The Test Tube and the Scale

The secret language of 45s is spoken only in the vivid silence of a record’s afterplay, and may sometimes—depending upon the listener—be accessible only after repeated plays. It works like this. The first line of the record will penetrate those shadows of consciousness where concepts lie around, waiting to be called into action. For example, Ball of Confusion’s first line comes across the terms “racial bias” on the floor of my brain and carefully considers the words’ experience of reality versus what the first line itself knows of the world around you. Does the first line recognize itself in you; is your mind judged competent enough to bear the weight of what follows? It’s this initiation into the process that gives the beginnings of great songs all their excitement; how long until—when and if—the song discontinues its engagement with you. What then follows is a dialogue of dissociative imagery and concepts, axioms and non-sequiturs that challenges clarity and establishes the pop recor...

  Gerry Rafferty’s brief but sympathetic account of a pair of transient lovers is told with the same storytelling brio that helped make the iconic seventies reputations of Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, and Rickie Lee Jones, but, unencumbered by their zeal for Beats inspired detail, Rafferty wins mass commercial radio success. Baker Street is understated FM rock whose thematic scale is broadened by a studio arrangement that includes one of the most instantly recognizable saxophone riffs by a player of narrow acclaim, Raphael Ravenscroft. Together with Hugh Burns’ equally stunning guitar solo, Baker Street’s studio personnel aggrandize the sad beauty of Rafferty’s lyric by pulling the curtain back on the lovers’ predicament to reveal the wide scale, winded attempts of a generation learning to absorb the gains and losses—personal, social—of the nineteen sixties as the decade began to calcify into myth. Though Rafferty’s lyric ends on the optimistic note of going home, there’s no disce...

  The old lady I was shopping with that day was my grandfather’s sister, Victoria, whom everyone in the extended family called Tia. She was a quiet, well mannered spinster without any children, who lived in the small bedroom in my parents’ house in between mine and my sisters’. Painted a cheerful sky blue color, her room was abuzz conducting the energy of female solitude over loneliness. She had a bathroom, a refrigerator, and a hot plate. Working as what used to be called a domestic—which is just below a maid, more or less, in the delegation of household duties; and she cooked—my great aunt was employed by a white woman who lived with her daughter and grandson in a nearby neighborhood where homeowners could afford to pay for such things. When it came time to update her wardrobe Tia and I would walk together the three blocks south to the Seminary South open-air mall to a department store called Striplings. Though it cultivated the high bourgeois, adults-only     air of co...

  Nostalgia is the sometimes overpowering need to recreate the details of a lost, temporal Utopia through fantasy, and then impose those details onto our current reality. At its best, musical nostalgia is an attempt at capturing the spirit of the music it is reviving while conveying it in a recognizably contemporary style. Hall and Oates sneak into rhythm and blues by way of a Whites Only rear entrance, bringing with them an assortment of instrumentation and production values that move them towards the niche marketable non-genre specific category of mid-seventies rock that also gave us the Alan Parsons Band’s “I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You,” Toto’s “Georgy Porgy,” Boz Scaggs’ “Lowdown,” David Bowie’s “Right” and “Fascination,” the bulk of the Steely Dan catalog, and Joni Mitchell’s “Help Me”; innovative works of funky pop sophistication that, to sympathetic ears, still resonate with vitality and adult clarity. Back Together Again easily transcends nostalgia’s novelty-song-like lim...

The intimation of danger that starts Back Stabbers is thrilling in a uniquely American way because it excites our taste for modern tension. Like the intro to Gimme Shelter, it not only portends the threat of menace to come, but it extends the reach of the song’s themes. After a lead guitar plays the song’s key melody, a swell of strings arises, repeating the melody and goading our sympathies. Back Stabbers is a master work of urban treachery and domestic paranoia that its producers, the legendary and influential Gamble and Huff, scaled to address the national crises: the winding down of the Vietnam War and its associated horrors, the emergence at home of a brutal and sadistic media darling, the serial killer, Watergate, escalating racial and social injustices.    Despite the O’Jays tapping into and confirming our shared capacity for betrayal, the combined singing voices of Eddie Levert, Walter Williams, and William Powell determinedly create the illusion that, in the presence ...

  The best of two outstanding tracks from the second LP by Jamestown, New York’s 10,000 Maniacs. The band was comprised of six members whose sense of professionalism when I saw them perform live in Dallas in 1985 took me by surprise. The personas the band presented to its audience was self-serious in a way meant to impose distance between themselves and us. It’s likely the band was uncomfortable playing a conventional stage show made up of borrowed poses and aped gestures from a tradition already thirty years or so old. Nevertheless, the musicians and Natalie Merchant herself generated a memorable excitement that convinced everyone inside of that small, Deep Ellum concert space that human unpredictability is as much a function of order and focus as it is of humor and passion. Inspired spontaneity gives Back O’ The Moon’s repeated plays their longevity and vim. The song snapshots that brief period in our lives when we choose between disabuse of the illusions from childhood mythology...

The great, impassioned project of girl group pop romanticism was the reduction in scope of of the extraordinary body of work from the preceding generation, the big band/swing era, whose typically elevated forms of expression brought us an aristocracy of twentieth century American pop. It was a time of serious economic and social deprivation, when work was considered such an essential tool of survival that, conversely, self consideration and -contemplation were often thought of as unaffordable luxuries. The music reflected this line of thinking; it evokes luxury and glamor, creating a fantasy of over abundance and wealth that still persists today, albeit to a hip-hop soundtrack. World War II, however, shrank the globe, and when the men who fought it returned to the States, the music they came home to was tense with the gradually decreasing gap between rural and urban experience. New York City’s The Cake, along with famed LA production duo Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, conjure the spir...