Better Than I Remember Dept. - The Charlies

Original unused cover design featured, like, literally coolest F1 driver, like, ever. Literally.

My first impulse, back in whenever, was to boo these upstarts for appropriating the name of a very important, if not actually that enjoyable, West Coast band from the Acid Years (The Charlatans, in case you're having attention issues). It was like a new band calling themselves Country Joe And The Fish, as far as I was concerned. But that first single [Indian Rope, 1990 - Ed.] was pretty damn swell, I had to admit. Good enough to turn me into an Accredited Charlies Consumer, the kind of unthinking, cash-rich fan every band needs. Then real life interrupted for a few decades, as it will, and my fansomeness only reactivated a week or so back with the release of the Somethingieth Anniversary edish of Some Friendly, their funkified first album.

Rholonne Déodoranté

 

I didn't think time would be kind to it. But it sounds better than I remember. It's always a delight to listen to a real band with a proper rhythm section, and the drums n' bass are so deep in the pocket they're rattling your kneecaps [This is very good, Farq. I don't often compliment you, but this is exactly the kind of content the internet needs right now - Ed.]. Add some acid jazz Hammond B3 and guitar that leaves you wanting more, and they cook up a timeless funky stew that leans into psychedelia just enough to invoke the term. Tim Burgess had the looks and the presence, but his voice is that rather weedy English placeholder thing, nothing to make the hairs on the back of your neck bristle. The Ian Brown school of underachievement. And the songs tend to the unmemorable, unless you play them a lot, which you just might. Because the album is absolutely playable, all the way through, with just enough variation to keep a grin on your face as you essay some ill-advised dance moves.

 

I wish they'd been able to use the original cover (the Marlboro thing scuppered it), because James Hunt has exactly the cool swagger of the music, and there's maybe a resemblance to Burgess. But here it is, probably its first public appearance.

 

Fast forward thirty-five years ...

The Charlies redux. Thirty-five years of setbacks and calamities, deaths and disappointments. The melodies are stronger, Tim's voice has improved with age, gaining a little grit. The sound is lush and deep and wide, but the album never dips into the generic - there's care and skill and imagination in every beat, every note, and it's distinctly a Charlatans album - couldn't be anybody else.

The original cover is terrible, almost inevitably, a scruffy, half-thought out, almost cynical example of this-will-do-ism. They have form here. So here's an alternative I crayoned up which has some resonance with the title, without even knowing the back story. 

Richard Luttrell wrote this letter and left it at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. along with the photograph he'd kept.

"Dear Sir, For twenty two years I have carried your picture in my wallet. I was only eighteen years old that day that we faced one another on that trail in Chu Lai, Vietnam. Why you did not take my life I'll never know... Forgive me for taking your life, I was reacting just the way I was trained..."

In March 2000, Luttrell travelled to Vietnam to meet with the daughter of the man he met on the trail in Chu Lai. [PBS War Letters - Ed.]

Most album covers are missed opportunities, rushed afterthoughts. They have an incredible, undervalued reach. Listen to the last track on this terrific album, and think of that boy sent to kill strangers in a strange land. Still happening.

 

This post made possible by the magic of muscle memory.