Album of the Week (full episodes) - Josh Rutner

Episode 24: Sweetheart (Dan Reeder, 2006)

Josh Rutner

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"He's good; you gotta give him that… He was good, but let it go… I love Bach, but come on you guys."

So says Dan Reeder, the Nuremberg-based, Louisiana-born and Southern California-bred painter, instrument builder, and musician, explaining the source frustration of his gently reactionary song, “Bach is dead and gone,” which appears on his 2006 release, Sweetheart. That German attitude that Bach is the beginning and end of all music. Get over it, the guy’s dead. The proof? Well, for one, he doesn’t answer email. Also, if you saw him, he’s just a pile of bones. Reeder’s not denying the man’s compositional greatness, singing, “While he was still living, he was one fast gun / I said let’s right some motets, he was already done.”

Reeder seems most comfortable with short forms—vignettes. Of the 16 songs on this album, only three fall beyond the three-minute mark. The lead-off track, “Waiting for my cappuccino”—an incredibly funny peek into the mind of a soft-spoken man who is pissed off that his drink order has been flat forgotten—is only half a minute long. But so much drama—albeit the internal drama sparked by normalcy—is packed into those 34 seconds.

Reeder claims not to be a poet, and that may very well be true, but throughout Sweetheart, there are lines that are such beautifully eloquent and powerfully resonant readings of the everyday, that I just want to pluck them out and bottle ‘em. Perhaps he’s a poet and doesn’t even know he is one.

What’s so great about Reeder, though, is that despite this gift of lyrical vividness, he’s extremely comfortable downshifting into “hup getalong doggie / little doggie getalong”s in his “Cowboy Song” and child-like “hey batter batter batter hey batter hey”s in “I drink beer.” He’s also happy to take a tiny snippet of a lyric, such as “All my money is gone,” and just shuttling it back and forth through the warp c(h)ords, and producing in the end an unexpectedly colorful cloth. The variations appear at the seams, when he inserts a “2, 3, 4” or “Tell it to the landlord,” or “Dance to the music.” Is it campfire singalong music? Perhaps, but it’s maybe more situationally at home at home, performed in a sleeping child’s bedroom. Rolling at the level of a lullaby after-party.   

Reeder was aware that he could sing, but there was a problem: he’s got a very quiet voice. He loves vocal harmonies but if he sings with others, he can't be heard. And “then came the Pentium processor,” he explains, “and that made it possible for me to sing barbershop harmony with myself and country gospel harmony with myself." Problem solved.

He sings all the parts, plays all the instruments—that, oh yeah, he makes—and records and mixes the records himself. Why does he prefer to work alone? For one, musicians are hard to deal with. They come with “thick air,” as Reeder puts it, translating from the German equivalent. “Bands are terrible.”

Among the plentiful honest-to-goodness sweetness that warm’s this record’s heart, you hear, sprinkled throughout, Reeder’s completely matter-of-fact potty-mouth. (Note the classic “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” warning invading the cover art, which, incidentally, features a full-headed bier stein linoleum cut created by his then nine-year-old daughter.) While he does name-check certain parts of the female anatomy written on a men’s room wall, a certain type of heaven that may not be ample enough to go around, and a certain onanistic activity Cowboys may or may not partake in—all of which, while I personally take no issue with, I am, to paraphrase Frank Zappa, circumlocuting at this present time in order to get this text on the radio—Reeder’s tender delivery of these so-called “explicit” words betray no wink or expletive-deleted-eating-grin. If “explicitness” be the soul of songwriting, write on, I say.

The album ends with a cover of Procol Harum’s 1967 debut single, “A whiter shade of pale,” seemingly tailor-made for Reeder. "It's maybe my favorite song of all time," he says. “I just wanted to see if I could do it.” He plays the introductory and transitional melody vulnerably and heartbreakingly on his harmonica. It’s not a flawless take, but all the better. He defended inexactitude when talking about the second tune on the album, an instrumental called “Just a tune,” saying, “Playing it better woulda made it worse.”

OK, OK, but how are we, the listener, to reconcile the fact that the introductory melody and harmonic progression of “A whiter shade of pale” is lifted directly from the grave of that old dead-and-gone pile o’ bones, J. S. Bach? “OK, you win,” Reeder admits. “See? I'm a jackass.” 

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week. 

 

Episode 23: Sound & Color (Alabama Shakes, 2015)

Josh Rutner

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The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said / The recent buds relax and spread / Their greenness is a kind of grief

So begins Philip Larkin’s 1967 poem “The Trees,” which digs deep into the nature of cycles.

Following four years on the heels of their first release, entitled Boys & Girls, the four-piece outfit called Alabama Shakes, which draws up their complex and multi-hued sound from their roots, is relaxing and spreading—coming into leaf—with their 2015 album, Sound and Color.

The band’s numerous influences are at once interleaved and kneaded into each other—masked. Lead singer and guitarist Brittany Howard focuses her energy on being herself, but almost out of necessity. You’ll never be your influences—don’t worry about that—so get in there and soak up their goodness. The way painters might find their way into their self by throwing themselves into copying the old masters. Howard acknowledges this conscious individuality through breaking-off from her influences while, albeit coyly, denying even a desire to copy, saying, “I don’t want to copy Aretha because I can’t sing like Aretha. I don’t want to copy James Brown because I can’t sing like James Brown.” Elsewhere she says “as much as I’m inspired by Bjork, I can’t be Bjork.” She shrugs off comparisons to Janis Joplin as too easy, saying that “people hear a powerful female singer in a rock and roll band and they say, ‘Janis Joplin.’” The old masters may not be copied outright herein, but boy are they ever allowed to bubble up to the surface. Howard sums things up nicely: “Everyone is paying homage to everybody… There’s no way to be original. All you can do is put yourself into it and do the best you can.”

Larkin’s poem continues:

Is it that they are born again / And we grow old? No, they die too, / Their yearly trick of looking new / Is written down in rings of grain.

Howard grew up listening to gritty golden oldies on the radio in her grandmother’s kitchen. That lineage is beautifully threaded through the the song “Miss You,” not missing out on the grit that she brings to the mic. Nothing dainty here.

