playing sloppy

By Robbie on September 28, 2011

...is not much of a desideratum, generally, but when you hear something as roughly played, deeply felt, adept in the non-instrumental categories of musical technique, and bravely innovative as the Flying Burrito Brothers' Gilded Palace of Sin (1969), you wonder if it can be a positive artistic quality. The record's not just Wizard of Oz sloppy -- some continuity errors and visible wires -- it's more Bride of the Monster sloppy: people striking contradictory chords at once; childlike glissandi serving as pianism; songs that, instead of starting energetically and with forethought, are counted off anti-metronomically and sluggishly assume their time-shape as they go; between-lyrics passages where no one sounds exactly certain what's supposed to be happening. The bass playing above all is confounding. Amid a lot of diddling around above the fifth fret, you can hear the player (OK -- his name is Chris Ethridge, and he's done a lot of great playing on a lot of great records, so don't mistake this for a broad attack) arrive at a change and guess at the root, sometimes guessing right but a little late and sometimes missing and correcting.

Is this sloppiness of a "couldn't" or "didn't" variety? On the couldn't side, were they hampered by a) tight resources, b) bad monitoring, c) youthful ignorance? Or was the sound of this record the result of d) a premeditated idea to play unpreparedly and recklessly? Or is this a product of that wonderful state where can't and don't conjoin -- e) stoned? Based on my limited and at best second-hand knowledge of the characters and the era, I would guess c), d), and e). It's interesting to see what the band, or the bandleaders, thought was important to be careful about. The songwriting is focused, engaging, and to some extent has to have been labored over. Likewise, the vocal performances have benefitted from exacting attention -- say what you like about Gram Parsons's shakiness, but his pitch here is good, and Chris Hillman's is better, and they phrase like brothers. I was surprised to hear Pete Kleinow's playing after many years away from the record. He's really the guy that makes the instrumental performances passable, in my judgment. At places like the coda on Juanita, the tops of Sin City and Wheels (not sure if that's him playing on the latter), and the daring, long, psychedelic swoops that color Christine's Tune, he demonstrates that, of all the players, he's the one who gave serious thought to what to play before the tape started rolling -- and his ideas were on-target.

A collective in which each man is unfetteredly pursuing his own standard of quality in isolation sounds like the condition for this kind of result, in which some excellent key ingredients stand out in a somewhat inharmonious, confused melange. A strong leader is wanted. Maybe one who is older, or at least soberer. That said, a doctrine of tighter scripting and looser performing energizing each other, if that was at all behind this record, is not a dumb doctrine. Enough great records have bloomed naturally from that symbiosis that someone was bound to make it an official theory. My friend Jon Spiegel made the shrewd point that if the songs had featured a little crowd noise and clapping afterward, you might not give the sloppiness a second thought. It's knowing that they had the time, money, environment, and technology to get it right, but went at it like a live record instead, that gets the listener wondering. Is this an approach, or what? If the mistakes are enough to make the average listener raise a baffled eyebrow, how weird is it that the guys that actually made the music heard the playback and nodded, "Yeah, that'll do it"?

As a check against overthinking the psychology of the creators, or indulging in the usual stereotype of Gram and his brethren as a merry band of turned-on youngbloods shaking up the dour old church, I feel the need to remind myself where country music was in 1969. The musical landscape is so comparatively settled and stodgy now, it's a challenge to leap back; but the FBB emerged less than one generation after Elvis Presley's breakthrough, and less than a decade after the Chet Atkins values shift in country production. Sedate, sophisticated country music was clearly the regnant commercial model in 1969 (Johnny Cash's prison recordings notwithstanding), but you only had to be 18 years old to have had clear personal memories of a time when the model was very different -- when the session player on a country hit would have been, say, Moon Mullican not Floyd Cramer, or Lightnin' Chance not Bob Moore, when the music cheerfully extolled narcotics and good times. The advent of Elvis of course forced country to redefine its audience and sound (and bluegrass likewise moved uptown, from Stanleys to Osbornes, in a calculated way and over the same brief period). When the country business divorced itself from the youth market the stage was set for the next Elvis-like talent to reset a connection whose sundering was recent and not very deep. This turned out to be Gram Parsons, who didn't set the world on its ear as Elvis did (though the Eagles, Emmylou Harris, and urban cowboy music, for whom he paved the way, constitute no minor industrial impression) but who gave the music a cochlear tweak that subtly altered its balance. The reverberations have been lasting. 

When I thought to mark the anniversary of his death by performing Gilded Palace, I didn't consider the sloppy factor, and when I started refreshing myself on the performances, I suddenly seemed to see five middle-aged men in other Chicago neighborhoods also scratching their heads over the perplexing savagery of the object of tribute. This was the case when we met at the club. "What the fuck?" -- Bassist. "This is perfect for the occasion." -- Pianist, striking ill-tuned keys of house piano. "Well, they sold a lot more records than we ever did..." -- Steel guitarist, bringing everyone some perspective. And guys who haven't offered up bold innovations or sold very many records really should have some humility before others who have and have. It's hard. Sloppy work by successful musicians is dismaying to us marginal yeomen due to some uneasy implications. It suggests we are on a path of mistakenness or irrelevance, with our commitment to organization, sensitive listening during performance, intonation, mental preparedness, and so forth. That some handsome youngsters could bulldoze all this with simple charisma and run laughing to the bank is discouraging enough; but to admit that as a valid artistic strategy is almost repulsive. Second, it brings up a question which I think is fundamentally unanswerable: when you recreate recorded music, do you recreate it hit for hit and note for note or do you recreate its intent? Either way is untenable, because you're either putting yourself in a corrective position of authority toward the music, or you're striving to recreate randomness, someone else's limits and mindset -- deliberation is fatal to the outcome.

