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~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Category Archives: Lost Chords & Serenades Divine

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #16

13 Wednesday Jan 2021

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Lost Chords & Serenades Divine, Music

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Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #16 by Stephen McClurg

Dua Saleh: Rosetta EP  (2020)

The songs on Dua Saleh’s Rosettasurge through rap, pop, and rock–sometimes in the same track. Considering the namesake of the EP is Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Dua Saleh’s Sudanese-American Musilim background, the record expresses the desires, joys, and challenges of a multi-hyphenated existence.

A video of “Umbrellar” has qualities of both ‘90s hip hop and Afrofuturism. It’s a catchy single and evokes a similarly nostalgic, yet uplifting mood as something like Chastity Belt’s “Different Now.”

“Smut” begins as a rap that gets pitched into alien voices and then transforms into an electronic R&B track while holding threads from the opening. Toward the end, a guitar line comes in that would sit comfortably on a Cure album. The unique structure of “Smut” keeps growing on me.

“Windhymn” features organ, percussive sounds, and wailing among several vocal overdubs. There’s an effective whispering voice featured on this track and throughout the record. Here it makes sense as a wind hymn. The track ends not in a whisper, but in a rupturing jazz sample. One of Rosetta’s characteristics is the unexpected noisy qualities at the end of most tracks.

Like Dua Saleh, Sister Rosetta Tharpe is difficult to describe. Mostly well-known as a gospel artist, she played gospel in jazz settings and also is considered the Godmother of Rock and Roll. Though she was married a few times, she also had relationships with other women. Check out her record Gospel Trainfrom 1956. The first track “Jericho” is one of my favorite performances, as is this live performance of “Didn’t It Rain” that proves what a goddess she was.

Bandcamp is one of the best ways to support living musicians. Rosetta and other recent singles and EPs are available here.


Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #15: An Interview with Tina Mozelle Braziel

26 Tuesday May 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Lost Chords & Serenades Divine, Poetry

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Stephen McClurg, Tina Mozelle Braziel

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #15 by Stephen McClurg

Tina Mozelle Braziel is an Alabama-based poet whose first book, Known by Salt, won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. The book captures specific elements of growing up poor in the South and how one navigates life by constructing a self, a family, or a home. I talked to her about these ideas, the threads of images throughout the book, and her writing process.

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Photos courtesy of Bang Images.

Stephen McClurg (SM): One of the elements of the book I enjoyed was its use and variety of settings: trailer porches, small office rooms, the cabin you’re building one piece at a time, the river’s edge, and even whole ecosystems.

Is this sense of place something indivisible from your thinking and process or did it happen by chasing ideas? What are your thoughts about place in poetry–in how you feel it works in your poems or in others that you like? Did you have models for these approaches?

Tina Mozelle Braziel (TMB): Recently many people on social media were discussing internal monologue or the lack of it. They seemed particularly concerned if someone didn’t have a voice in their head or running conversation made of words. Or at least that was the opinion I saw.

While I have an internal monologue, I also have this internal movie screen that plays back places I’ve been before. Often it is the landscape of a commute down county roads. Sometimes it is an interior room like the lobby of the school I attended as an exchange student in Germany or my grandmother’s kitchen. At any moment I can be in two places at once, washing dishes and driving Highway 25 between Pell City and Montevallo, for example. Place is intrinsic to my imagination and interior world.

But this isn’t just me. It seems like place is integral to poetry. Place is the essential feature for many of our poetic genres such as bucolics, greater romantic lyrics, and itineraries. Place also plays an important role in other poetic genres like georgics and ballads. No doubt this is because where we are from, where we are, and where we hope to go says so much about the individual human experience.

As for models, encountering Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s work has particularly inspired me. I became absolutely wild about “All Animals Were Once Called Dear” when I read her description of a bank housed in a trailer and of the pickup gunning its engine. Those images struck me as validation of my impulse to write the rural landscape as I knew it. I saw how the pastoral could include more than farmland, but also the rural life that I experienced: trailer parks and dammed rivers and wooded ridges.

As I wrote poems about building our house, I looked to Seamus Heaney’s work, especially “Glanmore Sonnets” and “Glanmore Revisited” as models. In fact, while I was writing those poems I did not leave home for an overnight trip without packing a Heaney collection. I was also influenced by how Claudia Emerson used images of homes and their environs to highlight personal relationships in Late Wife.

SM: You mention Heaney’s “Glanmore Sonnets.” Many of the poems felt like they may have begun as sonnets, but I may be mistaken. Several, especially towards the beginning of the book, have around fourteen lines, but don’t necessarily carry other features of the sonnet. Other than that, I mostly noticed couplets and tercets and not a lot of traditional forms, but also not anything in a free Whitmanian line. How do you approach form in your poetry?

TMB: As for form, I’m very focused on the line. I adore line breaks especially those that offer an additional meaning to the sentence. But I’ve learned that breaking every line in such a way can conceal meaning, so I try to rein myself in.

I wasn’t consciously aiming for sonnets, but I did notice early on that poems of that length are better received. Perhaps we have a sonnet-sized appetite. So that may have subconsciously influenced the length of the poems.

SM: In “Homemaking Along Lay Lake,” you write: “Made under that throng of willow flies, / made where piers hammer us to this drift of blossoms.”

The ending here captures the gruffness, maybe strength, and the difficulty of trailer park living. Words like throng, piers, and hammer provide that image. But the poem also captures a kind of tenderness and fragility of the kid playing with paper boats, albeit dipped in motor oil. This is echoed, too, in the words like willow, blossom, and later even doublewide. That last one, for all its connotations, actually sounds pleasant–I hadn’t noticed that before–maybe it’s the contrast to singlewide?

Then the pressure cooker is mentioned–well, living poor can be a pressure cooker, but also this may be the whistle for dinner, something good–home. I think “sunburnt kid” captures that dichotomy as well. The finding of home even in difficult places. Does any of that ring true to you? Could you speak about the poem and its images?

TMB: Yes! Absolutely! I’m thrilled that all of the above came through to you! The trailer park where I grew up was a magical and, to use your word, gruff place. I wanted to reveal it as having the fraught comforts of any other home.

The pressure cooker was particularly significant as an object that preserves the bounty of a particular place and time for the future. Yet, at least for me and maybe other children of the ’70s and ’80s, it is also a threatening object because they were reported to explode. When my grandmothers canned, my mother forced me to play outside so I would be out of reach of a blast of scalding water and shattered glass.

The practice of digging and spreading bulbs signified to me how even in nature some roots / homes are moved. I wanted to begin there to suggest the traditional idea of home as being stationary or a trailer being mobile may be too narrow or limiting.

The phrase “going to the house” was the impetus of the poem. Growing up I often heard many family members and neighbors who lived in trailers say it. It had struck me as odd because I was in a stage where I took everything very literally. Now I have developed an appreciation for using “the house” as a synonym for home, a word that someone could use for apartment or loft or trailer.

SM: “Known by Salt” captures peculiarities that connect us to family. My grandfather, a sometimes mechanic, full-time custodian, salted his food like you mention in your poem. I particularly remember him pulling tomatoes from his garden, sprinkling salt on them, and eating them as he inspected the plants.

I’m not sure if I have a question there. I guess I was taken with the image–of an action–and how it ties into the natural metaphors of place relating to home and family bloodlines and maybe rivers as bloodlines in the land. Does that make sense? I feel like it’s connected to some of the other images and themes in the book.

TMB: Oh, I love the idea and image of “rivers as bloodlines.” Mozelle adopted my mother, so I’m forever looking for ways that I’m connected to her. Many of those connections are actions: building houses, wearing silk, knitting, etc. My family often says, “We didn’t name you Mozelle for nothing” for doing these things.  As a poet, I like to think that in my family, names run thick as blood. But actions, particularly work, binds people to one another as well. Love for and life within a landscape does that as well. I’ve witnessed that a lot lately from members of Friends of the Locust Fork. They talk about how the river connects them to others who have different belief systems or political leanings.

SM: “Trespassing” seems to me to be about options or the lack of them, or being able to recognize opportunity when it presents itself. For one, we have to be in a place lucky enough to have options, furthermore, we have to be in a condition well enough to even know we can ask the question. Taking the book as a poetic sequence, “Trespassing” foreshadows the later poems about building the cabin. The longing for a home.

This made me think of the difficulties of being poor, and particularly being poor in America, where it’s often suggested that it’s not systemic, that somehow it’s tied to morality or ethics (later poems like “Trash” speak of this as well). One of the ways the poem spoke to me was that idea of not knowing what the options are. What possibilities do I have? Saying to children “they can be whatever they want to be”–is that helpful? So then the “Trespassing” (also the section title) could refer to that idea of growing up poor and feeling like one is trespassing, not worthy, or doesn’t belong. Do you think the poem does that kind of work?

TMB: Yes. I hope it does. I was also thinking about this in “Interview, 1966” when Mozelle looks down at her houndstooth suit and notices how one square steps into another, wondering how or if she will do that. “Trespassing” also examines how we find ways to make the world ours, to feel that we do belong, despite feeling as if we don’t.

I’m not sure if it is helpful to tell children they can be whatever they want. My ex-boyfriend complained it misguided him to drop out of high school. He felt later he had been duped when he confronted his lack of options after that decision. My parents, on the other hand, told me if I followed all the rules and did everything right, I might have a slight chance at a job or scholarship or any other opportunity.

In “Trespassing” I wanted to explore a moment when transgressing rules was allowed. Even so, it is a justified risk for Mozelle because she felt no one would accuse women and children of anything criminal. She trespasses in order to feed her sense of possibility and to prompt that sense in the speaker. I wanted to highlight the value of the imagination here, how it deeds us for a moment ownership and dignity or control. When we say to ourselves, “If it were mine, I’d make it this way,” we own our aesthetic. In the poem, the speaker doesn’t learn this while they are trespassing. She, like so many of us, is too focused on what we enumerate, money or zipcodes.  Yet she gets it later. I wanted that from this poem, too. That we have multiple chances to find possibilities.

