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Thursday, June 04, 2009
PEACE, AT LAST
Chas Jankel
Chas Jankel
Angel Air : 1980
[Buy It]
EVERYBODY WANTS TO FEEL LIKE YOU
John Prine
The Missing Years
Oh Boy : 1991
[Buy It]
GOOD TIMES
Sam Cooke
1964
Available on : The Man and His Music
RCA : 1986
[Buy It]
CRUEL STAGE
Graham Parker
12 Haunted Episodes
Razor & Tie : 1995
[Buy It]
Some weeks are filled with peace: peace in the weather, peace in the work, peace in the world. This wasn't one of them. It started with an illness that passed quickly but was severe enough to unsettle.
That was the first domino, and it fell over.
Then there were professional developments that, while essentially positive, were still destabilizing. I don't want to be vague, but I don't want to revisit them either. Suffice it to say that the same mechanisms that brings my work--the books, the essays, the journalism--to a broader audience brings that broader audience back to me, and while I like to know that readers are out there, sometimes I'm disturbed by how out there they are. Then I spent some time with a friend who is going through a hard time that seem to be half-psychological, half-somatic, if not all psycho-somatic. He will get better, I hope. Then I spent some time with another friend who is going through a hard time that seems to be half her own doing and half her undoing. She will get better, I hope. Then another friend got some disappointing news about a project she has been working on for years, and I spent too many hours on the telephone fighting the mortgage department of my bank over a dishonest escrow policy, and I encountered various forms of humorless mid-level bureaucratic stupefaction. Today I was at the end of the rope, and not the bottom end, either--I had climbed to the top with thoughts of leaping. Energy gone, patience gone with it, I then proceeded to have the worst day of the entire week, a dull afternoon growing frustrated with nonresponse from adults who should know better followed by an exhausting evening in which my younger son was impossible in all the ways that five year-olds are impossible. My older son tried to broker a peace, but I wasn't having any, and my wife, who is now in the grips of the illness that unsettled me at the beginning of the week, alternated between not reacting to any of it and overreacting to all of it. This is trivia, mostly, of course. It's the cost of doing business when the business is life. But this week, too, Dr. George Tiller was gunned down, in church of all places, and though I wrote a piece about that, my writing didn't make me feel any better about the cost of doing business when the business is death.
So I ended up here, now, looking for songs that produce peace. It took a while. The Chambers Brothers' "Love, Peace, and Happiness" makes promises, but it is too effortful to deliver fully on its title. Bob and Marcia's "Peace of Mind," a bit of Motown reggae with a little filip of a string arrangement, is closer, but Bob Andy's vocal is pushed too far forward in the mix to allow any listener to settle back comfortably. Cat Stevens' "Peace Train" and the Eagles' "Peaceful Easy Feeling" begin to create the desired effects, but they are cliches, and cliches turn themselves inside out.
I knew the songs were out there. I have Van Morrison on my iPod, and Caetano Veloso and Miles Davis and Mississippi John Hurt. Some people would try to find peace in the space between the songs, but some people are wrong. Still, the search itself was starting to become disruptive to my day, so I just put the thing on shuffle and gave up. Slowly, they started to come to me. First, was Chas Jankel's "Peace, At Last." Jankel, who played keyboards with Ian Dury and the Blockheads and was responsible for much of the songwriting, particularly the work that leaned out of pub-rock into funk and disco, released his first solo album in 1980; it included a few piano instrumentals, including this one.
After songs by the Beastie Boys, the Fall, and Bongwater--a triple shot of chaos--John Prine showed up. Prine has plenty of peace. I was thinking of him while I was searching actively, particularly "All the Best," from The Missing Years, which is a beautiful, simple song. What I got was even better: "Everybody Wants to Feel Like You," from the same record. While the lyric isn't the most generous he's ever written--it's a song to a woman who won't show him affection in the way he wants--the melody and the vocal are simple and magnetic, like a compass, and Prine's lyrics are always at once childlike and wise: Next time tell me that you want me
Put your little foot inside of my shoe
Next time tell me that you need me
Everybody wants to feel like you
They are also lovingly lickerish, which carries its own kind of peace:I used to love you so hard in the morning
I'd make you stutter and roll your eyes
I put your mind on a brief vacation
To the land of the lost surprise After Prine came the MC5, Iggy Pop, XTC, Grandmaster Flash, the Gun Club: not bad but not peaceful, and not welcome. Skip, skip, skip, skip, skip. Then I got Sam Cooke's "Good Times," which I was about to skip. I didn't. I hung in there. And I was rewarded, I think. "Good Times" is among the most misleading of soul songs. It's a song about pleasure, certainly, because it's a song that's built of pleasure: the swaying melody, Cooke's subtly soaring vocal. But the undercurrent of sadness is at least an undertow, and it threatens to take you back out with it. He's singing about a party, and it's ongoing, but he Cooke doesn't know for how long, or what pain will return when it dissipates. This is especially clear in the final stanza:It might be one o'clock and it might be three
Time don't mean that much to me
I haven't felt this good since I don't know when
And I might not feel this good again This felt hopeless, almost, so I was relieved when after another stretch of chaos (Stooges, Steinski, Sonny Boy Williamson's "Little Village"), the random hand of music landed on Graham Parker's "Cruel Stage." There are songs about coming out of the dark into the light, but few of them take responsibility to this degree, or do it with such a lovely, spiraling guitar part. It's almost a secular gospel:Take me for what I'm worth though it may not amount to much
Take me from this abyss and put me back in touch
Though I have strayed from you though I have fallen from grace
I am back on higher ground up from that lonely place
And I have found the going tough
But I will find the strength enough
And I am undoing this cruel stage
That I've been going through The people who should call won't. The friends who should pass through their difficulties might not. The occlusions may not dissolve, certainly won't dissolve all at once. The frustrations will keep on coming. But so will the songs.Labels: ben, folk, soul
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 |
Friday, May 15, 2009
GET UP I FEEL LIKE BEING A SEX MACHINE
James Brown
Sex Machine
Polydor : 1970
[Buy It]
GET UP, GET INTO IT, AND GET INVOLVED
James Brown
1971
Available on : In the Jungle Groove
Polydor : 1986
[Buy It]
GET ON THE GOOD FOOT
James Brown
Get On the Good Foot
Polygram : 1972
[Buy It]
PEOPLE GET UP AND DRIVE THAT FUNKY SOUL
James Brown
Slaughter's Big Rip-Off
Polygram : 1973
[Buy It]
GET UP OFFA THAT THING
James Brown
Get Up Offa That Thing
Polydor : 1976
[Out of Print]
TAKE ME HIGHER AND GROOVE ME
James Brown
Mutha's Nature
Polydor: 1977
[Out of Print]
GET UP OFFA THAT THING (LIVE)
James Brown
Hot on the One
Polygram : 1980
[Buy It]
LET ME GET UP ON IT
Tom Waits
Bone Machine
Island : 1992
[Buy It]
As I have been touring behind my new book, I have been listening to lots of old funk music: Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, Parliament, Mandrill, the Bar-Kays, War, more.
I have two things to say about that paragraph, and I will say them in two separate paragraphs.
First, this: touring behind a book is a strange process. When you read a biography of a rock star, fully half of the pages are devoted to on-stage performances. When you read a biography of a writer, readings are rarely mentioned. Writing is a solitary and isolated process, as is reading, and the public component is either overrated, superfluous, or both. Still, you get to meet people. You press flesh. And there is something genuine about that process, something that appears to be beneath analysis but is in fact above it.
Second, this: I am quickly filling up with funk. I have to listen, because the book is about funk music, about a funk musician. It's like a boxer listening to "Mama Said Knock You Out" before stepping in the ring. Did you know that it's built on a Sly and the Family Stone sample? There I go again.
The other day I tried to counterprogram all this funk with the least funky music I could think of: Lefty Frizzell, Diamanda Galas, Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant, Bread, Yes, Beyonce. It worked for a little while. Then I spoke to a friend of mine who is feeling down. There were many reasons, but they dissolved into one large reason: she was feeling underappreciated. "Down happens," she said. We talked on the telephone for a little while. I delivered heartfelt advice that may not have been helpful; it consisted mostly of aggressive reminders about her abilities and attributes. When I went back to the music, I found that it had changed back to funk music: specifically, to the fundament of up, James Brown.
Brown's dead, but he's very much alive, especially when you're feeling like your life is a little deadened. In 1969, Brown recorded "Lowdown Popcorn," but that was the last bit of lowdown anything he'd be serving up for a while; by the next year, outfitted with the Collins brothers and well on his way into the heavy funk, he had entered a period of intense vertical ambition and relentless optimism. In 1970, he urged others to get up (on account of the fact that he was feeling like a sex machine) and also, after the machine had been operated to everyone's satisfaction, to get up, get into it, and get involved. In 1972, he focused his advice more specifically on the good foot, and while he spent a brief stretch down and out in New York City in 1973, things soon went back up with "People Get Up and Drive That Funky Soul" later that year, not to mention "Get Up Offa That Thing" in 1976 and "Take Me Higher and Groove Me" in 1977 (where he repeatedly sings "take me on up").
The upness of James Brown is of special interest in the late seventies, because it was a period where all signs pointed to downness. He was not the volcanic force he had been in the early part of the decade. Disco had stolen some of his heat and most of his light. I have a friend who saw him at a tiny club that he said "held fewer people than a taxicab," and it wasn't even full. But he kept on, not because there were great rewards in front of him, but because there was so much momentum behind him. In the process, he produced several fine albums: "Jam/1980's," "Nonstop!" and "The Original Disco Man." One of the finest was the 1980 live record "Hot on the One," in which Brown takes a set of songs, mostly old, and submits them to sweaty, tireless investigation. He finds new things in the material because he is reaching up to it, not stooping down. Perhaps not accidentally, the strongest performance is explicitly about upness: "Get Up Offa That Thing," which is even fiercer and sharper than it was in the studio four years earlier.
"Get Up Offa That Thing" has philosophy on its mind, to some degree, but it also has its mind in its pants -- the lyrics seem to be about getting off your derriere and dancing, but they're really about releasing the pressure on the lower level. In this sense, it returns Brown explicitly to the first time he was up, with "Sex Machine" a decade earlier. Getting up offa that thing, at the lowest (and highest) level, is a form of creating, if not exactly procreating. Libido can be desire for sex, sure, but it is also that more general energy available for defining and advancing the self. Jung knew it and James Brown did, too. He sang about it almost ceaselessly and embodied it as he did: it's hard to be down when you're rising up. There is something genuine about this process, too, something that appears to be beneath analysis but is in fact above it. Getting up certain keeps the dogs at bay: disaffection, destrudo, various other downs. This may be why Tom Waits, near the end of the difficult but rewarding Bone Machine, weighs in with a minute-long instrumental that is both worlds away from and pressed right up against James Brown. The Waits song makes a request that may be more like a demand (Get up, stay on the scene, like a bone machine?), and there's an implication that lingers: when the world isn't giving you what you want, you should remember that you can always turn things around by getting up to something.Labels: ben, funk, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
AIN'T NO LOVE IN THE HEART OF THE CITY
Bobby Blue Bland
Dreamer
BGO : 1974
[Buy It]
I'M THROWING MY ARMS AROUND PARIS
Morrissey
Years of Refusal
Lost Highway : 2009
[Buy It]
HONK IF YOU'RE LONELY
Silver Jews
American Water
Drag City : 1998
[Buy It]
Moving to a new city means being alone. This is an obvious statement, almost too obvious to state. But when you're the one alone in a city, it strikes you as a blinding, almost brilliant epiphany. "Here I am in a place so full of people - yet completely alone!" you think, smug, then scared, in your solitude. Or in this case, my solitude. I moved to New York City this past fall, and was suddenly very much by myself. After ten years in another friend-filled town, it felt strange and new to me.
Thousands of others have had this feeling in thousands of other cities before me. Many of them aren't even new to the city - they're just newly alone. And many of them have penned songs about it. Which makes sense - when artists are faced with change and loneliness, they muse, create, and whine poetic.
When I first arrived, I spent countless hours by myself, Manhattan and music my only friends. Headphones on, I explored, I encountered, observed. And I listened to what the experts (albeit musical ones) had to say. Their advice was varied. Bob Dylan warned that I'd get kicked up and knocked down ("Hard Times in New York Town"). The Replacements explained the woes of drinking solo ("If Only You Were Lonely"). Nick Gilder did some meditative easy rocking ("Hot Child in the City"). Heart did some melodramatic squawking ("Alone"). Soon enough, I noticed a common theme in the soundtrack: lost love. Meaning: your baby left you, which in turn has left you roaming the streets, remembering the happy threesome you took for granted. It was always you, your lover and the city you adored. And now that it's just the two of you- you and the city, that is - you're left to meander and mope endlessly. It's the perfect blend of mental catharsis, physical exercise, and, well, sightseeing. Add music and you've mapped out a potential route to recovery.
In Bobby Blue Bland's "Aint No Love In The Heart Of The City," you can tell he once loved both the city and woman desperately. And now he has, in effect, lost both. Because the blissful romance has disappeared, so has its backdrop. Sure, the city's still there, but without the context of the relationship, it's just a town full of cold shoulders and old memories. Now that she's gone the sun won't shine - at least for him - which sure 'nough is a pity indeed, because he now hates the very place that could actually help him mend his heart. As I know, the city can be a great romantic lead. It's always willing, always up for adventures - and though it pleases a giant population on a daily basis - its sights and sounds often feel like they're made for you alone.
Yes, rather than resent the place, why not embrace it to the point of extremity? Who needs love when you've got architecture? Real love is for sissies, anyway. Leave it to Morrissey to wail this slightly ridiculous sentiment with perfect (or at least perfected) sincerity. "I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris" has him personifying a place in the absence of human touch. Give him avenues and buildings and give them fast-- only stone and steel accept his love, and you get the feeling he needs to love pretty bad. I guess I kind of do too. Thankfully, an affair with any city has the happy guarantee of reciprocation. There's an easy intimacy in getting to know its quirks, exploring its nooks and crannies. It gives and you receive expertise on where to go and what to do. What a selfless lover.
Perhaps my favorite approach is a bittersweet medium between the two. The Silver Jews' "Honk If You're Lonely" suggests using a place you love to get over the one you loved, and in doing so, find someone new to love. Or maybe just other lonely hearts to fill the void. David Berman's melancholy deadpan takes loneliness in the city and turns it into a hopeful anthem for losers everywhere. As he cruises the strips of his town, he weaves a tale of taking a second chance on life in the city. He might pine a little, but he'll be damned if he lets anyone get the best of his experience. And so he uses his old haunts to kindle new love. This seems the perfect way to deal with loneliness and explore the city from a different (and potentially refreshing) perspective:I know it seems sad to be this damn blue
But there's always a chance that you'll meet someone new Of course, all of this alone-ness is usually only temporary - eventually you meet new people, you meet more new people, and settle comfortably back into the routine of relationships. Which is where (and when) you feel most at home. Because let's face it, we're a needy bunch, us humans: needy for validation, conversation, and the occasional Sunday brunch.
But in those first solitary months, you find yourself alone in the city, and alone in the city you find yourself. After six months, New York and I are getting into the swing of things - slow dancing through evenings that run too late, stumbling groggily into hazy mornings after. I've met a lot of friends. Some keep going through the revolving door. Some stick and stick well. And when they're not around, I'm still content being alone. But I'm lucky - I wasn't heartbroken when I got here. So I guess I get the best of both worlds. And by worlds I mean cities. The sun is shining from the city hall to the county line. Stone and steel accept my love. And around every corner, there is the possibility of meeting someone new.
So by all means, honk if you're lonely.Labels: madeleine, morrissey, soul
posted by mad
LINK |
Thursday, October 30, 2008
REPETITIONThe Fall 1978 Available on : 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong: 39 Golden GreatsBeggars UK : 2004 [Buy It]JOY IN REPETITIONPrince Graffiti BridgeWarner Bros. : 1990 [Buy It]You know when you tell someone the same thing over and over again? You know when you tell someone the same thing over and over again? I mean, really: You know when you tell someone the same thing over and over again? Does it help? Does it? Does it help matters? Does it help matters when you tell someone the same thing over and over again? Recently I had to repeat myself. Recently I had to repeat myself. Recently I had to repeat myself. I was speaking to someone with whom I have at least the illusion of common cause. I believe that we are on the same wavelength, in some important ways, as humans. As a result we are friends. That is rare, and so it makes me happy. I repeat: That is rare, and so it makes me happy. People are a mix of learned wisdom and spontaneous immaturity, and to find a friend who either parallels or complements you in that regard, well, it's rare. It ignites the best things in everyone. Usually I have nothing to complain about with this friend. Once, a few months ago, I complained about something. It was a behavior of hers that I found slightly troubling and that I worried might develop into something more troubling. I mentioned it once and let it go. I didn't want to repeat myself. Recently, though, I did. Recently, though, I did. Recently, though, I did. Circumstances hadn't changed, and so I once again said the thing I said once before. I restated it, not in the sense that I revised it, but in the sense that I repeated it. Here we have two kinds of repetition, related but not identical. I repeated myself because the thing I was concerned about has not changed. Does that truly count as repetition, something that has not changed? I read something once by someone who said that all artwork is about finding a balance between repetition and variation. This is true, this is true. But it is truer than true, true not just for artwork, but for everything that artwork imitates and informs: Nature, time, the human mind, sex, breath. Everything is about finding a balance between repetition and variation, and by and large they have equal weights, if not equal shapes. Repetition is a form of variation. Variation is a form of repetition. Take pop music, which depends both on rhythm and melody. One is repetition and the other is, within reason, variation. But songs catch your attention by varying that which is repeated and by repeating that which is varied. The Fall is perfect for this kind of thing. This kind of thing is perfectly illustrated by the Fall. For a perfect illustration of this kind of thing, consider The Fall. Mark E Smith formed a band that depends upon repetition (song after song on album after album, year after year) and depends also upon variation (new band members, new sounds, new topics for lyrics). The Fall's song "Repetition" summarizes this tension concisely: Repetition in the music
And we're never going to lose it Smith is also very funny, and in that sense he also participates in repetition. The French philosopher Henri Bergson names repetition as one of the three foundational rhetorical devices central to laughter, and he traces it back to the childhood game of Jack-In-The-Box. The handle goes around and around and around, the repetition lulling the viewer into submission and creating one kind of pleasure, and then, with a kind of violent suddenness, the Jack jumps out of the box. Laughter is produced when surprise is produced and repetition is shattered. But then that process is good for another go-round, at least: the process by which variation is introduced can itself be repeated. It is a mainspring of the human experience: people say that we learn from repetition, and they are right. Mark E Smith is also very funny: We dig repetition
Repetition in the drums
And we're never going to lose it
This is the three R's
The three R's:
Repetition, Repetition, Repetition When I had to repeat myself recently it was because I felt that the circumstances that produced my original statement had not changed. But because the circumstances could only change as the result of action--by myself, by my friend--my repetition carried an implication of failure on both of our parts. Had there been effort, the circumstances might have changed, and so the repetition would not have been necessary. Because circumstances were the same, because the second identical statement applied months after the first, I felt that I needed to explain that I was not joking. "I am serious," I wrote, and considered writing it a second time for emphasis. Repetition without comedy is a specific form of emphasis, and it is a different proposition entirely from the one sketched above. When repetition is serious, it travels to the extremes of freedom. On the one hand, it can become suffocating and unforgivable. This was my fear repeating myself to my friend, that she would feel suffocated. On the other hand, serious repetition can be ecstatic. Spiritual satisfaction depends on repetition, as does sexual satisfaction. Prince's "Joy In Repetition" is ecstatic in both regards, and it may even suggest that one is a restatement of the other. In the song, a man goes to a nightclub and sees a woman at the microphone, repeating the words "love me" over and over again. He follows her into the alley, hoping for a conversation, but she keeps repeating herself: In the alley over by the curb he said tell me what's your name
She only said the words again and it started to rain
Two words falling between the drops and the moans of his condition
Holding someone is truly believing there's joy in repetition
There's joy in repetition
There's joy in repetition
There's joy in repetition
There's joy in repetition There is repetition in "Joy in Repetition." There is joy in "Joy in Repetition." The woman is repeating her request to eliminate any chance of misunderstanding. Prince is repeating his chorus in the same spirit. Repetition here isn't boring. It's joyful, as I have said--like the repetition of a friendship day after day after day--and as a result, the song makes me feel better about repeating myself, when I have to, which isn't all the time. Recently, I had to repeat myself. I had to tell a friend something that I also told her months ago. I had to tell a friend something I also told her months ago because things haven't changed since then, and so my words, too, haven't changed. My friend replied to my second statement much as she replied to the first, with a promise of improvement. She replied to my repetition with a repetition of her own. Repetition is a source of frustration, because it suggests a lack of progress (why aren't the bad things changing?), and it is also a source of comfort, because it reiterates a central premise (the good things remain intact). I should be able to see the benefits of repetition. I have learned and relearned that there are benefits to repetition. I have learned it repeatedly. I don't want to feel bad about repeating myself. I repeat: I don't want to feel bad. I repeat: I repeat. * HELLO PEOPLE OF NEW YORK CITY AND ENVIRONS: We have a special Moistworks announcement. Regular contributor Ben Greenman, who wrote the post above, will be celebrating the release of his fancy new limited-edition, handcrafted, letter-press book Correspondences at the Tenement Museum (108 Orchard Street) at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 6. Ben will read, along with Arthur Nersesian and Todd Zuniga. Come one, come all. Labels: ben, rock and roll, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
SHARE IT
Reverend Coleman
c. 1970
Available on: 45 Kings vol. 1
Fat City : 2001
[Buy It]
SHARE YOUR LOVE WITH ME
Aretha Franklin
This Girl's In Love With You
Atlantic : 1970
[Buy It]
AIN'T GONNA SHARE YOUR LOVE
Hersey Taylor
Future Stars 7" : 1974
[Out of Print]
SHARE CROPPIN' BLUES
Kay Starr
V-Disc : 1944
Available on: American Pop: An Audio History
Music & Arts : 2000
[Out of Print]
I know! Slow to write back, and out of touch but. So much has happened! I though that, instead of telling you all (y'all?) in turn, I'd tell all y'all (ya'll?) all at once on my blog that First of all, I got a new job! in charge of writing press releases for this consortium of bodegas I helped organize out here Second, I got invited to a green party at a house or church something. The Mets are winning! I've been watching Weeds a lot and my favorite youtube shows OMG, the other night Cheryl came over and the delivery guy actually had ceasar salad all over his face! That's the news write me back actual letters and I will totally write you back an actual letter!Labels: alex, letters, pop, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Thursday, June 05, 2008
ROYAL CROWN HAIRDRESSING
Little Richard
Available on: The Specialty Sessions
Specialty : 1989
[Buy It]
HOW YOU GONNA GET RESPECT (IF YOU AIN'T CUT YOUR PROCESS YET)
Hank Ballard
Starday King : 1968
Available on: James Brown's Funky People Pt. 3
Polydor : 2000
[Buy It]
BLACKENIZED
Hank Ballard
Starday King : 1969
Available on: Black Power: Music of a Revolution
Shout Factory : 2004
[Buy It]
WEAR YOUR NATURAL, BABY
Towana & The Total Destruction
Romark : 1971
Available on: Soulful Thangs vol. 6
Latin Soul : 2006
[Buy It]
FUCK A PERM
The Coup
Kill My Landlord
Wild Pitch : 1993
[Buy It]Labels: alex, hip-hop, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
SOUL PRESIDENT #1
John & Ernest
Rainy Wednesday 7" : 1973
[Out of Print]
THE FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT
Blowfly
Blowfly For President
Pandisc : 1988
[Buy It]
IF I WERE PRESIDENT
The Pharcyde
Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde
Delicious Vinyl : 1992
[Buy It]
I COULD NEVER BE PRESIDENT
Johnnie Taylor
Stax 7" : 1969
Available on: Chronicle
Fantasy : 1977
[Buy It]
The difference between Blowfly and Barack Obama is like the difference between Public Enemy & Eminem: Back when Flavor Flav couldn't give a fuck about the Grammys, it was because he couldn't have imagined winning one. When Eminem recycled the reference, a decade down the line, he'd already scored two of them.
So one thing that'll happen if Obama goes the distance is, a long tradition of African-American songs - rooted in the notion that no black man will ever occupy the office - will grind to a halt. (An old joke, along the same lines: "I firmly believe that, one day, a man in a kippa and prayer shawl will sit in the Oval Office.... Unless, of course, he's Jewish.")
I'm not sure how far back the tradition goes - for all I know, it's as old as the petitions black folks would send to Abraham Lincoln - but whatever the case, here's a small sampling of songs about the job: John & Ernst's Watergate-era mashup; some presidential potty-humor from the afore-mentiomed proto-rapper, Blowfly; a skit by the (currently reunited) Pharcyde; Stax man Johnnie Taylor, with the sine qua non of presidential soul songs...
