Yup, they're back! Everyone's on board! If you have loved a particular artist in the first four volumes, there's a good chance he, she or the band are here once again. Corngread Red? Check. Honeywagon? Check. Hit & Run Bluegrass? Check. The Petersens? Check. Brad Davis? Check. Iron Horse? Check. David West? Check. The Grass Cats? Check. Tim May? Check. Maybe even Dave Dick & his band? Check.
Check, check, check. Yes, they're all back, and they're all once again delivering very fine versions of popular hits from the late 1960s ("Here Comes The Sun", courtesy of The Petersens - ladies and gents, we've got our first Beatles cover!) to the late 90's (the aforementioned Mr. Dick covering Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Califronication" and Iron Horse going on "Broadway", tracing the Goo Goo Dolls' steps). In between, we get lots of beloved classics: "Don't Fear The Reaper"! "Stuck In The Middle With You"! "Billie Jean"! "Hungry Heart"! "Sad But True"! "Even Flow"! "Dancing With Myself"!"Heart Of Gold"! and many many more..!
A special mention for the second song from The Petersens - they nail Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", which really is no mean feat! But again, these are all good to great. It's like some weird Twilight Zone jukebox that plays the greatest hits of yesteryear - but only in Bluegrass versions.
...and I no doubt have in the last years, bemoaning his sudden need to price out the common man, that he pretends to stand up for, out of concert tickets and his music (seriously, Bruce, listing your 8 CD outtake box set for 250 bucks?!? Da fuck?!?). But when you need the man, he stands and delivers.
I heard this on the radio this afternoon, and even if I knew about the song, it hits pretty hard when stuck between the usual radio fare. Sure, the lyrics are, uhm, workmanlike, and so is the musical backing which he seems to have borrowed from the Wrecking Ball era. But, you know, who really freakin' cares? The dude's got things to say that need sayin', even if the song isn't some sort of protest song masterpiece. Then again, are any of them? Fittingly, Bruce's voice is now reduced to a croak that approaches Dylan, but again, who cares?
You might get bored of me leaving links to Brian Phillips articles, but here's another one well worth reading, and it also says things worth saying and thinking about.
I don't really have anything specific to add, having just talked about how you can't trust your eyes and ears in my A.I.-related thoughts (fittingly, led by Mr. Phillips), but you owe it to you and everyone else to try and keep those as open and discerning as possible...
Oh, also, fuck state-sanctioned murder squads 'upholding the law'...
I haven't been a fan of Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel for very long. Actually it took some nudging from friendly neighbourhood music blogs (quick shout out to Fu Man Chu!), but when I checked out Harley & his crew I liked a lot of what I heard. For years I only knew two songs of him/them, the inevitable hit "Smile (Come Up And See Me)" and their cover of "Here Comes The Sun", because those would turn up on various artists 'hits of the 70s''-type compilations. Finally diving deeper, I found it interesting how stylistically diverse the work of Harley & Cockney Rebel is. And of course, in the words of Anchorman, well, that escalated quickly. Somehow, I went from two Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel song to not one, not two, but three discs for the One Buck Record of the day. Up until yesterday, this was still a two-disc release, then I got to start digging and finding some more treasures and reshuffling again, and well...what can I tell ya, folks, things got a little out of hand, as they tend to when OBG sets his sights on some stuff...
Steve Harley was not only the clear band leader and pretty much used the same logic that Vincent Fournier applied to Alice Cooper, even though he didn't name himself like his band ("Ladies and Gentlemen, let's give a big hand to...Cockney Rebel!"), Cockney Rebel quickly went from a real band to a name brand, so whoever was around Harley at a given time would be Cockney Rebel. At least, Harley took the Cockney part of the name seriously, adopting a sneering Cockney accent for a good number of the band's rockier tunes. Just listen to "Tumbling Down", the opening track of disc two and tell me that he doesn't sound like a dead ringer for Ian Hunter. Othertimes his voice recalls Bowie, an influence on both the artier longer as well as the shorter glam numbers. The longer numbers have a clear prog and art rock influence, as well as a good number of theaticality, a mix that seems as much influenced by Queen's music hall prog as Spector-produced 60's girl groups.
