Tag: Hank Williams

Seminal Box Sets From Chris Bell and the Louisiana Hayride

Post author By Alex Greene
Post date November 29, 2017

The Complete Chris Bell (Omnivore Recordings)

The choicest cuts of this five-LP set (six if you include the interview disc) are well known, having been first compiled by Rykodisc in 1992 as the masterpiece I Am the Cosmos. That LP and Big Star’s debut earned Chris Bell many fans, but that only scratches the surface of his oeuvre.

Looking Forward compiles material recorded starting in 1969, when Bell was making the most of Ardent Studios founder John Fry’s largesse with free tracking time. These sessions included a shifting cast of players, including Terry Manning. Often Bell himself does not sing lead.

By 1971, the Ardent scene had solidified into a more stable band, Rock City, featuring Jody Stephens as the regular drummer. Their See Seven States is an immediate precursor to Big Star. And while both LPs feature well-crafted proto-power pop, they chiefly underscore how much further the final Big Star lineup took things, and not only through the addition of Alex Chilton and bassist Andy Hummel: Bell’s own writing, playing, and singing became more focused, and Fry’s engineering and production more crisp. If the early material conjures the late-’60s sounds of, say, the Youngbloods, it falls short of the glorious twin guitar crunch and soaring harmonies that made Big Star’s debut so groundbreaking.

After quitting Big Star, Bell began grasping about, both musically and spiritually. The capstone was I Am the Cosmos, and two LPs here feature alternate takes from that era, revealing Bell’s painstaking craftsmanship — and his indecisiveness through multiple mixes. Until now, most Cosmos fans only knew the title track and “You and Your Sister” in their sped-up versions, as released on Chris Stamey’s label in the ’70s and thereafter considered canonical. Finally, we can now hear those songs as they were recorded, a half-step lower in pitch, more relaxed and natural in feel. It’s a revelation.

All told, this box is most compelling for the beatific and tragic tale it tells. If some of the material is spotty, one keeps listening to see how the tale unfolds, enriched by liner notes by Bob Mehr and others. It’s a fitting tribute to an artist who captured ecstasy and sadness in equal measure.

At the Louisiana Hayride Tonight (Bear Family Productions)

Bear Family Productions has outdone itself this time, with a stunning 20-CD set dedicated to the Louisiana Hayride and its host station, KWKH in Shreveport. It’s fitting that the first track evokes the station itself, long before the Hayride began. The first voice we hear is W.K. Henderson, circa-1930, who recorded several 78s as op-eds for broadcast on his new station. “Hello world, doggone ya!” was his signature line. But soon the rants give way to pure music.

The success of the 50,000-watt KWKH led to the birth of the ongoing Louisiana Hayride concert series, and live recordings from the weekly shows make for the bulk of this set. Familiar names like Hank Williams or Red Sovine are interspersed with lesser-knowns like Cousin Emmy or Brother Homer. You can hear the genre evolving. As early as 1952, the announcer intones, “Well, we leave it to the youngsters when we want a swingy tune,” before Jimmy Lee plays a zippy instrumental “on his Fender guitar.”

By the middle of disc three, it’s 1954, and we hear the debut of Elvis Presley. What’s striking is how the country/jivey hop in Elvis’ first performances fits right in with the “swingy” numbers featured years earlier. Listeners at the time heard him sandwiched between a Lucky Strike ad and bluegrass fiddle breakdown, and it’s all of a piece. By the King’s later performances, of course, he dominates the proceedings, and we hear what may be the first utterance of those hallowed words, “Elvis has left the building.”

Many country stars were coming into their own throughout the ’50s and into the early ’60s. Johnny Cash, Jim Reeves, Webb Pierce, and “Ferlin Husky as Simon Crum” are but a few of the artists who can be heard, through glorious scratchy audio, honing their distinctive sounds in embryonic form. By 1960, it was over, but within its dozen or so years, the Hayride traced a pivotal, swinging time in country music, and this collection, along with the beautiful book (over 200 pages) brings that time to life.

Tags Chris Bell boxed set, Hank Williams, I Am The Cosmos, Louisiana Hayride boxed set, Red Sovine, young Elvis

Film Features Film/TV

I Saw The Light

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date April 5, 2016

The Hank Williams biopic I Saw the Light looks and feels like a movie that was scrapped halfway through shooting but cobbled together anyway, awkwardly, with many key and climactic moments left out. To patch all the disparate bits together, director Marc Abraham inserts aged, black-and-white footage of Bradley Whitford as the enormous and all-knowing head of music publisher Fred Rose, who appears on screen anytime somebody needs to explain what the hell’s going on or why anybody might care.

Instead of creating a sense of authenticity, indiscriminate use of documentary-style interviews makes the whole enterprise seem that much more insincere. One wonders if Whitford will eventually lead the cast in a rousing chorus of the “Time Warp.”

Tom Hiddleston as Hank Williams in I Saw the Light

The Hank Williams story is one part Amadeus and two parts Sid and Nancy. Here was a young, uncontrollable brat with a touch of genius whose genre-defying songs threatened a carefully maintained hierarchy in country and pop that ruffled more feathers from Nashville to New York than all the troubled hillbilly’s missed tour dates combined. There’s the obsessive, endlessly destructive marriage to his wife Audrey (Elizabeth Olsen), who was determined to become a celebrity in her own right. All of that potential drama is left on the table in favor of softer, more sympathetic characterizations, and a complete rejection of the idea that, in order for the light to matter, things need to get pretty damn dark.

