When I was in my late teens, I had one of those Proustian moments when someone played Mose Allison’s Parchman Farm on a local FM station and I was immediately transported back to the livingroom floor of our house in Tiburon where I would hang out with pencils and paper and draw whole dogfights on the vast expanse of the reverse of a discarded blueprint. I suspect that it was KPFA on the tuner, else it would have been an unlikely selection for radio, and likely still is. Allison (bio at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mose_Allison )
has done covers of some folks, and had many of his tunes covered by other folks, a lot of which missed the spirit of the original works, but, then, Allison is angular and understated, not attributes of the Who, John Mayall and others who’ve been inspired by Allison, thought I thought Bonnie Raitt’s cover of “Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy” worked really well. I saw Allison a number of times, mostly in pretty relaxed and informal settings, in a club, with drinks, and while the experience was never astounding, it was always satisfying. Allison turned out to be a minor chronicler of American music, in somewhat the same way of Ry Cooder, Jerry Garcia and Bob Dylan, though in a much lesser scope. And the best thing is his wit, often tart and cutting, and as pointed today as it was when it was penned, reminding me of the experience of listening to the satire of Tom Lehrer from the ’50s and ’60s that still rings true today, perhaps moreso than ever.
A sprinkling of little gems:
-Stop this world, let me off. There’s just too many pigs at the same trough.
-I don’t worry about a thing ’cause I know nothin’s gonna work out right.
-A young man ain’t nothin’ in the world today: the old men got all the money.
-If silence was golden, you couldn’t raise a dime. Your mind is on vacation and your mouth is workin’ overtime.
-A bad enough situation is sure enough gettin’ worse. Everybody’s cryin’ justice, just as long as there’s business first.
All of this is just a bit of Friday inspiration, keeping all the vitriol in perspective.