I ran into a few obscure funky soul sides from New Orleans. I was just listening to them roll, then I heard one that sounded mid-sixties and was thinking Damn, this sounds like the Dap-Kings. I knew it wasn't. The Dap-Kings didn't exist back then. I looked at the playlist to see who it was. Ernie and the Top Notes. Okay. (That's them, above.) Then I looked at the title: "Dap Walk". Fuckin' A, Also, it has a more than passing resemblance to Archie Bell and the Drell's "Tighten Up". We can always use more of that. Here's that one and a couple others, all three by artists unknown to me an hour ago. It's nice to be reminded of your ignorance. Check the Eldridge Holmes cut, right at 1:00, when the horns kick back in. That's tonights moment. But wait, there's more. Dig the drums in "Stay".
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
After seeing the photo above I realized something. It was so creepy I gave it some thought. You can buy whatever fancy expensive over the top Halloween costume you want and you wouldn't be half as scary as that menagerie of lame costumes. Man, if I ran across a mob like them I'd be scared shitless. Why was that? Was it because it's an old photo? Not really. Part of it is because all of their faces are covered. Part of it is that their costumes are so crudely put together. And part of it is because it just looks fucking scary.
Here's a link to a Halloween mix at Grey Haas. Haven't listened to it yet but I've heard others by her/him/it and they were good. Shit, I dunno...
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
Both song titles below seem to fall in with a Halloween theme. I can't speak to the subject matter or the lyrics, I'll have to look into that. They both have cool intros and start with a good scream. Sets the mood. Stretch first.
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
While a Halloween party isn't really legit without a witch, I can't think of the last time I saw an adult dressed as one. Maybe it's because you can do other costumes half-assed, but if you do a witch costume half-assed, it damages the franchise, and being that particular franchise, all sorts of bad things can prevail.
If you're party lacks a true witch, best to honor the hag in song, and I can think of no two better witch related songs than those below, by the Sonics (seen above with a fairly lame one) and Kip Tyler. Represent!
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
Tonight's post was just going to be Frankenstein related. I did not expect to find the original six minute version of "Frankenstein" by the New York Dolls. If the version on Too Much Too Soon is overly familiar to you at this point, check the one below. I could be wrong, the original may be better but I'm not going to play them back to back for the same reason I don't often play the LP. That version is too familiar, This one, to me, is shit hot. It really hit the spot tonight. Now I worry about it becoming too familiar. There's a couple other Frankenstein related songs down there too, but you Dolls freaks will get to those later.
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
Every genre has them. Covers. Some are good and some are bad. In reggae there is a fine line between a good cover and and a bad one. The good covers are usually either instrumentals, soul covers or Motown, or some older vocal thing. Rock covers by reggae artists are on double secret probation. One thing that absolutely shouldn't be done: incorporating rock riffs in a chunka chunka riddim. Listen to a few of the covers down there and then listen to Alpha Blondy's cover of "Whole Lotta Love". I'm sure some may like it. I don't. It just seems to be a little desperate for attention.
I've got an semi-related request. I really don't think anyone who reads this will have the answer (to crowd source successfully you must first have a crowd), but I have to ask: does anyone know the story of the version of "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" below by the Pioneers. The one I have was produced by Joe Gibbs. The one below sounds different, cleaner and mixed differently. I spent a bit of time trying to find out and found squat, So, just throwing it out there. Gibb's version is better anyway.
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
Remember when you used to go digging through records at a thrift store and you'd occasionally run into something oddball and cool looking and after further digging find others of the same vintage and genre? You start thinking that maybe someone died or they were just cleaning out the garage. You just scoop 'em up for next to nothing and hope for the best. I can understand how that can happen. I'm sure I have 45s that I don't remember I have, don't remember where I got them and haven't listened to in years. Revisiting 45s that have slipped from the living room playlist is one of those things that I've put off because you can only do it every few years. Because your tastes might change over the years, some of the records that you initially liked might sound like shit when you go back and listen to them again. But the opposite can happen too, and I know that probably at least a quarter of the 45s I own were bought on a whim, you know, they were cheap and had a good title or band name. It would take a lot of time to go through them and search for good ones that I forgot were there or was not in the mood for back when I bought them. And I know it's lazy looking for them online, and kind of cheating, but then again there's always a chance that someone else has found a stash in one of those places that still have low hanging fruit in their local thrift stores.
