This Stack of CDs

Last weekend I spent some long overdue time organizing my studio.  My workspace had become little more than a depository for the remains of the day; old receipts, junk mail, open paint jars – a real mess.  Sifting through this disaster I knocked over more than one stack of CDs that had been accumulating for well over a year probably.  Yes, I know CDs should be in cases, not stacks.  For the record, the cases are dutifully alphabetized in the racks and this works fine for finding what you want to listen to.  But when I’m done with and on to the next, the path of least resistance is to drop the used on a stack and look for a new.  You’re probably wondering why I even own CDs at this point in the digital music age and there is a simple if illogical explanation – I’m a liner notes kind of guy.  I need the multi-folded inserts to fiddle with while listening for the first time.  Experiencing new music for the first time is a near spiritual activity for me and having the liner notes in hand is a prerequisite for making that ritual what it is.  It’s fascinating for me to see who the band thanks, who played banjo on track (7) or shares a writing credit on the title track.  These are all very important bits of useless knowledge for a junkie such as I am.  I’m fine being possibly the only living soul who has to wait for the package of new music to arrive in the mail.  I’m not always comfortable in the instant gratification world in which we live and I think that the waiting is a large part of the joy of the music for me.  But I digress, before I’ve even started.

I’m taking some advice from an old friend with this one.  I can’t imagine you actually give a rats’ about what I’m listening to, but she convinced me that you might so here I am.  In case you missed them, here are the first, second and third previous similar installments.  Yes, a lot of those links are broken and yes I just linked you to my own blog (shameless self promotion).  I haven’t done, thought or seen anything terribly interesting in the last few days and I don’t foresee said on the horizon so this is as good as anything else to write about.  A writer much better than I, once told me to only write about that which you are most passionate.  That’s good advice and is apropos in this instance.  Speaking of good advice, I saw the best I’ve ever received on a t-shirt the other day: Show Some F&@%ing Passion!  That’s simply gold, no?  At any rate, this stack of CDs wasn’t going to jump back into their cases on their own so I dived in.  By dive in, I mean audibly examined them all again before shelving.  What you find below is what was at or near the top of the stack, in no particular order.  Enjoy.

Banditos – The Refreshments

This song typifies much of the netherworld that was the mid-‘90s musical landscape – mindless, devoid of any true artistry, but catchy as hell.  Think Shawn Colvin, Oasis, Green Day.  Against that backdrop, this isn’t actually that bad.  There were good bands then but a lot harder to find.  I first stumbled into the Jayhawks in the mid-‘90s for instance and they remain a favorite.  Music, by and large had just become tired: verse, hook, chorus or for the especially audacious, verse, chorus, hook.  Regardless the formula, it was all quite catchy and little more.  I will say this though, I don’t recall the last time I heard a lyric quite as catchy and (sadly) true as, “everybody knows, that the world is full of stupid people”.  Sometimes, catchy is more than enough.

Shotgun Sally – Cats in Boots

Speaking of writing from a played formula! I probably should’ve saved these tools for the unavoidable hair metal blog I will feel compelled to write one day.  But since that blog will be about a thousand bands deep, here they are in this one.  If you remember anything about the late ‘80s – early ‘90s you remember that every time you kicked over a rock, some ass of a band like this jumped out from under.  This is the reason “grunge” happened – the ‘80s went too far and the opposite of, in the person of Kurt Cobain was about the only thing that could have righted the ship.  I have nostalgia for this though and all the other crappy bands I used to listen to.  Truthfully though, there is nothing to see here.  Let’s move along.

How Will I Know - Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers

I preface what I’m about to say with the fact that I say this about 90% of the cover songs I ever hear, but this really might be the best cover ever.  How can you take a song that sucks as bad as this and make it not suck so?  The only way, in my opinion is to be Nicki Bluhm.  [Not hating on Whitney (R.I.P.) but she was never my bag.] This version of the song is one of the best things I’ve ever heard.  One of the comments on this page crystallizes how I feel about Bluhm, “She could sing the phone book and I’d listen.” I perused the vast catalogue of YouTube covers that these guys did for weeks before I ever realized they were an actual band.  The first song I ever heard was this little diamond, I Can’t Go For That.  Can you imagine being in that van?  I will live my whole life and possibly never know how cool it must be to be that cool. 

