In The Dust #12: The 10 Best Reissues of 2011
Once a week In The Dust rolls up its sleeves and digs to the back of the rack to find that record, the one you never knew you always wanted, the one that’s lost but not forgotten.
You’ve probably noticed a rush of lists lately, not only here at Thought On Tracks, but from every other music outlet. It’s that time of year, the output of new tracks slows and the critics begin to look back, not forward, as the calendar reaches its last page. We’ve seen the release of some brilliant new music this year, adeptly and diligently covered by our very talented authors, but as most of you may know, the eye of this piece looks not on the new, and this author’s sensibilities are dated and dusty. No release can better purse its lips and release one’s taste from the grime of age than the reissue.
Cleaned up, remastered, rediscovered, retooled, reordered, repackaged, revamped, the reissue is the music industry’s key weapon in the fight against time. Tastes change. Technology advances. Production slows and so does the heart. It is for all these reasons a reissue is necessary, to keep us from forgetting history in a society that is constantly looking forward, behaving as if it has none. Reissues, like Proust’s madeleine cake, re-invigorate a love that feels both lost and everlasting, tied to a period of life into which we are wholly thrust, through the channel of that love, and are allowed to somehow, indirectly, experience again. It is in this spirit that the best reissues are created: thoughtful, reverent, and comprehensive. It is in this same spirit that I present, in no particular order, for each is immortal in its own right, the 10 best reissues of 2011.
Brian Wilson – The Smile Sessions Box Set
What is there to say about an album that is at once completely incoherent and absolutely brilliant? Borne of utter insanity, Smile and its ancillary recordings are, not surprisingly, in large part utterly insane. Began by The Beach Boys in 1966 as an American answer to Sgt. Pepper’s, Smile held a reputation as one of the greatest and most fabled unfinished projects in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. The Smile Sessions Box Set collects all the tape from the definitive Smile sessions, recorded with The Beach Boys in 1966-1967.
Inextricably tied to its mastermind, Brian Wilson’s, mythical antics, deteriorating emotional condition, abuse of LSD and general erraticism, Smile, Wilson’s “teenage anthem to God”, was widely believed to be dead, forever lost to the annals of rock lore, but with the help of original lyricist Van Dyke Parks and musician and composer Darian Sahanaja, Wilson was able to finally complete the album, rerecording it in its entirety and releasing it in 2004.
John Fahey – Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You: The Fonotone Years (1958-1965)
Many will not have heard of John Fahey, but if you like M. Ward, you like John Fahey. Ward admittedly built the bulk of his guitar style on Fahey’s brand of minimalist folk fingerpicking, often crediting with spawning its own genre, American Primitive Guitar. Borrowing from a number of American music traditions, Fahey yoked traditional musical strands of American roots together with world and the avant-garde to create something familiar, yet entirely unique.
Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You: The Fonotone Years (1958-1965) chronicles what one might call Fahey’s early nativist period, before he ventured deeper into the avant-garde. The collection is full of faithful interpretations of American music, from old Delta blues to Appalachian string ballads, western rumbles and stomps and beautiful, soul-stirring folk gospel. It is Fahey at his most natural, connecting with the music that, like his blood, sits just beneath the surface of his skin, waiting to leap from it like Whitman’s yawp. It is American musicology, and an American education, in a box.
Junior Wells’ Chicago Blues Band – Hoodoo Man Blues [Expanded Edition]
This selection should come as no surprise. Subject of the 6th In The Dust, Hoodoo Man Blues, by Junior Wells’ Chicago Blues Band, is long an author’s favorite. Widely regarded as one of the greatest blues records ever recorded, the 2011 reissue of Hoodoo Man Blues includes one unreleased song, “I Ain’t Stranded”, and loads of studio chatter and alternate takes, giving you a direct look inside the “blues bar band” world of Chicago’s Southside. For more, please see In The Dust #6: Junior Wells’ Chicago Blues Band – Hoodoo Man Blues.
Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On [40th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition]
In March of 1970, Tammi Terrell, Gaye’s long-time singing partner, died six weeks before her 25th birthday of a malignant brain tumor. Gaye was devastated. He felt responsible for her illness and death. Refusing to perform or record, he withdrew from music altogether and tried out for the Detroit Lions, hoping to begin a career as a professional football player. He was unsuccessful, but this tangent lead to working with songwriters Al Cleveland and The Four Tops’ Obie Benson on a track called, “What’s Going On”, co-written for The Originals. Cleveland and Benson convinced Gaye to record the song himself, eschewing in a newly social, political and further spiritually conscious period in Gaye’s music.
