Bongo Jazz A Speciality

Christmas Is Coming — The Payola$ (1983)

2008-12-24T13:20:00.003-07:00

Businesses are failing. Hundreds of thousands of people are losing their jobs every month; at the same time, hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are being diverted to banks that won't divulge how the money will be spent. Christmas Is Coming is definitely a holiday song for these recessionary, economically bizarro times, even though it was recorded 25 years ago by one of my all-time favourite Canadian bands, The Payola$.

The song comes from the Vancouver band's third and finest album, Hammer on a Drum (pictured left). I recently brought out my vinyl copy and listened to it for the first time in years. I was blown away all over again. Hammer on a Drum reminded me a Mick Jones quote when he was reminiscing about The Clash: "The whole thing was fantastic," Jones said. "Who wouldn't write great tunes with such great lyrics?"

Indeed, the Payola$ songwriting tandem of singer Paul Hyde and guitarist Bob Rock (the future uber-producer of the heavy metal stars) had a real Strummer-Jones thing happening on this album and its predecessor, No Stranger To Danger, both of which were masterfully produced by David Bowie's former right-hand man, the late, great Mick Ronson. (Ronson's pal Ian Hunter even drops by to help out on some of Hammer's harmony vocals.)

Since the Payola$ continue to languish in relative obscurity, their four studio albums having never been released on CD, I will post a couple other outstanding Hammer tracks that didn't make the cut on the group's two, woefully inadequate compilations.

Wild West finds lyricist Hyde in full flow as he describes a certain cross-section of right-wing America to a punchy, rock-reggae backing. His final verse takes my breath away; the writing is so lively, vivid and concise: "I lived my life in the happy hour/ The .44 magnum feeling of power/ Warms my bloated, vulgar frame/ Makes the dancers fear my name/ Go-go dancers with greasy curls/ Spread their legs around the world/ Come on, baby, shoot!/ It's the Wild West."

Meanwhile, Perhaps Some Day is a sing-along, nuclear disarmament anthem but its themes of unity, hope and coming together for the common good continue to resonate in the age of Obama.

Enjoy, and Merry Christmas to all.

Christmas is Coming (link expired)

Wild West (link expired)

Perhaps Some Day (link expired)

Buy Payola$ here

All I Want For Christmas is a Beatle — Dora Bryan (1963)

2008-12-22T16:00:00.004-07:00

The seeds for U.S. Beatlemania were days away from being sown on this date, 45 years ago. After turning up its nose at early singles such as Please Please Me and Love Me Do, EMI's American affiliate Capitol Records finally decided four Liverpool moptops might have a modicum of commercial potential and, on Dec. 26, 1963, the label released its first Beatles record, I Want To Hold Your Hand b/w I Saw Her Standing There. It hit No. 1 on the North American singles charts five weeks later and the rest is over-documented history. Of course, The Beatles were already a phenomenon in their home country, so much so they inspired this novelty Christmas single sung by British stage actress Dora Bryan. It hit the UK top-20 in the waning days of 1963.

It's naff and blandly orchestrated, topped with a thickly accented vocal that some would diplomatically call an acquired taste. If the singer sounds more like a brassy broad than a lovestruck teenager in the first flush of Beatlemania, that's surely because Bryan was 39 at the time — perhaps too adult to spot the glaring errors in the source material. "I don't care whichever one (mum) gets me/ Ringo, Paul, John, George/ They're all the same," she sings, oblivious to the fact her target audience would consider this statement heresy. (I love hearing Bryan, at the one-minute mark, attempt to cram that particular lyric into too few bars of music. She almost gets panicky at the end.)

That said, All I Want For Christmas is a Beatle has both hapless charm and historical significance, as this is widely considered the first of countless Fab Four novelty records to come.

As for Bryan, memory loss forced her to abandon her acting career in 2006; she is now wheelchair-bound and residing in a nursing home in Hove. Wouldn't it be nice if Paul or Ringo dropped by for a visit this Christmas?

All I Want For Christmas is a Beatle (link expired)

Beatles' 1963 Christmas message for fan club members (link expired)

And, finally, what better way to get into the Christmas spirit than with the newly divorced Sonny and Cher harmonizing with daughter Chastity, actress Bernadette Peters and, um, Captain Kangaroo? Only in the 1970s...

Buy Dora Bryan music here

Dancing In The Street/My Enemy is a Bad Man — Fred Frith (1980)

2008-12-18T14:45:00.004-07:00

Dancing In The Street by Martha and the Vandellas is, without question, among the greatest recordings of the 20th century. Don't take my word for it: Ask members of the Library of Congress, who've chosen to preserve it in the U.S. National Recording Registry. So, you'd think other artists would leave well enough alone. Alas, this hasn't been the case and we live in a world with too many renditions of this Marvin Gaye-William Stevenson-Ivy Jo Hunter composition: most are simply adequate (Mamas and the Papas, Cilla Black); a few border on criminal (Van Halen and the excruciating Bowie-Jagger duet).

There is, however, one non-Vandellas version of Dancing I very much enjoy — you'll find it on Gravity, the second Fred Frith solo album and first following the demise of his British avant-garde aggregation Henry Cow. The 1980 album proved a surprisingly commercial venture — relatively speaking, of course — and Dancing in The Street, paired with Frith's own My Enemy is a Bad Man coda, was its flagship single (pictured left). Let's just say it didn't exactly challenge Christopher Cross or Air Supply for chart supremacy that year. Give it as listen and you'll hear why.

Frith's version may have an infectious, swinging groove but that's where the similarities with the Vandellas' classic end. Rather than strive for euphoria, Frith aims for disorientation and strangeness. The melody is seemingly played with one finger on a high-pitched synth, vibrato set to 11, not unlike The Tornados' otherworldly Telstar. However, one's attention is not captured by the awkwardly rendered melody but what's going on in the background: a muted cacophony of electronic noise, heavily distorted human voices and, if my ears aren't fooling me, the sound of barking dogs and power saws. Essentially, this single inverts how we normally hear music: We're compelled to listen through the familiar melody and beat to discern what's happening in the background, even though that's the most non-musical element of the song.

If you're going to cover Dancing in the Street, you better bring your own thing to it — and Frith certainly does that here.

Dancing In The Street/My Enemy is a Bad Man (link expired)

One more interesting version of Dancing in the Street for you today, courtesy of YouTube. From the All-American College Show in 1968, here is the Dick Carpenter Trio — who you'll recognize as The Carpenters with a bass player — who take the song in a decidedly Booker T and the MGs direction. The video quality is poor but it's still worth watching for the host's introduction — "Incidentally, she's a fine singer, too," he says of Karen, the group's drummer — and for the finale, where Zsa Zsa Gabor and William Shatner present the trophy and prize money to the future easy-listening superstars.

Buy it here

Lotta Love — Dinosaur Jr. (1989)

2008-12-17T10:15:00.005-07:00

Apparently Neil Young was a contrary ol' git even when he was a young man. In February 1979, a 33-year-old Young secured a Rolling Stone cover story (pictured below) to promote his then-current album, Comes a Time. Problem was, speaking to writer Cameron Crowe, the musician could barely muster a spark of enthusiasm for the record and its comfy country-pop.

"It's in the middle of a soft place. I hear it on the radio and it sounds nice," Young said dismissively. "But I'm somewhere else now. I'm into rock and roll." (True to his word, just eight months later, he'd release the edgier, punk-inspired Rust Never Sleeps.)

Certainly, Comes A Time isn't among Young's landmark recordings but the album does contain a lot of good songs, including the original acoustic version of today's post. That same year, Nicolette Larson (who sang on Comes A Time) gave Lotta Love a sunny, California-pop makeover and the song surged into the top-10. Hers is a great version but, again, not rock and roll. A decade later, the original Dinosaur Jr. lineup made the unlikely decision to cover Lotta Love for The Bridge, a 1989 alt-rock Young tribute album. Their rendition imagined a world where Comes A Time was recorded with Crazy Horse while the band was all hopped up on cheap amphetamines and powerful hallucinogens. Oh, and incidentally, that's a good thing.

Frontman J. Mascis sounds utterly unhinged, the pitch and meter of his vocals careening like a drunk on the highway. The guitars aren't just loud but tinnitus inducing, drenched in distortion and feedback. And Lou Barlow and Murph's attempts at vocal harmonies are hilariously hapless, especially at the end of the bridge, when what's supposed to be sweet "woos" sound more like the cries of a wounded animal. The overall effect suggests a three-piece band in which no one is aware, or cares, about the others are playing. (Should we be surprised this lineup fell apart before the year ended?) This is as far as you can push the shambolic envelope without the music collapsing into unlistenable chaos.

Dinosaur Jr.'s Lotta Love would have given that 33-year-old Neil Young wet dreams. It is not in the middle of a soft place. It is not nice. It is very rock and roll.

Lotta Love (link expired)

For comparison, here's the late Nicolette Larson lip-syncing (and poorly at that) to her hit version of Lotta Love in a 1979 promo clip. I can only assume from this video that all men in her band were forced to grow unflattering facial hair. It was probably a fetish or something.

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Chick-a-Boom — Joe Bataan (2005)

2008-12-15T14:07:00.009-07:00

He laid down some supremely funky, Nuyorica soul in the 1960s and '70s; in the process, helping to originate Salsoul, the genre and the record label. His fusion of Brazilian and Afro-Cuban styles with lush orchestration presaged disco. He charted one of the first rap singles. Now 66, he's still going strong. So why the hell don't more people know of Joe Bataan?

The man has a fascinating history. Born in Spanish Harlem, Bataan Nitoliano spent his youth running with Puerto Rican gangs and, from age 15 to 20, was incarcerated at the Coxsackie State Prison on car theft charges. Upon release, the self-taught pianist opted to pursue music, not crime. He formed his first band in 1965 and, two years later, was on the charts with a cover of The Impressions' Gypsy Woman. Throughout the late-'60s and 1970s, he'd record several landmark Latin albums (1970's Riot!, 1972's St. Latin's Day Massacre, 1974's Salsoul, 1975's Afro-Filipino), first with New York salsa label Fania, later on his own Salsoul imprint. Just as he ended the 1960s playing music that anticipated a dominant genre of the coming decade — disco — Bataan closed the 1970s with Rap-O, Clap-O, a 1979 single that anticipated a dominant genre of the coming decade — rap. (See the video below.)

Yet the streets eventually drew him back. Bataan put his musical career on hiatus following his 1981 album, Bataan II, and went to work for the next 20 years counselling juveniles at correctional facilities, where he'd share his own tales of crime and redemption. This was a full-time job, not some altrustic whim, and Bataan apparently didn't record or produce a note of music over those two decades.

Surely Bataan fans had long given up hope for new music when, in 2005, the sexagenarian surprised all by releasing his first record in 24 years, Call My Name, on Spain's Vampi-Soul label. Better still, the disc's eight tracks — including today's uber-funky post — pick up where his mid-'70s classics left off.

Chick-a-Boom is a groove-alicious treat, with its cool, syncopated drumming, spine-bending bassline and stabs of Hammond B-3. Great opening line, too — "This is a hold-up!/ Everybody on the ground!/ Put your hands behind your head/ Don't make a sound" — that leads into a lyric that puts the listener into the mind of the criminal in order to acknowledge (if not validate) the reasons for lawless behaviour. "Too much money in too few hands," sings Bataan (quoting Paul Weller's Money-Go-Round). "Imagine how it feels to be rejected/Imagine how it feels to be despised." Bataan might not have been writing music while counselling juveniles but Chick-a-Boom's lyrics suggest he was listening closely and taking mental notes.

Bataan continues to tour and his official website promises a new album is "coming soon."

Chick-a-Boom (link expired)

Here's Bataan, performing the forementioned Rap-O, Clap-O on Germany's Musikladen program in 1979:

Buy it here

The New Stone Age — Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (1981)

2008-12-14T13:00:00.005-07:00

Last Friday afternoon, at around 4:30 p.m., I was happy ... and very, very cold. My work day complete, I was looking at a three-week vacation ahead of me, as well as a protracted, white-knuckle drive home through a nasty blizzard that had slammed into Calgary a couple hours earlier. Temperatures in my little part of the world quickly dropped to minus-40 Celsius at night which, for the metric-impaired, happens to be the same as minus-40 Fahrenheit. Which, for those who know neither metric nor imperial measurement, can be described in three words: off, balls and fall (not necessarily in that order.)

A cold-day track is in order for today's post — and I don't know a better winter song than today's post, the leadoff track of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's third and best record, Architecture and Morality. First off, rest assured: If You Leave, it ain't. The New Stone Age begins with what sounds like gears grinding — you know, the sound a car makes when you try to start it in minus-40 weather when it hasn't been plugged in for a few hours. ("Plugged in?" you ask? May I suggest you click here and, oh, one final thing: right now, I despise you and your pleasant-all-year-round weather.) The track eventually whirrs into motion with the most un-rock and roll guitar strumming you'll ever hear and, more notably, gales of glacial synth that are the sonic embodiment of Arctic winds blowing across the featureless, white tundra. For years, I mistakenly thought this song was called The New Ice Age. Really, I think it's a more apt title.

An odd, personal note: Of my thousands of albums, Architecture and Morality is the only one for which I can pinpoint the exact date I bought it — Dec. 30, 1981 — only because I heard Wayne Gretzky score his record-smashing 50th goal in 39 games during a radio broadcast later that night. The only other thing I can remember about Dec. 30, 1981: it was a damn cold day. Go figure.

The New Stone Age (link expired)

OMD's original lineup recently reunited and performed Architecture and Morality in its entirety (albeit in a different running order). Rather than pull something from that tour, I opted to post this 1981 performance of A&M single Joan of Arc, if only to bask in the glory of McCluskey's onstage dancing. Please assure me he's not having a seizure.

Buy it here

Border Song — Aretha Franklin (1972)

2008-12-07T16:20:00.004-07:00

Rock lists are, by nature, contentious things but I'd be surprised if there was any significant opposition — outside of the Michael Bolton fan club — to Rolling Stone's decision to anoint Aretha Franklin the greatest singer of all time. Even the most cloth-eared must recognize her voice is a force of nature; an eighth wonder of the modern world. Recently, I've been digging into her back catalogue and realizing that, like Dylan, in the long shadow of her landmark records (Lady Soul, I Never Loved A Man The Way I Loved You) resides a treasure trove of less-heralded, second-tier albums that are 'merely' jaw-droppingly awesome. The fact they're untouched by overfamiliarity only adds to their appeal.

Spirit in the Dark, her bluesy breakup record from 1970, is my favourite Aretha album and listening to it on vinyl is one of life's simple pleasures. (Hence, the cover's appearance on the new-look Bongo Jazz masthead.) She followed Spirit with the brighter, less anguished Young, Gifted and Black; today's post is the 1972 disc's closing track and arguably the definitive version of the Elton John-Bernie Taupin song. The mostly cryptic Border Song had appeared two years prior on Elton's self-titled, sophomore album; its overt gospel flavour and plea for racial tolerance ("Holy Moses, let us live in peace/ Let us strive to find a way to make all hatred cease/ There's a man over there/ What's his colour, I don't care/ He's my brother/ Let us live in peace") must have resonated with Aretha, who pushed to record it and release it as a single prior to Young, Gifted and Black's completion.

Aretha's Border Song features Billy Preston on church organ, a watery guitar solo from Cornell Dupree that could have been lifted from The Beatles' Let It Be and a divine choir of soul voices, led by The Sweet Inspirations — yet the song peaked at a lowly No. 37 on the pop charts in October 1970. Jerry Wexler, who produced the session with Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin, wasn't surprised the song underperformed as a single.

"What's finally wrong with The Border Song," he told Blues & Soul magazine in 1971, "is that the black audiences don't know what the hell the lyric is about."

Should it matter, when the music sounds this heavenly?

Border Song (link expired)

Here's footage of a 22-year-old Aretha — then just a struggling R&B-jazz singer with Columbia Records — and Ray Johnson performing Mockingbird on a Shindig episode that aired March 10, 1965. This performance certainly sounds like the blueprint for the Carly Simon-James Taylor duet that scaled the pop charts nine years later:

Buy it here

She's The Kind of Girl — Gene Clark (1970)

2008-12-06T13:30:00.004-07:00

Official history shows the original lineup of the Byrds stayed together long enough to record two classic 1965 albums before reassembling eight years later for a largely uninspired, one-off reunion disc. Case closed. That's all she wrote.

Well, not quite. In May 1970, Gene Clark — the Byrds' best songwriter and first original member to fly the coop — convinced all four of his former bandmates to perform on She's the Kind of Girl, his first new solo single following the dissolution of his country-rock duo Dillard and Clark. (Two months later, the five original Byrds would record the single's B-side, One in a Hundred.)

Clark's powers of persuasion were not strong enough to get these warring factions together in one studio and one time — nevertheless, once the sessions were complete, the world had two more Clark compositions featuring Roger McGuinn on ringing 12-string guitar, David Crosby on harmony vocals, Chris Hillman on bass and Michael Clarke on drums. And just like the old days, the producer is Jim Dickson, who helmed the group's pre-Columbia recordings (later released on Preflyte). The only other musician on the track is L.A. jazzman Bud Shank, whose flute solo is a defining element on what is otherwise a great, lost Byrds single. She's the Kind of Girl could have fit snugly on either the Mr. Tambourine Man or Turn! Turn! Turn! albums, and it's certainly better than almost everything on that surprisingly lifeless, self-titled reunion disc. The fact it hasn't been included on either of the two Byrds box sets verges on criminal.

Perhaps Clark's label, A&M, didn't like this sadly beautiful ballad, or didn't recognize the value of a virtual Byrds reunion, but She's the Kind of Girl/One in a Hundred was never given a proper release at the time. Both tracks were eventually released on Roadmaster, a 1972 Dutch compilation of Clark off-cuts.

She's The Kind of Girl (link expired)

Undeterred by the aborted single, his next two solo albums, 1971's Gene Clark (aka White Light) and 1974's No Other, were both singer-songwriter classics (but, tragically, only recognized as such following his death in 1991). From the latter, here's the former Byrd performing Silver Raven:

Buy it here

The Shadow Knows — David Axelrod (2001)

2008-12-01T22:20:00.003-07:00

I still find it strange hearing the name David Axelrod mentioned regularly on the news and in the papers. Of course, that David Axelrod is President-Elect Barack Obama's former chief strategist and current senior advisor; the David Axelrod I've followed for years is one of popular music's unsung heroes, a cool-as-f--- composer/arranger whose late-career resurgence at the start of this decade appears to have petered out. Sad, that. I think it's time to give a little more love to the other David Axelrod, whose music will still be heard and enjoyed when President Jenna Bush takes office in 2033.

Born and bred in a working-class area of Los Angeles, 'The Axe' paid his musical dues with the Specialty and Contemporary labels before moving onto Capitol. There, he helmed a series of visionary and often overreaching albums by an impossibly diverse collection of acts (most notably The Electric Prunes, Lou Rawls, Cannonball Adderley and himself) during his 1964-70 purple patch. He built his reputation on big concepts, bigger orchestrations and bass 'n' drum work so booming, I'm sure they affected the tides. Certainly, his career has ebbed and flowed: He was on top of the world in 1969, on the brink of homelessness in 1988 and back in demand by the late-'90s, when his old grooves started to get sampled by the likes of Dr. Dre, Lauryn Hill, DJ Shadow and Mos Def.

Today's post is from Axelrod's last album of 'new' material, a self-titled 2001 release on James Lavelle's Mo' Wax label. The record was actually started in 1968 as a musical adaptation of Faust but the project was eventually shelved and forgotten ... that is, until Axelrod was handed an acetate of the original rhythm tracks in 1999. Loving what he heard, he re-entered Capitol's Studio B to do some supplemental recording, including two new tracks, and finally completed the record, minus the original concept.

The Shadow Knows, named in tribute to DJ Shadow, dates back to those 1968 sessions. Not one of his orchestral blowouts, this blues-jazz slow-burner features a couple stinging guitar solos from the late Howard Roberts and some beautifully melodic bass lines from Carol Kaye over cool, ominous chords, earthy B-3 organ and a laid-back, in-the-pocket groove. This is music to luxuriate in; turn it up and allow the sound to wash over you.

Alas, this could be the last new record we hear from Axelrod. He turns 73 in April and there's no sign or suggestion he's working on another project; in fact, the news section of his official website stopped being updated in 2006.

The Shadow Knows (link expired)

To hear how Axelrod's music has been sampled, here's the video of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg's The Next Episode, which makes excellent use of The Edge, a track Axelrod wrote and arranged for TV actor David McCallum's 1966 album Music: A Bit More of Me.

Buy it here

My Future Just Passed — Shirley Horn (1963)

2008-11-30T23:55:00.004-07:00

Last weekend, as I watched a preening Beyonce belt out a lung during her SNL musical performances, I was faced with a horrible dilemma: Do I poke out my eyes first, or chop off my ears? In the end, I opted for a third option: Mute the TV and go feed the cats. Less blood. Nevertheless, my initial reaction sums up how grating I find Beyonce and her diva contemporaries: They may have the ability to sing on key without the use of Auto-Tune but remain painfully oblivious to the concept of nuance, opting to deliver lyrics as if they should all end with an exclamation point.

Oh, what they could learn from singers like the late Shirley Horn, an exceptional jazz pianist who also happened to be one of the genre's greatest ballad singers, thanks to her smoky, seductive voice and impeccable, understated phrasing. Her best recordings are enticingly intimate. Rather than attacking the music and lyrics, she caresses them, gently and unhurriedly. If your heart doesn't skip a beat listening to Shirley Horn sing, you may already be dead.

Today's post is from Loads of Love, one of two pop-vocal albums she released on Mercury in 1963. (The other being Shirley Horn with Horns.) My Future Just Passed was originally a peppy little number performed by Victor studio band The High Hatters in the 1930 musical-comedy Safety in Numbers. Horn's version has some altered lyrics and an almost glacial tempo, both of which change the song significantly. Whereas the High Hatters' version sounds like harmless trifle (you can download it here), Horn's rendition is dark blue and desperate, as her case of love-at-first-sight turns into heartbreaking realization fate might not be an ally and her soulmate could belong to another: "Life can't be that way/ To wake me then break me," she whispers, with slight reservation, as if she really knows life can be that way.

Yet, in the liner notes to a 1990 reissue of Loads of Love, Horn dismisses her vocal performances on the Mercury albums. "When I made those records," she said, "I hadn't experienced enough to know what the song lyrics meant; I hadn't lived them yet."

Could've fooled me.

My Future Just Passed (link expired)

Horn put her musical career on the backburner following those 1963 Mercury discs and focused on family life for the ensuing 15 years. She began touring again in 1978 and released a series of critically acclaimed, Grammy Award-winning albums for Verve starting in 1987. In 2002, she had a foot amputated due to complications of diabetes but she continued to perform and record until succumbing a massive stroke in 2005. She was 71. Here is Ms. Horn in her latter years, looking frail, but still able to sing circles around pop stars a half-century her junior.

