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Nickel Bin #10:

Ian Matthew's Please Be My Friend

I'm tempted to title this entry Richard Thompson's Please Be My Friend. Yes, Matthew's wrote the song for his second solo record, Tigers Will Survive, and he sings it with his trademark earnest tenor. What's more, he's the producer and I'll bet it's his own voice doubling all the backing vocals.

Furthermore, this was Matthew's second pass at his own song, and Thompson had nothing whatsoever to do with the cozy and busy first attempt:

But today's focus, the second pass, is an altogether different, and far better, track. The pace has lost its country boy band rush; Matthews now has space to croon and sigh within his own version of Dylan's All I Really Want To Do.

But really, this is just a five minute excuse for Thompson, deep in his session musician phase after ditching Fairport Convention and before dawning a human fly mask for his own solo career, to shred it up 70's style. He styles himself here with the nom de plume Woolfe J Flywheel and he does some serious flying within the track.

Wait for him during the first verse; he's standing patiently in the wings, bobbing his giant head of hair and getting ready to nail it on the first take.

Enjoy this song everyone. We all deserve a friend like Richard Thompson.

#richard thompson #Ian matthews #nickel bin!

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Sandy Saturdays #14:

Fotheringay's Nothing More

Fotheringay could have been the best band of the 70's. Their drummer, Gerry Conway, who just passed away last month, was soulfully nuts, their lead guitar player was basically a Richard Thompson impersonator, their rhythm guitarist could strum better than me and was an exceptionally good bass singer, their bass player could, well, play the bass, and, most importantly of course, they were entirely dedicated to all things Sandy Denny.

But it all went south quickly: their first record is brilliant but went nowhere, their drummer split to Iceland, and Sandy soldiered her way into a solo career.

The world, I guess, was barely ready for a woman to front a band, let alone for a band to exist solely in support of one. Happily, that's no longer true in music; if only we could say the same about American culture and politics...

But every bit of the band's raw and dynamic potential is on full display in the opening track of their single record. Take a listen:

The drums don't keep the beat here, they drive it. Jerry Donahue's guitar gurgles and ripples about. And Sandy doesn't sing along, nor does she posture; rather, she fills the bold, strong center. This is her song; this is her band.

Remember, this was 1970. Sandy shows us in Nothing More that she was in lock step with Neil Young, Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell; each were layering new sounds around their music; each was suddenly writing in a deeply personal and mysterious manner that bore no resemblance to either Bob Dylan, on the one hand, or that era's pop music on the other.

Heady times! Hope you're having a very Sandy Saturday...

#sandy denny #sandy saturdays #richard thompson #fotheringay

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Shakey Thursday

Here's a quick note before I head out the door to see Neil himself tonight in all his ragged glory: word has it that Shakey debuted a previously lost final verse during Cortez the Killer last night during the very first moments of his new Crazy Horse tour.

This is super cool. But a hipster at Rolling Stone, whose publication totally sucks, reported news about the new verse as if he had his hands on the Pentagon Papers.

But I'm here to tell you that my famous brother, who, in case you want his autograph, will be on hand with me tonight at the show, told me about that new verse in November 2020. The Rolling Stone dude was probably in pampers at that point. I have email proof if you need it.

What conclusions can you draw from this? I'd suggest that there are several:

a) My brother: famous for a reason,

b) Rolling Stone has clearly cut their fact checking budget substantially since the dude in Almost Famous complained about all the work he was gonna have to do,

c) I'm REALLY excited for tonight, and I clearly know far more about Neil Young than is probably good for my health (but way less than my aforementioned famous brother),

d) Neil hired the wrong kid to join Crazy Horse for this tour; my famous brother would have been the bolder and wiser choice in place of Nils / Pancho / Danny.

Update: they did it all over again at my show, and they did it like champs. It's four days later and I'm still rockin' in the free world. Here you go:

#neil young #shakey sundays #crazy horse #Youtube

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Shakey Sundays #18:

Earth

It's countdown time: I see Neil Young and Crazy Horse this Thursday on the second night of their new tour. I'll be there to scream and lose my mind like a 12 year old. You'll then have to read about it all in minute detail over and over again for years.

But my famous brother, who'll also be there, has warned me that I need to brace myself: Nils won't be on stage with the band as he's busy making serious money with The Boss; nor will Pancho, who's still in retirement, and, although Neil is surely working on the necessary tech as we speak, no one has figured out - yet- how to bring poor Danny Whitten back to life. And so that means Crazy Horse is now welcoming, at least for the moment, its fourth official rhythm guitar player: one of the hipster kids from Promise of the Real Pancakes.

Here's a photo of him from the internet:

You're looking at Micah Nelson, Willie's son. Willie's 90 so either he had a kid at age 78, which seems totally possible for good old Willie, or this photo is not current. Let's google and find out... Micah is apparently 33 years old so either there's a hormone issue going on, or Willie's weed protects his progeny against aging or this is a dated photo; or all three of those things are happening at once. Regardless, I hope Micah wears this shirt while on stage Thursday.

By my count this particular Nelson was involved in at least four different Neil Young records during the dark Montsanto Years - there were two studio records, a live record and a soundtrack for Paradox, one of the worst of Young's 20+ films - which is totally saying something as many of them are largely unwatchable unless you're nuts like me - which is four more record appearances than I can personally claim with Young. Micah may even have a credit on Peace Trail as well; perhaps he programmed Neil's new robot. So, with all that under his belt and this new invitation to join the upcoming tour, Nelson's got to have something good going on for him other than his boyish good looks. We'll see.

Unfortunately, Micah will probably be on my assigned side of the stage: Billy Talbot usually sets up on Neil's right and, these days, Billy doesn't amble about too much; poor Talbot looks like he could use a walker, a hovercraft, or a whole tribe of Road Eyes to stabilize him, but he's still game and I sure as hell hope he sings a lot and pounds out some big boneheaded bass licks at the show: the dude has always given his fellow cavemen a good name.

But anyway, I've got to get my mind open to having this Nelson kid on stage so today I'm going to make myself listen to another Promise of the Real Potato Salad Neil Young record. We've already survived, barely, the first of them and I'm not listening to that overwrought codswallop all over again; I could sit through their second studio album together - it sounded cool for an anticipatory moment back in the day with its Time Fades Away meets anti-Trump vibe - but that record turned out to have a circus themed song on it that shook my soul down to a wounded, terrified core, so that's out, and there's no way I'm going to sit through another screening of Paradox any time soon: I feel like it was mostly iphone shots Micah and his band mates in period dress lined up and waiting for access to outhouse crappers.

So that leaves Earth, Young's nutty live-but-autotuned / field recordings record from 2016. I listened to the whole thing a few times way back in the day: I laughed a bit, got into it for moments and then never listened to it since. All that changes right now. Micah Nelson, please don't ruin my day.

The album sounds okay! It opens with Mother Earth, which, as I've discussed elsewhere, was the wrong song to end Ragged Glory with. But it sounds pretty lovely here with Neil alone on his pump organ. Go Neil, go.

But midway through the song Neil pasts on some professionals' studio vocals in an effort to ruin the good thing he had going; my memory tells me that he does the same on just about every song; Neil called the additions "edgy" at the time; I'd choose another descriptor. "Dumb" could work. Or "wacko". But let's just settle for "good old Shakey".

Because they're not that unexpected. Neil is surely a big fan of Dylan's Christmas record and Micah Nelson wasn't even a twinkle in Willie's eye when Young brought in a full boy's choir for Touch the Night, instructing the kids to sing joyfully along with him about a fatal, or perhaps just harrowing, midnight car accident; they're probably all still in therapy.

And remember, there's a 100 person choir out there who are still wondering if that session in which they sang about nausea and sexual death actually happened or whether it was all just a crazy dream.

We're fairly deep into this whole Shakey Sunday thing and I'm probably failing miserably in my originally stated goal of explaining, at least to myself, why Neil Young? But I want to suggest the obvious point here all the same: Neil Young just does whatever the hell he wants and typically that means doing something utterly wacko. And we love him for it.

So go for it Neil: bring in a pro choir and have them sing the names of gas stations with earnest polish while you do your crazy grandpa routine! It'll be totally edgy. I guess.

The other wacko, or truly Shakey, choice here is shoving a whole nature documentary into the record. Again, we probably should have seen this coming: Young's songs and focus at the time were almost solely on climate change concerns, and ever since his very first film over 50 years ago, there are often crackling fires to be heard on some of his best songs. Plus he came of age hearing the rooster in The Beatles' Morning Morning and the dogs chasing the train on Pet Sounds, and there are bird cries layered into Young's fantastic original version of Pocahontas.

