Mingus, Wilson, Watt
I don't buy many records nowadays and when I do I'm usually disappointed and wind up selling them to Half Price Books, whose employees greet my arrival in much the same way as the army of feral cats in the Fort Worth Stockyards, where I work, greets the coming of the myriad of crazy cat ladies who feed them. Just recently, though, I've scored three of 'em (records, that is, or I suppose I should say CDs to avoid sounding antique) I'm probably going to keep. One of 'em (The Great Concert of Charles Mingus) is a reissue -- much improved, of course, as these things tend to be -- of something I owned on vinyl a million years ago, which just might be my favorite record (sorry, CD) of all time. Another (Brian Wilson Presents Smile) is the legendary lost masterpiece of a demented genius that's only seeing the light of day 37 years after it was originally supposed to appear. The last (The Secondman's Middle Stand) is the long-awaited new work by a relatively younger artist (i.e., a guy who's my age): punk-era icon and hard-touring muso's muso Mike Watt. All three works are evidence of how disaster can be transformed into something transcendent and enduring.
First, the Mingus. As the title implies, it's the recording of a complete show (minus the encore) that the titanic bassist-composer played in Paris back in 1964, during a turbulent and much-bootlegged tour of Europe with a band that included the ebullient pianist Jaki Byard and doomed multi-reedman/avant-garde avatar Eric Dolphy. (Mingus' onstage patter includes a sardonic "Thanks" to promoter George Wein, who was returning to New York the following day "while we finish our 19 days or whatever." A posthumous release on Mingus' wife's label of an earlier Paris performance was entitled Revenge!) The night before this particular show, trumpeter Johnny Coles collapsed and had to be hospitalized; the concert proper (following a solo overture by Byard, the recording of which was omitted from earlier releases of this set) begins with the introduction of both the musicians and Coles' trumpet, which was placed onstage on top of its case. The show had started hours past its scheduled time, after midnight in fact, and press reports had the musicians leaving the sold-out hall to eat. No matter. Mingus was at the peak of his powers back then, meaning he was something akin to a force of nature, carrying the entire history of jazz on his back. Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Ellington, Parker, church music, blues, and what Waller called "the Spanish tinge" are just a few of the sounds you'll hear in this roiling vat of emotions, which boasts as many thematic peaks and valleys as Mingus' tumultuous 1963 masterpiece The Black Saint and Sinner Lady. Mingus was angry and politicized, too, to a greater degree than most of his jazz contemporaries; indeed, the climactic pieces of each hour of this set are "Fables of Faubus," a darkly humorous rant against the anti-integration governor of Arkansas ca. 1954 (greatly expanded from the version released on 1959's classic Mingus Ah Hum), and "Meditations on Integration," perhaps Mingus' greatest composition, an epic and ruminative tone poem inspired by the concentration camps that Dolphy told Mingus were being prepared for Civil Rights protestors.
You can hear the musicians (particularly Byard) struggling to fill in the holes left in the arrangements by Coles' absence, but it doesn't detract from their performances. Byard is as saturated with jazz tradition as Mingus, often flashing the striding left hand that many of his post-Bud Powell peers eschewed and occasionally venturing into atonality with Cecil Taylor-ish clusters. The opening number, "So Long Eric," is dedicated to Dolphy, who'd just announced his intention to stay in Europe at the end of the tour. (He'd die of heart failure in Berlin a couple of months later at age 32.) Previous releases inexplicably listed this tune as "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" and cobbled together takes of the song from two different nights, managing to omit Dolphy's solo altogether. It's available for the first time on this reissue in a marvelous, complete take complete with Dolphy's solo. Throughout the proceedings, whether he's playing alto sax, bass clarinet, or flute, Dolphy's voice is alternately playful, searching, and strident, and he sounds as vibrantly alive here as he ever did on record. (Dig him and the underrated tenorman Clifford Jordan as they comment on each other's solos during the Charlie Parker tribute "Parkeriana.") On bass, Mingus slings around great slabs of sound like an angry god, communicates near-telepathically with his longtime drummer Dannie Richmond to create a mosaic of shifting tempos and changing accompaniments, and plays a lovely solo version of Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady." Mingus' Great Concert is like an entire world compressed into just over two hours' worth of music.