Buy it here

Remembering Kenny MacLean

2008-11-25T00:00:00.005-07:00

Bongo Jazz was saddened yesterday to hear about the death of Kenny MacLean. For most, he will be best remembered as the bass player for Platinum Blonde, a hugely popular band in Canada during the mid-'80s who were, admittedly, thinly guised Duran Duran copycats. Suffice to say, Platinum Blonde were not my kind of thing and, as a young music writer learning the ropes, I surely took a few good swings at 'em in print at the height of their success. I thought they were fakes, flawlessly designed by accountants in some music industry boardroom to con 16-year-old girls to part with their money (and, at their concerts, with sundry items of clothing.) At the time, I thought musicians fell into two categories: those with integrity and those without, and the four members of Platinum Blonde fell into the latter category.

I had a lot to learn and Kenny MacLean provided a lesson I've never forgotten. In 1986, I chatted with MacLean over the phone to promote an upcoming concert at the 20,000-seat Pengrowth Saddledome. The show fell during Calgary's annual Stampede Week. MacLean was a good sport despite putting up with an interrogation, er, interview technique that can only be described as Defend Your Life. Near the end of the conversation, MacLean inquired what other acts were playing in the city during Stampede week. I mentioned The Everly Brothers were at the Saddledome the night before Platinum Blonde — and MacLean flipped out. He said he loved the Everlys; he mentioned he was in town that evening; he needed a ticket. I had an excellent pair of seats and no date, so I offered my extra ticket to MacLean. To my surprise, he accepted the offer and, an hour before showtime, I met a member of the dreaded Platinum Blonde at the hockey arena.

There was nothing 'fake' or 'manufactured' about MacLean's excitement that night. In fact, he reminded me of the girls I'd see at Platinum Blonde shows. He wanted to go to the merchandise tables and buy a T-shirt, and, omigod!, wondered if I had enough pull to get him backstage to meet Phil and Don. (I didn't.) He was dressed down that night — just a pair of ordinary jeans, a non-descript button-up shirt and hair that appeared untouched by any Vidal Sassoon product. Nevertheless, as we walked through the concourse, I could tell many of the kids who were dragged by their parents to see this lame-o show recognized MacLean. He was gracious and accommodating to all the teenaged fans who approached him for an autographs or to pose for a photograph. As the kids surrounded MacLean, a man likely twice their age, I surveyed the parents as they stared at this unassuming (albeit impossibly svelte) fellow. I suspected what they were thinking: This guy is a rock star?

Funny, I was beginning to think the same thing.

MacLean and I finally took our seats and, with a few minutes before showtime, we just shot the shit. We talked about the new records we liked; the songs we hoped the Everlys would sing. I mentioned I liked his previous band, The Deserters, and thought they recorded some pretty good material before losing their way. MacLean said he was proud of the Deserters and wished they could have paid the bills. Platinum Blonde, he said, didn't make the sort of music he personally enjoyed but, as a professional musician, it was good to have a steady gig, play high-energy music before big, adoring crowds, and tour with bandmates he genuinely liked. He felt blessed. And I thought to myself: Really, is that so bad?

Soon the lights went down, the Everlys took the stage and MacLean transformed into someone I recognized: a music fan, kind of like myself. Phil and Don's harmonies obviously lit up MacLean's pleasure centres; he whooped and cheered every song with unreserved glee. Sadly, I had to leave the show before its conclusion to file an early review; I wish I could have stuck around, to hear more Everlys, but moreso, to soak in MacLean's good vibes.

Platinum Blonde didn't have many more good years. As bands of this ilk are wont to do, they tried to go 'respectable' and 'adult' with an ill-fated 'funk' album and soon thereafter it was all over. Undeterred, MacLean stayed busy over the next couple decades, recording the occasional solo disc, playing sessions and helping developing artists. His sister found him dead Monday in his Toronto apartment.

I'll always remember him for that Everly show, and how he loved this song:

Let It Be Me (link expired)

Finally, here a video of MacLean performing Don't Look Back, the title track of his first post-Blonde solo album. Very Beatle-y, and a mighty fine song.

I Love You Like I Love Myself — The Playn Jayn (1985)

2008-11-24T03:00:00.011-07:00

Hair metal, hip-hop and electro-pop are among the genres most widely associated with the 1980s but anyone who frequented indie record shops during the era knows the decade also spawned a seemingly endless supply of quality, '60s-inspired psych and garage bands. A few hit the mainstream but most came and went without much notice, leaving behind a bunch of shoulda-been hits waiting to be rediscovered. Rhino's excellent Children of Nuggets box set from 2005 collected 100 of them — and still there were notable omissions, including today's post from The Playn Jayn.

Led by brothers Mike (vocals/harmonica) and Nick Jones (guitar), the London quintet released two albums — the first live, the second studio — that never have been released on CD (at least as far as I can determine). The wonderfully titled I Love You Like I Love Myself is the leadoff track from the group's sole studio offering, Five Good Evils, released in July 1985.

Naturally, this Jones/Jones composition is a meant to be a narcissist anthem but its dopey lyrics — "Love is like a butterfly/ Lives one day and then it dies" — suggests tongue is firmly planted in cheek. The music, though, is no joke: It's an uncannily accurate period pastiche, highlighted by Nick's doomy, horror-movie intro, Clive Francis's hyperactive drumming and Mike's playful vocal. "I love myself! I need myself!" he declares straight-faced, as the song comes to a close.

The Playn Jayn fell off the radar following Five Good Evils and a revival seems unlikely. According to internet reports (so take this with a block of salt), Nick has given up music and is working as a photographer, while brother Mike is an acid casualty, living with his parents in Bournemouth.

I Love You Like I Love Myself (link expired)

I was unable to locate any footage of The Playn Jayn but I found the next best thing: Cars keyboardist Greg Hawkes playing Eleanor Rigby on ukelele. Tune in, turn on and drop out, man.

Visit the Playn Jayn's Myspace page here

Amanita Muscaria — Shelleyan Orphan (1989)

2008-11-23T15:00:00.003-07:00

2008 will be remembered as the year a beloved, late-'80s act returned to record stores for the first time in 17 long years. I am referring, of course, to the Bournemouth, England, duo of Caroline Crawley and Jem Tayle, better known as Shelleyan Orphan. (To whom did you think I was referring?)

They are currently touring the UK in support of We Have Everything Their Need (pictured left), their first album of new material since 1991's Humroot. (You can hear a couple new songs, as well as their sublime 1986 single Cavalry of Cloud, about Nick Drake, on their MySpace page here.) These chamber-pop boffins didn't split because of intolerable, Pink Floydian rancour yet their reunion is still surprising because there seemed an utter lack of demand for one. I have great affection for their first three Rough Trade records, especially 1989 sophomore disc Century Flower, but I would have suspected Shelleyan Orphan could play to all of their remaining diehard fans in a venue only slightly larger than a telephone booth. I'm glad to be proven wrong.

Today's post is one of my favourite cuts from the forementioned Century Flower. Amanita Muscaria may not feature Crawley's lovely voice but the instrumental is bewitching all the same and representative of the baroque beauty of which Shelleyan Orphan are capable. The dramatic, sawing cellos and swirling, unfettered woodwinds combine for what could be mistaken as God's soundtrack for the blooming of a flower. Yes, it's that enchanting. Perversely, Amanita Muscaria isn't a flower but a poisonous fungus known for its hallucinogenic properties. Oh, the stuff you can learn reading this blog...

Amanita Muscaria (link expired)

Despite using such non-rock 'n' roll instruments as oboes and cellos and bassoons, Shelleyan Orphan are also capable of rhythmic, pulse-quickening songs, such as Century Flower's rollicking single, Shatter. Here's the video:

Buy it here

Stuff That Works — Guy Clark (1995)

2008-11-22T18:00:00.005-07:00

Great songwriting never goes out of style. That's why, when someone like Rodney Crowell is given the freedom to simply do what comes naturally, the Houston native crafts crackerjack Americana records like his latest Sex and Gasoline. This Joe Henry-produced disc has been on heavy rotation at Chez Bongo Jazz over the past six weeks; its humanity, (often black) humour and homespun wisdom replenish the soul while leaving a smile on your face.

Oh, and it rocks, too.

There isn't a dud on the disc — Crowell's first in three years — and a handful of tracks rank with the best songs he's ever written. I'm particularly sweet on the final track, Closer to Heaven, in which the 58-year-old takes stock of what's important to him ... and, in an amusingly cantankerous way, what's not:

"I don't like hummus/ I hate long lines/ Nosy neighbours and Venetian blinds/ Chirpy news anchors alter my mood/ I'm offended by buzzwords like 'awesome' and 'dude.' "

Among his loves he lists: his wife and kids; biscuits and gravy; actress Sissy Spacek, and singer-songwriter Guy Clark. Have a listen:

Crowell, of course, has mined this seam before. Closer to Heaven is a close relative of today's post, Stuff That Works, a song Crowell co-wrote with fellow Texan Clark on the latter's must-own 1995 album, Dublin Blues. Like Closer to Heaven, Stuff That Works is a simple yet poignant celebration of the old and reliable over the new and shiny. At first, Clark sings of favourite shirts and boots and guitars but, in the final two verses, the song becomes about even more venerable stuff. Stuff like trust and loyalty and true love. "Stuff that's real/ Stuff you feel," sings Clark, "the kind of stuff you reach for when you fall."

It takes a man of a certain vintage to deliver a song like this with authority — perhaps explaining why Crowell felt he needed another 13 years to write one for himself.

Stuff That Works (link expired)

Here's a little more from Sex and Gasoline, the video for the title track. Lyrically, it's the photo negative of Closer to Heaven, as it skewers society's misplaced obsession with youth and beauty. There are a lot of laugh-out-loud lyrics in this one. My favourite: "You're over 30/ Why, you old hag!"

Buy Sex and Gasoline here

Buy Dublin Blues here

One of Those Things — Dexy's Midnight Runners (1985)

2008-11-17T03:00:00.004-07:00

Exactly 30 years after Warren Zevon scaled the pop charts with Werewolves of London, the song's addictive piano riff was once again all over radio this year — this time, as the foundation of the ubiquitous Kid Rock single All Summer Long. Sampling Werewolves proved a savvy move on Rock's part but not necessarily an original one.

In 1985, Dexy's Midnight Runners released Don't Stand Me Down, the difficult and willfully contrary followup to breakthrough album Too-Rye-Ay and its globe-straddling single, Come On Eileen. The Celtic soul sound and gypsies-in-dungarees look of 1982 were gone, replaced by long, conversational tracks and natty Ivy League attire. If Dexys leader Kevin Rowland was trying to befuddle his fan base, he succeeded. Time has revealed Don't Stand Me Down as an idiosyncratic masterpiece but, at the time, it was career suicide.

One of Those Things was one of the album's catchiest songs, thanks to its unmistakable piano riff. It's Werewolves of London. Except, when Don't Stand Me Down was originally released, the song was credited to Rowland ... and no one else.

"Basically, I'm amazed and quite embarrassed at my arrogance when I hear this," Rowland wrote in the liner notes of the album's 1997 reissue. "I stole the riff totally from Warren Zevon's Werewolves of London after hearing it on the radio. I didn't care that it was obvious and I ignored the danger that it might well be detected, feeling that what I was doing was more important, Ironically, I thought up a melody that was maybe as good to go over the chords ... but I still insisted on using Mr. Zevon's as well, such was my obliviousness. He now rightfully owns a portion of the song."

One of Those Things might have stood an outside chance at radio play if the first verse, you know, didn't piss all over the music played on the radio. Gotta say, though: The song's chorus and central complaint — "It all sounds the same!" — is more relevant than ever.

One of Those Things (link expired)

Also from Don't Stand Me Down, here's the video for This Is What She's Like, a phenomenal 12-minute album track edited into a four-minute flop single.

Buy it here

You Can Make Me Dance, Sing or Anything — The Faces (1975)

2008-11-16T17:35:00.004-07:00

The surviving members of The Faces are scheduled to reconvene tomorrow for the first rehearsal for a planned Summer 2009 reunion tour. Certainly, it's good to see 'em back together. Considering their boozy exploits throughout the 1970s, it's a small miracle four of the band's five original members are still with us, their livers apparently still functioning. (Bassist-singer-songwriter Ronnie Lane died in 1997 after a long battle with multiple sclerosis.) The question remains: Can Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood, Kenney Jones and Ian McLagen conjure their former shambolic soulfulness now that they're all in their 60s? I'd be surprised if the old chemistry still exists but, hey, I look at it this way: as long as Rod is busy with The Faces, he isn't recording another installment in his abysmal Great American Songbook series.

Today's post is one of the Faces' last official releases before their dissolution in late 1975. Lane had left the band at this point, Stewart was eyeing a full-time solo career and Wood was only a year removed from replacing Mick Taylor in the Rolling Stones. Given the circumstances, You Can Make Me Dance, Sing or Anything could have been an uninspired toss-off by a distracted band in commercial decline. On the contrary, this jointly penned single, released in January 1975, proved a triumphant swansong that cemented a legacy from which The Black Crowes, Georgia Satellites, The Quireboys, Flies on Fire and countless others would draw inspiration.

You Can Make Me Dance, Sing or Anything (link expired)

Here are The Faces in their 1972 prime, covering Paul McCartney's Maybe I'm Amazed.

Buy it here

Rubber Ring/Asleep — The Smiths (1985)

2008-11-09T05:00:00.004-07:00

Another Smiths compilation; another missed opportunity. Rhino's two-disc Sounds of the Smiths best-of arrives in stores next week, boasting a fine track listing and much-needed remastered sound supervised by guitarist Johnny Marr. The first CD rounds up the usual singles, most of them timeless; a second CD cherry-picks album tracks and B-sides that haven't appeared on previous compilations. So what's this missed opportunity?

The Smiths' late-1985, 12-inch single, The Boy With The Thorn In His Side (pictured left), contained two excellent non-album B-sides, Rubber Ring and Asleep, which were effectively conjoined. These tracks would make regular appearances on subsequent compilations — 1987's Louder than Bombs contained both – but they were always separated for some inexplicable reason. (Sounds of the Smiths contains Asleep but not Rubber Ring).

Perhaps someone in the Smiths doesn't like the segue from Rubber Ring to Asleep. If so, he's wrong. These Morrissey-Marr songs fit like, um, hand in glove (sorry, couldn't resist); as originally released, they combine for eight uninterrupted minutes of Smiths bliss.

Fans of the legendary Manchester band will likely have to wait for the inevitable Smiths Singles CD box set to hear the combined Rubber Ring/Asleep in remastered digital sound. Until then, enjoy this vinyl rip.

Rubber Ring/Asleep (link expired)

And here's the none-more-'80s video for the A-side, which would later appear in remixed form on The Queen Is Dead.

Buy it here

There's No Blood In Bone — The Poppy Family (1969)

2008-11-08T16:30:00.002-07:00

There was a She & Him long before Her & That Guy. She & Him, of course, is actress/singer/songwriter Zooey Deschanel and multi-instrumentalist M. Ward, whose debut album Vol. 1 was one of the left-field hits of 2008. Deschenel's sweet, melancholy-tinged vocals wrapped in Ward's gentle country/folk/pop arrangements proved to a beguiling combination but not necessarily an original one. She & Him have drawn comparisons to countless acts and, today, I'll throw out a rarely mentioned antecedent: The Poppy Family, a Vancouver-based group led by another she-and-him partnership, Terry Jacks and his then wife Susan. Their two albums, 1969's Which Way You Goin', Billy? and 1971's Poppy Seeds, would not only appeal to fans of She & Him but also to anyone with an affinity for late-'60s, early-'70s soft-psych. Their music is ripe for rediscovery ... and more eclectic than you might remember.

The Poppy Family are best known for the title track of their debut, a No. 2 hit in the U.S. in 1970 and still a staple of easy-listening radio:

And 1971 brought the Poppy Family's best single, Where Evil Grows, which peaked outside of the U.S. top 40 despite sounding infinitely groovy (that riff! that sitar! those harmonies!) The song may have underperformed in the U.S. because its sinister lyric provided an unwelcome and likely unintended reminder of the Manson Family murders, still fresh in the American psyche. Thirty seven years later, this remains one of my all-time favourite songs:

Which Way You Goin', Billy and Where Evil Grows are very different songs and yet the group also could play straight-up country (1972 single Good Friends — very She & Him) one moment and soft-psych freakouts the next. Today's post, from the Poppy Family's debut disc, falls into the latter category.

"When Joey died, Marie went mad," is the song's outstanding opening gambit (not including the eerie spoken-word intro in which Susan's voice is varispeeded wildly.) The band embraces this unhinged spirit, with fuzz guitar and organ soloing almost free-form and Susan bellowing like Grace Slick after ingesting the bad brown acid. If you remember The Poppy Family as soft-pop peddlers, There's No Blood in Bone will confound your expectations.

Terry and Susan Jacks divorced in 1973 and the Poppy Family disbanded. They would both embark on solo careers and Terry even enjoyed an international chart-topper with 1974's ghastly Seasons in the Sun. But neither would reach the artistic heights they scaled together.

There's No Blood in Bone (link expired)

Let's end this post as it began, with a little She & Him. Here the video for Vol. 1's first single, Why Did You Let Me Stay Here?

Buy Poppy Family here

Buy She & Him here

A Change Is Gonna Come — Sam Cooke (1963)

2008-11-04T04:00:00.003-07:00

Dear America,

Hey, it's finally Election Day.

Please don't screw this up.

Sincerely,

Bongo Jazz

A Change Is Gonna Come (link expired)

Buy it here

Jimmy Browns — Bend Sinister (2008), Hiroshima (B-B-B-Benny Hit His Head) — Ben Folds (2008)

2008-11-02T17:30:00.004-07:00

Seeing Elton John in Las Vegas this summer was among my concert highlights in 2008, especially since the show began with my all-time favourite Elton song, Bennie and the Jets. I've never tired of this classic-rock fixture because, 35 years after its recording, the track has somehow maintained its elusiveness and duality. Bennie and the Jets is glam and disco; studio and live; celebration and satire; a dancefloor filler and stubbornly mid-tempoed. The song is so damn indefinable and flummoxing, I wonder if the producers of Soul Train realized they were booking a balding, pasty white Englishman to perform this chart-topper on the African-Amercian music show. Bennie and the Jets — it's a special song, indeed.

Within the last month, I've come across a couple of new songs that could be Bennie's grandchildren.

First up is Hiroshima (B-B-B-Benny Hits His Head), the opening track from Ben Folds' latest album Way To Normal (pictured left). Folds, of course, was initially described as the slacker generation's answer to Elton and this comparison, in some ways, stands up. Just as Elton went from the inspired pop of Honky Chateau to the perfunctory MOR of 21 at 33 in eight short years, Folds's recording career followed a similar trajectory between 1997's fizzy Whatever and Ever Amen and 2005's accomplished and mature (read: bland) Songs For Silverman.

The good news is Way To Normal recalls Folds's more playful and energetic earlier records. Opening track Hiroshima sets the tone: It's a blatant homage to Bennie, with its dubbed crowd noise and stomping piano chords (not to mention the stuttering B-B-B's in the subtitle), but whereas Elton's song describes some ultra-cool Rock God in full flow, Folds's song recounts the time he walked over the edge of the stage and sustained a concussion during a concert in Japan. "They're watching me/watching me fall," goes the catchy-as-hell chorus, while the verses are equally guileless and self-deprecating. The song has a great, abrupt ending, too.

There's more Elton love in Jimmy Browns, a track from Stories of Brothers, Tales of Lovers (pictured right), the second full-length album by Vancouver's Bend Sinister.

The quintet — think of them as Canada's answer to The Feeling — borrows liberally from FM rock of the late 1970s, especially from the modestly proggy likes of Queen, 10cc, Boston, Klaatu and Supertramp. Here, they build an entire song around the slightest variation of Bennie's piano chord progression although, to be fair, the rest of the song creates its own brand of electric music, solid walls of sound.

Hiroshima (link expired)

Jimmy Browns (link expired)

As good as these tracks are, they don't hold a candle to the song that inspired them. So, I'd be remiss if I didn't include a video of Elton performing Bennie and the Jets. Here's a campy clip of Elton duetting with the host of The Cher Show, from 1975:

Buy it here and here

When adverts go bad...

2008-10-26T19:00:00.003-06:00

One of the pleasures of flipping through old music magazines is finding those woefully misguided advertisements that surely remain a source of embarrassment for the acts they were intended to promote. Today, I thought I'd scan a couple to share with you.

Typically, an ad is placed to hype a hit. Here is a rare example of an ad inspiring a hit:

In 1976, Heart's debut album Dreamboat Annie had become a left-field million-seller and the group's label, Vancouver-based Mushroom Records, patted itself on the back with this National Enquirer-styled ad that appeared in December of that year.

"Regional hit mushrooms into million seller," read one headline.

"Tiny Record Co. Beats The Odds," read another.

In the end, tiny record co. beat itself.

The ad also pictured Ann and Nancy Wilson, seemingly topless and back to back, above the headline, "Sisters Confess: It Was Only Our First Time." The sisters were so appalled by the implication they were lesbian lovers they broke their contract with Mushroom, not long after this ad appeared, and signed with CBS affiliate label Portrait.

Barracuda, the leadoff single from Heart's first Portrait album, was inspired by the above ad; many of Ann's lyrics (You lying so low in the weeds/I bet you gonna ambush me") are surely directed at Heart's former label.

Next up, this gem from Fall 1981, promoting U2's sophomore album October.

The band is described as the "one thing standing between you and assembly-line rock," a reminder these future rock superstars were once simply upstart newcomers, considered longshots to knock the likes of Foreigner, Journey and Styx from their lofty perches. (To be fair, all three bands have played to bigger audiences than U2 so far in 2008.) Yet the ad's real delight is found in the copy below the picture. Does anybody remember Bono being nicknamed "The Green Tornado," or the Edge being known as "the man of a thousand guitars"?

Actually, U2 does.

"There was this really embarrassing line of promotion on our very first album," Bono told BBC, erroneously, in 1992. "When we arrived in America and we were feeling pretty cool...for about a minute. And (laughs) they described The Edge as 'a man of a thousand guitars.' They thought this was very exciting."

"It was ironic," revealed The Edge, "since I had only one guitar at the time."

Then drummer Larry Mullen reminded the BBC of Bono's short-lived Green Tornado nickname.

"I wasn't gonna bring that up," replied Bono, so embarrassed, he surely conceived his Mephisto alter-ego later that day.

