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Archives for April 2015

Certain Songs #168: Camera Obscura – “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken”

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Album: Let’s Get Out of This Country
Year: 2006

Until it actually happened, nobody really realized that what the 2000s were missing was a twee-pop answer song to a twenty-year-old Lloyd Cole song. I mean, in 2006, it wasn’t like Lloyd Cole was exactly a household name, even in households that worshiped Rattlesnakes when it originally came out. So I’m guessing that tons of people who loved this song didn’t have any idea it was an answer song in the first place.

Which is fine, because there’s more going on here than just an answer song. There’s a long organ breakdown,  a big guitar hook, and bigger strings that frame a chorus that doubles as Traceyanne Campbell’s shout-out to Lloyd Cole’s original question (”Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?”) and a great commentary on how your world shrinks when you fall in love.

Hey Lloyd, I’m ready to be heartbroken
Cos I can’t see further
Than my own nose at this moment

It captures that moment where you are all in in a new relationship, and willing to risk the heartbreak for whatever is going to come before the heartbreak. So even if she sang, “Hey Frank, I’m ready to be heartbroken,” it would have had the same impact. That said, it probably wouldn’t have gotten as much notice from music geeks like me.

For his part, Lloyd Cole loved the song,  and even asked Traceyanne Campbell for an instrumental mix of the song, so he could use it as the opening music for when he went onstage.  I haven’t seen Lloyd Cole in concert since 1986, so I have no idea if he ever got his wish. But I hope so.

Video for “Hey Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken”

Certain Songs #167: Caitlin Cary – “Cello Girl”

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Album: I’m Staying Out.

Year: 2003.

There was no way that Caitlin Cary was ever going to match fellow-Whiskeytown alum Ryan Adams in terms of quantity, but for a moment in the early 2000s, it looked like she might be albe to have at least one or two amazing tracks per record. And I still don’t think that Adams has written a song as empathetic on the nature of talent and memory and chance encounters as “Cello Girl.”

The pretty girl who played the cello
What was her name?
What was her name?
Particulars can slip away
Pictures etched upon the brain
Whooo-hoooa
Like her long blonde hair and her big thick brain
Long low notes that took years to fade
Years to fade

As the song goes on, Cary remembers more particulars about the Cello Girl, and and invents a whole life for her: moving to New York City, riding the F train, dating younger men, all along trying to remember:

What was her name?
What was her name?

Then she looks at herself and finds her own talent lacking in comparison to her memory of the Cello Girl:

Picked a squeaky violin to play
But I can’t really play 
No, I can’t really play
I think I wished for something deeper
Because high notes won’t keep her 
They’ll never keep her

And you start wondering, were they lovers? Did they spend a blissful evening playing their instruments for each other, never to see each other again? In the end, Cary imagines a happy life for her as an apartment-dwelling professional musician, and then wonders:

Sometimes I ride the Downtown F train
Would I recognize her anyway?
What was her name?
What was her name?
What was her name?
What was her name?

The music is the normal gorgeous alt-country, fully of lightly crunching guitar, classic-sound organs and Cary’s own fiddle haunting the edges, but it’s not what makes this song for me; its the beautiful meditation on the nature of memory, of how transitional people – even important transitional people – can fade away in your memory over time.

Video For “Cello Girl”

Certain Songs #166: Caitlin Cary & Ryan Adams – “The Battle”

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Album: While You Weren’t Looking (Bonus Disc).

Year: 2002.

Caitlin Cary was a singer, songwriter and fiddle player for Whiskeytown, and she was tough enough to go face to face with enfant terrible Ryan Adams and smart enough to get a Whiskeytown vintage recording of one of his (or most likely, their) best songs – and a candidate for Prettiest Song Ever Recorded (Americana Division) as a bonus track for her first solo album. 

I’ll get into my deep love for Whiskeytown when I get there in a couple of years or so, but for now, just a story … 

It was 1998, and Rox & I were seeing Whiskeytown in San Francisco for the second time. The year before, we’d witnessed an absolutely incendiary performance at the Bottom of the Hill – a wedding present from Matt Brown – and this time, they didn’t seem to be quite as amazing, as Ryan Adams seemed to be visibly annoyed about something. 

In any event, this turned out to be the show where he got so annoyed at the sound crew – a combination of the sound and the fact that he couldn’t smoke due to California’s recently-enacted indoor smoking ban – that he kicked the monitors offstage at the end of the show. I remember all of that, but that’s not the thing I remember the most about this show. 

