Paul Simon lifts the lid on his long and fascinating career in the latest edition of Uncut.
Interviewed in the July 2016 issue – which is now on sale in UK shops – Simon talks about his time in the UK folk clubs in the 1960s, his early run of solo albums, the Graceland controversy and his new album, Stranger To Stranger.
He also shares his memories of writing “The Sound Of Silence“, which turns 50 this year.
“I wrote it in the bathroom in my parent’s house because the room was tiled, so there was an echo,” he tells us. “I used to turn the lights off and leave the water running. It was like white noise, you know? My brother says it was amazing that I wrote it, because everything I’d written before that was way below it in quality. It was step up. It was probably one of those things when you’re in some kind of serotonin/dopamine flow, and it just comes out. But I was too young to know that those things happened. So I just took it as, “That’s a good one, I could close my act with this one.
“I remember I was just coming out of the phase where I was playing baseball for the schools that I was in,” he continues. “I was a good baseball player but I said, “Realistically, you’re never going to be a baseball player. You’re too small to be a baseball player. That’s over.” I know that I had a tremendous interest in making records as I did all those demos. I was an English Literature major in college, which I chose as my major because I had a crush on a girl who was an English major. I just liked playing music, I wanted to do that. I never envisioned that it would be a lifetimes worth of employment or that I would ever be having an interview like this, at this point.”
Were you ambitious at all?
“Yeah, I was. I wanted it. Also, I was competitive. I was competitive as an athlete. But there were no huge obstacles that I was facing other than I didn’t have a hit. But I wasn’t struggling. As a said, when I lived here I had tons of money for what I needed. When you’re a kid and you’re 21, 22 years old, unless something’s really gone wrong in your life, you’re pretty happy.”
You can read the full interview with Paul Simon – which includes his thoughts on why Simon & Garfunkel split up and why he didn’t see the Coen brothers film, Inside Llewyn Davis – in the new issue of Uncut, in shops and available to buy digitally now.
End Of The Road have announced the line-up for the Literary stage at this year’s festival.
It includes Brix Smith Start discussing her turbulent years with The Fall and former Uncut writer Barney Hoskyns reading from his new book on Woodstock.
The line-up is:
Vincent Thurkettle
Nina Lyon
Travis Elborough
Sally Bayley
Darren Hayman
Roddy Wombe
Cathi Unsworth
Barney Hoskyns
They join the festival’s musical bill who include Teenage Fanclub, Thurston Moore, Savages and Scritti Politti.
This year’s headliners are Joanna Newsom, Animal Collective and Bat For Lashes.
On the Comedy line-up, meanwhile Stewart Lee will be joined by Arthur Smith, Josie Long, Bridget Christie, Andy Zaltzman, John Finnemore and Hardeep Singh Kohli.
The festival takes place between September 2 – 4 at its ususal home in Larmer Tree Gardens.
Uncut will be hosting events in the Tipi Tent Stage again this year; check back here for updates.
You can find more details about tickets and the line-up at the festival’s website.
Blind since early childhood thanks to poor medical treatment, Rahsaan Roland Kirk developed the gift of seeing with his ears. That’s what someone says in the course of The Case Of The Three-Sided Dream, and it seems to have been true. Kirk imagined the sounds he wanted to make, and then invented the means to create them. Another voice in this biographical documentary sums it up: “It was his one and only reality. It was his life.”
As a small boy he cut a length of garden hose and played it like a trumpet. When he took up the saxophone, one instrument wasn’t enough. To the tenor saxophone he added two exotic members of the same tribe, the manzello and the stritch. He hung the three horns around his neck, devised a method of cross-fingering between the keys, adapted his embouchure to take in the trio of mouthpieces, and played them all at once. When he appeared in the early 1960s, the sound was like nothing heard before: a keen blast of harmonised reeds that bore no resemblance to any known saxophone section. It was his true voice.
He also hung whistles and small sirens around his neck, to punctuate his performances with sudden blasts that kept his audience on their toes. He was a wonderful flautist, too, one of the few capable of playing real jazz on the instrument, through which he often hummed or sang at the same time as producing the instrument’s own notes (thus providing a career for Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson). He sometimes played clarinet, cor anglais or harmonica, he kept a nose-flute handy, and occasionally he put a saxophone mouthpiece into a trumpet and played it that way. Having acquired the arcane skill of circular breathing, he never needed to stop playing; he recorded his “Concerto for Saxophone” in one 20-minute take, playing continuously throughout. His auditory perception went beyond the normal definition of acute. “We used to joke that he could hear around corners,” someone else says.
As if that were not enough, he also told stories. The first time I saw him, in Leicester in 1964, during his first British tour, he prefaced his piece “We Free Kings” with a long, rambling and utterly spellbinding tale about the three wise men on their way to Bethlehem, recasting it as a beatnik short story. Maybe Bruce Springsteen saw him around that time, because Springsteen’s way with a yarn – like the one about encountering Clarence Clemons on the Jersey shore – is straight out of Rahsaan’s playbook.
Unafraid of anything, he became more and more compelling. There’s a wonderful story about how, when the police tried to raid Ronnie Scott’s (where he was a favourite and frequent performer) one night, Kirk ordered the audience to blow the whistles he had handed out to them for participatory use in one of his tunes. Result: chaos and confusion and a swift retreat by the boys in blue.
Some people thought it was all a minstrel-show gimmick. It was anything but. Like Harry Partch, Moondog and La Monte Young, he was an American original. He could be uproariously entertaining, but he could also keep pace with the very finest exponents of modern jazz, such as the pianist Jaki Byard and the drummer Elvin Jones, with whom he recorded the great album Rip, Rig & Panic in 1965. Charles Mingus treasured his presence in his Jazz Workshop band: he’s an integral part of the roiling sessions that produced Mingus Oh Yeah! and Tonight At Noon.
But he was also political. His chant “Volunteered Slavery” formed part of the soundtrack to the civil rights era. In 1971, invited on to the Ed Sullivan Show, he brought with him a top-gun band including Mingus, Archie Shepp and Roy Haynes. Instead of the promised “My Cherie Amour”, they blasted into Mingus’s “Haitian Fight Song”. Sullivan’s response proved his chops for all time. “Wonderful!” he cried. “Wonderful! Wonderful!”
Four years later Kirk was half-paralysed by a sudden stroke. By 1977, while enduring kidney dialysis three times a week, he had devised a way of operating the saxophone single-handed and played and sang a beautiful “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”, Mingus’s elegy for Lester Young, at one of Ken Kesey’s Poetic Hoohaws, still top-hatted and festooned with whistles and sirens. He died that same year, aged 42. It’s all there, and much more besides, with testimony from family, friends and fellow artists, in Adam Kahan’s loving and beautifully made film.
To celebrate Siouxsie Sioux’s birthday today, here’s a classic piece from the Uncut archives on the Making Of… the Banshees’ debut, “Hong Kong Garden”. This originally appeared in Uncut Take 132.
You could be forgiven for thinking that the local Chinese restaurant is a pretty innocuous subject for a song – particularly during the insurrectionist sloganeering of punk. But Siouxsie And The Banshees‘ first single attracted its own share of controversy. Lyrics like “Slanted eyes greet the bright sunrise, a race of bodies small in size…” met with accusations of racism, exacerbated by Siouxsie’s predilection for wearing swastika armbands on stage at the earliest Banshees’ shows. In fact, nothing could have been further from the truth: visiting her local takeaway in south east London, Siouxsie now remembers “being really upset by the local skinheads who gave the staff such a hard time.”
After two years unsuccessfully hunting for a record deal, Polydor signed the Banshees after hearing “Hong Kong Garden” on a Peel session. Incredibly, they found themselves booked into Olympic Studios with American soul producer Bruce Albertine. Rejecting Albertine’s version of “Hong Kong Garden”, they regrouped at the Fallout Shelter, a smaller studio in the basement of Island Records, with producer Steve Lillywhite, who subsequently produced the band’s debut album, The Scream.
