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Aural Fixation- Gavin B.'s Music Blog
A lot of new music falls into my hands both at work and in cyberspace. 95% is not my cup of tea. The Song of the Day feature of my journal will share some of the relatively obscure groups and artists that I've come across that show a glimmer of artistic vision. On a music site like MB some of my picks may be already be already known to some forum members especially the music conscious Brits. I am hoping that many of my picks will be new to most folks.
Song of the Day http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...-AdamYoung.jpg Adam Young is Owl City Rainbow Veins by Owl City Owl City is a recording project of Adam Young who has produced three albums in his basement in the last year and a half. He hails from Owatonna Minnesota, which is a mighty cold region of the United States. Owl City's music is in the musical territory of indie electronica. To me it sounds like trippy psychedelic pop. Adam just released his third Owl City album called Ocean Eyes and will be doing his first big national tour beginning in September to promote the album. Here's a link to Owl City's My Space page. Rainbow Veins is from Owl City's first album, Maybe I'm Dreaming" which was released in 2008. |
The Music of New Orleans VOL I
The Music of New Orleans is something I've wanted to write about for a long time. I spent the first 14 years of my life living in New Orleans and it's impossible to grow up in the Crescent City without being exposed to the jazz, R&B, French creole zydeco, Caribbean, and rock and roll that is the unique heart and soul of NOLA. The Music of New Orleans is intended to be a quick and dirty survey of about 20 or so artists and groups that are at the foundation of New Orleans music.
The Pianists James Booker was the finest pianist you never heard and he was grand master of New Orleans piano in the style of Jelly Roll Morton. But the Spiderman was versatile and could play the blues, boogie, barellhouse, and the latest R&B or pop songs. Champion Jack Dupree was the king of boogie woogie and blues in the Crescent City style. Mac Rebennack aka Dr. John was the most commercially successful of the NOLA pianists and his awesome reputation as a player was hard earned. He's still one of the most sought after session pianists in the music business. Roy Byrd aka Professor Longhair developed a rhumba boogie style of piano playing that came to define the sound of New Orleans piano. He is arguably the most influential of the Cresent City piano masters. |
I was hoping you'd do one of these someday. Great start as well - the New Orleans scene is something I've been looking to investigate for some time (given the Elvis Costello-Allen Toussaint link there is), so I'll be keeping an eye out for some of those.
Looking forward to more from this thread. Keep up the good work eh. |
Song of the Day
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...e/FeverRay.png Karin Dreiger Andersson aka Fever Ray When I Grow Up by Fever Ray Fever Ray is a side project of musical eccentric Karin Dreijer Andersson, who is one half of sublimely dark Swedish electro act The Knife. Fever Ray's self titled debut album remains at the top my running list noteable albums of 2009 at halfway point to the end of the year. |
New Orleans Music Vol. II
The Jazz Players
Louis Armstrong- Louie was the very definition of jazz New Orleans style. Here's a 1959 rendition of Mack the Knife written by Kurt Weill for Bertold Brecht's Three Penny Opera. Eddy Davis' New Orleans Jazz Band- St. James Infirmary is an old blues song that is older than jazz music and Eddy Davis performs a rousing rendition of it New York City's National Underground Music Festival in the summer of 2008. Wynton Marsalis- Wynton does an impromptu solo rendition of Buddy Boden's Blues the earliest New Orleans jazz song. Jelly Roll Morton - Here's Fred "Jelly Roll" Morton's own recording of his famous Finger Breaker. Jelly wrote this to show of to New York Ragtime pianists (A.K.A. Early Stride pianists) that he had fine technique too. And was made even more famous in the excellent film "The Legend of 1900" I knew a classically trained pianist at the New England Conservatory of Music who told me that playing stride piano in the style of Jelly Roll Morton was far more difficult than playing any Chopin sonata. |
I recently came across an item in the venerable American magazine, Newsweek, that challenges the "conventional wisdom" of recording labels, the RIAA and their minions of intellectual property attorneys. From Newsweek 7/11/09:
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One of the hippest and most infomative music sources on the web is (believe it or not) the National Public Radio Music website. Are you doubled over in laughter at thought of NPR being musically hip? Before you choke on your coffee and spray it all over your keyboard, check out this link to the NPR Music website .
NPR's music coverage is quite expansive and covers everything from indie, to worldbeat, to blues, to jazz and just about any other music in the galaxy of genres that comprise contemporary music. There's even coverage of classical music. NPR Music has introduced a number of new indie music artists to my attention long before an internet buzz. I first heard about groups like White Stripes, Firery Furnances and Cut/Copy from new music profiles on NPR Music. NPR's own studio performance videos have often exposed new indie groups to a mass audience even before they've released an album. NPR Music also has a section with full lenth concerts on demand, including a recent Sonic Youth raveup. My favorite NPR Music feature is the Song of the Day which inspired me to carry a song of the day on my own blog here at MB. Speaking of which, here's my own selection for song of the day. Song of the Day http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...tashakahn4.jpg The exotic and photogenic Natasha Kahn of BFL Glass- Bat for Lashes Bat for Lashes is the musical project of Brighton England's Natasha Kahn. Glass is a song from her recently released album Two Suns. Ms. Kahn is Pakistan expatriate and also does multimedia performance art. Her musical influences are as diverse as Bjork, Dead Can Dance, Portishead, Sheila Chandra and Siouxsie. She has a hypnotic singing voice and a lot of her music is downtempo. Thankfully, Natasha studiously avoids stupor inducing languor of over-chilled electronica. This live rendition of Glass was performed on a radio show last month. |
Strange Bedfellows Dept.
Featuring Quirky and Oddball Cover Songs Jazz Goes Grunge Members of the modern jazz group, Bad Plus broke into a rousing avant garde rendition of Nirvana's Lithium at last week's Winnepeg Jazz Festival. Their version of the Cobain song didn't get a lot of applause, except from the three Nirvana fans in the audience. Jazz music fans aren't exactly known for their musical pluralism, unlike jazz musicians who are often very hip to contemporary music trends. The vocalist, Wendy Lewis has been doing jazz infused covers of offbeat songs for awhile and she's a great vocal stylist. Bossa Nova Bunnymen Nouvelle Vague has been around for about five years now and specializes in covers of post-punk songs with a twist of Brazilian samba or bossa nova. I like this Nouvelle Vague cover of Echo and the Bunnymen's The Killing Moon better than the original. Sorry about that, Echo. Angry Old Fogies My final choice is the Zimmer's rousing rendition of the Who's My Generation . The Zimmers were all the rage a mere two years ago and their music video went viral on the internet. Since that moment of glory, we haven't heard much of anything from the Zimmers. Apparently the band will only be remembered as just another one hit wonder but their rendition of My Generation is a memorable one. When your band's youngest member is 75 years old, you probably don't get many long term 5 album contract offers from record companies. Who knows?... Maybe half of the Zimmers have kicked the bucket since 2007. The official video of the song is wickedly funny and quite good musically...but copyright law forbids me from it embedding the video offsite. You can view it on YouTube |
Music of New Orleans Vol. III
The Neville Family
The Neville Brothers are the personification of 2nd line funk. There are 5 different brothers who perform with the group depending on which night you hear them. Iko Iko and Brother John are both NOLA classics. Wild Tchoupitoulas are a crew of costumed "indians" who play every year at the Mardi Gras parade. The drum corps is led by Big Chief Jolly Landry and his nephews in the Neville Brothers are frequent participants on vocals. The Wild Tchoupitoulas are a wonder to behold in their yearly performances at Mardi Gras. The group only released one album in 1976 and it's still one of the most sought after items by music collectors. Wild Tchoupitoulas also sponsor and run cultural arts center in New Orleans This is a steet video of the 2009 parade filmed last march, just as the Tchoupitoulas hit the sacred ground of Washington and LaSalle streets where jazz was born. The Meters were led by Neville brother Art and were produced by Allen Toussaint, the legendary NOLA musician. There is still an academic debate going on about who originated funk music, James Brown or the Meters. I'm not really sure, but I grew up in New Orleans listening to the funky music of the Meters when James Brown will still playing traditional R&B songs like Night Train, Please Please Please Please and Out of Sight. Aaron Neville is one of America's most venerated R&B singers and generally sticks to soulful ballads and gospel music. Tell It Like It Is is another Allen Toussaint production and was a chart topping R&B hit in the Sixties. Aaron has gone a little too MOR for my taste in the past couple of decades but his early work with Toussaint was a significant contribution to early R&B. P.S. Don't ask me why a publicity photo from the television show the Wonder Years is pictured on the video. I have no idea of what the YouTube poster was thinking about. |
