Tom Verlaine passed away a couple of days ago. I'm not even sure if the name registers with many of you. Verlaine was the lead singer and guitarist of the band Television, a band associated with the early New York punk scene. In fact it was them that convinced Hilly Kristal, the owner of CBGB, to give music other than country, bluegrass and blues a shot (CBGB being an acronym). Though lumped together with punk rock, Television really wasn't. They were a brainy flash-free band with excellent guitar interplay, between Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, that was more like distortion-less Neil Young than someone like the Stooges.
I've wanted to post some Television stuff for a while but was never able to track down anything from their first LP, Marquee Moon. It's baddass, a listener's album. Headphone shit. Check these and then think of them juxtaposed with the Ramones, another early CBGB band. Both are punk rock...somewhere.
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I ran into a handful of songs from the soundtrack of a movie called Date Bait. From the title it sounded like a juvenile delinquent flick and that's just what it is. I checked the trailer, in glorious black and white. With captions "Exciting as young love!" "Too eager to say, 'I will'". "Brutal as bare fists!" "Temper-hot tensions..leading to terrifying dangers..." I smelled exaggerations. Alright, back to the soundtrack..
Oohh, man, check out these song titles: "Gang Stalks Rick", "Bluesy
Mysterio", "Another Fight", "Bongo Jombo"; and they're all short, just
made to a throw in a mix to keep it interesting. I ended up finding the
whole movie too so I'm taking off. Hey I gotta go see the gang stalking
Rick while "Gang Stalks Rick" is playing.
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If you know the history of the Beach
Boys, you may know that the Murry Wilson, (father of brothers Brian,
Dennis and Carl) was an abusive, over controlling father. Frustrated
over his own lack of success in music, he took it out on his sons. He
may have had veiled good intentions, but when he got pissed, he really
let go, doing all sorts of incredibly cruel shit. Things like taking
out his false eye and making Brian look at the empty eye socket. Once
he got so pissed off at Brian, that he hit him upside the head (with a
piece of lumber, if memory serves), so hard that he became deaf in one
ear. So it was a strained relationship, to say the least. As with many
abusive parents, the dynamic changes as the child ages. Some children
handle it well, and take it stride. When the Beach Boys were riding
high, they became less submissive, and actually started to stand up for
themselves. And, thanks to the trend of releasing every outtake and
fart ever recorded in a studio, you can hear the Wilson family dynamic
as the boys started to realize that they may in fact have the upper
hand. So, with no further ado, here are two mp3s of the night a drunk
Murry Wilson tried to commandeer the recording session for "Help Me
Rhonda." The first version is 40 minutes long, admittedly a little
much, even for a Beach Boys freak. The other is a twelve minute edit
with the highlights.
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Here you go, a pop quiz. All three of the songs below are of the "nuggets" variety, meaning loosely under the garage band banner. They're not quite the snotty fuzz drenched parent-scaring type, but then a whole bunch of what's considered nuggets or garage are really just bands lacking the budgets or marketing push to become pop stars. Make no mistake, most garage bands didn't choose semi-obscurity.
So here's the deal, the three bands below all contain at least one member who went on to become a rock star. Some of you will know right away, others may not even recognize the names of the musicians. I'm already thinking about which of you regulars will have the answers. I'm sure of at least two. To keep things fair, no research, no Wikipedia or web searches. It's the honor system, as analog as it gets. I'm really curious how many will know the answers off the top of their head. One clue: The future rock stars are all worthy of web crawl. If no one comes up with the answers in the comments, I'll post them in a few days.
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Back in the day my brother was in a bunch of bands that lasted only a party or two, but he never failed to come up with a band name even if it for just one gig. One was the Sacred Cows, named after a fictitious band (above) from an episode of Get Smart. Get Smart was a TV series in the mid-late sixties, a spy spoof (created by Buck Henry and Mel Brooks). It had been a while since I saw the clip of the Sacred Cows on Get Smart. The songs title, "Kill, Kill, Kill", yeah, I'm going in. So I tracked it down and the clip I found actually had the real names of the musicians playing the Sacred Cows. I'd never taken the next step so I started digging.
It turns out that one of the Sacred Cows was Jerry Scheff, the dad of someone who was a few years behind me in high school. Jerry Scheff ended up playing with Elvis and his son ended up as lead singer and bass player for Chicago for a few years (Disclaimer: Chicago lost me after Live at Carnegie Hall.) It turns out that the senior Scheff put out an album with a band called Goldenrod (seen below), which also included another ex-Sacred Cow, Ben Benay. So I checked out the Goldenrod LP and, guess what, it ain't bad! These guys met playing on Fifth Dimension sessions so what you're getting is studio musicians doing a late sixties power trio hard rock semi-psych thing. It's like one long song, one solo after another, loud, sometimes sparse, sludge. It's all instrumental with no excessive effects so it comes off as a very long jam, like an opening band taking up space because Led Zep are stuck in traffic. Good for a soundtrack to something.