From this fall's two-CD reissue of October:

A Celebration (link expired)

Buy Heart here

Buy U2 here

Here Comes A Saturday/Wish — Cowboys International (1979)

2008-10-14T22:00:00.005-06:00

Cowboys International: Terry Chimes, far left

Sometimes one blog post begats another. While I was writing last weekend about Topper Headon's 1986 solo album Waking Up, I felt compelled to devote some words to the post-Clash career of the band's other significant drummer, Terry Chimes. He played on the Clash's incendiary 1977 debut (credited as Tory Crimes), left soon thereafter, only to return to the fold in May 1982 following Headon's firing. Between those two stints, Chimes sat in with Johnny Thunders's Heartbreakers and Generation X, but more significantly, he was a member of the short-lived Cowboys International.

Chimes didn't simply join a gang of Clash wannabes. Fronted by vocalist-composer Ken Lockie, Cowboys International specialized in propulsive, highly stylized synth-rock that, like many new wave bands of the era, was heavily influenced by Bowie, Roxy and Eno. If Lockie and Co. were trying to predict what '80s pop would sound like, give 'em credit: they were on the right path. (One suspects the nascent Psychedelic Furs were listening and taking notes.)

Today's posts come from the quintet's 1979 debut, The Original Sin. Here Comes A Saturday was the languid, glacial single, while Chimes drums the hell out of the album's closing track, the whirlpooling Wish, which also features a guest turn from Public Image Limited guitarist Keith Levene (also another Clash alumnus).

Alas, this Cowboys International lineup was disassembled about six months after The Original Sin's release and Lockie toured the record with an almost entirely different group of musicians. He released a solo disc, The Impossible, in 1981 before briefly joining PiL as a keyboardist. In 2003, he reissued The Original Sin as Revisited and, a year later, recorded a new Cowboys International album, The Backwards Life of Romeo.

Chimes, as previously mentioned, rejoined the Clash in 1982 and can be heard pounding the skins on the group's recently released concert set, Live at Shea Stadium. Chimes and The Clash parted company again in 1983; the drummer joining Hanoi Rocks and later Black Sabbath, before pursuing his current career as a chiropractor.

Here Comes a Saturday (link expired)

Wish (link expired)

Buy it here

Not One Of Us — Peter Gabriel (1980)

2008-10-13T15:50:00.006-06:00

Just a guess, but I suspect Sen. John McCain ain't big into rock music. That's OK, rock music ain't big into him, either. No wonder, then, the GOP's presidential candidate and his running mate are having a dickens of a time finding a rallying anthem for their campaign.

To date, John Mellencamp, Jackson Browne, The Foo Fighters and Heart have all asked the McCain-Sarah Palin ticket to stop using their songs. Browne even launched a lawsuit over the use of Running on Empty in a McCain TV spot, although you'll notice those truth-in-advertising watchdog groups didn't say peep about it. ("Running on Empty? Yup, that pretty much sounds right. Next...")

I may not be allowed to vote in the U.S. election, being a Canadian and all, but I'd like to contribute to the process in some small but meaningful way. So, today, Bongo Jazz would like to suggest the ideal anthem for the McCain-Palin ticket. Admittedly, the song wasn't a big hit, like Pink Houses or Barracuda or My Hero, but it chimes with an emerging theme of the McCain-Palin campaign: be suspicious, even afraid, of those people who are not exactly like you.

Palin may become tongue-tied when asked difficult, 'gotcha' questions like, "What newspapers do you read?" — damn that liberal media — but she was articulate and at-ease spreading xenophobic disinformation (how Christian of her!) by telling crowds last week that Barack Obama "palled around" with terrorists and that he "doesn't see America as you and I do." Meanwhile, Time magazine reports McCain volunteers are being encouraged to accuse Obama of being a terrorist, of being a secret Muslim, of refusing to salute the flag, of hiding where he was actually born. And some sheep ... er, value voters are believing this nonsense (see video below ... and get really depressed), pointing to what they consider irrefutable evidence: Obama's name sounds kinda threatening, especially the Hussein part. His skin isn't middle-America white. His family tree has roots around the world. And these McCain-Palin supporters are reacting exactly how you'd expect folks who respect the sanctity of life would: By shouting "kill him," and "off with his head," in reference to Obama, during GOP rallies.

Now imagine how energized this base would become if McCain-Palin adopted today's post, from Peter Gabriel's third solo album, as their official campaign song. Its chorus — "Not one of us/Not one of us/Oh no, not one of us" — boils down the intellectual complexity and philosophical nuance of the GOP's key campaign plank into just six words ... so few, even McCain-Palin supporters could memorize them all before election time. Republican strategists will nod their heads in agreement to the line, "There's safety in numbers when you learn to divide." And everyone who believes 'foreign' is a synonym for anti-American will surely chant "USA! USA!" after the lyric: "A foreign body/And a foreign mind/Never welcome in the land of the blind." (Blind, in this context, is not an insult. Travel and book-learning opens the eyes and makes you an elitist, don't you know.)

Of course, Gabriel is rebuking, not endorsing, xenophobic impulses, although methinks some of the people who now suspect Obama masterminded the 9/11 attacks might not be gittin' the rest of his lyrics.

Since Friday, McCain has tried to tone down the 'who is the real Barack-Obama' rhetoric at his town halls meetings but, sadly, the genie is now out of the bottle. The war hero is being heartily booed by his own supporters for stating the simple truth that Obama is "a decent family man." McCain and his handlers are fools if they expected any other reaction from their reconcilatory about-turn. I am reminded of a line in Bruce Cockburn's The Trouble With Normal: "What did they think the politics of panic would invite?

Not One of Us (link expired)

Buy it here

Topper Headon's Waking Up (1986)

2008-10-11T23:05:00.004-06:00

This has been an eventful year at retail for The Clash; not bad for a band that imploded almost a quarter century ago. Earlier this year saw DVD releases of Revolution Rock, a collection of live performances and TV appearances, and The Future is Unwritten, Julian Temple's acclaimed documentary on the life of Joe Strummer. This month, there has been a new record, Live at Shea Stadium, and an upscale coffee table book (very punk rock!) that doubles as the band's autobiography. It makes you wonder: has the bottom of the barrel been scraped clean, or can more CRP* be dredged up to lure Clash fans to the cash register?

(* Clash-related product.)

Clash Mark II guitarist Vince White has proposed a re-recording of the band's much-reviled swansong Cut the Crap that would use Strummer's existing vocals, a la Free as a Bird. An intriguing proposition, especially if Mick Jones were involved, but also a potential train wreck.

I'd rather see a CD reissue of Topper Headon's one and only solo album, Waking Up, originally released in 1986 and swiftly relegated to the delete bins. It deserved a better fate. Headon had been booted out of the Clash four years prior due to his heroin addiction and was still a user when he recorded Waking Up, although song titles such as Just Another Hit and Monkey on My Back are the disc's only signs of his junkie lifestyle. Otherwise, the eight originals and two covers (Gene Krupa's Drumming Man and Booker T's Time is Tight) are flamboyant and lively, reflecting Headon's lifelong affection for old-school soul, jazz and funk. Much credit goes to Headon's fine band, featuring guitarist Bob Tench (of The Jeff Beck Group), Clash session keyboardist Mickey Gallagher and veteran soul belter Jimmy Helms (who would later found Londonbeat and write its 1991 chart-topper I've Been Thinking About You).

Since this album has been long unavailable, I'll post three Waking Up highlights: Leave It To Luck, a gritty Sam and Dave-styled number with a bravura vocal from Helms; I'll Give You Everything, an infectious pop-soul tune that should've been a hit; and Got To Get Out of This Heat, a groovesome, '80s-funk instrumental that would have fit snugly on a Style Council record.

Leave It To Luck (link expired)

I'll Give You Everything (link expired)

Got To Get Out of This Heat (link expired)

Headon was imprisoned for drug-related offences a year after Waking Up's release. He has since conquered his drug addictions and, last January, joined former Clashmate Jones onstage for the first time since 1982. Here's footage of Topper, sitting in with Mick's new band Carbon-Silicon, playing the Clash's Train in Vain ...

... and Should I Stay or Should I Go.

Buy it here

Slow Down — Gonzales (2008)

2008-10-10T20:00:00.005-06:00

A love letter to the smooth sounds of the Yacht Rock era? Or an impressively detailed pastiche slathered in irony? I'm still not certain how to view Soft Power, the latest album from Jason Charles Beck, a.k.a. Gonzales. As the title suggests, Soft Power is a virtual compendium of soft-rock styles that dominated sales and radio play in late-'70s and early-'80s. Maybe Gonzales is simply allowing his inner Stephen Bishop to come out and play. Or maybe he's just taking the piss. All I know is: I put the record on, I feel like I've tuned into an AM station from 30 years ago and I get swept away by the lushness of it all, so much so I don't care if Gonzales' tongue is resting in his cheek.

Personally, I don't think that's the case. Most of the songs on Soft Power are so lovingly crafted, with such attention to period detail, that I'm confident this Montreal-born, Paris-based singer-songwriter-producer has genuine affection for the era he's mimicking.

Today's post is a Soft Power standout — a plush, mid-tempo piano ballad that's a little Stephen Bishop, a little Player (ask your mom about them), and a whole lot of Todd Rundgren's Can We Still Be Friends, topped off by the sort of overemotive sax solo that was once de rigueur for male singer-songwriters wanting to underscore their unassailable sensitivity (in an effort to get into some lovely lady's Jordaches).

Quite simply, no one makes music like this anymore. If alternative is hip, and you're striving to be truly 'alternative' in 2008, don't sound like My Chemical Romance — sound like Christopher Cross. Using this logic, Soft Power just might make Gonzales the hippest musician alive. Award the man bell-bottoms, a kaftan and a mood ring.

Slow Down (link expired)

Working Together is another Soft Power highlight; it's a little funkier than Slow Down and contains a lyric that'll resonate with anyone who related to the movie Office Space. Here's the track's delightfully sardonic video:

Buy it here

Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel 1979 — Okkervil River (2008)

2008-10-05T20:47:00.003-06:00

"So what you are about to see and hear is an unusual and exciting theatrical event," Gladys Knight said, with emphasis on the word 'unusual', when introducing a performance by Jobriath on the Midnight Special that aired March 8, 1974. "This young man, uh, you're about to see this morning is the act of tomorrow." Knight, of course, couldn't have been more wrong although, judging from her delivery of the introduction (see video below), it's clear the soul legend didn't believe a word she was saying. Just over 12 months later, this 'star of tomorrow' would see his glam-rock career implode under the weight of outrageous hype, overzealous management, drug abuse and widespread critical scorn, much of it undeserved.

Needless to say, his is one of rock's saddest tales. Jobriath — born Bruce Wayne Campbell in 1946 — was coming off the original Los Angeles run of Hair and a stint in a short-lived prog outfit, Pidgeon, when he signed as a solo artist with onetime Carly Simon manager Jerry Brandt. Glam-rock was at its commercial zenith and Jobriath — rock's first openly gay performer — was pitched to labels as the natural successor to the sexually ambivalent likes of Marc Bolan and David Bowie. ("I'm a true fairy!" Jobriath told Rolling Stone in October 1973.) Many labels passed — Columbia Records' Clive Davis reportedly described the Jobriath's demos as "mad and unstructured and destructive to melody" — but Elektra Records bit ... and bit hard. Label head Jac Holzman signed Jobriath for a reported $500,000 advance and sunk more big dollars into the promotion of the singer's self-titled debut, released in late 1973. World domination, at least according to Brandt, was a foregone conclusion.

Except it wasn't. Despite a 50-ft. billboard in Times Square, posters throughout the London transit system, full-page magazine ads and an appearance on the nationally televised Midnight Special, Jobriath's first album didn't sell and neither did its hastily recorded followup, Creatures of the Street (released just six months later). Jobriath's timing didn't help: glam-rock had peaked commercially and, by 1974, Bolan's popularity was in sharp decline while Bowie had wisely moved onto the plastic soul of Young Americans, which dovetailed with the nascent disco movement. (Some actually blamed Jobriath for the death of glam.) In 1975, first Elektra dropped Jobriath — Holzman later calling the music an "embarrassment," a sentiment shared by most critics at the time — and then Brandt ditched him, too. The singer announced he was quitting music and retired to the glass pyramid he erected on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. Attempts to break into the movies, to write a musical based on his life and to record a third album all failed and, by the early 1980s, he was working as a singer in a New York cocktail bar. In July 1983, Jobriath, a has-been-who-never-really-had-been, died of AIDS-related illnesses. He was 36.

Austin's Okkervil River never struck me as a band that would know, much less empathize with, a largely forgotten, glam-rock footnote. Yet today's post, which closes the band's outstanding new album The Stand Ins, is a heartfelt elegy to the late singer. The music is fittingly ambitious and disarmingly beautiful (Jobriath surely would have approved), while singer-lyricist Will Sheff uses a first-person narrative to inhabit the thoughts of his subject during those wilderness years in the glass pyramid. If you know some details of the period, Sheff's words ache with sorrow and regret; the general tone vacillating between self-pity and bruised dignity. "Pull down the shades/Let's kill the morning/Let it die ... Fuck long hours sick with singing the same songs/In the bars they'll soon be drinking/Let's cash my cheque and drink along." This is the autobiographical musical Jobriath never completed, condensed into six minutes of pathos. It is, as Knight would say, an unusual and exciting theatrical event.

Bruce Wayne Campbell (link expired)

Here are performances by Jobriath from that Knight-hosted Midnight Special, first playing Imaman...

... and later Rock of Ages.

Buy Okkervil River here

Buy Jobriath here

Hey. Stay. Wait. Explode! — Oh Darling (2008)

2008-10-04T17:33:00.006-06:00

For some people, cute is a four-letter word. Um, maybe I need to rephrase that. Let's just say, I can understand why certain folks wouldn't fall for the considerable charms of Portland's Oh Darling. For starters, the illustration on the cover of debut CD, Nice Nice (pictured below), is filled with more hearts and flowers than you'll find in a diary of some lovestruck Grade 8 girl. Pry the CD out of the jewel case and you'll see a hidden message: "we heart you." (Awwwww!) And then there's lead singer Jasmine Ash, whose little-girl vocals make Lisa Loeb sound like Tom Waits ... after a weekend-long, Drano-swigging bender. So, yes, there are some aspects to Oh Darling that are so precious, I wouldn't be surprised if fuzzy kittens and Gerber babies worldwide launch a class-action lawsuit charging copyright infringement.

However, if the above observations don't spark an uncontrollable urge to blast a Black Mountain CD, then perhaps you should give this two-boy, two-girl outfit a listen. You'll quickly notice Oh Darling aren't as cute as first impressions suggest. Ash's high, twee voice hardly prepares you for a withering putdown like, "I'd love you if I could/But just enough to fake it." The band's effortlessly melodic, hook-laden originals aren't dainty but muscular and agile, often recalling the springy, fizzy indie-pop of The Breeders. Meanwhile, if Ash's vocals are the first thing you notice about Oh Darling, her keyboard work slowly reveals itself as one of the band's most pleasing features. Today's post is an excellent example of this: The best part of this track is not its naggingly infectious chorus but the instrumental passage that follows, where Ash's synth swirls around Daven Hall's ascending, heavily treated guitar — a la The Cars' Greg Hawkes and Elliot Easton — to achieve a thrilling, 'we have liftoff' moment.

So, to cap: Cute on the surface, darker and more complex upon closer inspection.

(Hey, do I see human skulls amid all the hearts and flowers on the cover?)

Hey. Stay. Wait. Explode! (link expired)

Here's a video for another Nice Nice standout, Against the Skyline, which contains that forementioned 'fake it' lyric:

Buy it here

I'm A Believer — Robert Wyatt (1974)

2008-09-29T00:01:00.002-06:00

Another batch of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction candidates has been announced and, once again, Neil Diamond's name is nowhere to be found. His omission is inexplicable, bordering on criminal: If voters are reluctant to induct the bespangled one as a performer, then surely this Brill Building alumnus deserves admission for his compositions. Hell, even if he hadn't written Sweet Caroline or Cracklin' Rosie or Kentucky Woman or Cherry Cherry — immortal tunes all — he'd deserve induction solely on the strength of the pained, soul-searching Solitary Man and the euphoric I'm A Believer, which is, quite simply, one of the greatest pop songs of all time. The Monkees and Smash Mouth enjoyed major chart success with the song in 1967 and 2001, respectively, while the tune also inspired covers by such disparate acts as The Four Tops, The Ventures, Tim Huey and Bram Tchaikovsky. However, the most poignant version of the song surely belongs to Robert Wyatt, who recorded the track as a single in 1974, about a year after he accidentally fell from a third-storey window, leaving the former Soft Machine drummer paralysed from the waist down.

Produced by Pink Floyd's Nick Mason, who drums on the track, Wyatt's Believer hurtles along to Dave MacCrae's pounding piano and features lots of prog-rock guitar noodling by Fred Frith, who also contributes a violin solo. (This sort of thing was allowed in pop songs in 1974, apparently.) Meanwhile, in light of Wyatt's recent personal tragedy, Diamond's lyrics — "What's the use of trying?/All you get is pain/When I needed sunshine/I got rain" — carry additional emotional heft, while the song's central theme of overcoming hardship and transcending misery is genuinely inspirational coming from an artist who was doing just that.

Yet Wyatt isn't proud of I'm A Believer, released two months after his expressionistic masterpiece, Rock Bottom. In a 1996 interview, he revealed he was being pushed into recording radio-friendly singles by his then-label, Virgin.

"I didn't really mean to do that one," Wyatt told interviewer Richie Unterberger. "I thought, well, what should I do that's just like the most unhip thing you can possibly think of? But, that's really nice (laughs)? And I thought of the Monkees doing Last Train to Clarksville or something like that. But then, I couldn't remember the title, and I did I'm A Believer. I'm not full of malice, but I do dislike Neil Diamond a lot, and I'm sorry that I've done a Neil Diamond song. If I lived my life over again, I would leave them to the master (laughs)."

The master, however, is having the last laugh. Diamond recently revealed, of all the songs he's written, and all the hits he's charted, I'm A Believer has been the most lucrative.

I'm A Believer (link expired)

Regardless of Wyatt's antipathy toward the song, his Believer went top-30 in the UK, prompting an unlikely appearance on Top of the Pops in September 1974. The program drew Wyatt's ire when a TOTP producer suggested he perform in a regular chair, explaining a wheelchair-bound appearance was "not suitable for family viewing." (Different times, indeed.) Wyatt won this battle, although notice how the cameras avoid shots of the wheelchair ... and how pissed off Wyatt appears.

Buy it here

Bwana — Lindsey Buckingham (1981)

2008-09-28T19:45:00.003-06:00

Is Lindsey Buckingham becoming (gasp!) a prolific solo artist as he approaches his 60s? Certainly, recent evidence suggests so. The Fleetwood Mac frontman's sixth album under his name, Gift of Screws, arrived in stores two weeks ago, just six months following the release of a concert set, Live at the Bass Performance Hall, and only two years after his previous studio outing, Under the Skin. To put that into perspective, Buckingham's solo career is now in its 27th year yet half of its output has come in the last 24 months. Perhaps fatherhood (he and his wife have three children, 10, 8 and 4) and a seemingly happy family life have tempered his notorious sonic perfectionism (which, in turn, led to protracted recording sessions and some loooong gaps between records). Then again, maybe the fact he's turning 59 on Friday is also inspiring him to pick up the pace. Whatever the reason, I'm glad to see new Buckingham music in stores on a more frequent basis: since hitting his creative stride on the Mac's 1979 opus Tusk, he has recorded some of the most inventive, challenging and deceptively dark music ever released under the banner "mainstream pop." Besides, Buckingham sounds like no one but himself and no one sounds like Buckingham. The man is an original.

Today's post is one of my favourite Buckingham moments. Bwana kicks off his first solo album, 1981's Law and Order, on which Buckingham (abetted by his trusty co-producer Richard Dashut) picks up where he left off on Tusk. It's the sound of a millionaire rock star goofing around in a posh, state-of-the-art recording studio, trying to sound amateurish but in a good way. Buckingham performs everything here, from the faux tribal drums (shades of Tusk, the song, and 1981 hitmakers Adam and the Ants) to the playful, guitar solo made to sound like a kazoo and those silly "ra-ta-ta-ta" backing vocals. On the surface, it's childlike fun, impossibly catchy and guaranteed to put a smile on your face. Yet, as with many Buckingham songs, the lyrics allude to a troubled state of mind. "We all have our demons/And sometimes they escape," sings Buckingham — possibly a veiled excuse for allegedly throwing his guitar at Mac bandmate and former lover Stevie Nicks a year prior while onstage during the Tusk tour. ("I saw it coming and ducked; it would have killed me if it had hit me," Nicks told MOJO magazine in 2007.)

Buckingham would return to this lyrical theme over the years — "I go insane, like I always do" was the psychologist-baiting chorus of a 1984 single — yet Gift of Screws track Bel Air Rain suggests the musician has finally caged, if not defeated, these demons in his head. "Everyone's peace lives side by side with their war," he sings, "but eventually everyone gets tamed."

Good news is, judging from Gift of Screws, a "tamed" Buckingham is still as wildly creative as ever. The new record doesn't cohere like his best solo discs — Law and Order and 1992's Out of the Cradle, both of which I recommend without reservation — but there are plenty of superlative tracks, most of which are more fleshed out and rocking than his acoustically focused Under the Skin. One quibble, though: Like all of his post-1992 material, Buckingham's music is missing that little bit of California-pop fairydust that Dashut once sprinkled. Current co-producer Rob Cavallo is not an equitable replacement.

Bwana (link expired)

Law and Order also contained Buckingham's biggest solo hit — the sublime, soft-focus Trouble. I've unearthed its video. Immerse yourself in those silky, overdubbed harmonies; pity the fellas miming along to the song, including Mick Fleetwood. They do look terribly goofy, don't they?

Buy Law and Order here

Buy Gift of Screws here

Too Much Time — Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band (1972)

2008-09-13T17:50:00.006-06:00

When your career has been spent pushing envelopes, subverting musical styles and pursuing surrealism to the periphery of rational thought, what's left to shock your audience? Going mainstream, of course.

That's what Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band did in 1972 when they hired Van Morrison/Carly Simon/Doobie Brothers producer Ted Templeman to guide their seventh record, Clear Spot. The album's relative accessibility and conventionality must have seemed the most radical of all possible moves for the Captain, aka Don Van Vliet, who spent the previous three years engaged in the gnarled blues and anarchic experimentalism of Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby.

Yet Clear Spot was hardly a sell-out move: the record is simply too accomplished, too well-crafted and too replete with good ideas and good songs to be dismissed because of the ease for which it can be enjoyed.

"Believe me, I'm not compromising one damn bit on this album," Van Vliet told Rolling Stone in January 1973. "Sure, the changes will ruffle some feathers but I'm fooling them all because I enjoy playing this stuff more than Trout Mask Replica."

