Day 53: Junior Kimbrough – You Better Run

Reading about Blues music is almost more entertaining than listening to Blues music. In Kimbrough’s case, even just the album titles are awesome: “Sad Days, Lonely Nights”, “Most Things Haven’t Worked Out“, and “God Knows I Tried.”  However, in Kimbrough’s case, the music actually takes the forefront.

Kimbrough’s is a style of blues akin to RL Burnside‘s, and in fact they hailed from the same area and were on the same label. Their two families played on each others’ records often. But Kimbrough puts his own stank on the blues, charging his songs with desperation and nerve, telling grisly, inhuman tales at some times, and begging the universe to take it easy on him at others. The music underpinning every song shimmers with misery, and it sounds like the guitars themselves sound traumatized, like they have been pawned and redeemed dozens of times.

The best part of the album is, for me, just that concentrated discord. The music, even without the words, is a tour of a godforsaken world in which no one the narrator encounters has a soul. Consider the lyrics to “You Better Run“:

You know
One day I was in the park
I see a girl come running up to the car
She ran up to the car
She said, “Mr.”
Said, “Would you get me home”
I said, “What’s wrong with you, Baby?”
She said, “That man gotta knife”
Said, “He tryin to rape me”

You better run
Don’t let him get you
You better run
Don’t let him get you
If he catch you, Babe
He gonna rape you

Yeah
An’ on the way home
I said, “Baby,
You might still get raped”
She said, “Mr. Junior,”
Said “You don’t have to rape me;
Cos I love you”

These are actually the lyrics to an actual song. And the song is played as a relatively light-hearted affair. That’s what’s fascinating about the worldview portrayed here: For him this tale passes as a Meet Cute. Listening to the song you can imagine him telling this story to his grandkids while smoking a cigar.

There’s something endearing about these old bluesmen. I’m a sucker for a good toiling-in-obscurity-only-to-be-recognized-posthumously story. It makes me feel like no matter how poorly things in my life go, the work I leave behind might be beloved by some future generation with radically different standards from this one. And goddamn if that don’t make me feel nice.

Day 24: Charlie Rich – The Most Beautiful Girl – 20 Greatest Hits

For those unfamiliar with an artist, a best-of album can be immensely useful. It can show the progression an artist has taken from their oldest hit to their newest, and give one a sense of the path the artist has taken. Something like that would be perfect for Charlie Rich, an artist who had to try out quite a few styles. After trying to make an impression with some jazz and blues numbers he was writing, he caught the attention of people at  Sun Records who hired him as a writer and gave him a crash course in writing pop, giving him a stack of Jerry Lee Lewis records to study. Years of middling releases and failed hits later, Sun Records was struggling, and he was taken in by Billy Sherrill, architect of Countrypolitan, a budding genre that took strong Country vocals and put it over songs stacked to the rafters with impenetrable layers of strings and smooth female harmonies.

This tutelage handily synergized two factors: that Rich had a voice so damned sweet that it managed to infuse this repugnantly schmaltzy sound with honest-to-goodness soul, and that he was, by this point in his career, as desperate as he’d ever been. He had made sacrifices of integrity before (his frequent re-recording of his material over the course of his life leaving numerous iterations of his songs before his Countrypolitan makeover as evidence). Originally considering himself a Jazz pianist and having very little interest in Country, he had his piano taken away from him and ended up crooning on Vegas stages like a regular Tom Jones, and all the while plunged further into as many bottles as he could get his hands on.

The evolution of his style and the subsequent repurposing of his back catalog can be seen in the different iterations, recorded a decade apart, of “There Won’t Be Anymore”. The 1960s version is raw and bluesy, and lets his piano playing speak clearly as a fundamental voice in the music. The re-done 1970s version is more of a country ballad, with the Nashville sound starting to creep in. Rich’s voice is pushed toward the front even more, and given a hefty honk of reverb. It turns into into less of a brusque, smoky song and tones it down, remixing it into a saccharine ballad. Fortunately, as I said, Rich’s sonorous voice was seemingly made for this style of music, as it rings true enough to salvage the formulaic piece the song had become.

And this brings me to why this particular disc is somewhat of a disaster. Years after even that second version was recorded, once Rich was playing casinos and nightclubs (and was apparently none too happy about it), he ended up re-recording all of his biggest hits in the style he was playing them at the time, singing his soulful standards like they were just that: Standards, songs that he’s been hired to perform. He does little to take his songs and make them his own, and the saddest thing of all is knowing this was probably not his desire. Singing with a wistful distance from his own music, the whole experience flattens out, robbing the listener of much sense of his range.

However, even with this shortcoming, this album remains enjoyable, because when it came down to it, Rich was a terrific singer with a distinctive voice, who had a great ear for songwriting. Songs like “Rollin’ With The Flow” and “Behind Closed Doors” prop up quaint cliches with an ineffable sincerity that, even on this hi-gloss re-recording, rings true. The album stands as a testament to the talents of one of the most misunderstood artists last century, who, despite continuous mishandling by executives who didn’t know what slot to fit his style into, had one of the best voices around and an ear that knew what to do with it.