There are times on the record when Young's assembled monkeys, badgers and hornets sound totally appropriate. For example, every time they interrupt a song from The Monsanto Years, I'm totally into it: I'd rather listen to bears bellow than hear any of the songs on that record anyway.

But hold on, I just fired up disc two on my trusty IPod (no, of course I don't own this record on vinyl; I don't have 165 dollars to spare on the CD-Rom compatible blue ray download immersion set complete with pan pipes and rolling papers likely available on Neil's forever beta website) and either I'm currently drunk (well, maybe I am sorta: how the hell else do you expect me to make it through 4 hours of frog sounds mingled with The Promise of Real's bongos on every track?) or Box Store, another of The Monsanto Years' problem tracks actually sounds pretty great here.

Let's paste it in and give it another listen; you tell me: does this song still suck or is it a sweet space opera about Walmart?

We've got a car horn honking and ambiance and then it's time for a typical Neil Young song. Yes, I know, the choir croons a lot of sophomoric and terribly rhymed nonsense about Volkswagen being too big to fail and too rich for jail but there are no bongos to be heard, Neil's own vocals are strong and there's all kinds of 90's style remix action going on interspersed with vintage Shakey guitar shredding. This is actually pretty damn good. And when Neil drops a huge F-bomb about TV toward the end and then start ordering us all into line before dropping some real bombs, then frogs, on our faces I'm ready to award Micah and his preteen band mates honorary middle school diplomas. They likely need them.

And what about the songs we actually liked to begin with? Vampire Blues sounds pretty cool, I guess: Young's vocals are great anyway, the Chevron tie-in is so meatheaded that you've got to bow down, and Neil does demonstrate that he can successfully play the song while not totally wasted.

But Western Hero just sounds dull and After the Gold Rush, with its rampant participation from a sentient being, is downright horrifying. And yeah, after 34 years I'm finally into the song Love and Only Love now that I have it on vinyl but, for god's sake, why is there a 28 minute long version here complete with a whole orchestra pit filled with every bongo Joe Freakin' Lala ever owned and every member of Willie's rampant progeny wailing away?

Come on, Neil: you could have given us the rest of On The Beach in that same time instead. For the Turnstiles would feature baseball bleacher chatter and whale voices while the oblivious choir chants "Ten Dollars at the Door" with no idea whatsoever that they're filling in for pimps; the title track could clobber us with intermittent wave crashes, seagull screams and radio static before devolving into penguin screams. Could be pretty damn edgy.

Knowing Young, he's probably got that exact album in the can already; yet another new live album, F#$%kin Up, came out earlier today; so knowing Neil, Earth 2 will be out in mid-May

#neil young #shakey sundays #promise of the real pancakes #Youtube

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Sandy Saturday's #13:

Pass of Arms

I'll bet there are already far more words written about T. Swift's new record than in all of the Mahabharata (that's the Hindu holy book that contains the Bhagavad Gita; it's around 13,000 pages long).

The opposite can be said for Pass of Arms, a 1971 half hour film that contains two stand alone Sandy Denny songs. The film does not have a Wikipedia page and is not available in any form anywhere as near as I can tell: it exists but you literally cannot watch it.

Having a Wikipedia page is a pretty low bar. Without knowing, I bet there are extensive ones dedicated to Chewbacca's family tree and Joe Biden's dog. I'm right on both counts of course: I just looked.

But google to your hearts content: the internet confirms that the short film existed, that it claimed to be "award winning", and that a guy who worked marginally on the 80's buddy flick Spies Like Us, in which I seem to remember that Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase save the world from nuclear destruction while failing to make us laugh, directed it; and that's it.

Happily, we can still hear the songs at least, something I've never done with any real focus until this moment. Let's start with Here in Silence.

Okay, I'm digging it so far. I picture a knight in his pensive non-warrior boy clothes looking longingly at his maiden, fall grass billowing between them in slow motion; but then that scene gives way to that same knight, now in full armor, gearing up for gnarly battle and then we realize this is actually a film about the Children's Crusade, or maybe it's all a chunky metaphor and it's actually about angsty and hirsute teens in jolly old 70's England: they're looking to stick to the man, or bloke I guess - this is England - and, well, maybe there's a reason no one other than me is angry they can't watch this film anymore because this song, which Denny clearly did not write, kinda sucks. Sandy sounds glorious, as always, but I'd rather hear her sing The Wheels On The Bus.

Have some faith though, people. We've got the marginally more famous Man of Iron track left to consider. I've definitely heard this one before, but I can remember nothing about it other than the fact that it's really long and moody with strings. Here goes!

Yeah, those are strings alright. Today the students at my tiny high school were all bent out of shape - it's Spring and everyone's either breaking up, thinking about it or striving to create similar drama in their life asap, so I led a full school game of musical chairs on the basketball court and declared in advance that I would win at all costs. I did not win but I shoved a bunch of giant teen boys aside in the effort and everyone laughed at their weird teacher and got into it.

We're a pretty cool school so one of our tenth graders, who's already a semi-professional cellist, played whatever came into his head for each round, which sure beat dancing around the chairs while T. sang 65 new songs about her loser boyfriends or whatever. My student's cello sounded, some of the time, a bit like the vibe that starts the track, only better. Then for the next round he'd play Mozart at triple speed.

But now there's a whole mess of fifes involved and this thing is starting to sound silly. Bring in Sandy Denny soon, please.

Oh thank the sensitive medieval Jesus who probably repeatedly appears to the lead character in this film swathed in psychedelic splendor: here's Sandy, and she's brought a whole pack of Cinderella's helpful birds with her to twitter about, somewhat helpfully.

But these lyrics are unbearable. When I was in seventh grade I committed the cardinal sin of writing an earnest original poem about "the roller coaster of life" and then turned it in to my earnest, no clue teacher who of course then read it to the whole class while on the verge of tears - someone had finally attempted something, anything, of marginal note in his earnest but lousy class - which turned my pimply face red, then white, then putrescent purple with shame as the other 13 year olds around me murmured then moved on to mirth and then on to all out rage: never would I be forgiven for writing sensitive poetry in earnest. Jeff Stimpfig, the school's stock character bully, declared me both gay (it was 1989; "gay" equaled uncool and homophobia equaled cool; what a dumb world...) and soon to be dead through his potent fists. Anyway, my seventh grade poem was surely terrible. But it contained far fewer cliches than this claptrap.

Was this end you chose Sir Knight?

Was this why you were born so bright?

The wolves will chew your bones tonight...

Sandy clearly needed a sizeable offered payday to have ever uttered these words; Trevor Lucas, or perhaps Stephen Stills, surely talked her into the whole gig. The guitar is nice though... I wonder if Sandy plays it. Sounds like her...

But good grief, now we've got a stomach churning drum thing going on. I'm starting to think this whole film may have been a Stephen Stills vanity project: it probably centers on Stills's broriffic relationship with Joe Freakin' Lala; they're on a quest to no longer suck and it's going nowhere fast as their stuck in a room of lemons, all of them worth sucking, and buxom ladies who admire them for no discernible reason whatsoever; and then, at the end of the film / this terrible song, aliens in sunglasses descend and take Steve and Joe to their leader for an extraterrestrial blues jam complete with wolves and low production value fake wind. Clearly, they didn't have Neil Young's budget for fake wind: he's got a huge budget when it comes to producing fake wind.

I'm guessing that Sandy's estate is responsible for insuring this film can no longer be seen by anyone. Indeed, The Dollar Bin itself may soon be hacked so as to eliminated this entire post one conniving letter at a time in their nefarious quest to separate Denny from any observable connection to the film Pass of A....

#Youtube #sandy denny #sandy saturdays #stephen stills sucks #joe freakin' lala #I demand to see Pass of Arms

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Nickel Bin #9:

Emmylou Harris' Till I Gain Control Again

It's been a rough week.

Our former president is smirking, snorting and sneering at potential jurors for a trial he's likely to win in New York and someone stole my worthless-to-everyone-except-me bicycle out of my front yard in the middle of the day. My Dodgers are playing like they're in a Stephen Stills cover band, and Karl Wallinger, Tom Petty and Prince are still dead.

