B12 Solipsism

“When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin” (Mick Wall)

Yet another gossipy book about the tabloid years of Led Zeppelin, ignoring, again, the actual music, its influences, how it was created, how it shaped music that followed, yadda yadda.

Rick Moody writes:

Young rock enthusiasts! The thing that this sensational material neglects is the music. In Wall’s biography you will learn that Page has voted Tory repeatedly, and you will learn that Peter Grant, the Zeppelin manager, also snorted mountains of cocaine and was very large, and you will also get very many italicized second- person portions of the text — the deep history — passages that are more showoffy than necessary but easily skimmed. What you may not get enough of is the astonishment of the music. Because, no matter how horrible they were as people — and, frankly, they do seem as if they were rather unlikable people who wasted immense talent in a spendthrift fashion — the music is still remarkable, even when borrowed. What enabled that spooky end section of “When the Levee Breaks,” which used to give me the chills when I first heard it in the eighth grade? What about Robert Plant’s amazing harmonica solo on “Nobody’s Fault but Mine,” on the considerably underrated “Presence”? And what about the Indian strings on “Kashmir”? Whose arrangement? And beyond saying that Page and Bonham banged out most of “Kashmir” by themselves, what accounts for this mesmerizing and timeless composition? And is it really possible that John Paul Jones has nothing to say, though many of the really interesting frills and ornaments are his? The tamboura on “In the Light,” or the electric piano on “No Quarter” or the lovely faux-Cuban piano riff on “Fool in the Rain.” Should we not, young rock enthusiasts, use language, use paragraphs, to account for these splendid moments?

Maybe this is arcana. And maybe the time for arcana is past, the time for the picayune details of dinosaur rock — such that it’s the dirt, not the song, that remains the same. Maybe some publisher was looking over Mick Wall’s shoulder saying, “Put more about the shark incident in there!” Or maybe the members of Led Zeppelin are themselves somewhat to blame, as Robert Plant muses aloud at one point, despairing of the true story ever getting out: “We thought it was time that people heard something about us other than that we were eating women and throwing the bones out the window.” Indeed! Wall is conflicted enough about the facts that he allows this mythologizing title to be appended to his work: “When Giants Walked the Earth.” But these were no giants, these were just young people, like you, who for a time happened to have more power and influence than was good for them. In the midst of it all, they made extraordinary music.

[Click to continue reading Book Review - 'When Giants Walked the Earth - A Biography of Led Zeppelin,' by Mick Wall - Review - Rick Moody NYTimes.com]

So far, the best book I’ve read about the band and its music is the 33.3 book by Eric Davis, though even this dwells¹ on a discussion of Satanism and the occult as far as it related to Led Zeppelin.

“Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV (33 1/3)” (Erik Davis)

1. amusingly, actually, and one of the highlights of the book [↩]

“Metal Machine Music” (Lou Reed)

I am endlessly amused that Lou Reed’s famous Fuck You album has gotten a second life, and is being performed by live musicians. I was foolish enough to have owned a copy of it once, but have since sold it. Just not something I could ever bear to hear more than a few seconds of. In concept, a rather clever idea, but in practice, pretty difficult to enjoy.

Reed recorded his 1975 album “Metal Machine Music” (RCA) by leaning guitars against amplifiers, cranking them up until the feedback screamed, playing melodies amid the sonic melee and layering and manipulating the results, including changing the tape speed of some parts. Then he chose four segments for 16-minute LP sides.

It sounded like a riot in a shortwave radio factory: a fusillade of sustained, pulsating and scurrying electronic tones that adds up to a hyperactive drone, as consonant as the overtone series. It was proudly anticommercial and defiantly arty. It was Minimalistic process music at rock volume, an impersonal wall of sound. Now, 35 years later, it also sounds unexpectedly merry.

Ulrich Krieger had the bizarre idea of transcribing that thicket of tones to be played by live musicians. It took considerable time and the help of a partner, Luca Venitucci, to analyze the welter of information; they had finished only three of the four sections when the transcription had its premiere in 2002. Now they have four. At the Miller Mr. Krieger directed a 16-member, amplified ensemble of strings, winds, guitar, accordion, piano and percussion, though there was no conductor. The music is in proportional notation, played to a clock; a violinist periodically stood up to signal.

The transcription changes everything. It corresponds to some of the more perceptible events of the original: sudden dropouts and surges of certain registers, rhythmic throbs, the squeal when a high overtone suddenly appears, the suggestion of a melodic moment. But the original “Metal Machine Music” has no narrative line, no direction. It simply, and wildly, exists. There are few intentional phrases or interactions between parts, and no sense of ensemble. That’s what humans bring, no matter how conceptually disciplined

[Click to continue reading Music Review - Fireworks Ensemble - More Strings for Lou Reed’s ‘Metal Machine Music’ - NYTimes.com]

Like I said, I am amused that this piece of agit-pop is being performed by classically trained musicians.

From the Metal Machine Music wikipedia page:

According to Reed (despite the original liner notes), the album entirely consists of guitar feedback played at different speeds. The two guitars were tuned in unusual ways and played with different reverb levels. He would then place the guitars in front of their amplifiers, and the feedback from the very large amps would vibrate the strings — the guitars were, effectively, playing themselves. He recorded the work on a four-track tape recorder in his New York apartment, mixing the four tracks for stereo. In its original form, each track occupied one side of an LP record and lasted exactly 16 minutes and 1 second, according to the label. The fourth side ended in a locked groove that caused the last 1.8 seconds of music to repeat endlessly. The rare 8-track tape version has no silence in between programs, so that it plays continuously without gaps on most players.

A major influence on Reed’s recording, and an important source for an understanding of Reed’s seriousness with the album, was the mid-1960s drone music work of La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music (whose members included John Cale, Tony Conrad, Angus Maclise and Marian Zazeela). Both Cale and Maclise were also members of The Velvet Underground (Maclise left before the group began recording). The Theater of Eternal Music’s discordant sustained notes and loud amplification had influenced Cale’s subsequent contribution to the Velvet Underground in his use of both discordance and feedback. Recent releases of works by Cale and Conrad from the mid-sixties, such as Cale’s Inside the Dream Syndicate series (The Dream Syndicate being the alternative name given by Cale and Conrad to their collective work with Young) testify to the influence this important mid-sixties experimental work had on Reed ten years later.

