Hungry Weird Beatles

Everybody knows Sergeant Pepper and She Loves You Yeah Yeah Yeah.  The band is so mainstream that it got its own Rock Band game.  But The Beatles have an avant-garde side that still remains hidden to the casual fan, a good trick considering their ubiquity.  The vaults are piled high with bizarre recordings that are frankly better off left there.

In this episode, I introduce some of The Beatles’ strangest recordings – both as a band and as solo artists.  Some of these are pretty great, others are just about unlistenable.  As an impressionable youth, I took the time to listen to these – and now my suffering and fanaticism will be your quick & dirty guide to the Fab Four’s weird side.  Perhaps it was simply that no one could tell them No?

Included here: rare alternate takes from The Beatles in-studio, Paul’s techno and ambient recordings, John & Yoko’s feedback and screeching (apologies in advance), George’s electronica.  No Ringo, though.  He just wasn’t that weird.

Show starts about two minutes into the file.

SET LIST

The Beatles / Paul McCartney – Plastic Beetle
The Beatles – Only A Northern Song
The Beatles – And Your Bird Can Sing
The Beatles – The Inner Light
The Beach Boys – Vegetables
Paul McCartney talks about Carnival Of Light
The Beatles – Helter Skelter (Take 2)
The Beatles – What’s The New Mary Jane (Take 5)
The Residents – Beyond The Valley Of A Day In The Life

George Harrison – Party Seacombe
George Harrison – He’s So Fine
The Crystals – My Sweet Lord
George Harrison – The Pirate Song
John Lennon & Yoko Ono – “Life With The Lions” concentrate
John Lennon & Yoko Ono – “Wedding Album” excerpt
Yoko Ono – Why
Paul & Linda McCartney – Too Many People
Percy “Thrills” Thrillington – Too Many People
The Fireman – Transpiritual Stomp
The Fireman – Palo Verde
Twin Freaks – What’s That You’re Doing
Twin Freaks – Long Haired Lady (Reprise)

PhonoFun is a show that only plays music recorded before 1950.  While that will probably conjure up visions of greats like Django Reinhardt, Billie Holliday, Benny Goodman and all that, Cormac ventures further afield.   The recording era before 1950 also brought a wave of field recordings of traditional forms of music, many of which have been lost as globalization eats our cultural roots.  Not only will you find jazz & pop hits here from before World War II, but also incredible psychedelic sides from Turkey, Bali and beyond.

If you enjoy this, be sure to check out Cormac’s regular show Phonographic Funhouse, Sundays at 6pm Pacific on FCCFree Radio.

This episode profiles Gil Scott-Heron, the legendary poet-author-raconteur-musician who passed away last month.  Scott-Heron’s poetry and music were enormously influential on hiphop, in particular for his reputation as a sardonic proclaimer of truth with a funky, funky soul.

In two hours, I introduce a few of his best-known recordings, showcase some of the 1960s Black Revolutionary rhetoric that gave rise to his sound and touch upon the contemporary artists who call themselves his followers.

Gil Scott-Heron – B Movie
The Last Poets – On The Subway
Gil Scott-Heron – New York City
Dick Gregory – “Shoveling Snow”
Gil Scott-Heron – Winter In America
Bill Withers – Grandma’s Hands
Curtis Mayfield – Mr. Welfare Man
Malcolm X – “Democracy Is Hypocrisy”
Gil Scott-Heron – Whitey’s On The Moon
Willie Hutch – Brothers Gonna Work It Out
Malcolm X – “The House Negro And The Field Negro”
Gil Scott-Heron – Home Is Where The Hatred Is
Kanye West ft Common – My Way Home
Gil Scott-Heron – The Klan

Gil Scott-Heron – The Bottle
Stokely Carmichael – “We Ain’t Goin’”
Gil Scott-Heron – The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Gil Scott-Heron – South Carolina (Barnwell)
Linton Kwesi Johnson – Reality Poem
H. Rap Brown – Speech after Huey Newton’s arrest, 1968
Public Enemy – Pollywanacraka
Gil Scott-Heron – Shut ‘Um Down
Common – The 6th Sense (ft Bilal)
Atmosphere – Yesterday
Kanye West – Who Will Survive In America?
Spacek – Daughter
Gil Scott-Heron – Me And The Devil
Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie XX – I’ll Take Care Of You

Ben has been collecting Dylan bootlegs for over a quarter-century – and sometimes in particularly adventurous circumstances. His passion, for example, got him involved with a man named Groucho who picked him up at the BART station, sold him contraband, and was subsequently caught.

We also discuss bootlegs in general, a black market born in the late ’60s from a very few key black market releases by legacy artists’ to become a commonplace method for breaking new artists today.

We certainly hope this show doesn’t have the effect that Ben’s Captain Beefheart profile had after we aired it last Fall.

Dink’s Song
Quit Your Lowdown Ways
That’s Alright Mama
Moonshiner
That’s Alright Mama / Sally Free And Easy
Farewell, Angelina
She’s Your Lover Now
Visions Of Johanna
This Wheel’s On Fire
I Can’t Make It Alone
Big River (Takes 1 & 2)
Rock Me Mama
Going Going Gone
Abandoned Love (live)
Every Grain Of Sand (demo)
Series Of Dreams
You Belong To Me
Like A Rolling Stone (London, 1966)

Here are some quick, dirty and sort of ridiculous rules for finding your way through the hundreds of CDs released under his name:

1. You don’t really own a music collection until you have Kind Of Blue.
2. Only buy albums on Columbia Records.
   1. If you must buy a Miles Davis album that’s not on Columbia, there should be a verb in the title like Workin‘ or Relaxin‘.  Otherwise, forget it.
3. All the Gil Evans albums are good, but Sketches Of Spain should be your first priority, Quiet Nights the last.
4. Columbia studio albums with John Coltrane are all must-haves.  The live ones weren’t released at the time and often there is good reason.
5. Take studio albums over live albums.  The live albums are tough listens, not recorded with the same fidelity and – particularly in the 1960s – Miles & band were more in the mode of tearing down their ‘hits’ rather than playing them straight.
6. With the exception of Bitches Brew, prefer albums with a photograph on the cover.  All the ones with paintings and cartoons are something of an acquired taste.

A suggested starter kit:

• The First Great Quartet – Milestones and Kind Of Blue
• With Gil Evans – Sketches Of Spain
• The Second Great Quartet – E.S.P. and Nefertiti
• Electric – In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew

SET LIST

The Damned – I Just Can’t Be Happy Today
The Specials – Man At C & A
Nick Drake – Pink Moon
ABC7 Report on Family Radio
Curtis Mayfield – If There’s A Hell Below, We’re All Going (interrupted, sorry)
Prince – The Cross
Bob Dylan – When He Returns
The Beastie Boys – So Whatcha Want
XTC – This World Over
Harold Camping speaks out on giving refunds
The Clash – The Sound Of Sinners
Cabaret Voltaire – Sluggin Fer Jesus
Uncle Tupelo – Atomic Power
Lowell Blanchard and the Valley Trio – Jesus Hits Like An Atom Bomb

Jon Stewart says The Rapture = Free Clothes
The Smiths – Ask
Barbara Lewis – Baby I’m Yours
Super Furry Animals – It’s Not The End Of The World?
Barry McGuire – Eve Of Destruction
Flux Of Pink Indians – Tube Disasters
The Stranglers – Second Coming
Slayer – Jesus Saves
Rianovosti New – “North Korea threatens’sacred’ nuclear war”
Tom Waits – Earth Dies Screaming
Randy Newman – Political Science
Johnny Cash – The Man Comes Around
Kate Bush – Breathing
Sonic Youth – Do You Believe In Rapture?
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Death Is Not The End

Podcast temporarily offline

Standing at the crossroads of incendiary racial politics, American history, and a revolution in music’s means of production and distribution, Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back remains an absolute must-hear almost a quarter century since its original release.  In this episode, I delve deep into its sonic roots and how this team of untrained musicians rallied from its desultory debut album to become one of rock’s most important, hardest-to-imitate artists.

SET LIST

James Brown – Funky Drummer
Clyde Stubblefield interview, 2008
The J.B.’s – The Grunt (Parts 1 & 2)
Bobby Byrd – I Know You Got Soul
Run-D.M.C. – Hard Times
Beastie Boys – Hold It Now, Hit It
Public Enemy – Timebomb
Eric B & Rakim – I Know You Got Soul
Public Enemy – Rebel Without A Pause

Public Enemy – Bring The Noise
RZA on Chuck D
Chuck D on Flavor Flav
Public Enemy – Cold Lampin’ With Flavor
Hank Shocklee on finding his sound
Public Enemy – Night Of The Living Baseheads
Hank Shocklee and Chuck D on record collecting
Bobby Byrd – Hot Pants – I’m Coming, Coming, Coming
Bar-Kays – Son Of Shaft
Public Enemy – Caught, Can We Get A Witness?
Hank Shocklee on the Public Enemy sound
Isaac Hayes – Hyperbolicsyllablecsesquedalymistic
Public Enemy – Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos

Show starts about five minutes into the file

Haile Selassie rocking the mic

This episode was recorded on Grounation Day, the 45th anniversary of Ethiopian King Haile Selassie’s visit to Jamaica and one of the most important dates in Rastafarianism.  To mark the occasion, I feature great rasta-themed reggae and dub from Studio One, Trojan Records and beyond, including hits from bedrock Jamaican artists like BURNING SPEAR, DENNIS BROWN, THE CONGOS and many more.  Plus I try to explain Rastafarian belief and fail miserably.

SET LIST

Burning Spear – Marcus Garvey
The Congos – Fisherman
Desmond Dekker – Israelites
Augustus Pablo – East Of The River Nile
Cedric Im Brooks – Give Rasta Glory
Linval Thompson – Jah Jah Dreader Than Dread (extended)
Freddie McGregor – Africa Here I Come
Albert Griffiths – Roots Natty
Junior Bytes – A Place Called Africa
Johnny Osbourne – Sing Jah Stylee
Black Uhuru – The Whole World Is Africa

King Tubby – King Tubby Dub
The Skatalites – Herb Man Dub
George Dudley – Gates Of Zion
Dennis Brown – Wolfs And Leopards (extended)
Bob Marley & The Wailers – Small Axe
Sugar Minott – River Jordan
Johnny Clarke & U-Roy – Every Knee Shall Bow
Lee “Scratch” Perry – Jungle Lion
Max Romeo – War Ina Babylon
Lone Ranger – Natty Chalwa
Gladiators – Jah Jah Go Before Us
Serge Gainsbourg – Lola Rastaquaire
Jacob Miller – Westbound Train

For 1981′s 30th anniversary, this episode digs deep into its key releases and journeys through its indie landscape. It’s such a tough year to sum up that I’m sure I’ll need to do a Part 2 sometime later this year.

SET LIST

The Specials – Ghost Town (edit)
The Go-Go’s – Our Lips Are Sealed
Pete Shelley – Homosapien
The Human League – Love Action (I Believe In Love)
The Clash – The Leader
Elvis Costello & The Attractions – Strict Time
The dB’s – Black And White
R.E.M. – Radio Free Europe (original)
X – We’re Desperate
Black Uhuru – Youth Of Eglington
Tom Tom Club – Genius Of Love
Prince – Do Me, Baby

Kraftwerk – Computer Love
“1981 primitive Internet report on KRON”
New Order – Ceremony
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – She’s Leaving
Echo & The Bunnymen – With A Hip
The Cure – Primary
ESG – You Can’t Be Funky
The B-52′s – Dirty Back Road
Yoko Ono – Walking On Thin Ice
Gang Of Four – To Hell With Poverty! (Peel Sessions)
Dead Kennedys – Police Truck
Negativland – Dearmary
Grandmaster Flash – The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel

In this episode, I profile Prefab Sprout and Paddy McAloon, an artist with so much fine unreleased material that he makes Tupac and Nick Drake look like pikers.  Beset by health problems, it’s anybody’s guess whether we’ll ever have more music again from this very fine songwriter.  In the meantime, if you’ve never heard this band and have a yen for 80s music, Steely Dan, indie in the mode of Death Cab For Cutie or Sufjan Stevens, twee pop, Stephen Sondheim and all points in between, you are in for a real treat.

For more information on Prefab and tons of revealing interviews with Paddy, unofficial fan site PrefabSprout.net has a wealth of material.  There is no official web presence for the Sprouts at this time.

SET LIST (all by Prefab Sprout except as noted)

Desire As (Acoustic Version)
Radio Love
Cue Fanfare
Bonny
Goodbye Lucille #1 (Johnny Johnny)
He’ll Have To Go
Appetite (Acoustic Version)
The World Awake
Talking Scarlet
The King Of Rock’n Roll

Hey Manhattan!
Sondre Lerche – Nightingales
We Let The Stars Go
Moon Dog
The Sound Of Crying
Kylie Minogue – If You Don’t Love Me
God Watch Over You
A Prisoner Of The Past
Jimmy Nail – I’m A Troubled Man
Donna Summer
Nero The Zero
Cars And Girls

In addition to stalwarts BRATMOBILE, BIKINI KILL, and SLEATER-KINNEY, the RNRN will play selections from some of the bands who set the stage for the female-fueled rebellion like X-RAY SPEX, the SLITS, YOKO ONO, the RUNAWAYS, and many others.  Revolution Grrrl Style Now!!!

After the splintering effect of punk, the music itself hit a wall; punk had the attitude but not the chops to take pop to the next level.  Post-Punk was founded on questioning the tropes of baby boomer rock and roll.  Why does the guitar lead?  Can we write songs without jamming?  Can we ban love and relationships as subject matter?  Do we have to know how to play these things?  Do we have to tune up?  (Yes, please.)  Must a song be verse-chorus-verse?  In the end will this still recognizabley ‘pop’?

Not every attempt was successful – not by a long shot – but what shook out of this quick flashpoint era of roughly 1979-1983 is an enormously rich treasure trove of experimental music and sound.  Come along for a quick tour.

If you would like to read more about this genre, Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up And Start All Over Again is highly recommended.

SET LIST
Gang Of Four – At Home He’s A Tourist (Peel Session)
Gang Of Four – What We All Want
Gang Of Four – Damaged Goods
Gang Of Four – Anthrax
Gang Of Four – I Can’t Forget Your Lovely Face
The Mekons – Never Been In A Riot
The Mekons – The Curse
The Fall – How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’
The Fall – I Fell Voxish
Public Image, Ltd. – Swan Lake / Death Disco
LiLiPUT – U
LiLiPUT – You

James White & The Blacks – Contort Yourself (August Darnell Mix)
The Slits – So Tough
Wire – Ex-Lion Tamer
Joy Division – Transmission
Human League – Being Boiled
Tuxedomoon – New Machine
Devo – (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
Young Marble Giants – Final Day
XTC – This Is Pop? (BBC Session)
This Heat – 24 Track Loop
Talking Heads – The Big Country
Siouxsie & The Banshees – Israel
Scritti Politti – The Sweetest Girl (edit)
The Art Of Noise – Beat Box

Not quite post-punk, not quite glam, not quite hair band. Duran Duran is its own genre.

With this episode, I make the ultimate Valentine’s Day sacrifice.  My show. My credibility.    Hang on, I meant to say Gift. Yes!  A Valentine’s Day Gift of course!

For two hours, my wife’s all-time favorite band Duran Duran is the subject of this week’s episode.  As always in my artist profiles, I begin with a bunch of roots and influences to set the landscape.  Then – believe it or not – I’ve got a ton of rarities, alternate mixes and other Duran-related stuff that might just surprise you.  The wife joined me in studio to keep me in line.

You know, guys (and I do mean guys since their fan base has got to about 96% female), they aren’t that bad when you dig beneath the big hair.  Honest.  Tune in tonight to find out why.

In this episode, I explore the cover song through the good graces of my colleagues at The Chemung County Enlightenment Society, a global ragtag group of music dorks that tried to do the impossible last year: narrow down their favorite covers to just 10 each, then post to a shared folder.  This show dives deep into that folder and finds treasures both weird and wonderful.

The post title, by the way, is a quote from Pete Seeger.