Today's post is Clear Spot's most accessible track and first single, an uncanny replication of the classic Stax-Volt sound with horn charts by Templeman, sweet female harmony vocals by The Blackberries and some nice, Bobby Womack-styled guitar from Russ Titelman. No weird-ass lyrics from the Captain, either; just heart-on-shirtsleeve pining for a woman's affection ... and her culinary skills. "Sometimes when it's late and I'm a little hungry/ I heat up some old, stale beans/ Open up a can of sardines/Eat crackers and dream about somebody that'd cook for me," sings the Captain, likely raising the blood pressure of those pop fans who pushed Helen Reddy's I Am Woman to the top of the 1972 hit parade.

In the same RS interview, Beefheart predicted big things for Clear Spot — in his own unique way. "I know this album is going to make it for me," he said. "I can already feel all the fans blowing on me and I don't mind a blowjob, if you know what I mean. Do you know what I mean?"

Um, no. And ultimately Clear Spot didn't provide the commercial breakthrough the Captain anticipated although, as consolation, it ranks among his finest recordings. Unlike his other blatantly commercial album, 1974's Unconditionally Guaranteed, which blows in a bad way. Do you know what I mean?

Too Much Time (link expired)

Among the other Clear Spot highlights is the wonderfully titled Nowadays A Woman's Gotta Hit A Man. Here's a live performance of the song from 1980:

Buy it here

Hotel For Women — The Nails (1981)

2008-09-07T17:10:00.004-06:00

"Tanya Turkish liked to f--- while wearing leather biker boots/Brenda's strange obsession was with certain vegetables and fruit."

With that provocative couplet and 43 others just like it, no wonder 88 Lines About 44 Women became a calling card for The Nails, a New York-via-Boulder rock sextet that's also remembered for, frankly, not much else. Shame, that: They've released some fine records and one great one, the self-produced and independently released Hotel For Women EP, which contained the original version of 88 Lines (far superior to the 1984 re-recording for RCA). At the time, I thought 88 Lines was a clever novelty song, good for a snigger, but hardly the best track on the EP (pictured below). That honour belonged to the title track, a pulsating ska number with a cool dub breakdown that transported listeners to the seediest, most soul-sapping strip club in town. Twenty seven years later, I still think it's a better song than 88 Lines.

Hotel For Women is an oddity in the Nails' canon in that it's sung by a woman, Connie Garcia, who provided backing vocals for the group's early recordings. Her blank, detached delivery is perfect as she sings of life as a topless go-go dancer — "life is a factory/grinding out misery/living anonymously" — and her humble sanctuary, a hotel for women with "clean sheets and colour TV." The Nails surround Garcia's ennui with sax, Farfisa and melodica riding a humid, sticky groove, all drenched in delicious reverb. More than a few Two Tone bands would have traded in their pork-pie hats for a song this good.

Alas, by the time The Nails signed to RCA and recorded their major-label debut, 1984's Mood Swing, the reggae/ska/dub influences were gone, replaced by a more commercial (but still gritty) R&B sound. Long unavailable, Mood Swing was finally reissued last year, along with its tepid followup, 1986's Dangerous Dreams. Sadly, neither disc was appended with the Hotel For Women tracks which, aside from the original 88 Lines, remain unreleased on CD.

Hotel for Women (link expired)

Despite being recognized an '80s classic, 88 Lines About 44 Women received scant mainstream airplay back in tha day. No promotional clip was made for 88 Lines; instead, RCA spent its money making a video for Mood Swing's one non-original, a spirited cover of The Hombres' Let It All Hang Out. MTV actually aired the video quite frequently (back when MTV actually played videos); this, and not 88 Lines, is the closest The Nails came to having a bona-fide hit.

Buy Nails here

Forever — The Explorers Club (2008)

2008-09-02T04:00:00.003-06:00

For fans of Brian Wilson, last weekend was long in more ways than one. The three-day Labour Day break was welcomed but, truth be told, part of me was itching for today to arrive so I could hit the record shops and pick up a copy of Brian Wilson's new solo disc, That Lucky Old Sun.

I've been pining to hear it since Wilson, the Beach Boys' damaged genius, and Van Dyke Parks, his friend and occasional collaborator, started talking it up more than a year ago. And as the record's release approached, the positive buzz grew louder and louder until I am now hoping for music that's closer to the orch-pop excellence of Pet Sounds and SMiLE than the retread Wilson-isms of 1998's uninspired Imagination and 2004's dire Gettin' In Over My Head. (Alas, an early review on AllMusic — read it here — has tempered these expectations.)

While counting down the last few days to That Lucky Old Sun's release, I've sated by appetite for new Wilson music with Freedom Wind, the debut album from South Carolina six-piece The Explorers Club. (Apparently, none of the group's members knows how to use an apostrophe.) Released last spring, this 35-minute disc flawlessly recreates the sun-kissed sound of classic-period Beach Boys, circa 1965-66, on 12 'originals' written in whole or in part by 23-year-old frontman Jason Brewer. Of course, countless groups have evoked the Beach Boys and updated their sound — please stand up Pearlfishers, High Llamas, Ruby Suns and Beulah — yet The Explorers Club are different. There's no updating. There's no evoking. In fact, there's no trace of unique style or approach. The Explorers Club's sound is the sound of the Beach Boys and, providing derivative isn't a dirty word in your vocabulary, there's much to treasure in Freedom Wind.

Opening cut Forever is rife with Beach Boys references, both blatant and subtle. Its drum intro is borrowed from The Ronettes' Be My Baby, which happens to be Wilson's favourite pop song. Its title is the same as a notable Dennis Wilson ballad found on the Beach Boys' Sunflower album (hear it here). And, of course, the soaring falsetto lead vocal, stacks o' vocal harmonies, chiming Christmas bells and irony-free lyric about unrequited love for a special girl — all rendered in glorious mono, or a reasonable facsimile — shape a track that could pass as a lost classic from the Today! or Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!) sessions. Yes, it's that good.

One lingering question about these unabashed yet undeniably accomplished mimics: If Brewer is the group's de facto Brian Wilson, who drew the short straw and was named the de facto Mike Love?

Forever (link expired)

Now back to Brian. Here's EMI's promotional trailer for That Lucky Old Sun, with song clips from the new album:

Buy Explorers Club here

Buy Brian Wilson here

Comin' Back to Me — Jefferson Airplane (1967)

2008-09-01T12:00:00.004-06:00

There's a paradox at the core of the classic-rock radio format. On one hand, the format thrives because millions of people (and not just baby boomers) believe that rock music of the 1960s and '70s has never been bettered; that the albums of this era were indivisible artistic statements and not just one or two good songs surrounded by a bunch of filler. Fair enough.

Yet, time and time again, classic-rock radio will condense an act's expansive, much-heralded body of work into a clutch of songs that generally can be counted on two hands. Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones are among the lucky ones; they might have 15 or 20 songs played regularly on classic-rock radio. Conversely, few bands have been as short-changed by classic-rock radio as Jefferson Airplane, which released seven studio albums between 1966 and 1972, yet is generally represented on the airwaves by just two overexposed warhorses: Somebody to Love and White Rabbit. If these San Fran psychedelic scene-setters were so damn classic, can't some programmer find another JA song to broadcast?

Bongo Jazz is here to help. Today's post is hardly an obscurity; a thing of delicate beauty, this Marty Balin-penned and sung ballad closes Side 1 of the Airplane's much-loved Summer of Love soundtrack, Surrealistic Pillow (also home to Somebody to Love and White Rabbit).

JA road manager Bill Thompson says Balin wrote Comin' Back To Me in one sitting while staying at the Tropicana Hotel in Los Angeles and, according to lore, enjoying some top-grade marijuana given to him by Paul Butterfield. (The song's first line — "The summer had inhaled and held its breath too long" — suggests Butterfield's weed was, indeed, primo.) So excited about his new song, Balin immediately entered the studio and recorded Comin' Back to Me, with Jerry Garcia and Jack Casady on acoustic guitars and Grace Slick on recorder, in one take on Nov. 1, 1966.

"(Balin) told the engineer to start the tape and he sang it live one time," Thompson recalls. "Marty, always the poet, said: Yeah, it's rough, but that's how love is."

One take is all that was needed. Comin' Back to Me is breathtaking; its striking chord progression and Balin's nuanced, masterfully phrased vocal are the aural equivalent of stirring from a deep sleep and feeling nothing but slightly dazed bliss. The song was resurrected in the 1990s by Richie Havens and Rickie Lee Jones but, as accomplished as these cover versions are, they can't touch the original.

Push come to shove, it's my favourite Airplane song — and one actually worth playing on the radio. Really.

Comin' Back to Me (link expired)

Surrealistic Pillow contained a second lovely Balin ballad, Today. Balin sang it on the album, although Slick performed it with the Airplane during the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. Here's the footage:

Buy it here

Things Fall Apart/Slink — Jerry Harrison (1981)

2008-08-31T15:45:00.004-06:00

By now, Brian Eno and David Byrne fans surely have heard the pair's first collaborative album in 27 years, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, does not mark a return to the polyrhythmic, funk-rock experiments of I Zimbra, Remain in Light and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. For those disappointed by this fact, I dust off the mostly unloved first solo disc from Talking Heads keyboardist/guitarist Jerry Harrison, recorded less than a year after the release of Remain In Light and featuring most of that landmark record's supplementary musicians. Harrison titled it The Red and the Black; it could have been titled Remainder in Light. That's not meant as an insult; the best of these Byrne- and Eno-free solo tracks are better than the Remain in Light outtakes that surfaced on its 2006 reissue.

Case in point: Red/Black leadoff track Things Fall Apart. Steve Scales and the late Yogi Horton lay down a hypnotic, percussive intro before their fellow auxilary Heads lock into a deep, funk groove, driven by a killer bassline from George Murray and topped by the soulful background harmonies of Nona Hendryx, Dolette McDonald and Koko Mae Evans as well as a groaning Adrian Belew guitar solo. The lyrics, meanwhile, seem to address intraband tensions within Talking Heads during the Remain in Light sessions, when Byrne and Eno's creative 'leadership' made the other three Heads feel like sessioneers in their own band. "You thought that whatever happened, we would make up," Harrison sings about a subject who's "so convinced of your own point of view/In any event, you thought you'd know just what to do."

The summery, feel-good Slink is the closest thing to Red/Black's big pop moment, a la Once In A Lifetime, except a lyric detailing how to smuggle drugs past security without getting caught ("You've got to control your panic/ Slow down, pause and handle it") possibly prevented it from battling Olivia Newton-John and Quarterflash to the top of the late-1981 singles charts. Of course, the fact Harrison's lead vocals make Byrne sound like Aaron Neville probably curtailed the song's — and album's — commercial potential.

In the end, The Red and the Black proved the red-headed stepchild of the three Heads solo releases of 1981, easily eclipsed in terms of sales and acclaim by Byrne's soundtrack to Twyla Tharp's The Catherine Wheel and by Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz's self-titled Tom Tom Club debut, both of which have stayed in print since their release. Harrison's solo debut, on the other hand, was quickly deleted and remained unavailable until recently, when iTunes started selling it as a digital download.

Music fans still hankering for a sequel to Remain in Light could do a lot worse.

Things Fall Apart (link expired)

Slink (link expired)

So, what are Byrne and Eno up to on Everything That Happens Will Happen Today? Here's the video for first single Strange Overtones:

Buy The Red and the Black on iTunes

Help Me — Kensington Market (1969)

2008-08-26T22:25:00.003-06:00

The history of pop music is chock full of unlikely alliances and odd partnerships. Like when Frank Zappa started hanging out with The Monkees. Or when Aimee Mann harmonized with Geddy Lee. Or when jazz legend Miles Davis played on a crap Toto album. And who can forget Garth Brooks's contributions to the sessions that produced Chris Gaines's immortal debut album? Today's post is another left-field head-scratcher: A single from short-lived Toronto psych outfit Kensington Market, co-written by the guy who produced Cream's signature classic Sunshine of Your Love and the fellow who produced Rough Trade's new wavy, girl-on-girl fantasy High School Confidential. Well, you know what they say about truth being stranger than fiction....

I suppose a few details are in order. Help Me is the leadoff track and first single from Kensington Market's sophomore disc-turned-swansong, Aardvark, released in May 1969. (More on that title later.) The six-piece was managed by Bernie Finkelstein and featured in its ranks guitarist-pianist Gene Martynec, who penned Help Me with Felix Pappalardi, the producer of Aardvark and its predecessor Avenue Road. New Yorker Pappalardi was riding high in '69, having helmed a trio of Cream albums (Disraeli Gears, Wheels of Fire and Goodbye) and founding proto-metal band Mountain with Leslie West.

However, Help Me echoes neither Cream nor Mountain. The song's striking intro doesn't even sound like a 1969 psych track; rather, it starts like a 1980 electro-pop record ... played at 16 r.p.m. (Credit new member John Mills-Cockell, whose singular Moog and synth work colours many of Aardvark's 13 tracks.) When the band joins in, they build upon the intro's wobbly, slo-mo rhythm and woozy vibe; the end result could be mistaken for late-period Flaming Lips ... yet The Soft Bulletin was still 30 years away.

Alas, Kensington Market's prodigious consumption of hallucinogens took a toll on intraband relations and, before the year was up, the group had disintegrated. Undeterred, Finkelstein established True North Records in early 1970 and, over the ensuing three-plus decades, many of the label's acts (including Bruce Cockburn, Murray McLauchlan and Rough Trade) were managed by Finkelstein and produced by Martynec. As for Pappalardi, he found steady work as a producer until the late-'70s when hearing loss forced him to retire. He was shot and killed by his wife in their Manhattan apartment in April of 1983.

And, finally, why name an album Aardvark? Apparently, the band was pleased to see debut Avenue Road listed near the top of the Warner Bros. catalogue and, as you'd expect from any self-respecting psych band, Kensington Market was determined to get higher.

Help Me (link expired)

The surviving members of Kensington Market reunited last June at Hugh's Room in Toronto to perform a show celebrating the re-release of Avenue Road and Aardvark. Here they are performing Avenue Road single, I Would Be The One:

Buy it here

Cheap Champagne — Sloan (2008)

2008-08-25T09:00:00.003-06:00

This might make me sound like an old fuddy-duddy but I miss the days when the charts were populated with pop bands that contained multiple, accomplished singer-songwriters, each with a distinct style that nevertheless complemented the others. Oh, the fun one could have debating the individual merits of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison; McGuinn, Clark, Crosby and Hillman; Buckingham, Nicks and McVie; Stanley, Simmons, Frehley and Criss; and, of course, Woloschuk, Long and Draper. (It's my blog and I'll drop a gratituous Klaatu reference anytime I damn well want!)

A few of these multi-headed monsters still exist. In Canada, there's Sloan, a criminally underappreciated pop-rock quartet whose albums feature songwriting contributions from all four members. Yet if I were forced to carry a lunchpail adorned with a picture of my favourite Sloan member, I'd be spending my noon hours with Jay Ferguson.

Over the course of nine studio albums, Ferguson's contributions invariably wind up my favourites: breezily melodic, pure-pop confections such as The Lines You Amend (from 1996's One Chord to Another) and C'mon C'mon (from 1998's Navy Blues) zero in on the same aural pleasure centres that render me weak-kneed whenever I hear Runt-era Todd Rundgren, Badfinger, Emitt Rhodes and The Ballad of John and Yoko.

Today's post is, for my money, the best track on Sloan's fine new album Parallel Play and as good a song as anything Ferguson has done with the band. Clanking piano chords and a ba-ba-da refrain lead us right into the Cheap Champagne's bubbly chorus (sorry, couldn't resist) and, by the 20-second mark, you should be under the song's pop-tastic spell. And after the first verse, you'll be pleasantly surprised to learn the lyric is as sour as the melody's sweet. "When I look into her eyes," Ferguson sings, "y'know it never meant that much to me."

Cheap Champagne's key components — piano, strummed acoustic guitar, overdubbed close harmonies and simple, Macca-style drumming — ensure the track stands out among the album's many moments of electrified riffola. Yet Sloan remains the best vehicle for Ferguson's songs, as I can only imagine a solo disc containing 12 variations of the same theme would prove underwhelming.
Sloan's music remains greater than the sum of its parts, not unlike the Beatles, the Byrds, Fleetwood Mac and, er, Klaatu.

Cheap Champagne (link expired)

Here's the video for the forementioned Ferguson gem, The Lines You Amend. Dig its cool Ringo reference:

Buy it here

Old Turns — David Vandervelde (2008)

2008-08-24T13:10:00.004-06:00

Sometimes, you can tell a book — or a record — by its cover.

Waiting for the Sunrise, the recently released second album from David Vandervelde, pictures the singer-songwriter long-haired and bearded, looking like a young Kenny Loggins, sitting by the window of a room whose curtains and flowery bedspread likely have been unchanged since the Nixon administration. Put a cat somewhere in the foreground, staring down the photographer, and you'd almost have Carole King's Tapestry. (Gee, 2008 Vandervelde and 1971 King would have made a lovely couple, don't you think?)

Sunrise's cover gives you ample clue to the contents: Gone are the fizzy, electronically enhanced homages to Marc Bolan that populated Vandervelde's full-length debut, The Moonstation House Band; say hello to a warmly recorded approximation of early-'70s, Laurel Canyon rock, with soft- and country- modifiers, that owes more than a little debt to Neil Young's work with both Crazy Horse and CSN (and, as such, also echoes contemporary acts with similar influences, especially The Jayhawks and The Thrills). Derivative? Sure. But who cares when the new songs are instantly memorable and handsomely adorned in Hammond organ, pedal steel and multi-part vocal harmonies. The only way I could like this album more is by hearing it on a nice, thick slab of vinyl as the scent of patchouli oil fills the room.

Old Turns is my early favourite: a mid-tempo, taking-stock number with great harmonies; a surging, ascending chorus; and lyrics that suggest why the longtime Chicago and Brooklyn resident upped stakes and relocated to Nashville: "All the places I've been through/They don't compare to/All the beauty I've found/Shining through Mother Nature/All the money in this world/It cannot buy you a clearer mind."

Old Turns is worth the price of admission alone but I Will Be Fine, California Breezes and Cryin' Like The Rain are every bit its equal, making me wonder why Sunrise has received so many lukewarm reviews from fans who preferred his previous musical direction. Personally, I like acts that throw curveballs once in a while and, after all, anyone who pays attention to Sunrise's cover art can't claim they weren't warned.

Old Turns (link expired)

From The Moonstation House Band album, here's the record's second track, Jacket, with Vandervelde in full Bolan vocal mode:

Buy it here

Isaac Hayes: Coolest dude in heaven

2008-08-10T20:50:00.008-06:00

Just last weekend, I was jogging around the neighbourhood and starting to feel dog-tired when my iPod shuffle happened upon Sam and Dave's Hold On, I'm Coming. My fatigue immediately evaporated and my pace quickened, as the song's nagging horn riff powered my every stride and those stealthily filthy lyrics kept my mind otherwise distracted. (How did the song sneak by censors??!!) When this classic Isaac Hayes-David Porter composition ended, so did my second wind — not surprising, as only the truly special songs can get the adrenalin flowing and make you feel transcendent, if only for a few fleeting minutes. As I limped home, energy now fully expended, I decided to blog about Hayes sometime soon.

I wouldn't have believed, seven days later, I'd be mourning the great man's passing. To me, Hayes always seemed bigger than life. He was elemental. He was Black Moses and the tablets, for chrissakes. Alas, he was found by his wife, collapsed by a running treadmill in their Memphis home, and pronounced dead this afternoon. He was 65 — and is now, unofficially, the coolest mofo in heaven. If God ever wanted to hear Amazing Grace tranformed into a carnal, 22-minute slow jam, well, He's got His man.

Here on earth, his music remains immortal. With Porter, he penned such world-conquering Stax singles as Soul Man, When Something Is Wrong With My Baby, I Thank You and B-A-B-Y. Yet, when he embarked on a solo career with 1967's Presenting Isaac Hayes, he became more of an interpreter of other people's material, creating upscale, epically blackified versions of Jimmy Webb's By The Time I Get To Phoenix, George Harrison's Something and a handful of Burt Bacharach-Hal David standards (Walk On By, The Look of Love, Close To You). 'Proto' is a prefix that can be used liberally when discussing Hayes's influence. He was proto-southern soul and proto-disco and proto-rap; it's no exaggeration to say the '70s output of Barry White, Marvin Gaye and Gil Scott Heron owes a huge debt to Hayes's early, trailblazing solo discs.

And you all know about Shaft.

And Chef.

So, here's a miniscule sampling of Hayes's work: Rachel Sweet's cover of B-A-B-Y (a Hayes-Porter smash originally recorded by Carla Thomas), the edited, seven-minute version of By The Time I Get To Phoenix (not the 18-minute behemoth) and, finally, Hayes-as-Chef boasting about his Chocolate Salty Balls.

B-A-B-Y by Rachel Sweet (link expired)

By The Time I Get To Phoenix (link expired)

Chocolate Salty Balls (link expired)

For a fellow who initially made his name behind the scenes at Stax, Hayes proved to be a consummate performer, as this footage from the 1972 Wattstax concert at the Los Angeles Coliseum attests:

Buy Isaac Hayes music here

Dolls and Staples: Classic vehicles, used parts

2008-08-08T22:40:00.004-06:00

You never get a second chance to make a good first impression. There's a lot of truth in that hoary cliche. So remember: if you can't make that good first impression, consider stealing ... er, borrowing one from someone else. Musicians do it all the time and, in today's post, I present a couple of notable examples of great songs that were built with used parts.

"When I say I'm in love, you best believe I'm in love — L-U-V!" declares David Johansen at the beginning of Looking For A Kiss, the second track off the New York Dolls' classic 1973 self-titled debut album. It's is an awesome opening gambit, dripping with style and attitude, but it's not theirs: the Dolls pilfered it from Give Him a Great Big Kiss, recorded eight years prior by legendary girl group, The Shangri-Las.

The Dolls did not give Great Big Kiss composer George 'Shadow' Morton a songwriting credit on Looking For a Kiss; they did, however, hire him to produce their 1974 followup album Too Much Too Soon. Meanwhile, the Dolls' own version of Great Big Kiss, recorded before making their debut, surfaced on the 1992 demos compilation Seven Day Weekend, while guitarist Johnny Thunders continued to include it in his sets with the Heartbreakers following the Dolls' breakup:

The two songs are complementary: On Great Big Kiss, Mary Weiss tells her fellow Shangri-Las about the cool-as-fuck bad boy she's now seeing. ("He's good bad but he's not evil," she assures.) Looking for a Kiss seems designed as a sequel: eight years later, Weiss's bad boy is a New York Doll, he's screwing around and he's telling everyone he's looking for a great big kiss, too, but not from her.

And you thought Leader of the Pack ended tragically.

Give Him a Great Big Kiss (link expired)

Looking for a Kiss (link expired)

Next up: The Staple Singers' 1972 chart-topper I'll Take You There, written and produced by Alvertis Isbell, better known as Stax executive Al Bell.

