Sheryl Crow has been on the road a little too long. It’s just after 6 on a Saturday night, and Crow and her band are hanging out backstage at Characters Niteclub in Greenville, S.C. Located on a strip of frontage road just off the interstate, Characters has movie-lobby purple-and-green carpeting, a large floor for disco dancing and a bar stocked entirely with airplane-size bottles of liquor. Crow, who has been on the road for more than a year supporting her debut album, Tuesday Night Music Club (A&M), sits hunched on a bench with her back to the wall, drinking a Red Stripe beer. She wears a white V-neck T shirt, dirty jeans with a hole in the leg and green Puma sneakers. Her dog Scout, part yellow lab and part greyhound, with an all access laminate hanging off his collar, stares longingly at a catering tray of roast beef. Crow checks her watch. She has four hours to kill before the show. ““We don’t go on until 10:15?’’ she groans. ““What are we going to do until then?''
Crow’s drummer, Wally Ingram, who looks vaguely like Keanu Reeves in ““Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,’’ rummages near a coat rack. ““Hey, look what I found,’’ he says, holding up a furry helmet used for imitation sumo wrestling.
Crow leaps up with a shriek. ““That is hilarious,’’ she says.
Ingram puts the helmet on Crow’s head. She pulls the plastic mouthpiece over her face and examines herself in the mirror.
A year on the road would make anyone a little punchy. But the rewards are finally starting to come in: ““Tuesday Night Music Club’’ has become one of the year’s unexpected pop hits. The album was recently certified platinum, and the single ““All I Wanna Do’’ is on the brink of No. 1. ““Music Club’’ sounds like the kind of record that usually falls through the music industry’s cracks. Loose and rootsy, with its rough Rolling Stones edges softened by a dollop of modern production, it combines classic and new in a way that’s highly individualistic: ““Exile on Main Street’’ meets Thelma and Louise.
Crow credits her appearance at Woodstock this summer for turning things around: ““300,000 people seeing you play live is going to have an impact.’’ Al Cafaro, president of A&M, simply credits her persistence. ““Sheryl toured her ass off,’’ he says. ““Without that, none of your efforts at radio or video airplay have lasting impact.''
Crow’s career literally began on the road. Born in 1964 and raised in a small town in Missouri, she was playing in a cover band in St. Louis when, at the age of 22, she one day decided to up and leave town. ““I’d just broken up with a boy and I was really bummed out,’’ says Crow, now 30. ““I got in my car with a box of tapes and I drove from Missouri out to L.A., 28 hours by myself, nonstop. I didn’t know a soul in L.A. I pulled in on the 405 at 4:30 in the afternoon, and sat in traffic and just cried my eyes out. Like “Oh my God, what have I done?’ ''
But within six months, Crow had landed her first break, singing backup for Michael Jackson’s 1987 world tour. For a year and a half, she had a curious perspective of the music industry at its best and worst. ““As a background singer, you’re a chameleon, you’re nameless, you’re faceless,’’ she says. ““I had such a high-profile position, and then I came home and nobody cared. I always had this Puritan work ethic. If I worked hard, if I was a good person, I would make it. And that’s not how it works. I didn’t have a record deal; I didn’t know what to do. And slowly I got back to “OK, if I work really hard, if I’m a really good person . . .’ ''
Crow did some more backup work (Don Henley), wrote a bunch of songs and eventually did land a deal. But even that proved frustrating. Her early sessions were slick and overproduced, more in common with a conventional pop diva than her heartland roots. Crow started over from scratch. She found a new group of musicians, and made the record she wanted. ““Had we put out the first bunch of tracks,’’ Crow says, ““I would never have been heard of again.''
Crow seems pretty well adjusted to the odd turns her career has taken. Backstage at Characters, she and her band decide to head to the bus. The guys flop down in the front lounge area, and someone puts a video into the VCR – the World War II prison drama ““Stalag 17.’’ Crow sits down on the floor to watch. Scout curls up in the driver’s seat. When William Holden strikes a match on another character’s razor stubble, everyone hoots and applauds.
Chris Hudson, Crow’s tour manager, walks onto the bus and witnesses the scene. ““This is “Stalag 17’,’’ he says.
When the movie ends, Crow and band move into action. Shirts are steamed; hair is sprayed. By 10 p.m., the band is transformed. The guys are wearing suede vests, tinted sunglasses and Doc Holliday hats; Crow has on a feminine-tailored pin-stripe suit over a Sharon Tate T shirt that says manson sucks.
