Scribe
Salon.com
Joey Ramone 1951-2001
(reprinted from Salon.com April 17, 2001)
"Eleven years after punk rock changed the course of my life, during my first trip to New York, I found myself feeling culturally disoriented at a loft performance on the Lower West Side. The room teemed with gleaming FOSY (Friends of Sonic Youth). It was loud and I was lost. It was time to seek out my old friend, the wall.
There truly is something about a wall, its hard comfort speaking an international language of belonging to all who lean against it. Ten minutes later, a grinning man with a Texas accent approached me, "Ma'am, could you make room for my friend at the wall?" His companion stood, narrow, stooped and steady, towering over both of us. It was Joey Ramone. I thought, given his celebrity, that he'd want the whole wall to himself. I indicated my willingness to give him my space. "No, no, that's OK," said the Texan as Joey quietly took up his place against the wall, beside me. The Texan scampered elsewhere and Joey questioningly offered me a drink from his open bottle of beer, a sweetly silent gesture of trade and wall kinship. One of us! What stayed with me for years -- after the initial tourist thrill of "I am drinking Joey Ramone's beer! In New York!" -- was an unexpected sense of his gentle vulnerability.
My tape recorder had already borne witness to many hours of musicians, some of them heroes, sober and otherwise, all chattering away. With all those words, few had affected me and had said as much as Joey Ramone did in that silent encounter in a noisy room. He was what he was. And always will be."
-Cath Carroll
Melody Maker - RIPprinted in Salon.com December 19, 2000
When the music mattered: A former writer for the New Musical Express looks back at the overheated world of the British music weeklies.
"In the late 1970s, a generation of British teens was awakened by the call to arms of punk rock. I too wanted to play in a band and I wasn't going to let my rabbity guitar playing get in the way. Like many other music compulsives, I turned to the country's trio of carping, exuberant and sometimes sneering weekly music papers for guidance and company. I used to buy Sounds for its breathless enthusiasm and its new-wave coverage. NME covered similar ground but was, I feared, a little quicker to conceptualize and laugh at people's shoes. Melody Maker, I judged by its classifieds, was the house magazine for prog rockers and other of the technically minded fans we dismissed as "musos." Genesis formed in its "musicians wanted" section. This was all I needed to know to stay away. It was through a band ad in Sounds that I met my friend Liz. We pooled our musical knowledge (four chords) and we learned to love the NME. I shuffled into London around 1984 from England's premier miserable rock province, Manchester, where I had been a contributor to local music magazines. In a moment of festive boldness, at the 1983 NME Christmas party, I asked the editor if I could write the gossip news page. I spent most Mondays for the next two years walking to my typewriter at the Carnaby Street office feeling somewhat surprised by this new posting. The United States lacks an equivalent to Britain's irrepressible, obsessive newsprint weeklies, probably because of its geophysical sprawl and unbridgeable interstate and inter-ethnic cultural divides. And for all rock 'n' roll's cultural impact here, the music has only intermittently been a matter of social urgency for teens. The Anglocentric British weeklies thrived on a narrow geographic focus, love-it-hate-it London and its relationship to the upstart provinces, and an all-consuming need to precisely define a band's relevancy in any given publication cycle. The United Kingdom, back then, still had a higher-education program, which meant that many students did not have to work through school, thereby giving them plenty of time to read and care about those voluminous weeklies. And let's not forget a legal system that discourages spontaneous litigation by requiring the loser to pay the winner's legal fees. This process makes libel prosecutions a gamble and in practice allows a writer to be a little more creative with fact. As a writer in the United States in the years since, I have always been startled when the fact-checker actually gives me a call. When I left London, 11 years ago, Margaret Thatcher was still the prime minister and the media brass at NME, Melody Maker and Sounds were yet to face the trek across the treacherous tundra of the Internet. God knows what's going on over there today. Ken Livingstone, formerly the leader of the Greater London Council and leftist bane of conservatives everywhere, is