Thomas Beller goes for a bike ride in Central Park with his wife and their two kids. A remembrance in a little less than five minutes, featuring the Rolling Stones and Merry Clayton.
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/gimme-shelter-in-central-park?intcid=mod-latest
I went to an Ornette Coleman tribute Hal Wilner put on in the park near my house just about one year ago today.
Ornette is a jazz guy, perhaps the most popular of the free jazz players, and a musical giant. What I learned a year ago was that Lou Reed loved Ornette, but then so do many. I remember at poker games in the loft on Lispenard Street I would sometimes put Ornette on as a distraction, but somehow the beauty of his sounds won the day more often than I won the hand.
This one is live from Prince Street in 1970, same neighborhood as the poker (though 10 years earlier), and chosen especially because of the groovy vibe. (That’s Charlie Haden on the bass, Dewey Redman on tenor, and Ed Blackwell on the drums. )
Photo by DVanderheyden
The thing about free form radio was that you really got to know the DJs. They had taste and they demonstrated it every show. Sometimes the music was your style, sometimes it was something you’d never heard before in a style you didn’t know existed.
This is different than Pandora, which tries to match you with bands that play in a similar style to the bands you like. Free form mostly exists at college stations these days, and most of those shows feature a DJ known for playing a single style, at least most of the time.
But back in the hey day, the big palette was a virtue, at least for those of us who loved it, and WNEW was an incredibly great station while it lasted. In those years I also lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco, both of which had great free form rock stations, and Boston, which had a great oldies station.
Today, Boston has one of the best college stations in the country, at Emerson College. WERS is sort of free form, like Fordham’s WFMU (Scelsa’s last radio home), but is also fully aware of the value of having contributors who enjoy (and pay) for the programming.
Free form radio was (and is) great art, but it is niche. The Iheartmusic industry is built on the scientific finding that most people like to hear what they know, and are repulsed (or bored) by what isn’t what they already like.
Perhaps the best free form radio station today is WPKN in Bridgeport Connecticut. It takes no commercial or syndication money and relies solely on listener contributions. This is great, but most PKN shows are dedicated to a form. Bluegrass, polka, country, blues, free jazz, you name it. There is a show, but it isn’t a Vin Scelsa show.
Vin Scelsa’s thing was wild leaps of musical imagination, a love for Firesign Theater (if I’m remembering correctly), and a digressive patter that could extend to long closely-tended tales that I’ve long forgotten, but the memory of which produces astonishment still.
When I started this website, my heart was in this free form mixing of styles and enthusiasms and the energetic exploration of different stuff. That’s because of Vin Scelsa. And Jonathan Schwartz. WNEW DJs when I was in high school. And my high school (11th grade?) social studies teacher, Charlie Backfish, who is to this day a DJ on the SUNY Stoney Brook radio station.
There is an archive of Idiot’s Delight (the name of Scelsa’s show for all those decades) recordings, where you can get a short or long taste.
Nick Paumgarten writes about him in this week’s New Yorker, which does a good job of capturing Scelsa’s quirky personality.
Paumgarten also mentions that for his final show Scelsa opened with Sopwith Camel’s Hello Hello and finished with Lou Reed’s Goodnight Ladies. Both feature a brass bassline that sounds good to me.
Lou Reed’s sister tells the story of their childhood together, when some mistakes were made. It’s a gripping story told directly, sweet but awful, too.
And it’s hard not to come away with a different conclusion than she does. Or at least a bit of reservation about her sureness.
It is the League of Alternative Baseball Reality (LABR) weekend in Phoenix, and that means time with my bestest industry friends.
Later today I will see fellow Remnant Steve Moyer, but for the most part this week I have been traipsing from ballpark-to-ballpark with my running buddy Steve Gardner.
Steve and I always have so much to talk about: baseball, food, and especially music.
As we ate breakfast the other morning, we were talking about country and alt-country, and I remembered this anecdote from my youth.
When I was eight or so–so this is 1960-61–and was a cub scout, our little pack got tickets to the local NBC affiliate’s Saturday afternoon variety show. Remember that at that time there were just three TV networks, and nothing like cable. In fact I am not sure if PBS had a presence as of yet.
