Suicide and their precursors, Leon Russell's Ballad of Hollis Brown

The sight of stars of the rock and roll firmament fizzling away has been frequent in 2016, and has been an intimation of mortality for all of a certain vintage. Were the Cultureberg gramophone to be taken over by sentiment streaked retrospectives there would be scant time for new favourites, but one record that has snuck in there, possibly because I had never played it whilst its creator was extant, has been Leon Russell's Stop All That Jazz. From 1974, and encased in a cover where Leon is about to get cooked up in a pot (no, me neither), it features at least two off beat classics. First, an instrumental version of Spanish Harlem that sounds like Sun Ra in a loosey goose mood.  The second is linked to below, and is probably the best of Leon's many excellent Dylan covers, The Ballad of Hollis Brown.

Far superior to the version Dylan scraped out at Live Aid, and which Ron Wood believed was the Ballad of Collis Brown, this features a monster groove led by Leon on Synth, and the field hollers which introduce and punctuate the song put me in mind of Suicide's similar tale of patricide and hysterical anomie, Frankie Teardrop.  Its intensity is a bit at odds with the rest of the record, for example the take of If I were a Carpenter which has a likeable, braggart lope, but a listen to his eponymous debut or, even better, Carney, is enough to evidence that here is a singular musician for whom routine is anathema and whilst there is a solid grounding in Gospel, Country, Jazz and all strains of American musics, Leon is, quite frankly, all over the shop and impossible to second guess.  I suspect that amongst the piles of unaddressed and half remembered vinyl in the Cultureberg vault are copies of Hank Wilson's Back and possibly Will O The Wisp and Americana as well.  Bring em on!


To close, I will list some of the classics Leon played on as a sidemen, information borrowed from Uncut magazine.  Be assured, one doesn't even have to name the artist on these platters for even the most callow child to recognise them....The Monster Mash, Be My Baby, Da Doo Ron Ron, Mr Tambourine Man, California Girls, River Deep Mountain High, Strangers in the Night, 59th Street Bridge Song, Gentle On MyMind, Delta Lady, After Midnight and Watching The River Flow.  And if that ain't a genius, I don't know what is.