For all of the album’s boisterous distortionary outbursts, insistent inverted-ska beats, and grungy guitars—and maybe even because of it—what strikes and pleases me most about Sound and Color is its spacious quiet corners. Breakdowns that pit single line against single line, drum grooves that draw power from their missing pieces, vocals that tug at your ears with their quietude. Howard noted a change between the first two records in the form of appreciating the space, “and the ability to let the listener have time to think about what you’re doing and not just being bombarded by all of the instruments.”

The album begins with the pair of vibes and bass, in a sonic space otherwise quiet enough that you can hear the whir of the vibraphone’s motor. The full string section that sneaks in, mid-arrangement, earns its keep by not just appearing as a token texture, polyester and pedestrian as string arrangements can so often be on pop records, but by providing a plenary range of sound and color.

There is a compositional care throughout the record, successfully resisting the urge to lean on mindless-strumming backing arrangements or overindulge in unnecessary cuts-and-pastes. The third song on the album, “Dunes,” is one of many great examples. Refreshing harmonies, detailed attention to tempo, a thoughtfully repetitive bendy-bendy guitar solo, and the slowly building, slowly receding, Beatlesesque, Ringo-ish drum-fill–filled long-fade ending.

For me, the peak of subtle brilliance on the record is the seamless shift from the duple groove set up for a whole minute on the song “Gemini” into triple, when the voice enters. D’Angelo peeks through the super-laid-back delivery and parallel vocal harmony.

Never settling too long in a particular mode, Alabama Shakes’ highly-fragmented songforms command your attention by never letting you settle in too cozily. Beats don and doff masks, instrumentation tags in and out, distortion skrims lift and fall. The shape-shifting itself is a masterclass in the thinness of the line between the grooves of rooted then and fresh now.

Larkin concludes his poem:

Yet still the unresting castles thresh / In fullgrown thickness every May. / Last year is dead, they seem to say. / Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week. 

 

Episode 22: Pandemonium Shadow Show (Harry Nilsson, 1967)

Josh Rutner

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Harry Nilsson was really something else. He basked in late '60s tropes, but with the subtlety and control of one ahead of his time, or at least, not tied down to the style. The style both worked for him, and worked for him.

His second release, 1967’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, was originally intended to be titled Something Wicked This Way Comes (pulled of course from the cover of Ray Bradbury’s 1962 novel), but when legal friction pushed that title aside, Nilsson settled instead on a phrase from inside the same text, the name of the traveling carnival: Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show.  

"Ten Little Indians," the first song, which follows a brief introduction of Nilsson spoofily leading the rings, mis-barking the title as “Shandamanium Shadow Poe” and having a good laugh about it, is a grown-up count-down song, moved-along each successive verse by the transgression of biblical commandments. The arrangement grows in orchestrational intensity as the Little Indians are taken down one by one, with the one exception being the break after number five—reminiscent of the “five golden rings” breather in the middle of the otherwise monotonous 12 days of Christmas song. In Nilsson’s break-down, the electric piano continues, by its lonesome, its gentle pulsing of eighth notes, after two measures modulating without fanfare before a final set of bink bink bink bink bink bink bink binks. The drums and brass return to finish the job.

Number rhymes continue in the album’s melancholic second song, called “1941,” which tells of a child born, a father walking out, the son growing up, running off with the circus and having his own son, whom he then abandons in the same manner as his father did him. The final line of the song poses the question, what will happen to this youngest boy when the circus comes to town? 

The lyric was semi-autobiographical for Nilsson, who was born in 1941, on Father’s day, no less, inspired by Nilsson’s own father’s absence, long-believed by the children to be due to death in the war, but later revealed to be merely a plain and simple abandonment by a man still alive and well. As for the circus-as-hideaway for the runaway, that too was likely gleaned from Nilsson’s family history: his grandparents had been trapeze artists in an act called “Nilsson’s Aerial Ballet.”

Indeed, the theme of “the circus” tents a good deal of the album, not only in the bebloopered ringleader intro and the densely propped cover art, but in the ringling and tingling accompanimental arrangements throughout, most expertly given good weight via tightly stacked brass and tightly tuned drum by composer-arranger George Tipton.

The other major cluster of stars in Pandemonium Shadow Show’s constellation is The Beatles, of whom Nilsson was an unabashed fanboy. Upon first meeting George Harrison, at Harrison’s LA house on Blue Jay Way, Nilsson recalls seeing him at the far end of his pool, in a white, windblown robe, replete with beard and long hair, looking like “Christ with a camcorder.” It turned out the feelings of admiration were mutual, with the Beatles heartily singing Nilsson’s praises to the press and even trying to poach him from his label at the time, RCA. Nilsson would go on to do a ton of work with Ringo Starr as well as John Lennon, whose eventual murder would hit him particularly hard, pushing him to fiercely take up the cause of gun control, a cause which Nilsson would continue to champion through to the end of his own life.

On this album, Nilsson covers Lennon’s “You Can’t Do That,” but within his, what you might call, “conglomarrangement,” he references, usually subtly in multi-tracked backing vocals, as many as twenty other Beatles songs. He concludes his take with a Liverpudlian-tinged singing of the phrase, “Strawberry Beatles forevah.” Total fanboy.

As if quoting tens of Beatles songs within a Beatles song didn’t sufficiently message that Nilsson is fond of the lovable lads, he goes on to cover "She’s Leaving Home"—fitting in quite nicely with the runaway children theme introduced in “1941.” He doesn’t particularly stray from the original’s melody or arrangement, but he does make it his own through Tipton’s sensitive and sparkling brass orchestration and Nilsson’s at-once technichal, tightly-controlled and artsy, loosy-goosey vocal delivery.

A favorite of mine on the record is the Tom Jonesy show piece, “There Will Never Be Another.” Set in a syncopated 5/4 and accompanied not by drums but by two tambourines as percussion, the tune pulls the powerful rips of brass in the backing arrangement together with Nilsson’s expertly executed baroque ornamentation. Carefree exactitude.

Christ with a camcorder, there is some great stuff on this record. Give it a spin.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week. 

Episode 21: Three Feet High and Rising (De La Soul, 1989)

Josh Rutner

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“Peace and tranquility is now resumed under a DAISY like condition! De La Soul has now entered your MIND, BODY, and SOUL. Sit back, take a luuden, and everything will be Dan Stuckie. For this is a DAISY AGE.”

