Issue 148

Once again, I’m focusing on a single outstanding record; this time it’s a 1968 Johnny Cash live date in San Francisco that never saw the light of day prior to this release. Making this album even more noteworthy is that it was recorded by Owsley “Bear” Stanley — yes, that “Bear,” who helped create the Grateful Dead’s legendary “Wall of Sound” concert sound system. Bear was essentially a de facto member of the Dead, and recorded most of the band’s classic live albums throughout the Sixties and Seventies, along with many other notable concerts in the Bay Area. The performance he recorded for this album, Johnny Cash at the Carousel Ballroom, came only months following Cash’s soon-to-become legendary live performance at Folsom Prison.

Preface

I grew up in a small North Georgia village nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains; its population in the Seventies was around 300 people. And way out in the boonies; television reception was virtually nil, and I could only pick up two AM radio stations on my transistor radio. Those stations broadcast mostly news and farm reports, along with good old country music that often featured healthy doses of Johnny Cash. This was, after all, farm country, and most of my nearby relatives were farmers who loved the music of the Man In Black. I rarely remember visiting any of my uncles’ homes back in the day when Johnny or June Carter Cash (and occasionally Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton) weren’t playing in the background or pouring out of the open window of a pickup truck.

Once a week, we’d head down to Gainesville, the “Queen City of the Mountains,” to shop. Gainesville’s population was about 25,000 people, so there was a plethora of available goods, especially compared to the tiny burg I spent most of my time in. By the time I reached ten years old, I’d found ways to make a few bucks here and there, and on one of these trips into town, had decided to buy my first LP record album, which was definitely going to be the just-released Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. “Folsom Prison Blues” was all over the AM airwaves in mid-1968, and when we arrived at Mason’s Department Store (kind of a scaled-back, small-town version of a WalMart), I was intently focused on picking up Johnny’s new record. I made a beeline for the record department, which was shockingly large and diverse for such a relatively small town. And while I immediately scoped out the Folsom Prison LP, I also took some time to browse about – it was my very first time there and I was overwhelmed by the selection. When my mom arrived to collect me about an hour later, my resolve had wavered. She insisted that we needed to leave now, and I hastily changed my mind, grabbing a nearby copy of Meet The Beatles. My musical direction changed forever, but I’ve always maintained an appreciation for Johnny Cash throughout my life.

The Man In Black Makes a Comeback

Johnny Cash hadn’t had a hit record since 1964’s “Understand Your Man” broke into the Top 40. Cash had developed an increasing dependence on drugs, and his popularity – along with his record sales – had plummeted as his world seemingly fell apart around him. Johnny Cash wrote himself a letter at the end of each year of his life, where he detailed his personal accomplishments and downfalls, and he counted 1967 as definitely having been the worst year of his entire life. When he met June Carter and eventually got clean, he had regained his enthusiasm for life and for his music. And he began to pitch an idea about making a live prison recording to the record execs at Columbia, who (not surprisingly) were less than enthusiastic.

Cash’s bad-boy image had made quite the impression on inmates across the country, who plied him with letters that begged him to come play a live show for them. He’d already played numerous prison shows over the last decade, but never with the idea of recording one for commercial release. A 1967 shake-up in the country music division of Columbia Records found Bob Johnston (Bob Dylan’s producer) in charge, and he quickly embraced Cash’s vision for a live album. Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison was recorded in January and released in May 1968; it soon became a smash hit for him, reaching the No. 1 position on the country charts and No. 15 on the mainstream album charts. And the lead single, “Folsom Prison Blues,” cracked the top 40 – Johnny Cash was again at the top of his game. All of this was particularly astonishing, because the live album was given virtually zero marketing support from the record label, yet still became a commercial and critical triumph.

When the opportunity came to play the San Francisco date, all of the above was still weeks away from happening, and Johnny Cash was often filled with doubt. He was ebullient over his recent marriage to June Carter, and he brought her along for the show at a venue that was more frequently ensconced in flower power than wildwood flowers. The setting was the Carousel Ballroom, which was a joint collective venture between the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. The Carousel served as a social and musical experiment for the psychedelia of the time, and would later gain a greater measure of fame when promoter Bill Graham moved his west-coast concerts to the ballroom and re-christened it the Fillmore West.

Cash’s 1968 concert came at the peak of hippiedom in the Haight-Ashbury era, and although the Carousel seated approximately 3,000 patrons, most accounts estimate that only about 700 were in attendance, and they were mostly hippies who probably had a scant knowledge of Johnny Cash’s music. The show would feature Johnny’s classic backing band, the Tennessee Three, featuring guitarist Luther Perkins, bassist Marshall Grant, and drummer W.S. Holland. In addition to sets from Cash and his band, June Carter Cash would also offer a medley of her traditional tunes that she’d sung with the Carter Family, and would later join Johnny for duets on many of his songs. The crowd, though relatively small, was enthusiastic, frequently shouting out requests, which Johnny obliged, regularly departing from his usual set list. Cash played off their eagerness for his music with a show filled with a newfound joyfulness; whether he knew it or not, he was standing on the cusp of greatness, along with a complete revitalization of his career.

The success that Cash would enjoy only weeks later with Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison would have a long lasting impact on most of his future recordings for the remainder of his career. Record label executives would insist that Cash’s records needed to be production-heavy, multi-layered affairs to help make them more commercially viable. That overly-produced approach is in stark contrast to “Bear” Stanley’s classic verité style for the Carousel Ballroom date, where his recording focuses on a more natural presentation with enhanced aural realism. Bear’s recording here is part of what Stanley called “Bear’s Sonic Journals,” and was simply put down on tape to help him refine his recording techniques. And as part of his own personal record, with no intent of ever releasing the set commercially.

Johnny Cash at the Carousel Ballroom

This new live set captures the man in black at the height of his powers, an artist who was beginning to regain his former swagger. The recording features a set list that’s less formalized than those employed on his more well-known live albums, and it’s obvious from listening to Johnny Cash at the Carousel Ballroom that he took cues from the audience and improvised on the spot. Thirty years after the event, Bear Stanley would stumble upon the tapes again, immediately realizing that it was a landmark recording that greatly deserved to reach a wider audience. Thus began a journey that took another twenty years (and ten years after Bear’s untimely death) for the Carousel Ballroom tapes to finally come within reach of the ears of Johnny Cash fans everywhere. Bear’s son, Starfinder Stanley, has worked very hard to preserve his father’s legacy, and he made the following remarks in the liner notes for the new release about his dad, and about the Carousel Ballroom recordings:

“When we began researching these reels, we bought old copies of Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison and Johnny Cash at San Quentin to compare the set lists, but what jumped out at us was the difference in the sound of the production of these three live albums. Folsom is one of the greatest live albums of all time, but it sounds like what it is: a prison cafeteria. It doesn’t sound anything like a studio, which is part of its charm and its power. No one expected it to be a hit, and so its production brilliantly captures the raw relationship between Johnny and the outsiders he loved. After Folsom hit big, the label had high expectations for San Quentin, so they rolled in their best equipment. The recording quality is beautiful, but with that production comes the editorial voice of the times, and so, for example, they accentuate Johnny’s trademark bass with extra depth.

Bear’s recording gives us an entirely different perspective on Johnny’s live sound during this creative peak, and is probably the closest to what it actually sounded like to be in the audience for a Johnny Cash show in 1968. That’s because Bear was the house sound man at the Carousel, where he’d built the entire sound system and which served as his sonic laboratory of sorts. Bear’s tapes were the way he documented his tinkering so he could review the results, and so he called them his “sonic journals.” His goal was simply to capture the sound of the room as precisely as possible, which he did by carefully choosing and placing the mics, and by using the highest-quality equipment. And so what we’re left with is the uncanny experience of feeling like we’re up on stage in between Johnny, June, and the Tennessee Three.

There’s an idiosyncrasy to this recording; on every other Johnny Cash record you’ve ever heard, Johnny is centered in the stereo soundstage. But on this one, Johnny is entirely on the left channel, and the Tennessee Three are all on the right. That’s a bit weird until your brain adjusts, but you quickly realize that you’ve been set right between Johnny and his band…Johnny is crystal clear; the Tennessee Three has a sonic spotlight thrown on them, sounding like Luther Perkins is plucking a high tension electrical wire; and you get this 3-D effect that they’re in the room with you. We experimented with moving Johnny back to center, but every time we did, either Luther or Johnny turned muddy, and we came to understand that there was a distinct method to Bear’s madness. Far better to stand on the stage amongst the musicians than to chase a more conventional headphone mix that loses some of the magic of that intimate night. This was part of Bear’s special genius, and the way he mic’d the stage without splitting the feeds from the stereo pairs of mics, bringing instead different areas of the stage onto the two different channels of his two track recorder to preserve sonic separation and clarity – ahead of his time in 1968.”

Owsley “Bear” Stanley is without a doubt one of the most interesting peripheral characters in the history of recorded music, and Bear had an outlaw background that was quite possibly even more colorful than Johnny Cash’s own. Bear had been a rocket engineer for the Air Force, a professional ballet dancer(!), and also worked as a chemist who was one of the first and principal producers of LSD, especially in the Bay Area. Bear was at the epicenter of California’s counterculture scene (he supplied acid to everyone from Ken Kesey to the Beatles), and his acid-laced experiences informed not only his approach to life, but also his non-traditional approach to acoustics and sound recordings.

Starfinder Stanley continued: “My dad experienced synesthesia while under the effects of LSD. His brain was taking in the sound that was coming through his ears and interpreting it with his visual cortex. Hallucinating the visuals of the sound moving through the room, and it didn’t look like what he expected. He paid close attention and realized that your brain can process sound as long as it’s emanating from a contiguous source rather than a split source. That’s why he moved toward the Wall of Sound. Every speaker in that wall was dedicated to a specific thing. For example, when he did sound for the Grateful Dead, each string of Phil Lesh’s bass had its own speaker. So each speaker is doing less. Since it only has one job to do, it can do it better.”

The music opens with Johnny’s rendition of “Cocaine Blues,” which he’d also played at the Folsom Prison date, and he references the new record in his introduction to the song. Johnny had the uncanny ability to fuse his own range of life experiences into the songs he sang and the stories he told, and this helped him connect to audiences with a level of intimacy that many other performers could rarely approach. Johnny’s knack for great storytelling continues with gripping offerings of traditionals like “The Long Black Veil” and “Orange Blossom Special,” then he offers a compelling spoken intro that transitions into the train-riding classic “Going To Memphis.” He then gives a poignant rendering of the classic World War II story of a native American war hero fallen on hard times in “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” The somber mood rapidly changes to one of joy that gets the audience on their feet with a hard-rolling version of another train song, Cash’s immensely popular “Rock Island Line.”

