After 17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel Murray is taking time off from all new music, and is revisiting his record collection in alphabetical order, to take stock of what he's amassed, and consider what he still needs.
"Cross Road Blues" by Robert Johnson
According to legend, one night in the early 1930s, Robert Johnson showed up at the crossroads in the pitch of night and sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his musical talent. That's a cool story. But I like this one better: In November of 1936 and again seven months later, Johnson traveled to Texas to record a handful of songs in slapped-together studios, and the trebly, echo-y 78s that were pressed from those sessions would go on to capture the imagination of music buffs and would-be musicians around the world, establishing a model for many for how the blues should sound. Even now, some engineers work on vintage equipment—or experiment with microphone placement and filters—to replicate that spooky, middle-of-nowhere mood that Johnson conjured up with just his moaning voice, his fast-and-erratic acoustic picking, and the tin can electronics set loosely around him.
Shortly after I started getting more deeply interested in rock history in high school, I borrowed a stack of blues records—including one of the slew of Johnson anthologies available over the years—and was disappointed that I didn't feel the kind of immediate charge I'd expected, based on all the reading I'd done. I figured I was due for my own crossroads experience, even though I was just meeting Johnson in my suburban bedroom in the middle of the night. Instead I kept waiting for something to kick in. Drums, maybe. Or Mick Jagger's voice. I'd been thinking of myself as a purist, eager to scrape away the layers of crud that had accumulated on popular music over the decades in order to get back to the original machine. But what I discovered was that to a significant extent, it was the crud I'd been enjoying all along.
Over time, I've come to appreciate the blues more, helped immeasurably by my wife, who's more a devotee of all things archaic than I. But I'd be misrepresenting myself if I pretended that I generally prefer my blues straight and neat. I do like Robert Johnson a lot now—mainly because I get mesmerized trying to figure out where his guitar is going to go next—but for the most part I respond strongly to older blues recordings if they either capture something wild and spontaneous, or resemble mainstream pop in an unexpected way. On the former score:
"Honey Hush" by Robert Nighthawk
Contrast the one-man-in-a-lonely-room sound of Robert Johnson to the crowded roadhouse bustle of Robert Nighthawk, who grew up in the South under much the same circumstances as Johnson, but moved to the city and picked up a certain urban rush in his music. This live take on "Honey Hush" is the sound of something happening. If you were walking down the street and heard this coming out of a nightclub, you'd most likely pat your pocket to see if you could pay the cover. This track is the blues as sweaty, transporting dance music, fully anticipating what the genre would become It's about as far removed from rock 'n' roll as a frankfurter is from a hot dog.
Still, contrast Nighthawk to a more industry-entrenched performer like Stax Records' Rufus Thomas:
"Walking The Dog" by Rufus Thomas
Granted, Thomas is an unfair example, because his music is really more rhythm and blues, but Thomas' growly voice is as bluesy as it gets, and even this hooky dance song—later covered to good effect by The Rolling Stones—gets a lot of its thump from a choogling lead guitar that could've been swiped from a B.B. King record. Yet this recording is also clearly meant to be chart-bound, so it's a little tamer than Nighthawk. Which is fine by me, so long as it swings. The problem with a lot of straight-up blues in the rock era is that it's become awfully torpid. Witness Robert Cray:
"Lotta Lovin'" by The Robert Cray Band
In the '80s, Robert Cray briefly became part of what looked like a blues revival, spearheaded by Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Fabulous Thunderbirds and the ever-present Eric Clapton. Those acts—frequently championed by my father, and some of the older rock critics that I was reading at the time—are largely responsible for me avoiding most blues recorded after 1978, and even a lot recorded before. Cray can play like a dream, and he has a soulful voice, but too much of his music sounds downy, mellow—tasteful. It's meant to be heard in hushed nightclubs or on Austin City Limits, not in the kind of spaces where that Robert Nighthawk "Honey Hush" performance was recorded.
That's not necessarily meant as a knock on Cray (or ACL). But somewhat perversely, even though I'm deeply into certain kinds of soft sounds, the closer those soft sounds replicate the rigid structures and lyrical traditions of the blues, the more impatient I get. It may be heresy to say so, but I often prefer the appropriators, who take their own personal understanding of the blues—the parts of it they find exotic, or scary, or electrifying—and reinterpret it through their own cultural experiences. Whether it be The White Stripes wedding Howlin' Wolf to The Stooges, or Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones using the blues to evoke the epic and the disreputable, or Jimi Hendrix making the blues psychedelic, I'm usually more entranced by efforts to transliterate the form, and communicate something new with it.
This is not to argue in any way that The Rolling Stones are superior to the old bluesmen that they revered then ripped off. But compared to yet another familiar trip through the same 12 bars, I like it when artists pull it apart and goose it up. In the spirit of Robert Johnson and his personal devil, I like it when they sully it.