Shit, then I ran into a damn good cover of "Kill, Kill, Kill" by a punk band that even lifted the band name Sacred Cows. This second Sacred Cows had stuff out on Mystic so I'd guess that would put them in the early eighties. I hate to think where this leads. I'm that bored.
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I'm not in the mood tonight, time to raid the links that I hang onto for such occasions. Tonight, the beats, -niks or not, of which I've read very little. I've started Kerouac's The Subterraneans at least three times and all three times it was booted for some other book. I'm not sure why that is. Too rambling I guess, like a friend that won't let you get a word in edgewise. I'll undoubtedly give him another shot if only to see what all the fuss is/was about. I kinda think all that beat stuff to be like any other subculture, exploited by pop media with crap for insight, cashing in on stereotypes replete with their own "How to" ads in comic books, pulp paperbacks, and hack job films. (See also "bikers", "surfers", "punk rockers".) As with most subcultures, the real deals are the way they are because of pop culture. Why fuel it? Maybe that's my deal with Kerouac. Admittedly, I don't know shit about him, he did seem to be pretty public. Wgasa, bro.
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I don't know where I first heard of The Numero Group. It was probably from a blog, or Mojo or Waxpoetic magazines. It was early because it was right after their first release roughly twenty years ago. I liked the label so much I'd planned on picking up all of their releases. Nope, their output left me in the dust within a few months. They put out compilations of small independent labels or under-represented regions, and they do it right, with cool packaging, thorough liner notes and great archival photos (random example above). There's a lotta legwork in these, research, licensing, cleaning up master tapes; they are saving music from almost inevitable obscurity. I've managed to accumulate about a dozen of their releases over the years and they're all great. After listening to this totally random trio, I just went to revisit their website. It's been a while and I thought I'd prepared myself. Oh, fuck no. Their offerings have exploded. There goes the night.
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I'm in the shower this morning and kind of humming "Bang Bang" in my head. All of a sudden I blurted out "Jo Jo". I wasn't hearing Cher's version or Nancy Sinatra's, I was hearing a rocksteady version by Tomorrow's Children. I love their version because of the inexplicably placed "Jo Jo". It's just stuck in there in between a chorus and verse. No apparent reason. Just because it makes no sense, I dig it. I went looking for it and found out the flip of the original 45 was a cover of the Beatles' "Rain". Checking that out, the production is pretty raw, which is good, and each instrument is easily heard, but it's an odd mix. Like the prominence of different instruments are a little off. It's a crisp recording, if that makes sense, it's just off enough. Then I revisited Nancy Sinatra's version of "Bang Bang" just to hear Billy Strange's spooky guitar work. It is so understatedly perfect, it controls the song, it is the song. Then onto the video below of the Beatles' "Rain". It's poorly synced but that's what you get when you try to match studio audio with a live performance. Regardless, it's cool to see footage of that era (Revolver). This is where I get off. I already see three possible distractions if I don't get out of here.
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The other day when I heard that Jeff Beck had passed, I went looking for Beck, Bogart and Appice's cover of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" because I hadn't heard it in ages. I couldn't find an mp3 so I passed on it. Today, yeah, you guessed it. I just ran across it; and it's Friday the 13th, it kinda ties in so why the hell not post it? I gotta say though, while it's a classic slice of seventies power trio guitar rock, my taste is little broader than it was when I was a teenager devouring seventies power trio guitar rock. In other words, I definitely prefer Stevie Wonder's original. Kill me, I'm gettin' soft. Don't tell the guys around the keg.
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As has become custom, here's a few in honor of the day. Yep, the same three bad luck songs I've posted in the past. There's a shit ton of other bad luck songs out there but I don't feel like opening that can of worms.
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Ahh man. You probably heard. Jeff Beck died. Shit, he was one of the good ones, really. There are great guitarists, a million of them, but few are in it for, well, the guitar. Jeff Beck was more about the guitar and what could be done with it than he was with any particular type of music, or with being a guitar hero for that matter. Shit, he did it all, blues rock, 70's rock, jazz, rockabilly, and more, and played with everyone. Seriously, I'm not going to list them here when you can check his listings at Discogs or Wikipedia (I'm too lazy). Here's a few.