“Hong Kong Garden” reached No 7 in the charts in August 1978 – “it should have been higher!” claims bassist Steven Severin. But at least, admits Siouxsie, “it paved the way for us to do what we wanted…”
The sign on the auditorium door reads, “Radiohead kindly request no crowd surfing or moshing. Thank you.” Such considerations are, you’d imagine, relatively uncommon among rock bands. But as we have come to learn, Radiohead are not exactly anyone’s idea of a conventional rock band. As their first London show in four years ably demonstrates, commendably they still have a tremendous capacity to surprise; tonight’s show is never less than exciting, its twists and turns through the band’s canon often thrilling and digressive. They cover a lot of ground in two and a half hours, and the scope of their set allows out every iteration of Radiohead its moment in the spotlight.
Satisfyingly, car park rave Radiohead (“The Gloaming”, “Identikit”), folky Radiohead (“Separator”, “Present Tense”), Led Zeppelin Radiohead (“Talk Show Host”, “Myxomatosis”) and others are present and correct tonight. Though much of the material is drawn from their post 2000 catalogue – an extended period of wilful experimentation and dramatic reinvention – they still dip back into their earliest days. We don’t get “Creep” – they played that in Paris earlier in the week – but we do get “My Iron Lung” and a stunning version of “Exit Music (For A Film)” that is met by the audience in hushed, awed silence.
All these competing Radioheads jostling for air is a reflection that, in 2016, they have a number of public images and historic responsibilities they must try and reconcile. In much the same way A Moon Shaped Pool, released three weeks ago, found them mining their back catalogue while obstinately pushing their compositional skills forward. “We have a long history of writing songs and having them hang around unrecorded for years,” Jonny Greenwood told Uncut in 2012. He specifically cited “Burn The Witch” (dating from the Kid A sessions) and “Present Tense” (debuted at Thom Yorke’s Latitude show in 2009) – both of which, finally, saw the light of day on A Moon Shaped Pool, along with “True Love Waits”, first aired back in 1995. This is not unusual – both “Nude” and “The Daily Mail” also experienced lengthy gestations – but in the context of Radiohead’s now constant state of motion seems a little incongruous. To some extent, you suspect Radiohead thrive on such contradictions: Greenwood, after all, has famously denounced the guitar as old-fashioned yet still favours the Ondes Martentot – an instrument dating from the 1920s.
With its talk of “low flying panic attack” and “avoid all eye contact”, “Burn The Witch” feels much closer to the paranoid, nervy Radiohead of old. But it’s a testament to Jonny Greenwood’s blossoming second career as a soundtrack composer that it flies – the nagging strings underscoring the sense of menace in Yorke’s lyrics. It is an effective opener to their set, with Greenwood sawing away on his guitar with a bow. They play the first five songs from A Moon Shaped Pool in sequence – as they have done on previous dates – which could be a risky move but here simply showcases the diversity and richness of the songs. “Burn The Witch” gives way to the haunting “Daydreaming”, which is followed by the swoon of “Decks Dark” and the warm folky stylings of “Desert Island Disk” replaced by the motorik thrust of “Ful Stop”. The transition to “Lotus Flower” is striking: emboldened, this King Of Limbs track is given propulsive energy and a muscular funkiness.
Sandwiched between the skittering beats of “Lotus Flower” and “The Gloaming”, the mid-Nineties couplet of “Talk Show Host” and “My Iron Lung” sit slightly awkwardly. There is no denying their fan appeal: they’re both met with rousing cheers. “Exit Music (For A Film)” and “Separator” make a more favourable fit while the move into “Identikit” and “The Numbers” is smooth and organic. This tour has been notable for the way Radiohead have dusted down gems from the back of the cupboard. Although they might not quite be up there with Neil Young playing “Thrasher” or “Vampire Blues” for the first time in 40 years, tonight’s tour debuts for “Myxomatosis” and “Planet Telex” are enthusiastically received.
Critically, for a set that showcases assorted sides of Radiohead’s career, across this 25 song stretch, each member of the band is given a chance to shine. Yorke, inevitably, provides a strong focus – hey, there are even some LOLs during a glitch in the start of “Nude”, where he asks, “Is it buggered?” or mugging shamelessly, suggested “Let’s spend the night here and play everything!” Elsewhere, there is Thom dancing to content with. But otherwise while eyes may be on the ever-inventive Greenwood – folded over his piano, pressing buttons on a wall of equipment stacked to his left or attacking his guitar with his bow – there is strong work being done elsewhere on stage. Colin Greenwood has something of the John McVie about him: staunch, understated, masterly. Philip Selway, meanwhile, is a generous, adaptable drummer. Perhaps Ed O’Brien is tonight’s most undervalued contributor. His guitar lines add depth and texture to the songs while his tech intrusions add subtle but compelling nuance to the songs. He is the last man left on stage when the band finish their main set, hunched over some gadget on the floor, tweaking a sample of Yorke’s voice on “Everything In Its Right Place”.
Burn The Witch
Daydreaming
Decks Dark
Desert Island Disk
Ful Stop
Lotus Flower
Talk Show Host
My Iron Lung
The Gloaming
Exit Music (For A Film)
Separator
Identikit
The Numbers
Myxomatosis
Reckoner
Idioteque
Everything In Its Right Place
Encore: Morning Mr. Magpie
2 + 2 = 5
Nude
Planet Telex
There There
Encore 2: Present Tense
You and Whose Army?
Paranoid Android
Among major acts, Metallica seem late to the game of releasing ridiculously overstuffed editions of canonic albums. To be fair, though, they did anticipate the current deluge with 1993’s Live Shit: Binge And Purge, an exhaustive set that came packaged in a facsimile flight case and really should have come with its own roadie. Fans can now fill their man caves with these deluxe editions of the band’s first two albums: Kill Em All contains four vinyl records – a remaster of the 1983 original, a double live LP recorded in Paris in 1984 and a three-track “Jump In The Fire” picture disc – plus three more CDs with radio interviews, rough mixes, rarities and further live and archival finds. They’re accompanied by a DVD of two more 1983 gigs, books of photos and lyrics, and a patch for your favourite denim vest. Ride The Lightning – which draws its trove of live material from six shows, including the band’s Donington debut in 1985 – now sprawls over four LPs, six CDs and one DVD, plus books and posters.
Such lavish displays of generosity may seem absurd to middle-aged headbangers who spent their adolescence wearing out their cassette versions on crappy car stereos and worse Walkmans. But even the doubters will be impressed with the remastering work on songs that didn’t need to sound so grotty to set new standards for speed and power.
Recorded just weeks after the band replaced Dave Mustaine with Kirk Hammett, Kill Em All would change the shape of things to come with its exhilarating fusion of American hardcore and British heavy metal at its most bruising. Three decades later, it may be hard to hear Metallica with undamaged ears but the full-throttle thrash of “Whiplash” remains revelatory – here is where Metallica finds the unholy nexus of Black Flag and Venom.
Released in 1984, Ride The Lightning is topped only by 1986’s Master Of Puppets in the estimation of those who believe the band’s wider ambitions would soon get the better of them. Of course, the album also features their first quasi-ballad in “Fade To Black” and their earliest nine-minute epic in “The Call Of Ktulu”. But all the songs here display the firepower, dexterity and drive to innovate that prevailed before “Enter Sandman” introduced a more broad-strokes variety of bombast.
Nor do these songs’ lowest-fidelity live renditions – with the Donington recordings being spectacularly sludgy – dull the impact of early masterstrokes like “Jump In The Fire” and “Am I Evil?”. Indeed, since they more accurately approximate the experience of hearing the originals on a C90 covered in sloppily drawn devil signs, they may actually enhance the songs’ fundamental awesomeness.
The Royal Mail are to release a set of Pink Floyd postage stamps.
10 new stamps will be issued on July 7, 2016.
Six will feature album sleeves: The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, Atom Heart Mother, The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Endless River.
