Rock - what are you listening to?

[markof]

What a great forum for discovering new music.
Am downloading Son of the Black Peace (16bit flac - £3.96) right now.
Cheers for that.

[Claus]

Good to hear I am not the only one spending hours on proguitarshop listening to demos... ;) Must look into this guy. Thanks for sharing! :D

[cybot]

Stunning guitar playing,puts a smile on my face.Wouldn't you just love to listen to Dean
live in an intimate venue.
I must get the brown bear E.P.

The Brown Bear is absolutely stunning, especially in 12" 45 RPM guise :). I got my copy direct from Dean himself....

[cybot]

Good to hear I am not the only one spending hours on proguitarshop listening to demos... ;) Must look into this guy. Thanks for sharing! :D

You're welcome Claus :)

[cybot]

What a great forum for discovering new music.
Am downloading Son of the Black Peace (16bit flac - £3.96) right now.
Cheers for that.

You're welcome too Markof :)

[DaveF]

[mcq]

I've been listening a great deal to Judee Sill recently. The most important thing to say about her music is the sense of authenticity and commitment to her art that expresses itself so very forcefully and in such a compelling way to the listener. This is not music expressed as a series of empty gestures and postures, or as some kind of casual lifestyle choice, but, rather, it is music as life and as a form of salvation which once gave her the inner strength to kick a $150-a-day heroin habit whilst serving time in a dirty jail cell. As clichéd as it may sound, everything in her life was staked on her music which is exactly why a raw, emotive force burns through her songs in such a direct way. All of her songs are simply quietly plangent cries from the heart for some kind of redemption for what she perceived to be her past sins which continued to haunt her for all of her life. These songs are couched in religious imagery and appear to be addressed to some kind of heavenly figure. However, taken in the context of her family background - her father died when she was two and her only sibling, her brother, died when she was eight, and she grew up in a family home dominated by an abusive stepfather and an alcoholic mother - these nakedly emotional cries from the heart are directed, I believe, at an imaginary mother/father figure, earnestly begging for a love which she never received. Perhaps the best example of this is the extraordinary transcendental pieta that is The Kiss, which strikes me as nothing more or less than an image of a child with her arms outstretched to heaven, waiting for the redeeming touch of the holy breath and to have all her tears wiped away. The childlike nature of these songs indicate to me an interrupted childhood, an adult in name only, somebody who didn’t really understand life outside her music and books. Relationships with men in particular appeared to be emotionally fraught affairs which burned intensely for a while before fizzling out in a dramatic fashion. She appeared to be deeply distrustful of love and of the self sacrifice that such a commitment would entail. She was more at ease with purely physical relationships and, indeed, she thought nothing of turning to prostitution as a means of supporting her drug habit. All of these intensities are wrapped up in her music, which gradually reveal themselves and relinquish their emotional textures only with close and repeated listening.

One of her major influences was Nikos Kazantzakis' controversial masterpiece of spiritual enquiry, The Last Temptation. According to a 1972 interview that she gave to Rolling Stone, "Kazantzakis touches my heart more than any other author ever touched my heart". The opening image of Jesus as a young man building crosses for the Romans inspired her song, Jesus Was A Crossmaker, but there is more to it than that. The two most significant characters in Kazantzakis' book are the prostitute Mary Magdalene and Judas Iscariot, the most villified characters in the Gospels but, in The Last Temptation, the two people who inspire Christ to the fulfilment of his destiny. One of the most startling scenes in the book is an evening meeting between Jesus and Mary, after the last of her clients has left her home. She is resting on her bed in her darkened room when Jesus suddenly interrupts her rest. What follows is an angry, violent scene during which Mary unleashes a torrent of anger on Jesus. One line has always stayed with me: "I don't want your God. My salvation is my road of mud". During another 1972 interview (with the NME), when discussing her background in her usually frank way, she stops and simply says, "Out of the mud grows a lotus", a beautiful reference to the scene in Kazantzakis' book which ilustrates perfectly her state of mind at this point in her life (perhaps her happiest). This identification with Mary Magdalene - a woman living with her sins in need of redemption - has always struck me as significant in the context of Sill's life.

Her greatest achievement, and the one which offers us the deepest insight into this most troubled of minds is The Donor. Undoubtedly Sill's most personal and searching work, it is a deeply haunting and acutely distressing listen.

I'll chase 'em to the bottom
Till I've finally caught 'em
Dreams fall deep...
Where voices come a-chimin'
Moanin' and a-rhymin'
Warning me, their words are
Ringin' and a-whinin'
Hear 'em weep...
Songs from so deep
While I'm sleepin'
Seep in....
Sweepin' over me
Still the echo's achin'
"Leave us not forsaken"

The Donor begins with an insight into the creative inspiration for her music. Many of Sill's songs were directly inspired by dreams that emotionally resonated with her on a deeply subconscious level. Here we see her diving into the depths of her dreams to trace the roots of chanting voices that she hears. The further she descends the more she realises that these are voices of remorse which are firmly and deeply embedded in her psyche, and which, while she sleeps, overpower her completely with their cries for redemption and mercy.

So sad, and so true
That even shadows come
And hum the requiem...

O waters of the moon
Your vapors swirls and swoon
Your wake is wide...
And sorrow's like an arrow
Shootin' straight and narrow
Aimin' true, its sting goes
Reachin' to the marrow,
Silence cried...