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Looking for something else, I ran into that image above. All I remembered was that the person's music videos were engrossing. So I tracked down the post it was from and checked the videos. I was completely sucked in, again. Here's the original post.:
It's not always about the sound of a particular song or the type of music that sucks you in. There are other factors you might take into consideration. When you're young you're often drawn to a band that looks cool, and wanting to seem as cool, you adopt their style as your own if only to have something rub off on you. Sometimes you're drawn to a particular band because you want to hang with the other people who follow them, what you perceive as a cool crowd. Sometimes you can't put your finger on why you are drawn to something.
In the case of Romanian singer Sandu Ciorba, the self anointed "King of Gipsy Music", I can tell you why I'm drawn to him. When I watch his videos I can't look away. As far as I can tell, Ciorba is a competent singer. I'm no Roma music expert, so I can't tell you if the music he makes is faithfully traditional or not. Because some of it has a beat similar to dance music, I would guess that he delves into updated Romanian jams. Actually, when I watch his videos, the music is almost secondary. I've sampled several, and from beginning to end every one is, well, total WTF. Not because there is anything alarming. It's just that they seem to have been made in a vacuum, without any awareness of more sophisticated videos or anything current, despite the fact that some of were made as late as 2015. This one was my introduction. After watching the whole thing, trying to make sense of it, I was sucked in.
It would be easy to make fun of Ciorba's videos. There is an abundance of women in short skirts and a handful of shirtless bruisers (that bring to mind Vladimir Putin in his vanity shots), and a lot of extras, dancing, flexing, shaking and gesturing this way or that. The dancing style is foreign to me, I'll leave it at that. Besides Ciorba and his cast of extras, another big star of some of the videos is the green screen, which seems to be the favorite tool of the director. That and the jagged editing. But, damn. Dude loves the green screen.
What of Ciorba himself? He has a bit of a gut, scraggly hair and in almost every video a wrinkled shirt that looks like it was pulled from the laundry pile, unbuttoned to mid-chest. He carries himself as if he was the Tom Jones of Romanian Gypsies. Who knows, he might be. Like I said, it might be tempting to make fun of his videos, but I prefer to look at them in a different way. Watch them and imagine that they came from a David Lynch film. David Lynch meets Benny Hill. Lettin' it fly. What I really dig about him, his videos, his cast of characters and the green screen is that they sucked me in with their undefinable weirdness. When that happens, I tip my hat, and I don't ask questions.
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This morning a friend was over and we were shooting the shit about coincidences. I was telling him about an incident that happened about ten years ago. I needed to check the spelling of a word and grabbed a dictionary that was fairly large (but not one of those mammoth ones that sit open all the time on the side table in the study to make the owner look smart). Oh yeah, before you ask, I'll tell you that when a dictionary is readily available and you grew up without the internet, it doesn't occur to you to check spelling online. So, I pick up the dictionary and open it. Without flipping a page I looked down and my thumb had landed on the word I was looking up. It spooked me. So I told him about that leading up to something that happened last night.
Ahbez and Frank Sinatra
Last night I was thinking about posting a version of "Nature Boy" that I particularly liked (it's been recorded a zillion times). I knew that I'd seen it at Office Naps, a blog that hasn't been updated since 2019. So I go there and realize that they don't have a search box on the blog. Shit. It had been a while since I saw the song posted there so I had to figure out how to find it. They had a drop down menu to check out the old posts listed by month, posts that go back to 2006. Before wigging out about the task ahead I clicked on a random month and it went to, you guessed it, the "Nature Boy" post. First click. I'll be damned.
Ahbez and Brian Wilson, 1967
So, I'm telling my friend about that and, I am not shitting you, in the middle of me telling him, Ulysses Owens Jr.'s version of "Nature Boy" came on the radio. Even after last night's incident I was second guessing whether I should post the song, but after the second nudge by fate, I'm not questioning it.
"Nature Boy" is a song I've posted before. It's a song that won't leave me alone. The first time I heard it was after buying my Mom a Nat King Cole cassette. I had no idea that any song on the tape had any significance for her, I just knew that when we were kids she would play a Nat King Cole Christmas album. Anyway, when I brought that tape to my Mom it was the first of the "Nature Boy" coincidences and rather then rehash the story, you can read about it here.
A quick rundown of the songwriter. Eden Ahbez wrote it. He was, well, a nature boy. A health food eating, back to nature hippie, replete with long hair and face feathers. This in the 1940s. He thought the song would be good for Nat King Cole so he showed up at one of his shows and handed it off to someone on Cole's staff. It ended up a hit, which is why my Mom knew it. (It came out when she was a teenager.) That's a very short version of the Ahbez story. His whole story is worth a longer read and there are links below. His story is trippy and worth reading up on.
