Next up is one of the most notorious stories in pop music. The background to the release, and particularly to the title, of Marvin Gaye's 1978 album Here My Dear is uncommonly odd and unpleasant. For some years before the recording of the album the relationship between Gaye and his wife Anna Gordy had been deteriorating badly, with both accusing the other regularly of infidelity and irresponsibility and in 1975 Gordy finally filed for divorce. Gaye had been busy with his cash buying copious numbers of cars and mountains of cocaine and consequently didn't have anything like enough left to pay his alimony and child support. The answer? Agree to give Gordy half the royalties from his next album, which Gaye went into the studio to start recording in 1976 with the specific intention of making it as crap (or, in his own words, "lazy") as possible. Things didn't go according to plan and once recording started Gaye found himself pouring out all kinds of confessional stuff about the situation with the lyrics veering wildly between astonishingly vicious hatred and sentimental nostalgia, and the tunes accordingly found themselves being worked on with more and more attention to detail. The resulting album, whose title refers to the fact that pretty much any money it made was going to be given to Anna, was absolutely panned on its release but, as is so often the way, has had a monumental critical re-evaluation since, and rightly so. It's a fantastic record. It's certainly wilful, difficult, irritating, incoherent, but as a soul album, it's absolutely laced with odd, jazzy inflections, really funky breaks, and contains some of the most fascinatingly, explicitly, personal lyrics ever set out in music. When it's calm it rivals any of Gaye's other work for soulful introspection and when its dander is up it's furiously uncomfortable. 'When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You' and 'Everybody Needs Love' are fantastic examples of Gaye's real artistry, his ability to transcend the limitations of R&B and turn it into something quite other. There are hard to take moments (the 8 minutes of 'Funky Space Reincarnation' didn't absolutely need to be included) but on the whole, in its deeply personal nature, its unpredictability and its self-determined unwillingness to abide by any preordained structure, Here My Dear as is close to art as R&B is ever going to get.
After leaving The Softies for the first time, the queen of twee Rose Melberg formed Gaze with some like-minded chums. First album Mitsumeru (1998) is another twee-pop gem, scarcely any different to any other (and certainly closer to Melberg's work in Tiger Trap than the Softies). It's got some up songs, it's got some slow songs, but they're all of the artless, clumsy, thoroughly charming librarian pop school that was all the rage for the Olympia kids in the mid to late 1990's. There are songs about jelly beans, songs with names like 'Preppy Villain' and the whole ramshackle pop fun of the exercise is infectiously endearing. As with all of Melberg's work it flirts shamelessly with being annoying but always manages to stay the right side of the line. Melberg did let down Zoe quite badly once by being something of an arse, but that's a different matter, and her records are always speccy charm personified.
Whilst overseeing the endless production line of Giant Sand albums, the ludicrously prolific Howe Gelb also finds the time to make copious albums under variations of his own name, one of which is next on the list. The Listener (2003) is one of Gelb's more accessible excursions into the oblique and focusses more heavily on his instrumental work and occasional Lou Reed impressions than the abstract desert rock and Americana that he tends to centre his records on. There are some surprisingly low-key and graceful piano tracks and piano led songs on The Listener and although it can veer directly into wanting to be Berlin (second track 'Felonious' is a prime example, even stating that it's a Lou steal) it's a delicate Sunday afternoon of an album. There are great jazzy trumpet solos and babbling bass over the indie-blues of the piano work, but this isn't rubbish like Eels bizarrely misconceived notion of how indie bands play the blues, this is the work of someone who has worked hard to really get it, to really understand how different musical forms work and why it's worth using some and discarding others. The Listener is a surprising album for Gelb partly because his work, while always shot through with a mordant sense of humour, can be furious and ragged and instead The Listener is calm, subtle, smart and smarmy, sarky and cool, it's a record that knows it should be playing in the corner of a run-down bar on a hot day, a hyper-ironic take on Ry Cooder's Texico swing.
Pretty brief today but tomorrow is going be one almighty Gabriel fest - it's a whole day of prime Genesis. PROG ON.
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