Lowe-Fi: The Production Genius of Nick Lowe

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"As a producer, my biggest break came during working on "Watching the Detectives" and I discovered where the echo button was on the tape machine."
Nick Lowe

Despite being a fabulous song-writer, a smart quipper and passably handsome, Nick Lowe never hit stardom. Part of the reason might be that Nick, a long-time bass player, never loved the spotlight quite enough. From Kippington Lodge to Brinsley Scwharz, to Rockpile to Noise-to-Go and Little Village (and those are just the more famous ones) Nick always seemed to want to be part of, not just a band, but a team of equals. He used to seem a bit like a McCartney in search of his Lennon.

Further proof of his knack for team-work is the number of classics for which he's sat in the producers chair. Despite a catalog stacked with witty pop songs, more people probably own a song that Nick Lowe (more here) produced than one he performed. In interviews he often expresses amazement about this, as he believes he's no whiz at the mixing board. And certainly he's no sonic architect like Phil Spector or (shudder) Mutt Lange. After all, he earned his nick-name, Basher, for his recording philosophy of "bash it out now - tart it up later". But that gut-level style fit the times so perfectly and even when times changed and things got electronic ("Any barnyard horse can kick a synth" he once said) Nick always kept the songs and the people who played them right up front.

1. Graham Parker Back to Schooldays
Nick's first gig at the controls was this album, where much of his former band, Brinsley Schwarz, were now backing up this fiery little British soul-punk under the name the Rumour.



2. The Damned New Rose
Nick also produced what is commonly called the first punk rock single (which contained a love song and a Beatles cover - hmmm).



3. Snuff Rock Gobbing on Life
C.P. Lee (of Albertos Y Lost Trios Paranoias who deserve a post of their own) strikes again with first punk piss-take, which mocks the Pistols, the Damned and the Clash in a few short minutes.



4. Wreckless Eric Whole Wide World
Lowe's only production for Eric was this single, but it's a monster that will never die.



5. Elvis Costello Watching the Detectives
Lowe and Costello's partnership is another example of his ability to draw out the best in others, I mean how else can you explain how Nick produced Elvis Costello doing what many consider the definitive version of Nick's own "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding"?



6. Dr. Feelgood She's a Wind-Up
The Feelgoods may be the very embodiment of pub-rock and they certainly cranked up the tempo and the volume of what began a a bit of a laid-back movement.



7. Carlene Carter Baby Ride Easy
Johnny Cash's step-daughter (and child of country legends, June Carter and Carl Smith) married Nick Lowe who produced some hit-an-miss albums for her. Strangely, her move to Nashville, thankfully accompanied by her husband (and Tom Petty sideman), the late Howie Epstein, began her prime period.

Video here.

8. Mickey Jupp Old Rock n' Roller
Jupp is another lesser pub rock vet (he did write "Switchboard Susan", which got covered by both Nick himself and the Searchers when they recorded at Dave Edmunds' Rockfield studios).



9. The Pretenders Stop Your Sobbing
I suppose there are more popular nominees for the absolute zenith of Chrissie Hynde's catalog but I'd say she's made a fine, storied career out of never quite topping this one.




10. Richard Hell Kid With the Replaceable Head
Nick produced Hell? Yup, again just the once. (The 'video' is for the Destiny Street version produced by Alan Betrock and Hell.)



11. John Hiatt Love That Harms
Nick's would have a strong hand in bringing Hiatt's taut song-writing to a broader audience but not just yet.



12. Johnny Cash Without Love
When Johnny Cash is your step-father-in-law you better write him a damn good song, you better play on it and produce it in your basement. Much later, Nick's "The Beast in Me" became the linchpin in both his and Johnny's mid-nineties comebacks.



