Archive for the ‘Random Notes’ Category

Random Notes #4

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

The Psychedelic Furs
“High Wire Days”
1984

Music attaches itself to memory and emotion in odd ways, sometimes rising up in unexpected places, and making unexpected connections. I was a big fan of The Psychedelic Furs in the ’80s, but by the turn of the century I’d pretty much forgotten about this song, and most of the rest of the album it’s on, Mirror Moves. But sometime after September 11th it came back into my head, and through some strange connection of memory, imagination, maybe even desire, became my de facto soundtrack for memories of that day. I even have an image in my head to go with the song—not one I remember, but one I conjured up somehow, of someone stepping out of an apartment building somewhere in Manhattan and walking resolutely toward the twin towers as they burn. It’s more like a scene from a movie than a memory, but more like a memory than any scene from a movie I can recall. The song fits the image perfectly: it has a sense of defiance and a determination not to be fooled or victimized again, to take action, even if it’s unclear what that action would be. It is, in a sense, a heroic song, one with a prescient sense of upcoming disaster (“the lions have eaten the lamb/in tomorrow’s pages”). It’s a song about staring down the future, a future that may have been even worse in writer Richard Butler’s imagination than in reality. Released 17 years before the event, it has nothing whatever to do with 9/11, but in my mind, in ways I can’t quite explain, it has everything to do with it.

Tags:
Posted in Random Notes, video | Comments Off

Random Notes #3

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

Radioactive Cats
“Bed Of Roses”
1991

I am not a fan of hair metal. In the late ’80s nothing would make me change the channel faster than Motley Crue, Poison, Skid Row, Whitesnake, or just about anyone else in the genre. Guns ‘n Roses I could stand, but barely. I would sometimes appreciate the pop element in the sound, and I appreciate it even more now, but for the most part I saw them as preening, self-important buffoons, a description they might take as a compliment. I still feel much the same way, but it’s always important to consider exceptions, even to rules you create for yourself, and this record is one of them. It was never a hit. Released sometime late in 1991, any chance it might have had of success was swept away by the tide of grunge, and suddenly guys with perfectly groomed shoulder blade-length hair and shiny phallic (in both sound and appearance) guitars were no longer in vogue. Radioactive Cats’s sound may have been too pop even for hair metal, and they certainly were different. Hailing from Memphis, at times they reflected more of a pure blues influence than most hair metal bands, and even a bit of country and fifties rock and roll—the album included a track that recreated the echoey Sun Records guitar sound for it’s intro. This could have been just another song about how hot the singer’s girlfriend is, but it has a catchiness, and a romantic quality, that goes beyond what you’d normally hear in hair metal. Yeah, he wants to rock her all night long, just like every other horny, long-haired, blow-dried guitarist in America, but he wants to do it on a bed of roses, and the way he describes her, it’s obvious he can’t get over how lucky he is to have the chance. Even with much of the usual macho preening in the music, there’s a sense of sweetness, almost of innocence, to this record. Maybe these guys were just too nice to make it as a metal band.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Random Notes, video | Comments Off

Random Notes #2

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

Richard and Linda Thompson
“A Heart Needs a Home”
1975

The story goes that when the Thompson’s were halfway into the recording of their second album, Hokey Pokey, Richard was struck by some form of emotional crisis. The despair that filled so much of his music had overtaken him, and he felt that it was pointless to go on. The songs he’d written for Hokey Pokey were full of people engaging in random, frantic, meaningless activity, taking their pleasures in the earthly and ignoring the spiritual, looking for anything to fill the holes in their lives. Thompson, by all accounts, was beginning to feel the same way about his music. It was about this time that he and Linda attended a performance by a group of Islamic musicians. Thompson was entranced by the music, and speaking to the musicians afterwords, was equally entranced with their beliefs, founded in Sufism, the most artistically and intellectually open-minded of the Islamic sects. Shortly thereafter, Thompson converted to Islam and, rejuvenated, returned to work on Hokey Pokey. The first song he wrote after his conversion was “A Heart Needs a Home”, a prayer to Allah that, like much Islamic devotional music, took the form of a love song.

That’s the story, anyway. The reality is probably somewhat different (Thompson now says he’d been reading up on Sufism for a couple of years beforehand, so you can’t say that his conversion came as a bolt out of the blue), but the result is the same: one of the most stunningly beautiful songs ever written. I tend to prefer the live versions that have been released, partly because that’s how I first heard it (on Richard’s (guitar/vocal) compilation), and partly because the studio version is a little too heavily arranged. The song doesn’t need decoration, it stands up perfectly on its own—especially when Linda is singing it.

Tags: ,
Posted in Random Notes, video | 2 Comments »

Random Notes #1

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Frank Sinatra
“If I Had You”
1962

In terms of the lyric, there’s no reason why this can’t be a happy song, and that’s the way Sinatra had recorded it in 1957 for his album A Swingin’ Affair. Five short years later, though, the situation has changed. He still hasn’t got the girl who could make his life pefection, who could turn him into a superman (Ava Gardner, perhaps?); now he’ll never have her, and he knows it. Instead of conquering the world, he’s incapable of doing anything at all, including sing—listen to the way his voice cracks at the end of the first middle eight on the line “if I had you by my side”. This is a different Sinatra than the one usually celebrated—a vulnerable, depressed, even broken Sinatra. It probably isn’t a coincidence that this was recorded the same year he made The Manchurian Candidate, the darkest and most unsettling of all his movies. A few years later he was back on top, singing “Strangers In the Night” and “That’s Life”, cool, defiant, triumphant once again. But the undercurrent of despair never left him, and two years before he died he put together the compilation Everything Happens To Me, which included this recording; it was the saddest Sinatra album since Only the Lonely. The sound on this video doesn’t do justice to the subtleties of Sinatra’s voice, but there’s no escaping the pain he’s trying to work his way through. It’s devastating.

Tags:
Posted in Random Notes | Comments Off