Gordon Lightfoot And The Last Disc Problem

And so this is it, folks, the temporary end of the road for the career-spanning Gordon Lightfoot box set I put together, now complete with Volume Three. And inevitably, as with most career retrospectives, we now run into what is known as the Last Disc Problem, something a music fan who has listened to a boxset or five will be familiar with. If a retrospective follows an artist to the end, a gradual decline sets in, some time after the halfway point and, in a multiple disc box set, noticably on the last disc. Thus, the Last Disc Problem, as the high quality of the preceding discs simply isn't there. This is also true for our last run through Gordon Lightfoot's discography, unfortunately. A Life In Song Vol. 3 - River Of Light isn't as constantly great as the first two discs, which would have been a pretty high bar to clear either way. (I know, I'm doing quite the sales job for today's One Buck Record of the day, huh?!). But there is something to be said for sticking it out to the end - both for the artist, and its audience. And I can't think of many others who stuck it out until the end like Gordon Lightfoot did. And there is still plenty of great music here

When we first hear Lightfoot at the beginning of River Of Light, during rousing opener "I'd Do It Again", his voice is still strong. Summertime Dream is in many ways Gordon's last hurrah, both in commercial terms and as a songwriter of consistently high quality output.Everything else afterwards has to be qualified in some way. This would sadly be proven true by 1978's Endless Wire, the first disappointment after a long string of good to very good albums. "Handdog Hotel Room", like "I'd Do It Again" an ode to Lightfoot's relentless touring, and "Sweet Guinevere" are the top picks from an underwhelming album, mired in surprisingly awful production by Lenny Waronker, and with the most atrocious cover art of any Lightfoot album to add insult to injury. "Endless Wire should have been called 'Endless touring makes you tired'", said James Chrispell stingingly but correctly in his review for Allmusic to explain the bored, and boring-sounding material here and concluded, also correctly, "the downward slide had begun".  

Porn mustache + porn sunglasses = good job, guys, let's take this pic for the cover...

1980's Dream Street Rose was a much better effort by both Waronker and Lightfoot. The former (with some help from fellow VIP WB producer Russ Titleman) went back to a much more synpathetic production reminiscent of his mid-70s work, while Lightfoot simply wrote a better batch of songs, including "Ghosts Of Cape Horn", "On The High Seas" and the title track. But that album was indeed the end of the road for that producer-artist tandem that ran for a decade and eight albums, nine if you count the re-recorded first half of Gord's Gold. This is truly the last old-school sounding record of Lightfoot's career. 

1982's Shadows was produced by Lightfoot and Ken Friesen, and it was the start of Lightfoot's MOR/Adult Contemporary period, where acoustic instruments and orchestrations are now replaced by synthesizers everywhere. but it is a surprisingly strong record, something Lightfoot himself considered so. He was disappointed by the album's commercial failure, calling the album "the music industry's best-kept secret". Upon relistening for this project, I was surprised how many tunes I liked from an album I had written off as adult contemporary pap. Conseuqently, Shadows gets a whooping four selections - the most of any album post-Summertime Dream - on River Of Light, including the rousing seafaring tale "Triangle (formerly featured on Shanties), the stock-taking "In My Fashion" and the moody "Heaven Help The Devil". 

Waitaminute, guys...what was the title again? Was it Shadows or Soft Focus? 

Salute one year later, howver, saw Lightfoot sucumb to the trends of the days, as it is his most 80's sounding album, and I don't mean that in a good way. A plastic drum sound, electric guitars and keyboard swashes everywhere, together with a sometimes forced-sounding optimism make for akward listening, the romantic acoustic troubadour of old now sounding like he'd want to compete with Kenny Rogers and the like.  Thus, the two most old-fashioned and folky numbers, "Whispers Of The North" and "Tattoo" have been selected for inclusion from what is ultimately a misbegotten attempt to update his sound. 

The nadir of Lightfoot's glossy AOR/adult contemporary period is 1986's East Of Midnight, which has such a slick, synthetic production that even the few memorable songs inevitably suffer from it. Album highlight "A Passing Ship" survives intact, but for the other highlight "I'll Tag Along" - which Lightfoot began to perform as a solo acoustic song after the breaks in his shows - shows up here as a solo song, though played on eletric guitar, for a TV Special in 1991. It's much better than the glossy, overproduced version from East Of Midnight. 

Not sure how that cover could possibly scream 'adult contemporary' more if it wanted to...

Sandwiched in betwen these two songs is a possibly surprising selection. Fascinatingly, the exact things that essentially killed the utterly useless modern re-recordings on Gord's Gold Vol. 2 are responsable for the one song that is a success: "The Pony Man", originally from Sit Down Young Stranger/If You Could Read My Mind, and thus easily the oldest song on the set, is like the rest filled with keyboards that replace the original acoustic framework. But here it actually works!The synth backing is atmospheric, rather than distracting, maybe because the song itself is essentially a children's dream tale, with the slightly otherwordly keyboard backing conjuring a fitttingly dream-like atmosphere and thus adding to the song, rather than subtracting, as on every other remake from the disc. 

