Frisco Mabel Joy

'Frisco Mabel Joy
Studio album by Mickey Newbury
Released October 1971
Recorded 1971, Cinderella Studios, Tennessee
Genre Country
Length 44:47
Label Elektra
Producer Dennis Linde
Mickey Newbury chronology
Looks Like Rain
(1969)		 'Frisco Mabel Joy
(1971)		 Sings His Own
(1972)
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic[1]

Frisco Mable Joy is the 1971 concept album by singer-songwriter Mickey Newbury. This was the second of three albums Newbury recorded at Cinderella Sound. The album includes the original version of "An American Trilogy", which Elvis Presley later performed in his Las Vegas shows with much success. "How Many Times (Must The Piper Be Paid For His Song)" is a dramatically re-imagined version of a song first released on Harlequin Melodies, Newbury's RCA debut. Other standout tracks include "The Future's Not What It Used to Be", "Remember The Good", "Frisco Depot," and "How I Love Them Old Songs." The track "San Francisco Mabel Joy" was not initially part of the album, though it is included on some versions. Frisco Mabel Joy was collected for CD issue on the eight-disc Mickey Newbury Collection from Mountain Retreat, Newbury's own label in the mid-1990s, along with nine other Newbury albums from 1969-1981. In 2011, it was reissued again, both separately and as part of the four-disc Mickey Newbury box set An American Trilogy, alongside two other albums recorded at Cinderella Sound, Looks Like Rain and Heaven Help The Child. This release marks the first time that 'Frisco Mabel Joy has been released on CD in remastered form, after the original master tapes (long thought to have been destroyed in a fire) were rediscovered in 2010.

Background

By 1971, Mickey Newbury was one of country music's most successful songwriters, having composed scores of hits for other artists, but his first two solo albums were not commercially successful. The first, Harlequin Melodies, recorded in 1968 on RCA, was largely disowned by the singer on account of the extravagant production. Newbury would consider his next album, 1969's Looks Like Rain, on Mercury Records as his true debut album; its atmospheric songs and conceptual design was revered within the industry and would influence many other progressive country music songwriters and artists, such as Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings.

Newbury eschewed most of the conventions taken for granted in country music when he recorded Looks Like Rain: he recorded outside the Nashville studio system; he used unusual instruments, such as sitar, on his songs, which were often much longer in duration than anything that could be played on radio; and he employed sound effects, creating a seamless musical flow that led many to regard Looks Like Rain as the first true concept album in country music. Despite the artistic success, however, Newbury was unhappy at Mercury, later recalling to Peter O'Brien of the Omaha Review in 1977 that the president of the company had expressed dissatisfaction with Looks Like Rain and "It got back to me before the album was ever released, so I was already soured on the label when it did come out. Then there was a lot of other things. I went to New York City to work The Bitter End. I was the first country act ever to work The Bitter End. I was the first act that had ever been on Mercury Records that had been reviewed by the New York Times. Got a half page story. When I got to New York the people from Mercury Records didn't even know I was there or who I was." Newbury later told No Depression, "The president of Mercury told me he hated the album. And I told him to kiss my ass, I'd buy it back. Which I did. And I turned around and sold it to Elektra Records for $20,000 more than what I bought it for." Newbury eventually signed with Elektra Records and began recording 'Frisco Mabel Joy.

Recording and composition

Like Looks Like Rain, 'Frisco Mabel Joy was recorded at Cinderella Sound, a converted studio that had once been guitarist Wayne Moss' two-car garage in Madison, Tennessee. By then, the studio had graduated from being four track to a sixteen-track facility[2] The album was produced by songwriter Dennis Linde and mixed at Jack Clement Recording Studios. Although the album displays a more orchestrated sound, the recording approach remained sparse and relatively organic; the strings sounds that follow "An American Trilogy", for example, are actually composed of pedal steel and electric guitars.[3] Once again, Newbury made use of sound effects such as rain, thunder, and soulful interludes to lend the recording a moody, conceptual feel.

The album's most famous song is "An American Trilogy", a medley of three 19th century songs—"Dixie", a blackface minstrel song composed by Daniel Decatur Emmett that became the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy since the Civil War; "All My Trials", originally a Bahamian lullaby, but closely related to African American spirituals, and well-known through folk music revivalists; and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", the marching song of the Union Army during the Civil War.[4] It is the song most associated with Newbury and his highest charting original recording, reaching #26 in 1972, and #9 on Billboard's Easy Listening chart. Newbury's version would remain in the Top 40 for seven weeks. According to Joe Ziemer's Newbury memoir Crystal & Stone, Newbury was moved to perform the song - which had been banned in some southern states - as a protest against censorship and first sang it at The Bitter End in New York in front of an audience that included Joan Baez, Cass Elliott, Kris Kristofferson, Barbara Streisand, and Odetta.[5] As Ziemer notes, "The 'Dixie' presented that evening was not the rousing, rebel yell, battle march version, but the slow, heartfelt, melodious tune that we know today. Only by slowing it to a quarter-time ballad could Mick present it with great feeling and show its true beauty and meaning."[6] Newbury later recalled:

I got through with the "Dixie" part of the song and I looked down, and Odetta was sitting in the front row, and she had tears in her eyes...When I got through with that song, the place was like completely silent. Seemed like it went on for 30 seconds. And then I mean to tell you they stood and screamed and hollered like you would not believe. It was the most electrifying experience I ever had in music.[6]

Largely through his unique musical sensibilities and stunning voice, Newbury had turned a song many consider divisive into a song of unification. In 1972, Elvis Presley's version reached #66 and peaked at #31 on the Easy Listening chart, but it became the grandiose highlight of his live shows. The song gained worldwide exposure when Presley performed it during his Aloha From Hawaii television special in January 1973.

