Tom Waits – Downtown Train (September 26, 2021)

Downtrain Train, from the album Rain Dogs, was an unexpected hit back in 1985, largely on the strength of a gorgeous black and white video that worked its way into regular rotation on MTV and its international counterparts, which reminded me of Hitchcock’s Rear Window in the way it peeked into the lives of the different folks living cheek-by-jowl in their high-rise apartments. Life in the big city goes on while Waits dances in the moonlit street below, singing what is, for him, an unusually accessible ballad to broken-hearted yearning, its melodic grace only enhanced, somehow, by the singer’s characteristically gravel-voiced delivery.

Waits was always at his best writing about lonely, heartbroken people mired in the urban underbelly – if you ever need a really good, cathartic cry, have a listen to On the Nickel, his emotionally devastating depiction of the homeless alcoholics littering L.A.’s Fifth Avenue – and Downtown Train, while superficially more pop-oriented than a lot of his output, is very much of a piece, its protagonist a solitary figure, wandering the darkened streets, bursting with repressed energy and love to give (I’m shinin’ like a new dime, he says), while the trains full of Brooklyn girls race by on their way to the hot spots downtown, leaving him unnoticed, unwanted, and wondering when his time will come. While he expresses – feigns? – disdain for the bulk of them:

Well, you wave your hand and they scatter like crows
They have nothing that will ever capture your heart
They’re just thorns without the rose
Be careful of them in the dark

…there seems to be one, in particular, who has captured his heart, and not just his, apparently:

I know your window and I know it’s late
I know your stairs and your doorway
I walk down your street and past your gate
I stand by the light at the four-way
You watch them as they fall
Oh baby, they all have heart attacks
They stay at the carnival
But they’ll never win you back

He doesn’t stand a chance, of course. She’s riding downtown with all the other girls, and as he wonders whether he’ll catch another glimpse of her tonight, when the train rolls by, you get the sense that she aspires to a life someplace he’ll never get to visit, probably full of people more hip and monied than he’ll ever be. You get the feeling, too, that as she tries so hard to break out of her little mundane world, she’s never going to get there, but it’ll be too late for him by the time she figures that out.

As if to emphasize the school-of-hard-knocks ambience, that’s boxer Jake Lamotta, the Raging Bull himself, complaining about the coming serenade at the beginning of the video.

You know what? I’m betting you do need a good, cathartic cry, so here’s On the Nickel, recorded from a live performance in which Waits uses a few strains of Waltzing Matilda as musical preamble – and here I was thinking I was alone in appreciating the inherent sadness of that beautiful melody. Enjoy, and the next time you trip over a derelict drunk, you can think of his mother singing him a lullaby, back when he was just a little boy who never combed his hair.

Edwin Collins – A Girl Like You (October 2,2021)

Maybe it’s the relentless rhythm, the infinite weightiness of the low end, and that howling fuzz guitar; maybe it’s because it sounds like something that would have been played in a bleeding edge subterranean club in Sixties London, as if the Yardbirds just finished up their set at The Ricky Tick, and now Collins takes the stage; maybe it’s because it seems the perfect thing to play in some sweaty, darkened, off-the-radar basement hideaway where they’re slinging buckets of the hard stuff without a liquor licence, just the sort of imaginary place where the similarly grungy, dissolute masterpieces off Exile on Main Street always take you; or maybe it’s the way the whole meaning of the thing is wrapped up in that one frustrated, admiring line, and now you come along; plus there’s the way the vibraphone just fits moodily in the mix, you know, it’s just perfect (and played by former Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook to boot); but whatever it is, I just love this one. Love love love it. It really gets the party started – it’s all let’s wrap up this frivolous turd-hunt and do something intense. Supposedly it’s a tribute to the style of Iggy Pop, and that hypnotic drum track is actually a sample, extracted from Len Barry’s 1965 hit 1-2-3, but I don’t care how derivative it is, it just grabs you by the cajones and commands you to get with the program. That or get the f*&% outta here, ‘cuz we don’t got time for this.

U2 – Gloria (October 27, 2021)

Off the album October, the song that sold me on U2.

There didn’t seem to be a suitable pigeonhole. They weren’t punks, certainly, they weren’t members of the New Wave skinny tie brigade, and they sure as hell had nothing to do with the glammed-up synth-pop crooners of the New Romantic movement, spearheaded by Roxy Music, Spandau Ballet and that crew, which was then sweeping the U.K. Their style seemed to owe next to nothing to anything that was going on at the time, or anything that any of us had ever heard, for that matter, and they were so brash, so utterly, swaggeringly confident, as if they didn’t doubt for a second you’d be buying what they had to sell, so sure of themselves in the way perhaps only kids can be. They were just downy-faced kids! – upon revisiting the attached video, one’s first thought, inevitably, is My God, they were so young. But of course they were; the song and accompanying video were released in 1981, forty frickin’ years ago, back when records were pressed on vinyl.

