Day 25: The Lemonheads – It’s a Shame About Ray (Expanded Edition)

What a treat. I don’t want to attribute how much I liked this to nostalgia; that seems like it would cheapen the love affair we have shared  all day. Thank god I got this on a day off where I could really sink into it. Straight out of my Walkman circa 5th grade comes a lean slab of joyful, unalloyed pop, taking the crusty-eyed grunge of the time and turning it into something friendlier, more likeable, more chill-with-able.

It’s a Shame About Ray occupies a particular emotional space. Evan Dando’s vocals come off at times as ambivalent, morose, or indecisive, but when layered over the gleaming guitar, it tempers the mopiness with exuberance, resulting in a mixture that places the album in a perfect middle space between each extreme, its perspective accepting of happiness and sadness, and perfectly willing to acknowledge both (if simultaneously).

The album deals extensively in weird relationships, and describes with an understanding eye the turbulence in the spaces where people meet. In song after song, Dando confronts his own aloofness, as in “Confetti” when he sings “He kinda shoulda sorta woulda loved her if he could’ve/He’d rather be alone than pretend“, and manages not to judge himself for the weakness implicit in his bind: that he believes in being fair to this unnamed girl, yet struggles to act in accordance to his morals. That he takes this reflexive reprobation and makes it into an irrepressibly infectious hook shows his mastery of songcraft.

But these binds come from situations that at least occasionally satisfy. “My Drug Buddy” describes a friendship(?) with a girl that hits its stride when the two are doing drugs together, and describes in unflinching romance every moment of their rendezvous; she’s coming over, they’ll stop to use a payphone along the way; her eyes lighting up as she makes a connect; “We have to laugh to look at each other/We have to laugh ’cause we’re not alone.” It’s lovely, and reveals Dando lost in a rapturous love that lacks definition, and that seems lovelier for it. But like the music, this is where he’s most comfortable: when he can just get lost in the indefinite space adjacent a strict boundary. He lusts uncomfortably, on “Alison’s Starting To Happen”, when he finds himself obsessing about a girl as she blossoms into a punk rocker; he loves a virgin girl and comes to find beauty in her decision to remain chaste; and finally, on the excellent “Shaky Ground” he takes a whole-hearted stand behind his love of a (just a) friend, singing “Always helps to have someone else along/But if my girlfriend sees us, she’ll come to the conclusion it’s wrong/Does this mean we’re on shaky ground?/I’m happy when you’re around/So let’s not put our friendship at bay/I love you in a different way.“

“Shaky Ground” is not only excellent for its beautiful acoustic intimacy, where Dando’s just-shy-of-strained voice can be heard in its every breathy shade, but because it segues neatly into the bonus tracks that come with this re-release of the album. The demo versions, one for almost every track, are lo-fi and sound like revised first drafts: the vocals and guitars are in place, and the simple but thoughtful melodies shine without the commotion of the drums and amplifiers. The songs relax, and the lyrics blossom in that grey room-noise space. “Bit Part” goes from its rollicking album version to a dirge, as the line “I just want a bit part in your life/Little more than a cameo/Nothing traumatic when I go“, disarmed of its platonic enthusiasm, reveals a desperate man pleading to be allowed to resign himself to a compromise.

Day 11: The Black Crowes – The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion

So I just don’t really like rock ‘n’ roll. Maybe it’s because between the ages of 11 and 14 I wouldn’t listen to anything but the local classic rock station and just overdosed on it, but I have no enthusiasm for it whatsoever, bordering on a severe distaste. Years go by and my musical tastes get more willfully eccentric, and it becomes less and less relevant to my life. The closest bands I’ve found to rock ‘n’ roll that I’ve liked lately have been Spoon and Frightened Rabbit,  and despite distantly related to music like Led Zeppelin, they certainly don’t embody the same spirit. Spoon uses rock ‘n’ roll the way Alton Brown uses a kitchen, and Frightened Rabbit don’t seem tiger-stripe spandex enough for the genre. Despite the nostalgic factor of 70’s-era rock, the whole of it for me has been sullied by Guns ‘n’ Roses and the rock bands that hung on through the 90’s, the decade of my adolescence, when the only things I knew about the decade prior came filtered through the sneer of those too young to remember anything but the most ridiculous parts.

Most of what 90’s rock I loved was rather pussified by comparison. When I was younger and it was around I never appreciated alternative rock. I wanted to go bob my head to Aerosmith. But the acts that have stuck with me as I’ve gotten a little older have been The Wallflowers, Counting Crows, and slightly later-90s acts like 3rd Eye Blind and Weezer. Much softer, turned from 11 down to a more reasonable 7. Sensitive. Not really very rock’n’roll. But when I hear “rock’n’roll” I picture a 40-year-old-man waking up in his van, crawling out from under a mass of sweat-stained tiger-stripe jumpsuits and pulling on his pool cleaning company’s polo shirt, and checking his roots in the rear-view mirror to see how long he can get away with putting off bleaching his hair again. I picture protracted adolescence and really just kind of douchebag dudes who would have gotten a kick out of beating up a guy like me for putting Long December on the jukebox. Meanwhile, after a day’s listening, The Black Crowes seem like the kind of guys who would sing along to Long December with you, and then pour whiskey on a barstool and light it on fire.

The Black Crowes are one of those bands that seem to have had a real cultural presence for as long as I can remember, yet have managed to avoid infamy. They have been putting out strong rock tunes for most of my life and, despite listening to so much radio and watching so much MTV, I managed to go until today without really recognizing a song as one of theirs. Turns out that song She Talks to Angels, which gets me lip-syncing the words into the nearest pool cue whenever I hear it at a bar, was by The Black Crowes all along. Who knew.

Basically I like these guys, anyway. The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion is a pretty air-tight disc. The songs are cock-rock without getting too phallic. Guitar World lists this as #100 on their list of the top 100 guitar albums of all time, and it’s clear why. The guitars are like dueling flamethrowers, and point out that the gulf between “enjoyable guitar heroism” and “tiresome chromatic scale noodling” is about as wide as the average Grateful Dead live show is long.

On the whole, the album is memorable. Songs like Remedy temper the anxiety of the cyclonic guitars with a small female vocal accompaniment and a nimble piano spackling the cracks the guitars leave behind, but don’t let the album’s palpable continuous black-key tension waver, but they hit real high notes on the the standout Sometimes Salvation, where they rein in the rock and focus on the roll, letting the song tumble along on a frying-egg-sizzle cymbal hit and giant’s-stride stop-start guitars, as Chris unloads a soulful wail into the song’s firmament. Chris Robinson has a killer voice, and on the closing track, Time Will Tell (a Bob Marley cover, wow), he relaxes his bombast and softens his rasp, doing his best impression of a Baptist Revival church choir leader.

I enjoyed this album. It’s a well-rounded experience, upbeat without being tiresome and emotional without losing face. I’d recommend it, and I’ll probably revisit it in the future.