13. Fabulous Thuderbirds Diddy
The fun-loving, crowd-pleasing retro-minded music the Brit's cheerfully call "pub rock", North Americans derisively refer to as "bar rock". This is probably because while the back-to-basics movement Nick and his contemporaries built was vital and alive, sometimes the North American equivalent sounded like paint-by-numbers boogie even when, in the Fabulous Thunderbirds case, they have Stevie Ray Vaughn's brother in the band and had some middling eighties hits.

14. Paul Carrack Don't Give My Heart a Break
It's Lowe's song-writing and production (alongside Carrack's warm vocals) that keeps this from descending into tinky eighties pop.

15. Moonlighters I Feel Like a Motor
Austin De Lone, from Eggs Over Easy, was the Yankee in pub rock's court and even in his next band, the Moonlighters, he kept a vigil for the sounds of '75.

16. The Redskins Keep on Keepin' On
Their goal was,"To sing like the Supremes and walk like the Clash" and Nick's job was to keep them from sounding like a Trotskyist version of the Commitments.



17. His Latest Flame Somebody's Gonna Get Hurt
A pretty, if lushly melodramatic, pop song that bears little evidence of Nick's tricks.

The Men They Couldn't Hang Greenback Dollar
Sure TMTCH were Pouges-ian but what a ripping version of this Hoyt Axton-via-the Kingston Trio song.

18. Katydids Lights Out (Read My Lips)
An Anglo-American folk-pop band, to whom Nick gave a bright sound, to no commercial avail.

19. Rain A Taste of Rain
Liverpudlian jangle, probably owned a lot of the same records as the guys in R.E.M.

20. Mavericks Blue Moon
The Mavericks, not a name you'd want to be pallin' around with in these post-Sarah Palin times, played country with a keen sense of history, which made them a perfect choice to do one song (again) with Nick.




Nick hasn't produced much in recent years. Since the nineties, he's focused on his ideal micro-niche as a writer and performer of tightly focused soul-country-pop songs over a four album Brentford Trilogy.



 

"It's either this or the biscuit factory, really."
Nick Lowe on his career

Michael Roe: Face the Rising Sun

"Holy fuck!"

I swear to God, I spoke those words, aloud, multiple times during my initial listen to Michael Roe’s history of Southern gospel music, We All Gonna Face the Rising Sun. Perhaps it speaks to the paucity of my vocabulary or the degradation of my spirit that, when awed, I am reduced to cursing. Or maybe it’s evidence that this album demands a strong reaction. After all, some listeners may recoil at Roe’s appropriation of material so particular to another time, another place and another culture. Others may balk at Roe’s absolute sincerity, of which he said, “These songs make me tremble in my boots, I cannot sing these and not feel it every time I sing them. I picked songs I need to hear.”



Even most die-hard music obsessive will be unaware of Californian singer/guitarist Mike Roe’s almost thirty-year carer. Roe only bobbed above the surface of the mainstream when his eighties roots-rock band (sort of a heavier R.E.M.) the 77’s released a brilliant album on Island Records, the same week as U2’s The Joshua Tree, utterly consumed that label’s resources. Since then, Roe's soldiered on with the 77’s as well as adding his voice to alt-country collective the Lost Dogs.



For this album, Roe is on his own. He sang all the vocals, played almost every instrument (including the banjo which he’d never played on record before) and produced it all in his own home. What he has produced here is a virtuoso one-man show. While Roe is a very fine musician, it is his voice - a supple instrument, alternately sweet and stinging - that dominates these proceedings. Listening to him jump from a high lonesome country twang on "You Can't Go Halfway" to a deep bluesy growl on "Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down" (covered years ago by Uncle Tupelo) is damn exhilarating.



The eleven songs Roe sings on Face the Rising Sun could well act as an introduction to Goodbye Babylon, a six CD box-set of (mostly) pre-war Southern gospel, despite only a two song overlap. That prodigious collection was so revelatory that Bob Dylan was moved to buy a copy for a grateful Neil Young, who called it, "The original wealth of our recorded music." Like the Oh Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack (whose newly-recorded material included "Man of Constant Sorrow", a song Dylan had recorded on his debut album), Goodbye Babylon juxtaposed songs from all different Southern cultural traditions, illustrating just how deeply they had intermingled.



