Nick Lowe really IS the Jesus of Cool

In 1978, at the Sam Goody record store on Chestnut St (just down the block from what would be The East Side Club), it was likely just another afternoon when I accompanied my grandmother to one of her zillion appointments at Wills Eye Hospital. We'd stop at Goody's and I'd buy a single. Every week, Goody's had whatever singles the majors put out, even if it didn't chart. This store kept me in hard to find domestic singles for years (Buzzcocks, Monochrome Set, Slits) at lower prices than the comprehensive but expensive Third St Jazz.

I bought Nick Lowe's "So It Goes" for 99 cents, then the going rate for a domestic 45. And it fucking floored me as hard as any record did back then. Kindly recall what a violently fetile peiod this was.

"So It Goes" had a hook you could hang a Buick on, and Nick was the most engaging fella of his era (alienation was much more popular). The album from which the single was pulled, Pure Pop For Now People, was purchased for $5.59 + tax at Keller's House of Music at the Westmont Plaza. It was every bit as good as the single promised it would be, and you can't often say that.

PPFNP took its place beside Aereo Plain and Songs In The Key of Life as an epiphany, and it was because of Nick that I started buying imported records. Nick had some singles and an EP on Stiff, and that stuff wasn't going to be available anytime soon as domestic product. Nick was on Columbia here in the states, a label not really noted for non-LP B-sides and the like. My record habit exapnded to include Stiff as a label to which I was addicted, hardcore. More on that later.

Nick followed up with Labour of Lust, which included "Cruel To be Kind", and his star was sealed. Shortly after, his erstwhile partner, Dave Edmunds, got signed to Columbia, and the band they led, Rockpile, released an okay album, Seconds of Pleasure.

I wandered off to other pastures and so did Nick. I'd hear stuff from him now and again, but what he wanted to make and what I wanted to hear were two different concepts.

So fast forward to about 1997 or so, and Katy Moffatt is playing me some songs she's keen on. One was "What Lack Of Love Has Done", which was staggering. I asked if she'd written it. Nope. It was from Nick's then latest, Dig My Mood.

(Here's a sweet version of Katy playing it with Andy Hardin. Good as he is, I prefer her alone. She's the most complete solo peformer I know.)



Dig My Mood was a revelation for me. It answered thr question MUST WE ROCK? with a resounding NO.

Shortly after, I went through a period that focussed less on songs per se and more on jazz and composing.

So, it's summer 2007, and I'm dating this girl in Philadelphia. I'm having my coffee and listening to the radio in her kitchen, keeping her 3 year old son entertained while she gets dressed. Morning radio in Philadelphia for a great many people is WXPN, which is much like KCRW. As my friend Mike Villers calls the format, "cappucino music for yuppie checkwriters". Generally, what they play can only serve to counteract the coffee (these are the heartless f--kers that gave us Madeline Peyroux). The usual morning blandishments click by in the background.

Then I hear a familiar voice sing, "Do you see the way she lights up/When I walk in the room?/That's good", and i was riveted. Raymond Chandler said that art becomes art because it is posessed of sufficient intensity to burn by its own glow. This was that. I forget what was played before or after , but I damn well remember sitting there and holding my breath til that song was over.



I excused myself from the table, and immediately took the subway to the nearest good record store, and bought At My Age. The whole album killed me. Most of my favorite songwriters had been breaking my heart, and here was an old friend, who'd come back better than ever, better than anyone else I could name.

But it kinda gave me the courage I needed to finally put down the electric guitar and go back to acoustic guitars, songs, and maybe even allowing my age to figure into the songs I write. I had been struggling with that set of questions, and between Frank London's making me relearn a lot of basic stuff (for which I shall give eternal thanks) and hearing "I Trained Her To Love Me", I got excited about music again during what for me was a real wilderness period. I had about another year to go in Philadelphia, and this got me back on the path to songs the way I'd learn to love them.

And so it goes.

Dionysus Record thing, 11/4, Redwood Bar, downtown

a little landmark

While Alex North's 1951 score for A Streetcar Named Desire is arguably the first recognizable modern jazz score, the 1958 noir masterpiece I Want To Live! boasts the first modern jazz score written by a card-carrying jazz composer/arranger and played by the guys whose jazz records you bought if you were at all a jazz consumer.