So I say that we deserve a moment of simple grace, a moment of musical perfection. Till I Gain Control Again comes compliments of Emmylou Harris and her third solo record, Elite Hotel.

The intro guitar, and the vibes that creep in around it, bounce without flash and welcome in Harris's already rich vocals with respect. Drums, bass, piano, eventual strings: "note perfect" is not a phrase I can use with any authority, but I'll use it here all the same.

Aside from Harris herself, the song's two key ingredients are so humble you may miss them the first time.

The first, steel guitar player Ben Keith, is well known to Shakey Sunday readers as one of the most vital cogs in Neil Young's career: Keith was on hand and vital for much of the timeless stuff - and some of the weirdest bits too - between Harvest and Chrome Dreams 2.

Here, he glows around Harris within the verses, providing solace and depth before backing off to let the more obvious lead electric do its melodic work.

And second there's Linda Ronstadt. Imagine Taylor Swift or Beyoncé taking time away from their mammoth new records this month to sing unassuming alto back-up for a lesser known artist. That's the deal with Linda on this song in 1975, and I can't say enough about the yearning yet controlled tone she adds under Harris on each chorus and on the shimmering, why-does-it-ever-have-to-end, fade.

Enjoy this song friends! And for god's sake, someone put the dumb jerk in jail already, and hey, Stephen Stills, give me back my bike!

#emmylou harris #ben keith #linda ronstadt #stephen stills sucks #shakey sundays #nickel bin! #Youtube

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Shakey Sundays #17:

Ragged Glory, Part 3

When I was a senior in high school I experienced big-deal, pure, adrenaline surging joy - the kind that feels like it forever changes the shape of your face - three separate times.

Two of these moments happened separately on the same day, beginning in the afternoon with an obvious and rather pedestrian origin: I got into college. What's more, I got into a trophy school that would allow me leave home permanently and still be a goldilocks' drive time away from the two most important things in my life at that point: my ladyfriend and the summer camp job where she, I, and most of our friends worked (and where we listened to a lot of Built To Spill). I remember running from the mailbox and past my father, on my way to nowhere in particular, while ripping open the big heavy acceptance envelope, my ideal future suddenly revealed like a sparkling second sun.

My famous brother chronicled that same day's night from his own perspective earlier this month. We went together that night to see The Breeders play, yes, but The John Spencer Blues Explosion opened the show and they melted my already-altered-by-the-day face. Spencer crept around his Theremin like a tricked out cosmic bullfighter, tempting it to shout and gurgle and spin. The drummer broke several kick peddles in his mammoth exuberance; they had no bass player and no sense of composure whatsoever. I was not on any drugs, but it sure felt like it. And they were really good drugs.

John Spencer and his mates were, at that point in my life, the loudest, most alive thing I'd ever seen on stage; and keep in mind that I had already seen Tom Petty and Bob Dylan twice each, Neil Young three times, a crumbling and brutal Uncle Tupelo once and the Dead and Paul Simon more times than I frankly remember (there're years of future Dollar Bin posts left to come about all those shows).

I'm not saying the John Spencer Blues Explosion compares to those acts or played comparably good music that night. Instead, what I mean is that I was just right there with them: they were so alive, and so was I. And so I was SO, DAMN, HAPPY.

This video is from that same Spring, but not from my show. Had this been from my show, and had I filmed it, there would be almost no coherent footage: I spent the whole set wriggling like a fish on a line who just couldn't wait to be hauled bodily out the dull ocean and eaten raw.

And then Kim Deal came out immediately afterwards and chain smoked her frantic set away while not just blowing up the room, somehow, with an acoustic guitar, but she also managed to elbow, kick and head butt a whole cage of pedals around her, all the time singing with the cigarettes still in her mouth.

So, obviously, that whole show was the second time.

That year's third big-deal, pure, adrenaline surge of joy came, of course, in a record store. I was the good part of a year into my quest to find The Holy Grail. Not the real thing of course; that was of no interest. Rather, as should be obvious to the dedicated readers of the Dollar Bin, I was searching for my own copy of Neil Young's On The Beach.

I've already outlined how I'd heard the record long before finding my own copy, so suffice it to say that when I finally came upon On The Beach in a Venice Beach shop that year I screamed out loud and ran all over the shop, bearing it aloft in my triumphant hands. Keep in mind that this would have been late 1993 or early 94: eight or so years before Nabster and very much in the era when Young refused to issue the album on either CD or tape, meaning that you literally could not listen unless you found a vinyl copy or found some Neil Young freak to tape it for you.

Well, last weekend, when I talked that same ladyfriend, now my very patient wife, into dropping me off at Amoeba Records in Berkeley in the middle of our 12 hour drive home from a Spring Break trip, I did not run around whooping with another Neil Young record in my triumphant hands.

But I should have!

After all, look what I found after 30 full years of searching:

That's right, folks. I passed on 60 individual Dollar Bin finds and bought my first vinyl copy of Ragged Glory instead (that's not strictly true: I bought 18 other records at the same time for a buck each, so I didn't actual passed on anything - but saying so justifies my extravagance).

Okay, it's time to actually drop the needle (very carefully!) on this thing. Let's do this.

Good God...

I've already written about the record, without actually owning it, twice so feel free to read my Part 1 and/or Part 2. But I'm here to tell you that, after an initial 10 years of listening to the album on the tape I bought at age 14, then another 25 of listening to it digitally, it may be all in my imagination but I feel like I'm listening to Ragged Glory for the first time. It sounds like Neil is performing Country Home while riding piggyback on my shoulders. And we're hang gliding through flames.

Okay, I'm actually having a bit of a religious experience. Jesus Frickin' Cristo: Young is forever going on and on about how the perfect echo dies when you transfer his music to digital and, even though I'm a big record guy, I always kinda roll my eyes. After all, I've said it before and I'll say it again: I dwell in the Dollar Bin, not Nathan's VGG++ Nerd Shack.

And don't get me wrong, as advertized there is some bustle and pop on my new copy. But I'd be disappointed if the occasional scuffle weren't there: they add the kind of textures Joe Freakin' Lala could never even attempt, and, Sweet Billy Talbot, I'm hearing bass notes I've never heard before and the drums - THE DRUMS!

(By the way: you can disregard all the shade I cast on Love To Burn in one of those earlier posts - that track just started up and it suddenly sounds fresh and urgent as it spins forth from my record's new, precious grooves. I suspect the same thing will have during Love and Only Love when I get there...)

I'm so happy, friends. I'm SO HAPPY all over again. I'd even slow dance with Stephen Stills right now if he asked, just as long as we blasted my personal copy of Ragged Glory while we swayed.

#neil young #shakey sundays #amoeba records #jon spencer blues explosion #the breeders #stephen stills sucks #joe freakin' lala #Youtube

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Nickel Bin #8 / Sandy Saturdays #12:

Fairport Convention's Genesis Hall and

June Tabor's No Man's Land

Let's continue this week's Nickel Bin battle against the blues and get our Sandy Saturday going early by laying one of my favorite songs of all time, Genesis Hall, alongside a brand-new-to-me track that just made me fight hard not to sob.

I was introduced to June Tabor's rich voice, which sounds like Nina Simone, Emmylou Harris and Helen Mirren in the midst of a throuple, through her early 90's cover of Genesis Hall. My ladyfriend at the time (now my wife) worked at McCabe's Guitars and her fairly questionable hipster boss had just produced Beat the Retreat, a Richard Thompson tribute album. I'd hang around the place like I knew what was up while the hipster went on and on about what it was like to be in the studio with J Mascus as he piled up the tracks.

But when I sat down with the guy's record I was instantly taken instead by Tabor's naked, rugged, simple and shimmering boldness:

Not bad huh? Tabor strikes me as the only person this side of Linda Thompson who has any business singing a Sandy Denny song.

Here's Sandy's original of Genesis Hall from her second record with Fairport. If you've never heard this before, a) that's weird, and b) you might want to sit down. Richard Thompson opens the track by letting his guitar mimic a gallow's sway; you can hear the ravens strutting about with impatience, eager for the corpse to stop twitching so they can get at the eyeballs. Then Sandy comes in and lays it on us.

Thompson's poetry here is young and elusive; I don't think he or Sandy knew precisely what they were getting at. But so what: they identify, and conquer, a truly harrowing mood all the same, while the soon-to-be-dead-in-a-full-band-auto-wreck Martin Lamble's drum falls leave their forever mark.

