Pretty good, no? Kind of a darker take on the Talking Heads 77/Modern Lovers.
I learned about these guys, and a record company called Moonlee, that is dedicated to releasing new rock music from the former Yugoslav republics, from a Cuepoint survey of the scene.
The story ends with the story of Bernays Propaganda, a Croation band that is working these days sometimes with Mike Watt. Their tune Provekje is more indie than punk, but the story says their early stuff is angular, like Fugazi.
Another contemporary band, Serbian I think, is Replikator. This tune struggles to escape the murky bottom like that 90s mainstay Come.
A few years ago a popular documentary was released called Searching for Sugarman. It told the story of an American musician named Sixto Rodriguez who was very popular in South Africa. The Detroit based Rodriguez — whose signature song was called “Sugar Man” — released a couple of albums in the early 70s that received little recognition before he retired from music. In South Africa he was rumored dead but some fans decided to try to find him to determine if the rumor was true. The rest is history.
Another artist, William Onyeabor, has a story with similarities to Rodriguez. The Nigerian born Onyeabor released a series of serious funk records between the mid 70s to mid 80s. His eight albums languished in obscurity after Onyeabor left the music industry and became a devoted born again Christian. A parallel with Rodriguez is that his fans were left with little idea where he was or how to reach him.
In 2013, Talking Head David Byrne secured the rights to reissue some of Onyeabor’s music on his Luaka Bop label on a compilation called Who is William Onyeabor?. That’s where I discovered today’s SotW, “Atomic Bomb.”
The song instantly finds a groove that ambles along for its full 8 minutes. At various points along the way it is punctuated with tastful guitar licks and the early synthesizer noodlings that Onyeabor was famous for – and would later be an important ingredient that Bernie Worrell brought to Stop Making Sense era Talking Heads music. I pay no attention to the mildly suggestive lyrics, but I do like the sound of the background singers’ call and response as well as their “atomic bomb” chant in the chorus.
A loose collective of alt rock artists formed in 2014 to perform Onyeabor’s music under the name Atomic Bomb. According to Wikipedia the group consists of:
“… music director Ahmed Gallab and his band Sinkane (composed of Jason Trammell on drums, Ish Montgomery on bass and Jonny Lam on guitar), Alexis Taylor (of Hot Chip), Pat Mahoney (of LCD Soundsystem), Money Mark (of the Beastie Boys) Lekan Babalola and Jas Walton (of Antibalas).
The group has also featured special guests including David Byrne (of Talking Heads) Damon Albarn (of Blur), the Lijadu Sisters, Pharoah Sanders, Jamie Lidell, Joshua Redman, Kele Okereke (of Bloc Party), Luke Jenner (of The Rapture), Ghostpoet, Dev Hynes (aka Blood Orange / Lightspeed Champion), Wally DeBacker (Gotye), Young Fathers, Mahotella Queens, Andrew Ashong, Zap Mama, Charles Lloyd, Cheikh Lô, Peaking Lights, David Murray, Para One, Mike Floss, Moses Sumney, Sarah Jones, and Green Gartside.
As I’ve noted here a few times, I’m on Bob Lefsetz’s mailing list. Lefsetz is an older (as old as me) recorded music professional. I don’t know his bio, but I like his posts because they’re passionate and informed about a wide range of issues, and he loves the classic rock music (far more than me, but he really loves it).
I didn’t read his original post, but tonight he posted a letter from a musician named Jesse Dayton, who responded to a Lefsetz post by describing who he is:
Hey Bob. Dig your blog. Here’s the skinny. Old Texas family. Recorded w/ Waylon, Cash, Willie & slew others playing guitar after 10,000 hrs of moving the needle on Jerry Reed vinyl. Did hillbilly music for 3 Rob Zombie films which did good enough for me to buy a house in Austin which is now worth quite a few shekels. Just filled in for Billy Zoom while he was getting cancer treatment on 40 show tour w/ Doe, Exene & DJ in X which reintroduced me to a national audience. Wrote/directed a Cormanesque B-movie creature feature w/ Malcolm McDowell that sold & I made $ on & is now a cult thing. Just released new record The Revealer w/ a batch of songs that I didn’t just write, but opened a vein & let them bleed out of my insane childhood & all the desperate characters I was subjected too along the way. It’s all there…civil rights issues, conned hillbillies not voting their interest, being unworthy of real love…you name it. Right now I’m in the middle of nowhere living by my wits w/ 3 piece band on a never ending tour in a motor home. Thx for the shout out amigo. Onward JD
Now, I’m not a big Rob Zombie fan, but Corman, Malcolm McDowell, and Jerry Reed stroke my strings. I’m into open veins pouring, too, if it isn’t suicide.
The great thing about the modern world, a really great thing and I don’t think we’ve absorbed how this has changed us, is that after I read this email note I could immediately listen to Dayton’s record (on YouTubeRed, in this case). And I could judge.
And I judge, meh. Here’s a song I like more than others.
Very Jerry Lee Lewis, and that’s not bad. But as it goes on this guy seems to more marketing to me about his deep roots than actually rocking. The rock feels too organized for someone truly crazed by that wacked out background he describes. In fact the whole idea of the Holy Ghost Rock ‘n’ Roller seems, by the end of the song a pretty fail marketing ploy.
