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Friday, February 26, 2010
DON'T YOU SEE HOW THIS WORLD MADE A CHANGE
Blind Wilile McTell
1932
Available on: The Complete Blind Willie McTell, Vol. 2: 1931-1933
Document : 1990
[Buy It]
THE BIG CHANGE
Big Mama Thornton
1953
Available on: Hound Dog: The Peacock Recordings
MCA : 1992
[Buy It]
TIME CHANGES EVERYTHING
Johnny Cash
Now, There Was a Song!
Sony : 1960
[Buy It]
THINGS HAVE CHANGED
Barb Jungr
Every Grain of Sand
Linn : 2002
[Buy It]
LORD I'VE BEEN CHANGED
Tom Waits
Orphans
Anti : 2006
[Buy It]
Recently, things changed. Try to read that without laughing. Then without crying. Then without shrugging. Change is happening all the time, everywhere, all at once. In that, these recent changes were like any other, at once unpredictable and predictable. But one of them in particular sunk in, in strange ways, and, once sunk, resurfaced. It isn't a change in my life, exactly, as much as a change near my life. I don't want to be unnecessarily cryptic but clarification is unnecessary. Is it enough to say that someone close to me passed through a major decision. That makes it sound far more ominous than it is. It could have been as simple as deciding not to be a vegetarian any longer or deciding to have a child. It wasn't either of those. It could have been as simple as deciding to move in with a girlfriend. It wasn't that either. It could have been as simple as deciding to give up a cat. We could go on like this for hours, but won't.
This decision also has affected me, very secondarily -- compared to the effect on the primary parties, the effect on me is so trivial that it's almost wrong to mention it. As a result, I won't. I will, however, post a series of songs about change. To prove that change is an ancient theme, I have picked songs that sound like they were carved from the earth, from Blind Willie McTell's Scriptural blues "Don't You See How This World Made a Change" (which is only eighty years old, but sounds eight thousand, at least) to Big Mama Thornton's "The Big Change" (old-fashioned, and addressed straight at the heart of an age-old dilemma: do you trade in/change your lover before you're changed/traded in?) to Johnny Cash's cover of Bob Wills' "Time Changes Everything" (Tommy Duncan, the singer and songwriter responsible, was born on January 11, 1911, a date so full of one's that it feels like it might be located at or near the beginning of time, which evidently changes everything). Rounding out the post if Barb Jungr's cover of Bob Dylan's towering "Things Have Changed." Jungr's performance, which comes from the generally excellent Every Grain of Sand album, is deeply flawed. It's played like a "Threepenny Opera" outtake; Jungr is more youthful than Dylan and doesn't reverse the gender of the narrator, which undermines both the song's weariness and its sexiness; and there's a chorus chant added into the song that is more distracting than affirming. Still, for all these changes, the song remains the same, especially lyrically, and amidst the clutter and the questionable choices there are lines that stand out searingly:Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much
You can't win with a losing hand I was going to end there, but at the last minute I tacked on Tom Waits's "Lord I've Been Changed," which is all about conversion, and how altering your religious identity can bring you closer to your true self. I think the friend I'm talking about used to like Tom Waits but as some point changed his or her mind.Labels: ben, blues, change
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
NEVER TELL YOUR MOTHER SHE'S OUT OF TUNE
Jack Bruce
Songs For a Tailor
Atco : 1969
[Buy It]
YOU SAY YOU TRUST YOUR MOTHER
Swamp Dogg
1972
Available on : Excellent Sides of Swamp Dogg, Vol. 2
S.D.E.G. : 2001
[Buy It]
MY MOTHER WAS A FRIEND OF THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
Blurt
1980
Available on : The Best of Blurt Vol. 1: The Fish Needs a Bike
Salamander : 2004
[Buy It]
MAMA TOLD ME NOT TO COME
Randy Newman
12 Songs
Reprise : 1970
[Buy It]
MOTHER
John Lennon
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
Capitol : 1970
[Buy It]
I DON'T WANNA BE A SOLDIER
John Lennon
Imagine
Capitol : 1971
[Buy It]
WHO PUTS ME IN MY LITTLE BED
Ada Jones
1913
Edison Blue Amberol
YONDER COMES MY MOTHER
Son House
1965
Father of the Delta Blues
Sony : 1992
[Buy It]
In the last week three friends of mine have had what I'll call non-productive moments with their mothers. This isn't the appropriate place for details, so I'll make some up. One friend wanted to go on a camping trip in the wilds of Alaska, and her mother, who once lost a sibling to a vicious Kodiak, overreacted to the plan. "No," she screamed. "You will be torn to pieces by that bear, my darling." Another friend told her mother she was planning on taking crack. "Whatever," her mother said. "Save me some." The woman was then incensed that her mother didn't care more for her. The third friend had given notice at her job, which her mother had never much liked, on account of the fact that her boss was a hardened criminal who bootlegged DVDs and carried a gun in the waistband of his pants. But some important wires crossed in her mother's head, and she became furious with her daughter for once again becoming, at the age of 41, unemployed.
The other day I saw the Albert Brooks movie "Mother," which I have been bothering my wife to rent. She went to every video store within walking distance of our house, and no one has the movie. I despaired for it. Then it turned up on HBO, and we watched about two-thirds of it. I don't usually talk about pop culture other than pop music here, but I urge everyone to see it. It has too much dime-store psychology, and it knows that, but it has a fantastic performance by Debbie Reynolds as the perky, practical, judgmental, loving mother. Brooks is great, because he's always great: when he is forced to eat the permafrost sherbet in his mother's freezer, he screws up his face and says that it "tastes like an orange foot." There are plenty of moments of inspired discomfort -- at one point Brooks taunts his younger brother by pretending that he and his mother are having a sexual relationship -- but the climactic scene, where Brooks, who is playing a successful but blocked sci-fi writer, discovers that his mother also harbored dreams of literary fame, is legitimately moving. Consider this a Moistworks two thumbs up, though both thumbs are mine.
In the last hour I have been working on a technology to beam that movie into my friends' minds. I want them to understand that most of what their mothers do is done from love, and that the poor execution should be forgiven if possible. I would also beam the movie into the mothers' minds and tell them to ease off, that their kids are smart and confident so long as they are permitted to be that way, and that they need not worry so industriously about the worst-case scenarios. Of course everyone already know all of this, but I want to agree. And while I perfected the technology about five minutes ago, now I'm having second thoughts, mainly because the three situations I heard about this week concern mothers and daughters, and the Albert Brooks movie, along with everything I personally know, concerns mothers and sons. I think we can all agree that mother-daughter business is significantly different from mother-son business. It's knottier. It persists. There are mirrors hung next to windows, which can be confusing and exhilarating. I'm not even sure that mother-son solutions can address mother-daughter problems except in the most hapless, generic sense. Oh well.