SET LIST

Justin Townes Earle – Can’t Hardly Wait (The Replacements)
Adriana Calcanhotto & Daniel Jobim – Music / Impressive Instant (Madonna)
Lizzy Mercier Descloux – Funky Stuff (Kool & The Gang)
Cibo Matto – About A Girl (Nirvana)
The Raincoats – Lola (The Kinks)
Cat Power – (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (The Rolling Stones)
Mark Eitzel – No Easy Way Down (Dusty Springfield)
The Flying Lizards – Sex Machine (James Brown)
Lb – Superbad (James Brown)
Katzenjammers – Cars (Gary Numan)
The Dirtbombs – Livin’ For The City (Stevie Wonder)
Rahsaan Roland Kirk – What’s Goin’ On / Mercy Mercy Me (Marvin Gaye)
The Slits – I Heard It Through The Grapevine (Marvin Gaye)
Stevie Wonder – We Can Work It Out (The Beatles)

Vince Guaraldi & Bola Sete – I’m A Loser (The Beatles)
Tito Puente Orchestra – The Simpsons
Senor Coconut – Beat It (Michael Jackson)
Toots & The Maytals – Let Down (Radiohead)
Steel Vibrations – The Hustle (Van McCoy)
Cowboy Junkies – Ooh Las Vegas (Gram Parsons)
Johnny Cash – Rowboat (Beck)
The Specials – Maggie’s Farm (Bob Dylan)
The Bad Plus – Film (Aphex Twin)
Rickie Lee Jones – Show Biz Kids (Steely Dan)
Ken Boothe – Ain’t No Sunshine (Bill Withers)
Taken By Trees – My Boys (Animal Collective)
Van Morrison – I Believe To My Soul (Ray Charles)
Nina Simone – Just Like A Woman (Bob Dylan)

James Murphy, the driving force behind LCD, will be the first to tell you that he’s standing on the shoulders of giants – everyone from Harry Nillson to Giorgio Moroder.  In this show, I roll through a lot of the bands that Murphy is influenced by, borrows from and pays homage to in his music.  Which is a really a music nerd way of saying: I’m playing punky disco and it’s hella fun.

Put on a sweater, fire up the yule log and, um, grab a twist-off capped bottle of wine and settle in for two hours of seasonal music featuring guest DJ Susie Smith.

So here – the night after the close of the 2010 (AD) Festival Of Lights – there’s no reason to stop the music now. This podcast covers Jewish contributions to the pop music canon – along with a few hangers-on.

SET LIST

Beastie Boys – Right Right Now Now
Ben Kweller – Walk On Me
The Clash – Lost In The Supermarket
Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins – The Charging Sky
Bangles – Going Down To Liverpool
Amy Winehouse – Tears Dry On Their Own
Dionne Warwick – Are You There With Another Girl? (Bacharach/David)
Jefferson Airplane – 3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds
Elastica – How He Wrote Elastica Man
Lou Reed – NYC Man
Raspberries – Go All The Way
Van Halen – Janie’s Crying
Ike Turner & His Kings Of Rhythm – The Rooster
Elvis Presley – Trouble (Leiber/Stoller)

Serge Gainsbourg & Brigitte Bardot – Bonnie and Clyde
Ramones – Beat On The Brat
Sleater-Kinney – I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone
Bob Dylan – My Wife’s Home Town
Yo La Tengo – I Wanna Be Your Lover
Yo La Tengo – Periodically Triple Or Double
3rd Bass – Pop Goes The Weasel
Drake – Light Up
KISS – Strutter
Randy Newman – It’s Money That I Love
Marianne Faithfull – Why d’Ya Do It?
Charlotte Gainsbourg – The Songs That We Sing
William Shatner – That’s Me Trying
Bill Frisell – Kochot
Terry Hall & Mushtaq – Ten Eleven

Most notoriously, Neil started compiling a ‘Decade II’ in 1987 to follow up on the hit Decade compilation from 1977.  This project then morphed into the Neil Young Archives.  For years, this thing was dogged by rumors about its format, its length, what it would contain, when it was coming out…  It went on so long that fans gave up that it would ever happen and started compiling their own versions (like Neil Young Archives Be Damned) of what they thought it would be.

When the announcement finally came in 2008 that the archives were finally coming – for real this time – for many it was still an ‘I’ll believe when I see it.’  It was meant to be five 8-CD sets (or 5 DVDs – or something) with the first covering only the period up to 1972 – basically enough to cover his genesis as an artist and lead up to his most popular album, Harvest.  Sure enough, it was delayed again to mid-2009.  And Neil, in typically curmudgeonly fashion, said the primary reason it was happening now was because he finally found a format on which he liked hearing his music played: Blu-Ray.  Yes, he actually told us to all go out and buy PlayStation 3′s so we could listen to his demos from 40+ years ago.

I’ve never actually had the opportunity to play with the $350 – yes, $350 – Blu-Ray set, but from all accounts it stretches the very idea of musical autobiography to an apotheosis.  Each song gets its own file drawer full of related ephemera and trivia while easter eggs, hidden tracks and video highlights explicating his career abound.  The sound quality, of course, is supposed to be unbelievably clear.  Even more exciting, it’s a living, breathing archive with songs and video added at Neil’s will over the internet and unlocked with each buyer’s exclusive code.  Truly a redefinition of what an artist’s archive can be and how it can offer an immersive experience for serious fans.

Then the news broke last week that a fire had broken out at Neil Young’s San Carlos warehouse filled with his guitars, memorabilia and classic cars.  The Neil Young Nation held its collective breath.  Details were scarce, but television coverage showed workers scurrying out of a blackened prefab metal warehouse with film canisters and who knows what else.  Were the Archives OK?  Did this damage or kill the project?  For an artist who has consistently had mortality and aging as key concerns in their work, to have their Archives burned the same week as their 65th birthday (as it was for Neil), this awful event must have really hit home.

Fan site Thrasher’s Wheat assures us that everything is OK and the tapes are kept elsewhere, but really, who’s to know what’s truth or fiction here?  Let’s just all stand by and keep our fingers crossed for the next edition, which is supposed to take the story through 1981 and include four previously unreleased albums.

Strangely enough, there’s been far more coverage of Neil’s LincVolt, a pet project to entirely adapt a custom car to run on biofuel.  After rumors that the car had started the fire, a clarification came – from of all places – the newspaper of record that the LincVolt survived.  The dream of a hybridized classic car lives for another day!

While we wait for Volume 2, this week’s episode of my radio show is devoted to an exploration of the Archive released so far.  Honestly, it makes for a somewhat monochromatic show but if you’re a Neil Young fan who is daunted by the price tag or just the simple task of diving in, you’ll want to check this out.

This podcast originally aired on 11/11, Nigel Tufnel’s favorite day.  We can truly say that this day goes to 11 – a couple of times.

And there’s only one way to properly celebrate 11/11:  Get Loud.

In this episode, I pay tribute to the man who brought the LOUD to pop music: Phil Spector.  His Wall Of Sound was both smart marketing and a revolution in how records were made.  The songs were pretty good, too.  Then he started hanging with The Beatles and things just got weirder from there.  Really weird.

SET LIST (all produced or co-written by Spector unless otherwise noted)

This edition of The Entroporium features two hours of politically-themed anger and sadness – all the way from The Carter Family to Marvin Gaye to Lou Reed to Sufjan Stevens – with some words of wisdom from GW Bush and Noam Chomsky.

(Bottleneck Cafe ran a little over, so my show starts about four minutes into the file.  The sound’s too hot until 8 minutes in.  Sorry!)FIRST HOUR

If you only know Blondie from the songs played on commercial radio and VH1, you do not know this band. Starting as an updated punky take on the 60s Girl Group sound and following a slow launch trajectory that took three albums before success kicked in, the band veered off into more adventurous music after it became popular.  But was this a good thing?

Check out this two-hour career retrospective, including influences, hits, and rarities.  This show has live tracks, alternate takes and even a flashback from Debbie’s hippie days.  Plus a tribute to Ari Up of The Slits, who passed away this Wednesday.

The show starts about 1:10 into the podcast file.

FIRST HOUR
The Slits – Newtown (for Ari Up, RIP)
The Castaways – Liar, Liar
The Ramones – I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend
The Wind In The Willows – Djini Judy
Blondie – Out In The Streets
Blondie – A Girl Should Know Better
Blondie – X Offender (Private Stock Original Version)
Blondie – In The Flesh
Blondie – Man Overboard
Blondie – Rip Her To Shreds
Blondie – (I’m Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear
Blondie – I Didn’t Have The Nerve To Say No
Blondie – Poets Problem
Blondie – Hanging On The Telephone (Live)
Blondie – Picture This

SECOND HOUR
Blondie – Once I Had A Love (aka The Disco Song)
Blondie – Heart Of Glass
Blondie – Dreaming
Blondie – Die Young Stay Pretty (Live on BBC)
Blondie – Heroes (Live)
The Paragons – The Tide Is High
Blondie – Live It Up
Blondie – Rapture (Extended Disco Mix) (excerpt)
Go Home Productions – Rapture Riders
Debbie Harry – Backfired
Blondie – For Your Eyes Only
Blondie – Maria

In the second hour, I continue on the 60s R&B theme and fight a losing battle against my mixing board software.  The show starts about two minutes in to the file.

FIRST HOUR – SOLOMON BURKE TRIBUTE
Just Out Of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)
If You Need Me
Stupidity
Cry To Me
Home In Your Heart
Got To Get You Off My Mind
Down In The Valley
None Of Us Are Free (w/ Blind Boys Of Alabama)
He’ll Have To Go
Valley Of Tears (w/ Gillian Welch)
Maggie’s Farm
The Judgement
Nothing’s Impossible
Don’t Give Up On Me

SECOND HOUR
Soul Clan – That’s How It Feels
James Carr – Pouring Water On A Drowning Man
Rufus Thomas – Itch and Scratch (Part 1)
Eddie Bo – The Thang (Part 2)
The Gaturs – Cold Bear
Betty Everett – You’re No Good
The Velvelettes – Needle In A Haystack
The Flirtations – Nothing But A Heartache
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles – The Love I Saw In You Was Just A Mirage
San & Dave – I Thank You
Solomon Burke – Get Out My Life Woman
Dyke & The Blazers – We Got More Soul
Ray Charles – In The Heat Of The Night
Lowell Fulson – Tramp
Solomon Burke – Proud Mary
The Isley Brothers – This Old Heart Of Mine (Is Weak For You)

Tell me that wouldn't be scary to a 3-year old!

One bright Berkeley summer afternoon in 1970, my Dad’s friend Henry brought over a brand new stack of records to try out in the hi-fi.  (How great is that: people went to a record store, picked out hot new titles and made music discovery a social event!) Out of that pile appeared of the scariest things I’d ever seen: a double-album with a cover painting of angry witches, naked people, distorted body parts, lightning… This was no childrens book illustration.

Terrifying as that was, Henry insisted on putting this one on the turntable first – and out came formless electric jams full of scary-sounding instruments.  To a wee one brought up on The Beatles, CSN, and Prokofiev’s child-friendly Peter & The Wolf, this was a too radical departure.   (Bass clarinets sound particularly scary to small children, usually representing evil or mischief in cartoon scores.  Having Peter’s friendly grandfather voiced by a bassoon probably did enough to dissuade kids from enjoying classical music as the rest of the score did to attract them.)

I was so upset that I burst into tears, raced to my bedroom, slammed the door and refused to come out the rest of the day.  As far as I can remember, this was the only time I pulled a stunt like that.

The record in question was of course Miles Davis’s supposed landmark Bitches Brew – an album that I continued to despise and fear for many, many years afterwards.  I knew that this was supposed to be one of those canonical works that we music geeks are supposed to celebrate, uphold and nod knowingly about in mixed company.  And so like any good rock critic wannabe, I dutifully pulled it out every 10 years or so and give it another go.  First as a teen, then in college, then in my early professional years: Nope, this one just wasn’t working for me.

It barely sounded like a band playing together, much less playing a song.  Every time I let the needle drop or spun up the CD, I could only visualize a bunch of stoned guys with thousand-yard stares sitting in a circle each taking turns going Ba-Da-Dop!  Ba-Da-Dop! Ba-Da-Dop! and around and around and around for… oh my god 20+ minutes per track.  This from a time when crafting a double-album was a symbol of deep Artistic Importance – like ummmm Tommy or The White Album – that You Must Sit Through This And Inhabit This Artist-Constructed World.  Ugh, forget about it.  (Well, actually, I could get with “Miles Runs The Voodoo Down” on Side 4, which sounded most like a traditional if hella funky jazz piece, but still.)

Far, far from the jazz supper clubs...

I don’t know why this album offended me so deeply.  Surely it was related to that traumatic day, but I had never really had problems like this with funk or soul before or since.  Dissonance and strange sounds were not the issue.    I always insisted that Dad put on the Jimi Hendrix side of the Woodstock album over his objections.  The Beatles certainly had their share of avant-garde moments.  My GE record player was primarily fed by psychedelic rejects from my Dad’s collection, like Iron Butterfly and Their Satanic Majesties Request.  Dissonance and strange sounds were not the problem.  And Miles became a favorite of mine in college (stereotypically), especially Bitches Brew‘s sonic cousins, Nefertiti and In A Silent Way.

Finally this year with all the ecstatic re-re-reviews attendant upon yet another re-re-release of Bitches Brew for its 40th anniversary (replete, again, with remastering and extra tracks), I decided to give it another try.  This time it came in loud and clear.  Colors unlike any I’d heard from any other band, the thrill of shared discovery and freedom, great performances and riffs – it’s all there, all the things you would want and expect from a pop-culture masterpiece.  Sounding utterly like anything that came before it – in still-acoustic-dominated ‘jazz,’ anyway – it’s clear why this blew so many minds in 1970 and still continues to today.

Why hadn’t I been able to hear it before?  If you’re like me and have had a hard time finding your way into the Bitches Brew colossus, the key may be to skip the 20-minute opener “Pharaoh’s Dance,” which in LP terms takes up the entirety of Side 1. Instead crank up the title track from ‘Side 2,’ which provides a far friendlier and dynamic entry point.  Also, for the electronica fan or super-technical listener, it may be instructive to head over to one of the Miles obsessive sites that pore over how the tracks were constructed from loops and fragments – which one could interpret as having created the world’s best known and biggest selling example of musique concrete (with the probable exception of The Beatles’ “Revolution 9″).

It took 40 years, but Bitches Brew turned out to be worth the wait.

The Captain thinking about how to make his music more appealing to the ladies

“I’d always thought music was too formal, and I thought ‘Well, I’ll get into this and fix it.’” – Captain Beefheart

This show is fully dedicated to a profile of one of rock’s strangest, most enigmatic and most divisive bands: Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band.  Who was this guy, why did he make such strange sounds, did he really turn his band into a cult – and why should we care?  Beefheart scholar Benjamin Griffin brings in his collection of some of the Captain’s greatest and rarest recordings.

The show starts about 2:40 into the file.

SET LIST

Diddy Wah Diddy
Abba Zaba
Yellow Brick Road
Somebody In My Home (live)
Tarot Plane (excerpt)
Safe As Milk
Frownland
“Fast and Bulbous”
China Pig
The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)
Steal Softly
Old Fart At Play
Nowadays A Woman’s Gotta Have A Man
Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles
Big Eyed Beans From Venus
Golden Birdies
Bongo Fury
The Floppy Boot Stomp
Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)
Ice Cream For Crow
Veteran’s Day Poppy

The show kicks in about 2 minutes after the start of the file.

FIRST HOUR
Gyedu Blay Ambolley & The Steneboofs – Simigwado
The Sahara All Stars of Jos – Take Your Soul
The Semi Colon – Nekwaha Semi Colon
Lisandro Meza – Shacalao
Tony Allen & His African Messengers – No Discrimination
Honoré Avolonto Et L’orchestre Black Santiango – Dou Dagbé Wé
El Rego et Ses Commandos – Se Na Min
Joni Haastrup – Greetings
Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra – Big Man

SECOND HOUR
Fela Ransome-Kuti & The Africa 70 – Who’re You
Ify Jerry Crusade – Everybody Likes Something Good
K. Frimpong & His Cubano Fiestas – Me Yee Owu Den
King Sunny Ade – Tolongo
Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics – Blue Nile
Peter King – African Dialects
The Funkees – Ole
The Funkees – Dancing Time
Fela Ransome-Kuti & The Africa 70 – Gentleman

This artist would become one of the '70s coolest, most self-assured artists. Looks like a deer in the headlights here, though, yeah?

I will readily admit that I’ve made some errors in my first two broadcasts. Tonight I’ll demonstrate that some of our greatest artists were not immune to Rookie Mistakes, either.

Maybe it was the wrong song, maybe it was the wrong producer, maybe they were desperate, maybe they just plain weren’t ready yet.  In any case, their first record(s) kinda sucked before they recovered to become the legends you know and love.  Includes not-so-hot tracks by folks like The Beatles, Aretha Franklin, Madonna and many more.

…and because it was a schadenfreude show, this is my very roughest podcast.  The show doesn’t kick until a full 9 minutes after the start of the file.  Booooo.   Set list after the jump.

