True Stories: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Gordon Lightfoot: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

[purchase]

I have enjoyed all of the hit songs I have heard by Gordon Lightfoot, but many have a 1970s commercial sheen in the production that has kept me from exploring his work further. My research for this post has me rethinking that position. Certainly, from the sound of the song, you can tell that this was released on a major label. There are no quirks or mistakes that can either ruin or give an intimate and personal quality to an independent recording. Still, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is a song whose haunting quality grabbed me when I first heard it when it is was new, and the years have not changed that. What I found in researching the song is that many artists have tried and failed to create a quality cover of the song. I found folk versions that overdo the subtlety and lose the song’s haunted sound as a result. I found punk and hard rock versions that lose the song’s empathy by overdoing the drama. And there are jam band versions that lose track of the song altogether. Also, Gordon Lightfoot’s words have power, so instrumental versions exist for no reason that I can understand.

Our new theme is True Stories, and yes, there was a wreck of a ship called the Edmund Fitzgerald. Over the next two weeks, we may hear songs on happier topics, but some of the greatest tragedies in history have inspired great songs, so I am sure there will be more of those as well. The Edmund Fitzgerald sank, with all 29 hands lost, on November 10, 1975. You can find a great account of the incident here. Newsweek had a report of the wreck in their issue of November 24 that year, in which they misspelled the name of the ship, as the Edmond Fitzgerald. Gordon Lightfoot has said interviews that he felt this dishonored the men who died in the wreck and that this was why he wrote the song. The song must have come to him almost fully formed, because he recorded it in December of the same year. Lightfoot spelled the name of the ship correctly, but the song scanned and rhymed better when he changed the ship’s destination from Detroit to Cleveland. The old cook in the song was a Lightfoot invention, and some of the dialog in the song was not part of any official record. But the bottom line is this: Lightfoot’s song is the reason the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is still remembered today, forty years later. And as popular as the original song was, no one has had even a minor hit with a cover in all these years. You have only to think of all of the other hits that have been covers in that time to realize how remarkable that is.

Down: Down Where the Drunkards Roll

Richard and Linda Thompson: Down Where the Drunkards Roll

purchase]

I wish I could tell you that I own and know intimately the contents of every album containing every song I post here. Alas, no. So when this theme was announced, I immediately thought of Down Where the Drunkards Roll. But I was expecting it to be by Tom Waits. Indeed, the song is about the kind of people Tom Waits loves to write about, those down on their luck. Like Waits, the actual songwriter Richard Thompson does not ask for pity; rather, he finds beauty in lives most would dismiss. But, where Waits would have chosen a character, and presented his view of things, Thompson instead evokes a powerful sense of place. Thompson finds both depravity and madness here, but what he asks us to notice is that this place makes all of us equal. No one is judged, and some can return to their normal lives without consequence when the leave here.

Down Where the Drunkards Roll is also a wonderful vehicle for Linda Thompson. The song comes from a time when Richard and Linda were a couple, and at their creative peak together. Richard Thompson wrote here a perfect song for Linda Thompson’s voice, and she delivers the goods. While we are talking about the sound of the song, I believe the stringed instrument featured here is an autoharp.

Down: Geese

Camel: The Flight of the Snow Goose  
Anthony Phillips: The Geese and The Ghost
[purchase The Snow Goose]
[purchase The Geese and The Ghost]

One of the joys of a theme-focused blog is that it gives you a challenge to wrack your brain and try to think of a related topic. And it can be fun to take the theme to an unexpected place. Clearly, the obvious way to interpret “Down” is consistent with the thumbnail being used to illustrate the theme—“toward or in a lower place or position.” But the word has other meanings, including certain feathers of a bird used for insulation, often from a goose. So, here we are.

Camel is one of those English prog-rock bands from the 70s that had some success, both critically and commercially, but aren’t generally grouped in the top tier of the genre’s acts. Nevertheless, they released a bunch of good albums and have continued to perform and record until the present day, with a dizzying revolving door of members surrounding founding member Andrew Latimer.

