Introduction

1976-1989
○ Cabaret Voltaire: Led by grim Sheffield kids Stephan Mallinder and Richard H. Kirk, these guys began as radical avantgarde experimentators, busily constructing one corner of the industrial scene next to Throbbing Gristle; then, placing themselves somewhere at the meeting point be­tween «radical avantgarde» and «intelligent mainstream», they unleashed a never-ending series of albums that wove industrial, electronic, and minimalist threads into rhythmic patterns, so that young people all over the planet could happily dance their way to the end of the world. The music sometimes compromised with pop values, but never embraced them properly, the same way that dozens of other New Wave-era groups could stake their claim to fame and fortune — on the other hand, the «danceability» of the music could also alienate «serious» crowds, so the Cabaret Vol­taire fanbase was always limited. Over two decades of work, they gradually made the transition from a more guitar-based, dreary, cavernous sound to fully electronic textures in the realms of house and techno music, sometimes sounding one step ahead of their competition and sometimes one step behind, but almost never embarrassing themselves (except for some missteps in the late Eighties when the music became «too happy» for its own good). Nevertheless, this is definitely one band I'd rather prefer to quietly «respect» than actively «enjoy». Possible starting point: This one is a real stumper — they have so many albums out of the same comparable quality. The first of those that made more than just an average impression on me was 2x45 (1982), so this is the one I'd probably go along with, but it's so much a matter of taste (if not random luck) that... well, pretty much anything up to Micro-Phonies (1984) represents the «classic» period, and pretty much any of their 1990s albums is in the IDM camp, if you really need guidelines.
☺Camper Van Beethoven: Once a special brand of underground-college-rock heroes of the eccentric Eighties, Camper Van Beethoven have somehow managed to survive (or, more accu­rately, to resurrect) into the 21st century as one of the smartest (way too smart to have ever enjoyed much commercial success, despite much of their music written in a totally accessible manner) «meta-pop» bands of the last few generations. Where they once used to rethink all the musical genres in the world as ska (or polka, whichever you prefer), they have since applied a nonchalant, irreverent attitude to everything in existence, but without forgetting that it never works without a little bit of soul. From neo-country-western to psychedelic hard rock to a full re-recording of Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, they've been here and they've been there and they have made their mark on everything; a must-know for everyone who likes his pop with a good touch of irony, intellectualism, and musical verve. Possible starting point: Aw hell, just start from the beginning, woncha? Telephone Free Landslide Victory (1985) is a half-visionary, half-jokey classic if there ever was one.
○ Candlemass: These loyal disciples of Black Sabbath, led by indefatigable bass player and dark alchemist Leif Edling, are one of the reasons why Sweden is now regarded as a major hub for doom metal — the genre that pretty much owes its existence to these guys. Their importance and influence on the metal scene cannot be denied; as to the quality of their music, opinions differ, and mine is that they represent a classic case of perfect mastery of form (one could easily argue that they carried on the proper Sabbath spirit once the old Sabbath of Ozzy and Dio was no longer able to do that for itself) without being able to properly capture the substance. A typical Candle­mass riff is thick and crushing, but not particularly catchy; and a typical Candlemass vocal melody tends to be ruined by the hyper-operatic vocals of one of its singers, most notably the fan idol Messiah Marcolin (I am far more partial to his later replacement, Robert Lowe, who managed to replace Marcolin's operatic pomp with growling anger). They do have a few classics, and, in a way, continued to improve as they went on, both in terms of songwriting and production; but while Black Sabbath will always be capable of reaching a far wider audience than just the isolated sect of heavy metal fans, Candlemass have always had too limited a formula to ever venture far beyond the gates of conventional doom. Possible starting point: As a compromise, I will single out Live (1990) — good energy level, quality production, and all of the band's classic high points from the early albums captured in one package. Naturally, the fans would go for Epicus Doomicus Metallicus (1986), the record that put them on the map, but I think that Live actually improves on those songs.