Brian Wilson's Smile accomplishes much the same thing, in a very different idiom. Back in the '60s, the mythic southern California Wilson created with the Beach Boys seduced an awful lot of people, including the future Sir Paul McCartney (who spent the most interesting portion of the Beatles' trajectory chasing Wilson), and Brian did it all by himself, without any daddy George Martin to help put it together. Along with those other archetypal L.A. weirdoes Phil Spector and Frank Zappa, Wilson's pop creations have stood the test of time better than the trippy self-indulgences of the San Francisco hippies who originally dismissed them as "plastic." Like Spector and Zappa, Wilson was a pure creation of America who synthesized seemingly disparate elements -- in his case, Aaron Copland, the Four Freshmen, a bit of doo-wop, a dollop of Spectorsound, a dash of Chuck Berry -- into something quite strikingly original, and at his best (the bridge to "In My Room," the intro to "California Girls," all of "Don't Worry Baby" and Pet Sounds), he could be quite magnificent. Smile, heralded as "a teenage symphony to God," was supposed to be his masterpiece. Instead, it proved to be the high water mark of an unfulfilled talent when Wilson, always massively insecure, caved under the pressures of living up to the hype surrounding his work. Popular myth holds that during its making, Wilson lived in a tent on the floor of his bedroom, which he'd had covered with sand. For the sessions that produced the original version of "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow," he'd had the assembled musicians wear red plastic fireman's helmets, but he later destroyed the master tape when he became convinced that his music had caused the outbreak of a series of fires around L.A. Truly, the kid was wound too tight. Bits and pieces of Smile trickled out over the years ("Good Vibrations," "Heroes and Villains," "Cabin Essence," "Surf's Up"), but the larger work remained unheard by the mass-ass audience while Brian suffered the ignominy of watching the Mike Love-led Beach Boys debasing his legacy at county fairs from coast to coast and he himself was duped and exploited by his therapist and wannabe Svengali, Elliott Landy.
The late-'90s resurgence of interest in all the cooler parts of the '60s (The Zombies! Garage punk! Soul music!) led inevitably to a Brian Wilson revival and thankfully, he had recovered enough of his faculties to capitalize on it. A Pet Sounds box set was duly issued and he even toured behind it, performing the complete album with a full orchestra. Perhaps his handlers had noted the example of Pete Townshend, who continued to generate income throughout the last decade by periodically retooling one of his larger works (Tommy, Quadrophenia, Lifehouse) and incidentally found that, relieved of the responsibility of having to create new material, he was able to enjoy playing live again. Wilson, who'd ceased performing with the Beach Boys four decades previously, had a lot more demons to overcome than Townshend and surprised a lot of people when he teamed up with a relatively young L.A. band called the Wondermints to re-record Smile and take it on the road as well. Myself, I avoided the show when it came to Dallas -- I'd had a creepy-weird encounter with an arenaful of Who fans in their 50s and 60s a few years back, and didn't want to repeat the experience. But I was curious about the CD. Could it really be worth all the fuss?
The short answer is yes. We can only guess what this music would have meant if it had been released in 1967, but it stands up well today, absent any expectations of earthshaking Significance. The previously unreleased material isn't filler, and the three suites that comprise the album hang together well. Van Dyke Parks' lyrics are pretty much impenetrable, but that's fine. The music glistens and sparkles, and the harmonies are lush, all capped with Wilson's still-distinctive falsetto (a little worn, but in a good way). An unexpected discovery: notwithstanding its veneer of positivity and spirituality, this is the saddest music I can imagine, everywhere tinged with regret and actually disturbing in places ("Vega-Tables," which is as cracked as anything Pink Floyd's founding acid casualty Syd Barrett ever produced, and the "fire music" of "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow"). The kids from Omaha with the bad haircuts have nothing on this weird old guy from L.A. Having recently reached a point myself where I realize on a visceral level that I have fewer years in front of me than I have behind and accept the fact that there isn't going to be some future event that's going to make everything better; this is it -- I find it oddly comforting and reassuring that a man can endure all manner of trials and tribulations, including the disintegration of his personality, and survive to not only put back together the pieces of his life, but complete his masterpiece, even if it's nearly 40 years late. It's enough to give a person -- well, hope.
