There’s much to agree with in this piece by The Quietus’s Luke Turner on the closure of music venues in the UK.
In a climate where grassroots music venues are under pressure from multiple sides at once (decreasing ticket sales, decreasing bar takes, increasing costs, increasing noise complaints, particularly in city centres and often from residents in developements that were built long after the music venue opened), the typical defence of these venues is often an economic one.
You can probably guess how it runs: Ed Sheeran and Adele started off playing at the Dog & Duck, and now they’re global superstars contributing millions to the UK economy. Hence, we need to save the Dog & Duck lest there be no future Adeles and Ed Sheerans.
This isn’t exactly wrong. It’s just a very limited way of conceptualising the true value of live music and the spaces in which it occurs. Nonethless, the Music Venue Trust, an advocacy group for the grassroots live music industry, adopts this language of commerce and GDP – of career paths, ladders and ziggurats – when lobbying to government and local authorities, reasoning that it’s the only language they understand. You hear it, too, from fans, from venue owners and staff, even sometimes from musicians themselves.
In riposte, Turner argues that:
To focus on music venues as steps to be conquered on the way to a typical career is everything that is wrong with the commodification of art, especially in a time when that route is a slippery illusion.
He’s surely right. Ninety-nine per cent of the artists playing in any coffee house, pub, club, function room, church hall, village hall or any other ad hoc performance space you care to mention on any given night will never derive their entire income, or even a signifcant portion of it, from making music. But that’s not why they do it.
Music-making is a joyous experience, especially communally. Witnessing music being made up close can likewise be genuinely transformative. I’ve witnessed performances in front or 25 people that have moved me to tears, that have provided memories I’ll carry with me forever. Likewise, I’ve been in big rooms and festival crowds watching world-famous bands deliver sets that meant nothing to me and of which I remember almost nothing today. In music, audience size and quality of product are just not that directly correlated.
A society in which we have the leisure time and the economic means to create and the venues and opportunities to share that creation with others is simply better than one in which we don’t. Happier, healthier, more connected to each other. It is a moral good that such places exist. Part of me fears that when the only defence we can muster for their preservation is an economic one, we’ve already lost the argument.
I feel bad about not having posted here for such a long time, but I haven’t really had the brainspace.
In early January, my dad went into hospital and a few weeks later, on 31 January, he died. Since then, we’ve been planning his funeral, which was held last Friday, beginning work on getting the house ready to be cleared and sold, resuming normal life as much as possible, and just trying to come to terms with what happened.
As to what that was, I can’t exactly say, even having been there through it all. There’s an inquest, opened and now adjourned, and hopefully that might shed some light on things.
In the meantime, all that there is to do – except to grieve, celebrate his life, and attempt to process his loss – is to get back to normal. For me, normal includes recording, writing and playing music (I’ve kept up as much as possible with the last of those, not so much with the former) and writing here.
Much has happened over the last three months that ordinarily I’d have wanted to write about: the death of the extraordinary music writer Neil Kulkarni, the Pitchfork layoffs, and the many and various debates about online fandom, streaming royalties, touring ecologies, merch splits, gig etiquettes, industry plants and more besides.
Most of these subjects have lost their immediate topicality, so I doubt I’ll get into any of them right now. But I’m still here, I’ve not put the blog on hiatus. I feel rusty and trepidatious, But I’m looking for something to get me back into the swing of writing again.
Happy New Year everyone! Here’s something I dashed off a few weeks ago but didn’t quite finish at the time. I figured since I was responding to a piece that was already months old, that wasn’t really a problem.
During a particularly long and delayed journey into London yesterday (signal failure between Lewisham and New Cross; an hour to do the ten-minute journey from Hither Green to London Bridge) I caught up on Elizabeth Sandifer’s 26,000-word monster post arguing that the greatest recording artist of the 1970s was Joan Baez.
As Sandifer acknowledges in the opening line, this is a critically heterodox position. I’d go further: it’s somewhere between (delightfully) idiosyncratic, provocatively contrarian and absolutely buck wild.
I’ve got to say, I love it.
Give me the critical judgment of someone who can survey the 1970s in their entirety and can say, “yep, Joan Baez”, then argue it at novella length.
It’s worth backing up a second so we establish our premise and the possibilities that have been passed over.
Joan Baez.
Not – to stick just to Baez’s most musically related peers for a second – Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, John Martyn, Judee Sill, Carole King, Leonard Cohen or Neil Young.
Not Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Emmylou Harris or Townes Van Zandt.
Let’s pull out some really big guns and widen the scope a bit beyond the acoustic guitar-strumming set.
Not David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Roxy Music, Led Zeppelin, the Bee Gees, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, Earth, Wind & Fire, Donna Summer, Bob Marley, Curtis Mayfield, or Marvin Gaye. Not any punk band in New York or London. Not Lennon, McCartney or Harrison. Not even Ringo.
It’s quite a stance to take, and to Sandifer’s credit she kept me along for the ride for the whole thing, frequently sending me off to Spotify to check out songs I didn’t know. I’m perfectly willing to concede Diamonds and Rust, and found her 1977 proto-hip-hop track Time Rag charmingly unexpected and rather prescient.
Much about Baez is admirable. She has convictions that she’s lived by and stayed true to, and she’s demonstrated great physical bravery in doing so on numerous occasions, not to mention professional courage too.