○ Carcass: The Foul Four of Liverpool, these guys took extreme metal to new heights when, inspired by the success of Napalm Death, they invented a new variety of grindcore — the morgue variety, painting verbal and visual portraits of utter grossness to go along with the brutal mini­malistic riffage, insane tempos, laconic running length, and growling vocals. Although many others followed in their footsteps, trying with verve to upstage their progenitors (and at the same time cloning them so much that many of them even began with the same letter, like Cadaver or Cannibal Corpse), Carcass still managed to remain ahead of the pack — largely because they would significantly shift their image from album to album, until, by the mid-Nineties, they'd almost come close to turning into a «classic rock» band, at which point they thought it wise to stop and just disbanded, leaving behind a relatively small legacy that is worth exploring from top to bottom, unless you happen to be pathologically afraid of words like putrefaction and utero­gestation. Possible starting point: This depends on how well you are pre-adapted to this kind of music — Heartwork (1993) is more sparing in terms of melodicity, and does not revolve entirely around cadaverous matters, but for the strong-hearted, the band's debut Reek Of Putrefaction (1988) should be the obvious point of entry, since they would never be more extreme than on this arch-dirty collection of 22 brief bursts of insane macabre energy.
☺Carol Of Harvest: Raised by guitarist and songwriter Axel Schmierer, this German band, sometimes lumped in with the Krautrock movement just because they were Germans, only lasted for one album, but it was a good one — largely a dark-romantic folk-prog album that had more in common with acts like Renaissance than Can or Amon Düül, Carol Of Harvest (1978) was chockfull of melodic ideas, pretty-and-intelligent female vocals, and a genuine artistic yearning for the purity and innocence of days gone by. Sometimes touted by fans as one of the «lost progressive masterpieces», it is probably too derivative to deserve the honor, but it does have a touch of that elusive German spirit that, when married to British folk influences, produces a fairly special league-of-nations effect — well worth trying out.
☺Cars, The: Probably the best example of the missing link between «classic» and «modern» pop/rock, at their best these Bostonian guys were more than just a talented pop band with a knack for vocal and instrumental hooks — there's an air of melancholy and world-weariness that permeates most of their career and makes even the most upbeat of their songs soak in a happy/sad, psychological­ly non-trivial atmosphere. If anything, their main problem was that the first album came out too perfect to allow them to continue a steady journey upwards: pretty much their entire agenda was uncovered in about thirty minutes, and no matter how hard they tried (either by dar­kening the atmosphere on Panorama, or going synth-pop almost all the way on Heartbeat City), they never really evolved beyond the respectably tasteful, but small niche that they carved out for themselves from the very beginning. Possible starting point: The Cars (1978) unarguably re­mains their highest point — it's like a greatest hits package all by itself —the rest of the band's catalog deserves further study depending on how much you like the first album.
○ Celtic Frost: Jury still out.
☺Cheap Trick: These guys from Rockford, Illinois have always suffered from a case of split personality: they wanted to be The Beatles and The Rolling Stones at the same time, combining beautiful pop hooks with nasty attitudes and a dirty guitar sound. As a result of that, they became one of the quintessential «power pop» bands of all time — with vocalist Robin Zander respon­sible for the good looks and guitarist Ricky Nielsen providing most of the cool hooks, for several years in the late 1970s they provided America and the world with some of the finest, snappiest, smartest guitar-based pop music imaginable. Refusing to fit in with the New Wave standards of the time, they found it hard to deal with the Eighties, quickly plunging in a world of embarrass­ments along with their older colleagues from the Sixties — eventually recovering enough of a sense of taste to endure into the Nineties and the Noughties with a badly bruised, but breathing reputation; that said, their glory period of 1977–79 will obviously never be repeated if they live to be 99. Possible starting point: In Color (1977) is their catchiest and most ass-kicking collection, and Heaven Tonight (1978) is probably the smartest and darkest one, so it's really impossible to choose between either. And, of course, At Budokan (1979) is often hailed as one of the greatest live albums of all time — although that one might be more of a special phenomenon for its time rather than a lasting testament of the power of rock'n'roll.
