Michael Hurley “Parsnip Snips”

Normally I would never put on a record called Parsnip Snips, but seeing how this is a Michael Hurley record and I’m a big fan of Michael Hurley, I know that it will more likely be the naked, dirty, hippie with a sense of humor experience than the deadly serious, naked, dirty hippie experience, which pretty much sums up why I like some hippie shit and not others. A sense of humor is crucial, and that goes for all entertainers, as well as dentists, co-workers, friends, family, and countrymen. Not that Michael Hurley isn’t serious sometimes, and that’s when he’s better, but humor is the foundation. It says these songs were recorded on a Wollensak between 1965 and 1972—that would have been a portable, open reel tape recorder. So, naturally, it sounds like he’s over there on the other side of the room, right now. That’s even before I started recording, at age 12. (This is how old I am: my first tape recorder was a portable, open reel recorder (pre-cassette)—not sure if it was a Wollensak.) Too bad this guy wasn’t hanging around the neighborhood—he’d probably been a better mentor than the old guy who got us to shoplift for him. If I recall correctly, he’s lived all over, East and West, out in the sticks, mostly. This LP is on Mississippi Records, which would sound Deep South except the address is 4007 N. Mississippi, Portland, Oregon, which, if I recall correctly, is Deep Hipster.

Michael Hurley used to play at the bar across the street from where I lived in Portland (he probably still does—I’m the one that moved away). By the time I realized I should go see him, I could no longer tolerate being in a bar, in the evening, at all. For me, nighttime is not the right time. You’d think I’d be able to deal with it, for a guy like this, who is the very opposite of the spectrum of BluesHammer, but no. Bars have evolved, but it’s still drunks, just a younger generation drinking much better beer, which is also much stronger, and much sweeter—essentially the craft beer movement has given us a new generation of sweet wine alcoholics—it’s just now, instead of Night Train and Thunderbird, it’s Flying Raccoon Butternut Squash Porter. This album is really, really good by the way; don’t mind my diatribes. I pretty much love Michael Hurley (except when he’s cawing like a crow; I don’t even like crows when they’re cawing like crows; but I suppose that’s his version of Bob Dylan’s harmonica). I’ve gone semi-colon crazy in this review, the influence, perhaps, of the first song on the record, “You’re a Dog; Don’t Talk to Me”—maybe the only time I’ve seen a semi-colon in a song title, and it works!

The Band “Music from Big Pink”

I can never keep track of the relationship of this record and The Basement Tapes—which came first, or why—which songs are on both records—I think exact same versions, right? It’s way too tiring to look it up and read about it all, even if I did have use of the internet, but I believe this is their first record, and it’s maybe their best—even though I think they were incredibly young at this time—in the pictures on the inside cover they look like teenagers (except for Garth Hudson, who was probably born looking old)—they sound like mature old-timers, which I think was kind of their thing—and they kind of are taking on that look, too—not quite pulling it off—which was kind of the hippie thing of the time.

Anyway, every single song on this record is so incredibly strong that it’s kind of mind-blowing; could these guys possibly have come from another planet, or just Canada? The playing is pretty amazing, too, and the way it’s recorded. It’s one of my favorite records ever for the drum sound. The singing is otherworldly. What did people think when this album came out? Did they think it was put on Earth by angels? I bet it was not thought of highly enough… I bet decades had to pass for it to be fully appreciated. I bet it’s still not fully appreciated. I bet it’s terminally underrated. Not by me. On a list of the 10 best rock and roll records of all time, this one comes in at like number one.

Yet, in spite of having the most pretentious band name of all time, they are terminally under-appreciated—why? I have a few theories. One is: they forever have confused people; they are all from Canada, except for one guy, who is from the South. They are all songwriters, but you can’t really guess which songs they wrote, because they’re not necessarily the ones they’re singing. Three of them are good enough singers to front their own band, but maybe the best songwriter, Robbie Robertson, can’t sing (yet, there was an Andy Warhol 15 minutes there, at some point, where he was the coolest person on Earth). They are more known for being Dylan’s backup band than they are for being “The Band” (but every time I see old Dylan footage, I’m always looking for the fleeting images of these guys). On one hand, it’s a HUGE plus to have songs written and co-written by Dylan on your debut album (not to mention the cover painting)—but as well, they’ll always be in the shadow of Dylan. I’ll always be in the shadow of Dylan. You, reader, despite your lofty aspirations, will always be in the shadow of Dylan. That motherfucker casts a bigger shadow than Jesus and Godzilla combined.