In the last ten seconds, I put the blueprints for the movie-beaming device into the top drawer of my desk and took out a series of songs about mothers. There's Jack Bruce's "Never Tell Your Mother She's Out of Tune," which is interesting advice if you consider it more broadly - Bruce seems to be saying you should just take the lumps from maternal scrutiny/sanction and move on. Unfortunately, all the reasoned thinking takes place in the title; the song, despite some nice guitar by George Harrison, is a collection of disjointed blues-inflected lyrics. There's a similar problem at the heart of Blurt's spiky, excellent, somewhat nonsensical "My Mother Was a Friend Of the Enemy of the People." For actual answers, it's useful to go elsewhere. Swamp Dogg's "You Say You Trust Your Mother" investigates what can happen when children no longer believe that their mothers are acting in their best interest. As usual with Swamp Dogg, the song is far more complex than it first appears; it's not just about biological mothers, but about nations and patriots, the dangers of unconditional trust and the toxic sadness of suspicion. Randy Newman's "Mama Told Me Not to Come," on the other hand, illustrates what can happen when children fail to heed their mothers' advice - what can happen, it seems, is that those children can grow up fast: The radio is blasting, someone's beating on the door
Our hostess is not lasting, she's out on the floor
I seen so many things here I ain't never seen before
I don't know what it is but I don't wanna see no more
Mama told me not to come
Mama told me not to come
Mama said that ain't no way to have fun So what is the way to have fun? To listen to your mother? To ignore her? To ignore her knowing that what she's saying is half-panic and half-wisdom? In the Albert Brooks movie, he is drawn back to his mother when he starts to believe that he is dysfunctional in life because he has failed to understand what lies at the root of the mother-child dynamic. But he cannot accept anything his mother says at face value: she's always prodding him, always provoking, never saying exactly what she means. If she told him not to go to a party, he'd go, just like the young man in Randy Newman's song - and like that young man, he might spend much of the party thinking of his mother's sound advice, and even missing her a little. One of the most famous mothers in rock and roll belongs to John Lennon, who lost her when he was seventeen; she surfaces explicitly in the Beatles "Julia" and then "Mother," from Lennon's first solo album. She may also be present, though more obliquely, in "I Don't Want to Be a Soldier," the ragged, anguished political broadside that closes side one of "Imagine":Well, I don't wanna be a soldier mama, I don't wanna die
Well, I don't wanna be a sailor mama, I don't wanna fly
Well, I don't wanna be a failure mama, I don't wanna cry
Well, I don't wanna be a soldier mama, I don't wanna die
Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no Is Lennon appealing back to the mother he lost for sanity? For safety? Or is "mama" more generic here? Is it a girlfriend? Is it womanhood in general, understood as protection against the ravages of war and male insecurity? Again, these are all mother-son situations, and not particularly helpful for mother-daughter dust-ups. Again, oh well. I did find one explicit mother-daughter song, from Ada Jones, from 1913, though it's sung from the perspective of a child dreaming of adult romance and complexity and coming back, every time, to the reliability of a mother's affection--and then, as punchline, to the harsher reality of a father's responsibility:I've had the measles and the mumps
The stomach ache and stomach pumps
My ma says she's afraid a cough
Some day will surely take me off
I get five cents each time I take cod liver oil, you see
And when I've got a dollar saved my ma buys more for me
Who puts me in my little bed?
My mama dear
Who hugs me when my prayers are said?
My mama dear
Who buys me every kind of pill
With sugar on to cure my ills?
But who pays all the doctor bills?
My dear old dad In the ninety-six years since the song was first released, it hasn't gotten any less creepy.
Mothers, children, conflicts, bonds: it all comes together and all comes apart in Son House's "Yonder Comes My Mother," which is rich with unanswerable questions of separation, emptiness, fullness, exhilaration, and fear. While most songs about mothers get caught up in domestic particulars or psychodrama, this one sees only the big picture, and this may be because it's mistitled, somewhat: this is Son House's version of the spiritual "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder," which makes a case for accepting even the flawed among us, and for looking past shortcomings to the common thread that binds together all humans, even those who are already bound together. Wait, maybe it is about mothers and children, after all.Labels: ben, blues, rock and roll, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
HELP ME LIFT YOU UP
Mary Margaret O'Hara
Miss America
Koch : 1988
[Buy It]
THINK ABOUT YOUR TROUBLES
Harry Nilsson
The Point!
RCA : 1971
[Buy It]
HELP ME
Van Morrison
It's Too Late To Stop Now
Warner Bros. : 1974
[Buy It]
HELPING HAND
Fats Domino
1962
Available on: Out of New Orleans
Bear Family : 1993
[Buy It]
HELPING HAND (A THOUSAND MILES AWAY FROM HOME)
Snooks Eaglin
New Orleans Street Singer
Smithsonian Folkways : 1959
[Buy It]
'CAUSE I LOST MY HELPING HAND
Little Miss Cornshucks
1951
Available on: 1947-1951
Classics R&B : 2003
[Buy It]
MISTER, WOULD YOU PLEASE HELP MY PONY?
Ween
Chocolate and Cheese
Elektra : 1994
[Buy It]
The other night I had a dream. It was about the Somali pirates, which means that it probably wasn't about them at all. In the dream I was at home, watching the news. Most of the shots were aerial, footage of the captured boat and the captain with a gun to his head. A few of the shots seemed to be from the vantage of the boat; they showed helicopters with cameras bolted to their doors, zipping by in the afternoon sky. That was how the dream went: shot of boat, shot of sky, shot of boat, shot of sky. It started exciting, because it was a pirate dream -- avast, ye mateys! -- but it got boring fast.
Then after a while I noticed something in the background. It was a friend of mine. She was not on the boat. She was in the water, about fifty yards behind the boat, in a tiny white ring of a life preserver, the kind you see in movies. The air was perfectly clear, and I could see her expression. She looked peaceful. In real life, this friend is going through a series of intense experiences, some personal, some professional, some financial, some emotional. I wouldn't say I'm worried about her, exactly, because she's smart and capable and lands on her feet like a cat, but I have occasional twinges of worry, because I don't like her to be sad. Those occasional twinges displease me because I don't know what they're asking me, or even telling me, to do. Sometimes I give advice. Sometimes I back off and offer a sympathetic ear. Sometimes I tell her that if anyone crosses her during this difficult time I'm going to knock 'em out. But it's not an easy time for her, I don't think, and to be, on top of everything else, stranded in the ocean with only a bright white LifeSaver around her, well, that was just too much. She needed my help. In the dream, I called her and she answered. "Hi," she said.
"Hi?" I said. It seemed insufficiently dramatic. "I'm watching on TV and you're in the ocean behind the pirates. Are you okay?"
"Fine," she said. "The water's nice." She seemed unconcerned, like she was certain someone was on the way to rescue her.
"Okay," I said. I started to hang up, but something stopped me. "Wait a second," I said. "How come you're talking to me on the phone now, but in the picture onscreen, you're not on the phone?"
"Don't know," she said. "Maybe it's file footage." She coughed. "Did I just cough onscreen?"
"You're not even holding the phone," I said. "Anyway, I wanted to see how you are."
"Well, I have to go," she said. "Don't worry about me. I'm fine." At times, she has sounded under the weather when she has said these kinds of things, or under the gun. This time she sounded calm and confident. "Talk to you later." I hung up the phone and watched her on TV, there in the middle of the ocean. Her expression shifted -- to boredom, to anger, a flicker of fear, then to something I didn't recognize.
She had told me not to worry about her, but I did. I worried even after I hung up. I called the real-life friend and told her about the dream friend. At first, she didn't believe me. "Is that dream some kind of code?" she said.
"Dreams are always some kind of code," I said, as condescendingly as possible.
"You know what I mean," she said. "Did you really dream it, or are you just pretending as a way of telling me that you think I'm making a mistake about something?"
"Are you making a mistake about something?" I said, still condescending.