Alternatively, Australian singer-songwriter, Eric Bogle knew exactly what he was getting at when he wrote No Man's Land in the mid-seventies. He did not like wars, most especially WW1, and he didn't like Britain's ongoing mistreatment of the Irish. So he said something about it.

Honestly, this version, which I'm listening to for the first time as I type this, doesn't do a whole lot for me. It's too stately and sincere for my impatient ears midweek - if I had not heard Tabor sing the song to begin with earlier this afternoon I never would have stopped to listen.

But Tabor's version is a big deal. She creates incredible drama with the barest of ornamentation; she climbs up and down the melody with lithe strength. I've sought fruitlessly for another song of hers that hits me like her take of Genesis Hall for a full 30 years.

Until now:

There's so much to grieve for right now. I'm battered daily by the news out of Palestine, and I know there's comparable famine and suffering from Sudan to Haiti, all while I sit complacent about 12 miles from an international, and totally arbitrary, border that is intended to prevent millions of striving people from obtaining far better lives.

I don't know what to do about it any more than you do. But listening to this song today seems like a tiny, but solid, first step.

#sandy denny #june tabor #sandy saturdays #nickel bin! #richard thompson #fairport convention

[dollarbin]

Nickel Bin #7:

Mickey Newbury's Dizzy Lizzy

Whenever I put Mickey Newbury on the turntable someone in my family invariably says, "isn't this the really sad guy?"

I get it. Newbury does sound pretty damn sad much of the time and San Francisco Mabel Joy, which he seemed to include on just about every one of his records, kinda sounds to me like the musical equivalent of Michelangelo's Final Judgement.

What's more, Newbury almost always matches his melancholy with a typically soulful yet staggering pace: the sadder and slower the better for Mickey.

And so it was with a bit of shock that I flipped to the B Side of one of my latest dollar bin treasures, 1974's I Came To Hear the Music, and heard not just some rock steady pacing on a Newbury record but also some (relatively) joyful words and, get this, hand claps.

You know what I mean: hand claps are reserved for jubilation in pop music. We're talking I Want to Hold Your Hand, Celia, We Will Rock You, just about every Jonathan Richman song since 1975...

Prior to hearing Newbury's Dizzy Lizzie I would have told you that he was about as likely to feature ebullient hand claps in a song as Nick Drake ever was to laying a dance hall beat over Black Eyed Dog.

But just take a listen: Newbury even allows open strumming, bubbly horns, cuddly backing vocals, a joyful, drunken (yet still sharp) stagger of a bridge and some electric guitar player to shred on this complex, yet tossed off, song; I'm guessing that immediately after recording this song his wife gave him the album cover's smooch, seen below, saying, "You did it honey: you made unmiserable music!"

Okay, sure, he does slip in a line about how someone's gotta bleed when everyone wants blood, but maybe Newbury could, instead of dedicating the rest of his career to more sadness and lung disease, have gone disco, or pulled a Dan Zanes and made a career out of children's music; after all, rock and roll, as he tells us, is nothing but the blues with a beat.

#nickel bin! #mickey newbury #nick drake #dan zanes

[dollarbin]

Shakey Sundays #16:

Buffalo Springfield's Last Time Around

Okay, does this album even qualify for a Shakey Sunday post? Young immediately disassociated himself from the record and it's hard to hear him anywhere on the album outside of the precious, handmade and somewhat juvenile I Am A Child.

Well, my cat's impressed, (note that she instinctively blocks out every person on the cover except Young, who refused to go along with the photo concept and turned his brooding guise down and away from his band mates: good kitty...) so let's give the record a spin:

The lead track, On The Way Home, is a top 30 all time Neil Young song and the Monkees fanclub arrangement of it that appears on the record, sung by the soon to be big deal Jesus freak Richie Furay (I have a dollar bin solo late 70's record by Furay called I Still Have Dreams which has yet to ever make it to my turntable; hopefully the dreams Richie still has are psychedelic and not troubling in any way; maybe the record amazing!), may not measure it up to Young's own, innumerable, live versions (I saw Young play the song solo on the Booker T tour in 93 and it absolutely floured my 17 year old soul) but it's mix tape ready and sweet as all get out.

I kinda feel like Nick Drake used this take of the song as an inspiration for the initially baffling vibe on Bryter Layter; but Drake's song is better, of course...

And I kinda dig Young's complaint about what they did to his song. Just check out the complex, passionate and freeing potential of On The Way Home through Young's solo take from that same era:

Even so, Last Time Around is worth stretching your dollar bin buck when you see it for $4-8 smackeroos. None of the songs stink, and Stephen Stills, at this early stage, sucked a whole lot less.

But, essentially, it's a Furay/Messina record; they'd go on to found Poco after this album. I told my famous brother a few weeks back that there was surely no Poco song worth listening to, ever. He countered with the following little number. Let's listen with an open mind, then snicker at his famous tastes:

The vibe here is like Graham Parsons on way too many happy pills, or Neil Young if he pretty much sucked. There will be no Poco purchases in my near future.

Furay had been hanging about with Young and our favorite villain, Stephen Stills, for a year or three, walking in their shadows and planning for a sweet future in the manly arms of Jesus. Good for him. I see he is playing tonight, as I type, at a lodge in Montana. Tickets are still available in case you want to go: it seems that he is still busy merging rock and roll with country music; surely Richie was the first person to ever have such an idea; or maybe Jesus came up with it: I can see him dueling banjos with Richie on the Sea of Galilee.

Furay sings the best notes on this record; this may be his high water mark. Take a listen to Kind Woman: the guy had some pipes; maybe I'll try singing this to my wife tomorrow morning at the breakfast table... She loves when I bust out my trembling tenor. And my 15 year old just swoons.

Everything here is thoughtful and well paced; Stephen Stills' suckiness doesn't even get in the way. Never mind: looks like Stills doesn't actually play on the track; no matter it sounds so sweet.

Everyone other than Furay was making more important music elsewhere during the recording of this album. Young was focused on his first record, and it makes sense that he let the band have I Am A Child as it would not have fit anywhere on his own debut album.

Stills, meanwhile, was making some of the best music of his dumb career in Judy Collins' 68 band: let's end this very abbreviated Shakey Sunday with a terrific Collin's track - far better than anything on Third Time Around - in which Stills is does nothing more than play the bass:

Even Stephen Stills can't sink a track this great. No offense Richie, but I'd say Jesus would be way more into this track than anything on Last Time Around.

#neil young #shakey sundays #stephen stills sucks #judy collins #nick drake #buffalo springfield #jesus

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Sandy Saturdays #11:

Friends

A surprisingly caustic song always gets my attention. Whether it's Dylan sneering at some poor Greenwich Village denizen, demanding that they come and stand inside his shoes for a moment so as to know what a drag it is to see them,

or, 50+ years later, Lucy Dacus resisting the urge to punch an even poorer soul right in the teeth, I'm drawn to gruff brutality in song when it comes from a normally humane artist.

Dylan and Dacus wrap their causticity in paradoxically lovely sonic packages, and so we're drawn in even tighter to their songs; we're fascinated, repelled and suddenly eager to confront our own imagined enemies: I'd surely floor them with my comparable wit: "Enjoy the slammer Donald... Beware my terrible wrath, Stephen..."

Yeah, I should probably come up with something a bit wittier for Trump and Stills just in case we bump into one another at the urologist...

Sandy Denny, master of every genre she attempted, provides a perfect bridge between Dylan and Dacus's wrathful harmonies. She wraps Friends, the most brutal of her songs, in one her richest and most lovely arrangements. The patient piano, Dave Mattack's signature drumming, the lush strings and the direct, perfect vocals all soar with friendly grace, but Sandy's title is ironic and her message is clear: the dude she is singing to is no friend.

I have no idea who this song is about. All the internet has to say is that it addresses "a famous rock star who courted her" during the era. That means it wasn't her soon to be husband: he was the opposite of famous. That would be infamous.

So, was it Robert Plant, who she so famously sang with in 71, then left to live in the country immediately after telling him so long? He was about 6 feet taller (I've watched you rise up) than Sandy but I can see her knocking him down to hobbit height (and I've watched you fall down) after he went on and on without her at the end of the otherwise brilliant Battle of Evermore.

Or was it someone else in the band? They all look a bit off together; perhaps Sandy is already busy writing cutting lyrics in her head:

Or was it a member of The Who? Denny guests on their symphonic version of Tommy in 72 and since all they were doing was lolligagging around and letting professionals recreate old songs of theirs that were never that great to begin with I can see one of them trying to get fresh with our hero.