Johnny plays a pair of Bob Dylan songs back-to-back, “One Too Many Mornings” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Cash and Dylan had been mutual admirers and friends for years, and only a year following the Carousel Ballroom date, Dylan invited Johnny to make a guest appearance on his own comeback album, 1969’s Nashville Skyline. Not long after, Cash’s sudden change in fortunes would find him hosting the nationally broadcast The Johnny Cash Show, where he returned the favor by having Dylan make a guest appearance on the very first show. More traditionals follow; a particularly tender version of “Green, Green Grass of Home” shows Johnny at his most moving, and the rowdy, raucous “Bad News” finds him laughing out loud on stage. The audience shares his enthusiasm, and gives a big cheer when Johnny introduces “the little wife,” June Carter Cash, who joins him in a rousing rendition of Cash’s classic “Jackson.”

Johnny then takes a break, and June belts out a really compelling take of her original, “Tall Lover Man,” which ends all too quickly with a rapid fade out mid-song – I’m guessing that Bear’s tape ran out, requiring the unexpected exit. He quickly recovers, however, capturing a medley of June’s songs that were made famous by the Carter Family; once again, her performances are absolutely phenomenal, and it’s unfortunate that she chose to only give snippets of classic songs like “Wildwood Flower,” “Foggy Mountain Top,” “This Land Is Your Land,” and “Wabash Cannonball.” Johnny rejoins her on stage with a fabulous rendition of Carl Perkins’ “Long Legged Guitar Pickin’ Man,” when he and June literally scream the call-and-response lyrics at each other; the audience really goes berserk! Johnny then tells the crowd that they only have time for a couple of more songs, and then pounds out hits like “Ring of Fire,” “Big River,” and the Tennessee Three give a stirring instrumental lead-in to “Don’t Bring Your Guns to Town.” The dour mood of the song quickly shifts as Johnny launches into a rapid-fire offering of his all-time classic “I Walk The Line,” and a memorable concert comes to a close with another extended instrumental outro from the Tennessee Three.

Listening Results

I originally started the listening sessions for this album with a PS Audio amplifier and Magneplanar LRS loudspeaker setup. The Magneplanar LRS produces a shockingly wide and deep soundstage that enhances almost everything that plays over it with a sort of hyper-realism that just has to be experienced to be believed. But as great as this system is, I noticed something out of sorts right out of the gate. Johnny Cash at the Carousel Ballroom is definitely one of those discs where a more traditional audio setup is called for to properly experience the maximum effect of Bear’s recording. I swapped out the PS Audio/Magneplanar equipment for Zu Audio Omen loudspeakers and a PrimaLuna EVO 300 tube integrated amplifier. I have the toe-in of the speakers set up so that the tweeters are pointed to overlap each of my shoulders at my listening position – the right tweeter points to my left shoulder, and the left tweeter points to my right shoulder. This creates a broad soundstage with superb imaging and a bit more center channel presence with most material. The Zu loudspeakers employ a dynamic driver configuration from a 1930s Harry Olson design, and that, in combination with the tube amplification, definitely provided a more authentic and organic musical presentation. This setup was perfect for Johnny, June, and the Tennessee Three, and everything simply snapped into place aurally!

I listen to a lot of Fifties and Sixties classic jazz recordings, which often tend to be very hard “left-to-right” in nature, with sometimes very little center fill in the recordings. So the setup chosen by Bear Owsley for Johnny Cash at the Carousel Ballroom didn’t strike me as particularly unusual sounding at all, and was actually quite typical for the period. And I totally agree that (perhaps after a couple of adult beverages) it’s very easy to suspend your disbelief, and allow your brain to aurally recreate the on-stage arrangement of the players before you. Bear felt his job was to amplify the music so it sounded equally good in every seat in the ballroom; Starfinder Stanley is correct – this is a truly great-sounding recording!

Conclusion

The street date for Johnny Cash at the Carousel Ballroom got pushed back during the manufacturing process; the album was originally supposed to arrive in record stores mid-September, and now it’s been rescheduled for October 29. Which means that it still won’t actually be available (except for pre-order) for about a week after this review is published. Because of delays with the physical copies, only digital assets were available to reviewers prior to the release. So I can’t really comment on the compact discs or LPs, or their respective packaging, all of which lately has been top-notch for Sony/Legacy releases.

The accompanying booklet includes informative and entertaining new essays from Starfinder Stanley, Johnny and June’s son John Carter Cash, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, and Dave Schools of Widespread Panic. John Carter Cash calls At The Carousel Ballroom “A masterpiece…Dad gave what I believe to be one of the most intimate and connected shows I have ever heard.” Hawk Semins, executive producer at the Owsley Stanley Foundation, said he’d “heard a lot of tapes of Carousel shows where the audience is silent. This audience is fully embracing the performance, calling out requests, spontaneously cheering. It’s all of these historical textures and recognition of the moment that makes me gravitate towards this release as something truly special…Johnny Cash’s brilliance is in part that he connected with everybody.”

Johnny Cash fans will definitely want to connect with this outstanding new release, whether by LP, CD, or digitally streaming via any of the major online outlets like Tidal or Qobuz. Regardless, this is a remarkable record that’s so much more than just an archival or historical release, and is not to be missed – Johnny Cash at the Carousel Ballroom comes very highly recommended!

Sony/Legacy/BMG Recordings, CD/2 LPs (download/streaming from, Amazon, Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify, Deezer).

Images supplied by Shorefire Media, Sony/Legacy, and the Owsley Stanley Foundation.

I first caught “the Q” in college on a whim. It was a last-minute thing in 1987 and my buddy Matt who was from Hartford was a rabid fan. He had often played me NRBQ studio tracks but nothing really clicked until I saw them live. There at The Chance in Poughkeepsie, New York, I saw a band with incredible dexterity put on a show that covered rock, R&B, jazz, cowpunk, and even a few sweet American standards – all with an ease that allowed them to travel musically in ways I’d never seen before. From there my real relationship with this band took hold, and often found its way to the famed Toad’s Place in New Haven, Connecticut.

NRBQ has been at it for a while. They released their self-titled debut in 1969, and the band in just three configurations toured and recorded consistently until their 35th anniversary in 2004.  Then, in 2011 with the record Keep This Love Goin’, they introduced a new lineup with founder Terry Adams on keyboards, Scott Ligon on guitar, Casey McDonough on bass, and now John Perrin on drums. It was a daring move by Adams to introduce such a radical lineup to fans of a band who are known to be as faithful as they come. But this group had taken their time to get their footing and to be as solid as all of the lineups that preceded them before coming forward as “NRBQ.” Fans heard the result of that commitment and responded in kind.

Ten years later NRBQ will now return with its first full-length album since 2014. The record, to be released November 12, 2021 is called Dragnet, and in addition to their take on that TV show theme, the album contains ten new original tracks, all of which were written or co-written by the band, including Adams’ “Sunflower,” which was originally recorded for the 2018 film Change in the Air. The album sits comfortably alongside their best-known work, delivering songs that will make you smile, bop, and often giggle. It’s completely “Q!”

We had the opportunity to speak with NRBQ guitarist Scott Ligon about his tenure in the band, what it’s like writing with a rock legend like Terry Adams, and how the legacy of this remarkable act can be kept alive for generations to come.

Ray Chelstowski: How did you pull this record together during a pandemic?

Scott Ligon: We all don’t live in the same area, so we decided a long time ago that whenever we get together, we should try to cut some tracks. That’s how we have been doing it, even before COVID. Whenever we’d get together to do a two-week tour, we would book a couple of days on either end and spend a couple of nights in the studio. The real challenge with this record was finishing it. We had a lot of material that was in various states of being complete. We could have wrapped everything up a lot more quickly had we not been forced to be separated for so long.

RC: So, was Dragnet recorded in a number of different locations?

SL: No, it was pretty much all recorded up at Harmonium Studio in Massachusetts, where Terry has worked for a long time. A couple of things got cut several years ago at other locations because we were out on the road. We sort of have to work that way because several of us live in Chicago and Terry is out East.

RC: You co-wrote the album opener “Where’s My Pebble?” with Terry. What is the process like when you write with him?

SL: It’s always different. The very first time that I wrote with Terry was on an album called Holy Tweet. It was a solo record of his and it was really special because it was just me, Terry and Tom Ardolino (late NRBQ drummer). We had a tune on the record called “Yes I Will” and it didn’t have a bridge. Terry said, “Scott why don’t you write a bridge for this one?” Then they both stepped out. For me, being a lifelong NRBQ fan, that was terrifying. But it turned out good. “Where’s My Pebble” is a song that I had originally written as an instrumental. As we were kicking it around, Terry remembered that he had something that he’d been singing while riding around in the car that might fit. Somehow, the two separate ideas just matched up! So, there is never any one way we work together. It’s all based on necessity, [with all of us] together finding what the song needs.

RC: Five of the eleven tracks on the new record are Terry’s. Does he have a set way of approaching them in the studio or do you all help shape the final cut?

SL: A lot of it has to do with the way we’re playing, what each guy brings to the song. Terry does have some pretty specific ideas about what he wants but at times it’s a lot more wide-open. There are many songs we’ve recorded where there is very little discussion about how things should go. Terry will start playing and we all go along. At times something magical happens without much conversation at all. But every song is different and you never really know where it’s going to go. It’s kind of the way we work on stage. We never know what the first song is going to be. There’s just no formula.

However, Terry does give unique direction. For example, he might say, “the guy playing guitar on this is not a really good guitar player. He’s just a guy who’s barely hangin’ on,” Often, he uses a character: “the bass player on this one is a session guy who doesn’t really want to be here so he’s just playing the bare minimum.” This happens a lot with Terry.

RC: Your songs on the record have a real Al Anderson vibe to them and Casey’s song could have been written by Joey Spampinato [Anderson and Spampinato were former NRBQ members – Ed.]. Do you feel an obligation to follow the musical path they created when you write for NRBQ?

SL: No. I think that because NRBQ has been so influential in my life, it’s just part of my musical language. Part of the reason I was so impacted by them to begin with is because it was familiar. It was brand new but it was also familiar. I’m sure that a lot of NRBQ fans can relate to what I am talking about. There’s a certain sense of positivity in the songwriting. It’s always upbeat, which has become even more in focus as a result of the pandemic. It’s just necessary these days. But as far as the writing goes, ever since I was 18 years old, I have been writing songs that I have thought should be NRBQ songs. Honestly, anything I become involved with is going to have some of that feeling to it.

