Every Record I Own: Vampire Weekend, Modern Vampires of the City

I’d be hard-pressed to identify a band I was more predisposed to dislike than Vampire Weekend.

When their debut album came out, I was a sophomore in college in a jazz-wonk phase, so I was basically ignoring anything that didn’t come out between 1949 and 1980. By the time their sophomore record, Contra, came out, I’d taken an ethnomusicology class and subsequently investigated Fela Kuti, Ali Farka Touré, Oliver Mtukudzi, S.E. Rogie, and the Indestructible Beat of Soweto compilations. Shockingly, I was a snob about my interest in African music, and positioned myself diametrically against a bunch of Ivy League dorks in boat shoes playing what I felt was plastic, “African Music for Dummies”-grade indie pop.

I’ve since come around on both boat shoes — they’re comfortable and easy to slip on and off! — and Vampire Weekend. Regardless of whichever clearly mannered approach they’re taking at the moment, the thing that stays constant for ol’ Vampy Weeks is an unerring commitment to melody, song structure, and production. And as much as I can dislike the band’s frontman and chief content officer Ezra Koenig for:

1. Being a too-clever-by-half schemer who …

   • Had a rap group called fucking L’Homme Run

   • Explicitly positioned early Vampire Weekend as being the anti-Strokes, saying in Meet Me in the Bathroom that they purposefully featured no distorted guitars and dressed like moneyed Martha’s Vineyard dipshits to place themselves as far from 2000s rock revival aesthetically as they could. Make whatever music you want to make, but do it out of love, not preternatural industry canniness.

   • has a podcast called Time Crisis, when “Tekken Tag Tournament” would make a much better name for a podcast

   • went to NYU

2. Roughly 110% of his aesthetic.

… I sure can’t argue with his songwriting. While Rostam Batmanglij was the band’s not-so-secret weapon for three records (for not just his writing, but his arrangements and production) — and the rest of the guys are generally rippin’ players and seem nice — the group’s 2019 album Father of the Bride proved that Koenig doesn’t need him in the same way that, say, Robbie Robertson needed the rest of the Band.

ANYWAY: I loved this record when it came out. It sprawls, but mostly maintains a commendable concision and control. There are hooks; there are ~vibes.~ All this, despite providing me with, at virtually every turn, some new contrivance I viscerally disliked.

Exhibit A: The title of this record is a reference to a 1990 song by Jamaican dancehall artist Junior Reid called "One Blood." While I don’t doubt Koenig sincerely likes whatever he’s referencing, it’s that even — as on this record — when he stops mining not-white folks for sonic touches, he can’t seem to stop himself from doing so for window dressing. (Don’t worry, he went back to it for Father of the Bride, sampling Melanesian choirs and “palmwine” guitarist S.E. Rogie.)

And don’t title your album with a word that’s also in your band name. There should be a law.

Exhibit B: “Obvious Bicycle,” which, despite being a fairly straightforward chamber pop song, contains a sample of “Keep Cool Babylon“ by Ras Michael & The Sons of Negus.

Why was this sample — which seems to be a tiny snippet of percussion and maybe some manipulated vocals — necessary? Surely the band had access to a shaker or a synth patch at some point during this album’s lengthy and well-documented recording process. So unless they wanted to kick Michael — who is still alive — some royalties, it seems to me like they picked a nearly inscrutable, purposefully arcane sound for the sole purpose of saying they did so.

I still love this song, though: It’s a wonderful introduction to the album and showcases Koenig’s effortless swoops and dives throughout the entire range of his voice. There’s also the wonderfully evocative lyric “I’ll be half-asleep on the floor of a high school gym” to remind one of the lock-ins of days gone by (YMMV).

If you’ve read more than one of these — and if so, thanks! I’m a lot to deal with! — you know I’m a sequencing wonk. Spotify and Soundcloud essentially killed the idea of The Purposefully Sequenced Album dead in the Aught-Tens, but this album is a great example of why such an approach works. To wit: “Obvious Bicycle” is a relatively hushed, tentative start before “Unbelievers” kicks things up a notch.

The song, meanwhile, is a beautiful example of progressive dynamics and arrangement. Its structure cycles through a verse, pre-chorus, chorus progression, before a maximalist bridge that sounds like Aaron Copeland arranging a whaling shanty for synths. (The chorus line “I know I love you, and you love the sea” was Written for Me™.) Then it drops back to a quiet version of the chorus before wrapping things up in a semi-tight 3:22. VW can tend to run at the mouth — in lyrics and everything else — but “Unbelievers” is them at their most focused.

“Step” was one of the singles released from MVotC, which makes sense. It’s got a lovely, hushed sense of melancholy that’s juxtaposed with the semi-ridiculous —from this band, anyway — chorus “Every time I see you in the world, you always step to my girl,” set against twinkling keys.

That said, it’s also grating for the exact same reason as “Obvious Bicycle.” Per Genius:

Koenig was interested in using the chorus and melody to Souls of Mischief’s “Step To Your Girl.” He later learned that the melody was sampled from Grover Washington’s “Aubrey,” which itself was a cover of Bread’s “Aubrey.”

The line in “Step To My Girl”’s chorus was also borrowed from YZ’s “Who’s That Girl …”

Not only does this sort-of contradict Batmanglij’s assertion — again from Genius — that “Obvious Bicycle” contains the only sample on the record, it’s another example of how goddamn precious Koenig is about holding onto his too-niche-by-half references. If you discover the hook you’re trying to parrot is itself a parrot, maybe just … write a new hook? Or change it to the point where you don’t have to jump through 12 extra-musical hoops to preserve your woefully esoteric talking points.

Sonically, anyway, the track is lovely: The vocals on the chorus were recorded using the built-in mic on Batmanglij’s MacBook — leaving background noise like a subway train going by intact — and the drum track is a mix of live drums and tape-manipulated sounds. Koenig’s vocals get fed through an Eventide at one point, an interesting and welcome texture.

Of course, we have to get to the lyrics, which are Peak Vampy Weeks. As you may have gleaned, Koenig is A Lot, which to his credit, he seems to know. Here, his beloved geographical name-drops are largely front-loaded in a maximalist first verse, which includes:

1. Angkor Wat

2. Mechanicsburg

3. Anchorage

4. Dar es Salaam

5. New York

6. L.A.

7. San Francisco

8. Oakland

9. Alameda

10. Berkeley

That’s all before he gets into the shit from antiquity — there are lines that reference Kings Croesus and Solomon — and a few lines that may reference Jandek but definitely reference Modest Mouse and Run-DMC. There’s a perverse sense of stubborn doubling-down here — “Oh, you thought our first two records were dense? Check this shit out.” — but it is exhausting.

My favorite thing about “Diane Young” is the fact that the band bought two Saabs to burn for the above video — the song’s opening line being “You torched a Saab like a pile of leaves”) and their former owners were apparently cheesed off that the band bought the cars just to destroy them.

(For the unaware, there’s quite the cult around Saabs. The whole thing got funnier when Koenig’s response to the accusations was that Rostam’s family had a Saab growing up — so this was done in love, you understand — and that “Hopefully, people believe me when I say that our record label was trying to purchase the cheapest, oldest cars possible... From what I understand those old ones actually had a lot of electrical problems.")

Anyway, “Diane Young,” to my mind at least, is the best expression of the tension between the band’s conventional, poppy songwriting and the modern, glaringly digital production touches that dot MVotC. There’s a lot of glitchy, CD-skippy noises in the background of this song, pitch-shifted vocals, and a pretty processed drum sound — with a bunch of snare rolls that seem to be purposefully emulating a drum machine — that jostle with stuff like a baritone sax (played by Landlady’s Adam Schatz). The whole bridge kind of sounds like a Speak ‘n’ Spell having a seizure, which I am in favor of.

Also, this was featured in the 2013 Carrie reboot, which is just hilarious to me.

“Don’t Lie” — according to a Reddit AMA, bassist Chris Baio’s favorite song on the album — has the same kind of cool faux-sampled treatment on the drums. I love when the stutter-step verse rhythm drops into the pre-chorus — it’s just a great change in feel.

I have this not-particularly groundbreaking theory that 90% of VW’s thing is traceable to The Royal Tenenbaums. There’s the fashion, the Upper Manhattan Intellectual sensibilities, and Rostam’s love of harpsichords and strings, evidenced on the chorus of this song and the debut record’s “M79.” Musically at least, the biggest arrow in that particular argument’s quiver is Mark Mothersbaugh’s version of “Hey Jude” from the film; the through-line from his arrangement to Rostam’s favored touches seems pretty obvious.

One of the most well-liked bits of film criticism I ever did happened to be on Twitter, and it was about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (It got 11 likes and one retweet. I am not popular on Twitter.)

I was thinking about this film in context of what Gondry went on to do and I feel like the combined melancholy of Charlie Kaufman and Jim Carrey balance Gondry's whimsy in a way that "Science of Sleep" and "Be Kind Rewind" could have used desperately

— Skip James Patterson (@alex_heigl) August 22, 2020

Now, other than a gratuitous plug for my ability to semi-insightfully expound on an already-endlessly-discussed film, I bring this up because “Hannah Hunt” fulfills a similar function on this record.

The song is chockablock with the typical VW hallmarks of specifically-named women — in this case, Hannah Hunt was a girl that Koenig sat next to in a Buddhism class in college, because of fucking course she was — and locales such as Providence, Phoenix, Waverly, and Lincoln.

(Those last two are a fun example of how ridiculous the discussion around this band gets on Genius. They are believed to be either Waverly and Lincoln, Nebraska or Waverley and Lincoln, two stops on the Boston-Fitchburg MBTA commuter rail. The lyrics sheet for MVotC spells it “Waverly” which seems to make that definitive — though it hasn’t stopped the arguing — and obviously neither have any impact on the song.)

