Gavin B.'s Warehouse of Songs
 

Warehouse of Songs is a journal devoted to the songs that have stayed in my life over the years, even after I've played them relentlessly on my radio shows, at club gigs, on my home stereo and on my Zune MP3 player. Between my collection of vinyl albums, compact discs and MP3 files, I estimate that my collection music exceeds over 300,000 songs.

Of all those songs, only about 2000 to 3000 songs have been durable enough to become "perennials" in my music collection. Perennials are those songs that endure as favorites of mine year after year. If any song can withstand six months of the gratuitous non-stop play I give to my current favorite songs, then it is likely to be on my list of perennials.

Each journal post will be devoted to a single song and will include a short bio of the artist and the history of the song including whatever information I can find about the songwriter, session musicians and the producer. Since my musical taste runs the gamut of nearly every musical genre, I'm hoping there will be something for everyone in this journal.

Comments are encouraged even from those readers who think my taste in music is atrocious. I will probably do several daily posts during the first week of the blog to get the ball rolling and fall into a pattern of 3 to 5 posts a week once the journal begins to develop a reader response.

Looking forward to it Gavin!

Yay! Another new journal! 2013 is off to a great start!
Welcome, Gavin! You shall be immortalised in this weekend's journal update post.
:thumb:

Song Title:Waterloo Sunset
Recorded by The Kinks
Composed by Ray Davies
Released in 1967
Song first appeared on the album Something Else

http://o.scdn.co/300/c7dad83730378aa...65d5acb043db42

I can't think of a better way to begin a journal of my favorite songs than selecting a Ray Davies song as my first journal entry. Ray Davies is the poet laureate of British pop. The Kinks, weren't as boldly innovative as the Beatles but Ray Davies was arguably a better songwriter than the Lennon/McCartney team. The Kinks carved out their own unique identity early in the British Invasion era by Ray Davies' wry humor and his talent for writing biting satirical songs about life in English society in the waning years of the British Empire.

Nothing was was sacred for Ray Davies... A Well Respected Man took a poke at the hypocrisy of the British middle class, Sunny Afternoon was a jab at the decadence of Britain's aristocratic class, Dedicated Follower of Fashion targeted the fashion icons of Carnaby Street and Victoria was a profane and rollicking condemnation of Queen Victoria and her imperialistic values.

Needless to say, most Americans didn't get it. Ray Davies songs were about the social injustices of the rigid English class system and the decline of the British empire, topics which most Americans were completely ignorant of.

To make matter worse, Kinks were banned from touring the United States for four years at the conclusion of their tour in the summer of 1965. No official reason for the ban was ever given but their drunken and rowdy onstage behavior offended many well connected people in the music business back then. The Kinks weren't lovable and cuddly teddy bears like the Beatles in their live performances. The Kinks were best selling rock stars in the UK but the Kinks never got a foothold in the lucrative American music market.

Waterloo Sunset is look at the more tender side of Ray Davies. It's so well written that upon first listening to it, the song already has a familiar ring to it. The lyrics of Waterloo Sunset such a graceful fit with the music it's about as close to perfect as a pop song can get. The somber mood of the music and Davies vocal is at odds with his claim that he "is in paradise" whenever he gazes at the sunset over Waterloo Station.

AMG called Waterloo Sunset the most beautiful song of the rock era. I agree with that assessment and still get teary eyed listening to it some 45 years after it's initial release.

The story behind Waterloo Sunset has been obsessed upon by Kinks fans for years. Davies' boyhood home on Muswell Hill had a view overlooking the Waterloo Station and the song may be a tribute to his fond childhood memory of watching the sun set over the Waterloo Station. But there's usually more going on in the subtext of Ray Davies' song lyrics than a simple act of story telling. There are layers of meanings in most of Davies' songs and Waterloo Sunset is probably no exception.

One interpretation: Ray Davies was a sickly child who spent several months in a London children's hospital facing the Waterloo Station & at one point Davies said the "Julie and Terry" in the song were his sister and her boyfriend. The idea for the song came from Davies observing the two young lovers from his hospital room window as they walked toward the Waterloo Station hand and hand after a visit with him. That may account for the melancholy mood of the song.

However Julie and Terry are not the names of Ray Davies' sister and her fiance, who she eventually married, but Davies did know a couple with the names of Julie and Terry... read on.

There's also an insider account that supposedly unmasks the hidden identity of the Julie and Terry characters in the song. Ray Davies was friends with actress Julie Christie and actor Terrance Stamp. At the time Waterloo Sunset was written, Christie and Stamp were having an extra marital relationship unknown to nearly everyone except a handful of close friends including Ray Davies. Waterloo Sunset may be Davies' own reflections on the Julie and Terry's doomed love affair which fell apart shortly before the release of Waterloo Sunset. Davies may have been cleverly naming the romantic couple but hiding their romantic tryst in plain sight within a song praising the beauty of the sunsets over Waterloo Station. It was years after the song was released that people began to the connect Julie Christie and Terrance Stamp to the romantic couple meeting on Friday nights at Waterloo Station as the sun set over London town.

Over the years Davies has changed his story on his source of inspiration for Waterloo Sunset and has insinuated that any of the stories may or may not be true.

Waterloo Sunset lyrics

Dirty old river, must you keep rolling
Flowing into the night
People so busy, makes me feel dizzy
Taxi light shines so bright
But I don't need no friends
As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset
I am in paradise

Every day I look at the world from my window
But chilly, chilly is the evening time
Waterloo sunsets fine

Terry meets Julie, waterloo station
Every friday night
But I am so lazy, don't want to wander
I stay at home at night
But I don't feel afraid
As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset
I am in paradise

Every day I look at the world from my window
But chilly, chilly is the evening time
Waterloo sunsets fine

Millions of people swarming like flies round Waterloo Underground
But Terry and Julie cross over the river
Where they feel safe and sound
And they don't need no friends
As long as they gaze on Waterloo sunset
They are in paradise

Waterloo sunsets fine

Song Title: At Home He's A Tourist
Recorded by Gang of Four
Composed by Gang of Four
Released in 1979
Song first appeared as a 7" single release in the United States

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_jW-QMl4Sgl...s320/front.jpg

The 1979 release of Gang of Four's first album was hugely anticipated event by punk music fans both in the UK and the USA. Even without an album release, the music press in the United States was abuzz with stories of Go4's explosive live shows in venues around the UK. The release of their first American single, At Home He's A Tourist, was a tantalizing preview of their groundbreaking album, Entertainment which was released later in 1979.

In 1979 there was no generic category called post-punk. It wasn't until the mid-1980s that music critics began using post-punk as a descriptor for the numerous punk influenced bands that emerged in the wake of the punk revolution of 1977, led by the Sex Pistols.

In hindsight, three albums released in 1979: Metal Box by Public Image Ltd.; Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division and Entertainment by Gang of Four were the trio of albums that were the foundation of post-punk music genre. Public Image, Gang of Four and Joy Division maintained the punk attitude of rebellion but their music went beyond the basic high decibel rock of punk and explored more exotic musical realms like dub music, reggae, funk, electronic music, and avant garde.

Gang of Four hailed from the northern town of Leeds and were students at Leeds University. Vocalist Jonathan King and guitarist Andy Gill were profoundly influenced by Situationist International a group of European Marxist internationalists who were one of the moving forces behind the Paris revolts of 1968, an event that created a full scale leadership crisis in the French government.

Gang of Four songs had anti-consumerist, anti-imperialist and feminist themes. Their music was loud,confrontational and powered by chugging funk rhythms and crashing dub effects. Andy Gill called his style of playing "anti-guitar." Gill developed a highly innovative technique of guitar playing using choppy, dissonant, atonal chord patterns which often erupted into squalls of feedback and crashing waves of echoing reverb.

The 1980 performance of At Home He's A Tourist at the Ritz in New York City, I've embedded below is a good example of their electrifying on-stage chemistry. I saw Gang of Four a half a dozen times between 1980 and 1992 and they remain the best live rock band I've ever heard. Gang of Four has periodically reunited to tour since their heyday and I'm told they're still capable of blowing the roof off the joint. 57 year old Andy Gill is talking about taking Gang of Four out for one last tour before retiring from touring.

At Home He's A Tourist lyrics

At home he feels like a tourist
At home he feels like a tourist
He fills his head with culture
He gives himself an ulcer
He fills his head with culture
He gives himself an ulcer

Down on the disco floor
They make their profits
From the things they sell
To help you cover
And the rubbers you hide
In your top left pocket

At home she's looking for interest
At home she's looking for interest
She said she was ambitious
So she accepts the process
She said she was ambitious
So she accepts the process

Down on the disco floor
They make their profits
From the things they sell
To help you cob off
And the rubbers you hide
In your top left pocket

Two steps forward
(Six steps back)
(Six steps back)
(Six steps back)
(Six steps back)

Small steps for him
(Big jump for me)
(Big jump for me)
(Big jump for me)
(Big jump for me)

Two steps forward
(Six steps back)
(Six steps back)
(Six steps back)
(Six steps back)

Small steps for him
(Big jump for me)
(Big jump for me)
(Big jump for me)
(Big jump for me)

At home she feels like a tourist
At home she feels like a tourist
She fills her head with culture
She gives herself an ulcer
Why make yourself so anxious?
You give yourself an ulcer

Song Title: Cry Me A River
Recorded by Julie London
Composed by Arthur Hamilton
Released in 1955
First appeared on the album Julie Is My Name on the Liberty label

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/...500_AA280_.jpg

Julie London was sultry lounge singer with a deep smoky voice who was at the peak of her popularity for a 10 year period between 1955 & 1965. It's hard not to notice that Ms. London was a stunningly gorgeous, statuesque redhead and she became the epitome of female sexuality during the "Mad Men" era of Dwight Eisenhower, communist witch hunts and three Martini lunches.

Ms. London didn't have the vocal range of Ella Fitzgerald but she developed her own trademark singing style which was restrained and elegant. Her lingering vocal phrases created a mood of erotic tension that raised more than a few eyebrows... It was an era when squeaky clean, wholesome singers like Doris Day and Patti Page were the best selling female recording artists.

Julie London was a minimalist who preferred singing with a trio or a quartet. She generally avoided overblown string and brass arrangements and ensembles of chorus singers who frequently intruded on the simple beauty of song. Some the best performances of jazz vocalists in the Fifties and Sixties were marred by overdubbed string arrangements and insipid chorus singers.

Cry Me A River became Julie London's signature song and I've always been mesmerized by her effortless, almost lazy vocal in the song. It's the perfect kiss-off song. Julie's vocal style tells us she's cried a river over this guy in the past and she won't be bothered with making the effort to send him off with an emotional farewell.

http://tnation.t-nation.com/forum_im...ca_RABBIT2.jpg

Julie London's persona was the inspiration for the animated character, Jessica Rabbit, the curvaceous nightclub singer in the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Jessica Rabbit was voiced by actress Kathleen Turner.

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG...er=allrovi.com


The composer of Cry Me a River was Arthur Hamilton who was primarily a soundtrack composer. Hamilton included Julie London's version of Cry Me a River in his soundtrack for the 1956 rock and roll film The Girl Can't Help It with Jayne Mansfield. Julie appears in the film singing the song, along with some historic film performances by first generation rockers like Little Richard, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, Eddie Cochran and Fats Domino. I first became intrigued with Julie London when I saw her hypnotic performance of Cry Me A River in The Girl Can't Help It.

Julie's vintage 1955 version of Cry Me a River has more recently appeared on the soundtrack of the 2005 cult movie V for Vendetta, starring Natalie Portman.


Cry Me A River lyrics

Now you say you're lonely,
You cry the whole night through.
Well you can cry me a river,
Cry me a river,
I cried a river over you.

Now you say you're sorry,
For being so untrue.
Well you can cry me a river,
Cry me a river,
I cried a river over you.

You drove me, nearly drove me,
Out of my head;
While you never she'd a tear.

Remember, I remember,
All that you said;
Told me love was too plebian,
Told me you were through with me

And Now you say you love me,
Well, just to prove you do,
Come on and cry me a river,
Cry me a river,

I cried a river over you x4

Title: Wicked Game
Recorded by Heather Nova
Composer: Chris Isaak
Date of Release: August 30, 2005

http://www.geocities.ws/kylieimpossi...ss/redbird.jpg

For a fleeting moment in the 90's, Heather Nova was the darling of the indie pop world... but by the year 2000, Heather's choice of album material was uneven and she began missing the mark more often than hitting it, resulting in a loss of a good part of her audience.

Heather Nova's music was hard to fit into any neat musical category. As the 90s progressed she seemed torn between the choices of: 1) remaining a successful but marginalized indie rock star, 2) transforming herself into a mainstream pop diva or; 3) developing a new following within the growing audience for roots music. It's the same sort of self identity dilemma that has derailed Liz Phair's formerly promising musical career every since she released her uncompromising classic indie rock album, Exit in Guyville in 1993.

For the past decade, both Heather Nova's and Liz Phair's musical careers have been withering away in the limbo land of almost-famous, once-ago-promising alternative musicians. Since their own respective heydays in 90's, both Nova & Phair have been constantly falling one step sort of successfully reinventing themselves in a manner that will jump start their stalled musical careers.

By 2005, Nova's record label Sony International made the business decision to release her new album Red Bird in the UK only, which resulted further depletion of her diminishing fan base. It's unfortunate Red Bird was never released in the United States. It's probably the most consistent album of her career and has become a musical treasure to the small cult of fans who still love her music.

The track on Red Bird that is the most riveting is her gorgeous rendition of the Chris Isaak song Wicked Game. Wicked Game has been covered by a legion of artists since Isaak released it in 1989, but no version has come close to his original recording, except for Heather Nova's. With her operatic vocal range and smoldering passion, Heather Nova actually trumps Chris Isaak on his own signature song.

It's not only Nova's singing... I've listened to the Isaak & Nova versions back to back on several occasions and the session players on the Nova version play the backing track with far more finesse and elegance that Chris Isaak's band. I'm not dissing Chris Isaak but Heather Nova deserves to enjoy her moment in the sun for recording this sublime rendition of Wicked Game.

http://assets.rollingstone.com/asset...in-shields.jpg
A recent photo of notorious rock n' roll recluse Kevin Shields.
Is it just me or does Shields have a more than a passing resemblance to another guitar god, Jimmy Page?

Hey Kevin! What Took You So Long?

The 22 year wait for My Bloody Valentine's new album is over and most folks agree it was worth the wait. I hope the wait for the next album isn't two decades because I'll be too old, too deaf and probably dead and buried by then.

Three of the nine songs have more of a dream pop orientation than shoe gaze noise rock sound of Loveless. The embedded song below almost sounds like an outake from a mid 80s Cocteau Twins album.



Here's some of my observations on Kevin Shields unorthodox guitar playing and how he gets that thick, off kilter, liquid guitar sound that has become his trademark style over the years.

I've always thought that Cocteau Twins guitarist Robin Guthrie and Kevin Shields have been mutually influenced by the other's style of guitar playing. In the early Eighties Robin Guthrie was the pioneering guitarist who introduced a radical new approach to guitar playing that used lush thick chords played through a digital sound processor to create an impressionistic palette of strange and beautiful guitar sounds.

In 1988 Kevin Shields raised the sonic sound bar up a few notches with the release of My Bloody Valentine's second album Isn't Anything . Isn't Anything overlooked album and it was a harbinger of their 1991 magnum opus, Loveless. Around the time when Isn't Anything was released, I heard the term shoegazing creep into the urban hipster vocabulary to describe MBV and a handful of like minded purveyors of dream pop. Three years later, in 1994, the shoegaze descriptor had became a standard genre category to describe a wide range of bands who usually played in downtempo or midtempo time signatures including: The Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Mazzy Star, Galaxie 500, Slowdive, Ride, & Low.

