Music Writing by Carson Arnold
Music Writing by Carson Arnold
UNFOLD ME INTO THE WINGS I AROSE
Send me your music, I love it! I love it! These days, most of what oboes to me in the mail is pretty good; decent to a fair fly flying. You sure? Yaa. You gotcha' usual burrow yawn, but you know, nothing that can't been blown elsewhere. Though what wrinkles the cringe is the dishonesty, the point where the singer takes the pedestal, upholds the drive, but sees fear yonder, and backs down to conform with a gallon of soap gathered 'neath the troth of came home/laid on my bed lyric tra-la-la...Entertainment for short, but hey, even Sinatra's Columbia years took extreme measures to elect and impeach this all at the same swooned moon. Also, new spoken word is tough to critique, too, simply cos'/cuz' half the earth thinks they're a "po-et", but in the work- the music- the isis po' bitches they were far bloody-hell away from such a bell tolls, and "jesus, how dare you listen!!"- look here: Ohio sonic-drifter Charles Cicirella's The Haunted, Frightened Trees sharply takes this blind corner well and more. Anyway, now and then outta the ash and ballroom succumbs a lone wonder, a requiem to only the unfinished symphony. Ladies and gentlemen, let Bill Parker's 31 Minutes BEGIN! or, end, or, stop, or, I dunno. Hey, all I do know is that this one's A RUBY!! (he screams out the window. A dog faintly barks). A real medium cool and all that. Lemme hone you in: Parker is an ordinary name, suit to bompi mystery novels and coated all through this here nation's phone books (four in my woodsy area). So take a bus, lean your head against its back window (indeed the orb of the album), and roll through the tinted adagio of pickets, steam, and upchuck, where it all defines a sense of common prosperity and excellence into the distant blaze, visible in the eyes and smell of Bill Parker's songs...endless to the roadway night, to the morning felt wide.
This doesn't look like Kansas, Todo. First off, nah, 31 Minutes ain't served folk. Nor a finagle off it. No honky-tonk boom here either. Trust me, seniors and kids, it's nothing you've typically heard boom. Some sort of rough vibration, like watching a butterfly swim out of a junked Buick. Recipient to all one's essential tremors, probably in the most pale of a tender feet this music has wand on by. "Folk?" I balked when listening, "I dunno, what is it? Cue me in, have I missed something here?" His daughter tags it as "miminalist depresso music", but Parker prefers to clothe himself as hibernating in that of traditional American forms, currently constructing more upbeat tones to a newer record up in arms work (and that there american form thang- that ain't a nookie of spangle-ban, that's Charles Ives! talking, man. Maybe Joe Hill). Damn, we pray he doesn't screw it up, though. I've heard depresso 'zik, too; the contents can be stirred: One lovely album finds more instruments finds boredom finds nothing. I personally wish to see Bill Parker NEVER to engage his songs recorded with any other musician EVER, and if he was here, I might swear him in under oath as well. One hand over, keep it humble, subterranean, forget the audition- and hey-ho- Bill already knows this cold, cuz' like real poets, is nocturnal and dirt to performing anywhere: he replies: on back-porches, roofs, living-rooms, couches, cliffs...no one? Someone? Exactly. 49-years, pruned with a head of Ray Davies love, he's saddled a black cat outta various acts and albums since the 60's forth (maybe some tinker a few bells? Just Another White Boy, The Truth of Masks?), and while walking the decades has salvaged many a memory, particularly one friend of whom the spirit of this album is in homage for- a person, a grand Beatles lover, his whereabouts in this day unknown alive. Parker's desolation to him, his search for life, collides in our own eclipse of the tossing, swinging day.
