Long Time, No Seventies Pearls...but that's about to change...

Woof, time flies. I say that a lot around here, don't I? But yeah, it has been a while that we were back in this series' original roaming grounds and natural habitat, the 1970s. In order to confound expectations this time out, I'll start with some prog rock courtesy of Booth, Davis & Lowe. Usually I put the more proggy stuff towards the end, as sort of cosmic run-out grooves, but hey, gotta shake things up a bit from time to time, eh?! And this is definitely on the rockier side of the proggy side, ifyaknowwhaddamean. 

Sometimes a good cover version can reveal a song. I never much noticed Jackson Browne's “My Opening Farewell” on his debut album, and I can say I definitely prefer Michael Johnson's take on the song. Johnson's debut album, from which this is taken, sold pretty much nothing, but he became quite popular later in the 1970s, and then as a mainstream country star in the mid-80s. He is probaby also the biggest name around here. 

Portrait of the artist as a young man

I seemingly was in an upbeat  mood when assembling this, judging from Peter Goodale's groovy "Peter's Song", the b-side to his only single for the former memeber of Canadian psych band The Cycle. The Hoodoo Rythm Devils live up to their name with the ultra-heavy swamp groove of "Black Widow", while Heaven Worth "Ride The Tide" also lets the guitars loose. 

Another Canuck with another b-side to his only single is Bob Brunton with the mainstream pop-adjacent "Lies", complete with authentic vinyl crackle all over. Larry Groce's "Sad Bird" sounds appropriately sad, while my pedal steel gently weeps. And, in a totally different register, I also really like Eclipse's off-its-time disco arrangement of "Born To Be Wild". It's groooovy, baby!

Words fail me. Just...wow...

And didn't I mention that I usually put long, proggy stuff as an esoteric run-out groove. Oh boy, are you gonna be served here. German electronic ambient musician Michael Hoenig - later successful scoring movies  in Hollywood and video games - takes us on a trip for his "Departure From The Northern Wasteland". It's epic, it's cosmic, it's 18 minutes of spacey atmospheric music (slightly edited from the even longer original). What a way to take All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 22 home, if I might say so myself. 

So, get this, groove to this, tell me 'bout your favorites... 

Mr. Jones, care for another round in the old mixtape business?

And of course, Mr. David Jones is not the one to deny such an opportunity. And why would he? (Also, he's dead and I don't know him personally, but that's beside the point). So, part three of my "What I did during my summer vacation 2023" series, which was pretty much all Bowie all the time. The first two Bowie mixtapes you can find here and here, and - oh boy - is it really more than nine months since the last one? There's one more after today's edition, and the last part of my Bowie-related summer holiday mixing sessions was the never esisting sequel to art pop extravaganza 1. Outside, dashingly titled 2. Downtown. But yeah, enough with the chit chat, off to business. 

At the heart of Where Are We Now? was the idea to marry Buddha of Suburbia's outstanding (almost) instrumental "The Mysteries" to his vocals from late period masterpiece "Where Are We Now". From there I expanded to the usual 30 minutes, and as before I prioritized numbers from the Moonage Daydream movie as well as unusual versions of remixes to the original versions, so that even hardened Bowie fans would have things to discover or re-discover during this. So, "Shopping For Girls", one of the few successful Tim Machine numbers, is here in the attractive, acoustic, slide guitar-based arrangement Bowie used for his 50th birthday, "Panic In Detroit" is the remake he cut in 1979 and "Seven" is here in its demo version rather than the album or single cut.  

The original idea was to focus on his artier songs, but I quickly changed course, making place for fan faves like "Life On Mars?"and "Changes" and ravers "Holy Holy", fearing that otherwise the mix would become somewhat of a slog to get through. Now we not only have a solidly entertaining thirty minute trip through Bowie's career, but also something that has enough dynamism and variety to hold up to repeat listens. It also makes use of Bowie's own adventurism: Around the half-time mark we have a mash up that Bowie himself commissioned in the mid-2000s when these first became popular, "Rebel Never Gets Old". And finally, I decided to build the last third around Bowie's and Reeves Gabrels' pre-Tin Machine re-imagining of "Look Back In Anger", an impressive (if divisive among fans) track. And, ironically, Where Are We Now? has way more "Moonage Daydream" than Moonage Daydream! 

