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dollarbin · 8 months

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Dollar Bin #4:

Emmylou Harris's Angel Band

I visited four different Iowa record stores while dropping my second born off at college last week and I have much to report.

Yes, there are at least four record stores in the state. The mystery is how they stay open.

Emerson, Lake and Palmer records are deemed worthy of plastic protection in Iowa, and $25 Yes records come with handwritten stickers that say things like "Side 1 Skips!" followed by a frownie face. These stores are convinced - convinced! - that newly printed Guns and Roses records deserve places of high honor up on the wall and that Jerry Jeff Walker belongs in folk rock. After all, the Country section is behind a wall of dangling beads and George Jones fills an entire crate.

A rotund, nose-ringed salesdude nods when you enter, drops the store's diamond needle on Bad to the Bone, then ambles over to offer you a tour "of their whole set up" while bragging about the minty, clear vinyl, limited edition Blink 52 record they just scored for $75 even though it's worth $300, easy.

I was happy for the dude, I really was, but I shook them off, strode past a pickle barrel of still cellophaned tapes (4 for $5!) and found that their Neil Young section was - I swear to god - entirely empty.

Is that even legal? I mean can you really own a record store and not have a single Neil Young record? And how, you ask, are such stores even in business?

I'll tell you how: at one of them I found, after 30 years of earnest hunting, my first ever copy of Henry the Human Fly (it was an original Reprise print no less, and even though I could really give a flying turd about such things - this is the Dollar Bin after all, not Nathan's VGG++ Nerd World - I was still pretty damn fired up and almost hugged the salesdude). Anyway, I snapped up that little blue number for the very non-Dollar Bin price of 37 bucks, thereby keeping that store in business long enough for them to blast George Thorogood for another glorious day. B-B-B-B-Bad!

All kidding aside, the people of Iowa are amazing. At stop signs drivers wave to one another! Please pack up all spare copies of your favorite records, drive to Iowa, and donate them to those lovely people.

I don't know about you, but every time I enter a new record store for the first time I head straight to Young, Neil and start judging the place. I don't really expect to find anything by Neil that I don't already have - but please, God, please help me find a copy of Ragged Glory someday, and please make it cost less than $50; I don't ask for too much God but this one favor I do of you most humbly implore - but Neil's section is an easy and effective way to find out if the store is worth my time. Or yours.

If there's nothing to be found other than a $22 copy of Comes a Time, or even worse, nothing but an already dusty, year-old copy of Noise and Flowers for $65, I know I'm better off at Chili's eating a bloomin onion alone; if they have nothing but copy after copy of Re-ac-tor, Time Fades Away and Journey Through the Past, I stay open minded - maybe ten minutes earlier they sold a crunchy old copy of On The Beach; and if they have Old Ways or Trans for $8-10 it's time to get excited and explore the store.

Stop #2 for me in any new record store is always Emmylou Harris. I submit for your consideration the following thesis: a good record store should have on stock most, if not all, of her records between Gliding Bird (1970) and Bluebird (89). We're talking about something like 15 titles between those bookends, and all of them should be in any good record store for under 8 bucks a piece.

Don't get me wrong: these records should not be cheap given their quality. I am hear to tell you that Emmylou Harris does not make bad, or even mediocre records. Like Paul Simon (well, there is Songs from The Capeman...), she only releases good albums. The same cannot be said for Neil or Bob, though I love them dearly. I defy even my famous brother to find an argument for Down in the Groove or The Monsanto Years.

(For those at home taking notes: I did indeed make the statement in an earlier post that Neil can do no wrong. I stand by that statement! Dylan and Young alike put out crap intentionally. It's what genius's do, people! Come to think of it, that's why some (maybe all!) of my posts are gonna suck. Neil, Bob and I are simply shaking off any fair weather fans.)

But back to Emmylou: why, you ask, should every record store worth its salt have all her records cheaply in stock?