I’m only now really starting to discover who they are and it restores my lost faith in music.   The songs she did with her husband on Duets are exactly what you imagine them to be – soulful, organic, mesmerizing.  When you see them sing Always Come Back you see two people doing exactly what they want to be doing, saying exactly what they want to say and being exactly who they are.  That’s a rare thing at least in my experience.  She’s stunningly beautiful but fits no stereotype.  She’s got a crooked nose.  She has weird bangs and dark circles under her eyes.  She reminds me of Karen Carpenter.  Her voice is flawless – what a beautiful thing.

If that’s not enough for you, watch them make Loggins’ and Messina’s Danny’s Song their bitch. I’m sure at some point they will cover Chevy Van and the hostile takeover of my childhood memories will be complete. 

Deep Inside My Heart – Rock City Angels

It is with a bit of sadness that I share this song with you.  Bobby Durango, the lead singer recently passed away.  Even though I knew it was impossible, I always thought these guys would get their due.  He believed it too, right to the end so it seems.  They unfortunately fall into a category and that was probably their undoing.  These cats were so much more than a “glam” band.  These dudes were Memphis kids; dirty, hungry rock ‘n’ roll kids.  The first time I heard them I bought the cassette.  After I wore that one out, I bought another.  When the time came to buy a third one, music had switched to CD and these guys weren’t on the short list to be converted.  So there were a couple of years where these songs only existed in my reminiscence.  When the world finally caught up and RCA was available on CD I bought (4) copies thinking that it might not last.  I’ve still got (2) left in plastic in case I’m right. 

This is the band that was always playing at the bars we couldn’t get into after the rock shows when we were in high school, but we would see them prowling the alleys behind the Daisy and Rum Boogie.  One night before we had any idea who they were, my boys and I helped load their gear into the van after their set.  It doesn’t matter who they are when you are (16), right?  Young Man’s Blues is still a top (10) preferred album start to finish.  The music holds up to this day, first to last track.

Harlem River Blues – Justin Townes Earle

Through a life long love of his father’s music, I was introduced to this young musician.  A few years ago at one of his shows, Steve Earle spoke about his son between songs. I didn’t pick up on it at the time but there apparently is a huge divide between these two – I didn’t understand until after listening to Justin for a while.  As it turns out, someone who I hold in high esteem…someone who in some ways I say is a role model for the youth of this world did something most (myself included) would think unforgivable – he walked out on his kid.  I don’t have any way to process or even to empathize with what JTE must have gone through and it pisses me off that I even have to wonder due in no small part to my connection with his father’s music.  This wound is laid open publicly on his latest album and maybe that is why it’s not a favorite.  I prefer his subtle acknowledgement of the tragedy that he perceived his life to be.  I prefer this song.  It was right before he famously made light of his estrangement from his father and just after he put himself in to get clean – some apples do not fall that far from the tree, eh? 

Regardless of what he feels about his pops, he can’t escape the musical genes he shares with him.  They both have a mournful tone, a certain longing for something or someone that even as skilled lyrically as they are that they can’t quite put a finger on, can’t quite put a face to.  They are both seekers and I can only assume, outside looking in, that this is part of their problem.  He looks like his mom in his countenance, but he is his father made over in a different genre musically. 

It’s the most jubilant song you will ever hear about someone’s own suicide.  As many times as I’ve listened, I can’t help but wonder if he is playing a part he thinks he should, or if this is what he was feeling that day he wrote it.  Either way it’s infectious.  Rockabilly through an NYC filter is about as original as you will find.  I love its timidity and its simultaneous bravado.  I love its contradiction – music versus lyric.  In many ways, he is a living breathing musical and intellectual dichotomy.  I dig that.