"Well, I have to go," she said. "Don't worry about me. I'm fine." Again, calm and confident. "Talk to you later."
We hung up uneasily. Or rather, I was uneasy. Telling me not to worry once, in a dream, was fine. It might have been some kind of code. But telling me not to worry twice, once in real life, was too much. I could take a hint. I wouldn't worry, which meant I wouldn't help. Instead, I went to listen to music, and specifically to songs about help. I listened to "Help!" and "Help Me, Rhonda" and "With a Little Help From My Friends." As forms of counsel regarding advice and assistance, they seemed pat, like songs you've heard hundreds of times. I dug deeper, through Elton John's "Yell Help" and Hasil Adkins' "Can't Help It Blues," until I reached Mary Margaret O'Hara's "Help Me Lift You Up." Mary Margaret O'Hara is often at the deepest reaches of any question. This song is deceptively simple, which means that it can lose its way among some of the knottier, deceptively complex songs on her "Miss America" album. When you separate it from the rest of the class, though, it excels, not only as a song about friendship and help, but as a song about dreams:I have a dream
It's very clear
You're all around
But never near As life preservers go, it's more substantial than my friend's simple white ring but also darker. The chorus, "Help me lift you up," is many things at once, a statement of mutual need, a paradox, a plea. It's selfless but not entirely so. The argument, at least of that one phrase, is that you'll never get lifted without my lift, but that I can't lift you unless you're not just letting me, but helping me. I need to lift you to feel lifted myself, and I need your help. That complex, co-extensive process can unfold over the course of a lifetime--it can nurture two people in parallel or even in intersection--but it has to begin somewhere: with a phone call, say.
And so I was determined not to call my friend. Why should I? I had offered assistance and my offer had been received but not embraced, not once but twice. That was fine. I could take a pair of hints. Still, I went through the morning in a little bit of a haze. The air wasn't perfectly clear. What was my role as a friend, exactly? Should I challenge her? Should I let time pass? Should I joke? Should I call? It wasn't my problem, really: if the emotional circumstances tanked, if the professional circumstances derailed, it wasn't my tank or my train. Maybe the best thing I could do was to let her think about her own troubles. In Harry Nilsson's "Think About Your Troubles," this leads, via a convoluted marine metaphor, to a renewed perspective.Sit down at the breakfast table
Think about your troubles
Pour yourself a cup of tea
Then think about the bubbles
You can take your teardrops
And drop 'em in a teacup
Take them down to the riverside
And throw them over the side
To be swept up by a current
Then taken to the ocean
To be eaten by some fishes
Who were eaten by some fishes
And swallowed by a whale
Who grew so old
He decomposed
He died and left his body
To the bottom of the ocean But I had my own marine metaphor, and it left me with my friend floating in a life preserver in the middle of a heartless expanse. Maybe it was unfair to leave her with her own troubles. Maybe this was one of those rare cases where rushing in was advisable. Thinking about it too much was proving unhelpful, so I left the house and went for a walk in my neighborhood. People were talking about the Somali pirates, though no one mentioned seeing my friend on the news. A new store was opening in my neighborhood. There were apples on a table. "Want one?" a woman said. "Help yourself."
The next day, I was done with the apples. There was a core in the garbage and another one in the sink. My friend was still helping herself, or at the very least hadn't asked for my help. I was curious about her situation but not curious enough to do anything about it; I was all around but never near. And so the songs kept coming: Liz Phair's "Help Me Mary," the Lyres' "Help Me Ann," Stevie Wonder's "Heaven Help Us All." I settled, this time, on Van Morrison's "Help Me," which is a live cover of a Sonny Boy Williamson song. There's a tension built into the center of the song: Morrison is asking for help, but he sounds so vital that it's hard to imagine that he needs it. And in fact, he's not asking for help so much as offering an entry-level (if you know what I mean) position that he means to fill one way or another:You got to help me
I can't do it all by myself
You got to help me, baby
I can't do it all by myself
You know if you don't help me darling
I'll have to find myself somebody else Other songs are more honest in their abjection, like Fats Domino's "Helping Hand":I'm a thousand miles away from home, sleeping in the rain
A thousand miles away from home, waiting for a train
Nobody seems to want me or give me a helping hand
I nevermore will roam again if I ever get home again That's where my friend was in my dream, a thousand miles away from everything. She bobbed on the surface of the water and while she'd answer the phone if you called, she wouldn't call you. The song, which was adapted from Jimmie Rodgers' "Waiting on a Train," was also recorded by Snooks Eaglin, whose version is sadder than Domino's and, paradoxically, less desperate. Eaglin seems aware enough of his confusion and loneliness that there's a good chance he'll grab onto whoever reaches out to help. Little Miss Cornshucks (the stage name of the R&B singer Mildred Cummings) demonstrates this principle even more sharply with "'Cause I Lost My Helping Hand"; she's so deep in the well that it seems certain someone will pull her out.
But certainty's a funny business. Once, long ago, as a kid, I was walking with a friend -- a different friend -- and came upon a dead dog on the side of the road. There was something shocking about the sight, and it wasn't the fact of it. Dogs die. Sometimes they are violent deaths. Sometimes they are peaceful. What was shocking about this dog was that he was neither. He had an expression that I would only recognize much later in life. He was waiting for help that never came. I thought about the dog's expression while I tried to remember my friend's expression in the dream, the final one that came after boredom and anger and fear. She floated on the water and wanted...what? nothing? a chance to make her own mistakes? time to prove that they were not mistakes? a fair shake in the sea of possibilities without interference from, say, me? I was available for help but also happy not to help. The dog's expression was branded on my brain. My friend was out there in the ocean. I had woken up from my dream but that didn't mean it wasn't also true.Labels: ben, blues, pop
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, January 23, 2009
THE MEMPHIS TRAIN
Rufus Thomas
1968
Available on : Beg, Scream & Shout! The Big Ol' Box of 60's Soul
Rhino : 1997
[Buy It]
TRAIN TO TAMPA
Sam Dees
1968
Available on : The Birmingham Sound: The Soul of Neal Hemphill, Vol. 1
Rabbit Factory : 2006
[Buy It]
SAME TRAIN TWICE
Swamp Dogg
1977
Available on : The Excellent Sides of Swamp Dogg, Vol. 5
SDEG : 2007
[Buy It]
PLAY A TRAIN SONG
Todd Snider
2005
Available on : Tales From Moondawg's Tavern
TRAIN SONG
Tom Waits
Big Time
Island : 1990
[Buy It]
Last night I took the train up to Boston for a reading, and then took the last train of the day back to New York. There were equipment delays and subways going one way and commuter-rail connections the other way; all in all, the entire trip took fourteen hours, eleven of which were spent on tracks. The way up was a midday trip, crowded and aggravated. The way back was nearly empty, just me and what seemed like a youth soccer team and a woman reading a dirty book and another woman with a highly shaggy dog in a bag. I tried to sleep, had a little success, tried to read, had a little success.
