The scarlet lady of Chico

Barbara Manning - Blood of Feeling
The 6ths - San Diego Zoo (featuring Barbara Manning)

Barbara Manning is cute, in an aunt-like way, and quiet, but she’s got brains and grit under her extremely red hair. Doing covers of a Tom Lehrer song (”The Irish Ballad,” renamed “Rickety-Tickety-Tin”) and of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” one of my favorite Beatles songs, helps endear her to me, too, more than just any singer-songwriter shmoe. “Blood of Feeling” comes from her excellent album 1212, which has a fun song cycle about fire, from the points of view of everyone involved, including the arsonist and the match. There’s another good version on Under One Roof, a pretty solid singles collection, too. She’s got a lot of albums, with a whole bunch of bands, with weird track overlaps, and a lot of her stuff is out of print, but it’s not too hard to find in used bins, and it’s all pretty good. She also collaborates a lot with other bands. “San Diego Zoo” is one of those songs, from the 6ths, one of Stephin Merritt’s millions of side projects when he’s not writing another thousand songs for the Magnetic Fields. Aside from this song, Wasps’ Nests has a couple others that are pretty good, but most of the album’s value is the title, whose whole point is that it’s unpronounceable. The other 6ths album, Hyacinths and Thistles, is barely easier to say. That Stephin Merritt. What a joker. For some reason, Barbara’s really popular in Germany, and plays there all the time, but she’s from Chico, CA, and plays in California sometimes. I saw her play a lovely show, too short, at the Mile High Club in Oakland a few months ago. The extra bonus at that club is that they have tater tots, which go pretty well with a Fat Tire.