Song of the Day
Periodically Double or Triple is the single first release from Yo La Tengo's forthcoming album Popular Songs album which has a release date of September 8th 2009. Popular Music will be the 14th YLT album and according to Matador Records, Popular Songs will the full range of the YLT musical oeuvre including a two 20 minute plus epic songs. Periodically Double or Triple is a tongue in cheek performance that sounds like suburban lounge funk. Earlier this year YLT released an album rowdy drunken cover songs under the not-so-secret name of the Condo F*cks. The title of the album was F*ckbook was a big hint to their hard core fans that it was a YLT project. |
Song of the Day
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...etrahayden.gif The preciously talented Petra Hayden I Can See For Miles- Petra Haden Petra Haden's father is jazz bassist Charlie Hayden who played in the classic edition of the Ornette Coleman Quartet, the avant garde jazz group that was the launching pad for the free jazz movement. Charlie Hayden began showing his musical talent at age two according to his family and was singing with his parent's country and western act by age three. Like her father, Petra was a child prodigy. As a child Petra found out she could do a vocal rendition of any song upon one hearing... and not only that, she could also use her voice to do near perfect imitations of all of the musical instruments in the song. She began studying the violin when she was eight years old, and by her teens she was on her way to becoming a virtuoso. She also mastered the trumpet, mandolin, and various keyboard instruments, making her a true multi-instrumentalist. It was Petra's voice with it's extraordinary range that most people noticed. In early 2005, Bar/None Records released Haden's The Who Sell Out, a recording that she worked on intermittently for three years. The album reinterpreted the classic Who album in its entirety, using Haden's a cappella voice as the sole instrument. It's a cult classic. Hayden's voice was overdubbed on as many as 11 different tracks to provide all the vocals and instrumental tracks on the songs. In order to perform the complex a capella arrangements in a live setting, Ms. Haden wrote a musical score of her idosyncratic vocal parts and assembled a ten woman a capella choir and she sang and directed the choir at performances. I Can See For Milesis a live performance by Petra and her a capella choir called the Sellouts. More On Haden Family Talent Glut The Haden family musical franchise has a bigger glut of talented siblings than the Wainwright family. Neither family sells as many records as the Jonas Brothers but the jury's still out on whether the Jonas Brothers have any musical talent. In 2008 Charlie Haden recorded Rambling Boy an well received album of Americana folkways classics with three of his daughters and his son. As a result of performing on Rambling Boy, Petra and her talented sisters Rachel and Tanya formed a rootsy Americana group called the Hayden Triplets. Below is the Haden Triplets performance of the Carter Family classic Single Girl, Married Girl. For those of you unfamilar with Charlie Haden's work with the Ornette Coleman Quartet, I've posted a video a 1987 perfomance of the Ornette Coleman Quartet in Europe. Members are of the Ornette Coleman Quartet are Coleman on alto sax, the late Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Charlie Haden on upright double bass and Ed Blackwell on drums. Like Haden, Don Cherry sired musically talented siblings and was the father of R&B/Pop artists Neneh Cherry and Eagle Eye Cherry. Be forewarned that the Ornette Coleman's music doesn't adhere to a fixed harmonic structure and the entire band improvises at will without observing any rules about fixed metres, musical keys, tempos, instrumental roles, harmonics, stuctures of rythym. Free jazz abandons the idea of musical composition altogether. The timbre of Coleman's alto sax draws heavily from traditional blues. The title of the piece is 4 Tet. |
I just want to say thank you, THANK YOU for putting that Eddy Davis' New Orleans Jazz band video in your thread. I had never listened to any of their music and now I'm just in love with it. Those banjos add so much flavor and interest and the guys who play them are just the cutest things. After the trumpet player does his little wangy notes, I love how the little fat guy matches it on his banjo. And Eddy Davis' voice is just wonderful. Thanks again for opening up my eyes to these guys. They are my new favorite.
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Song of the Day
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...ry_block02.jpg Rory Block at recent performance Terraplane Blues- Rory Block Terraplane Blues is an old Robert Johnson blues song from the Thirties. A Terraplane is the model of an automobile manufactured by the Hudson Motor Company between 1932 and 1939. Johnson's poetic use of the Terraplane is loaded with sexual innuendo. The singer Rory Block is the finest interpreter of Robert Johnson's music which is no small feat considering that Johnson was a black male musician and Rory is a white female musician. Rory Block was the daughter of Allan Block sometime folk musician who owned and operated the Block Sandal Shop on McDougal Street in Greenwich Village in the Sixties and Seventies. The shop became a hangout for folk musicians like Dave Van Ronk ( aka the Mayor of McDougal St.), Harlem street singer and master of the ragtime blues guitar Rev. Gary Davis, David Bromberg, Stephan Grossman and boatload of other aspiring musicians. The main attraction (for the males) at the Block Sandal Shop was Allan's teenage daughter who red hot looking in addition to being a blues prodigy. Allan Block was a bit of a stage father and had been teaching Rory to play the blues since the cradle. I've seen her play several times and she is a better singer and guitar player than most of the old pros in Greenwich Village that schooled her to play the blues. She practically channels Robert Johnson on Terraplane Blues. Rory's first artistic muse was an elderly travelling companion of Robert Johnson's, Son House. Rory Block was 15 years old when she met Son House. Two improbable people. A young teenaged Greenwich Village guitar prodigy and an older black man, 62, who had recorded nine of the most powerful blues pieces ever for the Paramount label in 1930. Rory said Quote:
Terraplane Blues was Robert Johnson's most challenging song to play on guitar because of the abrupt changes in tempo and the masterful right techniques required to play the song correctly. This video is shot nice and close, so you can see Rory's incredible right hand guitar technique where she strums, picks and pounds the guitar using all five fingers. She even slaps at the strings using the entire palm of her right hand. |
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_____________________________________________ As it so happens, Flower Child's comments provides the opportunity for a seamless segue into my Song of the Day feature which offers four versions of the jazz/blues classic St. James Infirmary. Song of the Day http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...