In an interview with rock journalist Lester Bangs, Reed claimed that he had intentionally placed sonic allusions to classical works such Beethoven’s Eroica and Pastoral Symphonies in the distortion, and that he had attempted to have the album released on RCA’s Red Seal classical label;

[Click to continue reading Metal Machine Music - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

“Metal Machine Music” (Lou Reed)

original Rolling Stone Magazine review from James Wolcott, 1975

Lou Reed’s new set, a two-record electronic composition, is an act of provocation, a jab of contempt, but the timing is all wrong. In its droning, shapeless indifference, Metal Machine Music is hopelessly old-fashioned. After a decade of aesthetic outrages, four sides of what sounds like the tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator just aren’t going to inflame the bourgeoisie (whoever they are) or repel his fans (since they’ll just shrug and wait for the next collection). Lou Reed is disdainfully unveiling the black hole in his personal universe, but the question is, who’s supposed to flinch?
The critics. In a recent interview, Reed’s metabolism was in its usual inert state until the subject of critics came up, at which point he became agitated, lashing out at several. Reed probably conceived M/M/M knowing that only critics would pay serious attention to the damn thing. In the liner notes he admits that he hasn’t listened to it all the way through, and in the interview the claim that he made for M/M/M was that playing it “would clear the room.”

Well, I have. Played it, that is. Once. Which is one of the better feats of endurance in my life, equal to reading The Painted Bird, sitting through Savage Messiah and spending a night in a bus terminal in Hagerstown, Maryland. Yet, when my turntable mercifully silenced Lou Reed’s cosmic scrapings, I felt no anger, no indignation, not even a sense of time wasted, just mild regret. Avant-garde artists (Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Andy Warhol) have been experimenting with ennui as a concept for so long that it’s no longer daring to tax the audience’s patience by being deliberately, intensely boring. By now, one knows how to respond to such distended buzzing: One simply tunes out and tunes back in when the action picks up. Reed himself understands this: “I’m like everybody else, I watch things on TV,” he sings on “Satellite of Love.”

[Click to continue reading Lou Reed: Metal Machine Music : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone]

and from an interesting Lou Reed interview with Pitchfork writer Amanda Petrusich

Reed: The myth– depends on how you look at it, but the myth is sort of better than the truth. The myth is that I made it to get out of a recording contract. OK, but the truth is that I wouldn’t do that, because I wouldn’t want you to buy a record that I didn’t really like, that I was just trying to do a legal thing with. I wouldn’t do something like that. The truth is that I really, really, really loved it. I was in a position where I could have it come out. I just didn’t want it to come out and have the audience think it was more rock songs. It was only on the market for three weeks anyway. Then they took it away.

Pitchfork: Right, I read that it was the most returned record at that time…

Reed: It still may be the all-time champ.

Pitchfork: Do you think the critical and commercial response would have been different if it had been released on a classical label or an avant-garde label?

Reed: I haven’t a clue. I tried to have it released on the classical label at RCA. And on it, it says “An Electronic Composition”. That means no words.

Pitchfork: Plus it’s got that cover…

Reed: That’s a rock’n'roll cover, that’s for sure.

Pitchfork: As a songwriter in 1975, what kinds of contextual or personal cues made you want to experiment with things like drone, volume, and sustained sound?

Reed: In the Velvet Underground, my guitar solos were always feedback solos, so it wasn’t that big of a leap to say I want to do something that’s nothing but guitar feedback, that doesn’t have a steady beat and doesn’t have a key. All we have to do is just have fun on the guitar, you don’t have to worry about key and tempo. We just had tons of feedback and melody and licks flying around all over the place. I had two huge amps, and I would take two guitars and tune them a certain way and lean them against the amps so they would start feeding back. And once they started feeding back, both of them, their sounds would collide and that would produce a third sound, and then that would start feeding and causing another one and another one, and I would play along with all of them.

[Click to continue reading Pitchfork: Interviews: Lou Reed]

“I’m New Here” (Gil Scott-Heron)

Very happy to read that seminal poet/musician Gil Scott-Heron is back from jail, cleaned up, and has recorded an album due for release in February 2010. I already pre-ordered it.

The first surprise is the album’s ironic title and the fact that the title song itself was not written by Gil Scott-Heron but by Bill Callahan of the American indie group Smog. Like the covers that producer Rick Rubin chose for the late Johnny Cash on his valedictory American Recordings series of albums, “I’m New Here” sounds like a song tailor-made for Gil Scott-Heron, the great survivor: “No matter how far wrong you’ve gone,” he sings, “you can always turn around.” My instinct, on first hearing it, was to cross my fingers tightly.

Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949. His mother, Bobbie Scott-Heron, was a librarian and an accomplished singer, his father, Giles Heron, from Jamaica, was an athlete who would later earn the nickname the “Black Arrow” when, in the 1950s, he became the first black man to play for Celtic FC. “I’m used to white British guys getting in touch with me,” says Gil, laughing. “There’s this guy, Gerry, who keeps me informed about the Celtics. He brings me a new shirt every time he’s in New York.”

[Click to continue reading Gil Scott-Heron: the godfather of rap comes back | Interview Music |The Observer ]

and how the album came to be:

The story of how Gil Scott-Heron’s new album came to be made is a long and convoluted one. It is, among other things, a testament to the abiding power of great music outside the mainstream to spread like a virus across cultures, across decades. It begins back in 1987 in a rented house in Edinburgh when a young student is mesmerised by his friend’s collection of soul and funk music from the halcyon days of the early 70s – albums by the likes of Curtis Mayfield, Sly and the Family Stone, the JBs, the Meters, Bill Withers and, most mesmerizing of all, Gil Scott-Heron. The first Gil Scott-Heron song the young student heard was called

H20 Gate Blues [from the Winter In America album]

one of the singer’s great spoken-word monologues that would later earn him the soubriquet the godfather of rap. It was ostensibly about President Nixon and the Watergate phone-tapping scandal, but it was also about wider issues of power, corruption and injustice and the great divide that is race in America.

