Boney Earnest's Suburban Hilltop Tent Revue

Saturday, December 17, 2005 ... 11:16 PM

(Jesus Christ, I'm only halfway done with) Boney's Anachronistic Best of 2005, part three

4) Lightnin Hopkins

Lightnin Hopkins kept coming up in 2005. In the Spring, I bought the JSP boxed set of Lightnin's sides from 1946-1951. Five discs, 120 tracks. One hundred twenty. Later in the year, Oxford American made Lightnin the heart of their excellent Summer Music Issue, giving appreciation duty in the magazine to three different authors. Each of the other artists was given one author.

Like a lot of folks around my age, I imagine, I first heard of Lightnin Hopkins as the title of an REM song. It's an uptempo pop song, major chords, not a blues song. As far as I can tell, all the song has to do with the man is the use of his name and a Stipeian bead-string of rural Texas imagery.

Hound bark on the track
Hound crow hold onto your hat
Lightnin' won lightnin' won
Low lands timberlands bad lands bird lands

But it put the name in my head, and it's one of those names that sticks, rolls into mind while I'm washing the dishes or tying my shoes. I say it out loud: "Lightnin Hopkins." I like the sound of it. Early in my blues self-education (I'm at about a 4th grade level now), I finally picked up a vinyl double-LP called "Double Blues." The back cover is a B&W extreme close up of the old guy's face. It's meant to emphasize his rugged windcarved sunbaked features. Every pore is vivid. The wrinkles creeping out beneath his sunglasses, the beard stubble on his jawline. He seems to be made of dried river silt.

The first record starts with Lightnin telling a story of how, at eight years old, he built his first guitar from a cigar box, a wood plank, and some screen wire. He took the box down to where Blind Lemon Jefferson was busking and showed old Blind Lemon how he could imitate the great man's playing. The crowd set Lightnin up on the bed of a truck and he stood there and picked along with Blind Lemon. Eight years old. He plays acoustic and electric guitars throughout his career, to different effects. He uses dynamics dramatically: wide empty spaces between fast, chunky licks, and graceful jumps between hard and soft attacks. Willie Nelson might have learned his vocal phrasing from Lightnin's picking. Lightnin's style is complete and autonomous; he brings his sound to the guitar. Lightnin on electric archtop, I imagine, sounds not much different from Lightnin playing a cigar box.

The primary quality of his voice is that it's avuncular. Not creepy, as Mississippi John Hurt sounds. John Hurt is the short uncle who works at the green grocer and whom you don't trust alone with the kids.

Lightnin is the uncle who can't hold down a job, shows up drunk to Christmas dinner, and tells dirty jokes in mixed company. His nephews idolize him. Like Clarence Ashley, Lightnin sounds, even as a younger man, ancient, wily, and bewildered. The range of experiences catalogued in his songs reads like a Flannery O'Connor anthology. In "Bald Headed Woman," he learns that his woman is fucking another man, and he demands that she return the wig he has bought for her. Lightnin frequently invented his lyrics on the spot (he called them "air songs"), but whether any single narrative is legit or apocryphal, he's so convincingly baffled at every misfortune, they can be nothing but true.

I have nearly 200 of his tracks on my shelf, and that's hardly a dent in the man's discography. His catalogue is oceanic, in its breadth and its homogeneity. He nearly always plays in the key of E. He opens his every slow shuffle, and there have got to be thousands of them, with the same double-stop riff on the second and third strings, and he comes back to this riff constantly over the course of a song. All his thousands of tunes, maybe without exception, end with the same lick. On the second string, the B, it's tabbed: 0 2 0 3. It's a common blues lick, a turnaround, landing on the flatted 7th, unresolved. Everyone uses this lick at some point. After singing "Happy Birthday," little kids like to hang these notes with the lyric, "And many more." But Lightnin uses it as a signature stroke. He signs every song with it, as Van Gogh signed his paintings Vincent.

With the JSP boxed set, you can listen to Lightnin all night long and feel as though you've listened to one very long tune. He's no songster. Compared with a Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin's vocabulary seems tiny -- though I have no doubt that blues scholars and Lightnin completists can give me a million reasons why I'm wrong about this (and probably everything else I've said here). It's true that if you listen actively, you'll pick up variegations. He's got boogies and slow shuffles. Sometimes he plays with a small band -- upright bass and drum kit, the odd piano, and he audibly baffles sidemen with his expressive timing and tempo. He uses floating blues verses, and the common lover-leaving, highway-side, down-on-my-luck subjects, but his lyrics are political at times. Jim Crow is a topic, and maybe couldn't not be for a black man in Jim Crow Texas without conscious resistance. Vietnam, Korea, and WWII are all lamented and feared, though not blatantly protested. But if you're not listening for the nuance of each song and putting blank space between them in your mind, they soon wash together. That's fine, though. It all makes good fucking listening.

