The mystery of Bobbie Gentry

In Las Vegas, 1969, you had the choice of witnessing either Elvis Presley, Tom Jones or Bobbie Gentry putting on the style. All were star attractions. Yet while the King became immortal and Jones The Voice went on to continually re-invent his crimplene soul, Bobbie Gentry has vanished from sight. She hasn't given an interview in over thirty years and has barely entered a recording studio since releasing Patchwork in 1971, the last of her half dozen albums.

She was born Roberta Lee Streeter on July 27th 1944 to Portuguese parents in Chickasaw County, Mississippi. Her parents divorced when she was a toddler, and it was left to her grandparents to raise her. They lived on a farm in Chickasaw County - Mississippi Delta country. "We didn't have electricity, and I didn't have many play things," Bobbie recalled. "My Granddaddy liked possum stew, so whenever he caught one, he'd cut off the tail for me to play with."

Her Grandmother provided a toy that had a more long lasting impact when she traded a milk cow for a neighbour's piano. Bobbie taught herself to play by listening in church, and precociously had her first song in the bag by the time she was seven: My Dog Sergeant Is A Good Dog was later wheeled out as part of her nightclub act and survives on a BBC TV show. The rest of her oeuvre would be hugely influenced by her dirt poor, woodland community upbringing.

After grade school in Greenwood, Mississippi, where her father lived, Bobbie moved to California in 1957 to live with her mother. She attended school in Arcadia for two years before the family moved to Palm Springs, by which time she had taught herself to play the guitar, banjo, bass, and vibes. One afternoon, she caught the King Vidor movie Ruby Gentry in which Jennifer Jones plays a Southern girl from the wrong side of the tracks who falls for local land owner Charlton Heston. It was melodramatic fare, but also undeniably sensual for a 1952 Hollywood movie. Bobbie was so impressed she decided to change her name.

At 15, Bobbie Gentry was performing in a local country club, an act which was caught - and apparently encouraged - by Bob Hope and Hoagy Carmichael. Straight out of high school, she worked in Las Vegas as part of a nightclub review called Folies Bergere to raise a little cash, which then saw her through a degree in philosophy at UCLA. Transferring to the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music she studied guitar, majoring in theory and composition. All this time, Bobbie was playing in local venues, scrabbling for cash, some of the time as part of Hawaiian musician Johnny Ukulele's troupe of girls. Her only known recordings from the period were Ode To Love and Stranger In The Mirror, two 1964 duets with singer Jody Reynolds, who had scored a hit in 1958 with the death disc Endless Sleep.

Early in 1967, Bobbie made a demo which came to the attention of Capitol Records producer Kelly Gordon. He liked the songs immensely, especially one called Ode To Billie Joe. The song was around seven minutes long, and it's eerie, mossy, swamp-country atmosphere was unlike anything Gordon had heard before. With support from Capitol's number one producer David Axelrod, he was able to sign Bobbie. Her first single was one of the other songs on the demo, Mississippi Delta, but pretty quickly DJs picked up on the flip side.

Ode To Billie Joe, truncated to four minutes and made eerier yet by Jimmy Haskell's string arrangement, entered the Billboard Hot 100 on August 5th 1967. Two weeks later it was in the top ten: a week after that it was number one, dislodging the Beatles' utopian All You Need Is Love. No other debut single had made the top faster. No question, it was a unique record, and even the flower-waving underground had to be riveted by the narrative. Elliptically evocative, loaded with mysterious place names like Choctaw Ridge and the Tallahatchie Bridge, this smalltown apocalypse came across like The Waltons in reverse. It sounded entirely believable, autobiographical even. The central mystery of the song - probably lost in the edit - was what exactly the young couple threw from the bridge. After much discussion in the press, in cafes and pubs (it made the UK Top 20 in the autumn), the least controversial conclusion was an engagement ring.

Overnight, this unknown country folk singer, her hair piled up like a downhome Priscilla Presley, had crossed the tracks just like namesake Ruby. True to the movie script, she had also begun an affair with Kelly Gordon, who left his wife and kids for his protogee. The two quickly amassed tracks for an album named after the hit, all original material. It hardly sounds thrown together. Mississippee Delta, the rejected A-side, is gritty, and would give Tony Joe White a run for his money in the southern stew stakes; Sunday Best and Papa Won'tcha Let Me Go To Town were sepia prints of a south that probably didn't exist by 1967 but surely did in Bobbie's childhood. The follow up to Ode was ill advised, though - I Saw An Angel Die was kaleidoscopic, vague, and quite beautiful, but it was way too unstructured for radio and bombed completely.

This didn't affect the huge sales of the album, or the year-end impact of her number one single: after selling 3 million copies it won Bobbie three Grammy awards, including Best New Artist (she was the first country singer to win in this category); Billboard, Cashbox, and Record World nominated her most promising new vocalist; and Nashville's Country Music Association asked her to co-host their awards show with Sonny James. Life magazine even ran a feature on her grandparents' farm - the money she'd made from the hit had enabled Bobbie to buy them new trucks.

Next came The Delta Sweete. This took the Ode album on a step - it was a segued, multi-textural album about the south, and maybe her best record. Standouts were Courtyard, a delicately terrifying morality tale of wish fulfillment, and Morning Glory, cheeky and playful, with Bobbie's voice at its breathiest and most sensuous. Dotted around the album were choice covers - quite obvious, but still flavoursome - of Tobacco Road, Parchman Farm, and Louisiana Man. The oak-aged Okolona River Bottom Band had presaged the album as a November '67 single, but only reached 54; Louisiana Man, backed by Courtyard, fared even worse and spent a solitary week at number 100.

