Donuts & BBQ

Noble, Hamilton, and Holiday

2009-03-03T16:52:00.000-08:00

Did he still love her in spite of his knowledge of her? He looked into his weary soul for the true answer, and found it soon enough. Yes, he did, God help him. He adored her, and he would never do otherwise. After all his firmness he has just blurted out as much to her. Whatever she had done, whatever he knew about her, she could never be sordid—she was too beautiful to look at and be with; she was still too incredibly lovely. She just took him that way, and there was no use fighting it. She was not a mercenary slut in Earl’s Court. She was violets and primroses in an April rain, and her cheek and lips, the breath of violets and primroses, lingered on his mouth, stupefying him with pleasure and longing.

Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square, pp. 269-270

You're so desirable
I just can't resist you
You're so desirable
I have to give in
That firm resolve I made
Has vanished away now
I'm happy to say now
You win

You're so adorable
The moment I saw you
It's just deplorable
The fool that I've been
And yet I'm glad
You've got my heart dear
Like a butterfly on a pin
You're so desirable
I had to give in

Ray Noble, “You’re So Desirable,” sung by Billie Holiday

It is often the case that what can be done in a novel cannot be done in a song, and vice versa. As much as one can string things together—Bob Dylan and Arthur Rimbaud, Jack Kerouac and Charlie Parker, Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck—attempts to commensurate music and writing usually amount to a lot of intellectual grappling. The connection between Hangover Square and “You’re So Desirable” is more psychic than scholarly, as if some unknown force alighted the same feelings in two people separated by sea and by culture. But even psychic forces alight with logic.

“You’re So Desirable” was penned by Ray Noble, a British bandleader who relocated to America in 1934, where he led the orchestra at the Rainbow Room, on the top floor of Rockefeller Center. By all outward appearances, Noble was the opposite of George Harvey Bone, the impotent anti-hero of Hangover Square. Slim and handsome, with a manicured mustache, Noble slowly climbed the ladder of success, working his way from London to New York to Hollywood, where he appeared in television, movies and radio. He wrote several songs that went on to become standards, including “The Very Thought of You,” “Goodnight, Sweetheart,” and “Cherokee,” the last of which became a blueprint for Charlie Parker and the architects of bebop.

“You’re So Desirable” is one of Noble’s less-regarded songs, and one of Holiday’s less-regarded performances. Yet, it is the kind of song in which Billie Holiday specialized. She had an unsurpassed talent for extracting unseen pain from seemingly innocuous pop songs. Holiday’s critics were happiest when she was working with the blues that most clearly suited her persona. “Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child” remain her most popular pieces because they write her sorrow in blatant terms. Still, I’ve always felt her power most strongly on pieces like “Mandy Is Two.” It is hard to imagine a more utterly saccharine piece of songwriting, but Holiday opens in it new hallways. In her hands the once-smarmy couplets now suggest a complex history of familial strain. Great singers find the darkness lurking within songs and emphasize it. That is poetry, but Holiday did more. She transformed waste into wealth. That is alchemy.

Noble’s song appears harmless, but it isn’t as vacant as the critics claim. Unlike “Mandy Is Two,” which is no more than drivel on paper, “You’re So Desirable” shows keyholes and compartments. It’s almost as if Noble left treasure buried within his song, hidden to all but the most deserving of singers. There is something genuinely romantic about being struck by hopeless love, and dozens of jazz singers have played songs like this for romance. Maybe Ray Noble was trying for something romantic when he wrote “You’re So Desirable.” But Holiday has only to upturn a series of well-placed stones to elucidate all the ugly business of Hangover Square. Vanished. Deplorable. Fool. Holiday locates these words and hangs the song on them. These are thorns on a rose, the points that cut when you rub a soft song backwards. They gave Holiday the ability to express in two stanzas what Hamilton swam in for 300 pages.

The love described here is not a happy accident. It is a bitter affliction, a slow unwanted doom. George Harvey Bone’s reflection in Holiday’s rendition of "You're So Desirable" might be dimmer if it weren’t for that closing couplet. It seems implausible that an entire novel could be summarized in just a few lines, but one can’t hear Holiday sing these words and not apprehend the whole scope of George Harvey Bone and Netta Langdon, history’s most hateful lovers.

You've got my heart dear
Like a butterfly on a pin
You're so desirable
I had to give in

Ray Noble and Patrick Hamilton were born exactly three months apart and within miles of each other, in Brighton, England. While their careers took sharply different paths—Noble lived to a ripe age after a successful career as a mainstream entertainer, while Hamilton died early, a frustrated, alcoholic and largely unheralded writer—it is certain they were both familiar with the world of clammy pubs and desperate cliques depicted in Hangover Square. If they never met they are at least bound through Billie Holiday, a singer who shared nothing with them but a hopelessness that only she could express with such brief and withering clarity.

A Silver Roll of Big Star Rarities

2008-12-27T23:12:00.000-08:00

Chris Bell: Psychedelic Stuff (demo)
(Recorded at Ardent Studios, circa 1969)

Alex Chilton: The EMI Song (Smile For Me) (original mono mix)
(From the 1970 sessions, 1970)

Big Star: I Got Kinda Lost (demo) & In the Street (alternate take)
(From the #1 Record sessions, 1971)

Big Star: Another Time, Another Place and You (instrumental backing track)
(From the #1 Record sessions, 1971)

Alex Chilton: Oh Dana & Kizza Me
(Live on WLYX, Memphis, 1975)

Alex Chilton: The Lion Sleeps Tonight & Interview segment
(Live on "Rock of Ages," KUT-FM, University of Texas, Austin, October 1978)

For a band that only existed for a brief spell, Big Star left a lot of peripheral material in its wake. As with the lost works of Bob Dylan, or The Replacements, Big Star's unreleased recordings are patchy, but taken as a whole they illuminate the band's evolution as clearly, if not more, than the official output.

"Psychedelic Stuff" is the product of Chris Bell's high-school internship at Ardent Studios. John Fry, Ardent's proprietor, grew fond enough of Bell to allow him to record his own music in the studio on the nights when it wasn't booked. Bell must have felt like a kid in a candy shop. "Psychedelic Stuff" is the sound of one teenager's delirious discovery of the possibilities of the studio. It's more of a science experiment than a song, but you can't help but be charmed by Bell's enthusiasm as he excitedly pastes together mimicked bits from his favorite records by The Beatles, The Yardbirds, and The Who. And yet even as an amateur mash "Psychedelic Stuff" reveals something crucial about Bell's future shortcomings. It came easy to Bell to cook up a dazzling display of guitar parts, but finding the song underneath it all would always be a struggle.

Around the time that Bell was stealing studio hours at Ardent, Chilton was recording his first solo album in the same building. Chilton put together 1970 with the support of his Memphis pals Terry Manning and Richard Rosebrough. The album was Chilton's first attempt to establish himself as a solo artist independent of the Box Tops, and its schizophrenic array of Sticky Fingers-style rock, sarcastic C&W, and vulnerable pop music reflect its author's creative indecision. On some songs Chilton still uses the faux-gruff voice that Dan Penn had indoctrinated in him, but in the "The EMI Song" one starts to see the common ground on which Chilton and Bell would build Big Star. Bell heard "The Emi Song" and instantly recognized a fellow Todd Rundgren fanatic.

"I Got Kinda Lost" is a song that Bell labored over for years, and eventually found release on I Am the Cosmos. Much is made of Bell's Beatles obsession, but "I Got Kinda Lost" betrays his love for Neil Young, specifically the Crazy Horse of "Winterlong" and "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere." (A cover "Cinnamon Girl" was an early staple of the Big Star live set.) The demo is an example of how Chilton could help turn a dull Bell song into a great Big Star song. The guitar solo in "In the Street" is the ultimate example of Chilton's ability to deliver a guitar phrase in 15 seconds flat, as if cracking the top off a soda bottle. No guitarist is so free and so tuneful in the same moment, and in the blazing alternate take of "In the Street" he plays like George Harrison touched by the spirit of Jimi Hendrix.

Though it was never finished, the hypnotic, oscillating rhythm of "Another Time, Another Place, and You" could have brought #1 Record to a perfect close. Excising the sappy "Watch the Sunrise" and the tossed-off melodrama of "ST 100/6" in favor of this pensive, stoned instrumental might have made the all-acoustic second side of #1 Record a precursor to Neil Young's downer opus On the Beach. It would have peeled from #1 Record some of its strained mainstream aspirations, and in its final moments built a bridge between the Bell era and the staggered tempos of Radio City, and even beyond that to the lavish dilapidation of Sisters Lovers.

You could say Chilton's solo career starts with his live radio performance on WLYX Memphis in early 1975. For the band's first public appearance since recording Sisters Lovers, Chilton showed up with Jody Stephens (who delivers makeshift percussion), along with an entourage that included his friends Pat Rainer, Randy Romano and Beth Hudson. I can't say that these renditions of "Oh Dana" and "Kizza Me" best the album versions, but in these performances the songs are wrought for every drop of rage and resentment. On the record, "Oh Dana" is played with a collapsing grandeur. Here it conveyed in chokes and stabs. Meanwhile, Chilton chafes the chords of "Kizza Me" and reduces the groove to a lacerating thrust. Sarcasm and self-sabotage would become hallmarks of Chilton's music over the next few years, but I don't hear irony in these performances. At their core these are violent, spiteful songs that demand malevolence to be played truthfully.

By the time Chilton showed up to play a series of Texas gigs in fall 1978, he was intent on not only destroying Big Star's legacy, but his own reputation as a songwriter and singer. Enamored by punk, Chilton's party line was to be as offensive as possible and his performance on Neil Ruttenberg's late-night "Rock of Ages" program was notable for its inclusion of "Riding Through the Reich," a Nazi satire set to the tune of "Jingle Bells." Chilton played several songs from Like Flies on Sherbert, including "I've Had It," "No More the Moon Shines on Lorena," and "Waltz Across Texas." Inspired by his newfound cohorts the Cramps, Chilton was exploring his love for Fifties rock, and the highlight here is "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," which despite its mangled reading emits the night's only genuine good cheer. The background vocals are provided by a now-requisite gaggle of female hangers-on, which on this occasion included Austin scenesters Donna Rose and Susan Bunn, and New York punk photographer Stephanie Chernikowski.

In the interview segments Chilton enthuses about the art-rock of The Cramps, Devo, and Brian Eno. His speaking voice is unbearable, its jaded, effete tone setting the standard for an oncoming generation of rock snobs. It's always shameful to see musicians admired, and even rewarded for this kind of spiteful, condescending attitude, but there's something especially pathetic about Chilton's interview here. Big Star had helped him to untangle the embarrassing baggage of the Box Tops, but here his personal and creative gains appear lost to a new, bigger black hole of self-loathing and disengagement. Chilton was nearing thirty but punk had given him an excuse to regress to the spoiled insolence of his teenage years.

When Ruttenberg inquires after Big Star, the only response Chilton can muster is to blame the break-up of the band on Chris Bell's homosexuality (which was never public acknowledged, or even confirmed). Bell died a few months after this interview, but that isn't what makes my skin crawl. Anyone can empathize with Chilton's desire to escape his past, but his willful desecration of a band that once symbolized cooperative synergy and optimism was proof that even the heart that birthed "Thirteen" could turn black. Selling his former partner up the river in the name of a crude joke asserts a cynicism so all-consuming and noxious that the spirit of the band would never recover. No amount of reunion gigs can change the fact that this is the moment in which Big Star died.

The Poplar Siren

2008-12-14T18:33:00.000-08:00

Big Star: Femme Fatale
Big Star: Downs
Big Star: Kizza Me

From Third/Sisters Lovers
(Recorded in Memphis, Tennessee, late 1974/ early 1975)

Every scene has its own Lesa Aldridge. She is the precocious local barfly, foxy and damaged, always on the arms of the boys in the band. It’s a separate species of groupie from the world’s Nancy Spungens, Anita Pallenbergs, and Courtney Loves, lost causes who attach themselves to rock stars and swallow them like cancer. Aldridge was more like Miles Davis’s Betty Mabry, a catalyzing muse who made talent and trouble indistinct.

The daughter of a Mississippi minister, Aldridge settled in Memphis in her teen years. She was was initially introduced to Alex Chilton, but Andy Hummel was the first to date her. “Her family died tragically and her mother left for a protracted period and it was just Lesa with her two very little brothers and sisters and me hanging around,” says Hummel. “She was a senior in high school at the time. I just hung with her extensively at their house in Midtown and we dreamed dreams of a better life and stuff.”
(Jovanovic 134)

Lesa entered the Big Star circle through her second cousin, William Eggleston, whose photos were used for the covers of #1 Record and Radio City. Though he is now lionized as the patriarchal dandy of fine art photography, in the macrocosm of 1970s Memphis Eggleston was simply “Bill,” the aging outcast aristocrat who loafed around town on his family’s dime and still drank with the college kids. “Bill was a major hell raiser,” says Andy Hummel. “As were Alex and me at the time. We drank a lot, stayed out all night, and took all manner of drugs. Bill had no visible means of support that I could ever make out. He just drank like a fish, stayed out all night, screwed all the twenty-year-old girls he could find, and took lots of wonderful pictures. I never did understand why his family put up with it.”

During this period Eggleston was hauling a $10,000 large-format camera into bars in an attempt to catalog the faces of Memphis nightlife. In the afterlife of one night’s party, Lesa was comforting her best friend on a floral sofa when Eggleston photographed them. From Smithsonian Magazine:

The details are a bit sketchy now, but everyone agrees the picture was taken in Memphis, Tennessee, on a late summer night in 1973. Karen Chatham, the young woman in blue, recalls that she had been out drinking when she met up with Lesa Aldridge, the woman in red. Lesa didn't drink at the time, but both were 18, the legal age then. As the bars closed at 3 a.m., the two followed some other revelers to a friend's house nearby. In the mix was a 30-something man who had been taking pictures all night. "I always thought of Bill as just like us," Karen says today, "until years later, when I realized that he was famous."

The picture was taken on the night before she left home for her freshman year at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Her mother had made the red dress, patterning it after an Austrian folk costume. At the after-hours party, Karen was crying and "really distraught about some boy trouble," Lesa remembers. In order to talk in private, they went into a bathroom, where Karen somehow managed to fall into a bathtub full of water. After she dried off, she put on a blue velour robe that was hanging behind the door. Then the two camped out in the next room and resumed talking.

