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Part 1 - Faded Love It's early February, 1963, and Patsy Cline is back in the studio for the first time in 5 months. No, wait, how about a preamble. Those previous September sessions yielded the successful single "Leavin on Your Mind", one more in a string of hits since her label change in 1961 that allowed more leverage and creative control over her music. From 1954 into late 1960 Cline had been locked in a label contract with Bill McCall and 4-Star Records, a prison-rate deal that only allowed her to record tunes McCall outright owned the rights to, a dismal catalogue and basically a complete waste of her talents. 1961 had been a tumultuous year though: a last minute, career-saving recording of "I Fall to Pieces" ushered in her 'poppier' sound, a sound somewhat opposed to the straight-line country tunes she'd been unsuccessfully slaving over for 6 or more years. In this recording, a collaboration with Harlan Howard and Hank Cochran who would both continually encourage the advancement of her style, the "countrypolitan" tone was born, a more sophisticated, urban sound that would serve as the leitmotif for female country artists for decades to come. Her daughter had been born between the single's release in April and Cline's near-fatal car wreck in June '61, for which she spent the better part of summer recovering. In August '61, desperate, in-debt and her head still wrapped in bandages, she recorded the Willie Nelson penned "Crazy", but was unable to summon the high notes due to pain in her chest. She re-did her vocals several weeks later (The only time in her career) and "Crazy" released on August 21. It would go on to be the biggest radio hit of her career. Then that string of successful singles for the next year: "She's Got You", "So Wrong", "You're Stronger Than Me", "Why Can't He Be You", "Back in Baby's Arms", and "Leavin on Your Mind", all advancements of the countrypolitan style, a successful formula finally paying its dues. Maybe it was the quality of the songwriting, or the more intricate production, but Cline's vocal range seems tailor-made for these kinds of lilting songs, not that she had ever been a classified as a weakling, in fact her live persona had always been more suited to the rough and tumble honky-tonk scene. But it's strange to hear her transformation if you listen to the recordings chronologically. So, February 4th 1963. The first of four consecutive days of recording early that month which form a huge chunk (along with the cuts from '62 ) of her legacy, the "legend" part of her recording career, almost all of it in less than 18 months and after a decade of swimming in place. The February 1963 sessions would yield her soft, immaculate signature tune, "Sweet Dreams", and even show the possibilities of further crossover appeal with Harlan Howard's "He Called Me Baby", now an official soul classic thanks to Candi Staton, Ella Washington, and just about every other soul artist of the 1960s. If you were to ask me the recording of most significance during these sessions would be Faded Love, still the saddest song I've ever heard, not to mention one of the most emotionally vulnerable vocal performances ever recorded. Cline was no stranger to inhabiting her songs, channeling the mood, personae and emotional turmoils that come with musical interpretation. She was well known for weeping during recordings, literally embodying a song's lyrical characteristics and themes. You can hear it in the way she lilts during the last 30 seconds of "Sweet Dreams': hesitation, uncertainty. And you can absolutely hear it during "Faded Love"; the interchange with the plucked guitar and waves of string arrangements that repeatedly fade out imperceptibly as she fades in, she almost seems like she won't be able to finish, that last line drawing out impossibly to the point of breathlessness, the abyssal pause, then finally she inhales and quavers the last word of the song, like it's her final breath in life, resigned. I've listened to "Faded Love" hundreds of times and that moment makes my heart stop every single time. I can't help it, it gets me right there in my deep downs. There's a discernible fatalism in her voice on the '63 sessions, she even echoed it subliminally in a comment at the session wrap party when comparing the sound of her early recordings to these, something akin to: "Well, here it is ... the first and the last". "Faded Love", one of nearly a dozen songs she recorded over the next several days, was intended as the headliner for her upcoming album. Cline, age 30, died four weeks later in a plane crash along with her lover and manager Randy Hughes, as well as country singers Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins. Her fourth album was scrapped and the unreleased singles were instead collected onto the posthumous "The Patsy Cline Story" retrospective, though the majority of the 50 or so Decca master recordings would not be released as a complete package for another half century.  