Another mysterious album
in the collection gifted to me by
my artist and musician friend Curtis.
Here’s a songwriter that I would have
heard about, whose name I would
have recognized as a person often
cited as a significant figure, whose
songs I had heard performed by other
artists, but whose records had
completely escaped me. It’s 1969.
Piano and voice. Spooky. Emotionally
evocative. Dynamic in an almost
insane way, between quiet, almost
whispered performance, to a loud,
punchy, nearly anguished delivery.
Long pauses between movements.
Unconventional song structures
and wildly radical change-ups.
Impossible to predict. Sometimes
a full big band kicks in, but just as
unexpectedly they will duck out.
This album, New York Tendaberry,
strikes me as highly experimental,
even by 21st century standards–
but maybe that’s not a fair
comparison, because it seems to me
that music of the late 60’s and early
70’s had way fewer creative restraints
on it. Musicians sometimes got away with
murder. However, we might be revisiting
that particular freedom as major labels
begin to have less sway over the industry
as a whole. Without proof of any kind,
I’d argue that our era might be more
open to experimentation than the 80’s
or 90’s were. I no sooner write this
as side one ends with “Save the Country,”
a tune made into a huge hit by
The Fifth Dimension. This was her
special sauce, it seems, writing these
slightly bizarre pieces that other artists
would somehow straighten out
and turn into gigantic bangers.
This record is crazy. I find it incredibly
impressive and wild and surprising,
and while I don’t love it, don’t see myself
spinning it over and over, I sure can
hear the way she must have influenced
most if not all of the female singer
songwriters that followed, and even
the ones that were her contemporaries.
Surely, she was a pivotal, monumental
force in pop music.
Notes on the vinyl edition: New York Tendaberry, Columbia Records, 1969, used black vinyl in mediocre condition. Some pops and noise. Skip at the end of side two. Might have to find a new pressing.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
michael jarmer 