There’s a subdued — dare I say “autumnal” — melancholy to “Hannah Hunt” that even its more whimsical touches — what sounds like an overdubbed fretless or upright bass moaning through the right channel over the “regular” bass line — can’t overpower.

“Hannah Hunt” has these resolutely downbeat verses, in which textures are periodically added and subtracted to vary the arrangement and Koenig sings in his lower register. Then, it blooms to its fullest “form” — with a new drumbeat, added keys and other layers, including a rocketing vocal leap — over halfway through the song. That part of the song vanishes as quickly as it arrived and the whole thing downshifts again for the 40-second outro. Great stuff.

Taking a look at the Spotify numbers for this record makes me realize:

a) today’s listeners have absolutely zero attention span; you can see how the number of listens for songs drop off as the album progresses

b) some of the songs I like best on this album are not particularly well-loved by others

“Everlasting Arms”is, apparently, one of those. Starting a block of overtly religious songs, it’s a riff on the 1887 hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” — also referenced by R. Kelly on “I Believe I Can Fly,” so, uh, there’s that — and includes a call-out to “Dies Irae,” a super-old Latin text originally set to music in a Gregorian chant.

These are interesting — and notably, Christian — references to make in a song where Koenig, who was raised Jewish, is openly grappling with his relationship with God. The first verse’s lines “I took your counsel and came to ruin / Leave me to myself, leave me to myself,” when coupled with the pre-chorus — “Oh, I was made to live without you /But I’m never gonna understand, never understand” delineate this struggle.

The second verse’s line, ”I thought it over and drew the curtain / Lead me to my cell, lead me to my cell” could suggest that he shut the proverbial door on his faith but is ready to return with a renewed focus on it. (I’m reading “cell” in the monkish/religious hermit/original-definition-of-“cenobite” sense.)

There’s also line that seems to reference Koenig’s struggle with the life-changing success of the band’s debut: “Looked up full of fear, trapped beneath the chandelier” — you will perhaps remember that VW’s first record’s cover was a shot of a chandelier above some partygoers’ heads.

Sonically, the song represents a downshift in the record’s flow following “Hannah Hunt:” It stays in one fairly downbeat setting for its duration, bolstered by more pitch-shifted vocals and some Mellotron strings.

Weakest tune on the record, for my money. The sing-songy vocal melody and herky-jerk rhythms hearken back to the more grating aspects of the band’s early phase. That’s even before it awkwardly slams to a halt for one of the most irritating moments on MVotC. It’s a spoken-word interlude in which Koenig makes what I assume he thought was a very clever double-entendre out of the Passover seder’s closing cry for the Messiah — “Next year in Jerusalem” — and a falafel place near Columbia University. (Vampire Weekend went to Columbia *voice drips with sarcastic bile* — did you know that?)

The proprietors of the falafel shop were interviewed about this song and perhaps unsurprisingly, they were not fans.

Oh, cool bass work from Baio — who yes, is first cousin once-removed of actor and shitty Trump chud Scott Baio — though. Moving on.

We’ve established that Koenig is a hip-hop nerd, and I think “Worship You” is his “Bombs Over Baghdad.” Sure, he’s not exactly dropping Kendrick-level bars, but this song is 147 beats per minute — and “B.O.B.,” for reference, is 160 bpm — so I’m gonna give him this one.

“Red right hand” is, sadly, not a Nick Cave nod. Cave was referencing Milton with his song of the same name, and while I wouldn’t put it past Koenig to pull some kind of counterintuitive “actually, I’m a huge Nick Cave fan” nonsense, this song strikes me as a thematic partner to “Everlasting Arms.” It is About Religion and ratchets up that tune’s intensity by working primarily in the second-person tense. (Which, bold — a Jewish man addressing the Lord so familiarly in a secular song would be Puritan-murdered in Koenig’s adored New England a few centuries back.)

Incidentally, what a ridiculous guitar solo popping in at 1:46. I have zero idea what combination of pedals, amps and processing is producing that noise, but it’s far and away the most interesting guitar moment on the record. VW is one of the least guitar-heroic bands of their cohort: Despite leaning into Graceland-style guitars early on, they’re basically just textural on this record minus this track. By Father of the Bride, they were leaning back into the instrument, at one point posting a two-hour loop of just the opening guitars to “Harmony Hall,” which I have to admit I love.)

We’re deep into the religious zone of the record now. “Ya Hey” is a blasphemy-avoiding pun on “Yahweh” (see the “You won’t even say your name” lyric). The alternating chant of “ut Deo” is, more or less, its Latin equivalent. Also, Zion, Babylon.

(Side note: Cool bass tone on this one.)

(Side note 2: I deeply wish the “through the fire and through the flames” was a Dragonforce reference, but I doubt it.)

The “chipmunk” pitch-shifted vocals are … a choice. I don’t necessarily think they’re song-ruining or especially chafing, given how much we’ve heard of the same approach earlier in the record, but they’re a divisive touch amid VW fans online, and I get it.

Similarly, I’m not as put off by the second of this album’s spoken-word interludes, which occurs at 3:37, mostly because the song doesn’t make the same space for it as in “Finger Back.” While I would castigate a freshman using “my soul swooned” in any writing class I held dominion over, I do agree that if I heard someone spinning “Israelites” into “19th Nervous Breakdown,” I would take notice.

Ultimately, at 5:12 — the longest song on the record — my biggest knock against “Ya Hey” is its length. The arrangement swells and contrast with plenty of different textures, but its draggy tempo and the plodding four-on-the-floor stomp for most of its runtime is a bad combo.

Also, there’s a fucking choir at the end, just in case you missed the fact that the band was Grappling with Religion on this record.

There’s something perversely admirable about “Hudson,” the record’s second-longest song and the least-played of its tracks on Spotify. Genius tells us it’s based on an old poem of Koenig’s touching on colonialism and the Upper East Side, and I’m just gonna avoid dealing with any of that.

Also via Genius, VW drummer Chris Tomson had “a huge part” in “Hudson,” which would make this the perfect place to make a Ringo joke. I am, however, above that, and will instead note how much I enjoy the major-chord turnaround at the end of the chorus.

The song’s instrumental middle-eight is a very pretty arrangement — which I assume was Rostam’s doing — that sounds like something that would underscore a pivotal scene in a Wes Anderson movie. (It may just remind me of the section of Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom” scored to Benjamin Britten’s “The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.”)

I actually liked this pleasing little thumbnail sketch of an album closer much better before I read, again on Genius, that Rostam wrote the tune …

about a real-life June 2009 encounter that lyricist Ezra Koenig had “with an older Rasta at Dunkin’ Donuts,” a random stranger who stopped him while he was walking to the Brooklyn studio during the final weeks of recording “Contra“ and said to him: “You take your time, young lion.”

This annoys me in a way that’s vastly out of proportion with its actual space on the album. I’m definitely projecting here, but doesn’t Koenig just seem like the kind of guy who would bound into the studio all psyched about a chance interaction with a Rastafarian who delivered an eerily apposite gnostic pronunciation to him, in a fucking Dunkin’ Donuts, no less? Given that it’s a Rostam tune, I suppose I have to give Koenig credit for not making this supposed encounter the centerpiece of another song — one which would presumably juxtapose Evelyn Waugh with Haile Selassie or some shit — but doesn’t the anecdote seem, in the words of Hannibal Lecter, “like the elaborations of a bad liar?”

Also Rastafarians call everyone “lion.” That’s their thing! My actual theory? Koenig tried to cut in front of him in line and the guy was delivering a warning.

Final Thoughts

I’m no longer on this band’s train. I am aware that Father of the Bride was a pretty, pretty, pretty good record, but for whatever reason, I just didn’t flip over it the same way I did this one.

(I may have just been red-assed they ganked the Melanesian choral portion of the Thin Red Line soundtrack — which I used to listen to every time I was on psychedelics, despite falling asleep the only time I tried to actually watch the film — for "Hold You Now.”)

(“Harmony Hall” fucking bangs though.)

Why does little else of VW’s work resonates with me as much as this record? I’m pretty sure it all comes down to Projection 101. Koenig and co. are too clever, too wordy, too solipsistic, too reference-heavy, too interested culture-vulture-y. They make choices that I end up conceding, begrudgingly, are interesting ones, and the music is always eminently listenable. But I remain that preternaturally curmudgeonly snob who finds his own niche references preferable above all else.

After all, “Battle not with middle-class white intellectuals, lest ye become one, and if you gaze into Vampy Weeks, Vampy Weeks gazes also into you.”

— Hans Gruber, Die Hard.

Every Record I Own: Johnny Cash, Mean As Hell

Unpacking Johnny Cash post-”Hurt” is a tricky concept. The prevailing narrative around Cash’s Rick Rubin-produced late-career records (recorded from 1993 to 2002) is that Rubin rescued him from a personal and professional nadir. This was precipitated by years of drug addiction (Cash had entered rehab most recently in 1992) and an ill-fated attempt at repeating the success of his “funny” songs like “A Boy Named Sue” and “One Piece at a Time” with one of his worst songs, “The Chicken in Black,” a song about Cash’s brain going into a chicken and Cash getting a bank robber’s brain.

So Rubin gets Cash to record a bunch of stripped-down songs, a lot of them covers by contemporary artists, and — along with the impeccable art direction of the American series packaging, which relied on Martyn Atkins’ stark photography — the resulting series of records restored Cash’s gravitas, cemented his status as elder statesman and ushered in a new template for the late-career renaissance of an aging icon. The highlight of the American series is, of course, Cash’s devastating take on the Nine Inch Nails heroin ballad “Hurt,” which has become the chief entry in the ever-popular listicle, “TK Cover Versions that Are Better Than the Original.” The eerie Mark Romanek video was many Millennials’ introduction to Cash, and NIN mastermind Trent Reznor went on to say that “Hurt” “wasn’t his anymore.”

Anyway, all of this is to say that to approach Cash from a post-”Hurt” vantage point critically is to cut through a swath of dense associations and narratives, all of which have this super-serious sepia tint to them that threatens to obscure one primary facet of Cash’s career, which is that he was a messy bitch who lived for drama.