So concludes the comic adventures of De La Soul within the liner notes of their 1989 landmark album, Three Feet High and Rising. Without even hearing a lick of sound, the notes—and, of course, the eye-poppingly day-glow-bright daisy-filled cover art—give you an idea of what means these three young artists use to bring their art to the world: positive vibes, and private language; humor, wit, and satire. De La Soul consists of three: you’ve got Posdnous (a.k.a, Plug One, soppin’ up sound; favorite food: Twizzlers), Trugoy the Dove (a.k.a., Plug Two, a pioneer of a phrase called talk, who enjoys to eat yogurt enough to use it as the basis of his nickname), and P.A. System Pasemaker MASE (a.k.a, Plug Three, a man Making A Soul Effort, whose favorite food and beverage both is ketchup).

Don’t be fooled by the peace-sign and daisy imagery: these guys aren’t hippies—a point that seemed to require constant reiteration by the group: it’s “pure Plug Bull,” they say. “We can have a psychedelic sound in some of our cuts, but we are not psychedelic rappers and we are not hippies. We are not hippies.” They’re simply peaceful guys who like to wear peace signs in their hair. And the acronym DA.I.S.Y.—a description of their production—stands for Da Inner Sound Y’all. So: daisies.

One thing to keep in mind while listening to the freewheeling and hijinx-filled Three Feet High and Rising is that an album like this—piled high with layer upon layer of samples—simply couldn’t be widely released today, in our very un-DAISY age, thick as it is with legal precedent for weighty suits against so-called intellectual property theft. In 1989, particularly within hip-hop—which wasn’t yet the commercially blockbusting genre that it is today and therefore under the radar—young artists were able to use sampled beats, hooks, effects, etc., to get their musical ideas from brain to speakers quickly, efficiently, and—importantly—cheaply.

For a record like this one, which was released on Tommy Boy Records—an imprint with solid distribution due to their relationship with Warner Brothers—you’d’ve wanted to clear the larger, more obvious sampled chunks, often via one-time lump-sum agreements with the original artist—and Tommy Boy did that—but common sense dictated that it was absurd or at least unnecessary to clear every chopped-up, pitch-shifted, tweaked sample that appeared only as a momentary texture. The late '80s / early '90s was a beautifully creative time that provided fertile—and comparatively non-litigious—soil in which sample-rich and incredibly important albums like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, A Tribe Called Quest’s Low End Theory, and, of course, De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising, were able to grow. In Shunryu Suzuki’s 1970 book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, we are reminded that, “‘pulling out the weeds we give nourishment to the plant.’ We pull the weeds and bury them near the plant to give it nourishment.” Similarly, De La Soul dug through crates—not least those of their parents’ suburban Long Island record collections—and pulled forgotten or neglected wax by the roots to cut up and bury in their tracks, nourishing them.

In 1991, Three Feet High and Rising hit a snag when a pair of turtles smelled green. Let me explain.

Two former members of the '60s rock band The Turtles decided to sue De La for their uncredited use of a modified sample from the band’s song “You Showed Me”—a song, which, by the way, they didn’t write—in the 1 minute and 12 second interstitial track called “Transmitting Live from Mars,” which is as close to a throwaway track as could be, featuring, besides the the shifted organ and strings from the Turtles record, sampled and scratched audio from a French language instructional album. $1.7 million dollars ought to cover it, the two former-Turtles thought, offering at one point the option of collaborating with De La Soul on a track as a way of making the lawsuit go away. No thank you, masked men.

Tommy Boy Records, producer Prince Paul, and the trio took their De La Lumps and pressed onward, but the precedent had been set—the label and band settled out of court—and the artistic process of digging crates and creating first and asking questions later started taking a back seat to pre-production meetings with lawyers, talking about who they might want to avoid sampling.    

There are innuendos aplenty appearing through Three Feet High and Rising: Jennies, Jimmies, Buddies, and so on. The De La lexicographicalandscape runs deep and wide, and the coded language allows the group to operate on multiple planes. The liner’s comic strip shows a Walter Cronkite-looking gentleman with a finger waggling in the air and a talk-bubble overhead that states, “This album does not contain explicit lyrics. But the thought is EROTIC.”

De La Soul had a knack for sample-stacking, often using pitch-shifting when needed to best nest one inside or rest one atop another. In the 70-plus samples employed on Three Feet High and Rising, they pulled not only from the “classics,” as it were—I’m talking James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” and “Funky President” of course; talkin’ Parliament and Sly and the Family Stone—but also more left-field cuts (and here I mean tracks by artists who tended to skew more toward white demographics) like Kraftwerks “Trans Europe Express,” Steely Dan’s “Peg,” Hall and Oates’ “I Can’t Go For That,” and, not least, the track from which the album title was lifted, Johnny Cash’s “Five Feet High and Rising.” And then there’s the sample of a Richard Pryor stand-up bit in the track “Cool Breeze on the Rocks,” that of the French language instruction on “Transmitting Live from Mars,” and, a forever-fave of mine, Bob Dorough’s hit from Schoolhouse Rock, “Three is the Magic Number” sampled on “The Magic Number.” This is pastiche to a T.

“Pastiche is a violation of decorum, a mixture of unrelated elements, like the humble macaroni pie or pasticcio that gave it its name,” wrote Wendy Steiner, in her 1995 book called The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism. “Pastiche is democratically diverse and tolerant of inconsistency. It is the clownish face on social justice, a joke with deep seriousness.”

One of my favorite things about this album is how, despite that vast and dense mix of elements, the album is tied so tightly together, lyrically, and conceptually. From the title we are pulled into “The Magic Number,” which is three of course. On track 12, “Tread Water,” we meet, among others, Mr. Monkey, whose problem is that his bananas are ripe but with his bandaged climbing hand he can’t reach them, at their height of three feet. The trio helps by elevating Mr Monkey through the sound of De La (the “score” of which he picks up at the “Native store,” referring to the collective called “Native Tongues” De La Soul founded around 1988 along with Jungle Brothers and Tribe Called Quest. Both the Jungle Brothers and Q-Tip from Tribe Called Quest would make guest appearances on track 18, “Buddy.” 

