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Albums of Magic and Beauty #3... Realization

Johnny Rivers Realization (US 1968)

I've loved the album for as long as I can remember. It's one of those records that has a particularly fragile front cover - the purple seems to come off if you rub it even slightly making really mint covers, forty-plus years later, very hard to find. Every time I find one, I buy it, resulting in a small section in my record racks devoted to Realization preservation.

There are two versions on CD, one the album alone, and another that takes advantage of CD length to include a second LP as bonus. It took a while, but I sought out the single LP version for the same reason I don't want "bonus tracks" popping up at the end of Sgt. Pepper.

This was the LP's first single, released before the album and climbed to #14 on the US Billboard charts. Try as I might, I could not find a video for it that didn't sort of suck.  Just hit play and then look away from the monitor until it's over.



I always get a kick out of the Sgt. Pepper reference since that album was the soundtrack of that summer more than any other single record has ever been the soundtrack of an extended moment (even though it had no singles released from it and wasn't on many jukeboxes).

Writing for the All Music Guide web site, James Chrispell and Bruce Eder provide a really nice succinct description:

Not a concept album, but a song cycle depicting life in southern California in the late '60s, Realization is a fine cycle to catch a ride on. It's also a serious surprise -- when psychedelia reared its head in 1967, the results were frequently disastrous for those performers who'd been specializing in straight-ahead rock and roll, and few had rocked harder or more straight-ahead than Johnny Rivers. Instead of jumping on a bandwagon that had nothing to do with where he was musically, he hijacked the sounds of psychedelic rock -- much as the Temptations did at Motown -- and took it where he was going. Acting as his own producer for the first time, Rivers opened up a slightly gentler side to his work that's equally valid and a lot more interesting, if not quite as exciting as his rock & roll classics. After a few sonic digressions as a lead-in, "Hey Joe" gets going, carrying listeners into Rivers' gorgeous rendition of James Hendricks' "Look to Your Soul." His own achingly beautiful "The Way We Live" follows, and then comes Hendricks' "Summer Rain," which turned into Rivers' last big hit of the 1960s. And then he has the temerity to take "A Whiter Shade of Pale" and make it prettier and harder -- but less spacy -- than the Procol Harum original; from there he plunges into blue-eyed soul on "Brother, Where Are You." The surprises continue right through to the rather delicate, introspective reading of "Positively Fourth Street" at the close, Rivers succeeding in evoking a vast array of thoughts and emotions. For his trouble, helped by the two hits, he was rewarded with a Top Five charting album, and one that has continued to find new admirers across the decades.

River's take on "Hey Joe" (background on the song as well as over 1,500 cover versions listed here) is unique for it's optimistic psychedelia - instead of "shooting his old lady" Joe finds enlightenment.  Standout versions of "Look To Your Soul" and "The Way We Live" are a perfect lead in to "Summer Rain."

Track after track the album maintains a specific tone - a blend of a wistful melancholy with a trace of confusion that is directly tethered to a gradually emerging post-psychedelic culture.

Somewhere along the way I found a picture sleeve 45 released before the album, "Look To Your Soul" with "Something Strange" on the b-side. Rivers is pictured on the front, in a poncho and peace sign medallion in a dark and slightly fuzzy photo.  The labels credit the tracks as "From the album The Realization of Mr. Beelzebub."

In Chronicles, the first volume of his autobiography, Bob Dylan picks River's cover of "Positively 4th Street" that closes Realization as his favorite cover of any of his songs. Whether he would have said the same thing five minutes later aside, Realization remains an album of some magic and beauty.


*You should be able to download the album here, courtesy of Psychedelic Lion.

Albums of Magic and Beauty... Redux: Death, Dying and Rock’n’Roll

George Harrison’s wonderful posthumous album, Brainwashed, helped move rock and roll into the uncharted waters of the 21st Century.

I can remember sitting in a Catholic grade school classroom and the voice of the Parish Priest booming out of the public address speaker high up on the wall in the front of the room. The voice, sounding like I imagined the voice of God might sound liken said that, "under no conditions, will beetle haircuts be permitted."

I had no idea what he was talking about, none of us did, but anything that could put that little edge in God’s voice seemed like it might be worth checking out.

A little later, in February 1964, I remember sitting in my living room and, with my sisters and mom and dad, watching The Beatles’s debut performance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

This is not about nostalgia; it is about continuity and memory.

For many people my age the life cycles of The Beatles taught us something about aging and, yeah (yeah, yeah), dying. When Brian Epstein succumbed to “misadventure” it was the moment, collectively, we learned that people really could die. But, where Lennon’s death was a reminder that we could die, Harrison’s is the unsettling reminder that we will.

The memory of hearing John Lennon’s Double Fantasy in the days right after his death in December 1980 is caught up with the sense of tragedy that Lennon’s senseless murder evokes. Listening to George Harrison’s Brainwashed the inevitable comparisons between these two records have some important limitations.

