Happy Birthday to me !

My parents were coming around for dinner one Sunday and I was fretting about what music to play. I decided on Van Morrison, his music is reasonably inoffensive and it’s kinda tinged by Jazz so I thought my Dad would be OK with it. When he arrived and settled in my Dad asks “Is this Van Morrison ?” I answered in the affirmative, pleased that he’d noticed. Then my Dad says “Oh turn it off would you. We saw him at the Brecon Jazz Festival, can’t stand the cantankerous old bugger” !

Stories are legend about Van The Man’s miserable stage presence and his sometimes less than polite interactions with his musicians (I once saw him stop mid song to make the drummer apologise for a mistake that none of the audience had noticed. All this time his organist, the great Georgie Fame, was sat behind his Hammond roaring with laughter). But that confrontational side of him doesn’t reveal itself in his music.

At this point Van was making a hybrid Celtic Soul tinged with Jazz. Think of the title song, one you’ll undoubtedly have heard at some point, yet another that’s been done to death at open mic’s, and that’s a pretty good baseline for the album as a whole. After the failure, sales wise, of his previous album  “Astral Weeks” Morrison moved to the Catskills Mountains to write “Moondance” as a more structured, song based album rather than “Astral Weeks” more improvisational Folk-Jazz. He said of the two albums later on  "I make albums primarily to sell them and if I get too far out a lot of people can't relate to it. I had to forget about the artistic thing because it didn't make sense on a practical level. One has to live.", a statement I’m quite surprised he would make.

“Stoned Me” and “Into The Mystic” are the  most perfect examples of Celtic Soul. the lyrical themes are pastoral and folky but in the background you have a horn section sounding like it arrived straight outta Memphis. “Into The Mystic” sits at the very heart of “Moondance” and is one of its best known songs. Lyrically it’s very clever, is that opening line “We were born before the wind” or is it “We were borne before the wind” ? There are other lines like that throughout the song. It’s been covered many many times, most notably in my world by the Icicle Works and Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit.

It’s not usually the sort of thing I buy but I heard final track “Glad Tidings” in an episode of The Sopranos (for those that know it, it’s the episode where Tony Soprano kills his cousin Tony Blundetto played by Steve Buscemi) not only did I figure it would sound good played on a big system it’s a great example of the attention to detail the Sopranos production crew put into the tiniest details. The lyric you hear when Tony S shoots Tony B is “And we'll send you glad tidings from New York” which when you know why Tony S shoots Tony B is as pertinent as pertinent can be. So I bought this album and I was right, it sounds great on a DJ rig and I’ve spun it a few times since.

The more I’ve listened to “Moondance” recently the more I’ve come to like it. I used to fall asleep listening to “Astral Weeks” on tour busses (pronounced buzzes, I’m a Brummie), I found it very soothing and never got through the second track before I was spark out. “Moondance”s mix of folk, soul and jazz is much more engaging.

Glad Tidings - https://youtu.be/EW2TfQsSA7Q?si=3TBthnq-TdrIrG3Y

It had been many years since I’d bought a John Mellencamp album. I read about this one in an interview with Bruce Springsteen who had contributed guitar and vocals to 3 of its tracks for his long time friend (who knew ?). So I thought I’d take a chance on it.

It’s a quite different John Mellencamp from the one on “Scarecrow”. His voice has deepened and roughed up, he now sounds not unlike Tom Waits. It took me a while to get into this album but the wait was worth it. It’s very, very good. 

I like first song “I Always Lie To Strangers”…a lot. It’s taken at a beautifully world weary, sedate pace. You’re introduced to that gritty new voice (he may have been singing like this for years, I don’t know, I haven’t been listening for a long time). There’s a sense of “don’t blame me, you (the world around us) made me this cynical”

“I always lie to strangers, I am a man of low degree

This world is run by men, Much more crooked than me”

Once he started writing Mellencamp said he realised the songs were all coming from one character, one voice, so he continued with that in mind which gives the album a real consistency. The sedate pace continues through the whole album, we’re not rockin’ in the USA this time, it’s music made by an older man for an older audience that has grown with him.

The music itself is American roots, Americana whatever you want to call it. Miriam Sturm’s fiddle is prominent throughout. “I Am A Man That Worries” has a great Dobro/slide/barroom feel to it, “Sweet Honey Brown” is a life lost to Heroin, “Wasted Days” with Bruce Springsteen is very much in the vein of the Boss’s previous album looking back on life and willing yourself to make the most of what’s left of it. Springsteen also adds guitar and backing vocals to “Did You Say Such A Thing”.

This one may not be for all of you but it’s an album I’ve played a lot over the past year or so. I think it's the grumpy old man-ness of it that appeals, I wonder why that could be...

I Always Lie To Strangers - https://youtu.be/_1CtmRdvxXY?si=uB4-_GYJpazsX_D8

The reasons why I was drawn to this album are lost in the mists of time. It may have been because a friend who worked security at the NEC Arena in Birmingham asked if I wanted some tickets to see him (it can’t have been the reason as without knowing more about him than “Jack And Diane” I probably would have said no)…anyways I accepted a fistful of tickets and couldn’t give them away. So I went on my own, bought a slab of those horrible plastic bottles of lager they served at the NEC and set myself up dead centre on the very back bleacher of seats. 2 hours later my mind was suitably blown, the place was barely half full, there was no-one sitting within 5 rows of me and it’s still, to this day, one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen.

Well if that was the reason I bought “Scarecrow” then good, cos it’s a fantastic album, one of the first I owned that could be described as Americana. Yes it has hit singles on it, “R-O-C-K In The USA”, “Lonely Ol' Night" and “Small Town”, but elsewhere it has a similar feel to Springsteen’s “Nebraska” about it. It’s not as low-fi and stark as “Nebraska” but the songs about the trials and troubles of ordinary Americans, this time based more on farming communities than Springsteen’s songs of bars, cars and cops, feels familiar.

It starts right from the off in “Rain On The Scarecrow”

“The crops we grew last summer weren't enough to pay the loans 

Couldn't buy the seed to plant this spring and the Farmers Bank foreclosed 

Called my old friend Schepman up to auction off the land 

He said “John its just my job and I hope you understand” “

The video for the song begins with an interview with three farmers telling of their struggles. Feels like stories we’ve heard before on Drive-By Trucker and Jason Isbell records. Single “Small Town” describes where the people that haunt these songs come from and how they think. “The Face Of The Nation” bemoans the changing times, “You’ve Got To Stand For Something” is an exhortation to do just that, no suggestion on what just believe in something, preferably yourself.

There are lighter moments, Mellencamp and his band had spent some weeks in rehearsal before entering the studio playing through a list of a hundred rock and roll songs from the 1960s which led to the single “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A. (A Salute to 60's Rock)” and “Between A Laugh And A Tear” is a nice duet with Rickie Lee Jones.

“Scarecrow” was released in 1985, just a year after Springsteen’s “Born In The USA”, both at the height of Reagan-ism. Both albums are recounting the stories of ordinary Americans and how they were coping in that world, for many, not well.

Rain On The Scarecrow - https://youtu.be/joNzRzZhR2Y?si=A_h92A7QnvO7X30W