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The Next Hundred Years
Overview
This album shows what Ted Hawkins could do when properly recorded and produced. In my opinion The Next Hundred Years is the only really successful fusion of Ted's voice with session musicians. The earlier albums (Watch Your Step and Happy Hour) suffer by comparison to the bare 'field recording' style of The Venice Beach Tapes and The Kershaw Sessions. The Next Hundred Years is a mature and professional album and allows a glimpse of what the future might have been. This is an excellent CD, if you find it, buy it. (Now also available in a Gold CD version with a bonus track).
Availability
The basic CD is available in UK high street record shops, the Gold CD is available from online record stores. The basic CD is on Geffen Records. GED 24627. Released 1994.
Track Listing
- 1. Strange Conversation
- 2. Big Things
- 3. There Stands the Glass
- (Russ Hull/Mary Shurtz/Michael Pierce)
- 4. Biloxi
- (Jesse Winchester)
- 5. Groovy Little Things
- 6. The Good & the Bad
- 7. Afraid
- 8. Green-eyed Girl
- 9. Ladder of Success
- 10. Long as I Can See the Light*
- (John Fogerty)
- Bonus track - Corrina Corrina
- (B Dylan) NB This bonus track is only on the Gold CD
All songs by Ted Hawkins except as noted.
Produced by Tony Berg
© 1994 Geffen Records Inc
Cover Notes
As a guitarist and vocalist whose performances take place mainly in the streets, Ted Hawkins stands alone in the contemporary music scene. Yet he emerges from a long tradition which includes some of the important names in folk history - Blind Willy Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, Woody Guthrie and Furry Lewis come readily to mind. From Beale Street in Memphis to Chicago's Maxwell Street American folklore features any number of such characters. Ted Hawkins stands easily in their company because his singing and his repertoire (both original and remade) are so distinctive. He's probably the last of the line, or maybe there are dozens of other geniuses who can find no place to express themselves except on street corners, but those are just more reasons to rejoice in his presence - and the availability of this treasure of an album.
The singularity of Ted Hawkins stands out in other respects. He's not purely a blues singer. His most direct influences are soul singers like Sam Cooke and Otis Redding and he incorporates a fair share of rock n' roll and country in his approach and material. But what's really singular about Ted is that he seems incapable of singing a false note. This is true technically: Hawkins sang his version of John Fogerty's 'Long As I Can See The Light' a cappella and his sense of pitch and time proved so true that the band track was easily and unobtrusively over-dubbed, a phenomenon by itself. More important, however, Ted just has no ability to dissemble. He's the least metaphoric singer I've ever heard. When Hawkins sings 'There stands the glass,' he makes the image so concrete that you'd practically be willing to pour into it. When he declares that you can't get anywhere without 'connections,' in his 'Ladder Of Success,' he's speaking a simple truth which becomes more convoluted only when you realise how utterly simply he means it: He genuinely believes contact with God possesses more power than contact with mammon. This complex simplicity lends his songs their sense of strangeness and eccentricity. Still, out of the directness of his observations (when he declares 'the sky was red from off t'ward New Orleans,' you'd best believe it was red in the west that night) flows much of the power of his songs. To someone so fully grounded in the truth , it must be the rest of us that appear strange and eccentric.
All this gives Ted Hawkins an amazing sweetness of vision and an impressive lack of bitterness, no matter how harsh the reality he's describing. It doesn't come much harsher than the 'Good And The Bad' whose beautiful blues based homilies represent an extraordinary coming to terms with aging, rejection, hatred, emotional torture. It might have made for a mournful album except for Ted's exclusive use of major chords, no matter what the emotional mood. In assembling the record Ted and producer Tony Berg have very deliberately structured it to begin and end in affirmation. In the course of singing these songs, Ted Hawkins journeys from Mississippi to California and the, onward, through his music, to a state of grace found in nothing more than a green eyed glance. Because he takes us with him, we are blessed.
- Dave Marsh