Michael Johnson's First...And Finest...Feel The Breeze

You know what these All Pearls, No Swine albums are actually good for, besides providing you with a cool 70 minutes of quality music from decades past? Encountering artists you hadn't heard of before, as they did for me, obviously! So today's album is a follow-up to stumbling onto Michael Johnson's cover of Jackson Browne's "My Opening Farewell" on You Tube, then checking out more of Johnson from the same time period. As I opined in my write-up for All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 22, I think Johnson's confident take on the song is better than Browne's original, and it's one of the highlights of There Is A Breeze, our One Buck Record of the day. I hadn't heard of Michael Johnson before, though I'm sure some of y'all oldtimers remember him from an interesting, topsy-turvy career. 

Johnson's first brush with fame came in 1968 when he was drafted into The Mitchell Trio to replace last remaining original member Mike Kobluk, which led Chad Mitchell to disallow the use of his name, with the remaining trio thus becoming Denver, Boise & Johnson, releasing a lone single ("Take Me to Tomorrow") before splitting up. Johnson took some time to plan his next step, stepping away from trecording and touring to star in the off broadway musical Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well and Living In Paris (great title, by the way!).  He signed with Atco Records in 1971, but it took until 1973 for his debut album, the very One Buck Record of the day, to be released. It did only local business in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, so Johnson labored on until The Michael Johnson Album in 1978 with its Top 20 hit "Bluer Than Blue" broke him into the mainstream, albeit as a pure soft rock artist, and those late 70s tracks have a decidedly mainstream adult contemporary, soft rock sheen to them that are less attractive to me personally than these early singer-songwriter songs. At least Johnson played his hand right, veering into contemporary country in the mid-80s and becoming a bona fide country star with two number one hits, though like his colleagues he began to rely on outside songwriters rather than his own compositions. So, let's go back to the beginning instead...

There Is A Breeze is a bit of an odd duck of an album for reasons I will get into, but the highlights of the album are as high as any of his singer-songwriter colleagues of the time. So let's talk quickly about my three favorites from the album (besides "My Opening Farewell"). "Pilot Me" is an true opening statement, in more than one sense. It's open to interpretation, whether the entity the protagonist pleads to to pilot him through the obstacles in his path is a lover, or, you know, god, but it doesn't matter. It's a beautiful, impassioned plea for help and guidance that works both ways. But if I had to pick, I'd say the organ and flugelhorn arrangement points me toward the divine instead of the profane. Either way, it's a beautiful, stately song. 

"On The Road" is a lovely, bouncy memoir to younger, carefree times. "We didn't know who we were, we didn't know what we did, we were just on the road". It's essentially a children's song, as is the song that follows it on thjs version of There Is A Breeze, which means they hit something deeper. You might have just heard it, but you instantly feel like you've known this song for forever. The joyous chikldren's choir is a fantastic flourish. If you don't want to join in the chorus while, listening to this, I don't know what to tell ya. "Rooty Tooty Toot For The Moon", the next track, is rhythmically a lullaby for adults, somewhat like James Taylor's "Sweet Baby James". The chorus might be a big ol' pile of nonsense, but you'll not forget it and will catch yourself singing along to it right away: "Singin' rooty toot toot for the moon / it's the biggest star I've ever seen / It's a pearl of wisdom, a slice of green cheese / Burning just like kerosene, burning just like kerosene". Like "On The Road", you feel you've known this song forever, almost instantly. Total instant classic. 

For a debut album by the traditional acoustic singer-songwriter there is a nice amount of variety here: "In Your Eyes", definitely more wordly than "Pilot Me", is a nice little gallop that is led by country blues-y playing from fellow folkie Leo Kottke on bottleneck guitar, while "I Got You Covered", driven by bass and congas, is kind of jazzy. The title song uses cello and harp to, respectively, and alternatively foreboding and uplifting effect in what is ultimately as gloomy a relationship song, as, say, Browne's "Latye For The Sky"), while strings enhance the sad, elegiac "Old Folks", with its fatalistic reminder that "the old, old silver clock / that hangs on the wall / that waits for us all". There is of course a flipside to all these musical flourishes. With four different producers (including Peter Yarrown and Phil Ramone) laboring over the twelve songs , there is a bit of a 'everything but the kitchen sink' approach to proceedings, as if every producetr wanted to highlight a different side of Johnson. He himself felt that the debut album wasn't a true reflection of his music and opted for a more traditional acoustic guitar sound for the follow-up. 