Capitol took swift action - they weren't about to let such a hot property slip off the map, and Bobbie had two more albums out by the year's end. Local Gentry compromised some of her best songs (the saucy Sittin' Pretty, and deceptively airy, black-humoured Casket Vignette) with a bunch of more contemporary covers, including Fool On The Hill which became another flop single. There was also a definitive, curled-up-in-a-cosy-cabin take on Kenny Rankin's Peaceful. The striking red trouser suit and confident stance on the cover must have shifted a few copies of Local Gentry, too. Stanley Dorfman at the BBC was certainly impressed and offered Bobbie her own series, with guests including The Hollies and Donovan. Hits or no, at home she also regularly featured on TV. Something of a good luck charm, she was the maiden guest on Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash, and Bobby Darin's variety shows.

Towards 1968's end, Bobbie was teamed up with Capitol's other top country-pop crossover act, Glen Campbell. Somehow their album of duets rarely sounded more than perfunctory, in spite of great arrangers and another eye-catching cover. No matter, a version of Mornin' Glory - nowhere near as good as the Delta Sweete version - charted, and Let It Be Me, the old Everly Brothers hit, went to 14 on the country chart and restored Bobbie to the Top 40 for the first time in a year.

The Gentry live show was by all accounts more of a rocking affair than her records let on, and the 1969 album Touch 'Em With Love certainly shifted up a gear. The polished brass of the title track failed to chart as a single, but a version of Bacharach and David's I'll Never Fall In Love Again - with Bobbie's voice straining in an endearingly high register - charted all over Europe, making it all the way to number one in Britain. This was followed by the Top 3 All I Have To Do Is Dream, another Everlys-originated duet with Glen Campbell. Back home, Bobbie got hitched to casino magnate William F. Harrah - she was 25 and he was 58. It lasted three months. According to Mojo magazine Harrah, who was none too impressed with his young wife heading out on tour, followed her to a theatre and caught her in flagrante backstage. Maybe he should have listened to Courtyard before he signed the wedding contract*.

All of which made Fancy, her last single of 1969, seem more than a little autobigraphical: "Just be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy, and they'll be nice to you." Produced by Rick Hall at Muscle Shoals, it made the US Top 40 but felt bigger. Reba McEntire scored hugely with it in 1991, and apparently the film rights have since been doing the rounds for the story of a girl who "might have been born just plain white trash but Fancy was my name ... and I ain't done bad." Bobbie certainly hadn't. With the smarts as well as the sass, she set up her own publishing company, Super Darlin Publishing, and television production, Gentry Limited. Her purchase of a percentage of The Phoenix Suns basketball team in 1969, as well as vast tracks of land in California, made her a wealthy woman. Somehow, she also found time to record a stack of songs that remained unreleased, including Show Off, Donovan's Skipalong Sam, and the exquisite Smoke, unavailable until recently and all recommended.

In 1970 Johnny Cash introduced her on TV, singing Fancy, as "our Mississippi River Delta Queen, Bobbie Gentry." Internationally, she had now consolidated after her first instant rush of fame and was a genuine star. In Vegas she had a million dollar contract. "I write and arrange all the music, design the costumes, do the choreography, the whole thing," she said. "I'm completely responsible for it. It's totally my own from inception to performance. I originally produced Ode To Billie Joe and most of my other records, but a woman doesn't stand much chance in a recording studio. A staff producer's name was nearly always put on the records." Fame doesn't get more glamorous than aftershow parties with Elvis, yet a melancholy single called Apartment 21 that summer suggested she was beginning to feel trapped by it.

These feelings were made more explicit on her final album, 1971's Patchwork. Written and produced by Bobbie (this time, with full credits), it featured southern characters like Benjamin, Billy The Kid and Belinda who hadn't been around since The Delta Sweete, as well as Miss Clara and Your Number One Fan, both flapper skits, the latter aimed at her more dottily devoted supporters. Marigolds And Tangerines betrayed a yearning for a simpler, sweeter life; Somebody Like Me had a soulful strut; Lookin' In was effectively a resignation letter from the world of pop. Bobbie has since said that, of all her records, she is most proud of Patchwork and it's not hard see why.

It's hard to believe that Bobbie couldn't have found a new recording contract if she'd wanted to - we just have to assume she considered that she'd left her mark and wanted to move on. A compilation called The Sounds Of Christmas featured her renditions of Scarlet Ribbons and Away In A Manger, and EMI released two budget albums Sittin' Pretty and Tobacco Road. Otherwise, Bobbie was quiet until the summer of 1974 when she launched The Bobbie Gentry Happiness Hour on CBS. It ran for four episodes, and a single called Another Place Another Time (the theme for Max Baer's film Macon County Line) slipped out at the same time. A couple of years later Baer made a movie based on Ode To Billie Joe (re-spelt Billy Joe for some reason) and Bobbie re-recorded the song. Both the new and original versions  charted in the summer of '76. Another shortlived marriage, to Jim 'Spiders And Snakes' Stafford, resulted in a son called Tyler. On Christmas Eve 1978, she was a
 guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Since then Bobbie Gentry has never performed, sung, or given an interview.