A perfect marriage of soul and reggae, this is simply one of the greatest pop songs ever recorded. Next to Mavis Staples's sensuous vocal performance, the track's most distinctive features are its slinky rhythm and bassline intro, both lifted from The Liquidator, a 1969 reggae instrumental written by Jamaican producer Harry Johnson and recorded by his session band, The Harry J Allstars.

Bell travelled to Jamaica regularly and surely heard The Liquidator during his many visits there; besides, it was also a top-10 smash in the UK. Yet I'll Take You There sports his sole songwriting credit. This has been disputed — not by Johnson but by Staples, who insists she and Bell collaborated on the song's lyrics in her Chicago apartment. David Hood, who played bass on the track, says he and drummer Roger Hawkins also deserve some authorship. "I feel like we all co-wrote it because there was no I'll Take You There until we cut this track," Hood has said. "The idea for that was kind of out of the air."

Out of the air? You decide.

I'll Take You There (link expired)

The Liquidator (link expired)

And, from 1972, here are the Staple Singers performing I'll Take You There on The Flip Wilson show:

Buy New York Dolls here

Buy Shangri-Las here

Buy Staple Singers here

Buy Harry J Allstars here

Rockfort Rock — Sound Dimension (1968)

2008-08-03T13:30:00.005-06:00

In 1968, Motown had The Funk Brothers; Stax, Booker T. and the MGs. Further south, in Kingston, Jamaica, another record label house band was busy making history. Sound Dimension were literally inventing roots reggae in Clement 'Coxsone' Dodd's legendary Studio One recording studios.

Sound Dimension — named after a brand of echo-box machine — featured former Skatalites pianist Jackie Mittoo, Heptones singer-bassist Leroy Sibbles and oft-hired session guitarist Ernest Ranglin in its rather fluid ranks. Between 1968 and 1972, they provided the bedrock to countless classic reggae sides by the likes of John Holt, Dennis Brown, Alton Ellis and Freddie McGregor, to name a few.

They also scored many hits of their own, most notably Full Up and Real Rock, two of the most versioned songs in reggae history. (The former, for instance, provided the melody for Musical Youth's 1983 chart-topper Pass The Dutchie; the latter was turned into Armagideon Time by Willie Williams/The Clash, Cool Out Son by Junior Murvin, Keep in Touch by Sizzla, and All Mixed Up by 311.)

Rockfort Rock (aka Psychedelic Rock) hasn't been versioned as often as Full Up or Real Rock but, nevertheless, it is one of Sound Dimension's most popular and enduring tracks. This is deep reggae driven by a Sibbles's booming bassline, an elephantine riddim and a playful, stick-in-your-mind melody courtesy trumpter Johnny Moore, another Skatalites alumnus. (Listen for his little riff on London Bridge is Falling Down at 1:32.) The only problem with the track: It fades after two and a half minutes, leaving you craving more.

Rockfort Rock (link expired)

Venerable reggae duo Sly and Robbie imagined where Rockfort Rock could go after those original 150 seconds. Here's their amazing six-minute cover, performed live in 2005:

Buy it here

Shame — Randy Newman (1999)

2008-08-01T23:40:00.004-06:00

Randy Newman must have known he was skating on thin ice when he lampooned certain aging rock stars in I'm Dead (But I Don't Know It). "Everything I write all sounds the same/ Each record that I'm making/ Is like a record I've made/ Just not as good," he sings over a backdrop of mockingly cranky electric guitar. The song could have been ridiculing any number of classic-rock survivors whose best-before dates had long passed yet Newman, then 55, avoided self-incrimination by ensuring its parent album, 1999's Bad Love, was among his best ever.

Harps and Angels, the long-awaited followup to Bad Love, arrives in stores Tuesday. I haven't heard it yet but the advance buzz has been uniformly positive. No surprise there: now 40 years into his recording career, Newman only makes a new pop platter when he has the goods and, as such, Harps and Angels is his third disc of new material (excluding soundtrack work) in 20 years. Quality trumps quantity, then, as it always should.

Today's post is my favourite cut off Bad Love, another first-person lyric set to a New Orleans shuffle in which Newman's aging sugar daddy interrogates his sweet young thing to find out why she has been avoiding him. Of course, he already knows the answer: "A man of my experience of life/ Don't expect a beautiful young girl like yourself/ To come on over here every day/ And have some old dude banging on her like a gypsy on a tambourine."

As the song proceeds, he becomes increasingly agitated and aggressive, occasionally with side-splitting results. "You know what it feels like to get up in the middle of the night and sit down to take a piss? You do know? So you say," he rants, mouth now operating independently of brain. Then Newman does something I've never heard in a pop record: he shouts down the background singers, ordering them to shut up. Before the song spirals out of control and his character turns into caricature, Newman dials down the intensity and closes the track on an unexpectedly sweet and vulnerable note.

Shame is the work of a master songwriter whose best work could still be ahead of him. Tuesday can't arrive fast enough.

Shame (link expired)

For more Bad Love goodness, here's Newman performing the forementioned I'm Dead (But I Don't Know It) in Stuttgart, Germany, in 2006:

Buy it here

Cruel Sister — Pentangle (1970)

2008-07-31T15:15:00.003-06:00

As noted rock philosopher Neil Sedaka once opined, breakin' up is hard to do. He was mostly correct but what he failed to mention, or perhaps didn't know back in 1962, is that staying broken up can be a bitch, too, especially if there's nostalgia to milk and money to be made. Over the past couple years alone, The Police buried the hatchet ... or at least put it out of arm's reach for a while. The mighty Led Zep played a one-off gig that still promises to turn into a full-blown tour. Vince Clarke and Alison Moyet have rebooted Yazoo and, just this week, Cheech Marin (age 62) and Tommy Chong (age 70) announced they're getting their stoner act back together because, you know, there's nothing funnier than doddering gramp's pot jokes (providing, of course, you're wasted and your critical faculties have been toked into submission).

However, there's one reunion that's piqued my interest. The original lineup of Pentangle is together for the first time in more than three decades and has been playing select dates throughout 2008, including next month's Green Man Festival in Wales. The band's roster reads like a Brit-folk supergroup: guitarists John Renbourn and Bert Jansch, double bassist Danny Thompson, drummer Terry Cox and crystal-voiced frontwoman Jacqui McShee. These five may have been eclipsed by contemporaries Fairport Convention in terms of international recognition but, in terms of artistry and chemistry, they were untouchable. Pentangle's synthesis of British folk, rock, jazz and world music is preserved on six spellbinding albums released between 1968 and the lineup's dissolution in 1973. These records, particularly the first four, remain ageless and full of wonder.

Today's post is the title track of Pentangle's fourth album, Cruel Sister, released in October 1970. The project was a risky one: Pentangle opted to follow the biggest LP of their career, the mostly self-penned Basket of Light (containing a surprise hit single in Light Flight), with a disc of five traditionals, one of which, an 18-minute version of Jack Orion, filled the entire second side. Alas, Cruel Sister suffered a cruel fate. It stiffed and one could argue Pentangle never fully recovered from its commercial failure. Of course, I also should mention it's a freakin' masterpiece, the people who dismissed it in 1970 are tone-deaf morons and you should buy it now!

Here's a sample: Cruel Sister's title track, a murder ballad (aka The Twa Sisters) that dates back to the mid-1600s. It's the tale of sibling rivalry turned homicidal, as a dark-featured maiden drowns her fair-haired younger sister to ensure there's no competition for the affections of a visiting knight. Well, funny these things happen, but the body washes ashore and the men who find it turn the woman's breastbone and golden locks into a harp that's presented to the family's household. The harp starts to play itself and sing about the murder, implicating the older sister during her wedding to the knight. (You don't see shit like that on CSI Miami.) That said, the music is so dazzling, you may not even pay attention to the lyrics. The interplay between Renbourn, Jansch and Thompson is balletic; Cox's percussion is subtle but effective; and McShee relays the chilling storyline with ice-cold austerity.

I've only seen Pentangle once, in 1986, with a greatly diminished lineup. This is one reunion I dearly hope clicks and maybe, just maybe, there will be additional gigs beyond the UK and a new album and a TV variety hour and ...

Please allow me to dream like this: It keeps my mind distracted from the looming threat of a Kajagoogoo get-together.

Cruel Sister (link expired)

And here's Pentangle in 1970, at the peak of their powers, performing Light Flight for the BBC:

Buy it here

When We Refuse To Suffer — Jonathan Richman (2008)

2008-07-30T23:35:00.004-06:00

July turned out to be an excruciatingly busy month for Bongo Jazz, as work on an annual report consumed almost every minute of personal time. There were many late nights at the office poring over compliance documents, performance measures and financial statements — and if you think that sounds dull and soul-sapping, you'd be correct. But, once the office emptied at the end of the work day, and I settled in for the second-half of yet another double shift, I'd bring out my little iPod speakers and put on some music. I'd play new stuff, old stuff, loud stuff, quiet stuff — and, at least once a night, I'd return to Jonathan Richman's latest CD, Because Her Beauty is Raw and Wild. For those 45 minutes, Richman re-connected me to the real world where romance and art and life and death matter ... and org charts don't. The record was more than enjoyable. It was replenishing.

Now 57, Richman is making the best music of his career; his natural guilelessness and sweetness enhanced by the sort of profundity and perspective that comes with age. Ruminations on mortality pervade the new disc. Richman, who declared I'm Just Beginning To Live 23 years ago, is now admitting (without lament) Time Has Been Going By So Fast. He plucks Here It Is from Leonard Cohen's underrated Ten New Songs; the song's prayer-like refrain ("May everyone live and may everyone die") providing a powerful lead-in for closing track As My Mother Lay Lying, where Richman visits his mom in a nursing home and gleans wisdom from her last minutes of life. The song is so personal, so intimate and yet so universal. And, really, isn't that what great art's about?

When We Refuse To Suffer is another highlight — or should I say they're highlights, as the song appears twice in significantly different styles. Today's post is the second version, a slow-burning rumba with some sizzling electric guitar work, but both tracks share the same sentiment: In our attempt to avoid all discomfort, we've lost an integral element of living. Or, as Richman says much more eloquently, "When we refuse to suffer/When we refuse to feel/That's when the antidepressant wins/And the fresh air and the world lose."

When We Refuse to Suffer (link expired)

As much as I've loved his recent output, my favourite Richman song remains Now Is Better Than Before, the grown-up, unsentimental love song that closed 1985's superb (and inexplicably unavailable) Rockin' and Romance album. To my surprise, he brought it out of mothballs and played it on Later ... With Jools Holland. Here's his performance brought to you by the magic that is YouTube:

Buy it here

Hawaii — The Young Canadians (1980)

2008-07-01T20:50:00.005-06:00

Today is Canada Day in my neck of the woods; it's kind of like Independence Day in the U.S. minus the fervent patriotism and all that didn't-we- kick-some-Brit-ass bravado. Canada Day is time for all Canadians to stand tall, hold our heads high and declare to a waiting world: "Hey, man, we're really sorry for Nickelback. No, seriously, that was really bad. Can I buy you a doughnut?"

In honour of Canada Day, here's a genuine Canuck punk-rock classic that's surely well known to my compatriot readers but likely unfamiliar to all you nice folks in other parts of the world.

Hawaii is the title track of a four-song EP by The Young Canadians (formerly The K-Tels), a Vancouver-based trio led by singer-songwriter Art Bergmann. It was recorded in September 1979 and co-produced by Bob Rock, guitarist with fellow Vancouver underground scenesters The Payola$ and future knob-twiddler to countless heavy metal stars.

Punk, of course, can be a nebulous term and, in this case, Hawaii is ultimately a high-octane version of California surf rock, no more hardcore than the first two Boomtown Rats albums but hooky as hell. That said, the enduring appeal of Hawaii is Bergmann's delicious sneer and his recurring use of the F-word as an adjective to describe possible sunny vacation destinations where he can escape the West Coast rain; places like f---ing Hawaii and f---ing Tahiti and f---ing Miami. Strangely, mainstream radio didn't spin this record much at all. Too bad: Even a few well-placed bleeps wouldn't spoil Hawaii's irrepressible energy and mischievous spirit.

The Young Canadians would release another four-track EP, This Is Your Life, before playing their last show on Dec. 13, 1980. (Zulu Records gathered the group's studio recordings and some live tracks on 1995's No Escape compilation.) Bergmann fronted a couple other independent groups — Los Popularos and Poisoned — then released a series of fine solo discs, starting with the John Cale-produced Crawl With Me in 1988. Sadly, he hasn't released an album of all-new material in 13 years; last I heard, he was living on a farm outside a small Alberta town. You might have heard of the place. F---ing Airdrie.

Hawaii (link expired)

Here's Bergmann, with the Young Canadians, playing This Is Your Life track Data Redux on Vancouver TV in 1980.

Buy it here

Sun — The Toms (1979?)

2008-06-30T21:35:00.006-06:00

Now I'm no mathematician but I suspect the chances of creating a genuine power-pop classic are rather slim. So what would be the likelihood, then, of creating a power-pop classic and earning a Grammy Award nomination for work on Saturday Night Fever's crap sequel Stayin' Alive and collaborating with Richie Sambora on the Bon Jovi guitarist's first solo album? Pretty effin remote ... statistically speaking, of course.

Meet Tommy Marolda, the New Jerseyite who has defied these astronomical odds (which could explain why he now resides in Las Vegas).

His CV is a long one; the byproduct of a fruitful 30-year career spent running his own studio; contributing music to TV shows and film; and writing for and producing other acts. Yet Marolda might be best known and best loved trading as The Toms, a one-man band whose 1979 self-titled debut is rightfully hailed as a power-pop classic — and it doesn't even include Sun, arguably his finest three-and-a-half minutes.

Today's post surfaced three years ago on Yellow Pills: Prefill Numero 004, a two-CD compilation of late-'70s, early-'80s power-pop. Alas, the liner notes don't indicate Sun's recording date or session info and even Marolda's own website sheds no light on this amazing track. (Anyone with these details is encouraged to leave them in the comments.)

But here's what I do know. Fuzzy guitar squall and metronomic 4/4 snare beat sets Sun in motion and, if this sounds a little Sonic Youth in theory, in practice it's pure pop nirvana. On the chorus, Marolda plays a nagging riff on the bells and adds Space Invader-like sound effects and multitracked vocal harmonies, all nicely phased for slight psychedelic effect. "I'm waiting for the rain to end/Watch a whole new day begin," he sings and, indeed, the sound of Sun evokes beams of light breaking through the murk. That said, I'm still uncertain if Sun is a song of unabashed optimism or if its pockets of turbulence and recurring refrain of "darkness comes and darkness goes away now" make this The Catchiest Song about Bipolar Disorder ... Ever!

If you like Sun, check out that 1979 debut and, according to Marolda's website, more Toms titles are coming to iTunes soon.

Sun (link expired)

For a sample of his work outside of The Toms, here's the video for Ballad of Youth, the first single from Sambora's 1991 solo album Stranger in this Town, co-written by Sambora and Marolda:

Buy it here

That Was The Greatest Song — The Pooh Sticks (1993)

2008-06-27T23:00:00.002-06:00

I recently read a magazine article that claimed the music we love in our early teens gets hot-wired into the pleasure centres of the brain and will trigger feelings of happiness for the rest of our lives. Gawd, I really hope that's true because this theory justifies my otherwise inexplicable affection for Reunion's Life is a Rock (But The Radio Rolled Me) and countless other bubblegum hits of the 1970s. Naturally, I'm also a sucker for songs that evoke this era, such as today's post from producer/songwriter Steve Gregory and vocalist Hue Williams, the core members of Swansea pop conceptualists The Pooh Sticks.

To be entirely honest, these two indie smart-alecks evoked the era because they shamelessly pilfered from it, mixing and matching existing melodies, lyrics, solos, even song titles. (1991's Great White Wonder, for instance, contained such Pooh Sticks 'originals' as Desperado, I'm in You, Sweet Baby James and The Wild One Forever, titles more commonly associated with The Eagles, Peter Frampton, James Taylor and Tom Petty, respectively.)

That Was The Greatest Song — the closing track on the Pooh Sticks' penultimate album, 1993's Million Seller — is also made from used parts: its sunny chorus lifted (with appropriate credit) from the 1979 single Greatest Song by long-forgotten UK rock band Freeway. Williams wrote the rest, including the charming faux-naif lyric that quotes Pete Wingfield's 1975 single Eighteen With a Bullet and equates the thrill of a first kiss with the joy of hearing a perfect pop song. What self-respecting music fan would dare argue with a sentiment like that? Best of all, That Was The Greatest Song approaches pop perfection itself; it would have fit snugly between The Raspberries and Badfinger on an early-'70s AM playlist.

How very Pooh Stick: Recording the greatest song that was ever sung by anyone, baby, about the greatest song that was ever sung by anyone, baby.

That Was The Greatest Song (link expired)

Buy it here

Johnny Carson — The Beach Boys (1977)

2008-06-23T11:40:00.002-06:00

Last week marked the long-awaited deluxe reissue of Pacific Ocean Blue, the 1977 solo album from Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson. Although older brother Brian is the widely recognized genius of the three Wilson boys, middle child Dennis quietly crafted some of the group's finest post-'68 material; songs like Baby Blue, Slip On Through and Forever (see video below). Pacific Ocean Blue, however, was his artistic high-water mark: An ambitious and engrossingly personal album that represented what a mature-period Beach Boys could have sounded like in The Year of Punk. Could have ... but didn't.

Three months before Pacific Ocean Blue originally hit shops, The Beach Boys' much-ballyhooed 'Brian's Back' campaign shifted into high gear with the release of The Beach Boys Love You, a warm 'n' fuzzy title for a deeply strange and fascinating album. Yes, Brian was in the producer's chair and, yes, he authored or co-authored all 14 songs, just like the good ol' days. But Love You was neither a return to the group's surf-rock innocence nor Pet Sounds sophistication. In fact, there's nothing quite like it in the group's CV.

First off, Love You is a Beach Boys record in name only. By all accounts, Mike Love and Al Jardine had little faith in Brian's new material and participated sparingly throughout the sessions. That left the three Wilson brothers to piece together what's essentially a lo-fi Brian solo album. The florid arrangements and superlative session work of the past are replaced by electric piano and airless synths, while Brian's lyrics reveal a badly damaged psyche that had reverted to childlike state. This leads to a few disturbing moments: Brian, then 35, should not suggest sweet lovin' to a Roller Skating Child. Ewww! By comparison, today's post — a tribute to the venerable Tonight Show host — is brilliantly odd and one of my all-time favourite Beach Boys tracks.

Brian's lyric starts blandly ("He sits behind his microphone/ He speaks in such a manly tone") but gradually grows darker and weirder ("When guests are boring he fills up the slack/ The network makes him break his back"). Love and Carl Wilson tag-team on the mic and maintain straight faces throughout, even conjuring a little Beach Boys vocal magic on the choruses. But then the song takes another bizarre turn, stopping for a series of half notes on the piano before closing with the mock high-school cheerleader chant: "Who's the man that we admire?/ Johnny Carson is a real live wire." Crazy? Yes, but Brian genius is still on full display in the song's intricate rhythm and his wild synth bass work.

At the time, Pacific Ocean Blue and Love You both underperformed, selling only 300,000 copies each and peaking outside of the top-50. In retrospect, however, 1977 looks like the last great year to be a Beach Boys fan with two very different yet equally remarkable new albums to enjoy.

Johnny Carson (link expired)

And from 1971, here's Dennis Wilson performing his song Forever with the Beach Boys:

Buy it here

Nem Vem Que Nao Tem — Wilson Simonal (1967)

2008-06-22T14:40:00.005-06:00

Summer's officially here (at least on my half of the world) and, to my ears, there are few songs as summery as Nem Vem Que Nao Tem. Today's post radiates unabashed, carefree joy, a quality that belies both the political backdrop of its creation and the tragic fate of its artist.

Brazil's Wilson Simonal was a hugely popular nightclub performer during the 1960s. His sound fused samba with American soul and swing, a style that would become known as pilantragem (which, depending on the translation, means 'piracy' or 'mischief'.) People loved it — loved him — and the Rio native sold a ton of records, hosted his own TV program, drove expensive foreign automobiles and dated a bevy of attractive blondes. No wonder the pilantragem classic Nem Vem Que Nao Tem sounds like the work of a man who's on top of the world. In 1967, Simonal was.

The song — from the album Alegria, Alegria!!! (below left) — starts with a burst of Simonal laughter, party sounds and handclaps (as many of his songs did during this era).

Soon, it settles into a hip, fingerpoppin' groove, highlighted by some slinky guitar, jazzy piano tinkling and Simonal's playful, mischievous vocal. Nem Vem Que Nao Tem is so celebratory and life-affirming, you almost forget, at the time, Brazil was in the fourth year of a brutal, right-wing military dictatorship that would endure 17 more.

Alas, mischief — and not the musical kind — led to to his downfall. In 1971, Simonal suspected his bookkeeper was embezzling from him and called upon his friends within the police arm of the military government to kidnap the accountant and get a confession out of him. Bad move. The accountant was eventually released, sued Simonal for extortion and, during the subsequent trial, an army general claimed Simonal was a government informant, hired to spy on his fellow musicians. Once loved, Simonal was now a pariah. Naturally, his fellow artists wanted nothing to do with him, and he was banned from record companies, radio, TV and record stories. His career took a sharp downturn from which it never fully recovered.

Simonal died from cirrhosis eight years ago this week. According to friends, Simonal, on his deathbed, remained hurt by the accusation he was an informant for the military government.

Since then, his widow has accessed documents listing the former government's many informants.

Simonal's name? Didn't appear.

Nem Vem Que Nao Tem (link expired)

From 1970, here's some fabulous footage of Simonal sharing the stage U.S. jazz great Sarah Vaughan, who appears to succumb to Simonal's easy-going charms.

Buy it here

I Did It For Everyone — The Feeling (2008)

2008-06-15T22:40:00.003-06:00

Tabulate the most common disingenuous statements spoken by professional musicians and "I just play for me, I don't care if anyone else listens," or some variation thereof, must be top o' the charts. The sentiment rings hollow, though, when the artists who trot out this BS line have label deals that put their CDs in stores, their videos on YouTube and their asses onstage. Don't get me wrong: There are countless signed artists who don't pay heed to commercial considerations when making a record but surely even they want people to hear their work when it's done. Otherwise, they would have stayed in their bedroom/basement/garage with the door shut, happily unseen and unheard, like some Milford Academy honour student.

For The Feeling, however, populist is not a naughty word. It's a one-word mission statement. The British five-piece specialize in the sort of glossy, FM pop-rock that conquered the world in the 1970s. Queen, Wings, ELO, 10cc — there's a little bit of each of these bands in The Feeling and had they debuted in 1976 rather than 2006, Roy Thomas Baker and Alan Parsons would have fought each other to the death for the right to produce them.