Propelled along by the distinctive lead guitar work of David Evans, billing himself, boldly yet appropriately, as The Edge (and why not when the lead singer, Paul Hewson, insisted on being known as Bono Vox, for the love of Mike), Gloria arrived as a swift kick in the pants out of nowhere, sounding fresh, passionate, intense, hugely energetic, and a little bit mysterious. What was it all about, anyway? They were Irish, so it made sense that they were paying homage to countryman Van Morrison, whose own classic of the same name, released back in 1964, was all about lusting after a certain girl, yet this new Gloria seemed to be about God, of all things, its overtly religious sentiments expressed in a chorus sung in Latin phrases extracted by Bono from his memories of Catholic church services: Gloria in te Domine / Gloria exultate, which translates roughly to Glory in You, Lord / Glory, exalt Him, so there you go, it’s a sort of rock ‘n roll hymn praising the Almighty. Is it really, though? Or was this kid Bono finding the essence of the divine at a location somewhere south of the heavenly skies above? Said Bono, years later:

And of course Gloria is about a woman in the Van Morrison sense. Being an Irish band, you’re conscious of that. And I think that what happened at that moment was very interesting: people saw that you could actually write about a woman in the spiritual sense and that you could write about God in the sexual sense. And that was a moment. Because before that there had been a line. That you can actually sing to God, but it might be a woman? Now, you can pretend it’s about God, but not a woman!

So yeah, it’s about faith, and God, and the exalted plateau of cosmic understanding attained in moments of religious ecstasy, etc., as experienced particularly in moments of pained longing for the ethereal beings of the opposite sex, whose beauty and sheer capacity to move don’t just rival the power of the Divine, they’re actually the same thing.

Which sounds about right, doesn’t it?

Kinks – Phenomenal Cat (October 29, 2021)

An overlooked little gem, and about as pretty as anything in the Kinks’ catalogue, Phenomenal Cat is one of a number of quirky, idiosyncratic tracks off the classic Village Green Preservation Society, a quintessentially English album that featured Ray Davies being, as ever, both wryly and affectionately observant of the foibles of insular British society (as in the title track) and hopelessly nostalgic for days gone by (listen to the wonderful Do You Remember Walter?, about an old schoolmate, which concludes with the rather moving sentiment that things change, dreams are forgotten, old friends drift apart, but fond memories of people can remain). “I withdrew into my little community-spirit … my trivial world of little corner shops and English black-and-white movies”, said Ray, describing the record as his own version of psychedelia, suggesting, perhaps, that the distortions of memory can be just as illusory and deceptively beguiling as anything his rock ‘n roll peers were then experiencing under the influence of LSD.

In Sixties parlance, a “cool cat” was a guy who was hip by the standards of pop culture, but here Ray presents us with a phenomenal cat reared in the “land of idiot boys”, who’s been all over the world and seen it all, very much in the manner of an English gentleman of the Victorian era who’d toured the far-flung outposts of empire (I always picture him as an orange short-haired Tabby, the classic British “Imperial Cat”).  It sounds almost like a children’s nursery rhyme, yet with satirical undertones straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan, leaving one to wonder whether we’re meant to feel admiration or disdain. Ray’s bandmate brother Dave suggests the former:

It shows in a very cunning and thoughtful way the mystical and spiritual potential we all have… Phenomenal Cat is the mystical side of all of us. It’s a metaphor, saying, ‘You do have a soul.’ The cat is the coolest part of you. You don’t know it yet but through healing we can throw your ideas up in the air and see which ones stick.

…but I’m not so sure. Upon closer listening you can also discern something of a bitter indictment of the privileged classes, who alone enjoy the luxury of stepping away from the fray to while away their days in quiet, untroubled contemplation. Fat, inert, unbothered, and blessed by fate is our phenomenal cat, now oblivious to the wider world, idly remembering how he once visited exotic places, and learned, he believes, some sort of profound yet nullifying truth, which inspired him merely to prefer doing nothing while giving up his diet and eating his way through eternity. And who knows, maybe he’s right. Once you’ve seen the reality of it all, and provided you have the means, why do anything more than sate every decadent impulse?  What else can life really be for, honestly?  And if nothing has any real meaning, then surely there’s no point in growing beyond the self-indulgent impulses of a little kid. Is that it? Or is there something more? Is this comfy cat in his tree enlightened or just depressed, lazy or simply at peace, philosophically serene or thoughtlessly complacent? Does he know something we don’t, or is he just a smug, self-satisfied quitter, vying for the Python Award for Upper Class Twit of the Year?

