Freewheelin' Revisited! Which albums should Bob perform live in their entirety?

In recent years several artists have been giving shows that consist mostly of a single album, played in its entirety. Van Morrison not so long ago played Astral Weeks live to critical acclaim, even releasing the result as a cd Astral Weeks Live At the Hollywood Bowl and a DVD (exclusive to Amazon: see inset).


A few years ago Elvis Costello gave a performance of his first and most widely loved album, My Aim Is True, even reuniting with the original musicians.

And in 2002 David Bowie played the whole of Low in one set and then came back to perform his then latest album Heathen in a second set.

Rufus Wainwright even performed the whole of Judy Garland's Judy at Carnegie Hall.

Anyway, you get the idea.I started off by thinking that Bob would never do something like this, then I suddenly realized, he already has -- exactly 30 years ago this month he started the first of two tours on which he performed the whole of Slow Train Coming and the then-unreleased Saved in their entirety (barring 'Satisfied Mind' off the latter, which can be regarded as a sort of 'bonus track.' Also, 'Are You Ready?' only emerged as very a late addition to the second tour, and was then played throughout the third gospel tour, when Bob dropped some songs and added others, some of which remain unreleased to this day).

So once again, Bob was way ahead of the pack. Except of course, the context was different. One album was Bob's latest release and the other would be his next album, and both were informed by his religious belief, giving him a burning desire to perform them to audiences. I cannot see Bob doing a show in which he rattled off the whole of Highway 61 Revisited and then came out and did all of Blood on the Tracks. And even if he did, of course, the songs would be unrecognizable from the versions on the original albums, and the musicians would be different (even if all the original ones were still alive, I can't see him choosing to play with the same people again). And of course, whereas someone like Van Morrison sounds much the same as he did in 1970, Bob's voice has gone through umpteen changes.

So this blog is purely for fun. Tell me which two albums you would pick to be played in their entirety for your fantasy, one-off Dylan live show. Also, who would you like to play with him for these revisited versions (stick to living musicians, please, just to make it a little more plausible)?

I'll go first. These aren't necessarily my favourite albums, I just think that they would make for a fantastic show.

First off, Bob should do the whole of Freewheelin'. Firstly, that will give us a few live debuts -- I don't believe that he's ever performed "Bob Dylan's Blues", "Down the Highway", or "I Shall Be Free" live at all, while there is just one circulating live performance of "Oxford Town" and "Corrina, Corrina" and two of "Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance" (ignoring home recordings). "Bob Dylan's Dream" hasn't been heard since 1991, and "Talkin' World War III Blues" since 1965.

And this half of the show should at least predominantly solo, because we haven't seen that for a while. Maybe he could be joined by some backing musicians on a couple of songs -- maybe we could even finally get to hear what the rocked up "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" might have sounded like (backing musicians are said to be on this track on the Freewheelin' liner notes! No such version has ever surfaced. There is even a rumored "Dixieland" take!) And while they were out there, they could perhaps play on the live debut of Mixed-Up Confusion... The only other "outtake" from the Freewheelin' album I would include in the show would be the all-time great love song Tomorrow Is A Long Time (strictly speaking, it was not recorded in the Freewheelin' sessions at all, but was demoed in between sessions). But hey, if he wants to debut Rocks and Gravel while he's out there, who am I to argue with Bob?

I even have my running order for this one-off live show (to be performed at a suitable small venue within a 20 mile radius of my house), which departs from the original sequence.

I Shall Be Free (starting where he left off in 1963) -- Bob on guitar. Gets Bob and us relaxed and warmed up. New lyrics with updated references, including to Alicia Keyes and Scarlett Johannson)
Masters of War (Bob on guitar).
Oxford Town (Bob on guitar) -- end of first 'protest' sectoin
Down the Highway (Bob on guitar & harmonica)
Bob Dylan's Blues (Bob on guitar & harmonica
Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance (Bob on guitar) -- concludes blues section.
Talkin' World War III Blues (Bob on guitar) -- Bob brings house down with new final line: "Barack Obama said that! At least I think that's what he said!)
Girl of the North Country (Bob on guitar and harmonica)
Tomorrow Is A Long Time (Bob on guitar, Donnie Heron on violin) [End of the Echo-Suze section]

Bobtalk:
"Ladies and gentlemen! I want to introduce my current band! That was Donnie Herron you just heard on violin. On lead guitar, Charlie Sexton! On bass, Tony Garnier! On the drums, the best drummer we could find tonight, George Recile! And the other guy who you can never actually hear but who follows me around, Stu Kimball!)

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right (Bob on keyboards, the rest as above, except Donnie on pedal steel rather than violin).

Bobtalk: "This next song was my first single. Hands up if you were the guy who bought it."

Mixed-Up Confusion (musicians as above)
Rocks and Gravel (musicians as above) -- OPTIONAL
Corrina, Corrina (musicians as above except Charlie and Bob on acoustic guitars, no drums)

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall (Bob on guitar).

Bobtalk: "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen! That song was called "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall", and it certainly is. Goodnight!"

Long, sustained applause.

Encore:

Blowin' in the Wind (Bob on guitar and harmonica, Joan Baez on backing vocals -- just kiddin'!)

Curtain falls on first part of show, leaving the audience stunned and amazed, especially a certain raggedclown...

Which album will Bob play when he comes back for the second half of the show? Will it be Christmas From the Heart? Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, do let me have your own suggestions for albums* Bob should play in their entirety live, with as much detail as possible. Let your fantasies run wild!

*I was thinking of his own studio albums, but if you think he should sing the whole of Sinatra in the Sands or Kate Bush's A Kick Inside, who am I to stop you? It's your fantasy.

Loudon Wainwright III Part 5: I'm Alright

Now we come to one of the best records of Loudon's career, perhaps his second-best of the eighties. It was recorded two years after Fame and Wealth, once again on the small folk label Rounder Records. I'm Alright was recorded in London, England, and Loudon himself moved there around this time (the song "Cardboard Boxes" is about moving house, as it happens).

Loudon had produced Fame and Wealth himself, but perhaps realizing that the sound of that album wasn't too great, he invited Richard Thompson on board again, this time as producer as well as session man. The result is a much cleaner sound, though equally stripped down. (Ironically, Thompson's own albums at this time suffered from misguided attempts by other producers to give them an eighties sheen; he might have been better off producing his own records.) As was noticeable with Fame and Wealth, Loudon has given up attempts to be a rocker, having parodied his efforts in "Watch Me Rock, I'm Over Thirty" (on Final Exam, as we saw.)

The opening song of I'm Alright is in fact the lonely acoustic troubador song par excellence. It is ironic, then, that many people today probably know it best in a lush band arrangement with harmony vocals. Yes, it's One Man Guy, the song Rufus appropriated from his Dad and now everyone thinks is his own.

I'm not denying that Rufus's version is sweet on the ear, or that there isn't a curious Oedipal thing going on, with Rufus apparently going against the grain of the lyric by suggesting that whatever Loudon may be, he, Rufus, is not a miserable, selfish loner. That, at least is the impression given by his use of Richard's son Teddy and his own sister Martha on vocal harmonies. How can he be a one-man guy with his best mate and loving sis behind him?

Thus Rufus's version, however sweet, doesn't interpret the lyrics so much as reject their message. This is another of Loudon's loner songs, simultaneously celebrating and recoiling from his motel room existence and his alley cat ways (check out "Motel Blues", "Ingenue", and several others). The song confesses the selfishness of this kind of existence, while clinging to it, even revelling in it. It suggests that the only thing we can depend on and trust is ourselves:

these three cubic feet of bone and blood and meat are all I love and know

Perhaps no one since Philip Larkin has been this honest about the selfish pleasures of the single life.