What I remember is that at some point during all of the ongoing chaos, everybody else from Whiskeytown was offstange, and it was just Ryan Adams and Caitlin Cary, fiddle and guitar, who started singing this: 

When I am buried don’t visit my grave
God cannot save me from the sins I’ve embraced
Pay your respects at the old liquor store
Where I won the battle, but I lost the war

Whoa. Because it was just the two of them, and the melody they were singing was both timeless and new, I was transfixed.

You mine for silver, and I pan for gold
You keep yours hidden, while all my are sold
You tell the truth, and I lie and I barter
And I drink and I cry, and I pass out at night

Now, you gotta realize that Whiskeytown’s Stranger’s Almanac was probably my favorite album of the past two or three years, and it was filled with amazing songs. And within two verses, this song I’d never heard before was already as good as any of them. Well maybe not “16 Days,” but still.

I’ve always cheated, though I’ve never stolen no
I’ve wanted things that you ain’t never thought of
Pay your respects to that gambling’ score
Where I won the battle, and I lost the war

By this time, I knew I was going have to tell everyone who cared that while the entire show was a mess – especially compared to the previous time – there was this song, the gorgeous duet between Ryan Adams and Caitlin Cary, who for the first part of the last verse didn’t even play their instruments, because that’s how good their voices sounded together.

They always told me when death came my sins would be
Cast out, forgotten, laid to rest with my body
Pay your respects to that old church-house door
Where I won the battle, and I lost the war.

So you could imagine how disappointed I was in the next year or so when Napster gave forth not just the original Pneumonia album, but dozens and dozens of Whiskeytown outtakes from their entire recording career, and the only place where I found any kind of recording of this was from a bootleg of their Austin City Limits performance in 1997.

But then, in 2002, it showed up as a bonus track for Caitlin Cary’s first solo album – both a sweet and cocksure move on Ryan Adams part – and I have treasured it ever since. 

Video for “The Battle”

Certain Songs #165: The Byrds – “One Hundred Years From Now”

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Album: Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

Year: 1968.

As someone who was getting into The Byrds at the same time he was getting into punk rock, I’ll admit that it took me decades to fully understand the charms of Sweetheart of the Rodeo. It was probably wasn’t until the early 90s when the erased Gram Parsons vocals showed up on the first box set, followed by the alt-country movement and my subsequent discovery of Parsons’ solo albums and the Flying Burrito Brothers.

And while I’ll never revere it the same way I love those psychedelic albums, it’s impossible for me not to love their take on Gram Parson’s “100 Years From Now,” even if I’m a heathen and prefer the take with McGuinn & Hillman singing harmony to the one where Gram sings all by his lonesome. Either way, they’re asking a great question:

One hundred years from this day
Will the people still feel this way?
Still say the things that they’re saying right now

Featuring a dynamic pedal steel  hook from Lloyd Green and some subtle leads from Clarence White, “One Hundred Years From Now” feels like the missing link between The Everly Brothers and Rank & File and a song that could – in any era – fit snugly in either the Rock or Country camps, while reminding you that those camps reside on the same lake.

Also: believe it or not, we’re nearly halfway to finding out the answer to the question that Gram poses in the lyrics. It’s possible (not probable, but possible) that somebody could be reading this in 2068 who knows the answer.

Video for “One Hundred Years From Now” (McGuinn/Hillman vocals)

Video for “One Hundred Years From Now” (Gram Parsons vocal)

Certain Songs #164: The Byrds – “Change is Now”

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Album: The Notorious Byrd Brothers.

Year: 1968.

With its infamous cover photo of a horse standing in for the recently-departed David Crosby, The Notorious Byrd Brothers was the work of a band that was firing on all cylinders while completely falling apart. This was represented in several multi-part songs that never quite ended up where they started. Like every member of the band needed to contribute something completely unique to each song

That it held together at all was due to the fact that no matter where the songs went, The Byrds never abandoned their core strengths – their harmonies and McGuinn’s ever-surprising guitar.

For example, the appropriately-named “Change is Now,” which starts out as a slow, meditative piece with the usual hippie lyrics:

Change is now, change is now
Things that seemed to be solid are not
All is now, all is now
The time that we have to live

Then, with no warning whatsoever, it transitions into a country song – with future Byrd Clarence White (probably) playing pedal steel guitar as they sing the chorus:

Gather all that we can
Keep in harmony with love’s sweet plan

And then, just as abruptly, with session ace Hal Blaine playing the drums instead of Michael Clarke, they transition in to a very long psychedelic guitar solo unlike anything else that McGuinn had done – using sustain to let the notes of the solo blend into each other instead of articulating each one seperately, sounding more like Jeff Beck’s work in the Yardbirds than anything he’d previously done.