“I was just taken aback by the voice, the words, the poetry,” remembers Jamie Byng who, 22 years on, is the director of Canongate Books and still a fervent soul fan. “I had been raised on rock but this was just breathtaking. The seasoned voice, the wryness of the delivery, the level of irony and satire in the lyrics, the whole thing just blew me away. Discovering those songs was an epiphanic moment for me.”

Those songs range from the reflective – “Winter In America”, “Lady Day & John Coltrane”, “I Think I’ll Call It Morning” – through the socially aware – “Home Is Where the Hatred Is”, “Pieces of a Man”, “The Bottle” – to the wry and satirical – “H20 Gate Blues”, “Whitey on the Moon” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, whose title has now entered the pop cultural lexicon.

So taken was Byng by those songs that, having bought and rebranded Canongate, he tracked down his hero and, in 1996, republished his two long-out-of-print novels, The Vulture and
The Nigger Factory. An unlikely friendship was forged that lasts to this day. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for Jamie,” Scott-Heron, who is the godfather of one of Byng’s sons, told me last week, before adding, “That’s why I agreed to this interview, bro’. You come with good references.”

Simple game, hit shuffle on your music library, record the first ten songs that emerge. You can play too, but here’s what showed up on my Friday shuffle.

1. Bowie, David- Letter To Hermione

   
   Space Oddity – Strange to hear David Bowie play softly psychedelic rock before he became famous, and a better musician. Not skippable, but not a desert island disc either.

2. Band, The- Key To The Highway

   
   A Musical History – If you are looking for a good introduction to one of the seminal bands of the 1970s, you wouldn’t go wrong picking up this boxed set. Full of gems. This particular track has enough reverb to start a pogo-stick revolution. Err something like that. Hard to imagine The Band recording songs like this in isolation. I have no evidence either way, just strongly suspect this was recorded with minimal over-dubs.

3. Fools Gold- Poseidon

   
   Fool’s Gold Fool’s Gold is a Los Angeles collective that weaves together western pop aesthetics with African rhythms and melodies, and indeed this is true. If I didn’t know better, I’d think this song was from the Nigeria 70 series, or a Luaka Bop compilation.

4. Fahey, John- Give Me Corn Bread When I’m Hungry

   
   The Dance Of Death & Other Plantation Favorites – can never have enough John Fahey. This is a straightfoward acoustic blues, with percussive bass strings in homage to Mississippi John Hurt and others.

5. Tosh, Peter- Coming In Hot

   
   Honorary Citizen – Bob Marley was never as good as when he was part of The Wailers, and Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer were co-members. Peter Tosh as a solo act was hardly ever as deep as Bob Marley, but still better than most. This is a pop reggae tune with dub-style drums. I guess every song doesn’t have to have political and religious over (and under) tones.

6. Johann Sebastian Bach -

   
   Bach: Cello Suites [Disc 1]

   Bach: Cello Suite #1 In G, BWV 1007 – Menuet #1 & 2- Jaap Ter Linden

   ahh, Bach – in my best Radar O’Reilly voice…

7. Professor Longhair- Cherry Pie

   
   House Party New Orleans Style – A duet with Snooks Eaglin’s guitar. Not much of a lyric, I suspect cherry pie is a sexual innuendo perhaps.

8. The Ruts- Babylon’s Burning

   
   No Thanks! The ’70s Punk Rebellion – Meh. Serviceable track on a great boxed set. Tellingly, this is the only Ruts song I have in my library.

9. Thomas Mapfumo, The Acid Band- Matiregerera Mambo

   
   

   Hokoyo! – Thomas Mapfumo deserves a Nobel Peace Prize more than Barack Obama! One of my favorite musicians I’ve seen perform live: such a leonine stage presence. Don’t know if his band is playing electric guitar arpeggios or an electrified mbira, just know that the Zimbabwe government didn’t like the criticisms, and Mr. Mapfumo lives in exile these days.

10. Bert Jansch & John Renbourn- East Wind

    
    Bert And John – absolutely spectacular acoustic guitar duel/duet. If you play acoustic guitar, you should give this album a listen.

Nothing great here to hear, but nothing objectionably bad either. I’m too mentally drained at the moment to bloviate about each track, so just imagine me telling you amusing anecdotes as to why these particular songs ended up in my library.

1. Luna- Fuzzy Wuzzy

   
   Pup Tent

2. Wells, Junior- So Tired

   
   Junior Wells 1957-1963: University Rock

3. Lennon, John- Born in a Prison

   
   Some Time In New York City

4. Iguanas, The- Flame On

   
   Plastic Silver 9-Volt Heart

5. Monk, Thelonious- Eronel

   
   The Complete Blue Note Recordings

6. Watson, Doc- Brown’s Ferry Blues

   
   The Vanguard Years

7. Beastie Boys- Do It

   
   Ill Communication

8. Malathini and the Mahotella Queens- Thokozile

   
   Thokozile

9. R.E.M.- I Don’t Sleep, I Dream

   
   Monster

10. Deadstring Brothers- Where Are All My Friends?

    
    For A Decade Of Sin: 11 Years Of Bloodshot Records

“Twelve Nights in Hollywood” (Ella Fitzgerald)

Another glowing review of Ella Fitzgerald’s residency at the Crescendo Club in the early 1960s, this time by Will Friedwald:

June 1962. The Crescendo Club on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. Ella Fitzgerald and her quartet have settled in for a two-week run in her adopted hometown. In the middle of a set, she starts singing “Too Darn Hot,” which had been a highlight of her 1956 album, “The Cole Porter Songbook.” But a few notes into the song, Fitzgerald is interrupted by the sound of kids dancing the twist in another joint upstairs. She decides to go with the flow: Drummer Gus Johnson and pianist Lou Levy start pounding out a boogie-shuffle beat, and the singer improvises lyrics about how hard it is to sing Porter while everybody’s twistin’. She then launches into the “Kiss Me Kate” show tune with the kind of energy and swing that the young twisters couldn’t even dream about. It’s a brilliant, spontaneous moment, and a wonderful insight into the thinking of one of the iconic interpreters of the Great American Songbook.