From the very beginning, Roberta Lee Streeter seemed to know exactly what she wanted, and had the charm, skill, and talent to get it. Five years of recording took her from a Mississippi farm to Vegas and riches beyond most people's dreams. Then, simply, she got bored, poured her artistic ambitions into one last album, and quit while she was still at the top. Her catalogue is almost faultless. As a blueprint for ambitious feminists, the Bobbie Gentry story is hard to trump. 

Supermarket sightings are frequent enough these days. Starstruck fans report that her raven mane is still unmistakable. She's no hermit**. It's just that Bobbie Gentry knows exactly how to keep her legend bottled, her image unruffled, and her music timeless.

* It is often assumed that Bobbie managed to retire a wealthy woman after she divorced Harrah, receiving a $3.5 million settlement. Accusations of gold-digging are derailed by the fact she made over $3,000,000 in royalties from Capitol alone. Bobbie also made millions from her Vegas stints which lasted on and off until 1980, and an alleged $4,000,000 when Warner Brothers optioned Ode To Billie Joe.

**Here is a comment on a Bobbie Gentry thread from Tom Ewing's Popular blog: "I heard a touching story about Bobbie from the 1980′s. A couple years after her retirement, one of her Vegas male dancers became ill with AIDS. His lover told me they were penniless and about to be evicted from their home. Even though she was raising a newborn son as a single mother, she stepped in paid the bills and got her friend the medical care he needed. In an era when some people would not touch somone with AIDS she came to the hospital, held his hand and comforted him. She even paid the funeral expenses and made a terrible situation a little more tolerable for a dear friend. "

Greg Shaw spreads the word

October 2004 was a grim month for pop obsessives and record collectors, especially those who had come of age in the seventies and eighties. In the space of ten days we lost three great navigators of the  backroads, byways and ditches: John Peel, Dave Godin - the man who coined the term Northern Soul - and, Stateside, Greg Shaw. Some philanthropist should have corralled their collections and pop ephemera and created one beautiful library.

Shaw was, in his way, just as important as Peel. He was a fanboy with means. To precis his CV, he created the first pop fanzine (Mojo Navigator, later Who Put The Bomp), put Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus on the printed page for the first time, started the Pebbles compilation series, and was America's premier salesman for Glam, Punk and Powerpop - a genre he named. He created an independent label and distribution company in the seventies - Bomp - giving succour to the Ramones, and a home to Iggy Pop and the Flamin' Groovies. He also knew his parameters. When Michael Stipe showed up with his tape looking for a deal, Shaw sent him away, telling him to go to a major - Bomp wasn't right for him.

Who Put The Bomp, even now, is a great source for forgotten 45s (Shaw's format of choice). He would review British pop singles like Warwick's Let's Get The Party Going when they first appeared and were dismissed as worthless bubblegum by pretty much everyone else - the Warwick single wouldn't be revisited until the late nineties Junk Shop Glam boom, but Shaw's recommendation was enough for me to pick one up when I saw it. His publications have since been compiled in a hardback by ex-wife Suzy Shaw. When Mojo Navigator first appeared in 1966, pop nerds barely existed, and the ones that did were most likely unaware of each other. Likewise, rock 'n' roll record collecting rarely stretched beyond buying records to play at parties, after having first scrawled your name on the sleeve and label to make sure they also came home with you. Mojo Navigator was *the* first music rag by fans, for fans. Shaw was a cheerleader, not a chinstroker, and would always value the directness of Wild Thing or You Really Got Me over, say, the Grateful Dead. Time, it's safe to say, proved him correct. Greil Marcus says that Shaw put on paper "the irreducible thrill of hearing the secret before everybody else did, and the irresistible thrill of passing it on."

Still, Greg Shaw was no saint. Bomp's accounting system, for starters, was a little wayward. Suzy Shaw remembers one of the Dead Kennedys handcuffing himself to Greg's desk to get a check - it bounced. Another time their car was smashed to bits. There were threats of arson, after which a baseball bat was bought for the office. Asked to contribute to the book,  Kim Fowley said "I'm not going to glorify Greg Shaw because he was a thief and a pig in regards to paying me money. I always liked the idea of BOMP and the idea of Greg Shaw; he was a great historian but a bad executive and a disaster in accounting to his artists and producers."

While Greg's record collection was rumoured to number a million items, Suzy reckons "I knew the size well, as it was I who had the shelves built for them and arranged for the space in the warehouse.  There were probably a maximum of about 150,000. He often just wanted the record and had no particular interest in whether it could be played or not." Taking up almost as much room was an index card system that listed "every rock record that he owned, heard about, or suspected existed. He was a historian first and foremost, and wanted it to be a life's work that would survive as a reference for generations to come.  It was his obsession and although few people know it, the project probably took up more of his life than any other venture in terms of sheer hours."

Shaw was an outrageous womanizer, with four marriages and innumerable girlfriends. Pretty soon, each starry-eyed lover realised they were no match for the index cards - most of them came to the conclusion that if they could get rid of the cards, they could have Greg all to themselves. The one constant was Suzy Shaw: "I became accustomed to the frantic, late-night calls from Greg: "Help!  Suzy! Get over here, she's got matches and she's going for the cards!" Police would be called, tears would be shed, the girlfriends would leave, but the cards survived." It's a minor tragedy that the digital age has rendered them little more than a curio.