And then, back into the verses, as if nothing had happened at all, instead of everything happening at once, and while the long guitar solo section never returns, they do go back into the country chorus once more. Strange, and yet beautifully compelling, and – of course – held together by the McGuinn-Crosby-Hillman harmonies that never once waver during all of the weirdness.

Video for “Change is Now”

Certain Songs #163: The Byrds – “Lady Friend”

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Single, 1967.

Arguably the greatest song that David Crosby has ever written on his own, the majestic “Lady Friend” is kind of the “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” of The Byrds catalog: a fantanstic non-album A-side that was sabotaged by questionable production.  Because it was considered a failure, it wasn’t released on either of their Greatest Hits albums.

[Read more…] about Certain Songs #163: The Byrds – “Lady Friend”

Certain Songs #162: The Byrds – “Why”

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Album: Younger Than Yesterday.

Year: 1967.

With a beat that would sound like classic Motown if only Chris Hillman & Michael Clarke had even the tiniest bit of swing (The Byrds could pull off a lot of things, but R&B was beyond their ken)  and featuring two of McGuinn’s greatest guitar solos, “Why” closed the stellar Younger Than Yesterday with perhaps their hardest-rocking song.

Lyrically, it’s a trifle:

You keep sayin’ no to her
Since she was a baby
You keep sayin’ no to her
Not even maybe


Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

But this isn’t one of those songs I love for the words, I love it for the guitars – especially the raga-ish guitar solos, far more controlled than “Eight Miles High,” of course, but completely compelling – and (broken record) the way their voices go up when asking “whyyyyyyyyyyyy”?

And because of the straight-forward beat, tough(ish) guitars, and simple verse-chorus-verse structure, out of all of the Byrds songs, this feels like the one that set the template for all of the power pop to follow – it’s hard for me to imagine songs like “A Million Miles Away” or “Tomorrow Night” existing without it.

“Why”

Certain Songs #161: The Byrds – “C.T.A.-102”

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Album: Younger Than Yesterday
Year: 1967

. . .

To be a fan of The Byrds during their three-album psychedelic phase meant that you had to put up with a certain amount of silliness – lysergic and otherwise. Some of the silliness manifested itself in songs about David Crosby’s already contentious relationship with reality, but the rest manifested as Jim McGuinn songs about outer space.  Which, as you might imagine – especially when accompanied by jangly guitars and stellar harmonies – were right up my alley.

Perhaps the silliest – and therefore, my favorite – was McGuinn’s paen to a recently-discovered quasar, “C.T.A.-102.”  Initially discovered in the early 60s, C.T.A.-102 was initially held by some scientists to be proof of extraterrestrial life, until they realized that, nope, that’s just quasars. Better luck next time!

In any event, at some point McGuinn was inspired to write a great jangly-guitar song where the usual amazing harmonies sing the following words:

C.T.A. – 102
Year over year receiving you
Signals tell us that you’re there
We can hear them loud and clear

We just want to let you know
That we’re ready for to go
Out into the universe
We don’t care who’s been there first

That all takes up, like, the first 20 seconds of the song. After that, it’s a long instrumental section which is just basically just the jangly guitar and drums, “outer space” noises made by an electronic oscillator, and a “beep-beep” on the 2 & 4 – which I will insist falls under The Handclap Rule.  This lasts for a utterly glorious full minute until then they come back in for one final verse.

On a radio telescope
Science tells us that there’s hope
Life on other planets might exist

At which point, the song comes to an abrupt halt, and suddenly we’re in the middle of an extraterrestrial civilization (you can tell because they’re talking in alien voices), who are millions of light-years away, listening to “C.T.A.-102″ as it’s being beamed from Earth!!

This is either the silliest thing to appear on a 1960s album, or the greatest. Or both!!!

As I was doing research for this piece, I discovered I had written about it before, back in 2008 when NASA decided to beam a song that wasn’t “C.T.A.-102″ into outer space.  This probably means that I now lead the internets in writing about this song. I’ll leave it up to you to decide as to whether or not that’s a good thing.

“C.T.A.-102”

Certain Songs #160: The Byrds – “So You Want to Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star”

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Album: Younger Than Yesterday.

Year: 1967.

With its driving circular riff, Hugh Masekela trumpet and sound effects of screaming girls, “So You Want To Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” pretty much says its piece and gets the hell out of the way. With no chorus and deeply cynical lyrics – could be aimed at The Monkees, or it could be aimed at The Byrds themselves –i t was probably also the first Byrds song I noticed on the radio, and therefore, a key reason I decided to check them out.

