Go My Way - Robin Trower

 

Provenance: I know why I bought this album - Classic Rock magazine told me to - but where I bought it is lost to the mists of time. I vaguely recall buying Go My Way at the branch of WHSmith where I held a weekend job, but that seems unlikely. We only stocked the top sixty (nice round number) in the album charts.

Incidentally, I checked the official charts site to see whether there was a chance that Trower snuck into the top sixty in the heady days of summer 2000, I was aghast to see that neither Twice Removed From Yesterday nor the majestic Bridge of Sighs cracked the top forty. Check for yourselves!

Review: If you want me to like your album, do you reckon the opening gambit should be a nine-minuter that mostly consists of wah-guitar going "weow weowoeoowooeoow"? Well buddy I've got great news - that's pretty much exactly what I'm after. For fuck's sake, why else am I buying a Robin Trower album? The percussion? The cover art? (Look at that typeface - is it from Ecco the Dolphin?).

The biggest surprise, if one is allowed to be shocked at the contents of a Robin Trower album, is hearing el jefe stepping up to the microphone for a few numbers. You wonder why he hasn't done it so much before - it's really pleasant, not dissimilar to that of Mark Knopfler's (with the added bonus that Trower doesn't use homophobic slurs on his most beloved songs). Then again, when your vocal foils have included Jack Bruce and the mighty Jimmy Dewar, perhaps it takes time to wind up the courage to give it the tonsils.

I may be committing a heresy here when I say that this might be my favourite Robin Trower album. Better than Twice Removed From Yesterday? I think so! Superior to Bridge of Sighs? Maybe! This does fit in with a pattern of deviancy that considers Trans a stellar Neil Young release, Recycler a worthwhile ZZ Top platter and Love and Theft to be Bob Dylan's finest collection. In some parts of the globe such opinions can have you thrown in jail. But! Listen!!

For a start, the production and musicianship are far sparkier than anything from Trower's 1970s heyday. Normally I'm a sucker for the slightly muddy, claggy atmosphere many records of the era had - it's warm, organic-sounding and tend to make harmony vocals sound amazing - but Trower's guitar playing is such that it works better with a background wrought in sharp contrast. The benefits of the production job are a revelation, revealing ever more shading to Trower's remarkable playing.

You see, I think Go My Way features Trower's best instrumental performances. He blazes through songs like 'This Old World' and 'Run with the Wolves' (the latter of which sounds like an early Blur track, of all things) but it's on the gentler numbers that the guitar work properly shines. 'Into Dust' is a gorgeous thing already, but Trower's playing here is stunning, fragile and aching and kaleidoscopic all at once. In my personal pantheon Trower is right up there with Blue Oyster Cult's Buck Dharma as a stylish, characteristic player anyway, but here it's like someone stuck a rocket up him. His tone is like liquid caramel, and he bends his luminous, fragmentary blues guitar abstractions around these numbers with an understated virtuosity. 

If I could make a guitar sound like anything, and the good Lord knows I've tried, it would be like the guitar on Go My Way.

Is there a weak point here, a moment that drags, any slips into territory filler? Nah. Trower tries on a few different moods, ranging from wistful to hard-nosed but there's a remarkable consistency on Go My Way both in terms of quality and the sound universe the album inhabits. Does it just boil down to sequencing that everything links so neatly together that it can trick the listener into thinking there must be some kind of underlying concept? Perhaps. Am I just over-egging it all because I love Go My Way without reservation? Very possibly.

However, nobody reads this blog for dispassionate perspectives. I likes what I likes, and Go My Way has never long been off my stereo these past twenty years. Anyone who wants to make halfway tasteful noises on guitar should get turned on to some Trower power in any case; and there are few better examples of how to do it than the eleven tracks on Go My Way.

Bridge Of Sighs - Robin Trower

Provenance: Ah, the rowdy old days of the internet at the turn of the millennium. I was (just) getting into guitar, and my dad had come home from work with a suggestion from one of his colleagues; give a guy called Robin Trower a go.

