Blogcritics

Liner Notables: Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 07:26:10 EDT

"He's as personal and as universal as Yeats or Blake; speaking for himself, risking that dangerous opening of the veins, he speaks for us all."
Garnering an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits from note-perfect liner notes... Their minds are filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts…Idiot wind blowing through the buttons of our coatsBlowing through the letters that we wrote…Okay, so I exaggerate for effect when I suggest some senselessness to...

Liner Notables: Elvis Costello and the Attractions - Armed Forces, 2002 Rhino Edition

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Wed, 9 Apr 2008 10:06:37 EDT

"The highly charged language...is full of gimmicks and almost overpowers some songs with paradoxes and subverted cliches piling up into private and secret meanings."
Note-perfect liner notes: garnering an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits... More than coincidence? Well, no. But it’s nice to think it’s more than an accident happening when, on my way out the door out of town I grabbed copies of the Beatles’ Abbey Road and Yellow Submarine to play on the same day I started...

Liner Notables: B.B. King - Live in Cook County Jail

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 07:15:18 EST

"...a manifestation of human generosity and beauty on B.B.�s part and the raw appreciation of 2,117 of his most ardent fans.�
Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out-of-focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits... Note by note, notation by notation, the thrill is all over the place on the ever-emotive and blazing Live in Cook County Jail,...

Liner Notables: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Song Book

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:56:55 EDT

Ella handles nuances of wit and humor, "one of the prime requisites with Lorenz Hart lyrics, by turns satirical, sardonic, sexy, sophisticated, and sweetly simple."
Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out-of-focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits... If you asked them, they could write some commentary... And so, in the original album and the recent CD issue of 1956’s...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Liner Notables: The Great Lost Kinks Album

