BUCK OWENS Complete Capitol Singles: 1957-1966 Omnivore Ol’ Buck went on to stay at Capitol for almost two decades but, upon arrival, the onetime Alvis E. Owens of Bakersfield was just one more rural act the Vine Street nabobs had little notion what to do with. His first three platters were the same old pop cowflop as all the post-Hank Williams Nashville acts were shoveling up in the late 1950s with but for a few touches of the plainspoken cowboy charm that got him the gig. The best among them, “Sweet Thing,” is something Elvis or Buddy Holly might’ve knocked out of the park but instead trawls on the Jim Reeves country gentleman marzipan. “Second Fiddle” is where the real Buck emerges—a sadsack lament of a man who didn’t come in first in love’s race. “Under Your Spell Again” is even better and after that it’s one long sweet ride into California cowboy country—a soundscape evoking good old times, open heartedness, and the soft sawdust on a honkytonk floor that stretches into infinity, along with the bar. The duets with the great Rose Maddox are special delights, as is the cover of “Save the Last Dance for Me.” The second disc opener, “Act Naturally,” was covered by the Beatles and remains Buck’s signature tune. “Together Again,” “I Don’t Care As Long As You Love Me,” and “Tiger by the Tail” all went on to become fixed parts of his live repertoire, “Crying Time” is an oft-covered classic and “Waiting in Your Welfare Line” speaks to the emotional hobo in all of us. Don Rich’s clean, masterly guitar figures were Buck’s second voice and shine on “Buckaroo” and “In the Palm of Your Hand.” I await the next volume with some impatience. YOKO ONO Plastic Ono Band Secretly Canadian Little-regarded companion to the 1970 John Lennon LP of the same name, Yoko’s pass with the same musicians and producers tickles my ears as better than her late husband’s ultimately boring misery cycle. Lennon’s peak as a solo Beatle was short and not long coming, but the joint under consideration here quickly took its place as Yoko’s signature slab, a rollicking thrasher of proto-punk lunacy about twenty years ahead of its time. The opening track “Why?” shows John plus fellow Apple 70 64
Records inmates Ringo Starr and Klaus Voorman pounding away at a big sweathog Detroit riff as Yoko shrieks, snarls, ululates, expectorates, and glossolalicizes this oldest of existential interrogatives. Lennon’s guitar-strangling sounds every bit as advanced as Yoko’s giddy vocals and the snide laughter at the very end is quite Lennonesque of her. “Why Not” is slower, groovier and the vocalist leaps over this swampscape scatting an assortment of pretty feline purrs and yowls. “Greenfield Morning I Pushed An Empty Baby Carriage All Over the City” is cobbled out of an abandoned George Harrison sitar track and an old Beat-era poem of Yoko’s and damned if it doesn’t sound like an early pass at much of what Laurie Anderson would later do before ending in a rusticated Pet Sounds flourish. “AOS” is a 1968 performance with jazz great Ornette Coleman and his combo. The ferocious Velvet-y “Touch Me” was the U.S. B-side of John’s “Power to the People” and probably confused the fuck out of respectable Beatles fans. “Paper Shoes” is another evocative collage, this time beginning with train sounds before settling into a proggy groove. Though it appalled Capitol Records and the BBC, “Open Your Box” is easily the album’s highlight, a masterpiece of Yoko vocal exultation done over a raggedly hacked blues riff much in the manner of every punk rock diva to come. Bonuses include an extended blues-rock-jazz pass at “Why” which Lennon fanboys will want to savor as much as avant cratediggers already do. GAME THEORY The Big Shot Chronicles Omnivore Continuing the stellar Game Theory reissue series is this mid-80s pop masterpiece. Probably the sunniest album in Game Theory’s angsty discography, BSC is also where mainmain Scott Miller’s ambitions began to stretch. The opener “Here it is Tomorrow” is like a great lost Monkees song and “Book of Millionaires” a minor classic of Lennonesque snark. “Never Mind” and “Like a Girl Jesus” show less a musician in thrall to psychedelic pop but one already an accomplished hand at manufacturing the stuff. “Linus and Lucy” is a rousing instrumental pass at Vince Guaraldi’s deathless Peanuts theme and “Couldn’t I Just Tell You” is something Big Star’s Alex Chilton would’ve been proud to sing and prouder to sign. “Seattle” winds the album’s occasionally gale-force attack town to the tenderest of zephyrs before playing us out of yet another lost Reagan Age reverie. To this already fantastic haul comes a bonus of several jaw-dropping live tracks, including a pass at the Velvets’ “Sweet Jane” in which Miller declaims those smartass lyrics with more passion than Lou Reed ever summoned. Since this LP has only four Facebook likes (one of them mine), don’t talk to me about Donald Trump.