On the album’s official web site, Rolling Stone editor Anthony DeCurtis wrote:

There can be no question about the depth of Harrison's spiritual convictions, and Brainwashed makes that clear yet again. In his final years, Harrison confronted the imminence of his death, and that experience provides the foundation of this album, though not in a luridly explicit, confessional way. It's more like the events of his last years lent an inevitable gravity to issues Harrison had pondered for decades. When mortality stopped being a philosophical problem, but could be felt every moment in the beat of his pulse, these are the songs that George Harrison wrote.

Unlike Double Fantasy, Brainwashed is written by a man who knows his time is almost gone. That sense of immanent departure clings to every track here like little wisps of smoke from an incense censor.

Pop music hasn’t been exclusively “youth music” for quite some time, and as pop music sensibilities intersect and merge with the personal and political realities of adult life we get new kinds of albums that have no real precedent in rock & roll. Lou Reed’s 1992 album, Magic and Loss, structured like a novel in 14 chapters, confronted and examined the powerful feelings brought on by the loss of close friends to cancer. Warren Zevon's The Wind (2003) was released two weeks before his death from lung cancer.

What if all this talk of death and dying is not morbid and depressing? What if one of the core reasons that art is essential for the health and well being of a culture is in its ability to explore things like this and report its finding back to us in albums like these?

I expect to hear some claims that this is not the proper subject matter for a rock and roll record, that rock “works best from the neck down,” and so on.  But this is blue sky stuff. When we were twenty and making this music we kind of thought we’d live forever. As we headed into thirty and saw the bodies of those who’d fallen prematurely we thought “live fast, die young, leave an attractive corpse.” Now, as we slam into fifty at high speed we’re mostly thinking, “Hey, sixty’s not that old.”

There was a MTV interview that replayed in the day after George’s death. Both George and Ravi Shankar were on the program and you could sense that each of them found some comfort in the others presence. There was a guitar case sitting in the studio and the program’s host (whose name escapes me now) mistook it for Harrison’s and asked if he’d play something. Always gracious, George agreed and played 3 or 4 tunes. The one song that sticks out from his impromptu solo acoustic set was "Any Road," the opening song on Brainwashed.



I’ve always been a sucker for records with strong opening tracks and the reason I’ve been raving over this since I first heard it is at least in part because of how good this opener is. About half way through George sets up the album’s balance between self-deprecating observation and Zen advice:

I’ve been traveling on a wing and a prayer / By the skin of my teeth by the breadth of a hair / Traveling where the four winds blow / With the sun on my face – in the ice and the snow / But oooeeee it’s a game / Sometimes you’re cool, sometimes you’re lame / Ah yeah it’s somewhere / And if you don’t know where you’re going / Any road will take you there.

Besides having some of George’s best songwriting in years, this is a fantastic slide guitar album. What guitar fans will notice here is that Harrison’s slide style has moved into a more Ry Cooder-sounding direction than on any of his previous albums. His use of Indian micro-tonal scales is still present on tracks like "Marwa Blues" and the album’s title track, but there’s more of a blues-based character to his slide playing on the rest of the album than I think I’ve ever heard from him before.

Aware of his approaching death, most of the lyrics here are automatically given layers of extra meaning, and lines like these from "Rising Sun" gently return to the album’s central theme: But in the rising sun you can feel your life begin / Universe at play inside your DNA / You’re a billion years old today / Oh the rising sun and the place it’s coming from / Is inside of you….

The album was completed by Harrison’s son, Dhani, and ELO-founder and former Traveling Wilbury, Jeff Lynn. Lynn is notorious for a heavy-handed production style that borders on the obnoxious, but under Dhani’s supervision and with specific instructions left by George for Jeff to please not overdo it, the production is mostly sparse and to the point.

The album’s closer, the title track "Brainwashed," is also the album’s crown jewel. It sounds both like an extension of "Beware of Darkness" and also has a lyrical flair that reminds me quite a lot of a vintage Bob Dylan song (Dylan and Harrison had collaborated on a number of occasions and I was always dreaming that a full length project might one day show up). There is an unmistakable Dylan cadence to lines like:

They brainwashed my great uncle
Brainwashed my cousin Bob
They even got my grandma when she was
working for the mob
Brainwash you while you’re sleeping
While in your traffic jam
Brainwash you while you’re weeping
While still a baby in your pram
Brainwashed by the military
Brainwashed under duress
Brainwashed by the media
You’re brainwashed by the press
Brainwashed by computer
Brainwashed by mobile phones
Brainwashed by the satellite
Brainwashed to the bone

A cadence that switches back to pure Harrison on choruses like:

God God God
Your nature is eternity
God God God
You are Existence, Knowledge, Bliss

Frozen in time back in 1964 into his role as “the quiet one” I still miss George, his dry British humor and his understated guitar playing. Perhaps there is some solace to be found in the quotation that adorns the center of the CD booklet.

“There never was a time when you or I did not exist. Nor will there be any future when we shall cease to be.”  (Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita)

Albums of Magic and Beauty....