A further four stamps within a miniature sheet commemorate the band’s live appearances.
These are:
1st Class: UFO Club, 1966
1st Class: The Dark Side of the Moon Tour, 1973 £1.52: The Wall Tour, 1981
£1.52: The Division Bell Tour, 1994
The Division Bell album cover previously appeared on a stamp in 2010.
The stamps are available to pre-order online from May 26 by clicking here. They will be available to purchase in 8,000 Post Offices from July 7.
Wish I had some of the new solo set from Date Palms’ Marielle Jakobsons to play you, but please enjoy some highly recommended work from… Floating Points! D D Dumbo! Cass McCombs! And Factory Floor!
Follow me on Twitter @JohnRMulvey
1 Psychic Temple – Plays Music For Airports (Bandcamp)
2 Autechre – Elseq 1 (Warp)
3 Van Morrison – It’s Too Late To Stop Now Vol II (Sony)
4 Jeff Beck – Loud Hailer (Rhino)
5 Floating Points – Kuiper EP (Pluto)
6 Black Disco – Night Express (Matsuli)
7 D D Dumbo – Satan (4AD)
8 Marielle V Jakobsons – Star Core (Thrill Jockey)
9 Psychic Temple – III (Asthmatic Kitty)
10 Various Artists – Modernism (Ace)
11 Cass McCombs – Mangy Love (Anti-)
12 Dylan Carlson – Falling With A Thousand Stars And Other Wonders From The House Of Albion (Self-Released)
13 Death In Vegas – Transmission (Drone Out)
14 Autechre – Elseq 2 (Warp)
15 Mary Lattimore & Jeff Zeigler – Music Inspired By Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur (Thrill Jockey)
16 Protein – The Secret Garden (Alien Transistor)
17 Factory Floor – Dial Me In (DFA)
18 Mega Bog – Happy Together (Soundcloud)
19 Laraaji & Sun Araw – Professional Sunflow (Superior Viaduct)
Wilco, Savages, Julia Holter and Suuns are curating this year’s Le Guess Who? festival.
Celebrating its tenth edition, the festival takes place in Utrecht, The Netherlands, from November 10 – 13.
Wilco, Savages, Julia Holter and Suuns will curate their own programs – which will be announced in the months leading up to the festival.
The festival has also announced the first artists to perform in the general festival program.
These include Swans, Patty Waters, Dinosaur Jr., Digable Planets, Wooden Shjips, Raime, Cate Le Bon, The Comet is Coming, Ryley Walker and the world premiere of Lera Auerbach’s 72 Angels, performed by the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra and Raschèr Saxophone Quartet.
Also performing are St. Francis Duo (Stephen O’Malley with Steve Noble); Phurpa, The Dwarfs of East Agouza, Anna von Hausswolff, Jameszoo Quartet, Heron Oblivion, Nadja, Stara Rzeka, Richard Skelton, Guy One & The Polyversal Souls, Heather Leigh, Horse Lords, Ryan Sambol, a live special by DOODcast, and Scott Fagan, author of the long-lost soul and psych folk masterpiece South Atlantic Blues.
In this feature which originally appeared way back in Uncut’s issue 112, Paul Weller, Bruce Foxton, Rick Buckler and producer Vic Coppersmith-Heaven recall the making of The Jam’s classic single, “Eton Rifles”..
By late 1979, The Jam had taken on a singular position within British music. With punk a distant memory and the preening vacuousness of synth-pop on the rise, explosive teenage operas like “Strange Town” and “When You’re Young” spoke directly to the country’s young and disenfranchised. Out in the arterial sprawl of the South East and in the grey, semi-urban expanses across the country, a generation all too familiar with a system where “The world is your oyster but your future’s a clam” were willing to follow Paul Weller wherever he took them.
For “The Eton Rifles“, Weller set his sights on his most overtly political and contentious target yet. Following the Conservative victory at May’s general election, a raft of new policies led to a swift rise in unemployment and a growing suspcion that was the nation was being divided along class lines. “The Eton Rifles” was inspired by TV footage of Right To Work marchers being taunted by boys from Eton school – and it perfectly captured the queasy sensation that the country was slipping into what Weller would later describe as “the modern nightmare”.
Built on a roar of feedback and slashing guitars, it articulated the frustrations of those who believed privilege was being used to keep them down, while mocking those who suggest the solution can be found in a “revolutionary symphony” – a sly dig at The Clash, perhaps? That musical punch, more like heavy rock than power pop, perfectly reflected a nation in a state of both musical and political flux.
“The Eton Rifles” shot to number three in the charts in October 1979, and The Jam’s ascendancy – confirmed by follow-up “Going Underground” reaching number one early the next year – was complete. In the war against apathy, Thatcherism and vacuous say-nothing pop, the battle lines had been drawn in three and half spine-tingling minutes.
From this point on, whether he liked it or not, Paul Weller was a spokesman for a generation…
As part of our Prince tribute in the current issue of Uncut, I spoke to a number of his former collaborators – including Eric Leeds, who played saxophone with Prince from 1984 up to 2003, making him one of Prince’s longest-serving right-hand men.
In interview in the July 2016 issue – which is now on sale in UK shops – Leeds spoke in detail about exactly what happened with Prince met Miles. There was only space for an shorter version of this story in the piece, so here’s Leeds’ memories of the meetings between these two musical giants in full…
Were you there when Prince jammed with Miles Davis?
“I’ve got to tell you, I kind of was the midwife in that. Not that they wouldn’t have got together anyway, because I already was aware of Miles’ interest in Prince’s music. Prince was into quite a bit of Miles’ music also. I think they saw a lot of each other in their music. When I realized that Prince was reaching out to Miles to maybe do something, I made damn well sure I was going to be somewhere when that happened!
“The actual reality is that Prince and Miles were never in a recording studio together. That never happened. We did a track for Miles, for possible inclusion on what would have been Miles’ first Warner Bros album, Tutu. Prince decided that he didn’t think it was appropriate to be included on that album. He asked Miles not to include it and Miles agreed. Miles did overdub trumpet to it, but he did it on his own; Prince was nowhere around him when that happened. Finally, when we listened to that track, Prince came to me and Matt Blistan [trumpet] and asked my opinion of it. If Prince was going to ask me that, that meant Prince was not 100% sure it was that great. I agreed with him. I said, ‘If you’re going to do something with Miles, this shouldn’t be it.’ And he agreed.
“So we did a concert at Paisley Park. It was a New Year’s Eve, 1987. It was an invitation only performance. Miles was a guest and came on stage with us and played with us on one of the songs. To my recollection and to the best of my knowledge that is the only time Miles and Prince were in a space together performing. They became friendly and certainly stayed in communication with each other.
“Several years later, Miles asked Prince to produce some other tracks for him on a subsequent album. Prince was at that point extremely busy doing other things and was just not able to do that. Prince actually came to me and asked me to do a couple of tracks for Miles. I told Prince, I said, ‘Prince, Miles isn’t asking me to do a couple of tracks with him! He wants to go in the studio with you!’ He said, ‘I know! I just can’t see me doing that right now.’ I said, ‘Look, I’ll be more than happy to go in the studio and cut some tracks’ – which I ended up doing, but I have no idea whether those tracks were sent to Miles or whether he ever heard them. I really have no idea what happened to them. Obviously, I was very complimented! I had come to know Miles a bit, which was something of a dream come true.”
Apologies for the shameless plug, but you can read more of Eric’s memories as part of our 15-page special on Prince. Alongside David Cavanagh‘s superb tribute, I also spoke to Susan Rogers, who engineered Prince’s classic run of Eighties’ albums, his long-serving live sound man Rob “Cubby” Colby and Karen Krattinger, who for many years worked as general manager at Prince’s Paisley Park compound. “It’s hard to believe that he’s not on this planet anymore,” she laments.
The new issue of Uncut is on sale now and also available to buy digitally by clicking here.