I’m using obvious hyperbole here to prove a point, which is that, even before Cash was intoning shit like “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” and claiming that the dogs on the American Recordings album cover stood for “sin and redemption,” his career had a theatrical, melodramatic flair that could tip into the hokey. Of course, two things can be true at the same time, and in this instance, it can be true that Cash both loved a good story and was an authentic-ass Real American Man.

So: Mean As Hell. This album is actually a truncated version of Johnny Cash Sings the Ballads of the True West, a double LP released in 1965 that featured songs linked by Cash’s narration and their thematic focus on the American Old West. Mean As Hell was released as a single LP the following year and featured a trimmed-down tracklist that excised much of the narration.

We can probably safely infer that Cash was taking this shit extremely seriously, given the fact that in 1965 and ‘66, America was knee-deep in the British Invasion, Marty Robbins was six years past “El Paso,” and one of the biggest country records of the year was Chet Atkins Picks the Beatles. “Country Rock,” as exemplified by the Band, was at least two years out, A Fistful of Dollars was just about to break the spaghetti Western in America — the point I’m trying to get at here is that had Cash not been passionate about these songs and the mythological American West they occupy, they probably wouldn’t have made it to record, given their status as outliers in the prevailing music industry trends of the time.

Mean As Hell opens with “The Shifting Whispering Sands, Pt. 1,” which is a ridiculous song, as it turns out. The song was written in 1950 as a poem and by the time Cash got to it in 1965, had already been recorded by Billy Vaughn (with narration by Beat icon Ken Nordine) and Rusty Draper. Cash’s version hews pretty closely to Vaughn’s version.

Here’s the thing, though: I have no goddamn idea what this song is supposed to be about. Ostensibly, it’s narrated by a gold prospector who wanders in a dry valley, surrounded by death and the titular sands. But there’s a degree of narrative ambiguity to the song; the lyrics freely admit that the prospector has no idea how he escaped the valley, only that “to pay my final debt for being spared / I must tell you what I learned out there on the desert.”

There’s a Stephen King short story called “Beachworld” that’s about a group of astronauts who crash-land onto a sandy planet and gradually realize the sand is not as it seems. I would dearly like to believe that King was inspired to write “Beachworld” by the vaguely sinister implication of “The Shifting, Whispering Sands” that the sand in this valley is somehow alive and hungry for human flesh, and that the narrator has been spared from a grisly fate out in the desert by the sand and returned to civilization to lure others to a similar doom. Anyway, I’ve tweeted at him about it. Thank you for coming to my TEDTalk.

Despite my love for Cormac McCarthy, I’ve never gotten with horses. Horseback riding, in central Pennsylvania at least, was an upper-middle-class affectation that made zero sense to me, and my scorn for it was abetted by the fact that horses freak me out, what with their horrifying screams, big weird faces and teeth and also this nightmarish drawing of a horse wearing one high-heel that Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark embedded in my subconscious when I was 5.

Anyway, “I Ride an Old Paint” does nothing to abet the vaguely sinister air established by the possibly sentient sands of the first track. There’s a definite trope in post-millennium horror films of using overly-syrupy songs from the ‘50s and ‘60s incongruously next to shocking or graphic imagery. But it’s a real chicken-or-the-egg question: Is there something subconsciously sinister in the cloying string arrangement juxtaposed with Cash’s echo-laden baritone, or is just the fact that the song is literally about a man requesting that his bones be tied to his horse’s saddle after his death so they can continue to ride together?

If Cash’s greasepaint facial hair on the album cover didn’t convince you of his theatrical bent, perhaps “The Road to Kaintuck” will. Relying on the thorny concept of Kentucky as “the dark and bloody ground,” this is one of the Cash originals on the record, chalked up as a co-write between he and wife June Carter. It’s actually one of my least favorite songs on the record, despite the presence of reliable Cash foils The Statler Brothers on backing vocals, partially because it relies on what I like to call the Robbie Robertson School of Anachronistic Songwriting, in which a series of old-timey namedrops and references — in this case, Daniel Boone, Michael Stoner and Moccasin Gap — takes the place of any coherent characterization or narrative.

“I asked Mother Maybelle Carter one night to write me a Western song for this album,” Cash writes on the Mean As Hell sleeve. “The next morning she gave me this. Since the Bible on the plains was as uncommon as a letter from home, many cowboys called it that.”

Far be it from me to call Cash a liar, but I can’t find anything to back this up. The anecdote is, however, illustrative of the hilarious tenor of the writing on the Mean As Hell sleeve, which includes Cash’s claims that he prepared for this record by “[sleeping] under mesquite bushes and in gullies … [sitting] for hours beneath a manzanita bush in an ancient Indian burial ground and [breathing] the west wind and [hearing] the tales it tells only to those who listen.” He adds that he “ate mesquite beans and squeezed the water from a barrel cactus,” “learned to throw a bowie knife and kill a jack rabbit at 40 yards” and “was saved once by a forest ranger, lying flat on my face, starving.”

Anyway, that’s obviously all bullshit. Cash recorded or released seven albums between 1964 and 1966. While the notorious California wildfire incident occurred in 1965 and at least one article does mention that he liked to take off into the wilderness near Maricopa, CA for fishing trips/drinking binges, I can’t find anything to support the notion that he took months during this hectic schedule — which presumably also included live performances, TV appearances and arrests — to nearly die in the Western scrublands while learning how to kill a rabbit with a knife from 40 yards out. Myth-making in action!

“Mean as Hell” is, um … bad? It’s sort of a halfway point between the rest of the record’s actual songs and the spoken-word stuff that’s included on the True West double album. But there’s no melody to this song, with basically just Cash’s guitar as backing, and it doesn’t even succeed as prose. Opening with the fairly promising conceit that basically posits God and the Devil made a bargain to establish a new Hell around the Rio Grande, it devolves into poop jokes about Mexican cuisine and manages to fit both the death of a horse and a calf into the last 30 seconds. It’s hard to fuck up a song that takes “Texas blows” as its main premise, but hey, kids, drugs are bad.

“25 Minutes to Go,” by contrast, is everything that’s great about vintage Cash in a tight three minutes. It’s also written by beloved children’s author Shel Silverstein, who would also provide Cash with a hit in the much more popular “A Boy Named Sue.” Cash wasn’t the first artist to cover “25 Minutes” on record; that honor belongs to the Brothers Four, who released a version in 1962. (Silverstein put out his own version on his Inside Folk Songs, which also came out in ‘62.) Unfortunately for this record, Cash’s wildcat version on Live at Folsom Prison is the definitive one; his delivery is more unhinged, and the crowd is feeling it. The perversity of a guy who’d never been to prison singing a song about an imminent hanging written by a guy who’d never even been arrested to a crowd of prisoners… that’s just *chef’s kiss.*

Cash says he got this song from Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, which I love, because it’s one entirely self-invented cowboy sharing songs with another. It’s got an agreeable sort of amble as it proceeds, and the big refrains have both the Carter Family and the Statler Brothers joining Cash, an approach that reminds me of nothing so much as a lo-fi version of the stomp-clap “HEY”-folk microgenre practiced by the Lumineers and their ilk. (I mean that as a compliment.)

Cash also really bites into his dialogue here, most of which he wrote himself — his asides about the President and First Lady’s nicknames for each other always make me chuckle. Ol’ JR could always put a lackluster arrangement over by the sheer force of his charm, and this song is a great example of that.

Just a perfect, depressing little Old West tale. These tight, economical song-stories from this era of country music should be taught as literature. The way the chorus changes as the story progresses and of course the gut-punch closing verse … it’s like Charles Portis. Truly an underrated Cash deep cut in my opinion. (The overly-bright tack piano, though, is the one element of the song I take issue with, though I suppose it does leaven the crying-in-your-beer overall mood .)

This song is a great case study. Sad-cowboy warhorse “The Streets of Laredo” is an old song. I mentioned earlier how you can use Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs to contextualize Mean as Hell/True West, because the Robbins record, which came out in 1959 — a year after Cash had his first big post-Sun Records hit with “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” on Columbia — was a huge hit. It was certified gold in 1965, the same year Cash recorded this record. And Robbins’ follow-up, More Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, which came out in 1960, had a version of “Streets of Laredo.”

Cash and Robbins were linked by more than just genre and label (here they are duetting on this very song in 1969). Cash writes on the Mean as Hell sleeve that the idea of an album of Western songs was pitched to him by Columbia producer Don Law in 1961-2. And guess who produced both Gunfighter Ballads albums for Robbins? Don Law, baby! If the music industry knows one thing, it’s how to milk a concept.

As I mentioned before, Cash covered “Streets of Laredo” on American IV (the one with “Hurt”) and it’s instructive to listen to the two versions back-to-back.

This is one of the troubles of dealing with late-period Cash: The narrative surrounding these albums, and particularly IV, the last one released during his lifetime, is impossible to separate from the actual sound. Do I like the sparser instrumentation of the American version of this song, even though Cash’s voice (hitting some truly impressive low notes) is unquestionably in better shape on the 1965 version? Or am I just so conditioned to equate the latter version with unimpeachable authenticity and fraught, end-of-life emotional heft? Hard to say.

I don’t like this song, so I’m going to talk about the idea of the Old “Wild” West and Frontier America that Cash is mining on this record.

British historian David Hamilton Murdoch’s The American West: The Invention Of A Myth posits that “The Wild West” as a pop culture construct dates back to the turn of the century, when America, with the frontier closed and settled, was still trying to figure out what it meant to be an American. Aided by mass media (newspapers, dime novels, touring shows, movies, even paintings and illustrations), the American Frontier/West became “The Wild West,” and the stories that cropped up about it passed from fact into idealized myths that quickly became foundational to the national character.

