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admirers, is
brilliantly consistent with the finest of Brewer &
Shipley. Like their work, Winchester's is a song of recollection... a
young man who has grown up in sweet Vermont remembering the first serious
woman of his life.
As writers and performers Brewer & Shipley succeed in portraying no only what happened, but what it felt-like as it was happening. The images, set in the reverberation of time, work like a vision or an hallucination:
The
unself-conscious poetic quality disarms the listener, making him
vulnerable to the play of subtle emotions. The anguish of knowing
that this love affair had to come to and end, and that like the birds,
the young musician would himself soon be "southward bound", is softened
through recollection. The bitterness melts into the experience of
life's journey, and in a few simple stanzas you come to understand two
people whose lives crossed in deep emotion, but only for a certain time. Brewer & Shipley's music is perfect for this kind of word painting. "Yankee Lady" is alive with structured guitar texture, multitracked voices and flowing bass line you can dream on, driving syncopated into the chorus. The melodies flow with the ease of memory. At this point, one can only wonder about all the resistance Brewer & Shipley encountered with their famous song "One Toke Over The Line". It was understandable, in the highly politicized atmosphere of those days, that references to drugs would have been taken negatively in certain quarters. But as we all have seen, Brewer & Shipley were well ahead of the counter-culture recognition of the damage that was being done from a life style that was always "One Toke Over The Line". Their song was not an endorsement of the experience, rather a sweet, sad vision of the effects. A year later Neil Young returned to this theme with his song "The Needle And The Damage Done", while newspaper ad and subway wall posters now calmly but firmly broadcast a non-hysterical warning about the real dangers. It is not surprising that Brewer & Shipley were among the first of their contemporaries to meet this problem. Unlike the back-to-the-land settlers who are simply taking their urban problems to the woods, Brewer & Shipley have experienced the whirl of New York, San Francisco, and L.A., and have chosen their idyll in the outlaw country of Missouri but because it suits them, and strengthens their music. Poetry, said Wordsworth, is passion recollected in tranquility. Brewer & Shipley are among rock's most poetic figures, recalling the passion of life in the tranquility of their songs.
~ James Lichtenberg |
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