Music Notes

I haven’t done a Music Notes in a long time. I was on the road for two weeks and haven’t listened to new albums until now. There wasn’t a ton of news anyway. But let’s do this for the first time in 2022!

I saw Old Crow Medicine Show at the Tennessee Theater in Knoxville a couple of weeks ago. I had never seen OCMS before, but I most certainly had been to the Tennessee Theater. I lived in Knoxville from 1997-2000 and I saw a tremendous number of good shows at this beautiful palace to music. Heck, here’s a partial list of people I saw there who are no longer with us: John Prine, Merle Haggard, Doc Watson, Dr. John, Tony Rice, Chet Atkins, Charlie Louvin, Ralph Stanley. Probably some others too if I thought more about it. It had been a long time. Lot of memories while I was sitting there. Lot of loss.

Anyway, OCMS was a pretty good show. They are funny and silly and how you feel about the band probably depends on this. But their ironic silliness is not that different from the more straight ahead silliness that was a huge part of twentieth century country music. Hee Haw was ridiculous, but it’s not as if cornpone humor was uncommon at country shows. If you listen to old Stanley Brothers sets or really so many others, dumb humor is a huge part of it. They have a whole shtick, including pre-set dance moves! But boy can they play. Pulled off a few songs off the album I know best, Tennessee Pusher, which i like an awful lot. That included “Highway Halo,” which they don’t play very often. Lots of covers too. I would absolutely see them again. Was very lucky to happen to be in Knoxville on my recent road trip that night.

Sierra Farrell opened. I haven’t heard her debut album yet, but she was great live. Interesting background–girl from West Virginia who runs into a bunch of traveling musicians (hippies who rode the rails I think, the type you see in Eugene) and she joined them and did that for like a decade, learning the guitar and fiddle, playing the old timey songbook and writing songs of her own, getting questionable face tattoos. And now she is in Nashville and just was outstanding. I really look forward to hearing the album.

Speaking of my road trip, I listened to almost all albums on it. In fact, that was less than normal. Some of that was that my wife joined me for a bit of it so we put some podcasts in there. Some of it was that WNCW and WDVX are two of the finest radio stations in this land and I actually want to listen to them when I get the chance and so they actually trumped the albums. That said, over 15 days (was supposed to be 13 but the big snowstorm last week forced me to detour well out of my way, which did lead to a lot more graves in any case) meant a lot of time in the car. So here’s the playlist for the trip, all of which are things I bought on itunes over the years, which explains the lack of old country albums:

The great jazz bassist William Parker turned 70 recently and he gave a great interview at Aquarium Drunkard with all sorts of tidbits. One thing I learned though was that the saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc died not long ago. That’s a huge bummer. I saw Moondoc with Parker, Hamid Drake, and Steve Swell in Albuquerque in about 2006. It was a really fantastic show. Moondoc was a visionary saxophonist, one of the true improvisers of the last 40 years. I realize that is also the last of the three times I’ve seen Parker live. I really need to find a way to change that, including perhaps by simply figuring out when he is playing in New York and just going.

Country music lost its legendary television host Ralph Emery and the wonderful songwriter Dallas Frazier recently. Frazier wrote everything from “Elvira” to “California Cottonfields.” You probably know “Elvira” from The Oak Ridge Boys making a huge hit of it, but that was only because Rodney Crowell led his astounding debut album with it. Also, what was the deal with the song “Elvira” and then Elvira, Queen of the Dark both being big things in the 80s? Just kinda weird. Also, “California Cottonfields” is one of the finest Merle Haggard songs, a classic of his California genre. That he didn’t write it didn’t matter. Among the many great things about the Hag is that he had massive overwhelming contempt for the Nashville songwriting machine, but was more than happy to record great songs by great songwriters that fit his catalog. I hope Frazier got pretty rich through all this great work.

Very much appreciate Neil Young saying he wanted his music off Spotify so long as Joe Rogan is allowed to spew his murderous anti-vaxx trash there. Guess Neil probably isn’t a Packers fan either. Joni Mitchell and Dave Grohl have since followed Neil on this. Let’s hope more join them. Also, Spotify sucks.

