Popless Week 19: Glorious Crackpots

By Noel Murray
May 12th, 2008

Idaho

Years Of Operation 1992-present

Fits Between American Music Club and Red House Painters

Personal Correspondence Glorious Crackpot Week brings us inevitably to Idaho, and its lone persistent member, Jeff Martin. Stalwarts of the mid-'90s "slowcore"/"sadcore" scene, Idaho had a big enough following to score a short-lived deal with semi-major Caroline, but never broke big enough to develop a full-on "cult," per se. Since returning to independence, Martin and his revolving cast of Idahoans (most notably guitarists John K. Berry and Dan Seta) have released new records every couple of years, and toured Europe, where the band has always drawn fairly well. But those Idaho albums stopped getting much critical attention around 2000. Even I—who have purchased every single one of them—haven't written about the band since the '90s. Maybe that's because there's not a whole lot to say. Martin continues to write strikingly moody songs, and he's progressed in his concept for the band, although that vision has led him away from the scraping guitar and rattling percussion that made Idaho fairly formidable as rockers in the '90s. Today, Martin prefers to noodle on his piano and mutter evocatively. But like the best of the GCs, his music is reliably good, and it's been a pleasure to check in with him periodically to see what he's mumbling about now.

Enduring presence? I don't think the critical community's Idaho-neglect amounts to a major lapse; in the end, they are just another indie-rock band that's carved out a tiny niche. They're not a significant influence on anyone, and Martin hasn't been painting masterpieces in his dark corner of the room. But because we live in a satellite TV world, with hundreds of channels to choose from, I'm personally glad that I still subscribe to The Idaho Channel, which allows me to get away from the hubbub of who's buzzworthy and who's overrated, and instead just enjoy some pretty music that only a few people really care about.

Stray Tracks

From the fringes of the collection, a few songs to share….

Haystak, "Reckon"

When I interviewed this hulking Nashville rapper back in 2000, I made the mistake of treating him like any other fledgling local musician, and thus fully expected him to talk openly, earnestly and humbly about his struggles with trying to break wider in a tricky business. Instead, I got the full show. Haystak answered nearly every one of my questions with a lengthy, self-promoting speech that had almost nothing to do with what I asked, and he generally acted like he was already a superstar, and that his only real problem now was how to deal with the haters who were jealous of his success. I would've taken this pitch more seriously if we hadn't been sitting in a run down Mt. Juliet office park, right behind a tractor supply store, but hey, as you all know, I am but a naïf when it comes to hip-hop. I do like this song though, which bumps along with a lot of nervous energy, and makes nice use of the orchestral stings and local color.

Head East, "Never Been Any Reason"

Heart, "Magic Man"

I don't want to be one of those guys who romanticizes the music of an earlier era at the expense of today, but whatever the lapses of mid-'70s album rock radio and the regressive "classic rock" era it spawned, I've got to give those coked-out corporate whores credit for nurturing sublime crypto-boogie like these two anthems—the first a hit in '75, and the second in '76. They're both heavy and groovy (but not too much so on either score), and both emphasize the power of the rock wail. Heart of course went on to be the bigger band (though did you know Head East lead singer John Schlitt later became the frontman for Petra?), and while there's probably a lot that could be said about Heart's gradual transformation from kick-ass lady-rockers to proto-Celine Dion balladeers, I'm not especially interested in what happened to them or why. I'd rather think of Heart as another band, like Head East, that lived and died in the mid-'70s, kicking out a few ever-present, weird-sounding radio hits, complete with incongruous synthesizer solos. Hey man, is that Freedom Rock? Turn it up!

The Heartbreakers, "Chinese Rocks"

And now here's the antidote to the Hearts and Head Easts of the swingin' '70s. While the mainstream radio darlings wrote and recorded songs designed to take listeners out of their own lives for five minutes or so, Johnny Thunders and his Heartbreakers tried to open a window on every unpleasant minute of the street punk's existence. Dee Dee Ramone and Richard Hell co-wrote this exposé of drug addiction and its repercussions, but Thunders made it his own. (Quite literally…for years, Thunders' was the only songwriting credit for "Chinese Rocks," even though he had nothing to do with it, besides helping make it a punk classic.) Some people hear The Heartbreakers and can't ever take Heart seriously again. Others still like a little escapism mixed in with their docu-dramas.

Herr Louis & Weaselis with The Hungry Five, "Down By The Pickle Works, Part 1"

Somebody asked last week why I didn't focus more on some of the oddities in my collection rather than the same old indie-rock and soft-pop acts, so here's an oddity for you, taken from last year's Folk Songs Of Illinois anthology. It's a little piece of ethnic humor, from the era when a good exaggerated accent was enough to get people chuckling. Enjoy.

