Something About Blacktop.

thicker than a smokey - click for .mp3

There are few songs that sound better in those two thin slices of each day right before the sun comes up and just after it goes down than this one, Gary Higgins’ “Thicker Than A Smokey.” Recorded in 1972 on a commune in Connecticut right before Higgins entered a maximum security prison on a bum marijuana charge, it’s the kickoff and highlight of the lost folk gem “Red Hash.” Think Nick Drake guitar work meets Skip Spence’s warped worldview.

Drag City trotted him out a few years ago, “plucked from obscurity,” to record a new album that, while good, is inessential. Track down “Red Hash.” It’s a stunner.

I mark the coming of the summer season by what girls wear on bicycles. Just a few weeks ago, it seemed like they were all in full-body parkas, barely able to peddle, swaddled up like Eskimos. Then last week, the arrival of windbreakers and leggings. This week, like the arrival of good omen cardinals against snow, they collectively made the decision to wear sundresses. Based upon my very strict rubric, summer is here.

Includes: Nico-biting narco Dylan covers, lost soul rave-ups, Chicago’s great son Junior Wells, stacked harmony echo chamber hymns, teen pop AM radio weepers, Lightning Link Wray’s recluse brother, terminal garage squalor, vibraphone dub, ghost of chillwave shrapnel, 4-track homemade songs and a love letter to Mississippi John Hurt.

Open your windows.

sundrunk.

1. please stay - the crying shames

2. it’s so hard - the swamp rats

3. lonely son - vernon ray

4. nobody knows - t. l barrett

5.  mr. tamborine man - the flowers of hell

6. village soul - lennie hibbert

7. snatch it back and hold it - junior wells

8. sweet as john hurt - hiss golden messenger

9. beach point pleasant - ducktails

10. homemade songs - bobby charles

11. bad girl - lee moses

12. plain and sane and simple melody - ted lucas

(click photo to download)

(photo: chicago archives: ‘young black couple on south side beach, 1936.’)

Happy 80th, Willie. I cannot believe I’ve never seen this. Willie Nelson, Hank Williams III, Ryan Adams and Keith Richards going absolutely nuts on “Dead Flowers.” Cue the Stax horns.

You’ve got to crawl - click for .mp3

Arrow Brown - record producer, struggling would-be mogul, gun-totting churchgoer, and lord over a harem of underage women whose welfare checks afforded him the opportunity to pursue his soul music dreams.

Brown’s Bandit label, a ragtag group of collaborators whose sweeping and downright gorgeous soul scorcher arrangements belie the fact that the label was masterminded out of a garage in a seedier part of Chicago’s south side, existed in some form or another from from the mid-’60s until the early ’80s. 

This Johnny Davis track, a “if you’re coming back, you better come crawling” stunner was probably the closest Bandit came to a hit. Davis would’ve and should’ve been at least a regional star. Mysteriously, shortly after this 7” was released, he was found dead in a dumpster, killed by the impact of a 12 story fall from an abandoned building.

The story of the label, hell, the story of Arrow Brown alone, is some sort of strange hallucinatory folklore. A disgruntled and downright delusional soup factory worker with an ear for soul music and a charming streak that lured dozens of nubile young women into fulfilling his every wish lives like he’s a millionaire in Beverly Hills while barely having enough money to keep the lights on. It’s fascinating to say the least. 

A few years ago, the Chicago Reader put out a wonderfully researched and written piece that plots out the rise and fall of Arrow and Bandit as if it were a Greek Tragedy. Essential reading.

Opening paragraphs:

‘It looked as if a tornado had passed through the house, picked up the remnants of Arrow Brown’s strange, sordid life, and dumped them in the alley.

September 1990: Brown had been dead only a few weeks, but the passageway behind his two-story graystone at 4114 S. Martin Luther King Drive was already a mess. His papers were scattered, riffling in the breeze, his 45s lay in a thousand jagged pieces, and all around, spools of master tape were reduced to tangles of black ribbon glinting in the late summer sun.’

Check it out here : 

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-godfather-of-king-drive/Content?oid=918575

1988: ‘Let’s Get Lost.’ Chet Baker at the end of the road. Easily the most moving and beautiful documentary of all time. You’ll watch for a minute and get sucked in for it’s entirety. Storms all week here. Soaked. Chet Baker. Do it.