FIRST HOUR
Tony Sheridan w. The Silver Beatles – My Bonnie
The Beatles – Three Cool Cats
The Rolling Stones – Come On
Chuck Berry – Come On
The Rolling Stones – Stray Cat Blues
Ray Charles – Roll With My Baby
Ray Charles – Drown In My Own Tears
Aretha Franklin – Rock A Bye Baby (With A Dixie Melody)
Aretha Franklin – (Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone
Bob Dylan – Mixed Up Confusion
Bob Dylan – It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry
Beach Boys – Surfin’
Beach Boys – Here Today

SECOND HOUR
Bob Marley & The Wailers – And I Love Her
Bob Marley & The Wailers – Small Axe
Davy Jones & The Lower Third – You’ve Got A Habit Of Leaving
David Bowie – The Laughing Gnome
David Bowie – Space Oddity (1980 version)
Kraftwerk – Ruckzuck
Kraftwerk – Radioactivity (The Mix)
Public Enemy – Public Enemy No. 1
Public Enemy – Night Of The Living Baseheads
Madonna – Everybody
Madonna – What It Feels Like For A Girl
Pulp – Turkey Momma Mambo
Pulp – The Trees

This was my first show on FCCFree Radio.  A few technical errors here & there, but I’ll stand by this one.

In celebration of today, August 19, the first full 24 hours of legal weddings for all, it’s The Marriage Show! Pull a loved one close for two hours of tunes and more about love, devotion and gettin’ hitched.

Wait, this show got delayed until 8/26? And marriage equality is off until at least December? Damn it, I’m doing the show anyway!!!

The show starts about five minutes into the full file! (Don’t let the heavy metal fool you.)  The set list is after the jump.
FIRST HOUR

Magnetic Fields – It’s Only Time
The Intruders – We’ll Be United
Dionne Warwick – This Girl’s In Love With You
Teenage Fanclub – Your Love Is The Place Where I Come From
XTC – Big Day
Nas – Getting Married
Smiley Lewis – The Bells Are Ringing
The Orioles – Crying In The Chapel
The Platters – With This Ring
The Isley Brothers – My Love Is Your Love (Forever)
David Bowie – Be My Wife
Antony & The Johnsons – Be My Husband
The Ronettes – Baby I Love You

SECOND HOUR

Marvin Gaye – Time To Get It Together
Tim Easton – I Would Have Married You
Wanda Sykes on Gay Marriage
Frank Sinatra – Love & Marriage
The Velvet Underground – I Found A Reason
The Stone Roses – This Is The One
Bob & Marcia – Really Together
The Ebonys – It’s Forever
Cassandra Wilson – Harvest Moon
The Muppets – Kermit & Miss Piggy Get Married
Jim O’Rourke – Close To You

Malcolm Maclaren fronting hip-hop culture

While most of the obituaries for Malcolm McLaren will rightfully center on his time as manager of The Sex Pistols, this was just the first of his successes in revolutionary pop music.  Upon its release in 1983, Duck Rock‘s distillation of Soweto, South Bronx and proto-electronica sounded like nothing on earth and everything on it at the same time.  Nowadays it sounds almost ridiculously dated.  The primitive turntablism sounds like something your 4-year old could do when you hand him your iPhone to distract him for a while.  The raps are impossibly old skool, practically “moon” and “june” rhyming.  Even the selection of African sources seems downright quaint as the recent crate-digging revolution led by Soundway and others continues to dig up impossibly modern-sounding treasures from the 70s.

To truly appreciate how insanely alien Duck Rock felt at the time, you need to place your ears in its historical context.

The idea of creating cut-up music and rhythms from records and charismatically, charmingly rhyme-chanting over them was still very new.  Rap and hip-hop were still barely more than rumors to most of the country.  Even as a teenager in relatively open & urban Berkeley, the hip-hop hits that bled out into our mainstream were more like novelty acts.  Grandmaster Flash was on auto-repeat in the school cafeteria, while Tom Tom Club and Blondie had fluke hits that played on hip-hop styles without actually committing to them.  But that was about it.  The great Def Jam/Run-DMC/Beastie Boys explosion of 1984 was still yet to come.

I would never go so far as to say Malcolm McLaren discovered African music, but for the 80s generation Duck Rock represented its introduction into their consciousness.  South Africa and apartheid were only just entering mainstream conversation in America.  None of the great boycotts had started.  Nelson Mandela was still in jail – and wasn’t he some kind of terrorist or something?  All we knew about him we learned about from The Special AKA.  Stevie Ray Vaughn and friends had not yet declaimed “I ain’t gonna play Sun City!”  Most critically to the success of Duck Rock, African music simply hadn’t made it over yet.  After the political convulsions of the late 1970s, Africa’s music industry was essentially gone.  Graceland wasn’t even a gleam in Paul Simon’s eye.  The Indestructible Beat Of Soweto was not on anyone’s radar, except perhaps Robert Christgau’s.

Finally, Duck Rock believe it or not is a critical early entry into the creation of the synth-y pop sound that dominated pop in the 80s and is a focus of today’s 80s revivalism.  Producer Trevor Horn was fresh off the successes of a couple of the best sounding and most influential post-punk synth-pop productions, ABC’s The Lexicon Of Love and Into Battle With The Art Of Noise, and yet to move on to the monolithic and silly manifesto-ism of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome To The Pleasuredome.  It’s difficult to give the sense now of how new and modern Horn’s production style felt in the early 80s, especially coming out of a long period starting with punk where amateurism was so key to the aesthetic.  Crucially, the Horn style sounded great on Walkman headphones in the early days of personal stereos when little else did.  And whether on purpose or not, Duck Rock brought together several burgeoning genres – African, electronica, sampling and hip-hop – that sounded great on cheap portable headphones, even better when moving in virtual isolation through an urban environment – still a novelty in those days.

I think it also bears noting that there was – and should be – considerable controversy over the provenance of the songs. Connecting the dots between township jive and US inner city radio seemed pretty clever at the time and still gives a nice message that we’re all connected, baby.  But there’s also real reason to be uncomfortable with that message, especially in light of the songwriting credits that give all the rights to “Horn/McLaren.”  One listen and you’ll see strong reason to doubt that they really had much to do with songwriting.  While it’s true in the early days of sampling that credits were a bit less… stringent, the co-opting of others’ artistry – in particular from distressed urban areas around the world – reeks of the worst of cultural imperialism.   This is another crucial way that Duck Rock is a product of its time even as it stretched out ears into the future.

(Come to think of it, Malcolm had done something similar with another music project six years earlier.)

Sell Out was The Who’s fourth LP and the band’s first attempt at a full-length concept album.  The schtick was that the album was really a radio show complete with interruptions for station IDs and commercials.  (This also made for a clever way to gloss over the production problem of the album’s schizophrenic body of songs – everything from Beach Boys pop to proto-metal.)  Underlining the “sell out” concept, many of the ads were for brands they loved with the hopes that Premier Drums and [ahem] Jaguar would shower the boys in the band with free product.

The album’s conceptual centerpiece is the track where it all comes together.  “Odorono” sounds like a sweet if overdone Byrds-y pop track with a curious narrative about a female singer’s big debut.  It’s not until the last line of the song that the curtain is pulled back to reveal that the whole 2+ minute song is an advert for deodorant.

Listen: The Who – The Who Sell Out

Of course that’s all performed as a sly joke.  But recent events have brought product placement in pop songs into the spotlight as a legitimate brand-builder.  Most notably Chris Brown’s “Forever” was revealed to be a jingle for Wrigley Doublemint Gum only after the track had already launched into the Top 10.  (Perhaps we should have noticed earlier because of the chorus: “Double your pleasure/double your fun”). “Forever” also shows in the most dramatic way possible the pitfalls and opportunities inherent in latching your brand to a pop song.  As anyone who has passed through a supermarket checkout lane in the last five months would have seen, Brown’s reputation is now tattered following a domestic violence incident with his then-girlfriend, Rihanna, and Wrigley subsequently pulled his spots out of rotation.

Out of the blue, “Forever” was hijacked by a viral video that has become one of 2009’s biggest hits, “JK Wedding Entrance Dance,” now standing at over 25 million views and providing Brown’s song an unexpected return to the iTunes Top 10 singles chart.  Reflecting on how the private lives of artists impact their professional output is often a fool’s game, so we should probably look past using a love song by a convicted girlfriend-beater for a wedding.  But one wonders if Jill & Kevin were aware how much of a role Wrigley played at their (now very public) nuptials and how much free publicity they would be giving the gum.  (Or do they work for Wrigley?  Nowthat would be brand dedication: product placement at your wedding.)  One thing’s for sure: Google noticed – and turned “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” into a case study for monetizing YouTube content.

Def Jam, meanwhile, is taking a different tack by reminding publishers that its products often have many more eyeballs than famous magazine and web brands.  To that end, Mariah Carey’s new album will include a 34-page mini-Elle magazine – while Elle will feature a 14-page spread about the album.  “We sell millions of records, so you should advertise with us,’ ” said Antonio “L.A.” Reid, IDJ’s chairman. “My artists have substantial circulation–when you sell 2 million, 5 million, 8 million, that’s a lot of eyeballs. Most magazines aren’t as successful as those records.” And, he might add, hit records have a lot more shelf life.  Just ask Chris Brown.  Or The Who.

Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically, shaped your world. When you finish, tag 15 others, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea now? Good. Tag, you’re it!

When I sat down to write this, I thought in terms of the albums that helped me learn how to listen, to form a critical opinion, or opened new worlds avenues & possibilities and so forth. By its nature, then, these 15 albums may not necessarily represent desert island discs, favorite artists, or even the best of a particular artist. In a couple of cases, I don’t even particularly enjoy the album any more though I can still catch the whiff of thrill I felt when I first heard it.

I started with about 50 albums and ruthlessly edited until only 15 remained. Most of the late scratches were albums where I felt that the one that made the final list already epitomized something in common between those albums; examples include Power Lies and Corruption edging out Seventeen Seconds and Remain In Light. (I didn’t say it made sense, I just said it was.)

And so, in rough chronological order:

THE ROLLING STONES, Their Satanic Majesties Request – It’s absurd and in points unlistenable, but to a 4-year old with a close-n-play it’s mysterious and full of whimsy, from the playful idolatrous cover art to the nonsense psychedelia of the songs. I would listen closely, scrutinizing every note cough mumble; it seemed so important to decode it. Though just a curiosity today, it has some of the Stones’ loveliest pop songs before they went on to become the raw, bluesy world-beating band they were over the next 10 years.
PS The remaster sounds amazing.

THE WHO, Tommy – It’s full of filler and the story is absurd, grotesque and more than a little offensive. For me, though, it unlocked the idea that rock could tell a story and that the different instruments could be expressive of character and ideas. On that basis, it beat the hell out of the “Young People’s Guide To The Orchestra” or “Peter & The Wolf.” And the playing still knocks me out. I’ll put Underture up against anything as one of the great instrumental performances.

THE BEATLES, The White Album (for this is what it should be called) –  This list would not be complete without any Beatles, a band that I devoured well into my teens. I don’t think is their best nor is it my favorite – it contains the very worst efforts by all four of them – but its very density makes it the one that I still find the most fascinating – a real songwriters’ battle royale. Oddly, I think my two favorite Beatles albums today may actually be solo albums: Ram and All Things Must Pass. (Bing! Snooty rock critic alert!)

PUBLIC IMAGE, LTD, Metal Box / Second Edition – How did we get there from here? Coming in a bit late for punk, this was my one of my first pick-ups of the genre. But really it couldn’t be further from punk; the trebly in-your-face pop-based guitars replaced by a dominant dubby danceable beats. It was scary and invigorating to hear something so released from pop form but still essentially fun to listen to. I’m sure this set me up for both techno and reggae as I discovered them later.

BRIAN ENO, Ambient 1: Music For Airports – I bought this off the in-store turntable at Leopold’s. (What strange self-absorbed 12-year old does that? [raises hand] That would be me.) But this album was freeing in so many ways. Free from composition & structure. Free from noise. Free from pop and conventional song structure. Yet it was peaceful and engaging. Plus it came with instructions for setting up your speakers properly.

GANG OF FOUR, Entertainment! – Even though the songs, polemics and unique performances are this album’s most obvious attributes, the affirmation I got from Gang Of Four came from what people – especially Greil Marcus – wrote and felt about them. I started reading Marcus in my parents’ copies of New West magazine while he was plowing through many of the same touchstones I was running into working at Universal Records in Berkeley. From this experience – and kudos to my mother the Art History major, too – I learned about art criticism and how it could add value to my experience to be a critical listener, question the narrator’s motivation and look for themes in the music that go beyond the obvious strands of plot. Who needed English class?

KRAFTWERK, Computer World – It seems so tame now in the face of the booming techno genre, but when this came out in 1981, absolutely nothing sounded like this. All synthetic and machinist, yet hinting at underlying humanity. It bespoke a world of machines whispering too each other constantly night day, sharing our secrets. I remember a day in 1993 temping for a bank when I realized that all the machines were secretly connected. The buzz of the wires suddenly seemed alive to me. Kraftwerk foresaw all that and more on this album. Plus, funky as all get out.

NEW ORDER, Power, Corruption & Lies – A transition out of the dark post-punk noise and stifled emotion back into passion and pop. Not to mention my cassette had Blue Monday tacked on as a bonus, the pinnacle sonic achievement of the whole early 80s era without doubt.

ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ATTRACTIONS, Get Happy! (Part 2 here) – 20 perfect pop songs sung & played furiously by a drug-fueled genius with sparks flying out of his head every which way. Most importantly, though, Get Happy led me to explore the album’s true roots, the sounds of classic soul. I dove deeply and found a rich vein of Americana that still remains one of my easiest sources of joy.

MARVIN GAYE, Anthology – Which leads me here. Even singing silly love songs, was there ever a more compelling voice? I thought I could sing – I still think I can sing a bit – but this just humbles me. It humbles everyone! There was a night in freshman dorm when a friend and I got stoned and put on “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.”  We were totally halted in what we were doing, compelled as the voice crashed in, forcing us to Stop and…just listen. I don’t think any other singer ever did that to me so convincingly.

PREFAB SPROUT, Two Wheels Good / Steve McQueen – I was 19 and scared of life, it’s about being 19 and scared of life. (A recent Pop Matters essay guesses that it’s secretly a failed concept album about masculinity.) And as pop songwriting goes, it’s perfection, on par with any you can think of. Light and deep at the same time, as all great pop trifles should be

MILES DAVIS, Kind Of Blue – It’s nothing but a cliche to say that this, the most popular jazz album of all time, opened me to the genre (see, for example, the stoner brother chapter of ‘Sometimes A Great Notion’). It’s embarrassing, like saying “I love reggae, yeah, I’ve got Bob Marley;s Legend and UB40. What, Bob Marley had other records? Sly & who?”  But you know what? Kind Of Blue is that good.
PS In A Silent Way was a late scratch for this list, but I thought Brian Eno and Miles Davis together did enough to fill the same intellectual spot on the list.

PUBLIC ENEMY, Fear Of A Black Planet – Taking the formula of tight James Brown beats and infringing chaos as far as it could go, this album brought down the curtain on the first great age of sampling and hip-hop. It’s a mess, but for sheer sonic inventiveness it’s a pinnacle of the form. Not to mention that in a time of great urban strife, Fear Of A Black Planet sounded like a sonic representation of the horrible crack epidemic striking at the cities I lived in and a bellwether for the shocking racial incidents to come in the next few years.

GUIDED BY VOICES, Bee Thousand – The album that launched me to a thousand shows, or so it seemed like. But really for me it was a return to rock after years & years away. Buried under the fuzz and half-baked ideas, a great classic rock band struggled to break free – which indeed was what happened when they performed live. In a renaissance period for American indie rock, this was the album that led me back to it.

ALVA NOTO & RYUICHI SAKAMOTO, Vrioon – There’s a weird moment during power cuts when the silence blooms and you realize how much static & white noise you are forced to live within, both from the environment and from within. This album expresses both the silence and the buzz – and does both with beauty and surprising emotiveness.

A number of commentators have remarked that these CDs may represent the last great CD release, a tombstone for a dying format.� Based on Aerosmith�s phenomenal success with Guitar Hero, which made the band more money than any of their albums, the CDs are not the real reason we�ll be seeing this push.� In that case, why not just put out The Beatles Rock Band out this year and then create another major marketing push for the CDs (or DVDs or downloads or what have you) in 2010?

My hunch is that The Beatles currently available CDs � rushed on to the market with barely a remix in the late �80s � were too lo-fi as they stood to be released on to machines providing high-fidelity experience like Xbox 360�s or PlayStation 3�s.� All of my friends who play Rock Band-like games have their consoles hooked to their stereos, not just their tiny TV speakers.� And when played after the loud, bright, often surround mixes demanded by these environments, The Beatles recordings will sound at best mid-rangy and at their worst completely colorless.� Through 1966, all the vocals were on one channel, the instruments on the other, which means that all the new Stereo and Surround mixes to come will be 2009 inventions.

