 By Ian Reynolds
Click for Ian Sees The Future
Click for Perilous Persuit
Alison Kraus and Union Station: So Long So
Wrong
Rounder CD 0365 This was recently reviewed in BBN, but is repeated here with
a different slant...
Tracks:
S o Long, So Wrong; No Place To Hide; Deeper Than Crying; I Can Let
Go Now; The Road Is A Lover; Little Liza Jane; It Doesn’t Matter; Find
My Way Back To My Heart; I’ll Remember You, Love In My Dreams; Looking
In The Eyes Of Love; Pain Of A Troubled Life; Happiness; Blue Trail Of Sorrow;
There Is A Reason .
So, what the hell is ‘bluegrass’ anyway? AKUS would need an
18 wheeler to move their awards around, and by whatever yardstick you could
measure them, this is the hottest, most happening band in bluegrass at the
moment. So, if they say a beautiful song like Michael MacDonald’s ‘I
Can Let Go Now’ is bluegrass, you’d better believe it. Same goes
for ‘Happiness’, which is the best shot of the plot, if you ask
me.
There’s a lot of stuff here that’s going to spark vehement argument
in our tight little picking community. You can’t walk into a pick and
play a song like Harley Allen’s ‘It Doesn’t Matter’ and
expect people to be able to join in. Some of the chord sequences are decidedly
not your average bluegrass, and Krauss’s beautiful singing - by Suzanne
Vega out of Sandy Denny - adds to the growing impression that this here’s
something different and special.
Likewise the lyrics. Nothing here about pigs in pens or sour-mash whiskey,
no gratuitous instrumental pyrotechnics. On the contrary, It’s a brooding,
contemplative piece. ‘Less is more’ is the ethos here. The playing
and singing on show is deliciously tight, light and of tasteful. And it’s
trad bluegrass instruments, folks, with few exceptions. And A.K.? Has there
ever been a more sensitive singer; one that could disguise her powerful voice
as a frailty? I think not.
It was never going to be possible to imitate the double-platinum success
of ‘Now That I’ve Found You’ , the previous offering. It was
never going to be easy to keep all of the punters happy. The band has moved
onwards. Bluegrass, in my opinion, is a genre constantly developing and widening,
it’s not just a procession of imitations and reinventions. If it was,
it’d be dead by now, except as an historical side-show.
I’m reminded of an old gag. ‘How many folkies does it take to change
a light bulb... ? Five, One to change the light bulb, and four to sing about
how good the old one was. ‘
I’ve found this record to be an inspiration, especially after I’d
overcome my own preconceptions about what I was about to hear. It made me
feel that I could use the influences I’ve picked up as a musician in
other fields and add them to a bluegrass setting. Or at least that it would
be justifiable for me to try. More power to your elbow, AKUS. Love it.
Hey, that’s ‘product’ you’re picking!
Ian Reynolds
sees the future and needs a lie down
IT’S HARD FOR MOST MUSICIANS TO TAKE. You spend years honing your
craft, putting up with sore fingers - persevering for your art. Then you
think, ‘I’d like to make an album’. Enter the bank manager
or the A&R man. If you ever meet him, he’ll dissect your music to
find its’ socio-demographic market potential, he’ll discuss how
your ‘offer’ complements his label’s ‘handshake’,
he’ll want to figure out whether he can make a profit from selling your
‘product’. He’ll make you feel like a production line worker,
but he doesn’t give a bugger how you feel, if yours is a sound he can
sell...
Alright, it sounds pretentious, but playing and singing is as much an
‘art’ as yer Leonardo da who’s it’s pictures, isn’t
it? It’s what we do. If we wanted to make money we’d be doing something
else.
There’s no two ways about it. You want to sell CD’s and stay married
/ employed / sane, you’d better know how much it costs to achieve those
sales. Your marketing budget should at least equal your production budget.
Works that way on feature films, books and anything else you can think of
that is an ‘intellectual property’.
A case in point. One fruit of the editor’s world wide web efforts appeared
recently in the form of a CD, sent from Canada, for me to review. (In this
issue). Now, when I say that a CD was sent, let me just catch myself on.
Inside the impressive folder, marked with the logo of Andrew Roblin and The
Pocono Mountain Men, lay no less than a biography, a glossy A4 leaflet, an
A3 full colour poster, a sticker, a nice personal covering letter, a CD -
and a tape of the same offer for good measure. All this to get us to do a
review. (It is a good web site!)
Ten out of ten for first impressions. These are the tactics you need to adopt
if you release your own product, as this worthy band have done.
But, a note of caution. You can go too far.
It seems to me that Roblin and his confederates have confused the roles of
artists and promo guys. Let me explain.
Not ones to miss any opportunity, these Pocono boys have contorted themselves
into the ultimate in flexible propositions. Low budget? You can have the
man himself, and his considerable multi-instrumental talents. To prove it,
there are four tracks of man and guitar - even though the songs showcased
in this way might have benefited from a less dogmatic approach. The point,
obviously, is to sell more ‘gig nights’, as a hotel might seek
to boost its’ ‘bed occupancy ratio’. Next up, you can buy
a 2 piece, or a three: four of them if you’ve the dollars or all five
if you’ve won the state lottery. And the CD? That’s how your options
as a potential buyer / booker / DJ are showcased.
So the whole thing starts to feel a lot like a compilation record. A bit
tacky already, you might think, and it gets worse...
Next mistake is in the CD sleeve. Under the title ‘For Our Radio
Friends’ is a separate listing of the songs of the album, categorised
by ‘genre’. Great for the radio stations, and a must when you do
your record. But it made me feel that, had I bought the CD, I’d have
been subsidising the marketing budget.
And there’s more. There’s a tear off coupon in the packaging that
encourages you to buy a copy of this album for a friend. There are little
buffalo symbols all over the shop to show you that the track in question
complies with Canadian Government guidelines. Yes, honest.
This band seem to exist to sell product. They want to be a brand, not a band.
I guess they have ‘consumers’ instead of fans. And, as a buyer,
I’m peeved by this idea. I want to buy, in a CD, a body of work that
represents an artist’s developing talent, or understanding, or apathy,
or whatever. Isn’t music, as the most emotive of all media, the window
to your soul? Or is it a shop window?
Hands up; we’re not very good at selling ourselves. We can learn a lot
from these guys, but I hope we never loose track of our objective; which
is to play the music we love and to enjoy playing it.
Otherwise, we might as well bugger off en-masse and go sell toothpaste or
something else that doesn’t leave a sour taste in your mouth.
I’m sure this is a cultural, ‘either side of the pond’ thing.
But it’s coming. The age of MacDonaldisation, in which the uncertain,
unpredictable elements of life are removed by a process of regularisation
and standardisation.
Look what that’s done to pop music, to country. I don’t think we
really want to inflict that kind of bland product delivery on ourselves,
do we?
Confucius, he say: ‘Sell album, not soul’. And so say all of us?
So... on to the CD...
Andrew Roblin
& The Pocono Mountain Men: Perilous Pursuit
UPSTARTCD 1003
Tracks:
Plum Coulee; Pocono Jubilee; Freight Train Boogie; Lucky Trapper’s Reel;
Temperance Bear; Doing My Time; Festival du Voyageur; Don’t Let Your
Deal Go Down; Valerie’s Waltz; Peach Picking Time; Thank You; Red River
Jig; Broncho Buster; Who’s Yer Daddy; Walls Of Time; Manitoba; Ti-Jean
Bouribale
ALL THE WAY FROM EMMAUS, PENNSYLVANIA comes this offering via NWBN on
the Internet. It’s a bit like a Chinese Feast: there’s a bewildering
variety of goodies on offer, but to get to the good you have to chew on one
or two things that aren’t so palatable. There’s ‘newgrass’
(bluegrass tunes written by the band & friends); there’s
‘bluegrass’; there are hammered dulcimer tunes from Roblin’s
native Manitoba; Jimmy Rogers style yodelling songs and even an effort
categorised as ‘singer songwriter’.
Gems? A new tune called Valerie’s Waltz, the most achingly beautiful
banjo lament I’ve heard in years. Red River Jig showcases the hammered
dulcimer.
Weak Links? Plenty. I don’t appreciate the down-home folksiness of the
humour, perhaps it doesn’t travel too well: i.e. the story of a bear
visiting a bar to promote sobriety? OK...
This is a homogenised, consumer offer. It’s an album to sell at
gigs, it’s an album to get radio play. Which is all well and good, but
it feels like a marketing exercise to me, which is a shame, really. These
guys can play. The guitarist is Rich Sarkey, ex of IBMA showcase band Rabbit
in a Log. Mandolinist Scott Eager toured and recorded with Spirits of
Bluegrass.
So why does it leave me cold? Perhaps because I couldn’t rid myself
of the idea that Mr. . Roblin, had he been English, would have been an excellent
presenter of Crackerjack or Blue Peter, or a holiday tour rep. It all seems
so forced, a smile through gritted teeth.
Conclusion: so many different flavours that the taste of the thing is
compromised
Ian Reynolds, Blackley, Manchester, England
Updated 23rd Jan 1999
|