RC: The band’s music can be incredibly complex. What’s the hardest song to get your arms around?

SL: The hardest thing that we play is a song called “Bargains.” It was never officially released. I can’t give you the background on it because it’s impossible. It’s kind of like a sound collage. That’s the hardest song. Then again, just the intro to “Flat Foot Floozy” always makes me wonder sometimes if I’m gonna make it through!

RC: Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead has said that he dreams sometimes at night that when he is gone, John Mayer and company will carry the torch and keep the band’s music alive. Do you and Casey ever feel that way with NRBQ?

SL: When I first met Terry and we were just starting to audition some musicians for the band, he told me that he thought the band should just be called NRBQ, thinking about it in terms of The Duke Ellington Orchestra or something like that. It’s just this living thing that goes on for the musicians who understand where the music comes from and what it’s about. It’s just a new batch of guys [now]. When we first started playing it felt like we weren’t really ready to take on that name. It felt like we hadn’t quite earned it yet. That’s why we waited until 2021. I’m glad we did, because in some crazy way I have always felt like this is the band I am supposed to be in.

Header image of NRBQ courtesy of John Krucke.

It’s not unusual for musicians to be characterized as strange, eccentric and even downright wacky. Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to them. I’m fascinated by eccentricity, nonconformity and rebelliousness, traits seemingly exhibited by many top-shelf artists, along with their innate musical abilities. Is it possible musicians’ brains are wired differently than us mere mortals? According to neurological studies, clinical evidence suggests that they indeed are.

Did you know, for example, that the corpus callosum in musicians tends to be larger? “The porpoise calzone,” you ask? No, no the corpus callosum, the band that unites the two hemispheres of the brain. It’s where you’ll find the largest collection of white matter tissue in the brain. “Oh, that corpus callosum,” you sheepishly respond while scratching your noggin.

That fun, cocktail party fact is courtesy of Dr. Gottfried Schlaug. He’s the director at the Music and Neuroimaging Laboratory at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and an associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. Credentials that pretty much allow Dr. Schlaug to say whatever he wants about the corpus callosum. I’m certainly in no position to question the good doctor.

Dr. Schlaug relied on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRIs) to measure different parts of the brain. Standard MRIs show brain anatomy, while fMRIs show the areas of the brain that are active while performing tasks, such as playing a musical instrument. That’s when he first discovered the size differences in musicians’ corpus callosum. And then he discovered enlargements in the auditory and motor parts of the brain.

You can’t look at the fMRI images and determine if person is a genius (or not), but you could say with some degree of probability if a person is likely a musician. Schlaug also discovered that musicians who started their training at less than seven years of age had a significantly larger corpus callosum than those who began musical training at a later age.

A large part of Dr. Schlaug’s work is studying the therapeutic benefits of music for patients with brain injuries, including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and stroke victims. Click on this link for more information.

Other studies have reported differences in brain structure with musicians who play different instruments. For example, a part of the brain associated with hand and finger movement was more prominent on the left hemisphere for keyboard players, and more prominent on the right hemisphere for string players. The differences in brain structure are likely due to musicians adapting to the specific needs and demands required for the instruments they play.

Music as a tool for healing is accepted in many cultures. Only in the past twenty years or so have the medical and scientific communities come together to acknowledge the correlation. Mickey Hart, former drummer for the Grateful Dead, has been exploring music and healing for a number of years. He’s also on the Board for the non-profit Institute For Music and Neurologic Function.

Hart first experienced the therapeutic value of music with his own grandmother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s. Hart described the encounter this way: “my grandmother was fading and hadn’t spoken in three to four years. Not a single word. I started playing the drums and she started smiling, you know, as best she could. And then she said my name. It was a startling discovery. Musical rhythm reconnected her to the world that was fading away.”

So how do you explain the idiosyncratic behavior of some of our better-known rock stars? Ozzy Osbourne biting off a bat’s head or snorting ants. The Red Hot Chili Peppers performing nude with only a sock over their privates. Keith Richards smoking and snorting his father’s ashes, or Keith Moon throwing a piano in a pool. Can this all be attributed to eccentricity, a need for attention, illicit drugs and/or perhaps the presence of brain anomalies; which I’m asking with the utmost affection? It’s hard to say, but it’s quite likely some combination of the above.

Pink Floyd paid homage to its late co-founding member Syd Barrett in the track “Brain Damage,” from the seminal LP The Dark Side of the Moon. Co-founder and bassist Roger Waters has said the LP’s insanity-themed lyrics are about Barrett’s poor mental health. Water’s has also indicated the lyric, “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon,” is an acknowledgement that he somewhat related to Barrett’s idiosyncratic behavior. Waters views himself a bit of an outlier, though, of course, in far more modest terms than Barrett, who exhibited strong schizophrenic tendencies.

We all know the brain is a highly complex organ. It controls thought, memory, emotion, touch, motor skills, vision, breathing, temperature, hunger and more. It has several large-scale neural networks, including the default, salience and executive networks. Among people with high levels of creative thinking, there’s a strong connection between those neural networks, while in most people those networks generally work in opposition. Researchers have found strong evidence that the ability to think creatively can be reliably predicted based on an individual’s unique brain connectivity profile.

If you exposed a battery of objects to a large sample of people and asked them to describe a range of possible uses for each of those objects, the vast majority will produce a fairly limited number of ideas. But a small minority will suggest a large array of creative ideas that will leave the others baffled by their sheer number.

The late, great David Bowie once said, “I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.” Bowie, who exhibited massive degrees of creativity in music, fashion and so on, was hardly fearful of self-expression. He wasn’t afraid to take chances or display his individuality. How do you explain one of his greatest creations, Ziggy Stardust? Ziggy, a fictional character, isn’t an accountant, a schoolteacher or a bus driver. He’s a left-handed, bisexual, alien rock guitarist, who acts as a messenger for extraterrestrial beings. It’s just a hunch, but I’ll bet Bowie’s corpus callosum was obscenely massive.

Other uber-talented musicians who qualify or are in the margins of eccentricity include Michael Jackson, Elton John, Lady Gaga, Prince and Frank Zappa, to name a few.

In the world of comedy, look no further than the late great Robin Williams. In a previous lifetime, I had the pleasure of spending an evening with Robin Williams, Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg while filming a commercial for HBO. The filming happened to coincide with a 1993 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) debate between then vice president Al Gore and Ross Perot, the late billionaire, philanthropist and former presidential candidate.

During breaks in filming, cast and crew all huddled over a portable radio to listen to the debate. Without missing a beat, Robin Williams broke into impersonations of both Gore and Perot. He’d shuttle between the two like one would turn the channel on a television remote. In real time and totally unscripted, Williams nailed both their voices and their points of view, completely misconstruing their words for comedic effect. It was a close-up look at Williams’ comedic brilliance and his eccentricity. It was astonishing to listen to Williams spontaneously pull this together, his brain and timing in sync like a fine-tuned engine. It was all “A”-level comedic material and startlingly funny!

Of course, after Williams’ tragic death in 2014, it was revealed he suffered from Lewy body dementia (LBD), a brain disease similar to Alzheimer’s.

The famed clinical neurologist and renowned author Oliver Sacks spent 40 years studying the brain and chronicling his patients’ stories. A few of the late Sacks’ books include Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Awakenings, the inspiration behind the 1990 film of the same name starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

When you listen to interviews with Sacks he’s both positively brilliant and hysterically funny, a trait generally not associated with the neurological profession. Raised in England, Sacks grew up in a musically-oriented family. When reminiscing about his childhood, Sacks said when he was a five year old his mother asked him, “what do you like most in the world?” Sacks replied, “smoked salmon and Bach,” updating the story by saying, “almost 70 years later it’s still the same.”

Sacks’ tells a story of a man suffering from Alzheimer’s. The man could not recall what transpired a mere 10 minutes ago, where he lived or what he did for a living, though he remembered the baritone part to every song he’d ever sung, and could still perform each flawlessly.

Sacks rationalized the man’s behavior this way: “The memory to perform, procedural memory psychologists call it, is vested in the lower parts of the brain. You use your (brain) cortex to learn, and with repetition, the action patterns, along with all the intelligence and sensibility built into them, is safeguarded in the lower parts of the brain.”

https://www.npr.org/2007/11/13/16110162/oliver-sacks-observes-the-mind-through-music

Pianist Derek Paravicini was three months premature at birth and weighed only 1lb. 5 oz. An overdose of oxygen therapy in the neonatal ward left him blind and severely autistic (similar circumstances led to Stevie Wonder’s blindness).

By the age of two Derek was drawn to the piano, and his parents realized something unusual was going on. At the age of four, while attending a school for the blind in London, Derek made a beeline for a piano and without any musical training started playing scales and the song “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” from the musical Evita.

Derek, now 42, can’t remember his phone number and has trouble counting beyond 10, but he can hear a complicated musical composition once and instantaneously play it back note for note. Ordinary daily tasks that we take for granted are incredibly challenging for him, but today Derek is considered a prodigy and a world-class pianist. Derek’s case demonstrates how music can activate parts of the brain that for some are dormant or non-functional. Music functions as a trigger that stitches together non-functioning parts of Derek’s brain.

The brain indeed is like a musical instrument. Every individual brain is “tuned” a bit differently. The brain has restorative powers, while it can also short circuit like a guitar or amplifier. It can adapt and be programmed, though in moderation and with limitations that can vary by individual. The brain by far is the body’s most complex organ, and the therapeutic value of music for healing is undeniable.

There are many ongoing research studies on music, the brain and its related diseases. Given the brain’s complexity, there are far more questions than answers to unpack. A few neuroscientists are also working on a brain preservation technique called aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC). The goal of ASC is to preserve human brains at a molecular level, allowing for the possibility of future uploading to a computer or a synthetic body. It sounds like a Stephen King sci-fi novel.

Perhaps it’s the limitations of my own noggin, the smallness of my corpus callosum, or that I’m not a visionary, but that kind of brain restoration project sounds just batsh*t crazy. So, here are a couple of modern-day concerns to ponder: whom do you call if after uploading your brain begins to buffer incessantly? AppleCare? And how about viruses? Will McAfee or Norton provide virus scans?

Well, call me old fashioned, but I kind of like my brain exactly where it is.

Header image courtesy of Pixabay.com/ElisaRiva.

In Part One (Issue 145), we looked at Phil Keaggy’s musical beginnings with power trio Glass Harp, and his early solo recordings, which showed his skills expanding beyond hard rock music to incorporate elements of folk, pop, fusion jazz, classical, hymns, show tunes, new age music and more into both his guitar playing and writing. Part Two (Issue 146) covered the crystallization of these influences into some of his most cohesive and highly regarded releases, garnering Keaggy both Grammy nominations and GMA (Gospel Music Association) Dove Award wins.

