Jeff Beck and ZZ Top are on tour, and last week’s encore in LA was recorded. The song 16 Tons is one of the enduring country chestnuts first recorded by Merle Travis in 1946 which became a hit for Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1955. It’s one of those songs I bang out on the guitar, singing along, in my living room, and that’s the approach the boys took last week. Until the guitar solos.
Here’s the original Merle Travis version. A lighter touch, for sure, and he explains how the whole company store thing worked.
Which led me to this version, with Billy Gibbons singing in front of Jeff Beck’s band. Much better sound and way more engaged vocals than the Beck with ZZ Top.
Lawr’s foray into Dion DiMucci led me via YouTube links to this clip of La La Brooks in recent years performing the Crystals’ And Then He Kissed Me, a record she first sang on as a teenager 50 years ago.
This is a fantastic song, half back alley romance and half religious experience, and needless to say (I hope) that’s often the same physical thing.
But what’s funny is watching a woman who is clearly past the moment reveling in it. La La does so brilliantly, and the band does a fine job creating the atmosphere of the original production. But still, it’s an acting job. One she does very well.
But this provokes a question. Not only how much of a song like this is the singer, and how much the song, but also how much is the audience?
If La La was great playing the 15 year old when she was 60, aren’t the theatrics a tribute to her skill? Hell yes.
And yet I wonder how much is her performance and how much the music of our youth really belongs to us because we were young then. Sorry La La.
I wish there was video, but this is so different, mostly because the voice is in the middle of the music and ideas, rather than looking cagily backward. We have changed, too, and can’t keep the same naive viewpoint for 40 years and not end up in trouble with the law.
I’m not saying that rock is only for the young. Heck, most of the young don’t listen to rock these days. I am saying that something is lost (or changes) when we go from young to old. There are compensations, for sure, but you have to admit, everything changes, and only the song remains the same.
Patrick Davitt puts together BaseballHQ.com’s award winning and popular fantasy baseball podcast, and he’s a great fan of your rockremnants crew. In this week’s episode, available through iTunes and directly, we talked about baseball, of course, but also lots about rockremnants.com and why we’re here. I did my best.
It all goes back to some legendary evenings in Phoenix Arizona, sitting around and talking music.
Patrick is a fan of Rockpile, so he probably knows the band’s live version of Chuck Berry’s “Let It Rock,” featuring Keith Richards on guitar, from the Bottom Line in 1978. But I didn’t. What fun!
As I told Lawr when he suggested I make out a top 10, taking a dive into the Rolling Stones catalog is more like wading in the kiddie pool to the rest of you guys. But what the heck, it’s a fun exercise no matter what the degree of difficulty.
I’m going with the Stones because the thing that differentiates them from the Beatles in my mind is that their songs conjure up much more iconic memories for me than Beatles tunes, which always seemed to be here, there and everywhere. At least in my case, you listened to the Beatles. But you experienced the Stones.
Now, on with the countdown …
R.S. 10 Extra:Honky Tonk Women always makes me smile because of the intro where Charlie Watts does the tink-tink-tink. When I was working at a radio station back in the day, we had a fake commercial produced to coincide with Mick’s 44th birthday for “Mick’s Formula 44” cough medicine. (Fake Mick: “When I’m on stage hackin’ me lungs out, I get me a spoonful of Mick’s Formula 44.”) At the end he hits the spoon on the bottle to make his point — tink-tink-tink — and says, “Hey, that gives me an idea” as the song starts in the background. Yeah, we were easily amused back then.
10. Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker). I’m not a lyrics guy. It’s always the rhythm, the melody, the harmony and the tune that make me like a song way before any lyrics. With this one, the intro is really catchy and the lyrics jump out at you from “the PO-lice in New York City” and slap you around like a crooked cop. I’m also a sucker for horns in rock n roll, and this one is a great example.
9. Shattered. This one always reminds me of Beach Week in high school. The Stones were quite prolific during those years with Some Girls, Emotional Rescue and Tattoo You all out in a four-year period. Some Girls was the one we kept coming back to. The rapid-fire lyrics here may have been Mick’s nod to rapping (“what a mess/this town’s in tatters/I’ve been shattered/my brain’s been battered/spread it all over Manhattan”). Fun to sing with a group of others who’ve also had a few beers along the way. The cold ending caps everything perfectly.
8. Sympathy for the Devil. This song reminds me of a youth event at church during high school when we had 3WV, Charlottesville’s album rock station, cranked up in the fellowship hall while we were setting up for something. This song came on and those of us familiar with it didn’t really know how to react to the irony of the situation. So we sang the “Woo Woo!” part really loud. And no one really paid any attention, except to shake their heads at those silly kids.
