And The Doctor Said, "Give Him Jug Band Music..."

My music listening has pretty much been stuck in the sixties lateley (lately?), and one of my great pleasures has been a two record collection of the best of The Lovin' Spoonful. The best two dollars I've spent on music in a long time. It's always wonderful to hear the hits, "Do You Believe in Magic?"; "Summer in the City," but it's a joy to discover lesser-known tracks such as "Rain on the Roof" (or was that a single, too?) and the soul-influenced "'Til I Run With You." John Sebastian really had a gift for packing words into a line, creating some witty phrasing challenges. It would have been interesting to hear Sinatra cover "Jug Band Music." At times they sound like an "indie" band to me.

And speaking of indie music: I was knocked out by the show that Sufjan Stevens put on at The Great American Music Hall. He was promoting the recently released, "Come on feel the Illinoise" record. The eight piece band was decked out in t-shirts emblazoned with the letter "I" and they even did some half-hearted but witty cheers for the great state of Illinois. Tight band, good arrangements, lousy Great American Music Hall sound (can't anyone fix that speaker hum?), mellow but enthusiastic crowd. It could have been a silly and pretentious show but it wasn't.

The Beatles Were A Pretty Good Little Band

Lately, I've been listening to The Beatles a lot while I've been working on the beginnings of my memoir. I'm just old enough to say that I was a Beatle fan (a very young one) when the band still existed. I've been going through the entire catalogue, but I've been especially focusing on The White Album. That was the record (and SGT Pepper, which my stereo-sound-challenged stereo cannot play in its full overrated glory) which played every day in the first hippie house I lived in. Sides One and Two of the album, especially, put me into slightly stoned five year-old reveries.

It's a real mouldy fig thing to say, I know, but a serious troll through The Beatles' catalogue makes most other subsequent white pop music seem diminished. But that's a bad attitude to take. Who wants to be stuck in one musical era? Time marches on, doesn't it?

One way of solving that dilemma is to listen to Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, his "mash up" of The White Album and Jay-Z. I find it moving and stimulating. Thanks for burning that one for me, Jay-Glass.

As always, when I listen to The Beatles, I keep Ian Mac Donald's rigorous and querulous guide to their recorded music, Revolution in the Head, by my side. It's out of print in the U.S., but recently reprinted in the U.K. Sadly, he committed suicide a couple of years ago.

My other current Beatle read is Devin McKinney's Magic Circles. I'm finding it to be a very original and exciting exploration of The Beatles' place in history through a close reading of their texts (ie listening to their records). To McKinney, The Beatles, were The Sixties Band--an aggregation that reflected and received the youth culture's love and hate in equal measure. Think about it, man. Look at the love Paul and Ringo still receive; think about the violent attacks upon John and George. Think about love, love, love is all you need and Mansonian helter skelter.

The alphabetical listening project continues. On vinyl: many African-American gospel vocal quartet comps; Tompall Glaser and His Outlaw Band. On CD: the wide ranging experiments of Dave Douglas.

Post 9/11 Pet Sounds and Forever Changes

Back in 2001, six or seven weeks before the horrible events of 9/ll, a close family member nearly did herself in after repeatedly trying to do so for a couple of years. It was a particularly lurid, upsetting episode that I tried to stay away from but found myself getting emotionally sucked into anyway. It's hard to sever that umbilical cord.

I was already feeling pretty apocalyptic by the time of 9/11, although that catastrophe certainly put my suffering in some perspective. The national paranoia was the paranoia I've carried my whole life--that feeling of the other shoe about to drop.

While the media focused on the "Why do they hate us so much?" question, I thought, "Why do I hate her so much?" Solipsist that I am, I focused on the roots and setting of our troubles and the loss of our innocence: LA in the Sixties.

In the course of my emotional but zombified wanderings, I began to listen to The Beach Boys (with a little help from my friends Pumpkinhead and brianfromvegas). I finally got past the image of the Mike Love-led Kokomoists and bearded Republicans. I joined the Brian is a genius, Carl sings like an angel, Dennis is a minor and very tragic genius cults. I began to study Pet Sounds. Pet Sounds' themes of lost innocence and worried hope hit me right where I needed to be hit.

Reading about the fucked up Wilson family--born into love and violence in sunny LA; purveyors of an untattainable oceanside nirvana; sad, sensitive, stupid, drug-addled in turns; eaten up by the sixties; suburban naifs nearly devoured by Manson. It's a true California noir story! (check out Steven Gaines's Heroes and Villians for all the wild and weird details) I could easily see that determined to be doomed relative of mine going down slow with Dennis...Pet Sounds helped me; I wonder if it would have helped her...