Refreshingly, The Feeling don't apologize for their well-crafted melodies and lyrics, and one suspects they'd be thrilled, not embarrassed, to appeal to hipsters and housewives alike. In fact, they pretty much say so much on I Did It For Everyone, one of the highlights on The Feeling's jinx-defeating sophomore album, Join With Us.

"If sweet harmony could spread like a flu/Then all the world would be singing it, too/I did it for me/I did it for you/I did it for everyone," frontman/guitarist Dan Gillespie declares on a rousing chorus that would sound great blaring from a radio on a warm, summer day. The rest of the track is damn good, too — beginning low-key and sweetly melodic, like something from the Eels first record, but eventually making room big Brian May guitars, airbrushed vocal harmonies and, right at the end, a baby singing along a music-box keyboard melody. The diaper-filling demographic? Apparently, The Feeling did it for them, too.

I Did It For Everyone (link expired)

Also from Join With Us, here's the video for the opening track and single, I Thought It Was Over:

Buy it here

Think It Over One More Time — Buckwheat Zydeco (1985)

2008-06-14T11:00:00.004-06:00

A buddy of mine, who is of the heavy metal persuasion, has become all hot and bothered by advance hype that suggests Metallica will return to their speed metal roots on their forthcoming, Rick Rubin-produced album. Nobody, I was duly informed, can match Masters of Puppets-era Metallica for white-knuckle velocity and manic energy. Which sounds all pretty impressive if it were, you know, true and stuff.

Now I ain't slaggin' Metallica; I'm just saying intensity and velocity are not qualities exclusive to guys with electric guitars, tattoos and mammoth Marshall amps. Case in point: Today's post, a combustible combination of frenzied zydeco and urban blues by Louisiana's Stanley Dural, a.k.a. Buckwheat Zydeco. (Yes, a post that starts with Metallica segues into Buckwheat Zydeco. Welcome to Bongo Jazz...)

Born in Lafayette, La., in 1947, Dural was a piano prodigy who was playing professionally around the time his age hit double digits. Later, he'd accompany the likes of Joe Tex, Clarence (Gatemouth) Brown and, starting in 1976, zydeco originator Clifton Chenier, who would become Dural's mentor. Within a couple years, Dural had switched from organ to accordion, adopted the Buckwheat Zydeco name and struck out on his own — taking the music that Chenier pioneered and broadening it with R&B and rock elements.

Think It Over One More Time, a Dural original from his 1985 Rounder Records release Waitin' For My Ya Ya, is a superb example of the Buckwheat approach. It's a basic blues chord progression delivered at warp speed by the exceptional Ils Sont Partis Band, with Dural's crazy-ass accordion playing providing the authentic Louisiana flavour. The track moves and grooves at such a frantic pace that sitting still while it plays is simply not an option.
Break it down and, admittedly, there's not a lot to Think It Over: The chord progression and rudimentary don't-leave-me lyric just repeat over and over for three and a half minutes. But this is a case of: It's now what you say; it's how you say it.

White-knuckle velocity? Check.

Manic energy? Check.

Think It Over One More Time (link expired)

And here's some great footage of Dural's mentor, Clifton Chenier, entertaining a New Orleans audience with the wonderfully titled I'm a Hog For You. Chenier died in 1987; the same year Dural released his first major-label album, on Island. The torch was passed.

Buy it here

Sale of the Century — The Futureheads (2008)

2008-06-13T16:35:00.004-06:00

Rock's freshman class of 2005 were a promising bunch but, one by one, the likes of The Futureheads, Maximo Park, The Editors, The Magic Numbers and Bloc Party turned all moody, difficult and, frankly, kind of spotty in their sophomore year. Growing up, it's a bitch.

Of the forementioned acts, Sunderland's Futureheads are the first to release a third album of new material and — whew! — the melodies that went AWOL on sophomore disc News and Tributes make a triumphant return on This Is Not The World.

The Futureheads are still partying like it's 1979 — specifically, the abrasive, angular side of post-punk — but producer Youth (himself a post-punk legend with Killing Joke) has beefed up the band's sound and tunefulness, while keeping a watchful eye on quality control. The new album hits the same peaks as the debut; better yet, there are more of them.

Suddenly, 679 Recordings' decision to drop the band after the disappointing News and Tributes seems premature and foolhardy.

The Beginning of the Twist is the new album's first single and leadoff track:

But Sale of the Century is my early favourite, a track that starts off as a love song before U-turning into something stranger, darker — all to the soundtrack of a naggingly repetitive riff, jackhammer rhythm and the group's trademark four-part vocals. If you liked early single Meantime, you'll love this.

Sale of the Century (link expired)

Buy it here

Nobody But Me — Naz Nomad and the Nightmares (1984)

2008-06-09T21:00:00.004-06:00

Multiple personality disorder is not necessarily a bad thing— at least, when it afflicts a rock and roll band. Green Day, for instance, is currently sidestepping that whole 'how-do-we-follow-up-a-blockbuster?' dilemma by trading as Foxboro Hot Tubs and cranking out '60s-style garage rock, with a sprinkling of power-pop, on their derivative but highly entertaining 'debut' album, Stop Drop and Roll!!!

It is a savvy move on Green Day's part but they're simply following in the footsteps of several other bands that have sought fresh inspiration by adopting a different name and musical direction, typically one that's near and dear to their collective hearts.

XTC resuscitated their commercial and artistic fortunes in the mid-'80s after recording as their psychedelic alter-egos, the Dukes of Stratosphear.

A little before that, British punk band The Damned dove headfirst into the Nuggets and Pebbles songbooks under the awesomely alliterate band name: Naz Nomad and the Nightmares.

Their one and only album, Give Daddy The Knife, Cindy, contained mostly covers (unlike Foxboro and the Dukes) but original Damned members Dave Vanian (as Naz), Rat Scabies (as Nick Detroit) and Captain Sensible (as Sphinx Svenson) absolutely nail the energy, excitement and crude stereophonic panning of the source material.

And what great source material: The Wind Blows Your Hair (The Seeds), The Trip (Kim Fowley), I Can Only Give You Everything (Them), I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night (Electric Prunes), Kicks (Paul Revere and the Raiders), Action Woman (The Litter) — and today's post, a hyperactive version of the Human Beinz's Nobody With Me, complete with overdubbed party noise, swirling farfisa organ, handclaps and all the vocals blaring out of the right channel (because, as the album jacket points out, this music was recorded in "full 3D stereo.")

Give Daddy The Knife, Cindy is one of the Damned's finest moments even though the band isn't credited anywhere on the album — jokingly billed as the soundtrack to a (fictional) 1967 American Screen Destiny picture. But the real punchline? While many official Damned titles have long been deleted, Naz Nomad and the Nightmares' one and only record remains in print.

Nobody But Me (link expired)

And, for more multiple-personality fun, here are the forementioned Dukes of Stratosphear, looking like XTC frolicking in Sgt. Pepper's puppet playground, in You're A Good Man, Albert Brown:

Buy it here

The Blues Got The World — Bruce Cockburn (1973)

2008-06-08T17:00:00.002-06:00

If you visited Chez Bongo Jazz anytime over the past 10 months, chances are you were greeted at the door by the sounds of Bruce Cockburn on the stereo. He has long been a favourite of mine but, after seeing him perform last August in Banff, my wife and I purchased every Cockburn album we didn't own and proceeded to listen to his entire catalogue, one album at a time, in chronological order.

It has been a revelatory experience. Decades-old songs such as 1976's Gavin's Woodpile, 1983's The Trouble With Normal and 1985's Call It A Democracy could have been ripped from today's op-ed pages. Also somehow the man has not made a duff record in his 38-year recording career — and what other artist who's been putting out albums since 1970 can say the same?

I've particularly enjoyed discovering little-known gems on his earliest records. For instance, 1973's Night Vision, his fourth LP, contains one of his prettiest melodies, Clocks Don't Bring Tomorrow-Knives Don't Bring Good News, which has a piano coda that'll take your breath away. Yet, unless you're a diehard fan, you've likely never even heard of it.

The album also contains today's post, a frivolous ditty (with a purposely truncated title) that won't jibe with popular, one-dimensional perceptions of the artist as a rural hippie, questing Christian or righteous foreign policy critic.

Why? Because in this I've Been Everywhere-type travelling song, Cockburn concludes every verse with the plain-spoken observation: "Everywhere you look/ The blues got the world by the balls."

Yes, balls. You never expect Bruce Cockburn to sing about balls.

"I remember sitting in the back of my camper, feet dangling off the tailgate, being highly amused at myself over this one," Cockburn says of writing this track, on which the dexterous guitarist opts to mimic a kazoo during its instrumental break.

Needless to say, Wondering Where The Lions Are, it ain't.

I could have posted many better Cockburn songs but I chose The Blues Got The World because, in his expansive body of work, he doesn't have many others like it: A life's-a-piece-of-shit-when-you-look-at-it singalong that puts a smile on your face.

The Blues Got The World (link expired)

Fifteen years later, Cockburn would end his concerts with this Monty Python classic that could be seen as a highly evolved version of Blues:

Buy it here

Burnin' — Alan Wilkis (2008)

2008-06-07T21:24:00.003-06:00

High technology can be so overrated. Not always, of course: I am very happy to be writing this blog entry on a Mac iBook rather than a Commodore 64 and, no, I will not swap my iPod for your portable 8-track player. But when it comes to musicmaking technology, I'll always prefer analogue synths and wobbly, early-generation drum machines to their newfangled equivalents. Old technology is imperfect and, because of that, these machines can sound organic and, in the right hands, even funky.

That's the case with Brooklyn-based, one-man band Alan Wilkis, whose self-released debut, Babies Dream Big, employs vintage electronics and classic influences in service of fresh, primary-coloured pop-funk songs, like today's post.

Burnin' chugs along to a lo-tech motorik beat over which Wilkis layers all sorts of seemingly incongruous elements, including classic-rock guitar riffage, sweet falsetto vocals and what sounds like a synthesized melodica. The result is both familiar and unique: Certainly, I can't think of another pop song that reminds me of Todd Rundgren and Shuggie Otis and Rupert Hine's early-'80s solo albums, all within three-and-a-half, feel-good minutes. Such pop savvy and inclusive spirit bode well for Wilkis; one can only hope, if his promising self-released debut leads to bigger and better things, his music never forsakes its DIY charm.

Burnin' (link expired)

Buy it here

For a further sampling of Wilkis music, check out this GOOD magazine video profile of presidential candidate Barack Obama which features another Babies highlight, I'm Famous:

Flutter and Wow — Elvis Costello and the Imposters (2008)

2008-06-02T00:01:00.002-06:00

When I started to get into music in the mid-1970s, my young imagination was captured by not only the timeless bands of the era (Pilot! Jigsaw! Star-freakin'-buck!) but also by the strange, unfamiliar words used to describe stereo equipment. Thanks to Rolling Stone's annual hi-fi guide, I knew my woofers from my tweeters, and worshipped at the altar of Dolby. But the term I loved most was "wow and flutter." It sounded mysterious and otherworldly and, from what I could gather, chances are my cheapo Sears Electronics turntable had plenty of it. One day, my 12-year-old self dreamed, I would own a turntable that had neither wow nor flutter and maybe, just maybe, by then I'd actually understand what this really bad thing is.

As it turned out, wow and flutter isn't otherworldly at all. It's merely the frequency wobbles caused by speed variations in analogue reproduction devices that use rotary components — for instance, when the turntable spins that vinyl record, or the cassette player moves the magnetic tape over the tape heads, at slightly varying speeds. How such a mundane concept gets a sexy name like wow and flutter, I dunno. (Good PR agency, perhaps.) I do know nothing in the digital age compares; "wow and flutter" certainly kicks the ass of "lossless compression."

It also makes for a great metaphor, at least in the hands of a gifted lyricist like Elvis Costello. Flutter and Wow — one of the highlights on Costello's superb new album, Momofuku — is the greatest, all-time love song for that rarely catered-to demographic: folks who appreciate classic R&B and the intricacies of high-end audiophile equipment.

Musically, Costello is in full soul-man mode here; you can imagine Al Green covering this song, just as Chet Baker was destined to croon Almost Blue.

But it's the lyrics that seal the deal (at least for this particular music geek). "You make the motor in me flutter and wow," he sings to his romantic interest, a novel way of expressing the rush of romantic love. Of course, Costello being Costello, he can't resist exploring the tape-machine metaphor to the fullest: "The incident tape across the bed/ Threading it from the reel to the head/ I’m planting this thought in a magnetic field/ I’m pressing the button/ And all of a sudden/ Erase everything rotten." (Is it just co-incidence he penned this old-fashioned, analogue-referencing love song for inclusion on an album originally intended for a vinyl-only release?)

Please remember: Costello is a trained professional. This same metaphor in less capable hands — "Sweetie, you make me feel like a malfunctioning reel-to-reel machine" — may not have the desired results.

Flutter and Wow (link expired)

Buy it here

Costello isn't the first to use wow and flutter in song. From 1994, here's Stereolab:

Only A Hobo — Rod Stewart (1970)

2008-06-01T00:15:00.003-06:00

Once again, it's time for What's The Matter With the Record Industry, Part Frankly Too Many To Count. In today's episode, Rod Stewart informs his record label that he'd like to make an album of country and folk standards, only to have the idea rejected because it didn't 'test' well. The morons in J Records' all-powerful focus group probably didn't know Stewart made records before Lost in You. And surely they never heard the singer's early solo albums, where Rod the Mod's considerable interpretive skills are best demonstrated on country-folk material such as Ewan MacColl's Dirty Old Town, traditional Man of Constant Sorrow and today's post, the definitive version of Bob Dylan's Only a Hobo.

Dylan originally recorded the song in 1963 but it failed to find a home on The Times They Are A-Changin' album and remained unreleased (at least officially) until 1991, when it appeared on his vault-cleaning The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3 boxset.

By then, though, the song truly belonged to Stewart, who appropriated it for his 1970 sophomore solo set, Gasoline Alley. While his crack acoustic band provides pretty, sepia-toned accompaniment, Stewart finds value and dignity in a vagrant's recently ended life by conveying the sort of empathy and humanity that would recede from his music as his popularity swelled. Only A Hobo is affecting, heartfelt and about a million miles away from Do Ya Think I'm Sexy (which, in fact, was only nine years down the road). Oh yeah, and the acoustic guitars and fiddle and mandolin place the song firmly in a country-folk tradition that, I'm afraid to say, doesn't test well with cloth-eared number-crunchers.

Their loss? Nope, ours.

Only A Hobo (link expired)

And here's more evidence of Stewart's former greatness, performing Gasoline Alley/Around the Plynth with The Faces in Paris during early 1971:

Buy it here

Vladivostok Rock — The Golden Calgarians (1984)

2008-05-26T22:42:00.008-06:00

Dis darn interwebs thingie is pretty cool ... for being a series of tubes, that is. (Big shout out to U.S. Senator Ted Stevens for teaching me everything I know about modern technology!) The other day, I was browsing recent visitors to Bongo Jazz and noticed some of these pages were viewed by a reader from Vladivostok, Russia. I was thrilled and knew it was time to blog about my Canadian hometown's long-gone, garage-rock heroes, The Golden Calgarians, and their song Vladivostok Rock.

Led by a charismatic big-mouth simply named Bruno (pictured above), the group was arguably the most popular local act in the city's underground rock scene during the 1980s. They gigged incessantly, in Calgary and across Canada, and self-released several singles and two full-length albums. The first, 1981's It's Fun To Be Alive, captured a young band trying on ill-fitting new wave duds but 1984's Savage Love was much better: primal, pulse-quickening garage-rock that combined cartoonish humour, carnal obsession and era-defining Cold War paranoia.

Vladivostok Rock is the record's Nuggets-worthy opening salvo. Guitarist Doug Smith sprays fuzz-guitar goodness all over bassist Dave Degrood and drummer Jeff Smith's lurching, caveman beat, while Bruno's knowingly silly lyrics take a typical rock band fantasy and adds a nuclear-nightmare twist: "We were hired by the CIA/ To rock and roll for Destiny Day/We were rockin' for the KGB/We didn't want to but it had to be... Doin' it like we learned/Playing rock and roll till the world got burned."

Sadly, the Golden Calgarians never drew much, if any, interest from the Canadian music industry. They never had a hit, although their ode to Calgary fast-food institution, Chicken on the Way, was a local campus-radio perennial in the day. They never reunited and their music has never been reissued on CD, or found a second generation of fans. But maybe, just maybe, in a world where interwebs tubes link us all, where somebody in the former Soviet Union can visit a blog from the prairies of Canada, the Golden Calgarians might enjoy a unique bit posthumous exposure they never could have imagined 24 years ago: Someone in Vladivostok downloading Vladivostok Rock and possibly allowing the sound of Bruno's voice and Smith's guitar to waft through the Russian night.

Vladivostok Rock (link expired)

Sunday Soul: (Doin' The) Boom Boom — Eli 'Paperboy' Reed and the True Loves (2008)

2008-05-25T17:19:00.002-06:00

Listen to (Doin' The) Boom Boom and you might assume the record was released 50 years ago, not four weeks ago. Such is the soul authenticity of Eli 'Paperboy' Reed and the True Loves, whose recently released sophomore album Roll With You channels the spirit and testifying power of Sam Cooke, The Isleys, T-Bone Walker, Otis Redding and pre-funk James Brown. "We're just trying to play soul music the way it was supposed to be played and in the spirit and the excitement that it's always been intended," Reed (born Eli Husock) told MOJO magazine earlier this year. One listen to Roll With You and it's clear: He walks it like he talks it.

Skeptical? Hell, I don't blame you. Many of Reed's musical influences were long dead and buried when he was born just 24 years ago. Furthermore, the band hails from Boston, hardly a soul music mecca.

Yet playing old-school R&B is obviously his life's calling. After high school, he moved to Clarksdale, Miss., where he honed his chops at local clubs and accepted mentorship from drummer Sam Carr, the son of Chess Records bluesman Robert Nighthawk. Reed later found his way to Chicago where he was befriended by former Chess star Mitty Collier (best known for her 1964 single I Had A Talk With My Man), who invited the young, self-taught musician to be the 'Minister of Music' for a church she founded. The fact Reed has Jewish roots apparently didn't matter — they both worshipped at the altar of R&B, after all.

After learning the ropes from Carr and Collier, no wonder Reed and his well-drilled band emerged in 2005 sounding like the real deal. (Doin' The) Boom Boom, which ends Roll With You, is Reed's tongue-in-cheek attempt to spark his own dance craze; it sounds like wildest songs of James Brown and Wilson Pickett condensed into a three-and-a-half minute blast of dancefloor-filling soul. The drums and bass rumble like a runaway train, the horns lock into a tight, Brown-derived riff, and Reed make those neck hairs stand up on end with some of the most transcendent screaming since fellow Bostonian Black Francis fronted The Pixies. I love the song's mid-section where, as a sax blows a wailing solo, Reed gets caught up in the moment and starts rambling: "Shake your hips from side to side! Let your conscious be your guide! C'mon honey, lemme see you do it, awwwwlllllrrrrright!" Amen, Brother Reed...

(Doin' The) Boom Boom (link expired)

And, courtesy of YouTube, here they are live, performing another Reed-penned, Roll With You highlight, Am I Wasting My Time:

Buy it here

Long Long Time To Get Old/Flies in the Bottle — Great Speckled Bird (1969)

2008-05-24T16:30:00.004-06:00

A couple of milestones are approaching for Ian Dawson Tyson: He turns 75 in September and 2009 marks his 50th year in the music biz. In that time, Tyson (as one-half of Ian & Sylvia) was part of the Greenwich Village scene that sparked the early-'60s folk explosion. He helped birth the Canadian music industry (but please don't blame him for Nickelback). He inspired Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and, oh yeah, he also happened to write Someday Soon and Four Strong Winds — songs so good, they'll outlive us all. Not bad for a half-century's work.

Today, I wish to write about another Tyson accomplishment: the self-titled debut from Great Speckled Bird, a largely unsung country-rock classic. By 1969, Ian & Sylvia realized they had taken the folk duo concept as far as it could go and sought a new sound more in tune with the times. They brought aboard lead guitarist Amos Garrett (later with Maria Muldaur), steel guitarist Buddy Cage (later of New Riders of the Purple Sage), bassist Ken Kalmusky and drummer N.D. Smart, and entered the studio with Todd Rundgren at the helm. (At the time, Rundgren was the in-house producer for Bearsville Records, the label run by Albert Grossman, manager of Ian & Sylvia and, of course, some guy named Dylan.)

Long Long Time To Get Old is one of the record's many highlights; a feel-good, Tyson-penned track that moves to a chunky, loping groove with enough cowbell to cure the hottest of Bruce Dickenson's fevers. The lyrics are apparently about savouring life in the moment, a sentiment underscored by the chorus: "Remember this children/If the good Lord's willin'/There's a long, long time to get old." Tyson sings with a playfulness that characterizes the entire track, while Garrett's tasty, note-bending prowess and Sylvia's harmonizing skills are on full display. Long Long Time to Get Old blends into the ensuing track, the lovely Sylvia showcase Flies in the Bottle, another Tyson composition.

Alas, this lineup of Great Speckled Bird lasted just the one album, which disappeared from record shelves just months after its release. It was reissued in 1994 and remains available to this day; its quality undiminished by the passing of years.

Sadly, Father Time may be catching up to Tyson. Earlier this week, I watched him perform, along with special guests John Hiatt and Rhonda Vincent, at Knox United Church in downtown Calgary, about 85 kilometres north of Longview, Alberta, where the ol' cowboy has ranched for the past three decades. (The performance was videotaped/filmed for a television special to air in the fall.) On this night, his once strong, clear voice was worn and unsteady, and he seemed increasingly winded as the show went on. No crime in that; Tyson is a 74-year-old man, after all. We can only hope the good Lord will be willin' to give us such a long, long time before we get old. (The real crime: Hiatt forgetting — or not knowing — the words to Four Strong Winds during the show's big finale.)

Long Long Time to Get Old-Flies in the Bottle (link expired)

And here is the original Great Speckled Bird jamming with Jerry Garcia on CC Rider at Calgary's McMahon Stadium on July 4, 1970, as part of the Festival Express tour.

Buy it here

Lemon Incest — Serge and Charlotte Gainsbourg (1984)

2008-05-20T14:00:00.006-06:00

Up in heaven, Serge Gainsbourg is surely laughing. Only after banging a young hottie and sucking back a good smoke, of course.

That thought went through my mind when pictures of teen-pop superstar Miley Cyrus posing with her dad, country music has-been Billy Ray Cyrus, appeared in Vanity Fair earlier this month. There was outrage in some corners of the media and blogosphere as many believed 15-year-old Miley looked more like Billy Ray's jailbait girlfriend than his teenaged daughter. And, with Miley perched between Billy Ray's legs, the media critics might have a point. (See photo here.)