Listening back to this at least a year after last listening to it, I was pleasantly surprised. I think this runs really well and I hope you'll agree...

Ti Piacerebbe Ascoltare Qualcosa Di Spaventoso?

It's that time of the year again, folks! Yup, I'm still not a huge Halloween fan and won't dress up for these shenanigans, but give me a good excuse to post something horror-related and the One Buck Guy is in. Last year's collection of scary music (freshly re-upped recently)

Italian music to horror films is a little like the films itself: an aquired taste. The best of Italian genre cinema is among the greatest in at least two genres: the Western and the horror film. Sergio Leone alone is responsible for at least two of the greatest Westerns of all time. In horror, the Italian genre films benefitted from a certain gonzo freewheeling approach that emphasized atmosphere and set pieces over things such as plot, character motivations or coherence. This was even more pronounced in the very Italian subgenre of the giallo ('yellow', like the covers of the dime-store sensationalist crime novels they meant to imitate), which were technically thrillers and crime films, but often extremely horror-adjacent, with heavy body counts and elaborate kill scenes that precede the slasher film's emphasis on them. 

He doesn't need a mask to be scary...

Given their predilection for a certain type of illogical logic and 'whatever pleases' style excursions, it should come as no surprise that the music accompanying these films are also somewhat...ecclectic. Of course no Italian film music compilation would be complete without the late, great Ennio Morricone, il maestro, but we also have such unexpected artists as Bill Wyman and Keith Emerson, both supporting Dario Argento movies. The other big name for Italian horror films cores, especially if you are familiar with Dario Argento's movies, is Goblin. Goblin were little known early 70s prog rockers before Argento drafted them in to do the music for his last (at the time) Giallo, Profondo Rosso (Deep Red), and then his first supernatural horror film, the classic Suspiria. Afterwards, head Goblin Claudio Simonetti stayed on to score most of Dario Argento's movies in some capacity. 

One other thing that was distinctly Italian was re-scoring import movies for the domestic market. Aussie exploitation film Patrick got a new score courtesy of - you guessed it - Goblin, and so did George A Romero's modern classic Dawn Of The Dead, recut and shortened by none other than Dario Argento for the European market and retitled Zombie. Where Romero mainly used stock public domain library music for budget reasons, wilfully or accidentally emphasizing even more the film's ironic sheen, Goblin's new score - like Argento's cut - accentuated the film's action and suspense. 

"One way...or another...we're gonna find ya...we're gonna getcha getcha getcha..."

So, folks, time for an Italian vacation, a Roman holiday maybe, just for All Hallow's Eve. Enjoy some scary music à l'Italia...

Now even more Millenial Cosmic American Music courtesy of Neo Laurel Canyon Cowboys

My burgeoning interest in modern Americana while simultaneously building a big part of my classic record collection around the SoCal music scene (Jackson Browne, Eagles, et al) would obviously bring me to a place where the two would meet: in the music of Beachwood Sparks, musical friends and collaborators of One Buck Records house favorite Neal Casal and all around purveyors of that golden Cosmic American Music that marries earthly country rock to more heavenly designs. The mystery of Beachwood Sparks deepened with their frequent disappearing acts, with the band going on hiatus several times, sometimes for years on end, to focus on side projects and other endeavors. Which means that a band that started out in 1997 has a grand total of four studio albums to their name, plus a couple of EPs and odds'n'sods.  

Beachwood Sparks is the album that put them on the map in 2000, though most critics really and definitely jumped on the Beachwood Sparks train one year later for Once We Were Trees. Of course, that very train was about to go dead for a decade! Their self-titled debut gives a really good idea of the sunny, twangy, slightly fuzzy and more than a touch psychedelic sound the Sparks give to their take on country rock. Ultralovely stuff.  

