WATCHING THE WEB
08/16/2000 Caetano Veloso Singles Rita Lee Hoje E O Primeiro Dia Do Resto Da Sua Vida Os Mutantes Technicolor (Philips) By Lawrence Kay In 1967, after 60 years of samba, a decade of bossa nova, and 36 months of military dictatorship, Brazilian pop culture erupted with its first burst of psychedelic rock 'n' roll. A key event came when young singer Caetano Veloso performed an electric set at one of the country's most prestigious songwriting competitions. As heard on his new rarities collection, Singles, Veloso got booed off the stage just as Bob Dylan had been at the '65 Newport Folk Festival. The angry crowd had come to hear thoughtful poetry and subtle bossa nova rhythms, not that rock 'n' roll crap from North America. Backing Veloso onstage was a band of teenage freaks known as Os Mutantes, who soon became the house band for the new style known as "tropicalia." One of the first bands to break away from the cutesy, '50s-based teeny-bopper rock heard on the popular Jovem Guarda television show, Os Mutantes recorded wild Beatles/Byrds/Arthur Brown acid rock imbued with a peculiar South American twist. Eventually Os Mutantes fragmented and morphed into a boogie-blues band with off-kilter, folkie leanings, then further degenerated into a mildly horrific, prog-based stadium rock act. Their best record may have been a solo release by singer Rita Lee, who was the first member to leave the band and seek greater commercial success. Recorded in 1972 along with fellow Mutantes Sergio Dias and Arnaldo Baptista, the meticulously produced Hoje E O Primeiro Dia Do Resto Da Sua Vida showcases the Mutantes' most avant-garde leanings while avoiding the relentless jokiness of their other efforts. Phased vocals, musique concrŹte tape loops, funky bass lines, and soaring guitars lace through this remarkably eclectic record, which ranges from spacey art rock and free-jazz skronkiness to prescient parodies of lounge music. On "Teimosa," Rita Lee's Minnie Mouse vocals sound uncannily like Cibo Matto's, while other tracks highlight the group's Kinks-like devotion to music hall camp. Another piece in the Mutantes puzzle is their recently unearthed English-language album, Technicolor, which was recorded during a trip to Paris in 1970. Although it falters toward the end, Technicolor is a treat and a revelation, particularly the delicious translation of Caetano Veloso's surrealistic (and slightly psychotic) "Panis et Circenses." Like Hoje, Technicolor is smoother and more stylistically consistent than other Mutantes albums, and it's a must for fans who have always wondered what the hell those Brazilian hippie weirdoes were singing about.
10/11/2000 Digging Up Roots How Chris Strachwitz sparked a music revolution by releasing obscure, vernacular music By Lawrence Kay Back in 1960, when he put out the first record on his tiny Arhoolie record label, Chris Strachwitz didn't set out to change the way the world thinks about folk music -- it just sort of happened that way. Last month, the National Endowment for the Arts presented the Bay Area resident with the prestigious Bess Lomax Hawes Award, honoring 40 years of work as one of America's most influential folklorists and independent record producers. Fans of blues, bluegrass, and world music all owe a debt of gratitude to Strachwitz, who plunged into some of the most obscure and neglected corners of musical history, and set an example for the many independent record labels that sprang up in his wake. As one of the granddaddies of today's roots music scene, Strachwitz followed a strange muse, introducing generations of new listeners to the regional cultures that he fell in love with when he came to America. In 1947, Strachwitz emigrated from the German-occupied region of Lower Silesia, winding up in Los Angeles at the peak of a music boom sparked by the lifting of the wartime recording ban. Every kind of popular music was exploding -- hillbilly artists like Merle Travis and Joe Maphis performed weekly on radio and TV shows, bebop jazz and pop vocal performers were at their peak, and the West Coast blues scene was in full swing. A young Strachwitz soaked it all up but, strangely enough, found himself drawn to an even older, funkier kind of music -- the turn-of-the-century, traditional jazz that he saw performed in New Orleans, a hokey Hollywood film with Billie Holiday playing a maid in love with Louis Armstrong. Corny as it was, the film turned Strachwitz onto old-fashioned jazz and blues. Suddenly, he became an obsessive collector, hunting down 78 rpm records in L.A. music shops, department stores, and flea markets. In the mid-'50s, when the music industry shifted toward long-player albums, 78s fell out of fashion, and Strachwitz was able to pick them up for nickels and dimes (instead of their old price of 80 cents each). While going