Day 10: R.L. Burnside – Too Bad Jim

Oh man oh man oh man, I liked this a goddamn lot. From the opening notes of Shake ‘Em On Down I could surmise a number of things about R.L. Burnside:

1. He is probably blind.
2. He was probably in his 60s when this was recorded.
3. He was probably drinking continuously during the recording, including while singing; probably this involved a straw and a bottle of rye suspended from his neck by a frayed rope.
4. He probably has had difficulty maintaining healthy relationships.
5. The vicissitudes of his life have probably been the result of bad luck as much as bad decisions.

One look at his Wikipedia article revealed I was not too far off. This paragraph says more than enough about how beautifully, classically blues this album is:

Around 1959, he left Chicago and went back to Mississippi to work the farms and raise a family. Burnside was convicted of murder and sentenced to six months’ incarceration (in Parchman Prison) for the crime. Burnside’s boss at the time reputedly pulled strings to keep the murder sentence short, due to having need of Burnside’s skills as a tractor driver. Burnside later said “I didn’t mean to kill nobody … I just meant to shoot the sonofabitch in the head. Him dying was between him and the Lord.”

The album is not just a triumph of style, though. It’s genuinely great music. Any track from the album could stand up as a high point. The guitars on .44 Pistol positively saunter, sounding bitterly indignant. While RL’s voice is just perfect — ravaged by menthols and grain alcohol — the guitars really make it bleed. His leads are beautifully expressive, earning the phrase ‘licks’; he reaches into the deep footprints the rhythm section stomps out and plucks out the bluest chords you could imagine. He and his band are content to repeat a chord or two for a long while, letting a suggestion of a pattern linger, teasing it with flourishes, before R.L. seems to get annoyed and dig into his guitar for a second before regaining his composure. The whole sound is the blues, as far as I’m concerned: It’s a musical bad mood, and like real bad moods it juggles frustration, bitterness, disappointment, and elation, all in flashes that leave you haggard and bitter.

The complex soul of the music is especially evident in a song like Short-Haired Woman, which manages to be lazy and restless, sad and ambivalent, dismissive and insistent, blending all of these states in a true way. It’s not the garish sound of someone setting out to paint with tones, thinking “I would like this to be a sad song so it is going to be sad, and I would like it to resolve cathartically so it will eventually get upset and loud.” It is the sound of someone accustomed to strife shrugging at their misfortunes, knowing that real life, even at its worst, consists of too many concurrent feelings to be flattened out.

This album, in all its humanity, was especially invigorating today. See, I’ve now gone a week and a half without listening to music. Maybe that’s not technically accurate, but believe me it feels like it. The challenge of not being able to listen to the music I want to is the true soul of this project. The daily album is a way of assaulting my system, of expanding my horizons, of filling in some of the woefully cavernous gaps in my musical knowledge, of learning how to write about music in any kind of an effective way. But that’s all beside the point. The project is a way of instilling discipline in my life. I’ve always had a hard time sticking with things for very long. I have a hard time envisioning a year down the road, let alone constructing the things I want in my life when I get there.

Two things in my life have been relatively constant: music and writing. Music has always been my passion. Nothing mattered more when I was a kid, and not much matters more now. I wish this passion could have translated into a musical career of some sort, but I could never muster any talent on an instrument and the sad fact is I’m really not that creative. I’ve been playing piano for a while now and the best I can do is pluck out parts to songs I really like, and like enough to want to know how they operate.

“After a heart attack in 2001, Burnside’s doctor advised him to stop drinking; Burnside did, but he reported that change left him unable to play.” – Wikipedia

A friend was a bit puzzled at how abruptly I started this project. This is usually the kind of thing someone starts on January 1st. But I had been coasting for a while now, writing short stories here and there, trying to get into the right mental space to conjure a 2nd novel, and despairing at how vague an idea of the future I had. Moving to a new city has derailed my sense of continuity, and without any big career goal outside of eventually having spent enough time writing to hone my talent enough to convince someone to give me enough money for writing to pay my rent with, I needed something.

Inspired by my friend Kelsey’s blog project, Dear Mr President 365, where she has been writing a letter to the president every day for a year, I was thinking how nice it would be to have something like that: A daily task. A purpose. A small thing I have to do every day that actually draws on things I like. An opportunity to write, to converse with myself and a reader, about something that really means something to me. To learn something.

The idea for this blog hit me, and I jumped.

And so, for the next year, my life has meaning. It’s insignificant in the grand scheme of things; but it’s a concept I can stand for, trying to throw myself hard against something that has always been my greatest failing — sticking to a goal for more than a week — and in the process delineating a year in music, finding three hundred and sixty-five surprising new things to like, hate, and/or respect, gorging on a buffet of art greater than any I’ve ever tackled before.

Last night I overheard the first minute of Radiohead’s Everything in its Right Place, the opening track from one of my favorite albums, and couldn’t stop hearing it all night and all morning. It was tormenting me, and calling to me. It was an itch I couldn’t not scratch. And then I got this, my random album for the day, and put it on, and immediately realized that the remainder of the year will not be a challenge; it will be an adventure.