After releasing two albums with minimal success, the band decided to try a concept album. Rejecting a few novels to base their work on, they ultimately decided to attempt to create a work based on a 1941 novella by Paul Gallico (a prolific writer probably best known for The Poseidon Adventure), titled The Snow Goose. It tells the very sentimental story of the friendship and love between Philip Rhayader, a disabled artist living in a remote lighthouse in Essex, England, and a local girl, Fritha. A wounded snow goose is nursed back to flight by Fritha, whose friendship with Rhayader grows, while the goose returns over the years to the lighthouse. Rhayader uses his sailboat to rescue hundreds of soldiers in the Dunkirk evacuation, but is lost. The goose finds Fritha on the marshes, which she interprets as Rhayader’s soul leaving her, and she realizes her love for the lost man. The lighthouse is leveled by German aircraft, destroying all of Rhayader’s work, except for a portrait of Fritha, as a child, holding the injured snow goose.

The story struck a chord, and the book won an O. Henry Prize in 1941. It was read on the radio in 1944, turned into a BBC TV movie in 1971 featuring Richard Harris (as the goose—just kidding), and that won a Golden Globe and was nominated for both a BAFTA and Emmy. When Camel announced that it planned to release their musical adaptation of the book, Gallico gallantly threatened to sue the band (yay, lawyers!), so they were forced to call the album Music Inspired By The Snow Goose, and they had to abandon the idea of using lyrics based on the text, rendering the album fully instrumental. Despite these obstacles, the album, released in 1975, was both a critical and commercial success.

It is a beautiful, moving work, featuring rock instrumentation along with the London Symphony Orchestra (and, on one song, a duffle coat, used to simulate the flapping of wings). It is hard to pick a favorite song, but to be theme-appropriate, I picked “Flight of the Snow Goose,” which starts off slowly, but builds to a triumphant end.

In doing my research for this, I found a review which claimed that the Gallico novella also inspired another song, Anthony Phillips’ “The Geese and The Ghost.” Turns out, that isn't true. In fact, the title derives from two sounds on the ARP Pro-Soloist synthesizer which was used on the album.

Phillips was the original guitarist in Genesis, but left after recording their second album, Trespass, ultimately being replaced by Steve Hackett. Phillips left due to a combination of stage fright and other health reasons, and an aversion to being in the public eye. After leaving Genesis, Phillips decided to study music, and didn’t record anything for a number of years. His solo debut, The Geese and The Ghost, featuring some music that he had worked on while still in Genesis with friend and former schoolmate Mike Rutherford, and solo compositions, was released in 1977.  In addition to Rutherford, Phil Collins provided some vocals (recorded before he succeeded Peter Gabriel as Genesis’ singer) and Hackett’s brother John added flute.

In general, the album is somewhat folky, with orchestral flourishes, and the title track is beautiful. Genesis fans could definitely hear a kinship to some of the quieter moments of Trespass. Phillips went on to release music to little commercial success, more successfully create “library music” for use in films and TV shows, and appear on other artists' albums playing guitar and keyboards.

In fact, in 1982, Phillips appeared on Camel’s album The Single Factor, and co-wrote a song with Andy Latimer. That album is utterly devoid of any goose-related material (which unfortunately cannot be said of our local athletic fields).

Down: The Pogues, Down All the Days

The Pogues, Down All the Days

Purchase Down All the Days

From their 1989 masterpiece, Peace and Love, The Pogue’s “Down all the Days” is a tribute to Christy Brown. You will know Christy Brown from the award winning bio pic starring Daniel Day Lewis, My Left Foot. The title of the song is taken not from Brown’s seminal biography, but is the title of his first novel, Down all the Days, from 1970. It is a stream of consciousness reflection of Ireland and the Irish, much in the vein of the classic Irish style that James Joyce made so ubiquitous to the life and literature of the Emerald Isle. 