Nonetheless, seldom do I hear a Joan Baez cover, whether of Janis Ian’s Jesse, Jackson Browne’s Fountain of Sorrow or Dylan’s Simple Twist of Fate, and not wish I was listening to the original.
Now, it’s true that few artists are universally admired. Actually, none is; the contrarian spirit lives and thrives in all of us, and we all have our prejudices. Mine are, no doubt showing even as I type this.
Nonetheless, it’s tough to make an argument for Baez as anything more than a fringe figure in the 1970s when her greatest gift is as an interpretive singer, yet she has a voice that to many (including myself) is nails on a chalkboard. That’s kind of a problem.
Granted, it’s stunningly long, but I highly recommend Sandifer’s piece, Queen Shit: A Defense of Joan Baez. In an age when so much verbiage is lavished on the same half-dozen stars, and one in particular, to see someone go long on a neglected and uncool artist whose music they genuinely care about is a treat, even if the opinions advanced border on the crankish.
Hell, especially when they border on the crankish!
Eleven years ago today, I had a pacemaker fitted at Papworth Hospital in Cambridgeshire. The year before that, I was in an advancing state of heart failure. At that point of my diagnosis, I was Class IV on the NYHA classification chart; the subsequent class is “end stage”, which is what it sounds like. My diagnosis was idiopathic hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a disease where the myocardium is enlarged, weakening the left ventricle and impeding the heart’s ability to pump blood effectively.
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The problem with batteries is that sooner or later they stop working. When I had that first pacemaker implanted, the guidance was that the average battery life was seven years. Mine lasted over ten, but back in July I was told that, no time for delay, I needed a new box.
The procedure date ended up being two days before Melanie and I were due to head down to Cornwall for a week for a family wedding. In the end, the actual incision site wasn’t as sore as other random bits of me – I was unconscious for the procedure, but I gather they may have had to wrestle with me a bit to get the old box out (so many aches and pains in seemingly unrelated places) – but four or five days later I was able to play on the beach with my niece and nephew, and go for a walk from Sennen Cove to Nanjizal Beach with Mel. I started running about 10 days later. The Land’s End coastline is stunning, by the way. The views we had from the house we rented on the hill above the town were truly something special.
To my relief, life with the new pacemaker is much like it was with the old one, although it feels nearer the surface somehow; I feel more conscious of it when I shower and so on. But whatever – it’s a small cost to pay for getting to live my life more or less like nothing ever happened. It’s not something I ever take for granted.
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I lost a grandparent a couple of months ago – my mum’s father, Tom. Our beloved Papi. I struggle to think of anyone I admire more, and it’s been hard adjusting to the idea that he’s not here anymore, particularly for my Nana. His funeral was a strange day: incredibly sad, but so strangely uplifting at the same time. We’re quite a big family, so it would have been well attended anyway, but the amazing thing was how many other people were there: fellow parishioners, friends from the town, old colleagues and people who trained or served under him in the police. He made a difference in the lives of a lot of people. Even more than I’d realised. We should all aspire to that.
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Mel and I have had a busy year of music-making. We released our first album as a duo at the end of March, and have played a decent number of gigs – mainly in London for a change. It’s been really great. We’re at work on the next one already, with several songs in the can and some more gigs in the diary.
On top of that, I’ve been gigging and recording with Whelligan, including shows where I depped on bass and drums, and a really fun weekend playing the International Pop Overthrow festival in Liverpool at the Cavern Club. Jamie’s got so much material in the can already that we’re looking at more than one album here – it’s a question of deciding which songs go on which record, then doing the necessary mixing. I’ve also been recording some of my own more indie-leaning, non-folk-duo stuff, which will appear on some kind of solo release in 2024. Yo Zushi and I have finished a second Watertown Carps record too, to be called Bluto.
And, because four projects aren’t enough, I’m involved in another project with Yo. Twenty years ago, I was in Yo’s band the Great Days of Sail. Yo and GDoS’s other songwriter Russell decided to reconstitute the band, and I hopped on board too. We’re looking to do what we never managed the first time – release an album – as soon as we’re able. I reckon we’re probably about halfway there and it’s sounding, though I say so myself, rather splendid. Folk-rock and country and pop – good stuff like that.
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As the year winds down and we start looking forward to 2024, we’ve got a few things planned: another family wedding in early January, a couple of trips we’d like to take, a few gigs lined up. The first few months of the year can be a slot, so it’s nice to have some stuff to look forward to. Meantime, we’ll just keep on keeping on.
I hope, wherever you are, you’re enjoying the season and that you and yours are safe and well. Take care now.
Everybody needs a take on Now and Then, I suppose. Here’s mine.
Evaluating Now and Then as just a song is a nigh-on impossible task for anyone with a passing knowledge of who and what the Beatles were. Which is to say, it’s an impossible task for nearly everyone who’s taken the time to hear it.
Now and Then isn’t just a song: it’s Paul McCartney’s white whale; it’s the last musical testament of two dead men, both of whom have been deified by their fans and neither of whom were able to sign off on its release; it’s a proof of concept for machine learning technology in both archival and creative contexts; it’s a new pop record by two old geezers in their ninth decades; it’s number one in the pop charts.
Is it a good song? Is it a good record? Is it a good Beatles record? These are damnably hard questions to answer.
