New Monday #52

Happy Monday -

I hope you’re having a great start to your week. This week ended on a bit of a sad note. Producer and Engineer Dave Jerden died, as did singer and icon Marianne Faithfull.

Dave Jerden

Mr. Jerden died on February 5th in his sleep, a quiet and peaceful ending for a very decent man who lived up to his values.

He lived low key, especially in the past decade or so, when he seemed to have had enough of the music business...

"I found myself making corporate-type records and feeding the radio machine, I realized that I lost my bearings. I wasn't making records for the right reasons anymore."

He spent most of the 80s and the 90s doing exactly what he wanted—working with artists he respected and producing and engineering albums that were often seminal in their respective genres.

Engineering and mixing Talking Heads' Remain in Light in 1980, and then a decade later producing Alice In Chains' Dirt. And in between, launching Jane’s Addiction, The Red Hot Chili Peppers (engineering their debut and mixing Mother’s Milk), Herbie Hancock (the Future Shock album), a great Canadian band 54-40, Fishbone, Social Distortion, The Rolling Stones (Dirty Work), Mick Jagger (his first solo album), and Mary’s Danish (a GREAT mostly forgotten group).

Hard to imagine the same guy did Once in a Lifetime and Them Bones. Dang, even if that was it, it would be a hell of a career.

Dave kept cruising on, producing for Love Spit Love, The Offspring, Anthrax, Sweet Water, Stabbing Westward, and The Shrine.

One could argue that the early 90s was a golden era for audio recording. Analog technology was superb, with great-sounding tape decks and consoles, big studios with excellent acoustics, wonderful outboard gear that wasn’t yet ridiculously expensive, and, perhaps most importantly, bands that could play live, singers that could really sing, and solid songwriting.

This was a time before the ridiculous "loudness wars” and the fetishization of compression. I love the sound of records from this era: punchy and huge, yet clear with space, distance, and dynamics. One could argue that Dave Jerden was the sound of the early 90s, especially when it came to rock.

Marianne Faithfull

That Marianne Faithfull made it to 78 seems a miracle. Tuberculosis as a little girl. The drugs. Homelessness. Anorexia. Alcoholism. Falling down stairs and breaking her jaw. Losing her children. Bleak, bleak, bleak.

Her career started in 1965 with the single As Tears Go By, which was a hit for her as well as The Rolling Stones a year later—it was a Jagger/Richards composition. The orbit of the Stones in the 60s involved a lot of drugs. By 1970, Ms. Faithfull was homeless on the streets of London.

She continued to make records, usually singing other people’s songs. Her career went up and down, perhaps peaking with the album Broken English in 1979. A dark song made all the more intense by Ms. Faithfull’s now broken voice, Broken English was a surprisingly modern record and a touchstone for many artists as punk turned into New Wave. It earned her a Grammy award nomination.

Perhaps in keeping with her Austrian roots, Ms. Faithfull settled into something between pop and cabaret. Her voice, damaged and deepened by years of hard life, was expressive and compelling. She found good material, and often, good material found her. She cut vocals on records for Roger Waters, Hal Wilner, Rupert Hine, film composer Angelo Badalamenti, John Prine, and Metallica. On her own records, she recorded songs written by Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill to Beck, Billy Corgan, and Morrissey. She has an astonishing body of work.

For special consideration: a video from 1996. She performs a Harry Nilsson tune Don’t Forget Me. Harry’s own version destroyed his voice — he blew it out under the exhortations of producer John Lennon and it never came back. Ms. Faithfull’s version is faithful to the original. In the video she’s chic and beautiful, and ever the storyteller.