I Saw the Light chooses to turn Hank Williams’ life story into an old fashioned disease-of-the-week movie, with loving shots of Cherry Jones as Hank’s ma giving Scarlet Witch some stinky side-eye.

The saddest part of all this is that Tom Hiddleston’s acting chops are considerable. Loki may be a little stiff when he’s singing and swinging, but he’s an impressive shape-shifter and a fair vocal mimic.

For all of its landscape shots, I Saw the Light has no sense of place, and even less sense of purpose. Alabama could be Shreveport, could be Nashville, it’s all the same. But what’s most fascinating about the way I Saw the Light fails, is the way it decisively treats Williams’ music — from process to performance — as a tertiary concern. Musicians like Ray Price (Von Lewis) and Faron Young (Fred Parker Jr.) are introduced to the story line but never explained, and, aside from a handful of Hiddleston performances, no attention is paid to the changing sounds of postwar country music, the people who listened to it, or the people who profited from it. The guy had some hits, but what about all of the terrible back pain he suffered? And the drinking problem! Those ill-defined mommy/wifey issues? Without the music, no amount of talking head inserts can explain why we should care.

Tags biopic, Bradley Whitford, country music, Elizabeth Olsen, Hank Williams, Marc Abraham, Tom Hiddleston, Von Lewis

Opinion

Looking Back: Reunions, Hank Williams, Davy Jones, and Al Green

Post author By John Branston
Post date March 2, 2012

Who knew that Al Green can write as well as he can sing and preach? Or that Hank Williams could heal so many broken hearts? Or that the Jimi Hendrix experience once opened for Davy Jones and the Monkees?

I learned all of these things this week because of a confluence of musical forces.

One of them was an advance copy of a new book by Rheta Grimsley Johnson, former columnist for The Commercial Appeal. “Hank Hung the Moon, and Warmed Our Cold, Cold Hearts” is not a biography of Hank Williams but more of a musical memoir. The Alabama-born singer has been a comfort and inspiration to the Alabama-born writer all her life, helping her through the awkward phases of childhood, hundreds of long lonely drives as a columnist, and the sudden death of her second husband in 2009. The book is published by NewSouth Books and should be out soon.

Changing genres, Davy Jones, the cutest of the Monkees, died this week at the age of 66. The tidbit about Jimi Hendrix was in one of the obits. If you think about it, it’s pretty funny that Jimi Hendrix opened for anyone, especially some goofy white boys. The Monkees were the sixties answer to “American Idol” — a made-for-television band modeled, loosely, after the Beatles. Their big hits came out in 1967, the year I graduated from high school, and you could not possibly avoid them. Which brings me to . . .

Class reunions. If you are 27 or over you probably have gotten an invitation to one or two of these. Now they come supercharged by Facebook and e-mail, although I wonder if many in my demographic are paying attention. The Class of 1967 is having a 45th reunion. A tenth, sure, a 25th, maybe, a 50th if you’re lucky, but a 45th?

I guess it’s fitting because in a lot of ways we were the Class of In Between.

We were the first class of freshmen in the “new” East Grand Rapids High School. Newbies in a new building. You can’t get much lower than that. The old high school, still standing, reeked of history and tradition. The “new” one, which will be 50 years old next year, reeked of newness, Clearasil, and Canoe.

The touchstone of our freshman year was the assassination of President Kennedy on a Thursday afternoon in November. The see-you-later after graduation was the riots in Detroit in the Summer of ’67. We were products of the fifties but took the full brunt of the sixties.

The significance of those events was not lost on us, even then. But the truth is, my mind was probably preoccupied at the time with impure thoughts of some of my female classmates or the first day of basketball practice the next day. In sports as in algebra, the schedule proceeded as normal. Friday afternoon, as the nation mourned, the boys who would disappoint our classmates and coaches for the next four years took the floor. The athletic production line that had churned out so many champions pretty much shut down on the Class of ’67 and we managed to break winning streaks, start losing streaks, and set records for ineptitude. We even lost in sports like tennis and swimming as other schools and suburbs discovered the wonders of country clubs, affluence, courts with nets, and indoor swimming pools. Girls had three sports options: cheerleading, water ballet, or not being in cheerleading or water ballet. But times changed. Thanks to them, the school now boasts hundreds of championships.

We lived in an unannexed bedroom community not unlike present-day Germantown or Collierville, minus the black students. The Grand Rapids ghetto was a few miles from my house but might as well have been another planet for all I knew about it. Only last year, when someone loaned me “Thin Ice,” a book of coming-of-age stories about growing up in Grand Rapids, did I learn that one of its residents was a future Memphian and musical legend.

Al Greene, as he spelled his name then, moved from Forrest City, Arkansas to Michigan when he was a boy and lived there for about ten years. His story, “Half a Chance to Prove Myself,” is the best one in a very strong collection, for my money. He took and gave some beatings, learned that his gift was for singing not fighting, formed a group called Al Greene and the Creations, went solo, dropped the final “e” and moved to Memphis to record with Willie Mitchell’s band in 1968.

His autobiography is called “Take Me To the River.” Get it, or get “Thin Ice.” He was saved, as he tells it, by his own toughness, a caring teacher or two, and a local church. And, of course, that voice.

Tags Al Green, Davy Jones, Grand Rapids, Hank Williams, JFK assassination, Rheta Grimsley Johnson