Sean Lennon (son of Beatle John) and his model/musician girlfriend Charlotte Kemp-Muhl record together under the name The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger (GOASTT).
I’m not that familiar with all of their work but I’ve always liked their first single – the Mick Ronson produced “Jardin du Luxembourg.” Ronson, you may recall, was also the producer of Amy Winehouse’s perfect album Back to Black.
If there’s one thing that’s for certain it’s that Sean, like his half-brother Julian, inherited his daddy’s vocal chords. He may also have picked up at least a whiff of his father’s knack for psychedelic (e.g. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”) lyrical imagery.
People say your brain is like cream cheese
Takes the shape of anything you please
The dust from the trails under your fingernails
The leaves in the Luxembourg garden
Are showing their true colours
They’re blushing, they’re begging your pardon
Cause time’s a jealous lover
The lyrics, vocals and instrumentation all hang together as GOASTT delivers a fine piece of modern pop with a touch of late 60s flair.
If you like the variety of Americana made by artists like the Jayhawks, Los Lobos, the BoDeans, Marshall Crenshaw, Steve Earle and the Blasters, you must also be a fan of the Spanic Boys. Huh!?! Yeah, the Spanic Boys – the best roots rock band you’ve never heard of.
The Spanic Boys are the Milwaukee based father and son team, Tom and Ian Spanic. Tom was a self-taught guitarist that loved the instrument so much that he worked to become classically trained. (He even earned a position as a guitar instructor at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music.)
Later, when it was time for son Ian to learn to play guitar, Tom made sure he was trained in the classical method on an acoustic guitar before letting him have his own Fender.
Middle aged, overweight and bespectacled; the Spanic Boys are not your stereotypical rock stars. But man, can those two sing and play.
Today’s SotW is “I’m All You Need” from their 1991 album on Rounder Records, Strange World.
The influences are obvious – Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, etc. – yet their sound is contemporary… much like Nick Lowe’s and Dave Edmund’s Rockpile. Telecaster guitar riffs, a tight rhythm section and close harmony vocals with rockabilly influences – that’s all they need.
A bit of trivia about the Spanic Boys is their connection to Saturday Night Live. They’re often credited as being the most obscure musical act ever to perform on the show (though some will dispute that). They appeared on the episode hosted by Andrew Dice Clay in May 1990. The scheduled musical act, Sinead O’Connor, refused to appear with Clay because she felt he was vulgar and misogynist (he was). Her boycott left SNL’s bandleader and musical director, G.E. Smith, in a bind for a last minute replacement. He got permission to call the Spanic Boys, a band that he really liked at the time, and the rest is history.
One of the great Stax soulmen of the 60s was Eddie Floyd. His most popular song was “Knock on Wood” which hit #1 in the US in 1966. He also had modest chart success with “Raise Your Hand”. That one only reached #79 in the US but was further popularized through cover versions by Janis Joplin and Bruce Springsteen.
Here’s a cool version of Janis singing it with Tom Jones.
Dig the groovy 60s outfits and dance moves.
But today’s SotW is about my favorite Eddie Floyd song – “Big Bird” (1967).
Floyd delivers a passionate vocal and is supported by the famous Stax/Volt rhythm section (Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, “Duck” Dunn) and the Memphis horns. Check out Cropper’s blistering guitar riff – it drives the song.
The backstory adds a little poignancy to this otherwise upbeat song. It’s been often repeated that Floyd wrote the song from Heathrow Airport in London while waiting for his flight back to the US for Otis Redding’s funeral. Hearing that his plane needed some maintenance before it would be ready to fly, he had a justifiable concern that it might not get off the ground.
“Big Bird” went virtually unnoticed here in the US but later became a Northern soul favorite in England. UK bands, like The Jam, still do cover versions.
Cilla Black died today. She was a British singer managed by Brian Epstein, so she had a vague association with The Beatles. She recorded a Lennon/McCartney composition that they never attempted themselves — “It’s For You.”
The song was later covered by Three Dog Night on their first album.