1989-1998
○ Cardiacs: One of the craziest, if not the craziest band to appear on British soil in the 1980s — and that is not necessarily a compliment. Specially to describe Tim Smith's music, the critical establishment had to come up with the term «pronk» — «progressive punk» — and the same establishment used to actively put it down for committing atrocious sacrileges against the classic sacred values of punk. In reality, Cardiacs were «mashers»: they would take just about anything urbanistic (pop, blues rock, punk, ska, symphonic rock, etc.), chop it up, mix the ingredients in the most unusual combinations and release the results as convoluted artistic statements that seem like perfect illustrations for the statement «art is what you make of it». In their defense, they truly sound like nobody else (particularly in the Eighties), and the sheer complexity and unpredicta­bility of Smith's approach to the pop music formula can sometimes baffle the mind more than it may be baffled by the likes of Zappa or Beefheart. But personally, I find it very difficult to «men­tally visualize» 9 out of 10 of their ideas, or to make them come alive with meaning — admire and respect the form, yes, but failing to perceive (not to mention describe) the substance behind their tonal labyrinths. That said, I would agree that no Big Picture is complete without hearing and trying to digest at least one Cardiacs album; and they do get far more belated recognition these days than they did in their prime, so it's not just some obscure act from out of nowhere that you'd be producing to boost your indie credo. Possible starting point: A Little Man And A House And The Whole World Window (1988) arguably has the deepest and catchiest songs of their career (as well as the closest they ever came to a bona fide commercial pop hit), but on the whole, the band had remained highly consistent over two decades, and aside from the earliest cassette tape-only recordings that suffer from hideous sound quality (but still contain some of their best written material), it really makes no difference where to start. Actually, an even better choice might be Cardiacs Live (1988) from that same year — somehow, all those crazy songs end up sounding much better with doubled energy onstage, not to mention that it also works as a «best-of» package.
☺Cardigans: This Swedish band seems to be pursued by the post-ABBA curse: people are too wary around their brand of soft pop, centered around two male songwriters and (in this case) one female singer, even if the melodic skills of The Cardigans are quite favorably comparable not only to the ABBA songwriters, but to any non-Swedish pop band of the 1990s. With their early records, they pretty much invented a special subgenre, a sweet mix of lounge jazz and folk-pop, seasoned with intelligent and slightly surrealistic melancholia of Nina Persson's vocal delivery — and then they ended up doing Black Sabbath covers in that style! If that alone does not stimulate your curiosity, then how about there being three distinct stages to the Cardigans — the sweet early one (probably the best), the «commercial» dance-oriented middle one, and the «mature», more conventional-adult-pop-tinged one that still has its benefits? At the very least, in retrospect they honestly deserve to be better known and remembered than, say, Oasis. Possible starting point: Emmerdale (1994), their debut, already exposes all of their best sides — raise up some love for this one before moving on to the rest of the catalog.
○ Cat Power: This Georgian renegade with a flair for the mystical and the melancholic has plenty of admirers among the indie crowds, but I am not really one of them: for Chan Marshall, atmosphere always takes precedence over innovative or unusual melodies, and that atmosphere is almost always the same, suggesting some superhuman spiritual experience that most of us mere mortals will always be too coarse and shallow to understand. When she is in the mood, she can be a very talented songwriter and arranger, but that happens far too rarely for my taste; and her favorite hobby, that of taking other people's songs and turning them into completely interchan­geable Cat Power broodings that bear no resemblance whatsoever to the original, while enter­taining at first, pretty soon gets stale and even irritating. That said, as far as modernistic singer-songwriter patterns are concerned, she is certainly far from the worst out there, and at least she does vary her musical styles — from grunge to folk to country to electronica, she's done it all, refusing to be pigeonholed with any other pigeon than the Cat Power breed. Possible starting point: You Are Free (2003) is probably the one record where she experiments the most with melody, and, overall, the most accessible introduction to her world, although critics tend to prefer Moon Pix (1998).