Track 6, “Jenifa Taught Me (Derwin’s Revenge),” contains a sample of Liberace (of all people) playing “Chopsticks,” interesting because it’s only the sample of the elementary element of Liberace’s version of the song—the part that "any Derwin" could do. It’s about the layering of existing material with its own hidden stories that’s exciting. “Little Derwin’s got something to show us that Jenny could never do.” And Liberace makes a grand reappearance at the start of track 16, called “Plug Tunin' (Last Chance to Comprehend),” with a spoken-word sample taken from his patter introducing that previously sampled version of “Chopsticks.”

In track 9, “Eye Know,” Trugoy raps about losing all those other “Jennies” he reckoned with, and that this time the Magic Number is two, "‘cause it takes two, not three to seduce." Which brings us back to The Magic Number.

Paths like this one criss-cross the 24 tracks on the record and triangulate trios around the icositetragon—the day-glow yellow center of a daisy of your choice.

In its way, Three Feet High and Rising functions as a sort of commonplace book for the young men of De La Soul and their clever mentor, producer Prince Paul—a bibliaudiography. What strikes me most about the album is the pure and present joy. About the project, Posdnous would recall, “It was a capsule of our innocence; I can hear four individuals who didn’t give a damn about the rules and just went in and had a good time.”

De La Soul’s newest record, their ninth, titled And the Anonymous Nobody, is set to be released later this month.

It largely avoids samples.  

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week. 

Episode 20: Roxy & Elsewhere (Frank Zappa and The Mothers, 1974)

Josh Rutner

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All right, who wants to dance to the "Bebop Tango"? Rick, Jane, Carl? Lana? Brenda? Step right up. Oh this here? This is bebop, even though you think it doesn’t sound like that. Link your mind with the mind of George Duke. When he plays those funny fast little notes, twitch around and have a good time. And not too adagio!

In Frank Zappa’s powerhouse, live-with-overdubs recording from late 1974 called Roxy and Elsewhere, we’re treated to a wide range of signature Zappa compositional and performance features, including air-tight rhythmic and melodic virtuosity, loose-and-jammy solos, whirling masses of wild improvisation that suddenly snap back to attention like one of those collapsing thumb-push toys; and then there are the wacky skits, the golden-voiced and sesquipedalian introductory and narrational remarks, the stylistic parodies, and, yes, even some audience participation in the form of twitching around to funny fast little notes.

Frank Zappa had a way of pushing great culture into the ears and minds of his listeners. On the LP notes of his early 1968 album We’re Only in it for the Money, for instance, he beseeches the listener to hold off on spinning the final track—called "The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny"—until they’ve gone and read Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony.” (Instructions, by the way, that I followed to the letter when I first enjoyed the album.)

Zappa also wanted his audiences to know about 20th-century composers like Edgar Varèse, for example, not just by mentioning Varèse’s name in liner notes and in interviews, but by pulling those timbral and rhythmic influences into his own compositions, providing for those “stubbornly conditioned ears” of the public an intermediary stepping stone to perhaps some day get to the kernel of the real deal.

In The Real Frank Zappa Book, Zappa’s autobiography of sorts, he wrote about two modes of composition he flits between: “the ‘musically uncompromising boy-is-this-ever-hard-to-play’ category,” and the other category—”songs in which the ‘intrigue’ resides in the lyrics, rather than the music.” You get some great moments of unyielding musical complexity, at breakneck tempos, no less; and such intrigue! Penguins in Bondage, badinage about the smoking of a high school diploma stuffed with a gym sock, and an expression of highest regard for the campy cheapness of monster movies—cheaper the better.

In the middle of the instrumental romp entitled "Echidna's Arf (Of You)," Zappa draws attention to percussionist Ruth Underwood, claiming that the whole time she has been thinking, “What can I possibly do that will amaze everyone?” It brings to mind for me another protean and, indeed, protein-ly titled Zappa album, Uncle Meat, from 1969, in which Ian Underwood (Ruth’s then husband), tells the listener of his first meeting with Zappa, his audition for the band, when Zappa asked him: “What can you do that’s fantastic?”

Go check out Roxy and Elsewhere, and then, when you love what you hear, hunt down a copy of the concert film of same, entitled Roxy: The Movie, finally released after all this time in October of last year. If nothing else, take Zappa’s advice to heart: If you can do something fantastic, whip it out.

Oh, and register to vote.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

 

Episode 19: Whitney Houston (Whitney Houston, 1985)

Josh Rutner

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“Background singers: Ask for them by name.” The joke, attributed to David Letterman points to the fact that backup singers are functional, serving at the pleasure of the lead voice, almost by definition, nameless. So it’s not every day that back-up singers make their way upstage those “twenty feet” and become household names.

One notable exception is Whitney Houston, whose singing career began backing up artists like Chaka Khan—you can hear her on the 1978 mega-hit, “I’m Every Woman”—and Jermaine Jackson and Lou Rawls.

It was Clive Davis, who first saw her perform in 1983, who championed her and drove her solo career as a musician to its initial heights. At Columbia Records, Davis built a stellar record in the 1960s and 1970s, helping to sign, among others, Bruce Springsteen, Janis Joplin, Billy Joel, Earth, Wind, & Fire, and Aerosmith. As the story goes, he was fired from CBS Records when he hosted his son’s Bar Mitzvah on the company dime, but he bounced back, taking business—and any future Bar Mitzvah funding responsibility—into his own hands, founding Arista Records, and signing a slew of great artists, including Barry Manilow (an early cash cow for Arista), Aretha Franklin (who happens to be Whitney Houston’s godmother) and Dionne Warwick (who happens to be her cousin).

It took two years to make Whitney Houston, her formally self-titled introductory record—her follow-up, in 1987, titled the foreshortened and colloquial, Whitney, signaled her ubiquity and popularity. She and the public were on a first-name basis now. Davis spared no expense on Whitney Houston, with Arista eventually spending over $400,000 against a $200,000 budget, which, at the time, was a lot for an unknown artist. And just imagine the Bar Mitzvah bash you could host with that kinda money.

