown up work and responsibilities which have kept me away. I would dearly have loved to have been able to spend 2021 casually ruminating in (virtual) print on the oddities and virtues of the many, many dusty old LPs I have acquired, and spinning off ill-thought-out treatises from the assorted books on music and pop culture I’ve read whilst sitting on the bog. But guess what? I’m a grown up now, so I don’t have time. Moving thoughts from my head onto an MS Word doc is permanently next thing on the list; the thing which is never reached.

Charlie Watts was so clearly, so obviously, the best Rolling Stone that anyone who has failed to recognise the fact by this point should give up and go home. The least arseholish of their number by a country mile, the near sixty years he spent excelling at a repetitious task for which he never even pretended to show any enthusiasm stands as a shining inspiration to all of us lower echelon wage slaves.

Seriously though - he was great. All of the golden era Stones stuff walks a fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous, and nine times out of ten, I believe, it was Charlie’s measured/dispassionate presence which stopped the others from tumbling headfirst into the abyss of wankerdom. God bless him, and I hope that one day his drawings of hotel beds will be exhibited, assuming they haven’t been already.

And, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. Fuck, man. “What a character” scarcely does that old boy justice. His entire life and work is just… off the scale. We’d need to call in the profs and invent a new scale to even get a glimpse of it. 

So many garbled anecdotes could be related pertaining to his nigh-on supernatural shamanic weirdness, but at the end of the day, it’s the records that count, and, though my interest in dub/reggae has never progressed much beyond the dabbler/dilettante stage (given the number of second hand discs in the genre clogging up this corner of the world, I’d need to invest in a reinforced floor should I begin to cultivate a taste for them), at least a few Perry productions remain close to my heart. His perfectly harmonised moo-cows on The Congos’ Children Crying; the disorientating left channel cut-offs on the harrowing, low-down funkery of Woman’s Dub; the fuzzy esoteric pronouncements of Baffling Smoke Signal, which used to fascinate and perplex me when I recorded it off Peel as a youngster; scattered talismans of high level genius. RIP my good man - even this clueless, herb-decrying winehead salutes you.  

Wolfen; Mountain Movers; Heavy Sentence; Brandee Younger (major label alert!); Dope Purple; Potion; The Paradox; Bobby Lee; Smote; Emma-Jean Thackray; this Wicked Lady cover by the otherwise fairly absurd Salem’s Pot; Haig Fras; The Heartwood Institute; Obey Cobra; Ruby Rushton; Birds of Maya; Mienakunaru; Yerba Mansa Trio.

You’re welcome.

Labels: apologies, deathblog, I like, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, The Rolling Stones

On the great scales of metaphysical justice, should destruction of human life always outweigh artistic achievement? [YES - morality ed.]

By which I mean, how does murdering the star of ‘The Barbarian Queen’ stack up against recording ‘Be My Baby’ and ‘Baby, I Love You’, legacy-wise? [POORLY - morality ed.]

Such are some questions what may or may not never be resolved in our lifetimes. [DONE IT - morality ed.]

Over to you, Richard Williams:

“So what, in the final analysis, do we make of this strange little man - this combination of genius and pushy creep, of giant and gnome, of aesthete and pugilist? We can point to the personal demons which drove him through the early years and which now, quite clearly, won’t let him rest. Success has never brought him what he must have expected: the world’s unalloyed adulation. Always, he’s wanted more, and winning has often involved rudeness and ugly scenes (both justified and gratuitous) and the consequent unkind comment. Yet, he can also be the kindest, most thoughtful of men […].

To today’s kids, he means little or nothing. They can’t be expected to find interest in the fact that some of their heroes (Roy Wood for example) are living off Spector’s innovations of ten years before. Even those who grew up with his music often dismiss him, these days, as an Icarus in a world of Boeings. They, surely, are the ones who never mainlined on the spirit of his records, or prefer to forget their debts.

Perhaps his ‘accident’ is a sham, as some allege; maybe it’s another retreat, a response to Veronica’s show of independence, or in preparation for future work on his new label. More probably, it’s for real. Whatever the truth, on his eventual return he’ll be in the position of having to prove himself once again - a blatant and enduring absurdity in view of his achievements in the Sixties. Yes, as somebody once said in reference to teenage tycoons, but what about the fifty years before you die? Living in his Bel Air mansion, surrounded by monogrammed everything and pictures of himself covering the walls, Spector has yet to find an adequate resolution.

- Richard Williams Long Ditton, April 14, 1974”

What’s remarkable, I think, is that that summation remained entirely valid (give or take a Roy Wood reference) for nearly thirty years after Mr Williams banged it out and signed off his manuscript. Then, Phil’s addled brain and shaking fingers finally delivered the long-delayed resolution, much to the world’s chagrin.

Seeing ‘Pop Producer Jailed For Murder Dies Aged 81’ sink like a stone down the BBC top stories yesterday, nowhere to be seen 12 hours later, constitutes his sad reward.

 “..an Icarus in a world of Boeings..” 

 Lest we forget: 

 

Labels: deathblog, Phil Spector

Of course we knew this day would come, but still.

So, let’s get straight to the point here – Morricone IS film music, so far as I’m concerned. Even if he didn’t contribute to it all directly, a vast swathe of the cinema I love would sound very different without his influence.

Years before I actually saw any of the Leone films, hearing Morricone’s themes from them pop up on the radio (which they sometimes did in those days) was an event. My Dad (who, like many dads, had a yen for all things cowboy-related) would turn up the volume, and for a few minutes we’d soak it in. The drama, the atmosphere, the wild sounds were just completely intoxicating. They didn’t need any context – as always, Morricone’s music creates its own context. That was almost certainly the first time I stopped to think about music in films, about a kind of musical vocabulary which extended beyond lyrics and pop songs, and about the different ways in which sounds and images can combine to create emotion and excitement. Thirty years later, I’m still thinking about those things.

The medium by which I enjoy the Leone scores has moved over the years from radio, to parental vinyl, to CD, and back to my own vinyl, and during my adult life I’ve of course hovered up all the other Morricone I can find within my price range (which of course still only represents the tiniest fraction of the monolithic range of his total achievement).

From what little I know of Morricone’s beliefs and personality, I think it’s probably safe to say that he would wish to be remembered to the world for his work rather than his biography, so instead of rabbiting on further, I’ll share a swiftly cobbled together mix of fifteen (which could easily be thirty, or one hundred) personal favourite smash hits from his vast catalogue, assembled in no particular order. I’ll keep commentary to a minimum, because otherwise my responses to most of these tracks would just consist of variations on a theme of holy fucking shit.

Though the magic which Nicolai, Dell’Orso, Alessandroni and so many others brought to his recordings cannot be overlooked, Morricone remains a giant – one of the greatest composers and musicians of the 20th century, no questions asked.

For ease of ad-free listening, I’ve compiled these fifteen cuts into a mix on Mixcloud (embed below), but will also go through them one-by-one via Youtube links for those who wish to pick and choose.




1. ‘Titoli’ from ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ (1964)

Here’s where it all began.



