Author: Nathaniel FitzGerald
Record #350: Johnny Cash & June Carter – Carryin’ on With… (1967)
And what a way to get back to business than with Carryin’ On with Johnny Cash and June Carter, the famously dry-witted, mud-slingin’, square dancin’ album of duets between two of country-western’s biggest names. Jackson is legendary, as is their version of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” But the less celebrated tunes are just as wryly hilarious and tender—”Long Legged Guitar Pickin’ Man” sees the two trading insults, while “Shantytown” is as tender a ballad as they ever did. Their versions of Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman” and “What I Say” are fantastic as well, even if the funky electric piano of the latter is a little out of place alongside the finger picked acoustic guitars on every other song.
Record #349: Jesu – Conqueror (2007)
But few had the inspired idea of pairing those gentle melodies with huge walls of crunching metal guitars, glistening synths, and crashing drums. Justin Broadrick’s is a gentle voice in the eye of a hurricane, creating one of the most spellbinding records to ever come out of the metal camp.
Record #348: Jeff Beck – Blow By Blow (1975)
I originally purchased Blow By Blow, former Yardbird* Jeff Beck’s second solo album, after I remarked, “Oh, I thought that said ‘Jeff Buckley,’ nevermind,” mid-dig, and my friend, the record store owner shrugged and said, “just as good.”
I listened through it once before I returned it to him and said, “No! It! Is! Not! Just! As! Good!”
So now, having given it a fair listen this time, this isn’t due for an immediate removal from my collection. It’s an excellent archival piece–a look at a musician at the top of his form–but it’s not something I’ll listen to on any sort of regular basis.*but really, who wasn’t a former Yardbird?
Record #347: Jackson Browne – Running on Empty (1977)
While I spoke previously to Browne’s tendency towards subtler arrangements, many of the non-stage recordings here (like The Road, Rosie, and Cocaine) are downright sparse–a pair of acoustic guitar, a violin, a few extra voices singing harmony. A couple of the hotel room tracks include a drum kit and electric guitar, which raises the question: what kind of Holiday Inns were they staying in? The most impressive of these non-stage tracks is the bouncing Nothing But Time, recorded on a bus driving down the highway You can literally hear the engine shifting as Jackson sings about sleepless nights and state lines. Ambient noise is most recording engineers’ worst nightmare. Here, it adds a level of authenticity impossible in a studio.
All of these ignores the full band, stage performance tracks, though. The crowd is amped, the lead guitars scream, but the band resists the urge to take off after them. The restraint shown on their studio recordings remains intact, and Jackson sings just as earnestly in front of a thousand people as he does in a hotel room.
All of these elements create a live album that is less a portrait of the musicians’ live performance and more a documentary of life on the road–a life that Jackson assures us isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Record #346: Jackson Browne – For Everyman (1973)
Record #345: Craig’s Brother – Lost at Sea (2001)
And truth be told, that’s because this is sophisticated rock and roll. It is pop punk stripped of all pop punk tropes. Palm-muted power chords are relatively rare, the guitars instead playing more melodic lines through a phaser. The bass rarely rides the root notes at an even pace. The drums often break from the quick one-two’s of most punk and explore more varied dynamics.
Lead singer Ted Bond sings in a genre-appropriate sneer, but his lyrics utilize much more poetic images than typical pop punk—an out of tune orchestra, FDR growing weary as WWII waged on, a shipwrecked survivor drifting helplessly on bits of wreckage. Elements are borrowed from college indie rock (“Head in the Clouds”), thrash metal (“Back and Forth”), brooding alternative (“Lost at Sea”), and country (“Set Free,” before that awesome Smithsy jangle-rock pickup halfway through). But what’s probably most impressive is that throughout ten tracks of genre-bending turn-of-the-millennium pop punk, there’s not a bad song on here. Each song is just as strong as the next, which means an awful lot when we’re dealing with highlights like “Glory,” “Prince of America,” and “Divorce” (alongside every other song mentioned).
All of this is enough to make this album a rare gem, but (as I’ve just read on the album’s Wikipedia page) the album was damaged by tensions between Tooth and Nail over budget overages (specifically the choir on “Glory”) and a picture on their website of drummer Juice Cabrera giving the finger (Christian label, remember). The band was dropped from the label and distribution was on a by-request-only basis, which, paired with members leaving for other bands (hi, Yellowcard), led to Craig’s Brother’s disbanding shortly after its lackluster release. Learning this now makes me even more glad to have heard it when I did.
*we HAD the internet, but it was almost useless for discovering music. 56k download speed, streaming didn’t exist, file-sharing services almost always mislabled songs, a three minute video took two hours to load and you couldn’t open another tab while you waited for it, etc.