This performance is one of the many joys of the recently released four-CD boxed set “Twelve Nights in Hollywood,” and it’s also a microcosm of what was occurring in American culture at the time. At start of the ’60s, Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra were the powerhouses of the record-album business. Rock ‘n’ roll was in the doldrums, and even at its earlier height it was mainly a singles market. No less than Sinatra with his concept albums, Fitzgerald and her producer-manager Norman Granz had transformed the long-playing medium with their songbook and live albums. In 1959 and 1960, Fitzgerald brought both these ideas to unprecedented heights with one project that was incredibly ambitious, her five-LP “George and Ira Gershwin Songbook,” and another that was masterful in its simplicity, “Ella in Berlin—Mack the Knife.”

[Click to continue reading Ella Fitzgerald, Twelve Nights in Hollywood | By Will Friedwald - WSJ.com]
[non-WSJ subscribers use this link to read the full review]

“Twelve Nights in Hollywood” (Ella Fitzgerald)

Finally got my copy of the new Ella Fitzgerald boxed set, Twelve Nights in Hollywood. Awesome. Recorded over a two week stay at the Crescendo Club in Hollywood, 1961, with some additional material recorded in 1962 with a trio¹

With all the multi-disc jazz boxes that have come out in recent years — the complete Miles Davis on Columbia, the complete Charlie Parker on Savoy, the complete Duke Ellington on RCA and so on — it’s hard to believe that any significant tapes by any major musician might still be languishing undiscovered in a record company’s archives.

Yet Verve has just released “Twelve Nights in Hollywood,” a four-CD boxed set of Ella Fitzgerald singing 76 songs at the Crescendo, a small jazz club in Los Angeles, in 1961 and ’62 — and none of it has ever been released until now.

These aren’t bootlegs; the CDs were mastered from the original tapes, which were produced by Norman Granz, Verve’s founder and Fitzgerald’s longtime manager.

They capture the singer in her peak years, and at top form: more relaxed, swinging and adventurous, across a wider span of rhythms and moods, than on the dozens of other albums that hit the bins in her lifetime.

[Click to continue reading Ella Fitzgerald, Rediscovered - ‘Twelve Nights in Hollywood’ - NYTimes.com]

I haven’t had a chance to listen to the whole thing yet (77 songs, over four hours of music), but what I’ve heard is just spectacular. Highly recommended for fans of the human voice. The band is good, swinging intimate small-combo jazz², but the highlight is Ms. Fitzgerald’s emotive expressive voice and utter, relaxed joy.

“Twelve Nights in Hollywood” is not a complete document. (If it were, it would consist of more than a dozen CDs, not four.) But it does include what Mr. Seidel regards as the best version of nearly every song — 76 out of 83 — that Fitzgerald sang on those nights. Six of those 76 songs were also included on the “Ella in Hollywood” album. Because Verve was about to reissue it as well, Mr. Seidel, to avoid redundancy, picked different versions of those songs, which she’d sung on different nights from the ones that Granz selected. On five of those six songs, Mr. Seidel’s choices are clearly better — more spirited, more playful, more passionate, even bluesier.

The blues were never Fitzgerald’s strong point; her few stabs at singing them in the studio came off as lame because it was hard to believe she had the capacity to be sad. But on these recordings she sings several blues songs, most notably “St. Louis Blues,” and, while no one would mistake her for Billie Holiday, she takes them for a bumpy, saucy ride.

When she scats on these recordings, she goes higher, lower, faster, more syncopated, more harmonically complex than usual; it sounds like a really good bebop horn solo, not an affectation, as her scatting on studio albums sometimes does.

And when she sings a ballad, she takes the melody in more — and more inventive — directions while still making it at least as heartbreaking as she ever did in a studio or large concert hall.

Herman Leonard, the great photographer, once took a picture of Duke Ellington sitting at a front-row table in a small New York nightclub, beaming at Fitzgerald while she sang. More than any other album, “Twelve Nights in Hollywood” gives us an idea of what Ellington was smiling at.

photograph © Herman Leonard – Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington at the Downbeat Club

1. Paul Smith – piano; Wilfred Middlebrooks – bass; Stan Levey – drums [↩]
2. Lou Levy- piano; Herb Ellis – guitar; Wilfred Middlebrooks -bass; Gus Johnson – drums [↩]

“Barry Goldberg” (Barry Goldberg)

Michael Simmons reports on a bit of Bob Dylan related obscurity, namely that Barry Goldberg (songwriter of such hits as Devil With A Blue Dress and I’ve Got To Use My Imagination as well as being half of

Two Jew’s Blues

along with Michael Bloomfield) has reissued his mid-70s album with the original vocals restored.

Anyway, this rock ‘n’ roll Zelig also pounded the ivories behind Bob at Newport ‘65 when Zimmy stuck his middle finger in an electric socket and his hair frizzed out, after which every one else began letting their hair frizz out (or something like that). When you’ve shared a stage with someone in front of a hostile audience, it’s like sharing a trench. They stayed in touch and jammed together with the Band and Sir Doug Sahm and, of course, Bloomfield. In ‘73, Goldberg had a heap of good songs and was gonna record a single at RCA Records. His pal Bob sez “No no Barry, let me take ‘em to Jerry Wexler,” the legendary R&B producer at Atlantic Records. Wex agrees to sign him and take Goldberg into the studio but says Bob’s gotta co-produce the sessions with him.

When Bob Dylan is handed to you on a silver platter as producer (co or udderwise), you say yes. With relish. Especially when you’re the only artist he’s ever offered his services to in this role (and ever will).