I have favorite Lightnin Hopkins songs. It is possible to fish a few from the ocean. I like "War News Blues" for its foreboding, its twilit apocalyptic a-bomb anxiety. I used to dream pretty often of nuclear war, so it speaks to me. I like "Bring Me My Shotgun," because I get a good chill from songs about lovers wanting to kill each other. The connections, see, are completely subjective. All true, deeply felt musical connections are. Technique skill signficance -- blah blah blah. Above the rest, though, of all 200-some sides I've heard, I like "Standin on 75 Highway," from Double Blues, best. It's the slowest, most patient, most spacious in its delivery, haunted and lonesome. It's got its ear to that wall.

5) Guero, Beck (Geffen)

From the bloated, overindulgent, shockingly overrated mope-glut of Sea Change, Beck emerges a fit, mature artist. I've heard all the criticisms -- familiar safe retread, whatever. Fact is, like it or not -- and you might as well -- Beck is the voice of a culture. He's our laureate. Intimate and topical, current and eternal, he drinks his whiskey out of the Harry Smith grail, and I'll stand on Greil Marcus's coffee table in my Chuck Taylors and tell him myself.

Down on the corner
See me standing in a makeshift home with a dust storm comin
In a long black shadow
Pull a hammer from a coal mine down where your daddy was workin
Comb my hair back
Strike a match on the bathroom wall where my number was written
Driving on the sidewalk
lookin' back at the sky
It's burning in the rearview mirror
Na na na na na, I better go it alone

Nuff said.

Brendan

1 comments | 7"

Friday, December 16, 2005 ... 8:40 PM

Boney's Anachronistic Best of 2005, part two

3) Cold Roses, & Jacksonville City Nights, Ryan Adams (Lost Highway)

I've bought into the buzz around Ryan Adams this year, but I'm burnt out on it. Fans and press have tripped over themselves to slaughter the fatted calf for Ryan's return to twang, but I think that come the morning light, a lot of copies of Jacksonville City Nights will start bobbing up in the used bins. So many of the vocal performances on this record are just bad -- and not bad in a sustainably interesting way, but bad in a way that suggests to me a conversation like this:

Engineer: Eeesh. That was, uh ...
Producer: I know. It takes him six or seven takes to warm up. Roll back to zero.
Ryan (in the tracking room): All right, good enough. Next.
Engineer: Oh fuck, is he kidding?
Producer (over intercom): Yeah Ryan. That was pretty good. Let's get a few more, so we have some options in the mix.
Ryan: I said we're moving on. I wanna get out of here and get some sushi.

Still, I wonder how I'd feel about this record if it didn't include "Peaceful Valley." It's a plane wreck of a song, and its failure taints everything around it, destabilizes the record's entire dimension, like that jet engine in Donnie Darko. But I've harped on this enough. Clearly I'm the one missing something. I'd love for someone to convince me that my $15.00 was spent well.

I did, though, get plenty of mileage out of Cold Roses. I listened to it enough in the few months after its release to put it on my Best Of. It's purple Kool-Aid made with too much water: a diluted but pleasant enough summer refreshment. Good choruses, hooks and instrumental vamps are frequently stretched beyond their elasticity. The title track is a good example. A couple few tunes snap tightly and satisfying. Or one does, anyway. "Let It Ride," the blatant single -- meaning that it's blatantly good. You can just listen to it. The band gives an economical performance that's also deeply felt, bruised and moody and driving wobbily as if from a fight in which it got its ass walloped. It's solid country rock. (Also, any tune featuring a guitar hook bent by a Bigby and drenched in reverb has a leg up on winning me over. See the Sadies, and their work on Neko's Blacklisted.) Other tracks that still feel overdrawn, but manage to stand up above the rest: "Cherry Lane," "Sweet Illusion," "Beautiful Sorta." I'll listen to this record again next summer. Jacksonville City Nights, probably not.

Brendan

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Wednesday, December 14, 2005 ... 10:36 PM

Boney's Anachronistic Best of 2005, part one

This weblog dosn't have much journalistic currency. I try sometimes, when something new interests me. I write about the shows I manage to see. I wrote about Ryan Adams and Steve Earle when their most recent records came out. I have no illusions that my finger is on any pulse.