1993's Waiting For You, Lightfoot's comeback after he had declared giving up writing and recording (though not touring) after East Of Midnight's commercial failure, was hailed as a return to form and to a more fitting acoustic sound, even though for my personal taste a lot of it is still way too glossy. The title track and "Only Love Would Know" are the top picks from the album. 

Not as gritty as the cover suggests, but a step in the right direction...

The mid-90's is unfortunately also the time when Lightfoot's voice really started to get compromised. The muddled, fussy, keyboard-heavy arrangements Lightfoot leaned on were maybe also a way to try and compensate for Lightfoot's weakening singing voice, which lost range, power and stamina. Lightfoot started to be unable to hit prolonged notes, with his singing becoming clipped and wispy. You can hear that once strong voice decaying at unfortunate speed. It's already getting quite thin on 1999's A Painter Passing Through, notably on the title track and a couple of others, so I chose the two tracks ("Ringneck Loon" and "Uncle Toad Said") that reunited good songwriting with a stronger vocal performance. 

2004's Harmony was recorded after a major health scare for Lightfoot, and was constructed by his band around Lightfoot's vocals from his demos, which some critics used to explain the less-than-great vocal performance. But it ultimately probably wouldn't have mattered. Harmony is, other than as a welcome sign of life, a relatively forgettable album.  And yet it yielded a single classic, the newly minted title song for this volume of A Life In Song, "River Of Light". If you listen past the clipped enunciation and increasingly nasal delivery that would define his final recordings, the song itself is great, easily his best in years. 

Lightfoot touring and recording well into his Eighties despite his voice now reduced to a wispy croak is nothing if not a lesson in persisting. Old Lightfoot becomes a bit the Don Quixote character he sang about, if I may paraphrase. "Singing in a whisper now, he sings in cities from shore to shore / 'till he can sing no more". So, I'm of two minds here: I don't know whether it's brave or foolhardy to go into a studio at over eighty years old, just with a guitar, and with your voice almost gone, and record a solo acoustic album. Probably a bit of both. Truthfully, most songs on Solo aren't great - as songs or performances - and when Lightfoot tries (and mostly fails) to whistle on "Dreamdrift" it's almost painful to listen to. Time and cigarettes and illness may have done a number on Lightfoot's voice, but he does not yield. There is something noble in an old warrior like Lightfoot going out on his shield like that. 

The two songs from Solo, "Return To Dust" and "Oh So Sweet" weren't necessarily planned or written as 'last songs', though they surely play that role well. For Solo, Lightfoot had discovered some demos from 2001 and 2002, tried to update and revise some of them (and failed) and finally recorded them as they were. Both are - whether planned or not - songs that illustrate the long goodbye, Lightfoot's and everybody's. Though his voice is now clearly as close to the end of the trail as Lightfoot himself, the lyrics are impressive. "Return To Dust" is a clear-eyed look back, including at his alcoholism: " They said drink and be restored / all I ever drank made me end up on the floor / and what is more a mind turned to rust that's for sure / we will return into dust through the years."

"O So Sweet" adds some more retrospection, as Lightfoot looks back bitter-sweetly on his life: "The road I chose was not all it should be / but sometimes it was oh so sweet", only to end up with some last words of wisdom for the last steps of the road: "Sometimes I remember seeing starlight fade / back when life was still only a mystery / was it good, was it bad, was it the best you ever had? / But sometimes it was oh so sweet". 

And so was your music, Gordon, so was your music. 

Thank you for the music of a lifetime. Thank you for letting me, and us, tag along. Thank you for everything, Gordon. 

Yours Truly,

the One Buck Guy

The End (Or The Oz Is Dead, Long Live The Oz)

As usual, just an hour or so after I put up a new post, news drops that another rock'n'roll legend has died. I didn't keep tabs on Ozzy Osbourne and his health, but from what I read about concerts, the Ozzster was doing them sitting down and cutting down on his concert length, because his health and stamina wouldn't allow for more. For his last ever show, Back To The Beginning (now unofficially known as The End, For Real This Time) about two weks ago, he sat on a black throne throughout, and the reunited Black Sabbath Mark 1 struggled to get through a short four song set, after a six song Ozzy solo set, and a ton of supporting acts, including Slayer, Pantera, Guns'n'Roses and Metallica. But all that doesn't matter. Ozzy got to go out the way he deserved to: on a big fuckin' stage, in front of a whole load of people. 