"Suddenly, in the periphery, I heard Eggleston say, 'Oh, what a beautiful picture,'" Lesa says. "And then people were setting up lights and it was like Hollywood or something." Neither young woman paid them much heed. "I was just in that little world with Karen," Lesa says. "I was so used to Eggleston taking pictures everywhere we went that summer that it didn't even faze me," Karen says.

In the years that followed, Eggleston became the world’s most famous art photographer, and his untitled portrait of Lesa and Karen became one of his signature images. Though few admirers know her name, Eggleston’s photo transmits Lesa's fragrance, and even the way she wears her watch tells you everything you need to know. Around the time this photo was taken she started dating Chilton, and in those draped curls and unfurled posture Big Star’s last record was born.

****

By spring 1974, Hummel had left the band, Radio City had been released, and the two remaining Big Star members were both dating Aldridges. Alex had Lesa, and Jody Stephens had Holliday. That fall work started on the third Big Star album, and Chilton and Stephens had re-named their group “Sisters Lovers” to poke fun at their incestuous romantic arrangement.

As it swings from wide-eyed wonder to self-immolation, Big Star’s third album (variously known as Third, Sisters Lovers, or Beale St. Green) mirrors the tumult of Chilton’s affair with Aldridge. By all accounts, it was a doomed inseparability that entailed all-night cycles of fighting, making-up, drinking and drug abuse. Soaked in feverish sex and narcotic terror, Big Star’s third album isn’t the product of a proper band, but incidental accompaniment to the couple’s private drama.

The third LP has been variously credited to Chilton and Stephens, Chilton and producer Jim Dickinson, and Chilton alone, but above all it is the product of Chilton’s twisted partnership with Aldridge. She haunts every song and manifests herself in hidden corners. She sang Nico’s part on “Femme Fatale” and collaborated with Chilton for “Downs,” an avant-garde prank that has Chilton blathering truths about his drug-addled love life:

Flustered and erratic
'Cept when I lie with you
Naked on a Southern love
Give downs
Rub downs
Lie downs
Any downs at all

Throughout the “Sisters Lovers” sessions Chilton encouraged Lesa’s creativity. Aldridge provided diaphanous deadpan vocals to covers of The Velvet Underground’s “That’s the Story of My Life” and The Kinks’ “Til the End of the Day,” neither of which ever saw release. Following the final dissolution of Big Star in 1975, they formed a cacophonous acoustic trio with Lesa's old pal Karen Chatham and called it Gangrene and the Scurvy Girls. The group made “Downs” sound like The Carpenters and they only lasted a few gigs. The Aldridge-Chilton union ran aground shortly thereafter. Lesa found a new guy, and a dejected Chilton wrote “My Rival,” an anthem for the spurned and incoherent:

My rival
I’m gonna stab him on arrival
Shoot him dead with my rifle
My rival, he stole my girl away

In 1980, Aldridge ended the relationship for good when she left Memphis and moved to the northeast with her mom. She is now a mother of three and a high-school English instructor in Nashville. I can only hope that each year when she teaches Lolita, a few of her students dig up the Eggleston portrait and go on to uncover the damaged love affair that lies just beyond its quiet, painterly facade . In his photo Eggleston captured her spell, but its effects are imprinted in the violent gyrations of “Kizza Me,” where Chilton delivers the chorus in an exclamation of exasperation:

I want to feel you, yeah
Kizza me
Lesa
Why not!

Foregone Rivals

2008-12-09T15:23:00.001-08:00

Though Alex Chilton gets the most attention, Big Star was always Chris Bell’s band. As Chilton explains, “Chris’s band was already in place when I joined. And they weren’t very big on R&B, or black music, at all. So I just sort of did what the original concept of their band was. I tried to present things that were compatible with the concept of this group that was already in place. When I say ‘they,’ I guess I’m really referring to Chris. I just tried to get with Chris’s stylistic approach as well as I could. And then, even after he left the band, I sort of stayed with the basic concept that he originated.”

The Beatles achieved worldwide popularity during Bell’s high school years, but in Memphis, the cradle of black American music, Bell could still wear British pop as a badge of his outsider status. There were frequent dances at Bell’s high school, the elite Memphis University School, but the local bands invariably played R&B and current chart hits. Thus, Christmas Future was born, and the brand of sweetened pop practiced by Bell’s high school group worked as an unlikely act of rebellion. “It was mostly soul music in high school,” Bell explained in a 1975 interview. “So we decided to start a kind of underground movement in order to get a group together; a group that would just play English music. The audience hated most of it really. They would come and ask for ‘I Feel Good’ by James Brown and we would play ‘I Feel Fine’ by the Beatles.”

Bell’s anglophilia extended past his musical interests. He and his girlfriend, Carole Ruleman, spent “a lot of sweltering summer afternoons” watching British imports at the Guild, an art house cinema at Poplar and Belvedere. “We loved Morgan with David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave, and another favorite was Georgie Girl with Alan Bates, Lynn Redgrave, and Charlotte Rampling," Ruleman remembers. "We must have seen it five or six times. First we had to sit through these embarrassing trailers for this voyeuristic erotica called I, a Woman. The actress was nude and studying her body in a mirror to this grandiose voice-over that repeatedly boomed ‘I, a Woman,’ ‘I, a Woman,’ ‘I, a Woman.’ We were such kids. We were both embarrassed. Every time we saw the promo we’d crack up, and find ourselves sinking lower and lower into the seats. Then sliding deeper into the theater chairs was the joke, and we’d laugh and laugh until the trailer was finally over. Then Georgie Girl came on, and we were transported to England.”
(Jovanovic 66)

The Beatles and Stones grew up lonely in England, idolizing the South's black American blues, while Alex Chilton and Chris Bell grew up lonely in the South, idolizing the tune and whimsy of Britannia. They personified an inverted British Invasion. You could liken Bell’s disposition in 1960s Memphis to a kid in 1920s Harlem being obsessed with Italian opera, but don’t underestimate the importance of contrarianism to the formation of the adolescent identity. Or maybe Bell was just born into a loneliness that naturally guided him toward interests that left him in the minority. Either way, just as Big Star endure as a symbol for every band at odds with its time and place, Bell symbolizes every erudite youth who longs for culture beyond what his town can offer.

Like a lot of bright, restless kids who forge an identity in opposition to life in their hometown, Bell saw himself as exceptional, and felt certain he would make art to match his heroes. His tragic flaw was that he couldn’t enact the talent he saw in himself. Meeting Alex Chilton was Bell’s saving grace, and his downfall. Chilton germinated the great band that Bell desperately wanted but also decimated Bell’s image of himself as a genius-in-waiting.

Everything that Bell wanted seemed to come easy to Chilton. Bell had “Try Again,” Chilton had “Thirteen.” Bell had “My Life Is Right,” Chilton had “The Ballad of El Goodo.” Chilton was a better singer and a better songwriter. Plus, he was cooler. By age 18 Chilton had experienced the world as a rock star. While Bell was at the Guild, Chilton was laying chicks every night, jamming with Beach Boys and Doors, partying in Paris and L.A. Chilton had already tasted success. He didn’t have near as much to prove as Bell, and his wants weren't as clear or as potent. Where Bell was anxious and controlling, Chilton was carefree and self-destructive. For Chilton the art house titillation of I, a Woman would’ve been just another excuse to make it with his date.

Ostensibly Bell’s control freak tendencies and schizophrenic outbursts led him to leave Big Star in late 1972, but his combative behavior only masked the resentment and intimidation he felt in the face of Chilton’s effortless talent. #1 Record is a product of collaborative chemistry (just listen to “Feel” and “In the Street”), but its ingredients are uneven. There is exchange--Chilton gave Bell his band, and Bell enabled Chilton to find his natural voice as a singer--but ultimately it was Chilton that gave the group life.

Bell left the band to prove himself apart from Chilton but his absence only brought the lopsidedness of Big Star into brighter light. When Bell was removed from the equation, Chilton created Radio City and Sisters Lovers, by most accounts the best albums Big Star ever made. Chilton's theft of Bell's band wasn't malicious, or even intentional. The second and third Big Star albums illuminate Chilton's gifts as surely as they overshadow the sad fate of Bell, an architect unable to build his own house, let alone inhabit the designs of his dreams.

Mrs. Chilton's Potato Salad

2008-12-05T17:20:00.000-08:00

Big Star began in February 1971, when Alex Chilton and Chris Bell bumped into each other at Ardent Studios and collaborated on an impromptu recording of “Watch the Sunrise.” The band’s original lineup coalesced around Chilton (guitar, vocals), Bell (guitar, vocals), Andy Hummel (bass), and Jody Stephens (drums). Chilton’s parents ran an art gallery out of the ground floor of the family home at 145 N. Montgomery, in Midtown Memphis. In spring 1971, the new band started practicing in a vacant room in the big Victorian house.

The room had sofas and a grand piano. Track lighting was installed on the ceiling to illuminate the selection of contemporary and modern paintings that adorned the walls. Chilton wore tight-fitting Christmas sweaters from Grandma. These were rock’n’rollers who still ate supper with their families. That is, unless Mrs. Chilton was cooking, in which case the boys might stay over. “Mrs. Chilton used to make the world’s best potato salad,” Andy Hummel remembers, in Rob Jovanovic's book. “Her beef brisket was legendary!”

The freewheeling Chilton had only recently returned to Memphis after enjoying a lucrative, globetrotting adolescence as leader of the million-selling teen group The Box Tops. Bell and Hummel, on the other hand, were still living every kid's nightmare: rooming with their parents and attending The University of Memphis. The above footage was shot on borrowed equipment by Bell and Hummel, who were looking for easy points on a project for their college cinematography class.

What is shown here is only sections of what was originally planned as a 15-minute promotional film that would document the making of the band’s debut, #1 Record. Certain images were intended to be synchronized with songs from the album’s first side. For example, shots of young couples flirting after school would coincide with “Thirteen,” while a mini-drama about Chilton’s troubles with the local draft board would coincide with him fleeing the selective service office to the tune of “The Ballad of El Goodo”: “And there ain’t no one going to turn me round…”

This trailer is drawn from the DVD that came with Oxford American’s annual “Best of the South" issue. For unknown reasons, the footage is paired with “Thank You Friends,” a song recorded long after the living room practice space was vacated and Bell and Hummel left the band. Maybe it’s just as well. “Thank You Friends” is out of place on the skewed, desolate plain of Sisters Lovers. Its compact pop craftsmanship and cracking guitar solo belong to the band that played on N. Montgomery. The song’s sincere refrain is directed at no one specifically but in it one can read a fond farewell from Chilton to Bell, whose descent into drugs and madness culminated with the motorcycle accident that took his life on December 27th, 1978, just a few months after the release of Sisters Lovers.

Trust a Pro

2008-11-14T14:53:00.000-08:00

The Pandemonium of Participation

2008-11-04T11:03:00.000-08:00

Erskine Hawkins: Junction Blues
(RCA Bluebird, 1940)

There was one supreme holiday every two years, and there was nothing sad about it. This was not a family affair. It belonged to everybody. The poorest kid in town had as much a share in it as the mayor himself.

This was Election Day.

Months ahead, I started, like every other kid, collecting and stashing fuel for the election bonfire. Having quit school, I could put in a lot of extra hours at it. I had a homemade wagon, a real deluxe job. Most kids greased their axles with sut begged or pinched off a butcher shop, but I was fancier. I scraped genuine axle grease off the hubs of beer wagons, working the brewery circuit from Ehret’s to Ruppert’s to Ringling’s.

I hauled staves, slats, laths, basket-lids, busted carriage spokes, any loose debris that would burn, and piled it all in a corner of our basement. This was one thing the janitor helped me with. The Election Day bonfire was a tradition nobody dared to break. If you were anti-bonfire you were anti-Tammany and life could become pretty grim without handouts from the Organization. Worse than that, the cops could invent all kinds of trouble to get you into. So around election time, there were no complaints up the dumbwaiter shaft about the leaks in our garbage cans.

The great holiday lasted a full thirty hours. On election eve, the Tammany forces marched up and down the avenues by torchlight, with bugles blaring and drums booming. There was free beer for the men, and free firecrackers and punk for the kids, and nobody slept that night. When the day itself dawned, the city closed up shop and had itself a big social time—visiting with itself, renewing old acquaintances, kicking up old arguments—and voted.

About noon a hansom cab, courtesy of Tammany Hall, would up in front of our house. Frenchie and Grandpa, dressed in their best suits (which they otherwise wore only to weddings, bar mitzvahs or funerals), would get in the cab and go clip-clop, in tip-top style, off to the polls. When the carriage brought them back they sat in the hansom as long as they could without the driver getting sore, savoring every moment of their glory while they puffed on their free Tammany cigars.

At last, reluctantly, they would descend to the curb, and Frenchie would make the grand gesture of handing the cabbie a tip. Kids watching from upstairs windows were properly impressed.

About a half-hour later, the hansom cab would reappear, and Frenchie and Grandpa would go off to vote again. If it was a tough year, with a Reform movement threatening the city, they’d be taken to vote a third time.

Then came the Night. The streets were cleared of horses, buggies and wagons. All crosstown traffic stopped. At seven o’clock firecrackers began to go off, the signal that the polls were closed. Whooping and hollering, a whole generation of kids came tumbling down out of the tenements and got their bonfires going. By a quarter after seven, the East Side was ablaze.

Whenever out 93rd Street fire showed signs of dying down, we’d throw on a fresh load of wood, out of another basement, and the flames would shoot up again. After my stash was piled on the blaze, I ran upstairs to watch from out the front window with Grandpa.

It was beautiful. Flames seemed to leap as high as the tenement roof. The row of brownstones across the street, reflecting the fire, was a shimmering red wall. The sky was a great red curtain. And from all over the city, we could hear the clanging of fire engines. Our bonfire never got out of hand but a lot of others did on election night.

Grandpa enjoyed the sight as much as I did, and he was flattered when I left the rest of the boys to come up to share it with him. He pulled his chair closer to the window and lit the butt of his Tammany stogie. “Ah, we are lucky to be in America,” he said in German, taking a deep drag on the cigar he got for voting illegally and lifting his head to watch the shooting flames. “Ah, yes! This is true democracy.”