Thus as a son's gift to a father, Rufus's version is ambiguous, to say the least. Nevertheless, royalties on "One Man Guy" must represent one of Loudon's biggest ever pay days (after "Dead Skunk" and Johnny Cash's cover of "The Man Who Could Not Cry").

The song is written to be sung live at one of Loudon's endless solo shows:

People will know when they come to the show
What kind of a guy I am
They'll understand what I stand for
And what I just can't stand

Great word play, that! And a perfect concert-opener.

Here you can see Loudon perform the song:



And here is Rufus's very different interpretation:





The next song, Lost Love, is a breakup song without an apparent personal angle, it being highly stylized in the manner of a Noel Coward song or something from that era. I'm very fond of it, however untypical of Loudon it may be. There is some great wordplay again.

I've noticed that you never call me "darling", darling
I understand the reason wh-hy-hy-hy
There is no reason why you should call me "darling", darling
Leave love alone and let it die.

The middle part is more like the Loudon we know and are distinctly ambivalent about, however (see "Mr. Guilty" and the later "So Damn Happy"):

I'm not completely sure I'm sorry, darling
When I get angry, then I'm glad
I'M HAPPY THAT IT'S FINALLY OVER
[lapsing back into Noel Coward mode) But when I'm not glad, I'm sad.

As with his country pastiches on Final Exam you wish Loudon would write a little more in this jazz-lounge vein.

Then we have the blues parody, I'm Alright, the title track. Loudon introduces it in concert as the "happy blues." Those old black guys certainly make you think the bottom of their world has fallen out now that their baby darn left them, but a middle class white guy like Loudon can't be that unselfconsciously solipsistic, so on the whole you believe him when he says he's "all right without you", though there may be an element of protesting too much. The performance of the song below is prefaced by an interview with Loudon in which he explains that the album was originally going to be called One Man Guy, but his agent persuaded him that the record-buying public would think he was gay, so he changed it... The performance is a good example of the visual and physical element of Loudon as a performer: lots of spastic gestures and weird facial contortions.



In another interview excerpt shown after the performance of the song in the above video, Loudon says that he was originally drawn to the idea of making it clear that the singer is not "all right" after all; but in the end he was drawn to the comedy ending with the dental floss....

After those thematically linked songs comes a Loudon song about someone else (notice how these are becoming more infrequent as we go on? Not John is about the death of John Lennon five years earlier. It's a sincere tribute, though Loudon cannot resist an irreverent pun:

John Lennon and his wife Yoko - Oh No

youttube offers us a video montage together with the album performance of this song:



Incidentally, loser assassin Michael David Chapman may have been stalking a different victim 12 months earlier:





Cardboard Boxes is about moving house, as already stated, a nice semi-acoustic number with some great drumming.

Screaming Issue is a song written to Loudon's daughter by the singer Suzzy Roche (member of the family vocal group The Roches), who was born (judging by the song's lyrics) the previous Christmas. There would be another daughter (Lexie Kelly) by another woman later, so that it is sometimes difficult to be sure who these Wainwrights are singing about (Rufus has said that "Little Sister" is not about Martha, so is it about Lucy or Lexie?) At least there is no mistaking for whom this song is intended as Loudon mentions Lucy by name. The title puns, of course, on two senses of "issue." Delicate and beautiful.

Next we have one of Loudon's edgy funny songs, about the questions journalists always ask anyone who still has the temerity to outstay their welcome in the music business: How Old Are You?

The questions range from the nasty and impertinent:

How come you don't try to write a novel?
How come you don't try to write a play?
Isn't it time you died or retired?
Why the hell won't you just go away?
How old are you, are you crazy?
How old are you, are you really a drunk?
Are you bitter, have you grown lazy?
Were you embarrassed about "Dead Skunk"?

to ones that Loudon probably wonders about himself:

How come you didn't get big like Bob Dylan?
How come you didn't get big like Springsteen?
Were you unable or were you unwilling?
Tell us the truth about it, come on, come clean!

(Nice guitar by Richard Thompson, by the way!)

Then there is the utterly charming Animal Song, about the noises that animals make. A children's song. I don't trust the performer who never records at least one of those. Here's Loudon performing the song (followed by 'Five Years Old) live in 1987:





Out of This World is a hopeful song looking forward to the next life. Daddy Take A Nap is a slightly annoying brass band stomp with mildly amusing lyrics written from a child's point of view. Ready or Not (So Ripe) is an optimistic sounding song I've never got my head around.

The album closes quietly with Career Moves, which looks back over Loudon's career in the music business and as an entertainer with a lot of quiet pride:

For 20 odd years I have strummed on guitars
5,000 lost flat picks, four fingertip scars
I must have broken a million g strings
Picking and strumming, and playing these things
Banging and tunin', and playing these things.

And it's been 16 years now that I've written songs
Over a 100 and still growing strong
About drinking and hockey and flying above
Again and again about unhappy love
Over and over, unhappy love.

And it's music for money, but I'll do it for fun
Oh, I know how to do it, it's easily done
To stand on a stage doesn't make me afraid
I'm comfortable up there, it's gotten me laid
It always amazes me when I get paid.

So here am I doing all that I can do
You're paying, I'm playing, I'm grateful to you
Indoors and outdoors, at home and abroad
I sing these songs and you people applaud.
You haven't changed much, you still applaud.

With that obvious cue to the audience in the last line, it will be seen that the album is framed by two songs that seem written to order for Loudon's live shows. Moreover, "Career Moves" is Loudon's answer to some of the questions the hostile journalists ask in How Old Are You?, in particular, why he still sings and why he won't quit the business.

Here's Loudon singing "Career Moves" live on British TV in 1993:



You'll have to supply the applause yourself on cue!

I'm Alright was nominated for a grammy. It goes without saying that it didn't win...

Note: Scandalously, this fine album appears at time of writing to be out of print, with Amazon.com asking nearly $50.00 for a second-hand copy! Ordinarily I would not recommend that anyone download an mp3 copy of the album (that's against the whole ethos of these threads, which aim to present the artistic integrity of the LP/CD medium), but should you wish to support the artist, you can do so here: http://www.amazon.com/Im-Alright/dp/B000UDQ5VK/ref=dmusic_cd_album

Bob changes show opener, but still overlooks perfect choice

The three shows that circulate from Dylan's latest tour in this, the 20th year of the Never-Ending Tour, confirm the reports of those attending them that the man is back in very strong voice for the first time in at least a year. When that happens, even his current mediocre band can't hold him back.

The one disappointment is the continuing static nature of the setlists. Although no one could possibly obejct to a setlist like the first night of the Canadian tour in Saint John, New Brunswick, an excellent selection of vintage classics plus the best of the more recent Dylan songs, Bob still neglects large parts of his repertoire, particularly from the 70s and 80s.

At least he has started shaking up the opening slot. having opened with a different song on every night of the tour so far. But he continues to ignore, in my view, the perfect show opener....

The never-played opening song from his 1974 album Planet Waves, On A Night Like This has, in my view, all the ingredients of a perfect opening number. It even has some of the characteristics of the songs by which Dylan typically chooses to announce himself to the audience, which often make some kind of comment (usually ironic) about his relationship to the audience. Maggie's Farm is Bob's favourite song in this regard: it tells us right up front that, although we may technically be the boss and Dylan the hired worker, it doesn't mean he has to like it: "They say 'sing while you slave'/I get bored". So don't go complaining if his performance is merely workmanlike or if he actually falls asleep on the job. Others in this category are Hero Blues, that most unlikely obscure number with which Bob kicked off his eagerly awaited return to touring in 1974; and Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine, which was his calling card after "Hero Blues" was dropped after the first two shows in 1974 and again in 1989 and at other times.