But here's the thing: The 'more is more' approach that is applied here makes for listening that never gets into a 'nice, but sounds a little samey' quagmire that the guitar-based singer-songwriter album can sometimes fall into. Say what you will about There Is A Breeze, but it isn't boring. Especially in this slimmed down, all killer no filler version courtesy of good ol' OBG. Well, at least some of these experiments were too much or didn't work, which is why I reconfigured the album, with the old 'addition by substraction' logic. There were two okay-ish horn-driven numbers (a musical direction Johnson tellingly wouldn't follow up on), which I felt was one too many, so I only kept "See You Soon". 

But "Happier Days", the first jettisoned track wasn't an almost fatal mistake, like "Study In E Minor", a glacially paced dirge on acoustic guitar that is exactly what the title says. Except it doesn't go anywhere it hasn't been in the very first seconds, and takes a long time to get there. That track always stopped my enjoyment of There Is A Breeze dead in its tracks and made me hurry to the skip button, so skip it we will. Forever. Also tellingly, that this acoustic guitar tracks is the one produced by Johnson, so he might've felt that this was a true representation of him and his folksy roots. I'd also say if Johnson had delivered an album full of tracks in the "Study In E Minor" mold, I wouldn't be singing his praises here today. Lord knows (and my readership, too, if you've been here for a bit) that I love cohesive albums, but There Is A Breeze wouldn't be the sucess it is without some of the production flourishes. 

Sequencing, however, was another issue, with the album losing momentum a number of times, so I tried to maintain a number of songs in their original spots while improving the flow elsewhere. While shuffling the tracks around for this version of There Is A Breeze, I felt it was important to keep "Pilot Me" as the opener and the framing device of the original sequencing. Side one ended, as it does here, with "Rooty Toot Toot For The Moon", while side two was ended with a very different kind of lullaby: "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught", from the Rogers-Hammerstein musical South Pacific. Its uneasy, provocative take on racism and hatred passed on from generation to generation end There Is A Breeze on a slightly controversial note, allowing the album a moment of political comment. But it also reminds us of the rousing lullaby about that green cheese pearl of wisdom star, and how the lullabies we sing and the stories we tell our children will shape their, and our, lives. 

Michael Johnson got bigger, and the spotlight got brighter, but it is an open question whether he ever bettered There Is A Breeze. It is at least one of the too little known entries in the singer-songwriter canon, that deserves better than its almost total anonymity these days. Get in the breeze, open your ears and see if you'll agree...

Let's Talk About Dick...And By That I Mean Tracy Of Course.

Dick Tracy, the movie was a colossal miscalculation. When the public, spurned on by an unprecedented at the time marketing blitz, made Batman one of the top-grossing movies in 1989, the lesson was not to trot out 1930's era newspaper strip heores out of the moth balls and build wannabe blockbusters around them. The people who liked Batman wanted cool, moody comic book action, and instead in the following years got the pulp hero , newspaper-serial antics of Dick Tracy, The Phantom, The Rocketeer and The Shadow - none of 'em characters that would talk to a young or even semi-young person in 1990. If your target audience in 1990 were senior citizens, that strategy might make sense, but, uh, I'm not sure that was the idea, so most of these flopped pretty hard. Sure, Dick Tracy got the hype and made a ton of money (unlike those other three 'comic book movies'), but not like 'crazy money', and it didn't become a phenomenon like Batman a year before. 

Instead it will mainly be remembered as Warren Beatty's folly, a triumph of art direction, costumes and make up, but with an empty, hollow middle - one-dimensional characters in a one-dimensional, boring narrative. The crazy art direction and impressive costume and set design, as well as the elaborate latex make-up effects, and the idea to at least partly turn Dick Tracy into a musical - there are some bold and commendably crzy choices being made by director and star Warren Beatty - its was a bold swing, but a miss. Every time I watch the movie (which isn't often) I want to like it more than I do, and every time I lose interest once the unique setting and look has settled in. Dick Tracy is a bore. An expensive, elaborate, lovingly assembled bore, but a bore nonetheless. 