So as the sonic quality comes up to par, expect not just a Beatles marketing blitz, but perhaps a whole re-evaluation of their work and ability as musicians – not to mention, a huge online war between the purists who think the 2009 stereo remastering paints a mustache on Mona Lisa and others who feel like �we�re hearing The Beatles for the very first time.�� (Another rank unfairness against their brethren like the Rolling Stones and The Who, both of whom put out fantastic-sounding remasterings chock full of extras earlier this decade to little fanfare.)

Another prediction: expect new respect for Ringo�s contributions.

Oooooh I’ve been looking forward to this one. Il est temps pour Jacques Dutronc!

Even though he’s inexplicably passed over in Wikipedia’s “Music Of France” entry, Dutronc was one of France’s two or three most popular French-language acts of the 1960s. Married to Francoise Hardy and a collaborator of Serge Gainsbourg, his debut album “Le Cactus” was a million-seller in 1966 and his career took off from there.

He is often likened to Ray Davies for his ironic songs and name-checked as part of the roots of Freakbeat. According to Bardot A Go Go, which also fills in some biographical details and links to lyrics of his witty and sarcastic songs:

What makes Dutronc great for many non-French speakers is the driving psychedelic sound of his rockin’ tunes. The driving buzz saw guitar of Les gens sont fous les temps sont flous strips down The Kinks’ You Really Got Me riff to a bare one note minimum with maxi affect.

RFIMusique nails the allure of Jacques Dutronc:

The singer’s nonchalant stage persona and the ironic, almost insolent way in which he delivered his lyrics proved an instant hit with the French public who adored Dutronc’s openly provocative style. Dutronc’s sartorial elegance also made a great impact. In an age where most pop stars were growing hippy beards and dressing in Afghan coats and bell-bottom jeans, Dutronc’s tailored suits and chic silk ties were guaranteed to make him stand out from the crowd.

Wow, kinda like (the stereotype of) France! Check out a few of his hip-swingin’ tunes:

Jacques Dutronc – Les Gens Sont Fous, Les Temps Sont Flous.mp3
Jacques Dutronc – Les Cactus.mp3
Jacques Dutronc – J’ai Tout Lu, Tout Vu, Tout Bu.mp3

Slipcue has some recommendations for further listening.

Listening to his music, it’s easy to imagine Dutronc ogling mini-skirted young women who in turn flirt with semi-shaven semi-showered strangely-hip Frenchmen. You know, the 60s existential France of Godard and Delon. In fact, I think I can see it right here:

Jacques Dutronc – Mini Mini Mini video at YouTube

After yesterday’s unfortunate loss to France, it seems appropriate to show a sadder side of one of the Cup’s participants. Carlos Paredes, "The Man With A Thousand Fingers," was the master guitarist of Fado, a traditional Portugese music that has its roots in Moorish times. Alternately playful and mournful, Fado evokes the country’s strong relationship with the sea and its feudal past. Paredes himself was an exemplar of the form. The son of another Fado master, Artur Paredes, Paredes was himself something of a tragic figure: jailed in the 50s and 60s as a Communist sympathizer, and forced to spend the last eleven years of his life unable to play because of a nerve disorder. He passed away in 2004.

The first track is from Paredes’ debut album called, naturally, Guitarra Portuguesa. The second is from his 1990 collaboration with Charlie Haden, recorded shortly before Paredes’ disability ended his playing career.

Carlos Paredes – Divertimento.mp3
Carlos Paredes & Charlie Haden – Danca de Camponeses.mp3

After the dominant performance in the Group Round and with “The Hand Of God” as personal cheerleader, I figured Argentina was a sure thing for the Final. But always beware playing the home side!

Astor Piazzolla was the master of 20th century tango and one of its great composers — touring, recording and composing ceaselessly for nearly 50 years before his death in 1992. He was about as close as you can get to a country having a National Musician; thankfully for Argentina and its musical reputation, Piazzolla was more Mozart than Salieri. (Or, to torture a simile, perhaps more Duke Ellington than Nelson Riddle.) Any description of Piazzolla’s music seems to have the phrase “not your Grandfather’s tango” attached, and really I have no idea what that means because I’m not sure I’ve heard much tango that’s not by Piazzolla. I think what’s being referred to was his triumph in getting tango out of the brothels and into concert halls & cafe society. I guess people don’t think much of their grandfather’s reputation.

Here are recordings of Piazzolla playing original compositions in two entirely different settings, the first with his nonet shortly before he passed away and the second a piece he commissioned for Kronos Quartet:

Astor Piazzolla – Milonga Del Angel.mp3
Kronos Quartet & Astor Piazzolla – Anxiety.mp3
Lots more Piazzolla and tango recordings are housed at piazzolla.org

Meanwhile, with Tango now the hoity-toity music of Argentina, Cumbia villera (“shantytown cumbia”) is now the dominant popular music form among the underclass. According to Wikipedia, “Many bands were propelled into fame when emerging football stars from the shantytowns (such as Carlos T?vez) proclaimed their allegiance” so I guess this is what you might have heard if you walked into the Argentine locker room before the game.

Imagine gangsta rap played with Casiotones on the latin rhythm setting just al little too slow setting. You can hear several examples and read about the genre (in Spanish) at this site. And, as always, seek on YouTube and ye shall find.

Another country with music I know way too much about. Plus I work for Brits — – and I’ve got the challenge of trying to avoid rawther obvious use & abuse of Mojo’s recent “50 Best British Songs” list. Hmm, better step carefully here.

OK, how ’bout:

Fairport Convention – Come All Ye.mp3
XTC – Respectable Street.mp3
Peter Sellers – A Hard Day’s Night.mp3

Covered by these three songs: minstrelsy, “England’s green fields,” folk tradition, proto-prog, music hall, classism, comedy, post-war suburbia, Britpop Mark 1, art school, The frickin’ Beatles, guys who want to sound like the frickin’ Beatles, post-punk, post-punk pop, eccentrics that can’t tour because of stage fright.

Things missed: Manchester, Madchester, bedsit, immigration & imperial fallout, Britpop Mark 2, punk, prog proper, Victoria Beckham and her friends, Pop Idol, mods, rockers, The frickin’ Stone Roses.

Well, I tried. I’ll meet you at the Cemetry Gates.

All props to the plucky Socceroos! Italy is leading a charmed life.

Here is something I’ve been wanting to know for a long time. I lived in Los Angeles during the great mid-80s PR push for Australian pop; Australia was the Seattle/Montreal/Omaha of the moment. (Midnight Oil! Men At Work! InXS! Aaaaargh!) One of these new import bands — I believe it was Mental As Anything? — was offered by KROQ as a contest prize to come to your house do your yardwork if you won. I always loved the image of these guys getting off their tour bus at some San Fernando valley tract home and being ordered to cut the lawn and haul the trash by some 14-year old.

Was this real? Did the band actually show up? Were they hung over? Please if you know anything about this, I’m dying to know. Suffice to say, Mental As Anything did not make much of an impact in the US. (…and, wow, what an awful band name. I can only imagine the discussion in the record company board room: “We need a band like Men At Work!” “How about Mental As Anything?” “Never heard ‘em, but sign ‘em!” This did happen back in the day: A-Ha was signed because of the band’s photogenic looks without the record company ever having heard their music.)

The Church – Too Fast For You.mp3
Long before the wonderful but overplayed “Under The Milky Way,” The Church already had their sound and aesthetic down pat. They made several great records and are still putting out moody albums, but if you live in the US, you’d never know it.

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds (with Kylie Minogue) – Where The Wild Roses Grow.mp3
Extracted from the vaguely insane “Murder Ballads” album, this is easily one of the creepiest records I’ve heard, not least because in listening to it I’m forced to imagine Nick & Kylie’s love life.

The Saints – (I’m) Misunderstood.mp3
“(I’m) Stranded” was the hit — and possibly the finest single out of the first wave of punk, but it’s been profiled by World Cup bloggers elsewhere. At least I go with the “(I’m)” in the title by selecting this tune.

Two very different types of dance music compose my last entry covering a Group Round knockout:

Saban Bajramovic – Hanuma.mp3
Saban is known as the “World of Gypsy Music.” Why? Because Indira Gandhi dubbed him so! Yugoslavia’s leading artist in the 1960s, he has apparently gone missing after the former republic’s turbulent ’90s. “Legend also has it that Gypsies respect and love Tito the most, Saban second and then, after ten empty places, once again Saban.” More on Saban’s incredible story here.
UPDATE: Saban is still out there doing his thing. Here is an account of a performance last month in London: ROMA ROMA: Saban!

dZihan & Kamien – Stiff Jazz.mp3
d & K hail from Sarajevo, but moved to Vienna to study music after the hometown fell into a bit of chaos last decade; you may have heard something about this. Hmmm, that looks suspiciously like K&D. As well it should, as dZhihan & Kamien specialize in the same feckless yet pleasant and popular pseudo-jazz that their Austrian mates Kruder & Dorfmeister specialize in. I’m always torn whether to like this kind of music; it’s easy to enjoy and the playing is strong, but I tire of it as an indicator of Big-Money Cool at boutique hotels and high-end restaurants. I swear the W Hotel hasn’t changed the CD it plays at the bar in seven years, or since I first heard this genre as Business Manager for the ill-fated club-music magazine, Revolution.

Paraguay is surprisingly absent from the Internet. Hardly any pictures. No music. Wikipedia’s entry on "Music of Paraguay" mentions more reggaeton artists from Puerto Rico than anything native. The first few pages of a Google Images search on its capitol, Asuncion, returns a large proportion of pictures of a local Mormon temple. I am indebted to Call Me Mickey for finding something, anything.

Agustin Barrios – Los Indios Paraguayos.mp3

Random thoughts on a day of defeat:

Isn’t it appropriate that I have the US entry following the Saudi entry? We’ll follow those guys anywhere. (rimshot) I’ll be here all the week, don’t forget to tip the waitresses.

Rant coming: If people get so upset about American flag-burning, why is it OK to wear Old Glory as a bandana or a T-shirt or facepaint or a bikini top or a towel or…? I am always shocked when I see alleged patriots displaying old faded flags, flags touching the ground, faded flag bumper stickers, flags left out at night, unlit… It’s fundamentally wrong and easy to see & know that it’s wrong. When the military has elaborate routines about how the flag should be hung, folded and destroyed with honor, surely my fellow citizens should easily see that wadding up their faded American flag t-shirt and throwing it on the bedroom floor or drooling ice cream on it is disrespective and certainly not patriotic. Am I wrong in thinking that the people who are most likely to “wear the flag” are closely related or perhaps even the same people who get so upset over flag desecration? Shouldn’t proposed constitutional amendments banning flag-burning also cover bikinis?

Which is all just a way of working to this next thought: When I see people from other nations at the World Cup wearing their national colors, I usually think “Wow, that’s so great that they have such spirit.” On the other hand, if I see a bunch of Americans with stars and stripes painted on their faces or chests or whatever, I’m embarassed. Am I wrong to feel shame? Or would it be worse to be at the stadium and not proudly display the colors?

My colleague Simon over at My Name Is Betty, who has some pretty great World Cup music coverage going himself, heard this same complaint from me and responded “As for the people in national dress, you’re embarrassed? English national dress seems to be a shaved head and a beer gut, maybe a novelty hat. I’m fortunate to live in London though – my street alone has Ghanaian, Trinidadian, English, Australian, Portuguese, Italian and even Jamaican flags out, and it wouldn’t take me too long to gather the rest. It’s good fun, every four years doesn’t come often enough.” It must be nice to live in a place where immigrants are considered pluses.

I worked for a Frenchman for a number of years and he told me several times how amazing he thought it was that there so many flags displayed in America. I plead ignorance until we looked out at the view from North Beach and, sure enough, every building in downtown SF was flying the colors. It was shocking to really see this, and this was long before 9/11. It’s nice to be patriotic, sure, but it looked more neurotic than anything else, like the old saw that nothing is Cool that has to continually tell you it’s Cool.

And now to the task at hand. It’s completely ridiculous to try to sum up my home country’s rich musical tapestry in a couple of songs. Just think of the musical forms that are indigenous and original to the US: rap, jazz, surf, tin pan alley, musical theatre, blues, country… When I think of how my “World Cup World Tour” is trying to put this same straightjacket on 31 other countries, it brings home that I’ve taken on an enormous task with at best well-meaning chutzpah and at worst total arrogance. (And doesn’t that make me so quintessentially American?) But just to be clear, I’m not trying to sum up or size up countries or their musical output with just a couple of songs, but simply trying introduce a taste of the musical life that floats through each nation’s cultural aether. Hey, I can try, right?

So in that spirit, I offer for the United States its greatest living songwriter ruminating on natural disaster & cultural collision and two of its most rockin’ clown princes having a cultural collision and just being silly. Enjoy.

Bob Dylan – High Water (For Charley Patton).mp3
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion with Rufus Thomas – Chicken Dog.mp3

Insult to injury: There was no baseball on the night after the US-Ghana game.

As in Iran, female singers are banned in Saudi Arabia, thus knocking out half the fun. I get the sense that fun isn’t a real high priority over there.

Abdulmajeed Abdulla – Al Gaid.mp3
Mohamed Abdu – Abaa’d.mp3

I think the Mohamed Abdu track kinda rocks — it takes a while to get going, it’s 20 minutes long and it’s not exactly pop — but 20 year-old Rima Mo in Jeddah can’t stand it. Here are Rima’s reasons why she hates Mohamed Abdu:

1/Every Friday we visit my grandmother from my fathers side, and only God knows how she loves mohammed abdu. So we are forced to listen to all his music EVERY FRIDAY!!! :O

2/On our way to visit the same grandmother and on our way back home my Dad plays mohammed abdu’s CD ALL THE WAY and EVERY FRIDAY!!! :O

3/It’s like he has the same Melody but only different words.:S

4/I feel sleepy whenever I hear him singing.

5/He never Smiles.This man is like that All the time.(not happy)

Hoo-wee, at least my father dropped the Jimmy Buffett habit after a while. But if I have to hear Eric Clapton "Unplugged" one more time…

Abdulmajeed Abdulla comes courtesy of Call Me Mickey, which also has excellent World Cup music coverage

BTW I’m superstitiously not doing the United States today because I’m trying to save countries that make the Round of 16 for later. USA! USA!

Iran’s President Bans Western Music

(AP, December 19, 2005): Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has banned Western music from Iran’s radio and TV stations, reviving one of the harshest cultural decrees from the early days of 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Songs such as George Michael’s "Careless Whisper," Eric Clapton’s "Rush" and the Eagles’ "Hotel California" have regularly accompanied Iranian broadcasts, as do tunes by saxophonist Kenny G…

Well, heck, who can blame him?

Today’s MP3s come from Googoosh, who was Iran’s biggest female pop singer through the ’60s and early ’70s until the Islamic Revolution put an end to women getting to express themselves in public. The revolution ended not just her ability to give live performances, but also barred her from entering a recording studio or giving interviews.

O-Hum is today’s other featured artist. Certainly you’ve heard of bands that can’t get signed and turn to the Internet to seek its audience. O-Hum have a whole different spin. Iran’s most popular alternative band, its record label was behind them 100%, but The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance "ejected the album a couple of times, describing O-Hum’s music as "Western", "cheap" and contrary to Islamic moral standards. Because of this, the record company broke off its deal with the band and cancelled everything." (Or at least so says O-Hum’s Wikipedia entry.)

O-Hum – Darvish.mp3
Googoosh – Shahrzad-e Qesseh-goo.mp3
Lots more Googoosh here, mostly LP and cassette rips

After yesterday’s horrible beating of the US side, it’s only fitting to feature the Czech Republic. The former Czechoslovokia had a flourishing psychedelic scene around the time of the 1968 uprising, all of it illegal and deep underground. Surprisingly, quite a bit of material survived.

I should also note that the first thing that confronted me upon my only visit to Prague in 1990 — posted in the train station’s tourist office — was “Phi Zappa Crappa,” the famous poster of Frank Zappa sitting on the toilet. That’s enjoying your freedom!

Said the Gramophone: Arcade Fire’s Will Butler talks about 1960s Czech underground psychedelic bands (with MP3s)
Furious: The incredible story of The Plastic People Of The Universe

Down a man? Never played in the World Cup before? No problem for the folks from the home of calypso!

Lord Invader – No Place Like The West Indies.mp3
Lord Invader – Auf Wiedersehen.mp3
Photo by David Sanger

There are several countries for which presenting music is going to be a tad difficult. I’ll just come right out and confess that Ecuador and Paraguay have me stumped. I’ve got the rest under control, though.

Luckily, the always excellent Benn Loxo du Taccu, the blogosphere’s clear leader in African music, has Togo covered for me today.

