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Column: Ex Post Facto
Ex Post Facto: Patti Smith, Twelve
Patti Smith
Twelve
(Columbia, 2007)
As the last CD to be loaded into my library before the disc player broke, you might say I’m overly familiar with Twelve, its songs frequently shuffling their way into the mix. The album’s so-called obvious covers repertoire went wildly under appreciated by critics at the time of its release, some going as far as to call it predictable. Yet when I revisited the album, inspired by a surge of Patti activity this past December, I found it to be anything but that. I found the songs on Twelve to be tenacious buggers, snaking their way around my playlist in a not-so-random order. “Twelve truly had a mind of its own…” wrote Smith. I’ll say. These songs could get up, walk out of a room, and set up housekeeping on their own if they wanted. They are that commanding.
Her faithful version of the Jimi Hendrix psychedelic standard, “Are You Experienced?” has popped up on my iTunes sandwiched between “Which Side Are You On” (a striker’s chant updated for the civil rights movement by Len Chandler) and “Border Song” (a gospel-styled piano number by Elton John as sung by Aretha Franklin). Smith’s seriously to-be-reckoned-with cover of the Rolling Stones‘ screamer “Gimme Shelter” was been preceded by Public Enemy’s anti-racist tract, “By the Time I Get to Arizona.” Her version of the Beatles‘ “Within You Without You” revealed itself, surrounded by “There Was a Time”, by James Brown, “Paper Planes” by M.I.A, and “Winter in America” by Gil Scott Heron. And just in case it appears my collection’s top-loaded with music for your mind, it’s not, yet, Patti’s hits have never been dealt to segue with Aerosmith. Rather, they stream nicely aside heavyweights like Yoko Ono, Sly Stone, Max Roach, and Ornette Coleman. read more
“Body Count” Sans the Only Song It’s Known For
Body Count
Body Count
(Sire/Warner Bros., 1992)
Rapper Ice-T’s inaugural thrash-metal experiment Body Count answered the following important question: What’s more offensive than a song about anal sex at a Klan rally? Why, a song about shooting cops, of course. Anyone who was alive in 1992 remembers the mushroom cloud of controversy this album’s final track, “Cop Killer”, kicked up. No less than Charlton Heston and the fucking President of the United States (George H.W. Bush) took up the rally against “Cop Killer”, labeling it more obscene and harmful to America than any program Morton Downey, Jr. had ever done. Outraged citizens protested in the streets, police organizations across the country called for Ice-T’s head, and the blood pressure of Warner Bros. stockholders went through the goddamn roof (Body Count was released on Sire Records, a subsidiary of the WB). You could have cut the tension with a chainsaw. read more
Yo La Tengo: Summer Sun
Yo La Tengo
Summer Sun
(Matador, 2003)
Just a guess, really: I think Summer Sun made people sigh because it starts with a song called “Beach Party Tonight” that tricked folks into thinking they were anticipating a pop record when what fell out was actually an ambient wash. Or maybe they got frustrated at the lack of a “Sugarcube” or “Cherry Chapstick” and gave it a head-shaking once-over. But the only people I’m positive who have given Yo La Tengo’s most inexplicably maligned album a spin in the past six years as much as me—at least once a week—are my ex-girlfriends.
I used to grouse why the equally quiet predecessor And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out racked up all the plaudits in 2000 while its follow-up languished in relative obscurity with mixed reviews. Then it hit me. Inside-Out was an ambient record of the intense variety, more Eno/Hassell than Music for Airports. It gathered up descriptors like “haunting,” “stirring,” and “gentle.” No beef there. But the idea of a “happy” ambient record doesn’t really fit into record-reviewer compartmentalization.
Naked City’s “Radio” Is a Kaleidoscopic Collision
Naked City
Radio
(Avant, 1993)
Just because a train can stop on a dime doesn’t mean it does. Likewise, although John Zorn’s supergroup Naked City is notorious for their kaleidoscopic, “stop on a dime” collision of every aspect of musical culture, you’ll just as often find the group slowly developing a single idea—to the complete opposition of their reputation. Minute for minute, there is comparatively little of the quality for which Naked City is most famous.
Take, for instance, a song that does live up to the reputation: “Asylum”, the opening track of Naked City’s 1993 masterpiece, Radio. In that track, the virtuoso quintet careens through a hard bop gone mental pastiche, highlighting each of the performers’ talent for tightly compacted, highly technical solo material. At the last moment of the song, Zorn’s saxophone exhales a sarcastic wheeze, as if to say, “Whew, feeling a bit faint.” Listeners likely feel the same way.