2. ‘Il Grande Silenzio (Restless)’ from ‘Il Grande Silenzio’ (1968)



3. “Valmont’s Go-Go Pad” from ‘Danger! Diabolik’ (1968)



4. ‘Svolta Definitiva’ from ‘Violent City’ (1970)



5. ‘La Lucertola’ from ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ (1971)



6. ‘Guerra E Pace, Pollo E Brace’ from ‘Grazie Zia’ / ‘Come Play With Me’ (1968)



7. ‘Giorno Di Notte’ from ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ (1971)



8. ‘Magic and Ecstasy’ from ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ (1977)



9. Main theme from ‘The Thing’ (1982)



10. ‘Canzone Lontana’ from ‘Il Serpente’ (1973)



11. ‘Fraseggio Senza Struttura’ from ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’ (1970)



12. ‘Ballabile No. 2’ from ‘La Cosa Buffa’ (1972)



13. ‘Titoli’ from ‘A Sky Full of Stars for a Roof’ (1968)



14. ‘Astratto 3’ from ‘Veruschka’ (1971)



 
15. ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ from ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (1968)

This theme makes me involuntarily break down in tears each time I hear it. Really, every time, like clockwork. Which has proved quite embarrassing whenever I’ve watched the film in company.

My reaction has nothing to do with any personal/biographical connections, or anything in the film itself (incredible though it is). The sound of the music is just completely overwhelming.

It is simply one of the greatest pieces of music ever recorded, and any classical buffs who want to fight about that are welcome to. Everything that is worth feeling within the human experience, I can hear in this.

R.I.P. Il Maestro.

Labels: bad news, deathblog, Ennio Morricone, Italy, mixcloud, soundtracks

Of course it’s never been my intention to turn this blog into an all-obituaries-all-the-time kind of effort, but my love and admiration for the musical cultures of our fading civilization’s ‘50s-‘70s peak era (plus adjacent decades) remains vast and unquenchable, whilst we are meanwhile faced with the bad luck of living through an epoch in which the remaining denizens of said cultures are, to not put too fine a point on it, dropping like flies.

As some kind of self-appointed memorialiser of such things, it’s really been getting on top of me recently… it’s difficult to find the necessary time to process, let alone get anything suitable down in words.

Sticking strictly to those whose music I am familiar with, or that has affected my life in some small way, there’s Little Richard, Florian Schneider, Phil May, Henry Grimes, Betty Wright, John Prine, Lee Konitz, Henry Grimes…. am I missing anyone here? Almost certainly. Smaller, non-household names and non-band leaders especially, I’m sure. Syphoning news has become increasingly challenging lately, so please hit me up in the comments if there are any other departures I should be aware of.

It’s interesting to note that, of the more elderly folks on the above list, very few have had covid explicitly linked to their deaths, yet the numbers, compared to the quantity of noteworthy musicians we’d normally expect to lose in any given Spring, remain exceptionally high. Makes you wonder, doesn't it…. but this is most assuredly not a good time or place to take one’s wondering off in that direction. It won’t end up anywhere nice. Let’s all just pray daily for our surviving heroes and heroines who are not on the above list. Wishing health, long life and the divine spark of creation to them all.

SO, ANYWAY – Little Richard. That’s a strange one, right? Seems like much of the entertainment media didn’t quite know how to play it. Perhaps in some crazy sort of fashion, we’ve still not quite caught up with him yet.



Seems to me that, for the generation of more rebellious/anti-authoritarian rock fans growing up back in the day, he was little short of a GOD, the real number # 1, not-to-be-fucked-with well-spring for that wild, anarchic rock n’ roll energy, but his perceived importance seems to have waned pretty significantly over the years, to the extent that to those of my age or younger, he’s often not much more than that guy did track 5 and track 7 on that Big Bumper Retro Rock n’ Roll hits CD comp you always had lying around.

Perhaps he’s suffered to a certain extent from “wow, is he still alive, I had no idea” syndrome, a symptom of the long, slow 50 year plus come-down experienced by almost all of the household name ‘50s rock n’ rollers, doomed forever to some gothic, ‘Sunset Boulevard’-esque existence – a long life defined almost entirely by the shadow of some mad shit they laid down without a second thought in their early ‘20s.

For the old timers though, growing up without a supply of raging feedback and animalistic punk/metal nonsense on tap at all times…. well, he was something else entirely. As Simon Reynolds notes, writer Nik Cohn significantly christened his pivotal poetical history of rock n’ roll tome ‘Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom’. I just pulled it off the shelf to check the spelling of the title, and to quote from within (pp. 31-34):

“For instance, the first record I ever bought was by Little Richard and, at one throw, it taught me everything I need to know about pop.
The message went: ‘Tuttie fruiti, all rooti, tuttie fruiti, all rooti, tuttie fruiti, all rooti, awopbopaloobop alopbamboom!’ As a summing up of what rock n’ roll was really about, this was nothing short of masterly.
Very likely those early years were the best that pop has yet been through. Anarchy moved in. For thirty years you couldn’t make it unless you were white, sleek, nicely-spoken and phoney to your toenails – suddenly now you could be black, purple, moronic, delinquent, diseased or almost anything on earth and you could still clean up. Just so long as you carried excitement.”
[…]
“Most of his records sold a million each – ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘Lucille’, ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’, ‘Keep a Knockin’’, ‘Baby Face’. They all sounded roughly the same: tuneless, lyric-less, pre-Neanderthal. There was a tenor saxo solo in the middle somewhere and a constant smashed up piano and Little Richard himself screaming his head off. Individually, the records didn’t mean that much. They were small episodes in one unending scream and only made sense when you put them all together.”

Man, that’s a great book. I should read it again.

Jumping off from this idea, I distantly remember Greil Marcus (I think?!) waxing lyrical about Little Richard as the guy who first introduced a sense of surrealism / situationism to rock n’ roll, marking out a space in which meaning and coherence entirely disappeared – form transmuted into pure energy, combined with a kind of musical glossolalia (and, that’s a trick which naturally ain’t gonna hold up too well over 60+ years).

Personally, I’ve always found Little Richard’s music – great tho it it – makes for an odd fit amongst the first generation rock n’ rollers with whom he is invariably lumped in. Really, his stuff feels less like fully-fledged r’n’r, and more like a form of super-hyped up jump blues, foregrounding horns and piano and powerhouse vocals in a manner that makes it feel more like a weird, ultra-aggressive adjunct to the parallel development of what would soon become soul music, than to anything connected with the thinner, ghostlier, whiter sounds emanating from the Sun/rockabilly universe. A kind of blunt-yet-brilliant musical dead end of the kind more usually dug up on static-drenched compilations of totally obscure, indie label 45s – not on the freakin’ radio, or the Sunday Times obits page.

In a way, he’s always struck me as the kind of anti-Chuck Berry. Whereas Chuck gifted us with smart lyrics and story-telling, emphasising at all times the primacy of the electric guitar, L’il R (as no one has ever called him) made a point of smashing the loose remains of verbal narrative against the wall until they died bleeding, then proceeded to do the same to a brutally over-miced piano, doing his best to drown out the holy rhythm section entirely.

In a sense, perhaps Bo Diddley serves as some kind of weird, stylistic peacemaker here. By which I mean, his songs told stories, but they were nonsense stories, full of his own self-aggrandising, made up blather, whilst he simultaneously drew our attention to the drums and percussion as the most important part of the pie, because I mean, of course they are, you idiots. But, I’m getting off the point….

Whereas Chuck could number the Beach Boys, Beatles and Stones amongst his white boy descendants, Little Richard took a flying leap straight to The Sonics – which kind of says it all vis-à-vis his place in the canon, I suppose. Punk lineage, A plus 1.