Beyond the printed word, he was behind the Legendary Masters series of compilations, produced during a stint at United Artists - Shaw was as conversant in Fats Domino and Ricky Nelson as he was in Ramones and Raspberries. Then in the early eighties he was the secret compiler of the multi-volume Pebbles series, sonically imperfect bootlegs of obscure 60s garage punk which unearthed now-open secrets like the Litter's Action Woman for the first time. In look and feel, Pebbles was widely imitated on series like Highs In The Mid Sixties and Back From The Grave; the lo-grade pressings inadvertently galvanized new re-issue labels such as Bam Caruso, who issued the Craig's R&B freakout I Must Be Mad on their first Rubble album in pristine quality, eighteen months after Shaw had alerted the world to its primitive power. As he had with Who Put The Bomp, Greg Shaw started a whole underground industry.

The vast record collection Shaw amassed has been split up since his death between friends and collectors. One beneficiary - though not of the index cards - was Geoffrey Weiss, a sagely A&R man at Hollywood Records. "I always thought his biggest achievement was convincing people that popular music that wasn't successful could be great, that the guy up the street could be John Lennon for at least two minutes and forty five seconds."

30 years on: Felt's Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty

 On New Year's Eve 1989, I was in a pub in Manchester, talking pop with a bunch of friends. We reflected on two English singers who had illuminated the previous decade with great originality but no commercial success. Obvious star quality and wild eccentricity, it seemed, were no match for fickle fate. Fame would elude them. One was Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, the other was Lawrence from Felt.

In a decade of fey make-up boys and the gated snare, Felt's approach to record making had seemed positively antique - sumptuous, sculptured guitar melodies housed in sleeves that owed more to Barnett Newman than Gary Numan. Their first album was called Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty, a statement of intent in itself.

Felt had a rare air of mystery. Gigs were infrequent, some were in virtual darkness. As the decade wore on, odd stories about Lawrence snuck out. Apparently he was obsessively clean. A friend once stayed in his Birmingham apartment and woke up at 3am to hear scratching noises under the bed. Expecting to see a mouse he was shocked to see Lawrence with a dustpan and brush. Pete Becker of fellow West Midlanders Eyeless In Gaza claimed that, when Lawrence took him to gigs, he always drove in second gear. He was deadpan, dead pale, and once claimed he would become the first person in the world to die of boredom. All my girlfriends were in love with him.

Lawrence spent his teens in the Birmingham overspill of Water Orton. In 1980 he made a cacophonic DIY single as Felt called Index, a solo performance of clanging chords that sounded like it was recorded on a cassette at home - "after that I decided to form the greatest band in England." In spite of his ambitions, he couldn't tune or re-string his guitar. "I used to wait until I met someone who could do it for me. Sometimes it took ages." He'd often seen Maurice Deebank walk through Water Orton with a classical guitar on his way to have lessons, "so one day I got him round and he tuned my guitar in three seconds. I was in shock. Then he played a song, it was Mr Tambourine Man. I said 'I don't believe it, you're a genius'. We were only 16 or 17 and at that time I'd never seen anyone play that fast. It still went clunky when I went from one chord to another."

Deebank became a part of Felt. "I thought, God, I could really go somewhere with this kid. Ride on his back to the top, that's how I saw it." Initially, there were constant arguments. "They were always about clothes and drinking. I told him he would have to change his entire wardrobe. Sometimes he'd get drunk and go off down motorways, disappear for two days. Or he'd go round this big mental hospital with this other kid, after they'd been in the pub. One of those dark Victorian things. When you were a kid you lived in fear that someone would escape and break into your bedroom. Deebank used to go there and walk around the wards at night for a dare. He'd come back from those trips and every time I'd say 'we're finished, you're not serious about this.'"

What Lawrence wanted to create was something brand new - Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty (released in January 1982) was both beautiful and very odd, with Lawrence's near-asthmatic, heavily reverbed voice and Deebank's crystal clear guitar lines underpinned by what sound like red Indian tribal drums. Lyrics were largely indecipherable. The songs - just the six - all clocked in around the five minute mark. "The music had to be something I'd never heard before. A new kind of music. Long guitar solos, like something that Hank Marvin would do but extended." The result was closer to Tyrannosaurus Rex playing Marquee Moon in a barn. Truly, it sounded - and still sounds - uniquely atmospheric. "I wanted the first album to be the best English album ever released, in the history of music. We wanted the kind of impact The Stone Roses had later - the way they were a group, the way they cared about what they wore."

A critical hit - Sounds' 5 star review was enough to get me to buy it without hearing a note - Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty instead created a small but dedicated core of Felt fans which would grow incrementally over the decade. In 1987, Lawrence found his image in a Smash Hits sticker collection.  Suicidally, he chose to capitalise on this good fortune with an album of instrumentals called Let The Snakes Crinkle Their Heads To Death. "I remember taking the album artwork to Creation, really confidently, and Bobby Gillespie (of Primal Scream) was there. He said 'You're not really going to call it that are you?' I said yeah, it's a great title. He said 'Crinkle? What the hell's crinkle?' I realised I'd made the worst mistake. It was the worst title in the world."

Now, as then, Lawrence is childlike in his enthusiasm, and meticulous in his planning, even if genuine stardom seems as far away as it did in 1982. "I thought we could invent a new form of music. I really believed we could. Now I know it's practically impossible, but that was the kind of ambition we had."

Gene Clark: No Other

The Byrds, hailed in the beginning as the American Beatles, turned out to be as fractious and egotistical as their UK counterparts were tight, gang-like and grounded. Possibly for this reason, the Byrd deemed to be the heart, the driving force of their rich music, has shifted over the years: initially it was Roger McGuinn, architect of their jet-age jangle, and it stayed this way during the group's lifetime; the spotlight shifted to the smug hippydom of David Crosby in the Seventies afterburn; and then on to Gram Parsons, somehow deemed the most 'authentic' Byrd in the country rock-obsessed Eighties.

