Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

Stevie Wonder, Music Of My Mind

File Between: Marvin Gaye and Funkadelic

Comments: This is very much a transitional record between the youthful Stevie’s hit Motown singles packages of the late 60s and the mature album artist who would be hailed as one of his generation’s greatest composers and pop artists in the decade to come. Although he’s wielding a new-found control over the record-making process, writing, producing, and singing the whole album himself, the record suffers from a lack of focus, a few too many ideas that go nowhere, and one badly misjudged goof of a song (“Sweet Little Girl”) that comes off as simply creepy in the context of the burnished, pulsing elegance of the work that surrounds it. But the good stuff is very, very good: melodic, forceful, futuristic in its use of synthesizers without sacrificing any of the warmth of live instrumentation. And it stretches out, luxuriating in the extended possibilities of a post-pop world.

A Keeper? It’s not Stevie Wonder’s best album — not even his best album of 1972 — but it’s naggingly listenable, and several of the songs are overlooked classics.

Vinyl Rip: Happier Than The Morning Sun

Genesis, Foxtrot

File Between: King Crimson and the Blossom Toes

Comments: If you’re not willing to settle down for the long haul a progressive rock record requires — and I only very rarely am — then the Peter Gabriel version of Genesis is one of the least enjoyable bands ever. But then, once you start to listen to them — and this album in particular kicks off in a great way, with a song about a Jack Kirby creation — you don’t want to stop until it’s over. And of course by you I mean me. Probably the best and the worst thing about Genesis, aside from the lengthy instrumental sections that show off without virtuosity, is the unapologetic Englishness of Gabriel’s lyrics, a lunatic mashup of mythopoeic history, kitchen-sink drama, and grand wizards of silliness like Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. The (almost) side-long “Supper’s Ready” may or may not have anything to do with the Book of Revelation, but as a C. S. Lewis fan from way back, I can’t stop digging it.

A Keeper? I may prefer Selling England By The Pound, but that’s like saying I like hamburgers more than pizza: I’m perfectly willing to eat either at any given moment, assuming I’m in the mood.

Vinyl Rip: Time Table

50. Paul Whiteman & George Gershwin, “Rhapsody In Blue”
(George Gershwin)
Victor 55225, 1924 · mp3
In a very real way, the Rhapsody In Blue was to jazz what Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was to rock & roll — only, you know, better. It took the sounds, the discourse, and the bravura immediacy of the new pop form and conjured up a work that could stand with the most serious, intelligent, and highly disciplined art music of the day. In the 1920s, that was concert music; by the 1960s, it was jazz. And of course, while both works were highly praised at the time, their reputations have slipped since, as neither one is accepted by critical fascists as “real jazz” or “real rock.” The analogy breaks down after that, because of course Sgt. Pepper’s became the gold standard of album rock for two decades, while the Rhapsody had virtually no effect on jazz outside of Duke Ellington, though it did inspire a wave of jazz-influenced concert music. (Check out Milhaud’s Le Création Du Monde, Shostakovich’s Tahiti Trot, Antheil’s Jazz Symphony, Carpenter’s Skyscrapers, and Copland’s Music For The Theatre, all composed and performed, though not recorded, by 1929.) But while Sgt. Pepper’s may have been my first Beatles album, Gershwin has always had precedence. The wavering clarinet which opens the piece can still make my heart jump; I even like the schmaltzy section. Gershwin would go on to write better concert music, music which was tougher-minded while remaining true to the elegance of his jazz-pop roots — an American In Paris is much more sinewy and robust, and Porgy And Bess is indisputably the greatest American opera — but the Rhapsody In Blue was just about the last concert work to ever become truly popular (accepted, celebrated, and loved by the people) in the way Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner had been in the centuries previous. Most people know the 1942 Ferd Grofé orchestration, but the lean, small-orchestra version that Gershwin actually wrote and performed himself, with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924 is much, much better. When they recorded it, they sped it up and edited it in order to fit on two sides of a 78, but that just makes it sound more like jazz. It was one of the few times Whiteman’s orchestra — which did more than any other band in the nation to spread the idea of jazz — actually sounded hot, at least until Bix Beiderbecke joined up. (Technical notes: this is the 1924 version; a better-recorded 1929 version circulates more widely. For the first complete recording of the Rhapsody, see Arthur Fiedler’s 1935 Boston Pops version.)

Rita Coolidge, The Lady’s Not For Sale

File Between: Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Bramlett

Comments: In 1972, Rita Coolidge had dumped Leon Russell for Kris Kristofferson, who would later dump her for Barbra Streisand.  That little incestuous circle jerk is the only reason she had a recording career: her vocal personality wasn’t very developed, and the soulful country-blues-rock material she sang was made for fuller voices.  Still, on ballads she could kill, and probably the best song here is a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird On A Wire.”  It kicks off a string of great covers that takes in Bob Dylan, Dan Penn & Spooner Oldham, Kristofferson himself, and the great Booker T. Most of the rest of the record is taken up with second-rate hippy-chick numbers, but I’ll always have time for the loose, rootsy sound that made the early 70s great.

A Keeper? There’s probably not such a thing as a great Rita Coolidge record, but this one is about as good as she gets.

Vinyl Rip: I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight

51. Wendell Hall, “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’”
(Wendell Hall)
Genett 5271A, 1923 · mp3
I don’t necessarily want to belabor the point that the origin of country music was, in David Wondrich’s memorable phrase, “minstrelsy gone feral” — the historical accuracy of the fact is beyond dispute, even if it can be hard to discern burnt cork’s influence on a post-Hank Williams world. (Though not impossible: “A Boy Named Sue” is a shaggy-dog story of the kind that was first popularized by traveling minstrel troupes, and Jerry Lee Lewis’s covers of r&b numbers always had a whiff of blackface to them.) But even if I’ve provided enough examples, the thesis is really incomplete without this shining gem of a song, considered by many experts to be the first “hillbilly” hit record, which was what the industry called country music until the buying power of hillbillies made it politic to call it something else. But more than anything else, it’s the record where you can hear minstrelsy fade into country, two sides of the same tarnished coin. “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’,” especially as it picks up speed, is delivered in a wheezy chortle that was for decades the usual signifier of “black” on record, at least during the decades in which actual black people weren’t recording, which means it was really a signifier for blackface. But that chortle quickly became the standard sound of country music, at least until the high lonesome sound of Jimmie Rodgers (a city slicker) and the Carter Family (ethnomusicologists) set the tone for the next hundred years. Wendell Hall wasn’t actually a hillbilly either; that’s a ukelele he’s playing, not a banjo, and he was a pop and novelty singer not unlike Nick Lucas or Frank Crumit (or a few more we’ll be meeting) — but liberal notions of authenticity didn’t matter to the audience that bought this up in spades, revealing a new market to the recording companies who were only just beginning to exploit the black market. He’s best-remembered today as the designer of a custom series of ukeleles that still go for lots of money on eBay. Well, country music still owes a lot to Hawaiian music, of course: just a different instrument.