Prince is pretty famous for not licensing any of his music to any streaming service but Jay Z’s Tidal.
But he should also be famous for initiating many online services with various plans to serve music and publicity and other ideas over the years. After all, he was a major artist who went indy after his falling out with Warner Brothers.
He left the label, but they owned his music, so he presented himself as a slave and wouldn’t use the name Prince, since that was his slave name.
Prince’s various online ideas have now been collected at the PrinceOnlineMuseum.com. I’ve only browsed so far, so I have no tips, but this is stuff Prince did online.
This is a live cut. It’s a very fine rock song, and it only appears on the CBGB live compilation album, which was something of a survey of the bands who played CBGB who hadn’t yet signed major label deals. Mink DeVille, the Shirts, and Tuff Darts did, I don’t think the others did, but it’s still a pretty fun slice of the times.
I can’t believe we haven’t posted this one before. This is one of my favorite songs of all time.
Willy DeVille’s romantic songs kill me. This is pitch perfect, as is the whole Cabretta album. This music was taken at the time as some sort of revivalism, which as Gene said in the earlier post wasn’t handled all that much by the critics of the time, but that view misses the genius that somehow transforms that old time into the modern age. These songs aren’t oldie goldie mimicry but cries from the heart that use the languages available to express themselves most fully and directly.
One way to go with Mink Deville is the hard rock. Go here:
The sound of this YouTube clip and all those I listened isn’t as rich as the album, but this is an extraordinary rock ‘n’ roll performance from top to bottom.
My first experience of Mustang Sally was this single by the Young Rascals.
The history of white acts covering hits originally performed by black acts is long, deep and full of argument.
I mean, Pat Boone?
The Rascals, as they grew up to be known, were better than exploiters, but where you draw the line concerning cultural appropriation might color your opinion. What I’m sure of is the Rascals loved R&B music, and brought their own shape (my first thought was to say color, but that would be wrong) to it.
We could write tributes to those who have passed nearly every day. Today it is for Bonny Rice, whose biggest hit was released as Sir Mack Rice, who was a member of the Falcons in Detroit (with Wilson Pickett, Eddie Floyd, and Joe Stubbs), but who is best known for writing Wilson Pickett’s hit, Mustang Sally, and cowriting the Staple Singers’ Respect Yourself (with Luther Ingram).
The best anecdote from the NY Times’s obituary today: The song was originally called Mustang Mama, but Aretha Franklin, who played piano on the demo, convinced him to change the name.
Here’s the Wilson Pickett version, which was an R&B and pop hit. After the song there are some details about the writing of the song.
If there is an ur-moment of the birth of rock ‘n’ roll I would name the Sun Sessions with Elvis Presley. This is Elvis at his greatest, with a band that cranks it up.
If asked about the birth of rock I would chatter about Joe Turner and Little Richard. These are the giant creators of rock ‘n’ roll. And there was more going on at Sun than just Elvis in 1954.
But there are two records I put on when I want to hear the original stuff. The Sun Sessions with Elvis Presley and whatever compilation of Buddy Holly tunes I can find at hand.
Scotty Moore had jazz ambitions, but he gladly took the session backing Elvis. And you can hear in the finger picking that he inserts along with his rhythm part that his ambitions are greater than simply sideman.
Moore’s guitar is essential to Mystery Train.
What surprised me reading about this legend’s career was that his footprint wasn’t large. He made a deep impression early, and had influence forever, but there is not a big body of work out there that is Scotty Moore’s.
Still, this grab from Wikipedia explains his importance and his reticent impact:
“Moore is given credit as a pioneer rock ‘n’ roll lead guitarist, though he characteristically downplayed his own innovative role in the development of the style. “It had been there for quite a while”, recalled Moore. “Carl Perkins was doing basically the same sort of thing up around Jackson, and I know for a fact Jerry Lee Lewis had been playing that kind of music ever since he was ten years old.”[7] Paul Friedlander describes the defining elements of rockabilly, which he similarly characterizes as “essentially … an Elvis Presley construction”: “the raw, emotive, and slurred vocal style and emphasis on rhythmic feeling [of] the blues with the string band and strummed rhythm guitar [of] country”.[8] In “That’s All Right”, the Presley trio’s first record, Scotty Moore’s guitar solo, “a combination of Merle Travis–style country finger-picking, double-stop slides from acoustic boogie, and blues-based bent-note, single-string work, is a microcosm of this fusion.”[9]“
Everybody knows Jonathan loved the Velvet Underground. And John Cale produced the first Modern Lovers album, which is one of fewer than five epochal punk albums.
Later, Jonathan released this old-school rock ‘n’ roll sound, which has a fabulous sense of rhyme.
Frankly, my defense of disco would last about 100 words. It was unapologetic dance music that was the soundtrack to a great public flowering of gay and interracial utopias, hedonistic, aspirational, happy, at a time when really the whole world was going to hell.
The funny thing is that it wasn’t too long before this culture, so flamboyant and energetic and just plain wonderful, was destroyed by the darkness of AIDS.
The music, which started out as dance music by Kool and the Gang and the Ohio Players and the Commodores among many others, really straight up R&B, evolved into that pulsing 128 BPM sheen, a music that sacrifices swing for relentless intensity and pistonlike movement. This wasn’t music for sitting around and contemplating, this was music for getting sweaty on the dancefloor and sweaty in the bathroom and more sweaty at home, if you know what I mean. Utilitarian music, dance music, sex music.
Alright, that’s 154 words. Here’s a link to a story by a younger guy from Macon who explains it more, if you’re interested. The story starts out at Duane Allman’s grave, which is kind of cool.
Here are a few songs I think of as liking from that time, when you would go into a club and everyone would feel like they were in the minority. Everybody felt like they were venturing out, being a little dangerous, and also connecting to a world that hadn’t ever really existed before, to people they may not have seen before. Oh, I should also mention cocaine and amyl.
I guess my point is that you can freely hate all this music, these tunes, the beats, the arrangements, the crappy clothes the singers wore, but it really isn’t fair to say Disco Sucks. That’s because Disco was so much more bigger than the music.
The odds of me getting to Nashville are slim. The band is in North Carolina this weekend, but that’s no better.
I want to see these guys live. That’s all I can say.
I think you can find most of their recorded work on this site if you search Hans Condor, but here’s a little reprise for those who are wondering what the fuss is about.
Here’s the coda to a tune:
Here’s their excellent music video, supporting their album, with a fine rock n roll song:
