Daily Record 1/11/11: No Time Like Now-Translator (1983)

I don’t mean to drop names here, but I am Facebook friends with Steve Barton, one of the guys in Translator, a band with its roots in the early 1980s that continues to periodically reunite to play the occasional gig. Here is how this particular Facebook friendship transpired.

Cliff Hillis, an excellent musician/songwriter/producer who happens to live in the same town as me, mentioned to me awhile back that I kind of, sort of  remind him of his friend Robbie Rist, an excellent musician/songwriter/producer (who also happens to have played Cousin Oliver the last batch of Brady Bunch episodes).

So, I became Facebook friends with Robbie Rist. When I asked him to answer “Seven Questions About Creativity” for my other blog, he provided great, thought-provoking answers and suggested some other people who I ought to talk to, including excellent musician/songwriter/producer Steve Barton. Robbie directed me to Steve’s MySpace page (link below) on which I heard several Barton songs, including the evocative “Kinks On Vinyl,” which I would now list very high up on my list of favorite songs from the last 10 years, were I to make such a list. Incidentally, “Kinks on Vinyl” features some explosive drumming from Robbie Rist.

Steve’s current work is great (more on that tomorrow), but as it happens I had first seen and heard Steve as part of Translator back in 1982 and ’83.

A song called “Necessary Spinning,” which I heard on legendary Philadelphia new wave station I92 was my first exposure to Translator. I probably heard it in the summer of ’83, one of the brief periods in my life in which I was actually enthralled by a radio station. I92 was playing stuff that no one else was playing that summer, including some songs that were probably rarely played on the radio again.

It was an exciting time for me to be listening to such a station: I had just graduated from high school and was looking forward to moving on to new experiences in college. Some of those new experiences probably didn’t quite come to pass in exactly the way I was imagining they would while listening to I92 that summer, but no matter. I had my dreams of change and excitement and the music was so cool.

Just a few months into my new life at Temple University, the B-52’s came to play at the school. Translator was the opening act. I’m pretty sure I snapped up tickets the moment they were available.

I don’t remember details of Translator’s set, though I do remember liking it. The B-52’s were memorable, of course, and I appreciate the fact that I was able to see them before guitarist Ricky Wilson’s illness and passing in the mid-’80s. (I used to have a poster from this concert; if I still have it, I’ll post it here sometime.)

As much as I liked Translator, I have to admit that I didn’t follow-up by buying the album they were touring for at the time, No Time Like Now. In fact, Translator fell into that category of “bands that I’m going to get into soon.” As much as I did keep up, there were many of those bands I didn’t quite get to back in the heady 1980s.

Fast forward 27+ years and here I am acquainted with one of Translator’s members via a “social network” that none of us could have imagined in 1983. Clearly, as the album title indicates, there is no time like now for me to rediscover Translator.

The rediscovery process was facilitated by the great Princeton Record Exchange, where I found three Translator records a few months ago, one of which is today’s randomly chosen Daily Record, the aforementioned No Time Like Now. All three of the albums had the same former owner, as each of them have the last two numbers of their release year written in black Sharpie somewhere on the album cover.

No Time Like Now is an intriguing album that I clearly would have enjoyed had I picked it up after the B-52’s concert back in ’83. However, like my favorite album from that year (R.E.M.’s Murmur), I’m not sure that I would automatically fallen in love with No Time Like Now. It’s a grower, but lots of great records are.

The song that most strikes me on No Time Like Now is “Simple Things,” which sounds like it may have served as a little bit of a blueprint or template for “Kinks On Vinyl.” “Kinks on Vinyl” is by no means a rewrite of “Simple Things”–the former song is, to me, deeper and more genuinely enigmatic, than the latter–but I hear elements in “Simple Things” that show up 25 years later in “Kinks on Vinyl.” It is fascinating to me to see Barton’s creativity in action, playing out over a quarter century’s worth of time.

Being able to appreciate “Simple Things” and the rest of No Time Like Now retrospectively, as being part of what led to Barton’s more recent music, almost makes me happy I never caught up with Translator back in the ’80s. Though, of course, it would have been nice to support to band.

Every third day here at this website, I have been intentionally picking the Daily Record, rather than letting the gods of randomness do it for me. Tomorrow is my next third day, so, as a follow-up to today’s entry, I’ll be writing about Steve Barton’s recently released new album, Projector.

Until then, go listen to “Kinks On Vinyl”: http://www.myspace.com/stevebartonmusic .

Daily Record 11/12/10: The World of Country Music-various artists (1965)

The central idea behind this blog is that everyday I randomly pick a record or CD to listen to on the way to work and then, sometime later, I write about that particular record or CD. I had started doing this a while back with the previous entries, but life got in the way. I’m going to attempt to get back into the swing though.

The World of Country Music, a 1965 compilation of country music that had been released on Capitol Records during the previous five years (but mostly in 1964) is a great place to renew this project of mine. The album, a two-record set (“24 Top Hits on 2 Great Long-Play Records”) is a classic example of a compilation thrown together by a record company and sold cheaply in an attempt to get buyers interested in buying one (or hopefully more than one) albums by the artists represented on the collection.

