A freelance review

This is not going to be one of my elaborate reviews. Rather, it's going to be a rambling, enthusiastic recommendation to my readers to try something new and track down some Etta James. I myself only got around to her because of hearing about her recent death, so this appreciation is more in line with my earlier epitaph for Lena Horne than any of my usual reviews. Also, I hope some of my readers will appreciate my effort to keep up some level of activity on this blog.

If any of you ever want to send me fanmail or something....

The late Etta James was recording for Chess during the 1960s, when a singer's career was made or lost on the basis of singles. Albums scarcely entered the picture unless you were on the folk scene. Chess Records harboured musicians such as Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley and Howlin' Wolf. From what I know about them, Etta James was really something else.

Etta James is basically uncategorizable. She'd try her hand at anything, starting in the doo-wop and R&B genres, covering old pop tunes, covering the blues, adapting to soul, rocking out and even succeeding with the GREAT funk-tinged All the Way Down. At the advent of disco, she threw in the towel. "...I wasn't about to try to be like Donna Summer," she later said. This puts her golden period squarely in the 60s, and the Chess 50th Anniversary Collection of Her Best (pictured) is the place to start.

Frankly, Etta's homelife has the sound of a prolonged car crash. Underage mother, unknown father, on the road in the music business as a teenager, putting up with a string of abusive men and stuck with a drug habit almost all her life, Etta was nevertheless tough enough to survive all of what life dished out - and reflect it in her songs. Her tough, wiry, "don't mess with me" voice rings with an assurance that makes you believe all those emotions were being pulled from somewhere in herself. With her best material, you tune in to the joy or pain or recklessness within seconds.

The early selections on this particular CD are mostly made of recycled standards from the 40s. Being meant for crooners, that meant only one thing: schmaltz. Her signature song, At Last, has enough strings on it to make Phil Spector blush. That hardly matters with Etta singing so soulfully, so peacefully. The other tunes, such as My Dearest Darling, A Sunday Kind of Love, Trust in Me and Don't Cry Baby have a similar quality: they should be rather mundane love songs, but Etta refuses to croon, emoting and suffusing each song with an individual aura. It's not all gold. All I Could Do Was Cry has backing doo-wop vocals that sound horrible to my ears, at least.

The jauntier material is nothing if not better yet. If you don't smile the first time you hear Something's Got a Hold on Me, I'll worry about you. What starts as a cheeky send-up of gospel quickly becomes an awesome slice of early rock and roll, while Next Door to the Blues scorches with a sense of defiance and near-flippancy.

The second half of the CD sports a changing sound as music evolved from year to year. Two Sides to Every Story uses the horns and backup singers of classic uptempo soul, rushing headlong through the usual three minutes designated to pop songs. Pushover (one of her biggest hits) takes the same tack but mixes it with a slapdown of a self-assured town "Romeo" that makes for a satisfying story.

With the exceptions of the dirges Stop the Wedding and Losers Weepers, Part One, the rest of the late material is really strong, but first I'll mention the two duets. The early duet was If I Can't Have You (with Harvey Fuqua), a brassy little number with two rather comically opposed voices - Harvey sounds rather fussy, while Etta's all fire and strength. The other duet, In the Basement, Part One (with Sugar Pie DeSanto), is a delightful ode to the party zone. Etta and Sugar Pie compliment each other perfectly and the song shares the verve that Something's Got a Hold on Me had. A fun track.

A live bonus comes with the cover of Jimmy Reed: Baby, What You Want Me To Do. Etta could handle pure blues and judging from this sample, she must have been great to hear live. Messy, simple, weary and fierce (Jimmy himself never could sound fierce, which is why I like him anyway, but Etta's spin is excellent). She uses her voice like a horn at the end, which is enough reason to be impressed by this song.

In 1967, Etta went down south to Muscle Shoals and again revitalized her sound. Tell Mama was her big hit from this era, a strong piece of material, but the real gems are around it. There's the epic (five minutes!) funk influenced All the Way Down, an elaborate tell-it-like-it-is track, all about "boys playing games/changing their names/pulling tricks/getting their kicks/all the way down..." A truly great song and justifiably on the CD. There's an excellent Otis Redding cover, Security, and then there's I'd Rather Go Blind.

I'd Rather Go Blind is probably going to get among my top ten sad songs (and I've heard an awful lot). Everything about this short song is perfectly balanced and it gives me chills, that's how good it is. If I had to choose her definitive song, this would be the one. She sounds like she means every word she's saying, and the simplicity of the words (written by Ellington Jordan, who was a man in prison at the time) strike at the center of sorrow, and I, at least, have never been able to keep any sort of defense in place when listening to it. I feel it every time.

My conclusion is that Etta James deserves to be heard, and so I'm doing my own bit to spread the word, get some people to investigate her so they don't do what I, for the longest time, did: get her confused with Ella Fitzgerald. Do yourself a favour, track her down, give her a few listens and learn what I just learned. A great song has nothing to do with lyrical or musical virtuosity and everything to do with soul. And Etta James had a lot of soul. God bless her for it.

49th... Decadence

Aladdin Sane.

Okay, firstly I am sorry for the lapse. Really. It is unfortunate that I had to fall down over the holidays, but I'm back on my feet now. This review would have been ideal last week, but I was pressed for time and didn't make it, so up it goes now. My humblest apologies.