to college at Pomona and later at Cal, Strachwitz made ends meet by reselling his extra records to collectors in Europe for a buck apiece -- not a huge profit, but enough to keep his vinyl habit alive. Strachwitz became part of a small group of roots music buffs who pieced together the histories of obscure musicians almost by osmosis. One day a friend told Strachwitz that he'd found the then-forgotten blues singer Lightnin' Hopkins playing at some dive in Houston. Strachwitz hustled himself down south and stood in an audience at Pop's Place with about a dozen locals, blown away by what he heard. "I was just totally impressed by how this man was improvising these lyrics about how the rain was filling the chuckholes that night when he was trying to get to the show, and [how] his car would hit the holes ... about how his shoulder was aching because it was so humid and his arthritis was bothering him," Strachwitz says. "The whole night long it was like that, Lightnin' improvising all these lyrics, and I just thought, "God, somebody should capture this.'" Although he was never able to capture exactly what he heard that night, Strachwitz did get Hopkins to cut some recordings, and thus the Arhoolie label was born. Strachwitz recorded him and other bluesmen such as Jesse Fuller, Mance Lipscomb, and K.C. Douglas during the height of the '60s folk scene. Retired blues pickers who had been working as sharecroppers and day laborers found themselves performing in front of thousands of college kids at the Greek Theater. Gradually, as the Bay Area music scene expanded outward from its rock and pop base, the fledgling Arhoolie label became the center of a booming roots music revival. What set Strachwitz and his label apart from other folk and blues labels was his interest in what he now calls "vernacular" culture -- music played by regular people as part of their everyday lives. While urban blues fans valued flashy electric solos and folkies approached old-time music with academic reverence, Strachwitz recorded acoustic country blues artists and scrappy string bands. When he brought his unplugged blues acts to town, he was surprised to find that the rough-and-tumble clubs of Oakland and Richmond considered them too mellow while the on-campus folk scene went gaga over them. Probably the greatest contribution Arhoolie made to roots music was helping popularize Louisiana dance music such as Cajun and zydeco. The label began releasing zydeco records in the early 1960s, when the music was hardly known outside of the swamps, and "good folks" in the South scorned it as low-class trash. Strachwitz, of course, loved the stuff. He met accordionist Clifton Chenier through Hopkins -- the two were cousins -- and recorded several albums, which are all now classics of the genre. He also uncovered the music of the white swamp singers -- the Cajuns. "At that time Cajuns were treated like Gypsies," Strachwitz recalls. "They were like a pest. You'd ask people if they knew any good Cajun music and they'd say, "What do you want with those people? They live down in the swamps, don't fool with them!' That's how it was -- you either love that music, or you hate it." With persistence, Strachwitz searched out the hot Cajun dance halls, full of "great big women and little bitty men," and even tracked down the legendary Hackberry Ramblers, a band that had made the first Cajun records ever, back in the 1930s. In the 1970s, Arhoolie turned its attention to country music, recording some of the best early albums by bluegrass singer Del McCoury, as well as local revivalists such as the Any Old Time String Band. Taking advantage of vague copyright laws, Strachwitz stealthily reissued some of the best old western swing records of the 1930s -- music that was impossible to find in any other form at the time. He also put out several LPs worth of classic, late-'40s hillbilly boogie hits by country singer Rose Maddox, whose rowdy, brazen style is often cited as the inspiration for the rockabilly craze that came a decade later. Along the way, Strachwitz moved his business out of his apartment and into an actual storefront, using publishing royalties from an unexpected hit song -- Country Joe McDonald's "Fixin' to Die Rag" -- to purchase the El Cerrito building that now houses Arhoolie Records, and its sister store, Down Home Music. As part of its 40th anniversary celebration, Arhoolie has just put out a stunning five-CD collection of the music its founder loves. The Journey of Chris Strachwitz is a lavish box set featuring dozens of the label's best recordings and including blues players, jazz bands of all description, New Orleans R&B, zydeco, brass band music, Jewish klezmer music, and ethnic European folk bands. It also highlights one of Arhoolie's most surprising recent discoveries, the "sacred steel" music of a small