59. Real Foundation – Word to the wise

/ Afterthought, Dishy, 1995

I won’t pretend through omission that this is in any way objective.  I’m writing about the music made by friends; I’m writing about the songs written by an old friend.  And yet, I think I can stand outside of that friendship and say, this is a great debut record, that he was a great melodic songwriter; and that I still think it’s a shame that he didn’t go on to write as many songs as he might have, or that the songs that he did write never got to be better known.

So I know a lot about the genesis of the two songs on this single, and the others I heard played live a dozen times.  I know the music that influenced how they came out as they did.  I even know the songs written before them and remember noting the jumps in learning and craft at each stage.

Long before ‘Afterthought’ and ‘A word to the wise’ were songs such as ‘Angel Hill’, written about meeting a girl in what happened to be my home town.  And one day in the early nineties, while I was at work, the songwriter in his excitement at his creation played a demo of a song called ‘Sweet life’ down the phone at me.  And although it was not yet the finished article, from what I was hearing even through that tinny earpiece speaker, I couldn’t see how this songwriter wouldn’t become one that anyone with an interest in pop music would one day know about.

I know that the harmonies of a song called ‘Reach for me, honey’ were sung over and over in a Pimlico bedsit, and that far from irritating one of the other residents of the building, she was enchanted (though not above taking it upon herself to make some suggestions as to the song’s arrangement).

And I know that the songwriter – Jack – used to listen obsessively and at times exclusively to the Beach Boys.  You can’t hear that so much in this record, whose lyrical tone tends more to the sour than the sweetness which was actually the staple of his songwriting.  What you do hear is a breadth of listening.  Brian and all the other songwriting Beach Boys were gods, purveyors of ambrosia, nectar and wild honey, just as they have been for so many writers and listeners, but Jack strove to assert his own vision in a way that prevented the Real Foundation’s recorded songs from succumbing to any one predominant influence.  And of course the other boys in the band brought their ideas and influences with them, so that what resulted was a marriage of the Beach Boys to mod, soul, funk and nuttiness.

After the Real Foundation collapsed, Jack recorded songs under his own name.  These solo songs hinted at all sorts of possibilities, and a future beyond influence.  One, ‘Head full of sound’, appeared on a Dishy compilation; for reasons best known to himself, when an upcoming film director asked if he could include it on the soundtrack of his first feature, Jack said no.  It might never have made it there, in the end, of course, the world of film being what it is; but what it indicates is that there are so many other things beyond songwriting talent that enter the equation, that stop someone from making it, in whichever way you think ‘making it’ ideally applies.  The what ifs are legion.

Well, here it is then, both sides of a lost gem.  I hope its creators don’t mind me posting it in advance of telling them about it.  It’s my Christmas present to them, and to you.

• Real Foundation – Word to the wise (AA side)
• Real Foundation – Afterthought (A side)

58. Johnny Cash – Get rhythm

/ I walk the line, Sun Records, 1956

The incomparable.  The magnificent.  The mighty.  Even the fabulous.  Johnny Cash.

I’m a sucker for Walk the line, James Mangold’s film of 2005, its mythologising of the Johnny Cash story.  I was a fan of the Man in Black’s songwriting and delivery before seeing it; I’ve been an even bigger fan since (and it has to be said of Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon for their mesmeric acting in the lead roles).  Every time I watch it I go back to the records.  Back to the Sun recordings, and forward to the American recordings, and stopping off for the prison recordings in between.  Fifty years of being able to put something down which would stop listeners in their tracks; that’s a rare achievement, possibly unique.

We have a lot to thank Rick Rubin for, in terms of rescuing a drifting or drifted career.  Together he and Cash created the template that other once-greats have tried to follow, though mostly with nothing like as much success.  Which is not to say that the American recordings are choice throughout; although the fourth volume The man comes around contains ‘Hurt’, it also presents versions of ‘Bridge over troubled water’, ‘First time ever I saw your face’, and ‘In my life’ that to my mind either struggle to add to the originals or butcher them; not only that, but both ‘Danny boy’ and ‘We’ll meet again’ get wheeled out.  Sentiment was by then entering into a project which had started off so unsentimentally twelve years previously with songs as tragicomically hard as Cash’s own ‘Delia’s gone’ and Loudon Wainwright III’s ‘The man who couldn’t cry’.

The best of Cash’s own songs on the American recordings have the perfect storytelling economy that he established with Sun recordings like ‘Folsom Prison blues’ – how could you better the punch of lines like ‘But I shot a man in Reno / Just to watch him die’)?  Like ‘Folsom Prison blues’, the creation of ‘Get rhythm’ is dramatised in Walk the line.  The unknown John R. Cash, not long out of the army, spots a shoeshine boy hard at work on the street in Memphis, marks the image, hears the rhythm, puts the two together, and a song is born.  The Tennessee Two add a suitably rhythmic supportive framework; there’s Cash-like economy in Luther Perkins’ lead guitar break, which sings out a few birdlike phrases before swiftly returning the limelight to Johnny.

And who cannot at some point in their lives testify to rhythm having been the enemy of the blues?

• Johnny Cash – Get rhythm

Photograph by Mike Logan via Flickr.

57. The June Brides – Josef’s gone

/ No place called home, In Tape, 1985

‘Every sound, from each transmission, is stored away to be rewritten’ – ‘Josef’s gone’

‘The Manic Street Preachers also do a version of ‘Josef’s Gone’ – not on the tribute album. Their versions is actually called ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’!  They totally stole the chords… I would sue, but I kind of borrowed ‘Josef’s Gone’ from Roxy Music (‘Pyjamarama’) and Josef K in the first place.’ - Phil Wilson on Anorak

If Orange Juice were the sound of happiness, then the mood and mode of the June Brides was fast established as exuberance.  But therein lay their problem.  Because if you listened closely, you could hear that the joy was sharp-edged with melancholia.  As a songwriter, Phil Wilson grew almost too quickly for his audience, and that and the absence of any guiding strategist within or without the group meant that their star faded as quickly as it rose.

The mini-LP There are eight million stories showcases the exuberance, and the recorded as live (or as if live) excitement of their sound.  It was the sound of the Buzzcocks and Josef K combined, the musical leanings melodic as well as scratchy and wiry, the words lyrically defiant and defiantly lyrical.  On the LP there is no better example of the excitability than the cover version of The Radiators From Space’s ‘Enemies’.  It starts and ends chaotically, but in between somehow manages to strike exactly the right balance of loose performance and tight belief in what is being performed.  This was how they put across Phil Wilson’s own songs too, the songs that set them apart from and alongside the influences they wore.

The mini-LP made them lots of fans; for a variety of reasons – ones you can find recounted in the sleeve notes for Every conversation: the story of the June Brides and Phil Wilson – while these remained for the subsequent EP, No place called home, many fewer stayed on for the last post of This town.  For me this is where the best of the June Brides resides, on these two EPs – more than half of what would have been a great LP – where lyrically life gets more complicated still, and where musically the viola’s mournful edge takes the vibrancy of the brass down a notch or two.  Underneath, the guitars still cut and energise, but it’s shades of blue rather than red that predominate.

‘Josef’s gone’ still makes the heart swell all these years later.  The lyric recount the heart-in-mouth, what-will-happen-next feeling of taking to a stage to perform a clutch of songs, and is I presume simultaneously a homage to seeing Josef K do precisely the same.  That feeling of nervousness that a musician has is not so dissimilar to a fan’s for his favourites as they take to the stage – will this be a good night?  Will they do themselves justice, be loved by all these other ears, who may not be as on their side as I am?  It’s simultaneously about that feeling of anticipation, and an elegy for lost times.

Caught between principles and the music industry, misstepping, the June Brides disbanded, and contrary as ever, Phil Wilson gave into his country roots, performing solo in cowboy shirt and tie.  But in the face of harsh disinterest, a solo LP never appeared, and neither therefore did who knows how many great country or pop songs, following Phil’s decision to turn his back on music.  But it’s heartening to note that old wounds heal, that midway through the nineties the June Brides could reform and take a well-deserved bow; and that 2010 finally sees the release of a Phil Wilson solo LP.