Coming off his Grammy-nominated and hard rocking Crimson and Blue, with the secular version of Blue released concurrently in 1993, Phil Keaggy was on a creative and commercial roll. As often happens, record labels like to strike with a commercial follow-up while the proverbial iron is still hot. Phil Keaggy was swayed by executives at his label, Sparrow/UMG, to record his next album, True Believers, with British ex-Babe Ruth songwriter and producer Alan Shacklock. Shacklock, who wrote the title track, promised to have Keaggy’s next record “launch you for the next ten years,” and with Shacklock writing or co-writing 40 percent of the songs on True Believers, the project definitely went in a much more polished direction.

While Keaggy’s guitar playing and singing on True Believers remains outstanding, especially with his solos on “Salvation Army Band” and the heartfelt “The Survivor,” there is a forced feel to Shacklock’s heavy production hand akin to when Phil Spector stamped his Wall of Sound imprint on the Beatles’ Let It Be. Keaggy himself admits, in retrospect, that it probably wasn’t the best direction for him to go musically, although he still likes some of the songs and performs them in concert. In spite of the production, the quality of the songs and performances shine through.

Keaggy also performs an unusual Celtic rendition of the traditional hymn, “Be Thou My Vision,” replete with U2-type rhythms, bagpipes, rocking riffs, and psychedelic lead guitar lines at the end.

“The Survivor,” a tribute to attempted saline abortion survivor Gianna Jensen, is a tour de force extended-length track that starts as an acoustic ballad and builds to a rocking crescendo, similar to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”

True Believers became a big commercial success, which undoubtedly pleased Shacklock (who won an EMI songwriting award for the title song) and Sparrow. On a concurrent note of personal musical vindication, Guitar Player readers, wowed by his simultaneously elegiac, introspective, and celebratory instrumental masterpiece Beyond Nature, voted Phil Keaggy the Number Two Best Acoustic Fingerstyle Guitarist in 1995.

1995 also saw the release of Time, a 2-CD greatest hits compilation that included Glass Harp tracks and some previously unreleased versions of songs, such as a live performance of “Shouts of Joy” from Crimson and Blue and a live concert Glass Harp recording of “Do Lord.”

In the early 1990s, DIY digital multitrack recording capability hit the market in the form of the ADAT system. Created by Alesis (hence, A.D.A.T. = Alesis Digital Audio Tape), it was an 8-track system that utilized helical-scan heads comparable to VHS tape recorders to record 44.1 kHz CD-quality audio. The ADAT machines had an accurate electronic sync system that could chain together up to 16 recorders, thus capable of providing up to 128 discrete tracks. (Later ADAT versions could record in 48 kHz as well as 44.1.)

Utilizing S-VHS cassettes, the ADAT format became an indispensable tool for artists like Phil Keaggy, who already had experience engineering and mixing in his home studio, but had been thwarted by budget and equipment limitations in his ability to expand and upgrade to a higher-quality production level.

Once armed with an ADAT system, Phil Keaggy’s already-prolific catalog would grow exponentially, as a growing subcategory of original and arranged instrumental works and collaborations would continue to flourish alongside his conventional songwriting. His home studio, which he has christened “Kegworth Studios,” has since been the source for the bulk of Phil Keaggy’s recorded output.

Following True Believers, Keaggy’s subsequent concerts became the genesis of continued performance evolutions of some of its songs, like “Salvation Army Band.” Meanwhile, Keaggy found himself in a lyrical songwriting rut, but with a cornucopia of musical ideas. These instrumental compositions would form the nucleus of the electric 220 (1996), the Dove Award-winning Acoustic Sketches (1996), and On The Fly (1997).

1996’s 220 featured Phil Keaggy with Phil Madeira on keys and some friends, including Madonna collaborator Patrick Leonard and a debut on drums by then 9-year-old Ian Keaggy. 220 picks up the hard rock vibe where Crimson and Blue left off. Opening with the Steve Winwood/Traffic influenced “Animal,” 220 is a treasure trove of Keaggy’s rock lead guitar playing, complete with bluesy bends, shredding flurries, and jazzy chromaticism. Using few effects, Keaggy’s raw, blistering rock distortion tones hearken back to both Crimson and Blue as well as his earlier Glass Harp material. 220 reached Number 21 on the Billboard Christian Music chart, which can be attributed primarily to the strength of Keaggy’s reputation, since none of the songs have any lyrics or direct Christian themes.

Acoustic Sketches remains a personal favorite of Keaggy’s. In addition to winning a Dove Award, Acoustic Sketches showed Keaggy that an entire album of solo acoustic guitar devoid of orchestration could become popular with his audience.

He described it in an interview with Crosswalk.com:

“I don’t think it’s on anyone’s top-selling list, but it’s an album that has meant a lot to people, whether they are musicians or not. It’s an album that I’m very happy to hand out to people. I’ve entered a new season of instrumental songwriting that’s really exploded since 220 and Acoustic Sketches. I ended up doing On the Fly, which was as easy as breathing. That album came about so easily, with a lot of joy. There’s a lot of freedom expressed on that album, both on acoustic and electric.”

“Del’s Bells” is an example of the intimate ambience evoked on Acoustic Sketches. The Del is generally thought to reference luthier Del Langejans, who custom built the guitar Keaggy played on many of the tracks. On his Bandcamp page, Keaggy recalled these notes on the recording of Acoustic Sketches:

“Back when I was exploring new ways to use my Lexicon JamMan [looper pedal – Ed.] in the mid ’90s, and still recording to an analog 8-track reel to reel machine, I plugged my Langejans guitar into the JamMan and out of the JamMan straight into the input of channel 1 and 2 of the Tascam 388/ 8-track machine. I just started making stuff up and looping over the phrases.

Here’s a rundown of the obvious tracks that were spontaneous:

Tracks 1,2,4,6,7,10,13,14,16,17 and 18 were improvised on the spot.

The other tracks were formulated and constructed beforehand.

Track 11, ‘Swing Low,’ was actually recorded during my Beyond Nature sessions but we all agreed it didn’t fit that project, and it feels more at home here.

Tracks 21, 22 and 23 are bonus live recordings put here, hopefully for your listening pleasure – and mine as well, as I enjoyed hearing these live recordings, especially ‘Nellie’s Tune!’”

Well, there you have it – Freehand came about a few years later with an assortment of improvised pieces and worked out songs as well, similar to this collection.

Cheers – Phil Keaggy.”

On The Fly straddled the electric/acoustic dichotomy of Keaggy’s musical directions by incorporating both of those styles. However, his electric side on this record showcases more jazz fusion and ambient leanings, with a greater use of reverb, eBow [a hand-held electronic guitar sustaining device – Ed.], and other processing like on his 1987 instrumental album The Wind and The Wheat.

The six-part suite, “The Way Of The Pilgrim,” is separated into 1) Vision, 2) Longing, 3) Pursuit, 4) The Journey, 5) The Return, and 6) Rest, and is reminiscent of the style of Beyond Nature, highlighted by blending classical, folk, and jazz fingerpicking elements into solo acoustic guitar performances.

The 24:25 long “The Sojourner” brings both elements together, beginning with acoustic and then adding electric guitar.

1998’s self-titled Phil Keaggy returned to the rawer guitar and Beatle-esque sounds of Sunday’s Child and Crimson and Blue. “Days Like You” and several other songs are very much in the vein of his version of Badfinger’s “Baby Blue” from Blue.

The Celtic-flavored “Above All Things” took some of the U2-flavored and marching drum elements of True Believers into a more intimate realm of subtlety that eschewed Alan Shacklock’s bombastic flourishes for something, ironically, more in the arena of Paul McCartney pieces like, “Mull of Kintyre.”

By this time, Phil Keaggy was perfectly comfortable adapting his vast catalog of songs into solo acoustic performance arrangements, as this solo version of “Above All Things” demonstrates.

It is at this point where space reasons necessitate the omission of some releases, as Keaggy’s prolific output drastically increased beyond the scope of responsible coverage, and some of the recordings are out of print or only available from his Bandcamp site. For example, in 1999 Keaggy would release Premium Jams, which consists of outtakes and spontaneous jam sessions recorded during the making of Crimson and Blue. Additionally, Phil Keaggy released a four-part series of primarily instrumental releases under the theme “Music To Paint By” under the subtitles “Electric Blue”, “Still Life”, “Brushstrokes” and “Splash.” As Keaggy also released numerous collaborations and cover records (which will be covered in the next installment), the remainder of Part Three will focus solely on his solo releases that are commercially available.

With so many secular artists recording Christmas records, it would be remiss for Contemporary Christian music’s premier guitar virtuoso not to have one as well! 1999 saw the release of Majesty and Wonder: An Instrumental Christmas, which is billed, “Phil Keaggy with the London Festival Orchestra.” Not unlike the Crimson and Blue/Blue dual releases of partially different versions for different demographic audiences, Majesty and Wonder received the similar treatment, as Keaggy noted in Crosswalk.com:

“Judith Volz, who does A&R for me, worked out a situation for me to do some albums for Unison. The first one I did for them was the Christmas album. I finished it in June of ’98, but it wasn’t released last year. My good buddy John Schroeder at Fingerstyle [Guitar] magazine got permission for the fan club to do a limited release of that Christmas album. We called it A Christmas Gift. It’s the Unison album with a different sequence and artwork. It opens up with “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” which is done very tongue-in-cheek. It has a kind of ukulele-ish sound at the beginning. I’m playing a three-quarter size classical, a little student model. That’s the same guitar I played on “A Sign Came Through a Window.” It sounds like rubber bands being played.

The album went through some major changes and the title was changed to Majesty & Wonder, which was released this year. The album is produced by me, and I play all the instruments on it. I play quite a variety of guitars: the Tacoma Papoose, Langejans classical, Langejans Grand Concert, the Olson Acoustic SJ – I’ve been playing that guitar for fourteen years, and I still love it. I love Langejans’ guitars too.”

A Christmas Gift would subsequently be retitled An Angel’s Christmas.

Part Four of “Phil Keaggy: A Lifetime of Joyful Noises” will cover his recorded output in the 21st century as a solo artist, with a subsequent installment on his numerous collaboration albums, cover albums, and insights as to why he is held in such high regard by his musical peers and other guitarists around the world.

I must apologize to my valiant readers (all four of you) for the time lapse between Part Two (Issue 142) and Part Three. (Part One appeared in Issue 139.) I had a crazy summer professionally and personally. I trust you four are all well in these freakish times.