Granted, I'm already partial to Patsy Cline's output, her grounded personality and vulnerability, and her fantastic emotional and vocal range. In my opinion she is, without any hesitation, the greatest country music singer, probably an unconventional opinion within a musical genre that is usually known for its masculinity. But I think Cline's work, though thematically timeless, is also representative of specific era of recording in the history of popular music. Postwar American popular music (and by extension that of England and Western Europe) was a singles culture, an environment of contract work for singers who had very little control over their music. This led to a certain degree of homogeneity in schools of sound, but also a concentration of great talents with regard to producers, writers, and the revolving door of performers. For many small record labels it was make-or-break hit by hit. That financial pressure, along with a more primitive level of recording instruments, gave studio performances a certain desperation, an in-the-moment feel. This was evident on blues performances like those of Elmore James (who had to bring it 100%, wailing away on every last recording to compensate for the relative insensitivity of the equipment: he was a radio repair man in his spare time), as well as country, and most definitely soul of the 1960's. To this day the single 45rpm takes of many songs (including monaural recordings) remain the rawest, most exciting versions, even if they were later collected on 33 LPs. For many black soul vocalists the process of making music was one of perpetually scraping by. Nobody was going to be as big as Aretha, the preacher's best daughter (not even her own sisters), and thus everyone else had to be content with the leftovers of public attention. For those collecting singles compilations in the compact disc era this led to the obsessive unearthing of incredible lost vaults of soul treasure that never originally saw much (or any) airplay, usually due to financial politics between labels. Black female soul vocalists had it the worst, usually, though many of them trucked on decade after decade beyond their glory years with local or regional support. But in the 60's that same equipment, those same financial politics, led to some utterly incredible performances across genres, people baring their loving ghosts to make the single as convincing and alluring as possible. There really was a market for emotionally raw music, some of it heart-breakingly sad, a lot of it reflecting social anxiety during a century of near unfathomable mechanical slaughter of human beings. I guess I won't get too deep into all that, but my point is that as labels consolidated and recording technology advanced the music itself broadened and became more sophisticated, less distilled. Instrumental and vocal performance into the 1970s shifted towards demonstrations of intricacy and subtlety, the grand design of an album as an artist statement, and the abstraction of theme, emotion, and practical subject matter. That is to say, it all kind of changed. (strangely, the pop-country genre we currently know went in the reverse direction towards the blatant, unsophisticated, and infantile. I'd venture Waylon Jennings was probably the last remnant of old country, even though he's a weirdo.) I really love contemporary music of all kinds, from hip-hop, beeps and boops, and ambient, to industrial, punk, drill and bass, and the most commercial pop, or whathaveyou. I will not apologize for liking 2Chainz, ever. On the other hand I don't rely on most contemporary music for the same emotional punch as much of the stuff from 1955-1970. The social climate is just so different now, more cynical. If I were to make a gross generalization I would say that really sad, tragic music isn't really a focus of the popular consumer climate these days. There's just no demand. I don't mean it as a value judgement, but more as an observation. Who knows, maybe I'm wrong. So I guess that's what this thread is about. Some sad poo poo, more or less across all genres. Working in a record store for years served as a great introduction to music I never would've sought out of my own volition but, and maybe I just have a melancholic side to me…I always kinda gravitated toward heartbreaking stuff. I hope you'll permit me to sound naive, but I find something profound and cathartic about music where the artist just pours their insecurity, fear, heartbreak, etc. out on the ground in a grand gesture. The opposite of facade or pretense. I'll be updating this thread regularly with writing about a specific song or artist, but also with references to other artists of the time working in a similar vein, be it musicians, or cinematic or literary cross-references. The focus is on melancholy stuff as a theme, and