Houston was blessed with an incredibly powerful voice and a humble demeanor, both honed growing up in the church. At the time of Whitney Houston’s release, she was 21 years, and many of the songs of the album embraced and accentuated her youth—especially in the power-pop “How Will I Know,” with its childlike “If he loves me, if he loves me not” breakdown and its questioning of a mother-figure who "knows about these things" (and here it might be interesting to note that Whitney's actual mother-figure, her mother, Cissy, was singing backup on the track) as well as the head-bobbingly popping “Someone For Me,” which explicitly places Houston in the role of shy teenage girl getting her love-legs underneath her. This squeaky-clean “boy of my dreams” lyrical content and puffy production, however, isn’t able to pull her off her mature and polished delivery. Houston had pipes.  

It wasn’t all bubble-gum and trapper-keepers, though. Songs like “Saving All My Love For You” and “Greatest Love of All,” both of which became huge hits, delved into more adult themes of love and self-love. Funnily, in a July 1985 Ann Landers advice column, responding to a letter from a self-described “Eastern Liberal Square in Delaware” who is just terrified that the lyrics of her children’s music "encourage violence, promotes sexual promiscuity, and is extremely provocative," Landers lists “You Give Good Love” as an example (along with seven others) of sexually provocative, “trashy songs.”

(A quick note for those quick to jump down Landers’ throat, she did go on to say that while she doesn’t particularly care for the titles (nor the lyrics within the songs she may or may not have heard), there’s nothing really to be done. “Delaware,” in essence, should slow her roll. “Parents are always appalled at the music their teens listen to, but somehow the majority of teens manage to grow up OK, and some of them even become ‘Eastern liberals.’” Sick burn, Landers.)

While the lyrics of “You Give Good Love” are hardly sexually explicit, the music video for is, I admit, most definitely suggestive, or at least ham-handedly aiming for suggestiveness in the way that '80s music videos seemed somehow to perfect. Shall we dive in and give “You Give Good Love” a good hard look?

The video’s dramatic narrative follows an unexplained videographer in a patronless—I want to say… restaurant? after closing? as he gazes—both through the camera lens and (suggestively!) with his peeking, naughtily open eye around it—at the singer in the venue, played by Houston, who is outfitted (suggestively!) in a belted hot-pink unitard and backed-up by two spookily-lit backing singers. The very first sequence involves a tight close-up of Mr Videographer slowly—dare I say, suggestively—pushing his lens into the camera’s opening. Around a minute-thirty in, the cameraman’s head slowly tilts from his shouldered equipment so that both of his eyes can smile at her, and then the camera—our camera—cuts to an extreme and oh-so-suggestive close-up of the singer’s hands gently caressing the mic stand. Shots like these ping pong back and forth throughout: eyes, lips, hands, eyes, smile, lips. It’s hard to tell at this point if it’s just the very '80s-ness of the whole production that makes me see these moves as so comically ridiculous. But just wait, the suggestiveness takes a back seat to true ridiculousness once the kitchen staff gets involved.

Unable to cook at a time like this, the chef—creepily barechested beneath his open white coat, and glistening with sweat—comes out, removes his hat out of reverence, and gazes. Then his creepy sous-chef joins him, and they both leer and smile and disgustingly dip their fingers into the gruel the sous-chef was preparing—presumably for no customers—and, you know, suggestively taste it. (Blech.)

At three and a half minutes in, a third member of the kitchen staff has joined his colleagues and the sexual aggression has turned into a pitiful display of side-to-side dancing to the beat. It was at this moment that I remembered another music video of that time to feature not only a surfeit of aggressive sexual objectification within a restaurant, but an awkwardly dancing and wholly unsanitary kitchen staff. It was 1983’s “Hi, How Ya Doin’” by Kenny G on—what else?—Clive Davis’s Arista Records. That track, off his second record, G Force, which was more or less the general public’s introduction to Kenny G with its chart-reaching success, was produced by the now-legendary synthesizer guru and producer, Kashif. Any guesses on who produced Houston’s “You Give Good Love” a few years later? Mm hm. May the circle be unbroken. You all get an A. Class dismissed.

Modulations are sprinkled throughout the songs on the record—modulations being the shifting from one key center to another within the same song, usually producing a marked-if-mild euphoria of refreshed arrival, not back home per se, but back home after Extreme Makeover: Home Edition completes its work—the same but different. One might even say that Houston’s genre-jumps on Whitney Houston show off the same character-inhabiting talents she displayed in her teenage career as a fashion model.

Indeed, the vocal range revealed in the songs—the quiet-fire R&B “You Give Good Love,” the jazz-tinted “Saving All My Love For You,” the pop-tarty “How Will I Know,” the broad, nearly-Broadway “Hold Me”—is mirrored in the wildly varied cover art photography across the singles: “You Give Good Love,” borrowing the regal, earthtone-infused album cover proper; “Thinking About You,” a tightly cropped black-and-white headshot set against a cold and angular geometric background; “How Will I Know,” which is chockablock with 80s teen fashion and graphic design; and the pair of “All At Once” and “Saving All My Love For You,” both featuring Houston draped in black, straight-faced and strong-as-hell as she wades in the ocean with—you guessed it—a horse. I’ve always said, If you’re gonna spend a chunk of your $400,000 album budget on a day at the beach with a horse, you might as well squeeze two covers out of the shoot. But in all seriousness, what comes through in all of the cover photos and, importantly, in all of the songs, is her dignity, intact—see the song “Greatest Love of All” for details—no small feat for a young woman being groomed by a label to take the world by storm.

Taken as a whole, Whitney Houston (the record) does a great job of marking a moment in time—pulling as it does into one album stylistic elements that were taking hold in the early 80s—but also marking the arrival of Whitney Houston (the artist) onto the world stage, implicitly stating, “You will remember my name.”

And we did.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

 

Episode 18: Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway, 1972)

Josh Rutner

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When Nina Simone introduced her tune “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” to the packed house at the Philharmonic Hall in 1969, she said: “It is not addressed to white people primarily. Though it does not put you down in any way—it simply ignores you. For my people need all the inspiration and love that they can get.”