What we have here is ten songs, actually twelve, some better than others, some that just wave within one another like a skipping jurassic stone. This is like anything natural- like you- or maybe even me. Hit it on the nail like you mean it, son: I love this album, okay? It's nice. It ain't what I want, 'cuz- hit it again- I never knew such existed until now. That's what makes warm love, and perhaps good art. Un-refried. What solo Snooks Eaglin- his quiet tow- meant to a vine of the blues. Now was it recorded in a garage, a warehouse, a kitchen, a trapeze? Where am I now, you ask? A basic room, I respond. Nah, it's more approximate to an attic or a barn, perhaps a closet; a vulnerable second sways before each song, acoustics crack like wheaty-rafters, 'neath, possibly a glass of water applauds near arms stretch. Damn, I am now notified it was recorded in three evenings; two hours each. Damn, I really didn't want to know this, but I asked nevertheless for I wondered in duck disbelief how indeed one voice and one guitar- a rasp voice and one dry guitar- could fill a room- could sweetly implode our thoughts- with such fraction and steady-hand. Just when a song slightly begins to cream, veers into the non-chalant, Parker abducts the ear against the jagged cliff of a far different swallow of lyric, lip, and accumulating faith we've never heard. The closing feeling is of many- for instance- the enormous, itching silence removed after listening to a large Kurt Weil opera is one received. But hang hold, as I mentioned before...If you've ever been fortunate enough to float inside a train car through the starch-blown acres of the mid-west during its polar hours of the late evening and bum from the smoky lounge, hand in hair, out at the remote telephone poles all just passing, passing, passing, and passing by...waiting here lies Bill Parker. There is many a silence of small-town allegro beneath; dozing on a porch chair, afternoon, falling right into the heat of cars and chatter and stick tar- git up quick, honey, and you forget it all. This is the poignant rays of the songwriter of which separates music from crassly intruding, or damn, better yet, what this funny thing we spat as a "song" was employed to do. A point of spiraling levitation from all restraints. Good John Sebastian is in this guy, as is some weak Neil Young, but most notable, Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska trailers a strong resemblance. Definitely, babe. All that crisp pebble of a voice and bounced sound is right up the beanstalk of 70's troubadour strum, seldom revisits by today's new acts of Frusciante's and such. That whole car-hood 'n rag tune can jinx and irritate people through time, but when throttling, my, how it flys. Unlike 'ol Lou Reed who I get sick of very quick, and all that carted heroin-blues, too, but will pardon it all with this grain, this meat, of ground-level omega. Anyway, onward we bathe an eternal bath in the second track, following the brief intro where Parker sings/explains what goes on down up. Shortly a guitar shovels in, a mere breeze later his voice plows up this line, where in the arch and bend of its count you can hear and feel a world of saw-dust, tears, departs, joy, clinking bottles, and avenue secrets caught in the moment of a perfect, magical gusset: (voice rises off-balance, clear, very youthful) "just got back from my home town/and I swear to god it looks like east Berlin". His vocals are rustic but shaky, and in that individual phrase, the notes tip-toe as though wandering up two different stairways in flight. Down and up/down and up. Singing, whistling, talking gibberish, making sense. HELLO! The cymbals keep going like that. FEEL FEEL FEEL. Sorta bordered on the quake between fever and freeze and squints to see this song shivering and bumbling in the far distance and runs to catch its last remains. In fact, I even envision and imagine all of you- each one of you reading this right here, right now- packed in the backseat of a midnight car with me, blasted to the teeth of the open-road with a bit 'o Jackson Browne and Bill Parker's "east chicago/east berlin" dueling the hour within. What dawn? Easily the most handsome off the record- why not the best?- and from direct experience, will taunt even the most deadliest of dreams during ones night, trust me. Of reminiscing, of the underbelly, of scars, it's a sung tale of "sorry, kid, remember what Wolfe said: ya' can't find home." Very true. Run away, hitch a song. As if hell sunk to heaven, amazing, bright chords seem to be suspended to peel, and the rest of the woof carries an oblong trace of bastard rhapsody. Each track pours open a hoarse reflection, a bridge to many lands and waters, even despite the somewhat absent, Coltane-referenced liner notes by Stanley Booth; quote ending line: "Parker is one of those heavies; if he were a jeweler, he'd be on 10th street." Well I dunno. What not refer: Parker, he's a snack dish! Or: Parker, he's folk! I don't think so. Not today. Look up and see the ruby, it ain't jewels. Parker's inside us all; a trembling aspen; listen and release the wind.
