Re: (TV) four for four

[Jesse Hochstadt <jesseh58@yahoo.com>]

I've always found The Wonder to be the weakest of Tom's solo records - a big disappointment after the stunning Flash Light. Only Words from the Front comes close. The Wonder has some good songs, but that reviewer is right: the production's weak. Phil's comparison to the 1992 Television album is pretty apt: the production on that is dry to the point of near-sterility. Those songs come much more alive in concert.

On Neil Young: I've never been able to get as much into Neil as I might like, partially because of the sheer volume of material that's built up over the years. But at his best, he's quite remarkable and moving. I have a particular weakness for some of his songs that are just stompers, like "C'mon Baby Let's Go Downtown" and "When You Dance." (The latter doesn't really stomp, but it ... pounds? Someone help me with a verb here.) I don't tend to think of his guitar playing as being as technically developed or thoughtful as Tom's or (for certain) Richard Thompson's, but it seems like he can sometimes get to similar places by more primitive means. And maybe that primitivism is an illusion....

Neil's also got that great one-note guitar solo in, what is it, Down by the River? (I'm in a cafe where music's playing, so it's hard for me to pull songs up clearly in my head.) There's a list for you: great one-note guitar solos. I think XTC's "Love at First Sight," one of my fave raves, has one too.

On British folk: As a big Richard Thompson fan, I know less of this stuff than I should. I have all or almost all of RT-era Fairport; some Sandy; one John Martyn (and need more), if he's folk; several Nick Drakes; and much of the original Pentangle stuff. Pentangle at its best is just phenomenal. I'm insanely in love with "John Donne Song" - which is really a John Renbourn solo number - whose beautiful melody and the brilliance of Donne's language disguised its misogyny for me until a friend and I dissected the lyrics. I'd like to get more Jansch and Renbourn stuff if I knew where to start.

But as for Shirley Collins, I have "No Roses" and "Folk Routes, New Routes" and I'm afraid I just don't dig her singing. I respect her place in history, her work with Alan Lomax, etc., but there's something about her vocal timbre that feels wrong to me - a little thin, somehow? Gimme Linda Thompson (whom I actually prefer to Sandy Denny) any day. Which reminds me: I don't know June Tabor's or Norma Waterson's work well at all. And I still want to know more about the not-so-long-ago deceased Davy Graham (the British Sandy Bull?).

Any of you familiar with the oeuvre of Irish guitarist John Doyle? I first noticed his playing on Linda Thompson's "Fashionably Late." I have his record "Evening Comes Early" and while it sometimes descends into the merely pretty (if still very accomplished), the best of it, like "Pretty Saro" and "Early in the Spring," is transcendent. Like most folk tunes, the latter seems to have variations in the lyrics; the versions I'm finding on-line end with "If the girl is married whom I adore/I'm sure I'll stay on land no more." But Doyle's version ends with something fiercer and more resentful (I'm not home right now to check the lyric sheet) in which the narrator talks about returning to the sea and having the waves crash over him, and Doyle's musical arrangement does a powerful job of evoking the rise and fall of massive ocean waves. 

Martin Simpson, blah blah blah....

Can you tell I'm avoiding working?

- Jesse
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