Tony's 2011 Picks - Eleven from '11

I didn’t buy a lot of “new” music in 2011.  There wasn’t a lot of new music that jumped out and screamed “buy me.”  Some of those that I did buy I’ve already written about at length.  I pretty much stuck to stuff that’s come out in years past that I didn’t get when they were new.  So my list of favorite releases from 2011 is a short one.  Ten of them contain new music, and one of them is a monster of a box set.  As one would expect from me, the list is filled with the usual suspects, but as long as the usual suspects continue to make new music, I’ll continue to buy it and write about it.

Tom Waits – Bad As Me The only surprise about this Tom Waits release is the brevity of the songs.  All thirteen songs (16 if you got the “deluxe” version) run under five minutes.  Sound-wise, there are no surprises.  The “human beatbox” that was prevalent on 2004’s Real Gone is gone, and keyboards that were absent from that release make their return on Bad As Me.  As usual, Tom Waits barks, hollers, croons, and rasps.  Keith Richards makes an appearance on four of the songs, the funniest of which is Satisfied.  Here Tom Waits mocks Mick and Keith by name and tells him that, unlike the singer who “can’t get no satisfaction” he will be satisfied by the time it’s his turn to depart planet Earth.  There’s an anti-war rant called Hell Broke Luce, which features machine-gun fire and snarling guitars.  He’s got poetic ballads like Back in the Crowd and Kiss Me.  Bad As Me has the mix of the old-timey and the surreal one expects of any Tom Waits release.  The songs sound like they were recorded after all the bars closed.  There’s dark humor and sorrow, anger, disgust and heartbreak.  The disgust comes in Talking At The Same Time: “We bailed out all the millionaires/They got the fruit, we got the rind…”  The sadness comes in Pay Me where the singer tells of his family who pays him not to come home.  The only way down from the gallows is to swing… To borrow a phrase, Bad As Me is chock full of brawlers, bawlers and bastards.  It is essential for any Tom Waits fan.  Same as it ever was…

Ry Cooder – Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down  Ry Cooder’s most recent works have looked back in the past.  There’s his “California trilogy” – Chávez Ravine [2005], My Name Is Buddy [2007], and I, Flathead [2008].  These albums serve as an alternative history of California one won’t find in the text book.  Chávez Ravine dealt with the Los Angeles Hispanic neighborhood that “disappeared” [it was bulldozed in the name of “progress”] to make way for the construction of Dodger Stadium.  My Name Is Buddy chronicles the travels of a red cat named Buddy and some of his animal friends as they encounter dust bowl refugees, union organizers, union busters, anti-Communists, and a country music singer named Kash Buk.  Kash Buk reappears in I, Flathead, with its tales of drag-racing aliens, hot rods, honky tonks, hot blondes, his dog [his “homeland security”] Spayed Cooley, and 5000 country songs nobody wants to sing.  Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down doesn’t have an underlying them like the aforementioned trilogy.  Here, Ry Cooder channels his inner Woody Guthrie, and boy is he pissed.

Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down finds Ry Cooder commenting on current events.  He has a well-earned reputation of being a renowned Americana musicologist, and he puts that expertise to work on this CD.  Here he mixes blues, folk, ragtime, norteño, rock, and country.  Some of Ry Cooder’s usual suspects appear here – son Joachim [drums], Flaco Jimenez [accordion], Terry Evans, Willie Green and Juliette Commagere [vocals], Rene Camacho [bass].  Ry has the rest of the instruments covered – guitars, banjo, mandola, bajo sexton, bass, marimba.  Like Tom Waits he skewers those bankers who received financial bailouts from the government in 2008 in No Banker Left Behind.  In El Corrido Jesse James the outlaw asks God for his guns back so he can dispense some frontier-style justice on Wall Street.  In Quicksand a Mexican man describes a border crossing during which the guide for his group leaves in the middle of the night, and the man who takes over dies the next day in the sun.  He shows his disgust for Republicans in I Want My Crown [Republicans changed the lock on the heavenly door / keys to the kingdom don’t fit no more…]. Christmas Time This Year is Ry Cooder’s scathing indictment of America’s involvement in wars overseas set to a Mexican polka.  But there’s humor here as well.  John Lee Hooker for President imagines a world where all the Supreme Court justices are “fine looking women,” and if you’re nice you’ll have one bourbon, one scotch and one beer three times a day.  The children get milk, cream and alcohol if they stay in school.  If only…