Peace and Love is one of my favorite Pogues albums, though it is relegated in many’s opinion to one of the “lesser” efforts. Recorded at a time when drunken legend Shane MacGowan’s legendary drunkenness had finally started taking its toll on his musical and writing abilities, Peace and Love is a departure for two distinct reasons: one, it shies slightly away from the traditional Celtic-roots of the Pogues earlier albums and favors a broader approach, delving into rock, rock-a-billy, jazz and glorious pop. It is a manifold and expansive musical canvas the Pogues work with here and the diversity of sound enhances its strength rather than diminishes it. 

The second reason Peace and Love is so different from the Pogue's all too small catalog is that this album saw major contributions from the other members of the band in terms of lyrical content and composition. This album features amazing songs from long-time Pogues conspirators Terry Woods, Gem Finer and Phil Chevron, who each penned tracks that are absolute classics, all of who stepped in to fill the gaps MacGowan's behaviors had left. MacGowan’s performance on Peace and Love has been described at “mush mouthed” and his lyrics as “markedly beneath his previous standards”, and sadly, that is true, but then part of being a fan of the Pogues is buying into MacGowan’s ridiculous drunken buffoonery. 

It’s also appropriate to shake one’s head in disgust and sadness at what a squandered talent MacGowan has made of himself. But, then, that’s part of what the Pogues, as an institution, are about: greatness and what could have been. Characteristic of their significance and the pure exuberance of their total abandon into great music is the lingering sense of the tragic. MacGowan’s lyrical content has long focused on the darker side of love, politics and history, of bitterness, of defeat. The music is tinged with lament and a longing for better days, or at least getting a fairer shot in all of those arenas. Kind of like the Pogues themselves, all things could have been, and truly should have been, better. Like MacGowan’s seeming self-destruction: it took on greater dimensions of tragic when you realized how far it derailed this band's chances from being truly great. Burning stars rapidly arcing through the sky is a great metaphor, but the reality of the fact that the Pogues could have been a far more productive band, with a much longer and more varied catalog is a sad truth that only becomes more real with every listen to their music.

"Down All the Days" starts with an ethereal echo of a winding typewriter, being loaded, clicking and punching away, as if from behind a closed door, set to chiming strings. The songs winds up into a lilting spin of guitar, accordion, tin whistle, the typist still toiling away, the dinging bell of the approaching end of a line coming through in perfect timing. The lyrics vary between the voice of Brown himself mixed with an outside narrator introducing us to Brown as a “man renowned from Dingle to Down” but who was once merely a “clown about town.”  Brown himself enters the narrative and entertains by talking about his life and bragging of his drinking prowess ( I can type with me toes and I suck stout through me nose—both of which were very true of Brown) as well as giving us a vague sense of who he might, or might not have, supported in the soccer pitch. The song winds itself towards a soaring chorus, an aural symbol of that typewriter itself leading to a burst of energy, a writer punching the keys in manic ecstasy as the words, words, words tumble forth. Such a wonderful, almost magical song, the multiple instruments in such chaotic tuneful euphony. Like all great Pogues songs, there’s a manic, barely contained energy and the tune doesn’t so much play as it does swirl and carry the listener away. At a running time 3:45, I always wanted it to last at least twice as long.

I’ve seen the Pogues live many times and there was always the kind of excitement in the venue that might accompany the apparition of a saint—hard to believe they were really there in front of you. And, while it’s bordering on morbid, and certainly a ridiculous cliche by know for music writers, MacGowan has continued to defy expectations and is still going. And by that, I mean he's still alive. Sadly, he’s not producing music, but, it’s good to know he’s still out there. Like The Pogues themselves, MacGowan is timeless in a strange way, and the music, even if there is precious too little of it, is and will be timeless as well. 

