I shouldn't be surprised. Andre Williams recorded for a half million labels, so of course he would have recorded for Chess at some point. Dude got around. Dig "Cadillac Jack". Trademark Williams, a little story that's more monologue with accompaniment than singing. Come to think of it, I don't know if I've ever heard him really sing, really belt one out, hitting notes all over the place. Did he ever really stretch out? This is a good one though. Hit the old links if you want more
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If you look hard enough you can find a remix of just about anything and, let's be honest here, most remixes suck. You can imagine the original artist hearing a remix of their song, rolling their eyes thinking "Why the fuck would they do this?" I'm not even an original artist and I think that all the time. Remixers, and anyone taking advantage of any technological advances, should be reminded of your Granny's cautionary advice: just because you can doesn't mean you should. (Think about that next time you follow your GPS into a bog.)
What I really can't understand out is why someone would remix a song and take out, or greatly diminish, the very part of the song that gives it its oomph. Todays reminder is from DJ Spooky who chose to remix Public Enemy's "By the Time I Get To Arizona". The meat of the song is a sample of Mandrill's "Two Sisters of Mystery", a massive riff of fuzz, wah-wah, bass and clavinet. A whopper. You could freestyle Henny Youngman jokes over it and it would still sound badass. A insanely good choice by someone in the Public Enemy camp. And DJ Spooky took it out. Think you could do better? DJ Spooky did, and he was wrong.
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Need a mess of covers of different songs from James Bond films? Why the hell not, right? Even the shitty versions are usually passable. Cover Me posted a shitload of them, including some insanely cool ones. For my money, the Ray Barretto and John Zorn covers of the James Bond Theme are the best of the lot. But you ought to browse through the others, it's an eclectic cross section, Deadbolt, Radiohead, Magazine, Count Basie and so on. For those of you too lazy go elsewhere, there's a couple ticklers below, including two by John Barry, the OG. If you really can't get enough, there's a ten hour thing of Henry Mancini's version repeated over and over at YouTube. Ten hours. How does someone even upload that shit?
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Fifty years ago on Thanksgiving day, Arlo Guthrie arrived at Alice's Restaurant and an incident happened that would change his fate and be immortalized in a song he wrote and released a year or two later. Since it's been years since I've listened to it in its entirety, today I bit. I forgot what an entertaining song it is. It's actually more like a monologue with guitar, and not really about the restaurant, but about the butterfly effect of littering and how that got him out of the draft. It's eighteen minutes long, and entertaining enough that it was stretched out for a feature length movie.
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Because sometimes you need a little blue collar, gotta get home, the road's a drag, check out that chick, old school, political correctness be damned, give me another beer and a couple of the little white pills type of music, here's some songs that are about as real as they get. Good ol' American trucker music. Fire up a Pall Mall. The road will wait.
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It might be hard for any kid these days to appreciate how certifiably out there early synth-based records seemed when they first appeared in the early seventies. They turned the ear of just about everybody, with little hint of the defensive us versus them attitude that rockers nowadays would probably exhibit. It was more "Weird! Bring it on!" That's how Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" crept onto the charts, even in the U.S. (#25 in 1975), which is kind of unbelievable given its drone like sparseness.
How accepted was it? At the time I was a diehard guitar based rock fiend, nevertheless I distinctly remember driving down the freeway in my '61 Falcon station wagon when "Autobahn" came on my newly installed FM radio. I turned it up and imagined myself hauling ass on the Autobahn, the famed highway in Germany where there are no speed limits, never mind the fact that my beloved Falcon had a hard time going over 60 MPH. Just a few years later their LP The Man Machine was released, and that, coupled with Bowie and Iggy Pop's ersatz endorsement of the band (by way of Heroes and The Idiot) was all it took to whip up Kraftwerkmania with my group of friends. Despite the fact that we were in the thick of punk rock, a recreation of the cover photo of The Man Machine begged to be done, thus this hastily posed just for the fuck of it shot. It was 1978 and there were only a few shows a month worth going to, so it was no doubt taken on a slow night.