There's more than a touch of the Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie in Kevin's studio obsessiveness. "In attitude toward sound, yes," Kevin once said. "But not in approach. The approach for me is very simple, minimal effects, whereas the Cocteau Twins is based on the idea of using effects as instruments. I think Robin Guthrie is quite good, by the way." Guthrie relied on studio overdubbing and pre-recorded loops in live shows to get that thickly layered guitar sound with the Cocteau Twins. He refined it later on in his solo albums.

Shield's guitar playing sounds like it's overlaid with dozens of overdubs but in reality Shields use very few overdubs.

The bigness of his guitar sound comes from the fact that Shields often plays in open tunings which leaves a lot of room to play odd variations of a chord. What people mistake as lots of guitar overdubs are just varied inversions of the chords. Those inverted chords along with Shield's use the tremolo arm (aka "whammy bar") on his guitar are a big part of his trademark wall of guitars sound.

The one effect Shields uses quite often is reverse reverb which he processes through on a Yamaha SPX90 digital processor. SPX90 inverts a normal reverb envelope without making the notes backwards.

Shields spends hours adjusting his guitar & amplifier settings prior to a gig or recording session. If you've ever seen him play live, you may have noticed he uses about 15 or 20 floor pedals to alter the tone of his guitar with his processor. Shields: "There are certain settings I use that, along with the way I have the tone of the guitar set up, create a totally melted sort of liquid sound."

The reason why so many people try bit ultimately fail to imitate Shield's guitar sound, is his esoteric ritual of setting up his guitar and amp sound is a trade secret known only to him. On top of that, most rock guitarists have been trained to play in standard tuning and playing in open chord tunings has only been mastered by a handful of rock guitarists like Shields, Guthrie and Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis.

It's a big challenge for a rock guitarist who's been trained to play guitar in standard tuning to drop everything to learn the art of playing in open tunings, which requires the mastery of a completely different skills set. It's like re-learning to play guitar all over again. When Jeff Beck decided to master jazz guitar in the early 70s, the skills set was so different, he said couldn't play any of his previous rock & roll material from the Yardbirds because of the demands of learning the jazz guitar discipline. Beck didn't play a single blues song or Yardbirds song during the four year incubation period when he reinvented his entire approach to guitar playing. My point is once you've become a fully developed guitarist in the standard E-G-A-D-B-E six string tuning, it's a daunting task to drop everything and relearn guitar playing in open chord tunings.

A few blues players like the late great Duane Allman, Johnny Winter and Butch Trucks play with equal proficiency in standard and open tuning, mostly because playing slide guitar in the old fashioned delta bottleneck style requires a mastery of open tunings. The most notable open tuning guitarists Ry Cooder, John Fahey and Joni Mitchell all have folk music backgrounds. Prior to emergence of Robin Guthrie & Kevin Shields, very few rock guitarists played in open tunings.

Keith Richard sometimes uses an eccentric five string open tuning (G-D-G-B-D) in which he removes the sixth string from a vintage 1953 Blonde Fender Telecaster he uses only for playing in his self taught variation of Open G tuning.

Shields' main instrument is a Fender Jazzmaster guitar known for the note bending capabilities of it's whammy bar. He sometimes uses a Fender Jaguar which is slightly different in tone and playing feel from the Jazzmaster.

Shields has an elaborate system of miking his amplifiers. When I saw him live, he had 2 Marshall JMC800 amps, one of which had a standard single amplifier microphone but the other half-stack of amps had about 9 microphones aimed at the amp from numerous angles. His final piece of equipment is the Yamaha SPX processor which he uses to create all of those strange processed guitar sounds like vibrato, reverb, reverse reverb, sound delays, pitch modulation, sound compression and echoing.

I once watched a MBV sound check & it's hard to tell exactly what Shields is up to when he sets up his equipment but he's completely hands-on and doesn't allow the sound person to set up anything. I don't think Shields is using this painstaking ritual of setting up to conceal his trade secrets... He's simply an uncompromising perfectionist who has to personally adjust each and every setting according to the size of the venue, wall/ceiling & floor acoustics, the varying angles of the stage perimeters and probably even for the precise room temperature of the venue.

The Future of Rock & Roll?

http://static.nme.com/images/gallery...pes1080113.jpg
Can the high voltage retro-rock band the Strypes live up to the hype?

The most talked about band without an album release is the Strypes, a quartet from Cavan Ireland who play rhythm and blues with the same passion and ferocity as the best of the British Invasion groups of the early Sixties. The band formed in 2011 and the oldest member of Strypes is a mere child of 16 years.

Sir Elton John was responsible for hooking the Strypes up with legendary music producer Chris Thomas who has also produced the Beatles' iconic White Album and the Sex Pistols' explosive debut album Never Mind the Bullocks, Here's the Sex Pistols.

The public anticipation of the Strypes' debut album hasn't been this fierce since pre-release hoopla surrounding the 2001 release of the Stroke's first album Is This It... which is a good or bad thing, depending on how much you like the Strokes.

Every year, there are one or two bands are hyped by music industry opinion makers as "the next big thing" in rock music but the "next big thing" only happens once in a generation. The Beatles, the Sex Pistols, and Nirvana were perhaps the only bands in rock & roll history who delivered on the hype of being dubbed as the next big transformational rock band. It's not very often that a zeitgeist rock band opens the hidden door and creates a brand new musical paradigm changes everything.

The Strypes sound like the Rolling Stones circa 1965-66, when the Stones were still playing undiluted R&B on albums like the Rolling Stones Now!, Out of Our Heads & December's Children. The Styrpes embrace a retrograde Carnaby Street mod fashion look, complete with suave art school student haircuts popularized by the Beatles and the Stones.

The true believers are proclaiming the Strypes as the future of rock and roll. . I'm a bit skeptical because I've only heard their cover versions of classic R&B songs, which are powerful but their entire British Invasion shtick is a bit derivative. I still have egg on my face for proclaiming the Hives as the future of rock & roll back in 1997 and since then I've stopped making pronouncements about "next big thing" bands.

I'll wait until their much anticipated album is released later in the spring to render a verdict. I actually got an email from the Stypes' singer Ross Farrelly following up on a YouTube comment I made. Farrelly promised that the spring debut will be almost all original material and completely different from numerous R&B cover songs they've posted on YouTube over the past year. He seemed like a nice young Irish lad.

The fact that Farrelly took the time to send me an email is astounding. Farrelly is the only musician who ever sent me an unsolicited email in response to one of my internet forum postings.

Embedded is the Strypes' high voltage rendition of the Bo Diddley classic, You Can't Judge a Book by It's Cover. Whadda ya think?

http://thequeenmadre.files.wordpress..._one.jpg?w=500
Shingai Shoniwa of the Noisettes

The UK indie rock band the Noisettes have barely registered a blip on the radar screen in the United States but they're known to Brits from their extensive touring and television appearances. On August 5 2012, the Noisettes played to a huge audience in Hyde Park in Central London in celebration of their latest album Contact.

The front person for the Noisettes is Shingai Shoniwa, a British national of Zimbabwean descent. She's a talented vocalist and songwriter who has been compared to Chaka Kahn, Deborah Harry, Neneh Cherry, Polly Styrene, Santigold and loose-leaf binders full of other female vocalists. Rolling Stone bizarrely proclaimed, "Shoniwa is a living, breathing manifestation of the rock & roll spirit, with a voice that is equal parts Iggy Pop and Billie Holiday." Really?

In reality Shingai Shoniwa is like none of the above performers and her musical influences are so diverse, it's a challenge to place her or her music within any neatly defined category. The Noisettes are a record company's marketing nightmare because their music is a hybrid of styles.

On the song Scratch Your Name from their 2007 debut album, What's the Time Mr. Wolf?, the Noisettes play with the passion and fervor of a first generation female punk band like X-Ray Spex or Essential Logic.



Never Forget from the their 2009 album, Wild Young Hearts has more of a conventional R&B feel to it. It's a song that shares the musical territory as Sixties era blue eyed soul singers like Sandie Shaw, Dusty Springfield or Lulu.



That Girl from the Noisettes latest album, Contact (2012) is sounds like it's straight from the Brill Building songbook as performed by early Sixties girl groups like the Ronettes, the Chiffons and the Dixie Cups.

Someone sent me a Noisettes track a few years ago, and I really loved it. At the time I had a hard time finding anything else to listen to online though. Really glad to see this post! I'm listening to them on Spotify now. "Scratch Your Name" is fab.

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG...er=allrovi.com
The cover of Richard Thompson's latest album, Electric

Richard Thompson Goes Electric (Again)

Back in his days with the groundbreaking British folk rock group, Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson was an electric guitar player whose technical skills were frequently compared to other UK guitar gods like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck & Jimmy Page.

Like Clapton, during his Fairport years, Thompson played a vintage 1959 Fender Stratocaster to get a big fat blues sound. Stratocaster guitars were the choice of aspiring guitar gods of the late Sixties.

In his post-Fairport albums of the 70s & 80s, Richard began playing a baby blue customized guitar designed & built by Ferrington Guitars. The so-called Ferrigtoncaster mimicked the menacing sound of a vintage Stratocaster, but also had 3 different customized pick-ups that allowed Thompson to get an infinite variety of tones from his guitar.

http://www.richardthompson-music.com...gtoncaster.jpg
Thompson with his custom designed Ferrington guitar

In the early 90s Thompson began writing and playing more songs intended to be played on acoustic guitar and played most of his songs on a Lowden L32C acoustic guitar. Those fans of Thompson's electric guitar playing yearned for the glory days when Thompson was a guitar god. In reality, Thompson was considered the greatest traditional folk guitarist in the UK, but mastery of the acoustic guitar is not enough to maintain one's status as a guitar god in the world of rock music.

After nearly two decades of mostly playing traditional Celtic folk music, to the delight of his fans, Thompson has returned with an album of songs that are played on electric guitar with a rock music band. There are a couple of ballads played on acoustic guitar, but for the most part Thompson has returned to the rip-roaring electric guitar playing of his Fairport Convention days on his new album, Electric.

Since Electric is a brand new album released on Feb. 11, I was only able to find one song from the album posted on YouTube, but it's a good one. The dark and cynical song Stuck on the Treadmill is a tour de force of Thompson's fiery electric guitar playing skills. The tonal range of his customized Farrington electric guitar is breathtaking.

http://images.theage.com.au/2012/08/...70-620x349.jpg
The Go-Betweens: Arguably Australia's greatest pop band

AMG writes: I have to confess that I missed most of the Go-Betweens greatest moments in the early and mid Eighties while I was covering reggae music as a journalist and spending large amounts of time in Jamaica. Despite my focus on reggae music, I managed to purchase their masterpiece of pop classicism 16 Lovers Lane when it was released in 1988. 11 years later, I purchased their anthology Bella Vista Terrace which was a good representative sampling of their six pre-Beggar's Banquet albums recorded between 1981 & 1988. Those six Go-Between albums are frequently out of issue in the United States.

Even with with the purchase of those two albums, I remained largely ignorant of the full scope of the Go-Between's talents. Nearly every album they recorded over their 15 year association was a jewel. They made every song on every album count and recorded very few sub-par album filler tracks.

Each Go-Betweens album was a cycle of songs threaded together by a common thematic link. We used to call them "concept albums", back in the days when the album format was elevated as a new musical art form.

Following the punk revolution of 1976, concept albums fell out of grace. A new guard of music critics belittled concept albums as pretentious artifacts from the Mesozoic Age of Rock, recorded by self indulgent arena bands. Ironically, two of the greatest albums of the punk era, Never Mind the Bullocks: Here's the Sex Pistols & London Calling by the Clash, were both concept albums heralding the new world order of the punk rock insurgency.

Last fall I came across a flawless set of six of those early groundbreaking Go-Between albums in the vinyl bin of a local flea market & have spent most of this winter getting acquainted with the wonders of the Go-Betweens' musical legacy. The six albums were priced at $6 apiece, but the dealer sold me the entire set of six for $25, blissfully unaware of the each one of those mint condition Go-Betweens albums had a value of $25 apiece in the vinyl music collecting marketplace. Forgive me for boasting about the musical treasures I've found hidden in plain sight at flea markets.

As a point of reference, the Go-Betweens' primary songwriters Robert Forster & Grant McLennon were influenced by the sparse minimalist pop music of the Velvet Underground, the lyrical and enigmatic love songs of Leonard Cohen, as well the music of some of their contemporary music peers in the UK post punk scene of the early Eighties like the Cure, the Smiths, & Echo & the Bunnymen.

The Go-Betweens officially disbanded in 1989, but reunited in the post-millennium decade to record three additional well received albums. Here is the discography of the Go-Betweens' nine studio albums from 1981 until 2005. I've also added the AMG's rating of each album based on their 5 star ranking system. Additionally I've added my own favorite recommended songs from each of the eight Go-Between albums I've purchased and listened to over the winter.

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG...er=allrovi.com
1981- Send Me a Lullybye (rated 2.5 stars out of 5 stars)
Recommended Songs: None, I've been unable to find a copy of this album.

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG...er=allrovi.com
1983- Before Hollywood (rated 4.5 stars out of 5)
Recommended Songs: Dusty in Here; Cattle and Cane; That Way.

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG...er=allrovi.com
1984- Spring Hill Fair (rated 4 stars out 5)
Recommended Songs: Bachelor Kisses; Part Company; Draining the Pool for You.

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG...er=allrovi.com
1986- Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express (rated 4.5 stars out of 5)
Recommended Songs: Spring Rain; Head Full of Steam, Apology Accepted.

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG...er=allrovi.com
1987- Tallulah (rated 3.5 stars out of 5)
Recommended Songs: Right Here; The House that Jack Kerouac Built; Bye Bye Pride.

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG...er=allrovi.com
1988- 16 Lover's Lane (rated 5 stars out 5)
Recommended Songs: Love Goes On!; Quiet Heart; Streets of Your Town.

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG...er=allrovi.com
2000- The Friends of Rachel Worth (rated 3.5 stars out of 5)
Recommended Songs: Spirit ; Going Blind; He Lives My Life.

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG...er=allrovi.com
2003- Bright Yellow Bright Orange (rated 4 stars out of 5)
Recommended Songs: Caroline and I; Crooked Lines; Old Mexico.

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG...er=allrovi.com
[FONT="Garamond"]2005- Oceans Apart (rated 4 stars out of 5)
Recommended Songs: Here Comes a City; The Statue; Lavender; No Reason to Cry.

http://tinyways.com/images/jolie_holland.jpg
Neo-traditionalist Jolie Holland in concert performance

Jolie Holland was born and raised in Houston Texas who taught herself to play piano, guitar, accordion & violin. By her mid-teens, she left home and began working as a travelling musician. She eventually landed in San Francisco in the mid-Nineties where she became a popular performer in music clubs & cafes.

Around 2000, Holland moved to Vancouver British Columbia & formed the all female neo-traditionalist folk band the Be Good Tanyas with three promising Canadian musicians, Samantha Parton, Frazey Ford & Trish Klein.

Soon after the release of their 2001 debut album, Blue Horse, Holland once again got the urge to travel. She left the Be Good Tanyas before the ink on the rave reviews for Blue Horse had dried and she moved back to San Francisco where she produced a series of stark minimalist low-fi demo recordings that made the rounds & eventually caught the ear of the legendary Tom Waits who signed her on his own Anti record label and Waits became her career mentor & adviser.