Echo and the Bunnymen was a post punk, new wave band from Liverpool, England. The band earned very favorable critical notices here in the US, but never seemed to make a really big splash even though they received some considerable airplay from college and alternative rock radio stations.
Does anyone remember the ads for their fourth album Ocean Rain that boldly claimed it was “the greatest album ever made?” US record buyers felt otherwise – it only reached #87 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart.
Despite that over exaggeration, Echo was a very good band with a bunch of songs that I really like. Their first album, Crocodiles (1980), contained my favorite and today’s SotW, “Do It Clean.”
Ian McCulloch was the artistic leader of the group, but as this garage rocker shows, it was the rhythm section of drummer Pete de Freitas and bassist Les Pattinson that really had the balls.
And that’s important because the lyrics are pretty weak — a lot of gibberish that’s probably a drug reference. But this song is really all about getting the body to move, and that it does (at least for me).
For several months my daughter Abby has been imploring me to listen to the music of Leon Bridges. I wasn’t intentionally dismissing her suggestion; it was more a case of my early onset Alzheimer’s that was keeping me from checking him out. But eventually I got with it and gave him a listen.
Have you heard him yet?
Bridges is a 26 year old, Texan soul singer in the mold of 70s era Al Green. He was pretty much unknown just a few months ago, but a popular performance at SXSW and May spot on Later… With Jools Holland helped push him into the spotlight.
His debut album, Coming Home, was recorded at home in Fort Worth, before he signed with Columbia – some of it recorded on an artificial putting green in a local bar – with the help of White Denim’s Austin Jenkins and a few other home town pals.
Today’s SotW is “Better Man.”
It is a smooth soul ballad about a man pleading for a second chance after doing his woman wrong (a well-worn theme in R&B). The record is captivating in its simplicity and openness, giving it a timeless gospel/soul feeling.
In a time when so much popular music is dependent on synthetic beats, it is refreshing to hear some real music.
Thanks, Abby, for hipping me to Leon Bridges. You know your daddy’s taste in music very well.
My appreciation for Neil Diamond has always been a mixed bag. The sequin jump suited performer of the 70s always struck me as tacky and cornball. His invitation by The Band’s Robbie Robertson to perform at The Last Waltz seemed out of place. (Robertson was his neighbor in Malibu and produced his 1976 album, Beautiful Noise.) He was the one guy that didn’t seem hip enough to fit in with the rest of the musicians on the bill. That Neil Diamond – to me – is just karaoke kitsch.
On the other hand, he wrote some songs that I really like and respect; especially some of his mid-sixties songs recorded for the Bang label. Today’s write up features two of them as covered by other artists.
The first is “Solitary Man” by Chris Isaak from his album San Francisco Days (1993).
The original by Diamond was released in 1966 but didn’t make the Top 40 until it was re-released in 1970, when it reached #21.
In an interview in the July 2008 (#176) issue of Mojo, Diamond discussed how producers Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry prodded him to write songs with more depth:
“Solitary Man was my first song where I tried to really raise the level of my songwriting. It was inspired by the Beatles’ song Michelle, which was also written in a minor key. I don’t think I’d ever written a song in a minor key before, it was the first and it kind of broke the dam for me.”
The next SotW is Urge Overkill’s version of “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” that was featured in the film Pulp Fiction.
Diamond’s original hit #10 in 1967. The Urge Overkill version and its association with Quentin Tarantino and Pulp Fiction gave Diamond some badly needed hip credibility.
In the late 2000s, Diamond dialed up his cool factor even further by working with producer Rick Rubin to record a couple of critically acclaimed albums – 12 Songs and Home Before Dark. You probably recall how much Rubin’s golden touch helped Johnny Cash reach a larger, younger, hipper audience in the latter years of his career.
Michael Hurley has been making traditional American folk music since the mid 60s. So then, how is it possible that you (probably) never heard of him? Well that just ain’t right.
He’s 73 years old and has been putting out albums consistently from 1964 up to present day, mostly on small independent labels.
