Songs and Thoughts #1

Some song recommendations.

Hey.

Here are a few songs I’ve been listening to recently. I’ll keep them all in a Spotify playlist you can follow here.

If you listen, let me know what you think.

Thanks!
Tyler

Mad Dog by Lee Michaels (1970)

Spotify recommended me the album “Barrel” by Lee Michaels while I was writing in a Starbucks last summer. I was finishing up a story to submit to the Westchester Review, a literary magazine whose submission window closed the same day. Unfortunately, the story didn’t make the cut (in creative life, sometimes you’ll get 100 no’s before a single yes.)

The album’s cover photo sees Lee Michaels imprisoned inside a cask-turned-studio encircled by a mess of instruments and amplifiers. It fits the album’s sound perfectly, which I can easily imagine wafting through the cobwebs on the ceiling and saturating the wood around him.

The song’s lyrics are ostensibly anti-cop – a sentiment that, in 1970, wasn’t uncommon among young people given the Kent State shootings of the same year, the clashing between police and students outside the DNC in Chicago two years earlier, and the ongoing police brutality associated with the Civil Rights movement.

Today, Lee Michaels has a podcast where he (in front of a jungle wallpaper, behind a bright orange desk, and beneath a bright orange haircut) tells stories, gives important (and not-so-important) life updates, and pets a cat (also bright orange.)

Here is a great performance of his song “Do You Know What I Mean” on the Midnight Special, 1973. He looks as stoned as ever, and probably is.

I Heard That Lonesome Whistle Blow by Hank Williams (1951)

Hank Williams is a figure that, if you spend enough time listening to American folk music, will slowly encroach on your field of listening. He is undeniably one of the most important country artists of all time.

“I Heard That Lonesome Whistle Blow” was introduced to me by my History of Rock professor. In that class, we’re given the privilege of listening to great music on the classroom’s speaker system. Before listening, he emphasized Williams’s enunciation of the word “lonesome” as an onomatopoeia meant to half-mimic the labored, turning movement of a train. Regardless of Williams’s intention, it’s a fun thing to sing along with and a fun thing to watch friends react to for the first time.

My professor also emphasized how devastatingly sad the song is. The young narrator who – for reasons unknown – is imprisoned forever and may never see his gal or the outside world ever again must also endure the sound of the train passing by as an eerie reminder of his failures. It’s a Promethean image buttressed by fiddles and pedal steel guitar.

Hank Williams unfortunately passed away on New Years Day in 1953 at 29 years old. After a difficult life of illness and addiction, his final moments were in the backseat of a car during a snowstorm enroute to a performance. His talent and demise ought to remind us that our mortality differentiates not between endings and tragic endings.

Let George Do It by Steely Dan (late 1960s)

Steely Dan has a decently sized discography that may satisfy the casual listener. To the unsatiated nerds among us, however, there are a few sparsely circulated albums with demos and early recordings from before the band’s first album, Can’t Buy a Thrill (1972).

The early “Let George Do It” is, to me, a pretty impressive song that both carves out a funky, jazz-rock niche in the still-developing landscape of the late 60s and signals to listeners what more the duo have in their artistic arsenal. Like most other Steely Dan songs, it’s hard to grasp what the song is exactly about, but the vocabulary suggests some deep literary minds at work. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker met as English students at Bard College and bonded over their interest in the blues and literature.

There isn’t much online about this song other than it being an early example of the songwriting partnership. There are several Wikipedia entries about the idiom “Let George Do It” which the duo is no doubt referencing. Someone on page 9 in this thread from the Steve Hoffman Music Forums says Keith Thomas is on vocals, but I can’t find much info on him (other than on this poorly designed Dan database.)

This’ll just have to be one of those songs whose story is lost to time.

I’m Satisfied by Mississippi John Hurt (early 1960s)

I’m always blown away at just how different acoustic bluesmen sound from one another. They play the same chord progressions on the same instrument, armed with the same scales and patterns, but churn out completely different songs in completely different styles. Mississippi John Hurt has a style completely unto his own – to me, his guitar playing and singing is like candy; it’s often jubilant and jumpy and celebratory. 

John Hurt failed commercially as a musician in the 1920s and was rediscovered in the 1960s with the folk revivalist movement. At 70 years old, he was a performer at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, whose lineup included Bob Dylan (22), Joan Baez (22), Judy Collins (24), Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (36), and Pete Seeger (44). Unfortunately, he passed away 3 years later in 1966 at 73 years old.

What fascinates me about American folk music is its mystique. The classic American image is of an unaccompanied rambler; the lone, road-worn vagabond-cowboy whose emotionless facade breaks to reveal a poet, songwriter, and a man sensitive to his environment. Although this image is a romantic oversimplification (and doesn’t really describe John Hurt), it does speak to early American motifs, namely those associated with the Transcendental philosophical movement and the Realist literary movement of the mid-19th century.