Pentecostal sect in Florida that uses wild steel guitar playing to lead its congregations in prayer. (A documentary about the music, Sacred Steel, has its world premiere at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley on Oct. 18.) The box set also focuses heavily on Strachwitz's enduring passion for Tex-Mex conjunto music and Mexican corridos, two styles that are among the most neglected in the folkloric community. Strachwitz first released the music in the late 1970s, with records by Tex-Mex legends like singer Lydia Mendoza and accordionists Santiago and Flaco JimŽnez. The label has since issued dozens of albums worth of archival recordings from the '30s, '40s, and '50s, which are cherished by a tiny but devoted fan base. Still, the music is a hard sell to North American and European audiences who find it too stark or grating to listen to, and to Mexican fans who love the music but don't have enough income to afford historical reissues, even at Arhoolie's budget prices. Although his Mexican releases sell poorly, Strachwitz is committed to keeping the music in print and preserving the recordings against the ravages of time. He has established the Arhoolie Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes vernacular music of all kinds, but focuses particularly on the massive archive of over 30,000 rare Mexican and Mexican-American recordings that Strachwitz has collected. The foundation was recently given a major boost when one of the most popular Mexican ranchera bands, Los Tigres del Norte, donated a half-million dollars to the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center to help digitize the collection. The foundation has also donated hundreds of copies of a sampler of corridos to public libraries throughout the Southwest. "I probably have the world's largest collection of Mexican-American recordings," says Strachwitz. "It's not as sexy as collecting blues or jazz, but I figure that it's just as important for the culture that it represents. Here, the blues somehow crossed over and, from a totally disreputable genre, it became an artistically acclaimed music. This has not yet happened with the Mexican music. ... There's still that class difference, and the record labels treat it like something low-class." But Chris Strachwitz is used to following his heart, instead of his bank book. He certainly never expected to be given a national award for what to him is a passion. After four decades of mining some of the world's best and most obscure music, there's just one thing to do: keep on digging.10/11/2000 Tom Lehrer The Remains of Tom Lehrer (Rhino) By Lawrence Kay Tom Lehrer may be the most influential musical satirist of the past century. He was certainly one of the funniest, and one of the most widely emulated. Frolicking his way toward notoriety in the early 1950s, Lehrer defied the willful amnesia of the Eisenhower era, composing witty ditties about drug dealing, bomb testing, sadomasochism, and other topics America had persuaded itself it knew nothing about. Meanwhile, he aimed a sardonic jab or two at romantic love, sentimentality, and the vapidity of the budding folk scene. While the TV networks created their Leave It to Beaver universe, Lehrer reveled in critical thought and scathing, relentless irreverence. He also pioneered the DIY philosophy by self-releasing two 10-inch albums and selling them through mail-order, while holding down a day job as a lowly math professor at a place called Harvard. This lavish new three-CD set collects those records and everything else Lehrer released, including several live albums, singles, and rarities from the '70s children's show The Electric Company. On balance, Lehrer's catalog can appear rather slight, at least in comparison to his fame; some songs were rerecorded as many as three times, yet the repetition is hardly a drawback. It's fascinating to contrast the difference between his sparse-sounding early recordings -- which evoke images of a nutty party guest parodying Gilbert & Sullivan as the hot toddies make the rounds -- with the brilliantly professional comic timing of his later performances. While political songwriters from Tom Paxton and Phil Ochs to Leon Rossellson strove to be his equal, none was as consistently biting or genuinely hilarious; Lehrer created a body of work that serves as a thinking person's history of the stultifying politics and cultural pitfalls of the pre-hippie era. Where else can you learn about LBJ's sidelining of Hubert Humphrey, the American recruitment of Nazi Germany's scientific elite, or the ever-present obsession with the bomb, yet find yourself laughing instead of stifling a yawn? And how many history lectures have you humming along? Although he never actually earned his Ph.D., Tom Lehrer is still the Dean of Satire. Here's your chance to audit his course.
