Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
Rod the Mod finds his solo footing, headed for stardom, with the Faces in his wake.
6:00 AM GMT 22/06/2011
Features Disc of the day
Dory Previn
The Art Of…
(Zonophone/EMI, 2008)
Early '70s gestalt and battery, from the damaged Mrs Preview.
Looking back on the emotional over-investments, free-love profligacies and karmic withdrawals that took place out in the neon plains of late 1960s Hollywood it now seems inevitable that a crash was coming. Many were too bound up in their own private psychedelic reels to see it coming, but there was one harbinger of the nation's collapse who had no choice but to observe and report.
Born in 1925, to strict New Jersey Irish Catholics, Dory Previn was caught in the push and pull between an alcoholic mother and a violent father, who - thanks to a gassing during the war - believed he was sterile and Dory was not his child. Although he doted on Dory - writing songs for her, putting her into talent contests - when another child came, dad flipped and held his family at gunpoint in their home for over a month.
An already delicate Dory left home aged 16, and worked as a lyricist for MGM before meeting fellow studio staffer André Previn whom she married in 1959. The couple worked together throughout the 1960s but, following a nervous breakdown on a plane in 1965 ("Somebody in my seat is screaming," she told the stewardess), Dory developed a dreamily detached song-style on such classics as Valley Of The Dolls and Come Saturday Morning. Then, in 1969, at the news that her friend, Mia Farrow, was pregnant with André Previn's child, came a period of electro-shock treatment and gestalt therapy in which Dory was encouraged to write about her life.
The result was 1970's On My Way To Where, a collection of vaudeville noir sketches that included her Farrow character assassination, Beware Of Young Girls, and Twenty Mile Zone, which begins with Dory screaming, alone, in her car and ends with us all screaming for release from the human zoo. Whether writing as herself, or through one of the many voices she heard in her head, Previn's sinister riverboat chansons revealed the pain, games, lies and loneliness behind the L.A. myths.
After moving from United Artists to Warner Brothers in 1974, Previn's style became more abstract and optimistic and both albums from that period are worth tracking down but this 1970-72 collection - her first authorised compilation - is the place to start. Despite the avowedly personal nature of her work, The Art Of Dory Previn stands as a valuable record of a nation's crack up, from a writer who dared to document the unspeakable truth in sharp, terrible relief.
Andrew Male
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 04/09/2009
Further Listening
Dory Previn – We’re Children Of Coincidence And Harpo Marx (Warners, 1976)
Joni Mitchell – The Hissing Of Summer Lawns (Asylum, 1975)
Camera Obscura – Let’s Get Out Of This Country (Merge, 2006)
Previous Disc of the day
-
-
Earl Brutus - Larky
Last salvo of Ginsters Pasty-Warholism from Britpop ramraiders.
12:04 PM GMT 08/06/2011
-
Loudon Wainwright - T-Shirt
An overlooked small wonder from an unpredictable career.
6:00 AM GMT 03/06/2011
-
Landscape - From The Tea-rooms Of Mars… To The Hell-holes Of Uranus
Dry computer club Futurists, upon hitting implausible chart paydirt.
6:00 AM GMT 17/05/2011
-
-
Causa Sui - Summer Sessions Vol 1-3
Epic Danish jams, for when the neighbours get you down.
6:00 AM GMT 12/05/2011
end of body content back to top
Footer
Join us on:
© Copyright Bauer - all
rights reserved.
Reproduction of this
website, in whole or in
part, in any form or
medium without express
written permission from
Bauer is prohibited. All
use is subject to our
Terms of Use
|
|
Comments
Comment on this post
Comment on this post