Lotta Love – Nicolette Larson

So here’s an embarassing confession. I wrote this on an evening train from Manchester to London only to find the next day that I’d already published a piece about this song! Oh well, I like this one better, so I’ve junked the old one. This is what happens when you’ve been running a blog for three and a half years and lack of Wi-Fi means you can’t check your archives…

Imagine an album produced by Ted Templeman, and featuring the instrumental talents of Paul Barrere, Victor Feldman, Michael McDonald, Billy Payne, Klaus Voorman, Herb Pedersen, Fred Tackett, Albert Lee, Chuck Findlay, Jim Horn, Plas Johnson and Eddie Van Halen. Released on Warners, with a cover photo by Joel Bernstein. That record would be basically the most 1970s thing ever. Or maybe the second-most 1970s thing ever, after Rickie Lee Jones’s first album.

That record is Nicolette, the solo debut album by Nicolette Larson, which spawned a huge hit single in her version of Neil Young’s Lotta Love.

Larson had sung backing vocals on Young’s Comes a Time, which featured his own ramshackle reading of Lotta Love, on which he was backed by Crazy Horse rather than the Stray Gators, who were on the rest of the record. Lotta Love, Young has said, was his response to his road crew playing Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours day after day. That isn’t exactly the same as an attempt to write a Fleetwood Mac-style song, and Lotta Love didn’t have the lyrical depth of a Stevie Nicks composition, the deceptively lushness of a Lindsey Buckingham arrangement, or the steady groove of anything graced by John McVie and Mick Fleetwood. Frankly, it’s a little hard to hear Young’s reading of Lotta Love as in any way Mac influenced.

Larson’s Lotta Love (which she claimed Young encouraged her to record after she heard the song on a cassette tape Young left in his car), on the other hand, sounds like Stevie Nicks being taken to the disco. The standard mix of the song, rhythmically, is pure Mac, with Fleetwood’s trademark heartbeat kick-drum pattern (most associated with Dreams) present throughout verses and choruses, with a subtle hint of disco in the middle-eight’s four-on-the-floor kick drum and busier hi-hat figures. On top of this rhythmic chassis is electric piano, a prominent sax riff and soul-influenced rhythm guitar, all of which take it a way away from FM territory. Ted Templeman (Doobie Brothers, Van Halen) was an astute producer who knew what would sell. Fleetwood Mac playing disco? In 1978? That’d sell. It did.

Fortunately the record feels a lot less cynical than that makes it sound. Larson had a quite wonderful voice, and on Lotta Love her enthusiasm for the material was palpable. In harmony with Young on Comes a Time, she sounded a little like Emmylou Harris, but on her own record, her voice stood revealed as its own thing: soulful, sweet but slightly husky, and touch of grit in her higher range. With such strong material to work with, the success of Lotta Love was the most natural thing in the world. Unfortunately, Larson (not a prolific songwriter herself) would seldom have such strong material to work with; a forgettable duet with Steve Wariner is her only other notable chart success, and her albums are stuffed with little-known songs by fine writers of the calibre of Andrew Gold, Jackson Browne and Holland-Dozier-Holland, almost as if she was hunting for another Lotta Love in the overlooked work of these big-name writers. It never quite happened;  not as simple as it seemed, Lotta Love’s brand of deceptively casual perfection proved impossible to recreate.

Larson died in 1997, of liver failure and cerebral edema. She was 45 – far, far too young.

On Saturday Afternoons in 1963 – Rickie Lee Jones

It’s obvious why a young Tom Waits fan would have picked Rickie Lee Jones out of the four-for-£20 rack in Leigh-on-Sea’s Fives record shop 10 or so years ago. Jones, I knew, had been in a relationship with Waits at the start of her career, and I’d heard that her music mined similar territory to Waits’s, with storytelling lyrics drawing on a life spent within a Los Angeles beatnik demi-monde that had somehow still magically existed in the era of The Long Run and the Nervous Breakdown EP.

I was disappointed. While it contains some great songs, Rickie Lee Jones’s debut is a bit of a mess. The heavy-hitting Warner Brothers production team, Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman, had assembled an awesome array of instrumental talent* to play on her album, the same session kings that also featured on mid- to late-seventies records by LA titans like Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan and Randy Newman (including Newman himself). But as with Joni’s Wild Things Run Fast, the result – heavy on tinkly electric piano and, gasp, slap bass – was polite and bland. On low points like Young Blood, musicians run through their licks but seem to exist in a different world to Jones’s vocal. I can’t imagine the demo to that one wasn’t hugely superior.

(In full disclosure, the Waits records of this era that use electric band arrangements, such as Blue Valentine, are a similar turn-off to me; if Waits is in jazzbo mode, I want double bass and acoustic piano and nothing else will do. I love those sounds in the context of Steely Dan and Newman’s Trouble in Paradise, though, so make of this what you will.)