Here's a handful of miscellaneous very early synth type stuff. I was going to try to sort through all of this and find a coherent thread, but fuck it, finding the links to begin with was work enough. The first one down there, Dick Hyman's "The Minotaur" was the first electronic song to chart in the U.S. in 1969. Gershon Kingsley released his "Popcorn" in 1969, and it became a massive hit when it was covered by Hot Butter in 1971. (Don't miss the ten hour version of that below. That's right, ten fucking hours of "Popcorn".) After that a couple versions of Kraftwerk's "Autobaun", the single edit and the 22 minute LP version. Then their "Trans Europe Express", from 1977, which commemorates their cavorting with Bowie and Iggy with name drops for each. After that "The Robots", from The Man Machine. Being the third in a trio of well received milestone LPs, consider it their Exile on Main St. Yeah, sure, that's the ticket. And you gotta have Africa Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force's "Planet Rock". (It's like the Scarface poster for hipster geeks.) The unlikely samples of "Trans Europe Express" (along with some Yellow Magic Orchestra) turned rap on it's head in 1982.
Lemmchen Primary School keepin' it real (video below)
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I've been meaning to tell you about this one. Yes, the Screamers have been covered here. But not this profile. It's not the only band history sort of thing written about the band, and there are some longer, but for one that even touches on their pre-Screamers years, it's a relatively quick read. Perfect for those of you that can't understand what the big deal is. Not that it will necessarily help.
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I heard this today, coming out of a stranger's portable radio, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' "Wake Up Everybody". Hearing it come out of a radio for the first time in my life was a thrill. I don't know if that even makes sense to you. I don't care, it's a great slice of seventies soul, produced by Gamble and Huff when they were in the thick of it. The O'Jay's "Love Train" was another one of those.
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I make no excuses for posting surf music in November. It's Dick fucking Dale. Wasn't going to be a Dick Dale night necessarily, but being that it was 80 degrees today, and the water temp still hovering around 65, it didn't feel like November. So when I ran into "Mr. Eliminator", all bets were off. Just listen to these non-hit Dick Dale things. Although sounding different, particularly the early cut, "Del-Tone Rock" (before he eloped with reverb), there's one common thread that runs through all of these. It's their unrelenting pace.
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A long time ago, a good friend (who would later become a DJ partner) was living with a guy named Phong, who was the jazz buyer for the local Tower Records location. Having met him, but not really knowing him, I nonetheless sought him out when I was about to take the next big step, which wasn't buying a jazz album. I'd already busted my jazz you-know-what with Dave Brubeck's Time Out. No, the big step was asking a relative stranger for advice on what to buy. I usually heard someone's music before buying it, or read about it, or heard about it in conversation with someone I knew. So, even though I knew Charlie Parker was supposed to be the shit, I did know that much, I had no clue where to start. One day in the record store when I spotted Phong wandering the aisles, I approached him and asked to recommend a good Charlie Parker album. He looked at me with a rather deadpan look and answered "There is no bad Charlie Parker." Dang me if he wasn't correct. I haven't heard as much Charlie Parker as a full on jazz fiend, but it's been a couple decades and every random Parker title I've heard has been, what I guess I knew all along, the shit.
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Before I ever heard "Comin' Home Baby", the deck was already stacked against it. It was a version by Mel Torme, known affectionately by old farts as "The Velvet Fog". Never heard the song, but my general impression of Mel Torme was that of a tame middle aged crooner on seemingly every variety show and telethon in the seventies and eighties. But because of the blog it was on (I think it was Spread the Good Word) I gave it a shot. Boy, was I wrong. It's a smooth song, so smooth that I realized that I'd been an asshole about Torme all along. So it was that the Velvet Fog entered my personal club of cool.
Here's his version and another by Sylvie Vartan; hers, smoother than smooth, and in French. Ooh la la. That's her up there, rather than Torme, because you can't throw a rock without hitting a good photo of her. Sometimes I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to find an decent image of a band or artist, and the more I search, the more frustrated I get. But not with Sylvie Vartan, oh no. There's a shitload of her. Now I can spend all my inordinate time goofing off.
