Holy shit! It's the last day of summer. That went by fast. Granted I've been summer lazy and posts here have been sporadic, there's just less urgency. That said, it being the last day of summer, I figured it high time to post some surf music. I picked an unlikely band because, well, they're a borderline surf-ploitation outfit, the Lively Ones. Some of you may know the name from their cover of the Ventures' "Surf Rider" on the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction. Why Quentin Tarantino chose their version over the Ventures' is anyone's guess. Maybe it was too expensive to license the original. Who knows.
The reason why I consider the Lively Ones a surf-ploitation band is because they did so many covers of other surf tunes and, as far as I can recollect, didn't have any bona fide hits that were self-penned. I was listening to a few cuts of there fourth LP titled The Lively Ones And Surf Mariachis – Surfin' South Of The Border and it occurred to me that they were like a surf version of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, by no means authentic but entirely listenable.
The few below are from Surfing Drums, their second LP and one of three LPs released in 1963. The thing is dripping in covers, Duane Eddy, the Rockin' Rebels, the Tornadoes, the Bel-Airs and Link Wray and others. (Their first LP begins with three Dick Dale covers.) You gotta check out their cover of Link Wray's "Rumble". Dig the guitar/floor tom freakout at 1:18 and 3:26. (I know what you Wray eggheads are thinking: 3:26? That's right. At 4:10 this cover is almost twice as long as Wray's OG). Returning to the floor tom thing, just listen to the spare primal pounding. Something about it slays me.
You know rabbit holes. I'm sure you do. Once you hear one thing, it reminds you of something else so you go hunting for that. That leads to another song or artist, and so on. When I fall into a rabbit hole, it can last for days. This time it was Ten Years After that started the wandering. It was their version of "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl", a live thing from 1975. Originally released in 1969 (I think) I'd heard them do it, but it's been years. But first, take a moment to behold the epic guitar face of Alvin Lee.
I don't know how it happened but..just wow! The Cuban born Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz, is slated to be on a U.S. minted quarter. (That's a 25¢ piece). Soul sister Lady Spinsta hepped me to it. She knows. I totally dig Celia Cruz. Seriously, with that giant smile she had, and that voice, how could you not? And, jeez, talk about the jams?! With stellar backing and collaborators (Tito Puente, Johnny Pacheco and that whole Fania mob) her stature in Latin music was like Aretha's in soul. Massive.
I checked the old posts and none of them had any working links so, yeah, I dutifully trackew down a few. Like it or not, my super long break seems to have ended.
This is just a heads up to surf geeks: On Tuesday July 23 TCM (Turner Classic Movies) is airing all five pre-Endless Summer surf movies by Bruce Brown. Filmed from '58'-''62 these were made before the wide scale commodification of surf culture. Starting at 8:00 on Tuesday, going into the early morning, all followed by John Milius's Big Wednesday (1978).
Slippery When Wet (1958), Surf Crazy (1959), Barefoot Adventure (1960), Surfin Shorts (1960), Surfing Hollow Days (1962). The quality is crude and the narration corny as hell, but they capture the era well.
Bud Shank did the soundtracks to Slippery When Wet and Barefoot Adventure. It's total West Coat jazz. Used vinyl copies of both are pretty cheap and they're both really good.
Listen:
Bud Shank - The Surf and I (streaming) at YouTube
Full LPs:
Bud Shank - Barefoot Adventure (streaming) at YouTube
Bud Shank - Slippery When Wet (streaming) at YouTube
Years ago I used to go to a bar near the beach for happy hour. Pitchers were half off, at the time a pitcher of Bud was something like $2.50. I only went to that bar for happy hour. I was a bargain hunter. After going there for a while they got a CD jukebox. The first one I'd ever seen. It was a crazy advancement. The thing would have the full album CDs so for the first time you could hear a deep track on a jukebox. In a bar. Loud. Granted most of it was classic rock. The price you pay for cheap beer.
One time I was in there and the bar was more crowded than usual. Everybody was shout-talking in a battle with the jukebox. That being the case, you could here snippets of conversations a few people away. The loudest, most dominant conversations were of the bickering, agitated chest beating, tough guy routine type. Everybody yapping their early buzz ass off. It was a total cacophony,I decided to add to it.
I had earlier taken a look-see at the jukebox. There it was. The white album. You know it. The double LP by that hairy bunch above. I filed that away, that it was there in case I wanted to hear something from it later. It wasn't much later when, annoyed at the congress of loud talkers, I put on the song that was the way-the-fuck-out-there deep cut of the album. Eight minutes of weird shit. Talk about adding to the cacophony. A couple minutes into it two fights broke out. I left and went home for dinner before going back out to my non-happy hour bar which was way happier.
I wouldn't ordinarily feature someone who does all parodies Weird Al Yankovic ruined it for everybody. His were just stupid, mildly amusing yes, but not gutbusters. Obscurest Vinyl's though are a riot. Part of it is the music, spot on productions of all types of music from the past. The fake sleeves are good too. And the lyrics are like regular people speak,witrh some good ol' fashioned cussin'. This is one that made me give in,. A girl group type ditty with lots of f-bombs. There are tons of others at YouTube.
