"Please don't make me face my generation alone!"

Is that a great line or does it just sound like its supposed to sound like one?  It works just fine in this song:

 Is this band (fun.) huge?  They seem like they should be.  Watching this video, I'm struck by the way that,for me (and I imagine other members of generation video ground zero), the pleasures of watching a music video include a nostalgia for the unsatisfying.  This video is filled with images--like the band performing (for who?)* in the warehouse or the chase through the streets--similar to ones which I remember thinking ranged from cheesy to almost working when I watched them in the afternoons after school in 1983, but which now, at least when well executed and combined with a song I like, elicit a thrill of recognition: "yes, that's how you do that."

*They're playing just for themselves, that's how you know they really mean it.  It's just what they'd be doing anyway, acting out exactly what you need to feel right now.  No, they don't even need a sound system.

Anyway, my rock and roll friends can laugh, but I think this band is kind of amazing.  Here's a few more cuts: first a live version of that song, "All the Pretty Girls."

One thing that's interesting, watching this performance after the studio video: Part of the reason that the band is playing in the warehouse, for themselves and for the viewer's pleasure, which become one and the same, is that its actually very hard to film and record a live musical performance of a pop or rock band in such a way that reminds people effectively of the live experience.  For a variety of reasons. The in-studio style performance, as in the radio station video, has its own aesthetic, and I can't comment on it effectively because I am so fond of it.  In such a situation, a well recorded sound will also sound a lot like what you would hear in the room; bands will be relaxed but still honestly in performance and doing so in a room that is supposed to contain recording equipment; you can hear what's going on in the songs, etc.

And then there's this song, "Be Calm."  The epic.  The studio version is here.  More than worth a listen.  Below is a live performance in front of an audience, filmed by an audience member.

The last one is interesting.  I think that its power depends on both the poor production values, and its attention to the performance itself, which puts the viewer in the position of enacting the filmmakers engagement with the performance, an engagement whose verisimilitude is underscored by the shaky camera, the tiny sound, and the clear focus on that singer.  There's a few videos I've found like this, and down the road I want to look at a few of them together.

Tonight we'll finish up with one more from fun., their Christmas song:

Union Man

Well, Labor Day, or as Barrett calls it, "fake May Day" is almost over, but I still want to say something about a certain song.  "Union Man" by the Cate Brothers, from their 1975 album, Cate Bros. (pronounced "Cate Brothers"), produced by Steve Cropper, who also plays guitar on several tracks, including this one.  Here's the the songs, before we get much farther in:

 Its easy, in the first couple of verse, to hear just the narrator's skepticism about what the Union Man has to offer, his doubts about paying dues and going on strike. Since at least the 1980s that's the kind of sentiment that we expect from a narrator who declares "It's six A. M. and I'm out on the job/working like a fool for my pay" when he introduces himself.  Certainly that's all that blogger/DJ JB hears, as he encounters the song on an archaeological dig through the May 22, 1976 broadcast of Casey Kasem's American Top 40. But there's more to it than that, and the third verse and chorus are critical to what I'm convinced is a conversion narrative. first, lets pick up the last verse before the break, where, at the end, Ernie declares: "All the money, that I'm getting paid/Looks like I'm bound to lose!" which is as concise a summary of the the wage worker's place in capitalism as you'll find on record.  That's followed by a middle section that's all about point and counterpoint, including a guitar duel between Earl and Steve Cropper.  Then, his doubts resolved, at least temporarily, the narrator declares "hey hey Mr. union man, thank you for the helping hand/hey hey Mr. union man, so glad you understand."

The doubts in those first two verses always made me hear that last line as sarcasm, but I'm sure that's not the case now.  There's very little sarcasm or cynicism in any of the songs that make up the 4 Cate Brothers albums from 1975-1979.  In fact, until 1979's Tom Dowd produced Fire on the Tracks, every song is sung as a first person, narrative, and usually a heartfelt one.  That doesn't mean that that the narrator of every song is Ernie or Earl, but it makes it easier to get to know the narrators they speak through. And the narrator of this song is, by the end of the song, sincerely happy to take a "helping hand" from someone who "understands" even if getting to that point is a challenge to what he believes he's supposed to be doing to feed his "hungry family."  Not simply a pro-union song, its a dramatization of the conflict between unionism and the ideological disposition of much the southern working class.  Its instructive.

In many ways, "Union Man" much less ambivalent about the unionism than the song "King Harvest" by the Cates' friends, The Band.  If you're not familiar with the relationship between these two groups, here's some background.  Interestingly, Robbie Robertson, a voracious reader, has said that he wrote "King Harvest" after hearing about and reading about The Southern Tenant Farmer's Union.  In an interview last year, Earl said that they wrote the song after reading a book about the STFU, and I've been wondering since if it was, this one?  Earl and Ernie both also said that the song was originally slower, that Cropper wrote the opening like and sped it up, which explains his co-writing credit on the tune.