The maximalism and miscalculation on display in and with the film, also manifests in its peripherals. Like the music. Trying to be a carbon copy of the preceding year's blockbuster, the Dick Tracy filmmakers hired the very same composer to try and write a very familiar theme and score. There was an official soundtrack album, an exercise in overkill typical of early 90s CDs: a huge amount of bloat, notably by including a number of songs in several versions, despite none of those songs actually making it into the movie. And then of course, we needed a tie-in album from a big pop star, here obviously Beatty's paramour and film co-star Madonna.. If Prince gets to do an entire From And Inspired By' album for Batman, then goshdammit, Madonna will not settle for less. She won't get upstaged by that dwarf from Minnesota! 

And so we get the companion album I'm Breathless, which has a grand total of three songs that were featured in the movie and a nother batcch of 30's-era music pastiches (and, totally unrelated, top notch single "Vogue" attached at the end). So all in all you had to buy three Cds in 1990 for the full Monty Dick experience...and you'd still not get all the music played in the film. So, what about being more humble and condensing all this gigantism into one neat and tidy package, that could have come out in 1990 and might have beeen a better listen than the bloated, too-fat-too-float triple whammy that was proposed? Our One Buck Album will graciously try to fulfill that mission and bring you all you'll arguably need from the film in a tidy 42 minute (well, about 47 with the bonus tracks). 

That means some selections from Danny Elfman's score that is, well, an immediately identifiable Elfman score, whose "Main Title" tries hard to remind people of that other main title for that other comic book character, you know, the one who dresses up like a bat. You'd get the three Madonna songs from I'm Breathless, including "What Can You Lose", a duet with Mandy Patinkin. All of these mixed in with the songs from the soundtrack album that actually feature in the film, all of them more or less chronically arranged. That's what Dick Tracy - Motion Picture Soundtrack is. 

The musical director for the sound track was Andy Paley, once one half of teeniebopper-baiting power pop duo the Paley Brothers with, wait for it, his brother Jonathan. (who might show up on this blog, sooner or later). Afterwards he turned to producing, first turning heads with his work on Brian Wilson's self-titled debut solo album. Dick Tracy project was his biggest and most high-profile gig at the time. On top of producing and assembling the cast, Paley also wrote most of the songs in a faux-1930s style, though of course the big coup of the film's music department was getting Stephen Sondheim for the torch songs Madonna got to sing. Getting back to that cast for a second: There's some relative young guns here in k.d. lang and Erasure, but mostly Paley has assembled heroes and veterans like Brenda Lee, Jerry Lee Lewis and Al Jarreau. And it is fun hearing all of them croon their way through these faux-30s numbers. 

A word on the bonus tracks: These two are from the half dozen or so songs that weren't featured in the movie. LaVern Baker's "Slow Rollin' Mama" uses the old Blues trick of seemingly innocently talking about, in this case, rolling dough, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that she might not only talking about patisserie, if you know what I mean ("I need a big long rollin' pin, to get it ready and right, for my red hot oven"). Fabulously saucy stuff. Darlene Love's "Mr. Fix-It" is in the same pastiche mode as the ret of the tracks for the film, but is one of the best, so highly deserving of being included here, even if there's no trace of it in the film itself. 

And that is that. A single disc, 'has all you need' stop for a fun diversion, that in some ways is a better time than the movie itself. So check out Dick Tracy - Motion Picture Soundtrack (OBG edit) and see if you'll agree...

This is the first in a series of reworked soundtracks coming your way in the next months, often mixing songs and score for a more immersive film flashback experience...

Seventies? Check! All Pearls? Check! No Swine? Check!...Yup, we're good here...

All Pearls, No Swine strike again! As they should! With new projects always taking precedent, I've been neglecting the blog's once flagship series a little bit...but like Bob Dylan's Neverending tour, ANPS will continue, at their own pace. Vol. 29 brings us back to the Seventies, once more, with a roster chock full of artists making their ANPS debut, plus one or two old friends.And if you rightfully think that those last weeks, the One Buck Guy hasn't really indulged much in his beloved country rock, oooh boy, All Pearls, No Swine 29 is going to change that...