○ Catherine Wheel: One of the innumerable bands to become popular in the wake of the grunge, alt-rock, and post-My Bloody Valentine explosion, these British fellows (with Iron Maiden Bruce Dickinson's cousin Rob at the wheel) began as a pretty respectable provider of psychedelic guitar fireworks and mopey romanticism, molding their shoegaze techniques into something a little more reminiscent of traditional pop structures, but still loyally placing otherworldly texture above pop hooks. Unfortunately, Rob Dickinson rather quickly fell in love with himself as a post-Freudian interpreter of the human spirit, and this led to a steady decrease of interesting elements in the band's music and a steady increase in its ego, until everybody just got bored with them and they did not survive the transition from the Nineties into the Noughties. Possible starting point: Ferment (1992) may not be their catchiest set of tunes, but still probably remains their most musically inspired, so this is one more case where you're probably better off starting at the very beginning and stopping as soon as you feel like it.
○ Charlatans, The: Perhaps the quintessential example of what a hard-working, long-lived, strong-brained, and thoroughly mediocre Britpop band can be. Formed in the late Eighties in the Midlands, these guys went through several distinct musical phases — the Madchester phase, which yielded most of their big hits; the «Britpop proper» phase, that largely consisted of their ripping out musical and lyrical quotations from classic rock artists and building their own «modern» songs around them; the «I-have-no-idea-what-I-am-now» phase at the turn of the century, where they experimented with just about everything and never got anything quite right; finally, the «bitter old men» phase, where they'd simply write gloomy alt-pop laments about the end of the world as we know it (and nobody cared). Each of these phases yielded enough of something for the band to make a bit of an impact and offer food for the reviewer's thought, but not enough of anything to suspect genius. In the beginning, at least, they had an advantage, with keyboard player Rob Collins successfully introducing old-fashioned (and fairly wild) electric organ sound into their baggy-style dance numbers; but then Rob Collins died in a car crash, and lead vocalist Tim Burgess, a fairly colorless personage, became the key rallying factor in the band, slowly plunging it into deeper and deeper mediocrity. I cannot recommend this band to anybody except for hardcore fans of the Nineties' Britpop sound — even if their career remains technically interesting, and they were consistent enough so as to almost never end up properly embarrassed. Possible starting point: Just start at the beginning, with Some Friendly (1990), and go on from there for as long as your spirit is willing to carry you. (Personally, I completely lost interest after 2001's Wonderland, with the band totally losing its funky edge afterwards).
1998-2016
☺ Camera Obscura: In limited dosage, this band (actually, more of a vehicle for the talents and personal charm of bandleader Tracyanne Campbell) is a kicker — delightful twee-pop and cham­ber-pop that comes across as a lighter, whiffier, a little less morose (though still pretty icy) ver­sion of Belle & Sebastian (no big surprise, since Camera Obscura also come from Glasgow and owe much of their popularity to Stuart Murdoch taking them under their wing). There is one problem, though: neither Tracyanne nor anyone else in the band have a good understanding of what it is that separates a «nice moody tune» from an «unforgettable classic». When they acci­dentally stumble upon a great hook (ʽLloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbrokenʼ or ʽFrench Navyʼ are prime examples), for that one brief moment they become the greatest pop band of the 21st century. Then it's back to pleasant boredom for the rest of the album. Life can be so unjust, but then, maybe God just didn't have it in his masterplan to let Glasgow take over the world in the 21st century. They're not ready. Yet. Possible starting point: No idea. This is one band that really doesn't need the LP as their medium of choice. Just find those songs I mentioned and start from there (although, most likely, you won't find any better ones anyway).
☺ Carbon Based Lifeforms: A couple of Swedes (Johannes Hedberg and Daniel Segerstad) who specialize in, arguably, a kind of electronic music that would be most pleasing to the ears of «old school» fans who'd rather have Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Vangelis, and Eno over more modern reinventions of the electronic paradigm. Described by the somewhat vague and misleading term «psy-bient», their music does indeed heavily lean into the direction of ambient soundscapes, but it is typically more complex and sonically deep than most ambient, and it can stimulate rather than relax the imagination as well. As well befits their name, the duo constantly strives for realism, pain­ting musical equivalents of the living universe rather than completely imaginary worlds or geo­metric abstractions, and although they do not always succeed (and some­times give in to more conventional ways of music-making, as when they add superflous dance­able grooves to their compositions), on the whole they produce the impression of one of the more pensive and serious electronic acts of the 21st century. Possible starting point: They hit their stride with Hydroponic Garden (2003) and have not really produced a bad record ever since, although the more recent ones are kind of running out of fresh ideas.
