Sun Araw - Heavy Deeds (2009)

Buying albums simply because I like the look of the cover doesn't seem to happen so much nowadays but Heavy Deeds had me fumbling for my wallet the minute I caught sight of the picture of a young Stevie Wonder beaming out superimposed over a mysterious crowd shot.

I mean, the sheer cheek of it. There had been enough of an internet buzz about Sun Araw, aka Cameron Stallones, for me to know that Heavy Deeds had nothing to do with Little Stevie in his Motown heyday. Putting George Clinton on the front might have better hinted at the hypnotic psychedelic sludgefests within (Fundadelic's self-titled 1970 debut album is an obvious reference point), but Wonder's presence just seems to be pure mischief-making.

Perhaps the point is that Stallones, who is also responsible for all the artwork, is locating the inspiration for Heavy Deeds clearly in that late 1960s/ early 1970s period where rock still thought it could change the world, where spiritual exploration with a guitar or keyboard in your hand wasn't yet seen as cheesy and deluded.

Stallones may be filtering through a lot of 40 year old influences on Heavy Deeds and working on his own in the studio but he's far from a lone traveller on this particular sonic trip, with the psychedelic drone experiments of Neon Indian and his Not Not Fun label-mates Pocahunted floating in a similar stratosphere.

What makes Heavy Deeds stand out is how beautifully constructed it is. On first listen, it's easy to assume a bunch of stoners have simply cooked up some sloppy, dazed jams one hot night but the more you peer into the murk, the more you find it all fits together remarkably well.

It's curious that Stallones chose to record Heavy Deeds on his own, despite the vibe being very much communal. Music usually gets made by those oddball bands that come across more like a gang bordering on religious cult - Funkadelic fit the bill again, along with Sunburned Hand Of The Man or The Brian Jonestown Massacre.

The easy assumption is that Heavy Deeds is inspired by pharmaceutical exploration but Stallones is the child of academic parents who met his wife while they were both studying at an Evangelical Christian college. As a lapsed believer, his music seems to take on the search for transcendance.

I've no idea if Stallones is a straight edger but he reminds me of Wayne Coyne, a man who makes what often gets described as making 'druggy' music without actually taking any drugs to do it. Of course, Coyne has plenty of (hazy) memories to inspire him but the point is that may be, whisper it, the best way to make psychedelic music is to do it when you're actually sober.

In interview, Stallones comes over as a strange combination of part rigorous artist, part stoner dude. One minute he'll talking about the influence on his music of film-makers such as Tarkovsky, Altman and Greenaway, or 1960s free jazz (the band name is a riff on Sun Ra), the next saying things like: "At the center of most of my songs there is an object that has been retrieved. The song then takes a walk around that object and attempts to scope all 360 degrees." Like, whoa.

Sobriety certainly isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you put the needle on to side one of Heavy Deeds and the molasses thick wucka-wucka wah-wah of Stallones' guitar starts to ooze out of your speakers. Seemingly disparate elements slowly unfurl in a very Sunburned Hand Of The Man fashion before it starts to coalesce a minute in when the warped, murky, multi-tracked vocals begin to chant "It's all right/ Baby, it's all right".

The sonics are thick and sticky, like it was recorded on cheap equipment in a basement late on a hot summer night. The plodding drums are so muffled that they sound like they're coming through the wall. Imagine the most hazy parts of Exile On Main Street, say I Just Want To See His Face, then make it sound 50% more swampy and you're getting the picture.

The incantatory vibe feels like it's slowly winding down until a six-note organ riff emerges six minutes in and it starts to build again. Luminescent keyboard drones cluster and Stallones insistence that it's "all right" suddenly makes perfect sense. When it finally runs out of steam just short of the ten minute mark, you actually feel like you've been cut short.
Hustle & Bustle starts on a slow peal of guitar and drifting clouds of shimmering keyboards, Stallones' smothered vocals declaiming something no doubt mystical and righteous before he decides to wig out with an echo-drenched Eddie Hazel guitar solo.

The Message introduces acoustic guitars and more glimmering organ sounds, with Stallones insisting that "I'll fly my way home: - in the context of the four other songs feels like a skinny sliver of a song at just under five minutes long.

Side two starts with more drifting organ sounds mixed with the sound of breaking glass on Get Low. As much as Stallones likes to expand on his music in interviews, he's a fervent minimalist when it comes to his lyrics, repeatedly insisting "Fly away" as the song slowly ebbs away into an ambient twinkle before bursting into warped and greasy bass-heavy funk groove.

All Night Long sounds like exactly the kind of jam that could live up to its name, an organ solo drifting over a low-slung bass groove as those scuzzy vocals chant the title over and over again. A sloppy funk guitar solo drifts in and out of the haze and those shimmering, droning keyboards slowly build up a head of steam over 12 unhurried minutes.

