Abandoned Meander

Peaking Mandala, 2006

Today I start slow. Writing through the desire to not-write is hard. Writing every day, whether you feel like it or “feel it” or not—no matter if it’s beautiful poetry or heartbreaking prose or Dear Diary or a somewhat uneven pop culture blog—is very, very hard. Writers learn this if and when we set out to create a daily practice. I relearn this every time my schedule shifts, or my habits or my jobs, and my writing work falls by the wayside. My guitar over there in the corner, all dusty, learns it every day courtesy of my myriad other artistic pursuits and the time they take up. There are only so many hours. Dinner must be eaten. Friends and lovers connected with. The posts start coming later and later in the day.

You know who else writes every day? Musicians. Even if they don’t play every day, they’re hearing the sounds of nascent songs in their heads when they’re walking to walk or doing the dishes or whatever it is they have to do all day in order to make doing music possible. They see pretty paintings or landscapes or horizons and they are on fire with sound. They hear everything. And they write it, every day, inside their heads, whether it gets outside their heads that day or not. For this I admire them, and in this practice I empathize with them.

My friend Andy is a musician. He’s fairly quiet about it – quiet yet intense. He’ll talk about music, whenever and wherever, but he’s not one of those I’m-A-Rock-Star dudes who drive me crazy with their perceived artfulness and their dreams of unlikely fame. Andy used to be in some pretty good, pretty popular bands – Slaves, VSS, Pleasure Forever. But in recent years he’s segued into more solo work, less interested in touring and performing and more interested in just… writing and playing and recording. Making a narrative of songs. Most days.

For a couple years, he was working on an album. I would hang out with Michele, his partner and a close friend of mine, and she would mention gently, “Oh, Andy’s recording something now” and I’d say, “Oh, cool,” and then forget about it. After a couple years, in 2006, on one of our hangouts, perhaps having tea in their kitchen in the Haight Ashbury or catching up for a walk on a windy Bay Area weekend, Michele finally handed me a DVR and said, “This is from Andy.” The first in a projected quintet of albums about places and sounds and sensations and whatever else Andy writes about all day long, every day.

Whenever I listen to a record made by someone I know, I feel as though I am (hopefully) allowed a greater understanding of that person and their perspective on the world. It’s a terrific and sometimes odd feeling. But usually when I sample my friends’ art, I’m not all that surprised. I kind of already knew what it might be like and could basically guess where they were going with it while they were on the way there.

When I listened to this album Abandoned Meander, by someone named Andrew Douglas Rothbard, I had no idea who this recording was made by. It blew my mind. And yet, as soon as I heard it I also knew instinctively that it was so completely in line with what I would expect from my friend’s personality and artistic preferences, so totally Andy, it thrilled me in a new and unusually profound way. Because when you realize that all along, this person who you love and know somewhat well and are friends with but don’t really interact with all that profoundly, is a fucking closet genius? That’s a nice day.

There are contemporaries you can place Andy’s records next to. He doesn’t listen to them. Young guys, often white, often really well-educated in pre-1980s music. Guys who like to layer guitar loops on top of one another with those cool pedals that let people sample themselves. These guys, and Andy, too, often contain endless musical and trivial points of reference that speak to sixties psych, current-day experimental music, and other vintage sounds.

I wouldn’t say talking about the West Coast Experimental Pop Band or some farther-out late-60s acid folk pop is out of place here. I also wouldn’t say the cacauphonic spirit of experimental groups like the Boredoms or the skills of contemporary low-fi guitar acts like Six Degrees of Admittance are unrelated to this work. But because I know the person who made it, and I know the apartment in which he made it and the tape loops which he used to make it and I’ve seen that laptop open so many times on his desk–because I know how perceptive a student of music he is and how insightful his taste—I don’t even feel a need to spend too much time comparing Abandoned Meander to its sonic peers (which is, usually, the way most of us write about music).

