Earlier today I signed up for a music referral service called My Jams (I think). And posted a clip of the Crystals performing Da Doo Ron Ron on a TV show, with fantastic go go dancers. But I can’t figure out how to transfer that clip to this site, so I’m abandoning it.
And rather than double post the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron,” the greatest rock song of all time, today, I thought I’d instead shimmy into a really great Smokey Robinson song performed by the fantastic Mary Wells.
For a part of the summer between Elementary School and Junior High School, I was in love with a girl who was moving from seventh to eighth grade. Yes, an older girl.
I remember the joke that she told the night we (a bunch of boys and a bunch of girls, coincidentally) all slept out in our (adjacent) backyards. A girl is wearing a big dress. Someone says, I admire all your petticoats. She says, Oh no, I just teased my hair.
It took a while for us boys to understand (we weren’t thinking about pubic hair, I’m sure, and probably didn’t really know what petticoats were either), and while I can’t say it’s funny, I do remember. I think that counts.
We had some fun times that summer, surely driven by her and her friends enjoyment teaching us elementary school kids about growing up and our enjoyment learning, but at some point she and her family went on holiday to Cape Cod. We said we would write, and I did. Immediately.
So did she, but there was of course the lag before the mail was delivered. It seemed interminable. In those days of waiting, I sang along with what was the top hit in the country, everywhere. I’m not sure what the mailman thought, me and my friends trailing him like pilot fish, but when her letter came it was, um, a reminder that we were just kids.
But The Letter is still a great song.
Of course it turns out that the song was sung by Alex Chilton, who eventually became a great rock artist.
“Teenage Superstar” last night started a Night Music series of my favorite songs. For a while I’m going to post the stuff I really like.
Today Lawr sent an email to the group asking if we’d heard the John Prine tune, “In Spite of Ourselves,” sung with Iris Dement. Well yes, I said, but that put me in mind of this one, one of my favorite songs of all time. The album recording might be tighter, but part of Iris’s great talent is making herself available to her audience, which the video gets a little of.
The Vaselines were a short-lived Scottish band in the 80s who broke up after the release of their first album in 1989, and then got sort of alternative famous because Nirvana covered three of their songs. Sub Pop released all their recorded works in The Way of the Vaselines, in 1992, which is how I came to know them. It’s a terrific album full of catchy gems recorded with passion and a brilliant original sense of the sound of a pop song. “Teenage Superstar” is a fine example of a hooky melody, noisy accompaniment and radio-friendly lively vocals leading to recorded nirvana. Funny and snotty and clever, too. One of many on the disk.
There is a new box set of all of Sly’s music, and today was the last day of summer. What does that make? Magic.
I saw on Facebook today that the Dallas Observer had a feature listing Lucinda Williams’ 11 best songs. Williams is one of my favorite songwriters and performers and, without looking at the Observer’s list, I thought it might be a nice challenge to come up with my own 11 favorites. Here goes:
“Passionate Kisses,” Lucinda Williams
Pretty much a perfect pop song, though the arrangement here (as on this third album as a whole) is a little too clean and pretty. Or, maybe, not shiny and slick enough for pop radio. Mary Chapin Carpenter’s cover was a big hit.
“Pineola,” Sweet Old World
Harrowing story-song that crawls forward into the deepest of griefs, then explodes into a howl of defiance and resignation.
Live version of Pineola, plus Drunken Angel (which is listed below).
“I Lost It,” Car Wheels On a Gravel Road
An oldie from Happy Woman Blues that she rerecorded with the hard rocking band that defined her sound in the middle years. The 1980 version is lovely, sounds as classic as a Hank Williams track, while this is slower, more bluesy, more pounding, like a Hank Williams Jr. track (without the cheese).
“Drunken Angel,” Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
Sneering angry rant, makes the feet tap and the skin crawl.
“Greenville,” Car Wheels On a Gravel Road
Achingly sad breakup song, with Emmylou Harris singing harmonies (on the record, not the clip).
“Metal Firecracker,” Car Wheels On a Gravel Road
Has the poppy spright of Passionate Kisses, but delivers a breakup song full of hurt and a wishful rewriting of history in plain lovely language that kicks off on an irresistible hook.
“Lonely Girls,” Essence
Simple poetic language and a subtle folky reggae setting, doesn’t really go anywhere and doesn’t have to. I could listen to this all day.
“Essence,” Essence
A churning insistent atmospheric punch of love, it is at this point in her career her most naked expression of masochistic surrender, except that if this is surrender I’d hate to see the war.
“Changed the Locks,” Live at the Fillmore
The studio version on the Lucinda Williams album has the bones of a great song, but this live version is loud and scratchy and a full expression of the song’s anger and defiance.
“Fancy Funeral,” West
Plain and plaintive observation following her mother’s death. More intimate for its impersonal but poignant details.
“Honey Bee,” Little Honey
A flat out rocker that sounds more like her live band rampaging through that Texas rock sound that ZZ Top (maybe) invented.
Conclusion: Many shared tunes with the Dallas Observer, it turns out, and many differences. A note about Side of the Road, their No. 1 (they ordered their list, mine is chronological) tune. It’s a fantastic story song, as the writer says, sad and yet not depressing, an evocation of being a person in something larger than yourself but not sure where that ends and you begin. I left it off my list because I’ve always found the verse about looking up at the farmhouse a little clumsy, and that’s a fair judgement perhaps, but playing it again just now I’m reminded about how great a song it is despite that. It should be on my list of 12.
The site can never have too many kick-ass videos.
1) If I’d have heard this back then when I was nine, I’d likely be dead or in jail now.
2) Give me some of whatever Wayne Kramer is on.
3) Kramer’s second guitar solo is probably my favorite cliche rock solo riff of all-time. If every guitar solo had those arpeggios in it, I wouldn’t mind. For you youngsters out there, learn that technique and you will instantly sound HOT!!!
Little Richard’s version of “Rip It Up” was the first release, followed later by Bill Haley and the Comets’ cover. Which do you like best?
The song was written by John Marrascalco and Robert Blackwell, who also wrote Good Golly Miss Molly and Ready Teddy for Little Richard.
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:
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.
I always have, and I hope I always will.