11/01/2000 The 6ths Hyacinths and Thistles (Merge) By Lawrence Kay By all accounts, Magnetic Fields main man Stephin Merritt is indie pop's ultimate renaissance man -- Irving Berlin, Leonard Cohen, and the Human League all rolled into one. Merritt is an old-fashioned songsmith who uses '80s retro synth-pop to bridge the gap between kitchen-table home recordings and the Tin Pan Alley crooning of the '30s and '40s. Last year's three-CD tour de force, 69 Love Songs, showed his mastery over a dazzling range of styles -- cabaret torch songs, disco, blithe parodies of country, punk rock -- and set his name in the firmament of modern-day lyricists. Over the years, Merritt has continually been fascinated by other people performing his work. Hyacinths and Thistles is the second album by The 6ths, a challenging, often mystifying, project in which Merritt invites various celebrities to sing his songs. The first 6ths record was somewhat of a glorious disaster, featuring an all-star indie rock cast buried under a manic, monochromatically discofied sound mix. Here, by contrast, Merritt's brilliant wordplay comes through loud and clear, although the choice of guest artists is more varied and eccentric. Indie icons such as Sally Timms (of the Mekons) and Sarah Cracknell (of Saint Etienne) rub elbows with '60s folkies Odetta and Melanie and new wave pioneers Gary Numan and Marc Almond, with mixed results. One can understand why the stagy, ironically melodramatic Merritt would get a kick out of working with Soft Cell singer Almond, although the resulting track ("Volcana!") is unbearably schmaltzy. There are other moments of profound self-indulgence, such as the 28-minute-long "Oahu," which meanders interminably through a spacey synthesizer riff reminiscent of the old-school New Age-y electronic music they used to play in Nature Company stores. On the flip side, this disc has its fair share of home runs, including a dreamy mix of "Just Like a Movie Star," featuring one of France's great unknown indie popsters, Dominique A, and "As You Turn to Go" by Scottish avant-provocateur Momus. One surprise highlight is the understated ballad "You You You You You" by Katherine Whalen of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, who may be the singer most successful at picking out the poetic inflections and emotional ironies in Merritt's lyrics. In the old days, the true test of a songsmith was the ability to create "standards" -- songs that anyone could sing and make his own. Here, Cracknell hits pay dirt with her version of "Kissing Things" -- a melancholy love song that has been a concert staple of the Magnetic Fields for years -- proving that Merritt has what it takes to create a great pop classic.
11/22/2000 Johnny Cash; Merle Haggard Cash: American III: Solitary Man (American) / Haggard: If I Could Only Fly (Anti/Epitaph) By Lawrence Kay In rock and R&B, there's an obvious premium paid on youthfulness, and an almost reflexive disdain for old coots who keep in the game too long. Country music, by contrast, pays tribute to its elders and legends -- up to a point. The sad fact is that Nashville, like L.A., likes to see sweet young thangs shaking their heinies while racking up multiplatinum hits. No matter how many nods Music City makes to tradition, it's damn near impossible for old-timers to get any airplay these days. This reality was brought home forcefully last year when officials restricted George Jones -- arguably the best country singer alive -- to only part of his first radio hit in years during a televised award ceremony. Jones refused to sing, and it was left to a whippersnapper like Alan Jackson to stick up for him, playing the song in protest when it was his turn on camera. Still, with the right audience, geezer cred can work wonders for country legends. In the early '90s, Johnny Cash signed with American Records and found himself the toast of the college/indie crowd, his charisma and catalog skillfully milked by rock/rap impresario Rick Rubin. Solitary Man is the third album Cash has recorded for the label, and, once again, it's a mix of self-mythologizing and soulful traditionalism. Half the tracks are cover tunes, which employ varying degrees of irony. Cash's low-key delivery on songs by Tom Petty, U2, and Neil Diamond is oddly wonderful, but his version of Nick Cave's "The Mercy Seat" (itself a painfully obvious tribute to Cash's style) is just as insufferable and overblown as the original. Merle Haggard, another hick music legend with a rebellious sheen, makes his entry into the wow-the-college-kids genre with an equally understated record that could double as the soundtrack to a biopic on George Dubbya Bush. The opening verse is a sure-fire attention-getter about watching old friends snorting coke while yearning for the recklessness of bygone days. Party animal nostalgia echoes through the album, shamelessly balanced by a maudlin "confession" to his kids regarding the youthful indiscretions that sent Merle up the river to San Quentin. Despite the baldness of the writing, this is easily one of Haggard's best albums in decades. Both Cash and Haggard seem paradoxically impelled to put more effort into their songs when playing to the non-country audience. Say what you will about their marketing strategies, but these old guys can still cut the mustard.