Aladdin Sane is possibly the ultimate "New Year's" record. An album that rocks and is camp (this in the same year that Queen first appeared on the map); an album that wears the Rolling Stones on its sleeve and refers to all-night parties, champagne, beautiful women, showbiz, insanity, inner-city unrest, world war and the ravages of age. It has incredible artwork. Even the title is cool. It's everything you could want in rock music, combining decadent style with tight songwriting and musical virtuosity. David Bowie's voice, meanwhile, underwent a radical change between the recording of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. In 1973, his voice, good as it was before, had gained a whole new vibrancy and assurance.

Watch That Man is an odd choice for an opening salvo, being as the vocals are all in the back. This doesn't harm the song, which is a start to finish rocker that you can dance to (I speak from experience). The song would seem an uncomplicated, glammed-up tune, but the album as a whole juggles glam with soul/doo-wop (courtesy of the backup singers) and what I would describe as cocktail jazz (courtesy of the great Mike Garson on piano). Sonically upbeat, Watch That Man is actually a paranoid scene of party excess gone awry if you listen closely. "A lemon in a bag played the Tiger Rag/and the bodies on the screen started bleeding..."

Aladdin Sane is tonier, a sophisticated mixture of jazz piano, Japanese rhythms and WWI ruminations (based on the literary source of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies). The centerpiece is Mike Garson's avantgarde piano solo - dissonant yet, as you become familiar with the song, strangely melodic... The song cuts through the extravagances of pre-war society to land in the fractured madness of war itself. The subtitle (1913-1938-197?) puts this as squarely in the Cold War as in the First and Second World Wars. As for Aladdin Sane, he hardly exists on his own record. He's more a phrase than a person. That makes this one of the best, and certainly the most elusive war song ever penned.

Drive-In Saturday is one of the great underrated Bowie tracks, a song drenched in vibrancy. Doo-wop, fabulous percussion, saxophone, scat singing, bombast and space-age synthwork at its finest abound. The story is of a post WWIII landscape, the denizens of a land "where once it raged, the sea that raged no more," watching old movies, fondly remembering the days of Twiggy and Jagger, trying "to keep formation/mid this fallout saturation." I haven't figured out what it all means, but it's wonderfully glamorous and melodramatic.

More eclecticism on Panic in Detroit, with congas and whooping female soul singers backing a riff-centric slice of rock and roll that caves in to dissonance in the end. This one has David relating a story of inner-city chaos, police crackdowns, anarchist celebrities and their fans.

Cracked Actor is full-throttle raunchy blues-rock (with the harmonica fed through an amp) from first note to last. Ornate glamour is cast aside and the debauchery of an aging film star is dragged right out in the open. It's quite the savage little piece, but it still rocks like hell.

Time is the album's resident epic. Garson's piano is pure cabaret glory, Mick Ronson is finally let off the hook for a solo, David's at his theatrical best... Time is drama of the highest order; it's almost camp, but ambiguity saves it. What starts as pure theater ("Time/he's waiting in the wings/he speaks of senseless things/his script is you and me") expands to include fear ("Well, I look at my watch/it says nine twenty-five/and I think, Oh God/I'm still alive") and a very strange attachment ("...perhaps you're smiling now/smiling through this darkness/but all I have to give/is guilt for dreaming"). If you can make sense of all that, more power to you. And when I count the great lyricists, David Bowie is right up there with the usual folkie suspects.

Doo-wop makes a flaming comeback with The Prettiest Star, an old tune he had first recorded in the early seventies. This remake actually fits perfectly into the Hollywood trappings, despite being written somewhere on Gloucester Road. It's a sweet little interlude, and sports an endearing guitar riff. The "bop-bop-ba-oo" line is suspiciously similar to the one in his later showbiz-draped love song Absolute Beginners. Light and frothy though the song is, it's still delightful.

Then there's...Let's Spend the Night Together. Did he really have to cover the Stones? The good first: it rocks. Okay, now the bad: the synth overplays its hand and becomes plain obnoxious. Also, this is not a hammy Stones song and so it doesn't adapt nicely to the glam treatment. Lastly, the song isn't sophisticated enough to fit in. It doesn't make the cut anymore than a cover of Long Tall Sally or My Generation would. Yet oddly, his late '73 cover album Pin Ups was a stunning exercise in adaptation. Maybe David just needed practice...

The Jean Genie does something different, taking a classic blues riff (I'm a Man, anyone?) and vamping up a completely new lyric to make a swaggering, sophisticated slab of New York City blues-rock. The characters could have walked out of a Velvet Underground song, the lyric strangely surrealistic and the title a forgivable pun on French writer and criminal Jean Genet.

Lady Grinning Soul concludes the record with a genuinely romantic ballad. Mike Garson aims for Chopin and Liszt, Mick Ronson adds a flamenco guitar bridge and David's voice is at its most delicate and ethereal. The lady in question is a woman so perfect she seems to leave men in rapturous uncertainty as to her very existence. At the end of the song, piano, voice and Ronson's electric guitar all soar away in a breathtaking finale.

As amazing a rock album as Ziggy Stardust was, Aladdin Sane - its American counterpoint - bests it through sheer eclectic pizazz. It can be forgiven a small misstep. Next year, David would best himself again with the even more elaborate, extravagant Diamond Dogs. Then, realising he'd taken pure rock as far as that angle would go, he spun off into blue-eyed soul, looking for a new approach. He got it, too. He melded soul with the inexpressive machinery of krautrock and came up with Station to Station. And it only took him three years to get from here to there!

I call that impressive.