Well, I told you we would get to Nick Cave eventually. Kind of. Today we listen to another song by The Birthday Party. But at least this one is written by Cave. This song is off their album, Prayers on Fire. And it is called “Nick the Stripper.” I can’t say that it’s an example of good songwriting. But it’s a hell of a song.

“Nick the Stripper,” I would have to say, is post-punk. It has a great bass and drum part that is reminiscent of Gang of Four. On the other hand, the guitar is all over the place — post-punk at times and sixties San Francisco rock at others. Then there’s the great horn sounds. And Nick Cave’s unique contributions to singing that are not so much music as failed attempts at throat singing.

The whole thing is hypnotic and amazing. No wonder this group wasn’t successful!

Let us move on to the second album of The Birthday Party called, appropriately enough, The Birthday Party. And the song is “Happy Birthday.” It was a group composition when Nick Cave was starting to become the dominant songwriter (he never really did succeed in that regard). I love the song. Now you could listen carefully to the lyrics and come to the conclusion that it is a happy song. Many people think it is. But it’s not. When I was 17 years old, I wrote a song for a friend of mine’s high school graduation called, “Goodbye Graduate.” It was much more clear, with lines like, “You’ll get a wife and work for Dodge.” But “Happy Birthday” is about the same thing: aging and the fact that life just gets worse. Happy birthday!

One thing I find interesting is that Wikipedia refers to The Birthday Party as a “post-punk” band. How exactly is The Bithday Party post-punk? They sound very punk to me. But then Wikipedia insists upon calling every impressionist painter you’ve ever heard of as post-impressionist. Anyway, this song sounds like a lot of California punk from the late 1970s to me. But just remember, the boy in this song was eleven years old. That means he’s 47 years old now and his life sucks! Or he died of liver failure like one of the writers.

Tomorrow I might get to an actual Nick Cave song. In the mean time, enjoy this one:

The first band that Nick Cave was in was The Birthday Party. They were a punk band of sorts out of Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They were one of those bands that weren’t directly successful but had so much talent that they were nonetheless hugely influential. I want to highlight a song off their first album, Door, Door. Now officially, the album is by the band “The Boys Next Door.” But they were, in fact, The Birthday Party.

The song is, “Shivers.” It is not a Nick Cave song. It was written by the band’s guitarist, Rowland S Howard (although all the songs were credited to the whole band). He wrote it when he was only 16 years old, which is kind of annoying. But he died young, so I guess I will forgive him. It is a very funny song, in the Nick Cave sense. That is to say that I’m not sure that it’s meant to be funny. It does render very much what it’s like to be dumped when you’re 16 years old. But it seems self-aware — that it understands just what a silly song it is.

When it comes to guitar sound, Jimi Hendrix is more or less the alpha and omega. Oh yeah, I know that there have been other guitarists who have built a whole lot on what he did. But he’s the guy who really started us on this path where the guitar was something more than just a musical instrument. It probably isn’t a coincidence that he came around at the same time that the Moog really started to enter popular music.

What is there to say about Jimi Hendrix? Really, there isn’t much that I can add. I do think that people tend to forget just how experimental those first few albums were. They are amazing. And I can only imagine what they must have sounded like at the time. When I was introduced to them when I first went to college, they blew me away and I had grown up listening to plenty of people who were ripping him off to one degree or another.

I’d like to highlight something that doesn’t exactly speak to the full complexity of his work, “All Along The Watchtower,” off his third album, Electric Ladyland. It is, of course, a Bob Dylan tune. But Hendrix makes it so much more. And it shows that he could play a straight rock guitar solo as well as anyone. It also shows his absolute mastery of the wah-wah pedal. You don’t much hear that kind of total control of an instrument ever. It’s almost like listening to the very best classical music. And I fully expect that it will still be admired in hundreds of years.

When I was young, my favorite guitarist (by far) was David Gilmour. That was probably because he is one of the few lead guitar players who thinks in terms of melody. Most guitarists get too lost in scales and not much more. I believe after Roger Waters used his inner pain to banish all other songwriters from Pink Floyd, Gilmour was still given songwriting credit based purely on the basis of his guitar solos. See, for example, “Dogs” off a fairly unlovable album, Animals.

Here is David Gilmour with Richard Wright (who Waters threw out of the band — as you can see, I have a bit of an attitude toward Waters) performing “Comfortably Numb” off The Wall. It’s a great performance:

Okay. I’m willing to admit when I’ve made a mistake. And I’ve made a mistake with this poorly considered week of sound-oriented guitarists. So I’m going to finish out the week with guitarists who aren’t necessarily so into sound (although all electric rock guitar is a lot about sound). I’m just going to go with some guitarists who I admire. One of them is Dick Wagner. Another is Steve Hunter.

They are probably best known for their work with producer Bob Ezrin (one of my all time favorites — one of the unsung greats of rock music). In this capacity, they worked with acts like Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, and even Kiss. Well, Wagner played the lead guitar on the typically stupid Kiss song, Flaming Youth.

