Long Player #4 :Alabama - Feels So RightAlabama - The Closer You Get..

The scene is some academic summer camp or another when I'm seven years old. We're eating lunch in the cafeteria and one of the older kids, for whatever reason, asks me who my favorite band is. My answer?

Alabama.

I remember this very vividly. I also remember the other kids kind of snickering for some reason. (Though it probably explains why I remember it. I was always a sensitive soul.)

The music in my household growing up was predominantly country radio. That and NPR and talk radio. Neither of my parents are the kind of music heads that I would become, but they enjoy good music. And so I had my ears full of the stuff on the radio in the 80s - Alabama, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Ronnie Millsap, Kathy Matea, Aaron Tippin and on and on. And it's interesting to see how these things manifested themselves in my adult listening experience. Who knows if I would've given Son Volt the time of day in high school if not for the country influence.

I turned away from country radio and embraced rock around the time of the Garth Brooks revolution, so I've always sort of tagged him as the dividing line between more traditional country and the slick pop that defines the radio genre now. But I had a bit of an awakening about this when tackling these two albums. Garth, rather, was mastering something that had been in the works for some time. But let's get back to Alabama.

Alabama's first album was released in 1976, so by the time we get to 1981's Feels So Right, their second for a major and fifth overall, they were hitting their peak. Let's review how good the 80s were for this band. They released 9 studio albums (not counting a 1985 Christmas album) in the decade, only one of which (1980's My Home's In Alabama) didn't reach #1 on the Country albums chart. Every one of these 9 albums is certified platinum - the two I'm discussing today, 4 times platinum each. They never had another number one album after the 80s. They didn't have one before. So clearly, the 80s were something pretty special for the boys from Alabama.

It's a bit of a fascinating story. The three main members are all cousins, having started the band under a different name in 1969. So it probably explains a lot of what I found out by actually, for the first time in my life, listening to a complete album by them: they were just as rooted in the genre-hopping classic rock of bands like the Doobie Brothers as they were their country lineage. There are songs that dive into muted soul and r&b exercises, some that come close to out-and-out rocking a bit, and the ones that actually come fully into the country mode. The only part of an Alabama album that always hues close to the country playbook are the lyrics. But even there, they're just a Southern state reference away from it being a pretty down-the-middle pop exercise.

Two things I've thought about a lot while listening to these albums, beyond how enjoyable I've actually found them, is that while I like them, I'm not sure I'd actually go up to anyone and say: "Dude, but seriously. Check out The Closer You Get." If not for the obvious attachment of nostalgia to my childhood, I don't know that I could successfully argue that you were missing out on anything by not diving into the Albama oeuvre. Want to better understand 1980s country radio? Well, then, absolutely, come on aboard. Otherwise, you're good.

The other obvious problem, as you can see in the photo, is the Confederate flag. Four of their best selling records from this period have the flag predominantly featured. This one on the cover of Feels So Good is relatively subtle compared to the near dominance of it on some of the other covers. It's the kind of thing that makes me a bit unsure of how to treat this part of my musical background. I literally don't own another record with that image on it. But Alabama's songs are pure pop songs mostly rooted in love stories. There's not a whiff of politics on any of it, which is, of course, why the flag is there. It's just a cultural totem, probably more commercial choice than ideological one. The flag disappears by the late 80s, though it makes a small appearance on an early 90s greatest hits collection cover.

So how to deal with that? It's troubling, but I also can understand it not as something inherently racist here - but just inherently, and willfully blind to what it could be otherwise. If you're only surrounded by people who embrace the flag from the 'heritage' perspective, maybe you just don't think about it. I don't know if the members of Alabama were ever questioned retroactively about their use of the flag. (That great discussion Tom Petty gave about his band's use of it for the Southern Accents tour is a pretty great example of someone owning past ignorance and doing it gracefully and respectfully.) But it'd be a good question to ask them at some point. At the same time it makes me hesitate to even keep the one record around. Or to pull it out. Or to even try to make an argument for why the music on it is solid. Regardless, let's rank the songs:

Feels So Right

10. Woman Back Home
9. See the Embers, Feel the Flame
8. Ride the Train
7. Hollywood
6. I'm Stoned
5. Feels So Right
4. Burn Georgia Burn
3. Old Flame
2. Fantasy
1. Love in the First Degree

The Closer You Get...