P.S.: having just google-searched his image (try it), I’m inclined to realise that, throughout his life, this guy managed to look genuinely insane and frightening about 90% of the time someone was pointing a camera at him. I’d like to see you beat that across six decades, entire world of heavy metal.

Labels: bad news, blather, deathblog, Little Richard, Nik Cohn, rock n' roll, thinkpiece

I’m pretty gutted today to hear (via The Quietus) about the death of Tony Allen, a drummer whose work with Fela Kuti pretty much defined the sound of afro-beat as it developed during the ‘70s, but whose astounding energy and productivity has since seen his career range far and wide beyond even those fairly unsurpassable early achievements.

For no particular reason, I’ve been listening to a ton of Allen’s music during the current lockdown period, and have been really getting a feel for it. I recently acquired his first two albums as band leader, Jealousy (1975) and Progress (1979), bought a copy of Tomorrow Comes The Harvest, his 2018 collaborative 10” EP with Jeff Mills, and downloaded this astounding Africa ’70 live album (featuring a 16 minute drum solo/duel between Allen and the also recently deceased Ginger Baker) from the Flabbergasted Vibes blog.

These have been more or less random acquisitions, but they all stand as undeniably brilliant records, and the relentless rhythmic drive and sense of questing positivity which runs through them has helped  make them a nigh on perfect accompaniment for ploughing through mountains of working-from-home; in fact, they’ve really been keeping me going over a few rough days here and there.

As with McCoy Tyner last month, I’m afraid I don’t have much of an insight to offer into Tony Allen’s life history or personality, but the sheer open-mindedness with which he seems to have embraced collaborations with electronic, rock, jazz and quote-unquote ‘world’ musicians over the past few decades speaks for itself really.

Whereas we naturally tend to expect legendary musicians who have reached their sixth or seventh decade to slow down a bit, to fall back on the core styles which made their name, or to enjoy basking in their past glories a bit (especially when they specialise in a discipline as physically demanding as long-form kit drumming), it feels as if Allen has been all over the map since the turn of the century, doing GREAT work in all kinds of cultural contexts (just check out the aforementioned Mills EP, it's killer), to the point where he seemed like a pretty ubiquitous presence, his name popping up week after week on band line-ups, festival bills, label blurbs, record covers – you name it.

All of which naturally makes me regret the fact that I never took the opportunity to see him do his thing live whilst I had the chance; this stands both as a testimony to my own myopic idiocy, and as a reminder (as if one were needed after the past few months) that these kind of opportunities won’t be around forever, and MUST be taken when they arise. Let’s hope it will be a lesson learned, but for now, R.I.P. to an absolute powerhouse of a musician, his influence and cultural import vast beyond measure, but still secondary to the sheer pleasure of just losing yourself in his mighty groove.

Labels: deathblog, Tony Allen

We interrupt these Frist Quarter Report posts for a few words on pianist McCoy Tyner, whose death was announced earlier this week.

I’m poorly placed to undertake an obit for Tyner, in that his entire (vast) catalogue as a band leader / solo artist remains a blind spot for me, and I know next to nothing of his life and times, personality or beliefs. But, I’ve been on a big John Coltrane kick over the past year or so, and during that time, it’s been McCoy’s contributions to his work through the first half of the ‘60s which have most consistently knocked me out.

Time after time, recordings begin with Trane laying down the law, as is only right and proper, but after that first solo / chorus part / whatever, it’s Tyner’s coveted 2nd solo spot that can really spin yr head around, whether digging baroque new variations out of the architecture of some standard or show tune in the earlier years of their collaboration, or riding serene and siren-like across the broiling sea of chaos once the free/spiritual currents began to take hold. To call his playing “inspired” in this context would be shallow, obvious and unnecessary, but what else can I do with these clumsy, bear-like word-paws?

I know – randomly pick a couple of examples from roughly either end of Tyner’s Trane journey which highlight the singular nature his artistry. That’s what I can do. Here then is ‘Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise’ from ‘Live at the Village Vanguard’ (1961), and ‘Compassion’ from ‘Meditations’ (1965). On the latter in particular, it’s almost impossible to believe that both hands hammering the piano belong to the same human being; just extraordinary, ambidextrous stuff, perfectly controlled whilst simultaneously sailing off in ten completely different directions. Enjoy.

Labels: deathblog, John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner

As I get older and my history of – cough – “musical appreciation” correspondingly stretches back further, I’ve found myself developing a Ten Year Rule for the purposes of wheat / chaff separation.

Many people, I’ve noticed, tend - broadly speaking - to continue to enjoy the same music throughout their lives (hopefully adding a few things to the pile along the way, god willing). In their youth, they will discover a bunch of artists or bands or sub-genres or whatever that strike a chord with them, and they will continue to follow them across the years, and find them rewarding in perpetuity.

I have no problem with this. In fact, I envy these people. I wish I could do the same, rather than tempestuously embracing and dismissing different styles and performers every five minutes based on inexplicable whims and emotional impulses. It’s hard work sometimes, let me tell you. Sometimes I’ll be stuck for an answer when people ask me whether I want to buy a ticket for some band that I’d rather drink battery acid than listen to again, whilst other friends are apt to scan my recently played records and retreat blankly with an “uh…. yeah…”.

I’m certainly glad I don’t feel the need to manage my personal relationships the same way I do my mp3 player anyway. I’d be a right unmanageable, duplicitous, affirmation-chasing bastard.

Thus, the Ten Year Rule. This informal arrangement involves me thinking back on records that I liked a great deal ten years ago, and deciding how I feel about them. If the feeling is good, perhaps I will even listen to them. Perhaps, in the best case scenario, I will not have even stopped listening to them (but this is rare).

If I still find these records enjoyable and edifying - if I can approach them from a new angle and pull new meaning and nuance from their recordings from my vantage point of, uh, slightly greater maturity – they have passed the test. Having survived a decade amid the rapids of my treacherous tastes, they must surely contain some indelible, undeniable good stuff, and I can be confident that they will stay with me for life.

The Ten Year Rule, it should be noted, largely applies to song-based rock/pop/folk kind of stuff. Psych, drone and jazz records do not need this kind of fire & brimstone treatment; appreciation of them will either grow and deepen across the years, or it won’t. It’s cool, either way. Likewise, more formalised genres such as metal, country, soul and funk simply abide. They either are, or they are not. They do not change, and for this I love them most of all.

For reference then: Richard & Linda Thompson passed the test. ‘Forever Changes’ and ‘Third/Sister Lovers’ passed the test. Everything Neil Young recorded in the ‘70s passes the test. ‘Nebraska’ passed the test. You get the picture. These are the records I will build my fort around, and defend against all comers, should they make it across the flaming moat of free psych improv and cosmic doom.

As it happens, I was very, very big on Silver Jews in about 2008/09, which puts them back in the ring to fight it out with my ears, Ten Year Rule style.

Conveniently of course, David Berman aided this process by disappearing from view for exactly ten years, re-emerging right on schedule for what we now know was a horrifically short final act to his public career as a cult singer-songwriter type.

Most of what follows, it should be noted, was written before Berman’s death, but it still reflects my feeling on his work pretty accurately. At the time of writing, the messy, depressing and generally awful circumstances of his passing have neither endeared me to the parts of his catalogue I have issues with, nor soiled the swathes of it which I love.




