Little Joe Cook died this week at the age of 91. Cook had one Top 40 hit with the doo-wop influenced “Peanuts” in 1957. You can read his full obit here:
So why would I take the time to write an extra SotW for an old guy from the ‘50s that is barely a footnote in rock and roll history? Quite simply, because he was ours.
You see back in the 1980s BC (before children) my friends and I used to frequent the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, MA where Little Joe held a long residency. He could bring together the entire community – old and young, black and white, rich and poor, preppy and punk, townies and tourists – like no other performer.
He would play “Peanuts” several times a night and the crowd loved it.
He would work the crowd to get everyone “cookin” on the dance floor. It could be a zero degree, February night but it would be 100 in the Cantab. We would walk out of the club into the cold so drenched in sweat that you hair would freeze on your head.
Inside the Cantab it sounded like this:
So rest in peace, Little Joe. You touched a million lives.
David Ruffin was the lead voice in The Temptations, singing some of their most important hits including “My Girl”, “Ain’t to Proud to Beg” and “I Wish It Would Rain.” He was clearly one of the most important voices in the history of soul music.
His raspy, yet sweet, voice was an inspiration to many other singers including a number of rock artists that covered his material like Rod Stewart as a solo artist (“(I Know) I’m Losing You”) and with the Faces (“I Wish It Would Rain”) and Mick Jagger (“Ain’t to Proud to Beg”).
But Ruffin was also a flawed man, succumbing to substance abuse that affected his ability to keep his professional commitments to the group. This eventually led to him being fired… sort of. He famously showed up at a number of their gigs where he would jump up on stage, grab the mic from his replacement (Dennis Edwards) and sing some of his best known songs. This was all portrayed in a 1998 miniseries on NBC.
Once Ruffin left the Tempts, his career was virtually over even though he continued to record, release and perform material up until his death in 1991 at age 50. But not quite. His first release as a solo artist is a classic and today’s SotW – “My Whole World Ended (The Moment You Left Me).”
This is a very cool song. It opens with a flute piece that’s based on “Frühlingslied” by Felix Mendelssohn. Then the Funk Brothers kick in with another steady groove — a funky bassline, sharp horn charts, and Latin percussion.
Then comes “the voice.” Ruffin’s performance is intense and emotional – as if he has something to prove (to his former group, and he does). You can feel his pain as he describes how he can’t go on without the woman that ditched him. He wants so badly to understand why she left him (and hopes he can convince her to come back).
Oh tell me baby
Where did I go wrong, honey
Whatever changed your mind, baby
I’ve asked myself these questions over a million times
Baby, baby, oh baby
My whole world ended the moment you left me
I can listen to this song a thousand times and never tire of it. They just don’t make ‘em like this anymore.
Oops. Last Saturday I told you it was Record Store Day. I was a week ahead of myself. In fact, today is Record Store Day. So please support your favorite independent record store and treat yourself to a vinyl collectible today.
I went to a record collectors show a few weeks ago. One of the vendors had a box of records for $5 each. I ended up buying two or three simply because I had never seen them before. That’s pretty unusual for me. I come across a lot of records I don’t own, but very few I’ve never heard of or seen.
One was a double album by a band called Heads Hands & Feet. Have you ever heard of them? Well, they were pretty damn good.
I had to do a lot of digging on the web to learn about them. Here’s what I found. They were a British sextet made up mostly of professional session musicians. Chas Hodges (bass, violin, vocals) had been around the block, working with Joe Meek, Shirley Bassey and Jerry Lee Lewis. Lead guitarist Albert Lee went on to a long career in the music biz including work with Eric Clapton, Dave Edmunds and Willie Nelson. He was best known as James Burton’s replacement in Emmy Lou Harris’ Hot Band, contributing to several of her best known albums including Luxury Liner and Evangeline. His reputation rests on his ability to play very fast. Tony Colton (lead vocals) and Ray Smith (guitar) co-wrote most of the songs.
Most of the info I found on the band describes them as a country band. If you check out their YouTube videos they definitely live up to that billing. But the disc I bought (their debut) is much more expansive.
Take, for example, today’s SotW – “Look at the World It’s Changing/You Because You Know Me.”
The first song in the suite, “Look at the World…,” sounds more like early prog rock to me — a bit of Pink Floyd here, a dash of The Strawbs there. Drummer Pete Gavin’s style reminds me of ELP’s Carl Palmer. It also has a pretty nifty alto sax solo by guest Elton Dean. Dean had played with Reginald Dwight in Long John Baldry’s band. (Dwight combined their first names to come up with his famous stage name – Elton John.)
“Look at the World…” segues gently into “You Because…” which is a beautiful folk song. It has certain elements that could have been lifted out of the Paul Simon songbook.
So the record show was a success for me. I scored a good record and learned about a band I’d never heard of before. I love it!