Emmylou Harris – Hard Bargain  For most of her career, Emmylou Harris has contented herself with being an interpreter of songs written by other people.  She’s always been insecure about her songwriting.  I think she sells herself short in that regard – she wrote From Boulder to Birmingham!  What I didn’t realize [and I probably should have – I have many or her albums] was that she was the primary songwriter for only three of her albums before Hard Bargain.  Emmylou wrote all the songs on Red Dirt Girl [2000] and Stumble Into Grace [2003], but returned to recording other peoples’ songs for All I Intended to Be [2008].  On Hard Bargain, Emmylou returned to songwriting and produced a wonderful collection of songs.  There are three elegies on Hard Bargain.   The Road is for Gram Parsons.  In this song she can still remember every song he played.  My Name is Emmitt Till is told in the first person, telling how a black boy from Chicago was murdered in 1950s Mississippi for talking to a white woman, how he was kidnapped from his uncle’s house, beaten, stabbed, shot, and thrown in the river “like trash when they were done.”  And she tells of how Emmitt Till’s mother kept the casket open to show her son’s mutilated body “for the whole wide world to see.”  Darlin’ Kate is for her late friend Kate McGarrigle, a frequent collaborator who lost her battle with cancer.

The album includes Six White Cadillacs.  Here, death is a welcome respite from the road that “we won’t have to wander anymore.”  The Ship on His Arm is about a wartime marriage that was inspired by her own parents, who married during World War II.  There’s New Orleans, where “the whole world stood to watch us drown,” but “to cut and run ain’t in our blood.”  It’s interesting how Emmylou chose to make “hurricane” and “Pontchartrain” rhyme in a song.  There are songs of lonely women – Lonely Girl and Nobody.  Given her long-time advocacy for animal rights, she even wrote a song about a Big Black Dog.  There’s a lot of melancholy on Hard Bargain, but it’s a good album nonetheless.  Her voice is still as angelic as ever.  I read in Billboard not too long ago that her next project will be a duets album with Rodney Crowell.  It’ll be good, that much is certain.

U2 – Achtung Baby Box Set Carol got me this for my birthday.  When author Bill Flanagan wrote his book U2 At the End of the World, he wrote about U2 in their Achtung Baby/Zooropa period.  Manager Paul McGuinness described this time as a three-year campaign.  This box set is the product of that period.  Included in this set are six CDs and four DVDs.  The six CDs include the original Achtung Baby remastered, the original Zooropa remastered, B-sides and Rarities, 2 CDs of remixes [the Über and Ünter remixes], and the “alternate” Achtung Baby.  The hardest core U2 fans have heard all of these before, but not me.  The remastered Achtung Baby and Zooropa sound as good as one would expect.  The B-sides and Rarities are interesting.  I could do without the remixes.  The “alternate” album [‘Kindergaten’] is for U2 what Let It Be…Naked is for the Beatles.  Take away the studio tricks and underneath you still get a pretty good album.  The DVDs include the documentary U2: From the Sky Down.  U2 returned to Hansa Studios in Berlin to discuss the making of Achtung Baby with director Davis Guggenheim [he also made It Might Get Loud].  Half the film is devoted to the history of the band until 1990, the second half is devoted to the making of the album.  The best part of this film is when Bono and the Edge listen to some of the original session tapes.  You can almost see a light bulb go one over both of them when they hear how One came out of a working session for a different song.  One DVD contains each of the videos made from the Achtung Baby/Zooropa period.  A third DVD is the Zoo TV – Live From Sydney concert.  This show was quite a bit of sensory overload, but it was good to see Bono not take himself so seriously for once.  The fourth and last DVD has lots of goodies – a Zoo TV special,  an MTV documentary, MTV’s show Most Wanted where a fan got to see a U2 show via satellite from his house, a video short about Trabants [‘Trabantland’], U2 on Naked City, U2 on TV-AM.  There’s CD-ROM content as well, complete with links to websites.  This is how to do a box set the right way.