There is another category of opener in which Bob makes a big statement, announcing mock-heroically that he's ready for the challenge of facing the audience. Examples are I'm Ready - the Muddy Waters number used on the U.S. leg of the 1978 tour, and Hallelujah, I'm Ready To Go, the bluegrass opener earlier this century. And still another category in which Bob makes us a pledge, as in To Be Alone With You or Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You (that one usually comes second rather than first, it is true). On A Night Like This incorporates elements of all three of these categories (though there are still other categories, which I pass over here). First of all, the night is special to us, if not to Dylan: we are seeing him perhaps for the first time; or it may be the 200th time, but even so, in terms of the number of shows he gives, that is a mere drop in the ocean. So for us the night is quite special, and the way the line builds up to a climax - On a night like THIS - emphasises that specialness; but the same emphasis is double-edged, because as the song goes on, a note of recrimination sets in. "If I'm not too far out, I think we did this once before"—in the context of the song, this sounds barbed. This special evening he's spending with his old lover, reminiscing on old times.... not only are some of those memories not so sweet, but they've even done the nostalgia trip itself before. But as an address to the audience, the song would work as a sly nod of the head to the long-time Dylan fans seeing Dylan for the 10th, 20th, or perhaps even 100th time. And a gentle reminder to the first-timer that while this may be special for him/her,. it's not so special for Dylan, whose been through it all thousands of times....

On A Night Like This is such a perfect opener perfect, you can even hear it in your head: Dylan striding to the microphone, singing the first three words unaccompanied into the microphone (or maybe just strumming an acoustic energetically) and then the band crashing in, with perfect timing, on the word 'TH -I-I- I - I- S !!!'

This could even be why he doesn't do this number - the arrangement I've just suggested, which seems to me the obvious one, would require just the sort of showmanship that he only occasionally goes in for. He normally likes to start a show very loose and relaxed, so that the first song is often little more than a warm-up number. Starting with On A Night Like This would require him to hit the ground running every time. What a great concert would follow if he started off with this tight an arrangement.

However, the real reason could be that Dylan just doesn't like the song. In the Biograph booklet he tells Cameron Crowe:

"I wrote this in New York... Sometimes you are affected by people thinking you're too heavy. You know? They see you and pretend they don't, if you do something that's extreme on the one hand, then you've got to hurry and turn it around so people aren't so sure that they saw what they saw...you know, I think this comes off as sort of like a drunk man who's temporarily sober. This is not my type of song, I think I just did it to do it."

A very intriguing comment. Since prior to Planet Waves Bob had done nothing that could be regarded as 'heavy' or 'extreme' since, say, All Along the Watchtower, he can only be referring to songs on Planet Waves itself. He seems to be suggesting he wrote "On A Night Like This" as a counterfoil to 'heavy' numbers such as Dirge, Going Going Gone, and Wedding Song . And certainly without this song and You Angel You (which definitely sounds written just for the sake of having an uptempo, happy-sounding number and to exorcise the demons of Dirge), Planet Waves wouldn't have much variation.

(And though he may have disliked the song in 1985, he included Los Lobos's version of it for his 2002 movie Masked and Anonymous.

However, although it may have been written specifically to fulfil the role of the uptempo opener, the song nevertheless beautifully prefigures and encapsulates Planet Waves both thematically and in terms of mood. The themes of the album are to be reminiscence and nostalgia - but the mood is to be bitter-sweet. Some of the memories are going to be romantic, others painful or downright venomous. The situation in the song seems to be a former lover returning for the evening: and not just for coffee and to share a few old memories. She is going to stay the night - but this has the air of a one-night-stand for old times' sake or for the sake of sex; not a long-term reunion. Therefore "say you'll never go away to stray" is more about the excitement of the moment than a realistic hope. The song is one of Dylan's most sexually charged:

Hold on to me so tight...
Hold on to me, pretty miss...

Run your fingers down my spine
Bring me a touch of bliss

Put your body next to mine
And keep me company

The last lines have humorous pay-off: "There is plenty of room for all so please don't elbow me". Given Dylan's reputation, we cannot dismiss the idea that more than one person is sharing his bed, but these lines are better seen as humour: "Can you stay the night? Sure, I don't think there's anyone in my bed right now, let me check - oh yeah, room for one more!" This is curiously echoed in Tough Mama - "Won't you move over and give me some room?"

Those lines of explicit sexuality are reinforced by the sensuousness and vividness of other details: the coffee roasting on the fire while they reminisce, the hissing of the log fire; the contrast between the warmth within - "let it burn burn burn" - and the frosty cold, snow, and stormy wind outside; and the hint of vulnerability but cosiness in "cabin door". The snow lies deep on the pathway outside, frost piles up high at the window, and the four winds howl around the door, but the couple go on reminiscing... and kissing. It's a wonderfully vivid picture, painted in a few lines. The album as a whole will be replete with allusions to nature - a frozen lake and footprints in the snow in Never Say Goodbye, "rainy days on the great lakes" in Something There Is About You - and with sensual details in the description of women: "Tough mama, meat shaking on your bones..." "Hazel, dirty blonde hair".. "Is it the way your body moves, or the way your hair blows free?" "Something there is about you that moves with style and grace". "The way you walk and the way you talk/I feel I could almost sing"... "You're beautiful beyond words". "You've turned your hair to brown/Love to see it hangin' down."

A second source of imagery on the album - heat, fire, smoke - is also prefigured in this song, with the hissing log on the fire and the threefold repetition of "let it burn, burn, burn" - which sounds like it was inspired by June Carter's Ring of Fire: "it burns, burns, burns, that ring of fire". The imagery is repeated in:

Can I blow a little smoke on you?

Ashes in the furnace, dust on the rise...

Today on the countryside it was hotter than a crotch...

Something there is about you that strikes a match in me...

I love you more than ever and it burns me to the soul

Every time we meet you know, I feel like I'm on fire (from Nobody 'Cept You, which comes from the PW sessions, if not on the album).

The heat and flame that burns throughout the album - these are torch ballads, remember - is prefigured in On A Night Like This in those wonderful lines:

Build a fire, throw on logs, and listen to it hiss
And let it burn burn burn on a night like this.

You can hear those hissing logs in the rhyme of listen and hiss and then again in this...

"We've got much to talk about and much to reminisce." The theme of reminiscence and nostalgia is to dominate songs like Hazel, Something There Is About You, Never Say Goodbye, and Nobody 'Cept You. A final theme is the desperate longing for love - these memories build up at times into almost painful yearning for physical contact with a former lover (even if it is not always the same woman, all the women are blended into one):

Nothing matters to me
And there's nothing I desire
'Cept you, yeah you

You've got something I want plenty of
Ooh, a little touch of your love.

Never did feel this way before.
Never did get up and walk the floor
If this is love then gimme more
And more and more and more and more

No I don't need any reminder
To know how much I really care

You're beautiful beyond words
You're beautiful to me...

At times, this longing is satisfied:

Suddenly I found you and the spirit in me sings
Don't have to look no further, you're the soul of many things

You've got me under your wing

Sweet Goddess
Your perfect stranger's comin' in at last

At others, the feelings are so intense that they actually give rise to self-hatred:

I hate myself for loving you and the weakness that it showed
You were just a painted face on a trip down suicide road

My thoughts of you don't ever rest, they'd kill me if I lie,
I'd sacrifice the world for you and watch my senses die

or to a desire to take the record of all these memories and burn them on the blazing log-fire:

I'm closin' the book
On the pages and the text
And I don't really care
What happens next.
I'm just going,
I'm going,
I'm gone.