I'm going to avoid anecdotal discussion for the most part. I like reading about and discussing music so I guess this is mildly therapeutic for me. That being said, I know a lot of unassuming, positive-sounding poo poo can color outside its own lines and approach that heartbreaking feeling, given the right context (like the use of Nina Simone's "I Want A little Sugar In My Bowl" on The Wire, after Kima Greggs is hospitalized). For discussion purposes I think these types of references are totally legit. "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" isn't considered a tragic song per se, but within the context of Redding's death just days later it becomes something that was probably not intended, that surreal poo poo, a meditation on desolation by a man at the end of his rope. Redding never had a chance to add to or revise that particular statement, and so it remains, perpetually.  (let me know if any links are broken) edit; grammar BeanpolePeckerwood fucked around with this message at 10:26 on Nov 1, 2015 |
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Nov 1, 2015 00:52
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Contents: Part 1 - Faded Love Part 2 - The Old Revolution Part 3 - It Hurts Me Too (soon) BeanpolePeckerwood fucked around with this message at 08:40 on Nov 6, 2015 |
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Nov 1, 2015 00:52
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Part 2 - The Old Revolution On second thought, regarding "mechanical slaughter of human beings"  There's a stark, exhausted quality to Leonard Cohen's second album Songs From A Room. Released during the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1969 it delivered a sound that was considerably less ornate than his debut, purposely so, and I find it fitting given the subject matter of most of the songs. Cohen, who had already been published at least five times before he released his first album, arrived on the music scene as a fully-formed folklore bard…a counter-cultural nomad looking for warm beds and the notion of a clean conscience that seems to remain obscure to all gentleman womanizers. Indeed, Songs of Leonard Cohen, often considered one of the more stunning debut albums of the era, was focused almost entirely on the murky ambiguity of his love life, the women he admired, and his sense of place or lack thereof. It was a kind of bittersweet collection of songs regarding power relationships. Songs From A Room, in contrast, is often remarked upon as hushed and tired sounding, its instrumentation dialed way back to make room for the poetry. It can come off like a protest album at first listen, but one with a fragility, an almost sedate sense of pace and very little room for spectacle. Every production choice was made to ensure the poignancy of the song subjects would not be infringed upon or undermined. Where his debut was mostly nostalgic, Songs From A Room is a melancholy affair of sepia histories and legends, the single bright spot left for the coda in "Tonight Will Be Fine", and even that song proceeds with an air of acquiescence. So, for starters, at least 7 of the 10 tracks on the album are loving downers, and some are pretty obvious allegorical constructions about wartime in the 20th Century. "The Story of Isaac" is the first up with imagery of Abraham and Isaac as a parallel to contemporary fathers sacrificing a generation of sons to war, perhaps some natural human instinct (is the peacock spreading fan a fitness indicator, a reference to nuclear fire, a device of subterfuge?) manifesting as deadly social imperative, or the social imperative born of piety, it's not all clear. Cohen expounded on the themes of this song once in an interview: "I was careful in that song to try and put it beyond the pure, beyond the simple, anti-war protest, that it also is. Because it says at the end there the man of war the man of peace, the peacock spreads his deadly fan. In other words it isn't necessarily for war that we're willing to sacrifice each other. We'll get some idea - some magnificent idea - that we're willing to sacrifice each other for; it doesn't necessarily have to involve an opponent or an ideology, but human beings being what they are we're always going to set up people to die for some absurd situation that we define as important."  