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August 30, 2007
* "swingin' the world by the tail...."
Among those who, like me, have long been enamored with Rowland Salley's heartachingly beautiful tune "Killing The Blues", a great many were probably first exposed to the song via John Prine's version on his 1979 album Pink Cadillac. I'd somehow missed that one, having been sort of hit-and-miss with Prine's '70s catalogue -- some of those records I was fairly familiar with, others less so. It's possible I did hear the song, actually, as I have a vague memory of checking out Pink Cadillac from the local library way back around 1980; but either I never got around to playing the LP, or the song just didn't make an impression on me back then.
That definitely was not the case when I heard Chris Smither's version of the song on Smither's 1993 album Happier Blue; indeed, I was totally captivated by the track, which has ended up on various mixtapes and CD-comps I've made ever since. Smither's interpretation is exquisite in its arrangement, with subtle flourishes of various backing instrumentation, a slight but significant turn in the chorus that lifts the melody to another dimension, and a glorious fiddle solo in the bridge.
Shawn Colvin followed in 1994, including the song on her Cover Girl album; her take was pleasant enough, but didn't stack up to Smither's, at least in my mind. I'd not heard another version of "Killing The Blues" for many years after that, though a quick glance through the Allmusic database indicates it had been done a small handful of times by a few roots and Celtic acts. I wasn't too surprised to find that just last year it was recorded by Bill Chambers (Kasey's dad), as he's always had remarkably good taste in covers. Also listed for 2006, intriguingly, is a version by Malcolm Holcombe on a soundtrack album called Come Early Morning.
The reason my attention was recently drawn to the song again, though, is that it's among the tunes Alison Krauss & Robert Plant have recorded for their upcoming collaborative album on Rounder. It's a terrific choice for the two (kudos to producer T Bone Burnett, who apparently was primarily responsible for selecting the material); together on the track, they sound like neither of their solo identities, but rather an altogether different whole -- no mean feat for two artists with such distinctive imprints as singers.
And one more happy find while sorting through CDs this week in preparation for our upcoming cross-country move: It seems I'd missed that Prine's longtime guitarist, Jason Wilber, had recorded his own version of "Killing The Blues" on his 2004 album King For A Day. Not surprisingly, it's quite engaging and graceful, as has been the case with pretty much everything the underrated Wilber has done, both as a sideman and in his occasional forays out front.
All of which made me curious as to whether Salley had ever released his own version of the song. To my knowledge, he's really only served as a bassist for other artists; I first saw him with Lucinda Williams in the early '90s, and for the past decade or so he's been a fixture in Chris Isaak's band. The Allmusic listings indicated he'd actually recorded and released the song a couple years before Prine's version as part of a collective called the Woodstock Mountain Revue, but I've never come across it.
However, there was also a much more recent listing for a version by Salley -- apparently he recorded "Killing The Blues" for a self-released album of the same name two years ago. And -- hark! -- the song is actually posted this very moment to Salley's MySpace page. So, if, like me, you've long been a fan of "Killing The Blues" but have never heard the songwriter's own version, check it out here:
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=49514733
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
August 25, 2007
* Partners In Crime
Recently a solo disc showed up in the mail from a fellow named Patterson Barrett, titled I Must Be Dreaming. Among the details outlined on the press release included with the disc was the following snippet:
Raised in the Washington, D.C. area, Patterson Barrett moved to Austin shortly after appearing on Jerry Jeff Walker's classic first album on MCA Records, playing pedal steel, dobro and guitar (including the song "L.A. Freeway"). He soon formed the band Partners In Crime, which included Buddy and Julie Miller, and released one album under that name.
This got me curious, because, while I'd been aware that Buddy and Julie had been in bands together in Austin in the mid-late '70s, I'm not sure I knew a record existed which actually documented some of their work during that era.
A little bit of web research and a subsequent visit to the fine (and deep) online retailer gemm.com turned up a used copy of the self-titled Partners In Crime LP (released independently on Barrett's own Criminal Records label); a week later, it arrived at my door. Photos on the front and back cover show Julie -- credited on this album as Julie Griffin (her maiden name) -- cavorting with Barrett; apparently the two were dating at the time. Buddy, as it happens, was a late arrival to the band's lineup, as a photocopy of a brief article from September 1978 that was tucked into the album cover reveals:
Buddy Miller is Partners In Crime's newest member, having joined the band late this summer as guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter. Miller worked for a lengthy period with one of Austin's finest country dance bands, Little Bit Of Texas. Besides being a hot country guitar picker, Buddy is a co-contributor to the band's repertoire, and is undoubtedly one of the city's most impressive young singer-songwriters, possessing a deep, wonderfully resonant voice.
Griffin sings lead on two cuts: Bill Browder's ballad "Everyone's Dancing But Me", and the opening track "The Fever" -- written, fascinatingly, by Mark McKinnon, a former editor of University of Texas student newspaper The Daily Texan who later ventured into Democratic politics before switching parties in the mid-'90s to run then Texas governor George W. Bush's media campaign for the presidency. (Given McKinnon's presence in the president's inner media circle, perhaps this goes a fair way toward explaining all those eyebrow-raising tunes listed as being in heavy rotation on W's iPod in a press-release issued a few years back.)