The Hidden Cameras, "Death Of A Tune"

And now back to the indie-rock and soft-pop—or in this case, a cross between the two. I was a little thrown off some by The Hidden Cameras' early work, which extended frank sexuality into the realm of explicit smut, even while the band played twee music from the well-established "raging milquetoast" tradition. With bandleader Joel Gibbs' nasal, cabaret-ready vocals swimming smoothly through a warm instrumental bath, most listeners could hum along happily for three minutes at a time without ever realizing that they're enjoying a song that celebrates soiled underwear. The Hidden Cameras have gotten tamer over the years, and I'm especially fond of their 2006 record Awoo, which serves up one sweetly melodic retro-pop song after another—including "Death Of A Tune," a zippy little number about how a lover's silence sucks the music out of the room.

The Hombres, "Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out)"

I first got to know this garage-rock nugget from The Nails' 1984 cover, which I'd naturally assumed was an original, because the resources for learning otherwise weren't available back then. When I got a copy of Nuggets a decade or so later, I had one of those weird double-take moments when The Hombres' version came on. (Imagine if you were listening to an old Patsy Cline album and suddenly she started singing "Jesus Take The Wheel"… that would be a comparable experience, I would think.) I haven't heard The Nails in a while but I'm going to go ahead and give the edge to The Hombres, if only because the original recording sounds like a semi-parody of Bob Dylan, and the 1984 is just a party record.

Homer & Jethro (w/June Carter Cash), "Baby It's Cold Outside"

I'll give June Carter Cash my full attention in a couple of weeks, but since Eddy Arnold passed this week, I'll pay him tribute by putting up this song, which uses Arnold's records as the hick chic version of seductive sophistication.

Hoodoo Gurus, "Bittersweet"

I got a copy of Hoodoo Gurus' Mars Needs Guitars in a radio station giveaway back in 1987, and brought it home thinking I wouldn't know any songs on it. But when I cued up side one, I heard "Bittersweet," a song I'd been looking for months, without ever knowing its name or who was responsible for it. I'd heard "Bittersweet" a few times on Vandy's college radio station, and it'd made enough of an impression that I'd scrawled some of the lyrics down in this little notebook I kept with me at all times in high school. (I hope I still have that notebook somewhere in my attic. I bought it when I realized that I probably shouldn't be doodling and jotting down song lyrics on my desk, and it became like a semi-journal, full of cartoons, band logos, and general impressions of my current mood. Sort of like Twitter, but on paper.) I later discovered that Hoodoo Gurus had a few other songs that I would come to like a lot, but this is the one that I feel should've been a bigger hit in the U.S. There's really nothing objectionable or off-putting about it; it's just a walloping, well-produced rock song. If only John Hughes had put it on a soundtrack…

Hooverphonic, "The Magnificent Tree"

Hooverphonic has always been my go-to '90s trip-hop/dream-pop act, probably because they had utilize fairly conventional song structures, providing surer footing in an ethereal genre. Hooverphonic also won my allegiance with the title track from their third album, which makes brilliant use of Crosby, Stills & Nash's "Guinnevere," a song that's always meant a lot to me.


Hot Hot Heat, "Pickin' It Up"

Now that we're a few years removed from the glut of neo-new-wave acts riffing on XTC and Gang Of Four, Hot Hot Heat's at-the-time-disappointing 2005 album Elevator sounds a lot better, and I wonder now, if critics had taken to it more readily—or if the Warner publicists hadn't been such pricks about sending review copies out early enough for critics to get acclimated to the record's shiny, hooky sound—would we all have been spared last year's weak follow-up Happiness Ltd.? Even in my own mixed review of Elevator, I did recognize the greatness of this song, writing that it "bucks and sparks and is just about the most perfect 'good to be alive' post-punk anthem of the past ten years…It's worth the whole lot of uninspired new wave revivalists just for 'Pickin' It Up.'"

House Of Freaks, "Yellow Dog"

I mentioned above that bands inspired by Hüsker Dü are in some ways preferable to the original model, and I could say much the same about House Of Freaks, one of the first of the guitar-and-drums-only roots-rock duos. The bands that followed House Of Freaks—including Chickasaw Mudd Puppies, Spinanes, The White Stripes, The Black Keys and Hillstomp, to name just a few—proved more capable of dredging up the swampy sound that HoF only alluded to. But House Of Freaks were still a formidable live act, especially when they trotted out "Yellow Dog," a raver that always left the audience happily exhausted.

Howard Jones, "Hide And Seek"

I went through a brief period after the release of Human's Lib where I thought Howard Jones was some kind of whiz kid, and I was happy when his follow-up album became a huge hit in the U.S., even though I didn't like it as well as the debut. Perhaps not coincidentally, around the time Jones became a big star, I learned that I'd been mishearing one of my favorite Jones lyrics. What I thought was "Who do you find it in / Everything that you see?" was actually "Hope you find it in," etc. My disillusionment started the fairly rapid process of well-poisoning when it came to Jones. But hey, we all do it. What are some lyrics that you all preferred in the version you heard, as opposed to what the singer was actually singing?