-infirmary.jpg Above is a picture of the original sheet music of St. James Infirmary. The composer is listed as "Joe Primrose" which was an alias for a music publishing executive who made a false claim of writting the song to collect sheet music royalties on a public domain song. St. James Infirmary- Four Different Versions I first heard a version of St. James Infirmary when I was collecting and doing field recordings of blues and jazz musicians for the Smithsonian folkways collection way back in the Seventies. It was sung by a New Orleans street singer and blues musician named Snooks Eaglin I thought it was about the coolest song I've ever heard and later on I learned that just about about every jazz and blues performer in New Orleans did some sort of version of the song. Nobody knew who wrote the song. The earliest sheet music credits the song to "Joe Primrose" a long time psuedonym for Irving Mills who ran the largest music publishing house in New York from 1919 until 1965. Irving Mills was not the writer of the song. The song's origin goes back to the 19th Century and both Blind Willie McTell and Big Bill Broonzy said they first heard versions of St. James Infirmary when they were children in the 1890s. So it's likely that the royalty minded Mr. Mills was engaged in the sleazy act of registering a copyright on a public domain song for his own self enrichment. Keep in mind this was in the era that predated the rise of recorded music and the primary source of royalties were sheet music sales not record sales. Many American families had pianos in their homes and played the popular music of the day on piano, instead of listening to it on a record player. The mass marketing of RCA Victrola record player changed all that, but that's another topic. St. James Infirmary was first popularized by Louis Armstrong in 1928 and the song has long been linked to the Cresent City jazz and blues tradition. I've collected over 100 versions of the song by jazz, blues, R&B, folk and rock and roll musicians. My 100 different collected versions is just the tip of the iceberg because there must be 10,000 different versions of the song floating around in cyberspace and private record collections. I even have a version of St. James Infirmary by an Hawiian ukulele player. Some versions of the song are titled Gambler's Blues. St. James Infirmary is about the saddest song I've ever heard. The songs haunting lyrics have an unadorned authenticity of an everyday conversation. It's basically a blues song, but the use of minor chords makes it sound more like a funeral dirge. The song opens with a man coming viewing the dead body of his wife (or maybe girlfriend) laid out on a slab in the St. James Infirmary. Most versions have lyrics typical of the Louis Armstrong version: Quote:
The second guest artist is legendary trumpter Doc Cheatham who was a longtime associate of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Ma Rainey and Cheatham was the lead trumpeter for the Cab Calloway Band an all black jaza orchestra that rivalled the Count Basie and Duke Ellington band for recruiting the most talented black jazz musicians. Cheatham is the guy who emerges from the shadows in dark glasses to take the first solo in the video: St. James Infirmary ( Version #2 Swedish Blues Style) - Jers, Lindbom & Zetterlund. It's hard to belive that this trio of young musicians is from Sweden because they have the American blues idiom nailed with this harmonica, mandolin, and doublebass instrumental version of the song. All three musicians play with passion, conviction and soul. Filip Jers' use of vibrato on his harmoica playing is quite skillfully rendered. St James Infirmary (Version #3 Folk Blues Style) - Snooks Eaglin This is that first version of the song by New Orleans street singer Snooks Eaglin and it began my long oddessy to unravel the origins of the song. For all my research on the origins of the song, St. James Infirmary's origins remain as elusive and ambiguous as ever. The true writer of the song has acheived his own kind of immortality by becoming so notably anonymous. St. James Infirmary (Version #4 New Orleans Piano Style) - Doug Duffey. Doug is an old NOLA homeboy of mine and he plays piano in the ornate style of old school New Orleans blues piano masters. This 1991 live performance by Doug is my currently my favorite version because St. James Infirmary is the kind song that lends itself perfectly to a 3 am rendition in a smokey Bourbon St. after-hours joint, sung a lone piano player with an oversized taxi driver's hat bobbling on the top of his head. |
Song of the Day
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...0Caspar204.jpg The Melodians in recent concert appearance. Sweet Sensation - the Melodians Summer time is ska music time in my home by the banks of the Big Muddy River. I've skanked away many a balmy summer evening to the sounds of of this beautiful 1967 ska classic from the Melodians. Summertime photographs on the video storyboard are, as always, free of charge to gaze in awe at. _____________________________ The Artist formerly known as Santogold http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8.../santogold.jpg A few months back Santogold legally changed her stage name from Santogold to Santigold as a result of a threatened copyright lawsuit by Santo Gold a infomercial jewelry merchandiser. Her real name is Santi Gold. Santigold's musical oeuvere defies classification in the nomenclature of contemporary musical genres. Some critics attempted to place her music in the hip-hop ghetto even before she released her first album. Others called her an MIA knock-off because she toured with MIA prior in 2007 prior the release of her album. I don't hear much about Santogold on the MB forum. Her debut album last year has become this year's remix album in the underground club scene. I'm particulary fond of M.I.A. producer Switch's recent remix of Shove It from her debut album. Shove It (Switch remix)- Santogold Most folks don't know that Santigold was school at the Germantown School a Quaker run preparatory school in Philadelphia whose students have one of the highest rates of successful applications to Ivy League colleges in the nation. Santigold went to college at the posh and academically challenging Weselyan University in Middletown Connecticuit. Her father was a Philadelphia lawyer who ended up getting involved in a sordid municipal corruption indictment. Still Santigold's priveleged middle class background and academic accomplishment don't exactly fit profile of a Brooklyn hip-hop homegirl. Her network of musical associates comes from a grab bag of varied genres. She has plans to record with both David Byrne and the Beastie Boys and has already recorded with M.I.A., the Strokes Julian Casablanca, and Jay-Z and has toured in Europe with MIA, Architecture in Helsinki and Bjork. Santigold has said she is inspired by 1980s pop music. Quote:
Santigold gets testy with critics and music vendors who hang the hip hop, rap or R&B label on her music simply because she is a black artist Santigold says: Quote:
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Song of the Day
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...onhouseeq8.jpg Son House: The archetypal old blues man Death Letter Blues- Son House Son House was one of the last of the old school Mississippi delta blues singers. Son's music had a big influence on both Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters who both came from that rural area near Clarksdale Mississippi where Son House frequently performed at picnics, juke joints and roadhouses. When I first heard his version of this old blues classic I was thunderstruck by the intensity of his voice and guitar playing. Son House was the closest friend of Charley Patton the first American blues musician to record his music for a record label. Patton is acknowledged to be the father the blues music idiom. Patton and House spent their entire lives in the same delta region of Mississippi that was the home of the Mississippi blues. All Music Guide descibes the relationship between Patton and House as almost comically dysfunctional: Quote:
You have to understand that talented blues musicians like Charley Patton, Furry Lewis and Son House were made a lot of promises by white folks early in their musical careers and none of those promises were delivered. In Son's world, undue flattery from a white person was perceived as an attempt to exploit his hard earned reputation as a musician. When Son recorded his lengendary sessions for Paramount Records he was promised fame and fortune by Paramount but he was paid $5 for each song he recorded, and he returned to anonminity in Clarksdale Misssissippi and never heard from Paramont again. Those first generation of blues players didn't reap the financial rewards and universal public acclaim as the next generation of blues players like B.B. and Albert King, Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters. Yet without Son House or Robert Johnson there would have never been a next generation of blues players. Son spent his prime years working as anonymous sanitation worker (garbage collector) for the city of Rochester New York. He was retired and in his sixties when Al "Blind Owl" Wilson a musicologist showed up on his door step to rediscover him. It was the end of year long oddessy of a couple of blues researchers to locate him. Wilson and guitar virtuoso/blues researcher John Fahey came across a couple of Son's old 78 rpm on a field trip to Mississippi in 1963. Prior to that neither man knew of Son House's exsistence much less his connection the famed Charley Patton, whom coincidentally was the subject of Fahey's master's thesis in music history at University of California Berkeley. Wilson and Fahey spent several months doing a search for him in Mississippi. Just when they believed he had long since died, they got a tip from a distant relative that Son was alive and well and living in Rochester New York, a city was that was about as many miles due north of the Mississippi delta region as one could travel without without being in Canada Son hadn't played music in so long, the 22 year old white blues researcher, Blind Owl Wilson had the rather strange assignment of reteaching Son House how to play the guitar like Son House. Blind Owl was a talented blues guitarist in his own right and went on to form the popular blues boogie band, Canned Heat, with blues music collector Bob "The Bear" Hite. Despite of all his career setbacks and well being well into his sixties, Son delivers the goods on this rarely seen video rendition of Death Letter Blues recorded sometime in the 1960s after Blind Owl rediscovered him in 1964. Son House once said, "Al Wilson didn't redisover me... how can you rediscover somebody who never got discovered by nobody in the first place?" Bow to the wisdom of your elders, children. Errors of Fact on Video: The voiceover intro says Son House lived well into the Sixties, Son actually died in 1988 at age 86. The voiceover also says that Son recorded 3 or 4 songs for Paramont but in reality Son recorded 15 songs (19 if you count the session outtakes). This guy has done a tremendous service by posting this rare tape of Son House on YouTube. Unfortunately the 45,200 people who have viewed it will gotten some unintentional misinformation about the essential facts of Son's life. |