Between these failures, I had plenty of time to think, and one of the things I thought about was trains: or, more specifically, planes, trains, and automobiles, and how they have furnished fertile subjects for songwriters. In rock and roll, cars win: early rock and roll and rockabilly have too many car songs to count--the original "Brand New Cadillac"? "Dead Man's Curve"? the balance of the Beach Boys/Chuck Berry catalogs?--but if you widen the scope to include blues, soul, country, and jazz, trains may pull into the lead. (This is just a metaphor. I am not endorsing any car/train races. Very dangerous.) There's "Mystery Train," of course, and "The Train Kept A-Rollin'," and "Smokestack Lightning" and the Singing Brakeman and a tradition so rich that I would consider it at greater length if I wasn't so tired from the train. There are many, many things to say about trains in song, but I'm only going to be able to extract one today, and that's how trains embody both desire and helplessness, even when they're not heading into a tunnel. In cars, you drive, which is a self-starting and self-determined act. In trains, you're subject to schedules, to conductors, to people meeting you at the station or not being there to meet you. Songs about trains are necessarily songs about waiting, and that makes all the difference in the world. To that end -- I think it's called a terminal in train talk -- here are Rufus Thomas, Sam Dees, Swamp Dogg, Todd Snider, and Tom Waits. The last two are live versions, and in both cases, songs are preceded by highly shaggy dog stories. The Snider is especially epic, more than fifteen minutes of waiting before he gets to the song -- it just keeps a-rollin'.Labels: ben, blues, rhythm and blues
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, November 13, 2008
VOICES
Cheap Trick
Dream Police
Epic : 1979
[Buy It]
YOUR SWEET VOICE
Matthew Sweet
Girlfriend
Volcano : 1991
[Buy It]
I HEARD THE VOICE OF A PORKCHOP
Jim Jackson
1928
Available on: Good For What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows, 1926-1937
Old Hat : 2005
[Buy It]
Recently I've been doing interviews for my new book, which is a collection of short stories about letter-writing and correspondence, and the way that the recent and advancing technologies are harming, which is not to say destroying, the intimacy that comes from that kind of communication. That's the party line I've been spouting, and I believe it, largely. The interviews have themselves become players in the case I'm building against technology: some of them have been conducted on email, which is at least a little bit ironic. Others have been on the telephone, which is at most a little bit ironic.
The phone interviews have been conversations, of a sort, but they've been conversations with strangers. When I talk to friends these days, it's not always (or even often) on the telephone. I am not alone in this. The thing that we call the telephone is in fact a nodal point for several other kinds of communication that have little or nothing to do with telephony: text, IM, email. This evolution has had several major effects, but the main one is this: there are days when I talk to friends but I don't hear their voices. In a literary sense, this isn't quite true: I read things that they write, so I learn their voices, but the physical fact of their voices is less real than ever: air, cords, tongue. This week, I was speaking to a friend I haven't talked to in a long time; we reconnected on email. She was talking (writing) about someone's voice in her office, which struck me as strange. I could imagine that person's voice, since she was describing it, but I had no information about her voice. Had it changed over time? Was it roughened up by whiskey? Deepened by age? Stealthy? Persuasive? Careful? Candied? I didn't ask, because that would have been embarrassing, but I wondered, and wondered if anyone ever asks. What does your voice sound like? It's an intimate question, and intimacy means different things than it used to.
Though the world has fewer voices in it, it also has more voices in it, and pop music is one of the sites of that paradox. You can't listen to it for more than a minute or two without thinking about voices: why this one is better than that one, why that one is more affecting than the other one, why a certain technical ability fails to convey a certain kind of honesty. Magazines are constantly running features about the best voices in the history of the genre. Is Dylan better than Sam Cooke? Is Christina Aguilera better than Grace Slick? Is Ian Hunter better than Malkmus? Is Bobbie Gentry better than Beyonce? Every answer to these questions is right, and every answer is wrong, but the questions themselves are the point: it is voices that are being considered. The fact that you could go on forever -- or, more to the point, that I could -- is one of the central aspects of the entire art form. And yet, even within a genre universally defined by voices, though, there are only a few songs that are specifically about voices. Cheap Trick's "Voices" is one, and one of the best, because the melody is sweet without being saccharine, and because Robin Zander has a better voice than most singers. It's not about a conversation, but about the memory of a conversation, and about how memory can polish a lover's voice:I remember every word you said
I remember voices in my head This song reveals one of the secret truths about voices, which is that they are mostly for other people. Singers probably know this instinctively, but it's nice when they write songs that sharpen and drive home the point. When other people give you their voice, even a few moments of it, you can use it to build upon: you can yoke it to emotions, retreat inside of it, feather your nest. This idea is handled even more explicitly, and even more self-referentially, in Matthew Sweet's "Your Sweet Voice": Speak to me with your sweet voice
And take me through another night
Speak to me with your sweet voice
And I will surely be alright Try to read this with the pun stripped away. Or rather, try to hear it with the pun silenced. I can't. It sounds like he's at once pleading with a woman and marketing his own work. I once spent the night with a woman whose voice I really liked. I like the voices of everyone I've ever been involved with (how can you not? it would be intolerable) but this one woman had a tremendous voice. I told her so, that night, all the time, until I realized that when I was telling her things, she wasn't talking.
Since I started writing this piece, my phone has buzzed twice. That's two more voice mails I'll be listening to, two more voices which will, as a result of technology, leave me slightly cold.
My younger son is four. He's just recently started reading, which means he's just recently started to learn the process by which language becomes immortal (or is it tragically attenuated?) in the printed word. Up until now, as a pre-literate but already verbal child, he has had only one option for expressing himself, talking, which he did (and does) constantly. He talks and talks, and if using your voice is a form of generosity, he is the most charitable being I know.
Sometimes, when words fill up his head, he offloads them, and pretends that inanimate things are speaking to him: fire hydrants, cars, stuffed animals. The other night, he was supposed to read my wife a book after she read him a book, but instead he picked up a stuffed dog and let it do the reading for him. The dog read well. It was funny, because he made no real attempt to differentiate the dog's voice from his own, and it was also something other than funny, because it illustrated how firmly he's located inside a world of voices. That will change, and that change will be welcome in some small ways, because it will diminish his unrelenting chatter, and it will be sad in broader ways. You can make the argument that one of the dividing lines between childhood and adulthood is the moment when we stop pretending that inanimate things are talking to us, but then you'd have to contend with the counterargument, brilliantly expressed in Jim Jackson's "I Heard the Voice of a Porkchop," from 1928:I heard the voice of a porkchop say, "Come unto me and rest"
Well you talk about your stewing meats: I ain't know what the best
You talk about your chicken, ham, and eggs and turkey stuffed in dress
But I heard the voice of a pork chop say, "Come unto me and rest" Here, the porkchop is talking in the voice of the Savior. Jackson is lampooning Matthew 11:28 (no relation to Matthew Sweet) and the popular hymn based on it, but he's transplanting the divine comfort to something much more earthy. Puzzle out the song on your own time, slowly, and give me a call when it's unpuzzled. I'll pick up. I have one friend who gets annoyed when I don't answer my phone, and instead of leaving straightforward messages, she does funny voices. Her British accent is terrible, but don't tell her. Her sassy Puerto Rican accent is excellent, and you can tell her I said so. Those messages are more like songs, because they're resigned to be one-way communications, and because they're performances. Sometimes she'll pretend to be her own secretary, telling me to call her back.