I've paid the price of solitude but at least I'm out of debt.

All of these feelings climax in Wedding Song, in which longing, desperation, self-hatred, and the desire both to hang on to memories and to blot them out all come together:

I love you more than ever, more than time and more than love
I love you more than madness
Love you more than life itself
...your love cuts like a knife
I love you more than blood
I'd sacrifice the world for you and watch my senses die.
I love you more than all of that with a love that doesn't bend
Oh, can't you see that you were born to stand by my side
And I was born to be with you, you were born to be my bride,
You're the other half of what I am, you're the missing piece
And I love you more than ever with that love that doesn't cease.

and finally

I love you more than ever now that the past has gone.

Most of this is anticipated in the album's brilliant opener - the despair and self-hatred are not present in this song, but are prefigured in the manic air of the whole piece (perhaps this is what Dylan means by saying it sounds like the song of a drunk who has temporarily sobered up). All of the following songs can be seen as part of the lovers' fireside chat: the tender memories, the sexuality, the bitter recriminations... Planet Waves is an album that burns, burns, burns. All of its songs are within that ring of fire. (Note also the link between the blazing hearth and memory in Tangled Up in Blue, where the words of an old poem "glowed like burning coal", triggering memories of a former lover).

So then, On A Night Like This is an underrated song from an underrated album that I suggest would make a perfect opener for Dylan's show. It will probably never happen.

Stay tuned for a special blog to mark Bob's 67th birthday on Saturday. It'll be largely about another Planet Waves song. "See if you can guess which one that is."

Loudon Wainwright III - Part 3: T-Shirt & Final Exam

After Unrequited, like its predecessor, failed to sell, Columbia dropped Loudon, who then moved to his third label, Arista Records. His first album for his new record company, T-Shirt, was released in 1976.

This was Loudon's best produced record to that point in his career, and for the first time he sounds wholly comfortable with a band behind him.

However, at first listen it seems a strangely impersonal (and therefore very un-Loudon-like) album. The Loudon we know and love (since Attempted Moustache anyway) writes songs that are personal almost to the point of solipsism (a point which his son Rufus passed a long time ago).

But what do we have here?

The album opens with Bicentennial, a moderately sarcastic song about the anniversary of American Independence. It's quite funny, but it's more the sort of thing you'd associate with Randy Newman, who would be more pointedly satirical; Loudon is just poking his tongue out at the national occasion.

At Both Ends is about a young guy who parties himself into an early grave, and Loudon rocks out pretty well; but you can't help feeling Warren Zevon does this sort of thing much better. Reciprocity, a song about a couple into bondage, but it's not much more successful (and less amusing) than the song about gay sex on Unrequited.

Prince Hal's Dirge is a song about future King Henry V, whose conflict with his father is dramatized so brilliantly in Shakespeare's Henry IV Parts One and Two. Then we have Summer's Almost Over, a classic end-of-summer-back-to-school song that is given a gorgeous light jazz arrangement, with tinkling piano and shimmering xylophone; a song about a dog, Hey Packy; a quirky talking blues (Talkin' Big Apple '75), and a strange song entitled Just Like President Thieu.

Almost the only sign of the old Loudon, it seems, is the perennial drinking song, Wine With Dinner and a few personal references in Hollywood Hopeful.

So where are those songs about growing older, never quite making the big time, broken relationships, and family feuds that we associate with Loudon Snowden Wainwright III?

Well, all is not as it seems with this record (and I admit it took me about 30 years to realize this).

Although it starts off with a song called Bicentennial, the real anniversary that is the theme of the record is Loudon's 30th birthday (this was the year he met the dreaded 3-0). The existential dilemma posed by the approach of middle age is for Loudon, as for many of us, whether it should mean a change in our behaviour. Summer's Almost Over is the perfect metaphor for this: "Adopt a brand new attitude... For all those lazy, hazy days you must atone" (wonderful line, that). This accounts for the atmosphere of almost unbearable nostalgia in the song, as Loudon is reluctant to say goodbye to those "crazy days."

"Hollywood Hopeful" continues the theme of maturity vs. youthful irresponsibility (and fame/failure, of course):

Never thought I'd see the age of 25
It's 29 years now I've been alive
The panic I feel can hardly be told
In a matter of months I'll be 30 years old.

"I am full-fledged grown up adult/Trying to make a dent, trying to get a result/I'm holed up in a Hollywood hotel suite/Tequilla to drink and avocado to eat." These are classic Loudon rueful lines on the elusiveness of fame and fortune.

Both Ends Burning is a cautionary tale of someone who never knew when to put away excess. That's what's in store for Loudon if he doesn't reform his ways now that he is on the cusp of middle age. But Prince Hal's Dirge is the key song.

As you know, according to Shakespeare (following the history chronicles), the future Henry V was a tearaway as a young man, mixing with low company, getting into tavern brawls, etc., much to the dismay of his father the king. But all the time the young Prince Hal remains confident that, at the right time, he will be able to shake off this unruly life and accept his responsibilities:

If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wish’d for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

Loudon transforms this into a well-constructed, two-paced song, that starts off slow and builds to a dramatic climax:

Give me a capon, and some roguish companions
A wench and a bottle of sack
Take me to the alehouse, take me to the whorehouse
If I vomit, keep me off of my back

And in view of the fact that Loiudon was himself the son of a dysfunctional father, the following lines is interesting:

My father thinks I'm good for nothing
And that I won't amount to much
But he's not aware of my secret weapon
I can count on myself in the clutch

Show me a breach, I'll once more unto it
I'll be ready for action any day
I'll straighten up, and I'll fly most righteous
In a fracas I'll be right in the fray

I can drink you under 25 tables
Fight and be any lady's man
But all this will change when I'm good and ready
To be king of this land!

Self-reliance is to be Loudon's secret weapon ("I can count on myself in the clutch"). The song builds to a tremendous climax, probably the "heaviest" Loudon has ever gotten musically, suggesting real tensions in the lifestyle choices with which the singer is faced. For the time being though, he is not yet ready to shake off his dissolute lifestyle. This is probably why the drinking song Wine With Dinner is reprised again at the end of the record. The party is to go on, even though the dreaded landmark of 30 years old has been reached... "

A few comments on the other songs:

Hey, Packy

This countrified ode to a faithful dog was written by George Gerdes, the actor, who put out a couple of interesting records in the seventies (one of them with the entire group of Nashville musicians who played on Dylan's Blonde on Blonde!) and who co-wrote a song with Loudon on Unrequited (Kings & Queens). It's one of Loudon's best recordings with a band.

Hollywood Hopeful

A song held over from Unrequited (an outtake of the song from the sessions for that album was released on the reissue). This version uses the tune from the traditional song "Little Sadie" and has some nice banjo. This is the most directly personal song on the album.

Wine With Dinner

One of Loudon's droll songs about drinking (See The Drinking Song on Album III and Down Drinking at the Bar on Attempted Moustache).

T-Shirt, then is a very fine album, Loudon's finest to that date, with a unifying concept that makes it greater than the sum of its parts, and, as stated before, better produced than any of its predecessors. It was a crying shame that it was not issued on CD for so long.


Loudon's second album on Arista was a more lightweight affair, although it is just as well produced as its predecessor.

Many of the songs tend to the lightweight and ephemeral, though, such as Golfin' Blues, Pen Pal Blues, the title track, and The Heckler. However, the record ends with some strong songs. Best of all are the two country songs, Heaven and Mud and Two-Song Set.

A guy I used to share a house with in the 90s said, thinking about his approaching 30th birthday (he was a year older than I): "I'll be sitting here in this armchair, and all of a sudden, the desire to listen to country music will come over me."

