Return to glory

All eyes on Loretta: White Stripes singer Jack White, left, produced country singer Loretta Lynn's 2004 comeback album, Van Lear Rose. (Universal Music)

Since they started, ’70s radio-rockers America have had a tough time earning respect. For instance, to this day, many listeners mistakenly attribute the group’s first hit, A Horse with No Name (1972), to Neil Young. According to his semi-authorized biography, Shakey, when Young’s manager, Elliot Roberts, added America to his client roster, the Toronto-born rock legend threw a fit. “Waddya spendin’ time with this copy band,” Young asked Roberts, “when you’ve got the original right here, Elliot?”

While enormously successful in the ‘70s with hits like Ventura Highway and Sister Golden Hair, America soon faded into the relative obscurity of the casino circuit. Unpopular among reviewers, the band has never shaken its image as a derivative commercial act.

Not only is America set to release a new album, Here Now, in January, but it’s produced by Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne and James Iha of the Smashing Pumpkins, and features appearances from other young, high-profile musicians like Ryan Adams and Ben Kweller. Have rock musicians run out of heroes to pay tribute to? A combination of new songs and America chestnuts, Here Nowrecasts the band’s light, melodic, hippie-ish rock for contemporary audiences with bright, power-pop production and unlikely covers of songs by indie bands My Morning Jacket and Nada Surf (both of which appear on the album).

(Burgandy Records)

Here Now fits into a long-standing tradition — namely, the rock ‘n’ roll restoration project, wherein an older, fading music legend is stripped down and rebuilt, like a ‘60s Mustang or a shabby Queen Anne-style home, to vintage glory. Comeback albums benefit both parties: the older artist feels the buzz of working with a current hitmaker, while the younger musician gets to work with a childhood hero and enjoy the credit for the elder’s renewed success.

The examples are legion. White Stripes singer Jack White produced and played guitar on country singer Loretta Lynn’s acclaimed comeback album, Van Lear Rose; cool icon Marianne Faithfull worked with the likes of Beck, P.J. Harvey, Billy Corgan and Jarvis Cocker on her last two albums, Kissin’ Time and Before the Poison; and soul singer Bettye LaVette enjoyed a career revival with the album I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, which was produced by alt-country singer-songwriter Joe Henry and featured covers of Fiona Apple and Sinead O’Connor. Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart, whose music has been categorized as “freak folk,” helped resurrect the career of English singer Vashti Bunyan, who had released only one album (1970’s Just Another Diamond Day) before returning last year with Lookaftering.

The most notable restoration project may be Rick Rubin‘s work with Johnny Cash. In 1994, Cash was a country-music legend who had fallen out of fashion in Nashville, which had become enthralled with the pop-inflected, platinum-selling work of Shania Twain and Garth Brooks. Having produced albums for acts as dissimilar as Slayer, LL Cool J and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rubin decided to play up Cash’s reputation as an outlaw iconoclast. On American Recordings, their first collaboration, Rubin scrapped the country-music orchestration and encouraged Cash to use only an acoustic guitar to accompany his increasingly fragile baritone. Over six albums and a box set of outtakes, Rubin updated Cash’s material with covers of songs by Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails; guests on these albums included contemporary musicians like Flea, Fiona Apple and Nick Cave.

As the Cash example shows, the subjects of rock restoration projects aren’t always rockers. Among the first of such retrofits were blues artists like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who each released albums with updated, psychedelic versions of their earlier hits. Both artists played with British blues-rockers like Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, who championed them by covering their songs and appearing with them on TV shows. According to James Segrest and Mark Hoffman, authors of Moanin’ at Midnight: The Life and Times of Howlin’ Wolf, Wolf initially disliked both psychedelic music and hippie hairstyles. “Why don’t you take them wah-wahs and all that other shit,” the notoriously cranky bluesman told one hirsute session guitarist during a 1968 recording session, “and go throw it off in the lake — on your way to the barber shop.”

Wolf nonetheless enjoyed working with appreciative, well-mannered Brits like Mick Jagger and Clapton. The result was that The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions became the only one of the blues legend’s albums to crack the Billboard 200 chart, peaking at number 19 in 1971. Meanwhile, the young rockers he played with were able to bask in the grizzled authenticity of his music. Rock ‘n’ roll was still a relatively new art form then, eager to establish its credentials as something more than a fad. Five decades since its inception, the genre can claim its own long history. Yet rock’s obsession with authenticity as a badge of quality continues.

Shine on you crazy Diamond: Neil Diamond performing at New York's Madison Square Garden. (Chad Rachman/Associated Press)

While updating older artists’ material, restoration albums often feel like acts of revisionism that seek to transform has-been stars into wizened, haunted heroes. Lynn’s Van Lear Rose, for instance, might not sound like the pop-country work of Faith Hill, but the album’s wistful, retro tone and tastefully sparse instrumentation has more in common with the ‘70s country rock of Gene Clark or the Band than the corny tales of heartbreak and boozing that first made Lynn a star. By urging Cash and, more recently, Neil Diamond to sing with little more than an acoustic guitar as accompaniment, Rubin claimed he was revealing the “essence” of each artist’s music. Some might argue that Rubin’s minimalist production is merely the shrewd repackaging of an artist to suit the tastes of contemporary critics and audiences. I’d say that Diamond, a lifelong entertainer and devoted crowd-pleaser, might be more authentic dressed in sequins and backed by an orchestra than as the solo strummer he portrayed on last year’s 12 Songs, which was produced by Rubin.

A similar argument could be applied to the band America. An act that has neither the credibility of Cash and Lynn nor the kitsch appeal of Diamond, America is a surprising choice for a rock restoration album. Casting it as authentic would be a tall order, and album producers Schlesinger and Iha take pains to avoid such a strategy. Indeed, what makes Here Now interesting is that, in spite of the presence of such hipster artists, so much of America’s original sound remains intact.

The songs on Here & Now not only inspire nostalgic memories, but show that the Top-40 playlists of yesteryear have had at least as much of an influence on indie rockers as, say, the Velvet Underground or punk. One track, Ride On, features some slide-guitar and bongo drums that aren’t only ‘70s throwbacks, but also aggressively uncool.Chasing the Rainbow has a sleepy guitar lick and cooing harmonies that will remind 30-somethings of listening to AM radio while their dads drove them to school. Even America’s renditions of contemporary songs (like Nada Surf’s Always Love and My Morning Jacket’s Golden) are reshaped and smoothed out to blend in with the originals. (It’s not surprising that at times, America sounds remarkably similar to Fountains of Wayne.) Unlike Rubin, Schlesinger and Iha seem less concerned about stripping America to its core than recreating the sugar-coated sound of its ‘70s heyday.

Kevin Chong is a Vancouver writer. His book Neil Young Nation is published by Douglas & McIntyre.

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