Naturally I booted up the PC, opened Napster (the repository of all music back then, kids) and found a file called something like 'xXx2_Rolling_Stoned_0105xXx'. I knew that, unless it had been mislabelled or was just a bunch of white noise, if I left the download going overnight in a mere eight or nine hours I'd be listening to my first Robin Trower track.

To breakfast next morning, and I was in luck! Not only did the song match the title, but I had the whole thing bar the last twenty seconds. I could rule this a success. What a tune, too. Funky, soulful and spacey all at once; I spent no time delaying my trip to the local HMV.

Review: This is another collection I don't need to listen to in order to write about it, but will do so for the sheer pleasure of it.

Over the years, I've come to regard Bridge Of Sighs as a top ten all time album. There's simply nothing bad or even mediocre about it, at all. I've heard a lot of idiots talk shit about Trower being too derivative or a poor Hendrix imitation, and whilst the latter's influence is undoubtedly the most obvious in his playing, Trower is a sublime craftsman in his own right. You can call his style bluesy but he never seems to fall back on the hackey cliches of the more prosaic blooz-rockers. You could say he was stoner rock before the genre had been properly pinned down, but Bridge Of Sighs is neither lumpen nor plodding. The moods conjured up sometimes hint at space rock, but where Hawkwind clatter into deep space on the whoosh of their thrusters, Trower glides along on the Sea of Serenity.

If I could play guitar like one individual on this planet, it would be Robin Trower.

The difficulty I have with Robin Trower, and Bridge Of Sighs specifically, is that after I listen to it much else seems so prosaic, shackled to the earth, never able nor destined to take flight. The sheer ability to impose his will so fully upon his chosen instrument and coax all those weeping, howling, swirling sounds out of it is mystifying. Little tops the excitement I still feel when the first staccato notes of 'Day Of The Eagle' explode out of the speaker; to have that followed up by the stately, mournful title track is so indulgent as to be the aural equivalent of a lemon cheesecake, topped by a Black Forest gateau, topped with ice cream.

One aspect of his sound is that, although the guitars can seem thick or even sludgy, in fact what they play is almost always fragmentary, or at most arpeggiated. It's as if each song is a mosaic that Trower assembles from shards of electric guitar. Couple this approach to his signature style, namely masterful sustain and fluid legato picking, feed it all through some trippy effects and you have a the fundaments of a very singular sound that, when wrapped around the songs, can be a thing of wonder. I should also add that Trower's vocalist (and bassist) at the time, the late James Dewar, was one of rock's most underrated white soul voices. His performance on 'About To Begin' prickles the hairs on your skin.

I'm not going to talk about individual tracks too much here. Bridge Of Sighs is sensational and should be listened to front to back, but as that's less fashionable these days, here's one of the many, many highlights:



I count myself lucky to have seen Trower a few times live. The first of these was in Exeter with my then-girlfriend at the time, Sarah - or rather, then ex-girlfriend, as we had broken up not long beforehand due to my terrible behaviour. Nevertheless, I had tickets and for reasons that still remain a mystery, Sarah consented to go with me. Not only was Trower magical but Sarah also took me back that evening (which I absolutely didn't deserve), and we would spend the rest of university and some time beyond together.

We've since gone separate ways but I still remember Sarah with great fondness. She's a brilliant person, with a cool yoga business, and not only gives classes in the Bath area but also organises retreats in some fabulous locations. As someone who has never tried yoga I can't comment on Sarah as an instructor, but the tolerance and forbearance required to put up with me for such a long time bespeaks someone with the patience of a saint. In any case, it's something Sarah has an enduring passion for, so I am adamantine in my certainty that she's ace.

We all graft our own stories and meanings to the things in life that affect us in a profound way - be it music, literature, places or people - and so it goes with this. The wistful, foreboding, luminous, beautiful Bridge Of Sighs has for me become inextricably bound to my time with Sarah. I wouldn't wish it any other way.