I put a spell on you - click for .mp3 

Abandoning the clattering bayou  roadhouse skronk of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ original, Nina Simone’s 1965 cover of “I Put a Spell on You” traverses instead in late night exhales and pre-dawn plumes of blue smoke. Love the right hand piano trills throughout, the way they approximate hard rain on champagne glasses. 

Lonely Sidewalks - click for .mp3

This guy that lives somewhere in my neighborhood, he walks up and down the street, past the high rises and the beach. Short steps, kind of drags his left leg like it’d been broken a long time ago. Everyday, back and forth. This side of the street and then the other. All day. Keeps his head down, his eyes studying the sidewalk. He’s probably sixty. Scrawny, his elbows pushing out against the dull fabric of the windbreak he wears no matter the weather. Up and down, back and forth. Nowhere.

Early one morning on my way to the train, we crossed paths. He was holding a letter in one hand and a beer in the other. I said good morning and he looked up, his eyes bluer than marble at the bottom of a fountain, and said “I think so. I think so.” 

Won’t you come home - click for .mp3

After a few years in the freak folk wilds, one of my favorites, Devendra Banhart has re-emerged with what seems like his first album in decades (it’s been four years!), Mala.

He’s done some growing up, too. Decamped from L.A for N.Y.C. Asked a woman he’d known for 3 minutes to marry him. Changes, man. It shows. Gone are the goofy detours into calypso and the warbling falsetto, replaced with nuanced lo-fi, almost post-dub production and low key crooning. It’s his ‘New Morning.’ 

It’s also the first Banhart album that sounds best out of the sun, hell that sounds best post-midnight. It’s a night time record in the best possible way.

Grow Too Old - click for .mp3

‘Moving to a new city and very much looking forward to it’ cut from the sadly obscure Bobby Charles. After a string of regional ‘teen idol’ singles (most notably ‘See You Later, Alligator’) in Louisiana and the surrounding Deep South, Charles laid low for a bit before returning in the early 1970s with one monster LP of laid-back swamp rock. When his ‘grown-up’ debut didn’t make much of a stir in the music world, he went back underground, popping up only sporadically for the rest of his life.

Cut in 1972 with an all-star session band including the ‘Big Pink’-hot Band and Dr. John, Charles’ debut crackles with legitimately heartfelt glee. This was a small town guy cutting a record with his heroes and you can definitely hear it. 

Great sunny, ‘open up the windows even though it’s cold’ record.

Almost a recluse in his later days, he consistently turned down an annual invitation from the New Orleans Jazzfest to perform. He died back on his own Louisiana soil in January 2010.

Alright. I’m off to Chicago. 

Clay Pigeons - click for .mp3

I’m a sucker for songs about movement. Traveling the road, ect. ect. 

I’m also a sucker for a crazy back story. Raised by wolves, ect. ect.

This is why I like Blaze Foley.

His songs are about being on the run, riding buses and boxcars, rambling around small towns, having wings and talking to pretty girls.

He was shot in the chest after an argument and killed at 39. In some sort of Texas Justice shot of brilliance, every single person that witnessed the shooting told a different story in court ON PURPOSE. Unsure of what was real and what was fiction, the judge had no choice but to throw the case out.

Much like his close friend, the late great Townes van Zandt, Foley’s studio output is usually swamped in the ornate production that was popular at the time. He’s best when it’s just the man and his guitar.

As a lyricist, he’s right up there with Townes, able to peel away the layers of metaphor and drop jaws with cutting simplicity.  Come on, how great are these lyrics?:

Also, he lived in an actual treehouse outside of Austin. Amazing.

Disintergration Loop 1.3 - click for ,mp3

Decay, man, is creepy. Think, no matter what you do, millions of skin cells are sloughing off of you everyday, landing in your cereal, clogging up your furnace filter. It’s in our nature to push it to the side, to focus on growing out a beard or strengthening our nails, to forget that our face is molting. William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Tapes” brings the whole thing, all that decay and all that comes with it, into perfect focus. Most importantly, he makes it seem alright.

