Lou Reed: Perfect Day

Somewhat in praise of television, this. I thought it was glorious, give or take a couple of voices, when it first came out. 1997. Time flies.

It flies even further back to Lou Reed’s original. 1972. What was I doing then? Nothing I can write about here, I suspect. Both versions are perfect, as they should be.

Then, just recently, I had occasion to learn the song. Here are the chords, in concert pitch:

Intro: F Bbm x2

Verse: Bbm Eb Ab C# F# Ebm F x2

Chorus: Bb Eb Dm Eb Eb/D Eb/C Bb F Gm F Eb Gm F Eb

Inst: Gm F Eb

Coda: Dm Ab Eb Bb Dm Ab Eb Bb Dm

I know the jazzers would whizz through that but I get palpitations just thinking about it.

Then I did what any acoustic sensible guitar player does: stick on a capo. Take your pick where, according to desired pitch. Lou’s version (and the BBC one) is Capo 1.

Intro: E Am x2

Verse: Am D G C F Dm E x2

Chorus: A D Cm D A E F#m E D F#m E D

Inst: F#m E D

Coda: C#m G D A C#m G D

And suddenly you’re playing the song using all the usual suspects, give or take. Isn’t that nice?

I’m no virtuoso, but there’s one thing I’ve learnt about playing guitar: find the easy way. Lou did.

Somewhat in praise of capos too, then.

Tom Waits - Kentucky Avenue

I know exactly where I was when I first heard Tom Waits. It was 1976. I was staying with a band in Boston (the Massachusetts one) and they insisted I listened to Nighthawks at the Diner. Then the very next day they insisted I listen to Bruce Springsteen’s Greetings from Asbury Park. 

Double whammy. I’ve been listening to both ever since. And I probably have more Tom Waits albums that I have Bob Dylan. Or Guy Clark. 

They’re endlessly rewarding. Even the musically antisocial ones. There are plenty of them, but there are an equal number of heartbreakingly tender ballads. And there are at least four incarnations of Tom Waits so you can dip in and out of his albums at will and it’s always something different. 

I read somewhere that at least one critic has pointed out that Waits is more of a performance artist than an honest songwriter. That’s partly true - so many characters, so many voices - but I don’t mind and in any case I don’t buy it. Because for every theatrically contrived Tabletop Joe or in your face Eyeball Kid there’s a song like Kentucky Avenue. 

‘Write what you know’. That’s the standard advice to any writer. And that’s what Kentucky Avenue is: Waits writing what he knows, direct from the deepest wellspring of human experience.

Childhood. 

It’s powerful juju, your earliest past. And there’s no doubt Kentucky Avenue is autobiographical - at least in the sense that it takes us right back to the street where Waits grew up, and the people he knew. But like all the great songs, there’s mystery here. Childhood experience is loving and dark all at the same time, and it seems to me that in Kentucky Avenue all is not what it ought to be. It plays out like a Doctorow novel written on shattered glass: the adults are all strange and threatening violence, and friendship means jumping off the roof, and kids have got switchblades and scabs on their knees and boysenberries smeared on their faces.

The details, you see? It’s detail that makes great songwriting. So by the time Waits promises to take a rusty nail and scratch his friend’s initials in his arm (just as the strings start flowing up from the mix) we’ve got a cinematic kaleidoscope in our mind’s eye. And we’re ready for it to be shattered in an expression of loyalty and impossible dreams that only kids will ever understand.

Yet they stay with us, those dreams. Long after normality has grabbed us by the scruff of the neck and made life grey. Dickens knew this; Tom Waits knows it too.

By the way, if you ever catch anyone telling you he doesn’t have a great voice, unfriend them. They’re way wrong.

Anais Mitchell: Hadestown

I can’t remember when I first heard Anais Mitchell. A few years ago, to be sure, when I stumbled across that wonderful little album of Child Ballads she made with Jefferson Hamer. Americans singing the traditional English canon, better and clearer than any English person I’d ever heard. I loved it, but I stopped there.

I’d googled her, of course. And I knew she’d done this thing called Hadestown, which appeared to be some sort of folk opera based on the classics. Neither of which was promising, to me. So I threw it onto the Amazon wish list and forgot about it. 

At least until I once again stumbled across Anais, in a video clip with Chris Thile, performing a song called Why We Built the Wall. Which sounded like it was specifically aimed at Trump but turned out to be several years old, part of the Hadestown thing. It blew me away, but when I looked again at Hadestown I saw that it wasn’t Anais singing it on the album, so I left it on the wish list and forgot about it again.

Then, a few months later I stumbled across it again, when I saw an announcement that the National Theatre was about to put on the show. So I had an idle curious moment and finally bought the album. 

I dunno what I was expecting. Some kind of half-baked soundtrack record, I suppose. They’re usually not very satisfying without the visuals: the music’s supposed to help you navigate the plot, not stand on its own. Hadestown has a plot (Orpheus and Euridyce, no less) but you don’t need the story to enjoy it. It’s a completely original thing that swerves joyously through the musical references: there are echoes of Dixieland jazz and Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen and Ruben Gonzales, held together by a series of terrific vocal performances. Ani DiFranco is all sinister good time gal as Persephone, Greg Brown is as impossibly deep and dark as you might imagine Hades to be, and Anais Mitchell herself is tender and touching as Eurydice. And there’s much more besides.

I must have listened to it half a dozen times, just riding the music, before I paid attention to the story. But it works, despite my instinctive aversion to anything involving Greek mythology - and unlike any show or soundtrack album I’ve ever owned, I find myself paying attention all the way through. Even the two musical interludes, though I might skip past them after a while. Give me the vocals, every time. 

And now… give me the show. Different cast, of course, but I’m watching the National’s website to catch tickets as soon as they go on sale. It’ll be the first stage production I’ve ever seen where I know the music inside out before I sit down. 

Next time I'll pay attention a bit earlier. Anais Mitchell is one helluva songwriter.