ThreePenny listener Morezannue Knandle writes:
I am writing to you as a concerned music listener, and as a friend of Mr. John Wells.
I have known Mr. Wells since he moved to Lawrenceville in early 1999. I live and work in Lawrenceville. I am a cashier at Shop and Save.
I have attended many Three Penny Opry shows during the past couple years. I have always been concerned that Mr. Wells has been allowed to embarrass himself, his neighbors, other musicians, and music itself by occasionally taking the stage at Three Penny Opry, dragging his old, arthritic, diabetic, fat, hairy, and ugly body onto a stack of chairs to attack his guitar like a cerebral palsy afflictee wearing boxing gloves, and to moan and groan into the microphone with the voice of a chain smoking, whiskey guzzling, horny bullfrog.
As a friend of Mr. Wells, I am very sad that no one has taken steps to effectively discourage him from performing. Mr. Wells is not a real singer-songwriter. He exhibits none of the qualities of professionalism. He is not original like the real singer-songwriters who usually grace the stage at Three Penny Opry.As a friend of Mr. Wells, I am very sad that no one has taken steps to effectively discourage him from performing. Mr. Wells is not a real
singer-songwriter. He exhibits none of the qualities of professionalism. He is not original like the real singer-songwriters who usually grace the stage at Three Penny Opry.
This has gone too far. Mr. Wells has now issued a CD. It is not a professional effort. He did it all himself. At least musicians and engineers had the decency not to contribute to this amateurish effort of Mr. Wells', his tragicomedic attempt to produce a CD like those that real singer-songwriters with real money for real professional production and both the respect of Pittsburgh's musical community and the assistance of its members.
I, therefore, have taken it upon myself to write the following review of Mr. Wells' recording of his flat-footed song bashing to be posted on threepennyopry.blogspot.com:
Make Orgasms; Not DealsJohn Wells
This CD is an insult to acoustic singer-songwriters everywhere. There is not a single original song on it. This is tired old material. The instrumentation is totally inconsistent. One never knows what instruments are going to be used. Even though there are never more than 4 instruments, including Vocal, on any given track, there is a total lack of arrangement, and the art of orchestration seems to be something of which Mr. Wells is unaware. The Bass, including the Washtub Bass is synthesized rather than played on a real instrument, and this is obvious from the fact that it is always played in a register that is a full octave below the range of a real Bass. Effects are overused, obviously in an attempt to cover up Mr. Wells' lack of talent.
Track 1. Money, Honey (J. Stone)--Electric Guitar, Bass, and Vocal (As on all tracks, all instruments performed by Mr. Wells.): This song, like all the songs on this CD, is a tired old song which other musicians beat to death decades ago. It is obvious that Mr. Wells has no idea of how to properly record a multi-track performance. The Bass should have been recorded first. The Electric Guitar next. And the Vocal last. It is evident that Mr. Wells only knows his material from the point of view of his inept live performances. He obviously records his live performance versions then tacks on other instrumentation as an afterthought. Rather than treating the Bass as a rhythm instrument, Mr Wells plays it as though it was a melodic instrument serving the additional function of nailing the tonic notes of each chord change.
The lyrics try to make a protagonist of a man without sufficient funds to keep his woman. The definitive version of this song was recorded by the Drifters. It has also been recorded by Elvis Presley and later by Tom Rush. Mr. Wells' version ignores the Drifters arrangement, and Eliminates the entirety of the Coda. Mr. Wells' vocal delivery is a poor attempt at Elvis impersonation. The reverb on the Vocal cannot hide Mr. Wells' obvious lack of vocal training, his ruined gravelly vocal tone--the result of Mr. Wells' years of heavy drinking, drug abuse, sexual indiscretions, and the fact that he is much too fat, hairy, old, ugly, unprofessional, and uncouth to ever become an American Idol.
Track 2. House of the Rising Sun (Traditional)--Electric Guitar, Bass, Acoustic Resophonic Slide Guitar, and Vocal:No song in the entirety of the industrialized world has been more thoroughly beaten to death more often than this piece. Mr. Wells cannot seem to grasp the fact that the only way to redeem this piece is to play it faster than all other versions that have been laid to rest before. He plays it slowly and deliberately as though it contained some universal truth that reflects the subject of this CD's title. The slide guitar cries like a weeping child who needs to be slapped back to the reality of life and sent out to get a job.
