#404: Ian & Sylvia, "House of Cards" (1968)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riM0OdxBCT8

Given my over-complicated grown-up tastes, there wasn't much in my near-term upcoming queue that followed smoothly from the hippie sing-along "Free to Be You and Me", so my next selection is another from my mom's old collection that predates my birth. Ian & Sylvia represented well mom's taste in folk music, heavy on vocal harmonies, the kind of songs you get out the autoharp and sing together while snuggling cats -- Bob Dylan songs appeared in our house only when rendered by proper singers, Simon & Garfunkel or the Chad Mitchell Trio or the Byrds or, on-topic, Ian Tyson and Sylvia Fricke. (Dylan-loving friends I respect have tried repeatedly to sell me on his artful vocal expressiveness, and have failed.)

That said, Bob's "the Mighty Quinn" and "This Wheel's on Fire" are among the least interesting tracks on Ian & Sylvia's best album Nashville, most of which they wrote themselves.
Given Dylan's straightforward music, they could endow it with extra energy, and replace his nasal mock-Okie half-speech with Tyson's strong, eccentrically swooping, melismatic baritone and Fricke's steady, balancing alto; but they didn't seem to feel free to take it anywhere far from home. "House of Cards", a Tyson original, shows their imagination free to work, and while it's clearly a rock song, it's embellished with woodwinds, piano, energetic fiddle, and a free-falling a-cappella bridge as if those were the most natural moves in the world. Fricke, by the way, composed the album's equally standout "Southern Comfort"; they were a husband-and-wife duo, or then again, they were a wife-and-husband one.

There wasn't any question I'd pick "House of Cards" for this countdown, though. You wouldn't imagine this simply from listening, but it was for many years one of the hardest-rocking pieces of music I knew. No, not as bold as the Beatles' "Drive My Car"; certainly not distorted and daring like Simon & Garfunkel's "Save the Life of My Child", beyond which who knew if it were possible to tread. But "House of Cards" had firm, muscular acoustic guitar, sawing violin, and what remains absolutely astonishing bass guitar work from Norbert Putnam -- seriously, I can just focus on his agile finger-picked runs for four minutes, as if bassists were less a rhythm section and more the melodic equivalent of pacesetter rabbits -- and in a world where my occasional exposures to mainstream music meant things like "When You Get Caught Between the Moon and New York City", or "Every Breath You Take", it stirred my imagination that something fiercer was possible.

Now I am old and have heard death-metal records. Dude! They're noisy. But a slightly-fierce and more-than-slightly beautiful record still will be accorded plenty of room in my life.

P.S. While preparing this piece, I discovered a pleasant Rolling Stone feature arguing for the overlooked importance of Nashville, and catching us up on Ian and Sylvia, as people, during the several decades since.