Table of Contents: Music
Jane, gouache on illustration board, 10″ x 10,” 2009
This little ditty of a two night sketch is my contribution to the InLiquid 10×10 Benefit. It’s based on the cover of Jane Birkin’s adorably batty 1973 record Di Doo Dah. In Liquid? Great outfit, local Philly art collective, resources network etc… they are celebrating their 10th anniversary with a show of over 200 10″ by 10″ works. If you’re in Philly, check it here.
Those allergic to fey, turn away, now. The girl can u buy vicodin over the counter in mexico group version of Belle & Sebastian is upon us and it’s the bee’s knees. Stuart Murdoch adopts a Phil Spector/Kim Fowley role here (without, of course, the oogy, mad, leering vibe that darkens their reputations.) The tunes are elaborate, orchestrated melodic scaffolds built on the basic Belle & Sebastian model. Over them he drapes vocals one by his three belles, steps in for duets on two track, and on one brings in Neil Hannon from The Divine Comedy for a great campy cameo. The result is basically a survey of British girl group styles, from the Bacharachy swing of Sandi Shaw, to the alabaster soul of Dusty Springfield, to any number of long forgotten Decca girls like The Orchids, Louise Cordet or Susan Hampshire. It’s an incredibly rich listen – wide eyed and big hearted, swaggering and campy, and it sounds like a stack of singles and yet song by song, scene by scene, tells a story. Huzzah! Songs of the summer…
Here, for your pleasure, is a choice cut and two classic fab British girl group sides:
God Help The Girl:
Louise Cordet: Two Lovers
Susan Hampshire: When Love Is True
Hi. To celebrate the resumption of occasional publication, finer weather, and a general bonhomie, herewith, Sparks! Sparks! Sparks!
Happy Hunting Ground:
Warren, MI, 35mm film, 2008
So strange… This suburban neighborhood was jammed between a cluster of extended stay hotels off a major trunk road in Warren, a suburb of Detroit. It seemed so cut off from its surroundings it might as well have had a glass dome over it. Everything seemed to stop at its perimeter: the pavement, the landscaping, even the weather and ambient light conditions seemed to terminate abruptly. The scale seemed surreal, just slightly shrunken. For the entire duration of my stay in the adjacent hotel I never saw a single instance of human activity. Adding a final ominous flourish to the vignette was the plume of clotted gray smoke rising in the distance.
That plume is the link to another oddity…
During sightseeing cruises on the Sea of Rock, boats usually cut to half speed and glide by the melting tip of Al Stewart. Passengers look up for a moment as a soft melodic zephyr breezes by…in the year of the cat…
Below the waterline, though, looms a singular body of work. Imagine the following: one axis, stretching from tweedy personal narrative sketches to richly detailed historical episodes. The other axis encompassing the sonic spectrum from acoustic folk to richly layered progressive rock. Spatter the resulting quadrants with random points and you have a working map of Al Stewart territory.
The earliest records, like Bedsitter Images and Zero She Flies, close out the 60’s with restless explorations of bookish folk and psychedelia. Lush orchestrations and session work by Jimmy Page, Robert Fripp and Richard Thompson hint at the musical sophistication to come. In 1974 Stewart began a partnership with engineer and producer Alan Parsons (yes, of the Project), who established his reputation helping craft Abbey Road and Dark Side of The Moon. Parsons’ contribution was to deploy his arsenal of progressive production flourishes and session musicians in the service of uncharacteristically subtle songs. Together they recorded Modern Times, Stewart’s masterpiece, filled with character studies, historical narratives, pop sketches and, best of all, a harpsichord embellished precis of Kurt Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan.
AM radio, Clive Davis, and Japanese super-stardom followed. As those portents suggest, his fame immediately receded. He retreated to wine collecting, his bookshelf, and a boutique recording and touring schedule.
I saw him play a superb show recently at the Colonial Theatre in Pheonixville, Pennsylvania. He looks and dresses like a retired accountant and has the facial mannerisms of Monty Python’s Eric Idle. His stage banter was brainy and wickedly funny. He concluded a long introduction/digression with an aside about the English city of Dunwich, which was slowly consumed by the North Sea. It is said that you can still hear the bells of the church tolling below the waters. That vignette seems to me the essence of Al Stewart; the power of a painterly detail to emit the power of history – whether it be of youthful romantic manoeuvres in a Swiss cottage or the forgotten Swedish invasion of Russia.
A few selections follow. A small sampler can be downloaded here. Enjoy. And remember, the only things left on the beach when the apes take over will be the Statue of Liberty and acres of Year of the Cat LPs.
Bedsitter Images:
Carol:
Sirens of Titan:
If It Doesn’t Come Naturally, Leave It:
In terms of aesthetics, the classic punk rock flyer is a monument to the xerographic process. The conversion of the disparate source imagery to stark black and white is the primary source of it’s graphic power; unifying a roughly glued assemblage of random snapshots, cuttings from Seventeen, Vogue and the Orange County Register, hand drawn op art patterns and skeletons with martini glasses. The ultra high contrast exposure ladles on gobs of glamour and style. Faces loose all their middle tones, primary features gain mass and shape and everyone ends up looking like a cross between a mugshot and a Patrick Nagel painting. The effect is further enhanced by the translation of the intermediate tones into a coarse black and white grain. This texture, an important consideration in photography, is freely granted by xeroxing. The best flyers are a fusion of the direct urgency of underground publishing, order vicodin online overnight razor sharp glamour, fine art photography, the charm of the homemade, all screaming in the blaring tones of a tabloid.
