Welcome back. Hopefully I can get up enough energy to submit these entries more than monthly soon. Today...the Angry Young Man of New Wave most people forgot.
....which is a shame because if you consider Joe Jackson The Beatles, and Elvis Costello The Stones, then Graham Parker is The Kinks, the one that helped shape the genre while not getting the credit his peers deserved. And let’s be honest; like The Kinks, Parker had a tendency towards inconsistency and an annoying habit of trying to chase the American market instead of being true to himself.
This is from a later phase in his career, after he broke ties with his most famous collaborators The Rumor, and was recording as Graham Parker And The Shot (this being the only album he records under that name). This is a very transparent song about converting native cultures to Christianity and, while it’s not as unsubtle as ‘Green Monkeys,’ a song off the otherwise excellent,return-to-form album Struck By Lightning, it’s pretty obvious what Parker is getting at. It’s sort of a sad period of his career, when he was flailing about trying to keep an audience that was growing bored with him. It’s not for nothing that Parker never quite found another sympatico set of collaborators thoughout the late 80‘s onward until he recently reunited with The Rumor for the rather good Three Chords Good.
As you can no doubt tell, I don’t have much to say about this song. If Graham Parker is The Kinks, then this is from the period in his career analogous to the late 70‘s era that saw Ray Davies produce Low Budget and Celluloid Heroes.
Portrait of a misanthropic crumudgeon as a misanthropic firebrand.
Sorry I’ve been quiet for so long...but I’ve brought one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite artists with me!
This is a live recording from 1979 Los Angeles show I got from a sadly long-gone blog devoted to archiving all those bootlegs us music fans used to get from Music Stores of Questionable Means. Here in New York, there were a number of record stores in and around Bleeker Street that would have this one cabinet in a corner somewhere with stacks upon stacks of cassette tapes with monochrome construction paper covers of badly photocopied pictures of the star contained within. While I never got this particular concert, I did get a number of Robyn Hitchcock and New Order ‘rarities’ from these stores that I listened to until the emulsion wore off. There was something about having this forbidden fruit, even if the sound levels were, well, lousy, that made them all the more special.
I love this song--I used to sing it a lot at karaoke until my good friend Vinnie Bracco started using it as an ‘icebreaker’ song (i.e. the song that a karaoke DJ uses at the top of each rotation to loosen up the crowd and convince them to participate)--and it fascinates me how the practices of the English Press that Jackson is criticizing in this song have become prescient for the American press. This performance begins with Jackson gleefully reading out random headlines from a British newspaper, and they’re no different from some of the stuff I can see being printed in The Daily News and The New York Post. This was meant as satire when Jackson wrote it, and now it’s reality for me in one of the most literate cities in this country.
This particular performance is also interesting because it gives us a glimpse of Jackson’s misanthropic nature back when, in that moment in time when punk and new wave were the king of the musical heap, it was not only acceptable but welcome. Listening to the bootleg straight through, you can’t escape that Jackson has a bit of a contempt for his audience. Oh, he appreciates them on some level and is grateful they’ve come out for his show, sure....but there’s a surliness to some of his banter that serves as a hint of some of the greater ugliness to come. Sure, this misanthropy will wax and wane with his musical periods--when I saw him live during the Big World Tour, he was positively charming--but I can’t help thinking this was one of the times he didn’t feel the need to hide the monster inside, and probably took pride in mocking his audience while basking in its praise.
It’s not my favorite song of this period; I still hold the title track for I’m The Man (another song that seems erieely prophetic here in the Age Of The Tentpole), and contend there are moments of ‘Is She Really Going Out With Him?’ that threaten to make it the most perfect pop song ever. But it’s a great number, and a great little captured moment in the career of this man. Now he seems to have once again retreated into his jazz-o-philic tendencies, but hearing this track reminds you of how he once was one of the nastiest, surliest, pop star ever....
Here is a live performance from 1980 of the song--probably from the same tour as the one this recording is taken from.
Another Jackson song, this one from an interesting period in his career. 'Goin' Downtown' is from Laughter and Lust, the album for which Jackson gave up on his stance to no longer do videos (he objected to the way that A&M Records has issued a video for the song 'Breaking Us In Two' without his permission).
Apparently, after willfully working the rest of his contract with A&M with a series of increasingly uncommercial (but still listenable) albums--one that featured his aborted soundtrack for the James Bridges film Mike's Murder, a mock jazz album, the impressive recorded-live three-sided album Big World that's a personal favorite, and an album of instrumentals--he signed with Virgin and produced Laughter and Lust, a screed about how unhappy Jackson is with the world and the career he's chosen disguised expertly as a pop album.