The other day, my younger son called me at the office. As he goes from pre-literate to literate, he's also going from pre-numerate to numerate, and one of his favorite things to do is to pick up the house phone and dial my wife's or my cell phone number, which he's memorized. Some days, he'll call me four or five times. I am assuming this phase will pass. The other day, he called twice. I picked up both times. The first time, he said "hi," and then I said "hi," and he said "hi" again. The second time, he told me that he was wearing a Superman sweater that had been mine when I was four. That part I understood. Then there was a garbled monologue about pants and fish and, I think, a firefighter who was wearing a hat but wasn't really standing on the side of the road so much as climbing a pole but then his shoes were not rubber but they were black rubber. I may have gotten the details wrong, but it doesn't really matter. It was nice to hear his voice.Labels: ben, blues, pop
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, November 07, 2008
HOW CAN I MISS YOU WHEN YOU WON'T GO AWAY?
Dan Hicks and The Hot Licks
1969
Available on : The Most of Dan Hicks
Epic : 2001
[Buy It]
HOW CAN I MISS YOU WHEN I'VE GOT DEAD AIM?
Ida Cox
1926
Available on : Complete Recorded Words, Vol. 3: 1925-1927
Document : 1925
[Buy It]
Tiring week, no? Exhilarating, then exhausting, and the second part, maybe, because of the first. So, welcome, new President. I also went to a wake this week, for a friend's father, and that was exhausting without being exhilarating, except that exhausting isn't exactly the right word. It was sobering without being bracing, spine-straightening without being exciting. If I didn't already know that time marches on, this would have reminded me. Left boot, right boot.
The friend whose father died ended the week more or less tapped out, which is more or less predictable. One of the hardest things about the wake, he said, was having to conduct intimate business with so many people he didn't really know. What do you say to the man who was your next-door neighbor when you were four? You don't really remember him, but he's part of your past, and consequently, part of your present. His absence for most of your life doesn't erase a sense of presence at key moments.
Last night I had a book launch. The event was the opposite of a wake, or maybe the mirror image. Acquaintances showed up, along with colleagues, along with strangers. The people I see and speak to all the time were also there. Those people interest me the most, which is probably why I see and speak to them all the time. They interest me because the very fact of them is so strange. What makes you stay close to another person over time? Though I am not stupid--or because I am--that question interests me. Are you drawn back day after day because you believe that person to be a source of wisdom? Of amusement? Because the person is pleasing to look at? Because the mere fact of interacting with that person gratifies you greatly? Because that person's interest in you is also evident and you feed off of it? I'd say that it's some or all of the above. Cynics or depressives will say that friendships persist as a result of inertia, but inertia is harder to keep up than physics suggests.
There aren't many people I talk to or see every day, but there are some. How much is there to say to a person like that? There are two answers to this question. On the one hand, there is nothing to say, because you've used it all up. On the other hand, there's everything to say, because it's always all in play. Party conversations are a quick, clean illustration of this principle. With old friends, you catch up on plot. With new acquaintances, you acquire information about character. With everpresent friends, you reflect back the ongoing light. You talk about nothing and everything: small talk, non-talk, fragments of conversations from before. Yesterday's inside joke becomes tomorrow's cherished nostalgia.
Assuming, that is, that everyone remembers yesterday's inside joke. The circuit I've sketched out above is how it works when it works. But what about when it doesn't work, when one little wire goes haywire? At the party, I was talking to a friend I talk to all the time, and I reminded her of a comment she made a few months ago. She said that she didn't remember saying it, but that it sounded funny. I laughed and said that she was her own best audience, but for one split-second, I missed her. It was a crazy reaction. She was standing right there. I speak to her all the time. It was nothing. A few seconds later she asked me why I hadn't answered an email she had sent earlier today. I said I thought I had, but even if I hadn't, what difference did it make? I knew I'd be seeing her later. What was it about, anyway? She didn't remember. Another nothing.
Later, after my friend left, after my wife and I went home, after some food, after some TV, I thought about the party conversation a little more. Or rather, I thought about the week that had ended with the party conversation. The wake, in particular, had furnished hard evidence of what happens when the circuit between people breaks irrevocably, leaving all memories one-sided and all emails unanswered. Is that why the tiny hiccups in a relationship have a slightly larger ripple effect, because they're fore-echoes of the Big Forgotten Comment? Does presence in most of your life erase a sense of absence at key moments? I clarified with the assistance of two songs, one by Dan Hicks and the other by Ida Cox. Hicks's song is about being fed up with (or possibly pretending to be fed up with) another person's ongoing interest:Out of three billion people, why must it be me?
Oh why, oh why won't you cut me loose?
Just do me a favor and listen to my plea
I'm not the only chicken on the roost! I am certain that people feel this way about me sometimes, because I feel that way about them sometimes. Get another roost! But the best friendships outlast this impulse and return to finer feelings, in part because they are driven by the fear that when people really go away--back to the wake again--you are condemned to miss them forever. Cox's song shifts the power balance, almost completely, and gives advice for women recovering from their man's sudden withdrawal of interest. Here, too, a lack of attention activates intense attention, but of a different sort--the results have collateral damage:If your man quits you, don't wear no black.
Find the girl that bit you for him, and bite her back.
If you kill my dog, I'm gonna kill your cat;
I'm gettin' even with the world and there's nothing to that. The songs, taken apart and then taken together, draw a bead on the not-quite-conversation I had at the party and the not-quite-problems it raises--at the forgotten comment, at the unanswered email, at the remembered affinity. They reframe the question and, at the same time, answer it: The friends you talk to all the time are the ones you miss even when they don't go away.Labels: ben, blues, folk
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
BAD BOY
Eddie Taylor
Vee-Jay : 1955
Available on: Bad Boy
Charly : 1993
[Buy It]
BAD BOY
The Jive Bombers
Savoy : 1956
Available on: Savoy Chart Busters
Savoy Jazz : 2005
[Buy It]
BAD GIRL
The New York Dolls
New York Dolls
Island : 1973
[Buy It]
BAD GIRL
The Zakary Thaks
J-Beck : 1966
Available on: Form The Habit
Sundazed : 2001
[Buy It]
BAD MOTORCYCLE
The Storey Sisters
Cameo : 1958
[Out of Print]
BAD MAN FORWARD, BAD MAN PULL UP
Ding Dong
Available on: The Biggest Ragga Dancehall Anthems 2006
Greensleeves : 2006
[Buy It]
My bad. *My bad what?* I've always wanted to ask, since I was on vacation or something when that phrase hit the street. Anyway, I am bad, truly. Alex asked me to post, oh, *ages* ago, and I'm only stepping up to the plate now. I've always been bad with deadlines - *superbad* with deadlines, in fact, as a legion of aggrieved editors will tell you. But that's okay, because we all know that "bad" means "good." I believe that this has been traced back to a specific usage in Yoruba, I think it is. But some of us who grew up encased in the mantle of certain religions I won't name here had intuited the concept even before Shaft and James Brown sent entire roomfuls of Andy Rooneys to sputtering outbursts of distress and confusion and ire a generation ago. And for some of us, it all started with "He's a mean motor scooter and a bad go-getter," which is a line from "Alley Oop" by the Hollywood Argyles (1960) that immediately transcended its context and became common if precious coin in the schoolyard vocabulary. Naturally, there's bad and there's bad. If I say, "I think that milk is bad," will that cause you to drop everything and go guzzle it? I mean, you're welcome to do so, and I'll make sure we have some frosty cold bad milk on hand whenever you drop by. And if you hear it said of someone, "He's a bad man," you're likely to think that he cruelly pokes animals and makes merciless fun of small children. But if the same party should be called a "bad boy" instead, all sorts of romantic notions may possibly come rushing into your head. As for bad girls...at my advanced age I'm ambivalent, having seen one of them absquatulate with priceless family heirlooms, and having forsaken at least one European throne for the hand of another. Believe me, good girls are just as hot. But I digress. We also know that bad art is sometimes so bad it's good - in fact it's better than good art, which risks being so good it's bad. Let's face it, badness accounts for a major portion of the cultural history of the past fifty years. Is it running out of fools, or is it just getting started?Labels: blues, doo-wop, garage rock, luc, punk, reggae, rockabilly
posted by Luc
LINK |
Friday, March 21, 2008
KILL IT KID
Blind Willie McTell
Atlanta Twelve String
Atlantic : 1949
[Buy It]
Someone once asked me if the reason I wrote was that I couldn't sing. "Sometimes it seems like you'd rather be a singer," she said. "But you do your best." I rolled away from her and faced the other way in bed. It hurt my feelings: not the part about why I wrote, but the part about not being able to sing. If I had been smarter, or quicker, or happier, or older, I would have said that she had hit the nail on the head, gotten up, put on a record, gone back to bed, and done my best. That record would have been "Kill It Kid."Labels: ben, blues
posted by Ben
LINK |
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
ALABAMA BOOGIE
John Lee
Federal : 1951
Available on: Rural Blues vol. 1 1934-1956
Document : 1995
[Buy It]
ALABAMA MAN
Earl Scott
Chascamp c. 1960 (?)
