John Hiatt "Mystic Pinball" (4.5*)



I had Radio National’s The Music Show on in the background when I turned my thoughts to a review of John Hiatt’s latest recording and had already decided consistency was going to be the theme to riff off this time around. Andrew Ford kicked off with a track from the new Van Morrison, and that, I thought, was the way into this one.

Around fifteen years back I was aenjoying Van the Man. He seemed to have located a rather pleasant groove,  was mining that seam rather well and seemed to be displaying a fair degree of consistency with the odd flash of brilliance. I started to cool towards Mr Morrison somewhere around the turn of the century and while I haven’t heard all of the half dozen sets of new material between The Skiffle Sessions and Born to Sing I’ve heard (and read) enough to suggest we’re moving from groove into rut where Morrison’s concerned, largely due to an apparent willingness to surrender to an innate tendency towards Grumpy Old Man With a Substantial Chip on the Shoulder and a Simmering Resentment Concerning the Price of Fame.

In any case, what I heard at the start of The Music Show on 6 October sounded a hell of a lot like what he was doing fifteen years ago, so I’m inclined to give Born to Sing the old flick pass. The new John Hiatt, on the other hand, comes as a reminder that Hiatt remains on the automatic purchase list, and we definitely need to fill in the gaps in the back catalogue, starting with 2008’s Same Old Man.

The first thing to note is the continuity from Dirty Jeans & Mudslide Hymns. Hiatt has kept his regular road band (Doug Lancio on electric guitar, dobro and mandolin, Patrick O'Hearn on bass, and Kenneth Blevins on drums) for the instrumental component and producer Kevin Shirley in the control room.

Lancio has been on board since The Open Road and the rhythm section dates back to Same Old Man, so you’d expect them to be up to just about anything Hiatt can throw at them. Dirty Jeans had an uncharacteristic slickness to it, and this time around Shirley pares things back a little while still keeping the sound sharp and focussed.


See the opener, We're Alright Now for a close to faultless, radio friendly example  of what I’m talking about, straight into a chugging heartbeat rhythm, funky, roar it out on the highway chorus (complete with handclaps). Gets things moving right from the get go, very much in the tradition of Riding With The King.

As is often the case where Hiatt is concerned, it’s about character sketches rather than autobiography. There’s a girlfriend who gets her jollies from drawing blood on Bite Marks, and recollections of a former lover doing a hundred miles an hour through the trailer park on a motor cycle without a helmet before slamming into a concrete drain pipe on It All Comes Back Someday. Wood Chipper kicks off with an admonition to beware any conversation a man starts by calling you Skipper, has a bloke track his ex- and her new bloke on the run after an armed robbery down to a shack in the middle of nowhere. He bangs his knee on the wood chipper in the yard, winds up dead and ground up for bait and finishes the tale from the hereafter. Justice is done in the end since they’re ambushed down the road by the forces of law and order. She ends up dead and the cops are puzzling over what seems to be a coded note found in her breast pocket. The note, as it turns out, is a shopping list.

The casual listener might be inclined to dismiss My Business as a throw away, but the tune gives Hiatt and The Combo a chance to rock out as they head into Howlin’ Wolf territory (there’s a howl at the end to round off the Wolf style riffage), and the change of pace as they rock out leads rather neatly into I Just Don't Know What to Say  a slower number in the we’re losing it and I’m bewildered mode that features a rather tasty solo from Mr Lancio (whose playing is consistently excellent throughout) and some rather tasty imagery as the protagonist admits he’s lost for words as he surveys what’s left of a relationship he’s not ready to give up on.

The main character, whoever he is, in I Know How to Lose You has a slightly different problem. He’s been bouncing from woman to woman and playing the field, but it’s only a means to distract him from the memory of the one he actually loves. After those heavier themes, you need something to lighten the mood, and it comes in the form of a crunchy groove on You're All the Reason I Need.We’re back in lost love territory for One of Them Damn Days where an embittered alcoholic is back on a bender after sights his ex with someone else across town. He’s just not sure which day it was...

The lighter side of things gets another guernsey in No Wicked Grin, sweet without being cloying and Give It Up continues in upbeat mode, even if the narrator’s begging a mate to get himself off the sauce or whatever additive he’s using to make his life bearable. The pendulum swings back slightly for Blues Can't Even Find Me, with a protagonist who can’t see the big picture anymore if there’s even one to view.