But this Cyrus family photo is as provocative as a Little House on the Prairie episode compared to Lemon Incest, a 1984 duet between French icon/notorious provocateur Gainsbourg and his then 12-year-old daughter Charlotte that closed his Love on the Beat LP (pictured right). The song's melody is derived from Chopin's Etude Op. 10, No. 3 but the track remains a product of its era — all synthesizers and sequencers — unlike the timeless brilliance of his late-'60s, early-'70s output. Histoire de Melody Nelson, it is not. And chances are, without its subject matter, the track would be judged an unremarkable contribution to the Gainsbourg ouevre.

But Gainsbourg being Gainsbourg, the subject matter is taboo-shattering and, according to many, sick. "The love that we will never make together/ is the most beautiful, the most violent/ The most pure, the most heady" is a rough translation of one of the lyrics. You don't need to know a word of French to assume Serge and Charlotte aren't singing about selling Girl Guide cookies door-to-door; their voices — his gruff, hers breathy — entwine like Serge's sexually charged duets with Charlotte's mom, Jane Birkin.

For me, Lemon Incest is one of those songs that I find too disturbing for my tastes yet, as someone fascinated by the history of pop music, I'm intrigued a significant artist dared to push this particular envelope.

Serge Gainsbourg died of a heart attack in March 1991. Charlotte turns 37 in July; she continues to work as a singer and actress, recently appearing in the Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There and singing Just Like a Woman on the soundtrack.

Lemon Incest (link expired)

And here's the video for Lemon Incest. Now I ask: Still have a problem with Miley and Billy?

Buy it here

Brainwashed — The Kinks (1969)

2008-05-19T19:14:00.003-06:00

It's Victoria Day in Canada and, to mark the national holiday, I was initially tempted to write about Victoria, the Kinks' 1969 single and opening track from Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire). But that seemed too damned obvious. Even so, I spent the day listening to Arthur for the first time in a long time and, approaching it with fresh ears, I was again blown away by the deftly executed story arc, Ray Davies's resourceful production and the sustained quality of his songwriting. Arthur was the band's third consecutive masterpiece — following 1967's Something Else and 1968's The Village Green Preservation Society — and arguably the last, truly great Kinks record.

Look past the album's singles, Victoria and Days, and fan favourite album tracks Shangri-La, Australia and the harrowing anti-war anthem Some Mother's Son and you'll find a treasure trove of lesser-known Kinks klassics like today's post, where the band's early power-chord impulses make a mighty return. That said, it's not exactly You Really Got Me, Part 2: Horns bolster the electric guitars, the bridge sounds like it comes an entirely different song and the vocals are inexplicably buried in the mix. Listen closely, though, and you'll make out some scathing observations on the perpetuation of the class system:

You look like a real human being
But you don't have a mind of your own
Yeah, you can talk, you can breathe
You can work, you can stitch, you can sew
But you're brainwashed...
You're conditioned to be what they want you to be
And to be happy where you are
Get down on your knees

Strangely, Davies has always looked upon Arthur with disappointment. The album was originally conceived to soundtrack a musical television drama but, while the Kinks finished the songs, Granada-TV withdrew its support. "On the whole, I remember (Arthur) for what it might have been rather than what was eventually realized," Davies wrote in his autobiography X-Ray.

I can't help but think that, had circumstances been different, we'd now agree the best thing about Arthur: The TV Drama is its evocative, inspired music.

Brainwashed (link expired)

And, from 1969, here are the Kinks performing Days:

Buy it here

Sunday Soul: Copy Kat — The Bar-Kays (1968)

2008-05-18T17:06:00.003-06:00

Plagiarism is rarely so shameless and blatant than when artists 'borrow' from their own back catalogue. Think Baby Talks Dirty, The Knack's rewrite of My Sharona. Think Nickelback's entire career. And, of course, think Fantasy Records suing John Fogerty for plagiarizing his CCR hit Run Through The Jungle to write his 1985 single Old Man Down The Road. (Feel free to add your own examples in the comments.) Today's post is another notable example of self-plagiarism but, in this case, the Bar-Kays had a good reason to revisit old glories.

Released in October 1968, the fittingly titled instrumental Copy Kat was a transparent attempt to duplicate the sound, feel and chart success of the band's debut single, Soul Finger, a top-20 pop hit during the spring of '67. Couldn't blame them, really: The previous December, most of the Bar-Kays perished in the same plane crash that killed Otis Redding, whom the band had been backing. The two remaining members (bassist James Alexander, who wasn't on the flight, and trumpeter Ben Cauley, who somehow survived the crash) assembled a new lineup and recorded Copy Kat, an apparent attempt to link the old Bar-Kays with the revamped Bar-Kays.

It didn't work, at least commercially. Copy Kat did nothing at radio and even less on the charts despite sharing many of Soul Finger's distinctive elements, most notably the dubbed-in party noise. But, listening to the track today, the son of Soul Finger sounds even more exciting than its parent song. The stabbing horn chart and na-na-na chanting combine for an infectious hook, while Michael Toles's blistering lead guitar and Alexander's rapid-fire bass during the chorus push the song's intensity into the red. If Copy Kat doesn't get your party kick-started, chances are nothing will.

Copy Kat's commercial failure didn't deter the new-look Bar-Kays. They'd back Isaac Hayes on his landmark 1969 album, Hot Buttered Soul, then enjoy varying success under their own name throughout the 1970s and '80s. The Bar-Kays' legacy received a little boost last year when Soul Finger and Too Hot to Stop appeared in box-office blockbuster Superbad.

Copy Kat (link expired)

And here's what appears to be the original Bar-Kays playing Soul Finger:

Buy it here

Bottle Rocket — The Go! Team (2005)

2008-05-17T14:00:00.003-06:00

Forgive me, dear reader, if I seem a little too excited about the imminent arrival of summer. In my corner of the world, we had snow in January. And February. And March. And April. And, yes, May, too. But, today, the sun is shining, the mercury is rising and those lazy, hazy days of summer don't feel so far away anymore. I might even store the snow shovel in the garage today. (Yes, that is a tear of joy now falling down my cheek.)

How can I not post a great summer song on a day like today?

So, from 2005, here's Bottle Rocket by Brighton six-piece The Go! Team — an exhilarating whir of primary-coloured dance-pop that layers old-skool rap; cheerleader chants; vinyl scratching; live drumming, and swinging a punchy horn arrangement. The lo-fi production actually enhances the song — everytime you listen to Bottle Rocket, you hear something else hidden in the mix. And, if you're like me, once the track ends, chances are you'll be reaching for the repeat button.

The version of Bottle Rocket posted here comes from the original Memphis Industries pressing of the band's debut, Thunder Lightning Strike, and not the remixed, markedly inferior version that was released in North America a year later.

Bottle Rocket (link expired)

The Go Team! returned last year with its sophomore album, Proof of Life. Here's the video from its leadoff single, Grip Like A Vice:

Buy it here

Sunday Soul: Intensified — Desmond Dekker (1968)

2008-05-11T15:54:00.004-06:00

If I had to identify my all-time favourite rock lyric, I wouldn't scour the songbooks of Dylan or Cohen or Costello. I'd look no further than the first few seconds of Tutti Frutti when Little Richard screams: "Womp bomp a loom op a womp bam boom!" — words that capture the essence and excitement of a music that would dominate the next half-century. Not bad for a so-called nonsense lyric, huh? Soon pop music would be full of womps and bomps and tra-la-las, while Barry Mann and Gerry Goffin celebrated the emotional sway of these seemingly meaningless words in 1961's Who Put The Bomp.

Desmond Dekker used a few nonsense words of his own to provide his 1968 party anthem, Intensified (aka Music Like Dirt), a little extra kick.

Unlike his signature tracks Israelites and 007 (Shanty Town), Intensified has no socio-political subtext whatsoever; its only agenda is to inspire listeners to shake booty.

Mission accomplished.

This Leslie Kong-produced dance classic is highlighted by its hyperkinetic bass playing — a style mimicked by David Steele on many early (English) Beat songs — and its nagging hook: "Ram baba looba bam bam ba louie/Ram baba loo bam bam ... intensified!" What does it mean? My guess: That this is the best party in the world ... ever! Or something to that effect. How good are Dekker's nonsense words? Just try to imagine the song without them.

Intensified was the third-ever winner of the Jamaica Festival Song Competition; the only time Dekker would receive this prestigious honour. You can find the track on countless compilations but I recommend Trojan's expanded edition of 1969's This Is Desmond Dekkar (sic), a superb collection of his enduring late-'60s reggae and rock steady cuts that, as you can see above, misspells the artist's name on the cover.

Dekker died of a heart attack two years ago this month. He was 64.

Intensified (link expired)

And, from 1970, here's Dekker performing his then-recent chart-topper Israelites at Wembley Stadium. Sadly, the video ends before the song does but, for two minutes, you can see Dekker at his artistic and commercial peak.

Buy it here

Why Don't You Kill Yourself — The Only Ones (1980)

2008-05-09T18:40:00.002-06:00

How do you follow up a pop music classic like The Only Ones' 1978 single Another Girl, Another Planet? The simple answer is you don't. Songs like that come once in a career, if you're lucky. Nevertheless, the short, turbulent career of The Only Ones (1977-81) left a body of work that only the foolish would describe as 'the hit and the other stuff.' Even in 1980, as his band was unravelling and his drug addictions spiralled out of control, frontman-songwriter Peter Perrett still managed to write well-observed, acid-tongued songs like today's post.

Perrett penned this for his ex-girlfriend who, in a perverse way, must have been flattered to inspire something this bilious and mean-spirited ... and succinct. "Why don't you kill yourself/You ain't no use to no one else," Perrett sings in a chorus that boils down everything he needs to say in a tidy, memorable couplet. That said, his other lyrics are pretty good too: Surely, this is the only song with a middle-eight that tabulates how many times a girl had her stomach pumped.

Perrett seemingly savours the malicious intent of every word; the song's sentiment nicely complemented by Perry's stinging guitar work, especially on the outro.

Of course, it's no Another Girl, Another Planet.

Then again, what is?

Why Don't You Kill Yourself (link expired)

All four original members of The Only Ones (Perrett, guitarist John Perry, bassist Alan Mair, drummer Mike Kellie) reunited in 2007 for a short UK tour with more dates planned this year.

Here they are performing Another Girl, Another Planet (top video) and a new song, Black Operations, last month on Later ... With Jools Holland:

Buy it here

Sunday Soul: Hang On In There Baby — Johnny Bristol (1974)

2008-04-27T15:38:00.002-06:00

Barry White was a big, big man but, in 1974, there still wasn't enough of him to go around. Thank goodness for Johnny Bristol, who helped to meet the era's insatiable demand for satin-upholstered R&B makeout music with Hang On In There Baby, a track so seductive, some of you dear readers likely exist because of it.

Mind you, Bristol was no opportunistic coat-tail rider. He spent most of the previous decade as a singer, songwriter and producer for Motown Records where he worked with many of the label's biggest names and did so quite stealthily due to the large shadows cast by Norman Whitfield and Holland-Dozier-Holland. Nevertheless, Marvin and Tammy's Ain't No Mountain High Enough and Your Precious Love? Bristol co-productions. Diana Ross & The Supremes Someday We'll Be Together? A Bristol production and co-write, and that's even him singing response to Ross's lead. Edwin Starr, David Ruffin, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Jr. Walker & The All-Stars? They all benefitted from Bristol's wide-ranging talents at one time or another.

Bristol left Motown in 1973 and, after a brief stint as Columbia's in-house producer (where he helmed Boz Scaggs's Slow Dancer LP), he moved to MGM to launch his solo career with a song he wrote and produced just for himself, Hang On In There Baby.

"When I heard the final thing, I flipped," recalled Bristol of the recording. "You see, after I'd finished putting down the vocal, . . . we spent a lot time sweetening the track, getting the strings and the girl chorus integrated into the sensuous feeling I wanted . . . Sometimes, you can tell a new recording's a hit. With Hang On In There Baby, I could taste it."

The song is constructed using the tried-and-true Barry White/Love Unlimited Orchestra formula: A gentle intro of high hat, liquid bass, electric piano and whispered sweet nothings; cue wah-wah guitar, harp and finally the whoosh of the full orchestra as Bristol — in his best deep, lurrrverman voice — promises his lady friend to lead her to "that sweet moment of surrender" and "to give you more than you ever dreamed possible." (Sadly, you know it's just a matter of time until the Viagra folks co-opt this tune). In a year when White classics Love's Theme, Can't Get Enough of Your Love Babe and You're The First, The Last, My Everything were all huge hits, no wonder Hang On In There Baby also found millions of receptive ears and promptly scaled pop's top-10, just as Bristol thought it would. Alas, nothing else he recorded under his own name would enjoy similar success, although he remained active into the mid-1990s.

Bristol died in 2004 of natural causes. He was 65

Hang On In There Baby (link expired)

Finally, I'd be remiss not to mention the death of soul singer Al Wilson, who succumbed to kidney failure last week at age 68. Like Bristol, Wilson also enjoyed his biggest-ever hit in 1974 with Show and Tell. That same year, Bristol produced some tracks for Wilson, including the much-loved La La Peace Song.

Here's Wilson performing Show and Tell on Soul Train from 1974:

Buy Johnny Bristol here

Buy Al Wilson here

Back Seat of My Car — Percy 'Thrills' Thrillington (1971)

2008-04-26T01:46:00.002-06:00

In all the top people's diaries, November 8th is a red letter day — Paul and Linda McCartney are holding a ball to celebrate their next album. Meanwhile, McCartney Productions has apparently made a signing. Percy Thrillington (that's for real), an Irish bandleader, is the lucky man. His first release is likely to be an instrumental version of Ram.

— Rolling Stone, Nov. 11, 1971

Well, this particular Rolling Stone writer got some of it right. Percy Thrillington's first release was, indeed, an instrumental version of Paul McCartney's second solo album but, as we now know, the rest of the story is just a mischievous Macca ruse. (That's for real. Really.)

Truth is stranger than fiction in this instance. Just two weeks after the May 28, 1971, release of Ram, McCartney invited arranger Richard Hewson to Abbey Road studios to craft a mostly instrumental version of the album. (Further proof ex-Beatles could do whatever they damn well pleased in 1971.)

McCartney wouldn't play or sing during these sessions, only produce. He'd also hand-pick the pop combo whose basic tracks would be orchestrally embellished; these musicians included bassist Herbie Flowers (Lou Reed), drummer Clem Cattini (The Tornadoes) and the Mike Sammes Singers (whose scatting was wrongly credited to The Swingle Singers for many years). Because Ram was new in shops, most of these musicians hadn't heard McCartney's latest when they recorded its instrumental cousin in a whirlwind, three-day session. The instrumental Ram was mixed the following day, and Paul and Linda started to formulate a back story for their fictitious new signing, Percy 'Thrills' Thrillington, a socialite bandleader from Ireland ...

As the Rolling Stone item suggested, there were immediate plans to release the instrumental Ram under the Thrillington pseudonym but ultimately the project was put on the backburner as the McCartneys launched Wings with the Wild Life album that December. Percy's career appeared over before it even began; he'd surely be upset if he, you know, existed.

Then out of the blue, in April 1977, the six-year-old Thrillington project finally saw the light of day on EMI's Regal Zonophone imprint. McCartney was mentioned as a friend of Percy's in the liner notes (penned by Macca under yet another pseudonyn Clint Harrigan) but otherwise there was no suggestion the former Beatle was involved in the record. And without his cachet, Thrillington went unnoticed and quietly slipped into obscurity, where it continues to reside despite being briefly reissued on CD in 1995 and 2004.

Shame, that. Ram, after all, ranks among McCartney's finest solo works and its songs are strong enough to withstand Thrillington's radical reinvention. Certainly, the complex structures of Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey and Back Seat of My Car (posted below) welcome the orchestral treatments, while slighter Ram tracks such as Ram On and Monkberry Moon Delight are utterly transformed by their new jazz-swing arrangements. As such, Thrillington is neither an act of artistic folly nor mere Beatle-related curio; it's a charming album in its own right, albeit in an easy-listening vein. And here's the good news: It has been made available once again, this time on iTunes. If enough people rediscover it, maybe Percy will come out of retirement to tackle Back to the Egg.

Back Seat of My Car (link expired)

A final bit of trivia about Thrillington's version of Back Seat: Following the track's piano coda, you can hear water dripping. That's the sound of Abbey Road's leaky toilets, carefully recorded by McCartney and engineer Alan Parsons.

Buy it on iTunes or buy it here

I Me You I'm Your — Jim Noir (2006)

2008-04-25T17:30:00.002-06:00

It's the mark of a great song when you can vividly remember where you were, and what you were doing, the first time you heard it.

For me, Jim Noir's Key of C was one of those songs. In January 2006, I was saving the rainforests and listening to BBC6 when this fizzy pop confection stopped me in my tracks. (On second thought, maybe I was just tidying the house and not saving the rainforests — honest mistake — but I swear the rest of the story is accurate.) I rushed out to buy the Manchester one-man-band's freshly minted debut Tower of Love and the deal was sealed. I was a fan.

I had no choice, really. I have a soft spot for the Beach Boys circa 1966-71, for eccentric English psychedelia, for bubbly laptop pop — and Mr. Noir (Alan Roberts to his ma and pa) tickles all of these pleasure centres. He has a whispery, high-pitched voice similar to Robert Wyatt's; he multi-tracks this voice to create harmonies that'd make Brian Wilson shed a tear; and his songs are all perfectly formed pop that nevertheless operates by its own unconventional rules. At Chez Bongo Jazz, Tower of Love was on heavy rotation throughout 2006 and '07.

The album included the forementioned Key of C ...

... but also today's post, I Me You I'm Your, a song that's so damn catchy and pleasing to the ear (with its twinkling synths, Macca bass, church organ, ba-ba-ba refrains) that you might not immediately realize the slight, oft-repeated lyric is pretty much nonsense.

I Me You I'm Your (link expired)

I'm glad to report Noir's self-titled second album, which hit stores earlier this month, avoids the sophomore jinx and builds upon Tower of Love's many strengths. If you like today's posts, I recommend Tower of Love and the new disc with utmost confidence.

Buy Jim Noir music here

Sunday Soul: Cantaloupe Island — El Chicano (1970)

2008-04-20T17:58:00.002-06:00

The mighty Los Lobos weren't feigning modesty when they named their 1993 compilation Just Another Band from East L.A. The group knew they were following in some formidable footsteps, including those belonging to El Chicano, a Mexican-American outfit responsible for a series of stunningly eclectic, early-'70s albums. Jazz, rock, blues, pop, soul, samba, the kitchen sink, you name it — there was room for all of it in the El Chicano sound and, as you'll hear in today's post, they had the chops to pull it off.

El Chicano chose to kick off their 1970 debut, Viva Tirado (pictured right), with Cantaloupe Island, a cover of Herbie Hancock's 1964 jazz classic. There's amazing Hammond playing from Bobby Espinosa (riffing on the song's central theme), some fluid Wes Montgomery-styled lead guitar from Mickey Lespron and the rhythm section work could have been the inspiration for Steely Dan's 1972 single Do It Again. This laidback, mid-tempoed version of Cantaloupe Island also teaches an important lesson about funk: It doesn't have to be fast to be effective.

El Chicano would have modest commercial success with Viva Tirado's jazz-instrumental title track, a surprising top-30 pop hit, and Tell Her She's Lovely, which peaked at No. 40 in 1973. Yet the group would never be as popular as fellow Californians Santana, to which they were inevitably compared, and frequent personnel shuffles kept the band only intermittently active throughout the 1980s and '90s. According their official website, original members Espinosa and bassist Freddie Sanchez are assembling a new lineup.

Cantaloupe Island (link expired)

There's great footage of El Chicano playing Viva Tirado in 1971 here.

And, from 1985, here's Hancock and longtime bandmates Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Ron Carter and Tony Williams playing Cantaloupe Island:

Buy El Chicano music here.

Sunday Soul: Big Long Slidin' Thing — Dinah Washington (1954)

2008-04-13T21:57:00.002-06:00

In the last four years of her too-short life and career, Dinah Washington came under fire from critics for supposedly pandering to the marketplace by recording a series of string-smothered, mainstream pop songs.

The criticism didn't stop her, of course: By then, the Swingin' Miss D's had long established a reputation for singing whatever she damn well pleased. You gotta love a performer who's as comfortable crooning a silky pop ballad like What a Diff'rence A Day Makes as she is sinking all of her bluesy chops and womanly wiles into something more salacious, like 1949's Long John Blues or its close relation, Big Long Slidin' Thing.

Recorded for Mercury in 1954, Big Long Slidin' Thing finds a 30-year-old Washington pining for her absent man who's apparently proficient with his extraordinary instrument — a trombone (cough, cough), naturally. Such sexual double-entendres were commonplace in "suggestive" R&B of the era (Big Ten-Inch Record; It Ain't The Meat; I Love To Play Your Piano, Let Me Bang Your Box) but Washington infuses her naughty wordplay with charged eroticism, tranforming a mere novelty song into a sexual tsunami. Washington was often called The Queen of the Blues; on Big Long Slidin' Thing, she proves she also could be Queen of the Blue.

Big Long Slidin' Thing (link expired)

And here's Washington, two years later, performing the G-rated I Don't Hurt Anymore. If you're not amazed at how she could be convincing singing naughty and nice, ask yourself: How do you think Diana Krall would handle My Humps?

Buy it here

Drunk — Anna Domino (1986)

2008-04-13T00:05:00.003-06:00

As Leslie Feist collected five Juno Awards last weekend in my hometown, I thought about Anna Domino, whose superb 1986 debut (pictured left) could have provided the musical blueprint for 1-2-3-4 singer.

Domino applied cool, sensual vocals to addictively rhythmic jazz-pop almost two decades before Feist did the same on her breakthrough CD Let It Die.

Unlike Feist, however, Domino's Euro chill-out sounds didn't register even the slightest blip on the mainstream radar, at least in North America. Her music is ripe for rediscovery.

Admittedly, Domino's inaugural effort now sounds somewhat dated due to the synths and drum machines employed by co-producers Marc Moulin and Alan Rankine (of Associates fame) but the material and performances remain fresh.

Drunk, the aural equivalent of a vicious hangover, is one of the album's highlights. Fittingly, it gets off to a staggering start as Domino, in a low voice, recalls the events of The Night Before. "To think you swallowed all that junk," she sings with barely concealed contempt, "with those people that you now despise." The song finds its groove in time for the chorus, when Domino asks her perpetually wasted subject: "What'll it take to break you?/What'll it take to make you rise above it?" Drunk ends up being the rarest of pop songs — an intervention you can dance to.

Drunk (link expired)

Buy it here

Domino's sophomore album, 1987's This Time, marked a dip in quality but had some fine moments, especially the title track and the single Tempting (below):

The Specials: Live!