My first reaction, listening to it without headphones in a hotel room during a conference last weekend, was that it was an interesting curio. It was weird to hear John Lennon’s voice in a contemporary musical setting: pitch corrected and quantized, with a backing of heavily compressed, sample-augmented drums. I most probably “hmm”ed out loud.
Over the course of several listens last Saturday, taking a solo walk around Venice during a couple of hours of blissful freedom from conferential duties, my resistance to the obvious digitalness of its existence started to drop away, and I began to find the interplay of young John’s and old Paul’s voices moving. Some of the arrangemental aspects still struck me as superfluous or poorly judged (I’m not really on board with Giles Martin’s string arrangement or those strummy electric guitar bits in the later verses that sound like hamfisted Nile Rodgers), but as a song it’s definitely grown on me.
It has some of that delicate, almost halting, beauty that the best seventies Lennon ballads have, all major sevenths and ninths in the vocal melody. That tune would have suggested to me a more restrained arrangement – something more akin to Woman, say. But Now and Then, despite the presence of Ringo on drums and some acoustic rhythm guitar recorded by George Harrison recorded in the mid-1990s, is McCartney’s baby, and McCartney is astute enough to intuit that if the song was to be released as a new recording by The Beatles, it had to sound Beatlesque. It needed some Beatles sonic signifiers – hence the strings and a slide guitar solo more or less in Harrison’s style, despite McCartney’s reported resistance to Harrison playing slide on the song during their attempts to record it in the 1990s.
The less cynical take on the latter would be that it’s a tribute to his friend from an older, wiser and more empathetic Macca, and that’s probably true too, but I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to go about creating an arrangement to an unfinished John Lennon song, knowing the world would pass comment on every single choice you make. The weight of expectation was surely felt, even by a man as experienced and secure in himself and his legacy as McCartney. Chucking in some George Martin strings and some Harrison slide probably seemed like a good, safe, Beatlesy bet. They don’t harm the song, even if they don’t help it to truly take flight either.
In all, Now and Then reminds me somewhat of Michael Stipe’s famous comment on post-Bill Berry R.E.M.: “a three-legged dog is still a dog, it just has learn how to run differently”. It’s a John Lennon song with extensive input from Paul McCartney as arranger and editor, and contributions from Harrison and Starr as instrumentalists. It’s not insulting, or a cash grab, or cynical, for it to bear “The Beatles” on its sleeve.
But it’s also other to the rest of the group’s catalogue, and not just in the circumstances of its creation: the use of new technology and so on. It’s other in the way Real Love and Free As a Bird are other. Part of what’s so narratively perfect about the The Beatles – for fans and pop culture historians – is how their career as a band is compressed into one decade, how they function as perfect shorthand for “the sixties”, how their various solo careers reacted against their shared history as The Beatles even while they continued to appear on each other’s records as musicians.
Now and Then, and the two Anthology songs, exist outside all that.
Now and Then is a demo of what would probably have been a pretty good late-period John Lennon song if he’d chosen to carry it to completion. As a finished recording in 2023, it’s also a pretty good song, albeit edited in structure, and there’s something that’s undeniably moving about McCartney, his voice audibly aged compared to Lennon’s, taking care of this piece of unfinished business as a tribute to his mate. As a musician who loves to tinker with old songs and recordings, often just for my own amusement, I totally get the impulse felt by McCartney to tidy up Now and Then and get it out there into the world. But as a Beatles fan, Now and Then – like Free As a Bird and Real Love before it – complicates the band’s legacy even as I enjoy the act of listening to it and don’t begrudge its existence for a second.
I suspect we’ll be kicking this one around for decades to come. Ask me how I feel about it in 2043; I may have an answer for you by then.
For reasons of space, I’ve not wanted to get into the Peter Jackson and Disney of it all. Suffice to say, that’s also somewhat complicated.
Two years ago, after writing a piece on the 25th anniversary of R.E.M.’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, I spoke to my buddy Yo Zushi about his doing a guest post here to mark 25 years of Up, the band’s 1998 album. More familiar with Up and a bigger fan of it than I am, he seemed a better candidate for the job of taking it on.
Unfortunately for me, The New Statesman offered to pay him money to write about Up, so that’s available to read here – it’s paywalled, but at least within the UK you can register to read a few free articles every month.
If you’re not able to access the article, Yo’s argument is that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise to power in the 1990s of Clinton and Blair, Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 “end of history” thesis – the idea that liberal democracy was the final organisational basis for society towards which the countries of the global West, and increasingly developing countries too, were tending – seemed broadly to be true.
In Fukuyama’s proposition, with clashes of ideology and civilisation relegated to the past, we would settle into a frictionless, artless time of comfort and ennui: “In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history”, as Fukuyama put it.
Now, we all know what happened next; it’s hardly necessary to demonstrate how wrong Fukuyama got it. The point, as far as Yo’s essay is concerned, is that Fukuyama’s ideas probably unconsciously birthed an aesthetic within music, of which Radiohead and R.E.M. were the avatars:
The “end of history” merely became a flavour, an aesthetic adopted by some, but not all, artists. Among its defining features was a sort of sexless ennui, libido obviated by the iron cage of micromanaged comfort: no alarms and no surprises, and no boners either.
