There’s a segment I loved as a kid from an old Jack Benny show I heard once. It’s like fifteen minutes to airtime and Jack Benny asks his writers for that week’s script and is summarily told that there isn’t one.
When Benny asks why, Mel Blanc (the guy behind Bugs Bunny’s best work) as one of his writers responds in a perfect cadence of disgust and apathy with the line, “Awwww, we just didn’t feel no motivation.”
I liked it as a kid because I idolized anyone who took laziness to that level of extreme pride, but since the pandemic “I just ain’t felt no motivation.”
The last thing I published was about 18 months ago, and I purposely made it about something as banal and absurd as possible.
Seeing Ray Flanagan play his music with a five-piece, hard-charging band with two other guitarists filled me with enough joy that I felt excited enough to try to write something about it. Hopefully, I don’t desecrate it.
The best thing I can say is that it was exactly how I had hoped and wanted his music and songs to sound.
I’ve heard every song he performed at the Winchester last night before but almost exclusively as solo acoustic pieces or at venues that required a more subdued level of volume.
I said that to a couple of people who have seen him play in all his different guises, and I honestly didn’t mean it to belittle him as a solo acoustic performer.
His songs are solidly written, they are lyrically clever, his phrasing is always interesting whether he’s paying off a punchline or revealing that he’s been knifed in the gut by love. At his best, he can pull both off at the same time.
Ray’s well worth seeing as a solo, but I dig bands that can do loud and aggressive properly. I like energy.
So, I’ve spent the better part of two years imagining how I’d ideally like to hear those songs presented, which stunningly was almost exactly what I got.
I’ve even asked the dude what he would sound like if he was able to make some noise. Good luck with that. He’s inscrutable when you ask him to talk about himself or his music.
The truth is music is an auditory experience and to ask a real artist, who insists on playing his own in a city filled with cover bands to describe it is an uncomfortable, disrespectful, and unrealistic demand. The only answer if you are for real is that you’d have to be there and hear it that way.
If I put all my passion into something, I wouldn’t want to have to describe it like I’m in a five-minute movie pitch meeting either.
I have no interest in writing something and having to say it’s a mix of Vonnegut, Voltaire, and me. I’d rather they just took the time to read it.
So now I get to flail away attempting to describe it when I should merely just say it was well worth my time to hear and see in person and that I’m happy it’s so close to where I am now.
I don’t have any desire to hear Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt” done with blazing bright telecasters, but if it’s “Cocaine Blues” that’s exactly how I want to hear it.
People forget how Chuck Berry was really a country guitarist, and it’s out of fashion to recognize how much rock and roll was just as much aggressive country guitars with tons of attitude as it was rhythm and blues.
Country music has so many different guises, but I am not particularly a fan of traditional bluegrass sounds. Most modern country leaves me cold, but I know there’s good stuff out there.
I prefer it aggressive and loud. Bobby Fuller’s version of Sonny Curtis’ “I Fought the Law” is amazing. The Clash’s version is even better.
It’s the way you know certain Hank Williams songs would be awesome if he had had the watts to back up his attitude back in the day. It’s what Hank III does with them when he feels like it.
I love Rockabilly, the amped-up fifties-style rockers of Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds’ Rockpile efforts (for contractual reasons they only released one album as Rockpile, but it was the same band pumping out their solo efforts when they weren’t on the same label), I was a big fan of the so-called country-punk movement which included the Long Ryders and Jason and the Scorchers.
None of the tempos were any different, it’s just that finally, I got to hear these songs behind a hard-charging band, where the three guitars answered each other with vicious, bright-cutting savagery. At times they chimed, and at times they seared with prideful vibrancy.
No one was showing off. It didn’t veer off into metal or punk, it just all had that perfect tone that shows off a telecaster at its best. A hard-charging train bent for true love or hell forging its way forward as powerfully as possible without ever coming off its rails.
That bespoke the musicianship, because the band was tight as hell, and everything mixed perfectly, which amazes me given the fact that it was their first show together as the Mean Machine.
