In real life Ethan Hawke made a mixtape of his favorite songs by the Beatles during their solo career to give to his daughter, apparently after he and Uma divorced.
At the same time, over the last 12 years or so, he was making a move with Richard Linklater called Boyhood, which is the story of a boy from the age of five to 17. The trick of the movie is that it was shot with the same actors over a 12 year period. Ethan Hawke plays the boy’s father, and he presents him with the Black Album after the fictional couple, the boy’s parents divorce.
This article at Buzzfeed publishes the song list for three disc worth of tunes (too many), and the liner notes that Hawke gave his daughter and rewrote for the movie’s purposes. Beatles experts may have something to say about its interpretation of history, but I would say the whole thing is kind of lovely. Much nicer than How Do You Sleep?
I’m not sure anyone wants to follow how I landed on this song.
We went to see Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell tonight at a show in the park by Lincoln Center. For free. This city in the summer is chockablock with concerts and movies in the parks.
Emmylou Harris got her fame from singing with Gram Parsons, but she’s done a ton of great stuff since GP died. The show tonight opened with a Parson’s song, moved onto a Townes Van Zandt song, and then moved onto tunes from Emmylou and Rodney’s histories, and (of course) the Grammy-winning album they released last year.
Country music is all about song writing. There are fantastic musicians playing country music, but all of them are playing to service the tunes that the great songwriters provide. Which is why outsiders are (or maybe it is better said were) anathema. They don’t/didn’t understand how the system works.
Gram Parsons was not part of the system, but he loved the songs.
I discovered Gram Parsons and bought his records and his CDs, though he was long dead. But he taught the Rolling Stones a lot about country music, and the songs were fantastic.
Until today I thought Parsons wrote Streets of Baltimore, which is a dark story song a couple who leave the country for the city. Turns out the song was written by some country dudes. With story and chorus and verse, it’s not trad., but part of our American history for sure.
I cannot even remember what I was looking for in YouTube when on the list of suggested items I saw a link to a version Dion’s Runaround Sue, just a fantastic song.
I am sure Peter and Gene, New Yorkers both, appreciate Dion, first with the Belmonts, then as a solo artist, who represented the doo wop bands, and the toughness of the New York streets of the 50’s better than anyone.
Dion’s pained voice and words reflected the unspoken angst of an era when angst was indeed not to be spoken about: but, at least we could live our pain vicariously through Mr. diMucci.
Dion, who had his struggles along with his hits, still lives and I believe still performs, but in the 1961, with Runaround Sue, he was dynamite.
What is funny is this clip, of the singer with the band The Del Satins, is just weird.
First, I don’t remember ever hearing-or at least knowing about–a song by them backing Dion.
Second, I could swear they are all just lip synching here, because Dion recorded the song under his name alone after splitting with the Belmonts. And, the song represented sure as hell sounds like the original recording.
But, even for lip synching, these guys have to be the most laconic band in the history of anything.
Even so, my man Dion is still at least trying to perform, but the rest of the band, especially the back up sax guy who largely snaps his fingers, and sings back-up with the two guitar players, is almost dead. And, when they go into their “awwwwwwwws” none of them moves even remotely close to the single mike. Not too mention their lips are way out of synch.
The piano guy is even worse, for though he is playing, or pretending anyway, he is largely looking at the camera in some kind of earlier wishful version of a photo bomb or selfie or something.
But, enough of the band, the audience is even worse. They seem to be in a nightclub, but no one has have a drink in front of him or her (well, ok, I saw one beverage, but it looks untouched). Otherwise, they are just fucking sitting there, while Dion is at least pretending to wail. And, even if the song is piped in from the original recording, that song rocks.
Yet not one person is so much as tapping their finger on the nice white table cloths, or even swaying just a little.
Which confirms my notion of how sadly repressed we were.
Whew. Glad we can all now have sex and drugs and rock’n’roll.
While we are at it, while thinking about this piece, I happened to hear J.D. McPherson on KTKE, in Truckee, performing a song new to me, but surely evocative of Dion and doo wop and rock’a’billy.
Check it out. Pretty cool tune, and though it seems the sax is overdubbed in this video, the sax player still showed more moxie than that guy in the Del Satins.
I’m thinking about 1974 because this weekend there is a high school reunion featuring the Smithtown High School class of 74 out on Long Island. I’m upstate and can’t get away for what would be a fun time hanging with old friends. I wish I could.
Which got me thinking about the songs of our senior year. These are the songs, if I was there, I would hope would evoke tears and lovely hugs, which reminded us best of how much more civilized we are now than we were than.
So I started sifting through the top pop songs of 1994 and discovered that the first song I could embrace esthetically was also a killer dance tune and just one of an amazing album’s worth of songs in a variety of genres by a band that would late become emblematic of disco dreck. But that was later.
But for one album, called “Wild and Peaceful,” Kool and the Gang were not only a great funk band, a great soul band, a great jazz band, and a great pop band, but, um, a great band.
