Tag: 1990

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Things I Will Keep #25: HANK WILLIAMS, Rare Demos: First to Last

Hank Williams
Rare Demos: First to Last
1990, The Country Music Foundation

Hank Williams died of heart failure when he was only 29 and deaths like that freak you out when you get old. That’s a painfully young age to go, but too many pills and too much booze can snuff out the brightest candle.

It happened in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1953. Williams rode in the backseat of a Cadillac, on his way from Knoxville, Tennessee to play a show in Canton, Ohio. Sometime around 5 AM, his driver stopped for gas in Oak Hill, West Virginia and then discovered that the great songwriter, who’d been silent for many miles, wasn’t merely sleeping off his latest bender.

No, he was even more pale than usual. Not breathing. Gone.

The story goes that Hank Williams died with these four things in his pockets: a loaded gun, a pint of vodka, tablets of chloral hydrate (a sedative), and a rough draft of lyrics for a new song written on a piece of paper.

All are symbols of what killed him and when I write about his death it’s not to romanticize it. No, it was pathetic and it shouldn’t have happened.

However, I can’t listen to Hank Williams songs without thinking about his death and that’s because they both reveal the same thing, which is the fragile soap bubble of human life. Our very hearts (in both the literal and figurative sense) sometimes try to kill us and often succeed.

Sometimes death is so close that it’s in your pocket.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #55: BIG TROUBLE

Hazzard Hotrods
Big Trouble
2000, The Fading Captain Series

I like bad music.

And by bad music I don’t mean the soulless junk that we all hear everyday piped into drug stores or issuing from other peoples’ cars. Those forgettable aural space-fillers. Those frat party soundtracks. That slickster stuff that they tell me is country music, but that sounds like the regular ol’ Top 40 except that the singer has something that resembles a twang underneath the electronic pitch correction.

No, I’m talking music that’s too lo-fi to live. I’m talking about noise. Total racket. Audio chaos that you can’t recommend to just anybody–or anybody at all most of the time. I’m talking about shit that’s fucked.

I don’t love every little thing that’s moaned or droned into a microphone, but if you like rock music and you’ve dug even slightly underground in an attempt to find other worlds, you probably like bad music, too. Maybe you’re a big trash-brain. Feedback is fine with you. So is tape hiss. Room noise. Accidents. Maybe you like the results of a cheap microphone and a simple 90s-era consumer-grade cassette recorder that strains to capture a room full of sound, only to come off like a hazy transmission from Pluto.

Some might call it garbage; you call it otherworldly. Or maybe it’s actually perfectly of this Earth. Gritty. Human. Raw. Blemished.

This weird space is where Hazzard Hotrods live. The original vinyl-only release was limited to 500 copies, which sounds right to me. That’s about how many people might like this.

So what the hell is it?

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #4: BOSSANOVA

Pixies
Bossanova
1990, 4AD/Elektra

Mainstream opinion puts the first two Pixies albums on a pedestal and then treats the next two as lesser lights. There’s always somebody around who insists that Doolittle is their best. It was definitive, they might say. It’s the perfect snapshot of the band’s personality. The peak of their screaming surrealism and pulverizing pop. Doolittle was the album on which the band sharpened their blade as good as it was ever gonna get.

There are some cuddly songs on Bossanova and Trompe le Monde, sure, but the shine was off the chrome–or maybe it was TOO shiny as the band got more comfortable in bed with producer Gil Norton, who had a real ear for how to make these strange songs sound like sugar.

Now, I disagree. I disagree so much that I declare Bossanova my favorite of the original Pixies albums. I think it’s great. If the previous records are played-out to the max in my world, this one is still breezy and fun to me. It’s a perfect pop album. It makes me bounce off the walls.

Still, I do understand the detractors to a degree. While Bossanova isn’t a total departure–it’s still no-nonsense screamy rock music–there ARE differences from what came before.

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