If you've an eagle eyed local here you may have noticed mentions of (and links to) The Hound, aka Jim Marshall, a record collector and a radio DJ with killer taste, and also has a blog. Though no longer being updated it is a mandatory bookmark. Mandatory. There's so much information there, bios, little known facts, recording info, and it's all about the good shit (I'll get to that). His profiles of artists make bios elsewhere seem scant. Though he used to have song titles in the text linked to mp3s, the links are no longer functioning. That's a bummer but regardless, the blog is still very valuable.
So what's the Hound into? Here's what esteemed musician/composer/bandleader John Zorn had to say "It's sick, twisted, horrible noise. Those are four of my highest compliments." The late guitarist Robert Quine (Richard Hell and the Void-Oids, Lou Reed) said "The key factors are brutal and stupid. It must have redeeming value." The Hound himself said "It's music of wild abandon and snarling attitude. These are just the records I like, and we present the stuff in the spirit in which it was made."
There's three radio shows he did in 1986 linked below. To give you an idea of his taste, in the first twenty minutes of the first show he plays Dale Hawkins, Esquerita, Roy Hall, Memphis Slim, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, and Howlin' Wolf. That's just the first twenty minutes. Later in the show, Hasil Adkins, Joe Maphis, Kip Tyler and others. In other words, right up my alley.
The Hound was off the air for years but came back for a while in 2017 doing his shows online at Little Walter Radio. The easiest way to find his shows are at Mix Cloud, per the Hound, "Their search engine is pretty funky, search for 'The Hound Show' [as opposed to 'Little Walter Radio']." Here's a bunch of links. Pardon the fidelity, it's the music that counts.
Listen:
The Hound as heard on WFMU March 15, 1986 mp3 at Internet Archive 2:51, 39.2M
The Set list for above at TheHound.net
The Hound as heard on WFMU March 22, 1986 mp3 at Internet Archive 2:55, 40.1M
The Set list for above at TheHound.net
The Hound as heard on WFMU April 5, 1986 mp3 at Internet Archive 2:51, 39.3M
The Set list for above at TheHound.net
The Hound Show #7 March 30, 2017 at Mixcloud (streaming) 2.00
The set list for above and subsequent Little Walter shows at Mediafire (downolads)
Visit:
The Hound Blog
Loud and Nasty: The Hound on Radio at NY Times 1991 This is where the quotes came from.
Jim “The Hound” Marshall at New York Social Diary I haven't delved into the site, seems possibly a little snooty for my tastes. All the photos are of his home, all the fancy shit he's got. That said, it's a good interview.
On the ride home tonight, it was Gal Costa. She hit the spot. Driving into the beach area where I live, it was sunny and warm, breezy. With Gal Costa on the deck I felt like I was traveling in a different country. I've no explanation. Despite her singing in Portuguese (she was Brazilian) it wasn't that. It may have been the hard to peg nature of her music. It's definitely Brazilian (what with Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso collaborating and a cover of Os Mutantes' "Baby") but not traditional, it's Tropicalia, kind of a mixed bag at that. If you are not familiar with Tropicalia, here's a good primer, Brazil - The Tropicalist Revolution, a documentary on the movement that changed Brazilian music. Part one is below and links to the other parts are at the bottom of the post. If you really want to go down a rabbit hole, do a random web search for "Tropicalia" and cancel all your plans for the night.
It's been decades since the original Nuggets garage punk compilation came out and I still haven't really gone out of my way to look into the backgrounds of many of the bands on it. That's because that first two LP compilation was joined by others. There were multiple Nuggets compilations, another series, the imaginatively titled Pebbles, the Back From the Grave series, more from Sundazed,...there were just too many to check out the bios of every band. So, once I return to a song I like, that's when I do a cursory background check. Today, a band lost me.The Leaves coulda passed the test based on the two songs I know. "Too Many People" was the one I had to hear. "Hey Joe" was the other. (Their version of the latter was the first released, before versions by Hendrix and others.)
Before the bio check, the photo. Yikes! I ran across the photo above. Things ain't looking too good. Those perfectly coiffed bowl cuts seem a little disingenuous, even keeping in mind that almost all bands back then had their eyes on the charts. So, the Leaves are on probation. Now on to background shit, I dunno, let's try Wikipedia. Once there, there, I was almost blinded. In a sea of words, it might as well have been a neon sign, "They were discovered by popular singer and actor Pat Boone". Game over. Anyone who had anything to do with Pat Boone has a space reserved on the shit list. As you know, Boone is the archenemy of any true Little Richard fan. The conversation ends here.
I was just going to a random mix at Internet Archive, a radio show. Four one hour shows. Right out of the gate, Frankie Ford's "Sea Cruise". It had been so long since I've heard that song it was like going home. So, before listening to the mix, I was off on a Frankie Ford tack. Then, after hearing Ford's cover of Joe Jones's "You Talk Too Much", I went to the Jones original (Jones wins). Then I remembered. The ballgame is on.