Benn loxo du taccu: The Togo Upset?
featuring the music of Bella Bellow

The Sweet Talks – Eyi Su Ngaangaa.mp3
Honny & The Bees – Psychedelic Woman.mp3
Photo credit: kirikou.com

“What makes a great conservative rock song? The lyrics must convey a conservative idea or sentiment, such as skepticism of government or support for traditional values. And, to be sure, it must be a great rock song.”

Surprisingly, Mr. Miller missed the all-time greatest conservative song (in the revulsing conservative kinda way): “Student Demonstration Time” by The Mike Love Beach Boys.

The National Review: Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs
The National Review: Another 50 Conservative Rock Songs

As usual, Marc at The Sunday Morning Hangover leads the way on the classic art rock tip. Today is the 40th anniversary of the release of Pet Sounds, a weird and wonderful record that still stands virtually alone in its sound and scope. David Leaf’s liner notes for the 1997 edition of Pet Sounds are the ultimate guide to this watershed production.

Be sure to check out Marc’s show this Sunday for “rehearsals, outakes, vocal and backing tracks for the entire Pet Sounds project. Lots of very rare and exciting material will be featured for this two hour special.” Sundays, 8-10am Pacific Time at KWVA Eugene.

[Soundtrack]
The Beach Boys – God Only Knows 1967 tour rehearsal

Listen to The Sunday Morning Hangover archive or subscribe to the podcast.

Last update: December 20, 4pm PDT.

You know you need it: Christmas music that you can bear. Get these on your iPod and connect it to the stereo before your stepmother can hit Play on The Kenny G Christmas Album. I’ll add to this list as I find more good sites.

Music blogs with massive yuletide offerings
Something Old, Something New: Have A Something, Something Christmas Be sure to look around the rest of this blog, as Volumes 2, 3 and 4 have been subsequently posted.
Comp?s 6/8: Jinglebell Rock
Womenfolk: Fa la la la la
Rusty Spell’s Online Mix Tape
The Sufjan Stevens Christmas Album – Hark! Songs For Christmas, Volumes 1-3
Copy, Right?: 15 cover versions of Wham’s “Last Christmas”
ENTRETIEMPO CON M?SICA: S?LO POR LA MALDITA NAVIDAD
Why Fidelity: Christmas Podcasts of “Music That Falls Between The Cracks”

Cheesy Christmas – whole albums!
Ernie (Not Bert): Christmas Sharity Recap, Week Three
Example title: Dick Leibert At The Console-The Happy Hits Of Christmas (Christmas Evergreens Played On The Radio City Music Hall Organ)

Christmas Albums For You To Admire and/or Fear
101 Christmas Album Covers
Bizarre Christmas Album Covers

I’ve been one of the semi-obsessed people that’s been downloading the infamous John Peel Singles Box off of I Love Music all week. Granted I’m up against one of the all-time erudite music snobs, but I’m still blown that I know maybe 20% of the singles that the world’s leading DJ and archivist treasured most. (Particularly awesome Paul Morley story on the Box can be found here.)

As I go through the spoils, I’m going to share some of my favorite finds. After all, that’s what Mr. Peel would have wanted. As an American, I can’t actually say that I ever had the pleasure of enjoying his show or his finds, but there’s little question in my mind that his tastes radiated outward to influence a whole lot of my own: the A&R man that worked for all of us, not just the labels. Without any further ado…

When this version of “I Wish It Would Rain” came on as I was doing some chores, I stopped dead in my tracks — which of course is pretty much the highest compliment you can give a piece of music; the moment when you stop and go “What was that?” In my mind, The Temptations take on this song was melodramatic and insincere. With a solo artist taking this on, it seems that much more heartfelt and wrenching, not least because it’s no longer a showcase for a group mind but a stripdown for a lonely solo artist. The Temptations’ backup singers seem to be providing consolation; not so here. No longer friends clicking up their heels in the background, the backup singers in Adams’ version become part of the singer’s psyche, echoing thoughts and doubts. Without the gloss and the synchronized moves, “I Wish It Would Rain” blooms into something much more riveting: a man on the edge for an undisclosed reason pushing a bad situation into outright masochism.

[Soundtrack]
Johnny Adams – I Wish It Would Rain

Some info on Johnny Adams. He was from Nawlins, wouldn’t you know?

Marc Time, my old friend and the founder of robot dancing, swept the radio awards in the Eugene Weekly’s annual “Best Of Eugene” issue! Marc took the bowling trophies for Best Local Radio Personality and Best Radio Show. Considering he’s on at 8am on Sundays, that’s an impressive achievement. Way to motivate the voter base, Marc!

Eugene Weekly 2005 Best Of: Local Personalities (Marc is near the bottom)

Check out Marc’s award-winning radio show, The Sunday Morning Hangover, every Sunday 8am-10am.

It’s 8:00 on a Tuesday and I could hop the bus and be outside The Warfield in a matter of minutes scalping tickets for Gang Of Four. I loved their show in May and they recorded two of my all-time favorite albums, but something stops me, just as something stops me from scurrying after Go4′s new album of re-recorded classics, Return The Gift. It seems odd that a band that made its myth by critiquing the listener’s and the band’s relationship to Capital is so actively repackaging, re-touring, re-playing, Re-Spinning. I realize that the re-recordings are in fact part of a continuing effort to Stick It To The Man, but there has to be a better way than asking the same people to pay for Sticking It again and again. (I thought that was Elvis Costello’s job.) Surely most of tonight’s crowd will be people who attended one of the two Fillmore shows. So at best, it’s playing to the choir (and shaking them down at the same time), and at worst, well, I’m going to give them the benefit of a doubt and not go into the worst.

In any case, for those of you who have their curiosity piqued by this whole Return The Gift thing – it’s got a dollar in the cover, get it? – Silence Is A Rhythm Too has a couple of MP3s and some good commentary.

Silence Is A Rhythm Too: Return The Gift

UPDATE: This show was canceled. So there went a whole lot of hand-wringing for nothing. Must be a blog.

Nick over at Jazz And Conversation, a jazz MP3 blog (with conversation, natch), posted an excellent podcast in support of Nawlins community radio station WWOZ 90.7 FM. Nick is consistently interesting and has a lot of great music picks, so mosey on down to his place. After you read The Entroporium, of course.

Jazz and Conversation – Bringing the Music Back To New Orleans

Here’s the sequence of today’s mix, dedicated to the WWOZ staff and the musicians who make the spirit of New Orleans:

Sugar Foot Stomp / King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (recorded in 1923)
Tipitina / Professor Longhair
Walking to New Orleans / Fats Domino
Ma ‘Tit Fille / Buckwhat Zydeco
Iko Iko / Dr. John
Basin Street Blues / Louis Prima
Hey Pocky Way / The Meters
Will The Circle be Unbroken / Neville Brothers

Continuing The Entroporium’s series touching on some of its favorite New Orleans music…

Wynton Marsalis is easily one of the most controversial, clever, talented and interesting people working in American music over the last twenty years. That said, he also has a catalogue that’s nearly impenetrable to outsiders. In 1999 alone, he put out nine albums — actually eight albums with a bonus freebie. And which one is the point of entry? For us jazz-loving laymen, there’s almost no way to know.

Compounding the problem, his most ‘significant’ works tend to be way over two hours, full of ‘seriousness’ and somewhat lacking in memorable tunes. The shining example, in so many ways, would be his masterwork Blood On The Fields, a 3-hour piece on slavery that was the first jazz work to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize. A major achievement, yes, but if a melodic, well-performed 3-hour jazz meditation on slavery didn’t win a Pulitzer, wouldn’t you be a bit surprised? I mean, really. At least it wasn’t for Stanley Crouch’s incredibly pompous sermon on “The Death of Jazz,” which features on the otherwise fabulous 1989 release The Majesty Of The Blues.

Fortunately there are a few accessible points in Marsalis’s 40+ album discography. One highlight is his 1991 trilogy Soul Gestures In Southern Blue. (See, it still has to be a Trilogy, not just a plain old album.) One of the things that Marsalis always has going for him is his ability to identify and nurture young talent in his bands, and these three albums play up his sidemen’s strengths and gives them lots of room. That’s the good news about a trilogy; everybody gets plenty of time at the front of the stage.

About the time that Soul Gestures came out, I had the privilege to see Marsalis and his band with Elvin Jones, late of John Coltrane’s famous quartet, on drums in a small club in Emeryville. Even though Jones had played on Soul Gestures Vol. 1, the band instead ran through a furious version of “A Love Supreme.” It was unexpected and completely stupendous, one of the finest performances I’ve ever seen anywhere. Since then, Marsalis has graduated to concert halls and the chance to see him in smaller venues is essentially gone. But if you get the opportunity, Go!

Today’s selection is the title track from Levee Low Moan: Soul Gestures In Southern Blue, Vol. 3. Before Katrina hit, this tune was simply a depiction of a slow, hot, sticky carefree day in a neighborhood across from a levee in New Orleans with the Mississippi whispering behind the walls. Now of course you could see this as more of a longing for that simpler time. Nevertheless, a terrific little piece of restraint and beauty, well worth the 10MB download.

[Soundtrack]
Wynton Marsalis – Levee Low Moan.mp3

Blogcritics.org: Wynton Marsalis on America’s Cultural Bankruptcy (with audio and PDF links to Marsalis’s original speech, followed by interesting comments from readers)
Slate: Trumpeting Mediocrity – Was Wynton Marsalis ever that good?

Continuing The Entroporium’s series touching on some of its favorite New Orleans music…

They won’t count this one in the death toll, but it’s demonstrative of the shock and stress that Katrina is putting on her people. Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, surely the owner of the best New Orleans musician nickname this side of “Frogman,” passed away yesterday yafter being forced to travel to Texas from his Slidell, LA home. Although his sound had a strongTexas influence, Brown was a fixture on the New Orleans scene and was still active as recently as April despite a long battle with cancer.

Here is one of his early jump blues hits in the style of Wynonie Harris. Though I can’t find the exact date for this, I’d place it in the 1948-52 area. This is in the popular style of the time, but instead of a bunch of one-note faux-exciting sax solos in the middle section, there’s a distinctive kick-ass blues guitar solo.

[Soundtrack]
Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown – Rock My Blues Away.mp3

Alligator Records’ Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown bio with streaming music
BBC: Blues star Brown dies at 81

Continuing The Entroporium’s series touching on some of its favorite New Orleans music…

All these sad songs! Enough already! It bears remembering that the classic New Orleans funeral march is a pretty upbeat affair. Gotta get back to the funk!

The New Orleans scene has a jauntiness that made it a breeding ground for wacky, dementedly joyful records. In particular, it had a flair for being the epicenter for novelty hits andin the 50s and 60s, everything from “Iko Iko” to “I Like It Like That” to “Mother-In-Law.” And of course you can’t leave out the charismatic and eccentric shouters like Richard Penniman, better known to the world as simply Little Richard.

Here are a couple of my sillier favorites. Play loud!

[Soundtrack]
Eddie Bo – The Thang, Part 2.mp3
Clarence “Frogman” Henry – Ain’t Got No Home.mp3

Continuing The Entroporium’s series touching on some of its favorite New Orleans music…

Randy Newman isn’t really perceived as a New Orleans artist, but his impressive body of work often revisits his hometown both in content and in tone.

Unfortunately, Newman is best known to non-aficionados for his soundtrack work and some of his jokier songs like “Short People,” “I Love LA” and “It’s Money That Matters.” Those have their place in the grand scheme, but the albums that really make Newman worth discussing are the three he released in the early 1970s: Good Old Boys, 12 Songs and Sail Away. Utterly unafraid of taking on big issues in his songs, Newman is one of the great Baby Boomer satirists; in my head, I always figured that a Kurt Vonnegut novel would sound like a Randy Newman record.

At times, his incisive humor and economical songwriting would cut almost too close to the bone. Take “Sail Away,” surely one of the loveliest songs ever recorded. A beautiful lullaby to the Naked Ear, except that the song’s narrator has something more incendiary on his mind; it comes out over the course of the song that he’s a slave boat captain with designs on luring unsuspecting Africans onboard and into a new life :

In America every man is free
To take care of his home and his family

You’ll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree

You’re all gonna be an American

By making the song so beautiful and lushly orchestrated, you too are lulled into the trap; it could be many spins before you realize the horror that the narrator is proposing to you, the listener. It’s an amazing songwriting gambit that few performers have accomplishe. The elegance and wit of the trap make “Holidays In The Sun” and “California Uber Alles” seem like fourth grade haikus by comparison.

Today’s song has been around the blogosphere quite a bit lately for obvious reasons, but it’s strong enough to bear repeating here. I love the image of the “little fat man” that follows President Coolidge around as he tours the flood damage. If only Michaels Brown or Chertoff were indeed ‘little fat men,’ the circle would be complete.

[Soundtrack]
Randy Newman – Louisiana 1927.mp3 (original version from Good Old Boys)

Salon Brilliant Careers: Randy Newman (no day pass necessary!)
NPR: Randy Newman, Live in Studio 4A
The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Randy Newman at Jefito.com

Continuing The Entroporium’s series touching on some of its favorite New Orleans music…

I’m out of my depth when it comes to writing about Louis Armstrong and his importance to modern music, except to say that he’s somewhere up there with — oh, I don’t know — Beethoven, John Cage, The Beatles, Elvis Presley… Artists that shattered paradigms and then built their own. When we listen to jazz played by a smalll combo, you’re on Armstrong’s turf.

Here are two recordings, one by his groundbreaking Hot Band from the 1920s and a 1946 version of a song that a lot of people are going to find themselves singing in months to come.

[Soundtrack]
Louis Armstrong – St. Louis Blues.mp3
Louis Armstrong – Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans.mp3

Before rap so overtly became “the black CNN” (as Chuck D memorably put it), African-American music was often full of heavily coded messages about African-American life. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but when I see the title “Do You What It Means To Miss New Orleans” on a record from 1946, I can’t help but think of the massive nation-changing diaspora that took place during & after World War II when Southern Blacks moved into the North to take better-paying manufacturing jobs that had previously not been available to them. The area where I grew up, San Francisco’s East Bay, is chock full of unexpected Southern touches and cuisine because of the great migration of Southerners that came in the 1940s. Armstrong had traced much this same route through his career; born in Nola, he achieved his greatest successes when he burst national out of the Chicago, LA and New York jazz scenes. I don’t know if Armstrong performed this song to speak upon his own experience or whether he was playing to a sentimental crowd, but I like to imagine it was the latter.

Jazz Profiles from NPR – Louis Armstrong: The Trumpeter
Louis Armstrong biographical information at PBS

I get back from my annual Burning Man-forced news blackout and frickin’ Armageddon hit a huge swath of the country. I knew going up that things were going to be bad; my last news as my radio signal faded in the desert was that the levees had broken and the water was spilling in. I imagined that the city was gone, but I was still surprised by the level of depravity and desperation achieved. We should all be asking ourselves questions about how this might happen in our own communities and what we can do to prevent it, but that is a topic for a later post.

I never had the privilege of visiting Nawlins, but it always loomed large for me as a place of cultural richness and weird behavior, seemingly catering to the very worst touristic instincts — gluttony, drunkenness, sloth — but without the cold calculation of the minds that run Las Vegas. Not to mention centuries of political machinations, running the gamut from virtual dynastic royalty to populist uprisings to Lee Harvey Oswald hawking socialist newspapers down on the corner.

For the next several posts, I’ll be whipping out some of the great artists that made Nola one of the most influential musical cities in the universe. With the great diaspora under way and most of the area’s housing stock destroyed, we may never see a city like this again where history and demographics conspired to blend such disparate influences and peoples to create unique, exciting music.

Today’s artist, Lee Dorsey, is a personal favorite. With several huge national hits in the mid-60s (including “Ya Ya,” “Working In A Coal Mine” and “Everything I’m Gonna Do Is Gonna Be Funky”), Dorsey was massively influential on the birth of funk in the late 60s. Although he didn’t have the flash of megastar performers like James Brown, you can hear Dorsey’s intonation and groove in many of the great funk bands of the 70s, like Parliament and Cameo. Perhaps he’d be better known today if he hadn’t retired in 1970 to open an auto repair business. Yes, really.

[Soundtrack]
Lee Dorsey – Yes We Can Can.mp3
Lee Dorsey – Give It Up.mp3
Lee Dorsey at AllMusic
Robert Christgau covers Dorsey opening for The Clash in 1980

And indeed they did kick out the jams (is there really any other way to say it?). The reconstituted DKT/MC5 slammed through the whole album, from the iconic title track (though without the spoken introduction) all the way through the cover of Sun Ra’s “Starship.” It was a storming rendition of one of the all-time great rock and roll albums, and it was treated with reverence and authority by the original performers. What more can you ask for?