All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 29 has indeed a ton of my beloved country rock/Americana, in different flavors and varieties. First there's  J.J. Light and his short trip to "Gallup, New Mexico", which turs a little psychedelic towards the end. Then The Oxpetals come "Down From The Mountain" and bring some tasty harmonies and organ playing with them. Poker Flatts go to a "Lake Of Fire", Comox And Friends hang out with (or are?) "Beautiful Losers", whileJoyous Noise add more than a bit of r'n'b and soul, if not outright funk, to "Funky Lady". APNS alumni Mark Jones brings the harrowing "Lion Trap", a bleak look at people going nowhere in a dead end job in a dead end ton that's bleak as hell and precedes the No Depression sound by fifteen years. Country Ward, not in APNS action since Vol. 6, bring an old-chool country weeper with the sentimental "Just Another Country Dream" while Chicago-era band Aliotta Haynes - named after their members, the Aliotta brothers Mitch and Ted, and guitar player Skip Haynes -  crank up the harmony-singing to eleven for ultra-lovely "Brother Sparrow". After Ted quit the band right after their debut album, they would add John Jeremiah on keyboards and continue as Alliotta, Haynes & Jeremiah.

Seriously, could these dudes look any more like the 70s?

Aslan have more of a folk sound which they bring to "Sonshine", as do City Freez with the lovely "City Talkin'", while Les Dudek's grovy "Cruisin' Groove" reminds you quite a bit of Little Feat's funkier numbers. Though a big influence on little brother Sweet Baby James, Alex Taylor never really made it as a recording artist, and is arguably only on third place in the Taylor brother hierarchy, after James and Livingston. Still, he was from time to time cranking out good stuff, slightly more rough-hewn than the softer voices of his two brothers, though still plenty smooth. 

You wouldn't expect a band from Fresno to be called Folly's Pool, and you definitely wouldn't think that they would mix their harmony-laden California folk-rock with a more than heavy sprinkle of U.K.-styled prog rock. Yet that's what they did, creating their version of folk-prog, as on the song that gave the band its name (or vice versa?).

If you didn't know any better, you'd say this is a '90s alternative rock album...

The ladies bring a bit of a different flavor to things. Mary Asquith's take on "Cocaine" has shades of Janis Joplin, while being distinctively British, befitting of Manchester's 'queen of blues and folk', whereas Dory Previn's brutal tale of "Mary C. Broown and The Hollywood Sign" uses music hall for its impressively bleak tale of Hollywood horrors. And then Bill Madison rides out All Pearls, No Swine 29's grooves with a tour on the prairies for "Buffalo Skinners", closing the circle and ending up where we started, with a piece of psychedelic Americana.  

Even though All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 29 is admittedly quite heavy on country rock/Americana numbers, the variety on display here should please the discerning APNS afficionado. 

Slip Away On That Carefree Highway With Gordon Lightfoot

So, here comes part two of the huge Lightfoot retrospective I recently started. Disc Two of A Life In Song, this time covering most of Gordon's prime period, from 1971 to 1976. Same deal as the first disc: I'll run through the albums and from time to time explain why I picked the tracks I picked. Overall, Carefree Highway is probably the most consistently listenable of the three volumes, due to Gord widening his commercil and popular appeal and opening up his sound. Having three of his biggest smashes - "undown", "Carefree Highway" and "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald" on here - doesn't hurt either. So, let's check what's going on on this Carefree Highway, shall we? 

Don Quixote is the last album of Lightfoot as a tried-and-true folkie. Orchestrations or not, up until this album his songs were still esssentially acoustic folks songs. That would change withh the following album, when for the first time Lightfoot would employ a drummer, as well as upping the country instrumentation, notably making the pedal steel a fixed part of his instrumental repertoirse. Don Quixote is also one of Gord's best, a thoroughly enjoyable record without a weak track on it, which made picking songs for this comp difficult. The classic title song and his ode to the area of his childhood (and summer sailing trips) "Christian Island -Georgian Bay)" were obvious picks. I have always loved "Looking At The Rain", a classic Lightfoot ballad that was written around the time of the Sit Down Young Stranger/If You Could Read My Mind album a year before and sounds like it. Which leaves essentially one spot for another track. I'm sure many would vote for the jaunty "Alberta Bound" with Ry Cooder's mandolin playing, but my pick is "Brave Mountaineers", a song that summarizes what early Lightfoot was about. A lilting, memorable melody and chorus, uncluttered instrumentation, even some whistling during the outro - this song could have easily come from any of the albums preceding it, being a nice capper to that first phase of Lightfoot. 