Here's a few I've run into recently and they are definitely not of this era. De Maskers have been here before but it was with the others and it's good so listen to it. Dutch fuzz. Jerry Colonna is the asshole in the bar and Don Carson is a just a complete fucking dog. That leaves the Deuce Coupes, a non-existent band made up of studio hired guns. A good cross section from that pile over there.
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
I wasn't even looking for it and if you would have asked I would have said I wasn't in the mood for trucker music. But after a few random clicks I ended up on Red Simpson's "(Hello) I'm a Truck". It hit the spot. The Bakersfield sound of it, his rap in the middle of it, and that it's a truck singing about it's owner. Good stuff too, the shame of being passed by a "Volkswagen bus full of hippies".
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
Yikes! I just realized that tomorrow is the last day of National Hispanic Heritage Month. I really could have been more diligent about posting Latin music and was going to pop in some last minute additions but when I started looking at old posts for ideas of what to post, I realized that a shitload of the stuff on the old posts was still click-able. That and game five of the Dodgers vs the Giants series (do or die) is on and I welcome that distraction. So, here's a couple ticklers and a link to all of the posts with Latin music. If you hit a dead link, don't dismay. There are plenty in there that are still good.
First off, you really need to hear the dirge that is Los Comandos' cover of Led Zep's "Moby Dick". From Peru, not Latin per se but not really rock en español, more like dirge en español,
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
I'm not sure where I first heard that Mickey Baker was a hot shit guitarist. I do know that everything I've heard him play on has been better than "Love Is Strange" the hit he had as the Mickey in Mickey and Sylvia (Sylvia Vanderpool). Their hit wasn't bad but it didn't really highlight his playing. His playing on "No Good Lover" is a much more, uh, rockin'. I kept on the lookout for more. Then I pretty much hit a wall. Recording credits back in the fifties were minimal, and really minimal on 45s. Finding things that definitely had Baker on them was next to impossible. I heard cuts that sounded like they had Baker playing, but there was no way to confirm it. Until today.
I ran into a compilation that had Mickey and Sylvia's "No Good Lover" and thought "If this is on it, the rest might be worth a listen." I listened to snippets of two other songs and they sounded like they had Baker. Now I'm interested. Then the heavens parted and there were liner notes. At the end of the first paragraph it says "A garland should be handed to Mickey Baker, whose gutsy guitar work is in the matrix on nine of these titles." Yee haw! "He was a great influence and his name should be a household word," Here, here!!! "accordingly we dedicate this album to him." Awesome. Here's the nine.
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
I was just thinking about this song a week or so ago and I remembered that 8 Eyed Spy used to play it live. 8 Eyed Spy was Lydia Lunch's band after Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. I always liked Lydia Lunch, she always seemed to have just the right amount of not giving a shit. Anyway, I made a mental note to look for her version the next time I ran into Bo Diddley's, and guess what? I just ran into Bo Diddley's. So here's that, an 8 Eyed Spy version and Captain Beefheart's because it's got a killer crunch to it. Then I started revisiting other versions. Now I'm diddy wah spent.
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
Whoah! I almost forgot that National Hispanic Heritage Month is still going on and I haven't posted Flaco Jimenez! When it comes to accordion (don't you fucking dare dis the accordion), in Norteño, Tex Mex and Tejano, he's the man. And he's recorded with Dr. John, David Lindley, Ry Cooder. Bob Dylan, Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens, and the Stones. He's received four Lifetime Achievement Awards from four different organizations, one of them a Grammy.
Here's a couple of Flaco proper and two with the Texas Tornadoes, the Tex-Mex supergroup consisting of Flaco, Doug Sahm, Freddy Fender and Augie Meyers. There's a bunch of videos at YouTube from throughout his career. The one above is from 1976.
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
Here we are. Friday. Yee haw. Baseball play-offs on the tube, Oktoberfest gathering of knuckleheads down by the pier, water temperature up, a weekend with no plans. My favorite type of weekend, just bounce from here to there. I'm starting it off with some Beastie Boys instrumentals. I miss those guys. They were one of the few bands that followed their own course and were irreverent doing it. And they learned to play better and drew from more sources as they progressed. Punk rock, hip hop, funk, kraut rock, soundtrack type cuts, the whole shopping bag. With any other band you'd say they were all over the place but the Beastie Boys were in the same place the whole time, they were in the Beastie Boys place.
