The fourth, Rundgren produced, album, Mother's Pride (1974) is more of the same, but with both the rock and ballad elements played up, so the big numbers are great stomping rock-outs and the ballads are real weepies. The slower songs are better than ever and the rock numbers are good fun but the album sounds a little tired despite it's grandstanding production and I reckon that being banned from playing in the UK for being, no joke, too sexy, and not achieving anything like the record sales that had been anticipated for the band meant that Fanny started to come apart (there's nothing that I can write that won't sound somehow filthy). Anyway, Mother's Pride is a good record and it's really something of a surprise that Fanny don't have a larger part in the story of 70's rock.
When Americana pioneers Uncle Tupelo split I don't think anybody expected Jeff Tweedy to be the one to make a big name for himself and the huge success of Wilco came as a surprise to everyone. But the other surprise was that Jay Farrar didn't have any big-time success at all. As the more likeable one of the pair, and the one whose songs were more immediately engaging in Uncle Tupelo, and had ignited the alt-country genre, the smart money would certainly have been on Farrar's career taking off, but it wasn't to be. It's a shame, but it's understandable when you listen to Farrar's post Uncle Tupelo records. They are uniformly great, but they're too whimsical, too prone to uncertainty and they certainly don't have any big songs on them and in a way they're almost too low-key for major attention. Although his band Son Volt have made some great country-rock albums, even they don't seem to have the requisite determination to really stand out. Farrar's first solo album, Sebastopol (2001), is a lovely record which takes his one-time groundbreaking alt-country approach and adds various layers of other earthy sounds and styles. There's a folkish element to a lot of it, and although the nasal, melancholic tone to Farrar's voice remains unchanged that's exactly why there are times when you imagine how well his songs would fare with a vocal counterpart. There are little sound collages and instrumental experiments dotted between the leftist tales of hard lives, and on the whole it's a charmingly clear album with little commercial ambition but lots of interesting touches.
That willingness to experiment with funny noises and little experiments takes more precedence on the follow-up, 2003's Terroir Blues. Almost half of the album's 23 tunes are these odd footlings, and although they occasionally seem redundant, many of them demonstrate Farrar's discomfort with just releasing records composed of straightforward country-rock. Although having said that, the straightforward country-rock songs on Terroir Blues are some of the best he's written (making them, by default, some of the best of the genre) and as a album taken in toto it's really a rather special bit of understated invention. The tragedy of Farrar's work is that having almost single handedly created a modern genre, his work often sounds like he's just another practitioner of it, and it's sometimes hard to remember that although he hasn't changed his style all that much, he still pretty much devised it himself.
Last up for Farrar is his 2009 collaboration with Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard, the soundtrack for a doc about Kerouac called One Fast Move Or I'm Gone. While this should have been an interesting match-up instead it plays to both of their weaknesses and ends up being a perfectly pleasant but singularly uninspiring set of moody country-tinged indie-rock songs. At no point is it anything other than decent but at no point is it particularly great either while it rolls past gently and unobtrusively it does feel a bit like something of a missed opportunity.
Hmm, yet again Blogger seems to be ballsing up. I assume this looks odd now. Never mind. I can't concentrate on any negatives now that I'm on to possibly the greatest single released in any European territory, let alone its native Holland. That's right, I'm talking about the pinnacle of the career of one of the great geniuses (don't get all Saxondale on me, I swear the plural is geniuses) of the modern age, Father Abraham's 'The Smurf Song'. What's missing from 'The Smurf Song'? Nothing surely: profoundly philosophical lyrics ("Do Smurfs like to dance and croon? Yes, but only to this tune"), challenging musical complexity ("Hey, you're Smurfing out of key!"), a blistering key change, and a performer with a massive beard and thick Dutch accent. There's nothing missing. Nothing. B-side, 'The Magic Flute Smurf' stinks like a corpse though.
Finally for today it's Britain's premier prog-folk mystic miserabilist Bill Fay and his eponymous debut album from 1977. Overblown, astonishingly pretentious, abjectly silly and utterly brilliant, the Bill Fay album is awash with skipping strings, sawing cellos, rambling piano and delicately arpeggiated guitars coupled with lyrics of such mystifying meaninglessness as to make you genuinely question if you're missing something. It's a masterpiece of self-indulgence, played out as if Fay's life depended on it. Of course nobody bought it at the time and that commercial failure seems to have led directly to a collapse of Fay's confidence (in humanity if nothing else it seems) and led to second album 'Time of the Last Persection', the front cover of which surely was the inspiration for Mitch Cohen's Calling It Quits in the stupendous A Mighty Wind....
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