The latest issue of Wax Poetics focuses on Prince and the birth of the Minneapolis sound during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The interviews with various Prince affiliates, including Morris Day, Jesse Johnson, and Andre Cymone, offer some insights into the interpersonal dynamics of the scene’s early days. Of course, I picked up the issue for its coverage of The Time, the best funk band of the 1980s. But I especially appreciate the magazine’s attempts to clear up one of the more irksome misconceptions about the group. Many people believe Prince wrote and performed all of The Time’s material. In fact all of the band’s albums were collaborations (the first one primarily between Day and Prince) and, while Prince did write much of The Time’s early work, their two biggest hits, “Jungle Love” and “The Bird,” were actually penned by guitarist Jesse Johnson. Prince probably should’ve loosened the reins a lot more. After all the band did include Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who, of course, together went on to become the architects of New Jack Swing after Prince fired them for missing a show. It’s also worth noting that much of the band’s success can be attributed to its longstanding reputation as one of the greatest live R&B acts of, well, all time. Back in the 1980s, when they were Prince’s opening act, they were known for giving audiences the better show.
The group, probably for legal reasons, is now known as the Original 7ven and released an album of new material last year. Personally, I think Johnson is the group’s most interesting success story. In the Wax Poetics piece he talks about how Prince derided his songwriting efforts during the band’s early days:
“I played tapes of my songs for him, and Prince would literally start laughing,” Jesse says. “He’d call Morris over and be like, ‘Listen to this, listen to this,’ and they both laughed. When I bought him the music for ‘Jungle Love,’ he wasn’t laughing anymore.”
Johnson got the last laugh in more ways than one. He enjoyed a successful solo career during the 1980s after writing the aforementioned Time hits, but what’s more his most recent album, Verbal Penetration, is easily one of the best R&B albums of the preceding decade, right up there with Teedra Moses’ Complex Simplicity, Raphael Saadiq’s Instant Vintage, and Kem’s Kemistry. That’s a hell of a lot more than one can say about Prince’s latest work.
Unfortunately, the Wax Poetics article doesn’t touch on Verbal Penetration at all, so I’ll just say a few things about it. The album is far from perfect. It has several unnecessary extended interludes. I say that immediately because its scope and musicianship invite hyperbole. Johnson wrote all of the songs, and they are, for the most part, beautiful. Indeed Johnson has improved on his songwriting skills tremendously since the days of “Jungle Love.” The album is primarily made up of protest songs, love songs, and funk-rock workouts. The lyrics are subtle, well-constructed, and occasionally profound. For an example of the latter see “Love Letters,” the ballad of a soldier who proposes marriage to his girlfriend while away at war. The tune calls to mind the best of Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield. Likewise “Propaganda” is a clever attack on black stereotypes and crime that, perhaps because of Johnson’s cool delivery, doesn’t seem preachy. The love songs are especially tasteful and catchy, particularly “Sheila Rae,” an ethereal nod to Quiet Storm. Johnson nails it with the chorus:
Forever I’m your baby
Sho’ nuff, ain’t no maybe
I’m your man, will you be my baby?
(Sheila Rae)
Lovin’ you so crazy
My torch is burnin’ lady
I’m your man, will you be my baby?
(Sheila Rae)
Johnson is one of the last great funk-rock guitarists in the tradition of Eddie Hazel, Ernie Isley, and, of course, Jimi Hendrix. He has said that he vowed not to play the same chord twice on this record, a constraint that required him to develop a greater understanding of his instrument. It paid off. Johnson now knows his way around several black American musical traditions. “Merciful,” my favorite tune on the album, is an extended Hazel-style solo over a deep funk groove, an old school b-side that sounds like something Pimp C would’ve paid top dollar for. “Beautiful Sadie” and “Peace Be with You” are more bluesy. But the technical knockout here is “Ali Vs. Frazier,” a straight-up jazz number in the swinging, bop-inflected style of Wes Montgomery. It’s clear from these cuts that Johnson can play circles around the purple one.
I’d love to say that Verbal Penetration, which actually came out three years ago, is the future of R&B, but this is the kind of album that requires a certain pre-digital knowledge. Don’t get me wrong, Johnson employs all sorts of modern technology on the album (one reason comparisons to D’Angelo’s Voodoo, which you come across here and there, miss the mark), particularly state of the art synthesizers and drum machines. But Johnson was able to produce this incredibly textured album in large part because he learned his craft the old-fashioned way. Far too many artists and producers in the world of contemporary R&B only know how to use high-tech samplers. Unfortunately this leads to the abandonment or at least the attenuation of black America’s rich musical heritage in today’s pop world.