But now's the season for Year's Best lists. I enjoy reading them. I'm only slightly embarrassed by how few albums released in 2005 I've actually heard, but I've heard few enough that I won't go on record about which songs albums artists guitar-solos hairdos and so forth I think are the best. I've listened to a lot of music this year, though, that came out of a lot of different years. It's all new to me. So here is part one of my 2005 Top Ten List of Best Music From Whenever, culled from the stuff I've been listening to for the past 12 months. Find old, new, borrowed, and blue in this Earnest wedding year.

1) Tim Easton, "They Will Bury You," Evening Muse, 7/8/05.

You have bottleneck slide on a crusty old flattop guitar, you have minor chords. Portentous lyrics that skim the collective dream. You have rasp. Mainly, you have atmosphere. Listening to this music gives you the feeling that you've got your ear to a thin wall between your own consciousness and American Mythology. Sounds goofy, I'll admit, but it's the feeling that flipped the twang switch in my head years ago. I heard it first in Grant Lee Buffalo and Mazzy Star, and then early Cowboy Junkies. I get it from Clarence Ashley, Skip James, and Neko Case. It's what I want when I go hunting for music: that bottomless depth, that ear to the wall. In a tiny nightclub, around four fans turned up to witness a Tim Easton suddenly turned hoodoo man, summoning this sensation of thunder rumbling your floorboards -- that summer storm feeling of the sky holding its breath.

Listen at Tim's site.

2) Detroit Blues: Blues from the Motor City 1938-1954 (JSP)
Disc C, "Stop Breaking Down," Baby Boy Warren
Disc A, "Highway 61 Blues," Sampson Pittman

Baby Boy Warren came from Louisiana and cut his teeth in Memphis, but in the 1950s became a staple in Detroit's postwar blues scene anchored by the Hastings Street ghetto. Black folks moved up around the Great Lakes from all over the South to work in the motor plants. A lot of these guys brought the primal seed of the rural blues with them. It rooted in the concrete. It mutated in the assemby lines, hardened, buzzing with electrical current and the pumping of brass valves. John Lee Hooker hit a major stride in Detroit, grew up and out, crossed over to the lucrative white market.

Baby Boy Warren didn't quite. When the Hastings Street scene got bulldozed in the 60s, he quit music to focus on feeding his kids. He died in Detroit in 1977. I love his take on Robert Johnson's "Stop Breaking Down." I like Warren's gregarious delivery, predicting the pressed professionalist passion of Motown acts to come. I like the angular, workmanlike thrum of his band: saxophone, piano, drums, guitar, well-oiled, lit up. The factory has wrung out any traces of the Delta, of the individual bluesman's expressiveness. It's urban party music, loud and grinning.

Sampson Pittman, though, is pure individualism, acoustic expressiveness. He survived the misery of wild, lawless Arkansas levee camps and arrived in Detroit before the War, where he cut some songs and stories for Alan Lomax, after which he apparently disappeared. Lomax liked his rhythmic oral histories, but I think his best narrative is given by his slide guitar performance on "Highway 61 Blues." That's cheesy, I know it. But listen to it. The cut starts at a stomping Texas tempo, and Pittman with his dirtpile voice moans out a couple of floating blues verses. Then he goes out on a guitar break, and never comes back. If there are more words to this tune, he doesn't know them, or he's lost interest in them. He's given up on the lyrics, which don't belong to him anyway. Whatever he has to say, he has no use for words. The music spreads wide, out through his hands. The tempo picks up, but organically. His bottleneck licks are varied and simple. There's no rhythmic thunking of the bass strings like you hear in Delta blues. It's all melody, curling into the air like smoke.

Brendan

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Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas
(Novello Festival Press, April 2008)
includes my essay, "Link Wray"

SITES WHICH THE TENT REVUE RECOMMENDS

MUSIC
Flop Eared Mule
The Celestial Monochord
HickoryWind.org
Dig and Be Dug in Return
Modern Acoustic Magazine / Blog
The Old, Weird America
Honey, Where You Been So Long?

LITERATURE
The Greensboro Review
Mixed Animal
Night Train
Fried Chicken and Coffee
Mungo (This was the blog of my friend, the late Cami Park. Miss you, Cami.)
Staccato Fiction
Wigleaf
PANK Magazine

OTHER
Cat and Girl
Film Freak Central

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