BTW – This cut is a vinyl rip because the song isn’t available for download. Nor is it available on YouTube or Spotify. It’s just too rare.
Speaking of vinyl records… today is Record Store Day. Please try to support your favorite local record store. You can probably find a cool special edition collectible by one of your favorite artists or some unexpected gem like today’s SotW.
Sloan is a Canadian quartet that’s been around for over 20 years but is virtually unknown here in the US. They are a national treasure in The Great White North, right up there with their much more famous rock brethren such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.
I first heard of them on a compilation disc I picked up in the very early days of the CD, when titles available on the format were still relatively few. The CD contained the first single, “Underwhelmed,” from their Geffen debut Smeared.
There’s a distinct feature to “Underwhelmed” that makes it a very odd choice for a first single – the lyrics contain no rhymes. Instead, the song is a long narrative about a boy that is infatuated with a girl in his class, but they’re very different. He’s pretty conventional (maybe a geek) and she’s a bit of a rebel. He’s smitten with all of her little peccadilloes – things that she’s totally oblivious to. She couldn’t care less about him. Here’s a sample:
She wrote out a story about her life
I think it included something about me
I’m not sure of that but I’m sure of one thing
Her spelling’s atrocious
She told me to read between the lines
And tell her exactly what I got out of it
I told her affection had two F’s
Especially when you’re dealing with me
I usually notice all the little things
One time I was proud of it, she says it’s annoying
She cursed me up and down and rolled her R’s, her beautiful R’s
This is pure genius. And it’s a pretty fun pop song too. It opens with a sound like a buzzing bee then bursts into psychedelic riffage you might expect to hear from Nirvana or Sonic Youth. The vocal harmonies fit the style of the song and enhance it.
With all four band members writing songs, Sloan is a very prolific group. They’ve released somewhere in the order of 175 songs! Check them out.
Some time ago one of you responded to one of my weekly missives to say that week’s song was also on the All Music Guide critic Stephen Thomas “Tom” Erlewine’s Desert Island Singles list. On his allmusic.com bio page he provides a couple of other “lists” — The Usual Suspects — Boring Desert Island Discs I Still Love and The Real Desert Island List — Albums I Listen to More Than the Previous List.
I really relate to his taste in music. I especially respect his singles list. He fearlessly includes such “unhip” selections as Al Stewart’s “Time Passages” and Spandau Ballet’s “True” (a song I often closed with when I was a club DJ in the mid 80s).
At the end of his “lists” he creates up a bunch of “categories” and selects his own “winner.” Here are a few examples with my answers added in parentheses:
Favorite Music Books:
Shakey; The Last Party; No Sleep Til Hammersmith (Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music) Favorite Songwriters:
Chuck Berry; Nick Lowe; Ray Davies; Lowell George (Lennon/McCartney, Dylan, Ray Davies) Singers Who Make Your Skin Crawl:
Patti Smith; Linda Perry (Stevie Nicks) Artist You Will Always Defend:
The Rolling Stones (The Beatles) Albums That You Will Always Defend:
Urge Overkill — Exit the Dragon; Menswear — Nuisance (Crowded House – Woodface)
Australia’s Crowded House began as a trio (Neil Finn, Paul Hester and Nick Seymour) and recorded their first two albums in that configuration. For Woodface, Neil recruited his brother Tim Finn (formerly of Split Enz who had a hit with “I Got You” in 1980) who brought along a batch of songs and another terrific harmony voice. Add production help from Mitchell Froom and mixing expertise from Bob Clearmountain and there’s a decent chance the album will be pretty good.
The lyrics tell an interesting story but are vague enough to leave room for any number of interpretations.
Walking ’round the room singing Stormy Weather
At Fifty Seven Mount Pleasant Street
Well it’s the same room, but everything’s different
You can fight the sleep, but not the dream
Things ain’t cookin’ in my kitchen Strange affliction wash over me Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire Couldn’t conquer the blue sky
Well, there’s a small boat made of china It’s going nowhere on the mantelpiece Well, do I lie like a lounge room lizard Or do I sing like a bird released?
Everywhere you go, always take the weather with you
I’ve always thought of this as another in the long line of break up songs. “The same room, but everything’s different” is the feeling we all experience when someone we love is no longer present. And who among us hasn’t lost sleep after losing a lover? Then again I could be totally off base!
I’m also intrigued by the song’s form/structure. It opens with vaguely Eastern sounding chords and rolls into the first verse with Beatle like harmonies. Next it moves into a second verse with a totally different melody. (Some might call it a bridge, but I wouldn’t.) The third verse is just like the first but it’s a little more complicated. In the final “movement” the song title is repeated numerous times. It could be tedious, but not in the hands of this band. They arrange it in such a way that you hardly notice.
