• Rating:
Los Angeles
City that either dodges you or tramples you
in its “eternal dust” viscosity of myth and dystopia, urbanism and nature, imagination and reality…
James Ellroy, after years of perdition, amphetamines and Benzedrex swabs, attained that celebrated popularity, that chimera capable of lending you an eternal smile like a page turned in Cosmopolitan. And finally, addicted to that boredom, after traveling the world, he happily returned to that native Los Angeles curse, after many years rediscovering that breathtaking beauty that always comes to life at the sight of that eternal bay, of that fetal softness.
Somebody said to me
You know that I could be in love with almost everyone
I think that people are
The greatest fun
And I will be alone again tonight my dear
That stunning inlet, Dionysian curve of femininity and infinite beauty, has “screamed” for centuries in the minds of lost souls wandering at midnight through railway depots, it has washed with its glassy effluvium every contact with the flesh, emitting celebratory and desecrating flashes, that diabolical and disquieting contradiction of dream and utopia that even disconcerted Brecht.
That curse that marries music, that adoration for works abandoned and scattered in time, the creative storm, that intimate and solitary act.
Theios aner.
Thin fragment of hybris, escaped divine punishments and enlightenment that saw only reason as human perfection, underestimating the imaginative, beyond existential matter.
Strange and unlikely liaison this between Hamilton Wesley Watt Jr and William J Lincoln, reborn from a fevered illumination born in Los Angeles in '65.
Can an album with a B-side of arpeggios so soft, like “A Gift From”, be reconciled with a narrative of lyrics so heart-wrenching, with macabre tales of suicides, drug use, clandestine escapes from reality...perhaps it would be enough to be born in Los Angeles to have a different perception of it.
If listening doesn't help to form a precise idea of the band and its historical role, because of those asymmetries, between bluegrass and psychedelia, between the tracks and in the tracks themselves, the artists' own history leaves us on those heights without a lifeline, with all those unanswered questions - where do these merry-go-rounds of pain come from, who are they and then...where did they really go after the album's release?
Two budding songwriters at the dawn of the Summer of Love, enchanted by the White Album and thrilled by those 13th floor elevators, ethereal in that baroque Slab City, that project stolen from Love and the Bee Gees (yes, yes, the Gibb brothers with bordeaux bell-bottom pants) imagining (hybris!) a global Rock opera, a bit folk, a bit country and psychedelically symphonic. We can only imagine them because if little is known about their beginnings, little and nothing is known of their past after the album was released, in years when someone was still allowed the luxury of feeling invisible.
Hamilton is a thin brunette head vaguely resembling Marc Bolan while Lincoln, as in the album cover, is the perfect double of John Voight, with a full south-western look like in Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy.
Perhaps also in search of that chimeric dream of Joe Buck & Sozzo, that other strange couple adrift in that tour bus bound for Texas, that spark of emotion in the desert that became authentic virtue when it rose in pure and solidary brotherhood.
There is a slight dystonia in “A Gift From”, the first and last track of that stellar route, concentric journey with a view on the constellations of Cassiopeia, released after 5 years of intense wandering in November 1968 without any promotion, under the good star of Capitol Records, which took a big gamble and apparently left carte blanche for the album's definition, recorded between Hollywood, Nashville and the psychedelic country of The Notorious Byrd Brothers.
The album apparently was a colossal flop at the time and the duo was lost to time after the album, as Capitol invested a lot economically to market that complex of genius & madness, but genius and madness, as we know, are stardust…
Nothing new then under that scorching Californian sun but the very multiform and luciferian essence of psych-rock that permeates the whole album and in "Suicide on the Hillside " seeps as a unique and explosive episode of Their Majesties Satanic in foreign land, with those fuzz slashes and that intermodulation of drums, bass, guitar and voice possessed by a lovely torment, that vibrant lash that is denied to no one who is exaggerating with Reason.
But the great surprise is in that second track, "The Stone River Hill Song", lost all hope of redemption, with the trench coat soaked in tobacco, with the last train of the night rediscovering that magical expedition of Dillard & Clark, that lush and bluegrass troupe that tears up and raises the bar of memories.
With breath becoming labored and eyes returning to the same shiny state as the first time you were taken by that Chateaubriand madness of that murderous 5-string banjo plucked by that unrepentant autoharp, capable of dissolving into a laughing chaos among the geometries of those fields all that Byrdian haze, that lovely progressive bluegrass that recalls that brilliant and solitary soul of Bill Monroe.
At the same time "Did you Get the Letter " is a tremor of craters, it's transition within transition, in simple words...sublimation.
The movement is concentric, the sound is all a flow and reflux, the destination seems to be the City of Angels, that synthesis of Paradise and Apocalypse, but the true triumph is in the movement, in the journey...
Probably the essence would lie entirely there, in the cipher of that alien and hypnotic message, blurred in that psychedelic mash-up in White Album territory; a double piano mandolin overture followed by a delicate banjo arpeggio, en plein air on screens visions of catharsis, invasion of effects, gunshots, sound effluvia, while a siren anticipates, divisively, the return of the soft original arpeggio, with the fuzz pedal still smoking.
50 years later, those sirens still echo in the mind, but we are not yet in the lane but under the shady protection of Danny Lee Blackwell, in that track "Cream Johnny" from that R&B Outlaw album, historical appeals of psychedelia and here too of that lovely Los Angeles waywardness…
The other half of that message could be found in the pastoral sweetness of Lady Bedford, after the guitar explosions of the first part of the album it's now the pauses of the harpsichord setting the rhythm for a dreamy voice, after crossing a hard musical landscape the sound softens in the splendid and entirely orchestral ballad of Hollywille Train, reminiscent of the early Walkabouts.
Digging into the grooves and the depths left by listening to this album after a series of listens, in the land moved by the brownish waters one glimpses that state, of passage, that transition and that flow to which the band's sound refers you, with folk rock and Bluegrass atmospheres that suddenly tinge with psychedelic. Probably those peremptory changes, even existential ones that Sir Arthur Lee referred to precisely in that period.
Gentle but fatal, that macabre dream haunted by the fuzz guitars of "World" closes the album with that farewell note to the world - “I hope that one day we will meet again” - always in Los Angeles.
Loading comments slowly