Continuing our celebrations of Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday, this archive feature from Uncut’s September 2013 issue, burrows into the sessions Dylan’s Self Portrait album – which had just been re-issued in expanded form as the Bootleg Series Volume 10: Another Self Portrait. Here, Damien Love spoke to three key players on the Self Portrait sessions and find out details of the Bootleg Series team’s “deepest ever archaeological dig”…
Charlie McCoy
The Nashville studio multi-instrumentalist who played on every Dylan album from Highway 61 Revisited to Self Portrait
When Dylan first showed up in Nashville to record Blonde On Blonde, he hadn’t finished writing the first song. We ended up recording it at 4 o’clock in the morning. And we’d all been there since 2PM the afternoon before. Dylan’s flight was late, and when he arrived he hadn’t wrote the first song he wanted to do. He said, “You guys just hang loose till I finish it.” So we sat around while he wrote “Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”.
Dylan seemed a little uncomfortable in Nashville at first, because he was in a strange place, with strange musicians, although he had Al Kooper and Robbie Robertson on board with him. But he never said anything to us really, so it was hard to tell just what he was thinking or feeling. But, the next day, we came back to the studio, and from there it was pretty much business as usual then: I mean, he still didn’t say too much, but he started playing his songs, and we started recording them.
But, like I said, he never said anything. I was session leader on that record, and when you’re session leader, you’re like the middleman between the artist and the producer. So, Dylan would pick up his guitar and play his song to us, and I’d hear it, and I’d immediately start to get some ideas, and I’d say, “Bob, what would you think if we did this, or that…” And he’d have the same answer every time: “I dunno, man. Whadda you think?” He was very strange in that way, very hard to read.
When we did John Wesley Harding, I didn’t have any information prior to going in about what it was going to be like. But Nashville studio musicians, we go to work every day, usually never knowing what we’re going to be doing. We hear the music the first time we walk into the studio. We’re used to that, it’s just the normal way it’s done here.
I noticed that there was a definite shift in the music, though, the style. After Blonde On Blonde, Dylan had that motorcycle wreck. I don’t know if that has anything to do with anything. But I know that that was a major happening to him in his life, one that had nothing to do with music. Blonde On Blonde took 39-and-a-half hours of studio time to record. John Wesley Harding took nine-and-a-half hours. Of course, the band was much, much smaller. Just Dylan, me on bass, and Kenny Buttery on drums. There was steel guitar on a couple tracks, too, but that was it – there wasn’t much on that record. But as for Dylan himself, there was no change. The same thing: he’d play a song and not say anything.
Photo credit: Al Clayton
The next time round was Nashville Skyline, which again was a shift, a step into country. John Wesley Harding, especially those last two tracks, seemed a kind of a bridge towards that sound, and Dylan had formed a friendship with Johnny Cash, so it didn’t really surprise me at all. I think Dylan hesitated about coming to Nashville originally, because it has always been known as the capital of country music. But we were known as a country market, and this was the height of what, in Nashville, we called The Hippy Period: that San Francisco, Haight-Ashbury, whatever it was scene. And, of course, Dylan, 1966, was seen as the champion of that group of people, he was the king of it.
He took a bold step by coming here. But Nashville Skyline was the last time he came to Nashville to record. Self Portrait, he wasn’t around. On some of the songs for that, Bob Johnston just brought us in recordings of Dylan, just guitar and vocal, and he asked Kenny and me to overdub bass and drums. And that was difficult, because Dylan’s tempos on those tapes really weren’t so steady. It was tough. But we added bass and drums to several songs. Why the record was done that way, I don’t know for certain. I’d have to say, though, that Self Portrait, it’s just not as vivid in my memory as the sessions when Dylan was there. I can remember songs from the first three records I worked on with him, but at this point, I couldn’t name you one single song from Self Portrait. I guess on this new version that’s coming out, if they’ve stripped all that stuff away, you’re going to be hearing the same tapes much as Kenny and I heard them, which could be interesting.
David Bromberg
Virtuoso guitarist and multi-instrumentalist who studied his craft with the Rev. Gary Davis, Bromberg was a key figure in the Self Portrait sessions and New Morning
The Self Portrait sessions were the first time I played with Dylan. At first, when I got a phone call from him – he called me himself – I thought it was a joke, somebody playing a trick. But I realised fairly swiftly that it actually was Bob Dylan on the phone. He’d come to various clubs in the Village where I was playing guitar for Jerry Jeff Walker, and I’d always assumed he was only there to hear Jerry Jeff. But I guess he was listening to me, too.
The way he put it to me was that he wanted me to help him “try out a studio.” It became clear to me pretty quickly that we weren’t just trying out a studio – we were recording. But I was too much in the moment to worry about what was going to happen in the future. So “trying out the studio” turned out to be making Self Portrait and then New Morning.
Most of what I remember is that it was just Bob and me in there. For several days straight, maybe even a couple of weeks, just the two of us, sitting across from each other playing and trying things. I had some really nasty cold thing going on all through that – I had a fever, and I’d work all day, come home and fall asleep in my clothes, wake up, take a shower and then head back into the studio and do it all over again. The songs that I did with him, as much as I can recall, were mostly folk songs. I’m not sure I remember seeing any Sing Out magazines, but Sing Out published a couple of songbooks, and I remember that Bob had one or two of those. But he knew those songs. He might have referred to the Sing Out books just to get a lyric here and there, but he knew those songs. Bob, as we all know, came up through the folk clubs, and he was really great at singing this music.
There was not a whole lot of discussion or direction. I think he liked how I played, and wanted to see what I’d come up with. Then he listened to the results, and what he really liked he used, and what he didn’t, he saved.
New Morning was quite different. There were quite a few musicians in the studio, a whole group. Russ Kunkel was on that, playing drums, and playing with him was a big thing for me, because I was always a huge fan of the way he plays. Of course, Bob doesn’t pick any losers. Ron Cornelius, was there, a fine guitar player. Ron played electric on that record, and I played acoustic and dobro.
In 1992, I produced another set of sessions with Bob in Chicago, and the great majority of those songs haven’t been heard yet, although a couple turned up on the Bootleg Series record Tell Tale Signs. On those sessions, I would have loved to have done some tunes that Bob wrote – but he didn’t want to do those. And, in fact, he did a few tunes that I had written. In a strange way, I was almost relieved that they didn’t come out, because people would have accused me of forcing Bob to do my songs. But let me just tell you: you don’t force Bob to do anything.
Recording sessions are all different. Bob has his own way of doing things, and it’s one that requires the musicians to be intuitive. And, in a musical sense, that’s one of my strengths. In a more prosaic sense, it’s one of my weaknesses: you know, if we’re going to do something, and I’m not told what we’re doing, I generally won’t figure it out. But when it comes to music, even if I haven’t been told where we’re going, I will figure it out. I’ll see ahead. And that’s kind of what’s required on Bob’s sessions. Perhaps the most important aspect of the process with Bob is that, Bob is very careful not to exhaust the material. And, as a result, there’s a spontaneity that’s present in all of his work. You’ll do a song once or twice, and that’s it: you’ve either got it or you don’t.
Al Kooper
Along with David Bromberg, one of Dylan’s favourite sidemen
I’d played on Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde, but I’d left while Bob was doing John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline .Then I came back for what became Self Portrait.
From 1968 to 1972, I was a staff producer at Columbia Records in New York, so I was easy to contact. They just booked me for, I think it was five days of recording with Bob, like a Monday-Friday. There was Bob, David Bromberg and me. In some cases it was just the three of us, in others there was drums and bass in with us. It gets a little mixed up in my memory, because New Mornin happened very, very soon after Self Portrait, and I worked very closely on that album, probably as much as I had worked on Blonde On Blonde.
I remember us doing a lot of stuff that didn’t end up on Self Portrait. The first day I walked in to the studio, Bob had like a *pile* of Sing Out magazines, you know the folk music journal, just a bunch of them, and he was going through them, songs that he’d known in the past, and he was using the magazine to remind himself of them. So we were doing stuff pulled from Sing Out magazine, at least for a couple of days: “Days Of 49”, that kind of thing. As the week went on, Bob’s choices got stranger and stranger. It got to the point where we did “Come A Little Closer” by Jay And The Americans.
