Bobbie Gentry
Local Gentry
1968, Capitol Records
As a man whose life is a perpetual mess, I’m drawn to things that are neat and tidy. There’s a memorable anecdote in Anthony Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential in which the young Bourdain, still learning the ropes of the restaurant life, witnesses a head chef jump on a line cook’s ass for keeping a dirty work area. The chef points out the refuse and splattered sauce everywhere and tells the guy “That’s what the inside of your head looks like now. Work clean”.
“A messy station equals a messy mind,” Bourdain goes on to clarify.
I couldn’t agree more. In some of the most misguided times in my life, I was also a giant slob. Messy car, messy home. A sloth with no discipline. My surroundings reflected that. Your home and the space where you work are mirrors of your own mind. If it’s fucked up, you’re fucked up. Take the time to clean and organize and, in my experience, your mental clarity benefits as a result.
If you want to make some kind of art, but it’s not working out… if you want to escape a feeling of depression, but you’re not sure how… if you have absolutely no idea of what you want to do with your life…
Well, my advice is to first clean your goddamn house. Or your apartment. Or your room. Whatever you’ve got. Scrub everything. Organize everything. Clean surroundings make you feel like part of the human race and give you a sense of accomplishment that you might like to build upon.
I’m not saying that this is a magic solution to your problems, but if you’re in a bad place and you haven’t cleaned your bathroom in a while or organized your bedroom closet, start there. Make it sparkle. Get on your hands and knees. Put time into it. Work. Spend all day on it. And then keep going. Do a good job and then continue that same discipline into other areas of your life.
At least give it a try. Couldn’t hurt.
This is all a very complicated way of saying that a huge reason why I love pop music is for its tidiness.
Oh, sure I like messy music, too. I wouldn’t love Robert Pollard so much if I didn’t. I’ve always been a guy who likes things that come off as opposites. I’m all over the place. Disorganized on the surface, but organized in my own head. This very website is an attempt to organize. I’m scrubbing my bathroom floor with every post.
In any case, I do feel a warm, sugary satisfaction with a lovely, immaculate dessert of album.
Such as Bobbie Gentry’s classic work, which, last I checked, hasn’t been discovered by anyone under age 40 yet.
All of these young creeps are sleeping on some of the best records of the 1960s (Gentry’s most enduring audience these days is in Europe, from what I understand). The good news is that vinyl copies are easy to find for cheap. They are true thrift store classics.
Now, I was not around in the 1960s, but from what I’ve read, back then the radio in the USA was eclectic. You could hear The Rolling Stones, Buck Owens, Stevie Wonder and Perry Como all in the same afternoon without changing the station. Genres didn’t matter so much, just the appeal of the sound.
That approach is what Bobbie Gentry’s records are all about. Her work fits comfortably into several genres. It’s a little pop, a little soul, a little blues and a touch of country, or at least some real deep South flavor, all neatly–oh so neatly–arranged, complete with strings when necessary. These records are like beautifully decorated homes, warm, full of lovely touches and with lots of comfortable places to relax.
Gentry is from the gorgeous, forest-filled state of Mississippi, home of the blues. She’s a white girl who sings like she learned by listening to black girls sing. Gentry’s voice is sensual and smokey and she doesn’t disguise her Southern accent, even when singing a Beatles song. She sings ’em like she owns ’em.
Opening track, “Sweete Peony”, written by Gentry herself, is a great start for an album and an even better start to your day. It’s wired and full of determination, spring-loaded and ready to blast. It’s simple, swampy and dangerous.
Second song, “Casket Vignette”, another Gentry original, is venom sweetened with strings and a melody that’s got wings for days. It’s so easy on the ears that it’s easy to miss its delicious plot. Our narrator is a slick funeral home director who lays his sales pitch on a not-so-grieving widow who also seems to be an atheist on top (“Why are you laughing at me/ Don’t you believe in eternity?”). She ain’t buying any of his shit. There’s a whole Flannery O’Connor short story in Gentry’s knowing delivery. The very 60s sound effects–those creaky casket hinges–seal the deal.
Up next Gentry wraps her pipes around “Come Away Melinda”, the chilling, yet lovely, child’s point-of-view war protest song originally by Greenwich Village folkies The Weavers.
“Fool on the Hill”, the first of three Beatles covers here (all McCartney songs), holds up fine next to the original. I may even like it better, even if Gentry doesn’t sound totally into it. She pulls it off, no matter. I never thought about it before, but it turns out that Southern-fried Beatles is good stuff.
The next two songs are fine pieces of Southern tradition. “Papa’s Medicine Show” and the story-song “Ace Insurance Man” both flaunt Southern ways and make fun of them at the same time in entertaining fashion. They’re genuinely funny.
The American South’s sense of humor is underrated. When we’re not pretending to read the Bible or keeping a close eye on the stranger who just showed up in town or grinding the flesh of Northerners into our pork sausage, we’re constantly making fun of ourselves. Ask anybody down here.
Side two opens with another darkly comic casket vignette (and another Gentry original), “Recollection”, but this time our heroine is a child who laughs at a funeral (“For all around her are tear-sorrowed faces/ But she is too young to know dying”).
Next comes the mesmerizing slink of “Sittin’ Pretty” and another Beatles song, “Eleanor Rigby” this time in a spare, almost jazzy arrangement full of guitar, organs, light percussion and a few string flourishes that is a definite improvement on the original (always one of my least favorite Beatles songs).
The album closes out with two spring breezes. Her version of Kenny Rankin’s “Peaceful” (a song later recorded, and made into hits, by the likes of Georgie Fame and Helen Reddy) lilts across the lilacs and then The Beatles’ “Here, There and Everywhere” dances through the daffodils.
To put on this album is to feel refreshed. Sometimes I think that the 60s was the peak of record-making. You could bake biscuits in this album’s warmth. Producers back then could pile on the production without it sounding overdone. When they had a great singer, they were smart enough to make her sound like she’s singing two feet away from you. They served the song.
You might say they kept a clean house.