• The June Brides – Josef’s gone
• The June Brides (MySpace)

56. The Go-Betweens – This girl, black girl

/ Man o’sand to girl o’sea, Rough Trade, 1983

Part two: Grant

Mind, their first phase singles all came backed with intriguing B sides too; Go-Betweens songs with their flaws left in, and in certain lights some of these rough cut gems have more life in them than the highly polished diamonds on the albums.  Take, for example, Grant’s enigmatic ‘Heaven says’ and Robert’s metallic, shellac ‘World weary’, both as angular as anything on Send me a lullaby, and more evidence that the Go-Betweens have been as underrated as a post-punk art band as they are highly rated for what they became: second-to-none purveyors of literate, lyrical romantic-realist pop.  In his essay on the Velvet Underground in The 10 rules of rock and roll, Robert writes:

‘My first great realisation about the Velvet Underground was this: they were the first band I’d ever heard who wrote songs better than they could play them. … And this is exactly what the Go-Betweens tried to do at the start: we wanted to be a band that wrote great songs – but could barely play them.  This was partly due to our primitive musical ability, but also because to us it seemed noble and perverse – an attempt to upset the normal balance of rock’n’roll between what songs you had and how good you were on your instruments.  The kings and queens of this were the Velvet Underground.’

But that’s just the first third of the first phase of the Go-Betweens.  Their musical prowess soon matched their songwriting ambition, and even their offcuts are flush with melody and poetry.  There’s the emotional power struggle of Robert’s ‘Rare breed’, and his ‘Rock and roll friend’, which inverts the anthemic language of the form and loads it with luxurious heaps of self-pity.  Then there’s Grant’s almost-masterpiece, ‘Casanova’s last words’; but for the fact that it’s a little spoilt by the over-insistent gated reverb drum sound, it would have been my choice here.  But it’s still a wonderful song, full of detail and lived wisdom, the wisdom of McLennan and of Casanova; of life lived to the full.

All these offcuts you can find in their best available versions on the two disc editions of the albums.  ‘This girl, black girl’ appears on Before Hollywood though really it belongs to Spring Hill fair, and is notable not only as one half of the first pair of recordings to feature Robert Vickers on bass – it’s great to hear him feeling his way into being a Go-Between – but also as the first flowering of the image-laden and melody-soaked song writing whose impressive shoots had been Grant’s ‘Cattle and cane’ and ‘Dusty in here’.  As an elegy, ‘This girl’ matches Robert’s setting of Marion Stout’s lyric for ‘When people are dead’, and who better to tell us about how it came to be than the songwriter himself, as he did in the sleeve notes for the first ever Go-Betweens compilation, 1978-1990:

‘There is an annual event in north Queensland country life called the Oak Park Races.  People come together to race their horses and to congratulate each other on a good year or to console each other if it has been a poor one.  I had just returned from a trip which included a recording session in Scotland, a close shave in Egypt and a six week hangover in New York.  I found myself in a tent three hundred miles from the nearest bookshop.  My relatives asked me to play guitar for them but I knew it was impossible to dance the gypsy tap to ‘I need two heads’ so I wrote this song.’

• The Go-Betweens – This girl, black girl
• Part one: Robert – The Go-Betweens – Girl lying on a beach 
• A jumped up pantry boy on The Go-Betweens

55. The Go-Betweens – Girl lying on a beach

/ Caroline and I, Jetset / Trifekta, 2003

Part one: Robert

From the same period as the underrated Bright yellow bright orange set (admittedly it’s somewhat elusive on the ears, but I like that in certain records) it’s a shame that ‘Girl lying on a beach’ didn’t make the cut for that long player.  Possibly Robert thought it was too personal, being the story of how he met his wife.  So he tucked it away, rather like the photo that brackets the lyric of the song, on a CD single few people would have troubled to buy.  ‘Girl lying on a beach’ is parenthetically perfect, in a way few songs are, a masterclass in songwriting economy and art.  The delivery is just so, with Robert adopting the softer tone he would later use to great effect on The evangelist; less arch than usual, more intimate – a performer who knows when to hold off on the performing.  And perhaps too, this late Go-Betweens song closes a bracket opened twenty-five years before by their first B side, ‘Karen’, later a live favourite perhaps precisely because it coincidentally celebrates a girl with homophonically the same name as the woman who would become his wife, Karin.