☺ Caribou: A pseudonym for Canadian maverick Dan Snaith (who used to go by the name of Manitoba first, before another Manitoba — lead singer of The Dictators — threatened him with a silly lawsuit). The guy is really talented, with his music largely being a mix of electronica, jazz-pop, and sunny psychedelia; on his best albums, he does a great job combining the spirit of idealistic Sixties' art-pop à la Brian Wilson and Rod Argent with modern digital technologies, although the vibe can sometimes get a tad monotonous — typically of most modern artists, he is more interested in zooming in on one particular area and micro-managing it to exhaustion. That said, when he does try to branch out, the results may be underwhelming: after an initial «jazzy» period and what may have been his «golden years» of merging electronica with art-pop, recently he has gone too far in the direction of generic IDM, losing much of the original appeal in the process. Still, he's definitely not a phony or anything, and it's pretty safe to try him out regardless of whether you're hunting for Sixties nostalgia or live entirely in the 21st century. Possible starting point: Andorra (2007) is my obvious favorite, but it is also the most retro-oriented of his albums, with acoustic instrumentation taking precedence over the electronics and vocal melodies taken almost directly from the Love / Zombies / Beach Boys textbook, so if you want something a little more futuristic, The Milk Of Human Kindness (2005) might be a better place to start.
○ Carly Rae Jepsen: I have only tackled this young Canadian lady because the indie community went crazy over Emotion, insisting that here, at last, was a conventional mainstream pop album with soul and quality songwriting. Indeed, she is better than the average competition when it comes to factory-made teen-oriented dance-pop songs with conventional arrangements, and she's got plenty of reservations that might prevent her from going the way of Britney Spears or Miley Cyrus in the future. But that does not mean that she makes «great» albums — it's more like, a tiny ray of hope if you're one of those sour dudes over 30 (like me) who wants to find at least some common language with those darn kids these days. And I'm sorry, but ʽCall Me Maybeʼ sucks, no matter how many memes it managed to generate back in 2012. Possible starting point: Well, yes, Emotion (2015) is still probably the only album from her (so far) that might be listened to from start to finish, although I do find myself partial to a couple of tunes from her debut, as well (back when she was not so totally into the dance-pop scene yet).
○ Cass McCombs: A guy who may have set out to reinvent Californian singer-songwritership for the 21st century, but ended up as just another face in the large indie crowd of today's confused musical landscape. On the positive side, he has a beautiful singing voice, great taste in influences (everything from Brian Wilson to Leonard Cohen and beyond), a solid poetic gift, and genuine ambitions. On the downside, I'd hesitate to call him a musical genius: like Dylan, he relies way too often on the trick of using some simplistic traditional groove as the basis for expressing his own personality, but, unlike Dylan, he just does not have enough quirks in his personality to make such things endurable for the 5-6-7-8 minutes that his songs often go on for. He'd started out very strong, though, but then got progressively more boring as the years went by, and most of his albums seem to have more of an intellectual than emotional appeal. Possible starting point: Unquestionably, one should start at the very beginning — appropriately titled A (2003) — as it probably has the best musical textures (a lush baroque soundscape) of his entire career. In my opinion, he has never been able to top it, but everybody is free to proceed from there chrono­logically and choose the right moment to jump off (or back on).