2008/09, I should note, was a bit of a funny time for me, full of minor league stupidity and pointlessness. As such, the Silver Jews records carry associations with times that I do not remember fondly. Combine this with Berman’s tendency toward toe-curling public confessionals and self-mythologising drama of one kind or another – a tendency I am now apt to regard with distaste and uneasiness, particularly in view of its ugly conclusion – and, well, let’s just say that, on the surface of things, the band’s chances of making it through the gauntlet of the Ten Year Rule do not look good.

Such though is the beauty of the Ten Year Rule. Any roving, forgotten set of mp3s can be a contender. All they’ve got to do is get by attention with a good left hook, back it up with something solid in the gut, and they’re in with the immortals.

In 2012/13-ish, I found myself sitting in an airport departure lounge, listening to the sketchy, slightly naïve first Silver Jews LP, 1994’s ‘Starlite Walker’, and was deeply moved by the opening song, Trains Across the Sea. Next time you’re travelling, I’d recommend it. It’s a good one to listen to in an airport (and not merely because it had literally been “evening all day long” at the time of listening either).

Keeping the album around, I subsequently got pretty fixated on the strange, fourth wall-breaking, somewhat horror movie-ish song New Orleans, and could easily have composed a whole rambling blogpost unpicking its allusions and twists and turns (not at mention the creative disjuncture it reveals between Berman and his more collegiate Pavement buddies), had time allowed.

Actually, the airport is often a good place to listen to Silver Jews, I feel. So many of those Berman lines take on a strange, new resonance when you’re lolling about in transit in an atmosphere of enforced neutrality, subliminally prepped for sudden emergencies or emotional wobbles. Try it out!

As luck would have it, I was actually supping beer alone in – where else? – an airport bar earlier this year, when I received an email on my magic 21st century telephone from the Drag City mailing list, announcing David Berman’s return with the Purple Mountains record. Streaming the proffered lead track through headphones, I made the mistake of treating the exceptionally downbeat lyrics with far more irony than we now realise their author had intended, and found myself somewhat won over by the rich, whisky-soaked character of our hero’s voice, and cheery, country-rock caste of the accompanying tune (tad over-produced tho, but never mind).

Overjoyed, I was inspired to wander around the departure lounge for a good half hour, ducking those luggage carts with the flashing lights and listening once again to my favourite Silver Jews album (see below). It worked a treat. I found so much it it that I had never previously considered. The band’s chances in the big ten-year bout were suddenly looking considerably brighter.




The album in question of course was Berman’s second under the Silver Jews name, 1996’s ‘The Natural Bridge’, and you know what? Upon reflection, it doesn’t merely “stand up well” or some crap like that; approaching it cold, emotional baggage checked at the door, it is an absolute, 24 carat masterpiece – a statement in sound as complete and timeless as any of the untouchable, classic rock singer-songwriter holy-of-holys you’d care to name. Seriously - front to back, whether considered as a collection of songs or a unified entity, it is just great.

The leap forward from ‘Starlite Walker’ here is vast. That earlier record retained the feel of Berman simply mucking around with his college buddies, giggling over football trivia and long forgotten indie-boy in-jokes as they jammed away a few afternoons; its intermittent moments of poetry emerging despite rather than through the circumstances of its recording.

On ‘Natural Bridge’ though, Berman’s lyrical / poetic ambitions are front and centre as he gives the orders to a coterie of essentially anonymous backing musicians. For the first time, he doesn’t have to hold back for fear of embarrassing himself in front of his college pals, and the results, simply put, are astounding.

The opening trio of How to Rent a Room, Pet Politics and Black & Brown Shoes largely set the blue-print for the kind of sardonic, aphorism-filled rambles through the realm of literary-poetic evasion tactics that would come to define Silver Jews for most listeners, but whilst I would contest that they deliver on the promise of this formula more perfectly than anything Berman recorded subsequently, they also dip their toes into a dark twilit netherworld beyond the easy pleasures of mere eyebrow-arching lyrical zingers.

One could easily listen to the former song a dozen times before noticing that the outwardly sardonic lyrics – rather queasily, in post-August 2019 hindsight - largely centre around the narrator’s fantasy of his ex-partner learning about his death and realising she was responsible for it, even as Berman carefully sidesteps the kind of autobiographical solipsism that would increasingly characterise his later output.

The disconcerting, room sound-drenched crepuscular drift of ‘Pet Politics’ meanwhile swings even darker, breaking through the curtains of its predecessor’s vague, break up-related ruminations, forcibly shaking listeners out of their indie-rock complacency, introducing them to something else entirely;

“Adam was not the first man
Though the bible tells us so
There was one who came before him
Whose name we do not know

He also lived in the garden
But he had no mouth or eyes
One day Adam came to kill him
And he died beneath these skies”

Beat that, Leonard Cohen. Whether this heretical twist on the creation myth was somehow drawn from Berman’s apparent interest in Talmudic tales and parables, or whether he just pulled it straight from his fevered brain whilst in search of some good rhymes, who knows, but it certainly does a good job of setting the tone for what follows.

As the album progresses, the range of Berman’s lyrical trapeze act becomes broader and more audacious - and frequently more disturbing too. As the gentle humour of the earlier cuts blackens and burns to a crisp, the effect he and his band achieve on central tracks like Dallas and Albermarle Station leaves me entirely in awe. There is a bleak, slouching immensity to these songs’ psychotropic vision of mid-American daylight that is impossible to trap within this kind of easy, critical lingo.

There are several things which I think readers unfamiliar with ‘Natural Bridge’ should be made aware of.

Firstly, as mentioned above, very few of the lyrics on this album can be said with certainty to be directly autobiographical. I’m sure that Berman had all of the usual dilemmas and torments that defined his life hanging over him when he composed this material, but, like so many great artists, he seemed to realise here that, by burying the signifiers of his troubles within fleeting, third person dioramas, fictionalised projections of self and fragmented fields of abstract detail, he could hit at a level far deeper and longer-lasting than the banality of a mere confessional would allow. (Of course, I wish he could have kept this realisation more clearly in mind in later years, but… I don’t want to get ahead of myself.)

Secondly, I feel that, whereas detractors could easily write Berman’s songs off as collections of essentially fatuous two-liner puns and gags nailed together at random intervals atop generic, lolloping country-rock tunes, on ‘The Natural Bridge’ his trademark non-sequiturs feel as if they have been very carefully assembled, hewn into shape across years of trial and error, whilst his mid-verse shifts in perspective are used to create visceral effects – sinister ones, by and large – which reach beyond the scope of the individual lines.

“John Parker the Third, steps over a bird, on a Wall Street window ledge
Little Wilkie, dead cat rotting, deep inside the hedge”
- ‘The Ballad of Reverend War Character’

“We saw B.B. King on General Hospital
In the Oak Cliff dram-house where we stayed
When Clancy beat her with his belt buckle
We cleaned her cuts and then we prayed”
- ‘Dallas’

The deeper you get into the album, the more religion – of a more millennial Christian than Jewish bent, oddly enough – seems to intrude into these songs, with the looming spectre of some kind of divine judgement ever close at hand (“don’t you know, God stays up all night?”). During the records’s unsettling final stretch, these images build into a kind of apocalyptic fervour – an all-consuming obsession with The End, cut through with watery-eyed childhood / familial nostalgia, and expressed in terms both religious and secular.