This is a record I would buy on CD and vinyl and repeat, even if I didn’t know the person who made it. This is a record I’d blog rapturously about. It loops you in from the start, a true meander across a constantly expanding and imploding landscape that seems to only to climax only to come back around. It assaults the senses with highs and lows and cycles that mirror the violent, tender march of the fog that so famously barrels in to San Francisco from the Pacific, drawing a dividing line of wet grey across the city right about where Andy and Michele’s apartment sits. There are layers that never end. Guitars and vowel sounds and trip upon trip. If I were doing that record review thing where I compare music to other things, I might try to talk about this record in reference to a Buddhist mandala or a Russian doll set: ever unfolding, re-manifesting, rolling through sonic movements, and—oh, yes—rocking.

So have a listen. Then buy it and its cyclic sequel, Exodusarabesque, and wait, like me, for numbers three, four, and five of Anrew Douglas Rothbard’s closet opus. In the meantime, drink some tea, listen to some vinyl, and let the fog wrap around you in the middle of the day. It’s so worth it.

Dolly Parton: The Best There Is

BMG, 1987

I started a new job today. I’m working from home. It’s exciting. It’s full of newness. And it’s also my first experience in a virtual office environment, where there are other people working from home “with” you (as opposed to what I’m used to, which is being a self-employed, solo at-home worker).

Here in the virtual office, there are widgets for tracking hours, different digital interfaces and management systems, and clients where the word “client” means a computer program through which you use other computer programs. Applications. Deliverables. Some of these words are not new. You can see them on Mad Men and on my resume. And some of these vocabularies change with decades, as our technologies do.

What hasn’t changed is that women make less money than men, for the same work, with the same work experience, and often with more education.

Dolly knew this. The tedium described in “9 to 5″ is just as real now for many women as it was when she sang it 30 years ago. It goes for a lot of men, too, but women still face amazing amounts of discrimination in the workforce, from consistently lower wages to the way “they just use your mind and they never give you credit” to always being seen as overbearing in negotiations where a guy would be perceived as “strong.”

[Lady Sovereign, the British short white girl rapper, has another take on the "9 to 5" concept in which she falls asleep on the way to work and dreams she's forced to change her image by her record company, posing in scantily clad situations next to expensive cars. If I wasn't tired of computing from a first full day at a new job, I might compare the two.... but that's another post....]

Here in the virtual office, I’m also free to listen to music, not on headphones, which makes work about 10,000 times better right off the bat. I listen, and think about lying on the floor of my mom’s living room and listening to Dolly Parton when I was a kid, not really understanding the impact of her lyrics, many of which so beautifully focus on inequality of all types (poverty, relationships, etc). To listen now, the songs feel smaller. They seem quieter, the dated aspects of their production more prominent. But one thing remains loud and clear: this woman can write a song. “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors”… every “hit” on this greatest hits comp deserves to be there.

Take “I will always love you.” We know it because Whitney Houston made it a mega-hit in 1992, almost 20 years after Parton first recorded it. After I wrote about Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger and mentioned he had penned another hit that he didn’t record, Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” a friend of mine asked me if I thought the mark of a good song was chart-topping success, and I don’t… but I do think sometimes the mark of a chart-topping successful song is good writing.

Dolly wrote this as a country song, a quiet and wispy melodic statement of love that when she sings it comes across as sad, a mournful reflection complete with a plaintive “I love you” spoken during the instrumental interlude. Whitney made the song bigger — more dramatic, with big quiets and louds and the accent on “I” and “you”, not “love.” No matter what you think of Houston in general and this song (one of the most overplayed and best selling in recent cultural history), you gotta admit– the bones of the song are good. They’re as good as whatever is underneath the bizarre Barbie exterior of this tiny, powerful musician who started out wearing rags to school in the backwoods of Tennessee and became a pop culture icon, an Academy Award-nominated actress, a theme park topic (who by being so employed of her entire, struggling community), and a good ole time to listen to forever after.

Yes, she is bizarre and tacky at times. Yes, I don’t really understand all the plastic surgery, particularly mixed with the feisty feminist leanings. And yes, there are bloated instrumentations at times. But that’s Dolly. She can still make you cry with a frail run of her trembling-yet-steady voice, a simple plea from a rejected lover, or her sheer fucking can-do spirit.

