Red House Painters: "Songs For a Blue Guitar"

A good friend from the RS.com Castaways board mentioned that he had wanted to listen to Red House Painters' "Songs for a Blue Guitar" but that he couldn't find his copy. And thus I felt compelled to respond in this fashion:
Glenn, if it turns out you've acually lost your copy of "Songs for a Blue Guitar" just let me know and I'll give a package to the local mail carrier and instruct him to get the process started in which it will find it's way over many state lines, eventually turning up at your doorstep and into your CD player where, within the first ten minutes of it's duration you will have sobbed a melancholy tear with "Have You Forgotten" and then rocked out slowly but effectively to the repetitive strains of "Make Like Paper".

As you proceed into the album you will no doubt be impressed with Mr. Kozelek's fine guitar playing and introspective lyrics, not to mention that honey-soaked voice. You may well be put in mind of Nick Drake on a couple of songs, at which point you'll smile and consider that there could be lots worse legendary icons he could sound like INSTEAD of Drake...that guy from Quiet Riot for instance.

Maybe you like cover versions, maybe not...either way you might still like "All Mixed Up" (though I don't) or maybe even the YES classic "Long Distance Runaround" (which I do like, in spite of or maybe because of how radically he's re-done it). But beware after this point...be on the lookout for one of the worst covers Mark's ever done, the sprawling, laughable "Silly Love Songs" (in which "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is, at one point, suggested in the music though not the lyrics). If your CD player has a remote you will save the trouble of having to get up and push the "next track" button. If not, you would still do well to hit that button, despite the effort expended.

You could just shut the thing off when you get to that point, but then you'd miss the album's beautiful closing number, "Another Song for a Blue Guitar".

But I forget...you have likely only misplaced your copy and I'm sure that all I've said here is old news to you.

But did you know THIS? "Songs For a Blue Guitar" is not really a Red House Painters record? There may be one of the RHP guys playing on the album (I think it's the drummer) but most of the musicians were people that MK invited to play on this, which was supposed to be his first solo album. 4AD had not been happy with the stuff (hard to imagine, though I guess it does veer away from any resemblance to "the 4AD sound") so Mark left after fulfilling his contract with the release of "Retrospective" (with it's second disc of outtakes, demos, etc...Glenn, if you don't have that one, let me know. It's not really a "must-have" but there are a couple of nice things on it, including a great outtake of "Uncle Joe", an acoustic guitar version of "Mistress" and a couple of unreleased songs).

So, anyway, with the 4AD contract terminated, with Kozelek and Ivo parting on more-or-less amicable terms, "Songs For a Blue Guitar" was offered to several labels. It eventually wound up on a subsidiary of Island called Supreme Records. At this point, starting out anew, Kozelek made the decision to use the Red House Painters name instead of his own. His reasoning was sound---it probably wouldn't be a good idea to attempt a solo break-out at such a transitional period. Best to just see how things went.

But they went badly. The bigger label didn't give the kind of promotional support needed to expose the material to a new audience. Even if it had it wouldn't have made too much difference because the parent label (Island) was bought out, folded into a major conglomerate (I think it was WEA) and the whole thing practically slipped off the map. Kozelek had an RHP album completed by the time all this shit hit the fan ("Old Ramon") but they held it back, not wanting to drop it into the cesspool that their record deal had turned into.

"Old Ramon", as I'm sure you know, was released a few years ago when they landed a decent deal (I can't even tell you, off the top of my head, what the label was). But by that time MK had already put out one solo CD (ep, actually, "Rock 'n' Roll Singer") with another soon to follow ("What's Next to the Moon"). The RHP stuff was very good, but didn't exactly stray too far from their signature sound.

The solo material, though, was a different story. For the most part entirely acoustic (singer/guitar), it showed Kozelek's strengths in an entirely re-cast setting. The John Denver influence came to the forefront (a strange combination, John Denver's early musical stylings with the testosterone fueled lyrics of AC/DC's late front man, Bon Scott). He went on to release two very good live albums in this style, and somewhere in between all that he formed what may well be the crowning glory of all he's ever done, Sun Kil Moon.

I never would have thought I would like SKM more than RHP. The first few times I listened to their debut album, "Ghosts of the Great Highway", I was less than impressed. But persistance definately paid off with this one. It grew on me in a big way until eventually I found myself in that conundrum where I had to break down and admit that he'd outdone just about everything else in his career.

...It would appear that I've entered into territory that is not only trivial history, but is also the kind of trivial history that anyone who even halfway likes this music is already well aware of. And so I apologize for the rambling and will proceed.