****
Harpo Marx, from Harpo Speaks!

I Shall Be Released Pt. 3

2008-09-12T18:55:00.001-07:00

Bob Dylan & the Band: I Shall Be Released
(recorded summer 1967)

Bob Dylan (with Happy Traum): I Shall Be Released
(Columbia Recording Studios, NYC, 9-24-71)

Bob Dylan (with Happy Traum): You Ain't Going Nowhere
(Columbia Recording Studios, NYC, 9-24-71)

A sense of trade and collaboration elevates every performance on The Basement Tapes, but the authorship behind some of the songs is obvious. “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” is pure Bob Dylan, while “Katie’s Been Gone” is pure Richard Manuel. Neither of them needed the other to write those songs. “I Shall Be Released” is extraordinary because neither Dylan nor Manuel could have done it alone. It’s the sum of each musician’s strengths, and the 1967 Basement recording is the only performance in which they have an equal say.

It’s impossible to know for sure who wrote what on “I Shall Be Released.” The last verse (“Yonder stands a man in this lonely crowd / A man who swears he’s not to blame”) could come from no one but Dylan but the song as a whole is molded in Manuel’s spirit. Of course, there is the band—their drumless murmur moves forward like a makeshift raft on the Mississippi river and makes every subsequent rendition seem overthought. But the singing is the main story. Dylan uses a voice on the 1967 performance that he’s never used on any other song in his career. He’s doing Manuel—an attempt at naked soul music, arguably his first. As a musician trying to recover from years of self-consciousness and social unease (culminating in the disastrous 1966 tour of England, and the cataclysmic motorcycle accident that followed it), Dylan must have been encouraged by Manuel, who was able to drop his guard to the ground every time he stepped up to sing. To understand their connection just listen to the way Manuel’s falsetto shadows Dylan on every chorus, more spectral reflection than traditional harmony.

Despite his unmistakable imprint, “I Shall Be Released” is rarely regarded as a Richard Manuel song. His invisibility is plainly told in this congratulatory singalong, in which Martin Scorsese’s fleet of cameras manages to get a close-up of all 13 people onstage, except for the man singing the song. I don’t think Dylan had much to do with writing Richard out of history, although he did try to repossesses the song for himself in 1971. Working with Happy Traum, a chum from the Gerde’s Folk City days, Dylan recorded versions of “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and “I Shall Be Released” for inclusion on his Greatest Hits Vol. II—his way of nudging an audience still largely under the assumption that those songs were written by The Byrds and The Band. The frayed dirge of 1967 is here replaced with a spry but understated swing. Now Dylan is the confident rock star, miles from the Woodstock idyll. This is how Ronnie Lane and Ronnie Wood might play it—two friends with acoustics approximating a hotel room jam in the roomy Columbia studio.

They also reminisced on the Basement with “You Ain’t Going Nowhere,” its revised opening proof that Dylan was not too grown-up to be goofy:

Clouds so swift, the rain falling in
Going to see a movie called Gunga Din
Pack up your money, pull up your tent McGuinn
You ain’t going nowhere

I Shall Be Released Pt. 2

2008-09-10T10:12:00.000-07:00

Nina Simone: I Shall Be Released
(RCA Victor, 1969)

Marion Williams: I Shall Be Released
(Atlantic, 1969)

The Heptones: I Shall Be Released
(Studio One, 1969)

Keith Hudson: I Shall Be Released
(Mamba, 1974)

Rather than dig into the dark heart of the song, performers preferred to refashion it in their own image. Marion Williams and Nina Simone helped to reinvent “I Shall Be Released” as gospel, something that never sat right with me. In the declarative refrain black singers heard a sequel to “We Shall Overcome” and “People Get Ready,” but they too easily overlooked the spite and desolation of the verses, especially the first one:

They say everything can be replaced
Yet every distance is not near
So I remember every face
Of every man who put me here

Nina Simone and Marion Williams are powerful performers (how could they not be?), but they shouldn’t have mistaken “I Shall be Released” for a song of strength. Paired with the admissions of each verse, the refrain appears not as a determination to rise above, but as a cheerless mantra for a singer resigned to his lonely station. As with “Wild Horses,” this narrator seeks comfort from a promise in which he doesn’t believe. Often forgotten, the song ends with an image of madness:

Standing next to me in this lonely crowd
Is a man who swears he's not to blame
All day long I hear him shout so loud
Crying out that he was framed

“I Shall Be Released” makes more sense as a suicidal lament than a freedom singalong, but performers and audiences in the late Sixties were so hungry for the Dylan of “Blowing In the Wind” that no one noticed when a song about cold desperation was played as a campfire anthem.

The song took on a second life in Jamaica, where Jackie Mittoo and the Studio One house band applied a percolating rhythmic design to the old melody. For Jamaica singers “I Shall Be Released” could never be anything other than an emancipation song. With his tear-strewn tenor, Leroy Sibbles is perhaps the only performer who understood the song from Richard Manuel’s perspective, but in its new frisky arrangement “I Shall Be Released” sheds every trace of its shamble and gloom. Dozens of songs have been based off of The Heptones’ original, but the only Jamaican who came close to capturing the spirit of The Basement Tapes was Keith Hudson. He plays it like a leaky faucet, and when he sings the refrain in his cracked croon we finally understand the song as a hymn of ruination, not liberation.

I Shall Be Released Pt. 1

2008-09-09T22:54:00.001-07:00

The Impressions: People Get Ready
(recorded in Chicago, 1964)

Bob Dylan & the Band: I Shall Be Released
(recorded Summer, 1967)

The Band: I Shall Be Released
(recorded January 1968)

There was a lot of bumpkin fun happening in the basement of Big Pink in the summer of 1967, but what Bob Dylan and the Band wanted more than anything was to write songs as good as Curtis Mayfield’s. None came closer than “I Shall Be Released,” which borrows its minor chord changes and tragic candor from Impressions songs like “I Made A Mistake” and “See the Real Me.” Of course, “People Get Ready” provided the singular blueprint. Dylan had heaps of wild poetry, but Mayfield wrote songs like prayers. Bob wanted one like that.

Like “People Get Ready,” “I Shall Be Released” consists of three epigrammatic verses, and a declarative refrain. Though it pays tribute to Curtis Mayfield the song feels out the common ground between Dylan’s two favorite poets, Smokey Robinson and Doug Sahm. The weary tune is country-and-western, but its open wound is straight soul music.

In late 1967 the original 14-song acetate of The Basement Tapes was shelved when the clean, quiet John Wesley Harding was submitted as Columbia’s official follow-up to Blonde On Blonde. Still, Albert “The Greasy Bear” Grossman wasn’t about to forsake the profit potential of 14 unreleased Bob Dylan songs and he immediately started shopping the acetate around. Naturally, Grossman’s clients got first crack. Joan Baez celebrated the windfall with Any Day Now, an entire album’s worth of unreleased Dylan that showcased several Basement songs and borrowed the refrain from “I Shall Be Released” for its title. But it was The Band who crystallized the Basement commotion with Music From Big Pink. The group’s blissful and measured take on “I Shall Be Released” became the model for every subsequent rendition. Richard Manuel’s falsetto is a career performance, but The Band’s cosmic doo-wop is disturbingly pristine. In the Basement the song had an earthly aroma, but The Band's version is strangely odorless.

Get the Picture

2008-04-15T00:34:00.000-07:00

Music videos have never known a better crew than the one behind King Creole. Jailhouse Rock was directed by Richard Thorpe, a guy best known for helming a string of Tarzan sequels in the Thirties; King Creole, on the other hand, was directed by Michael Curtiz, he of Captain Blood, Casablanca, and Angels With Dirty Faces. The art direction was overseen by J. McMillan Johnson and Hal Pereira, who between them counted credits on Double Indemnity, Roman Holiday, and Alfred Hitchcock's best films from the Fifties (Rear Window, Vertigo, To Catch A Thief). Above all, though, one must credit cinematographer Russell Harlan for the "Crawfish" clip. Harlan was Howard Hawks' favorite DP, responsible for Red River, Thing From Another World, and Rio Bravo, among others. Here, his camera peers around the iron-lace detail of the balcony before it leans in to watch our star. We spy through a filmy curtain as Presley pulls a comb across his oil-slick hair. This simulated voyeurism must have felt very real in 1958, when hungry fans wanted more Elvis than a still photograph or a waist-up TV shot could possibly offer. They yearned to slow dance and watch him in his most private moments. "Crawfish" delivers on the promise of that fantasy.

The image is a reflection of the song. Its rhythm isn't just seductive; it's straight soul music, a premonition of Lee Dorsey's "Workin' In A Coal Mine" eight years before the fact. The female voice belongs to Kitty White. Popular in L.A. nightclubs at the time, she recorded a string of LPs with West Coast greats like Buddy Collette and Chico Hamilton, and found work singing in a few other films, including Kiss Me Deadly and Night of the Hunter. That's her on the cart, although she was uncredited; as far as I know, she's still alive. On her voice, "Crawfish" drifts out as easily as it drifts in. The lyric doesn't attempt to be more than what it is, but by the time White and Presley are done with it, there is more sex in the air than anyone was willing to acknowledge in 1958. Can you imagine a duet album in the same vein? "Crawfish" is widely considered a filler track on a forgettable film, but to me, this hints at the soul music a 23-year-old Elvis could have made had he been under the auspices of real musicians instead of Colonel Tom Parker.

For a fleeting moment in the French Quarter, song and image were perfectly united. The clip's fusion of artifice and authenticity is my defining image of the young superstar. His limbs so loose, his acting so slight; pants and hair raven black, and between them a snug t-shirt, snow white even in shadow. Style never came easier to Elvis, and for once, he was surrounded by people who truly got the picture.

I Wrote It For You

2008-02-03T23:12:00.000-08:00

The Fascinations: You'll Be Sorry
B-side of "Girls Are Out to Get You" (Mayfield, 1967)

Ken Nelson Remembered

2008-02-01T00:21:00.000-08:00

Buck Owens: Let the Sad Times Roll On
(Capitol, 1965)

Wynn Stewart: I Can Take It or Leave It
(Capitol, 1965)

Gene Vincent: Catman
(Capitol, 1956)

(All songs produced by Ken Nelson)

When it comes to obituaries, why is there always more writing about the people we are least likely to forget? I suppose there is little about the obit business that makes sense. The occasion of someone's death is the hardest, foggiest time in which to reflect. What can one offer? How to the shake the feeling of erroneousness, of cheapness, that comes from trying to define an individual moments after their ability to define themselves has vanished?

The best obituaries deal with lives that have been, or are about to be, forgotten forever. As an A&R executive and producer at Capitol Records from 1948 to 1976, Ken Nelson played one of music's most invisible roles. Though he did not paint the music of Bakersfield, he colored it, framed it, and put it on display for all to hear. Capitol mainstays Wynn Stewart, Buck Owens, and Merle Haggard are the names that define the sound of Calfornia C&W, but that mine of immortal music belongs as much to Nelson. He brought country to Los Angeles as surely as Mulholland brought it water, but Nelson's legacy is also the reminder that great records aren't born in a vacuum; they are brought into being by a team of unknown faces and bygone names. In the short, sweet LA Weekly obit he wrote for Nelson, Jonny Whiteside makes a small stand not just for one monumental L.A. "record man," but for all those names we'll never know.

Tie On A Grin

2008-01-29T11:34:00.000-08:00

Without Ronnie Lane, the Faces could have easily been another Humble Pie, or Bad Company: plenty of sweaty, weighty groove, but with little more than groin for guiding light. Ron Wood and Rod Stewart specialized in the combustive strut that made a signature of “Stay With Me,” but in the end what makes the Faces the Faces isn’t their boozy bluster but the sweetness in songs like Lane’s “Oh La La.”

Even though Kenney Jones and Ian McLagan are not present, this 1971 Top of the Pops performance is still the best snapshot of the Faces because of how closely it brings us to Lane’s personality. It's pathetic how rare smiles are in rock music; the stage is a horribly vulnerable place, and many performers feel a scowl is their last vestige of protection against a peering mob. Few achieve the self-possession of Lane, whose ever-present grin projects generosity and fellowship. Eager, even cherubic, his face is a constant affirmation that the tiresome demands of rock’n’roll will never outweigh the joy he gets from playing it. He emits an energy that puts everything around him at ease. When a stream of toilet paper falls over him mid-song, Lane reacts like a giddy kid in the drizzle.

Who but Lane could have relegated Rod Stewart’s scarecrow centerpiece to side stage? Surely there are those who feel it isn’t the Faces unless Stewart is out front dancing with the mic stand, but there’s something even more special in having him contribute one-note upright bass from the shadows. Could you imagine Robert Plant doing the same? Or Mick Jagger? In an era of egomania, Lane brought the Faces the humility that is their saving grace.

Ragged but Ron

2008-01-27T22:54:00.001-08:00

Ron Wood: Mystifies Me
I've Got My Own Album To Do (Warner Bros., 1974)

The legend loves “Mick and Keith” but inside the walls it’s always been more “Keith and Ron.” They are the best friends in the band, with a chemistry that comes from being bros before bandmates. Like siblings they share jet black scarecrow haircuts and keening background voices; even their wives look the same. Though Mick Taylor will always be the best choice for the Stones musically, without Wood the group might have become permanently humorless. Wood makes Keith grin, and as Keith smiles so do all around him.

For his solo debut, Wood got his dream band: Richards on his right, The Faces’ Ian McLagan on keyboards, and a rhythm section consisting of Willie Weeks (bass on Donny Hathaway’s Live) and Andy Newmark (drummer on Sly Stone’s Fresh and Small Talk). It is still hard to believe that within the ego pageant of Seventies rock there was a sideman with sense of humor enough to call his solo shot I’ve Got My Own Album To Do. Wood could have easily pushed the album on the basis of its myriad cameos—who else could bring Rod Stewart, George Harrison, and Jagger/Richards together under one roof?—but instead he let the stew speak for itself, and appeared alone on the album cover, smirking and sporting a ludicrous Hawaiian print shirt. Of course, he was just setting us up. With the Faces, Wood perfected the trick of fooling the audience by feigning recklessness, then disarming them with sudden sincerity (it’s the blueprint that built Paul Westerberg’s career). So goes I’ve Got My Own Album to Do, which starts with the fallow Jagger duet “I Can Feel the Fire” and ends with a twitchy instrumental called “Crotch Music,” but in between contains “Mystifies Me.”