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 12:36:05 EDT

Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out-of-focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits... Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, Ray Davies reminds us in “Til Death Do Us Part,” which kicks off The Great Lost Kinks Album, leaving him in no mood to catch up: In my little life,I know that the world must keep on turning,Even though it leaves me far behind…A collection of enjoyable but low-key and disheveled outtakes, rarities, and B-sides, mostly from the late-'60s, the LP’s 1973 release date instantly pegged it an instant period piece -- “Groovy Movies,” anyone? -- but often refreshingly so, considering the then-encroaching age of hand-wringing soft-rock and cosmic bloat. The Great Lost Kinks Album -- much like the previous year’s marvelous and somewhat more conventional catch-up anthology The Kink Chronicles -- was indeed a Brit-centric treasure trove of provincial pop, trumping more widespread pap and prog. But let’s not go too far. Rear-view reflecting is a great thing, but how about myopic hindsight in a house of mirrors, and the dizzying loss of historical perspective it brings? The hit-and-mostly-miss liner notes of Lost, extensive enough to provide a critical and then-updated overview of the group’s career, as well as a song-by song assessment of the album’s tracks, were written by noted music critic and Kinks chronicler John Mendelsohn. And while the commentary certainly benefits with such literate and expressive writing, it almost seems as if Mendelsohn needs to be dragged out of the Carnaby Street carny kicking and screaming L-O-L-A into the Kinks-sized ’70s. “What’s clearly amiss with the Kinks since the dawn of the present decade,” he hastily sniffs in a comment redolent of redundancy, “is that Raymond D. Davies’ songwriting brilliance as a songwriter has greatly dimmed.”A has-been in the course of a mere two years? Let's do the math, and the poetics. First, give Mendelsohn the benefit of one doubt and put the raucous 'n' rollickiing 1970 decade-sitter Lola Vs. Powerman and the Money-Go-Round in the ‘60’s column -- that means the critic is basing his argument on the western-style worthy Muswell Hillbillies, from 1971, and the following year’s loopy ode-to-the-road Everybody’s in Show-Biz. Mendelsohn’s ears weren’t attuned to Muswell’s affectionate mix of boozy music hall and poignant Americana: “But in her dreams she is far away... With Shirley Jones and Gordon McRea,” Davies sings in the exquisite “Oklahoma U.S.A.” And instead of acknowledging some of the LP's roots in the Davies brothers' upbringing in Muswell Hill north of London, Mendelsohn bypasses the biographical, asserting that “Ray’s treatment of the familiar theme of the old fashioned tradition-cherishing soul’s inability to suffer the cruel modern world was largely clumsily heavy-handed and obvious.”The double album Everybody’s in Show Biz, which includes the classic “Celluloid Heroes,” comes in for even more socio-babble as the grumbling Mendelsohn finds “hardly a trace of my own favorite Davies, the immensely-social-conscienced champion of the forgotten ordinary people. Instead, it’s a bitchily egocentric Davies who dominates the work…” (Davies Goes Eclectic! Not only that, but there may be room for more doubt: At this point, of course, Mendelsohn hasn’t yet heard that soon enough Davies Goes Eccentric! -- such elaborately theatrical concept albums and stage shows as Preservation: Act I and II (1973-'74) and The Kinks Present A Soap Opera (1975) will really get us all day and all of the night. Or not.) Day-O! One disc of Everybody’s in Show Biz is a concert recording of Ray and the boys’ typically loose, drunk, and rowdy stage shows of the period -- and I’ve personally lived to tell the tale, or at least awakened in unfamiliar places and made something up. Though I understand to an extent Mendelsohn's declaration that he would quit seeing the band live “if it meant the rejuvenation of the Ray Davies who wrote 'Waterloo Sunset,' 'Get Back in Line,' and 'Shangri-La' and 'Days,'” I must also go along with his contention that, nevertheless, “The Kinks [had] become just about the funnest live rock and roll show under the big sky...”At least the music journalist expressively captures in print the live show’s quintessential good-times buffoonery, interspersed with "Wateroo"-style wistfulness. Wotta sight are the current Kinks! Groupies charlestoning frenziedly in the wings… An immense motley horn section -- one of whom looks like three of Black Sabbath’s identical twin, another of whom looks like he just wandered off the bandstand of The Lulu Show -- doubling up with laughter at the absurd Dixieland that’s coming out of their horns… And this preposterous bow-tied bastard grandson of Oscar Wilde grinning the most lopsided grin anyone’s ever seen while flouncing to and fro like a Ziegfeld choreographer’s worst nightmare. But, as was noted in The Kink Kronicles, the role of underdogs has always been much cherished by them, and only a stranger could conceive of a Kinkdom in which nothing was amiss.The only thing conceivably amiss on Lost, however, is that while understandably evoking the songs from the Kinks ‘60s classics Face to Face, Something Else, and The Village Green Preservation Society, it’s a misfit clearinghouse LP that doesn’t conform to the 33-and-a-theme format that found favor in such albums as the brilliant conceptual works Arthur and Lola. Instead, it’s wry and ramshackle charm stems for the most part from the wit and poignancy of the always-perceptive writing and observances of tunesmith Ray Davies. But the