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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 |
Thursday, October 25, 2007
END OF THE RAINBOW
Sonny & Linda Sharrock
Paradise
Water : 1975
[Buy It]
END OF THE RAINBOW
Elvis Costello
1985
King of America (expanded)
Rhino : 2005
[Buy It]
RAINBOW
Gene Chandler
1962
Available on : Vee-Jay: The Definitive Collection
Shout Factory : 2007
[Buy It]
RAINBOW
Gene Chandler
1965
Available on : Beg, Scream & Shout: The Big Ol' Box of Sixties Soul
Rhino : 1997
[Buy It]
OVER THE RAINBOW
Jerry Lee Lewis
1980
Available on : All Killer, No Filler
Rhino : 1993
[Buy It]
GOD PUT A RAINBOW IN THE SKY
Mahalia Jackson
1959
Available on : Gospels, Spirituals & Hymns
Sony : 1991
[Buy It]
I can't say I don't like Radiohead. I once loved The Bends; when it came out I nearly wore out the cassette listening to "High and Dry." But I haven't been able to get behind an album of theirs since then--not OK Computer (tried and failed), not Hail to the Thief (the packaging excited me, the record less so). When the band announced that its latest record, In Rainbows, would be available for download for whatever price listeners wished to pay, I was interested. I downloaded it. I listened to it off and on for about three days. It faded away. This may well be my fault rather than Radiohead's.
The one thing that did stick was the title. It was part of a coordinated design; the site, inrainbows.com, had a fuzzy multicolored background. More than that, it was a title with promise: it suggested something trippy, emotional, and vivid. Maybe the album is that. It isn't yet, to me (as I said, this may well be my fault). At any rate, a few days after I downloaded In Rainbows, I had a vivid dream of northern Indiana. This was back in 1994, about a year before The Bends was released, and I was driving with my girlfriend. At the time, we were living together in Chicago and both going to graduate school; one spring, she got a job teaching painting on Saturdays in South Bend. Each week, we woke up early and drove down there. I walked around while she taught, then we got lunch and drove back to Chicago. It was tiring, but it wasn't awful.
And then at some point it was awful. We had gotten together young--I was barely twenty, and she was a few years older--and the fears and ambitions that we might have been able to survive a decade later consumed us, individually and together. She went through periods of depression. I went through periods of nonspecific fury. The relationship melted like a wax face near an open flame. With our luck gone, it became a matter of will, and I'm not sure that either of us wanted things to improve. At some point, all the backing and forthing started to shake apart the frame of our feelings for each other. By the time I started to drive her out to South Bend, we were closer to the end than we realized.
The class lasted eight weekends, I think. On one of the last Saturdays, we were driving home, though the fields of northern Indiana, and we saw a rainbow in the sky. It was like something a child would draw, with clearly defined bands of color and a perfect arc. And it was huge. I don't know how rainbows are actually measured, but this was larger than any rainbow I had ever seen. When the road curved away to the north, I tried to keep the rainbow in the corner of my eye, but at some point I lost it and when I turned to look, it was gone. About a month later, I went to visit my parents, and when I came back, she had moved out of our apartment.
We marveled at the rainbow together. We experienced its disappearance together. That was our relationship, writ small. When I dreamed about the rainbow, I was dreaming about the relationship. When I woke remembering it, I was remembering the relationship. The whole thing confused me, which made sense. Rainbows have baffled people as long as there have been people. The ancient Greeks thought that rainbows were the contrails of gods, traces of their paths as they left earth for the heavens. The Hindu believe that rainbows were actual bows, and that thunder and lightning were arrows fired from them. The Irish, of course, think that a rainbow is also a kind of treasure map. Find the end, and you'll find a pot of gold, like the wordless, beautiful "End of the Rainbow," by Sonny Sharrock and then-wife Linda.
Or will you? They--rainbows and relationships both--are highly equivocal phenomena, sources of intense optimism and intense pessimism at once. One of the most persuasive arguments regarding the dark side of rainbows is made by Richard Thompson in "End of the Rainbow," from I Want to See the Bright Light Tonight. Thompson is no stranger to depressing lyrics, but these take the cake, douse it in cheap wine, and leave it in the alley to rot. Elvis Costello covered the song during the King of America sessions, and kept in most of the anguish:I feel for you, you little horror
Safe at your mother's breast
No lucky break for you around the corner
'Cause your father is a bully
And he thinks that you're a pest
And your sister she's no better than a whore.
Life seems so rosy in the cradle,
But I'll be a friend I'll tell you what's in store
There's nothing at the end of the rainbow.
There's nothing to grow up for anymore Here, the rainbow is false hope, and its promise of reward is a cruel trick. Recently, a friend of mine started a relationship. After the fourth or fifth date, she called me to say that she was happy. "Everything is brighter," she said. "I mean things like colors. Remember a week ago when I was having a terrible day and everything seemed gray? This is different." That's the rainbow. Without it, there's just daytime: one colorless stream of light that isn't ramified into passionate reds and yellows and indigos. A rainbow makes everything come in colors, but can it support your weight?
