Monthly Archives: November 2013

Songs of the Week – Negro y Azul: The Ballad of Heisenberg, Los Cuates de Sinaloa & Crapa Pelada, Quartetto Cetro

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OK, I have to start this post by admitting that I was a latecomer to the hit television show Breaking Bad. I didn’t watch a single episode until this October; right after the series finale was aired.

But I started to binge on it and I’m now in the middle of the fifth and final season. (I probably would have finished it by now, but the Red Sox kept winning all the way through the World Series and sucked up a lot of my screen time.)

The series is outstanding; a compelling premise with great story line development and terrific characters. But one of the pleasant surprises to me was the ingenious use of music in the soundtrack. Most of the music is obscure, but when the producers chose popular songs they used them to great effect (“A Horse with No Name” “Tush”).

This week let’s listen to a couple of my favorite songs from the series. First up is “Negro y Azul: The Ballad of Heisenberg” by Los Cuates de Sinaloa.

The song is in the Mexican style called Narcocorrido. A corridor is a traditional Mexican story song. A narco-corridor is… well you get it. “Negro y Azul” translates to “Black and Blue,” a clear reference to Walter White’s (Heisenberg) hat and product.

My next choice is “Crapa Pelada” (1945) by the Italian vocal quartet, Quartetto Cetro.

This is such a quirky song that it is irresistible — kind of jazzy with a machine gun rat-a-tat-tat of words flowing in tight harmony. I’m pretty sure I’d like this song anyway, but the associated image of Gale (Walt’s lab assistant) singing it as he watered his plants while cooking his dinner is indelible. The song perfectly captured Gale’s idiosyncratic personality of which to that point, we knew little about outside of the lab.

There are dozens of other great songs featured in the series. I like most of them other than the rap/hip hop. (I know I’m proving that I’m an old man.) Some people have compiled Breaking Bad playlists on YouTube that are worth checking out.

Enjoy… until next week.

Night Music: Bikini Kill, “Rebel Girl”

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Back in the days of the second punk eruption, in the early 90s, a subset of the scene took the name Riot Grrls for their girl centric rockish devotion and community. There were a lot of girl led hard rock bands then and I got into L7, Babes in Toyland and of course Hole, as well as bands like the Amps and Breeders and Belly, who all seemed to have the DIY enthusiasm of the first punk eruption. This was a music scene, but also a fashion scene and a revolutionary movement, and a lot of the music was really good.

But for whatever reason I didn’t hear Bikini Kill until a little later, when Subpop (I think) put out their first two albums on one CD. And this was different. Kathleen Hanna (about whom a movie was released in NYC today, which is what got me thinking about this) has a great big enthusiasm and a great big personality that kind of makes everything glow, and you can hear it in Bikini Kill’s music. I’m not saying her bandmates didn’t make fantastic contributions, but just that when you see a star you know it.

Perfect video, too.

Night Music: Texas Tornados, “Who Were You Thinking Of”

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I started with Flaco, then Flaco and Freddy, then Lawr bit the madeleine and added Doug Sahm. Those were all different bands, but that inevitably leads us to the Texas Torandos, a band started in 1990 by Flaco Jimenez, Freddy Fender, Doug Sahm and Augie Meyers, a member of the Texas Music Hall of Fame. Something of a conjunto supergroup, if you will.

Night Music: Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

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As a student of literature, I was always struck by the function of the spice cake in Marcel Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past .

The whole thing is framed around Swann, the main character, taking a bite out of a piece of spice cake that reminds him of cake of his youth.

This olfactory experience brings Swann back to his childhood, and that becomes the vehicle for moving forward with the whole story of Swann’s experience.

Well, Peter putting up Freddy Fender totally tripped the musical spice cake in me, reminding me of my favorite Fender tune, Wasted Days and Wasted Nights. Though the version I favor is from Doug Sahm’s wonderful, The Return of Doug Saldana.

Sahm, leader of the super hippie trippy Sir Douglas Quintet, always had his finger on some kind of musical pulse, with his band kicking out some really great songs. She’s About a Mover,  Rain, and Mendocino were all fine radio tunes with a Tejano twist that complemented the psychadelic sounds of the time.

With Doug Saldana, Sahm did move back to the roots music of his youth in a really solid work.

And, well, this version of Fender’s tune is as rocking and soulful as can be.

So, on this Thanksgiving day, grab your spice cake, or turkey, or yams, or whatever and have a taste of some ear candy.

 

Night Music: The Upper Crust, “Let Them Eat Rock”

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It is not a joke to say that this is one of the great songs and performances of the rock era.

No, it wasn’t a hit. But listen again. We have time. It speaks to all of us, and it rocks.

The Upper Crust, Let them eat rock

The amazing thing is that nearly 20 years on the Louis 14 thing is still working. As it should. We’re fighting the upper crust more now than at any time since the 30s.

Night Music: Freddie Fender and Flaco Jimenez, “Until the Next Teardrop Falls”

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I was put in mind of Flaco Jimenez today because I found that clip of Cooder and Evans from a Les Blank film I haven’t seen. Flaco Jimenez was in that band, as well as many others I’ve admired over the years.