When we did New Morning, though, he was doing his songs again. And he had a definite, stronger thing going on. You know: he didn’t have to learn the songs, he wrote them. New Morning was very similar to Blonde On Blonde, in some ways, with the way I worked with Bob and acted as bandleader – and then, in the middle of the record, Bob Johnston just disappeared, and so for the second half of the record, I was actually producing it. I also had some arrangement ideas. Not that Bob always agreed with them. On the song “New Morning” itself, I did an arrangement where I put a horn section on there, and in “Sign On The Window,” I added strings, a piccolo, and a harp. I asked Bob’s permission, and he said fine, and then I went and did it all while he wasn’t there, because it didn’t need to take up his time. But when I played them back for him, he didn’t like them – he didn’t throw the whole thing out, he kept like one little part of each of them on the record. But then he told me he was going to erase all the rest of these parts, wipe the tapes. I asked if I could make a mix of it before he did that, because I had done a lot of work on it, and I wanted to keep a copy of it, just for myself. So he said yeah, but the way it worked, I had to mix it right there and then, in front of everybody, and do it fast.
On this new record that’s coming out now, they’ve included those sweetened versions of “New Morning” and “Sign In The Window”. I had kept my tapes of those personal mixes for like 40 years, and when I heard about this new set, I sent them to Jeff Rosen, Dylan’s manager, and Jeff said, “Well, I don’t like the mix.” And I said, “Yeah, it was a rush, but it’s all there is, because Bob erased all the parts afterwards.” And Jeff said, “No he didn’t. All the parts are still here. Do you want to remix it properly?” So that was great news to hear, and I went and did that. I spent quite some time doing that, and those are now on the new set.
Steve Berkowitz
A Bootleg Series veteran, on the restoration of the Isle Of Wight concert tapes
With the new version we’ve done of the Isle Of Wight concert, the first thing you have to remember is the circumstances of the original recording. It’s 1969. There are no cell phones. Basically, you’ve got a couple of guys stuck in a truck, hundreds of yards away from the stage. It had to have been madness. They’ve been awake for three days straight, and they’re recoding with no tangible connection to the stage or the board or what’s going on. You know: how many people are playing, where are the microphones, who else is set up at the same time, what time do they play, how long do they play for, are they gonna move around, when’s the guitar solo coming…? It’s a true testament to Glyn Johns and Elliott Mazer who did the original recording that they got it at all.
Their tapes have all the information on there, albeit kind of distorted, and sometimes without a direct microphone on anything, and with tremendous leakage from microphone to microphone. But the tapes themselves were in good shape, eight channels. So, in the new mix, we’ve tried to bring back in something of the size and scope of what was happening. For one reason or another, any time I’ve heard material from this concert in the past, the mix sounded small, close together, almost like a form of Basement Tapes, as if they were closed in together in a small space. But this was a huge open-air event, with tremendous anticipation, and, even at the time, some historic notoriety, because this was Dylan returning to the stage after three years away.
So we’ve tried to bring that back – make it live, make it as big as it was again, and have it feel like it’s out there, in this place, in the middle of hundreds of thousands of people, with excitement and energy bristling, both on stage and in the audience. The tapes are still kind of distorted in parts – but that’s okay. When you hear it now, it brings back the excitement and the tension of that moment. You know: Bob and The Band are playing, and they’ve got The Beatles sitting right there in front of them.
A personal favourite moment is the version they do of “Highway 61”. It sounds pretty clear that there are only overhead microphones over Levon Helm. And Levon sounds like he’s having a pretty good time: he’s hollering along with Bob, and you can really hear him – and I don’t think he even had a vocal mic at that time. I think it’s just these overheads are picking him up, because he’s singing it, screaming out so loud. It has fantastic life to it. And any distortion or bleeding makes no difference, because those guys are just rocking. It’s thrilling.
I should add that we’ve mixed everything both completely analogue and digital, and, for the people who care, I think the vinyl LP’s that come from this will be pretty great. They’re made like records were made, from tape and analogue mixes. We wanted to be faithful to the period – 1969-71 – and we thought that the record should sound and feel and be of the dimension of its time. They’re pretty special.
I figured it was time again to round up a few records I’ve enjoyed these past few weeks, beginning with one you probably already know: Brian Eno‘s “The Ship”, an album that could be usefully retitled “Ambient 5: At Sea”. It’s been five years since Eno last worked with either Coldplay or U2, and, perhaps unencumbered, his own solo career has taken a concurrent upturn. 2012’s “Lux” stands as one of his finest environmental works, and “The Ship” successfully combines – surprisingly for the first time – his ambient and song-based work. Though Eno denies as much in a recent Uncut interview, Gavin Bryars’ “Sinking Of The Titanic” is a clear antecedent for these grave meditations on war and sea; micro-detailed, ebbing constructs that have significant cumulative force. Eno’s rarely sung better, too. A cover of the Velvets’ “I’m Set Free” exposes the song’s innate spirituality, joining the dots between Eno’s art-rock roots and his latterday private obsession with gospel music.
Compared with the elegant structural conceits of “To Pimp A Butterfly”, the chant of “Pimp Pimp Hooray!” which recurs throughout Kendrick Lamar‘s “Untitled Unmastered” feels a little half-baked. Nevertheless, it’s typical of Lamar’s artistry that even a compilation of offcuts comes formatted and conceptualised. The themes and musical textures remain consistent with last year’s masterpiece, as Lamar nimbly works through more complex equations of race, faith and fame over a soundbed informed by jazz, nu-soul and the abstract hip-hop of semi-forgotten outliers like Anti-Pop Consortium. “Untitled 03” and “Untitled 06”, meanwhile, suggest this wise and brilliant music was excluded from the original album due to constraints of time and space, rather than quality.
Not long ago, prepping for a UK tour with Danny Thompson, Ryley Walker told Uncut that his next album would be “less of a guitar record”, influenced instead by Talk Talk, American Music Club and “Sketches Of Spain”. “Cannots” is not that album, being instead another duet detour to file alongside Walker’s 2015 set with Bill Mackay. Charles Rumback, who gets co-billing here, is a Chicago jazz drummer, very much Billy Higgins to Walker’s Sandy Bull on these five instrumentals (or John Truscinski to his Steve Gunn, for a more recent analogue). As ever with Walker, though, his visceral engagement with the music means that he transcends mere homage, either on flighty acoustic improvisations like “River Limmat”, or on the title track’s slugging blues, where Rumback flutters around the guitarist’s palpably blitzed virtuosity.
Always something of a free spirit, Cass McCombs‘ career choices of late have been enterprisingly capricious, even by his own standards. Collaborations with Phish’s Mike Gordon and the Soldiers Of Fortune suggest a move into jamming circles, loosely confirmed by The Skiffle Players‘ “Skifflin'”, a low-key and frequently gorgeous new project. Latterday cosmic cowboys from the Dead diaspora, the CRB (notably Neal Casal) and the Beachwood Sparks fill out the Skiffle Players, on sessions that take in grooving folk refits (“The Coo Coo Bird”), New Orleans shuffle (“Michael Weikel”), Pink Floyd dreamstate (“A Star For You”) and, best of all, a sort of elevated hobo motorik (“Railroadin’ Some”). “I’m on my way, but I don’t know where,” sings McCombs pointedly, liberated once again.
One doesn’t normally think of a musician taking a road trip, indulging in a troubadourish chasing of the muse cross-country, when their instrument is a harp weighing 85 pounds. This, though, is the backstory to “At The Dam”, in which Mary Lattimore (sometime collaborator of Kurt Vile, Thurston Moore and Steve Gunn, and with another fine duo set with Jeff Zeigler imminent) takes her harp and laptop away from Philadelphia to Joshua Tree, the mountains east of LA and the hippy enclave of Marfa, Texas. Not for Lattimore the Celtic and African flourishes of Joanna Newsom: her instrumentals have an improvised but quasi-ambient serenity, the likes of “Jimmy V” delicately adjusted by the odd electronic tweak. A much-devalued word – and probably one the creator despises – still seems apposite for this lovely album: ethereal.