If I don't post it now, I'll forget. For all of you into beat poetry, here's Allen Ginsberg reading Howl and Jack Kerouac reading his October in the Railroad Earth (with Steve Allen on the 88s). It's mind blowing to think that Howl was such a controversial piece when Ginsberg first read it in public in 1955. (The reading below is from 1959). It had a way of getting under the skin of straights, that I understand, but banning it? Come on, that's like banning people for thinking.
Listen:
Allen Ginsberg - Howl mp3 at Internet Archive
Jack Kerouac - October in the Railroad Earth mp3 at Internet Archive
The other night I had the ball game on with the sound off. The Padres got hammered by the Yankees. The post game coverage came on and there were two Padres commentators talking to each other. The sound was still off. In my head I was imagining that one said to the other "Ahh, we sucked pretty bad on that one." What the hell? Where did that I get that from? Then I remembered. It was uttered by a young teenager in 1967 during the Croton-on-Hudson Band Festival. I last heard it in 2012 when I posted a video of the festival. Yeah, selective memory. Here's the original post:
No mp3 today. Instead, I'd like to direct your attention to the video
below. It is most awesome. It's a few different groups playing in some
sort of battle of the bands in Croton-On-Hudson, NY in 1967. This
sucker's a hoot, so many things to dig. The teen dancers, the
distinctly different bands, the venue. You've got your choice here. It
opens with a standard (for the time) group, the Active Ingredients,
followed by three other groups that didn't have the wherewithal to put
their band name on the drum head, so I can't ID them. The Active
Ingredients do "Midnight Hour," passably for school age kids I suppose.
I love the ad-lib grunts and such towards the end. When the second
band comes on (at 2:06)...well, the first thing that hit me was that
they had a Monks-like beat. All repetitive, all banging thuds. I
really like them. The drummer plays funny to boot. They're followed by
a guy who probably thought of himself as some sort of sensitive John
Mayer-type lady killer, at least of Croton-On-Hudson in 1967. I was
kind of annoyed with this guy. I wouldn't go so far as to say his band
have this thing completely nailed down, but they're far better than
the rest of the bands, and that of course makes them completely
uninteresting to me. The fourth band, whoa, they're my favorite. It's
kids, really, trying their hardest, bless their jumping-the-gun hearts.
Their tune (at 3:25) is quite a racket. In a way that I love, meaning
that the only redeeming thing about it is that they are trying so hard
to hold it together. And, they're at least doing it. (Proto-William Hung.)
The kid singer assesses the performance at the end. Clearly audible
as the song ends (at 3:51), he says "ahhh, we sucked pretty bad on that
one..." It is a defining moment in rock 'n' roll, because every rock
'n' roll band has had one of those moments.
In a book I'm currently reading, it mentioned Head, the 1968 film that starred the Monkees. The book described the film as "A whoopee cushion that belched pot smoke." It's that and more. Besides the Monkees, the film also had Annette Funicello, Frank Zappa, Carol Doda, Sonny Liston, Victor Mature and uncredited cameos by Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson. If that sounds like a surreal cast, you're starting to get the idea. 
It's worth a viewing if for no other reason than to see a disjointed stoner flick written in a weekend long pot party by Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson. Case in point: While writing the script, one of them brings up the ridiculous idea of having the Monkees come flying out of Victor Mature's hair. Later, when they came back to earth, they realized that the idea would require Victor Mature's participation. (He signed on.) That's just one short weird scene. Expand that to a feature length full of short weird scenes and you have an idea of what it's like to spend a weekend getting stoned with Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson. (Note: If you're a regular here you know, it's been posted before. But, shit, it's been three years. What did you post today?)
While I was trying to decide whether or not I was going to post tonight, I figured I'd listen to some African music that I hadn't heard. Destination: Internet Archive. I'm blown away at the amount of music, books and other stuff over there. It's a rabbit hole of many flavors. Todays gamble certainly paid off. It's eight episodes of a radio show, "The Africa Express", from KOOP in Austin. They're good and varied. A LOT of more obscure stuff, even for those into African music. Book mark it, it's eight hour-long shows. Note: You can also download them from the the link in one the right of the page about halfway down, click on "Download Options". Click on "VBR MP3" for the mp3s. I guess I am posting.
If you're at all into reggae, you know who Lee Perry is. What you may not know is that as far back as his Black Ark studio days he was working with non-reggae musicians, the best known collaboration being with the Clash. Amongst others he worked with were the McCartneys, those McCartneys. I had heard about the collaboration and shuddered at the thought. I recently gave in and gave two cuts a listen. While not as offensive as I expected, it's still just bland cod reggae. But, man, would I have loved being a fly on the wall at Black Ark. Imagine the conversations that may have occurred. As it is, two years later Perry would end up intentionally burning down Black Ark. Were the events connected? While you ponder that, here's the two cuts and a link to posts about Lee Perry from the past.