““If you really love your babies, then people show your pride,” Johnson sings in the album’s opening. I love that line because it seeks to bridge the gap between the past and the present. He entreats the old to show the young just what it means to appreciate their history and themselves. A deep cultural consciousness—in terms of both form and content—animates this record. That is why I must echo New Yorker critic Ben Greenman’s comment that it “would be a shame if it were overlooked.”
R.E.M., live performance of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game”
I can’t figure out what 1995 show this recording is from—it was briefly a staple of their live performance. But it doesn’t really matter, this is the killer take that, had they heard it, they should’ve put out on the promo 45.
The Chris Isaak song, according to Wikipedia, only became a hit after a David Lynch-obsessed DJ in Atlanta got into it through Lynch’s Wild At Heart. The Roy Orbison mode, which Lynch dipped into regularly, you would think would be a bit foreign for chronic mumbler Michael Stipe but he shows himself to be at least equally capable as Isaak in crooning the shit out of it.
Sometimes I wonder what the eighties would have looked like, had the Boss been more like Prince. That’s not to say I wish he were more pop-star-ish, or a guitar wizard. But I think of him, like Prince, as was one of those pop-auteurs who appeared in 1970s swaddling and then went on to build interior worlds from virtually no preexisting parts (or from among the wreckage of the exhausted pop-rock idiom). For each, the central imagery and motive force remains so consistent across songs that, well on the way through a record, you can start to imagine living there. (If I weren’t already an obvious mark for “Dancing In The Dark,” the last verse always gets me with the detail that the struggling working-class speaker is struggling to write a book.)
For Bruce and Prince—and unlike someone like Bowie—this world remained essentially personal, and in each song’s narrative voice there is a mixture of isolated dramatic invention and a recurring, strengthening emotional arc. And I guess I imagine that if Springsteen had, like Prince, completely played, arranged, and produced his own work then the strength of that musical interiority would have been even greater. (I have to admit I can’t understand what the E Street Band is going for much of the time.) But I guess that’s a fatuous wish, since what he did record is already so good.
In “I’m Goin’ Down” (the sixth of seven singles from Born in the U.S.A.) Springsteen’s vision is more than usually a direct product of the vocal performance, which is one of his most relentlessly focused, refusing to wander, and perhaps for that reason makes the sax solo actually welcome.
The flip side (which on my copy includes a sprawling note in bubbly handwriting dotted with hearts and hoping “the same thing won’t happen in cross-country next year”) is this slight but—I think, lovely—B-side from those sessions, “Janey, Don’t You Lose Heart.”
A historical compilation project like Nuggets, designed for educational consumption, is going to have some inescapable problems. The main one, probably, is that it’s impossible to really dig out all the lost gems in any sort of objective way. Lenny Kaye, the guitarist for Patti Smith who captained that project, liked weird, generally 70s-predictive rollocking numbers, and they dominate the original double-LP (apparently the liners include one of the first appearances of the phrase “punk rock”). But the fact that many of the bands represented on Nuggets only appear with their most “freakbeat” of songs belies the fact the rest of their catalogues were generally much more conventional.
Wimple Winch was a weird band to be sure, with lots of modes, even in the span of a single song (“Atmospheres” lurches between the aggressive fuzz guitar and reveries of unadorned Brian Wilson harmonizing). And their loopiest tendencies were skimmed off for the second volume of the Rubble series (“Pop-Sike Pipe Dreams”), which was particularly focused on loopiness. This sort of thing, despite being educational, can just as easily complicate understanding, since for a band with wide popularity—the Beatles, say—the loopier songs were classified among themselves only alongside the simple, straightforward ones, which were often the best known. When a single individual attempts to digest an entire oeuvre for future generations it often happens the other way, and things like Wimple Winch’s “Coloured Glass” get omitted, since I guess they aren’t obviously innovative on their own; though might seem to wear a subtler meaning next to their more frequently collected numbers (e.g., “Save My Soul”).
Detail from an advertisement for financial services, 1992
This is my fucking anthem. Roky Erickson blasts through self-deception in a way so complete it could only be conceived by a schizophrenic. Unlike Syd Barrett, the other familiar martyr to psychedelia, his world did not crack gradually, in a musical way—it was already cracked all over. The metaphorical mode of his lyrics described from the start (when they were most fluid) the messy inner workings of the psyche. And even through the most drug-drenched stretches of his career, the music remained peculiarly grounded.