Sweet Gene Clark. How sad and typical of his ill luck that he died in 1991, just as the consensus swung his way.

He had been the most handsome Byrd and their finest and most prolific songwriter, but on stage he was sidelined as tambourine player, a proto-Davy Jones. Fear of flying meant he would leave and rejoin the group on several occasions - it also hindered the promotion of any subsequent Clark projects. For decades, ludicrously, he remained a well-kept muso/fanboy secret.

No Other, a dark, baroque album is central to Gene Clark's critical rebirth. The artwork is a giveaway, a collage of Twenties glories with Anita Loos and other sexy flapper chums at its heart. Hollywood Babylon revisited. On the back, rugged Gene appears in mascara and billowing drag. He looks quite terrifying. Drawing parallels between the decadence of the Twenties and the coke-addled extravagance of the mid-Seventies, Clark fashioned a suite of songs that was a pure, personalised Americana, a distillation of all he had seen and learnt from his childhood in Missouri and his adult years in LA. Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks had talked of their aborted Smile album being "a Gothic American trip"; likewise, Clark's fellow country rock traveller Gram Parsons once expressed a dream of creating Cosmic American Music. No Other was the real thing.

Aside from his mastery of melancholy, there had been few clues in Gene Clark's back pages that he would deliver something this wild and dark - his last fully realised album had been the beautiful but spartan White Light in 1971. The turning point was meeting the producer Thomas Jefferson Kaye, a Steely Dan acolyte and one-time colleague of the wunderkind producer Curt Boettcher. Their shared love of Zen Buddhism, booze and drugs took them to the Village Recorder studios in west LA in March 1974 with $100,000 from Asylum Records burning a hole in Kaye's pocket.

He had just massively overspent on a Bobby Neuwirth album and now saw No Other as "my Brian Wilson extravaganza". As for Clark, the record was "all about soul searching". Eight songs in six months suggest that there was plenty of that.

Life's Greatest Fool is a misleading opener, being an exercise in fine country rock with only the gospel harmonies and cautionary philosophy there to cause a stir. The gothic undertow of Silver Raven, all "darkened waters" and "troubled sky", veers into Johnny Cash territory. The title track is where things take a wholly different turn, a hypnotic almost funky piece which occupies the same niggling darkness as David Bowie's Golden Years. Apparently it took a week before the musicians got their first take and you can sense the numbness, the intoxication.

Strength of Strings is the album's centrepiece. The brief Clark set himself was to convey the subconscious way in which music is created, how it can be so magical, spiritual, overwhelming. No less. He pulls it off with a slow-burning intro of near-oriental harmonies, almost treading on Crosby, Stills and Nash's toes, while Kaye adds layers of ghostly church voices until the whole thing explodes with Clark's tearful tones - "In my life the piano sings, brings me words that are not the strength of strings." Side 2's opener, From a Silver Phial, is almost light relief, though its lyric - criss-crossing between the tale of a cocaine casualty and a sensual master-servant saga from the old South (or is it Hollywood?) - is as much the opaque heart of No Other's mystique as Strength Of Strings' grandeur.

The eight-minute Some Misunderstanding came to Clark in a dream which he dictated to his wife in the middle of the night. Its vagueness is its beauty, beginning as a meditation on how to take a relationship forward then ruminating on the recent death of Gram Parsons - "We all need a fix, but at times like this, doesn't it feel good to stay alive?" It soars and floats over pedal-steel and organ interplay (the cream of LA session players, anyone you care to name) and hangs eerily in the air, unresolved. Passing through The True One, another country-rock interlude, we reach the climactic Lady of the North, "like silver on the ocean shore". Clark sounds awed, lovestruck, and never sang better, reaching from rumbling baritone to near-falsetto (think of the middle eight of Elvis's Any Day Now and you're close). Dense and hypnotic, his voice weaves in and out of the piano, cello and electric violin - when the shimmering coda arrives it is pure release.

Over the years No Other has been lauded by some but frequently criticised for over-ambition (David Geffen at Asylum concurred and put no promo effort in - it consequently sold zip). This is conservatism on a par with Mike Love's criticism of Pet Sounds. Recorded in a stultifying era of newly-minted and consequently too-cosy singer-songwriters, the result of Gene Clark's search for America's dark heart seems all the more impressive. And it sounds deeper and stronger with each passing year. What a terrible pity he isn't around to receive his standing ovation.

Happy birthday Elvis

Elvis would have been 77 today. As he only lived to be 42 we were spared that 1986 album, produced by Bob Clearmountain and wrecked by gated reverb; also his ill-advised cover of With Or Without You; and of course his late 90s Rick Rubin album, with Elvis sounding lethargic, barely awake, as he is cattle-prodded through All Apologies. Sadly we also missed his recording of Feels Like I'm In Love (written for him by Mungo Jerry's Ray Dorset, and later a no.1 for Kelly Marie. Sound unlikely? Imagine it in the style of Burning Love).

We are reduced to imagining what might have happened as his real life story has been combed over incessantly for the last 35 years. Elvis has been treasured and traduced in equal measure - the ever-expanding library now stretches from Peter Guralnick's two exhaustive volumes, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love, to the film Schmelvis: In Search of the King's Jewish Roots and re-prints of his cookbook.

