Nashville-based singer-songwriter explores her ’70s pop roots
After a short run of modern pop records for Island, singer-songwriter Courtney Jaye shucked off the major label gloss for the wonderfully quirky independent release The Exotic Sounds of Courtney Jaye. The album’s Hawaiian-tinged California canyon country was magical in its combination of island breezes, Topanga afternoons, girl-group bounce and country twang. Her second indie release tightens up the production, drops many of the island influences and homes in more directly on the sweeter side of 1970s West Coast adult pop. Those who followed Deana Carter’s career as she moved from the country success of “Strawberry Wine” to the ’70s pop-rock influences of her subsequent albums will recognize a similar turn here.
Two Texas roots legends rekindle their funky-blue partnership
Delbert McClinton and Glen Clark are long time musical compadres who also happen to be Texas roots music legends. The duo recorded a pair of albums as Delbert & Glen in the early ’70s, but as their individual careers took off (McClinton as a recording artist and performer, Clark primarily as a songwriter), additional collaborations became a topic of discussion rather than a studio reality. Having rolled around the idea of a new project for more than a decade, the pieces finally came together, with McClinton’s songwriting partner Gary Nicholson helping to craft this album’s original material.
The ease with which these master musicians rekindle their rapport is nearly as breathtaking as the music that their collaboration has produced. Both players wear their maturity well, with the raspy edges of their voices adding authority to songs that retain a rye attitude. Don’t expect apologies for their seasoned points-of-view; as they sing on the album’s opener, they’re not old, they’ve just been around a long time. The experience of those years fuels both their performing and songwriting, though as they sing in “Whoever Said it Was Easy,” even the wisdom of age is powerless to unknot the eternal mysteries of relationships.
This celebration of Woody Guthrie’s one hundredth birthday is more like a family gathering than an all-star tribute. That’s because every one of these performers is an artistic descendent of Gurthrie’s music. It’s impossible to overstate Woody Guthrie’s impact on popular music, as his themes, songs, style and attitudes have transcended several generations of performers and fans; Guthrie remains a North Star by which folk-derived music is navigated. The song list includes many of Guthrie’s best-known and best-loved songs, along with archival lyrics posthumously set to music by Joel Rafael, Lucinda Williams, Jackson Browne and Tom Morello.
Staging this homage as a concert, rather than a collection of studio recordings pulled together over weeks and months, honors one of the basic tenets of Guthrie’s work: music as a shared, visceral experience. Guthrie’s songs were written for live performance, and every one of the night’s performers was fueled by both the material, the stages they’ve traversed throughout their careers, and each other. The breadth of Guthrie’s mastery is evident in material that ranges from endearing children’s songs to strident social commentary and searching introspection. The universality of his work is equally evident in the range of musical styles in which his songs are comfortably expressed, and the continuing currency of his topics.
LeAnn Rimes has traveled a long way from the innocent pining of “Blue,” and listeners – fans and foes alike – can’t help but hear her music through the prism (some might say “prison”) of her personal-made-public life. Her well-documented marital misdeeds weren’t scrubbed from the public’s consciousness by apology or silence, so Rimes is now embracing them in song. Those who still believe in Rimes’ humanity will hear her taking ownership of her mistakes, while those who remain unconvinced of her remorse will hear the third step in a publicist’s damage control plan. Most likely these songs (and the attendant interviews, publicity and rehab stint) split the difference, with Rimes fighting to make peace with herself more so than with the public.
The plea from Rimes (or her fans) to “just listen to the album” will go mostly unheeded, as any album – and particularly this album – doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Rimes has spotlighted the issues that cause friction with her detractors, and in doing so is likely to add gasoline to the conflagration. And it’s a shame, because if you could divorce the songs from the real-life transgressions of their author, you’d find an album of emotional performances that are more earthen and gritty than anything Rimes has recorded before. But you can’t unring a bell, and it will remain unseemly to many listeners for Rimes to take on the aggressive posture of “Spitfire,” to sing the public mea culpa of “What Have I Done?” or to lustily serenade her co-conspirator with Buddy & Julie Miller’s “Gasoline and Matches.”