That wasn’t the only problem, though. Jones wasn’t writing uniformly strong melodies (her songs have never really found favour with other performers, especially compared to those of a certain other songwriter I should probably stop mentioning at this point) and her drawled vocals sometimes sounded less like jazz and more like pastiche or like an idea of jazz. In fairness, this was her debut and she hadn’t had time to grow into herself or her persona yet; even with as sympathetic producer as Waronker at the helm, she couldn’t help but come off as callow.

On Saturday Afternoons in 1963 is, then, the standout moment on the album, Chuck E’s in Love aside. Certainly it’s the song that has the biggest emotional wallop. Recorded live at TBS a month after the main tracking sessions for the record, and like After Hours (the other song recorded this supplementary session) featuring only piano, vocal and strings, it benefits hugely from its sparse arrangement and straightforward vocal performance. Jones sounds, appropriately given the song’s themes, more at home here. I don’t know that I can make much literal sense of the lyric, but that’s relatively unimportant. The song’s power comes from the repetition of “years may go by” – the sort of micro-phrase that invites the listener to attach their own associations, positive or negative, wistful, nostalgic, regretful, joyful, whatever – over that piano riff and the supporting orchestration. Meaning is suggested simply by the way Jones hangs on to the word “years”. What may have happened in the time since the childhood being invoked here? A novel’s worth of possibilities is contained within that one word.

So many successful songs work this way, because the writer paired the right phrase with the right snippet of melody. Maybe some tunes are so charged with inherent meaning that they lead the writer to pick the correct lyric to pair them with. Fortunately for Jones and for her listeners, when this tune spoke to her, she listened.

RLJ, Best New Artist Grammy in hand, doesn’t need to care what I think of her debut record

*Let me run through some of the credits for you: Dr John, Michael McDonald, Randy Newman, Victor Feldman, Tom Scott, Steve Gadd, Buzz Feiten, Andy Newmark, Jeff Porcaro, Willie Weeks and, inevitably, Michael Boddicker. Some of these guys are among my favourite players ever. I’ve written about almost all of them in glowing terms elsewhere on this blog.

Chinese Cafe/Unchained Melody – Joni Mitchell

Hi all. I should be in Barcelona right now, but owing to a rather nasty ear infection that dogged me all last week and hasn’t completely gone away yet, I thought it better not to risk flying; it tends to play havoc with my ears at the best of times. So since I’m here, here’s a little bonus post.

Joni Mitchell is high up on the list of my push-comes-to-shove favourite artists. But my appreciation of her music is based principally on the run of albums starting with Blue and ending with (but including) Mingus. There’s much good work to be found outside this period (the only time I’ve written about her on this blog before, I wrote about a song called Tin Angel from her 1969 album Clouds), but 1971-79 is where the most of the classics reside.

Wild Things Run Fast falls outside her great period. It’s the first studio album she made after Mingus, the first after signing to Geffen. It’s an album of variable quality, almost inconceivably bland at its worst. The mix of legit jazz players (Victor Feldman, Wayne Shorter) and LA session men (Steve Lukather, Michael Landau), intriguing on paper, instead seemed to bring out the most pedestrian aspects of both factions, making the album’s title the more unfortunate.

The record does, however, start with a wonderful song, a bona fide Joni Mitchell classic, and maybe the best thing she wrote in the whole of the 1980s: Chinese Café/Unchained Melody.

Interpolating an old song in a new song is a trick Mitchell had pulled off before, on Harry’s House/Centerpiece, an astonishing track from The Hissing of Summer Lawns. In that instance, the insertion of a romantic swing tune in such an unsparing portrait of a crumbling marriage signified the emotional distance travelled by Harry and his wife from the optimistic (1950s) beginnings of their affair to the (1970s) endgame of a marriage grown empty, in which love and optimism had been replaced by work and the accumulation of things. An irresistible but bitterly ironic musical joke, it’s the greatest coup on an album full of them.

Inserting Unchained Melody into her own Chinese Café, Mitchell repeats the trick to more straightforwardly poignant effect. Initially just quoting the song’s opening line within the chorus (“We’d be playing ‘Oh my love, my darling’ one more time”), she ends the track by singing a whole verse and chorus, with a few canny melody adjustments and reharmonisings. As in Harry’s House/Centerpiece, the older song stands for youth, for optimism, for the “birth of rock’n’roll days” that are referred to in the first stanza, so different from the life the narrator finds herself living now.

In 1982, Mitchell was 39 and given that the song’s narrator refers to bearing a child but not raising her, it’s probably not presumptuous to assume Mitchell was singing about herself. Which makes Chinese Café, like Hearts and Bones by Paul Simon from a year later, one of the great backward-looking, stock-taking songs of middle age, a style of song not too well served by rock music on the whole. Akin to Hejira and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter musically, but departing from the long-stanza, third-person reportage of her writing on those albums in favour of a simpler, near-the-knuckle style, Chinese Café stands comparison with her very best work.