now, disconcertingly, Lord Mayor of London. Livingstone's recent repositioning is not a bad thing, just surprising, rather like finding out that Lou Reed now has a theater in Branson, Mo. However, it is sad news indeed to hear that Melody Maker, an institution since 1926, will be no more. Its owner, IPC Media, announced last week that the paper would close. Melody Maker's last stand-alone edition has just been published, but its name and "musicians wanted" section will live on, ironically, in the pages of the NME. Melody Maker and NME enjoyed a certain rivalry despite their both being owned by that same IPC Media. Looking back through the mists of history, the tone of this rivalry was pitched somewhere between mods vs. rockers and a schoolboy feud: a mixture of superficial stylistic, social and occasional sartorial differences invisible to outsiders but deeply diverting for those involved. It was quite silly, really. During my stay at the NME, Melody Maker sent us two editors and countless other staff members and nobody thought twice about it. By then, Nick Kent and Chrissie Hynde, the last of the rock 'n' roll glamorhacks of the period and both NME stars, had moved on, as had the famously vicious teenage double-act of Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, whose scathing classic meditation on punk rock, "The Boy Looked at Johnny," is still marvelous reading. The truest test of notoriety was the number of annoyed readers denouncing one on the letters page. Most complained of at either paper at the time were the NME's Paul Morley and Ian Penman. Morley infuriated the readership with his passionately conceptual embrace of pop and style. Penman, his prose less frothy than the extravagant Morley's, was given to elegant strings of obtuse argument that were nonetheless provocatively positioned. Melody Maker frowned on punk rock and its variously arty offspring a little too long; it lost some credibility in the late 1970s. When it revived and sought new direction in the 1980s, it embraced some of the styles that Sounds and the NME had ignored. It championed goth bands and a particular kind of bleak, pre-grunge rock that was quietly growing up outside London, giving the Sisters of Mercy and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry a good home.The NME threw itself into promoting dance, rap and populist lefty rhetoric. A natural polarity evolved. Melody Maker scoffed at the earnest folkie Billy Bragg and NME skewered the gloomy Mission. The disputes probably sold more copies of each paper. Ironically, Melody Maker also harbored a group of young post-Morley/Penman theorists who out-NME'd everyone. One night at the bar of the Mean Fiddler, a fellow NME-er and I were pleased to find ourselves in the rare company of Penman, who had since moved on. My colleague nudged me just in time to witness a couple of those word-conscious young MM writers furtively peeking around the corner. Wide-eyed with wonder, they were staring at Penman as if Santa Claus himself had put in an appearance there in distant Harlesden. The weeklies provided a paid alternative to Speaker's Corner for a handful of obsessive enthusiasts. At NME and, I'm sure, at Melody Maker as well, pink-cheeked 25-year-olds would stand in the middle of the office shouting excitedly to themselves about R.E.M.'s third album, which was either vital or redundant, depending on whether or not one felt Roxanne Shante deserved the front cover instead. Day after day, week after week, the fever burned ever hotter and whiter at the Tuesday morning editorial meetings. Those ruthless conceptual trouncings that so many PR activists and bands complained of were not the product of jaded strategists. At that time, I was holding the popularly despised position of being a writer who also had a band. Being both an artist and a critic who wrote in judgment of one's peers made for a slow-boiling dissonance of self. This syndrome is probably not so common in the United States, where critically vandalizing the tenderly crafted wares of other people is not considered mainstream entertainment. Naturally, on several occasions I was to find myself on the receiving end of a critical trouncing. My work and stage presence were mercilessly cataloged by the style hounds at Melody Maker. My band was called Miaow; had I been a kitten, one writer said, I would have been drowned in the Thames and we'd all have been a lot better off. I should note that the magazine was occasionally kinder as well; I didn't take any of the comments too seriously, since I appreciated the need to entertain as well as the duty to vent one's truth. Harder, though, was being hissed at and tampered with while buying