 Finding new material to celebrate rock's all-time golden boy is tough. A few years back the 1968 Comeback Special was given the triple DVD treatment - you want to see (or, at least, hear) Elvis split his pants doing a karate workout? You got it. Along with half a dozen takes of If I Can Dream (mesmerising) and Darlene Love shaking a tambourine for 20 minutes (less so). 



Astonishingly, however, it is still possible to find hidden nuggets in his back catalogue. Elvis's career of mighty peaks and dramatic troughs means a lot of fine recordings have been almost forgotten.

 Here are a bunch of songs which oldies stations tend to skip that capture his voice, humour, plentitude and pathos.

 Some of them you may well now, but if any of them aren't familiar you're in for a treat. Happy birthday Elvis.

Blue Moon (1954)

Recorded for Sun but unreleased for a couple of years, this is one of the eeriest recordings to ever reach the UK Top 10. A muted, clip-clop backing, rather like a Radiophonic Workshop evocation of sepia Americana, is a bed for echo-drenched Elvis to toy with Rodgers and Hart's classic. He sets the sad mood - "Blue moon, you saw me standing alone, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own" - and then repeats the line, abandoning the happy denouement and replacing it with a ghostly wordless falsetto. Right at the start of his career, he already sounds like a spectre returning to haunt America's pop culture party.

Lonesome Cowboy (1957)

The first of several Elvis recordings with "lonesome" in the title. From the film Loving You, here was a real indicator of how far he was willing to deviate from straight R&R. Who is this channeling? Mario Lanza? Hank Williams? Frankie Laine? Revisiting the ghostly atmosphere of Blue Moon, this oddity was dwarfed by the other songs on the Loving You soundtrack (the title track, Mean Woman Blues, Teddy Bear) but deserves a moment in the high noon sun.

Doin' the Best I Can (1961)

A commercial monster after the so-so success of Elvis is Back!, GI Blues is sometimes seen as the beginning of the end. Yet there are some excellent songs on the soundtrack: Pocketful of Rainbows' unfettered joy, the driving rocker Shoppin' Around, and this Pomus/Shuman ballad of infinite sadness, the cuckolded Elvis singing "You know I was the kind who'd run anytime you called/ I guess I was the only one who didn't mind at all." The Japanese had the good taste to extract it from the score as a 45 - we got Wooden Heart instead.



That's Someone You Never Forget (1962)
A rare co-write for Elvis on this spooked love song that sounds a lot like a eulogy - possibly to his mother. It was included on the Pot Luck album which had artwork that looked like a thrown-together hack-job but included the considerable Suspicion, the wedding-bell weepie Something Blue, and the only song the King wrote on his own, a Begin the Beguine knock-off called You'll Be Gone.



Tender Feeling (1964)
"I'd like to make one good film before I leave. I know this town's laughing at me." - Elvis to co-star Marilyn Mason on the set of The Trouble With Girls

By now the films were getting sillier, more slapdash and more frequent (three in '64 alone), and the music sounded flatter as if there was some essence missing from the recording process - like soul. Most of his soundtrack albums featured one exception to the rule. Tender Feeling (from Kissin' Cousins, with Elvis in a bloody awful blonde wig) is picture postcard pretty, with a lovely celeste motif; singing high, Elvis wrings all he can from this early sixties rock-a-ballad. Part of his greatness was that he always had the ability to make a song seem better than it was.



It Hurts Me (1964)
A lyric dripping with unrequited love, scorn and indignation gave Elvis something to get his teeth into, and he turned in a towering, angry performance that presaged his late-Sixties rebirth. Unsurprisingly, then, he revived It Hurts Me for the 1968 TV special - apart from hardcore fans, most had missed it first time around as the B-side of the daffy title song from Kissin' Cousins.



Animal Instinct (1966) 
Flirtatious flute, a bottomless bass riff, and the session drummer Ken Buttrey's fancy fills make this a potential club hit (Martin Green has been known to give it a whirl). Elvis is a panther in Valentino garb in this highlight from the Harem Scarem score. He often walked out of the Hollywood sessions, disgusted at the material chosen on his behalf (I like Do Not Disturb more than he did, but it's hard to question his commitment given real dreck like Yoga is as Yoga Does or Old Macdonald). With a cheeky number like Animal Instinct, Elvis at least sounded energised - I'd like to think he was even having fun.



Please Don't Stop Loving Me (1966)
The closest he got to a deep soul record, originally on the Frankie and Johnny soundtrack, this has all the hallmarks: funereal pace, subtle Steve Cropper like guitar inflections, the feeling it could burst out of its skin with emotion at any given moment. Like 1962's Suspicion, this is sensuous and paranoiac, and the vocal is a faultless exercise in restraint.

Down in the Alley (1966)

While recording the How Great Thou Art album, Elvis cut loose with this secular screamer, first recorded by the Clovers in the 1950s. Starting with a nutso "changity changity" vocal hook, Down in the Alley features metallic guitar, shrill organ, honking sax and wailing harp. Lascivious is the word. It's loud and rude enough to have been a substantial hit, but RCA sat on it for two years before tacking it on to the Clambake soundtrack.



Tomorrow is a Long Time (1966)
Recorded at the same session, this Dylan cover met a similar sad fate when it could have single-handedly changed the public's perception of mid-Sixties Presley.