Song of the Day
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...nehcherry1.jpg Neneh Cherry: She's a germ free adolescent. Germ Free Adolescents- Neneh Cherry When Neneh Cherry was 16 years she moved from her parent's home in Stockholm to London and became immersed in the local London punk scene. Early on Neneh brief stint with one of the ground breaking bands punk rock, the Slits but she rarely stayed in a group longer than a few months. In addition to the Slits, Neneh sang for the Cherries, the Nails, Rip Rig + Panic and Float Up before reinventing herself in 1986 as a hip-hop artist. This is a 1997 performance by Neneh Cherry performing the X-Ray Spex punk anthem is at a party for a film premier at the Cannes Festival. Neneh's rendition is notable because she sings the song with as much conviction as Poly Styrene the original X-Ray Spex vocalist, and does so in a $15,000 haute couture dress lent to her by French fashion design icon Jean Paul Gaultier for the event. Punk had come a long way from ripped t-shirts, saftey pins and leather jackets by 1997. Nenah has been recording on and off with Massive Attack and is the featured singer in her husband Cameron McVey's electronica group Cirkus. Cameron was the first manger of Massive Attack and had a lot to do with the production of their debut album Blue Lines in 1991. |
Song of the Day
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...e/Iggy-Pop.jpg Ever the outlaw, Iggy defies the Super Wal-Mart's No Shirt-No Service rule Nice To Be Dead - Iggy Pop Iggy's new album Preliminaries is one of the more subued musical offerings from rock and roll's resident wild man. Nice To Be Dead is an exception. As the title of the song implies "Nice to Be Dead is a gleeful celebration of being dead and buried six feet underground sung to a backdrop of distorted guitar noise from Hal Cragin who produced the album and co-wrote many of the songs with Iggy. At age 62 Mr. Pop proves to his grandchildren that he's still a force to be reckoned with. |
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I don't even know where to start -- you have posted so much interesting stuff in this thread. I guess I'll go back to The Bad Plus - that's funny about audience reaction to their Nirvana covers. I remember hearing an interview (on NPR, by the way) back when their first album was just released - they said the pianist had never heard Smells Like Teen Spirit and in fact, had never heard of Nirvana. In the interview they said the ages of the band and I figured that the guy was in his late teens when Nevermind was huge. But he had only listened to/studied classical music until he joined the Bad Plus. Anyway, thanks for everything. |
Song of the Day
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...-Youth-001.jpg WARNING: Do not try this at home. Man in photograph is a professional stunt guitarist. Antenna- Sonic Youth Sonic Youth, America's most celebrated makers of joyful noise got sacked by last year by Geffen Records and released their latest album, The Eternal is on the venerable indie label, Matador. The music is bold and experimental but songwritting has a dreamy harmonic sheen that is beguiling. It's as about as close to revisiting the fabled territory of Daydream Nation as our heroes have gotten in the past twenty years. When I frist heard the trippy guitar intro on Antenna, I had an acid flashback and finally recalled the horrifying details of a lost weekend in the Dali Lami's ashram in Dharamsala India. The Eternal is great music to discover the dark and swampy region of your subconcious mind. |
Gavin, you don't get nearly enough credit for this.
Some wonderful choices here; I particularly liked the New Orleans sound piece you wrote. Cheers, guy. |
Three Rarities from the Nico Archives
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v81/lapeste/Nico.jpg Nico- Good cheekbones are a girl's best friend I recently came across a couple of rare video tapes of Nico that predate her days in the Velvet Underground. From about 1960 until 1966 Nico was first tier fashion model in Europe and was beginning a promising career as a movie actress. The first video Striptease is from a 1963 movie soundtrack composed by Serge Gainsbourg. The song is accompanied by a slide show of photographs of Nico in her early days as a fashion model. It's a side of Nico that few people have ever seen: Striptease - Nico with Serge Gainsbourg (1963) The second video is I'm Not Saying, was made in 1965 roughly a year prior to Nico's involvement in the Velvet Underground. Nico was midway between her career as a European actress and model, when she burst upon the scene at Andy Warhol's Factory in New York. Nico was introduced to producer Andrew Loog Oldham by Rolling Stones' guitarist Brian Jones. It was Oldham who cast her as a folksinger and chose Canadian Gordon Lightfoot's "I'm Not Sayin'" as her debut release. Jones played acoustic guitar on the session. I'm Not Saying- Nico (1965) This final video I wanted to post was a performance of Femme Fatale by the Velvet Underground. Femme Fatale is a song about the self destructive Warhol factory girl Edie Sedgwick written by Lou Reed at the request of Andy Warhol. Edie was also the subject of the Bob Dylan song Just Like A Woman. This performance is one of the few videos of a VU live performance in which both the sound and video are of good quality. The performance is also notable because of the chemistry between Lou Reed and Nico. Nico's battles with stage fright were legendary and drugs were a way for her to cope with her severe performance anxiety. At the beginning of the video, you'll see a reassuring nod and smile passed by Lou Reed to Nico as he plays the guitar intro. A similar nonverbal exchange between Reed and Nico happens at the end of the song. It's a very tender moment of intimacy between two key members of a band that is most often celebrated for it's dark and decadent music. Nico is often remembered as a world weary diva and cruel social dominatrix but the video shows the vunerable and insecure soul of Nico that coexisted with her many demons . It goes without saying that the greedy chuckleheads at BMI wouldn't allow me to embed such a remarkable historical document without getting their $250 performance fee for embeds of the song. To view this video you have to hit my link to at the YouTube page where it's posted. |
Song of the Day
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...lutuaskake.jpg Yekermo Sew- Mulatu Astatke In the late Sixties and early Seventies, hypnotic grooves of Astake and his Epiothique Orchestra had a big influence on American jazz players like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Pharoah Saunders. Post-bop jazz was moving away from the traditional blues and ballad structure of bee-bop jazz and began to experiment the avant garde, modal music, afrocentric jazz and fusion. Old school jazz players like Wynton Marsalis has agrued that those African influenced musicians like Miles and Trane, were no longer playing jazz, and in strict sense of jazz theory, Marsalis was correct. Traditional jazz had it's roots in the blues but that doesn't mean that modern jazz isn't capable of absorbing influences outside of uniquely American musical forms like blues, ragtime and swing. The translation of the title from Astatke's native Ethiopian is A Man of Wisdom and Experience. The densely layered sound, the Eastern atonality of the main theme and the loosely structured riddims lend an aura of seductive mystery to the song. The wacked out, acid drenched guitar solo which begins around 2:44 has the kind of fuzztone distortion you'd expect to hear from a garage band like the Seeds, the Wipers or the Electric Prunes. All of which adds up to a magnificent if not slightly strange musical offering. The Ethiopiques broke up in the mid-Seventies but the 66 year old Astake continues to tour the world as both a soloist and with jazz ensembles. The inclusion of Yekermo Sew in the soundtrack to the Bill Muarry movie Dead Flowers, awakened an interest in Mulatu Astake's music in the United States. |
More great music, Gavin. The song in the video does remind me of Pharoah Saunders or Yusef Lateef - a great way to spend 10 minutes. Thanks.
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Any idea on the date of that Femme Fatale performance?
