UNDERRATED ALBUMS # 17

‘With its major chords, rising choruses, close harmonies and sparkling guitars, there’s more than enough sunshine here to banish any rainy day.’

Rainy Day Music (2003)
by The Jayhawks

The Jayhawks are usually described as an Alt-Country, Americana or Folk Rock act. All of those labels fit a band who might feasibly be regarded as heirs to The Eagles - but for the sharp contrast in their career trajectories. Apart from having their avian monickers in common*1, the two bands are worlds apart in terms of units shifted. Of  The Jayhawks eight albums since 1986, only one has reached the Top 40 of either the US or UK charts (their 2011 reunion record, Mockingbird Time crept to # 38 in America). The Eagles did rather better: virtually all of their albums, including live sets and compilations, sold like proverbial hot cakes – Their Greatest Hits (1971-1976) has jockeyed for the title of Best Selling Album Of All Time, not to mention a score of hit singles including half a dozen # 1’s (whereas The Jayhawks have never had a proper hit). However, in that alternative universe that I sometimes allude to in this series of reviews, I like to think that The Jayhawks are a serious commercial proposition.
 

In the real world, the Jayhawks albums that seem to be most highly rated critically, are Hollywood Town Hall (1992) and Tomorrow The Green Grass(1995), both of which featured Mark Olsen sharing co-writer and co-lead vocal duties with Gary Louris. Olsen then left, only returning with another former member, Karen Grotberg for the aforementioned Mockingbird Time*2. In between, the band, now led by Louris as chief songwriter as well as lead singer and guitarist, inclined more towards Rock with Sound Of Lies (1997) and Pop with Smile (2000).

All of these records are good, but the next in the sequence may be The Jayhawks’ best. It was to be their last until the reunion some eight years later.

Louris, Perlman, McCarthy, O'Reagan

Hailed by some as ‘a return to roots’, Rainy Day Music with its austere cover art and ’stripped down’ sound, is certainly a more basic production than its predecessor, Smile. Apart from their very early work though, Jayhawks albums tend to have a trademark character of well crafted County Rock songs which they only occasionally diverge from – and then not by very far.Anyway, more basic the album may be, but it’s not for the lack of musicians or voices. Apart from the band themselves, we find busy sessioneer Richard Causon on assorted keyboards, famous-name juniors, Jakob Dylan and Chris Stills joining alt-rock popster Matthew Sweet on various backing vocals, and lo and behold: is it a Byrd? Is it an Airplane? No, it’s an Eagle! Bernie Leadon, no less, playing banjo on one track. Then there’s multi-instrumentalist producer, Ethan Johns on everything else.

‘Stumbling Through The Dark’ bookends the programme (opening up and being  reprised with a slower, acoustic version at the end). Co-written by Louris with Sweet, it’s a sprightly, bittersweet love song about a ‘little girl’ who is so much in love that ‘it’s a crime’. It is followed by the ironically uplifting  ‘Tailspin’, a vague tale about a defendant on trial who is ‘going down, baby baby’ for all of ‘fifteen years’. The fine ensemble harmonies and string-playing, feature Stephen McCarthy’s twinkling steel guitar, Leadon’s banjo and the power-chording of Louris, belie the dark lyric.

At this point, it might be as well to warn listeners not to expect too much from the words in most Jayhawks songs: they’ve never really been the band’s strong point. Interesting ideas are often expressed cryptically and left hanging undeveloped. On the first track they even manage to audibly confuse preceded with ‘proceeded’ – an error which you’d have thought might have been corrected by the combined intellects of producer, Johns and executive producer, Rick Rubin – but, hey, in a world where accept and except are now epidemically muddled all over the media, what can you expect? (Get on with it! Ed.)

Fortunately, the overall effect of the harmonies and melodies tend to render the lyrical weaknesses incidental and unimportant. The nebulous theme of crime continues in ‘All The Right Reasons’ with its narrator ‘dreamin’ how it’s gonna be the day that I am free’ (although later we’re told that he’s ‘outside lookin’ in’) to join his ‘morning star’. Again though, the hushed, yearning melody carries the song through. ‘Save It For A Rainy Day’ is a better effort lyrically, about ‘Marina’, a woman ‘lookin’ like a train wreck / Wearing too much make-up’ with a ‘Pretty little hair-do [that] don’t do what it used to’. As with so many of their songs, the musical structure is tight and there is usually an appealing solo somewhere along the line; in this case on a harmonica.

The nostalgic ‘Eyes Of Sarahjane’ goes downhill after evocative opening verses:

                                 ‘Warwick hotel

                                 I remember it well

                                 We lived a dream so sweet, so sweet.

                                 I see Philly in the snowy gloom,

                                 We could have laid there ‘til afternoon,
                                 Our cut runs deep, so deep, so deep’

But the rest of it is sustained by its clanging guitar riff, rocky solo and the Hammond organ that trickles through it.

A pump organ underpins ‘One Man’s Problem’, which features another crunching guitar riff and a narrator struggling to reconcile himself to a lost love:

                                 ‘I heard she went out to celebrate;

                                 Three cheers for her brilliant escape

                                 From the prison we were in.’

‘Don’t Let The World Get In Your Way’, the first of two fine songs on the album written and sung by drummer Tim O’Reagan, is one of those time-to-move-on numbers. Cloaked in shadowy string effects, it may bring to mind The Beatles and Neil Young, who are both often cited as influences on The Jayhawks.
 

There’s a feeling with some listeners that the album goes slightly downhill from about here at half-way in, but I don’t subscribe to that point of view. Rather, I consider Rainy Day Music to be an impressively consistent piece of work. Some might say it is a little samey in terms of style and tempo; others may say it all hangs together really well: take your pick. 

Louris & Rickenbacker

‘Come To The River’ rocks in convincingly (despite another obscure lyric) with steel guitarist McCarthy again on good form. He and O’Reagan harmonise closely with Louris on ‘Angelyne’ which, like many tracks here, could have you singing along on first listen. The lap-steel laden ‘Madman’ invokes the spirit of Crosby, Stills & Nash whilst the disillusioned ballad ‘You Look So Young’ highlights Louris on a lead guitar worthy of either Don Felder or Joe Walsh.

The album closes with O’Reagan’s melancholy road song, ‘Tampa To Tulsa’, which is the sort of performance that fellow Minnesotans, Low specialise in; and bassist Marc Perlman’s elegiac ‘Will I See You In Heaven?’*3.

Paradoxically, this collection of sad songs is so tunefully crafted and winningly performed that they raise the listener’s spirits. Full of major chords, rising choruses, close harmonies and sparkling guitars, there’s more than enough sunshine here to banish any rainy day. And don’t pay too much mind to my quibbling over the lyrics  - after all, isn’t it true that a vast amount of high-quality pop songs get by the ears with an absence of poetry and only a passing acquaintance with what they mean. Believe me, you’ll be singing along with these songs long before you bother your head with what they’re actually about.  

 

N. B,

*1 – There is actually no such bird as a jayhawk, although the compound word has several applications in America.

*2 – Olsen and Louris released the album Ready For The Flood in 2009 as a duo.

*3 – The original release of the album came with a six track bonus disc featuring a Gary Louris solo live version of ‘Waiting For The Sun’ from Hollywood Town Hall; alternate mixes of ‘All The Right Reasons’ (led by accordion) and a quieter, slower ‘Tampa To Tulsa’; and three songs that didn’t quite make the cut: ‘Fools On Parade’, another jaded road song, and demo’s of ‘Say Your Prayers’ and ‘Caught With a Smile On My Face’, both of which stand up well.