Green Day: American Idiot
Green Day
American Idiot
(Reprise, 2004)
I can think of no better musical companion in 2004—my year of feeling teenage—than Green Day’s quasi-rock opera about a bad boy gone good. Of course, that phase of life is a long time gone for me, but there are still days when I feel like I’m on the same wavelength as the average adolescent waiting in vain for life to begin. Both of us are out of our heads, slam-bang in the middle of life-changing passages, based on the premise that “this is the dawning of the rest of our lives.” No wonder we aren’t thinking clearly—that’s a whole lotta platitudinous junk to be throwing at people who are high on hormones, supposedly having the times of their lives.
It was during one of my bouts with mid-life disorientation that great and merciful rock ‘n’ roll in the form of American Idiot gave voice to my existential confusion, much in the same way similarly undecipherable rock operas like Quadrophenia and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway did when I was a pre-tween: If there had been proper librettos to accompany those pieces they’d make as little or no sense as American Idiot does, but I suppose that is partly the point in trying to capture existential angst in a teenage rock opera. Certainly it’s the point of opera, which is meant to be felt.
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss: Raising Sand
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss
Raising Sand
(Rounder, 2007)
In the wider circles of rock ‘n’ roll, the fall of 2007 was preoccupied with an event of global proportions, an event that had the media and marketing machines of the music industry talking about it way more and way longer than necessary: The Led Zeppelin reunion. Remember? Maybe right now, you read that in disbelief, thinking that it barely raised a blip on your own music radar, but really think back and I think you’ll agree with me. Music movers and shakers couldn’t seem to calm their collective excitement about what was going to go down, and it was mostly on the premise that the one-off reunion show set for December 10, 2007 was a mere inkling of what was yet to come, that being a full-scale tour. This, of course, never happened. The reunion show was pretty cool, I guess, if you were connected or rich enough to actually get there. But basically the concert came and went and now, in retrospect, two years later, it seems clear that it didn’t have much lasting significance, or relevance, or well… much of an impact at all.
In the wake of all that frenzy, there was actually news on the Zeppelin front worthy of our time and subsequent allegiance, and that was the release of the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss album, Raising Sand.
This album ended up going platinum and winning Album of the Year at the 2009 Grammy Awards, so it certainly received its critical and commercial due, but for me—and I bet for many who were sick of all the Zeppelin talk and speculation taking over our RSS feeds—I didn’t even listen to it back when it was actually released by Rounder in ’07. Raising Sand hit the market in the midst of the media storm. It was, and is, a collection of music that’s devoid of any hype or expectation, quite unlike that parallel project that brewed just beyond. Two years later, Raising Sand remains refreshingly free and disaffected—a surprise collaboration that was candidly captured and executed. And that innate harmony shines through on the recording.
Cornershop: When I Was Born for the 7th Time
Cornershop
When I Was Born for the 7th Time
(Luaka Bop/Warner Bros., 1997)
Sometime in 2002, following the release of the curiously titled Handcream for a Generation, Cornershop came through Los Angeles, played a gig, and followed it the next day with an appearance on a local morning radio show. This is not an extraordinary sequence of events—bands do it all the time (or used to anyway), the order of operations varying by degrees. But there was something unusual about the exchange between the radio DJ and bandleader Tjinder Singh. Something told me to grab a cassette, pop it into the boombox, and press record as I listened to them talk about the new album, Singh’s side project named Clinton, and the previous Cornershop album, When I Was Born for the 7th Time.
DJ: Did you feel a lot of pressure after that record?
Singh: No, actually, none at all, we carried on in the usual fashion…
DJ: Was the music you did with Clinton a precursor to the new Cornershop record?
Singh: Not really, no.
DJ: Can you tell us about the new album, then, when you set out to make the new record?
Singh: This one?
DJ: Yeah.
Singh: There’s not much to talk about, really. We just tried to make it as hot as possible and as undeniable as possible.
DJ: Tell me about some of the influences on this record. It’s not unfair to talk about a soul influence on this record.
Singh: Isn’t it?…
The Misfits: Famous Monsters
The Misfits
Famous Monsters
(Roadrunner, 1999)
THEY SAID it couldn’t be done. The first chapter was too horrific—who could possibly stomach another episode? Humanity surely wouldn’t stand for… a second Misfits record without Glenn Danzig? Indeed, 1997’s American Psycho had been such an affront to the punk rock universe, so universally and thoroughly rejected, that no one thought the Danzig-less Misfits would have the balls to come back. Well, like the horror movies they drew so much inspiration from, these muscle-bound haunt-rockers proved there will always be a sequel no matter how many people protest, so long as the franchise remains profitable. Lord knows their Crimson Ghost emblem was moving enough t-shirts, shoelaces, and belt buckles in the late ’90s to keep Lodi’s finest on unshakable terra firma.
