“Sopranos” Death Watch Continues; Fan Fears Worst
Strange things have been going on with “The Sopranos” musically. Not only is this the best season they’ve had in the last three or so, but their song picks have been scratching the back of my brain, sneaking up from the rear. Last week’s show had two moments:
1) Christopher, the recovering doper and alkie, is back on the needle, back in the bottle. He shoots up at the Feast of St. Someone, and his sludgy nodding is scored to Fred Neil’s “Dolphins,” from his 1966 debut album. Hadn’t heard this version before, didn’t like it, couldn’t help wishing they’d used the Linda Ronstadt-Stone Poneys remake, which I love. But that would have been too beautiful, too much for the scene, all wrong. Christopher is on his way down the toilet, not out over the sea. Neil with his graceless voice was dumb, thick, and just right. Strange how such things work.
2) The sound, far behind a fairground scene as Tony happily hoisted a toddler, of Johnny & The Hurricanes’ 1959 instrumental “Red River Rock.” A great plastic hybrid track, mating of the cheesy hard-shell roller-rink organ with the grainiest prairie-pop favorite of yesteryear — “Red River Valley,” theme to The Grapes of Wrath, once rasped tunelessly and touchingly by Henry Fonda’s Tom Joad as he waltzed with Ma in the migrant camp. Only thing funny about its “Sopranos” appearance was that I’d come across the song earlier that day on the Internet, hearing it for the first time in years, warming to it like a long-lost childhood friend. My wife heard it for the first time ever and thought it was lovable. So we snapped each other smiles when, a few hours later, there it was on the TV.
And what is that strand running back behind this “Sopranos” season with “The Three Bells”? By my count the Browns’ lachrymal 1959 death ballad has surfaced twice now:
1) Over the young man whose mob-connected father died, leaving him with a garbage business he must unload, and suddenly beholden to Tony, Paulie, and who knows what other shadily-motivated sociopaths. The fellow likes to row, practicing his craft in a long placid canal that looks like it might run by Harvard but is probably only a brackish Jersey slime-line. We hear the first verse of “The Three Bells.” There’s a village hidden deep in the valley, among the pine trees half forlorn — and there on a sunny morning, little Jimmy Brown was born. By the end of the episode, Paulie has shown up to break the young rower’s shins.
2) Over Vito — the mound-like Soprano functionary who, outed as gay, goes on the run — as he first fled his home, feeling the heat creep in. He sat on a motor lodge bed, gun on the nightstand. We heard the second verse of “The Three Bells.” There’s a village hidden deep in the valley, beneath the mountains high above — and there twenty years thereafter, Jimmy was to meet his love. Soon Vito will take refuge in a quaint New Hampshire village. He’ll meet a butch biker who makes johnnycakes in a diner. They’ll kiss.
If you know how “The Three Bells” ends, it’s hard — no, impossible — not to see these two fleeting aural emanations as omens, the song itself as a harbinger of Death, a sad black-robed wraith out of Medieval drama or a Bergman movie. “The Three Bells” will be heard again before the season is over: of that I am certain. And when it gets to that last verse, well, something is going to happen.
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Slighted Song Returns in Triumph; Fan Offers Contrition
I was listening to the second installment of Bob Dylan’s satellite-radio show yesterday, the one where he plays DJ and picks the platters. This week’s theme was “Mother,” appropriate with Mom’s own day coming up. Among Dylan’s selections was Jan Bradley’s “Mama Didn’t Lie,” which I recently dismissed in my Stranded countdown thusly:
JAN BRADLEY, “Mama Didn’t Lie” (Formal/Chess). Hmm, so that’s what this is. There are those songs you realize, upon identifying them in later years, you’ve actually heard many times before, without ever quite knowing what they were: their distant memory rushes up to greet you. I love that feeling, and I like this record. It fits roughly into the girl-group lineage, but the fit is pretty rough: the backing thumps a bit harder than usual for the genre (Chess on the label might account for that). And Bradley’s vocal, sweet-natured but implying a largeness of spirit, is closer to Martha Reeves than Shirley Alston. Doesn’t quite make it to the island, though. 1963.
I must say, this crow tastes mighty fine. Because Marcus was right. And Dylan was right. And your blogger was wrong. “Mama Didn’t Lie” is beautiful, is an all-timer, and indeed would grace anyone’s island, office, yard, room, radio, or dream life.
Please, Jan, take me back.
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Grizzled Bard-Turned-DJ Hits ‘Em Where They Ain’t; Fan Reports Surprise, Delight
The Dylan shows are pretty phenomenal so far. Playlists have been inspired, and even the records I might not care for at another time are transformed by context into rare and special things: the country and blues and other roots genres grow new roots when planted side by side, out of their usual confining genre-anthology window-boxes. Dylan plays Buck Owens next to LL Cool J, Carter Family’s “Keep on the Sunny Side” with Joe Jones’ original version of the Riverias surf classic “California Sun.”
Dylan’s patter is that of a greasy, grinning griot who just enjoys telling stories and doesn’t need too many facts gumming up the flow. Lots of that old Chronicles cod-mysticism, and I love it. In fact listening to the shows is not unlike reading Chronicles for the first time: even if, like me, you’re not someone who eats all things Dylan with a stick, you have to fall back a bit at the man’s ease, his experience, his agrarian funk, his innate connection with some essential and all but vanished strand of American strangeness, and think, Christ, he can dee-jay too?
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Musical Legends Enter Endless Sleep; Fan Wishes Sweet Dreams
Speaking of Buck Owens, a tip of the 10-gallon to his recently departed spirit: March 24, he suffered a heart attack just hours after performing for fans at his own Crystal Palace club in Bakersfield, California, the town he often sang of, the nowhere he made into a somewhere. ‘Cause all I have to do is act naturally.
And let an invisible rose fall for Gene Pitney, who died of natural causes April 5 in a hotel room in Cardiff, Wales. He had received a standing ovation after his performance at St. David’s Hall the night before. Pitney was 65 and went in his sleep. I wanna love, love, love, love my life away with you.
Pop with a Shotgun 