Saturday, July 6, 2013

Reinventing Pop Nostalgia with The James Hunter Six


America is the birthplace—the one true home— of rock and roll and this will remain true, no matter how it is rendered or forged, rushed or slogged, fusioned or funked. When the first 45rpm singles of blues and ‘rock’ were shipped overseas in the 1950s, the world was exposed irreparably and irrevocably to some madness, mayhem derived from heartbeats of many ethnicities, traditions, and practices.

In 1974, perhaps to wash clean his soul following his stint of activism and bed-ins, John Lennon assembled his own nostalgia outfit, seeking to rekindle his earliest rock and roll passions. With sessions taking place in Hollywood and New York under the direction of Phil Spector, Lennon’s penultimate album—the 1975 release Rock and Roll­-- astounded critics, as it contained no original material, but rather a collection of reworked antique pop, from Fats Domino to Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me.” Growing up on the imported recordings of American popular music in the 1950s, Lennon (and a band that included Leon Russell, Steve Cropper, and Klaus Voorman) may have been seeking to challenge and succeed in conquering his earliest musical memories, what he knew of backbeat-driven pop long before any of Sir Paul’s carefully melodic bass lines reinvented the pop song form (it’s worth noting McCartney released his own moldy-oldie tribute record, Run Devil Run, in 2004).

Lennon’s Rock and Roll album has been called a critical failure; to many, it was a step in reverse, as the former Beatle drifted from the simplistic punctuality of rallying cries like “Instant Karma” and “Power to the People,” and into the banality of tired 1-4-5 chord structures. Despite the flawed recording sessions and legal entanglements that plagued the album’s creation, Lennon’s mid-1970s effort is important—perhaps critical—in understanding the relationship between the soul of American pop and the unique pop instilled in British soul. While Lennon orchestrated complex studio efforts on both coasts in America, Van Morrison’s live album It’s Too Late to Stop Now was released, and served then as it does today, as a touchstone of power-pop, the sound of someone who was born on the other side of The Pond from Chuck Berry, yet could sing the blues as if having had the opportunity to know far more than any one Brown-Eyed Girl. While Morrison would mature through his successful career into a renowned pop-rock-folk guru, Lennon retreated after the release of Rock and Roll, to relative seclusion: he reunited with Yoko and raised his son, while the films Grease and American Graffiti repopulated mainstream culture with well-worn and cherished melodies. The fascination and idolization of that era of American music has yet to end, despite our countless endeavors into new forms of electronic music, rock’s fusion with jazz, and much else. Everything old is new again; in the United States, everything old seems to at least bear repeating, in new iterations across generations.

In the mid-1990s, Van Morrison discovered James Hunter: the guitarist and singer was performing in a club, and Morrison befriended him. Hunter ended up as part of Morrison’s band (including on the live release A Night in San Francisco), and as his opening act as well. While Hunter’s solo releases in 2006 and 2008 garnered the typical attention and faint praise of late-night television, Rolling Stone, USA Today, and rhythm and blues communities on both sides of the pond, this endeavor—a six-piece power outfit—seems to be not only a good fit for the not-humble now-fifty front man, but totally ripe for the day and age into which the group enters: our brave and repetitious world of 21st century American culture. The James Hunter Six is the band Lennon sought to assemble, to perform Rock and Roll; it is a patriotic, percussive sound, pulled together by someone on the outside looking in, from across The Pond.

And so on a sultry Friday night in July--four days before the US release of their back-to-retro album-- the James Hunter Six [JHS] swaggered and sweated through an hour-and-twenty minute set at the Tupelo Music Hall in White River Junction (7/5/13). Like Elvis, his short black hair reminded me of Tony Curtis; like Elvis, Hunter needed a sweat towel after the completion of the first song. Unlike Elvis, James Hunter sought unsuccessfully to establish a relationship with the aging, balding baby-boomer audience; unlike Elvis, Hunter needed to dry off the fret board of his Stratocaster between songs, as he moved around the same five-or-so bar chords rapidly, in almost every tune. Balding heads simply bobbed and toes tapped until they wore themselves out; one guy, who looked like Bob Weir, kept time with both feet, gently clapping along in sixteenth note patterns when he was really enjoying himself. Moments of true musicianship and musicality were highlighted, as they often forced a Canadian woman to stop talking, mid-sentence at times, to her partner, a bald man in a white dress shirt. Unlike Elvis, Bob Weir, or Tony Curtis, James Hunter had and took the opportunity to be fifty years old and to work as hard for an audience of less than one-hundred  as he would have treated a crowd of thousands.  

