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April 30, 2008

CHARLIE MONROE
I'm Old Kentucky Bound: 1938-1956
(Bear Family)

(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- While Bill Monroe stood as the Father of Bluegrass in the '60s (though often eclipsed during that time by Flatt & Scruggs), older brother Charlie -- half of the legendary pre-bluegrass duo the Monroe Brothers -- worked two jobs, one as a fry cook at a Howard Johnson's in Martinsville, Indiana.

It was a profound reversal of fortune. Eight years Bill's senior, Charlie originally had the edge. After the duo's strained 1938 split, Charlie recovered with a new band that did well on radio and records and planned to audition for the Opry in 1939. When Bill and his original Blue Grass Boys got there two weeks sooner, the die was cast. Charlie and his band, the Kentucky Pardners, worked in Bill's shadow thereafter, the brothers' relationship uneasy. In the '50s, semi-retired in comfort to his Kentucky farm, failed business deals and his wife's terminal cancer diagnosis left Charlie virtually destitute.

This definitive four-disc collection assembles all Charlie's primary material for the first time. His 1938-39 Bluebird sessions, 1946-1951 RCA material and 1950's Decca sessions cover three discs. A fourth showcases Monroe and the Pardners onstage at Maryland's legendary New River Ranch in the mid-'50s, recorded by folklorist Mike Seeger. High-quality remastering restores the vitality of the prewar material, and even the live disc sounds clear and crisp. The booklet features a fine anecdote-rich Dick Spottswood biographical essay including comments excerpted from Doug Green's 1972 interview with Charlie.

"Bluegrass," Spottswood rightly concludes, "remained foreign to Charlie's style." Indeed it did. While Bill emphasized dignity, complex vocal harmonies, fiery instrumental breaks and a propulsive backbeat, Charlie's vocals were warmer, his sound looser and more flexible. He was solidly traditional on his '30s material and early postwar fare such as 1946's "Bringing In The Georgia Mail". Since he tilted toward the mainstream by adding amplified lead and steel guitar, it's no shock hearing his 1950 session with Hank Williams' Drifting Cowboys.

It would be Jimmy Martin, not Bill Monroe, who in 1972 brought Charlie back to the stage. Three years before, after Charlie's remarriage -- to a woman Bill had dated -- the brothers had a final, irrevocable split. Still living hand-to-mouth and despite suffering from leukemia, Charlie returned to performing in 1974 and died a year later. Given the quality of the music, it all seems unfair.

-- RICH KIENZLE
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Rich Kienzle

Posted by Grant at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 25, 2008

JOHN ANDERSON
Just Came Home To Count The Memories
All The People Are Talkin'
Eye Of A Hurricane
Tokyo, Oklahoma
Countrified
(Collectors' Choice)

(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- First charting in 1977 and coming on strong by 1980, John Anderson was a harbinger of the New Traditionalist movement that hit Nashville in the mid-'80s, a young man with an old man's voice -- his unfettered, adenoidal baritone tore like Lefty and Haggard and swooped like Jones. These, his third and fifth through eighth Warner Bros. albums (the previously reissued Wild And Blue was his fourth), cover 1981 through 1987 and balance no-apologies honky-tonk with textbook country-boy rock that could only have seemed radical in those Urban Cowboy years.

Anderson sounds like nobody else, before or since; not only is he instantly recognizable, but when he rips into a lyric full-bore, he leaves most other singers sounding limp and inhibited. Yet he also has a mawkish streak that could let the air out of even his strongest albums, and he sometimes allowed strings and backup singers to undercut his best performances. He can also be distractingly self-conscious and erratic in selecting material; for all his career high points, he never cut a truly essential album.

I Just Came Home features the newly-arrived star bemoaning a country burnout on "Can You Catch A Falling Star" and flirting with bluegrass on "Stop In The Road" and Dylan's "Don't Think Twice It's All Right", before closing with a version of the Delmore Brothers' "Trail Of Time" that sounds like Hank Williams cutting the follow-up to "Lost Highway". (Lionel Delmore, Alton's son, was Anderson's favorite writing partner.)

All The People, probably the best of these five reissues, is dominated by rocking songs with country themes, including "Black Sheep" (co-written by filmmaker Robert Altman) and "Let Somebody Else Drive", but "Look What Followed Me Home" is a ghostly weeper. Hurricane, Anderson's first album of all new material (by a variety of writers), was well received and yielded three hits, but sounds in retrospect like a bit of a time-marker, part apex and part beginning of the end. "She Sure Got Away With My Heart" (a dead ringer for Van Morrison, of all people) is the most engaging single, while the rambling-man album track "Lonely Is Another State" is an understated sleeper.

By Tokyo, Anderson's whole approach is beginning to seem formulaic, more rutted than rooted, despite the devastating "Down In Tennessee". Countrified smells like a contract-fulfilling throwaway that only a books-balancing major-label accountant could truly love. Anderson subsequently switched labels and went into a career swoon that lasted about five years before he temporarily righted himself with the likes of "Straight Tequila Night" and "Seminole Wind".