segment of Mendelsohn’s liner notes devoted specifically to the out-of-print Lost's 14 songs -- several of which "are neither profound humanitarian statements nor monuments of satire, but rather only sheerest whimsy" -- are an intriguing and potentially irksome read for the targeted Kinks' fan, and range from sardonic subjectivity to slapdash musing. There’s nothing here in regard to specific recording information -- dates, credits, and such -- but if you like “what to listen for” clues for you all, you’ll learn the not terribly riveting bit of trivia, in the bouncy “Til Death Do Us Part,” that “So demanding are the charts they’ve been asked to play that the horns can be heard gasping for a second wind about three-quarters of the way through…” Mendelsohn is also good for a segue or two in sketching out his insights about such tunes as the lovely and harpsichord-laced portrait of loneliness, “Rosemary Rose” -- though “someone is treasuring a picture of you” -- to the darker “Misty Water,” while going the extra vinyl to cite a relevant reference to the insidiously menacing “Wicked Arrabella” from Village Green.A solid connect-the-dots case could also be made to link the character of Rosemary Rose, who is “not beautiful as someone would know,” to the plain Jane and her gentleman caller central to “When I Turn Out the Living Room Light.” Here, Mendelsohn notes, Davies makes us “feel like callous swine for giggling at the sorry plight of two homely lovers ... but how can we help but giggle when the person Ray’s singing to is obviously the most unsightly mutant ever coughed up by homo sapiens?” Indeed, “Living Room Light” finds Davies “near the pinnacle of his form, making us want to laugh and cry simultaneously.” Commence misery and mirth: Your nose may be bulbous,Your face may be spotty,Your skin may be wrinkled and tight.But I don’t want to see you,The way that you are,So I turn off the living room light.We don’t feel so ugly,We don’t feel so draggy,We don’t feel so twisted up tight.And we don’t feel as ugly as we really are,When we turn off the living room light.When we turn off the living room light.We don’t feel as ugly as we really are,When we turn off the living room light.Another sign that a writer is "near the pinnacle of his form" lies in the timelessness of his or her songs and the universality of their themes, broad issues being couched in the specifics and discerningly-applied craftsmanship. “Plastic Man” in the pen of another could’ve easily become a ham-fisted and outdated protest about the establishment, man. Mendelsohn gets it half right, overlooking some of the song’s satiric sideswipes, saying that this “infectious toe-tapper implies no moral judgment” -- but he's beguiled more by the overt jocular spirit: “By being just unspeakably good-natured musically and pointing out lyrically that plastic folk aren’t distressed even when people stomp on their toes and pull their noses all over the landscape, it hints that being plastic might be loads of fun.”Mendelsohn, however, more certainly misses the mark on a couple other songs on The Great Lost Kinks Album, one an obscurity and the other a Kinks classic with a lead vocal by brother Dave. “Lavender Hill” is an eerie and evocative slice of fantasy without a trace of summer-of-love bandwagonry about it, but the only inspiration elicited from Mendelsohn is the joke that it “reveals little, if anything, about Ray's sexual leanings.” And in the shout-from-the-rooftops declaration of personal independence that characterizes “I’m Not Like Everybody Else,” the rock critic gives it short shrift, relegating this often re-issued 1966 track to hippy-dippy sloganeering and saying he “fails to detect anything other than the usual I’m-gonna-let-my-freak-flag-fly sentiments therein…”Then again, maybe you better fly your freak flag while you can. In old age you will be just like everybody else, as the Kinks leader reminds us in “Where Did My Spring Go?” -- which an on-target Mendelsohn calls “probably the most chillingly cynical of all of Ray’s songs.” It’ll surely sap any good will generated by the absurdly cheery if tongue-in-cheek “Pictures in the Sand” and “Mr. Songbird,” on which “Jimmy Page did not play the recorder.” In any case, in “Spring” Ray sings “the part of a man terrified to the point of cursing the time he spent being in love by the realization that physically he’s no more what he once was”: Where did the spring go? Where did my hormones go? Where did my energy go? Where did my go go? Where did the pleasure go? Where did my hair go? Remember all those sleepless nights,Making love by candlelight,And every time you took my love,You were shortening my life.Where did my teeth go? Where did my hair go? Where did my shoulders go? Where did my chest go? Where did my hormones go? Where did my go go? Where did my energy go? Where did my skin go? Where did my muscles go? Where did my liver go? Where did my heart go? Where did my bones go?"Thank you for the days," Davies once sang in the tender "Days," but he may not have intended the passing of time at the expense of time-lapse seasons and rapidly deteriorating vital organs. Cue Mr. Songbird, please, and show Mr. Mendelsohn the door...Track Listing Side One"Til Death Do Us Part" – 3:12 "There Is No Life Without Love"* – 1:55 "Lavender Hill" – 2:53 "Groovy Movies" – 2:30 "Rosemary Rose" – 1:43 "Misty Water" – 3:01 "Mister Songbird" – 2:24 Side Two"When I Turn off the Living Room Light" – 2:17 "The Way Love Used to Be" – 2:11 "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" — 3:29 "Plastic Man" – 3:00 "This Man He Weeps Tonight"* – 2:38 "Pictures in the Sand" – 2:45 "Where Did My Spring Go?" – 2:10