So sing it, working girl. It’s time for happy hour.

Red Headed Stranger

Columbia, 1975

When I was ten years old, my father bought me a ¾-sized acoustic guitar and accompanying after-school lessons at a music shop downtown. At the first lesson, my teacher asked me what kinds of songs I wanted to learn. I barely remember the conversation, but I certainly remember what I answered: Willie Nelson. That’s what I, at ten years old, wanted to learn to play. And not just any Willie Nelson song—the first song I ever learned on guitar was “Bloody Mary Morning.” At the time I had no idea what a Bloody Mary was, but I knew that song from both my mom and my dad. My mom had at one point had to explain to me what “something stronger to start off the day” might be (hint: it’s liquor). But mostly I just liked the way it sounded: Pure. Guitar and a voice and a harmonica and a fingering and rhythm that was going to be really difficult to learn. Simple but smart, and simply good.

Soon after I started learning the fingerpicking pattern for Bloody Mary Morning, the guitar got pushed aside because I didn’t have time to do that and attend my intensive ballet lessons after school. [A quarter of a century later, and I am still playing guitar and wishing I had not stopped learning it formally. Ballet? Yeah, um, it’s been a while.] But my love of Willie persisted. I felt like with Willie, whether the cheesier songs or the more minimal ballads, you were getting more than a song. You were getting a story, a character, and an almost movie-like flood of images with every quiet strum of his guitar. My most-loved Willie albums are 1998’s Teatro and Red Headed Stranger, which both offer up a spare, lonesome sound infused with Western-influence guitar technique to haunting, cinematic effect.

Red Headed Stranger is a record that, like the song “Bloody Mary Morning,” I can’t recall ever encountering for the first time. It snuck in, somewhere back there: one of those works of art—like certain songs or fictional characters or cinematographic points of view—that have been in me since I became aware of knowing songs, or knowing the lyrics to those songs, or having taste in cultural things. Since forever. It’s also one of those records that I think is perfectly itself, beautifully realized and infinitely memorable—so much so that when I pick it to be the soundtrack to another suddenly sunny San Francisco morning, I’m a bit concerned I won’t have much to say about it.

Red Headed Stranger is a “concept” album that, at the time it was released (1975), revolutionized the country music world. It is minimal, spooky, and dark—yet still contains terrific country-style songs. In the 70s, Willie Nelson and his cohorts were earning the label “outlaw country” because they were making music that contradicted the more pop, produced sound that was coming out of Nashville. Willie became a superstar with this mega-selling record and even won a Grammy. So, you know. “Outlaw” is sort of relative here.

Back to the “concept” part of concept album. This can mean many things to many people; to me it means an album that is written and recorded and designed as a whole. It means it centers on one theme, or one story. One concept to connect it all. For me, the “concept” album’s dangers are that it can become bloated, overwrought, overstated. When it works, it works entirely. And Red Headed Stranger works.

Piano and guitar and Willie’s tenuous tremor of a voice are the overriding elements here. Close your eyes and you’re in a country opera… or more like a Western film.

Indeed, what Willie Nelson and his outlaw band did with this album was make a Western record while everyone else was busy concentrating on “Country.” And it is Western, with all the associations that term carries with it, whether of the “wild” or Hollywood variety or both: the open skies of Montana, the bizarre justice mores of the American West at the dawn of the twentieth century, hard and cruel white men riding around on horses unable to express their emotions except through acts of violence.

He found them that night in a tavern in town
in a quiet little out-of-the-way place.
And they smiled at each other as he walked through the door
And they died with their smiles on their faces.

The plot is pretty simple: preacher loves woman. She cheats on him. He kills her and the guy she’s now in love with, who was a past love she’d left behind when she came out West. (Which is sad for obvious reasons of killing people, but also because the new couple seems to be so happily in love.) So, that’s two relationships ruined and two people dead. Then the preacher is sad, too, and rides horses around the great West, sometimes killing people and ruining countless other lives and relationships in the process.

