#rodd keith

All three records thrive on the tension between Rodd’s knack for instantly devising sophisticated settings for words that violated most of the rules of commercially viable songcraft without even trying. What puts this one ahead are the handful of songs that are such emotional horror shows, you have to count yourself as blessed never to have been stuck in a dark corner with the people who wrote them.

Mind you, not everything is dire. I’ve been waiting for 15 years to hear the lead-off song, “Green Bermudas,” ever since Rodd’s son, jazz saxophonist Ellery Eskelin, used it to accomplish a sui generis cross-generational collaboration that was impossible in real life; Rodd died after diving off an LA overpass in 1974. The song is a trifle, a goofy tribute to a girl’s swaying posterior and its verdant wrapping. It's just the kind of song that turns song-poem collections into laugh riots. Rodd delivers it with good-natured lustiness that is true to the song’s spirit and betrays no contempt for the naivete of its construction. “Bus Driver Stop That Bus” is all cheap rhymes and banal observations but Rodd delivers it like Tom Jones going for the gold. He doesn’t always keep a straight face, though; Rodd mugs his way though the blues clichés on “The Game of Love” so outrageously that the customer who submitted the lyric asked for a redo.

A different kind of blues surfaces on the title song, penned by one Tshakajomo Zekekayzulu. Mr. Zekekayzulu seems to have been one to hold a grudge and his “Black Phoenix Blues” is a bitter takedown that assures the object of his enmity that even God can’t protect her from his wrath. He stands taller and meaner than Nick Cave’s nastiest protagonists because there’s nothing cartoonish about him; he’s mad and he’s out for blood. One hopes that Rodd’s cruel, committed delivery was sufficiently cathartic that he didn’t have to take it any further.

Even bleaker is “Sing My Death Note,” which is credited to one Charles Holloway, but comes across like Rodd’s own final farewell. Accompanied by amp buzz and gospelized piano, he confesses to whoring his talents and then lists the ways he can do himself in.  It would be pure pornography if it weren’t also pretty damned good. And it’s not the only death song on here; there’s also a nutty cowboy tune with a body count, and the record ends with a country-soul reach-out to Jesus that Rodd infuses with a fervor concealing the song’s clunky lines.

It’s at moments like this that Black Phoenix Blues makes the case that Rodd’s investment and skill, which made him a towering talent in a milieu that gladly accepted incompetence and prized impersonal expediency over skill, might also have been what brought him down. It’s one thing to be a hack if that’s all you can be; he could have been more, and he knew it.