Gordon Hauptfleisch, alias Neanderthal Hawthorne, is a Blogcritics Books Editor, free lance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. He's also an enigmatic visionary of unfathomable secrets and many a guise, or at least he plays one in his delusions of grandeur. His mandate also includes weird bugs. In a previous life he was a leprous horse thief.

Liner Notables: Nuggets, Volume Three - Pop (Various Artists)

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:24:29 EDT

Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out-of-focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits... Rhino Records, your “One Stop Pop Culture Shop” dedicated to “discovering and compiling … relatively obscure hits, and those ‘hits’ you never heard,” not only offers a wide variety of ‘60-era American and British pop, pre-punk, and psychedelic “Artyfacts” in its Nuggets anthologies and boxed sets, it also aptly documents in its albums’ liner notes applicable rock history that can serve as either refresher courses or as edification for the uninitiated.Nuggets, Volume Three: Pop, from 1984, is a good example of how the LP’s back cover annotations provide succinct and incisive commentary and biographical information that not only enhance the track-by track listening experience, but also sets up the overall scheme of things. It's a mission statement of sorts that touches upon some nuances of experimental changes creeping into the state of AM Pop radio of the time: While pop music of the mid-to-late 1960s brought far reaching change and experimentation, the vast majority of musicians were still trying to concoct good old fashioned, pop-oriented hit records. The San Francisco Sound was promoting turning on and dropping out, but many musicians from all over the country were more interested in becoming the next Beatles, while only marginally incorporating the more radical ideas going on around them.Perhaps nothing on this album's 14 cuts signifies that inclination for “becoming the next Beatles” better than 1966’s “Lies,” by the Knickerbockers, which kicks off this volume of Nuggets. Even after all these years, “Lies” remains an uncanny fab-four dead ringer, from its Lennon-ish lead vocal to rave-up harmonies and spirit. But anyone who remembers seeing the Knickerbockers on their many TV appearance back in the day -- it was virtually the only way people were convinced that they weren’t actually the Beatles -- knows that any similarities stopped with the sound. As the liner notes remark, the Knickerbockers were “An affable bunch [but] their appearance was disappointing, looking more like an early ‘60s New Jersey lounge band (which they were) than a hip Beatles-era rock band.” Also on the Beatlesque end of the spectrum, though not as slavishly so, is The Merry-Go-Round, represented here by the McCartney-styled sweetness of “You’re a Very Lovely Woman” (I would’ve preferred the Paul-Pop of the great “Live,” but I think that gem shows up on another Nuggets compilation). The Merry-Go-Round were more of a regional success in California, a quartet “led by Emitt Rhodes, ex-drummer of the Palace Guard … After a couple of years and a half dozen singles on A&M, Rhodes became a solo artist. Very Beatles-rooted, his acclaimed 1970 solo debut LP was very favorably compared to Paul McCartney’s first solo album, both in sound, and in playing-all-the-instruments-approach.”From “Red Rubber Ball” to rudderless, “Turn Down Day” to turned-around life. Both bouncy hits by the Cyrkle ("Red" written by Paul Simon), Beatles manager Brian Epstein’s first America-signed acts, are here. But after he died, “the band was left with little direction, and the members broke up the band a short time thereafter.” A little prefab foursquare position is also taken up by Boyce and Hart, writers of such Monkees hits as “Last Train to Clarkville,” and “Valleri.” “I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight” made it to number eight in 1968, but “the Boyce & Hart ‘artist’ concept was short-lived, although they joined ex-Monkees Dolenz and Jones, and recorded and toured in the ‘70s as ‘Dolenz, Jones, Boyce, and Hart.'"The stand out track for me on Nuggets, Volume Three: Pop is The Bobby Fuller Four’s vibrant and rollicking “Let Her Dance,” a stomping and shimmering production suffused with reverb and lyrical defiance and ache. “The Bobby Fuller Four,” notes the commentary, “was originally from Dallas, but relocated to Hollywood, where they became a very popular club band. A listen to their very best work reveals what may have been the state-of-the-art of rock recording for that period. ‘Let Her Dance’ … preceded ‘I Fought the Law,’ and was the record that established the band in Los Angeles.” Indeed, encountering a mobbed Bobby Fuller was one of my first up-close-and-personal rock star moments, when as a kid growing up in L.A. -- shortly before he was mysteriously found dead in his car, a death implausibly ruled a suicide -- I saw Fuller at an in-store appearance in 1966. It was also the same department store where I would later buy my first electric guitar. And, in retrospect, where I would start collecting my own rock ’n’ roll nuggets, good and bad. 1. "Lies" - Knickerbockers 2. "Sugar and Spice" - Cryan' Shames3. "I Feel Good (I Feel Bad)" - Lewis & Clarke Expedition4. "Sunshine Girl" - Parade5. "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight" - Boyce & Hart6. "Turn Down Day" - Cyrkle7. "You're a Very Lovely Woman" - Merry-Go-Round8. "Let Her Dance" - Bobby Fuller Four 9. "Can I Get to Know You Better" - Turtles 10. "Red Rubber Ball" - Cyrkle11. "Baby What I Mean" - Spiral Starecase12. "Time Won't Let Me" - Outsiders13. "I Love You" - People14. "October Country" - October Country