Below, a tune written by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, Cynthia Weil, and Barry Mann:
ONLY IN AMERICA
The Drifters
Atlantic : 1963
(Released in 1972)
Available on: A Change Is Gonna Come: The Voice of Black America 1963-1973
Ace/Kent : 2007
[Buy It]
ONLY IN AMERICA
Jay & The Americans
UA : 1963
Available on: The Leiber & Stoller Story Vol. 3 1962-1969
Ace : 2007
[Buy It]
Here's what my liner notes have to say about it:Two weeks prior to the Drifters' "On Broadway" reaching its chart peak, the group returned to the studio to record another song by the same four co-writers, but not before it had undergone a revamp. Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the same year in which police dogs were trained on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama and Governor George Wallace stood in the doorway of that state's University in an attempt to block the entrance of the school's first black pupils. [A sidenote, from John McPhee's 1969 book about Arthur Ashe: "Wallace is beautiful. He's doing his own thing. He's actually got a little bit of soul. What I worry about is people who say one thing and do another. Wallace is in his bag, and he enjoys it." - ed.] Sympathetic to the Civil Rights cause, Barry Man and Cyntia Weil wrote for the Drifters a protest song, "Only in America," the lyric of which included the lines "Only in America, land of opportunity, do they save a seat in the back of the bus just for me/Only in America, where they preach the golden rule, do they start to march when my kids try to go to school...." When Mann and Weil played [a draft of the song for Leiber and Stoller], the producers opined that it needed humour, suggesting a rewrite from the opposite viewpoint. Thus, the song was remodelled from a WASP perspective and recorded by the Drifters on the very same day that Martin Luther King was placed in solitary confinement in Alabama. Atlantic's Jerry Wexler felt that whether percieved literally or with irony, the track had little airplay potential and could in fact cause trouble for his company and the group, nixing its release. And so, the Drifters recording was shelved for a decade. The version which did appear, in July of '63, had been recorded by these guys.
It reached #25 on the pop charts.Labels: alex, hip-hop, pop, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Friday, April 11, 2008
MONEY (THAT'S WHAT I WANT)
Paul Revere and the Raiders
1964
Available on : Mojo Workout!
Sundazed : 2000
[Buy It]
I NEED SOME MONEY
John Lee Hooker
1960
Available on : Hooker
Shout Factory : 2006
[Buy It]
MONEY NEVER RUNS OUT
Cannon's Jug Stompers
1929
Available on : The Best Of Cannon's Jug Stompers
Yazoo : 2001
[Buy It]
DIRTY MONEY
Clipse
Hell Hath No Fury
Re-Up Gang : 2006
[Buy It]
MY BABY'S JUST LIKE MONEY
Lefty Frizzell
1951
Available on : Life's Like Poetry
Bear Family : 1994
[Buy It]
SHE TOOK ALL THE MONEY
Frank Black
Bluefinger
Cooking Vinyl : 2007
[Buy It]
LOVE OR MONEY
Prince
7" Single
Paisley Park : 1986
MUSIC FOR MONEY
Nick Lowe
Jesus of Cool
Demon : 1978
[Buy It]
This week has been all about money.
It's tax season, but it's more than that. I have a friend who came into some money. I have a friend who was seized by terror at the thought that she doesn't have enough money. I have a friend who lost money in a bad deal. I have a friend who found some money on the sidewalk. I spent most of a morning and part of an afternoon sitting in a gray chair in a bank lobby, conducting various transactions on behalf of myself and my money. These are just incidents, and they don't coalesce into a philosophy. Money thwarts philosophy, or rather it requires the simultaneous operation of many philosophies. Money is life. Money is death. Money is freedom. Money is a prison. Money is the root of all evil. Money can't buy you love. Money changes hands. Money changes everything.
This week, being all about money, is also about jokes about money. People have been telling them to me all the time. "Joke" might not be the right word. Grimly comic statements about money, let's say. "If I had a nickel for every time I've spent a nickel," one friend said, "I'd break even." Another friend tried to make a withdrawal from an ATM, only to find out that her card had been frozen. "Come out of there, you cowards," she said, pounding on the screen. I told them both one of my favorite jokes about money, which is a Johnny Carson joke. Abraham Lincoln goes to a nightclub. He hands the doorman a five-dollar bill. "You trying to bribe me?" the doorman says, offended.
"Bribe?" Lincoln says. "No, of course not. That's my ID."
There are profound things to say about money, but most of them have already been said in the songs above. Paul Revere and the Raiders say some of them in the mock-bitter spoken introduction to Berry Gordy's "Money." John Lee Hooker, who was performing a version of "I Need Some Money" before Gordy reinvented the song, says some of them in his reclaimed version. Cannon's Jug Stompers imagine a world where money flows like water. Clipse investigates the link between financial and sexual control. As does Lefty Frizzell. As does Black Francis. As does Prince. And Nick Lowe's just singing for his supper.
As thinking is free, please list any and all thoughts about money after listening to these free songs on this wonderful blog where writers write for free.Labels: ben, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
HELP
John Lennon
The Complete Home Recordings
[Unreleased]
HELP ME
Ray Sharpe w/the King Curtis Orchestra feat. Jimi Hendrix
Atco : 1966
Available on: Blues & Soul Power
Atlantic : 2003
[Buy It]
HELP THE BEAR
Ted Taylor
Atco : 1966
Available on: Blues & Soul Power
Atlantic : 2003
[Buy It]
WATCH THE DOG
Sandy Gaye
Moonshot : c.1969
[Out of Print]
DO THE HAWG
Eddie Kirk
Volt : 1963
Available on: The Complete Stax-Volt Singles 1959-1968
Atlantic : 1991
[Buy It]
PASS THE HATCHET
Roger & The Gypsies
Sevem B : 1969
Available on: The Instant & Minit Story
Charly : 2005
[Buy It]
SKIN THE CAT
Jimmy Merchant
Bo-Mar : ?
Available on: Shakin' Fit
Candy : 1992
[Out of Print/Download it here]
SPILL THE WINE
 Live
Eric Burdon & War
Eric Burdon Declares "War"
MGM : 1970
[Buy It]
WRAP IT UP
Sam & Dave
Stax : 1968
Available on: The Complete Stax-Volt Singles 1959-1968
Atlantic : 1991
[Buy It]
PATCH MY HEART
The Mad Lads
Stax : 1966
Available on: The Complete Stax-Volt Singles 1959-1968
Atlantic : 1991
[Buy It]
CLOSE THE DOOR
The Holmes Brothers
State of Grace
Alligator : 2007
[Buy It]
. . . . . . . . . .
WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS
John & Sean Lennon
The Complete Home Recordings
[Unreleased]Labels: alex, soul, soul/garage-core
posted by Alex
LINK |
Friday, March 14, 2008
LOVE FOR SALE
Elvis Costello
1981
Available on : Trust (Expanded)
Rhino: 2003
[Buy It]
LOVE FOR SALE
Fine Young Cannibals
Available on : Red Hot + Blue
Capitol : 1990
[Buy It]
DAY TRIPPER
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
1967
Available on : BBC Sessions
Experience Hendrix : 1998
[Buy It]
SHE WORKS HARD FOR THE MONEY
Donna Summer
She Works Hard For the Money
Polygram : 1983
[Buy It]
I COULDN'T PAY FOR WHAT I GOT LAST NIGHT
Swamp Dogg
Gag a Maggot
Stone Dogg : 1973
[Out of Print]
THE MIND DOES THE DANCING WHILE THE BODY PULLS THE STRINGS
Swamp Dogg
Have You Heard This Story?
Island : 1975
[Out of Print]
In 1930, Cole Porter and Herbert Fields wrote the musical "The New Yorkers," which told the story of a socialite who embarked on a fling with a bootlegger and began to investigate the city's underbelly: bootleggers, thieves, the demimonde. One of the songs in the production was Porter's "Love For Sale.":When the only sound in the empty street,
Is the heavy tread of the heavy feet
That belong to a lonesome cop
I open shop.
When the moon so long has been gazing down
On the wayward ways of this wayward town.
That her smile becomes a smirk,
I go to work.
Love for sale,
Appetising young love for sale.
Love that's fresh and still unspoiled,
Love that's only slightly soiled,
Love for sale.
Who will buy?
Who would like to sample my supply?
Who's prepared to pay the price,
For a trip to paradise? "Love for Sale" was a hit at the time for Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians; over the years, scores of performers have taken a crack at it, including Billie Holiday, Art Tatum, Elvis Costello (who kept the lyrics intact), and Fine Young Cannibals (who focussed on the chorus and filled the corners of the mix with actual fake street noise). In early 2008, the song was covered, of a fashion, by New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who was exposed as a customer of a high-priced escort service.
As a politician, Spitzer shot himself in the foot, and then the other foot, and then between his own legs. As a human being, though, he joined a long, storied, and highly equivocal tradition. The Beatles, who consorted with all kinds of ladies of all kinds of evenings in Hamburg, liked to joke that "Day Tripper," was about prostitution, as they did at an August 1966 press conference in Los Angeles:Q: I'd like to direct this question to messrs. Lennon and McCartney. In a recent article, Time magazine put down pop music. And they referred to "Day Tripper" as being about a prostitute...
PAUL: (nodding) Oh yeah.
Q: And "Norwegian Wood" as being about a lesbian.
PAUL: (nodding) Oh yeah.
Q: I just wanted to know what your intent was when you wrote it, and what your feeling is about the Time magazine criticism of the music that is being written today.
PAUL: We were just trying to write songs about prostitutes and lesbians, that's all.
(room erupts with laughter)
JOHN: "...quipped Ringo."
PAUL: (chuckles) Cut!!
JOHN: You can't use it on the air, that. Donna Summer was certainly not joking in "She Works Hard for the Money." The song's video, which you will no doubt remember from the nineteen-eighties, includes scenes of women working in sweatshops, as nurses, and as policewomen; the main character is a waitress in a diner (played by an actress, though it echoes the picture of Summer on the record sleeve). Beneath that, though, it is explicitly identified as a tribute to "the working woman," and it's hard to subtract prostitution from that equation:Twenty five years have
Come and gone
And she's seen a lot of tears
Of the ones who come in
They really seem to need her there
It's a sacrifice working day to day
For little money just tips for pay
But it's worth it all
Just to hear them say that they care Spitzer's escort-service patronage raises several issues about the sanctity of the marriage contract, particularly the function of married sex--which, as we know, is the kind you don't shell out $4300 for, even if it does involve unprotected assplay or drugs or whatever the unsafe practices hinted at actually were. I have sung the praises of Swamp Dogg repeatedly, but it's more efficient just to let him sing. In "I Couldn't Pay For What I Got Last Night," he tells his girlfriend or wife why she's the one for him:Last night you kissed me and my heart began to flutter
And I melted in your arms like good old country butter
You whispered sweet words honey in my ear
I knew it was the truth when you said "I love you"
You got a way of treating a man so right
If I had all the money in the whole wide world
I couldn't pay for what I got last night The girlfriend or wife will no doubt be thrilled to hear this, but also a little disconcerted. After all, who has introduced the concept of payment here? He has. A second before the song started, no one was thinking about paying anything. It's like "Can't Buy Me Love" turned to less reputable ends. And then there's the more philosophical, more funky, and more monumental "The Mind Does the Dancing While the Body Pulls The Strings," which goes halfway to explaining why men--in power or out of power, in marriages or out of them, in sickness or in health--don't always make the right decision in carnal matters:Every time you parade it never fails to rain
All experienced spectators advising you get it together
Oh, a meteorologist what's going to be the weather?
Your mind is playing tricks on you
It's got you so confused
You can't talk right all you do is stutter
You want to know why white milk makes yellow butter
Where do lights go when they go out
There's too many things you feel you gotta find out about
The mind does the dancing and the body keeps pulling the strings But the last word should belong to Michael Keaton--or rather Michael Keaton as Bill Blazejowski in Ron Howard's 1982 comedy "Night Shift," in which a pair of morgue workers (Keaton and Henry Winkler) decide to start an escort service. As the business gets underway, Bill assembles all the working girls, writes the word "Prostitution" on a chalkboard, and proceeds to deliver one of the finest motivational speeches in the history of the movies. I am quoting from a twenty-five year-old memory, so I may be a bit off:Prostitution--what does that mean really? The first thing you have to do to find out what a word means is break it up. "Pros." Doesn't mean anything. "Tit." We're all big boys and girls; I think we know what that means. "Tu." Well, there's two of them. "Shun"--that's from the Greek, meaning "I don't want it, I don't need it, push it away." I have no idea what the hell that's doing here. Labels: ben, jazz, soul, vocals
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, February 28, 2008
YOU WON'T SEE ME
The Beatles
Rubber Soul
Capitol : 1965
[Buy It]
OFF THE HOOK
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones Now!
Decca : 1964
[Buy It]
TELL HIM I'M NOT HOME
Chuck Jackson
I Don't Want to Cry
Wand : 1965
Available on The Very Best of Chuck Jackson 1961-1967
Varese : 1997
[Buy It]
BIGGEST FOOL IN TOWN
Gorgeous George
Stax : 1965
Available on: The Complete Stax/Volt Singles: 1959-1968
Atlantic : 1991
[Buy It]
YOUR PHONE'S OFF THE HOOK, BUT YOU'RE NOT
X
Los Angeles
Slash : 1980
[Buy It]
HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE
The Nerves
Nerves EP
Bomp: 1976
Available on: D.i.Y. Come Out & Play : American Power Pop 1975-1978
Rhino : 1993
[Buy It]
ANSWERING MACHINE
The Replacements
Let It Be
Twin-Tone : 1984
[Buy It]
I hate the telephone. It's fine for taking care of business or making contact in a more personal mode than e-mail. I doubt that when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone he had any idea the type of misery it could create in personal matters. The telephone is an idiotic and torturous enemy to the lonely or obsessive. These songs all predate cell phones, e-mail and text messaging, which further complicate matters. I don't even have a land line anymore - just a cell phone. I'm always there, whether I want to be or not. Presence can be painful when you want to be absent, and even worse is absence when you want to be present.
Most of these songs deal with that dynamic in on one form or another. Paul McCartney wrote "You Won't See Me" after having his phone calls ignored by girlfriend Jane Asher. Her line is always "engaged" - the English really have a way with words. Mick Jagger, too, gets only "an engaged tone." He figures it's off the hook or maybe she's ill or sleeping, until he's heading off into paranoia. Why won't she talk to him? He's Mick Jagger for Chrissake! Even The Beatles and Stones are getting dissed.
Chuck Jackson's really got it bad. Every time he calls his girlfriend, someone else answers and he hears her in the background saying "Tell him I'm not home." The telephone has turned Gorgeous George into the biggest fool in town, and he's had enough. And from the sound of things, George doesn't seem like someone you'd wanna fuck with.
"You're Phone's Off The Hook, But You're Not" is a great title and a great line that I once used on a girlfriend when, after a terrible conversation in my apartment, she said the first part ('cause it was) and without missing a beat, I responded "But you're not!" "What did you say?" "Oh, nothing." Jack Lee from the Nerves is "in the phone booth - it's the one across the hall," but guess what? She won't answer and he's hanging on the telephone. He's gonna let it ring off the wall. He can't control himself. It's a common reaction to being ignored.
Finally, Paul Westerberg takes us to the eighties version of no reply: the answering machine. Remember those? No call waiting. No voicemail. A machine and a tape. "How do say goodnight to an answering machine" he asks.
How do you say I love you to an answering Machine?
-by Ted BarronLabels: indie, power-pop, rock, soul, ted barron
posted by James
LINK |
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
NORTH TO ALASKA
Johnny Horton
Columbia : 1960
Available on: Greatest Hits
Columbia : 1987
[Buy It]
WHEN IT'S SPRINGTIME IN ALASKA (IT'S 40 BELOW)
Johnny Cash
Personal File
Sony : 2006
[Buy It]
ROCKIN' LITTLE ESKIMO
Bobby Swanson
Igloo : 1959
Available on: Nashville Rockabilly
Stomper Tome : 2003
[Buy It]
THE MIGHTY QUINN
Solomon Burke
Bell : 1969 (Unreleased)
Available on: Proud Mary: The Bell Sessions
Sundazed : 2000
[Buy It]
STEPHANIE SAYS
The Velvet Underground
VU
Polydor : 1985
[Buy It]
THE MIGHTY QUINN
Hopeton Lewis, Henry Buckley & Dienne w/The Gaylettes
Available on: Trojan 60s Box Set
Sanctuary : 2004
[Buy It]
WHEN IT'S SPRINGTIME IN ALASKA (IT'S 40 BELOW)
Johnny Horton
Columbia : 1958
Available on: Greatest Hits
Columbia : 1987
[Buy It]
Readers of Moistworks!
On this, the twenty-third day of our millennium's eighth January it is cold as stone/ice/witch's teat/Kerouac's liver/someone who's digging for gold, and throwing away fortunes in feelings! But nowhere is it colder than in the United States Internets' 49th State of Alaska, which the following bullet points are intended to clear some pretty nasty preconceptions goings on about town about Alaska:
- People in Alaska arrive in Alaska by crossing over a land mass which covered the Bering Strait tens of thousands of years ago
- People in Alaska have a median income of 3.6
- People in Alaska are 5 years of age or older
- People in Alaska are not people in Alaska
- People in Alaska are polar bears
"My initial impression is that Alaska is very very big. And cold, too, sometimes." So writes a friend who's actually been to Alaska. But these, too, are misconceptions. In fact, visiting, or even reading or watching television about Alaska tells us very little about Alaska itself. For this, we must look to song.
The recording artist Jewel, who is from Alaska, and has never recorded a song about Alaska, but other, equally talented recording artists have. Our personal favorite? The Gaylette's "Quinn The Eskimo," which if this wasn't the theme song for Jamaica's bobsled team then, OMG/WTF/BFF/QWERTY/TGIF/UOK?
But, of course, "Quinn, The Eskimo" was written and recorded by Bob Dylan, who had this to say about it in his memoir:On the way back to the house I passed the local movie theater on Prytania Street, where "The Mighty Quinn" was showing. Years earlier I had written a song called "The Mighty Quinn" which was a hit in England, and I wondered what the movie was about. Eventually I'd sneak off and go there to see it. It was a mystery, suspense, thriller with Denzel Washington as the Mighty Xaveir Quinn a detective who solves crimes. Funny, that's just the way I imagined him when I wrote the song "The Mighty Quinn." And, of course, our other friend - let's call him Dan - has this to say about "The Mighty Quinn," the film, which he's actually seen, and which I saw him talking up just the other (equally cold) day, to yet another friend - let's call him Garnette - who is actually from Jamaica but not, to the best of my knowledge, a police detective or Eskimo:A-
Denzel Washington, the police chief Xavier Quinn, from The Mighty Quinn (1989). The general idea is mostly that he's chasing his childhood friend Maubee, who is accused of murder. Quinn considers his case with a lieutenant:
XAVIER: You think Maubee did it? Cut a man's head off?
JUMP: That fucker, he does that! That's why he's like that!
XAVIER: Try and make sense when you talk, Jump.
Denzel gets to do a vague West Indian accent, wear a white suit, and sing.
XAVIER: I had the blues
I had the blues so bad
It put my face in a permanent frown
But I'm feeling so much better, I could cakewalk into town . . .
and
I woke up
One morning
Felt so good I got back into bed
Put that big leg over me mama
I might not feel this good again . . .
Watch me cakewalk, y'all.
The black people in the movie sing "Quinn the Eskimo" at him a lot, and drink beer, and go to work; the white people in the movie lurk around being racists, attempt and fail to sleep with Denzel, and try to overthrow governments. Some of the black people try to sleep with Denzel, too, but that's neither here nor there. Overall it's a pretty accurate picture of the universe. There is no actual cakewalking, which, as I understand it, was a dance that took as the source of its name competitions held by slaveholders, with slices of hoecake as prizes for the best dancers.
A couple hundred people singing in an island juke joint sound like this:
Come all without,
Come all, within
You aint seen nothing like the Mighty Quinn.
No, actually, that's not what they sound like. So: We sincerely hope that clears up whatever mis-and-preconceptions you might have had about Alaska, and goes some way towards freeing your doubting mind/melting your cold cold heartsLabels: alex, country, geography, reggae, rock and roll, rockabilly, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Thursday, January 10, 2008
CRYING FOR ATTENTION
Graham Parker
Another Grey Area
Arista : 1982
[Buy It]
IGNORE ME
The Gas
Single
Polydor : 1980
[Out Of Print]
LOVE AIN'T NO TOY
Yvonne Fair
The Bitch Is Black
Motown : 1975
[Out Of Print]
WHAT AM I WORTH
Dave Alvin
King of California
Hightone : 1994
[Buy It]
Over the holidays I was watching a show on cable and noticed that a character had the same name as a woman I used to know, and not just the same name but the same exact name: first, middle, last. That got me thinking about the woman, and the talks we used to have, and specifically one of the last talks we had, in which she told me that I didn't pay her enough attention.
That fateful conversation is one of the only things about her that I remember clearly. We were sitting in her apartment, which was just off the campus of the college she attended. Some friends of mine had been in town that night, and we had all gone to dinner. The wine she drank at dinner, and the glass or two she tacked on back at the apartment, had made her expansive, and over the course of the evening she navigated through all the things she liked to discuss: clothes, sex, art, whether all duty was unconditional, Guns 'N' Roses, Aeschylus. She was at once profoundly brainy and prodigiously trivial, and if it wasn't a calculated philosophy, it should have been. I thought we were headed for the bed, but she pulled up short and told me that I had hurt her feelings during dinner. "You ignored me," she said. "I need you to pay attention to me more than you do."
I laughed it off. She was being ridiculous and I said so. I was paying attention to her at dinner and if she couldn't see that, it was her fault. She said it was okay and that she wasn't upset and I, a fool, believed her. A few weeks after that, we weren't dating anymore -- did I mention that we were dating? -- and then a few months after that, we weren't friends anymore.
Her memory, or at least my memory of her, is inseparable from the music I played when I spent time with her. "Crying for Attention" has, like many Graham Parker songs, made itself known by degrees. Back then, it was just another decent track on a solid but unspectacular record--not Squeezing Out Sparks, not even Stick to Me. But every time the knottiness of unrequited love has tightened around me, I have come back to this particular song, and especially to the deceptive calm in the vocals and the midtempo arrangement:What's the matter?
Well there is no need to flatter
How do I get you to take notice?
Do I have to break and shatter?
When I feel that I am driven
Over the edge where it's all hidden
I hang my head and hit a table or a chair
I know my place--I just can't stay there
I'm not crying for attention baby
I'm not crying for attention baby
I'm not crying for attention
I'm screaming to be heard
Everybody's listening but you
It's your loving example I need to receive
I need more than a handful -- give it to me
Hey sometimes everybody has to be the center of attraction
But I never expect any satisfaction
And I'm not crying I'm not crying I'm not crying
Not crying for attention In my situation, it was a woman who wanted my attention, and who was brave enough to tell me so. In Parker's song, it's a man who wants the attention, and not just the sex he's getting (more than a handful). For me, the song turns on one line in particular: "I know my place--I just can't stay there." What's important is that the tendered offer isn't enough. Desire is by definition aspirational. If she had quoted that line to me, it might have done the trick. Instead, she was straightforward, and she suffered for it, and then I suffered.
What this brief autopsy excludes is an answer to the main question: Did I ignore her? Well, yes, probably. I had just come out of a relationship that meant more to me than she did, though she was more beautiful and more willing than the other woman. I was still a little ashamed that things with the woman I loved more hadn't worked out, and that hampered my ability to really try things with her. Strangely, I remember walking around with her feeling like I was the one being ignored, even though she was reaching for my hand. I felt like she was unable to sense something essential about me. I didn't know "Ignore Me," by the Gas, then, which is a shame, because it has an irresistible chorus that I could have shouted at her when we fought, which was often, as well as a perfectly inverted perspective that makes ignoring seem like an elevated form of paying attention. Instead, I told her the truth, which is that I didn't agree that there was a problem and that if there was I was sorry because I simply didn't think I could do any better.
Nobody likes to hear this. Yvonne Fair was a singer with James Brown who recorded the original version of what would one day be "I Got You (I Feel Good)," and in the seventies became a rising solo artist for a time. Her most important solo recording, "The Bitch Is Black," was a collaboration with Norman Whitfield and, from a distance of three decades, stands as one of the best funk diva albums of the time, far better than similar albums from Claudia Lennear or Marie "Queenie" Lyons. "Love Ain't No Toy" is one of the best of a set of consistently strong songs, and it plays like vintage Betty Davis, as reconceived by a woman who can actually sing:I don't know what your friends call you
When you're out in the street
Romeo or Casanova
To me you ain't nothing but a low-down cheat This is a song about cheating, not ignoring. Maybe Yvonne Fair thinks ignoring would have been better. I don't. I have said that the conversation about how I ignored her--the woman I was dating, not Yvonne Fair--was one of the last. That's somewhat misleading. It had happened before that, many times, and it happened even after we broke up: she would call me and say that she was thinking of me but that she couldn't understand exactly what went wrong. Had she been too needy? Had I been conflicted? I couldn't answer, not then. Even after a few years, after a few more tries with a few more women, I had no real idea. Eventually, though, it came to me. The problem wasn't that I was ignoring her. The problem was that I was capable of ignoring her. If she had been the right person -- or even one of the right people -- I would not have and could not have made her feel alienated. I could have made her feel angry or sad or given her a (metaphorical) whack across the face with a (metaphorical) rolled-up newspaper of recrimination. But ignoring someone and making them feel needy in the process -- as if the very attempt to connect is monstrous -- is the one emotional sin that is irreconcilable with love, not even big-L Love, but anything close. The way I feel, looking backwards, is that I may have been a jackass for making her feel needy, and also that I was blameless. There was nothing I could do because I was not correctly positioned.