Richards and Jagger were great architects, but Richards and Wood were great alchemists. Given some chords and a band with a good feel they could take something that sounds scant on paper and make it move like an Otis Redding ballad. In any other song that opening line would be "Stay a while and work it out with me”—there is commitment there—but with Wood it's “Stay a while and work it out of me." It's a small twist that sums up the sweet hopelessness these men see in themselves when it comes to fixing things. While Ron and Keith could wear their playing as loose as their scarves, they always—always—sung from the heart when it mattered.

You look so fine, true
I would not lie to you

Charred Romance

2008-01-25T16:12:00.000-08:00

Keith Richards: The Nearness of You (Hoagy Carmichael)
(Long View Farm Studio, North Brookfield, Massachusetts, 28th May, 1981,
during rehearsals for the Tattoo You tour)

"I suppose you think it's all fun being me. Listen, I never get a chance to sing by myself like this, play the piano, without some bastard weirding out and asking me why I wasn't playing the guitar and looking mean . . . I bet you didn't think I could play the piano, did you? Or sing classics from the thirties? Well, I can."

***
From Gil Markle's Tattoo Me, the engineer's account of the time he spent with the Stones as they lived and recorded at his Massachusetts farm

Below the Blues

2008-01-23T11:41:00.001-08:00

Keith Richards:
Sing Me Back Home (Merle Haggard)
Say It's Not You (George Jones)
Don't (Elvis Presley)
(Sounds Interchange Recording Studios, Toronto, Canada, 12 & 13 March, 1977)

In late February, 1977, a bad week gets worse. Upon arriving with Keith in Toronto, Anita Pallenberg is arrested at the airport after she is found carrying cannabis and “other substances.” Three days later, the authorities arrest Keith in his hotel room for possession of drugs. Over the course of the next several days, the couple undergoes a series of hearings, bails, fines, and re-arrests; as his buddies do their best to soothe his habit, Keith does his best to rehearse with the Stones. It doesn’t take much imagination to grasp what an uninspired affair these sessions must have been for everyone involved. Finally, on March 8th, Mick Jagger and Ron Wood leave Toronto to start working on Love You Live in New York City. Charlie Watts departs the following day. Bill Wyman follows, and on March 11th, Keith is left alone to await his impending court hearing.

When there was nothing left to do, and no one left to lean on, Keith spent the last two nights before his hearing playing songs in an empty studio. Ian Stewart (pianist and ceaseless guardian angel to the Stones) kept Keith company as he played many of the songs he would return to six years later on the Honeymoon Tapes. The Everlys, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis. Though mostly, as Keith later explained, he played “all these songs I learned from Gram Parsons. I was very tight with him for a long time. I've never really done anything, in the eight since years since he taught me, anything more than put them on cassette to just remember the lyrics.”

Maybe it’s too presumptuous to say that Keith couldn’t help but think of the doomed Parsons as he faced the prospect of losing his gift to an indomitable addiction and an unlucky set of circumstances. Surely these pieces came to him for more reasons than that. A depressed soul will naturally gravitate toward songs such as these, with their staggered tempos and mournful voices. The narrator of “Say It’s Not You” doesn’t want to face the cold truth about his lover, while “Don’t” finds its singer desperately trying to convince his girl of his heart’s feelings. They are two different songs, sung from two different points of view, yet in Keith’s hands they become a single painful plea. Even if the lyrics hadn't offered a woundedness for Keith to emphasize, he could still unite them on style alone. The keys are played as if by gravity alone, and the songs are bound by little more than deep breaths. For those two lonely nights in Toronto, every note was hurtfully splayed and too far extended.

If life read like rock history, Keith would have overdosed after these sessions, leaving them his last will and testament. “Sing Me Back Home” would be pure gallows humor from a man facing jail time, if Keith didn’t play the song as if he were resigned to any fate but living. Rock fans would still be eating out on this epitaph: “Take me away and turn back the years / Sing me back home before I die.” Instead Keith kept going. And rather than reprise Parsons’ romantic ruination, his story became more stupidly surreal. His trial was delayed for a year and a half, and instead of facing hard time, Keith got Lorne Michaels to testify on his behalf, and was eventually sentenced to playing a benefit concert for the Canadian National Institute For the Blind. Rock martyrdom has never experienced such a severe diversion.

It’s better that the story didn’t end with the Toronto tapes. Keith went on to write “Beast of Burden” as an apology to his bandmates for being such a fuck-up, while the Toronto tapes went down a lost record, its woeful moans a secret confession rather than symbolic elegy. "Lost" is right. Even the albums that most plainly convey a damaged state of being—Neil Young’s On the Beach and Tonight’s the Night; Big Star’s Third; Scott Walker’s The Drift—display a sense of self-possession and creative energy that is completely missing on Keith’s Toronto tapes. These recordings refuse to fail or succeed by any normal standards. They belong as much to the junkie’s decaying body as they do the artist’s sensitive heart, a hopeless reflection of all that was their creator.

Low On Chances

2008-01-18T19:31:00.001-08:00

Keith Richards: Wild Horses
The Complete Honeymoon Tapes (bootleg, 1983)

At this late stage Keith can’t escape his fate as a symbol of indestructibility. His leathery frame has long since become a living trophy for anyone who claims allegiance to rock’n’roll’s “live hard” ethos. Keith wears tough well, but his legacy of invincibility feels a little unfounded. If any Stone could claim the mantle of infallibility, wouldn’t it be Mick, who has never experienced a moment that he couldn’t glide over with good looks and a raffish grin? To this day, Jagger eats ‘em and smiles; Keith’s teeth were replaced after they rotted out young. When the 60-year-old Jagger bowed to trends with the Lenny Kravitz-sponsored Goddess In the Doorway, Rolling Stone deemed it a classic; meanwhile Keith hasn’t released a solo record in 15 years. In Toronto in 1977, everyone in the band was on drugs, but only Keith got busted. As Richards faced jail time for heroin and cocaine possession, Jagger assured the press that the Stones would continue to tour if Keith was sent away. Would anyone (let alone a band member) dare say the same about Jagger?

The talk of Keith being the “heart and soul” of the Stones is a lot of lame lip service. The sad fact is that as symbiotic as the Twins are, Keith has always needed Mick a little more. Their relationship illustrates two hard, but fundamental truths of rock and roll: Bands with ace guitarists but no frontman are bands you and I will never hear about. A great song will sink in the hands of a poor singer, but a great singer can make even the worst song fly.

Deep down, I think Richards wishes he possessed the voice to sing a bigger share of all those classic songs he wrote. Keith fans might think him impervious, but I think that deep down he’s always carried a little shame about his voice. A reedy, wounded instrument, it might have made him an excellent high lonesome tenor had he grown up in Appalachia, and not in Kent, England, where his role models were the rich hollers of Muddy Waters and Elvis Presley. Maybe that’s why Keith has always responded so deeply to country music?

“Wild Horses” is a song about making promises sung from the point of view of someone who will never keep them. It is so clearly Keith’s song, and it is so moving to hear it in his hands alone. His importance to the Stones is summed up in the way he whips the groove in a listless song with just a few well-timed guitar strokes. And while Jagger gives “Wild Horses” a great dramatic read, you know it belongs to Keith because he sings it as a man resigned to the injured soul of the song’s lyrics.

No Time For Tenderness

2008-01-17T10:45:00.001-08:00

Keith Richards:
Cathy's Clown, So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad), Learning the Game
The Complete Honeymoon Tapes (bootleg, 1983)

How could a voice so fragile come from a body so indurate? Even after 20 years of playing in front of audiences, many of them the size of small towns, Richards still sung with the self-conscious hesitation of someone just starting out. The mighty Keith, chin to chest, whispering songs to the wall. At times, it seems like his voice might trail off into tears. There are few recordings as private or revealing.

Keith Richards’ marriage to Patti Hansen took place on his 40th birthday—December 18th, 1983—at the Finisterra Hotel, Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. With his childhood friends and music biz comrades looking on, Keith serenaded his bride with a solo acoustic version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Nearness of You.” He spent the last weeks of 1983 honeymooning in Cabo, enjoying the gentle breezes of Baja and recording dozens of songs on a portable tape recorder.

Maybe it was because of everything that was happening around him that Keith suddenly felt the need to confess to a lonely machine. His twenty-year-old band, after surviving the onslaught of punk, was on the verge of creative bankruptcy and personal dissolution. At age 40, his features and body were finally turning the corner from outlaw beautiful to crevassed, haggard, worn. In the middle of it all and against the tide, he’d found true love. Alone in his room (the bootleg credits on some tracks “an unidentified Mexican on backing vocals”), Keith played songs for comfort. He played Hank Williams and Merle Haggard. He played the Stones songs he was most proud of, including “Beast of Burden” and “No Expectations.” He played the hits by Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley and Little Richard, his companions since childhood.

More than anything else, Keith played song after song by the Everly Brothers and Charles Hardin Holley. It is heartrending to hear Richards returning to songs by these two particular artists in his moment of emotional upheaval. Buddy Holly and the Everlys were the idols of the idols of the 1960s (Lennon & McCartney, the Beach Boys), but they were left behind when rock and roll adopted delinquency for its image. The Everlys and Holly represented a tenderness and a vulnerability that didn’t fit the agenda of the counterculture revolution. Little Richard and Chuck Berry offer a thrilling high that will attract teenagers like Richards to the end of time; the Everlys, on the other hand, are on the verge of becoming an extinct influence. Hearing Richards render these songs with such tearful affection is like eavesdropping on the ruthless bandit who still sleeps with a locket from his first love.

In Richards, rock and roll found its pirate prince, someone who personified the culture’s ideals, namely an undying faith in playing it loud and loose. In public, he is a Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters fan til death; these are influences that suit his duty. In private, he played Hoagy Carmichael, Buddy Holly, and the Everly Brothers, artists that spoke directly to a heart his role as rock icon forced into hiding.

Bones of a Bounce

2008-01-15T12:25:00.000-08:00

The Spinners: It's A Shame
single (Motown, 1970)

Alton Ellis: It's A Shame
Jamaican single (1973)

Stevie Wonder wrote and co-produced “It’s A Shame” for the Spinners, and why he chose to join such an ominous lyric to such a merry arrangement we’ll never know.

Alton’s Ellis’ rendition isn’t a reinvention of Wonder’s song. He doesn’t alter the instrumentation or switch the verses. He doesn’t change the melody. It would have been easy for Ellis to do a sunny rocksteady translation of “It’s A Shame” that retained the original’s major chords and brisk bounce. Reggae loves its horns, but Ellis ignores convention and delivers a slow-cooked reduction of what everybody else thought was a Motown-Philly soufflé. All that remains is a succulent skeletal groove and a throbbing pulse.

There is an idea here; there is skill; there is execution. Cat Power’s “Aretha” is like watching someone throw ingredients on pan without heat. Ellis patiently simmers the Spinners over low flame until something new emerges. He climbs inside the song and extracts from within it a brooding blues that only he could hear. Not just cookery, but pure chemistry.

Shadow Show

2008-01-10T12:52:00.000-08:00

Cat Power - Aretha, Sing One For Me
Jukebox (Matador, 2007)

George Jackson - Aretha, Sing One For Me
single (Hi, 1972)

George Jackson was a songwriter, not a singer. His vocals on “Aretha” are rough around the edges—even strained, just slightly—which makes his song’s plea to Aretha more poignant. Jackson and the other voices at Hi Records embody the emotions of mortal men and women; when Aretha sings it feels like something superhuman. Though this is the reason I’m drawn more to Hi than to Aretha Franklin, I identify with Jackson’s narrator. Sometimes one prays for a supernatural voice because one’s own is simply too earthly an instrument to express feelings of phenomenal love. Jackson’s song isn’t only about being in love, but about why we listen to records to begin with: In songs we seek amplification of emotions that we’re incapable of expressing on our own.

Hi excelled at crafting music that conveyed complex ideas in very simple terms. There are so many lessons you get just from listening to the recordings created at Hi between 1971 and 1977. The economy. The intimacy. The ingenious feats of musicality. Witness the way the piano, organ, guitar, and strings bob and weave on George Jackson’s “Aretha” without the arrangement ever becoming bigger than a nickel. After the weeks of recording in Memphis, and the countless nights touring with Hi’s in-house guitarist Teenie Hodges (that’s him on Jackson’s song), I thought Chan Marshall would have absorbed more. Judging from her performance here, “Aretha, Sing One For Me" means little more to her than words and chords, words and chords.

The precision of Jackson’s song is traded for mush. The instruments trip over each other in drunken simulation of half-digested sounds from old Dylan and Stones records. Marshall forgoes any attempt at rendering a considered vocal, and instead delivers carefree karaoke of a song that once told a story about love and sincerity. The drumming is insufferable. It’s hard to hear the work of Howard Grimes—soul music’s humblest and most integral drummer—translated by someone so clumsy and boneheaded that he can barely maintain the illusion that he is keeping good time. The performance is about as amusing as watching some sots play frisbee with the family china. “Loose and sloppy” isn’t a style, it’s just sad. “Bad” playing isn’t an attitude, it’s just embarrassing.

In a recent interview I did with the 93-year-old actor and raconteur Norman Lloyd, he traced the erosion of acting to James Dean, who validated mumbling in movies. Lloyd admitted Dean’s art was an important innovation, but that people have been using it as an excuse for careless craft ever since. I can’t help but feel that Exile On Main St. exerts a similar influence on rock musicians. Aspiring players use Exile as validation for sloppy style and a lack of discipline, even though that record embodies everything but.