Liner Notables: Iggy and the Stooges - Metallic 2 K.O.

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 10:48:24 EDT

Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out-of-focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits... With a sound ranging from tinny din to sonic sludge-fest, Iggy and the Stooges’ Metallic 2 K.O. (recorded in Detroit on Oct 6, 1973, Feb 9, 1974 and released in 1988) wouldn’t seem a natural candidate for expansion from its bootleg beginnings and original 1976 single-record version. It certainly isn’t ideal as an introduction to the song stylings of James Newell Osterberg - that’s what you have Fun House from 1970 and 1973’s Raw Power for.But for anyone who has ever seen Iggy in live performance, in either his Stooge or Pop incarnations, this double album is a reasonable -- though not-to-scale -- facsimile, a what-you-hear-is-what-you’ll-get proto-punk Pop approximation that includes the audience participation portion of the program. Which pretty much amounts to a confrontational rough-and-tumble that largely lasts, as I recall, throughout the entire concert: mutual abuse and altercation for all, spit and suds and all, if not the blood and broken glass free-for-all. The renowned critic Lester Bangs, one of Metallic 2 K.O.’s liner note writers, along with Giovanni Dadomo and Nick Kent, succinctly and evocatively sums up what this means, for you, the record buyer: “It’s the only rock album I know where you can actually hear hurled beer bottles breaking against guitar strings.”Surely such disorderly conduct is at odds with the careful craftsmanship that went into writing and refining the songs, with say, “Cock in my Pocket” an improvisational exception? “No,” insists Iggy, “that particular track was written in Los Angeles at home one night - I think it was over the New Years’ holiday. And I remember that because it took some time - maybe half an hour writing that!”Not that perfectionism is uppermost in Iggy’s mind. “We’re the hardest working band in the business,” he reminds the crowd right before he and Ron Ashton, Scott Ashton, James Williamson, and Scott Thurston launch into “Gimme Danger.” “I don’t care if we aren’t the best.”He’ll get no argument from Giovanni Dadomo, who puts Metallic 2 K.O. in a broader context in his commentary. Regardless of it being “no great record per se,” and “crass, conceited, vulgar and unpleasant,” it is nonetheless unique as an “astonishing piece of documentary work, revealing as it does the face of rock ‘n’ roll that few singers/musicians would ever be so rude, angry, wrecked or impolite to reveal.” Metallic 2 K.O. is simply, Dadomo concludes, “A record that quite literally has to be heard to be believed.” A little in the way of vivid and descriptive liner notes can be of help, too.

