Tag: Things I Will Keep

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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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Things I Will Keep #24: FLORALINE

Floraline
Floraline
1999. Minty Fresh

1999 may have been the peak of human life in the western world. At the very least, it was the last year that all of the tools and technology to achieve Utopia were laid out before us and we still felt good about it.

We had the internet, but it hadn’t eaten up most of our brains yet. We didn’t have it in our pocket yet. We weren’t distracted by it in traffic yet. There was no social media to scroll and raise your blood pressure at any time of day yet.

The soul of the internet was still weirdness. Regular people made the rules and corporations were still figuring out what to do with it.

Technology was in the WOW! stage, as opposed to the This is going to take away my job and leave me starving on the streets stage.

Also, the World Trade Center attacks hadn’t happened yet. We had a tragic school shooting in the US (Columbine), but that sort of thing was still an unheard-of crazy anomaly. You could be an adult who lived your whole life without hearing the word pandemic.

Crass sex comedies could still be box office hits. Every neighborhood had a bookstore and a music store and a video store (or two) nearby. New movies from Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch were coming out.

Growing up in the USA in the eighties, our vision for the turn of the century was Armageddon. We had the Cold War mentality. Me, I was also raised on Biblical prophecy (in the eighties, my mother really wanted me to know that the world was going to end soon and I probably wouldn’t live to be 25; thanks, mom). In 1999, the sky was gonna be all purple and people were gonna be running everywhere.

The switch-over to 2000 would not be smooth and half of your loved ones were sure to be trampled by one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Then 1999 actually happened and everything was… FINE. No apocalypse. Overall, 1999 was a chilled-out, frozen margarita of a year. Me, I was a young wreck, but my memories of that time are still pleasant. I’d go back for a day and cruise around.

My pick for the music would be the sole release by a group from Atlanta, Georgia called Floraline. It’s a little-known pop gem that’s endured as my own personal, private definitive album for that final, frivolous year of the last century.

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Things I Will Keep #23: FLEETWOOD MAC, Future Games

Fleetwood Mac
Future Games
1971, Reprise Records

I was born in October 1976, which makes me too young to have any firsthand nostalgia for the 1970s, but I do have some simple, dreamy images in my head that don’t really mean anything.

The dark hallway of the house where we lived at the time. Patterns on bedsheets. Green shag carpet.

I don’t remember people. I don’t remember words. I recall nothing that happened. All I have are these surface details, these scattered dinosaur bones buried in my memory.

I’m interested in that. Why do we remember what we remember? What story did I want to keep alive somehow by remembering bedding and carpets? Is the answer so complicated that I’ll never understand it? Or is it so simple that I’ll always overlook it?

I doubt that I’ll ever know, but the first time that I heard Future Games (about twenty years ago), it sounded like a witness in my investigation. It was sooooooo 1970s and sooooooo dreamy and sooooooo removed from the present world that it touched a nerve and I had an irrational love for it right away.

According to the price sticker on my ragged old vinyl copy, I paid fifty cents for it. Sometimes that’s all that it costs to blow your mind.

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Things I Will Keep #22: THE TOMS

The Toms
The Toms
1979, Black Sheep Records
Reissue: 2005, Not Lame Recordings

Over the decades, the genre that my proctologist and I like to call power pop has acquired all sorts of geeky baggage. It’s associated with music for nerds and sad sacks. It’s catchy hooks and ringing guitars for the terminally uncool.

Part of this is simply because power pop bands always went for the regular Joe look. Smiling guys in jeans and T-shirts. Suits with skinny ties are as wild as it gets. There’s nothing wrong with that, but on the surface these bands tend to look more dorky every decade.

Another part of it is because most young people don’t know what the hell power pop is. If you’re under 35 and have even heard the term, I’m impressed. It’s usually thrown around by crumbling music nerds like me, who still compare most guitar pop to Big Star and The Raspberries. The best power pop is timeless like all good music, but it’s a genre that all but requires you to reach for 50-year-old references.

The result of this is that power pop became the domain of outsiders, dweebs and old people and THAT’S OKAY (speaking as an outsider, a dweeb and an old person).

However, it didn’t used to be like that. If you listen to the vintage stuff made by ambitious young men and can imagine yourself back in 1979 (whether you were there or not), it becomes clear that power pop was a reflection of the dating scene. It was horned-up and virile.  Its influences were The Beatles, The Beach Boys and talking to pretty girls.

Maybe it was far from innovative, but it had something to say, even if it was just “let’s go out on a date”, which counts.

It’s something that I can’t stop thinking about when I listen to this power pop punch-in-the-face by The Toms, an album that I would call definitive.

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Things I Will Keep #21: THE MURMAIDS, “Popsicles and Icicles”

The Murmaids
“Popsicles and Icicles” b/w “Huntington Flats”
1963, Chattahoochee Records

Everyone talks shit about vanilla, but it’s my favorite flavor.

The word itself is often used as a synonym for boring or bland. You can lead a vanilla lifestyle with vanilla interests and have vanilla sex–and no one who describes it that way means it as a compliment.

Vanilla is also typically white, like a politician’s shirt or the plain walls of an unfurnished living room or Pat Sajak–and that’s supposed to be bad, too, I guess.

You hear these slanders about vanilla all of the time, but you won’t hear ’em from me because I LOVE IT. I’m crazy about it. Vanilla is refreshing and cozy. I’m even nuts about the scent of it. Furthermore, vanilla, like me, may look very white, but it has Mexican roots (all real vanilla is derived from an edible orchid plant indigenous to Mexico; the Aztecs of old were way into it).

In that sense, I am vanilla. I identify.