I remember the show was hosted by the news anchor, who also hosted the kids Saturday morning/weekday afternoon kids cartoon show, along with that variety thing (which was that period’s time of local cable access filler).
Well, when I was in the audience, the musical guest was Buck Owens, and he sang his new hit, Tiger by the Tail.
It was just Buck, though he surely had a shiny suit and flashy guitar (at least to an eight-year old), so no Buckaroos. And, I am pretty sure Buck had an electric (not as cool as the metalflake vintage Tele being played below) but was not plugged into anything.
Furthermore, this was my first exposure to lip syncing, in its most rudimentary form.
On the floor, in one corner of the little studio, was a little plug-in Admiral, much like the phonograph we had at home, and someone dropped the .45 single on the turntable at the right time, dropped the tone arm, turned up the volume, and the race was on (ok, George Jones reference) so to speak.
Funny how we remember. Before Buck was big stuff, for sure.
I feel like I’ve read some of this elsewhere, but Frank Owen was there and does a fine job describing the mayhem and machinations out of which came The Buzzcocks, The Fall, Joy Division, Morrisey and The Worst, among others. Some of it is the big picture, but there is also the personal:
“The Perry Boys had snuck up behind me and one of them had hit me over the head with a specially sharpened Levi belt buckle, leaving me lying on the concrete in a halo of my own blood. They probably would have kicked me into a coma if it wasn’t for my PVC-clad friend Denise Shaw, who stood over six feet tall in heels and dressed like a fetish model. She saw the incident and rushed over to fight off my attackers with her handbag.”
The Perry Boys were kids from the Council Houses, who hated the punks. Mark E. Smith wrote a song for the Fall about them:
Kim Gordon was Sonic Youth’s bass player for 30 years, until she and husband Thurston Moore split up. Moore, 52, had found another woman. Gordon has now written a memoir, Girl in a Band: A Memoir
and this excerpt is a description of the band’s last show at a festival in Brazil. It’s a weird and naked document, with a side-eyed look at the rock ‘n’ roll life that feels very real and unfiltered.
The first tune they played that night was an oldie. Let it be your soundtrack.
You tell me the year. The We Are Family Pirates were playing the Orioles in the World Series. I was working for a film distribution company, specializing in arty European movies. We had a hit with a bit of sexploitation called Wifemistress, about (if I’m remembering correctly) an Italian revolutionary who had to go in hiding in a barn across from his old apartment, and thus witnesses his beautiful wife’s liberation, after which she chooses to bed many of his old foes and friends. Laura Antonelli was brilliant as, The Wifemistress.
On this particular October day, it seems that we had a routing problem with the prints of the film, and the only way to get a copy of the movie to the theater in Old Roslyn, on Long Island, for its Friday opening, was for me to personally drive to Harrisburg and pick up the print after the last show on Thursday night, then drive back and deliver the print on LI when the theater opened the next morning.
I listened to the World Series on the radio that night, drove through the PA night past Three Mile Island, which had only recently almost gone China Syndrome, stayed in a cheapo motel somewhere, and then hit Long Island the next morning, delivering the print in time for them to begin their regular schedule. Success!
There was a record store in Old Roslyn, and it was there I found a copy of the Hombres’ Let It All Hang Out. I bought it because of the cover photo, which shows the band dressed in serapes and those big round Mexican hats, hanging out around a dumpster. Also, probably because it was cheap. Maybe fifty cents or a buck. The revelation came when I got home.
This was cheese. These guys were going for the novelty hits, the way, let’s say Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs did, but they were just as tight and fun as Sam et al were. This was cheese with chops. The bottom line was, if you take off from this post and play any of the songs on the elpee, including the hit, Let it All Hang Out, or the cover of Lee Dorsey’s Ya Ya, or whatever, you will be charmed. By an album that coughed up one semi hit and laid down a winning mix of New Orleans/Memphis style rock roots tunes and soul.
I give you Hey Little Girl, tonight, which reflects the band’s blue-eyed soul roots, an abiding interest in the rhythm part of I Fought the Law, and a video of ace go-go dancing. The band’s organist was brother to the bass player in the Box Tops, for what that’s worth. Memphis is a small town it seems. Let It All Hang Out.
Dust is some nasty shit. Swear.