Now, Marvin Gaye’s 11th record, and arguably his most famous, gets the super deluxe treatment. Rereleased with a whopping 28 bonus tracks, 16 of which have never seen the light of day, including a stripped down test mix of “What’s Going On”, original mono mixes of the album’s singles, and a ton of spare parts, alternate mixes and jams, this is a bevy of information on a truly significant American artist at the crux of his career.
Miles Davis – Live In Europe 1967:Best Of The Bootleg Vol.1
Bop. Live. In Europe.
As if that isn’t enough, this recording of Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet, the first in an intended series, features not only Miles Davis, the original cool cat, heir to Armstrong and Bechet’s thrones as king of the trumpet, it also boasts Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, all of whom are fully-realized legends with storied and celebrated careers. This was at the time, and is today, one of the greatest bands ever assembled, and here they are raw, off-the-cuff, unfettered and uninhibited, playing the way the best bands play, fearlessly, dangerously, and in the best of all conditions for jazz: live.
The Smiths – The Smiths Complete
First thing’s first, this is not technically “complete”, so this is not the end of the road for those who want to own everything. They did leave some things out, but this is almost everything: the four studio albums remastered, three compilations of the singles and one-offs and a live record.
For those who know The Smiths, this is a condensed representation of the long and tumultuous career of one of the best bands of all-time. For those who don’t know The Smiths, this is a dense, cavernous route to the essence of a legendarily depressive and hopelessly romantic Manchester alternative rock band, Johnny Marr, its innovative guitarist, and Morrissey, its lead singer, one of the most notorious and iconic frontmen ever, master of tragic beauty:
And if a double-decker bus / Crashes into us / To die by your side / Is such a heavenly way to die / And if a ten-ton truck / Kills the both of us / To die by your side / Well, the pleasure – the privilege is mine
“There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” – The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead
In the words of another poet, the French Dramatist, Jean Racine, “a tragedy need not have blood and death; it’s enough that it all be filled with that majestic sadness that is the pleasure of tragedy”.
The Rolling Stones – Some Girls [Deluxe Edition]
In a lot of ways an oddball in The Stones’ oeuvre, Some Girls attempts to bridge The Stones’ trademark roughness and modern pop trends. The result is weird, commercial and excellent. The group tackles disco, very faithful country and several strange, punkish brands of western, echoing, as does its cover art, the rising punk movement in the U.S. and their native Britain.
Much more polished than their previous work, and unabashedly more commercially ambitious, Some Girls shows The Stones at a point of portage: crossover into the rage and the popular, or turn around and go the way they came. What resulted is the last great record they ever made. This reissue includes an entire bonus disc of unreleased recordings made during the Some Girls sessions, further document of a band in flux.
Lee “Scratch” Perry – Return of Pipecock Jackxon
Credited by some as the originator of “dub”, Lee “Scratch” Perry is a reggae legend, instrumental in the growth of reggae and its acceptance across the world. His production techniques are a thing of wonder, widely influential and totally innovative, but his personal life is truly stranger than all. Known to defecate in champagne flutes as an illustration of man’s primitive and animalistic nature and secret them around his house for his wife to later find, Perry’s insanity runs very, very deep, and on Return of Pipecock Jackxon he wears it on his sleeve.
The final album to emerge from Perry’s infamous Black Ark studio in Jamaica before burning it down in a fit of rage to “cleanse himself of his sins”, Perry recorded Pipecock Jackxon during a period in which he frequented Amsterdam and took LSD in bulk. This string of various “escapes” from mounting social tension and personal stress produced what many see as Perry’s darkhorse masterwork, a rich opus expanding on the themes of his past work, while also hinting at a strange and promising future for reggae, dub, and even soul and R&B to come.
Ray Charles – Singular Genius: The Complete ABC Singles
106 songs and each better than the last, such is Ray Charles’s radical contribution to ABC Records during his 13-year tenure there. Recorded during what is known as Ray’s “crossover” years, the ABC singles are famous for racially integrating country and pop music, and for Ray’s legendary contract, one including several noteworthy stipulations like ownership of his masters, which virtually no one in the industry had ever received, much less a black artist. During this period Ray also realized his power as interpreter rather than author, ceasing to write new material and growing into the iconoclastic and idiosyncratic master of the popular standards for which he was famous in his later years. For fanatics, the set includes both the A and B sides of all 53 singles, 30 previously unreleased songs, and 21 receiving, for the first time, the digital treatment.