There was no song that I knew that could explain that to me, not well. Then, years later, I bought Dave Alvin's King of California. Alvin, of course, was the songwriter behind the Blasters, who I never liked quite as much as I thought I should have. When he became a solo artist, his vocals waterlogged him further. But on King of California, which is filled with stripped-down, shuffling versions of old and new songs, he evolved from artlessness to a style that was wise, warm, and colloquial. Best of all, in two cases he set his nearly voice against beautiful female counterpoint. The duet with Syd Straw on George Jones's "What Am I Worth" was, and is, my favorite. Both singers articulate the desire to be valued by the other, with the result being perfect romantic equipoise. But it's not just desire -- it's ontological desperation:I don't know why you're making me cry
Honey, won't you give me a clue
What am I worth on God's great earth
If I don't mean nothing to you
I might get sent to be president
I'm sure I could do it for you
They would feature my face all over the place
For all the good thing I do
I might get my name in the hall of fame
Or even in the book of Who's Who
But what am I worth on God's great earth
If I don't mean nothin' to you
What am I worth here on earth
Darling, if I can't have you
I just can't find no peace of mind
With anything that I do That's how it should be -- how it has to be. Attention is the only currency in active relationships. It should be asked for, even demanded, without a second's uncertainty. If you don't feel good about asking for someone else's attention, then you're not standing in the right stream. People who say that they have lots of space between them must only mean that they have translated hands-on (or eyes-on) attention to a different kind of attendance. If there's no real presence, then there's real absence, which is why this woman and I broke up, and why I don't remember very much about her other than what I have related here, and why there is a greater chance of my seeing the TV show with the woman with the same name than there is of my talking to the real woman with the real name again.Labels: ben, rock, soul
posted by Ben
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 |
Thursday, December 13, 2007
PRANCIN'
Icky Renrut
1959
Available on : Ike's Instrumentals
Ace UK : 2000
[Buy It]
THE NEW BREED (PT. 2)
Ike Turner & His Kings Of Rhythm
1965
Available on : Ike's Instrumentals
Ace UK : 2000
[Buy It]
BOLD SOUL SISTER
Ike & Tina Turner
1969
Available on : Bold Soul Sister - The Best of the Blue Thumb Recordings
Hip-O : 1997
[Buy It]
GETTING NASTY
Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm
A Black Man's Soul
Pompeii : 1969
[Buy It]
MONEY
Ike Turner
1970
Available on : His Woman, Her Man
Night Train Int'l : 2004
[Buy It]
BI POLAR
Ike Turner
Risin' With the Blues
Zoho : 2006
[Buy It]
INTERVIEW WITH WBLJ FM
Ike Turner
2007
Ike Turner's death this week at the age of 76 is a highly equivocal event. Every obituary acknowledged his role as a musical innovator, but every obituary also lamented how that legacy came to be eclipsed by his personal demons and reprehensible behavior. Even in his final moments in the light, the shadow he cast was the most prominent part of his image.
The shadow in question is Ike's abusive behavior toward the women in his life, and particularly toward Anna Mae Bullock, who achieved some fame under the name Tina Turner. The obituaries all mentioned that Ike bullied Tina, got high around her, threw shoes at her, and jellied her nose. How could they not? It's a wonderful story, in the sense that it's a compelling and horrible one with a clear villain, a clear victim, and lots of light at the end of the tunnel. Tina left Ike behind and went on to have a massively successful solo career: Remember? What's love but a second-hand emotion?
I have nothing against the movie of Tina's life, except that Angela Bassett's arms were so spectacular that it seems implausible. Wouldn't a Tina who was ripped like that just have hauled off and knocked Ike cold? But there's also a movie in Ike's life that goes beyond the charismatic black-hearted prince that Laurence Fishburne potrayed. Turner's birth name was either Izear Luster Turner, Jr., or Ike Wister Turner -- in either case, a superb name for a future R&B star -- and when he was a child, growing up in Clarksdale, Mississippi in the nineteen-thirties, he watched as his father was beaten by a white mob who objected to Izear, Sr.'s dalliances with white women. His father was refused admission to the local hospital -- no blacks -- deteriorated in a makeshift tent hospital in the back yard, and died. Stepfathers beat Ike, who learned to hit back. He also applied himself to music, studied piano with Pinetop Perkins, and became a local bandleader by the time he was a teenager.
The group he assembled, the Kings of Rhythm, traveled to Memphis to record for Sam Phillips at Sun in 1951. That's the prehistoric ages in rock terms, and in fact the record that Ike and his band cut there, "Rocket 88," is considered by many to be the first rock and roll record. I didn't post it here, because it's well-known. Instead, here's "Prancin'," from later in the decade, and it features an astonishing guitar solo from Ike. People like to talk about Lowman Pauling's solo in the 5 Royales' "The Slummer the Slum," and it's fantastic, of course, but this is better. Ike's playing not only blows the doors off the place, but sets it on fire on the way out. Take just the first fifteen seconds, in which he lauches an all-out assault, bending notes, sliding up and down strings, detonating the ends of phrases. (The fury and focus he demonstrates is equivocal, of course, in that it produced both blistering R&B and actual human bruising.) In general, the instrumentals from this period tend to be superior to the vocal records, as the talent Ike backed wasn't always stellar.
In the late fifties, he found a stellar singer, the aforementioned Anna Mae Bullock, transformed her into Tina Turner, and promptly recorded "A Fool In Love," which became a huge hit at the close of the decade. It remains a phenomenal record almost fifty years later, mostly for the brute physicality of Tina's vocals, but it's also too well-known to post. With and without Tina, Ike recorded heavily though the early and mid-sixties. "The New Breed" recorded for Sue records in 1965, is another intense instrumental, this time updated with soul horns, and it makes it clear that Ike's guitar technique hadn't been staling in the intervening years. It's so jagged and unconventional that it sounds like Ike is playing a broken car antenna. Like "Prancin'," it's available only on the Ace import "Ike's Instrumentals." (The Ike Turner catalog, spread out over so many labels and so many years, is in more disarray than that of any R&B star of comparable stature.)
Much of Ike and Tina's reputation through the sixties stemmed from the duo's frenzied live shows and a few big singles, including "Proud Mary" and Phil Spector's controversial "River Deep - Mountain High," but Ike was continuing to evolve in the studio. "Bold Soul Sister," from 1969, shows how far toward full-out funk Ike and Tina went when the wind was blowing that way. With a melody borrowed from Sly and the Family Stone's "Sing a Simple Song" and lyrics that would surface a few years later on Funkadelic's "Stuffs and Things," the song sounds like a blueprint for Betty Davis's career. "A Black Man's Soul," an instrumental album from the same year, has become a favorite with DJs, largely for the breakbeat standout "Funky Mule." Billy Preston plays piano on the sunny, communal "Getting Nasty." And the cover of "Money" that went unreleased at the time may feature Tina on vocals, but it's distinguished by Ike's highly contemporary arrangement and guitar.
When Tina left him, it set Ike back, not just because he lost his creative partner and muse, but because he was suddenly perceived as Abusive Husband Number One, a role that he didn't relish. He began a comeback in 2001, when he released "Here and Now," a record that earned him a Grammy nomination in Best Traditional Blues and found him still fighting for his reputation -- his rewrite of the bad-marriage lament "Five Long Years" is titled "Eighteen Long Years" as a (metaphorical) slap in the face to Tina. "Risin' With the Blues," released last year, was not only nominated but won, and "Bi Polar," the last song on the album, is another in a long line of fine Ike Turner instrumentals.
The last piece of audio comes from just a few months ago. Ike, then 75, went on with the morning DJs at the Detroit FM station WJLB to talk about his career resurgence and a reality show that he planned to undertake with one of his many ex-wives (fourteen, according to the legend and the man himself, though official records only show four or five). The DJs -- Coco, Foolish, and Mr. Chase -- prod him repeatedly about his checkered past, but Ike insists that he's done with drink and drugs, if not younger women. For the most part, he sounds focused and relaxed in this interview, very much like an elder statesman trying to make sense of the new generation. Viagra comes up, and senior sex, and one of them asks, "Do you see yourself getting with somebody like I Love New York?" Ike obviously doesn't know what they're talking about, and instead says something about an upcoming collaboration with a man. "Well, that would mean that would be homosexual if you're doing it with a dude," one of the hosts says. "What are you talking about?"
"What's wrong with homosexual?" Ike says.
"Are you gay, Ike?"
"Do I sound like I'm gay with fourteen wives?" Ike says. He gets his back up a little bit, but there's not much sign of the temper that used to terrify journalists, producers, wives, and children. Did he mellow later in life? Did he clean up his life enough to redeem himself? Is there any fair way to balance his artistic achievements against the damage he did to those close to him? It's impossible to say on the strength of a lone radio appearance, but Ike proceeds through the rest of the largely undignified interview -- an R&B legend plumping for a reality TV project on Morning Buffoon radio -- with something approaching reserve. He seemed at peace, almost, and now he can rest in it forever.Labels: ben, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, December 06, 2007
CAN U KEEP A SECRET
De La Soul
3 Feet High and Rising
Tommy Boy : 1989
[Buy It]
I HAVE A SECRET
Half Japanese
Sing No Evil
Drag City : 1984
[Buy It]
SECRET LOVE
Billy Stewart
1967
Available on : 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection
MCA : 2000
[Buy It]
YOUR SECRET'S SAFE WITH ME
Robert Cray Band
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
Mercury : 1988
[Buy It]
THE SECRET
Slapp Happy
1973
Acnalbasac Noom
Recommended : 1980
[Buy It]
MY DIRTY SECRET IS A DIVINE DILEMMA
Banner Barbados
2005
Demo
Years ago, I was dating a woman in another city west of here. One day, we woke up, got dressed, and went to get coffee. She had her head down in the coffee steam, more so than usual. Then she raised her gaze to meet mine. "I have to tell you something," she said.
I would like to freeze that moment. It was the dead of winter in the Midwest. Freezing the moment's easy. She was about to tell me a secret. I had a number of thoughts, all at once. First, I was excited. It seemed like a step forward for us. Then I was curious whether I could guess her secret in the few seconds before she revealed it to me. I think that I preferred that I be able to do so, both to soften the blow and to prevent our relationship from being exposed as the kind of relationship that needed a boost in intimacy. Then I foresuffered a feeling of anticlimax. She would tell me whatever it was and I would receive it and process it and then what? We'd finish our coffee? We'd go back home? I'd worry about what other secrets lay beneath the surface? A black curtain would fall down over the world?
She told me the secret. I won't say what it was. It belonged to the class of things that young people early in a relationship believe they should tell their partners. Maybe it was that she had slept with someone else. Maybe it was that her father was an alcoholic. Maybe it was that she had a strange habit of taking the hair that collected in the shower drain and putting it into her mouth. Maybe it was that she once masturbated on a train. Maybe it was that she stole money from a roommate at camp and blamed the theft on another girl. Like I said, I won't say. What I will say is my reaction to her secret exactly echoed the thoughts I had just before she revealed it. I was excited, then I was comforted that my internal guess had been roughly accurate, then I was disappointed. She had told me something about herself that wasn't exactly interesting, except in the sense that I hadn't known it a minute earlier. Now what?
This is not the only kind of secret, obviously. There are secrets you can tell about others without their consent. In the late eighties and early nineties, there was a boomlet of stories outing gay celebrities. I was in college then, and at least a few friends (whether straight, gay, or getting there) had strong opinions about the propriety of exposing someone else's innermost secrets. De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, which was released the same year that Michelangelo Signorile founded Out magazine, stages a trivial version of that same process:Paul has dandruff
Posdnuos has a lot of dandruff
Mase has big fat dandruff
Trugoy has dandruff
Everybody in the world, you have dandruff Homosexuality has a sizeable soial charge. Dandruff, less so. The most common secret in pop music, is the one that directly precedes a relationship: secret love. There's Ron Sexsmith's "Secret Heart," The Miracles' "I Love You Secretly," and Half Japanese's "I Have a Secret," in which Jad Fair's yowls out his heart's deepest desires:Someone sent you roses, Karen.
Yeah that's twice this week, isn't it, Karen?
You're a lucky girl, Karen.
To have someone who cares about you so much, Karen.
Karen has a secret admirer. And I have a secret.
Karen has a secret admirer. And I have a secret too.
And my secret is you. We can all agree that this is a noble and even majestic secret: just listen to Billy Stewart's "Secret Love," a remake of an earlier Doris Day hit, and just as exuberant and idiosyncratic as Stewart's cover of George and Ira Gershwin's "Summertime." The kind of secret under consideration here, the kind that can emerge with a frisson early in a relationship, is different. Think of something minor, shameful, purely personal. At the beginning of the piece, when I listed the possible secrets revealed by my girlfriend in another city, I included chewing on hair from the shower drain grate. Those are the kids of secrets I mean -- bad habits and fetishes, the revelation of which might temporarily make a new lover feel closer. Think of them as dandruff on the inside. What reason is there to share those things? None, I think. They should not be served up. No one wants to eat that dish.
Sometimes secrets are presented, and sometimes they are extracted. Here's a secret: the story I told at the beginning of the piece, about my girlfriend in a city west of here, isn't exactly true. Everything in the story--the way she lowered her face into the coffee steam, the way she raised her head to meet my gaze--happened, but something else happened before that. I pushed a half of a muffin across my plate, sighed heavily, and said, "Tell me a secret." I was pushed into this decision by sex and high spirits, and by the fear that followed immediately upon those high spirits. I thought I might lose this woman if I didn't seal the seams of our very new relationship. So I asked her for a secret.
Six months later, we weren't dating any more. The secret she told me didn't seal our fate, but the impulse that led me to ask for it may have. Asking for a secret in such a flagrant manner appears to be a gesture of intimacy, when in fact it is nothing of the sort. A secret that is requested or presented plainly is a form of currency. It appears to carry the value stamped on its face when in fact it's worth far less. It's a bond that hasn't matured.
When you have a secret, what do you do with it? You either tell it all over town or you keep it safe, like a seed inside of your heart. But dark seeds flower into dark blossoms. In Robert Cray's "Your Secret's Safe With Me," a man who has been coveting a woman across the way watches in horror as she betrays her boyfriend with a new lover. Though the production is slicker than on Cray's breakthrough, Strong Persuader, the song plants both feet firmly in the Memphis soul that has increasingly become his calling card:Baby you should keep your bedroom shades pulled down
I can see right in; I've seen you in that black nightgown
I've seen you with your lover when your man is out of town
But don't worry, babe, your secret's safe with me
I'm very very jealous, weeks of wanting you
I never made a move. I never dreamed you'd be untrue.
Imagine my surprise when I see you loving someone new
Don't worry, babe, your secret's safe with me. The cases where shared secrets lead to happiness are surprisingly rare and often precious. Slapp Happy's "The Secret," a Peter Blegvad/Anthony Moore composition sung prettily by Dagmar Krause, is a strange little gem of a pop song about the intimacy that's forged by holding onto something for someone else:Strike a light
He's making my days into night
Mercury man does everything he can
And my only plan is to keep his secret secret Banner Barbados, a band from Seattle that made a splash online a few years ago with a Velvet Undergroundish song called "Since You Caught My Eye," had a second standout single that speeds through a Stonesy riff into jangly, organ-driven mayhem that conflates theological and romantic revelation. It's an appropriate place to conclude, because the song gives away the real secret: that God is in the details. About a year ago, a friend of mine was dating two men. One of them screwed his courage up and, over drinks, asked her for a secret. I think she complied with the hair-chewing thing. The other one never raised the issue of secrets. He put in his time, made lots of small talk, noticed things about her, and eventually knew her well enough that the secrets were superfluous. The goal is not to deliver or receive secrets on demand, but to get them as part of a steady flow, to know another person rather than another person's secrets.Labels: ben, rock, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, November 29, 2007
WHO LOVES THE SUN
The Velvet Underground
Loaded
Warner : 1970
[Buy It]
WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN
Van Morrison
Veedon Fleece
Polydor : 1974
[Buy It]
WHO WOULD YOU FUCK
Ghostface Killah
Supreme Clientele
Sony : 2000
[Buy It]
WHO TOOK THE MERRY OUT OF CHRISTMAS
Staple Singers
1970
Available on : The Complete Stax-Volt Soul Singles, Vol. 2: 1968-1971
Stax : 1993
[Buy It]
WHO SLAPPED JOHN
Gene Vincent
1956
Available on : The Road Is Rocky: Complete Studio Masters 1956-1971
Bear Family : 2005
[Buy It]
WHO SHOT SAM
George Jones
1959
Available on : Cup of Loneliness: The Classic Mercury Years
Polygram : 1994
[Buy It]
WHO DONE IT?
Harry Nilsson
Nilsson
BMG : 1977
[Buy It]
WHO THREW THE WHISKEY IN THE WELL
Wynonie Harris
1944
Available on : Big Band, Blues & Boogie: Roots Of Rock 'N' Roll, Vol. 1
President : 2003
[Buy It]
I KNOW WHO THREW THE WHISKEY IN THE WELL
Bull Moose Jackson
1946
Available on : Greatest Hits: My Big Ten Inch
King : 1994
[Buy It]
I had guests over at my house this week, including some I didn't know very well, and I had to decide where to set my level of curiosity. Pitch it too low and people feel neglected. Pitch it too high and they feel scrutinized. I think I worked it out, but it's a struggle for me and always has been, not because I find it hard to ask questions, but I find it hard to stop once I've started. Maybe it's curiosity, or a mix of curiosity and boredom, but it's always been that way. As a kid, I dressed up as Sherlock Holmes for Halloween, and that authorized me to look at things closely, squint, and then ask a number of inappropriate questions. (Some years, when the nearby adults got lazy or my dad didn't have a spare pipe, I was a cat burglar, and I imagined that I was committing crimes that Sherlock Holmes would have to solve the following year.)
For these reasons, I've always been drawn to question songs. There are all kinds of inquiries, from "Where did our love go?" to "When will I be loved?" but I prefer who songs. Not Who songs, but "who" songs, though "Who are you?" is both. Who made who? Who do you love? Who says a funk band can't play rock? Who knows where the time goes? Some of those who songs are the jumping-off point for broader inquiries. The Velvet Underground's "Who Loves the Sun," which is a kind of pessimistic response to "Here Comes the Sun," features what might be Doug Yule's best lead vocal, which isn't saying much. But "Who Was That Masked Man" features what might be Van Morrison's best lead vocal, which is saying much:Oh ain't it lonely
When you're livin' with a gun
Well you can't slow down and you can't turn 'round
And you can't trust anyone The title comes from the Long Ranger and possibly from Lenny Bruce, but the song comes from somewhere far stranger. It's on Veedon Fleece, Morrison's strangest and most elemental album, which was written and recorded (quickly) after his divorce from Janet Planet. Morrison uses a mournful falsetto, which is a vocal approach that he didn't employ often in his earliest records and almost certainly can't employ anymore. It's eerily effective here, where Morrison contemplates the value of stardom, not to mention identity itself, and comes down on the fence:When the ghost comes round at midnight
Well you both can have some fun
He can drive you mad, he can make you sad
He can keep you from the sun
When they take him down, he'll be both safe and sound
And the hand does fit the glove
And no matter what they tell you,
There's good and evil in everyone Question songs don't have to be ontological. Some are specific challenges, like Bill Withers' "Who is He (And What is He To You)," in which romantic doubt hardens into jealous certainty. (The song, complete with its unforgettable central eight-note clusters--four up, four down--later received a lesbian makeover from Me'Shell Ndegéocello.) Some are games, like the overlong Ghostface skit that rates potential bedmates: Lil' Kim or Foxxy Brown? Lady of Rage or Rah Digga? Janet or Chrissy? And still others are polemics: The Staple Singers' "Who Took The Merry Out of Christmas," which is a kind of unholy holy cross between "Inner City Blues" and "Be With Me Jesus."
Then there are the who songs that pose true mysteries. The first one takes us all the way back to 1956. Gene Vincent was already well along the road to rockabilly immortality, thanks in no small part to the guitar of Cliff Gallup, when he recorded "Who Slapped John." In the song, there's a party. There's a question of relations. And then there's a crime, sort of:Well I heard John say, "Man, she's my gal"
I heard another say, "Man, she my pal"
Well John jumped up, then he screamed
"Well, she's my gal, man, and that I mean"
Well, who-who, who slapped John?
Who-who, who slapped John?
Baby, who slapped John when the lights went low-oh?
Who-who, who slapped John? Three years after the lights went low-oh, George Jones co-wrote and recorded "Who Shot Sam." It's an echo of and possibly even an answer record to "Who Slapped John," but it's also connected to the folk tradition of complex story-songs that would later reach its apogee/nadir with Bob Dylan's "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts"--the Jones song counts among its characters Sammy Samson, Silly Milly, Flirty Mirty, the police chief, the judge, and the narrator. There's also a lyric that might be cryptically filthy:We met Silly Milly, everything was all right
Her eyes started rollin', we shoulda went a-bowlin'
Wham-bam, who shot Sam, my-my "Who Shot Sam" is mentioned in the opening line of Elvis Costello's "Motel Matches," in 1979. Within two years Costello would be covering and performing with Jones.
"Who Slapped John" and "Who Shot Sam" remain unsolved. And in the end, they're minor crimes, mere party (or roadhouse) mayhem. Neither has the production values or the narrative drive of Harry Nilsson's "Who Done It?" Nilsson had already recorded a murder mystery, of sorts, with "Ten Little Indians," and "Who Done It?" revives the calypso stylings of "Coconut" for a closed-door manor-house case that's straight out of Agatha Christie. The song is from the underrated album "Knnillssonn," whose double-exposure cover image doubles its doubled typography, and it's pushed along by a lovely, confusing string part that sounds like a sample in a hip-hop song. Nilsson's vocals are not as angelic as they once were; rupturing his vocals cords while making "Pussy Cats" with John Lennon had taken care of that. But it's a committed performance, if you mean commitment to irony. There are Smythes, Sloans, Chopin (a snatch of the Piano Sonata No. 2, "pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you"), and a superb alibi from Nilsson's narrator ("I was in Colorado, having breakfast, with a nun!") In the end, like much of Nilsson's best work, it's a high-level novelty record, and all the more personal for its impersonality.
We close with the saddest mystery of all. "Who Threw The Whiskey In the Well?" is credited to Wynonie Harris, though in fact the song was originally released by Lucky Millinder and his Orchestra, with Harris as a vocalist. The song became a big R&B hit, and Harris, who was not restricted by Millinder's recording contract, went off to seek his fortune as a solo artist. In addition to producing that solo career (which yielded such immortal hits as "Mr. Blues Jumped The Rabbit," "Bloodshot Eyes," and "Good Rockin' Tonight"), the song produced an answer record by Bull Moose Jackson, who had replaced Harris in Millinder's orchestra. So who did throw the whiskey in the well? Find out yourself. No need to ruin a good mystery.Labels: ben, rock, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
THANKSGIVING
Loudon Wainwright III
Career Moves
Virgin : 1993
[Buy It]
THANKSGIVING DAY
Ray Davies
Other People's Lives
V2 : 2006
[Buy It]
ALMOST THANKSGIVING DAY
Graham Parker
Your Country
Bloodshot : 2004
[Buy It]
BE THANKFUL FOR WHAT YOU GOT
Massive Attack
Blue Lines
Virgin : 1991
[Buy It]
THANK YOU LORD
Horace Andy
1973
Available on : Feel Good All Over: Anthology
Sanctuary Trojan : 2002
[Buy It]
STUFFY TURKEY
Thelonious Monk
It's Monk's Time
CBS : 1964
[Buy It]
COLD TURKEY
The Godfathers
Hit By Hit
Link : 1986
[Buy It]
Sometimes, there's a long table. Sometimes, there's a large table. Sometimes, there's a small table. Three old men sit around it, eating. Someone prefers the white meat. Someone else prefers the dark meat. Someone else waits for the wishbone. All three carve.
The room is warm. Someone cracks a window to let the air in. There's a song coming from a car out on the street. There's a young man in the car bobbing his head back and forth. There's a young woman in the front seat next to him. The young man and the young woman kiss.
"Diamond in the back," someone says.
"This isn't the original," someone else says. "The singer's different."
They listen. It isn't the original. The singer's different. The car pulls away. Someone closes the window. Someone else begins to hum the song, and then to hum another song. Someone else taps out a beat on a glass with a spoon. The tapping stops. It is dark outside the window. The room is white with silence.
Someone leaves the room to make a call. Someone else can hear him making the call. The call is as warm as the room. "Thanks for coming by the other day," someone says. "I was very happy to see you. I don't always remember to tell you how great you are."
Someone comes back into the room. Someone else leaves to make a call. The call is as cold as the air that came into the room. "Thanks a lot," someone says. "I can't say that I'm surprised. Listen, I need to go."
Someone comes back into the room. Someone else leaves to make a call. "You don't have to thank me," someone says. "Being kind to you isn't a burden. Eventually you'll see what you mean to me."
Someone comes back into the room. Someone sits. Someone else sits. Someone stands up and opens the window again. Someone else thinks he hears another song. Someone else can't hear a thing. The window is closed again. Someone slides back from the table. Someone else angles his chair to the side. Someone else stretches and sighs. All three leave.Labels: ben, rock, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, November 08, 2007
WORDS DISOBEY ME
The Pop Group
Y
WEA Int'l : 1979
[Buy It]
IN OTHER WORDS (DEMO)
Sly & The Family Stone
1982
Available on : Who in the Funk Do You Think You Are: The Warner Bros. Recordings
Rhino Handmade : 2001
[Buy It]
LANGUAGE IS A VIRUS
Laurie Anderson
Home of the Brave
Warner Bros. : 1986
[Buy It]
WHEN THE WORDS FROM YOUR HEART GET CAUGHT UP IN YOUR THROAT
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
1968
Available on : Complete Motown Singles 8: 1968
Hip-O-Select : 2007
[Buy It]
THE LOVE I SAW IN YOU WAS JUST A MIRAGE
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
1967
Available on : The Ultimate Collection
Motown : 1998
[Buy It]
FLY ME TO THE MOON (IN OTHER WORDS)
Smokey Robinson
Timeless Love
New Door : 2006
[Buy It]
Last time I wrote about the limits of language, the way that our most complex (and, in different ways, our simplest) feelings are betrayed by the words we use to try to express them. People wrote in to agree or disagree, using language. Some extended the argument. Some distended it. Others still upended it, claiming that the issue isn't that language fails, but that it succeeds at diversion and obfuscation, which are the only true roles of language. In the comments section, Yuval Taylor posted one of the epigraphs from Stendhal's The Red and the Black, which is credited to R.P. Malagrida: "Speech was given man in order to hide his thoughts." Plenty of people have agreed with Stendhal. Mark Stewart, of the Bristol post-punkers Pop Group, concurred a century and a half later:Truth is a feeling
But it's not a sound
Truth is a feeling
But it's not a sound
We don't need words
Throw them away The point's made again in "In Other Words," a surprisingly guitar-heavy Sly and the Family Stone demo from the early eighties:When I hear you talking and I feel what you say
It sounds a little funny cause the words are in the way
I get the meaning that the words can't steal
In other words, I hear what you feel And it's (re)made (yet) again in "Language is a Virus," a funny little Laurie Anderson number in which a friend suspects her of performing her speech rather than feeling it. (The title and chorus are taken from a William S. Burroughs quote, "language is a virus from outer space"; he's her Malagrida.):Well I was talking to a friend
And I was saying
I wanted you
And I was looking for you
But I couldn't find you
I couldn't find you
And he said: Hey!