With the period songs he tracked down, Roe weaves together multiple musical idioms, ones once labeled "race records" or "hillbilly", just as Bob Dylan did on his first album back in 1962. However, on this album, Roe wears even more masks than the young Dylan, who never multi-tracked himself into a full-blown gospel quartet as Roe does on the title track!



Every guise is not equally successful. However, while the album may have befitted from the guiding hand of a strong producer like T-Bone Burnett (an old Dylan sideman who produced Oh Brother as well as Raising Sand by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant) or even Rick Rubin (who kept Johnny Cash taking chances till the end, which even the Gaslight Anthem noticed) Roe's achievement remains stunning.



On the 77’s 1982 debut album Roe sang Washington Phillips’ (via Ry Cooder) “Denomination Blues” and here he interprets Phillips’, “Paul and Silas in Jail”. Back in ’82 he nailed “Denomination Blues” but in a most literal way, as a young seminarian might rigidly interpret a single bible verse. In “Paul and Silas in Jail”, as on the whole album, you can hear Roe wrestling with the poverty, suffering and degradation intrinsic to these indomitable songs. But this album is no glum recreation, in fact the most awe-inducing thing is how Roe took a rock n' roll cliche (the "back to my roots" album, of which the blues-based album in the most trite) and instead of making a self-indulgent vanity project or a studied exercise in history, he's made a joyful fucking noise.



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(This an updated version of a review published in the Manitoban, the University of Manitoba's student paper.)

V.A. Hootenanny Special (1965)

In memory of Liam Clancy's passing, I'd like to offer a piece of my childhood. While we never owned this Zenith Collector's Item, the songs of Pete Seeger and the Clancys filled my early days. We didn't really need it anyways, in my house we sang the songs ourselves, the hacked-up records were just for rainy days.



This set, which the liner notes call a "doozer", really contains all of the contradictions of the early sixties folk boom. In fact, by '65 this collection must've already been a bit of a curio. The set puts together thirties survivor Pete Seeger, New York actors (and Irish emigrants) the Clancy Brothers, collegiate folkies the Brothers Four, easy-listening act New Christy Minstrels and the Village Stompers who aspired to be the Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass of folk. Then Bob Dylan, with two old songs, ends both the album and the quaint era of the Hooteanny.


  

Dylan, Clarke and Bragg

John Cooper Clarke's moment of fame came in the thick of the punk era, though at the time he said, "My relationship with rock is like Lenny Bruce's with modern jazz - I like the clothes and attitude." While Clarke owed a massive sartorial debt to Bob Dylan (and some attitude debt to Bruce) his oeuvre is pure, amphetamine beat poetry with accompaniment ("I try to talk in tune" he once said), eschewing the vintage folk, blues and gospel which power Dylan's work.



In contrast, Billy Bragg gained little fame during his tenure as leader of '77 punk band Riff Raff but when he returned from driving tanks for the British army to take up arms against Spandau Ballet in the mid eighties he grabbed his nation by the throat. Bragg, to commit an over-simplification, mixed up musical and lyrical elements of the Clash and Bob Dylan till you couldn't tell which was which. Now here, in the midst of his 2009 Canadian tour, he tries that mash-up trick with John Cooper Clarke and Bob Dylan, trying to do Clarke's "Evidently Chickentown" (with the original lyrics) in a Bob Dylan (circa "Desolation Row") style. There's almost four minutes of chit-chatting to begin with but the end result is fascinating.



Fittingly, Bragg praises Clarke as a poet and as Dylan has said, "Everyone admires the poet, no matter if he's a lumberjack, a football player or a car thief. If he's a poet, he'll be admired and respected." Of course this was also the man who said, "I don't call myself a poet because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist." For proof of that statement, here's Dylan working without a net.