DOWN: ALL FALL DOWN: LINDISFARNE

Did Lindisfarne ever mean much in the U.S.? I have little idea and suspect not, but, for a brief window, early, early 70s, they were huge over here, contrarily atypical of anything else on the market at the time, too folk for prog, too ramshackle for folk, a glorious blend of mismatched voices and acoustic instruments, underpinned by a rock solid rhythm section, belting out tunes with all the measure of a McCartney. And those mismatched voices came together to give the uncanniest of ragged harmonies, the like of which would not be heard again until the heyday of the Jayhawks. Alan Hull, author and the main singer of most of the songs, had a knack to pierce through to your soul with his anguish and joy, his songwriting capable of both effortlessly crafted wordplay or of the tightest social comment, often in the same song. This song, the lead track from their 3rd record, 'Dingley Dell', is an example of the latter, a wistful lament to and of its times, the backing a beautiful blend of mandolins and a silver band.

The band, named after the almost-island off the Northumberland coast of England, were slow to meet overnight success, the first record, o so aptly entitled 'Nicely Out of Tune', almost slipping by unnoticed, until, ironically, their 2nd release, 'Fog on the Tyne' was released. This was, astonishingly, the surprise biggest UK selling album of 1972, its lead single, a song by bassist Rod Clements, 'Meet Me on the Corner', becoming a number 5 single success. 'Lady Eleanor', the earlier single from that first record was released a 2nd time, surpassing that and reaching number 3, buoying the parent LP up the charts behind it, the melancholic mandolin of Ray Jackson, also the harmonica player for meet 'Me on the Corner', no small part of the either songs attractiveness. The other 2 members of the band, Simon Cowe, on guitars and the biggest pigsty hairstyle ever, and Ray Laidlaw on no nonsense drums, each added to the whole. 'Dingley Dell' was a much more ambitious pice, and, in retrospect, was perhaps a step too far for their fanbase, that version of the band then breaking asunder, as their success faltered. I remember buying it, on the day of release, being both delighted and disappointed, variously, by the changes in and widening of direction. Two factions, Hull, Jackson and new members, lurched on as Lindisfarne, but it was never quite the same. The other 3 formed the rather more folk influenced 'Jack the Lad', with likewise limited favour, outside, at least, my ears. The original 5 reformed together in 1976, with a further hit single, 'Run For Home', but times had changed and their style was now out of vogue, hindered by the material promising, ultimately, more than it could deliver. More was to be gained from their famed yearly Christmas gigs at Newcastle City Hall, which were fuelled more on past glories than new. At least once a year, the fog on the tyne was, surely, theirs. Alan Hull had also a solo career alongside these later years, with greater acclaim, particularly in retrospect, than with his concomitant band work, ahead of a way too early demise, in 1995, aged 50, from a heart attack. In 2012 a plaque was unveiled in Newcastle to his memory.

Since then, as is seemingly now compulsory of bands from the last century, the band lurches on, various original members slipping in and out, often one replacing the other, as when Ray Jackson 'retiring' in 2015, to be 'replaced' by Rod Clements. Sadly Simon Cowe died in 2015.

Search further: this is the best of from their first 3 (and best 3) recordings, which were each on the quirky UK Charisma label, also an home to Genesis, the 2 completely different bands going out on tour together on one occasion, to the possible bemusement of the fans of each.

Down: Way Down In The Hole

Tom Waits: Way Down In The Hole
[purchase]
[purchase The Wire soundtrack, with 4 of the 5 versions used in the credits]

This year, it seems like I’m writing more about television related music. I watch an enormous amount of television, and I do think that there is so much great stuff to watch these days. In fact, there’s a ton of shows out there now that I would like to check out, but there are just so many hours in the day. In addition, there are a bunch of older shows, often considered to be among the medium’s best, that I have never seen. Some, I’m not interested in, like Game of Thrones, but mostly it is because I didn’t start watching them during their initial run, such as The Sopranos (80 episodes), or Mad Men (92 episodes), or Breaking Bad (62 episodes, plus I’d have to watch Better Call Saul), and their multi-season runs make binge watching difficult.