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the idea of rebuking self-censure and instilling self-love in African-Americans was coalescing. Steve Biko, anti-Apartheid activist and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, would later refer to his slogan, “Black is beautiful,” as saying to a person: “Man, you are OK as you are. Begin to look upon yourself as a human being.” And this cultural movement was greatly catalyzed by black musicians at the time. The summer of 1968 brought James Brown’s single, “Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud”; 1970 brought the aforementioned Nina Simone recording of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” a deep and gospel-influenced cover of which would be released later that same year by Donny Hathaway. It was covered again in 1972 by Aretha Franklin on her album Young, Gifted and Black, the same year she would release her live, full-on gospel record, Amazing Grace.

1972 also saw the release of Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway’s plainly-titled duet record, Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway—this week’s Album of the Week—which featured the song “Be Real Black For Me,” a grooving love song illustrating not only romantic love between people, but a love for the black body itself.

The song, while formatted as a private conversation between two lovers, is clearly addressed to the “black public sphere.” “You don't have to wear false charms,” Hathaway sings. In Flack’s line about her partner’s hair being “soft and crinkly,” she implicitly denies the chemical hair straighteners and relaxers that had been so popular as tool of assimilation, and reaffirms natural black beauty. Flack’s own majestic afro was on display in the image of her and Hathaway inside the fold of the LP jacket, and it nearly overtook the album cover of her 1971 release, Quiet Fire, the typographic design accentuating—halo-like—her hair’s round contour. Hathaway, for his part, preferred to wear hats, stating once in college, “I can't play unless I have my ‘sky’ on my head.”

An Atlantic Records advertisement for the recording that appeared in JET magazine in 1972 featured quotations from Flack and Hathaway about each other, which both sold the record as a true mutual admiration society—two accomplished performers who actually love each other singing love songs—but also, importantly, signaled to JET readers the pair’s dedication to the black-is-beautiful movement—Flack saying of Hathaway that listening to him is a “totally black religious experience,” and Hathaway saying of Flack that she “is unique. She has classical soul. She's black, beautiful, talented, trained, and qualified to be where she is.”

The second track on the album is a version of Carole King’s song, “You’ve Got a Friend,” which was released as the album’s first single on May 29, 1971, which, as it happens, is the exact date that James Taylor’s version of the song came out. Yet another version of “You’ve Got a Friend” appeared on Aretha Franklin’s aforementioned Amazing Grace record, a year later. It wasn’t the only non-tradition song to make an appearance on that record—Franklin also included a tune by Marvin Gaye—but its placement, as a medley with the gospel pearl “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” is compelling. Franklin had, of course, in the late 1960s, had a hit with King’s composition “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” so an inclusion of another one by the composer certainly makes sense, but the practice of peppering gospel records with pop songs, and, indeed, adding straight gospel songs to pop records was a bold and powerful statement, and one that more and more artists at this time were willing to make.

On Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway—which, speaking of Aretha Franklin, also featured a bouncy, country-fied version of “Baby I Love You,” from Franklin’s late-1960s repertoire—we find for example an utterly unstoppable version of the traditional gospel tune, “Come Ye Disconsolate.” Both Flack and Hathaway had included traditional or modern gospel tunes on their previous solo recordings, so it wasn’t a ground-breaking move for either at the time, but something about the two of them singing together, particularly at the song’s climax, skyrockets this performance to another realm. The tempo is achingly slow, and the spare accompaniment of Hathaway on piano, Flack on organ, and the superlative Chuck Rainey on bass, helps to show off Flack and Hathaway's powerful and ethereal individual and interlocking vocals. No false charms are worn around this tune: a pure signal from God’s lips to your ears.

Both Flack and Hathaway’s roots are in the church: Flack the daughter of a church organist, and Hathaway a child prodigy, who achieved notoriety in St Louis circles at the age of three, when he was billed as “Donny Pitts, the nation’s youngest gospel singer.” The two met while attending Howard University.

The album is full of slow-jams, which is just fine by me—I could listen to these two sing at slow tempos all day every day—but it was the slightly more uptempo “Where is the Love?,” the album’s third single, that would eventually take over the airwaves, boosted in large part due to Flack’s growing popularity, with her version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” originally released on her first record, First Take, being featured in a romantic scene in Clint Eastwood’s 1971 directorial debut, Play Misty for Me, netting her the Grammy for Record and Song of the Year for 1972.

One of the most strikingly emotional songs on the album is the standard, “For All We Know,” which Hathaway sings solo, accompanied by Flack’s sensitive piano. The song tells us to hold fast to the ones we love, for though tomorrow was made for some, tomorrow may never come, for all we know. It is a particularly heavy message given Hathaway’s young death at 33, which came but seven years after the release of this album, when, on a cold January night, he plunged fifteen floors from a New York hotel window.

The medical examiner determined that his death was a suicide, claiming, among other things that “adults don’t fall out of windows. Children might fall out of windows, but not adults.” Hathaway’s friends, including Flack—who was with him up to a couple hours before his death—while fully acknowledging Hathaway’s intermittent but very real “low, low points of depression,” disagreed, claiming his spirits were high that evening, and noting his eccentric habit of leaning out of high windows and full-throatedly singing and preaching for the world, or at least for the birds and the wind—something for which he’d apparently been removed from hotels in the past.

“We come and go like the ripples of a stream.”

Regardless of whether his fall was intentional or accidental, Hathaway would be remembered for his music.

His final note on “For All We Know” flutters away with 40 seconds remaining in the track. Strings, Hubert Laws’ flute, and Flack’s piano build to a final climax, hinting at a conclusion—but it’s not yet the end. Flack comes back in for a final word, quietly resolving the chord, as the strings play a funereal root.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

 

Episode 17: Sleep With One Eye Open (Chris Thile & Michael Daves, 2011)

Josh Rutner

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"What is tradition?" Max Frisch asked within his 1954 book, I'm Not Stiller. "I thought it meant tackling the problems of one's own day with the same courage one's forefathers brought to bear on theirs."

Chris Thile and Michael Daves—singing pickers both—who met in 2005 at a jam session, and whose 2011 duet album, Sleep with One Eye Open, documents their chemistry and telepathy—acknowledge this idea of bringing to bear such fire and innovation to their own conception of quote-”traditional” bluegrass music. Thile talks of breaking out of the mold of the musical archivist who simply "swaps tales about the golden days" while Daves seeks to disrupt the spotless veneer of respectability that he believes has enveloped modern bluegrass as a backlash against a questionable vision of it as some "hayseed, backward, redneck thing." He doesn't believe either to be a helpful view and prefers not to dress the genre up at all—in overalls or Sunday best. "I'd rather take it and destroy things with it," he says.