"Can't You Hear Me Knocking" by The Rolling Stones
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Pieces Of The Puzzle
Rickie Lee Jones
Years Of Operation 1978-present
Fits Between Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits
"Pirates (So Long Lonely Avenue)" by Rickie Lee Jones
Personal Correspondence When my family moved into the first house we ever owned around 1983, my stepfather inherited his folks' pool table, which we put in the basement along with his drafting table, our biggest TV, some comfy furniture and a spare hi-fi. The stereo had an 8-Track player, and during one of my periodic trips to the flea market, I bought an 8-Track copy of Rickie Lee Jones, which I listened to a lot while shooting pool, feeling just like one of those Venice Beach neo-bohemians that Jones often sang about. Jones moved to L.A. as a teenager, and found a whole scene developing around the likes of Tom Waits (her one-time boyfriend) and Chuck E. Weiss (the inspiration for her biggest hit, "Chuck E.'s In Love"). Her debut album aimed to popularize the jazzier, more character-oriented version of West Coast soft-rock that her friends, lovers and mentors had pioneered, and the plan worked, briefly. Rickie Lee Jones became a platinum-level hit, capitalizing on Waits' and Joni Mitchell's experiments by smoothing them out and giving them a cocky, playful attitude. Subsequent Jones records failed to chart as high, sometimes because they were too tricky, and sometimes because they weren't all that good. Me though, I've always held on to that original image of Jones in her red beret, lighting up a cigarette on the cover of her first album. It always reminds me of idle afternoons spent chalking up a cue and knocking in billiard balls to beat of "Weasel And The White Boys Cool."
Enduring presence? When I wrote up Rickie Lee Jones for "Permanent Records," I was surprised by the negative reaction from a lot of commenters, who called Jones soft, annoying and phony—or at the least, represented in the column by an album that wasn't her best. To both camps I offer up a track from Pirates, the more musically and emotionally complex follow-up to Jones' debut. This song is reportedly a reaction to her breakup with Waits, and if you want to carry it this far, you can trace the arc of their relationship in the music itself, which goes from peppy and poppy to washed-out and dissolute, all over the course of four minutes.
Robyn Hitchcock
Years Of Operation1981-present (solo)
Fits Between Syd Barrett and John Lennon
"Bass" by Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians
"Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)" by Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians
"Glass Hotel" by Robyn Hitchcock
Personal Correspondence I stumbled across Robyn Hitchcock when I was a senior in high school, and for a time I was buying a new Hitchcock album roughly every month, and trying to convert my friends by insisting they listen to one of Hitchcock's quirky/scary novelty numbers, like "The Man With The Lightbulb Head" or "Uncorrected Personality Traits." But while I was urging my friends to bop along to "Balloon Man," I was keeping Hitchcock's dreamier songs—the "Winchester"s and "Acid Bird"s—to myself. And I kept returning to I Often Dream Of Trains (still the key Hitchcock album to me), in which Hitchcock connects archaic Britannia to Freudian preoccupations, establishing that he's deeper than the average loon. It's always been a thin line that Hitchcock walks. His best "fun" songs, like Element Of Light's "Bass," throw out gleefully surreal imagery while simultaneously transcribing a neurotic's nightmares—but at their worst, those songs can also come off as pointlessly silly. His best "straight" songs, like the oddly titled "Flesh Number One," are classic guitar-pop, beholden to The Beatles and The Byrds—but if Hitchcock goes too classic, his music loses a lot of its necessary kink, and dries out. The one mode that Hitchcock has perpetually returned to with great success since I Often Dream Of Trains is that of the somber, haunted acoustic balladeer, represented here by "Glass Hotel," a song from the sublime Eye (and re-recorded for the concert film Storefront Hitchcock, the source of the version above). Even at his most fantastical, Hitchcock's bizarre lyrical imagery has always been tied to personal pain and yearning, and on songs like "Glass Hotel," the trip through Hitchcock's subconscious seems fully connected to what's going on during his waking hours.
Enduring presence? If John Lennon were alive today, I bet he'd be a lot like Hitchcock, putting out a new record every couple of years and continuing to circle the same lyrical and musical obsessions. And that might not be so bad. The most vital era of Hitchcock's music-making has long passed, but while I no longer look forward to his new records the way I did in the '80s, I nearly always enjoy them when I hear them. (And he still comes up with one or two stunning songs per set.) Final fun fact: The album Eye was the first record I ever reviewed "professionally." A friend of mine was editing The University Of Georgia's student paper, and needed a review of the Hitchcock album to tie in with an upcoming show, so she asked if I'd write it up. I knocked out 800 or so words and got paid five bucks. Off and running.
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