Nellie McKay Revisits 1960s Songs

Nellie McKay
My Weekly Reader
(429/Savoy Jazz)
In A Word: Über-Charming

Broadway musical actress and singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist as well as former comedian McKay provides the perfect contemporaneous ameliorative for Diana Krall’s Wallflower collection of classic rock and pop numbers for “adult” fans of that music rendered as smarmy wine and cheese soundtrack music for a hot yuppie seduction session on the Ikea sofa. Then again, this listener is an immediate sucker for any artist from the younger generation who covers “Sunny Afternoon” by The Kinks (accenting its English music hall origins with rollicking upright piano) or The Small Faces’ “Itchykoo Park” with the blissful narcotic bounce of its original.

Or for that matter, how can anyone who came of musical age with the 1960s San Francisco psychedelic scene not be enchanted by again hearing Steve Miller Band’s “Quicksilver Girl” (done with mesmeric minimalism), Country Joe’s “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine” (as stoner pop-rock) and Moby Grape’s “Murder In My Heart For The Judge” as a stinging mid-tempo rocker laced with rolling banjo (by Bela Fleck) that becomes subtle SDS-style agitprop in its extended outro?

British Invasion buff? Check out how McKay buoys “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter” (Herman’s Hermits) on a gentle bed of ukulele and marimba or her lean and seductive take on “Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying” (Gerry and the Pacemakers). And how can you not be charmed by a lass who not only knows former Animal Alan Price’s minor masterpiece O Lucky Man! but medleys his “Poor People” done chamber show-music style into the Afro-Caribbean lilt of “Justice”?

McKay’s pliable voice has just the right light-powdered sugar coating of cute yet enough oomph to sing “bloviated turd” with the snap it requires, and oodles of winning personality that make each track a vivid vocal mini-movie. The arrangements abound with imagination, wit and daring as well as smart restraint. What singer-songwriter type would even attempt Frank Zappa’s “Hungry Freaks, Daddy” and make it a carnival freak show all her own or just play Lennon/McCartney’s “If I Fell” rather straight and make you swoon? (Longtime Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick is her co-producer and partner in crimes of delight.)

Every track here is a winner: Richard Farina’s “Bold Marauder” becomes a bright Celtic reel interwoven with strains of art-rock, and the Paul Simon co-written pop hit “Red Rubber Ball” is Dylanesque folk chomping on a tasty wad of bubblegum. After she finishes up with a solemn yet airy reading of “Wooden Ships” you just want to spin this disc all over again, as it’s nigh-on-impossible not to be utterly enchanted with this glowing gem of an album.

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Rob Patterson

Rob Patterson began writing about music in 1976. Since his first published record review in Crawdaddy he has contributed to numerous national popular music magazines such as Creem, Musician, Circus, Spin, Request, Tower Pulse!, CD Review, Acoustic Guitar, Harp and many others along with major country music, consumer audio, musical instrument and studio recording magazines plus international publications New Musical Express and Country Music People in the U.K. From 1977 to '84 he wrote a nationally syndicated music column as well as stories for Newspaper Enterprises Association/United Feature Syndicate that ran in more than 400 daily newspapers across the nation. His work has also appeared in many weekly newspapers, onlinepublications like Salon.com and The Huffington Post, such books as the Rolling Stone Record Guide & Revised Record Guide, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Rock History and The Year In Rock, 1980-81, plus liner notes for 20 album releases.

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