The late playwright Stewart Parker was 'The Irish Times'rock critic in the early 1970s. Here we publish extracts from a new collection of his often acerbic but always compelling columns, with an introduction by Gerard Dawe
PARKER WRITES WITH panache, curiosity and a real sense of history. The reader never feels that he or she is in the company of an obsessive snob because Parker wants to share his enthusiasms, not preen himself on how much he knows. His lightness of touch matches his self-confidence; at precisely the right moment he will say what he thinks. High Pop is full of such high points: discriminating (in the best sense of the word) and alert to all who have contributed to the making of the music he is discussing, he rarely leaves out a name in a band, or in the production team. His taste is impeccable, too. For a younger generation of readers in search of an iPod playlist of the best in post-1950s music, there is no better place to start than right here. Parker's High Pop is a kind of mini-history, a fascinating overview of popular music before business took over the music.
You can't help but feel you know the man who is talking through these pages, for stylistically High Pop reads like a conversation, a really intelligent conversation, with one who loves music, rather than with a puppet that loves himself. Parker doesn't giggle or insinuate or patronise the subjects of his column, even when he isn't too impressed with their musicianship, lyrics or production values. He speaks his mind, for sure, but he does so with the kind of respect and belief in artistic values and cultural standards that has, let's be honest, largely disappeared from media coverage of "popular art".
Parker had his favourites, clearly, and the Band ("peerless" is his word) are right up there in lights, along with many vocalists and singer-songwriters who he obviously rated very highly - Maria Muldaur, the McGarrigle sisters, Carole King, Sandy Denny, Janis Joplin, Sonja Kristina (Curved Air) and Joni Mitchell. Here's Parker on Mitchell's Blue: "a gust of rain in a dry season . . . an instant commercial success, but equally sure to be a lasting artistic one". Like so much else in High Pop, he got that and other judgments absolutely right: James Taylor, "solid gold in a field of corn", Loudon Wainwright III, "one of that handful of genuine originals which sustains your belief in the future", while Steely Dan ("my favourite rock group"), the Strawbs, David Clayton-Thomas (Blood, Sweat Tears), the Grateful Dead, Captain Beefheart, Jimi Hendrix, DJ John Peel, all come in for special mention.
His changing views of Dylan form a subplot (and a topic for discussion all on its own), as does his robust attitude to John Lennon, which varies between reverence and utter rejection. Nor is Parker ever afraid to speak his mind and risk sounding unfashionable or even blasphemous. Thus, David Bowie and Marc Bolan are "lurid narcissists" and, in terms of the 1960s, make up "the Jacobean fag-ends of the movement", while Led Zeppelin are deemed "uninteresting", to be more precise, "a humourless bore".
John Lennon and Yoko also come in for criticism where it is due, as Parker astutely puts it: "the degree of Yoko's influence and collaboration is in inverse proportion to the quality of Lennon's songs". Parker does not pull any punches. He is an exacting listener who tires of anything flat, old, re-hashed, under-average and embraces with all his being the original, the novel, the experimental, the deserving. His praise is effusive when called for, his censure bitingly hitting the mark when warranted, making for a body of writing that speaks with authority and genuine interest, that is passionate in its opinions and discerning in its judgments - ultimately an exuberant and endlessly engaging read. Rock music, part of "that vast barbaric confederation known as pop music", is unpicked and the real thing revealed alongside the inauthentic and phoney.
He sets high standards.
Gerard Dawe
BEATLE ALONE
Paul McCartney, McCartney
PAUL McCARTNEY'S GIFT is for melody and lyricism, John Lennon's for surrealism and satire: they don't have Irish blood for nothing. It was the combination of these qualities that produced the Beatles' finest songs and their two larger masterpieces, the Sergeant Pepper album and side two of Abbey Road. In these they used the recording studio as an instrument and treated the long-playing record itself as a musical genre instead of as a carrier-bag for assorted stage songs. Just how their collaboration was more than the sum of its parts is illustrated in little by the finale of Sergeant Pepper, A Day in the Life, where a weary and abrasive Lennon lyric is given an extra dimension by the insertion of a fast, nervy McCartney passage in the middle.
From Beaumont and Fletcher through Somerville and Ross to Rawicz and Landauer, it has become axiomatic that collaborators are not so hot when they go it alone. The solo album, McCartney(Apple PCS7102), just released, is further evidence. There is melody and lyricism here in plenty, sufficient in fact to make a laughing stock of all his competitors - except for one: the Beatles. The same principle applies to John Lennon's offerings with the Plastic Ono Band. But where Lennon has gone didactic, McCartney has gone megalomaniac. For not only does he sing his own composition on this album but he produced it too, and played all the instruments, and his wife Linda took all the sleeve photographs of him (and her and his dog and the kids), and she tra-la's a bit too and the first song is called Lovely Linda. The result is that at times during the album, and most strongly in the five dull instrumental tracks, one reacts as to the neighbours' home movie. But then again there are four songs which are not the work of the boy next door, unless you happen to live beside a man who can write standards as the rest of us write postcards.
The most immediately appealing of them is called Junk. It is the quintessence of that wistful nostalgia which was formerly such a moving foil to Lennon's resigned stoicism (as on the Golden Slumbers-Carry That Weight section of Abbey Road). It might serve as an epitaph to the collaboration - "'Bye Bye' says the sign in the shop window. 'Why, why?' says the junk in the yard". The tune has that satanic knack for lodging itself in your mind after one hearing, so that you keep catching yourself trying to hum it. To promote this process, there's a "singalong" track on side two. Every Nightand Maybe I'm Amazedare love songs with a fresh realism, married love songs, the latter being especially well put together. Teddy Boyis about a rejected mother's boy; again, even while finding it interesting, the treacherous ear laments the passing of Eleanor Rigbyand She's Leaving Home.