A thick lawn grows back between the opening and a crow's glide to the closing verse in "texas moon". So I listen again. Then again. Possibly once more. Impossible without interruptions. A pack of wild cats yowl outside my pane to the woods, but somehow, all rupture fits within the music. There are indeed very few occasions when such a fantasia is blessed as is Parker's. One, foremost, street musicians. Two, Elgar and Black Sabbath. And three, the hardcore romanticism of the lean songwriter- NO! NOT THAT PITY POWDER ON THE RADIO- but the evicted intertwine of Wizz Jones and by far Jackson C. Frank, of whom, in style and vogue, I dramatically contrast to Parker- particularly Frank's previously-unreleased, last five cuts off his debut (and only album), where the raw 'you never wanted me' loganberry breathes open a few gospel cobwebs of varnish and beauty, and gad! almost histamine (though, not as pained and hurt). Yea', all that stuff, too, under the infirmary of loner vibrato, 31 Minutes- its stark fork and shovel- a solid chapter of these paths. Foretold the untold, an open screen patterns a new earth; I even wonder at times if Parker drags his hand through library bookshelves in trace of mistaken photos lost behind, and thereupon writes up his opus inscribed. It's all there, "whatever works," he added. And a lyric sings: (slow, his voice rises, carefree) "Watch for Shadows on the Water"/(softer, anticipating the next line)/ "...at the Turn of every Tide." It ain't wisdom grooming here, it's blood simple bone. No ism. What flowers the candor is the charming twinkle of a voice moving together like wind twirling inside a piano- the melodies- as unbroken waves of a child-toy's lush dream. It's all transcended from a very Lennon/McCartney approach, where the sound fluidly excludes its own bomp upon let-go and dance. But damn, I hope this doesn't amuse the tendency to popofy up and subserve his songs. Jesus, I don't wanna flip on the box to see Parker cowboyin' on some Olive Garden thang, no! SING! SING! SING! And they do. They must. Urge to take grandeur and 'piration from Alan E. Duke- a Northampton, Massachusetts. street musician, who I met today singing along side the shady doorway of a church:
"Yeah, I hitch-hiked all over the country and played on street corners. Down in Nashville, out in California, Chicago, all over the place...In this town it's not so easy. I sat out here last Saturday for about four hours and made six bucks. I wasn't there for the money anyway; I just like playing, you know. When I was out in California I was doing it everyday. I made anywhere between thirty and sixty bucks a day!...You could live on that, oh yeah."
And the 'ol doth of 31 Minutes stirs in these words of many. Native wrappings. Good-bye friend.
Hear the intimate shoulder of "i don't believe we've met" and sink feathered with "stick around". Believe in "texas moon" and christ, fight like hell for what you're hearing afterward!!! The minutes flow as a tapestry of the ear- or at least that's how I heard 'em through my decent, but ringing pair. See for yourself. It's a grizzly, beautiful deluge of self-taught spice, and yeah, the last four or five songs could be a bit topsy, less graceful than the first five, but hey, what ain't. Bill Parker sings as though his arteries are inhibited by a compressed accordion everflowing when words are in need of a song and a guitar is in need of its long lost shadow. Lyrics don't obey, but comb endlessly through. Nothing here rapes the listener; it nurtures and binds. All mirrors are removed. I like everything about it- content I am- it's pretty; the way it sounds, the way it turns, the way it reflects off all people and things I'll encounter after I'm finished writing this here piece to you. Jeez, I hope you're all still in the car with me- we've arrived, wake up. Come dig up this remarkable album from the ash- not a classic, yet ever great- but dear, one that refuses the world hasn't let ya' down just yet, 'ol timer.
Dear Bill,
Thanks for answering all my questions about your 2000 album 31 Minutes. With luck, maybe we'll meet someday if I ever take a train or something through Indiana. Meantime, please keep me up-date on any new releases. Perhaps consider that people will indeed kill for your songs. Maybe it's best you didn't know that. Oh well. I've been taping "east Chicago/east berlin" for a lot of people lately. Beautiful. Until then, I'll breathe your name to the streets and all woods surrounding. Take care...
Sincerely,
--Carson Arnold - August 3rd, 2003
*** Bill Parker, 31 Minutes (Lonesome Records 7013 17th Ave NW Seattle, WA 98117)
copyright 2003 Carson Arnold
H(ear) is an online music column consisting of interviews and articles written by Carson Arnold. As an independent writer and musician living in the woods of Vermont with his family, Carson widely encourages one to submit their art, writing or any interesting piece of material that you would like to share. H(ear) is accepting both promos and demos for review or any other valuable music-related subjects. If you wish to make a comment or would like to receive H(ear) weekly by email please contact Carson at [email protected]
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