Even if Cat Power's Stonesy take on "Aretha" resembled Exile's exhilaration rather than a tired Stripped rehearsal (the album is titled Jukebox; it should be Soundcheck), the performance wouldn't mean much. Rather than searching the inside of Jackson's song, Marshall decided to hold it at arm's length. Hi’s recordings are relayed clean and deliberate, as if spoken to us at close range. In Jackson’s recording—and in everything else that was recorded at Hi in its golden age—there is a complete refusal of reverb. Cat Power's cover, on the other hand, piles on echo as a distancing distraction, in an attempt to suggest a mystery and personality that just isn't there. That's the difference between these two songs, and their tellers. Hi brought us as close as possible to its sound because it had nothing to hide; Cat Power keeps us as far away because it has nothing to give.

The September of My Seconds

2007-12-13T09:39:00.000-08:00

Most of these YouTube fight videos from L.A. are set to lowrider music: either the trunk thump of Zapp rap, or the soft harmonies of Chicano doo-wop soul. I first encountered them while rifling through various L.A.-related videos. Most of them are unwatchable, either because of a complete lack of action, or because the action that is there is too hard to stomach.

But here, I was slayed from the first seconds. I felt certain this was most achingly played organ-and-tambourine slow dance ever recorded. What was it doing in some young hump’s fight video? YouTube suddenly seemed a tide pool and not a desert. Among the webcam detritus and miniature music videos, some pristine nugget of vintage East Los Angeles sweet soul had entered my life by way of a sideways glance. Is there a better way to fall in love? Between gang boasts and put-downs, the comments section told me: The Bees – I Love You.

I found out I was wrong on all counts. The Bees are not old. They aren’t a harmony soul group. They aren’t from anywhere remotely near California. The Bees are an indie rock sextet from the Isle of Wight. I’d actually heard them before, but in America they go by A Band of Bees. They specialize in a patchwork of Sixties styles, borrowing from both Desmond Dekker and Them, with a heavy emphasis on early and mid-period Kinks. Some of it’s pleasant enough; most of it is freakbeat-by-numbers. Several of their songs have appeared in British TV advertisements for deodorant and Sainsbury’s supermarkets; a perfect fit for this band. But I can’t imagine “I Love You” in a commercial.

So my excavation revealed I had a bone and not a fossil, but the mishap only deepened the video for me. Some youngster in Carson imports a British rock band’s approximation of Chicano sweet soul to soundtrack a fight between kids whose grandparents helped invent Chicano sweet soul? Listen to the hum of the modern world’s crossed wires.

Beyond The Bees, there is something here that compels me. Is it seeing the heated, ineffectual violence of young people juxtaposed with aching, delicate soul music? Is it because in a year when gun violence between blacks and Latinos in L.A. reached a seething peak there is comfort in the image of two teenagers who can’t even box attempting to settle their anger with their hands? Is it because the voyeuristic point-of-view from behind a dumpster adds to the sense that this footage is secret, unreal, out-of-time? It is because the music, the slow-motion movement of two bodies, and the late-afternoon lambency behind some Walgreens in Carson conspire to turn a crummy fight video into a gentle fever dream that inadvertently encapsulates life in Los Angeles? All of these reasons, I suppose.

A mop-haired band from an English island and some kids who might represent the ugliest side of Los Angeles end up in oblivious collaboration on a piece of video art that translates Southern California on a three-inch screen. I found it floating in the YouTube ether. Life occurs in accidents.

Slow Sun Show

2007-12-03T01:05:00.000-08:00

Antelope Valley Antennas

2007-11-27T23:42:00.000-08:00

The Informers - If You Love Me (1965)
Captain Beefheart - I'm So Glad (early 1966 demo)

A pristine piece of doo-wop in the middle of one of rock’n’roll’s most iconoclastic debuts, “I’m So Glad” is often interpreted by Beefheart fans as another of the Captain’s pop music subversions. Sandwiched between “Dropout Boogie” and “Electricity” on Safe As Milk, it’s difficult for listeners to accept “I’m Go Glad” as much more than a punch line; like when the death metal band from from Wild At Heart suddenly breaks into that tender rendition of “Love Me.”

Beefheart fans like to envision the teenage outsider locked alone in his room with a stack of Howlin Wolf lp’s—Van Vliet himself did much to fuel this image in his later years. The reality is that Beefheart came of age in the late Fifties and early Sixties in far North Los Angeles, and spent his hours listening to DJs like Huggy Boy, Art Laboe, and Wolfman Jack broadcast from KRLA, where they played records that would go on to shape the Chicano soul sound of East Los Angeles. Beefheart had blues in his bones, but his first love was the angelic harmonies of Latino L.A.

Beefheart’s teenage pal Frank Zappa was raised on the same radio (surely they spent many a night listening together in Antelope Valley), but experiments with doo-wop like “Go Cry On Somebody Else’s Shoulder” and “How Could I Be Such A Fool?” (from 1966’s Freak Out) were part of a tongue-in-cheek pastiche. “If You Love Me” (a song by the Philedelphia quintet The Informers that remains a low rider favorite to this day) touched Beefheart somewhere deeper, and he could only respond with the utmost sincerity. “I’m So Glad” is not a parody; on the contrary, it’s almost unbearably sincere when removed from its context. For all his immense power, Beefheart was still an insecure 25-year-old at the time of recording. One can’t help but think that the only way he could comfortably release such a naked and heartbreaking vocal performance was to disguise it within the bombast of Safe as Milk, veiling it in a protective layer of irony.

Though it rarely reflected in his music, Bob Dylan wanted to be Little Richard. Even after he took Woody Guthrie for an idol, Richard’s rock remained lodged in Dylan’s heart, and I like to think that everything Dylan did from age 16 on was touched in a small way by Richard’s spirit. As much as Don Van Vliet blanketed it over a career-long obsession with furious commotion and abnormal pulses, I feel in even his most confrontational moments a warmth drawn directly from his roots as a late night radio disciple in early Sixties Los Angeles.

A Clean Start

2007-11-25T21:01:00.000-08:00

The Montgomery Express: Steal Away
The Montgomery Movement (Folkways, 1974)

"I always could pick up an instrument. I used to go home to Gulfport for the summer. When I was about nine, I remember these birds laid in the mulberry were singing and humming, it sounded like a supernatural thing. I got mama to hear it. These birds were singing and humming. I heard music in the air. Beautiful music. I have heard an orchestra up in the air. I know I’ve heard it."

---

From my interview with Paul Montgomery, 2004
Blind since age six
Lead singer and rhythm guitarist for The Montgomery Express
West Palm Beach, Florida

Time Out For Pinball

2007-08-01T21:27:00.000-07:00

Flophouse Dedications

2007-07-30T13:59:00.000-07:00

"My" Michelle Young and a 15-year-old Saul Hudson, Hollywood, CA, 1979

Guns N' Roses: My Michelle
Live at the Ritz, New York City, 2-2-88

All of Appetite felt dirty, but "My Michelle" and "Rocket Queen" were the songs that really scared the shit of out me as a kid. They were sordid and shocking in the way that Robert Williams' painting was. Listening to "Welcome To the Jungle" and "Paradise City" was like hanging out with the bad kids at school; listening to "My Michelle" and "Rocket Queen" was like spending the night where they lived. I clearly remember the sweat on my palms and the red flags running in my head. "I shouldn't be here," I chattered on the inside. "This is too much."

As the popular story goes: Michelle Young--a friend of Slash and Steven Adler from junior high and high school--frequented the club scene, and later started dating Axl. One day in the car, as Elton John's "Your Song" came on, she told Axl that she wished someone would write a song like that for her. He tried to write something sweet, but when that didn't work, he sketched the details of Michelle's life and that became "My Michelle."

The lyrics are lurid (porno, coke, heroin, etc.), Axl's singing is terrifying, but what makes the song truly harrowing is that it embraces a real person--a friend of the band, no less--for its subject matter. Talk about "explicit lyrics." It was important to G'N'R to tell the world about how fucked-up their friends were, and that friends that fucked-up could only come from Hollywood. More than "Welcome to the Jungle," "My Michelle" is their most local song, and therefore one of their best.

Look at G'N'R's circle in the early days, and you'll see the run-off progeny of old L.A.: band photographer and "sixth member" Marc Canter was the son of Alan Canter, who founded the legendary Canter's Deli on Fairfax; Axl's first wife Erin Everly, the son of Everly Brothers singer Don Everly; even Slash himself, the son of David Bowie's costume designer, and a graphic designer for Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. There were daughters of movie stars at the shows (Steven Adler still tells of bagging Britt Ekland's daughter), and then people like Michelle Young: born and bred Hollywood, the offspring of showbiz casualties. This was exactly how G'N'R saw themselves: the glamour gutter.

Social Studies Tattoos

2007-07-28T13:26:00.000-07:00

Axl Rose and Slash perform as Hollywood Rose at Madam Wong's East in Hollywood, California on June 28, 1984. Photo by Marc Canter

“All the dos and don’ts of getting tattoos went in one ear and out the other,” he said. The first tattoo came when the Artist Formerly Known as Saul Hudson walked into Sunset Strip Tattoos in Los Angeles and presented Robert Benedetti with an original sketch. He was 15. “The chick that’s on my right arm—that’s from a doodle I made up in high school, in social studies class. I was supposed to be writing a book report or something to that effect, and I ended up making up this entirely different story on the back of the paper having to do with a guitar player and his girlfriend. His girlfriend was the chick that’s on my arm. Her name is Shirley named after my old drummer’s mom."

...

From a Slash interview
Tattoo, November 1993

I Wear Stories On my Sleeves

2007-07-26T13:40:00.000-07:00

Photo: Marc Canter

Apologies to Tom Waits, Ozzy, Henry Rollins, and especially Bon Scott, but tattoos did not exist in rock'n'roll before Guns N' Roses. It was with Axl and Slash that arm ink became a permanent part of the rock star recipe.

As a kid, I memorized all of G'N'R's tattoos. It wasn't a conscious decision; the tattoos were there in every photo I saw, as distinctive and etched-in-stone as each band member's face. Motley Crue may have worn tattoos years before Guns N' Roses, but can anyone remember what Nikki Sixx or Tommy Lee have on their arms? There is no mystery in green limbs.

Axl carried three tattoos on each arm, each marking some aspect of his past. Besides the mystery stare of Monique Lewis (the penultimate "woman's face" tattoo), there was the following:

Photo: Marc Canter

The "Rocker" tattoo on his upper left arm was paid for by Chris Weber, who founded Hollywood Rose with Izzy Stradlin. When Izzy's friend Bill Bailey flew into L.A. from Indiana, he was brought on as the singer. "First things first," I imagine Weber saying to Bailey. "You're the singer--you need a tattoo."

Below that is the "Victory or Death" tattoo. The motto of the 32nd Armored Regiment of the U.S. Army is one of Axl's favorites.

On his upper right arm there's the "Black Rose" tattoo: a replication of the cover of Thin Lizzy's 1979 record of the same name. "The only bummer is, I always wanted to show it to Phil Lynott, then he died on me," Axl later said.

Below that is Monique Lewis.

Below Monique is the cross tattoo, probably the most famous in rock'n'roll. Like most of his tattoos, Axl had it done at the legendary Sunset Strip Tattoo studio by Robert Benedetti, who inked most of the rock stars of the era. Designed by Bill White Jr. and redrawn for the cover of Appetite by Andy Engell, it is still the ultimate tattoo: a marker of a specific time, place, and a group of people; equally realistic and surrealistic; classic enough to resemble something belonging to a sailor, but scary enough to unnerve strangers.

Axl put the cross on his arm while the band was recording Appetite. He'd been steadily acquiring tattoos as he rose through the ranks of L.A. notoriety, first with Hollywood Rose and later G'N'R, but the cross was the last tattoo he would get during his time with Guns. In this interview from 1987, Axl has a premonition about the destruction of the band:

"I got the (cross) tattoo first (before the Appetite album art). I had a friend design it because I just felt that no matter what happens with this band, where it went, what we sold, or if it broke up, changed, or whatever, any other members, that at that time it was the most important thing. And it's like, I like tattoos and I wanted something that would always remind what was once there. You know, a symbol of it."

You could trace the last of the many, many nails driven deep into the coffin of Gun N' Roses to the moment in the late Nineties when Axl paid someone to blot out the faces in the cross. It now appears as blank and black as Axl's own career. A tattoo ruined reeks of desperation and anxiety. There must have come a day that he couldn't stand to be reminded of what he was once so sure he wanted to remember. Of course, tarring over it won't make the shapes of your past disappear.

Monique

2007-07-23T21:34:00.000-07:00

By all accounts, Izzy Stradlin's "Think About You" was the song from Appetite that the band liked least. You can see why: it was an older song that was a breezy glam piece ("It was caught up in the whole Hanoi Rocks thing that was popular at the time," Slash later complained) rather than the kind of gutter groove rock'n'roll they were breaking into on Appetite.

With "Anything Goes" (another old song--this one held over from Hollywood Rose), "Think About You" is easily the weakest link in Appetite, but it still fits. At one time, G'N'R was just another set of Sunset Strip newbies, as emulative of the cool older band (in this case, Hanoi Rocks) as everyone else was. Even as the band converged over the firebreathing style of "Welcome to the Jungle" and "It's So Easy," their breakthrough album couldn't completely shake the traces of that younger group.

The new issue of Rolling Stone contains an article about Appetite in which Tracii Guns reveals that Izzy wrote "Think About You" for Monique Lewis--a Strip groupie "who we all dated. Axl has a tattoo of her on his arm."

I always wondered who that raven-haired woman on Axl's arm was. The tattoo always seemed like a perfect fit for G'N'R. Some nameless mystery chick whose face hovered in every photo, at every concert. Half-trashy, half-exotic; half-sexy, half-sad. She was a tattoo with a tattoo.

Her song may not have been the band's best, but she was their sixth member, and that's how she finally appears in this twentieth anniversary cover shot.

More From Robert Williams

2007-07-21T20:25:00.000-07:00

“So barbaric is the sensory domain of the eyeball that curiosity supersedes logic, sight is my opiate.”

"Something dead in the street commands more measured units of visual investigation than 100 Mona Lisas!"

“Tits and ass and open wounds and hot rods and pirates and flying saucers and people tearing other people’s heads off and spitting down their tracheas and just great stuff, you know?”

