The Spotify playlist for THE REVELATIONS OF PRESTON BLACK is Part Two in a series
I started with THE DEVIL AND PRESTON BLACK– way back in 2012. Spotify seemed like the perfect tool to allow me to pull together all of this music from the book people may or may not have ever heard before. In a way it was a no risk endeavor for readers who enjoyed the story but didn’t know the music. All you had to do was download Spotify.
Here are some highlights from the list. I’ll talk about why a song—or a particular version of a song—was included in the playlist or book, and maybe an excerpt. But BEFORE you read any further, take a minute to get the playlist up in Spotify so you can listen along.
Katy looked at Pauly like she would’ve stabbed him with her fork if she could’ve gotten away with it. She turned to me and said, “I told you I didn’t want you opening with that song because you’re perpetuating this whole thing in your head. Robert Johnson had hellhounds on his tail, not you.”
“Trail,” I corrected her.
“Whatever, Preston. You have to learn to separate who you are on stage from who you are with Pauly and me. I know you feel like you have an image to maintain, but trying to live up to it is stressing you out. You can’t be two different people. Most of us have a hard enough time being one. Your drinking is borderline out of hand and the not being able to sleep is from the anxiety of touring and writing. Not hellhounds.”
As far as Americana is concerned, Robert Johnson took the original trip to the crossroad of Highways 49 and 61 down there in the Mississippi Delta. He waited at that intersection all night for Old Scratch to come by and tune his guitar. When Johnson returned to town the next day with skill beyond belief, he’d cemented his legend.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t around long enough to really enjoy it.
Robert Johnson fell victim to the Curse of 27, which was a key theme in THE DEVIL AND PRESTON BLACK. I’m not sure how many casual music listeners are familiar with Johnson’s contributions to modern rock, but everybody from Cream (“Cross Road Blues”) to The Stones (“Love in Vain”) to Zeppelin (“Traveling Riverside Blues”) have ‘borrowed’ from Johnson. Maybe that’s the curse part of it? His intellectual property has provided so much financial and artistic gain for these guys, yet did very little for him in his own lifetime.
I guess this song can be a metaphor for everything Preston perceives is wrong with his own life. He’s not articulate enough to put it into his own words, so he adopts a song to sum up what he’s feeling. The only hitch—Preston has a little problem with playing into self-fulfilling prophecy.
I liked the idea of duets. Working really closely with Heidi over the past year has given me new insight (and respect) to the dynamics of creative couples. And in a way, I used this to symbolize the changing nature of Katy and Preston’s relationship—playful, but still a working one.
Hank Williams has a West Virginia connection—he died there. Because of that he’ll always play a key role in Preston’s life, whether he knows it or not. See Death of Hank Williams.
Spotify hasn’t worked out a licensing agreement with The Beatles yet, so finding suitable covers is one of the more enjoyable aspects of compiling these playlists. I chose Richie Havens’ version because it was stripped down to the bare minimum—no Mellotron, funeral brass, swarmandal, overdubs, or backwards masking.
In a way, his version reminds you that this is JUST a song—not a manifesto or a vision.
I liked the idea that it was Cash covering Lennon—two central figures in the novel.
And like Lennon, Johnny Cash had experienced a transformative event at an important junction in his career, one which was quite the opposite of Robert Johnson’s. After a pill addiction relapse, Johnny tried to kill himself deep in Nickajack Cave, in Tennessee. He pushed himself further into the cave, into the darkness, when suddenly a light and a breeze directed him back to the entrance. To him, it’s was proof of God’s love, and Johnny saw it as a chance to be reborn as a Christian and a family man.
Another Beatles’ song that forced me to get creative with a cover version. Atkins was influenced by a range of diverse guitarists, from Mother Maybelle Carter to Django Reinhardt. And he was a Nashville guy, making this version a perfect fit for this scene.
“This is where Duane Allman camped in the parking lot and taught Wilson Pickett ‘Hey Jude’ to break into the business. Music history. He knew the world needed him like he needed the world.” Nothing I said would change her mind so I toned down my excitement. “I’m sorry. I really thought you’d be into this.”
This song is a Preston Black trifecta— Duane Allman + Beatles + Muscle Shoals. There was no way I couldn’t use this in my book. Aside from that, it plays a very important role in Duane Allman’s career—it’s this very recording that got him the record deal that lead to the formation of The Allman Brothers Band.
The Stones recorded this (along with “Brown Sugar” and “You Gotta Move”) at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Alabama from December 2-4, 1969. Once recording ended, they left The Shoals for California, to play the disastrous Altamont show where a concert goer was stabbed to death by one of the Hells Angels that had been hired for security.
According to Tommy’s brother, LeDell, it was Tommy, and not Robert, who had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for mastery of the guitar. Tommy frequently carried and displayed a large rabbit’s foot—a powerful token in southern folk magic, as evidenced by the line, “And you’ve got a rabbit’s foot, To keep away de hoo-doo,” from the old minstrel song There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight
Even though Robert and Tommy Johnson were unrelated, the story later became more strongly associated with Robert, despite Tommy’s musical virtuosity. Legend has it that Tommy could play behind his back, between his legs, and from time to time he’d even throw the guitar into the sky, catch it, and keep right on playing.
