I was sitting with my friend/mentor/guitar teacher yesterday and while we were talking about 70’s bands we both loved and abhorred, Ronnie Montrose came up.
Of course the real frame of reference for Montrose in the Bay Area was his first album that featured Sammy Hagar, and had the tune Rock Candy, on it.
Montrose and Hagar did it together for a few albums, but by the late 70’s Sammy went on to his own successful, if somewhat loud solo career.
Montrose continued to play, and released a wonderful instrumental album in 1978 entitled Open Fire, and that disc contained the guitarist’s well known cover of Town Without a Pity, a tune I had not thought of in years till Steve and my conversation went there.
Of course, discussing Montrose invariably led to Hagar, who had a bundle of catchy rockers around the same time such as Red and You Make Me Crazy.
But, the song I’ve Done Everything for You,” also released in ’78, was always my favorite, though I don’t believe it ever appeared on an album till Hagar released a compilation disc (I still have my 45 of the single with Otis Redding’s Dock of the Bay on the flip side).
I guess at best you could call the vid below a guilty pleasure, as well as a nice time capsule of spandex and big hair. It does rock, although I am sure if Hagar appeared today with the giant pic of himself in the background, #Humblebrag would be all over him.
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.
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!
If you have ever been in a band–and I hope my buds Steve and Gene affirm this–you are doomed to play covers.
Speaking for myself, and the Biletones, between my own catalog of originals, and that of bandmate/singer/rhythm guitarist Tom Nelson, we could easily play a two hour set of tunes we penned.
However, especially if your group does not have, shall we say, “a name,” then for the most part you have to get used to playing Little Queenie, Dead Flowers, Moondance, and a zillion other tunes that I have played way more often than I wish.
Still, it goes with the territory, as people want to hear and dance to stuff they know. We do play Tom’s Rich Girlfriend as a regular tune, and have done my own Geography Matters, as well as a couple of more Tom wrote (Bad Dreams, DUI Bars) but for the most part we have to squeeze the desire to play originals into playing more obscure covers.
That means we play a chunk of Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, and Wilco, all of which are fine by me, to go along with Queenie and the more mainstream cover ilk.
Sometimes those odd covers work (Gravity’s Gone, by Drive by Truckers) and sometimes not (Having a Party by Sam Cooke, and Borrow your Cape by Bobby Bare, Jr.).
Well, about a month ago, the song Reform School Girls, by Nick Curran and the Lowlifes appeared on the weekly practice list.
The song is a great paean to the Phil Spector sound, as well as an homage to the Bitch Groups like the Shangri-Las, and well, once we started playing it, I found myself humming it for days at a time.
Written by the very talented Curran, who sadly passed away from oral cancer in October of last year at the age of 35, Reform School Girls is as beautiful a send up to the genre as is the Tubes Don’t Touch Me There.
Not that I was ever against them, but sort of like Masters of the Universe, I was born too late for them.
By the time Rush hit what Wikipedia refers to as the band’s “Mainstream Success” years (1977-81) I had run from the Arena rock of ELO and Queen to the Punk bands from England and New Wavers out of New York.
Furthermore, Rush was a Prog Rock band, and I had already grown weary of Yes, not that I did not respect the musical chops of Steve Howe and his mates. Yes’ music just seemed a bit on the forced/overwritten side to me compared to the visceral guitars of the Pistols and Eddie and the Hot Rods and the Records, et al.
Actually, the real bottom line was that the Prog Band of my adolescence was The Moody Blues, and then Pink Floyd, both of whom were cutting edge in the late 60’s, before Yes and Rush and even Fripp and Eno (there was Roxy Music out there too, though they were more Pop/Art Rock than Prog in my opinion).
I was given a copy of Rush’s single, New World Man when it came out in the mid-80’s, and it was OK, but I more remember a photograph of a Dalmatian on the cover (our family had one as I was growing up) than the actual song.
Over the years, I have heard songs by Rush on the radio waves, and with their distinct style and Geddy Lee’s falsetto vocals, they are pretty easily recognizable. And, they are not bad in any way. I never turn them off or change the channel: I just never crave more.
Except for the tune The Spirit of Radio which I have heard from time-to-time on said radio, and which I thought was a really great cut, but which I had never really listened to, if that makes a lick of sense. And, I certainly did not know the title of the tune.
However, I did catch the Band’s live performance as part of their introduction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and lo and behold the band played a red hot version of said song.
Again, I noted I liked it a lot, but I still did not know the title till the other night when I was returning from band practice, and the local hard rock station (the Bone at 107.7) played the original album track from the 1981 album Permanent Waves.
Of course with its unmistakable Alex Lifeson riff that runs through the tune, it is pretty hard to miss, but the truth is, since I heard it that last time, I cannot stop hearing in my head.