Bitchin'

2007-07-19T20:46:00.001-07:00

In my earliest encounters with images of explicit sex and violence, I would experience a physical reaction that I can remember quite clearly: my eyes would burn. I'd be staring down at some ripped-out page from Swank magazine in a friend's treehouse, and this recalescence would blanket my eyeballs. It wasn't painful--just intense enough to remind me that what I was doing was illicit, and possibly damaging to my well-being. All of which added to the thrill.

The G N' R art burned my eyes. I was about 10 when I first saw Robert Williams' painting on the inside flap of Appetite For Destruction (oblivious at that point to the existence of vinyl, what I saw looked like this). Following the initial pressing of Appetite, the band agreed to move the image from the front cover to the inside jacket, as feminist groups and MTV boycotted and created a shitstorm of bad publicity that threatened to sabotage the record's imminent success. In the end, the compromise worked in the band's favor: the album sold millions of copies with the replacement artwork (a detailed replication of the very cool and iconic tattoo Axl had gotten on his right forearm), and hiding the fucked-up picture on the interior made the whole package seem even more like porno contraband.

The "banned" image has always been interpreted as a shocking badge of the exploitative sex and violence that Appetite wears on its sleeve. Which is, of course, true. Yet, the band's decision to include a piece by this particular artist runs deeper than the critics, the fans, and even the band members themselves were able to acknowledge.

Born in 1943, Robert Williams split his formative years between sun-baked Albuquerque and Montgomery, Alabama, where his dad ran a drive-in restaurant as well as a stable of stock cars that would compete in locales across Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Art class was the only part of school in which Williams excelled, and in 1963 he left to study art at Los Angeles City College. Within a peergroup fixated on abstract expressionism, Williams was osctracized. Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were in vogue; Williams' primary influences were "comic books, b-movies, girlie mags, hot rod mags, and a variety of subcultural pollution I acquired, like many other young people."

As the counterculture era took hold in the mid-Sixties, Williams fell in with the collective of underground cartoonists associated with Zap Comix, including S. Clay Wilson, Gilbert Shelton, and R. Crumb. The work was fantastical and filthy, a celebration of the wild unconscious. Anti-Rothko, anti-Kline, it was a sendup of everything they had been taught in art school and a complete affront to all mainstream elements:

While cartoons by Crumb and Shelton ended up on emblematic album covers for Bay Area hippie groups the Grateful Dead and Big Brother & the Holding Company, Williams' work was specifically steeped in the culture of Los Angeles, his adopted hometown. His employer and main influence was Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, the dean of outlandish custom car culture in Southern California, and the inventor of Rat Fink. Strewn across Williams' paintings were traces of taco stands, Chicano murals, all-night neon, endless concretes and sky blues, and lowriders.

As skateboarding and punk rock came to dominate Los Angeles youth culture in the Seventies and Eighties, Williams' designs found a whole new home. A close ally was writer-artist-surfer C.R. Stecyk; among other achievements, Stecyk was the first person to recognize and articulate the artistic achievement of some radical Santa Monica skateboarders known as the Z-Boys. In 1994, Williams and Stecyk founded Juxtapoz magazine as an outlet for what Williams deemed "lowbrow" art: in other words, everything (including illustration, comics, tattoos, car and skateboard graphics) that is rejected by museums, galleries, classrooms and other outposts of the "fine art" world.

When Axl Rose came knocking at Williams' door asking to use his artwork for an album cover, Williams thought he was a gay transvestite. "When they pulled up in front of my house and it got out of the car, I told my wife, I said 'Look, look at this girl!' My wife says, 'That's not a girl!'" Williams took them for another one of the "little, shitty punk rock bands" he had seen all over L.A.

They looked through some slides, and Williams advised against them using his painting (titled "Appetite For Destruction") but the band knew what it wanted. "And I said Well, ya know that's gonna get you in a whole lot of trouble - so he said Well we want it, and I said Well if you have the guts to use that, that's bitchin'."

Though Williams didn't know it at the time, the album to which he was lending his artwork was the musical culmination of his "lowbrow" philosophy. Like Williams before them, here was a group of young punks embracing the sleaze they loved as teenagers (Sex Pistols, Aerosmith, Johnny Thunders) and assaulting everything their society held dear: the fluff metal of Poison and Bon Jovi, the overtures of U2, the intellectualism of Talking Heads, the disposable pop of Wang Chung, Bananarama, Cyndi Lauper. Just as Williams' imagination and skill separated him for every other back seat doodler, G N' R were separated from all those "shitty little punk bands" by the fact that they could actually play. Here was a talented rock'n'roll band that reveled in the Los Angeles low life and shared Williams' values: immediacy, vulgarity, energy.

Williams got paid peanuts for his artwork, even after the band stole his title for the album (but what else could it have been called?). They should have paid him to do PR instead. In describing his own art, Williams inadvertently explains what makes Appetite For Destruction special in an appraisal that is as eloquent as any as we're ever likely to hear:

"During the late Seventies and early Eighties when I got involved in punk rock art, I got into this really brutal world of gratuitous sex and violence that was so thrilling because the artwork was designed to show at after hours clubs where people were drunk at 2 o’clock in the morning or loaded so the work could have this really dashing, adventurous look to it, you know, and be anti-social and pyretic and daring. And it was really a thrill to do that stuff but eventually that market slid away and I was getting older… a lot of that stuff, if you weren’t involved in that punk rock scene and you saw that work it would just revile you, it would just make you sick. I got an enormous—ENORMOUS—amount of criticism, and the feminists were on me all the time but I had this following that loved the work and I loved the work too because it had so much energy. It was just devil-may-care vulgarity, it was wonderful. I just don’t see that anymore. We’ve moved into a time now where young people are very, very complacent and very sensitive and caring and whiny and dependent on each other’s feelings and their peer group’s judgments and whatnot and the wild spirit just isn’t there, it’s just not there anymore."

Our Band

2007-07-16T20:12:00.000-07:00

"We've all got Never Mind The Bollocks and Aerosmith's Rocks and right now," says Axl, "we listen to Exile On Main Street a lot. The Ramones - back in '78 Izzy and I had all the tapes and learnt all the songs. Duff is a real big Johnny Thunders fanatic." They all like the Beastie Boys and Motorhead. As for Guns n' Roses . . .

"We have pieces of everything in our band," says Axl, "and we try and find a way to bring it all out rather than limit ourselves into one frame. You don't see a lot of that any more - Queen used to do it, and Zeppelin, but nowadays people tend to stay in one vein.

"I sing in about five or six different voices - that are all part of me, it's not contrived - and there's a ballad, there's one song that's kind of like Black Sabbath goes to Ireland, there's two guitar players that play very different from each other - one plays an '80s blues electric guitar and the other guy's completely into Andy McCoy and Keith Richards - and they've figured out a way to fit it together."

"I think it's going to kick ass," says Izzy, listening to the playback. "It's against the mainstream grain. It's definitely a case of you'll either love it or hate it - which is good, as long as you notice it."

...

From "Colt Heroes"
Kerrang! 148 June 11-24, 1987

Appetite Turning 20

2007-07-12T19:57:00.000-07:00

"Welcome to the fuckin' jungle. We're Guns N' Roses--remember that!"
Fender's Ballroom, Long Beach, California
3-21-86

Fender's Ballroom looks like a sardine can with a cheap curtain. It held 1000, and was L.A.'s premier violent punk rock club in the mid-to-late '80s, although everyone from Slayer to Link Wray to Todd Rundgren stopped by at some point. There is a great little forum on MySpace where people trade memories of the club--Celtic Frost/Voivod/Running Wild triple bills and a whole thread devoted to the 1986 Motorhead/Cro-Mags show that started a riot between longhairs and skinheads. Even reading the strung-together, internet-transmitted reminiscences, you get a feel for the scene. High energy, but with a lot of bad air: heavy drinking and drugging, stabbings and beat-downs. Someone had a story about a Samoan gang that shot a skinhead down after a scuffle in the pit.

"Welcome to the fuckin' jungle."

Guns N' Roses are nine months old in this video (the classic line-up played its inagural show at the Troubadour in June of '85--"A Rock N Roll Bash Where Everyones Smashed"). Along with Bay Area glam outfit Jetboy, the group was supporting Johnny Thunders--the ultimate G N' R father figure.

They hadn't quite nailed the look yet--no leather (they couldn't afford it), and Axl still didn't know quite how to tame his mane. Slash looks like more of a Venice beach bum than a Hollywood badass. His hair hasn't had time to grown to rockstar length, and is still caught in an afro stage. They may have looked like kids who wanted to be rockstars, but they didn't play like kids.

More than a year before the world heard it on record, G N' R had "Jungle" down. And they knew it. This band was ready. They stood like a gang (not since the Clash...). They had a throat from another world. With one fell swoop thet had won the sound they wanted: "Back In The Saddle" meets Never Mind the Bollocks. And Fender's was the place to play it. Seeing it here, you're reminded that "Jungle" isn't a radio anthem but a club song, packed tight and played close. What Axl later called "street-level" rock'n'roll.

That down-spiralling vortex that carries the song to its climax kills me. Of course, you know the part I'm talking about--when the riffs fold into dark slipsteam and Axl lets rip high rock'n'roll theater ("You know where you are?!"). I try to imagine G N' R writing this in the rehearsal space, but every time I hear it seems to erupt naturally from beneath the belly of the song, as if the band is suddenly sent hurtling forth on a rocket they had spent the last three minutes fuelling.

Axl had just turned 24. Slash wasn't yet 21.

Four days after this show, the band signed with Geffen.

Three years later, in March of '89, Fender's was declared a nusisance by the neighborhood and shut down. Nearby condo owners were angry about "noise, drunks, gun shots, mini-riots and a fire last Spring."

Killer of Sheep

2007-04-29T20:02:00.001-07:00

I'm used to hearing warm-glow-of-the-radio wartime songs like Luis Russell's 1945 "Sad Lover Blues" in nostalgic period pieces like L.A. Confidential. These are the songs that get us to believe that the 1940s and 1950s were a simple, stylish time when people gathered around radios and jukeboxes like campfires. Its use in this trailer makes Killer of Sheep seem like a more wistful movie than it really is. Setting this montage of images to the dulcet tones of a big band crooner affirms the distance between us and these images. The trailer plays like a collection of snapshots from "long ago," or "way back when." Despite the hints of violence and worry in the trailer, its design makes the movie look more or less like a nostalgic "day in the hood" film--a forlorn, documentary Friday before there was a Friday. It’s a misleading introduction, but the trailer is captivating anyway. Even with constant interruption from an escalating collection of quotes from blue-ribbon blowhards, Charles Burnett's images speak for themselves.

But there's more to "Sad Lover Blues" than typical trailer decoration. The reappearance of Killer of Sheep has been made an occasion in part because the public release of the film has been blocked for years due to music rights issues. Though these issues were finally resolved thanks to a $75,000 donation from filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, "Sad Lover Blues" is not among the songs Burnett used in his film. Assuming Burnett supervised the trailer, why did he use an extraneous piece of music, especially when the music that is in the film plays such an integral role?

Luis Russell was from Panama. He won the lottery and he used the money to move to New Orleans. In 1925, he migrated to Chicago, where he found work as a pianist. He played with Doc Cook, and later King Oliver. He put together a band of top-notch musicians that included many from Oliver’s crew, and they made records in New York for Okeh and Victor that bridged New Orleans hot jazz and big band swing. Russell’s band was so good that Louis Armstrong co-opted them for his own in 1935. For the next eight years, Russell and his band gave up a career of their own to support Armstrong as he became the most famous jazz musician in the world.

By the 1940s, Russell’s star had passed; the styles had changed. In 1943, he formed a band that played the Savoy and other New York venues. He made his last series of recordings in 1945-1946 in an attempt to cash in on the trends of the day. The songs were either illustrations of the boogie woogie craze, or emulations of Billy Eckstine’s ballroom crooning that Russell recorded with a revolving door of anonymous singers. “Sad Lover Blues” is one of the latter.

It seems like exactly the type of song Burnett would remember from his youth in South Central Los Angeles, where Killer of Sheep takes place (his family moved there from Vicksburg, Mississippi around the time that “Sad Lover Blues” was recorded). Burnett came of age amidst the Central Avenue scene of Charles Brown, Amos Milburn, and Cecil Gant (whose eternal “I Wonder” represents this bygone period with its key appearance in Killer of Sheep): all Southern transplants who transposed the piano blues of Texas and Tennessee to the tarnished glamour and vacant skies of Los Angeles. Emblematic of the dozens of long lost nightclub musicians who entertained South Central denizens in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the only place one can hear “Sad Lover Blues” now is buried on an obscure single disc collection of Luis Russell’s 1945-46 output. Songs like this are beyond forgotten; they could only be remembered by people like Burnett, who might have heard it as a kid (like one from the movie) on a barber shop jukebox or drifting from a kitchen radio.

“Sad Lover Blues” is an unnoticed song from an unnoticed period in the career of an unnoticed musician. What better song for a film that portrays a place and a person flushed by utter invisibility and defeat? I was wrong: Russell's cast-off song would never have been used in a high-gloss production like L.A. Confidential, which licensed vintage hits by big names like Johnny Mercer and Dean Martin to represent its prefab portrait of old Hollywood. The songs in Killer of Sheep are there to indicate more than a mood and a time period. As the forever-anonymous singer of "Sad Lover Blues" spells out the movie’s theme in a plaintive first verse (“Here I stand, all alone…”), Russell's song stands for both the soul of the movie, and its burnt-out, beautiful location.

Piano

2007-04-11T21:36:00.000-07:00

Ocapellos - The Stars
Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou - Tenkou! Why Feel Sorry?

Is there a more comforting, empathetic instrument?

If you are listening to these songs, no.

The Conductor and Chief

2007-04-02T13:33:00.000-07:00

Operating in complete command of a twelve-piece orchestra, whose every member gives everything they have for, and towards, their leader;

Who, meanwhile, never even breaks a sweat, and rather, appears completely at home within a vortex of musical energy that could easily overwhelm the average human being;

Who is so in control of her own art, even in its most intensified stage, that she finds time to break out some effortless dance moves,

and let loose a triumphant scream ("Waahw!").

Where you put James Brown, put Celia Cruz too.

Nothing But A Blue Sky

2007-03-31T11:54:00.000-07:00

UGK feat. Outkast: International Players Anthem (produced by Three Six Mafia)
(opening track on Underground Kingz, out 5-8-07)

FORGET IT, RAPPERS.

