RIP Alex Chilton.
1985 Back to the Future
Emusic now has the Pogues catalog, which is cause for celebration and for me cause for a rather vivid flashback to 1985, the year of Rum, sodomy and the lash.
I found the wiki on the year fascinating and foreign, yet strangely familiar. (And yes, the original Back to the Future was based in that year.)
Herewith, the brilliant Pogues classic, “A pair of brown eyes,” and an entertaining, not particularly linear video by Alex Cox (police state! Thatcher!), along with a few other carefully culled selections from that year. Presented without further comment.
PAIR OF BROWN EYES
FROM ST. KILDA TO KINGS CROSS
CLOSE TO ME
LOVE IS ALL AROUND
THE CHAIR
Count the time in quarter tones
I was googling around for St. Vincent performance videos last night and came across this one, and it’s gotten under my skin.
At first I wondered why she’d bother with a cover of this morose little tune, written by Jackson Browne, apparently at the tender age of sixteen, and first performed, oddly but endearingly, by Nico.
Scrolling down the YouTube listings, I shuddered in fear at the thought the song had been covered by Bon Jovi and the egregious Rascal Flatts, but THANK GOD, those are different songs.
“Please don’t confront me with my failures. I have not forgotten them.” That’s a little hard on yourself at sixteen, Mr. Browne, but typical of adolescent self-laceration at its best. Maybe it could only have been written by a sixteen-year-old. Not far from the Replacements’ “Sixteen Blue,” and—surprise!— Paul Westerberg has also covered this song.
Anyway, Annie Clark’s version blows them all away.
I don’t know for sure if she’s really feeling it, or just selling it really well (that is her secret, as it should be), but when her voice starts cracking and her eyes welling up, she’s exposing some pretty raw nerves. And then that steely thousand-yard stare. She’s got a magnetism that is at once alluring and kind of scary.
Ms. Clark’s appeal was always apparent. She had the gorgeous voice, the sophisticated compositions, the bona fide guitar chops— but there was always something a little off-putting about her. My initial resistance had to do with what I saw as her formalist, ironic affect, more music conservatory than rock ‘n’ roll. But her charms have continued to grow on me, as I think I’m beginning to see the wicked wit in her sensibility. Now I’ve swung ever so gradually into the zealot camp, to the point where I’m wondering when Karl Lagerfeld will claim her as his latest muse…..
Mr. Wikipedia has the whole history of “These Days,” which is fairly fascinating, actually.
“I can’t see the future but I know it’s watching me”
A funny deadpan ThunderAnt sketch frames a terrific song by Annie Clark, who seems impossibly talented, and blessedly perverse in sensibility.
feeling canadien today
For some reason….
That devil would tempt me, for sure. And I love the spontaneous choreography in the dance club.
For comparison, the original version, from Bunuel’s Simon of the Desert.
Truckin’
My mother’s favorite male celebrities were Liberace and Claude Akins.
I know! That’s quite a pair (comparable: Ernest Borgnine and Paul Lynde; Charles Bronson and Charles Nelson Reilly). But she was a banquet waitress and a true small-d democrat. She cherished equally the autographs of both men, superstars from a kinder, gentler era.
Been having trucking songs running through my head lately. Found this clip from Movin’ On, which starred Akins and had a great song by Merle Haggard
Staying with truckin’ songs, and trying to match the weirdness of my mother’s pairing (God rest her), another classic, albeit one from a distinct tradition, that of the scary, exhilarating roller coaster ride that is a Fall song:
Fancy: Gonna move you uptown
Bobbie Gentry’s “Fancy”, another entry in the creepiest country song ever sweepstakes.
If you know it, you probably know it from Reba’s over-the-top 1990 version. This one is over the top in its own way but the song just comes off way cooler, like something off Dusty in Memphis. (I had to look it up to check, but Dusty never covered this, which is a shame.) Love the set, the body suit, the de rigeur spidery eyes, and Bobbie’s little shuffle strut dance.
“Blood harmony”
Absolutely killer performance of a Richard Thompson song by Del McCoury, along with sons Ronnie and Rob. If you stick around to the end (and you should), there’s a brief chat where Vince Gill talks about “blood harmony … nothing better in the world than hearing family sing together .”
Del looks like a complete gentleman but when he narrows those eyes, well, when he sings “I tell you in earnest I’m a dangerous man,” there is no suspension of disbelief needed on my part.
I also think highly of the line, “Red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme.”
Timeless: “Love vigilantes”
“Love vigilantes” came around on my ITunes while I was fixing dinner. A Laura Cantrell song I must have downloaded ages ago, but only tonight popped into the foreground. It was haunting, about a homesick soldier who finally gets his “leave” and flies home–to find his wife on the floor clutching a telegram that “said that I was a brave, brave men but that I was dead.” It was strangely familiar, but weirdly hard to pinpoint, as if from some distant era. World War I? The Korean War? Vietnam?
Actually you only have to go back to 1985. The band: New Order. I didn’t recognize this stripped-down version. I had heard it countless times before, but never, to my shame, paid much attention to the lyrics. At first I thought Persian Gulf War, but the years didn’t line up. The Falklands seems the most likely, though it could be any war.
It took Laura Cantrell (much beloved of John Peel, who of course also loved New Order) to find the beautiful, sad, ghostly ballad inside New Order’s Wall o’ Sound.
What an unearthly, powerful song, in both versions.
New Order, live in Japan 1985
Laura Cantrell, 2008
The Chieftains and Ry Cooder make an album about los san patricios
The Chieftains, in collaboration with Ry Cooder, Los Tigres del Norte, Linda Ronstadt and Van Dyke Parks, will release San Patricio on March 9. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the San Patricios (as I was), they were “a downtrodden group of Irish immigrant conscripts who deserted the U.S. Army in 1846 to fight on the Mexican side against the invading Yankees in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848).”
Below is Part One of a six-part documentary on the subject by Mark R. Day.
Also, from what I can gather, Howard Zinn discusses los san patricios in The Stories Hollywood Never Tells audio book.
Thanks to Chris Floyd, who has a great site and who pointed this out….