Playlist #2

A selection of tracks from the last few albums featured (plus our short Daytrotter interview):

1. Otis Redding - I'm Sick Y'all

2. Neil Young - Tell Me Why [Live]

3. Robert Johnson - Love In Vain

4. Terry Allen - My Amigo

5. The Beatles - I've Got A Feeling

6. Talking Heads - Crosseyed and Painless [Live in Rome]

7. Plant and See - Put Out My Fire

8. The Beach Boys - Feel Flows

9.The Band - King Harvest (Has Surely Come) [Live in the studio]

10. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi - Radiohead [Live from the Basement]

11. Time Fading Lines - Woods [Daytrotter Session]

Click below for the playlist via YouTube:

Immediacy and Impulse: The Vibration of the Take

Reflecting on my continuing fascination with recorded music in the After The Goldrush feature,  I couldn't articulate it better than that fascination being rooted in the recording process' ability to "capture a real performance, and in so doing, document a moment that can move you." It's what M C Taylor called the 'vibration of the take'. Below we collect some of our favourite thoughts on the topic:

“I got the chance to go back after hours and tried to improve some things and I realised it wasn’t possible. It was part of something that happened at the moment and you just couldn’t change it. It might have been more perfect, but it wasn’t as good. So I just said, That’s it. He knew what he was doing and this is how the baby came out. Honour the moment….I wish there was more of that stuff in music because as grateful as we are for the technology to do things we couldn’t do early on, sometimes we get seduced trying to get things perfect when actually I don’t think there is such a thing. Desire just has a feel to it. It’s visual. Bob was like a painter who was throwing paint on a canvas, but he knew what he was doing.” 

 

Emmylou Harris on recording Desire (as told to Mojo Magazine)
 

The ethos is to keep-it-simple so that what the bands leave behind is "four absolutely collectible songs that often impart on whomever listens to them the true intensity that these musicians put into their art, sometimes with more clarity than they do when they have months to tinker with overdubs and experiments. These songs are them as they are on that particular day, on that particular tour – dirty and alive."

Daytrotter

"Cinema verite? I got into audio verite..... Hey, I've made records where you analyze everything you do 3,000 times and it's perfect. I'm sick of it. I want to make a record that's totally stark naked. Raw. I don't wanna fix any of it. I don't care if it's totally out of tune, man, let's play. Fuck it.... I like the idea of capturing something. Record something that happened. I'm a musician. I don't wanna sit there and build a record. I built a couple of records. Big deal. Tonight's the Night doesn't care. And that makes you feel good about it. There's no pretense."

 Neil Young

"Don't spend too much time or too many takes on each song, try to capture the vibration of the first couple of takes even if it means leaving mistakes in. Keep overdubs to a minimum unless the song is begging for something special. Immediacy and impulse."

 M C Taylor (Hiss Golden Messenger)

"At Stax the rule is: whatever you feel, play it. We cut everything together - horns, rhythm, and vocal. We'll do it three or four times, go back and listen to the results and pick the best one. If somebody doesn't like a line in a song, we'll go back and cut the whole song over. Until last year, we didn't even have a four-track tape recorder. You can't overdub on a one-track machine."

 Otis Redding

“[On Mirage Rock] a less-is-more approach freed up a lot of mental space just to enjoy the moment, I'd also say it stopped us from worrying too much about what we sounded like or what we can program into a computer to make it sound more cohesive. It was more organic, haphazard even, and I think that is so important when making a record. Because of modern technology, it's so easy to over think the process and lose focus on the actual songs. That was the most enjoyable part of the whole experience for me, and hopefully it's something I'll take away and use in the future.”

Ben Bridwell (Band of Horses)

Surf's Up / Pet Sounds / Best Of by The Beach Boys

This selection of back covers by The Beach Boys are all a little drab in contrast to the front covers of two of them. The front of the third, Surf's Up, has been described as their most 'un-Beach Boys' cover. It is a painting based on the sculpture End of the Trail, by James Earle Fraser, which honours the struggle of the Native Americans (I had wrongly assumed it depicted an image of Don Quixote I half-remembered). As The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit points out, Surf's Up saw "[n]o more songs about girls, cars, or surfing" but a "new world-conscious Beach Boys attitude...duly reflected in the choice of album art". The back cover of Surf's Up continues the theme and is dark to the point of almost consuming the black font of the song titles.