Available on: Nashville Rockabilly
Stomper Time : 2004
[Buy It]
THE STORY OF ALABAMA BOUND
Jelly Roll Morton & Alan Lomax
c. 1938
Available on: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings
Rounder : 2005
[Buy It]
Welcome, folks, to Alabama!
The great state of Alabam' is the 'bammiest state there is. Established in 1973, Alabama was desert until a creek run through, and didn't that desert turn verdant with pasture and slaves? These days, Alabama folk live peacefully and know there never was much to worry about.
ALABAMA
The Blue Sky Boys
RCA : 1949
Available on: The Blue Sky Boys
JSP : 2007
[Buy It]
ALABAMA LULLABY
The Delmore Brothers
Columbia : 1931
Available on: Classic Cuts: 1933-1941
JSP : 2004
[Buy It]
AUTOMOBILE RIDE THROUGH ALABAMA
Red Henderson
OKeh : 1928
Available on: The Roots of Rap
Yazoo : 1996
[Buy It]
Still, people is people, and Alabama people have stories to tell. Stories about apple trees, space men, bull frogs and the sometimes mistreatment of peoples. Up in Chicago, J.B. Lenoir had some mean things to say about the way white folks treated the black folks down in Alabama, and up in Chicago he wasn't afraid to sing about it -
ALABAMA
J. B. Lenoir
Alabama Blues
L& R : 1965
[Buy It]
and sing about it -
ALABAMA (LIVE)
J.B. Lenoir
Home Recording (with Willie Dixon) : 1962
Available on: One of These Mornings
JSP : 2003
[Buy It]
and sing about it some more -
 ALABAMA (LIVE)
('bout 7.5 minutes in)
Like Skip James' "Washington D. C. Hospital Center Blues," the song "Alabama," by J. B. Lenoir, is a last gasp of the old, acoustic country blues. But "Washington D. C. Hospital Center Blues" is a spider-web of a song; "Alabama" is a mighty gasp. Born in Mississippi, Lenoir recorded in and around Chicago for over a decade, but never broke through to a national audience. By 1967, he was working as a dishwasher a the U. of Illinois Champaign campus; he died of heart attack that year, at the age of thirty-eight. The last, unrecorded song he wrote went like this:Something got a hold of me
it must be the Lord
Something got a hold of me
it must be the Lord
Something got a hold of me
it must be the Lord
Something got a hold of me
it must be the Lord
I can't sing right, I can't play right
I can't walk right, I can't talk right
I can't eat right, I can't sleep right
I can't do nothing at all. According to the liner notes I'm looking at, "J.B.'s autopsy revealed that blood from his heart was backing up into his abdomen. His family settled a wrongful death suit against a driver who had hit his car from the rear [three weeks earlier] for $2250. After the lawyers and the court got paid, there was a little over $1,400 for the Lenoir family." Across the pond, in England, John Mayall recorded this eulogy for Lenoir; you can see more of Lenoir on YouTube here, here, and here.
But that's neither here nor there (big love to the Heart of Dixie!) except insofar as "Alabama" by J. B. Lenoir always did strike me as one of the more politically-minded records of the sixties; just a few years earlier, you could stick a microphone in front of any old bluesman, ask all about the hard times, and get no reference to any mistreatments whatsoever:
MONOLOGUE ON ACCIDENTS
Alan Lomax & Blind Willie McTell
The Library of Congress Recordings
c. 1940; first released in 1969
Document : 1995
[Buy It]
Given all this history, it's not surprising that some of the ways folks in Alabama get along is by drinkin':
I AIN'T A BIT DRUNK
George Roark
c. 1938
Availbale on: Kentucky Mountain Music
Yazoo : 2003
[Buy It]
Workin':
OLD ALABAMA
Artists Unknown (Recorded by Alan Lomax)
Negro Prison Blues and Songs
Legacy Intl. : 1994
[Buy It]
And singin' about movin' to Alabama:
GOING TO MOVE TO ALABAMA
Charley Patton
Paramount : 1930
Available on: Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues
Revenant : 2003
[Buy It]
If you're thinking of moving to Alabama, you'll want to print this handy map out. Keep it in your glove compartment. And those of you without a glove compartment, take heart: Alabama is also a fairyland where no one else can enter, and your every valuable is always safe:
STARS FELL ON ALABAMA
Billie Holiday
Verve : 1957
Available on: The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve 1945-1959
Polygram : 1993
[Buy It]
STARS FELL ON ALABAMA
Art Tatum
c. 1955
Available on: The Tatum Group Masterpieces vol. 4
Pablo : 1991
[Buy It]
STARS FELL ON ALABAMA
The Mountain Goats
Nine Black Poppies
3 Beads of Sweat : 1995
[Buy It]Labels: alex, blues, country, geography, jazz, old-timey
posted by Alex
LINK |
Monday, December 31, 2007
WHAT TIME IS IT?