I again refer you to Spotify to check out the rest of the album, especially “Chocolate Cake,” “It’s Only Natural,” “Fall At Your Feet,” and “Four Seasons In One Day.”
In the late 70s – early 80s the best place to see and hear rock ’n roll in Boston was basement club The Rathskeller – known as The Rat, for short. For those of you who were never in Boston back in those days, The Rat in Kenmore Square was Boston’s equivalent to New York’s CBGB’s.
Not only did The Rat have great music, it was also home to the ground floor rib joint called the Hoodoo Barbeque. The Hoodoo was relocated to The Rat after its predecessor, The Rainbow Rib Room (at the corner of Mass Ave and Newbury St), closed. Chef James Ryan had a recipe for the best ribs and barbeque sauce I’ve ever tasted and the onion rings were out of this world. They were cooked by comedy sitcom writer/producer Eddie Gorodetsky who was then a student at Emerson College and entertained his customers with his humor, cracking wise while performing his fry cook duties. Both spots had fantastic, eclectic juke boxes with records by everyone from The Clash to Tom Waits to John Coltrane.
But I digress.
The radio station I was a DJ at (WZBC) was transitioning at the time. We were quick to pick up on the US and British punk/new wave music of the day – before the big Boston commercial stations, WBCN and WCOZ. We also played the music of a lot of local bands, doing our best (with only 1000 watts) to help break them. Human Sexual Response was a favorite at ZBC. If you’ve never heard them, check out their first album, Fig. 14, on Spotify as Fig. 15. Or better yet, try to find a live performance on YouTube. They were really performance artists, so the visuals were as important as the music.
The song I’ve chosen for today’s SotW is by La Peste – one of the local scene’s most notorious punk rock bands that appeared frequently at The Rat.
“Better off Dead” is also a straight ahead punk rock record – three in-your-face chords and angry, abrasive lyrics about a daughter having under aged sex that the parents can’t do anything about.
The band was a trio fronted by Peter Dayton. Their recorded output was very slight but “Better off Dead” alone is good enough to keep their memory alive. Dayton is now a fine artist based in Long Island.
This is just one example of the vibrant local rock scene in late 70s Boston.
Today’s SotW is “Mother Earth” from the band of the same name, a group led by Tracy Nelson. The song was written by country blues artist Memphis Slim and was included on Mother Earth’s debut album Living with the Animals from 1968.
Nelson was a pretty good blues singer and piano player that often drew comparisons to Janis Joplin – partly because she moved her band’s home base to San Francisco in the late 60s and partly because her repertoire leaned toward the blues and R&B favored by Joplin. I don’t think they sound much alike even if the pained shriek Nelson lets out on the word “go” on the last line of “Mother Earth” (“You got to GO back to Mother Earth”) does remind me of Janis’ scream in her classic “Piece of My Heart.” It’s beautiful.
Another “connection” to Joplin is through Powell St. John who wrote several originals for the album and, in the early 60’s, was in a Texas band with a young Joplin called the Waller Creek Boys.
But I must admit, the real reason I’ve selected “Mother Earth” for the SotW is because it benefits from a great performance by blues guitar master Mike Bloomfield who was originally credited on the album as Makal Blumfeld, apparently due to contractual obligations.
Bloomfield grew up in Chicago and knew from a very early age that he wanted to be a blues guitarist (much to the chagrin of his wealthy parents). He studied the seminal recordings and went a step further, befriending some of the idiom’s most important masters and picking their brains to learn the techniques they devised.
Just listen to the licks and solos he played on “Mother Earth” and you can tell this guy really understood the blues including its vices — drugs and alcohol. It has often been rumored that Bloomfield recorded his parts on Living with the Animals lying on his back, too drugged out to sit up or stand. Unfortunately his excesses led to an early death by overdose at the age of 37.
But I shouldn’t sell the album too short. It really is a pretty decent album aside from Bloomfield’s contributions. Other quality musicians were involved including his colleagues from the Butterfield Blues Band, keyboardists Barry Goldberg and Mark Naftalin.
I’m long overdue for a SotW featuring new music, so I’ll fix that today with a song by the band Temples.
Temples is a new psychedelic 4 piece band from the UK that treads much of the same territory as Tame Impala. But where TI takes 60s psych influences and gives them a very modern face lift, Temples seems happy just to inhabit the sounds of the past. They even record with analog equipment, including reel-to-reel tape deck and effects pedals, and classic Rickenbacker 12 string guitars.
Their first single, “Shelter Song”, was released in 2013 but their debut album, Sun Structures, was just released in February.
You can hear the territory that “Shelter Song” stakes out from its first psilocybin chords. The music draws comparisons to so many icons of Nuggets era 60s psych – 13th Floor Elevators, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Byrds, Donovan, Love, Syd period Pink Floyd – that it’s senseless to try to name them all. I even hear a little Marc Bolan/T Rex glam influence too. (But I may be influenced by lead sing/guitarist James Bagshaw’s curly head of hair with that assessment.)
