The Test Tube and the Scale

  After hearing the 1959 Cobra Records version of Otis Rush’s All Your Love, you’ll never again doubt the sexual indomitability of the working class. The recording is vicious, recorded when Rush was only twenty four. He’d arrived in Chicago from Mississippi roughly a decade earlier, and you can hear in the record’s overly amplified production just how deeply urban living had influenced him. The saxophones especially, by Harold Ashby and Jackie Brenston, signify with raucous command that passage through youth when you’ve leaped aboard the carousel of multiple-partner sex and you can feel it begin to spin out of control but you’ve grown attached to the recklessness and vice so you allow yourself just one more go which becomes another string of assignations. Rush re-recorded the song for Chess two years later with another band. This new version is considerably more polished than the original, the tone more plaintive, mysterious. It’s as if the possibility of a large, commercial audien...

  When Scotland’s the Delgados released their fourth LP, Hate, in the States, January, 2003, American politics were in the grip of Republican strategist Karl Rove’s enactment of his bigoted vision of a country divided along party and ideological lines. 9-11 was still a fresh wound, and the additional horrors of the Bush administration’s Iraq invasion and the Global War on Terror were only months away. The lies justifying both wars were occupying so much media airtime and print space that we all lived in a palpable, stultifying mood of inevitable dread. What was ultimately so maddening about that time—which has extended into today—was how grossly indifferent the GOP was to the effects of its falsehoods on anyone who was paying attention. One side internalized the hate of political propagation because of our helplessness to do anything about it, while the other side wanted the volume on deception turned all the way up because it inflamed their wildly egregious biases. All You Need Is...

  The Elvis Costello version of All This Useless Beauty is an elegiac waltz sung with a heartful, tender sympathy. Costello floods his voice with so much emotion that your responses are flattened, but Steve Nieve’s virtuoso piano accompaniment, though played for irony, recalls the quietly assured strength of the late Bill Evans. By contrast, June Tabor’s rendition is a masterwork of emotional restraint. Tabor narrates the tale of a businessman’s wife who, after a row with her husband, surveys a history of the intermingling of the sexes both through her feelings and her home’s collection of books and films and paintings. Her investigation yields the deeply held truth that over time she’s allowed herself to be used and undervalued, an institutional tradition of marriage that has reduced both spouses to something less than human, mere archetypes beyond the reach of great art. Written by Costello especially for the great English vocalist, it’s a challenging lyric, but Tabor simplifies ...

  Loneliness, our experience tells us, is inevitable. If we aren’t currently enduring it, then it’s there, waiting to poison us, in some unavoidable future. I listen repeatedly to Marty Robbins sing about it not because he has any relevant secrets to share about ridding oneself of it, but to remind me of the mechanisms of our internal worlds, their disruptions and the many ways we resolve to ornament and mitigate them with emotion and imagination. All the World Is Lonely Now is like a Joseph Cornell or Jess postcard mailed to us from the ephemeral locale of shared associations; in this case, the lonesome white cowboy of the post atomic age, his big acoustic guitar tuned to a key of abandonment. Robbins strips the Roy Acuff original of its squeezebox and fiddle accompanied carnival atmospherics and evokes a desert landscape of torment and loss, populated by one. In our time, the American stranger has come to signify any one of our most enduring mythological figures who operate in so...

The new wave theater that Sheffield’s ABC helped export to the States with their 1982 debut record The Lexicon of Love has its genesis in Bryan Ferry’s celebrity. The cool, romantic figure who, with Roxy Music, helped fuse together the Frankenstein monsters of Elvis and Bogart in the lab that Andy Warhol built was also keenly aware of the value of his solo persona. After the combined galvanizing fire of the first two Roxy records, Ferry retreated into the cold, hard rock image of Sinatra iconography, post Ava Gardner. Gazing at photographs of Ferry from this period onward, it’s virtually impossible not to be reminded of the great crooner’s In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning. What so many new wave artists overestimated in their appreciation of Ferry’s influence on their aesthetic was his sense of theater. Like any other serious rock star, Ferry indulged in theatricality—what is glam rock if not extravagant theater—but he also understood the camp essence behind glam; it’s what he refe...

  I sometimes forget the influential importance of the British Invasion in a way that just does not happen to me with folk country or American blues. Is this because I was born in 1966, the year the Beatles—with whom the British Invasion is forever linked in my imagination—famously retired from live performance, and so, by the time that I became aware of their great achievement, their legend was already a fait accompli, the greatest rock story ever told, and therefore sometimes, often times, easy to take for granted. In the States, the musical excitement we generally associate with the early to mid-sixties was born from honky tonk jukeboxes and the emerging garage rock and urban soul scenes. Overseas in Great Britain a new generation was busy configuring its experience of the Chess-Sun dynamic, merging the spirited aggression of the former with the primal, working class authority of the latter, then clarifying the resulting admixture with a centuries old gift for melody. Only the K...

  When Led Zeppelin released their seventh studio album in late summer, 1979, All My Love received so much airplay in the DFW radio market that for years afterwards I was actually convinced that I liked the song. I finally became disabused of this false impression when I recently heard it played one too many times. All My Love is overly sentimental, but its real problem can be heard in Robert Plant’s vocal delivery; he sounds lazily distracted, as if the pretty lyric he’s written has failed to hold his attention. By contrast, Bettye LaVette surrenders to the lyric and is possessed by it. What’s revealed is the intensely sweet and tortuous longing at the heart of sexual desire and the messy complications that come to dominate our lives because of it. LaVette is such an interpretive master that she even blows the cobwebs off of the lyric’s metaphors, transforming them from mere tropes into lyric poetry. Her version of All My Love is timeless, too; hearing it as you age, when your sex...

  Of the many, many songs I was introduced to at Sound Warehouse, where I worked for fourteen years, beginning in 1985, listening to the Lightning Seeds’ All I Want was the only time I felt compelled to fill one side of a Maxell XL-II C90 with only one song. I can remember it playing brilliantly, like a disco ball reflecting colored light, and thinking it was possible, through repeated plays, to capture that brilliance. The best pop music can make me feel as though I were on the verge of a synesthetic experience, with no clear path forward. Though I have yet to undergo any extreme sensory phenomenon and I’m always restored to banality as I knew it, the core certainty that I carry with me—that I am alive in a bottomless well of classic 45 rpm singles, a vast global resource powered by passion and commerce—is unendingly fostered by my obsessive/compulsive need for repetition, the paradoxical conviction that, in a world of infinite plenitude, your favorite song is the only thing worth...

  In 2003, I owned a CD player and a turntable. The former was an essential possession, like clothing or porn; I was absolutely bourgeois about it. The latter, I now realize, I had already outgrown and was holding onto strictly because I wanted a relic from my quickly receding past. Vinyl’s golden age was now over and rock and roll, without my ever having taken notice, was breathing its last. Only a few years before, I’d given away the bulk of my vinyl record collection to a co-worker, largely to prove to myself that I was, in opposition to the vinyl purists, dispassionate about the physical collection. If, as I suspect, the guiding principle behind the rock and roll aesthetic, the chief attitude steering its style, is cool, then I had to prove myself, prove my monastic adherence to a form of detachment. What better way to do this than with a literal sacrifice of the rock and roll fan’s most precious totem. One of the final long play releases of the compact disc chapter of the stor...