Second
Time Around
Greg
Brown
If I Had Known
(Red House)
The compilation is a malignancy responsible for wrecking a lot of good
music over the years; I'm urging the Recording Industry Association
of America to promote legislation banning all compilations and greatest-hits
sets (except the really fancy ones with a bunch of CDs, a nice booklet,
lots of pictures, and cool packaging, which sit on the shelf like new
BMWs on a dealership's showroom floor). Like it or not, compilations
do not induce listeners to seek out context by buying the albums from
which the songs were plucked. In fact, there is a not particularly subtle
two-part message that goes with such releases: that the artist may well
have nothing new to say and that the label (which in the case of Greg
Brown's If I Had Known is owned by the artist himself) is saying
an album is not work created and recorded in a certain context that
needs to be heard as such to be properly experienced, but is rather
just a convenient pocket to stuff a few songs into (and no matter when
one or two songs slip through a hole and wind up elsewhere).
Then again, there is the rare exception – when the package offers
something unique, and that is the case here. What at first looks like
a two-CD set actually contains one CD and one DVD. The former has 17
great Brown songs, which I refuse to write about because you need to
buy the original albums to hear the music. The latter is a 46-minute
documentary called Hacklebarney Tunes about the southern Iowa
area where Brown's family is from and where he now makes his home. Filmmakers
Jeffery Ruoff and Andrea Trupp have made a movie as relaxed and finely
etched as Brown's music. They offer him onstage and in his living room
(live versions of songs like "Downtown," "If I Had Known,"
"Our Little Town," and "Laughing River" aren't to
be missed), plus conversations with Brown, his parents, and musicians
he's collaborated with and a glimpse of life in Hacklebarney as warm
and thick as an Iowa summer. Not bad! (J.H. Tompkins)