But I'm not sure any of these guys look worth Sandy's time. Still, she does reference fools in Friends:

After all, imagine hiring Sandy and then having her sing all of two lines on your entire album. Who are they, you ask. (Who? Who? Who? Who?) They are foolish dummies:

Or could Sandy's mysterious loser/lover be Ringo himself? He was involved in this Tommy thing too. But surely, it's not Ringo... Then again, he had lost about everything but what money could own at that point (let's see, he'd lost The Beatles, and he was busy being cuckolded by George Harrison at the time). But , come on: not even any of his former bandmates ever wrote an angry song about Ringo, and they sure did take the time to complain about everyone else in the band repeatedly in song. So it can't be Ringo. Impossible.

Well, anyway, there's some famous loser out there who inspired some dense yet straightforward, cutting and introspective words from Sandy.

I call upon my famous brother, who is surely putting the final touches on some insightful piece of music writing as we speak as a familial counter balance to this nonsense I pumping out, or the culprit themself, to fill us all in via the comments section below: who (who!who!who!who!) deserves our forever thanks for inspiring Sandy's lovely, angry song? And who deserves our forever disdain for upsetting Sandy to begin with?

Is it you, Stephen Stills? Reveal yourself!

Update: Well, that didn't take long: our Sandy Saturday had barely began when my famous brother reported that the jerky troublemaker in this saga was in fact Pete Townshend. My brother was born in 1979, 7 years after this all went down, so he is apparently not a first hand witness and cannot testify under oath. He has, however, done some actual research; turns out such facts are easily obtainable if you simply read a book on this subject rather than writing recklessly whatever the hell pops in your small brain. I will claim credit for putting Townshend on my list of suspects to begin with; my powers of deduction are, well, marginal.

Anyway, I hereby declare that pissing off Sandy and inspiring the fantastic song Friends is Pete Townshend's greatest musical contribution. I'm not a big Who fan, you see... My almost famous other brother gave me Live at Leeds decades ago and I listened, shrugged, and then went back to Fotheringay.

Cheers Everyone.

#sandy denny #sandy saturdays #stephen stills sucks #lucy dacus #bob dylan

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Shakey Sundays #15:

Before and After

How's your dad doing?  Mine's hanging in there; thanks for asking!  At nearly 83 he walks the dog incessantly, mumbles through his task list, sleeps like a baby in front of Fox News and enjoys taking you down to his garage where he'll point out beloved paraphernalia with declarative statements like, "Whoa!"

Same goes for your (and my) imaginary dad, Neil Young.  At 78, Neil already checks just about all my dad's sweet and curmudgeonly boxes (though I suspect he sleeps through MSNBC instead).  Let's spend this Shakey Sunday on last fall's Before and After, a tossed off token from his summer solo shows.

I saw Young twice on the tour, once in San Diego and once, much more impressively, at the tiny, tucked-out-of-sight, John Ford Theater in LA via tickets my famous brother scored for us via his big deal insider status (or maybe he just went online and bought them; I don't remember jack schmoe about how that part of it all went down).

But I do remember some great beers in the parking lot and just about everything else about that night in LA, most of which, sadly, isn't captured on the Before and After. The record removes every second of crowd noise and ties all the songs into one fictionally seamless take, as if Young finished the whole show in under 35 minutes and no one reacted.

The reality was a little different! Indeed, Young spent much of the show wandering about his cluttered stage with an invisible and forever hot mic, mumbling "whoa" like my dad and pointing at his dizzying number of pianos and guitars. 

Young also peppered his set with shaggy dog stories about the origins of those various instruments: "Stills gave me this one: Whoa," he said, more to himself than to us, as he picked up a six string. Then he just stared at it for awhile, thinking deep, Stills-centered, thoughts. Stephen himself was surely tucked up in his devilish manse, watching Ally McBeal reruns and sucking on a lemon.

Young eventually remembered we were there. "Intense," he resumed, still fixated on the guitar. "Really something. They don't make 'em like this one anymore.  Nope." 

At one point Neil turned his back on us and operated a toy train around his stage.  16 of Neil's hipster minions surely supervised the train's safe transport throughout the tour, a job which required way more care and intelligence than their previous gig, playing alongside Young in a band called Promise of the Real.

Young offered no explanation for the train, nor did he connect it to any song on the set. He was just showing off stuff from his garage.

But fear not, those of you who are eagerly anticipating his upcoming Crazy Horse tour: hanging out with Neil is still a blast.  Even if our dads were some of the world's greatest living performers, I doubt any of them could still get on stage alone at their age and roll out a note perfect rendition of their best known song (Heart of Gold), let alone resurrect a 40 year old track that David Geffen famously rejected and, prior to Before and After, had never been released (If You've Go Love). 

During a set he described as "hidden by the hits", Young was alternatively soulful and tender on tracks like When I Hold you in My Arms and My Heart, rowdy and fuming on 90's rarities Prime of Life and Song X and just plain awesome as he brought back Ohio and the Springfield's Burned.  

Just like with my dad (and, my kids would say, me) it was occasionally tough to tell if Neil was joking.  Several times he took a pause while receiving yet another pre-tuned instrument, each time from an entirely new hipster, to tell us all that his job was "hard". Listen, when I'm his age I'll have to hire my own team of hipsters to tie my shoes, but he's Neil Freakin' Young: he should do amazing feats with ease.

So, was he being ironic with his "hard work" shtick? Beats me.  And when he slapped out a wheezing and frantic version of Mr Soul on his gothic cathedral of a pump organ it was impossible to tell if he was making fun of the song or channeling its depths. Probably he was doing both; that's Neil Young.

Perhaps most impressively, Neil closed out the concert by successfully leading a sing along that did not suck.  50+ years ago Neil simply could not lead audiences in collaborative performances of Sugar Mountain.  No matter how much stoned instruction he offered, he simply could not get everyone to hold the beat.

But there he was last summer, teaching the audience to accompany his vocals on Love Earth, a downright corny song from his barely-there last Crazy Horse record. The song sounds like Neil spent some quality covid time with the dead body dance scene from Clue.  You all know the song and scene I'm talking about, but it's been excised off of the net, except in the look, I filmed my own tv, version below; maybe Neil uploaded this himself while writing Love Earth; the song is so slight that he must have been doing something else at the time.

The song is regrettable as an album track, and Young left it off Before and After. But, somehow, the live result was actually pretty magical.  Everyone was on their feet and into it, especially once Neil told us - without losing the beat - that we all sucked for not singing loud enough.

Here is doing his "what's your favorite planet?" thing at my San Diego show:

Sadly, Before and After fails to convey most of this magic. The songs are there, sure, but the rich novelty of the set is now old news, and the swaying on stage, soulful and bemused cranky grandpa act that happened live before my very eyes won't come through to those not lucky enough to have been there.

My dad can still do some pretty incredible stuff at his age.  Like Neil, he still goes out on the road.  Rather than lighting up the West Coast and reminding us of his largely undiminished greatness, my dad heads down to Belize a few times a year to volunteer in a poor community.  He's been at it for more than 25 years now, and he sure as hell doesn't lead any successful sing-a-longs down there.  But he keeps the beat steady all the same, and the community he serves always eagerly welcomes him. 

One hopes that, unlike Old King, my dad, and yours, and Neil all still have a long way to go.

#neil young #shakey sundays #stephen stills sucks #promise of the real pancakes

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Sandy Saturdays #10:

Blues Run the Game

When I was a kid there were two required initial steps to take if you wanted to one day rock: first, you had to learn how to play Stairway to Heaven. Then it was time to learn Blackbird.

I did neither; rather I borrowed my buddy Eric's spare acoustic and taught myself how to stumble through Knocking on Heaven's Door (G-D-C; G-D-C).

My approach is not recommended: my famous brother and my other, almost-as-famous, brother are both surely shredding on their six strings as we speak, their families gathered about them, rapt with awe, as they sing about the lady who's sure that all that glitters is gold and the poor blackbird's sunken eyes. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here, writing this.

(But I did recently witness a big deal version of Blackbird: the eighth grade at my school sang it with horrific, tuneless assembly requirement while their music teacher showed off his seventh grade level guitar licks, but at their center stood a committed, fearless/oblivious young woman who, I kid you not, busted out a whistled, note-perfect and full, blackbird warble at the song's end; surely that warble on The White Album is a field recording, not Paul whistling, right? But this was no field recording: the kid was on tweeting fire. I read this morning that some 14 year American boy just got a professional soccer contract for millions of dollars in England; Paul McCartney ought to offer the young woman at my school a similar contract, pronto.)