“Tomorrow Never Knows” is one of those songs that everybody seems to point to as a pivotal moment in the Beatles’ ascension, and perhaps, as a turning point in the 60s themselves. Consider the fact that this was the song used by Matthew Weiner of TV’s MAD MEN to illustrate Don Draper’s failure to keep up with the changing times. Lionsgate, the studio that produces “Mad Men,” paid about $250,000 for the recording and publishing rights to the song.
A lot of people kind of assume that “Tomorrow Never Knows” signals the transition to a SGT. PEPPER-era Beatles because of its psychedelic nature, but it was actually the first song recorded for the REVOLVER sessions. Lennon was deep into Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner’s THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE: A MANUAL BASED ON THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD and wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama shouting from a mountaintop. John’s original idea was to have engineer Geoff Emerick to dangle him from the ceiling with a long rope, then swing him back and forth past the mic. Emerick came up with a much simpler solution, which was to use a Leslie speaker cabinet which utilized rotating speaker horns to get that unique sound. Throw in a few double-speed, reversed guitars, a Mellowtron, reverse cymbals, and a baggie filled with ¼ inch tape loops supplied by Paul McCartney, and you begin to understand why Pitchfork Media placed this song at 19 in their list, “The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s.”
DJ Spooky said that ”Tomorrow Never Knows” is “… in the DNA of so much going on these days that it’s hard to know where to start. Its tape collage alone makes it one of the first tracks to use sampling really successfully.”
On the edge of the stage, the announcer wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, and said, “Got a big show for you yet, so don’t you go running off.”
Electricity streaked through my arms and legs as Johnny walked past. He stood a little shorter than I anticipated, wearing that white jacket with the black piping. Behind me a little Fender Pro breathed steam into the old civic center. A wall of heat and hum that knocked people back into their seats. I pulled on my necktie to loosen it, and for the first time all night I could breathe.
I fixated on a large illuminated clock behind the stage right curtain. A white face with black block numbers. Seemed like the only thing that truly made sense to me.
Then Johnny nodded, giving me the signal to go.
The second I set my pick to that string the crowd stood. That Fender Esquire sounded like an angry dog barking at a freight train. Girls in pale pastel dresses with hair twisted and sprayed into beehives watched Johnny swagger up to the mic. Guys in suits and skinny ties—now that they were being ignored by their girls—watched my fingers work through the first few notes as the announcer rushed to finish his introduction. He said, “America’s greatest folk music star—Johnny Cash!”
The kids sat back down, and before that old square could even get his ass off the stage Johnny hovered over the mic banging out the chords to “Big River.” I looked over at Marshall plucking that big old upright bass’s strings. He just smiled away as he counted out that old ‘one, two, one, two…’ with his hair pushed straight back from his forehead by a gob of grease. Marshall Grant was a good old boy, all right. He smiled and bounced to the beat, kicking his leg out and slapping those strings like he was swatting a bee.
These songs come at a pivotal point in the book—Preston’s ‘Black Baptism.’ In this scene old magic is used to send Preston to the ‘other side’ to talk to the dead, who know things the living don’t. Being able to find live versions of each of these songs made me very happy, indeed.
Replace ‘Who do’ with ‘hoodoo’ and this song starts to make a lot more sense. Especially in the context of the book.
I walked forty-seven miles of barbed wire, use a cobra snake for a neck tie
Got a brand new house on the roadside, made from rattlesnake hide
I got a brand new chimney made on top, made from a human skull
Now come on baby let’s take a little walk, and tell me “who do you love?…”
This is Joe Strummer’s pre-Clash band, and I love the song because it ties New Orleans to London in a non-Zep/Stones/Clapton kind of way. Originally called “Junker’s Blues,” the song’s many references to drugs, needles and prison made it perfectly suited for a punk reboot.
“I listen to ‘Layla’ and I feel like I’m a part of something bigger, because in my experience, God doesn’t only exist in cathedrals or out in outer space or in some other dimension. In my experience you find him wherever you find him. And that’s all I want for me and for Katy and for anybody else in here who doesn’t believe same as you do—is to be able to stumble upon what we believe where and whenever we’d like.”
Rachael watched from their box. I tried to gauge my progress by her expression.
But she motioned for me to go on. “When the piano kicks in, and Duane’s guitar soars, I can close my eyes and be anywhere on earth. Anywhere. And it’s not just the guitar—Mick says a guitar’s just a block of wood somebody saw fit to take a saw to—it’s the union of guitar, piano, drummer… It’s a group of people locked in to each other, making something more beautiful and more perfect than a single man could ever make alone. The piano by itself doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t say anything. It’s a chord progression. That’s it. Nothing divine there.”
I wiped sweat out of my eyes. “And Duane’s guitar?”
I waited while a bunch of the guys cheered and smiled. “Man, there’s a reason Clapton went looking for him down in Miami. In my opinion, divinity brought them together. Divinity put Duane’s slide with Clapton’s melody. And I don’t need the likes of you all telling me my ideas are wrong. Because I know who came through the darkness and saved me when I was down. I’d close my eyes and ask God to bring my mom back or make my presence less of a burden on Pauly and his mom and pap. And you know who answered?”
They waited in silence.
“Duane Allman, that’s who…”
And I think that pretty much sums it up, right there.
