Well, here's a shit week for you. Wayne Shorter, jazz saxophonist (Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Weather Report and others), David Lindley, multi-instrumentalist (Jackson Browne, Linda Rondstat, Warren Zevon, Ry Cooder, John Prine and others) and Glen ‘Spot’ Lockett, engineer (Black Flag and other SST bands), all three died in the space of a few days. I'm not going to wallow in it but I do want to point out a couple things. In Shorter's case, I'm not going to pretend I know much about his career. I've heard his work as a band member on the jazz station, but I've not done a dig.
Lindley, on the other hand, I used to follow quite a bit. I gotta be honest, much as I like his session work, once he went solo with El Rayo X I realized I wasn't crazy about his voice. Not only that but his playing, which has always been stellar, had been increasingly processed. I'm not sure what guitar effects he uses on his solo stuff but it has obscured his fretwork. This is a bummer, especially since El Ray X has him playing the bulk of the LP as rocksteady, including covers of the Everly Brothers' "Bye Bye Love" and Isley Brothers' "Twist and Shout". After thinking about it last night I remembered that he was one of the first backing musicians I ever looked into. This was back in the boys' room days, when I was still living at home. I was taping the FM rock station on a second hand reel to reel deck (the only time I ever taped anything on it). They played Jackson Browne's "Redneck Friend". The slide guitar hit me hard enough that I had to go to the record store and look at the liner notes to see who it was (this was years before the internet). From then on Lindley was on the list.
"Spot" Lockett was someone whose name I'd seen on record covers for years. The in-house engineer for SST records, handling the bulk of Black Flag records and a bunch of other other SST bands, from behind the board. So, last night I was listening to Black Flag and thinking that he was the perfect engineer for them. Here's where things took a lighter turn. Also last night, Stanley Kramer's It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was on TV. (A classic comedy must-see, seriously.) After having just rocked out to Black Flag's "Black Coffee" I realized that the aural mayhem was perfect as a soundtrack for a particular scene in the movie. The scene has Jonathan Winters as a somewhat mellow truck driver. Mellow, that is, until he gets bound by tape by two gas station attendants and gets pissed off. He destroys the gas station with brute strength and a few happy accidents. The scene and the song are almost the exact same length (only four seconds difference) and even if they don't sync perfectly, the aggression in the song fits the scene. So your take home assignment is to cue up the clip from the movie, then start the Black Flag song. Turn it up.
Sync this video:
It's A Mad, Mad, Mad , Mad World (Gas Station Scene) at YouTube (Mute it.) Jonathan Winters, Dir.: Stanley Kramer
To this song
Black Flag - Black Coffee mp3 at Pretty Goes With Pretty (play with above clip)
Battle of the David Lindley guitar tones:
Jackson Browne - Red Neck Friend (streaming) at YouTube
David Lindley - Twist and Shout (streaming) at YouTube
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