Considering how different the music of Harley & Co. could be, the sequencing of most Best-ofs and Compilations - almost always chronological - didn't make sense to me, mostly due to the different styles snuffing out a disc's momentum. If after, say, a couple of sub-three minute glam stompers we stop for a nine minute suite with choirs and several 'movements' the momentum stops dead in its tracks. Don't get me wrong: I think Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel did some of their best and most interesting work on long-form songs such as "Death Trip", but it was difficult to see those tracks working alongside their more single-oriented rock'n'roll sides. So, from the beginning it seemes obvious that I was going to separate thes two different brands of music, which evidently led to the title of the comp. But the title isn't entirely true. What to do, though, with Harley's later work, which is of middle-length, mostly clocking in between four and five minute, but more importantly, is stylistically different again, more reflective and often more acoustic-based, with a voice that cearly shows its years?
So technically, this compilation is now three sets, on three discs: Disc One, The Short Of It, compiles 20 of Harley & Cockney Rebel's short and sprightly work. Disc Two, The Long Of It are Cockney Rebel and Harley long-form songs. And disc three, the one too long for the album title (and thus cunningly hidden behind an asterisk), is A Long Journey's End, whichchronicles Harley's work since the mid-90s, increasingy an old man's songs sung in an old man's voice. There's a lot more sentimentality in these songs whose titles like "The Last Time I Saw You", "Journey's End (A Father's Promise)" and "Compared With You (Your Eyes Don't Seem To Age)" already hint at their emotional and sentimental content. This is both understandable and quite touching. Harley feels that his long journey is approaching its end, so he is, by and by, saying his goodbyes, his regrets and his wished for the future. Speaking of: it seems eminently fitting that the comp should end with his lookinto a future when he's long gone, with "2000 Years From Now" harking back to the spacey prog sound of the Cockney Rebel heydays.
So, either rejoice in some choice memories of an interesting British band and its main songwriter, or be like me and go from zero to...well, a lot in terms of grooving to that Cockney rebel and his Cockney rebels...
And I mean that literally. Don't let it be said that I don't recognize the trace of a good idea if I stumble upon one. My use of alternate takes including pedal steel and violin when reconfiguring Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here tempted a reader (hi, Thames!) to declare it a country album, which - while not strictly accurate - does capture the different feel of that version. It also left me with a new idea: What about making a real, dyed-in-the-wool country album of Pink Floyd tunes. And here it is: Welcome To Pink Floyd Country?
There were two problems with the plan: first of all, there were way less country covers of Pink Floyd songs than I imagined - maybe that match made in heaven wasn't as obvious as I made it out to be? And secondly, of those that existed, there was a rather uneven playing field: I could probably fill a compilation with covers of "Wish You Were Here" and "Time" alone, as these two are by far the most popular cover song choices, including some country & bluegrass artists. But I wanted a variety of songs, so no doubles, not counting the pedal steel version of "Wish You Were Here" of the band itself that was all over the OBG Edit of Wish You Were Here, and is here in all its unaltered, full glory.
But I did find enough good stuff to complete This Is Pink Floyd Country. One thing that was interesting is that more than half of the tracks on here come from The Wall. I wouldn't have thought that at first, thinking that tracks from Dark Side Of The Moon would outnumber them, but that was definitely wrong - "Time" excluded. Though, to be fair, I took a full four tracks from a single band and album: Luther Wright & The Wrongs covered the entire Wall album in a bluegrass style, though I'm still not quite sure whether the whole thing is an elaborate piss-take on the album or an honest, if definitely idiosyncratic take on it. There is definitely a touch too much of country humour in Mr. Wright's voice, but I took the tracks that sound the most genuine, while definitely bringing the country instrumentation in spades.
I'm already on the record as declaring Cornbread Red's take on "Comfortably Numb" as my favorite take on the song - ever. But there are also great takes on "Mother" by main Dixie Chick Natalie Maines and a really nice run through "Run Like Hell" by multi-instrumentalist David West (he also adds a great take on "See Emily Play"). Wish You Were Here is represented by Cody Jinks' fantastic take on the title song, again led by a majestic pedal steel, showing how that song would have turned out if David Gilmour was a redneck (and I mean that in the best possible way), as well as prog bluegrass band Kitchen Dwellers' take on "Welcome To The Machine". Out of the "Time" covers I chose the one by Cash Dawson, who really brings a nicely atmospheric alt country/Americana vibe to it. And finally, there's Billy Strings with an awesome, extended take on "Fearless".
So, cool cover, cool cover versions, here's This Is Pink Floyd Country for your delectation...
