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Carlene Carter, Lee Clayton, City Boy –quick hits — 591, 590, 589

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.

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The Coolest Cover Yet of ‘Angel from Montgomery’–by WPC

In this blog post  is  a song.

Play it.

Christopher M. Viner. and Sasha G. Alcott  PHOTO CREDIT: Cait Bourgault

Push the sideways triangle.

It’s a cover by When Particles Collide  of ‘Angel from Montgomery’ and it may be a challenger for  the best  cover yet of that song or at least puts it  in that conversation.

And believe me that’s saying a lot considering who has covered this John Prine classic:

  • Bonnie Raitt (she has done duets of this song with Prine, Tracy Chapman, Jackson Browne, Bruce Hornsby and more.)
  • Susan Tedeschi
  • John Denver
  • Cameo
  • John Mayer
  • Dave Matthews
  • Ben Harper
  • These are just a few who have covered it. The list goes on and on.

See what you think.

You, audience, are the first to hear this outside the inner circle. It’s a little different than Raitt’s famous version(s). It hits you with a little more force, urgency. It replaces melancholy and hopelessness with the beginnings of raw pain, and anger. For me the flies take on a  bigger buzz.

There’s flies in the kitchen
I can hear all their buzzin’
And I ain’t done nothing since I woke up today
How the hell can a person
Go to work in the morning
Come home in the evening
And have nothing to say

When Sasha sings the above, she spits out the last four lines and we suddenly wonder what the woman has done. The ambiguity in Prine’s  poetry starts to melt  away.

Give a little listen  w headphones.

Back ground here: Earlier in these bloggies, I wrote about this great  group When Particles Collide. I saw them  several months ago, a husband-wife band, performing on the back porch of my  basketball buddy Eric Stockman’s home here in the Birmingham area.

These 40-somethings from Maine had quit their day jobs and took WPC out on a 14-month U.S. tour. I picked up a record of theirs and loved their hard rocking style.

I wrote that I’d like to also hear some softer stuff, such as “Angel from Montgomery” cover of John Prine, which they had  played in the back porch concert.

I requested the song from this band and  like all good bands they played it. Not only played it, but recorded it and sent it to me. (I can’t swear to these time sequences, they may have already had this song recorded or plans to record it before I made the request about a month or so ago. But I like to think they fulfilled my request in the  rock and roll tradition.  And, as I have announced, they are coming out with an acoustic album , Eric tells me.

Learn more by going to WPC’s website.

www.whenparticlescollide.com/

To comment  or weigh in on the best ‘Angel’ cover, click the blog title and scroll to the end.

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Tracy Chapman — 592

ALBUM: Tracy Chapman (1988)

MVC Rating: 4.5/$$

Forget the hole in the head Cracker, the world needs another folk singer like Tracy Chapman.

I had a feeling that I could be someone, be someone

For me it wasn’t that the words blew me away Or the music and playing was so much better than many other great folk singers. For me it was all these things together and the voice. Yes the voice. I can’t really describe it. There are certain voices I really appreciate.  And hers,  singing about race, domestic abuse, poverty and just plain heartache and heart break, sounded real

That the voice comes from a gay black woman, and seems shot-through with wisdom brought by pain makes it all the more remarkable that it connects so powerfully with an older balding white guy, me, and I’m sure many others like me.

She’s got her ticket is a song about someone in pain who wants to fly away.

She’s got her ticket I think she gonna use it                                                                      I think she going to fly away                                                                                                 No one should try and stop her

And from this Grammy award-winning  album, her debut,  came probably her signature song: Fast Car.

That song plays on the same theme of escape, and is cathartic in its slow down, speed  up sound.  The words are potent but the song transcends the words and  should be heard. See video below.