It's not surprising that Stallones revisited this epic psych-trance sound again for last year's On Patrol LP, stretching out over a double album that's nearly twice as long as Heavy Deeds. But at 41 minutes, this is the one that I find myself coming back to, largely because he managed to create such a concise distillation of a sprawling, hypnotic sound. Stallones has described Heavy Deeds as "a point of total ascension" - or as Stevie would put it, this is music of the mind.

'The world's only networked vinyl-only radio show'

The tagline may have been rubbish but that was the only thing I didn't enjoy about Peter Paphides' excellent Vinyl Revival radio show on 6 Music last week.

Well, I did wince a bit when the press release pointed out that his record collection is worth a million quid, but that was probably pure jealousy on my part.

Paphides was a genial if slightly tentative host and had rounded up some excellent guests to help him ruminate on the joys of their shared obsession. Paul Weller was very much in Modfather mode, having brought along some of his crackly vinyl favourites, including Little Richard's Slippin' And Slidin' and Emmit Long's Call Me.

'Vinyl is addictive, it's like a drug addiction,' noted Laura Marling at one point to general murmurs of agreement. Her vinyl selections were equally astute, including Smog's I Feel Like The Mother Of The World and Lee & Nancy's Some Velvet Morning.

The second hour involved a trip to Norman Cook's house to have a rummage through his collection, resulting an entertainingly eclectic selection of tunes including 10CC's Rubber Bullets, Just Brothers' Sliced Tomatoes (which he remixed into his The Rockafeller Skank in 1998), Monochrome Set's He’s Frank and the excellent Patrick Cowley remix of Donna Summer's I Feel Love.

Plenty of passion, a little trainspottery knowledge and a few rueful confessions about the geeky pleasures of collecting records made the whole show very entertaining. 6 Music have commissioned another one-off show and hopefully there'll be enough interest to earn it a regular weekly slot.

Presumably Paphides is saving his old pal Bob Stanley for show No.2, with the duo recently undertaking a vinyl-buying trip round the country together, as chronicled in the Guardian recently.

Neil Young & The Stray Gators - Time Fades Away (1973)

Time Fades Away is probably the most famous album never to have appeared on CD, with more than 10,000 people having signed an online petition calling for a reissue and Uncut magazine recently voting it No.1 in their list of the 100 most neglected LPs. Not bad for a raggedy live album featuring 8 previously unreleased songs that lasts barely more than half an hour.

Time Fades Away was released in October 1973 and is the first in the infamous 'ditch trilogy' of albums Young recorded in the wake of his rise to global success with the mellow sounds of his After The Goldrush and Harvest LPs - and particularly the massively popular 1972 single Heart of  Gold.

The smooth harmonies and gentle acoustic sounds of the West Coast were on the rise and would make huge stars of The Eagles, James Taylor, Doobie Brothers and Jackson Browne among others. Young could have been king of that particular soft rock hill but decided, not for the first or last time, that he didn't care to go where the wind was blowing. As he put it in the Decade liner notes: 'Heart of Gold put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch.'

The result was a remarkable trio of albums (also comprising Tonight's The Night and On The Beach) that seemed to reflect not only Young's troubled mood but also that of a nation suffering a nasty hangover after the death of the Sixties dream, locked in a futile war in Vietnam and increasingly at war with itself. It's the souring of hippie idealism into hedonism and a lack of direction that Robert Greenfield portrayed so well in his 1974 book A Journey Through America With The Rolling Stones. Or as Hunter S Thompson put it in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (first published in 1972): 'We were riding on the crest of a beautiful wave. Now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.'

Having agreed to his biggest tour to date - 65 dates in just 90 days - supposedly to promote Harvest, Young decided to get his old Crazy Horse sparring partner Danny Whitten involved again and move back in the direction of 1969's Anybody Knows This Is Nowhere. However, Whitten was a strung-out wreck when he turned up at Young's ranch for rehearsals in late 1972 and was eventually sent home a few weeks later with $50 in his pocket.

He was found dead later that day after overdosing on valium and alcohol, a miserable end to such a promising talent. Young was hit hard by the news, telling a friend: 'Every musician has one guy on the planet that he can play with better than anyone else. You only get one guy; my guy was Danny Whitten.' Young was still talking about him onstage the last time he played in Manchester in 2008.

Tour preparations took an even worse turn after Young agreed to pay respected session drummer Kevin Buttrey $100,000 to do the tour and the rest of the band found out. Keyboard player (and respected producer) Jack Nitzsche had a drunken confrontation with Young about it, with the singer angrily agreeing to pay everyone the same amount.

The scene was now set for a disastrous tour. Young was paying all his musicians well so he compensated by treating them all badly. Even the fans were getting on his nerves with their demands for the mellow folkie sound he'd grown tired of.

Tequila became Young's drink of choice and the band flew around the States in an old  Electra prop-jet amusing themselves with a huge hookah hash pipe somehow constructed out of an aquarium pump. Bassist Tim Drummond described it as 'like putting your mouth over the exhaust pipe of a car'.