Liner Notables: Honkers & Screamers - Roots of Rock 'n' Roll, Vol. 6 (Paul Williams, Hal Singer, Big Jay McNeely, Lee Allen, and Sam "The Man" Taylor)

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Mon, 5 Mar 2007 08:51:33 EST

Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out-of-focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits... The honkers and screamers were the original rock and rollers … They were wild men. They disrupted the smoothness of black popular music in the 1940s with their booting, shrieking solos and outrageous stages routines - walking out into the audience as they honked one note over and over, peeling off their jackets and ties while they played and then lying on their backs and kicking.The usual fluff-piece function of album liner notes to promote the recording artist at hand usually undergoes a change in best-of retrospectives, with their focus on career-long appreciations. While the liner notes writer will almost invariably consider the applicable historical context, the approach for various-artists’ anthologies is to expound upon the broader historical implications and cultural perspective.That Robert Palmer, the late New York Times pop music critic and Rolling Stone contributing editor, can supply some depth as well as breadth to a 1979 Savoy Records anthology of influential pre-rock artists is remarkable. Honkers & Screamers: Roots of Rock and Roll, Vol. 6 showcases the music of saxophonists Paul Williams, Hal Singer, Big Jay McNeely, Lee Allen, and Sam “The Man” Taylor. But, in addition to providing biographical information and track-specific details on Honkers, Palmer considers other aspects as well. He not only explores the roots of the music -- such as in the African masked dancers who also masked their voices and “gurgled, bellowed, shrieked, rasped, buzzed, and generally carried on” -- and the immediate antecedents of saxophone R&B, he also, when the occasion calls, delves into the nuts-and-bolts technicalities of the subject. For example, as Palmer sketches out the honker and screamer beginnings of jazz masters Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, he explains how the instrumental technique of their avant-garde tendencies was rooted in R&B saxophone tradition. The sound was largely a result of “overblowing the horn to get a distorted tone, biting down on the reed in order to produce shrill squeals, playing lengthy solos that grew hotter and hotter until they verged on hysteria.”And one thing led to another. When the big band era faded away after World War II and “the boppers took the intellectual jazz listeners away,” the young honkers just starting out discovered the benefits of showmanship, when “a little repetition, tonal distortion, and grandstanding, when cannily paced and well-placed in a program, could create pandemonium.”Palmer, in his methodical, thorough and accessible chronicling, also notes a geographical bearing on the development of honker and screamer rhythm and blues, as he takes the blues riff, the basis of R&B music, on a southwestern route. In contrast to jazz bands elsewhere who worked from written arrangement or continued on with New Orleans-style collective improvisation, black musicians in such southwestern regions as Texas and Oklahoma “were playing ‘by head,’ getting together on blues riffs and making up new riffs behind improvising soloists as they went along.”Established bandleaders, seeing the potential in such audacious sidemen, enticed them away from other bands, and the swaggering sound and riff-based construction of honking and screaming quickly spread. Palmer shows how even the non-saxophone efforts of vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and guitarist Charlie Christian, were, well, instrumental.In any event, the stage was set for the careers of Williams, Singer, McNeely, Allen, and Taylor. And while Palmer devotes a generous chunk of commentary to all five musicians, many of the colorful retellings involve Paul Williams -- according to producer Teddy Reig, a “‘glamour puss’”who’d “‘play his solos and make the broads happy’” -- whose talent makes for a good illustration of how and why honking spread. “‘The word got out,’” Williams himself recollects, “’Maan, that saxophone player down there blowed the mike into the FLOOR! And that was it. We started doing dances and we had lines, both ways, as far as the eye could see. Fire department, police department, everybody was there.’”Big Jay McNeely, an extrovert who was a master of endurance able to out-honk just about anyone, and who, Palmer says, “went on to acquire a reputation as a wild man among wild men,” was equally suited for the spotlight and famous for his “walks.” Walking -- leaving the stand and walking through the audience, down the length of the bar, even into the street -- “was as much part of being an R&B saxophonist as honking and screaming.” As Palmer shows in a choice anecdote, McNeely even topped Williams’ showstopper of walking and honking alongside a hired midget who walked atop the bar: ‘I remember we were playing on a package show in an amusement park outside Beaumont, Texas,’ recalls Teddy Reig, ‘and Big Jay and part of his band did a walk. And the white folks’ police didn’t understand what his walk was all about and they took him and the other musicians who were walking down to the jailhouse. Well, the rest of the band was still on stage playing, and the people were screaming for Big Jay. And then we got a call from the police station and we had to run down there and get him out.”All the makings for rock and roll, in its pre-rock and roll state. In his summation, Palmer writes that the R&B and rock stagecraft of today owes a lot to these pioneer exhibitionists and attention-seekers. “They brought large black audiences together in communal celebration, and they rocked the theaters and dance halls where they played to the foundations,” he states. Moreover, as Palmer goes on, “their visceral, invigorating music has withstood the test of time with its energy and irreverence intact. Listen and enjoy.”No doubt Palmer’s incisive expertise and entertaining liner notes has helped to enhance that listening experience and enjoyment.