“Bad roads, bad snow, bad bridges
Could turn a once bad man religious
If my kingdom ever comes, you’d better run, run run run”
- ‘Albermarle Station’

“When the governor’s heart fails
The state bird falls from its branch
Icicles on Hell’s higher hills”
- ‘Pretty Eyes’

Knowing Berman, this End is more liable to be a personal than collective one – self-annihilation, the end of a relationship, or of a way of life – but as the ominous feeling becomes ever stronger through the Beckett-like dead ends of the warped bar room jokes dryly relayed in The Frontier Index (“bartender says, hey, we don’t serve robots / robot says, oh but, someday you will”), the idea of a more tangible oblivion waiting to engulf the cast of fragmentary characters Berman has introduced us to across these songs becomes ever harder to avoid.

“One of these days, these days will end
The kitchen window, the light will bend”
- ‘Pretty Eyes’

Throughout ‘The Natural Bridge’, it feels as if the kind of unabashed sentimentality that plays a(n arguably detrimental) role in other Silver Jews records has been ruthlessly hammered down and repressed. As a result, when it finally breaks through on the closing Pretty Eyes, the effect is devastating. You can almost see the orange glow of a ‘Miracle Mile’ nuclear conflagration appearing on the horizon over the sedate family ranch house that the lyrics of the album’s final songs keep obsessively returning to, as Berman signs off, “final words are so hard to devise / I promise I’ll always remember, your pretty eyes”.

As the CD player whirs to a stop (I don’t believe I’ve ever even seen a copy of this on vinyl – we're deep in 1996 here folks), you may be apt to think back to the lines which, delivered in a far more flippant, good-humoured tone of voice, opened the album some forty odd minutes earlier: “you know I don’t really want to die / I only want to die in your eyes”.

Yeah, that’s right – the fucker only went and made this album circular. Some kind of Mobius strip of phantasmagorical Pan-American despair – every i dotted, every t crossed. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Of course, it is only now, returning to the album again, that I begin to notice just how fixated on more common-or-garden death Berman was here too. From the suicide fantasies of ‘Pet Politics’ to the multiple fatalities of The Ballad of Reverend War Character, to classic zingers like “there must be a pool out behind the church / cos he looks so cool in the back of the hearse” (‘Albermarle Station’), I don’t think there is a single song here that doesn’t touch upon mortality to some degree. Even the otherwise obscure album title seems suggestive of a transition between life and death. Viewed from a certain angle, the whole thing starts to play like history’s most elaborate musical suicide note. We should be glad, I daresay, that it didn't turn out that way.

Before we move on, I also want to throw in a word for the production and musical backing on ‘Natural Bridge’, which is sparse, but exquisite. On the first go-round a decade ago, I largely dismissed the music here as a kind of utilitarian, deliberately unobtrusive backing to the hi-jinx of Berman’s monotone wordplay, but upon returning to it, I can more readily appreciate the understated beauty of the band’s nuanced, alt-countrified playing, drifting and flowing like the tides and rains frequently evoked in the songs. (I’ve seen the term “countrypolitan” thrown around in press releases once or twice… I like it!).

Just those two chiming, clean-toned guitars playing off each other, big room reverb, and some deceptively simple, rolling rhythm-playing keeping everyone on their toes, Berman’s own soft, unsteady acoustic (perhaps drafted in from some solo demos?) drifting in and out of the tracks here and there – that’s all that’s needed. Throw in an occasional gesture of jarring experimentalism (ominous static creeping into ‘Pet Politics’, a “malfunctioning robot” noise solo on ‘The Frontier Index’), and this is a great production which serves the song-writing perfectly. The album’s instrumental cut, The Right to Remain Silent, which I often used to skip through in the past, now feels a highlight.




Much to my chagrin, it is ‘American Water’, the 1998 follow-up to ‘Natural Bridge’, which seems to have become enshrined as Thee Classic Silver Jews Album. Personally however, I’ve never really warmed to it, perhaps simply because I’m so fixated on its predecessor. For me, it has that kind of ‘overreaching-follow-up-to-a-classic’ feel about it. You know, one of those records that seems on first glance to give people MORE of all the stuff that made the previous album such a hit, but somehow adds up to less than the sum of its parts. (T Rex’s ‘The Slider’ or Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Tusk’ both spring to mind as text-book examples of this phenomenon.)

As with those records, there are some excellent songs on here, of course - Buckingham Rabbit and Smith & Jones Forever in particular are favourites of mine, both absolute highlights of the band’s catalogue, and closing track The Wild Kindness remains sublime.

Elsewhere though, Berman’s writing feels less cohesive this time around, veering closer to the louche assemblages of smart alec couplets that my hypothetical detractors were mentioning earlier, and, although guest star Stephen Malkmus adds some beautifully lyrical guitar solos to the album’s best songs, his over-bearing presence on these recordings frequently proves detrimental, dragging us toward the same indecisive doldrums that were blighting Pavement’s output at around this time, making sprawling, jam-happy tracks like ‘Federal Dust’ and ‘Blue Arrangements’ feel like a chore to sit through. (“‘American Water’ isn’t a Pavement album, but it could play one on TV,” I think I recall reading in a review somewhere.)

Significantly, ‘American Water’ also has the distinction of containing the first Silver Jews song which I absolutely cannot stand to sit through (‘Honk If You’re Lonely’), marking the emergence of the particular strain of cartoon-ish, sing-song self-pity which would sadly go on to make Berman’s 21st century work more difficult to fully get behind.

Which brings us neatly onto 2001’s ‘Bright Flight’, an album which I remember caning relentlessly for a couple of months in 2008, but which now resides comfortably within the “battery acid instead please” category of my music library.

Apparently recorded deep within an abyss of severe substance abuse issues and a set of dizzying highs and lows in Berman’s personal life which culminated in a bizarrely dramatic suicide attempt in 2002, a quick skim through the album confirms my worst fears. It is indeed a tough listen in 2019… and not in a good way, either. Full of wide-eyed, faux-naïve pleas to the writer’s lady love, the album’s moments of jaunty humour feel desperate, whilst its corresponding stretches of k-hole desperation sound like a joke, setting a pattern that subsequent albums would struggle to overcome.

More than anything, ‘Bright Flight’ plays like an unsympathetic pastiche of a Silver Jews album, full of needlessly obscure lyrical convulsions, insincere emotional hand-wringing and morbid metaphysical pronouncements. Even the sound, Disneyfied and EQed to within an inch of its life, is fucking ugly compared to the unadorned room sound of the earlier records, as indeed is the cruddy polaroid sofa pictured on the cover (like, yeah, lo-fi, man). Just say no, kids.



After this, the two Silver Jews “comeback” albums, ‘Tanglewood Numbers’ (2005) and ‘Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea’ (2008) feel like dictionary definitions of “mixed bag”, interspersing songs which delight me beyond all measure with others which irk me so much I can’t even stand to share a room with them.

Chiefly I think, these two “happy” (in heavy inverted commas) Jews albums are noteworthy for introducing the world to Berman’s previously unsuspected talent as a writer of comedy songs, revelling in a sense of absurdist whimsy that, allowing for a transatlantic cultural translation, wouldn’t have been out of place on a Vivian Stanshall record.

Of the two albums, ‘Tanglewood..’ holds up the best, with only a handful of songs I feel compelled to skip through, including, ironically, ‘Punks in the Beerlight’, the first Silver Jews song which ever grabbed my attention. A chest-beating, cod-Springsteen pre-fab “anthem” for the Pitchfork crowd, it’s romantic celebration of drug abuse now strikes me as woefully ill-conceived.

