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Friday, February 10, 2006
Taxonomies of Fowl Music: A Preliminary Foray
1. CHICKEN RHYTHM
Slim Gaillard
Clef : 1951
Available on Laughing in Rhythm
[Buy It]
2. CHICKEN STRUT
The Meters
Struttin'
Sundazed : 1970
[Buy It]
This is the story of a quest, one that began as a whisper, a rumor, an overheard remark I've been unable to trace: "The origin of funk is the chicken." Implying, I gathered at once, both the dancer's act of imitating a chicken's walk, and the guitarist's replication of the barnyard fowl's characteristic claw-scratch and gullet-cackle. Was it George Clinton who said it? Sly Stone? Jimmy Nolen? Jimmy 'JJ' Walker? Likely much too modest an aside to credit to James Brown, who'd have claimed to have inspired the chicken. Wherever I'd gleaned it, google hasn't helped me reinstate the source of the epiphany, though I'm certain I didn't concoct it in dreams. For years it merely lurked, a curiosity in musicological imagination - accruing stickiness when a reissue landed Slim Gaillard's "Chicken Rhythm" in my iPod (almost wrote 'I myPod', which sounds like a novel by Isaac Asimov) and a fortuitous shuffle placed it back-to-back with The Meters' "Chicken Strut". Here was due homage: musicians calling to their masters, a music gone pecking backwards in search of its own native source. You'd hardly wish to referee the contest between these chicken imitators, each so gleeful, each so scrupulous, so committed, so fowl. Gaillard's track features, like "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream", a stifled laugh (and recall, from "Tombstone Blues": "The sun's not yellow, it's chicken"). Slim Gaillard, the clown prince of jazz after Louis "Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens" Jordan, was widely known for his invention of Vout, a nonsensical alternate jazz language no more intelligible than a chicken's palaver to human ears. Less well known is that Gaillard, long after his musical heydey, played one of the extra apes in the original "Planet of the Apes" (hey, like the clown sweeping up after the elephants said, 'at least I'm in show business') and, when the hours grew long and the ape suits hot, spearheaded a true-life revolt against ape on-set conditions, demanding longer breaks and better-ventilated costumes. You could look it up. Another anecdote, even more poignant and, for that matter, even faintly germane to this inquiry into the great chicken-music lineage: when Gaillard was dying, alone and unknown in a Los Angeles hospital, rushing to his bedside to pay an acolyte's homage was none other than George Clinton.
3. CHICKEN HEARTED WOMAN
Clarence Samuels
Excello : 1956
[Buy It]
4. CHICKEN
Sly and the Family Stone
Life
Epic : 1968
[Buy It]
What had been a trickle, an inkling, a scratch at the door, became an smashed levee of feathers as I began to consider the conspiracy's extent, hidden in plain hearing: The Fame Gang's "Keep My Chicken Loose", James Brown's "The Chicken", The Chilli Peppers "Chicken Scratch"The Handicappers "What It Is (Pyschedelic Chicken)", Booker T. and the M.G.'s "Chicken Pox" and of course Rufus Thomas' "Do The Funky Chicken" (easily the commonest denominator of fowl music, Thomas's song stands in relation to its genre as Star Wars does to science fiction - somehow seminal without being important, or vice versa). Literally countless are the variants of chicken-walking, chicken-twanging, fowl-indebted proto-funk. To assemble just those who wear their chicken on their sleeves, or in the titles of their songs, was merely to scratch the surface: The pocca-pocca is the pledge of allegiance of the nation under the groove, a groove which may in fact have been carved by a claw in dust. (And the one time I had the privilege of breaking bread with James Brown, we ate chicken.) Clarence Samuels' "Chicken Hearted Woman" is remarkable for its elucidation of the close bond between hen-cackling guitars and the wailing Delta blues stylings which gave rise to Clapton, Page and Beck - the stretch is not so far from Samuels' licks to, say, the Yardbirds. His lyrics decry perhaps the most wholly negative image of chickenhood in all of fowl music, climaxing in the memorable: "I tried to change you - tried to get that chicken out your blood!" No such luck - as anyone with so much poultry in his sonic attack ought to sensibly grasp, once the chicken gets in your blood, it's there to stay. Sly Stone, typically, expresses no diffidence in his own gloss on interspecies convergence. He mocks the chicken. He will make love to the chicken. He is the chicken. He can no longer tell the difference.