The lights in the house go down. Characters is full to its 1,640-person capacity. ““We haven’t seen the place this packed since Foreigner played a year and a half ago,’’ whispers a stagehand. The sound system plays the Stones’ ““Factory Girl,’’ from one of Crow’s favorite albums, ““Beggars Banquet,’’ and the band takes the stage.
Crow waits in the wings. She wants to hear the song through to the end. Then she walks onstage, and the place goes crazy, and she’s where she wants to be.
Karen Schoemer in Greenville
LUCAS
The rapper and producer Lucas’s ““Lucas with the Lid Off’’ is the freshest single on the air, melding hip-hop and big-band swing into a joyful noise. The debut album Lucacentric (Big Beat/Atlantic) by this Copenhagen-born Danish-Russian-Jewish-American (now living in London) proves he’s no one-bag wonder: it ranges from dense, churning funk (““CityZen’’) to ruminative jazz keyboard (““The Statusphere’’). On the multicultural anthem ““Spin the Globe,’’ guest rappers spiel in different languages, with Lucas’s Pee-wee Hermanesque transitions: ““Spin the globe! Stop! Where am I? France!’’ He may mean this to be evocative, not cartoonish. Or he may have contempt for such a distinction.
Lucas’s O-spontaneous-me trip can get downright Shelleyan: ““let / whatever bubbles up out your head / spread the vibes and illuminate the sky.’’ But he’s also an anxiety case – surely the first rapper ever to claim that ““if i didn’t have rap i’d have an ulcer.’’ He frets over his identity (““when i speak / do i hear my own voice / or my mother’s voice / or my father’s voice’’) and, on the alarmingly relentless ““Pendulum Swings,’’ over time itself: ““i’m a little afraid to see / i mean i shouldn’t be . . . i mean i gotta, hell / i can’t wait to see / what’s gonna be swingin’ out of me.’’ Us either.
David Gates
LOUIS ARMSTRONG
It took ’em long enough – how long have boxed sets been around? – but Louis Armstrong: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1923-1934 (Columbia, 4 CDs) is worth the wait. Photos you’ve never seen. (Louis with his baseball team, Armstrong’s Secret 9.) Notes, by ex-Down Beat editor Dan Morgenstern, with stuff you didn’t know. (Tony Bennett, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman singing on a 1970 Armstrong date.) And Armstrong’s classic recordings, select juvenilia – even his backup work for the country singer Jimmie Rodgers – in chronological order. If you’ve forgotten why Armstrong is (yeah yeah, arguably) the most important figure in American music – maybe you’ve OD’d on ““What a Wonderful World’’ – this set will remind you.
Disc One shows Armstrong the young sideman – and proves that the Hot Five records, the first under his own name, were a throwback; he’d already outgrown their New Orleans style. Then the masterworks: the proto-scat singing on ““Heebie Jeebies,’’ the climbing, tumbling trumpet intro to ““West End Blues,’’ the leaping, dry-toned ““Weather Bird,’’ the wacky demolition of ““Chinatown, My Chinatown,’’ the racially double-edged ““Black and Blue.’’ Obsessives may deplore omissions – don’t get us started – and find the sound brighter but noisier than Columbia’s previous digital remasterings. (Two late cuts are noisy, period, next to RCA’s versions.) It’s still a deal: 81 tracks by Louis Armstrong at his best, for the price of 81 tracks by anybody else.
David Gates
GEORGE JONES
Producer Brian Ahern writes that the guest stars on George Jones: The Bradley Barn Sessions (MCA) showed up ““to motivate this great artist’’; it turns out that singing old Jones favorites with the man himself motivated them. Alan Jackson and Trisha Yearwood have never sounded better; Dolly Parton has, but not for years. Keith Richards’s earnest imitation of a country singer on ““Say It’s Not You’’ misses by a mile, hits something else – God knows just what – and makes him Jones’s strongest foil. Vince Gill lends Buck Owens-ish vocals and Don Rich-like guitar to ““The Love Bug’’; the few bars he plays to finesse a key change in ““Where Grass Won’t Grow’’ is one of the album’s many small wonders.
And what did these sessions do for country music’s greatest singer? They provided warm, unfussy support from some of Nashville’s best pickers, on furlough from grinding out ’90s radio product; Glenn Worf’s retro acoustic bass gives the beat a lean muscularity. Jones sounds as if he enjoyed it – though old pros like him fake that five shows a week. His voice today is richer than ever – he’s 63 – and still under masterly control. So what’s not to love unreservedly? Maybe the songs: too high a novelty-to-tearjerker ratio. Or maybe the very collegiality. Jones is a good sport and a great harmony singer (check this remake of ““Golden Ring’’ with Tammy Wynette), but his deepest gift is for solitary melodrama. At his absolute best, he’s tough to take; this is just an album you’ll play again and again.