Buddy also sings lead on one cut, though it isn't one of his own songs: "Wondering How" is credited to Larry James Schulz. That Buddy is featured as a singer on a track is somewhat surprising given his recent addition to the band, but Barrett's liner notes on the back cover go a little way toward explaining:
Someone mentioned to me recently that all recordings are flawed in that they're all dated the moment they're recorded. This record is an excellent example. We worked on it a year and a half and could easily have worked longer. By the time we'd finished, we'd added two members (Mike Rieman on bass and Buddy Miller on guitar and vocals) and decided to include a song from the latter's demo.
Barrett's style as a singer, songwriter and performer on the Partners In Crime album is likable if not revelatory. The record suggests the band was probably one of the more entertaining and intriguing live acts on the local scene in mid-late 1970s Austin -- a "good-time honky-tonk rock and blues band with a dash of country and bluegrass," as the photocopied press clipping summarizes. (I believe the article was written by Steve Sagik, though it's slightly unclear from the placement of the byline. The name of the publication is also unclear; a tag at the top says "Rumors, Gossip, Lies & Dreams", but I've never heard of any '70s Austin zine that went by such a name, thus I suspect it was just a section within whatever publication this was....perhaps the long-defunct Austin Sun?)
As for Buddy & Julie -- there's probably not quite enough of a presence here to suggest this album should be dug out and reissued on CD, though for big fans and history buffs, there's certainly value in hearing what apparently were the first recorded and released performances by these two, before they became a duo both personally and musically. There are hints of the talents that would soon blossom in both of them. And, well, the photo of Buddy sporting a full beard is a hoot, for sure...
Barrett's new disc, by the way, is due out October 9; not surprisingly, Buddy & Julie show up on a couple of tracks. Julie's high-school classmate Tommy Taylor (best-known for his work with Eric Johnson) is on drums. The songs are mostly Barrett's own but include one by Bill Browder (the same guy who wrote one of the songs Julie sang on the Partners In Crime LP), and one by Gurf Morlix & Rod Picott, plus a version of The Band's "Sleeping".
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 2:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
August 11, 2007
* "between the parted pages and were pressed...."
My intention initially when I sat down to write this entry was to discuss the quandaries and pitfalls of storage, owing in part to a troubled laptop hard-drive, as well as the increasing awareness of gigabytes flowing over with bulky music files and the couple thousand photos & videos we took with our digital camera on our recent Canadian trip. A computer-savvy friend noted that though he'd recently bought additional external-drives to house his music and photo files, he'd found that he nevertheless quite quickly filled his internal HD back up again. I fear this is a never-ending battle.
Add to that our desire to pare down physical CDs in preparation for a cross-country move, and, well, the question of "where do you put all this stuff" has been weighing a bit heavy on the mind recently.
But an item that was among the things unearthed when going thru another batch of boxes put me in a somewhat more nostalgic frame-of-mind about the whole process. Last night my wife handed me a small envelope which I'd marked, eons ago, "1993 receipts -- Webb songs." In it are dozens of cash-register receipts from record stores all over the country that I visited during a nearly yearlong phase of collecting albums (a few CDs but mostly old LPs) which featured at least one song written by Jimmy Webb.
Some have detailed information, some don't. Most are at least marked with the store name and city they came from. Here's one from the late Tower Records store in Seattle's University District, where apparently I purchased Johnny Rivers' Changes/Rewind double-disc, Art Garfunkel's Watermark, and a Nick Cave record with "By The Time I Get To Phoenix" on it. Here are a couple of handwritten receipts from Seattle's long-departed Park Avenue Records, where I got LPs by the Four Tops, Judy Collins, Roberta Flack, the Supremes, Percy Faith, Richard Harris, and the 5th Dimension (a couple of whose Webb-heavy albums, Up, Up And Away and The Magic Garden, are being reissued this month as a twofer on Collectors' Choice, by the way). Here's a handful of slips from Bop Street in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood -- a vinyl specialist that, against all odds, has not only survived but grown considerably in the intervening years, even as the record-shop biz has deteriorated.
At some point I started searching beyond Seattle and found plenty more Webb songs in stores much farther afield. In Nashville, I spent 30 bucks at Great Escape and 60-plus at Phonoluxe (with any luck, at least one of those is still around). A visit to Georgia resulted in purchases at Fantasyland in Atlanta and the storied Wuxtry in Athens (where, as I recall, leaving the store that day, I encountered three folks loitering on the sidewalk, who I eventually realized were Michael Stipe, Kurt Cobain, and Courtney Love). There are receipts from stores in Raleigh and Chapel Hill, many years before I relocated there (the first time). And it appears I spent over $100 on a jaunt to Portland checking out several different stores there.
The end result is documented in a file on my hard-drive which lists more than 700 Jimmy Webb covers that are in my possession. The physical proof rests in a bookcase across the room, four shelves full of LPs that all contain at least one song written by Webb. And, oh yes, with the imminent move, here we are back at the storage dilemma again.
Somehow, though, I just gotta hang on to those records. As the envelope reminds me, it was far too much trouble gathering them all to give 'em up now....
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)