The story is something out of a student film: The celebrated but destitute New York artist discovers a box of old tapes in the back of closet as he’s being evicted from his Brooklyn studio. On said tapes: recordings he’d made twenty years earlier, at a different point in New York’s history. Everything. The hum of his antique refrigerator. The clang of his building’s elevator between floors. The bum outside his door asking for change. Everything. All things.

Deciding he wants to keep the useless sounds for posterity, he begins to run them into his computer, but realizes immediately that they haven’t been properly stored and are disintegrating before his eyes, that the sound being fed into his hard drive is being modified with each pass through the tape head. The decay yielding to change.

So he stays up late into the night and lets each loop play through the machine over and over, watches as the metallic gleam of the tape flakes away and onto the table. For some of the tapes, it only takes a few minutes for the reel to completely oxidize. For others, close to an hour. 

Finished, Basinski heads to bed a few hours before dawn on Sept. 11th. Opening up his blinds the next morning, he sees only smoke across the river. He joins the rest of his building, hell, the rest of Brooklyn, on the roof and watches the ensuing chaos. He pulls out his stereo and plays his work from the night before as everyone huddles together and watches one version of New York fall away, sees a new version being born.

Engrossing doesn’t come close to describing the sound of these tapes. The gentle sway of the loop repeating, the phantom realization of slow change — it’s literally one of the purest musical experiences I’ve every had. Beautiful, sad, subtle and uplifting all at once.

Sit quietly and let it play, let it leak out all around you.

You’re falling apart. It’s going to be okay.

End of The Trail (Bud Tutmarc) - click for .mp3

You’re having it again. That dream. And in it you wake up lying in the backseat of a car as it rides the rumble strip of an interstate off-ramp. The seat is  nineteen inches too short for you and your knees hurt from being pressed into the chrome door handle for all of this time.

Your contacts are sticking to your eyelids. You wonder if the pleat of the vinyl seat has been etched into your sleep-hot right cheek like the raised mattress seams did when you were just a kid. You don’t sit up. There is a tear in the pea green upholstered ceiling — near the dome light that’s full of dead and shriveled gnats and mosquitoes — and you can see the asbestos white padding underneath.

 Every night, all the windows are fogged but the driver doesn’t give two fucks about the defrost, reaches up and rubs a space clean with her shirt sleeve about the size of a photograph, cranes her neck forward. Her hair spills out and over the back of her coat collar. Tonight, it is June blonde, unbleached by sun. Last night: augite black. You ask if it’s still snowing, if the roads are bad. She says ‘had to get off.’ 

In this dream, you’re aware that you’re moving north. You swear you can feel it by the pressure in your ears. The driver pulls into the filling station and the light that fills the car is monstrous after the chalky interstate sky.

She runs in ahead of you. The way the snow whips in the overhead lighting makes her look like a little kid. It’s icy. Her boots are mismatched. She never falls.

You open the door and are the only one inside. The driver has disappeared. The tile smells like bleach. A popcorn machine hisses, hot oil in a pan. From a speaker tucked somewhere you can’t see, woozy organ moves underneath slack-key guitar. It scares you, the abject strangeness of it — a trilobite in amber. You pick through the snack aisle but everything is expired. Some of the packages are filled with ants. 

You do not buy anything, but hand the elderly cashier a dollar for letting you warm up. Her face is put together delicately wrong, like someone really cared about building all the parts but got drunk before gluing them together. She smells like Nivea Creme and menthols. In this dream, she is always wearing a banker’s visor. You are worried she might have cancer.

Her lips are thin, taunt at the corners and red like boiled lobster. She reaches out a waxy hand and pulls you close, kisses your mouth.

“The music is beautiful, huh.” she says, her lips still just inches from yours. “I made it myself.”

Her husband is always there, hovering behind her. Some nights he takes a picture of you with a Polaroid camera then pulls her hair until she falls to her knees and all you can see is the green of her visor hovering over the lip of the counter. Some nights he’s using a hammer to drive finishing nails into his left hand. He cups the blood in his palm then rubs it on the wall without looking. A mural of the cashier on fire is almost finished. You hear the door behind you open and close, turn to see the driver moving back through the squall..