I don't think he ever did get into country, at least while I knew him, but I myself have got into country music in a big way since turning 30. It does seem the more mature person's music. This is because it is less about strutting one's stuff like rock 'n' roll, and more a vehicle for talking about family problems, alcoholism, and the other joys of maturity. It's a shame, therefore, that Loudon hasn't used the genre more extensively. The two country songs on Final Exam are a real treat.

Heaven and Mud is a song about falling off the wagon after being "high on life" for "14 boring days"! Certainly any hopes Loudon had of cleaning up his act on T-Shirt have been abandoned.

Two-Song Set is a real gem, very well arranged and produced, with a great singalong chorus. Note how much Loudon's singing with a band has improved since his earliest records. Lyrically, the song is full of aching regret over missed opportunity and nostalgia for the old days.

The waitress is polite to me, but it's just not the same thing now
A few years ago, Bobby, I was the cat's meow
You win some and you lose some, that's an attitude I can understand
And I know what they're saying, Bob, they're saying I was a flash in the pan.

Then there is Pretty Little Martha, one of Loudon's neat little banjo songs. Martha was then two years old.

Finally, as if to emphasize that his rocking days are over, is the parody song Watch Me Rock, I'm Over Thirty.

But it wasn't just Loudon's rocking days were over. Final Exam also marked the end of Loudon's days on a major label. The Dead Skunk era was well and truly dead. Creatively, however, Loudon's best work lay ahead of him....

Note: T-Shirt and Final Exam have never been available separately on CD, but in 2007 they were remastered released as a "two-fer" on the Acadia label of Evangeline Records Ltd.

Dinosaurs on A Diet - the late, great Phil Ochs

Phil Ochs took his own life 30 years ago today [this piece was written and posted on a messageboard 9th April, 2006].

In April 1976, he'd been kicked off the Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan's traveling hootenanny of 60s folk stars, and that was the final straw; although in truth Phil had been in no fit state to tour. Having suffered for years from what would now be diagnosed as clinical depression or "bipolar disorder", he was further disillusioned by Watergate, by his own lack of commercial success, and by a physical attack (which he believed to have been organized by the FBI) in Africa that damaged his vocal cords. After his death, it was revealed that the FBI had a 410-page file on Ochs.

Although he flirted with Communism, Ochs was too much of an American patriot to embrace it entirely. His brother has described his work as "love songs to America"; his reaction to America's betrayal of her ideals is like that of a jilted lover. This can be illustrated in The Power and the Glory from his first album (All the News That's Fit To Sing), a kind of update of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land". Here is a video of Ochs performing the song live in 1974 (apparently with a broken arm), accompanied by his friend and mentor Jim Glover.



Ochs's first album also contains a direct tribute to Guthrie, taking its title from that of Guthrie's autobiography, Bound for Glory. Guthrie had been hospitalized for the best part of 10 years, but his influence on a younger generation of folk singers remained immense. See how many Guthrie song titles you can spot!

But Ochs was more than about political anthems. His first album also contains a tender ballad for Cecilia Pomeroy, held in a Filipino jail and separated for 10 years from her American husband, and a spirited adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe poem The Bells.

His second album I Ain't Marching Anymore likewise contains an adaptation of a poem by Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman. It's a reading of great dramatic power, and one of my favourite recordings by anyone. Here is a remarkable video clip of Phil performing the song live:



The title track of Ochs's second album became one of his best known, and most covered, songs. As if realizing that I Ain't Marching Any More would become the anthem of draft dodgers, Ochs included Draft Dodger Rag on the album, which examines the motives and morals of some of the draft dodgers themselves. There is a serious point behind the humour: this particular draft dodger isn't like the young people who were openly burning their draft papers and risking jail to make a political point, but merely interested in saving his own skin.

Another song on the album is That Was the President, written shortly after John F. Kennedy's assassination two years earlier. In the liner notes, Phil wrote:

My Marxist friends can't understand why I wrote this song, and that's probably one of the reasons why I'm not a Marxist.

After JFK's assassination, Fidel Castro aptly pointed out that only fools could rejoice at such a tragedy, for systems, not men, are the enemy. Later Phil would write another, more surreal and poetic song about the Kennedy legacy, Crossroads.

The finest singing on Ochs's second album is definitely on his cover version of Ballad of the Carpenter, a song written by British songwriter and political firebrand Ewan McColl. Like Guthrie's "Jesus Christ", it's an attempt to turn Jesus into a left-wing hero.

And so to Ochs's third album, Phil Ochs in Concert,which was not entirely recorded live, despite the title (some songs were actually recorded in the studio). It was the last of his purely acoustic albums, after which he asked to be released from his Elektra contract, having failed to have the commercial impact that he wanted in order to spread his political message (although In Concert did brush the lower reaches of the Billboard charts). In truth, the world had moved on from simple protest songs: by the time of Ochs's Elektra debut, Dylan had already given up the genre, disillusioned by Kennedy's assassination and even more by the Left's attempt to turn him into their performing monkey. The Beatles-led British invasion and Dylan's own monumental Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde albumns had changed the face of popular music, and Ochs sounded dated.

Nevertheless, In Concert contains some of his best work, and definitely his best singing on record.

There But for Fortune is the best known song, having been a minor hit for Joan Baez (Phil jokes about her having written it for him). Here's a short clip of Phil singing it:



Canons of Christianity is a rather tender song lamenting the subversion of religion, sung (like 'There But for Fortune') with aching tenderness. By contrast, the spoken introduction shows his natural gift for comedy.

The Cops of the World, on the other hand, this is one of the most angry and sarcastic songs Ochs ever wrote. It portrays the U.S. Army as a strutting, macho bunch of thugs, imposing their will on the rest of the world by rape and brutality:

We're hairy and horny and ready to shack
We don't care if you're yellow or black
Just take off your clothes and lie down on your back!
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World

The song builds to a bitter climax:

When we've butchered your sons, boys
When we've butchered your sons
Have a stick of our gum, boys
Have a stick of our buble-gum
We own half the world, "Oh say, can you see",
The name for our profits is democracy
So, like it or not, you will have to be free
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World

For Vietnam, read Iraq.

With caustic wit, Ochs also excoriates those who describe themselves as liberal - until a black man moves in next door or they are asked to bus their children into segregated areas. Love Me, I'm A Liberal ends pointedly:

Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I've grown older and wiser
-- And that's why I'm turning you in!
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

In Concert also includes a rare, and astonishingly beautiful love song, Changes, which has one of the loveliest melodies ever written.

The final song on the album is a mournful reflection on death, When I'm Gone. When Ochs returned with a new label in 1967, he would be a different kind of creative artist, no longer relying on straightforward protest to get his message across, but rather using irony and Dylanesque surrealism and experimenting with musical form.




After failing to change the world or sell enough records to get his message heard to a wide audience, Ochs, as stated above, asked to be released from his Elektra contract. He went away for a while, and returned in November 1967 with a very different album from its precedessors, on the then new A&M label. Pleasures of the Harbor, while flawed, is Phil's masterpiece, and most of the songs still hold up well today.

More controversial are the arrangements. Rather than follow Dylan's lead into the new hybrid "folk rock" ("folk" music played with an electric guitar-led band), Ochs attempted a different kind of pop crossover, with arrangements drawing on classical, lounge, Dixieland jazz. rock and roll, and experimental synthesized music crossed with folk.

Further symbolizing the break with the past, the album was recorded not in New York City (centre of the U.S. folk scene in the early to mid sixties), but in Los Angeles, where Ochs had moved, and where psychedlia and "acid rock" was taking over from the folk-rock of Dylan, The Byrds, Simon & Garfunkel, and The Mamas & The Papas (Dylan responded by going rural Americana, on his way to outright country).