Meanwhile, I also picked up another sixties album rock classic: Love's Forever Changes. Like Pet Sounds was for twenty four year-old Brian Wilson, Forever Changes was the summary statement for twenty two (!) year-old Arthur Lee. But while Brian slightly hinted at darkness on Pet Sounds, Arthur Lee went straight to the heart of it on Forever Changes. But like Pet Sounds, finds transcendent beauty (or at least survival) in the midst of the fear--as the final song "You Set the Scene" states. What a prescient vision, considering the thirty five years of trials and tribulations that Arthur Lee would face!

Anyway, Love's finger on the violent pulse of groovy LA (and the nation) makes Jim Morrison's bloody visions seem silly. One acquaintance of the band said they should have been named "Hate." They were thugs with an ear for melody. Mansonite mudering cutey-pie Bobby Beausoleil was briefly a member of an early version of the band (although Arthur Lee says he can't recall this).

(And let me tell you this: after seeing a pissed-off Arthur Lee nearly punch a drunken fan at a live recreation of the Forever Changes album, he is still not to be fucked with!)

But anyway, anyway, this was the true soundtrack of my apocalyptic bloody LA in a most bloody apocalyptic season. I doubt my relative has ever listened to this record.

I've spun these two albums hundreds of times over the past four years and have drawn much strength and inspiration from them. I think they're at the musical and spiritual heart of a certain sixties-era family I'm trying to recreate in writing. Just thought you might like to know.

Alphabetical update: a great vinyl gospel compilation of fifties era black vocal groups--Jesus Is the Answer. Featuring The Swan Silvertones; Dorothy Love Coates; The Staple Singers; The Five Blind Boys of Alabama; and so on.

Pop music and Chamber Country Purchases

First of all, let me tell you this: I'm listening to Nancy Sinatra's latest release, which Sparky taped for me. It's pretty good, ya know! Produced by Morrissey with compositions by people such as Thurston Moore, Jarvis Cocker, and Pete Yorn. Nancy's in pretty good voice and the songs are uniformly solid. I know this sounds like a back-handed compliment, but I'm still shaking off my purist, rockist shackles.

This tape fits nicely with the odd batch of records I bought at Amoeba yesterday in the fine company of the Psychedelic Eskimo. I had good vinyl luck. I found two albums that I've been searching for some time: Willie Nelson's Shotgun Willie and Mickey Newbury's Heaven Help the Child. Willie's record is a kind of country soul fusion produced by the great Jerry Wexler. Soul legend Donny Hathaway does the string arrangements on "So Much to Do"! Heaven Help the Child is one of a trilogy of albums Mickey made for Elektra in the early '70's. They're sort of country art records, accompanied--but mostly not weighed down by-- layers of strings, voices and effects. But super soulful and melancholy thanks to Mickey's pleasantly weathered Texas drawl and well-crafted songs.

I also picked up Tompall and the Glaser Brothers' Through the Eyes of Love--late '60's, early '70's chamber country produced by the great Cowboy Jack Clement. Featuring terrifying cover art in which a blonde girl's face is superimposed over a tableau of her and her strapping love walking through a grove of trees. Good record, though, if you like the Countrypolitan genre.

What fascinates me about the above trio of country records, is that they're creative Nashville (although Shotgun Willie was actually recorded in New York City!!!) responses to The Beatles and mature pop songwriting.

And speaking of mature pop songwriting: I also forked over two bucks and bought a compilation of Jimmy Webb compositions--some performed by him, some by others. It features some obvious cuts: Richard Harris doing "MacArthur Park"; The Fifth Dimension's "Up, Up and Away"; Glen Campbell's mighty "Witchita Lineman" (in my all-time top ten). But it also features an impressive "Galveston" by Jimmy himself and "Crying in My Sleep" and "All I Know" by Art Garfunkel (!). I've usually dismissed Artie, maybe because of his hair and his earnestness, but I have to say I dig him doing these songs. He recorded an entire album of Jimmy Webb compositions. Dare I search it out? One of my goals this year is to track down some of Jimmy Webb's records. I know Rhino has just released a box set of his works, but I don't have the scratch for that. Looking for the vinyl will be more fun.

My final vinyl purchase was XTC's Oranges and Lemons. Slowly but surely, I've been collecting their stuff. Criminally underappreciated by today's kids, sez crabby old KFS.