Doom & Gloom Dispatch #15: Rekindle Youth's Pop Kick
Stella Kola, Tom Verlaine, R.E.M., Philip Glass, Chuck Berry
A beautiful piece of Western Mass Britfolk. Masterminded by Beverly Ketch (Weeping Bong Band) and Robert Thomas (Sunburned Hand of the Man), Stella Kola nods heavily in the direction of such faves as Vashti Bunyan, C.O.B. and Pentangle but has its own dreamy flavor, occasionally leaning into the poppier, more delicate side of things. A throwback sound, for sure, but still fresh as the morning dew. With a selection of all-star guests including Wednesday Knudsen, P.G. Six, Willie Lane and more, the album feels kind of like an instant classic of its kind — timeless and lovely, a secluded corner of the world to nestle into.
Guiding Light :: A Tom Verlaine Appreciation
More Verlaine! Doom & Gloom hasn’t turned into an all-TV-all-the-time newsletter … but there’s this bit of necessary reading over on Aquarium Drunkard. Over the past week, I bugged a bunch of favorite musicians/writers/etc for their thoughts on Tom, and to my surprise, lot of them responded! Ilyas Ahmed, Stephen Malkmus, Dean Wareham, Alan Licht, Glenn Mercer, Chris Forsyth, Horsegirl … and many more.
A heartfelt thanks to all of the contributors. Selfishly, this is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to read in the days following Verlaine’s death — tons of insight into what made the guy a guiding light for so many artists over the past several decades. (Oh and hey, if you need a soundtrack, my little mix of Television covers has been re-upped at AD, too!).
R.E.M. - Tyrone’s SBD Compilation
Was R.E.M.’s first bootlegger … R.E.M.’s guitarist?! Allegedly, Peter Buck made this compilation of early live recordings and gave them out to fans and friends back in the early 1980s. Thank you, Peter! This Tyrone’s material is well-traveled, but I always love revisiting it, as it neatly showcases the band’s first burst of creativity — they had been together just a brief spell, but already had an extremely unique sound and a repertoire packed with bangers. They were definitely rekindling youth’s pop kick!
I’ve always liked Charles Aaron’s evocative description of the scene surrounding R.E.M. in Athens at the time:
“At one point, the band played every three weeks for two dollars at Tyrone’s, a run-of-the-mill bar that started a new wave night in 1980-81 because of Pylon’s popularity and lucked out as R.E.M. packed the place. Instead of thrusting out at you from the stage, R.E.M.’s songs subtly swept you forward. The rhythm section’s melodic swirl and Stipe’s lulling vocals were immediately intriguing. As a result, everybody danced, but in this introverted, twitchy way I’ve never really experienced since, except maybe at raves. It was the spectacle of uptight white kids trying to feel good about their bodies, and succeeding.
"What Athens brought to rock'n'roll was this non-macho, non-confrontational, communal stance. It was not punk. Nothing sucked and hostility was in bad taste. Lead singers didn’t beg you to fuck them or hate them. R.E.M.’s guitar-pop aesthetic was influenced by a scene enamored with European new wave, funk, ‘70s soul, and glam rock, plus the liberating groove of the New York gay club scene. Compared to most other American rock bands at the time, R.E.M. was practically disco—all bass lines, nifty beats, and superfluous, sensual lyrics. I figured the band was too specific to Athens’s subculture for anybody else to get it. Guess not. Everybody got it, or got something about it.”
Philip Glass - New Sounds San Jose, Montgomery Theater, San Jose, California, July 2, 1978
I’m seeing the Philip Glass Ensemble down in Denver this week. They’re playing the hits! Selections from “Glassworks,” “The Photographer” and “Einstein on the Beach” — and for one of the first times in almost 50 years, “Music In Eight Parts.” Hell yes. Phil himself won’t be there, but to get hyped, I’m checking out this performance from way back, when Glass was performing at the first New Sounds San Jose festival. Awesome, occasionally freewheeling stuff here; at about the 15 minute mark of the opening tune, things start to get quite cosmic, inventing at least five future music genres. New Sounds, indeed!
Philip Says: The kind of music I was doing in the Seventies was very radical. The structure became the music itself. It became identical. In that way it was closer in a way to maybe Jasper Johns was painting and I was very influenced by his painting — when Jasper Johns did a painting of a flag, he painted a flag. So the question is: is it the flag or is it the painting of the flag? In the same way when I did a piece, I had reduced everything to scales and to a few simple notes. The process of the music became the structure of the music. So what was interesting for me was that the content and the form were identical — that was a very radical idea in music and in many ways it may still be a radical idea.
Johnny Be Good: A Film About Chuck Berry
I read and loved RJ Smith's Chuck Berry: An American Life last month. Like Smith's James Brown bio, it does a fairly incredible job at portraying an extremely complicated and contradictory man, giving us a more-than-convincing argument for his genuine genius without shying away from the genuinely unpleasant aspects of his character. An angel, a monster, an artist, a weirdo — an American life! It's to Smith's credit that through it all, the music starts sounding better and deeper than ever before.
"Extraordinary to think of the voodoo that happened when folks heard an electric guitar with their feet for the first time, flooding their spines, connecting them to every other spine in the barn," he writes towards the end. "Extraordinary, as well, to think about a human strong enough to invoke that state again and again, hundreds of times a year. It was a form of play from the start, your hands opening up spaces that radiated a shocking form of love, of wildness, of lawlessness within community. It was better than work, harder than work. Not work."
Smith mentions this documentary for the BBC Omnibus program, and it's definitely worth watching for its intimate interviews, rollicking (occasionally intense) live performance footage and general late 1970s midwest ambiance. "This was not an easy documentary to make," writes Mike Southon. "Berry is a difficult man who blows hot and cold without warning. Despite having to deal with his temperament the hairs still went up on the back of my neck the first time he ventured out onto the stage at a small town cinema where he was performing and those inimitable chords begun." After all of it, Chuck emerges as a total enigma, naturally, driving his enormous coffee-colored Cadillac through the streets of Wentzville, MO, all the way to the White House.
From The Doom & Gloom Archives
Sandy Denny - The Bitter End, New York City, February 5, 1972
Winter, 1972 — Sandy Denny and the Happy Blunderers (Richard Thompson, Timi Donald and Pat Donaldson) are at New York City’s Bitter End club. Richard, in his recent memoir, sets the scene:
In January, we played the Bitter End in New York, with twenty-three-year-old Jackson Browne opening. He was obviously something special, with amazing maturity of voice and songwriting, and a genial human being. Between sets, we would repair next door to Nobody’s Bar, sawdust on the floor and Tapestry on the jukebox. One night, the guy on the door at the club told us that Bob Dylan was in the house. If there was one sure way of ruining Sandy’s set, it had just happened. I’d never seen her so nervous, self-conscious and clumsy on stage. Bob slipped away before the set ended.
Fortunately, this more-than-decent audience tape of the Blunderers a bit later in early February is far from clumsy. In fact, it’s a pretty masterful performance, with Sandy in fine voice, Richard providing typically brilliant guitar accompaniment, and the Donald/Donaldson rhythm section sounding very sturdy. A great band, really! We get a bunch of selections from The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, plus some trad-folk reinventions … and Buddy Holly and Bobby Fuller Four covers, naturally. Pull up a chair at the Bitter End and listen, listen.
Currently Reading: Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg