We mustn’t discount differences in cultural context, even transatlantic ones, when gauging differences in reaction to popular music. If I remain fond of The Levellers, for instance, it’s probably because they remained relatively obscure in the States and in any case hit the scene only after I left college, thus sparing me the ghastliness, as described by my British friends, of attending a school disco and witnessing a great faceless throng of young people all bellowing “THERE’S ONLY ONE! WAY! OF LIFE!” in perfect unison and with perfect lack of irony. (Also, I still like to play this one live, in fat sliding dropped-D chords with a heavy strum.)
Who would have thought, in a supergroup whose members include Richard Thompson, that the sweetest and most soaring bits of pop-rock bliss in the catalog should come from the pen of the guy who cut his teeth in the determinedly-unlistenable freakshow of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band? It’s like finding out that Morton Feldman was ghostwriting for Johnny Mercer.
“500 Miles” is one of those songs that becomes a standard simply because it refuses to go away. It’s in the same company as “I Melt With You” or UB40’s “Red Red Wine”—songs that get rediscovered ever four or five years, leading to a renewed ripple of airplay, maybe a single re-release, a flurry of licensing: they’d never monster hits, but they’re always just there, at the edge of cultural consciousness, bubbling under. I read with amusement that a re-recorded comedy version of “500 Miles” hit Number One, which the original never managed.
I remember Television’s eponymous reunion disc was greeted with some disappointment upon release, on the grounds that it lacked the aggression of the band’s earlier work. Now, I love Marquee Moon as much as anyone—but even then it was clear that Television were interested in far more than simple attack dynamics; and even a cursory listen to Tom Verlaine’s solo catalog (especially the all-instrumental Warm and Cool) gives a roadmap for understanding Television the album. The oblique lyrics, the fractured street-life fairy tales, the brooding romance are all accounted for; the relative polish of the production still serves the songs; and Verlaine’s singing is better than ever, taking an octave down into Bowie-slash-Iggy Territory.
But the biggest change—and the real revelation—is in Richard Lloyd’s role. For all their virtuosity (and I never bought the comparisons to the Grateful Dead, by the way: I always thought the band’s twin-guitar work was modeled pretty obviously on the Allman Brothers), TV always worked within a pretty traditional lead guitar/rhythm guitar paradigm, with Lloyd hammering out chordal riffs while Verlaine squalled above, or occasionally vice-versa. Television, though, finds the riffing sparse, with Lloyd’s and Verlaine’s guitars in a weaving conversation of arpeggios, single-note figures, and spacious, ringing partial chords, while Fred and Billy keep the grooves tight.
Some found it anticlimactic: I thought it was a fulfillment of their promise, a re-imagining of the two-guitar rock band as a democracy of voices. As some of Lloyd’s statements about his recent projects show, his voice can be pretty, um, eccentric, and there’s a palpable sense of freedom to his work here as he’s cut loose from the straitjacket of keeping strict time. It’s thrilling listening still—detailed without being dense, expert without being masturbatory. And I dig that this song is so in love with the act of making music, of strumming that B minor chord with wildly impassioned delight.
“Bulldozer” was the A-side of a one-off vinyl 45 on Bob Mould’s old Singles Only Label (SOL). The B-side, “Carny,” is even better, but in all m y efforts to find a digital copy I’ve been SOL indeed. Anybody’s got an mp3, give me a holler in the comments.
To say that the next three songs taken together constitute a set of inquiries into country music modes and methods would be to vastly overstate both the argument (such as it is) and the smarts of the guy (me) presumably making it. Still, there’s something here. Country & Western is something of an alien tongue to me, and I never thought it was part of my musical DNA (remember, I grew up in the Northeast, the one part of the nation where C&W never really took root, and well into my adult life there were no commercial country radio stations in my listening area)—but there’s something in me that responds to, say, Eddy Arnold or Red Foley or Merle Travis, to the point where my own songwriting drifts instinctively towards country blues territory.
I dig the way that Bruce Cockburn turns “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” inside-out to show the black, poisonous heart of the frontier myth—but more than that I think I dig the sound, the spectral pulse of the tremolo guitar, the high-tech/low-tech alchemy of the Leslie conjuring up that restless ghost.
I hate the formulation that Thing X is Thing Y on steroids: but I will say that inside the hard-hitting, absurdly overpowered “We’re Not In Kansas,” hurling its lumbering bulk around like 2007-season Barry Bonds, there’s a sprightly country rave-up as natural and likeable as 1993-season Barry Bonds. (We picked up this Big Country album—on cassette, no less—during our honeymoon in London, as it had no US distribution at the time.)
Sometimes I wish I hadn’t separated Workout Wednesday out into its own blog, because, Lyle Lovett’s “Stand By Your Man” dovetails into something I wrote there about gendering in popular music. When this track first came out—even before Neil Jordan used it as the closing theme for The Crying Game—it was used as evidence of Lyle’s status as a country iconoclast; it was simply assumed that he was subverting the song—one critic (can’t remember who) referred to this cover as a “bizarro transvestite version.”
But how bizarre is it, really? Lyle sings the song absolutely as written, with all pronouns intact. And in looking at those lyrics, I’m seeing no intratextual evidence that the narrator—the implied “I” of the song (implied because the song is entirely constructed in the second- and third-person) must be a woman.
Q: Yeah, but what kind of man sings a line like “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman”?
A: Any man with working eyes and a functional capacity for empathy.
Assuming that the narrator must be a woman just because you first heard a woman singing the songs seems incredibly reductive and limiting to me (although maybe that’s because I heard Lyle’s version first, and to date have still not heard Tammy Wynette’s). Indeed, a male narrator opens the song to all kinds of interesting angles. Maybe he’s an omniscient observer, or a sympathetic bystander (also possibilities with a female singer)—a Hollywood-style Gay Best Friend, even. Or maybe he’s the cheating husband himself, obliquely acknowledging the damage he’s done and the pain he’s caused, even as he begs for forgiveness and love. I think I like that one best.
Then it’s two from the mixing board of Daniel Lanois. I still get a kick out of the reconciliation of opposites in the Gabriel track—the African drumming with the Highland pipes and the crunch guitar, the naked emotionalism of the mid-period solo records with the verbose nonsense of the Genesis years… and melody for days to take us out.
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