☺ Chairlift: A now-extinct three-piece (and later on, a two-piece) band that started out in Colo­rado and ended up in New York, these guys were capable of highly diverse and sensitive art-pop, ranging from cute twee thingies (ʽBruisesʼ, their most famous song because nothing beats an iPod Nano commercial) to deep, near-epic atmospheric canvases — and well boosted by the intelligent vocals and nerdy-beautiful looks of chief writer Caroline Polachek. As time went by, they moved closer and closer to a more de-personalized synth-pop sound, before Polachek eventually realized that she did not need anybody else in the band and went solo. On the whole, a surprisingly soul­ful and smart project that used to be at least a couple of heads above the average indie outfit — too bad they burned out so quickly. Possible starting point: Does You Inspire You (2008) is the primary reason I got into the band at all — a bit less «mature» in content, perhaps, than the next two albums, it is also the one record that has them trying to expand in all directions rather than settling in on one particular formula.
Part 1. Before The Rock'n'Roll Band Era (1920-1960)
CARL PERKINS

DANCE ALBUM OF CARL PERKINS (1958)
1) Blue Suede Shoes; 2) Movie Magg; 3) Sure To Fall; 4) Gone, Gone, Gone; 5) Honey Don't; 6) Only You; 7) Ten­nessee; 8) Right String, Wrong Yo-Yo; 9) Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby; 10) Matchbox; 11) Your True Love; 12) Boppin' The Blues; 13*) All Mama's Children.
Carl Perkins' only «original» LP from his four-year tenure with Sun Records, like most LPs from that period, is really just a chaotic compilation of A-side, B-side, and outtake material. But even in this form, or, actually, because of this form, it still counts as one of the most impressive and fun-filled LPs from the rockabilly era. Influential, too — which other single LP from the era could boast a whole three songs to be officially covered by the Beatles?
The important thing about Carl Perkins is that, of all the notorious rockabilly people of the era, he was the one to most tightly preserve the «simple country boy» essence in his music. Bill Haley probably came close, but Haley didn't have much of an individual personality, and his backing band, The Comets, was at least as important as its frontman, blending a touch of country-western with a Louis Jordan-esque big-band jump-blues entertainment approach. Perkins, on the other hand, wrote his own songs (or radically reinvented traditional ones), sang his own melodies, played his own lead guitar, and, overall, made it so that we rarely ever remember anything about his sidemen during the recording sessions. Quick, name the bass player and the drummer on ʽBlue Suede Shoesʼ without googling! Yeah, right. Not even Google can help that easily.
Thus, Carl is essentially a «loner», and in that status, gets the right to his own influences and no other's — and chief among those influences is The Grand Ole Opry, with Bill Monroe, Gene Autry, and Hank Williams as his major idols. The good news for those who, like me, feel a bit iffy when it comes to «pure» country music, is that Carl obviously preferred his country with a sharper edge, and if anything, his rockabilly style is a direct continuation of Hank's faster-paced, boogie-based material like ʽMove It On Overʼ. Although Carl's own spirit was never as tempes­tuous or torturous as Hank's (not a single Perkins song shows any signs of acute bitterness), he always had a thing for raw excitement, energy, speed, humor, good-natured irony — anything that would put a smile on your face and an itch in your feet.
Most importantly, Carl's «lonerism» is responsible for making ʽBlue Suede Shoesʼ into one of the coolest songs of its era — and the lyrics had a lot to do with it: "Don't you step on MY blue suede shoes...", sung in a friendly enough tone but with a very clear hint of a threat. This is really where all the Gene Vincents of this world come from: the «rebels» were inspired by the individualistic cockiness of a plain, harmless, friendly «country bumpkin» who inadvertently tapped right into the spinal cord of his era. ʽRock Around The Clockʼ was a good enough count-off for the rock revolution, but it was a general fun party song. ʽBlue Suede Shoesʼ takes us into one particular corner of that party, where one particularly self-consciously hip guy is busy protecting his own particular interests against the whole world, and backing them with sharp bluesy lead guitar licks that sound like a bunch of slaps in the face of whoever has been unlucky enough to step on the protagonist's lucky footwear.