Track 3. Separation Blues (Patrick Sky)--Acoustic Guitar and Washtub Bass:Obviously Mr. Sky, a man of Irish and Native American descent, was drunk when he wrote this piece of would-be humor. Mr. Wells' amaturish interpretation features an entire AAB form verse done instrumentally, but during which the acoustic guitar does nothing that it doesn't do during the vocal sections. During this section one is, therefore forced to concentrate on the unrelenting portamento technique of the pseudo Washtub Bass, which also does nothing different than what it plays during the Vocal passages.
Track 4. Ebb Tide (C. Sigman and R. Maxwell)--Acoustic guitar, Bass, and Vocal:This song should never have been culled from the movie "Sweet Bird of Youth," then it could have been forgotten along with the film. The lyrics take a saccharine and sentimentalist view on love and trust. This is Mr. Wells' excursion into the realm of Easy Listening Music and Lounge "Jazz." The Bass track was obviously tacked on to cover up for Mr. Wells missing the G# major chord in the bridge by a full beat in the guitar track.
Track 5. Baby, Please Don't Go (Traditional)--Acoustic Resophonic Slide Guitar and Vocal:In claiming that this piece is "Traditional" Mr. Wells ignores the fact that "Big" Joe Williams long ago obtained a copyright for his sophisticated arrangement of this prison song. Mr. Wells totally ignores Mr. Williams' sophisticated arrangement. He instead opts to perform a primitive, naive, and totally unsophisticated arrangement, utilizing slide guitar non-technique that ignores all the exciting ways of playing the instrument that everyone else uses. Topping off this lack of sophistication, Mr. Wells demonstrates his lack of talent as a mastering engineer by applying effects processing to the master mix such that the song sounds as though it was recorded at a prison farm in the early 1930's with primitive recording equipment.
Track 6. Jelly Roll Baker (Traditional)--Electric Guitar, Bass, and Vocal:Once again, in claiming that this is a "Traditional" piece, Mr. Wells ignores legitimate copyrights. Almost every Blues artist who has recorded this song has obtained a legally binding copyright on it. Obviously, Mr. Wells is just trying to get out the legal responsibilities of paying royalties by this ploy. Once again, the effects used on the vocal track cannot hide Mr. Wells' lack of vocal training. The worst part of this song is the fact that the "Bass" is obviously playing to a different drummer than the Electric Guitar and Vocal. The rhythm that the Bass follows only rarely crosses paths with the other instruments. This is clear to the listener who plays the recording and concentrates on the Bass, because in doing so it becomes impossible to follow the other tracks.
Track 7. I Am the Blues (William Dixon)--Acoustic Resophonic Slide Guitar, Bass, and Vocal:Mr. Wells takes Mr. Dixon's fine piece of Electric Chicago Blues and with no respect for its form tosses it into a time warp, archaicizing and acoustifying it mercilessly, speeding it up from its intended Chicago Blues tempo to the tempo of 1920's and 1930's Downhome Blues. Then, apparently unhappy at how he'd slaughtered the piece, Mr. Wells proceeds to mix genres and idioms and styles the way untrained writers mix metaphors. He tacks on a simplistic and repetitive Chicago style Bass line and mixes it in much too prominently for its lack of sophistication, but for once at least attempting, though ineptly, to play the Bass as a rhythm instrument. Mr. Wells has no right to play this song, because he is not a Negro.
Track 8. Deep River Blues (Traditional)--Acoustic Guitar and Vocal:This is a pitiful attempt to imitate Doc Watson. Mr. Wells obviously does not have the guitar playing skills to even come close to Mr. Watson's several recorded versions of this piece, eliminating Mr. Watson's brilliant, virtuoso arpeggios, replacing those in the turnaround with a lame series of chords. Mr. Wells also adds a bridge of his own composition which is utterly superfluous to the song. Unlike Mr. Watson's versions of this piece which emphasize instrumental virtuosity, Mr. Wells takes the lyrics too seriously making this piece, which is good time music in the hands of Mr. Watson, into an ode to males who experience impotence from having sex with only one woman.
