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... 

Martin Briley makes all the right moves...or does he?!

Blame it on the Hoff. Yes, thanks for asking, I do have a David Hasselhoff album in my collection. Don't ask me why. Country of birth. Nostalgia. Or maybe because it was a buck (my name obliges...). While Hasselhoff's Night Rocker album is generally...not great (though not as awful as when he would hook up with German schlager-shlock merchant Jack White (né Horst Nußbaum), there is one track that amounts by default, but not only, to the standout track, a cool little rock number named "All The Right Moves". Until last spring I never particularly wondered why, until I did. So I researched where "All The Right Moves" came from and found one of the great shadow men of pop - Mr. Martin Briley. 

Before my little research missio,, I never had heard of or heard anything by Martin Briley. Maybe you haven’t either, at least not consciously. When he published his first three records, including fluke hit “The Salt Of My Tears” in the early-to-mid 1980s I wasn’t part of the record-buying or even record-listening part of the population yet, and then the man and his beret disappeared for more than two decades from the eye of the public, starting a modest ‘comeback’ by finally publishing another record in 2006. When I call him one of the shadow men of pop, that’s because he was for long stretches of his career, first as a performer, then as a songwriter. A behind the scenes presence on more records than you’d know or care to listen to, with credits that go in the hundreds. 

That one moment in the spotlight when “Salt” climbed into the top 40 and then got him tagged as a one-hit wonder (technically correct, unfair as it is) came after heaving away in the music industry for more than 15 years, and after that brief moment of (semi) stardom, he returned to the grind for a prolific if completely behind-the-scenes career as a songwriter/songdoctor and composer for film and television.

Never without my beret...

Briley started out with one of the many UK psych bands that crowded the market place in the wake of the summer of love, Mandrake Paddle Steamer, later shortened to just Mandrake. Mandrake Paddle Steamer only ever got to issue one single, a recorded album stayed unreleased at the time and was only issued in 2018. To my unwashed ears it sounds like pretty standard stuff for the time, style and the era, but I’m not at all an expert on that particular genre. Just Mandrake also went nowhere after a sole single was released exclusively in Sweden, so clearly world domination was out of the picture at this point. So Mandrake was kaput, though Briley continued to work with the band’s Brian Engel in a number of projects. One of these was an orchestral pop album for George Martin’s AIR label, that also got shelved and was finally released in 2007. 

With Engel he worked as The Liverpool Echo and contributed to a number of other short-lived projects like Prowler and Starbuck, while also going into studio work as arranger, vocalist and guitar player for hire, collaborating with hit writer tandem Howard and Blakley, and also joined the BBC orchestra for an extended stay. He joined prog band Greenslade in 1974 for a short interlude, cut an instrumental slightly proggish album for Island then the Ian Hunter Band for a couple of years in the late 70s. Afterwards he was doing studio work with a ton of artists of all ilk, from Engelbert Humperdinck to Mick Jones.

The hunter on a spear

Looking at his clientele list you realize that Briley had no qualms about working with uncool and hopelessly MOR artists, including Cliff Richards, Olivia Newton-John and Tom Jones (though sadly, never with the Hoff). This would become a topic for his later career from the mid-80s onwards as songwriter/songdoctor for everybody, from dozens of teenage bands/acts to Christian pop artist Rebecca St. James to the inevitable Celine Dion, not to mention out of left-field choices like Rosie O’Donnell or Nana Mouskouri and even Bill Wyman’s child bride Mandy Smith. He dryly notes on his website that he hasn’t heard most of the fruits of his labor for the teen acts and other “gun for hire” work. He also became a bit of a Jim Steinman mainstay, working with and for Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler. That’s Briley playing the guitar on “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (though usually Rick Derringer gets credited for it!).

But right there in the middle, just before attacking hundreds of songs, co-writes and commissions for music for TV and films, are his glory years, three albums from which I pulled the accompanying compilation. As a general rule, I prefer a “all killer, no filler” approach, so instead of wading through three albums with a rising amount of filler-ish tracks, here’s what I think are the best tracks from his run on Mercury records. I have a clear preference for his debut album, Fear Of the Unknown, which sounds still amazingly fresh forty years later. It has a pretty obvious New Wave influence, with a faint hint of the Cars sound, but Briley makes it work fabulously without ever seeming to imitate someone else. 