“It’s definitely an unusual thing to take on a road trip, like a giant pet,” Lattimore told me recently, ” but it’s just part of life now. My mom has been a professional harpist for years, so I’ve watched her move it around since I was a kid.
“Recently I got interviewed for a public TV show and they wanted to get a shot of me lugging the harp up the stairs, awkwardly, and I thought, shit, that’s totally not necessary, it’s just promoting a cliche that it’s a cumbersome, impractical classical instrument. It’s not flattering, that shot. It’s not a jokey kind of old-timey thing, like wheeling a piano down the street to a cartoon soundtrack. It’s a normal, real instrument that just happens to be tall. If the harpist isn’t a delicate flower about it, it’s no big deal. I think the thought that it’s too weird and heavy discourages people from getting into playing it and that’s too bad – drummers have a million different parts to carry around, it just goes with the territory. I want this instrument to be not so alien in 2016.”
Finally, a vinyl reissue for an album that I’ve been hunting for years: Eddie Hazel‘s “Game, Dames & Guitar Thangs”. For a long time, the Funkadelic guitarist’s one official solo album was something of a holy grail for record collectors. According to the not-entirely infallible Wikipedia, a 1994 TV episode of Homicide: Life On The Street pivoted on the shooting that followed a treasured copy being destroyed.
In truth, “Game, Dames & Guitar Thangs” isn’t quite that desirable, being a jam-heavy high in the erratic stretch of Hazel’s career between Funkadelic’s peerless “Maggot Brain” in 1971, and his death in 1992. Waywardness and addiction did not adversely affect the guitarist’s virtuosity, as the ornate, easy-going freakouts on the themes of “California Dreamin'” (in two versions) and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” (blissed-out where the Beatles were brutal) prove. George Clinton co-produces, the mighty “Wars Of Armageddon” is revisited, loosely, for “What About It?”, and staunch Mothership footsoldiers Bootsy Collins, Garry Shider, Bernie Worrell, the Brides Of Funkenstein et al are all present and correct. But for all the psychedelic Egyptology and Afro-futurist imagery on the sleeve, the lack of a palpable overarching vision leaves it mildly frustrating. A little short, then, of the solo masterpiece that Hazel’s acid virtuosity deserved.
The Ramones debut album is to receive a deluxe edition to mark its 40th anniversary.
The 3CD/1LP set will be released as a limited edition of 19,760 individually numbered copies.
The set includes stereo and mono mixes of the original album, plus rarities, as well as unreleased demos and live show.
It will be packaged in a 12 x 12 hardcover book and also include production notes by the album’s producer Craig Leon, an essay by journalist Mitchell Cohen along with additional pictures taken by Roberta Bayley.
The first disc features Leon’s newly remastered stereo version and mono mix of the album. “The earliest mixes of the album were virtually mono,” says Leon. “We had an idea to record at Abbey Road and do both a mono and stereo version of the album, which was unheard of at the time. I’m thrilled that now, 40 years later, we followed through on that original idea.”
The anniversary edition’s second disc spotlights single mixes, outtakes, and demos. Several of those recordings have never been released, including demos for “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend“, “53rd and 3rd” and “Loudmouth”.
The third disc captures the band performing two full sets live at The Roxy in West Hollywood on August 12, 1976. While the band’s first set has been available before, the evening’s second set makes its debut here. Rounding out the set is an LP containing the new mono mix of Ramones.
The tracklisting is:
Disc One: Original Album Stereo Version 40th Anniversary Mono Mix
“Blitzkrieg Bop”
“Beat On The Brat”
“Judy Is A Punk”
“I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”
“Chain Saw”
“Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”
“I Don’t Wanna Go Down To The Basement”
“Loudmouth”
“Havana Affair”
“Listen To My Heart”
“53rd & 3rd”
“Let’s Dance”
“I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You”
“Today Your Love, Tomorrow The World”
“Blitzkrieg Bop”*
“Beat On The Brat”*
“Judy Is A Punk”*
“I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”*
“Chain Saw”*
“Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”*
“I Don’t Wanna Go Down To The Basement”*
“Loudmouth”*
“Havana Affair”*
“Listen To My Heart”*
“53rd & 3rd”*
“Let’s Dance”*
“I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You”*
“Today Your Love, Tomorrow The World”*
Disc Two: Single Mixes, Outtakes, and Demos
“Blitzkrieg Bop” (Original Stereo Single Version)
“Blitzkrieg Bop” (Original Mono Single Version)
“I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” (Original Stereo Single Version)
“I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” (Original Mono Single Version)
“Today Your Love, Tomorrow The World” (Original Uncensored Vocals)*
“I Don’t Care” (Demo)
“53rd & 3rd” (Demo)*
“Loudmouth” (Demo)*
“Chain Saw” (Demo)*
“You Never Should Have Opened That Door” (Demo)
“I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” (Demo)*
“I Can’t Be” (Demo)
“Today Your Love, Tomorrow The World” (Demo)*
“I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You” (Demo)*
“Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” (Demo)
“I Don’t Wanna Be Learned/I Don’t Wanna Be Tamed” (Demo)
“You’re Gonna Kill That Girl” (Demo)*
“What’s Your Name” (Demo)
Disc Three: Live at The Roxy (8/12/76) Set One
“Loudmouth”
“Beat On The Brat”
“Blitzkrieg Bop”
“I Remember You”
“Glad To See You Go”
“Chain Saw”
“53rd & 3rd”
“I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”
“Havana Affair”
“Listen To My Heart”
“California Sun”
“Judy Is A Punk”
“I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You”
“Today Your Love, Tomorrow The World”
“Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”
“Let’s Dance”
Set Two
“Loudmouth”*
“Beat On The Brat”*
“Blitzkrieg Bop”*
“I Remember You”*
“Glad To See You Go”*
“Chain Saw”*
“53rd & 3rd”*
“I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”*
“Havana Affair”*
“Listen To My Heart”*
“California Sun”*
“Judy Is A Punk”*
“I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You”*
“Today Your Love, Tomorrow The World”*
“Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”*
“Let’s Dance”*
40th Anniversary Mono Mix LP Track Listing
“Blitzkrieg Bop”*
“Beat On The Brat”*
“Judy Is A Punk”*
“I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”*
“Chain Saw”*
“Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”*
“I Don’t Wanna Go Down To The Basement”*
“Loudmouth”*
“Havana Affair”*
“Listen To My Heart”*
“53rd & 3rd”*
“Let’s Dance”*
“I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You”*
“Today Your Love, Tomorrow The World”*
Laurie Anderson lifts the lid on the archive of her late husband, Lou Reed, in the latest edition of Uncut.
Interviewed in the July 2016 issue – which is now on sale in UK shops – Anderson reveals: “There’s a million things in there. Eight hundred hours, it’s massive. We’re trying to think of some really good things to do with it so we’re still sorting through it.
“Does it go back before the Velvet Underground? Oh yeah. It’s his life work.
“He spent the last three months of his life remastering stuff from the Arista era,” she continues. “It’s about 25 CDs. It’s so beautiful and to see how excited he was about it, about using technology from now to make that stuff sound like its true self, was really surreal. It’s not about smoothing it out, it’s about roughing it up sometimes. There’s always different criteria. The energy of that music comes zooming out in a way that is almost terrifying. It’s really exciting.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Anderson shares her favourite memory of David Bowie, how she came to MC for William Burroughs, punching Andy Kaufman and why exactly she isn’t planning to run for President of the United States…
The new issue of Uncut is on sale now and also available to buy digitally by clicking here.
Lou Reed: The RCA & Arista Album Collection will be released on October 7.