Les Baxter and His Orchestra “April in Portugal” / “Suddenly”

Whenever I happen to have a random pile of 45s for whatever reason (I just always do) there always seems to be a Les Baxter record, and I never listen to it. This one, from 1953 (on that boring, purple Capital label) has been kicking around for awhile, and I think this is the first time I’ve put it on. So I asked Internet for a bit about Les Baxter, and I didn’t realize he was an Exotica guy. That makes me a little more interested. “April in Portugal” sounds like it has a zither in there, but I don’t know. It’s a bouncy instrumental that I could picture playing along with some robotic contraption at House On The Rock. “Suddenly” is a vocal number, with Bill Kennedy singing, and is an actually pretty nice song, kind of romantic and corny. “Suddenly the night was very still and your touch became a thrill and I knew I was part of you, but I told my heart to be still, until your lips kissed mine,” (like disembodied lips, kind of creepy). The idea here is that two people were not really on each other’s radar, and then suddenly they’re kissing, and rest is history. Or eternity, if you believe in that kind of stuff.

Bob Dylan “Bringing It All Back Home”

I would have been too young to appreciate this record when it came out, I suppose, though I kind of wish my parents were Dylan fans and I would have heard all this. Or maybe not. This has to be a lot of people’s favorite Dylan record, it’s got some of his best songs and maybe a better overall early rock’n’roll sound than any of them. I’ve always just kind of ignored it, I don’t know why. Just read the liner notes on back, written by Bob with minimal caps and punctuation—surreal and cryptic but pretty good. The cover photo is BD and a woman in a red dress holding a cigarette, sitting with a bunch of records and magazines in front of a fireplace. BD is holding a grey kitten. They’re all staring right at the photographer with remarkably similar expressions. I wonder whatever happened to that cat. Or that woman. Or that fireplace.

I wouldn’t want to have to say what my favorite Dylan songs are (or maybe I would like to, and I should make one of those favorite 100 songs lists—but I’ll have to listen to them all, some rainy day)—but “Maggie’s Farm” has to be one of my favorites. Is this the record that marked Dylan’s shift to electric rock’n’roll and rejection of the folk scene? It does have “Mr. Tambourine Man” on it, but then ends with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Who is playing on this record, anyway? There is no listing of musicians.

There is, folded up inside, a huge poster of that classic BD drawing (is it by Milton Glaser?—that’s the name in the upper corner)—it’s his head in profile, with big multicolored hair. The colors are lovely pastel shades. Did this come with this record, or just happen to get stuck in here? It’s never been hung up—there are no holes or tape-damaged corners. I bet I could sell this for some serious bread on eBay, and the people who own this cabin would never notice. (I’d just have to remember to edit this before publishing it.) Does some cafe around here have wifi where I could run my sale? Could I make enough for gas money back to civilization? So many questions, today, and so few satisfactory answers.

Vikki Carr “Nashville by Carr”

Vikki Carr has always been there, it seems like, but I realized I knew nothing about her. I was reasonably certain that Mr. and Mrs. Carr didn’t have a daughter and name her Vikki. Her story is kind of fascinating, and you too can read about her on the internet if you’re so inclined. I hoped for more from this record, the pun of the title kind of implying it’s her “country record,” but it’s not really very country, though she does do some great songs by some great songwriters, and it’s recorded in (you guessed it) and some heavy studio guys play, but overall, the arrangements strike me as flat as the photo collage on the back album cover. The problem is, the surface of this album cover is a very porous cardboard—actual textured surface, like something you do pastels on, but when you reproduce photos on it, especially smaller ones with a lot of detail, you get fuzzy, flat, sadly unimpressive images (and it doesn’t help that she has a Bride of Frankenstein hairstyle, like the guy singing with the James Gang in 1974—maybe he was influenced by Vikki Carr). The album opens up, revealing a 12 by 14 inch panoramic photo of Vikki Carr sitting on the white fence of a horse farm; the problem is, the art department was so obsessed with symmetry, they put Vikki right in the crease, making her look like a Mad Magazine inside back cover “fold-in.” It’s an appropriate album cover given the arrangements.