Hope and affirmation are not qualities most people associate with punk-rock, but maybe that just shows the limits of their imagination. Since his days in the Minutemen, Mike Watt has never hewed to anybody's idea of punk orthodoxy; indeed, the Minutemen's creed was "Punk-rock is whatever we make it." They meant it, too. Exploding out of the seaport town of San Pedro onto the incipient L.A. hardcore scene, they played music that was more agile and funkier than any of their peers', declaiming political messages while proudly claiming John Fogerty and Blue Oyster Cult as inspirations. Since recovering from the death of his best friend and bandleader D. Boon in a 1985 highway accident, Watt has toured relentlessly with a series of bands including fIREHOSE (essentially the Minutemen with a different frontman), Porno for Pyros, the bass duo Dos, the free improv outfit Banyan, and his own solo outfits. Until he was laid low by a near-fatal illness in 2000, he's never stopped or even slowed down. In some ways he has the best of both worlds, recording for a major label while continuing to "jam econo," touring by van, crashing with friends and fans in each city he visits in true DIY style. The tour diaries on his website , written in the engaging amalgam of beatnik jive, Spanglish, and sailor's slang he calls "Pedrospeak" after his hometown, are a must-read.
Watt's solo records (1995's all-star Ball-Hog or Tugboat? and 1997's "punk opera" Contemplating the Engine Room preceded this one) are admittedly an acquired taste, largely due to his idiosyncratic vocal quality. In person, he comes across like a character from Cannery Row or one of Harry Partch's hobos from "Barstow" -- possessed of a sense of wonder unusual in a middle-aged man and an attitude of gratitude that lots of other musos could beneficially emulate -- and he sings that way, too: technically limited but almost painfully genuine and sincere. The Secondman's Middle Stand tells the story of "that illness": an internal abscess of the perineum that was misdiagnosed as the flu and nearly killed Watt before he was saved by emergency surgery. (During his lengthy convalescence, Watt reacquainted himself with the bass by playing Stooges songs. Since then, he's played Stooge music in a variety of contexts, several of them with original Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton. For his trouble, Iggy Pop picked him to play bass on the road with the reformed Stooges last year. Lucky Watt.)
Another Watt inspiration: Dante's Divine Comedy. Like that work and Wilson's Smile, Watt's new piece is divided into three sections that roughly correspond to Dante's Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each of those sections consists of three songs that conclude with a self-portrait of Watt at different points in his ordeal. There are three men in his band, too: himself, organist Pete Mazich, and drummer Jerry Trebotic (replaced on tour by young Pedroite Raul Morales). In civilian life, Pete and Jerry are longshoremen in Pedro. Sho nuff, the band is an organ trio, but it's closer sonically to Deep Purple than Jimmy Smith or MMW -- and that's not a slam. At times, Watt uses a whole array of devices to shape his sound and play "lead bass," kinda like he did on the Minutemen's cover of BOC's "The Red and the Black" (still a Watt live staple). The interplay between the musos is more important than any one solo voice, though. The music is alternately dramatic and intense ("Burstedman," "The Angels Gate"), trippy and ethereal ("Beltsandedman," "Pelicanman"), even gentle and whimsical ("Pluckin', Pedalin' and Paddlin'") and sounds like it'll be a gas to see live (which we plan to do when Watt and his crew hit the Gypsy Tea Room in Deep Ellum in November).