 Sparse and lonesome ("I can't remember the sound of my own name"), it features a beautiful fade with the fugitive Elvis humming to himself as he walks off into the sunset. Dylan rated it the best adaptation of any of his songs.



Edge of Reality (1969)
From Live a Little, Love a Little, a film that was also home to A Little Less Conversation, Edge of Reality's claim to fame is that it soundtracked a psychedelic dream sequence, not an everyday happening in Elvis movies. Dark and wordy, black and brooding, the brass bruises the singer as he hears "strange voices echo, laughing with mockery".



I'm Leavin' (1971)

The 1970s were clogged with self-pitying ballads - blame Elvis and Priscilla's separation. This forgotten single, a UK no.23 in a year in which he scored five Top 10 hits, is something else: intense and wholly despairing, Elvis is perfectly balanced with the subtle orchestration as he breaks into the chorus ("tried so hard, so hard, and I just can't take it"), ending it with the title sung in a fragile falsetto.

If I Get Home on Christmas Day (1971)
Elvis's second Christmas album is usually dismissed, apart from lip service paid to the endless blues chugger Merry Christmas Baby. Much more in keeping with the magic of Yuletide is this bittersweet song written by the British hit machine Tony Macaulay (Build Me Up Buttercup, Don't Give Up On Us, Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes). You can picture Elvis as the Wichita Lineman in deep December, presents in the back his truck as he ploughs home through snow storms. With the feeling he injects into it, and the choir of angels at the climax, you know he'll make it back by dawn.



Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues (1974)
"I'm not a kid at 33" - the retired playboy's admission of his own mortality. This wistful, country piece was as good as it got with late period Elvis, and it would have slotted neatly into Atlantic City, The Last Picture Show or Fat City; visions of a stumbling, lost America, mirrored by the pitiful decline of her greatest living icon. "Play around, you'll lose your wife," sings Elvis - on stage he'd grin and say, "I already did that." After the next line about losing your life, he'd add, "I almost did that already too."

Unchained Melody (1977)

His body was about to give out, and his between song patter on stage was rambling and sometimes embarrassing, but Elvis's voice rarely let him down. If he felt the song, he was as effective as ever. This is a man on the brink, fighting the odds (which include the song's ubiquity) - you will him on, pounding the piano, sweat rolling off him. And he wins. It's astonishing. A few weeks later, he was gone.

An introduction to Brute Force

If anything symbolised the insanity of the Beatles' Apple set-up, and its dadaist approach to running a business, it was a 1968 single called King of Fuh by the New Jersey-born Brute Force. George Harrison thought Brute had "a lovely voice and a beautiful record", and radio programmers would surely have been bowled over by the London Symphony Orchestra's sumptuous backing, but there was a small problem with the chorus: "All hail the Fuh king."

Born Stephen Friedland in 1940, Brute Force became a member of the Tokens* in the early sixties, soon after they had scored a US #1hit with The Lion Sleeps Tonight. As part of the Tokens' Bright Tunes writing and production team, he used his unexplained nom de plume to write three minute psychodramas that few, Shadow Morton aside, could equal: Del Shannon's She Still Remembers Tony and the Bitter Sweets' What A Lonely Way To Start The Summertime were two of the best, both super-intense, end-of-romance wrist slashers.

And then there's the Chiffons' Nobody Knows What's Going On In My Mind But Me from 1965, an insight into a teenage girl's unhinged but meticulously controlled mind-state. It is at once garbled, triumphant, and - like the Bitter Sweets' single - on the verge of completely losing it. Nobody Knows... is one of the ultimate late-period Girl Group 45s and a rare (though fragile) show of female defiance in the genre. It eventually became a hit of sorts, on the dancefloor at Wigan Casino, via Tammy St John's clattery cover.

The full Force of what was going on in Friedland's mind was eventually revealed in 1966 on an album called Confections of Love. Recorded with Leonard Cohen in attendance, it featured song titles such as To Sit on a Sandwich and Tapeworm of Love. The Chiffons didn't record any of these songs, as far as I know.

Out of the Tokens and sore from the failure of Confections, Force made an attempt to swim the Bering Strait in 1968, from Alaska to Russia, to focus world attention on the closeness of East and West at the height of the Cold War. He made it halfway, to Little Diomede Island. The Inuits took pictures, Life magazine ran a feature - he may have an odd name, they thought, but the kid's all right. Then came King of Fuh.

A Brute Force show could open with him lying on his back, panting like a dog for four minutes - his Extemporaneous album, released in 1969, captured his whacked-out philosophical improv. Still performing, he remains ecologically concerned, politically involved and satisfyingly odd. When Extemporaneous was re-issued by Rev-Ola in 2004 he played a few shows in Britain with Brummie eccentrics Misty's Big Adventure: while he was over he played a one-off show for a horse, the thoroughbred mare Premier Bid (the horse's owners named a foal Special Bru in his honour). If you've seen the documentary The Battle For Brooklyn, you won't be surprised to hear that Brute, now 70, played a show at the re-opened Freddy's Bar, with its original prohibition-era fixtures and fittings re-located from the building that had made way for the barely legal Atlantic Yards development. Brute still picks his battles well.

Director Ben Steinbauer (Winnebago Man) is apparently working on a documentary. Brute's daughter - calling herself, with obvious pride, Daughter Of Force - has been playing shows in Brooklyn.  A little while back her dad's website announced the "same sex marriage of Stephen Friedland to his trademark, Brute Force. Both are male. In lieu of a gift, please send a contribution to your favourite charity."