Overall, this record strikes me as so uninspiring that I’m listening to it over and over, thinking there must be buried treasure there somewhere, because I expect more from 1970. I keep listening, but no. I guess the one thing that’s good is I can play this record and not get annoyed by it—but is that what you’re shooting for, as a musical artist?—to not annoy people? Okay, here is one interesting thing—she does Kris Kristofferson’s pretty great and fairly over-the-top song, “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.” Now, this isn’t a gender-specific song, but there is something about the imagery that you just really picture it being a man singing, there, in first person. Is that sexist of me to say that? I don’t mean that I disapprove—in fact, this is the world that I want: women wandering alone through the park, half drunk, watching a father with his son, smelling bacon cooking somewhere, and longing for something from the near or distant past. I guess if I was a DJ, like in public, what I’d aspire to do is play songs that blew people’s minds—just a little bit. So I could see playing this one. It’s a really vivid song—and I have no idea if Vikki Carr was a drinker or not—but it’s kind of hard for me to imagine her chugging beer for breakfast.

Bob Dylan “Self Portrait”

This is a double album that—in the tradition of double albums—announces the celebration of an explosion of creativity that is unable to be contained on the traditional single LP format. Or maybe it’s something else entirely, seeing how it’s Bob Dylan, and who ever knows what he’s thinking? There is a self-portrait painting of him on the cover with no words or frame. The album opens and there’s a list of the songs, on four sides, and also a list of 50 names; on further inspection, this appears not to be a random list from the phonebook, but likely a list of musical collaborators. Quickly glancing through the alphabetical list I see: Charlie Daniels, Al Kooper, David Bromberg, all the members of “The Band,” and many more names I recognize, and many more that I don’t.

I never heard this one before. It sounds like a Bob Dylan record, kind of, or maybe a parody of one, which you arguably could say about any Bob Dylan record. It’s kind of amazing, I’ve been listening to this dude for 50 years and I keep hearing stuff I never heard—kind of like the original Star Trek broadcast. There’s a few covers on this record, including: “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know,” credited to a C.A. Null, who I don’t know, but I know the song as sung by Skeeter Davis, one of my favorites (she has an album by that title). The lyric goes: “I forgot more than you’ll ever know about him.” Which is a woman singing to another woman, a rival, about a man, I believe, and when you change the gender it doesn’t quite work for some reason—but I also like to think of it as a general proclamation, to anyone, about anything.

It’s interesting—I must have been aware of this record—not when it came out when I was ten—but in later years when I started listening to Dylan records—it would have been in the record store bins, maybe even in cut-out bins like Planet Waves always seemed to be—but I avoided this one like a perennial golden turd in the sun. But listening to it now, on my third or fourth time through, I realize I’ve never heard a lot of this stuff and it’s some of the best Bob Dylan I’ve ever heard. It’s kind of like BD’s “Covers Record”—though a lot of the songs he covers are Dylan songs. (Idea: BD should do an entire record of Cat Power songs.) Here lies the best versions of both “Let It Be Me” and “Blue Moon” I’ve ever heard. A lot of this is BD singing in his “Jim Nabors” voice, which I’ve grown to love. Of course, this is the post-death-Dylan, or “second” Dylan, as the theory goes, and the future (1970 thru 2016) looks bright.

Bob Dylan “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid”

This is apparently the soundtrack record for the movie Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) which was directed by Sam Peckinpah and written by Rudy Wurlitzer—a movie I’m sure I’ve seen, but don’t remember too well (like, I didn’t even remember that James Coburn was in it, but there are credits on the back album cover. I love James Coburn). There is a scene I remember from a movie—and I’m not sure if it is this one—so maybe someone can help me out. A guy gets shot, and before he dies, his last words are something like, “I wish… wish…” Not sure if those are the words, or this is the movie, but it’s something that made a huge impression on me, that scene, and I hope to clear this up someday.

A lot of this is the usual kind of wanky western soundtrack stuff I can do without, with fiddles and “traditional instruments”—there is even something that sounds like the dreaded “pan-flute.” The first song, “Main Title Theme (Billy)” is the kind of music that sounds like it’s celebrating the grandeur and mythology of “The West”—which just strikes me as so much bullshit. I guess I’m not much of a fan of the western genre, as the lies jump out like all political lies, and I don’t believe there was anything good about the old west, just a lot of slaughter, rape, and pillaging, bullies and blowhards, and disgusting behavior all around. I’m guessing Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man gets about halfway closer than any other western. Anyway, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” is a great, great song, and there’s a couple more here with Dylan singing (“Billy 4” and “Billy 7”) that make this record almost worthwhile.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet “Newport 1958”

It’s kind of amazing to me that we live in a time when you can pick up a record like this for nothing, and because it’s been produced on an indestructible format, it has not only survived but is superior to anything that’s come along in the last 60 years. I just put this record on like it was no big deal, and holograms of this jazz quartet popped up in my room (not all see-thru and distorted like in a sci-fi movie, but indistinguishable from my memories, and me). The extensive liner notes pinpoint Thursday, July 3^rd, 1958, and a salute to Duke Ellington (some of these songs are his compositions). This is a nice record. If the hologram strikes you as a little too real, you can focus on the album cover, which is a slightly expressionistic painting of the quartet (or else four guys with glasses playing piano, bass, drums, and sax). The painting’s by Bob Parker (somewhere, someone has the original) and I’m going to make a note of his name, because hopefully I’ll see other work by him. Can you take the A Train all the way up to Newport? When it’s a time machine, you can, and that’s what this record is.