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
Man, I gotta say. Lenny Kaye did us a solid so many years ago. He put together the first Nuggets compilation, at the time a two record set. It was the first compilation of garage bands when compilations were a rarity and "garage band" a term only used by total music fiends. Released way back in '72 before he was playing in Patti Smith's band, when he was a writer that worked in a record store. It was followed by single LPs compilations of more nuggets and by the time the late seventies punk rock thing happened, a lot of the bands had added covers taken from the compilations. The cool thing was that the original 45s, recorded from 1963-68, were still to be found in thrift stores and dusty record racks.
All the Nuggets compilations would soon be followed by Crypt Records' Back From the Grave series. While drawing from the same idea, Back From the Grave compilations leaned towards the more obscure bands, most regional releases, like Nuggets mid-sixties garage bands every bit as wild, in most cases wilder, and as a result none drawn from hits. There was also a series of Pebbles compilations and Sundazed Records' Garage Beat '66 series which narrowed it down to a single year, 1966 being about the peak of garage snottiness.
Here's a handful I was buggin' out too back in the day, from the earliest Nuggets compilations. I think four of these charted, so, yeah, it's really like a beginners course. Most of you know these well but if they're new to you, this is really basic shit you should know. If you dig them, a heads up. It is a very deep rabbit hole. I'd start with the first Nuggets and then the first Back From the Grave and go from there. It's slippery. Beware the jingle jangle.
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
After a crazy thunderstorm last night I did not expect it to be nice out today at all. Long story short, it was. Sunny and still mid-seventies when I got home. The surf was small but the water was still moving and salty. Did the seal thing. Just kinda swam from this point to that and ducking in waves when they came along. Waiting for sets is boring, wasted time in the water. None of that has anything to do with music other than it has nothing to do with music. But it gave me an idea. I wasn't in the mood for an involved post. I'd just pick a random cool photo in my computer and post a song by who ever it was. That lead to Tommy McCook which just so happened to be the vibe I wanted after the early evening swim like a seal thing. I'd be lying if I said right here that I was ducking out because I don't want to have anything to do with music. Of course I want anything to do with music. I just don't want to have anything to do with computers.
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
Back when I used to DJ on a regular basis, like most DJs I had my favorites that no one else would play. Considering that I wasn't the only one that hop-scotched genres in order to keep things moving and the surprises coming, I latched on to songs that were far from hip. It was the late eighties, it wasn't hard to dig out something that would elicit "Who the fuck is this?". In reality it was "Crowd pleasers be damned, I'll pick my own crowd pleasers whether they please the crowd or not." That was easy because the bar that I began DJing at was not a huge place. On any given night, about three quarters of the crowd were regulars and a large percentage were so liquored up they'd be oblivious to whatever was playing.
Sookie Sookie at 3:20
So, with this backdrop I would dig through my records. Anything
was game, deeper cuts would be less recognizable and therefore a plus.
Of all records, I pulled out Steppenwolf, not optimistic but what the
hell. It'd been years since I heard it and I couldn't name one song on
the LP save the two hits, "Born To Be Wild" and "The Pusher". I put it
on and "Sookie Sookie" was perfect. An unlikely band to play a funky
groove, but they did it with a definite Steppenwolf thud. I listened to
others on the LP but stuck with "Sookie Sookie". It wasn't until it
became a regular part of my set list that I bothered to look to see who
wrote it. Don Covay and Steve Cropper. That's why it's so cool, they're
doing a hard rock version of a Stax groove, like Cropper if he got
stoned and let it all hang out. Shit, I just remembered, the first line
of the song is "Let it hang out baby". Guitar players never listen.
Check the video above. It's from three different episodes of Playboy After Dark. If you don't skip ahead you'll be treated to a tuxedo'ed Hefner, pipe in hand, interviewing John Kay. I'd love to make fun of it, but I'll leave that to you. I'm over here letting it all hang out.
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
I don't know how I landed on this. I had a few different things I was going to rattle on about but that all went out the window. Must have been the name. The Eskimos. What the hell I never heard of them, so I clicked and now all I want to hear for the rest of the night is weird shit. This song started it. It's just one of those strange oddball rock 'n' roll records released years ago in some far off land, in this case Greenland. There's almost always something a little off in this type of international pop record. In "Mr. Twist" there are many things off. The guitar solo is pretty cool, slightly distorted and admirably tweaked. After hearing it I was curious to hear their version of "Wipe Out" and to see what the guitarist would do with it. I'm happy to report that both the guitarist and drummer take great liberties with "Wipeout" all but rewriting it. I can't tell, particularly with the drummer, if the intent is to change it to show off or to hide the fact that they can't play it like the original. Regardless, they think different and sometimes that's all it takes.
~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~