Glen Campbell – Ghost On The Canvas  The country icon makes his final album and says goodbye to his fans.  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/search/label/Glen%20Campbell

 

Gregg Allman – Low Country Blues  Gregg’s first solo studio album in fourteen years has been nominated for a Grammy in the Best Blues Album category.  In fact, of the five albums nominated, three were made by members of the Allman Brothers Band.  Perhaps for this year they should rename the category “Best Blues Album by a member of the Allman Brothers Band.”  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/08/gregg-allman-low-country-blues.html

Warren Haynes – Man in Motion  Also nominated for Best Blues Album [the third being the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s Revelator].  The hardest working man in the music business, Warren took a year off from Gov’t Mule to release and tour behind this soulful gem.  To these ears, Man in Motion is more of a soul album than blues, but I tend to nitpick.  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/05/warren-haynes-tale-of-two-albums.html

Neil Young – A Treasure  Neil Young changed musical directions with every album he made for Geffen during the 1980s.  This CD captures Neil and some legendary Nashville studio pros in his “country phase.” http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/06/neil-young-treasure.html

Levon Helm – Ramble at the Ryman  Recorded at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in 2008, Levon Helm and friends keep the spirit of The Band alive.  Levon doesn’t do all the singing, but with Larry Campbell, Theresa Williams and daughter Amy Helm along for the ride, he doesn’t have to.  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/06/levon-helm-ramble-at-ryman.html

        

Joe Bonamassa – Dust Blow  This is the first of three releases Joe Bonamassa put out in 2011 [the others being Black Country Communion 2 and Don’t Explain (with singer Beth Hart)].  With three releases in 2011 Joe is trying to take Warren Haynes’ title as the hardest working man in the music business.  Unwilling to be put in a blues-rock straight jacket, Joe goes in a more eclectic direction as he did with his previous two releases, Black Rock [2010] and The Ballad of John Henry [2009].  I love to hear this guy play.

http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/search/label/Black%20Country%20Communion

Black Country Communion – 2  After a not-so-stellar first album,  Glenn Hughes, Joe Bonamassa and company fulfill their potential on their sophomore release.  At times Black Country Communion sounds like the second coming of Deep Purple.  Everything is better – Kevin Shirley’s production is better, Glenn is singing better, Joe is playing like a hard-rock guitarist, and Derek Sherinian can finally be heard in the mix.  Jason Bonham didn’t need to improve his drumming it’s still rock-solid as it was on the first album.  Father John would be proud.  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/search/label/Black%20Country%20Communion

 

Glen Campbell - Meet Glen Campbell/Ghost On The Canvas

I have a confession to make.  When I was a little kid in the 1960s, Glen Campbell and Herb Alpert were my babysitters.  Not in the literal sense though.  They never got a dime for their services and they didn’t even know they were babysitting me.  Whenever my mom wanted to sit and watch her soap operas uninterrupted [there were lots of them, and this was an everyday thing], she’d plop me in front of the stereo, get out the Glen Campbell records, get out the Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass records, and left me to my own devices.  The back of my head got somewhat flattened from me banging it on the wall to the beat of the music [I grew out of it – physically anyway, maybe not so much mentally].  I even got to see Glen Campbell in person when I was five years old.  I don’t remember a damn thing about it, except that it was in San Antonio during Hemisfair ’68 and it was Glen Campbell.  Later in life I found out that Bob Newhart was also on the bill that evening.  I don’t remember what Glen Campbell played that night [I was 5, ok?], but in going back and looking at which of his records was popular at the time, I can make a pretty good guess.  Gentle on My Mind, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, and Wichita Lineman were all monster hits at the time.  I’m pretty sure I heard those songs that night.  When I was a teenager and I got first eight-track tape player [now I’m dating myself], my mom bought me the Greatest Hits tape.  It had those songs and it had Rhinestone Cowboy, Houston [I’m Coming to See You] and County Boy [You ‘Got Your Feet in LA].  I wore the tape out but never got a new one.  My point [and I do have one] is that Glen Campbell’s mushc is part of my DNA [at least his early famous stuff, anyway].  