Johnny Mandel, at that point known almost exclusively as a West Coast jazz arranger, was called in to compose. The movie was a fictionalized account of the arrest and execution of Barbara Graham, a party girl involved in a 1953 murder that went down in Burbank. She became the third woman to die in the California gas chamber. When the film dropped in '58, the case was still relatively fresh in people's memories -- they still had memories in 1958 -- making this film its generation's Monster.

The importance of the music in this movie can't be oversold. Not only did it make the storyline feel more credible -- the score didn't sound like some type of thing the character would know, it was exactly the type of music she did know -- but it vested a great and realistic movie with exactly perfect musical punctuation, alternately stark, unhinged, ghastly, and harsh. The whole thing starts with a dissonant horn blast followed by a bongo roll that sounds like a coin rattling against a table as it falls. A truly spooky bassline follows, then finally an unforgettable recurring main theme that states outright, "This is so not gonna end well."

Johnny Mandel is certainly one of the classiest jazz composers of his generation, and this score launched him as a film composer -- "The Shadow of Your Smile", "Emily" and the famed MASH theme are all his. Also, he wrote the score for Caddyshack. As an arranger, he's worked with Joao, Sinatra, Diana Krall etc. He's still a giant.

Probably no score in the lexicon is better suited to its purpose than IWTL. As jazz scores go, I have to rate it with Chinatown, The Hustler, and Sweet Smell of Success. Except that I think it's a little ballsier.

It's almost impossible to write music that is from its first note perfect to its task, but this might be an example.

best live band

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I love Del McCoury. I honestly think his band is the best live music there is these days.

Vassar Clements joins the band on fiddle. This performance was taken from a Bill Monroe tribute show, and I'll spare you another go-round of my armchair Bill Monroe.

Vassar's role in John Hartford's Aereo-Plain band can't be overestimated. He really was the most forward-looking musician in that ensemble, but in some ways also the most closely related to bluegrass tradition. His improvising was less in your face than Benny Martin's, but he was a true extrovert. Bluegrass fiddle guys have to be. They lead the charge, so it's no place to be Bill Evans.

But Vassar understood the Bill Evans notion of how to improvise with the rhythm section than over top of it all while remaining true to the artistic pulse of bluegrass music. He participated in three of the most important bluegrass records of a generation: Aereo Plain, Old and In The Way, and The Nitty Gritty Dirtband's vastly influential Will The Circle be Unbroken?

Old and In the Way was a supergroup that featured Vassar, Peter Rowan, Grisman, and Jerry Garcia. They put out a self-titled album that helped establish a song stash for the upcoming generation of bluegrassers (including the guys who taught me the stuff). Those three albums (plus certain stuff by the New Grass Revival and Norman Blake) were the bylaws of the new generation. For fans of Chris Thiele, each of these is like the How To Grow A Woman From The Ground Up of a generation.

Del McCoury's band is the perfect traditional bluegrass outfit. Del is one of the most incredible singers, and he and his son Ronnie (the mandolin player)are one of the great harmony teams ever, right up with Jimmy Martin and Bill Monroe (for my money).

This clip is from a Bill Monroe tribute concert (John Hartford did a great "Little Cabin Home On The Hill"). Vassar's lyricism is off the charts, the band powers this song like a train, and the McCoury's hit the high lonesome hard.

My kinda muisc.

Coming Soon: The Early Skip

Back before I came to California, I recorded for the tiny by very switched on Gladman label, which was a one-man operation brought to you by Ed Jollimore, who was and is my brother in all things music. From 1992 to early 1995, I made records for Ed's label. He engineered them (oocasionally with help from Dale Drumheller), played great drums on a lot of what I recorded, sange the harmony parts, and generally made me work at it. Because of him, I got my first real notice as a musician in Philly, not least of all in the local press, which was very kind and positive.

We made two albums that came out and one that didn't. The first of these, Fallen Hand of Love, is available at CDBaby. The second, Moon Country, was cassette only, and was the first time I wrote a whole album from scratch. The third, East of Dixie, never came out.