I did a lot of cooking this morning. I don’t really have any family in this country, so fortunately, my late wife, Cathy’s, family decided to hang onto me.
I say this because Cathy’s mom, Edie, turns 80 on Monday (go girl!), and later today we have a celebration planned.
Where the dust comes in is that Thursday morning, as part of the spate of rain we have been jonesing for in Northern California for the past six months, it got cold where Cathy’s brother, Eric, and his wife Jill (these would be Lindsay’s folks) live, and Jill slipped on some black ice. The results were a broken wrist and fractures to her cheek (hopefully she won’t need surgery there), meaning a nasty fall.
This meant a couple of things: first, Jill is on a soup diet for a spell, and second, Jill always makes birthday cakes (except for her birthday, when I do it) and well, no way that was going to happen.
So, I took it upon myself this morning to both bake Edie her cake (blueberry-buttermilk bundt with glaze), and also make some soft stuff Jill could eat (creamed spinach, honey-pepper-cheese grits, and tomato basil soup). If you don’t get this yet, I really love to cook, so I had a good time doing this.
But, inspired both by Peter’s posting of I’m in Love With My Car, and Tom’s Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White, I decided to fire up the turntable while cooking for a few hours, and listen to some stuff I had not heard for a while. Plus, I like vinyl.
I started with A Night at the Opera, per Peter, and it was so fun. Death on Two Legs is wonderful, as is Sweet Lady (“you call me sweet, like I’m some kind of cheese,” what a line), and then I went to the first side of Jesus Christ, Superstar (sorry, guilty pleasure, but the band is killer, and well, it is sentimental for Diane and me), t0 Their Satanic Majesty’s Request (who hoo, In Another Land, and Citadel), then Boston’s first (sorry, another guilty pleasure, but a fun guitar album), Idlewild South, and finally to Then Play On.
When I first bought it, Then Play On was my favorite album, and it was followed by Kiln House. I cannot remember which, but I believe one of those made my 50 essentials.
Then Play On is really Peter Green’s album, and a beautiful one it is. So vast and varied, and well, it has the iconic Oh Well, but that is not even my favorite cut on the album. In fact, I don’t know what is.
But, where the dust comes in is I have not played a few of these albums in a while, maybe 20 years, and I cleaned them before playing, but they had so damn much dust, it took playing the sides or songs a few times before I could get a real listen.
But, it was worth it. This recording is really just the studio one from the album, but it has two-plus minutes of stoned out banter and mistakes before the song gets underway (which was the song on the album after Show Biz, and I tried to find a pairing because the two work so well together), but it is pretty good fun.
We will get to more of the Mac, one of the most interesting bands of all time, another time.
For now, dig Peter A, whom if you listen, Santana got his sound from.
Free association is a fun thing.
I responded to Peter’s I’m Your Puppet post regarding James and Bobby Purify with a version I like by Yo La Tengo.
So, Peter posted a fine version by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell (actually, probably Valerie Simpson).
But, what got me from that version was the graphic that featured the song on “Ric Tic” records.
In truth I have been told I have a photographic memory, though I think this is not so. I mean, I forget to buy toilet paper and lose my keys, things that overall are way more important than remembering Don Demeter’s batting average in 1960 (.274).
It isn’t like I try to remember that stuff, mind you. It just sticks.
Well, my brother and I collected 45’s (those would be vinyl singles to all of you born after 1980) and still have a pretty good collection of those discs, including all the Beatles and Stones singles with cool picture covers.
But, what I noticed about Peter’s response was the record label for Marvin and Tammi’s I’m Your Puppet was “Ric Tic,” and that immediately triggered this song, Gino is a Coward, by Gino Washington. That is because, as you can see, Gino was on Ric Tic as well.
I knew this right off because remembering labels and songwriters and producers of singles was no different than remembering batting averages, or film directors, or the order of Mark Twain’s novels for me. I can’t help it. I just remember this shit.
Back on track–if there is one–I thought it would be fun to revisit Gino and his hit from 1964, and the truth is, the song is pretty good. For the time, it totally rocks, with a pretty advanced guitar solo, machine gun drums and fine walking bass. Gino has pretty good range, as well, and the words are basically pretty funny.
Have at it.