There is a myth going around that Elvis «stole» the song from Carl while the latter was recupera­ting in the hospital after a car accident, and that this effectively put an end to Carl's career as a pop star. In reality, Carl never had the makings of a star, and the image of a «teen idol» would have probably never sat too well with him in the first place — he was, first and foremost, a song­writer and a guitar player — none of which, however, prevented ʽBlue Suede Shoesʼ from going all the way to the top of the charts, while Presley's version (a classic in its own right, no doubt about that) stuck at No. 20 (admittedly, RCA people agreed to hold back the release until Carl's version lost its original freshness — see, there was a time when record industry people could occasionally show signs of gentlemanly conduct).
Already ʽBoppin' The Bluesʼ, the folow-up to ʽBlue Suede Shoesʼ, did not chart as high (No. 7 was its peak) — and it wasn't Elvis that had anything to do with it, but rather the fact that the song was comparatively toothless in comparison, a fairly formulaic rockabilly creation describing the simple joys of rock'n'roll dancing with little challenge or defiance. In the hot, tense competi­tive air of early 1956, Carl soon lost the lead, and although the next three years would see him reeling between inspiration and repetition, the record-buying public pretty much wrote him off as a one-hit wonder and focused on Elvis instead. In addition, Carl loyally stuck with Sun Records through those years, meaning that he couldn't even begin to hope for the kind of promotion that Elvis got (on the positive side, Carl never got to have his own Colonel Parker).
It is a doggone shame, though, that such fate also prevented a great tune like ʽMatchboxʼ from charting — without the Beatles' support, it might have altogether sunk into oblivion, but really, few pop songs sounded as harshly serious and deep-reaching in 1957 as that particular reincarna­tion of an old, old, old blues song by Blind Lemon Jefferson. When those echoing, distant-thun­der-like boogie chords start rattling around the room, it's as if you were being prepared for some important social statement, and, in a way, you are, since Carl preserves many of the original ly­rics, infusing the song with a blues-based sense of outcast loneliness instead of the usual get-up-and-dance stuff. In a way, «socially conscious rock'n'roll music» starts somewhere around this bend, even if Carl himself probably never intended it to be this way.
On a personal note, I must say that ʽHoney Don'tʼ feels to me as one of the very few rock and pop songs by other artists that the Beatles did not manage to improve upon — and not because Ringo is a worse singer than Carl (he actually did a fine job to preserve the tune's humor), but because George Harrison never really got around to learning all the tricks in Carl's playing bag: as rough as the production is on the original, Perkins compensates for it with a series of improvised «muffled» licks that George did not even try to copy, playing in a «cleaner» style that left less room for rock'n'roll excitement. (On the other hand, George did get the upper hand on ʽEvery­body's Trying To Be My Babyʼ by managing to raise the tension on the lengthy second instru­mental break, whereas in Carl's version it pretty much stays the same throughout).
Of the twelve songs assembled here, only a couple are relative clunkers; ʽTennesseeʼ, in particu­lar, sounds as silly as it is sincere, a heartfelt tribute to Carl's native state with a hillbillyish cho­rus and somewhat uncomfortable lyrics that, among other things, urge us to give credit to the fact that "they made the first atomic tomb in Tennessee" (a somewhat inaccurate reference to Oak Ridge, but even if it were accurate, I'm not sure I would want to boast about it even at the height of the Cold War). Pompous, vocally demanding ballads are also not one of Carl's fortes (ʽOnly Youʼ), but he can come up with a highly catchy homely, simple country ballad when he puts his heart into it — ʽSure To Fallʼ, with its melody almost completely based on serenading trills, is quite a beautiful little piece.
One of the most interesting things about comparing old rockabilly records from the mid-to-late 1950s is the relative proportion of their ingredients. Some veer closer to R&B, some to electric blues, some to «whitebread» pop, some are jazzier, some vaudevillian. From that point of view, Dance Album Of Carl Perkins is a curious mix of something very highly conservative with an explosive energy that is nevertheless kept under strict control, like a fire burning steady and brightly, but only within a rigidly set limit. Had all rock'n'roll looked like Carl Perkins in the 1950s, it would probably have taken us a much, much longer way to get where we are right now — but, on the other hand, maybe we wouldn't already be wondering where exactly is it possible to go from here. Ah well, enough speculation; here is the expectable thumbs up, and we will be moving on.