It's unfortunate that Wild And Blue couldn't be part of this batch, because it's his best effort. Anderson die-hards will greet these long-unavailable albums enthusiastically, but others are better served by the two volumes of Greatest Hits condensing this era. Regardless, you do need to hear Anderson, who's proof that worthy music can happen in Nashville even amidst its worst phases.

-- JOHN MORTHLAND

Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or John Morthland

Posted by Grant at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 23, 2008

BO DIDDLEY
I'm A Man: The Chess Masters 1955-1958
(Hip-O Select)

(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- If Chuck Berry molded his music from his love of jazz, country, pop and blues, Bo Diddley, who moved from McComb, Mississippi, to Chicago in 1934, retained a gutbucket earthiness blending overtones of the rawest Delta blues with sounds of the primitive Chicago street bands he played with as a kid. Half a century after his debut single, "I'm A Man"/"Bo Diddley", and decades after Buddy Holly, the Rolling Stones, George Thorogood and others built on his foundations, it's worth examining Bo's first four years in greater depth.

This limited-edition two-CD package assembles 48 tracks, encompassing released and unreleased masters, twelve alternate takes, and eight unissued masters, one an edgy rendition of Mickey & Sylvia's 1958 hit "Love Is Strange".

Bo's primal nature embraced the conventional blues structure of "I'm A Man" and drove his trademark sound, manifested on "Bo Diddley"; the song's "hambone" rhythm and raw, tremolo-drenched guitar defined him. Such raw, relentlessness begat "Mona", "Bring It To Jerome", "Say Man", "Diddy Wah Diddy", the tongue-in-cheek voodoo of "Who Do You Love" and the fiery "Down Home Special".

The alternate takes, combined with dramatically improved remastering, allow the listener to hear the creative process unfold as Bo and the band work out ideas. It's easy to hear how editing created certain released masters, thanks to the inclusion of both edited and unedited masters, along with Chris Morris's concise notes and George White's discographical data.

Last November, McComb honored Bo (a.k.a. Ellas McDaniel) with a plaque on the Mississippi Blues Trail, noting his influence and citing him as, to use a hackneyed but correct cliche, "a founder of rock and roll." Still recovering from the crippling stroke suffered in May, he attended the ceremony and sang a bit. That indefatigable spirit comes through on this extraordinary collection, which easily merits a sequel.

-- RICH KIENZLE

Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Rich Kienzle

Posted by Grant at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 16, 2008

LYNYRD SKYNYRD
Street Survivors (Deluxe Edition)
(Geffen)

by GRANT ALDEN

(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- But for the passionate arguments of Patterson Hood, Lynyrd Skynyrd would probably be remembered here only as the music blaring from the bondo camaros the rough smoking guys stood around with their high school girls, who probably did put out. Or as the flames LP, recalled and redesigned after the plane went down, a lower case butcher album on the collector market.

Or, and this is the most inexact fate, for its principal single: "What's Your Name," a cavalier -- wonderful word, that, for both meanings fit: its archaic sense as a gentleman, and its present connotation of disrespect -- ode to the rock star life of the 1970s. It is the kind of song which would have kept me from listening to the band, much less the album, for that kind of hedonism has always seemed both below and beyond me.

And yet.

And yet it is a finely drawn, carefully rendered song, or so it plays today. (So it played then, but I couldn't hear it, too much a fan of Peter Green and Keith Emerson.) Effortless in its simplicity, and deceptive for all that. It's a nasty guitar riff, a nasty, predatory song. And it's not. In 1977 that opening line about a limo driver smelled of debauchery, but now it seems quite self-evident that musicians should not drive themselves around strange towns, particularly when they're achieved a certain iconic status. And "little girl"; man, that plays differently now than I think it was meant when written. "I've done made some plans" and "I've found a little queen/and I know I can treat her right" roots the singer's class, there's been a fight in the hotel bar, and yet the closing line for the one night stand is this: "shouldn't you stay/little girl/though there ain't no shame." Shame. In the end, of course, the singer offers cab fare home, same time next year. A gentleman, despite himself. In addition to himself.

The temptation, then, is to let that song frame Street Survivors as an album celebrating the wretched excess of '70s rockstardom, only this simple eight-song LP is far more complex than that. Remember that it was built during the era of rock operas and concept albums, and remember that albums were conceived of as comprehensive statements, as suites. That sequencing was important.

Except the second track is "That Smell," Ronnie Van Zant's voyage through the same territory Neil Young explored with "The Needle And The Damage Done," with more preaching and less fury, if that makes any sense. The juxtaposition here cannot have been accidental. And, in passing, I wonder if some of the street jargon -- "'ludes", in particular -- is as impenetrable to most of today's listeners as Billy Joe Shaver's dominecker hen was until I realized it was a specific kind of barnyard animal, and nothing less...nor more).