You see my old man’s got a problem
He live with the bottle that’s the way it is
He says his body’s too old for working
His body’s too young to look like his
My mama went off and left him
She wanted more from life than he could give
I said somebody’s got to take care of him
So I quit school and that’s what I did
You got a fast car
Is it fast enough so we can fly away
We gotta make a decision
Leave tonight or live and die this way
 =–=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Another of her biggest hits here.
NOTE: I talked about certain voices that I like and somehow writing and listening to Tracy made me think of another one of my favorite singers: Phil Lynott (now deceased) of the Irish band Thin Lizzy. But the singers are nothing alike other than a smooth sounding voice. See video below.
 Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease.

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Captain Beefheart, Captain Beyond — 600, 599

ALBUMS: Ice Cream for Crow (Captain Beefheart, 1982) Sufficiently Breathless (Captain Beyond, 1973)

MCV Rating: Beefheart 4.0/$$$; Beyond 3.5/$$$

Two Captains. Passing in the night.

Captain Beefheart, and Captain Beyond.

Here are two albums I’m going to review together because, well, it seems like a good idea as I type this.

There’s nothing that really ties them together other than they were out of the mainstream of rock. Captain Beyond was a hard rocking psychedelic band made up of members of several well -known hard rock bands: Deep Purple, Iron Butterfly, and Johnny Winter.

Captain Beefheart, on the other hand, is kind of a legendary California artist who put the avant in avant-garde. Surrealism is another word associated with him. He collaborated with Frank Zappa some. He was apparently considered a child  prodigy and sculpted at age 3. ‘Nuff said. The double LP Trout Mask Replica was considered his masterpiece.

The music of Captain Beyond starts promisingly enough with Sufficiently Breathless, which is the airy light and nicely played title track. But from here on, it’s hit and mostly miss including some spacey backward tracking loop leading to a sort of a Sourthern-fried jam band ditty called ‘Everything is a Circle.’ I agree. But am not too hot on the song which accelerates as it moves amid a glossy crunch of power chords, into nowhere, or maybe the beyond.

While Beyond take themselves seriously, Beefheart  aka Dan Van Vliet and crew clearly does not.  With songs like Hey Garland I Dig Your Tweed Coat, and Semi-multicolored Caucasian. The band flows in and out of  traditional song structures (usually out), using  accoustic guitar interludes,  with switched up thrash  as background to Van Vliet’s surrealistic raps.

For example: “Bumblebees, their wings arranged with pictures out of the past and the rainbow baboon gobbled fifteen fisheyes with each spoon’

That’s not surreal, that’s twisted Captain Kangaroo. Or just  bad sushi?

For examples of both Captains’ strange music listen below.

Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease.

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Billy Bragg — 620, 619

ALBUMS: Talking with the Taxman about Poetry (1986);  Back to Basics (1987)

MVC Rating: Taxman 4.0/$$$; Basics, 3.5/$$$$

A smart bloke this Billy Bragg.  Articulate working class. We could be mates I think, over a pint.

He doesn’t even try to change his thick English accent. Hell why should he? To sell more records, maybe?

Basics is a compilation of early songs, mostly just Bragg and his guitar. Taxman has higher production values which means a violin and trumpet sneak in some of the songs.

He was a smart lad; I haven’t followed him in  years but I’m sure he retains his intellect, if not his passionate fight  for the poor and working class. But I do know he worked with Wilco producing an extraordinary song together called ‘California Stars,’ taken from unpublished writings of Woody Guthrie.

To get a sense of his mind, one can look at the song titles: ‘Ideology,’ ‘There is Power in a Union’ ‘Help save the Youth of America’ ‘To Have and to Not Have.’

Or burrow down deeper into his lyrics. In one of his best songs, Levi Stubb’s Tears, a few lines capture a world of hurt.

She ran away from home in her mother’s best coat
She was married before she was even entitled to vote
And her husband was one of those blokes
The sort that only laughs at his own jokes
The sort a war takes away
And when there wasn’t a war he left anyway

Weaving songs of personal relationships and their many hazards with songs of protest and activism have an interesting way of meshing; one side illuminates the others.

But listening  through these earlier songs, a line jumps out that’s probably not surprising given his age and by the fact it is  hard and slow to change the system.