SM: There’s a reference in “Trailer Fish” to the Elizabeth Bishop poem “The Fish.” I thought it was a fantastic reimagining of the image, but one that still registers the hard beauty of experience from the referenced poem. I loved the description of the trailer that builds on that idea, that the trailer is “cold-blooded” and the “windows open like gills.” I assume Bishop has been an influence. If so, what have you liked about her poems? Also, who are other poets that have influenced you and whose work are you currently enjoying?

TMB: Oh yes, Bishop influences me quite a bit. I particularly love Bishop’s use of perspective and the intimacy I find within it. Reading Bishop, I feel as if I stepped inside the mind that looks close then closer. She generously re/creates a moment, extending an invitation to take a journey. Like in “The Moose,” we get a bird’s eye view of a bus traveling across the landscape, then we move inside the bus and overhear the passengers’ conversations, and then the journey dissipates in the scent of the moose and gasoline. She carries us on that journey without ever losing us. Bishop challenges me to not only look closely, but also to write as if I “looked and looked (my) infant sight away.”

As I mentioned earlier, Brigit Pegeen Kelly and Seamus Heaney have influenced me a great deal. I look to Philip Levine and Larry Levis often. Right now, I’m totally ga-ga about Alice Oswald and Camille Dungy. Oswald’s Falling Away is amazing. I love her poem about flies and how she gives us a sense of what it must be like to be that fly buzzing its way into oblivion. I’m in awe of Dungy’s skill in Smith Blue in drawing us into intimate moments and making huge events like climate change feel very personal.

SM: “Pins” contains another matrix of images and meanings. The pins, shrapnel, nails, etc. in the poem operate both as pieces of metal that invade and scar the body, but they also become stories that connect or hold together experience like rebar in concrete, but they also become trophies or heirlooms–and maybe something like the old lures dangling from Bishop’s fish that she calls “medals.”

Just as scars can be inner or outer, the poem suggests something similar about the stories we tell others or ourselves about scars or trauma. The poem is much earlier in the book, but rereading it, I also connected it to the gathering of a life and the gathering of material for the cabin. I can imagine that this poem began with one of those small pieces of metal and built up from there. What was the process like? Did it originally have those connections because those ideas were on your mind or did they come about through the arrangement of the book?

TMB: It began with the dress pin. Late in Mozelle’s life, she said she wished she had the pin that killed her mother. This reminded me of how my Dad sometimes wished he had the rung that broke and caused him to fall fifty feet. I wanted to connect those two stories, but I could not figure out how to do it. I wondered for too long what doctors do with such things.  I even imagined that there could be a depository for the objects that maim or kill our loved ones—a jail for the things that assault us.

I wasn’t conscious of how this poem would connect to gathering materials to build the cabin. I like that you saw that link. Instead, I was focused on making a stronger connection between Mozelle and Dad. Their similar desire to take hold of the objects that had done harm felt like one way. I also wanted to show that they both overcame physical hardship: Dad’s fall in this poem and Mozelle’s recovery from a detached retina and deafness from scarlet fever in “Mozelle’s Shoes.” Those stories loomed large in my imagination growing up.

The image of the soapstone was a gift from my brother that connected the two stories. When I was visiting him, he showed me some soapstone he had found and asked, “Who does this remind you of?” That gave me the object that showed Dad’s recovery and his dedication to construction work. The soapstone was a way to suggest that work mends us.

SM: The “Allure” section begins with a George Eliot quote: “For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.” Do you understand this to mean that the interior is controlled by the environment or our own physical exteriors or both? I was interested if how this feeds back into the poems about poverty, about love, about living in the world as a woman, and the cabin, but I wasn’t sure if I was just getting carried away. Again, this inside/outside here forms a web or matrix of images, rather than a linear form of arrangement.

TMB: For Eliot, “what lies outside” is society, the force it exerts on how we interact with one another and how we see each other and ourselves. I wanted to allude to that and an awareness of this force by the speaker when it comes to issues of class and the role of women, particularly as an introduction to “Allure.”

In addition to that though, I feel that the natural world provides an escape or an alternative from the force of society. In woods or even in a trailer park, the light filtering through the pine needles or the pattern of shadow on the river offers transcendence and beauty no matter who you are or how much money you have. It is a bounty open to all, at least somewhat. That richness is what I want to determine my inward being.

SM: The poem “Allure” is one of my favorites, not only for the interesting mix of allusions, from Looney Tunes to the Hebrew Bible, but also the range of emotions and experience it manages to cover in a relatively small amount of space.

The image of how the young stripper steps into the thong “the way she’d cross a low wall” struck me. It’s very precise, but it also reminded me of the “good fences make good neighbors” line from Frost. If she is stepping over a low wall, what kind of neighbors are these? The poem gives us a few answers and they mostly aren’t positive: the Fudd character, who is turned on, but ashamed, the decapitations of the Salome section, the husband’s rude friend.

TMB: I hadn’t consciously meant to allude to “Mending Wall” though it was a poem that I had been studying at the time.

SM: The poem also suggests an empowerment for the dancer, who becomes more confident as the poem shifts from a third person to a first person perspective–more embodied, but somehow disembodied from the experience? The aforementioned decapitations are several: the money that stacks up, the turning off of thought and emotions, the silhouettes and shadows of paper dolls watching, themselves seemingly not empowered or being rational in any way.

TMB: Thanks for noticing that. I find that to be a central irony of stripping. The dancer is elevated. She is on stage. She is given money. Yet she is denigrated and looked down upon. I wanted to give her the agency and power that isn’t granted by social norms.

SM: The “Formica” section leads toward this turning off of emotions. The Fudd character, previously the blushing hunter, becomes the husband and then the sculptor of the Galatea metaphor. At first, I felt there was an interesting tension in that Bugs has more agency in the low art version rather than in the high art version. The dancer, Bugs, who’s always in control, becomes the statue–though that seems still like prey, but not active. And even though one is high art and one is low–the lower one maintains an action even if they are acting, whereas the high art version does not get agency. The dancer regains control in the last section.  The poem captures both the potential empowerment, and the joy of it, and the shame and how people still look down upon it.

TMB: Wow, I hadn’t thought too much about the difference in agency between the high and low art versions.  While Bugs has more agency, he need only to remove his “femininity” in order to change the power dynamics. He’ll be hunted but in a different way. In every cartoon, he gives up on the guise of femininity to “save” him because it won’t. For the speaker in the third section, she doesn’t want to be shaped by the male gaze. Like Bugs in the cartoons, she rather give up femininity and return to what she was before, to a more natural state of stone.

SM: A previous poem, echoed with “Allure” to me. “Interview, 1966” felt like it could be a Coen Brothers scene, but I was surprised about how many elements these two poems shared.

TMB: Coen Brothers!?! That’s a huge compliment. Thank you.

SM: “Claims” has a rusted sign decayed into reading “NO  SING.” I took this as a commentary on the man’s hubris of claims or simply something like the littering shown in the poem, but also how those claims can’t be permanent. I also found that the claim was made on a rusted sign that was falling back into the earth, but also made in language that itself was about having no song. The true poem, or maybe nature’s answer is a song in the form of the fawn found in the moment. The poem moves like the frequent nature walks mentioned in these poems, which I also connect to the web or matrix of images that the book develops. Does any of that register with your experience of writing the poems?

TMB: Absolutely. After listening to this and some of the house building poems, a neighbor told me that I wrote in a way that made the cabin seem temporary, as if we and it were just visiting the land where it sits. Perhaps that is the trailer park kid in me holding on to the sense that home is a bulb to be dug up and spread. I’m suspect of human claims. The surveyor’s claim to the lines he sited feel stronger to me because of the work he put in. I understand the claim made by the campfire ring of a trespasser. When nothing is yours, it all is. Or as Larry Levis says, “Anything is enough if you know how poor you are.” All of this is to say I wanted to explore how transitory or even ridiculous our claims are on land. How much can we really claim other than the footprint beneath or feet or where we lie down?

SM: Maybe I’m being too precious, but the building of the cabin and the writing of a poem seem linked in that both are a means of constructing a way in the world. Building a poem a line or word at a time is echoed in the cabin poems.  Like birds building a nest–itself a theme in the book–finding oneself (or selves–there are the multiple identities and names that the persona takes on) and finding someone else, finding love, and building a place to be in the world. Building a poem and then a book of poems strikes me as a potentially similar project.

TMB: I definitely feel that building a home and building a poem echo one another. I grew up hearing my grandmother claim that my father and his father and brothers (all of them were bridge builders) were filling her narrow living room with bridges whenever they talked shop. So I’ve been imagining words building things all my life. I wanted Known by Salt to address how home is made, emotionally as well as physically.

Building the house itself taught me so much about the creative process. Building the house and putting a collection of poems together are enormous projects that felt overwhelming to me. I couldn’t grasp the full scope of what I would need to do to finish them. Since we moved in before we had our walls up and needed to dry the house in quickly before winter, I didn’t have the luxury of overthinking or procrastinating about building. That gave me practice in moving forward into uncertainty when it came to writing.

I had no idea what book I was writing when I wrote most of the poems in Known by Salt. I had written a series of poems about Mozelle, others about growing up in the trailer park, “Allure,” and I kept writing poems about building the house. I worried that I had the “seed” poems for three or four different collections. At some point I realized I needed to write poems that filled in between those themes, much like I needed to frame windows between studs to create walls. “Trash,” “A Clear View,” “Rivering,” and “Looking Glass” are some of the poems that filled that need.

Much like how my husband and I moved the bed and scaffolding around as we lived in the house as we built it, I shifted poems around trying to figure out where they’d best fit with one another. I reread collections I admired, paying attention to how they were structured. After looking closely at Natasha Trethewey’s Domestic Work, I decided a mostly chronological order peppered with a few flashbacks to Mozelle’s life worked best.