The Beatles formed in 1960 and now they seem to have split in 1970. It's as if they instinctively felt that their corporate identity belonged solely to the decade in which they revolutionised popular music, and to which they virtually contributed a style of life. But maybe the split is only temporary; or maybe, against all the odds, Lennon and McCartney will each develop in unprecedented ways to surpass their former combined brilliance. Maybe the 11 or so Beatles LPs will stop sounding like the Complete Works. There is at any rate another one, Let It Be, still awaiting release.
Meanwhile, we must be content with the merely relative excellence of McCartney.
Monday, May 4th, 1970
THE EXASPERATING DYLAN
Bob Dylan, Self Portrait
WHAT MAKES Bobby Dylan run? He is a major composer of popular songs; he also has a tuneless whine of a voice which he keeps tampering with so that it changes from record to record. His songs can be incandescent poetry; they can also be banal and pretentious nonsense. He is an adolescent of 28 with the immunity of a great innovator; in short, the most exasperating figure in pop music.
Dylan fans are like that, too (so was Dylan Thomas, from whom the name is borrowed). They laugh all discussion out of court. Dylan cannot err. If you find something to criticise, it's because you're missing the entire experience. And yet even they must have endured a crisis of sorts upon hearing him sing Blue Moon.
The Blue Moon?By Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers? The very song, along with that other martini-and-tails workhorse, Let It Be Me. All this and more surprises yet are there for the buying on his new double album, Self Portrait (Columbia C2X30050). It opens with a female backing group singing two repeated lines to a string accompaniment, as in TV commercials, for three minutes 11 seconds. When you are just about ready to hatchet the turntable, Dylan comes on with a tolerable song called Alberta. No sooner have you relaxed than he oozes into a treacly old country-and-western tearjerker called I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know.
And yet the old Dylan is still present here. When a track called Minstrel Boy looms up, you grit your teeth in anticipation of Thomas Moore crossed with a steel guitar, but it turns out to be a new Dylan song with typically mind-teasing lyrics. Better still are the two tracks, Little Sadieand In Search of Little Sadie.These are contrasting treatments of the same set of words which tell the story of a rural murder, pursuit and arrest. They're a sudden gust of reality through a miasma of self-parody, audience send-up and general egomania. They remind you of what Dylan is really about, or what he used to be about: treating the folk music of America not just as a museum but as the source material of a personal art.
Tuesday, July 28th, 1970
UNRIVALLED JONI MITCHELL
Joni Mitchell, Court and Spark
THERE ARE a few, just a few, artists in popular music whose new album releases are major events awaited with bated breath. One such is Joni Mitchell. She has an unrivalled range of talents: she sings like an angel, composes like a composer and writes lyrics like a poet. She plays deft and expressive piano and guitar. She can arrange quite large-scale instrumental resources in an unmistakably personal style. She even looks good.
All of this is so extraordinary in a scene of Eurovision marionettes, wizened children and sex-mutated circus acts, that her work shocks the ear afresh each time. It's something to live with and assimilate gradually. For the initial few hearings, her last album (For the Roses) seemed to me very beautiful but not as profound as her preceding masterpiece Blue; but having played it constantly for a year and a half, I rate it now on a par with Blue. It'll take at least as long to come to as full acquaintance with Court and Spark(Asylum SYLA 8756), her new work.
The title comes from the opening song, which personifies love as an itinerant street musician looking for a woman to "court and spark". The singer, mixed-up and unsure as ever, resists his advances because she can't let go of Los Angeles, the "city of fallen angels". Her singing is throatier and more soulful than of late, and the backing is a full group sound, with piano and steel guitar and chimes featured.
This is the pattern for the whole album. Although the lyrics are as personal as ever, her voice is direct rather than intimate, soaring over fat accompaniments which often swell to orchestral proportions. Help Meis a real pop song, with walloping drum and cymbal, backup singing and brass lines, addressed to a man who loves his loving "but not like you love your freedom". Free Man In Parishas Jose Feliciano and Larry Carlton on guitars, and Crosby and Nash singing vocal harmonies with her. The following two tracks are run into each other and are in her familiar vein of disconsolate self-analysis linked up to unhappy social situations; in fact, the second song is called Same Situation, the first one being People's Parties. The imagery in both cases is strikingly vivid and well observed, but Same Situation builds up to an awkward and rather soppy climax, with strings arranged by Tom Scott.
It's interesting that the next song, Car on a Hill, which contains a far more successful use of quite complex instrumental colouring, was arranged by herself.
The peak of elaborate orchestration is reached in Down To You, with Joni playing a clarinet, and a fleet of phrases from various of the woodwinds bobbing on a sea of guitars, keyboards, brass and strings. This I find a little too ornate, and the lyrics also seem rather written to order, generalised abstractions.
But Just Like This Trainis a relaxed and brilliant train song, Raised On Robberya light-hearted rocker, with Robbie Robertson playing the guitar, and Troubled Childa moving treatment of emotional breakdown, with lovely muted trumpet work by Chuck Findley. Finally, there's the delightful surprise of her cool, masterful singing of Twisted, the old Lambert-Hendricks-Ross number which I've cherished for years. It's a performance which proves beyond doubt that Joni Mitchell could have made it to the top on vocal ability alone.
Thursday, April 18th, 1974
High Pop, The Irish Times Columns 1970-1976 by Stewart Parker is published by Lagan Press, £14.99