He was one of the three acts on the 1976 compilation album Have Moicy! that also included cuts by the Unholy Modal Rounders and Jeffrey Frederick & The Clamtones. This album has earned massive critical acclaim – most famously selected by the Village Voice’s music critic Robert Christgau as “the greatest folk album of the rock era.”
To be honest, I did not become familiar with the record back in the bicentennial year. In fact, I really can’t remember exactly when or how I finally got acquainted with it. But it is one of those records that you can listen to a thousand times and it never lets you down. A couple of the most popular songs on the album are “Midnight in Paris” and “Griselda.” But my favorite song, and one of today’s SotW, is “Sweet Lucy.” (And I swear that has nothing to do with the fact that I named my older daughter Lucy.)
It’s a funny story about a guy and his “old lady” (sorry for the anachronistic expression, but hey it’s 1976 remember) going on a bender.
In 1994 Hurley released his 13th album, Wolfways. That album contains today’s second SotW, “I Paint a Design.” It first appeared on Hurley’s 1988 album Watertower as a solo performance. But he decided to redo it with a full band on Wolfways and I like the newer version better.
Christgau weighed in again. This time he panned Wolfways, but awarded “I Paint a Design” his Choice Cut designation – defined as “a good song on an album that isn’t worth your time or money.” Kind of harsh on the album but the song does get into your head and won’t leave. The female background vocals kill it.
The song is used very effectively over the closing credits of Ray McKinnon’s Academy Award winning short film The Accountant (2001). It can be viewed in three parts on YouTube starting here:
Any of you under 30 years old might relate to the comparisons made between Hurley and Devendra Banhart. In fact Banhart is a fan and Hurley released two of his more recent albums on Banhart’s Gnomonsong label. Hurley’s songs have been recorded by several other more current acts that are also fans – Cat Power, Espers, Vetiver, and The Violent Femmes among them.
He does most of his own album cover artwork too. Check it out.
IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED
Today’s SotW is the 500th song featured since this thing started in February 2008. Thanks for your continued feedback and support. T
I recently finished another great rock music history by Greil Marcus – The History of Rock ’N’ Roll in Ten Songs (Yale University Press, 2014). It’s a terrific book and I highly recommend it if you like intelligent, intellectual rock history.
The first song he chooses is “Shake Some Action” by the Flamin’ Groovies.
The Flamin’ Groovies were a San Francisco based band that formed in the mid 60s and lasted through the 70s as the core band. Different configurations gigged until 1992 and there have been a few reunions in the 2000s. This band never achieved the fame they deserved as pioneers of the power pop genre.
“Shake Some Action” was the title song from their fourth album, released in 1976. The song was produced by Dave Edmunds, a British pub rocker that is no stranger to cutting a pop hit.
Marcus makes his case for “Shake Some Action’s” importance in the history of Rock ‘N’ Roll thusly:
‘The story told in “Shake Some Action” is complete in its title – though in the song it’s a wish, not a fact, a desperate wish the singer doesn’t expect to come true. The words hardly matter: “Need” “Speed” “Say” “Away” are enough. It starts fast, as if in the middle of some greater song. A bright, trebly guitar counts off a theme, a beat is set, a bass note seems to explode, sending a shower of light over all the notes around it. The rhythm is pushing, but somehow it’s falling behind the singer. He slows down to let it catch up, and the sound the guitar is making, a bell chiming through the day, has shot past both sides. Every beat is pulling back against every other; the whole song is a backbeat, every swing a backhand, every player his own free country, discovering the real free country in the song as it rises up in front of him, glimpsing that golden land, losing it as the mirage fades, blinking his eyes, getting it back, losing it again – that is its reckless abandon, the willingness of the music, in pursuit of where it needs to go, where it must go, to abandon itself. “You have to go into a crowd and do something they can’t,” [Neil] Young said that day in 1993. “Some of them are hearing it and some of them aren’t, but it doesn’t matter. The idea is the tension.”
