Here's some last minute Halloween shake. By the way, I saw the worst costume ever over the weekend. Some dickweed in a store wearing a Santa hat. Ain't nobody got time for that. In other Halloween news, it's 8:20 and I haven't had one damn trick or treater. And you know as well as I do, if I didn't buy candy they'd be knocking the damn door down. Screw 'em. I'll eat the two fucking bags of candy myself.
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I just heard the news this morning. The Killer is dead. Jerry Lee Lewis passed away on Friday after a bout of pneumonia. He was 87 years old. This one really fucking hurts. He was the last of the tier one original rockers. I have total respect for Lewis, not just as a rockabilly artist, not just for his singing, his piano playing, showmanship, or his ability to make any song sound like a Jerry Lee Lewis song. The one quality that he had that evaded a lot of the early rockers: he made mistakes and, this is important, owned them. He fucked up as many high profile rockers did, but he was honest enough to cop to them, right or wrong. You might disagree with some of the things he did, but you cannot accuse him of shrinking away from his actions. Most of them anyway.
All day today I was toying with doing a mammoth post but there's just
too much to say. Jerry Lee Lewis has been on the top of my list of
all-timers for decades. I guess the shit hasn't sunk in yet. Before I go
to mourn one of the greatest rockers that ever lived, I should mention
two books. I highly recommend Nick Tosches's 1982 Lewis biography Hellfire. It's probably the best biography I've ever read. Rick Bragg's 2014 authorized biography based on interviews with Lewis, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story,
is good too. In addition to Lewis's version of the years covered by
Tosches's book, it fills the gap between '82 and '14. Let's get on with
it. Here's a few random songs. RIP The Killer.
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You knew they were coming. The Sonics and Kip Tyler anyway. Every Halloween, whether you need 'em or not. Essential. This year I ran into another, Lollipop Shoppe's "You Must Be a Witch". And then I ran into the flick I Married A Witch, which looks like it was made in the fifties. What the hell. Might be a hot witch in it. I skipped around and, yes, the witch is hot. I took one for the team.
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Here's a cool one, another mix, this one by J.R. Williams, over there at Boss Radio 66. Described as "more spooky instros, annoying novelties, and radio spot ads for vintage
fright flicks, all entombed together in a convenient zip file". Why the fuck not? You had me at "spooky instros".
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Sheeit! You know I'm slacking when I forget my favorite mode of slacking! We only have, what, a day and a half before all of the whack costume parties go off? I'm not going to do the customary ragging about slutty nurse costumes and bad cowboy costumes. I haven't gone full tilt into Halloween in years, but I'm in the minority, so let's get on with it.
One band who gets into it is Rocket From the Crypt. In past Halloweens they gussied up as the Village People, astronauts, jungle savages, skeletons, and I forget the others I've seen. They're one of those on-again off-again bands and I guess this year they're on because they have a Halloween gig. That might get me out of the house if there wasn't the costume thing. Anyways, here's a couple from them and a link to some mixes of random Halloween stuff at Grey Hass. I forget what's in the mixes but I've linked to them before so they made it through the "this doesn't suck" filter. [Update: Listening to Volume 5 right now and it is pretty fucking good!] There's links to downloads and all six mixes streaming at Mixcloud for the gadget folks.
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A couple days ago I mentioned the egret incident. I didn't mention that the two guys that I accosted to point out a damn bird had, in the course of our short conversation, asked who I thought was the best punk band from back in the day (to me that would be roughly 1977-79). My first reaction was that there were so many that were really good that it was hard to narrow it down. I started thinking about all the different scenes that I was familiar with back then, London, New York, San Francisco, L.A. and here, in San Diego. Going through a mental inventory of bands, records, and shows, without regard for location or how well known any were, in a matter of seconds isn't easy. After some quick deliberation, I answered that the Dils were the band that I thought were the best representation of that era of punk rock. That's taking into account the above mentioned criteria, records (only three official 45s), shows (many, many shows, primarily on the West coast of the U.S.) and without any apparent regard to what other bands were doing, or what a label wanted. An oft quoted line from one of them (I think it was Tony Kinman) is "We do as we please.". Amen. That says it.
