Slicer had a ball on Sunday, out at another night of blues music. Apart from a great unaccompanied choir at the start, it was heavily guitar-driven – whether acoustic or electric. Several folk commented on the “visceral” or physical nature of the genre. It’s always tough to follow live music with listening to a recording, but a trawl through his physical (as opposed to download) collection, led him to Nils Lofgren’s Acoustic Live. Although Slicer was first introduced to Lofgren more than 30 years ago (Cry Tough) by a friend across the street, the artist’s solo music didn’t really connect until a recent re-introduction at a high end audio demonstration, where the merits of this particular album were much to the fore. If you only listen to this one in compressed MP3/AAC on an iPod, you literally don't know what you're missing.
Lofgren is a Swedish/Italian American singer-songwriter solo artist who is also a longstanding member of Springsteen’s E Street band and has been a member of Crazy Horse (well known for its association with Neil Young) and Ringo Starr’s All Starr Band. He’s an able pianist as well as guitarist, and he plays both on this album of his own compositions. The album captures his performance in Vienna, Virginia in 1997. It’s a triumph of recording technique in a live environment. It’s not blues – more acoustic rock – but the songs it contains do demonstrate many of the qualities of good blues music: identification of, and empathy with, suffering; and a hope for a better future. Following an earlier Slicer post on the importance of dreaming, several songs on this album encourage a re-appraisal of the way things are and how they might be – not least Some Must Dream:
“Some try so hard but not for the team
So some must dream...
...Restless souls, shattered hearts
Talk of peace that never starts
Self-proclaimed saviors just float downstream
So some must dream.”
Lofgren’s talent on guitar is particularly evident on this track, and also on Keith Don’t Go. Mud In Your Eye is an expression of what we all feel when someone who’s abusive gets their comeuppance. It starts with some guitar slapping percussion and moves along with a riff which reminds of The Clash’s Should I Stay Or Should I Go?
Wonderland is one of Lofgren’s better known songs and it’s here that his dreaming and envisioning is perhaps at its most daring:
“Well the boys and girls like to dance on the way to school
And even the pretty girls think that being nice is cool
Ain’t no locks upon the door
Ain’t no country fighting no war
Ain’t no boss or president here
And no judge to keep score...
Well there ain’t no government tellin’ you who to fight
And you don’t get singled out every time you’re wrong or right
Ain’t no hungry people to feed
Ain’t no homeless children in need
Ain’t no prejudice in anyone’s heart
And no crime in the street...
Compassion is something people understand
In a Wonder, in a Wonderland...”
It’s easy to be sceptical, or take a glass-half-empty position: that this is equivalent to a Miss World contestant’s aspiration for “world peace” (and Lofgren is never anywhere nearly as lyrically adept as Springsteen or Dylan). Lyrics to some of his other songs are a bit syrupy but perhaps believing in and striving for the kind of dream captured in Wonderland is not just wishful thinking. Lofgren is not in denial about suffering. He acknowledges “Don’t dreamers get the blues...?” in Big Tears Fall. The Magician’s Nephew (chapter 12) springs to mind where, when Digory wanted a quick fix (his mother cured), he looked up from the Lion’s great feet and huge claws and was taken aback by what he saw...
Escape from pain is the subject of Man in the Moon, written from the perspective of a 14 year old. In Believe, Lofgren sings “you fight so hard for some dignity in a world out of control,” notions covered by 2 separate songs in the Dylan canon – Dignity and Everything is Broken. Believability, and the difference between theory and the passion to make things better, are covered by To Your Heart:
“The longest trip is from your head to your heart.”
Taking this passion and converting it to action is the thrust of a song dedicated to the inspiration of his grandmother, I’ll Arise.
Dreaming seems to be an attractive theme to song-writers. The great John Martyn sang “What happened to the Fisherman's Dream?” Slicer says: Let’s get creative, let’s do some imagining and see if we can then move things beyond just imagination...
To the glass-half-empty, dream-stifling nay-sayers out there, I’ll leave you with a little of Dylan’s I Feel A Change Comin’ On:
“Well now what's the use in dreamin'
You got better things to do
Dreams never did work for me anyway
Even when they did come true...”
Sometimes it comes down to how you choose to see things.
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