I lost track of Glen Campbell after Southern Nights, and I REALLY didn’t care after he had the fling with Tanya Tucker.  Then his cocaine debauchery set in.  It was the early 1980s and it wasn’t cool to like Glen Campbell.  I saw him sing in Clint Eastwood’s movie Any Which Way You Can, but after that, who cared?  Country music was what my dad liked, and I didn’t want anything to do with it especially if my dad liked it, just like any teenager.  This was during the time of Urban Cowboy, and I was discovering other things at the time, namely the Allman Brothers Band, Pink Floyd, and Bob Marley.  During this time Glen found Jesus, and then I REALLY didn’t care.  And so Glen Campbell was out of my musical consciousness until a couple of years ago when I heard he was going to make his first record with Capitol Records in fifteen years.   It was said that it would sound like Glen in his late 60s/early 70s prime.  I heard some samples of this new record on Amazon, liked what I heard and bought the album.  That album was Meet Glen Campbell.  I thought that was an odd title because I’d already known him for forty years.  The point was that Glen Campbell was going to introduce himself to a new, younger audience, and to do that he would sing the songs of contemporary artists.  That didn’t bother me because Glen was never a prolific songwriter to begin with.  He had Jimmy Webb writing songs for him, so why bother writing your own stuff?

Some of the people whose songs Glen covered kind of threw me for a loop.  Green Day, U2, Lou Reed, Foo Fighters.  At first I wondered if Glen was back to snorting coke, but my fears were allayed when I heard the album.  Some of the song choices didn’t work out as well as the others.  One of those that didn’t was Lou Reed’s Jesus.  It wasn’t done badly, but there were others done so much better.  For instance Green Day’s Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life) and Foo Fighters’ Times Like These were done so differently from the originals that I think of the originals as inferior to what Glen put down.  It helps that Glen Campbell can sings circles around Dave Grohl and Billy Joe Armstrong.  It’s like what Johnny Cash did with Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt.  You just can’t listen to the originals and can’t help but think of how these old masters have taken new songs and staked their claim to them.  Glen’s treatment of Tom Petty’s Walls and Angel Dream are two more cases of Glen taking ownership of songs written by others.  There a couple of songs that sound pretty close to the originals.  Those would be John Lennon’s Grow Old With Me and U2’s All I Want Is You.  They stuck to the original arrangements.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  Again, they aren’t done badly.  They’re done very well in fact, but they didn’t sound radically different like the Green Day, Foo Fighters and Tom Petty songs did.  Glen recorded Jackson Browne's These Days.  It's an excellent version.  The one thing I can ask Glen Campell is this - what took you so long to record this fine song?  On balance, Meet Glen Campbell is a solid piece of work.  I don’t know how many new fans he won with it, but at least it re-ignited my interest in his music.  That’s good enough for me, and hopefully it will be good enough for Glen.  Meet Glen Campbell sounds like his records from the 1960s and early 1970s.  Producer Julian Raymond did that on purpose – he wanted to play to the strengths that made Glen Campbell a star in the first place – a fine interpretive singer and a superior instrumentalist.  Given an exceptional set of songs to work with a sympathetic producer, Meet Glen Campbell works.  Forty-one years after his take on Gentle On My Mind, Glen Campbell still has a fine voice that hasn’t been ravaged by the sands of time.