Now, 15-year-old me may not have known much about Francis Fukuyama but I definitely perceived Up on its release as some kind of kin to OK Computer and a conscious change of direction for R.E.M. I knew all about drummer Bill Berry’s aneurysm during the Monster tour and his subsequent retirement. I knew that the remaining members of the band had decided not to try to replace Berry with a permanent drummer, but instead employed a mix of programmed loops, drum machines and beats played by session musicians like Joey Waronker, coupling them with a great array of digital and anlaogue synths. I knew Radiohead and R.E.M. had toured together and were friends, and that Nigel Godrich produced OK Computer and worked on Up, too.
But I heard lots of differences between the records as well. OK Computer sounded cutting-edge and modern to me, even while referencing some decidedly 1970s precursors, while Up had a retro quality to its wheezing analogue synthesisers and drum machines, not to mention its Brian Wilson pastiches, of which At My Most Beautiful is only the most prominent. Even as a guitar-obsessed 15-year-old, I could hear the antiquated shonkiness of the keyboard sounds R.E.M. were using, and assumed that these were deliberate choices.
If we accept Yo’s “End of history” framing, though (and why not? It’s an interesting lens to be looking through), the principal difference between Up and OK Computer/Kid A/Amnesiac-era Radiohead lies in the lyrical outlooks of Stipe on one hand and Yorke on the other.
Yorke clearly disliked the authoritarian tendencies of the era’s neoliberal governments, and – quicker than most to intuit something unpleasant forming in cyberspace – he also seemed to feel a rising panic over the negative consequences of a hyper-connected digital world. This fear and distrust tended to make him cold and aggressive lyrically; a ranter and a pointer of fingers.
Stipe saw things a little differently. A humanist and more or less an optimist, Stipe lived in a world in which a love song could be mediated by answering machines. When he wrote from the perspective of a corporate employee working overnight in a regional office of some multinational company, he wrote Daysleeper – a “humane and generous account [sic] of the era’s First World problems”, as Yo put it. In the song’s key line – “I cried the other night, I can’t even say why” – Stipe showed a greater degree of empathy for that office worker than I imagine you’d ever get from Thom Yorke. If Yorke had written Daysleeper, the narrator would have been a villain, or at least some kind of idiotic dupe – a pig in a cage on antibiotics.
None of which is to say that Up was an achievement on the level of OK Computer or Kid A. It clearly isn’t. But within its overly extended, CD-era bloat, there’s around half of a very good album there. If I were to re-programme the tracklisting to make it more to my liking, I’d keep Airportman, Lotus (but with a remixed vocal), Suspicion, At My Most Beautiful, The Apologist, Walk Unafraid, Daysleeper and Diminished – but even some of those I’d want remixed and edited. Perhaps if you gave me the “Oxford American” version of Why Not Smile (a Daysleeper B-side), I’d settle for a 9-song version of Up, lasting around 35 minutes or so.
But for all that it’s the band’s last album with much forward-thinking, well-written music on it, and for all the bravery points they earn for beginning the record with a 4-minute duet for burping synth, feedback guitar, and murmured barely audible vocal, the album’s best songs are plainly Daysleeper and At My Most Beautiful – the ones that could have appeared on Out of Time, Automatic for the People or New Adventures. And when playing tracks like Walk Unafraid and The Apologist live, they rearranged them quite extensively to make them function as straight rock songs that would work in a set also including Star 69, What’s the Frequency Kenneth? and The Wake-Up Bomb. In doing so, they improved on the recorded versions, which came to seem like rough demos in comparison.
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Listening to Up today, it’s hard not to feel the loss of that so-called golden age. In many ways it was bogus, and the Nineties helped to set the stage for all the horrors that followed – but what a beautiful thing the American century once seemed.
Up is a thematically fascinating record, compelling in all the ways Yo details. It has interesting things to say about the values of the world it was born into, about relationships, identity, politics at the end of the twentieth century. But it’s hard to argue, taking it only on its musical qualities, that Up is not a step down from New Adventures. It remains the kind of record, for me at least, that’s more rewarding to talk and think about than listen to.
A little grumpy and cynical on a Sunday morning? Me? Never.
“I’m sure many fans won’t share my reservations and will love Stasium’s work immediately,” I wrote a month ago. And so it’s proved. Pitchfork’s Jeremy D Larson, who has given the new edition of Tim a perfect 10 score, is merely one of the prominent Replacements fans who loves the new Ed Stasium mix without reservation or qualification.
Me, I’m with Elizabeth Nelson of the band the Paranoid Style, who wrote incisively about Tim in The New Yorker:
the perverse net effect is of taking a defensive stance to an LP that never truly needed defending. The new Ed Stasium remix is fine, but it was never really Erdelyi’s heavy hand that prevented “Tim” from attaining its commercial aims. The original mix sounds no more gated or dated than “Born in the U.S.A.,” which never had any difficulty connecting to a mass audience.
So yes, of course the drum mix is more impactful on Ed Stasium’s “Let it Bleed” mix. Much more muscular, much more representative of the live sound of a rock drummer playing loud and hard. Of course the reverb on the original mix is a bit cheesy, a bit obvious, and the new treatment sounds more natural. Of course the vocals on the new mix are much more persistently audible than Tommy Erdelyi had them.