It just all fit.
The sounded like they have been touring this stuff for a solid year their first time out.
Not to mention that Ray showed me a real front man vibe I’ve never seen before. Decked out in a sheer flashy shirt that looked like he’d bought it with Elvis at Lansky Bros. back in the day. Ray’s a performer.
There were times he sounded as if he was making a sexy come on and then he would instantly turn it around into a cry of anguish shifting between alternate modes of passion on a dime.
You’ve got a cold, cold heart
You’re heart is so cold
But your body’s warm
I’m embarrassed because I don’t know the title of that one, but it started with a sense of sexy intrigue and built itself up and down repeatedly into a final worthwhile expression of frenzy until Ray ended it with a last gasp, Elvis, at his most sensual mimic, which said, “I’ve put everything I have into this all I can do is slow it down, tease you, and make you want to hear it again.”
I wish I had more of his lyrics, but they are too well crafted for me to risk misquoting them. He sets his lyrical targets up well and knocks them out at the end with knock-out punches like “Evil walks; and it’s magnetized.”
“Stupid Sound,” was a highlight and I got these from his Bandcamp page so they are probably somewhat correct to give you a vibe
I’ll always remember
You lying on the ground
Your handkerchief neck
In your sad story town
You ever get hungry
You ever get dry
Just go on down to Molly’s
Get some bread, wine, and pie
Who knows? Who cares?
It’s raining dumb out there
I turn
You down
Turn up that stupid sound
Woowoowoowoowoo
It’s right onto Ferndale
Where you had left a stain
I can hear your sweet crying
From Kamm’s Corners down Lorain
We’re rolling past midnight
With many proofs to prove
I got $32
Should get us in the groove
Who knows? Who cares?
It’s raining dumb out there
I turn
You down
Turn up that stupid sound
Woowoowoowoowooo
If you pass the Maker’s
Please tell them I said hi
I’m drowning on Neptune
Though I was just driving by
Paper says it’s Friday
But I find it hard to tell
‘Cause my memories say it’s Tuesday
And they’ll only serve me well
Who knows? Who cares?
It’s raining dumb out there
I turn
You down
Turn up that stupid sound
Turn up that stupid sound
Turn up that stupid sound
Woowoowoowoowoowoowooooo
https://rayflanagan.bandcamp.com/track/stupid-sound
It doesn’t sound like Dylan on “Positively Fourth Street” or the perfectly honed insults on Elvis Costello’s first four albums, but it’s on that level. Whether he’s expressing love, disdain, empathy, or anguish it’s the sound of an artist who won’t tell you what he sounds like or what his songs mean but knows exactly who he is and what he’s about.
When you hear something you dig with that much passion and skill there’s little reason to deny or resist it.
I had hoped the versions of these songs I’d previously heard were just blueprints for something that could be this aggressive, loud, and tasteful. How rare is it to get exactly what you wish for these days?
His music isn’t pornography, but the best I can do without embarrassing either of us is ape Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart when he defined it by saying, “I know it when I see it.”
I know how I like to see people turn out blues/country-infused stomps, Chuck Berry vamps, and lyrically adept philosophical rockers. That’s what I hoped for and that’s what I got.
It just happened to turn out exactly how I’d hoped it would.
I know it when I hear it!
All five musicians meshed perfectly. It left me motivated enough to ramble on about it past 5 AM. I haven’t felt that way for a couple of years now. I barely thought it possible even a week ago.
I feel bad that my nicotine addiction deprived me of parts of it. After the final song which started with a gospel hush of sincerity that again built to a satisfyingly frenzied climax that fancy shirt hung drenched in a well-earned sweat.
He gave everything he had, and for the first time in forever, I was exuberantly glad that I had gotten out of bed and left the house.
Well worth the wait. Hopefully, the plagued sky is clearing, and I’ll get to hear a lot more of it soon no matter how bad the weather gets around here in the next three months.