Times Like These

 

Good Riddance [Time Of Your Life]

Walls

Angel Dream

All I Want Is You

Last week saw the release of what Glen Campbell calls the final album he intends to make – Ghost On The Canvas.  He executed the same formula he followed on Meet Glen Campbell – same producer, same musicians, good songs from contemporary songwriters.  Paul Westerberg provides two outstanding songs [Ghost On The Canvas, Any Trouble].  He is Glen Campbell’s latter-day Jimmy Webb.  There is one twist – Glen Campbell and producer Julian Raymond wrote about half the songs themselves.  Glen Campbell isn't known for his songwriting, but it's all top-notch here.  Again Glen, what took you so long?  I’ve read in many on-line publications that Ghost On The Canvas was meant to be a companion piece to Meet Glen Campbell.  But instead of it being just a collection of songs like Meet Glen Campbell, Ghost On The Canvas has a narrative that tells the story of Glen Campbell’s life.  The fact that he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's lends more poignancy to this song cycle.  From the very first song [A Better Place] Glen sings "Some days I'm so confused, Lord," you know not all is right in Denmark but Glen doesn’t ask for your pity.  He just lays it out matter-of-fact style that his mind isn’t what it was.  In the title track he knows he’s on the “doorstep of eternity.”  In other songs he tells us a little about his past and his upbringing, about his triumphs and his failures, and that on balance he’s been fortunate in life ["The one thing I know/The world's been good to me"].  Jakob Dylan, Paul Westerberg, Robert Pollard, and Teddy Thompson have captured Glen Campbell’s essence perfectly.  The most stark, and perhaps chilling line of the entire album was one he wrote himself for his wife - "This is not the road I want for us/But now that it's here/All I want to be for you is strong."  One thing is perfectly clear – the look back on a life lived, good and bad, is unflinching in its honesty.

There are some instrumental surprises on the album.  Listen closely to In My Arms and you hear Glen tearing it up with surf guitar god Dick Dale.  On the closing There Is No Me...Without You Glen lets his guitar do the talking with other players like Rick Nielsen, Billy Corgan, and Brian Setzer.  Some of the songs have the sweeping orchestral arrangements one expects from Glen Campbell albums, but in other songs the strings add just a little bit of color and lets the musicians carry the tune.  There are some modern production touches to the album, but they still fit in the Glen Campbell framework.  There’s a good balance between the grandiose and the intimate.  Some songs remind on of Wichita Lineman, but Any Trouble reminds me of Everybody’s Talkin’ from Midnight Cowboy [I know, that’s a Harry Nilsson song, but that’s what my ears tell me].  There are some brief instrumental interludes written by Robert Joseph Manning that would not be out of place on Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds.  I think that’s an intentional nod to Glen Campbell’s time spent with the Beach Boys before he became a star in his own right.  The album is sentimental without being syrupy.  For those who purchase the MP3s on Amazon or iTunes, you’re treated to the bonus of a song from Jimmy Webb called Wish You Were Here.  Would a Glen Campbell album be complete without something from Jimmy Webb?  I don’t think so.

Ghost On The Canvas is that rarest of albums in my collection – I like every single song.  I can’t even say that about Abbey Road.  Ghost On The Canvas is an appropriate way for the Rhinestone Cowboy to ride off into the sunset.  Ghost On The Canvas bears no resemblance to the albums Johnny Cash recorded with Rick Rubin.  As those albums progressed, you could hear a man who was dying.  Glen Campbell isn’t dying yet – he’s just slowly fading away.  His voice and his instrumental prowess were captured here as strong as ever.  This album is part of Glen Campbell’s long goodbye to his fans and to the music business.  And he got to do it his way.  Does it get any better than being able to pick and chose when to get off the horse?

Goodbye Glen, and thank you.

A Better Place

Ghost On The Canvas

Any Trouble

Strong

It's Your Amazing Grace

A Thousand Lifetimes