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Listening to a Duke Reid mix earlier today, "Ba Ba Boom" by the Jamaicans came on. That was it, the "one song and out" post I was looking for. A slack night. One problem. I started reminiscing about the first time I heard it, and the fortuitous scores I made that day. "Duke Reid's Greatest Hits", "Alton Ellis Sings Rock 'n' Soul" and "The Sensational Maytals", all in one fell swoop. Brand new. Original labels. Fu-huck. Needless to say it was many years ago. I'm now going down Memory Lane somewhere else, so one song, make that three songs, and out. Dig on the "Ba Ba Boom". A masterpiece of rock steady simplicity. I love this shit.
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P.F. Sloan died yesterday. He was a songwriter with his name on a shitload of hits. (You can see a list of the most well known at Wikipedia.) Some of them are silly, some just proper pop, and some a little more serious. The first song of his that made me stop and look at the fine print was one of the latter, "Eve of Destruction". A mindblower, then and now. Just a fucking great, great song. Sadly, almost always relevant to one degree or another.
Here's the hit version of "Eve of Destruction" by Barry McGuire, and a later song "Karma" off a Sloan solo album. The grand finale is a version of "Eve of Destruction" by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra featuring Mr. Lemmy Kilmister. I shit you not. And it's good.
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Just a little catch up here, a couple Velvet Underground things that were floating around out there. I don't think I've posted either before, but I'm too lazy to check. If you want to call me on it, by all means, knock yourself out. Just check the past VU posts (scroll down) for a fair bunch of stuff, mp3s, videos and bonus dead links. Here's the two I just ran across and, what the hell, the instrumental version of "Guess I'm Falling In Love", just because it's a crunchy racket that I can't get enough of.
The French documentary below features footage of Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico live at Bataclan. Near as I can guess, it's that Bataclan, the venue that got shot up a couple days ago.
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Stirring this pot again. Not for the sake of stirring, but because I was hepped to a Yardbirds (the snappy dressers above) version on YouTube, and as long as I'm going there, I may as well stir the pot again. Listen to Jake Holmes's original version of "Dazed and Confused". You'll no doubt hear the similarities in both Led Zeppelin's version and the Yardbirds' version. But it wasn't until 2012 that Holmes settled out of court with Led Zeppelin for a piece of the pie. Seems that back in the day, Jimmy Page thought he changed it enough that Holmes didn't need to be credited. Much as I respect Jimmy Page (particularly his appreciation of Link Wray's "Rumble"), he does seem to have a history of borrowing songs. Perfect Sound Forever covered that topic well, so just go there to see what real sleuths dig up.
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A couple thousand years ago a friend of mine was a rep for a record label that specialized in reissues. When she pulled into town, she'd sometimes give me promos. Ritchie, the Ritchie Valens LP was one of them, and every time I play that record I think about her. I also think about what a young hot shit talent Valens was.
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This might be one of the greatest things I've ever heard. Start your day with it. Bookmark it, Listen to it every time your fucked up day gets in the way. Listen to it again and again. Remind yourself that everything is a little fucked up. But sometimes it can be gloriously fucked up.
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It's kind of stupid to post the same song two days in a row, not something I'd normally do. But there's a good reason this time. In case you missed it among the bunch of stuff posted yesterday, you've got to listen to the Pointer Sisters' cover of "Yes We Can Can", written by Allen Toussaint and originally recorded by Lee Dorsey, Just listen to it. Dig that bass line. Holy shit. About twelve seconds into it, when the guitar comes in, isolate it, just listen to the guitar. Man, that's some fine picking. Do the same thing with the drums. Just listen to the drums. Funky as shit, no? And they just keep getting funkier throughout the duration of the song. Now marvel at the fact that those are the only instruments. Guitar, bass, drums, that's it. Now dig on the vocals. Fuck. Is this not the package? I mean, shit, how could you possibly improve it?