SM: I enjoy the kind of crossover you do with love and ecopoetry. Like I mentioned earlier, they’re really bound with other topics throughout the book. “All Our Things Are Resurrections” represents even in the title–that love is an act of resurrection, that care is also about resurrecting others. “Simple Machine” does this beautifully–making a life together as a simple machine–or something built out of simple machines–hammers and hearts beat together throughout many of these last poems. I could carry that into natural cycles or the rhythms of the poetic line. The ecopoetic qualities aren’t directly about nature besides the one line that mentions saplings, mostly it is about recovery and repurposing. The idea of simple machines reminded me of Williams and his notion of “no ideas but in things.”

In a way, maybe I’m asking about the connection of writing to living in the world, to finding love, making and sharing spaces, that writing poetry itself is a simple machine–or can be–a simple machine of love and resurrection?

TMB: Your question is worded so beautifully, I feel like the best way to answer it is to simply say yes.

So–yes.

It also reminds of a prompt that Geri Doran, my thesis director at the University of Oregon, gave my poetry workshop. She asked us to take a day without the distractions of social media or email or TV or even the radio. Instead, we were to pay close attention to what bubbles up and shape that into a poem. That encouragement to see how living in the world gives rise to poetry is something I’ve tried to keep my sights on ever since.

At first, building our glass cabin was a means to a writing life.  The best way we knew to afford time to write was to rid ourselves of a rent or mortgage payment. That sense quickly shifted as we became invested in the creativity in building our home and life. We then realized that what we were doing had evolved into a creative life. In other words, all of our labors became meaningful, if not art. Now living in and building our glass cabin, writing, and loving each other has become the ecosystem we inhabit. All of it is intertwined and interdependent. We don’t see divisions between them. And what is ecosystem other than continual resurrections?

You can find out more about Tina Mozelle Braziel’s work at her website and you can follow her on Twitter.


McClurg

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

 

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #14: Sweating to the Goths

18 Wednesday Dec 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Blog Post, Lost Chords & Serenades Divine, Music

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Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #14 by Stephen McClurg

Sweating to the Goths

In middle school, I couldn’t elude the yearly discussion of the science fair project on how different music affects plants. In English classes, someone would try to recycle their report as their English research paper.

Today, there is keen interest in the link between music and physical performance.

Much of the research shows how music supports workout intensity better than other activities. As much as I like reading, I’ve never been able to read and exercise. Unless I’m walking or cooling down, I don’t maintain workouts with podcasts or audio books either. That bears out in the study in which people gave a thirteen-percent higher happiness rating when listening to music rather than podcasts. 

My gym time is now essential. For complicated reasons and another essay, I ended up weighing 400 pounds and on the verge of some serious health issues. I worked with my doctor on diet and exercise, and had some counseling on changing behaviors. I was able to drop over 100 pounds, but like so often happens, I’ve gained 30 pounds or so back, which I’m working on getting rid of now.

Having to go to the gym has also meant that I have had to figure out ways to make the experience something that I want to do. I’ve found music essential. 

The way I choose music goes through phases. Preferring albums, I don’t like playlists. Initially, because high tempo music can increase exercise rates, I started with uptempo music that I knew well: most of Public Enemy’s records, Ice Cube’s The Predator, a variety of rock and metal, especially Entombed’s Wolverine Blues, The Misfits, and Faith No More’s albums through Angel Dust. These are still favorite records for workouts, but I had to find ways to vary it.

I discovered that I could listen to almost anything that had one of three drummers: Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, or Billy Cobham. They are ferocious, master musicians, who propel their music forward. Oddly, a fourth drummer I deeply love, Zigaboo Modeliste from the Meters, just does not work for me a workout. Modeliste has one of the deepest grooves ever, but I find his music too relaxing, maybe too bound with Mardi Gras, revelry or something. Modeliste makes me dance. Elvin Jones has a similar deep pocket, but he also has the forward propulsion of someone like Williams, albeit approached dissimilarly.

Another phase of listening has been simply checking out new music, whether a new release or an older album I’ve never heard. I never thought this would work, but workout intensity hasn’t suffered. If a record just isn’t keeping me going, I skip to a new one. If I check out three that don’t work, I go to an old faithful like almost any Fishbone album or Mastodon’s Moby Dick-inspired Leviathan, which was I found through this process. Even when I’m working out, I need music of some substance. I’m not much of a dance fan, and though I like electronic music, I can’t workout to it. Hearing some of these rock and pop records from year’s past has worked. I also get to hear new releases that I normally wouldn’t. Lizzo’s work has been refreshing and energizing lately.

One of the records that I didn’t expect to enjoy with workouts is Bauhaus’s In the Flat Field. I had only seen “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” on MTV’s 120 Minutes, but I had never listened to an album by the group. For whatever reason, Flat Field was recommended to me and I thought it was contrary to my setting enough to be fun, like listening to Joy Division or The Cure and looking at brightly lit rows of ellipticals and tank tops. The first song, “Double Dare,” has a slow descending riff like “Bela,” so I thought that if this is their thing, then I was going to have to listen to it at home. As the song continued, though, I found myself settling into my workout. 

In “Spy in the Cab,” the guitar felt oddly familiar, but I couldn’t place it. And the drums, which sound like some sort of hand drums were also messing with my musical memory. A few minutes into cardio–it hit me. Secret Chiefs’ “Renunciation.” The guitar parts and arrangements, forwardness of the melodic component as well. Peter Murphy’s voice in the case of Bauhaus and Eyvind Kang’s violin/viola in the case of Secret Chiefs. I thought Bauhaus–though not an impossible–but at least a strange influence for SC3, but they certainly share some theatricality–especially the live versions.

Then I remembered that “Renunciation” was a cover. It was originally written by Ananda Shankar. Maybe it influenced Bauhaus, too, and that was possibly the connection. 

“Stigmata Martyr” seems like an obvious influence on Ministry, particularly “So What” and maybe in title only– “Stigmata.” For one, even early on Al Jourgensen was singing in a British accent not too removed from Murphy’s own. The approach toward basslines, the noise, the repetition, all seem cut from the same prayer cloth. I love Murphy’s exorcism in this song, as scary as anything Ministry has done. The bands project a similar chaos and energy on stage as well, though Ministry was certainly upping the ante throughout the ‘90s. 

I’ve thought about music as something fun, spiritual, or intellectual most of my life, but there’s been a joy in experiencing music in a practical sense–How fast can it make the flowers grow? I’m too late for the frizzy hair and leather pants, but I feel lucky to find In a Flat Field when I needed it, on the elliptical, bathed in the most unflattering fluorescent lighting.

We should all be lucky enough to find the music when we need it.


Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #13: Palm’s Rock Island

28 Wednesday Aug 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Lost Chords & Serenades Divine, Music

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Palm, Rock Island

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #13 by Stephen McClurg

Palm: Rock Island (2018)

A something in a summer’s noon –
A depth – an Azure – a perfume –

~Emily Dickinson

Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu.
Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu, nu.

~Anon., “Summer Is I-cumin In”

Palm’s Rock Island conjures an aura of summer, from the sharpest July light to the dimming of vacation’s last rays. The music is vibrant, partially because of the vocalists using higher registers and partially due to bright guitar tones. Despite being described as experimental or post-rock, there is a commitment on Rock Island to vocal melody, reminiscent of Lush’s floating, silvery vocals, and sometimes even Surf’s Up-era Beach Boys.

Palm Rock Island

At odds with this melodic catchiness is Palm’s approach to rhythm. A recurring compositional element on the record is a battery of stuttering rhythms and syncopations, several so severe they sound like skips or loops. Because they are performed, they don’t register like electronic or mechanical repetition, but feel like an organic jab-and-stammer. One of the ways they achieve this sound is by using slow strums, sounding one string at a time, rather than playing full chords, an effect emphasized by a kind of hyper-chorus effect that frequently sounds like steel drum triggers to me. It’s like a steak knife in the honey. The bass sometimes shifts to upbeats, rather than the traditional downbeats in a rock band. While it’s a technique common in funk (Larry Graham is a master), Palm uses it to disrupt anticipations rather than groove.

Other rhythmic approaches include polyrhythms. I regularly hear parts in three played over rhythms in two or four. On some tracks, rather than lock in on a riff, the band will play a musical statement across multiple instruments. For example, in “Forced Hand,” a musical phrase starts on guitar, continues on drums, and ends on bass. Some first-time listeners may find these approaches jarring, but after a few listens, the songs are as hummable as any radio pop.

The lyrics, often about relationships or lost loves, are cryptic, but not wholly abstract. 

The story in “Pearly” feels just outside of comprehension, but shimmers with vague dread. The song is about a love and a vow, but it’s unclear what kind of love and what kind of vow. 

The first verse ends with “My own rules/Are always best when broken” and leads into the commitment or warning of the chorus: “I want nothing but the best for us.” The end of the song turns, and makes the direction of the danger ambiguous. Someone “enduring a vow” sounds unpleasant and recasts the “I want nothing but the best for us” line:

In a void
You put a lock on the door
But you endure
A vow

A vow to stop at nothing
I want nothing but the best for us

The lyrics are tinged with obsession, while the music ripples with bright elements like a vocal choir sample or trigger saying “Ahhh!,” chorus effeects, and handclaps. The song feels like horror in daylight as it bleeds away, slowing, then staggering to silence. 

“Composite” features the aforementioned strumming effect, yet bounces in ways reminiscent of late-’60s Beach Boys or yacht rock. The “composite” in the lyrics–“Let me put the pieces back in place”–could be referring to a relationship or the world at large. Lyrics like “Fake a nap to breathe in for a while” capture that kind of peculiar dread about the unpeculiar, an amorphous doubt on a sunny Saturday. 

“Composite” also describes the song’s structure. For example, the last “verse” is really a composite of various song elements. Many of the songs on Rock Island play with verse-chorus-verse structure, but bend and alter it, often by having one or two different bridges or alternate, sometimes intertwining, sections.