Ochs' chief collaborators on the record were producer Larry Marks, arranger Ian Freebairn-Smith, and pianist Lincoln Mayorga, whose contribution to the albumn was outstanding. The achievements of the producer and arrangement are more debatable.

All these musical changes add texture and ironical counterpoint to the lyrics, which are the record's biggest departure. Gone are the somewhat simplistic finger-pointing songs of the early albums (perhaps Ochs had been stung by Dylan's unfair accusation that he was a journalist rather than a songwriter). The songs are still political, but Ochs is more of a social commentator than a rabble rouser this time round. The songs are longer, and the anger and bitterness of his early albumns is replaced by irony, satire, and pathos.

Passing over the somewhat overproduced opening song Cross My Heart, with its drums, harpsichord, flutes, strings, orchestral horns, and vocal overdubs, we come to the first really classic song on the album, Flower Lady - a deft piece of ironical social commentary wrapped in an achingly beautiful melody:

Soldiers, disillusioned, come home from the war
Sarcastic students tell them not to fight no more
And they argue through the night
Black is black and white is white
Walk away both knowing they are right.
But nobody's buying flowers from the flower lady.

All the people in the song are too wrapped up in their own little lives to indulge in simple pleasures like buying flowers. In the final verse, even the Flower Lady no longer knows what she is selling flowers for.

The Byrds apparently thought of covering this song, but unfortunately for Phil, they decided against it.


A different kind of self-absorption is depicted in the best-known song of the albumn, Outside of A Small Circle of Friends. The song was inspired by the brutal murder of a New York woman, Kitty Genovese, and the inaction of her neighbours. The story was sensationalized in an inaccurate and misleading New York Times report entitled "Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police", and the case was cited as illustrating the supposed callousness of urban America. Ochs' song uses a Dixieland jazz backing (with Mayorga on tack piano) that remains almost manically jaunty and unconcerned despite the grim events narrated by Ochs in a splendid deadpan voice:

Look outside the window, there's a woman being grabbed
They've dragged her to the bushes and now she's being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But Monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.

And a later verse:

Smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer,
But a friend of ours was captured and they gave him thirty years
Maybe we should raise our voices, ask somebody why
But demonstrations are a drag, besides we're much too high
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends

Unfortunately, the drugs reference in the above verse got the song banned from most radio stations, just when it was threatening to chart. An edited version later flopped.


Even more successful in marrying form and content is the albumn's masterpiece, and, in my one, one of the greatest songs ever written. The Party is an account of a high society party in which Ochs plays the part of a singing lounge pianist (although the piano is of course played by Mayorga, who is quite brilliant in his improvisations, quoting everything from Mozart, Bach and Schumann to lounge standards such as "As Time Goes By" and "Stardust"), who passes satirical comments on the guests as they arrive:

The fire breathing Rebels arrive at the party early,
Their khaki coats are hung in the closet near the fur.
Asking handouts from the ladies, while they criticize the lords.
Boasting of the murder of the very hands that pour.
And the victims learn to giggle, for at least they are not bored.
And my shoulders had to shrug
As I crawl beneath the rug
And retune my piano.

"Boasting of the murder of the very hands that pour" is a splendid line. My favourite verse is the following:

They travel to the table, the host is served for supper,
And they pass each other for salt and pepper.
And the conversation sparkles as their wits are dipped in wine,
Dinosaurs on a diet, on each other they will dine.
Then they pick their teeth and they squelch a belch saying:
"Darling you tasted divine."
And my shoulders had to shrug, etc.

"Dinosaurs on a diet, on each other they will dine" is a splendid line. What Ochs is actually saying to these aging, backbiting socialites who nibble on lettuce and light snacks and pass scandalous remarks about one another is that they are dying. Or perhaps he is saying, "Die, die, die!" The image might have come from Sheridan's School for Scandal.

In the final verse, the commentator does not spare himself, catching sight in the mirror of a "laughing maniac who was writing songs like this."

The song is the equal of Dylan's 12-minute opus "Desolation Row", to which it is indebted.

The title track, Pleasures of the Harbor, is a bittersweet story of sailors seeking escape on shore leave, possibly a metaphor for other sorts of escape.

In the room dark and dim
Touch of skin
He asks her of her name
She answers with no shame
And not a sense of sin.
Until the fingers draw the blinds
A sip of wine
The cigarette of doubt
The candle is blown out
The darkness is so kind.

Soon your sailing will be over
Come and take the pleasures of the harbor.

The album's final track, Crucifixion, is a surrealistic reflection on the death of John F. Kennedy, which moved Bobby Kennedy to tears when Ochs played it for him. Unfortunately, the song is lost in the eerie morass of loops, electric harpsichord, and washes of electric distortion arranged by Joseph Burd, leader of a late-60s experimental electronic rock group called The United States of America.

Clocking in at more than 50 minutes, Pleasures of the Harbor was an outrageously long album for 1967. This was Phil's most ambitious project ever, but it was not terribly successful commercially, peaking at #168 in the charts. While Ochs would not retreat to acoustic folk for his subsequent A&M LPs, and would continue to write songs as unusual (and often as lengthy) in construction throughout the rest of the 60s, he would never again employ textures as recklessly varied as those heard on Pleasures of the Harbor.

[The second part of this piece, dealing with Ochs's final three albums, was never completed].

Classic Cash: Ride This Train

Unlike the previous blogs in this series, this one has been almost entirely rewritten since it first appeared on a messageboard three years ago.

Johnny Cash is best known to younger folk today from the hit movie Walk the Line and from the brilliant series of albums he made towards the end of his life with Rick Rubin on the American Recordings label. His creative work between leaving Sun Records and his work with Rubin has been somewhat neglected of late.

The rock crowd may be surprised to know that the concept album was invented by a certain Mr. Frank Sinatra, who first realized the potential of the new long playing record and used it to create albums that were more than simple collections of singles, but had a cohesive identity that made them more than the sum of their parts.

Johnny Cash was swift to follow Sinatra's lead. His 1959 Columbia Records albums Hymns and Songs of Our Soil were loose collections around simple themes, but his 1960 album Ride This Train was altogether more ambitious.

Ride This Train is not an album of train songs. Rather it is a travelogue of a journey on board an imaginary train that travels across state borders and through time. It's also the first Americana album. It's a celebration of American values, but Cash does not forget to pay tribute to the American Indian, who would be the subject of one of his greatest albums in a few years' time (Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian).

It also reveals Cash's poetic talent. Each song begins with the sound of a steam locomotive and the words "Ride this train...", followed by a poetic monologue written by Cash in the persona of the character whom the following song is about.

The travelogue begins with a recital of the place-names of America, majestic in their artless poetry, and continues with the thundering names of the Indian tribes who lived there first. Then Johnny Cash boards the train, stopping first at a a small town in the mining country of Kentucky. He presents a brief sketch of a boy whose father is a miner - when he comes home "nothing is clean but the whites of his eyes" - and whose ambition is to follow that calling. This leads to the first song, Loading Coal, which was written by the great Merle Travis, who himself came from a mining family, and who wrote many classic songs as well as inventing the "Travis picking" style of guitar-playing. In the second selection, Cash travels to Mississippi and its levees and constant fight against flood waters. In this sequence Cash sings his own version of the traditional Going to Memphis, a song of the convict work gangs.

Ride This Train was the first of a series of Cash albums celebrating or exploring various aspects of America. Although he rarely makes explicit political comment or "protests" (though see again Bitter Tears), his concerns are the same as the protest crowd; but he documents rather than sloganizing or advocating. It is this aspect of Cash's great series of 1960s concept albums that makes them classics of the folk music genre as well as of country music.