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Song of the Day
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...ndSonHouse.jpg Young John Fahey discusses chaos theory with his blue singin' pal Son House Poor Boy - John Fahey Poor Boy is one of the oldest songs in the American blues folkways and it's origin has never been determined and probably won't be. John Fahey who referred to himself as a "primative American guitarist" re-recorded Poor Boy eight different times during his 43 year career in music. Each version had subtle differences from the other ones. At age 19, Fahey first recorded Poor Boy his debut album titled Blind Joe Death, which Fahey self produced and recorded in 1959, partially by the unauthorized access to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's music recording lab in the middle of the night. The first and only pressing of Blind Joe Death appeared in a generic looking cover with no information about the name of the artist or the titles of the songs. It's first issue Blind Joe Death on Fahey's do-it-yourself homemade record label sold 95 copies and the album promptly disappeared without any critical notice. That failed enterprise might have caused many an aspiring musician to throw in the towel and look for a real job, but young John Fahey was a glutton for punishment. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...ndJoeDeath.jpg Cover of the 1959 issue of Blind Joe Death In 1967 Fahey re-recorded the Blind Joe Death album for Vanguard Records and it sold 9000 copies, a runaway hit by Fahey standards. By the Seventies his album were creeping toward the 30,000 mark in the first issue. Music collectors were beginning to demand long forgotten and out of issue titles in John Fahey's back catalog and by the time of the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo people were standing in block long lines waiting to get their back-ordered copies of Fahey classics like The Dance of Death and Other Plantation Favorites Ummm...well... maybe not. There really weren't any block long lines... I just got carried away with an great allegorical opportunity. In reality, by 1990, music critics were hailing Blind Joe Death as one of the most influential jazz, blues and folk albums of the contemporary era. Nobody could ever quite figure a musical genre to describe Fahey music and he also recorded albums of South American folk music, Indian ragas, Christmas songs, and West Indian music. Fahey always had a healthy cult following and he earned a living as a working musician for over 30 years. In 1986, he contracted Epstein-Barr syndrome, a long-lasting viral infection that, combined with diabetes and other health problems, sapped his energy and resources. Although the Epstein-Barr virus was finally overcome, the mid-'90s found him living in poverty in Oregon, where he paid his rent by pawning his guitar and reselling rare classical records. The appearance of a major career retrospective on Rhino, Return of the Repressed, in 1994 boosted his profile to its highest level in years. In 1997, he returned to active recording. Fahey recorded and tour until his death in 2001. More Notes on the History of Poor Boy The first known recording of Poor Boy was made in 1927 by Barbeque Bob an obscure blues guitarist from Atlanta Georgia. Every musician has a gimmick and since Barbeque Bob was a barbeque cook, he performed in a chef's hat and a long apron. Nobody ever figured out if Barbeque Bob was playing music to promote his barbeque establishment or the cooking gig was just a day job until his musical career took off. (Which it never did) The reason why I love the blues is you couldn't dream up the kind of characters I've met in the world of the blues. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...arbequebob.jpg Barbeque Bob in full performing regalia A Partial List of Artists Who Have Recorded Poor Boy Some of the song titles vary but it's the same old song that's been around since the 19th Century
Rolling Stone Magazine Bio of Fahey |
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Song of the Day
Ye Me Le - Sergio Mendes and Brazil 66 http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...io20Mendes.jpg Blame it on the bossa nova- Sergio Mendes and Brazil 66 Okay...okay, I confess. I'm guilty as charged loving for dance oriented electronica groups who play bright bouncy pop music. Blame it on the bossa nova and Brazil 66. My shameles craving for coma inducing saccharin pop goes way back to my childhood. It all began with my father's martini-before-dinner ritual when I was growing up. Every night without fail, my father would come home from work, mix up a martini then go straight for his prized hi-fi set and put on a song. He usually put on the jazzy bossa nova offerings by Sergio Mendes and Brazil 66 then he headed over to his Lazy Boy recliner, took a sip of his beverage and closed his eyes and drift away into some girl from Ipanema fantasy. My father worked a thankless and stressful job and I firmly believe his nightly ritual of a martini and music were his own form quaint form of psychoanalysis. Whatever name you want to call his ritual, it worked. My father never raised his voice or his hand to any family member, he never made nasty remark about anyone, and the only time I ever saw him lose his temper was when a sadistic Catholic nun left welts all over my legs as a result of a severe beating she gave me with a barber's strap for talking in class. Brazil 66 played pop oriented songs fearturing exotic samba rhythms and two comely female vocalists doing seductive renditions Brazilian bossa nova and samba classics along with Latin infused covers of current American pop songs. For many years Brazil 66 was dismissed as a lightweight, easy listening pop band by it's critics. When the public interest in international music came to the fore in the Nineties, it slowly dawned on Brazil 66's former detractors that the group was one of the earliest if not the first band to experiment with the fusion of global music rhythms with jazz and popular music. From my father’s love for this dreamy pop music, I learned of the mystical properties of music and it's p[ower to cure pain and restore the human soul.10 years ago when I was still in grad school studying clinical psychology, the medical literature on music therapy was just beginning to emerge. In my own personal experience I’ve seen music heal more far more folks with mental health problems than drugs, self help groups or counseling. With every one of my therapy clients I use music as way to earn their trust and form a theraputic bond with them. Music will become an even more important curative tool when the rest of the medical research world finally realizes what Bob Marley already told us in Trenchtown Rock: One good thing about music When it hits you feel no pain So hit me with music Hit me with music now It doesn't matter if your taste in music is Sergio Mendes or Bob Marley, the end result is what's important. I can even imagine that William Shatner's stark raving, straigh outta of the looney bin rendition of Mr. Tamborine Man helps a few troubled souls to make it through the night. Ummm, well... maybe not. There has been a sudden interest by deejays, rappers and remixers in the sambanistic riddims of Brazil 66. The Brazil 66 song Mas Que Nada has been sampled, remixed and rapped over by dozens of prominent artists and club deejays during the past year. If you browse YouTube you will see a large assortment of remixes of the Brazil 66 by younger deejays. Two of my favorite bands Stereolab and Saint Etienne were influenced by Brazil 66's breezy pop approach. On Stereolab's earliest albums the vocal harmonies of Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen sound strikingly like Lani Hall and Janis Hansen's blended vocals with Brazil 66. Listen to the Sadier and Hansen’s vocals on the first four Stereolab albums and you’ll see what I mean. Saint Etienne’s similarity to Brazil 66 is less obvious and has more to do musical tonality and timbre. Electronica stylists like Ivy, Annie and Owl City have explored and expanded the musical territory of Brazil 66 opened up. On the video below if you listen to Lani Hall's modulating voice when she sings the chorus "ye me le" the timbre her vocal like is remarkably similar to that former Cocteau Twin vocalist Elizabeth Frazier. ============================================== Bonus Video Smile of the Century The video posted below is a remix by a group called the Rapture Riders and it's a great mashup of the Blondie's Rapture and the Door's Riders of the Storm that's been around on the internet for a couple of years now. The music isn't the reason I embedded the video. The real star of the video has made his appearance in the first 10 seconds of the video and disappears back into immortality before the music ever begins. At the opening is an old newsreel film of Jim Morrison sauntering up to a customs counter at an airport. Wacth for the reaction on Morrison's face when the customs agent asks him for his occupation. The clip is only 10 seconds so keep your eye on it. That two second moment frozen in time, tells you more about inner workings of Jim Morrison's mind than the all the words in the in the dozens of biographies of his life. A printed screen shot of Morrison's devilish smile at that very moment, should be hung next to the Mona Lisa where it's on display in the Salle des États at the Louvre. Jim's spirit undoubtly prowls the street of Paris and when gets bored with his afterlife in the Père Lachaise Cemetery just down the boulevard; I'm sure he spends more than a few restless afternoons roaming the halls of the Louvre. If Jim came across a framed picture of his own smiling image next to Mona, he may give us all one last enigmatic smile to remember him by. For now all we have is this priceless video on YouTube. |
12 Year Old Nordic Kid Has Bad Case of Dem Ol' Texas Flood Blues
I don't quite know what make of this. It's video of 12 year old Norwegian blues guitar prodigy, Fredrik Strand Halland. Fredrik has the angelic face of a Vienna Choir boy but plays the blues on his Fender Stratocaster like he sold his soul to the devil at some remote rural crossroads near the Gaularfjellvegen fjiords. Fredrik looks far too innocent to be playing the the devil's music. Just one word of career advice, Fredrik: Stick with the guitar and hire a vocalist for your band. |
Song of the Day