Are you talking to me?
Or are you just practicing
For one of those performances of yours?
Huh? Some may hold that the limits of language are the limits of the world, but others insist that language must be set aside before you can feel your way down to the truth. I was thinking about that last week, during a difficult (but rewarding) conversation with a difficult (but rewarding) friend of mine with whom I have always had a rewarding (but difficult) relationship. Over the years, there's been lots of talking. You might even say a surplus. Maybe it would have been easier, all along the way, to dispense with language. But then what? Semaphore? Anyway, dispensing with language has never been a possibility, because we're both highly verbal, which is to say that we're both highly limited by language, which is itself highly limited. I keep saying that, in that same dumb way, to make my point and at the same time prove it. But the point is more capably proven, to the point of disproof, by Smokey Robinson. His argument comes on "When the Words From Your Heart Get Caught Up in Your Throat," a B-side from 1968 that was completed in the studio forty years ago today; I'm going to quote the whole lyric, because that's what you do with literature:My heart has been trying to express itself
And it's really getting me down
There's a strange effect that comes over me
Whenever you're around
I have so much confidence when I'm by myself
It's like my nerves wore an armored coat
But baby now you're such a charmer you melt that coat of armor
And the words from my heart get caught up in my throat
Maybe I'd better write a note
My heart is getting discouraged with giving me line after line after line
But my lips can't relay what my heart has to say
They stutter and stammer each time
If I don't tell you soon what my heart wants to say
My chance will get more remote
But each time you've given me the opportunity
The words from my heart get caught up in my throat
Maybe I'd better write a note
I make the same promises to my heart every morning
That the very next time we met
I would tell you that I loved you and make you mine
By the time the sun starts to set
I rehearsed my lines a thousand times
Read some sweet poetry I could quote
But when you open your door to greet me
Smiling oh so sweetly
The words from my heart get caught up in my throat
I think I'd better write a note
I want to say the words but they're caught up in my throat
I'm gonna find myself a pencil cause they're caught up in my throat The music lets the lyrics down somewhat, which can happen with late Miracles songs. And while a hyper-articulate song about being tongue-tied may be a peculiar kind of grandstand play, that's the genius of Smokey Robinson. In the last verse, when he says that he prepared for his date by reading "some sweet poetry [he] could quote," he might be talking about Shakespeare, about Beatrice's lament in "Much Ado About Nothing" that "men are only turned into tongue"; or the way Iago, in "Othello," describes Emilia's reticence by saying that "she puts her tongue a little in her heart"; or how the Clown, in "Twelfth Night," explains that "words are very rascals since bonds disgraced them." But it's just as likely that he's talking about his own lyrics--that he's not reading Shakespeare, in other words, because he's writing it.
If the song recognizes that clear communication is an illusion, it also implies that is is only one of many. You may not be able to say what you mean or mean what you say, but you also can't believe what you see or you feel, as he explains in "The Love I Saw in You (Was Just a Mirage)." It's a justly famous song -- it went top twenty and appears on all the anthologies -- that remains the most devastating account of romantic illusion in pop music history. The story is simple. It always is: boy meets girl, boy loves girl, girl pretends to love boy, boy wakes up one day to discover that his heart has been ripped out of his chest by girl's deceitful ways. It's been around as long as there have been boys, girls, and hearts. But the lyric is peerless. People like to mention the famous Bob Dylan quote in which he referred to Smokey Robinson as "America's greatest living poet." I just wish it was clear how unironic a statement it was:We used to meet in romantic places
You gave the illusion that your love was real
Now all that's left are lipstick traces
From the kisses you only pretended to feel
And now our meeting you avoid
And so my world you have destroyed
Just a minute ago your love was here
All of a sudden it seemed to disappear
The way you wrecked my life was like sabotage
The love I saw in you was just a mirage The idea of a mirage may have been a little bit abstruse for a pop song, so Smokey offered a compact two-line definition that, when sung, is one of the best lines of poetry in the song:Just like the desert shows a thirsty man
A green oasis where there's only sand This song, of course, gives the lie to the other one, which also gives the lie to itself, and as a result it's an instrument of tremendous hope beneath its message of hopelessness. This is exactly what language can do when it's not concealing or misrepresenting the truth--it can tell the truth in so many words.
Time moved on. Age came to Smokey, as it comes to everyone. Plastic surgery came to Smokey, perhaps more than it comes to everyone--in fact, sometimes it looks like he underwent some extra procedures that were earmarked for others. In 2004, he released a gospel album, "Food For the Spirit," that was also a tie-in with Smokey Robinson Foods ("The Soul is in the Bowl"). In 2006, he released an album of standards, "Timeless Love," that was, in its own way, just as divided between art and commerce. Rod Stewart had just gone quintillion platinum or whatever with his American Songbook series, and others like Carly Simon had followed, so Smokey probably felt that it made sense to redeploy those songs with one of America's iconic voices. The album was recorded with a small jazz combo, and the strings were added later to give the project more sonic foliage. Smokey's wavery tenor was still a thing of great beauty. And there was a clear, strong geneaology that linked the standards of the forties and fifties to the standards he had written in the sixties. "Fly Me to the Moon" had already been remade as a soul song, by Bobby Womack, but Smokey's version went back to the beginning, to 1954, when the song was written by Bart Howard and recorded by Kaye Ballard. It was originally called "In Other Words," and that was the meaning in addition to being the title. "Fly Me to the Moon" (the title was changed when Johnny Mathis recorded it in 1956) reiterates that true feelings don't require flowery language, that sometimes words get in the way of a simple message, but it also locates the consolation prize. If words didn't disobey us, if the words in our heart didn't get caught up in our throat, if we had no fear, we might also have no poetry:Fly me to the moon
And let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like
On Jupiter and Mars
In other words hold my hand Labels: ben, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, November 02, 2007
IF YOU PICK HER TOO HARD (SHE COMES OUT OF TUNE)
Little Richard
1972
Available on : King of Rock and Roll: The Complete Reprise Sessions
Rhino Handmade : 2005
[Buy It]
WE'RE GONNA HAVE A REAL GOOD TIME TOGETHER
The Velvet Underground
1969: Velvet Underground Live, Vol. 1
Mercury : 1974
[Buy It]
TOO MARVELOUS FOR WORDS
Frank Sinatra
Songs for Swingin' Lovers!
Capitol : 1955
[Buy It]
TOO MARVELOUS FOR WORDS
Art Tatum
The Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces, Vol. 1
Pablo : 1953
[Buy It]
YOU CAN HAVE WATERGATE (JUST GIMME SOME BUCKS AND I'LL BE STRAIGHT)
The JBs
1973
Available on : Funky Good Time: The Anthology
Polydor : 1995
[Buy It]
A friend of mine returned from a trip recently. We spoke a few days later. I'm sure that the thing I was supposed to do was to say, "Welcome back" and leave it at that. But you know how it is with friends -- they're not acquaintances. So we got into a discussion about life and what it means. At some point, philosophy slid into soap opera. She wanted to talk about a relationship she's in and I was reluctant at first because I didn't think it was a wise idea. The relationship, I mean, not the talking about it, although it turned out that the talking about it wasn't such a great idea, either, because what I said caused additional tension. What I said was that this relationship of hers seemed to have an element of opportunism, and a section of my mind felt that was unfair. The man she was seeing seemed to me to be spending intimate time with her under somewhat false pretenses, not in a malicious way but not in an especially provident way either, although I recognized that it was condescending to suggest that she wasn't capable of seeing that on her own and making her own judgment about how much the false pretenses were offset by the genuine pleasure and comfort. I was worried about someone I cared about standing in harm's way, even voluntarily, but opening up my mouth to begin to express that worry was not necessarily my right. I didn't say that. How could I? It was a conversation, not a symposium. But what I did say failed me, and her, and our friendship. I was bossy. In working things through in my mind, I came uncomfortably close to telling another adult how to live her life. I grew angry at myself -- I should have laid out and said nothing -- and then I grew angry at language.
Why was I mad at language? Well, let me explain, using more language. Language has limits, particularly when it is charged with expressing complex emotions. Or rather: there may not be any theoretical limits, but there are operational limits. The operators of the language (in this case, me) are hobbled by conflicts of interest, by positionality and personality, by temerity and timidity. There were no words, or there weren't enough words, or there were too many words that got in the way. Stupid language.
Songs seemed like a better way to go. They have one foot in language, but that foot is tapping. They have meaning but also the spell of melody and the force of rhythm, which improves their ability to address situations that touch on emotional and physical issues along with intellectual ones. This is a contentious stance -- again, stupid language -- until it's demonstrated. Exhibit A: Little Richard. In the early seventies, Little Richard, like many iconic artists from the fifties, was in limbo, uncertain how to respond to the quickly changing times. The electric blues giants who were still alive released heavy blues-rock records with psychedelic flourishes (Muddy Waters had Electric Mud, Howlin' Wolf had Howlin' Wolf's New Album), but the rockers faced equally severe identity crises. Each of them dealt with it idiosyncratically, sometimes desperately, and not always to their critical or commercial advantage. Elvis had been to Memphis and was already slouching toward Vegas. Jerry Lee Lewis had shifted over into country. Chuck Berry experienced a pyrrhic victory when "My Ding-a-Ling," the worst song he ever recorded, hit number one. Bo Diddley soldiered on at Chess, covering many of the artists who had imitated him. The remaining giant of fifties rock, Little Richard, signed to Reprise and recorded a quartet of records: The King of Rock and Roll (1970), Second Coming (1971), The Rill Thing (1972), and Southern Child. They were roots records, reaching back into country and jazz as well as taking a stab at the rock-and-roll of the time. The vocals weren't as volcanic as the Specialty sides, but they were more than just respectable, and the songwriting was sometimes fascinatingly personal.
Respectable and fascinating sold poorly. Sales were so sluggish that the fourth album of the series, Southern Child, wasn't even released at the time, and only saw the light of day thanks to bootleggers and, eventually, a Rhino anthology of the Reprise years. Southern Child is of a piece with the others, with some key differences: more original songs, subtler vocals, and a more mellow feel. It also contains Little Richard's mid-career masterpiece, a country-folk composition called "If You Pick Her Too Hard (She Comes Out of Tune)." The song has many assets (arresting title, peaceful acoustic guitars, unorthodox structure) but its real strength is in its wordless opening, which consists of some two dozen sweet exhales and then a rousing cry that communicates some kind (and maybe all kinds) of freedom:Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Whoa whoa whoa yeah yeah yeah The song has other lyrics, and they're not bad.If you pick her too hard she'll come out of tune
If you pick her too hard she'll come out of tune
The sound of your breath mixing with my breath
It's the only sound that's true
The touch of your back pressing on my back
Gives us both a place to play out back If you subtract the sexual implications (which make up about 50 percent of the song) and the strangeness of Little Richard addressing a love song to what seems to be a woman (40 percent), there's not much left over, but what there is conveys a simple message: don't pressure your intimates lest you throw your relationships with them into crisis. It seemed like a good lesson regarding the benefits of laying out rather than charging ahead. And while the song isn't expressly about using language injudiciously, the argument is elevated, and maybe even made true, by the nonsense syllables in the lyrics.
Connected to this apology was my own need for reassurance that I hadn't caused any permanent damage to the friendship. I couldn't ask directly. That would mean more language. Instead, I turned to another song that turns on wordlessness, the Velvet Underground's "We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together." The lyrics aren't artful or even anthemic, but they're not exactly placeholders either:We're gonna have a real good time together
We're gonna have a real good time together
We're gonna have a real good time together
We're gonna laugh and dance and shout together
Na na na na na na na na na na na hey hey hey baby Listening to it restored my hope. So now I had two song-messages, one about my understanding that I should have backed off and the other about my hope that good faith would return intact, and they said what they needed to say without any words at all. Whoa whoa whoa yeah yeah yeah, na na na na na na na na na na na hey hey hey baby.
Little Richard and Lou Reed weren't the first songwriters to recognize that the language that they depended upon for their livelihood was iffy at best. The great Johnny Mercer, who once dismissed a musical he didn't care for by saying "I could eat alphabet soup and shit better lyrics," copped to the problem in 1937, when he fit words to a song by Richard Whiting for the film "Ready, Willing, and Able":You're just too marvelous
Too marvelous for words
Like glorious, glamorous
And that old standby amorous
It's all too wonderful
I'll never find the words
That say enough, tell enough
I mean they just aren't swell enough
You're much too much, and just too very very
To ever be in Webster's dictionary
And so I'm borrowing a love song from the birds
To tell you that you're marvelous
Too marvelous for words The song became a standard. Everyone recorded it: Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Rosemary Clooney, Nat King Cole, Johnnie Ray, Frankie Laine. In 1947, a version by Jo Stafford was used in the film, "Dark Passage," which starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and the film also incorporated an instrumental version. The irony of stripping "Too Marvelous For Words" of its marvelous words was not confined to the film. Art Tatum recorded a coruscating solo piano version of the song (as wordless pieces go, it's pretty wordy--all those notes!) and the song even supplied the title of James Lester's biography of Tatum. "Too Marvelous for Words" is about love, of course, but love is just one of many possible sites of failure for language; pretty much any emotion that requires explanation also thwarts explanation.
When I spoke to my friend a few days later, I didn't plan on raising the issue of her relationship. She raised it. She said that she had thought more about the situation and why she was in it. She then explained herself, badly. "Things will either get better or they will get worse and when it's better or worse than I'll know which way it's going," she said. She was trying to tell me something, and probably trying to tell herself something, but she ran afoul of language. Then, that night, I was listening to the JBs perform "You Can Have Watergate (Just Gimme Some Bucks and I'll Be Straight)." The lyrics are largely the title, repeated over and over again, along with a few other short chants and some James Brown punctuation. The song is officially listed as an instrumental, but in this case the small amount of language does everything it needs to do:You can have Watergate
But give me some bucks and I'll be straight
I need some money You can spend all your time discussing the large issues of corruption in society or the complexities of an imperfect relationship, but when it comes down to it, people have needs that have nothing to do with fine-grained discussion, precise rendering of interior states, or persuasive argument. Those things are luxuries. My friend just wanted her bucks and she'd be straight. I was going to call her and recommend the song. But then I'd have to explain the connection, and maybe who the JBs were, and that would mean more words, and maybe picking too hard. I remembered that Little Richard had said "whoa whoa whoa yeah yeah yeah," and also something else that he said. He said "Shut up!" That was good enough for me.Labels: ben, funk, jazz, soul
posted by Ben
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 |
Thursday, October 18, 2007
I'M NOT LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE
The Chocolate Watchband
1966
Available on : Melts in Your Brain Not on Your Wrist: The Complete Recordings
Big Beak UK : 2005
[Buy It]
I'M JUST LIKE YOU
6ix
1971
Available on : What It Is! Funky Soul and Rare Grooves (1967-1977)
Rhino : 2006
[Buy It]
I BELIEVE I FOUND MYSELF
Sir Stanley
1970
Available on : Chains and Black Exhaust
Jones : 2002
[Out of Print]
DO UNTO OTHERS
Pee Wee Crayton
1954
Available on : Complete Aladdin and Imperial Recordings
EMI Int'l : 1996
[Buy It]
SICK OF MYSELF
Matthew Sweet
100% Fun
Volcano : 1995
[Buy It]
LET ME BE MYSELF
Roscoe Robinson
Paula : 1971
[Out of Print]
I once had a problematic friend, a writer, who would always tell me how the world was a place of moral drought and psychological dropsy. She talked like that. She was problematic to me not because she was inherently annoying--she was, but she was my friend--but because of a habit she had of saying something preposterous and then turning to me and saying, "You understand what I mean, I'm sure, because you're exactly like me." Later on, I had another friend who did something similar. When someone offended his sensibilities, he would say, "They're not like us." I found this troublesome, as he was a neo-Nazi. No, no. Just kidding. I found this troublesome because he wasn't me. Who wants to be lumped in like that? My individuality, which can't be separated from my separation from others, is one of the few things I really own. I don't mind bonding with other people, but I want it understood that we're different individuals choosing to agree on something temporarily. There are a million ways to disagree, and that's why this temporary agreement is miraculous. If you listen to "I'm Not Like Everybody Else," either the Kinks original or the superb Chocolate Watchband cover, you'll see why identity is such a vexed issue. This whole anxiety reached its nadir a few years ago. I was in line at a Wendy's and there was a little person ahead of me--an actual little person, not just a small guy--and I noticed from the leather tag on the back of his jeans that he wore the same size pants as me. His were cuffed or cut, obviously. I am six feet tall. In the car with my wife, I made a big comic production of being bothered to conceal how deeply bothered I actually was.
All of these traumatic experiences have led me to develop a rule: People aren't just like me and I'm not just like them, unless I'm not looking closely enough. Different strokes for different folks, as Sly Stone said. Though, of course, Sly also said "I'm just like you." The song in which he said it, conveniently titled "Just Like You," was written and produced for a group called 6ix, and it's a skeletal, spooky bit of business built on sparse percussion and Charles Higgins's vocalsCross the track and take a look
Turn the page and finish the book
Yeah I know that scares you too
I know how you feel I'm just like you I read it as sarcastic.
Now, of course, there is a conspicuous exception to my rule, and that's romance, or more specifically the first phase of romance. You don't have to be like everybody else, but everybody needs somebody to love, right? And sometimes you can get off by recognizing how different you are from the woman or man you're dating, but just as often, you get off on the similarity. It might be narcissism (on Seinfeld, didn't Jerry marry a woman who was exactly like him?) and it's certainly not true, but the draw is powerful. People are always telling their lovers that they were lost without love, that without love they were nothing, that love helped them find themselves. One of those people is Sir Stanley. Actually, to be honest, I'm not sure if Sir Stanley is the name of the singer or the band, but either way, the song remains scorching:The woman that I got
She fulfills my ever hour
I believe that I have all I need
To live my life just as I please Between friendship and romance, there's a third category: friendship between men and women. I have written about this before, particularly about the way that romance (call it sex if you want) grows through the cracks in the pavement. You can stamp it down, of course. You can call for the city to come out and fix the sidewalk. You probably should. But while you're waiting for the crew to arrive, it's worth thinking about exactly what it is that's sprouting up. Years ago, I had a female friend who passed through a period of extended romantic misery. As I was not the cause of her misery--and as I was in the kind of stable relationship that she envied, or at least thought she envied--I got to hear all about her sadness. I listened with the right mix of sympathy and amusement, gave some advice, withheld other advice. Then one Friday night she was going off on a date she assumed would be another terrible date. It seemed so: the guy was a neo-Nazi. (Again, kidding.) But I didn't hear from her Saturday, didn't hear from her Sunday, and finally ran into her Monday on the way to work. The date had gone well: seventy-two-hours well. Her hair was a mess. I told her I was happy to hear it. She said she was glad to see me. We were both lying.
I went to work feeling terrible. I went home and fought with my wife. Here's a good question: why? Some would speculate that I had feelings for that friend, and that I was feeling jealousy that stemmed from the thought of (as opposed to the fact of) her seventy-two hours of continuous screwing. When you imagine a carpentry job, it's never with someone else's hammer. But I think it's even simpler than that. I think I missed her and worried she wouldn't return the friendship intact. When you get especially close to someone else, when that person permits you to see his or her fears, lusts, and hopes, you start to take ownership of that person, and that person of you. Leakage occurs. That's an exhilarating feeling. I think they call it intimacy. But it's also a terrible feeling, because it's nonsense, or at the very least unsustainable. It's a high and it's illusory. It's like standing on a cloud.
This is something you learn in marriage, which may start as an exercise in this ecstatic leakage but usually becomes a push and pull of drawing your partner close and pushing your partner away. It's not, however, something you learn (at least not efficiently) from close friendships with people of the opposite sex. Those people remain, in many ways, idealized, which is to say that they become solipsized. Many experts believe that you should treat other people as you want to be treated. Pee Wee Crayton, a blues singer who grew up in Texas and then moved out to California, applied the golden rule in "Do Unto Others," which was written and produced by Dave Bartholomew and has a somewhat familiar guitar solo. (Easiest question in rock history: Can you guess what song later lifted it?) But the golden rule has a flaw. It doesn't account for self-annihilating impulses. What if you're lonely and you want someone else to absorb you, envelop you, or numb you? In that case, you can end up with a friendship that's more properly curative, that takes what's wrong and makes it right. That's better, but it's worse, because it collapses the boundaries between people. I direct you to Matthew Sweet, the poet laureate of self-loathing:You don't know how you move me
Deconstruct me and consume me
I'm all used up--I'm out of luck--I am starstruck
By something in your eyes that is keeping my hope alive
But I'm sick of myself when I look at you
Something is beautiful and true
In a world that's ugly and a lie
It's hard to even want to try
And I'm beginning to think baby you don't know In my case, I had come to depend upon my friend to see myself and I was deeply disappointed when the mirror turned away. Except that, of course, she wasn't a mirror at all. She was another person--translucent, flawed, needy of love and approval, willing to trade up for a better deal, horny, lonely, alternately circumspect and short-sighted, with a body that could please or fail and had hairs in errant places. I guess in that sense, she was a mirror. See how this gets confusing?
Questions of this nature are often most productively settled by obscure soul singers from Alabama--Roscoe Robinson, for example, whose short career was revived by Northern Soul enthusiasts. There are other soul songs about how love can repair you, or transform you, or make you see someone else's essence in a way that alters your own (Sir Stanley, above, or Carla Thomas's "I Like What You're Doing (To Me)," for example) but Robinson stays levelheaded. He doesn't ask his woman to let him be part of her (or, more egotistically, for her to be part of him). He isn't looking for a mirror with a glory hole carved in it. He respects the differences between people, and the distances, and in this sense he seems to be writing more about friendship or partnership than about romance:If you want me baby let me be myself please darling
So many ruin their lives trying to be somebody else
I may not can do what other men do
But I try my best to please you
If you want me, come on, baby let me be myself If she was a midget, he wouldn't try on her pants. He wouldn't even check the size.Labels: ben, power-pop, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
MAGGOT BRAIN
MAGGOT BRAIN (ALT. MIX)
Funkadelic
Maggot Brain
Westbound : 1971
[Buy It]
PLEASE STAY
Slim Smith & the Uniques
Unity : 1970
Available on: Keep That Lovelight Shining
Trojan : 2004
[Buy It]
BAD GIRL (PT. 1)
REACH OUT, I'LL BE THERE
ADORABLE ONE
Lee Moses
Time and Place
Maple : 1971 / Castle/Sanctuary : 2007
[Buy It]Labels: acid rock, alex, rocksteady, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Friday, August 10, 2007
BRAVE & STRONG
Sly and the Family Stone
There's a Riot Goin' On
Epic : 1971
[Buy it]
I'M NOT AFRAID TO DIE
Gillian Welch
Hell Among the Yearlings
Acony : 1998
[Buy it]
NOT AFRAID
Bizzy Bone
Alpha and Omega
Bungalo : 2004
[Buy it]
JEANNIE'S AFRAID OF THE DARK
Robbie Fulks
13 Hillbilly Giants
Bloodshot : 2001
[Buy it]
IS IT SCARY
Michael Jackson
Blood On The Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix
Sony : 1997
[Buy it]
THE FEAR
Pulp
This Is Hardcore
Island : 1998
[Buy it]
I was reading an article by Ron Paul recently, and that's the first time I have ever started a sentence like that. It wasn't as bad as I thought it might be. I might even do it again. I was reading an article by Ron Paul recently, and he was outlining his thoughts about fear:
While fear itself is not always the product of irrationality, once experienced it tends to lead away from reason, especially if the experience is extreme in duration or intensity. When people are fearful they tend to be willing to irrationally surrender their rights. As the end of these rather dense and prolix sentences--no political speechwriter would ever sign off on them, and that's part of their charm--he reveals the heart of his argument, which has to do with the way that fear can be used as a tool of political repression. Ron Paul's completely right about that, of course, and that's the first time I have ever started a sentence like that either. But if Ron Paul wasn't running for office, he'd be making a broader point, and a highly contentious one that that. Does fear lead away from reason, especially if the experience is extreme in duration or intensity, or does it lead to reason? Is fear irrational or is it the most rational aspect of humanity? I flipped a coin to find out. It landed on its edge.
Pop music is full of fear. Fear of Flying, Fear of a Black Planet, even Fear of Music. Songs that say they're about bravery, like Sly and the Family Stone's "Brave & Strong," are also about the absence of bravery:
Frightened faces to the wall
Can't you hear your mama call?
The brave and strong survive The big fear, of course, is the fear of death. This last week, it seemed to be everywhere. My wife has been planning her father's 85th birthday party, hoping that the Uninvited Guest doesn't show. A friend in her twenties was taken to the hospital, unexpectedly, for something that turned out to be nothing but had her family worried, briefly, that it might be everything. Another friend in her thirties told me, matter-of-factly, that she has been thinking of dying often. Or rather, she was thinking about dying once, often.