I was driving to the ballpark the other day, streaming KTKE, my favorite radio station from Truckee, Ca., when through the speakers the opening bars of Counting Crows tune Murder of One came blasting (of course I turned the volume up even more) from their debut album, August and Everything After.
I cannot actually remember ever hearing Murder of One on the radio before (which is one reason I love KTKE as they surprise me like this constantly), and it had been years since I listened to August and Everything After, although it was on constant play for a long time following its 1992 release.
In fact, I saw Counting Crows open for Los Lobos when the Lobos were touring, promoting their great Kiko and the Lavender Moon disc. The Crows were very good, I might add, sounding kind of like The Band, and kind of like a mix of LA roots bands like The Blasters and the Violent Femmes, but still with that San Francisco psychedelic core that a Bay Area band should have.
The band played mostly from their still be released debut, that became August and Everything After, and as stated, that disc was regularly in the CD rotation for months after.
As time passed I pretty much forgot about how much I liked it, and then when I heard Murder of One, I thought writing about the album, as I did XTC’s Skylarking a while back might be fun.
But, shortly after KTKE played Murder of One, I heard How Will the Wolf Survive?, from Los Lobos’ debut album of the same name, also a disc I love, and one that actually placed in my Top 50 album list we concocted a while back.
And, that made me think about writing the piece on the Lobos work, instead of the Crows. So, I went to my CDs, and pulled both out of the stacks so I could re-listen to both since it had been a while, and upon scouring the credits, was reminded that T-Bone Burnett produced both of them.
My first knowledge of Burnett was when I bought the third album by the Alpha Band, The Statue Makers of Hollywood, in 1978, some vinyl I still own.
A few years later I saw Burnett back Ian Hunter on guitar during the Your Never Alone With a Schizophrenic tour. In fact the wonderful Mick Ronson was also part of that contingent and I saw the duo with Hunter twice.
But, I think it was the production job Burnett did on How Will the Wolf Survive? that really grabbed my attention, for I still remember the first time I heard the title track, on MTV believe it or not, and from the first pop of the snare I knew this was a group and album I had to check out.
Obviously it was a match for as I noted, the record is among my all time favorite Top 50 albums (I have it on vinyl and CD).
I did buy one of Burnett’s solo efforts–the fine 1992 The Criminal Under My Own Hat–but it is the work behind the dials that requires acknowledgement. For, the vast variety of great artists that Burnett produced since I discovered the Lobos that is really amazing. In fact, just for fun, here are a few of them:
Roy Orbison
Delbert McClinton
Peter Case
Elvis Costello
Kris Kristofferson
Leo Kottke
Spinal Tap
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
Jimmy Dale Gilmore
Freedy Johnston
Gillian Welch
Tony Bennett
k.d. lang
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss
B.B. King
Robert Randolf and the Family Band
Willie Nelson
Elton John and Leon Russell
Gregg Allman
Steve Earle
The Chieftens
Mind you, there are a ton more artists you probably know–and music you probably own–aside from the selection of musicians I listed.
Pretty amazing.
But, what also blew me out about Burnett was that he was also part of the Bob Dylan Rolling Thunder Revue, a piece of information that somehow eluded me until I bought the 2002 Official Live Bootleg release, and while listening got my socks knocked off by Mick Ronson’s blistering solo on It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry (I cannot believe there is not a You Tube vid of it, but I did look.)
“Who is that?” I asked myself the first time I heard, so naturally while looking through the printed materiel, I discovered that it was Ronson, but that Burnett played on the tour as well, as did Stephen Soles, Burnett’s eventual partner in The Alpha Band.
However, I am this deep into this piece, I have not even noted the terrific work Burnett has also done in film, and in particular with the Coen Brothers, having produced the music for The Big Lebowski and Oh Brother Where Art Thou, for which he won Oscar Nominations along with the Coens remake of The Ladykillers.
But, Burnett also produced the music to the fine Walk the Line, and actually won an Oscar for the tune he penned with Ryan Bingham, The Weary Kind, from another award winning film, Crazy Heart.
As I noted, pretty amazing, this all is. In fact, though I can think of many great and versatile artists, I am hard-pressed to think of a hands on player who wound up with a resume anything close to that of Burnett.
Although, I have to admit, I am seriously open to your suggestions.
There has been a lot of banter among us about what really constitutes rock ‘n’ roll.
For those of us who have contributed to the site–as well I suspect to those who have been kind enough to read us–we all have our interpretations and definitions of the musical form that ushered our generation into control of the various airwaves.
For certainly no matter what else be said, when Led Zeppelin and Steppenwolf and even the Beatles Revolution are the sound backing mainstream TV commercials (for the cynics, note that Joni Mitchell has never let a song of hers be used for advertising purposes) then the influence of rock in our culture simply cannot be denied.