Ed has wanted for ages to anthologize the second and third albums in a CD. The stumbling block here was, um, me. There were way too many songs that just didn't cut it even if they seemed like a good idea at the time. But more of what we did turned out well enough that I didn't want to hang myself upon hearing it. So I agreed to a reissue if -- and only if -- I had some veto power. Ed agreed. So the most blatant ersatz Westerberg, Ridgway, Waits attempts remain unissued. The Moon East of Dixie is the compilation Ed and I fleshed out together, made up of stuff I can bear to remember, stuff I'm shocked to have forgotten, and stuff that shows off a decent little Philly bar band.

Ingrid McCarthy had a pic of me from this period, and I handed it over to Jamille Malfi, who did her usual excellent design. Ed unearthed a few pix of us back in the day, and there are about 20 songs that might have gone to dust had Ed not been so loyal to them.

For those of you who were around then, a bonus is that you get to hear the late, beloved Aldo Jones play some of his best bass ever. Also, the only recording of my singing a Dave Alvin song -- "Brand New Heart" -- with the band I had in Philly that opened for him a lot. We were a good bar band, it seems.

(The one thing there ain't that I wish there had been -- recordings of the Rustics when I was in the band. That was such an important part of that time.)

Here's a preview:



And here I am -- no lie -- singing Kurt Weill!


I wonder what ever happened to the shirt on the cover?

out beyond the blues

One really amazing thing that happened in the late 1970s -- new paths in guitar playing that weren't from our beloved blues influences nor from our deplored prog dinosaurs. The perfect storm of the era -- punk, post punk, the funk avant garde of James 'Blood' Ulmer and Ornette's Prime Time. The tradition-minded rebel could look to Billy Zoom for inspiration. And I did.

The mavericks among us were looking to a different breed -- Keith Levine (PiL), Marc Moreland (Wall of Voodoo), Alan Riggs (Delta 5), Jody Harris (Contortions), and, my two favorites of that world, Andy Gill from Gang of 4 and Viv Albertine of the Slits.

Andy Gill was a thrilling wake-up call. About 1979, I got ahold of the Gang of 4 debut album, Entertainment!, which was nothing short of a masterpiece. The muscularity of that rhythm section was staggering, and Andy Gill... Andy Gill did to my fourteen year old mind something Cecil Taylor did to my twenty year old mind. He made me think that the way you hear songs and chords and all that stuff had better be flexible, because sometimes the things songs express might need something other than chords as usual. As Frank Zappa said, sometimes there isn't a chord ugly enough to express what happens to your tax dollars.

Gang of 4 had a fierce anti-conservative message, and a rhythm section that was bottom heavy funky. Gill's guitar playing grooved like Jimmy Nolen did (the guy on the James Brown records), but he spiked it with aggressive and dissonant chords, chords ugly enough to point up to Thatcher's England. I've never heard a guitarist with more presence on his instrument.



Viv Alberine -- of the Slits -- came at it from a different operating system. They started out as an all-girl first generation punk rock band. Their original drummer, Palmolive, wound up in The Raincoats. So for the Slits' landmark first album, Cut, they brought in Budgie to play drums. Most people know Budgie's drumming from Siouxsie's records, and they should. He was one of the most creative musicians of a very creative time and place. The Slits, Modettes, Delta 5, and Siouxsie each did a lot to impact a post-Patti Smith idea of just what a woman rocker is.

But he wasn't the only one in that band who was. Bassist Tessa Pollitt and guitarist Viv Albertine were obviously big reggae fans, to be sure. But they also had a slinkier, mischievious thing. Budgie's Bruce Smith, who also played in The Pop Group, another incredible band of the period. The first Slits record he appeared on what "In The Beginning". The follow-up to Cut was the innovative and underappreciated Earthbeat, a record that prefigured so much of the post-punk worldbeat fusion.

