Once I knew a cat named Scarlet NoHaira. She was, I think, a Sphinx cat. Bald as an eagle. Wrinkled and charmingly Golem-like. Left impressions from her skin oil on whatever or wherever she sat. Her twin was the first thing I noticed on the black-and-white, sepia(?) toned cover to Marcia Waldorf’s album “Memoranda” when I came across it flipping through the bargain bin at Backstreet Beat on beautiful Bainbridge Island.
As you can hopefully can make out from the photo here, this kitty is being petted by, I suppose, Marcia Waldorf, who looks a little like Alannis Morrisette, in flowing robes, wearing a crown/diadem/tiara, drinking something dark out of an outsized wine glass or fairly-normal sized brandy snifter.
There are peacock feathers too.
She’s hanging out in a room of leisure and decadence, its varying shades of gray and all lines blurred or bent, like a Puget Sound winter landscape. Mountains and islands and salt water drawings done by fat pencils, then smudged by poor attempts at removal by old, nubby erasers.
Albums from this era – 1974, according to the liner notes – tend to have covers which don’t really give one an idea of the musical style or content. Not always, but, if they ain’t no disco, you might get something either much softer or much harder or much duller or much more interesting (see last month’s column on ‘Ross’) than the music.
Marcia’s cover, however, delivers: what-you-see-is-what-you-get. The songs and arrangements – written by Marcia, recorded in Alabama, released by venerable Southern Rock label Capricorn – came with large and diverse accompaniments. There are substantial string and horn sections, as well as banjo, congas, harmonica, and slide guitar in the regular band, in addition to the usual standard instrumentation. The album reminded me of other women singer/songwriters from the time: Carole King, Carly Simon, Barbra Streisand. There’s less diversity from Marcia in the individual songs than from those ladies, but that alignment kept the album together and coherent. “Hands” was perhaps my favorite, almost a parody, but just earnest enough. Unlike the cover, the album title doesn’t, to my brain, align: Memoranda is a thing one sends or receives in an office, back in 1974 via some sort of in-wall vacuum device or on literal carbon copies. Very much to the point, BLUF, no attempt at flower or words. Just the facts, ma’am.
Unlike both this column and this album.
In the soft, blurry, dimly lit room where Marcia and her kitty lounge, as in the bargain crates found at so many fine independent record stores around our blurred, gray peninsula, you are encouraged to enter, hang out, experience some metaphorical warm brandy, and maybe caress a hairless cat. All for $10 or less. And in Marcia’s and this cat’s case, for only $3.
Re: To whom it may concern: If that is the memoranda that manifested itself in your allegorical inbox, then please, take that for action ASAP. Thank you in advance. // J. OVERTON