Thus, founding bassist Jerry Only and his crew of gum-chewing Jersey boys dropped Famous Monsters in 1999, a record that caught many a cynical rocker off guard when it turned out to be pretty damn good. Leaning on a larger, spookier, more metal sound, Famous Monsters vastly improves upon its Geffen-stamped cartoon doom, punk-lite predecessor. This is real, honest-to-goodness fright rock—heck, you can almost taste the dry ice billowing out of Doyle’s gargantuan amplifiers as he unloads scathing riff upon scathing riff. Vocalist Michale Graves graduates from male cheerleader to full-fledged graveyard Goulet, tossing off delightfully soaring choruses on slap-chop moshes like “Witch Hunt” and “Pumpkin Head.” Producer Daniel Rey seems to have buried everything in the red; this lends an immediacy and attack to Famous Monsters that American Psycho sorely lacked. You can love it, you can hate it, but you can’t say the darn thing isn’t loud.
Jack Logan: Bulk
Jack Logan
Bulk
(Medium Cool / Twin/Tone, 1994)
Bulk is one of those golden records of lore, the kind that languish in relative obscurity despite the fact that once someone happens upon it they fall instantly for its endearing surplus of cheerless mystery and loner laments. Yep, this record is one huge downer, but if being down is your thing, Bulk is almost unsurpassed in its pursuit of all things bleak. Upon its release, the record was met with a lot of critical acclaim but it didn’t get much further than that. Currently out of print, let’s consider this Ex Post Facto my plea for re-releasing the record so it can be celebrated by all once more.
Bulk is a two-CD project by Jack Logan who, in 1993, sent Peter Jesperson (responsible for the early career of the Replacements) a prolific 600 home-recorded songs that he’d documented since 1979 with a rotating cast of musician friends he hung around with in a town just outside of Athens, Georgia after he was done with his day job as an auto mechanic. Jesperson quickly signed Logan to his label, and thereafter, they whittled down 600 songs to the 42 that appear on Bulk—a masterful lo-fi excursion through droning Southern gothic ballads and blotter-enhanced meditations. The narratives of the small town drifters and losers found on this record permeate the atmosphere like the stench of whiskey, stale smoke, and decaying patrons of a dive bar adorned with a jukebox playing an array of proto-punk, listless country-blues, and ’60s-inspired white-boy rockers. Logan treats his down-and-out cast with the humility of a fiction writer like Raymond Carver, and we, in turn, feel all the empathy in the world for these crusty characters.
Ex Post Facto: Tiny Tim, I’ve Never Seen a Straight Banana – Rare Moments: Vol. 1
by: Denise Sullivan
I’ve Never Seen A Straight Banana – Rare Moments: Vol. 1
(Collector’s Choice Music, 2009)
Once upon a time, 16-year-old fanboy Richard Barone persuaded Tiny Tim—the unusual falsetto/vibrato singer, ukulele player, and a 1960s musical phenomenon—to make a record. Now that I’ve Never Seen A Straight Banana has finally surfaced after 33 years on the shelf, it sounds as strangely beautiful, naïve, and sophisticated as the combination of its two musical forces would suggest.
In the ’60s and early ’70s, the long-haired, flower-peddling Tiny Tim was ubiquitous. Guest shots on the popular comedy series Laugh-In, a hit single with “Tiptoe Through the Tulips”, and a marriage to a woman mysteriously named Miss Vicki performed on live television to a record number of Tonight Show viewers are the highlights as I recall them. A long-haired, slightly gender bent peace-freak with a thing for old time music didn’t seem an anomaly in the culture, though his appearances occasionally lead to giggling and eye-rolling among the straights. And yet, children especially loved Tiny, and he even released some songs, For All My Little Friends, just for us kids. Prior to his 15 minutes in the late ‘60s, Tiny had enjoyed a Greenwich Village moment on the scene with Bob Dylan and recorded with the Band, all appreciators of his knowledge and devotion to music from the early part of the 20th Century—Al Jolson, Rudy Vallee, Eddie Cantor, and singers with names more obscure. But when Barone, a budding musician in his own right, caught up with Tiny Tim, he found him on the dreaded lounge circuit, home to many skilled musicians in their 40s and 50s trying to stay alive in the mid-’70s. Performing at a Travelodge outside of Tampa, the underage Barone couldn’t actually see the show, but following the set, Tim invited the young man and his friends up to his room for a private audience. By the end of the evening, the teen had talked Tim into recording an album with him.
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by: Denise Sullivan
published: March 10, 2010
in column: Ex Post Facto
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