Of course, I got my copy of The World of Country Music decades after its release (at the Princeton Record Exchange, one of the greatest record stores in the world, as far as I can tell), so Capitol’s priorities have probably shifted away from selling copies of Jean Shepard’s Lighthearted and Blue, Tex Ritter’s Hillbilly Heaven, and Merle Travis’ Travis! . But the fact that the marketing work of The World of Country Music has long since been completed makes the record that much more fascinating. It exists now simply as a wonderful time capsule encapsulating the country scene of the early 1960s (at least as could be found on Capitol Records).

Of course, even back then Capitol probably had higher priorities. Like, say, the Beatles. The Beatles influence is felt on The World of Country Music at least twice: first, on Buck Owens’ song, “My Heart Skips a Beat” (influence rolled back and forth between Owens and the Beatles); and second, on the goofy Tommy Collins’ tune, “All The Monkeys Ain’t In The Zoo,” which references the Beatles.

The songs here range from the somewhat silly (Jean Shepard’s “Second Fiddle,” and Ferlin Huskey’s “Timber, I’m Falling”) to the maudlin (Tex Ritter’s “I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven,” Red Johnson’s “There’s a Grand Ole Opry Show Playing Somewhere”). Musically, the tunes here are similarly diverse, ranging from traditional “hillbilly” sounds to rock’n’roll-influenced numbers to examples of the sophisticated and genteel “Nashville sound” (think Patsy Cline’s string-drenched ballads, though she’s not represented here).

Track for track, The World of Country Music is an excellent collection and takes me back to a time just before I was born when, as Bob Dylan wrote and sang, “the country music station plays soft but there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off.”

Biggest Hits-Bobby Bare (1982)

Biggest Hits–Bobby Bare (1982)

It usually takes around five hours to drive the 240 miles from the Aston/Boothwyn section of Pennsylvania to Dad’s hometown of Mt. Savage, Maryland, though my grandfather could allegedly do it in three hours. He apparently did not believe in rest stops.

When I was a kid, we’d head out to Mt. Savage a couple times a year—sometimes around Easter, during the summer, and once more around New Year’s. During our trips to and from Western Maryland, Dad used to control the radio.

Since the Volare station wagon didn’t have a tape player (either cassette or 8-track), we’d usually be held captive to Dad’s radio whims. More often than not, these whims revolved around finding a decent AM country music that could be enjoyed until its fading signal could be replaced by another decent AM country music station. And so it went.

Gradually, things like FM radio and Casey Kasem’s countdown shows began to creep into the travel equation, but let’s focus for a minute on those AM country-dominated trips.

Dad would find a station and lock in on it. Lisa and I, in the back seat, would take about as many songs by Conway, Loretta, Conway & Loretta, Charlie Rich and so many others about trucks, mama and jail as we could stand, before we’d beg Dad to find a station that might be playing the latest hit from ABBA or Elton. He’d relent for a while, if he found such a pop station, but then we’d be back to country once the pop signal showed signs of disappearing.

Mom has told me about one trip, which probably would have happened in 1980, during which we couldn’t get away from George Jones’ classic, “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” which, Mom claims, sent me into fits of laughter after hearing it one too many times. This might have been the trip that inspired me to write the words to my own fake country song, “Mama Was a Truck Drivin’ Man.” Which, I should note, was not about my mother.

Memories of those car rides have led me to a more thorough appreciation of country music in the 1970s than I had when we were actually making those trips and “suffering” through those AM stations. The well of country music runs so deep that any time I play an album from those years I feel like I might hear some forgotten (at least by me) classic, a tune I may have been forced to hear four hours into one of our in the Volare journeys–somewhere between Frederick and Flintstone, probably– but haven’t heard since.

A craving for tunes from those times is probably what led me to pick up Bobby Bare’s Biggest Hits compilation from one of the cheap boxes at the Princeton Record Exchange, one of the World’s Great Record Stores. The album’s title is a bit of a misnomer though—while some of the songs on Biggest Hits were undoubtedly popular with Bare’s longtime fans, he did not enjoy as much commercial success in this period of his career (the album covers three albums and a single Bare released from 1978-1981), as he had done previously. In fact, Biggest Hits really marks the last period during which Bare (whose career began in the early ‘60s) enjoyed any real radio play at all.

Lack of commercial success (I probably didn’t hear many of these songs on the Mt. Savage trips) certainly doesn’t dim the quality of the music, which is strong throughout the album.

The subject matter for Bare’s songs—drinking, loving, fighting, cheating—is typical of country songs, at least until he gets to the cross-dressing. Incidentally, all those subjects and more can be found in Biggest Hits’ leadoff track, “Tequila Sheila,” co-written by Mac Davis and frequent Bare songwriter Shel Silverstein. Bare seems to be able to have it both ways, with heartfelt ballads like Rodney Crowell’s “Till I Gain Control Again,” and goofy novelty songs like “Big Dupree” (a humorous song about castration) that usually don’t wear out their welcome too easily.

In addition to “Tequila Sheila,” two other highlights from Biggest Hits — “Numbers” and “Goin’ Back to Texas”—are all taken from Down & Dirty, a raucous 1979 live album that sounds like it would be a good fun listen, if you should ever happen to stumble upon it.

These days, of course, we have way more than just AM country radio stations for our car trips. While I’m sure this is a relief to my kids, I think I’d like to hear some of those stations again.