By this point in a lengthy career long term fans know Hiatt’s not likely to be springing any surprises on you, but that’s not a problem. You’re virtually assured of a well-honed collection of songs with intelligent lyrics, each one more than likely telling a story or portraying a character, on a new Hiatt album, along with an instrumental accompaniment delivered with precision, down and dirty when it needs to be, crisp and clear when that’s the appropriate approach.

Another worthy effort from a master craftsman who has always been comfortably ahead of the pack, and not that far behind the likes of Costello, Thompson and Newman in my personal iconography.

Levon Helm "Ramble at the Ryman" (4.5*)

Recorded by a travelling version of the late Levon Helm's Midnight Ramble, rather than the regular sessions that have been running at Levon’s studio at Woodstock in upstate New York since 2004 Ramble at the Ryman (that’s Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, the former home of the Grand Ol’ Opry) might look to be rather heavy on past glories (six tracks out of fifteen from The Band’s catalogue) but with a crack outfit including multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell and Helm's daughter, vocalist and mandolinist Amy alongside a number of guests (Little Sammy Davis, Buddy Miller, Sam Bush, Sheryl Crow and John Hiatt) the result is a highly listenable collection of rock, blues, country, and folk that rocks along very nicely indeed.

The Band material here, starting with the opening Ophelia  and stretching through Chuck Berry’s Back To Memphis (covered regularly as part of The Band’s live set), Evangeline, Rag Mama Rag, The Shape I’m In, Chest Fever and The Weight are significantly reworked the way you’d have to when you can’t call on Garth Hudson’s keyboards, with the emphasis on the shambling horns and guest vocals from Sheryl Crow (Evangeline), Larry Campbell (Chest Fever) and John Hiatt (The Weight).

The guest vocals are, in large part, a function of the throat cancer that damaged Levon’s vocal cords and while the predictions that he mighty never sing again didn’t materialise, it took a while before his voice was up to singing, so for much of the early Ramble era he was content to leave the vocal department to others.

Issues regarding vocal resilience come to the fore in Dirt Farmer’s Anna Lee, where his own voice might not be strong enough to carry the song by itself on his own, but choral support from the ensemble’s female members gets it over the line.

Little Sammy Davis takes centre stage for the old R&B hit Fannie Mae, which dates, I suspect, back to the Ronnie Hawkins days, and Slim Harpo’s Baby Scratch My Back, while Sheryl Crow is front and centre for the Carter Family’s No Depression In Heaven and Buddy Miller gets to do his own Wide River to Cross.  The traditional Deep Elem Blues is handed to Larry Campbell, while Teresa Williams does the full country bit on Time Out For The Blues and Levon’s back for A Train Robbery.

That vocal chopping and changing could, under other circumstances, come across as an all-star celebrity occasion, but the ensemble, with egos deposited in the cloak room, comes across as a group of talented friends who coincidentally happen to be rather fine musicians getting together to have a bit of fun, sing and play and enjoy each other’s company.

It’s the kind of vibe that you can only create by extensive playing together (as noted the Woodstock Rambles date back to 2004) and the core group creates an environment where the guests slot in seamlessly. Helm’s work behind the drum kit drives things along, the instrumental line up are equally at home in the mountains and down among the bayous, the horns are a delight and while the half-dozen Band numbers form an unavoidable core (you wouldn’t really expect Levon to ignore them, would you?) they’re reinterpreted rather than reproduced.

Ramble at the Ryman may not be the same as hearing Levon Helm play for a few dozen guests at in Woodstock, but now he’s gone you’re not going to get that opportunity anyway. One of the greats, recorded in what’s arguably the right setting.

Little Village "Little Village" (4*)

I've frequently bemoaned the relative dearth of music fans who happen to have similar tastes to my own in these parts and here's a prime case in point. Had I been in the middle of the same sort of bunch of music fans I recall from my musical heyday there would've been someone in the crowd who'd have picked up a copy of Little Village.

Alternatively, had I been in a larger centre I may well have sighted this under-appreciated little gem in a cutout bin or second hand rack and weakened. After all, you'd expect that an album featuring the guitar of Ry Cooder, John Hiatt's vocals and songwriting, Nick Lowe on bass, vocals and the occasional writing credit and drummer Jim Keltner would be worth the price of a discounted admission.

Hiatt, Cooder, Lowe and Keltner had worked together on Hiatt's Bring the Family in 1987 and various permutations and combinations of the four had appeared on other projects credited to Cooder and Lowe, so it's not too difficult to see the origins of this 1992 album. 

