Julia Neugarten's Blog, page 5

Nashville Skyline – Bob Dylan

Year: 1969

Label: Columbia

“I must have been mad/ I never knew what I had/ Until I threw it all away”

Nashville is simply sublime.  If, like me, you are lucky enough to have visited the Tennessee capital, then you know exactly what I’m talking about.  Home to many a musical marauder, it is a glimmering bastion of having a damned good time. The main strip, which seems no longer than a few hundred metres, is a path of musical and cultural enlightenment. Cowboy boots, barbecue and booming country rock n’ roll at every rest point. And by rest point, I mean bar, of which there are many.  Aptly dubbed music city, you can’t walk thirty seconds without running into a overly talented busker, or soon to be famous bar playing band. The nickname ‘Music City’ is well earned and terrifyingly apt. Hell, even the post boxes play Johnny Cash!

No surprise then, that the greatest lyricist of all time and seminal figure of the 1960’s movement, set his sight on Music City, duly dedicating a whole album to its glory. Dylan had been folk. He’d been electric.  With Nashville Skyline, he was country.  And he was’t just dipping his toe into the barnstorming Cumberland River water. He was going all in.

Ask yourself.  What is the best possible way to start a country album, on what is your first full on foray into the genre?  If your answer was “Ask Johnny Cash to duet with you on one of your most beloved folk songs, thereby making it a country ballad”, then you would be correct.  Girl From The North Country originally appeared on The Freewheeling’ Bob Dylan, way back in 1963.  It is nothing short of gorgeous. Heartbreaking.  Dylan’s simple chord progressions and brooding voice combine with soul crippling lyrics to create a masterpiece, as happened on so many occasions previously, and since. On Freewheelin’, the song is a true folk ballad. It’s one of Dylan’s most impressive albums and the track fits perfectly.  For Nashville Skyline, Dylan again shows his genius, in his ability to reinvent himself.  As a country lullaby about a lost love, the song is a beauty.  Cash provides the base vocals so often associated with country music. Storied men telling tales of lost loves.  I implore you to listen to both versions of the song, and compare the emotions the two illicit. The Crosby, Stills and Nash cover is most certainly worth a listen too (As is anything by those three as it goes!).

Nashville Skyline Rag is an ode to the wealth of wonderful country musicians that contributed to the album.  The instrumental Nashville jig shows off the prowess of Charlie Daniels (The Devil Went Down To Georgia) on guitar and world famous pianist Bob Wilson amongst many others.

To Be Alone With You tinkers into life with piano and guitar, with country licks lovingly litter this folk hit.  Songwriting at its simplistic best, Dylan plays suitor, longing to be alone with his bed mate. He professes The night time is the right time/ to be with the one you love.  Ain’t that right!  I Threw It All Away is a classic love song, delivered in typically succinct yet poetic Dylanesque form. He confronts the age old problem of not knowing what you’ve got until it’s gone.  Obviously, he does it perfectly.  Peggy Day follows next, the third two minute, classic love tale in a row.  This one, more positive than the last.  You get the feeling that Peggy Day (and Peggy Night for that matter) is the love that Dylan had and lost in the previous track.

Dylan knocks it out of the park with Lay Lady Lay.  His Bobness begs us not to wait any longer for the world to begin/ You can have your cake and eat it too.  If you love somebody, tell them.  It’s a simple message, personifying the genre and the man, delivered in masterful, incomparable fashion.

In One More Night, Dylan begs his love for one more night with her.  It’s a country jamboree, and a bloody good one.  He mourns his missed opportunities; It’s shameful and it’s sad/ I lost the only pal I had/ I just could not be what she wanted me to be.  His girl is gone, and with her the light and his reason for living.  Tell Me It Isn’t True tells a similar tale, albeit under more morose musical circumstance.  His Bobness feels pained in this track.  His woman is cheating on him (I have heard rumours, all over town/ They say that you’re planning, to put me down), and he urges her to tell him that it’s all hearsay.  Bob, like anybody who has ever loved and catastrophically lost, is willing to disregard conjecture as long as his love puts his mind at ease.