So everybody descends on Muscle Shoals, Alabama — Barry and wife/co-writer Gail and Dylan and Wex. Waiting for them are the hotshot Southern studio cats with whom one Duane Allman had paid his dues before the Brothers and who’d grooved on Two Jew’s Blues. Eddie Hinton, Jimmy Johnson, Pete Carr, David Hood, Roger Hawkins and friends. If you’ve ever dug an Aretha Franklin tune from the late ’60s, you’ve heard these aces of soulfulness. They tracked Barry’s Gladys Knight tune and one Rod Stewart covered called “It’s Not the Spotlight” and a bunch of others. “…Spotlight” and “Minstrel Show” were damn good songs about being a working musician. “Orange County Bus” is about the kind of legal trouble hippie musicians experienced all too frequently in them days. It’s a song of its time, as is “Dusty Country,” a paean to the earthy rural ideal sporting a lovely dobro. Even the strings on “She Was Such A Lady” and “…Spotlight” sound natural — no cold synthesizers that were beginning to be popular in that period. A solid album. Comfortable. Real. What they now call Americana.

[Click to continue reading Michael Simmons: The Only Album "Bob Dylan" Ever Produced ]

Sounds like perfect Rock snob fodder…

“Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary” (Stephen Calt)

Ooh, I’m getting a copy of this dictionary. Sounds fun…

Enter Stephen Calt, a blues historian and amateur linguist whose new book, “Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary,” published by the University of Illinois Press, is an impeccably scholarly, irresistibly readable guide to the language heard on the recordings of the great blues singers who were active in the first half of the 20th century. If there was ever a time when you found yourself wondering what it means to get a “stone pony” or “make a panther squall,” Mr. Calt is your man. As far back as the late ’60s, he was interviewing aging blues singers and sifting through arcane printed sources in the hopes of untangling the verbal mysteries of the music he loved.

…

All this and much, much more is made manifest in the pages of “Barrelhouse Words,” perhaps the only dictionary on my bulging bookshelf that can be read for pure pleasure from cover to cover.

Part of the pleasure arises from Mr. Calt’s donnish sense of humor. He must have been smiling quietly to himself when he defined “crying shame” as “an exceedingly lamentable occurrence.” No less enjoyable, though, are the examples of contemporary usage that accompany his definitions, all of them drawn from classic blues records. A few are genuinely poetic, while others are drop-dead funny. Look up “business, pork-grindin’,” for instance, and you’ll be confronted with this stanza from Kokomo Arnold’s 1935 recording of “Sissy Man Blues”: Lord, I woke up this mornin’ with my pork-grindin’ business in my hand / Now if you can’t send me no woman, please send me a sissy man. This is a family newspaper, so if you can’t figure the rest out for yourself, turn to page 42 of “Barrelhouse Words.” I haven’t laughed so hard while reading a reference book since the last time I consulted H.L. Mencken’s “New Dictionary of Quotations.”

[Click to continue reading Barrelhouse Words Defines the Blues | Sightings by Terry Teachout - WSJ.com]
[non-WSJ subscribers use this link for full version of article]

postscript: I hope there is an entry on Little Red Bike, as discussed here

I had not heard Kokomo Arnold’s version of this song, only these two, with similar lyric. Connie McLean sings: with my business in my hand, and Josh White sings what sounds like “pork grinding business“, but the words are a bit hard to make out:

1. Connie McLean’s Rhythm Boys- Sissy Man Bues

   
   The Copulatin’ Blues Compact Disc

2. Joshua White- Sissy Man

   
   Roots N’ Blues: The Retrospective

I’ll have to look for the song. Looks like an album of 24 Kokomo Arnold songs is available at Amazon for $8.99.

Plugged headphone into iPod containing 27,773 songs¹, hit shuffle, and here’s what emerged. Added a two mile run on the treadmill to the beginning of this mediation, which did require me to skip an 8 minute cello piece; cannot keep a steady pace unless the music is moving too.

1. Yardbirds, The- You’re A Better Man Than I

   
   Greatest Hits, Volume One

2. Led Zeppelin- Immigrant Song

   
   BBC Sessions

   One of the few Led Zeppelin songs I just don’t care for. This live-at-the-BBC-studios version is better than most.

3. Freddie King- Play It Cool

   
   Atlantic Blues: Chicago

   slinky guitar blues from 1969, about the sexual revolution, or something. Mini-skirts, my baby thinks she was put here forever, so she’s going to love as many (men) as she can, etc.

4. The Velvet Underground- Rock & Roll (Demo)

   
   Fully Loaded Edition

   The vocals aren’t quite as tightly wound, and there is a flub in the last minute or two², otherwise this could have been the final version. Thinner sound, perhaps, were there over-dubs on the final release?

5. Cooder, Ry- Look At Granny Run Run

   
   Bop Till You Drop

   is this about a prototype of Viagra? 1979 seems a little early to be singing about a brand new pill that Grandpa takes that causes him to regain his, umm, energy for lovin’. Filled with tasty Ry Cooder guitar licks, of course.

6. Thomas Mapfumo, The Acid Band- Chengeta Va Bereki

   
   Hokoyo!

   A favorite concert of recent vintage was in Manhattan a few years ago, at some benefit hosted by Bonnie Raitt. For me, the highlight was Thomas Mapfumo. Such a voice, full of expressive power with a hint of melancholy. A musical hero of mine.

7. Cale, John- Child’s Christmas In Wales

   
   Paris 1919

   Buoyant pop tune, you’d never know that John Cale was the glowering rocker clad in black on the Velvet Underground’s first two albums just a few years prior to this album’s release in 1973. Some of the lyrics are obscure to me, but the melody compensates. Also, I’ll have to check, but that sure as hell sounds like Ry Cooder playing some slide guitar. You should probably own this album if you don’t, highly rewarding.³

8. Led Zeppelin- The Song Remains The Same
   Conspiracy Theory
   Bootleg recording from 1975, to my ears, not recorded from the soundboard, despite. Still pretty good quality, so maybe it is from a soundboard. Not Jimmy Page’s finest guitar solo – it is kind of formless, and John Paul Jones is mostly buried in the mix, but John Bonham sounds fucking loud, possessed, and Robert Plant assures you everything small will grow. If you like Zepp, you should have this.
9. Fred McDowell- Red Cross Store Blues

   
   Good Morning, Little School Girl

   Fred McDowell’s voice and his guitar perfectly in tune, limited range, but extremely powerful. In the days before Yelp!, one had record one’s complaints in song form, and hope for compensation. Whatever that Red Cross Store did to Mr. McDowell, they should be sorry. Damn. Probably racial, at least in part, but who knows. All we know is that he’s not going to that store any more.