If I were able to get out to the Marriott in Islandia tomorrow night and join in a rocking dance floor, the first song I’d want to hear is this one. Hello all!
In 1981 my friend Max and his associate (and our friend) Kathy, made an advertisement for the magazine Max worked for: Audio.
I have no recollection of how the whole thing came together, but at the end of the day three members of the Warren Street All Starz stickball team, Rafael Pizarro, Fleming Meeks and moi, were cast. Fleming as the delicate consumer, Rael and I as the Mono Brothers, the wild beasts of the street.
The “record store” was set up in the Cooper Square loft of Janet, a friend of other All Starz members.
I remember brutalizing my hair with a pair of scissors, trying to make it as spiky as I could, before heading over to the shoot, though it doesn’t look that spiky.
The image tells the rest of the story. This episode did not prove to be a stepping stone to a new career.
I came across this story today, by Anil Dash, which celebrates the 30th anniversay of Prince and the Revolution’s Purple Rain by dissecting it. Full of excellent detail, it also illustrates our current linking problem. Many of his links are to Spotify tracks, which don’t play for me. I hope they do for you.
But what was weird and wonderful and included in Dash’s story was the video of James Brown, Michael Jackson and Prince on the same stage, maybe not at the same time but nearly so. You don’t want to miss this.
The first rock band I ever heard/saw live was the Sounds of Modification (the perfect band name for Nixon loving Long Island), who set up in the parking lot in Smithtown, outside Chess King (our jeans store) and rocked. At least a couple of them had been in my dad’s gym class at Sachem High School, and I’d met them, but now I was here with friends out on our own. When they played I stood as close to the band, who used a flat truck trailer as a stage, as I could, and was deafened by the volume. We walked home afterwards, overjoyed and exultant.
I’m awed that a song I heard that day I can hear again.
Yes, the Doobies singer, the white soul singer, the terribly popular terribly MOR singer everyone who had any taste hated. Harvey writes too about something called Yacht Rock, which we don’t usually cover here, but the clip of Cris Cross playing with the Roots wearing yachting caps is worth the click.
Jethro Tull are considered to be the only rock band that featured a flute, according to things I was reading last night. Now, we’ve already had Jeremy Steig on the Remnants, but I was put in mind of the Hello People, a band that never had a hit but caused a ruckus in 1970 with Anthem, a song about the lead singer’s time in jail for draft resistance.
Well, not about the time he spent in jail, but a call for others to stand up for what they believe.
Anthem is a sing songy pop song attempting to conscientious objectors, and showed some signs of breaking out when it was banned from the radio. I think their appearance on the Smothers Brothers show came about in defiance of that ban.
One other thing: They wore face paint and performed as mimes, though thankfully not the miming part in this or any of the clips.
Now sure, that’s not a rock song. But this one is.
Finally, the Hello people in the 70s hooked up with Todd Rundgren and served as his touring band. He produced an album for them in 1975, on which they covered this Rundgren tune.
Andy Paley grew up in Boston and formed a band called Catfish Black with future Modern Lovers members Jerry Harrison (keyboards) and Ernie Brooks (drums). They renamed themselves the Sidewinders, added Billy Squier, and recorded an album produced by Lenny Kaye in the mid-70s. Cuts from the album, which is well worth hearing, are on YouTube, but you have to dig.
The highlight here is at the two-minute mark, when we see a closeup of the band on the back of the jacket and Andy plays an extended solo. They were regulars at Max’s Kansas City, Andy played guitar on Elliott Murphy’s Night Lights, and disappeared leaving little more than a trace.
After the Sidewinders, Andy and his brother Jonathan formed the Paley Brothers, signed with Sire and released an album produced by Springsteen’s engineer at the time, Jimmy Iovine. It’s a fantastic elpee, a staple on the Kreutzer turntable back in those days of collegiate love and squalor.
The brothers also recorded a cover of Richie Valens’ Come On Let’s Go, with the Ramones for the Rock and Roll High School soundtrack.
The Paley’s went on tour, opening in arenas for the similarly hair-styled Shaun Cassidy, but did not break out with the teenyboppers and did break up.
Andy played guitar on the Modern Lovers’ Back In Your Life album, which features Abdul and Cleopatra, and that live show at the Peppermint Lounge I posted last night (which reminded me of Andy and his career–which I’ve augmented by looking things up).
In the early 80s I was visiting a friend’s family’s big country house a little bit upstate in New York. A few of us went out to play croquet and ran into a long-haired guy knocking a ball around. I recognized Andy from his album cover, and we played. He was a friend of one of the cousins, I think. He was writing songs and producing Jonathan Richman records. Nice guy, though he loved to send people. But don’t we all?
In real life Ethan Hawke made a mixtape of his favorite songs by the Beatles during their solo career to give to his daughter, apparently after he and Uma divorced.
