Various Artists: The American Song-Poem Anthology: Do You Know The Difference Between Big Wood And Brush

"America's largest song studio wants to see your material," went the come-on for one of the many tiny ads run by the song-poem industry, a shady corner of the music business in operation since the invention of recorded sound. "Just write the words as you feel them," it continued. "We'll inform you if you qualify." Naturally, everyone qualifies, and of course it's a scam, but as song-poem archivist Phil Milstein explains in the liner notes to this new compilation, it's "the only scam that produces a unique work of art with every transaction." Here's how it works: Aspiring lyricists (or, in the simplified terms of most ads, writers of "song-poems") respond to the ad and submit work for evaluation to companies known elsewhere as song-sharks. All the writers get high marks, plus a notice claiming that they need to send in money to get the ball rolling on their musical careers. Once cash has changed hands, the bottom-feeding professional composers and musicians in the song-sharks' employ set the words to music and lay down a recording later pressed in a limited batch and sent to the artist with vague promises of promoting it to the industry at large. And there the process ends. Though still in existence, the industry reached a commercial (and arguably creative) peak in the '60s and '70s with such labels as MSR, Sterling, and Preview. Do You Know The Difference Between Big Wood And Brush anthologizes this period, collecting 28 tracks highly regarded in song-poem-collecting circles. What kind of song-poets submitted their work? Based on this admittedly selective sampling, they seem evenly divided between the tragically misguided and the certifiably insane. The song that gives the collection its title–which strains to the breaking point a metaphor contrasting quick-burning infatuation with slow-burning love–typifies the former. Francis "Sonny" Fernandes' song "All You Need Is A Fertile Mind," a jaunty number that condemns pornography before launching into a paean to the virtues of proper masturbation, typifies the latter. A better question might be, why listen? As Milstein argues on his song-poem web site (www.aspma.com, a nice complement to the CD's good but far-from-exhaustive liner notes), there's more than ironic enjoyment on Do You Know, although there's plenty of that, too. Here, the clash between artistic inspiration and commercial calculation found in all pop music plays out in its rawest form. Believe it or not, sometimes the art wins. Exhibit A: "How Can A Man Overcome His Heartbroken Pain," a song composed and performed by Rodd Keith, the song-poem industry's resident tragic genius, who engaged the lyric, redundancy and all, on its own terms, and created a piece of fractured brilliance. That's not always the case, but it doesn't make the pop stylings of "Convertibles And Headbands" ("a convertible and a headband makes the scene"), "I Like Yellow Things" ("lemon pies and butterflies, yellow submarines, corn on the cob and tangerines"), or "Human Breakdown Of Absurdity" ("searching for a place in the mountain where the sexless virgins could moan / watched by clergymen with faces of stone"), the bastard children of con artists and some of the most fertile minds in America, any less perversely fascinating or strangely inspiring.