Louis Armstrong – Satchmo: Ambassador of Jazz
OK. Many of you are probably saying that this is cheating. Satchmo: Ambassador of Jazz will not be released in the U.S. for another three and a half weeks, but it’s Louis Armstrong. The rules do not apply.
Armstrong’s influence on music and the world is incalculable. Pioneer of “hot jazz”, scat singing and the trumpet as a solo instrument, Armstrong was truly a visionary, one-of-a-kind, and one the first black performers to completely “cross over”. As a musician he was second-to-none, and as a personality, he was irresistible. His importance, his grandeur, cannot, by any stretch, be overestimated and, honestly, it makes this author’s heart ache to even think about it.
This collection streamlines the former 10-CD Armstrong retrospective into a 4-CD set. Most will probably never need the 10 CDs containing virtually everything he’s ever done, but all should have it. At the very least, all should have this, for it is the gospel, the Bible of music, a love letter to and a symbol of all things indispensable.
As is the nature of a limited list, some things get left out. Honorable mention for the best reissues of 2011 goes to:
Pink Floyd – Discovery Box Set: The Complete Studio Recordings of Pink Floyd
Nirvana – Nevermind [Deluxe Edition]
Jesus & Mary Chain – Psychocandy [Expanded Edition]
And, last but not least:
Iggy Pop & James Williamson – Kill City (Restored, Remixed, Remastered)
All are immortal albums and all require space in everyone’s collection.
Written by Ben Brundage
Album Review: The Bonesetters ‘SAVAGES!’
At long last it’s here. The Bonesetters SAVAGES!. An album that nearly never saw the light of day. Were it not for a successful Kickstarter campaign and the generous lip service of blogs like Musical Family Tree, there was a significant chance that we never would have heard this album. That result would have been an unacceptable travesty.
For those of you that don’t know, this album has been in the can for quite sometime, but after the close of Mossback Records left the lion’s share of the recording costs on the shoulders of the band, the SAVAGES! release was in jeopardy. Fortunately for us, our ears need not fret. The Bonesetters are here.
The album opens with the title track. A soothing serenade of ahhs gives way to a rollicking guitar riff. Enter lead singer Dan Snodgrass. I happen to know that Dan spends his days as an assistant librarian. His station in life bleeds into his writing. Snodgrass’ songs contain full story arcs. The characters are rich and the descriptions vivid. He understands irony, symbolism and all of the other literary tricks of the trade, and he knows how to make them do his bidding. His writing is the type that only comes after long days spent thumbing through tomes written by men who have already conquered the beast that is the blank page.
Snodgrass’ knack for painting clear pictures in his listener’s mind is on display in the first verse of “Savages”, when he sings: “I have been a dead man, / But since those nights I’ve stretched to keep a level head / If I’ve learned one good lesson, / It’s how to keep an eye or two open while in bed.” These clever turns of phrase are littered throughout the album.
One aspect of SAVAGES! that appeals to me the more than any other is that it is completely vacant of gimmicks. Too many bands amongst the indie scene seem so intent on creating the appearance of complete originality that they wind up colluding their songs with layers of looping, incoherent sound effects. The Bonesetters don’t sound concerned with such frivolous pursuits. We all know that music, for the most part, is a medium that is shared and borrowed amongst its members. Originality proves an elusive dream. So The Bonesetters refuse to dress their songs up, leaving their stories and melodies to stand on their own. The result serves as a refreshing change of pace.
Choosing favorite tracks from SAVAGES! proves difficult. Mixed by Tyler Watkins of Margot and the Nuclear So and Sos, the album has an air of maturity that seems beyond a group that should still be discovering its identity. At the risk of sounding like a cheerleader, I’ll go ahead and say that there isn’t a single song that I dislike. Even the brief, instrumental, circus-like “Shakespeare” that appears on the latter half of the disc works for me as a nice intermission of sorts—as if allowing the listener to escape for a cigarette before the band brings this baby home.