Pet Sounds and Best Of (released only two months later) stick to a familiar formula; the band shown in lighter mood on the back cover, with the latter not missing the opportunity for a bit of advertising too.
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Researching these back covers I stumbled across Malcom C. Searle's excellent and marvellously in-depth Back Through the Opera Glass website dedicated to the artwork of The Beach Boys. It is worth reproducng what he says about the back covers of Pet Sounds and Surf's Up in full:

"For the rear of the Pet Sounds album sleeve Capitol Records chose to put together a collage of frames highlighting the importance of the group as they liked to see them. The candy-striped shirts were back in evidence, guitars in hand, mixed in with a number of stills taken during the Japanese leg of their recent concert tour. This was almost suggesting that this was their way of showing that the album was their boys together … not merely a frontage for Brian’s strong-minded dominance of the music within.

Whilst Brian had been recording the instrumental tracks for the new album, using Los Angeles’ finest collection of studio session musicians, and prior to the boys laying down the vocals, the remaining five-piece band had been performing a 15-date tour of Japan, followed by a one-off return journey show, on Saturday 29th January, in Honolulu. Eleven of the fifteen pictures that graced the rear sleeve were taken during this tour, four of which featured Mike, Alan, Carl, Dennis and Bruce dressed out in traditional Japanese costume, pictured during a promotional visit to Kyoto's famous Samurai studios on January 10th. The remaining tour pictures featured the band on stage, dressed in traditional Beach Boy costume. Striped shirt and white pants, Capitol Records undoubtedly smiling silently in the background, although judging by the picture of Carl wearing a Hawaiian flower Lei around his neck they are taken from a variety of the shows from the tour. Japanese-based photographer and writer Dave Jampel is credited with being the man behind the lens for this series of pictures, and at least Bruce once again made the rear cover …

“I think that album is my favourite, and it drove me crazy that I couldn’t get my picture on the (front) cover because I was still signed to CBS, from the days when Terry Melcher and I were producing for them. I couldn’t get a clearance to be on the front cover, but I’m on the back … but I’m so proud just to have been able to sing on that record …” Bruce Johnston (Beach Boy)

Brian only appears in two pictures on the rear montage, uncomfortably alienated away from the antics of his fellow band members he is seen driving his car, leaning out of the window, sombrely dressed in black, whilst the more dominant pose sees him sitting at his piano, fingers poised over the chord structure of another great composition. It’s a strange sight seeing the sad, lone figure, the group mastermind, presenting his personal masterpiece, surrounded by shots of his smiling, laughing comrades …"

 And on the Ed Thrasher-designed Surf's Up (see also):

"For the reverse of the sleeve the deep blue and green hues that had framed Fraser’s front image re-appeared, this time as an ageing parchment (or maybe even tobacco leaf). The song titles were simply laid out from top to bottom, and nothing else was printed or featured that could remove the impact of the barren, desolate creation that was held up before the eye. It really was a most impressive, yet despairingly depressive sleeve to behold....

Overall, and despite the comparison to the bands precious releases for both Capitol and Warner’s, it is clearly apparent how this one sleeve epitomises the mood of the album held within. It deserves serious listening, serious appraisal … and it is indeed a serious offering."

In Rainbows by Radiohead

"Knocking over a table covered in candles [and] NASA’s website" Thom Yorke (on the inspiration for the album's art-work, as told to The Believer magazine )

The story of how Radiohead chose to market and charge for In Rainbows is well known (without a record label, initially only in digital format on their own website, with buyers able to pay as much or as little as they liked), but the artwork was part of the intrigue that surrounded the album's release. Initialy the band decided not to include a cover for the digital release of the album, ditching it last minute and holding it back for the physical release. In the absence of a cover, people even made their own.

The artwork, both back and front, was designed by Stanley Donwood, who has worked with Thom Yorke on all of Radiohead's album covers since The Bends. In The Believer interview Yorke explained the genesis on the In Rainbows cover:

The Believer: It’s funny, because the loss of palpable CD artwork seems like it would effect Radiohead more than other bands, considering that your artwork collaborations with Stanley Donwood have become so linked to your aesthetic. How do you normally work with Donwood on artwork?

Thom Yorke: Has it? Well, the In Rainbows artwork came literally from him knocking a table over. He had some candles on a table and, well, we were gonna do some pornographic etchings, which didn’t work out for a number of really good reasons…. They were pornographic landscape etchings.

The Believer: Pornographic landscape etchings, huh? Is that how I would describe them if I saw them?

Thom Yorke: No, you’d say, “That’s a bunch of fucking scratches on a piece of paper, mate.” [Laughs] But in the process of doing that he knocked all these candles onto his paper and thought, Well, that looks nice, scanned it in, and went from there.

The Believer: And weren’t NASA pictures somehow involved?

Thom Yorke: Me and my son got into watching the shuttle live. And one day I ended up at the gallery to the NASA page, which is fucking amazing. So all my input ended up being, “Here, look at these NASA pictures.”