For Cash, who was born in 1932, his window out of rural Arkansas as a boy was the radio, and there were a large number of narrative radio Westerns he could have been hearing at that time. Then, Cash went into the Air Force in 1950, at which point Hollywood was moving into the Golden Age of its Western-dominated era, with foundational genre classics like Broken Arrow (1950), High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), Wichita (1955), The Searchers (1956), and Rio Bravo (1959), all films Cash could have seen at one point, either while serving, or after he settled in Memphis. And he was a touring musician by the time television like Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, Rawhide and Bonanza were going strong in the late ‘50s, which means he probably saw a good bit of Western TV in hotel rooms.

Cash was born too late to experience anything of the actual Old West; his entire concept of it came from a concerted, decades-long, cross-medium mutation of history into drama and drama into myth. With this record, Cash steps into the lineage of people like John Ford and every nameless dimestore novel scribe who wrote breathlessly about Wyatt Earp. And if there was anyone prepared to be fully, “authentically” immersed in an exaggerated myth, it was Johnny Cash.

I’m sorry, I can’t take this shit seriously. It’s where the schtick curdles the most for me, and it’s definitely not helped by the guys who are doing the “stampede!” backing vocals, who are either wasted or purposefully fucking up the whole thing. I can’t listen to them all trip over each other to yell “Stampede!” with all the vigor of men who have been at this shit for eight hours and just want to go home without laughing. Good Western Death™ in there, though; I give it an A-.

So, another one Cash revisited for the American series — this time, on the first record. It’s not really a fair comparison, though, as the version on this record is much more of an actual Song, whereas the American version is a long, mostly-spoken version that incorporates the entirety of Badger Clark’s famous “A Cowboy’s Prayer” as an introduction. Clark was an interesting figure: He was South Dakota’s first poet laureate and lived alone for years in a cabin with no electricity, running water, or telephone, on land that is now a state park. In other words, he was the real deal in a way that Cash was not. Cash would have presumably been aware of the poem after a life lived in country music; even Sarah Palin has name-checked it.

But it’s fitting that we close the record here, with these two versions. Older, wiser, Cash omitted most of the original song’s sad-bastard lyrics in favor of a hopeful poem about finding beauty in the natural world. (And again, this is a man who burned down several hundred acres of California forest the year True West was recorded.)

I thank You, Lord, that I am placed so well / That You have made my freedom so complete

That I’m no slave of whistle, clock or bell / Nor weak-eyed prisoner of wall and street

Cash sounds genuinely humbled, genuinely grateful as he’s intoning those words. After spending this long meditating on the invented Johnny Cash and the invented American West, it’s truly wonderful to hear him at his most sincere, reciting a piece of poetry that came from the real place he’d spent so much time working in a fictionalized shadow of.

I know that others find You in the light / That’s sifted down through tinted window panes

And yet I seem to feel You near tonight / In this dim, quiet starlight on the plains

I love hearing this line about the divinity of nature from him. The two versions of this song are odd siblings: One appeared the same year Cash, high on fame and pills, literally destroyed a swath of the natural world; the other arrived near the end of his life, when he was newly sober, humbled. In this instance, Cash the myth, Cash the man and the invented Old West he spent so long mining for stories and songs finally fall into alignment.

Every Record I Own: Rites of Spring, S/T

Provenance: Human Head Records

I’ve got a weird relationship with DC hardcore and the whole “Revolution Summer” thing. I got into Minor Threat in high school, just like everyone else, eventually branching out into Embrace and then Fugazi, but I mostly missed Rites of Spring as a Youth. (I’m not sure why. I think I stalled out at Fugazi, who basically blew my mind and are still on my shortlist of The Greatest American Bands.)

As much as I dig solipsism and introspection, there’s a part of me that shies like a spooked horse at something like Rites of Spring’s debut, the aural equivalent of a raw nerve. Black metal, death metal don’t scare me, but Rites of Spring scares me. Maybe I’m just afraid of remembering being the kind of person who might have made music in this vein and placed their emotions so nakedly on display without the remove of years of internet-honed irony.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? Guy Picciotto — first name Greatest, last name Unibrow Ever — was barely 19 years old when Rites of Spring recorded this album. Nineteen! And it’s funny to me that, with literal decades of doing this shit ahead of him, he was already as concerned with looking back as inwards, singing shit like, “I woke up this morning / with a piece of past caught in my throat / and I choked.” The world is controlled by the old, but it belongs to the young, even if they’re as preternaturally emotionally wizened as Picciotto. I don’t think a work like Rites of Spring is even supposed to resonate with a 33-year-old except as a reminder of what it was like to be 19. It’s a musical snapshot of a feeling; a feeling that ages like a Polaroid in reverse — the colors get less intense the longer it’s out in the world.

Whew, okay, that got a little heavy. Onto the music!

(Quick necessary aside for anyone not invested in the particulars of D.C. punk rock: Ian MacKaye was in foundational hardcore punk band Minor Threat and started the now-legendary independent record label Dischord. He, Picciotto, and RoS drummer Brendan Canty would go on to form Fugazi; during the in-between, they were all in like, 16 other bands.)

Rites of Spring’s opener is more or less its whole thesis statement. The song is called “Spring,” and the lyrics…

“Caught in time so far away
From where our hearts really wanted to be
Reaching out to find a way
To get back to where we'd been
And if summer left you dry
With nothing left to try”

… quickly map out all the classic “emo” signifiers: Time, hearts, summer. (I know Picciotto and MacKaye have both talked about how much they hate that word and their reputation as godfathers of the movement; sorry to these men.)

I tar the British music pretty heavily as being unduly obsessed with class, but as someone who’s also too focused on the socioeconomic side of music, there’s something a little precious about the relentless navel-gazing of the Revolution Summer bands. Of course, that’s just what young people, especially white-collar and urbane young people, do. But there is an element of idleness — and not just because one of Ian MacKaye’s bands was called The Teen Idles — to their solipsism. I realize that’s pretty unfair of me — you could never accuse Picciotto of being anything less than a truly progressive individual — but as opposed to a band like Black Flag, whose music is so relentlessly grimy and street-level, Rites of Spring seem … removed from those concerns. Making rent is not an issue to them; “[building] a wall around these hearts and hands” is.

Canty was also around 19 when he played on Rites of Spring, and he’d only been playing drums for four years. But I think this album is as much his as it is Picciotto’s: He’s already basically got his Fugazi style — minus the dub/reggae touches — pretty much in place. There’s a great snare roll that intros the song, I hear some John Bonham-style fills … (According to this great interview, Fugazi bassist Joe Lally’s nickname for Canty was “Jazz-bo Flash,” which I love.) Here, he hasn’t yet acquired the enormous church bell that characterized his kit with Fugazi; apparently, Picciotto bought it for him in their short-lived and terribly named post-RoS band Happy Go Licky.

So much to love here: the aforementioned “piece of past” lyric, an interesting production flourish in the double-tracked guitar solo in the back half, and a great singing, melodic bass part from Mike Fellows. I feel bad for Fellows and other RoS guitarist Edward Janney; Picciotto and Canty went on to become alt-superstars with Fugazi, and their bandmates … didn’t. (Janney also did the extremely cool woodcuts for the record.)

I feel like Picciotto doesn’t get enough credit as one of the great all-time vocalists in alternative music, or maybe I just haven’t read enough shitty listicles about it. So often, people focus on his Iggy-Pop-as-sex-panther stage presence with Fugazi — I love watching him casually jump the three feet or so onto a Marshall half-stack in Instrument; dude had hops — but he demonstrates an amazing grasp of his voice for a 19-year-old in this band, knowing just when to push it into a snarl or scream.

Are you really a musician from the D.C. metro area if you don’t have a song making reference to a park in the area? John Fahey did it, and RoS’s contribution to the canon is “Hain’s Point,” which is a misspelling of Hains Point, an artificial park built from material dredged from the Potomac River in the late 1800s. It’s named for an Army Major General, Peter Conover Hains, who was actually more known for his engineering efforts than his military career. (He laid out the Panama Canal!) I wonder, given the focus on the military-industrial complex by Picciotto in Fugazi, if this song is making reference to him … or just the park and I’m reading way too much into things.

Also, it’s got a great bass line, and the kids can dance to it!

One thing I haven’t talked much about yet is Inner Ear Studios, which is basically a wing of the Dischord house at this point. Don Zientara’s Arlington, Virginia studio saw pretty much every major — and minor — D.C. band pass through its doors, and boy howdy does Zientara know how to record some bass guitar. I’d always loved the sound of Lally’s bass on the Fugazi records, but man, when you compare Zientara’s work in the mid-’80s to something like Hüsker Dü’s New Day Rising, out on SST in 1985, it’s like comparing a Blu-Ray to a VHS. (That said, the digital versions of Rites of Spring do have the bass a bit more present, which is a nice advantage to the modern era.)

(Incidentally, the fact that we will probably never get decent remixes of the SST catalog because of Greg Ginn’s whole … thing is such a goddamn travesty.)

“Drink Deep” is the RoS cut that sounds the most like a Fugazi song, and that’s not just because of MacKaye’s chesty baritone singing background vocals. The bass is doing some nifty octave moves — though Joe Lally would absolutely not have biffed that opening figure the way Fellows does — and the drums have moved away from the more bog-standard hardcore beats. One thing that Picciotto has always stressed about his joining Fugazi is how out of place he felt at the beginning of the band, because MacKaye, Lally and Canty had already become such a solid unit. But something like “Drink Deep” — with all those aforementioned elements, its amorphous, noise-y bridge, and unhinged outro — is a direct antecedent to Picciotto’s stuff with the band.

And then all that frou-frou shit is dispensed with on “Other Way Around,” which just flies out the gate with a great unison guitar/bass riff. Fellows is a great bassist; I’m inclined to chalk up his upper-register stuff to being influenced by Joy Division and New Order’s Peter Hook, though he may also have been listening to the Cure and Bauhaus at the time. (Any bassist playing past the 10th fret on the D and G strings in the ‘80s was influenced by goth bassists.) Even if New Order were in somewhat of a lull in 1985, I also hear Hook’s influence on Chris Bald’s playing with Embrace, who recorded their sole record in late ‘85-early ‘86.