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Man, oh man, I don't know if you've heard yet, but Allen Toussaint passed away today while on tour in Spain. He was a songwriter, performer, producer, label owner, studio owner, mentor and unofficial ambassador of New Orleans, the city he helped put on the musical map. To say he did it all is an understatement. He was about as big of a part of the classic New Orleans R & B sound as anyone could be.
His songs were recorded by fellow New Orleans icons Lee Dorsey, Benny Spellman, the Meters, Ernie K-Doe, Aaron Neville, Art Neville and Irma Thomas, among many others. That's just one city. Outside of New Orleans, the Doors. Q65, Al Hirt, the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, the O'Jays, Alex Chilton, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Elvis Costello, Patti LaBelle, Dr. John, Joe Cocker, Glen Campbell, the Band, Devo, Etta James, Ramsey Lewis, the Leaves, Ringo Starr, the Kingsmen, Bo Diddley, the Paul Butterfield Band, the Who, the Nomads, and about eight paragraphs of other names.
Excellent BBC documentary
It is a sad day. Make no mistake, this is big. His influence is so vast that it's hard to name an living musician that comes close. If you're unfamiliar with his work, do a little digging. Over a half century of work is out there, and hardly a stinker in the bunch. This is just a random sampling, a very small, very random sampling.
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I've but one reason to be playing Duane Eddy stuff. That album cover above. I mean, c'mon. When you see something like that, are you really going to go about your normal business? Not around here you don't.
Eddy's shit is solid, for his tone if nothing else. As you can guess, dude's big on twang. Though his records are a mine field of hokey vocals, sax solos, and corn in general, there's a lot to like. He's like a spit shined Link Wray Light, and that ain't half bad.
Here's a random assortment. I tried my best to avoid the most irritatingly hokey ones. Cut me some slack for doing a Duane Eddy post only a few months after the last one. I've only posted one of these before. Besides, look at that album cover.
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For whatever reason, last night was spent revisiting Japanese bands, starting with Takeshi Terauchi, then the Mops, Melt Banana, Cornielius, and so on. But with Buffalo Daughter, Guitar Wolf and the 5678s waiting in the wings, Cibo Matto derailed everything. It seemed like just a couple years ago that Cibo Matto were all the rage, but it was actually the late nineties (jeez, that went by fast), They were on the top of the college charts and in the front racks of independent record stores. After a couple LPs and a handful of singles they fizzled went their separate ways, going out if not on the top, close enough that they had built up a decent following. As someone that has developed skepticism towards new releases, I generally don't read up on much of anything current, figuring that if a band is good enough, word will trickle through soon enough. So, I had no idea that Cibo Matto reunited a few years ago, was playing live again, and had newer records out. Last night was catch up time.
Back when their first LP, Viva! La Women, was released in 1996, they got my attention right away for their music, a mix of keyboard driven synth heavy hip hop and pop (heavier than it sounds), and somewhat abstract lyrical content. How are you going to ignore a chorus that starts with "Shut up and eat"? Plus, dropping a few F-bombs here and there; that always wins bonus points in these parts. And all of the songs were food related, some more metaphorically than others. So, yeah, despite not really being the type of music that gets regular plays over here, I got sucked in like everybody else. Their followup LP, Stereo ★ Type A, was just as engaging as the first, if not more so. So when they went kaput, they left a lot of people hanging.
I still haven't heard much of the new stuff, but that way with words seems to be intact. To wit, "MFN" off their latest, Hotel Valentine: "MFN" is short for "mother fucking nature". Dang me, I love candy mouths. And lines like "Don't tell me "what the hell?" I'm a ghost. Don't throw the fucking oyster shell at me."? You could put that over Mantovani and I'd still eat it up.