Since I've started this, its past labor day, but hardly time to put aside the value of work.  The Cates kept working long after those 4 albums, and even after "retiring" in 2006, they still work a lot.  Here's a more recent performance of "Union Man" from the slightly surreal locale of the Cherokee Casino in Siloam Springs.  Thanks for listening.

What the hell happened to rock criticism (pt. 2)

OK- just a quick note because I'm working on more important stuff. I shouldn't complain about most current rock criticism unless I can provide something more specific about what it it should or could be doing that it isn't. So here it is: the liner notes to True Love Cast Out All Evil detail a horrific story describing how the 13th Floor Elevators, and Roky in particular, were victimized both by local law enforcement for their advocacy of psychedelic drugs, and by would-be friends and psychedelic guides and gurus, notably Tommy Hall who, upon joining the band as a "jug player" insisted that the members dose every single time they played live. Long story short: Roky, already acting more than a little discombobulated is arrested for possession of a single joint in 1969, and faced with a potential life sentence pleads insanity and is sentenced to indefinite detention in a state hospital for the criminally insane where he's treated to a regimen of electroshock and chemical "therapy."  He is released after a couple years, but his musical output is erratic, in part due to continuing mental problems and in part due to the severe side effects of his medication.  Unable to support himself, he ends up in subsidized low-income housing under the care of his mother who forbids all medication on religious grounds.  He deteriorates further, develops painful and dangerous abscesses in his mouth and is eventually arrested for stealing his neighbor's mail.  As shown in You're Gonna Miss Me, Roky's brother Summner fights for and wins custody, is able to get Roky better help including actual therapy and more sensible and individually indicated medication.  Within a few years Roky has re-established relationships with his son, taken over as his own legal guardian, begun performing and recording again and even bought a house and a car. And made a pretty good record here.  One that's substantive and interesting enough that I'm saving talking about the actual songs on the record for later.


On True Love Cast Out All Evil producer and Okkervil River songwriter Will Sheff has chosen to dramatize Roky's back story to some degree, to make it part of the experience of the album.  He does so in his choice of songs from Rocky's archive to either re-record or overdub, in the sequencing of those songs, and in the musical choices in the recording and production of those songs, including the use of sound fragments from Roky's archive of live performances, demos, and home movies and recordings, and in the use of dissonant instrumental passages in the context of what (except for their lyrical content) otherwise pass as straight ahead folk and pop inflected rock songs.  It's an interesting strategy and it raises interesting questions.  Sheff brings real musical depth and evidences real respect for Roky as a person and a musician, but does putting Roky's history of mental illness at the center of the record trade upon his misery differently than previous attempts to market Roky as the icon of crazy rock?  Or was that history so unavoidable that it had to be dealt with before Roky's art could be presented simply as his art?  Would some of these songs have been more powerful without the sometimes literal evocation of dissonance and confusion, or do these sonic choices extend the meanings in the songs themselves as much as they do the meaning of the singer's history?


And, if that history is at the center of the story, what does that history tell us about he abuse of authority; about the harm done by indiscriminate drug-taking as a response to abusive authority; about the shameful history linkage between poverty and mental illness in America; about the dangers of over-medication and the dangerous and romantic myth that mental illness and creativity are so inexorably linked that treating the former with medication necessarily destroys the latter; and about the uses of mental illness or "madness" in the rhetorical construction of authenticity in rock performance?


To my mind, these are all interesting questions, although not apparently to any of the approximately 500,000 people writing music reviews right now.  And that's a shame because this record sits right where criticism-thoughtful text-based listener engagement with popular music and its production-ought to live.  Roky Erickson is a "popular" artist whose career has manifested itself almost entirely through the attention of a subset of critics (to use the term quite broadly) and fans connected to each other and to Roky as much or more by textual accounts of recordings and performances than by those same recordings and performances.  To some degree this has involved a romantic engagement by those fans and critics with circumstances that have caused Roky very real pain. And to some degree it has involved, depended on and marshaled disparate people's sincere emotional connections with Erickson's music and what it evokes, making a well produced and widely distributed record by the 63 year-old former singer of the band that placed a song at #55 on the Billboard Pop singles chart of 1966, possible.  A textual engagement with this record, whose liner notes, by Sheff, were nominated for a grammy, ought to betray some critical or at least reflective consciousness of that history instead of reading like it was cut and pasted from the allmusic guide.