In 1978, on the heels of the hit movie Rocky, Sylvester Stallone used a script he’d written prior to Rocky for a new movie, Paradise Alley. Music producer Bones Howe has related that he doesn’t know how Stallone and Waits met, but suddenly Stallone was just there. Stallone gave Waits a small part in the movie, casting him as Mumbles, a salon piano player. Two Waits songs made it on the soundtrack: “(Meet Me In) Paradise Alley” and “Annie’s Back in Town.” Waits was thrilled at the chance to act, and a new career branch sprouted. Sprooshed. Sprang. Whatever.

Waits’ next non-musical project was to write the text for an art reproduction book of Peellaert paintings, titled Las Vegas – The Big Room. Waits liked the diversion, telling Rolling Stone, “Well y’know, ya have to keep busy. After all, a dog never pissed on a moving car…” That’s our boy.

 In 1980 Francis Ford Coppola needed a film to help refill the bank with the money he’d lost on Apocalypse Now. Despite critical raves and the huge box office success, Coppola had spent a fortune on the film and needed to do something lighter and less expensive. Coppola had heard Waits’ music and wanted a kind of lyrical running score to complement the love story One From the Heart. Waits was interested in the idea but had become tired of the piano bar approach to his music and was looking for a new direction. Waits decided to do the project despite the “lounge operetta” theme Coppola wanted because first, Waits was given the entire score, and shoot, it was Francis Ford Coppola.

Unfortunately, Coppola was unable to rein in his budgetary appetite, creating a soundstage to duplicate the Las Vegas setting of the movie, with hotels, streets, shops, a replica of McCarran Airport complete with a jetway and a refurbished jetliner, and the spectacular blaze of the Vegas cityscape. Dude, just film it in Vegas like everybody else. Of course, Coppola isn’t everybody else.

On release, One From The Heart received poor reviews and grossed $636,796 after spending $26 million to produce. Eeep.

One happy result was that Waits got a cameo part and the experience of scoring a major movie, and he and Coppola became fast friends. Coppola loved Waits’ personal and artistic style, using Waits in four of his subsequent films, and having Tom sing at his daughter’s wedding.

Another bit of serendipity had Waits meeting his future bride and savior on the set. Kathleen Brennan was working as a story analyst on One from the Heart when she bumped into Waits, and Tom was in love. Waits and Brennan would later spin some different stories. I saw Brennan in the audience of an interview with Tom Waits. She was asked how she met Tom, and she said she was a nun in a convent and found Tom asleep in the church one morning. She was so captivated she gave up God for him. Waits naturally loved her rendition of how they met, and would repeat the tale often.

Whatever the circumstance of their meeting, it was the union of Waits and Brennan that would help create the new direction Waits was looking for, helped along by Kathleen getting Tom to quit smoking, cut down on the alcohol, and generally cleaning him up. She became his muse, his inspiration, and often his writing partner.

Waits’ film career continued with some 35 films after One From the Heart, right up to a new film, Licorice Pizza, to be released in 2021. He played Renfield in the 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Got to watch that one. In 1987 he played a bum in Ironweed with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. I did watch this one and I recommend it. It’s worth the watch to see Jack and Tom together. Waits on Nicholson: “Nicholson’s a consummate storyteller…You can learn a lot from him just by watching him open a window or tie his shoes.” High praise from a fellow consummate storyteller.

Back to the music. In 1983 Waits self-produced Swordfishtrombones, his first album since Heartattack and Vine. Here was a major stylistic change encouraged by Kathleen. The name is a tell. This stuff is like, well, a swordfishtrombone. Waits dropped the piano act and banished the sax entirely. The opening track “Underground” is a classic example. The entire approach of instrumentation and arrangement is a lot of fun and a real departure.

The album features master weirdo percussionists Victor Feldman and Francis Thumm. The assortment of percussive whiz-bangs, including metal aunglongs, marimbas, bass boo bams, brake drums, and bass drum with rice, afforded Waits fascinating undercurrents to his songs.

One tune, “In The Neighborhood’, is kind of a throwback but worth a listen just from his still-beautiful lyrics.

The next two entries are favorites from the recording. “16 Shells From a 30-Ought-Six” is a great recording and another example of Waits’ new direction.

This next is interesting just from the storyline. “Frank’s Wild Years” is a short story Waits wrote as a spoken piece, which eventually spawned an idea for a play that Tom and Kathleen co-produced, and which spent play time in a Chicago theater while they lost money. The arrangement goes back to an earlier feel, with Larry Taylor on acoustic bass and Ronnie Barron on the Hammond B3 organ.

“Frank hung his wild years on a nail he drove through his wife’s forehead.” Yeah, you can get a play out of that.

Elektra, Waits’ record label at the time, hated Swordfishtrombones, so he switched to Island Records instead of compromising, thank heavens. The album is a real hoot and should be savored like a martini shaken with an olive and a razor blade. Some of the cuts are definitely Waits Meets Zappa.

Rain Dogs, released in 1985, was written while Waits lived in New York and features street sounds recorded by Waits on cassette and used as backdrop on some tracks. Like Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs channels instrumentation that at times evokes Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn, and in other places, Zappa. Bass players unite! Dig the bass track to “Midtown.”

The opening cut on the album again shows Waits new direction with a typical lyric for him, but the arrangement uses instrumental ideas born in Swordfishtrombones. With Marc Ribot from the Lounge Lizards on guitar, here’s “Singapore.”

Waits had gotten Keith Richards’ attention, and Tom certainly had a good day when he got Richards for three songs on the album. This next is “Union Square,” and I could have just thrown this out there and most of you would have been able to identify who played the guitar on this track.

Rain Dogs followed the usual pattern of critical raves and poor sales in America and successful sales in Europe, but by now Waits no longer cared, if he could keep doing as he pleased.

Waits took a cue from the track “Frank’s Wild Years” and wrote his next album, Frank’s Wild Years. The album contains songs used in the play of the same name, including three he co-wrote with Kathleen Brennan. One of the collaborations is “Please Wake Me Up.”

Gorgeous. I must meet this couple someday. I don’t know what I’d say, but I know it would be something I won’t forget. I recently spent 20 minutes with Bela Fleck and even though I was a blithering sycophant I know I won’t forget the encounter.

Bone Machine was released in 1992 and is a minimalist masterpiece. To continue with the “m’s,” Bone Machine is a magical, mystical, musical manifestation of mayhem. The difficulty in presenting this album in this article was how to choose which tracks to show you. Just do this… You can stream if you want, but my advice to my fearless dreamers is, just buy it. Trust me buy this album, do the guy a favor. But keep it away from flammables.

Waits produced and Brennan co-produced. The story of the recording has Waits booked into a studio he hated. He got no “vibe” from it, and getting that vibe was becoming more important with each work. He then found a storage room in the basement of the studio with a cement floor and a broken window. It was perfect. He recorded the album entirely in that room. The problem with the broken window was it looked out onto the street, so those street sounds, with cars passing by and airplanes overhead, would become part of the tracks.

Kathleen co-wrote eight of the cuts and they are all great. I’ll just throw one out there and trust you’ll check out the rest.

“Murder In The Red Barn” features Joe Marquez on banjo, Waits on drums/percussion and Larry Taylor on upright. And that’s all folks.

?list=PLTMN6OMDTnKlRQ2hAhGT_xZQ7jzggXhyN

One track with just our boy on bass and guitar is “Jesus Gonna Be Here Soon.”

“Black Wings” is a spooky tune, co-written with Brennan, with Larry Taylor on that upright, Waits on drums and rhythm guitar, and Joe Gore on those neat western Tele licks.

Bone Machine deservedly won a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album.

I will wrap this series up with a Part Four that continues with Waits’s life and some of the last albums. Unless I get in trouble with the law. If you don’t get my letter, you’ll know that I’m in jail.

What will the audiophile section of heaven be like?

1. You’ll have an endless supply of Black Gate capacitors of all types and values.
2. Quads will always go low, play loudly, and never fail.
3. All tubes are NOS Telefunken and they will never die.
4. All FETs will be soldered in place by Nelson Pass, on loan from Earth.
5. Cartridges will set their own VTAs.
6. All DACs are R-2R designs.
7. All transformers are made by angels.
8. Cables do not matter, ever; but they are all really big and expensive.
9. There is no feedback.
10. Record cleaning fluid flows from a natural fountain, works flawlessly, tastes like The Macallan 25, and is totally organic.

More than one audiophile’s idea of sonic heaven: the Koetsu Rosewood Signature Platinum phono cartridge.

 

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Joe Haupt.

Here’s an eclectic collection of music appropriate for Halloween you might not have heard before or listened to in this context. This assortment ranges from ballet, movie, and orchestral works to operas and an operatic musical. It includes appearances by the Devil, a ghost or two, music on the subject of death, a costume party (of sorts), and a cautionary tale (for educational enrichment). Sorry – no rock, pop, or old MTV clips here: Every composer has a major classical music or musical theater connection.

Herrmann/Music From the Great Movie Thrillers/Bernard Herrmann, cond. (Decca LP) Bernard Herrmann composed many chamber and concert hall works including suites (Welles Raises Kane, The Devil and Daniel Webster), a cantata (Moby Dick), a symphony (Symphony No.1), and an opera (Wuthering Heights). But he’s best known for his film scores, especially the ones he wrote for several Alfred Hitchcock films. The soundtracks for North by Northwest and Psycho, two of the director’s best films, easily qualify for inclusion at a Halloween party attended by people who aren’t what they appear to be.

Listening to the North by Northwest  “Overture” will get you in the mood for this column’s selection of musical tricks and treats. It’s a thrilling, rhythmically exciting few minutes that starts softly but quickly develops into gripping music that pulls you right along with it. The “Overture” is based on a hemiola, a rhythmic trick that gives music the impression of speeding up…an ideal device for building tension and moving the action forward as the film’s story of murder and mistaken identities unfolds. [1]

If that isn’t enough to get you in the mood, try “Psycho (A Narrative for Orchestra)”  from a film that centers on a very different kind of mistaken identity. It includes the slashing sounds Herrmann used for the iconic shower scene: You’ll recognize the murder when you hear it. Like the “Overture,” it’s an outstanding recording with a wide and deep soundstage, although the perspective isn’t similar to what you would actually hear in a concert hall. 