Loudon Wainwright III: A History (Part 2)

So far in his career as we have examined it to date, Loudon has recorded a handful of good songs (and one brilliant one, School Days), but his albums have been rather patchy. With Attempted Moustache, his fourth album and his second for Columbia, he finally produced an album's worth of quality songs.

The album was produced in Nashville by Bob Johnson, Dylan's producer on Highway 61 Revisited through New Morning, of Simon & Garfunkel, and a host of other folk-rock artists. Unfortunately, the results were not satisfactory, as Loudon notes in the liner notes to the 1998 reissue of the album:

I sure would like to remix some of Attempted Moustache. On several of the more raucous band numbers, producer Bob Johnston had me sounding like I was singing in some other room. The record was cut in 5 days, practically an eternity by Nashville standards at that time. Usually you'd do a song once, maybe twice, and that was it—the cats were out the door and on the way to the next session.

Still, the Nashville session musicians are undoubtedly brilliant, and as Loudon also notes, the album contains some of his best songs.

The Swimming Song

Loudon's best song since "School Days" and also much covered. Loudon noted in 1998: "My then-wife Kate McGarrigle taught me to frail (lovely verb!) a banjo, and it remains one of the nicest things I ever learned from anybody." Kate plays along on second banjo.

A.M. World

This song is a satirical look at the "fame and wealth" resulting from the success of "Dead Skunk." After two decades of listening to this album, I've finally realized that the album title could be a glance at this song! ("Attempted Moustache" = A.M.)

Liza

With this song, Loudon finally masters the art of sketching the funny-charming vignettes we know and love him for. In his 1998 liner notes, Loudon writes:

I went to school with Ms. Minnelli but it was in the second and third grades and we last saw each other in 1954. Someone from Danish National Radio once played her this song and taped her reaction, which went something like: "Oh yes, I remember little Loudie Wainwright, and if he keeps singing that way, he'll ruin his voice."

Very sweet and funny, but note that yet again that Loudon is in a familiar role: looking on while someone else gets the success and fame. He seems more comfortable in this role than in the long black limousine of "A.M. World."

Loudon sings this one a capella.

The Man Who Couldn't Cry

I consider this another my best songs—certainly it's one of the longest. I like the cutting sound of my DiAngelico on the track. Check out Johnny Cash's great cover of this on his fine record American Recordings.

Johnny Cash's version is an anomaly. Whatever his other great virtues, Cash doesn't normally do irony or piss-taking, subjects on which Loudon is a leading authority. Therefore he treats this strange story as a genuine tale of redemption, like the other songs on that masterpiece, American Recordings. Maybe there really is a serious story in there. Cash's version is sung live in a trendy young persons' night club on Sunset Boulevard. Loudon no doubt appreciated this extra irony.

Back to Attempted Moustache . Come A Long Way is the song the least marred by the production. It was written by Kate.

And finally, there are two songs about Rufus. The first was written to the lad while he was still in the womb. Loudon trumps the outrageous pun of the title—Dilated To Meet You—with an even more excruciating alternative one in his 1998 liner notes: "At Your Cervix." Sung with Kate. The second is Lullaby. To quote the reissue liner notes again:

Another song I still do. And it's myself I'm telling to shut up, not Rufus, as I led the lyric-reading listeners to believe.

(The printed lyrics add "you're Rufus" after the words "you're ruthless.")



Loudon's fifth album was released in 1975. Critics and fans had complained that his studio records were not on a par with his live performances, so on Unrequited Loudon tries to have it both ways. For those of you who don't remember the days of vinyl, the records had two sides, and when you reached the end of the first side, you had to flip the record to play the second side. The first side of Unrequited had seven tracks recorded in the studio; side two's tracks were recorded live at the Bottom Line in New York City.

On the 1999 reissue, Loudon writes:

:

The big picture of me on the front cover of the album with the tear rolling down my cheek (a glycerine drop I can now confess) seems to say 'look at the sad clown.' Yes, I was sad, but I was one pissed off clown, too. In 1974 my marriages to my wife Kate McGarrible, my personal manager Milton Kramer, and Columbia Records were all on the rocks. Kate and I were separated. Milt and I battled constantly about the direction of my career, and Columbia was poised to drop me from their roster. My last effort for the label, Attempted Moustache, had bombed badly in comparison with my first record for them, Album III, which had contained the hit 'Dead Skunk.' In 1974 things were't going great. Just check out some of the titles of the songs...

Indeed, all the best songs on the album are about the breakdown of relationships. The other tracks, especially those with a band, are not very successful, particularly The Lowly Tourist, which is a faux reggae pastiche (reggae parodies were very popular in the mid-70s; the most successful were 10CC's Dreadlock Holiday and the Kinks' Black Messiah). It does have Harvey Brooks playing bass on it though—that man gets everywhere!

Much better is Kick in the Head, which Loudon sings at the piano, about a man whose lover sleeps with his best friend. But the record really takes off with the savage Whatever Happened To Us, which has some very caustic lyrics:

We used to be in love
But now we are in hate
You used to say I came too early
But it was you who came too late...

There's a whole lot of crap about a tender trap
What it is, is a suicide snare
And all I want to do is forget about you
And our lousy love affair.

Another good track is the jazzy Crime of Passion, which has some great sax. But even better is....

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

This one has Kate singing along with him. A song of tender regret, it's the obverse of the nasty 'Whatever Happened To Us?"

Things weren't easy when we were together
We had plenty of days of lousy weather
But now...I'm in a hurricane
And I'm gonna grieve
And I'm gonna moan
'Cos you not here
And I'm all alone

The joke's on me, you had the last laugh
I find out the hard way who was my better half
And now...I'm the worse for the wear
When I see you again, expect some Champagne wine
And on Valentine's Day expect a Valentine
'Cos now I know how much I care.

This well-constructed song is the first really successful personal song of Loudon's career, the first in a long line that includes such heartbreaking classics as "Your Mother and I", "April Fool's Day Morn", "That Hospital", "Dreaming", "Surviving Twin" and others.

Now lets flip the record over and listen to the live tracks. They are all good, and it's hard to know which to single out.

On the Rocks

Another song about breakup, but the live audience allows Loudon to really camp up the funny parts. It's a blues send-up. Part of the humour is in the use of modern, middle class terms like "domestic problems" instead of "the blues" to describe falling out with the missus.

Even funnier is...

Mr Guilty

This is the least guilty song you could possibly imagine! Loudon confesses to his faults, but you don't really believe him! Especially when he hits the mock teenybop chorus...

Call me Mr. Guilty
Mr Guilty, that's my name
Without a doubt, it's all my fault
I am the one to blame

You say that you're unhappy
I do believe it's true
'Cos I'm the one, the no good bum
That did it all to you.

Ooo-ooo-ooo. I'm so sorry.
Sorry as a man can be.
I'm so guilty
This is my a-po-lo-gy...

A comedy classic.

A curiosity on Unrequited is Untitled (actually called The Hardy Boys at the Y, but Loudon's manager feared a lawsuit from the author of The Hardy Boys Mysteries), which deals with a gay relationship. It's not exactly homophobic, but in the seventies you could only sing about homosexuality if you were treating it as one big joke. Loudon sings the whole thing in a fake British accent of indeterminate location. The song is quite pornographic, and when Loudon sings the aside, "It's fabulous", he sounds just like Rufus.

Unrequited to the Nth Degree

Another of Loudon's songs that seems to be aware of life's comedy at the same time as its tragedy.