Cohen, in order to embody an ageless moral authority seldom really adopts a specific time or place in these fables, they exist in historical limbo. The fourth song, "The Partisan", is an adaptation of the song "La Complainte du Partisan" about the French Resistance, a lovely and lonely song of persecution and survivor's guilt notable for its use of French singers on one of its verses. In one passage it describes a woman who sheltered resistance members in her house until the soldiers came and "she died without a whisper." And of course there's "The Old Revolution" which is straight up sad as hell. I will say up front that even when chronicling horror and despair Cohen seems to find a sort of grandeur in the process of human recognition: "…even damnation is poisoned with rainbows/ all the brave young men are waiting now to see a signal/ which some killer will be lighting for pay/ into this furnace I ask you now to venture/ you whom I cannot betray." There are so many evocations from these short passages, it's amazing what perfect word choice can do in poetry, especially when accentuated just right to music. It's strange, "The Old Revolution" isn't so much of a protest song as it is an acknowledgement of the creation/destruction dichotomy, a realization of unending folly and the significance that it bestows on remaining human experience. In this sense war is not a thing most men choose consciously but is instead a magnified manifestation of the inner drive towards activity, chaos, renewal, and change. Novelty as a verb. I think Cohen adopts that frame of mind, to some extent, especially when he's singing about the beauty of doomed camaraderie marching blindly into a hellhole, or about stuttering shellshock victims, or the latent guilt associated with handing out orders for men to kill or die.  The song summons imagery from the entirety of conflict during the 20th century, and thus it's a lament stuck out of time. The words could be describing the machinery of the French or Russian Revolution, an almost naive admission of youth fighting for the only side they know, hopeful and singing in anticipation of victory only to have the breath unexpectedly crushed from their lungs. Simultaneously, the mention of "search and destroy" is rooted firmly in the Indochina conflicts, the Vietnam war, the Malayan Emergency, wars that frayed morality in very distinct and cruel ways, and strategies that purposefully treated innocent humans as statistics to be counted and parsed in order to identify combatants (now we do it with drone strikes). In this song Cohen is conflating the horrors of 100 years into a single fever dream of forlorn awareness. He's mindful of the shame that lies in the statistics, but he's also mindful of the grand scale of human striving that is at times gorgeous, at times sickening. How about a statistic. During the 20th Century, a century that is primarily defined by its wars (secondarily by advancements in communication), it is estimated that 262,000,000 deaths were caused by 'democide', a term coined by R.J. Rummel that describes "the murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder." A lot of people. A staggering amount, actually, usually killed for believing the wrong thing or saluting the wrong way, or just being poor and in the way. The democide term excludes people killed in war battles, civilians unintentionally killed in war and killings of rioting mobs. Another lot of people. Were you to combine the statistics you would start to form an image of massive social reorganization that is usually condensed into ideological abstractions or bullet points, one talked-around rather than felt. All those people came from somewhere, from some panting hominid. If you're sitting at computer and reading said statistics with a beer or coffee in your hand, I guess it would be fair to consider yourself fairly lucky, all things considered. With that in mind, and knowing that Cohen is going for not just an anti-war statement but a sentiment that transcends categories of human experience, I'm compelled to link the themes of his poetry to Abraxas.  Not that Abraxas.  That's the one. Abraxas is a Gnostic word/concept and also perhaps deity/daemon that combines the opposing life and death judgements into one force, some might say God and the Devil (I'm not religious so I couldn't say for sure), but basically all the novelty (including tenets of morality/immorality/ammorality) that composes our reality would seemingly be dictated by Abraxas, you know, for subscribers. Abraxas can be represented symbolically in a few obvious ways, one of the most common being the basilisk-like or chimeran figure brandishing a shield and a whip, or in abstract terms as a bird struggling free from the egg, a common visual reference from Herman Hesse: "The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas." You know, when I hear "The Old Revolution" and Cohen timidly (almost devastated) arrives at the verse "I fought in the old revolution on the side of the ghost and the king/ of course I was very young and I thought that we were winning/ I can't pretend I still feel very much like singing / as they carry the bodies away…" …that's when I start thinking of Abraxas, and those images from Demian of WWI trenches and mustard gas victims and stretcher bearers. All Quiet On The Western Front has an Abraxis moment, a beautiful one: someone playing a harmonica in the background as a soldier reaches for a butterfly amid the rubble (the tv remake has the soldier sketching a bird). I also think of The Thin Red Line, a film that is literally jam-packed with Abraxas references, some very loving obvious. At one point the regiment is climbing Guadacanal Hill 210 through mortar and hidden machinegun fire, and as the camera cuts chaotically between images of maimed soldiers it also hovers for 3-4 seconds on a freshly hatched baby bird, wet with amniotic fluid, crawling like a near-corpse through the underbrush. Life and death judgements sharing the same knoll.  