Since I've been shocked to hear from several intelligent, with-it friends who have no idea who Scott Walker is, here are two favorite tracks. These early solo career outings suggest that even though he was being mislabeled as an MOR crooner at the time, there is more than a little evidence that he is no Jack Jones.
"It's Raining Today" has those wonderfully weird and spooky strings that sound both elegant and foreboding. "Boy Child" is evidence of lyrical abilities, and an approach to emotion that is both distant and intense.
I've been a follower of Scott Walker's since the early 1980s when he was listed on all the "rock snobs" lists, and I have been on a listserv for at least a year about the film Scott Walker: 30th Century Man, a sort of anti-VH1 Behind the Music biography. Scott mentions that in his youth he drank a lot and once going home with a Playboy bunny, but that is important only in that she introduced him to Jacques Brel. Beyond that, there is none of the usual rock/pop star bio stuff of messy love life and substance issues. In fact, it's never clear if Scott has had a long-term relationship of any kind.
The film starts of leading you to believe it might have all the conventional elements of rise, fall and return. Walker went to England, had short but huge success there, went through a dry patch and then started making weirder, darker and more obscure music loved by a very specific circle. There are talking heads that include Lulu, Bowie, Eno, Marc Almond, Radiohead and Alison Goldfrapp. The most priceless moment is late in the film when Lulu, who seemed to have a crush on Scott in the 1960s and toured with him, listens to a track Tilt. Her eyes get bigger as she tries to form a smile of sorts that starts to quaver as the camera moves in, and she just sits in silence listening in apparent disbelief.
Things wrap up with him recording his 2006 release The Drift that included tunes from the perspective of Mussolini's dead lover and Elvis' twin that died shortly after birth. We see a percussionist being instructed on the proper way to beat a side of beef for a perfect sound effect and Scott's voice wailing "I'm the last person left alive" into the abyss.
People love him or hate him, and I definitely fall into the former. I was thrilled that the film ended not with him having some marvelous and joyous reunion before adoring fans, but taking off his sun glasses to explain himself and contending that he will probably just continue to get weirder and darker with the passage of time. That gave me an odd comfort.
Just when I thought Scott Walker and Lee Hazlewood were my two favorite male singers of the 1960s, I've lately been reassessing the work of PJ Proby whom I once dismissed as a light-weight equal to Bobby Sherman. But this amazing clip -- from German or Dutch TV (not clear from the mumbled intros) -- proves the range of Texan. From Motown to crooner, PJ and the visuals here give us mid- and late 1960s converging in a glorious way.
PJ was always more popular in Europe than the US, and maybe that's because you wouldn't expect someone who looks the way his does in this clip moving and sounding like that. To me, at least, that's what makes it so wonderful. That ballad that takes up the second half of the clip is an especially pleasantly bizarre mix for a soup. It as if Charles Manson is channeling Judy at Carnegie Hall with Phil Spector producing the whole beautiful mess.
Besides appearing with the Beatles and the Yardbirds, he was better known for how he managed to pour himself in tight pants that often split on stage as a part of his act.
It reminds me of some back and forth emails this week about entertainers in the 1960s, ranging from Mrs. Miller to Tiny Tim who are easily dismissed as novelty acts but were a wonderful mix of the weird, sublime, silly and prophetic. PJ was certainly more than a novelty act and not typically southern. I'll add him to my list with Scott, Lee and -- of course -- Tony Joe White who forever enriched our culture with "Polk Salad Annie" and the class line "gator got your granny".
I began this year by discovering the increasingly obscure tracks of Scott Walker and am ending it by doing the same with Lee Hazlewood who died earlier this year. I am nearing the point of being a completist with both. After growing up drawn to almost any female songwriter or chanteuse, I seem to keep finding my influences to be increasingly male in recent years.