low-end groceries in supermarkets by self-styled anarcho-punks hissing, "the fuckin' NME!" -- as if we freelancers, the micro drones of the IPC empire, were some sort of regal oppressors of the masses. Adjusting my raincoat, I wondered anew at the power of the weekly word and the enormity of the illusion that I too once held. The reality was that I had just returned from a trip to Record & Tape Exchange, where I had sold a big bag of gaily packaged 12-inch remixes and other dubious review product, the food stamps of the freelance weekly contributor. I also wondered why was I never accosted in more artistic environments, which would have provided a much more noble context for the insult. I easily justified my hyena-like occupation by inventing my own ethical code: You could make fun of someone's fashion sense but not the size of their ass. One day I thoughtlessly regurgitated a story about a musician's drug-induced psychosis, considering it an unremarkable music-biz pitfall along the lines of a tax audit. My friends asked me what on earth I was thinking. The horror of long-lost perspective began to dawn, heavy and grim. And hardest of all was hearing the voice of that deputy editor barking excitedly that I had ceased to "go for the jugular." It is possible that the over-thought journalistic hotpot that produced those three papers and their attentive readers will never be seen again. It was truly a singular privilege to be allowed to rant about music in this forum and to such a tolerant audience. Sometimes one forgot, though, at 4 in the morning, crying bloody tears over a faulty typewriter, sentenced by that deputy editor to a third rewrite of an interview. "Write about the bloody music!" "But it's boring!" "I know! Say so! And say so before tomorrow, for Christ's sake!!!" As music fans leaned less and less on the printed weekly music media for news, the papers readjusted. NME broadened its brand name, endorsing everything from music awards to knitting patterns (OK, they stopped short of knitting patterns) and securing a strong online presence. Melody Maker redefined itself as an "entry point" for teenagers interested in in-depth musical analysis. It went glossy and tabloid-sized. It even went hard rock. It did everything except embrace Scientology, but it still had to close."
-Cath Carroll
TONY Reviews 2001 / Time Out New York
Alison Krauss and Union Station New Favorite (Rounder)
Issue No. 309 August 23-30, 2001
"Union Station bass player Barry Bales has commented that the band's busy side projects leave them creatively sated enough to permit a true collaboration on full-band recordings such as this one. On their solo material, Krauss and the band produce, write and record in a traditional bluegrass modern the singer most recently on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack as an ensemble, they take each other into a headier musical space. Their last collaboration, 1997's So Long So Wrong, was a finely wrought masterpiece of deep melancholy countered by exuberant, pure musicianship, and it set a high standard. New Favorite draws on the same exquisitely rendered fusion of bluegrass and contemporary folk-jazz, but it lacks the silvery tristesse of its predecessor.
The instrumental "Choctaw Hayride" and the more orthodox Appalachian-and-blues-style compositions sung by Dan Tyminski and Ron Block showcase the group's joyous musical spirit; the remorseless Scruggsian churning of Block's archly syncopated banjo is alone worth the price of admission. (Those wishing to hear more of Block may want to check out his recently released solo debut, Faraway Land.) These performances lead one to appreciate anew the strange, rarefied beauty of this group's voyages outside the bluegrass realm. Together, the musicians shape sublime harmonies, managing to morph some rather proggy chord resolutions into a magical translucence in Bob Lucas's "Daylight," which suggests the Beatles had they turned to bluegrass instead of Ravi Shankar.
Krauss's singing is always breathtaking: Her flawless tone can turn sulky and punchy when necessary, but it's always easy on the ear. She's the one who brings the songs for the band to select, and her choice of Dan Fogelberg's "Stars" and Gillian Welch-David Rawlings's "New Favorite" is quite typical of the album's lack of stylistic posturing. She breathes otherness into Fogelberg's earnest ballad and takes Welch and Rawlings's song into spooky, dusky territory. A couple of songs use drums and percussion bold step since traditional bluegrass combos are drummerless. It's hard to imagine a whole class of musicians with little use for drummer jokes: How on earth do they amuse themselves on the tour bus?"