The Beach Boys Friends (1968)

While Pet Sounds (1966) is clearly Brian Wilson's most realized work, it is the first in a series of four releases that define the band's best period.  It's taken this long to see this work without looking at it through the prism of the collapse of Brian's Smile album, his "teenage symphony to God."  Released in its wake, Smiley Smile (1967) seemed like someone talking you through a tour of a house they loved, but after a fire. And swept up in the wake of that odd record - an album that the years have definitely redeemed - were two of the best Beach Boys albums of all.

Also released in 1967, and the last of their albums to be issued in both stereo and mono, Wild Honey is the funkiest the Boys ever got, and side one opens with four really strong tracks and is still a blast to put on today. "Wild Honey" "Aren't You Glad" "I Was Made To Lover Her" and "Country Air" are high energy and imbued with a new post-Smile confidence.  Side two opens with "Darlin'", the most successful single off the album (#19 US #11 UK) and the song I most vividly remember from the only time I ever saw The Beach Boys when they opened for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at Philadelphia's Spectrum in what would be a mostly disastrous tour in the Spring of 1968 (canceled after drawing only 200 people to their show in New York City). They wore white suits and had a large horn section and played on a stage that was covered in flowers.



In 1968 The Beach Boys released Friends, the album that remains my own favorite to this day. I am a sucker for records with great opening tracks and, at 38 seconds, "Meant For You" is about as perfect as it gets (when I recorded the third Many Bright Things album I opened it with the 26 second track, "Many Bright Friends", as my own private little homage).



The album has twelve tracks and the tenth "Busy Doin' Nothin'" is classic Brian Wilson. Legend has it that the directions given in the song actually led to his house outside of Hollywood. It's also a perfect Bossa Nova.



Here's the title track. Enjoy.

Tim Buckley

My friend Fast Eddie and I saw Tim play once, at The Main Point, a tiny coffeehouse outside of Philadelphia on Lancaster Avenue. It was either in 1973 or 74, he was with a trio of musicians and I mostly remember the feeling of the performance more than any particulars. It was an unaffected melancholy; a genuine world-weariness that pervaded the show.

I have always loved Tim's voice, even though I find the son, Jeff, a second rate parody of the father (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, "Only someone with a heart of stone can listen to Jeff Buckley sing 'Hallelujah' without laughing."). It is his second, third and fourth LPs, Goodbye and Hello (1967), Happy Sad (1969) and Blue Afternoon (1969) that are my favorites, though I appreciate the later, more experimental, efforts.

What I think of as his best album wasn't released until fifteen years after his death in 1975 at the age of 28. Dream Letter: Live in London 1968 (1990) is a double live LP (yes, it was released on vinyl as well as CD) that manages to capture all his best qualities. It also has my favorite of his songs, "Morning Glory." There is a cover version that is on the very first Blood, Sweat and Tears album, Child Is Father to the Man (1968), their debut (the band founded and led by Al Kooper and not the one featuring vocalist David Clayton Thomas) and another of the "best records by anybody ever."

A wonderful song; this version from Late Night Line Up from the BBC has surfaced on Youtube and is as perfect as perfect gets. Enjoy.

Well.... What HAVE you done?

Beck & Limbaugh.  Tag team from hell.  Getting rich by tearing down the American experiment, sodomizing the democracy, and generally spreading panic and misinformation to a nation of boobs.

Tarring and feathering seems so... I don't know... 18th Century.  I mean, it's absolutely what would have happened to these nimrods back in the 1780s or so; put out of town on a rail as the Torries and loyalists they are.  What is replacing the Divine Right of Kings with the doctrine of jusnaturalism (the natural rights of ALL people) if not the advent of democratic socialism?

And I'm not even sure where you can just go buy feathers today anyhow.  But you know those Styrofoam packing peanuts?

You want a tea party-esque solution?  I say we tar and peanuts these bastards!

All in flavor, say "pie."

* Cartoon photo-shop by Grace Tunis.

Our Paris Apartment....

Here's a link to an article titled "Tenant protection laws are onerous."  By the title you may surmise that the laws are deemed "onerous" because they are very one-sided toward protecting the tenant.  Those of us who lack the means to buy Parisian real estate might well title the same article "Tenant protection laws are pretty darn sweet."

The two elements of these laws that caught my attention are these: all agreements between landlord and  tenant are for a minimum of three years (unless the tenant wishes a shorter lease), and it is impossible to remove a tenant - even for the non payment of rent - until the end of that term.

Let's review.

In a purely hypothetical example, let's say that my friends Mark, Greg and I were to draw straws and one of us were to rent an apartment in Paris. Something nice, maybe in the Marias, in the 3rd arrondissemont; not too far from the Picasso museum or this little Irish pub where the ex-pats hang out. We all pool our money to get the place rented, and then, well, see above.

Let's review.

At the end of the three years, we are (1) evicted and (2) next guy on the list rents a place and, voila*, three more years of life on whatever the French word for "dole" is.

Three guys, nine years for three months rent and some sort of deposit that, who knows, French law possibly says we still get back. In addition, since there will be periods when none of the three of us are visiting, we can rent the place out to tourists three to six months out of each year.

Not to mention the book deal.


* French for "then."