At dinner the other night, my friend Walker talked about this guy, whose piano playing was an influence on Theophilus Beckford, the Jamaican piano player who was a reggae pioneer. I’d heard the story of r and b radio in New Orleans drifting over to the Islands, and helping germinate ska’s syncopation, but didn’t have a name to put on it.
Another story on Gordon’s Wikepedia page is about Sam Phillips selling the master of Gordon’s tune Booted to both RPM records and Chess records. Both labels released it as a single, and the RPM version went to No. 1 on the R and B chart. Afterwards, RPM and Chess made a deal. RPM kept Gordon, while Chess signed Howlin’ Wolf.
Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks made four records back in the late 60s and early 70s that I wore out. Dan was a jazz guy, he liked novelty songs and the sounds of the 30s, though he started out as the drummer in the somewhat psychedelic Charlatans, a forerunner of the SF bands of the second half of the 60s. One Charlatan ended up in the Flamin’ Groovies, even.
Hicks didn’t play drums in his band, he played guitar, and he played with terrific fiddle players and acoustic bass and, of course, the Lickettes. They always sound a little crazed, mad with joy or fear or whatever bit of gut and smile they’ve got going in one of Dan’s terrific songs. All of them sound like they’re going to spin out of control, but they never do, at least not unless it’s on purpose, and the reward is a collection of great songs that are made even greater because of Hicks’ thoroughly delightful commitment to them.
This first clip is a promotional film featuring the first Hot Licks band in 1969, lip synching to their recording of the the Jukies Ball.
Here’s a silly party song with the Lickette’s out front from the Flip Wilson show.
His greatest song has all the same elements, yet isn’t silly at all.
Back in those crazy early 70s I listened a lot to Dan Hicks and Commander Cody, another funny band playing old music not for nostalgia’s sake, but because the songs are catchy and great, especially when played straight, as if the sound of before was a perfect fit for today. There were plenty of other bands mining this same vein of ore, not rock, but for me the others felt false and lacked the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll. They were playing old peoples music, while Dan and the Commander were delighting in their eternal youth.
The guitarist from the Tar Babies, Bucky Pope, has a new album out with a band called Negative Example. Ben Ratliff tells me so in the NY Times. He calls Pope “one of the great non virtuosic guitarists of the era.”
Here’s a Tar Babies song, Rockhead.
Here’s another tune.
Well, actually, it’s hard to tell who are Tar Babies and who are other bands called Tar Babies. But this is their first release, a 12″ put together from sessions produced by Butch Vig and Bob Mould. It’s a much heavier headbanging sound than the funk-inflected tunes above.
Tar Babies were from Madison Wisconsin in the 1980s. They reformed in the 90s for an elpee, and then played some more in the Aughts as the Bar Tabbies.
The only Negative Example album I could find on YouTube was this cover of the Beach Boys Disney Girls.
I don’t listen to that much metal, of any type. It would have suited my 15 year old head, but didn’t exist them (as far as I knew). Deep Purple filled that space a year or two later.
So, I saw the movie the Big Short today. It’s a fun and energetic telling of the story of the 2008 worldwide financial meltdown, with goofy period costumes (a la American Hustle), and lots of music, a la Scorcese and his imitators.
It also has Christian Bale playing an autistic genius MD with a thirst for metal. And a need to drum when things go bad. Almost all the writing and acting in the movie is on the mark, but Bale (as he often does) is above and beyond, not only chewing the scenery but making you (me) believe it needs to be chewed. That is, unostentatious ostentation.
I don’t listen to much metal, but one of the metal bands I like is called Mastodon, and they’re in the movie. Which is a good excuse to revisit this one. (And go see the movie. It is actually fun, and if you aren’t mad about the financial industry and government, you should be, with blood and thunder!)
A nice set of pictures of Debbie Harry taken by Chris Stein can be found here at Slate. Here’s a detail from the photo that makes me want to check out the whole book:
Mayfield should be most famous as the writer of the massive Ray Charles hit song, “Hit the Road Jack,” but that song isn’t on Poet of the Blues. Charles signed him to Tangerine Records, where he wrote other hits for Ray, and this song, which was made a hit by Elvis Presley in 1970, on his Back in Memphis elpee.
I didn’t know about this song until today, since it also is not on Poet of the Blues, and I have to say that if I’d only heard the Presley version I would probably wouldn’t have wondered about who wrote the song. It sounds like one of those big star blues jams, fun and all, but without a signature.
But signature is what Percy Mayfield had, always, and especially when he sang. Here’s his version of Stranger in My Own Home Town, which is deeply satisfying, but makes me want to hear Jerry Lee Lewis’s version, too.
Gene and I lived in New York in the late 70s, and I can say I was shaped by the decay and civil breakdown of that time. Ford to City Drop Dead made loyalists of us all. I’m reading Garth Risk Hallberg’s massive novel, City on Fire, which takes place in New York in 1977. So far–I’m only 250 pages in–the punk scene is his focus, but in those years, in the Bronx, another Do It Yourself movement was taking shape. Today we call it Hip Hop.
This bit about a movie called Rubble Kings makes the case that the gang summit in The Warriors was a real event, and the peace that followed (in the real world) is what created the culture that helped Hip Hop grow.
I don’t know about that history, I was downtown, but what I do know is that the music coming out of the South Bronx was as captivating as that percolating in the East Village. Here’s a trailer for the movie Rubble Kings, which surely looks like its worth a peak.
There’s a lot of dying going on, but this afternoon I read a story in yesterday’s NY Times about a singer songwriter I’d not heard of. Brett Smiley had the aim back in the day to be a similarly big star in the glam rock world as David Bowie, and coincidentally died two days before Bowie, at age 60.
Josh Max became friendly with Smiley in Central Park in the 80s. They played guitars together, critiqued each others songs, but it wasn’t until Max looked Smiley up on the internet after his death that he learned the whole story, which involves Andrew Loog Oldham, a scrapped 1974 album that wasn’t released until 30 years later, oh, and the drugs. But Max does a convincing job introducing Smiley as a genuine nice guy whose story is certainly sad but maybe not exactly tragic.
Loog Oldham recorded that original album, but after the release of the first single (Space Age b/w Va-va-va Voom), he pulled the record. It wasn’t put out until 2004. The reason?
Max writes: “I just refused to let them release the album,” Mr. Oldham said. “I knew it would be a disaster, and we’d already had one — the 45 r.p.m. release of ‘Space Ace,’ ” a song from the record.
, by a songwriter/singer named 