Lee Mavers, the singer/songwriter/guitarist/all around man in charge of The La's, is a legendary rock and roll flake. The La's music fits, like so many other bands, in another era: the 60's. And my favorite story about Mavers goes like this: in an effort to satisfy the mercurial and unsatisfiable Mavers, the band's label bought him a gigantic recording console from a studio and shipped it to his home in an effort to get the recording process kickstarted. Mavers took one look at the console, walked out of the room fuming and screaming and told them to take it back because it didn't have the original "60's dust" on it, or, more importantly to him, in it.
For fans of The La's, the release of this BBC In Session is a landmark moment. I read about The La's in Newsweek magazine (I Shit You Not) when I was 15 years old, bought the tape a few weeks later on a Concert Band trip in a San Antonio mall, and I haven't stopped listening to it since. I go through phases, naturally, but turning friends on to what was their singular release is always a thrill for me, and I’ll typically start listening to it again semi-obsessively. So, that said, hearing what Mavers at least accepted as his vision for these songs (he hated the album released by the label and basically quit playing music after it’s release, defeated by the music industry), is a vision in itself. Different aspects of The La’s that I missed become much more evident, cool, awesome, radical aspects of a band I adore.
The La’s music aspires to nothing more than pop perfection--songs about love, jangly guitars, and no song longer than 3 minutes, etc. Their music fits about as firmly in the early 60’s post skiffle, early Beatles school of songwriting as possible. In fact, in that school (which ended in 1963) there’s as much attention to Lee Mavers as there is to John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Blasphemy? Well, I’m a fan…This record represents four different live sessions and four different lineups of the La’s--recorded in the BBC studios from 1987-1990--the constants being Lee Mavers and bassist John Power. Live in the studio, the songs take on very different personalities from the versions on the record, and with four different sessions and four different bands, you naturally get four different energies from the sessions.
Over the 17 songs, you get eight songs done twice. The only song performed just once being the token staple La’s hit--and a very rocked up version with crisp distorted guitar--“There She Goes.” While once a prolific songwriter, Mavers hasn’t been doing much these past 17 years…a new version of The La’s surfaced a few years ago, and Mavers emerged from semi-legendary reclusehood playing…the same old songs from The La’s album set. There are two tracks not included on the self titled record: a very Spanish sounding “Callin’ All” and the rare non 100% Mavers penned “Over.”
The strength of this record is not in the new, though. It’s hearing what you’ve heard before. The stop-start acoustic strum that opens “Feelin” is frankly, iconic in rock and roll history, and it’s really fun to hear a new take on it--even better to get two. And, in what I think is possibly the second greatest song ever written about liking music, “Timeless Melody,” John Power adds a totally new dimension to the song with his beautiful harmony vocals. It might feel silly to be singing along to “If you look in your mind, do you know what you will find?…Open Your Mind,” but you can’t help it anyway. A new classic, this record, to me, is like finding a copy of Smile when Brian Wilson was still the world’s first or second (Syd Barrett was still alive living in his mother’s basement) most famous rock and roll recluse.