“Bloody Hammer” is one of the few self-eviscerating metal jams that, for me, actually makes convincing the gruesome vocabulary of its lyrics. The 1980 lead guitar and a wandering vocal repeatedly find themselves confronting mass-delusion, self-enforced with the “Bloody Hammer.” For everyone, the coping mechanism is to “hammer their mind out,” but Roky is the “special one”—and the B-movie set decor is a twisted (but ultimately true) world that he must confront, as one who refuses to “have the bloody hammer.” Roky was subjected to electroshock therapy in late 1960s by the government of his native Texas for drug convictions and presumably the alien quality of his unshakeable world-view. But before that he was already singing songs like 1966’s “Monkey Island” (written by fellow keep-Austin-weirdo Powell St. John) which stresses his fundamental estrangement from the conventional world.
Though the lyric is considerably less fractured than “Bloody Hammer,” it has the same radical self-conception that made Roky the outsider’s outsider. And disturbingly predicts his ordeal at the mental hospital with lines like “Well there’s one thing about these monkeys, baby / They don’t know I’m around / But that’s pretty good, ‘cause if they knew / They’ll probably come and put me down.”
Captain Beefheart sketched a plausible, genre-crazed parody of culture, as the homelessness-exploitation artist. But Roky redefined the parameters. He didn’t strip mine his difference for its surface appeal; he could do nothing but sing in its native tongue.
The Creeper Ohio tape Double Dwa? is one of the many buried treasures of the fertile Ohio scene of the ’90s. Jeff Robertson and Mike Rep’s collaboration paired oddball, stripped-down indie originals with an assortment of idiosyncratic covers (Tommy James’ “Draggin’ The Line,” “Little Bit o’ Soul,” and “In The Pineys” by their pals The Strapping Fieldhands). One of standouts is this cover of the 1966 pop-psych nugget “Little Black Egg,” by the Nightcrawlers. The creepy nursery rhyme is made even stranger in this arrangement. Robertson’s vocals are as endearing as they’re estranging: Double Dwa? is the rare thin, reedy twee indie that verges on precious but is never at all affected.
Mike Rep, whose own consistently excellent output from 1974–1997 is collected on Stupor Hiatus, is sorta the Chris Knox of Columbus: he has credits on records by Guided By Voices, Times New Viking, Bassholes, and Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments. The “produced by” credit, befitting the anti-production attitude, is LFW—“lovingly fucked with.” He chimed in on a thread somewhere about Creeper Ohio:
The cassette was also available as a CD-R from ORANGEENTROPY for several years, but I believe it is out of print now. The CDR version was minus the song “Draggin’ The Line” which was removed because; a) R.E.M. did it in the Andy Kaufman “Man On The Moon” movie and b) we really didn’t do the tune that well anyway…. I could not get any labels interested in releasing this “Thinking Man’s Bubblegum” (as I like to call it) classic on vinyl or ‘real’ CD back in ’96. It remains one of my favorite projects and Jeff Robertson an woefully unappreciated wondrous talent. We had a great time making this.
(Their version of “Draggin’” is actually excellent.) The whole cassette here (and possibly only there). Thanks to Kellie for pointing this out.
This is a song to get dressed to in the morning. The incantation of silver screen idols—Harpo says “you feel like Steve McQueen / when you’re driving in your car” and you think you are “a new kind of James Bond / when you’re smoking your cigar”—simultaneously inflates the scope of the mirror’s reference and, in its sarcasm, deflates its narcissism. The twinkling Swedish production—with a passing reference to Ingmar Bergman, and gossamer backing vocals by Frida of Abba—strikes me as a kind of daylight inversion of “Dancing In The Dark,” reversing Springsteen’s pulsing, echo-chamber interiority into a wry lambaste directed outward.
This was pretty much the only song by Harpo that made it far out of Sweden, but it did well when it was released in 1975, hitting #1 in Germany and Sweden, #3 in Australia and #24 in the UK.
I have always thought of reggae as a special subcategory of pop, predicated on slinky bass lines, Jamaican colors, and a slightly narcoleptic combination of Hammond organ, skanky guitar and offbeat rhythms. But the personality and the magnetic charisma of Bob Marley himself was what glued it all together, what it was about. Probably no other music genre is so singularly dominated by one artist, which is a shame, because it eclipses so much talent.