The Jive Five
Beltone : 1962
Available on: Our True Story
Ace : 1991
[Buy It]
I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TIME IT WAS
Roland Kirk Quartet
Mercury : 1962
Available on: Rahsaan: The Complete Mercury Recordings
Polygram : 1990
[Buy It]
TIME FOR EVERYTHING
Ed Pauling & The Exciters
Federal : 1965
Available on: The "5" Royales : Catch That Teardrop : The Best of the Home of the Blues 1950-1954 Sessions (Plus the Complete Federal & Savoy Recordings of El Pauling & Royal Abbit)
Ace : 2007
[Buy It]
PLEASE SEND ME SOMEONE TO LOVE
Percy Mayfield
Specialty : 1950
Available on: Poet of The Blues
Specialty : 1990
[Buy It]
PLEASE SEND ME SOMEONE TO LOVE
James Booker
Keyboard King of New Orleans
c. 1976 (JSP Reissue : 2005)
[Buy It]
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE
The "5" Royales
Federal : 1960
Available on: Catch That Teardrop : The Best of the Home of the Blues 1950-1954 Sessions (Plus the Complete Federal & Savoy Recordings of El Pauling & Royal Abbit)
Ace : 2007
[Buy It]
I CRIED ALL NIGHT LONG
Harvey Sims
Art Rosenbaum Field Recording : 1991
The Art of Field Recording Vol. 1
Dust to Digital : 2007
[Buy It]
TO LOVE SOMEONE (WHO DON'T LOVE YOU)
The Kaldirons
Twinight : 1970
Available on: Eccentric Soul: Twinight's Midnight Rotation
Numero Group : 2007
[Buy It]
HAPPY NEW YEAR, BABY
The Johnny Otis Orchestra
Excelsior : 1947
[Buy It]
MEADOWLANDS
Nancy Jacobs & Her Sisters
Quality : 1955
Available on: The History of Township Music
Wrasse : 2001
[Buy It]
YOU'RE ALL I NEED TO GET BY (TAKE 2)
Aretha Franklin
Atlantic : 1970
Available on: Rare & Unreleased Recordings from The Golden Reign of The Queen of Soul
Atlantic : 2007
[Buy It]
HAPPY NEW YEAR
Lightnin' Hopkins
Decca : 1963
Available on: Blue Yule: Christmas Blues and R&B Classics
Rhino : 1991
[Buy It]
THIS TIME ANOTHER YEAR YOU MAY BE GONE
Rev. Edward Claybor
Vocalion : 1928
Available on: American Primitive vol. 1: Raw Pre-War Gospel (1926-36)
Revenant : 1997
[Buy It]
NOBODY'S BUSINESS
Joe Harris & Kid West
Available on: Field Recordings, vol. 5: Louisiana, Texas, Bahamas 1933-1940
Document : 1998
[Buy It]
The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears. ~W.H. Auden
NEW YEAR'S PARTY
Blowfly
Weird World 12" : 1980
Available on: The Worst of Blowfly
Hot : 1996
[Buy It]
Happy new year to you and yours, from Ben, Brian, James, Joanna, Alex, and the extended Moistworks family!
AULD LANG SYNE
Jimi Hendrix
Live @ The Fillmore : January 1, 1970
Courtesy of: WFMU's Beware of the Blog
[Unreleased]Labels: african, alex, blues, doo-wop, gospel, holidays, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Friday, August 17, 2007
NERVOUS MAN NERVOUS
Big Jay McNeely
1953
Available on : The King R&B Box Set
King : 1996
[Buy it]
I'M SO GLAD
Skip James
Today!
Vanguard : 1964
[Buy it]
I'M SO GLAD
Iggy & The Stooges
1973
Available on : Wild Love: The Detroit Rehearsals and More
Bomp : 2001
[Buy it]
SO GLAD
Howlin' Wolf
1956
Available on : Ain't Gonna Be Your Dog
Universal : 1994
[Buy it]
SO GLAD
Fats Domino
1963
Available on : Out of New Orleans
Bear Family : 1993
[Buy it]
HAPPY BOYS HAPPY
Small Faces
Small Faces
Immediate : 1967
[Buy it]
Big Jay McNeely was a jazz saxophonist in the late forties before he headed off for the riskier, raunchier world of R&B. He hit number one on the R&B charts with the instrumental "Deacon's Hop" in 1949 and was quickly crowned king of the "honking sax" style. More hits followed, including "Nervous Man Nervous," and after retiring from the music business in the early sixties, McNeely enjoyed a comeback in the eighties and nineties. (There's one story, possibly apocryphal, about how he was playing at the Quasimodo Club in West Berlin the night the Berlin Wall came down, and how the German press called him "the modern Joshua" for blowing down the wall.)
I mention McNeely because he was on my mind yesterday, when my older son, who is six, went on a field trip with his summer camp. It's not the first field trip. He has been to Coney Island, to the Staten Island Children's Museum. He's been bowling. I have lost track of all the trips, in fact. Maybe one time they went to Belmont Park and each were given $10 to bet? But then, Wednesday night, I came home and saw the announcement sitting on the counter. It said "Rye Playland."
I had a strange reaction to it. I became nervous and even afraid. The fear wasn't severe, and I'm not even sure it was my own. It may have been an echo of my wife's--she gets that way more often, and she was standing nearby, giving off high levels of Afraidiation. Whatever the reason, I got a little anxious. Partly this was because Rye Playland is further than the other places he's gone. Partly this was because I remembered that earlier this year, a 21-year-old woman was killed in an accident involving the Mind Scrambler, and that the news reports of that death made mention of an earlier death, from 2004, of a young girl. But the rational part of my mind got to the fearful part in a hurry and smothered it with a blanket. Two accidents in four years is sad, but is it a high rate? How many people go through the park in a year? Besides, little kids aren't going on the Mind Scrambler.
The fear, which was ridiculous, receded while I was awake. When I was asleep, it surged. I dreamed that I was with my family in an apartment somewhere. We were leaving to go outside. My wife and younger son went out the door, but my older son wouldn't listen. He went into the bathroom. I followed him in, ready to yell, and found him standing in the middle of the bathroom, staring upward at dozens of fresh corpses hung by meathooks from the ceiling. I woke up immediately. Not comforting at all. I have already written about the idea of fear, but I should add that I'm rarely fearful. When I was a kid, I liked climbing up to the roof and walking around, or going to the top of the tallest tree. Every once in a while, I'd fall the entire height of the thing. It scraped me up, but it didn't scare me. Once, some years ago, before 9/11, my wife and I were flying from Miami to New York and had horrendous turbulence that lasted almost an hour. The woman behind me was screaming "Jesus, no!" for about twenty minutes. It put me off flying for a year but it went away.
So all of this is to say that fear is foreign to me for the most part, and that I don't know what to do with it when it arrives. Work yesterday was smooth but the ice was thin. When my son got back from the dreaded Playland in one piece, with stories about candy and other kids and rides and candy -- a high percentage involved candy-- I was unpredictably glad. So glad that I went and tried to find a song to explain to myself how glad I was. What I found, for the most part, were songs by classic blues singers who decided to set aside their money trouble, girl trouble, health trouble, floods, death, and nobody's dirty business to celebrate life. They lay off of what Hubert Sumlin called "sad blues" and opt instead for what he called "glad blues." And that's the word they tend to use, "glad," instead of "happy," which makes sense -- happy can just happen to you, but glad is, generally, a result. Glad is how you feel when it turns out that the things you were worried about weren't worth worrying about. Glad has, either explicit or implied, an element of relief.