ONWARD AND INWARD BY DAVID COTNER I’ve spent a fair portion of the past ten years keeping track of all the bookstores between Morro Bay and San Clemente. That includes comic book stores, too. I even visit the dead ones to see what’s in them now. I have my reasons. Mostly it’s that I like to know. I’ve seen more bookstores than I can count on both hands, feet and brain cells shudder and fade into oblivion—most barely remembered by an increasingly aging readership that leaves behind in its wake a peacock’s cloak of old bookmarks from bookstores that live—like the Road Warrior—only in our memories. This is neither good nor bad. It is just is. But while it is what it is, it’s also a worthwhile epiphany to realize that books—like bookstores—are good places to hide out for a while. Polish your bearings. Be watchful. Listen to the pages turn. Did you know that there are two bookstores in southern California that have basements? You get to go down there, smell the sweet rot of books yellowing before your nose; sneeze a little. The point of all this is that you’ve got to make as much time all your own as you possibly can. These books are as good a doorway into your inner self as I can think of in 3000 words or less.
Hey Joe: The Unauthorized Biography of a Rock Classic by Marc Shapiro ($20, Riverdale Avenue) is a story of a song that, like songs such as “Gloomy Sunday” or “Louie Louie,” has taken on a life and an aura all its own by now. These are the perennials in rock’s garden of songs, constantly recurring and capturing the public’s ear even as countless other songs fade into the weeds of disuse. It’s up to the pop culture addicts—actually cultural saviors—like Marc Shapiro to take the godlike view of hindsight and examine the culture in works like this. Shapiro puts the “fan” into “fanatic” with this history of the song that everyone knows Jimi Hendrix sang but, as with every stately oak, there’s always more beneath the surface than just the roots. It is the heads and the bugs like Shapiro, going on jags and benders and coming up with books like these that will ever make any sense out of an increasingly fractured culture that is deceptively omnipresent. Like the caves at Lascaux or the rebuilt Cathedral at Notre Dame, “Hey Joe” is a work of art the original authorship of which remains uncertain and apocryphal—and that’s one of the cornerstones of popular music that makes it such a strong phenomenon. The mystery. They never tell you when you start playing music that you should leave things out; that you should be a shadowy figure. Try it. The origins of “Hey Joe” could be from anywhere in Appalachia, might be from prison work gang songs, may be somewhere at the dawn of the
blues. Folksinger Billy Roberts—who is 80 as of this writing—is the man on the 1962 copyright. Apparently the mailbox money from “Hey Joe” still flows to Mr. Roberts in a healthy stream. Through this exhaustive yet slender volume, Shapiro charts the rise and fall of the song’s popularity; just like ague or measles, songs have their rise and fall. “Exhaustive” is rather an understatement—even though there are websites devoted entirely to chronicling the “Hey Joe” covers out there, the narrative here at times becomes one of “And then… and then… and then…” which can get a bit beige after a while. He traces the lineage of the song—no slouch in the due diligence department, he— giving credit to Southern California garage band the Leaves getting the ball rolling that turned into the avalanche which carried the song everywhere from the live sets of the bands of the 60s Sunset Strip to buskers on streets the world over, hungry for connection and an honest buck. The Leaves’ version starts out like “Needles and Pins” by the Searchers, but then goes completely sideways with frenetic guitar stranglings and childlike yawp. Of course there’s the saga of Jimi Hendrix and how he almost didn’t record the song that was his first big hit—the song with which he closed out Woodstock. Even Patti Smith, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Seal make an appearance here. The great gift to music that books like these possess is that after you’ve read the entire story, you hear the song differently. In this way, the song becomes multidimensional, opening up pathways through its many interpretations that you didn’t even know you could tread. It’s only 150 pages long. You know how you’re always saying you want to start reading again? It’ll take you an afternoon, maybe less. You should read this. It’ll make you feel better about yourself. On a scale from 1 to 10: The smoke of the first cigarette of the morning, caught in that precise moment where it will only ever be everything that it was meant to become. As for Steve Jones’ memoir Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol, ($27, Da Capo), the authorship of the work of art known as Steve Jones is never in question. He writes like he speaks, and if you’ve ever heard him do his show on KLOS, you’ll hear his voice in your head speaking the words while you read the book. It’s cheaper than the audiobook, anyway. If you’re looking for a book about what it’s like to actually be a musician, this isn’t it. His is a story about being self-aware much later than might be useful—a sort of l’esprit de l’escalier, but in hardcover. Creatures of the moment—like many artists seem to be—tend not to overanalyze what’s happening in front of them the minute BOOKS