10. John Fogerty- Heaven’s Just A Sin Away

    
    The Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again

    Speaking of copyright theft, John Fogerty got screwed re: Credence Clearwater residuals for years. This country-pop song is pretty light-weight though.

11. Akli D.- Azul – Salut à vous

    
    Anefas trankil
    not quite Raï, but similar in spirit. Tamazight, actually, a Berber language from North Africa⁴. Hypnotic, insistent, quite spectacular. Worth owning if you are at all fond of desert blues.

12. Sun Kil Moon- Lily And Parrots

    
    Ghosts Of The Great Highway

    Really love this song, timbre of the lead vocalist reminds me of Neil Young, and now that I think of it, this could be a Crazy Horse record. Rocking, in other words.

13. Big Star- September Gurls

    
    Keep an Eye on the Sky

    Probably my favorite box set of 2009 was the Big Star collection. Remastered, and filled with transcendent moments, including songs like this one. Love the backing vocals going “whoo-oooh”, among other subtle touches.

14. Damned, The- Noise, Noise, Noise

    
    Machine Gun Etiquette
    I know The Damned are punk-rock legends, but this song doesn’t do much for me. Not that it sucks, but I’m not picking the needle up to play the tune again

15. Thompson, Richard- Rockin’ In Rhythm

    
    Strict Tempo!

    Sprightly instrumental, did Richard Thompson overdub the second guitar? or does he have 25 fingers? Seeing as the only other musician credited on this seemingly out-of-print album is drummer Dave Mattacks, I guess Thompson does have 28 fingers.

16. Boozoo Chavis- Who Stole My Monkey?

    
    Who Stole My Monkey

    ?
    Nearly instrumental, as a matter of fact, the lyrics are just variants of You Stole My Monkey, repeated over a danceable zydeco beat.

17. Little Richard- Good Golly Miss Molly

    
    Greatest Gold Hits

    even after a thousand plays, still love Little Richard’s whoops.

18. Helmet- Unsung

    
    Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – Radio X

    In Grand Theft Auto, music plays on the radio in any car you steal. As the GTA franchise has gotten older, the soundtrack has gotten more expansive. This box set is actually pretty good, even though this heavy rock song is on it, not my typical listening.

19. Wire- Strange

    
    Pink Flag

    such an unusual loping vamp in A and E⁵. R.E.M. covered the song , but the original is better. Love this song, love this album.

Part of the fun for me of this project is stretching my memory: can I remember what my impressions about a song are later when I am in front of a computer? Listening to music is, and has been, my most favored hobby for nearly my entire life, but I would not assert that I am an astute critic of what I hear. I’ll never get better explaining what I like and don’t like unless I try. Odds are, I’ll tire of it soon enough, and go back to mostly blogging about politics and corporate corruption.

1. out of a possible 61,676 [↩]
2. Lou Reed can be heard laughing [↩]
3. nope, turns out it was Lowell George, of Little Feat fame. Interesting. Though Ry Cooder did do studio work on Little Feat’s first album [↩]
4. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and elsewhere [↩]
5. if my guess is correct [↩]

Haven’t gotten bored with this game yet- lower the lights, go into the sauna-pod, put on the headphones, and hit shuffle on my iPod. Here’s the latest results:

1. El Rego et ses Commandos- Vimado Wingnan

   
   Legends Of Benin

   Delightful West African release of Afro-funk etc. If The Talking Heads were not listening to artists covered on this album, I would be very surprised. Chiming arpeggio guitars, funk drums, driving bass lines, infectious poly-rhythms, great fun.

2. Young, Neil- Through My Sails

   
   Zuma

   A near-Desert Island disc. Still debating whether to splurge on the BluRay Neil Young archive Vol 1 or not. If it doesn’t include regular audio files that can be converted to MP3 and played on an iPod, will hardly ever listen to it. This lovely song is acoustic guitar, with backing vocals by what sounds like Stephen Stills and maybe even David Crosby.

3. Observer All Stars, The- Rebel Dance

   
   Trojan Dub Box Set

   instrumental reggae, not much dub weirdness, thus not a great tune. Good for meditation though.

4. Weezer- O Girlfriend

   
   Weezer (Green Album)

   gah what tiresome 1990s alternative rock crap. If I wasn’t an inveterate pack rat, I’d have deleted this annoyance long ago.

5. Ramones, The- I Don’t Wanna Be Learned / I Don’t Wanna Be Tamed (Demo)

   
   Ramones

   whew, a welcome palate cleanser after the Weezer dreck. The Ramones only play two or three chords, but more energy in their demos than Weezer’s entire recorded output combined.

6. Joe Higgs- My Baby Still Loves me

   
   Life of Contradiction

   I lean towards political reggae more than “sweet” reggae, but this is a decent enough “sweet” reggae tune. Can’t always listen to songs of institutional oppression, right? This is a good album to own if you want to branch out beyond Bob Marley, especially since Joe Higgs was extremely influential on creating the classic Wailers sound, mentoring Marley and Tosh in the early 1970s.

7. Funkadelic- Hit It And Quit It

   
   Maggot Brain

   Before George Clinton decided if Parliament-Funkadelic was a rock band or a funk band, they recorded this album. Other than a somewhat annoying organ solo, a great tune. A template for all the Red Hot Chile Peppers and like-minded bands to follow; reverbed-like-crazy rock guitar, coupled with driving New Orleans style funk drums. Still remember purchasing this album from the now defunct Sound Exchange next to Mad Dogs and Beans and Les Amis. Ahh, youth.