P.S Those intrigued by Clarke shouldn't miss his beat-punk cum hip-hop, "Health Fanatic" from Urgh: A Music War.


A big thank you to regular reader/commenter Biopunk without whom this post would never have happened (though he is not to be held responsible for the rambling herein).

V.A. A Bunch of Stiffs (1977)

Speaking of Stiff Records, their second L.P. release, after Damned, Damned, Damned, A Bunch of Stiffs emphasizes the lark-ish side of the label. The hits here are Wreckless Eric's "Whole Wide World", Elvis Costello's "Less Than Zero", "Back to Schooldays" by Graham Parker and Motorhead's "White Line Fever" (officially released on Chiswick). Then the going gets weird. Nick Lowe's "I Love My Label" works as a laugh and a song, Dave Edmunds' cover of Jo Jo Gunne fulfills the rock n' roll quotient and, predating Dewey Cox by thirty years, we have "Food" by the Takeaways with a Mystery Guest you're all supposed to hope is Bob Dylan. As if, deep into his mystic-poet guise (not his best but far from his worst) between Desire and Street Legal, Dylan did boozy self-parody.

(Badges courtesy of Buy the Hour)

I Love My Label - Nick Lowe
Go The Whole Wide World - Wreckless Eric
White Line Fever - Motörhead
Less Than Zero - Elvis Costello
Little By Little - Magic Michael
Back To Schooldays - Graham Parker (uncredited)

Jump For Joy - Stones Masonry
Maybe - Jill Read
Jo Jo Gunne - Dave Edmunds
The Young Lords - Tyla Gang
Food - The Takeaways


This post owes some inspiration to Bert Muirhead's Stiff: the Story of a Record Label. After a little more digging I found this on some other blogs (including one of the first, and still one of the best, music blogs, Power-Pop Criminals). I was in too deep to stop, so to add some value (the book sells for almost a hundred bucks on eBay), here's its gossipy entry on this album:

A 'cash-in' record all the acts here were old friends of (Stiff founders) Jake (Robinson) or Dave (Rivera). The album worked well considering the ragbag of demos and finished articles from which it was compiled. The blend of heavy metal, rock and roll and new pop combined to make a potent album. Certainly, when the word punk was on everyone's lips and there was little of it in the shops, it helped fill the void.

Only the Costello and Wreckless tracks had been issued as singles and Motorhead's would have been if they had not signed to Bronze. Of the rest, "I Love My Label" was a typical Nick Lowe ditty (co-written with Jake). Magic Micheal was well-known on the benefit concert scene and was on the first Greasy Truckers album. GP's track was uncredited as he'd just signed with Phonogram but was still managed by Dave Robinson. Stones Masonry featured Martin Stone and postdated his spells with Mighty Baby and Chilli Willli (famous Jake connection). Jill Read was in fact Dave Edmunds. (Sean) Tyla was also part of the pre-Stiff crowd. The Takeaways were a studio band comprised of Lowe, Edmunds, and Larry Wallis. The nasal intonations are probably* Tyla imitating Dylan. Recording costs were minimal and the profits were probably high as the album sold like hot cakes.

* According to roberto (and backed up by the authoritative 45 Revolutions) the faux-Dylan was in fact C.P. Lee, head of faux-punk band Albertos Y Lost Trios Paranoias and author of the definitive Stiff slogan, "If it Ain't Stiff, it Ain't Worth a Fuck".

* C.P. Lee dropped by to give some excellent detail, "It was me - It was the second take - the first take was done in the 'style' of Brian Ferry - Jake and Nick asked if I could do Dylan - I did and got £25, a free copy of the album and a night out at The Marquee - Vive Le Rock!!" Bless you, C.P.

(Image courtesy of fredpopdom)

A Bunch of Stiffs L.P.