Hmm, I probably should have saved my spiel about Hook’s influence on bassists in D.C. in the mid-’80s for this song, which opens with a bass part that is very nearly Hook’s iconic intro to New Order’s “Age of Consent,” which came out on their Power, Corruption & Lies in 1983.

(Side note after watching New Order clip: The only bassist other than Hook who comes as close to looking like he’s playing in a completely different band than the rest of his bandmates is original Weezer bassist Matt Sharp, seen here doing Pete Townshend moves on the bass behind a virtually immobile Rivers Cuomo on Letterman.)

Cool guitar layering on this track, in any event.

One knock against this record is that Picciotto does tend to go back to the same lyrical well over course of the original record’s 12 songs. I am entirely too lazy to do this, but I suspect that parsing this record’s lyrics would reveal an over-reliance on “time,” “heart,” and “hands,” which is some freshman English major shit. Whatever, I’m nitpicking, especially because he was actually a freshman English major at the time.

(And while I’m nitpicking, there’s an absolutely glaring bass clam on this track at 1:22. I had to go find the timestamp on a digital version to point it out because, frankly, Joe Lally would never.)

Great bridge to this one, too, with a ton of pick-slides and crashing, overlapping chords.

I’m not quite enough of a nerd to know which U.K. pressing plant Dischord was using in 1985, but hot damn this is a great pressing. It’s not quite 180 grams, but it’s a solid platter, and — gratingly for a sequencing dork like myself — has the gnostic utterance “there is no A or B side” scratched into the run-out groove … despite the both the record’s label and sleeve both clearly reading “Side One and Two.” On Side Two, the etching reads, “I love it when you try not to laugh,” the meaning of which I’m not interested in gleaning at the moment, though it’s apparently a consistent message for this pressing.

Okay, I know I’m digressing a bit from my expected formula of bass-playing critiques and D.C.-area minutiae, but the titular lyric to this song, “I am the victim of a persistent vision / It tracks me down with its precision,” reminds me of a line from the short-lived and only intermittently good Jonathan Ames-scripted pseudo-noir HBO series Bored to Death. At one point, Jason Schwartzman’s Ames-surrogate character has an exchange with indie director Jim Jarmusch; Jarmusch says to him “You must really suffer from the terrifying clarity of your vision.” (Schwartzman/Ames’ response: “Thank you. I do suffer. Thank you.”)

Anyway, I feel like someone — possibly Jem Cohen — may have said that to Guy Picciotto at some point.

Bonkers drumming here from Canty and some more MacKaye backing vocals as well. The brief and crazy tape-effect vocal effects at the track’s end also presage the experimental leanings of Happy Go Licky and late-era Fugazi. They also remind me of the first Mission of Burma record in 1982; MoB had a full-time tape manipulator in their lineup. )

Guy’s vocals seem to be treated slightly differently on this track; they’re a little more buried in the mix and there’s either doubling or a slapback effect on them. Not sure why they went with that treatment on this track and this track only; if I’m absolutely talking out of my ass, I would conjecture that it’s because his vocals for this one may have been tracked at a different studio or at a later date with a different setup and masked this way in the mix to obscure that fact. I am not in the weeds enough on this record to know if that’s the case.

Further giving the lie to the run-out groove’s “no side A or B” hogwash, “End on End” is 150 percent a swing-for-the-fences-ass album closer if I’ve ever heard one. There’s not one, but two spoken-word samples that bookend the track. First, someone saying “Wide-eyed innocent boy” at the beginning, which must have been an inside joke because I cannot for the life of me find out what it’s referencing by Googling. Then at the close, a rip of one of those classical records with contextual narration layered in, speaking about Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring — Stravinsky used a near-exact version of the passage himself when talking about the piece; I assume the differences come down to some quirk of translation.

Anyway, this track’s length and structure seem like A) an attempt to capture the group’s legendarily intense and chaotic live show in the studio and B) an early forerunner of Fugazi’s habit of breaking a song down to whisper-quiet, extended bass-and-drum goove, only to upshift into a Very Loud Part. Guy pulls out every one of his vocal tics including some weirdly sexual heavy breathing; the vocal take as a whole is easily the most bananas performance on a record full of them. Someone probably should have been keeping a firmer grasp on the timing of the whole thing, though, because the finish of “End on End” is clearly just the sound of the master tape running out while the group is still going full-steam. But in its way, it’s perfect; you get the sense they could have just kept breaking things down and building them back up into peak after ecstatic peak until the end of time.

It’s hard to judge what Rites of Spring might have meant to me had I come across it as a teen; I could easily see myself parked in my car listening to “For Want Of” on repeat before school the way I did with “Blueprint” or the Embrace record. But that’s not what happened. I can appreciate this record’s moth-to-flame intensity, its scorched-earth inward glance, but I’m equally baffled by it, being so much older now than the band was when I made it and with so many other concerns. It’s a feeling like watching a film projected slightly out of focus, disintegrating as it spins around the reel. And you know what? It’s beautiful.

Every Record I Own: Cyndi Lauper, She's So Unusual

Provenance: Curb find, though with a sticker from “Crazy Eddie Record & Tape Asylum”

For so much of my early life, Cyndi Lauper’s music — usually “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and “Time After Time” — was kind just... ambiently in the air. With my vague cultural memory of her association with professional wrestling, she seemed like a live-action cartoon from the Thundercats era that had somehow become flesh and blood — and then irrelevant, in that order. Then of course, there was her time on Celebrity Apprentice, which I’m not going to talk about at all.

As with a lot of things, as I got older, I reassessed and discovered, obviously, that Lauper is a national treasure. The woman left home at 17 to escape an abusive situation, traveled to Canada, worked a bunch of jobs and was, at one point, told she would never sing again after damaging her vocal cords — and this was all before she’d recorded and released She’s So Unusual in 1983.

Lauper had already been chewed up and spit out by the major label system as part of a band called Blue Angel, discovered and signed by Allman Brothers manager Steve Massarsky. She essentially went back to her roots after their debut album flopped and they broke up; it didn’t take long to get re-discovered while singing in bars and signed as a solo artist. (To her credit, she refused offers to sign her as a solo artist while a member of Blue Angel.)

There were an absolute shitload of people involved in the making of She’s So Unusual, and its personnel, if nothing else, would make it an important tributary in the waters of American music.

Ellie Greenwich — who wrote or co-wrote "Be My Baby", "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," "Leader of the Pack," and "River Deep – Mountain High," among others — does backing vocals. Eric Bazilian, who wrote Joan Osbourne’s hit “One of Us,” plays bass and does a lot of other shit. Rick Chertoff, who also worked with Osbourne, as well as Sophie B. Hawkins, produced and arranged. Richard Termini did synths and would eventually go on to work with fellow Brooklynites Type O Negative. Engineer John Agnello got his first big break with this record, he’s gone on to become an in-demand indie dude, working with Nothing, Kurt Vile and the Hold Steady.

And, incidentally, though the cover to the record — shot in Coney Island by Annie Leibovitz— has become iconic, I can’t believe I never noticed the back sleeve, where the soles of Lauper’s high heels are printed with Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” In the end, Janet Perr picked up a Grammy for Best Recording Package in 1985 for She’s So Unusual.

Album opener “Money Changes Everything” is a cover of a 1978 song by a group called The Brains. Listening to Lauper’s version, my first thought was “This sounds like a Bruce Springsteen song,” which the original seems to hammer home — replace the synth line with a guitar riff, and it would have fit in perfectly on Born in the USA. Released as the fifth single from She’s So Unusual, it was first song from the album not to hit the Billboard Top 10, which, ouch, America — the fuck’s your problem? Comparing the two versions, I gotta say Lauper’s voice sells this song in a way writer Tom Gray’s more salt-of-the-earth yarl doesn’t. She sounds like a brash, sympathetic air-raid siren, especially near the end, where she hits and holds a series of nearly wordless, very impressive high notes.

“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” had an interesting evolution. It was written by a guy named Robert Hazard, whose version opens as a turgid plod before kicking into the more familiar double-time beat. It’s good, but not great, though there’s a ripping guitar solo near the end. An early demo version of Lauper doing the song, released as part of the expanded edition of She’s So Unusual, shows how she moved the “just wanna” backing vocals that mirror the song’s central riff from an afterthought — in Hazard’s version, they only pop up at the end, and they’re pretty buried — to a central part of the arrangement. And, at some point, the extremely savvy decision to have her hike the vocal up into her higher register was made as well; she’s still singing it near the bottom of her range on that demo. In its finished form, the song barely resembles Hazard’s rock version, sounding way more like something off Prince’s Dirty Mind, which had come out in 1981. That brings us to …

I’m actually not wild about Lauper’s version of this song. For starters, it’s slower than Prince’s version and takes its time getting to the song’s defining riff, which lends it an element of throat-clearing. For seconders, there’s an extended board-fade outro with some fretless bass noodling and airy guitar atmospherics that just comes off as aimless. (Prince’s version clocks in at 3:46, Lauper’s is 5:06.) Lauper supposedly found Prince’s original lyrics misogynistic — though that sourcing is sus — and there’s an element of competitiveness to her own whistle-register dolphin-squeal at the top of the bridge, as if she’s saying, “I can do that, too.” Still, though, “When You Were Mine” is a perfect song, and Lauper absolutely sings the shit out of it — especially the way she hits the “I love you baby that’s no lie” line in the chorus — even if my heart resides with the Prince version.

Of course, speaking of perfect songs, there’s “Time After Time.” Lauper said she nicked the title from a TV Guide listing, and there’s of course an element of made-for-TV melodrama to the song, but … whew. Supposedly it was the last song recorded for the album, and her label wanted it as the lead single; she and her manager convinced them “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” was the better lead-off.