The kind of cool-ass painted cover art you don't see anymore...

His singing voice isn’t particularly distinctive, sometimes reminding you a bit of Peter Gabriel (he’s a dead ringer on “Heart of Life”) and to me personally of Men At Work’s Colin Hay. What is clearly distinctive, though, is his songwriting with a decidedly unique point of view on such tracks as “I Feel Like A Milkshake” or “School for Dogs” with its delightful double entendre use of the expression “man’s best friend”. Even on some of the later, more conventional tracks his pop smarts and craftsmanship are undeniable and no doubt contributed to the subsequent demand for him as songwriter for hire.

This is glorious pop, intelligent and quirky, but not with such an amount of mannered quirk that it threatens to derail songs, like, say, some of what Lindsay Buckingham was doing at the same time. Like Buckingham, Briley is also somewhat inspired by 60s pop, as on “It Shouldn’t Heard that Much” with its doo-wop style backing vocals and even throws in a tribute to his prog days on “Fear Of The Unknown”, again complete with Peter Gabriel-styled vocals. The production gets slicker throughout the album trilogy, while the songs overall probably get weaker. Some of the demos he cut during that time recall the freshness of the debut with their slightly more rudimentary, but also more immediate sound. As such, the accompanying comp breaks down as having eight tracks from the debut, four each from the follow-ups and four demos (including my beloved "All The Right Moves"!) from the time frame. So, without further ado, let the shadow man step out of the shadows for a moment...

(Old) Feat (Mostly) Don't Fail Me...Now

Quickly, what smells like old feet? Or old Feat? This certainly does! And yet, to my surprise, I have some smelly old Feat on this here blog...and I'm getting used to the smell of them. Little Feat, for me, were always Lowell George's band, and they should have died with him. For the longest time I considered the Little Feat that reformed in 1987 with ex-Pure Prairie League leader and singer-songwriter Craig Fuller as George's replacement as a bunch of impostors, usurpers of a band name that didn't belong to them. Nevermind that the band minus George was fully present or that Payne was probably as much a founding father of the group. I, of course, met the 'new' Little Feat under the worst circumstances: On the otherwise fabulous sampler As Time Goes By: The Best Of Little Feat, a compilation that was exclusive to Europe and for years the only good and comprehensive single disc comp on the market, some of these Fuller-era tracks were dropped in the midst of the classic George-era tracks and could only suffer, badly, in comparison. Little Feat without George were no Little Feat at all, to younger OBG. 

But things change, times change, and people, too, even lil' ol' me. After hanging out at, ah, whatchamacallit?!? - it seems the mere mentioning of Little Feat can sometimes cause serious memory loss - I started to reconsider. Farq and Babs championed latter-day Feat, and while I still think they should have gone out there as The Rock'n'Roll Doctors or something, I decided to relisten and give these Fuller and even Shaun Murphy years a fair shake. Now, this is still no patch on classic George-era Feat, but taken on its own terms, this stuff really isn't half-bad. Way to sell you guys on the accompanying comp, huh?! 

Latter-day Feat are still a groove-based band, but the grooves are quite different. This is clearly a veteran band whose bread is buttered by going on the road and doing a bunch of groovy, but not exaggeratedly so, tunes night in and night out. On record, this translates into a band that still has faint echoes of the old Feat, but is also often grooving dangerously close to AOR/MOR territory. But, if you cherry pick from the Fuller- and Murphy-era albums - and as usual here at One Buck Records cherries were picked.

As you will see from the set list, I greatly prefer the Fuller era to the Murphy one, with the Fuller era getting twelve tracks to Murphy-era five. I don't hate Shaun Murphy, and I think a track like "Drivin' Blind" is a fine addition to the Feat canon either way, but the songwriting did take a bit of a dip towards the end of the 90s. Fuller could still conjure some of the old Pure Prairie League magic on tracks like "Cajun Girl" or "Voices On The Wind", and does a more than credible Billy Gibbons impression on the clearly ZZ Top-inspired "Texas Twister". Bill Payne's voice is well-fitting for songs like the unexpectedy attractive "Eden's Wall", a surprise for me personally was how much he sounds like Marc Cohn on some of these cuts. 