The Believer: So you’ll continue collaborating with Stanley on artwork? This isn’t the end of Radiohead album art as we know it?

Thom Yorke: No, we’ve actually got a really good plan, but I can’t tell you what it is, because someone will rip it off. But we’ve got this great idea for putting things out.

The NASA images seem to have been the main source of inspiration for the back cover.

In an interview with A.V.Club, Ed O'Brien and Thim Yorke elaborated on Donwood's role:

Ed O'Brien: Stanley is always in the studio with us when we're working.

A.V.Club: Is that by design?

Ed O'Brien: He's either in a little room adjacent or above us in the mezzanine, or in the shed at the bottom of the gully. He's always with us, and we need him in that creative process. Not just for his artwork, but because he'll say, "I know nothing about music, but that was fucking brilliant!" By being there, the music seeps into him. He listens to things the same we do, having it repeated over and over and over again. It gets in him, and the stuff in that—the mood of the songs—is conveyed in the artwork. He's a receptor to that, and that's great.

Thom Yorke: There can be some really difficult times in the studio, but most of the time, we have a laugh in it. A lot of times, when we're doing the artwork and things, there is an element of comedy about it—I've been throwing wax at bits of paper! It's not exactly the punk ethic, but we always end up taking a piss.

For his part, Donwood told Radio 4, "Well it's very colourful – I’ve finally embraced colour! It's a rainbow but it is very toxic, it's more like the sort of one you'd see in a puddle." In an interview with Junkmedia, of his work he said, "My work that I call 'art' is largely concerned with what could be termed 'political' issues. This is the work that I find hard, challenging, difficult, awful, painful, and ultimately, sometimes, rewarding. But I do also feel very drawn to create work that I sincerely hope people will find beautiful. I hope my work for In Rainbows will have some sort of effect in this way."

The Band by The Band

"I'll be down to get you in a taxi honey

You'd better be ready around half past eight
Ah baby don't be late I want to be there when the band starts honey"

I had always been intrigued by the quote on the back cover. Was it from a film, was it made up...if I had looked closer, I would have seen from the footnote that it was actually a lyric taken from "Darktown Strutters' Ball", a song published over 50 years before The Band appropriated it. A jazz standard written by Shelton Brooks, it had been recorded many times, and by a wide variety of artsists including Fats Domino (his version seems to be the lyrics used by The Band), Fats Waller, Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin and the Beach Boys.

 The back cover continues the theme from the front; rustic, straightforward, not of its time. A reaction to the psychedelic and explicitly multicoloured music that preceded it; the quote from the early part of the century fits. No surprise that The Band's eponymous album was also dubbed the 'Brown Album'. The subjects and styles all looked backwards, but as Pitchfork put it, both The Band, and its predecessor Music From Big Pink, managed to "sound simultaneously experimental and traditional, irreverent and respectful...blues, folk, jazz, rock, funk, soul, r&b;, and country and western all synthesized into twin monuments to the American music they'd been playing for nearly a decade in clubs, roadhouses, and honkytonks."

A 1971 profile of the band in Melody Maker made a similar point: "Their second album was titled simply The Band, and was a masterpiece, shooting Robbie straight up into the forefront of contemporary composers. 'King Harvest' and 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' reflect sure grasp of the feeling and scope of pan-American music, and the voices of Helm, Danko, and Manuel sounded as old as the hills. The instrumentation was more idiosyncratic than ever; accordion, mandolin, wheezing saxes and grunting tuba made telling appearances."

It was recorded in the pool house of a rented house in the Hollywood Hills once owned by Sammy Davies Jr. The equipment for recording therefore had to be shipped in. As John Simon, who co-engineered the album, recalled in an interview with Sound-on-Sound, "When we finally got all the equipment from Capitol together, we decided to hear what it sounded like. This was in the middle of the night, so we put on the most recent record that we liked, which was a Dr. John album that had a song with snatches of 'My Country Tis Of Thee' and 'America The Beautiful' in the chorus. Our wives were with us, and suddenly one of them ran in, saying, 'The cops are here! The cops are here!' We immediately went outside to see what was going on and it turned out that we'd also hooked the sound up to the outdoor pool speakers, so this patriotic song was just blasting through the Hollywood canyons."

The overlapping voices and the fact the most of band members regularly swapped instruments, gives the album a great feel and despite some overdubs, the basic tracks were indeed laid down as an ensemble. The organic way the voices and instruments intertwine, it can't help but qualify as a great 'feel' album.

