Big Nothing: 11/21/23
Recursive details in country-fried rock and roll.
Happy Tuesday, pals.
By my calculation, next week’s Thursday email will be the second anniversary of the beginning of this newsletter. That is real neat. I’m super grateful for y’all.
Let’s get into it.
Beggar's Day - Crazy Horse
If you stick around long enough, music will become recursive. Like the tuneful, hazy fuzz of the first two Hum records influenced Torche’s downtuned sludgegaze which influenced Hum’s artfully balanced thicket of heavy shoegaze on their comeback album, Inlet. Like the Beatles’ Rubber Soul influenced the artiness of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds who’s kitchen-sink approach was a direct influence on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club. Tracing the roots of these influences is one of the most fun parts of the writing I like to do.
For instance, follow me on this one:
Jack Nitzche cut his teeth helping to orchestrate the vision of Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” recording approach. Taking this influence, he became both a collaborator of Neil Young’s as well as a full—fledged member of Crazy Horse, a band that backed Young for years. The rough, speaker-straining approach of Nitzche and Crazy Horse vocalist and lead guitarist Danny Whitten on songs like Young’s Cinnamon Girl and this track off Crazy Horse’s Young-less debut, was a direct influence on the grunge movement that cropped up in the Pacific Northwest about a decade later. THOSE bands would go on to be an influence on Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s 90s records like Ragged Glory and Rust Never Sleeps, despite the absence of both Nitzche and Whitten in the lineup.
If you’ve been following me over the last (almost) two years, you’ll know that I’ve got my pet theories on why music feeds off itself, why inspiration must necessarily come from a new perspective on an existing situation and why, in my opinion, most of my favorite music comes from moments of cultural shift that often have nothing to do with what’s on pop radio. It’s always fun to see that Moebius continuum in practice though.
Oui, Tu Es Mon Ami - Stampeders
Another thing you might have recognized if you’ve been following me for some chunk of the last two years is that I can reliably be trusted to have an almost guilty-pleasure-like soft spot for two things: anything even remotely French-adjacent and any offshoot of traditional and/or “ethnic” music. This song ticks both of those boxes in the absolute goofiest way.
Driven by a kind of comical banjo riff that could nestle right along side Mungo Jerry’s In the Summertime, Oui, Tu Es Mon Ami is a featherlight French pop tune that also just happens to be a vague French translation of Stampeders’ biggest hit, Sweet City Woman, which appears earlier on the album. Interestingly, Sweet City Woman also has this weird bridge that is in French, torturing the phrase, “C’est bon,” or “It’s good,” into an almost unrecognizable gibberish. (I think of Manu Dibango’s Soul Makossa who’s chorus of, “Mama ko, mama sa, mama makossa,” got a similar treatment in Michael Jackson’s, Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ as, “Mama say mama sa, mama makossa.”)
It’s an example of that recursiveness that borders on the orobourotic which is a word that I just made up but like very much. The snake swallows his tail until he gets to the back of his own head. And thus three country boys from Alberta (including their improbably named drummer, Kim Berly - no really, his parents just figured that out of all the names one could bestow on a child with the last name of Berly, Kim was the most logical one) enter a strange, liminal corner of music history.
That’s all for today. Thanks for listening.