Ray’s voice, sped up to sound like a child’s, portrays this cat as both sly and inscrutable, betraying nothing, while singing happily and enigmatically to himself: Fum fum diddle um daaaaaaaa…..

Simon and Garfunkel – The Only Living Boy in New York (October 30. 2021)

A platonic love song, and my favourite off Bridge Over Troubled Water, the massive zeitgeist album which in 1970 sold something over 13 million copies while serving both as an elegant swan song for the duo and a sort of bookend for the Sixties, then coming to a crashing close with the breakup of the Beatles, the tragedy at Altamont, and the untimely deaths of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, with Jim Morrison soon to follow. The Only Living Boy in New York was written in a time of loneliness and uncertainty, when Paul was left behind to write the songs for their next album while Art jetted down south to play a role in the film Catch 22; Art is the “Tom” who’s flown off to Mexico, a reference to the formative days in the late Fifties when the pair billed themselves as “Tom and Jerry”. As filming dragged on, month after month, Paul wrote about feeling all alone, abandoned, lost in the big city, and gone somewhere, but he didn’t know where, a feeling somehow perfectly evoked in the studio recording by the swirling, echoing backing vocals (performed by an ensemble of fifteen different voices), and that evocative, plaintive “here I am…”, the very sound of waiting and watching expectantly for someone to come back home, at once sad, wistful, and hopeful. You can almost see the sun setting behind the towers of Manhattan. In retrospect, it’s also easy to make out Simon’s dawning awareness that he and his old friend were about to go their separate ways, as he acknowledges that his longtime collaborator has been eager to fly on his own for a while now, and offers the assurance that Tom’s part’ll go fine, hey, he just has to let his honesty shine “like it shines on me”, a lovely sentiment; if this is farewell, then there’s no hard feelings.

I stumbled across the live rendition from the “Pigpen Cover Series” by accident. It’s a nice performance, don’t you think?

Jackson Browne – Running on Empty (January 18, 2023)

The title cut from the greatest live record ever made, Running on Empty and its companion songs are all about living on the road, playing one city after another in a dizzying whirl of confusingly similar venues and hotel rooms, with the interior confines of the probably cramped and messy tour bus serving as a sort of mobile home away from home. Everything on the album was recorded on the fly, either on stage, or somewhere proximate, sometimes backstage, sometimes on the bus, wherever they happened to be when the muse struck them; the liner notes tell us that the terrific country lament Shaky Town was recorded in Room 124, Holiday Inn, Edwardsville, Illinois, while the extraordinarily moving The Load Out, a song of the day a while back, was recorded live at Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia, Maryland:

Song of the Day: Jackson Browne – The Load Out

Listening to this, you can feel yourself on that bus, you can hear the steady hum of the tires and see the scenery rushing by, roaring along at 70 MPH between some place like Cleveland and maybe the Best Western in Pittsburgh, PA., or is it Chicago (“or Detroit?” sings Browne in The Load Out, “I don’t know, we do so many shows in a row, and these towns all look the same”). There’s a restless, relentless sense of forward motion to the pacing and arrangement, evocative of that strange mix of emotions peculiar to folks like touring musicians who can be out on an adventure that’s also an interminable grind – exhilaration, sure, but tinged with fatigue, loneliness, boredom, and, being as this is a song by Jackson Browne, the worried wondering about how it all came to this, and where it’s all going to wind up.

Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels
I don’t know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels
Look around for the friends that I used to turn to to pull me through
Looking into their eyes I see them running too

Years later, Cameron Crowe captured the same sort of feeling on film in his wonderful Almost Famous, with its pitch-perfect depiction of the highs and lows of hopping from concert to concert, the annoyances, the frustrations, the fleeting intervals of pure joy, the petty group dynamics that never quite overwhelm the camaraderie, all of it fusing together to produce what fond memory later frames as the romance of the road.

It’s so immediate and authentic that it comes as a bit of a surprise that Browne didn’t write it while he was out on tour. It came to him instead during the recording sessions for his previous album, The Pretender, when he was driving back and forth to the nearby studio every day in a car that always seemed to be out of gas. “I was always driving around with no gas in the car, I just never bothered to fill up the tank because – how far was it anyway? Just a few blocks.” So many great songs seem to spring from such mundane circumstances, I suppose because it’s at times like those that the creative mind starts to wander in the most productive ways, you know, those times when you and I just get bored and frustrated.