Old Dan's Record is a conundrum in Lightfoot's discography, and especially in the context of the albums surrounding it. It is the great lost Lightfoot classic, an album long out of print and essentially forgotten. I knew it existed, thanks to the inclusion of the title track on Gord's Gold, but could never find it, so when Rhino issued it on CD for the first time in the early 2000's I had to get it just out of pure curiosity. And you know what? It's totally unfairly buried deep in his discography, as it's one of his best. It's also, as hinted above, a precursor of things to come, notably a more modern, radio-friednly sound. But what's relly striking about Old Dan's Records is the country influence. It's essentially Gord's country record, as you can easily see in the four picks of the album. I'd have more to say about it, but strongly consider posting the whole thing on here some day, so I'll just leave it at that, merely pointing out that "It's Worth Believin'" is one of my favorite Lightfoot songs and that "You Are What I Am" is a weirdly neglected charting single, never making any Greatest Hits package. 

And then of course Lightfoot hit it big with Sundown, the song and the album. "Sundown" the song is of course an improbable number one hit song - it has an amiable acoustic shuffle and a singalong chorus, which no doubt helped propel it to the top spot, but it's a very weird singalong - the lyrics are surprisingly dark, even menacing ("you better take care if I find you been creepin' 'round my back stairs"), ostensibly about Lightfoot's jealousy while in a relationship with groupie Cathy Smith - and the sweaty, nervy atmosphere Lightfoot evokes is almost unpleasant, yet couched in Gord's friendly, folk-pop sound it sounds like an upbeat song of some sort if you're not taking care what you are singing or humming along to. "Carefree Highway", the follow-up single, also became a top ten hit. Lightfoot's seafaring classic "High & Dry" has to be here, and the last selection from the album, "The Watchman's Gone" , is an underrated classic from the period and captures the wanderlust theme that underlies about half of the album. It has one of Lightfoot's most memorable melodies, yet has never been put on a compilation of any kind. Weirdly, Lightfoot only put a scant three selections from Sundown on his Songbook box set, essentially relegating his biggest seller to the status of a minor album. 

Lightfoot had all the career momentum in the world, so it was too bad that he couldn't really back it up with another quality batch of songs, as I would say that 1975's Cold On The Shoulder is one of his weaker efforts. Sounding fine while it plays, it simply isn't very memorable. "Rainy Day People" became an adult contemporary number one hit, based on Lightfoot's charts momentum, and I like the melody of "All The Lovely Ladies", even if the arrangement drifts a little too much into adult contemporary. The secret classic, or at least my secret classic, of the album is "The Soul Is The Rock", a more ambitious and epic song than most of its brethren. It is certainly odd, both in its possibly religious undertones ("live like a sheep, die like a lamb") and the weird allegories it uses. Slightly repetitive it might be, but it's hard to get the song's melody out of your head. 

After a decade of recording, Lightfoot compiled his first 'official' hits package, the double LP Gord's Gold, as United Artists had continued to throw 'Best Of's' of his five album-tenure there on the market, as soon as "If You Could Read My Mind" made him a star, and Warner/Reprise decided it was time to counter that. Rather than licensing songs from United Artists, Lightfoot took the package as a way to reinterpret and re-imagine his early recordings in his then recent folk-pop style, giving these songs fuller arrangements that the earlier, folkier work didn't have: drums, steel guitar, orchestration. Some purists might hate these remakes, but since this is essentially (at least for me) Lightfoot's signature sound, I love them and prefer a number of them to the originals. And that is why you get "For Lovin' Me" in the 1975 version, as well as the medley of "I'm Not Sayin'/Ribbon Of Darkness". And despite the song being featured on Vol. 1, you'll also get the 1975 remake of "Canadian Railroad Trilogy". It's an interesting case study in 'same but different'. Arrangement and lyrics are the same, but the song's slightly slower tempo, the addition of whining steel guitar and Lightfoot's by this time weathered voice give an entirely different feel to the song. While the original with its enthusiastic acoustic strumming and Lightfoot's youthful voice seemed to emphasize the pioneering spirit and wonder of achievement present in the song, the version from eight years later seems to emphasize the losses and loneliness of the endeavor, sommething the ever-touring, slididng into middle-age Lightfoot would know a thing or two about.  