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...mokeeaters.jpg Smoke Eaters- a journey in to the heart of the apocalypse Acid Apocalypse- the Smoke Eaters The Amersterdam based Smoke Eaters' remix videos began to appear on YouTube about a year ago. Since then they've released 9 videos all of which are notable for their adroit editing, skillful remixing, off kilter perperspective and their high concept ideas. To my knowledge they are still without a label. You can go to Smoke Eater's YouTube homepage if you want to hear more of their remixes. Acid Apocalypse weaves film clips and spoken voice samples from Francis Ford Coppola's grounbreaking film Apocalypse Now to shape an ornate dance tempo remix of the Door's epic musical freakout,The End. The End was also the acid drenched musical backdrop to Francis Ford Coppola's surrealist storyboard for his Vietnam film saga Apocalypse Now. The End will remain married forever to Apocalypse Now in the minds of both Doors and Francis Ford Coppola fans. The end product of the Smoke Eater's endeavor is an impressionistic rendering of Coppola's storyboard. For the musical component the Smoke Eaters use a revved up. tripped out dancebeat remix of The End. For those Doors fans who think 128 bpm dance remix of a Doors classic like The End is a profane act of blasphemy against the Lizard King, listen to the music in the video. The high velocity dance tempo works in a way I never thought it would have. Coppola wrote the script of Apocalypse Now using Joseph Conrad's dark and allegorical novella of colonialism in the Belgian Congo The Heart of Darkness as a conceptual template. There are a few talented people that excel in sound mixing, and an equally few talented people that excel in video editing, however it's rare to watch a video where the aural content of the music is seamlessly connected to the visual content of the video. Acid Apocaplyse is typical of the Smoke Eaters post-modern, deconstructive methodology of remixing music and editing video. |
Musical Profile
Bob Brozman: Blues Master with a Real PhD in Blues http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...oadofblues.jpg Bob and his truckload of vintage guitars. The guitars are worth 20 times the blue book value of the truck. I first heard Bob Brozman play guitar in at Duff's a popular eating and drinking establishment in the Central West End of St. Louis in the mid-Seventies. At the time I was just out of high school, and attempting to eke out a living playing blues guitar in the old fashioned style of 1930s players like Blind Willie McTell, Furry Lewis and Rev. Gary Davis. I had a weekly Saturday night gig at a St. Louis bar, Cafe Louis, in the warehouse district on Laclede's Landing. It was all very romantic to me... I was just out of high school and playing the blues in a smoke filled juke joint at the edge of the Mississippi River like so many of my old blues heroes once did. One night I sauntered in to Duff's and just by happenstance heard Bob Brozman playing guitar in the middle of one of his sets. I had never heard of or had seen him before that night, but by the end of Bob's set at Duff's, I was making a major life decision because of him. Hearing Bob play changed my life because after hearing him play guitar, I decided to give up my aspirations as a guitarist. The jig was up and I realized if I played guitar the next five decades of my life, I'd never play 1/10th as well as Bob. It was a sound decision on my part because in hindsight, I lacked the disipline, dedication and talent to ever play guitar as well as Bob. So that entirely random encounter at Duff's rescued me from spending the next five years on an ill conceived trek to a career dead-end. Shortly after that night, I quit my weekly gig at Cafe Louis but I had one final gig commitment that I had to honor: a headline performance at Tower Grove Park to benefit the Cesar Chavez's fledgling migrant farmworker organization, the United Farmworker's Union. I wasn't about to stiff a benefit gig to raise money for Cesar Chavez's noble La Causa. I got this idea to invite Bob to be the headliner at the UFW benefit concert and I'd be his opening act. To my surprise, Bob's enthusiasm for playing the gig was unconditional, even if there wasn't any pay involved. At the benefit, I played my set and then Bob came on and did exactly what I knew he'd do...blow me off the stage. I figured if I was going out and at the end of my music career, I might as well go out at the top, playing on same bill as a great player like Bob. Bob was awarded a PhD in Blues from Washington Univeristy in St. Louis. I'm not pulling your leg on this....Bob designed his own unique curriculum for a PhD in Blues in his self directed doctorate program in music at Washington University. I think Bob liked the idea of billing himself as the Doctor of the Blues and having the appropriate academic credentials to do so. Later on, Bob told me about an extraordinary aspect of his own musical development as a child. Bob's uncle, Barney Josephson, was a prominent club owner who ran the legendary Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, one of the first places in New York, or anywhere, where black and white musicians played on-stage together. I learned a lot from my casual and passing aquaintance with Bob Brozman. The few times we had a chance to talk, all our conversations were limited to blues trivia, antecdotes about the various old blues masters we each had met, and blues playing techniques. It was the kind of subject matter that only the geekiest of music fans would find entertaining. A year or so after my first encounter with Bob Brozman at Duffs, I packed my bags and headed out to the East Coast to obtain an undergrad degree in critical theory at University of Massachusetts. During the intervening years, I never heard anything about Bob. Bob Brozman's fate remained a mystery until one day in 1988 I came across a recently issued album by Bob called The Devil's Slide. at Tower Records in Boston. After developing a cult following from a decade of live performances, Bob's music career was starting to take off. Bob has since recorded 17 albums and two concert videos and traveled every corner of the globe from Europe, to Asia ,to Australia bringing the message of the blues to all. Paraphrasing the great Tom Waits, Bob was even big in Japan. Over the years, Bob has expanded his musical oeuvre to include music with broader cross cultural focus. Bob was awarded best slide guitarist in the 2008 Accoustic Guitar magizine's Reader's Choice Awards. Follow the little blue underlined link to visit Bob Brozman's website I selected three short clips from a guitar instruction video Bob once recorded to give you an idea of his incredible range as a guitarist. He's playing his instrument of choice, the National Steel resonator guitar which was an embedded resonator to amplify the sound of the guitar. In the 1920s and 1930s, prior to the development of electric guitar, the National Steel guitar was the favored instrument of many blues musicians because the chiming sound of the guitar's resonating speaker could be heard over loud din of a juke joint or noisy roadhouse. Song #3 is essential straight-in-your-face Mississippi blues bottleneck in the style that Bob was playing when I first heard him in the Seventies: Song #2 is a short demonstration of Bob's unique percussive style of playing. Bob once pointed out to me that nearly all of the great early blues guitarists pounded away at their guitars like the were perscussion instruments. Another great guitarist, John Fahey chided those guitarists who feared their guitar and played it delicately. Fahey's line was "stop playing your guitar like as sissy and hit it like you want to break it in two." Song #1 is a demonstration Bob's newer culturally blended playing style where he puts it all together in a song called Down the Road. In this one short song you can hear elements of delta blues, ragtime, calypso and the earliest New Orleans 2nd line style of jazz. Down the Road an amazing tour de force of stylistic guitar playing |
Song of the Day
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...otestrally.jpg Phil Ochs viewed as himself as an agit-prop musician not as an artistic commodity under the ownership of a music label Phil Ochs spent his career living beneath the long shadow cast over the folk music scene by his friend Bob Dylan. Ochs was closer to the style of a conventional old school folk singer than Dylan. Phil was viewed (for better or worse) as an ideological outlaw while Dylan was cultural icon. Phil Ochs was in frontline of artists who were deeply involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements. He was the only big name performer at the first anti-Vietnam war protest at UC Berkeley in 1965. His left wing politics put him in the crosshairs of the House Committee on Un-American activities, the FBI's watch list of prominent communist sympathizers and eventually Phil even had the honor of making the Top 20 on the Nixon enemy list. Dylan's early music was as socially powerful as Ochs but Dylan's involvement in the frontline struggles was that of a dabbler not an activist. I think Dylan's own skepticism of politics in general played a role in his limited participation in political protest. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8..._phil_ochs.jpg Phil Ochs performing at the first anti-Vietnam rally in UC Berkeley in 1965. By the time of the first antiwar protest at Berkeley in 1965, Dylan had abandoned topical and protest music and was reinventing himself as a countercultural zeitgeist who sent shock waves through staid Newport Folk Festival by plugging his guitar in to play a high decibel set of bluesy rock and roll backed by the members of the Paul Butterfield Band. During his performance, the usually affable Pete Seeger was off-stage cursing Dylan and making a frantic effort to pull the plug on the set and put an end to this nonsense by Dylan, right then and there. Unfortunately Seeger was an old school, low-tech folk singer and he couldn't figure out which plug to pull. There were a lot of hard feelings between Dylan and his former folkie friends but Ochs didn't involve himself in the controversy and never commented on Dylan's radical transfiguration at Newport. Two years later in 1967, Dylan was injured in motorcycle accident and observers were beginning to wonder what, if any, future lay ahead for his musical career. There were rumors that Dylan was suffering brain damage. Dylan had sequestered himself in a remote area of upstate New York and nobody, not even Albert Grossman, Dylan's normally long winded manager was commenting on the state of Dylan's physical or mental health. It was that fleeting moment in 1967, it appeared that Phil might finally free himself from his unhip image as old school "hootenanny" folk singer and gain some crossover appeal to the Dylan's tuned-in audience of the rock underground. Pleasures of the Harbor was released during the Summer of Love in 1967 and was hailed as Phil's most ambitious and musically varied album by music critics. It was a concept album and a couple of songs contained orchestral arrangements. The album was consistently imbued with images of mortality, and it all came together on the abstract, electronic-tinged final track, "The Crucifixion." This time around, it wasn't Dylan who robbed Phil of his moment in the sun, it was the Beatles, who released a Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band their most ambitious album to date, which like Och's Pleasures of the Harbor, was concept album with widely varied music and contained orchestral arrangements. Like Phil's finale song Crucifixion, the Beatle's album ended with A Day In Life a spectacular finale song that tied together the diverse array of the album's songs. The fact that Pleasures of the Harbor and Sergeant Pepper's were created and released at nearly the same moment in 1967 is case study on the probability of synchronicity. Synchronicity is defined in Webster's as: the creation of the same new idea at causally disconnected places by two persons at approximately the same time. Phil's attempt to reach a larger and younger audience with Pleasures of the Harbor was foiled because all eyes and ears were upon the Beatles new album in the summer of '67. The Haight Ashbury counterculture had arrived and the 27 year old Ochs was regarded as a relic from a bygone era of coffee houses and folk music revivals. It's a shame because Phil Och's beautiful Pleasures of the Harbor ended up commercial failure and peaked at 167 on the Billboard Charts and to this day, Pleasures of the Harbor remains a criminally ignored musical masterpiece. The first and only single from the album Outside of a Small Circle of Friends was promptly banned from airplay on the radio for the lyric "smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer". For all of their popularity with the counterculture, neither Dylan nor the Beatles would never dare to make an endorsement of marijuana use. Too much commerce was at stake, and breaking the establishment taboos could be a career ender for a band. John Lennon discovered as much after he made his "God" comment in 1966. Phil didn't care about commerce and fought his A&M label tooth and nail, to keep the controversial lines endorsing marijuana use in the song. Small Circle was initially inspired by the New York murder of Kitty Genovese, in the previous year, in which several neighbors heard screaming but did not call the police, the tongue-in-cheek verses deal with the consistent inability of the general public to help their fellow man due to fear, ignorance, or just plain laziness. In the end, the song makes a point about role apathy plays in larger social issues like poverty, government censorship, punitive drug laws and racial conflict. Over 40 years later, there isn't a single lyric or social malady commented upon by Phil in Circle of Friends that has become dated with time. The more that things change, the more things stay the same. Lyrics: Outside a Small Circle of Friends Look outside the window, there's a woman being grabbed They've dragged her to the bushes and now she's being stabbed Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain But monopoly is so much fun, I’d hate to blow the game And I’m sure it wouldn't interest anybody Outside of a small circle of friends. Riding down the highway, yes, my back is getting stiff Thirteen cars are piled up, they're hanging on a cliff. Maybe we should pull them back with our towing chain But we gotta move and we might get sued and it looks like it's gonna rain And I’m sure it wouldn't interest anybody Outside of a small circle of friends. Sweating in the ghetto with the colored and the poor The rats have joined the babies who are sleeping on the floor Now wouldn't it be a riot if they really blew their tops? But they got too much already and besides we got the cops And I’m sure it wouldn't interest anybody Outside of a small circle of friends. Oh there's a dirty paper using sex to make a sale The supreme court was so upset, they sent him off to jail. Maybe we should help the fiend and take away his fine. (*) But we're busy reading playboy and the Sunday New York Times And I’m sure it wouldn't interest anybody Outside of a small circle of friends Smoking marihuana is more fun than drinking beer, But a friend of ours was captured and they gave him thirty years Maybe we should raise our voices, ask somebody why But demonstrations are a drag, besides we're much too high And I’m sure it wouldn't interest anybody Outside of a small circle |
Song of the Day
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v81/lapeste/sbm.jpg "The name is Billy Carter not Billy Corgan and it's screaming messiahs, not smashing pumpkins." Smash the Marketplace- Screaming Blue Messiahs 1986 was a dismal year for me musically speaking. The three bands that meant the most to me from a cultural perspective, the Clash, Gang of Four and Mission of Burma had all disbanded in the course of the last two years. Roots reggae had fallen out of favor in Jamaica. And James Brown still couldn’t get on his good foot. (Good god! Bring me my cape and my sceptor, Maceo!) The 1986 hit parade turned into a death march to the edge of a rancid landfill of musical garbage. The best of Music in 1986 was a pathetic grab bag of the most insipid, contrived and musically toxic performances ever presented for mass consumption by the brain-dead-and-now-on-life-supports music industry. Surfing the crest of musical stardom was Mr. Mister, Bruce Hornsby and the Range, Huey Lewis and the News, Falco, Peter Cetera, Survivor, Bananarama, Billy Ocean, Kenny Loggins, Lionel Ritchie, Wham! and INXS (whose name I thought was pronounced "inks" for a couple of years, to show you how tuned out I was from the hip MTV subculture). Listening to mainstream music and watching MTV back in '86 was as dangerous as sampling the free Kool-Aid in Jonestown, back in '78. The one MOR performer that actually had some talent was Whitney Houston, but I couldn't escape the saturation bombing of the song I Will Always Love You. I Will Always Love You was stalking me everywhere and jackhammering itself into my brain until I got a migrane. All of my worst nightmares in 1986 had I Will Always Love You on the soundtrack It got to the point where every time I heard Whitney singing those fateful opening lyrics: "If I should stay, I'd only be in your way..." I began to responding her lyric by yelling back at her "That’s right Whitney so get the f*ck outta here, girl" which some people (mostly teenaged girls) playing the song on their boom box took personally. Maybe I owe a sincere apology to all of those teenage girls I scared the hell out of in 1986. Ummm... maybe not. I'm personally grateful that the boombox fad ended because the boom box gave blanket persmission to all tone deaf people to waterboard captive audiences with a tidal wave of abysmal music. I spent many a long subway ride in 1986 being hijacked by a boom box operator and taken on a hellish excursion to Satan’s palace of musical demenita. The horror...the horror of it all. After that rant I can barely remember my selection for Song of the Day... Oh yeah... The Screaming Blue Messiahs... SBC's music was the only ray of light that got me through 1986. I felt like I had wasted the best decade of my prime years during the 12 months of 1986. The Screaming Blue Messiahs lifted me up from the lithium induced haze of a really bad year and gave me a swift kick in the ass. I want personally thank the Messiahs for intervening before I had a chance to pull off a Double Van Gogh Knife Procedure on my ears. The one live performance I saw them was at was Spit in Boston. I was not disappointed. The Screaming Blue Messiahs were an angry, raging beast to behold in concert. Most SBM fans don't need read another commentary on Bill Carter's fiery guitar playing or his menacing stage personae, so I'll spare the agony. I will only say that Bill did better windmills that Pete Townsend. A couple years after I saw them at Spit in '86, the Messiahs fell from the face of the earth never to be heard from again and their former label Elektra Records has never bothered to issue any of the Messiah's albums in CD format in the USA. Not even Rhino Records ever reissued any SBM albums. And Rhino wants to broker a reissue deal with nearly every band in history that nobody cared about. Around four years I back began a collector's search a vinyl edition of SBM's first album Gun Shy. The album had been long absent from my personal collection, but I had also had a second reason for the search: Maybe be there was a story that could be told about the demise and afterlife of this great band. I checked with their former label Elektra who dropped them in 1990, no luck except I found out Elektra had long since sold the recording and publication rights to SBM’s music sold to the Warner Tamerline Publishing Group. I checked the legal filings of Warner Tamerline and found there was never any litigation filed by Warner Tameriline vs. Bill Carter or vice versa. All of the performance and songwriting credits were in Bill Carter's name but no legal filings by Carter or Warner Tramerline. So there was no pending litagation that prevented the reissue of SBM back catalog. So why weren't there any reissues of SBM's albums over the past 20 odd years? Then one day out of the blue, an administrator at music forum owned by Brit music publication Mojo , mentioned in passing that the Screaming Blue Messiah's former manager was a forum member. He introduced me to a guy named Haile Milgrim and I did a background check on what Haile told me about himself, and I found out that this guy was the real thing. Milgrim had a credit on the SBM's first album as creative director for the band. When I met Haile, he was employed by the Grateful Dead organization as an associate producer in the ambitious project to release remastered edtions of the all of the