10. Lovin' Man
9. Dixie Boy
8. Dixieland Delight
7. Alabama Sky
6. Very Special Love
5. Red River
4. What in the Name of Love
3. The Closer You Get
2. Lady Down on Love
1. She Put the Sad In All His Songs

Next Week: Oh, boy. We go further down the questionable road with not one, not two, but three Woody Allen stand up albums: Woody Allen; Woody Allen, Vol. 2; and Standup Comic : 1964 - 1968

Long Player #3:The Afghan Whigs - Black Love

The Afghan Whigs are not only one of my favorite bands, but they encompass one of my favorite rock band trajectories: One solid album to get their footing, three or so increasingly stellar albums afterward, a really good swan song, and then at least ten years later, a reunion with record(s) that match the originals in quality. There are obvious exceptions to this rule, but in a lot of ways, I feel like 5 is the optimal number of albums that one group of musicians ought to record together. (This does not include EPs.) Call it the Pavement Rule - one great debut (Slanted..), three increasingly great follow ups (Crooked Rain.. through Brighten the Corners) and the good swan song (Terror Twilight).

I go back and forth on which Afghan Whigs album is actually my favorite; I tend to cycle between the main focus of today's piece and 1993's Gentlemen. Both are superb and pretty much perfect in their own ways. But there's a little phrase that's been tucked away on most every project Greg Dulli has laid his hands on these past three decades: "Shot on location at" That's what all these albums say in lieu of "Recorded at.." And Black Love is without question the most cinematic of the Afghan Whigs' original run.

Both albums also share one of my favorite lyrical conceits - a returning theme. Dulli is great at opening with a line ("a lie...the truth...which one should I use?" in "Crime Scene Part One") and then returning to it in a slightly different context later (on "Blame, Etc.").

The album is paced and structured pretty perfectly. The slow build of "Crime Scene Part One" leads into the soaring blitz of "My Enemy," to the propelled slinkiness of "Double Day" and the raging "Blame, Etc." All of this makes the fifth track, "Step Into the Light," one of the best examples of tension relief on most any album I've ever heard. It's perfectly placed an executed.

"Going to Town" has some of my favorite Dulli sin/hell-based lyrics ("When you say, 'Boy, we got hell to pay' / Don't worry, baby, that's okay / I know the boss") and "Honky's Ladder" has a perverse sing-along chorus that best exmplifies something I noticed for the first time on this recent listen. The guitars at the center of the Afghan Whigs music, played by Dulli and Rick McCollum, always seemed just the slightest bit off-key. Like the pegs needed just a slight turn more. But I realized now that they give the music its gleefully off-kilter sound. The sound of chaos straining, on the verge of boiling over. And more than that, they echo the voice of Greg Dulli. Dulli's voice is a powerful one. He can take his voice up into falsetto brilliantly, but can hover somewhere between a growl and a yowl, sounding like someone with just a bit of rasp trying to re-create some of the best soul crooners of the 60s and 70s.

The album ends with another thing that I think is a marker of a great record: an ending triptych. "Bulletproof" into "Summer's Kiss" into "Faded" is as engaging a closing set of songs that you could ask for. Especially as "Faded" fades out into the same el-train/subway noises that the record opens with, bringing it all full circle. There's not a wasted noted or effect on this album and it's truly the Afghan Whigs at the peak of their prowess as a band.

The copy of Black Love that I own is the 20th anniversary reissue from last year and it includes some extras - none of which are that interesting, honestly, aside from a cover of New Order's "Regret" which is pretty transcendent and could've fit in somewhere on the original album I think. Dulli's work as an interpreter of other people's work - making it into his own - is without parallel in indie-rock.

Should I rank the songs? Maybe. Black Love works so well as a piece, that I hesitate to do so, but here goes nothing.

11. My Enemy
10. Night by Candlelight
9. Double Day
8. Bulletproof
7. Summer's Kiss
6. Crime Scene Part One
5. Honky's Ladder
4. Going to Town
3. Blame, Etc.
2. Step Into the Light
1. Faded

Next Week on Long Player: Alabama - Feels So Right and The Closer You Get..

Long Player #2 :Ryan Adams - 29

If it weren't for the idea of Ryan Adams, I'm not sure where his songs would land him. To be clear, what I'm talking about here are the ways he's overshadowed his art in his fairly lengthy career. The stage tantrums, the run-away prolificity, the stunt albums. All of it has created a bit of a haze around Adams for me over the years. The high points are really incredibly high, but they also come so early in his career that it's easy to forget. For me, Whiskeytown's Stranger's Almanac and his debut solo album Heartbreaker, while obvious and championed to death, really are his finest hours. But they also earned him enough goodwill to engender the support for albums since. Everyone hoping that the next would be that great return to excellence.