But, it has struck me with the first challenge tunes going back to the very early days of the genre Alan Freed so aptly named, the real soul of the music belongs to the African American community.
Not that I am the first to note this, but when we do talk about the music and its roots, and what it really means, Bill Haley always gets a nod. And, that is fine for Haley was a trendsetter, and had a great band and deserves some respect there.
But really it was Shake, Rattle, and Roll, recorded in February of 1954 by Big Joe Turner, five months before Bill Haley covered the same tune and three months before Rock Around the Clock was recorded and released, that probably owns the title of the breakthrough song pushing the then new form to the masses.
Of course, what cannot be denied is that irrespective of the quality of either version of Shake, Rattle, and Roll, it is the Haley version that got the ink and reaction and coverage in those days. It was also a much bigger hit, as was his cover of Rock Around the Clock.
However, it is important to remember the context of why, and the large reason Haley enjoyed more success than his African American counterparts was that in 1954, the civil rights movement was still in its infancy.
So, aside from the fact that Haley reached a bigger market, white America’s attitude to the African American community was such that music, styles, food, hell virtually anything from the rich culture that emerged from slavery, and to a large degree out of the notion that necessity is the mother of invention (guess whose band grabbed at that one?) was driven by evil dark forces.
It was in May of 1954, that the Brown v. The Board of Education case declared that segregation, and the notion of “separate but equal” was unconstitutional. And, that decision, was 15 months before Rosa Parks and her dog tired dogs, after a hard day of work, refused to step to the back of the bus.
Even with that, it was seven more years until James Meredith was granted admission to the University of Mississippi, the first African American to gain entrance to that institution, and one that met with a fair amount of violence at the time (I still remember reading the headlines, and not being able to understand who cared who went to what school as a then nine-year old). Mind you, that was almost a decade after segregation was ruled unconstitutional.
But, as with Pat Buchanan, inexplicably announcing before his dismissal from MSNBC a few years ago that America was built on the backs of white people, the real grunt work of the country–and like it or not, our current music scene–can completely be owned by that same African American community in the same sense that the Egyptians or the Romans can take credit for their great civilizations, but the building of the cities and the pyramids was completed by slaves.
And, while I can give that respect to Haley, for example, I can give none to Pat Boone for bastardizing the true rock ‘n’ roll of Little Richard. For, Richard, and Chuck Berry come as true to defining the form for me as anyone (and the truth is, it would not matter to me if they were pink Martians, they still rocked the shit out of what Boone and his ilk turned into pablum).
For Boone’s treatment of Little Richard was sanitized out of the fearfulness that the African American community–particularly their men–simply wanted to get white women drunk and/or stoned and then have sex with them, using music as part of the means to that end. And, if that sounds outrageous, try reading Daniel Okrent’s excellent narrative on Prohibition, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. (Also remember that the Volstead Act was repealed barely 20 years before the Brown V. the Board of Education decision.)
In fact, in reviewing Okrent’s tome to that troubled period in our history, Publisher’s Weekly notes that ” He unearths many sadly forgotten characters from the war over drink—and readers will be surprised to learn how that fight cut across today’s ideological lines. Progressives and suffragists made common cause with the Ku Klux Klan—which in turn supported a woman’s right to vote—to pass Prohibition.”
If you wonder about this, here is a vid of Boone’s treatment of Tutti Fruitti:
And, now, here is the man, Little Richard showing us exactly how it should be done:
But, essentially the blues form, and rhythm and blues, and Motown, can all be looked to as the seeds of modern rock and pop whether anyone likes it or not, for virtually all modern rock ‘n’ roll stems from that 1/4/5 chord motif that the blues presented.
Further, if you look to the British wave of music, that followed Haley and Richard by ten years, the bands who made a difference–The Beatles, The Who, The Stones, for example–all cut their early chops playing a heavy dose of Motown and Soul music.
In fact, it really was that amalgamation of American rhythm and blues and the Noel Coward sort of tin pan alley that formed the essence of the Brit-pop that invaded America and changed the musical scene around the world forever.
Oddly, despite now being almost 60 years beyond Brown V. the Board of Education and Shake, Rattle, and Roll being released, we are still essentially fighting the same stupid fights, with laws about immigration and diversity (which are the essence of America’s success) and voting rights.
It is easy to get sanctimonious about all of this, but, at the end of the day, as noted by another great freedom fighter, Mohandas Gandhi, “in the end, the truth is still the truth.”
Long live Chuck, Richard, Turner and rock! They started it all (with a little help from their friends).
My site mate Mike Salfino really touched on a subject so near and dear to my heart with his piece on listening to the radio–and pretty much only the radio–during his time in Southern California in the early 70’s, that it really spurred me on to state just how much I love the radio.