One of the most complicated uses of the metaphor comes in Gene Chandler's "Rainbow," a landmark of Chicago soul that was co-written with Curtis Mayfield. First, Chandler says that he has a rainbow in his heart, which seems nice until he reveals that the rainbow reminds him of how he and his girlfriend parted. She's "gone forever," but he's not the kind of guy to give up easily: "deep down in his heart," he pledges, he'll "love her forever." What permits him this forbearance? Is it the rainbow? Does it function as a source of optimism? And if so, is it real or false? I have a different friend who I like to see tremendously. I always feel brighter around her. The last time, though, wasn't the best time. We seemed to be running on fumes. What if there's no more rainbow, and no gold after that? "Rainbow" was rerecorded by Chandler several times; the 1965 version has a call-and-response breakdown where he admits how painful it is to carry around a good feeling about a bad situation: I'm down on my knees
Please listen to my plea
I'm looking up above
Pray for your love
Please, please stop this rainbow
Baby, baby, come on darling baby
Come on stop this rainbow If you don't want the rainbow to end, you have a few options. The most obvious is to keep going beyond it, as explained in Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg's "Over the Rainbow," which was written for Judy Garland's starring role in the Wizard of Oz in 1939 and almost immediately became an American standard. Garland probably sang it so many times that "bluebird" and "lullaby" started to sound like nonsense words to her, and it's been covered by hundreds of other artists: the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Frank Sinatra, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole. For me, the best version is by Jerry Lee Lewis. It starts with a cloppety-clop saloon piano and quickly turns into unholy gospel. People talk all kinds of nonsense about phrasing, but listen to how Jerry Lee sings "where kisses are melting like lemon drops." Or "that's where you'll find me." Or for that matter, "ol' Jerry Lee." Or how he plays the piano like a man firing off stray shots.
If you don't go over the rainbow, you can get under it. Mahalia Jackson's "God Put a Rainbow in the Sky," from 1959, isn't her only rainbow song -- three years earlier, she had recorded the more didactic "There Ain't No Color Line Around the Rainbow" -- but it's her best, reaching back into the Bible and also up into the heavens:When God shut Noah in the grand old ark
God put a rainbow in the sky
Oh, yes, the sun grew dim and the days were dark
God put a rainbow in the sky Most of the song, of course, is just Mahalia testifying and calling on the children to hear her testify. It pays to reprint the lyrics, if only to demonstrate the power of song over words; transcribing them is like looking at the names of colors instead of at the colors themselves:God put a rainbow in the sky
A rainbow in the sky
A rainbow in the sky
Oh, God put a rainbow in the sky
A rainbow in the sky
A rainbow in the sky
It looked like the sun wasn't gonna shine anymore
God put a rainbow in the sky
Apart from the brilliant mispronunciation in the chorus -- Jackson sometimes says "rainboat" instead of "rainbow," maybe to remind us about the ark -- the song is a straightforward and undeniable reminder about what rainbows really are. They are the opportunity for happiness, but not without a tinge of the sadness that is knit into it. They are simultaneously the signal that the storm has broken and the reminder of the storm. My friend who has just started dating probably isn't really seeing a rainbow; she's just seeing stars from standing up too quickly. I may be at the end of the rainbow with my other friend, afraid to look for gold I suspect I'll never find. I'm not sure why there was a gigantic rainbow off the road in Indiana. Shouldn't have been.
*
ALSO: LISTEN: ANNOUNCEMENT: PAY ATTENTION TO THIS:
On Tuesday, Oct. 30, at Paris Bar, at 10 p.m. the excellent critic Alex Ross (of the New Yorker) and the excellent pianist Ethan Iverson (of the Bad Plus) will appear together for what is being called "An Evening Of Spooky Modern Music." Ross will read from his new book about twentieth century music, "The Rest is Noise," and Iverson will play some of the music. Dominique Nabokov's photographs of some of the giants of twentieth-century music will also be on display. The word "music" has been used several times to give you the idea that the event is mainly about music. It is. All in all, expect an edifying, entertaining, and idiosyncratic evening. Paris Bar is at 15 Gramercy Park South in New York City. Tickets cost $25; more details, including a ticket link, are available here.Labels: ben, gospel, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Monday, June 25, 2007
BLESS OUR HIPPY HOME
The Assortment
Fenton : 1967
Available on: Scream Loud : The Fenton Story
Wayback Records : 2006
[Buy It]
Monday is Brian Howe day in this, the summer of our new Moistworks lineup. But Brian sent a mssg. to the MW superfriends last night: Doom and gloom, deadlines loom, anyone want to play DH?
Well, ok.
Everyone's getting married this summer, and I've got a few songs that, for one reason or another, never quite made it onto a wedding mix I made for my friend Z. (I owed her one, anyway.) Above one of the stragglers (Z.'s not much of a hippy), and below, one which sailed through every cut (Z is, however, very lovable):
CAN'T NOBODY LOVE YOU
Solomon Burke
Atlantic : 1966
Available on: Home in Your Heart
Atlantic : 1992
[Buy It]
Al was in from out of town, and he, James, BJ, & I saw Glenn Mercer, and 4/5ths of the Feelies the other night at Maxwell's. We were, for once not even remotely close to being the oldest folks in the audience. It was like going to church.
YOU'VE GOT TO MOVE
Two Gospel Keys
Available on: Goodbye, Babylon
Dust-to-Digital : 2003
[Buy It]
In mostly unrelated news, the new hotness from Kanye West:
STRONGER
Kanye West
Graduation Day
GOOD : 2007
[Pre-order]
Sounds a wee bit like the old hotness from Kanye West:
ADDICTION
Kanye West
Late Registration
Roc-a-Fella : 2005
[Buy It]
Hotter beat; weaker lyric, right down to "I'd do anything for a blond dyke" (?!?), and the repeating verse about Prince & OJ, which doesn't benefit all that much from the repetition, and brings us right back to Burke:
STUPIDITY
Solomon Burke
Atlantic : 1966
Available on: Home in Your Heart
Atlantic : 1992
[Buy It]Labels: alex, garage rock, gospel, hip-hop, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
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