I can't in all honesty claim to be a huge Ozzy or Black Sabbath fan, I'm more of a 'Sabbath's first two albums and an Ozzy Greatest Hits package will do' kind of guy. Even though I always forget what a great tune "Crazy Train" is, until it comes on. But a post for and with the Oz feels appropriate, and it also gives me an excuse to get some crunchy rock'n'roll on this here blog, where in the last weeks we have been mostly acoustic and well-behaved. Well, enough of that for a second. Let's have Ozzy, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler throw down some heavy shit, shall we?

So today's very humble One Buck Record Of The Day is an EP, or strictly speaking half an EP. In 2016, to celebrate their The End tour - the last ever Black Sabbath live tour - they sold The End at concerts, an EP (actually, more like a double EP, or simply an album, at fifty-five minutes of length, which does indeed make it longer than 13 itself). The first half were Rick Rubin-produced outtakes from their 13 album, whereas the second half were live tracks. Those were strictIy of the o.k.-ish variety, so I only kept the studio tracks, which were surprisingly good for what are essentially outtakes and deserved to get a proper release either way. 

Rage Against The Machine's Brad Wilk is manning the drum set here for these four songs. "Season Of The Dead" opens with one of Iommi's doomiest riffs, before the vocals kick in, only to open up a machine gun fire of different riffs in the middle. As Ozzy said, when talking about the original sessions for 13 which started a mere 12 years (!) earlier: "Tony was still firing off these amazing heavy metal riffs. He just goes 'here you go' and comes out with one better than you've ever heard in your life. ". "Cry All Night has a neat little blues solo in the middle. "Take Me Home" bring sout more heavt riffage, while "Isolated Man" brings some distorted psychedelia into the mix. 

Speaking of the mix, this was one of the major criticisms of 13 and Rubin especially, with its extremely high loudness levels and high compression. You can hear this also on the four The End tracks, and while it's not a dealbreaker, it does position The End towards the tail end of the Loudness wars (ca. 2005-2015 I'd say). Still, this is probably as good as any latter-day veteran version of Black Sabbath was going to sound. Finally, The End - tour or EP - wasn't, as said above, the end. The end was the way back to beginning, just days before the real end for Ozzy. But The End does stand as a nice reminder of what Sabbath and consequently Oz were all about. Let it rip. 

R.I.P. John Michael "Ozzy" Osbourne (1948-2025)

P.S.: Still on holidays here, folks, with a crap laptop (NEVER buy a Linux-based computer, folks!), so for once there is no artwork attached to the tracks... 

Bluegrass Chartbusters Ahead! Yeehaw and Hotdiggity!

If you have followed this blog for a bit, you already know that, when not listening to folks giving it a neo-traditional spin, I like my bluegrass...weird-ish. I'm down with folks putting hip hop and bluegrass together, and I'm down with a couple of Finns doing bluegrass covers of hard'n'heavy songs. So, it's fair to say I'm not a traditionalist. Still, I wouldn't have bet on engulfing myself as much as I did in bluegrass groups covering popular songs, and I certainly hadn't expected to do so with the help of the Pickin On... series. After albums highlighting bluegrass covers of single artists like Neil Young and Green Day, time to take it a step further and wander through more than fifty years of charts history...via the all-new Bluegrass Chartbusters series!

This album that runs through songs from 1968 to 2015 also doubles as a bit of a Best Of of Cornbread Red, for my money the best band that worked for CMH and the Pickin' On...-series. These guys burned brightly, and quickly - relatively speaking of course - going through ten tribute albums in three years...and then just vanished. Cornbread Red were built around three bluegrass veterans: Stan Dailey on lead vocals and bass, Marc Scott on banjo and mandolin, and Dennis Clifton on guitar, dobro and bouzouki. They recorded those famous blugrass tributes to, among others, Franz Ferdinand, Aerosmith, The Offspring, and Maroon 5, as well as doing the lion's share of the label's two classic rock tributes, from which a majority of their tracks were sourced. Bluegrass bands covering pop and rock songs can always come off as gimmicky and joke-y, and that's kind of the point in a way, but these guys actually found the essence of the songs, instead of just doing fun covers. 

Which means that their versions of these rock and pop classics (and semi-classics) have now supplanted the originals for me. Their version of "Comfortably Numb" is my favorite version of that song, bar none. I've never liked Roger Waters' vocals on the original. I've always liked the melody of "Here Without You" by Three Doors Down, but the compressed nu rock production didn't do it any favors. It's not needed anymore, as isn't the smooth sounds of Maroon 5, whose "You Will Be Loved" is much better as a bluegrass tune than a soft pop number. And finally, I'd probably go out and say that Cornbread Red's version of The Offspring's "Self-Esteem" is also my new favorite take on that number. I liked Steve'n'Seagulls' version fine enough, but that one really tipped over onto the humour side, whereas Cornbread Red's version really finds a sort of logical variation for it, protraying the protagonist loser like a country bumpkin who's getting abused and is too nice to do something about it. You should also check out what they do with Cheap Trick's "Surrender". Good stuff. 

