Category Archives: best

Night Music: Freddie Fender and Flaco Jimenez, “Until the Next Teardrop Falls”

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I was put in mind of Flaco Jimenez today because I found that clip of Cooder and Evans from a Les Blank film I haven’t seen. Flaco Jimenez was in that band, as well as many others I’ve admired over the years.

The first Les Blank film I saw was called Chulas Fronteras, Beautiful Frontiers, and it was about the Tejano culture that straddles the Mexican and Texas border. They play a fantastically rhythmic, ecstatic, danceable music there called Norteno, a blend of polka and Mexican corrida and other forms, that takes Mexican emotion and fuses it with Germanic precision.

I always think of Linda Ronstadt’s funny line, that her problem in her life was that she ended up singing like a German and thinking like a Mexican, her parental lineages. Give us more of that.

Freddy Fender was Tejano and perhaps the biggest Mexican pop star up to his time, and he constantly battled the problems of getting real and feeding the international music machine (witness the hair). Feeding wins, up to a point. In that context, this song is far from pure, but it is a hit for obvious and well earned reasons.

You Have to Hear This: Ry Cooder, Terry Evans, “Down in Mississippi”

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This is a song written by the bluesman JB Lenoir, but this version I just came across from a concert and Les Blank movie from 1987, has to be heard. Amazing!

The rest of the band: Vocals: Bobby King, Arnold McCuller, Willie Green Jr.
Drums: Jim Keltner
Bass: Jorge Calderon
Keyboard: Van Dyke Parks
Accordion: Flaco Jimenez
Percussion: Miguel Cruz
Sax: Steve Douglas
Trombone: George Bohannon

Freaks and Geeks: Nick Auditions

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Freaks and Geeks only ran for one season, did not attract a big audience, and the for a time vanished. I remember the promotion when the season was released on DVD, but it wasn’t until earlier this year I started watching it on Netflix. The premise is simple: The year is 1980, I think. A brainy high school girl, Lindsey, grows dissatisfied with her sheltered suburban life, and decides she wants to be friendly with the clique of freaks who hang together on the edge of academic engagement. Meanwhile, her nerdy brother and his friends enter high school, and try to navigate through the pubescent mine field there.

One of the freaks, Nick, is a stoner whose identity is linked with his giant 29 piece drum kit. He’s not that bright, but he’s sweet and for a while he and Lindsey go out. In this episode a leading local rock band loses its drummer and Nick auditions. The result is wonderfully nuanced.

Night Music: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”

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At some point as I approached my teens I realized that there was more to music than the current pop radio hits spun by Cousin Brucie. I read in a magazine, maybe Hit Parader, about this guy Jerry Lee Lewis and his songs Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On and Great Balls of Fire. I went down to the local record store and asked if they had the 45s and they actually had an oldies release that had both tunes on the same disk. This seven minute version of Whole Lotta is red hot and kind of awkward and goofy, too. By this point the Killer had been playing this song for seven years, but he doesn’t seem tired of it at all.

Night Music: Beck, “Satan Gave Me A Taco”

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You may or may not be a fan of Beck. He is a Scientology challenge, for sure, and he’s made a lot of desultory music over the past 10 years or so. Is his relationship to the mothership to blame? I have no idea. Is he depressive? Apparently so.

What I do know is that the music on the first handful of records he made is great. Fantastically great. His album Stereopathic Soulmanure may well be his best, but we’re all free to argue about that. What can’t be argued is that “Satan Gave Me a Taco” is irresistible.

RIP: Lou Reed

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Bear with me a moment.

I went to see Antony and the Johnsons the first time, at the Knitting Factory in Tribeca, because Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson were working with him and pumping Antony and his band up. It was a fantastic show and I immediately sent off for his first album.

This isn’t about Antony, so I’ll just say that I quickly became a fan. Coincidentally, so did my friends Jane and Pete, so when the Johnsons played Bowery Ballroom some time later we went. And when tickets were some time later again went on sale for a show at Carnegie Hall Pete was at the front of the line. A group of us, about eight or so, ended up in the seventh row middle. The seats were so good that David Bowie was in our row, and Lou and Laurie were sitting a few rows behind. When Bowie showed up Lou greeted him and they kissed on the lips. It was lovely.

The opening band was the McCulloch Sons of Thunder, a trombone band from a school in Harlem that played raucous praise music. The second performer was the incredibly frail at that point contralto Little Jimmy Scott, who was wonderful, a walking bit of history still with great instincts. And then Antony and the Johnsons played songs from the great first album and the most excellent second album, which features a photo of Candy Darling on the cover.