Aside from that and a couple of other unedifying clunkers on the first side however, the rest of this album remains pretty great. To my surprise, the frantic Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed is still an absolute joy, every couplet a LOL-worthy wonder (“happiness won’t leave me alone says a bird in a nest / get a load of this fucking view, it’s the best in the west”), enhanced no end by the perfect timing of Berman’s slurred, shambolic delivery.

The understated calm of I’m Getting Back Into Getting Back Into You meanwhile sets the blueprint for what a “happy” Silver Jews song could and should have sounded like in a world that no longer needed those inverted commas, and has the distinction of featuring perhaps my single all-time favourite Berman stanza;

“I’ve been working at the airport bar
It’s like Christmas on a submarine
Wings and brandy on a winter’s night
You wouldn’t really call it a scene”

Sadly, we must now conclude that that world without the commas never really became a reality, but here more than anywhere, you can hear bits of hard-won, universal wisdom and warmth creeping through the humour and eccentricity of Berman’s post-rehab writing, nowhere more so than in the splendid opening to How Can I Love You If You Won’t Lie Down;

“Fast cars, fine ass
These things will pass
They won’t get more profound

Time is a game only children play well
How can I love you if you won’t lie down?”

At this point friends, I challenge you to deny that this man was touched by a certain amount of genius.

I don’t intend this piece to be a teary-eyed tribute when I started writing it, but spending some time reacquainting myself with ‘Tanglewood Numbers’ makes me feel like turning it into one.

In the context of what now seems certain to be filed away by posterity as a life blighted by depression, addiction and wasted potential, it’s difficult not to shed a tear upon hearing Berman sounding calm and reflective as that aforementioned bird in its nest on Sleeping is the Only Love;

“Lately I’ve come to find
Life is sweeter than Jewish wine
Give a box of candy or a foot massage
Some people don’t take the time”

All that, and we haven’t even got to the looming horrors of The Farmers Hotel. Another one I could dedicate pages to. Let’s leave it to speak for itself, shall we.

By the time we get to ‘Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea’ a few years later (the only Berman LP to eschew the tradition of gnomic two word titles, curiously enough), the tentative happiness of the preceding album seems to have hardened into an eerie rictus grin, held in place largely by the twinkly preciousness of the heavy-handed, post-Flaming Lips type Pro-tooled production.

Like a porcelain-toothed convert emerging from a Scientology meeting, the album’s pointed positivity has a weird vibe to it – a feeling only enhanced by Berman’s insistence on foregrounding the presence of his wife (and bassist/co-vocalist) Cassie in the album’s accompanying videos, press and stage appearances, presenting his “true love” to the world as if she were some kind of glittering trophy.

I mean, of course we all sincerely wished them well, but… if ever a guy seemed to be publically setting himself up for a fall, y’know?

I loved this album when it came out (Stereo Sanctity album of the year 2008!), and whilst I won’t dwell further on what I now perceive to be its failings, suffice to say, it all just sounds…. a bit too desperate to be liked, to Keep It Simple Stupid and to entertain. An admirable goal, no doubt, but for a writer as quixotic and introverted as Berman, it can’t help but sound a bit forced, a bit self-deluding.

It is ironic therefore that the only bits of the album I feel the need to revisit ten years on are its out-and-out comedy songs.

The epic San Francisco B.C., as you will probably be aware if you’ve read this far, is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. A masterpiece story-song for the ages, set to an impeccable ‘Foggy Notion’ groove. At a push, I think I could probably recite the whole thing word-for-word straight off the top of my head by this point, and the fact that Berman apparently never applied himself to giving the world more of whatever this is, instead leaving it an inexplicable one-off within his catalogue, makes me feel desperately sad. (Well, there’s always ‘The Farmers Hotel’ of course…)

To my surprise, I also continue to greatly enjoy two other relatively light-hearted trifles on the album’s b-side. Firstly, there’s the laidback Candy Jail, in which it is difficult to fathom whether Berman’s vision of confinement in an institution “where the guards are gracious, and the grounds are grand, where the warden really listens and he understands” is meant to reflect his experience of married life, his position as a sort-of-famous musician recording for a nice-guy indie record label, or just a wider comment on, like, life in Capitalist America, man. Whatever your preferred interpretation though, it’s one of those cases where the metaphor itself is outlined so appealingly that it doesn’t really matter what it “means”.

If my earlier comparison to Vivian Stanshall meanwhile sounded like a stretch, I refer you directly to the opening lines of Party Barge, an obnoxious three minutes of self-amused, throw-away goofery which, miraculously, continues to win my favour a full decade down the line;

“Father drove a steamroller,
Mother was a crossing guard
She got rolled when he got steamed,
And I got left in charge”

Take a bow, Dave – you’ve earned it.

For the life of me, I can’t explain why I still like this song. By any conventional yard-stick it’s quirky, novelty guff of the lowest order, but hearing the gusto with which Berman announces, “Ports of call! Day-Glo bait! Come see a legend while it’s still being made!”, backed my what basically sounds like a load of bell-ringing, horn-honking gimmicky chaos thrown together minutes before the studio kicked out for the evening, never fails to brighten my day.



So, that’s how the Silver Jews catalogue stacks up for me a decade down the line. As I daresay I’ve made clear, this has been a complicated test case for the Ten Year Rule, but the very fact I’m bothering to write this I think serves as its own verdict.

Against all the odds, this handful of troublesome, ill-starred LPs continue to mean a great deal to me, long after the appeal of most of their indie-rock kith and kin has fallen away – and, I would contest, they should probably mean something to you too, if you’re at all interested in the delicate art of writing songs with words.

For better or for worse, D.C. Berman was on a plain of his own; a true one-off. His achievements in the field of song shine through above and beyond all of the wasted potential and self-sabotage.

Originally, pre-August 8th, I was going to conclude here by taking the ‘Purple Mountains’ record to task, but I can’t do that now. I can’t even go near it.

How, as either writers or listeners, are we supposed to approach the shiny new opening salvo of a bold creative comeback that didn’t even last long enough for the band to begin their first tour; whose leading light barely even lived long enough to skim the reviews? It’s an impossible weight for a recording to bear.

I mentioned something earlier about ‘The Natural Bridge’ sounding like an album-as-suicide-note. Well, whether planned or otherwise, ‘Purple Mountains’ has become just that, and it’s not pretty.

Streaming the pre-release videos for the songs a few months back, the sentiments expressed in the lyrics seemed so exaggerated that – in combination with the jaunty, up-tempo musical backing and the videos which seemed to intersperse shots of Berman moping about in his suburban home with footage of him sharing a stage with his wife – I’d assumed the whole thing must be some kind of a gag. I imagined him happily back at home, deliberate attempting to write the most morose, depressing songs imaginable and to playing them in cheery, “triumphant” fashion, as some kind of quirky creative / cathartic exercise.

It was only later, reading this no-doubt-soon-to-be-infamous interview with the Washington Post, that the penny dropped. Was he REALLY living alone in a room above the Drag City offices, marriage permanently on the rocks, looking as if he’d barely got out of bed in the past month...? Oh, come on man, please say it ain’t so!

In the light of this, the full album, when released, was difficult to stomach – and after last week of course, it’s taken on a whole other terrible, toxic feel which makes it impossible to even approach.