*The Tokens' own BT Puppy label is, in its own way, as odd as Apple. Some of its releases were in such tiny numbers they are almost impossible to find, including the Tokens' own album Intercourse: if you ever want to hear a harmony pop album with songs of haiku length, humorous-stroke-suicidal lyrics,  and odd animal noises, then look no further.

Worlds Within Worlds: Basil Kirchin

This is an interview I did with Basil Kirchin in 2002, three years before his death. Please bear this in mind when I refer to dates. Since I wrote it, Jonny Trunk has done a superb job of sorting and issuing the Kirchin archive, much of which had never been given a commercial release, a favourite of mine being Charcoal Sketches. Oh, and I should say that Basil was more obsessed with music than anyone I have ever met.

Basil Kirchin's home may be in Hull, but he spends most of his time in a place most of us are hardly aware of, in "the 834th of a second before thought comes rushing in. In a state of alert inactivity. I spend 90 per cent of my time there so the other reality, keeping a roof over my head, has to make it on the remaining 10 per cent. Which gets pretty difficult at times. The key is, you have to try and act before there's time to think."

Very charming, very intense, Basil Kirchin, 76, has spent the past 40 years sculpting music from "sounds never before heard by human ears, music from another dimension". His reputation rests on a series of works called Worlds Within Worlds, parts of which surfaced on two albums in the early Seventies and which have remained out of print but highly prized ever since. Brian Eno cites them as a primary influence on his ambient music. At the other extreme, he is praised by industrialists such as Coil and Nurse with Wound. He is one of the great innovators in postwar British music, and he remains - very much against his wishes - a well-kept secret.

This should change with Quantum, the first in a series of reissues from Kirchin's startling catalogue. It's jazz, of a sort. Hornbills replace bassists, a bassoon and some geese overlap until you can't tell which is which. There are guitars, amplified insects, saxophones, trams, lions and the voices of autistic children.

It's thrilling, sometimes terrifying, and - though over 30 years old - feels very new.

Kirchin joined his father's big band, aged 13, as a drummer in 1941. "When the war started, I'd come home from school and my old man used to let me play with the band. I was eaten up with it. For two and a half years I slept in Warren Street station and played thirteen and a half sessions every two weeks. One afternoon off - in which I played with the relief band for free. Insane." After the war, Kirchin played with Harry Roy and Ted Heath before taking over the leadership of the Kirchin Band in the mid-Fifties. They acquired famous fans - Sean Connery, Elizabeth Taylor - while Billy Eckstein and Sarah Vaughan would tour Britain only if the Kirchin Band backed them. "I was the loudest drummer in the world. I was known as the Fall of Tobruk."

Uniquely, the Kirchin Band owned a PA system, which enabled Kirchin to record every show. They broke attendance records and starred in Melody Maker polls, but by 1957 skiffle and rock'n'roll were hitting the band's popularity and in any case Kirchin "realised it wasn't enough, because you're a prisoner of rhythm. And I was fed up playing other people's music."

He chucked it all in and escaped to India, where he spent five months in the Ramakrishna Temple on the Ganges. His next stop was Sydney, where disaster struck.

As his luggage was being taken from the ship, something snapped and it all fell into Sydney harbour. All Basil's tapes of the Kirchin Band, basically his whole life, was lost. It still distresses him.

In 1961 Kirchin returned to Britain to work on a "music that was individual". He stayed with his parents in Hull and worked with a local lad called Keith Herd on electronic music. He made some fabulous music for the De Wolfe library, all with odd time signatures, a Kirchin trademark: highlights were the flute and harpsichord suite Abstractions Of The Industrial North (a perfect, self-descriptive library title) and Mind On The Run, which sounds like an alternative Avengers soundtrack. Film work naturally followed; The Shuttered Room, The Abominable Dr Phibes, and an incredibly beautiful, fragile score for I Start Counting, a Jenny Agutter thriller set in freshly built Bracknell new town.

But it was experimentation with tapes and sound manipulation that created Kirchin's big breakthrough. "There is no such thing as a long note," he explains.

"If you take the human voice and slow it down five octaves, immediately everything you can hear drops away. Take birdsong, all those harmonics you can't hear are brought down -sounds that human ears have never heard before. Little boulders of sound. In 1964 it was hard to capture. There was only reel to reel tape, and it took eight or nine years of my life. It was long and hard and painful. Now with the new technology you can hear these boulders of sound without changing the pitch, which is miraculous!"

On and off through the Sixties and Seventies, Kirchin stayed in an autistic community at Schurmatt in Switzerland. "These autistic children, the sounds they make when they try to communicate are unbelievable. They jabber away and of course it's gibberish and meaningless. But if you record it and apply the techniques I've mentioned...trust me, you can hear what they're trying to convey. There's a lot of them in Quantum."

Since the two Worlds Within Worlds albums, Kirchin has written 40 pieces, 12 of which have been recorded but none released. He's now very ill, but is "still working, still roaring, even if it is three months at a time. People of any age should know never to give up. I'm still young, I can't help it if my body's falling apart." This is the first time he's visited London in 15 years, and he seems genuinely delighted that people want to talk to him about his music.

"I'm only good for two things in this world. One is music and the other is this knowledge. It sounds so pretentious, man, my toes are curling, but I have to say it. I want to try and leave something for young people who are starting in music and looking for something as I've been looking all my life. The challenge is, you have to make your life meaningful. Because life is meaningless, the universe is meaningless. It's hilarious really."