Consider:

A) between 75 and 89 she put out a record a year, all of them good, and sold them consistently to my mother and all my mother's friends and all my mother's friends' friends and... you get the idea: that's a lot of records;

B) all those women have, since they made those purchases, got a life. Unlike me. They don't need their records anymore and they've told their loser sons to put down their bongs and go out and do something with all their old vinyl in the hopes that the sons will learn entrepreneurship and decency in the process. Those loser sons have, in turn, not ignored their mother and listened to the Emmylou Harris records (like they should have!) but instead taken them to their local Treasured Vinyl and exchanged them for autographed copies of Roll the Bones, or some other comparable crap;

C) unlike her friend Dolly Parton, Emmylou has no amusement park to call home, nor any lifetime movies made in her honor; and, finally,

D) unlike Fleetwood Mac, no boyband applicant on a skateboard drinking juice has destroyed the internet with one of her songs as a soundtrack, thereby unleashing hoards of hipster kids to demand of all the local rotund record store dudes copies of Rumors.

Put all that together friends, apply a little supply and demand, and what do you get? Record stores should be full of cheap and outstanding Emmylou Harris records.

So let's focus in on one of my favorites and one that I bet none of you have ever listen to, Angel Band.

There's no getting around it, I have to tell you: Angel Band is a Jesus record.

Don't panic! You haven't been lured in here to be told that He Gets You. Instead, it's time for this entry's second thesis: Angel Band is The Best Jesus Record (by a white person, anyway).

That's right, it's better than Saved, Jesus Was a Capricorn, My Mother's Hymn Book and everything Van the 80's Jesus man ever put out. By far! Indeed, I'd even go so far as to argue that while listening to Angel Band you will forget altogether that the man from Galalee is even involved.

Before I preach the word of Emmylou, let's listen to the opening track.

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I kinda feel like I could just end this entry right here. What can anyone possibly say other than Jesus Christ! The barely there but perfect band creates simple and delicious space around Harris' aching goddess of a voice. If some jerk doctor ever tells me I need to stop drinking beer (dear God, I'm back! Never mind my earnest appeal for Ragged Glory. Rather, God, please avert that hateful beerless future!), then I'm gonna have to listen to this album every day just to calm the hell down.

My prime hobby in life (good news everyone: as of this morning this blog is my day job because, thanks to my famous brother, I now have like 16 followers and surely that means cash money is coming my way, yes? Isn't that how the world wide web works? Siri, where's my paycheck?!) is teaching High School English and History; in that role I teach a four week block each year on The Holy Books.

The class is easy to teach even though I'm not a regular church goer; tell cool teens about Muhammad getting seized by the Angel Gabriel, back that up by showing them that Abraham is everyone's mythical great-grandad and they are all in. But, given the fact that Donald Trump and Samuel Alito continue to exist and threaten all our lives, Jesus is a tough sell to teens. (See that? Right there I'm not shaking off any new fair weather fans; I'm telling any Trump people reading this to go away and stop acting like shitheads.)

I do what I can in my Holy Books course to salvage Christianity: we get to the good stuff within the Sermon on Mount and St. John's Prelude and we separate St. Augustine's hateful nonsense from the essence of Christ. But the turning point, the moment when smart, open-minded kids realize that Jesus is about love without exception, not hate, often comes not through the texts or through my earnest lectures, but instead when I play them them The Stanley Brothers Angel Band or The Louvin Brothers I See A Bridge. No spiritual teaching that leads to such beauty could be altogether with merit, and kids get that.

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Just about any song on Angel Band could win that same argument, including Harris' version of the title track. Covering a song that is perfect to begin with is either a brilliant move (see Dark End of the Street, originally by James Carr, and the versions by Linda Ronstadt and Richard and Linda Thompson), shrugable (Neil Young singing If You Could Read My Mind) or intolerable and gross (Stephen Stills' version of The Loner - I curse thee Stephen Stills!). But as far as I'm concerned Emmylou Harris could cover anything, from Will to Love to Love Shack, and make it great.

So get over your fear of Jesus, dive into your local dollar bin and relax while listening to Angel Band. God, if we are lucky, exists. And she sings just like Emmylou Harris.

#emmylou harris #stephen stills sucks #louvin brothers #Youtube

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