Cutting across gender and genre, albums by Annie Lennox, Lindsey Buckingham, Tom Waits, T Bone Burnett, Michael Penn and Suzanne Vega have made 1992 a superb year for that stand-alone, psyche-searching breed known as the singer-song-writer. In this tested company, Freedy Johnston rates an immediate "who he?" The short answer is that he's a 31-year-old Kansan (now living in Brooklyn) who has produced an extraordinary second album, one of the most tuneful, propulsive and penetrating of this or any year.
The first thing that strikes you about Johnston is his voice. Its high, reedy lonesomeness led reviewers of his first album (The Trouble Tree, 1990) to compare him to Neil Young. Like Young, and also like the Band (remember them?), Johnston in certain songs sounds like an emissary from an earlier time. But though both sing as if in a dream, their styles are different: Young's dreaminess has a lender, haunted, lost-in-the-ether quality, and Johnston sings with the wide-eyed urgency of a man whose dreams have seared his soul.
He writes that way too. The songs on Can You Fly tell the fractured stories of buffeted, often uprooted characters, sometimes including himself. In "Trying to Tell You I Don't Know," he strip-mines an episode from his own life—how he sold his inheritance, his grandfather's farm, to help finance his music—yielding an ore rich in determination and desperation: "Yes I sold the house where I learned to walk/ Falling down always/ Fifty bucks to use the van/ Trying to find your city/ Trying to get back my guitars."
Johnston's lyrics can be almost photographically specific. Recalling his innocent love for the title character in "The Mortician's Daughter," he sings, "We drew our hearts on the dusty coffin lids." More often he is both specific and elusive. You figure out that ' "The Lucky One" is about a low-stakes, bus-riding Vegas gambler. But even if you don't quite get that the transcendent title song is about an angel who falls from heaven into a dirt-poor farmer's backyard, you know you are witnessing some magical event in the narrator's life, and you are as transfixed as he is.
That's the beauty of the way music and lyrics can work together—the melody lends authority to the words. while the words make the melody concrete. A rocker at heart, Johnston draws from country and folk at will, and on Can You Fly he and a passionate group of musicians give each song its own distinct mood and musculature. There are 13 songs on Can You Fly. Each leaves you with lyrical mysteries to gnaw on, musical comforts to lean on. (Bar/None)
Maceo Parker
We like to do 2 percent jazz, 98 percent funky stuff! Good God!" shouts saxman and singer Parker over a dippin'-'n'-slippin' beat on this live album's opening cut. "This is known as happy music. Happy! Uhh! Happy music is when you hear it, you start movin' and shakin" somethin' automatically.... And you smile a lot too." Well, music fans, Parker delivers. And if his patter makes you think of James Brown, the grooves will too, and for good reason: Parker, 49, played with the Godfather of Soul on and off from 1964 to 1984. Parker has also worked with funkmaster George Clinton, Deee-Lite, DeLa Soul and 10,000 Maniacs, but here he and his guitar-organ-horns-and-backup singers are on their own and making the earth move. (Verve)
Liza Minnelli
This album is echt Liza: She gives it all she has. Would it be apostasy to wish that Minnelli would hold a little back and not demand so obviously that her audiences love her?
If what audiences have loved all these years is Minnelli's clear, stentorian voice, there is somewhat less to love these days. On this recording at least, the voice sounds a bit frayed. But Liza belts on—standards like "Teach Me Tonight," "Some People," and of course "Theme from New York, New York," stretching syllables to the breaking point. Unfortunately, she seems more intent on seeing how far her voice can carry than how much it can express. One of the recording's few quiet, touching moments comes in the bitter, rueful "Sorry I Asked." Minnelli does dish up an amusing Kander and Ebb paean to that lady nobody doesn't love, Sara Lee, and assisted by a band of chorines she refers to as the "demon divas," she delivers an infectious, toe-tapping "Stepping Out" (from the movie). Still, when all is sung and done, the listener's reaction is more exhaustion than exhilaration. (Columbia)
Lemonheads
If Nirvana and Pearl Jam are any indication, to be a hip rocker requires a bleaker-than-thou attitude. Too much gloom can give a listener a headache, though, which is where the Lemonheads come in. This Boston-based band has a less alienating, almost folky feel. On their second major-label disc, head Lemon Evan Dando writes songs that get loud without getting on your nerves—from the peppy, twangy "Rollin' Stroll" to mid-tempo material like the Dylan-esque title track.
While grunge rockers mumble and bemoan, Dando tends toward wistful meditation. Blending less strident rock with personable lyrics makes for music that puts you at ease rather than on edge. (Atlantic)
>Freedy Johnston
KANSAS BOY BEGS PRAIRIE DOGS' PARDON
FREEDY JOHNSTON WAS 16 AND SUBSISTING on a diet of Elton John, David Bowie, Steely Dan and Led Zeppelin when he ordered his first guitar from a mail-order house in Delaware. There were no music stores near his home in Kinsley, Kans. He still remembers the sunny morning when "the UPS truck pulled up in front of my house, and the man pulled out this, ironically, coffin-shaped cardboard box and carried it up to me. That was the start."
He had grown up on a farm until his parents divorced when he was 7, and alter high school he tried the University of Kansas in Lawrence before dropping out to work in restaurants and practice his guitar. He came east in 1985. Freedy (a spin on Fred bestowed by his mom) had earned money for that first guitar by doing farm jobs, including one traumatic day of exterminating prairie dogs by pouring gasoline down their holes and sealing the holes with dirt. "Their burrows destroy the ground, and cows fall into the ruts," Johnston explains. "I only did it one day, but I felt really bad about it. Prairie dogs are so cute you can't imagine ever wanting to hurt one. They have almost humanlike faces."
Nowadays, Johnston tours and writes on his guitar. For him, chords lead to a melody, which leads to a groove, which suggests a title. Then come the lyrics. He likens writing to being "a mouse in a maze searching for the cheese. You try one route, dead end, try another, always smelling for that cheese." Or perhaps it's like being a prairie dog in a burrow. He laughs. "Yeah, looking for the exit."
- Contributors:
- Eric Levin,
- Joanne Kaufman,
- Craig Tomashoff.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