While “Dog Milk” and “Color Code” are two favorites, I keep coming back to “Heavy Lifting.” And though the songs may have little to do with each other, I keep pairing it in my mind with the Talking Heads’ track “The Book I Read.” Both songs take quotidian objects and events, but say so much with that simplicity. “The book I read was in your eyes” has been a line that has stayed with me since I first heard it. Similarly, “Heavy Lifting” has lines like “Go out and let the cat in/Work out a plan to retire” or “You want more/Well, so do I (conditioned?) / The last one / I’ll ask you for.” Half of the song is a gorgeous, hypnotic intertwining of mostly instrumental parts. It reminds me of the “Na na na na” part of “The Book I Read” or the last third of “Found a Job,” David Byrne’s short instrumental section written as a tribute to Steve Reich–or at least meant to emulate some of Reich’s compositional techniques. These are short, meditative musical gifts big enough to live in.

While the lyrical content is more in line with the rest of the album, “Swimmer” sounds like the Residents covering “Kokomo.” It combines lyrics like “They’ll bend your eye’s ‘til all you can see is the sunshine” with electronic horn and percussion sounds that echo Residential soundscapes. 

Sometimes instrumentals feel out of place on rock/pop records, like unfinished songs. On Rock Island, the instrumentals contribute to the whole. The instrumental track “20664” opens with Eno-esque buzzing and synth before uneven hip hop electronic drums or drum triggers–that echo the opening of the album– take over the track. “Theme from Rock Island” features jangly guitars under a theme built on melodica or keyboard violin–or possibly triggers meant to sound like that. Either way, they have a breathy quality and the melodic sense of other vocal songs on the record.

Rock Island approaches at slants and angles that make it evocative, but hard to classify. Palm satisfyingly sounds like a coherent, unique whole, and not a solo project in waiting. It will be interesting to hear where they go next.

You can listen to and order Rock Island on Palm’s Bandcamp page. 


McClurg

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #12: Safe as Milk Dialogue

16 Tuesday Jul 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Lost Chords & Serenades Divine, Music

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Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, Safe as Milk

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #12 by Stephen McClurg and John King

Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band: Safe as Milk (1967)

STEPHEN: Unlike Machine Head, Safe as Milk has been a favorite album for about two decades, though I felt late to the Beefheart party.

Safe as Milk

After college, I played music regularly and met several Zappa fans. I knew Zappa as a pop culture reference, a guest on The Monkees. These guys discussed how Zappa and Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) went to high school and played in bands together and I thought that was interesting.

Most of my friends were not into Top 40 music. Everyone had a few overlapping tastes, but I had a friend into noise, a friend who played fingerstyle blues, friends playing jazz, etc. I had unknowingly played a few Beefheart songs in one band.  I played to the chords, since I hadn’t heard the songs, but they stood out to me and I wanted to hear more. When I found out it was The Magic Band, I asked what I should hear next.

Mistakenly, I was told Trout Mask Replica.

Trout Mask Replica

While it’s not my favorite Beefheart record, I do like Trout Mask now, but upon first hearing it, I felt cheated. Initially, I thought, “They’re playing two or three songs at once. Ok….” I had heard so much about this record over the years and I just didn’t get it. I know I’m not the only one who has had or will have that experience. It’s not an easy record to digest.

I gave up on Beefheart until I heard “Electricity” on a documentary. I immediately responded to that song and we started covering it. That made me want to check out Safe as Milk.

The album opens with “Sure ‘Nuff ‘n’ Yes, I Do,” a variation on the blues standard “Rollin’ ‘n’ Tumblin’.” It’s funny to think of this band–known for being challenging–whose first song (on an album, I think they did some previous singles) is essentially a “girls-and-cars” song.

That first verse has a mysterious quality. The desert part happens to be true for Van Vliet and it seems to place it out of the traditional Delta blues, but it’s a quote from “Minglewood Blues” that the Grateful Dead eventually popularized–after this record. Mentioning New Orleans brings in the hoodoo, voodoo, gris-gris, and all that which is accompanied by the slide guitar, something more akin to the devil’s instrument–the fiddle–than to traditional European guitar. The “tornado” piece reminds me of American tall tales, Pecos Bill, in particular, and finally, I love “the moon stickin’ in m’eye,” but I feel like that comes from somewhere, too.

The rest of the lyrics are mostly about pursuing love or sex, which just gets old to me and probably why I listen to a lot of instrumental music. Sometimes I just find that stuff boring, particularly men singing about “girls.”

During the third verse they play a two-measure break. That rhythmic sense in that verse, moving from something relatively smooth and pulsing to more stuttering parts becomes a method that the band will use throughout its existence. It’s one of the ways that they build contrasts.

Part of the lyrics at the end make me laugh: “Stick with me and I’ll stick with me and you.”

The most exciting aspects of this track for me are Ry Cooder’s slide playing and John French’s drums.

JOHN: If memory serves, I first started listening to the good Captain while recovering from a hernia operation deep in Interzone, quadrant 9.7. The bat couriers were disrupted by the sulfur hurricanes, and on a really bad TV set with sandpaper reception I probably saw the same documentary that you did: The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart.

“Electricity” drew me into its web, too, in part because the song is an ecstatic hoedown with swooping and galloping slide guitars and a theremin and the Captain is yowling like the ghost of Wolfman Jack who wasn’t even dead yet. It almost sounds like a 1950s novelty record. Those tinkling high notes on the guitar recall the Indian whooping of young David Lynch indicating something about the passage to the Black Lodge. One thing I find strange is that this never made it onto the classic psychedelic songs featured on the radio.

STEPHEN: In one of the Black Lodge or dream sequences, there’s a close-up of a mouth saying “electricity.” And almost every film uses flickering lights or sparks as some sort of sign of evil or danger.

The original idea before theremin was to use a saw, but supposedly they couldn’t get a good recording of one. Saws on metal making music and sparks (metal machine music?) which oddly links with the future Lynch work. I’ve always imagined that they would have sounded similar to the various metallic sounds Peter Thomas was able to conjure in the 1971 Fists of Fury soundtrack.

JOHN: Safe as Milk might be the safest Beefheart record, but it sure punched a big psychic hole in 1967 and marked a major psychedelic turn, but it’s also a trippy march through so many classic genres of songs. On a first listen, Safe as Milk is both weird and very familiar.

STEPHEN: One of the interesting things about the record is the mixture of genres you mention. They do garage rock. They do soul/R&B, blues, and whatever “Electricity” is.

“Zig Zag Wanderer,” again, in some ways is a rock-and-roll cliche: the drug song. Most of the time that’s also boring to me. Zig Zag is a type of rolling paper.

I do like the fairy tale imagery. I feel like “the wanderer” here isn’t going to lose his house because he is in some ways his house and is always traveling with it. “You can dance, you can prance. / These old timbers got strong beams.” The house is well-built: he’s got strong legs.

Again, like that “stick with me” line, I love “Heaven’s free, ‘cept for a dollar.”

JOHN: The lyrics get so specific for Beefheart, even if I don’t really follow what he is saying. Maybe I am not listening hard enough, or maybe I am listening exactly as lucidly as can be without going crazy. This was the same year The Doors released Strange Days, The Grateful Dead released The Grateful Dead and Anthem of the Sun, and The Beatles released Sergeant Pepper and The Magical Mystery Tour, though “I am the Walrus” certainly reaches Beefheartian levels of lyrical disjointedness.

STEPHEN: I love the bass and vocals section of “Zig Zag Wanderer.” The bass sounds like a tuba. There are a lot of complaints about the way this recording sounds, especially from the musicians involved, but I’ve always liked it. It’s not clean, but it is full of character. I know there were quite a few overdubs, but it captures a band playing together in a room really well.

JOHN: Compared to the Beatles, the good Captain seems to be recording in a tin outhouse somewhere in Albuquerque. “Zig Zag Wanderer” is a bit repetitive to me, and a bit too on the nose–the song doesn’t zigzag as much as the lyrics would suggest. Not a bad vamp, and wow that bass is fat, but not a lot of surprises outside of the general crusty texture. Honestly, the strength of this record is its profoundly crusty texture and the odd arrangements.

STEPHEN: The only record I know well on that list you mentioned is Strange Days and it has marvelous production, but I agree, the texture and arrangements here help make the character of the record. I’ll take odd and crusty as much as marvelous.

“Call on Me” always makes me think of the intro to The Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” It’s partially because the guitar effect sounds somewhat like a 12-string. The lyrics don’t do much for me on this one.

JOHN: “Call on Me” is rhythmically interesting. The jangly guitars bouncing with the harpsichord bits make this a seasick adventure in the best possible way. The lyrics are vapid, instructing the listener that the singer can help appease her (his?) loneliness while the music is a bit batshit, suggesting that the singer is lonely and weird and maybe not the most reliable antidote to loneliness, but then again if you are lonely you probably need someone weird to identify with. But frankly when listening to Beefheart, I often ignore the lyrics, except when he speak-sings poetry.

STEPHEN: I’d never thought of that, but Beefheart’s narrators come off as unreliable as Poe’s.

I like the horn parts on this and that they fade into the riff from “Then He Kissed Me,” which turns up in a lot of places.

JOHN: “Dropout Boogie” is the first great song on Safe as Milk.

STEPHEN: Yeah, even though the voice is stylized after Howlin’ Wolf, this one feels like the first “Beefheart” tune on the record. He sounds menacing even though the lyrics, again, aren’t much to me, though I love this section:

You told her you loved her,
So bring her the butter.
You love her adapt her.
You love her adapt her.
Adapt her adapter.

Something about “Adapt her adapter” reminds me of early domestic relationships in Cronenberg films.

And then there’s a great pseudo-waltz section with marimba that transitions to solo guitar that builds the phrase higher and then when the main riff slithers back in it just sounds even dirtier. The rhythmic sense of this track has nice off-kilter moments like the “What about after that?” phrase.

