All The Bells And Whistles

Niela Miller: Songs of Leaving

This album is as much a document as it is a collection of songs. The reason for its existence owes mostly to the fact that, in 1962, Niela Miller walked into a studio and laid down the song that would inspire hippies for the remainder of the 60s.

Fill in the blanks: Hey _____,  Where’re you goin’ _____? It’s the lyrical link between this song and “Hey Joe.” Miller’s song asks someone named Kid why they’re going into town. She’s concerned that he will go to a pool hall, complain to people that his father keeps him down, and then get into a fight without his father around to protect him. It’s totally square. Miller even sings it like a scolding. Billy Roberts, her boyfriend at the time, stole the song and rewrote it. So no, this isn’t quite the song recorded by the Byrds, Love and the Creation, and others.

A large number of the songs on the record deal with listening to the people that came before you – your mother and your father. On the surface, the tone and content may seem amusing, especially since this woman supposedly planted the seed for a counter-culture.  However, the record is so spooky the call to heed one’s elders feels more like a warning, telling of curses that will inevitably ensnare youth.

She sings about prisons, executions, drownings, abuse and love that overwhelms. This is the stuff that haunts. What makes much of this so compelling is her performance, the shitty equipment at Variety Recording Service and the damaged condition of the acetate, which all give it a Victrola texture. The sound is time itself, already passed. If it was performed intimately by someone sitting in the same room with you, the effect would be radically different. But on this one document, when she sings her homage to Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” it sounds like she disappeared into those woods long ago. The haunted characters in the songs are now ghosts themselves and they ask us to take heed. They were once like us. We will all be like them.

by Timothy Imse, October 27, 2009