Album Reviews

The South African trumpet and flugelhorn player Hugh Masekela first became known to American audiences as a pop star with his 1968 hit “Grazing in the Grass.” He played trumpet on The Byrds' hit “So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star,” and among audiophiles, his song “Stimela (Coaltrain),” recorded live, is a sonic standout as well as an inspiring track.

There were good reasons British blues musicians like the original Peter Green led Fleetwood Mac or blues influenced ones like The Rolling Stones wanted to record in Chess's legendary Ter-Mar Studios in Chicago. One, of course, was the possibility of jamming with blues legends like Willie Dixon, Otis Spann, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolk and, well, you can run down the names yourself, including “Guitar Buddy,” what Buddy Guy had to be called due to contractual obligations. The other reason is to get that fabulous Ter-Mar Sound, which The Stones managed to do on some of their earlier albums.

Having licked his wounds and moped us into a melancholic swoon on the sumptuous sounding break-up album Sea Change, Beck casts off his blues and self absorbed ballads, puts his ears to the ground and, reunited with Mike Simpson and John King (a/k/a The Dust Brothers), comes up with an Odelay style, beat based musical mélange sure to please fans.

1969 Velvet Underground Live (Mercury SRM 2-7504) starts off with Lou Reed talking up the crowd for a minute and a half before even starting “Waiting For My Man”.  He asks the crowd if they have a curfew, if they prefer one long set or two sets: “Whichever makes it easier for you”.  He encourages the handful of fans to “Settle back, pull up [their] cushions…and whatever else you have with you that makes life bearable in Texas,” and even mentions how the Cowboys killed the Eagles earlier in the day.  Pretty standard pre-show preamble—yet completely bereft of the ego-adrenaline fueled yawp of, say, “Hello Cleveland” that Spinal Tap made famous and that Van Halen apparently took as gospel.

 

I nearly lost my best friend in one of the worst taping accidents ever. Lending him my copy of 1969... to dupe for a much anticipated road trip, I was mortified when upon pushing it into the Blaupunkt that it went straight into song.  When I questioned (alright, interrogated) him, his response was: “I wanna hear tunes, not some schlep talk about football.” 

 

Suffice it to say, things were never the same between us again, and after losing him to the great Guns N’ Roses-Nirvana wars (he fought for the Axl of Evil) of the early nineties, we lost touch altogether.  However sad, and even true this story is, it proves that along with religion and politics, one should not discuss the Velvet Underground.

 

Bright Eyes, however, is a different story.  Conor Oberst is the petite protagonist of the piece in question, and for all intents, he is Bright Eyes.  What greets your ears when you drop the needle in the groove (or, ahem…push play) is not music at all, but the groggy voice of a young man who coolly sips at a glass of what I hope is water, and who proceeds to tell a story of a woman flying on a plane to see her fiancé.  After a futile attempt to converse with a fellow passenger, she reads an article about a third world country she can’t even pronounce to fight the boredom. Suddenly, an engine gives out and as the plane plummets towards the ocean, she asks the silent passenger where they are going.  His response is that they are going to a party: a birthday party—her birthday party, and that they all love her very, very, very much.

 

Just as with that Velvet Underground album, many a soul will be tempted to pass over the prose and get right into the lead song, “At The Bottom Of Everything.” A mistake really, as his rambling offers an important introduction to the piece you’re about to hear.  Indeed, it sets the tone and feel of the entire album, and is not some exercise in self-indulgent fulfillment, but an odd statement of purpose that makes the album wholly complete and understandable in such a way that you end up wishing it hadn’t.  Listening to I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning is like stealing someone’s micro-tape recorder cassettes that have been filled up with disturbing thoughts and observations that are so personal you can’t help but to feel ashamed as you listen from the confines of a locked washroom stall.  Like our recent voyeuristic-fetish fascination with “Reality TV,”  I’m Wide Awake evokes the feeling of a guilty pleasure.

 

The album is as New York as anything by Paul Simon or Lou Reed, but from the perspective of a transplanted Nebraskan who’s young enough to feel he can change the world, but wise enough to know he can’t.  He’s lovelorn and fragile, melancholically sedated yet hopeful in his new land of child prostitutes, drugs, and neon signs that call to him in a language he vaguely understands.  Yet at the end of day “it all boils down to one quotable phrase: if you love something give it away.” That line, from “Landlocked Blues”, can almost be seen as a signifier for the entire album—that he is in the excruciatingly painful limbo of awaiting the second half of that quotable phrase: if it truly loves you, it will come back.

 

The songs are wonderfully recorded with spare, mostly acoustic accompaniment that features: mandolin, vibraphone, trumpet, and pedal steel to round out the guitar, drums, and bass that typify the alt. folk sound that Conor Oberst has come to represent.  So affecting is his voice (delicate and nasally soft yet with an ability to scream out lyrics like he just punctured a lung), that combined with his lilting arrangements, it took me a while to realize the woman harmonizing with him on three of the tracks was indeed Emmylou Harris.  No small feat considering the impact her voice can impart on a song, and doubly so considering I’m a die-hard Gram Parsons fan who after many years still sheds a tear every time I hear “A Song For You” and “Love Hurts.” It’s a refreshingly uncompressed sounding album that has a live-in-the-studio type feel to it, with cracked vocals and bum notes (however few and far between) left on for time to judge; and for audiophiles to drool over as they call up their friends to see if they too heard the cough on track three coming from the left speaker that is undoubtedly to be blamed on that damn pedal steel player.

 

Yet for all the audio-knobery (an affectation, I promise) and great melodies this album offers, it’s Conor Oberst’s ability to express dark feelings that every human at one point in their lives has felt that makes him so engagingly endearing.  It’s not some gloomfest, “my world is falling apart at the seams” type diatribe going on here, but rather a heart- felt outpouring of emotions that most of us are too self-conscious and ashamed to verbalize in any real way lest we be seen as abnormal and weak that sets this album apart from others; that more often than not come off as self-serving and contrived.  Oberst has had enough of, to quote Modest Mouse mainman Isaac Brock, "that Mad Max bullshit,” and has in the process served up a platter that almost approaches Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks in transcendental- soul scouring- scope and complexity.

 

If the point of this record is to transport the listener back in time to an intimate late-1800's musical recital in some well-to-do mid-westerner's or southerner's living room parlor, perhaps overlooking the Mississippi River, then it is a complete success. Even if it has some other purpose and I'm totally wrong, the record is a winner.

When Quantegy, the last analog tape manufacturer, went into bankruptcy late last year, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy was quoted in a Wall Street Journal story saying something to the effect that the tape upon which his albums are recorded may become worth more than the recordings themselves and that the tape may have to be recycled so the group could continue recording.

This mostly fabulous sounding 10 LP set cut almost exclusively from original analog master tapes puts into focus a so-called “in between” period for Miles: between the end of the Kind of Blue era and the beginning of the Miles/Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams quintet era chronicled on Mosaic's The Complete Studio Recordings of The Miles Davis Quintet 1965-1968 (Mosaic MQ 10-177).