Liner Notables: Frank Sinatra - In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning, Only The Lonely, No One Cares, Point Of No Return

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Wed, 7 Feb 2007 12:30:22 EST

Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out-of-focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits... The adage that “you can’t tell a book by looking at its cover” may apply to record albums, too. The forced, sad-clown persona suggested by Frank Sinatra’s Only The Lonely (1958), is an off-putting depiction, even though it was a Grammy-winner for album design. It seems so unlike young Ol’ Blue Eyes, such big top bathos skewed for this arguably bleakest of Sinatra's Capitol Records' series of melancholic saloon song sessions. But can you always tell an album from its liner notes? Even a lone yet telling tidbit culled from the Sammy Cahn and James Van Heusen-written notations for Only The Lonely -- that the album was originally going to be called "For Losers Only" -- could support a case that this LP‘s commentary reflects its dreary, defeatist concept. “‘Scuse me while I disappear,” “Angel Eyes” ends, and we almost expect to see the singer slink off into thin air.But to explore further, the liner notes for 1954’s superb In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning -- an album whose cover is the hands-down winner in evoking a 3AM-of the soul sense of despair -- points out that, when Sinatra sang, “he created the loneliest early-morning mood in the world.” It’s an insomnia-fueled heartbreak darkly conveyed even in the first sung notes of the lead-off title track. Was Sinatra's recent split with Ava Gardner too much on his mind?Point Of No Return (1961), a collection of ballads resonant with “The bittersweet memory of tender moments to which there is just no return,” has “an extra ingredient that intensifies” the forlorn feeling: “For these songs all express,” the commentary reads, “the special longing that comes with the memory of a September not spent alone, or an April when someone did care. Every one of them is a revelation of a human being with a heart that beats, experiencing a sort of moment of truth…”But for an expanded and more in-depth take on how Sinatra “sings ballads in a lonely mood,” we need to go beyond No One Cares’ straining-for-effect cover photo of a pensive Frank, in fedora and overcoat, drink in hand, by himself in a crowded bar. The liner notes of this 1959 album were penned by the prominent jazz and pop music critic Ralph J. Gleason, and perhaps it takes someone immersed in all-things-music to articulate the empathetic and natural style that complemented Sinatra‘s “gift for tempo” along with the “special magic of the timbre of his sound, the accent of his voice and the way in which it brings him personally across to the listener.” Gleason further remarks upon Sinatra‘s “inspired phrasing and his ability to understand and communicate the lyric,” as well as, interestingly, the way he sings the verses to the song. “Verses never have the impact that the chorus has,” Gleason notes. “Yet, when Sinatra sings them, “they take on new life, set the stage for the mood and the message of the song.”In an intriguing and pertinent facet to Gleason’s observations, he takes an historical and social perspective: For all our gaiety and our brass, this is a country with an element of sadness running through its soul. The Italians and the Irish, the Jews and yes, even the English, have a melancholy side to their nature and thus we have a great appetite for the song of unrequited love, the lament of love gone cold or hopeless. This underlying note of tragedy is imbedded in most American art, as it is in American life. It is one of the reasons Frank Sinatra can sing the sad songs in this album so well.For, as Gleason continues, "those bittersweet, late night, sad songs of days that used to require an interpreter who can be sad without being maudlin, who can, in short, be man enough to cry a little and with the tears gain dignity.” But damn that Ava Gardner, anyway. Hasn’t she done enough?