SUMMER 2007 HAS BEEN BOUGHT!

UGK and Outkast over “I Choose You” by Willie Hutch.

If you ever wanted more than that from a song, then I can’t help you.

DJ Paul & Juicy J have proven yet again that all you need to make a rap masterpiece is a copy of The Mack soundtrack. Amen!

The innovation of “My Love” means nothing in the face a formula like this. Every great song from the past year now sounds labored.

Everyone gets a part:

Andre for a minute straight, over just the record;
Pimp C enters on the bass drop;
Bun B on those stuttering castanet claps;
Big Boi brings it home on the bass alone.

Breathe in and bask.

Call it “grown-man rap” or whatever you want. You hear this and everything else suddenly seems like a sandbox game.

I can’t even imagine the medicinal potential of blending this with “Poppin’ My Collar.”

I may never be depressed again.

Soul music returns to radio in 2007!

Grandeur Is Good

2007-03-29T21:37:00.000-07:00

8 Ball & MJG feat. Three Six Mafia and Slim of 112: Cruzin'
Ridin' High (Bad Boy, 2007)

When cheese is this magnificent, does it cease to be cheese?

Does the system even exist that can play this song at the adequate volume?

Is this song even comprehensible to anyone who doesn’t have a chandelier the size of a merry-go-round, a hot tub the size of a dog track, and a penthouse apartment made entirely of glass, or at least to anyone who doesn’t (just a little) secretly covet those things?

Am I the only one that feels a certain levitation as this thing kicks in?

I guess this is what you get when you ask a guy like P. Diddy, “Yeah, but can you make it bigger?”

This has a hugeness like “What You Know”… but “What You Know” erupted from below. This thing just rains down.

Having that loser from 112 sing the hook legitimizes the song. If they had actually gotten R. Kelly or Bizzie Bone or whoever, it would have been too professional, too tame. 112 guy is so eager…he overplays it so hard. He’s perfect. It’s an absurd performance for an absurd song. If wasn't a completely irrelevant performer, he wouldn't be able to belt it with that desperation. It comes off like the last chance that this probably is for him.

God, it’s just so far out there. So cheesy and huge.

And I don’t ex-pect e'ry motherfucker in here to know what I’m tal-kin’ bout
These niggas ain’t got no game a lot of these niggas just talkin’ loud
I know I’m not the best lookin nigga, but I’m so far from the worst lookin nigga
When it come to the Dirty me and my nigga we was one of the first in the picture
Three stripes on my feet for my nigga Jay, MJ put your peace sign in the air
Want to go to a place where they don’t hate listen to your boy let me take you there

Ralph Mooney

2007-03-27T17:57:00.000-07:00

Waylon Jennings (w/ the Waylors): Never Been To Spain
(live at the Opry House, Austin, Texas, 9-26-74; from Waylon Live: The Expanded Edition)

Introducing the Waylors onstage in Texas, Waylon urged Ralph Mooney, his virtuoso pedal steel guitar man, to “show ‘em the foot that made Merle Haggard a star.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. Ralph Eugene Mooney’s much-imitated style graced the early hits of Hag, Buck Owens, Wynn Stewart and many other West Coast greats. At the time of the Texas concerts, he was about to turn 46.

Moon was the unifier within the Waylors. His sharp toned, economical style gave the band’s disparate musical elements cohesion. He played exactly what the song needed—no more, no less. His playing made a greater point: Waylon’s sound might have roared more than some purists and old timers might have liked (in that era, a few reactionaries actually felt he was assaulting all that country held dear). But with Moon riding shotgun, it couldn’t have been anything but country.

....

From Rich Kienzle’s liner notes to Waylon Live: The Expanded Edition

Biggie

2007-03-09T12:23:00.000-08:00

The saying goes, “No man is an island.” But if any man can challenge the wisdom of that proverb at this moment it’s Biggie Smalls. Within the A-room of friend and mentor Sean “Puffy” Combs’ Daddy's House recording studio, the Notorious B.I.G., casually dipped in his own line of Brooklyn Mint sweats and a pair of sneakers, rests his impressive, six foot plus, currently immobilized frame in a beige easy chair; a charismatic island of hulking human mass, wholly human emotion and superhuman talent hobbled by a still-recuperating broken femur bone suffered in a September car accident. A nearby table-top is littered with stray remnants of the miscellaneous offshore activity that swirls about him: a pack of Halls mentholyptis, empty food containers, an unopened bottle of Hennessy, an empty record jacket for Gang Starr’s “Take It Personal.”

But forget the physical manifestations of island-ness this posture evokes. Ignore the Dutch-passing presence of his loyal sidekick, Lil’ Ceas of Junior M.A.F.I.A., and his man Gunner, shrouding the small room in a haze of cannabis clouds, and recognize that Biggie Smalls—like cheese—stands very much alone. Very simply, this 24-year-old emcee is, above all others, the central figure in contemporary hip-hop’s pantheon of ever-rotating stars. Doubt the cat’s status and he’s more than happy to lobby on behalf of his own perspective on the matter, for should you be so unaware, Biggie Smalls is not only the illest, but he’s also mentally vexed.

“I want people to buy (my new) album,” he states emphatically, “and just straight up say, ‘Yo, he’s the best. He’s the best ever. He’s the best that ever did it.’ That’s what I’m lookin’ for. I want my props. ‘Cause they slept on me. I read [what people write and say] and they give me my props as being that solo emcee that blew up from the East Coast. But they don’t give me my props like, ‘Yo, Big be straight dicin’ niggas on the mic! On the rhyme side, he’s nice!’ They don’t really look at me like that.”

Though I can’t personally recall anyone foolish enough to front on Biggie’s lyrical skills, before I can fully debate the validity of his dispute, Big’s trusty comrade vocalizes in support.

“A good example is that Source shit, man,” chimes in Lil’ Ceas.

“I never got “Dopest Rhyme of the Month,” laments Biggie.

“I seen a lot of wack shit in that shit,” complains Ceas.

“I never!” continues Big. “That shit been out for a while, yo. Some rappers been on there couple times. Twice.”

“Nas on there twice, Redman’s on there twice.”

“Prodigy too. Don’t get me wrong, I respect all them niggas as emcees. They get very busy. But how you gonna give me Lyricist of the Year on The Source awards but don’t give me ‘Dopest Rhyme of the Month’ not once?”

“Foul!” Biggie exclaims, obviously savoring the righteousness of his cause. “I just want niggas to fuck all that (other) bullshit. Let’s just get down to the straight up and down real to real: lyrics and beats. That’s what it’s all about, right? It’s all about the lyrics and the beats. ‘How’s the beat?’ ‘The beat is bangin’.’ ‘How’s the rhymes?’ ‘The rhymes is BANGIN’.’”

“Who’s you favorite emcee?” the Notorious B.I.G. one asks me in that tone of voice that falls somewhere between a criminal prosecutor and that high school chemistry teacher/wrestling coach who never really liked you.

“Some of the people you just mentioned,” I answer vaguely.

“No, who’s your favorite emcee?” Forget the Black Frank White. Scrap the crutches, give Biggie a wheelchair, and he could be the Black Perry Mason. My response doesn’t arrive quickly enough.

“See, I want you to be able to say, ‘Big,’” he says softly, turning the charm back on with a chuckle. “Without hesitation—‘He’s the best.’”

....

From “The Once and Future King,” by Chairman Mao. The Source, April 1997.

Devil's Dictionary Pt. 1

2007-03-08T20:37:00.000-08:00

(Photo: Tom Dube)

Organ
[Augustus Pablo - Satan Side Version (aka Kiss 14)]

Guitar
[Hallelujah Chicken Run Band - Mudzimu Ndiringe]

Clarinet
[Raekwon w/ The El Michaels Affair - The PJ's From Afar]

El Sonido Sincero

2007-03-04T22:21:00.000-08:00

Lovells - Pledging My Love (Jimmy Treviño, lead)
Fabulous Moonlighters - Uh Huh, Uh Huh, Oh Yea
Casino Royale - Don't Mistake Me For A Fool (Tommy Zamudia, lead)

In 1960s San Antonio, there was a parallel to the world of Nuggets, only instead of the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, all the teenagers idolized Johnny Ace and Jesse Belvin.

[Is the difference between The Count Five and Casino Royale just the difference between The Rolling Stones and The Five Keys?]

[The difference between "Satisfaction" and the "Glory of Love"?]

Marching On

2007-02-24T11:43:00.000-08:00

Young Buck - Get Buck
(Director: Bernard Gourley, 2007)

Is there a film—music video and motion picture features included—that captures the South in winter as well?

Flat light and puddles in the potholes. Skeleton trees and endless overcast. Everything in browns and grays except for those monster, candy vehicles.

It couldn’t be more appropriate that the ever-maligned Young Buck delivers a video that upends every cliché criticism that a Spike Lee or a Bill Cosby or a Common could throw at contemporary rap music.

Where is the cash, the coochie, the degradation? What we have is one mean marching band, a beatific gospel chorus, and gangstas beating the pavement in cane-wielding choreography. And what is that monk/soldier line dance they are doing? The tubas and trombones look like cannons. The only women here are the fully-clothed chorus, faces tipped toward the sun.

Can you complain, Spike?

Where’s the yacht? The whole thing takes place in the lot of a cash-and-carry. It looks like it was filmed on last week's damp Wednesday.

The lyrics aren’t much, but neither were Peetie Wheatstraw’s. This is hard and low Southern dance music; always new, always the same. This “Jesus Walks” will never win a Grammy.

Neighborhood music never needed to prove itself to anyone outside the neighborhood, but still, a music video’s never done better by its job.

The Night They Drove

2007-01-30T21:49:00.000-08:00

The Main Ingredient - I Can't See Me Without You
The Temprees - Dedicated To The One I Love
Ol' Dirty Bastard - Harlem World

Everything on Highway 7 between Oxford and Water Valley looks different when you are driving back after midnight:

-A pasture shared by cattle and two emus

-A small sign marking the hidden entrance to the Golden Spike Hunting Club

-Cotton: razed and stubbly in the winter and spring; blanket white in the summer and fall

-Roadkill dogs, bloated and stiff-limbed

-Deer, live and skittish / dead and mangled

-Dim garage and backroom house lights that stay on all hours

-A homemade sign, block letters: “Gunsmith, next right”

-A distant cell-phone tower, pulsing red

-Average ranch-style homes, with wading pools and swingsets

-Extraordinary homes fashioned from junk

-Goats loose in a yard

There are also kudzu canyons and imposing woods, but I’m not sure anything particularly screams “you are in Mississippi.” There are no “crossroads.” It’s hard to pick up good stations (WRBO Memphis finally falls beyond reach on this drive) and easy to lose cell phone reception. It’s a good road for records, especially at night, when it’s quiet except for trucks.

When I moved to Mississippi, I thought I’d be listening to Son House or Ishmon Bracey on roads like this, but returning to Water Valley very late at night, these were the only three songs I ever wanted to hear.

“I Can’t See Me Without You” and “Dedicated To The One I Love” are doo-wop songs recast in the 1970s. Less innocent, larger versions of the ballads by the Pastels and Flamingos that preceded them, but no less lonely or ghostly. They were meant to be played in cars, during the small hours. The strange, remote mix on the Main Ingredient song makes it sound like a recording of a recording being played on a car’s AM late at night.

The Temprees song contains the longest outro of any recording I know (it takes up half the song) but I still wish its billowing harmonies cycled on ad infinitum.

And then, a grunt rap song from New York. The vocal groups were blues in their own way, but out among the goats and the vines ODB’s snort-and-heave was equal to Charley Patton and Howlin' Wolf. More Mississippi than anything else I could imagine.

Christmas Music

2006-12-24T22:01:00.000-08:00

The Band: All La Glory
Stage Fright (Capitol, 1970)

Maybe it would be only a kid’s lullaby if it wasn’t played like a morphine drip, and its refrain wasn’t:

I’m second story
Feel so tall
Like a prison wall

Maybe it would sound less like a song about addiction if it wasn’t played by five men beginning to fall apart.

This is a band that knew how to play the forlorn with grace, but warmth and loneliness were never as interlocked as they are here.

2006 In Review: Brightblack Morning Light

2006-12-22T21:23:00.000-08:00

Brightblack Morning Light: Everybody Daylight & Friend of Time
Brightblack Morning Light (Matador, 2006)

These are really the only two Brightblack Morning Light songs. The rest of the album is a weaker variation on one of this pair. I find nearly everything about this band insufferable, particularly their self-promotion on the basis of the most unbearable backstory a rock band has ever employed ("Allman Brothers Screwed and Choppped" would have been a catchier marketing scheme), but I listen to these two songs over and over again. I want to listen to something else instead but I haven't found anything else with the sound of this record. Like most human beings, I am genetically programmed to salivate at the sound of a Rhodes keyboard, and the instrument has never been broader or richer than it is here (this is one of a crop of recent records that belong as much to the engineers as the musicians). In interviews, the band purports a connection to Deep South church music that I don't hear at all in their reconfigured idea of a "gospel" sound. I do (and would rather) hear echoes of the South in those double-time hi-hats on "Everybody Daylight." The drums are an amalgamation of slow motion Three Six Mafia and this.

All the babble on rivers, rainfalls, feathers, clouds, and canyons is in vain. Brightblack Morning Light is clearly about three things only: bass, drums, and Rhodes.

I wish I could remove all the J. Spaceman-derived reverbed breathing vocals and the insipid New Age lyrics and the slide guitar and enjoy these two songs for what they are: dub.

2006 In Review: A Melt At Any Speed

2006-12-22T12:12:00.000-08:00

Marc Moulin: Balek
The Placebo Years: 1971-1974 (Blue Note/EMI, 2006)

I heard the first five cuts from Sam Suffy at Turntable Lab in L.A. during the July heatwave. I thought it was some incredible, unreleased hip-hop stuff before I asked the attendant. The shit was unbelievably slow and heavy. I went over to watch the platter spin. The attendant—a wild, goofy guy with big hair—was losing his mind he was so excited. “Is this for real? Is this fucking for real?” He was practically shaking. “Lord almighty! Jesus H. Christ…Ho-ly SHIT!”

