perfidy

Let me get a little personal here. Go, go fetch a drink and a crying towel; I’ll wait.

Back in 1996, just after I graduated college, I drifted for a time rootless and aimless. After a summer whiled away drinking gin and tonic and reading books, I moved to Pittsburgh for lack of anything better to do. At the time, I wasn't in the greatest shape in any sense, thanks to a late college regimen of heavy drinking, late nights, a succession of (let's call them) 'thorny interpersonal relationships,' and world class self-flagellation. It wasn't a very good time.

Pittsburgh was a good place to be. I met some people and became a regular at a couple of the less reputable drinking establishments in Squirrel Hill. One night I was abducted and forcibly exposed to nudie bars. Thus it went that my first year after college was a time of assing around, personal growth, and various indeterminately enjoyable false starts.

Sometime in the summer of 1996, I picked up Freedy Johnston's album, This Perfect World (Elektra, 1994) on the strength of a review I found in an old music magazine. It came along at a perfect time. I listened to it constantly, sometimes letting Freedy sing me asleep (some would call it passing out) on the couch after last call.

The first song on This Perfect World, "Bad Reputation," seemed to sum everything up for me at age 23. The first verse went, "I know I got a bad reputation, and it isn't just talk talk talk / If I could only give you everything, you know I haven't got / I couldn't have one conversation, if it wasn't for the lies lies lies / And still I want to tell you everything until I close my eyes and suddenly I'm on the street / seven years disappear below my feet / Do you want me now, do you want me now?" Seventy five words contained everything that my little Holden Caulfield mouth had been trying to say for months and months to all my friends and former associates. Right there in music was everything I needed to get off my chest.

Freedy Johnston is very good at that. Robert Christgau called 1992's Can You Fly (Bar/None)

... a perfect album. Not a world-historical album or a ground-breaking album or even a concept album; not an album that will grab you by the neck and change your life. Just a perfect album - thirteen songs, thirteen discrete, discreet little moments that connect lyrically and stick musically

If anything, Freedy Johnston is the master of the musical short story, the Eudora Welty of the rock world. Each one of his songs is a perfectly self-contained snapshot of a moment or a feeling complete with a history and a future (if you care to imagine it) with all the loose ends tied up and not a word wasted. His melodies and arrangements tend to be simple, pleasant and catchy, and his music inhabits the middle ground between simple folk and four-chord rock. In a way he’s the opposite of Springsteen, who is all about the grand gesture, the fist in the air, the tornado and blood on the highway. Freedy Johnston is about the hand on the shoulder, the whispered secret, and the love letter delivered years too late.

The centerpiece of Can You Fly is the title song about a farmer and his son who come across something in their fields. Over a quiet bed of acoustic guitar and mallet percussion, Johnston sings,

Can you hear me?
Now the wind is dead
You fell from the cloud,
In the frozen mud
Can you see me
And my idiot son?
Down in golden light
Thrown out of the dark you came
Down down down down
on a midnight storm.
Down down down down
on a midnight flash.
We've all been looking at you,
I must know, is it true?
Can you fly?
Can you fly?

Can you hear the wind?
Now the light is dead.
You flew from your bed
Woke up on the floor
Can you fly tonight?
From my pointless fence?
Back up to the cloud
Up into the wind you came
Down down down down
on a midnight storm..
Down down down down
on a midnight flash.
We've all been looking at you,
I must know, is it true?
Can you fly?
Can you fly?

Is it an angel? Is it a metaphor? Who can tell? This is a perfect little lyric, utterly descriptive, finely drawn, and full of hidden nuance (Why is the fence pointless? Was it poorly built? Did the crop fail? Were the cows all sold?), and this is what Freedy Johnston does best.

Unfortunately, he didn't do it for very long. To my ears at least, Johnston started on a path of diminishing returns with 1996's Never Home (Elektra, 1997), tracing a career path a bit like Elvis Costello's post-Armed Forces. His albums have their charms, but they cannot help being measured against his first few and often found wanting. For this reason, I found the new Bar/None compilation of early Freedy Johnston demos, amusingly called The Way I Were, particularly intriguing.

Recorded on four-track between 1986 and 1992 (the year he made Can You Fly), The Way I Were chronicles Johnston's early experiments as songwriter and singer. Despite the primitive recordings, the arrangements are tasteful, intelligent, and above all proportional. These are not big songs, and big arrangements would overwhelm them. Strikingly, Johnston's gifts for economy were there from the beginning, as was his unique songwriting voice. At no point does he seem to be ripping off anybody, though rumors of the Pretenders, the Raspberries, and the Replacements surface from time to time.

The liner notes give no clue as to what was recorded when, or in what order the songs came. Thus, it becomes a game for the listener to try to figure out if the neat pop of "She's A Goddess" predates the messy and ridiculous "This Really Happened," or the other way around. The only way tell is by the sound of Johnston's voice-- his tenor warble appears in various stages of refinement on the fourteen tracks here. My best guess is that the more mannered vocal performances are the later ones, after Johnston got his ya-yas out.

But what ya-yas did he have? Early recordings are always dicey affairs. Have you ever heard the Replacements' first record, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out The Trash? It's a boozy punk stew that doesn't even sound like the same band who would within a few years record Let It Be or Tim. It sounds like a bunch of idiots more concerned with chasing tail and taking speed than being a band. By way of contrast, this is the sound of Freedy Johnston's ya-yas:

So it's your birthday
(yes it is!)
Happy birthday!
(thank you!)
Happy birthday!
(yes it is!)
Happy birthday!
(thaaanks!)
(I got some records... from my mom, and I got a couple tickets to see Madonna from my sister, and then... I got-- well I mean, I didn't get-- I kind of went out and spent-- you know, I bought some stuff for myself.)

All this over a loop and a skeletal bass and guitar line. The song is called "Happy Birthday." And yet within a couple years, he would be writing an elegantly drawn song about buying a mail-order bride called "I Do, I Do."

Shine up those city lights, Dust off the Empire State / My baby's flying to the city tonight, I'm gonna meet her at JFK. / Straighten the towers, paint the avenue, she's my Polaroid bride / Won't understand a word I'm telling you, Or the neon signs.

The voice is the same, the sound is the same, but somehow between 1986 and 1992, Freedy Johnston learned how to turn quirk into consequence.

www.freedyjohnston.com

This post also appears at Blogcritics.org. Blogcritics.org is clinically proven to build healthy teeth and bones.*

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