So how glad was I, according to the giants of glad blues? As glad as Skip James in "I'm So Glad," which was originally recorded in 1931, revisited by James after his rediscovery in the sixties, covered famously by Cream and somewhat less famously by Iggy and the Stooges. As glad as Howlin' Wolf in "So Glad," which was the B-side of "I Asked for Water." As glad as Muddy Waters in "I'm So Glad I'm Living" or Sleepy John Estes in "I Ain't Gonna Be Worried No More." I was as glad as all those songs, but I was exactly as glad as Fats Domino in "So Glad," a little-known but reliably irrepressible specimen of the classic New Orleans sound:
Well I'm so glad my baby's coming home
Don't know what to do
I'm so glad my baby's coming home
All of my troubles are through Labels: ben, blues, rock
posted by Ben
LINK |
Monday, May 21, 2007
NASTY DAN
Johnny Cash
The Johnny Cash Children's Album
Columbia : 1975
[Buy It]
RED HOT DAN
Thomas Waller with Morris's Hot Babies
c. 1927
Available on: Fats Waller and his Friends
RCA : 1992
[Buy It]
DANNY'S DREAM
Jeanne Newman
Available on: Memphis Belles: The Women of Sun Records
Bear Family : 2002
[Buy It]
MIDNIGHT DAN
Julia Moody & Her Dixie Wablers
Available on: Tight Women & Loose Bands: 1921-1931
Louisiana Music Factory : 2000
[Buy It]
DAN THE BANANA MAN
Nettle Brothers String Band
Bluebird : 1938
Available on: Tulsa Twist: Stompin' Singers & Western Swingers
Proper : 1999
[Buy It]
DANNY SAYS
Tom Waits
Orphans, Brawlers, Bawlers, & Bastards
ANTI : 2006
[Buy It]
HUSTLIN' DAN
Bessie Smith
Columbia : 1930
Available on: 1929-1933
Allegro : 1998
[Buy It]
ROLLIN' DANNY
The Fall
This Nation's Saving Grace
Beggars UK : 1985
[Buy It]
&
LONE STAR : KINKY FRIEDMAN ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
by Dan Halpern
The New Yorker : 2006Labels: alex, blues, jazz, rock, rockabilly, western swing
posted by Alex
LINK |
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Here's a nice quote about love:
Love: we are those beings who must, at all times, give our all. To be decieved has no real meaning for us, for we act under immense pressure and the object has the sole functionof unleashing this. Thus we are as naive as children when it comes to judging the loved one. Even when a lover only desires flirtation and a touch of sentiment we are so dazzled that we want to give her everything - our very soul. We are ridiculous, but for good reason.
- Robert Musil, Diaries 1899-1944
And a few tracks from the mix cd I'm working on:
I'M STANDING IN THE SHADOWS
The 5 Royals
Todd 7" : 1963
[Criminally Out of Print]
THAT'S HOW I FEEL
The Soul Clan (Solomon Burke, Arthur Conley, Joe Tex, Ben E. King, Don Covay)
Soul Meeting
Atlantic : c. 1968
Available on: Atlantic Unearthed: Soul Brothers
Atlantic : 2006
[Buy It]
WHEN YOU TOUCH ME
The Reigning Sound
Too Much Guitar
In The Bed Records : 2004
[Buy It]
PEGGY
Toots & The Maytals
BMN 7" : 1965
Available on: Pressure Drop The Definitive Collection
Trojan : 2005
[Buy It]
LOVE POTION #9
The Coasters
The Coasters on Broadway
King : 1973
[Even More Criminally Out of Print]/Courtesy of Soul Sides
CRIMSON & CLOVER
The Uniques
Available on: The Best of Slim Smith & The Uniques 1967-1969
Trojan US : 2003
[Buy It]
A TASTE OF HONEY (LIVE)
James Booker
Spiders on the Keys: Live at the Maple Leaf Bar
Rounder : 1993
[Buy It]
(THE LOVE I SAW IN YOU WAS) JUST A MIRAGE
The Uniques
Available on: The Best of Slim Smith & The Uniques 1967-1969
Trojan US : 2003
[Buy It]
SEARCHING THE DESERT FOR THE BLUES
Blind Willie McTell
Available on: The Best of Blind Willie McTell
Yazoo : 2004
[Buy It]
GOODBYE BOOZE
The Delmore Brothers
Available on: Classic Cuts 1933-1941
JSP : 2004
[Buy It]
FUEL FOR LOVE
Wrinkers Experience
Available on : EMI Super Hits
EMI Nigeria : c. the early '70s
[Out of Print]/Also courtesy of Soul Sides
There's no theme yet, except that a few friends are getting married this year, so it's pretty heavy on the love songs. And not all of the squares are in place, but a few of these songs - Crimson & Clover, Love Potion # 9, James Booker's Rachmaninov- flavored Taste of Honey - will make it on by dint of their awesomeness. So this is more or less what I've been walking around in the sunshine listening to. And now, in entirely unrelated (but somewhat more timely) news:
FIDEL CASTRO
Lord Invader
Calypso Travels
Folkways : 1959
[Buy It]Labels: african, alex, bluegrass, blues, calypso, reggae, soul, soul/garage-core
posted by Alex
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Wednesday, November 29, 2006
THE DYIN' CRAPSHOOTER'S BLUES
Blind Willie McTell
Last Session
Prestige : 1960
[Buy It]
DEAL RAG
Walter Taylor
Gennett : 1930
Available on: American Primitives Vol. II
Revenant : 2005
[Buy It]
GRANDMA PLAYS THE NUMBERS
Wynonie Harris
King : 1949
Available on: Bloodshot Eyes
Rhino : 1994
[Buy It]
SPORT
THE BONES FLY FROM SPOON'S HANDS
FOUR BITCHES IS WHAT I GOT
Lightnin' Rod
Hustler's Convention
Celluloid Records : 1973
[Buy It]
Brian's taking a sick day today, so we thought we'd post some songs for Megan's dad....Labels: alex, blues, rhythm and blues
posted by Alex
LINK |
Monday, September 25, 2006
DOWN ON ME
Eddie Head and His Family
Columbia : 1930
Available on: American Primitive v.1
Revenant : 1997
[Buy It]
Janis Joplin: the greatest white blues singer of her generation or minstrel show train wreck? Here are some of the "obscure soul classics that Joplin made her own" (thank you, Rolling Stone).
CRY BABY
Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters
United Artists : 1963
Available on: Cry Baby
Collectables : 1991
[Buy It]
GET IT WHILE YOU CAN
Howard Tate
Get It While You Can
Verve : 1967
Reissued: Hip-O : 2004
[Buy It]
PIECE OF MY HEART
Erma Franklin
Shout : 1967
Available on: Golden Classics
Collectables : 1994
[Buy It]
TRY (JUST A LITTLE BIT HARDER)
Lorraine Ellison
Loma : 1968
Available on: The Best of Loma Records
WEA : 1995
[Buy It]
Assessments of Joplin's soul power vary. I'm not a hater, per se: her version of "Summertime" is one of my favorites and that's saying something. But I saw this House of Blues (shudder) compilation called "Songs of Janis Joplin," and it's got Etta James and Syl Johnson covering songs that Joplin had covered. And that just felt so wrong. (Since when is "Trouble in Mind" Joplin's song? These people are crazy, them and their blues for tourists.)
Then again, when you listen to Big Mama Thornton, who, unlike the artists above, is not known for her subtlety and restraint, you can see what Joplin was going for. I think she does a fair approximation of Big Mama, actually. Except for Big Mama being able to sing and all.
BALL AND CHAIN
Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton
Available on: Vanguard: Roots of the Blues
Vanguard : 2002
[Buy It]
Big Mama's also the kind of blues that's popular in Chicago, the kind I don't particularly like. I'm kind of burnt out on blistering guitar solos and I'm definitely over that whole Blues Brothers palookas-with-saxophones aesthetic. You know?
Still undecided? Check Janis on youtube.
Down on Me
Cry Baby
Try
Piece of My Heart
Summertime
Ball and ChainLabels: blues, megan
posted by Megan
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