HP Riot, "I Have Changed"

I've been writing about Brazilian bands influenced by American funk and soul, but here's an R&B obscurity—taken from the super-cool anthology Super Cool California Soul 2—that borrows the vibrant bustle of worldbeat, to thrilling effect.

Huey Lewis & The News, "Do You Believe In Love"

It was a strange era when rockers as square as Lewis and songs as straightforward as this one could become massive hits. I can't mount a defense of The News as heartfelt as I did for, say, Hall & Oates, except maybe to mention that Lewis has an expressive voice and an affable demeanor, and that as cheesy as The News' biggest hits often are, they're also admirably fleet and unpretentious. I'm not a raving fan by any means, but I've always had a soft spot for Lewis. Chalk it up to being a teenager in the '80s.

The Human Beinz, "Nobody But Me"

When you hear this song, do you think of Paul Shaffer & The CBS Orchestra singing the theme song to the game "Know Your Cuts Of Meat," or do you think of the big swordfight in Kill Bill: Volume One? (Or neither?) By the way, nothing against The Isley Brothers, but this take on "Nobody But Me" has always struck me as definitive, perhaps because it chugs along somewhat joylessly, making the singer's superiority almost sound like a burden.

I Am Kloot, "Over My Shoulder"

Ian Dury & The Blockheads, "There Ain't Half Been Some Clever Bastards"

Here are two more for the Glorious Crackpot file (UK edition). The former is a current indie-pop act led by Johnny Bramwell, who over the course of a small handful of albums has shown allegiance to a spare, hooky sound and a slightly skewed sensibility, building songs on a few lines of imagistic poetry and some hushed-but-rhythmic instrumentation. As for the late Dury, he belonged to music hall and cabaret traditions both new and old, and he mastered the art of talk-singing better than anyone since the heyday of Rex Harrison.

Ice T, "O.G. Original Gangster"

It should surprise no one who's been reading this column that I'm not big on gangsta rap, but there are exceptions. I'm a fan of N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton (which I'll get to later), and I love Ice T's O.G. Original Gangster. I love its diversity of sound and its focused lyrics—the songs on O.G. tend to stay on topic, and thus deliver a cogent take on thug life that's part voyeurism, part social commentary.

Regrettably unremarked upon: Hasil Adkins, Hazel Dickens, Heatmiser, Helmet, Hem, Henry Mancini, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, Herbie Hancock, Hillstomp, Ho-Hum, Hoagy Carmichael, The Hollies, The Holy Modal Rounders, Hope Sandoval, Hot Snakes, Howlin' Wolf, Hoyt Axton, Hugo Montenegro, The Human League and Ice Cube

Also listened to: Harvey Hindemeyer, Hauschka, Havanna Exotica, Hawsley Workman, Hawnay Troof, Head Like A Kite, Head Of Femur, Headmess, Headmint, Health, Healthy White Baby, Heather Duby, Heatwave, Heavy Stereo, Heavy Trash, Hefner, Heidi Saperstein, Helen Foster, Helene Smith, Hell On Wheels, Hell Promise, Hello Stranger, Helvetia, Hendricks & Co., Hendrik Meurkens, Henrik Schwarz, Henry Spaulding. Henry Thomas, Herbert, The Here And Now Boys, Here Today, Herman Jolly, The Hero Cycle , hi-posi, High Inergy, The High Strung, The Higher, Highway QCs, Hiroshi Takano, His Name Is Alive, The Hiss, History At Our Disposal, The Hit Parade, The Hitch-Hikers, The Hitmen, Hobex, Hockey Night, The Hokum Boys, Holler Wild Rose, Holly Dolly, Holly Golightly, Holly Williams, Holy Fuck, Home, Homunculus, Honeybus, The Honeycombs, Hootie & The Blowfish, Hopewell, Hot Chip, Hot Club De Paris, Hot Club Of Cowtown, The Hot Dogs, The Hot Puppies, The Hotel Alexis, Hotel Lights, The Hourly Radio, House Of Pain. Howie B, Howie Beck, Howie Day, The Howling Hex, Hoyt Ming & His Pep-Steppers, HP Riot, The Hues Corporation, Hugh Maskela, The Human Society, Humphrey Ocean, Hurrah!, The Hurricane Lamps, The Huxtables, Hypatia Lake, The Hyperions, The Hytones, I Am The World Trade Center, Ian Hunter, Ian Moore and Iceage Cobra

Next week: From Idlewild to Jan Hammer, plus a few words on jamming

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