Jeff Miers: Sound Check
Jeff Miers: Ben Harper gears up with new band, album
Versatile artist gears up with new band, album and reissues of old stuff
Ben Harper has gone about his business with such subtlety over the past 15 years that you’d be forgiven for not having noticed him.
Which is not to say that the singer/guitarist/songwriter has flown fully below the radar. On the contrary, Harper and his band, the Innocent Criminals, have managed to amass a sizable following largely among the set that frequents festivals, follows various jam bands, and is highly likely to have already arranged yearly vacation time to coincide with both Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza. In that world, Harper is still a young lion-prince, an artist whose ability to fuse the sultry blues-based thunder of Led Zeppelin to the earnest walking-on-air roots-rock-reggae of Bob Marley is accepted for what it is: a rare and precious gift.
Much is happening in the world of Harper presently. EM-I/ Virgin recently reissued his entire catalog on audiophile-quality, 180-gram vinyl, a testament to the fact that the man’s fans are a discerning lot when it comes to sound quality. On May 5, Harper will drop a brand new album, “White Lies for Dark Times,” a collection of unabashed soul-rockers featuring his new band, Relentless 7. (The first single from that album, “Shimmer and Shine,” is a real corker, a fuzz-drenched slab of rock buoyed by Harper’s wistful, aching tenor.)
From the outset, Harper has favored an outsider’s approach to his art. Of African-American, Cherokee and Jewish descent, he grew up hanging out at the folk music center his grandparents owned and operated in California’s Pomona Valley, and it was there that he became immersed in the rural Southern blues and the various folk musics that grew from that same soil. That’s telling, for though Harper has pursued a music that is multi-idiomatic and genre-defying at its core, it is certainly the disembodied, world-weary and haunted essence of Robert Johnson’s precious few recordings that is the primary consistent element in all his music.
Harper began playing slide guitar in his teens and gradually worked his way to the Weissenborn lap steel, a rare and highly sought after line of instruments hand-crafted in the ’20s and ’30s. He’d found his “ax”; to this day, the lonely whine and, when run through amp distortion and various guitar effects pedals, keening howl of the Weissenborn is a primary focus of Harper’s music, both on record and in concert.
The use of Weissenborn had another, most likely unintended effect on the Harper “image.” The instrument is played while the musician is seated and, as a result, Harper often appears stoic and Buddha-like in concert, a man fully lost in his own music and reticent to perform the usual rock star shucking and jiving moves common to his own and every generation.
Tackling the whole catalog on vinyl is a nice way to fully immerse oneself in that universe. The records sound fantastic, warm, well-rounded, welcoming and in stark contrast to the Pro Tools-obsessed, overcompressed recording studio shenanigans favored by the majority of Harper’s peer group. This is perhaps best exemplified by the album “Lifeline,” the 2007 effort Harper and the Innocent Criminals laid to 16-track analog equipment over a seven-day period immediately following the conclusion of a nine-month tour.
The clear-eyed revolution rock of the debut “Welcome to the Cruel World” and its follow- up, “Fight for Your Mind,” gave way to the more reflective ethereal balladry, refined reggae and full-bore Zeppelin indulgences of the excellent “The Will to Live.” This early period was forever captured on the album many Harper heads hold to be his finest, the sprawling twin-disc, four-record set “Live From Mars.” Deftly blending extended vamps highlighting his singular guitar work and the organic flow of the Innocent Criminals rhythm section, with the folk essence of the more song-oriented material and a smart fistful of cover songs — the Verve’s “The Drugs Don’t Work” can sit proudly adjacent to bits of Marvin Gaye and, yes, Zeppelin, in Harper’s cosmos — “Live From Mars” is certainly one of the strongest live albums of the past two decades.
Of course, Harper refuses to sit still, stylistically speaking, and his forays into ancillary projects — a visceral gospel album with the Blind Boys of Alabama, a gripping featured slot in the “Standing in the Shadows of Motown” film and on its corresponding CD — have served to strengthen his musical resolve. The maturing process is abundantly represented by the double album “Both Sides of the Gun,” the 2008 recording into which Harper welcomed a string quartet for assistance on some of his most elegant songs to date.
The simultaneous rerelease of the Harper canon on vinyl might be interpreted as a cleansing of the palate, as he prepares to release his first album without his longtime partners in the Innocent Criminals. (Harper has repeatedly insisted that the split is far from permanent, but that the Relentless 7 is an ensemble capable of indulging another side of his musical personality.)
However one receives it, this heap of Harper is a real treat, a collection brimming with passion, imagination and serious chops. And, it would seem, the guy’s just getting started.
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