'Tea in the Sahara'

"One Wish Before We Die"

For a start, it's April Fools. It's going to be a few days before Nodus Tollens is going to come out. I figure it might be an opportune moment to talk about this instrumental cover I did.

The original is of course the snobby, The Police on their Synchronicity album. It used to be the last track on the LP released in Australia, but later iterations and the CD version features 'Murder by Numbers' as an extra bonus track that comes after 'Tea in The Sahara'. I like 'Murder by Numbers' but one thing it is not, is a closing track for me. It creates more confusion than anything. If the Police didn't think it was worth putting on the original release, I kind wondered if it really belongs at the end of a very unified album without it.

Rick Beato has a nice video about how wonderful 'Murder by Numbers' is but really, one must ask, does it really belong on Synchronicity? And if so, does it belong as the last track?

What's interesting about this song is how the intro section is a C#minor vamp kind of thing which then slides into the verse which is built around F#minor and A, and the Chorus is a disarming I-IV-V sequence in E which resolves back at the C#minor. There's an almost mathematical beauty in how the bits fit together while disguising the E major feel of the chorus right through the intro and verse. Sting works very hard to hide the dirty secret that the song has a happy I-IV-V chorus until it lands on your lap like a delightful surprise. Who writes exquisite songs like this any more?

Rick Beato was also talking about Paul McCartney and Sting as seemingly the only two people who write modal songs, and nobody else seems to do it. It's getting to be a lost art.

With all that said... This is a bit of fun cover. I never feel up to singing Police songs, but I always like playing them on guitar and bass, so it seems inevitable I'd play a cover of something by them at some point. This version features my Telecaster, and my PJ bass. It's a very Fender kind of recording.

Listening To...

'57th & 9th' - Sting

The good news is 2016 didn't claim him and here's a new album. The not so good news is that it's so-so. The better news is that it's ostensibly a straight up rock album. For somebody who bought his damn Lute record with Deutsche Grammophon, you approach it with trepidation. It really has been a while since Sting gave us a straight up rocker.

He's been talking about this one like he's going back to his roots but of course his roots is jazz, so it's a bit deceptive. I guess some of these numbers could be perceived to be Police-like numbers, but the beats-per-minute slows down rapidly during the album and gets a little snoozy. I'd hoped he'd go through the whole album at 145bpm, because that's where The Police found gold on 'Outlandos' and 'Regatta', but also, no, he slips back towards a 'Nothing Like The Sun' vibe which isn't what was really being hoped for.

If anything, the single cut 'I Can't Stop Thinking About You' should have been done with the Police. The rest, not so much. I guess if the album rocked any harder, it would have been quicker to reassemble the Police, but that's one place to which he's never really going back. More's the pity.

Blast From The Past 'Alchemy' - Dire Straits

I picked this up because I recently got into a conversation with an old friend about just what the hell happened to Dire Straits after their fourth studio album 'Love Over Gold'. Well, they did this double live album which features a bit of Brett Whitley art on the cover. It was quite something back in the day, with its mind-blowing gatefold double LP cover. Behold:

Oh yeah.
As it turns out, the live versions these classic Dire Straits tracks go on and on and it got me thinking about why I liked the album 'Love Over Gold' so much and of course Mark Knopfler does the Steve Howe thing of swapping guitars mid-song and radically going from classical guitar tones to Stratocaster. That, is one of the hallmarks of prog rock, together with the really long songs; so it finally dawned on me just how much prog rock Dire Straits were doing on their first four albums without really telling the world that's what they were doing. You could draw a line from 'And You And I' to 'Romeo and Juliet'. If you substitute out Roger Dean and insert Brett Whitely, well, you get the idea.

What happened with Mark Knopfler after 'Alchemy' was he moved on to playing a Gibson Les Paul a lot more as his main guitar, than his Stratocaster, and suddenly it sounded a lot less interesting for me. 'Brothers in Arms' was the huge international hit, but I really don't like that album as much as I like the first four studio albums. As with Sting, he's never really managed to recapture that magic of his early work.

Some New Sounds I Bought

Zappa Plays Zappa

This one's a bonus CD that comes with a Double DVD of Dweezil Zappa leading his band through the sonic adventures of his old man Frank. I saw them over a year ago and it was a revelation to hear the songs played live and it didn't hurt to have Napolen Murphy Brock and Steve Vai playing on stage with them. My review of that show is here.

Since seeing them I'd seen the DVD set in various J&B hi-Fi shops I've been trundling into, priced at anywhere between $30.00 and $45.00. Having seen them live, and not wishing to let the memory totally fade, I decided to buy the thing only to discover there was a bonus audio disc. (Hooray!)

The songs are culled from their stage shows that have slightly different interpretations of the songs. The more standard takes are on the DVDs. They songs are played immaculately, and lovingly. IF there's one complaint I have, it's that they seem to go just a little too slowly. I've been listening to the 'You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore' Series on my iPod in the car for months now, and I'm used to hearing these numbers zip by with gusto and over-rehearsed casual abandon. It's no biggie, but you can hear on these recordings at least that Dweezil's band is still climbing the heights Frank's band found.

One more thing: Dweezil censors his old man's lyrics a lot. 'St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast' was missing the word cock in the line "He stumbled over his cock."

Not sure if Frank would have approved of that.

Sting Plays Reneaissance Stuff

It's a real drag to find the most pretentious impulses are the ones that get Sting a record from the immensely revered, all-conquering, Von-Karajan-inflected  Deutsche Grammophon label. The album I speak of is the 'Songs from the Labyrinth' where he sings the songs of John Dowland accompanied by Lute. I guess the curiosity got the better of me an I shelled out the bucks for this album. I might have been better buying the deluxe edition of 'The Who For Sale', but I thought, "no, buy something you wouldn't know the content thereof!"

I dunno.

Maybe I should stick with stuff I know I like at this stage of my life. Sting makes a fine job of huksing and crooning his way through this album to the accompaniment of a gorgeous sounding lute, but I just feel this is as phony a classical recording as my Beastie Bach, if not worse in as much as he just seems to make his delivery as straight as possible to put across the point that this is somehow a 'serious recording. I mean, it's a fine enough album but Deutsche Grammophon? Come off it Gordon!

To be blunt, I would have preferred if he played updated rock versions of these songs rather than this pseudo-historical, pseudo-intellectual quest for some kind of authenticity that fails because he's Sting. He should leave this stuff to people who do this stuff because they can't do anything else. He does rock, well. This is just perverse.

And I bought it like the sucker punter that I am. :(