But these changes aren’t unalloyed positives, and one of the issues I’ve had with the discourse surrounding Stasium’s mix is the way all the differing aspects of Stasium’s and Erdelyi’s mixes are framed as the former fixing the latter’s mistakes.
A mix is built out of thousands of small decisions. Need some EQ? OK. Graphic or parametric? Which frequencies? Shelf or sweep? Wide or narrow Q? Pre or post? Decisions, all of them.
Erdelyi made some good ones – many of them better than than Stasium made when faced with the same choices. To frame this new mix as Stasium fixing Erdelyi’s shit is not merely technically a bit clueless, it’s also insulting to a guy who isn’t around to explain his thinking and, frankly, has been used as a punching bag too long already.
Chief among Erdelyi’s good decisions when mixing Tim was keeping the vocals somewhat buried in the mix. Few rock records benefit from having the vocalist’s every breath audible like the singer is Karen Carpenter on Goodbye to Love. And Tim is no exception to this rule. I agree, too, with another Pitchfork contributor Alfred Soto, who in conversation with Larson on Twitter asserted that the album’s quieter moments suffer under Stasium’s hand: “The mystery is gone from the ballads (i.e. “Here Comes a Regular”).
Here Comes a Regular is a key text on the album. It’s Tim‘s darkest, most moving and compassionate piece. In contrast to the admittedly heavy-handed approach Erdelyi took to the album’s rock songs, his treatment of Here Comes a Regular is delicate and ethereal – equal parts Springsteen (that synth/organ sound) and Lindsey Buckingham (that enveloping echo sure feels like something Lindsey might have cooked up for a Stevie Nicks ballad). Stasium’s Here Comes a Regular feels too loud, dry and close. Rather, it’s a bit like Westerberg is playing it to you at open mic night. Everything – once again – is too plainly audible, including the words. As Soto rightly said, the mystery is gone.
I’m genuinely ambivalent about all this. As I said previously, what I personally would have wanted from a Tim remix is, essentially, a drum mix with a tougher snare sound, with everything else left more or less the same. That’s just me, and there are undoubtedly ways in which Stasium’s mix solves some of the issues many, many people had with the original. I don’t doubt the sincerity of those who’ve found the new mix of Tim has made them fall in love with the album all over again.
But the binary nature of the discussion from so many proponents of the new mix is kind of silly when it’s not actually disrespectful. And as I said, Rhino have to take some responsibillity here in their marketing of the remix as “definitive”, as does band biographer Bob Mehr who has echoed the sentiment in print.
So perhaps the problem here, as so often, isn’t the object but the discussion of it – the insistence that we have to choose a side, the inability to praise one thing without denigating another. There’s no “definitive” when it comes to art; don’t trust anyone who says otherwise. They’re just trying to sell you something. Interestingly, given Nelson’s centring of economics and class in her reading of the record in The New Yorker, Westerberg’s voice isn’t among those clamouring for us all ditch our copies of Tim from 1985 to purchase the shiny new version instead.
By the time The Band released Northern Lights – Southern Cross in November 1975, they’d not put out an album of original material in more than four years. That’s not an especially long time in today’s market, but in that era it was long enough that the record was viewed by many critics (and probably fans too) as a comeback, and The Band as having something to prove. After all, since Cahoots‘s release in September 1971, Elton John had put out no fewer than seven albums (the run from Madman Across the Water to Rock of the Westies), including a double.
In the meantime, The Band had not been idle, but they had spun their wheels rather. Following a drop-off in his writing on Cahoots, where the magic seemed to go out of his work, Robbie Robertson had gotten hung up on the idea of making serious music, reflecting an enthusiasm for composers including Krzysztof Penderecki. Levon Helm, meanwhile, would later say that The Band weren’t getting along or creating new songs as the other members resented Robertson’s assumption of control and domination of songwriting credits and royalties. Meanwhile, the drug and alcohol consumptions of Helm, bassist Rick Danko and pianist Richard Manuel had increased as they waited for Robertson to bring them material they could record, with Manuel’s songwriting drying out, never really to return.
The way out of that impasse was a live album, 1972’s Rock of Ages, followed by a record of covers, Moondog Matinee, in 1973. Both are strong and intermittently inspired works, but from a group who had all but redefined rock music in 1968, they betrayed a certain lack of ambition.
In late 1973, The Band went into the studio in LA with Bob Dylan, backing him up on the record that would be released as Planet Waves in January 1974, before heading out on the road with him for six weeks, swelling the group’s coffers and – perhaps – easing tensions between Helm and Robertson a little, if we believe that at this point in The Band’s career tensions about money were already high.
After the tour finished, the group followed Dylan from New York to Malibu, leasing the Shangri-La ranch above Zuma Beach and converting it into a recording studio. It was here that they would record Northern Lights – Southern Cross over the spring and summer of 1975. The studio at Shangri-La was a 24-track facility, more upscale than they had used before, and it played a key role in shaping the sound of their new album.
The Band’s records, particularly The Band, are fetishised today for their down-home, live-in-the-studio sound. While arranged and performed with consummate skill, those arrangements tend not to feature much in the way of overdubs. Indeed, vocals were routinely cut live with basic tracks.