Between the liquid guitar, the contrapuntal bass line and that insistent rimshot on the snare, I hear a lot of the DNA of The Police in “Time After Time.” And here’s the thing: “Every Breath You Take” was released in May ‘83 — when Lauper and co. started production on She’s So Unusual — and went on to become one of the defining songs of the year. If “Time After Time” was indeed the last song recorded for the record, there’s no way its genesis wasn’t in some way influenced by “Every Breath You Take.”

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to Miles Davis’ version of the song; the man knew an amazing ballad when he heard one.

Either way, what an incredible goddamn Side 1 of a record, right?

If anything, She’s So Unusual is bound to disappoint in its back half, simply because the first side of the record is basically flawless. I personally find “She Bop” a little annoying, mostly because its central riff is so flattened out of any rhythmic nuance by being ported to synth. But anything that pissed off Tipper Gore enough to land it on the Parents Music Resource Center’s “Filthy Fifteen” list alongside Mercyful Fate and Venom means it owns by fiat. According to some oft-cited Howard Stern interview I’ve never heard, Lauper recorded the vocals in the buff, which similarly owns, and the weird, spaghetti-Western-esque whistle solo in the bridge — you guessed it — also owns. Crafting an ode to masturbation that made it this far into the mainstream is an achievement; though the video made the subtext text, the ever-sharp Lauper said she wanted kids to think the song was about dancing and only “get it” as they aged.

Conversely, I find that the synth bass on this song rips. (I’m a fickle overlord, I know.) It’s another cover, though writer Jules Shear makes an appearance, doing backing vocals. Cars guitarist Elliot Easton produced a version of this for Shear, but it was never released, making Lauper’s the definitive version, for which she cranked the key up a minor third to better fit her voice. All that said, I’m not really wild about this song overall, to be honest. There’s a barebones rehearsal take on the expanded edition that showcases the difficulty the band had with that opening arpeggio and the power of Lauper’s voice — which sounds like it’s threatening to blow out whatever the demo was recorded on — but still … meh. Pretty weird synth solo in the middle for a pop ballad, though — points for that.

There are few things I hate more than white-person reggae. If “Time After Time” seems to reflect the Police’s popularity, then “Witness” puts that at the fore, along with some extremely Flock of Seagulls-esque guitar delay. However, in this video, Lauper (in her inimitable New York honk) says the song was inspired by not wanting to “witness” a friend of hers get hit by a taxi in New York… which … well, I still hate it. But cool story. If anything, I would have been interested had this been one of the songs she chose to rearrange for her acoustic record, because I like the vocal melody, but … ugh, Jesus, she just started scatting. Hard pass.

“I’ll Kiss You” is a co-write with Shear. It’s another one that sounds vaguely Prince-esque, with the chicken-scratch guitar and layers of pillowy synths. One thing that Lauper doesn’t have, though, is Prince playing everything on these songs, so even her funk-adjacent experiments tend to come off as pretty square, but I’m still fine with it. The synths are actually pretty out of control on this one, layering in some discordant notes early on and getting into some vaguely Remain in Light squiggly territory. There are also some great deadpan backing vocals that start chiming in as the song progresses, and some nice wordless ones on the verse out of the bridge. Coming after “Witness,” and a relative deep cut, “I’ll Kiss You” is a delight.

This song, dating back to the 1920s and written by Al Sherman, Al Lewis and Abner Silver, was performed by Helen Kane, who was the inspiration for Betty Boop. If anything, its inclusion here just reinforces my twin theses that A) She’s So Unusual is a New Wave version of the great New York songwriting traditions of vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building and Phil Spector maximalist girl-group pop and B) Cyndi Lauper is an actual cartoon.

Unfortunately, Lauper would have needed one pants-shitter of a closer to compete with Side 1 of this record, and “Yeah Yeah” just ain’t it, chief. Between the hard-panned rolling-rink organ in the left channel, the honking saxophone, and the incessant Betty Boop-style vocals in the right channel, it’s kind of a mess. There’s a lot of ideas here that could have worked better if there had simply been less of them. Pan the organ less, reduce the vocal asides, keep the horn arrangements and maybe make the sax solo less of a feature (though honestly it’s a pretty good sax solo) — and you’ve got a perfectly frothy nothing of a song, but as an album closer, “Yeah Yeah” falls seriously short. I think I know what they were trying to do, which was unite all the strands of pop music Lauper was working with — there’s an explicit “River Deep — Mountain High” reference in the lyrics — in a modern setting, but … nah.

There’s a really interesting reading (mine) of this record — and Lauper’s career as a whole, especially when you take into account her writing the Broadway musical Kinky Boots, her blues record, and her acoustic record — that positions her as a link in a chain of uniquely American, feminist songwriters. With She’s So Unusual, Lauper attempted to unite Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, Phil Spector and New Wave, and was almost extremely successful. I can’t get over the sequencing — Side 2 is such a letdown, mostly — but ultimately, it’s one of the rare monster smashes from the ‘80s that sounds both of its time and eternal.

Every Record I Own: The Sword, Age of Winters

Provenance: Academy Records Annex, Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

I always had this theory that the fundamental difference between Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin was that while Zeppelin riffs were something you had to sit down and learn, Sabbath riffs were something you … unearthed. Something primal. You sit there, noodling around in the minor pentatonic scale, maybe throwing in some Big Honkin’ Bends™, and this nasty, evil riff appears under your fingers. If you’re lucky, you figure out that you unconsciously nicked it from Sabbath before you show it to someone else.

Sabbath are the supermassive black hole around which all heavy music gravitates. Their pull is inescapable, and it’s not just down to Them Riffs, either. Bill Ward’s swinging plod (or is it a plodding swing?) is, along with John Bonham, a lodestar for any drummer seeking to both groove and smash. (Ward calls jazz pioneer Gene Krupa his “definitive influence.”) And because Tony Iommi was one of the first guitarists to detune the instrument — as low as a minor third below standard — if you should happen to be taking that route to make your band sound heavier, you’re standing in the shadows of Sabbath as well.

Which brings me to The Sword. The group’s reputation as Sabbath-derivative was one of their defining characteristics when I first encountered them 2006, thanks to Guitar Hero II, which included the Age of Winters track “Freya.” That song has basically become the band’s theme song, even as they moved away from their avowed Sabbath and Zeppelin worship into occasionally proggier and now more Schlitz-swillin’ territory. Age of Winters was their full-length debut, containing material worked out by group founder J.D. Cronise prior to the band’s formation. It was a hit for indie label Kemado, selling — per Wikipedia — at least 80,000 copies (half the cited links in that page are dead, so it’s probably not a stretch to assume Age of Winters has passed the six-digit mark at this point).

One thing I’ve always loved about the Sword is their relatively high-minded references, at least for a stoner-rock band. The cover art for Age of Winters, done by Conrad Kelly (who according to his website, will accept synthesizers in exchange for art, which owns) is an Alphonse Mucha homage, and its liner notes contain a William Butler Yeats passage.

The Sword also love their instrumentals. Age of Winters opens with “Celestial Crown,” which is pretty much the thesis statement for the rest of the record: Behind-the-beat guitars doing Big Honkin’ Bends™ and drummer Trivett Wingo going Hulk Smash on his cymbals. The song segues into “Barael's Blade” which rips. Cronise jumps up to the top of his range for a high harmony on the line “Spiller of the silver blood!” and it’s one of my favorite moments on the record. Cronise produced the record himself, and while I hear some harshness to the cymbals’ high end, at least on this pressing, the man does know how to track a guitar or four.

Another thing that owns about this record is that, for all the Sword’s expansiveness, Cronise has a decidedly pop-economist streak to his songwriting. “Freya” is catchy as shit, it’s possible to get in and out of Age of Winters in under 45 minutes, depending on how long it takes you to load up the bong. This track in particular has some of Wingo’s most air-drum-begging work and Cronise nods to Iommi’s habit of tracking multiple guitar solos atop one another on the song’s first guitar break.

First of all, please enjoy Cronise’s Zappa facial hair in this video. Between that and the samurai swords displayed on his stone fireplace’s mantle, he’s exactly one ringer-tee away from getting kicked out of a Grand Funk Railroad show (on the Closer to Home tour) at the Richmond Coliseum for selling weed.

Second of all … “Winter’s Wolves” is so fucking good.

It makes me want to build a time machine for the express purpose of finding the maybe-never-existed “god bear” deep in the Russian wilderness and headbutting it to death. It makes me want to forge my own blade like Nicholas Cage in Mandy, before mastering the forbidden art of necromancy to raise Genghis Khan’s entire army (1206 AD lineup) from the dead so that I can die fighting them on the windswept steppes of Mongolia. It makes me want to German suplex a tiger.

Story time: The only time I’ve seen The Sword live was at Washington, D.C.’s Black Cat club in ‘07, at which point the club was already too small for them. We drove into the city in the middle of a snowstorm, and people lost their shit so much at “Winter’s Wolves” — the whole crowd started howling in the middle of the song — that Cronise had to tell us to calm down, lest the band actually be crushed by the crowd. (He said something like, “You can tell all your friends that you saw the Sword and JD said calm down and it was lame, but please.”)

I’m going to resist my impulse to just write out every lyric to this song, but they are the platonic ideal of wizards ‘n’ shit songwriting. I may or may not just have teared up reciting them aloud in the apartment. Cronise’s voice does this little whinny “May the earth swallow your hosts” — probably because the spirit of a lich-king possessed him in the vocal booth — and it just gets me every. Single. Time.

Original Sword drummer Trivett Wingo was self-taught, and I have to say that his clattering playing goes a long way towards the band’s charms on AoW. The band replaced him with Santiago "Jimmy" Vela III, who you can see playing in that home-recorded version of “Winter’s Wolves” (on which they deploy a “Tom Sawyer”-esque Moog line in the outro, which also owns). I’m not going to get into a comparative discussion of their merits as drummers, but I will say this album is as much Wingo’s record as it is Cronise’s. Wingo is now an accountant in Charlottesville, Virginia; he quit the band mid-tour in 2010 over severe touring-induced anxiety, which the remaining members have spoken of with varying degrees of animosity.

“The Iron Swan” has some of the first non-extremely-loud-electric textures on this record, with a nice acoustic intro that quickly turns into as close as the band gets to all-out thrash, at least on Age of Winters. I don’t really have any criticisms of this album at this point; as with a lot of debuts, it was clearly pored over for a long time. Nice little (very short) bass outro, too. A fun fact about this song is that it's the namesake of band’s second line of beer (the first being Winter’s Wolves Beer, which owns) and they put out a hot sauce, too, at one point, which also owns.

The Sword’s compositional template of FAST RIFF—> HALF-TIME RIFF—> FAST RIFF AGAIN becomes apparent and a little tired at this point in a full-length, though the main riff to “Lament For the Aurochs” does have this little dropped-beat skip move that I really love. The Sword should probably have their own wiki at this point simply for a taxonomy of all the different animals and historical and literary references they mention. For those of you wondering at home, the aurochs is “an extinct species of large wild cattle that inhabited Asia, Europe, and North Africa,” and in this song alone, we’ve also got:

• the liquid light of Leviathan

• the sunken cities of the Saurians

• the shimmering of Avalon

• the ages of the alchemists

• the Huntsman's hounds

• the ancient Wyrm

• the basilisk

• the phoenix

Anyway, that all owns.

Cronise pulled out some of his neater arrangement tricks for the back half of the record, it seems. “March of the Lor” — an instrumental in eight movements — opens with a cool high-register bass riff and an insistent (and eventually semi-grating) ride pattern from Wingo. I have no idea what a Lor is, as it’s nigh-on-un-Google-able, but this song also makes two references to spiders, one to plagues, and one to “Halora,” which may be an Elder Scrolls reference. And HEED, KNAVES, the return of the BIG HONKIN’ BENDS™. Some cool Wingo fills and a straight-up blast-beat (and a set of sleigh bells?) at one point as well. Hail.

Cronise’s approach to vocal harmonies and judicious deployment of harsher singing timbres (he approaches black-metal territory on this tune at one point) are consistent high points on Age of Winters. I’m not sure if he double-tracked all these vocals manually or simply went the Eventide Harmonizer route, a la the Ozzy solo records, but it’s an approach I really love. “Ebethron” lurches along with a duly heavy series of riffs, but it’s not really the strongest album closer, IMO it should have been sequenced earlier on the record and left something with more punch for the finale.

It’s hard to grade this record on anything but a steep curve, as my memories of it are pretty inextricably tied to the weightless rush of being in college and living in my first apartment. I think I air-guitar and drummed through all of Age of Winters over the entirety of Fairfax, Virginia and a chunk of D.C. before I turned 21. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and while the Sword were able to eventually dodge their Sabbath comparisons, none of that factors into my love of this record, which, like those Sabbath riffs from so long ago, was not so much learned as unearthed.

Every Record I Own: John Carpenter, Lost Themes

Inasmuch as it’s possible for someone whose formative cinematic influences went from Disney animation to Jackie Chan to have a “favorite filmmaker,” John Carpenter is mine. I have an appreciation for my fellow Italian-Americans Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola — mostly thanks to our shared Catholic guilt and love of Keith Richards — and my the Criterion Channel hipped me to Les Blank, but really, I’ve just seen Big Trouble in Little China more times than I care to admit.

(Halloween was also indelibly, forcefully stamped onto my unconscious long before I ever actually saw the film. When I was a kid, one of my neighbors eschewed ninjas or commandos as the theme whenever we played in our backyards, preferring to don a Michael Myers mask and coveralls and stalk me around the neighborhood with a fake butcher knife.)

Painting Carpenter as a lone-wolf auteur short-sells his collaborators, like fellow composer Alan Howarth, cinematographer Dean Cundey, producer Debra Hill, and FX wizards like Rob Bottin. That said, there’s a stubbornly independent streak to his career — along with his love of Westerns and his persistent fixation on mythology and institutional failure — that makes him, to my mind, one of the most capital-A American filmmakers, as does *drumroll* … his parallel career as a composer.

Carpenter — whose father was a music teacher and started a young John out on violin — famously composed most of his own scores. At least in the early days, this was a financial consideration, because he preferred to dedicate the bulk of his budgets to expensive cameras, lenses and film stock. But for someone who loved the maximalist studio Westerns of Howard Hawks and John Ford, Carpenter film scores are stark, simple, constructions that — and here I’m quoting a Red Letter Media video, though I can’t remember which one — he thought of as “wallpaper” for his films. Because of this evocative description and because I’m a giant dork, I’m tracing a direct line from Erik Satie’s early 20th-century “furniture music” — music composed to unobtrusively take up background space — to minimalist pioneer John Cage and on into Carpenter’s work, even though he’d probably scoff at such a high-minded comparison.

Excluding wacky stuff like his Big Trouble song with an ad hoc group called the Coup De Villes that included frequent film collaborators Nick Castle and Tommy Lee Wallace and must be seen to be believed …

… most of Carpenter’s film scores are based around 1970s analog synths like Arps, Prophets and Oberheims. This came down to pragmatism; as he put it, synths were “a way to sound big with just a keyboard.” He worked fast, composing the score to Assault on Precinct 13 in three days. Along with the labor-intensive nature of those early synths (they had to spend as much time tuning and resetting them as they did playing them), this ensured an economy to his compositions that you didn’t always see in contemporaries like Vangelis or Tangerine Dream. Carpenter may be an ornery outsider, but there’s a streak of pop-music efficiency to his work, even as he eventually switched over to the limitless digital pastures of Logic and its software synths for his debut solo record, 2015’s Lost Themes.

The album, Carpenter said in its promotional materials, was “all about having fun,” as opposed to the pressure-cooker environment of soundtracking his own films. He worked with his son Cody (and Kinks guitarist Dave Davies’ son Daniel) on the record, eventually touring behind it in 2016. I saw him at the friggin’ Best Buy theater in Times Square on that tour (backed by, um, the Tenacious D rhythm section), and he was clearly having a blast, parked behind a keyboard for what was basically a greatest-hits soundtrack set along with a couple cuts from the record.

“Vortex” was Lost Themes’ lead single, and it’s easy to see why. Between the insistent quarter-note pulse that underpins the song from the start and the Big Trouble-esque guitar tones that alternate with its piano chords, it’s essentially Carpenter Composition 101 (a course I would gladly take, or teach). Some of the higher-register colors that wash in remind me explicitly of Big Trouble as well; I can easily see a be-mulleted Kurt Russell gallivanting around the sewers of San Francisco to this.

Incidentally, Carpenter’s label, Brooklyn’s Sacred Bones, commissioned a bunch of remixes for these songs from folks like Zola Jesus and JG Thirlwell; I haven’t investigated all of them in-depth, but they’re included on the Spotify version of the record.

Provided to YouTube by BWSCD, Inc. Obsidian · John Carpenter Lost Themes ℗ 2014 Rodeo Suplex, Inc. d/b/a Rodeo Suplex Music under exclusive license to Sacred...

Quite a lot of Lost Themes is dependent on the aforementioned four-on-the-floor kick-drum feel, a holdover from Howarth’s Linn LM1 drum machine. But “Obsidian” embroiders that pulse with a neat double-time floor-tom figure, and the song moves through a multi-movement structure — with a variety of keyboard sounds and some nice harmonic shifts in the back half — that practically moves it into prog-rock territory. (At nearly eight-and-a-half-minutes, it’s the longest song on the album.)

One knock against Carpenter is that — perhaps because of his get ‘er done approach to composing — he’s definitely got a formula to his songs, which usually goes something like: Quiet “A” riff - LOUD GUITAR JOINS “A” RIFF— quiet “B” part — LOUD AGAIN — quiet textural wash — LOUD OUTRO. But he’s canny enough about varying his sounds — and Lost Themes sounds great on vinyl for an entirely DAW-produced album — to get the most out of that format. (Supposedly he improvises a lot of these, which kinda shoots down this formula theory.)

Side note: I love the incredibly half-assed names of these songs. They would not seem out of place in a setlist taped up in a dive-bar bathroom, with “Fallen” and “Obsidian” perhaps sandwiched between “Drop D” and “Trilogy.”

“Domain” is … interesting. It’s possible that after three resolutely minor-key, ominous-sounding tunes, the song’s blaring major-key fanfare and harmonized guitars are just striking me as completely laughable in the moment. Carpenter’s background of formal violin instruction explains the quasi-classical sound and contrapuntal approach to his layers of synth lines; it wouldn’t surprise me if his dad forced some Bach on little Johnny early on.

The Halloween theme is probably tied with Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” as the Western world’s most famous song in 5/4, and some of that odd-meter DNA is embedded in the tumbling opening arpeggios of “Mystery.” (It also sounds like it’s got a Picardy third in there at one point; apparently Cody studied music composition at UC Santa Barbara.) But this one is also illustrative of the largest weakness of the album, which is that the connective tissue of these songs’ constituent parts isn’t uniformly strong. Frequently, things kind of just… grind to a halt and pick back up in lieu of more natural-sounding transitions. “Mystery” drops into a pretty bitchin’ Bonham stomp in its final chunk, though, which rules.

I’m kicking against my limitations as a musician here when I get into this — because ya boi has pretty much parked himself in 4/4 for life — but it sounds to me like “Abyss” winds through some odd-meter parts as well, which contrast nicely with another smashy-smashy beat. I’m also hearing what sounds like a Mellotron cello, which is a welcome deviation from the by-now bog-standard analog synth tones. This tune is on the longer side as well, but it just doesn’t feel like its disparate movements have enough room to breathe adequately. That may be due to the fact that Lost Themes was recorded mostly via email-swapping; its longer songs have a cut-and-paste feel where you can see the stitches showing.

