Once upon a time, in what seems now like a land far, far away, there was this magical, wonderful thing called AM Top 40 radio. True Top 40 radio, though its FM version persisted well into the ’80s, saw its last real period of dominance in the ’70s, before the rock audience was filleted, ever more thinly, by radio niche marketing and a record industry promotional switch from singles to albums. In 1972 or ’73, for example, if you had a Top 40 outlet as grand as the one we had in Kansas City (WHB 710 AM), you might have heard Marvin Gaye, the Stones, Zeppelin, Charlie Rich, the O’Jays, Conway Twitty, Neil Young, Alice Cooper, Al Green, the Raspberries, Dylan, Elvis, Elton John, War, Sweet and more, all on the same station. Today these artists have been corraled into their respective oldies formats, but back then the music they made could all accurately be described as “pop” because it shared, over and above its many differences, a conviction that great singles — with identifying instrumental hooks, hummable melodies, unabashed studio craft, and, if helpful to the song, full and dynamic arrangements — were…well, great.
Ten years old in 1972, I cut my musical teeth in this eclectic, singles-driven era, passing entire lazy afternoons just singing along with the radio and falling in love. Is it any wonder, then, that the pop charts of 1972, experienced just as I was first developing a self-conscious sense of my own taste, still provide a pretty fair representation of my core aesthetic, even as an adult?
I can’t say for sure, of course, but I’d wager that Joe Henry, who’s barely a year older than me, and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, who turned ten in 1977, experienced much of their own musical comings-of-age around ’70s pop, too. Certainly all three of us (and anyone else around our ages, which is to say one hell of a big chunk of what amounts to the alt-country audience) know quite intimately what transpired next: Album-oriented rock exploded at just about the same late-’70s moment that punk hit, and in their wakes was left an increasingly fragmented rock landscape, including the expulsion from pop radio of virtually all twang as well as the rapid development of narrower and narrower formats. It was the rootsiest elements of one of these formats, college rock (later, “alternative”), that would eventually pave the way for Uncle Tupelo and what we now term alt-country, whatever that is.
Time was, it didn’t get much alt-countrier than Joe Henry or Jeff Tweedy. In fact, one way to trace the genre’s current flowering would be to recall a 1993 tour Henry opened a string of dates for Uncle Tupelo. Henry’s bassist at the time, Jim Boquist, first met Tupelo co-leader Jay Farrar on this tour, foretelling the eventual development of Son Volt.
But the times they have a-changed. Henry and Wilco’s latest albums — Fuse and Summer Teeth, respectively — are alternative country by past association only, a development that wasn’t exactly unpredictable. Henry, for example, has already explored several distinct sounds over the years. He started out a little bit rock ‘n’ roll, and then, with the Jayhawks in tow, he was a little bit country, too; on his last album, 1996’s Trampoline, he forged a moody, groove-based sound best realized on the title track, a rubbery-legged fever dream of loss and chronic ghosts.
Fuse continues the Trampoline approach, but it’s a better disc because the grooves, largely played with unexpected soufulness by assorted Wallflowers, have so much give in them, so much room to breathe deep, even as they close in claustrophobically around Henry’s wracked characters. Produced by Henry and T-Bone Burnett (with additional mixing done by Daniel Lanois), the album sketches men who have seen love blow up in their face and are convinced it’s about to explode again. The angels he feels around him in one track, for instance, aren’t guardians so much as capricious prophets of doom; in another song, he’s mocked by a looped “ha-ha” that laughs like a creepy Greek chorus.
With their fatalistic and paranoid minds, the men in Henry’s songs self-destructively proceed to realize their worst fears, promising the impossible, wanting too much, holding on to what’s already departed. Even alone they seem unable to let go or move forward — unable to do anything, really, other than love on with a passion that’s so tactile and involuntary that it sometimes seems nearly biological. “I love you with my skin and teeth,” he moans in one typically evocative phrase.
It’s the sound of Fuse, though, that’s most compelling. The earliest tracks here are of a piece, generally, with Trampoline, but as the disc progresses, bits of early ’70s pop spring to the fore. Quite a few of the cuts — with their slinky, chicken-scratch fills and soulful rhythms built around conga-like beats and funky bass lines — suggest spookier versions of Bill Withers’ folk-soul-pop cuts such as 1971’s “Grandma’s Hands”, or stripped-down Curtis Mayfield hits. The instrumental “Curt Flood”, with its jazz-funk guitar figures and laid-back churchy groove, brings to mind any number of early ’70s blaxpoitation soundtrack numbers. Best of all, from its opening chime-like trumpet to its soul groove and swelling string arrangement, “I Want Too Much” sounds for all the world like a kind of spare ’70s soul: a lo-fi “Me And Mrs. Jones”, or a subdued “Papa Was A Rolling Stone”.