Because they had so little recorded output, I feel it
necessary to mention what I consider their best period. Their second 45,
"Class War"/"Mr. Big" was the first overtly political U.S punk record I
remember hearing (key word: overtly, there were others I'm sure).
Sometime between that one, late '77, and their last record, a three song
EP in 1980, they became their own band with their own sound. They were the first
band that I remember making ticket prices an issue. I don't remember if
it was hard and fast, but they wouldn't play a show that charged more
than something like five dollars. And though I'd occasionally see them
(Chip and Tony Kinman) at shows, they didn't really seem like there was
any attempt to "make the scene". Live, they were exceptionally tight.
The video above from a 1980 show, low quality as it is, gives you a
decent idea. (That low of resolution was about the norm for that era.)
I'm getting too long winded here, I'm cuttin' out.. Anyway, two guys
from the pier, these are for you. Oh yeah, Killed By Death is back
online!.
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I was the pier today, being an old fart. I'd just spotted a snowy egret in the tide pools. I'd never seen one in tide pools before, or even close and I've lived near them for almost my entire life. This is where the old fart comes in. I just had to point it out to someone. Which I did. The first two people that walked by, they were from Seattle, here to see a couple pop punk bands. When I hear the term pop punk I think Blink 182. I'm sure these days they're old hat and there's younger bands that were influenced by them. I don't care. I hate pop punk. Rightfully, I think bands like the Ramones, the Real Kids and the Buzzcocks should be the bands called pop punk. Bands like Blink 182 just seem like pop music with loud guitars. I didn't go into any of that with these guys because once I get started on that path all critical hell would break loose. Plus, if they dig it, good for them, I digress. The conversation continued lighting briefly on the first generation of punk rock. I told them about Killed By Death, a blog I've linked to multiple times over the years. I checked tonight and it appears to be offline. As they seemed interested in that site and it's now kaput, as a consolation I'm re-posting Don Letts's Punk: Attitude. If you don't know early punk rock, it's a must. Letts was there, as were the others in the film. It's The best punk rock documentary I've seen and I've seen a bunch. It's been here before, blame the egret.
Horns with a beat, that's what I wanted when I got home. But then somehow I started thinking about Ukraine and how little you hear of the horrors still going on over there. (Don't be distracted.) While not 100% out of the funk, I did happen to find an apropos song with horns and a beat, Antibalas' "War Is A Crime". As long as they're here, there's a couple more. I love that band. And, anyway, fuck Putin.
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Driving this morning listening to the soul and r&b station I happened to hear Sean Paul's "I'm Still In Love With You". I practically swerved off the road. I'd never heard it before and it's not every day that you hear a cover of a 1967 Alton Ellis song on FM radio. Though it's not really straight up reggae, it was close enough to start the day well. Coincidentally it is the riddim of that song that was used for Althea and Donna's "Uptown Top Ranking" posted a just few days ago. So, it's another reggae night, this time with songs that were later covered by non-reggae artists.
Ellis's song is down there, along with "Tide Is High by the Paragons (covered by Blondie), "Pass the Kouchie" by the Mighty Diamonds (covered as "Pass the Dutchie" by Musical Youth), "Cherry Oh Baby" by Eric Donaldson (covered by the Stones), "Rudy, a Message to You" by Dandy Livingstone (covered by the Specials) and "Police and Thieves" by Junior Murvin (covered by the Clash).
