#924: townes van zandt - pancho and lefty (private concert, 1988)
the saddest song by the saddest man who’s ever lived, played in a goddamned honest to goodness holiday inn in texas. “lefty he can’t sing the blues all night like he used to,” he sings, leather-faced and i think a very sorrowful drunk.
townes van zandt, even in a motel room by a fern singing about kerosene and murder, looks like a priest.
#923: david bowie - i can’t explain (1973)
pin ups is no hunky dory, it’s a galaxy below ziggy stardust and two below low—and even if his eyelids were peeling off from drug use by the end of station to station, at least that one wasn’t all covers of english pop songs. but show me another album whose music made backup singers shake their calves like this! it’s terrifying music. it whips. one half of one of david bowie’s skeletal pin-up struts is more upsetting than 10,000,000 pete townshend stiff-armed arena strums.
#922: jimmy witherspoon - it’s a low dirty shame (1962, frankly jazz)
a violent burst of mid-april new york city sunshine is almost exactly like a jimmy witherspoon’s finger snap, except jimmy witherspoon’s snapping was cooler.
#921: david bowie - station to station (in christiane f.) (1981)
the night before last, really early in the morning, i dreamed i was falling very slowly from high over a beach and toward rolling waves. there was a big truck behind me that was almost like a parachute, and i was drifting closer to the ocean, which seemed like it would be much softer to land on. i even reached behind me and grabbed a little bit of cloud! still, it felt like things were going to end very, very badly. with the tides becoming bigger and bigger, as i fell closer and closer, i woke up. i was amazed and grateful to be back on land—with people, love, david bowie, early-80s german films, and david bowie in early-80s german films.
#920: chuck berry - memphis, tennessee (live, 1963)
don’t let any friends, loose acquaintances, literature professors, film critics, classicists, historians or religious leaders tell you that in the history of mankind, from homer to the bible and the sixth sense, that there’s ever been a better trick ending than the “marie” revelation in the second to last line of the last verse of chuck berry’s memphis, tennessee, the most important song about long-distance telephoning and six-year-olds we’ll ever know.
#919: the cure - jumping someone else’s train and grinding halt (1980, amsterdam)
all feature films would be better off if movie theaters played a selection of exceptionally well-picked old music videos before the coming attractions start, instead of 20 minutes of very large television advertisements and like behind-the-scenes footage of upcoming abc family channel sitcoms. specially, what if the sean penn as a robert smith nazi hunter vehicle had a cure video, a talking heads video, and maybe something from will oldham beforehand? someone get harvey weinstein on the phone immediately.
#918: curtis mayfield - freddie’s dead (1973, live)
death to all other opening drum rollers! a hex on the houses of other hat wearers, soul stirrers, and beard growers! no man, no man at all, will know such wahwahing. freddie is dead but mayfield lives on forever.
update: ask binky griptite and mavis staples, they’ll tell you the very same thing.
#917: rahsaan roland kirk & john cage - sound?? (dir. dick fontaine) - 1967
“franz kline was about to have the first showing of his black and white paintings at the egan gallery. realizing that his mother had never seen his paintings and that she would surely be interested in doing so, he arranged for her to come to new york for the opening. after she had been in the gallery for some time, she said, ‘franz, i might have known you’d find the easy way out.”
- john cage’s a year from monday, the chronicles of hallucinatory minimalist music memoirs.
“now there’s the black cross, the green cross, the white cross, the double cross, the criss-cross, and the lost cross. and the cross gets awful heavy at different times, but one is supposed to keep on going on and carrying the cross on his shoulder, because you ain’t supposed to let no cross cross you up. you’re supposed to let a cross help you get across. and if you let a cross help you get across, you won’t get crossed up but you’ll be on the cross ‘cause you done got across on the cross. so if you can remember this, you won’t get lost on the cross while you’re trying to get across. so we’re just here to let you know about it. i know that you knew already, ‘cause y’all the hippest people in the world, hip black and white. but you still know that you got a cross you must deal with. so when it crosses you up, go on and deal with it, and leave it alone.”
- rahsaan roland kirk, giving the most important speech since harry nilsson’s the point
learning it’s not r-a-s-h-a-a-n roland kirk but rahsaan roland kirk makes you feel like a real ass. good thing he doesn’t come up very often in conversation. i do however know how to properly say boogie-woogie string along for real, and i recommend it for this sunday. and every day.
#916: smog - i break horses (1999)
bill callahan writes obituary-bleak songs and sings them, sometimes under the name smog, in the best american baritone since johnny cash’s. it is an insult to describe his music as wooden, but his best songs will remind you of old trees that were here before your family, will last longer, and don’t care about who happens to be around at the moment. except even branches are doomed in smog songs: tired birds fill them up and then blacken skies.
but what’s terrifying about his music isn’t morose lyrics or even minor chords. it’s the same thing that scares joan didion’s new readers every year: a wise person so disappointed in the most special people and the dearest things. wisdom? doesn’t exist! romance? ha. the cosmos? no, bill callahan has dived into the muck. his widow flirts with the mourners at his funeral. strangers’ living rooms are warmer. his watch is off. he feels you riding on his back. you.
that means you may have heard bonnie “prince” billy’s no more workhorse blues and thought to yourself that under no circumstances could you ever hear an american born as a william but releasing music under an obscure-sounding pseudonym sing a more upsetting equine-themed love song. then you hear i break horses and you weep.
but, reader, don’t worry: sometimes the weather lifts, and today bill callahan released a heaven hep the child cover. rejoice.
#915: leonard cohen - the partisan (france, 1969)
leonard cohen in black and white, with just his organs, and an organ somewhere in the back, sings in french on french t.v. about wind, shadows, frontiers, and dying without whispers. then he grimaces. good luck to the next guy who tries it! here’s more from the saint of widowers and warriors.
#914: loudon wainwright iii - rolling in my sweet baby’s arms (1974)
loudon wainwright was a scary man even before he grew the terrifying beard of ‘76. he’d already written a song about making angelic kate mcgarrigle cry by getting drunk and angry and smashing his red guitar and throwing it in the fireplace—he put a picture of the corpse on the back of album iii if you didn’t believe him. and even when he was at his spiffed-up-for-the-bbc cleanest, looking like the descendent of peter stuyvesant that he was, and a westchester son of a life magazine editor too, he slices open the world’s gentlest dixie bedroom jig to transplant the coldest line in leadbelly’s angriest song. how did he get that way? maybe it’s the curse of his middle name: snowden. “man was matter, that was snowden’s secret,” joseph heller wrote in catch-22. “drop him out a window and he’ll fall. set fire to him and he’ll burn. bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. the spirit gone, man is garbage.” that’s exactly the sense you get from hearing goodnight irene shot into the middle of rolling in my sweet baby’s arms—and yet, thank god, how beautiful it is.