JOHN: The feel is if The Trashmen had a cold and were covering The Kinks and forgot the lyrics, with the odd dainty flourishes of the marimbas.

STEPHEN: “I’m Glad” is fine as a soul track, but it’s not my favorite thing that the Magic Band does.

JOHN: It’s a cross between The Philly sound and Van Morrison. What’s weird is how not weird it is.

STEPHEN: It does serve as a kind of palate cleanser for “Electricity,” which we’ve discussed a little. But, yeah, imagine being in a crowd and seeing them play “Electricity” and then “I’m Glad.” I would be energized hearing “Electricity” last, but confused if “I’m Glad” were last.

“Electricity” reminds me of Blue Velvet, “Now it’s dark,” “In Dreams,” the lipstick scene, etc.:

High-voltage man kisses
night to bring the light
to those who need
t’ hide their shadow-deed
hide their shadow-deed
Seek electricity………..

“Yellow Brick Road” is one that I normally wouldn’t like. Too positive, but besides “Electricity” it is one of the tracks that oddly defines the record for me. Lynch also uses Wizard of Oz imagery in several films. There’s a simple bell or xylophone that plays a simple, happy melodic line, and I’ve always liked the kind of bouncy, fairy tale, “peppermint kite” aspect of this track.

These works are all Americanizations of the European fairy tale tradition. Similarly, Lynch mines The Hardy Boys and ‘50s Big Boy culture in a way that Beefheart mines these American musical traditions.

“Plastic Factory,” for me, is like “I’m Glad”: It’s fine for what it is, I’m just not as interested in it. I like some images in the lyrics, the vocal whoops that Beefheart does so well, I’m not sure what they’re called, but it’s almost like an octave shift on a syllable, and the primal nature of the bridge that shifts into a three-feel.

“Where’s There’s Woman” has some cool echo or delay effects and creates a dangerous, sexy–maybe noirish?–mood. I think Zappa is on the backing vocals, but that’s about all I think about the track. I like what it evokes, but the details aren’t necessarily interesting to me.

JOHN: The tempo of “Where’s There’s Woman” is so fucking creepy, like insectile smoke unfurling into the mind of a city, and the lyrics seem to match:

Where there’s truth, the green valley steals cottonwood

Where there’s peace, a little cloud of music gleams brotherhood

STEPHEN: One of my favorite drum tracks is on “Grown So Ugly,” especially what French does with the high-hat accents on the verse. The guitar intro has that off-kilter blues sound the band could do well. Also, there’s a magnificent use of tension before the band shifts into what I guess is a pre-chorus of fantastic howls in a two-measure guitar and drum phrase that builds to those wolfman sounds (Oooohhhhh Baay–Bay!”).

There’s a sense of the wolfman’s story or something like a doppelganger, though it’s explained through the line about being in Angola prison for 20 years. Unlike “Where’s There’s Woman,” there are a lot of details in this one I find more interesting. The bass part is traditional, but perfect in this song.

JOHN: When white people appropriate the blues, it helps for them to find a gimmick that lets them in. Jack White used avant garde style with the costumes and color schemes of The White Stripes. But weirdos like Tom Waits and Beefheart seem to transcend the question of race, which is to say their blues are reconfigured into their own weirdness.

STEPHEN: For me, the weakest part of “Autumn’s Child” is the vocal lines with Zappa and the theremin that then become the chorus. They sound boringly psych-rock to me, but the rest of the track is spectacular. The song has a range of parts and maybe my favorite lyrics on the album. There are several spots I like, but I might as well quote the first verse:

Autumn’s child got a loophole ‘round her finger.
Halo rings her head.
Cornhusk hair makes me linger.
Her cat’s stare meets my dare.
A man’s chair greets my stare.

I’ve always heard that second line as “Halo razorhead,” but I guess the pronunciation is something like “Halo rangs’er head.” I’ll still probably always hear the former.

JOHN: You’ve skipped over the absolute best song on the album: “Abba Zaba”! The rumbling percussion with those madenning lyrics sung with such confidence:

Song before song before song blues
Babbette baboon
Babbette baboon

STEPHEN: Yeah! I don’t know why I skipped it. I feel the same way–everything works here, which is maybe why it was supposed to be the title track. The company who owns the candy of the same name had issues with it. The back of the record has the pattern that’s on the wrapper! I’ve heard the Babbette baboon reference is to the artwork or some kind of artwork associated with the candy, but I may be confused about that.

Of course, as a bassist I was intrigued that there was a bass solo. I should relearn it. I love how French, as usual, drives the song. I just find the lead guitar parts on this one beautiful: crackly, birdlike, sometimes insectile, but still beautiful.

The “song before song” lyric you mention is one of my favorites, along with “two shadows at noon” and “tobacco sky.” Pungently evocative imagery. It gives the listener a lot of room for interpretation and discovery.

JOHN: That dominant bass and noodling guitar reminds me of how gorgeously off-kilter Primus is. That is a fine bass solo, and the song is this rhythmic chant of joyous nonsense. Hopefully that description can be put on my tombstone.

Marc Maron bought the LP and a stranger who saw him asked, “Catching Up?” Aren’t we all?


McClurg

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

 

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #11: Machine Head Dialogue

06 Wednesday Jun 2018

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Lost Chords & Serenades Divine, Music

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deep purple, machine head

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #11 by Stephen McClurg and John King

Deep Purple: Machine Head (1972)

In my weekly blog post, I discussed the recent circumstances that led me to hearing Deep Purple’s classic album for the first time. John won’t shut up about it.

Deep Purple Machine Head

JOHN: Turns out a “machine head” is the part of an instrument for tuning strings. Hmmm.

STEPHEN: Yeah, it is a “machine head,” but I’ve never heard a musician call it that. Everyone calls it a “peg” or a “tuner,” though “machine head” may be more common in England. I just figured it was a not-so-subtle sexual reference like their name.

Is the cover supposed to represent the title? Heads reflected in a metal machine? It freaks me out, like they’re all standing behind me in an elevator and I’m looking at their reflections on the door desperate to get to my floor. Maybe they’re all staring at a metal sex doll trying to figure out how it works and wondering who will go first.

I had written about how I happened to hear the album. What about you? When did you first hear it?

I’d also be interested in what your experience of the record is as a non-musician—or do you play guitar? The song (you know which one) is so attached to guitar playing that it’s almost impossible for me to divorce my listening experience from my musical apprenticeship. [In my original post, I discussed how “Smoke on the Water” was verboten in most musical contexts.]

JOHN: I got the LP of Machine Head around ‘87 or ‘88 if memory serves. Vinyl was cheap then, a dying format, and I got it out of a pure dumb hunger for more music. The crudeness of the cover is exactly how I felt, and I was pretty sure it couldn’t be any worse than Quiet Riot, who invited us to bang our heads in 1983.

I don’t remember if I cared about “Smoke on the Water.” What I remember is that I was wowed by the organ and the drums on this record, much more than the guitars. One of my favorite records at the time was Long Player by the Small Faces, and I also had this 45 of theirs that had an instrumental called “Skewiff (Mind the Fuse)” that was a good jam. Deep Purple felt like a hard rock version of them. Side 1 of Machine Head grooves.

STEPHEN: I like that the criteria for the purchase was “this can’t be worse than Quiet Riot.” Well, that and a “pure dumb hunger for more music.” I can still relate to that sentiment.

The drums haven’t struck me one way or another. It’s possible I haven’t listened to the record enough. Paice is a crisp, tight player, but I love Jon Lord’s organ work on it and I quite like Blackmore’s guitar playing.

I think I like “Highway Star” much more than you do.

JOHN: “Highway Star” is an okay vamp, but it never quite goes euphoric. The lyric conceits seem to be that the inamorata of the rock singer is a car, or is like a car, or he is some sort of trans-dimensional god zooming over the highway trying to keep up with a nymphomaniac’s libido. The music is good, and the lyrics weird enough to be listenable, but it doesn’t really get over.

STEPHEN: After “Highway Star,” “Maybe I’m a Leo” had some good lines, but didn’t strongly catch my ear.

JOHN: “Maybe I’m a Leo” is a funky groove that’s so desultory it’s beautiful. In 1972 when this record came out, being conversant in astrology was a prerequisite for getting laid—poor dumb bastards trying to walk in bell-bottoms—so the lyrics come off as really funny to me. Paice’s fills and the guitar and keyboard solos all seem to soar off the general sloppiness of the tune.

STEPHEN: I knew I would listen to the whole album when I got to the lines “I’m alone here/with emptiness, eagles, and snow” in “Pictures of Home.” That line works for me on multiple levels.

The first level was just how surprising it was. It caught me off guard with the connection of multiple levels of abstraction. Visually, it mentions mountains and such, too, and reminded me of Rush’s concept songs and albums—which I love. It’s a Dungeons and Dragons image.

But the lines are also interesting poetically. The repetition of the vowel sounds, especially how the “e” sounds are used, is nice. Also, that it sets up the long “o” early and comes back to it. In the full chorus, it plays off the assonance of “alone” and “snow” with “home”—a home that isn’t there. The words are connected by sound, but contrasted in terms of image. The syllables count down in an effective way: emptiness (3), eagles (2), snow (1).

This connected to my memory of Anglo-Saxon poetry with its ubi sunts, imagery, and alliteration. Making the literary connection, whether they intended it or not—really endeared me to the track. And it connects to both the outsider image, the Byronic aspect of rock’n’roll, and the warrior image of hard rock and metal.

Plus the bass solo! It’s kind of sloppy and raw, but punchy. I hear a lot of Mike Watt, or I should say that I think Roger Glover influenced Watt’s playing.

JOHN: “Pictures of Home” is bouncy like “Highway Star,” but really the song is an excuse to jam, and Ritchie Blackmore’s quivering guitars and that Jon Lord organ droning work well, and the singing is strong. I don’t listen to the lyrics too much, or else I’d probably have to stop listening to most rock music period. You’re a better listener than I am.

