Keith Richards birthday today. This is upbeat.
But when I think of Keef these days I think of Wingless Angels, the recordings he made with his Jamaican neighbors. According to his book, these live recordings in his yard were pretty much done on the fly. A record of neighbors getting together for nightly jams, maybe around the fire pit. On the actual releases, you can hear the crickets. It’s beautiful.
I’m reading Springsteen’s book. It’s a good read, he’s as bold an overwriter as an autobiographer as he is (or was) a lyricist, and that’s a good thing. It’s very lively and evocative of the time and his passions as a boy, and as a teen learning to play guitar and gig around. That’s how far I am.
When he gets his first electric guitar, which costs $69 with a small amp the size of a breadbox, a Kent from Japan, he sets to learning to play Honky Tonk. Which got me to thinking about what Honky Tonk sounded like, and I couldn’t conjure it. Though, of course, it’s a song we’ve all heard a million times. Here’s Bill Doggett’s original, parts 1 and 2 combined.
It’s a blues, so of course Johnny Winter covered it. Sans shirt, for some reason, which isn’t really an impressive look.
The Winter recording is from an Italian show in 1988. A look at the Honky Tonk Wikipedia page shows tons of covers, very few of them after the 1960s. What’s funny is that the Beach Boys, that premiere harmony group covered the vocal-free song.
The Boss talks about how in the early 60s, before the Beatles, the idea of a rock combo singing was pretty much unheard of. Bands with electric guitars played instrumentals, like Honky Tonk and Pipeline and Wipe Out! Thank you Beatles.
Believe it or not. Now I know it’s time for me to move on to the next life.
My research led me to this sentence in a turntable review. Too good not to pass on:
“I forgot how one focuses when listening to a record rather than a 102 song play list. You end up reading the record jacket and actually listening.”
The former music biz guy turned newsletter ranter, Bob Lefsetz, has a piece today about something called Skyville Live. Skyville Live is a video show that appears to be a small club in which mostly old musicians play with a crackin’ house band, reeling off classic tunes quite wonderfully. Lefsetz hinges his piece on this cover of the Allman Brothers Whipping Post by country star Chris Stapleton.
https://vimeo.com/188680983
Stapleton is a rising star, maybe a rised star. He’s written more than a handful of No. 1 hits, and since becoming a recording performer (in 2015) has been nominated for just about every major award and won some of them, too. So, he’s living the dream.
Skyville Live, it turns out, is a video show out of Nashville that is shown on some weird Verizon channel, and has clips on Vimeo.
Here’s my gripe. Whipping Post is a great song. It’s also a great song because the Allman Brothers recorded it twice brilliantly. And those performances are a part of what makes Whipping Post one of the great classic rock songs of all time.
In contrast, this cover, which seems to be conferring cannon status on the song, is kind of small. I was going to get into a whole argument about organic versus copies, about virtuosity versus chops, about the magic of the moment versus the nod toward nostalgia, about the weak slide guitar, but then I found this clip of the Allman Brothers playing the song in 1970.
I can’t help but think that Stapleton and band, no matter how well intentioned, aren’t paying tribute to the song. It feels like they’re speaking to their own glory by covering a transcendent performance—in a professional manner.
Whipping Post is a great song, but part of the thing that made it as great as it is is the arrangement and musicianship of the Allman Brothers. Stapleton and his session guys are excellent, but they chose the wrong song. They act like they’re playing a song from the cannon, a tune that a proficient rendering will justify. But it doesn’t. The great classic rock songs are usually tied not only to the excellence of the song, but also the moment (and excellence) of the performance. If you don’t live up to that, why bother?
This isn’t to say that great songs and performances can’t be covered, they can, but the artist has to bring something else to the table besides the cover. Think about the Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, one of the great tunes of all time:
Devo, of course, raised their profile by their brilliant cover, which totally resets the song. Way to go, Devo.
The Searchers were a beat group out of the Merseybeat sound, contemporaneous with the Beatles and the Hollies. They recorded a lot of pop covers early on, and good ones, like Sweets for My Sweet, Love Potion #9, and most notably Needles and Pins, which they helped make a classic.