“North by Northwest: Overture”

“Psycho: A Narrative for Orchestra”

Britten/The Turn of the Screw/Benjamin Britten, cond. (Decca CD) Every Halloween celebration should incorporate at least one ghost story, and Benjamin Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw, based on a novella by Henry James, fits the bill perfectly. The “Prologue” sets the scene:

It is a curious story.
I have it written in faded ink – a woman’s hand,
governess to two children — long ago.
Untried, innocent, she had gone first to see their guardian
in London, a young man, bold, offhand and gay,
The children’s only relative…
This then would be her task [as their governess].

But there was one condition: he was so much engaged;
affairs, travel, friends, visits, always something, no time
at all for the poor little things – she was to do
everything – be responsible for everything – not to worry
him at all – no, not to write, but to be silent, and do her best.

She was full of doubts….

As well she should have been. Disturbing and frightening things follow but this isn’t your usual haunting: aspects of the story are open to interpretation and the reason for the ghosts’ appearance is ambiguous.

Related: You don’t have to wait for a special occasion to enjoy the elegant and creepy The Innocents (1961), a psychological horror film based on the same Henry James story but without Britten’s music. It stars Deborah Kerr, has a screenplay adapted by Truman Capote and playwright William Archibald, is available on YouTube, and – it’s in CinemaScope!

The Turn of the Screw/“Prologue” (CD)

The Innocents (Film)

Monteverdi/L’Orfeo/Emmanuelle Haïm, cond. (Virgin CD) Recognized as the first true opera, Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607) with a libretto by Alessandro Striggio [2] tells the story of what occurs when Orfeo, who is about to marry Euridice, finds out she has died of a snake bite. Orfeo resolves to recover her from Hades and travels there to meet with Pluto, King of Shadows and the Underworld. Pluto decrees Euridice can go back to Earth on one condition: As Orfeo leads her out he can’t look back. Of course, he does look back to make sure Euridice is really behind him and she fades away as a result. Having lost Euridice a second time, Orfeo returns to Earth alone and the chorus comments on the paradox of a man who can conquer Hades but not his own emotions.

Before the wedding Orfeo sings “Vi ricorda, o boschi ombrosi” about how fortune has changed her tune and turned his griefs to joy. (“Vi ricorda” incorporates a hemiola – the  same rhythmic alteration used by Bernard Herrmann over 400 years later.) In “Tu se’ morta, mia vita,” sung after Euridice’s death, Orfeo contemplates softening Pluto’s heart through the power of music so he can bring Euridice out of Hades “to see the stars again: or, if adverse destiny denies me this, I shall remain with you among the dead. Farewell, Earth; farewell, skies; and Sun, farewell.”

“Vi ricorda, o boschi ombrosi” from Act II (Video: Le Concert des Nations/Jordi Savall,  cond.)

“Tu se’ morta, mia vita” from Act II (CD)

Stravinsky: The Soldier’s Tale/Igor Stravinsky, cond. (Sony CD) The Devil plays an important part in Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale (L’Histoire du soldat), a theatrical work performed by several actors, dancers, and instrumentalists. It’s a cautionary story based on a Russian folk tale – the parable of a soldier who trades his soul (symbolized by a violin) to the Devil for a magic book that can tell the future and make him rich. However, he soon discovers that money does not bring happiness. The soldier manages to break his contract with the Devil and return to the way things were only to have the Devil prevail in the end by retaking the soldier’s soul. After the “Triumphal March of the Devil” the narrator closes the tale by stating the moral of the story:

You must not seek to add
To what you have, what you once had;
You have no right to share
What you are with what you were.

No one can have it all,
That is forbidden.
You must learn to choose between.

One happy thing is every happy thing:
Two, is as if they had never been.

“Triumphal March of the Devil”

Gould: Fall River Legend/Morton Gould, cond. (RCA LP) You’ve heard it before:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

True story: Lizzie’s father and stepmother were hacked to death and it became “the trial of the century” in part because the murders were so bloody. [3] Despite Lizzie’s acquittal in 1892, the question of this gentle woman’s guilt has never been resolved.

Fall River Legend is Morton Gould’s music for Agnes De Mille’s 1948 ballet of the same name. The story is retold as it might have existed in the minds of people who were there at the time, and Lizzie is hanged in the ballet version. The “Epilogue” brings together many elements of the story: the respectable household, confusion surrounding the murders, questions about whether Lizzie’s quiet personality was masking a murderess, the Puritan New England manner presented as psychological repression, hymn tunes, Lizzie’s and the Pastor’s mutual attraction, and her hanging.

“Epilogue”

Berlioz/Symphonie Fantastique/Colin Davis, cond. (Philips LP) Just about everyone enjoys a costume party and at a BBC Proms concert in 2019, the Aurora Orchestra members wore masks for a performance of the “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath” from Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.

Symphonie Fantastique (1830) is a program symphony [4] from the early Romantic period. Through its five parts it tells the story of “an artist, gifted with a vivid imagination, [who falls in love with] a woman who embodies the ideal of beauty and fascination that he has long been seeking…. [5] Having become certain that his love goes unrecognized, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dose of the narcotic, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a sleep accompanied by the most horrible visions. He dreams that he has killed the woman he had loved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold, and that he is witnessing his own execution.” [6]

The final part describes the artist’s satanic dream. The artist “sees himself at the sabbath, in the midst of a frightful assembly of ghosts, sorcerers, monsters of every kind, all [coming] together for his funeral. Strange noises, groans, outbursts of laughter, distant cries which other cries seem to answer. The beloved melody [idée fixe] appears again, but it has lost its character of nobility and reticence; now it is no more than the tune of an ignoble dance, trivial and grotesque…” [7] Images are reflected in the music by a variety of spooky sounds, like the clattering of dancing skeletons produced by striking violin and viola strings with the stick of the bow (col legno).

If you’ve been searching the record bins for a great performance of Symphonie Fantastique, try to find the Colin Davis LP recommended above. Davis was a Berlioz specialist and the LP was produced during Philips best-sounding years. Davis’ later CD version is fine, too, but you won’t be able to treat yourself to that larger LP cover depiction of witches painted by Goya.

“Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath” (Video)

Crumb: Songs, Drones, and Refrains of Death/Ensemble New Art (Naxos CD)

George Crumb was well-known for his use of extended instrumental and vocal techniques. [8] “Death-Drone III,” the final movement from “Drones,” uses some of these techniques to create an eerie ambiance.

According to Crumb, “From 1962 until 1970 much of my creative activity was focused on the composition of an extended cycle of vocal works based on the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. The cycle includes Songs, Drones, and Refrains of Death (1968) for baritone, electric instruments, and percussion…the largest in conception and the most intensely dramatic in its projection of Lorca’s dark imagery…. Lorca’s haunting, even mystical vision of death, which embodies, and yet transcends the ancient Spanish tradition, is the seminal force of his dark genius….”

“Death-Drone III” isn’t a Charles Bronson action film. It’s perfect Halloween music: mysterious, spooky, and ritualistic sounding…even if that wasn’t the intention. Keep the lights on for this one.

“Death-Drone III” (CD)

Sondheim: Sweeney Todd/Original cast album (RCA CD) “More hot pies!” demand the customers at Mrs. Lovett’s pie store. What the unwitting customers don’t realize is that the barber Benjamin Barker, who was exiled to prison on a trumped-up charge by the villainous Judge Beadle Banford, has returned to London. He now goes by the name Sweeney Todd and has been slaughtering men indiscriminately until he can take his revenge on the Judge. Todd disposes of his victims by slitting their throats during a close shave, then causing their bodies to fall through a trap door. The tunnel below leads to a bakehouse, where the ever practical Mrs. Lovett bakes their flesh and serves it as an ingredient in her delicious meat pies.

I used to be a horror film fan. When I heard about “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” I couldn’t imagine how the story could be made into a musical (some refer to it as an opera because there are only a few minutes of dialogue). But Sweeney is a winner both literally – having received a Tony Award for Best Musical as well as awards for the movie version – and figuratively.

“The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” sets the scene. To help you recover from that ominous start, move along to the comforting “Not While I’m Around” sung by Tobias Ragg, an orphan who serves the pies and reassures Mrs. Lovett during the calm before the stormy ending.

Related: For those with similar appetites but lighter tastes, The Little Shop of Horrors, a 1960 movie about a people-eating plant by schlock film director Roger Corman, was transformed into a successful Off-Broadway musical, then into a very funny movie. The musical had a plant that not only eats people and talks (“Feed me!”), but generated a hit song as well (“Suddenly Seymour”).

When you’ve finished listening to these selections, relax. Have a piece of pumpkin pie. No need to be afraid of homicidal barbers, killer plants, hatchets, showers, or mistaken identities once Halloween is over. You can go back to reading this column without fear. At least until next October.

“The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” (CD)

“Not While I’m Around” (Video)

The Little Shop of Horrors/“Suddenly Seymour” (Video)

[1] A hemiola is a musical rhythmic alteration in which six equal notes may be heard as two groups of three or three groups of two. Using numbers instead of notes and counting each number equally, two groups of six notes in a hemiola would sound something like this: 1,2,3 / 1,2,3 / 1,2 / 1,2 / 1,2.

[2] For more about Striggio see “Size Counts” in “The Mindful Melophile,” Issue 138.

[3] A hatchet was actually used to do the deed, not an axe. And her father got up to 10 or 11 whacks, her mother 19. After the trial “Lizzie inherited her parents’ money, moved into a large modern house in a different neighborhood, and lived until age 66 in relative isolation.” Sam Frizell, “5 Crazy Things You Should Know Before Watching Lifetime’s Lizzie Borden Took An Axe,” Time, January 25, 2014.

[4] Instrumental music that carries an extramusical meaning, e.g., a literary idea, scenic description, legend, or personal drama.

[5] The woman he loves is represented by a theme (idée fixe) that appears throughout the symphony. An idée fixe is related to a leitmotif or leitmotiv – a short, recurring musical phrase associated with a particular person, place, or idea.

[6] From Berlioz’s own program for the symphony.

[7] Ibid.

[8] See “Whatever Happened to Honk, Bonk, Boing and Blomp?” in Issue 126.

I’m not a degreed engineer. True, I understand and can write about complex concepts. In fact, I’ve edited and rewritten articles by engineers, some of whom are way better at their trade than they are at putting words together, but I’m not, in fact, a trained engineer.

This often puts me at a disadvantage when diving into the tech of audio stuff, and especially when getting into debates about subjects that require comprehensive engineering knowledge. For example, I know what the Nyquist theorem is, but not so deeply that I can convincingly argue on a technical level why some people think the 44.1 kHz sampling rate of CD-quality audio is inadequate. I get the concepts, but can’t debate on the topic on the same level as an engineer who knows his or her stuff. It’s been said that 44.1 kHz can be inadequate because of poor brick-wall filters in A/D converters…or, would that be D/A converters? Or both? I gotta look it up again. (It doesn’t help that in many cases, the older you get, the harder it is to remember things.)