Gregory Isaacs, who passed away last year, is a legend in Jamaica and beloved by a generation of mostly British fans who grew up making out to his 45s. He is an example of how a talented artist entirely devoted to their music can create an important musical contribution that lives on through influence and local or regional popularity, while disappearing almost entirely from mainstream recognition. I’m thinking of artists like Sister Rosetta Tharpe who at the time of her death was virtually unknown, yet influenced the entire wave of black popular music that swept through the American Century; and who even now is not half as well known as say, Mahalia Jackson; or Joe Tex, and his pivotal and yet ultimately forgotten place in the Soul pantheon, eclipsed quite completely by James Brown. Similarly, Isaacs will never enjoy the kind of iconic and messianic status that Bob Marley has. Nevertheless, you can hear his voice on parish roads in Jamaica and in local clubs and record stores. Far more than Bob, it’s his voice that you want the DJ to put on when you’re looking across the bar at someone and hoping for a dance. The pop icon status cuts both ways. Bob Marley is what they play on loop back at the Radisson Negril, for the tourists who get home high and tipsy, wishing they had stayed on.
This is not a question of authenticity versus commercialism. On Night Nurse (1982), Isaacs’ breakthrough album for Island records, the lovers rock ballad is updated with light touches of British new-wave synth riffs. Isaacs produced the record himself, and the production is clearly calculated to capitalize on English cross-over potential. In general, Isaacs’ output gave only an occasional nod to rastafarianism, largely steering clear of overtly political songs. His sound wasn’t rootsy or rugged; he was a suave lover man, the Cool Ruler. On stage he carefully cultivated this look, always sporting wide-brim hats and affecting a pimp strut, playing up the dapper don flair of a bow-legged, lanky player about town.
Isaacs’ originality is entirely in the grain of his voice, and his awareness of its charms. His delicate and restrained tenor evokes an aching and yet distant seduction. It is certainly lonely, as is appropriate for the lovers rock ballad which he built his early career on. But it is also removed, as though his love songs were animated by a desire that has already consumed itself, and is really only meditating on the memory of its sweetness. In a number of his songs he brings almost an ambivalent feeling to his seduction. “Cool down the pace for me little woman / This is not how it should be,” he admonishes warmly on the hook of his eponymous single, backed by a light tinkling of guitar and a swooning synth progression, with the overall effect like ice cubes melting in a glass of rum. But the coolness is also in his poise, a knowing restraint that complicates the classical role of the crooner. The particular quality of his music is the way he plays around his own image of a weary, almost reluctant lover. In “Extra Classic (Sister Love)” Isaacs runs his compliments both ways, crying out, “Please don’t stay too far / You may not be a movie star / But extra classic is what you are.” Isaacs teases, acknowledging his lover’s beauty in genuine terms, while still chiding the aloofness of her pretensions; his voice is again warm and intimate, yet the casual delivery could also easily be made over a long distance phone call.
This combination of suavity and restraint yields a catalog of songs that foreground intimacy, but leave much of the personality of the singer out. It’s hard to know where the real feelings of the Cool Ruler lie. Like fellow Jamaican crooners Jackie Edwards and Alton Ellis (the voice behind the rocksteady classic “I’m Still In Love With You, Girl”), he seems at times to be more of a spectral presence than a driving force in reggae, the way Marley was. The flip side to this is that a lack of mainstream success has made Gregory Isaac’s cool style difficult to recuperate. His drug problems in the eighties and his consequent scuttling from Island Records ensured that he never made it into the MTV era. But the early capping of his career has also freed his voice, allowing his songs to work as personal markers, as intimate vignettes. They are not anthems or cultural markers like Marley’s magnificent incantations, but songs that fit a certain kind of not-so-innocent nostalgia; love songs that express precisely how it feels to remember dancing with a girl, remember the flirtations of a summer, to re-enact the ambiguous gestures of courtship. When Gregory sings on the track “Tune In,” in his sweet and ethereally high hummingbird register, “Meet me on the corner / Of the avenue / And I’ll be patiently / Waiting there for you” it is impossible to tell whether the poignancy of his imperative lies in his wish that such a meeting will take place, or that it already has, perhaps many times before, and the song is simply his expression of the same desire vividly restored.
