JACK NITZSCHE & VARIOUS ARTISTS
Hearing is Believing: The Jack Nitzsche Story 1962-1979
Nitzsche was best known as arranger and foil to Phil Spector during the great Wall of Sound days, and then as auxiliary member of and shadow mover behind Crazy Horse and Neil Young’s Stray Gators. He played piano on the Rolling Stones’ “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” and arranged Buffalo Springfield’s “Expecting to Fly”; he penned classical suites and masterminded soundtracks to films as diverse as Performance, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Cruising. But even if, like me, you thought you knew something about Jack Nitzsche — producer, arranger, composer, crackpot genius, woman-assaulting drug fiend, all-around pop studio pinch-hitter and mystery man — you’ll never cease being surprised at the scope of the recordings he was involved with. Not all of them great or even good, some just surprising.
For instance, I didn’t know or had never really registered that:
Nitzsche did the strings on “Castles Made of Sand” (1963), one of my favorite Stevie Wonder records, and in fact had his hands in several Hollywood-recorded Motown sides of the period;
or that he arranged and conducted the backing on Doris Day’s “Move Over Darling,” theme to the ‘63 movie of the same name starring Doris and James Garner (I love that song, especially the Tracy Ullman version [hmm, that’s the third time I’ve mentioned a Tracy cover on this blog as being better than the original]);
or that he was somehow in on Carole King’s 1966 solo release, “A Road to Nowhere” — a dark monument, a bone-shivering track — which seems to have been, in arrangement and overall dynamics, virtually a demo for the roughly contemporaneous and utterly horrific version included here, by Judy (“Queen of the Beatniks”) Henske;
or that he was responsible for the strings behind the James Gang’s “Ashes, the Rain and I,” from their great Rides Again album;
or that he’d produced Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks, represented on this anthology by the anti-abortion tearjerker “You Can’t Be Too Strong.”
For Neil Young, Nitzsche wrote “String Quartet at Whiskey Boot Hill,” and did the symphonic arrangements that gave the otherwise honey-flavored Harvest its bitter edge. (He also had an affair with, and later physically assaulted, Young’s one-time wife, the actress Carrie Snodgress; charged with attempted rape, he pled down to lesser crimes. Nitzsche and Snodgress remained friends. Read Jimmy McDonough’s Young biography Shakey for that convoluted tale.)
Spector, typical for a genius, downplayed the influence or even uniqueness of his supposed amanuensis in the composition of Spectorsound. You get that story in this Nitzsche obituary, written by Richard Williams, first and finest anatomizer of the super-producer’s method. (Nik Cohn was better on Spector’s madness.) But Nitzsche had a sound of his own, and if you listen to Spector it’s well in there. The earlier Nitzsche productions, pure Hollywood pop, are often centered around muscular, heroic guitar tones — single-string plucks that thrum like a beefier Duane Eddy — tricky percussive syncopations, and unashamedly romantic strings. Things go haywire a bit later in the ‘60s, when Nitzsche was wont to work his webs in service of freakniks and plain mediocrities like Bob Lind, P.J. Proby, Garry Bonner, Lou Christie, and Tim Buckley. It can be painful to hear plangent and progressive pop textures straining to animate dead, albeit eccentric, lumps of hyper-emotional art-song.
This anthology shines an introductory light on the darker alcoves of the Nitzsche mansion, but aside from the 1962 instrumental hit “The Lonely Surfer,” it offers none of his solo work (he did several albums under his own name). Nor does it get into the Spector or Young work at all. As for Crazy Horse, at least a taste of their magnificent first album — say “Gone Dead Train,” hauled over from the Performance track, or Nitzsche’s own vocal showcase, “Crow Jane Lady” — would have been welcome. A note in the booklet indicates some of this work was “unavailable” for inclusion, but career anthologies were invented to span those gaps. This guy was singular and deserves, how would the jailhouse lawyer phrase it, FULL AND PROPER REPRESENTATION.
Separated At Birth?
Jack Nitzsche & Robert Christgau
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Trojan Rocksteady Box Set
Mid-’60s rocksteady — cooler and more dignified than ska, its pixilated forerunner, less political or passionate than the classic reggae that followed it — agglomerated in the shanty towns of Kingston and was the favored gliding music of the often antisocial rude boys. But for the most part rocksteady itself was not rude, it was gentle as breeze, or, at its extreme, merely ebullient. It was Jamaican Motown crossed with Jamaican doo wop. Sunshine music to shine over tin roofs and muddy streets. Alton Ellis, the Melodians, Derrick Harriott, the Paragons. “Just Tell Me” by Toots & The Maytals. So beautiful.
Many of the best songs, chiefly clustered on Disc 1, seem derived to greater or lesser degrees from contemporary American soul. Harriott’s “The Loser,” so sweet and limpid it wants to melt in your very ear, sports a chorus directly evocative of Billy Stewart’s “Sitting in the Park.” Elsewhere the Federals’ “Shocking Love” is straight tribute, in all but name, to Smokey Robinson.