-Cath Carroll
Trisha Yearwood Inside Out (MCA Nashville)
Issue No. 303 July 12-20, 2001
"There has always been something naggingly familiar about the beauteous ache in Trisha Yearwood's voice. It taunted us in "The Song Remembers When" and dodged into doorways in "XXX's and OOO's." That familiar something has finally revealed itself in this new release: As a singer, Yearwood has much in common with C&W's golden boy of the '60s, Glen Campbell. They are both classic country vocalists and sophisticated interpretive pop singers, with the same exquisite strength and rarefied clarity of tone. It was perhaps in recognition of this that Inside Out producer Mark Wright added gaudy bursts of strings, similar to those charmingly intrusive orchestral flourishes that punctuate some of Campbell's finest recordings.
The tenor of this CD is a mite mopey, full of balladlike, perfectly crafted songs which may reflect the recently reported heartache in Yearwood's private life. With the exception of a faithful version of Rosanne Cash's glorious "Seven Year Ache" (which includes backing vocals by Cash plus standard '80s synth hand-claps), there are no brightly colored instant winners on this album. Still, Yearwood is singing better than ever. Her vocal tone is bold and true, yet it possesses a translucence rarely found in big-voiced singers. She really shines at the end of a phrase when most singers fade away, breathless; it is here her voice unfolds and flutters like gorgeous butterfly wings.
Yearwood has also chosen her company very well for this collection Vince Gill, Don Henley, Kim Richey and Buddy Miller, as well as the aforementioned Cash, are all singer-songwriters of both popular and critical acclaim. Their presence adds thoughtful musical shadings, although Cash is the only one of these songwriting dignitaries to also have a writing credit on this album. Yearwood's collaboration with Miller is the highlight: In Hugh Prestwood's "Love Let Go," Miller's signature swamp-gospel vibe gives Yearwood a rougher-hewn space, which she inhabits with a natural, earthy grace, a pleasing counterpoint to the sentimental sheen of the other songs."
-Cath Carroll
John Anderson Nobody's Got It All (Columbia)
Issue No. 290 April 12-19, 2001
"Recalling the slow incubation of his acclaimed 1992 eco-lament, "Seminole Wind," in an interview some years back, John Anderson revealed the key to his creative ethic. He said he didn't want to sound like a protester as he wrote of the slow destruction of his beloved Everglades, but wanted to craft the song in a "picturesque and a subtle way." And he most certainly did. This deep-rooted, sometimes stubborn, always honestly poetic approach is the foundation of his newest work, the first for his new label, Columbia. Anderson, the serial-comeback man of country music, still sings as if he's in the tantalizing grasp of some exotic larynx shiver. His is a singular voice which, like a dutiful fairy-tale giant, can easily lift a song that lacks its own momentum. The privilege of producing Anderson went to current Nashville favorites Paul Worley and Blake Chancey, most recently recognized for their work with the Dixie Chicks. Although they've done a wonderful job, matching their commercial skills with Anderson seems somewhat unnecessary, and they appear to serve more as a fancy housewarming gift from the new label. Anderson invests all his work with wry humor and sincere concern, refusing to be pressured into higher productivity and defining for himself what is authentic. Still, despite these tough parameters, the singer can accommodate can't-lose radio material like Dennis Linde's catchphrase-laden "The Big Revival." But he truly shines with the kind of folkloric testaments embodied by John Scott Sherrill's "Five Generations of Rock County Wilsons" and by "Appalachian Blue," co-written by his sister Donna. Many artists celebrate their country roots by crowding around the cultural touchstones of vintage George Jones, all things John Deere and the freedom to conform. Anderson goes deeper, convinced that family, community, our history and the land we live on are all part of the same continuum."