Country Pie is Dylan pushing his country crooning to the limits.  It is an ode to the genre, which tips the scales of taking it too far.  Fun nonetheless, Dylan rattles through country chords like there is no tomorrow, combining them with lyrics which leave the mind boggling – ‘Just like old Saxophone Joe/ When he ‘s got the hogshead up on his toe/ Oh me oh my/ Love that country pie’. I haven’t a clue what Bob is talking about here, but I’m still dancing, and now I’m hungry.

Dylan saves the best until last, with Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You. The last in a long line of love songs, the protagonist puts everything aside, throws everything away, to stay with his love.  It is delivered in impeccable fashion, and serves as a fantastic ending to a fantastic album.

Nashville Skyline is short, punchy, brave and near perfect.  Dylan showed in 1965 that he wasn’t afraid to upset people by trying something new, plugging in his Stratocaster and going electric.  Fair to say that worked out pretty damn well, as does his foray into country.  Alongside John Wesley Harding and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Nashville Skyline shows that Bob is a man for all genres. A musician for all ages. And a songwriter who shall stand the test of time.  Never a better thirty minutes spent, than listening to this masterpiece.  Preferably in Nashville, Tennessee.

The French Inhaler

 

Rickie Lee Jones – Rickie Lee Jones

Year:  1979

Label:  Warner Bros

“Say Goodnight America / The World Still Loves A Dreamer”

Throughout the 70’s, rock n’ roll starlets Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt and Carole King soared, belting out hit after hit, cover after cover, some of varying quality but all with immense success.  And if these three angels were flying high above the radar, Rickie Lee Jones was carousing along under it.  Late to the party, petulant, perturbed by her new Californian surroundings, it took the kid from Arizona a good few years to score a record deal.

Rickie enjoyed the darker side of life, which is evident in her music.  She tells the tale of a young girl lost in a strange land, which is exactly what she was in 1975.  As the decade aged, she began mixing with great yet salubrious musical minds, including the likes of Tom Waits and Donald Fagen.  It was no coincidence that her music started to get noticed around the LA Canyons and Hollywood Hills during this period. It was 1979 then, that a record deal was struck, and one of the most beautifully crafted debut’s of the decade was released.

Rickie signed with Lenny Waronker of Warner Brothers, primarily due to his work with, you guessed it, Randy Newman.  Like Randy, Rickie saw LA, and the world, from a different standpoint to the rest.  She was more beatnik than Mitchell, more pained than King and more cynical than both of them together.

The album bursts into life with ‘Chuck E’s In Love’, a debut smash hit. An unadulterated clash of jazz, blues and folk gave birth to this tribute to old friend and songwriter Chuck E. Weiss.  Weiss, along with Waits, were purveyors of the LA underbelly smorgasbord, and led Jones down a path she’d seldom come back from over the next few years.  When Weiss informed Waits that he’d abandoned his two friends to elope with his cousin, Waits put down the phone and told Jones that Chuck E was in love.  A hit began to manifest. “How come he don’t come and do PIP with me no more?” she opens with.  Rare was it that an artist of the day had the balls to open a funky jazz ballad with a line about her taking acid. Rickie had balls. She also oozed cool. That much is evident from the opening track alone.

‘On Saturday Afternoon in 1963’ could easily have been on Randy Newman’s ‘Sail Away’. Lyrically, you would be forgiven to think it had been written whilst under the affects of the aforementioned acid. But that doesn’t matter so much here.  The track is the antithesis of ‘Chuck E’s’.  Although regarding the same subject, a lost love, the first could only have been written on an upper, and the second only on a downer. “Years may go by” she sings again and again. Who knows what she is alluding to for the remainder of the song, but any listener can take that phrase and interpret it towards their own personal heartbreak.

The album flows almost unknowingly into ‘Night Train’, where Lee Jones tries to cling onto her child, and shield them from the illicit world that surrounds her. She’s at the wrong end of “the eight ball black” – One more hit, and that could be game over for everything she knows and loves.  The album rediscovers its funky groove in ‘Young Blood’. Rickie takes “a walk around midnight in the city/ Young blood is hiding there somewhere”.  Despite the jovial and upbeat nature of the track, you have to wonder what a young 20 something year old girl is doing wandering around the more suspicious parts of the city.  At midnight no less!

‘Easy money’ is the spirit of jazz.  Just listening to it, your voice drops an octave, a beret appears on your head and a cigarette in your hand.  The lyrics couldn’t be darker. What must this girl have seen in her short but storied life to be able to turn such a tale?  It’s the story of “A couple of Jills with their eyes on a couple of bills”, setting up a potential customer, in an attempt to make some “easy money”.  Rickie concludes, at what is the end of a rather scandalous scene, that there is no such thing as easy money.