When Bagshaw sings the hippy dippy lyrics, his vocals are somewhat reminiscent of Robert Plant.
One night
You came on over to me
Late night
We shared a drink or three
Night night
I read a proverb to you
That night
She left a room with a view
Take all the time
Time that you want to
Make up your mind
Mind how you go
Take me in time
Time to the music
Take me away to the twilight zone
That the band has an ear for a decent pop melody is what makes their album so pleasurable. If you’re up for a paisley filled, musical nostalgia trip, Temples’ Sun Structures will take you there.
Back in the day before CDs, downloads and streaming, people bought their music on vinyl albums from record stores. The 12” album covers often had extraordinary artwork but also were large enough to publish vast amounts of information – liner notes. They included biographical info, lyrics and production credits. I would occasionally be induced to give a record a listen because I read the liner notes and thought the instrumentation was interesting or found some familiar names in the musician credits.
That was the scenario that first led me to listen to singer/songwriter Dirk Hamilton’s debut album, You Can Sing On the Left or Bark On the Right (1976). The album was on ABC Records and was produced by Dan Katz who also produced Steely Dan (one of my favorite bands) on the same label. In fact Katz brought in a slew of the session musicians — Elliott Randall, Jeff Porcaro, Victor Feldman, Larry Carlton — that played on the Steely Dan albums to work on Hamilton’s record. Instinct told me this album would be good.
Well, I wasn’t disappointed but it wasn’t because of the crack musicians. It was Hamilton’s terrific songwriting that won me over. He writes with wit and humor, and has a keen eye for detail. His lyrics use clever wordplay and rhymes.
After two records for ABC, he moved on to Elektra/Asylum where he also made a couple of albums. The first for E/A was titled Meet Me At The Crux (1978) and received excellent critical notices. In 1990, Steve Pond of Rolling Stone included it on his list of “glorious one-shots and overlooked gems” of the 70s.
Here’s the cut that Hamilton refers to as his “least unknown song,” from Crux.
I liked these records so much that in the summer of 1978 I used my affiliation with WZBC (Boston College’s radio station) to arrange an interview with Hamilton before his gig at the Last Chance Saloon in Poughkeepsie, NY. (Before the interview I was having dinner with my girlfriend at a nice restaurant. I hurried through it fearing that I was going to be late for the interview. She accused me of caring more about the interview than being with her. At that moment I did.)
Fast forward to the present.
I was reading my Facebook news feed recently and what popped up? A notice that Dirk Hamilton would be performing at a funky little art gallery in Berkeley called the Art House. How this ended up on my feed I’ll never know, but I took it as a sign that I should check it out. My wife and I arrived early and were the first ones in the door other than the guy that runs the place – and Hamilton. In this intimate setting I was able to have a nice chat with him.
He told me that he dropped out of the music business for a few years back in the 80s, but quickly returned. He was born in Indiana, grew up in California and now lives in Texas where he’s still writing, recording and performing. He has a strong fan base in Italy and spends a couple of months doing concerts there every summer.
Sometimes the music business just isn’t fair. If it were, you all would already know about Hamilton and have some of his music in your collection. It’s not too late.
I recently read a blog post by music industry insider Bob Lefsetz (The Lefsetz Letter) about the new Rosanne Cash album, The River & The Thread. (He liked it.) He mentioned that the songs were co-written with her husband, John Leventhal, and went on to say that Leventhal “worked his magic most famously on Shawn Colvin’s debut, still my favorite album of the nineties, even though it was released at the tail end of 1989.”
That comment was enough to inspire me to blow the dust off a SotW essay I started years ago on Colvin’s “Shotgun Down the Avalanche” – a song off said debut Steady On that Leventhal produced and co-wrote with Colvin.
This is a lovely song with the “avalanche” serving as a metaphor for the fragility of a faltering relationship. (Stevie Nicks conjured up a similar image with her classic “Landslide.”) In fact, it’s about her relationship with Leventhal!
I love you so much and it’s so bizarre
A mystery that goes on and on and on
This is the best thing and the very most hard
And we don’t get along
After countless appeals
We keep spinning our wheels
On this mountain of new fallen snow
So I let go the catch and we are over the edge
You have left me nowhere to go
The song is beautifully arranged and performed by Colvin and Leventhal. Colvin has described getting the sound she wanted by tuning “the low E string down to D so when the verses and chorus hit the major V, a D chord, the bass would ring out.”
Steady On contains many other fine songs that had the benefit of some terrific supporting musicians including Bruce Hornsby (piano), Rick Marotta (drums), Soozie Tyrell (fiddle player now with Springsteen’s E Street Band) and Suzanne Vega (background vocals).