Track 9. Death Don't Have No Mercy (Traditional)--Acoustic Guitar, Bass, and Vocal:A really tired, really old, really sad, really depressing song. It is hard to understand how Mr. Wells conceived it appropriate to include this piece of Pagan Theology, wherein the anthropomorphic personification of the personal deity Death roams the world picking off the living, into an album which purports to be "...an in depth analysis of the ethics of romantic love examining both what can go wrong and what can go right. Concluding that one should Make Orgasms; [sic] Not Deals." Mr. Wells restructures the verse order to Freudian psychology, whereas traditional performances have non-ordered verses such that the song is considered to be a collection of verses, each of which is a self contained short story, and the verses are sung in no particular order. Mr. Wells structures the verse order to represent the order of love fixations throughout the course of a human life from birth to the immanence of ones own death, i.e., mother, father, sister, extended family, community, and, finally, spouse. He always perfoms the verses in this order. This song is much too long. It clocks in at something like 12 minutes. There are too many guitar solos, each of which is a full chorus, two of which are verbatim Rev. Gary Davis solos. Incongruously two of the guitar solos sound like and intercultural marriage of Scottish dirges and Negro spirituals, one being a constant drone on the high E and the D below it played over the chord progression, the other being a constant drone on the high E and the Bb below it over the chord progression. This is long and boring. This song will put anyone to sleep.
Track 10. Hellhound on my Trail (Robert Johnson; P.D.)--Acoustic Resophonic
Slide Guitar and Vocal:
Mr. Wells claim that this song is in the Public Domain is obviously erroneous. Despite the the silly, obsolete copyright law which states that intellectual properties published but not copyrighted are in the public domain, recent lawsuits have established that these silly and out of date laws will be ignored by the courts just like the equally silly and out of date 4th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The founding fathers never thought of modern problems. There was no Terrorism in the days of the Boston Tea Party. If the 4th Amendment was enforce today, lots of crimes which hurt no one would go unpunished, because restricting the police from seizing people and property without warrants specifying for what and for whom they could search and what they could seize many crimes that hurt no one would never be discovered. So recent legal action has made clear that this song cannot be performed, or published in writing or audio recording without the legal team which initiated the case receiving royalties and dispensing the pennies left after legal fee to Robert Johnson's heirs. Mr. Wells has committed a crime in recording this song and claiming it to be within the public domain. It is too long. It doesn't sound anything like the original. The evil eye can only be lifted by a ritual performed at the stroke of midnight on the cusp of Christmas Eve/Christmas Day. The evil eye has cursed the protagonist in the same manner as the protagonist of Deep River Blues. Forcing him to a life of sexual promiscuity.
Track 11. The Coming of the Roads (Billy Ed Wheeler)--Acoustic Guitar, Bass, and Vocal:Sentimentality on the part of a hillbilly who loses his girlfriend to a strip miner. This wouldn't have happened to him if he had a job. Who cares?
Track 12. Sitting on Top of the World (Traditional)--Acoustic Resophonic Slide Guitar and Vocal:Yet another sickeningly sentimental song about a poor man (this time a farmer-- as opposed to the greaser/hoodlum of Money, Honey and the murderer/prisoner of Baby, Please Don't Go, or the tree hugging hillbilly of The Coming of the Roads) bemoaning his woman running off to find a responsible man who cares about the important things in life, i.e., getting a job and making money.
Track 13. No Regrets (Tom Rush)--Acoustic Resophonic Slide Guitar, Bass, and Vocal:This is a very confused song from another musician who, like Mr. Wells is not a real singer-songwriter. To the best of my knowledge and belief Mr. Rush only wrote 3 songs in the course of his career: (#1.) On the Road Again; (#2.) Rockport Sunday (an instrumental piece heavily influenced by "The Bells of Rhymny"--I've never figured out if it depicts the church bells of Rockport, Massachusettes or those of Rockport, Maine.--; and No Regrets, which, while it benefitted from the influence and constructive criticism of Phil Ochs, is still a piece of sentimental drivel. The theme of this song is I don't care that you left me, but I can't get used to living alone. Again, who cares? Why doesn't he start dating?