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Okay, it's crowd sourcing night, though the meager traffic that stops by here could hardly be called a "crowd". That said, I have every bit of faith one of you eggheads will have the answer. Here's the set up: I just finished reading Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, a book I should have read in high school but don't remember ever reading. It's good book that, like science fiction often does, foretold of stuff that actually happened years later. TV screens that take up entire walls, bullet-shaped objects that fit in your ear in which you can communicate wirelessly with someone elsewhere and the big one: persecution of intellectuals. This was the future as imagined in 1953 (actually begun at the tail end of the forties). I figured that, like most literary classics, there had to have been a film made. Turns out there were at least two, a recent version for HBO (2018) and another 1966 film directed by François Truffaut. After viewing the trailer for the recent version, I thought I'd check the trailer for Truffaut's version. It looked way cooler. A minute into it, I was totally distracted by the soundtrack, in a good way. The background music was badass. I looked for the soundtrack info and, sonofabitch, the soundtrack for the film was done by Bernard Herrmann. Herrman did a mess of soundtracks, notably for nine Alfred Hitchcock films. I went to YouTube to look for the soundtrack and found a couple songs, neither of which sounded anything like the music in the trailer. That didn't surprise me because Herrmann's soundtracks are usually symphonic and the music in the trailer definitely wasn't. It almost sounds like Neu!, actually it sounds quite a bit like Neu!, but their first LP didn't come out until 1972. It also sounds like the Velvet Underground jamming on Eno's "King's Lead Hat", but that's just getting stupid.. Those may not be accurate descriptions but listen to it and you tell me what or who it is. I doubt seriously that it's Herrmann.
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The bug in my ear for the last twenty four hours is solved. Last night while watching the ball game I heard the intro to Bob and Earl's "Harlem Shuffle". I must have been making dinner because later on, without a visual cue, I couldn't remember if it was the ballpark music or something else. Nonetheless, the intro stuck in my head all day. A couple hours ago, I saw a commercial for a new movie that had House of Pain's "Jump Around" as the soundtrack. The same commercial must have been on last night. There it was, House of Pain sampled the intro for the intro to their song. It is a great way to come out of the gates, a burst of blaring horns then the beat, set up by what sounds like tympani. It's really effective and the song itself hard not to shake one's ass to. Fucking excellent. Since we're on the Harlem thing, here's the Viscount's cover of Earl Bostic's "Harlem Nocturne". They get the nod because of the noir-type sax and the guitar tone. Plus, it is also fucking excellent.
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Here we go, the start of the yearly Halloween slackfest, starting with It's Monster Surfing Time, the LP by the anonymous studio band the Deadly Ones. Many postulate that Joe South was involved because J.South appears in the songwriting credits, Who cares really? It's seasonal semi-lame cash-in surf corn. I can live with that.
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It's game three of the Padres/Dodgers division series. Yeah, I'm distracted. I've been meaning to post some early Tom Waits and, since he was at one time a local (in the photo above outside the original location of Folk Arts on Washington Street), it's a good enough. The first two songs are Southern California-centric. "San Diego Serenade" is, obviously, and "Diamond On My Windshield" is about driving north, name checking first Oceanside (roughly 60 miles up the road) and then San Clemente and the Orange Drive-In (which may not exist anymore). Regardless of locale, all of these songs are favorite early Waits tunes. It's crazy how his stuff evolved after the early eighties, when he started getting a little weirder. Then again, he's always his his own style. Even with his early stuff he was wildly different from his contemporaries, not the least because of his gravel voice. While the Eagles (who covered his "Ol' 55" on an early LP) were singing about peaceful easy feelings, Waits was singing about pasties and G-strings.
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¡Mierda! It's Latinx Heritage Month and it ends in three days! I haven't had a Latin music post all month! I'll remedy that but quick, with minimal blab. My San Diego Padres (the only Major League Baseball team with a hometown and team name both in Spanish) are playing against the Dodgers in the National League Division series and I have to give that my full attention, especially since it's tied at 3-3 in the bottom of the 5th (as I type this). So here's a few of the boogaloo persuasion. I really dig this type of stuff. But, hey, it's the playoffs. Focus man, focus.
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Just about every summer I post Althea and Donna's "Uptown Top Ranking". I don't remember posting it this past summer so I have no problem posting it again. When I went swimming just before sunset today the ocean was 67° and the air was 72° so it might as well still be summer. I don't really need an excuse anyway because this one has the B-side version clipped onto it, Joe Gibbs and the Professionals "Calico Suit". Dig what sounds like clavinet, you don't hear that often on a reggae record.
To fill this out there's a souple others. What's labeled as the original version of Horace Andy's "Skylarking" (pre-Studio One?) along with the B-side version. Regardless of whether it's the original, it's as good as the Studio One, with what seems to be a little different mix, still better than later recordings he did of the same song. Next, the Heptones with the original version of Cool Rasta, again with a version tacked on. I love all three of these songs and having them lengthened in any way is a bonus. Hang around, more reggae will be coming intermittently as long as the weather holds. Or doesn't.