Perhaps it’s my tinnitus—SUPER FUCKING LOUD since seeing George Clinton earlier this month—but I can’t find the bass through the organ.

“Never Before” is a pulsing groove that sounds a lot more earnest than “Highway Star.” I am charmed by the chorus, “I’ve never felt soooooooo baaaaad … before” sung so prettily by Ian Gillan, the way no sad person could ever sing … unless one is a highway star.

Tracks 2-4 are truly great to drive through.

STEPHEN: That’s exactly what stands out to me on “Never Before.” I wish my heartbreak and sorrow sounded as sweet. Overall, it’s a groove and a chorus and not much else for me.

“Lazy” is the longest track on the album, but it’s ultimately a blues jam with vapid lyrics. It also gives them a chance, for maybe a minute, to almost play some “classical’ music. I would have liked more of that, especially the noisier possibilities, but I wonder if where the organ sounds novel to me, if it wasn’t something that people had gotten used to and were maybe tired of after the ‘60s. I’m sure a ton of psych-rock covered that territory.

JOHN: “Lazy” begins sounding like some live Doors vamp then veers into what could almost count as straightforward blues of that era, hints of Booker T and the MGs. Note: Ian Gillan is actually singing to himself, I think, as a lyric writer.

Lazy
just stay in bed
You’re lazy just stay in bed
You don’t want no money
You don’t want no bread
If you’re drowning
you don’t clutch no straw, no
If you’re drowning
you don’t clutch no straw
You don’t want to live
you don’t want to cry no more
Well my trying ain’t done no good
I said my trying ain’t done no good
You don’t make no effort
no, not like you should
Lazy
you just stay in bed
Lazy
you just stay in bed
You don’t want no money
You don’t want no bread

That was one unmotivated cat. Good harmonica, though. They do have the good taste to wait 4 minutes into a 7 minute song to start the singing. A minute and a half later, the band returns to jamming.

Actually, “Lazy” is fucking superior to Mick Jagger’s variation on this theme, “Let’s Work,” which should count as exhibit A in why Mick isn’t cool—not primitive cool, either.

Clearly the director of this video thought, “Mick means every word of this ironically, doesn’t he? Let’s have clichés of workers trying to prance along with Mick in the middle of dangerous vehicular traffic.” My favorite part is when pallbearers drop a coffin on the highway.

STEPHEN: I know the song preceded both of these films, but I was hoping “Space Truckin’” would be more Alien than Flash Gordon. But despite that silliness, it’s a rockin’ track. I’ve always liked that kind of Motown beat with the snare on all four, and in a rock situation it often gives the drummer space to do some interesting bass work.

I love how the gnarly, weaving chorus riff is an unexpected, but really cool, transition in and out of the verse, which has the same beat. That might be my favorite riff on the record.

The verses wouldn’t be as great if the band didn’t experiment with texture. The verse as it is isn’t that special, but right before the solos, Blackmore plays a choppy, muted rhythm against the verse, while Gillan goes shrieking full-on, like a Muppet in space on fire. For a verse! Of course, he brings it back and goes even higher for the conclusion of the song.

Also, that spacy chromatic transition from the solos seems out-of-place and perfect at the same time. There’s some string-bending like the beginning of “Iron Man.”

JOHN: The rollover riff to “Space Truckin’” is okay, I guess. Angus Young would speed up the tempo to that trick with “Who Made Who” and then more with “Thunderstruck” (which I always thought was an overblown copy of “Who Made Who”).

The lyrics of “Space Truckin’” are there maybe as part of the rhythm section, just to give Ian Gillan something to do. Clearly they could have taken more drugs, lyrically speaking. Really, this whole record belongs to Jon Lord and Ian Paice. If you think that Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars came out a year later, “Space Truckin’” is even more lyrically disappointing.

In 1996, there was a movie called Space Truckers starring Dennis Hopper. It didn’t use the Deep Purple song. Or special effects better than what MST3K was using at the time. Ash vs. Evil Dead used the song, though.

STEPHEN: I think part of the elevator pitch for Alien was that it was part Jaws and part truckers in space. It makes sense someone just ran with it.

How did you get into Small Faces/Faces? You mentioned them earlier, but even at the height of Rod Stewart’s fame I don’t remember hearing much about those groups. I think there was a lot of British rock that just didn’t make it over. I’m guessing anyway.

JOHN: I just had the one LP from The Faces (Small Faces), and it really came down to the randomness of what records I came across cheap in my teens. Rod Stewart confuses me in that he could be a hard rocker (“Hot Legs”) or disco trash (“Do You Think I’m Sexy?”) or treacly pop (“Forever Young”). Liberace had more musical integrity.

STEPHEN: There was a Zappa fan in our college orchestra. He was a percussionist who sat behind me and was a good-natured snob who was really into prog rock. I used to warm up every day with something like “Smoke on the Water” just to drive him crazy. “In a Gadda Da Vida” or even parts of “Do You Think I’m Sexy?”—etc. Sometimes I threw in some Police songs. I loved to see how much I could make him cringe.

Then again, he could have been cringing at my intonation on upright bass, but I like to think it was more about my skill of finding the most annoying riff at the right time.

JOHN: Yeah, out of context, the riff on “Smoke on the Water” sounds dumb. It doesn’t sound much better in context—like a satanic bowel movement. Come on cheese!—come on donuts!—get this evil—out o’ me!

I loved when the song was on season 2, episode 1 of The Sopranos. Tony is driving around in jersey and bopping awkwardly in his seat, and the CD glitches on Frank Zappa’s name, and goes Zap-Zap-Zap-Zap-Zap-Zap-Zap-Zap, and Tony blacks out crashing his goddamn SUV.


One of the reasons Deep Purple doesn’t get half the respect it deserves is because this one song is their legacy according to classic rock stations.

I fucking hate classic rock and all its two to five hundred song-lists set to replay and replay and replay and half of those were utterly fucking stupid the first time. No more “Hotel California” or “Paradise City” or anything by Bon Motherfucking Jovi. This isn’t the death of rock and roll. This is the zombie afterlife of actual rocks. It grinds my last fucking nerve, this bullshit.

STEPHEN: I think I used to know what “classic rock” is, but I don’t know anymore. It just so happens I’ve never been a fan of any of the bands you mention as “classic rock.” The Eagles just never caught my ear. I remember being a kid and being trapped in the car with my parents listening to the radio. My mom has always liked and still likes Top 40 music—-whatever happens to be Top 40. She heard Kanye before I did, though she’s never liked his stuff. When I was a kid she liked Devo, Talking Heads, and Blondie, so that’s what I heard growing up. But if I were in the car and “Hotel California” came on, I just hated how long and boring it seemed. I still don’t like the Eagles, but I’ve also never heard a whole album, which is the same situation I was in with Deep Purple which sparked this whole conversation to begin with—so I don’t know. Maybe I do like The Eagles and I just don’t know it yet.

I was already into Jane’s Addiction and Metallica when I heard Guns N’ Roses. Overall, I just wasn’t interested, I think I peaked in hard rock around White Lion and Def Leppard and just wasn’t interested anymore. It’s good that I’ve always been ready to hear something new, but bad in a sense that I think I understand something more than I do based on genre. Sometimes I’m just wrong. I’m willing to admit that. I think a lot of us do this. It’s partially survival—-otherwise the world is overwhelming, but there is something about getting into the details. They almost always subvert our shorthands.

I never liked Bon Jovi either, though “Runaway” cracks me up and that talk box effect on “Living on a Prayer” I always liked, but I always turned it off when the verse started.

But I actually like a lot of classic rock. Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, etc. I still love “White Rabbit” or “Barracuda” or….Is Lou Reed classic rock? Velvet Underground? I guess sometimes.

JOHN: I saw both Aerosmith and AC/DC in 1988, and White Lion was the opening act for both of them. GNR was the opener for Aerosmith for half of their tour, but nope, not for the Hollywood Sportatorium date. Wait? Wait? Why, White Lion, will you fucking get better if I wait? How about you wait, you skinny bitches.

Everything about Bon Jovi fills my heart with hate. They make White Lion sound like Slayer.

STEPHEN: I love “Wait.” That would have been an exciting time to see GNR.

I admire your ability to be angry about these things. I think for many years I felt poisoned by music around me and felt physically affected by music I didn’t like. These days I just say “not for me” and move on. I can be moved to tears by music, but I rarely react negatively to it.

I do not like that almost every public place I go to pipes in music.

JOHN: Now I lock myself into my iPod as much as possible when in public, which keeps me saner. I mean Taylor Swift’s music is purely anti-human and Katy Perry is a triumph of cliché, but I have mostly avoided them, whereas Bon Jovi and Poison and Van Hagar and a lot of other shit got their toxic tentacles into my ears as a teenager because iPods didn’t exist and I had to rely on the radio and (shudder) MTV.

Wait, you think I’m angry? What the fuck makes you say that?

Technically, the machine head is the peg, plus the gear and housing. The back of the LP featured the whole back neck of a … bass?

Deep Purple Machine Head back
I guess they thought that out of context “machine head” sounded really cool. They were kind of right.

STEPHEN: The digital age allowed me to call this album up and listen to it, but one of the things I don’t like, and maybe this is a “get off my lawn” moment, is the lack of artwork, lyrics, and notes. I’ve never seen the back cover, even after all those years of shuffling around used copies.

I agree. It’s a cool name! It cracks me up that they put the bass headstock on the back of the album. It’s so obvious that I find it as confusing as the cover. That looks like a Fender bass, but someone more eagle-eyed would be able to tell if it’s a Precision or Jazz bass.


