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Friday, October 17, 2008
SHADOWS OF LOVE
The Pearls
1955
Available on : Atlantic Vocal Groups
Rhino Handmade : 2008
[Buy It]
There is a common mysterious phenomenon I will now try to summarize for you. It involves two people. One of them should be you, because that way you can obtain direct experience of the phenomenon. The other one should not be you. In this phenomenon, one person (maybe you?) enters into a brief social interaction with another person (maybe you?). Maybe there is food. Maybe there is alcohol. Maybe scenery. Those things are often around people as a consequence of our stubborn insistence on civilization. After a little while, though, the first person (for the sake of efficiency, let's just decide that it's you, okay?) feels a growing interest in the second person. Perhaps the interest is physical. Perhaps it's emotional. Perhaps it's simply opportunistic. But there's clearly some sort of pull. There is a leaning in response to the pull, mostly indiscernible to the naked eye, maybe a few centimeters at most. Then the curtain drops.
Why does the curtain drop? Well, for privacy, and also because I have no idea what happens next. Or rather, I know full well what can happen next. Those two people can go to an apartment. They can go to a car. They can go out onto the street. Or they can go, most dangerously of all, into each others' imaginations. That'll happen sometimes, though just as often one person will, upon further consideration, decide that the other person does not fit comfortably into his or her life as already conceived and constructed. In those cases, the second person has nothing to do but recede, either gracefully or disgracefully, until the interest that has grown has shrunk back out of sight. This is what is known as plot. Characters move through it with the illusion of free will. But let's not move into plot. Not yet. Let's remain with that moment just before the curtain drops, the moment at which the air between two people is carbonated with possibility.
Why remain there? Well, for two reasons. For starters, it happens. I am very old these days, with a wife and kids, as tied down as Gulliver in Lilliput, and still sometimes I will be out at a place and enter into a brief social interaction with someone else, maybe with food too, maybe with alcohol, and after a little while I will feel something elastic inside me. Rather: I will feel something inside me and I will know that it is elastic by the fact of its stretching. The sensation is between physical and emotional, and bridges both. Recently I was out with a group of people, and this happened, and I was surprised, both pleasantly and unpleasantly. Maybe by recently I mean years ago. Or maybe I wasn't out and it was during a telephone call, or maybe it was even over email. Who knows? I'll never tell. During this recent happening, not much more happened than I have already indicated. I detected a kind of beauty running through another person like a current and then it crossed my mind that in another world, in another time, under vastly different circumstances, with responsibilities erased and decisions unmade, that this other person and I might be able to spend some time together and not feel compromised about it to the point of mutual paralysis. This all seems extremely run-of-the-mill, doesn't it? One adult likes another adult. Faces and bodies like faces and bodies. Big deal! But maybe it's not run-of-the-mill at all. At one point, I went to the restroom of the restaurant (alone) and stood there by the sink and wondered, for a few seconds only, about the magic of other people. I'm not even sure I always understand why there are other people, let alone why they appear to me as sources of pleasure or (even better) magic. But when they do, they really do: they appear but not as apparitions. They are solid. I left the restroom but my thoughts remained there.
They remained there--and I remain there--for another reason, too, which is that artwork, particularly pop songs, encourages the location. When I was returning from the place where this most recent episode occurred--where, mythology and monumentalizing aside, I met a woman and felt a twinge of interest that I imagined was at least fleetingly mutual, despite the fact that she has a normal old life and so do I and, well, that's pretty much the end of the twinge--I listened to music. I was a little drunk and so the evening demanded it. The first song that came on happened to be about the indefinite nature (but definite existence) of human attraction, as was the second song and the third. The fourth was Bruce Cockburn. Who knows what the hell he was talking about. Nuclear power plants or something? Anyway, after that my iPod got back to the business at hand. I was attracted to the music about attraction, which felt like either a displacement or an extrapolation, but which also felt safe. Music is a source of embrace, especially when it's music about embrace. One of the songs was the Pearls' "Shadows of Love," which is a pretty typical mid-fifties vocal-group song from Atlantic Records, thrillingly sung, highly sentimental:I can see shadows across the sea
Hear your voice calling me
Lord, I suffered, I suffered so
Just to hold you, hold you once more
I went down, down by the sea
I could see shadows of you and me
Yes, I miss you, darling baby
Please hurry home to stay To some degree, the song embarrassed me, because it was about love, and that wasn't what I was thinking about at all. I was thinking about a different kind of attraction, about a short magnetic span. And I wasn't thinking about anything so specific at the exclusion of other things; the source of the twinge was on my mind, but so were other cases of twinge from across the years, in part because I would never be so presumptuous as to erase those other cases and overburden the one (minor) one that had just occurred. The broader notion of twinge was on my mind. That may have been why I came back to "Shadows of Love" a second time, instead of replaying the New York Dolls or Jesus and Mary Chain or Bobbie Gentry. I liked the simplicity and complexity of the song's central idea: shadows of love. It seemed Platonic, both in the nonsexual sense, and also in the sense outlined in the Republic, where shadows on the cave wall are all we know of reality. Is momentary attraction a shadow of love? Does it keep you coming back for more? Does it remind you what you have in real life? Does it risk exposing love as a shadow of something else? I played the song a third time and fell asleep still a little tipsy.Labels: ben, doo-wop
posted by Ben
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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 |
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 |
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
STRANDED IN THE JUNGLE
The Cadets
1956
Available on: Doo Wop Box, Vol. 3: 101 More Vocal Group Gems from the Golden Age of Rock-N-Roll
Rhino : 2000
[Buy It]
STRANDED IN THE JUNGLE
The New York Dolls
Too Much Too Soon
Universal : 1974
[Buy It]
STRANDED IN THE JUNGLE (live)
The New York Dolls
From Paris with L-U-V
Sympathy for the Record Industry : 2002
[Buy It]
THOSE CONGA DRUMS
Jonathan Richman
Jonathan Sings!
