Last Saturday there was a street fair down the street. I usually avoid the street fair because it's kind of lame. Junk food, lame bands and booths selling rain gutters, insuramce and amatuerish artwork. So I went to the beach. On the way home I was across the street from the edge of the fair and I ran into Paul, a guy I went to high school with. I hadn't seen him in roughly twenty years. I knew he was into recording and engineering musicians and that he had worked with J.J. Cale amongst others. That's about all I knew. I was about to know more.
He'd just come from the record store and had a bag of LPs from the 99 cent bins (yes!). After he flipped through them telling me the merits of this producer and that studio, the band on the edge of the street fair started to play Robert Parker's"Barefootin'", a song I love. I mentioned that and was surprised that he knew the song and that the 45 original release was on Nola. I asked him who produced it, thinking I knew the answer. When he said Allen Toussaint, I thought, oh shit, this guy is good. My guess was Cosimo Matassa. (I ended up being correct.) When I mentioned Matassa, I was amazed that he knew the name and he started telling me what type of microphones Matassa had used! I was dealing with a full on fiend. Then the band that had been playing "Barefootin'" started playing J.J. Jackson's "It's Alright", another song I love, and Paul did too. Then he said "What's next, the Meters?" There was a mention of the Meter's "Cissy Strut" and the conversation continued for another hour. It was awesome reconnecting with him and finding that we had way more in common than we did in high school.
So, that was Saturday. On Sunday, I'm at the beach and right as I was walking past someone sitting on the wall, they hit the play button on their wireless speaker doohickey and "Cissy Strut" starts blasting. Consequently, for the past few days I've been on a Meters kick. Here's "Cissy Strut" and a few others. Check their version of Lee Dorsey's "Ride Your Pony". If you're familiar with Dorsey's original (which I love) and convinced that no one else could come close (as I was) you'll be amazed at the power of the Meters' version.
The Meters - Cissy Strut mp3 at Internet Archive
The Meters - Ride Your Pony mp3 at Internet Archive
The Meters - Look-Ka Py Py mp3 at Internet Archive
The Meters - Chicken Strut mp3 at Internet Archive
The Meters - Chug Chug Chug-A-Lug (Push n' Shove) Part 1 mp3 at Internet Archive
The Meters - Chug Chug Chug-A-Lug (Push n' Shove) Part 2 mp3 at Internet Archive
1 comment:
I have to figure those 99¢ LPs were second-hand. Hopefully they will still sound reasonably good. I have a cut-out, never played LP of the Meters' "Cissy Strut" LP on Island. I paid only 16¢ for it. It is somewhere on the inside back porch here. Many of the old milk crates holding my LPs are up against the walls and have boxes stacked in front of them. I could use some help at uncluttering here. X=I)
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