7. Torn and Frayed. Everything on Exile on Main Street is fantastic, so this tune serves as a representative of that album and the Stones’ ability to do country-roots-rock with the best of ’em. It also gets extra points for Phish covering it the first time I saw them live. What an unexpected treat that was.
6. Under My Thumb (live version, from Still Life). I didn’t like the studio version of this one at all, but the live version has so much more oomph. This was a staple of my listening rotation in college. Friday afternoon … crank up some live Stones.
5. Just My Imagination (live). Same deal here with the Temptations cover. Mick substitutes “strictly” in the line “To have a girl like her is truly a dream come true.” And as was the case with so many of those parties in college, the song perfectly describes my chances of hooking up with one of those beautiful girls.
4. Monkey Man. I couldn’t tell you what the hell this tune is about, but it’s incredibly haunting and it kicks ass. The slide guitar stuff on Let It Bleed like this one and Midnight Rambler is great. When Mick starts screaming like an actual monkey, you can’t help but picture him strutting around on stage. And maybe needing to be caged.
3. Brown Sugar. The Stones at their rockin’ best. Love the guitar interplay. Throw in the horns and the sax solo. Yeah, yeah, yeah, woo! This could easily have been No. 1.
2. Jumpin’ Jack Flash. You can have Satisfaction; this is my pick for the definitive Stones guitar riff of all time. It’s meatier with the chords and dramatic pauses before the hook kicks in. The bass line also gets plenty of love here too. Unlike some of their biggest hits, I never get tired of hearing this one.
1. Gimme Shelter. I’m not alone in giving this one top billing. It has everything from soulful vocals (with an incredible guest performance), a memorable chorus, head-bopping drums, classic Keith on guitar and lyrics that make a powerful statement, even to a non-lyrics guy.
I’ve seen Charlie Haden play many times in the last 20 years or so. In 2005 he reconvened the Liberation Music Orchestra to protest the War in Iraq, and I saw them in an explosive show in the Village.
A year or two later his family, musicians all, including his daughter Petra, who we’ve featured here a couple of times, put together a country band in honor of the Haden Family Band that toured the country when Charlie was a boy. I saw them at an outdoor festival near Lincoln Center. And some time earlier I saw an amazing show with Haden and Thad Jones at Iridium, when that club was in that fantastic space across the street from Lincoln Center.
In between I fell deeply in love with a gentle album of Latin American melodies and tunes performed with the great Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, though I never got the chance to see the two of them perform.
A few weeks ago I posted Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman here. Charlie Haden played bass on that classic, and much of the early Ornette stuff. His straightforward melodic bass lines were the spine that held together Ornette’s and Don Cherry’s raucous soloing in those free jazz days.
One of my favorite Haden stories in his obit in the Times today involved a show he was performing in Lisbon with Coleman in the early 70s, during which he dedicated Song for Che to the black resistance fighters in Mozambique and Angola, Portuguese colonies. He was promptly put in jail.
A detail I didn’t know about Haden’s life. He played only country music until he was 21, when he saw a Charlie Parker show in Omaha. He was inspired, started to play jazz and moved to LA, where he met and played with Hampton Hawes and Paul Bley and eventually hooked up with Coleman.
This tune is from a 1989 show with the great drummer Paul Motian and the pianist Rubalcaba. It combines the lyricism with the wildness the was a part of Haden’s whole package.
The West Coast Beserkely counterpart to Sire’s Paley Brothers were the Rubinoos, who created some sickly sweet confections (I Want to Be Your Boyfriend) and could also rock.
Live, at the Peppermint Lounge, in Manhattan, which was kind of next door to the original and awesome Barnes and Noble Store.
Not that Barnes and Noble had anything to do with it, except that rents were cheap in that belly of Manhattan, for reasons that are hard to imagine now, at that time.
As far as Jonathan Richman and his white reggae goes, this live cut explains a lot about what he’s thinking. And the band executes. Richman was a legendary originator of the punk sound, and later a performer who repudiated much of what came before, and still made a bunch of music that was passionate and individualist and passionate.
I found this band about 10 minutes ago. I hear Queen and a ton of glam, and I’m happy to have heard them. I think you will too.
I have no idea where this music fits in the grand scheme, but it resonates in my part of the world. Get me on the mailing list!
Ps. Listened to some more Falling in Reverse today, and I have to say that The Drug In Me is You is a really good song. Maybe their best. A little of this stuff goes a long way for me, but most of it doesn’t connect at all. This song does, despite the silly video.
, of her pictures of music fans.