1968 or 1999? You couldn't tell, right? 

Beachwood Sparks, at a little more than 40 minutes has the classic running time of a vinyl album from the era they emulate, So, was there really a need to turn it into a double album (in vinyl era terms)? Well, I let you decide. There was something about the sequencing of what would be the tail end of side one, right around "Singing Butterfly" and "Sister Rose", that didn't quite work for me, so I started to play around with resequencing the album, then said fuck it, why not go the whole hog in adding a couple of tracks and making the whole affair a double album. So that's what the One Buck Record of the day is. 

Three tracks from Beachwood Deluxe and two from The Sandbox Sessions thus complement the original album, coming from either the album sessions or roughly the same time frame. What's interesting is that the tracks in question make up only roughly a quarter of tracks, but add more than 50% of music to proceedings. Which is a rather unelegant way to say that the added tracks are longer than most of the tracks on the original album, with some of those being mere doodles. This is the sequencing that made sense to me, with the two Butterfly interludes opening and closing the second record. As it turns out, (imaginary) vinyl sides one and four are the most different, incorporating the extra tracks, whereas side two feels the most like the original, having original tracks six to ten run in exactly the same order! 

So, guys, what if we rename ourselves 'The Monkey Business'? Huh?! Huh?!

So, if you're new to Beachwood Sparks, you're in for a treat, and if you are a long-time Spark..uh...ler (?!), then this will maybe give you a good excuse to listen to this album again, with fresh ears and mind. Either which way, Beachwood Sparks is somewhat of a lost classic from the early 2000s, and deserves to be more widely heard. So, start here, then...

From The Record Shelf: The Alpha and Omega of Jay Farrar

The story of Son Volt is of course closely linked to the ignominious end of predecessor band Uncle Tupelo. After relations between Jay Farrar and "the bass player" as he only deigned to call Jeff Tweedy afterwards had reached a point of rien ne va plus, they broke up the band with Tweedy forming Wilco out of the remaining Tupelo members while Farrar hooked up again with original Uncle Tupelo drummer Mike Heidorn and brothers Dave and Jim Boquist, the latter contributing all kinds of instruments, from fiddle and dobro to pedal steel. Son Volt quickly recorded our One Buck Record of the day, Trace. Trace is a great album. It is a very Jay Farrar album. It is also pretty much the only album from Son Volt you'll ever need. 

Let me explain. Even a cursory listen to Trace will reveal how much they sound like Farrar's old band and how much Uncle Tupelo's music and mood were originally influenced by him. Which of course led to the fits of jealousy that broke up the band when Tweedy began to assert himself more. But Trace also reveals another truth about Farrar's songwriting, namely that Farrar wrote and rewrote the same songs over and over. Some of his best songs are on Trace, but that's why I call the album his alpha and omega in the title: you don't really need to listen to any Son Volt after this. Farrar has said everything he had to say here, in a way he rarely equaled and never bettered. 

"Well, are we having fun yet, guys?...huh?!...uh, guys?!?"

Take opener "Windfall" for example, a modern Americana classic if ever there was one. The storytelling in that long all night ride down the lonely midwest is fantastic, and the details are telling. "Switchin' it over to AM, searching for a truer sound..." intones Farrar's protagonsit, ending up with a country music station from somehere in Louisiana, "sounds like 1963, but for now, it sounds like heaven". Farrar's music, searching for a truer sound, always looking backward, also starts to sound like you are stuck on a retro radio station. This, of course, was the ultimate humiliation for Farrar, assuring an amount of grumpiness that makes Oscar the Grouch look cheerful by comparison: Wilco, after the admittedly unsure debut of A.M., began with Being Here not only to gain critical acclaim that soon surpassed Son Volt's, but also began to move into all kinds of interesting, enticing directions: art pop, electronics-tinged pop, krautrock. Whereas Son Volt didn't move, not really, proudly running to stand still, keeping Farrar's twin occupations of Neil Young& Crazy Horse-like guitar rockers and sad country weepers alive, but never moving out of these boundaries.