But I also love that because of that, every part of his catalogue has its defenders. For me, aside from the two aforementioned albums, the last calendar year that I had a lot of hope in the work of Ryan Adams was 2005 and it was precisely for one of the reasons I mentioned earlier as an overshadowing element: the prolific nature of his work.

It was announced in the spring of that year that Cold Roses, a double album, would be the first of three records released that year. A Billboard article from March of that year announced the names of the following albums as "September" (this would instead be Jacksonville City Nights) and "29." The first two albums would do really well for Adams respectively. The latter, not so much. But while I unquestionably think Cold Roses is the best of the three, 29 is a record that has held my attention and intrigue for more than a decade. I can't say for sure why, though it does share an overall feel with the album that would follow close on this one's heels, Love Is Hell, one of his other albums that I'll generally stick up for.

Here's where I'll abandon my journalistic integrity (hah) for a second and just say what I think I remember. What I remember is that Adams announced that 29 was an ode to his 20s, with one song for each year. Now, for all I know, this makes about as much sense as when Liz Phair claimed that Exile in Guyville was a song-by-song rejoinder to Exile on Main Street despite the two having different numbers of songs and, you know, the concept just not being there. So, the album opens with the title track. So does it go in reverse order? Also, there are only nine songs on the album. So does he not include when he was 20? It sounds like another case of Adams talking about something ("New album called September!") that just wasn't to be.

Of the three albums that year, this was the only one not recorded with his new backing band The Cardinals, and it's the low-key and smaller structure of this album that probably appeals to me. It's very piano driven in spots. But it also opens with a bit of a rocker ("Twenty Nine") and then goes into softer territory. Part of me wonders if he aimed to replicate Heartbreaker's similar structure as a bit of a tease.

If I were really going to amuse myself here, I would take each song and try to come up with what happened to Ryan in that year of his life. Some of these songs are personal narratives, others are character sketches. There's clearly nothing blatantly autobiographical going on here, but somewhere in his intentions, I suppose there was.

Adams' lyrics are sometimes the most banal things on Earth and sometimes utterly beautiful, but "Carolina Rain" does contain what I consider one of his clunkiest lines. "I pulled into Mecklenburg..." starts the line. Adams is originally from North Carolina, but he pretty famously doesn't hold much truck with his home state anymore. Now, for all I know, there are people here still pissed off at him enough from the Whiskeytown days that he just stays clear. But he did name an album Jacksonville Goddamned City Nights (possibly not the actual title) and wrote "Oh My Sweet Carolina" and now here's another Carolina song, so he has feelings for us, clearly.  But Mecklenburg? For those of you not native to this state, Mecklenburg is the name of the county wherein sits the city of Charlotte. There is no city of Mecklenburg in the state. Now, that's fine, and you can play with details all you want in song, but the word just scans poorly. Charlotte would've made more sense. Or Raleigh. Or something. But not "Mecklenburg." So it does me the double disservice of being a) a poor choice of words aesthetically and b) irritating me as someone knowing that Mecklenburg is not a city.
But 29 is a really good record. It's an album for contemplation and thoughtfulness. About your 20s or whatever you have in mind. Just, stay out of Mecklenburg. Let's rank the songs:

9. Voices
8. Strawberry Wine
7. Carolina Rain
6. Nightbirds
5. Blue Sky Blues
4. The Sadness
3. Elizabeth, You were Born to Play That Part
2. Twenty Nine
1. Starlite Diner

Next week on Long Player: The Afghan Whigs' Black Love

Long Player #1 :AC/DC - Back in Black

Welcome to Long Player. Once a week, give or take some holidays, for the foreseeable future (read: years?), I will be proceeding through my vinyl music collection in alphabetical order. Some of these records will be painfully obscure, others painfully well known. With most artists, I will actually devote a different column to each album I have of theirs. In some cases, I may lump several records together for one entry. Or none. I don’t know. I’ll decide as I go and will have logic to go along with it.  

In some ways, I feel like starting off with AC/DC’s Back in Black is an intimidating thing to do. In other ways, it's the most appropriate thing that could happen. Here's why. I’m taking a long, thorough dive through my vinyl collection, something more interesting to me than it could possibly be to anyone else. My LP collection is an oddity in some ways. It's not the primary way I have ever bought music, but it's not insubstantial in amount. I've gone deep on collecting certain things, and then have spartan examples of other catalogues that I managed to get cheaply. Back in Black is a perfect example of that as it's the only AC/DC album I have on vinyl. I've had chances to buy others. I haven't yet done that.