When I talked up there about how latter-day Feat as a road/jam band transkated to record, I forgot one side effect of this: Most of their tracks run long, and quite a bit longer than they need to. Most have long run-out grooves that are mainly repetitive and don't go anywhere specifically, so I edited a number of tracks here. Just a fair warning, in case you're a latter-day Little Feat purist, which sounds weird to think about, but whaddayaknow. The whole point here was, as usual, listenability and flow above everything else, and I think these 17 tracks achieve that and make a good point for latter day Feat as being pretty damn good. Not Lowell George-good good, but pretty damn good nonetheless. 

Gimme some power...gimme some pop...gimme some power pop!

 

A discussion over at Jokonky's Bar Blog concerning albums you're still looking for reminded me to post this. I stumbled upon Jonathan Kupersmith, almost entirely unknown master of power pop , while fishing for pearls, being successful in unearthing two which (among many others) one of which you can find here. So I got interested in what else Mr. Kupersmith was up to (his entry at Discogs is otherwise empty) and found this. It seems to be a non-label self-published album that I would presume Mr. Kupersmith would sell at gigs and such. Still, Your Dog Ate My Homework wan't quite what I wanted it to be. Shedding two slightly boring-ish ballads and reworking the sequencing et voilà - a very fine album of power pop that can slide in just fine with more known alumni like Dwight Tilley, Big Star, Shoes or The Posies. 

Songs like the recently pearled "Christopher Robin", "My Maid Maryian" and "Broken Arms" are just powerpop manna from heaven. Slightly twee, maybe, but lovely all the way 'round. And in this slimmed down version you'll get an 'all killer no filler' album, thirty minutes of fine power pop confections!  

The artist in his younger years

So, friends and neighbours, you have half an hour to spare? Invest it into Mr. Kupersmith's slice of power pop heaven...

He was free again! Alex Chilton's lost first album

Free Again: Not just a song title, but a declaration of purpose: Alex Chilton was finally out of the Box Tops, where the producers and managers controlled everything, from tour and TV dates, to song choices and even his singing style. When Chilton deviated from the raspy growl that had made him and his bandmates famous via "The Letter", he was immediately reprimanded. His own fledgling songwriting career was stifled, with no place on the Box Tops' records for his own contributions, at a time when even in the pre-fab Monkees Michael Nesmith & Co. were able to get some of their shit in. To appease him, some of his first songs appeared on b-sides from the Box Tops, but within the confines of the band, both he and his band mates felt increasingly boxed in. Kinda like the Boxed-In Tops, AmIrite?

So, when he went into recording studio, anything went, from recutting former Box Tops b-sides (his countryfied take on "The Happy Song" is a total highlight here) to goofing around in the studio with piss-take versions of  "Jumpin' Jack Flash" (which I didn't keep here) or "Sugar Sugar" (which I did). The results were as idiosyncratic and messy as Chilton's subsequent career would often get, but also with some great highlights mixed in. But I felt like neither 1970 nor Free Again: The 1970 Sessions, the two incarnations in which these sessions were issued, were the best ways to listen to this material. I did feel that there was a good album in there somewhere, once the chaff, the doubles and the jokes are filtered out. 

So that's what I did, leaving only the best of these sessions. The title song is the slightly punchier original mono version. "All I Want Is Money" - like "Free Again" a song title and a statement of purpose - was a fine, rumbling song, but it rumbled/ramble on too long, so I edited that down quite a bit. Speaking of editing: A bunch of tracks from the sessions were little more than larks to essentially entertain themselves. In a number of them, they essentially turn into Vanilla Fudge, going for a really heavy sound for the hell of it. "It was sort of a humorous thing", said Chilton, "like Iron Butterfly doing 'Sugar Sugar'". That latter track is present here, as a medley with a snatch of Chilton's original "I Can Dig It" which has the same heavy, sludgy atmosphere and shortened a bit because well, the joke's funny, but it isn't that funny. The other goof I decided to keep is "I Wish I Could Meet Elvis", a decidedly vaudevillian performance by Mr. Chilton. 