Old Friend is about the breakup with a long time friend. In view of Loudon's comments quoted earlier, he might be referring to his manager Milton Kramer.

The original album ends with Rufus Is A Tit Man, which achieved a retrospective irony when the then infant Rufus grew up to be more of a cock lover than a tit fancier. At the end of it, the crowd can be heard chanting "Dead Skunk, Dead Skunk!", as Loudon notes ruefully in the liner notes to the 1998 reissue. The reissue also includes a studio version (with band) of "Rufus Is A Tit Man" as a bonus. It's actually more successful than some of the other songs with a band.

It's interesting to compare Unrequited with Dylan's masterpiece Blood on the Tracks, which was released earlier in the same year. Both albums are about the breakdown of relationships and divorce. But the similarities end there. In songs like "Idiot Wind", Dylan stands like Lear in the tempest, and the breakdown of his marriage seems like part of a universal malaise that's sweeping all over America itself ("From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol") in the aftermath of Watergate. As in Macbeth, all normal values are reversed ("What's good is bad, what's bad is good/You'll find out when you've reached the top/You're on the bottom"). The pain of love's ending is like a corkscrew to his heart, but eventually he wills himself to pull through in the cathartic "Buckets of Rain."

Life is sad, life is a bust
All you can do is do what you must
You do what you must do
And you do it well.

On top of all that, there are spiritual allegories like "Shelter From the Storm" and the cinematic scope of "Lily Rosemary & the Jack of Hearts", where the star-crossed lovers take on symbolic or allegorical roles.

Unrequited isn't anything like as ambitious or as traumatic or all-encompassing. It's the sound of one guy singing to himself to cheer himself up. But in its own small way, it's a minor triumph also.

Classic Cash: Blood, Sweat, & Tears

This is an excerpt from a thread about Johnny Cash I made on a messageboard three years ago.








Blood, Sweat and Tears celebrates the American working man - black and white, free, convict, and slave, all those who earn their crust or are forced to labour in the sweat of their brow. The album starts with the grunting of a man sweating in hard physical labour and the sound of an axe swinging against cold steel. This is the prelude to the story of John Henry, a semi-mythical African-American folk hero. To quote Wikipedia:

Like other "Big Men" (Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Iron John), John Henry served as a mythical representation of a particular group within the melting pot of the 19th-century working class. In the most popular story of his life, Henry is born into the world big and strong. He grows to be one of the greatest "steel-drivers" in the mid-century push to extend the railroads across the mountains to the West. The complication of the story is that, as machine power continued to supplant brute muscle power (both animal and human), the owner of the railroad buys a steam-powered hammer to do the work of his mostly black driving crew. In a bid to save his job and the jobs of his men, John Henry challenges the inventor to a contest: John Henry versus the steam hammer. In the process, he suffers a heart attack and dies. In modern depictions John Henry is usually portrayed as hammering down rail spikes, but older songs instead refer to him driving blasting holes into rock, part of the process of excavating railroad tunnels and cuttings.

Johnny's version is suitably epic in conception, clocking in at over eight minutes. There is a lot happening in this song - I seem to hear something new every time I play it. The changes of tempo, the vivid narration and characterization of the various protagonists make the song dramatic and moving (particularly in John Henry's death-bed speech to his wife) at the same time. John Henry is taunted:

But the bad boys came up laughin' at John Henry They said," You're full of vinegar now but you bout' through! We gonna get a steamdrill to do your share of drivin' Then what's all them muscles gonna do? Huh? John Henry? Gonna take a little bit of vinegar out of you."

Hiding in a coal mine during his lunch break, he hears the pit foreman shouting:

Get up whoever you are and get a pickax Mine me enough to start another hell and keep it burnin' Mine me enough to start another hell.

Whether slaving down the mine or driving steel (hammering stakes into the ground in order to extend the railroad), the working man's lot is a hard one in this era of American history. But his labour supports his wife and children, whose livelihood is threatened when the boss tries to replace man-muscle with machine power. John Henry takes his stand against the machine in the name of the working man. In the dramatic climax of the song, the Carter Family shout "Go, John Henry!", and the hero responds with real spit-in-your-eye defiance: "I'll die with my hammer in my hand..but I'll be LAUGHIN'!" In the following remarkable sequence, Cash imitates the machine letting off steam in competition with the swing of John Henry's axe. John Henry is victorious, but it costs him his life.

The next song, "Tell Him I'm Gone", is a real blues song of a type not often sung by Cash. It starts with the same pick-hammer sound as heard in John Henry's Hammer. It tells the story of an escapee from a chain gang who sends a message of defiance to the "captain".

Blood Sweat and Tears is the first Cash albumn to feature The Carter Family, the first family of country-folk music. They are Mother Maybelle Carter (on autoharp) and her daughters Anita, Helen, and of course, Johnny's future second wife June. Anita's voice is an important contribution to "Another Man's Done Gone."

This is a work song collected by those important collectors of American folk songs Alan and John Lomax. It concerns the grim fate of an escaped convict, no doubt a worker in one of the chain gangs of the American South (he could be the escapee we heard in "Tell Him I'm Gone"). Although the song is spare of words, the song does tell us that he was captured and hanged before witnesses, including his own children. The acapella performance by Johnny and Anita is unforgettable. (This is not the song of the same title written by Woody Guthrie and performed by Wilco & Billy Bragg.)

The next song is "Busted," written by Harland Howard. It deals with another aspect of the working man's life in the Depression years (and today!): crippling debt. However, the song is anything but gloomy; as the liner notes suggest, it is almost "philosophically cheerful." Ray Charles had a big hit with this song later.

Light relief is provided by the next song, the story of the famous Irish-American engineer Casey Jones, a real life character, although his story has been embellished in legend. To quote the album liner notes:

In the early morning hours of April 30, 1906, about ten miles north of Canton [Mississippi], Casey and his fireman Sim Webb roared around an S-curve right into the rear of another train. Viewed simply as a chronicle of events, "Casey Jones" is one of the world's most exciting ballads. But it is at the same time a compelling argument for the inevitability of fate. From the very beginning of Johnny Cash's version with its eerie, whippoorwill-like train whistle, we know that Casey is doomed. As Johnny points out, his orders that morning said, in effect, that Casey was "taking a trip to the promised land."

This is followed by "Nine Pound Hammer", a song written by the great Merle Travis, author of several superb songs that sound timeless and traditional to this day. Cash covered his "Loading Coal" (Travis came from a Kentucky mining family) on Ride This Train and would later cover "Dark As A Dungeon" and "Sixteen Guns." "Nine Pound Hammer" is a variant on "hammer" work songs ("Tell Him I'm Gone" shares some of its themes). See this link for an interesting note.

The next song is "Chain Gang"; this time, rather than an escapee, we hear about a prisoner - a "carefree lad that loved to roam", but who was imprisoned on the chain gang for the crime of wandering about with no money in his pocket.

"Waitin' for A Train" is the story of another vagrant - one who travels the country by riding the rails. The price of being free from labour is poverty and homelessness. There is something really lovely and pure in the plaintive way Johnny sings "I haven't got a nickel". Cash re-recorded this one towards the end of his life (it's on the Unearthed boxed set of American Recordings outtakes).

The final song takes us back to the chain gang - "Roughneck" concludes the album on a lighter note. Sheb Wooley's song is about a brawny character who brags "By the time I was five there was no kid alive who could get the best of me"; but now "layin' pipe is ha-a-ard labour." He was "born to be a roughneck." Like "Busted" it takes a semi-humorous, philosophical look at a bleak issue.

Amazingly, this masterpiece (along with the equally excellent "Bitter Tears") has yet to be remastered. Apparently, Johnny Cash's Children's Album was a bigger priority.