Say what you will about cable and streaming and dish and CDs and downloads and instant gratification: I come from time where no one had to walk six miles to school through a driving snow storm. My version of childhood deprivation is that we only had three TV stations in the Sacramento Valley (four in the Bay Area) and as a kid, local radio was AM only.
Since it was the universe in which we lived, we did not think much of it. FM was as odd and obscure as was cable TV, when it was offered at hotels a few years later for an extra charge.
But, whatever you wanted was out there on AM at the time. In Sacramento KROY was the station in the early 60’s, and though I hungered for time in Berkeley–which meant decent bookstores, and extra TV station that showed Dodger/Giants games, and much better radio–with my grandparents while I was too young to move back to the Bay Area, there were some ok things about what I now refer to as “excremento.”
The main was the original Tower Records store, about 3.5 miles from our home, which seemed to make for a formidable bicycle ride for an eight-year old (don’t ask me, no one wore helmets then, bikes had maybe three speeds, and if you wanted to ride your bike to the record store, yay, we were out of the house for three to four hours) in 1960-61.
Tower was a treasure trove, though, with listening booths and stacks of current stuff and oldies, and since part of the deal was to build a record collection, it was not out of the question to buy “The Wa-Watusi” as an oldie, as it was “The End of the World” as a current hit.
It was the radio that was our salvation, bringing the new, and to me the rockin’ and the loudest, inhabiting my every pore and cell so infectiously that I was almost paralyzed when I heard a song that sent me.
At night we could often draw in the cool Bay Area stations–KYA and KEWB–which somehow seemed to waste the local stuff in its sophistication, something I seemed able to discern that early in my years (I was also always drawn to The New Yorker at the Dr.’s office for some reason, and I don’t ever remember anyone suggesting I read it).
At the time–before I realized I had a contrary streak in me–I was also a Dodgers fan in Northern California, and sometimes I could adjust my radio against the evening sky and pull in KFI, 50,000 watts over Los Angeles, and hear Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett anounce my beloved team (sponsored by Farmer John and Union 76).
Before clock radios, and bedroom stereos, though, I would go to sleep, seemingly surgically attached to my transistor which was stashed neatly under my pillow, full volume, so I could hear it through the down feathers upon which my head rested.
Then, magically, as those same stereos and clock radios became more mainstream, so did FM radio, and San Francisco debuted the first free form station–KMPX–started by two ex-KYA jocks, Tom Donahue and Jim Washburn.
Within a year or so there were political issues at KMPX, so Donahue fled and started KSAN, right around the time I moved back to the Bay Area for good in 1972 (that station lasted until around 1983).
Much like listening to my shuffle, though, it was great. I will never forget a set that featured a movement from Swan Lake, Brother Jug by Gene Ammons, Chelsea Morning by Joni Mitchell, and She Said Yeah by the Stones.
All so different, and yet all so great, and none of it disrupted by commercials or any of that crap.
To this day, listening to radio like that–be it music, or especially baseball which still translates so beautifully via the radio medium–is and will always be my favorite.
I don’t really do Sirius/XM, or even play CD’s much any more.
But, there is something so right and intimate about listening to the radio, hearing a familiar voice describing a 53 ground out, or telling us about a new Jake Bugg tune.
So, I must share the station I have been listening to for almost the last year: KTKE, 101.5 in tiny Truckee, California (population around 10,000).
Truckee is about 40 miles southwest of Reno, and about 20 miles from the North Shore of Lake Tahoe, and as we have some property in Soda Springs–about ten miles east of Truckee–I simply discovered the station by accident, surfing through the car radio dial looking for any signs of intelligent programming.
When I found KTKE, though, it was paydirt.
To give an example of the breadth of what they play, here are the last ten tunes they list on the live stream that showed as I write:
Time to Move On (Tom Petty)
Further On (Bronze Radio Return)
Radio Girl (John Hiatt)
Vaporize (Broken Bells)
They Told Me (Sallie Ford and the Sound Outside)
Smile Happy (War)
Louie Louie (Black Flag)
I’m Shakin’ (Jack White)
Sugar Craft (Medeski Martin and Wood)
When You Were Young (Killers)
I admit, I don’t know Medeski Martin and Wood, nor Bronze Radio Return, and I could do without the Killers, but War, John Hiatt, Black Flag, Jack White, Tom Petty, and Sallie Ford all in the same set?
And, that is pretty much why I gave up tracking the news all day, or simply listening to my shuffle, as I love streaming KTKE, hearing the funky commercials from the Tahoe area (like Smokey’s Cafe and Burger Me) and the great playlist of new and old from really good and personable jocks (whom I also feel like I know).
Mostly, I love this though because I really do love listening to the radio.