Jolie Holland's music is a skillful blend of blues, jazz, folk, gospel, Tex-Mex border music & popular standards. Her approach is from a minimalist, post modernist perspective using low-fi production techniques. Many of her songs sound like they were recorded using a vintage two track analog high-fidelity tape deck, the kind of equipment by Smithsonian Folkways label used to make field recordings of rediscovered delta blues artists in the late 50s and early 60s.

Jolie Holland's biggest musical asset is her smoky voice and her innate gift for vocal phrasing which is reminiscent of the languid phrasing of the great jazz songbird, Billie Holiday. Like Billie Holiday, Jolie Holland's singing phrases often linger behind the tempo of the song to make her singing sound intimate and conversational.

Like Billie Holiday, Jolie Holland doesn't have the range of many modern day pop music divas, but her strength as a singers rests on the flawless timing of her vocal phrasing. As Sinatra once put it, "A singer with a four octave range is still a singer, but a singer with a two octave range who has mastered the art of phrasing is a vocal stylist."

Her vocal rendition of Sasha on her 2004 album Escondida is a good example of Jolie Holland's talent for vocal phrasing.



On another song from Escondida, Holland commits an act of musical blasphemy... She subversively transforms the revered Christian fundamentalist gospel anthem Give Me That Old Time Religion into a New Orleans jazz funeral dirge praising the wonders of that old fashioned opiate pain-killer morphine.



Since 2003, Jolie Holland has produced five studio albums & in 2008 she relocated to New Orleans where she cobbled together a home studio.

In January 2013, Jolie spent every Sunday evening woodshedding new material for an new album before audiences in a small club in Brooklyn. The songs are largely improvised and she's backed by a seven piece jazz ensemble, the largest band she's ever worked with.

Jolie will be returning to the West Coast in late February to perform in a trio with with Carey Lamprecht and Keith Cary. Jolie emailed me a copy of her concert schedule for her West Coast tour.

Jolie Holland Tour Schedule February/March 2013
[FONT="Garamond"]2/21 Davis, CA – Odd Fellows Hall
2/22 Sebastopol, CA – Hopmonk Tavern
2/23 Oakland, CA – The New Parish
2/24 San Fran – Swedish American Hall (NoisePop 2012)
2/26 Santa Cruz, CA – The Crepe Place
2/27 Seaside, CA – Alternative Cafe
3/4 LA, CA – Bootleg Theater

Coming tomorrow: The Atlantic Records Story

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...soul-music.jpg

History of Soul Series

The Atlantic Records Story

Many lovers of 60s soul music believe the big rivalry in R&B music recording & production were Motown Records in Detroit Michigan & Stax Records in Memphis Tennessee.

But the biggest fish in the soul music pond was Atlantic/Atco Records based in New York City. Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler began signing R&B black artists in 1952 and it was Wexler himself who coined the term "rhythm & blues." Among the earliest Atlantic recording artists were Solomon Burke, The Coasters, The Drifters & Big Joe Turner.

Atlantic records had a reputation for treating their artists, studio musicians, sound engineers and even the front office switchboard operator with respect and paying every employee a fair wage. In an era when recording artists most commonly complained about little or no royalty payments, Atlantic artists were given a fair cut of their royalty payments in a timely manner. "Atlantic even instituted an affirmative action program in 1952, in an era where Jim Crow was the law of the land and the only jobs for black folks in most corporate offices were sweeping the floors & cleaning the toilets.

From 1961 until 1968 Alantic/Atco & Stax records were in a business partnership, and the was some movement of artists from Atlantic to Stax & vice versa.

Otis Redding actually recorded most of his albums on the Volt Records label which was a subsidiary of Stax. Volt was created as a result of the newly formed partnership with Atlantic/Atco. Volt Records was created primarily to accommodate Stax's biggest star, Otis Redding. At the time, the strict rules on payola only allowed a radio station to have two songs in their play rotation by any one given label, so Volt was created as a subsidiary label so the prolific Mr. Redding always had a song in rotation at the radio stations. Atlantic Records created Atco Records for the same purpose.


Atlantic Records was founded in 1947 in New York City by Ahmet Ertegun. Ahmet was the son of Turkish immigrants and a fanatical fan of American jazz and rhytym & blues. In 1944 Ahmet's parents moved back to Turket but Ahmet remained in the USA doing graduate studies at Georgetown University but in reality Entegun was spending most of his time following his musical passion and attempting to form a startup label to record black music artists he idolized.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmast...c_essay_01.jpg
A dapper looking Ahmet Ertegun posed for this 1950 photo

According to Ertegun biographers Dorothy Wade & Justine Picardie, The label's original office in the Ritz Hotel, Manhattan proved too expensive so they relocated to an $85 per month room in the Hotel Jefferson. In the early fifties Atlantic moved from the Hotel Jefferson to offices at 301 West 54th St and then to its best-known home at 356 West 56th St.

At first Atlantic was primarily devoted to recording modern jazz musicians like John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Pepper & James Moody but with the growing influence of producer Jerry Wexler & sound engineer Tom Dowd, Atlantic became the first label to market black rhythm & blues music to a white audience. Prior to WWII black musicians were ghettoized on race labels which marketed 78 rpm singles of jazz and blues music almost exclusively to black audiences. [/FONT]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...ethaampRay.jpg
For most of the '60s & '70s Aretha Franklin & Ray Charles were Atlantic Records reigning superstars.

Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin were Atlantic Records premier R&B artists. Ray Charles' crossed over to a large white audience of mostly jazz and blues fans in the early Sixties but Aretha was the first Atlantic R&B artist to break through to large white cross-over audience when her single Respect became a million selling #1 hit. It was three years after the Supremes became the first Motown group to cross over to a large white audience when their 1964 single Where Did Our Love Go. Most think it took Aretha longer to capture a large cross-over audience because it took whites a few years to acclimate their ears to the raw power of her gospel trained singing voice.

Roster of Atlantic/Atco Soul Music Artists

Aretha Franklin

Recommended Recordings

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...oveYou1967.jpg
I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You (1967)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...dySoul1968.jpg
Lady Soul (1968)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...thaNow1968.jpg
Aretha Today (1968)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...ection2007.jpg
The Definitive Soul Collection (2007)

Aretha was such a prolific artist that it's impossible to the evaluate the depth of her music with single anthology collection. The trilogy of 1967-1968 albums listed above are her most critically acclaimed, but only a small three of the 29 albums she made up until the rising popularity of disco music put her recording career into a tailspin. The Definitive Soul Collection, a double cd collection of her career spanning hits is the best buy for a collection of her music.


Ray Charles

Recommended Recordings:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...harles1959.jpg
The Genius of Ray Charles (1959)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...nMusic1962.jpg
The Modern Sounds In Country and Western Music Vol I & II (1962)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...ection2009.png
Genius The Ultimate Ray Charles Collection (2009)

Like Aretha, the long span of Ray Charles' career can't be summarized by single anthology or a couple of his best album. The 1959 album The Genius of Ray Charles show how deeply Ray's music is rooted in jazz, blues, and gospel, in addition to R&B.

Ray's most critically acclaimed album was (believe or not) a collection of country & western standards. Modern Sounds In Country and Western Music was recorded in one session a first volume was released early in 1962 and the second volume came out later in the year. (Double albums were unheard of in pop music until the Dylan released Blonde on Blonde in June of 1966). The high quality sound fidelity on 19 songs on the Genius anthology simply floored me. In the mid 70's while still in my teens, one of the first albums I bought was titled Ray Charles' Greatest Hits on 8-track. It was the state of the art sound back then, but the pristine sound on the 2009 Genius anthology is light years away from that earlier 8 track collection.


Wilson Pickett

Recommended Recording:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...ection2006.jpg
The Definitive Soul Collection (2006)

Wilson Pickett was frequently compared to Otis Redding during his career and both men and both men sang a rawer Southern form of soul music of the kind played in Georgia, Mississippi & Alabama. Wilson also recorded his music at the Stax recording studio by special arrangement, so Wilson was working with the same group of Stax musicians on his sessions as Otis used. At the pinnacle of his career between 1965 and 1968, Wilson Pickett was keeping up with Aretha's non stop run of top ten singles. The 30 songs of Rhino's remastered Definitive Soul Collection an excellent anthology of Pickett's glory years at Atlantic.

=================

COMING TOMORROW! I'll finish up the Atlantic Records Story but posting album recommendation for many Atlantic's 2nd tier soul artists like The Drifters, The Coasters, Don Covay, and Sam & Dave."]

The Atlantic Story (continued)

Roster of 2nd Tier Atlantic Records Artists


Solomon Burke

Recommended Recording

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...ection2006.jpg
The Definitive Soul Collection (2006)

Solomon Burke recorded 32 singles with Atlantic in the early Sixties. Burke didn't have a large white crossover audience like Aretha or Ray Charles but his steady string of hits between 1965 and 1966 reportedly kept Atlantic Records financially solvent after Ray Charles signed on with ABC and prior to Aretha's breakthrough in 1967. The Definitive Soul collection cover most of those early '60s singles on Atlantic by Burke.

The Drifters

Recommended Recording

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...er-art2009.jpg
The Definitive Soul Collection (2009)

The Drifters were one of the earliest Atlantic R&B groups and it was R&B artist Clyde McPhatter who originally signed on. Amhet Ertegun was a fan of McPhatter and sought him out in 1952. McPhatter agreed to sign with Atlantic on the condition that he be allowed to form his own vocal group. McPhatter recruited a group of singers he knew from the Mount Lebanon gospel singers and dubbed them the Drifters. The Drifters weren't strictly a soul group. Many of their hits were written by some of the legendary Brill Building song writing teams like Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller, Carol King & Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil, and Doc Pomus & Mort Shuman. The broad appeal of such songs pop oriented songs as On Broadway, Up on The Roof, and Under the Boardwalk built a solid white crossover audience in an era when most black R&B artists only received airplay on black operated radio stations.

Joe Tex

Recommended Recording

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...er-art2000.jpg
Joe Tex 25 All Time Greatest Hits (2000)

Joe Tex was mostly unknown to white audiences for most of the '60s, but his record sales on the R&B charts equaled James Brown & Otis Redding. His real name was Joseph Arrington but picked up the "Joe Tex" nickname because his Texas origins.

Tex began as an artist on King Records where a lifelong rivalry between him and King Records label mate James Brown began. The feud began when Tex opened for James Brown at a show in Brown's hometown of Macon Georgia in 1963. Tex was a bit of clown with an offbeat sense of humor. In his final song, Tex parodied James Brown's finale routine by rolling around on the floor of the stage in a tattered cape screaming "Somebody help me get outta this cape." JB wasn't laughing. Brown retaliated by seeking out Tex at an after-hours party and shooting up the nightclub with a gun.

Throughout his entire career Tex accused Brown of stealing his song material, his dance moves and his microphone tricks. Indeed both singers had similar stage moves and similar raw bombastic funk driven musical sound. In 1968 Tex even challenged Brown to a singing contest for the title of Soul Brother #1. Brown declined the throw-down in a polite & dignified press released which enraged Tex even more.

Frustrated with living in the shadow of James Brown at King Records, Tex moved to Atlantic Records but he never broke through to a large white crossover audience, unlike his nemesis, James Brown.

The Coasters

Recommended Recording

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...onAtco2007.jpg
There's A Riot Going On

The Brill Building songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller took The Coasters under their wing in the mid-'50s and produced their first album on their own small indy label, Spark Records. The record was popular enough that Atlantic Records offered Leiber and Stoller an independent production contract to produce and record the Coasters for Atco Records an Atlantic subsidiary label. The Coasters biggest career asset was having Leiber & Stoller as their songwriters, producers & patrons. The team wrote six top ten hits for Elvis Presley including Jailhouse Rock & Loving You & also wrote several hit singles for producer Phil Specter's stable of girl groups at Philles Records. The Coasters' involvement with Leiber & Stoller provided a path for the Coasters to get crossover airplay on Top 40 radio.

Some of the Coasters' most popular songs like Charlie Brown & Yakety -Yak and Little Egypt had comic/novelty themes, but others like Poison Ivy and Bad Blood had more conventional themes. Some may find the four CD collection There's a Riot Going On to be a bigger dose of the Coasters than they can handle. For the more squeamish I recommend the single disc 2011 anthology Baby That Is Rock 'n' Roll. Baby That Is Rock 'n' Roll is mastered in the monaural format but the fidelity of the sound is outstanding.

Recommended Recordings by Other Significant Altantic/Atco Recording Artists

Sam & Dave
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...ste/211857.jpg
Soul Men (1967)

Ben E. King
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...nyKing1996.jpg
The Very Best of Ben E. King (1996)

Don Covay
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...er-art2000.jpg
Mercy/See-Saw (2000)

William Bell
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...faBell1967.jpg
Soul of A Bell (1966)

LaVern Baker
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...nbaker1991.jpg
Soul On Fire The Best of LaVern Baker (1991)

Clarence Carter
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...Carter1968.jpg
This Is Clarence Carter (1968)


=======================

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...rald-cover.jpg
Title: The Shocking Miss Emerald
Artist: Caro Emerald
Release Date: May 6, 2013

Caro Emerald is a Dutch born jazz singer who reminds me a bit of '50s era lounge torch singer Julie London. Her first single Back It Up unexpectedly became a European club hit when several deejays did drum 'n' bass remixes of the song. Her first album, Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor became a best seller in Europe, prompting AllMusic.com to dub her as "one of the most exciting new artists to emerge from the Netherlands in some time." With her second album, The Shocking Miss Emerald Emerald continues to play the same sort of crossover jazz that has become her trademark style.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...aroemerald.jpg

Most of Emerald's music sounds like lounge jazz from the '50s era heyday of vocalese, but her stylistic approach to the material has a post modern twist that appeals to a young audience. Emerald writes most of her own material in collaboration with French Canadian club deejay, producer & composer Vincent de Giorgio. The embedded YouTube video is a May 4th live performance of Caro Emerald performing Liquid Lunch in Montreal.

Two Recent Releases

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...00version2.jpg
Title: Trouble Will Find Me
Artist: The National
Release Date: May 21, 2013

Fans of the National will find plenty to like on the NYC based band's new album release, Trouble Will Find Me even if the sum of it's parts don't add up to the visceral power of previous three albums. Beginning with 2005's Alligator, to Boxer in 2007 and finally with High Violet in 2010, each new album followed a path to a higher evolutionary plateau in the National's musical development. Trouble Will Find Me places the band in a holding pattern and following the same highly successful musical template they used High Violet.

Trouble Will Find Me sounds like it could have been the bonus c.d. in a deluxe edition of High Violet, even so, I couldn't find a single weak song among the 13 tracks on Trouble Will Find Me. I rarely like half the songs on any given album release. With most artists, I cherry-pick the best three or four tracks on a new album because I know I'll never listen to remaining 6 to 8 tracks.

In this digital age where the MP3 single has become the standard currency of exchange, the National is among that rare breed of bands capable using the album format to make a compelling artistic statement. It's really worth your time and money to purchase the entire album with a band like the National because every song stands on it's own merits.

The embedded song Fireproof is a selection from the latest the National album Trouble Will Find Me.



===========================================


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...Light_0513.jpg

Title: Some Say I So I Say Light
Artist: Ghostpoet
Release Date: May 6, 2013

After being an early fan of rap music, I lost interest in the genre when the most talented and visionary hip hop artists were shouted down the growing army of self indulgent rappers who were devoted to boasting about their sexual prowess, dissing homosexuals, spewing out profane misogynist epithets, glorifying the thug life & expressing self hatred in manner similar to that of a histrionic juvenile offender with a borderline personality disorder. All of these malignant attitudes were expressed to the dubious cause of the rapper's artistic duty to "tell it like it is." Really?