How were we as listeners (and never mind all those release day critics saying “yeah, nice comeback album, 8/10”) supposed to have known, when this guy sidled up to us after ten years off the radar and started crooning, “lately I tend to make strangers wherever I go / some of them were once people I was happy to know” and “conditions I wish weren’t taking control / darkness and cold, darkness and cold”, that he was entirely sincere?

Shit, how could we have NOT known? Did I really just hear this man with a well-known history of depression and suicide attempts sing, “feels like something really wrong has happened / I confess I’m barely holding on”? (Sorry if that's a misquote, I’m not going back to double-check.)

A cry for help, a final ‘fuck you’, a sincere attempt at soul-bearing or a doomed attempt to ‘deal’? What were these songs when he recorded them, and what are they now? How are we to possibly understand this thing in years to come?

Maybe in another ten years, I’ll be able to go near it and figure something out.

For now, all I’m able to do is go back nearly fifteen years, to closing song (more of hand-on-heart spoken confession / statement of intent kind of a thing, really) from ‘Tanglewood Numbers’, in which a post-rehab, on-the-upswing Berman told us, “there is a place beyond the blues I never want to see again” - and then experience a very hollow feeling inside.

Labels: David Berman, deathblog, Silver Jews, Ten Year Rule, thinkpiece

God. I only just heard.

In spare half hours recently, I’ve been pulling together a long, rambling blog post laying out my mixed feelings about David Berman and Silver Jews, to sort of contextualise a brief discussion of his recent ‘Purple Mountains’ record. So, I’ve been listening to and thinking about his stuff a great deal, for better or for worse.

All that’s out of the window now of course, but there were some heart-felt words in there I hope, so I’ll try to rake it over with this awful new knowledge, see where it goes and get back to you.

As with so much of his later output, it’s difficult to tell whether the Purple Mountains record represents a troubled man desperately trying to sound cheerful, or a happy man trying to sound troubled, and this uncertainly lent it an unpalatable whiff of insincerity on pre-8th August spins…. but I guess he’s given us a pretty irrefutable answer now.

Basically, I fear there is precious little room here for hope, or serenity, or closure, or whatever the good feeling you’re supposed to have when looking back on the legacies of people who have died is. This is nasty, unplanned, improper. Ghastly in the strictest sense. The new record has a few fleeting breaths of wisdom, grace and charm about it, but they are suffocated by a pall of ugly, clown-ish self-pity most unbecoming for a gentleman of his age, which I did not feel should be encouraged. For an artist who liked to unpack his life story in public every few years, it makes for a weird and terrible epitaph.

Berman was an incredible talent, perhaps the single best lyricist ever to work in popular song, and some of his recordings remain close to me always. For him to go out this way is unspeakable.

What else can you say? I feel so sorry for everyone who cared about him, I hope he’s at peace somehow.

Labels: bad news, David Berman, deathblog, Silver Jews

Price paid: £5 from a record fair in a gymnasium in Leicester, circa 2004-ish.

At the time I spied this LP, Roky Erickson’s solo career was still very much an unknown to me. Of course, I already knew and loved the work of The 13th Floor Elevators (I have a budget two-fer CD package bought from a Borders clearout sale at an impressionable age to thank for that one), but beyond that…? I was vaguely aware that the guy had made some scattered recordings subsequent to his release from Rusk State mental hospital in the mid-70s, but – to their eternal shame - none of the sources I relied upon for musical guidance at the time had clued me into the fact that this music might be worth tracking down and listening to.

Since then, both reissues of Roky’s ‘official’ discography and his surprise re-emergence as an active presence in the world circa 2007 have helped to raise the profile of his solo work to some extent, but if you ask me, it STILL doesn’t get its due, and, back in the early ‘00s, this disc felt like some way-out, marginal shit, lurking on the fringes of the cult-rock canon; a shrugged off footnote to the litany of collapse and mental illness that ended every potted Elevators biog.

As such, I had no idea what I was getting into. “Oh, that guy from The 13th Floor Elevators who went crazy,” I remember thinking to myself. “I wonder what he got up to after the band broke up?”

Even in those pre-vinyl revival days, £5 seemed like a strikingly low sum to fork out for an answer to that question, so I took the plunge, returning to my dusty, rented garret and only to drop the needle and discover THE BEST ANSWER I could possibly have imagined.

I had been expecting, I suppose, merely a curio – some damaged, acid casualty folk meanderings would have been my best guess. So, you can imagine the joy I felt being hit full on by the raging, high energy distorto-choogle of ‘The Wind And More’, and realising that Roky Erickson had actually spent the decade following his incarceration crafting an awe-inspiring catalogue of raw, punkoid heavy rock songs dealing with vampires, zombies and the wiles of Satan, and indeed had performed them with raucous gusto, backed up here by what sounds like the most shit-hot bar band in the entire universe. Holy cow!

Why didn’t anyone TELL ME he was this great?, I remember thinking. As I proceeded to dig deeper into some of Rykodisc’s CD reissues, discovering the sinister, synapse-blazing wonders of Two Headed Dog, I Think of Demons and I Have Always Been Here Before, my disbelief at the fact that Roky Erickson wasn’t enthroned amid the highest pantheon of weirdo rock’n’roll royalty only grew. I mean, whichever way you approach it, this shit is just amazing. These records are raw and uncouth and mind-bogglingly strange, but, through all his travails, the guy’s aesthetic vision remained pure, whilst, in terms of melodic song-writing, he just knocked out hit after hit after hit.

All these years later though, I still think that this shady bootleg, of uncertain provenance and unknown recording date, remains one of the strongest Roky performances ever captured on tape, and one of the best possible introductions to his particular thing.

As his fans will be painfully aware, Roky’s tempestuous mental health made the quality of his live appearances pretty hit and miss, to say the least. I was lucky enough to see him perform on three separate occasions following his surprise come-back in 2007, and, though he was by all accounts experiencing a greater degree of personal stability than he had enjoyed in decades, it was still pretty eerie to hear him perform his songs in perfect, note-for-note fashion, dutifully recreating every slurred line and vocal tic of the studio-recorded versions, before staring vacantly into the middle distance once the applause died down, not saying a word, and often relying on his band members to prompt him by whispering the title of the next song in his ear. (Those who have attended Brian Wilson concerts during the 21st century will quite possibly have noticed the same phenomenon.)

By contrast, the performance presented on ‘An Evening With..’ finds Roky on absolutely top form, sounding sharp, energised and clearly in the mood for some ad-libs and improvisation. (I STILL don’t know where and when this album was recorded by the way, but The Explosives began acting as Roky’s backing band from 1978 through to the beginning of his “lost years” in the early/mid ‘80s, so… probably sometime around then.) (1)

“The Hells Angels at the Mick Jagger concert…. stabbing the girl at Altamont!” he exclaims, apropos of nothing, during the instrumental coda to opener ‘The Wind And More’ (basic fact checking = not a Roky specialty). This song, apparently written in celebration of Luciferian powers of telekinesis, has incidentally become one of my favourites in Roky’s horror-rock repertoire, and it gets a great extended work-out here.