Worse yet is “Borrowed.” Songs about cheating have a long and celebrated history in country music, but the first person narrative of “Borrowed” hits too close to home in a world that cycles and recycles scandal so liberally in the media. The lack of abstraction between Rimes’ lyric and the real-life immorality it chronicles is wince-worthy. When she fictionalizes, such as with the mistreatment of “You Ain’t Right,” she neatly elides adultery from the inventory of offenses, and when she sings of being wronged on “God Takes Care of Your Kind,” it’s as if she’s channeling the emotions of her first husband, as well many of her former fans.
It’s difficult to tell whether Rimes is purposely pillorying herself, or was simply unaware of how these songs play in public. She wraps rationalization around an olive branch for “Just a Girl Like You,” but in doing so only manages to suggest an absolution that’s wholly unbecoming. The album’s most lucid moment is heard on “I Do Now,” in which Rimes admits she hadn’t really understood Hank Williams’ cheating hearts until she had one of her own. But the song’s affirmation of eternal love for her new mate as “the one that matters” begs the question of whether her guilt is genuine, and the declaration “I’m alive more than I’ve ever been / Freer than I’ve ever known” plays like a protestation in place of a truth. This may all be her truth, but it’s not one her many former fans are ready to accept.
Sonny Bono’s one and only solo album was released in 1967, just as Sonny & Cher’s hits and Cher’s solo success were entering a three-year drought. The obvious touchstone for this 5-track, 33-minute experimental outing is the Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which Sonny quotes in the album’s title track. But the acid-tinged lyrics (including quotes from both “The Battle Hymn of the Republic†and “A Day in the Lifeâ€) and pseudo-psych musical freakouts have neither the expanded consciousness nor musical inventiveness of the Beatles. The anti-drug Bono might have heard Sgt. Pepper’s, but he didn’t really seem to understand it. The drums, likely played by Wrecking Crew ace Hal Blaine, sound as if they were lifted from a Phil Spector session, and the sitar noodling and tuneless harmonica blasts are indulgent and irritating, especially at the jam-session length (12’45) of the opening track.
The social commentary of “I Told My Girl to Go Away†might have drawn more attention had Bono been a more commercially compelling vocalist, or perhaps if Janis Ian’s scathing “Society’s Child†hadn’t exploded earlier in the year. The 32-year-old Bono sang with an air of defeat that couldn’t compare to Ian’s searing defiance. “I Would Marry You Today†might have made a nice light-pop folk-rock production for Sonny & Cher, and would have greatly benefitted from the latter’s ability to carry a tune. A few years earlier, and with a gender switch and some editing, “My Best Friend’s Girl is Out of Sight,†might have made a good tune for one of the New York girl groups, but sung as light-pop and stretched to over four minutes, it hasn’t the focus of Bono’s hits. The closing “Pammie’s on a Bummer†is more successful with its instrumental experimentation, though its message (prostitution leads to pot leads to LSD) isn’t particularly knowing.
Few knew what to make of Blue Cheer when they released Vincebus Eruptum in 1968 and their outrageously electric cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” climbed into the Top 20. Amidst a music scene that had grown louder and harder in the aftermath of the Summer of Love, Blue Cheer was harder and louder than anything around them. They took rock music to 12, pasting together the hardest, loudest bits you might have heard from The Who or Jimi Hendrix into a sustained scrum of growling, feedback-heavy guitar, thumping bass, pounding drums and howling vocals. Many listeners simply didn’t know what to make of this new sound, but by album’s end, which included a weighty cover of Mose Allison’s “Parchman Farm,” it was clear that this power trio was launching something completely new.
The group waxed and waned for the next forty years, sustaining innumerable lineup changes, but mostly retaining its thunderous rhythm section of founding bassist-vocalist Dickie Peterson and early drummer Paul Whaley. Peterson provided the group’s foundation through thick and thin, dropping out only very briefly in 1975, and it was Peterson and Whaley, along with guitarist Andrew “Duck” Peterson, who recorded this 2008 live set for the German television show Rockpalast. This lineup had been together off and on since MacDonald joined the band in 1988, and had been playing together steadily since 1999. Peterson passed away the year after this set was recorded, but as this recording shows, the band retained their pummeling sound to the end, and the rasp in Peterson’s voice added patina to their heavy psych-blues.
Shadwick Wilde emerges from the cloud cover