Though I've been vaguely aware of most of Lee's songs through the years and had a number of his discs, I'm not sure why I never heard this tune, perhaps because its near perfect lyric would not speak to me so directly as it now does and was ringing in my head as I snapped today's shots above: Kiss all the pretty ones goodbye Give everyone a penny that cry You can throw all my tranquil' pills away Let my blood pressure go on its way For my autumn's done come My autumn's done come. Done come
Let those 'I-don't-care-days' begin I'm tired of holdin' my stomach in No more slinky folk dollars for me I'll take Sears & Roebuck dollars gladly For my autumn's done come My autumn's done come. Done come
Bring me water short and scotch tall A big long black cigar that ain't all Hang me a hammock between two big trees Leave me alone, damned! Let me do as I please For my autumn's done come My autumn's done come. Done come
With the forecast of the past few and next days, Scott Walker's words are once again very fitting: It's raining today and I'm just about to forget the train window girl That wonderful day we met She smiles through the smoke from my cigarette It's raining today But once there was summer and you And dark little rooms And sleep in late afternoons Those moments descend on my windowpane I've hung around here too long Listenin' to the old landlady's hard-luck stories You out of me me out of you We go like lovers To replace the empty space Repeat our dreams to someone new It's raining today And I watch the cellophane streets No hang-ups for me 'Cause hang-ups need company The street corner girl's a cold trembling leaf It's raining today It's raining today
There are a few performers for whom I am a completist -- Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Dinah Washington, Kurt Weill, Caetano Veloso, Velvet Underground, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, Ennio Morricone, Brad Mehldau, Keith Jarrett, Erik Satie, David Bowie, Chico Buarque, Randy Crawford, Maria Callas, John Coltrane, Francoise Hardy, Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, Vashit Bunyan, Cass Elliott, The Beatles, Claude Debussy. Those I've been pretty intentional about having their full library.
Then there are some that it's sort of crept up on me how much of their stuff I have and it embarrasses me -- Pet Shop Boys, Diana Krall, Harry Connick, Jr. Ute Lemper, Steely Dan (yes, I know, and I don't have some deep-rooted straight guy vein daring to creep out). But I am not lying when I say that I don't listen to them very often, though I do still have a weak spot for several tunes on Aja and most of Gaucho. At least I can still claim to be living in a home completely free of Madonna, Whitney, Justin, Celine, Britney, Mariah, et. al. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
This past fall's release of Scott Walker's The Drift encouraged me to try filling in the gaps. I've been intentional of not doing it all at once, though I've yet to find too much of Scott gets on my nerves. I especially love putting him on random play, so the stuff from 1967 and 1977 has The Drift wedged right in between. Trying to explain the evolution of Scott is really hard to explain without putting a diversity of his tunes or imagine Phil Spector producing Jack Jones singing the tunes of John Cage and you start getting an image of him. And, at the same time, he can sound like he's singing the work of any three of those artists without an ounce of influence from the others.
Today has been an overcast, pleasantly cool February day that was just right for the mood I've been in that called for just a little more Scott Walker in my life. Besides being matinee idol-modster appearing much of his life, he had a Valley of the Dolls-Imitation of Life theme song voice that you could see aunt Agnes and uncle Walter enjoying over martinees in a cocktail lounge that rotating as they peered out on the glittering new frontier. Then, just as the lyrics talk about how his heart wil break, he goes through a break down as the music does the same, his velvet baritone never completely breaking. And he's also sung about getting slapped on the ass like a queer on Next. How can you not love this guy!
So imagine my delight when I walked into the Virgin Megastore this evening to discover a two disc German import marked at $25.98 only to have it marked down to $6.98. Six-ninety-eight, I said to myself as I walked to the door, sure the buzzer would go off alerting the manager of a clerk's error. Heading up Stockton, I pulled out the receipt, and sure enough there it was on the receipt -- an actual bargain at the Virgin Megastore. There is a god afterall. Now I have Soctt singing the theme songs from movies that include The Sterile Cuckoo, The Fox and Mary Queen of Scots. The last one has to be the best, something called. This Way, Mary. Now I just have to wait for the screening of 30th Century Man once it makes it across the big pond.
Location: San Francisco, California, United States
JunkThief is your typical Gallic Jew boy born on the Great Plains, went to Gotham and Ouagadougou and Kathmandu before settling in San Francisco's Mission District. Now he searches the dark alleys of that city to find good conversation, Weimar culture and (but of course) the perfect door knob.