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Things I Will Keep #20: BUD POWELL, Broadcast Performances 1953, Vol. 1

Bud Powell
Broadcast Performances 1953, Vol. 1
1973, ESP-Disk

Even at my advanced age, I still feel that someday I will be into jazz. Someday I’ll be a guy who references Miles Davis and knows what the fuck he’s talking about. Someday I’ll have strong opinions about alto saxophone players. Someday I’ll put on a jazz record and follow the notes like each one is a hundred dollar bill blowing by in the wind. Someday I’ll hear the emotion in these sounds that dart through the air faster than summer wasps. Someday it’s all gonna hit me.

Until then, I just “like” jazz. I like it when it twinkles in the background. I’m your regular dilletante, a total bird-brain and a complete fuckface. I enjoy jazz, but I’m not conversant in it. I’m like a guy who has a picture of the Eiffel Tower hanging in his living room, but hasn’t spent more than a day or two in Paris.

Someday, though…

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Things I Will Keep #19: JIMMY SCOTT, The Source

Jimmy Scott
The Source
1970, Atlantic Records

You ever get lonely? I’m talking about that big, dark feeling where no one cares about you and the serpent is about to strike. That bleak silence. That cold wind that blows through your soul.

Nothing seems important anymore. Nothing matters. The daytime sun hurts your eyes. The night is too dark. Nothing is satisfying. You don’t belong.

It’s a big, big world, but somehow there’s no room in it for you.

Maybe in the past you had some ideas about how this life could all work out, but that fell apart somewhere along the way. Maybe you know exactly when that happened. Or maybe you have no idea. It just happened. 

A million dollars couldn’t solve it. You don’t even know how to talk about it.

You’re broken, baby. And nobody knows how to put you back together. Not even you know how to do it.

I can’t think of a single singer on Earth who conjures up that feeling better than Jimmy Scott.

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Things I Will Keep #18: THE ROLLING STONES, Their Satanic Majesties Request

The Rolling Stones
Their Satanic Majesties Request
1967, London Records

I guess that I can understand why the longtime members of the Rolling Stones look back on this album with all the fondness that one might remember a case of food-poisoning. Despite their history of drugs and decadence and how the mere mention of their name conjures up fleshy images of the over-the-top rock star lifestyle, they ARE professionals. At least today, when they’ve cleaned up, fart through silk, blow their noses with $100 bills and play for huge crowds at the Palmolive Dish Soap Arena and the Speed Stick Deodorant Ampitheatre, where people pay three-figure sums (or more) for tickets to NOT hear shambling, lysergic drug-bombs such as “Sing This All Together” or “Gomper”.

With the exception of hit “She’s a Rainbow”, Mick ‘n’ Keith no doubt don’t want to bother with these songs today, either. Beyond a few moments, this album isn’t really them. It was a product of 1967 and if you were an English rock band then maybe you HAD to react to psychedelia in some way. Like the smell of strong pot from a fat joint, it was in the air.

You could ignore it and instead change with the times by indulging in concept albums like The Kinks and The Who did (and ignoring something is a reaction in its own way).

Or you could follow the purple flashing lights and trail of flower petals and embrace the acid and that’s what The Stones did. For one lost, crazy half a year or so, at least.

The result was out of character, strange and controversial. Decades later, Mick Jagger called it “nonsense”. Keith Richards called it “a load of crap”. It’s one of the few Stones albums of the time from which Martin Scorsese hasn’t licensed songs for his movies.

But, fuck me, it’s my favorite. I love it. As far as I’m concerned, any happy home needs a copy of Their Satanic Majesties Request. 

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Things I Will Keep #17: THE MUFFS, Happy Birthday to Me

The Muffs
Happy Birthday to Me
1997, Reprise Records (original vinyl on Telster Records)

The news of Kim Shattuck’s sad and unfair death at age 56, due to ALS complications, knocked all of the wind out of me last week.

I first saw it on Twitter and I couldn’t believe it (“Huh, Kim Shattuck is trending? I wonder wh–OH, FUCK!”). Total punch in the gut. Her illness was kept private. It was a complete surprise to us in the peanut gallery. At the moment, other people were around me and I had to walk away from them and find a quiet place to sit and think.

The deaths of musicians rarely get to me like that. Even if I liked them. For the most part, I tend to figure that they made their mark and will live on through their work. I might get a little wistful and misty, but I don’t feel hurt.

But Kim Shattuck’s passing hurt. 

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Things I Will Keep #16: GEM, Hexed

My cracked CD case says “hi”.

Gem
Hexed
1995, Restless Records

Happy September, folks.

August will probably always be a slow month on this site. I write everyday, but in the drag days of late summer in Texas, my brain takes a vacation. I won’t repeat my rant from the beginning of my Jill Cunniff piece from last year, but I always spend the 100-plus degree days of August annoyed at everything. I make notes and write fragments for new articles for this site, but in my cranky, sweatball state they rarely feel like anything worth pursuing. If this was my job, I could work my way through this misery, sure, but this is not my job, so I can say “fuck it” with impunity and just not update for a few weeks.

Now, it’s mid-September and it’s still fucking hot (Texas), but the nights are getting more pleasant. The supermarkets have Halloween displays up. Changes are happening, however slowly. The leaves here haven’t yet changed color, but as the world around me slides back into routine, I feel myself receiving good energy again.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m in the mood for some for some killer back-to-school rock and Gem’s shotgun blast of a debut album nails it. Maybe none of these guys had been in school for awhile when they made it. Maybe main songwriter Doug Gillard had been in bands for about fifteen years at this point. Nevertheless, they still kicked up the kind of blare and had the kind of songs that, in a better world, would have shouted out of high school parking lots in 1995.

From the cynical, misfit kids, at least. The kind of kids who could hear a song like “Your Heroes Hate You” and it just confirmed what they suspected about the world already.

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