He was free again, to do what he wanted...and so there is place for a bit of everything on my version of Free Again: Rock'n'roll, country rock, sensitive singer-songwriter songs. Something for everyone, so be everyone and check out what freedom meant to Alex Chilton back in the day...

C U 4 Y2K Pearls

All Pearls No Swine from the Aughts (horrible word, but we got nothing better, right...the naughts?), part two. As with the first volume of that decade, you'll find the patented mix of Americana, sophisticated pop and some rock'n'roll. I didn't want to have too much overlap with the first Millenial Pearls, so only OBG faves Midlake make a repeat appearance here. 

The Von Bondies were probably more famous for the fist fight their frontman got into with The White Stripes' Jack White and his ensuing bloody nose, but compilation opener "C'Mon C'Mon" is a nice driving number to kick off APNS 21. They were supposed to be one of the many 'next big thing's during the wave of 'The' bands in the wake of The Strokes, but finally were never more than also-rans. Osaka Popstar bring a pedal-to-the-medal rendition of "Man Of Constant Sorrow" that has nothing in common with the famous O Brother Where Art Thou rendition from Union Stations's Dan Tyminski. Magnolia Electric Co. , the guitar-based outlet for songwriter extraordinaire Jason Molina, a.k.a. Songs: Ohia, bring the fabulous "The Dark Don't Hide It", slightly reminiscent of Neil Young & Crazy Horse. 

Speaking of people with different-sounding outlets: Will Johnson fronts two bands, Centro-Matic and South San Gabriel. Technically, they are the same band, with the latter inviting guests. But unlike, say, the aforementioned Mr. Young who varies between styles from record to record (or even from song to song), Johnson compartmetalizes. Centro-Matic play the electric guitar and feedback-drowned alternative rock, whereas South San Gabriel is for more mellow, introspective and slightly country-influenced music. It goes without saying that while both make worthwhile music, I prefer South San Gabriel. "I Am Six Pound Of Dynamite" is from a concept album called The Carlton Chronicles: Not Until The Operation's Through, which is about the adventures of a dying cat. Sadly, we never got more Carlton Chronicles after that. 

There's a bunch of old heroes here, too: Alejandro Escovedo with the magnificent story-song "Ballad Of The Sun And The Moon" and Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros with the lilting, singalong "Mega Bottle Ride". Jay Farrar goes to "Barstow" without leaving his usual gruff-voiced Americana grounds. Dwight Twilley's "Chance Of A Lifetime" was my first exposure to that fabulous songwriter. Poco's Paul Cotton brings the sun with the warm "The Sunset Kiid", while Delbert McClinton offers us a bit of sophisticated Western swing with "When Rita Leaves". 

Willard Grant Conspiracy and Clem Snide were two Americana bands I was quite into at the time. The best of the former, an alt-country collective from Boston built around the ssinging and songwriting of Robert Fisher, still is great, despite a somewhat samey sound. And while the sarcastic, deadpan style of Eef Barzelay and his merry men in the latter can become grating over long stretches, they had some very fine songs. 

Portugal. The Man was another 'next big thing' for a hot minute, with them sounding a little like other next big thing Dawes. The World Music-inspired Beirut, essentially a one-man band project from Yankee Zach Condon was a critical favorite at the time, which I can only listen to in small doses, before it gets grating. For some variety with a quick apparition on a compilation like this it's perfect, though. And finally, France's Phoenix were touted as a 'next big thing' until they blew up with Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix in 2009 and actually became stars, including in the US. But "Everything Is Everything" from 2004 could have already been their breakthrough single. 

So, these are some of the fabilous artists on this all Y2K edition of All Pearls, No Swine. As ever, enjoy...

This Just In: Brownsville Boy Beats The Devil...

Outstanding songwriter. Charismatic actor. One-of-a-kind singer of his songs. Activist and defender of those that couldn't defend themselves. 

Where others buckled or crouched, he always stood tall. Really fuckin' tall. They truly don't make 'em like that anymore. 

R.I.P. Kristoffer Kristofferson, 1936-2024