Home at Last – Steely Dan

This week I read Donald Fagen’s Eminent Hipsters, which Mel gave me as a present last weekend. I’d have liked to pace myself while reading it, but instead I tore through it in a couple of evening and morning train journeys to work. It’s not a straight memoir, but rather an ‘art-o-biography’ (Fagen’s term): a series of short essays on figures (musicians, authors and DJs) who influenced him when he was growing up, then a diary of his 2010 tour with the Dukes of September Rhythm Revue (him, Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald), where he reveals himself to be the grouchy old geezer I suspect he’s been since at least the mid-seventies. After all, Steely Dan stopped touring halfway through that decade in order to dedicate themselves fully to writing and recording. Donald Fagen was not built to be a road warrior.

As so often happens when I read a book about a musician, I dive into the records. I haven’t had a Steely Dan phase in a while, so it’s been a huge pleasure to listen to those albums again. The revelation for me has been The Royal Scam: with its opening run of Kid Charlemagne, The Caves of Altamira and Don’t Take Me Alive, as well as Sign in Stranger and Green Earrings, it’s probably higher up my personal list of Dan LPs than I’d realised. I’ve never been able to decide whether I like Aja or Gaucho the most (it depends which one’s playing at the time you ask me), but if you’re a fan of the Dan’s most cooking rhythm section, Chuck Rainey on bass and the peerless and utterly bonkers Bernard Purdie on drums, The Royal Scam is the Dan record for you. They appear on almost every track and are in the sort of form that can sometimes make lesser guys like me feel like giving up.

These two also appear on what may be my very favourite Steely Dan track of all – Home at Last from the 1977 album Aja, which is the first record of theirs I bought and is probably the group’s most widely loved album. It’s run close by Pretzel Logic, which tends to be the choice of fans of the band’s earlier incarnation, although I see it more as the start of their second phase. The original 5-piece line-up didn’t function as a recording unit on Pretzel Logic, with Jim Hodder – an excellent drummer but not excellent enough for Fagen and Walter Becker – credited only with backing vocals. All of which is to say, I guess, that people can hear the same music quite differently, and that there are folks – even Dan fans – who find Aja too clean, considered and fussy.

(I’m kind of puzzled by this. As someone who came to Steely Dan long after their first career, after their first reunion record even, I’d fully absorbed all the handed-down tales of the group’s perfectionism long before I heard a note of their music – the idea that anyone would pine for Steely Dan’s Garage Days seems patently ridiculous to me. Rick Marotta: “They were the most demanding of anybody I’ve ever worked with. Donald was like the Prince of Doom. I’d walk in the control room and it would sound unbelievably great, and he’d just sit there, looking at the floor, saying, ‘Yeah, I guess it’s OK’.”)

So Home at Last, then. This is a song I wanted to hear before I bought the album, thanks to Ian MacDonald in his ‘Decadent Diversions’ essay recounting the story of Fagen spending four whole days punching in the words ‘Well, the’, from the chorus (as in, ‘Well, the danger on the rocks is surely past’). I wish it were true, but it sounds apocryphal to me. There were harmonies to record, too, so I can just about imagine someone spending a day, or maybe two, on that job, which would still be an absolutely ludicrous amount of time. But four whole days? Sorry. I know the seventies were a different time, but I’m not buying that.

I don’t know what I’d imagined the song would sound like, but it became clear pretty quickly that it’s an odd confection. A Chicago blues shuffle, with a hint of reggae in the horns and bass, jazz voicings in the piano (played by Victor Feldman) and lyrics that borrowed their central metaphor from the Sirens episode in The Odyssey. The track is most famous among musicians for its employment of a Purdie Shuffle, Bernard’s idiosyncratic take on the standard half-time shuffle, featuring a complex, ever-shifting array of ghost notes on hi-hat and snare (8ths, 16ths, dotteds, triplets – crazy shit).

It’s an undeniable groove, a gorgeous song with fantastic performances, an amazing arrangement, and solos on synth and guitar from Fagen and Becker, respectively: the duo seldom played the solos on their own records, handing over duties to session players of the calibre of Paul Griffin, Larry Carlton, Jay Graydon and Elliott Randall, so it’s kinda sweet that my favourite Dan track has actual Fagen and Becker solos on it, something I didn’t realise until recently. Perhaps I thought the guitar was Denny Dias – it sounds quite like him tonally. The whole track, solos and all, swings outrageously. Everyone should hear Aja (or another Dan album if you prefer) at least once. You might love it, you might be left cold, but Home at Last in particular may surprise you.

Steely Dan: Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Can we get Jeff Goldblum to play Fagen in a biopic now please? © Chris Walter