The day after Radiohead released its new album In Rainbows—the long-awaited follow up to 2001’s Hail to the Thief—Gigwise reported that it had already been downloaded 1.2 million times. According to industry polls, most of the downloaders had voluntarily paid an average of between two and ten dollars. This didn’t include those who had bought the deluxe-edition discbox for eighty. With no middle-man to soak up the revenue, you do the math.
It’s official: Radiohead has beaten the machine. The industrial one, at least. And being Radiohead, they were clever enough to use another machine (ok, computer) to do it. The thought that these ironies are the result of carefully structured planning is kind of frightening. Then again, (it’s hard not to feel) Radiohead had to be the band to make this move. Quite simply, no other rock group has attacked the struggle between the isolated individual and the impersonal forces of automation as aggressively. More importantly, no band has staged that tension on as many different levels of its sound. The most essential of those stagings was always the battle between lead singer Thom Yorke’s choir-schooled falsetto and his band’s monolith of noise, which could either hoist that wail skyward or rush over it as a merciless, overwhelming tide. In most of Radiohead’s best early songs (“Fake Plastic Trees”) both of those things happened within a matter of minutes. The effect was as exhilarating as it was exhausting.
Though Todd Haynes’ his-name’s-not-Bob avant-biopic, I’m Not There, might appeal only to a certain type of Dylan fanatic, its accompanying A-list soundtrack should rope boomers and hipsters alike. Representing a third of the 34 cuts are two house bands, southernwestern collective Calexico and a superdoopergroup, The Million Dollar Bashers, featuring Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, Beck/Tom Waits sideman Smokey Hormel, organist John Medeski, and current Dylan bandleader/bassist Tony Garnier.
With the exception of Sufjan Stevens (who translates “Ring Them Bells” into pastel impressionism) and Sonic Youth (who convert the titular obscurity into a detuned throb), nearly all submit reverent telescopings of the originals. If Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Calexico-backed “Just Like A Woman” is almost too lovely, then Stephen Malkmus and Lee Ranaldo’s “Can’t Leave Her Behind”—performed by Dylan only on a mumbled ‘66 hotel room bootleg—is exacting nonchalance.
Does the world really need another Tower of Power? Fans of Scare Tactics, a new CD by The Afromotive may say the comparison is unfair. Tower of Power plays high-energy funk shows and Afromotive is world-beat and Afropop. But there are plenty of similarities. Afromotive, led by West Africa native Kevin Meyame, is a group of jazz and classically trained musicians. They produce technically superb music, full of heavy rhythm and jaunty horns, accessorized by Meyame’s French, English and Baoule vocals.
Afromotive’s superb musicianship must be the calling card that won them collaborations with Erykah Badu. But while Badu and Tower of Power practically drip musical passion, Afromotive’s music is sterile. The challenge Meyame faces is to inject zest into this top-notch sound machine.
Gram Parsons Archives, Vol. 1: The Flying Burrito Bros Live At The Avalon Ballroom, 1969
Amoeba
Gram Parsons’ short tenure with The Flying Burrito Brothers still reverberates powerfully across rock and renegade country. So these two sets (April 4 and 6, 1969), recorded by Owsley “Bear” Stanley and lost for decades in the Grateful Dead’s Vault, arrive like the Rosetta Stone. That’s true even though the April 6 set has been widely available for years on bootleg vinyl as “Winterland ’69.”The Burritos’ sound rumbles huge and timeless, yet firmly rooted in the psychedelic era: Michael Clarke’s click-track drumming, Chris Ethridge’s thundering, melodic bass, Parsons’ rawly emotive vocals twinned with Chris Hillman’s high harmonies, and Sneaky Pete Kleinow’s innovative pedal steel, blazing in like a cosmic foghorn. This is Bakersfield country, honky and Okie, mixed with 50s-style rock (covers of Little Richard’s “Lucille” and Roy Orbison’s “Dream, Baby”) and a drugstore cowboy aesthetic. Even at their most delicate and mournful, the Burritos bristle with energy. Their occasional warble and wobble just give tunes like Aretha’s “Do Right Woman” immediacy.
Parsons, who plays guitar and organ, specialized in every stage of heartsick—just-burned on the medley “Undo the Right”/ “Somebody’s Back In Town,” yearning on “Hot Burrito #1,” raucously bitter on Mel Tillis’ hooky “Sweet Mental Revenge” (“Well I hope that the train/ from Caribou, Maine/ runs over your new love affair/ you walk the floor/ from door to door/ and you pull out your puh-rox-ide hair ...”) “Long Black Limousine” is plum mournful. And listen to Parsons moaning high and lonesome on Hank Williams’ “You Win Again,” while Sneaky Pete struts and slides.
Who needs Bruce Springsteen when we’ve got Steve Earle? The former Nashville-based singer/songwriter has even relocated to New York, just a stone’s throw from Bruce’s beloved New Jersey. The two have a lot in common musically, though Earle has never enjoyed The Boss’s mega-success and overzealous fan base. In a saner world, perhaps he would have. But then again Springsteen has never been addicted to heroin or spent four months in jail on drug charges like Earle did in 1994. Earle’s 12th studio album is dedicated to his new hometown and named after a neighborhood that hatched the ‘60s folk revolution. His sound has been updated a touch with the help of John King, known for producing Beck. Several tracks— “Satellite Radio” and a cover of Tom Waits’ “Way Down in the Hole”—have a beats-driven hip-hop feel. The other ten tracks are what you might expect from Earle—rootsy numbers like “Down Here Below” and “Jericho Road,” with the singer doubling (like Bruce) on harp. The album’s most inventive song, “City of Immigrants,” features acoustic Brazilian band Forro in the Dark and lyrics you might expect from a newbie New Yorker: “All of us are immigrants /Every daughter, every son /Everyone is everyone.”