...is a bunch of y'all folks, with no one bothering to speak up. Ol' OBG's got you covered, though, so on this second edition of My Back Pages I'll upload/re-post music to the threads that some of y'all have wondered in lately.
Folks, you might have a thousand reasons to not post a comment, find one to do so and ask for a repost. But if not, these back pages will be back from time to time to get some of this cool stuff from out of the attic...
My, how time flies. I say that regularly on this blog, and it's eternally true, but I realize this just as regularly as I say it, when I notice that something that I wanted to post got sidetracked and then - whoops - it's *checks notes* a year later. Last January I took a look at the largely iunderrated and little-known transitional years of Fleetwood Mac in between the Peter Green blues era and the Lindsey Buckingham-Stevie Nicks cocaine california rock platinum era. I then followed that up with a look at the Buckingham Nicks album issued during that period od transition and the original plan was then to follow that up with looks at what the two guitar slingers post-Green and pre-Liddy Buck were up to after leaving the Mac. But then I got caught up with working on some Warren Zevon, David Lynch died and pushed me to work extensively on a compilation of related material etc. etc. - and those two axemen got the axe, temporarily. A piece on forgotten hero of missle-era Mac Danny Kirwan is in the works, but as it's been a little while since we got some kick-ass rock'n'roll on this site, let's start out look at the other Fleetwood Mac guitar guys with Bob Welch.
Now that last sentence sounds like an oxymoron. Bob Welch, with his penchant for jazzy, midtempo and sometimes close to MOR tunes (The Mac's "Sentimental Lady" from their hidden masterpiece Bare Trees) as a guy for heavy rock? Hell, I even called the buy 'Boring Bob' - perhaps unfairly - on these very pages because his Mac work didn't indicate that Welch had a penchant for harder-rocking rhythms. And yet, that was exactly what was on his mind when he quit the Mac. Welch complained afterwards that the band had curdled what he could bring to it, that they only wanted a certain type of guitar playing and songwriting from him and that he couldn't express himself within the confines of the band.
It was still somewhat surprising to see him veer completely into the other side of the spectrum when he founded hard rock combo Paris, which towards their end included the services of brothers Tony and Hunt Sales, later infamously employed by another hard rock combo with some random dude as their lead singer whose name now escapes me. He had started the band with sound engineer Jimmy Robinson over their common love for Led Zeppelin, then backed away from the real heavy hard rock stuff when, after the release of the self-titled debut his ex-colleagues frpom the Mac asked him what he was doing with "that Led Zeppelion crap". You know, not to say these guys are right, but I personally have very little use for the bone-headed hard rock of Paris' first album, while the follow up Big Towne, 2061 has a move towards a more funk- and groove-inspired sound and has a trio of songs, "New Orleans", "Outlaw Game" and the title track that I like well enough (and that are thus featured on the album of the day). To have at least something from the first Paris album I edited down "Narrow Gate", which is more or less the only thing I like from their debut, into a special (and exclusive to this comp, natch!) single edit.
So, the mission for today's One Buck Record was simple. Grab the old Bob Welch comp I did years ago, verify the sequencing and flow, maybe take off three or four tracks of this relatively long 23 track, 78 minute comp - et voilà. Easy peasy. Except of course, I had to make life more complicated for myself. That Welch comp had only a smattering of his 80s new wave work for RCA, which also happened to be some of my favorite numbers on it. So, out of , ahem, amateur's professionalism I decided to recheck his discography, then found said 80s new wave work for RCA and of course loved a ton of it. As long-time One Buck Heads - thanks to my comps on, say, Randy VanWarmer or Martin McBriley know, the One Buck Guy loves himself some 70s pop/rock star revving up the synths and Linn drums and jumping on the new wave bandwagon. So all of a sudden, the idea of condensing the original 23 track comp into an 18 track disc went completely into the other direction, with the comp ballooning and essentially doubling in size: now we're talking about a double disc 40 track anthology covering Welsh's heyday from 1976 to 1983.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Bob Welch seems to be strangely forgotten, considering that he had several top 20 hits and platinum albums at around the same time his old band was ruling the charts with Rumours. Sure, everyone remembers his sortrock remake of his ol' Fleetwod Mac standard "Sentimental Lady" - which included all Mac members, including Lindsey & Stevie on backing vocals - that hit no. 8 in 1977. As a matter of fact, Welch stayed friendly and hung out with the members of the Mac until the end of the decade and retained Mick Fleetwood as his manager until the early 80's. But, still, quickly name me the other four Top 40 hits he had. Well, you might remember "Ebony Eyes" a soft-rock disco hybrid that is pretty much exactly like what you'd imagine, but is still better than "Precious Love" which really goes too far into the disco route for me. I had to include these, obviously, but buried them pretty deep down the second disc.
