Disc of the day
Heaven 17 - Penthouse And Pavement
From Sheffield, synth pop and funk to stick it to Thatcher. Currently being played live!
Features Disc of the day
Ray Price
Burning Memories
(Columbia, 1964; reissued as twofer with Touch My Heart, 2003)
A walk through the grey, haunted rooms of country heartbreak.
Burn-ing i) adjective: ‘Characterised by intense emotion’; ii) noun: ‘the act of burning’; “he’s outside on the back porch right now, burning something”. As titles of country music albums go, Burning Memories takes some beating, conjuring as it does those twin worlds of romantic pain and self-destructive pity that imprison the archetypal country barfly, seat of his pants slick from the barstool, hand in the shape of a glass… Few were better at creating this spectral, smoke-woven world of longing and loathing than Ray Price. The man who brand-marked the 4/4 bass-driven country shuffle sound of the 1950s backed by high fiddle and steel guitar, Price gave his sound a radical overhaul in the next decade, wrapping massed strings and harmony vocals around a pop crooning style that suggested Mario Lanza doing Porter Wagoner after a whisky-soaked boozathon in some unseemly motel dive. Amidst Don Law and Frank Jones’ vast, haunted dancehall production, Buddy Emmons’ steel guitar, Floyd Cramer’s piano and dark shadows of violin swirl around troubled Ray as he walks a beer and sawdust world of lonely faces and those memory-stained rooms where sadness lurks, an ever present entity “that’s been here since you've been gone… in every chair where I sit down.” Price’s new sound eventually became the vilified template for ’70s pop country, the kind of production that the Outlaw Movement rebelled against – but listened to now, after a surfeit of alt.country preciousness, it sounds astonishing; swirling, drunken, eerie and poetic: the sound of hard booze and heavy heartbreak lifting a mind high up into the black, black clouds.
Andrew Male
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 1:54 PM GMT 24/10/2008
Further Listening
Elvis Presley – From Elvis In Memphis (RCA, 1969)
George Jones – The Grand Tour (Epic, 1974)
Ray Price – Night Life (Columbia, 1963)
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