Well, anyway, neither Plant/Page's overblown, but still kinda killer (the drums!), epic or McCartney lovely yet paternalistic race anthem existed in 1965 when Sandy Denny, Nick Drake and Paul Simon were teaching themselves to be, well, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake and Paul Simon.

It's really too bad. Imagine Sandy singing Stairway to Heaven. Someway, somehow, she'd make it not sound cliche. While we're at it, imagine Sandy's perfect phrasing, volume, tempo and sense of self taking over altogether for Plant's shirtless, hollering ego.

(Don't panic, I enjoy a little Zeppelin now and again as much as the next white guy who writes a blog about his record collection, and we'll get to Plant and Denny's famous, dense and soaring, shared track on some upcoming Sandy Sunday).

And Nick Drake's version of Stairway to Heaven would be a joyful romp, no? In his hands we'd worry about the Piper rather than be warned against him.

Paul Simon, meanwhile, would revamp the entire chord structure, have 16 tracks on the demo and make Artie stand around, waiting for his turn to do something, anything, only on the last, trembling and drawn out phrase over cymbals, kettle drums and fifes: "and she's buying a stairway.... to heav......en."

But, since that song was yet to be written (Plant must have been about 7 in 65/66) there was a clear stand-in apprentice track for aspiring mid-60's Brits to work at: Blues Run the Game, Jackson C. Frank's lick heavy paean to room service gin. Simon, Denny and Drake all put their stamp on the song, Denny and Drake through home recordings and Simon through an early studio track.

We'll start with the original on this fine Saturday. Simon was there for the song's birthing; he's the producer here, which mostly seems to mean that he said "roll 'em" then looked away while the terrified Frank laid the song down live.

Frank's biography is ready for the Sophocles treatment; he and Oedipus could compare mournful notes, competing to see who had it worse from the gods.

Frank: "Look, Oedipus, I hear you about your mom and all, but did you survive a childhood fire that killed bunches of your peers? No? And was your precocious initial development followed by failed relationships, failed marriages, a terminally ill newborn son and decades of homelessness? No again? Quit trying to interrupt Oedipus; no one cares about your dad. Finally, were you blinded in one eye by errant, random fire from a teenager wielding a pellet gun? No? Well then, quit moping, and shrug it off dude!"

Poor Frank spent a lot of the seventies charging around Woodstock, NY, in his birthday suit, occasionally complimented by a sword and/or cape, his schizophrenic delusions overcoming him. All kidding aside, you gotta feel for the dude.

His tragic life makes his sad song, and his raw performance of it, all that much sadder. The full success of his leisurely, mournful pace also explains why Simon wisely shelved his own comparatively cheerful effort with Garfunkel:

Drake's performance, in turn, is studious and personal; he is trying to prove to himself that he's worthy to join the ranks of not just the quickly lost American, Frank, but also the full gamut of British performers who had the jump start on him, from the boy band ranks (Donovan, Cat Stevens, The Zombies) to the hersute bohemian ne'er do wells (John Renbourn, Richard Thompson, John Martyn) to the guys already living solidly on the astral plane (Heron/Williamson).

Clearly, the elegant Drake belonged in their club; indeed, once he took a deep breath and stuck out his comely head, he was everyone's better.

I don't know that Denny's take competes with Drake's or the original. But it's still damn good and it solidly serves its purpose: Denny sings this boy song boldly as a woman, and she presents it with her soon to be signature balance of power and grace.

Sandy dated Frank at the same point she privately laid down this track and Frank's other stone cold classic, Milk and Honey (a song that is worthy of its own future post). It seems as though Denny's dating decisions were not equal to her musical chops: she soon took a pass on the soon to be naked all the time Frank and shacked up with the world's tallest, most red-headed, dullard, Trevor Lucas.

Lucas, so far as we know, never donned a cape and charged around naked, so score one for Trevor. But he never wrote Sandy a good song, and Frank gave Denny two of them. What's more, Frank helped convince Sandy, during their time together, to quit nursing school and focus full time on music.

Good shot Jackson.

#sandy denny #sandy saturdays #paul simon #nick drake #jackson c. frank

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The Last of World Party Week:

Love is Best and Rolling Off a Log

I know the week of Karl Wallinger's passing is long past but I can't resist one final, for now anyway, entry. I've played a lot of World Party this month, relishing the music and the fact that my wife doesn't complain when I've got them cranked.

(The later of these benefits is decidedly not in place during a lot of the deep auditory research work needed for this august blog. This weekend I heard several, very reasonable, spousal sighs while the Stills-Young Band did their fairly terrible thing for this week's Shakey Sunday. Turns out that coked up tunes from Stephen Stills about deep sea love making with Jesus as your only witness are not the best basis for marital bliss. I therefore put on a pair of headphones.)

But at 9:15pm on Saturday evening my wife woke me up from a way too early, book in my lap, snooze with a groovy question.

"I want to hear that one World Party song you played lately," she announced as I came back to some form of consciousness and remembered that I had yet to brush my teeth. "I don't really know how it goes. And I don't know the words. I think there's 'love' in the title."

She then hummed something incredibly vague: it could have been a version of Thank You World, or Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, or Bach's 65th Piano Concerto or Raffi's Baby Beluga. My wife had no other hints, theories or guidance to offer. She wanted me to figure it out and play her that song. Now.

Well, I love this kind of thing. Seriously. Ask me out of the blue what Neil Young song rhymes "knees" with "frozen peas" and I will not rest until I've (without any help from google; I can't stand that approach) identified the track (Dirty Old Man), played it through twice and decided, after nearly two decades of loathing, that the song is actually kinda great.

Well, maybe it's not that great after all. But we get to learn about what happens when you drink on the job and then get caught doing something or other with the boss's wife in the parking lot. So that's good information to have. Thank you Neil.

Anyway, it took me three false guesses and ten minutes on Saturday night before I identified the World Party song my wife wanted to hear: Love is Best from the band's fourth, too long and occasionally dull, record Egyptology.

I'm so glad my wife set me the challenge. Love is Best is a fantastic, richly textured dream I'd never fully appreciated.

Until now:

There must be 16 vocal tracks floating through this homemade, yet polished, track. We also get a tiny, perfect bridge, sweet, understated electric guitar and the corny title is given a perfect home in the all-too -sudden ending.

The song also highlights yet another of Wallinger's manifold gifts: his surprising, richly rewarding sequencing. Want an example? Goodbye Jumbo's two timeless pop singles (Way Down Now and Put the Message in the Box) are bridged by the spacious and epic background track When the Rainbow Comes.

Indeed, here's a fitting sister song to Love Is Best: a full twenty seconds pass before the track really begins, allowing us time to savor not just Karl's rats and bleeding in the sewer but also the harmonies that carried us in Way Down Now; and then at the 35 second mark we get a surprise, beautifully bent, second hook. There's just enough happening in the lyrical postman bridge to grab us fully and then the song just glows for another two and a half minutes, fading out with perfect la la las, and leaving us fully prepped for the record's central motif in Message in the Box.

Love is Best serves a similar purpose on Egyptology, setting us up for the record's most ambitious and rewarding song:

Wallinger's approach is so thoughtful here. The Sergeant Pepper strings, the spoken bridge, the balance of falsetto with strength, the muscular but respectful guitar that only arrives a full five minutes in, and the surprise vocal gymnastics that chase us soon after: Rolling Off A Log echoes the complexity of a Disintegration-era Cure track without ever losing its identity as a World Party classic.

So good! I can't wait for my wife to vaguely order up more World Party greatness.

#world party #neil young #stephen stills sucks #world party week #Youtube

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Shakey Sundays #14:

Stills-Young Band's Long May You Run

I've gone all soft on Stephen Stills of late. After seven straight months and 50+ posts spent excoriating Neil Young's nemesis/buddy/paste-eating boyband classmate I've given Stills a break in March. He had no business interrupting my vital appreciations of Karl Wallinger, Kris Kristofferson and Sandy Denny. There was barely room for him in my far less vital ruminations on Neil Young's Life or Peace Trail.

But your play time is over young Stephen. It's time to pack away your blocks, crayons and wah wah peddle and face my puritanical, yet objective, judgment regarding a core phase in your suckiness: that's right, it's time for me to actually listen to all of Long May You Run.