In “Shake Some Action,” the tension is there from the first moments – that count is a count to the end, the dead end, the door you’ve locked from the inside and can’t open, and the whole song can feel like an attempt to escape the tension, to let it dissipate, until the musicians no longer remember that the theme that kicked them off was fate. Here, every element in the music is a leap. As different parts of the song slow, as others pick up speed, depending on where you are, which wave in the song you’re riding, the sense of imminent loss can disappear – and then the singer drops back and there is a guitar, more than a guitarist, replacing the story you’ve heard with one you haven’t.
It’s what the singer is afraid of losing defined now purely in the positive, as flight, as freedom, in Norman Mailer’s words loose in the water for the first time in your life, because no matter how many times in how many pieces of music you are swept away at the instrumental passages in “Shake Some Action” can sweep you away, it’s always the first time. When the guitarist steps onto the magic carpet of his first solo, it is a picture of everything the singer is certain is slipping away from him, but it is not slipping away, it is present, you can hold it in your hand, see it glow. At the end, the guitarist again steps forward – and while the notes played might on paper be the same as they were before, in the air they are speaking in a different tongue. The drum roll that has tripped the song into the instrumental passage that will end it has tripped it over a cliff, and you feel not the worth of what the singer wants, but what it was worth, before it vanished, before it went back beyond memory, into fantasy, as if desire never had a face. Is that why you have to play the song again, to make it come out differently? Or because you can’t live without that beat?’
Alright!
I can’t end this post without answering the question I know you all have – What are the other 9 songs? Marcus often makes his case by discussing multiple versions of a song but I’ll just list the originals:
Transmission – Joy Division
In the Still of the Nite – The Five Satins
All I Could Do Was Cry – Etta James
Crying, Waiting, Hoping – Buddy Holly
Money (That’s What I Want) – Barrett Strong
This Magic Moment – The Drifters
Guitar Drag – Christian Marclay
To Know Him Is to Love Him – The Teddy Bears
Today’s SotW is “When Things Go Wrong” from the eponymous debut album by Robin Lane & the Chartbusters.
Although this album didn’t come out until 1980, Lane already had an established pedigree in the music business. The daughter of Ken Lane (Dean Martin’s pianist on The Dean Martin Show) and wife (for a couple of years) to The Police’s lead guitarist Andy Summers, Lane performed folk rock around LA in the late 60s and early 70s. She caught the attention of Neil Young who brought her in to contribute that haunting harmony vocal on “Round & Round (It Won’t Be Long)” from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
Somewhere around the mid/late 70s Lane moved to the east coast and ended up in Cambridge, MA where she hooked up with the Chartbusters — Asa Brebner and Leroy Radcliffe (who had been with Jonathan Richman and the post “Roadrunner” Modern Lovers), Scott Baerenwald and Tim Jackson.
With the Chartbusters she played a brand of harder rock that often led to comparisons with Pat Benatar and Heart. But she always seemed to me to be closer to Chrissie Hynde.
I saw them perform live in Boston a few times and remember that their three guitar attack was exhilarating.
When their album came out, I remember being very confused by the cover art. It didn’t seem to fit the band I had seen live. Warner Brothers seemed to try to soften their street cred by putting her in spandex (Pat Benatar again) and a stupid stripped sweater. I read an interview with Brebner and he seemed to agree.
“I still cringe at that album cover, which I think largely sunk us as a candy-ass major label contrivance to those uninitiated to our music. The music itself was watered down enough so it could not overcome that basically cosmetic impression that the casual record store [browser] would garner on seeing it in the bins. It didn’t represent us, and I felt cheated.”
Lane & the Chartbusters went on to put out a fine 5 song, live EP and a second album, Imitation Life (1981), but they never garnered the acclaim that they deserved. Damn that album cover!
In 2014 her drummer bandmate Tim Jackson, produced, directed and premiered a film called When Things Go Wrong – Robin Lane’s Story that documented her work. Hopefully it will receive a general release sometime soon.