I’m better at writing than I am at math. I can “grok” math up through trigonometry, but as a college freshman I was chagrined to find out that I simply didn’t understand anything beyond basic calculus other than to know that there are limits, and my brain had reached mine.

But math and engineering are inseparable.

In other words, when talking with engineers, I’m on unequal ground. When I was just starting out in audio, this made me feel insecure. Who the heck was I to talk speaker design with David Wilson, or room acoustics with Dr. Floyd E. Toole? I just didn’t have the foundation to converse on their level. I still don’t. I’ve learned a lot, but I’m never going to get that engineering degree.

On the other hand, I have decades of experience in working with and listening to audio components. And when it comes to having the conviction of knowing what I hear, the word “insecure” does not apply. I’ve been to the Harman listening lab in Northridge, California, where I laid my reputation on the line and passed rigorously-controlled double-blind listening tests with flying colors. (But that was something like 15 years ago. Could I pass such a test today, with hearing that is undoubtedly now diminished? I bet a dime, Martini.)

So, what’s the real disadvantage for me, as an audio editor and writer and audiophile, of not being a trained engineer, aside from the fact that no one’s ever going to hire me as a product designer?

The only time I feel that a lack of understanding puts me in a weaker position is when I’m reading certain audio forums.

Let’s shoot the BB gun right into the hornet’s nest and bring up some fave topics of…discussion on these forums.

Cables make a difference.

Analog and vinyl sound better than digital.

44.1 kHz isn’t a high enough sampling rate for digital audio.

Blind testing is the only way to determine differences between components.

Listening without measurements is useless. If you can’t prove your observations by measurements, they’re meaningless.

Like so many online forums, they tend to be dominated by a few individuals who anoint themselves as “experts,” complete with their self-proclaimed expert scientific background. (To be fair, at least a few are scientists and engineers.) That would be one thing – it’s a free country, and we’re all entitled to our opinions. The problem is when they get vicious and insulting about those who don’t agree with them.

I sometimes hear differences when listening to different cables. I know this in every fiber of my soul, just as I know that if I put my fingers in a certain position on my guitar, I’m going to play an E chord. I have decades of experience and trust my judgment. Observation is a valid scientific principle. So, when I see some online forum know-it-all not only proclaiming, say, that cables don’t make a difference, but hurling personal insults upon anyone who dares to say otherwise, my first reaction is, I’m going to take them on. But I can’t do it using math, or by citing experience of having done any measurements or testing. So, I can’t defend myself on their playing field.

And, that’s about it as far as having an engineering insecurity complex these days. In fact, I understand most of the principles of audio (I should hope so, having kicked around the field for all this time), if not all of the math. And, again, I trust my ears.

I don’t want to make it sound like I’m down on engineering types. Quite the opposite. I am boundlessly thankful to them. Without engineers, audio components wouldn’t exist. And I have to say that all of the engineers and designers I’ve met over the decades have been unfailingly generous with sharing their knowledge. (I haven’t met any of the nasty internet pundits, and don’t feel any great sense of loss.) We should respect and cherish engineers and designers. And it’s not like they don’t get flak either. A brilliant cable designer, who I respect immensely and who has taught me a great deal, told me that if you’re an engineer you have to have a thick skin. You will encounter those who are skeptical of your ideas, or say they’re impractical or impossible to put into production, or won’t work, or cost too much.

Let’s shift gears. How much do we really know about science, let alone audio science, and when you get down to it, the nature of reality, anyway?

If technology is increasing at an exponential rate, how far along are we on the curve? If we’re at or close to the base of it, then where will technology be 50 or 10,000 years from now, and doesn’t that imply that we know relatively nothing? Or are we on the S-curve of audio innovation, where progress begins slowly, then accelerates rapidly, then slows? For example, how much further can loudspeaker materials evolve?

Physics has been trying to come up with a Theory of Everything that would explain and reconcile all known physical aspects of the universe – Newtonian physics, quantum mechanics, why those greasy Jack in the Box tacos have such irresistible appeal – everything. They haven’t.

What the heck are dark matter and dark energy? Is the universe a hologram? A giant alien computer? The face of G-d? Is the human mind even remotely capable of understanding what’s really going on? In the novel The Dark Forest by the brilliant science fiction writer Cixin Liu, one of the characters states, “…our science is nothing more than a child collecting shells on the beach who haven’t even seen the ocean of truth. The facts we see under the guidance of our science and reason may not be the true, objective facts.” Speculative fiction, or prescient insight?

While some may find such heady stuff daunting (or even a little upsetting), I find it thrilling. It means that there are many discoveries yet to be made in audio (and in everything). After all, if the goal of a high-end audio system is, as Harry Pearson put it, to reproduce the sound of real music in real space, we’re not there yet.

And we won’t get there without engineers. Or astute listeners, music lovers, musicians, reviewers, critics, cranks, idealists, pragmatists, acousticians, computer scientists, writers, poets, business executives, mathematicians, hobbyists, experimenters, researchers, tweakers, accountants, physicists, naysayers, professionals, amateurs, skeptics – and dreamers.

Header image courtesy of Pexels.com/ThisIsEngineering.

[The first installments of this series appeared in Issues 143,144, 145, 146 and 147 – Ed.]

Like many prolific composers, Burt Bacharach was called upon to compose music for a handful of films and stage productions. Some were fantastic works. One was so notoriously difficult that it led to a bitter breakup. I won’t cover all of his soundtracks here, but will visit some interesting highlights.

This first tune isn’t from a specific soundtrack, but many of us who were around a television in the early 1970s tuned to their local ABC affiliate will remember the “Movie of the Week” theme. This was Bacharach’s tune “Nikki,” written at the time for his prematurely newborn daughter. (You can relive the ABC opening credits here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM-Vkd7On2Q).

Bacharach’s first film score was for the wild 1965 sex comedy What’s New, Pussycat?. None other than the hip-swaying Welsh belter Tom Jones provided the vocal for this boisterous waltz, having had his massive breakthrough hit “It’s Not Unusual” earlier that year. Jones also recorded the theme for the film Thunderball (which was not a Bacharach/David composition) later in 1965.

Another of Bacharach’s early film scores was the 1966 Peter Sellers vehicle After The Fox, which also featured Victor Mature and Sellers’ then-wife Britt Ekland, in an elaborate scheme to steal a shipment of gold. The vocals on the main title theme were sung by The Hollies. Thankfully, someone set the recording of the tune to the film’s opening credits for this video.

1967 brought us the Casino Royale film score. The film itself is chaotic, but the Colgems LP of the soundtrack became legendary for its sound quality among audiophiles. After the narrow confines of the comedy After The Fox, the scoring for Casino Royale is more fully realized, with many changes in mood, from the bustle of “Bond Street” to the brassy main title theme, and the sultry Dusty Springfield take on “The Look of Love,” which is the definitive version of this tune, either by Springfield or the countless other vocalists who have covered it.

The film score that followed was for the Paul Newman and Robert Redford film Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. The big hit from the film was “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head,” although it appeared in a scene in shortened form as “On A Bicycle Built for Joy.” (On that version, B. J. Thomas was suffering from laryngitis, which accounted for his rough voice on the soundtrack and on the A&M soundtrack album.)

A rather unique track from the score is “South American Getaway,” featured here. This is a five-part vocal track, and the way it was used in the film was unprecedented. This tune was used during a montage and chase sequence. The voices were recorded dry (without any reverb or effects); in the film, the sounds from the action and voices on screen are muted as well. It’s an odd juxtaposition of a modern jazz vocal sound (check out the unusual chord progressions) against the 19^th century setting of the film, yet it works surprisingly well. The vocal group was primarily the core of the Ron Hicklin Singers, with Sally Stevens (soprano) a featured soloist.

A somewhat forgotten film called The April Fools featured Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve. Both married, each have uncaring, unloving spouses, and go out on an adventure around town, eventually deciding to run away together the following evening. Accompanying the film was the poignant title tune, performed by Dionne Warwick.

Lost Horizon is the soundtrack that sidelined the Bacharach/David partnership. A musical remake of Frank Capra’s 1937 film. It not only failed catastrophically at the box office, but to this day is still lambasted as one of the worst films of all time. (Your author has tried to sit through it as well…I will say, the critics lambasting it were way too kind.) Bacharach himself has said that the songs worked in isolation, but not in the context of the film. The title track is sung by Shawn Phillips.

Mark Lindsay was known more as the front man for Paul Revere & The Raiders, but also recorded a handful of his own albums, scoring big with the hit “Arizona.” He was tapped to sing the catchy title track for the film Something Big, a comedy western starring Dean Martin, Honor Blackman and Brian Keith.

A relatively unknown Italian film from 1979, Together? originally had a score provided by the Italian progressive rock band Goblin. For US release, Bacharach created a new score, which was released on RCA. Here is “I Don’t Need You Anymore,”a tune featuring Jackie DeShannon.

Bacharach’s most well-known cinema tune is the main title for the film Arthur, starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli. Bacharach, along with lyricists Carole Bayer Sager, Christopher Cross and Peter Allen, would win an Oscar for the chart-topping “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do).”

In the next installment, we will revisit Dionne Warwick with some interesting, under-appreciated gems from her catalog.

The term “folk revival” usually conjures up images of Joan Baez and the Kingston Trio in the 1960s, but there’s a much more recent manifestation of folk music making inroads into the indie rock scene. And it’s not quite what used to be called folk rock, either. The British band Mumford & Sons is one of the best examples of this 21st-century hybrid.

Singer-songwriter Marcus Mumford isn’t really the leader of Mumford & Sons. Nor are the other members – Ben Lovett, Winston Marshall, and Ted Dwane – his sons. They just liked the old-timey ring of using a family name. With Mumford as the lead singer on guitar and mandolin, Lovett usually covers drums and keyboards (including accordion), Dwane is most often found on electric bass; and Marshall is the go-to guy for banjo and various types of guitars, including the all-metal resonator.

The band formed in 2007 as one of the indie groups in West London exploring acoustic folk roots. Before this, all of them had played together in the backup band for Laura Marling, with whom they continued to tour under the Mumford name. Unlike the folk revival of the 1960s, the West London scene had no clear-cut socio-political charge; it also was more about using folk sounds for new music than about digging up and performing traditional songs.

Having signed with Island records, they released their debut, Sigh No More, in 2009. It was produced by Markus Dravs, known for his work with many major artists including Coldplay, Arcade Fire, and Björk. While the album took over a year to catch on in the US, it did eventually reach the No. 2 spot on the Billboard 200, and the single “Little Lion Man” went to the all the way to the top of the indie/alternative chart.