The first Les Blank film I saw was called Chulas Fronteras, Beautiful Frontiers, and it was about the Tejano culture that straddles the Mexican and Texas border. They play a fantastically rhythmic, ecstatic, danceable music there called Norteno, a blend of polka and Mexican corrida and other forms, that takes Mexican emotion and fuses it with Germanic precision.

I always think of Linda Ronstadt’s funny line, that her problem in her life was that she ended up singing like a German and thinking like a Mexican, her parental lineages. Give us more of that.

Freddy Fender was Tejano and perhaps the biggest Mexican pop star up to his time, and he constantly battled the problems of getting real and feeding the international music machine (witness the hair). Feeding wins, up to a point. In that context, this song is far from pure, but it is a hit for obvious and well earned reasons.

You Have to Hear This: Ry Cooder, Terry Evans, “Down in Mississippi”

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This is a song written by the bluesman JB Lenoir, but this version I just came across from a concert and Les Blank movie from 1987, has to be heard. Amazing!

The rest of the band: Vocals: Bobby King, Arnold McCuller, Willie Green Jr.
Drums: Jim Keltner
Bass: Jorge Calderon
Keyboard: Van Dyke Parks
Accordion: Flaco Jimenez
Percussion: Miguel Cruz
Sax: Steve Douglas
Trombone: George Bohannon

Night Music: Divine, “You Think You’re A Man”

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Last night I posted Hole’s repulsively propulsive “Retard Girl,” but in the morning I felt badly about it. The bad taste in that song is really bad taste, and while I think (hope) the point is not just the shock, I didn’t want to be so associated with it so I clawed it back. If you want to hear it you can search Google for it. The music is powerful, the lyrics make me cringe.

So tonight, thinking about bad taste, I came upon this song that Divine originated, but did not write. It’s a total disco track and obviously Divine embodies bad taste with grand (and big) style. What surprised me was that the song is one I know from the cover done by the Scottish post-punk pop band The Vaselines, who covered it some years later. Their version isn’t that much different, though they look nothing at all like Divine and don’t play disco instruments.

Night Music: Oh Lucky Man!

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I kind of get a kick out of those Sprint commercials with James Earl Jones and Malcolm McDowell.

I have always been a fan of McDowell’s since I saw his first film, Lindsay Anderson’s IF, and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is my all time favorite movie (though in fairness, it is tied with Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game).

Anyway, seeing the commercial usually reminds me of A Clockwork Orange , but the other day I found myself thinking about Anderson’s brilliant sort of sequel to IF, his film Oh Lucky Man!

Oh Lucky Man!  shows us McDowell’s IF character Mick Travis a few years later, giving a treatise on capitalism, life, death, and existence in a sort of comedic dramatic epic form that is also Zen.

If nothing else, the story is fascinating (it also really needs a couple of viewings).

Anyway, the soundtrack to Oh Lucky Man! was written by Alan Price, the keyboardist/songwriter of the Animals, the great British blues-pop band, who not only featured Eric Burdon, but whose bass player, Chas Chandler, is credited with “discovering” Jimi Hendrix.

Price wrote a fabulous soundtrack to the movie, bookended by one version of the title track for the opening credits,

and then a second version that serves as the closing credits.

Just a great cut. And, now I will have to dig up my old VHS of the movie and watch it again. Hell, maybe I will even buy it on DVD!

Song of the Week – Love Me Hard, Dust

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IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED

Back in the early 70s a pioneering heavy metal rock band called Dust put out a couple of albums that were largely ignored. The Brooklyn based band soon faded into the dustbin of rock history – nearly, but not totally forgotten. But not the individual band members – Richie Wise, Marc Bell and Kenny Aaronson.

Wise was the band’s leader; lead singer, lead guitarist and main songwriter. He went on to co-produce the first two Kiss albums.

Marc Bell was the groups over the top drummer. This dude really pounds the skins. After Dust, he made his way through a few of the New York City based punk bands, including Wayne County and Richard Hell & the Voidoids. In 1978 he settled in for a 15 year stint as the Ramones drummer using the moniker Marky Ramone.

Bass player Kenny Aaronson scored a big hit with the song “Brother Louie” when he played with The Stories. Then he became an “in demand” road/studio musician working with the likes of Bob Dylan, Hall & Oates, Mick Taylor, Graham Parker, Billy Idol, and Billy Squier and serving as a full time member of Joan Jett’s Blackhearts in the first half of the 90s.

Today’s SotW is from their self-titled, 1971 debut, “Love Me Hard.”

The song rocks with the best of other early 70s hard rock bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and the James Gang.

It opens with a heavy guitar riff, then in comes the pounding rhythm section and vocals. Midway through is an interlude that starts with acoustic guitar and then turns really heavy before returning to the main riff for some guitar soloing and the big rock ending.

Their two albums are available to stream on Spotify. Search for them under the album name Hard Attack.) This music is really deserving of a listen, even if you’re not a big hard rock fan. The songs are inventive and each has its own interesting details and flourishes.

Enjoy… until next week.