-Cath Carroll
Patti Page Brand New Tennessee Waltz (Gold Label)
Issue No. 279 January 25-February 1, 2001
"Patti Page had several pop hits in the 1950s, including "Let Me Go Lover!" and "All My Love," but as she noted in her press kit, "My pop hits back then would be considered country if released today." Working in her familiar style on this newest collection, she has proved her point most beautifully. She engaged the services of Victoria Shaw and Jon Vezner, two of contemporary Nashville's most experienced song crafters, yet she retained her traditional pop-country identity. It was Ms. Page, not her peers Les Paul and Mary Ford, who first took the vocal overdub technique onto the popular charts: In a prescient act of technology abuse, her manager, Jack Rael, had her overdub straight to acetate for 1948's "Confess" (which was credited to "Patti Page and Patti Page"). But although she is an expert in self-accompaniment, the singer chose to hire newer, established artists to provide background vocals for this album. The saintly gauze of Allison Krauss anoints the sentimental "Hope Chest," and the sorely undervalued folky clarity of Suzy Bogguss shores up "One Less Rose in Texas." The shadowy refrain of "New Way Out" is gorgeously rendered by Emmylou Harris and Trisha Yearwood, both of whom blend discreetly without eclipsing the star of the show. Of the five female guests, Kathy Mattea is the closest to Page in style and timbre, though Mattea's work tends to cover more somber lyrical territory. In a delightful twist, Page covers the senior weepie "Where've You Been," which had previously been a chart success for Mattea. It is startling to realize that, at the time of recording, Patti Page was 72 years old. The breath control demanded by some of the slower ballads sometimes hints at her snowy vintage, but in up-tempo mode, she navigates the quick, Western inflections with a youthful and elegant flirtatiousness. The honest cultivation of her phrasing and her tawny vibrato have had an enduring influence in popular music. The style was later refined by Karen Carpenter and can be heard today (albeit dressed in less) in Shania Twain. This album is a wonderful testament to the art of the popular vocal. "
-Cath Carroll
Cynthia Plastercaster on Health Care
Interview by Cath Carroll from Escandalo #4 (Matador)
CC: Do you like the way public policy is leading on the healthcare issue?
CP: I find it most disturbing and... confusing.
CC: Where are you on the question of insurance?
CP: I favor universal insurance, a single payer system, somewhere between the Canadian and British model.
CC: Do you feel this safety net should absolve us of all personal responsibility in keeping ourselves out of the doctor's office? For example, some sort of legislation to stop smoking and improve our diets.
CP: You mean like having a law against taking up too much room on the bus? Sure. You must not let yourself go too far.
CC: So the healthcare crisis begins at home?
CP: Absolutely. You have to look inside yourself. Once I went for a colonic with my manager. Neither of us like it. You should time your visits to be useful, like if you're plugged up. But I wasn't, really. Nothing came out.
CC: What about those pocket things?
CP: What things?
CC: Diverticuli. A constant demon in the colonics industry appears to be the Ham Sandwich You Over-Ate When You Were Fourteen. Like your insides are hoarding deli tray of viands, all squirreled away. Are you sure you didn't have anything?
CP: I couldn't see what was flowing through my tube, it was directed behind me. There might have been a ham sandwich. Enemas are always a good idea. A friend suggests stringing the enema bag over a high tree branch. He says the pressure is incredible.
CC: Dr. Richard Schulze, a specialist in alternative colon care, claims if there was a coffee shortage, we'd need nuclear weapons to unblock America.
CP: It would take more than coffee to unblock America, darling.
CC: Thank you, Cynthia.
For the NME:
The Housemartins - lightweight ex-buskers or roaring young lions from the Go! stable? Cath Carroll storms their ne st.. Steve Pyke takes flight.
"OK you Housemartins, get the fuck out of here!" bawls a less than reverent Student Ents person at Go! Discs quartet from Hull as they parcel themselves up after another spanking performance at a venue in the wilds of North London.