Dead's studio albums. Haile told me that the reason why the SBM's titles have never been re-issued is that when guitarist Bill Carter walked away from the band, he burned all of his bridges with the music industry and won't even discuss, much less sign off on any projects in which he was the performer or songwriter . And Bill Carter is primary performer and sole songwriter for nearly all of SBM's songs. Haile told me that Bill pursues his second great passion in life: motorcycles, and works in a motorcycle repair shop somewhere in London. He mentioned the specific area of London but I didn't bother to write it down in my notes. According to Haile Milgrim, Bill Carter never looked back and has no regrets. There was one final incident in my SBM dossier that is worth relating to SBM fans. About a year after I talked to Haile. a slightly mysterious event happened. Early in 2006 on the page of a MySpace member named "Screaming Bill Carter", three previously unreleased SBM songs were posted for download. Within a week the songs and the MySpace account had disappeared, never to return. Hmmmm. Comments on the Song: Any band who plays a song called Smash the Market Place should be arrested for shamelessly pandering to my own vulgar Trotskyist taste in music. But hey... don't look at me, I'm the last person who would file a pandering complaint against the band. Instead I say this: The act of smashing the market place is a life affirming act! Smashing the market place is a blow against the empire. Smashing the market place is right up there rocking the casbah, demanding to be sedated or kickin' out the jams. Shall we pick up our bats and run riotously through streets smashing the market place?" Oh hell, yes! |
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One night Bob led the entire audience inside Duff's out into the middle of Euclid Ave. and the crowd blocked traffic while it's members were square dancing, Deadhead twirling and doing the funky chicken with Bob the Pied Piper until the cops came and broke up the party. Bob had this talent for breaking down your inhabitions and challenging you to do something really crazy that you'd remember (fondly or painfully) for the rest of your life. One more Broz story: One afternoon my girlfriend and I were walking in Forest Park when suddenly Bob Brozman came bursting out of the main gate of the St. Louis Zoo running like a sprinter and clutching the neck of his National Steel guitar in one hand. Bob was moving like a freight train, and as he flew past me Broz, said, "Can't talk right now" and off he ran. About 15 seconds later a contingent of four or five visibly angry St. Louis police officers came bursting though the same gates of the zoo at breakneck speed. They were waving billy clubs and cursing. It was like a Keystone Cops comedy. There was no doubt that the "perp" they were chasing was Broz. Suddenly Bob broke off the sidewalk and ran down a long hill and into a densly wooded area to elude the cops in hot persuit. Bob didn't need to worry, about 100 yards past the gate the cops were covered with sweat and out of breath. I asked one of the more approachable cops what the deal was. He told me that skinny sumbitch with chrome guitar was always busking (ie..public singing for spare change) at the zoo without a permit and every time they tried to arrest him, he'd disobey their order to halt and go running off. When he asked if I knew the identity of the culprit, I told the cop," I'd never seen that dude before in my entire life and I would have remembered a face like that." My girlfriend and I returned to our walk but the second we both got out the earshot of the cop patrol, we both were doubled over in laughter for about five minutes. |
The Melugeon Connection:
Did Country and Western Music Originate in Africa? http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...60px-Goins.jpg An Indigenous Mulungeon family. Who are these people? No sir, I haven't flipped my wig. Country music, the long standing music of choice for red necks, Klan members and anti-segregationists may have partial origins in the folkways of African music. Now just calm down there pal, and hear me out! I'm currently working on a small research paper for the Gates Foundation to submit as part of a larger project on the ethno-cultural origins of traditional country and western music and I've found what appears to be an African connection at the root of country music. None of this is news to anthropologists specialize in Appalachian subcultures but the African connection to the Appalachian musical folkways has gone unnoticed by prominent American music historians (which I am not one of). Most music historians agree that traditional country music as sung by Roy Acuff, the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers originates within the musical folkways of Appalachia and leave it at that. Both Alan Lomax and Harry Smith (who were prominent music historians) correctly connected the origin of traditional country music to the folkways of Appalachian culture. Lomax and Smith comment extensively on the Scotch-Irish, welsh, English immigrant influence upon the music of Appalachia, but beyond the Celtic influence both historians ignore the influence of a second cultural group, the Melungeons (aka Melungian). The region of Appalachia is at the tri-cornered region of three states: Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. The Melungeons are unique native American group of unknown origins who exist only in the Applicant region. Melungeons are technically Native American but not in the sense that most Americans understand "Indians" to be Native Americans. Melungeons have origins in a different region of the globe and have no resemblance of the members of the American Indian tribal nation. Melungeons may have originated in the sub-Saharan region of Africa but since Melungeons were living in America when the colonists arrived, the mystery is how did they get here? Descriptions of Melungeons vary widely from observer to observer, from "Middle Eastern" to "Native American" to "light-skinned African American." There has been a heated debate among anthropologists about exactly who these Melungeons really are. A small minority of athropologist deny the exsistence of a culturally distinct group of Melungeon people and most of those people got their antropology degree from a Christian fundamentalist institution of higher learning, where scholars are taught to be racially color blind (racially color blind as defined by a policy of "close your eyes and all those uppity racial minorities will go away). Fortunately I'm not an anthropologist so I don't have any political stake on the racial or ethnic classification of Melungeons. From pictures they look like gypsies who are a nomadic people with origins in the Arabic culture of North Africa and then migrated to Bohemian, Romanian and Carpathian regions of Eastern Europe and regions of Spain, Southern France. So who are Melugeons and what does "Melungeon music" sound like? The word Melungeon means many things to many people. To the Arabic it means "Cursed Soul." To the French it means " Mixed." To the Scottish and Irish immigrants to the Appalachian Mountains, it meant not quite white. Nobody really knows what authentic Melungeon music really sounds or may have sounded like because the Melungeon folkways may have been blended into the folkways of country music, bluegrass, and Appalachian music. American music historians still have yet explore the cultural trail that leads to authentic Melungeon music. The earliest delta blues by Charley Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson was unheard of and largely unknown to exist before music historians began taking field trips to document it's history. Had there not been a few 78 rpm records left from the 1920s and 1930s the delta blues may have disappeared completely from the face of the earth by 1950. Part of my involvement in the Gates project will be a field trip to the tri-corner region of Appalachia to collect recordings of "authentic Melungeon music" which may or may not exist. There aren't any scratchy old 78 rpm recordings of long forgotten Melungeon stars that are laying around, to my knowledge. There is no Melungeon equivalent of Mississippi John Hurt. It's a daunting task because Melungeons live deep in the woods in remote mountainous areas that for the most part are off the grid and even the Census Bureau doesn't know where to find many Melungeon households to enumerate in the census count. I'm forced to admit the prospect of traveling those regions alone conjures up visions of the movie Deliverance. I won't blame you if you are skeptical about the validity of my Melungeon Connection theory. One of the board members at the Gates Foundations thought my initial proposal was a hoax, and that Malungeons came straight out of my creative imagination. If his allegations were true, I'd be getting a pretty good laugh (and a small monetary advance) at the expense of the Gates Foundation. For the sake of disclosure, I wouldn't be above perpetrating the very kind of hoax the Gates foundation board member accused me of, just to see if it was possible to fool an foundation advisory board with some wild fabricated story. Let me also add that I'd fess up to the truth if the proposal was awarded funding because jail is not a very nice place to be. © Attributed free use without permissions is granted by author |
Song of the Day
As a rule I never select my all time favorite song for Song of the Day, but in the case of this song I'll make an exception. The video isn't Howard Jones, rather it's an artistic interpretation of New Song. And before you file that complaint to have me kicked out of the forum let me ask you a question. Do you have any idea of who your dealing with, pal? The performers are on the video are a group of satirical artists who call themselves UberNooder and have developed a cult of YouTube followers with over-the-top yet playfully endearing tributes to long forgotten New Wave pop bands. |
ITEM: Jim Morrison As You've Never Seen Him Before
In 1964 before packing it in a moving to LA, Jim Morrison was a student and Florida State University. As part of a class project, Jim participated in this Leave It To Beaveresque public service announcement film, as an actor. |
Ha - look at the way the lizard king opens his mail.
Head ****ed and hips swinging even as a teenage square. |
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