I’m hitting a wall at this point. When I bought this record, I put it on a lot while I made dinner or folded laundry — which, “wallpaper music,” remember? — so sitting down and intensely focusing on a bunch of swirly synth sketches is taking it out of me. I’m also noticing that much of this record is an over-relies on pretty stock drum beats and guitar parts. There are a lot of BIG HONKIN’ UNISON BENDS™ every time the guitar kicks in — and the lead parts were, apparently, mostly Davies’ work — and it would have been nice to hear more variation there.

Side note: The liner notes to this explain that Davies was responsible for the score to I, Frankenstein, as if that’s anything other than something he’ll have to answer for in Hell. Between this and the rote guitar work here, is Dave Davies’ son Daniel John Carpenter’s greatest villain?!?)

“Purgatory” opens with a stately progression before moving into what is, bar none, the most interesting drum work on the record. It doesn’t sound programmed to me, because it’s a lopsided beat based on a snare roll that — while it doesn’t exactly “swing” — sounds like a jaunty halfway-point between rock ‘n’ roll and New Orleans parade drumming. (That is a bizarre conclusion to draw, I know, but you get what you pay for here.)

Closing out Lost Themes with “Night” at the end was a sharp move. It’s currently the only one of Carpenter’s non-soundtrack songs sitting in his top 10 most-streamed on Spotify, which I guess qualifies it as the album’s “hit.” My ears immediately perked up at the guitar figure, which more than any other song on here (except maybe “Vortex”), sounds like, well, a lost theme to one of his films. That said, I’m a little disappointed they didn’t opt for the LOUD-RIFF-SMASHY-BEAT treatment for this song; it feels like it’s building to a climax that never arrives.

So, final thoughts: Individual mileage with Carpenter’s non-film music will definitely vary depending on your level of love for his films. Without having this kind of texture-heavy music linked to foundational cinematic visuals, a casual listener might find Lost Themes a little exhausting or simply uninteresting. But I still maintain there’s a lot to like here, and approaching it on its own merits is more rewarding if you’re not expecting anything world-shaking. And — though I made it through this whole entry without using this word — it’s spooky! Halloweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee —

Every Record I Own: The Modern Jazz Quartet, Blues at Carnegie Hall

Provenance: Inherited

This record came to me from the collection of my Uncle T (short for Tom, but I only ever heard him called that a handful of times in my life). He was a fairly avid music fan who gave me my first Miles Davis records, but his taste in jazz was perhaps a little staid (he was not listening to Last Exit) and that’s where I — perhaps unfairly — have always slotted the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Anyone who’s matriculated through a college jazz program or sat through some jam sessions has played MJQ vibraphone player Milt Jackson’s signature tune “Bags’ Groove” at some point. But that is more or less the extent of my familiarity with the group, excepting drummer Connie Kay’s association with Van Morrison and the odd Miles stuff I heard bassist Percy Heath play on.

(Side note: The vibraphone has to be on a shortlist — along with the upright bass and the harp — of “prettiest instruments that are also inordinate pains in the ass.” Concert pianists and drummers can mostly rely on house equipment, however shitty, but anyone who’s ever lugged an upright bass through the subway or shlepped a set of vibes up a staircase has spent at least quadruple that amount of time questioning their life choices.)

So: Blues at Carnegie Hall is a live record, made during a benefit concert for the Manhattan School of Music scholarship fund. The group’s set consisted entirely of tunes based on the blues form, hence the title, though Alun Morgan’s liner notes specify that “Blues Milanese” “is not, strictly speaking, a blues.”

There’s a fundamental tension to the title and concept of this record that Morgan doesn’t address, which is the element of novelty (at best) and condescension (at worst) to the idea of “blues at Carnegie Hall” and its implied high/low distinction. Bear with me: This record came out in 1966, which made it contemporaneous with the Newport Folk Festival’s run of showcasing “rediscovered” Depression-era blues stars like Skip James and Son House. But there’s a vast remove between the blues from that group of musicians and this record. For one thing, I highly doubt there were any vibraphones in rural Mississippi, and for another, rural blues are unrecognizable from a jazz combo’s version of the same. Where John Lee Hooker might play a 13- or 14-bar blues as he saw fit — adding or subtracting beats from a bar in the process — or spend an entire song playing one chord, by 1966, a “jazz blues” meant (mostly) a strict 12-bar form that added all kinds of extra chords imported from European music theory.

All of this which is to say that even though these were four black men playing Them Blues™, they were also urbane (literally, all four members grew up in cities), professional musicians making music for a well-off audience that presumably thought of themselves — unconsciously or not — as more suited to these blues than Son House doing “Death Letter Blues,” even if they acknowledged the two were branches of the same tree. Without getting too far down the rabbit hole of “authenticity,” there’s no denying that the edges are sanded so far off the MJQ’s blues as to render them frictionless for a white, middle-class audience.

Anyway, let’s spend some time with the music.

There’s an element of slow-build throat-clearing to opener “Pyramid (Blues for Junior),” with a call-and-response approach to the interplay between the instruments. This tune’s a great showcase for Kay’s somewhat unconventional approach to the drums: He spends the tune’s first chunk switching between a sort of march pattern and a press-roll on the snare before picking up a tambourine(!) for the first part of Jackson’s solo, eventually moving over to the ride cymbal; I don’t think he even hits the snare until Lewis’ solo. There’s some nice gospel-ish changes to this one, too.

Stray observation: As you might expect from Carnegie Hall, this is an extremely mannered crowd; they applaud strictly after the solos and when the tunes conclude. Also, the Spotify version of this record is notably not in mono, as my vinyl is. Lewis’ piano is panned hard to the left there, with Jackson’s vibes in the right channel. That seems to mirror the group’s stage orientation, at least from the admittedly limited research I just did.

I know I’m stating the obvious here, but Kay is a fantastic fit for this group. The man really knew how to hit a cymbal: where a heavier or more bombastic drummer might pulled the band earthwards, his playing seems to dance in the air alongside Jackson’s vibes. “The Cylinder” is the first appearance of what I would consider a “standard” jazz drumming pattern in the set, and he and Heath lock into a solid groove after the jittery intro.

“Really True Blues” lives up to its name: I’m not looking at a lead sheet, but it sounds like there aren’t any unusual substitutions or chord changes in the form. One pain point I’m noticing three songs into the set is that, since the two lead voices in the MJQ are both fixed-pitch instruments, only Heath’s upright bass is able to land in the microtonal no-man’s-land of “blue notes.” And, given that he spends most of his time in a support role, he can’t slide or slur into notes very much, which means there’s a paucity of the “in-between” notes a guitarist, vocalist, or horn player would use in typically bluesy playing. Lewis and Jackson get around this — as all fixed-pitch instrumentalists do — by “brushing” or trilling between notes to approximate a bend, which starts to grate on my ear after the umpteenth time. Shoulda played guitar, my dudes. (Kidding!)

I will say that the variation in the structure of these songs goes a long way towards helping to avoid the “blues fatigue” I feel after, for example, an hour of Crossroads festival performances. To wit: “Ralph’s New Blues,” which opens with a series of tumbling figures that sound like Lewis and Jackson racing to make it to the bottom of a hill first. Kay’s solo, which Morgan’s liner notes inform me is a “comparative rarity on record,” is… fine, I guess? It’s admirably restrained but doesn’t take enough time to really stretch out into anything show-stopping. And shut my mouth, Heath’s solo here opens with some of those slides and slurs I was just talking about! Lewis and Jackson drop out for it, and I’ve biffed enough bass spotlights in my life to know that you cannot short-sell anyone able to string together a coherent solo without any harmonic support.

Side two opens with “Monterey Twist,” which is a nice change of pace for both for its brisk tempo and the fact that it’s a minor blues that isn’t “Mr. P.C.” That tune, which was John Coltrane’s tribute to bassist Paul Chambers, appeared on Giant Steps in 1959 and has become probably the go-to minor blues for jazzers. Consequently, I never want to hear it again in my life.

With its jaunty opening groove, “Home” is immediately reminiscent of the kind of stuff Cannonball Adderley was doing around this time and that means I LOVE IT. One thing that isn’t apparent at faster tempos and in “riffy” tunes like this one is this next fact I just learned from Wikipedia. Jackson apparently set his vibraphone’s oscillator (the device that rotates over the soundholes of the vibraphone’s vertical pitch tubes to create its distinctive *Aaron Neville voice* wah-wah-wah effect) “to a low 3.3 revolutions per second,” which gives his held-out chords that lovely, gentle, shimmering quality.

“Blues Milanese,” the aforementioned “not a blues,” opens with a nice little Heath figure. Unfortunately, ya boy does not have a particularly sharp transcribing ear, and I wasn’t able to find a lead sheet for this song, so I won’t be elaborating on how exactly it deviates from the form. I can tell you that it slows to a stop for for a really nice and all-too-short unaccompanied Lewis solo with some churchy moves that segues into his solo. The group also winds to a stop at the end of his solo to allow Heath to close out the song with his own showcase for his chef’s-kiss vibrato and gorgeous tone. (This record was engineered by Tom Dowd, who, as a bassist himself, could record the shit out of an upright bass.)

The crowd recognizes the opening figure to “Bags’ Groove” and reacts at the top of the tune, which practically qualifies as a riot for a Carnegie Hall audience of this era. One thing that Lewis mentions in the liner notes is the influence of Count Basie on the MJQ, and you can really hear it in the insistent little riffs he plays on this tune. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from a misspent life in music, it’s that if you play something cool, you should probably play it four to seven more times.

And just over 41 minutes later, we’re done! Without having listened to a ton of MJQ, I can’t really say whether or not this is a must-have record of theirs — and with the focus on such a limited repertoire, I can’t imagine it is; I really would have liked a slow ballad at some point — but it’s a great way to spend a relaxed two-thirds of an hour with an iconic set of musicians.