By the mid-'90s most of first generation hip hop artist like Grandmaster Flash, the Furious Five, Run DMC, Funky 4 + 1 and the Sugarhill Gang had fallen out of fashion. The most innovative crossover rap groups of the early '90s like A Tribe Called Quest, Arrested Development, P.M. Dawn, and the Digable Planets were drowned in the tidal wave of hate spewin' gangsta rappers. Leading the charge to mediocrity was the self hating poseur Marshall Mathers. The Beastie Boys managed to survive because they built a large and loyal crossover audience early on and earned the creative license to expand their musical vision. For his part, white boy wigger Marshall Mathers led a generation of black rappers into becoming minstrel show parodies of themselves. Is it any wonder that Elijah Mohammed referred to white men as "blue eyed devils?"

In 2005, the debut album the London based Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A. rekindled my interest in hip hop music. The UK hip hop scene hip hop scene had it's own unique path of development & it's most creative artists like Neneh Cherry, Tricky & Dizzee Rascal had emerged from a diverse U.K. hothouse of musical styles like trip hop, reggae and uniquely British club music scene. Some of the early British hip hop artist were even influenced by the music of the '77 punk rebellion in the UK.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...ehCherry-1.jpg
Nenah Cherry- First UK hip hop star & patron of the early trip hop scene

Neneh Cherry is the Swedish born daughter of renowned jazz trumpeter Don Cherry. While still in her teens Cherry moved from Stockholm to London where she joined the final lineup of punk music's original riot grrrl Rastafarians, the Slits. After the breakup of the Slits, Cherry drifted into the newly emerging early '80s hip hop scene in London. After a couple of career setbacks, Cherry became the first international hip hop star from the UK with her 1989 debut album, Raw Like Sushi. In the early '90s Cherry met the Bristol based group Massive Attack through Geoff Barrow and she became the principal financial backer of the band's efforts record their first album, Blue Lines. In the process, Cherry supplied the venture capital for Barrow to record the debut album of his own band Portishead. The unique symbiotic relationship among the punk, the reggae, world-beat, and electronic music communities in the UK created a uniquely British hip hop community that was highly experimental and infused with a rich blend of musical styles.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8.../ghostpoet.jpg
Obaro Ejimiwe a.k.a. Ghostpoet

Ghostpoet is one of the emerging stars from the eclectic & pluralistic British hip hop scene. His sophomore effort, Some Say I So I Say Light consolidates the artistic vision he showed on his 2011 debut album Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam. Ghostpoet's music exudes the same kind of stoned out, sleepy anxiety as fellow rap innovator Tricky. His message is that of a visionary paranoid who managed to get his facts straight.

Ghostpoet raps in a languid and sonorous baritone reminiscent of the great jazz rap innovator Gil Scott Heron. Ghostpoet's music has a minimalist framework but he uses woozy off beat rhythms, dub trickery and dazzling array of ambient electronic effects in the production sound-mix. Some his sound production techniques are associated with dubstep artists like Ikonika & Burial; and many knowledgeable folks might even place Ghostpoet's music within the dubstep genre.

Ghostpoet isn't for everyone, but if you like trip hop, downtempo electronica or dub reggae, he's certainly worth checking out. Embedded below is Plastic Bag Brain, a selection from Some Say I So I Say Light.



===========================================

Orphan Artists Vol 1

Today we begin a periodical series titled Orphan Artists. I call them orphan artists because they are bands or individual artists who don't have sizable audience or critical acclaim they so richly deserve. Some of my profiles will be of contemporary artists who are currently working and others will be of bygone artists who were simply drowned out in the music industry's deluge of annual album releases and quietly ended their musical careers without fanfare.

The School

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8.../theschool.png
Photo above: The School

The School is a currently active band from Cardiff Wales who have released two albums since 2010 on the Madrid based label Elefant Records. The band is largely unknown in the United States but I'm told they're big in Spain which the record label's home. I'm not sure of the School's popularity in Great Britain, but I didn't see either of their albums on the UK indie/alternative music charts which I follow regularly.

The School's fixation on more innocent aspects of Sixties pop music is reminiscent of two Scottish bands, Camera Obscura and Belle and Sebastian. But the School's music has a more direct connection to the Phil Spector girl groups of the early Sixties and the UK female pop singers of the mid-Sixties like Sandie Shaw, Cilla Black, Lulu, Marianne Faithfull, Petula Clark & Dusty Springfield. In that sense, the music of The School has a closer link to Saturday Looks Good To Me, the experimental American indie pop band that wears it's Motown/Phil Spector/Brian Wilson on it's sleeve.

Prior to forming the School, lead singer & songwriter Liz Hunt gained some notoriety as the singer for The Loves, a less polished band with harder edge. Hunt has a sweet melancholy voice and The School is clearly vehicle that is better suited to her singing & songwriting talents. Liz Hunt's songs show an almost scholarly reverence for the Sixties pop idiom. A listener unacquainted with the School's music could easily mistake the School for an obscure Sixties band because of their adherence to the production methods used by the great producers of that era like Phil Spector, Joe Meek and Bruce Botnick. It's hard to stamp a date on the School's music without knowing the history of the band.

The School selected Ian Katt as their first producer who was a logical choice since Katt also produced the London based band Saint Etienne, who gained their reputation by fusing house music rhythms with catchy Sixties influenced pop songs.

Discography

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...Unbeliever.jpg
Title: Loveless Unbeliever
Release Date: April 6, 2010
AMG Rating: 4 1/2 stars (out of 5)
User Rating: 4 1/2 stars (out of 5)

http://www.yanopuedomas.com/wp-ynpm/...ng-200x200.jpg
Title: Reading Too Much into Things Like Everything
Release Date: May 14, 2012
AMG Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
User Rating: 4 1/2 stars (out of 5)

The quality of the music is consistent over both the 2010 & 2012 album releases and either album can serve as a good starting point to those unacquainted with the School. The second album Reading To Much into Things Like Everything is my own favorite simply because I like more of the songs on it. I'm sure there are MB members won't like the School's music for any number of reasons. Most people either love or hate the sort of sunny retro-pop that is the foundation of the School's trademark sound.

The embedded song is That Boy Is Mine a selection from the School's second album Reading To Much into Things Like Everything

The weird thing I find with The School is that their albums sound really warm and exciting the first couple of times you hear them and then it wears off and they start to sound a bit cringe-worthy and cheesy. I must go back and listen to their albums again though to see f they have any effect on me.

I love indiepop when it's done right, Allo Darlin's self-titled album from 2010 is an example of this and it's one of my favourite albums of this decade so far. Nothing fancy, just simple bittersweet pop songs. I'm a big fan of Camera Obscura and Belle & Sebastian as well.

I agree with your thoughts on the short staying power of The School and there are many other bands that grow thin with repeated listening. What I do is take them out of play rotation when they begin to grate on my nerves & when I revisit the songs six months or a year later, I'll rediscover what I originally liked about them.

My threshold of tolerance for certain songs by '70s rockers like Japan, Roxy Music, Bowie, Cale and Eno really wears thin but their music always finds it's way back to my playlists because their music was such a big part of my life when I was a lad.

The only album by Allo Darlin' I own is last year's Europe which I adore. I've been meaning to download their debut album for awhile and your post will be the impetus for me finally getting the album. I read somewhere that Allo Darlin' is an Aussie band that relocated to London recently.

I've a similar relationship with She & Him where I like their albums on the first two listens before they really start to grate, as much as I like Zooey Deschanel and everything.

I liked Europe but the first Allo Darlin' album is by far their best, some even consider Europe their sophomore slump. Their music doesn't sound forced in any way or have a novelty factor like what I find with some indiepop bands and that's what makes their albums stand up well to repeated listens. They're half Australian half English actually, and based in London. You can certainly tell that their frontwoman Elizabeth Morris is from Australia as her accent comes through nicely in her singing.

AMG wrote about Zooey Deschanel's aspiring vocal career with She & Him: Zooey's quirky and precocious persona began to wear thin for me around the time she reached the age of 30. In the United States she does a frequently aired 30 second commercial for the iPhone which makes me want to bullet in my brain rather than endure the torture of Zooey saying cute things to her iPhone app. UK internet comedian Paperlily does a funny satire of Zooey's iPhone ad:



"Quirky & precocious" are acceptable and often attractive traits for naive college coeds, but as a woman grows into middle age, those fashionably quirky traits of a school girl blossom into annoying personality disorders.

There thousands of female vocalists with more talent than Zooey, who earn their living singing for tips in the piano bar of a Holiday Inn motel. Zooey's only advantage is she's way cuter than all of them.

I don't understand my own pathological dislike of Zooey Deschanel. I usually have a high threshold of tolerance for fashionably quirky women who dress in fashionably quirky Bohemian apparel. But something about Zooey Deschanel stirs up the evil demon that lurks in the dark swamp lands of my subconscious mind.

History of Soul Music Part II

The Stax Records Story

Stax/Volt Records was founded in 1957 in Memphis under the name of Satellite Records. Satellite by two white businesspeople, Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton. (STewart/AXton = Stax).

Early on most of Satellite's recordings were country music recordings which reflected the musical tastes of label co-owner Stewart, who played fiddle in a country music band. The move of Satellite Records into recording R&B artists was primarily the work of Rufus Thomas, a deejay on a black radio station, who was also a respected R&B singer in his own right.

In 1960, Satellite Records relocated it's studios into the abandoned Capitol Movie Theater, at 926 East McLemore Avenue in South Memphis, the heart of the Memphis black community. Jim Stewart opened the Satellite Record store next to the Stax studios which carried a full line of soul music on all labels, not just Stax. Satellite Records survives to this day in it's original location next to the Stax Museum, housed in the original Stax studios.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PDYZYw2CKQ...1600/stax1.jpg
The legendary Stax recording studios in the mid 1960s

The workplace culture at Stax was a bit different from the fair minded, progressive but highly professional atmosphere at Atlantic Records in New York. Owners Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton often used the analogy of "one big family" to describe Stax Records, and portrayed themselves as the parental figures who took care of their "children", the black recording artists in their "family". Since Stewart and Axton were white Southerners, this characterization of their black artists appeared to infantalize them as helpless children. There were very few complaints from the artists because the reaction of a typical Southern white to a black soul singer in the early Sixties was hostile and often violent. By all accounts, Stewart and Axton paid out the royalties in a timely manner and gave their artists the creative space to grow. It should be said that Stewart & Axton treated Stax artists far better than the tyrannical Barry Gordy the black owner of Motown records who treated many of his black artists like field hands on a plantation.

The first release R&B release by Satellite Records was Cause I Love You a duet sung by Rufus Thomas & his daughter Carla. Alantic Records picked up the distribution rights to the single and the song sold 40,000 units, by far the largest selling release at Satellite Records to that date.

Atlantic's distributionship of the Rufus & Carla Thomas single laid the groundwork for a unique business partnership between Atlantic Records in New York and the newly started R&B label in Memphis.

The renaming of the label to Stax was a result of the newly formed business partnership with Atlantic Records.

Satellite Records didn't amount to much until Stewart & Axton partnered with Atlantic who had the distribution contacts, cash resources & technical expertise to transform Stax into a major label. By 1965 Stax Records had grow from a regional label into national label powerhouse with a roster of some of the leading R&B artists of the era.

In 1962, Stax created a subsidary label, Volt Records, primarily to accommodate their new star performer, Otis Redding. The newly passed federal law on payola was the reason for recording Otis on a subsidiary label. At the time, radio station programmers were banned from playing more than 2 songs by one single label in the airplay rotation at any given time, so record labels got around the ban by forming subsidiary labels, which technically complied with the language of the law. Atlantic formed the subsidary label Atco Records for the same purpose.

Otis was an extraordinary talent and by the time Otis was half-way through first audition song for Stax, owner Jim Stewart knew that Redding was the future superstar that would bring financial solvency to his struggling label. When Otis wrapped his first take of that first audition song "These Arms of Mine" Stewart practically leaped over the soundboard with a recording contract for him to sign.

As a result of the partnership Atlantic Records retained the rights to nearly all of the Stax Records back catalog between the years 1961 and 1968, after the Atlantic/Stax partnership was dissolved in 1968. That included the rights to the lucrative back catalog of Otis Redding at Volt Records. This may seem irrelevant, but keep that in mind because the financial future of Stax Records rested largely on regaining the rights to Otis Redding's music if the Stax/Atlantic partnership was dissolved.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...atmonterey.jpg
Photo: Otis Redding brings down the house at the Monterey Pop Festival, six months before his death

For five years, Otis Redding was largely unknown to white audiences. Even though he was the top performer on the R&B chart, Top 40 radio (i.e. white radio) programmers refused to play Otis' records on the shaky premise that his raw signing style only appealed to black audiences. Otis finally broke through to a large white crossover audience following his barn burning appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. Six months later, on December 10,1967, Otis was killed in an airplane crash while flying from Cleveland to a gig in Madison Wisconsin.

At the time of his death Otis was a superstar on black radio stations, sold tens of thousands records and was routinely at the top of the Billboard R&B charts. But prior to his death, most white Americans were still largely unacquainted with the music of Otis Redding... his highest ranking single on the Billboard Pop charts had been Try A Little Tenderness, which peaked at #25 in early 1967. His best selling album prior to his death was Complete & Unbeleivable Dictionary of Soul released in October 1966 and it rose to lower tiers of the Billboard Pop chart at #73.

Otis' white audience grew following his Monterey appearance in the summer of 1967, but it snowballed and turned into an avalanche after his death.

Otis became a far more valuable recording artist as a dead man than he ever was in his lifetime. In January 1968, Volt Records released his posthumous album (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay, and the 45 rpm single of the title song became the first and only #1 single Redding ever had in the Billboard 100. It sold 4 million copies and a Volt's first anthology of Redding's recordings A History of Otis Redding, issued in the spring of 1967 before his death shot up the charts and sold 3 million copies world wide. This was in the era when Elvis and the Beatles were the only contemporary artists capable of selling more than 1 million units of an album worldwide.

What happened next between Stax Records and their Atlantic Records partners was a real shocker. In 1967, Warner Brothers "aquired' Atlantic Records. The entertainment idustry lawyers from Warner's pointed out to Stax owner Jim Stewart that he he had unknowingly signed away the rights to the original master recordings for all of Stax's Atlantic-distributed recordings. Stewart was under the impression that the ownership of master recordings in the Stax catalog would be returned to him if the Atlantic partnership was ever ended. The executives at Warner refused to return ownership of the Stax masters to Stewart.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...e/staxlogo.jpg
Image: The original Stax logo (left) was designed in 1961 when the Stax/Atlantic partnership began. The modernized Stax logo (right) was designed in 1969, when Al Bell took over as president of Stax Records.

Stewart walked away from the Stax/Atlantic partnership and signed over the controlling interest in Stax to Paramount Pictures a week later. Stewart eventually sold his share of Stax Records to Al Bell who became the president of Stax Records. Under Bell, the Stax studio recorded some great soul music after Stewart's departure but the Stax limped along crippled by the loss of Otis Redding. Stax was completely under-capitalized without the cash flow of funds from the sales of Redding's lucrative back catalog of recordings. Isn't the music business fun?

Seven years after Atlantic withdrew from the partnership in 1968, Stax Records was insolvent and filed for bankruptcy.