It's also an album that has been written about a million times over and the odds of me saying anything new or interesting about it border on the infinitesimal. But since I've already admitted that this writing exercise is more for me than anything else - and I'm truly hoping that people enjoy it along the way, though that's not the point - then why not tackle one of the monoliths of rock and roll?

Back in Black is of course a strange record in rock's history because of its placement at the front of the second half of the Bon Scott/Brian Johnson eras of the band. You'd be hard pressed to think of another band that lost one of its key members (especially a lead singer) only to come back immediately with a record that would become its most successful to date at the time and one that defines the band to this day.

One thing I certainly like about the vinyl era of music was the physical limitation. If you wanted to avoid spreading out onto a second LP, you were limited to around 45 minutes of music or less. This made albums fairly compact and to someone who grew up in the age of cassettes (60 minutes) and CDs (80 minutes), the smaller scale punch really stands out. I noticed that most of my favorite albums of 2016 were in the 30 – 40 minute range. And that’s not a surprise. Albums that length tend to hit with their best songs and get out before wearing you down and also prompt repeat listening as a result.

Back in Black is a masterclass in this kind of thinking. It clocks in at 42 minutes and each side basically rolls from barnstorming opener (“Hells Bells” on side 1; the title track on side 2) into hellacious rockers and fist pumping giants before settling into the slowest respective song on each side. Which is not to be mistaken for a ballad. “Let Me Put My Love Into You” at the end of side 1 is really all about setting you up for the monumental “Back in Black” on the opening of the next side. “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” at the end of the record is just a nice, heavy sigh by way of winding things up.

My 21-month old daughter came home about a month ago singing Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” I have no idea who taught her this or why, but it eventually lead me to bring up the video for the song on YouTube for her to see. Now of course I’m stuck playing that video, or the song itself on Spotify, over and over for her. (On the plus side, with the percussion instrument set I got her for Christmas, I’ve managed to get her to imitate the iconic thump-thump-pop of the song. She’s the next Janet Weiss, guys, I’m serious.) But in doing so, I’ve been forced to re-evaluate a song that I’d long cordoned off in the same part of the world as Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” and, well, Queen’s “We Are the Champions” from the same album as “We Will Rock You.” And in doing so rediscovered what’s so engaging about it in the first place.

Same with Back in Black. The big hits on the album are massive. To have escaped “Back in Black,” “Hells Bells” or the gigantic “You Shook Me All Night Long” somehow implies a level of purposeful cultural ignorance that I would tip my hat to. Even “Shoot to Thrill,” never a single, has appeared in too many big move soundtracks to count. All of these songs come back to life within the context of the album. “Hells Bells” is an opener with few peers in rock. “Back in Black” is the same for the second side.

And “You Shook Me All Night Long” is the poppiest song on the album, earning its ubiquitous presence in our culture. I find myself singing along with it in a way that would seem tedious if I ran across it on classic rock radio. Context is everything in the case of a lot of these songs. But it’s interesting to think about in comparison with the bloated modern album. Do big singles regain anything within the span of albums like Drake’s VIEWS? Or are their purposeful single-hood pointed out all the more? And is this an effect of the era-of-bloat or more about Back in Black’s status as an unimpeachable album from front to back? Clearly the answer is the latter, but the svelte size of Back in Black doesn’t hurt.

And it is pretty perfect. Even the deep cuts (god, “Shake a Leg,” y’all – for real) are golden and carry the album along transcendentally. I read a listener review of the album over at AllMusic where they basically said “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” is the worst song on the album but only because its slow, winding-down throb just suffers a bit by comparison after the previous 37-and-a-half minutes of lightning. I find that a legitimate argument, but if that song is the worst on your album, you’re doing something right.

Plus, also, Veruca Salt’s American Thighs. I do really enjoy band lyric references in other bands’ album titles.

And, what the hell, let’s just rank the songs on this album for the fun of it. I may do this with every album, or I may not.

10. Let Me Put My Love Into You
9. Have a Drink on Me
8. Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution
7. Given the Dog a Bone
6. Shoot to Thrill
5. What Do You Do For Money Honey
4. Hells Bells
3. You Shook Me All Night Long
2. Shake a Leg
1. Back in Black

Next Week on Long Player: Ryan Adams - 29