In all of these cases, I tried to kill off this fear of death. I told my wife that her father will be fine. I mean, who dies in their eighties? I sent cheery messages to my twentysomething friend. I told my thirtysomething friend that she can think of dying all she wants, so long as she's not afraid of it. "I'm not afraid of dying," I said, full of bluff. She said nothing. Her silence suggested that maybe claiming that you weren't afraid of death was in fact proof that you were afraid of death. It also suggested that the largest issues work by contraries. Silence just won't shut up sometimes. There are songs that also have something to say about this issue. In "I'm Not Afraid to Die," Gillian Welch finds solace in the inevitable:
Forget my sins upon the wind
My hobo soul will rise Bizzy Bone's "Not Afraid" takes a more nihilistic route to the same destination. So, two versions, one peaceful, one meaningless. What is there to fear? According to my thirtysomething friend, her fear involves being alone on her deathbed, with no company, no family, no solace. Oh, and caring about it, and not having any confidence that she'd go on to something better. That's bad.
It's strange that fear of death makes people feel so alone, because it's something shared by almost everyone. If you think thirty is young, what about "Jeannie's Afraid of the Dark," which Dolly Parton wrote and sang with Porter Wagoner on the 1968 duet album Just the Two Of Us. (The version here is a fairly faithful Robbie Fulks cover, though remaining fairly faithful involves preserving the almost unbearable five-hankie weepiness of the thing.) Jeannie's a little girl, afraid of the dark, and every night she runs to her parents' room so that she doesn't have to sleep alone. One day, her parents take her to the cemetery, and she makes a morbid (not to mention unhygienic) request -- that when she die she not be buried, because she won't be able to deal with the dark. Parents with kids this nervous should probably keep them away from the Paul Tillich books:
The first assertion about the nature of anxiety is this: anxiety is the state in which a being is aware of its possible nonbeing. The same statement, in a shorter form, would read: anxiety is the existential awareness of nonbeing...It is not the realization of universal transitoriness, not even the experience of the death of others, but the impression of these events on the always latent awareness of our own having to die that produces anxiety. So how to deal with these anxieties? Well, one way, weirdly, is to feel fear -- fear, that is, of other things, things that don't involve annihilation. In fact, other fears are life-affirming, because they require being. So be afraid of snakes. Be afraid of clowns. Be afraid of ghosts. (That's why fear of the dark has a special status, I think -- it's easy to forget that you exist.)
The other night I did a reading at a bookstore in the city. Afterwards, at a bar, I was talking to another writer whose husband is a film scholar who specializes in horror movies. I was asking what counts as the minimum requirement for a horror movie, as opposed to a scary movie. Does someone have to die? Does more than half of the audience have to scream? Does the film have to be aware of the entertainment value of its own capacity for producing fear? "There are books written about that," she said. I went on, asking her if werewolf movies were all about masturbation and vampire movies all about sex (there are books written about that, too, as it turns out), but the basic question was the one that stuck. What makes something a horror movie rather than a scary movie?
I brought the question with me back to music. What's scary? Fantomas? Scott Walker? Nico? Is bleakness scary? Is Ice Cube scary? Is rage scary? Is truth scary? And if many of those artists have recorded scary songs, what's a horror song? I found two, I think: Michael Jackson's "Is It Scary," which is an unholier-than-Thriller piece of meta-horror in which he keeps testing your threshold for experiencing terror as entertainment, and Pulp's "The Fear," which does more or less the same thing, stacking misgivings like bricks in English bond. The effects in both songs are so outsized, so preposterous, that they shouldn't work at all, and yet both of them work scarily well at delivering their message. Existence may be terrible and scary, but it's life. it goes and goes again. And it has death beat by a mile:
Oh baby,
Here comes the fear again.
The end is near again.
A monkey's built a house on your back.
You can't get anyone to come in the sack
And here comes another panic attack
Oh here we go again. Labels: ben, country, rock, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
by popular demand:
HEY JUDE
The Overton Berry Trio
The Overton Berry Trio At Seattle's Doubletree Inn
Jaro : 1970
Available on: Wheedle's Groove: Seattle's Finest in Funk & Soul 1965-1975
Light in the Attic : 2004
[Buy It]
DEAR PRUDENCE
CRY BABY CRY
Ramsey Lewis
Mother Nature's Son
Cadet : 1969
[Out of Print (except via iTunes)]
TAXMAN
Junior Parker
Love Ain't Nothin But a Business Goin' On
Groove Merchant : 1971
via Soul Sides
[Buy It]
ELEANOR RIGBY
Kim Weston
People : 1970
Available on: Soul Gospel
Soul Jazz Records : 2005
[Buy It]
Like most of the songs in this post, "Eleanor Rigby" was also recorded by Aretha Franklin, The 4 Tops, Wes Montgomery, Ray Charles, Booker T. & The MGs, Oscar Peterson, Richie Havens, Skip James, and the Dalai Lama.
COME TOGETHER
Ike & & Tina Turner
Come Together
Liberty : 1970
Available on: Absolutely The Best
Varese Sarabande : 1998
[Buy It]
JEALOUS GUY
Donny Hathaway
Live
Atlantic : 1972
also via Soul Sides
[Buy It]
DAY TRIPPER
Otis Redding
The Dictionary of Soul
Stax : 1966
[Buy It]
AND I LOVE HER [UNRELEASED VERSION]
The Wailers
Studio One : 1965
Available on : One Love: Bob Marley & The Wailers @ Studio One
Heartbeat : 1991
[Buy It]
THIS BOY
Joe Bataan
Sweet Soul
Fania : 1972
[Out of Print]
And the one and only James Booker.
Originally posted on 8/18/06Labels: alex, repost, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Thursday, July 26, 2007
LOW YO YO STUFF
Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band
1972
Available on : The Spotlight Kid/Clear Spot
Reprise : 1999
[Buy It]
HOT STUFF
The Rolling Stones
Black and Blue
Virgin : 1976
[Buy It]
YOU THINK YOU'RE HOT STUFF
Jean Knight
Mr. Big Stuff
Stax : 1971
[Buy It]
SISTER BIG STUFF
John Holt
1000 Volts of Holt
Santuary Trojan : 1973
[Buy It]
COME AND GET THIS STUFF
Syreeta
Stevie Wonder Presents Syreeta
Motown : 1974
[Buy It]
STUFFS AND THINGS
Funkadelic
Let's Take It To The Stage
Westbound : 1975
[Buy It]
I was having a debate with a friend about the differences between childhood and adulthood pleasures. She was wondering why, when, and how the things that excited her as a child (cartoons, games, new streets, new jokes) gave way to adult opiates: money, alcohol, and especially sex. The stuff she did as a kid wasn't the same stuff she's doing as an adult; the adult stuff was more limited, more narrow, although arguably more powerful. It's an e pluribus unum situation: out of many childhood pleasures come a few adult pleasures, and possibly only one. The word, "stuff" seemed okay as a placeholder at first, but as time went on it started to settle in, partly because of its connotations of filling and being filled, and partly because it's the centerpiece of many songs.
Take Captain Beefheart's "Lo Yo Yo Stuff":Alright baby, do your Low Yo Yo with all your stuff
Now, baby, do your Low Yo Yo Stuff
Now, baby, it's in your being
Whether you're long, tall, short or skinny
Sometimes it's rough
You mean to tell me it's that Low Yo Yo Stuff? What's that stuff? Is it possible that he's activating the pleasures of childhood? Maybe he's playing cards on the road. Maybe he's spinning around until he gets dizzy. Maybe not. Later on, he clarifies further:What if my girlfriend back home
Finds out what my fingers have been doing
On my guitar since I been gone?
Don`t anybody tell her,
I been doing the Low Yo Yo Yo Yo
Like any other fella
Away from home, all alone
Been doing that Low Yo Yo Yo Yo
Ya, I been really carrying on! This is fairly straightforward music for the Magic Band, both thematically and musically. It's closer to "Shake Your Booty" or "Rump Shaker" or "Dancing in the Sheets" than it is to "Sweet Sweet Bulbs." It could be a Rolling Stones song. In fact, the opening riff of "Low Yo Yo Stuff" sounds similar to the Stones' "Hey Negrita," from the 1976 album Black and Blue. Mick Taylor had recently departed, and the Stones were trying out a set of new guitarists. Ron Wood -- who would eventually be selected to replace Taylor -- played lead on "Hey Negrita," but the most surprising song on the record was "Hot Stuff," a disco song with lead by Harvey Mandel, the blues-rock guitarist who had previously played with Charlie Musselwhite and Canned Heat. Here, there's a bit more equivocation with the "stuff": for most of the lyric, it seems to be music itself, or a general expression of exhilaration that comes from the music. Only in the last two verses does it begin to dovetail with Beefheart's stuff. And, of course, because this is the Stones -- and especially because this is Black and Blue -- the last verse reminds us which people have the hottest stuff. Here's a hint: not white people. To everybody in Jamaica
That's working in the sun
Your hot, your hot stuff
Shake it up, hot stuff The phrase had been around for a while. Vess Ossman recorded the ragtime hit "Hot Stuff Patrol" in 1897. But the implication became explicit, and by the time of Donna Summer's megahit three years after Black and Blue, there was no doubt what it meant. That song's not posted. Neither is "Mr. Big Stuff," the megahit five years before Black and Blue, on which Jean Knight, a New Orleans soul singer recording for Stax, stood her ground against a ladies' man. Usually, stuff is gendered female -- it's more common to hear of someone "showing her stuff" than "showing his stuff." In this case, it's male, and it's sizeable, related to his money and his "fancy clothes" and his "big fine car." Many girls have fallen for it, but Knight's defiant. Later in 1971, Knight released a sequel to the song, "You Think You're Hot Stuff," that plowed the same furrow with less yield. (There are probably a dozen other Big Stuff offshoots, and since other blogs like SoulSides and Stepfather of Soul have done a fine job working through them, here's only one, by John Holt, who stuffed the Stones' Jamaican stuff and Knight's big stuff into the same casing.) Knight, aware of adult pleasure but also the risk of accompanying risk of emotional pain, tells Mr. Big Stuff he'll never get her stuff (though she calls it her "love"). People aren't always so withholding. Syreeta Wright, singing a lyric that's as lubricious as any Stevie Wonder ever wrote, swoops and chirps while the backup singers repeat, "I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming, come and get it." You don't have to ask twice.
When I had collected all the songs, I sent a list to the friend who, I thought, had come up with this stuff in the first place. I thought it would help answer the question of why the entire kaleidoscope of childhood pleasures get funneled into a single (admittedly great) adult activity. "No," she said. "I had it the other way around. I said that the pleasures were about getting unstuffed."
"Are you sure?"
"Of course," she said. "It was my idea, so you'd think I'd know. My theory was that when you're a kid it's so easy to see the world as boundless, and when you're an adult, it gets harder, more cluttered, more pressured. The goal was to get unstuffed, which is about being unburdened and liberated. I'm annoyed that you would even use something I thought of, let alone get it backwards."
I remembered that it was her idea, and I agreed that she would know. She was right. Then I listened to Funkadelic's graffilthy "Stuffs and Things," which says plenty about being liberated:I'm going to ease in on your beat
I'm going to shuffle when I move my feet
I'm gonna stuff your stuff with thang
Until I make your whole thang twang
I'm going to do things to your stuff She was wrong.Labels: ben, funk, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
Jimi Hendrix
LADY MADONNA
Fats Domino
Fats is Back
Reprise : 1968
[Buy It]
OB-LA-DI-OB-LA-DA/WISE MAN (MEDLEY)
Desmond Dekker & The Aces
Beverly's : 1969
Available on: You Can Get It If You Really Want
Trojan : 2005
[Buy It]
AND I LOVE HIM
Video
Esther Phillips
And I Love Him
Atlantic : 1965
Available on: The Best of Esther Phillips 1962-1970
Rhino : 1997
[Buy It]
I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND
Al Green
Green is Blues
Hi : 1970
[Buy It]
LET IT BE
Aretha Franklin & The Dixie Flyers
Atlantic 7" : 1970
Available on: This Girls In Love With You
Atlantic : 1970
[Buy It]
LADY MADONNA
Swamp Dogg
Cuffed, Collared, & Tagged
LP Records : 1972
Available on: Excellent Sides Of... vol. 2
S.D.E.G. Records : 2001
[Buy It]
SOMETHING
Tina Turner (?)
[Can't find a thing on this, or remember where I got it]
WHY DON'T WE DO IT IN THE ROAD
Lowell Fulson
In a Heavy Bag
Jewel : 1969
[Buy It]
COME TOGETHER
Michael Jackson
HIStory
Sony : 1995
[Buy It]
WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS
Prince
SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (SLIGHT REPRISE)
Jimi HendrixWe used to really laugh at America, except for its music. It was black music we dug. Over here, even the blacks were laughing at people like Chuck Berry and the blues singers. The blacks thought it wasn't sharp to dig the really funky black music. The whites only listened to Jan and Dean and all that. We felt like we were... we had... the message was, "Listen to this music...." Nobody was listening to rock & roll or to black music in America. And we felt as though we were... we thought we were coming to the land of its origin. But nobody wanted to know about that.
- Lennon Remembers, 1970 Labels: rock and roll, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
GHOST IN MY HOUSE
Graham Parker
1986
Available on : Loose Monkeys
UpYours : 1999
[Buy It]
GONE
Ferlin Husky
1956
Available on : Greatest Hits
Curb : 1990
[Buy It]
MISS YOU SO
Lillian Offitt
1957
Available on : The Best of Excello Records
Excello : 1994
[Buy It]
HAVE YOU GONE
Mary Margaret O'Hara
Apartment Hunting
Outside : 2002
[Buy It]
MISSING YOU
Diana Ross
1984
Available on : The Definitive Collection
Motown : 2006
[Buy It]
PLANS I MAKE
Husker Du
New Day Rising
SST : 1985
[Buy It]
Recently I was vacationing with my family--my parents, my wife, my kids, nieces, nephews--and at the end of the first week, my wife, my younger son (he's three), and I left to come back to New York. My older son, who's six, stayed an extra week with my parents and his cousins. On the day we left, the three of us got onto a boat and waved at my older son, who was on the dock. "See you in seven days," he said, with a precision that betrayed his anxiety.
We came back to New York. For much of the next week, I went around the house in a fog. I had one kid there, but not both kids. The place was full of emptiness, haunted by it. I felt incompleted, and I tried to complete the picture. "So, are you homesick?" I said to my son when we spoke on the phone.
"Maybe a little," he said.
"Do you miss Brooklyn?"
"Yes." His voice wobbled slightly.
"Do you miss going to the park?"
"Yes." The wobbling increased.
At this point I was leading the witness. It wasn't that I wanted to break him down, exactly. But I did want to get a sense of what he was feeling about the separation. He's only six, of course, so I imagined that his feelings were more representative of some pure state, that he could admit them straightforwardly, without irony or defensiveness. Evidently I was wrong, because he recovered his composure. "Gotta go," he said. "There's a bat in the house."
During my son's week away, I had a number of other experiences of missing people, or maybe I was just tuned to that station. One friend of mine left for a long weekend in the Pacific Northwest with a friend of hers. They were having boring summers and thought that maybe the trip would reënergize them. Another old friend left to go abroad for the rest of the year. A third friend told me that he and his girlfriend were leaving New York for good. None of the departures was especially surprising. The friend in the first case always travels. The friend in the second case has spent a decent amount of her time out of the city--and some of that out of the country--for the last few years. The friend in the third case has discussed this move for the last six months. And yet, in every case, as soon as my friends told me about their trips, I began to miss them. It was difficult at first to understand why. For starters, it's not entirely appropriate to miss an adult friend. Or rather: you can miss anyone you want, but saying that you miss someone--or even acknowledging it to yourself--suggests a degree of emotional involvement that is, at least, sketchy. The world of pop music bears this out; the vast majority of songs about missing people are romantic songs. Take Graham Parker's excellent cover of R. Dean Taylor's "Ghost in My House," one of Motown's most durable rarities. There's a ghost in my house
The ghost of your memory
The ghost of the love you took from me
And it keeps haunting me
Keeps on reminding me For two lines, this is a generic song, human to human. The third line blows all that up. Let's try again, with Ferlin Husky:Since you've gone
The moon, the sun, the stars, and the sky
Know the reason why I cry
Love divine once was mine
Now you've gone For three lines, this might be platonic. I suppose you could be astronomically sad because your brother left Bakersfield. But it's not platonic. Lillian Offitt gets there even quicker, in the first word:Darling, how I miss you
Oh, darling how I miss you
You've been gone so long, baby, you done me wrong
I miss you. In all these cases, what's emphasized is powerlessness. The songs suggest that there is not only a separation, but an abandonment, that there is one party who has left, and another that has been left behind. This sentiment is broadly inapplicable to my situations: with my son, I was the only potential abandoner, and with my friends, no one abandoned anyone. Adults were just living their lives, a process that sometimes brings them closer together and sometimes takes them further apart. All these factors explained why I didn't say anything to my friends about anyone missing anyone else. "Have a good trip." That I said. "Fly safe." That I said. "I'm sure Texas will be great." That I said.
But then, left to my own devices, I thought about this situation and the other, wondered at the weight of a departure. During my son's week away, I looked in his room, looked at his toys and books, spent time imagining the moment when he'd return. If anything, it served to remind me how much I enjoy him when he's around. As for my friends, we'll continue to email during their time away, I'm sure, and since in at least two of these cases we don't see each other so often these days even when we're in the same city, I don't know why it makes any difference that they're in another city or on another continent. And yet, it makes a huge difference. In at least one of the cases, the sense of being without was almost physical at first, more than a twinge if not quite an ache. I think maybe Mary Margaret O'Hara, mostly writing one of her singularly weird love songs, catches a piece of it.I have no one to be anymore
You have no one to be anymore When someone is nearby, in matter or in mind, you come to depend on that other person's presence to know that you are present. When they go, a piece of you may go with them. Identity, a fragile thing, cannot always endure the sudden shifts. And while with a child there is ultimate control--I can tell my son when to come home, and in fact he depends upon that order--with another adult there is an ultimate absence of control. In "Missing You," which Diana Ross recorded as a tribute to Marvin Gaye after his death, this is very clear. Written by Lionel Richie and based on conversations Richie had with Ross about Gaye, it plays like a straightforward lovelorn song:Since you've been away
I've been down and lonely
Since you've been away
I've been thinking of you
Trying to understand
The reason you left me
What were you going through? Most lost-love songs at least hold out the faint hope of reunion. That's not the case here, even though the lyric won't admit it. There's a false optimism, both in the writing and in the lightness of the vocals, and this gives the song its bottomless sadness and a certain creepy beauty. It's a song of deep denial, more so than, say, "Wish You Were Here." And it's easy to understand why. People can walk toward you or away from you any time they want. They can come and they can go at will--at their will. But the person who goes always has more power than the one who remains, whether it's in friendship, in love, or in death. Movement is less sad than the observation of motion.
Toward the end of the week my son was away, I was watching TV. He's home now. It's been great. We took a long bike ride together. Movement is less sad than the observation of motion. Anyway, on TV, a man was leaving on a trip. A woman--maybe she was a girlfriend, maybe just a friend--took him to the airport. She dropped him off. She pulled away. She had to drive fast to escape the sense of being left behind.Labels: ben, country, rock, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, July 12, 2007
MAX'S VARIATION (POP GOES THE WEASEL)
Clifford Brown & Max Roach
Available on: Alone Together: The Best of the Mercury Years
Verve : 1995
[Buy It]
THE BOO BOO SONG
King Coleman
King : 1967
Available on: It's Dance Time!
Norton : 2003
[Buy It]
MOCKINGBIRD
Inez & Charlie Foxx
Dynamo : 1968
Available on: Count The Days
Charly : 1995
[Buy It]
MARY'S LITTLE LAMB
Otis Redding
Volt : 1964
Available on: Otis! The Definitive Otis Redding
Elektra : 1993
[Buy It
ROW, ROW, ROW YOUR BOAT
James Carr
Goldwax : 1970
Available on: The Complete Goldwax Singles
Ace/Kent : 2001
[Buy It]
+ an:
Educational Video Courtesy of Dallas Penn Dot Com
A) Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
B) If your parents never had children, chances are you won't, either.
C) Never have children, only grandchildren.
D) I am fond of children - except boys.
E) Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
F) Children are contemptuous, haughty, irritable, envious, sneaky, selfish, lazy, flighty, timid, liars and hypocrites, quick to laugh and cry, extreme in expressing joy and sorrow, especially about trifles, they'll do anything to avoid pain but they enjoy inflicting it: little men already.
G) There are only two things a child will share willingly - communicable diseases and his mother's age.
H) I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
I) There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.
J) In America there are two classes of travel - first class, and with children
K) The thing that impresses me the most about America is the way parents obey their children.
L) The English take the breeding of their horses and dogs more seriously than they do their children.
M) Your children need your presence more than your presents.
N) I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.
O) Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes, they forgive them.
P) The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.
Q) Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
R) Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
S) My music is best understood by children and animals.
T) You make 'em, I amuse 'em.
U) The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.
X) Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is.
V) Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.
X) God is dead! Heaven is empty - Weep, children, you no longer have a father.
Y) It is a wise father that knows his own child.
Z) You don't even live once.
. . . . . . . . . .
1)John Adams 2)Margaret Atwood 3)Robert Benchley 4)Jean de La Bruyère 5)Dick Cavett 6)Lewis Carroll 7) Clarence Darrow 8)Ralph Waldo Emerson 9)Robert Frost 10)Theodore Geisel 11)Oliver Wendell Holmes 12)Jesse Jackson 13)King Edward VIII 14)Karl Kraus 15)Gerard de Nerval 16)Princess Michael Of Kent 17)Antoine de Saint-Exupery 18)William Shakespeare 19)Socrates 20)Benjamin Spock 21)Igor Stravinsky 22)Harry Truman 23)Gore Vidal 24)Andy Warhol 25)Oscar Wilde 26)YodaLabels: alex, jazz, kids, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
A SADNESS FOR THINGS
Calvin Scott
1971
Available on : The Complete Stax-Volt Soul Singles, Vol. 2: 1968-1971
Stax : 1993
[Buy It]
WHAT A SAD FEELING
Betty Harris
1965
Available on : Soul Perfection Plus
Westside UK : 1998
[Buy It]
SAD OLD WORLD
Frank Black
Fast Man Raider Man
Back Porch : 2006
[Buy It]
I CAN'T GO TO SLEEP
Wu-Tang Clan
The W
Sony : 2000
[Buy It]
WAVES OF FEAR
Lou Reed
The Blue Mask
RCA : 1982
[Buy It]
When I was in college, I had a habit of walking out of parties minutes after walking into them. The reason was simple: I didn't like the sadness. I'd come into the room, and it was like I was walking into a sliding glass door of shame, embarrassment, and self-hatred--and not just my own. I'm not saying people didn't have fun at parties. People had fun. But the fun was created, to some degree, by the sadness. It was the negative space carved out of the unfun. I didn't like it, and when it started creeping up my spine, I left. Later on I learned some strategies for blocking out the sadness I was absorbing from the room, most of which involved poor eye contact and a steady stream of jokes. We do what we can with the tools we have.
Recently, I was taking a trip, and at some point along the way I sat in O'Hare in Chicago and watched the people pass by, their brows furrowed with one worry or another--maybe the mortgage was late or the insurance on the second car was too expensive or the husband was putting on weight in a way that seemed to indicate depression or the stepson was developing violent tendencies or the boss wasn't showing enough respect or the lover wasn't loving back the way she used to or the mother needed surgery. Every expression, every gesture, seemed to broadcast sadness. I put my headphones in to block it all out and went to get something to eat. In one of the restaurants, I got a sandwich, and while I was sitting there and eating it, I saw a woman sitting by herself, also eating. It was an airport. People eat alone all the time. There was no reason to make too much of it. And yet, the more I watched her, the more I was sure that she was sad, and not sad in a transitional or instrumental way, but deeply, foundationally, irreversibly sad. She was in her mid-thirties, attractive but tired-looking, reading a business report filled with black-and-white charts. At one point, she took out her cell phone, started to make a call, and thought better of it. The hand holding the phone sunk down until it was in her lap. I had taken my headphones out. I put them back in.
A few days after that, I was talking to a friend, and I mentioned this woman, and my other friend got angry at me. My problem, she said, wasn't that I was assuming that these other people's lives were sad--she agreed that they were, for the most part--but that I thought somehow that my life was better than theirs. "Well," I said. I didn't know what I was going to say after that. Luckily, she went on. She said that the reason I felt conflicted was that my feelings took the form of pity (which felt presumptuous to me) rather than straightforward sadness. If I allowed myself to simply feel sad for people, it might lead to sympathy rather than some dumb combination of pain and superiority. We were all in the same boat, so we might as well acknowledge our powerlessness before that fact. "Well," I said again. She had to go, she said. She went.
I thought about what she had said, and it seemed true for a few minutes. Most of what she says does, as a result of her incredible smartness. But then parts of it started to shimmer, like a mirage, and I wasn't as certain anymore. The part about connecting to the common humanity in us all had a certain appeal, but the part about doing away with the dumb mix of pain and superiority bothered me. Isn't that what much artwork is about? You feel the pain, it starts to drive you to your knees, you bring yourself back up (thanks to a narcissistic impulse), you move forward on this cushion of temporary superiority and use the energy generated by this process to create something. In fact, after a few times, you come to value the sadness, to receive it with a kind of joy, because you know that it will, in time, bring you to creative work.