David Gates
ROBERT EARL KEEN
There’s a certain kind of country sensibility you just can’t get in Nashville. It’s about empty open spaces instead of city lights, broken-in boots instead of sequins, dirt roads instead of walks of fame. Down in Texas, singers like Robert Earl Keen keep their distance from country’s mainstream. Keen is a songwriter in the classic Texas mold: he has a penchant for odd details and a habit of extending a story at least one verse beyond its logical conclusion. Gringo Honeymoon (Sugar Hill) offers several recipes for misadventure. In ““Think It Over One Time,’’ a wayward man tries to stop a good woman from walking away; in ““Tom Ames’ Prayer,’’ written by fellow Texan Steve Earle, a hardened criminal waits in a back alley as the cops close in. ““Merry Christmas From the Family’’ is a picture-perfect portrait of a dysfunctional holiday. ““Fran and Rita drove from Harlingen / I can’t remember how I’m kin to them,’’ Keen sings in his dusty, affectless voice. ““But when they tried to plug their motor home in / They blew our Christmas lights.''
Keen has been a pal of Lyle Lovett’s since their ne’er-do-well days, and he shares Lovett’s warped sense of humor. But where Lovett likes to dwell on the dark side of his own psychology, Keen is an optimist. His songs have the breezy acoustic pace of someone who likes where he’s headed. With a little luck the mainstream will find him.
Karen Schoemer
MARCUS ROBERTS
Poor George Gershwin. His are the most abused melodies in the fake book, daily grist for the faceless army of keyboard toilers in skating rinks and piano bars across the land. Tired isn’t the word for such oft-requested Gershwin standards as ““Summertime’’; they’re played to death. But of course the reason they’re played to death, the reason the tunes are standards, is that they’re so good. The genius of Marcus Roberts’s Gershwin for Lovers (Columbia) is to validate America’s love for Gershwin by making his Greatest Hits sound new again.
Roberts has deconstructed the jazz trio, turning each cut into a minimalist orchestral piece. He has bassist Reginald Veal state some melodies in the instrument’s singing upper register; ““Our Love is Here to Stay’’ closes with the near-silent scratch of a brush on drummer Herlin Riley Jr.’s snare. The spare, intricate arrangements somehow make it seem easier to hear this quiet recording, which seduces without preaching. The three mesh effortlessly; they worked together for five years in Wynton Marsalis’s quintet. And Roberts, 31, considerately keeps his own solos short, in spite of boasting as powerful a technique as anyone in jazz. These tunes aren’t much longer than one side of a Gershwin-era 78. It’s all part of a brilliantly realized effort to demystify jazz, to make it ““naturally digestible,’’ as Roberts puts it, without giving up any of the subtlety. Jazz fans will find this disc sublime; Gershwin lovers can play it during a candlelight dinner and conjure up the ultimate piano bar.
Tom Masland
TOM JONES
One can’t deny that Tom Jones has loads of kitsch appeal. Back in the late ’60s, when rock artistes from Lennon to Dylan were busy aspiring to cultural significance, Jones was prancing around in seam-splitting pants, mopping his brow with ladies’ panties and aspiring to nothing more than the old bump and grind. In the ’70s and ’80s Jones became the ultimate Vegas act (after Elvis, of course): the hits may have dried up, but the undergarments never did. Ever since 1988, though, when he recorded a version of Prince’s ““Kiss’’ with avant-pop duo Art of Noise, Jones has been on a rebound into hipness. INXS opened its 1990 tour by dimming the lights, turning on the mirror ball and playing a tape of ““What’s New, Pussycat?’’ Tim Burton used Jones’s ““With These Hands’’ in the crucial seduction scene of ““Edward Scissorhands.’’ If Jones has refused to go away, maybe it’s because his particular brand of sweaty, hard-sell sexuality never goes out of style.
Now a bunch of industrial and dance producers have teamed up to make what is surely the most fabulous album of new Jones material in years, The Lead and How to Swing It (Interscope). And it’s not just kitsch. Like Tony Bennett’s ““Unplugged’’ and Johnny Cash’s ““American Recordings,’’ ““The Lead and How to Swing It’’ has a tributary feel. New jack swing king Teddy Riley lathers up the suave ballad ““Fly Away’’; Trevor Horn adds heavyweight guitar punch to ““If I Only Knew,’’ written by Rise Robots Rise. Tori Amos contributes vocals to the soft soul number ““I Wanna Get Back With You.’’ Jones throws himself into the proceedings with his usual fervor, belting and howling like the Tarzan of pop that he is. Guaranteed to light your mirror ball.
Karen Schoemer
