Category Archives: night music

Night Music: Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen, “Charlie Parker”

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Steve Allen was the host of the Tonight Show in the time of Kerouac’s popular fame, and Allen had him on the show many times. This isn’t great music. Allen was a good pianist and a prolific songwriter, but a lot of what he plays is, as Truman Capote said it, just typing.

Oops, Capote said that about Kerouac, whose literary tick was the long line, the repetitions, the onomatopoetic bursts. But in a way it also describes Allen’s voracious appetite for sounds and the way he chews them and offers them back.

When I was in high school I fell in love with Kerouac’s writing. Those long lines described the rhythm of my thoughts and the way some idea that felt really large would pull my tongue down with its gravity, til I couldn’t speak or could only speak really fast. When a boxed set of Kerouac’s readings with musicians came out, sometime in the 80s, I bought it and enjoyed it immensely. But by that time the romantic hold of Kerouac’s romantic tongue had lost its grip on me.

Tonight I’m near Lowell, Massachusetts, where Jack Kerouac grew up, and thinking about a friend who died yesterday of cancer at 59. Kerouac died when he was 56, and thoughts like this make me want to change the subject. Of course, Charlie Parker died when he was 35, so we all got a lot more of it than he did, poor Buddha.

Or did we?

Night Music: Bikini Kill, “Rebel Girl”

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Back in the days of the second punk eruption, in the early 90s, a subset of the scene took the name Riot Grrls for their girl centric rockish devotion and community. There were a lot of girl led hard rock bands then and I got into L7, Babes in Toyland and of course Hole, as well as bands like the Amps and Breeders and Belly, who all seemed to have the DIY enthusiasm of the first punk eruption. This was a music scene, but also a fashion scene and a revolutionary movement, and a lot of the music was really good.

But for whatever reason I didn’t hear Bikini Kill until a little later, when Subpop (I think) put out their first two albums on one CD. And this was different. Kathleen Hanna (about whom a movie was released in NYC today, which is what got me thinking about this) has a great big enthusiasm and a great big personality that kind of makes everything glow, and you can hear it in Bikini Kill’s music. I’m not saying her bandmates didn’t make fantastic contributions, but just that when you see a star you know it.

Perfect video, too.

Night Music: Texas Tornados, “Who Were You Thinking Of”

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I started with Flaco, then Flaco and Freddy, then Lawr bit the madeleine and added Doug Sahm. Those were all different bands, but that inevitably leads us to the Texas Torandos, a band started in 1990 by Flaco Jimenez, Freddy Fender, Doug Sahm and Augie Meyers, a member of the Texas Music Hall of Fame. Something of a conjunto supergroup, if you will.

Night Music: Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

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As a student of literature, I was always struck by the function of the spice cake in Marcel Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past .

The whole thing is framed around Swann, the main character, taking a bite out of a piece of spice cake that reminds him of cake of his youth.

This olfactory experience brings Swann back to his childhood, and that becomes the vehicle for moving forward with the whole story of Swann’s experience.

Well, Peter putting up Freddy Fender totally tripped the musical spice cake in me, reminding me of my favorite Fender tune, Wasted Days and Wasted Nights. Though the version I favor is from Doug Sahm’s wonderful, The Return of Doug Saldana.

Sahm, leader of the super hippie trippy Sir Douglas Quintet, always had his finger on some kind of musical pulse, with his band kicking out some really great songs. She’s About a Mover,  Rain, and Mendocino were all fine radio tunes with a Tejano twist that complemented the psychadelic sounds of the time.

With Doug Saldana, Sahm did move back to the roots music of his youth in a really solid work.

And, well, this version of Fender’s tune is as rocking and soulful as can be.

So, on this Thanksgiving day, grab your spice cake, or turkey, or yams, or whatever and have a taste of some ear candy.

 

Night Music: The Upper Crust, “Let Them Eat Rock”

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It is not a joke to say that this is one of the great songs and performances of the rock era.

No, it wasn’t a hit. But listen again. We have time. It speaks to all of us, and it rocks.

The Upper Crust, Let them eat rock

The amazing thing is that nearly 20 years on the Louis 14 thing is still working. As it should. We’re fighting the upper crust more now than at any time since the 30s.

Night Music: Freddie Fender and Flaco Jimenez, “Until the Next Teardrop Falls”

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I was put in mind of Flaco Jimenez today because I found that clip of Cooder and Evans from a Les Blank film I haven’t seen. Flaco Jimenez was in that band, as well as many others I’ve admired over the years.

The first Les Blank film I saw was called Chulas Fronteras, Beautiful Frontiers, and it was about the Tejano culture that straddles the Mexican and Texas border. They play a fantastically rhythmic, ecstatic, danceable music there called Norteno, a blend of polka and Mexican corrida and other forms, that takes Mexican emotion and fuses it with Germanic precision.

I always think of Linda Ronstadt’s funny line, that her problem in her life was that she ended up singing like a German and thinking like a Mexican, her parental lineages. Give us more of that.