It took me a few years to find this relatively common-place Dollar Bin record way back when in the 90's. That's because all my usual haunts dumped their fairly worthless copies of Long May You Run in the never-of-any-interest-to-anyone-with-a-decent-sense-of-ethics-and-self-respect Stills, Stephen section instead of in Young, Neil.

But I knew the album's title track from Decade and from what remains my most prized Neil Young record: a bootleg copy of his 74 Honey Slides Bottom Line Show (note: the bootleg is better than Neil's recent official release of the show in that every rambling, humble word and harmonica fumble remains intact). That bootleg was so expensive at a very sketchy shop on the Santa Monica Promenade (the place also sold Star Wars ephemera and water pipes) that I convinced three of my buddies to chip in $5 each in exchange for my commitment to have it transferred to tape for each of them post haste.

Every moment of the show is rich and fulsome, including the premier of the song Long May You Run, which Neil introduces as a song he wrote for his new bus because he can no longer deal with flying airplanes, a detail that goes a long way to understanding the concept behind one of his most complicated records, Landing on Water.

And so I am still never prepared to hear the original album mix of this song. Young ditched not just Zuma-era Crazy Horse but also his savant producer David Briggs to make the entire coked-up record; out of an equal mix of savvy and bitterness Briggs then remixed Stephen Stills almost entirely out of the song on Decade. He also chucked the most Briggs-like event in that original version, a what-the-hell-just-include-it errant harmonica blast before the song gets started. "No sloppy sounds are allowed, Neil" Briggs boomed from his captain's chair. "Not unless I'm around to approve them!"

The song is a Young classic, sure, but it's never been one of my favorites. Too pretty; too earnest. Yes, the verses include a good sex joke (we found things to do in stormy weather) and some juicy Beach Boys non sequitors, but Young is too wasted to land his own jokes.

Neil has a dozen or more different ways to sing while wasted. There's his terrific tequila stagger (just about everything on Tonight's the Night), the terrifying "someone, please someone, pull me out of my dumpster of sorrow" vibe on songs like Pardon my Heart and Borrowed Tune, not to mention his, "Hey, everybody look! I'm so high I'm a flapping penguin" vocals on Vampire Blues or Cripple Creek Ferry.

I could go on; Neil is a connoisseur of making art while altered. The only time Neil sounds unappealingly stoned is whenever Stills's percussionist/vocalist/dealer Joe Lala is around, cutting lines of coke for everyone on his handheld mirrors. Here are Lala and Young together during his Trans tour. Neil is inquiring where he went wrong; Lala is indicating that it all goes back to hiring him to play bongos.

Throughout Long May You Run, it sounds like Neil keeps catching glimpses of himself in Lala's chop glass, and every time Stills and Joe are there grinning over both his shoulders; you can hear the dull, self-loathing result in Long May You Run's vocals.

The same thing happens, only worse, on Young's potentially best song on the record, Let It Shine. I first came to the song via driving and soaring cuts from 76 Japan bootlegs (catch my details on that vital tour here).

But on the record Young sings Let It Shine with self-hatred and a layer of very unattractive menace. There's nothing funny here; it's just ugly. And the guitars sound like they too are supplied from Joe Lala's terrible stash.

I've never done cocaine. The reasons are many: too scary, too expensive, too many lives ruined by the drug trade, and did I mention, too scary? But I've never really needed to think twice about the drug because I've heard this song once a year, or so, for the past 25+ years. If this is what coke does, I want nothing to do with it.

Neil shakes all this weighty failure off a few times on the record. He sounds appealing silly on Ocean Girl, helps the band make a Bee Gees audition tape on Midnight on the Bay (Joe Freakin' Lala passed the test; I imagine Stayin' Alive is the best song he ever performed on) and earnestly asks us about some complex nonsense on the Florida-based, wave riding precursor to Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze, Fountainbleau.

For the record: I do not know who put the palm over your blond, Neil. Nor do I know who's been moving everything to where it last was seen. But I do know that Joe Freakin' Lala does everything he can to wreck this otherwise groovy track with his terrible, whoops-I-dropped-my-bong-on-my-bongos-again percussion.

I only play this record when I've got the chance to sit beside the turntable. That's because there are four Stephen Stills tracks littering up the mix, each of them unlistenable. But I will now make myself listen to them anyway.

Here goes:

Make Love to You is ugly terror. Stills thinks he's Ray Manzarek meets Neil Diamond. He gathers the band around him to buff and polish both his nails and his lizard skin pants. The song was recorded 48 years ago but the "girl" in question is probably still in hiding after hearing Stephen the bar crawling man monster bust out his bluesiest warble to announce that he wanted to make love to her and that it was gonna take all night.

There's a flute driven bridge planted in the middle of this harrowing track like a Trump Flag at a pro wrestling event; someone get me the hell out of here before Stills wants to make love to me too.

Black Coral is a soundtrack for my nightmares. The piano riff is fevered and gross, Joe Lala thinks he's getting paid per beat, and Stills has shanghaied us 200 feet down underwater (with Jesus of Nazareth apparently in attendance, I guess? Maybe he forgot how to walk on water?). Stills has no coherent plan other than reminding us to take care: turns out he's more than a terrible musician, he's also the world's worst scuba instructor. There's more flute here too. The drummer, Joe Vital, is responsible. He probably figured, I played a mean flute in elementary school so, what the hell? How could a song like this get any worse?

12/8 Blues is actually worth listening to, once, so as to hear Neil's tiny, I'm a mouse and I'm trapped, backing vocals and his fairly killer guitar. But the riff is toxic and so are the lyrics. Stills tells he's dying, but don't get your hopes up. He wants us to know that he's "got the music" and he grunts like he knows how to pump iron while Neil tries to make something worthwhile out of it all.

The album closes with Guardian Angel, which somehow manages to be boring and nauseating all once. Lala shows off his touch typing skills throughout. Curses upon him. Stills' guardian angel demanded reassignment the moment they heard this song.

Neil has a guitar solo towards the end of Guardian Angel that's mixed to sound like he's in another state; which of course he was, as he literally told them all to eat a peach and went back to Crazy Horse at his first sober and available moment.

And that's exactly what I'm going to do now too: leave the Stills-Young band solidly in my rear-view mirror, listen to Zuma and recover.

#stephen stills sucks #neil young #joe freakin' lala #shakey sundays #honey slides

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Sandy Saturday's #9:

Late November

The weirder the better when it comes to Bob Dylan and Neil Young's lyrics. There is no logic to the ghost of electricity howling in the bones of Johanna's face, just as there's no clear meaning to Mother Goose, on the skids, looking for someone to scream at.

But the surreal images summoned up by such lyrics, together with their phrasing and the musical textures that swirl around them, never get stale; they never get old; instead they glow in our waking and sleeping dreams alike and rumble deep in the marrow of our fears. I'd love to stand with Johanna or Mother Goose for a moment; then I'd flee.

Sandy Denny was an unappreciated and unrecognized lyrical peer to both Dylan and Young. Just take a listen to Late November, the opening track from her first solo record, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. The birds, they are clouds; the temples, they're filled with the strangest of creatures; and the pilot flies solo on the mercury sea.

Denny stacks image after image into this bustling fever dream. We've got a sunken boat, tall brown people and a wooded, serpent laden ravine. 50+ years ago Joyce Carol Oats famously used Dylan's own image stacked It's All Over Now, Baby Blue as the basis for her celebrated short story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? I call upon her to follow that tale up with another story, this one based on the images within Late November.

Denny recorded the song with her third band, Fotheringay, for a sophomore record which never materialized. Rather, she ditched that far too boyfriend heavy band, and brought Richard Thompson in to clean up the track and help her assemble Grassman. You can hear him here, layering on alternatively frantic and stately licks without ever getting in Denny's way.

The emergent track is fantastic, but I don't know that it's perfect. The denser and richer the lyric, the less is needed from the instrumentation. Says I.

And so it's always a pleasure to experience Late November by Sandy alone. Here she is in one of the very, very few available videos of her performing.

This is from 1971. 54 years ago. Denny was just 24 years old. But yet she had just 7 years left, many of them lost to misguided males, booze and post-natal depression. Just think of all the dreams, all the visions, poetry and beauty we were not able to behold.

The methods of madness, the pathos and the sadness God help you all, the insane and wise. The black and the white, the darkness of the night I see only smoke from the chimneys arise...