“The forces of evil are in full sway!”, he cheerfully declares as the ominous, opening chords of ‘Night of the Vampire’ kick in, and indeed, the old boy seems to have been having a whale of a time, his rhythm guitar ringing our rude, loud and in perfect time. Encouraged perhaps by this, the band seem to be at their ease and proceed to play a veritable blinder. (2)

Lead guitarist Cam King is, it must be said, very dominant here. Building on the tricky lead lines devised by Duane Aslaksen of Roky’s prior backing band The Aliens, King takes things to what I think can be safely deemed “the next level”, packing every available second of these recordings with grandstanding, soar-with-the-eagles shred. Crucially however, he never steps on his boss’s toes, and remains in sympathy always with the spirit and melody of the songs. A perfect “church key” accompanist, he brings a variety and excitement to the sound that keeps even the gruelling, mantra-like repetition of the eight minute ‘Stand For The Fire Demon’ sounding fresh.

At the end of the side one, goaded on by shouted requests from a woman in the crowd, the band even take a shot at ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’. “This is a song they play in old Baptist church houses, on the old wooden organ..” Roky rambles by way of an introduction, before being cut off by The Explosives, who proceed to transform the song’s immortal four chord stomp (one of the first things I ever learned to play on the guitar, incidentally) into a punkoid juggernaut so joyous it almost succeeds in eclipsing the original Spades and Elevators versions in my affections, aided by King’s valiant attempt to recreate the inimitable sound of Tommy Hall’s “electric jug” by means of some high velocity, tremolo neck-tapping.

I believe it was Jad Fair who once said that there are only two kinds of songs that matter, love songs and monster songs, and rarely has an artist taken that ethos to heart quite so thoroughly as Roky Erickson. Another thing then that helps make this bootleg so great is that it’s track list takes the time to highlight the oft-overlooked former aspect of his catalogue. In between the scarifying odes to gremlins, ghosts and demons, each side of the LP contains a beautiful example of Roky’s gentler balladry, reminding us that, in a kinder, less weird world, he could easily have enjoyed an alternative career as a romantic pop troubadour, slotting straight into the specifically Texan tradition of Buddy Holly and Bobby Fuller.

‘For You’, on the A side, is in particular a wonderful song, and Roky’s stuttering declaration that “the other girls were around / but I never tried to score” [because] “I'd stay completely true / I who would wait forever / wait for you” is incredibly touching – a disarmingly sweet flip-side to the kind of swaggering, travellin' band machismo we’d reasonably expect from this brand of OTT ‘70s heavy rock, and a reminder that, in a weird sort of way, Roky also often feels like a spiritual precursor to the oddball, heart-on-sleeve stylings of the aforementioned Mr Fair, or to his sometime movie buddy Daniel Johnson.

(Insofar as I’m aware, this was ‘For You’s first recorded appearance, although it was reprised in slightly altered form on Roky’s excellent 1995 ‘comeback’ album All That May Do My Rhyme, a beautiful set which concentrates primarily on his love songs, and is well worth tracking down.)

At the complete other end of the scale meanwhile, Side B also contains what I feel is one of the best available versions of the oft-recorded Bloody Hammer, arguably the definitive statement of Roky’s post-hospital era, and a singular landmark of post-traumatic outsider art / heavy metal damage. It’s impossible to fully compartmentalise the disorientating rush of mixed emotions embodied in this song, but, like the very best of the horror movies Roky loved so much, it is a pretty overpowering experience, both exhilarating / empowering and sickeningly disturbing.

Marking what I think is the only instance of Roky explicitly addressing the nightmare of his incarceration and electro-shock “therapy” in his lyrics (“I am the doctor / I am the psychiatrist / to make sure they don’t hammer their minds out”), the song’s implications of real world abuse swiftly dissolve into a terrifying melange of incoherent horror imagery (“the baby ghost in the 1900s says, beat it with your chain!”) that, paradoxically, feel far too much like a raw wound for its public airing as a rock n’ roll freakout to seem at all comfortable.

For all that some may see a bottomless, Mansonite black hole at the heart of Roky’s music though, he – and, by extension, we – can take strength from the fact that, in spite of all the ugly obstacles placed in his path, he never went fully over the dark side. For all the shrieking demons he conjured on stage, he never lost his natural gentleness, or his stuttering, schoolboy naivety. As he is determined to tell us, even in this darkest corner of his songbook, “I never have that bloody hammer”.

Throughout his life, Roky Erickson treaded a harder road than most of us can imagine, but by embracing his demons and inviting them out to party, he came through it smiling, with his amp roaring, ready to entertain, and may God and Satan alike bless him for that.

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Throughout the halcyon years of file-sharing, I searched in vain for a ripped mp3 copy of ‘An Evening with Roky Erickson & The Explosives’, longing to carry it around with me and plunder it for mix CDs. After much frustration, I finally discovered that the exact same recording is in fact far better known under the seemingly arbitrary title of ‘Casting The Runes’, and that it first appeared in 1987 (see footnote below), and subsequently on CD during the ‘90s.

You can listen to it in its entirety on Youtube here, and you know what? If anything I’ve written above remotely interests you, you REALLY, REALLY should.

After that, you will naturally want to hear more, so I would recommend atoning for your bootlegging sins by buying some of the official Roky Erickson reissues, from which his family and estate will hopefully receive some royalties. (Gremlins Have Pictures would be my number # 1 pick for beginners.)

An Evening with Roky Erickson & The Explosives gets the square root of a zillion kaleidoscopic thumbs ups, and an eternal, three-eyed love triangle stare.



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(1)Whilst researching this post, I have finally ascertained that the tracks on this LP were recorded at the Soap Creek Saloon, Austin TX, on November 27th 1979, and at the Rock Island club in Houston on December 22nd 1979. The recordings were made by David Hough for use in a planned documentary entitled ‘Meeting with an Alien’, and Edwin “Savage Pencil” Pouncey provided sleeve notes for the first LP release under the title ‘Casting the Runes’, which appeared in 1987. Thanks Discogs!

(2) We should put in a word here about Erickson’s fondness for excessive volume and full spectrum guitar distortion when playing in a band context – an element that lends a hair-raising proto-punk kick to his earliest solo recordings. Throughout his post-hospital years, Roky reportedly used blaring noise from TVs and radios as a kind of DIY therapy, and his maximalist approach to guitar-playing (pretty rare in children of the ‘60s) seems to have reflected this, to the extent that, during a series of ill-fated Elevators reunion gigs in the early ‘70s, the other band members were forced to rig up a system that allowed them to covertly turn his amp down, because otherwise he’d just crank all the dials to ten and deafen everybody. (This story is recalled from the book ‘Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and The 13th Floor Elevators, Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound’ by Paul Drummond, which came out in 2007 and is a *great* read, albeit a rather expensive one at the time of writing (reprint please!)).

Labels: album reviews, deathblog, old LPs, Roky Erickson, The Explosives

I have, of course, been devastated to learn this evening that Roky Erickson has passed away at the age of 71. As regular readers will recall, Roky has long been one of my absolute favourites. I return to his music constantly, and it never fails to inspire me and make me happy. In spite of the oft-discussed damage, tragedy and darkness that characterised much of his life, he was both a colossally talented artist / songwriter / musician / rock n’ roller [select whichever designation you favour], and a warm and genuine human being. The vision he brought to underground rock music was utterly unique, and, though individual tolerance may vary, it fits my own sensibilities like hand meeting glove.

Unfortunately I’m not really in a position to compose a proper obit post right now, but watch this space—appropriate tribute will be coming soon.

To jump on the line that will no doubt figure in about 98% of social media obits - we’re gonna miss him, baby.

Labels: bad news, deathblog, Roky Erickson