Liner Notables: The Kinks - Face To Face

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 09:01:52 EST

Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out-of-focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits...“It has been said by mercenary-minded persons,” the liner notes to the Kinks' Face To Face begin, “that upon setting out along life's road the bread, the filthy lucre of W. Shakespeare of highly regarded memory would seem to be the thing to go for. So if you accept the opinion of these aforesaid persons in the spirit in which it is given and get cracking you get the loot. So what next?”What next? Well, if you’re the considerably less mercenary-minded Ray Davies, you get cracking and create a classic album that foreshadows the similarly-themed elegance of 1967’s Something Else and the following year’s nostalgia-on-parade pinnacle, The Village Green Preservation Society.And if the afore-alluded to Face To Face can be considered, as it has been, an early and at least loosely-constructed concept album, why shouldn't its liner notes also be seen to cohere conceptually? Ray Davies’ character studies and sharply-etched observations of British society musically permeate and pepper this 1966 release, but such impulses also inspire the album cover content. In the wonderfully woozy and boozy smash “Sunny Afternoon” lurks a cautionary tale of what befalls when “The taxman's taken all my dough / And left me in my stately home / Lazing on a sunny afternoon.” And the jaunty hit -- well, a hit in a cover song incarnation by Herman's Hermits -- gets a more aptly sneering vocal by Ray Davies as he warns an aging ladies’ man what's in store for him: “And when you're old and grey you will remember what they said / That two girls are too many, three's a crowd and four you're dead.”A haughty air infuses “House In The Country,” which declares a haughty heir “got his job when drunken Daddy tumbled down the stairs,” and wry humor imbues “Holiday in Waikiki” wherein a vacationing English boy encounters a genuine hula hula dancer from New York City whose “mother is Italian / And my dad's a Greek." In contrast, poignancy paints “Rosy Won’t You Please Come Home,” and “Little Miss Queen Of Darkness,” who “Although she looked so happy there was sadness in her eyes / And her curly false eyelashes weren't much of a disguise.”How does such an array of profiles in discouragement play out -- as the record plays on -- in the liner notes of Face To Face? Poetically and expressively written by Frank Smyth -- yeah, I don’t know who he is either -- the commentary complements in letter and spirit the incipient ’60s-style anti-materialistic societal essence in spades. Moreover, just as the album traces a trajectory from the personal inexperience and alienation expressed “Party Line” -- “Wonderin' all the time / Who's on the other end” -- to the world-weary and skewed sensibilities of the penultimate “Sunny Afternoon,” so too do the liner notes chronicle a “passage through this vale of tears," using not only imagery spurred by the songs on Face To Face, but also earlier Kinks’ hits, to chart the rise and fall of the self-made “man about town.” "So far on your passage ... you have been a hick, a nothing and an unheralded nobody. To be a well respected man must be your next aim,” Smyth says, as he goes on to note the importance of a “dedication to the dictates of fashion”: “The Carnaby Street. The striped natty suiting. Touches of velvet upon the collar. Touches of lace upon the underwear. And of course ties of polka dot and Persian-originated Paisley pattern.” Next, of course, comes the reward for working so hard, the Shangri-la, the country house - then a yacht and a motor car “with white walls to its wheels smiling in the golden gravel drive.”But what of the gold-digging trophy wife who’ll will lead you to ruination, the "big fat mama trying to break you?" Ladies of course. Ladies with long legs and little bosom, hair the colour of corn, very mini, very skinny dresses. Status symbol ladies with rich dark sheen in the depths of the skin. Dwindling in the end to one lady, one Special who gets in among the soul. The trouble being that the perfect woman becomes a bore, like having Venus de Milo constantly upon one's hands. So angry words are spoken, and she of golden hair and mini skirt, half woman, half thighs leaves. With car. Back to ma and pa. With tales of drunkenness and cruelty.And as if things couldn’t get any worse, “fate flings its last custard pie” as “The taxman cometh.” All you have left, then, is “the sun on the uplands with dappled shadows and all"... and that glass of ice cold beer. In the summertime, in the summertime…