Most versions of "Nature Boy" are pretty straight forward vocal numbers, sometimes with strings or big bands.The version that I sought out last night is by Etta Jones, I dig it because it's more rhythmic, somehow more real than the . Cole's OG is down there too, as well as David Bowie's and two others. Bowie does it up, the dramatic ending and fade out take up a third of the songs length.
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I remember clearly the first time I heard the Collins Kids. As I made one of my ritual stops at a friend's record store, he was nearly frothing. A rockabilly compilation had just come in, with a mindblowingly good band, who were just kids. I was used to these "you gotta hear this" things from him. The proprietor of said record store, Dan McLain (who was the drummer for the Crawdaddys and later better known as Country Dick Montana, of the Beat Farmers) had already turned me on to several bands and singers (not the least of which was Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps). So I knew the drill. But still, I was amazed.
The first time I actually saw footage of the Collins Kids was at a small barbecue at the home of a couple I knew. After a few beers and burgers, it was time for the main event. The video tape came out. (This was well before DVDs.) It would be another slack jawed moment. Even being familiar with some of the Collins Kids' music, nothing could have prepared me for the sight of a kid in his early teens playing technically incredible stuff, with a big ass smile on his face. As if that weren't enough, the little fugger was moving like he had ants in his pants. It kinda gave me the creeps, because it was so unthinkable. It still does a little. "So good, it's scary."
There's a shitload of Collins Kids videos at YouTube, some from later reunions as well. The ten minute bio below is a good introduction.
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I've finally hit a fork. This blog gets shit for traffic, mainly because there are so many outgoing links..Google penalizes for that and also gives preference to commerce sites. Long story short, the traffic here is dismal. I could walk down the street and tell perfect strangers about Hasil Adkins and have more of an impact. So at this point, anything goes. I'm thinking what I might do is set up another blog and have only one outgoing link, back here for associated media. I don't know. Here's the deal, ten years ago when music blogs were all over the place, people had longer attention spans. That's when blogs were more popular. I was getting 30K page views a day. Now page views are down to a few hundred, sometimes much less. Today it's app this, zoom that tik tok and stream your instagram ass off. Fucking enough.
I'm not going into detail about what it was like and why I started this blog in the first place. All I know is I feel like I've lately just been addressing the few regulars. There, that was the light bulb I needed. From here on out, we're doing a little switching of gears. I did feel like I was addressing a few regulars, but that was not my intention. Now it is. So things are gonna be a little sloppier but at least now we can take our shoes off. The photo above has no relevance whatsoever. I ran across it years ago on a found photo site. "Parking lot chick" I just dig the attitude. The song below has no relevance either but it was the song I was going to post before my little fucking epiphany up there. Mexico 68 Afrobeat Orchestra was a Los Angeles band, sounding much like the Budos Band or Antibalas. The song is from 2015. It's a nice jam. Your feet stink.
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Non-Jamaican reggae has been in my waiting room for a long time. Although my preference has always been Jamaican reggae, I can't really dismiss reggae from elsewhere if I haven't given it a chance. Here's what happens. Horace Andy, for example, has recorded in Jamaica, Canada and the UK, for different producers, in different studios, with different bands. Faced with three releases (one from each country) that you've never heard, which are you going to pick? Exactly.
In an a attempt to see the UK side of things I decided to check out Babylon, a movie with UK sound systems as its backdrop. It debuted at Cannes in 1981 but remained unreleased in the U.S. for decades, in the interim becoming one of those heard about it - forgot about it things. So I've never seen it. A restored version is on YouTube so that's the haps today. Before I settled in I thought I'd find some other stuff to go with it. I remembered a documentary about the U.S. reggae label Wackie's, so there you go, still staying on the non-Jamaican theme.
That's when the wheels came off. Looking for tunes to include, I made a pit stop. I listened to a Dillinger cut. Dillinger is distinctly Jamaican. There goes theme night. After the first two lines I had to break ranks. It is now officially a reggae mish-mash night. Because I found the first two lines nutty, I had to include the song. Dillinger's "Ball of Fire" starts with "My name is Ball of Fire and I've got crab in my underpants and it keep me dancing." When you listen to it you might hear "crap in my underpants" but, really, either one sounds unpleasant. You shit your drawers or you have lice. In the first lines of the song. Awesome. It stays on topic so yeah, wash down there. So here's that and a few other totally unrelated cuts. Movie time.
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