These days, like (I suspect) a lot of folks who cheered when we heard Neil Young singing "It's better to burn out than it is to rust" in the aftermath of punk, I'm starting to have second thoughts re: the relative merits of checking out early versus sticking around long enough to decay naturally. Like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation and Richard Serra's giant sculpture Vortex, 2002 that sits outside the Modern Art Museum here in Fort Worth, Mike Watt and Brian Wilson are finding some interesting ways to rust -- same way Charles Mingus did before he checked out from Lou Gehrig's disease, first week of 1979. I should also add that as much shit as I like to talk about major labels, it's nice to see that at least a couple of 'em (Verve, Nonesuch, and Columbia released these discs) are still willing, on occasion, to, uh, subsidize the arts.
First, the Mingus. As the title implies, it's the recording of a complete show (minus the encore) that the titanic bassist-composer played in Paris back in 1964, during a turbulent and much-bootlegged tour of Europe with a band that included the ebullient pianist Jaki Byard and doomed multi-reedman/avant-garde avatar Eric Dolphy. (Mingus' onstage patter includes a sardonic "Thanks" to promoter George Wein, who was returning to New York the following day "while we finish our 19 days or whatever." A posthumous release on Mingus' wife's label of an earlier Paris performance was entitled Revenge!) The night before this particular show, trumpeter Johnny Coles collapsed and had to be hospitalized; the concert proper (following a solo overture by Byard, the recording of which was omitted from earlier releases of this set) begins with the introduction of both the musicians and Coles' trumpet, which was placed onstage on top of its case. The show had started hours past its scheduled time, after midnight in fact, and press reports had the musicians leaving the sold-out hall to eat. No matter. Mingus was at the peak of his powers back then, meaning he was something akin to a force of nature, carrying the entire history of jazz on his back. Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Ellington, Parker, church music, blues, and what Waller called "the Spanish tinge" are just a few of the sounds you'll hear in this roiling vat of emotions, which boasts as many thematic peaks and valleys as Mingus' tumultuous 1963 masterpiece The Black Saint and Sinner Lady. Mingus was angry and politicized, too, to a greater degree than most of his jazz contemporaries; indeed, the climactic pieces of each hour of this set are "Fables of Faubus," a darkly humorous rant against the anti-integration governor of Arkansas ca. 1954 (greatly expanded from the version released on 1959's classic Mingus Ah Hum), and "Meditations on Integration," perhaps Mingus' greatest composition, an epic and ruminative tone poem inspired by the concentration camps that Dolphy told Mingus were being prepared for Civil Rights protestors.
You can hear the musicians (particularly Byard) struggling to fill in the holes left in the arrangements by Coles' absence, but it doesn't detract from their performances. Byard is as saturated with jazz tradition as Mingus, often flashing the striding left hand that many of his post-Bud Powell peers eschewed and occasionally venturing into atonality with Cecil Taylor-ish clusters. The opening number, "So Long Eric," is dedicated to Dolphy, who'd just announced his intention to stay in Europe at the end of the tour. (He'd die of heart failure in Berlin a couple of months later at age 32.) Previous releases inexplicably listed this tune as "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" and cobbled together takes of the song from two different nights, managing to omit Dolphy's solo altogether. It's available for the first time on this reissue in a marvelous, complete take complete with Dolphy's solo. Throughout the proceedings, whether he's playing alto sax, bass clarinet, or flute, Dolphy's voice is alternately playful, searching, and strident, and he sounds as vibrantly alive here as he ever did on record. (Dig him and the underrated tenorman Clifford Jordan as they comment on each other's solos during the Charlie Parker tribute "Parkeriana.") On bass, Mingus slings around great slabs of sound like an angry god, communicates near-telepathically with his longtime drummer Dannie Richmond to create a mosaic of shifting tempos and changing accompaniments, and plays a lovely solo version of Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady." Mingus' Great Concert is like an entire world compressed into just over two hours' worth of music.