‘The Last Chance Texaco’ gives a glimpse of Jones’ abilities as a songwriter and storyteller. A broken down truck provides the metaphor for her broken heart. It blows the mind that in the 70’s, a young girl would know about spark plugs and car batteries. It shows again how unique a person and a poet she was at the time.  Like a young girl with a heavy heart who’s still in love, the truck “gets scared and she stalls/ she just needs a man, that’s all”.  Ironically, the song shows that Rickie definitely does not need a man. She can get along more than fine without one.

‘Danny’s All-Star Joint’ is a funk filled party, an ode to the purveyor of the bar, who “knows all the under riders on the boulevard”.  It provides welcome relief, before the darkness hits fever pitch with ‘Coolsville’.  There’s no funk beat here. No jazz. Just a thumping drum beat, a threatening piano and the occasional whining guitar jabbing you in the feels.  The song is a mystic masterpiece, but unlike Lee Jones, I have no desire to go to Coolsville off the back of it.

The vibe takes another turn, with the story of ‘Weasel and The White Boy Cool’.  Poor Sal “Buys his meat from the whore next door/ He wants it rare but gets it well done”. Kid Sinister knows that a quarter could take him home, and “a dime could make a dream come true/ But a weasel ain’t got a dime for the phone”.  It’s sinister storytelling at its best. ‘Company’ could be an Etta James hit, telling the story of a women longing, crying for companionship.  The album that started so upbeat finishes painstakingly with ‘After Hours’, a song not out of place in a Broadway classic. The sentiment is the same. The gang has gone, and she has been left alone, taking solace in the fact that “the world still loves a dreamer”.

Rickie Lee Jones may not have had the rip roaring success that many of her peers experienced.  But her self titled debut is a genius turn, and a glimpse into the darker side of dream chasing.  Jones paints a picture of a little girl lost, who knows too much too young.  A women who has experienced a lifetime of heartaches in a lowly number of years, but has still managed to come out the other side somewhat satisfied. Now, that’s got to be worth a listen.

The French Inhaler

 

Sail Away – Randy Newman

Year: 1972

Label: Reprise

“Everybody knows my name/ But it’s just a crazy game/ Oh, it’s lonely at the top”

‘He sounds like the guy that sings the Toy Story song!’, is the stock answer when you play a Randy Newman song to anybody under the age of 30. Or 40. Scrap that, 50.  Well, he is that guy who sings the Toy Story song. Newman’s 1995 hit, ‘You’ve Got A Friend In Me’, bought him front and centre stage for the first time in a long time.  He has since become a Disney darling, writing scores for Monsters Inc, Cars, A Bugs Life, and many more. In fact, Newman has twenty Academy Award nominations for Best Score and Best Original song. TWENTY!? In your face Spielberg..

But before the movies. Before the Oscar nominations. When Pixar was still just a word on a sheet in a filing cabinet, there was just Randy Newman.  A seminal figure in the LA musical movement of the 1970’s, he carved himself out a niche. Quirky, poignant, beautiful, on the point. Randy offered the world something that The Eagles, Jackson Browne and other legendary artists of the day couldn’t. He laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. He laughed at himself. Hardly blessed with the looks of JD Souther or the heavenly vocal range of Crosby, Stills and Nash, what else could he do?

As a songwriter in the late 60’s, Newman had pumped out hits for the likes of The Everly Brothers and Art Garfunkel, all the way to Dusty Springfield. As the decade turned, so did Randy’s focus – to himself. After a critically lauded self titled debut, came his first real dent into popular culture – ‘Sail Away’.

You recognise instantly the Randy from Toy Story. Every track could find itself as the title song on an animation hit. Albeit, some would have to be considerably darker than others. The album shares it’s title with it’s first track.  It oozes irony, with an overbearing melancholic pathos. Being able to “sing about Jesus and drink wine all day”, genuinely defines what is great about being an American to vast swathes of the populus. The orchestra may make you believe Newman is one of those, but his voice suggests otherwise. In a nutshell, it pleases the lovers, and the doubters. Interpret as you will.