A few years ago, when I started my own practice, there wasn’t much work right away. I decided to binge watch one of the shows that I had missed, and hit upon The Wire. It was only five seasons (and 60 episodes), it was supposed to be great.  Also, I was a big fan of Homicide: Life On The Streets, which shares significant creative DNA with The Wire.  And my wife wasn’t interested in it. Perfect. (I also watched the 24 episode British show The Thick of It, which was amazing, and easily the most profane program I have ever watched).

The Wire was, in fact, great, and harrowing, and depressing and brilliant. The way that it dissected the Baltimore of its era by focusing on the decay of its major institutions—the police, the unions, the government, the schools, the press, and even the street gangs—was remarkable. The narrative style was groundbreaking, and the performances, by actors who rarely, if ever, have reached the same level of quality since, were stunning. And there was Omar.

But, as I so often have to remind myself, this is a music blog. The credits for the first season ran over a cover of Tom Waits’ “Way Down In The Hole,” recorded by the Blind Boys of Alabama. At the time, I didn’t know that it was a cover, because I’m not that big a Waits fan. The second season, they used the original. For season three, it was a Neville Brothers cover, and in season 4, they commissioned a version, credited to DoMaJe, sung by Baltimore middle schoolers, which related to the season’s focus on the public schools. The final year, they used a cover by Steve Earle, who also acted in the show. Here are all of the credit sequences, conveniently edited into one video:



If you’d like to read more about the credits, go here.

David Simon, the creator of The Wire, followed up that show with a number of well-received television projects.  Generation Kill, which I haven't seen, was about the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  Tremé, which I loved, taught me an enormous amount about post-Katrina New Orleans, and that amazing city's culture, particularly its music. After that, he adapted my friend Lisa Belkin's book Show Me A Hero into a gripping miniseries about zoning (cheap joke--it was about race, and politics and ambition and much more).  A couple of weeks ago, his new show, The Deuce, focusing on the sex and pornography industry in New York in the 1970s, debuted to critical acclaim.  So far, I think it is good, but, and I bet Simon gets tired of hearing this phrase, it isn't The Wire (but is it more like that show than the other Simon projects?).

Down: Burning Down, by REM

         

Purchase Burning Down, by REM

REM’s “Burning Down” is an interesting song with a patchwork history, and it stands out for two reasons. One, it’s classic early REM: arpeggiated chords, an all-over the neck bass line that was melodious than rhythmic  and, most indicative of REM’s uniquely nascent sonic fabric, Michael Stipe’s unintelligible, mumbled, yet beautifully imagistic lyrics. Stipe’s vocal delivery was a turn-off for some back then—“I can’t understand what he’s saying!”—but was a badge of uniqueness and cause for devotion to REM’s earliest fans. Especially when the occasional intelligible phrase would break through the gauzy swirl of harmonies, and sit there, like some strange prophecy: “Running water on a sinking boat/Going under but they’ve got your goat…” A lot of it didn’t make sense, but it sounded amazing, so comprehension was secondary. 

As a front man, Stipe set the band apart, with his mop of grecian sculpture curls, and he set a tone for fashion, and a model for navel-gazers who wanted to shuffle and mumble and bury ourselves in our poetry and hide behind our notebooks, in our thrift store chic uniform of flannel cords and wingtips. I’ve written about this before, but when I was coming of age, music and the bands I listened to were a tribal signifier and part of an intricate rite of passage. To identify by a band or a genre of music isn’t unique in itself, but the music—the sound, the bands, the labels and social mores of the actual artistic movement—helped more to create identity than any other source of influence. 

