Frank Christian: "Where Were You Last Night?"

 As I make my way through my vinyl after finally getting a turntable, I'm working from A to Z while also working back from Z to A, so this afternoon, I pulled Suzanne Vega's eponymous debut from 1985. This is the LP from which her 'breakout' tune, "Marlene On The Wall" comes. It didn't really chart in the US, but did become a hit in the UK and other European countries. However, it did get some solid airplay on MTV and some alternative and college radio stations, so it ended up on my turntable.

I'm writing today though because the amazing songwriter-guitarist Frank Christian appears on three of the cuts and seeing his name brought up so many memories and emotions. In the early 90s, I tended bar at the famous Ear Inn on Spring Street. It was a well-frequented bar for musicians, often they'd come in after gigs. In this way, among others, I served Laurie Anderson, Stevie Winwood, Joey Ramone, Stuffy Shmitt, Suzanne Vega, and many others. One of the regulars was Frank Christian, who would also sometimes play there at the bar, either solo or with some other locals.
 

His playing and original songs moved me deeply. And he and I became, if not friends, more than acquaintances and certainly more than a simply customer/bartender relationship. This included some heartfelt conversations over time and there were a few times we drank together. He had a low-key charm, dry wit, and could be a bit of a curmudgeon as I can be. Yet, at no time did he put on any airs. I had to learn slowly and mostly through others that he was a well-respected musician, one of those musicians loved and respected by other musicians, more than ever becoming a popularly recognized name outside the folk and blues community. 

In fact, chances are if you never heard of Frank Christian, you've heard his music. Nanci Griffith recorded his "Three Flights Up" on her Grammy winning 1992 release, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Besides his work on Suzanne Vega's LP, Christian played on dozens of LPs by people like John Gorka, Jack Hardy, The Smithereens, and Dave Van Ronk among others. 

Christian also recorded four solo LPs. In 1992, he gifted me a copy of his second album, Where Were You Last Night since he knew I loved the song after hearing him perform it at The Ear Inn. That was the year he turned 40. I stopped tending bar by 1995 and lost touch with the scene and with Frank. It was a sad day when I learned that he died from pneumonia on Christmas Eve, 2012 at the young age of 60. 

"Where Were You Last Night" captures a lonely, in my mind, rain-drenched noir atmosphere. In fact, after hearing Frank play this at the Ear, I asked him a day or two later for the name of the "noir-like song" and he immediately knew which I meant. It begins with an exquisite 1:30 second acoustic guitar intro that sounds a bit like a Spanish classical lute vibe. Then a jazz-tinged vibraphone, and soft brushed drum comes in. Frank's vocal comes in, with the cinematic image straight from a classic film noir like Sam Fuller's Underworld USA: "Cigarettes and coffee black on a rainy Tuesday morn...."  

and it continues with imagery that is as stark as the black and white of the great films noir:

Tolling bells and brief farewells
Newspapers stuck on thorns
A winding breeze 'round crippled trees
Tossing notes of light
Where were you last night?

The moonlight like a dagger shines
Through Venetian blinds
Showing yearning shadows
Starting to unwind
partly eclipsed the quiet traffic
Scars the asphalt with tatoos
And I sit and think of you

But now I only stare through windows
Scratched with veils of rain
And I see a sky bleached white
And I wonder will I ever forget the pain
That you were a lie

I remember your smile
Elastic on your face
Put me in a viscious sweat
I grasp you in the haze
And your eyes so soft and warm
You delighting in your harm

Maybe pour yourself a wee dram of bourbon or rye, dim the lights, and give this a listen:

La Varieté by Weekend

 
La Varieté: the French term for popular radio, everything that's not heavy rock; music drawing on diversity and depth. This album is a meeting of songs and improvisations....

Thus this album of sonic perfection was described by the band on the back cover of its sole album. Weekend was a Welsh band made up of Alison Statton on bass and vocals, Simon Booth on guitar, and Spike on guitar and viola. The other guest "weekenders" included Roy Dodds on drums, Dave Harwood on double bass and violin, Dawson Miller on Percussion, Larry Stabbins on some wonderful tenor and soprano sax soloing, Annie Whitehead on trombone and Phil Moxham adding bass on a few cuts.