Point being, the balance of the album seems like a meditation on the singer's transition from roving hotel cavalier to family man ("One More Time," "I Never Dreamed," etc.). The second side, of course, opens with "You Got That Right," another one of those feral, fighting songs for which the band was justly famous. But it closes with "Ain't No Good Life," which almost certainly has to be a nod to Willie Nelson's "Night Life," doesn't it? Only it feels more like Haggard: "I want to know/Tell me why is it so?/Well, just 'cause I don't pray/Lord that don't mean I ain't forgiven/Just because I'm alive/that don't mean I'm making a living." (There's a song begging to be recast as southern gospel, should, say, Mike Farris happen by needing material.)

And on those terms, as a self-conceived work of art, not simply as an ode to the sybaritic excesses of the road, this is one hell of an album. And, of course, it rocks.

This deluxe edition reissue appends the original eight tracks with a second disc, which you will listen to once. It includes the first version of the album, produced by the legendary Tom Dowd, known (apparently) as the Criteria Studios Album. The same eight songs, only they sound as if they were played by a really competent cover band who had learned them note by note from careful tablature. Dowd has a great reputation, though I confess to not really knowing his work. This, too, is a fascinating reminder (Car Wheels On A Gravel Road is another) that musicians aren't simply being petulant artists when they reject all that work because it comes off wrong. Somehow Dowd neutered a band, neutered these songs. It's bizarre to listen to, but no fun at all.

And then there are five live tracks from August, 1977, just before the crash. But the sound quality's not much, and I can't make it through them. So you're on your own there.

Some of us will always wonder what Jimi Hendrix might have become had he struck up a working relationship with Miles Davis. What Buddy Holly might have made of Sgt. Peppers and Phil Spector, or whether he'd have gotten their first, somehow. (But not, somehow, what Kurdt Cobain might have come up with; he wasn't going to pull through, not that burning ember, though I wasn't clever enough to see that.) I don't often put Ronnie Van Zant and Skynyrd in that same dream world, the one in which he steals Brian Henneman from the Bottle Rockets about 1998 and...oh, that's just silly.

And this is a serious album, conflicted, complex, and a whole lot of fun. And sad, for there was no next year.

Posted by Grant at 8:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 10, 2008

MERLE HAGGARD
The Studio Recordings 1969-1976
BONNIE OWENS
Queen Of The Coast
(Bear Family)

by BARRY MAZOR

(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- By 1969, as this second completist six-disc box of his Capitol recordings begins, Merle Haggard was well-established as a smooth purveyor of working man's blues, from "Mama Tried" to "Sing Me Back Home". During the span of this extraordinary collection, Merle steps into history, digging and observing and reporting back in a singular conversation that has not stopped since. He would also test himself against his own heroes -- Lefty and Jimmie and Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan -- even as he saluted them by reviving their material.

The Strangers were now a great, tight bar and studio band, capable, as these tracks remind us, of following Haggard across musical boundaries. Yet he'd still augment the sound with horns -- which had for some time been near-anathema in much of roots music, and country in particular. Many of the tracks on the vast Hag collection exploit the brassy, jazzy sounds that made Merle the first Country Hall of Famer on the cover of Downbeat.

(Album-long salutes to Rodgers and Wills, and the Strangers instrumental albums of this same period, will appear on a separate concept albums box; Haggard's unissued studio explorations of the music of Georgia minstrel Emmett Miller and the Love Affair With Trains material are here.)

This was also the time when Haggard stepped into controversy, with the culturally pointed, right-veering "Okie From Muskogee" and "Fightin' Side Of Me" singles. Extensive interviews with Deke Dickerson in the excellent book that comes with this set clear up the matter of Merle's intentions in those songs for good; he meant every belligerent, received, semi-thought-through line at the time. They were no joke -- and he considers them ridiculously naive and wrong-headed today, which is why he's lampooned them since. It will surprise some that by 1976 his campaign-year topical songs include a reference to "the Brothers Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson...and Martin Luther King" in his definition of freedom fighters.

For all of the exploration, Merle had as many hits and self-penned classics in this period as at any time of his career -- from "If We Make It Through December" to "It's Not Love (But It's Not Bad)" to "It's All In The Movies" to "Tulare Dust" to "Living With The Shades Pulled Down".

Merle's muse for all those love songs in this period was mainly Bonnie Owens, his longtime singing partner and, for quite a while there, his wife. Her recorded works have been notably under-represented until the appearance of this second four-disc retrospective set, Queen Of The Coast. It covers all of Owens' output from small west coast indies through Capitol Records, from 1953 to 1971 -- including (and this is going to be the key attraction for many listeners) all of the often gorgeous duets with Merle. These two are probably the least-revisited of the great male-female duos of the '60s; this is your chance, and you should take it. Like Dolly and Porter, the sheer vocal perfection is as key to their power as the chemistry.

Bonnie tended to put her own career to the side during their married years, and there weren't, consequentially, an unending string of great new songs coming her way during that time. As a vocalist, she tended toward the lighter, thinner Kitty Wells approach -- and the songs often match that tone with docile, long-suffering lily sorts of lyrics. And then Bonnie surprises you with the in-your-face lies of "Number One Heel", and you see the power she often brought to country classics in during these years, and even more so, arguably, in the years beyond.

Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Barry Mazor.
Illustration by Shocko Grafix

Posted by Grant at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)