Nothing like a long ride on a train to provide fodder for blog posts. So in lieu of the weekly random 10 post (not to mention the weekly movie post), here's a random 20 (only a few days late), courtesy of Amtrak. With comments, written In Real Time (mostly)...
1) Slint - “Washer” - tinkly guitar, a spare slow drum - with little flickers of guitar slipping in and out. The little delicate guitar filigrees - sliding fingers on the strings - singing - delicate - odd . . . This is pretty good - they were big in the 90s - "big” - and I never heard of them until they reunited. . . . There’s the release - twin guitars banging out chords - someone faking a solo - back to the jangle. Is this “emo”? - those are “twinkly guitar parts” if I ever heard any.
2) Outkast (Big Boi) - “Intro to Speakerboxx” - cutesy noise, drum machines . . .
3) Neil Diamond - “Love on the Rocks” - lucky me! Boy, I’m glad I got that record! Shitty live recordings of Oh Caroline and a couple good songs, plus crap like this. Stinks of record contract shenanigans - the early stuff must be on a different label. Christ.
4) Neil Young - “After the Gold Rush” - “we got mother nature on the run in the 1970s.” Brother Neil wrote real songs in the Dylan style, but cleaner, with plain lyrical lines. Still - Dylan is Strange - Neil is more classic - the lyrics make actual sense, on the surface. (Damned harmonica.) “Children crying and colors flying all around the chosen ones” - “all in a dream, all in a dream, the loading had begun” . . . a song you have to listen to . . .
5) Edith Piaf - “Avant Nous” - French pop is quite nice. [That’s all I wrote? Why is it nice? It sounds like nothing else, really - not folk, not jazz, not classical, does it? Interesting. I don’t know what to say about it, but I do like it.]
6) Bikini Kill - “Alien She” - cheesy hardcore stylings - not bad, but hardly X-Ray spex . . .
7) Velvet Underground - “Stephanie Says” - good old Lou.
8) Ramones - “Pinhead” - thank god - I don’t want to be a pinhead no more . . . precise and tight - as a Dixieland band, Johnny said. They didn’t evolve, but why change when you’re all set? Gabba gabba! Gabba gabba!
9) Fleetwood Mac - “Rattleshake Shake” - from one of the Boston Teaparty shows. We’ll be here awhile. “I guess I got to shake it myself.” But get Pete going- I’ve only listened to this once in all the time I’ve had it. I like this record - like this song - but how often do I have 25 minutes to spend on one song? [And why spend it on Fleetwood Mac and not Miles or Coltrane?] It’s a good car song - trains will do; “jerk away the blues” - the intertwining guitar lines - a lot more groove to Fleetwood Mac than to almost anything like it - the 2 guitars playing off each other - the constant, rock solid groove - and Green’s unbounded inventiveness and utter mastery of the instrument. They circle the beat (Green and Kirwin) - Kirwin dropping back, speeding up, dropping chords into different places - accenting . . . while Pete solos . . . and the rhythm section grooves - grooves - grooves! - like a motherfucker. Kirwin comes in (as Pete slides off to he side). Kirwin’s biting attack on the guitar - like Townshend, or like he maintains his role as a rhythm guitarist in his solos. I love that. If you gotta boogie for 20 minutes, this is how to do it. (Oops - that was 12 minutes - now they’ll do Albatross.)
I have to note - Peter Green is better than anyone other than Hendrix, and - I think - Richard Thompson. Thompson is more versatile - and a much better songwriter (though that is probably due as much to the drugs as anything else - Green, sane, probably would have held his own most of those years. [Though it’s also due to the fact that Thompson is much less beholden to the blues. White Englishmen are not the ideal blues songwriters - Thompson draws from a much wider array of music, and draws more fundamentally from British folk, which probably makes his songs sound more real. But it’s moot since Green did not stay healthy all those years.]) . . . Delicacy, touch - the perfect notes - always in tune with the song, the rhythm, everything else . . .
10) Big Country - “Republican Party People” - a slide guitar intro - cheesy vocals - kind of crappy. Stuart Adamson! I remember this guy’s name! (Is this song about Lee Atwater? Holy crap - could be.)
11) PJ Harvey - “Rubit til it Bleeds” - the quiet little beginning, slowly building into that distorted buzzsaw of release - most of her songs do that, back then . . .
12) Minor Threat - “Sob Story”
13) Mission of Burma - “Train” - “making sense of all the hidden facts” - the sputtering guitar parts and bits of jangly noise - “how can you pretend to give a fuck when nothing seems to matter at all”. The “solo” at the end - great stuff - all chords - all three of them throbbing and crashing . . .
14) Six Organs of Admittance - “Shadow of a Dune” - Another band that is instantly recognizable, an odd fact, since I've been listening to them less than a year. They are in deep already. They’re good - or, Ben Chesny (or whatever his name is) is good.
A tripod in a meadow.
15) Modern Lovers - “Road Runner” - ah. And the highway when it’s late at night, “don’t feel so alone got the radio on” - “the highway is your girlfriend . . . I’m in love with rock and Roll and I’ll be out all night” . . . that sweet beautiful organ solo.
16) Friction - “Dear Richard” - Peter Laughner and company - Pete jangles - sputtering guitar parts . . .
17) Johnny Cash - “25 Minutes to Go” - “the trap and the rope they work just fine . . . this ain’t the movies so forget about me.” Goddammit what a song. Cash’s banter - “my idiot sheet” - “how ya doin’ Shirley?”
18) Buzzcocks - “I Believe” - another great one.
19) Pere Ubu - “Perfume” - Pennsylvania, one of David Thomas’ nourish recitations - all desert imagery, echoey guitars (Tom Herrman’s return - the sharp, cutting slides.)
20) Jim O’Rourke - “Halfway to a Threeway” - quiet little acoustic thing. “I try again and again to indulge in just one sin.”
That’s all. That got me home.
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