Running on Empty was hugely popular, and went multi-platinum at a moment when everybody could understand that mid-1970s feeling of emptiness and exhaustion after having gone so far, so fast, over the prior decade and a half of social and cultural upheaval. Nothing was the same any more, and it was starting to dawn on everybody, after the successive blows of Vietnam, Watergate, the energy crisis, repeated inner city race riots, the premature deaths of so many of the era’s most iconic musicians, and a few devastating assassinations tossed in along the way, that things had generally gotten worse instead of better. You could call it The Great Disillusionment. Those like Browne who’d come of age in the Sixties were still hurtling towards an uncertain future at breakneck speed, but the old optimism was gone, replaced by a sense that we couldn’t keep racing down the road we were on, not as individuals, and not as a society. It wasn’t working out. We didn’t have the energy. Yet everybody kept going, because the thing about those long ribbons of black asphalt that stretch off into the infinite distance is that sometimes, there just don’t seem to be any exits.

Emm Gryner – Lone Star; Summerlong; Stereochrome; Beautiful Things; Almighty Love; Seeds (December 3, 2022)

Ontario’s own Emm Gryner has been kicking around the music scene for about 25 years now. She’s one of those artists who earns the warm respect of her peers, garnering praise from the likes of Nelly Furtado, U2’s Bono (who’s said that the attached Almighty Love as one of a half dozen songs he wishes he’d written), David Bowie (with whom she toured as a backup singer and keyboard player, after he named her as one of his two favourite Canadian artists), Ron Sexsmith, and even Curtis Mayfield, but she’s rarely cracked the Top 40. The exception was 1998’s Summerlong, a big hit that drew not really apt comparisons to the Go-Gos and the Bangles, and earned her the reputation as an up-and-coming “Toronto indie goddess”. It was certainly the song of my own long, hot, 1998 Toronto summer, playing on heavy rotation over the FM boombox as I struggled through 16 hour days working like a draft horse at our new house, trying to clean it up, filling enormous floor-to-ceiling cracks, pulling up filthy rugs, disposing of disgusting things left behind in unexpected places, dealing with a basement full of bulky detritus, and painting, painting, painting. I was always happy when Emm’s song came around again, so full of longing, dashed hopes, and emotional insight, asking of her wayward lover “do you ever think that maybe we’re similar, just looking for someone?”, to which the answer, apparently, was the usual indifferent male shrug; all summer long, the city smiled when you were ‘round, went the chorus, but now the summer’s gone.

Maybe after that she disappointed all the folks who bopped to Summerlong, and imagined they were about to get more of the same in some sort of Eighties-style girl group revival. The rest of the attachments make plain the extent to which that wasn’t in the cards, and how unlikely it was, in retrospect, that anything even vaguely reminiscent of Bananarama was going to form the output of this extravagantly talented, classically trained pianist and multi-instrumentalist who, unlike so many of her contemporaries, actually writes all her own stuff, straight from the heart (check out the songwriting credits for the likes of Pink, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson et al, and see how often the big hits are authored by, or “co-written” with, Scandinavian pop wizard and possible computer algorithm Max Martin). Have a listen to the superb craftsmanship, the melodicism, and the undercurrents of disappointment and heartache that characterize songs like Stereochrome, Beautiful Things, and Lonestar, neat, pretty, emotional compositions with lyrics like these:

All the stars above I named for you
Constellations spinning in a sea of aqua-blue
Now where do I find us
Without love or kindness
Piecing up these broken scenes
Burning down my teenage dreams

Tuneful? Sure. Light and frothy? Not so much.

One of my favourites is Seeds, all dreamy and serene, like a hymn echoing under the stone vault of some ancient monastery at evensong.

Gryner, it turned out, had plenty in common with Jane Siberry, Aimee Mann, Tori Amos, and Suzanne Vega, and nothing much at all with Belinda Carlisle, which is probably why she never sold millions of records, and the major labels tended to drop her from their rosters. That’s O.K. When nobody else wanted her she kept putting out excellent music on her own label, Dead Daisy Records, and I read this week that she’s just signed three different album deals with Germany’s Légère, Japan’s P-Vine Records, and High Wire Records, who issue into the American and U.K. markets. Gryner, always something of a romantic, described the touching optimism with which she approached the labels, after so many years off on her own:

There are people in the world that aren’t going to screw you over and there are people who love music, and I think it’s just about being brave enough to find those people…I guess I just opened myself up to the possibility that those people existed.

I can’t help but worry they’ll end up letting her down, which wouldn’t be surprising, really, and wouldn’t be all bad for the rest of us, either, so long as it gives her the inspiration for another of her finely wrought, bittersweet expressions of baffled, heartsick disappointment.