The central character is classic Western material: a formerly believing, ordered man who becomes, through a romantic betrayal and his violent reaction to it, a “stranger” to all, riding the “untamed” land on his beautiful horse with a new, trigger-happy persona masking his deep loneliness and grief. This is the type of frustrating but legendary macho/vulnerable murderer/hero that the Western genre is so good at giving us.

Is this a glamorizing ode to violence, including violence of the domestic variety and the violence brought to the land by the westward expansion of white folks? Totally. It is certainly that. Just like most Westerns.

Despite, or perhaps because of these issues, the Western has always felt sad to me—the myth of it being a sad facet of our culture, as well as the reality of it being sad for many regular, struggling people at the time who must have made the journey West, contributed to the genocide of another culture and the failure to realize the rewards upon which the whole mess was predicated. There were a lot of dreams placed on us out West here, and most of those dreams were false and/or broken for the large majority of the people involved.

And, just like Western films, this story of a violent and lonely man and his journey is only palatable to the audience because it is a tale of vulnerability as well as hardness. This is Montana, in “the year of ’01.” This is the typical hard-knocks mythical West, in which a man is allowed to kill a women who tries to steal his horse, but not really supposed to cry when his girlfriend breaks his heart. So why do we like this red headed murdering stranger so much?

Because he does cry:

He cried like a baby
He screamed like a panther in the middle of the night.
And he saddled his pony
and he went for a ride

And it’s because of the preacher’s sadness that Red Headed Stranger becomes not just a classic country album, but a classic Western album. This is thanks to Willie Nelson’s songwriting abilities. The songs, many of them ballads, are sad, and often flash the listener back to other, better times in the lives of the characters, times of unending love and courtship and unlimited possibilities. They do lyrically contribute to the cool myth of the lonesome cowboy, but mostly they are about loss.

Red Headed Stranger is also an ideal example of an album that is an album. Taken one at a time, the songs yield a couple hits – “Blue Eyes Cryin in the Rain,” for one, which Nelson didn’t write but was forever identified with because of his performance of it here —but they lose their narrative impact when split up. Many of them are only refrains, fragments of songs lined up in a cohesive order. As a record, from start to finish, there is a story being told here, a sound being developed from the minimal building of haunting chord fragments through to the final reprise. Take it and mix it up and throw it on an iPod, and it’s not the same. Also, without the particular medium of vinyl, you don’t get this (click to embiggen):

The entire back cover of the record jacket is a storyboard, an illustrated short-hand for the entire narrative of the album, drawn in cartoon style with excerpts from the lyrics. How cool is that?! An album complete with characters, scenes, dialogue, and a freakin’ storyboard. Willie Nelson made a Western movie for us, and he put it on wax.

Also:

I think most people know by now that Willie Nelson wrote the song Crazy, which was made iconic by Patsy Cline. If you didn’t know that… well, now you do. While we’re on the topic of super famous songs that were written by country songwriter icons, Dolly Parton wrote “I Will Always Love You,” the song with which Whitney Houston sold a gazillion records. So, “country” is also a bit of a myth. Mostly, good songwriting is good songwriting. Doesn’t matter which chart it tops.

Volume 2: Death Chants, Breakdowns, & Military Waltzes

Takoma, 1967

I love everything about this album.

The almost-fuzzy closeness of the lowest guitar tones, as recorded, in my speakers.

The T A K O M A  printed on the label.

The cover art and layout. The color orange.

The no words.

There are no words.

There is:

Constant underpinning of the bass note, thumbplucked (or plucked with whichever finger Fahey chooses; I think he has about 42). I don’t know how he recorded this, and I’m not going to look it up on the internet right now. I’m not going to read his famously poetic and rambly liner notes until after I write this.

There is something precise in the combination of the tuning, the playing, the room or the mix or the tape, that makes this record slide. I can hear the pieces of fingerskin hit the metal strings, it’s all so crisply voiced. Yet. It sounds blurry. No, not blurry – it sounds like how it feels to lie on the floor in an echoey room. Say that room is your room before you moved in your furniture, or after you’ve moved everything out and your life’s in the truck double parked outside.