In some ways, MC5 represented everything that’s overblown and hateful about 60′s rock. Let me count the ways: free jazz freakouts, excessive use & abuse of Louie Louie and blues scales, noodly high-octave soloing, references to the crowd and band as “Brothers & Sisters,” obligatory unhappiness about the current political situation, multiple attempts at breaking down The Fourth Wall between the crowd and the performers… but I have to admit, this was the Revolutionary 60′s shtick done to the 9′s. That awesome sound of guitars so loud that the music starts to feel like it’s coming apart – contemporary exemplars include Thurston Moore and Neil Young – mmm it was good.

The element that really made sealed the deal was the enthusiasm of the crowd, many of whom were from back in the day and clearly in heaven to be part of it again. Most of the punters sang along under its breath, while the 3-part singalong round of “Rocket Reducer No. 62 (Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa)” was the most complex piece of audience participation I’ve ever seen pulled off successfully. On different occasions, Mark Arm and Wayne Kramer roamed the crowd and they were treated with a reverence you never see at a typical stage-diving show. It was revolutionary, sure, but we can still respect each other! An important message for our impolitic era.

After Mark Arm’s screams sent the Starship “leaving … the … SOLAR …. SYSTEEEEEMMMMMM!,” the band took an intermission before it came back and ran through most of Back In The USA. Manitoba did his punk-wrestler act, Kekaula evangelized and, um, looked at us (as per the song), and Mark Arm did his cross-eyed crazy man routine to a T. Even without knowing that this was once one of the great bands, this was still a great night for my friends who were not familiar with the original material. Susie got her picture taken with Mark after the show and everybody agreed that it was a an all-time Top Ten show. Not bad for a spur of the moment lucky break on vacation!

Curiously this was not a sellout, possibly because MC5 was due to play the next day for free with Sun Ra Arkrestra and DJ Spooky in Central Park, but I’m betting that it also had something to do with the aftertasted of last year’s semi-disastrous Evan Dando tour. Nevertheless, the NorthSix management said that this was the most enervated & excited crowd that had ever come out to the club, which is pretty amazing given the roster of talent that’s come through there over the years. Brothers & Sisters!

[Testify!]
Jukebox Graduate was there, too, she’s got pictures of the show and she’s far more knowledgable about MC5 than I am
jukeboxgraduate.com: i wanna hear some revolution: return of the MC5

Pop Matters on Kick Out The Jams: “With the exception of the Who’s Live at Leeds, no live recording has captured the primal elements of rock more than the MC5′s inaugural effort…”

Lil Mike has a brief history of MC5, some randy pictures and a few MP3s

MC5 – Kick Out The Jams.mp3

Ah, the good old days of music TV before all the sleazy videos. Just a band lip-syncing and bringing their special brand of love to the fanbase…

These clips are probably the weirdest, most abrasive performances ever on Top 40-type programs. Today this would be TRL — the performance finished, Carson Daly dashes onstage to kick it with Johnny, who in turn introduces a vaguely pedophilic Jojo video.

[Audio-Visual]
Public Image – Death Disco.mpg on Top Of The Pops, 1979
Yes, Jah Wobble is really sitting in a dentist’s chair

Public Image lipsyncs “Poptones” and “Careering” on American Bandstand, 1980 (20MB MOV)
Stick with it for the dancing. Dick Clark demonstrates laudable good sportsmanship. That man will do anything to please the kids!


Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

In the dark days before MP3 blogs and the internets, it was a lot harder to come by music news out of the mainstream. Now put yourself back in 1981 and 14 years old. Even for a kid working in a record store, there were very few outlets to find out what the latest on the art punk heroes from far away. The mainstream music press, which then was Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone and Rolling Stone, took an almost complete pass on the punk revolution and its aftermath. I had three main sources, each of them lovable and flawed in their own ways.

First there was Trouser Press. Today it’s considered one of the ne plus ultra music reviewers of its time, but that’s mostly on the strength of the Trouser Press Record Guide, which is still in print and can now be accessed in full for free. TP was the only national magazine covering the New Wave in any kind of detail with cover stories for the likes of The Clash and Devo.

Nevertheless, during my readership it was still handing covers to Bill Wyman and Genesis. It’s a great reminder of how confusing a time it was for listeners and for the music press. Petty was being marketed as a new waver power poppers like The Police and Squeeze were advertised as cutting edge. Even Billy Joel got in on the act; “It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me,” incredibly, was seen at the time as his punk hit. (Click here to see TP’s bizarre cover choices.) If you wanted the latest on the new wave sounds that managed to fight to the top of the charts, though, Trouser Press was the only choice.

More fun was Damage Magazine, a tabloid-sized punk zine from San Francisco in the manner of Search & Destroy or Slash, which had both already come & gone. Unfortunately I can find nothing anywhere about Damage, not on eBay, not anywhere. It’s just plain gone. If anybody has an archive, let me know!

The most influential for me, though, was Greil Marcus’ column in New West. The magazine was like New York Magazine, West Coast-style. For some reason, the editors gave Marcus completely free rein, and instead of writing about the burgeoning West Coast punk scene – or even the West Coast sound dominating the charts at the time (Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, etc.) – he tackled the fringes of UK post-punk with feature length articles about the likes of Gang Of Four, Delta 5 and the Au Pairs. Then he’d mix all that in with pieces about his love for Jackson Browne’s back-up vocalists. It must have been terribly confusing for readers his age, but for me it made perfect sense. The post-punkers were my bedroom listening, but all that California pop was what my parents were playing when they got stoned while I sat in the backseat of the Volvo. They were deeply separate worlds, but I was living in both.

[Soundtrack]
Public Image – The Cowboy Song.mp3
Trouser Press had a (regular?) column about misheard lyrics. (Creedence: “Don’t go out with Ike / He’s bound to take your wife / There’s a bathroom on the right” Ha ha ha) One time they wrote that they wanted to include the complete lyrics to PiL’s “Cowboy Song,” the B-side to “Public Image,” but space prevented them from doing so. Naturally I was intrigued, so I ran out and found a copy. Well, your guess is as good as mine. Were they kidding? Was this an in joke? I still can’t tell.

Crime – Piss On Your Dog.mp3
Representing Damage Magazine, here’s an example of how it looked and read, but in sonic form: messy, smart and pretty darn funny.

Greil Marcus’s New West columns are collected in In The Fascist Bathroom, originally published as Ranters & Crowd Pleasers. This book is still a fixture in my fascist bathroom.

Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Let’s think about this for a second. It’s a lonely hearts club. For war widows and widowers. The Beatles are standing over an open grave. Despite its triumphal sound, its more mournful and depressing than anything else.

Is this really an appropriate opener for a concert benefitting Africa’s impoverished?

“This one goes out to all my African homies who have lost loved ones to poverty, AIDS and civil war! ‘It’s wonderful to be here, it’s certainly a thrill, yer such a lovely audience, we’d like to take you home with us…’” It’s kind of a dirty line, really, when the band is singing it to a roomful of widowed old ladies.

Lecture presentation on why Sergeant Pepper is actually incredibly depressing instead of technicolor touchstone to come in some future entry.

I wanted to get this track up last week for Gay Pride, but this being The Entroporium, there’s always a little bit less energy over time.

Lizzy Mercier Descloux was a peripheral figure in the No Wave scene that hit New York City at the end of the 70s. Enormously influential on many of today’s artists, the No Wavers brought the heavy funk, a downtown art punk attitude and sly humor to everything they did. If you’re an LCD Soundsystem devotee, you should definitely do a little digging because you’re going to like what you find.

“Funky Stuff” exemplifies the best and outright funniest elements of No Wave. It’s a cover of a Kool & The Gang hit, made unrecognizable, the beat turned completely inside out and back in on itself, like somebody took the original and kicked it down a very long staircase.

It’s best, though, to think of this track as more of a visual piece. Descloux is center stage in the mix in front of a robotic chorus of men, who are dancing in unison, sweating, getting down, doing what they do. Her attitude is tough to gauge. Clearly she’s spent a lot of time in the club life, but she’s jaded about the whole scene. The men yell “Can’t get enough of that funky stuff.” She parries, “What a surprise!” And when she evangelizes everyone to “Get High! Get High!” it’s done with more than a hint of derision, not exactly the late 70s Studio 54 attitude (or present day, for that matter). At best she’s an untrustworthy narrator. But she’s there, she knows the scene, and when the track breaks briefly into a more straightforward ecstatic moment, it’s a terrific representation of one of those transcendent moments that you spend an entire night of clubbing looking for. And then it’s gone again.

“Funky Stuff” is perfect sonic portrait of the uber-jaded club girl and her coterie of male admirers & hangers-on. Jaded to the max, the best dressed, the most outrageous, the most bored, the most desired, the least outwardly desiring (except of course for the unspoken cool factor), but always there.

At 17 she was more sophisticated than anyone I’d ever known, while also seeming utterly unaffected. Or at least her affectations came from such a stubborn confidence and will to defy convention that they were irresistible…
– Richard Hell on Lizzy Mercier Descloux

[Soundtrack]
Lizzy Mercier Descloux – Funky Stuff.mp3

Lizzy Mercier Descloux bio and paintings at the Ze Records site
Lizzy Mercier Descloux’s obituary: “A Brief Career In Punk And World”

This is so sad that Debbie Harry is being replaced by Star Wars at the top of my blog. I’m not much of a Star Wars fan. I actually managed to miss Episode Two; are we of a certain age allowed to do that? But I let Susie drag me to the new one and I was pleasantly surprised and entertained, so long as I didn’t expect basic film stuff like acting, plot and dialogue.

Me being me, I had to sit there in the front row and go all metacritic, and so a couple of things jumped out for me (which basically means that I wasn’t really paying attention to the movie). Here’s a dumb one: in George Lucas’s conception of the city of the future (or “Long Ago,” yes, I know), there are no plants. No parks. No ballfields. No nothing. Just city blocks and traffic. There is not a smidgen of greenery on the planet where the government governs (but is presided over by some kind of self-appointed meritocratic Joint Chiefs Of Staff, what? We’d never let that happen here, right?).

Here’s another thing. What sets the original Star Wars apart from the rest of the series is the sly humor, which is pretty much absent from the other five. (Important exception: Harrison Ford.) And music, which is otherwise overwhelmingly serious, provides the best comic relief in the film. Why do these films have to so darn ponderous?

And remember, it’s the Fun of the Star Wars universe that captured you in the first place. Let’s pretend we’re back in 1977, we’re 10 years old and we’re all seeing Star Wars for the first time. What’s the scene where a little family drama with spaceships went blasting into hyperspace and took over your intellect? You got it: The Cantina. It’s there that we meet the charismatic Han Solo, we first glimpse the personal threat posed to Luke Skywalker by The Empire, we meet all manner of weird aliens, and the adventure is really ON! This is a thrilling, funny, scary rollercoaster of a scene and arguably one that George Lucas never again got close to in his career. (Please don’t argue with me about it. I don’t care.)

And your favorite part of The Cantina was the band, of course, a bunch of strange creatures playing happy weird swingin’ tunes. It’s the best joke in the whole six movies when Han Solo shoots…whatever that was… and the band resumes playing as if nothing happened.

In the Summer Of ’77, Star Wars and disco mania took hold over America’s youth, and Meco provided the perfect combination. Each time we sat in the back seat, we hoped and prayed that Meco’s “Star Wars Disco” would come on the radio. The most highly anticipated part of the song, of course, was The Cantina Band segment, leading to a whole lot of gleeful car dancing and spastic behavior. For those of us lucky enough to own the 45 (to bring to classroom parties, natch), everyone knew exactly the place visually on the record where the needle needed to go to get to that “good part.”

Here for your edification — and my embarassment — the infamous Star Wars Disco. The Cantina Band comes in at 3:30.

[Soundtrack]
Meco – Star Wars Disco.mp3

Get inside the mind of Meco!

The cantina band’s stock has sunk low in the Lucas universe. The LucasArts folks apparently think so little of music other than John Williams bombast that they’ve banned “other” music from the Star Wars universe. Why can’t we get some intergalactic karaoke love?

Thanks to Angry Robot for the inspiration.

Arriving in Los Angeles in the mid-60s, Bingenheimer somehow wormed his way into the city’s flowering hipster music scene, a constant at every party and a certainty to turn up whenever visiting rock royalty came to town. In the 70s, he became a virtual A&R man without portfolio, opening the first glam club in the US and breaking tons of artists through his popular radio show – everybody from David Bowie to X to No Doubt.

But no hipster can keep his cred forever – especially one whose cred depends on the cred of others, a step removed from the locus of hip – and most of the movie concentrates on Bingenheimer’s long, slow slide from Center Of The Action to Merely Relevant to Eccentric Relic. By the end of the movie, Rodney has only a tenuous hold on his lonely 12am-3am Monday morning time slot and seemingly nothing but regret and loneliness. It’s chilling to see how quickly it can all go and how much worse it can be when one refuses to acknowledge it. Bingenheimer is too savvy an operator to wind up as Norma Desmond, which is all the harder to take since he’s all too aware of his plight.

Don’t let the horrific box fool you at the video store. The box copy screams COLDPLAY!, GWEN STEFANI!, GREEN DAY! and many others. Well, yes, they are all in there, and in typical rip-off fashion, the appearances are fleeting though relevant to the movie’s ‘plot.’ More striking are all the archival photos of 70s rock decadence and interviews with early US punkers like X and Blondie. Nevertheless Mayor Of The Sunset Strip is a riveting portrait of what happens when someone stays on stage too long because he doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

Hickenlooper, whose previous movies include documentaries on Francis Ford Coppola and Dennis Hopper at their scariest, will be mining this area again in his next film, a biography of Edie Sedgwick with Guy Pearce playing Andy Warhol.

[Soundtrack]
Kim Fowley – The Trip.mp3
There are several interview segments with Bingenheimer’s longtime friend, scenester mercenary Kim Fowley, notorious for (among many other things) “discovering” The Runaways. Members of The Runaways are interviewed and make quite clear that they detest the man. Here’s one of Fowley’s earliest cynical moves, a single he recorded in 1966 to cash in on the Psychedelic Music trend. It’s a neat trick to be so condescending towards the audience you’re trying to rip off and still be so damn amusing. Flying dogs and silver cats and emerald rats, indeed!

Trailer for Mayor Of The Sunset Strip

A day with a Debbie Harry picture on your blog is a good day.

I’m proud of my Berkeley hometown and its radical and confusing heritage. I take pride in walking around San Francisco and pointing out countercultural landmarks like the Jefferson Airplane house and City Lights Books. I really don’t mind the Grateful Dead (American Beauty, anyway). But I’m also happy to keep these things in the past, free of grey hair and acid burnout.

Entroporium guest correspondent Holiday Darin reports in on what happened when some hippie also-rans recently played The Fillmore:

Daryl and Tom got me to go to see Hot Tuna Friday night. (I’m embarrassed just TYPING that band name. Ranks among the dumbest all time.) You know…I figured Jorma and Jack … two legends ……….. whatever. The first set was acoustic. I did all I could to remain upright holding out hope the second half would justify my attendance. It didn’t.

I drove everyone there so I couldn’t leave. I figured I could do a good, thorough tour of the Hall and its posters to kill time. Fatigue overcame me though, so I sat down. A woman woke me up suggesting I go with her outside for some fresh air as they don’t really like patrons sleeping at the Fillmore. After I got over my indignity (and momentary embarrassment), I realized she had a good idea. Fifteen minutes later, I gave (electric) Hot Tuna (f*cking “old-timey”, hippy blues…) another try. Boredom. This time I toured the downstairs. 15 or 20 minutes later, a man woke me as I leaned in a chair against a wall saying something about not being so wasted (I wasn’t…. I was bored!) and maybe I should follow him outside for some fresh air.

There you have it….asked to leave the Fillmore twice in one night. A first.

[Soundtrack - acid rock before it got all out of control]
Jefferson Airplane – Plastic Fantastic Lover.mp3

While the film seeks to be a “warts and all” account of The Ramones’ brilliant career, the dirt is really secondary to the array of loving interviews given by friends and contemporaries like Deborah Harry, Joe Strummer and Clem Burke.

Archival footage of The Ramones’ early performances makes End Of The Century essential viewing for any band that aspires to rock as pure power performance. But the unchanging nature of the band’s performance clips over time also highlights one of the interesting undercurrents of both the film and of The Ramones’ career, indeed any band that makes ‘purity of form’ a part of its visual and sonic presentation. There’s a constant tension in the interviews between Johnny, the leader and the protector of the group’s image, and the rest of the band, who sometimes bristle artistically and personally at being pushed to constantly and continuously keep the songs the same, the same haircuts, the same clothes, the same everything. While artistically laudable, it’s easy to see that maintaining the image and the consistency was wearing at the band members as early as 1980 when Joey pressured the band to hook up with eccentric (and dangerous) superproducer Phil Spector.