The other 'name' band in CMH's employ is of course Iron Horse out of Alabama (below), who are taking care of the majority of the other tracks here, including Kansas' "Carry On Wayward Son", a cool version of Steve Miller Band's "The Joker", lovely takes on Van Morrison' "Into The Mystic" and Elton John's "Rocket Man", as well as a cover of Kings Of Leon's "Molly's Chambers", the only non-chartbuster here, but a cool version of a cool song, that got the band noticed in the first place. The third band in the Pickin On... stable is The Sidekicks, who more or less replaced Cornbread Red on the roster, though they seem to be less like a real working band and more like a bunch of varying studio pros drafted in for the occasion. Be that as it may,  their take on Hanson's "Mmmbop", for example, does two things: make you understand the lyrics for the first time (try that on the spead up mickey mouse voiced original) and make you appreciate the song (although adult Hanson's acoustic readings of their song are very good as well). They also have a nice, drawl-y take on Blind Melon's "No Rain", their version of Imagine Dragons' "I Bet My Life" is clearly an improvement on the original (not that hard) and a cover of Hootie & The Blowfish's "Only Wanna Be With You". 

This is a fun, rollickin' time, offering often beautiful takes on some of the best known songs from the last half decade. You don't even need to be a particular big fan of bluegrass, armed with even a basic appreciation of acoustic or country-tinged music you'll probably find something to like here. Yeehaw, let the good times roll...

Mixtape Mania Returns! Bowie's Back! In A Ton Of Different Languages!

And the enunciations continue! Stop the press! Hot from the mixing desk! That's Right! Can't Stop Won't Stop!

O.k., enough of this nonsense. But yeah, holiday pastime Bowie mixing is back. It might not have seemed that way, because I spread out my little Bowie mixtapes/megamixes over a year and a half of One Buck Records time, but these were all done in summer 2023, along with the 2.Downtown continuation of the Nathan Adler diaries. And by the end of the summer, I was very well mixed out and Bowie'd out, so I bowed out of Bowie mixing endeavors for a good long while.  But while sorting through my music folders a month or so ago, I realized that at the time I had put a bunch of songs aside for two further mixes, including one with a thematic hook that I really wanted to do. 

And wouldn't you know it, it's the first week of holidays for me, so I could get to work right away, and Bowie mixtape no. 5, fresh from OBG's mixing desk, is here. And if the name of the mix, Babel, hasn't tipped you off yet - it's the first one with a clearly defined theme: Bowie has dabbled, for most of his career, in recording in different languages to cater to his fans worldwide. No one can accuse Bowie of not being a cunning linguist...   

Sometimes he cut a foreign language version because he loved the coutry or the language, as in his two Indonesian-language songs, and sometimes as a career move, such as trying to catch the attention of German schlager listeners in 1967 with a 'German version' (basically one German verse followed by most of the song in English) of "Love You 'Till Tuesday". The same idea is essentially true for the Italian adaptation of "Space Odyssey". Bowie was told that Italians wouldn't get the whole spaceship astronaut thing, so the song was turned into "Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola" - lonely boy, lonely girl. How do you say 'lost in translation' in Italian? 

Some of these tracks went nowhere, such as a barely released Spanish version of "Day-In, Day-Out", others were little gifts to fans, such as the Japanese version of "Girls" as Bowie's habitual bonus track for the Japanese album version of Never Let Me Down, or the French and German adaptations of "Heroes" on those countries' versions of the album of the same name. I also went back to his Berlin trilogy for the Turkish-flavored parts of "Yassassin" and the wordless vaguely Eastern-inspired wailing of"Warszawa", as well as the African rhythms of "African Night Flight" and a snatch of Japanese from "It's No Game". The atmosphere of "Abdulmajid" seemed to fit, so that instrumental track got mixed in as well. This is not supposed to be an 'all non-English music of Bowie, ever' thing, but pretty much everything of significance that isn't English should be here. 

Here's the tally of Bowie's Babel: 2x German, 2x Italian, 2x Indonesian, 1x Spanish, 1x French, 1x Mandarin, plus the above mentioned bits and bops, for the usual 30 minutes of Bowie. 

Bowie the chameleon is one of those easy catchphrases for the genre-hopping artist, but he is also - and definitely -  a chameleon in terms of dealing with these foreign languages. I obviously can't speak for how well he pulls off Indonesian, Japanse and Mandarin, but the Spanish sounds okay. He clearly doesn't speak German and manages with phonetics, while Italian seems to come naturally to him. His accent in French is pretty atrocious, though. But these versions are often more than pure gimmicks, and seem to have been important for Bowie, at one stage or another of his career. Now they can all be enjoyed in one easily digestable 30 minute package which I hope you will enjoy. In any language. 

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.