Brian Wilson's Smile accomplishes much the same thing, in a very different idiom. Back in the '60s, the mythic southern California Wilson created with the Beach Boys seduced an awful lot of people, including the future Sir Paul McCartney (who spent the most interesting portion of the Beatles' trajectory chasing Wilson), and Brian did it all by himself, without any daddy George Martin to help put it together. Along with those other archetypal L.A. weirdoes Phil Spector and Frank Zappa, Wilson's pop creations have stood the test of time better than the trippy self-indulgences of the San Francisco hippies who originally dismissed them as "plastic." Like Spector and Zappa, Wilson was a pure creation of America who synthesized seemingly disparate elements -- in his case, Aaron Copland, the Four Freshmen, a bit of doo-wop, a dollop of Spectorsound, a dash of Chuck Berry -- into something quite strikingly original, and at his best (the bridge to "In My Room," the intro to "California Girls," all of "Don't Worry Baby" and Pet Sounds), he could be quite magnificent. Smile, heralded as "a teenage symphony to God," was supposed to be his masterpiece. Instead, it proved to be the high water mark of an unfulfilled talent when Wilson, always massively insecure, caved under the pressures of living up to the hype surrounding his work. Popular myth holds that during its making, Wilson lived in a tent on the floor of his bedroom, which he'd had covered with sand. For the sessions that produced the original version of "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow," he'd had the assembled musicians wear red plastic fireman's helmets, but he later destroyed the master tape when he became convinced that his music had caused the outbreak of a series of fires around L.A. Truly, the kid was wound too tight. Bits and pieces of Smile trickled out over the years ("Good Vibrations," "Heroes and Villains," "Cabin Essence," "Surf's Up"), but the larger work remained unheard by the mass-ass audience while Brian suffered the ignominy of watching the Mike Love-led Beach Boys debasing his legacy at county fairs from coast to coast and he himself was duped and exploited by his therapist and wannabe Svengali, Elliott Landy.
The late-'90s resurgence of interest in all the cooler parts of the '60s (The Zombies! Garage punk! Soul music!) led inevitably to a Brian Wilson revival and thankfully, he had recovered enough of his faculties to capitalize on it. A Pet Sounds box set was duly issued and he even toured behind it, performing the complete album with a full orchestra. Perhaps his handlers had noted the example of Pete Townshend, who continued to generate income throughout the last decade by periodically retooling one of his larger works (Tommy, Quadrophenia, Lifehouse) and incidentally found that, relieved of the responsibility of having to create new material, he was able to enjoy playing live again. Wilson, who'd ceased performing with the Beach Boys four decades previously, had a lot more demons to overcome than Townshend and surprised a lot of people when he teamed up with a relatively young L.A. band called the Wondermints to re-record Smile and take it on the road as well. Myself, I avoided the show when it came to Dallas -- I'd had a creepy-weird encounter with an arenaful of Who fans in their 50s and 60s a few years back, and didn't want to repeat the experience. But I was curious about the CD. Could it really be worth all the fuss?
The short answer is yes. We can only guess what this music would have meant if it had been released in 1967, but it stands up well today, absent any expectations of earthshaking Significance. The previously unreleased material isn't filler, and the three suites that comprise the album hang together well. Van Dyke Parks' lyrics are pretty much impenetrable, but that's fine. The music glistens and sparkles, and the harmonies are lush, all capped with Wilson's still-distinctive falsetto (a little worn, but in a good way). An unexpected discovery: notwithstanding its veneer of positivity and spirituality, this is the saddest music I can imagine, everywhere tinged with regret and actually disturbing in places ("Vega-Tables," which is as cracked as anything Pink Floyd's founding acid casualty Syd Barrett ever produced, and the "fire music" of "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow"). The kids from Omaha with the bad haircuts have nothing on this weird old guy from L.A. Having recently reached a point myself where I realize on a visceral level that I have fewer years in front of me than I have behind and accept the fact that there isn't going to be some future event that's going to make everything better; this is it -- I find it oddly comforting and reassuring that a man can endure all manner of trials and tribulations, including the disintegration of his personality, and survive to not only put back together the pieces of his life, but complete his masterpiece, even if it's nearly 40 years late. It's enough to give a person -- well, hope.