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It doesn't happen often, hearing the Contours' "Do You Love Me?" in the wild. Last night I was in the alley having a smoke and I heard it in the distance. I think it was playing at the shit show they call Oktoberfest down by the beach. My town's Oktoberfest has very little to do with Bavaria, brats, kraut, sausages, or lederhosen and everything to do with knucklehead out of towners needing an excuse to get trashed. It's really kind of pathetic, no oompah bands or anything. And they line up like lemmings in a hour long line to pay for the privilege of going into a fenced-in area to get drunk when there's dozens of bars or breweries with cheaper drinks and no admission charge within three blocks. I don't get it, but then no one asked me.
Anyway, about the Contours, most people only know the one song, "Do
You Love Me", and that's a pity. Their whole first album is great. It's a
Berry Gordy joint, pre-Motown, on the Gordy label. It doesn't really
sound like hit machine Motown, it's closer to a cross between the Four
Tops and an earlier vocal group like the Olympics. You can find a copy
online for less than ten bucks. Make sure you get the '81 reissue
that has "You Get Ugly" and "First I Look at the Purse", the latter
covered later by the J.Geils Band. "Do You Love Me?" has been covered a
bunch: the Dave Clark Five, the Supremes, the Sonics, Paul Revere and
the Raiders, the Miracles, the Kingsmen, the Heartbreakers and more. (If
you're curious go here).
To
those of you who have tastes similar to mine, check the video liked
below (the LAMF video). Walter Lure (Heartbreakers), Wayne Kramer (MC5), Tommy Stinson
(Replacements) and Clem Burke (Blondie) doing a version of "Do You Love
Me?" live in 2016. I'm kind of cynical when it comes to punk related
"supergroups" doing what is essentially an oldies review but as I looked
at each member one by one and then saw Clem Burke and thought "Good for
Clem Burke, I like that guy." followed by, "Aw hell, good for all of
them. Why be cynical? Save it, pick your battles." Like shitty
Oktoberfests.
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It never occurred to me to look for any live footage of mid-career Lou Reed. It must be because it didn't occur to me any would exist. If you weren't a hitmaker, in the pre-internet, pre-cable TV days, there wasn't much of a demand for live footage of lesser know acts, at least here in the states. So this one stuck out like a sore thumb. Live footage from a 1974 concert in Paris. The quality is surprisingly good and it's a good look at Reed trying to figure out where he was going next. From the same year that Rock 'n' Roll Animal, a live album, and Sally Can't Dance were released, this footage is about thirty minutes long with six songs starting with two Velvets songs. A bunch of oddball moments in here, from intermittent Jagger-on-ludes moves, to the instrumentation that barely resembles the original recordings. To wit, within ten seconds of each other, a few seconds that sound like Steppenwolf morphing within a few measures into a riff that sounds an awful lot like the intro to the Talking Heads' cover of "Take Me to the River" and that's just a ten second chunk; this in "Waiting For the Man". The year after this, Metal Machine Music was released. Still trying to figure it out.
I gotta be honest. Despite Loretta Lynn being a headlining country and western performer during my entire lifetime, I know relatively little about her life and work. I love classic country and western and all that but it's never been in the front of the stack. I knew who to turn to though, good ol' Rocky 52, a dyed in the wool stone cold fiend of country and western, rockabilly, hillbilly, bluegrass and all points in between. My first stop at times like these. Rest in peace, Loretta Lynn. Thank you Rocky 52.
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It's rare that I run across three artists in the same day that I've never heard of that merit a further dig. That further dig will not happen on a Sunday night. Here's the three, coincidentally two with coffee in the title. All solid rhythm and blues of the house party variation. Check Mike Pedicin, dude can blow.
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I tell ya, it's just criminal how little recognition Johnny Otis gets for his role in the rhythm and blues scene back in the fifties. (If you're not familiar with him, just check the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page.) I heard a song of his earlier today and he got in my head and hasn't left. Here's a few of his, his son Shuggie on guitar.
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