Looks Like Rain

Looks Like Rain
Studio album by Mickey Newbury
Released 1969
Recorded 1969
Genre Country
Label Mercury (original release)
Saint Cecilia Knows (2011 reissue)
Drag City (2011 vinyl reissue)
Producer Bob Beckham & Jerry Kennedy
Mickey Newbury chronology
Harlequin Melodies
(1968)		 Looks Like Rain
(1969)		 Frisco Mabel Joy
(1971)
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic
Rising Storm(Favorable)[1]

Looks Like Rain is the 1969 concept album by singer-songwriter Mickey Newbury. After recording his debut album with RCA, Newbury was dissatisfied with the resulting album and left RCA to pursue a style closer to his tastes. Recorded at Cinderella Sound, as his next two albums would be, the result is widely considered his first real recording and represents a peak in the singer songwriter movement, especially for Nashville. The sound and style of the record would be highly influential during the Outlaw Movement during country music in the 1970s especially on albums by David Allan Coe and Waylon Jennings. Linking the tracks with delicate arrangements and liberal amount of atmosphere (almost all tracks feature rain sound effects), the record contains some of Newbury's most celebrated compositions including "She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye", "The Thirty-Third of August," "I Don't Think About Her No More", and "San Francisco Mabel Joy". Allmusic's review of the album concludes "Looks Like Rain is so fine, so mysterious in its pace, dimension, quark strangeness and charm, it defies any attempt at strict categorization or criticism; a rare work of genius."

Looks Like Rain 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, Frisco Mabel Joy and Heaven Help The Child. This release marks the first time that Looks Like Rain 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

After composing several hit songs for other artists (including four #1 hits across four different Billboard charts), Newbury recorded his debut album for RCA, Harlequin Melodies in 1968. Despite featuring several of these hits, the album was a commercial failure and was disowned by the singer, who was unhappy with the over-the-top production. "If they wanted cookie cutter music," Newbury later quipped, "I was the wrong guy to talk to."[2] Due to a verbal agreement with the late Steve Sholes, Newbury was able to get out of his five-year contract with RCA and sign with Mercury where he could work with his good friends Jerry Kennedy and Bob Beckham.

Recording

Just about every aspect of the recording of Looks Like Rain was unconventional by Nashville's standards at the time, beginning with Newbury's choice of studio. Cinderella Sound was located in a residential area of Madison and was run by guitarist Wayne Moss, who had converted his two-car garage into a recording studio. Newbury's decision to record outside the Nashville studio system would inspire other country singers, such as Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, who were also frustrated by the confines of Music City's traditional recording practices. Newbury would record three albums at Cinderella Sound, reveling in its relaxed atmosphere. One significant aspect of Look Likes Rain's production is the inclusion sound effects to link the songs, which gave the LP a conceptual feel. This was as much by necessity as design, as Newbury biographer Joe Ziemer explains, "Since the reel-to-reel machines accommodated just four tracks of audio...the recording of Looks Like Rain was ping-ponged - recorded from one-multi-track machine to another - to increase the effective number of audio tracks. As this laborious process increases noise and tape hiss, Mickey used the sound of rain to mask the annoying imperfections.[3] However, Newbury recognized the thematic value of sound effects immediately, later recalling:

The sound effects on Looks Like Rain came from another Mercury act, The Mystic Moods. The first time I heard them used was on Rod McKuen's albums of poetry and prose. After many nights on my boat listening to the 'roughs.' I decided to use the sound effects...one, to cover the hiss...two, I liked the way they framed the songs, allowing me to ride seamlessly from story to story.

In an 2011 interview with Jessica Thompson of Tape Op, however, Moss contends, "We didn't have any tape hiss because we were cutting at 30 ips. The rain and the train were just things Mickey wanted to set a mood with." Although concept albums with sound effects had existed in country music previously (such as Johnny Cash's Ride This Train LP), Looks Like Rain, with its eerie wind chimes, whistling, and other interludes, was unlike anything the country music industry in Nashville had heard before. In 2011 Pitchfork's Stephen M. Deusner observed, "It ought to be corny as hell, a tired gimmick meant to literalize certain aspects of the songwriting. The effect, however, not only allows the album to cohere into a listen-in-one-sitting experience, but reinforces the emotional alienation of these songs." In addition, Newbury's radical choice of instruments, from synthesizer to sitar (the latter played by Jerry Kennedy), were also unconventional. The length of the songs was also unusual compared to what was played on country radio, with several songs clocking in at over five minutes. The result was a spare, intimate collection of songs that felt like one connected piece. Although Jerry Kennedy is listed as the album's producer and Bob Beckham is credited as engineer, "twenty-nine-year-old Newbury served as Director and Producer."[3]

In addition to Moss and Kennedy, Looks Like Rain featured some of Nashville's most talented musicians, including David Briggs, Kenny Buttrey, Charlie McCoy, and possibly Chet Atkins.[4]