But there are strange bits galore, like covers of “To Sir with Love” and “The Shadow of Your Smile” that actually work. (Work as what? you just might ask. You’re right to ask.) Lee Perry creeps in toward the end, forecasting his ’70s ascendancy into outer dub space, promising I am the Ah-venger / You’ll never get away from me. There’s also a bliss-bringing instrumental by Ike Bennett & The Crystalites titled “Illya Kurayaka.” Instantly familiar, it holds your head in place long enough for your head to realize that it is, in fact, the theme from A Summer Place. Can you help but smile? You think of Kingston and the slum of Trenchtown. Therrrrrrrrre’s a summer plaaaaaaaaaaace . . .
Ah yes. Ah, blow breeze, blow, blow over shanty town.
BUCK OWENS
Bridge Over Troubled Water
Now that he’s dead, you see a lot of people scrambling to suggest, without actually saying it, that oh yes, they’ve been Buck Owens fans just for years. Not me. For all those years he was to me, as to many of us, merely the guy who stood next to Roy Clark on “Hee Haw.” He was the one who wasn’t a virtuoso guitarist. Who didn’t guest star on “The Odd Couple.” Who laughed like a loon at every cornpone witticism and was vaguely thought to have been a singer of the lowest notoriety, back before TV came along.
Look how wrong you can be, especially when you take the tube as your text. Maybe 15 years ago, performing due diligence as a Beatlephile, I listened to “Act Naturally.” And durn if I didn’t like it better than the Fabs’ whacking, wayward go at honky tonk. It had an acoustic bounce you couldn’t resist. Buck was a singer of confidence and generous throat, supreme commander of the hillbilly blues: any fool could hear that. Other songs were heard here, heard there. Things were read. It developed that Owens was truly respected in his realm. People who knew far more than myself knew all about him.
So an Owens expert I’m not, but I’ve gotten a few albums and while I’ve not liked them all equally I’ve begun to get an elliptical sense of what he had going for him, and how unusual that was. How much I’d rather be listening to him than to Toby Keith — or for that matter to R. Kelly. Eventually you learn how much you have yet to learn.
So here we are with the present case:
This 1971 Owens LP almost overdoses on echo, but it skirts clamor to catch beauty. Its stated raison d’etre was to demonstrate that representative works by the most respectably relevant of modern pop composers were really just country songs in disguise. So Owens covers inevitable picks by inevitable penmen (Dylan, Donovan, Simon) but pours country hickory all over them, insisting, for instance, on changing “Homeward Bound”‘s escaping to exscaping — a pleasurable vocal irritant that Elton John might once have envied. Nothing is sung straight, but nothing is sung ironically either. Owens, his pianist, a skating-rink organ, and a really powerful echo box turn “Love Minus Zero,” already one of Dylan’s prettiest songs, into a controlled rhapsody on the properties of love as felt in a dazed, post-coital dream.
His “Bridge Over Troubled Water” does not hack Art Garfunkel’s, and doesn’t try. Going the opposite direction, it scales the epic down to verse and chorus, wastes no wax on intro or outro, and goes straight to a big, big sound. The backing is countrypolitan with real pop muscles, but of course it wouldn’t work if you couldn’t buy the voice. Buck Owens was matched only by George Jones in the boldness of his overemphasizing: almost every line bulges with melisma to magnify woe, sympathy, a general burgeoning of emotion. “When you’re weeeeeeeeeeeary, feelin’ smaahhhhhlll, when tears are iiiihhhhhhn — yourrrrrreyes . . . ”
That’s about where you surrender your defenses — if, like me, you’re a sucker for well-turned melodrama and a voice that dares to rattle the stars.
JAH WOBBLE, JAKI LIEBEZEIT, HOLGER CZUKAY
How Much Are They?
An EP from 1981, pairing the Public Image bassist Wobble with drummer Liebezeit and producer-bassist Czukay of Krautrock godfathers Can. It’s post-PiL skeleto-funk, with warehouse-district ambiance and industrial warmth, punched through by steel-girder guitar noise. In place of the screeching or moaning Lydon voice is Wobble’s distant incantation, dazed and distracted. Funky and scary all in all, and very much in the grain of its moment, that post-punk moment when art-school fops with sharp guitars and disco beats came back to reclaim the cutting edge and paint the UK gunmetal grey as a land of dead souls and smoking ruins. It stands with the best of that style (PiL itself), particularly “Twilight World” which is like the Specials’ “Ghost Town” stripped of pop pleasure and humor — nothing left but a beat, a nightmare organ, and the sense of walking freakshow streets after hours in a town of tall buildings and concrete canyons that echo all night long.
Pop with a Shotgun 