It’s also interesting to study the underlying story of The Ramones as a business. By 1981, the group had determined that it would never “make it big” and instead concentrated on other business alternatives for turning its passion into a respectable living. In fact, End Of The Century could be required viewing for Business Schools: how to care for a brand, how to work with difficult co-workers, when & how to make the decision to be a niche player instead of a market leader. It’s never discussed, but the band obviously did quite well for itself in the end — not Jimmy Page rich, but rich enough. Johnny had the world’s largest collection of old-time glossy 8×10 baseball photos, while Joey was so into day trading that he wrote a song for his posthumous solo album about Maria Bartiromo, CNBC’s reporter from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

All in all, End Of The Century is a colorful portrait of a band that carries the DNA for pretty much every other rock band you love. Even if you know the story, it has enough impressive concert footage, interviews and subtextual hints about what was left out to make for riveting viewing. Check it out!

[Soundtrack]
Ramones – I Wanna Live.mp3

Punky baseball fans will want to check out this article in which Johnny & Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane interview each other

Wattstax catches Soul and the Black Power movements at a critical time of transition. The Sound of Black America was shifting away from indie labels like Stax and Motown, while majors like Warner and Columbia were quickly muscling their way in with money and “distribution deals.” Soul artists, meanwhile, were finding it harder to reach a white mainstream audience – and the Afrocentric styles and attitude of the day probably didn’t exactly help either. The money was shifting into the major media centers, radio was re-segregating and so was the rest of the culture industry. As urban Americans of all races were more & more forced by law and by economic circumstance to live closer to each other, their lives ever more intertwined, American culture was rapidly re-balkanizing after the halcyon days of ’60s soul – “The Sound of Young America.”

Stax’s evolution was a perfect example of this cultural shift. After the bi-racial triumphs of artists like Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin and Booker T & The MG’s, Stax started to move away from the mainstream (though the quality of the music remained very high). The label was at a crossroads, having ejected or alienated most of its white management and keystone musicians in place of a paranoid gun-toting regime under Al Bell. The pinnacle moment came in 1972 when at the behest of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the label funded a concert in Los Angeles to showcase many of its remaining hit acts. Meant to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Watts riots, Wattstax took place on a Saturday afternoon in the cavernous Memorial Coliseum.

With over 100,000 seats, this was an unforgiving place for what was essentially a restaging of 1950s-style showcase tour, each act getting maybe 30 minutes to run through its hits and quit the stage for the next act. The stage was placed at the 50-yard line, seats were sold towards in a horseshoe towards one end zone and the 60-70 yards of field between the stage and the seats was left open. Schlitz kicked in for a sponsorship, so all the seats were $1, bringing out many folks that probably had few opportunities to see concerts.

For acts that typically performed in clubs and churches, this was at best a daunting situation, and unsurprisingly some acts fare better than others. Albert King and Pops Staples don’t make much of an impression, while the science-fiction Afro craziness of the Bar-Kays brings down the house. Rufus Thomas’s spastic dancing and razor wit also cut through, but his nearly his short peach jumpsuit is what’s really memorable about his brief set.

Headliner Isaac Hayes, nattily attired in his trademark chain mail, was the only performer to go on after dark, but even with that advantage he doesn’t have the charisma to overcome the stage set-up. Riding high on his current smash hit “Theme From Shaft,” Hayes had only recently become a performer. Starting as a house songwriter for Sam & Dave and others, his breakthrough album Hot Buttered Soul was so lightly regarded by the label that he was forced to record it outside the Stax studios and cut the whole thing in one take. It also didn’t help that Hayes elected to simulate the “Shaft” string arrangements by playing over a rickety 1972 click track.

The film of Wattstax was re-released by Warner last year in a “30th Anniversary Special Edition.” What’s evident is that Stax didn’t want to simply make a concert movie, but rather create a collage of urban life in 1972 Los Angeles: a Black Power-oriented view of the Watts community and its consciousness. The film opens with an effective montage of street scenes over The Dramatics’ “What You See Is What You Get.” The cameras also visit churches, barber shops and the streets of Watts to capture the sound and thought of contemporaneous black culture. A particularly rich bonus is that Richard Pryor is interviewed several times in a nightclub, basically doing his then-current act.

The consciousness scenes are not entirely successful, though. The presence of Ted Lange, best known as Isaac from The Love Boat, rapping with “his brothers” in a barber shop about ghetto life throws the “spontaneity” of the documentary sequences into doubt. It’s also curious that Stax, so rooted in the South by its sound, staff and tradition, would only choose to portray LA and skip the South entirely.

The “dialogue” and styles are so dated that Wattstax becomes essential viewing as a historical document; surely portraits of the ‘real life’ of ’70s American black life are few and far between. (The only alternatives that leap to mind are the horrific Blaxploitation movies that ironically made superstars of some of Soul’s most ‘conscious’ artists.) The crowd concert scenes showcase an incredible array of colorful clothes and gravity-defying hairstyles that we’re unlikely to see again in our lifetimes. You may want to keep your hand on the Fast Forward button for some of the boring bits, but if you’re at all curious about Stax, its artists and its demise, Wattstax is well worth your time.

[Soundtrack]
Bar-Kays – Son of Shaft.mp3

[Recommended Further Reading]
Peter Guralnick – Sweet Soul Music

Tonight I will get to see some old heroes on the reunion circuit, Gang Of Four, a band I’ve been hoping to see for about 25 years. I almost saw them in ’84 (with the original line-up already tore up, natch) opening for Black Uhuru and Talking Heads, but the Heads opted to play Steve Wozniak’s Us Festival instead. How’s that for a wayback machine entry?

For regular readers, pardon the interruption while I repeat a story from my March 31 entry. When I was 13. Gang Of Four did an in-store at the punk rock record store in Berkeley where I used to “work.” (I *was* working, doing most of the used record filing, but does a 13-year old really work?). Go4 were in Berkeley to publicize the Universal Records-sponsored gig they were doing with Romeo Void and Wall Of Voodoo. It was the first in-store they’d ever done, and they were really shy at first. They didn’t bring any management, just showed up, hung out, drank beer and chatted with whomever for several hours, until one of them said (I think it was Jon), “Is it OK to leave now?”

Looking back now, it’s difficult to see what a thorn they were for their record company. With songs about the failure of capitalism and their noisy declarations of complete artistic control, Go4 were undoubtedly a pain for their relatively mainstream label, Warner. This was pre-Chomsky-innundation so all this still seemed revolutionary and fresh. Growing up in Berkeley, all the “revolutionaries” seemed tired or lost, fatigued through too many years of battle, paranoia and cult recruitment. For a bunch of normal-looking guys (like me! but English!) to come along and say this stuff was eye-opening at the least.

I’ll let y’all know tomorrow how it goes.

[Soundtrack]
Gang Of Four – If I Could Keep It For Myself.mp3

This is a shorter entry, and I hope to follow it up with a much longer sequel over the weekend.

I’ve only ever bought three records off the turntable at record stores, and none in the last 25 years. The three records were U2′s Boy (which was then available only on import), Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music For Airports and The Specials’ debut album.

Elvis Costello produced the latter, saying that he wanted to get them recorded before someone came along and ruined them. As it turned out, he was right, but the supposed enemy came from within. This will be the subject of that promised sequel.

I knew nothing of them, but news reports started to come through after I bought this album about their incredible live shows and the racial politics they championed. In retrospect, what really stands out for me is the misogyny. You can see all three of these elements at work in this incredible picture of one their early live shows. Note that despite their commitment to a racial equality message, this picture appears to be entirely white men. I guess the woman-bashing songs like “Little Bitch,” “Stupid Marriage” and “Too Much Too Young” ultimately made more of an impression on their fan base.

I heard this record first at Rasputins when it was its way-old location between Channing & Durant, the one that burned down in 1980 (I think). To get a great sense of what Rasputins was like in those days, have a look at these pages from Cometbus 30. (Scans are PDFs, right-click to download.)

[Soundtrack]
The Specials – Stupid Marriage.mp3

Contemporaneous press coverage of The Specials live experience

One of America’s greatest poetic and musical forces is gone at the age of 63. He always claimed to be “just a song and dance man,” but whether he meant to or not, he meant so much more to so many. He will be missed.

Props to Sunday Morning Hangover for bringing this to light.

Rock world mourns a mate: Crowded House’s Paul Hester commits suicide

I saw Crowded House several times over the years. I (basically) met my longtime paramour at one of their shows, and our relationship sometimes seems to use Crowded House/Neil Finn shows as checkpoints along the way. (Doesn’t every couple have a longtime band like that?)

If you told me that someone in this band, who were funny & generous performers with a truly joyous sound, was on the path to suicide, I’d never have believed you.

Crowded House – Distant Sun.mp3

Universal Records had its share of odd moments. A few of my favorites include:

* Gandalf, the crazy coupon man, saw Jonathan Richman walking by with his guitar and conned him into playing a few songs.

* Marc declaring ELO Week, so we blasted Out Of The Blue for a week straight, which confused our art-punk clientele pretty good. The look on their faces when they came looking for the new Cure single…and then “Blue Skies” roars out of the stereo.

* Gang Of Four did an in-store to publicize the Universal Records-sponsored gig they were doing (at Market Street Cinema!) with Romeo Void and Wall Of Voodoo. It was the first in-store they’d ever done, and they were really shy at first. They didn’t bring any management, just showed up, hung out, drank beer and chatted with whomever for several hours, until one of them said (I think it was Jon), “Is it OK to leave now?”

* Going to a Jars gig in Provo Park. Marc drummed his ass off and looked totally exhausted at the end, so I asked him “Can I get you anything?” “Yeah, you got an extra shirt?” Uh, no.

But now I will tell you the greatest Universal Records story of them all: how Marc Time invented electro. This is 1981, long before Afrika Bambaataa, Mantronix and all that, and I swear this is a true story.

There was this African-American guy named Robin who always hung out in front of the Berkeley Public Library on Shattuck. Somewhere along the line, Robin got it in his head that what he really wanted to do was dance like a robot. For some reason, Robin chose to come to our punky store (why us, of all stores?) to ask the fateful question, “You got anything I can dance like a robot to?” We of course knew just the record for Robin: Kraftwerk’s new record, Computer World.

When we put it on the PA, Robin’s striking blue eyes lit up even more than usual. Before long, you could see Robin any afternoon in front of the UA7 movie theatre, doing his robot dance. I like to think that he was the start of it all, and before we knew it young African-American men across the country were popping & clicking & acting like robots. I like to imagine that Robin went on to tour the country, spreading the gospel of Kraftwerk and robot-dancing, and then it busted all mainstream, paving the way for Baambataa, Whodini and all that noise. All because of the gang at Universal Records.

[Soundtrack]
Kraftwerk – Pocket Calculator.mp3
Balanescu Quartet – Pocket Calculator.mp3 Robot dancing, 18th century-style

Does anybody out there have any Jars records?

I’m not really sure how it happened, but somehow I wormed my way from “hanging out” to “working” at Universal Records, which was the name that The Music Faucet took on when it moved up between Bancroft and Telegraph. This was prime real estate — close to campus, next to Rasputin’s Records and across from Blondie’s Pizza. From here I was to learn a lot about music and life.

I was just one of a really odd cast of characters. Marc Time and Gary Nervo were the guys who ran the place, and I was completely devoted to trying to look cool in their eyes. For some reason, they let me be there, probably because I was doing a huge amount of the used record filing. Marc and Gary were in The Jars, one of the first bands on Berkeley’s Subterranean Records. They were pretty good and opened some interesting shows, including for Flipper. They had two singles released and fit in nicely in the whole early 1980s new wave pop thing. Just to give you an idea of the sense of humor around these guys, on the covers of their first two singles, they planted clues that their guitarist/singer, Mik Dow, was dead. That’s sort of funny, but what was REALLY funny is that they didn’t tell Mik. And then they told all their friends. (at least, this is how I remember it)

Ron was the owner. I couldn’t really read him, but he was always smiling a Cheshire Cat grin. (There may have been good reason for this, but I was oblivious.) He seemed really apart from the life of the store, and yet it was his. Then there was a whole periphery of other folks: Richard, the manic English 100-pounds with the huge nose, convinced that Rocktography would be the Next Big Thing; Gandalf, a spaced-out hippie who passed out “dollar off” coupons for us and once corraled Jonathan Richman into coming in and playing some songs; and Rob, a disaffected punk teen, lead singer of Intensified Chaos, who later gave it all up to become the F Scott Fitzgerald-like “Robert Cameron The Third.”

But I am an MP3 blogger, so let me stick to the music for a moment.

It’s 1980 and I’m buying my first non-commercial, non-parentally influenced records. Can you guess what they were? Obviously London Calling was a biggie. I liked that fine, but it didn’t seem especially punk or strange to me, and I have actually always been a little baffled why The Clash are considered punk heroes. I like them fine, mind you, but it seems like a pretty short street from Bruce Springsteen to Joe & Mick. Joe & Mick just happened to have more diverse taste than Bruce. But that’s another discussion.

The first record of this period that really captured my imagination was Public Image Ltd’s Second Edition. I knew little or nothing of the Sex Pistols’ music, so PiL’s deep dubby grooves didn’t seem as shocking to me as it probably did to my fellow 1980 folk. For me, hearing dance music be treated as avant-garde experiments was competely novel. I realized that it was mostly improvised, but the tracks still held enough interest that I would turn up the headphones and listen closely BETWEEN the bass lines (if you know what I mean). This was completely mesmerizing stuff, full of pain and rhythm and strangeness and drama, and I was hooked.

Ooooh and then I found the Metal Box version! As perfect as the distorted art, silvered ink and scribbled lyrics were on the Second Edition cover, Metal Box was the most unbelievable record package I’d ever seen, and may still be. It’s one of the only records I’ve retained over the years. If you don’t own one, you should. The discs had no song titles and you had to shake the can to get the records out. And on 45, the bass lines sounded incredible.

Asked why the Metal Box, John Lydon answered — Because it made the records hard to get out. The simplicity of that use and the complexity of the package still make me laugh. I also liked the idea from the surrealist standpoint, that to play them was to destroy them, like Andre Breton’s sandpaper covered book that was intended to destroy all the books next to it on the shelf.

The obvious thing to illustrate my feeling about this album is to put up “Graveyard” or “Death Disco,” but since I’m at the end of my bandwidth month, here instead is the 7-minute “Poptones.” Lydon said back then that this was a song about a rape of a man by another man, but you can’t really tell if that’s true or if Lydon (typically) is just trying to tick off his audience. But to me that doubt about the true subject matter of this song makes it even scarier, as it was to an impressionable 13-year old with headphones on and the lights out.

[Soundtrack]
Public Image Ltd – Poptones.mp3

this is what you want, this is what you get
Find a Metal Box

Running a college basketball pool definitely sets back your ability to write interesting posts, and tonight I’ve got setting up my fancy new iBook to preoccupy me! The So-Called Post-Punk Life will resume shortly.

While writing the MSCPPL series last week, I had the good fortune to run across Marc Time, a former colleague from my 13-year old life in the Berkeley punk rock record store. He shared some great stories and ghostly pictures from my past life. He also runs a darn fine radio show which you can check out at his blog, The Sunday Morning Hangover. You’ll see some really interesting things come out of this re-found relationship in the next week or two.

On a related note, I’ve awakened every day for the past week with this song in my head. It seems appropriate to post it here and now — a great song for someone who aspires to posting every day and just can’t do it. Ha. When I was 13, it felt like a great song to blast when Mom forced me to clean my room. Oh, what an ironist I was.

[Soundtrack]
Gang Of Four – Outside The Trains Don’t Run On Time.mp3

Get your tickets now to see the Gang Of Four reunion tour!

Tuxedomoon was a local art-punk band that I found by way of The Residents. Ralph had signed them and then of course I just had to have their whole back catalogue.

Their first couple of EPs, Tuxedomoon and Scream With A View were particularly great because they seemed so enigmatic. Self-released, hardly any liner notes, bizarre cover images, and the band seemed to change identities completely from song to song. Check today’s offerings below from Tuxedomoon’s scarce debut EP, which has them swinging from Kraftwerk-y electro-pop to prog to Wire-style freakouts. (Compounding this, the other tracks on the EP were avant-garde classical and a Cole Porter cover.) Plus they were the only ‘punk’ band around sporting a line-up of melodramatic actor lead singer, alto saxophone, bass and viola.

Once they were on Ralph, the production started to de-muddy and I gradually lost interest in them, especially after 1981′s Desire. Tuxedomoon’s sometimes lead singer, Winston Tong, could also be just… a… bit… TOO MUCH TOO MUCH TOO MUCH TOO MUCH. That last sentence is a pretty good demonstration of Tong he might have sung that line.