Songs about sadness, of course, are highly common. There's the sad-eyed lady and the sad mood, there's fa-fa-fa-fa-fa, there's "Sadly Beautiful" and "To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)." But songs about the fact that the world is sad are rarer. Calvin Scott, a blind pianist and singer, was born in 1938 in Alabama and performed in a duo with the also-blind Clarence Carter before splitting up in 1966. (How they split up is noteworthy: the band was coming home from a performance and got into a car wreck. Scott was badly injured and then had a legal feud with Carter as a result of the medical bills.) Carter, of course, went on to have huge hits with "Slip Away" and "Strokin'"; Scott became a minor soul performer for Atlantic and then Stax who released a few singles and an album called "I'm Not Blind, I Just Can't See." This song, the leadoff track, moves through an almost comically inclusive litany of sad things ("Intelligent parents that are sometimes completely confused...Street dogs and lost kittens and people that cry"). Betty Harris, a New Orleans soul singer best known for her cover of Solomon Burke's "Cry to Me," covers some of the same ground--in fact, both she and Scott use dining alone as an archetypal scene of sadness. Maybe they were at O'Hare, too. (Harris also employs one of my favorite soul-music tricks: singing about loneliness while a trio of backup singers echoes the sentiment.) The Frank Black song has a more minimalist sensibility but also explains how we're wounded by busted love and illness:I know something about sickness
I know something about that now
There's nothing you can do except witness
No there's nothing you can do
And when the petals on the flower start to curl
Well you better hang on, now,
You better hang on
'cause its a sad old world
'cause its a sad old world
'cause its a sad old world
Don't try to tell me it's gonna be alright Of course, all this poetry can obscure the fact that sometimes it's impossible to process the world's pain into beautiful sadness. Sometimes, existence leaves you raw, at which point sadness (for others) turns to fear (for yourself and your survival), which in turn leads to rage and self-loathing and self-medication and sleeplessness and Ghostface and Lou Reed.Labels: ben, hip-hop, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
AMERICAN MOMENTS OF MAYBE
Brad Neely : 2007
ONLY IN AMERICA
The Drifters
Atlantic : 1972
Available on:Rockin' & Driftin' : The Drifters Box
Rhino : 1996
[Buy It]
OPEN LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT
Roy C
Alaga : 1971
Available on: Does Anybody Know I'm Here? Vietnam Through The Eyes of Black America
Ace/Kent : 2005
[Buy It]
FORTY ACRES AND A MULE
Oscar Brown, Jr.
Mr. Oscar Brown, Jr. Goes To Washington
Polygram : 1965
[Buy It]
THE MONKEY THAT BECAME PRESIDENT
The Brotherhood
JB's : 1975
Available on: Funky Funky New Orleans vol. 4
Funky Delicacies : 2005
[Buy It]
PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE
The Watts Prophets
Available on: Things Gonna Get Greater : The Watts Prophets: 1969 - 1971
Water : 2005
[Buy It]Men when free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
-D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classical American Literature AMERIKA
Video
Rammstein
Reise, Reise
Republic : 2004
[Buy It]Labels: alex, rock, soul
posted by Alex
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 |
Thursday, June 21, 2007
LOVE AND HAPPINESS
Al Green
I'm Still In Love With You
Hi : 1972
[Buy It]
LOVE AND HAPPINESS
Al Brown
Available on: Soulful Reggae
Trojan : 2002
[Buy It]
WEST BOUND TRAIN
Dennis Brown
Available on: This is Reggae Music: The Golden Age 1960-1975
Trojan : 2004
[Buy It]
MY SOUL HAS GOT TO MOVE
Dixie Wonders feat. Clephus Mabone
Available on: Soul Gospel vol. 2
Soul Jazz : 2006
[Buy It]
Picking up where Ben's post left off, a few more songs which nicked the opening guitar riff from Al Green's "Love and Happiness." Also, Ted in the comments says he'll be posting the original version of "Stranded in the Jungle" in a day or two - you can get it at his exciting new audioblog, the Boogie Woogie Flu.
BULLY OF THE TOWN
Joe Harris & Kid West
Available on : Field Recordings vol. 5: Louisiana, Texas, Bahamas 1934-1940
Document : 1998
[[Buy It]
James asked me to say something about an article I wrote for the July issue of GQ, which comes out sometime this week. I don't have a whole lot to say, except that it's a long article, that it involves bullies, and bullying, and that I broke my hand reporting it. Also, the photos are fun.Labels: alex, old-timey, reggae, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Thursday, June 14, 2007
THE LAST LETTER
Hank Snow
1951
Available on : The Thesaurus Transcriptions
Bear Family : 1991
[Buy It]
LETTERS DON'T COUNT
The Nazz
Nazz Nazz
Screen Gems Columbia : 1969
[Buy It]
YOUR PICTURE SAYS REMEMBER, THO' YOUR LETTER SAYS FORGET
Frederic Rose
1908
Edison Gold Moulded Record
I used to send lots of letters. In college, I had a girlfriend who was at another college, and sometimes each of us would send three or four of them a day. We had no Internet then and we scooped food from stone bowls with our hands.
As soon as email came along, though, things really took off. The problem wasn't sending messages. It was finding someone who was willing to get those messages and give the same back at a clip. The problem was finding someone who corresponded to you.
It might seem that I'm writing about love letters. I'm not, although that's also a worthy topic for a post. It would include Hank Snow, and his eloquent, bitter, all-too-forthright communiqué that doesn't--as the last line tells us--hit its mark. It would include the Nazz, who turn a typically dopey Rundgren pun into a typically beautiful piece of Rundgren pop that goes nuts at the end with its aggressive backing vocals. It would include Frederic Rose, in 1908, warbling out a B-list song with a Grade-A title. It would not include Richard Thompson's "Tear Stained Letter," which, though fine, contains the lyric "The scars ain't never gonna mend in a hurry." (How can something "never mend in a hurry"? Isn't it either/or? He's better than that.)
I'm writing, I think, about songs about messages. Not message songs, like "For What It's Worth" or "Fortunate Son" or "(We Gotta) Bust Outta The Ghetto" or "1 Million Bottlebags," but songs about the equivocal process of trying to reach out and communicate with another person. And though there are probably a million places to start, there's really only one place to start.
I'VE GOTTA GET A MESSAGE TO YOU
The Bee Gees
Idea
Polydor : 1968
[Buy It]
GOT TO GET A MESSAGE TO YOU
Swamp Dogg
1970
Available on : Total Destruction to Your Mind/Rat On
Charly : 1991
[Buy It]
I GOTTA GET A MESSAGE TO YOU
Tim Rose
1970
Available on : Tim Rose/Love: A Kind of Hate Story
RPM : 2000
[Buy It]
I should start by saying that this song has a story. The main character is condemned to die, and he's desperate to tell his wife that he's sorry and that he loves her. We know this because Robin Gibb has said that's what the song is about, and he co-wrote it. This Death-Row-What-A-Brother-Gibb-Know plotline, though, is among the worst things about the song. For starters, it results in some laughably bad lyrics, which sometimes happens with the Gibbs.It's only her love that keeps me wearing this dirt. I like to think of it as something more epistolary and epistemological, a song about the urgency and imprecision of communication. Partly because this is because I have already seen "The Green Mile." Partly it's because there is something interesting about the syntax. The man in the song is not saying "I've got to get a message to her." He's saying "to you." This seems to be an internal monologue; he's talking to that part of her that is alive inside of him. The alternative is paradoxical. If his wife hears the song, or any part of it, then she has in fact received a message from him. In that case, he might as well say what he wants to say instead of just saying that he has a message. It's like sending a telegram that says, "I am trying to send you a telegram." And given his precarious state, even if she hears the song, she is certainly hearing it after his execution. There's an issue here not only of the man's death, but of his death as an author. I'm not saying that my logic is flawless, only that the song's logic is flawed.
So why is it so hard to get a message to, or through? Why is it so difficult to be heard, let alone understood? One of the problems is that most forms of expression are insufficient. There's the famous Flaubert passage in which he derides the impotence of language ("Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity"). I'm not sure that it's the bears that are dancing. I'd argue that just as often, it's the messenger -- people are afraid to say the things they mean to say, and so they hem, and they haw, and that's how more language gets born. This isn't to suggest that all writing is evasion, but most works would be shorter if the speeches, and the speech, were more direct. That kind of directness might result from an upjut of bravery, from painful impatience, or from another kind of urgency -- like, say, imminent execution, though we've already seen how circuitous a condemned man can be. If I always had to say just what I meant, things would be...well, different. There would be a little more lust, a little more anger, and fewer jokes. Much of what I'd say would involve my asking people to say things back to me: any things, really, just a conversation (with words, gestures, touch, whatever) so that I know I'm not dead. If I rewrote the Bee Gees' lyrics, they'd go like this:I've just gotta get a message to you
Which is that you've gotta get a message to me. No worse than Robin.
Of the three versions here, my tastes lean toward the Swamp Dogg cover, which is sung with a kind of abject ecstacy, and away from the original - chamber pop, no matter how tremulous, doesn't strike me as a particularly lonely genre. (Tim Rose, on the other hand, does. Rose, of course, was one of those semi-obscure Greenwich Village folk-rockers--the third Tim, behind Buckley and Hardin - and a King of Almosts. He almost had a hit with his slow arrangement of "Hey Joe," which inspired the monster hit by Jimi Hendrix. He almost recorded the headlong version of "With a Little Help From My Friends" that went to Joe Cocker instead. He almost replaced Brian Jones in the Rolling Stones. His life of ups and downs, marked by bouts of alcoholism, ended during a late-career comeback in 2002.)
It's fitting to end with a message song about the importance of messages.
COMMUNICATION
Bobby Womack
Communication
United Artists : 1972
[Buy It]Labels: ben, country, funk, oldies, power-pop, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Monday, June 11, 2007
SUMMERTIME
Rahsaan Roland Kirk
Boogie Woogie String Along For Real
Warner Bros : 1977
[Out of Print]
Thanks, perhaps, to the immense popularity of Moistworks dot com, people come up to Ben, Brian, James, Joanna and me all the time: Rank strangers, but they ask us, have we been ignoring you? Or, how do hydroelectric dams work? Or, what have you been listening to? Strangers: I can't speak for Ben, Brian, James, or Joanna (actually, I can speak for Joanna - she's been listening to the Zombies non-stop for the past 18 months or so) - but I've been listening to this spider web of a song: Rahsaan Roland Kirk, in New York, post-stroke, in 1977. From his last recording session.
A SAD SAD SONG
Charles Crawford
Hy-Sign : 1973
Available on: Shreveport Southern Soul: The Murco Story
Kent : 2000
[Buy It]
Stranger, here's something else you'll like: Sir Shambling's Deep Soul Heaven. Countless 45s, annotated, indexed, transferred to MP3, and free to each and every one of you. I downloaded everything - then the iPod and I had a lovely candlelit evening all to ourselves. It's where I found Charles Crawford's "Sad, Sad Song," which also happens to be the only song Charles Crawford recorded. Too bad, no?
. . . . . . . . . .
NOCHE AZUL
Unknown Cuban Orchestra
[Test Pressing for a certain Mr. Madriguera]
Available on: Music of Cuba: 1909 - 1951
Sony : 2000
[Buy It]
MOONLIGHT HIGHLIFE
Dr. Victor Olaiya
Available on : Lagos All Routes
Honest Jon's : 2005
[Buy It]
I've been collecting old Cuban recordings, and - this isn't entirely unrelated - obsessing over Congolese music from the 50s and 60s, and Nigerian and Angolan music from the 60s and 70s. Hoarding it, really, in hopes of dedicating Moistworks to Cuban music, or African music - or bleed-through between the two - for a few weeks, exclusively. But who has the time? So, in lieu of theme weeks, here are two of the loveliest things you'll hear this summer.
. . . . . . . . . .
TOP TEN ROCK
Fuller Todd
King : 1958
Available on: King Rockabilly
Ace : 2001
[Import]
Next up, a kick-ass rockabilly track (which I know next to nothing about - it seems fairly google-proof), one of the best things Willie Colon ever (what's the appropriate cliche here - committed to wax?), and some old, equally google-proof funk from Ohio. Let me know if it gets you through the day.
LA MURGA
Willie Colon & Hector Lavoe
Asalto Navideño
Fania : 1970
[Buy It]
JUNKIE'S HUSTLE
Earth's Delight
Black Forest : 1970 (?)
[Out of Print]Labels: african, alex, cuban, funk, jazz, rockabilly, salsa, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
SON OF A PREACHER MAN
Video
Dusty Springfield
Dusty in Memphis
Atlantic : 1969
[Buy It]
SON OF A PREACHER MAN
Aretha Franklin
This Girl's In Love With You
Atlantic : 1970
[Buy It]
SON OF A PREACHER MAN
Mavis Staples
Only The Lonely
Stax : 1970
[Buy It]
SON OF A PREACHER MAN
Honey Cone
Take Me With You
Hot Wax : 1970
Available on: Soulful Sugar: The Complete Hot Wax Recordings
Castle : 2002
[Buy It]
SON OF A PREACHER MAN
The Gaylettes
Available on: Reggae Sisters
Trojan : 2003
[Buy It]
Last we looked, there were 12,438 versions "Son of a Preacher Man" floating around on our hard drive, and about as many honest-to-goodness preacher's kids out there, in the music scene: Sam Cooke, the Franklin Sisters, Ann Peebles, the Ruffin Brothers (& Dennis Edwards!), Jessica Simpson, the Womack brothers, James Carr, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Wilson Pickett, Shelton Brooks, Albert King, Bobby Rush, Ruth Brown, Joe Tex, Jackie Ross, Nina Simone, Kelis, The Pointer Sisters, Nat King Cole, Darlene Love, Al Jarreau, Toots Hibbert, & Terrence Trent D'Arby.... The list goes on, we're sure, but these are all the names we could think of. Got more? Send your answers to moistworks at gmail dot com, and whoever comes up with the most names wins a copy of MW's Summer Mix. (Just to make it easy, we'll count Tori Amos & Alice Cooper towards your total, so make sure to mention them.)Labels: alex, contests, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Thursday, May 24, 2007
PARTY GIRL
Charlie Rich
The Complete Smash Sessions
Polygram : 1992
[Buy It]
Our friends at Minnesota Public Radio are putting together a segment on campaign songs, so MW & MPR are forming like organized crime to pose the au courant musical question: What campaign songs should America's most enterprising and indefatigable candidates adopt?
BAM BAM
Toots & The Maytals
Monkey Man
Berverly's : 1970
[Buy It]? UTAH MORMON BLUES
Phil Pavey
Available on: Jazzin' the Blues vol. 4 : 1929-1943
Document : 2000
[Buy It]? Readers of Moistworks - good news. We're opening the floor up to you! What do you think? We mean, really? We're interested. And, for once, we're talking big news: Obama, and McCain. Romney, Clinton, Edwards, and Hero Mayor Rudy G. - Important stuff!
OMG WTF LOL, right? But for serious - you're our BFF! So let us know, in the comments below. Ground rules?Surprise Us: TAKE ON ME [DEMO]
A-ha
[Unreleased]& Make Us Love You: NOBODY
Larry Williams and Johnny Watson with the Kaleidoscope
Okeh : 1967
Courtesy of [the newish & wonderful audioblog]: Office NapsTell The Truth, But Eschew The Obvious - RUN ON FOR A LONG TIME
Bill Landford & The Landfordaires
Columbia : 1949
Available on: There Will Be No Sweeter Sound : The Columbia/OKeh Post War Gospel Story 1947-1962
Legacy : 1998
[Buy It]& Off Point: BRENDA AND EDDIE
Billy Joel
Live : somewhere& Omit Those Words That You Find To Be Needless: ONCE
The Feelings
Dearling Darling
Darla Records : 1990
[Buy It]
Bonus points for riffing off something whichever candidate you're on about said, or did, within the past few news cycles - we paying enough attention to you to know you're paying attention to that sort of thing so: we'll post the best songs next week, and who knows - you might even end up famous here or on the radio! Either way, any idiot with with a suitcase nuke can tell you that the fate of this free world we're building rests squarely and securely on your shoulders.
NB: Speaking of same, Moistworks' Astoria Bureau would like to take this opportunity to endorse Mitt Romney - who believe you us, the last thing we want is to see our friends and readers committing Sodomites and catching GommorrheaLabels: alex, country, gospel music, indie, pop, radio, reggae, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
THE JOURNEY
Mott the Hoople
Brain Capers
Atlantic : 1971
[Buy It]
Once, many years ago, I left my small town to travel to the big city. Before I left, I spent the better part of the evening with the woman I loved, kissing her and running my hands across her shoulders and back. At dawn, I embraced my parents and set out on foot, with nothing in my pack except food, a canteen, and a knife. What else do you need?
The city was five days away. The first few days were calm and the weather was mild. But the third night, I heard owls hooting with menace, and I felt my solitude and my terror. I rolled up my pack before the sun rose and set out at a clip, eager to cover as much distance as possible. After an hour, though, I was exhausted. The sun I had waited for had come up and stayed up, beating down on me violently. I was on a desert now, and to say that it was unbearable is an understatement.
SEARCHING THE DESERT FOR THE BLUES
Blind Willie McTell
Okeh : 1932
Available on: Statesboro Blues
RCA : 2003
[Buy It]
A mile more of desert would have been the end of me. Luckily, I came to a flat plain punctuated with small deep lakes. I took my canteen out of my pack and filled it with water from the nearest lake. The water was cool and sweet. I drank again. The third time, when I touched the canteen to the surface of the lake, I saw something flicker in the corner of my eye. It was a gold bird, standing on the edge of the lake.
"Hello," said the bird.
"Hello," I said. To say that I was surprised would not quite have conveyed my state.
"Have you enjoyed your trip so far?" the bird said.
"Well," I said, "yes." I felt strange, but the more I spoke to the bird, the more comfortable I became speaking to the bird. It was quite a pleasant bird, with a friendly expression on its little face, and after a few moments I considered him a friend. It is hard for me to say this without sounding foolish, even to myself, but there it was.
SOMETHING IN THE WATER DOES NOT COMPUTE
Prince
1999
Warner : 1982
[Buy It]
Suddenly, I saw a shadow in the deep part of the lake. With a start I realized that it was a sea snake. It was as long and as thick as a man’s leg, with sharp yellow teeth and rough green-brown skin, and it was heading right for the edge of the lake where the bird was standing. Without thinking, I took my knife from my bag and swung it down into the pond, cutting the snake cleanly in half. The lower half of the beast fell down to the lake's bottom. For a moment the bird and I just looked at each other. The bird spoke first. "Thank you," he said. His voice was unsteady. He lifted one wing and then the other and then flew away over the lake.
I continued on my journey. Near day's end, in the shadow of a tree, I sat down to take a nap. I was closing my eyes when a giant sea snake leapt out of the lake. The snake that had menaced the bird was terrifying; this one was almost twice as large. Its eyes were a terrifying blackness that appeared endless. The huge snake put a coil around me and doused me with its foul breath. "What?" I managed to say.
"I hope that you have not fixed your mind too firmly on the city," the snake said, "for you are fated to die here."
The snake explained that the first snake I had seen, the one I had cut in half, was her son. She had gone underwater, moving from lake to lake, waiting for the moment when she could spring upon me and take my life. "Take my life?" I said. "But I did not kill your son from malice. He was coming for the bird that I had befriended."
"I do not care," the snake said.
"Please," I said. "Make an exception."
The snake made an angry noise. "I will spare your life on one condition."
THE SNAKE
Al Wilson
1968
Available on: The Original Northern Soul Selection
Original Selection : 2005
[Buy It]
"This tree above us," the snake said, "is a blood pear tree, They are extremely rare. Look." I looked up and saw what appeared to be a handful of giant bells, hanging from the highest branches of the tree. "I have never tasted a blood pear," said the snake.
"Why don't you just wait until they fall?"
"They only fall after the first of the year, when we are burrowed into the bottoms of the lakes. By the time we come up again in spring, they have spoiled. I fear that I will never taste one unless someone knocks it down for me."
"Okay," I said. "I will try to climb the tree and knock down a blood pear."
"No," the snake continued. "You must knock one down from here. If you cannot, I will kill you."
My heart pounded in my ears. I thought of my family, of the woman I loved. I prayed to every god I could think of but received no answer and no relief. The face of the woman I loved was fading. I was done for. I knew it. I cursed every god I could think of.
NO FRIEND OF MINE
Boyce Day
The Lie That You Believe
Black Fly : 2005
[Buy It]
At that moment I heard a sharp crack, and a moment later something rushed by me and thudded into the ground. It was a blood pear. The snake's eyes widened, and she took the pear in her mouth and slithered back into the lake.
I stood slowly. I could hardly breathe. I would live to visit the city after all. I would return to the woman I loved. I picked up my pack and started to walk away from the tree. And it was then that I saw the gold bird from the lake, its face smashed flat and bloody where it had hit the pear, its body cold and dead on the ground.
CRASHING BY DESIGN
Pete Townshend
White City: A Novel
Atlantic : 1985
[Buy It]Labels: atlantic records, ben, rhythm and blues, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
TRUST
The Pretty Things
S.F. Sorrow
Snapper : 1968
[Buy It]
Recently, I was talking to a friend of mine in Chicago, and the issue of trust came up. I noted that at times in our friendship - which has spanned eight years, three cities, various jobs and relationships - she has not trusted me. "Of course," she said, like I was stupid for not noticing sooner. "I'm sorry," I said, though I was lamenting more than apologizing. Why has she not always trusted me? Well, look. It's none of your business. I think we can all agree on that. I'll only say that there have been periods where I behaved imperfectly. My intentions were good, of course, but as my imaginary rural grandmother likes to say, "Good intentions are like an empty milking bucket." I like this friend tremendously, and during periods of difficulty I always feel pain, but the trust between us hasn't always been easy to rebuild. Why? I must have said it out loud, because she said, "What?" I stammered the conversation to an end and then went to look for an answer to my question.
IT DON'T COME EASY
George Harrison
Apple c. 1970
[Unreleased]
This song is better known, of course, in the version sung by Ringo Starr. He got by with a little help from his friend George, who here offers a demo version. It's a love song, in a sense, but there's one lyric that bears upon the discussion I was having with my friend.I don't ask for much
I only want your trust
And you know it don't come easy How naive and cynical at the same time. How George. I don't really appreciate that he raises the issue without solving it, but maybe that's his way of getting me to think for myself because he won't be there with me.
YOU'RE UP TO YOUR SAME OLD TRICKS AGAIN
Bettye Swann
c. 1969
Available on: Bettye Swann
Astralwerks : 2004
[Buy It]
ILL PLACED TRUST
Sloan
Never Hear the End of It
Sony BMG : 2007
[Buy It]
So how do you get someone to trust you? Well, not this way, obviously. If you say you want to meet for lunch, don't show up and say you're not hungry and keep looking at your watch. That's not going to create the kind of foundation you need. And don't embark upon an aggressive campaign of lying and cheating as outlined in the Sloan song (though Sloan also suggests that maybe the person who can't trust is at least partly responsible for the sad stage of affairs as a result of his creeping paranoia). Of course, these are two examples of trust songs that are love songs. Are there any songs about trust in platonic friendship? My imaginary rural grandmother liked to say, "Friends are easy to trust. That's why they're friends. Lovers are impossible to trust, at least within the context of your desire. They are both the thing that completes you and the thing you can never really possess. How can you trust that? Ooooo-eeee! Will you look at that? I just ate a fly!"
TRUST IN ME
The Fall
Fall Heads Roll
Narnack : 2005
[Buy It]
FRIENDS
The Beach Boys
Friends
Capitol : 1968
[Buy It]
Well, that's more like it.If you need an X-ray
I'll come 'round to your house and do it for free What a generous offer! I might very well need an X-ray one of these days. And the Beach Boys song, well, there's nothing crazier than Brian Wilson in the spring of 1968.You told me when my girl was untrue
I loaned you money when the funds weren't too cool
I talked your folks out of making you cut off your hair
We've been friends now for so many years
We've been together through the good times and the tears
Dim dipple ee dim dipple ay dim dipple oo dim dee aye oh The role of trust in this friendship isn't even raised! It's just assumed. Maybe it's part of "the tears." But maybe not. Maybe there's always been trust. Like I said, crazy. But Beach Boy crazy is not your run-of-the-mill crazy, and when I listened to the song again I started to think that maybe there's something to be said for the laid-back approach. I thought about this particular friend, the one from a few paragraphs ago. When I have gotten into the chicanes of distrust with her, I have tried to maneuver my way out aggressively. I have yelled. Sometimes, I have yelled with a drink in my hand. "Hey," I have said, "you should trust me!" This turns out to be stupid. If you try to compel someone else to trust you, you may well be indulging in a kind of bullying that erodes the very trust you are trying to build. I am sure that she has explained this to me, but sometimes it's hard to understand things unless you learn them from a song.Labels: ben, friends, power-pop, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, May 10, 2007
HEY KARI G.
The Sparrows
Susstones: 1990
[Out of Print]
SHE SENDS KISSES
The Wrens
The Meadowlands
Absolutely Kosher: 2003
[Buy It]
BIRDSONG
Tomahawk
Mit Gas
Ipecac: 2003
[Buy It]
A FUNKY SPACE REINCARNATION
Marvin Gaye
Here, My Dear
Tamla Motown: 1978
[Buy It]
AH FRAID PUSSY BITE ME
Mighty Sparrow
Comi-Kal Cat Fight
Mighty Sparrow: 2001
[Buy It]
Once, years ago, in a short story in my first book, "Superbad," a bird sang. It was a small bird, and the song it sang was small, too, though the consequences of singing were enormous. "The bird flew through a gap in the wire, minding its own business, singing - it was actually singing, a happy little song about the spring - and she plugged it at two hundred yards." Pow. Bye, bye, birdie. When I finished the story, I sent it to a friend who was also a writer for his comments. I received one comment, which was that birds didn't sing when they flew. He told me that it was a well-known fact, with a tone that was infuriating but somehow replenished my affection for him. He had enough certainty to send me to the encyclopedia, where I discovered that he was wrong. Many birds, including skylarks and pipits, sing while they're flying. In attempting to differentiate between the British Chimney Swallow and the American Barn Swallow, John James Audubon wrote in Birds of America that "both sing on the wing and when alighted, and the common tweet which they utter when flying off is precisely the same in both." They sing on the wing. That's a song in itself.