You can hear the two of them play together on a bunch of Alice Cooper albums. Dick Wagner was particularly close to him. But I thought we would listen to the two of them off the beginning of Lou Reed’s album Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal. They played so beautifully together. This intro — before “Sweet Jane” — was written by Hunter. I think Reed especially sucks at this period where he was addicted to speed. But the band is so great that it doesn’t much matter.

Today, we come to the guitarist I was most thinking of when I started the week talking about guitarists who were focused on sound: David Howell Evans — better known as The Edge of the band U2. I’m not a huge fan of the band or even of The Edge as a guitarist. But he is a great guitarist and he is an even greater sculptor of sound. I think of him as the Brian Eno of the guitar.

What we have here is a collection of featured guitar parts from him on eleven different U2 songs. As I’ve noted, I’m not at home, so I’m not going to the trouble of making sure the following list is correct. But of the songs I know, it is right:

1. 11 O’Clock Tick Tock
2. Sunday Bloody Sunday
3. New Year’s Day
4. Bullet the Blue Sky
5. Until the End of The World
6. The Fly
7. Mysterious Ways
8. Love Is Blindness
9. Please
10. Miracle Drug
11. Unknown Caller

It’s pretty amazing stuff. At the same time, it isn’t really my kind of stuff. I’m not that into sound. But I greatly admire it. And The Edge has been enormously influential. There are now two generations of guitarists who his thinking totally dominates. It’s pretty amazing, especially coming from such an unassuming fellow.

Update

I just found this article, The Top 5: Overrated Guitarists. It contained this, “Most sensible critics see the iconic U2 guitarist for what he is: a great sonic pioneer who turned out to be the perfect receptacle for Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ sonic experimentation.” I had never really thought much about the guy, so I was pleased to hear that my take on him was actually widely shared.

I’ve long felt that Frank Zappa was one of the most underrated guitarists of all time. But it has only been over the last decade or so that I really began to appreciate his later work. When I was younger, I tended to miss what he did. Now, its brilliance seems self-evident.

In 1981, he released a double album of instrumental tunes called, Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar. He eventually went on to release two followups. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this. I think most people recognize the brilliance of Frank Zappa. It’s sad that we lost him so young.

Here is a nice pseudo-reggae tune, “Treacherous Cretins”:

I’ve decided to just run through some guitarists I admire. But not just any guitarists. Last week I did guitarists I admired: acoustic blues guitarists. I want to focus now on electric guitar players with a focus on people who craft sound as well as music. Today, I’ve picked Joe Satriani. Now he isn’t such a sound craftsman. But I do love the sounds he makes. But mostly he’s just really good without a lot of nonsense. He keeps the focus on the music.

Well, I’ll admit: live he can become a bit much. But that’s what you expect from a jazz musician. And that is basically what Joe Satriani is. It’s just that he insists on not playing jazz. He is a lot like Frank Zappa. They are guys who I think want (wanted) to play jazz but know (knew) where the money was. Regardless, Satriani’s music has a jazz fusion feel to it. But it’s missing the harmonic complexity to really delight me.

Still, it’s hard not to listen to him play just about anything and not sit in awe. Music is interesting in that an instrument in the wrong hands just is noise. And that’s especially true on the guitar. In the hands of someone like Joe Satriani, it sounds like he was born attached to it — like he’s singing rather than playing.

Anyway, here is probably the first song of his I ever noticed, “Always With Me, Always With You” off his second album, Surfing with the Alien. It appeals to me more than his hard rocking numbers. Because I’m an old guy now. But really, how can you not love this, except that it was once overplayed:

I’m at a loss as to what to do for music this week. The truth is that my day job is taking a lot of time. This is good and bad. There’s been a lot of interesting stuff. But also, my boss asked me to write a resource page about XML. I can’t escape the feeling that she gets a slight thrill out of giving me projects that are nearly impossible. Right before Christmas, she had me write a thousand words about SMIL. I know you haven’t heard about it (unless I’ve complained earlier), because it’s a project that kind of started and ended 15 years ago without ever working quite right. All of these projects are difficult for different reasons. XML is hard because it is either trivial or enormously complicated. In order to really understand XML, you have to understand XSLT, and so on. Not that I don’t love it. But when you start with a blank screen, it is very lonely. (The reason I, an editor, write these things is because I’m the only one in the company who can, apparently. So lonely indeed.)

Anyway, I’m going to start with Adrian Belew and see how it goes. I’m not much of a fan. I admire him, of course. I especially loved the work that he did on the best Talking Heads album Remain in Light. And the song “The Lone Rhinoceros” has been going through my head for days. It’s off his first solo album, Lone Rhino. I do rather like the rhyme of species with feces. But the main rhyme offends my sensibilities: “I’m the lone rhinoceros; there ain’t one hell of a lots of us.” If he had just used “lot” instead of “lots” it would be fine. And the rest of the lyrics are really quite clever.