Warner Bros. : 1983
[Buy It]
JUNGLE LION
The Upsetters
1973
Available on : I Am the Upsetter: The Story of Lee "Scratch" Perry: Golden Years
Trojan : 2005
[Buy It]
"Stranded in the Jungle," in its original version(s) -- it was written and recorded by the Jay Hawks in 1956 and quickly remade into a hit by the Cadets -- is a novelty single, a piece of comedy, like "Run, Red, Run" or "Alley Oop." Half of it is told by a man who has been captured by cannibals and whose girlfriend is still at home. In the other half, which takes place "back in the States," the romantic rival of the castaway comes on to his girlfriend. Your man's finished, he tells her, so you might as well choose me. The two halves of the song are played in entirely different styles -- the States is slick doo-wop, while the jungle is native-sounding drums, animal noises, and scary booga-booga cannibals. (As many people have pointed out, it's not exactly a Civil Rights anthem, though there's more than a little Fanon: "The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers," etc.) It's a song about opposites that can't be reconciled, but it's also a song about reconciling them. Last time I wrote about the Bee Gees's "Gotta Get a Message to You," one of the Scriptural songs about mis- or non-communication. "Stranded in the Jungle" is another one.I crashed in the jungle
While tryin' to keep a date
With my little girl
Who was back in the States
I was stranded in the jungle
Afraid and alone
Tryin' to figure a way
To get a message back home The deeper and hotter the hot water gets, the more preposterous the idea of "getting a message back home" becomes. As long as the man is in the jungle, his girlfriend will hear nothing, and as long as she hears nothing, she's vulnerable to the advances of his rival. So he does what any man would do. He breaks loose from the cannibals, hitches a ride on a whale, makes it home, and reclaims his lover.Baby, baby, your man is no good
Baby, baby, you should've understood
You can trust me as long as can be
So come back pretty baby where you used to be
'Cause I love you, 'cause I love you
'Cause I love you, 'cause I love you
'Cause I love you It's a nice story. Who doesn't like a happy ending? It's also a solution to the whole "Gotta Get a Message to You" quandary. The only real message is the one you deliver yourself. If you want someone to talk to you (or love you, or trust you), talk to them. Simple. Imagine if the Bee Gees' song, which has a similarly dire circumstance (melodramatic, not comic, but still), ended this way, with the condemned man hightailing it away from Death Row. And then imagine that Death Row and the jungle are metaphors for romantic separation.
As for the song, the Jay Hawks’ version is hard to find (it's available on an Ace UK import called "The Golden Age of American Rock & Roll, Vol. 5") and fairly tame. The Cadets insta-cover is more assured and funnier. As fine as it is, it's blown clear out of the water by the New York Dolls' version. It might not be David Johansen's best performance. There is, after all, "Frankenstein," and there's "Pills." Oh, and "Bad Detective." But it's up there: the jungle is deeper and darker than the Cadets' jungle, and the States are hellishly bright. And the animal noises sound less like nature and more like the terrifying hoots and howls of uncivilized punks. Which, of course, they are.
I'm including as overgrowth Jonathan Richman's "Those Conga Drums" (which I've always thought of as a half-cover of "Stranded in the Jungle") and the Upsetters' "Jungle Lion" (which is an instrumental cover of Al Green's "Love and Happiness" and also has terrifying animal noises).Labels: ben, cannibals, doo-wop, punk
posted by Ben
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