"Hey Kari G" is a song in itself, also. The song was written by the Minneapolis power-pop great Dan Sarka, who recorded it first in 1990 with a group called the Sparrows. The Sparrows only released two singles, as far as I know, and Sarka resurfaced a few years later with a band called the Vandalias, who were best-known for existing in both human and cartoon form. Conceptually, they were located somewhere between the Josie and the Pussycats and the Gorillaz; aesthetically, they were closer to Cheap Trick and the Raspberries; somewhere along the way, they rerecorded "Hey Kari G." Eventually The Vandalias folded, like most bands, and Sarka went on form to a band called Stingray Green that released one strong album, "Hard Numbers," before also folding. I read about the demise of Stingray Green just this past week online-the band's farewell concert was May 4-and that sent me back to the Sparrows' version of "Hey Kari G." It's everything it needs to be, both plangent and poignant. The guy in the song-the guy singing the song-hopes against hope that his small, strong voice will reach the girl and turn her toward him once again. It's a document of innocence and hope and sad defiance; he has an idea but no might, and so he cannot bring his idea into the world. I doubt that the girl turned.
The girl also doesn't turn in "She Sends Kisses." The record does, though:Ten tons against me and you've gone
I put your favorite records on
and sit around
it spins around
and you're around again. This is a song about human song, of course, not birdsong. The French composer and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen was obsessed with birdsong. He recorded and notated the songs of birds his entire life, and often integrated birdsong into his music, most notably in his the orchestral work Reveil des Oiseaux, from 1953. Mike Patton, the lead singer of Tomahawk (and, before that, Faith No More and Mr. Bungle) is among the most birdlike of singers, in that he often uses sounds instead of words. Recent research has shown that there is a strong link between birdsong and memory. Birds have unique songs, but they don't simply remember them. They dream of them. While they sleep, they learn what they want, and what they want from their songs and their lives. They may, upon waking, be reminded of what they do not have. The consequences of singing are enormous. Pow. Bye, bye, birdie.
There is a desperately beautiful song named "Sparrow" on Marvin Gaye's album Here My Dear, from 1978, which chronicles Gaye's divorce from his first wife and his blossoming love for his second wife. In the song, Marvin explains that he "used to hear a sparrow singing," but that "one day as [he] went along [he] didn't hear his song." This silence doesn't sit well with him, and what starts as a polite request to the sparrow to resume singing becomes a down-on-my-knees-please entreaty. "Sing before you go," he sings. "Sing to me, Marvin Gaye, before you fly away." "Sparrow" ends with a semi-attached bit of poetry, calligraphed in layered, lighter-than-air vocals: "I remember a bird." What kind of bird he remembers is clear from another song, "A Funky Space Reincarnation," that is more relevant here: first, because it's an unhinged, lickerish meditation on flight in which Marvin takes a girl out into the solar system for some interplanetary screwing, and second because it includes a lovely come-on in which he calls his new bride, "Little Miss Birdsong." Anna, Marvin's first wife, was seventeen years his senior and Berry Gordy's sister. Jan, his second wife, was seventeen years his junior and Slim Gaillard's daughter. Jan turned. Marvin turned, too, or had his head turned. He may not have understood why, but Mighty Sparrow did.
. . . . . . . . . .
Ben Greenman is the author of several books of fiction, including Superbad, Superworse, and the new A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both: Stories About Human Love. He is an editor at the New Yorker and lives in Brooklyn.Labels: ben, calypso, indie, power-pop, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Monday, May 07, 2007
1.
I'M A HUMAN RADIO STATION
The Black Pope
Courtesy of: WFMU
Not the Black Pope who secretly controls the Vatican, but the Black Pope of New Orleans: Never in your life have you heard a disc jockey come through here like him. Then again, never have you heard a disc jockey like Bob Dylan, who gives the Black Pope a run for his money in the greatest-radio-personality-in-the-world department:
BOB DYLAN INTRODUCING THE PRISONAIRES
& ANSWERING AN EMAIL FROM JOHNNY DEPP
Theme Time Radio Hour
XM Radio : 2006
2.
PUPPET ON A STRING
Gino Washington
Correc-tone : 1962
Available on: Out of This World
Norton : 1999
[Buy It]
I've spent a week getting to the bottom of Gino Washington's "Puppet on a String" and - I'm still not at the bottom to it. Is he singing "you turn me off/and you turn me on"? Or "you tie me off/and turn me on"? It's the difference between a perfectly dark love song and a more or less perfect song about heroin. If it's the latter, the images are that much darker and deeper, and the title - a junkie's belt : a puppet's string - becomes the greatest image of all. Also nice: the jews harp.
Not to be confused with Geno Washington, Gino Washington still performs in and around Detroit; here he is on WFMU, in 2003. And here he is on coming up in the Detroit club scene, alongside of Bob Seger et al. Also from Detroit, a song about how blacks and jews didn't always hate on each other:
3.
EXODUS
Harold & Carol Diamond
Motown :1962
Available on: The Complete Singles vol. 2
Hip-O : 2006
[Buy It]
4.
Hannah from the internet writes: "I love, love, love your blog - this lot made me glad to be alive today." Thanks, Hannah! We're glad you stopped by, and stayed long enough to recognize that we at Moistworks support the culture of life. So this follow-up to the Coasters' epic reworking of the Searcher's "Love Potion No. 9" is dedicated to the blacks, to the jews, to you, and to the 3 or 4 other ladies we at Moistworks like to imagine are out there, listening:
DOWN HOME GIRL
The Coasters
Date : 1966
Available on: 50 Coastin' Classics
Rhino : 1992
[Buy It]
& (on account of its "Russian students in the closet/hung up on jazz and funk"), "Down Home Girl"'s A-side:
SOUL PAD
ibid.Labels: alex, radio, soul
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
LINK |
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
SINCE I FELL FOR YOU
Doris Duke
I'm A Loser
Canyon : 1970
[Buy It]
SINCE I FELL FOR YOU
Nina Simone
Nina Simone Sings The Blues
RCA : 1967
[Buy It]
SINCE I FELL FOR YOU
Fontella Bass
The "New" Look
Checker: 1965
Available on: The Very Best Of...
[Buy It]
SINCE I FELL FOR YOU
Mavis Staples
Only For The Lonely
Stax : 1970
[Buy It]
SINCE I FELL FOR YOU
James Booker
United, Our Thing Will Stand
Night Train : 2005
(Recorded Live at Tipitina's in New Orleans : 1976)
[Buy It]
. . . . . . . . . .
I'M STILL IN LOVE WITH YOU
Thelma Mae Joseph
Angola Prisoners' Blues
Arhoolie : 1959
[Buy It]Labels: alex, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Monday, April 16, 2007
MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Eric Burdon & War
MGM 7" : 1970
Available on: The Best of Eric Burdon & War
Avenue : 1996
[Buy It]
MINNESOTA THINS
Mike Manieri
Available on: Rare Funk vol. 4 (Soundtrack Edition)
[Out of Print]
FLO
Isaac "Redd" Holt Unlimited
Isaac, Isaac, Isaac
Paula : 1974
[Buy It]
MAN FROM CAROLINA
The G.G. All Stars
Trojan : 1970
Available on: Tighten Up: Trojan Reggae Classics 1968-74
Trojan US : 2002
[Buy It]Labels: funk, James, reggae, soul
posted by James
LINK |
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH
Buffalo Springfield
Promo
Monterey
Smothers Bros.
FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH
The Staple Singers
For What It's Worth
Epic : 1967
Available on: A Family Affair
Kent : 2004
[Buy It]
FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH
Miriam Makeba
Keep Me In Mind
Reprise : 1970
[Buy It]
FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH
Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66
Stillness
A&M : 1970
[Buy It]
WATCH THIS SOUND
Slim Smith & The Uniques
Camel : 1968
Available on: Best of: 1967-1969
[Buy It]
Why can't my songs about trouble be popular? I ask. But people are tired. Sometimes people are tired of thinking of difficult and unpleasant things.
-Miriam Makeba
Andreas from Europe writes:Dear Moistworks folks,
as a reader from Europe I wonder if there has been,
say in the last 12 or 24 months, a song (or songs)
which, in your opinion, said something meaningful
about the war in Iraq and the "war on terror" - we all
know the classic anti-War songs, and, yes, of course,
Neil Young did his (rather uninspiring, unfortunatly)
share, but I sometimes have the feeling that it is a
curious thing that this war is not really really
really a big thing in contemporary music. This war is
different from other wars, and so should the music
"about it". or not ? We told Andreas that it seemed like the kind of question our readers like to answer, so let him know, in the comments below. In the meanwhile:
A HARD RAIN'S GONNA FALL
The Staple Singers
Use What You Got
Stax : 1973
Available on: A Family Affair
Kent : 2004
[Buy It]Labels: alex, gospel music, reggae, rock, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Thursday, April 05, 2007
I'M GETTING 'LONG ALRIGHT
Esther Phillips
Available on: The Best of Esther Philips 1962-1970
Rhino : 1997
[Buy It]
SHE'S ALRIGHT
Bo Diddley
Available on: Rare & Well Done
MCA : 1991
[Buy It]
NIGHTIME/ANYTIME (IT'S ALRIGHT)
Jim Guthrie
Comes w/: The Believer Music Issue 2005
The Believer : June/July 2005
[Buy It]
FEELIN' ALRIGHT
Lulu
New Routes
Atco : 1969
Available on: What It Is: Funky Soul & Rare Grooves 1967-1977
Rhino : 2006
[Buy It]
ALRIGHT OK, YOU WIN
Mikki Wilcox
Sun 7" : 1961
Available on: Memphis Belles: The Women of Sun Records
Bear Family : 2002
[Buy It]
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
Pete Townshend
Another Scoop
Atlantic : 1987
[Buy It]
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
The Who
Video
MAKE EVERYTHING ALRIGHT
Rufus Thomas
Ghost of The Stax
[Unreleased]
DIE, ALL RIGHT!
The Hives
Veni, Vidi, Vicious
Reprise : 2000
[Buy It]
FEELIN' ALRIGHT
West Coast Revival
West Coast Revival
LA Records : 1977
Available on: California Soul: Rare Funk, Soul, Jazz, & Latin Grooves From The West Coast
Ubiquity/Luv N' Haight : 2002
[Buy It]
IT'S ALRIGHT TO CRY
Rosey Grier
Free To Be You And Me
Video
Ladies and gentlemen, from now on, MW's Astoria Bureau will use the art that goes along with this post to signal: (a) No words, just songs, which have more or less to do with one another. (Today, songs which have more than less to do with the state of feelin' more or less alright.) & (b) Feelings are such real things and/They change and change and change.Labels: alex, funk, rock, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Friday, March 16, 2007
TIGHTEN UP PT. 1
TIGHTEN UP PT. 2
Archie Bell & The Drells
Atlantic : 1967
Available on: Tighten Up: The Best Of....
WEA : 1994
[Buy It]
HORSIN' UP
Orchestra Harlow
Available on: Nu Yurican Roots: The Rise of Latin Music in New York City in the 60s
Soul Jazz : 1999
[Buy It]
HIPPY SKIPPY MOON STREET
The Moon People
Available on: Funk Fu: Psycho Funk vs. Rare Grooves 1970-1976
Fu Music : 2000
[Buy It]
Hey, Joe Bataan! Whatchoo doin' on my record?!? Is rock and roll anything more than the white man's tighten up? Moistworks' Brooklyn Bureau flew to Australia recently, to report, while rest of the team took a week off to provide logistical support from home. We'll present the results in a moment or two, but for now, a few takes on the original.
PS Thanks to Jody R. for forwarding this, latest installment in the Bob Dylan Bootleg SeriesLabels: alex, soul, spanish grease
posted by Alex
LINK |
Thursday, February 08, 2007
FIRE (SHE NEED WATER)
Wayne McGhie
Wayne McGhie & The Sounds of Joy
Birchmont : 1970/Light in The Attic : 2006
[Download Here]
WADE IN THE WATER
THE GRAHAM BOND ORGANization
Ascot : 1965
Available on: Sound of 65/There's a Bond Between Us
Beat Goes On : 1999
[Buy It]
Hey, baby. Would you like to make a deal?
Last week we looked at Jamaicans playing soul music in Toronto, and different variants on "Wade In the Water". This week, two late additions. Wayne McGhie is the singer you'll hear on the songs by Jo-Jo & The Fugitives, below. Please scroll down and download those songs right now; they will surprise you by being so very excellent and exciting.
Welcome back. "Fire" is a McGhie original and, what a song. It's a bit incoherent until you realize that you, too, know exactly what that kind of relationship is like. But then, the fact that it is a relationship song sounds like the least of McGhie's worries. Download this song, too - it's at least as good as "Chips, Chicken, Banana Split," and that's praise from a deep place. Moistworks would like to thank the good folks at Light in The Attic records for bringing these songs to our enthusiastic attention.
THE GRAHAM BOND ORGANization was one of the earlier, bluesier Brit bands - they broke up when Graham Bond's RHYTHMsection up and formed Cream. Not so very well known these days, Bond was once voted "Britain's New Jazz Star" (that, according to this website). But here's Bond's take on the blues of today: "We are playing the blues of today," he said. "I can get away with playing practically anything." Somewhat coincidentally, Bond threw himself under a train the year b/f Eric Clapton (I kid you not, he really did) release/d an epic reworking of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."
So much for the past, and on to the soul covers of Bob Dylan tunes:
SHE BELONGS TO ME
Billy Preston
That's The Way God Planned It
EMI : 1969
[Buy It]
MAGGIE'S FARM
Solomon Burke
Atlantic : 1965
Available on: The Beat Goes On: Atlantic Dance Through the 50s, 60s, and 70s
Ace/Kent : 2000
[Buy It]
and Rolling Stone Magazine's award-winning song-of-all-time, as interpreted by Jimi Hendrix, the Wailers, and Phil Flowers & The Flower People. There's a four-minute version of the latter, but our best guess is that, whoever you are, the full nine minutes might be worth your time:
LIKE A ROLLING STONE
Jimi Hendrix
San Francisco : October 10, 1968
[Unreleased]
ROLLING STONE
The Wailers
Studio One : 1966
Available on: Bob Marley & The Wailers: One Love at Studio One 1964 - 1966
[Buy It]
LIKE A ROLLING STONE
Phil Flowers & The Flower People
A&M : 1970
Available on: Git Down: Funk Rarities 1967-1961
[Buy It]Labels: alex, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
WADE IN THE WATER
The Lincoln Four Quartette c. 1928
Available on: Vocal Quartets vol. 4 K/L/M (1927-1943)
Document Records 2005
[Buy It]
WADE IN THE WATER
The Soul Stirrers
Available on: Sam Cooke's SAR Records Story: 1959-1965
ABKCO : 1994
[Buy It]
WADE IN THE WATER
Booker T. & The MGs
Available on: Soul Men
Stax : 2003
[Buy It]
WAIT 'ROUND THE CORNER
Leona & The Lovejoys
Available on: The Daisy/Tiger Records Story
Sundazed : 2003
[Buy It]
LET'S WADE IN THE WATER
Marlena Shaw
Cadet : 1966
Available on: Anthology
[Buy It]
WADE IN THE WATER
The Ramsey Lewis Trio
Cadet : 1966
[Buy It]
"In all the songs of the slaves, there was ever some expression of praise of the great house farm," Frederick Douglass wrote in his memoirs. "Something which would flatter the pride of the owner, and if possible, draw a favorable glance from him:I am going away to the great house farm,
O yea! O yea! O yea!
My old master is a good old master,
O yeah! O yea! O yea! But the flattery was mixed with "other words of [the slaves'] own improvising- jargon to others, but full of meaning to themselves." So, baptismal songd like "Wade in The Water" doubled as sets of instructions for escaping slaves: Wade in the water, they reminded you, so that the bloodhounds lose your scent.
The codes were subtle and/or site-specific, and not even slaves caught the gist of every song; it wasn't until his own escape that Douglass himself fully understood "the deep meanings of those rude, and apparently incoherent songs," or heard in them a "tale which was then beyond my feeble comprehension." (I've been reading, folks.)
The textual instability - an all-American slippage - gave the music much of its force, and accounts for a good deal of its crossover appeal. So, join us next week, when we trace Levi Stubb's tears straight back to the middle passage.Labels: alex, gospel music, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
DAKAMERAP
ADDU KALPIN
Alif
Dakamerap
out|here : 2004
[Preview and Buy It]
LET ME DOWN EASY
Bettye Lavette
Calla : 1965
Available on: Down and Out: The Sad Soul of the Black South
Trikont : 1998
[Buy It]
ABASS
Abass
African Underground Vol 1: Hip-Hop Senegal
Nomadic Wax : 2004
[Preview and Buy It]
TERSOYUM
Ciguli
Sabir Yaaaa Sabir
Zorba Muzik Yapim : 2004
[Buy It]
Thanks to the success of our recent pledge drive (give it up for resident diva Alex Abramovich!), we've renewed our commitment to you: the end user, the target market, the unwashed masses yearning to breathe free. And we're newly dedicated to our mission as responsible global citizens.
Nobody told me this was a rock blog, so I've been planning a musical tribute to the Ottoman Empire for weeks. It'll probably run sometime after the High Holy Days (I've got a lot of sins to apologize for this year -- Phillyis, Clive, LeShaun, Ahmadou? if you're reading, please get in touch. I left the matchbooks at the motel and I forgot to ask for last names.) Also, this week the world music festival is running in Chicago. I'd post about that except I'm missing it all to stay home with the kid.
Instead, here's Alif. All I can tell you is what they put in their press kit. They are apparently the only all-woman crew in Dakar, the East Coast of African rap, out of a field of 3,000+ (gee, that's a lot of rappers!). Myriame, Mina and Oumy are on the socially conscious tip, using their rhymes to document daily life in Dakar. Hence, Dakamerap. I've never wished so hard I could speak Wolof. "Addu Kalpin" is apparently about a gang of thugs robbing minibus passengers. The sisters do sound a little squawky and disapproving on this track, don't they? Wolof-speakers, liner-notes-havers, I welcome your insights. Also, Alif? It stands for Attaque Liberatoires de l'Infanterie Feministe -- Attack of the Feminist Liberation Army. (Dude, you had me at hello.) The Buy It link sends you to Calabash because you can preview all their tracks there and tons of other stuff besides. It's my one-stop shop for Senegalese rap.
Alif is on this German label out|here records. When did the Germans get so hip? I was in Germany in 1989 and all I remember are jumpsuits and the occasional sex shop. And let me take a moment to give mega props to Germany's Trikont label. I've bought maybe six of their compilations and they're all gold. One of them had this tough Bettye LaVette on it. Cause bopst is right: we can't forget about Bettye LaVette.
Not all of you know this (warning: spoiler), but I have a thing for black women. I get it from the Jewish side. But just because I'm down with the sisters, doesn't mean I'm a player hater. Here's Abass, another Senegalese rapper, representing for the men. His case doesn't seem too compelling, but my French is rusty. Seidrik, des autres copains Francophones?
And then, Ciguli. The "C" sounds like the "J" in "Jew," and it rhymes with "Svengoolie." You know, there aren't a lot of English cognates in Turkish, so I'm flying blind, Latin alphabet notwithstanding. (And we don't have Turkish characters enabled, so I had to approximate spelling.) A very sleazy Ukrainian turned me on to Ciguli, which he described as "Turkish gypsy fuck music." Ciguli does mean gypsy, and my hips really do some surprisingly lewd things when I play this. But on the album cover the guy looks like Telly Savalas with a drawn-on pencil mustache. What's that about? Is he like a Turkish Stepin Fetchit or more of a Cantinflas? Dear readers, I leave the mysteries in your hands.Labels: megan, soul, world
posted by Megan
LINK |
Thursday, September 14, 2006
EVERYBODY KNOWS
O.V. Wright
If It's Only For Tonight
Back Beat : 1965
Available on: The Soul of O.V. Wright
MCA : 1992
[Buy It]
Readers of Moistworks, O.V. Wright is playing over the headphones and I'm about to pack it in. Moistworks, I mean, though it's not really mine to fold or bestow. James Morris (he of the masterly post the other day) started and designed this site, and ran it singlehandedly for a year or so. Our bloggerly quirks, and brave disregard for nuances of spelling and punctuation, divine from him. But we've been at it a long time and sometimes over burgers, James and I will talk about pulling up stakes.
I'M AGAINST IT
Groucho Marx
Horse Feathers
I usually come out against it. I mean, if Moistworks is more ambitious (or whatever) than it might be, it's because there are (at the least) four of us, and because one of us (at the very least) seems to have writer's block for a living. MW has good stuff on tap: Osvaldo Golijov, John Doe, Craig Finn, Country Joe, Juan Maclean, James Murphy, John Darnielle, Jason Moran (can we get our Amen yet?!?)and - we hope - Nina Nastasia in our first musicians' week or two. After that, another well-wrought writer's week. Megan and I are doing a two-day exchange on black power, or the lack thereof. James Morris will write more posts about his childhood homes and Brian Howe will write posts consisting entirely of poetry. Brian's a good poet, people.
REVERSE STATUS
Chris Mars
Horseshoes and Hand Grenades
Polygram : 1992 (out of print)
[Buy It]
I always liked this record - bought it, lost it, bought it again and lost it one night. Got it again the other day and you know what? For the rest of September, it's best solo record any Replacement put out. Sometimes, when I think about America, I remember that Chris Mars and Frank Black have less syllables in their names, combined, than I do - this makes their music sound very American to me - and one thing I like about Moistworks is that, while it's black, white, Russian, Australian, American, and Southern, Moistworks is pretty much American. I noticed that people were reading us in Beirut during the bombing. Mecca, too, tunes in. My favorite backstage page is the one telling us what countries you're coming from, and that helps make it worthwhile. Another thing is, the bar is so high! Soul-Sides is a true player; the Lightnin' Rod of West Coast audioblogs. Locust St.'s Chris O'Leary is writing a Tristram Shandy of sorts, working chronologically through all sorts of canons in great and (we hope not) obsessive depth. Recently, he's branched out into primary colors. The whole thing's fantastic, and half dozen other blogs are, most of the time, inspiring. Not to mention that MW got me in to see Jason Moran tonight and - goodness me.
LOST AND LOOKING
Sam Cooke
Night Beat
RCA : 1963
[Buy It]
Still, what is really the point? I notice, sometimes, that people will introduce me/James/Megan/Brian/Joannna as as "s/he does Moistworks?" This always draws blank stares and silence. We all know that there are, out there, brilliant, sensitive, powerful people who would sleep with us simply for filling their iPods so brilliantly. Why else would four guys, four dudes - sorry, M & J, four men and women - get together and form a rock blog? But we'll never meet them, those people, and if we did they (& it) would be weird. That said, we'd love to ask them & you for money. ((If more or less all of you sent us a buck a week, we'd more or less make the rent.) (Don't do it, though: Send kevlar to Iraq. Write your Congressmanorwoman about Darfur. Send stuff that will actually keep people from dying (click one of the links to your left).))
Personally, I find the idea of "having" a blog a bit embarrassing, and hope that MW belongs to you as much as it does to us. When that fails, I blame the feeling on James.
FOUR BITCHES IS WHAT I GOT
Lightin' Rod
Hustler's Convention
Celluloid Records : 1972
[Buy It]
Am I bitching? I don't mean to bitch. I don't even know how Brian feels - I missed his last time in New York, and North Carolina is a long time away. Megan, too, is far away in Chicago. James and I live in Brooklyn and Queens and have lunch once a week or so in Manhattan - Island Burger & Shakes, over on 9th Avenue. That's how Moistworks works.Labels: alex, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Monday, September 11, 2006
IF LOVING YOU IS WRONG
THE RAP
IF LOVING YOU IS WRONG (REPRISE)
Millie Jackson
Caught Up
Spring Records : 1974
Reissued: Hip-O : 1999
[Buy It]
Not that many white folks involve themselves in Millie Jackson music....Blacks buy my records and they are, in general, the lower class blacks. You could call me "the Poor People's Queen" if you like, because my ideas relate to that section of the people.
-Millie Jackson, 1975 Growing up, I hated R&B, which I called "love-me-down music." I didn't hear it as the overproduced remnant of the great soul tradition. It was some guys in matching outfits singing falsetto with this oily chatter in the middle of the song, like "Girl, I never meant to hurt you" or "I wanna love you, like a man's supposed to " or "Baby, let's forget about that fight." And while the singer is breaking it down, there's the guy on the high-hat (chish) and some pianissimo bass backing him up: duh-DUH-duh (chish); duh-DUH-duh (chish). Eventually the king of lovers gets excited and spluges out, Girl! Oooooooo, giiiiiirrrrrl! and it's supposed to be good for you too.
Sasha Frere-Jones would call me a racist: broadly speaking, I am not a fan of urban contemporary music. But this epic performance by Millie Jackson is pure pleasure. If I were technically savvier, I'd have combined the three tracks, in the perfect union that Millie intended for them. It's textbook R&B, down to the rap in the middle of the song and the freaking duh-DUH-duh breakdown. But she's backed by the Muscle Shoals swampers and the woman can SING. And the rap! "Lonesome as a mickey-frickey?" So much information packed into one pert little simile. Respect, Millie. And that crack about the funky drawers? How many Steve Harveys, how many Jackees were spawned by that line? Oh, Ms. Jackson, so much to answer for.
Caught Up was a concept album about a love triangle. It sounds cooler than it is. There's an especially egregious song about a summertime deflowering, for instance. But there's also the part where Millie, as the other woman, confronts the wife, "since I been going with your husband for the last past year and a half, that would sort of like make us wives-in-law." Kitsch-mongers will dig the album, but really, all you need is right here. And how often can you say that to someone and not be lying?