"Animal Space" is a great, brilliant guitar record. It's a high point for everyone. Ari Up's vocal is sotto voce menace, and the rest of thre band sounds like evil dub. I saw the live at Emerald City on Halloween 1980, and they were truly frightening. They sounded like they'd made as dark a deal with Satan as anyone else to emerge of that era, including Jefreylee Pierce. True haunted stuff.

The American in me always points to American music as the roots stuff, as the voice of the have not. But alas, this is not a strictly American problem, and the great roots expressions of it aren't always rooted in something Woody Guthrie would recognize.

One again, Roger Miller was right about England: It does swing like a pendulum do.

Eydie Gorme ain't playin'

In 1965, Eydie Gorme made a record with Trio Los Panchos, who were the most popular of the Mexican trios to emerge in the forties. The Panchos might not have been the first trio nor were they the first to really catch on (Trio Calveras were that), but what the Panchos did for romantico trios was like what Muddy Waters did for electric blues: he threw down the template that everyone else gravitated to. By the fifties, they had singer Johnny Albino in the fold, truly one of the great Mexican bolero singers. And guitarist Alfredo Gil was slick and lithe. They offered definitive treatments of the Mexican standards. Anything of theirs you can find on Columbia or CBS up to about 1968 is totally worth it. If you're in California, these records pop up all time for cheap. grab 'em.

Their biggest seller was Amor, the LP that paired them with... yes: Eydie Gorme.

It's hard to think of Eydie now as much more than a Vegas stereotype singing with Steve Lawrence. But she was at one point ragin' full on.

Amor remains as definitive a treatment of Mexican standards as Frank Sinatra's Song For Swinging Lovers is for American standards: It's the 'how to' guide. This isn't Steve's Eydie. This is Eydie Gormezano, from the Bronx, whose parents were Sephardic Jews. This is the Eydie who sang with the Tex Beneke band (to you, the Glenn Miller band after Glenn died). This is the Eydie who worked at the UN as an interpreter. This is the Eydie who could have been a Barry Sister or June Christy at will. She alternately belts, croons, swings, and then some. This is one of my favorite female singer records. Also, one of my favorite guitar records.

(I've commented on guitarists through this blog, but, for the record, my fav female singers are Dolly, Dionne, Katy Moffatt, Nara Leao, Jennell Hawkins, and Hazel Dickens.)

Incidentally, it has been rumored that Eydie never met the Panchos, that either she overdubbed her parts to their tracks, or that the record said that the Panchos were the band on the record but that it was NYC studio guys. Neither is true, and this TV appearance proves it. It has been rumored that Yomo Toro was one of the guitarists filling out the ensembles in this clip, and he did studio work with them, so it might indeed be so.

Eydie made two more albums with the Panchos (the second of which was a Christmas album). Like most sequels, they're not as forceful as the lead-off. Amor is as true a music treasure as I know. Have at it.

I've been a Tom Waits fan for 30 years? JEEZ!

When I was a child, I might've spake as a child, but I had very good taste.

When I was 14 or so, I had a job in a record store at the Westmont Plaza. I used to take home the promotional LPs nobody else wanted, which did wonders for my new wave library. For some reason, my bosses at the store, who had good taste, weren't all that enamored of Tom Waits' Blue Valentine album. They each liked Tom Waits, but somehow I ended up with that record, thus beginning a musical enthusiasm that has been a staple of my life. I'be bought almost every record he's made since, and always within a week of release. When I don't like them, I take it personally. Very few songwriters have ever hit me that way. Not Randy Newman, nor John Prine, Dylan, Willie. Paul Westerberg is the only other one I ever got mad at.

(I only ever got mad at Dave Alvin for not writing new stuff.)


Waits has been through distinct periods as few of his cohorts have. His career is neither all about who's in his bands nor sudden complete changes in writing style (since Swordfishtrombones, anyway). His status these days is of a kind of elder statesman of a state only he occupies, so I guess he shares that with Captain Beefheart, and maybe now Los Lobos.