For me, REM was the antithesis and antidote to the goofy, spandex-laden, hair-sprayed excess of 80s metal that we were all listening to. There was something indefinably cool and mysterious about REM and the “progressive” music of that era, and as I got older and finally accepted that I couldn’t grow my hair long, REM provided the kind of musical medicine I needed to help me nail down some kind of understanding of my ever-elusive teenage identity. I’m still looking, I know, but like any true devotee of music, I formed my coherence of self through music and identified as a fan, with a a capital F. In this case, REM was my first true badge, and I felt like some kind of indie legend walking the halls of my high school in my Document Work tour t-shirt. If you have your timelines in order, you might say: Hey, Document rang in the end of REM’s indie cult-status. And you’re right—sadly, I came to them slightly late, but I will say I was the first—the first!—to have Document and I had a personal mission to turn everyone on to a little song called “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” 

Going further back, to classic REM,“Burning Down” was actually born as a different track, “Ages of You”, and both songs can be found on REM’s B-sides collection Dead Letter Office. “Ages of You”, though meant to originally be released on the EP Chronic Town, was left off. Later, continuing its life-cycle as an unwanted stepchild, it was left off the full length Reckoning, as well.  As quoted in the liner notes of Dead Letter Office, Peter Buck describes the strange duality of the song’s history: “When we got tired of ['Burning Down'], we kept the two pieces that we liked and rewrote the rest to come up with 'Ages of You'. We got tired of that one, also.” 

Burning Down finally saw life as a European only B-side on the 7” and 12” for “Wendell Gee”, from Fables of the Reconstruction. A decidedly different musical contrast exists here, juxtaposing “Wendell Gee’s” maudlin, piano and banjo balladry to “Burning’s” earnest, chiming, sing-along anthemic drive.

Give both tracks a listen. Peter Buck refers to “Burning Down” as a “companion piece” to “Ages of You.” And for that distinction alone it deserves a critical listen. And if you haven’t listened to REM (classic REM) in a while, the track will remind you immediately of what was so great about the band, when you were still a kid, with goofy hair but cool shoes, and a whole world of disappointing disillusions yet to come. (That would be REM's Out of Time, not life in general...)

    

That t-shirt...

Down: All That You Dream

purchase [The Last Record Album]

I hadn't intentionally pre-planned continuity from my last post to this one, but - as the "responsible" for this theme, I do wonder if my eventual theme choice wasn't at least subliminal (I think that applies). I mean, going from Little Feat's Can't Stand the Rain >> Little Feat's All That You Dream. <Entre paranthese> I have to give a tip of the hat to the comment from Dead_Elvis, Inc for the correction in the comments [right side]. But beyond, the theme offers up the possibility of pursuing Little Feat's <Down on the Farm>, notable for little except being the final album to which Lowell George contributed [a little because he was giving his time to <Thanks, I'll Eat It Here> as referenced by Dead_Elvis, Inc.]

There's something similar about the way that Little Feat's (and Steely Dan's- [RIP Walter Becker]) music affects me. Technically, I think I've got it right if I say they both incorporate somewhat complex structures that combine "California pop" with jazz. I'm talking catchy/pop-ish tunes with a twist away from the standard R&B I-IV-V chord structure. Add in lyrics that generally go a little beyond "She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah.." and you've got me on board. (Spyro Gyra and even into a lot of the ECM music from the mid 70s)

Yes, I confess, I am stuck back in the past. There isn't a lot from the present that I listen to. Most everything that comes to mind for a <Down> theme goes back to before the 90s. Heck, most everything I have ever posted here goes back to before the 90s. Not all. Most.

It seems to me that this is a song that sings about a better future, or at least the hope for better. Certainly regret and acknowledgement that things aren't what we wished they would be, but also a desire to improve:

All of the good times were ours ...
Rainy days turn to sunny ones ...
Can't be 'round this kind of show no more

Worth considering that the song isn't credited to Lowell George, but it is among the last that he was here for. Possible premonition because he wasn't around for too many more shows? Online sources say it is he doing the vocals (sounds right).

Also worth considering -from my perspective- is that the song doesn't bring me down. There are songs that do, but the tempo and harmony here aren't sad despite the lyric word choices (clouds, rain, wash away ...)

While you are here, also see Darius' long ago related https://sixsongs.blogspot.com.tr/2012/01/on-air-on-your-way-down.html