Dayton touches all the bases of apostasy, but starting with the album image and ticking through the tunes, the hi jinx of rural religion is used to denote authenticity. And the music of rock ‘n’ roll is used to denote authenticity.
And the music? Fun, if you’re will to suspend your belief in legitimacy.
I recommend listening to all of Dayton’s tunes. This isn’t bad music and is mostly not bad thinking, but from the album image to the calculated lyrics, this seems more intellectualized than rocked.
Bottom line, I can’t keep listening to it. If I want to hear this music I listen to Joe Ely, to Hank Williams III, to Steve Earle. If I don’t want so much testosterone I listen to Lucinda Williams and, on the sweet side, Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins.
But I am going search out that Malcolm McDowell movie.
What I didn’t know before today was that Brian Epstein, the Beatles manager, discovered these guys. He changed their name, and John Lennon suggested alternative spelling.
Plus their biggest hit was co-written by Paul Simon. He still gets royalties.
They played as an opener on many of the Beatles last stadium shows.
After the well ran dry they wrote jingles, and produced Foghat albums. Kind of crazy, like a red rubber ball with spin.
Van and Bob sitting on a hill with the Parthenon in the background, singing a Van Morrison song (that isn’t One Irish Rover) with acoustic guitar (Van) and harmonica (Bob).
Followed by One Irish Rover, both playing guitars, singing harmonies. Simple, but excellent nonetheless. With Van playing guitar quite nicely and hypnotically, kind of perfect. You probably don’t want less, and you certainly don’t want more.
There’s more after that, excellent Van, but the songs on the hillside are what got me here. Icons, maybe showing off, but simply.
My old friend Dot skipped the debate tonight to see ZZ Top in Scottsdale, in Arizona.
Good choice, I said, but then I started thinking about ZZ Tops’ biggest hit and the video that dominated MTV for a while and thought it provided some commentary for the current political situation, which involves a lot of lies, a discombobulated narrative, bullying and, we hope at the end of day, some women’s liberation. Even if we don’t ever see Hillary kiss Bill again.
As you might expect, the signifiers are a mixed bag. Just vote.
A design studio named Dorothy has released a survey of alt-rock music based on the schematic design of a transistor radio that came out in 1954, the year Bill Haley released Rock Around the Clock.
That’s a detail from a much larger image over to the left.
I’m not sure about the information included in the diagram. I mean why do the Ramones lead to Mink Deville lead to Talking Heads.
Why is Elvis Costello in smaller type than the Specials?
Why aren’t the White Stripes next to the Black Keys?
There are many of these questions, which seem to be answered rather randomly. That said, there is a broader logic as to time and place and style, and it’s good fun browsing using the magnification tool. h/t Herrick Goldman.
In one of the most humble acts in human history, Sonny Rollins interrupted his lucrative career as a jazz saxophonist in order to hone his craft more fully. Even though he was already well established in the jazz circles – having played with luminaries such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman, and recorded more than 20 albums – in 1959, at the tender age of 29, he nevertheless decided he needed to drop out of the scene and woodshed in order to take his game to the next level. He spent the next three years in relative seclusion, practicing his playing under New York’s Williamsburg Bridge for most of each day, in all kinds of weather and through all four seasons.
In April 2015, Rollins told the New York Times:
“The problem was that I had no place to practice. My neighbor on Grand Street was the drummer Frankie Dunlop, and his wife was pregnant. The horn I’m playing, it’s loud. I felt really guilty. One day I was on Delancey Street, and I walked up the steps to the Williamsburg Bridge and came to this big expanse. Nobody was there, and it was beautiful.”
He returned in 1962 with his album titled The Bridge. Today’s SotW is the title song from that album.
In an article from the AV Club, Joseph Heller describes the beauty of the piece:
Like a runaway daydream, “The Bridge” is both frenetic and meditative, the sound of a scattered mind exulting in its own agility. Hall and Rollins trade solos like sparring tides; the rhythm section of bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer Ben Riley lock into a fleet, liquid-tempo syncopation. But rather than trying to hop on the bandwagon of free-jazz abstraction, the Rollins composition reflects a very real set of coordinates in emotional space-time: when he stood below that bridge, day after day for months on end, pouring out his soul. What it must have been like to be a random passerby during those years, hearing the song’s embryonic skronk slowly coagulate into a masterpiece.
Hamilton’s thesis is that the Stones were so adept at embracing and mirroring the black music they loved, that they eventually came to represent a new white authenticity that was embraced by white blues and metal bands that knew little or nothing about the Stones’ roots.
I’m not sure what this means in the book’s larger picture, it is an excerpt of course, but without looking at the argument’s validity as regards the whole history of rock ‘n’ roll, this little slice of story feels kind of genuine. Like, yeah, that may be true, though he have maybe set up something of a straw man argument, too. Still feels like useful analysis.
But Hamilton draws in a lot of historical sources to tell this story, and it’s fascinating to read quotes in the black newspapers of 1964 praising the Stones, while the mainstream white press rips them down. And his description of the musical opening of Gimme Shelter is exact and thrilling, like the music itself.
It’s curious that the Margo Jefferson quote from earlier in the piece comes from 1973, which was also a germination point for Death, who we posted about here last week. It’s possible that this book will shed some light on the way rock ‘n’ roll evolved musically and as a business in a racial context.