2008-04-01T23:36:00.003-06:00

At first, I was pretty jazzed when I heard The Specials were planning to reunite for a series of shows later this year. The Two-Tone act certainly left us all wanting more when its classic lineup split after two brilliant albums, the immortal Ghost Town single and a reputation for fun, frenzied live shows. No wonder, then, the media jumped on Terry Hall's recent comments on BBC 6 Music that suggested the lineup is rehearsing for its first live performances in 27 years.

I immediately hit the worldwide web looking for more details and noticed all of the stories failed to address one obvious question: Is Specials founder/keyboardist Jerry Dammers, who's never seemed remotely interested in resurrecting his old band, actually taking part ... and if so, who twisted his arm? And how? Without Dammers, a Specials 'reunion' is as legitimate as The Beat 'reuniting' without David Steele and Andy Cox. However, with Dammers and all of the other original members, a Specials reunion could be the musical event of the year.

Need proof? Check out these three sizzling live performances from Dance Craze, the long-deleted 1981 soundtrack to a Two-Tone concert film of the same name:

Nite Klub live (link expired)
Concrete Jungle live (link expired)
Man at C&A live (link expired)

Buy Specials music here

Sunday Soul: Please Uncle Sam (Send Back My Man) — The Charmels (1966)

2008-03-30T12:20:00.005-06:00

This weekend's opening of army desertion drama Stop-Loss inspires today's Sunday Soul post. Please Uncle Sam (Send Back My Man) was released in November 1966 but surely its sentiment would still resonate among the loved ones of soldiers now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the track barely resonated with anyone upon its release; it was the first of four flop singles the Charmels recorded for Stax subsidiary Volt between 1966 and 1968, relegating the vocal group to footnote status in the annals of Memphis soul. Too bad: the songs deserved a much better fate.

The Charmels must have thought the stars had finally aligned for them in 1966 after five mostly fruitless years trading as the Tonettes and the Dixiebelles. Isaac Hayes, a proven hitmaker at Stax, took the trio under his wings, installed lead singer Barbara McCoy as a fourth member and, with partner David Porter, concocted the Charmels' debut 45, Please Uncle Sam (Send Back My Man).

"They wrote songs specifically around my voice," McCoy said of Hayes-Porter (pictured left), "and (the songs) were always sweet and kind of high."

She's right. Please Uncle Sam is not the gritty Memphis soul typically associated with Stax; it has more in common with slicker sounds of Motown and the innocent charms of The Fifth Dimension — which, I stress, is not a complaint.

This is a great track, highlighted by McCoy's yearning vocal and some nice call-and-response between McCoy and fellow Charmels Eula Jean Rivers, Mary Hunt and Mildred Pratcher. The song's emotional punch hits hardest during the bridge when the Charmels recall the last words the much-missed soldier man said before shipping out to Vietnam: "Don't worry baby/Course I love you/I'll be back in a year." You can tell by McCoy's nuanced voice that she understands the promised return could be in a body bag. (Amazingly, McCoy, who had never sung with a secular group before the Charmels, was so nervous in the studio that she insisted the lights be turned down so she couldn't see the people on the other side of the glass while recording.)

Please Uncle Sam (Send Back My Man) did nothing on the charts; ditto for the Charmels' next three Volt singles: 1967's I'll Gladly Take You Back and As Long As I've Got You, another two Hayes-Porter ballads that recall Burt Bacharach and Hal David's work with Dionne Warwick, and 1968's Lovin' Feeling, a funky interpretation of The Righteous Brothers' You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling that proved to be the Charmels' final Volt release. A short and sweet body of work, then, but one worth discovering.

Please Uncle Sam (Send Back My Man) (link expired)

Buy it here

Dawn (Go Away) — Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (1964)

2008-03-29T17:52:00.003-06:00

What will be actor Joe Pesci's most enduring contribution to pop culture? Showing moviegoers how to kill a man by stabbing him in the jugular with a ballpoint pen surely will garner a few votes. However, 35 years before his role in Casino, Pesci played an integral but often unheralded role in shaping 1960s pop when he introduced a couple of his Jersey pals, Bob Gaudio, a talented keyboardist/songwriter/arranger, and Francis Castelluccio, a doowop tenor with a stratospheric falsetto who'd soon change his name to Frankie Valli. Pesci's two pals would strike up a creative relationship that would allow their band, The Four Seasons, and Valli's concurrent solo career to challenge The Beatles for chart supremacy for much of the 1960s.

(U.S. label Vee-Jay, which owned the rights to the early masters of both groups, took advantage of the situation by releasing the two-LP compilation The Beatles vs. The Four Seasons, in October 1964. "The international battle of the century," the front cover proclaimed. "You be the judge and jury!")

Those early Four Seasons chart-toppers (1962's Sherry and Big Girls Don't Cry, 1963's Walk Like a Man) thrust the group to stardom but, artistically, the best was still to come. Gaudio's songwriting and Bob Crewe's production made huge strides between 1964 and 1967 and many of the Four Seasons' songs from this golden era represent some of the greatest pop music of all time. Today's post, a top-5 hit from March of 1964, is my all-time favourite Four Seasons track, a bittersweet, class-conscious tale of selfless love soundtracked with a driving rhythm, sophisticated arrangement and widescreen Phil Spector-styled production.

"Pretty as a midsummer's morn/They call her Dawn," Valli swoons prettily at the start the record ... but this is no ballad. As the harmonies fade, the song kicks into gear with galloping drums (the stickwork on this track is outstanding), glockenspiel and stacks o' vocal harmonies as Valli dissuades his true love from falling for him and guides her into the arms of a wealthier boy.

"Think what a big man he'll be/ Think of the places you'll see/ Now think what the future would be with a poor boy like me," implores Valli, who takes a potentially corny pop storyline and infuses it with genuine heartbreak and street smarts. His vocal performance suggests Valli, the son of a barber and an Italian immigrant, could empathize with the song's "poor boy" and his plight. Surely others did, too. You can hear echoes of this tough yet tender Gaudio-Sandy Linzer song in fellow Jersey-ite Bruce Springsteen's Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) and especially in Billy Joel's 1983 hit Uptown Girl.

So how did this exciting, ageless track not soar to No. 1 in its day? There were three reasons, actually: (1) I Want To Hold Your Hand, (2) She Loves You and (3) Please Please Me. In the International Battle of the Century, give this round to the Beatles.

Dawn (Go Away) (link expired)

And, from 1962, here are the Four Seasons performing Big Girls Don't Cry:

Buy it here

Rock 'n' Roll Toilet — The Soft Boys (1979)

2008-03-28T00:14:00.005-06:00

As Robyn Hitchcock embarks on another reissue campaign of his solo albums, I wonder what's taking so long to refurbish his earlier recordings with The Soft Boys. Matador gave the Cambridge group's 1980 sophomore album Underwater Moonlight the deluxe treatment a few years back but 1979 debut A Can of Bees and posthumous odds-and-sods collection Invisible Hits are currently (and tragically) unavailable on CD.

Some of Hitchcock's best work is on these albums, including today's post, which was recorded in 1979 but emerged four years later on Invisible Hits. Truth be told, I bought the record back then based solely on the fact I wanted to hear a song named Rock 'n' Roll Toilet. If you're going to use Rock 'n' Roll as an adjective, I decided Toilet is a cooler noun to modify than, say, Band or Fantasy or even Hoochie Koo. Strange reasoning, I know, but the song doesn't disappoint.

Hitchcock's usual Syd Barrett-isms are replaced by a tumbling guitar riff and snaking blues harp that prompt some people to consider Rock 'n' Roll Toilet a Rolling Stones parody. And maybe it is. The Soft Boys reportedly swapped instruments during its recording, suggesting they weren't taking the track too seriously. But so what? Rock 'n' Roll Toilet is big, loud, dumb and a helluva lot of fun, even if I'm still uncertain if the lyrics are pure nonsense or a sly stab at cokeheads. Give it a listen and decide for yourself:

Rock 'n' Roll Toilet (link expired)

And here's Hitchcock on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1985 performing Brenda's Iron Sledge, a track from his solo debut, Black Snake Diamond Role:

Buy it (used) here

Clowns — Goldfrapp (2008)

2008-03-26T21:06:00.002-06:00

"Say something once, why say it again?"

David Byrne posed this rhetorical question more than 30 years ago yet this Psycho Killer lyric still comes to mind every time I hear a 'new' album that sounds suspiciously like its predecessor. Sticking to a successful formula may be smart business, at least in the short term, but it's a drag in the long run. Certainly many of pop music's most enduring and influential acts — from Neil Young to the Velvets, Bowie to the Beatles — have a history of defying expectations rather than pandering to them.

Apparently British duo Goldfrapp is also more interested in embarking on a journey than simply running on the spot. Four albums into their career, Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory are proving to be as artistically restless and musically fearless as pop's most revered mavericks. Look at their short history: Critical plaudits for the electronic torch songs on 2000 debut Felt Mountain; a sharp left turn towards glammy electro-disco on 2003's Black Cherry and 2005's Supernature; and now for something completely different, the mostly quiet and gentle chill-out disc Seventh Tree. And it's outstanding.

The new album has been called Goldfrapp's pastoral English folk album, a description that's mostly but not entirely accurate. (The label doesn't fit the effervescent pop of Caravan Girl or the Beatlesque Little Bird, with its Strawberry Fields mellotron and melodic McCartney bassline.)

But 'pastoral' is a fine adjective for today's post, Seventh Tree's bewitching leadoff track, Clowns. Goodbye disco ball and squelchy synths; hello finger-picked acoustic guitar, Alison Goldfrapp's breathy voice hitting notes at the high end of her register, unobstrusive strings and even bird song. It's part Nick Drake, part Cocteau Twins and, in the grand scheme of things, not a million miles away from Minnie Riperton's Lovin' You. I haven't been knocked out by such a gentle song since Mysteries, the opening cut from the 2002 Beth Gibbons/Rustin Man album Out of Season.

Be warned, though. If you fall in love with Clowns, and fall in love with Seventh Tree, as I have done, savour these songs knowing there's a chance Goldfrapp will be pursuing death metal polka on album No. 5.

Clowns (link expired)

And here's the video for A&E, the first single from Seventh Tree:

Buy it here

Sunday Soul: Uptown Babies Don't Cry — Max Romeo and the Upsetters (1976)

2008-03-23T16:27:00.002-06:00

Max Romeo and producer Lee Perry (pictured, from left) were both at the peak of their powers when they recorded the 1976 reggae milestone War Ina Babylon at Perry's Black Ark studios. One Step Forward, I Chase The Devil and the title track were the album's calling cards but its other six tracks were equally outstanding, including today's post, a powerful, journalistic look at the cruel, unjust chasm between the rich and poor.

Romeo — born Maxwell Smith in Saint D'Acre, Jamaica in 1942 — grew into his role as a social commentator. His stage surname was surely chosen to complement the sweet love songs he initially recorded, although it was the lascivious Wet Dream that established his name ... and his rude boy cred.

More saucy novelty tracks followed (Pussy Watch Man, Mini Skirt Vision, Wine Her Goosie) but Romeo soon tired of his lover-man image and his political convictions drove him to record more socially conscious material. Romeo aligned himself with the socialist People's National Party (PNP) during his country's blood-drenched 1972 elections and his songs became fervently political and partisan. The PNP romped to victory but, four years later, on the eve of another election, the rich were still rich, the poor still poor.

The Romeo-penned Uptown Babies Don't Cry could have been written to remind the young 'people's' government of the work it still needed to do:

"Hear that little baby crying/She's crying because she's hungry/ You can hear her mommy saying, 'It ain't easy when you're poor, you see ... But uptown babies don't cry/They don't know what hungry is like/They don't know what suffering is like/They have mommy and daddy/Lots of toys to play with/Nanny and granny/Lots of friends to stay with."

Perry's sympathetic production is as vivid as Romeo's lyrics, with swirling organ and horns parts accenting the singer's supple vocal and adding colour to an earthy roots groove. Perry and Romeo's partnership was so symbiotic and produced such outstanding music that the dissolution of their relationship following Babylon's release still seems like a tragic lost opportunity.

Uptown Babies Don't Cry (link expired)

Romeo, now 65, is still recording and touring. Here he is singing the title track from War Ina Babylon earlier this year:

Buy it here

Church Not Made With Hands — The Waterboys (1984)

2008-03-21T20:36:00.002-06:00

A spiritual song seems apropos for Easter weekend so I present Church Not Made With Hands, a track that doesn't mention God by name but is undoubtedly all about Him. Except, in this early Mike Scott masterpiece, God is a breathtaking woman, worthy of worship yet utterly unattainable. It's a metaphor, of course, but a very apt and effective one.

Church Not Made From Hands marvels at the infinite mysteries of life and basks in the beauty of unspoilt nature which is, Scott suggests, the only cathedral truly befitting its creator.

"When it's dark and evening falls/ She moves among men/ They would seek to have her as a prize," sings Scott, likely alluding to religious leaders who use their 'knowledge' of God's will to build their personal empires.

But, Scott suggests, you won't find the Almighty in some manmade mega-church.

"She is in the shadows/The ocean and the sand," he sings of this elusive spirit, "she is everywhere and no place/Her church not made with hands."

The lyric's sense of wonder is only matched by the music's rousing romanticism, building from an acoustic guitar strum into skyscraping, Wall of Sound arrangement, highlighted by a soaring brass riff, a blistering electric guitar solo and Scott's own impassioned vocal. He called his sound Big Music in 1984 but, in the case of Church Not Made With Hands (the leadoff track on the Waterboys' second album, A Pagan Place), the music was also stirring and epic without being too over-the-top or earnest.

Divine, in other words.

Church Not Made With Hands (link expired)

Here's more Waterboys from their early 'Big Music' phase. From 1983, this is the video from A Girl Called Johnny:

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Sunday Soul: We've Only Just Begun — Curtis Mayfield (1971)

2008-03-16T14:01:00.002-06:00

The Carpenters weren't exactly known for their civil rights anthems. Yet, in 1971, one of Karen and Richard's biggest hits was transformed by Curtis Mayfield on his Curtis/Live! double album. Once you hear Mayfield's version of We've Only Just Begun, you may never hear the song the same way again.

Promoting racial equality surely wasn't on the minds of Paul Williams and Roger Nichols when they wrote We've Only Just Begun. The song made its debut in 1970 as a commercial jingle (sung by Williams) for a California bank. Richard Carpenter recognized the composition's hit potential and opted to record it for The Carpenters' sophomore album, Close To You. Richard's faith in the song was warranted: We've Only Just Begun hit No. 2 on the pop charts in November 1970 and, since then, has become an easy-listening classic and a wedding-song perennial. Do you hear 'black power' in any of that?

Mayfield apparently did. He included the song in his set list when he played New York City's Bitter End in January 1971 and, perhaps surprisingly, it didn't sound out of place surrounded by his own black enpowerment anthems.

Mayfield doesn't change Williams's lyric; he simply asks the listener to approach the song from a different angle and hear it with a fresh pair of ears. "A lot of folks think this particular lyric is not appropriate for what might be considered underground," Mayfield tells his audience, "but I think 'underground' is whatever your mood or your feelings might be at the time so long as it's the truth. I think it's very appropriate that we might lend a few words of inspiration here."

Indeed, the aspirational message of We've Only Just Begun ("So much of life ahead/We'll find a place where there's room to grow") isn't far removed from the sentiment of Mayfield's own Move On Up ("Just move on up and keep on wishing/Remember your dreams are your only schemes/So keep on pushing"), We're A Winner ("We're a winner/And never let anybody say, boy, you can't make it") or Keep on Pushing ("Now maybe some day I'll reach that higher goal/I know that I can make it with just a little bit of soul").

If only the Carpenters tipped their hat to Mayfield and covered Mighty Mighty (Spade and Whitey) ...

We've Only Just Begun (link expired)

Here's more classic Curtis, performing Keep On Keeping On on The Old Grey Whistle Test:

Buy it here

I May Hate You Sometimes — The Posies (1988)

2008-03-12T23:06:00.005-06:00

The Persuaders said it best on their 1971 soul hit Thin Love Between Love & Hate but that hasn't stopped countless other acts from walking the same adoration/abhorrence tightrope. My favourites: Squeeze's If I Didn't Love You ("...I'd hate you...") and today's post, an early gem from the Jon Auer/Ken Stringfellow songbook.

I May Hate You Sometimes ("...but I'll always love you...") originally surfaced on a self-released cassette titled Failure in 1988 which later re-emerged as the Posies' debut LP. Back then, the Posies were just a twosome comprised of childhood friends Auer and Stringfellow, who multi-tracked themselves into a full-bodied power-pop band.

The dynamic duo doesn't miss a trick: luxuriate in their close harmonies, chiming guitars, shaking tambourine, supremely catchy melody and outstanding middle-eight. You may forget you're listening to the Posies and think you've tripped upon a great, unreleased Hollies single. Yes, it's that good. Meanwhile, the song's jokey title belies lyrics that possess genuine emotion and pathos: "Do you think you could treat me like somebody special," Auer and Stringfellow implore, "I can't be everything to everybody/Could I at least be something to you?" Only the hard-hearted and cloth-eared would be unmoved.

I May Hate You Sometimes (link expired)

And here are Auer and Stringfellow dusting off the 20-year-old tune last December:

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The Age of the Understatement — The Last Shadow Puppets (2008)

2008-03-10T19:03:00.003-06:00

Alex Turner resurfaces this spring, not with a third Arctic Monkeys record, but alongside pal Miles Kane of The Rascals.

The duo will trade as The Last Shadow Puppets and the title track of their forthcoming debut affirms the 22-year-old Turner is too bright and too ambitious to be satisfied with recording just more of the same. Cue unexpected spaghetti western motif and sweeping orchestration; it'll be interesting what other surprises Turner has in store.

The Age of the Understatement, the album, will be released April 21 in the UK and May 6 in North America.

The Age of the Understatement (link expired)

Buy it here

Sunday Soul: Grinnin' In Your Face — Son House (1965)

2008-03-09T20:00:00.003-06:00

An old man's voice, a pair of hands for clapping/slapping, and a long, hard life lived. That's all Son House needed when he recorded his song Grinnin' In Your Face for producer John Hammond Sr. in April of 1965. The result was two minutes of bracing blues and a prime example of music as unvarnished human expression.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall when 63-year-old Eddie James 'Son' House walked into Columbia's New York City studios to lay down his first recordings since Alan Lomax's Library of Congress sessions produced 19 songs in 1941-42. House was a tall, slender man whose disposition was reportedly as gloomy as his music was intense. Born near Clarksdale, Miss., in 1902, House was at varying times a Baptist preacher, a convicted murderer (House claimed self-defence), a train-hopping hobo, a pioneer of the Delta blues (along with contemporaries Charley Patton and Willie Brown) and an inspiration for Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson. The man is a genuine icon of 20th century music.

Yet, a year before his three-day Columbia sessions, House was working at the New York Central Railroad and claimed he hadn't picked up a guitar in years. Guitarist-researcher Alan Wilson (later of Canned Heat) found House at the railroad; informed the non-practising bluesman of the surging interest in his recordings for Paramount in 1930 and for Lomax; and convinced House to resume his music career, even helping him re-learn his songs and guitar style.

This culminated in a three-day Columbia session released as The Legendary Son House: Father of Folk Blues LP in 1965. (It was re-released in 1992, with an extra CD of outtakes, as Father of the Delta Blues: The Complete 1965 Sessions).

Grinnin' In Your Face is one of two a cappella tracks on Father of Folk Blues and the song's stark intensity is spine-tingling. House had surely seen his share of injustice in his 63 years and, on Grinnin' In Your Face, he paints a world where deceit trumps loyalty and a friendly smile to your face can be followed by a shiv in the back. "You know they'll jump you up and down/They'll carry you all round and round," he sings, "just as soon as your back is turned/They'll be trying to crush you down." His voice still possesses the passion of a young man but the years have made it worn and weakened. The imperfection of the performance (listen to his voice give out at 1:21) and the intimacy of the recording (you can hear every intake of air and almost smell his breath) make Grinnin' In Your Face utterly compelling; when it's playing, it demands your full attention. You can't listen to it passively.

The Columbia sessions would be House's last studio recordings, although he toured into the 1970s. Alzheimer's and Parkinson's forced House to stop performing in 1976; his last 12 years were spent in Detroit, where he died on Oct. 19, 1988.

Grinnin' In Your Face (link expired)

And from 1967, here's Son House playing Death Letter, a song later covered by The White Stripes on De Stijl:

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Dead Finks Don't Talk — Brian Eno (1973)

2008-03-08T21:15:00.002-07:00

Brian Eno is known to be many things: Innovator. Theorist. Egghead. But humourist? Not so much.

Yet Eno's 1973 solo debut, Here Come The Warm Jets, is actually quite funny — in a subversive and absurdist way rather than a Weird Al Yankovic way. First of all, there's the album title: 'Warm Jets' sound kind of mysterious and exotic until one discovers it's merely Eno's euphemism for, um, urination. (Better than naming your record Here Comes The Piss, mind you.) Then there's Dead Finks Don't Talk, a hilariously bitchy skewering of Eno's former Roxy Music bandmate Bryan Ferry. Or so goes the story.

Eno's sonic manipulations played a huge role in shaping Roxy Music's first two albums but increasingly strained relations between he and Ferry about the direction of the group led to Eno's departure in 1973. Shortly thereafter, Eno — the self-professed non-musician — started recording Here Come The Warm Jets and, judging from Dead Finks Don't Talk, his Roxy divorce still rankled.

Eno initially denied the song was directed at Ferry, pointing out the album's lyrics were all randomly generated. So it was purely co-incidence, then, Eno addresses a subject who's "always so charming" but also a "headless chicken" with a "bad sense of direction." So, in no way should listeners think the line, "to be a zombie all the time requires such dedication," is about the perpetually cool, seemingly bloodless Ferry. But, um, how does one explain the mocking Ferry impression at the 1:14 mark?

Eno later admitted that, yeah, maybe he was taking the piss, albeit unwittingly.

"Dead Finks Don’t Talk is the most randomly generated of my songs. I wrote the lyrics at home with my girlfriend with a cassette of the backing track from the studio. I sang whatever came into my mind as the song played through ... (Producer) Chris Thomas said, ‘you’ll get me shot for that track. It’s obviously about Bryan.’ So I listened back to it and it obviously was. It was certainly something I hadn’t realised."

If Ferry carried a grudge over the song, he has apparently put it aside. Eno revealed in 2006 that he contributed two tracks and played keyboards on the long-gestating Roxy Music reunion album. Maybe Ferry can laugh about Dead Finks Don't Talk now. At least he's got to admit: It's a helluva lot funnier than Music For Airports.

Dead Finks Don't Talk (link expired)

And, from 1972, here's Roxy Music with a leopard-skinned, knob-twiddling Brian Eno playing Ladytron on The Old Grey Whistle Test:

Buy Here Come The Warm Jets here

Buy Roxy Music here