It’s high time we had a collection which gathers together the Go-Betweens’ post-reformation B sides and rarities; as B sides often do, they have little imperfections or infelicities or a slight sense of incompleteness so that you can see why they didn’t make it onto the associated albums, but of course Grant’s and Robert’s offcuts are trimmed from material of the highest quality.  ‘Sleeping giant’ and ‘Erotic sunshine’ are two more great Forster songs to add to the collection, and ‘The locust girls’ and ‘Instant replay’ are a whisker from being genuine Grant McLennan classics.  His ‘Stone’ is indisputably that, having a lovely, typically yearning melody that once again makes you wish Grant was still with us so that greedily, insatiably, we could have many, many more of them.

• The Go-Betweens – Girl lying on a beach
• Part two: Grant – The Go-Betweens – This girl, black girl
• A jumped up pantry boy on The Go-Betweens 
• A jumped up pantry boy on Robert Forster

54. Toiling Midgets – Mr. Foster’s shoes

/ Golden frog, Matador, 1991

Anyone who had missed the ‘Bad liquor’ wildness and fury of American Music Club from Everclear onwards – in a recorded sense, for live Eitzel could still be just as unhinged as he once was routinely in the days when the group performed mostly in San Francisco alone – would welcome the howls of rage that formed his contributions to Toiling Midgets’ Son LP (or ‘Sketches tO make you ruN away’ as the back cover put it).  It gives you a sense of the many musical Mark Eitzels there were, might have been, and indeed have been, more or less successfully, since he broke free of the restrictions he felt being a member of American Music Club placed upon him.  Eitzel was really only passing through the Midgets as a guest vocalist; they had been Toiling a long time before he came on board – since the late seventies San Francisco punk scene, in fact.  Drummer Tim Mooney would later became a member of American Music Club; AMC’s Tom Mallon was also involved in the making of Son.

Part prog, part punk, part alt or avant, there’s the light and shade but not the subtlety that made Engine, California, United Kingdom and Everclear such inviting records in which to wallow, but it’s still a compelling listen, dissonant and discordant, a definite precursor of quiet-loud post-rock.  Eitzel fits right in, bad-mouthing the moon and everything it illuminates.

Another favourite of Eitzel biographer Sean Body’s, coming at number two in his personal selection of the best less well known American Music Club songs in his book Wish the world away, ‘Mr. Foster’s shoes’ is a stripped-down version of a song on the LP, with the psychodrama of Eitzel’s vocal performance underscored by Tom Mallon’s string arrangement, beautifully played by cellist Carla Fabrizio.

• Toiling Midgets – Mr. Foster’s shoes
• Toiling Midgets – Golden frog
• Toiling Midgets website
• American Music Club – Chanel #5
• Mark Eitzel – The ecstatic epiphany 
• Mark Eitzel – Mrs Wright

53. Mark Eitzel – The ecstatic epiphany: a celebration of youth and beauty past, present and future

/ On the emblematic use of jewelry as a metaphor for the dissolution of our hopes and dreams, a.k.a. Take courage, Matador, 1991

That show at the Borderline, 17th January 1991.   The day that aerial bombardment of Iraqi troops in Kuwait began.  The day I passed a busker in the Underground singing ‘There but for fortune’.  Amended a little for flow, this is what I wrote in a magazine called Fire Raisers later that year:

‘The drunken showman came to town.  He was more oceanic, demonic, human and angelic than I dared expect, and this was, he felt, a bad showing.  He looked like a clown coming onstage, in his red shirt, pinstripe jacket and woolly hat.  Some seventies American bum comedian, who delights in looking ridiculous, whose amble brings the first laugh of the night.  He dispenses with the hat and jacket.  You soon realise there is another reason to love this man, for he gives all that he has.  He sings with almost infinite expression, shocking to see after so many blank faces mouthing.  [My habitual diet was indie groups in pub back rooms, so there’s more than a measure of truth in this].  He begins with ‘Firefly’, the song I began with.  The guitar is bright, his face full of energy and movement.  It’s an unselfconscious performing air that swells up the songs and makes writing flat words on paper seem like a dead occupation.  Even in cutting these songs into grooves, what feels important here now might be lost.  They oughtn’t to make the planned LP of this show.  The sound man seems to pack up early, and Eitzel laughs sadly, feeling that it would be still more damning as a record, these songs rushed out of himself, imperfect songs that are complete for being the next feeling, a part of the whole, joined to all previous songs whose existence he so desperately craved.  It’s above the songs, in the air between him and us; where ‘Jenny’ is, where spit, tears and rolled eyes, contorted face and stretched jaw are.  Sometimes he’s concentrating so hard on the feelings behind the songs that he loses concentration and often seems on the verge of losing it altogether, unable to come to the next word.  At other times, the sense of conflicting urgency and despair, and frustration at the shade and shadow cast on his voice by the electrics, leads him to sing without the microphone; then he worries that this is worse because he can’t be heard and goes back behind the amplification.  He wants the full impact of these songs to explode inside your head.’

In contrast with that live performance and the record they did indeed put out (Songs of love live), this single is an oddity, recorded the previous summer with the reverb up to ten and an ethereal softness to the singing.  This is the record of Mark Eitzel’s which is most deserving of the up-to-that-point not entirely fathomable comparisons to Nick Drake – Pink moon-ish in its bleak, stripped-down acoustics.  You wouldn’t exactly call the B side ecstatic, but it’s as close as Eitzel got at the time; resignation from longing seen as a kind of ecstasy.  I can stop trying; what bliss.  Its mood and melody must have bled into ‘Chanel # 5’, for its chorus shows it to be a sibling song, baked in the same batch.

Typically at the time Eitzel said of the single, ‘You don’t want to hear that, it’s a piece of shit’, a view he may also have been holding when he wrote the sleeve notes for it.  Of the B side he said, ‘I was a hoodlum from Manila and I could operate in any kind of extreme heat and humidity.  I could keep my cool and sell you the kind of trash that a sucker would believe they always deserved.  I was a crook from the Pacific Rim and I could do my bit for Jesus by making you find beauty in the kind of trash I made you believe you deserved. etc’.  And of the A side: ‘I used a lifetime of experience to produce something almost incomprehensible about a single banal childhood memory.’

You begin to understand why he isn’t quite as revered as Nick Drake or either Buckley.  Obviously it’s a major drawback still being alive.  Obtuse and perverse to the end, Mark has thankfully declined to do the one thing guaranteed to make him a star: to die in mysterious, narcotic or suicidal circumstances.  Added to that, there are plenty of other examples of the will to failure, like the choice of Mitchell Froom as producer for Mercury at the point when a big pop record might easily have secured for American Music Club the kind of sales that would have taken a long time to tail off with each subsequent release; the name of his music publishing company (I Failed In Life Music); and his inability quite always to hold a tune when singing live.  Eitzel is far from perfect, but that’s what makes him a more loveable character than the sexually confident Buckley senior, and a warmer one than the more isolated Drake.  If his afterlife when it comes will resemble anyone’s, Townes Van Zandt is the most likely model – remembered for being quick to make a devastating joke at his own expense, but highly respected and like treasure when you find his songs for the first time.

• Mark Eitzel – The ecstatic epiphany: a celebration of youth and beauty past, present and future  
• Mark Eitzel – On the emblematic use of jewelry as a metaphor for the dissolution of our hopes and dreams, a.k.a. Take courage
• Mark Eitzel – Mrs Wright
• American Music Club – Chanel #5
• Toiling Midgets – Mr. Foster’s shoes