Flustered, you leave and getting in the car you ask if you can drive. “No.” You get into the back seat and lie back down, watching the tear in the ceiling as the light from the filing station ebbs away. You are almost  asleep before the driver pulls back onto the interstate. She wedges the stolen Polaroid of the cashier kissing you into the console, next to the odometer. It is always gone when you wake up again.

As much as I love Guided By Voices’ Wire-inspired guitar freak-outs and Robert Pollard’s flights of proggy fancy, I’ve always been a sucker for the moments in their 1000+ song catalog when the group dials back the garage histrionics and shoots for softer sounds. Less brawn, more beauty. Pollard, for all his beery bluster, is a Midwestern softy at heart and with the volume down, his way with a turn of phrase and ability to squeeze meaning into non sequiturs is really a beautiful thing. Quietly and under the radar, the man has written some of the best love songs of the past 30 years

I’d like to imagine that in some alternate universe there’s a group called “Bobby Pollard & The Voices” that popped up on Ohio regional stations sometime in the AM radio-era with one great album of crystalline rock & roll ephemera entitled “Ohio Hearts of Gold” and then disappeared into the ether.

Built around Pollard’s flawless 1993 recording of Gram & Emmylou’s “Love Hurts” with fellow Ohioan Kim Deal, this set is structured like one of those long-lost dollar bin late 1950s teenybopper albums. Ten tracks, five to a side, with a running time of under 25 minutes. The entire off-kilter endeavor built from the ground up by hopeless romantic and legendary lady-killer Bobby Pollard.

Just in time for your annual Valentines’ Day swoon, it’s…

Bobby Pollard & The Voices

Ohio Hearts of Gold

1. Learning to Hunt

2. Love Hurts w/ Kim Deal

3. Awful Bliss

4. She Wants to Know

5. Yours to Keep

6. Things I Will Keep

7. Queen of Cans and Jars

8. The Best of Jill Hives

9. Peep-Hole

10. Girls of Wild Strawberries

gris-gris: an amulet or incantation rooted in voodoo which is believed to protect the wearer from evil or bring good luck.

Right now over 800,000 revelers are pouring into the Crescent city for one of the earliest Mardi Gras in recorded history. Seriously, how can Fat Tuesday be before Valentine’s Day?  For those of us trapped far away from the French Quarter fray, the music that courses from New Orleanian veins is as close as we will get to being blacked out at 2 pm, trying desperately to touch a police horse.

From Dr John’s swampy mystic “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya” to Professor Longhair’s boogie piano standard “Tipitina” to (the Robert Johnson of Creole Accordion) Amede Ardoin’s “Two Step”, this mix is 30 minutes of humid NOLA voodoo hijinks.

So listen to this while you’re in the shower or getting ready for work or, like, eating a King’s Cake or something. It’s a dull blah-blah forty day march to Easter. Get Fat.

somethingaboutblacktop. : gris-gris

1. gris-gris gumbo ya ya - dr. john

2. bon ton roula - clarence garlow

3. two step - amede ardoin

4. tipitina - professor longhair

5. i’m gone - shirley & lee

6. that certain door - smiley lewis

7. gator bait  - the gaturs

8. shirley - john fred & his playboys

9. big chief - professor longhair

10. sugar bee - cleveland crochet

(click photo to download)

 I Just Want To See His Face - click for .mp3

Humidty-soaked wet basement wall swamp gospel rumble from the Stones. Following the indomitable ”Ventilator Blues” on 1971’s ramshackle blissed-out touchstone “Exile on Mainstreet,” this track doesn’t really line up to evenly with anything else in their catalog. It’s as if the Stone’s wanted to prove they could pull off a straight gospel rave-up and then having reached that cliff,  looked around and said “Yea, that was alright.” A black sheep in the best possible way. It’s never made its way onto one of their fifty or so greatest hits albums. It’s never been played live. It murky in all the right places, the production so close it sounds like everyone is sharing a broom closet…and a needle. Clearly,Jagger learned a thing of two sitting in on all those late ’60s Dr. John Sessions. Hoodoo abounds.

Sounds pretty good on those winter days when it’s rainy and warm enough to open your window.

“I don’t wanna walk and talk about Jesus, I just want to see his face,” Jagger says. Strong words from a strung-out stone cold heathen.