But Bob Welch had a ton of songs that were better, even if they didn't do better. As said above, I am especially fond of his RCa new wave period including gems like the newly minted title song (despite being a Bryan Adams song!), "Two To Do", "I'll Dance Alone", "Secrets"and "It's What Ya Don't Say". But the polished, shiny AOR rock, sometimes bordering on soft rock (or yacht rock as the younguns would say) also throws up a number of highlights, including "3 Hearts", "Hideaway" and "Future Games". I threw off most of the soft rock numbers, and Welch could work up a pretty mean groove on his midtempo and uptempo numbers, including the Paris selections. I admit it, I did him wrong - Boring Bob has to be renamed. So, any suggestions? Boppin' Bob? Badass Bob? (Nah, too much).
Anyhoo, while Welch was flying high in the late 70s, his career and life took a turn for the worse after his RCA deal ended. He hung out with a bunch of hair metal dudes (including future Guns'n'Roses member Izzy Stradlin jam and occasionally sleep in his soundproofed garage. As to why he hung out with that crew? Why, their shared love of heroin of course, which finally sent him into a two week coma followed by a drug bust right after, which combined at least and long last led him to clean up his act. He moved to Arizona with his new wife and then later Tennessee. He recorded one more album in 1999, and a couple of records mostly containing remakes of old Fleetwood Mac songs in the mid-2000's. Alas, as with brother in arms Danny Kirwan, a happy end wasn't in the cards. After some health issues and unsuccesful spine surgery that left him in fear of becoming invalid, he took his own life in 2012. Bummer, Bob.
Time for us, though, to get back to the good times of Bob Welch, which Remember has plenty of. So, groove to Boppin' Bob's best material. "Remember the days that went on forever..."
I hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about A.I. this winter, even though the encroaching of A.I. slop into all aspects of media life - hey, they even got to the cute animal videos! - is hard to ignore. If you didn't specifically search for A.I. slop for some reason, you weren't specifically exposed to it, if -, like me, your socialmedia presnce is *checks notes* zero. And yet the march of the sneaky robots continues ever on, whether I tookn specific note or not. There is a fabulous article from December called "The Sloppification Of Everything" by the ever-reliable Brian Phillips over at The Ringer that you should really check out. Phillips points out how fact and fiction are now less separatable than ever, how in the era of the deep fake in image, voice and moving pictures you can not just trust your own eyes or ears, as has been the inofficial measure for incredible things for centuries.
That ear part became eerily prescient just a short bit later, when I didn't find A.I. sloppification, but A.I. sloppification found me. As ever, in disguise of course. For the homebrewed All Pearls, No Swine and Bluegrass Chartbusters series I am from time to time scouting Youtube for new hidden gems, or overseen track, and of course this is where the ghosts of A.I. past and present found me. Having racked up a good number of views on the 'Tube, on the sidebar its algorhythm of course presents me from time to time songs it might think I like. Sometimes they're right, often they're wrong like any algorhythm, but before - at least as far as I can tell which is, given the subject, not very - Youtube's algorhythm hadn't proposed an A.I.-created song to me, only to propose me two in the space of a couple of days.
Enter Jared Hutcherson
Among the songs proposed, was a track called "Sunrise Sessions" by artist Jared Hutcherson. As usual I clicked on it. Oh, modern country music with a girl singer. Fine. Nothing worth getting excited about, but listenable. No identifying who the girl singer is though with or under the track. So I decide to see and swing by Discogs. No Jared Hutcherson listed there, which makes an awful lot of sense, because Jared Hutchinson doesn't exist. You can't find a picture of him if you tried. For someone who is a totally anonymous phantom, 'he' sure is busy, though, his Youtube discography counting no less than 30 studio albums, filled with between 17 and 21 songs each. That is a lot of music to create for a hard-working country musician, but an easy day at work for an Artificial Intelligence. As Phillips notes in one of his rules to identify, slop exists at scale. Jared Hutcherson slop definitely exists at scale.