Flea, the bassist with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, has bemoaned the state of rock music today, during an interview on SiriusXM’s Pearl Jam Radio by guitarist Mike McCready.
Flea – real name, Michael Peter Balzary – discussed the current state of rock music, saying that he “looks at rock music as kind of a dead form in a lot of ways.”
The full interview has been transcribed by Alternative Nation, in which Flea claims the music made during the grunge era in the 1990s was superior to today’s fare.
“I just remember being so excited that we were playing with [Pearl Jam] and with Smashing Pumpkins, because it was just an exciting time for rock music. A lot of times, especially recently, I look at rock music as kind of a dead form in a lot of ways. Nothing to take away from us and [Pearl Jam], because obviously I believe we’re relevant bands that come with a real energy,” he continued.
“But if you’re a kid today, and you get in a rock band, it’s like – when we were kids, when I said I want to be in a rock band and that’s what I’m doing for my life, that’s what I was going to do, no question. You’d get: ‘You are a fucking lunatic, you are crazy. You’re never going to get a decent job in your life. What are you doing? You’re ruining your life.”
“I was like fuck it, I don’t care, this is what I want to do, this means everything to me, I found a home. I’ve been a weird, neurotic, loner kid all my life, I was always the kid you called fag in high school, punk rock gave me a home. But nowadays, you decide you want to be in a rock band it’s like, ‘Oh great, let’s get you an image consultant, and a lawyer, and a manager, and let’s see what we can do here. It’s a great money making opportunity for you junior.”
The band release their new album, The Getaway, on June 17.
The Rolling Stones have collaborated with St. Tropez-based beachwear brand, Vilebrequin, on a range of men’s swimwear.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the clothing label’s CEO Roland Herlory said, “In 1971, Vilebrequin was founded in St. Tropez, and in the same year, Mick and Bianca Jagger got married in the city hall of St. Tropez! The whole band was actually in exile on the French Riviera.”
“Working with The Rolling Stones is truly a huge opportunity,” Herlory continued. “When their agent proposed that we do something together, we knew we had to take it on.”
The French brand has devised a print based around a collage of Stones’ artwork that it used on two men’s trunks: the signature Moorea ($280/£192) and flat-waisted Merise ($295/£203). The third piece is a black T-shirt ($135/£92) with the band’s tongue-and-lips logo in the same print.
Vilebrequin have also produced a limited edition of 30 fishtail longboard skateboards.
With Fallen Angels, Bob Dylan, like Linda Ronstadt and Rod Stewart before him, has seen fit to continue his exploration of the Great American Songbook begun with such unexpected poise and humility on last year’s Shadows In The Night.
In his case, however, it’s not been a completely untrammelled ransacking of the hundreds of possible standards; instead, Dylan has continued to restrict his choice to those songs which conform loosely to a mood of weary resignation, extending the engaging crepuscular mood of Shadows In The Night, with Tony Garnier’s bowed bass and Donny Herron’s creamy pedal steel guitar oozing along like a slow-flowing river, carrying Dylan’s warm, weatherbeaten croon on songs such as “Melancholy Mood” and “It Had To Be You” like Huck Finn laid in a rowboat, a straw dangling from the corner of his mouth.
Following his able negotiation of the latter’s spoken intro, the band slides into the song like a lazy snake slithering into water. Dylan sings with a sigh in his voice, emphasising the theme of acquiescence to a beloved’s shortcomings: “For nobody else gave me a thrill/With all your faults, I love you still”. It’s a delivery which restores a sense of caution to the oldest song here (1924), one which has, through its appearance in countless movies including Casablanca, Annie Hall and When Harry Met Sally, become disinfected of this more circumspect interpretation, and re-cast as the evocation of inevitable attraction.
As with its predecessor, Fallen Angels features many songs from the Sinatra repertoire, including “Polkadots And Moonbeams”, Frankie’s first hit with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. Here, acoustic guitar heralds pedal steel flourishes over a slow drum shuffle in a long, 90-second intro before Dylan arrives, serenading his memory of a dancefloor encounter, and its subsequent consummation “in a cottage built of lilacs and laughter”, an image of bucolic bliss you’d never find flowing from his pen, surely.
Ironically, a year before Sinatra’s 1940 success with “Polkadots And Moonbeams”, he and Harry James’ band were fired from their Hollywood club residency specifically for performing “All Or Nothing At All”, which the club owner considered a room-clearer with no redeeming virtues. Which shows what he knew: five years later, it was one of the singer’s most popular songs. Here, Dylan’s dismissive inflection, borne on a gentle country vamp, applies a sort of Gallic shrug to the song; and while he strains for the rise in the bridge, it does lend a certain confirmation to the line “My heart may go dizzy and fall” at its end.
Billie Holiday, never one to overplay any potential hint of desolation, gave a far jauntier interpretation of “All Or Nothing At All”, and as for Sinatra, his 1966 revisiting of it with Nelson Riddle swung, as they say, like a pendulum do. Dylan’s version, by contrast, is haunted by the song’s obsessional, absolutist implications. He seems to naturally inhabit the underlying darkness in these songs, and recording them with his small combo, presumably in the manner of Shadows In The Night – live with no vocal booth, no headphones, and no overdubs – ensures that, unlike most modern-day punched-in vocal constructions, there’s a real sense of fallible humanity to these performances.
That’s most evident in “All The Way”, a song which proved so popular in Sinatra’s 1957 Oscar-winning original recording that the film from which it came, The Joker Is Wild, was subsequently re-titled after the song. Here, the way Dylan sings the title-phrase, it’s as if he’s reaching from some immense distance, exhausted by the effort. When he returns after the break, it’s touch and go whether he’ll hit the right key, but as with his live performances, it just adds to the quixotic charm. A similar enervated abjection applies to “Melancholy Mood”, where his delivery is less clipped than at last year’s Albert Hall show, more appropriate for the song’s enraptured spell, in which “whatever haunts me, steals upon me in the night, forever taunts me”. Although, if we’re considering lyrics unlikely to bear Dylan’s own writing credit, the line “Love is a whimsy as flimsy as lace” would surely come near the top of the list.
Another song profiting from his tone of weary disinterest is “Nevertheless”, where over a descending lilt built around Donny Herron’s pedal steel guitar and featuring a silky, restrained guitar break from Stu Kimball, Dylan sings as if all the lyrical quandaries of “maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong” have been sandblasted from his affection, leaving just the smooth certainty of love. Which just about compensates for his version’s lacking the crepuscular smokiness of Sinatra’s, or the blithe geniality of Bing Crosby’s.
The song here which most closely approaches both those characteristics is “Maybe You’ll Be There”, in which a lonely guy awaits the return of the love of his life. Dylan’s resignation, tempered with anticipation, is echoed by the brooding horns, which along with the violin, suggest the song may be an outtake from the Shadows In The Night sessions. By contrast, the enervation with which he delivers the closing “Come Rain Or Come Shine” over Kimball’s jazz guitar and Tony Garnier’s bowed bass makes his declaration of eternal company sound like more of a potential burden than a romantic promise. Certainly, it doesn’t challenge Ray Charles’ peerless reading as the definitive version.
Likewise, while his warm and gentle presentation of “Skylark”, over violin and Kimball’s nimble acoustic guitar, is one of the album’s most appealing interpretations, taken solely on its own merits, it clearly lacks both the easy familiarity and characteristic blues inflections of Hoagy Carmichael’s original, and the lush sweetness of Linda Ronstadt’s ’70s version. Carmichael, certainly, inserts the kind of uncertainty into the song which might have rendered it more congruent with the general mood of Fallen Angels.
As things are, it feels slightly out of place, along with “Young At Heart” – which admittedly, delivered as it is in Dylan’s elegant groan over a slow and weary steel guitar country arrangement, makes for a cute contrast with the song’s lyrical theme – and “That Old Black Magic”. The latter whisks lightly along in a souffle confection of Latin/country crossover, much faster than the rest of the album, with pedal steel employed as a background whine behind a neat, restrained guitar vamp and skittish rhythm. For once, Dylan sounds almost excited in his professed rapture. Though not excessively so: that would spoil the overall mood. It’s the only real misstep here, the result of an insurmountable contrast between theme – beguiled, mesmerised falling in love – and a tempo which favours feverish excitement over spellbound entrapment.
