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”).
Charles Keil wrote the majority of Urban Blues (University of Chicago Press, 1966) as a master’s thesis in anthropology at Yale, when he was 25. An elegant, yet thoroughly academic work, it veers between contemporary, personal interpretations of Malcolm X and confident applications of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism while laying out interviews and impressionistic sketches of live gigs. All of this in a then unheard-of effort to analyze a contemporary musical idiom—electric blues.
In an encomium of Keil’s career in a 1998 issue of the Village Voice, Robert Christgau observed that Keil’s anthropology was itself really just an excuse to write about music. It’s true: as in many of the worthwhile products of academia, Keil is manifestly more interested in his subject than his praxis; but it’s significant that the devices of anthropology don’t seem to encumber him either—if anything, much of the persuasive power is conveyed by the terms of the study. Christgau contextualizes the book as “Laying out scholarly debts, pinpointing the mouldy-fig fallacies of the gullible blues buff Samuel Charters and the sacrosanct amateur culture theorist LeRoi Jones, offering up a credible phylogeny of blues and a knowledgeable account of the then uncodified concept of soul, and—crucially—paying detailed, candidly enthusiastic attention to both artists and fans, Keil not only broke academic ground but wrote more eloquently than all but a handful of the thousands who followed.”
Keil’s footnote about LeRoi Jones1 is typical:
Perhaps I should both mollify and amplify this accusation [about LeRoi Jones’ ethnic affectation] slightly with two brief but relevant comparisons. Jones’ more recent anti-white tirades and plays have stirred up some needed controversy but lack power when compared to the pro-black statements of Malcolm X. There is, I think an important difference between a man who burns up hatred as a fuel and one who parades and peddles the stuff as art—the pragmaticist who holds some things sacred, and the polemicist who finds all things profane. They are perhaps equally capable of dramatizing the terrors and atrocities that currently sustain the “American way of life,” but that man who can diminish some of the terror as he exposes it is at a premium. Similarly, men like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman who attain a certain hard-won serenity through their musical struggles should perhaps be differentiated from musicians like the late Eric Dolphy, whose scrambling, strident, and sometimes brilliant improvisations sounded like those of a driven man looking vainly for solid footing. Like Dolphy, Jones has often produced more fury than sound.
Detail from the sleeve of the Beach Boys, ‘Pet Sounds’ (1966)
From Paul Shaw’s amusing review of Simon Garfield’s new typography-for-laymen book:
Garfield analyzes the use of Cooper Black on the cover of Pet Sounds, the 1966 Beach Boys album, to explain one difference between legibility and readability: the impact of size. His point is correct, but his example is not. Although the title of Pet Sounds is set in Cooper Black, the song titles—his example of how Cooper Black is “unreadable” at small sizes—are not. They are set in Clarendon. Elsewhere there is an account of the type designer Cyrus Highsmith’s attempt to get through an entire day in New York City without seeing Helvetica. It’s one of the best stories in [the book]. Unfortunately, it’s not true. Highsmith has never lived in New York City …
In the 11 June 2011New York Times, Evelyn McDonnell on Ellen Willis’s posthumous essay collection, Out of the Vinyl Deeps:
This middle-class child from Queens was not so broad-minded when it came to race. As she confessed in “Pop Blues” in 1968, as a teenager, she actually preferred the white pop versions of 1950s R&B songs. Her predilections were typically “rockist,” as some writers (including her erstwhile lover Robert Christgau) would later call the white, guitar-driven, ’60s-shaped chauvinism of a generation of critics. There are no articles here about James Brown, Al Green or even Labelle. Willis described Joplin as “the only ’60s culture hero to make visible and public women’s experience of the quest for individual liberation.” Great: even the world’s foremost feminist rock critic didn’t give Aretha Franklin respect.
It’s obvious that race plays a role in the consumption of music in America. The enormous popularity and success of performers like Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, Elvis Presley, and Eminem—artists of varying talents, to be sure—is due in no small part to the fact that they are white. Many American consumers are drawn most to art that reflects how they view their cultural identities (hence, in the lit world, the oft-heard complaint that one cannot “relate” to a book’s characters; usually this is code for “these characters do not come from where I come from”). Being able to relate to the human qualities embodied in a work of art is valid and probably necessary. But when human is defined narrowly (though this is never stated directly, oh no!) as “white” or “my very limited cultural experiences growing up in suburban Cleveland” we’re not really dealing with artistic appreciation, are we? We’re dealing with adolescent solipsism, which, unfortunately, many people do not outgrow.
