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:

King of the Delta Blues Singers by Robert Johnson

This album was released in 1961, a compilation of sixteen of Robert Johnson's recordings, thirteen previously unreleased. At the time, when there was a revival of interest in the genre, little detail was known about the lives of bluesmen who had recorded these songs in the 1930s. The back cover was still then a key source of what little information there was available on the featured recording artist. More academic biography and musical analysis than we are used to today. On this album the back cover spent a fair amount of its space just defining what constituted 'country blues'.

 

The notes on the back started:

"Robert Johnson is little, very little more than a name on aging index cards and a few dusty master records in the files of a phonograph company that no longer exists. A country blues singer from the Mississippi Delta that brought forth Son House, Charlie Patton, Bukka White, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson appeared and disappeared, in much the same fashion as a sheet of newspaper twisting and twirling down a dark and windy midnight street."

The album's Wikipedia entry notes the potential unreliability of the information: "At the time of its release very little scholarship had been done on Johnson's life, and the album liner notes contain some inaccuracies and false conclusions, and a speculative portrait of Johnson's personality. As the two surviving portraits of him were discovered a decade later, the cover painting depicts a faceless musician in field clothes."

It is easy see how intoxicating these albums must have been for new listeners, and how important the liner notes became, accurate or not.

Come 1971, a second compilation of recordings was released. With the unearthing of the first known photographs of Johnson still a year away, both back and front covers still had to resort to artistic interpretations. This time depicting the makeshift sessions in San Antonio, Texas in November 1936, recorded in the Gunter Hotel at 205 East Houston Street where the record company had rented Rooms 413 and 414. The former used as the control room while Johnson was playing in the latter.

The cover artwork was produced by Tom Wilson and, on the front, it depicts Johnson playing in Room 414. The back showed what is assumed to be Art Satherly (the record company's recording director) and Don Law (their A&R man) at their recording equipment in Room 413 and with a cable going under the door to Johnson's microphone. With effectively the whole of the 60s between volumes, the back cover had witnessed a material change. No lengthy essay (although still much was unknown about Johnson) and the introduction of some colour. What it did say was hard to argue with though:

"What you hold in your hands is a collection  of 16 songs by the greatest down-home blues singer of all time, Robert Johnson. This, the second volume of "King of the Delta Blues Singers," completes the release of Johnson's total recorded output.

Robert Johnson's influence on contemporary rock is just beginning to be felt. The Stones included one of the tunes from this collection (Love in Vain) on their "Let It Bleed" album....So if  you dig contemporary music, especially the blues, give a listen to Robert Johnson, the original master." (Jon Waxman)

Sources:  Gioia, Ted, 2008. Delta Blues. New York: W W Norton & Company Inc. Dixon, R M W and Godrich, J, 1970. Recording the Blues. London: Studio Vista Limited. http://www.tdblues.com/?p=526. The liner notes for Volume 1 reference The Country Blues by Sam Charters (Rhinehart 1959) and Blues Fell This Morning by Paul Oliver (Cassell, Ltd., 1960) as sources. With thanks to John Seaton.

New Morning by Bob Dylan

I stumbled across this in a secondhand record shop and was intrigued by the back cover. It showed a clearly much younger Dylan than the age of the album (released in 1970) standing next to someone he looked very proud to be photographed with. It was not a Dylan album that I was particularly familiar with, really only knowing "If Not For You" and "Time Passes Slowly", both of which feature on the excellent compilation Biograph, the former also covered by George Harrison on All Things Must Pass. 

It is easy to forget those we revere today also revered their predecessors. None more so than Bob Dylan, who had already been pictured on an earlier album, Bringing It All Back Home, brandishing, among other albums, a copy of Robert Johnson's King of the Delta Blues Singers. His adoration of Woody Guthrie, and his pilgramage to see him on his deathbed, is of course well documented.

Ed Ward's 1970 Rolling Stone review of New Morning sheds more light on the origin of the 1962 photo: 

"To begin with, there's the cover. Dylan, looking like he's been through some rocky times, but confident. And the back cover, with Young Zimmerman and Victoria Spivey, self-appointed "Queen of the Blues," standing by her piano. He's holding a guitar that Big Joe Williams had just given him, and she is beaming up at him, immensely pleased. The look on his face seems to say, "I thought I could do it, and I could. Shit, man, I'm Bob Dylan, that's who I am." And indeed, that's who he was. And is."

The man who took the photo of the young Bob Dylan with Victoria Spivey was Len Kunstadt, Victoria's husband and manager.

In a 2001 interview with Rolling Stone Dylan himself reinforces the point:

Rolling Stone: It seems that some of your most impassioned and affecting performances, from night to night, are your covers of traditional folk songs.

Dylan: Folk music is where it all starts and in many ways ends. If you don't have that foundation, or if you're not knowledgeable about it and you don't know how to control that, and you don't feel historically tied to it, then what you're doing is not going to be as strong as it could be. Of course, it helps to have been born in a certain era because it would've been closer to you, or it helps to be a part of the culture when it was happening. It's not the same thing, relating to something second- or third-hand off of a record.

I think one of the best records that I've ever been even a part of was the record I made with Big Joe Williams and Victoria Spivey. Now that's a record that I hear from time to time and I don't mind listening to it. It amazes me that I was there and had done that.

Poor Moon by Hiss Golden Messenger

I'm not sure where I first heard about Hiss Golden Messenger's Bad Debt, an EP of acoustic songs recorded at M C Taylor's kitchen table. For me, a captivating cross between Robert Johnson and Neil Young. It was either through The Guardian's New Band of the Day or perhaps via Uncut, who have been constant champions of their output.

That EP led me to their full-length, Poor Moon, on which a number of the tracks from Bad Debt were re-recorded with a full band. As well as the fantastic music, which lost none of its magic in a different setting, the grassroots ethos behind the production of the music itself is inspiring. To begin with Poor Moon was not released on CD and only via limited hand-numbered run of 500 lovingly-produced LPs (I got 165). Put out by Paradise of Bachelors with photography by Abigail Martin and drawings by Alex Jako, front and back covers are real works of devotion to the art of the record.

"The imagery was drawn by my friend Alex Jako, who lives in Todmorden, England. She did an incredible job, I think. It was all laid out by our friend Brendan Greaves. I wanted to evoke a feel similar to some of the Nonesuch Explorer LP covers." (M C Taylor, interview with Uprooted Music Review)

Apparently a new album is also in the works.