This is a song about death. The waters of the moon initially make one think of the Sea of Tranquility and what could be more dreadfully tranquil than the waters over which one is ferried by Charon to the underworld of the afterlife over which Pluto resides. And there she sees the shadows, or shades, of the dead who sing of their profound sorrow as they expiate their sins and wait for redemption. Sill sings from deep personal experience of the localised and surgical precision with which the deepest, most profoundly existential sorrow goes straight to the marrow of your very being. The words, "silence cried" recall "death's silent starkness" and "silence is your tomb" from an earlier song, My Man on Love. This is a song that was born out of a deep depression, and, I think, a song that acutely pained her to write. Perhaps the most frightening thought to her was that death would not mean an end to her suffering, but rather a purgatorial experience that would extend her pain as she expiated her sins on earth.

As finely crafted an achievement as the studio version of The Donor undoubtedly is, I believe that, in terms of sheer emotional force, it is transcended by the live version that appears on the Live in London CD. The vocal introduction to this version is significant, particularly the bald admission that “I don’t deserve any more breaks because I already squandered them in weird places”. Personally, I find it very hard to listen to this introduction. It takes the listener to a dark place of solitude and seclusion, whose doors are tightly locked against the outside world. This is a vocal performance of a weary and deeply despairing young woman, who sings her song of songs with the finality of an epitaph and it is no coincidence that she alters the lines, “so sad and so true, that even shadows come and sing the requiem” to “so sad and so true, that even shadows come and sing my requiem”. It is paining her and draining her quite audibly to sing this song and she can barely manage a mumbled “thank you” as the applause dies away. I think that, by the time of this concert, she had burned her bridges completely with David Geffen and she knew it. Her UK tour was nearly complete and her career as well. The next six years would see a gradual but sustained retreat to heroin addiction. It is worth pointing out how little she cared about preserving any kind of legacy. She appeared to simply crave the dark, silent vacuum of oblivion that heroin offered her, an anaesthetizing, non-judgemental, cocoon of dark peace that appeared to isolate her and cushion her from the world around her. She made no attempt at all to memorialise her life. She pushed aside friends that tried to pull her back from the abyss, and turned forever inward into the dark recesses of her soul.

However, the one song which seems to reference an end to this darkness is Crayon Angels, the first song on her first album. The more I hear it the more I think of the drug overdose that ended her life and the song appears to be a series of last thoughts on her life before passing on, effectively a laying down of her weary tune.

Crayon Angel songs are slightly out of tune
But I'm sure I'm not to blame.
Nothing’s happened but I think it will soon,
So I sit here waitin' for God and a train,
To the Astral plane.

(Crayon Angel songs are a particularly apt way to describe all of her songs. You think of childish drawings depicting a heavenly figure coming down from above to save us from this world of woe. They appear out of tune to Sill because her life is slowly ebbing away. “I’m sure I’m not to blame” refers to a sense of absolution, the heavy burden slipping from her shoulders.)

Magic rings I made have turned my finger green.
And my mystic roses died.
Guess reality is not as it seems,
So I sit here hopin' for truth and a ride,
To the other side.

(Hopes and dreams have come to naught. In her “hoping for truth”, she prays for redemption. To recall Dylan: "At times I think there are no words/But these to tell what's true/And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.")

Phony prophets stole the only light I knew,
And the darkness softly screamed.
Holy visions disappeared from my view,
But the angels come back and laugh in my dreams,
I wonder what it means.

These are the most chillingly prescient of all her lyrics. “Phony prophets” is a direct reference to David Geffen, a man in whom she placed all of her faith once upon a time, but who cruelly crushed her musical dreams. The “darkness softly screaming” is a direct reference to the “crying silence” of The Donor and the realisation that her career had come to an end, and also a chilling visualisation of the deep despair that must have tortured her continually. Perhaps the laughing angels are mocking her but I would prefer to think that she did, indeed, receive the redeeming love that she craved for all of her brief life. Ultimately, she doesn’t have a clue about what this dream means, but its resonating force is so strong that she feels compelled to write a song about it. It would take another ten years before it would finally dawn on her what it all meant.

It is hard to write about Judee Sill’s music, especially in the context of the life she lived. I first came across her first two albums four or five years ago. The first few listens left me reasonably nonplussed, with an abiding impression of an atypical 1970s Southern Californian singer-songwriter, but without Joni Mitchell’s gifts. It must have taken quite some time, divided by weeks and months of listening to other music, before it started to dawn on me just how special this music really is. I have an abiding memory of listening to Heart Food on repeat late one Sunday night and having to physically break myself away to go to bed. And since then the emotional pull of her music has only grown stronger. However, it is impossible to separate the triumph of the songwriting achievement from the tragedy of her life, the fear of which seems to inform every word of her songs. Quite literally, she put her life and all its requisite hopes and dreams into her music, fearing that failure would mean a return to a life of crime, drug addiction and prostitution and praying that her musical dreams would be reciprocated. I really get the overriding impression that she staked absolutely everything on her music, and when her musical career stalled, something withered and died inside her and she gradually but systematically imploded over time. When all is said and done, however, what we are left with is no more than a fleeting glimpse of somebody who gave us some of the most sincere and powerfully affecting songs in the popular music canon. And that is more than enough.

I stood unwound beneath the skies
And clouds unbound by laws.
The cryin' rain like a trumpet sang
And asked for no applause.
Lay down your weary tune, lay down,
Lay down the song you strum,
And rest yourself 'neath the strength of strings
No voice can hope to hum.

("Lay Down Your Weary Tune" - Bob Dylan)

[fergus]

On vinyl....





....takes me waaayyyyy back!!

[DaveF]

That's quite a write up there Paul! Thanks for making the effort in sharing your thoughts with us.

[DaveF]

Double LP version plus "The Kitchen Tapes" on CD.