Farrar contunues plowing the same field. It's - as you will hear on Trace - a great field, but how many times can you rework the same soil before it gets barren? Still, Trace shows Farrar & Co. in exceptional form, alternating said guitar rockers and country weepers, and working both to (almost) perfection. "Windfall" is a sort of modern classic, but "Tear-Stained Eye" isn't much behind. "If learning is living, and the truth is a state of mind / You''ll find it's better at the end of the line". Farrar's protagonists here are on the run again, from something they can barely define to somewhere they can not possible get to. As he sings in "Windfall": " Never seem to get far enough / staying in between the lines / hold on to what you can / waiting for the end / not knowing when". Springsteen's protagonists also were always on the run out of small town America towards an unknown future, but they at least always had a glimmer of hope. Farrar's don't: "We're all living proof that nothing lasts",as he sings on "Route". 

Fittingly black and white, mostly black...

All of these reflections make it sound like Trace is a total downer of an album, but it isn't. It is, however, the best display of Farrar's pitch-black world view and the sharpness of his songwriting. That's why the most tender and hopeful moment on Trace doesn't come from Farrar's pen, but rather incredibly, from that of Ronnie Wood in closer "Mystifies Me". Mystifying indeed. So, here's one of the true classics of 90s Americana...and may the wind take your troubles away...

What'd you say? You want more Gene Clark covers? Oh boy, have we got you covered...

So folks, time for round two of We've Got You Covered, featuring the one and only Gene Clark. Or rather, a bunch of cool but (too) unknown folks covering songs of Mr. Harold Eugene Clark, pride of Tipton, Missouri. And since launching the series I'm happy to report that we will have definitely five volumes of this series. 

The other thing that is important for me in this series is variety of song choices. As we discussed with secret author Jonder when covering the other segment of We've Got You Covered, starring Lowell George and Little Feat that you could probably fill an entire album with covers of "Willin'", which thankfully his last cool Little Feat covers album over at Jokonky's wasn't. With Gene Clark, the song that is more often covered than any other is "Feel A Whole Lot Better". But Clark's song catalogue is so rich and my 'no doubles on an album' policy strict enough to limit each disc to a single "Feel A Whole Lot Better" - on this album provided by country-pop lady Juice Newton - and different songs all around, as well as no doubles in terms of artists per volume. We'll see whether that principle can hold until the end, but for right now variety of songs, styles and artists is assured. 

So, what goodies do we have today? 

There's the British music collective built around 4AD label head Ivo Watts-Russel who kept the relatively high-profile Gene Clark covers coming in the late 1980s and early 90s, here with their appropriately arty take on "Strength of Strings". There's contemporary artists and co-workers like Linda Ronstadt, Byron Berline and Iain Matthews, an artist who has been faithful to covering Clark, from 1974's Sometimes You Eat The Bear And Sometimes The Bear Eats You all the way to 2017's A Baker's Dozen, from which this version of "Silver Raven" is taken. There's younger admirers like Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, also rans from the 1990s 'cool cymru' run of successful bands from Wales or Wilco, of which three of the most prominent members (thus the band name Demi-Wilco) cover "Tried So Hard". 

But, as ever, I'm happy to have lesser known artists with some of the lesser-known Clark songs: Speed Hearse covering "Dark Of My Moon", Velvet Crush covering "Why Not Your Baby", Ross Thomas covering "In A Misty Morning" or King Penguin covering "Gypsy Rider", a song which has surprisingly often been covered by Clark admirers. Or, you know, almost completely unknown atist with known song, such as Jrsn2Music, a guy named John doing covers on YouTube, including this very lovely reading of "She Don't Care About Time" with dubbed over mandolin. And finally, there's family, with brother Rick paying tribute with a very fine version of "Del Gato", the song he co-wrote with his big brother.  