5. THE ROOSTER
Outkast
Speakerboxxx
La Face : 2003
[Buy It]
6. TURKEY WALK
Barry Jones
Backbeat : 1970
[Buy It]
7. EAT THE GOOSE (BEFORE THE GOOSE EATS YOU)
Swamp Dogg
Available on: Swamp Thing: The Complete Calla Recordings 1966-1967
[Buy It]
8. KNOW YOUR CHICKEN
Cibo Matto
Viva La Woman
WEA : 1996
[Buy It]
No need to belabor the obvious: Outkast's "Rooster" is simply the manifest, unembarrassed capstone to a tradition. But what had seemed a pure inquiry into 'chicken music' took a swerve - when exactly, I can no longer say - when other fowl strutted and waddled into my viewfinder. The onset of the turkey and geese signaled a deepening beyond the relatively blithe birds of yore, to the fat-bottomed, aggressive species of the late sixties and beyond. Geese, as Swamp Dogg evidences, are a degree or three more strident than chickens. In "Eat The Goose" the ramshackle soul auteur otherwise known as Jerry Williams causes us to ponder the specter of a Dogg eaten by a goose (and this from a fellow whose album art once depicted him bestride a rat). Other examples of goosedom, more than space allows herein, reveal this same tendency to 'heavyosity', like Little Mack's "Goose Walk", a low-down and sneaky instrumental, with exhortations to the dancer from not only the singer but also his sultry girlfriend. And Hot Chocolate's "Good For the Gander" (not the same Hot Chocolate of "You Sexy Thing", nope), from the revelatory Chains & Black Exhaust anthology of a year or two ago, is a slice of psychedelic soul that veers closer to Jimi Hendrix than to a Norman Whitfield production for Motown. And speaking of frontality (have I done that?), Barry Jones' "Turkey Walk" dares to take the chicken head-on, and merrily survives. Cibo Matto chimes in with an internationalist perspective, a banner any fowl music enthusiast must consent to fly beneath: Know Your Chicken....
(Continued here....)
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Jonathan Lethem is the author of The Fortress of Soitude, a novel, and The Disappointment Artist, a collection of essays. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine.Labels: jonathan lethem, writer's week
posted by Alex
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Thursday, February 09, 2006
Taxonomies of Fowl Music: A Preliminary Foray - Part II
read Part I
9. THE DUCK
James Booker
Single w/ The Crown
Duke : 1961/62
available on Gonzo: More Than All the 45's
10. THE DUCK
Andre Brasseur and His Multi-Sound Organ
Single w/ Fugue to a Lonesome Heart
Palette : 1968
11. DUCK IN A TREE (live)
Vic Chesnutt
Is The Actor Happy
New West : 2004
[Buy it]
12. HOW DOES A DUCK KNOW?
Crash Test Dummies
God Shuffled His Feet
Arista : 1993
[Buy it]
The duck, seemingly the cheeriest and most intrepid of fowl, with its layer of insulating fat, its waterproof-oil-squirting glands, its idyllic scummy ponds - tends, correspondingly, to be sassy, daffy, dippy, rude, and zestful in its waddling musical incarnations. James Booker seems nearly stymied by his ostensible dancing partner's resistance to the self-evidence of his proposition - "Aw, c'mon, baby, just do the duck - you won't mess up." Or perhaps it reflects his impatience at being shoe-horned into the novelty-dance format - he'd rather be coaxing some unholy medly-muddle of "St. James Infirmary Blues" and "Eleanor Rigby" out of a beer-splattered piano in front of an audience of bewildered tourists (see: Resurrection of the Bayou Maharaja, or Spiders On The Keyboards). Hard to believe it's the same guy. I adore Andre Brasseur and His Multi-Sound Organ's "The Duck" for its auditory space, for the way the chamber in which it was recorded seems full of appreciative, possibly drunken, musicians and groupies, into whose midst the fowl-imitating-organ appears to stroll, cueing vast delight. See also "Diving Duck Blues", by Taj Mahal, and Swamp Dogg's "The Philly Duck". Paradoxically (or not? Perhaps it's just not that paradoxical), much as with upscale cuisine, the duck is often where fowl music goes to get arch, pretentious, and even opaque (what, for instance, is a 'multi-sound organ'? Are other organs thereby asserted to possess just one sound?) Vic Chesnutt, "Duck In A Tree" may appear both to have sniffed out this tendency (duck as porno queen - what chook would lower herself?) and to be quite firmly in its grip. The Crash Test Dummies might seem to have earned a berth only by dull technicality, yet "How Does A Duck Know?" in truth not only sincerely ponders the titular duck -- and his wife -- but expands on the fact that "you can cut a chicken's head off, and it will keep on running and twitching". (To suggest that Brad Roberts sings as if he's got a mouthful of feathers would be rude). This points to the chicken's primacy in fowl music: a song titled for a duck, goose, or turkey frequently makes mention of a chicken as well (see Barry Jones' "Turkey Walk", from yesterday's post.) whereas no song named for a chicken would bother to glance at a goose, turkey, or, hah! -- duck.