8. Johann Sebastian Bach – Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier [Disc 1]
   Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 – Prelude #12 In F Minor, BWV 857- Leon Berben
   ahh, Bach.
9. Reign- Padre Nuestro
   Silencio= Muerte: Red Hot + Latin Redux
   am a sucker for the Red Hot + comps. This a latin dance-club tune, or what I would call so anyway. Good in small doses
10. Garcia, Jerry- Gone Home

    
    Almost Acoustic

    I don’t know this for a fact, but strongly suspect Jerry Garcia was in the depths of his heroin addiction when this dirge was recorded. Waltz-time, but slower. Though, to be fair, it is a funeral song, and has some fine mandolin bits, and bit of the High, Lonesome wild mercury sound that Bob Dylan is always muttering about. Not a shite song, just wouldn’t be good to listen while biking the lakefront, your bike might keel over.

11. Dylan, Bob- You Ain’t Going Nowhere
    Genuine Basement Tapes
    I wish these delightfully fun tracks would get a proper release. They float around on the internet, but the bit rate is often low. Bob Dylan and The Band hanging out in Woodstock, having a probably illegal amount of fun. Lots of silliness, like in this track, probably one of the ones where the lyrics were written randomly¹ by committee²; Richard Manuel backing vocals, and some classic Robbie Robertson guitar work. Wonder if Robbie Robertson’s copyright theft from the rest of The Band is part of the reason these songs have never been given a proper release?
12. The Mamas & The Papas- California Dreamin’
    All Time Greatest Hits
    I first heard this band only a couple of years ago, before the whole incestual/attention grabbing news about John Phillips and his daughter, but the song is a classic slice of Americana, evocative of the time in which it was created. Undercurrents of foreboding, minor keys, but so damn catchy.

1. just pick up that oilcloth/cram it in the corner/I don’t care if your name is Michael/you’re gonna need some boards/get your lunch/you foreign bib/you ain’t goin’ nowhere [↩]
2. this particular Basement track was polished up, all that remains on the Genuine Basement Tape version is the chorus [↩]

“Almost Famous” (Cameron Crowe)

Held up better than expected on a second viewing, can this movie really be 10 years old?

Almost Famous is a 2000 comedy-drama film written and directed by Cameron Crowe and telling the fictional story of a teenage journalist writing for Rolling Stone magazine while covering a rock band Stillwater, and his efforts to get his first cover story published. The film is semi-autobiographical, as Crowe himself was a teenage writer for Rolling Stone.

The film is based on Crowe’s experiences touring with rock bands The Allman Brothers Band, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. In a Rolling Stone article, he talks about how he lost his virginity, fell in love, and met his heroes, experiences that are shared by William, the main character in the film. Kate Hudson earned an Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of band groupie Penny Lane, while Crowe won the Oscar for his original script. Jason Lee and Billy Crudup co-star.

[Click to Netflix Almost Famous]

Speaking of the joys of vinyl records, this film’s poignancy partially based on nostalgia for a different era, an era where a suitcase full of records¹ can be a talisman. If the film were set in 2009, you could not hand off a loaded iPod with the same emotional resonance.

Some Cameron Crowe maudlin moments, but nothing that gets in the way of the film’s narrative flow. Helps, probably, if the lead character’s personality (outsider, unusual family life, passionate music lover) resonates with the viewer.

There is a director’s cut, called Untitled,² which adds some 34 minutes of footage, but as far as I can tell, this is unavailable in the US. Perhaps Dreamworks is working on a re-release?

Ebert raves:

Oh, what a lovely film. I was almost hugging myself while I watched it. “Almost Famous” is funny and touching in so many different ways. It’s the story of a 15-year-old kid, smart and terrifyingly earnest, who through luck and pluck gets assigned by Rolling Stone magazine to do a profile of a rising rock band. The magazine has no idea he’s 15. Clutching his pencil and his notebook like talismans, phoning a veteran critic for advice, he plunges into the experience that will make and shape him. It’s as if Huckleberry Finn came back to life in the 1970s, and instead of taking a raft down the Mississippi, got on the bus with the band.

[Click to continue reading Almost Famous :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews]

as does the anonymous NYT reviewer:

The power of popular music — its ability to give shape, meaning and intensity to the inexpressible emotions of daily life — is something of a motif in Cameron Crowe’s career as a director. Think of John Cusack hoisting his boombox aloft outside Ione Skye’s window in “Say Anything” or Tom Cruise hurtling down the highway in “Jerry Maguire,” spinning the radio dial in search of a song to suit his mood and happening upon Tom Petty’s “Free Falling.” Mr. Crowe has always used rock not merely as soundtrack decoration but also as a window into the souls of his characters.

In “Almost Famous,” a loose, affectionate look back on his earlier career as a teenage music journalist, Mr. Crowe has devoted a whole movie to the love of rock ‘n’ roll. The soul he lays open — a sweet, forgiving and generous one — is his own. The movie follows the adventures of William Miller (Patrick Fugit), a San Diego 15- year-old whose fairy-tale ascendance from nerdy schoolboy to Rolling Stone reporter mirrors Mr. Crowe’s own life story. But Mr. Crowe is less interested in biographical or historical literalism — he freely mixes real and fictional characters and prefers period atmosphere to period detail — than in evoking the joyful, reckless, earnest energy of rock in the years between 60’s idealism and punk nihilism.

[Click to continue reading ´Almost Famous´: With Sympathy for the Devil, a Rock Writer Finds His Way - NYTimes.com]

1. IMDb: The old records William looks through at the beginning are actually Cameron Crowe’s, saved from his younger years. [↩]
2. Cameron Crowe wanted to call the movie this all along, but the studio balked [↩]

Today’s edition of Songs That Played During My Meditation Time¹

1. The Besnard Lakes- Disaster

   
   The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse

   Like this pulsing bass line a lot, and actually this song is really growing on me. The band has a new album coming out early next year, I’ll probably pick up a copy.

2. Destroyer- European Oils
   2006 Pitchfork Music Festival Sampler
   I went to the Pitchfork Music fest this year², I think, but I don’t remember seeing Destroyer. Probably would have been fun, as I like the album this song is taken from.
3. Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five- You Will Always Have A Friend
   Disc E: 1949-1950
   you will always have a friend, as long as you have money to spend. True, cynical, but true. Recently picked up a 5 disc box set of Louis Jordan: a slightly forgotten, R&B jump blues jokester from the 1940s and 1950s. Highly enjoyable. This is a danceable calypso-esque song, with horns, drums, piano and percussion.
4. Beastie Boys- Get It Together

   
   Ill Communication

   With Q-Tip providing additional vocal contributions, one of the better tracks on Ill Communication, the last great album the Beastie Boys released, so far anyway. Ma Bell got the Ill Communication. Indeed.