The band consisted of a tenor sax, baritone sax, drum kit, stand-up bass (played through an amplifier), and a keyboardist. The only instrument that kept the show in this century, and from being totally analog, was the Hammond XK-3, a digital-oscillator-based replica of a single manual B-3. Though played extraordinarily well by fill-in keyboardist Dave Slocum, the board’s stoic and digital drones sliced through the tight grooves like an electric knife through butter: unnecessarily powerful and lacking the mechanical nuance of a true tonewheel instrument. Its simulated drawbars (and lack of Leslie) seemed to keep its player mostly bored, save for his handful of ornate solos. The sax players stood on the opposite side of the stage, ever aware of and ready for their next cues, whether they were introducing a smattering of percussive accents, dotted rhythms, or punctuated, sustained tones. At their best, the sax players took lavish and jazzy solos that rivaled any licks being played this summer on Phish tour (a three-night run at SPAC was initializing during the JHS show, less than one hundred miles west of the Tupelo); at his best, Hunter duplicated his own guitar riffs with his voice, a difficult technique. Hunter himself was not in fine voice; many of his songs, constructed around falsetto vocal moments, seemed to present a not-insurmountable challenge. His style of strumming was more akin to the Rastafarian shuffling of Bradley Nowell, and contained far less trickery than one might have anticipated (“Hail Hail Rock and Roll” may be Hunter’s Chuck Berry track-of-choice). His guitar solos did not involve effects or pedal boards, and the one Townsend-like arm-windmill move he did looked out of place and strange; he did comedically use the microphone stand as a slide at times, and thrashed oh-so-briefly, as to always leave the crowd wanting more. Perhaps the true rock star, however, was the JHS drummer Jonathan Lee: from beneath his fedora, and his consistently calm—almost vacant—facial expression, Lee propelled the group ahead in every song (his only fault may have come in speeding up a couple of already-too-fast rockabilly-inflected numbers). With the double-bass player by his side, Lee covered the gamut of rock beats, circa 1955-1965, always looking as cool as late October, on a Friday night in July. While some of Hunter’s original material may cross from emulation and tribute and into replication and forgery, Lee was a joy to watch: it was from the drum beat, and not the hints of the unmistakable instrumental riff, that I recognized the original source of Hunter’s song “The Gypsy” (The Champs’ 1958 hit “Tequila”). When teamed with double bass player Jason Wilson, whose tone may have been some of the finest amplified stand-up bass I’ve heard, the rhythm section of JHS allowed all others to rest easily on the backbeat, and to show no concern for their timing within the congruent and angular structure of the sound.  

There’s a reason why the JHS sound in concert like a Sam and Dave cover band, and at times resonated with the crowd like a Blues Brothers routine tapped of humor and mystique: under the direction of producer Gabriel Roth (who won a Grammy for his work on Amy Winehouse’s first album), the JHS completed a remarkable—and mono—recording at Daptone Studios in Brooklyn, thus entering themselves in the high-stakes race to claim the future of reproducible pop music. Prior to her diagnosis of cancer, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings had planned to have JHS serve as their opening act, on a coast-to-coast American summer tour. So, one may wonder how the JHS album would sound different, if it had been produced by Jack White, at Third Man Studios, another retro-analog facility that seeks to question and redefine the production of recorded music? What would Rick Rubin do, with a British blues-rocker seeking to cover nothing, but to record “new” material that sounds like The Five Royals, the Cadillacs, the Duprees, and the Imperials, to such an extent as to be interchangeable? What we buy to spin on our record players at home offers these valid challenges, in musicology and production; in live performance, the James Hunter Six helps define American pop music, its constant revolution and resurrection of recurring forms.

 

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