13. TURN MY CHICKEN LOOSE (fragment)
The Fame Gang
14. CHICKEN GREASE
D'Angelo
Voodoo
Arista : 2000
[Buy it]
15. THE ROOSTER MOANS
Iron & Wine
The Creek Drank the Cradle
Sub Pop : 2002
[Buy it]
16. THE BIRD THAT YOU CAN'T SEE
Apples In Stereo
The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone
Spin Art : 2000
[Buy it]
What ultimately centers the fowl music quest so firmly on the chicken is that bird's great versatility. Geese, duck and turkeys may divertingly walk and thereby inspire a dancer or two, but only the polymorphous chicken so readily shifts from comic joke-butt to sexual protagonist - consider the ribaldry of Lightnin' Slim's "Rooster Blues", Sam Cooke's "Little Red Rooster", Taj Mahal's "Little Red Hen Blues", or simply the implicit Caligulan chaos of The Fame Gang's "Turn My Chicken Loose", where little more needs to be said beyond the title, except by that lilting piano, those dipping, leering horns, that down-flaying drummer, that total nut who somebody mistakenly handed a tambourine. Further, the chicken's a staple, eminently edible: c.f. Bill Thomas & The Fendells "Southern Fried Chicken, Pt. 2," where the band announces the chicken's arrival on your plate with a dollop of potato salad (represented by a drum solo); James Vernon & The Main Men's "Shake a Chicken Bone", where the eating's already over before the number begins; and, last, the presumed feasting of the Diamond Four's "Chicken Hawk" (but recall that the Warner Brother animators originally intended the baby chicken hawk to be the star of the Merry Melodie in which Foghorn Leghorn made his debut - the braggart rooster's popularity caught them entirely unprepared). Or, splitting the difference between edible and fuckable poultry, D'Angelo's "Chicken Grease"('crisco sittin' on top of the stove' - yipes!), a song splendidly encapsulating fowl music's past and future - for, even under D'Angelo's quiet storm rumblings can be detected the chicken's halting strut, a bird that knows its way home. Another measure of the chicken's versatility is its unexpected depths in portraying state 180 degrees from the manic or horny -- states of abjection, despondency, abstraction, anomie (but then again, what's more abject than horniness, especially a rooster's?), those tonalities beyond the reach of any other fowl: Magnetic Fields' "A Chicken With It's Head Cut Off", Gary Burton's "Chickens", The Jug Stompers' "Tired Chicken Blues", and Iron & Wine's "The Rooster Moans", which gets my vote here for, once again, referencing in its gawky plunking the actual action of a bird in a pen. Lastly, The Apples In Stereo provide us with the Schrodinger's Cat of fowl music, in'The Bird That You Can't See' - the eponymous feathered creature, who's climbed, much like Chesnutt's duck, onto a perch, may wish to be taken for a kookaburra or a partridge (or for Bhodisattva or Prajapati or Ubik, for that matter), but its identity is simple (just so long as you don't peek): you can hear, in the chunk-a-lunk of the backbeat and rhythm guitar, the walk of particularly nervy young chicken - a show bantam of some kind, one not yet humbled by a second-place ribbon. A fowl risen above its station is still a fowl. And there's no shame in taking spiritual guidance, any more than in taking dance lessons, from a chicken. For me, a journey - excavation, really - that began in intricate specificity - Rich Little-esque impersonations, an instance or two of a guitarist's corny squawk - has taken on the glow of the universal, the omnivorous, omnipotent, the ovoid, the unavoidable: it's all chicken music to me now. It's only chicken music. And I like it. You, or Paul, may be the walrus. Me, I'm the eggman.
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Jonathan Lethem is the author of The Fortress of Soitude, a novel, and The Disappointment Artist, a collection of essays. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine.
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I Am Trying To Waste Your Time:
http://www.earlychildhood.com/Crafts/index.cfm?C=202&FuseAction=Craft
http://philipchadwick.homestead.com
http://www.subservientchicken.com/
http://www.zuidwijk.nl/fun/funky/
http://www.amazinghumor.com/pictures/funky_chicken.shtml
The%20Funky%20Chicken.htm
http://gd.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funky_Chicken
http://www.funkychickens.net/poems.htmLabels: jonathan lethem, writer's week
posted by Alex
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