Welcome back to Monday, people.Labels: megan, soul
posted by Megan
LINK |
Friday, August 18, 2006
HEY JUDE
The Overton Berry Trio
The Overton Berry Trio At Seattle's Doubletree Inn
Jaro : 1970
Available on: Wheedle's Groove: Seattle's Finest in Funk & Soul 1965-1975
Light in the Attic : 2004
[Buy It]
DEAR PRUDENCE
CRY BABY CRY
Ramsey Lewis
Mother Nature's Son
Cadet : 1969
[Out of Print (except via iTunes)]
TAXMAN
Junior Parker
Love Ain't Nothin But a Business Goin' On
Groove Merchant : 1971
via Soul Sides
[Buy It]
ELEANOR RIGBY
Kim Weston
People : 1970
Available on: Soul Gospel
Soul Jazz Records : 2005
[Buy It]
Like most of the songs in this post, "Eleanor Rigby" was also recorded by Aretha Franklin, The 4 Tops, Wes Montgomery, Ray Charles, Booker T. & The MGs, Oscar Peterson, Richie Havens, Richie Valens, Skip James, and the Dalai Lama.
COME TOGETHER
Ike & Tina Turner
Come Together
Liberty : 1970
Available on: Absolutely The Best
Varese Sarabande : 1998
[Buy It]
JEALOUS GUY
Donny Hathaway
Live
Atlantic : 1972
also via Soul Sides
[Buy It]
DAY TRIPPER
Otis Redding
The Dictionary of Soul
Stax : 1966
[Buy It]
AND I LOVE HER [UNRELEASED VERSION]
The Wailers
Studio One : 1965
Available on : One Love: Bob Marley & The Wailers @ Studio One
Heartbeat : 1991
[Buy It]
THIS BOY
Joe Bataan
Sweet Soul
Fania : 1972
[Out of Print]
Here's final words from James Booker, Van Halen "covering" Skip James, and a youtube video you canwatch.Labels: alex, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Thursday, June 08, 2006
LIVING LEGEND (PART 1)
Florence Farmer
Bethlehem : 1969
[Out of Print/Buy It]
RECITATION BY HANK BALLARD
Hank Ballard
James Brown: Get On the Good Foot
Polydor : 1972
[Buy It]
I'M IN LOVE
Lee Austin
People : 1974
[Out of Print/Buy It]
GOD HAS SMILED ON ME (PART 1)
James Brown and introducing Rev. Al Sharpton with the Gospel Energies
Royal King : 1981
[Out of Print/eBay]
Part III of III
It just so happens that artists affiliated with James Brown tend to record extravagant tributes to his mercy, kindness and generosity. Florence Farmer, for instance, lived with JB for a while in the late '60s; they never married, but she was apparently sometimes called "Mrs. Brown." I'm told that the backing track for the two-part "Living Legend" was arranged by Sammy Lowe. Farmer's sense of rhyme and meter is rather unusual. If, in fact, it's hers. Curiously, the single for "Living Legend" doesn't have a writing - or production - credit. Perhaps somebody was being modest. You know, he's modest, too.
Hank Ballard and the Midnighters had had a long string of gigantic hits in the '50s, including "The Twist" and "Work With Me Annie." JB, always a fan (he recorded Ballard's "Teardrops On Your Letter" as late as 1991's Love Over-Due), produced a long string of non-hits for Ballard beginning in the mid-'60s. Some of them are very, very good (I love "You're So Sexy" and "Butter Your Popcorn"); a whole lot of them seem to be Ballard singing over already-issued Brown backing tracks. The only two that charted were the awesome "How You Gonna Get Respect (If You Haven't Cut Your Process Yet)," which recycled "Licking Stick - Licking Stick," and "From the Love Side," sung over a track that had already appeared on the instrumental Ain't It Funky Now album and provided the backing for Marva Whitney's "I Made A Mistake Because It's Only You." This drunken, defeated "Recitation" (backing track: JB's "World") is stuck in the middle of Brown's own Get On the Good Foot double-LP. I can't even imagine how that happened.
Sometimes, the obeisance of the revue just took the form of name-checking its other acts, as on the recitative that opens "I'm In Love," from former JB bodyguard Lee Austin, a.k.a. Leon Austin. (The "real woman" Austin mentions was the title of a single he'd released in 1972.) Occasionally, it was just mentioning their one big connection in passing, as in the original title of Marva Whitney's first studio album, I Sing Soul with James Brown. (Not included here: Bittersweet's "Portegé of J.B." [sic]. ) But there's something almost perverse about how the young Rev. Al Sharpton's procession of heroes (MLK, JFK) on 1981's "God Has Smiled On Me" culminates in the Godfather. Pretty much any time JB performed in New York in the '90s, Rev. Al showed up, delivered a little rap ("I've looked all around/But one thing I've found/If you want to get down/You've got to find James Brown"), and executed a dance move or two. He may still be doing the same thing at his first duet partner's shows.
-Douglas WolkLabels: soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
HONKY TONK (PART 2)
Bill Doggett
Available on: All His Hits
King : 1956
[Buy It]
LET'S MAKE IT
James Brown
Available on: Roots of a Revolution
Federal : 1956
[Buy It]
SOUL JERK (PART 1)
Bobby Bennett and the Dynamics
Loma : 1965
[Buy It]
HONKY TONK
Bill Doggett
King : 1969
Available on: King Funk
[Buy It]
HONKY TONK
The James Brown Soul Train
Available on: Funky Good Time: The J.B.'s Anthology
Polydor : 1972
[Buy It]
HONKY TONK
James Brown
Soul Syndrome
c. 1980
Available on: Funky Men
[Buy It]
Part II of III
Bill Doggett's biggest hit is as simple as an instrumental blues gets: a couple of little riffs that get manhandled in turn by guitarist Billy Butler and tenor saxophonist Clifford Scott. James Brown caught on to it very quickly - his vocal version, "Let's Make It," was recorded before "Honky Tonk" had gotten much attention. (As usual in such situations, "Let's Make It" is credited to one James Brown.) "Let's Make It" was buried away on the B-side of the non-hit "Just Won't Do Right" - which Brown also re-recorded repeatedly, but that's another story.When a bunch of JB sidemen cut their instrumental debut for Loma in 1965 as Bobby Bennett and the Dynamics, their song "Soul Jerk" - credited to guess who - bears, well, a very strong resemblance to "Honky Tonk."
If there was any bad blood between King labelmates Doggett and Brown, though, it had gone away by 1969, when Doggett released the JB-produced single "Honky Tonk" b/w "Honky Tonk Popcorn." (Curiously, its catalogue number is the one immediately before "The Popcorn" - which, when it became a hit, was promptly followed by "Butter Your Popcorn," "Mother Popcorn," "Answer to Mother Popcorn," "Let a Man Come In and Do the Popcorn," "Popcorn Charlie," "Lowdown Popcorn" and "Popcorn with a Feeling.")
Brown's released two other recordings of "Honky Tonk": one with The James Brown Soul Train (basically the entire revue doing the chant at the beginning, and his regular touring band playing the groove; you can hear how its lope evolved into 1973's "Doing It to Death," too), and another from 1980's Soul Syndrome, by which point the rhythm section's precision swing had evolved into the sort of light foot/heavy foot regularity that's plagued his live performances ever since.
-Douglas WolkLabels: soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Thursday, May 18, 2006
TIME IS ON MY SIDE
Irma Thomas
Imperial 7" : 1963
Available on: Sweet Soul Queen of New Orleans
Razor & Tie : 1996
[Buy It]
IT'S ALL OVER NOW
The Valentinos
SAR : 1964
Available on: Sam Cooke's SAR Records Story 1959-1965
Abkco : 1994
[Buy It]
FORTUNE TELLER
Benny Spellman
Minit 7" : 1962
Available on: Fortune Teller
Collectables : 1990
[Buy It]
POISON IVY
TheCoasters
Atco 7" : 1959
Available on: The Very Best of The Coasters
WEA : 1994
[Buy It]
LOVE IN VAIN
Robert Johnson
Volalion 78 : 1938
Available on: The Complete Recordings
Legacy : 1990
[Buy It]
SHAKE YOUR HIPS
Slim Harpo
Excello : 1966
Available on: The Excello Singles Anthology
Hip-O : 2003
[Buy It]
The boys do not use any original material - only the American Stuff. "After all," they say, "can you imagine, a British-composed R and B number? It just wouldn't make it."
-Record Mirror profile of The Rolling Stones, 1963 Tomorrow on Moistworks: The History of Rock and Roll in 3 Easy Lessons!Labels: alex, rock, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Monday, May 08, 2006
STRONG AS DEATH (SWEET AS LOVE)
Al Green
Hi : 1974
Available on: The Immortal Soul of Al Green
The Right Stuff : 2005
[Buy It]
FOOLISH FOOL
Dee Dee Warwick
Mercury : 1969
Available on: I Want To Be With You: The Mercury/Blue Rock Sessions
Hip-O : 2001
[Buy It]
DATE WITH THE RAIN
Eddie Kendricks
Tamla : 1972
Available on : The Ultimate Collection
Motown : 1998
[Buy It]
First of all, thank to Alex for inviting me over to do a Moistworks cameo - MW has been one of my favorite audioblogs since Day One.
Given that I have a CD to plug based on my own audioblog, I thought I'd do a post about the "songs that didn't make it." The trick is putting together a compilation isn't simply what to put on...it's dealing with the fact that you won't get everything you want. Some labels charge too much, others simply refuse to clear certain songs, etc. etc. When I began the process of assembling Soul Sides Vol. 1, I had...maybe 20 songs? That got whittled down to 16 but then, as we were going through the clearance stage, we lost a solid handful of songs that would have otherwise made the final cut.
Of that batch, it was most painful to me to lose the Al Green song (Hi Records simply wanted far too much for it) since it was one of the first songs I knew I wanted on there. It's long been one of my very, very favorite Green tracks - a rarely heard B-side cut from '74 that sounds like it should have been on one of his popular 1971/72 albums instead. Not only is the music lush and affecting but Green puts on an amazingly deep vocal performance. Who knows - maybe we can get this on a future volume?
The next two tracks were cut because they're owned by Universal, which refused to license any songs to us - I don't know if it was for money or other issues but in one fell swoop, that cost us at least 3 songs since Universal owns what feels like half the known music universe. In any case, the Dee Dee Warwick was a song I always liked but Kevin Drost, the guy at Zealous Records who basically put this CD together for me, REALLY liked it and I was more than happy to see it included. Dee Dee is Dionne's younger sister and - surprise, surprise - a lot less famous even though she clearly has some killer vocal power at her disposal. This song obviously depends on a lot of repetition but I like how it builds drama through that technique.
Last but not least, it was also painful to lose Eddie Kendricks - his People...Hold On (which is where this song comes off of), is one of the finest soul albums of the 1970s in my opinion. There's not a single bad song on there and "Date With the Rain" isn't necessarily even the best song (I picked it for the comp because it went better with it fellow selections) but it is most definitely a great one. If you really want a treat, track down the disco remix 12" by DJ Dmitri of this song - it is the best thing you'll ever hear.
- by Oliver Wang (aka DJ O-Dub)Labels: soul
posted by Alex
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Thursday, May 04, 2006
PIECE OF MY HEART
Erma Franklin
Shout : 1967
Available on: Golden Classics
Collectables : 1994
[Buy It]
PIECE OF MY HEART
Dusty Springfield
Dusty... Definitely
Philips : 1968
[Buy It]
PIECE OF MY HEART
Big Brother & The Holding Company
Cheap Thrills
Columbia : 1968
[Buy It]
PIECE OF MY HEART
Janis Joplin with Big Brother & The Holding Company
Live at Winterland '68
Sony : 1998
[Buy It]
"I never even recognized the song when I first heard Janis' version on the car radio," Aretha Franklin's older sister, Erma, said, when she first heard Janis Joplin's cover of her recording of "Piece of My Heart" on the car radio. "Naturally, it would have been great to have gotten the exposure, airplay and sales that she got but her version is so different from mine that I really don't resent it too much." God only knows what Erma would have made of the Red Rocker's cover - it doesn't get much better than the versions above, or much worse than this:
PIECE OF MY HEART
Sammy Hagar
Standing Hampton
Geffen : 1981
[Buy It]
Written by Bert Berns (who also wrote the anarchic "Twist and Shout") the song itself is sweetly masochistic; not as scary as Goffin-King's "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)," but not quite innocent, either. Soul Sides's O-Dub prizes Erma Franklin's original over all others, but I'm not sure that Franklin's self-posession, or Springfield's sophistication, serve the song as well as Joplin's somewhat overwrought anguish. In this case - and at least a few others we've been privy to - overwrought anguish seems called for.Labels: alex, soul
posted by Alex
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Tuesday, April 18, 2006
I JUST DROPPED IN TO SEE WHAT CONDITION MY CONDITION WAS IN
Sharon Jones
Daptone : 2005
[Buy It]
HUNG OVER
The Martinis (Packy Axton)
BAR : 1967
Available on: It Came From Memphis, vol. 1.
Upstart : 1995
[Buy It]
A quick soul shot to get you through the day: Sharon Jones' take on Mickey Newburry's "I Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)" isn't as majestic as her version of Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land, but it is lovely in its own right, and it's been in heavy rotation at the Astoria Bureau.
The Martinis' track is an old favorite. Saxaphone player Charles "Packy" Axton was the son of STAX cofounder Estelle Axton, a first-generation Mar-Key, and enough of a rabble-rouser to get banned from Stax's South Memphis studio. But, as Bluff City music historian (and sometime moist-worker) Robert Gordon points out in the first companion CD to his can't-recommend-it-enough classic, It Came From Memphis, this didn't stop Axton from recording elsewhere. This track was cut at the then-fledling Ardent Studio, with the Hi Rhythm Section. Along with its obvious virtues, and in lieu of a bridge, it features Axton taking what appears to be an in-studio shit. Tune in next week for songs about ass-play and golden showers....Labels: alex, soul
posted by Alex
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Friday, January 20, 2006
MERCY, MERCY
Don Covay
b. 1938
Rosemart : 1964
[Buy It]
YOU'VE GOT MY MIND MESSED UP
James Carr
1942 - 2001
Goldwax : 1966
[Buy It]
PEOPLE SURE ACT FUNNY
Titus Turner
1933 - 1984
Soulville
Collectables : 1990
[Buy It]
A NICKEL AND A NAIL
O.V. Wright
1939 - 1980
Back Beat : 1971
[Buy It]
CUTTIN' IN
Johnny "Guitar" Watson
1935-1996
King : 1962
[Buy It]
ONE MONKEY DON'T STOP NO SHOW
Joe Tex
1933 - 1972
Dial : 1965
[Buy It]
OH, HOW IT RAINED
Eddie Floyd
b. 1935
Stax : 1970
[Buy It]
NINETY-NINE AND A HALF (WON'T DO)
Wilson Pickett
1941 - Yesterday
Atlantic : 1966
[Buy It]
My singing doesn't have one source. I'd certainly have to tip my hat to Little Richard. But it's sort of a composite guy, because I love Wilson Pickett, and there are a few guys who have that sort of high, edgy thing.... Wilson even screamed in tune.
- John FogertyLabels: alex, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Thursday, December 22, 2005
POET
Sly & The Family Stone
There's A Riot Going On
Epic : 1971
[Buy It]
THANK YOU FOR TALKING TO ME AFRICA
Sly & The Family Stone
There's A Riot Going On
Epic : 1971
[Buy It]
IF YOU WANT ME TO STAY
Sly & The Family Stone
Fresh
Epic : 1973
[Buy It]
SYLVESTER
Sly & The Family Stone
Ain't But The One Way
Warner Bros. : 1982
[Buy It]
Betsy Ross did okay with what she had. I just thought I could do better.
- Sly Stone
At its best, American music has mirrored dips in the nation's emotional life, fluctuations in the marketplace, and America's ability to live up to its own, assimilationist ideals. At worst, it's recorded the occasional collective failure to do so. But in the case of Sylvester Stewart - who is better known as Sly Stone, and was perhaps America's most popular musician at the time of my birth - the promise was so great, and the betrayal so grand, that Stewart himself is squirreled away from view, releasing none of the music he's said to be recording, at a Garboesque remove from the world.
There's been no word from Sly Stone in well over a decade, and no sight of him since 1993, when he showed up, unexpectedly, at his own Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, and left without saying a word. His last known visitor came and left in 1996. So it was a shock to see that one of the records displayed most prominently on Starbucks' counters this year bore the credit: "Produced by Sylvester Stewart."
The album itself wasn't much to write home about: The latest remix record to come along, it features artists like Big Boi, Moby, and D'Angelo looping, rapping over, and otherwise updating decades-old Sly and The Family Stone tracks. (A Sony Records representative I spoke with declined to say whether the album really was produced by Stone, or merely approved by his representatives.) But its appearance - alongside that of the fourth greatest-hits album Stone's fans have been treated to in lieu of a proper career retrospective - raises old questions about the aspects of Stone's career we've chosen to celebrate, and the lengths we've gone to in avoiding others.
As of this writing, Stone's best work, There's a Riot Going On, can only be bought in bowdlerized form, with the title track unlisted and the once-provocative album art (a red-white-and-black American flag) replaced with a snapshot of Sly and the Family Stone performing a stadium show. Despite the deluge of greatest-hits albums, five of Sly and The Family Stone's eleven LPs are out of print, with the rest waiting to be remastered. And for all the pages devoted to James Brown, Marvin Gaye, and Sam Cooke, Stone's name has gone almost unmentioned in the music books. (An excellent oral history by San Francisco rock critic Joel Selvin finally appeared in 1998, but not one of the seven New York City bookstores I checked stocked the title, which I finally tracked down on Amazon.)
Girls, guns, and ungodly amounts of cocaine all played their roles in Stone's fall from grace. "He was the cocaine king," a bodyguard named Hamp 'Bubba' Banks told Selvin. "I saw him going down Hollywood Boulevard with a little violin case and he looked like the Morton salt woman." But James Brown liked his angel dust, Marvin Gaye lived and died in a cocaine-induced psychosis, and Sam Cooke was killed in sad, squalid, circumstances - and these facts are mere footnotes when we compare them to the accomplishments. Why should Stone be the exception? Perhaps it's because, more than only other musician of his generation, Stone had the confidence - and chutzpah - to present himself as the star-spangled incarnation of American dreams. And so, Stone's fall from grace was fraught with more symbolism than any career could bear.
He was born in Denton, Texas in 1943; the Great Migration carried the family to California, where Stone's father worked as a janitor and his mother joined the local Pentecostal church. Both parents were musical, and at the age of four, Stone joined his siblings in The Stewart Four. (In 1952, they cut a gospel record - "On The Battlefield of The Lord" b/w "Walking in Jesus' Name" - and Sly sang lead.) By the age of nineteen, Stone was a DJ (on KSOL), the author of a national dance craze (The Swim), and the in-house producer for a San Francisco hit factory called Autumn Records (where he recorded the Beau Brummels, Bobby Freeman, and early incarnations of the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead). He wore Beatle boots, dated white girls, and drove a green Jaguar. He never had to cross over; only cash in.
In 1967 he tried, with the kind of band A&R executives only dream about: Sly and The Family Stone was multi-gendered and multi-ethnic. Most of the members were, in fact, related; everyone sang, and everyone played one or more instruments. (Sly could play most of them.) Bassist Larry Graham - who "invented" the slap technique of playing his instrument, and now records with the artist intermittently known as Prince - was a virtuoso, and the band itself must have looked like a walking PSA. They honed their chops in an East Village where, at their best, they might have gone up against the Velvet Underground.
Their first album, A Whole New Thing, mixed rock and roll with soul, gospel, doo-wop and, surreptitiously, jazz. It was funky, hard-nosed, and fairly uncompromising music, but the sound wasn't quite formed, and a dismal showing in the marketplace inspired Sly to come up with an idiot-proof variation on the theme.
The songs that followed - "Dance to the Music" and "Everyday People" come to mind - were full of flashes; deep textures and brilliant, disconnected passages that form the backdrop of more than a few hip-hop classics. But the cynicism broke through: "He hated it," Stone's saxophone player told Selvin. "'Dance to the Music,' dance to the medley, dance to the schmedley. It was so unhip to us. The beats were glorified Motown beats. We had been doing something different, but [those] beats weren't going over. So we did the formula thing."
The results were influential. Stone's performance at the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival stirred Miles Davis to form his first electric band, his songwriting allowed Motown artists to look beyond the top forty, and his style and sartorial sense inspired Prince, P-Funk, Andre 3000, etc. By the early seventies, Sly had supplanted Brian Wilson as a prime architect of the Gold Coast sound, and his band's multi-voiced, many-layered arrangements provided a clear alternative to James Brown's severe, stripped down structures.
The group made its fortune, and a show-stopping Woodstock set turned Sly into a superstar. But instead of reveling in America's embrace, Sly traded the Booker T. Washingtonian integrationism he'd championed for a sort of Du Boisian disconnect: On his sole 1970 release, the "Thank You Falletinme Be Mice Elf Again" single, Stone thanked his audience for the party, but explained that he "could never stay." On There's a Riot Going On (the album title was a rejoinder to Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On?"), he recast his heretofore formulaic invitations to stand, sing, or dance: "Feel so good/inside myself/I don't need to move," he explained in the album's opening lines. And, in case we'd missed the point, he ended the album with a slow second draft of "Thank You": A few years earlier, Sly had sung about making it if we tried. On "Thank You (For Talking To Me Africa)" the "you can make it" trailed off into a scream. Riot's first single, "Family Affair," spent three weeks atop the pop charts, and sold two million copies (the album itself sold a million). But, having taken it home and absorbed the message (which Greil Marcus likened to "a jar of acid thrown in America's face") a goodly percentage of Stone's listeners seemed to turn their backs on the band. Sly and the Family Stone never hit the top ten again.
Instead, Stone began to break up the Family, and become his own worst enemy. In 1970, he missed twenty-six out of eighty concerts. The following year, he missed twelve out of forty. When he did show up, actual riots broke out, and when he appeared on television, he was often late and always stoned. Rolling Stone headlines from the time - "Sly Explains All as Washington Burns"; "Sly Slips, Gate Dips, Sis Skips"; "Sly Busted Again; Que Sera, Sera"; "The Struggle For Sly's Soul At The Garden" - read like the stage directions for an on-screen suicide.
Sly made other, excellent records, but the album titles - Heard You Missed Me, Well I'm Back!, or Back On The Right Track - sounded like apologies. In time, he took to singing in a whisper (see "Sylvester," above). Arrested on drug charges, parole violations, or failure to make his child support payments, he spent stretches of the eighties in jail, or hiding from the authorities. He was said to have become homeless and - eventually - hunchbacked. A composition called "Eek-Ah-Bo-Static Automatic," appeared nineteen years ago, on the soundtrack of an affirmative-action farce called Soul Man - it was Stone's final contribution to American song.
But Stone's fate was't entirely of his own making: In a neat reversal of the stock rock narrative, the American mainstream welcomed his cynical overtures, but couldn't make sense of his authenticity, and ambivalence (about, other things, the American mainstream). And yet, that abivalence - with its neat echo of Du Bois' "double consciousness" - told us more about what it is to be human in America than integrationist fantasies like "Everyday People" ever did.* That it also spoke to realities the mainstream has yet to accept made Stone's Starbucks' CD a doubly ironic artifact - proof positive that, profitable as it might be to remix and recycle our history, the original article carries a price we're still unwilling to pay.
*This isn't exactly subtle in Kayne West, either.
BONUS GRAFS FROM WEB DUBOIS' THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK:
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, - this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.Labels: alex, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Thursday, December 15, 2005
THE LETTER
The Box Tops
The Letter
Bell : 1967
[Buy It]
BIG BIRD
The Eddie Floyd
Stax : 1968
Available on: Eddie Floyd: Chronicles
[Buy It]
JET PILOT
The Three O'Clock
Sixteen Tambourines
Frontier : 1983
[Buy It]
BURNING AIRLINES GIVE YOU SO MUCH MORE
The Brian Eno
Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
EG : 1974
[Buy It]
Here at Moistworks, we tell ourselves stories to make sense of the world: A blond walks into a carwash. A baby seal walks into a club. But what do we do when the narratives fragment, and the waves of sense recede? What do we make of the ice flows of meaning? A screenwriter pulls onto his street, only to find his house burned to the ground and his dog lying dead in the driveway. His wife runs out of the neighbor's house; her dress is torn and bloodied. My god! says the screenwriter. It was terrible, says the wife. Your agent came by. He shot the dog, burned the house. Raped me. Wait, says the screenwriter. Did you say my agent was here? Meanwhile, the rest of us get stuck with Syrianas, and Aeon Flux. Well, it'll take more than that to answer the nagging questions this website was designed to explore: Where does freedom end, and intellectual property begin? Are ostriches birds, or mammals? Should we register to vote? Why do the terrorists hate planes and public transportation? At least we're American, we tell ourselves. We live in America, we think in American, we only even date Americans. But the more we repeat it, the less things seems to mean.
Take, for instance, the Jews. Or, better yet, the Wu-Tang Clan: Can it be/That it was all so simple then? Just a few years ago, we were little boys and girls, reading Ranger Rick and dreaming about komodo dragons. Now that we're older, we spend our time worrying over world affairs and reading as many books as we can on National Security. We've read Ghost Wars, Assassin's Gate, Platform, The Year of Magical Thinking. We've put "Planes Gone Wild!" on our Netflix queues, and listened to Hendrix's "Third Stone From The Sun" over and over again - sometimes on pause. But the more we read, watch, and listen, the less sense things seem to make: Once again, the Wu-Tang Clan: "Tears fell from our daughter's head/As she cried giving the white man head." Is there out there a more elegant summarization of the human condition? If so, where, or why not? Just thinking about it makes our heads spin. So: If anyone's got ideas/suggestions/mantras, or /koans. leave them in the comment box, below. We're still here - and we're listening.
-A Holiday Greeting from Moistworks' American BureauLabels: alex, soul
posted by Alex
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