I’m not going to waste your time by breaking this album down track for track. I would rather you listen and discover what they mean to you. See what Dan and the boys have to say. There’s an oft quoted Kurt Vonnegut line that goes, “I trust my writing most and others seem to trust it most when I sound like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am.” Though Dan is from New Palestine and his band gained their footing in Muncie, this too is a Hoosier voice worth hearing and one that others across the country can trust.
Connect with Bonesetters via Facebook | Twitter | Bandcamp
Written by Rob Peoni
In the Dust #11: Mississippi Fred McDowell ‘Steakbone Slide Guitar’
Once a week In The Dust rolls up its sleeves and digs to the back of the rack to find that record, the one you never knew you always wanted, the one that’s lost but not forgotten.
When most people today get to talking about the blues masters, they first mention names like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King and Buddy Guy. Further on into the conversation, you hear Elmore James, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Son House. Stick around a while longer and there’s Skip James, Charley Patton, Furry Lewis and Tommy Johnson. Take root at that table, settle in, and you get to Mississippi Fred McDowell, slide guitar master, renowned to those well-initiated, but relatively obscure to many.
Of course this conversational progression is by no means doctrine of blues hierarchy, but it is a fact that Fred McDowell is rarely mentioned in the same breath as many other early masters of the craft, despite the fact that he was their contemporary. This is not for lack of talent, but rather the unusual origin of McDowell’s blues that set him apart.
McDowell was born in 1904 in Rossville, Tennessee but eventually moved to Mississippi, working for a spell in a feed mill in Memphis and settling in Como, a town in a region known as ‘North Mississippi’, just to the east of the Delta. It is here McDowell lived and developed his own brand of the blues. He began playing slide guitar with a pocketknife, as did Henry Sloan (a man mentioned many times here, famous for playing the first blues W.C. Handy ever heard and writing the ubiquitous lyric, ‘goin’ where The Southern cross The Dog’). McDowell then graduated to a ground-down steak bone, for which he is famous, and eventually a true glass bottleneck. As played by McDowell, this brand of blues, referred to as ‘hill country’, is a slide-based, Delta-esque style that incorporates some of the finger-picking flourishes of East Coast, ragtime-influenced Piedmont blues, while emphasizing African traditions like droning and single chord “harmonic centers” played in repetition, rather than complicated chord changes and drastic variations movement to movement. Succeeded by the more modern artists of Fat Possum Records such as Junior Kimbrough and R. L. Burnside, Mississippi Fred McDowell was arguably the first successful ‘hill country’ blues artist. He is widely regarded in deep blues circles as one of the most technically talented slide guitar players to ever slip on the bottleneck but does not often receive the same accolades as his contemporaries because of this slightly removed, heavily localized and “primitive” style.
Like many seminal blues artists active in the 20s and 30s, McDowell’s popularity subsided in the late thirties, concurrent to the approach of the Second World War, but a rise in the popularity of folk and blues music in the late fifties brought about an infamous rediscovery period for all music Americana, of which McDowell was a primary beneficiary. He recorded with the truly immortal Alan Lomax in 1959, which eschewed McDowell into a career renaissance. His music received state-of-the-art sonic treatment, rather than the hasty, acetate field recording he was used to. The uniqueness and virtuosity of McDowell’s sound showed through for the first time in crystal lucidity (a track recorded by Lomax from early in this period, indicative of the audio quality and guitar styling of the sessions, is “What’s The Matter Now?”, and well worth checking out). The records recorded by McDowell and Lomax proved immensely popular and he toured extensively as a result. Those recordings still stand today as some of the finest, most poised and truly remarkable tracks of his career.
One such record, Steakbone Slide Guitar, McDowell’s first solo electric album and one of the last he recorded before his death in 1972, exhibits the searing slide, soulful articulation and idiosyncratic, indefatigable spirit for which his music, and the man himself, is still revered.
The album opens with the blues standard, “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl”, originally recorded in 1937 by John Lee Williamson (AKA Sonny Boy Williamson I). This song has been done and done and done by almost every bluesman under the sun, but McDowell, somehow, seems to imbue it with new life unlike any other rendition this author has heard. His acrid but immensely satisfying slide work elicits a kind of vibration deep in your mind’s center akin to floating in still waters. The hypnotic tweak and twang of his glass bottleneck, mimicking his vocal patterns in a songbird’s call-and-response, juxtaposes with a clean, sharp melodic attack his gruff, aged vocals, emulsifying into a strange, southern syrup tinged with the mellow sweetness of sugar cane and decades of toil’s salty tang.