Photography was by Elliott Landy (see also Allman Brothers feature), with the design by Bob Cato. The New York Times described Cato, art director and the vice president of creative services for CBS-Columbia Records, as "a ground-breaking graphic designer who helped turn the record album cover into an important form of contemporary art". It goes on to note that he "created or supervised some of the most memorable record-album covers of the 1960's. It was his idea to put the work of the underground illustrator R. Crumb on Janis Joplin's Cheap Thrills.'' He also designed the cover for Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits.

Plant and See by Plant and See

"The songs and the artwork are both compelling and unusual" Brendan Greaves (Paradise of Bachelors)

This back cover is as much about the label as it is about the album. I only heard about Plant and See having bought Hiss Golden Messenger's Poor Moon, a limited-run vinyl release. Both were put out by Paradise of Bachelors. It's also our first featured gatefold, with the front and back covers being inextricably linked. As it happens, the music inside is excellent. As Alastair McKay wrote in his Uncut review (see extended version here): "The album suffered because it was impossible to pigeonhole, though that is its strength too. The sound is built on Lowery’s swampy guitar, but flits between the sultry rock stylings of “Put Out My Fire” (like a jittery Hendrix, channelling tribal rhythms) and the sweet soul of “Henrietta”, with Lowery’s pained vocal floating over lush harmonies."

Paradise of Bachelors describe themselves as being "dedicated to documenting, curating, and releasing under-recognized musics of the American vernacular, with an emphasis on the South, broadly defined. In all our projects, we endeavor to commit ourselves to in-depth, detailed contextual research and the presentation thereof, to careful and compelling curation, and to respectful and mutually beneficial collaborations with artists and other partners. This is a mission."

The Plant and See release typifies what thay are about, and the accompanying press release is worth a read:

"Paradise of Bachelors is honored to celebrate the life and music of influential songwriter, singer, and guitarist Willie French Lowery (1944-2012) with the first-ever reissue of the sole eponymous album by his interracial swamp-psych band Plant and See. Originally released in 1969 on L.A. label White Whale—home of Jim Ford, the Turtles, and the Rockets—Plant and See is the strange fruit of disparate people, places, and players in dialogue. Its humid, storm-cloud guitars, ductile vocal harmonies, and intuitive, loose-limbed drumming are redolent of a specifically Southern syncretic musical identity and sense of place, testifying to the outstanding, colorblind musicianship of Lowery, African American drummer Forris Fulford, Latino bassist Ron Seiger, and Scotch-Irish vocalist and songwriter Carol Fitzgerald.

American Indian frontman Willie Lowery grew up in swamp-laced, tri-racial Robeson County, North Carolina, the state’s geographically largest, economically poorest, and most ethnically diverse county. Shaped by his own Lumbee Indian heritage as well as the influence of local African American and European American musical traditions, Lowery’s style developed into a powerful, singularly soulful sound that appealed to contemporary psych-rock audiences while directly addressing the concerns of his own Indian community. Plant and See represents his first major recorded work, following stints playing for the “hootchie-cootchie women” of a traveling carnival and the lite-psych group Corporate Image, as well as serving as Clyde McPhatter’s bandleader.

Plant and See was a short-lived incarnation; White Whale, already on the brink of dissolution, lacked the resources to effectively promote the album, which contravened the standard race, place, and genre-based markets of the day. Shortly after its release, the band regrouped as Lumbee, named in honor of Lowery’s tribe, the most populous East of the Mississippi. Lumbee’s 1970 album Overdose is, like Plant and See, a rare and highly collectable psychedelic classic; it attracted the attention of the Allman Brothers, whom Lumbee joined on tour in the early `70s. However, the mercurial Lowery quickly changed course, exploring ways to use the country, blues, and gospel idioms of his youth to articulate the history, politics, and cultural identity of the Lumbee people."

In an interview with Indian Country Today Media Network, Brendan Greaves of the label added more colour:

"As a label, we’re interested in telling stories of under-recognized musicians, musical artifacts, and communities, so it was critical to have the perspective of family and the Lumbee community to inform and contextualize this reissue...Plant and See was largely unknown except to dedicated psych-rock record collectors, White Whale label fanatics, and Willie’s family and friends. The songs and the artwork are both compelling and unusual, and we were thrilled to have the opportunity to reintroduce and share this remarkable document...The vinyl format pays respect to the original release, sounds better, and showcases the artwork at a proper scale...In my mind, Plant and See and Lumbee weren’t so much seminal or influential — in the grand scheme of things, not many heard them then or now — as they were representative of the best ways Southern music can synthesize various musical traditions and cultural perspectives (American Indian, African American, European American, etc.) into something new and powerful, both strange and strangely familiar."