Leonard Cohen “Songs of Leonard Cohen”

The album cover says “Songs of Leonard Cohen” but the label simply says “Leonard Cohen”—I believe this is his first album. It’s the one with the back cover drawing of a naked, chained woman enveloped in flames and not so subliminal skulls. This is an old, scratchy copy of this record, constant scratchy record sound, which sounds very beautiful to me. Maybe it’s just that it sounds so good, the record, as opposed to the digital version through my computer speakers. If you cannot appreciate the scratchy record, however, I have no use for you—go listen to your digital half-life version, and if you claim to have a superior digital system, well okay, I realize my computer speakers suck, and yours are good, but you could also be spending that money on a half-decent record player and it would sound great.

This record is so much Leonard Cohen upfront that I can imagine thousands or even millions of people who can’t handle it, like oysters, or okra, and also some of these songs are amongst the most over-played songs ever, but if you are lucky enough to get hit by a low branch or something and your perception gets a bit realigned and you can hear the record a-new, you are very lucky indeed, because this is the most amazing collection of great songs on one record maybe ever. Any songwriter could call it a career with any ONE of these songs, and here they all are on this one record. The recording sounds at once very young and very old, like they were a little too much 20-something in their giddiness of recording (it was 1967, after all), but Leonard Cohen’s voice overpowers all of the instrumentation, which is a good thing, and he’s right there in your room. He was that odd person who seemed fully mature at a very young age and then just seemed to get younger from there (maybe we’re all like that, but it’s just not so much on display).

Bob Terri “Judy, featuring Bob Terri”

I bought this record because of the cover, which is a gigantic, a little bit cartoonish, color portrait of a woman—her face taking up most of the cover—it kind of reminds me of one of the Mad Magazine artist renditions. I don’t know who this is, but I’m guessing, “Judy.” It’s all a bit confusing, I guess because Judy, Bob, and Terri are all first names, so it kind of sounds like a movie: Bob, Terri, and Judy. (There are a lot of movie titles that are two names, but are there any that are three? There must be, but I can’t think of any offhand.) There are liner notes on back that tell us who is Bob Terri, but it reads kind of like a very dry CV—so I didn’t take much from skimming it. There is no date (Internet tells me it’s 1966), and the songs are mostly standards, but with one song (“Judy”) by Terri. Because of the garish cover, and that the singer is a guy named “Bob”—and because of my association of Judy Garland with drag queens, I guess I was sort of hoping this would be a kind of campy, crazy, drag queen record. Though I don’t even know what that would sound like. As it is, it’s a lot of straight, quiet renditions, pretty much piano and voice (with some accompaniment). I guess you could imagine walking into a little, dimly lit piano bar, and it’s just him there playing.

It’s still a little hard to listen to “Blue Velvet” and not think of the movie, Blue Velvet. I don’t want to think about the bar where Dorothy Vallens sang—I’m still trying to imagine a small, dark, perpetually smoky place… pretty much empty. No picture of this Bob Terri, so even if I imagined him, I’d probably be wrong. I guess he wrote the song “Judy” so I’m paying especially close attention to that. It’s a good song. It’s got an intro, then it’s a loving portrait of this Judy. I’m guessing it’s about a real person. I wonder what Judy thought about this song? Well, I certainly hope she was into it, or else she’d be a little creeped out. “Shadow of Your Smile”—that’s a good song, and this is a nice, pretty intense version. I had a fairly negative reaction to this record the first time I heard it, I’m not sure why, but now I’m really liking it. I can listen to this record. And it’s kind of interesting that I can’t really find anything about Bob Terri on the Internet. It was worth buying for the crazy cover, but it’s a nice listening record, it’s really growing on me. And it’s on Terri’s own label—it might be extremely valuable. I feel like I solved one mystery: what this record sounds like—but so many more mysteries have opened up, like: who is Bob Terri, and where is he now?