Monthly Archives: June 2016

Look, it’s hard to tell people how you feel, what’s going on, the tides pushing and pulling.

Time was when a mixtape was that bridge, or the spin of a well-intentioned record eliciting its own waltz about a candlelit room with the object of one’s adoration.

It’s an emotional world, it is. Thus, TVD HQ’s recurring fuel for your fires and mixtapes. Reading between the lines—encouraged.

The late-1960s was loaded with musical groundbreakers, and one of the most enduring is Sly & the Family Stone. Formed by brothers Sly and Freddie Stone, the group grew by leaps and bounds through the combination of rock, R&B/soul, psychedelia, and pop, and by ’69 they had effectively conquered the scene. Theirs is a reign dotted with masterworks, and Sony has collected the bulk of the discography into the vinyl box set Original Album Classics. It includes five 180gm LPs remastered from the source tapes by Vic Anesini and pressed at URP; for a limited time it’s available exclusively at Popmarket.

He was born Sylvester Stewart in Denton, TX in 1943. Two decades later the man was wielding the handle Sly Stone, and when his Sly & the Stoners joined forces with his brother’s Freddie & the Stone Souls in ’67 San Francisco, he was already well-ensconced in the music biz both as a performer and producer at Autumn Records. In due time Sly excelled at his leadership role, though the Family Stone, credited as the first major American rock act to incorporate integrated multi-gender personnel, was always something more.

They initially consisted of Sly (vocals, organ, and assorted other instruments), Freddie (guitar, vocals), Larry Graham (bass, vocals), Cynthia Robinson (trumpet, vocal interjections), Jerry Martini (saxophone), and Greg Errico (drums), with assistance from Vet Stone, Mary McCreary, and Elva Mouton, collectively known as Little Sister (backing vocals). Signed to CBS Records’ subsidiary Epic, they worked fast, maybe too fast; the first long-player was in the can before June was done.

Indeed, if they’d broken up after A Whole New Thing’s cashbox failure, Sly & the Family Stone would likely be forgotten. Over the years the debut has taken its share of heat, some of it undeserved. Things begin fairly well; “Underdog” is bookended by horns riffing on the melody to “Frère Jacques,” but the meat of the matter is upbeat soul. The opener establishes one of the album’s distinctive attributes, specifically a heavier drum sound than was then the norm for the R&B genre.

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Look, it’s hard to tell people how you feel, what’s going on, the tides pushing and pulling.

Time was when a mixtape was that bridge, or the spin of a well-intentioned record eliciting its own waltz about a candlelit room with the object of one’s adoration.

It’s an emotional world, it is. Thus TVD HQ’s recurring fuel for your fires and mixtapes. Reading between the lines—encouraged.

I admit it: I haven’t listened to much Bill Callahan, who has spent the bulk of his career recording under the Smog moniker. But I’ve listened to 2003’s Supper about a quarter of a million times, and why, given how much I enjoy it, I haven’t listened to any of his other albums is an imponderable mystery, like what happened to D.B. Cooper, why the dinosaurs and the 8-track went extinct, and what exactly it is about the Police that other people hear but I don’t.

Callahan followed the patented path from lo-fi to high, although in his case the increasing sophistication was due less to shifting aesthetic preference to sheer lack of access to more expensive recording technology in his early years. He has however, stayed faithful to his relativity primitive songwriting approach, which emphasizes simple and repetitive song structures, and often eschews choruses. That, compared with his deadpan vocal delivery, gives his LPs a unique feel, one that is often simultaneously down in the mouth and exhilarating. Or, depending on your tastes, it makes them exercises in monotony, which are likely to send you running to something with more variety, say Prince or just about everybody, really.

“Feather by Feather” is a lovely and haunting slow burner of a country rock tune on which Callahan is joined by Sarabeth Tucek. The organ is pretty, as is the pedal steel guitar, and while I can’t say I know what the song is about, I sure do like it when Callahan sings, “When they make the movie of your life/They’re going to have to ask you to do your own stunts/Cuz nobody nobody nobody nobody/Can pull off the same shit as you/And still come out alright.” I also like the ending, when Callahan and Tucek sing, “And you are a fighter/You are a fighter/You are a fighter” and so on until a synth comes in and they repeat, “The kids got heart.” I’m not enthralled by “Butterflies Drowned in Wine,” which opens with some stop and start until it breaks into an enthused passage, which in its turn is followed by some slow country music. And so it goes, the tune twisting and turning about on itself and going every which way—there’s even a section where Callahan and Tucek sing, “Temporary sister and brotherhood” over and over again—and it’s just too busy for my tastes.

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“At risk of doing that whole ‘cryptic songwriter’ thing, I’d like to keep ‘Bella Tell’ open to interpretation. I don’t want to ruin the story. Sometimes I write songs based on very clear stories that were told to me, or that are known folklore, but this one is based on my own specific experiences and I wouldn’t want them to taint the listeners’ personal experience of the song based on their own histories. If I were to choose keywords for the song, though, they’d be these: RUCKUS, GUILE, GRIT, and DEBAUCHERY”

“Something I think quite a lot about is intention. Living at a time when things are constantly thrown at us, constantly changing, buzzing, flashing, it can be very easy to lose sight of intention. What vinyl represents for me is intentional listening. It’s an opportunity to break out of mindless scrolling and pressing buttons.

It’s delicate. It’s about listening to an album for the pure experience of it, rather than simply cutting the silence. It’s more than the listening too, isn’t it? It’s a full sensory experience—the smell of the record, the artwork, the feeling of it in your hands as you gently place it onto the player.

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Much of The Replacements’ deserved reputation rests upon their work for the Minneapolis indie Twin/Tone, and last year fans desirous of owning said material on vinyl were given the treat of a 4LP box set. But it’s hard to find a lover of the ‘Mats who gives up on the crew after the transition to Sire; if The Twin/Tone Years ended with a peak, a high percentage of its follow-up collection hangs in the vicinity of those heights as the remainder documents their decline. Offering a pair of absolute gems and the rocky but convulsively interesting later period of an oft disheveled band, The Sire Years is out now.

Born in the tail end of the 1970s and surviving into the early ’90s (of course, there was a reunion), The Replacements stand as one of the defining acts of the decade between. Consequently, there is no shortage of synopses of these booze-soaked underdogs’ existence, though the consensus on later achievements gets a little bit thornier as the story heads to its conclusion.

1981’s Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash established trashy punk parameters as ’82’s “Stink” EP found them dabbling with hardcore a la hometown contemporaries Hüsker Dü. ’83 brought Hootenanny’s rough-edged growth spurt, the album capturing increasing flirtations with true greatness; ’84’s follow-up marked a more significant rendezvous with the masterful, Let It Be standing as one of the ‘80s finest albums and a cornerstone of proudly unpolished pop-rock.

Part of The Replacements’ appeal derived from their collective persona as the guys least expected to succeed, and like many of those told they ain’t never going to amount to nothin’, they could engage in bouts of self-sabotage; the gradually deteriorating gig issued on the ’85 cassette-only release The Shit Hits the Fans would’ve spelled serious trouble for most bands, but in this instance hearing the wheels come off proved part of the allure (the admittedly small Okie crowd stayed to the end).

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Look, it’s hard to tell people how you feel, what’s going on, the tides pushing and pulling.

Time was when a mixtape was that bridge, or the spin of a well-intentioned record eliciting its own waltz about a candlelit room with the object of one’s adoration.

It’s an emotional world, it is. Thus TVD HQ’s recurring fuel for your fires and mixtapes. Reading between the lines—encouraged.