5. Stone Roses, The- Made Of Stone

   
   The Stone Roses

   from one of the many golden eras of British pop, now reissued and remastered.

6. Marley, Bob & The Wailers- Duppy Conqueror

   
   Burnin

   speaking of ululation, this track from one of my Desert Island discs³ has some funky background vocal effects. I suspect Peter Tosh is making sounds with his mouth emulating a cat purring, but who knows. Lovely track, not my favorite on this album, but every song by the classic edition of the Wailers⁴ is excellent in my estimation.

7. O’connor, Sinead- All Apologies
   Universal Mother
   and speaking of trills and spills, love how O’Connor’s Irish brogue is noticeable on words like marriage, buried. Also imagine she sings in the son I feel as one, instead of the Kurt Cobainin the sun I feel as one, but I could be wrong.
8. Callahan, Bill- Diamond Dancer

   
   Woke On A Whaleheart

   Bill Callahan’s⁵ decent, observational song about a girl who danced by herself so hard she became a diamond, gave the world her light. His baritone is so emotionless, he probably irritates you or enthralls you, depending upon your mood.

9. We The People- You Burn Me Up And Down

   
   

   Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era, Vol. 4
   Florida based garage rockers, a favorite song from my favorite compilations of garage rock, the Nuggets series.

10. Butthole Surfers- Mexican Caravan

    
    Psychic … Powerless … Another Mans Sac

    I came of age in Austin during the Butthole’s heyday, so of course I love this song and this band. Not everyone loves psychedelic punk rock songs about scoring Mexican heroin, that is their loss.

11. The Black Keys- Stack Shot Billy

    
    Rubber Factory

    Modern garage rock, slightly derivative⁶ but still quite fun. One could compile an eclectic mix of Stagger Lee songs, ranging from the original recorded versions of bluesmen from the 1920s and 1930s, to the R&B versions in the 1950s to the 1960s British blues-rockers to The Clash to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds to The Black Keys. That Stagger Lee is a bad motherfucker.

all in all, a pretty good meditative soundtrack

1. no playlist today, just a shuffle [↩]
2. 2006 [↩]
3. an album I would theoretically take with me if I had foreknowledge I was going to be stranded on a desert island [↩]
4. before Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh left [↩]
5. aka Smog aka (Smog) for some reason [↩]
6. but then what rock music isn’t? [↩]

Another installment of the music that plays during my evening meditation session¹

1. Felice Brothers- The Big Surprise

   
   Yonder Is The Clock

   are they really brothers? More alt-country, but this album and band has really grown on me.

2. Joni Mitchell- Coin In The Pocket Mingus
   Charles Mingus talking about always having a little coin in his pocket. Not rich, but enough.
3. Psycho Acoustic Sounds- Covered Wagon
   Godzilla vs. Ralph Records
   just like it says. Quick, full of energy, fun, but not music to play during family dinners.
4. Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphony No. 4 in B-Flat Major, Op. 60: II. Adagio- London Symphony Orchestra

   I don’t know all that much about classical music, still, even after listening to it for more than half my life, but love this symphony. Also, in part because of my lack of musical training, I often visualize playing electric guitar in accompaniment – mostly on the sustained notes – whatever they are, oboe? French horn?

5. Les Boukakes- Kallouha
   Marra

   
   “Marra” (Les Boukakes)

   Raï, with linky funk-esque verse, and heavy rock choruses. Not sure of the language, sounds Arabic, North African, or similar. Awesome. Get this if you can find a copy².

6. Joni Mitchell- A Chair In The Sky
   

   “Mingus” (Joni Mitchell)

   a very jazzy number, with fretless bass, slightly amorphous melody, some scat-singing by Joni Mitchell, an organ or vibes player that I could do without. All in all, an interesting song, but not a toe-tapper.

7. Cluster- Rosa

   
   Zuckerzeit

   German instrumental electronica from 1974, always want to astral-project over meadows when listening to it.

8. Andrew Jenkins- Alabama Flood
   People Take Warning (2 of 3) Man Vs. Nature
   

   “People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs 1913-1938″ (Various Artists)

   tale of an Alabama flood, accompanied by guitar, fiddle and back-up vocal. How do they all fit into the can?

9. They Might Be Giants- Withered Hope
   The Else
   meh. Not TMBGs best work, imo, lyrics are not sparkling. The Dust Brothers drum loops are ok.

1. generated from a iTunes smart playlist called This Years Models. Criteria is: added to iTunes library this year, more than four plays [↩]
2. seems out of print [↩]

A surge I could believe in…

“Audio Technica AT-LP2D-USB Fully Automatic Stereo Turntable with USB Output, Includes Recording Software and Dual Magnet Cartridge” (AUDIO TECHNICA)

At a glance, the far corner of the main floor of J&R Music looks familiar to anybody old enough to have scratched a record by accident. There are cardboard boxes filled with albums by the likes of Miles Davis and the Beach Boys that could be stacked in any musty attic in America.

But this is no music morgue; it is more like a life-support unit for an entertainment medium that has managed to avoid extinction, despite numerous predictions to the contrary. The bins above the boxes hold new records — freshly pressed albums of classic rock as well as vinyl versions of the latest releases from hip-hop icons like 50 Cent and Diddy and new pop stars like Norah Jones and Lady Gaga.

And with the curious resurgence of vinyl, a parallel revival has emerged: The turntable, once thought to have taken up obsolescence with reel-to-reel and eight-track tape players, has been reborn.

[Click to continue reading Vinyl Record Albums and Turntables Are Gaining Sales - NYTimes.com]

If I had space, I’d love to have a room dedicated to a turntable, a quality headphone, and a wall of vinyl records. Sigh.