But that’s not what I find irritating about the characterization of Willis above. After all, in “Pop Blues” she’s talking about her tastes as an adolescent. And even if she continued to inhibit the development of her humanity into adulthood by hewing strictly to artistic experiences that reflected her provincial outer-borough upbringing, which appears to have been the case, that’s her right. What irritates me is the way in which her “rockist” paradigm continues to be celebrated. Every fucking week the Times has an article about Bob Dylan. Seriously, look it up. Rock music did not change the world, at least not in any significant political way. It was not a social revolution. A “culture hero” is only relevant insofar as he or she contributes something to cultural production, i.e. art. To applaud anything else is to abandon music criticism for simple fandom. I suppose that this is in part what bothers me about rock music as a cultural phenomenon, the churlish cultural chauvinism that surrounds it and inflates its cultural importance. That and, to quote Lester Bangs, it’s “merely a bunch of raving shit.”
My favorite jazz albums change from day to day. They might include Born to Be Blue, You Must Believe in Spring, Cris-Cross, McCoy Tyner Plays Duke Ellington, or Fuego. To me these albums are perfect or pretty damn close to it. They engage me from beginning to end. But others have gotten me through long stretches of boredom and loneliness. One summer several years ago I wore the hell out of A Love Supreme and Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. When I was at Morehouse Something Else was a reliable companion. I listened to The Big Beat so often three years ago through a pair of crummy headphones that I suspect it is partly responsible for a lengthy, unwelcome episode of hearing loss and tinnitus.
It always resonates with me. I can listen to it anytime, day or night. I don’t waver when it comes to its value: it is without question the finest piano trio album I own. Obviously, I have a thing for the piano. No other instrument can match its purity. You could also make the case that it is the only instrument (excluding the drum, of course) that can accommodate the entire range of African-American musical styles. That’s another story. Back to Ray Bryant. No one was making piano trio albums like this one in the ’50s—refined, bluesy, quiet. Bill Evans would arrive at a similar, classical-informed aesthetic, with fewer sprightly and mirthful sallies, in the ’60s. The album is a strange mix of forgotten pop tunes and standards (“Golden Earrings,” “The Thrill is Gone,” and “Angel Eyes,”), classic bop and third stream (“Django,” “Sonar,” and “Daahoud”), and blues originals (“Blues Changes” and “Splittin’”). Each song is sensitively rendered in a distinct style and feels almost like an etude. Bryant could get a deeply expressive sound out of his instrument. His solo on “The Thrill is Gone”—so measured, so precise—conveys more feeling and tension than many artists manage in entire albums. His soloing style was versatile but primarily showed traces of Teddy Wilson and Bud Powell—part stride and boogie-woogie, part bop and gospel. His strong left hand made him a formidable solo player, and his unaccompanied albums, Alone with the Blues and Alone at Montreux ’77, offer excellent history lessons in twentieth century American piano technique. But, far as I can tell, there’s nothing in his body of work, or anyone else’s for that matter, that quite resembles The Ray Bryant Trio.
Detail from an Autumn records advertisement, ‘Billboard’ magazine (9 October 1965)
“Dream On” was one of countless tracks the Beau Brummels recorded between their debut record in 1965 and 1966’s hastily-released (but superior) followup, Volume 2. Much of this work is nimbly balanced between their first, British Invasion-style rock and the transition into their own version of psychedelic pop. But, as their label pressured them to fit the model of existing bands, the demos that reflected their more innate fluency in country-folk territory were shelved in favor of more rocking, “Louie Louie”-esque garage rompers — and those, apart from being a little thin and clearly not their forte, failed to chart.
The luxe, remastered 2004 Rhino collection Magic Hollow collects almost all of the unreleased work, which reveals a band that was as inventive as the Lovin’ Spoonful or the Byrds, but who remained remembered as the one-hit wonder responsible for “Laugh, Laugh” (that is, the song their caveman equivalent performed on The Flintstones).
The majority of the tracks collected in Magic Hollow should have been released to begin with, but especially some material thought little of at the time: this one, along with “She Loves Me,” “I Will Go,” “That’s Alright,” “Can’t Be So,” and “Love Is Just A Game.” Many of these songs only were only worked on over the course of a single session, though this is barely discernible, perhaps in part because the demos and singles alike were produced by 22-year-old Sly Stone.
The principal songwriter, Ron Elliott, becomes increasingly acid-etched over this period, but it’s increasingly disorienting at the same rate lead singer Sal Valentino’s angelic voice gets eery. Most of these songs give the impression that the band is—in a metaphorical sense, as well—in a different key than the vocal harmonies. Things do get hairy when Elliott collaborates with high-school pal and lyricist Robert Durand and you end up with Van Dyke Parks/Brian Wilson vagaries. On “I Grow Old:” In my room are demons / On the ceiling hangin’ / Once I was a he-man / Lost in time now danglin’.
Even that song recovers, though. My favorite collection of this stuff—there have been half a dozen or so—I discovered in a discount bin at Gimme! Records in the East Village. A compilation released in the early-eighties by the German label Line, it’s titled as if to pose as the lost third record, Volume 3. The record the Brummels could never get made. And though it includes the usual compilation follies of studio jabber, a cover of “Louie Louie,” and numerous typos … Still, the tunes sound great—no remastering needed.