Roster of Stax/Volt Artists

Rufus Thomas
Albert King
Booker T. & the M.G.'s
Eddie Floyd
Jean Knight
The Soul Children
The Staple Singers
Johnnie Taylor
The Dramatics (Volt)
The Emotions (Volt)
Otis Redding (Volt)
The Bar-Kays (Volt)
Isaac Haynes (on Enterprise, another Stax subsidiary)
The Mar-Keys (Satellite, then Stax)
Carla Thomas (Signed on Satellite, moved to Atlantic, then Stax)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v81/lapeste/stax.jpg
Historic landmark sign in front of the old Stax recording studio which is now the Stax Record Company Museum & Archives.

Orphan Artists Vol 2

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...m1-255x321.jpg
Glen Johnson, co-founder & leader of Piano Magic

I avoided Piano Magic's first two albums because I hated Glen Johnson's chosen name for his band. Call me shallow, but "Piano Magic" sounds like like an album title for an anthology of Liberace's greatest hits. There is probably some humorous irony in the band's name because there is no piano player in the band and most songs are centered around the otherworldly sounds of Johnson's guitar playing.

What caught my attention and perked my interest in Piano Magic was an 1999 AMG review of the band's third album Low Birth Weight. The review began with the following provocative declaration: Shields is the reclusive icon of indie rock who revolutionized studio production technology in the early Nineties. Shields' bold use of digitally processed guitar sounds made him a reluctant guitar god of indie rockers for the next two decades. So it really got my attention when AMG evoked the sacred name of Kevin Shield to describe the relative importance of Glen Johnson to the UK indie rock scene. I immediately headed down to my local indie record store and purchased a copy of Low Birth Weight.

Johnson originally composed the songs on Low Birth Weight as content for the soundtrack of a Spanish film it but the soundtrack project evolved into Piano Magic's third album. Since that album, Piano Magic's best albums share a similar cinematic quality. The music of Piano Magic is highly conceptual & experimental but nearly all of Piano Magic's songs have the unobtrusive ambience of music from a film soundtrack. It takes several listening sessions to fully appreciate the lush complexity of the music. Glen Johnson is a sly minimalist who's uncomfortable with brash displays of his technical mastery.

On the AMG comparison to Kevin Shields: Johnson's guitar playing doesn't sound like Kevin Shields and Piano Magic doesn't sound anything like My Bloody Valentine. Johnson's guitar sound is closer to that of former Cocteau Twin's guitarist Robin Guthrie. Like Guthrie, Johnson uses a reverb delay peddle, a digital sound processor and open guitar tunings to create cascading columns of guitar chords that have an ethereal, otherworldly quality. Both Kevin Shields & Glen Johnson have mentioned Guthie as a stylistic mentor and both have used Guthrie's bag of guitar tricks to shape their own highly individualistic guitar styles.

Piano Magic is structured as a musical collective with revolving door of musical contributors. Since the departure of Piano Magic's other two founders, Glen Johnson has become the glue that has held the collective together for the past sixteen years and by default Piano Magic has evolved into his own personal artistic statement. Johnson's role in the band is low key and a contingent of talented male and female vocalists are the front line performers. Johnson also shares the limelight with talented instrumentalists like Martin Cooper, Alexander Perls and Matt Simpson.

Piano Magic is hard to pigeon-hole in any given musical category. Their music has been compared to a wide and varied array of artists including This Mortal Coil, Pink Floyd, the Cocteau Twins, Eno and any number of bands associated with the shoegaze/dream rock/ambient music/post-rock categories of sub-genres. Piano Magic may be musical chameleon without a instantly recognizable trademark sound like My Bloody Valentine or the Cocteau Twins, but the music of Piano Magic has the same beguiling metaphysical qualities.

What Glen Johnson has most in common with Kevin Shields is a relentless perfectionism that's reflected in the shimmering sound quality of their production work. Both men literally spend months and often years, doing post-production tweaks, remixes, and overdubs of the music they're producing. Despite the post-production delays, Johnson has managed to produce 13 full Piano Magic albums in 16 years. By contrast, Shields has only produced 3 full length albums for My Bloody Valentine in 25 years. Shields critics have said his obsessive perfectionism has been a hindrance to his artistic development and believe he's wasted away his musical prime by spending 22 years completing a follow-up album to My Bloody Valentine's 1991 breakthrough album, Loveless.

Piano Magic does very little touring and attendees of their rare live shows say the band sounds completely different on stage than on their albums. On stage, Piano Magic plays with reckless abandon and the go-for-broke fury of a punk band... It's a sharp contrast to the moody ambience of Piano Magic's studio albums.

I'm not sure why Piano Magic doesn't have a larger group of fans in the United States. They probably have a larger contingent of fans in the UK, but Piano Magic gets very little coverage in the plethora of British indie pop magazines & Brit-pop websites that I follow on a regular basis. I don't recall seeing any posts on Music Banter over the years. (MB forum members: please correct me if I'm wrong about that).

Low Birth Weight (1999) is my personal recommendation for a starting point for novice listeners. It receives receives 5 stars out of 5 on my album rating scale. If you like Low Birth Rate then there's five other album releases you should check out:

Artist's Rifles (2000) 4 stars out of 5
Son de Mar (2001) 4 stars out of 5
The Troubled Sleep of Piano Magic (2003) 4 1/2 stars out of 5
Disaffected (2005) 4 stars out of 5
Pale Monster (2007) 4 stars out of 5

I haven't heard their latest release, Life Isn't Finished With Me Yet (2012) because I haven't seen available as a download from any internet music retailers and I couldn't find the cd issue of the album at any local record stores. Their albums are often hard to find because they've recorded on a seven different indie boutique labels and the retail distribution of their albums is erratic.

The first YouTube video The Fun of the Century showcases the vocal talents of Raechel Leigh and Hazel Burfitt, two female vocalists who teamed up to sing on most of the tracks of Low Birth Weight.



Glen Johnson is the vocalist on second song, Crown Estate. Johnson has a soft, world weary singing style and Crown Estate has the somber mood & haunting quality of an early Joy Division song.

Cool stuff!

Some cool trivia info about Stax, Post Atlantic.

Besides the usual amount of great music, there were a few good stories through their time with Paramount (Gulf and Western) including the massive Soul Explosion promotion which included the double album collection of Stax legends as well as Dot/Paramount artist Mitch Ryder being allowed to do an album with Booker T's band with no problem (no contract disputes that usually surround such happenings), although sadly the album was under-promoted (Dot was more comfortable with soundtracks, I guess). With the Ryder story, I think he was given a choice between working with Andy Kim or working with Stax legends, and of course we all know that with the singer there was no second choice when Stax was mentioned.

Despite having plenty of major hits here and there, the saddest chapter of Stax's history with CBS through The 70's was the final years when there were some well-intended albums that were aimed for the K-Mart/Woolwroths marketplace which were a very ill fit with the rest of the music that was going on including albums by noted TV personalities Morton Downey Jr. (As Sean Morton Downey Jr. - I Believe America was the album) and Mike Douglas (Today, 1975) as well as child singer Lina Zavoroni (who sadly passed away after her battles with anorexia...as a kid, she could sing very well despite the cheesy nature of her album that was released through Stax in The US). Times were very rough, especially with a huge amount of under performing music released through it and it's gallery of sub labels including Volt, Enterprise, and Gospel Truth (the later being connected with The Rev. Jessie Jackson), and it was thought that more mainstream music would solve some of their problems which it did not. Although there were some major successes, including Wattstax, there were some ill fated projects including plans for a film division which planned four films, but I think only three only were completed, Darktown Strutters being a film that's noted in Urban Action history especially with it's appearance by The Dynamics and Distribution through Roger Corman's New World. Having to deal with bills from pressing plants and other business related problems soured any attempt to return to their former glory. Oddly enough, it was a hit single on one of the sub labels, Truth (aka Gospel Truth I think), Shirley Brown's "Woman to Woman", that softened the ride to their first end.

College Rockers should also take note that Ardent, another Stax Sub, housed Big Star for their first two albums.

The final Stax album release of the 1970's I think was the two album set The Congressional Record of the Living Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by Congressman Walter E. Fauntroy in 1975.

After Stax's announcement of going Chapter 11, Fantasy Records (home to Creedence Clearwater Revival) later picked up on the post-Atlantic years even going as far as releasing more compilation albums.

They returned in the Late 2Ks and are doing well after teaming with the Concord Music Group.

I thank Screen13 for the knowledgeable follow up post to my Stax Records history. Part of my dilemma in writing these histories of the major soul music labels was limiting the content. If you write a blog post that exceeds 20 or so medium size paragraphs, you lose that 50% of readers who lack the attention span to read a longer piece.

My original unedited Stax history was 65 paragraphs but only a handful of people with a deep interest in soul music would have read the unedited version. I decided to concentrate on Stax's anchor artist, Otis Redding and therefore many important players in the Stax chronicles, like Booker T and the MGs, Isaac Hayes, Rufus Thomas and Albert King didn't get their due.

I'm currently editing the Motown Story which is the longer than both the previously posted Atlantic and Stax histories. Motown's sordid story under the rule of Barry Gordy is a compelling object lesson on how not to treat your artists, producers and front office employees. It's ironic that the only black owner of the three legendary '60s soul record companies was a ruthless tyrant who ran his record label like Idi Amin ran the nation of Uganda. There are so many compelling stories at Motown that I think I'll have to allocate two seperate posts to Motown, even after I complete the final edit. I'm hoping to get the Motown story posted by the end of this week.

Orphan Artists Vol. 3

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...cksonspeed.jpg
Photo: Chicks on Speed

Chicks on Speed is a Munich based cyber grrrl trio who are more agit-prop performance artists than music artists. Much of their material lacks substance but there's an exciting surface to their music that's infectious. Their music is influenced by other less than polished punk era girl groups like the Slits, Au Pairs and Delta 5 and they have a talent for parodying the banal aspects of club culture, fashion and romantic relationships. Chicks on Speed is truly an international group comprised of a Munich born native, a New Yorker, and an Aussie.

I don't recommend a steady musical diet of Chicks on Speed to anybody, but I've always gotten a surge of phone inquiries whenever I played one of their songs on my radio show.

Recommended Recording

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...lsaveusall.jpg
Chicks on Speed Will Save Us All (2000)
Gavin B.'s Rating: 3 1/2 stars out of 5

Chicks on Speed Will Save Us All is their 2000 debut album but there's been 2 or 3 interesting songs on each of the six albums they've recorded over the past 12 years.

Chicks on Speed's deconstructed cover of Grace Jones' Warm Leatherette



Chicks on Speed's version of Delta 5's 1980 feminist/punk anthem, Mind Your Own Business.

The Decline of Western Civilization

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v81/lapeste/DOWC.jpg
Darby Crash on a promotional poster for the 1981 film documentary of L.A. punk bands, The Decline of Western Civilization.

I was browsing the Punk Music forum and came across a thread which more or less restored my faith in the judgement of a few MB forum members, who refused to deify Germs singer Darby Crash as an icon of punk music. I started to write a reply but when it got overly long, I decided to post it in my music journal instead.

In her 1981 documentary on Los Angeles punk rock, The Decline of Western Civilization, director Penelope Spheeris devotes a significant portion of screen time covering Darby Crash & the Germs. It's significant that Darby Crash, committed suicide on December 7, 1980, when Spheeris was still editing footage for the unreleased film. For that reason, The Decline of Western Civilization provides a rare and candid glimpse into the final days in the life of Darby Crash.

Spheeris' documentary is required viewing for anyone interested in the evolution of the American hard core punk scene in the early Eighties.

Spheeris' footage of Crash's final days presents a disturbing portrait of 21 year old man who was a total mess. He still lived at home with his mother who acted as a sort of co-dependent caretaker for Darby who was unable to care for himself because his constant state of intoxication. She was hardly a role model for Darby and she had her own extensive history of substance abuse and mental health problems.

Darby Crash seemed hellbent on achieving immortality by following Sid Vicious' road map to success and going out in a blaze of glory before he got old. Darby got his wish by intentionally overdosing himself on heroin at age 22, but he failed to achieve immortality because media coverage of his death was completely overshadowed by John Lennon's murder at the Dakota on the day before Darby decided to check out by committing suicide.

The Germs's musical skills weren't even in the same class as the Sex Pistols in their prime. For all their incendiary stage theatrics, the Sex Pistols original lineup (without Sid Vicious) played with a ferocity and passion that was truly revolutionary. I think Sex Pistol guitarist Steve Jones was one of the most under appreciated musicians of the era. When Sid Vicious joined the band, Steve Jones ended up doubling as bass player in the Sex Pistols' recording sessions because Vicious lacked the musical skills to play a simple three chord progression on the bass.

Sphreeris' documentary features footage of characteristically hectic and sloppy Germs live show in which Crash, heavily intoxicated and under the influence of drugs, calls to the audience for beer, stumbles and crawls on the stage and slurs lyrics while members of the audience write on him with permanent markers. Spheeris' live footage of another L.A. band, X, simply blows away the Germs' amateurish performance.

I'm among those punk music fans who refuse to elevate self-hating misanthropic drunks like Darby Crash & Sid Vicious to the status of legendary hero. Both men hated their fans and the music they played as much as they hated everything else in their pathetic lives.

The Germs' only studio album is a remarkable contrast to the band's sloppy live performances. Joan Jett's crisp production quality captures a band in a far more refined form than their chaotic live shows. The real star of the album is guitarist Pat Smear who sets the frenetic pace with his monster guitar riffs, and from my perspective Darby is huffing and puffing out his vocals to keep up with Smear's playing.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...e/patsmear.jpg
Guitarist Pat Smear, alive, well and playing, three decades after the Germs' dissolution.

As it turns out, Darby Crash's best friend and Germs co-founder Pat Smear has achieved the punk icon notoriety that eluded Darby Crash. Following the collapse of the Germs, Pat Smear eked out a living as an actor in a few television and film roles. Smear also periodically gigged with Mike Watt, the co-founder of the short another short lived L.A. hard core band, the Minutemen. In 1988, Smear was asked by the Red Hot Chili Peppers to replace guitarist John Frusciante; however, he turned them down. Instead, Smear toured as a member of Nirvana, establishing a close friendship with frontman Kurt Cobain and his wife Courtney Love. After Cobain died, Smear replaced Cobain in a short lived edition of Nirvana. Smear played on and off for the Foo Fighters following the dissolution of Nirvana, and is listed as a fully chartered member of the Foo Fighters on their well received 2011 album, Wasting Light.

Book Review

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8.../stonefree.jpg

Title: Stone Free
Author: Andrew Loog Oldlam
Publisher: Escargot Books
Publication Date: January 1, 2013
Book Length: 487 pages
Retail Price: $16.99 (USD) paperback edition; $9.99 (USD) electronic edition

===================================

For those unacquainted with the history of the first British Invasion (1964-1966), Andrew Loog Oldham was a pop music impresario most notable for being the Rolling Stones first manager. Oldam is a talented raconteur with a self-effacing charm of a man who is willing to own up to his own failings. His book, Stone Free is an unflinching look at early years of the British Invasion which transformed handful of British pop bands and their managers into overnight tycoons and the closest thing to God for a generation of post-WWII young people in the UK and the United States.