At first overthinking what they might do on this album, they eventually decided to just record what they do best: they'd show up, play traditional tunes, and be spontaneous about it.  So they booked time at Jack White's studio, stepped up to a single vintage RCA77 ribbon mic, faced off, and commenced to destroy.  

Bluegrass is a modern tradition, coming into its own in the mid-1940s, when Bill Monroe and others were blowing audiences away in part with their virtuosic picking at breakneck tempos. Daves, looking to help contextualize the genre, likes to point out that bebop was developing around the same time. And, in fact, bluegrass and bebop share, among other things, a love of the line. The long line. Steady streams of eighth-notes whose internal rhythmic pops contain the conception itself. "Everybody's a drummer." 

You can hear that barn-burning speed in their version of one of bluegrass' more well-known tunes, the traditional "Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms." The point of course is that it's a relaxed speed. When you hear Charlie Parker or Oscar Peterson, for example, you're not particularly anxious because you're pretty confident that they're gonna stick the landings. Same here. It’s makes you forget that these are prohibitive tempos for John Q. Human bluegrass player.

Within the bluegrass tradition, there is lineage of "brother duets"—The Monroe Brothers, The Stanley Brothers, The Louvin Brothers—and Thile and Daves continue this tradition, albeit as brothers from other mothers. The Louvin Brothers—another guitar/mandolin duo—in particular are a favorite of the pair. On this record, we're treated to "You're Running Wild," a gently off-balance tune that the Louvins popularized.

Daves' tenor is highlighted in their version of "Cry, Cry Darling." Cranking out full-voice high-Cs with abandon, he channels the tenors of the past against Thile's melody.

More than anything, you feel in these 16 essentially live tracks an excitement for making music together. Thile and Daves are a great pairing—fearless and fun-loving—and the tradition, whatever form it takes, should be glad to have them.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

 

Episode 16: Five Leaves Left (Nick Drake, 1969)

Josh Rutner

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Nick Drake was 26 years old when, in 1974, after having suffered for years with depression, his mother found him dead in his room—a self-administered overdose of the antidepressant he had been taking being the cause. His mother would later heartbreakingly comment that the first thing she saw was “his long, long legs." I can’t imagine. Such helpless legfullness. Her young son had sadly found, in the end, a truly troubled cure for his troubled mind. 

By that time, Drake had released only three albums, none of which was a commercial success, each selling in the low thousands. He was apprehensive, to say the least, about performing live—a lack of stage presence coupled with minutes-long breaks between songs to re-tune his guitar into one of the many non-traditional tunings he used to produce the chords he produced, didn't help matters. He much preferred the solitude of the studio. Or the home.

It would take nearly 20 more years of gentle, organic growth for his legacy to firmly take root and his talents to be affirmed by the wider public.  

1969's Five Leaves Left, his first album, is an intimate studio affair, full (perhaps overfull at times) with orchestral arrangements to complement Drake's deft and laser-accurate, finger-style guitar playing. He had had Randy Newman on the brain, imagining the lush orchestrations. After an initial failed attempt with Richard Hewson—the then House Arranger for Apple Records, who had, among other things, done the string arrangements for the first James Taylor record—Drake recommended his Cambridge chum, Robert Kirby, whose work would eventually turn around the at-first skeptical producer, Joe Boyd. 

Drake's singing style is direct, cello-like in its resonance. When a vibrato appears, it is subtle, perhaps not even there. In many ways, his voice and style strike me as reminiscent of the great bossa nova singer Joao Gilberto. Reserved, but filled with potential energy. On re-listening this past week, I noticed for the first time a tendency Drake has to close off the “M”s and “N”s at the ends of words quickly, so that rather than holding out a long vowel at the end of a phrase, he is able to hold out a closed-mouthed hum whenever possible. This habit both helps to draw out the string-like instrumental quality of his voice, and, perhaps, illustrates his symptomatic unconscious preference to keep his mouth closed. 

When an artist kills himself so young, producing so precious few albums, it's tempting and convenient to read deeply into all his lyrics and see all his performance tics through the blue-colored glasses of his depression, seeking clues and confirmation. In Drake's case, however, one doesn't have to dig as deeply as unconscious humming: he wore his world-weariness on the sleeves of his records. The head of A&R for Drake’s label remembers, “we saw it coming, we just shrugged our shoulders and thought well, that wasn’t unexpected.” 

Eschewing for the most part songs about love or other people generally, he was besotted with poetic images of nature: oceans, shores, rivers, skies, and sun; flying birds, flying people, flying light, and flying time. 

As a reader in English literature at Cambridge for a spell—including the time of the Five Leaves Left sessions—it makes sense that references to some of those readings would have make appearances. 

While Melody Maker's review in posited that "All smokers will recognize the meaning of the title” as referring to the "five paper left" warning near the end of a packet of Rizla cigarette papers, it seems likelier to me—or rather, I’d like more to believe and it seems reasonable—that the reference was at least in part to O'Henry’s short story "The Last Leaf," about a young artist, dying of pneumonia, watching the ivy leaves fall off the vine: "They're falling faster now,” she says to her best friend watching over her. “Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to count them. But now it's easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now." Then she tells her friend, "when the last one falls I must go too." 

Falling leaves also appear in the album’s second tune, “River Man,” in which Drake sings of a “Betty” who “Said she had a word to say / 'bout things today / And fallen leaves.”

On the album cover of Five Leaves Left, Drake, like the artist in "The Last Leaf," looks out a window of a walk-up onto green leaves, but the knowing half-smile in his eyes might tell us that perhaps all isn’t yet lost—that he’s leafed through to the O’Henrian twist at end of the story.