Prince, Carole King, Paul Simon and the supergroup Case Lang Viers all feature in the new issue of Uncut, out now.
Prince is on the cover of our July 2016 issue, and inside David Cavanagh pays tribute to the superhumanly productive and eclectic musician and reflects on the profound impact and implications of Prince’s art. A number of his closest collaborators remember in detail his unstoppable creativity, 24/7 jams, wild schemes and instant parties. “It’s hard to believe that he’s not on this planet anymore,” one erstwhile colleague laments.
As he releases new album Stranger To Stranger, Uncut meets Paul Simon, as he muses on Woody Allen, baseball, Art Garfunkel, his long career and his sensational new album. “Is there anything left to learn? It’s infinity. There’s so much to learn that you’re never going to get there,” he says.
As Carole King prepares to perform her Tapestry album in full in London’s Hyde Park, Uncut reveals the making of a masterpiece… How a feted songwriter found herself, surrounded by candles, incense and the gifted community of Laurel Canyon. “I’d hand Carole a lyric and within an hour she’d write a great lyric,” we’re told.
We travel to Portland where KD Lang, Neko Case and Laura Viers discuss the trails and rewards of becoming a very special Americana supergroup. “We all had our microscopes out, combing for lice…”
Elsewhere in the issue, Laurie Anderson answers your queries about her plans for the archive of her late husband, Lou Reed, MCing for William Burroughs and punching Andy Kaufman. 10CC recall the creation of their 1973 hit “Rubber Bullets” while Wilko Johnson takes us through the best albums of his career, from Dr Feelgood to The Blockheads and on to his acclaimed collaboration with Roger Daltrey.
Guitar explorer William Tyler takes us through his favourite records, while the new issue’s front section features Lift To Experience, Belly, Allen Ginsberg, William Bell and upcoming Chicagoans, Whitney.
Our reviews section includes new albums from Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Dexys and Allen Toussaint, and archive releases from Ryan Adams, Kris Kristofferson, Grace Jones and much more. We catch Iggy Pop and Lush live, and review DVDs and films including David Bowie in Baal, The Rolling Stones, Elvis & Nixon, All Things Must Pass: The Rise And Fall Of Tower Records and more.
The new issue also includes a free CD, packed with tracks from My Morning Jacket, The Low Anthem, Swans, Holger Czukay, Jackie Lynn, Swans and The Felice Brothers.
In December this year, Status Quo will cease to exist as an electric band. Once they finish their 2016 touring commitments, Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt will pack away their Telecasters and bring down the curtain on half a century of Quo rock’n’roll. No more Frantic Four reunions. No more heads-down boogie. No more pounding out the riffs of “Big Fat Mama”, “Little Lady” and the 180bpm speedrush of “Down Down”. Today’s public may view them as veteran light entertainers, but Quo’s setlist, for 67-year-old guitarists, is one of rock’s most punishing assault courses. And Parfitt’s already had three major heart scares.
While Quo fans wait to see if Parfitt and Rossi might re-emerge in future for acoustic shows – their 2014 album Aquostic (Stripped Bare) featured the famous hits performed on mandolins and accordions – UMC release another trio of 1970s Quo albums in 2CD expanded editions, following last December’s initial batch (Hello!, Quo, Rockin’ All Over The World). As before, all three contain previously unreleased tracks and, as before, all three tell very different stories. On The Level (1975) sailed to Number One on a wave of confidence and popular appeal. If You Can’t Stand The Heat… (1978) alienated the fanbase with a controversial, hi-tech production. Whatever You Want (1979) got the fans back on-side with a superb title track and a re-establishment of Quo priorities. So much euphoria, angst and rebirth in four short years. So little margin for error.
Appearing a month after its advance single, “Down Down”, topped the UK singles chart, On The Level was the follow-up to Quo (1974), a hard-boiled, heavy album on which bassist Alan Lancaster had been the dominant singer. On The Level saw the softer-voiced Rossi reassert himself as lead vocalist, but it was Parfitt’s “Little Lady”, opening the album like a bat out of hell, that laid down the mission statement. There was a girl walking down a street, there was a blizzard of guitars and that was pretty much it. But the song’s structure was quintessential Quo: start rocking, keep rocking, don’t stop rocking, drop down to a quiet bit, build it up again, louder, louder, and then – this was the key moment – resume rocking with absolutely ferocious intensity. Rossi’s songs (“Most Of The Time”, “What To Do”), tended to be lighter, more country-ish, presenting Quo as the crossover act they would later become, a denim-rock phenomenon with the melodic hooks to catch the ear of every generation.
Music critics despaired of them (“a poor man’s Canned Heat” – NME), but Quo were a band, like Creedence Clearwater Revival, who had more skill than outsiders imagined. Quo’s job often looked easy, even facile, but no other configuration of people could have clicked with the same chemistry. Audiences could sense it; Quo would feed off it. The second disc of On The Level has a pulverising “Roadhouse Blues” from Glasgow Apollo, 12 minutes long but not an ounce of flab in it, with Rossi working the crowd like Steve Marriott at a Humble Pie gig. There’s 26 minutes, too, from a show in Mainz, Germany – a mono recording, alas, though not as lo-fi as the unlistenable Paris bootleg on the reissue of Quo – providing further evidence of how the Frantic Four crossed the language barrier. They did it by adhering to the time-honoured curriculum of the three Rs. Rock. Roll. Rock’n’roll.
Attracting fans from eight to 48, Quo were never troubled by the rude uprising of punk in 1976-7 (they were faster than many punk bands, for one thing), but other reproaches did annoy them. Their lack of airplay on American radio became an unfortunate obsession. For Quo in the era of Hotel California and Rumours, the US was a tantalising territory as yet unrocked. But when they did something about it, their fans reacted like football supporters whose half-time pies have been swapped for crab vol au vents. Rockin’ All Over The World (1977) introduced a new type of Quo production: textured, cushioned and toned down. However, If You Can’t Stand The Heat… (1978) was an even more comprehensive makeover. The songs were submerged in keyboards, horns and female backing singers. One of the first instruments heard on the album was a synthesiser. As Quo de-Quo-ified their music in an effort to woo new suitors, “Again And Again” at least resembled a familiar boogie. But “Accident Prone”, co-written by their producer Pip Williams, made a virtue of a disco hi-hat and the whole point of Quo – their raison de wossname, as Rossi would have put it – was that their songs were a different kind of floorshaker.
Williams was retained for Whatever You Want (and went on to produce eight Quo albums in all), but the horns and the girls weren’t invited back, which allowed Rossi’s and Parfitt’s guitars to take up their rightful positions again at the forefront of the mix. The intro of “Whatever You Want”, their best single since “Rain” in 1976, seemed to last forever, enjoying its rediscovery of ancient Quo rituals, while “Breaking Away”, the six-minute closing track, became an epic of self-validation as first Rossi, then Parfitt, sang of life in the belly of Quo (“Hot wax, jacked-up on the television… skin me another and pass along the whiskey and coke”). The song moved into a dreamy middle section, and then into a viciously fast shuffle just like the old days. It felt like something akin to an atonement.
All the same, the bonus disc of Whatever You Want includes eight tracks from what’s ominously described as an ‘American remix’ of the album, US-released in 1980 under a new title (Now Hear This). The remix, needless to say, made no more impact on American radio than Quo’s own self-produced albums Piledriver, Hello! and On The Level. Whatever they had, whatever Britain and Europe couldn’t get enough of, America simply didn’t want it. To this day, Quo’s only US Top 40 hit is “Pictures Of Matchstick Men”, all those years ago in 1968. Ironically, it’s one of their most English-sounding songs ever.