As a teenager, Oldham was a self-proclaimed hustler who spent summers swindling tourists in French towns. Oldham's interest in the pop culture of the 1960s and the Soho coffeehouse scene led to working for Carnaby Street mod designer John Stephen and later as an assistant to then emerging fashion designer Mary Quant. Mary Quant became the toast of mod Carnaby Street fashion and the earliest Mary Quant fashion models like Jane Birkin, Twiggy, Marianne Faithfull, Jean Shrimpton, Jane Asher, all went on to become international supermodels on the basis of their work with Quant. Birkin, Twiggy and Faithfull parlayed their fashion modeling careers into enduring careers as actresses and pop music singers.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...n-designer.jpg
Fashion icon Mary Quant who developed the Mod fashion style

Oldlam's apprenticeship with Mary Quant allowed him to reinvent himself from a working class juvenile delinquent with a history of petty theft into self assured hustler and icon of England's emerging mod youth culture. To her credit Quant has maintained a life long friendship with Oldlam, even after he left the employment of the Rolling Stones and every other A-list scene-maker in London stopped taking his phone calls.

At age 18, the precocious young Oldlam boldly approached Beatles manager Brian Epstein with the offer to manage London booking dates for the Beatles, when the Beatles were still a Liverpool based band on the verge of breaking out in the UK. As overly ambitious as he was, Oldlam was shocked when Epstein accepted his offer and for a year Epstein schooled his young protegee in the art of band management. Oldham turned out to be a fast study.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...Stones1963.jpg
Photo: The Rolling Stones 1963

In April 1963 Oldham first heard the Rolling Stones playing in a London club, the Blues Cellar and immediately offered his services as a manager. Andrew's sense of fashion style and youthful exuberance was a striking contrast to the mostly middle aged businessmen who didn't even like the music of the young bands they managed. Oldlam was the first manager who was a peer of the bands he managed. The Stones liked Oldlam because he spoke their language and dressed like a band member, not a band manager. Being a teenage music impresario had it's setbacks for Oldham. For the first two years of his tenure with the Stones, Oldham was too young to sign legally binding contracts on behalf of his clients.

Oldlam has written two other autobiographies but Stone Free is his best effort. Stone Free is a series of autobiographical essays in which Oldlam comments on various music business people (mostly band management impresarios) who he came to know over the years, including Brian Epstein, Albert Grossman (Dylan's manager), Kit Lambert (the Who's manager), Phil Specter, Malcom McLaren (Sex Pistol's manager) and the controversial Allen Klein, the New York based promoter who replaced Oldham as the Stones' manager and went on to manage the British Invasion triumvirate of musical cash cows, the Beatles, the Stones and the Who.

There is no chronological order to the essays, so you can pick and choose the essays in any order you want to read them.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...ldham-1964.jpg
Photo: 20 year old Andrew Loog Oldham as mod insurgent in 1964

Oldlam shrewdly presented the Rolling Stones as a sort of "bad boy" alternative to the cuddly and lovable Beatles. Oldlam's marketing campaign was picked up by the British press and the Stones cultivated a rougher and edgier audience of fans than the Beatles.

Most importantly Oldlam transformed Mick Jagger and Keith Richards into a songwriting team that was almost as successful as the gold standard team of Lennon and McCartney. Prior to their involvement with Oldlam, Jagger and Richards showed no inclination toward songwriting and were content to do cover versions of their favorite blues, R&B and rock and roll songs. Oldlam noticed that performing artists only received 2-3% of the royalty payments on the gross sales of albums, while songwriters frequently commanded 12 to 15% of the royalty revenues. The Beatles wrote and performed most of their songs and received royalties in the amount of $450,000 for every million album units they sold. By contrast, the Rolling Stones did all cover songs on their first four album releases and only received royalties in the amount of $80,000 for every million album units they sold.

Oldlam did the math and forced Jagger and Richards to become songwriters, often locking them up in the same room until they composed a decent song. Oldham's harsh task making turned Jagger and Richards into a first rate songwriting team. With the exception of the Lennon/McCartney catalog, the Jagger/Richards songbook is still the most valuable property in pop music.

Oldlam's essay on Allen Klein is a riveting portrait of a former account who acquired rock bands like a Wall Street equities trader. Klein frequently gained the trust of an artist by offering immediate financial gain, free of charge. Bobby Darin and Sam Cooke each received immediate payment of $200,000 in unpaid royalties, following Klein's audit of their royalty accounts with their respective record companies.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...allenklein.jpg
Photo: Allen Klein, the predatory American promoter who made a fortune siphoning off the future wealth of the British Invasion bands.

Klein used his accounting skills to force the labels to pay out royalties that were often hidden on a second set of books. Darin & Cooke were so impressed they signed management contracts with Klein, unaware that they were also signing away their rights to future royalty claims to Allen Klein.

Both Darin and Cooke fired Klein when they discovered he had stolen away their royalty rights but Klein still maintained ownership of their most valuable asset, their right to all future royalty claims. Klein's practice was perfectly legal and the artists can blame themselves for not hiring adequate financial counsel to represent them in the contract negotiations with Klein. Indeed, Klein's ruthless exploitation of the artists he represented was an arguably an unethical business practice. Unfortunately, businessmen have never had a code of ethics or a professional organization the governs the ethical practices of the business profession.

Klein's royalty scam had the most devastating effect on Sam Cooke's surviving wife and children. 11 months after Cooke unknowingly signed away his royalty rights to Klein, Cooke was murdered in a Los Angeles hotel. Cooke's wife and children were shocked to discover that Cooke had signed off his royalty payments and they were forced into a life of poverty. Oldlam believed that Klein began courting British Invasion bands after his reputation in the United States soured when his unethical management practices with Cooke and Darin came to light.

Oldlam points out that the UK pop music scene in the early Sixties was a pale imitation of American pop. Prior to the Beatles, there wasn't a single British pop singer who had built an American audience. Cliff Richard was the "British Elvis" but he was a mediocre singer and a tepid performer who failed repeatedly to find success in America. It was only after the Beatles succeeded that American promoters like Klein saw Great Britain as the source of a brand new stream of revenue for their personal enrichment. Word of Allen Klein's seedy reputation had yet to reach the shores of the insular and provincial UK music scene, so Allen Klein was able to prey upon the first generation of British pop stars to strike in rich in America.

Klein first approached Brian Epstein offering to buy out his management contract with the Beatles. Epstein saw Klein for the grifter he was and sent him packing after a 15 minute face-to-face meeting. Epstein believed that entertainment management was a gentleman's profession and was wary of American promoters who generally didn't conform to code of ethical behavior. In general, the more genteel British business class did a far better job policing unethical behavior within it's ranks and often banished rogue operators from management careers. There were incompetent clowns managing music artists in the UK back then, but none of those managers were robbing their clients blind, as Klein and other American promoters did as matter of routine in the United States.

Epstein also had an uncanny talent for spotting rogue promoters who would prey upon his the financial resources of his beloved Beatles. Oldham admired Epstein's ethical behavior and tried to manage the Stones in the same manner but Oldlam simply lacked the experience to deal with a seasoned con artist like Allen Klein.

The Rolling Stones became the first UK group to sign on with Klein, mostly at the urging of Mick Jagger who fell under the spell of Klein's promise of untold riches. Oldham always thought that money was the prime motivator for Jagger while the other Stones were in the music game for the love of the music, the women and the drugs.

Oldlam admits it was his own shortcomings as a manager that allowed Klein an opening. Oldham was 15 years younger than Klein, stoned on high grade marijuana most of the time and cared little for managing the financial affairs of the Rolling Stones. He was an easy target for a buy-out of his management contract by Klein. Oldlam continued on as the Stones' de facto manager until the end of 1967. But Oldham finally left when Klein's overbearing management style left him with little to do in the way of work on behalf of the Stones.

Oldham's departure frayed relations between himself and the Rolling Stones for many years. He still doesn't speak with Mick Jagger who has installed himself as C.E.O. of the Rolling Stones Inc. since Klein's departure and eventual death in 2009. He gets on well with Keith Richards who shares Oldham's view that the Rolling Stones have no purpose other than a corporate entity that feeds Mick Jagger's boundless appetite for acquiring wealth.

For all practical purposes the Rolling Stones were a dead rock band by the early '80s. Jagger and Richards don't talk, don't compose music as a team and record their parts to songs in separate recording sessions. Their only contact is on the stage during Rolling Stones tours, but they travel on separate flights to gigs, stay in separate hotels, and even avoid acknowledging each other with any sort of eye contact when the Stones are performing live. It's the epitome of a loveless marriage where both spouses survive on cruise control for lack of a better way of relating to each other.

Oldham's book is a wealth of gossipy anecdotes about British rock stars. Oldham recalls that after becoming bona fide rock stars, the Rolling Stones began to frequent the posh and trendy Soho cafes favored by the jet-setters and European royalty, while the Beatles continued to eat and drink at the same sort of low-rent, blue collar pubs they favored while growing up in Liverpool. Oldham thought it was remarkable how the Beatles remained four unspoiled blokes from Liverpool even after their unprecedented musical success.

Oldlam made and eventually lost a fortune in the music business but he seems to bear no ill will toward his former rivals. But Oldham isn't afraid to criticize the shortcomings of his former associates in a even handed and often humorous fashion. The sad story of the music business is former big-time players remain lurking in the wings awaiting a second chance to get back in the game, when only handful of the most talented (both artists & music businessmen) get a second chance to swim with the sharks. Fame and fortune are as addictive as heroin.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...ldhamtoday.jpg
Photo: Andrew Loog Oldham- 2012 photo portrait

Oldlam is a survivor who got out of the music business when it stopped being fun. He moved to Bogota Columbia in the Seventies and works as a successful fee-lance journalist. Oldham lives a far less flamboyant lifestyle and earns fraction of the income he made at age 20 as a rock and roll impresario. To his credit, Oldlam never looked back and it's his own unique status as one time music business insider turned music business outsider that makes him a fearless chronicler of the dark side of the British Invasion era.

History of Soul Music Part III

The Mowtown Story 1959-1964

Motown Records was founded in Detroit Michigan in 1959 by Barry Gordy an aspiring songwriter. Prior to founding Motown Records, Gordy was best known for writting the music and lyrics to Lonely Teardrops, the first hit single for the legendary R&B singer Jackie Wilson. Early on, Gordy was an aspiring prize fighter and a formidable competitor in the middle weight class.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...tsvilleusa.jpg
(Picture above) For Motown's glory years (1962-1968), the duplex on West Grand Blvd. in Detroit with the "Hitsville USA" sign was the world headquarters of Motown Records. The Clash paid tribute to the Motown offices with the song Hitsville U.K. on their 1980 album, Sadinista.

The former headquarters in now a museum which I visited in 1998. It's a remarkably modest & spartan facility. The downstairs rooms had a single recording studio (Studio A) connected to a small control room, a large room containing a library of the label's master tapes, and the fourth downstairs room was the home of Motown's administrative office. From 1959 until the mid 60's Barry Gordy used the upstairs rooms as a living quarters. After Gordy moved into sprawling "Motown Mansion" in the posh Boston-Edison Historical District of Detroit, Barry's upstairs apartment at Hitsville USA was used as a guest quarters for visiting artists or an a sleep-over apartment for artists working late in recording sessions in Studio A. As Motown expanded, Gordy purchased additional houses near the Hitsville office to use as office space, but he never built or leased a large central office facility to put all of Motown's Detroit operation under a single roof.

Motown was a completely different operation from Atlantic or Stax Records. All of the artists at Atlantic & Stax were performing musicians who paid their dues and played their countless live gigs prior to signing a recording contract. Performers like Rufus Thomas, Booker T. and Otis Redding were seasoned performers who were able to protect themselves from the con-artists and hucksters who operated on the fringes of the music industry.

Atlantic and Stax had both developed reputations as honorable and ethical operations. Many seasoned soul music artists sought out recording contracts with Atlantic and Stax because of their reputation for treating their recording artists in a ethical manner. Atlantic and Stax treated their artists, producers and studio musicians & engineers with respect. In an age when recording companies swindled artists out of royalty payments, Atlantic & Stax made fair royalty payments to their performing artists and supporting musicians. The corporate leadership of Atlantic and Stax stayed out of the music making end of the business and allowed each artist the space to pursue their own unique artistic vision.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...ie-blog480.jpg
(Picture Above)Stevie Wonder makes his debut at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem at age 12. Barry Gordy billed Stevie Wonder as the "12 Year Old Genius."

Barry Gordy handled his stable of talent & business affairs differently. He created artists in the same manner that television producer Bob Rafelson created the Monkees or later on, music producer Lou Pearlman who created '90s era boy bands like the Backstreet Boys & 'N Sync.

To create his stable of prefab recording artists, Gordy scouted out talented young singers with little or no performing or recording experience, mostly in the black community of Detroit. Most of the early Motown performers were still in their teens when Gordy recruited them. Smokey Robinson was 17 years old when he first signed with Motown; Diana Ross was 16 years; Stevie Wonder was 11 years old. and Michael Jackson was only 9 years old when he and his brothers signed on with Motown. Barry Gordy may have been robbing the cradle to obtain talent but from a business perspective he was a genius. He knew that younger artists were malleable talents who could easily be shaped into his protegees.

Gordy placed his young protegees under his control obsessed command and he shaped every detail of their career, including their performing costumes, their synchronized dance steps, the songs selected for their albums, the touring & television appearances, right down to creating rehearsed stage banter that his performers used over and over at every gig. Gordy had a strict code of moral behavior for his artists but he exempted two older performers, Junior Walker & Marvin Gaye from code sanctions.

Gordy didn't provide any space for creative development for his artists because he shaped the image of every artist at Motown and dressed them up in an assembly line fashion: dinner jackets or stylish European suits for the boys; and designer evening gowns for the girls. The Motown template for success was nicely dressed Negro performers, all doing the same dance steps and maintaining a wholesome image that didn't offend white folks.

Motown's rivals, Atlantic & Stax Records developed recording artists regardless of their white audience crossover potential while Barry Gordon developed recording artists for the sole purpose of becoming crossover artists with a sizable audience of white fans.

Gordy took a dim view of artists like the explosive wild man James Brown singing about black power; or Curtis Mayfield who wrote heartfelt anthems of black oppression & redemption, or even the affable Otis Redding who sang with the fury of a black Mandingo from the backwoods of rural Georgia. Gordy instinctively understood that to gain a white audience he had to create a stable of non-threatening artists who conformed to the rigid standards of conduct that white audiences imposed upon black entertainers.

Sam Cooke was the first black artist to achieve white crossover success. Cooke appealed to white audiences because he was the opposite of rock and roll wild men like Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Cooke was an impeccably dressed, light skinned black performer who crooned innocent love songs in a sweet melancholy voice. What Cooke's white fans didn't know was that Cooke was also a down home soul singer when he appeared before all black audiences at the Apollo Theater or the Harlem Square Club.

There were two Sam Cookes: One who lip synced the lyrics to his latest crossover hit before an audience of white kids on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, while the other Sam Cooke brought down the house as a headline artist on "chittlin' circuit" of all black clubs in the era of racial segregation. Before black audiences Sam Cooke was an entirely different performer who sang in the same raw soulful manner of other black headliners like Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett, and other "hard" soul artists who were confined to playing uptown venues in the black community during the era of segregation. In the era of racial segregation, it was unprecedented for a black singer like Sam Cooke to appear before white television audiences on the Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand.

Barry Gordy's top priority was grooming his artists to become American Bandstand successes in the manner of Sam Cooke. If an artist was "too black", Barry Gordy didn't sign him to Motown.