Bragg sang, “I don’t want to change the world. I’m not looking for a new England, I’m just looking for another girl.”

Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease.

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The Beach Boys — 653, 654

ALBUMS: Pet Sounds (1966) Shut Down Volume 2 (1964)

MVC Rating:  Pet Sounds, 5.0/$$$$$; Shut Down 4.0/$$$$

So, we’ve had the Beat Farmers, Beat Rodeo and the Beat. Before we get to another band with a ‘Beat’ in it, let’s go to the Beach.

This  copy of ‘Pet Sounds’ is a little worn. My rock roots were decidedly Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Who, Al Green, Hendrix, Janis, Otis Redding, Allmans and so on.

The Beach Boys didn’t sound like those. To my rock n roll ears, the Beach Boys tilted slightly toward Pat Boone’s version of ‘Tutti Frutti’ not Little Richard’s definitive take.

The Beach Boys on the west coast, specifically Southern California, seemed so white-surfer- boy with a decidedly middle class orientation — and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But for all their initial radio beach and car songs, there was genius at work from Brian Wilson. Listening to arguably their best work, ‘Pet Sounds,’ one is struck  by the arrangements and interlocking melodies, a jazz sensibility.  ‘God only Knows’ is a near perfect song. Sloop John is perennial.

Shut Down has Fun, Fun, Fun, which is definitely worth the three Funs. Shut Down also had some talking interludes which reminded me of a Zappa interlude if Zappa wasn’t so cynical. Come to think of it Zappa was actually making fun of the Beach Boys. Interestingly on Pet Sounds, there is some secret freak out at the end of the album after ‘Caroline No.’

Counting down my 678  vinyl records  before I die of  brain disease.

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The Beat Farmers — 656, 655

ALBUMS: Tales of the New West (1985), Van Go (1986)

MVC  Rating: ‘Tales’ 4.0/$$, Van Go  3.0/$$

Now this group I haven’t listened to in more than a decade but I remember a time in the 1980s that some of my close Birmingham News friends thought this (first record anyway) was the greatest thing since sliced  beets. We even had a tradition that lasted years where we passed around a can of beets. Never opened it mind you, just passed it along, the same can.

I don’t know how it started exactly but at the height of Beat Farmer mania, someone bought a can of beets to a party held by say Will and Adele. So then Bob and Tondee have a party and guess what:  Will has a can of beets behind his back. Surprise! Beets! Tag you’re it!

(I know it, sounds like a B-52’s song but that’s what happens when you are living in your own private Idaho). This little beet shenanigans was going on about 1985-86

When the Beat Farmers came to Birmingham we all went to the Nick to see them. Or was it still the The Wooden Nickel at that time? Anyway, the band lived up to its reputation as being one of the best bar bands anywhere.

I have to say, and stop me if you can, but I truly believe that The Beat Farmers’ style was rootsy,  and grounded in the beat.

And they were  funny. If not a little profane.

Their funny songs were often sung by the now deceased Country Dick  Montana, who had to be midway between 6 and 7 feet tall and had a bass voice so low, it made the china chatter when we put one of his songs on in the  house. Here’s a sample lyric from California Kid with Country Dick on beat vocals (at the risk of revealing what we all thought was funny when we were 20-somethings.

She undid my boots, she untied my jeans
She untied my tubes I had tied in my teens
‘Bout that time the front door was kicked in
And there stood some scumball all covered in sin
He said “that’s my woman” I said “that’s no lie”
I blew a hole in him just as big as the sky

I got my Colt Forty Five, right by my side
I’m the California Kid, I hope you’re quite prepared to die

Whew! The Beat Farmers ladies and gentlemen.

They also had a song called Happy Boy which was silly enough to be a regular feature on the Dr. Demento show.

Country Dick died Nov. 8, 1996 with his boots on in the middle of a song, massive heart attack at age 40.

The video below will feature one of their more ‘normal’ songs.

Counting down my 678  vinyl records  before I die of  brain disease.