The opening acoustic section of the shows (first solo and then with the band) were well received but the electric section was more troublesome, the fans baffled by the rickety and raw sound, and deeply ambivalent new songs.

Young quickly decided Buttrey was the source of his problems and ragged on him mercilessly until the drummer left the tour two thirds of the way through to be replaced by Johnny Barbata. Then Young's voice started to give out and he called in David Crosby and Graham Nash to help out on the final few dates.

The tour finally limped to a close in April 1973 and the sane response would have been to put the money in the bank and the experience behind him. Instead, Young decided to release a live album documenting the mayhem in all its murky glory.

What's so gripping about Time Fades Away is just how heartfelt it is. Young recalls his father, Scott, telling him, 'As a writer, the one thing you have to do is lay yourself bare', and it's a dictum he certainly lives up to here.

Listen to one of the full gig bootlegs floating around from the tour (there's a good one from Norfolk, Virginia linked on www.guitars101.com that features Buttrey on drums) and you'll hear plenty of the tunes from Goldrush and Harvest that the fans were after, but it's the new songs that Young uses for the album. The set list evolved during the tour, with great songs such as Lookout Joe and New Mama for some reason excluded from Time Fades Away only to pop up in studio versions on Tonight's The Night.

The most famous of songs on Time Fades Away is probably Don't Be Denied, which Young told his biographer Jimmy McDonough that he wrote the day after he heard that Whitten had died. A meditiation on life's frustrations that starts with his parents splitting up and getting beaten up at his new school, before moving on to dreams coming true and his distrust of the music business, it's sloppy and raw (because that's how life is) while still sounding defiant and focused. The riff perfectly reflects this, being slow and drawn out yet tense and pained at the same time. One of his finest songs, it could easily have sounded self-pitying but in fact sounds anything but - Young is determined to battle on and is clearly hurt that the 'friend of mine' did not.

The title track,Yonder Stands The Sinner, L.A. and Last Dance are also all full band electric numbers featuring a staggering swampy rock sound that Young would hone to a woozy perfection during the Tonight's The Night sessions later in 1973, with three solo numbers completing the set.

The album kicks off with the title track, and the words 'Fourteen junkies too weak to work/ One sells diamonds for what they're worth/ Down on Pain Street/ Disappointment lurks', immediately making it apparent that something weird is going down here. The lyrics here are vague, the meaning deliberately ambiguous, but the vibe is clearly dark. Nitzsche's barrelhouse piano playing and Keith's slide guitar and incredibly sloppy backing vocals flesh things out beautifully.

Journey Through The Past is a solo piano tune that from his 1971 tour (the only song on the album not to come from the Stray Gators tour), but it fits the mood perfectly, with Young singing about love like a man clinging to a liferaft.

Yonder Stands The Sinner is the most cryptic song on the album, with what's sounds like Crosby introducing it as 'kind of experimental', and Young really straining his voice at times. This must have sounded like a chaotic disaster to many fans at the time, particularly the booze-sodden lyrics about hiding 'behind the nearest tree', but it hints at addiction ('he calls my name/ without a sound') and depression among the goofing about.

L.A. is nearly as ramshackle, with Young singing about the 'uptight/ city in the smog' before asking 'don't you wish that you could live here too?' The fact that hippie baby boomer poster boys Crosby and Nash are singing backing vocals just adds to the sly humour of the song.

Love In Mind is another solo piano song, with Young baffled by the times he finds himself living in, just hoping that love will save him. It's a theme he returns to again with The Bridge, though when he sings about 'The bridge was falling down' he sounds like he's trying to patch up the troubled relationship with his second wife, actress Carrie Snodgrass (they split up in 1975).

Hardly a barrel of laughs so far, Time Fades Away still manages to end on a particularly down note with Last Dance. According to Young's biographer Jimmy McDonough, a studio version of this song was recorded before the tour that sounded like a call to arms to escape the dreariness of working man's 9 to 5 ('Wake up! It's Monday morning/ No time left to say goodbye') in favour of 'You can live your own life/ Making it happen/ Working on your own time/ Laid back and laughing'. But Last Dance seems to have served as a barometer of the mood of the band and the 8-minute version here suggests that salvation is simply an illusion, undercutting those optimistic words with 'Oh no/ Oh no'.

It all gets a bit surreal 7 minutes in when Young, after playing a fine solo, works himself into a frenzy, croaking the word 'no' 59 times while Crosby and Nash bizarrely attempt to cheerlead the crowd into singing along. It feels wonderfully raw and real and under-rehearsed. The fact that everyone involved was an excellent musician certainly helps, whatever the troubled circumstances.

Young has given various reasons for not releasing Time Fades Away on CD over the years, from technical problems with the recordings to admitting he finds it painful to listen to. Whatever the truth, it's well worth digging out a vinyl copy. The fantastic cover and massive handwritten lyric sheet inside just adds to the twisted, drunken romance of the whole thing. Strange times indeed.