Composition

Looks Like Rain features two of Newbury's most recorded compositions: "San Francisco Mabel Joy" and "She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye." The former is one of Newbury's most notable songs, an opinion shared by the artist himself.[5] "San Francisco Mabel Joy" was heavily covered as both a folk and country song in the early 1970s. In an early 2000s interview Newbury considered "San Francisco Mabel Joy" his most successful song because, "It broke the rules and it broke the walls down. It became the foundation for a new form of expression in country music." Richie Unterberger of Rolling Stone calls it "A country-folk song of epic proportions..." Newbury's original version is a slow folk song which relates the tragic saga of a Georgia farm boy's experiences in Los Angeles. The song plays an important role in Newbury's legacy; it served as the title for his 1971 concept album Frisco Mabel Joy and would be featured on several live albums, including 1973's Live at Montezuma Hall. Newbury later recalled that some of his friends and associates had little faith in the song:

Everybody said, "What're you gonna do with a five minute song?" I said, "I don't know, sing it I guess"...It's sold 55 million records so far. It's been on some of the biggest albums in history. It was on Joan Baez's platinum album, Blessed Are.... It was on John Denver's platinum album Some Days Are Diamonds. It was on Kenny Rogers' multi-platinum album The Gambler, which sold 35 million copies. So I'm glad I wrote the song that would never get recorded.[6]

"She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye", written by Newbury with Doug Gilmore, was also covered extensively, with Jerry Lee Lewis first taking it to #2 on the Billboard country singles chart in 1969. The ballad's haunting line "It's not her heart, lord, it's her mind," would be referenced in Steve Goodman's original recording of "You Never Even Called Me By My Name." Newbury would perform the tune during his appearance on The Johnny Cash Show in March 1971. The inspiration for "I Don't Think About Her No More" (aka "Poison Red Berries") came from a visit to Sammi Smith's house, as the singer later divulged to Country Song Roundup: "I went to Sammi Smith's house to pitch a song, and she had one of those berry bushes in her yard. She told me not to touch the berries; the red ones are poisonous. I forgot about that until years later, when I was searching for a line equating poison with a lost love."[7] Nashville songwriter Ron Peterson has claimed that the ominous "33rd of August" was written by Newbury "when he and [Kris] Kristofferson spent a long weekend at Mick's cabin on Center Hill Lake, and yes, there were some drugs taken."[7] The lines "It's the 33rd of August and I am finally touchin' down/Eight days from Sunday finds me Saturday bound" and other references to dancing demons and a vagrancy arrest were a far cry from the syrupy sentiments coming out of Nashville in 1969.

The liner notes to the album were written by Kris Kristofferson. Newbury recorded his own as-yet unreleased version of Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee" during the Looks Like Rain sessions, as well as the titles "Gallup Ain't Goin' Nowhere", "Thirteen Goin' on Fourteen", and "Coming Home Soldier".[8]

Reception

Largely due to the iconoclastic nature of the album, as well as the length of the songs, Looks Like Rain yielded no hit singles and did not make the Billboard country albums chart. However, it was enormously influential in country music circles at the time and is now considered one of the classics of the era and a forerunner of the nascent outlaw country movement. In Newbury's 2002 Rolling Stone obituary, Andrew Dansby stated Looks Like Rain "marked the beginning of a string of classic fringe-country recordings. With little concern for Nashvillian regimen, Newbury's 'country' music...was indescribable..." Country Music People notes, "The results on Looks Like Rain were superbly simple, yet effective. The sound is acoustic and deliberately underplayed, letting the mood and lyrics gently draw in the listener." AllMusic's Thom Jurek enthuses that Newbury "created an album so haunting, so elegant, so full of melancholy and mystery, it sounds out of time, out of space and is as enigmatic in the 21st century as it was when it was released in 1969." Allan Harbinson of Goldmine calls the record "a quiet stunner, an astonishingly mature and achingly beautiful album...almost perversely against the grain of the times." No Depression writes, "Generally speaking, Newbury is regarded as a classic country tunesmith, but Looks Like Rain and several subsequent albums...suggest a direct connection to an entirely different direction in modern music."

Track listing

All tracks composed by Mickey Newbury; except where indicated

  1. "Wrote A Song A Song/Angeline"
  2. "She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye" (Mickey Newbury, Doug Gilmore)
  3. "I Don't Think About Her No More"
  4. "T. Total Tommy"
  5. "The 33rd of August/ When the Baby in My Lady Gets the Blues"
  6. "When The Baby In My Lady Gets The Blues"
  7. "San Francisco Mabel Joy"
  8. "Looks Like Baby's Gone"

Personnel

Selected cover recordings

References

  1. ↑ "Mickey Newbury "Looks Like Rain"". RISING STORM.
  2. ↑ Zeimer 2015, p. 102.
  3. 1 2 Zeimer 2015, p. 109.
  4. ↑ Zeimer 2015, pp. 109–110.
  5. ↑ "Songwriter Interviews - Interview with Mickey Newbury". musesmuse.com.
  6. ↑ Zeimer 2015, p. 115.
  7. 1 2 Zeimer 2015, p. 112.
  8. ↑ Zeimer 2015, p. 116.
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