Hope and affirmation are not qualities most people associate with punk-rock, but maybe that just shows the limits of their imagination. Since his days in the Minutemen, Mike Watt has never hewed to anybody's idea of punk orthodoxy; indeed, the Minutemen's creed was "Punk-rock is whatever we make it." They meant it, too. Exploding out of the seaport town of San Pedro onto the incipient L.A. hardcore scene, they played music that was more agile and funkier than any of their peers', declaiming political messages while proudly claiming John Fogerty and Blue Oyster Cult as inspirations. Since recovering from the death of his best friend and bandleader D. Boon in a 1985 highway accident, Watt has toured relentlessly with a series of bands including fIREHOSE (essentially the Minutemen with a different frontman), Porno for Pyros, the bass duo Dos, the free improv outfit Banyan, and his own solo outfits. Until he was laid low by a near-fatal illness in 2000, he's never stopped or even slowed down. In some ways he has the best of both worlds, recording for a major label while continuing to "jam econo," touring by van, crashing with friends and fans in each city he visits in true DIY style. The tour diaries on his website , written in the engaging amalgam of beatnik jive, Spanglish, and sailor's slang he calls "Pedrospeak" after his hometown, are a must-read.
Watt's solo records (1995's all-star Ball-Hog or Tugboat? and 1997's "punk opera" Contemplating the Engine Room preceded this one) are admittedly an acquired taste, largely due to his idiosyncratic vocal quality. In person, he comes across like a character from Cannery Row or one of Harry Partch's hobos from "Barstow" -- possessed of a sense of wonder unusual in a middle-aged man and an attitude of gratitude that lots of other musos could beneficially emulate -- and he sings that way, too: technically limited but almost painfully genuine and sincere. The Secondman's Middle Stand tells the story of "that illness": an internal abscess of the perineum that was misdiagnosed as the flu and nearly killed Watt before he was saved by emergency surgery. (During his lengthy convalescence, Watt reacquainted himself with the bass by playing Stooges songs. Since then, he's played Stooge music in a variety of contexts, several of them with original Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton. For his trouble, Iggy Pop picked him to play bass on the road with the reformed Stooges last year. Lucky Watt.)
Another Watt inspiration: Dante's Divine Comedy. Like that work and Wilson's Smile, Watt's new piece is divided into three sections that roughly correspond to Dante's Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each of those sections consists of three songs that conclude with a self-portrait of Watt at different points in his ordeal. There are three men in his band, too: himself, organist Pete Mazich, and drummer Jerry Trebotic (replaced on tour by young Pedroite Raul Morales). In civilian life, Pete and Jerry are longshoremen in Pedro. Sho nuff, the band is an organ trio, but it's closer sonically to Deep Purple than Jimmy Smith or MMW -- and that's not a slam. At times, Watt uses a whole array of devices to shape his sound and play "lead bass," kinda like he did on the Minutemen's cover of BOC's "The Red and the Black" (still a Watt live staple). The interplay between the musos is more important than any one solo voice, though. The music is alternately dramatic and intense ("Burstedman," "The Angels Gate"), trippy and ethereal ("Beltsandedman," "Pelicanman"), even gentle and whimsical ("Pluckin', Pedalin' and Paddlin'") and sounds like it'll be a gas to see live (which we plan to do when Watt and his crew hit the Gypsy Tea Room in Deep Ellum in November).
These days, like (I suspect) a lot of folks who cheered when we heard Neil Young singing "It's better to burn out than it is to rust" in the aftermath of punk, I'm starting to have second thoughts re: the relative merits of checking out early versus sticking around long enough to decay naturally. Like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation and Richard Serra's giant sculpture Vortex, 2002 that sits outside the Modern Art Museum here in Fort Worth, Mike Watt and Brian Wilson are finding some interesting ways to rust -- same way Charles Mingus did before he checked out from Lou Gehrig's disease, first week of 1979. I should also add that as much shit as I like to talk about major labels, it's nice to see that at least a couple of 'em (Verve, Nonesuch, and Columbia released these discs) are still willing, on occasion, to, uh, subsidize the arts.
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