It's ironic that his first big crossover success was the Supremes, a trio girl of singers who were spectacularly unsuccessful at selling records among both black and white audiences prior to 1964. The Supremes' lack of a best selling single became a joke around Motown Hitsville USA offices. After releasing 8 straight singles that went nowhere between 1961 and 1963 the Surpremes earned the derisive nickname of the "no selling Supremes" at Hitsville USA. The Supremes earned their keep by doing clerical work in the Motown offices and providing background vocals and hand-claps on the tracks of songs of those Motown stars who actually sold a lot of records. Gordy made sure that every Motown artist earned their keep, even if they ended up answering the phone or sending out promotional mailings at the Motown administrative offices.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...dy-en-1964.jpg
(Picture Above) Barry Gordy at a 1964 press conference announcing that the Supremes song Where Did Our Love Go was the first million selling single for Motown Records.

All of Barry Gordy's efforts to sell to a white audience finally paid off when Motown became the first R&B label to reach a large crossover audience of white music fans. For years the two leading Motown artists Marvin Gaye and Mary Wells routinely recorded singles that placed them in the Billboard Top 40. Gaye's 1962 single Pride & Joy reached #10 on the Billboard Pop chart and sold 450,000 copies. But it was the singers formerly known as the "no selling Supremes" who became Motown's best selling superstars, when their single Where Did Our Love Go reached the #1 spot on the pop charts and it was certified as Motown's first million selling single in the spring of 1964. In 1964 the Supremes had a rivalry with the Beatles for the coveted #1 spot on the Billboard pop music chart. In 1964 and 1965, the Supremes had 10 straight million selling singles on the Billboard charts, while the Beatles had 12.

Barry Gordy was a tyrant who mistreated his artists and used contracts to keep his artists under his control. Gordy often created internal conflict by playing one artist off the other. Gordy's efforts to drive a wedge through the Supremes turned the young Diana Ross into a self absorbed monster whom studio musicians, producers and tour promoters dreaded any contact with. Prior to the Supremes' international success, co-members Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson shared lead singing duties with Ross. Gordy decided to enrich himself but cutting Ballard and Wilson out of any and all royalty payments as performers.

In 1965, Gordy announced that Diana Ross was the lead singer of the Supremes. Gordy then offered new contracts to the girl group that cut the other two Supremes out of their all their royalty rights, while maintaining the royalty payments for Ross. Gordy's new contract designated Supreme members Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson as "supporting performers" who were to be paid the at the same hourly union scale wages as studio musicians and members of the supporting band while on tour.

This Draconian move by Gordy enraged Supremes member Florence Ballard who was the actual founder the Supremes. And indeed, Ballard was the acknowledged creative leader of the Supremes and she recruited Diana Ross into the group, two years prior to their first encounter with Barry Gordy. Barry Gordy didn't like rivals for creative leadership of any of his bands and Florence's creative hold over the Supremes was a threat to Gordy's absolute control of the group. Florence bowed out of the Supremes following Gordy's edict.

Gordy followed a similar process of cutting the Miracles out of royalty payments by designating Smokey Robinson as the performer and relegating the rest of the Miracles to positions as salaried side players. Gordy frequently added his name to the song writing credits for a song to collect a cut of the song writing royalties, even if he had nothing to do with writing the song.

Motown Records became Barry Gordy's personal cash cow and only a handful of top tier artists like Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross were allowed to share some measure of Motown's financial success. As far as Barry Gordy was concerned, the 2nd tier artists at Motown were expendable and he treated them accordingly. Gordy had a similar attitude to Motown's stable of gifted producers, recording engineers. and songwriters.

============================

Coming tomorrow: The Motown Story (1965-1962) Barry Gordy does battle with Norman Whitfield, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder over censorship. The downfall of Barry Gordy's Motown empire.

History of Soul Music Part IV

The Motown Story (1964-1980)

Barry Gordy was notorious for using creative bookeeping to shortchange his less successful artists out of royalty payments. But he also lavished his superstars like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, & Michael Jackson with generous royalty cuts on their album sales. Gordy understood that bigger stars have better lawyers & financial consultants who regularly demanded audits of royalty payments, so he didn't push his luck. Barry Gordy's 1st tier of superstars were the only Motown employees that didn't complain about Gordy's management style because they benefited from his special treatment and lavish royalty agreements.

The first signs of a rebellion began when Gordy's most talented songwriting team walked off and filed a lawsuit against Gordy for his unsavory business practices. Motown's premier songwriting team Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland (known in the trade as Holland–Dozier–Holland) left Motown in 1967 accusing Gordy of taking songwriting credits for songs they wrote and shorting them on royalty payments for the songs they got credit for writing. The natives were getting restless.

The Norman Whitfield Rebellion

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...whitfield1.jpg
Norman Whitfield- Brilliant producer who crafted the trademark Motown sound

Norman Whitfield began hanging around the Motown offices as a 19 year old kid. He wasn't on the payroll but he become the office mascot who'd run errands and fetch coffee for tips. Gordy noticed the ambitious kid and hired him to fill an entry level position in the quality control department. Marvin Gaye discovered Whitfield's songwriting talents and they collaborated on a few songs on Gaye's early albums.

Smokey Robinson, who was the Temptations producer in the early 60's noticed Whitfield's skills on the soundboard and trained him as a sound engineer. When touring commitments kept Robinson from completing the production of the Temptations' 1966 album, Gettin' Ready, Smokey asked Whitfield to produce the six remaining songs on the album. Those six cuts sounded better than any of the songs Robinson ever produced for the Temptations and one of the songs was Ain't Too Proud to Beg which became the Temptations first million selling single.

Robinson and Whitfield developed an ingenious method of quality control for Motown's single releases. In early Sixties, a listener's first encounter with a new single release was usually hearing the song on a car radio. Whitfield & Robinson would finish the studio mix of a single release and tweak the mix by playing it through a standard issue speaker for a car radio. Every Motown single was produced for optimal sound quality on a cheap $5 dollar car radio speaker.

In the fall of 1968, Whitfield walked into a Temptations recording session and made the announcement that he was going to "shake things up." Whitfield proceeded to lay down three tracks in rapid sucession: Cloud Nine, Runaway Child Running Wild, a fresh take on an early Marvin Gaye hit, I Heard It Through the Grapevine. The outcome was a radical departure from the Barry Gordy classic Motown factory production sound.

Earlier that year, Sly & the Family Stone had their first top 10 song Dance To the Music. The churning funk sound and the psychedelic guitar of the Family Stone's first single caught the ear of Norman Whitfield, who thought it was high time for Motown to modernize their sound.

Whitfield became an admirer and friend of Sly Stone. Sly began his career as a San Francisco soul music deejay. He had a degree in music theory and composition and played trumpet, guitar, and keyboards in several bands in the early garage/psychedelic era. This lead to a job as a producer at Autumn Records where Sly produced the earliest albums by folk rockers, the Beau Brummels and the San Francisco based psychedelic garage band the Mojo Men. Sly Stone also produced the debut release of the Haight Ashbury hippie band, the Great Society lead by Grace Slick, who later became an icon of the psychedelic generation as vocalist for the Jefferson Airplane. Sly was impressed by the creativity of the earliest psychedelic bands and wanted to created a band that was a fusion of psychedelic music with funky drum & bass sound of the James Brown band.

In early 1967, Sly Stone formed his own group, the Family Stone. The Family Stone was influenced as much by the psychedelic music of the Haight Ashbury hippie culture, as contemporary soul music. The All Music guide wrote,"Sly & the Family Stone treated soul as a psychedelic sun splash, filled with bright melodies, kaleidoscopic arrangements, inextricably intertwined interplay, and deft, fast rhythms.

Whitfield's vision was to refurbish the Motown production methodology to sound more like Sly Stone and less like Barry Gordy's trademark uptown soul music sound. Gordy was opposed to any music that made social commentary at Motown and was no fan of psychedelic music but he reluctantly approved Whitfield's proposal for the Tempation's Cloud Nine album, fearing that his best producer would walk away to another label. The end result was a radical leap into the future for the Motown sound. Motown's legendary session guitarist Dennis Coffey's use of distortion, the wah-wah peddle and an Echoplex tape delay was soon imitated by most psychedelic guitarists including Jimi Hendrix.

With Whitfield at the soundboard, the churning bass and funk rhythms of the Motown house band The Funk Brothers became the template for '70s funk sound. Even though Gordy disliked Whitfield's psychedelic freakout, he couldn't complain because Cloud Nine sold a lot of units and won a Grammy for best album by an R&B group. As much as he disapproved of Whitfield's psychedelic soul, his stable of superstar performers were selling fewer and fewer units and by 1968 Gordy knew the classic Motown sound was in dire need of a face lift.

The Temptations felt a bit out of the loop the debate over the psychedelic controversy, but it was hard for group members to protest Whitfield's radical reinvention of their musical direction, given the critical and commercial success of Cloud Nine. Temptation lead singer Eddie Kendricks was alienated by Whitfield's makeover and left the group shortly after the sessions for Psychedelic Shack, the 1970 Whitfield produced follow up to Cloud Nine. The long time lead singer of the Temptations David Ruffin had departed to pursue a solo career in early 1968, just prior to the Cloud Nine session, and now Eddie Kendricks was leaving over creative differences with Whitfield. The Temptations had a few minor hits in the Seventies but the departure of Kendricks was the beginning of the end for the Temptations.

The Marvin Gaye Rebellion

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...vin-gaye-1.jpg

The Temptation's controversy was a sideshow for Barry Gordy. Gordy had bigger fish to fry at the time. Marvin Gaye faced his first career crisis at age 30 and began a protracted fight with Gordy to release a collection of songs that touched on taboo topics like urban decay, environmental woes, the Vietnam War, police brutality, unemployment, and poverty. When Gordy refused to underwrite the production of his proposed album "What's Going On" Gaye retaliated by refusing to record or tour. Because of his loss of royalty and touring revenues, Marvin Gaye was close to personal bankruptcy and spent his most of his idle time using drugs and chasing women.

Gordy vetoed the songs in Gaye's What's Going On album project as noncommercial but he also worried that all this rabble rousing by Motown artists would scare away the lucrative white crossover audience he worked so hard to nurture. Gaye issued an ultimatum to Gordy: He wouldn't record any more new material until Gordy released What's Going On. Gaye was engaged in a dangerous stand-off with Gordy that could end his career as a performer. But Gaye appeared to be ready and willing to throw away his career to the cause of artistic integrity. Gordy began to feel pressure from both music industry insiders and Marvin Gaye's fans to resolve the matter by releasing the controversial album.

Barry Gordy finally relented and released What's Going On album in May of 1971, Marvin Gaye proved Gordy to be wrong, the album was a tremendous commercial and critcal success and hailed as the greatest musical masterpiece of Gaye's long career.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...arvin-gaye.jpg
33 year old Marvin Gaye at the peak of his creative powers, during a 1972 recording session for Let's Get It On.

During his 23 year recording career at Motown, Marvin Gaye made and lost 3 different multi-million dollar fortunes. Gaye had a remarkable talent for reinventing himself every time he was written off by his critics as a "has-been." Marvin was an electrifying live performer and his female fans often swooned and keeled over into arms of security guards who were stationed at the apron of the stage to cart off the fainting girls to a medical station. Now some 50 years after his recording first single and 30 years after his tragic death, Marvin Gaye has supplanted Motown's golden boy, Stevie Wonder as the most widely admired Motown artist.

The Stevie Wonder Rebellion

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...andSly1975.jpg
Stevie and Sly pose together during 1975 tour

Barry Gordy's authority was also being questioned by Motown's most consistent hit maker, Stevie Wonder. The label's golden boy who signed on at age 11 in 1961 was now a young adult in his early 20s. Wonder's spiritual transformation began when he ditched the designer suits mandated as proper stage-wear by Gordy. Instead, Wonder began wearing colorful African dashiki robes with tribal jewelry. After Wonder braided his hair in the style of a Massai tribal warrior, Wonder's exotic corn row braids became the latest hairdo fad among black youth. To Gordy's distress, Wonder was also becoming active in the Civil Rights movement and talking about black consciousness. Just as the Norman Whitfield/Cloud Nine & Marvin Gaye/What's Going On controversies were settled, Barry Gordy began to get nervous about Stevie Wonder's black pride freakout.

To make matters worse for Gordy, Stevie Wonder was touring with a pair non-Motown artists who were leaders of the Seventies musical insurgency. Sly Stone had developed an "uppity" attitude and his critics thought some of his songs had menacing anti-white messages. Wonder's other touring partner was Rastafarian rebel, Bob Marley who was also mislabeled by many American critics as as a militant proponent of black power. But Wonder's association with the rebel faction of black music made him a credible voice for change and won him an even larger audience. Oddly enough, Wonder continued to have spectacular crossover sales success.

In 1972 Wonder successfully fought Gordy to have the song Big Brother included in his album Talking Book. Big Brother was a harsh blanket indictment of government for surveillance of black citizens and illegal searches of black homes by the local police and the F.B.I. The song goes on to accuse politicians of only visiting the black community "around election time" and the final verse Wonder accuses the big brother government of killing "all our leaders." To Barry Gordy's ears, Stevie Wonder was beginning to sound like Malcom X.

The following year Gordy attempted to waylay the release of Wonder's album Innervisions which covered many of the same controversial social topics covered by Marvin Gaye on What's Going On. Gordy relented with less of a fight this time around. The 23 year old Stevie Wonder was world's biggest Soul music star and the future of the Motown label... Gordy couldn't afford to lose his rainmaking artist to a rival label.

It was a smart business decision by Barry Gordon. As '70s era unfolded the top tier Motown performers like Mary Wells, the Supremes, the Four Tops & the Temptations stopped turning out the hits, and only two first generation Motown artists, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, kept selling enough records to keep Motown financially solvent.

But Barry Gordy's luck was beginning to run out. His decision to relocate Motown to Los Angeles was the first in a series of management mistakes that would place the Motown label in financial peril over the next decade.

Gordy Moves Motown Out of the Motor City

In 1972, Barry Gordy abruptly closed the funky Motown "Hitsville USA" Detroit headquarters to and moved the entire Motown operation into posh a Los Angeles office building. Gordy was burning all of his bridges and his relocation of Motown Records to Los Angeles obliterated Motown's historic past as a regional soul music label with strong ties to Detroit's black community.

Gordy's decision to move Motown out of Detroit had dire economic consequences for a city that was already reeling from job losses in the automobile manufacturing industry. Neighborhoods in the black community of Detroit were beginning to look like ghost towns at the end of the gold rush era. During the next two decades the population of Detroit dropped from 1,800,000 residents to 950,000. The days of Motor City and Motown prosperity were over for the City of Detroit.

Motown's move to L.A. transformed Motown into just another West Coast record label on the make. And the aspiring artists who flocked to the Los Angeles music scene in the early '70s were overly ambitious musical neophytes who measured success by big money and big bling. The experimental mood of the Sixties L.A. music scene was ancient history and by the early Seventies every musician, producer and record company executive was "only in it for the money" as Frank Zappa once put it. Most of the visionary artists and music producers who put Los Angeles on map as a haven for musical creativity were no longer in the game.

In the '70s, the L.A. music scene was hijacked by the corporate boardroom and bottom line oriented music executives like David Geffen and Irving Azoff installed themselves as the purveyors of good musical taste on the L.A. music scene. The music began sound like the non-offensive, middle of the road, country rock, jazz fusion and mellow soul that yuppie management types used as the soundtrack to their pathetic money grubbing lives. It was the kind of music that American psycho Patrick Bateman listened to while rolling out the plastic sheeting for his next murder victim.

