Time is here today and because it keeps slipping, slipping into the future, I need to move on this. Here’s a 3-for-1 special. There’s nothing really that ties these albums together other than they happen to be next on my alphabetical list and the artists here all sing and play musical instruments.
Carlene Carter – 591
ALBUM: Musical Shapes (1980)
MVC Rating: 4.0/ $$
This is a cutout, meaning the record company, nicked the corner off or punched a hole in the cover’s corner. This meant they were slow sellers and the distributors were to mark them down. Cutouts were controversial in the industry, but I bought them regularly. That’s because I felt like I might find that rare album, the best of all time that no one ever heard of. I almost did many times.
I think I bought this in Athens, Ga., I remember reading a little about it. Carter was the daughter of June Carter Cash, by June’s first husband, and thus, she was the step-daughter of Johnny Cash. She is also the ex-wife of Nick Lowe, who plays bass on the album. Dave Edmunds, who played guitar on this album, was Lowe’s, co-band member in the great rock and roll group called Rockpile.
All said and done, this is a keeper. Her voice is good. Her cover of stepdad’s ‘Ring of Fire’ is pretty bad, though. ‘Sandy’ is good –“I like that cold cash, that cold hard cash. The duet with Edmunds, on ‘Baby Ride Easy’ is fun and sums up the tone of the album, a little rock but a strong extra dose of country. In fact it sounded like a party going on in recording this.
“I was too drunk to remember, I was too blind to see,” she sings.
Carter was in concert in her early years and she famously (or infamously) introduced a song by saying “Well this one will sure put the %$^& back in country.” She said a naughty word left when you take the ‘tree’ off the musical genre.
Unbeknownst to her, June and Johnny, slipped in to see Carlene’s concert that night.
(Story updated 2 p.m. Jan. 29 to reflect Carter was married to Lowe, not Edmunds).
City Boy– 590
ALBUM: Young Man Gone West (1977)
MVC Rating: 3.0/$$
What is this? 10cc cover band? Queen without Freddie Mercury? 5cc?
I like ‘She’s Got Style’ because it rolls along as if art students were on sabbatical in the Tulsa Time zone. Are they the embers of the Sparks?
‘The Man who Ate His Car.’ ?? Is there some subtle social commentary in there. I still have to go back to 10cc. That group was sometimes great. But sometimes good 10cc was bad 10cc. This is bad 10cc that may rhyme but has no reason.
Good guitar player though.
Lee Clayton — 589
ALBUM: The Dream Goes On (1981)
MVC Rating: 3.5/$$$
This album I know I bought in Auburn. I listened to this for the first time in years. Interesting cat, this Lee Clayton, growing up “surrrounded by fences” in Oak Ridge where he lived next to the Atom bomb factory, apparently. He’s still radioactive about it — at least on this album which came out in 1981.
Industry sucks, he seems to be saying, but, he acknowledges: “It makes me sick — and well.”
The vitriol and dramatic singing makes you wonder what really happened to him. In ‘Industry’ he talks about ‘the big boys’ and the people being ‘drug crazed’ and then he quotes the Constitution and then the Bible. In ‘Where is the Justice’ he rails on about a bad concert tour in Hamburg and Brussels where he saw ‘goose-stepping Russians.’
At one point he sings with great feeling about “23 hours of madness for one hour on that stage. That ain’t justice. That’s bad pay.” What?
And then (whew) he comes up with a simple sweet and lovely song that I remembered the words to after several decades of not hearing this song.
“Won’t You Give me One More Chance.”
“To make it with you. Forget about the bad we had, don’t believe its true come and lie with me like the way we used to do; you’re the only thing I’ve got to hold on to.”
I know this sounds like a strange and perhaps awful album as I describe it but it’s really not. He’s passionate, perhaps unbalanced and thus interesting. The music keeps it together.