Nitzsche/Simon: Deserved Reissues................
Mystic
Amazingly enough two classic works from musical giants find their way
onto compact disc this past month:
The Jack Nitzsche Story - Hearing is Believing: 1962 - 1979
I couldn't agree more with McCulley's assesment of this treasure. He
overlooked Jack's contribution to Neil Young's masterful first 15
years as engineer and musical side kick but hits most of the key
components of Jack's giagantic and magical influence on modern
music.................
A long overdue, all encompassing career overview of probably the most
revered all round arranger/songwriter/producer in the history of
popular music. The sub-title is 'Hearing Is Believing'. 2005.
"The late Jack Nitszche was one of the greatest of his era, a wizard
of the charts and mixing console who initially helped engineer Phil
Spector's fabled Wall of Sound, yet eventually developed a spacious
arrangement/production knack that was nearly its sonic opposite. Many
of Nitzsche's fabled sessions (as far-ranging as Ike & Tina's "River
Deep", the Stones' "Have You Seen Your Mother Baby", "Porpoise Song"
by The Monkees, Ringo Starr's hit "Photograph" and Buffalo
Springfield's ghostly "Expecting to Fly") were beyond the reach of
this compilation. Nonetheless, these 26 tracks offer up a compelling
tribute to his singular musical vision via a wealth of early singles,
album cuts and rarities by artists spanning the early '60s pop of
Doris Day and Bobby Darin and '70s new wave of Mink DeVille and Graham
Parker. Early instrumentals (the Nitzsche-penned Cali-classic "The
Lonely Surfer," a rousing cover of Link Wray's "Rumble") display the
ballsy studio power he could conjure. While tracks like Judy Henske's
"Road to Nowhere," "Ashes, the Rain and I" by The James Gang and
Marianne Faithful's harrowing read of "Sister Morphine" showcase the
haunting, incomparable impressionism that graced so much of his work.
His eerie theme for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest also pays tribute
to a parallel soundtrack career that yielded such unsung 90's gems as
The Hot Spot and The Indian Runner before his passing in 2000. --Jerry
McCulley
http://www.spectropop.com/JackNitzsche/
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/9/nitzsche.html
John Simon "John Simon's Album "
Amazing cast, amazing producer, a giant in the musical industry. Band
fans rejoice...................it's finally available in the
states...........
Producer John Simon did a pair of albums of his own during the 1970s,
starting with John Simon's Album (1970), which was two years in the
making and featuring many of the musicians with whom he'd been working
over that period, including Cyrus Faryar, Garth Hudson, Richard
Manuel, Rick Danko, Delaney Bramlett, Leon Russell, Jim Gordon, Carl
Radle, Jim Price, and Rita Coolidge, Bobby Whitlock, and Jean
Millington. Perhaps not surprisingly, John Simon's Album mostly
resembles the first two Band albums, with a clear, sharp, brittle
sound rooted in a multitude of popular music strains. The strangest
song here is the first, "Song of the Elves," a surreal, psychedelic
song derived from an R&B source and beat (with a strong '50s New
Orleans feel) that calls to mind both Randy Newman and Brian Wilson --
the strange chorus with its deliberate distortion evokes the late '60s
and the peculiar brand of psychedelia generated by the Beach Boys. And
speaking of the latter, the bluesy "Did You See" sounds like some
magnificent lost piece of the Wild Honey sessions, Wilson suddenly
trying his hand at piano-and-guitar blues. The album also encompasses
stripped-down gospel in "Nobody Knows," but the real jumping off point
comes early, in the horn-driven "Tannenbaum," which sounds for a
moment like the original Blood, Sweat & Tears jamming with the Band,
and "Davey's on the Road Again" (co-authored with Robbie Robertson)
could be a lost Band track in its playing and texture, though Merry
Clayton's soaring backing vocal adds a special wrinkle (and recalls
Simon's arrangements on Leonard Cohen's first album). Much of the
rest, regardless of who's playing, moves between intimate Newman-like
(or even Wilson-like) quirkiness and the lean, rocking sound of the
Band -- though the piano tends to be the lead instrument, somewhere in
there (most notably on "Don't Forget What I Told You") the guitar
(mostly played by John Hall) comes in along with the bass and drums,
all sounding like part of the Music From Big Pink of The Band
sessions. Anyone seeking a kind of stylistic/textural extension of
either of those first two albums need look no further, and Simon's
music holds up as well" Bruce Eder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_From_Big_Pink
Mystic-