Weekend in fact, came out of the dissolution of Young Marble Giants who also produced one contemporary classic, Colossal Youth. Young Marble Giants were Alison Statton, Phil and Stuart Moxham. That band's album, released in 1980, is a minimalist masterpiece that sounds like a "bedroom record" if you know what I mean. Intimate, simple, unadorned, and perhaps a bit dark at times.

La Varieté, on the other hand, is warm, evocative of sunny skies, warm temperatures, and gentle breezes. As described, there's a diversity here with nods to Caribbean and African rhythms akin to the floating flowing sound of someone like Sunny Ade.

When this lp came out in 1982, I was living in NYC's East Village, in a tenement walkup on the corner of First Ave and E 4th Street. My girlfriend, Pat and I, not making a lot of money, at one point were listening to tapes of music on our answering machine. The album came with a little booklet of water color drawings by Wendy Smith and some featured lyrics we would peruse while listening.

From the breezy guitar work that introduces the opening track, "The End of the Affair", this album was a perfect soundtrack to lazing around the apartment on sunny summer days, making love in the afternoon in between naps, perhaps snacking on the brie and champagne she'd bring home from her catering job at SNL. 

The soulful sax that is featured on the instrumental, "Weekend Stroll" was a song I loved to have on while driving along country highways during those times we were able to get away from the city to upstate or on one road trip to Maine. "Summerdays" paints a picture of such summer indolence:

                    Summer morning bright and hazy,
                    I lie in bed I'm feeling lazy

                    And up over the trees, high in the breeze,
                    The kestrel hovers with graceful ease.
                    Thoughts of earlier days come to me,
                    The light came flooding through the trees.

This is followed by the Calypso-tinged "Carnival Headache" with a rollicking trombone solo and then "Drumbeat For Baby." A pop tune, its lyric tinged with some ominous color:

                    Confirmed were the deepest fears
                    And through they eyes blurred with tears,
                    Was there nothing you could say,
                    All that you could do was play
                    A drumbeat for baby.

Side One ends with the Nigerian Afro Pop-like instrumental "A Life In The Day Of... Part One". And of course, Side Two opens with Part Two. Then, a turn towards a darker side of the weekend with a haunting string arrangement behind the mysterious lyric of "surreal dreams" and the reocurance of "childhood fears" leading to its concluding verse:

                    Wasting time talking to reflection
                    Don't know where to go or what to say
                    Times of change rearrange your world
                    And challenge minds with bleak destruction
                    Wasting so much time.

"Women's Eyes" picks up the tempo, and "Weekend Off" is another rousing instrumental featuring Stabbins' jazzy sax work. 

The final two songs close the album with the darker side of indolence, ennui, and nostalgia. The sun has set, and you are alone at night with a solitary dim lamp burning. "Red Planes" ends with:

                    Absent now the silent home,
                    Missing people vacancies.
                    Past dreams and wishes frozen view,
                    Fades away for calling new.

That line, "missing people vacancies" captures for me the concept of saudade described as a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostaliga said to be characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperment. What makes it different though, from simple melancholy, is that it can be for that which has never really been. It's all about absence, whether the literal absence of a loved one or something never really possessed to begin with. 

Saudade is often associated with an understanding that one may never again encounter the object of longing. It is colored by the sweet-bitter recollection of emotions, experiences, places, or events (like the memory of lightning bugs on a summer night) that cause a sense of separation from the joyful sensations they once caused. This is an emotional feeling deeply prized in Brazil to the point that The Day of Saudade is officially celebrated on January 30th.

"Nostalgia", the cut that closes the album is pure perfection:

                    The photo on your wall
                    Is a record of the past
                    Things you had forgotten
                    Things that couldn't last,
                    Now that things are different,
                    A moment on your own brings back memories,
                    And the thought will make you crave for old friends,
                    Some of them you see sometimes
                    Some of them are dead.

And isn't that just what this post is about? What the reason I even started this blog is? Every album is a record of a life that no longer is. That tenement is an expensive condo now and the East Village way beyond my capacity to afford! My lover, a woman I had thought of as the "love of my life" is married and thankfully we are still in contact with each other after all these years! So many of those I knew then, some very intimately are either dead or lost to time. 
 
So the concluding verse that ends the album may be a piece of advice for those who get too caught up in nostalgia:

                    Don't forget the bad times
                    You swore not to forget,
                    The anger, mental violence,
                    The worries and the threats,
                    Sometimes it's nice to see people
                    Who used to be really close to you,
                    But now you've escaped from your dependence
                    Don't get another dose.