Perhaps the most potent potential literary reference is the song "Fruit Tree," a meditation on fame. Drake’s song begins, “Fame is but a fruit tree / so very unsound / it can never flourish / 'til its stock is in the ground”—a crashingly stunning metaphor, and one which I have to imagine he borrowed and expanded from Jonathan Swift in his first major prose work, A Tale of A Tub, sarcastically subtitled, “written for the universal improvement of mankind, long desired.” Here’s what Swift wrote:

“I have a strong inclination, before I leave the world, to taste a blessing which we mysterious writers can seldom reach, till we have gotten into our graves: whether it is, that fame, being a fruit grafted on the body, can hardly grown, and much less ripen, till the stock is in the earth: or, whether she be a bird of prey, and is lured, among the rest, to pursue after the scent of a carcass: or whether she conceives her trumpet sounds best and farthest, when she stands on a tomb, by the advantage of a rising ground, and the echo of a hollow vault.”

Swift’s book was a parody; Drake’s song, in light of what would happen just a few years later, was most serious. His fame, as he and Swift both darkly predicted, did eventually flourish, and ripen, years after his death.

Go and check him out. 

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

Episode 15: W H O K I L L (tUnE-yArDs, 2011)

Josh Rutner

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W H O K I L L, the second album from Merrill Garbus as tUnE-yArDs, begins with a brief recording of her grandmother introducing her as a performer when she was a toddler—a moment, for a child, in which all attention is on them, and the ways of the world, revolving though they may be around her tiny head, are as other as other can be. But the sample is swiftly cut off by a propulsive beat—and we're off. Sleep tight, kiddo; the adults are going to talk now.

Those drums aren't coming from a traditional drum set but from Garbus' makeshift high/low, two-drum set-up. Bass and snare—a boom of the heel of the hand against the snap of a pencil on a lunchroom table. Find a video of Garbus performing as tUnE-yArDs and you'll more than likely see her standing behind two microphones—one to catch sounds for looping—flanked on her right and left by floor tom and snare, playing the two drums with arms wide open, as opposed to the cross-armed compactness of a sitting set-player. There's something about that image—high and low, playing against each other, rarely hitting at the same time and kept at arm’s length, but connected by a central puppet master and, aggregated, producing a complete and stirring image—that seems, to me at least, apt for tUnE-yArDs. A muted metaphor.

The beat in this lead-off track—a wry indictment of America entitled "My Country"—is soon joined by two of Garbus’ voices sung in hocket—a further illustration of voices worlds apart drawn together. Hocket is the musical practice of orchestrating a single melody between two or more voices. In this case, "Garbus One" sings only up-beats, and "Garbus Two" only down. The effect is magical and seductive from the outside, but, speaking as someone who's attempted this type of singing in the past, it's quite difficult to appreciate the aggregate beauty when you're in it. Sometimes the only way to stay on track is to ignore the other voices altogether.

"My Country" tears at the seams of the "American Dream" with lines like, "Your love it drags me down into the underground / My country bleeding me / I will not stay in your arms." It brings to mind for me David Byrne’s 1997 stab at dressing-down America through anthropomorphizing her—his song "Miss America," in which the narrating character, infatuated with this country-cum-supermodel in the manner of a teenage fan, professes his love but notes that she has wicked ways and secrets to be kept, like, for instance, how tall she is without her platform shoes. In Garbus' "My Country," she too latches onto this idea that America has dark secrets she is repressing, but she takes it a step further, screaming, "With my eyes open how can I be happy?" and whispering, "The worst thing about living a lie is just wondering when they'll find out."

Throughout W H O K I L L, Garbus addresses serious social issues but always with a nod of acknowledgment to the complexities of being a white Connecticutian who moved to Oakland via Montreal, and who incorporates a good deal of African musical elements into her music, singing about gentrification and cultural appropriation.

"I'm more comfortable with questions than with answers,” she says. “Which is why, [in the song Gangsta,] it's ‘What's a boy to do?’ rather than ‘Look at this dude who thinks he's a gangster.’ It's not even a judgment. Who am I to assess the situation and know what it's like to walk in those shoes?"

One of the most overtly political songs is "Doorstep": She sings, sing-songy—almost disturbingly happy-go-luckily, given the subject matter—"Don't tell me the cops are right in a wrong like this / ‘Cause policemen shot my baby as he crossed over my doorstep." The song was directly inspired by the case of Oscar Grant, a young, unarmed African-American man shot and killed by a police officer on an Oakland BART platform on New Year’s Day, 2009.

"I saw what was happening in the community and tried to grasp it from some kind of personal perspective,” Garbus recalls. “I found the distance between the human experience of that event and the way it was processed by the system horrifying."

There is a similar disconnect in the way she sets such a set of lyrics to a bouncy, doo-woppy groove in a major key. But the truth, as ever, will out: the pleasant melody is mottled with intentionally out-of-key notes. Toward the end of the song, the tick-ticking of her sticks on rims signals the marking of time as she sings: "How many gone before you listen to the cries?" Not "how long," but "how many gone." Time marked with bodies. Those ticks bleed into the off-camera sounds of a ticking clock proper at the start of "You Yes You," which changes tack—if sarcastically—by reframing the question to begin with the optimistic, “Now that everything’s gonna be OK, now that everything is gonna be all right...”

After laying all this serious "bizness" on the listener, there is, in the penultimate song, "Wolly Wolly Gong," a feint toward pleasantly lulling us to sleep, reassuring us, like a parent does to a child, that the coming morning will fix and undo wrongs, that all will be well. "For your sleep is guard 'gainst the cold and hard, a soft shroud of safety in a world gone wrong," she sings. Like many lullabies, however, listen close and you’ll notice the violent underbelly. “Rockabye baby in the treetop”—for the moment, anyway. Boughs break and babies fall. The final words of “Wolly Wolly Gong” pose the question, "When you fall what happens when you're landing?"

There’s an often-quoted retort by Prince Richard in Anthony Harvey’s 1968 film version of The Lion in Winter in response to Prince Geoffrey’s claim that it doesn’t matter the way one falls down. Richard, who is determined to provide no satisfaction to the approaching King, and certainly will not beg, says, “When the fall is all there is, it matters.”

It seems inevitable that we fall and and it’s nigh-impossible to imagine a return to any sort of prelapsarian bliss—if there even exists such a “time before the fall”—so the best we can do, perhaps, is pay attention, and do what we can while we’re landing.

It matters, after all. 

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.