Jade Stone & Luv, "Mosaics: Pieces of Stone"
Whoever decided not to run a limited reissue of this album on 8-Track should be flogged to death by hot chicks in hot pants using hot fuzzy dice. Jade Stone's 1977 self-release looks like it was born in a bargain bin but sounds well weird. It's hard to decide if it's a minor classic or obnoxious nonsense.
Jade Stone looks like he was born with chest hair, moustache, and thumbs hooked into his (possibly flared) diapers. Strangely his voice has a haunting female quality. He produced and released this record independently 30 years ago and I won't pretend that it is not as dated as the seats in an old-style silver Cadillac leaving Vegas and headed into the desert. It does, though, have a bizarre, cranked, tripped-out, high-octane charm. There is probably no other album that begins with the word "strawberries" but sounds less rural. This is truly music from a nocturnal trawl across bright lights not-so-big-city terrain populated (as Scott Walker once sang) by "plastic palace people." Not that Stone ever sounds less than flesh, blood, testosterone and whatever else he had running through his system.
Like many of the songs on Mosaics, "Backroads Of My Mind" is an invitation to, well, what exactly? Slightly clichéd imagery, cheap drugs, flute solos and scattershot virility? Maybe, but the opening guitar riff is oddly spine-tingling and the vocal arrangements crisp and affecting: a familiar pattern across the album. It might be the overtones of Roy Orbison in Stone's voice but, especially when listening to the live bonus tracks, the fictional image of Frank Booth and Dorothy Vallens in the audience comes to mind. On those tracks Stone's voice projects impatient hunger for the major success that would elude him. The rougher production adds an air of crackling energy and an aroma of unpredictability. (Maybe that was just D. Luv's perfume.)
Jade Stone had a local hit in the early 1960s on the then fledgling Austin music scene. He even "cut some sides" with the Jordanaires and guitarist Scotty Moore before traveling between Nashville, Hollywood, and Austin gathering wives, divorces, fans and addictions, but missing out on major deals. He left the music business, managed a pizza restaurant in San Antonio for a while and has been plagued by cocaine addiction. For a time he was married to his Mosiacs sidekick, Debbie Luv, but by his own admission has been his own worst enemy. It is easy to mock his fashion and un-anemic over-the-top style (Jade & Debbie's matching leisure suits are genuinely the stuff of nightmare) but the man obviously always gave 110%. With a more rock oriented (less Nashville sound) engineer things might have been different. There are certainly plenty of less-talented people making money from music today but as Stone sings, "what's done is done." These recordings ooze provincial glamour and are gritty reflections of the free creative life that Jade and Debbie were living. Once again taste is the enemy of art and WFMU is still giving him respect, I hear.
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