I saw the Neville Brothers play a few years ago. Okay, maybe in 2008. They were great, but what impressed me was that they said this was their 30th year. I saw them in 1978 at the Bottom Line in New York, opening for the Wild Tchoupitoulas. At the time the Nevilles seemed timeless, and the Tchoupitoulas even more so.
But while Art was a seasoned veteran with the Meters and countless sessions, the Brothers had only stepped out on their own that year, backing up Big Chief Landry. It was a great show, maybe the best live show I’ve ever seen, in part because it was impossible not to dance and while the Bottom Line crew tried to enforce the city’s no-dancing rule, everyone knew that was hopeless on this night.
The Nevilles and the Meters before them played with everyone. Part of the magic of New Orleans is how this music helped create ska and reggae, and how the jazz of Louie Armstrong and the amazing Professor Longhair led to a culture of breadth and rhythm.
So, choosing a song is impossible, but rest in peace Art. I saw you plenty, felt I knew you, but that was an illusion.
My second influential elpee was the Rascals Time Peace, which was a greatest hits collection that went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts. For me it was a chance to play this great band’s great songs all the time. It was also an introduction to Wilson Pickett and the Atlantic R+B style, which has been a treat ever since.
In any case, Come on Up was a single off their second album, Collections, and was not a huge hit. But it sure is a cool song.
Gene named me in the 10 most influential elpees in 10 days challenge on Facebook. My Day 1 choice was Cream’s Disraeli Gears, which was in no way obscure but did feel like my music, rather than pop music everyone liked that I liked too, like the Beatles, Stones and the Who. I thought I’d post a song from each of my albums over here, just for fun.
This one was a Clapton song rewritten by producer Felix Pappalardi and his wife Gail. It’s the lead song on Disraeli Gears and seems like the epitome of the band’s psychedelic blues.
I wrote about these guys a few years ago, posting one of their new wavey songs with an excellent video. That was then.
After they made that good song their drummer left, and rather than replace him they remade themselves as a bizarrely earnest harmony band. They stand on the stage, no matter how big, closely together so they can hear their partners and make incredibly lovely harmonies.
They played tonight in the park by our house, and we were jazzed. This is music that is far from rock, but also music that has no genre. I think sometimes they sound like Mumford and Sons, revivalists with big ideas, but they resist that. They aren’t old style. They’re still new-wavey, only they eschew the drum kit (they have a kick drum) and they love their voices, which they surely should.
Moyer will roll over tonight. Good for him.
So, YouTube fed me this one I didn’t know. I like this band.
I remember driving in the car somewhere with my dad, maybe to the library, which is a place we went every week.
What I remember is trying to explain how much I loved this song, the Lulu version, even though every part of me that had any aesthetic sense of value versus cheese knew that it was Top 40 folderol. I might have phrased it that way, that’s the sort of kid I was.
But I didn’t hear this version until today. When Al Green proves that with Willie Mitchell almost anything can work. Excellent song.
h/t Darrin Viola.
I didn’t know Duncan by name, but he was a vocalist and guitar player in the Quicksilver Messenger Service, one of the great San Francisco bands of the late 60s. Quicksilver made a great impression on me with the brilliantly adolescent and epic first song on their first album.
QSM were nothing if not quintessential hippies, living on a commune, jamming constantly, living on health food and drugs, as this obit describes. But Duncan had an earlier incarnation as a musician in The Brogues, whose I Ain’t No Miracle Worker was included on Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets collection.
But maybe it’s not a problem. There is a lot to like about this song. Dreamy and meandering with a wash of rhythm underneath, it’s kind of lovely, which makes it like loud folk rock.
In any case, here’s a heads up.
I keep listening to this, seduced by the wiry guitars and solid drums, and realize I’ve wandered into a pretty powerful description of sexual power and the dynamics that ensue.
This band, from Portland Maine, is playing nearby tonight. I’m not going, we’ve got an oratorio being performed by 30 canoeists in the Gowanus Canal at the same time (can’t miss that), but I did check them out.
I’m a sucker for this sort of rock, a rock that has hooks and a beat, a catchy melody and clever wordplay. This one is from 2016, so it’s a good sign they’re still working at it.
Plus, really good band name.
First video I ever saw with a color grading credit. Very video forward.
Jody Rosen has written a long and worthwhile story about masters archives, jumping off from a fire that burned about 120,000 masters of the Universal Music Group in 2006.
He does a great job explaining why the masters of albums by Elton John and Nirvana and Muddy Waters and John Coltrane, among many others, are valuable even when you can stream their music online.
But then he gets grittier, and talks about Don Bennett, whose masters burned in the UMG fire, and whose career is almost impossible to survey. He was a vocalist in the Chocolate Watchband, which I’d heard of, but he also had a solo career, which has almost completely disappeared.
The point? Lots of music that is disregarded at first turns out to be valuable later.
So, here is the Chocolate Watchband. And a plea for Rosen to digitize the album he bought and get it out there!