McClurg

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #10: Diamanda Galás with John Paul Jones: The Sporting Life

16 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Blog Post, Lost Chords & Serenades Divine, Music

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Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #10 by Stephen McClurg

Diamanda Galás with John Paul Jones: The Sporting Life (1994)

[…]For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

~Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies, trans. Stephen Mitchell

“My voice was given to me as an inspiration for my friends, and a tool of torture and destruction to my enemies. An instrument of truth.”   ~Diamanda Galás

The Sporting Life

In listening to this album again, I remembered how often I heard Diamanda Galás referred to as either “the crazy one” or “the one who shrieks.” There’s a certain amount of truth to this. Galás frequently portrays characters that run the border between sanity and insanity (a few examples–just on this record–include “Skótoseme,” “Devil’s Rodeo,” and “Baby’s Insane”), though I think she’s performing “madness” in a way to comment on what she sees in the world.

An Anne Carson essay, “The Gender of Sound,” is useful here. Carson writes, “It is in large part according to the sounds people make that we judge them sane or insane, male or female, good, evil, trustworthy, depressive, marriageable, moribund, likely or unlikely to make war on us, little better than animals, inspired by God.”

Glass Irony & God.png

While Galás can conjure seemingly anyone or anything with her voice, she is often remembered for the high pitches and wailings which Carson says go “together with talkativeness to characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self control. […] Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable.” I think this effusion, this overflow of sound and energy, levels this traditional idea of quiet or silenced women. I believe Galás is playing with the tensions that Carson discusses, reappropriating these gendered ideas similar to how Kara Walker reappropriates racist and sexist imagery in her art.

Carson writes that “Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public, in ancient as well as modern contexts.” Galás is no stranger to performance art (she also uses glossolalia, or speaking in tongues), even her persona as an artist could be described as a kind of possession or a kind of ecstatic ritual. Other than being “that one who screams,” she’s probably best known for performing topless and covered in cow’s blood in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine during her Plague Mass, part of a body of work protesting the Catholic Church’s treatment of those suffering during the AIDS epidemic.

In discussing a poem by Alkaios, Carson writes, “the women are uttering a particular kind of shriek, the ololyga. […] It is a highpitched piercing cry uttered at certain climactic moments in ritual practice (e.g., at the moment when a victim’s throat is slashed during sacrifice) or at climactic moments in real life (e.g., at the birth of a child) and also a common feature of women’s festivals.” The sound can represent either “intense pleasure or intense pain.” These outpourings had to be regulated in that they could either represent madness or create madness in the listener. Much of Sporting Life’s material represents scenes of amour fou, or obsessive love, also a weaving of pleasure and pain. It’s interesting to note that her music is called “sexy” by some and “demonic” by others. In other words, Galás reappropriates elements of the oloyyga and its rituals, and spins them into modern narratives.

One set of songs on the album is built out of the rhythm section of John Paul Jones and Pete Thomas (of Elvis Costello and the Attractions). The eight-string bass that Jones plays on the record mirrors the effect of a tightly played riffs played on both guitar and bass. In effect, he sounds more like Jesus Lizard on “Skótoseme” than Led Zeppelin. The title track riffs sound similar to Rage Against the Machine. “Do You Take This Man?” is built on a structure reminiscent of Morphine and the keyboard line on “Hex” could be on an early-post pop Ministry record.

The album opens with Jones tremolo picking on a reverby eight-string bass and Galás mirroring this on voice, similar to many styles of Arabic music. Galás doesn’t simply mimic musical genre, she incorporates textures and techniques from various sources and synthesizes them to express seemingly anything at whim. Galás often performs multiple voices like multiple characters in these songs. She sings in Greek, English, Spanish, and glossolalia–maybe even other languages I didn’t pick out–on this track alone. Each character seems to speak a different language and if you listen to the record on headphones, these voices float around you, an effect I think of as “The Furies.” At the end of this track, as on other tracks, she manages so much vocal force she overdrives the recording equipment, but controls it, similar to a guitarist using feedback. While the track features her fusion of extended vocal techniques, operatic vibrato, and blues, this overdriven effect is nothing I’ve ever heard another singer do.

The title track is in some ways an extension and lyrically an inversion of this opener (called “Skótoseme,”  which means “kill me” in Greek). If “Skótoseme” is directed inward, then “The Sporting Life” is directed outward and ponders a variety of ways of destroying the once-beloved.

The other strand on the record includes ballads, particularly blues and soul ballads.“The Dark End of the Street” is unexpected, but magnificent. It’s a song frequently covered, and Galás and Jones perform a particularly gorgeous one here. The song is originally out of the Memphis Soul tradition, which Jones nails, while adding lines similar to James Jamerson of Motown fame. He spent several years as a session musician before Led Zeppelin, and at least at the recording of Sporting Life, hadn’t lost any of those chops.

Galás’s performance on this track, hammond organ and vocals, is sublime. In relation to the gendering of sound, this song is normally performed by men, so she also flips the power dynamic on the song, telling the man not to cry and just “walk on by.”

“Baby’s Insane” is a favorite not only of this album, but also of her catalogue, and it’s a gospel tune–of sorts. The hammond organ began as an alternative for churches that couldn’t afford a pipe organ. The musicians here are cheekily playing within the idiom, which often features vocals, hammond organ, drums (often tamborine, too, but they don’t go that far), and bass. The melody is fairly simple, as many sing-alongs are supposed to be. The refrain of “Baby’s Insane” is frequently repeated. The song is in a way an extension of how Galás uses ritual and music, and often fuses the sacred and profane. Here the lyrics provide the profane. They begin:

Arms covered in blood, the war has begun.
Hide the straight razor ’cause Baby’s insane.
New telephone number, new lock on the door.
Hide all the knives, ’cause Baby’s insane.

On top of incredible vocal technique, an intensity of performance, and sometimes serious and disturbing subject matter, Galás is often wickedly funny.

While Diamanda Galás still records and performs, Sporting Life is out-of-print, though there are copies floating around for sale online and in used bins. You can hear the record on YouTube, and see a few live videos, including a performance on The John Stewart Show.


Carson, Anne. “The Gender of Sound.” Glass, Irony, and God. New York: New Directions,
1995: 
119-142.


McClurg

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #9: Stump: Quirk Out (1986)

02 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Lost Chords & Serenades Divine, Music

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Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #9 by Stephen McClurg

Stump: Quirk Out (1986)

Stump Quirk Out.png

Stump, a band difficult to categorize, is compared most frequently to Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. Stump formed right around the time that Beefheart’s last official album, Ice Cream for Crow (1982), came out, so maybe something in the ether passed on there, but Stump rarely reference the blues, a basic ingredient in the Beefheart stew. Stump comes out of pop-rock in terms of melody and punk in terms of aggressive, emphatic rhythms–though they share a similar sense of arrangement with the Magic Band: independent, weaving guitar and bass parts that lock up with the drums on certain beats, and sudden shifts of tone or tempo. Stump also reminds me of Wall of Voodoo, The Residents, or early DEVO, and were precursors to ‘90s bands like Primus or Mr. Bungle.

One characteristic that all of these bands share is a sense of humor, which turns some listeners away, something I’ve never understood. Maybe my predisposition for it was growing up and reading MAD or listening to The Muppet Movie soundtrack and enjoying the funny songs as much as the tender ones. I’ve had more than one person tell me that humor in music “makes me feel stupid.” It makes me feel human, and many of these bands revel in a type of humor that can be gleaned from literature like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (if read as a mock epic), Beckett’s Endgame (“If you must hit me, hit me with the axe.”), or Kafka’s Metamorphosis (Despite having turned into “vermin,” Samsa’s worried about getting to work on time.)

But I digress.

Quirk Out opens with “Tupperware Stripper,” a song that showcases a punk approach to the Beefheart aesthetic. Mick Lynch, the singer and songwriter, opens the song chanting about a housewife looking forward to a Tupperware party for reasons other than the plastic. Lynch frequently tells absurdist stories built from quotidian elements, yet steeped in beautiful and bizarre imagery. Don Van Vliet (the “Captain” of the Magic Band) is known for a similar approach, but Lynch doesn’t use Van Vliet’s growled dadaisms. Lynch leans toward more traditional senses of narrative and melody.

This song also showcases Kev Hopper’s idiosyncratic playing. Hopper plays fretless electric bass and utilizes the expressiveness of the instrument, and at once exploits the characteristic smooth glissando and works against it with a variety of rhythmic clicks. His lines weave traditional roots with harmonics, sliding harmonics, chords, and ghost notes that become either rhythmic or melodic depending on how he deploys them.

The second song, “Our Fathers,” is a kind of rock ballad, reminiscent of Tears for Fears or Big Country, with the exception of Hopper’s harmonics and chorusy, sliding octaves, which would have likely been performed on a synthesizer in those other bands. Stump scattered a few pop-rock ballads throughout their brief catalogue. “Our Fathers” is surprising in how comfortably one can imagine it on Top 40 radio or on a film soundtrack, yet the song has probably rarely been heard out of the UK, especially pre-Internet. The song’s lyrics are about “the sins of the fathers” or how, as Philip Larkin put it, “man hands on misery to man” without learning anything from the process.

Built out of wobbly, skronky guitar and bass lines, the verse (and guitar solo) on “Kitchen Table” is probably the most Beefheartian piece on this record. The chorus switches into a more traditional rhythm and sing-along that eventually becomes a dense, roiling noise of an ending.

“Buffalo”–their “most famous” song–was my introduction to the group. While watching the video, it’s hard to deny the charisma of Mick Lynch despite the fact that (or because?) he looks like a rubbery, spastic Tintin spouting seemingly jejune lyrics like “Swing bottom / Swing big bottom / Swing-a ling-a” or “How much is the fish? / How much is the chips? / Does the fish have chips?” My children have been dancing and singing to this song since they can remember and still request it. So it’s childish, but maybe in the purest sense. Besides, how many times can one hear “The Hot Dog Dance” or “Let It Go” and not lose it? Lynch says in a few live videos that this song is about the reincarnation of the American Buffalo, which I presume means, given the song narrative, that they come back as American tourists, “bulls” in the “china shop” of London.