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It's not often that you run across a mix of early reggae that doesn't include a bunch of songs that you're all too familiar with, not necessarily because you've heard a lot of reggae, but because a lot of reggae mixes include "deep cuts" that are really only deep to myopic Marleyites. So this sucker hit the spot. Only one song that I've heard before. Some familiar names, but unfamiliar songs, and some completely unknown to me before tonight. Girlie and Jomo? Never heard of them. But shit, all of these are just awesome, from the early DJ stylings of Count Matchuki to a seriously puzzling Millie Small. Prince Buster, the Upsetter? Yeah. Dice the Boss? Who? This is an emphatic yes. Go. It's available streaming if you don't want to commit, or as a mp3 download if you want to hear it again and again. I don't have to tell you which way I'm leaning.
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It's happened again. This time it's Pucho and the Latin Soul Brothers (that's the P-man upstairs), a name heretofore unknown to me. It's all Groove Addict's fault. One wild hair click and I'm binging on Latin soul jazz, funk, acid jazz or whatever you want to call it. Might not be your thing, but it is mine, tonight anyway. This stuff swings, baddass in completely different way. Get a whiff.
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There I was, just browsing, when I came across the Mighty Diamonds doing a cover of "Get Out of My Life Woman", a song written by Allen Toussaint, and a hit for Lee Dorsey (above) in 1966. I had to hear it, knowing that a reggae cover of a Toussaint song had to be decent, plus I happen to dig the Mighty Diamonds in general. Alas, it lacked that certain oomph I was hoping for. The quest was on. I ran into another reggae cover of it by Byron Lee and the Dragonaires that was a little closer to the mark. Good enough, but wait, what's this? A cover by Dutch beat nuts Q65 that I'd completely forgotten about. Dig the gloriously honking sax on that. Then, what the hell, if you're going to post a cover, it's helpful to post the well known version for comparison. Couldn't find Lee Dorsey's version anywhere but YouTube, but in looking for it I ran across Get Out Business, a zip with thirty one, count 'em, thirty one versions, a veritable "Get Out of My Life Woman" black hole. Does anyone need that many versions? Yes and no, depends on who you are. But the first one I listened to, by someone named Grassella Olliphant, is awesome. Old school stoner jazz. It alone is worth fussing with thirty other versions.
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If you're at all into the Shaggs or at least aware of them, then sometime in the last 24 hours someone you know may have hepped you to a post at Dangerous Minds with old footage of the Shaggs live. I just saw snippets of this morning before heading out, bookmarking it to check it out later. And just like that, it was gone. Pulled for copyright something or other. 23,000 hits will do that. But the article over there at Dangerous Minds, by Howie Pyro, is a good read regardless. If you don't know the Shaggs, read the article and check the songs below. See if you feel the fuss.
The rest of you jaded fucks, guess what? That video is still up, and has been for a good year, just without sound, which is likely why the one posted at Dangerous Minds is gone. The music was overdubbed and not synched anyway. The soundless version might still be up because maybe it was the actual music that got the other one pulled. But if I was you, and at all interested, I'd check it now.
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Digging on this tonight, "Autumn Sounds" by Jackie Mittoo and the Soul Vendors, from the most excellent LP Evening Time. Mittoo was the go-to keyboard guy at Studio One, on everyones records including several of his own, I happen to have the LP so I've heard "Autumn Sounds" a bunch, but after running across it
unexpectedly, I'm off on a Mittoo detour and I know I won't
be coming back, not tonight anyway. So here's that one and two that have been posted before. They're all completely different and completely cool.
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You gotta like the second and third tier rockabilly dudes. They had to do whatever it took to stand out from the crowd, particularly after Elvis broke. They accentuated all sorts of stuff. Maybe a little more hiccupy in the vocals, a crazier guitar solo, bashing the drums a little harder, you know, all the things that would make someone stand out. But radio stations back then, as now, didn't go for the crazier shit, not unless listeners demanded it. And if listeners never heard it in the first place, there's the catch. Outside of regional recognition from people that happen to see them at local shows, they really didn't stand much of a chance. Thankfully latter day fiends unearth it, collect it, reissue it, and brag about having a vinyl copy that no one else does.
Benny Joy is one of those guys. Ten or twenty years ago, you and I wouldn't stand a chance of ever hearing his stuff. But now, oh boy, does his brand of exaggerate-abilly sound good.
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