Northern Lights – Southern Cross is not that. At Shangri-La, with more tracks to play with, the members of The Band, particularly organ player Garth Hudson, had room to stretch out, to think and work a little differently. Hudson had begun the process of overhauling his set-up for Tour ’74 with Dylan, replacing his old Lowery organ with a new H25-3 model with a Brass and String Symphonisizer, as well as acquiring synthesisers including a Minimoog, an ARP2600, a Roland SH2000, and an RMI KC-1.
With all this new gear at his disposal, he was able to conjure up a Dixieland brass arrangement for Ophelia, rich pads and textures on Hobo Jungle and It Makes No Difference, a pretty credible funk horn section on Ring Your Bell, as well as the gorgeous tapestry of sounds on Acadian Driftwood. As much as one could view Northern Lights – Southern Cross as “Robbie’s album”, due to his sole writing credits on all songs, it’s Garth’s album too – the one where his singular musical imagination is given the freest rein.
It begins with Forbidden Fruit, in which Levon Helm’s narrator finds himself in medias res, “high and lonesome out on Times Square”, a surprisingly urban setting for a group that had always been associated with the backwoods. Key to their appeal in 1968 was the – not actually correct – perception that these were mountain men, untouched by progress and hewing their music from a timeless seam running deep under the earth. It was never true. Wherever its members had grown up and wherever they lived later, The Band evolved out of the Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, who made a living playing clubs in the centre of Toronto. Robertson knew whereof he wrote and Levon whereof he sang.
Less a cautionary tale than a finger-wagging warning to avoid the temptations of drugs and general hedonism, Forbidden Fruit would be a bit of a chore if it weren’t for The Band’s ecstatic musicianship: Levon’s dancing drums, Rick Danko’s constantly moving bass guitar, and the lead guitar and keyboard parts from Robertson and Hudson. Robertson takes longer solos during the song than he’d ever allowed himself before on a Band record, and, like Hudson, is clearly having fun with his new gear. In place of a clean Telecaster or Gibson 335, he’s now playing a Strat through a filter and a wah pedal with a bit of distortion, making occasional use of the tremolo arm, particularly during the intro. It’s not only a very different sound for him; the spirit of his playing is more akin to the tear-it-up ethos he displayed when backing Dylan than his previously hyper-disciplined work in The Band. It’s a strong start to the record.
Hobo Jungle, while displaying the sentimentality that Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus observedin their reviews of the album, keeps us in the urban world of Forbidden Fruit. If NL-SC didn’t already feel like a departure – a new beginning – for Robertson’s songwriting, most recently concerned with the last of the blacksmiths and the whole congregation standing on the banks of the river, it should do now.
Again, Hudson and Robertson do beautiful things on the edge of the arrangement, with the latter taking prominent lead lines while Garth weaves his organs and synths around the piano chords. It’s a simple progression with a few choice changes to keep things interesting – the move to the parallel minor on F; the chromatic descending move from E minor to D minor via E flat, the effective key change to D major for the final verse. It’s one of the loveliest pieces Robertson ever wrote, sung tenderly by Richard Manuel – even at this point, he was still the group’s best vocalist when working within his now-reduced range.
Unlike Manuel, Levon Helm’s voice hadn’t lost anything in the last few years, and nor had his drumming. On Northern Lights – Southern Cross I feel like his playing is a little different than it had been on the group’s earlier albums. His kick drum patterns are a bit more syncopated and complex, his work on the toms more fleeting and less thuddy – he feels wristier overall, in fact. Ophelia shows off this later style really well, as well as the continued strength of his voice.
While Levon has fun on the drums, Garth Hudson gets to create an entire New Orleans horn section with his organs and synths. Bearing in mind that this was 1975, he builds an entirely credible arrangement without any real brass at all, I think. When I first heard the song on Capitol’s 2000 Greatest Hits release, on which Ophelia is track 16, I didn’t clock that the horns weren’t real – not because the sounds are totally convincing, more because Hudson’s arrangement was so astute and well observed that it feels authentic and in the spirit of the group’s other work, even as the sounds themselves are synthetic. When The Band hired Allen Toussaint to do the charts for The Last Waltz the following year, he hardly changed Garth’s Ophelia arrangement at all.
Ophelia gives way to Acadian Driftwood. This is the big one, the musical centrepiece of the record, and one of the two or three best songs in The Band’s entire discography. There are days when it’s my absolute favourite.
Lyrically, it tells tells the story of the Expulsion of the Acadians during the conflict between French and British colonial powers over modern-day Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Maine. Each long verse section is split into two, usually with Manuel taking the first half and Helm the second, before both singers join with Danko to sing the chorus in three-part harmony. For fans of the cascading, overlapping voices heard on early songs like We Can Talk and To Kingdom Come, Acadian Driftwood sees the group recapturing the vibe of those early records. All three (including Danko, who gets the ice fishing verse) rise to the material, as do Hudson and a guesting Byron Berline on fiddle. The small-ish flaws in Robertson’s history have been picked over elsewhere, but as an emotionally evocative narrative song, Acadian Driftwood is about as good as it gets. It’s a true masterpiece.
But no great album is made up of wall-to-wall masterpieces. A great album is about the relationship between all the tracks; how they live and breathe with one another. All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Ring Your Bell, which follows Acadian Driftwood, is in its good-humoured way just as important to the album as the more major songs that sandwich it.