So, yeah, a wonderful mix - if I dare say so myself - of known and lesser known songs by known and lesser known artists.Which in many ways is a lot more like the artist being paid tribute to than an all-star, all-known 'hits' comp would have been. Enjoy. 

 

Digging Up Alt Country Gold: The Music Of Hazeldine

I mentioned in the write-ups to the All Pearls, No Swine from the Naughts that that was the time when I got pretty heavily into Americana. I was a student with a student job, and spent most of my money on seriously building a record collection. One act that I got into pretty early was Hazeldine. I had vaguely heard of them, remembering a short but enthustiastic write-up of their debut How Bees Fly. The album that brought me to Hazeldine wasn't How Bees Fly, however, it was Digging You Up, their sophomore effort that also was their major label debut. For all that was worth. The late 90s were the last great time of chnages and reconsolidation in the record label business, shortly before it would all start to come down with the invention of the MP3 technology and the rise of per-to-peer websites like Napster. But in the late 90s record labels were still riding high, buying up smaller labels or merging for more market power. Which finally meant a huge amount of trouble for Hazeldine. 

Their demo tape that became How Bees Fly hadn't stirred up much interest in the U.S., but German specialist mailorder record store turned specialist record label Glitterhouse were mightily interested in the three females and one male alt country band from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Instead of mere positive feedback to their demo tape, Glitterhouse proposed to issue it as their debut album As a matter of fact, before Breaking Bad I'd say Hazeldine was pretty much the only thing I'd associate with Albuquerque. 

Anyway, so Glitterhouse had issued How Bees Fly which had some reasonable success and critical raves in Europe, so finally a major label, Polydor, came knocking. Hazeldine re-recorded some of the most memorable songs from their debut album, together with a number of newly written numbers, for their much slicker major-label debut, helmed by Jim Scott, at the time producer of some of my favorite artists from that (or any) era: Whiskeytown, Matthew Sweet, Neal Casal, Todd Thibaud. Alas, it was almost all for nothing: Polydor in another tour of record label mergers got swallowed up by the Universal Music group and with it Digging You Up. The album never came out in the U.S. and had a very limited release in Europe. What was supposed to be their big break, almost broke the band. 

Soon, the four-piece band was an all-female trio. Multi-instrumentalist Jeffrey Richards (drums, but also guitar and banjo) had started to want to force his ideas a bit too much on his female colleagues, to which they had the natural reaction of firing his ass. Decades before 'mansplaining' became a buzzword, Richards got sent packing for it. As a sort of thank you and break-up gift to Glitterhouse, the label had gotten Orphans, a DIY compilation of cover songs, but finally the label that decided to take a chance on them welcomed them back  with open arms: Their third and, unfortunately, final studio album Double Back came out on Glitterhouse in 2001, exquisitely produced by the dB's Chris Stamey. Yet a couple of months later, the band was done. 

Hazeldine could've and should've been bigger than they were. Unknown by a wider audience in the U.S. while conquering heroes on the old continent, their story is a little reminiscent of Neal Casal, whose inability to break through in his home country often was a source of frustration and lack of understanding from his European fans. As a reminder of the fabulous alt country act that was Hazeldine, I have compiled this compilation of what I think are their best moments. The selections are nothing if not democratic: four songs apiece from How Bees Fly and Orphans (including covers of Gram & Emmylou, of course, but also The Mekons, Hank Cochran via X and Peter Gabriel), and five apiece from Digging You Up and Double Back. Of the four songs that were on both How Bees Fly and Digging You Up, I split the difference, choosing two apiece, prefering How Bees Fly's more fragile take on "Allergic To Love" and their punkier version of Grant Lee Buffalo cover "Fuzzy", whereas flagship song "Apothecary" and the sad country ode to "Daddy" are here in the fuller versions from Digging You Up. 

Let the fabulous harmonies of Shawn Barton and Tonya Lamm wash over you, and if you don't know them, let Diggin' It Up: The Music Of Hazeldine introduce you to a half-forgotten treasure from the boom time of the alt country movement...