While Cold On The Shoulder had been only so-so, Lightfoot struck back a year later with his last classic album, and one of his all-time best, Summertime Dream. Not only did it have his last big chart hit, and best story-telling song, "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald"  (already discussed at great lengths here). But a set of well-written songs and committed performances, for his most consistent album since, arguably, Don Quixote. There are, in fact, so many quality songs here - and I still had to drop antiwar song "Protocol" - that the Summertime Dream songs will spill over onto Vol. 3, but you get a trio of great songs: opener "Race Among The Ruins", a wonderful, weirdly underrated song, the album's sprightly title track, and of course "Edmund Fitzgerald" as the moody album closer. 

A Life In Song Vol. 2 - Carefree Highway covers Lightfoot's commercial zenith as a folk-pop crossover star, and it has a ton of classics that yiou should either add to your collection, or relisten to again. Whether you are a Lightfoot neophyte or afficionado, getting on that carefree highway to listen to some of the most beautiful music of the 1970s should in either case be your next destination...

 

 

Bruce And The Promise Of The Forgotten Albums

It's not easy being a music fan invested in the Bruce Springsteen's music. Not because there are weird detours like his sould excursion Only The Strong Survive but because he is now entering a phase of his career where curating his work becomes more pressing for him, which means that there is more and more of all the famously discarded material now officially available, as made evident by The Promise chronciling all the songs recorded in the run-up to Darkness On The Edge Of Town or The Ties That Bind - The River Collection. Added to that there are the demos and other scraps that stay unoffcially unreleased and there is just so much music to go through. Famously prolific, it is said that for every album Springsteen does bring out, there is at least another (or an entirely different version of it) that stays in the vaults, and that is true. Sometimes, there is more than one. Sometimes there is more than two. Springsteen's vault of unreleased material literally has hundreds of unreleased songs in various states of composition and mastering.

Like every Springsteen fan, I'm dabbling in arranging and re-arranging this material, and the release of lat week's Tracks II boxset, including seven albums of material, is a good an excuse as any to get back into the alt Bruce business. Actually, the last dib into OBG versions of Bruce stuff, Don't Back Down, was due to the box set coming out, as I wanted to get my version out before the official one did last week. With that out of the way, we can now go back and settle into a more chronological approach, which means back to the mid-70s we go... 

The Promise, the album that is the One Buck Record of the day, largely but not exclusively draws from the compilation of the same name that covers songs Bruce recorded beteen 1976 and 1978 to create a companion piece to Darkness On The Edge Of Town. The idea was to make it a brighter, more optimistic companion, while not necessarily abandoning entirely Bruce's preoccupations and themes on Darkness. This isn't an all-out party or 'let's celebrate we're young' record, which are albums you possibly could have made out of the The Promise box set. No, this is an album that looks for balance, for some light in between the moments of doubt and darkness that you can still see and feel in the distance. I didn't want to go overbaord and create an anti-Darkness, but rather an album that feels like it could stand alongside that work while also being able to stand on its own as an album. 

So you get the optimistic opening punch of "Rendezvous" that clearly recalls Born To Run musically and lyrically ("we'll be riders,through all of the night") and was first issued by Greg Kihn in the late 70s, but also mood pieces like "The Preacher's Daughter", a Darkness outtake that is the only officially unrelesed song on here and on eof my faves of Bruce's stash of still unreleased songs. And there's the title cut, which lyrically would have fit like a glove on Darkness. Still, I realized that even though I didn't want to do another Darkness, I was inevitably drawn to the moodier, more serious songs rathar than Bruce's tribute-pastiches to Buddy Holly, The Animals or 60s girl groups, so The Promise did end up being a bunch of slower, moodier tunes anway, so I drafted in his version of "Because The Night" to make it a little more lively. 