I've always loved his ballads, and not just the jazzier ones. His first two albums (Closing Time and Heart Of Saturday Night) definitely have their torch intact, but songs like "Ol' 55" 9covered by the Eagles), "I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You" (covered more recently by Hootie and the Blowfish)are as quintessentially 1970's David Geffen as anything Jackson Browne ever gave us, albeit better crafted. Waits was about 22 when he wrote those, and they'd've been enough to cement his rep as an emergent heavy hitter. He had adopted Prine's trick, of being a young man who can write old. Waits' "Martha" could have been about the woman in Prine's "Angel From Montgomery". I don't think it was.

As Waits moved through the seventies and into the eighties, he grew restless with his beatnick torch persona and entered a phase that would come to its full fruition in 1985, with Rain Dogs. That was the best band he ever had -- with Marc Robot and Ralph Carney -- and the songs and performances have the thrilling sound of a man inventing his own new music. Careless camparisons to Beefheart abounded, but I think that's because -- like Beefheart -- the new stuff didn't really sound like anybody else's music. And when he mounted live shows in 1985 (some of which were filmed for the concert film Big Time), we saw a band where Waits uber-personality had charismatic counterparts in Marc Robit and Ralph Carney, resulting in a band as interesting as its leader.

We are now 25 years since that band and their wonderful records, and Tom Waits at once is as classic as Willie Nelson but as cutting edge as anyone. Like Miles Davis managed to do, Waits has kept a new music feeling through his work, whether for good, bad, or ugly.

These three performances each typify a thing I love about Waits. I stayed away from the hits. I don't think "Purple Avenue" was ever officially released in a pristine form on a Waits album. Holly Cole recorded it on her first album, and it emerged as a bonus cut in conjunction with a version of "Once Upon A Town" on the One From The Heart soundtrack CD. The live version of "Heart Of Saturday Night" is vontage midseventies issue stuff, and "God's Away On Business" is about ten years old, and just fantastic.

I can't imagine any of my friends not knowing at least some of Waits' music. But if I'm wrong, sit down. This guy's fantastic.

Tom T. Hall, Dave R., and I

In the Bicentennial 1976 Summer, I mostly stayed with my grandmother in her South Philadelphia apartment. I brought a little stash of cassettes that had been made for me by a guy who lived up the street from my parents, Dave Richter. This was the tape stash that included Aereo Plain, Best of the Best of Merle Haggard, Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Ramble, and Old and In The way. Among these was Tom T. Hall's Greatest Hits Vol 1.

There was a Tom T tribute album called I Love, which featured most of the reliable roots music types covering their favorite TTH hit. Looking back, I don't think anyone covered anything that wasn't on either Vol 1 or 2, except Syd Straw's cover of his best known song, "Harper Valley PTA", which was one of her best recordings, come to think of it.

When I was learning my first three chord songs, TTH provided a wealth of great and easily mastered material. Also, his lyric writic style has a certain flat-outness about it. Songs like "Homegoing" and "Ballad of 40 Dollars" are masterpieces of essential storytelling and economy of language. I knew them cold by the time I was 12 years old.

As I've gotten older, I've stayed close to TTH's music. His stuff on Mercury Records is a major body of work. He was produced by Jerry Kennedy, who at the time also produced Jerry Lee Lewis, Dave Dudley, Faron Young, Johnny Rodriguez, and had in the sixties done Roger Miller's and Charlie Rich's best stuff. He knew how to strip it down so that the arrangement and the performance conspired an understated setting for the song. His artists excelled at songs. Which is why Jerry Lee's best stuff in his 60s Smash stuff. But that's another blog.

I've always had a soft spot for "I Remember The Year That Clayton Delaney Died", because it reminded me of Rich Meisner, a blind guy who sang and played for change in front of the Woolworth's near my folks' house. I already knew this song at the time I first encountered Rich, which would be about 1977, and he taught me a few guitar basics that I still lean on.

I never saw Rich drink, he was a churchgoing guy who lived quietly in a boardinghouse in Haddonfield, and was by no means disrespected around town. But I saw him as he local Clayton Delaney.

My favorite thing Tom T. Hall ever said, in an issue of Penthouse I stole when I was of the age when I had to sneak Penthouse, was as follows:

"Songs are nourishment for working people. You don't just hand 'em out like hors d'ouvres."

Dave, thanks for giving me Tom T. Hall.