First, there's the music itself. Ultra clean digital sound sheen and absence of any personality in vocals
and performance. I clicked on another Jared Hutcherson track, this time a male, young-ish voice, vaguely recalling the country-pop singers of yesteryear (and today? I haven't kept up with what comes out of Nashville). Okay, I thought, so I finally found the real Jared Hutcherson. Then I clicked on another Hutcherson track, and surprise, the man has just changed his voice. The young-ish pop voice is now a middle-aged grizzled Americana voice à la Colter Wall - that's weird. But only, of course, if you still considered that 'Jared Hutcherson' is some sort of real person, or even persona.
Here's 'young poppy' Jared Hutcherson
And here, on the very next track, is 'middle-aged grizzled Americana vet' Jared Hutcherson
Whatever else 'Jared Hutcherson' is, he for sure is somewhat of a ventriloquist, sounding like at least two different people with completely different voices, and at least once - maybe as a weird nod to Prince's Camilla phase - also a girl, which was what got my attention in the first place. Maybe someone messed up labeling on sound files, and "Sunrise Sessions" was supposed to go with the totally real female country-pop singer Tyler Slow. His name is clearly chosen on purpose, generic enough to be plausible and pass muster and possibly also for easily confused listeners who like 'that Hutcherson guy' to confuse him with Jonathan Hutcherson, a real and existing country music singer.
Once the detective instincts of ol' OBG awakened, I couldn't help but be drawn back to the Jared Hutcherson mystery. Elementary, dear readers. Next clue: The album covers - all totally generic images, mostly computer-created, and not a single identifying or personal feature on them. One would think a guy with 30 albums under his belt would at some point show his mug on one of these, but if you don't have a mug to show...And of course it got worse: Whoever is behind the Jared Hutcherson project is also quite lazy. Two of the album covers for the different studio albums are the same generic sand dunes image, just colorgraded differently. Come on, man....uh, I mean bot...
Jared Hutcherson and his classic album Sway...
and Jared Hutcherson with, uh, his other classic album Sands Of Time...
(I mean, aren't they all classics..?!)
If the whole Jared Jutcherson saga teaches us anything, it's how utterly generic and hollow most modern country-pop is, if a computer can so easily mash up a thousand clichées and regurgitate them without anything seeming amiss, at least on a cursory listen. 'Jared Hutcherson' could easily make it into a radio or internet radio playlist without rasising any red flags, and that's maybe the scariest thought of it all.
Having just discussed music streamers with my old college buddies (who are both streaming their music, and happily so), I sent them an article on how Spotify is freezing out real artists to pay their (miserable) royalties in favor of specially commissioned tracks that sound a bit like these, but are royalty-free, being paid with a lump sum by Spotify. That was, of course, a couple of years ago. It wasn't super-ethical, but at least it was still music made by real musicians, however badly paid, uninpired and uninspiring the results. A.I. has of course completely dusted that text and its concerns, because now, things are ven easier for Deezer and Spotify to lull you into total complacency with music that you probably like because the algorhythm tells them so: They can just pay a couple of guys to cook up hundreds of hours of music in mere days. What's real or not, on You Tube or in your Spotify or Deezer play list is becoming more and more difficult to discern. Then again, sign of the times. As Brian Phillips says, "real things seem a little bit fake. Fake things seem a little bit real."
Jared Hutcherson (artist illustration)
Here's the thing: I'm not a sworn enemy of A.I. I mean, professionally I am, because as a language teacher ChatGPt and its brethren are my worst enemies, because students only use it to cheat...and doing a bad job of it at that. But I can roll with A.I., notably for my weakest area in creating stuff for One Buck Records - the cover art. I have occasionally used A.I. images for that, though it really is a crapshoot and you rarely get what you were hoping for. But still, there's a place for it. As a matter of fact, the lead in picture above the article with the appropriately menacing robot (which I didn't choose as such, like I said, a crapshoot) is, yes, A.I.-produced. But I don't use A.I. to fool anyone, or to present it as something it isn't.
In this spirit you'll also find the OBG record of the day, which this time is an EP's worth of AI songs reimagining pop or rap songs as classic soul or blues records, an automated take on the 'unusual covers' subgenre' that occasionally amuses me, and is openly and proudly AI. As for the slopification of everything, keep your eyes and ears open, folks, even if that ain't what it once was anymore...
Disclaimer: All pictures in this article have been created by Artificial Intelligence. All words, however, are still by hot-blooded human OBG.