Originally the idea was to call the outfit Hiatus, and while most of the vocal duties were passed to Hiatt the idea seems to have been to produce a genuine four-way collaboration, which is fair enough as a concept, but democracy doesn't always work in a band situation. 

Initial reactions when the album was released twenty years ago were very mixed, possibly due to the same degree of heightened expectation that tends to cruel highly anticipated supergroup collaborations.

If you'd heard and enjoyed Hiatt's earlier work (and particularly Bring the Family), loved the early Ry Cooder and noted Hiatt's presence on The Slide Area and Borderline, and spotted Lowe as a classy collaborator who could turn out a quirky song or three you'd probably have been licking the lips and anticipating a masterwork of staggering genius.

That's always going to be tough to deliver in an environment where you're making a band record featuring three strong performers who are used to calling the shots, so Lowe's summation of the album (of which Lowe has said, this rather limp record, which got limper and limper as certain members of the group messed around with it) might be understandable, because there are probably things on there he'd have done differently, and you'd suspect Cooder and Hiatt would have said something fairly similar.

Casting those issues aside might be difficult for the participants but having heard a sample of live Little Village via bootleg I was intrigued enough to chase down a download of the album. When you listen to it well removed from the high expectations of 1992 it's actually a rather good listen, provided you can remove yourself from expectations of stellar performance.

As an example of that, try Don't Think About Her When You're Trying To Drive, a track that would have been a highlight on a John Hiatt solo album, or Do You Want My Job, a bleak portrait of life in a place that may or may not be a fished out archipelago somewhere in the Pacific. 

For the rest of the album, Solar Sex Panel addresses male baldness and global warming issues with Hiatt espousing the virtues of his solar powered loving, The Action gives a sort of blow by blow description of a good time hangout, and Inside Job grooves along nicely around a Cooder solo. Six and a half minutes of Big Love might be a bit much to take if it wasn't for the fat rumbling licks Cooder slides in underneath the vocals, while Take Another Look switches the vocal spotlight to Lowe.

Then there's Do You Want My Job? On this description, the answer's a firm No, regardless of the tropical island vibe. 

Don't Go Away Mad has Hiatt front and centre in a track that grooves along pleasantly but doesn't have a lot going for it, though the guitar solo in the middle is kinda tasty, but with Fool Who Knows we've got Nick Lowe back on vocals in a trademark vocal performance in a song he obviously likes (he was doing it on tour with Ry Cooder in November 2009), interesting guitar action. 

There's a bit of motoring metaphor on She Runs Hot for Me, where everyone seems to be having a good time, that you might see continuing into Don't Think About Her When You're Trying to Drive. Yeah, sure it does, but it's another one in a lengthy series of heartfelt heartbreak Hiatt ballads where you're looking for the searing Cooder solo (on the surface you'd think it would be a natural fit) but the guitar work stays at the tasteful punctuation stage. 

Finally, there's a slick groove driving Don't Bug Me When I'm Working, complete with audio inserts from the Sonny Boy Williamson track that gave the band its name.

Now, when you line Little Village up against the best work from the three headliners it might come across as slightly lightweight, but that's in comparison with some very classy competition. Definitely worth a listen, particularly for Hiatt fans.

Oh, and those live bootlegs where Mr Cooder gets a bit more room to stretch out are worth chasing down as well...

David Bromberg "Use Me"

David Bromberg Use Me (4*)

As you might expect, someone who has been associated with the likes of Reverend Gary Davis, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jerry Garcia,Jerry Jeff Walker, Willie Nelson, Jorma Kaukonen isn't going to be short of musical friends and acquaintances.

On Use Me David Bromberg calls in some musical favours from Dr. John, Levon Helm, Linda Ronstadt, John Hiatt, Widespread Panic and Los Lobos to produce an album that offers a lively amalgam of blues, folk, jazz, bluegrass and country & western, played with Bromberg's characteristic restrained virtuosity.

After returning from a recording hiatus lasting 17 years for 2007's Try Me One More Time (in the meantime he's been operating a violin sales and repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, with his wife) this latest effort, recorded on the various guest artists' home turf (Levon Helm in Woodstock, Dr John in New Orleans, Nashville for John Hiatt, Tim O’Brien and Vince Gill, Los Angeles for Los Lobos) works the same territory he's been mining through a lengthy career.

If you're looking for rootsy eclecticism, with very classy performances on fiddle, acoustic and electric guitar, pedal steel and dobro with warm vocals and a classy lineup of guests who don't get in the way, Bromberg's your man.