Category Archives: night music

Night Music: Paul Revere and the Raiders, “Like, Long Hair”

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I’m down in Williamsburg Virginia, and, well, Mark Lindsey and his band dressed up in those period costumes, just like everyone in the historic park here.

I wanted to find a song less obvious than Kicks, but while I like listening to their other pop songs (the songs are good, the guitars and harmonies strong), and I own the vinyl of their greatest hits album, Kicks is the song of theirs that really stands out. Written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill for the Animals, but when Eric Burdon didn’t want to sing it they passed it on to the Raiders.

The thing I learned about Paul Revere and the Raiders today is that they were actually started by a guy named Paul Revere, an organist, who played in a few different bands with Mark Lindsey before they named themselves Paul Revere and the Raiders in 1960. They released their first hit, “Like, Long Hair” in 1961, the title refers to the Rachmaninoff riff it starts with (this was back when classical music was referred to as long-hair music), but Revere was doing community service in a hospital at the time to work off his Conscientious Objector status, so he was replaced on the band’s first national tour by Leon Russell.

Their next hit single was a version of Louie Louie that may have predated the Kingsman’s hit version, recorded in the same studio.

The group didn’t start wearing the costumes until after the start of the British Invasion, which played directly into the band’s name and their musical style, which they reshaped in the wake of the sounds of the Beatles and Yardbirds and others.

Night Music: The Replacements, “Takin’ a Ride”

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I’ve been listening recently to a set called The Replacements “The Complete Collection.” As you might imagine, it seems to have just about everything the Replacements recorded and released on lp or ep. Don’t ask me about bonus tracks or anything, the draw here seems to be all the discs in track order, from the first to the last. (If you want rarities and alt versions, check out this site.)

I remember seeing the Replacements’ first album, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, in some record store when it came out. Great title, for sure, but I’ve never owned it and didn’t get into the band until later, when everyone did. So sue me.

So the other night I was making some food and I started at the beginning. The first song on Sorry Ma is called Takin’ a Ride, and it is mind blowing. First of all, it’s fast. The drums hurtle right at you and the guitars pizzicato and roar and then pulsate like a siren, while Westerberg seems determined to say it as plainly and as quickly as he is able. The effect is transfixing, even if his voice sounds a little like a box being crushed.

This is a tune that starts out sounding like the Clash, chugs like Blue Oyster Cult, suddenly becomes vintage Modern Lovers, embraces the Heartbreakers, and then explodes with some of that good regular rock music from the 70s that bubbles out of the gutter and reaches greedily for the bright lights. What teenage boys in suburbia dream of instead of disco. For a bunch of goofball fuckups, this is some powerfully ambitious songmaking. Tommy was only 14 at the time. Maybe they didn’t know any better.

And it seems like every song on this album is like this, a million ideas and sounds, all of them played as hard as they can, as if this was their last chance. Their only chance. Maybe because it almost was.

PS. One thing about the (digital) boxed set is that it sounds great. YouTube is not nearly as alive. I’m assuming the masters were cleaned and remixed, but in fact after a little digging around it doesn’t seem like much push was put behind this. Whatever. I have it streaming on Google Music All Access, and it’s getting plenty of play in my house. The Replacements albums I did own, Let it Be, Pleased to Meet Me, All Shook Down, came out during my cassette years. Ugh.

Night Music: Ben Harper, “Get It Like You Like It”

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Once again, I found myself listening to KTKE the other day when this Ben Harper song came on. Only, I did not realize it was Ben Harper, sounding to me like some kind of cross between Prince’s Raspberry Beret and anything out of the Band’s catalog.

Harper is so interesting.

Clearly, he is a killer guitar player, and has so many influences that drive his music which I think is the result of exploration of whatever groove he is feeling as anything. And, I guess that is a good thing.

 

 

Night Music: Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, “Cover of the Rolling Stone”

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Tom posted about Dr. Hook earlier today in his weekly story.

I was skeptical about Will Sheff’s claims about this long forgotten Dr. Hook DVD, from a show on German TV in 1975, but I started reading, which got me to listening, and he doesn’t exaggerate as much as he could have.

I don’t see quite the danger he does in Penicillin Penny, but then he’s watched the show enough times to know how the story plays out, and his reading of the song definitely makes the story better. And the story does play out, dramatically and expressively, when the band plays their greatest hit.

The way George Cummings hijacks THe Cover of the Rolling Stone is explosive, in the same way Andy Kaufman could wrangle the spotlight away from whomever and twist it onto some other space where Andy Kaufman shined brightest. Cummings is making a feedback screech, for some unstated reason, and it makes for surprisingly vigorous theater.

But the real brilliance is that this doesn’t seem at all staged. It’s just a guy in a band stealing the spotlight on this particular night in Germany. The stakes were small, the rebellion (in context) large. Caught on tape.

http://www.willsheff.com/we-never-have-to-be-alone-dr-hook-and-the-medicine-show-live-1974/

Great find, Tom! Will doesn’t overstep when he points to part of this show as being punkish. These guys were the guys Patti Smith hated in high school.

UPDATE: I posted the above, thinking I’d read Will Sheff’s story to the end. But I hadn’t. It turns out Sheff opens the story up into a discussion of all sorts of problems with authenticity and stagecraft, the very lack of which—in this program—I thought he was holding up to some esteem. But he has suspicions that the high drama might have been staged.

I find his late reveal on the potential that all this crappy stagecraft could have been orchestrated to be problematic. I feel tricked. At the same time, hate the storyteller, but if he’s right the tale gets better. And if not, the tale is as good as it ever was.

You are forgiven Will.

Night Music: Blood Sweat and Tears, “I Can’t Quit Her”

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Talking about great first albums that dwarf everything that came after, the story of Blood Sweat and Tears is a good one.

Al Kooper and Steve Katz played together in the Blues Project. Kooper, known for going electric with Dylan and producing Hendrix and playing on Let it Bleed with the Stones, was something of a quiet star. He wanted to start a jazz-rock fusion band before that was really a thing. Blood Sweat and Tears was to be his band, named after a Johnny Cash album, for some incongruent reason.

But the better point is that these musicians, working only a few years after the Beatles and Motown and others launched the brave new world of modern pop, rock and soul music that was both fantastically popular and often formally ambitious, were trying to take it up another notch. Could they make music that incorporated blues sounds, pop song structures, horn parts and maybe even strings, plus backwards masking when it worked, to make pop music?

The band’s first album, The Child is the Father to the Man, has fantastic cover art. It also meets the challenge in spades. It is an album full of improbable pop hits, though it was slow to catch on despite the band’s pedigree and the attention it garnered even before its music had been heard.

But even after its minor success, the band thought Kooper’s voice, which I think is an major asset, was not that exact. Which is also true. So they canned him, even though he was the band’s leader. They offered him the keyboard job. I’m sure he cursed. And after that Blood Sweat and Tears were dead to me.

But for one album this improbable ensemble really nailed it.