Black Sabbath – Solitude – 1971

watch?v=lsRqgek0Gr8

I return to the song, that same haunting melody, the same witchcraft on a hill. Really, the words betray the depth of melancholy this song encompasses. It’s not a lovelorn lament – it’s an apocalyptic sadness, a wasting away to the end of the world. The music is so much sadder than words can express. Ulver’s cover of “Solitude” turns the song into an atmospheric, sluggish lament – an oh so distant mood from the folkishness of the original.

Ulver – Solitude

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Thanks for the spot, Hemant; what a great band! There’s a trumpet or something in the background and what sounds like a box being blown about by the wind. You can actually feel the wind in this version.

Ulver – Blinded by Blood – 2005

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Another great Ulver track with outstanding artwork by Giger. How dark the future can look and sound sometimes. Turn it up. Let it wash over you, full of doubt and lethean suspense, the tinkling xylophone of a demented jester and a chorus of angels.

At times, melancholy catches everyone. The sorrow at the heart of the blues tradition is usually a life affirming thing, but sometimes, it reveals a deeper loss- the inability to deal with the forces that defy meaning. The jive, the swing, the delightful r’n'b ishness – that’s the form speaking, but there is none of the bluesman’s boast that has been part of the idiom since it’s birth.

The Grateful Dead – Death Don’t Have No Mercy – 1968

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No one here is drinking with the devil.

The second that bassline kicks in, something big and serious begins, a bassline like that is too good to be used for anything shorter than this anything less monumental. This is the sort of jam that builds a house and then keeps embellishing it. And it all stands on the foundation of that marathon-runner of a bassline. 

The Allman Brother’s Band – Whipping Post – 1970

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If you’re used to seeing lots of recent shows, what may surprise you is the lack of distance , both physically and sonically, between the band members – the sound emerges as from one source, fused and melted together like a chocolate bar. That bassline never actually disappears; even when the bassist hooks off on a brief psychedelic meander, the riff preserves it’s memory. 

What really knocks my socks off this jam never loses tension; never lets you off the hook. That takes more than skill – it’s something Led Zeppelin never managed to pull off. It takes some sort of knowledge of your limitations, of your place in the art. 

I hear Phish used to cover this song a lot, but I can’t find it. A pity. I’d love to see the best jam band of our times recreating what I think might be the greatest jam of all time.

And also, much more settled and calm: 

The Allman Brother’s Band – In Memory of Elizabeth Reed – 1970

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I close my eyes and I see red deserts under low cloud ceilings, the road leading through the rocks. Where the road ends, the hills start. An endless climb through sharp grass and heather which pricks through the pants, the wind buffeting the climber down the direction he came. At the end of the climb, at least in this version, my traveler lifts off into the storm and flies away. 

Life isn’t easy but that doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful.

Neil Young – Like a Hurricane – 1977
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Still, there are times when presence can be transmitted; can be conveyed, even with a minimum of context. So when I came across this video of Patti Smith shutting down CBGB in 2006 with a haunting, quavering dirge, I froze and felt a prickle down my spine. It’s part the quality of the song, and part the funeral sobriety of a last farewell.

Patti Smith – Elegie – 2006
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Naturally, one thing leads to another, and before terribly long, I had come across a couple of videos from CBGB that caught my eye. This one is interesting to me because it’s just so surprisingly comfortable for GnR at their peak to just drop an acoustic jam without the floodlights and accoutrements of rock gods; to be so relaxed and at ease; there’s this pervasive collegiate-jam sense of relaxation, a smell of beer in the air. There’s a bit of humour, a little country twang – this could be a bar in Nashville, but it’s the CBGB of the Ramones and Blondie – you expect a little more sophistication.

Guns n’ Roses – Mr. Brownstone – 1987
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The more “traditional” CBGB acts used to take advantage of the lack of barriers and divides at CBGB to destroy any gaps between the audience and performer. The results could be chaotic and unpredictable, occasionally brilliant and frequently an unholy mess. The same performance could go from peace and love to a riot in minutes. 

Two shots from the Bad Brains
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[Which is how you channel a groove]
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[Which is how you work a crowd!]

An entire generation tuned into the alternate continuum of American punk/hardcore/DIY grew up thinking of CBGB as a temple, and those who got to play the stage as gods. Which is why, when Patti Smith reads out her list of absent friends, there’s a whiff of mortality. Till somebody nerds it out, the tension evaporates, the show is over and everyone goes home on the subway.

Company Flow – 8 Steps to Perfection – 1994
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7_aWIA3bhA

This is the hip hop of the lonely examination of the ego, of the man as urban hero, street samurai, gritty and cheap by circumstance, none of which serves to hold him back from the destiny his talent serves him. The structure is too basic for storytelling; but manufactures atmosphere. The hyping is surreal at times, El-P sending us into orbit “Color me Maxmillian/ cause I’m that crazy robot/Teetering on the edge of outer space/Spitting buckshots till black holes surround me” and bringing it all back again. 

The video is remarkable for how spare it is; how monomaniacal about the only thing that matters, the flow. Nothing about the city or the sea matters; the surroundings fade out appropriately. It’s hard to imagine this video ever getting play on any music channel – it’s unwatchable except by a student of hip hop with the album memorized. 

Funcrusher Plus is dense as black matter, so dense that it takes half a dozen listens to figure out how the tracks work. But some of the menace, the attitude, transmit instantaneously. The production is paranoid, schizophrenic, drives a man to reach for something to protect himself; the environment is dangerous, filled with hate. Anything might come out of the night that contains the stinging sitar work on my favorite track. 

Company Flow – The Fire in Which you Burn – 1994
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqxoIGuvWPk&feature=related

And with the swagger that runs through the spine of the dystopian masterpiece that is Funcrusher Plus:

“Not the type of nigga to steal any scene too long, son,
I might lace you, leave the EP evidence and then I’m gone“

Muddy Waters – You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had

And, a version with James Cotton on harp

The scene is a pastiche of visual cues all pointing (a little self conciously) to the South, the Great American Night, Travel Across Monumental Distances and the Soul of Black Music. The audience sits across the tracks, literally and metaphorically, looking in on a still painting – looking, in some ways, back in time.

Now that you know this, because the blues is a machine for the transmission of wisdom, not knowledge, but wisdom, think of all the bankers who didn’t!