So you want to be a rock ‘n’ roll star
Then listen now to what I say
Just get an electric guitar
And take some time and learn how to play
And when your hair’s combed right and your pants fit tight
It’s gonna be all right

The beauty of this song to me is that it reads more cynically than it plays. While the new, more experimental period signified by “Eight Miles High” in retrospect clearly also signified the commercial death knell (relatively speaking, of course) of The Byrds, the reality is that they were only a commercial powerhouse in 1965, when folk-rock felt new.  

Then it’s time to go downtown
Where the agent man won’t let you down
Sell your soul to the company
Who are waiting there to sell plastic ware
And in a week or two if you make the charts
The girls will tear you apart

So even as the four albums they released from 1966-1968 were among the greatest in the 60s, all for totally different reasons, fewer and fewer people heard them.  And by the time they wrote “So You Wanna Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” a seemingly surefire single if there ever was one, it barely dented the top 30. Of course maybe that’s because it wasn’t so surefire after all, as McGuinn & Hillman neglected to come up with a chorus outside of the “La-la-las” at the end.

What you pay for your riches and fame
Was it all a strange game
You’re a little insane
The money that came and the public acclaim
Don’t forget what you are
You’re a rock’n’roll star 

Many many years later – in 1984, I believe – MTV did a show called “Rock Influences,” which purported to take a contemporary band and show how they were influenced by a particular musical genre. The inaugural episode featured R.E.M. and the genre was Folk-Rock.

So along with some boss vintage clips – including the first time I ever saw a clip of Bob Dylan just killing it with “Maggie’s Farm” at the Newport Folk Festival – “Rock Influences” showed excerpts from a R.E.M. show where various folk-rock luminaries like John Sebastian and Roger McGuinn shared the stage with them.

John Sebastian, of course, seemed fine with the whole thing, sporting his auto-harp and enthusastically singing “Do You Believe in Magic” while Michael Stipe and Mike Mills sang “ahhhhhhhhhhs” in the background. It wasn’t great, but it was kinda fun.

But the “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” with Roger McGuinn was kind of a trainwreck. He clearly didn’t want to be there, and there is a moment in the first verse where Michael Stipe sings the wrong words on the harmonies and you could almost see McGuinn do the mental calculation on whether or not he’s going to hit Stipe over the head with his guitar.

“So You Want To Be A Rock and Roll Star”

“So You Want To Be A Rock and Roll Star” Roger McGuinn & R.E.M.

Certain Songs #159: The Byrds – “Eight Miles High”

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Album: Fifth Dimension
Year: 1966

Ladies and Gentlemens, welcome to my favorite song from the 1960s.

That’s right: I love “Eight Miles High” even more than “What Goes On” or “I Can See For Miles” or “Visions of Johanna” or “She Said She Said,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”  There isn’t anything I don’t love about “Eight Miles High”

I love that it’s the last Byrds song that Gene Clark had a hand in (talk about passing the torch!), and that for whatever punchline David Crosby later became, he at the very least co-wrote this.

I love how got banned for being about drugs when it’s so clearly about flying to London and how it inspired Husker Du to not just create the greatest cover version in rock history, but write a sequel (”Dead Set on Destruction”) where they’re stuck in London forever.

I love Chris Hillman’s ominous bassline, and how Roger McGuinn’s guitar comes in playing the main theme, and then almost instantly devolves (but really heightens) into an insane mess of Coltraney Shankarisms for a few seconds until setting up that opening phrase:

Eight miles high

And then, for an instant, the entire universe stops, until Michael Clarke’s drum roll snaps it back into existence.

And when you touch down
You’ll find that it’s stranger than known

And there’s that drum roll again, which will spend the rest of the song as a spirit guide, only appearing when it is absolutely necessary to make sure the entire song stays together after McGuinn’s guitar continually threatens to rip a hole in the fabric of the universe. (I originally wrote “rip a whole in the fabric of the universe” and now I’m convinced that McGuinn was trying to do that as well!)

At the end of the day, it’s kinda ironic that it took jazz-influenced guitar solos to create a full-fledged psychedelic rock classic, but there it is, and what’s so beautiful about the guitar solo is that McGuinn clearly didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. I mean he did conceptually: he knew how to leave holes (and wholes!) at first to set up tension, he knew how bring the main theme back in before just randomly splattering notes everywhere, but the fact that he was in no way a virtuoso was what made all three solos so powerful.

And so what does it all add up to? A single that must have been incredibly weird to hear over the radio, one of the first psychedelic songs – predating even “Rain” or “Tomorrow Never Knows” – and one of the most gorgeous and influential songs ever recorded.

“Eight Miles High”