Duke Ellington: “Never No Lament (Don’t Get Around Much Anymore),” with the band featuring Jimmy Blanton on bass and Ben Webster playing tenor sax, ca. 1940. Ellington evidently did get around a great deal though, as is revealed in this excerpt from a 1944 interview reprinted recently in Lapham’s Quarterly, in which Duke outlines his favorite dining destinations:
I have special places marked for special dishes. In Taunton, Massachusetts, you can get the best chicken stew in the United States. For chow mein with pigeon’s blood, I go to Johnny Cann’s Cathay House in San Francisco. I get my crab cakes at Bolton’s—that’s in San Francisco, too. I know a place in Chicago where you get the best barbecued ribs west of Cleveland and the best shrimp Creole outside New Orleans. There’s a wonderful place in Memphis, too, for barbecued ribs. I get my Chinook salmon in Portland, Oregon. In Toronto I get duck orange, and the best fried chicken in the world is in Louisville, Kentucky. I get myself a half-dozen chickens and a gallon jar of potato salad, so I can feed the “seagulls.” You know, the guys who reach over your shoulder …
There’s a place in Chicago, the Southway Hotel, that’s got the best cinnamon rolls and the best filet mignon in the world. Then there’s Ivy Anderson’s chicken shack in Los Angeles, where they have hot biscuits with honey and very fine chicken-liver omelets. In New Orleans there’s gumbo file. I like it so well that I always take a pail of it out with me when I leave. In New York I send over to the Turf Restaurant at Forty-ninth and Broadway a couple of times a week to get their broiled lamb chops. I guess I’m a little freakish with lamb chops. I prefer to eat them in the dressing room, where I have plenty of room and can really let myself go. In Washington, at Harrison’s, they have deviled crab and Virginia ham. They’re terrific things. On the Ile-de-France, when we went to Europe, they had the best crepes Suzette in the world, and it took a dozen at a time to satisfy me. The Cafe Royal, in the Hague, has the best hors d’oeuvres in the world—eighty-five different kinds, and it takes a long time to eat some of each. There’s a place in Paris that has the best octopus soup. And oh, my, the smorgasbord in Sweden! At Old Orchard Beach, Maine, I got the reputation of eating more hot dogs than any man in America. A Mrs. Wagner there makes a toasted bun that’s the best of its kind in America. She has a toasted bun, then a slice of onion, then a hamburger, then a tomato, then melted cheese, then another hamburger, then a slice of onion, more cheese, more tomato, and then the other side of the bun. Her hot dogs have two dogs to a bun. I ate thirty-two one night. She has very fine baked beans. When I eat with Mrs. Wagner, I begin with ham and eggs for an appetizer, then the baked beans, then fried chicken, then a steak—her steaks are two inches thick—and then a dessert of applesauce, ice cream, chocolate cake, and custard, mixed with rich, yellow country cream. I like veal with an egg on it. Monseigneur’s, in London, has very fine mutton. Durgin-Park’s, in Boston, has very fine roast beef. I get the best baked ham, cabbage, and cornbread at a little place near Biloxi. St. Petersburg, Florida, has the best fried fish. It’s just a little shack, but they can sure fry fish. I really hurt myself when I go there.
It’s a mystery to me how Ian Matthews makes as much out of “Mobile Blue” as he does. The original, recorded by stalwart Nashville songwriter Mickey Newbury, is built around his coarse, hoarse instrument. The lines — “Drunk and down and out and making time / With anything that comes my way” — are often twisted around over the top of bars, like barbed wire. It’s hard to imagine its being picked up by Matthews, the original male singer for the English folk group Fairport Convention. With the clean, reedy intonation of a choir graduate and the same studiously correct phrasing, he seems just the wrong person for the job. But maybe — this seems often to be the case — it’s just because of that. In any case, he was more a follower of American folk forms than English. The LP it appears on, 1972’s Journeys from Gospel Oak, is based firmly in those traditions. And it’s one of those oddities — a grab bag of mostly covers, recorded hastily to fulfill a contractual obligation — that, through the consistency of the band and its unfussy production, sounds like it sprung into existence not in five days but instantaneously.
In “Mobile Blue,” Matthews simplifies the phrasing, drawing out the nuance of the lyrics, and they benefit from it. Newbury makes a lot of significant details: being caught with “some wired-up chick from Jacksonville / And brother did we look like we could fly” (I believe present-day Jacksonville retains the appropriate evocations). And regretting it, staggering to the Greyhound station to get back to his baby — yelling out “put me on that dog take me away.” The craftsmanlike construction of the song combined with its weird, penetrating diction reminds me of Jimmy Webb — whose “Bride 1945” Matthews also covers on the record.