Freddy Fender was Tejano and perhaps the biggest Mexican pop star up to his time, and he constantly battled the problems of getting real and feeding the international music machine (witness the hair). Feeding wins, up to a point. In that context, this song is far from pure, but it is a hit for obvious and well earned reasons.

Night Music: Divine, “You Think You’re A Man”

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Last night I posted Hole’s repulsively propulsive “Retard Girl,” but in the morning I felt badly about it. The bad taste in that song is really bad taste, and while I think (hope) the point is not just the shock, I didn’t want to be so associated with it so I clawed it back. If you want to hear it you can search Google for it. The music is powerful, the lyrics make me cringe.

So tonight, thinking about bad taste, I came upon this song that Divine originated, but did not write. It’s a total disco track and obviously Divine embodies bad taste with grand (and big) style. What surprised me was that the song is one I know from the cover done by the Scottish post-punk pop band The Vaselines, who covered it some years later. Their version isn’t that much different, though they look nothing at all like Divine and don’t play disco instruments.

Night Music: Oh Lucky Man!

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I kind of get a kick out of those Sprint commercials with James Earl Jones and Malcolm McDowell.

I have always been a fan of McDowell’s since I saw his first film, Lindsay Anderson’s IF, and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is my all time favorite movie (though in fairness, it is tied with Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game).

Anyway, seeing the commercial usually reminds me of A Clockwork Orange , but the other day I found myself thinking about Anderson’s brilliant sort of sequel to IF, his film Oh Lucky Man!

Oh Lucky Man!  shows us McDowell’s IF character Mick Travis a few years later, giving a treatise on capitalism, life, death, and existence in a sort of comedic dramatic epic form that is also Zen.

If nothing else, the story is fascinating (it also really needs a couple of viewings).

Anyway, the soundtrack to Oh Lucky Man! was written by Alan Price, the keyboardist/songwriter of the Animals, the great British blues-pop band, who not only featured Eric Burdon, but whose bass player, Chas Chandler, is credited with “discovering” Jimi Hendrix.

Price wrote a fabulous soundtrack to the movie, bookended by one version of the title track for the opening credits,

and then a second version that serves as the closing credits.

Just a great cut. And, now I will have to dig up my old VHS of the movie and watch it again. Hell, maybe I will even buy it on DVD!

Night Music: Tiki Brothers, “Ocean—Thank You Lou Reed”

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My buddies the Tiki Brothers play a lot of water and beach themed tunes. They started out playing covers, lots of novelty tunes (Pipeline anyone?) a few years ago and at one of their early shows at the Steinhof Cafe, a bar up the road from my house, they played a gorgeous non-novelty song about the sea that stately-sloshed it’s way up the bank and back down the beach again, with a long inevitable build of tension and melody and determination. These are the not coincidentally the characteristics that, for me, dominate Lou Reed’s song writing. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that he wrote this late Velvet Underground song that I didn’t know, called “Ocean,” which I’d surely heard because it was on the Velvet’s big commercial move, Loaded. (The link here is to the demo version, which features John Cale on organ and wasn’t on the released elpee.)

Walker, the Tiki’s bassist, sent me a recording today. It’s Ocean, the Lou Reed song, only with a kind of righteous poem dedicated to Lou Reed laid on top by the Tiki’s vocalis/mandolin player, Buck, extemporaneously I’m told. And like the original it starts quiet and builds into something of a roiling swamp of tone poem and tribute and something a little lovely and oddly familiar with Lou. It’s recorded live in the rehearsal studio so the balance and mix isn’t always perfect, but that’s okay. It builds to something I thought worth sharing.

Ocean–Thank You Lou Reed, by the Tiki Brothers.

louandlaurie-southfork Ps. I went looking for a picture of Lou Reed at the beach, maybe doing tai chi or working on his tan, but this was the closest I could find.

Night Music: My Bloody Valentine, “Sometime”

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I was asking Gene to turn up the levels on his vocals, but yesterday’s foray into his song the End and the Beatles overlaid a hundred times, put me in mind of My Bloody Valentine. This is one of the most loved albums of the 90s, and he wisely buries the vocals underneath the overlaid and overdubbed guitar and whatever other noises he uses. (NOTE: After writing this I was reading some interviews with Kevin Shields, the Valentine’s lead guitarist and main writer and he says the sound is a result of open tuning and a wang bar that he pulls on while he plays. Sounds lewd, but he also says there are very few overdubs, that the band values simplicity. Of course, here’s Shields’ idea of simplicity, as applied to the recording of the song “Only Shallow:” “That’s just two amps facing each other, with tremolo. And the tremolo on each amp is set to a different rate. There’s a mike between the two amps. I did a couple of overdubs of that, then I reversed it and played it backwards into a sampler. I put them on top of each other so they kind of merged in.” Quote from a story by Alan DiPerna originally published in Guitar World.)

I was torn about whether to use the Lost in Translation version, with those visuals, or the album cover only version. The music makes its own images, but if Scarlett Johanssen gets in the way, close your eyes. This is beautiful too.