Later on, in what seems like an intentional nod to "All Quiet…", as the Americans assault the bivouac filled with sick, starving, and traumatized Japanese soldiers (ordered by the Emperor to stay and fight to the death, mind you), the camera watches from behind a line of Americans as they run through the trees and slowly out of the depth of focus. In this shot the most recognizable element is a bright blue butterfly crossing the frame. Abraxas. Nature proceeds with reckless indifference, as does humanity in its own way, also of nature. Herzog said it well, "There is no harmony in the universe, [ ---- ] there is no harmony as we have conceived it."  The final verse in Cohen's song mentions "you who are broken by power/ you who are absent all day/ you who are kings for the sake of your children's stories/", and in a way it could almost be an indictment if it wasn't pronounced with such lament, like one witnessing the ways of the old world collapsing in rubble. This passage always makes me think of the family portrait of Tsar Nicholas II, the autocrat of detached political impotence. Apparently he was a nice enough fellow, a good father even. He never really knew any better, in fact, he was purposely raised to not know better...to remain at a certain disconnect with the peoples affairs.  This image is loving haunting, like a prelude to the new paradigm. I guess I can't say if they all deserved a bullet in the head or not, but one thing's for sure, the world just loving devoured them. Nicholas Romanov was given the title of "martyred saint" 64 years after he and his entire bloodline was wiped from this earth. I guess that's like a lifetime achievement award or something. Thanks for reading. Bonus; Salvador Dali's "Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man".  An Abraxas moment if I ever saw one. Dali saw America as the new dawn, the bird hatching from the egg to establish empire and bring about change, stabilizing itself with a hand on Europe. I'm sure he was optimistic about the endeavor. I'm a bit hesitant to share his optimism, but you never know. edit; links BeanpolePeckerwood fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Nov 8, 2015 |
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Nov 6, 2015 08:28
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We played this at Bob Dave's funeral after his PCP fueled suicide by cop. Makes me tear up every time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRRnU8VzOok 
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Nov 9, 2015 05:48
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My late cousin John was an aspiring drummer, and like me a huge Led Zeppelin fan. As part of the eulogy at his funeral; the lyrics to "Stairway To Heaven" were spoken in psalm by the pastor. It was surreal, yet comforting in a way I really can't describe. Seven years later and I still can't hear it without being reminded of him.
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Nov 10, 2015 06:23
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NESguerilla posted:We played this at Bob Dave's funeral after his PCP fueled suicide by cop. Makes me tear up every time. Nice try, friend. Gonna have to call your mom and tell on you. 
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Nov 10, 2015 08:21
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There's a few songs that do it from me. One is Ray Charles's version of "Georgia On My Mind" - which is my favourite recording of a song - but I can't ascribe any personal emotional significance to it that explains why I find it so affecting. I don't necessarily relate to the lyrics, and musically, it's even in a format from the 1960s I usually don't like - a singer targeting "pop crossover" audiences (read: middle-aged, middle-class white people who frequented to supper clubs) by recording standards or showtunes backed by a string orchestra (see also: Sam Cooke, a singer I love who was consistently underserved by his material for most of his recorded career). So I must attribute it to Ray's singing. The song clearly matters to him, and it matters to him so much that he makes me believe that it should matter to me as well. I have enjoyed your other posts, OP, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else you have to say. 
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Nov 13, 2015 15:53
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