We could write tributes to those who have passed nearly every day. Today it is for Bonny Rice, whose biggest hit was released as Sir Mack Rice, who was a member of the Falcons in Detroit (with Wilson Pickett, Eddie Floyd, and Joe Stubbs), but who is best known for writing Wilson Pickett’s hit, Mustang Sally, and cowriting the Staple Singers’ Respect Yourself (with Luther Ingram).
The best anecdote from the NY Times’s obituary today: The song was originally called Mustang Mama, but Aretha Franklin, who played piano on the demo, convinced him to change the name.
Here’s the Wilson Pickett version, which was an R&B and pop hit. After the song there are some details about the writing of the song.
If there is an ur-moment of the birth of rock ‘n’ roll I would name the Sun Sessions with Elvis Presley. This is Elvis at his greatest, with a band that cranks it up.
If asked about the birth of rock I would chatter about Joe Turner and Little Richard. These are the giant creators of rock ‘n’ roll. And there was more going on at Sun than just Elvis in 1954.
But there are two records I put on when I want to hear the original stuff. The Sun Sessions with Elvis Presley and whatever compilation of Buddy Holly tunes I can find at hand.
Scotty Moore had jazz ambitions, but he gladly took the session backing Elvis. And you can hear in the finger picking that he inserts along with his rhythm part that his ambitions are greater than simply sideman.
Moore’s guitar is essential to Mystery Train.
What surprised me reading about this legend’s career was that his footprint wasn’t large. He made a deep impression early, and had influence forever, but there is not a big body of work out there that is Scotty Moore’s.
Still, this grab from Wikipedia explains his importance and his reticent impact:
“Moore is given credit as a pioneer rock ‘n’ roll lead guitarist, though he characteristically downplayed his own innovative role in the development of the style. “It had been there for quite a while”, recalled Moore. “Carl Perkins was doing basically the same sort of thing up around Jackson, and I know for a fact Jerry Lee Lewis had been playing that kind of music ever since he was ten years old.”[7] Paul Friedlander describes the defining elements of rockabilly, which he similarly characterizes as “essentially … an Elvis Presley construction”: “the raw, emotive, and slurred vocal style and emphasis on rhythmic feeling [of] the blues with the string band and strummed rhythm guitar [of] country”.[8] In “That’s All Right”, the Presley trio’s first record, Scotty Moore’s guitar solo, “a combination of Merle Travis–style country finger-picking, double-stop slides from acoustic boogie, and blues-based bent-note, single-string work, is a microcosm of this fusion.”[9]“
Frankly, my defense of disco would last about 100 words. It was unapologetic dance music that was the soundtrack to a great public flowering of gay and interracial utopias, hedonistic, aspirational, happy, at a time when really the whole world was going to hell.
The funny thing is that it wasn’t too long before this culture, so flamboyant and energetic and just plain wonderful, was destroyed by the darkness of AIDS.
The music, which started out as dance music by Kool and the Gang and the Ohio Players and the Commodores among many others, really straight up R&B, evolved into that pulsing 128 BPM sheen, a music that sacrifices swing for relentless intensity and pistonlike movement. This wasn’t music for sitting around and contemplating, this was music for getting sweaty on the dancefloor and sweaty in the bathroom and more sweaty at home, if you know what I mean. Utilitarian music, dance music, sex music.
Alright, that’s 154 words. Here’s a link to a story by a younger guy from Macon who explains it more, if you’re interested. The story starts out at Duane Allman’s grave, which is kind of cool.
Here are a few songs I think of as liking from that time, when you would go into a club and everyone would feel like they were in the minority. Everybody felt like they were venturing out, being a little dangerous, and also connecting to a world that hadn’t ever really existed before, to people they may not have seen before. Oh, I should also mention cocaine and amyl.
I guess my point is that you can freely hate all this music, these tunes, the beats, the arrangements, the crappy clothes the singers wore, but it really isn’t fair to say Disco Sucks. That’s because Disco was so much more bigger than the music.
The odds of me getting to Nashville are slim. The band is in North Carolina this weekend, but that’s no better.
I want to see these guys live. That’s all I can say.
I think you can find most of their recorded work on this site if you search Hans Condor, but here’s a little reprise for those who are wondering what the fuss is about.
Here’s the coda to a tune:
Here’s their excellent music video, supporting their album, with a fine rock n roll song:
I’ve been listening to the new Brandy Clark album this week. Brandy is a country songwriter who has been trying to break as a performing artist. Her album 12 Songs I wrote about here a while back. The song Stripes is the kick ass fun number, but there’s lots of other good stuff on that album.
The new album has equally clever and direct songwriting, but it has some extra production patina and maybe some compressed audio to make it more contemporary radio friendly. Hard to argue with that. I’ll probably post about the song The Girl Next Door soon, since I’ve been playing it a ton.
But the funny thing about listening to Clark is that after a few songs play in the mix I get distracted and I start thinking about Carlene Carter.
Carter is the daughter of June Carter and her first husband Carl Smith. I’ve written about her here before. She has a big strong voice, and a terrific other voice as a songwriter. She was married to Nick Lowe for about ten years, and they made some terrific records together and others looking at each other. But the record that Brandy Clark pushed me toward is Little Love Letters, the 1993 record she made after Carter’s Lowe adventure was over.
It’s a terrific record, country in flavor and sentiment with a solid foundation of rock beat on the fast ones. Her constant collaborators here are Howie Epstein and Benmont Tench (both of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers), but she also writes a song with Bernie Taupin, and this one, Every Little Thing, with Al Anderson of NRBQ.
Is this a song of love, lust, or maybe something more unhinged?
Which reminds me of some other Every Little Thing songs.
The Police had this tune that kind of exposed them (or at least Gordon Sumner) as cheese balls. But the dysfunction of the narrator and the crazy calypso feel are for me irresistible. Yes, dismiss it as fodder, the video suggests the Police are just cranking out what they can, but at the same time it’s about a strong and creepy emotion that hasn’t been as well expressed since Every Breath You Take. Hmm. Or Don’t Stand So Close to Me. The Police were good at perversity, weren’t they?
And, of course, the Beatles have their own Every Little Thing.
The YouTube versions are all chopped up bootlegs, so not much pleasure in the listen, but there’s enough here to suggest that the Beatles too found in the expression Every Little Thing a bit of unhealthy obsession.
Chip Moman was a guitarist who got his start at Stax, then founded his own studio (American Sound Studio), and wrote, produced and/or played on an impressive body of work. You can read the NY Times obit here.
Moman wrote The Dark End of the Street with Dan Penn, and produced James Carr’s recording of it.
An English guitarist of great taste, who spent a lot of time around Paul McCartney and Wings, but also played the guitar solos at Woodstock for Joe Cocker when he turned With A Little Help From My Friends into a monster smash.
McCullough’s solo in this bit of MOR elevates it. I’m a fan of McCartney’s stuff, and I’m always happy to hear this, but less happy today that McCullough is gone.
Lots and lots of music sounds derivative of some other music. Sometimes that’s a bad thing, evoking the thought, Why bother? But other times the song is so right it feels absolutely fresh and absolutely classic at the same, which is the case with this new country song.
What’s extra-funny about this tune is that it is paean to listening to FM radio in the car, which is not the religious experience it once was (unless one finds one of those rare stations practicing the free form format).
Form meets function in My Church. I can’t stop playing this.