V – Golden Smog      

If there was a band that was more on my radar while I was in college, I’m not sure who it might have been.  This incarnation of the band included members of the Jayhawks, Soul Asylum, Wilco.  Anything Jeff Tweedy touched turned to gold at that time.  And Gary Louris has been a staple in my musical wanderings for years.   

This song was released a few years prior to my time in Stark Vegas but was still in near constant rotation for me, especially after that one shitty winter’s unraveling.  It reminds me of flaking out of studio and those never-ending afternoons that stretched into bottomless nights at The Dark Horse – shooting pool and live music on a low stage and hot bartenders.  This CD has lived near the top of the stack since.

Nowhere To Sleep – Chatham County Line

I stumbled across these guys at a music festival in Memphis six or seven years ago.  Not sure why they were there – the headliners were Nine Inch Nails and the New York Dolls – but I did enjoy their abbreviated set.  I forgot about them until one night I was driving past the Earl on my way home from work a few years later and heard this song spilling out into the EAV streets.  I’ve been hooked since.  There’s nothing else to say really.  This is pure Appalachian bluegrass played by a bunch of kids from North Carolina; no more, no less.  They are keeping their roots alive and that is a wonderfully awesome thing. “If I don’t get near some kindling, dear, somebody’s gonna find me dead.”  Epic.

When My Time Comes – Dawes

They’ve been billed as the second coming of the Laurel Canyon Sound.  Some say where Joni Mitchell and Neil Young and America left off, Dawes begins.  I’m not sure that I agree with that.  It seems to reduce them to a lot less than they are.  There certainly are similarities I guess – I do hear a faint haunting of Sister Golden Hair or Ventura Highway in some of their other work, but this is different.  It’s more cynical.  In spite of what appears to be a throw-back sound, it’s decidedly modern.  I see it as the best of both worlds – they’ve drawn from the strange emotional well that must be growing up in suburban Los Angeles and have spun it into a music that’s all their own.  They don’t owe it to anyone.

Lyrically, I don’t think I’ve encountered a band in the last (10) years that has matched them.  It’s contemplative and internal at the same time that it smacks you in the face with your own personal meditation.  It’s background music that forces itself into the foreground with measured subtlety. I’ve been listening to this CD on the way to and from work and I swear I don’t remember the drive in either direction for weeks now.  It’s a beginning to end album.  The individual songs are great but they are enhanced when played in the context of the one before and after.  To say that I’m taken with this music would be a gross understatement.

The interpretation of this song through the vehicle of Cool Hand Luke was genius but even that falls short of what the song truly means.  It’s not secret that I’ve identified more with Luke than probably any other fictional literary character.  And it might even be genius that they give Luke the freedom that he chased his whole life at the end of the video that he never found in print.  I think that is what I find so compelling about this particular song.  It’s a sad, woe is me type of thing for most of it until he realizes the futility of his angst.  The lyric I reference is the same throughout.  It’s not sung with a different inflection even, but you know when it changes for him if you are listening.  

“You can judge the whole world on the sparkle that you think it lacks. 

            Yeah, you can stare into the abyss but it’s staring right back.”

Each time you hear it, it becomes less mournful and more hopeful.  By the time you get to the acapella chorus towards the end, you know that what seemed like a hopeless estimation of his life on the front end of the song has become an acknowledgement of that which he cannot change but that which will never hold him back again.   He’s found hope.  The final tones are victorious.  It’s a celebration of overcoming odds and a determination not to be the sad-sack bastard that had always allowed himself to be oppressed by the world in which he lived.  When My Time Comes transforms from a prediction of his empty death to a celebration of the possibility of his future life.   It’s a hymnal to never giving up on oneself.

That’s a deal that I can get behind.

The ridiculous is that the deeper I went into the stack, the fewer I put away.  I’m convinced that none of the CDs I own are in their cases right now. 

I’m okay with that.