13 Comments

Thank you for mentioning The Dain Curse.

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As an aside, the "baby!" before the last verse on the Ullman version was provided by Kirsty - so in a small way she's been there all along. After belatedly discovering her glorious original on the Stiff Records box set I couldn't help but imagine an alternate history where it'd been part of the small inroads that label made into the U.S. circa '79. My teenage self would've been enraptured.

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Funny. That’s the only moment on the record that sounds false to me.

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Well, that dramatic pause after the instrumental break needed something to happen, and it strikes me as something a 19-year-old might spontaneously conjure up.

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Ha! You beat me to it. As I understand it, Ullman didn't think she could do that "baby!: half as well as the original, so they just dropped it in as if it was a sample before samples were a thing.

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Kirsty herself sang backup on this and several other songs on both of Tracey’s albums. She did the “BABY!” as part of that.

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Thank you for everything here, but I'm particularly caught up by the Perry descriptions. Beautiful.

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I’m surprised and intrigued you weren’t left cold by The Dain Curse Mr. Marcus. You’re one of the first I’ve encountered to have a less negative opinion on Hammett’s second novel than many of his fans (including myself). Do you care to elaborate?

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The scene where the Op leaves the addict with her packets of dope and returns to find, as he’d bet with himself that he would, herding on her bed it’s a very picket at, chewed on, m in tatters, but not opened, has always stayed with me.

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I agree with your description of that particular scene Mr. Marcus, but I still don’t consider one memorable scene on a page to make a great or even a good book by itself.

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Nolan's interview with Taj in RS where Taj worries about the closet white fascist voters is a message from the dim past that illuminates today's bitter imbroglio.

Great, forgotten bio of Macdonald -- RM's The Chill worth a reread.

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I love and treasure Sinéad O’Connor’s version of “I Believe in You.” My departed friend Brian Keizer (a friend and collaborator to Dave Marsh) once wrote this about it: “She whispers the song like a love letter and an oath seemingly unselfconscious that she has, through her faith in it--the song--made off with it to another space, time, has tapped into the medium it emerged from and it's now hers. You hear her the 15 year old girl, a renegade away from home in Dublin, surviving as a kiss-o-gram girl and a singer in coffeehouses, belicosely delivering Dylan as she discovers the strength and range and urgency of her own voice. Here she enfolds it into a whisper, a twilight vespers, unfolding it mysteriously like a sudden candle in an unmade church.”

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Jerry Wexler did not want "Slow Train" on the album according to Regina McCrary. I suspect it was the "foreign oil" verse.

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