Finally we decided it was meant to be played at 45. After a few cuts, it was back on 33.

Then he played “Balek.”

Fanfares

2006-12-20T19:48:00.000-08:00

The Kashmere Stage Band: All Praises (Live, 1972)
Texas Thunder Soul 1968-1974 (Now Again, 2006)

Sun Ra & His Myth Science Arkestra: Star Time
The Nubians of Plutonia (Saturn, 1959)

It’s hard to imagine the sense of power and exhilaration these Houston high-schoolers felt playing in a band like Kashmere. You get a sense of it in the live recordings, made in 1972. Playing with your peers, kids you grew up around, kids you go to school with. Having an expert teacher who encouraged you to write your own music, and who helped the band arrange their favorite songs from the radio. Playing in the auditorium or gymnasium of your school—same place you have gym glass, or morning assemblies. Playing concerts that your folks attend, and your friends’ folks. You can feel the eagerness of the group as they shoot “All Praises” upward in collective motion.

The Kashmere Stage Band has less in common with the funk rarities in which Now Again specializes that it does with Duke Ellington’s bands, or Count Basie’s bands. But the energy is different. Kashmere shares more with Sun Ra and his coterie of devoted pupils. The balance between the homemade and the professional; between amateur zeal and disciplined skill. I imagine Conrad O. Johnson and Sun Ra could’ve had a good conversation. Their bands knew the meaning of a joyful fanfare.

2006 In Review: Morris Brown

2006-12-18T20:34:00.000-08:00

Outkast (Feat. Scar and Sleepy Brown): Morris Brown
Idlewild (LaFace, 2006)

Ah, the magnificent "Morris Brown."

All kinds of folks have been jumping on the marching band fad in recent years (thank you, Drumline!), but no one wears it like Outkast. This is a card they were born to play.

Everyone gripes that Andre and Big Boi haven’t really acted together on a track since 2000, but everything about “Morris Brown” is consummate Outkast. So what if they don’t both rhyme on it? It’s a Big Boi rap over an Andre arrangement. It indulges Andre’s need for musical eccentricity without resorting to awkward pastiche. Big Boi sounds at home. It hits that perfect pop note that Outkast have perfected over the past few years, without sacrificing any of that Georgia bounce. It’s musical. It sounds like Atlanta. It couldn’t be anyone but Outkast.

Not only did they invite the hometown college band to play on it, but they named the song after them. How class is that?

Meanwhile, Kanye steals “Move On Up” and people cry genius.

It wasn’t a blockbuster. It got played on the radio a few times then got drowned out by the bad press surrounding the disastrous Idlewild. I played it on repeat in Mississippi during early summer and it was perfect. It won’t get played in hotel lobbies like “Hey Ya!” does, but it’s better that way. It’s a good secret—the perfect antidote to the inundating success of Hey Ya!”

It was buried beneath a dismal album, which was buried beneath an even more dismal movie, but “Morris Brown” alone was enough to keep the Outkast legacy afloat in 2006.

And if it ends up a swan song, you couldn’t ask for a more radiant passing.

2006 in Review: They Sum Beast

2006-12-17T18:15:00.000-08:00

In 2007 I am starting a label that will record and release only Southern college marching band music, because my life changed in 2006 when I saw this.

In this world, there exist machines that can produce music so deafening that it cracks the ceilings of Atlanta clubs.

And there exists in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a college where teenagers use drums and 200-year-old brass instruments to generate a sound that makes that music seem like it belongs in an elevator.

I can't think of anything more comforting.

Beyond The Boil

2006-12-14T20:41:00.000-08:00

Nina Simone: Sinnerman
Pastel Blues (Philips, 1965)

Ending Inland Empire with "Sinnerman" is the most reciprocal pairing of music and film in a long time. Each work brings out the catharsis and terror of the other in equal measure.

Even at its most antagonistic and inchoate, Inland Empire is most definitely a movie.

But can a purgation as vivid as "Sinnerman" fairly be called a "song"?

My Lime Green Grind

2006-12-12T17:47:00.000-08:00

Young Bleed: I Couldn't C It
My Own (Priority, 2000)

Young Bleed sounds like his native Baton Rouge: smack between the project claustrophobia of No Limit’s New Orleans, and the coastal drawl of UGK’s Port Arthur. “I Couldn’t C It” is Gulf Coast music: a muggy hustle (is it even possible for wah-wah guitar to evoke cold weather?).

I can’t argue with the millions of folks inspired in 2006 by the Mega-Church of Grind led by Minister T.I. and Reverend Jeezy, but if you really want to talk about hustling, you need to talk about guys like Fiend and Young Bleed. Any chance these guys ever had of making it big was subsumed by the No Limit brand over a decade ago, yet they still fight to make rap music with all the salt and syrup of real Louisiana. Jeezy grinds to go triple platinum; these guys grind just to get their music out there.

Jeezy appears in a lime green Lamborghini in his video, but what kind of car do black folks in Georgia and Louisiana drive?

And what kind of car does “I Couldn’t C It” remind you of?

2006 In Review: Fiend and The Bottom of The Map

2006-12-11T14:26:00.000-08:00

Fiend: Get It Bitch (feat. Shorty Redd) & That's Survival
The Addiction: Hope Is Near (Fiend Entertainment, 2006)

My woman ask, “Baby when you gon’ sleep?”
In the same breath ask me, “Baby, when we gon’ eat?”
This rap shit’s slow
I ain’t sayin’ I’m too good for a regular job
I just don’t have the regular probs

You are Fiend (né Ricky Jones). The success you had as part of the No Limit explosion is ten years behind you. You make your money doing some ghostwriting and production work. Your neighborhood (17th Ward, New Orleans) was the first to flood when the 17th Street Levee broke during Katrina. The man who made you famous is now on Dancing With The Stars.

You are not supposed to make, and self-release, an album like The Addiction.

It starts with Fiend screaming “I want it all,” and ends with him big-upping the “bottom of the boot.” Former No Limit production team Beats by Pound a/k/a Medicine Men (KLC, Craig B) is all over this album, still operating in a zone of their own, ten paces and two worlds removed from everyone else: queasy hard rock guitar, orchestra hits, and plenty of that New Orleans jump. There’s a song on here that is the slowest, most polluted, bad-trip intoxication rap this side of Kokane’s “No Bark No Bite.” Fiend titled it “Oprah (Color Purple).” This is the Southern rap that you do not hear on the radio.

Listen to that second line brass Craig B edges into “Get It Bitch.” Or are those the horns from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell On You”?

Brass Rules Everything Around Me

2006-12-10T11:29:00.000-08:00

Rebirth Brass Band / Hot 8 Brass Band: Talkin' / It's Real
DJ Concerned Presents Talkin' Loud but Sayin' Something!!! (mixtape, 2006)

The Rebirth Brass Band came to the Twin Cities about a week after Katrina happened. They had decided to keep dates that they’d booked months before the storm, even though everyone in the band had lost houses, cars, friends, etc. The show lasted almost three hours with no lack of steam. Rebirth were pros, and played the lame Cabooze like it was the last bar on Earth. They started “Fuck Katrina” chants. They exorcised all anxiety from the room by telling Katrina stories like the storm was a hot chick they all got a piece of. They cheered the Saints, and vowed this would be the team’s year. They brought all the females in the audience onstage and grinded with them to the music. They blew the shit out of their borrowed brass instruments. I’ve never seen an audience so hopelessly compelled to move their bodies. People were going nuts, but there wasn’t an iota of negative energy in the entire room. A group of Katrina evacuees was congregated in a war whoop circle up front, spinning and jumping, helicoptering t-shirts, screaming their heads off. It was the best hip-hop show I’ve ever seen.

Nights like that and Talkin’ Loud prove beyond anyone’s misconceptions that the distance between this and this is none.

A Third Ward World

2006-12-08T16:45:00.000-08:00

It’s hard to refute the argument that ghetto DVDs like Straight From the Projects: C-Murder are anything more than project porn. Under the guise of a warts-and-all exposé of real project living, what Straight From The Projects really offers is a chance for non-project dwellers (no one actually living in the projects is going to waste $20 to watch something they can see any day in their own neighborhood) to indulge in all the gangsta iconography without any of the real-world hassle of really living in the projects. While plenty of subjects revel in the on-camera gun-wielding, there is an uneasy sense that the people being filmed aren’t entirely complicit in the film’s motives. One particularly stomach-turning scene shows a salesman writing up a life insurance policy for a twelve-year-old in the living room of his mom’s home. Dapper host Ice-T (I know, I know...) repeatedly defends the footage with claims that "ya'll need to understand what’s real,” but in scenes like that, any attempt at a relevant social message is utterly overwhelmed by the kind of cheap voyeurism usually reserved for Fox News "special investigations."

But what’s really remarkable about Straight From The Projects is that it isn’t just about kids brandishing assault rifles (unlike this). Most of the footage represents a side of localized ghetto living not often seen in big budget rap videos. Second line parades snake through the ghetto on a sunny day; motorcycle races and a Sunday picnic are staged on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain; a walk to the local record market; afternoon drinks from the corner bar. As the fate of the New Orleans depicted in this video seems increasingly certain, the detailed chronicle of Third Ward living depicted in Straight From the Projects plays like an extraordinary time capsule of pre-Katrina New Orleans culture.

Once intended as a fearsome celebration of project life, Straight From The Projects now serves as a look back to a vanished city. Soulja Slim, who has a key cameo, was murdered in 2003. C-Murder himself is currently on house-arrest, awaiting a retrial for a second-degree murder charge from 2002, while nearly every stop on his Projects tour has closed in the wake of Katrina: Peaches Records and Tapes on Gentilly Boulevard, not far from where Slim was killed. The Rose Tavern at Thalia and South Dorgenois, “Home of the Original Calliope High Steppers.” The Washeteria on South Dorgenois. The Rhythm City nightclub. And of course, the Calliope and Magnolia projects, the heart of the Third Ward, and the epicenter of New Orleans bounce and hip-hop. Both housing projects are slated to be demolished by the end of 2008.

Unpredictably, what was initially marketed as a coarse portrait of ghetto New Orleans now illuminates precisely what’s at stake in the battle being waged for the future of New Orleans’ public housing projects.

What the Housing Authority of New Orleans doesn’t get it that the residents’ fight to return is as much a battle for identity as it is for shelter. What Straight From the Projects shows above all else is how crucial Calliope and Magnolia were in giving an identity to residents whose social, political, and economic resources were completely diminished. HANO continues to purport the argument that the projects are decrepit and uninhabitable, but the Third Ward has always been decrepit and inhospitable, which, along with the parades, and the gumbo shops, and the gold teeth, and bounce, and the thugs, and the family, is what made the Third Ward the Third Ward.

It’s easy for outsiders to appropriate an image of Magnolia and Calliope and Melpomine as ant farms of crime and poverty without recognizing that its residents accepted the Third Ward as a lifestyle, an identity, a world. Its residents took pride in everything that it was. Even at its ugliest, they embraced the Third Ward, because everything in it belonged to them.

During an on-camera stroll through Magnolia a grinning Soulja Slim, the patron anti-saint of the New Orleans projects, puts it best:

“All this is me.”

The Magnolia Natural

2006-12-07T14:11:00.000-08:00

Soulja Slim: Get High With Me
Give It 2 'Em Raw (No Limit, 1998)

As loathe as redevelopers are to admit it, New Orleans culture has always been a complex fusion of community and tradition, and vice and crime. This incorporation only grew more potent in the years that Soulja Slim came of age, and by the time he started making bounce records in the early 1990s, the plain fact of drug dealing and murder in the projects had become an integrated part of cultural life in Slim’s Third Ward landscape. Slim was Third Ward New Orleans personified: born into Central City tradition (his mother, Linda Porter, is president of the Original Lady Buckjumpers Social Aid and Pleasure Club; his stepdad, Philip Frazier, leads the Rebirth Brass Band on tuba), and engendered with all the nihilism of a Magnolia thug.

“Get High With Me” is a heavy track. It is so unlike the jazz-and-soul-based hip-hop of New York that it barely admits a relation to rap music as most know it. Tropical storms usually pass through Jamaica before they reach New Orleans, and if anything, “Get High With Me” is ugly kin to something that floated to N.O. via a sweltry Kingston dancehall. Same blunted, incantational flow, same low-pressure system. There are atonal, nauseating beats all over Give It 2 ‘Em Raw, but this is the one song from Slim’s masterpiece wholly embalmed in that New Orleans humidity.

Three years after Slim's murder on the steps of his mother’s Gentilly home, the Magnolia projects are scheduled to be demolished. For now, they stand eerily vacant and cordoned off with barbed wire. Driving through New Orleans last July, Magnolia was the grimmest sight in a city blanketed by death and destruction. Laid on quads of rough-cut lawn, its jaundiced fortress façades, collapsing roofs, and looming smokestacks made it look like an inner-city Auschwitz. Despite its declining state, Magnolia's steadfast residents continue to fight for their right to return. Someone had jumped the barbed wire and burned an aerosol tribute to Soulja Slim on a second floor wall. Even in death, a guard to his kingdom.

"He loved the rowdiness. He loved the party scene. He wanted to go with a big bang" -Philip Frazier

The Rebirth Brass Band and the Lady Buckjumpers play a second line dedicated to the memory of Soulja Slim:

2006 In Review: The Camel and the Cockroach

2006-12-05T14:09:00.000-08:00

Lil' Wayne: Show Me What You Got (Remix)
Tapemasters Inc: Purple Codeine 9 (mixtape, 2006)

I have no brain, I’m retarded
We are not the same, I’m a Martian
You can be my Jane, I’m your Tarzan
I’m from the jungle where the snakes is all poison

When boredom peaks, so does confidence. Here, Wayne smashes this year’s platter of trap rap clichés on the floor, and breaches some other quarter of his tattooed brain.

This is the sound of a pro with nothing to lose.

All the basketball references are appropriate—Jigga might brag about being Jordan, but Wayne moves like a point guard. Flashing, skidding, switching, faking, ducking, and taking it. A hissing inked-out midget (with Down’s Syndrome?) steals the ball from a 6’3” conglomerate king: this fall’s best play.

You know a rapper has reached it when he can make nonsense credible.