Bassist Ted hangs on the end of a telephone, plugging his ears against the unholy alliance that surrounds him. Paul, who's apparently unaware that he owns the freehold for one of beat music's most gilded larynxes, is fretting over a damp cardi and shirt; failure to change these at once, he claims, would result in imminent snuffles. "Sometimes I feel like Private Pike on Dad's Army".
>From the eye of this storm, guitar man Stan is explaining the fate of one of his and Paul's earlier non-musical ventures, The Saturday Elephant.
"It was along the lines of Viz comics, though we hadn't seen one at the time. We thought there was a need in the market for a non-serious fanzine that rips into everything. A lot of fanzines just concentrate on one kind of music they like and slag everything else off". The first edition ripped into the current Premier without ceremony. "It was lovingly produced, but when we took it to the printers, we didn't know it was run by solicitors who also printed Conservative leaflets. They must have read it because when we went in to collect it, they wanted our names and addresses to take legal action. We just picked it up and ran out. It was like being taken before the headmaster". Listening to the group's set, a thousand references spring to mind - The Jam, Dexys, Sam Cooke, Nightingales, Undertones, the wondrous Clyde McPhatter...whilst a more concrete influence is unveiled in their four-part accapella renditions of "We Shall Not Be Moved" (sing along children!) and Luther Ingram's "Just Like A Shelter (In A Time Of Storm)" - and the latter, shiver seekers, causes nothing less than sonic ripples down the spine.
Stan had been singing in folk clubs throughout the Midlands, he is unashamed to admit and met Paul through an advert in Paul's front window. Did the pair set out to recruit a rhythm section who could also sing on purpose? "Not really, it just happened that they were good singers... Hugh (the drummer) has a great bass voice - he's also a very good actor". There new single "Flag Day" is a poke in the eye for "Good Works" (as in jumble sales, Blue Peter appeals and similar metaphors) which are substituted for more effective measures.
As far as lyrical content goes, they cannot be accused of trivia. This is among the milder of their socialist and anti-racist tirades. Doesn't Paul ever write about, you know, lurve and Cupid and stuff? "I've tried and I can't... I'm going to. I tried last night. I could show you them, but they're not very good. I sing about love in politics, and hate, but I'd find it offensive for women for me to write about them. Smokey Robinson's love lyrics are brilliant. I set those as a standard".
You take a lot of inspiration from gospel songs. The group's touring van has an "I Love Jesus" sticker in the window. Is it there for kitsch value or does The Lord move within you? "Can I say "I'm not saying?"? He laughs nervously. "It just comes from a love of gospel music. When I'm listening to Al Green singing "Belle" I think I'm missing out on something here. And "Jesus You've Been Good To Me" by the Keynotes. It's literally fantastic.
I don't know what Jesus has done for them but it must be something very big, they're singing something real special. That's what the Labour Party should be doing, sending round a sort of "Jesus" van saying Marx Saved You!"
The single is not entirely representative of the group's musical repertoire, which is rooted in a '60s backbeat, but Paul and the boys intend the next single to be more clubby dance material. Paul protests that they do realise they are living in the '80s. The band are, live especially, a ball of talent.
Do you think you are good, Paul? "It's difficult knowing what you sound like, it's like knowing what you look like. Is the word "introspective"? Something posh like that. We're not the most original band in the world, but there's a lot that goes into you and get radiated out again".
The band currently lurk under the threat of becoming renowned for their "wackiness". Their on stage ad-libs and insults are mighty entertaining. On the night, billows of dry ice were unleashed on our unsuspecting heroes. Ted could be distantly heard whimpering "Help" as he battled with the smog - certainly their personalities do not fit into the standard rockscape. Their nervous energy may have its outlet in boyish antics but this masks their uncompromising political stance. Paul fervently slams the massed ranks of Liberals and Kinnocks in "Sitting On The Fence" and "Drop Down Dead" and when goaded can be downright scathing.
So forget the "zany indie band" pigeonholing. Long may The Housemartins live and play by their ideals.
FLAG ME DOWN (23 November 1985 NME - written by Cath Carroll)