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Friday, June 10, 2005
STICKS AND STONES
Titus Turner
c. 1958
Soulville (Collectables)
[Buy it]
THAT'S IT - I QUIT - I'M MOVIN' ON
Sam Cooke
1961
available on various compilations
[Buy it]
IT'S BETTER TO HAVE (AND DON'T NEED)
Don Covay
available on Mercy Mercy (Razor & Tie) [out of print] and
Hot Blood (RPM) [out June 27]
1974
[Buy it]
GREEN SHIRT
Hot Chocolate
Class (EMI) : 1980
[out of print]
ROCK AGAINST RACISM
China Street
EMI Single : 1978
[out of print]
WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT PEACE, LOVE, AND UNDERSTANDING
Brinsley Schwarz
What IS so Funny About Peace Love & Understanding
Hux : 1974
[Buy it]
DANGER ZONE
Ray Charles
1961
available on fewer Ray Charles anthologies than you'd think, really
[Buy it]
This is Franklin Bruno, guest-posting because Alex asked if I would put up a few songs related to my book on Elvis Costello's Armed Forces, in Continuum's 33 1/3 series. Why, don't mind if I do. You'll notice there's no Elvis above - it turns out that the biggest reward of focusing on one record for, oh, nine months is discovering all the music connected to it in one way or another. Here, I'll just briefly note the connections without tying them together - if you want to know more, read the book (as they used to say in the Time-Life commercials), and if not, well, they're still good songs.
Much of the book has to do with the fallout of the infamous "Columbus" incident on the American tour for Armed Forces; in the years since, EC's covered two songs associated with Ray Charles. EC's version of "Sticks and Stones," recorded for a BBC TV show and slipped out as a b-side,shows up on the recent reissue of Kojak Variety; in the liner notes, he's careful to identify it as a Titus Turner song. So here's Turner's original. Turner, by the way, was a Georgia songwriter and singer active through '50s and '60s, on the cusp of R&B and Southern soul. He also wrote "All Around the World" (a.k.a. "Grits Ain't Groceries") and, with Little Willie John, "Leave My Kitten Alone," also covered by EC.
Sam Cooke's "That's It - I Quit - I'm Moving On" was one of his lesser hits, and it never seems to make it into dusties rotation. Maybe it's that tacky piano, a conceit typical of Hugo (Peretti) & Luigi(Creatore), his production team at RCA. (They're also the guys who turned The Weavers' version of "Wimoweh" into "The Lion Sleeps Tonight.") The song's here because (a) it swings, piano or not, and (b) the verse melody and rhythm are amazingly similar to EC's "Blame It On Cain," from My Aim Is True. (Huge thanks to Douglas Wolk, who first played this for me.)
Pardon my iffy vinyl-transfer skills on the next three songs. In the Armed Forces liner notes (Rhino reissue, again), EC cites this Don Covay single as the template for "Goon Squad." Well, I believe him - the 12/8 groove is similar, and check the hi-hat against Pete Thomas' - but I never would have guessed it myself (Covay? Another not-celebrated-enough '60s soul figure - he wrote "Chain of Fools," but that's just the beginning.)
The cover of "Green Shirt" (which, now that I think of it, I didn't even have space to write about) comes from an ill-conceived attempt by UK R&B stalwarts Hot Chocolate - yes, the "I believe in miracles, you sexy thing" Hot Chocolate -- to update their sound with some "New Wave" material; they do The Police's "Walking on the Moon" on the same album. I don't think Errol Brown quite captures the tone of the lyrics; love the strings, though.
"Stand and take your place/When the psychos of the night decide to show their face": in this context, those psychos would be National Front marchers. China Street's single is a sort of semi-officially-sanctioned offshoot of the Rock Against Racism's anti-NF efforts in 1977 and 1978. (EC headlined the movements last festival-size show, in Brixton.) I damn it with faint praise ("middling roots track") in the book, but I've come to enjoy it quite a bit - hey, maybe all men are brothers.
Ultra-tangential point for Conceptual Art fans: the writing credit reads "(Pilkington/Sugden/Hall/Williams/Willan)," and I strongly suspect that "Pilkington" is critic Philip Pilkington, who was also associated with the Art & Language/Red Krayola collaborations.Brinsley Schwarz' original studio version of "What's So Funny About..." is fairly glossy folk-rock; this one's from a radio session recorded a few months later (and a few months before they broke up for good), and it's closer to the better-known cover on the U.S. release of Armed Forces -- but still not quite there. Note Nick Lowe's dripping-with-sarcasm spoken section, absent from the EC/Attractions version - though I've recently heard him use it in concert.
Finally, the other Ray Charles-associated song EC has covered, first in a very anti-Thatcher BBC session in 1983, and later on solo acoustic tours. "Danger Zone" was the b-side to "Hit the Road, Jack"; both sides were written by Percy Mayfield, yet another artist I knew hardly anything about before starting this project. (If you're familiar with Mayfield's own biggest hit, "Send Me Someone To Love," you'll recognize that the structure and harmony are very similar.) I love this song to death: "What'd I Say" and "Busted" and all the rest are great, but how come we can't hear "Danger Zone" coming out of a Starbuck's every twenty minutes?
Elvis Costello's Armed Forces
by Franklin Bruno
Continuum : 2005
[Buy it]
posted by James
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