The West Coast move signaled the beginning of a slow decline for Motown Records. Motown's visionary producer Norman Whitfield left the label and it was increasingly clear that Gordy was out of touch with the times. By the early 80's Motown was an over-extended and under-capitalized money pit awash in red ink, under Gordy's leadership. Facing imminent bankruptcy proceedings, Barry Gordy sold off his interest in Motown Records to MCA in 1988. The current MCA subsidiary label bearing the Motown brand is a shell of Motown's Hitsville USA glory in Sixties.

By the end of the Eighties, 75% of the all music sales in the United States were controlled four L.A. based corporate entities. When Barry Gordy sold off Motown to the MCA entertainment consortium, he also sold off Motown's rich legacy as an independent soul music powerhouse label. Motown became just another spread-sheet property in MCA's growing portfolio of record company acquisitions.

There will always be a controversy about Gordy's high-handed treatment of some of his recording artists, but Motown's most successful artists like Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye remained loyal to Gordy, possibly because of the preferential treatment he accorded them.

Barry Gordy remains an enigma, he was the first black owner of a soul music label that achieved stellar success but he also treated many of his black artists like field hands on a plantation to accomplish this success.

Robert Ashley: Performance Artist & Pioneer of Electronic Music

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...-WTC219751.jpg
Photo: Robert Ashley

Robert Ashley holds a degree in liberal arts from the University of Michigan and was PhD. candidate in music theory at the Manhattan School of Music in the late 50s. While working as a research assistant in the Speech Research Laboratories at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Ashley organized the ONCE Festival. ONCE was the first festival dedicated to avant garde music and performance art. The festival was a huge success and it was an annual event in Ann Arbor from 1961 to 1969. The festival ended when Ashley moved to Oakland California in 1969 to serve as the director of the Center For Contemporary Music at Mills College.

Robert Ashley was never the staid academic type and he spent most of his time in the academy writing and staging his performance art and electronic music projects. One is tempted to call Ashley's work ambient music but the theatrical nature of his music is outside the realm of ambient music.

Ashley's musical works are ambitious "operas" that combine elements of electronic music, performance art, video footage, spoken language and surrealist poetry. Ashley is a musical minimalist in the tradition of classical composers like Eric Satie and John Cage and a few people mislabel him a classical music performer when in fact he's a post modernist composer of experimental music.

In the late Seventies, during a three month run his opera, Perfect Lives, in New York City, Ashley became a cult hero in Manhattan's downtown music scene. Ashley's performance art had a big impact on musicians like Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Lydia Lunch, Arto Lindsay and other artists in the No-Wave movement which was at the peak of it's short lived run as the musical trend of the moment in NYC.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...anderson_2.jpg
Photo: Laurie Anderson

Ashley's biggest impact was upon Laurie Anderson, a 30 year old art history professor at City College who was a aspiring performance artist on the downtown art scene. Anderson's performance art combined elements of music, film, visual projections, dance theater, and most importantly spoken and written language. In a sense, Laurie Anderson was the female incarnation of Robert Ashley.

Laurie Anderson became the first (and only) performance artist to develop a cult following of rock music fans when she released the album Big Science in 1982. Big Science rose the 128th position on the Billboard charts, which was an unprecedented success by performance art standards. In 2008, Laurie Anderson married Lou Reed, the former founder of the Velvet Underground, who has been her collaborator on several projects since the 1990s.

Unlike Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley has never achieved the sort of high profile success that led to a crossover audience among rock music fans. But Ashley did have cult of followers among a group highly regarded New York City musicians who were profoundly influenced by his performance art.

I stumbled into Ashley's eccentric and brilliant performance art as a college student working at the M.I.T. media lab in Cambridge in 1981. I was also avid fan of the post-punk club scene in Boston.

Besides being the college of choice for the nation's best and brightest future engineers, M.I.T. was a haven for electronic and experimental music in the early Eighties. WMBR, M.I.T.'s radio station played a solid format of nothing but fringe electronic music and esoteric experimental rock. I don't think I would have ever heard any of Ashley's music, had not been for WMBR music shows, which were piped into the media lab as ambient music for the lab employees.

I first heard Robert Ashley's album Private Parts on WMBR and Ashley's music hit me like a bolt of lighting. To my ears, Ashley sounded like the missing like between the Beat Generation's jazz driven poetry recitals and present day post punk music scene being spearheaded by groups like Public Image Ltd., The Gang of Four and other groups who were combining performance art with rock music. That same year I saw Laurie Anderson in concert for the first time. Big Science had yet to be released but her performance art show at MOMA in Boston previewed most of the songs on that album.

Most of the performance art and electronic music of early pioneers like Robert Ashley and Laurie Anderson have been co-opted by the mainstream pop music and ambitious pop star wannabes like Katy Perry and Lady Gaga who have transformed their stage shows into banal imitations of performance art.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...ivateParts.jpg
Photo: Cover of Robert Ashley's avant garde opus, Private Parts

There are only two songs on Private Parts. Side I is a 22 minute song called The Park and Side II is a 24 minute song titled The Back Yard. Ashley recites the words of his surreal and often dissociated prose with the sparse background accompaniment of tinkling cocktail lounge piano, along with the insistent drumbeat of an Far Eastern tabla drum and the impressionistic tonal washes of a synthesizer keyboard. Ashley's intones his prose/poetry in a soft spoken, world weary voice. His use of non sequiturs and surreal imagery creates an element of dramatic tension in his music. You keep asking yourself "where is this guy going with this thing?" Ashley's method of writing was influenced by the "automatic writing" of surrealist Andre Breton and the random "cut and paste" writing techniques of Beat Generation novelist William S. Burroughs.

For three decades, Private Parts still remains the best album to listen to while under the influence of cannabis of all the albums in my music collection.

Since YouTube doesn't allow videos longer than 20 minutes, I'm sharing an edited 15 minute version of The Park from the 1978 album release of Private Parts by Robert Ashley. The song may sound boring at first, but it has the mesmerizing effect of a mantra. It takes about 8 or 10 minutes to fully appreciate where Ashley is going with his strange narrative.

I apologize for the editing cut at the end. That's YouTube's cut, not mine. Private Parts has out of issue for around 15 years, but I'll email a zip file of the entire album to anyone who's interested in Ashley's music.

Early Videos of Future Rock Stars

Jimmy Page makes his first television appearance in 1957 with his skiffle band. Page is the dark haired guitarist on the left. In the interview, Page tells the host he wants to be research biologist. The host seems like a sex offender on the prowl when he's interviewing the boys.



Jimi Hendrix's first television appearance in 1965. Jimi is in background to the center, next the sax player. He looks like he's having a case of stage fright. The two singers are as gay as the Village People. Maybe that's what Jimi's scared of.



Jim Morrison acting in a television commercial for Florida State University while in high school.



Earliest known video of Bob Dylan singing North Country Blues at a Newport Folk Festival workshop in 1963.

Sitting to Dylan's right is the legendary guitarist, Doc Watson. You can see him in the close up shots. The female sitting behind Dylan is the beautiful Carolyn Hester who was a popular New York folk singer in the early Sixties. The guy with the banjo is the master of the claw hammer banjo style, Doc Boggs. I think the guitarist seated behind Dylan who hands him a pick before the song is bluegrass is Lester Flatt, but I'm not sure.

The video was filmed 50 years ago, which is enough to make me feel old.

Movie Review

Brassed Off Revisited

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...off-poster.jpg
Tara Fitzgerald and Ewan McGregor on movie poster for Brassed Off

One of my favorite films of the Nineties was Brassed Off (1996) a small independent movie about the struggles of a colliery brass band in a Yorkshire village in the waning years of the Thatcher administration. It was billed as a romantic comedy in the United States but it is also deadly serious political film that criticizes the human suffering caused Margaret Thatcher's economic policies. As a bonus to music fans, Brassed Off has a great soundtrack of traditional brass band music by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band.

With the recent passing of Margaret Thatcher, I decided watch my DVD of Brassed Off to see how well it's political message has held up in the sixteen years since it's theatrical release. The story line is a thinly disguised fictional account of the impact of the closure of a colliery (coal mining pit) in the South Yorkshire village of Grimethrope. Following the closure of the colliery, Grimethorpe was named the poorest village in Great Britain by the European Union.

Writer/Director Mark Herman changes the name of the village to Grimley in the film but most the script of Brassed Off is faithful to the real live events surrounding the closing of the Grimethorpe colliery. The film is short on location in Grimethorpe and except for a few screen actors, the Grimley brass band is made up entirely of real life members of the Grimethorpe Brass Band who are the actual players on the movie soundtrack.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...313_Medium.jpg
Pete Postlewaite as band conductor Danny in Brassed Off

At the center of the film's story is Danny, the long suffering and stern conductor of the Grimley Brass Band. Danny is portrayed by the late Pete Postlewaite one of the finest stage and screen actors of his generation. Steven Spielberg called Postlethwaite "the best actor in the world" after working with him on The Lost World: Jurassic Park. I think Brassed Off is the best screen acting performance Postlewaite's long and distinguished career even topping his 1993 Oscar nominated performance in In The Name of the Father.

The Grimley Brass Band was sponsored by the local coal mining colliery and most of the players were employees of the company. The band has a long and ignoble history of losing national competitions but Danny has never lost sight of his goal to turn the band around and win the finals of the national brass band competition at Royal Albert Hall in London.

For those readers who don't live in the UK, there's a long history of community brass bands in England that dates back to the late 19th Century. The costs of maintaining these community brass bands are underwritten by the local businesses who sponsor the bands.

When a talented young flugelhorn player named Gloria (played by Tara Fitzgerald) auditions for the band, Danny sees Gloria as the sort of talented musician who could turn around the band and restore it to it's former competitive greatness. As it turns out Gloria grew up in Grimley then moved to London to pursue a higher education and a professional career.

Gloria's deceased father was somewhat of local legend as the most talented flugelhorn player to ever play in the Grimley Brass Band. With Gloria's father in the band, Grimley actually made the finals of the national brass band completion but never won the national trophy. Gloria plays the antique flugehorn once played by her father in the band. Gloria becomes a symbolic link to the Grimley Brass Band's glory days for Danny who once played in the band with Gloria's father.

The addition of the lovely Gloria on the flugelhorn to the all male Grimley brass band adds an element of sexual tension to the story. We learn that Andy (played by Ewan McGregor) once had a schoolboy crush on Gloria but he was too shy to pursue her in his younger years.

The future of Grimley Brass Band is placed in jeopardy when the local coal mining company announces it's plans to evaluate a plan to close the Grimley colliery. Since the mining company is the sole sponsor of the brass band it's likely that the brass band would be dissolved if the mining company closes down the operation.

The events of the movie mirror the real life events in Great Britain in the early Nineties. The conservative Thatcher government made a decision some years earlier to replace coal with nuclear power as a source of fuel, and as a result some 140 pits, representing more than 200,000 miners' jobs, were declared redundant. The closure of a pit means the death of a town, because a village like Grimley depends entirely on the wages of the miners, whose families for generations have gone down in the mines--and played in the band.

Despite his own failing health from black lung disease, band conductor Danny sees a final opportunity for the Grimley Brass Band to march to glory in the national competition. At first the band members are too preoccupied with the loss of their jobs to perform well. In one hilarious scene, the band drowns it's sorrows by spending the afternoon getting drunk on ale which results in a comically off-key performance in the competition.

Note to reader: If you want to avoid any spoilers that give away the ending of the movie, stop reading the review now!

=======================

It all changes when Danny collapses and falls into a coma and is hospitalized. The band members decide to pull it together and win the competition for their director.Meanwhile Danny wakes up from his comatose state, escapes the custody of his nurses and travels to Royal Albert Hall to watch the performance of his band offstage. The YouTube video is their performance of the William Tell Overture in the finals of the national brass band competition at Royal Albert Hall. Except the fake horn playing of actors Ewan McGregor, Tara Fitzgerald and Stephen Tompkinson, the scene is a real performance of the Grimethorpe Brass Band, filmed at the Royal Albert Hall. They're all first rate musicians.



The Grimley Brass band wins the national competition, but conductor Danny emerges from the back stage curtain to reject the award with a stirring speech against the conservative policies of Margaret Thatcher. None of the cast members knew what Pete Postelwaite was going to do or say in the final acceptance speech scene because the director Mark Herman wanted a completely spontaneous reaction by the cast members to Danny's speech. Below is a YouTube clip of Danny's non-acceptance speech.



Brassed Off is a rare film that has the guts to make a fearless political statement about the lives of ordinary real world people. Director Mark Herman avoids the usual comic stereotypes of working class Brits but also he also refuses to glorify his characters as noble working class heroes. The characters in Brassed Off are flawed human beings who rise to a moment of short lived greatness when an economic crisis threatens their livelihood and their identity as a community. As Roger Ebert said in his 1997 review of Brassed Off, "There is not a moment in "Brassed Off'' when I did not believe Postlethwaite was a brass band leader--and a bloody good one."

Lost Album Classics- Volume I

Lost Album Classics will be a periodical feature of my journal in which I trawl my extensive music collection and feature a handful of under-appreciated albums that never found a large audience when they were released.

My aim isn't to feature the most obscure and non-commercial albums I can possibly find, rather Lost Album Classics are the albums in my music collection that should be heard by more people. I'm sure many Music Banter forum members will be familiar with some of the albums I choose because many the artists have cult followings among fans who follow a particular genre of music.

Only one rule governs the selection of an album choice: Any album that ever charted on the Billboard Top 200 sales list is automatically disqualified from consideration, since my purpose is to feature worthwhile albums that had poor sales in the marketplace.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v8...te/SoAlone.jpg
Title: So Alone
Artist: Johnny Thunders
Release Date: 1978

Johnny Thunders made his biggest impact as guitarist for the glam/proto-punk group the New York Dolls but fans of the New York punk scene are familiar Thunders from his work with the Heartbreakers and as a solo artist. During the Eighties, Thunders began to sink into the depths of heroin addiction which resulted in his death from a methadone overdose in New Orleans in 1991.

So Alone is the last truly great album from Thunders, although he continued record compelling music for the next thirteen years until his death. On the albums he recorded after So Alone, Thunders unwittingly documented his own implosion from drug addiction.

You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory is the second cut on So Alone.

The Decline of Western Civilization is an excellent documentary. Darby Crash was a character not built to last, seeing the live footage of The Germs in the documentary he seems absolutely wasted and completely all over the place. God only knows what he was like just before he died.



My favourite part of the film is FEAR taunting the crowd before their set, hilarious.

Fear was the first hardcore punk band in the United States. They formed in 1977 but didn't issue an album until 1982. Fear was too busy raising hell to make a record.

Fear was also the most confrontational punk band, even more inflammatory than the Sex Pistols in their heyday. Fear's front man Lee Ving has since recanted his negative remarks about gays and said his remarks were aimed at homophobic meat-head jocks in the audience, to (unsurprisingly) rile them up. In the footage from the documentary, Ving appears to be doing just that. The people angered by Ving's gay baiting are a group of jocks who were dumb enough to be personally insulted by Ving's outlandish remarks about their sexuality.

In 1981 Fear appeared on Saturday Night Live and was the first and only unrecorded band to ever appear on the show. Lee Ving brought in a group of skinhead slam dancers who tore up the set and nearly incited an audience riot. The bands behavior resulted in a ban any more appearances by Fear on Saturday Night Live or any other NBC show.

When Fear finally released their first album in 1982, they surprised a lot people by playing a set of songs with daunting skill and brutal intensity.

My favorite performance from Decline of Western Civ was X. In the video below X rips through a version of Nausea while everyone in the audience is slam dancing, fighting and drinking to the point of acute alcohol poisoning... It makes me yearn for good old days of 1979, when I'd awake the next morning in a trash dumpster in Kenmore Square.