Final Draft Win

Dan Morganstern makes an excellent point in his liner notes when he laments the tendency to refer to Roy Eldridge as a “link between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie.” For one thing, Diz eschewed the kind of brilliant trumpet tone that characterized the work of Eldridge and Armstrong. Considered in this light, if one starts with Armstrong’s early achievements and then looks for anything like that kind of distilled joy in all the subsequent history of the music, one gets no further than the spectacular sides the man they called “Little Jazz” made for Columbia in January 1937. There’s just no one after that to “link” to, ever…

Before they had even released 3-Way Tie for Last in the fall of 1985, the Minutemen had blocked out plans for their next album, which was to be a sprawling three-LP set featuring three sides of studio material and three sides of live recordings. Initial pressings of 3-Way Tie included a ballot so fans could vote for the songs to be included on the live half of the upcoming album; the tragic death of D. Boon meant the Minutemen would never make another studio album, but Mike Watt and George Hurley compiled the ballots sent in by fans and used the results as the basis for this album, which uses radio broadcasts, studio outtakes, rehearsal tapes, and audience recordings to assemble a final tribute to their fallen comrade. As you might expect, the quality of the sound varies quite a bit from track to track (though there's nothing as awful as the stuff on side two of The Politics of Time), and there are a few items here that were outtakes for a good reason (like the overlong version of "Mr. Robot's Holy Orders" or the spontaneous soundtrack improvisation "Hell"). But for the most part, Ballot Result is a fitting memorial that makes clear the Minutemen were just as strong onstage as they were in the studio and that their songs were smart, provocative, adventurous, and stand up well to the test of time.