McDowell proceeds to play several timeless blues standards, such as the first song he ever learned, “Big Fat Mama”, as well as “The Train I Ride”, “Get Right Church” and “Worried Life Blues”, billed here as “You Ain’t Gonna Worry My Life Anymore”, all in beautiful, skillful fashion, sliding up and down his open-tuned neck with a calm and practiced air, often embellishing with “talking slide”, a common but nonetheless impressive technique where the last, or last few, words of a particular phrase are dropped and replaced by a slide guitar’s approximate enunciation, fore-father to the modern talk box popularized by Peter Frampton and wah-wah pedals of Hendrix and countless funk acts.
The centerpiece of the record is a McDowell original, “What’s The Matter With Papa’s Little Angel Child?”. Perhaps the most classically ‘hill country’ of all the songs on the record, McDowell stays on a repetitive, finger-picked progression, circling doggedly the harmonic center, milking from it a churning, trance-like phrase which he intersperses with choice flourishes on his top strings, moving his thumb-heavy bass up a string or two but working still underneath, anchoring, pulling you deeper and deeper into the groove and out of your body. “I wonder what’s a-matter / With Papa’s little angel child? / She won’t come home / ‘Til twelve o’clock at night,” he cries, his guitar seething and writhing as if it were his rogue thoughts and he is wrestling with it, calling out in desperate agony like a snake charmer no longer in control of his serpent: “the meanest woman, lord, you’ve e’er seen.”
The album closes with the song for which McDowell is likely most well-known, “You Gotta Move”, a slow, twisting exhibition of slide mastery made famous by The Rolling Stones of their celebrated 1971 album, Sticky Fingers. McDowell, who was later clung to like a shark with so many suckerfish by the rock-and-rollers and blues-wannabe, rediscoverers-and-appropriators the 60s and 70s, famous declared, “I do not play no rock ‘n’ roll.” He was reluctant to associate himself with younger pop acts, but taught the worthy, including Bonnie Raitt, with generosity and patience the ways of slide. Despite his aversion to rock-and-rollers, McDowell was flattered and delighted by The Rolling Stones remarkably faithful rendition of this song, and when listening to McDowell’s original, it is clear that The Stones went to great lengths to preserve the essence and tonal integrity of a master’s masterpiece.
Blues historian and music critic, Robert Palmer, wrote in his classic book, Deep Blues, about the truly subtle and almost imperceptible tonal intricacies of blues music, the bending of notes so delicately and precisely that a particular intonation is achieved, both vocally and instrumentally. A music thought by many uninitiated to be primitive, loose, even sloppy, Palmer argued is, in fact, extraordinarily and almost incomprehensibly complex, a somewhat mystical musical style built upon difficult techniques honed over years of physical and mental preparation, often born of a very specific upbringing, one of anguish, hard work and a complicated relationship with a very Southern brand of faith.
“You Gotta Move” is, in the author’s mind, perhaps the best example of that precise intonation. McDowell delivers a powerful, brilliant performance, but the magnitude of its brilliance could just as easily be confused for not giving a shit whatsoever. Somewhere in this gray area is the mystical allure of the blues, a seemingly relaxed, low-down and easy musical form that, once examined, becomes a convoluted abyss of names, genres, sub-genres, styles, apocryphal tales and astonishing skill. McDowell straddles that line better than most, laying back during “You Gotta Move” in a special sweet spot, “the pocket”, setting fire to shine soaked juke joints with the scorch of his slide and beckoning patrons to dance the building down with a cool, throaty holler.
Maybe it is the seemingly sleepy, sly, cock-eyed vibe of the droning ‘hill country’ blues that kept the genre and its artists so long from the popularity that other brands of other Southern blues experienced? Maybe it is their slightly removed position from the Delta, plantation-cum-blues Meccas Dockery and Stovall and the infamous Beale Street that held them back? Maybe it is the superficially simple use of the harmonic center that led audiences to gravitate to more apparently complex forms? What it is the author cannot say, but if exploring the vast musical tradition of the ‘hill country’ means digging deep into blues and its periphery, passing on the way the Blinds, the Johnsons and the Jameses, marooning oneself on a distant and reputedly “lesser” form of blues all in the name of finding one man who can make the guitar speak in a tongue you’ve never heard, then the answer is simple. You gotta move.
This album is available via Spotify and iTunes.
Written by Ben Brundage
Thought on Tracks 