"An American Trilogy" sets the stage for an album dealing with loneliness and deep sentimental longing. Newbury inhibits his own compositions vocally, with Thom Jurek writing in his AllMusic review that the singer "moves into an entire series of songs that talk of dislocation, emptiness, and endless searching through regret, remorse, and ultimately acceptance and resignation. And Newbury's vocal abilities are just astonishing. He has a different voice for literally every song." Elektra Records boss and Newbury supporter Jac Holzman explained to Mojo in 2012, "If you only hear 'An American Trilogy,' you'll hear a typical Mickey performance - a closely-miked guitar, very intimate, with Mickey's voice in what seems to be just a bit too much reverb, until you get comfortable with that. The quality of his voice is something no one in Nashville came close to." Many of the songs address the emotional damage caused by broken relationships ("You're Not My Same Sweet Baby," "Swiss Cottage Place") and aimless wanderlust ("Mobile Blue," "Frisco Depot"). "Swiss Cottage Place" was inspired in part by his three year stint in England in the early 1960s when he rented a place in Swiss Cottage, England, where he "had a party that lasted three years", according to Goldmine writer Allen Harbinson. Newbury biographer Joe Ziemer describes "Mobile Blue" as a "Dylan-esque foot-stomper" and contends "How Many Times Must the Piper Be Paid For His Song" "raises the ante on the proposition that poets are born and not made."[7] In the mournful ballad "The Future's Not What It Used to Be," the drunken narrator intends to take a train to Skowhegan, Maine "hell bent to forget" but winds up in Seattle with some "fast, easy women and hard drinkin' men." In light of the album's somber tone, Newbury chose to conclude the LP on an incongruously jolly note with the rousing, ultimately redemptive "How I Love Them Old Songs", a number he would perform on The Johnny Cash Show in March 1971. A Salvation Army band plays near the end of the song before giving way to a distant, plaintive harmonica. Newbury later revealed that he wrote it after he got married: "It's not a time to write sad songs, you know. So, I set out to write some love songs and I couldn't do it. But I did write a happy song."[8]

Reception

Frisco Mabel Joy became Newbury's only LP to crack the National Top 100, reaching #29 on the country chart and #58 on the pop chart. At the time of the album's release Hit Parader proclaimed, "Frisco Mabel Joy is not just an album - it's an experience." Karen Berg of Rolling Stone enthused, "If you get into Mickey Newbury you can really get hooked...He's never mawkish. He's cathartic and his melodies clear the head of clutter. And can he ever sing." Rolling Stone included the LP in its poll for "Album of the Year". AllMusic describes the songs on the LP as "slippery, enigmatic, and mercurial...'Frisco Mabel Joy is a masterpiece." No Depression states, "Frisco Mabel Joy upped the ante with the most consistently strong songwriting of his career."

Track listing

All songs written by Mickey Newbury unless otherwise noted.

  1. "An American Trilogy" (Newbury/traditional) - 4:50
  2. "How Many Times (Must the Piper Be Paid for His Song)" - 5:48
  3. "Interlude" - 1:44
  4. "The Future's Not What It Used to Be" - 4:14
  5. "Mobile Blue" - 2:48
  6. "Frisco Depot" - 3:38
  7. "You're Not My Same Sweet Baby" - 3:46
  8. "Interlude" - 1:05
  9. "Remember the Good" - 2:57
  10. "Swiss Cottage Place" - 3:10
  11. "How I Love Them Old Songs" - 5:30
  12. "San Francisco Mabel Joy" - 5:17

Personnel

Production

Charts

Album

Billboard (North America)

Year Chart Peak position
1972 Pop Albums 58
Single
Year Single Chart Position
1972 "An American Trilogy" Billboard Pop Singles 26

Selected cover recordings

References

  1. ↑ Frisco Mabel Joy at AllMusic
  2. ↑ Zeimer 2015, p. 127.
  3. ↑ Zeimer 2015, p. 128.
  4. ↑ Ponce de Leon, Charles L. Fortunate Son, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007, p. 172, ISBN 978-080901641-9
  5. ↑ Zeimer 2015, p. 123.
  6. 1 2 Zeimer 2015, p. 124.
  7. ↑ Zeimer 2015, pp. 129–130.
  8. ↑ Zeimer 2015, p. 129.
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