‘Lonely At The Top’ transports us to 1950’s New York. Originally written for Frank Sinatra, the song begs us to be careful what we wish for.  Against a musical back drop which wouldn’t find itself amiss in ‘The Aristocats’, Newman continues to focus on the darker side of the American dream, and could make the most ardent status hunter rethink their game plan.

‘He Gives Us All His Love’ is an ironic nuclear bomb. It’s a beauty of a song which can bring a boy to tears.  It’s a poem portraying Randy’s continued criticism of religion. “He hears babies crying/ He hears old folks dying”, ‘he’ sees all types of misery in the world, but it’s OK, because ‘he’ loves you. I let you decide who ‘he’ is. ‘Last Night I Had A Dream’, under different circumstances, and if it were ten minutes longer, could have been a Pink Floyd song.  ‘Simon Smith And The Amazing Dancing Bear’ could have been on The White Album.  This exemplifies the musical genius of Newman. It could have been Floyd, it could have been the Beatles. But thank fuck it wasn’t. He takes an amalgimation of influences and places an irreversible spin on them. It could have been them, but it’s undeniably him.

‘Old Man’ is a lullaby, a farewell, to a dying father. Randy is the only one by the man’s side, and the song is a beautiful serenade to someone who may already have gone.  Like Neil Young (in his song of the same name), he sees himself in his older counterpart.  But whereas Neil almost goads the old man in the light of his impending doom (“Doesn’t mean that much to me/ To mean that much to you”), Newman hauntingly promises his that he will live on through him.

‘Political Science’ was written 44 years too early. If the world is unfortunate enough to be burdened with a President Trump (at least ‘he’ gives us all his love..), do not be surprised to see this farcical prophecy come true. Randy assumes the voice of the patriotic American, sick of the vitriol they receive from the rest of the world (“We give them money, but are they grateful?/ No, they’re spiteful and they’re hateful”). The only feasible option, of course, is to drop the bomb and “pulverise them”. Nobody escapes the tyrannical President Newman’s devastation. Asia is destroyed on account of being to crowded. “Boom” goes London and Paris.  As he says, “They all hate us anyhow, so let’s drop the big one now”.  It’s funny. But, in 2016, it’s scary too.

‘Burn On’, is again a song about destruction and pain, accompanied by a ditsy show tune. It is a perfect marriage. Telling the tale of the Cuyahoga river fire in Ohio, one of the biggest environmental disasters of the 1960’s. It’s a historical piece, which would not be out of place written about tragic environmental destruction we still see today. ‘Memo To My Son’ reverses ‘Old Man’. Newman sings to his baby.  He wants the baby to love him, and nothing the baby could ever do would make Randy not love them back.

‘Dayton, Ohio 1903’ was, nay, is, a Pixar classic in the making. It’s heartbreaking but in a subtle way.  Like much of Newman’s songs, you get to the end, and you’re tearing up, but you aren’t entirely sure why.  Granted, this probably isn’t true for the next track on the album. ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On’ has been covered by the world and his dog, most notably Joe Cocker and Tom Jones.  It identifies what men, ESPECIALLY Tom Jones, find most attractive in a women – them being naked. Men, to this day, are a perverse people. Looks mattered then.  Looks matter now.  Randy only professes his love for the women when she’s dancing wildly (with only her hat on), on a chair for him.  Then, and only then, she gives him “reason to live”.  Randy, you old dog.

Newman finishes as he started – at his ironic, satirical, anti-religious establishment best. God is asked a question, and he replies with full disdain, making clear his dislike for mankind. God openly laughs at his hoards of followers. He can’t believe what he get’s away with, but he keeps getting away with it (“I burn down your cities/…You must be crazy to put your faith in me/ That’s why I love mankind.”).  No matter what he does, the people need him, and that and only that, is why he loves them.  Sound like a certain Republican candidate for the US Presidency?…

Randy Newman is a amongst a small group of musicians who can incite a full rainbow of emotions across an album.  He laughs at himself, at America, at us. The hypocrisy of it all. His epic songs, so masterfully put together, provided a relief from the drug fuelled pain and heartbreak tracks his fellow artists of the 1970’s were creating.  You know him for his Pixar masterpiece. Now it’s time to know him for his other masterpiece too.  Yes, the guy who sings the Toy Story song, is a genius.

The French Inhaler