All of this prelude leads to this. For an encore, the ultimate one I think, Lou Reed took the stage wearing leather pants and a leather jacket. He looked lean and taut, yet way craggy, and the band played Candy Says, Lou’s great song about Candy Darling from The Velvet Underground’s eponymous elpee. Lou turned his back to the audience and played an extended solo that started simple and pretty and built into something hard and coruscating. Watching his posture and his arms and his legs but not his fingers, watching him facing Antony, who makes such pretty and heartbreaking music, watching him building this overpowering guitar solo seemingly by force of will alone, was an act of love, a sharing of the power of music and grief and the incredible obligation and opportunity that is the act of living. It was a moment of grandeur and pure passion that is perhaps unmatched in my life lived with art.

This clip of the two performing the song is from a different more casual show, and significantly lacks the guitar solo. But it is a lovely piece that comes together at the end and Lou demonstrates that same power of love, in a much simpler way.

Night Music: Betty Davis, “Anti Love Song”

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I knew nothing about Betty Davis until her records were rereleased by an enterprising and admirable label called Light in the Attic.

But that’s not why we’re here tonight. Light in the Attic has released a lot of excellent old music, but in her day Betty Davis made three albums of totally commercial funk that somehow missed the boat back in the day. And this missing was an injustice.

But the records are out there now and they truly are great. Okay, maybe if you hate women you’ll cringe at Betty’s self-assertion, but assuming otherwise, you’ll love the way she shapes the songs to a perspective that isn’t usual. And she backs it up.

Ilan Mochari Loves Counting Crows’ August and Everything After

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duritz-harlequin head

Not Ilan, Adam

I know Ilan in the most direct peripheral way: He used to write for the Fantasy Football Guide. But he didn’t write directly for me, so I’ve never met him or even had a conversation with him, except on Facebook a little. I have written him checks. For some reason, I guess having to do with the 20th anniversary of its release, and its pedigree as a T-Bone Burnett production, Counting Crows’ August and Everything After has been discussed quite a bit here recently.

Ilan weighs in with a piece for the WBUR (a Boston NPR station) website about his love for the album. He’s read the Steven Hyden piece about which I wrote a few weeks ago and quotes it, so this isn’t all out of the blue, but I liked Ilan’s personal account and thought it was worth reading. He says:

“For months, the album felt like my own little secret. I evangelized it to friends, family or anyone who’d listen. They had a hard time grasping my zealotry for the fledgling band. It seems strange, today, to think of Counting Crows as fledgling. But, for a period of five months in late 1993 and early 1994, they were. The smash hit “Mr. Jones” — which became a No. 1 song in April 1994 — had not yet been released. In casual conversations, if you mentioned Counting Crows, the likely reply was, “Are you sure you’re not thinking of The Black Crowes?”

Read the whole thing here.

In discussion on Facebook Ilan also cops to what can best be described as Counting Crows’ weaknesses, with a rationale I like a lot: “i was a little abashed about the essay, because there are millions of people who don’t respect CC’s album-mastery and judge them as lame/whiny (not without some justification), because of their dreadful joni mitchell covers and the overplaying of certain songs and what the singer LOOKS LIKE, which is so utterly phony i want to barf, but that’s humanity.”

 

Night Music: The Modern Lovers, “Roadrunner”

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All that traffic yesterday landed us outside Boston, where the Red Sox started the ALCS against the Tigers tonight. Nice to see friends checking in from the ballpark, which got me thinking about tunes about the city. Too much congruence to ignore. My first impulse was a piece of premier cheese, Dave Loggins’ maudlin “Please Come to Boston,” but as I type this the hometown boys are down 1-0 in the top of the ninth, with the Tigers threatening. Consider this classic a rally cap, in the neon when it’s cold outside:

PS> I hadn’t been paying attention, I was out at the movies seeing Captain Phillips, so I didn’t realize that the Red Sox had been no hit through eight. In the ninth Daniel Nava singled, breaking up the no hitter and introducing some offense into the Red Sox dismal night. But it was not enough.

PPS> Captain Phillips is very well done, but any reviews that suggest that there is extra thinking going on here are wrong. Very exciting action sequences are connected by succinct storytelling bits, but apart from the thrill ride there isn’t much here to make you say wow.

PPPS> All the acting, by Tom Hanks and the non-professional Somali crew, as well as everyone else, is great. As far as they’re asked to go. The Somalis go far because they’re not at all trained. Hanks goes far because he is really good when he’s inside his zone. He is here.