Chris Salmon’s guitar solo is sublime, stuttering wonkiness. There are moments in his output with the band that sound like Snakefinger or D. Boon. He plays country licks on a few tunes reminiscent of other ‘80s oddball groups like Wall of Voodoo that had similar forays into the genre. One of my favorite songs by any group, and one that highlights Salmon’s use of country-styled guitar is “Charlton Heston” on their only full-length release A Fierce Pancake (1988). While Salmon pseudo-chicken picks, the backing rhythm is built out of a plague of croaking frogs. The lyrics are built out of puns of Biblical language along with references to film and the apocalypse. Fishbone’s “Party at Ground Zero” is a similar example of Cold War apocalyptic anxiety filtered through humor.

“Everything In Its Place”–a sort of song built out of chorusy bass and country-esque yelps and phrasing–delineates a crude Panglossian approach to human biology, including lines like “You should be glad he put two nostrils /  in the middle of your head. / You might have to smell the roses / through your underpants instead.” “Bit Part Actor” reels like a noisy punk stomp, with a snaky, scalar guitar line that ends the verse phrases. Drummer Rob McKahey anchors this last track with what sounds like violently-played homemade percussion. Another comparison to Beefheart may be how Rob McKahey drives Stump’s music similar to how John French’s drums anchored the Magic Band. McKahey favors high hat patterns more than French, who is known for his tom and full-kit patterns. McKahey, on other releases, also plays bodhran, an Irish frame drum frequently played with a double-headed stick or tipper.

None of Stump’s work is in print, though there is an odd early and late collection available. Their other albums are worth hearing, especially if you like Quirk Out, which in some forms includes their first EP Mud on a Colon (1986). A Fierce Pancake, mentioned above, is worth hearing along with the disc of unreleased material on The Complete Anthology (2008, now also out-of-print). Their music does exist in various forms digitally, and maybe the Anthology will get released again.

In 2014, the band released a YouTube video called “Finding Mick Lynch” in which the members had gotten back together and tracked down their vocalist. Evidently this led to rehearsals and spots on the festival circuit. Unfortunately, none of it panned out as Lynch died in December 2015.

Since Lynch’s death, there has been more discussion on the Internet and more video uploads about the group. Lynch helped found an Irish puppeteering group that is still going. I would love to see any puppet work that he had either performed or had written. He also evidently did a one-man show of songs on a guitar with no strings. More recently, I’ve discovered Kev Hopper’s music. Along with free improvisation, Hopper also recorded a pop album with a single and video that is like Thomas Dolby and David Lynch collaborating with Peter Greenaway.


McClurg

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #8 : Oumou Sangaré: Mogoya (2017)

18 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Lost Chords & Serenades Divine, Music

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Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #8 by Stephen McClurg

Oumou Sangaré: Mogoya (2017)

Innovation in pop music seems connected to production rather than musicianship. I hear great sounds and textures sometimes in pop music, but it’s rare I get excited by musical performance. Maybe that’s my own failing in not putting in the listening hours in the genre. Whatever it may be, I’ve been enchanted by not only the production, but also the depth of musical performance on Oumou Sangaré’s recent album Mogoya.

Mogoya

The initial allure was a pop record played by humans. Sangaré’s voice isn’t overproduced or layered in effects. Sometimes it’s bare and raw, yet still melodic. She’s effective and beguiling in any dynamic—understated or soaring—though I do not understand the lyrics. I still enjoy music, especially pop music, with lyrics I can’t understand. Even my elementary school-age children were undaunted by the language barrier. Their reaction to this record was to simply dance.

From what I understand she sings in Wassoulou, the name of the language and region in Mali in which she lives. She has been a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations and is frequently working for and singing about women’s rights. Part of me dismisses needing to know anything about her biography or the lyrics in order to enjoy the music. Another part of me rejoices that she does humanitarian work and is a role model for women in and outside of Mali. Like Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, Sangaré’s music is proof that politics, poetry, and dance do not have to exclude each other. Incidentally, master drummer Tony Allen, who helped create Afrobeat with Fela, appears on Mogoya.

The album opens with the track “Bena bena” and the now iconic sound of Malian acoustic guitar. The other musicians come in together with a bass riff that drives the song–a line that plays off of the rhythmic tensions of a meter based on 3 and 4. Sangaré is also called “The Songbird of Wassalou” and as on many of the tracks, this one highlights her and her fellow singers’ voices.

“Yere Faga” carries an anti-suicide message, according to NPR. The groove and some of the synth sounds are similar to those from the Talking Heads Speaking in Tongues-era. Dark, rolling marimba chords provide an atmosphere punctuated by distorted slide guitar licks.

“Mali niale” is a ballad that is undergirded by polyrhythms, and initial chord changes that are reminiscent of the beginning of the Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.” The similarities end there. The stars here are not surprisingly the choral and solo vocals that are powerful, but still tender enough to make the song work as a ballad.

“Kamelemba” features a syncopated bass groove that accents the and-of-2 and the 4 (as a reference, the stereotypical classic country bass plays on the one and three–the BOOMS of the BOOM-chicka rhythm). Like “Fadjamou,” it’s a nice groove-oriented dance track, but like “Mali niale” the vocals are a highlight. The interplay of the choral vocals and Sangaré’s solo voice is one of my favorite performances on the album. Complementing the weaving of the voices is the exchange between the guitar and the n’goni, an African harp with a rustic quality to it used throughout the album (a likely ancestor of the banjo).

“Koun koun,” another ballad, develops throughout the track. The bass line begins with a three note phrase and lots of space over several measures that becomes more complex as the song continues. Again, the n’goni provides a foundation and the drums eventually slide into a double-time feel. It’s a dreamy, low-key track, but one that is far from filler. “Mogoya” is a tender, gorgeous closer featuring strings and synth washes and other abstract electronic sounds that help build the soundscape for the vocals.

Song order matters and care has been taken in organizing this record. The performances and both the attention and restraint of the production team make this an overall exceptional selection of pop music. I intend to dig into Sangaré’s earlier recordings, but I am a little wary given how high the bar is set with Mogoya.

Oumou Sangaré’s Mogoya is available through her label, No Format, and other online distributors. World Circuit carries her previous releases.


McClurg

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #7: Angles 9: Disappeared Behind the Sun

04 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Lost Chords & Serenades Divine

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Lost Chords and Serenades Divine #7 by Stephen McClurg

Angles 9: Disappeared Behind the Sun (2017)

If someone has been escaping reality, I don’t expect him to dig my music, and I would begin to worry about my writing if such a person began to really like it. My music is alive and it’s about the living and the dead, about good and evil. It’s angry, yet it’s real because it knows it’s angry.

        —Charles Mingus

My first notions of music as political and social commentary grew out of seeing the once omnipresent TV commercials for Time-Life box sets. I mostly remember boomer nostalgic over the music of the ‘60s. This was all vocal music, stuff like “Give Peace a Chance” or “Fortunate Son,” with the exception of Hendrix’s jagged take on “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Was it protest? Or drugs and distortion?

I’ve heard arguments about the beauty or crassness of that moment, but it’s not often that instrumental music, unless nationalistic, evokes much commentary, at least in the world in which I’ve grown up. There are stories of people walking out, hissing, or being generally disgusted over the third movement of Mahler’s first symphony when he turned a children’s song into a death march in 1889. Stravinsky caused a riot with the premiere of “The Rite of Spring” in 1913, though the intensity of the disturbances in both of these cases seems to grow and get mythologized over the decades. Ornette Coleman was bullied by other jazz artists and had his head shaved by police–for being different and playing differently.

“Blues People” by LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) opened me up to ways of hearing politics in instrumental music. For example, he reads bebop drummers as engaging particularly African approaches to rhythm and polyrhythms as a rejection of the swing style that had been a part of many of the large, mostly white, big bands.

There has been an openly progressive and protest movement within the large group improvising tradition. The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) has been known for its avant-garde creativity and has been a rich ground for African American and other artists of color. Similarly in Europe, the Globe Unity Orchestra wanted to unite players from around the world in a large free jazz ensemble. Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra made pointed protests against America’s involvement in Vietnam. Maybe Sun Ra created his own universe, through the Arkestra, in order to break free and comment on the one Herman Blount was born into.

disappeared_behind_the_sun.png

My assumption is that Angles 9 is working in this tradition of free jazz ensemble with “Disappeared Behind the Sun.” The title of the record is a translation of an Iranian phrase that is meant to describe people who are detained by governments, but not formally arrested or tried, and never come back. The music is born out of frustrations and the complicated emotions of difficult political climates. This music shrieks in protest and howls affirmations. It rocks and swings, cries and punches, laments and screams.

“Equality & Death (Mothers, Fathers, Where Are Ye?)” opens with free sax playing, an expected sound for a record like this. But the drums come in and drive the track using a variation of the Motown rhythm, a snare hit on each down beat, often played by Uriel Jones, which is unexpected and propels the track. It’s one of my favorite recordings I’ve heard this year. Andreas Werliin’s drum sound is dynamic, with a bass tone at times wonderfully cavernous–likely a large marching drum. His use of tonal colors with cymbals and slight altering of rhythms with the same beats, creates interesting alternating textures throughout each tracks.

Along with the sensibilities of a free jazz ensemble, Angles 9 mixes in the sounds of Balkan brass and occasionally New Orleans second line marching bands and funk grooves. A few of the tracks echo elements of the late 60s’ Coltrane groups, particularly the Jimmy Garrison bass ostinatos. But regardless of influences, Angles 9 is making a music that is beneficially filling and fulfilling: a music for the body and mind, heart and soul.

You can hear the recording and purchase it from Clean Feed Records.


McClurg

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

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Recent Posts

  • Episode 456: Lily Brooks-Dalton!
  • The Curator of Schlock #339: Black Scorpion
  • Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #106: Crafting a Witch’s Story
  • The Diaries of a Sozzled Scribbler #23
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