It's late, freezing cold and I'm waiting for a train to get me home. I'm leaving a slowly dying town on the South Coast. At least that's what the Czech taxi driver told me. After a couple of days of being there I'm inclined to agree.
I spend a lot of time listening to music on trains. I listen to a lot of music from the peripheries. Neil Young said something about avoiding the middle of the road by lurching from ditch to ditch. A lot of the time I feel like I'm sitting in a nearby field watching the smoke from the crash.
It's not all free jazz psychedelic outsider freak out for me although I do love all that. Even when I don't like it, I like that it's there. Tonight I'm listening to Chuck Prophet doing his version of the Dreaming My Dreams album by Waylon Jennings, which is pretty straight ahead. It's called Dreaming Waylon's Dreams.
I'm a guitar fan and as much as I like a guitar pushing an amp into howling overdrive and feedback, I love me some twangy geetah or even a bit of gentle Tal Farlowe jazz tone. Yeah, I like the clean sound.
Now Chuck has a real knock out guitar tone. He doesn't have some fancy 1957 Fender Telecaster he plays a Squier with an odd tuner on the low E string but the mojo is in the fingers.
Odd thing to do covering an entire album but I really like this one. It's not note for note or even tune for tune. His version of The Door Is Always Open for example is fantastically off kilter and quickly descends from a kind of nonchalant monologue to deranged psychosis with spooky organ and desperate echoing rants.
On the train now. It's not warm and I'm full of cold and I just realised I've got to change trains again. Ugh. I could do a few echoing rants myself.
What else can I tell you about the record. Eh....the cute girl in Rough Trade East who sold it to me looked me in the eye and said 'enjoy' when I bought it, a totally random selection by the way, so I left the shop with a good vibe. Me and an old accomplice had just had great Indian food down Brick Lane and were having a great day.
It has definitely not been a one listen wonder. I couldn't go into a track by track description but if you think you could get into a countryish, twangy guitar thing with a curveball or two check it out.
I know this is a bit of a random post but I need to raid the medicine cabinet and get some sleep. Writing it kept my mind off how woozy I feel.
Thanks for tuning in.
Doc J