The 6/8 meter and the wistful, back-to-the-earth lyrics of “Dust Bowl Dance” make a good introduction to Mumford & Sons’ style. Acoustic piano connects the piece to an older version of rock, while the plunking of banjo calls up quite a different tradition. But by the end, it’s billowed into a grinding, hard-rock sound, and the result is reminiscent of The Pogues.

Although Mumford & Sons have not been prolific – they take several years between albums and clearly have a meticulous work ethic – they do keep busy with projects outside the studio that they deem important. For example, they founded a company called Gentlemen of the Road in 2009. Besides being a record label, its function is to facilitate concertizing in places that can’t normally support a major act on tour. The purpose is to provide an economic boost to local businesses.

Once the record label arm of Gentlemen of the Road was up and running, the band recorded Babel (2012). It was a number one hit right out of the gate. The lead single, “I Will Wait,” did very well, encouraging them to release half the album as singles over the coming weeks. They have continued this practice for subsequent albums, taking advantage of the unique possibilities of streaming technology to get listeners interested in their work.

Babel won Album of the Year at the 2013 Grammy Awards, one of the band’s two Grammys that year. The other was for their participation in the movie soundtrack for the concert film-cum-cross country documentary Big Easy Express, directed by Emmett Malloy. They shared this award with fellow indie-folk groups Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros and Old Crow Medicine Show.

Babel’s strengths lie in its intense, poetic lyrics and the use of dynamics, from a thin, delicate pianissimo to massive, organ-like sonorities. Expect a torrent of emotion and romanticism in the 19^th century sense of life’s noble suffering. “Ghosts That We Knew” is a gentle, aching ballad. The sound production, immediate and intimate, gives the simple harmony extra power.

A co-release by their own label and Island Records/Glassnote, Wilder Mind (2015) represents a change in the Mumford sound. Some critics complained that the band strayed too far from its folk roots and were now blending in with other, less distinctive indie rock groups. But this album gave the musicians a chance to solidify their rock bona fides; their folk bona fides were never in question. Plus, they could still rely on their distinctively emotional and poetic lyrical content.

The lyrics of “Broad-Shouldered Beasts” brings together the mundane strain of urban living with quasi-fantastical imagery. For its part, the music supports that dichotomy, its dissonances muted and silky.

Although it took three years for the next full-length album to come out, Mumford kept busy with touring, relieved by some collaborative time in the studio. During a trip to South Africa, the band recorded the EP Johannesburg (2016) with a few outstanding African musicians: the Senegalese singer Baaba Maal, a South African pop band called Beatenberg, and Esau Mumwaio, a Malawi singer who collaborates with British production duo Radioclit on a project called The Very Best.

Maal and The Very Best are featured with the band on “Si Tu Veux.” Maal’s celestial, ringing voice swirls around Mumford’s breathy chorus and haunting instrumentals.

Mumford did continue its string of full-length albums. Unfortunately, the title of the most recent, Delta, now has connotations that were unimaginable when it was released in 2018. But try not to let that distract you. Of the band’s four albums, it was the third to hit the No. 1 spot on American charts, and some of the tracks are infectious in the best possible way.

Whether it was a response to criticism of Wilder Mind or just the natural development of their style, on Delta the band brought back the banjo and other folk gear. Only, according to interviews with Mumford, they were determined to find non-conventional ways of using those instruments. There’s also an introspective element to the songs and the sound, with shades of Peter Gabriel and a nod to the lo-fi movement that allows and even celebrates the squeaks and clicks made in the act of playing an instrument. “The Wild” is a good example, ethereal pizzicato strings and all.

It’s been three years since Delta came out. Things took a drastic turn for the band in March 2021, when Winston Marshall caused an internet uproar for supporting a book by right-wing personality Andy Ngo; the fallout was so severe that Marshall subsequently quit. He has yet to be replaced.

Still, there’s no reason to think this is the end of Mumford & Sons, even in the absence of word on an upcoming album. The band has always taken its time to craft recordings, like a cooper who forms whiskey barrels out of hand-cured wooden slats or a barber who still uses hot towels and a straight razor. For those who appreciate the old ways, it’s worth waiting for a quality product.

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Stefan Schäfer, Lich.

Born in Paris in 1804, Louise Farrenc grew up in a swirl of artsy types, the true embodiment of the bohemian spirit. Yet she must have been focused and disciplined despite that environment, since she managed to get into the prestigious Paris Conservatory when she was only 15. While her work has hardly been part of the central canon of 19th-century repertoire, over the past year or so Farrenc has gained increasing attention as an important composer of various instrumental genres.

The fact that she did not limit herself to solo piano music and small chamber ensembles is remarkable on its own. At the time, female composers, when they were tolerated at all, were discouraged from bothering to compose anything that needed to be played outside of their own parlors. Clara Wieck Schumann is a case in point; you can see my piece about her in Issue 92. Like Clara Schumann, Farrenc was able to overcome society’s obstacles more than other women because of a family advantage: Farrenc’s husband was a music publisher.

Although Farrenc did write some wonderful works for small forces, she also composed three symphonies. Happily, all of those genres are well represented in recent recordings.

I do not mean to discount her solo piano compositions. After all, they were praised by Munzio Clementi, one of the inventors of the classical keyboard sonata (Beethoven was a big fan). As a pianist, Farrenc was a successful concertizer; as a piano teacher, she must have been quite special: she was the Paris Conservatory’s only female professor in the entire 19th century!

In a recording released by Steinway and Sons, American pianist Joanne Polk presents a collection called Etudes and Variations for Solo Piano. While most of the tracks are from Farrenc’s two volumes of Etudes, marked only with Italian tempos, a few bear programmatic titles, in the style of piano miniatures being popularized at the time by the likes of Schumann and Mendelssohn.

The choice to make this recording was characteristic of Polk, who has stalwartly championed female composers during her career, most recently on her best-selling CD of works by Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944). This new Farrenc album shows both pianist and composer in brilliant, flattering light through performances of 15 short works.

Souvenir des huguenots, Op. 19, finds the composer borrowing material from Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots. Polk displays simultaneous power and buoyancy in this virtuosic mini-suite. Its second section sets the German chorale “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” as theme and variations because Meyerbeer’s opera deals with the spread of Lutheranism.

As for the CD’s central work, the Etudes, that collection was so well regarded in the 19th century that Paris Conservatory adopted it as a textbook. Polk demonstrates the wide range of techniques it demands of intrepid pupils. If you’re expecting mechanical perpetual motion finger workouts like Hanon and Czerny, you’re in for a surprise. A mastery of phrasing and expression was considered as important as physical technique in the Romantic era. Here is Book 1: No. 15, Andante affettuoso:

Farrenc composed about a dozen chamber pieces for various configurations. Farrenc: Music for Violin and Piano, a new recording on Brilliant Classics by violinist Daniele Orlando and pianist Linda di Carlo, concentrates on duo works. These include the eight-movement Variationes concertantes sur une mélodie Suisse, Op. 20, as well as the two violin sonatas.

Even by the standards of 19th-century miniatures, the Swiss variations are particularly tiny, some lasting under a minute each. Farrenc lays them out like a doll-sized potluck dinner, with a little of this and a little of that, using every flavor and texture she can invent.

Orlando plays the opening Introduzione, marked Andante maestoso, with enough Romantic passion and gravitas to make Goethe himself sigh. These achingly pulled bows with wide, wistful vibrato and gritty attacks may seem over the top to modern tastes, but that style would have been precisely right for Farrenc’s audience.

Contrast the Finale, a jubilant, sparkling Vivace. For her part, di Carlo brings a touch of Alpine folksiness to her piano part when it’s called for, but easily swings into Romantic powerhouse mode at the cadences. And speaking of cadences, they do go on and on, more proof that Farrenc was a creature of her time. Just when you think the movement is ending, the musicians meander through a few remote keys until you wonder if the final tonic chord will ever arrive.

Lest you picture her as some sort of self-taught savant with a keen ear for musical fashion, it’s important to recall Farrenc’s education. As a teen at the Paris Conservatory, Farrenc studied with Anton Reicha, who knew Beethoven and would soon begin teaching Liszt and Berlioz. She was right in the thick of things, in other words. No wonder she was not afraid to try her hand at orchestral writing. That category of her output included three symphonies plus a couple sets of variations and some overtures.

Those pieces have been recorded on Naxos by the Solistes Européens, Luxembourg, under the direction of Christof König. The newer disc includes the First Symphony plus both overtures and the Grand Variations on a Theme by Count Gallenberg (featuring pianist Jean Muller), presumably written for a patron who dabbled in composition. An earlier album offered Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3.

König draws a rich sound from the orchestra, focusing on the dynamic and textural contrasts made possible by Farrenc’s imaginative orchestration. Comparisons to the rhythmic sweeps of Brahms are not inappropriate for the opening movement of her Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 32.

Another new recording of Farrenc orchestral works is by Laurence Equilbey. The 59-year-old French conductor is best known for her mastery of choral music, but there’s a lot of the same kind of chordal and contrapuntal intensity in the Farrenc symphonies. The first and third are included on a disc on Erato by the Insula Orchestra.

Farrenc clearly loved reeds. Just as the bassoon features in the First Symphony’s opening movement, so the clarinet and oboe get some starring moments in the second-movement Adagio cantabile of the Symphony No. 3 in G Minor, Op. 36. The sweet and compact melody writing displays a Mozartian touch.

There’s no question that Farrenc had top-notch training and knew what to do with it. Until recently, her place in music history has not matched the level of her talents, but I’m happy to say that’s starting to change.

For Halloween, some street art: these ghostly fellas are painted on an alley in Bisbee, Arizona. Bisbee, a former mining town, is a remote community where artists have discovered the interesting homes that line the slopes of the Mule Mountains. Many of the homes can only be accessed via stairs, and Bisbee hosts an annual race which includes over 1,000 stair steps on the course.

We couldn’t find any information on this Telefunken Musikkoffer (music case) ad (from the 1950s or 1960s?), but it was too cool to pass up. And it sounds even better plugged in!

A Garrard Model 70 automatic turntable, circa 1973. By this time Garrards had strayed from the specs of the classics, but there was something just too cool about that angled headshell mounted on the straight tonearm. Photo courtesy of Howard Kneller.

What we wouldn't give to see that fold-out chart on hi-fi sound. Electronics World Hi-Fi Annual & Audio Handbook, 1960.

A noteworthy Philips poster from 1960. Some of those radios look like they're mono, though...