Apparently dealing with a run-in with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the late 1960s (an incident also alluded to in Caledonia Mission from Music from Big Pink), it’s a nicely loose R&B number built on a great Danko bass line and funky Helm drum part, with Garth Hudson once again building a synthetic horn arrangement on top that works brilliantly. But the best part of the song is that it once again features the three vocalists trading lines in the verse, finishing each other’s sentences, before coming together in the chorus to harmonise. It’s just so completely joyful. Whatever may or may not have been going on between the members of The Band at this point, whatever resentments and tensions, on record they still sounded like brothers.
It Makes No Difference is Ring Your Bell’s emotional counterpoint, and the other self-consciously big song that acts as a sort of tentpole for the album. A heartbroken first-person plaint of the sort that Robertson rarely wrote (I can’t think of another song like it among his material for The Band), it inspires possibly Danko’s best ever vocal performance, as well as some absolutely lovely textures from Hudson on his keyboard.
I have to admit, I’ve never liked the “stampeding cattle” line, which I’m sure I read is Robertson’s favourite, but even with that minor blemish it’s a wonderful song that manages to breathe new life into its romantic commonplaces (lines like “I’ve never felt so alone before” or “like a scar the hurt will always show”) – partly because of how rarely Robertson had ever employed them before but mainly due to how thoroughly Danko commits to the emotion of the piece. He seems to empty himself out in front of the microphone.
A quick word, too, for Hudson’s and Robertson’s solos at the end end of the song on soprano sax and guitar. Hudson’s saxophone is sometimes overlooked, with everything else he brought to The Band (organ, synth, Clavinet, piano and accordion, plus his arranging skills and advanced harmonic knowledge), but whatever he plays – whether it’s a tender, lyrical solo as on It Makes No Difference or honking rock ‘n’ roll sax on something like Moondog Matinee‘s Ain’t Got No Home – it’s always perfect.
The next track, Jupiter Hollow, finds The Band in a place they’d never been before. One of their greatest strengths was that each member could play multiple instruments, but one constant was that whatever else everyone else was doing, Robbie Robertson always played guitar. Not on Jupiter Hollow. He instead plays a wah-wah Clavinet, while Richard Manuel plays drums alongside Helm and Hudson layers up organ and synthesisers in the now customary Northern Lights – Southern Cross fashion. The result is a soundworld unlike anything else in The Band’s canon. I can imagine some people finding it a bit twee – I think maybe I did back when I first heard the album – but nowadays I find it rather charming. Like Ring Your Bell, it seems to me the essence of a great album track.
The record closes with Rags and Bones, and if Northern Lights – Southern Cross has any inessential songs, it’s probably this one. It’s musically attractive, of course: beautifully played (especially Levon Helm’s cantering drums) and well sung by Richard Manuel, but lyrically the song never quite manages to make its list of images of urban life mean more than they seem to on the surface, and at nearly five minutes it feels 90 seconds too long. It’s nitpicking, sure, but ending with the weakest track on the album is a little bit of a shame.
Even given that slight criticism, Northern Lights – Southern Cross is a fantastic album, and there are days when it’s my favourite by The Band, even though I’d always acknowledge the greater importance of the debut and the self-titled records. In 1975, the world had moved on and The Band were yesterday’s men; the fact that they rallied enough to make such a strong album at that stage of their career is remarkable, and like many others I feel it’s a shame that the Islands emerged a year or so later – the only Band album prior to their reformation without Robertson that could really be called inessential. Northern Lights – Southern Cross is a much better testament to The Band’s greatness, a final flash of brilliance from a group that had changed the course of popular music seven years before.
Islands was, essentially, a grab-bag of leftovers, covers and hastily written filler to fulfil their contract with Capitol and allow them to release The Last Waltz on Warner Bros.
The impact of Robbie Robertson’s songwriting was immediately transformational and lasts until this day. His songs – even more than his guitar playing with Bob Dylan – are his greatest achievement. His compositions on Music from Big Pink and The Band, and the best of those on the latter records (particularly Northern Lights – Southern Cross), stand as his epitaph.
We’re talking about The Weight, King Harvest (Has Surely Come), Caledonia Mission, Across the Great Divide, The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down, Rocking Chair, The Shape I’m In, It Makes No Difference, Ophelia and Acadian Driftwood, and that’s an incredibly non-exhaustive list of the first ones that come to mind. The way Robertson’s work fused rock, country, gospel and R&B (plus hints of blues and jazz) with storytelling lyrics informed particularly by his fascination with the American South has inspired several generations of songwriters since the release of Music from Big Pink, The Band’s 1968 debut.
Prior to Big Pink, of course, they had been The Hawks, rather than The Band, and had been best known as Bob Dylan’s backing group for this 1966 tour. In this phase of his career, Robertson was Dylan’s hotshot lead guitarist, pouring molten lava all over Dylan’s corruscating mid-sixties electric material.
It won him his rep as a guitar player, and when I was younger I definitely worshipped at Robbie’s altar. I’ve copped more than a few of his licks down the years. But these days I’d rather focus on his own songwriting, which during his tenure with The Band was close to unique. For all the thousands of bands that have come along since Music from Big Pink who want to revive that sound and that band-of-brothers, living-in-the-woods spirit, there’s none that share Robertson’s often surreal lyrical sensibility and melodic know-how, let alone his way with a Telecaster.