People have spilled a lot of ink over Led Zeppelin over the years. There’s maybe not much left to say, but that’s hardly going to get in the way of a full New Yorker reconsideration of the band. The one particularly interesting thing in here is thinking about the band’s tendency to, uh, borrow, from other musicians.

Nowadays, skeptics are likely to judge Page’s project of “narrowing the distance between genres” as entitled cultural appropriation, or even plagiarism. Extending its traditional hostility, Rolling Stone has accused the band of having a “catalog full of blatant musical swipes.” Words like “plunder” and “stolen” are thrown about online. Spitz prefers the gentler phrase “suspiciously close.” Through the years, the band has been sued or petitioned by Willie Dixon (“Whole Lotta Love” took words from Dixon’s “You Need Love”), Howlin’ Wolf (“The Lemon Song” borrowed its opening riff and some lyrics from his “Killing Floor”), Anne Bredon (who wrote the original song that Joan Baez, and then Led Zeppelin, made famous as “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”), and the band Spirit, whose “Taurus” contains a passage that indeed sounds “suspiciously close” to the opening chords of “Stairway to Heaven” (though Spirit lost a lawsuit it brought in 2016).

Page has certainly been parsimonious with credit-sharing, and, in at least one case, shabbily slow to do the right thing—he should have credited the American performer Jake Holmes, who created the musical basis for “Dazed and Confused,” on “Led Zeppelin I.” (Holmes sued and won a settlement in 2011.) But the blues evolved as an ecosystem of borrowing and recycling. The musical form cleaves to the twelve-bar template of I-IV-I-V-IV-I. Musically, you need some or all of this chord progression to cook up anything that feels bluesy, as a roux demands flour and fat, or a whodunnit a murder; originality in this regard would be something of a category error. In the Delta-blues or country-blues tradition that flourished before the Second World War, words tended to drift Homerically free of their makers. Performers might write a couple of their own verses and then finish with lines of a borrowed formula—so-called floating verses, or, the scholar Elijah Wald writes, “rhymed couplets that could be inserted more or less at random.” In fact, the postwar Chicago blues musicians who excited a generation of English performers—Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf—were themselves nostalgically repurposing, partly for a white crossover market, the Delta sound of lost prewar giants like Robert Johnson, who died in 1938. As early as 1949, the music industry cannily decided to baptize this modernized, electrified blues sound as “rhythm and blues.” In this sense, you could say that English players like Clapton and Page were double nostalgics, copiers of copiers.

Robert Plant’s tendency to lift words and formulas from old songs should be seen in this light. Plagiarism is private subterfuge made haplessly public. But to take Willie Dixon’s “You’ve got yearnin’ and I got burnin’ ” and put the words into “Whole Lotta Love” as “You need cooling / Baby, I’m not fooling”; to reverse the opening lines of Moby Grape’s 1968 song “Never,” from “Working from eleven / To seven every night / Ought to make life a drag,” and put them into “Since I’ve Been Loving You” as “Workin’ from seven to eleven every night / Really makes life a drag”; to punctuate “The Lemon Song,” which is obviously indebted to Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor,” with the repeated allusion “down on this killing floor,” while guilelessly referring to Roosevelt Sykes’s “She Squeezed My Lemon” (1937)—to make these moves, in a musical community that was utterly familiar with all the source material, testifies not to the anxiety of plagiarism but to the relaxedness of homage.

Plagiarists do what they do out of weakness, because they need stolen assistance. Does that sound like Led Zeppelin? The genius of “Whole Lotta Love” lies in its opening five-note riff, which has no obvious musical connection to Dixon’s song. “The Lemon Song” makes of “Killing Floor” something entirely new. “Since I’ve Been Loving You” is a better and richer song than Moby Grape’s “Never.” “When the Levee Breaks” is astonishingly different from Memphis Minnie’s. (It isn’t a blues song, for starters.) And, yes, “Stairway to Heaven” has more spirit, along with a few other dynamics, than Spirit’s “Taurus.” Besides, Led Zeppelin did credit many of its sources. The first album names Willie Dixon as the composer of “You Shook Me” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby.” Generally, on the matter of homage and appropriation, I agree with Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin, who, in “Led Zeppelin: All the Songs,” call the band’s version of the latter song “one of the most beautiful and moving tributes ever paid by a British group to its African American elders.”

This feels right to me. Those guys did rip off other musicians with aplomb and Page has been a real dick about it. But that doesn’t mean they did it because they were desperate or anything. They were cultural appropriators, of course they were. But it was still a great band, at least before the drugs got too out of control.

Album Reviews. Of course all of these albums are from 2021 as my list of albums from that year remains huge. Will get to some 2022 releases soon I’m sure:

The War on Drugs, I Don’t Live Here Anymore

I really don’t get why War on Drugs is such a divisive band. I happen to like them a good bit, even as I realize there are some limitations. Some people say if they wanted to listen to a Jackson Browne album, they’d listen to a Jackson Browne album. Well, OK, but this is hardly the first band to wear its influences on its sleeve. Others hate that they have brought guitar workouts back into rock music, as if the influence of electronic music is something so great and guitar music sucks, which I will go to my death saying is not true. Now, this band probably isn’t innovating anymore than they already have. The last couple of albums have largely tread the same water as before. I have tickets to see them in a few days for the first time and I am very interested to see how this works as a live show. As for the latest album, yeah, it’s a War on Drugs album. That’s good enough for me.

B+

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Ice

This is a quite fascinating album. She is a Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer, with published novels, who has started applying her words to music. Like, say, Kae Tempest or Sadie DuPuis or David Berman, you can really appreciate the quality of literary words here. But it’s the music that pulls this over the top. It sounds like early PJ Harvey, with the propulsive rock drumming at the bottom of it. She has her own songs and also covers one of the classics of indigenous songwriting, Willie Dunn’s “I Pity the Country.” It’s nice when good music, good intentions, and good lyrics all coalesce. Because you have all the good intentions you want but if the music’s doesn’t hang together, the whole thing falls apart. That does not happen here. Really worthy project.

A-

Rodrigo Amarente, Drama

Amarente is a veteran of Brazilian music who has lived in Los Angeles for several years. So the first thing to note about this album is that some of the songs are in English, which surprises and largely delights. I wouldn’t say that Amarente is really stepping too far out of the Brazilian tradition, which sometimes leads to feel that most of this music sounds basically the same, if almost universally enjoyable. It’s warm and lovely and makes you want to have a drink. Which ain’t bad even if it ain’t changing my life either.

B

Andrew Cyrille Quartet, The News

Nicely played of course, but also a bit dull, with more of an attention to being tasteful than to pushing any envelopes. This is surprising for Cyrille, who is a force of nature on the drums and a genius musician. I realize this is an ECM release and thus is going to be subdued. But there’s nothing wrong with subdued. This is actually just kind of boring. And I am very sad to say that the biggest problem here is Bill Frisell, who used to be my favorite guitarist ever but since about 2010 has gone deep into just making pretty music with little substance behind it. Of course both Frisell and Cyrille can still make wonderful music; their album Lebroba with Wadada Leo Smith is just great. This though is not. David Virelles contributes on piano and Ben Street on bass.

B-

Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Way Down in the Rust Bucket

In the big scheme of Neil Young’s vast catalog, one rarely thinks of Ragged Glory as a real great album. And I guess it’s not. But it is perfectly titled. The thing rocks. This is a live collection from the tour off that album. It does exactly what you would want a 2-disc collection out of Neil’s archives to do. He plays most, though not all, of the album. There’s a few rarities. Then there’s the serious long rockouts to “Sedan Delivery” and “Like a Hurricane” and the closer, “Cortez the Killer.” This isn’t exactly a great record. It is a very, very listenable and rocking record. So yeah, maybe it is kind of great.

A-

As always, this is an open thread for all things music and none things politics or any boring shit like that.