I’ve long thought them to be an important band, because they played so well, and were such an important part of this most important pop scene, but I’ve been listening again lately and as much as I like all these songs, and admire the polish and playing on them all, the variety of styles and approaches leads me to conclude that the Searchers may have been, in their day, the world’s best wedding band.
I don’t mean that as a put down. Wedding bands are different from first rate rock bands, so I’ve dug a hole the Searchers have to climb out of, but I think they can do it. My point is that bands usually coalesce around some principles that guide their sound, their choice of material, their approach, or in other words, their vibe.
The Searchers didn’t really. They had the beat group sound, but they sampled pop and soul sounds without any orthodoxy. They just played, and like the best wedding bands, they brought great chops and energy to everything they did.
Which brings us to Alright, which seems to owe a lot to Ray Charles, but which also has a kick ass guitar solo. I love the way these guys play, but I also see that they’re not very visionary. Nothing wrong with that, but it does tamp down expectations. In any case, enjoy this!
In a week of sad deaths, I have no personal stake in the death of Sharon Jones.
I’m not heartless, I just mean that despite her gifts as a singer, and the obvious talents of the Dap Kings, I found much of their music more a simulation of other music than something organic. Music of nostalghia rather than experience.
I always put Sharon Jones in the same basket of imponderables that I put Gillian Welch, an Appalachian archivist who mimicked old styles more than create her own.
That said, Sharon Jones had a great soulful voice, as Gillian Welch did fine Appalachian holler, and with the Dap Kings made sounds that were totally derived from the old music, but live in real time. I think that means they made me think I was living in those days, though I won’t testify to that.
In any case, she has died, and left a funky body of work behind.
I remember an indie band called Gomez, but not one called Chavez. But Chavez is back! And the NY Times put this on their weekly list of new tracks to pay attention to.
They were on Beavis and Butthead once, too.
I don’t remember whether I first heard Leon Russell on Mad Dogs and Englishmen, or the Concert for Bangladesh or his excellent solo albums. What I remember is that he was off the radar until he was on it, and when we found out about him we loved his songs and his piano, we loved his Stones covers and we loved Youngblood. But what I remember most distinctly was learning that he’d been a session player on Frank Sinatra sides!
But when someone dies you learn other things. Such that Russell co-wrote (with Bonnie Bramlett) Superstar, the great weird Carpenters song.
And then there is the session work, like this early Stones demo featuring Russell, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, of a song that grew up to become Shine A Light.
And then there is the big hit.
Found myself singing 2000 Man today. It’s a great song to sing when you’re doing something mindless. And so, while I cooked dinner, I put on the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesty’s Request.
It is a psychedelic record by the least psychedelic rock band of all time, but mostly that doesn’t matter. For instance, in In Another Land, there is a psychedelic verse with harpsichord and audio effects, but when the chorus kicks in, the song rocks. Then I awoke, was this some kind of joke? Yes!
You should listen to the whole album. Even Gomper, the Stones prequel to Patti Smith’s Radio Ethiopia, has merit, but the fact is that all the songs rock in a way no other psychedelic band rocked. Thank Charlie, perhaps. The songs can’t help it. Here’s 2000 Man, a song about temporal displacement the Kinks would be have been happy to record.
Okay, my favorite song on the album, may be The Citadel:
I have been listening to the complete reissue of The Who Sell Out, which has the original tracks and bits of commercials supporting Peter Townshend’s penchant to make an album a cohesive unit.
Townshend, as most of you likely know, imagined the album as a daily radio program on the BBC, so he sprinkled in radio spots, largely performed by the band making the music sparkly, the ads goofy and funny, and the entire work just so different and musically prescient that the whole affair just kills me. In fact, The Who Sell Out is my favorite album by the band.
With the reissue all the original cuts are indeed there, along with the released spots, but there are almost 30 cuts on this, with several takes on several songs in several styles making the whole smorgasbord kind of fascinating in so many ways.
But, at the core is the music which my mate Steve Gibson called alternative, even though the album was released 10 years before the Sex Pistols saw daylight.
If you listen to the song below, Jaguar, I think you will see what Steve means.
If you drop down to Rael, you will find an instrumental riff that worked its way into Underture from Tommy.