Further reading: The most aesthetically rewarding period (for both music and flyers) was around 78-81, when the the notion of punk was subject to wildly different musical and stylistic interpretations. Punk rock flyer archives abound. One of the best selections is here. Also it’s well worth checking out the work of Mark Vallen. Vallen was a LA scene fixture and flyer artist (he did the original Decline of Western Civilization flyer and art for Slash magazine.) He currently works as a figurative painter and activist. His site features old flyers, albums, and fanzines, all accompanied by short thoughtful essays on punk design and scene culture. Forgive him, however, for the site design, which is comically awkward. It’s totally worth exploring fully… (flyers from Operation Phoenix Records)
Last August, Morrissey was a guest DJ on LA’s KCRW and closed his set with the greatest song he never wrote, “There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner” by Noel Coward. In honor of Morrissey’s upcoming new record and best cover art ever, here’s a short, unlikely tale of cabaret and espionage.
In performance the critic Kenneth Tynan described Noel Coward this way – “…he padded down the celebrated stairs… halted before the microphone on black-suede-clad feet, and, upraising both hands in a gesture of benediction, set about demonstrating how these things should be done. Baring his teeth as if unveiling some grotesque monument, and cooing like a baritone dove…. If it is possible to romp fastidiously, that is what Coward does.”
So hold in your mind this picture of Coward as a fastidiously romping baritone dove when you consider this next biographical detail. Coward, it turns out, was a British secret agent during World War II. His exploits are detailed in a fantastic essay in the New York Times Book Review. He was trained in Bletchley Park, the legendary secret spy training center where tweedy teams worked feverishly to crack the German Enigma code. He used his European cabaret tours and invitations to diplomatic functions to sift for intelligence. He was sent on a mission to Hollywood and paired with fellow spy Cary Grant. He took dinner with Roosevelt and his clearance came from Churchill himself. As he put it, “Celebrity was wonderful cover. My disguise would be my own reputation as a bit of an idiot … a merry playboy.”
To ponder his biography is to imagine possibly the single greatest movie never made – a spy thriller, splashed with Technicolor and debonair wit, set in Europe and Hollywood amongst the glitter of high society, reaching to the highest levels of power, its suspense and heavy stakes lightened by swaths of swaggering cabaret.
As a bonus, here, for your delectation, is “There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner”
Given my general embargo against hip hop, I’m surprised at how fondly I remember the release of Paul’s Boutique. Pitchfork’s reappraisal of the record was a gobstopper of nostalgia… how it emanated its bong-y idiot glee all throughout the early nineties, to it’s dense referencing of the early 80’s (Robotron!) to it’s crash course in 70’s kitsch. Anything that 20 years later reminds me of how much Vaughn Bode’s Cheech Wizard ruled my world back then is a force for good.
Odd that the best things in rock and roll all begin with P. The essential ingredients, and my entry in a wheezing graphic conceit. (Revised: Power pop to plain pop… more concise graphically and yet broad enough to now include the Archies’ Feelin’ So Good.)
So, here, below, please find a recreated, reposted version of the first in the For Your Pleasure series, from 2008.
It was originally posted at my old ad agency’s then-obligatory “weblog.” That post, along with this, marked the beginning of a good four/five years of committed blogging and writing. I set things up over here at shepelavy.com shortly after, and, well, here we are, still transmitting in the wilderness.
Looking back I can see why I wanted to commemorate that year in music. So much boss tunage! Stew’s remarkable musical Passing Strange opened on Broadway that year. Embedded deep in its soulful heart was “Arlington Hill” – a gorgeous benediction to ardent, addled, questing oddballs everywhere – “Yes, suddenly there is a meaning… and everything’s alright”
It was a banner year for swinging psych — I had finally tracked down the erotically volcanic “Mundo Colorido” by Brazilian jazz chanteuse Vanusa; gotten turned onto the Cambodian rock melange of Dengue Fever; lost it for the hi-gloss epic 60’s revivalism of the Last Shadow Puppets.
Neon Neon remains an enduring one-off treasure – the gonzo synth soaked tribute to the life of 80’s avatar John Delorean.
There were comebacks & old head hits galore: Stereolab and REM released their most vital work in years; the long abandoned second album by Sandy Denny’s Fotheringay was finally, lovingly cobbled together; a delightful egghead pop record by Byrne/Eno; and the Psychedelic Furs played one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen, playing with genuine punk passion to a small motley crowd in a now shuttered, forgotten West Philly niteclub.
Can’t remember where I happened upon the spellbinding, spooky spoken-word charms of Meanwhile, Back in Communist Russia – as evocative, singular, wordy and weird as their name. The apocalyptic synth-punk of Lost Sounds sizzled and Amanda Palmer’s barrelhouse melodramas were still well inside their sell-by freshness date.
And, as welcome and pleasant then, as now, and ever, ladies and gentlemen — the seasonal zephyr we like to call the Sea and Cake.
Total time: 53 minutes. Download the comp here. Thanks for listening. Cheers.