And that's the greatest trick of this album. Every last one of these songs is soaked in vitriol and anger, and yet they're sweet, upbeat and exciting numbers--hell, the song that was the single for the album, "Obvious Song" was just one complaint after another done in that pulsing, jazzy Jackson style. Even the cover, which has Jackson dressed up as Buster Keaton dressed as a prisoner complete with ball and chain, speaks of the snarkiness with which he viewed his then-present condition.
This song is one of a number of songs that explore Jackson's love/hate affair he has with New York City. He's lived here off and on since 1982 (he presently lives in Berlin, although he still maintains a place in this city, as well as Portsmouth, England). As in keeping with the teeth-bared nature of the album, Jackson talks about the habit some New Yorkers have of traveling to Greenwich Village, Soho, and Chelsea under the pretense of 'hanging out'--but actually to watch the various 'freaky' people who live there go about their lives and mock them. It has the usual upbeat and happy tone--but with a sneering resignedness underneath, as if Jackson wants to break the habit but just can't. It's the flip side to some of his previous New York-centric songs, like 'Chinatown', the side that shows the shadows that dwell in the corners of the bright lights....
After Laughter and Lust, he did one more pop album, Night Music before signing with Sony Classical and producing a pair of symphonies and returning to his roots as a singer/songwriter with jazz tendencies with his albums from Rykodisc. He also released some amazing live albums (one, released by Sony Classical, features a blistering cover of 'Summer In The City,' adding to his suite of New York songs) which I recommend you do pick up.
No video for this one, but here's a live performance of the number from a 2008 performance in Vancouver. In some ways, I've felt Jackson's work is best experienced live, where the raw honesty of his voice, and his true love of jazz stylings come to the fore....so enjoy.
I know, I know...I took a day off. Give me a break; it's the last few days before it's Back To School, and I work retail. Retail as in children's shoes. So it's understandable that I was too exhausted to continue this annual experiment.
So let's get to what would have been yesterday's pick, an original number by Inara George. I first became enamored of her thanks to Brian Ibbot's Coverville. Brian played her sublime cover of Joe Jackson's "Fools In Love," and I was hooked. She's definitely taking her cues from the easy listening lounge revival that threatened to blow pop culture wide open in the 90's--her songs are low-key, her melodies laid back and her vocals have the steamy class worthy of a Bachrach woman. Incidentally, she's also extremely busy--in addition to her solo work, she's one half of The Bird and The Bee, one half of Merrick and one third of the Living Sisters.
And this song? It's pretty cool. The Q in the title stands for questions...namely, the questions Inara asks the listener that never get answered. As the song goes on its own mellow way, we learn more about the question and what Inara paints is a strange tableau of someone climbing into her bedroom window and sleeping in her bed, where she finds him/her. We never learn what the question is (although we can certainly infer it from the circumstances), but we do learn the results...the breaker-in says nothing, and our heroine is stunned into silence.
For me, what makes this song so charming is what happens at the end--namely, we get a false stop, a pause...and then we get a strange, atonal, hypnotic humming and whistling that ushers in the real ending...I don't know why, but I love this affect, as it's the songwriting equivalent of those little scenes that filmmakers have been tucking away in the middle of the credits as an incentive to stay in the theater until the very end.
No video for this one, but here's a fan made one for that cover of "Fools In Love" I mentioned....
And now, ladies and gentlemen--one of my favorite musicians, in one of his most idiosyncratic periods.
I have been a fan of Joe Jackson from the start. Part of it is because while he may not be the most learned or accomplished singer, his voice is rubbed raw emotional. When he's singing, you're getting the real deal--no mannerisms, no vocal tricks to hide weaknesses, just a man who lets you know what he's feeling at all times. During those early blooms of the New Wave, Jackson found himself lumped in with the 'Angry Young Men' of pop music--but, much like fellow Angry Young Man Elvis Costello, Jackson branched out quickly to explore other aspects of his personality.
Which brings us to this song, and the other reason I revere Jackson--this is a man who doesn't stop exploring and challenging himself. In his career, he's done a reggae album, a collection of instrumentals, a full blown choral piece, two albums of film music...and an album of swing standards, Jumping Jive, which is where this song comes from. That last album is right up there with I'm The Man as one of my favorites of his work, and the reason for it is that this is not standards done ironically (like when David Johannson briefly transformed into Buster Poindexter), or as an attempt to keep his waning career vital (as any number of aging rockers--I'm looking at you, Rod Stewart). He made this album at the height of his career, a year before what is arguably his most famous album, Night And Day was released, because damnit, he likes this music.
As such, this is a painstaking recreation of Louis Jordan's 1942 novelty song bouyed by the love Jackson has for the source material and that aforementioned emotionality of Jackson's voice. I love this song, I love this album, and I wish more people would discover this.
