Working Class as the Better Class

Song 231: The playlist song for this last week of 2014 and first week of 2015 is Better Class of Losers by Randy Travis, written by Randy Travis and Alan Jackson. I think country music has always been a working-class art form, and this piece draws a very clear picture of the conflict between a working-class guy and his middle-class uptown wife or girlfriend. Having grown up as one of those working-class guys myself, when this song showed up on New Country radio in the early '90s, I knew exactly what RT meant when he sang about people who looked down on those that drank 3-dollar wine, and I understood why he, and I, would rather hang out with a better class of losers who don't pretend to be something they're not. From a different angle, I have, for most of my time as a musician, paid more attention to songwriters and players than I have to singers, but on this song, and every other track I've heard by Mr. Travis, he handles the vocal so well that I can't help but notice what a talented singer he is, with a uniquely-expressive tone that he wraps around every line. On a side note, this track is my third sly reference to the first verse of my own song As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, which begins with a line that mentions Pam Tillis (Song 210) and Johnny Cash (Song 218), and then follows it with the line because Travis gets kind-of Randy sometimes, you know. You can find the As Long as Merle is Still Haggard video here.

Hearing the Call From a Passing Car

Song 230: The playlist song for this Christmas week is I Hear the Call by The Unforgiven, written by John Henry Jones. You can find a link to a YouTube video of it, as usual, by visiting the home page of my website (daveelder.com). I wouldn't call that video a great one, but it does have some good scenes, and I could watch it again without feeling a strong sense of wasted time, unlike the way the vast majority of music videos make me feel, so I would call it one of the better ones I've seen. Going back a few years before there was a Clint Eastwood movie called The Unforgiven, there was an L.A. rock band by the same name, which is apparently more than coincidence, because, according to their official story, the band reached out to Eastwood, hoping to hire him as director for their music video. Clint didn't want to direct their video, but evidently he liked their name. I don't recall how I first heard the call of I Hear the Call, but within a year or so of its release, I had the LP called The Unforgiven spinning on my turntable quite a lot. A few years later, in compiling cassettes of favorite songs to accompany my musical travels, I added this song to an '80s favorites tape. Heading to Brooklyn a few short weeks ago in early November, I played that tape on the road, along with a few others, and the next day, walking in Park Slope on a balmy, sunny afternoon, a car went by playing a song that I recognized, and that I liked. I Hear the Call did not make the charts in the era of its release, and neither the LP The Unforgiven nor the band gained any wide recognition, but obviously, from my experience on the street in Park Slope, I can say that others besides myself must have heard the call and liked it. I often smile at the line Papa was loud but he thought of himself as the poetic type, I relish the guitar interplay, and I particularly enjoy the ending coda that takes the recording in a surprising and unique direction with some flute sounds that remind me of traditional Irish music -- hearing this call, I will gladly listen closely to it, and I will answer it.

That Was the Ticket!

Song 229: This week's playlist song is Ticket to Ride by The Beatles, written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The Beatles had totally rocked my world from the moment of that February 1964 Ed Sullivan Show appearance, and I listened to every song by them that I could get to hear, but since the rest of my family, other than my little brother, didn't like the Fab Four, and actually disapproved of their music, I could mostly only hear them, and other rock and rollers, by visiting friends who had the records, or occasionally sneaking some listening time on the transistor radio somewhere alone. Under those circumstances, I couldn't really follow the progress of their latest releases, so when a classmate brought this new record into our music class at the end of the school year in June of '65, I could feel the earth rocking once again. I had already loved their music, but it had never occurred to me that they could get even better, yet somehow they did. Over the course of my own development as a musician, I went through various rounds of understanding and appreciating the music of The Beatles. At a certain point, having learned to play Ticket to Ride, I marveled at the chording on the tune -- as Dylan said of the mop tops, "Their chords were just outrageous," and they were. In Evanston in the mid-'70s, a singer/songwriter friend once remarked to me about the double-time effect at the end of this track, which I hadn't fully appreciated until he pointed it out. A decade later, my Oakland friend Doug, as an ex-drummer who shared my affection for the music of The Beatles, spoke about the unique, sort of off-balance (as he put it) drum beat on this record that I had also somehow never focused on, and I found myself marveling again. Then, in the 2007-2009 era, working on recordings of my own music with my production partner David Seitz, I began to hear elements of record sound quality that I had missed before, and I recognized that some of the songs I like were produced (recorded and mixed) much better than others. In this process, I noticed the consistently high production quality of Beatles records, and when I mentioned this to David, he remarked that despite all the improvements in recording over the 5 intervening decades, in terms of sound production quality, some of those old Beatles sides still can't be beat, or even equalled, and Ticket to Ride still stands as one of the best-sounding rock and roll records ever produced. If you're not sure, put on some headphones and compare it to a dozen other tracks, from any era, and I bet you'll probably agree.

Not Blue Enough to Move to L.A.

Song 228: For this week, the playlist song is Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues by Danny O'keefe, who also wrote the piece. As the summer of 1972 started turning into fall, this song started climbing the charts, and on first hearing, I liked it a lot, then liked it more as I heard it more. Ironically, I picked up some criticism then from a member of the older generation I knew who, upon hearing this track on the radio, accused me of copping my entire style from the singer. While I liked the song and the tone, over the previous few years I had worked at developing an original artistic style for all facets of my music, and though I could admit to some common points with Danny O, it surprised me that this particular personal critic could believe I was imitating a guy who had only recently popped up on the radio, and who I knew nothing about before his big hit came across the airwaves. It didn't occur to me then, but looking back, I would guess that the critic had no idea that Danny O's record was new, and that I had no prior knowledge of him. Currently some commentary floating on the web quotes Mr. O as indicating that he wrote the song about an imaginary character, but back in the '70s I assumed that he was singing about himself, and I figured that when he said everyone was moving to L.A., he meant all of his musician friends, since L.A. had by then become the center of gravity for the American music business, and almost every other town, with a couple of exceptions, would waste your time if you wanted to pursue a career in modern music. Knowing this, I still spent 10 years living in Oakland and Berkeley, only visiting L.A. a few times, at least in part because living in the S.F. Bay Area can feel so good that even the possibility of a more rewarding career in southern CA, only a few hundred miles away, can't necessarily compel you to try moving to L.A.