Good grief. Everyone: count your blessings. And have a great Sandy Saturday.

#sandy denny #sandy saturdays #bob dylan #neil young #fotheringay #Youtube

[dollarbin]

Dollar Bin #35:

Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece

To date I've put off writing about two of my favorite 60s/70s artists, Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell. This requires some explanation, as leaving either of them out of the Dollar Bin is like leaving rice and beans off your shopping list; life is better when you have these staples available at all times, yes?

In the case of Joni, I'm continuing to procrastinate because what the hell could I really say that's either of interest, insight or humor about her classic records? Um, they're classic; you should get your act together if you don't have them all memorized.

And when it comes to everything after Hejira, where do you even start? Um, well, they're less good. But you should still listen to them. What the hell else are you going to listen to right now? Your kids, you say? Your spouse? Tell them to simmer down and stand aside because it's time to crank Dancin' Clown loud in the living room.

Yep, that's Billy Idol doing his obnoxious thing in the track; apparently Tom Petty's involved too but he's smart enough to stay in the background. Yikes, this is not Joni's great hit.

Even so, I always plead with the student DJ's at my high school school's (that's where I work whenever I climb out of the Dollar Bin) dance's to slip this pop chestnut, along with the B-52's Love Shack, into the Winter Formal mix. I long for the terribly awkward, you see. (To be clear: I'm not a big Dancin' Fool fan. But Love Shack? That's my jam.) Happily, the students never listen to me. If they did I'd feel obligated to get down on my own like a Dancin' Clown.

Anyway, we'll all drink a case of Joni together at some point soon; maybe Mitchell Mondays will be a thing when Shakey Sundays start to wind down (which, at Neil's pace of releasing records should be around 2045). Thanks for your patience Joni!

I've been putting off Van for some of the same reasons I guess. He's not on Joni's level for me, but I recognize that every one of his records are either stone cold classics or have greatness within them up until the mid 70's. But then he hit a brick wall and, frankly, I've never taken the time to survey a lot of the wreckage. If you ask me How Long Has This Been Going On? (the self congratulatory name of Van's mid-90's record) I'll tell you, "beats the hell outta me; I don't listen to Morrison after Feel the Music."

After all, who wants to hear synthesizers mingling with old white man jazz moves, all of it fronted by back up singing ladies and Van's grumpy indifference? And don't even get me started on his recent anti-vax crusade; were I to meet Van today I'd mask up and tell him to get a goddamn life.

Yes, it's true: my buddy Greg, who's reading this right now and freaking out, tells me that No Guru, No Teacher, No Method, No Pizza, or whatever it's called, is a good record, and I'm sure he's right. But I have never found the energy to really listen to it.

Don't get me wrong: I hear Van about gurus; I don't have one either, and Dylan's song about working on one is terrible. But I am a teacher, so I don't appreciate Van trying to get me fired. And I tend to employ methods of all kinds, except while I'm pumping out this nonsense. Finally, I enjoy pizza. And Van apparently doesn't want me to have any. Damn it, Van: give me slice!

But I'm hear to tell you that Veedon Fleece is a Dollar Bin classic: it's soulful, weird, relaxing and elegant; plus, it's just about the last will and testament of Van the Man before he became No Plan Van.

I resisted this album for a long time, not giving it a chance until my late 20's. Why? Well, for one thing, I'm not that into domesticated animals - my cat Batty should be named Compromise, Surrender or Capitulate. Because that's what I did when we got her.

Just look at this beast, busy trying to block out the last 45 years of Morrison's career:

Van appears with giant dogs on the cover of Veedon Fleece, and that fact alone made me pass on this record in the Dollar Bin until around 2003.

The dogs on its cover look far too much like the drooling, child-eating ones my famous brother and I cowered before at ages 6 and 3 respectively at some babysitting co-op lady's house. There we stood, 4'1 and 3'nothing, doggie biscuits in hand, supplied by that well intentioned mother who'd sent us outside to greet them. In the face of all that sniffing, shuffling and terrifyingly hairy life-force my famous brother and I did the only reasonable thing at the time: we ate the doggie biscuits ourselves and then got the hell back in the house.

Frankly, I can't think of a single album cover which features domesticated animals and contains good music. Pink Floyd's Animals doesn't count: that pig ain't real. There are no dogs on the cover of Hounds of Love and the cat on Tapestry is benign. Joni's own Dog Eat Dog is majorly mediocre, Elvis / Old King is a grainy footnote to the cover of Everybody Knows this is Nowhere, and I'll be damned if I ever listen to the Alice in Chains' album with a dog on it or this other Van Morrison record which, for all I know, features the same terrifying dogs as Veedon Fleece, only this time they've been shorn and one is muzzled so as to leave the other free to gorge independently upon my flesh:

But somewhere in the early to mid-aught's my buddies Ryan and Ned cranked up the first song on Veedon Fleece's B Side as we rolled out of town, heading for a men's weekend in the desert. During that trip I melted my shoes in our dead yucca tree bonfire while wearing them (it's amazing what can happen under the influence) and fell in love with Veedon Fleece.

Here is that first track on the record's flip side, and it's the closest thing on the record to a pop single:

The song features just about all the wonderful bits Van had to offer back in the day: he grunts, warbles and shouts whenever he isn't soaring along, plus we've got driving acoustic guitar, chasing bass and drums, pick-me-up piano and complimentary six string riffs.

But the country folk rock of Bulbs, and the stately, epic white blues track that follows, Cul De Sac (which features what may be the greatest scream by a white male in popular music) are outliers on an album which is otherwise concerned with some of the most obscure and introspective music Morrison ever recorded.

Before we get into that truer tale of the record, here's Cul De Sac with its aforementioned scream ready for your pleasure at the 4:56 mark.

I once had a school-wide tug of war rope snap like gunfire in my hands, instantly shredding four of my fingers, one of which still feels funky ten years later. My scream was just as loud. But it was not musical.

Morrison recorded these two tracks separately from the rest of the record, and it shows. What's more, in true Morrison style, he basically wrote off the whole album afterwards: he's almost never performed any of the songs live and he spent the following few years singing only to his gargantuan hounds.

The other record Morrison has treated with similar disdain is Veedon Fleece's spiritual companion, Astral Weeks. Both records must be too thoughtful, complex and warmly spiritual for his liking. It's like he twice got caught gardening turnips in the nude by his neighbors and decided each time to skip town and bail on the mortgage as a result.

Take a listen to Veedon Fleece's opening track, Fair Play: all his ginormus dogs and lady friends are elsewhere; this is just Van, surrounded by sympathetic peers, searching for deliverance among magpie topics that veer from The Lone Ranger to Transcendentalism and back again.

Everything else on the record matches this yearning, graceful tone. Often you lose track of just how obscure and particular the lyrics are; indeed I often forget that Morrison is actually singing in a language I know.

The record's second and third songs depict a sensitive, San Fran everyman psychopath who wields a hatchet at human heads and never misses church on Sunday; the last two songs on Side A are is basically Van's own - albeit highly vague and vastly abbreviated - Intro to Major British Authors II course, and they are way better than the course I took by that title as an undergraduate. Every song flows together; every stands on its own; everything is supremely weird and lovely: what could be better?

But it's the record's two final, so-sparse-they-are-barely-there songs that mean the most to me. Come Here My Love is probably the last thing any of Van seventeen ex-wives ever want to hear him say again, but when he sings it you can dig why they all married him in the first place. It's pretty damn sexy, and if I were into 78 year old covid deniers who should never missed an open casting call to play The Penguin in the next Batman movie I'd swipe vigorously left or right or whatever direction indicates heavy interest on Van's Christian Mingle dating profile.

The album then closes with something even spacier, even sparser, even more astoundingly beautiful. Listen for the ghostly choir emerge way in the backspace, explore the majestic Country Fair:

There's nothing in his catalog that beats Morrison guiding the dense and stretched melody on this track. While the recorder forrays about on its own, Van leads every other musician, and all of us, on a brooding, Pied Piper ramble through endless green ways and shimmering, summer fields.

Country Fair, and Veedon Fleece as a whole, leave me incredibly sad and wonder struck at once. It's a Dollar Bin journey I'm always so eager to take. I'd even feel safe enough to reach out and pet Van's dogs if I came upon them mid-record. And if I had a dog biscuit in hand at the time I'd split it in three equal parts. Then we'd all enjoy it together.

#van morrison #joni mitchell #batty the cat #veedon fleece