Which brings us face to face with the futility and absurdity of "tribute" performance, the thing that brought us here to begin with. Well, we all love the music and it's a kick to dive into...but "tribute" performance is really a blind alley to steer away from. The problem with musical mimicry is often shielded by the fact that you're mimicking up, so to speak -- apeing a player who's better, or "better," than you are. It's when you mimic down that you may discover that the challenge isn't merely mechanical; it finally comes down not to "better player" or "worse player" but to "different person."

As I got more interested in the intent of these different people that came up with this different music in 1969, I looked at some old Burritos footage and read some more recent interviews with Chris Hillman. He seems remarkably clear-eyed on the era and his role in it -- especially remarkable given that, by his own account, he cleaned up some of Gram's messes, worked polishing co-writes while Gram slept, kept the band going after Gram left it, served if inadvertently as a level-headed, hard-working Abbott to an irresponsible, flamboyant, mythogenic Costello. In Hillman's estimation, Parsons was a good writer in a world stocked with good ones (and less-heralded); Gram wrote, he thinks, a number of good songs and a handful of great songs, many of which had co-writer names attached. This strikes me as a fair and honorably motivated effort to give Parsons his proper size against the breathless death cult that rose from his ashes. Still, from the point of view of someone younger and uninvolved, the throughline of Parsons's credit in a slew of consistently fresh and outstanding compositions is hard to explain as a collaborator's good luck. And are songs such as "Sin City," "Hickory Wind," "Juanita," "$1000 Wedding," "In My Hour of Darkness," "She," "Christine's Tune," "Las Vegas," "Hot Burrito #1 (I'm Your Toy)," and "Still Feeling Blue" -- and the list could go on, a bit -- "good" or "great"? How many country songwriters of like achievement are we talking about? More than ten? Hard to say, because there's no metric to help judge -- they're just such memorable, universal-feeling yet completely personal songs.

One interviewer I caught on youtube asked Hillman what he thought his highest achievement as a songwriter was. I found it striking that his answer was not any of the above titles, or "Time Between" or any of the other tunes he wrote or cowrote while with the Byrds, but "Love Reunited," his first hit song with his highly successful 1980s group Desert Rose Band. To go back to the film analogies, Flying Burrito Brothers is to Desert Rose Band as Bride of the Monster is to Psycho. The singing of Herb Pedersen and the soloing of Jaydee Maness and John Jorgenson truly are as thrilling to experience, as expressions of fully developed technique, as Martin Balsam falling backward down the staircase as the camera tracks him. When I watched some relatively "produced," multiple camera videos of the group's live performances on youtube I was reminded of their sharp-honed attack. Yet I distinctly remember that when I opened for them at a club in about 1988, their stage show was disappointing; it seemed as pre-set as a Vegas act but without the determined effort of a Vegas act to forge a relationship with the onlookers. Though it's too harsh a critique to use against a country band full of great musicians, I was reminded once again of H.L. Mencken's words on the trap into which skilled writers fall as their careers stretch on:

"Every such man, soon or late, falls a victim to his professional technic. His very skill at publishing his notions degenerates inevitably into mere virtuosity, and so he becomes a sorry mountebank, juggling brillinatly a set of gaudy but increasingly hollow balls."

Ignoring the imperative to improve one's own technique falls into the "can't" camp. It's embedded in any mentally healthy artist's idea of his life's story that this year's work will improve on last year's; and as a practical matter, no matter what stimulation may be offered by radical or outlandish delights, the path to progress is in a hawk-eyed chipping away, not in wholesale destruction and reinvention. "Acts" may try to resist any change whatsoever, but any musician who loves his craft, who takes heed of what his predeccessors did and his peers are doing, has a self-improvement narrative that trains hard on his technique and can't just be willed away. Now that I've been releasing music for twenty-some years (since the 1970s if you count what are for some reason called "demos," since 1989 if you count only music released on outside labels) I've noticed that there is a likeable quality to the ignorance in my first record or two. I certainly hope that there's some way to compensate for its absence as I grow older, but to recreate it, as much as some of my audience might wish it, is patently impossible. Record to record and year to year, one works through the progression A, B, C... Each step represents a smaller and subtler gradation, and no turning back; with each you trade a little ignorance for -- what? It's all very sad in a way, verging as it does on the biblical account of the fall of man.

If Gilded Palace of Sin is a document of beautiful ignorance -- I think it's both that and something that could have sounded better if played a little better -- then it's fascinating that it should land where it did, within popular music's version of an ancien regime. Country music is the musical category that firmly enshrines experience. Whether in forms commercial or non-, it deliberately evokes the distant past, and makes positive use of the artifacts of physical age or experiential wear in vocal performance (Hazel Dickens, George Jones, Ralph Stanley, Fields Ward, Vern Gosdin, Grandpa Jones, on and on). An old person singing with authority about irrecoverable things -- the persona Parsons was headed toward -- is moving and potent. A young person singing about the same, with recklessness and imprecision and less-than-complete knowledge, can (as we now know) make for captivating contradictions. Gram's music, with and apart from the FBB, maintains a strong interest quite apart from the circumstances of his departure, which shouldn't be brought to bear on his work as much as they have been. The music's curious tension, and its permanent value, lie in those contradictions, right there on its jarring surface: youth/death, craft/carelessness, religious denial/corporeal delight, country/rock.