Before I get to the review, a few words to honour a lost friend.
Our cat Vizzini has been sick for a couple of years with late-stage kidney disease. He was always a tough old bastard and was handling the less tasty prescription food and some medicine well, had a good life, and had beaten his two-year survival prognosis by a solid seven months.
That changed this week, with his health taking a sudden downturn, laboured breathing and weakness. The vet confirmed the worst, as he was having severe heart failure and on Wednesday, amid quite a lot of tears, we had to put him down.
Vizzini was a rescue cat and over the years he went from a semi-wild wacko to a loving and affection (but still crazy-at-times) lap cat. Unlike our previous two cats, Vizzini was an equal opportunity lap cat who played no favourites. He would snuggle part of the night on one of us before swapping over to the other.
He was a weird and wonderful cat, full of energy. “Loves to play” was the advertisement describing him from the rescue agency, and holy shit did he. He was also a hunter – no moth was safe, nor was a shoelace if you were foolish enough to leave it dangling.
Suffice it to say, we loved that cat a lot, and his passing leaves a large hole in our lives. He sat on pretty much every flat surface in the house (except the kitchen countertop, although it took about 10 years to break his efforts on that front). Because of this, every room is filled with memories of him sitting there, staring at you with what we came to refer to as his ‘Ghostface Killah’ expression, daring you to love him just as he was. That’s exactly what we did.
I miss you buddy. The house feels very empty without you.
Thank you for your indulgence – on to a review.
Disc 1818 is…Semi Crazy
Artist: Junior Brown
Year of Release: 1996
What’s up with the Cover? You can tell he’s the good guy because he’s wearing a white hat, but he’s also chosen to play a ‘guit string’ (a double neck guitar that is one half regular guitar/one half lap steel). Is this instrument OK? I mean, it isn’t as willfully wicked as a key-tar, but it does reflect a morality which, at the very minimum, is complicated.
How I Came To Know It: I was at some party or event a few years ago where there were a lot of people I didn’t know – I think probably my wife’s office Christmas party. I’m an extrovert and my natural inclination is to meet people and learn more about them (people are awesome!). The thing I usually want to know first is what kind of music they like. Since I don’t listen to the radio, recommendations from strangers are always welcome. One fellow recommended Junior Brown. I wrote it down to check out later and, well, here we are.
How It Stacks Up: It took a while, but last year a couple used Junior Brown albums popped up at my local record store. I’m on the lookout for a third, but of the two I have, “Semi Crazy” is second best.
Ratings: 3 stars
Junior Brown makes old time country music, with a healthy dollop or rockabilly. He has fun doing it and it shows. “Semi Crazy” is an album full of energy and love for old school fifties and sixties country music, updated with a little bit of California surf.
Brown wears his love for old school melodic structures on his sleeves. There’s little effort to show this to be a “modern take” on those old school country crooners like Conway Twitty, Merle Haggard, and George Jones. Brown doesn’t need a modern take – he knows that old school sound holds up just fine when it’s done right.
It is easy to fall into Junior Brown’s voice – a rich and deep baritone that makes you shiver in delight even after you’ve heard the same song multiple times. Getting tired of hearing that voice would be like getting tired of looking at a mountain range, or a waterfall; it’s just too filled with natural and enduring beauty to ever feel overworn.
The topics are just as traditional. “Gotta Get Up Every Morning” is a song about having a wife that likes to stay out night partying. It is brilliant, playful and fits right alongside classics in the genre like Buddy Holly’s “Midnight Shift” and Emmylou Harris’ “Feelin’ Single, Seein’ Double”. Other tunes cover heartbreak, jail time and good old-fashioned love.
Brown is a master of those seemingly effortless turns of phrase common to old school songwriting as well, with plenty of clever wordplay and rhyme. The best example is the title track, a song about being a truck driver. At the tender age of five I was certain I would be a truck driver when I grew up. Nothing seemed cooler. That desire faded into other dreams, but listening to “Semi-Crazy” brings all that fun of learning “CB lingo” and 18 wheelers back to me. Best of many good verses:
“I'm just an old
blue collar, semi-crazy road scholar
They tell me that I'm half insane
And I've been driving so long, I got diesel in my blood
And ninety weight oil on my brain”
Sign me up (minus the long hours, low pay, and chronic back injury, of course).
Accompanying Brown’s storytelling vocals is that aforementioned ‘guit’ guitar. It may look a bit weird, but Brown can make that unnatural monstrosity dance under his able fingers. I wouldn’t say he injects a ton of artistic tone into his playing like Mark Knopfler or Buck Dharma would, but that’s not what he’s going for. Instead, he makes the notes jump off the axe with precision, energy and vibrancy. A fine example is “I Hung It Up” which features a wide range of Brown showing off his talents.
The album ends with a medley of old surfer tunes that Brown injects with a hint of rockabilly. Brown plays the hell out of it, but it felt unnecessary filler tagged onto the end of the record and had me wishing I could hear the originals instead. That’s not the feeling a good cover should elicit.
The record can also occasionally veer into kitsch. Sometimes it works, like “Venom Wearin’ Denim,” a not very complementary song about a femme fatale (where the rhyming title exceeds the sometimes downright cruel imagery that follows).
Sometimes it doesn’t work, such as on “Joe the Singing Janitor,” where the concept for the character far exceeds the actual rendering of it. We get it - Joe’s a janitor that likes to sing - but apart from that, the narrative is thin.
Despite a couple of missteps, “Semi Crazy” is a good time record, played from the heart and with joy. It is what I needed during what has otherwise been a dark and depressing week. I’ll leave you with a rare non-cover photo of me and my buddy Vizz in happier times:
Best tracks: Gotta Get Up Every Morning, I Hung It Up, Semi-Crazy, Venom Wearin’ Denim
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