The reason I bring them up is because the band is making its first appearance in San Francisco in a very long time this weekend. I’m committed to a birthday party, but I’m thinking I’m going to go out and see these guys, as I was too young to pay my respects at the time. Tuxedomoon picked up and left the Bay Area for Rotterdam shortly after Ralph’s implosion in 1981, so this is really a rare thing. Always more popular in Europe, this should prove to be a classic “triumphant homecoming.”

As far as I know, Tuxedomoon has no material available in the US right now, though there is a re-release program under way in France. With all the other Class of 1980 folk coming around, surely some enterprising label should have an interest in cleaning up the original tapes and re-issuing them.

[Soundtrack - tracks from the debut EP]
Tuxedomoon – New Machine.mp3
Tuxedomoon – No Tears.mp3

Confessional: Tuxedomoon’s Half-Mute is the only item I ever shoplifted. From Rasputins Records. So now my secret is out. Ken Sarachan, if you want your $7 back, drop me a line.

I think the folks at The Music Faucet were trying to get rid of me, their personal 13-year old hanger-on groupie. Or maybe this was a “Punk Rock Record Store Guy” test of sorts. One day Gary Nervo issued a challenge to me. He reached into his own stash behind the counter — a rare honor! — and pulled out a copy of The Residents’ Please Do Not Steal It, a collectors item DJ-only promo of The Residents “greatest hits.”

(God knows why Ralph Records issued this. Did they really think they were going to get airplay? It was later released UK-only as Nibbles.)

This was before The Residents started parading around in eyeballs and tuxedos. At this point, they had no public image at all. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

I brought it home and put on the first track, “You Yesyesyes.” Immediately, the most ghastly guitar solo started pumping through the speaker. It made me feel scared and ill. I skipped on to the next track, somebody muttering something about a Santa Dog. And on to a bizarre cover of The Doors’ “Light My Fire.” And so forth until the end.

Instead of giving up, though, I started listening again and soldiered through. After all, the great Nervo had given this to me. I couldn’t let him down!

What I had in the end was a band that completely rattled my parents, something my classmates couldn’t understand at all, something that met my own standards for psychedelic pop (which I’ll talk about sometime later this year), and a whole lot of private jokes. Because if nothing else, the best Residents stuff is great satire.

As it turned out, this period turned out to be the peak years for The Residents. Eskimo was out shortly afterwards and The Commercial Album a year after that. Ralph Records, The Residents’ homebrew label, was also very active during this time, releasing albums by Bay Area art-punk luminaries like Tuxedomoon (more on them in my next post) and MX-80 Sound (who were regular visitors to The Music Faucet and its next incarnation Universal Records). I wound up so obssessed with Ralph Records that I bought a copy of every single thing that came out on the label and in some cases multiple versions if there were small changes to the artwork on a reprinted edition.

Since Ralph was right over in San Francisco at 444 Grove Street (a revered address in my mind), I decided that I had to go in there and see The Residents. Remember that The Residents shielded their identity and never performed live. For all I knew, they weren’t even human. I was pretty sure they weren’t. But I had to know.

I bravely got on BART by myself (which I don’t think I’d done before and for which my parents would certainly have grounded me), found my way to Grove Street, nervously paced around their door for awhile and finally knocked. The door was answered by a perfectly normal fellow. I presented myself, requested that he sell me some records and after some wariness was let in! (“Can’t you find these at a record store?” Thinking quickly, I blufeed, “Uh, which one should I go to?”) Wow, I was in The Residents studio! Are they here? No, they’re not in today. The place had murals everywhere and everything was covered with plastic sheets to create walkways and rooms. I paid whoever it was — who of course had to be a Resident! — and went back home, triumphant.

Except that the records were warped!

So now I had to go back, make the exchange… Anyway, pretty much the same thing happened. I explained that records weren’t right. The man went off into the back to check them on the “The Ralphinator” as he called it. Sure enough, they were warped and he gave me new copies.

After The Commercial Album, The Residents started off on the Mole Trilogy and that put me off them. But for about two years, they were total obsession for me. The picture above was a poster on my bedroom wall and my backpack was festooned with Residents-related badges.

Here today is one of The Residents’ best and rarest works, The Beatles Play The Residents and The Residents Play The Beatles, an early version of what would now be known as a mash-up and a great example of the sense of humor that The Residents brought to everything they did. One of the most appealing aspects of following The Residents was their demolition of pop history, a recurring theme in their work. (See also The American Composer Series, The Third Reich n Roll, The King & Eye, etc.)

It’s incredible that the copyright police let this one go through. Back in the day, eh? It was released originally as VERY limited edition 7″, but can still be found on some European compilations.

[Soundtrack - The Beatles Play The Residents & The Residents Play The Beatles]
Beyond The Valley Of A Day In the Life.mp3
Flying.mp3

The siren song of Telegraph Avenue led me to hanging out at The Music Faucet, a quintessentially divey record store at the unhip end of the street away from Sproul Plaza and all its attendant early-80s student madness. Luckily the guys who ran the place took a shine to me and started feeding me records to check out. I think they were trying to scare me off with some of their choices (more on that in my next post), but they were also pretty obliging when they felt like it.

One of my great early finds from Music Faucet was Blondie, a band I fell immediately in love with. Sure, the singer was hot, but I think what really got to me was the imaginative blending of punky threat with good old-fashioned girl group Brill Building-style pop. Plus, they had a synthesizer player that made weird sounds! And a kick-ass out-of-control drummer, just this side of Keith Moon! This had a lot of appeal to a 12-year old who was only hearing Jackson Browne and The Eagles around the house.

Parallel Lines was out, but hadn’t quite hit yet; “Hangin’ On The Telephone” was the bomb first single and I don’t think megahit “Heart Of Glass” was released for a good six months after the album dropped. No, I didn’t dig the new one anyway. The albums that sent me were the two first ones, Blondie and Plastic Letters. They were sexy and threatening, but also had great pop sense. You could sing along without embarassment because Debbie was no girly-girl.

For a kid who was set to see his first pornographic magazine, this was a complete thrill — and because the band wasn’t popular yet it was like having a secret older woman girlfriend in a really innocent kind of way.

I was actually sort of embarassed by Debbie’s hotness quotient. I just wanted to check out the music, but all the bootlegs had to have pictures of her nude or somehow exploited. I felt bad for Debbie. How could everybody look at her like that? She’s so cool! In retrospect, this probably made me one of their best fans since the band was always complaining that “Blondie is a band! Quit checking out the lead singer!” (Author’s note: No, I am not gay.)

(It doesn’t look like things have changed much either. As I got ready to do this post, I discovered that there are some really creepy Debbie Harry sites out there.)

Things peaked when I got into bootlegs. I had a live bootleg with some demos on that I loved, which gave me a taste for more. The next one I set my eye on happened to be a picture disc with a nude Debbie ingrained in the vinyl. I asked permission from my parents to buy it, they said OK, but I never got up the courage.

The band stayed one of my favorites through Autoamerican, which despite its huge hit single with “Rapture,” even I recognized as incredibly pretentious twaddle at age 14. A very very disappointing shark-jumping release.

It’s hard to believe now that Blondie was considered Punk and semi-avant garde in its heyday. Leaving aside the band’s appearance and home base (late 70s NYC), the first album would fit neatly next to most of the things you hear on a Solid Gold Oldies AM station. Maybe it was because Debbie dared to look bored and angry. Oooo daring.

[Soundtrack - 'album cuts' from Blondie's 1977 debut]
Blondie – In The Sun.mp3
Blondie – Rifle Range.mp3

After posting on Flipper, it seems like an opportune time to take a stroll through the post-punk life of a kid growing up in Berkeley in the 70s and 80s.

My first brush with punk came from my godmother, of all people. She’s not exactly straight-laced, but what baby boomer was in San Francisco in 1978? This person is the wife of a law firm partner and I always picture her in my mind in a turtleneck. But indeed, Terry was the start of my journey into punk.

It’s 1978, I’m 11, and all I know about punk is something about the Sex Pistols coming to town last year. I hear The Tubes are pretty punky, too. My parents go see them every New Years Eve. “White Punks On Dope” is wild stuff to a kid that thinks The Beatles are the alpha and the omega, with occasional Who & Stones interludes.

We were over at Marc & Terry’s house and Devo’s Are We Not Men is presented to me as a birthday gift. I’m baffled. What, no Paul McCartney record? No, Terry has heard that this is what all the kids at USF are listening to and it’s supposed to be hilarious. OK, sure, I’ll check it out. I have firm roots in psychedelia, I’m game for anthing. I run it to the “upstairs stereo” and drop the needle.

Bright yellow cover with a strange doll-like man on the front. He’s standing in front of a golf ball? The inner sleeve shows a very high energy band in weird jumpsuits that look vaguely like something to do with…science. They look like Super Friends.

I dropped the needle…

Yeah yeah yeah
Yeah yeah yeah
Yeah yeah yeah Yeah yeah yeah
YEAH!!!!!

On paper, it looks pretty tame. But that man screaming those words terrified me to my core. What was the Uncontrollable Urge? What was it doing to him???

The music totally baffled me. What was with those crazy rhythms? Why did the songs stop & start at random? Why were they singing about Space Junk? Why do they talk about monkeys so much? What did they do to that Stones song? That’s horrible!

I relay my review to the assembled, probably stoned-off-their-ass adults. “I don’t get this.” They seem disappointed, but then go back to whatever. I went back upstairs to play it again, to parse the mystery of the man screaming about his Urge.

But I held on to my copy for many years and it quickly became one of my favorites. Devo became so accepted around Berkeley that Freedom Of Choice was a mainstay of 8th grade parties.

Mark Mothersbaugh now makes soundtracks for Nickelodeon cartoons and Gerry Casale (according to my friend, Dan) makes imitation songs for commercials. (“You need a song that sounds like Get Ur Freak On for a truck ad? I can do that!”) There’s a certain symmetry there — from “Space Junk” to Spongebob, sure why not — but it still seemed pretty radical at the time. The mainstream rises up to hold the center yet again.

[Soundtrack]
Devo – Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Getting).mp3

The gang from Flipper is still hangin’ in there. And it’s still not pretty.

San Francisco Bay Guardian profiles Flipper’s Bruce Lose

After I sold all my vinyl, there were a very very few that I regretted banishing. My original Flipper 7″s were near the top of the list.

There was a fabulous legend around the “Sex Bomb” single. The art was all done with stamps and rumor had it that the guys had sat up all night on acid doing it themselves. Actually, it’s almost impossible to see how that’s not true.

Here is Flipper’s complete first single. No handmade acid-stamping cover, but an image of a crying malnourished baby floating down a toxic river will have to do instead.

[Soundtrack - The complete first single]
A-side: Flipper – Love Canal.mp3
B-side: Flipper – Ha Ha Ha.mp3

1981
Track listing and discussion

Thanks to The Tofu Hut for pointing out the location after Pitchfork previewed it last week.

If you’ve been wondering what Tuxedomoon, Depeche Mode, The Cure, PiL, The Dead Kennedys, XTC and The Undertones would sound like as Brazilian music, boy have I got the album for you. And you’re a very strange person to be wondering about that.

Two guys get together and decide to do bossa-nova covers of 80s songs. Sure. But the corker is getting a bunch of elegant young French chanteuses to go all up on it.

It’s a happy marriage. The covers work, nicely playing up the emotional depth of the original tunes, and to judge by the photographs it looks like the guys get to have a lot of fun. Everybody wins.

[Soundtrack]
Nouvelle Vague – Love Will Tear Us Apart.mp3
More Nouvelle Vague tracks can be found here in Flash
If you like this, you might also find bluegrass versions of Air of interest

Robert sent me a copy of Bobby Darin Sings Ray Charles. Since I posted on Brother Ray earlier this week, the kismet screamed out me: “Post It!” So here it is.

I knew almost nothing about Bobby Darin until Kevin Spacey’s recent publicity caravan came careening through town to support his movie bio, Beyond The Sea. You take one look at the guy — and Spacey, for that matter — and think, No way, that poor fella is going to embarrass himself trying to do this material. Turns out that Bobby can handle the material just fine, but unfortunately his band struggles to swing as hard as he does. Mostly they are just… about… there, but sometimes just about not. On the plus side, Darin manages to keep his backup singers from sounding too much like the Andrews Sisters, which is often the Achilles heel of the not-so-soul-band trying to be a convincing soul-band.

Some of the tracks don’t work out; “Leave My Woman Alone” strays mighty close to being a rave-up from a “hip 60s musical comedy.” But the good performances work just fine, and that’s enough!

[Soundtrack]
Bobby Darin – Drown In My Own Tears.mp3
Bobby Darin – That’s Enough.mp3

One of the best things you’ll ever read about any band, but caution! may be totally incomprehensible if you know squat about Sonic.
EVOL” href=”http://vinyljourney.blogspot.com/2005/01/evol.html” target=”blank”>Vinyl Mine on Sonic Youth’s EVOL

As for me, the first time I listened to this record — it was my roommate’s very favorite album, I thought I’d give it a try — she’d gone out, I was alone in the house — Put it on the turntable real loud — It echoed down the hallway, filling the house — I made dinner — Puttered about — Loud, loud, louder — Drooooone — and — Droooooone — and after about a half hour I realized — that the same two tones had been modulating over & over — filling the old building overlooking empty Haight Street on a wet winter night — Deee-DOOOOO — Dee-DOOOOO — what the fuck? — I went into the living room — It was a goddamn lockgroove — I’d been listening to a lockgroove for how long? — Dee-DOOOOO — I let it play a little longer before I gave up.

That was one of the most unexpected, most _feeling_ moments I ever got in my listening life.

Sadly, the lockgroove is not part of the CD release; instead it fades out after a while. Worse, it’s followed by a particularly onerous “Bonus Track.” (A gift that does not give.) Can’t SY re-release this puppy and just let the lockgroove run until the CD capacity fills?

[Soundtrack]
Sonic Youth – Shadow Of A Doubt.mp3

Vinyl Mine seems to be on a roll. Jim’s s also got a mighty fine write-up on Pere Ubu’s The Modern Dance, too.

Hey y’all! Merry Christmas! Let’s be careful out there!

[Soundtrack]
The Youngsters – Christmas In Jail.mp3

Seriously, though, doesn’t seem a bit like discovering the Rosetta Stone?

Rare Velvet Underground acetate turns up in Portland

[Download]
Excerpts from The First Family.mp3

Just in time for the election and Halloween, a reason to talk about imitations of politicians. Vaughn Meader is dead.

Who?

In 1962, 27-year old comic Vaughn Meader was hired by a couple of veteran comedy writers to imitate President Kennedy for a record called “The First Family.” This was the ‘golden age’ of comedy records (basically starting with Shelley Berman and ending with Bill Cosby) and they still sold like crazy. After its release in late 1962, The First Family became the then fastest selling album of all time (1.2m copies in two weeks, 7.5m copies overall) and won the Grammy for Album Of The Year. Meader quickly became a megastar, appearing on every talk show, playing to sold out rooms and being profiled for Life Magazine. The record company readied Volume 2 for a November 1963 release.

I think you can see where this is going. After JFK’s assassination, Meader was dropped from public life like that. (“It was character assassination,” he said. “My character was assassinated. I got a bum rap.”) With no more prospects in show business because of his close association with JFK, his life descended into drinking and drugs, and he never again received any kind of national attention. You can read Meaders’ reflections on this bizarre life turn here.

I remember this record well from summer vacations out at my grandparents’ house in Roslyn Heights, NY. They had basically no pop records, but a smattering of the comedy records from the early 60s like the weirdly racist Jose Jimenez and The Button Down Mind Of Bob Newhart. The First Family was my favorite. It’s a classic and a gentle reminder that not all political humor need be mean-spirited.

[Soundtrack]
Tuxedomoon – James Whale.mp3

I’m sure I’ll be posting again before Halloween, but I wanted to give all you Monday-Friday folks a chance to hear the scariest song in my whole collection. This is from San Francisco art-punks Tuxedomoon’s debut album in 1979 and is long out of print in the United States.

Turn the lights down for this one. Even better, blast it from your house when the trick or treaters turn up.

[Download]
Nick Lowe – Let’s Stay In and Make Love.mp3
More tracks from this excellent record available from Nick Lowe’s site.

After posting yesterday’s sad, sad M. Ward track, I started humming it to myself and found myself naturally “medleying” into this warm inviting track from Nick Lowe. It’s got virtually the same chord progression and arrangement yet the sentiments couldn’t be further away from “Undertaker”. Isn’t that funny how just a few slight changes in inflection can change the whole feel of a song?

When the chorus comes in here at about 2:20 in, it’s about as simple as a song can get and yet there’s just something so reassuring, romantic and positive about it. It makes me feel good.