With the accusations by Levon Helm that Robertson took more credit and a greater financial share from The Band’s work than was reasonable or fair, his legacy is at least a little complicated, and it’s not disrespectful to mention that here. But the in-depth discussions about all of that are probably best left for another day. For now, I’m doing what I suspect many of us are doing this week: diving headfirst back into The Band’s music, which I’ve not really listened to much over the last few years.
I think I’m going to do a piece on Northern Lights – Southern Cross once I’ve given it a few more listens to refamiliarise myself more with this longstanding favourite. Hopefully see you later in the week.
There probably isn’t a Replacements record that’s not compromised to at least some degree. Flawlessness was never what these guys were about, and fans treasure their records warts and all. But even among the band’s army of long-term devotees, the sound of Tim has always been a sore spot.
As producer, the band chose Tommy Erdelyi (Tommy Ramone), with old ally Steve Fjelstad also enlisted as engineer. With Erdelyi a punk-rock drummer and Fjelstad a trusted presence who’d worked with them before, it doesn’t seem like the band were feeling the pressure to gussy up their sound too much, even as they made the jump to major-label production.
Yet, despite this, Tim sounds like a band and producer overthinking. The guitar tone on the rockier tracks like Left of the Dial, Bastards of Young and Lay It Down Clown is thin but blisteringly loud and distorted, while the drums – particularly the snare – sound like biscuit tins: feeble and distant, unable to hold their own against the roar of guitars. The ballads, meanwhile, are at least a little hobbled by that unpleasant drum sound, all treble and cheesy reverb.
So, the news that Rhino Records are releasing a deluxe edition of the album (called Tim: Let it Bleed Edition) that features an entirely new mix of the whole thing by Ed Stasium is potentially very exciting indeed. Thus far, only the remix of Left of the Dial is available. As you’d expect, it’s an interesting listen.
The first thing that strikes you is how different the guitar sound is. There have been rumours for years that the guitars were recorded using a Rockman, the Tom Scholz-designed headphone amp used on Scholz’s Boston records, as well as big 1980s rock albums like Def Leppard’s Hysteria. I’ve never found any proof of that and, having not used one, I’m not in a place to comment.
What is clear is that Erdelyi was going for impact with the guitar sounds, particular on the heavy tracks. On Erdelyi’s original mix of Left of the Dial, the lead part, the louder and more distorted of the two guitars (played presumably by Bob Stinson), is right upfront – panned centrally and placed almost preposterously forward. It’s ear-scorching.
Stasium dials the sound down several wide notches and mixes it a little off to the right. While this gives much more space to the drums, which we’ll come back to, I do miss the aggression it lends to the original track. The little bit of feedback 11 seconds in, so prominent on the original mix, is almost hidden on the new one. That may sound like a small thing; it’s not. That feeling, of the song being almost out of control, is key.
Stasium does bring the lead guitar up from the solo onwards, but actually leaves it too revealed in the final verse for my taste. It detracts from and fights with the vocal rather than sitting behind it and bolstering it.
Westerberg’s voice, meanwhile, is much more revealed, again in a way that I’m not 100% sure about. I’m not always a fan of super-clear vocals on rock records – I tend to like them sunken in a bit – and on Erdelyi’s mix of Left of the Dial I’ve enjoyed not always knowing what the words were. It took me years to realise the line was “didn’t mention your name”, as the delivery of “your name” gets a bit lost under the guitars. It emphasises the sense of Westerberg shrugging in disappointment that you have to squint, so to speak, to even hear what he’s saying.
Similarly, I didn’t know until today that Westerberg sang “you sounded drunk” in the second verse, and if there’s a backing vocal (or echo vocal?) during the solo on the original mix, I never caught it.
By contrast, the Stasium mix gives us a more persistently present, much drier and more prominent vocal, if only because the guitars have been moved out of the middle. I’d have liked a bit more reverb on the track generally; the dryness of it feels a bit of an overcorrection and makes it sound demo-ish. It’s a small moment, but that backing vocal is actually probably my least favourite part of Stasium’s mix – in a track that now sounds raw and much more like a live performance, it’s too obviously a producer’s touch, and it takes me out of the song.
The new drum sound, though, is a definite improvement. For me, with a much fatter snare drum, a more audible kick, and cymbals with more body and bottom end, the drum tracks just sound much more powerful and the band sounds like a band.
Whether that’s enough to compensate for the other changes in the balances, I’m not sure yet. This is one I’ll definitely have to live with and hear in the context of the whole remixed album when it’s released. My gut instinct is that I’d have perhaps preferred a version with a new drum mix but with everything else more or less as was. That said, it’s totally cool to hear a different take on the mix even if – as with Matt Wallace’s remix of Don’t Tell a Soul from a few years back on the Dead Man’s Pop release – it doesn’t supplant the original or improve on it in every aspect. And I’m sure many fans won’t share my reservations and will love Stasium’s work immediately.
In ending, I do have to raise an eyebrow at Rhino’s claim that this mix is “definitive”. Even if Stasium is a friend and collaborator of Erdelyi, for Rhino to commission him to do a remix of Erdelyi’s work after he’s no longer alive and then claim it as “the definitive version” feels tasteless and disrespectful. Nonetheless, like everyone else who’s ever wished the drums on Tim hit a little harder, it’s tough for me not to be intrigued and want to hear more.
songs from so deep 