Category Archives: night music

Night Music: The Velvet Underground, “Sister Ray”

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Screen Shot 2013-10-29 at 8.39.51 AMI was driving back from Spring Training in Arizona to LA in March of 1991. I had a rental car out of San Francisco that I’d put a rather lot of miles on (my buddy Jack and I had toured down by the Salton Sea and entered Arizona in the south, at Yuma, where the Padres trained back then).

Jack had flown back from Phoenix and a couple days later, after exploring some archeological and historical sites around Phoenix, I drove back on the turnpike. At one point I ran into a fantastic sandstorm that stippled the car’s paint nicely, and when that was in the rear view I blew up into the pass and at the highest elevations hit blinding snow that landed me in the warmth and safety of a motel for the night.

In the morning I decided to forego a trip into Joshua Tree and headed off into the San Berdoo valley, finally entering LA in the afternoon, with the goal of seeing the show at LACMA of Hitler’s Decadent Degenerate Art. This was modern and intellectual art, Expressionist and avant garde art that Hitler and Goerring thought didn’t reflect the values of the Third Reich. Gloriously it didn’t.

It was a beautiful day and I had the radio turned up and the traffic was moving in mid-afternoon, and heading into the heart of city “Sister Ray” came on the radio. It has that fantastic sound of shoe box drums, and a creaky old circus organ, but more rhythms and noise and propulsion than you can count, and a lovely melodicism that defies all the shabbiness of the recording. It was perfect on the radio exactly because its 15 minutes couldn’t possible be radio friendly.

Sister Ray ushered me off onto Melrose or Wilshire or whatever and around the Tar Pits until I found a parking spot, at which I settled in and just closed my eyes, laid back and rode the song to the end. Put coins in the meter and walked around the holes of black goo, looking for a palette cleanser. Found it sort of, but the residue was eternal. It was a beautiful day.

Night Music: Freedy Johnson, “Wichita Lineman”

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I loved this song when Glen Campbell did it, but when I learned about the writer, Jimmy Webb, I got more interested in the way a song gets turned into pop music. For instance, Jimmy Webb wrote that song about MacArthur Park where someone left the cake out in the rain.

Then one day I was sitting in my car, waiting for the parking rules to expire, and WFUV played a Freedy Johnson version of this Jimmy Webb song that Glen Campbell made famous (with strings).

It’s a fantastic song about a guy doing his job, taking care of the electrical wires in Kansas, which makes the fact that Glen Campbell turned it into a hit seem incredible. In any case, Freedy is an excellent songwriter and a fine interpreter, which makes this choice.

Night Music: Hellacopters, “I’m Eighteen”

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I wish at the appropriate time (too late now) Miley Cyrus had covered this Alice Cooper song. It would have been more rebellious than hiring writers and producers to guide her into the music of the street. (I like a bunch of the songs on her new album, but they are in no way adventurous or limit pushing. This is middle of the road rebellion, at its best.)

Today, in the giant park that is a block away from my house, the Secret Service shut everything down so that a helicopter and supporting choppers could drop off the President, who had some fundraising events and plans to visit a school in the area. I happened to be out on the street when the swarm of helicopters took off for points no doubt secure, the president left behind and ensconced in a pod in the back of an Escalade running at high speed into the heart of Crown Heights, where both the Jamaicans and the Orthodox Jews practice jaywalking promiscuously, if not always quickly. Lots of room for catastrophe there. No doubt John Carpenter is writing the screenplay now.

Which put me in mind of the Swedish hard rock band the Hellacopters, who my friend Steve introduced me to many years ago, sparing no laudatory adjectives. And they are a really good band, one I would gladly stand in front of and drink a beer or three while their sound blew my hair straight out behind me, like I was moving fast or in an ad for Marshall stacks. But when I put the records on get a little lost. The sound is energetic and rockish, but their original songs don’t always cohere. They sound great in spurts, but the overall effect is disorganized, and after a few songs I tend to switch away.

But their covers are different. They are pretty faithful and the playing suddenly becomes effectively disciplined, and they rock. I’m not sure this version of I’m Eighteen is better than Alice Cooper’s version, but this version is damned fine, and it was recorded in 2005, when the accolades that accrued to Alice were wispy ghosts. This is rock played in order to rock, and it sounds like it.

Night Music: Tommy Erdelyi, “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”

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I happened upon this today, an acoustic version of the Ramones’ classic performed by the song’s writer and the Ramones’ drummer, Tommy Erdelyi. It’s folk.

Listening to the original, it’s hard not to notice that this too is folk of a British Invasion style, which they called skiffle. Wouldn’t this be just as good and sound much the same if it was by the Searchers? The Ramones surely thought so, since their cover of “Needles and Pins” makes the connection very clear.

Night Music: Bow Wow Wow, “I Want Candy”

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Bow Wow Wow was a Malcolm McLaren project that combined the percussive center of the band from Adam and the Ants with the subversive thrill of a sexy teen named Annabella acting out.

At the time, in the early 80s, we reviled this music as craven bubble gum, and it still qualifies as that, though this Richard Gottehrer tune’s Bo Diddley heart also touches a place more primal.

This clip of the original version, by the Strangeloves, has muddy sound, but is the best (if flawed) video I could find of the excellent go-go dancing.

Night Music: Dum Dum Girls, “Jail La La”

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More distaff singers (and drummers and guitarists, too). I got into this album, the band’s first, when it came out a few years ago. It’s fairly low-fi, and adopts a variety of rock and pop styles, all in a handmade approach I find pretty irresistible. (I just learned that the album was produced by Richard Gottehrer, who not only produced the first Blondie album, but as a younger man wrote such hits as “My Boyfriend’s Back,” “I Want Candy,” and “Hang on Sloopy!” He also was co-founder of Sire Records.)

Night Music: Young Marble Giants, “Music for Evenings”

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I swear, listening to Betty Davis this morning put me in mind of the Young Marble Giants. It must have had something to do with the all the space between the sounds, because they’re working different genres, for sure.

The Young Marble Giants’ only album, Colossal Youth, was released in 1980, but I didn’t hear it until 10 years ago or so. It is a terrific elpee, full of these spare and tuneful songs with sneaky rhythms, and not at all cute, though it easily could be.

Night Music: Betty Davis, “Anti Love Song”

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I knew nothing about Betty Davis until her records were rereleased by an enterprising and admirable label called Light in the Attic.

But that’s not why we’re here tonight. Light in the Attic has released a lot of excellent old music, but in her day Betty Davis made three albums of totally commercial funk that somehow missed the boat back in the day. And this missing was an injustice.

But the records are out there now and they truly are great. Okay, maybe if you hate women you’ll cringe at Betty’s self-assertion, but assuming otherwise, you’ll love the way she shapes the songs to a perspective that isn’t usual. And she backs it up.

Night Music: The Cars, “Good Times Roll”

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I have a memory of waking up one morning in 1978 or 1979 and the clock radio was playing this song. Or maybe it was another Cars song. What I remember is that it marked the beginning of a format on WPLJ called “The Next 25 Years of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” and at the time I didn’t know that the drummer in this band had been the drummer in the Modern Lovers. I remember thinking that this was weird music for the radio, though now the Cars don’t sound weird at all. But the next 25 years, according to WPLJ, which had had a progressive rock format until that morning, was going to be jangly new wave and punk, when the weird became normal.

I was in Boston last week and heard the Cars on the radio, and it all sounded homespun.