If you were in that room and you were beginning or ending or transitioning, this is what it would sound like. You’d not have had lunch; potentially sore of muscle and slight of headache. There is nothing but sound in the room, the soundtrack to the experience you had here; or will have. In your closed eyes plays a film with actual film in the projector, the negative saying “flip-flip-flip-flip” at the end of the reel.

The next reel is the soundtrack to a few too many drinks and then a walk by yourself through landscapes, pick whichever landscape you want but it should be green –  new bushes blooming into roses in a suburban Northwest springtime, or dark moist smell of California redwoods when it’s hot everywhere else. The pumping assault of the Pacific Ocean wind on your lips and eyelids. There are movements here.

It’s not blurry; it sounds like the record is warped. I don’t think it is, though.

It lies flat; I lie flat out on the living room floor.

Wasn’t this what the 60s were about in some ways? The potential implied in a transition phase. the hope in new horizons eventually tempered by the in-between-apartments moment of actually moving from one context to another? From one place to another. With the one place still resonating, and the other place resonating on top of it, and there is John Fahey’s way of writing the history of the world in a widescreen opera for one instrument.

You’ll learn soon, listeners of the Internet, that I don’t really know anything about classical music. (I welcome recommendations; that’s the one area of popular music I haven’t yet deeply delved into.) But this is a work in movements, no? Song titles like “The Downfall of the Adelphi Rolling Grist Mill” and “America” speak to grand works, visions of historical folly, “folk” en masse–cinematic, epic works that are too bloated to get under your thumb but nonetheless do, and they’re “great.”

There is little wankery here, as you might expect there would be in solo guitar. It’s not hokey-folksy. It’s not even just the blues ripoff/evolution that Fahey often claimed it to be. It’s operatic. It’s Real American Classical Music, to me. I know Fahey thought in classical terms a lot, in terms of both structure and narrative style: a lot of Takoma’s notes on his songs and his own quoted quotes reference classical works by which he was influenced. Shit, he even brings  a flute in there a couple of times (which was unusual for him–usually it was all guitar, all night long).

Fahey on “Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Palace Of King Phillip XIV”:

“Another strange tuning – a low C, then two Cs an octave above that, then G, E, and a high C. I played it lap-style on a triple resonator National. I kept changing the title – originally it was Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Invisible City Of Bladensburg, inspired by Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Legend Of The Invisible City Of Kitezh.”

This is an opera for guitar and… guitar? Ridiculous! It’s folk music, popular culture tells me. It’s the 60s in Berkeley, this odd and brilliant guy who later had a big beard and wrote long liner-note opus poems and played guitar like a genius who’s maybe done a bit of acid. That’s what I’m often told John Fahey is. That’s what I often tell others when introducing them to his music. But that’s not what I hear.

I hear death chants, military waltzes, and breakdowns. I hear boys in broken boots marching, the comical dressing room antics of the scene in which the power doesn’t hear the swelling verses of the times outside. I hear us still doing this. I hear prodigious talent, sure, I hear the remarkable era that produced this, but I also hear the reality of its not really being all that unique, as eras go. (Every generation thinks it’s the One, no?) There’s a million ways I can describe this music but mostly there’s just this: sweet simplicity.

Drawing the true sound from one thing, and being happy exploring that until it’s done.

And it’s never done.

Also:
Sometime, maybe, I’ll do a side-by-side listening of the original 1964 issue of Death Chants…. with the 1967 and the 1998 issues. The one I talk about here, “Volume 2”, was a reissue/rerecording done in 1967 because of the outstanding popularity of the first. And because Fahey never plays the same song twice. There have been a lot of Death Chants.

And:
Record collectors: My pressing of this album has “Side A” mislabeled as “Side B” and vice versa. Or maybe it’s the album sleeve that’s wrong; either way, they don’t correspond. Is that a known thing about this pressing?