More important, there is something amazingly compelling about the song. It isn’t just guitar processing. I love the rhythm section. It kind of reminds me of another Talking Heads album, Fear of Music. So here’s the song. I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow. Maybe another Adrian Belew song. Or maybe Joe Satriani.

For many years, I have been fascinated by the blue duo Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley. They recorded four songs in 1930 and two the following, which are classics to people like me who love all that old blues music we associate with the Mississippi Delta. In addition to it being really unique in that here you have two great blues singers and guitar players working together, there was the fact that we didn’t know anything about them. And I did look into it. But unlike Robert Johnson who we at least have lots of legends about, there was nothing about these two. But then I found this amazing article by John Jeremiah Sullivan in The New York Times magazine, The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie. It was subtitled, “On the trail of the phantom women who changed American music and then vanished without a trace.”

If you are interested in this music or the period or just the work that ethnomusicologists do, stop reading right now and go read the article. It is fantastic. A great mystery is unraveled right before you. But I will warn you: at the end, you will want more. It is a very long article, however. I’ll give you the lowdown here. And the first thing I should probably do is introduce you to Geeshie and Elvie. Although most people who are into this kind of music would totally disagree, their most accessible tune is their version of Luke Jordan’s “Pick Poor Robin Clean.” I also think it is the best introduction to them:

One thing that is most interesting about this whole story is the centrality of Mack McCormick, an ethnomusicologist who knew more about this period than anyone else in the world. From the age of 16, he’s investigated 888 counties in the south. He is now 83 years old when the article appeared with tens of thousands of pages of interviews, photos, and much else documented. It was his life’s work, yet most of it has never been released because, having collected the data he found himself under the crushing burden of trying to make sense of it all.

What’s interesting to me is that I know of McCormick because I went through a phase when I was crazy for Robert Johnson. I still am as far as his music goes; but I don’t especially care about his life story anymore. And the reason I don’t is because I read an interview with McCormick where he laid out the case that we probably don’t know anything about Johnson. Regionally, Johnson was such a star that there were a lot of Robert Johnson impersonators. Not in the sense we think of with Elvis Impersonators, but a lot of blues singers of that time just grabbed the name. So the story of Robert Johnson getting poisoned by a jealous husband? Maybe that was the guy who created those songs we love; and maybe not.

What I didn’t know was that this was just one small part of McCormick’s work. And in an interview with John Jeremiah Sullivan, McCormick revealed that he had interviewed a woman near Houston, TX in 1961 by the name of LV Thomas who used to be a professional blues musician. Through a lot of twists and turns, we learn that LV was in fact Elvie Thomas. She had always lived in Houston, so she wasn’t from Mississippi at all. Even though Geeshie is now the more famous one, Elvie was the veteran. Six years ago, I wrote a short article complaining that not only did Wikipedia not have a page on Elvie Thomas, when she was mentioned on the Geeshie Wiley page, it claimed she was a man! That should give you some idea of just how exciting this new information is.

Apparently, Wiley’s real name was Lillie Mae. It was LV who gave her the nickname Geeshie, which was slang for something like a country bumpkin. Geeshie seems to have come from Louisiana originally — or maybe even Mexico. She was in her early 20s when the recordings where made whereas Elvie was almost 40. So the power structure seems pretty clear. After those recordings, it seems they worked together for another four years when LV found God and decided that her music days were Satanic.

But the most interesting thing is that LV was a lesbian. I don’t know if that was why she was hiding in the church. Baptists have lots of funny ideas about the world. Regardless, one year after the recording was made, Geeshie murdered her husband — stabbed him in the neck. But we know she didn’t go to jail for it, because she and LV continued to perform together for three years after that. What’s more, in 1961, LV indicated that she knew where Geeshie was — west Texas, supposedly. It is speculated that Geeshie could have gotten off by claiming self-defense. She and her husband were black and the authorities didn’t much care regardless.

This raises all kinds of interesting questions. Could Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wileyhave been lovers? Did Geeshie kill her husband because he found out about their affair? Did LV find God after Geeshie dumped her? There are too many great novels that could be written with the fragmentary information that we have. But what’s most frustrating is that McCormick did another interview with LV during which she was apparently more forthcoming. And we don’t know at all what she said. (McCormick died last November and seems to have been a bit difficult.)

At least for now, we have the music. Here is a playlist of the six songs they recorded, more or less in the order they were released:

Bo Carter is perhaps the greatest character of the Mississippi delta. He is known mostly for his bawdy songs like Banana in Your Fruit Basket and Your Biscuits Are Big Enough for Me and many others. But he was a whole lot more than that.

I quite like his guitar playing, which reminds me a lot of Mississippi John Hurt. It’s an intricate picking style, clearly designed to put the focus on his voice. I’ve also heard him play some slide guitar, which sounded very good.

Now I had meant to provide you with one of his straight songs, but I think you should hear “All Around Man.” It’s probably his most clever song of sexual innuendo. Although if you try really hard, you can see it as a plea for a place to stay and work because he’s a jack of all trades. Still, when he talks about being able to help out until the milkman comes, I’m afraid he steps over the line of innuendo.