I probably did it unconsciously, but the album seems itself to do the bridge between Born To Run and Darkness, having the numbers that sound most like Born To Run ("Rendezvoous", "Iceman","City Of Night on the first side, whilde side two gets moodier and more downbeat, even as Bruc's protagonist's try to hold on to notions of romance and optimism in "Hearts Of Stone" or "The Way". But even the song's protagonist's urging "Come On (Let's Go Tonight)" - the early version of Darkness' "Factory" -  has something desperate to it. They want to shed their troubles downton, but Elvis is dead, and there is nothing to do about 'em anyway. Fittingly for an album that starts with the promise of a "Rendezvous" and the ringing sounds of Born To Run, the album ends in a darkness on the edge of town, just down Thunder Road. During the long coda of "The Promise", Bruce's protagonists find themselves on Thunder Road once more, but the road, and its promises have irrevocably changed. Where in the original song, Thunder Road was the promise of an unknown, but surely better, future, this Thunder Road is a road to nowhere, a dead end street. 

The idea of my version of The Promise as to spotlight a number of absolute top notch Springsteen songs, that - scattered as they are on Tracks, The Promise and the vaults, don't necessarily get their due. Here, they make sense together, they give sense to each other, and they are appreciable as another, slightly sunnier path through the dark roads the boss was cruising and choosing in 1978. If the promise of The Promise is, to have a real album made of these things that the Boss couldn't or wouldn't quite fit together, then I not quite humbly say, promise fulfilled. What say you? 

Count 'em. It's one...two...three...four..Roscoes!

Generally speaking, I'm not a huge fan of remixes. Often, they don't add much to the original. Or, conversely, they change so much, that the original is hardly recognizable anymore. However, sometimes, a remix can reveal a cool side of a song that you didn't see before. Such is the case with today's very short One Buck Record (more of a One Buck EP, actually). I stumbled upon these a little like I stumbled upon Midlake itself and their fantastic The Trials Of Van Occupanther., recently resequenced for a better listening experience.  As said on the write-up to taht post, the album was almost a total blind buy, other than a little blurb from a music store employee I believe, and possibly a song I heard on one of those music samplers that were popular with music magazines, in this case Rolling Stone. 

The song that might have been on that sampler, and the one that opens Trials and puts people under the spell of Midlake's strange alchemy? That would be "Roscoe", the song that gets put through the (remix) wrnger on this little offering. The song is perfect, in that it already brings everything the album will do to the table.It's also a weird little tune, as most on Trials are: "if I could change my name to something a little more productive like Roscoe". Say what? 

I don't feel like dancin', no, sir, no dancin' today...

The surprising thing about this song is how elastic it is. Before stumbling upon these remixes, I hadn't necessarily thought of "Roscoe" as a song you can dance to, yet these three variations bring out that part of the song, to various degrees. The 'Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve Mix' that opens this EP emphasizes the song's dreamy side, while also retaining a dance-able rhythm. The 'Justin Robertson Remix goes full dance beat with 80s keyboard motifs, that the band probably would approve of, added to the mix. The 'Fading Soul Remix', while also maintaining a dance-able rhythm seems to put an emphasis on the melancholy side of the song. And to remind you how good the original is, I added a live version of the song to the end, if you want a purer "Roscoe" than the very dancehall-ready other three. 

But why would you? These are just way cooler than they have any right to be, which is why I wanted to share them with you. So, get ready to get to know Roscoe 1, Roscoe 2, Roscoe 3 and Roscoe 4. Groovy, baby!

All Pearls, No Swine Megapack Part Two

Yeah, yeah, more rummagging, with the first 90's-bound APNS racking up over 60 views AND NO DAMN REQUEST FOR A LINK. It's really easy, folks. Unless, you know, you'd just like to read stuff, which is fine also. 

So, as I've seen some other APNS-related activity for Volume 14 and 20, here's the same deal as last time. You get the megapack with volumes 11-20, I don't have to wander into half a dozen threads to upload. EVEN IF NO ONE ASKS FOR A DAMN LINK!

And then, as a way of saying 'hi' or 'thanks', you can leave a comment on whether you actually like the music you find herewithin...

Deal?

Deal!