The Test Tube and the Scale

John Prine’s country classic about the rural poor calling out to us from the rougher edges of mortality. As songwriter, Prine is as clear-sightedly unsentimental as the best folk artists, and Bonnie Raitt sings with a full-bodied country blues swagger that registers as a frustrated carnal longing spread out over a lifetime. Performing before audiences from a very young age, Raitt’s sensitivity to character helps broaden Prine’s vision of female isolation; she puts flesh on the bone of the inspired characterization from Prine’s 1971 debut. Her vocals impart to the lyric a dimension of the ache of domestic fatigue that anchors the song in your imagination like an Edna O’Brien short story. Fifteen years prior to her commercial breakthrough album Nick Of Time, Raitt had already created, together with the great album producer Jerry Ragovoy, an American genre classic with the artistic reach to transcend genres. Angel From Montgomery resonated at a time when the States was just learning to in...

  In 1972, the same year that Paul Simon recorded American Tune in London at Morgan Studios, Richard Nixon committed himself and members of his administration to the Watergate break in and its subsequent national convulsion. I remember my mother telling me, on one those occasions when she was being honest with me, that it was the Watergate fiasco that pulled the scales from her eyes, her fall, as an American citizen, from a state of innocence. I don’t think she was alone in her experience. Simon sings, “For we lived so well so long. Still when I think of the road we’re traveling on I   wonder what’s gone wrong.” Raised a Catholic and now lapsed of faith, I find the conceit of innocence—outside the realm of jurisprudence, and sometimes within it—inherently ridiculous and unappealing. Not only is it an imaginary state—the ancient Greeks made a more convincing case for the reality of Olympus—but it’s jejune and, on a national level, conceived in bad faith to create a patriot clas...

  Like John Lennon and Kurt Cobain, Tom Petty was a singer-songwriter whose talents came at us by way of the collaborative dynamic of rock group musicianship. Each was uniquely self-taught, attuned to the private voice of his interiority, and with a gift for making that voice public. They were commercial artists who tended towards group expression because of the power of their sensitivity, which, according to the facts of their lives, was often overwhelming. On his 1976 debut record with the Heartbreakers, Petty isn’t yet in full command of all his talents but his singing voice is already fully developed, at once confident and anxious, desperate and sexy, aggressively confrontational. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is the record of a band learning to come together in the recording studio and occasionally finding inspiration. Then, at the end of side two, a moment worthy of watching clouds part in the sky above to reveal a perfect bicentennial sun. Petty’s and Mike Campbell’s twin ...

  It’s utterly gratifying that the mystery of Simon and Garfunkel’s America goes unresolved. If the aching emptiness—the same trait that goes on to haunt many of the characters of Simon’s songs—were any more clearly defined, it wouldn’t be ours. That indefinability also gives America the scope of a national mythology; so do many of the song’s details. The empty pack of cigarettes, the open field, the roll call of states, even Joe Osborne’s bass guitar, which fixes the steady motion of the Greyhound bus for the listener, the intermittent rumble and echo of Hal Blaine’s majestic drum breaks, and Larry Knechtel’s keyboards that give America its coda; these elements in combination solidified Simon’s role as the country’s second greatest living architect of twentieth century mythologies, big and small, in pop music. He is the Big Apple songwriter who absorbed so much of his country’s corrupting and sanguine energies because many of its   dramas were enacted just outside of his fron...

  Photographs of Candy Darling from the late 1960s show a heavily made up, white, female beauty telegraphing such a delicate frailty she appears almost otherworldly. Her look is a deceptively provocative mask of sexuality itself, as powerfully dangerous as implied consent. What gives Am I the Same Girl? its lasting vitality, fifty three years after its release, is the distinctive, breathy reading Dusty Springfield gives the song’s lyric, eroticizing its theme of feminine vulnerability. Against the backing of her session and touring band the Echoes Dusty not only makes vulnerability sound sexy, she makes sexuality sound utterly dependent upon the power of vulnerability in order to function, an attitude that may run counter to our current age of Wet Ass Pussy. Dusty’s version of Am I the Same Girl? also helped create the kind of mid-tempo sixties pop that charmed AM radio audiences into a risk-free acceptance of conventional, pro-nuclear family relations. But Dusty had a secret. And ...

  Cool. It’s a dead word that, by the time I came to use it in the polyester-clad 1970s of my youth, had acquired a catch-all definition like Warhol’s “great,” meaning the tacit approval of whatever the word was being used to describe. Elsewhere, in New York, the commercial image of cool—as practiced by its now legendary downtown punk scene—could be traced all the way back to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, and their association with kill-your-sons rerouting of mental circuitry drug use.This was cool experienced as extreme alienation and emotional detachment from mainstream life. Tom Verlaine, during his career as co-founder and member of Television, and later as solo artist, projected this dangerously sincere and cool image of New York punk. But that image was complicated by Verlaine’s boyish good looks, so the persona that translated instead was more the aloof boy-genius with an electric guitar holding his own in a downtown milieu of junkies and seasoned thugs. An adept at d...

  It’s virtually unthinkable that, without the stylistic and influential antecedents of Rubber Soul, Pet Sounds, and Blonde On Blonde, we would even have the stunning final arrangement of Alone Again Or as it appears opening Forever Changes. Yet as it plays there’s no doubt in my mind that Alone Again Or, written by L.A. wunderkind Bryan MacLean, eclipses those canonical masterworks, in both beauty and lyric strangeness. The song’s far-reaching ambition helps generate a low-key dramatic suspense that the fiendishly nuanced rhythm section complements while the interplay of guitars, vocals, and strings—arranged by David Angel and called by the Library of Congress “arguably the most distinctive sustained orchestration in rock music history”—formalize a style of sixties baroque pop that would remain peerless until the release of Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter four years on. At the center of Alone Again Or, at its now immutable core, is an empathic sadness first ostensibly expressed on beha...

  A single guitar chord strikes like a blade untethering the song from earth, followed by some indecipherable male tenor mumbling, then percussion and a rhythm guitar light the fuse and, in under a minute, the rhythm section blows open the door and the song is under way. Allah Wakbarr is all rhythmic momentum, a blast furnace of pre-digital electrification that hits so directly, so quickly, you may not realize until after your first few listens that the group, Ofo the Black Company, has dispensed with conventional song structure altogether. Yet the song plays as organized as any jazz improvisation with hard rock tempo. What sounds remarkable to twenty-first century ears is, with a only debut single, how seamlessly Allah Wakbarr binds the musical histories of two continents: the emerging post-civil war rock scene of early seventies Nigeria to the visionary, urban radicalism of Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, and the magus himself Miles Davis, then back again to west Africa and the great ...