By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28740659
Dick Clark introduces an appearance by Berry promoting this album and stumbles over the title, with the audience tittering at the double entendre. Really?
It is 1959, and, as Clark mentions, this is an album that has on it Carol, Maybelline, Johnny B. Goode, Roll Over Beethoven, Little Queenie and many more.
Those were the days of album oriented rock. Not.
It’s an incredible trove, not a greatest hits album, that the Rolling Stones particularly mined for their early (and later) setlists.
Berry, of course, looks right at home playing along to this other cut, Back in the USA, that is also on Chuck Berry is on Top, with the totally white and polite audience clapping along.
This is an amazing and catchy new song refracted through a few different lenses simultaneously, about cancer, mortality, friendship and empathy. Plus 3D printing. Wow.
One of the thrills of the punk years was the primacy of singles. US bands would launch with a self- or independently pressed 45, looking for enough buzz to get a major label deal. UK bands and labels eased the way into the US market by dropping 45s into the indie record stores, where some people, I was one, would hang out and hear the choicest cuts on the store’s record player.
These singles came, usually, with picture sleeves. Sometimes they came with other gimmicks. I’m sure every punk band wanted a hit single, but most of these weren’t destined for radio play. They were meant as samizdat from the heart of DIY RNR, a beacon looking for similar youths with guitars and loud drums. If you had a single, you had a calling card at least.
One true thing was that there were some great songs released, and another true thing was that many were followed by fairly crappy albums.
The Dead Boys album leads off with their great single, Sonic Reducer, and is followed by a collection that sounded pretty strong in its day. Looking back at it now, what seemed like great energy and clever arrangements then seems today a little obvious and not quite as hard as they should have been. Such is context.
Gene points out, however, that this album should have been on the Rolling Stone Punk Top 40 Albums, and he may be right. It was historic, one of the first true punk albums on the shelves. I’m not sure of that importance as I listen today, but I am nostalgic. See, I actually performed on the album as a musician, of sorts.
The cut is the second track, All This and More. My girlfriend’s sister’s boyfriend, Jim, was an assistant engineer on the album for Genya Ravan at Electric Ladyland. One day we were hanging out there, maybe waiting for him to get off work, when he brought us into the studio. It was the weekend, for sure, it wasn’t someplace we could wander in to usually. But on this day we got headphones and instructions to do the hand claps that lead off All This and More. And we did them and are on the record.
I think. Because I’m assuming our hand claps were good enough. I’m assuming that Genya didn’t get some other young people in to do better hand claps. No way to know that now. In any case they’re good claps. Not as good as the hand claps in the Stooges’ No Fun, but good enough for All This and More, which has one of the great weird first lines in all rock songs.
So, Gene reminded me that I probably performed on a record he thought should be in the Top 40 of Punk albums, even if it’s the elpee that displaces Blink 182.
What a joke.
In other words, we didn’t get any royalties or credit. And I haven’t played the record since before it came out, which I guess is why I forgot about this story. Until now. But there it is. History, perhaps.
We like what we like. You get to judge. Here’s my story, and no apologies.
Al Jarreau died yesterday. When I heard the news I immediately thought of Teach Me Tonight. I loved that song.
I don’t know much of Jarreau’s career, which was a good one according to everyone, but what I know is that album that has Teach Me Tonight on it. I have that album in my basement, and if I had an actual record player I think I would play it sometimes. Or would have.
When I got back to my house today, after the news of Jarreau’s demise, I searched YouTube for Teach Me Tonight, and after listening I wasn’t so sure I should write about it. But that’s crap. I should write about it.
Jarreau’s version of a classic is all crudded up with mature music frou frou, and if I was smarter I would have hated it. But I didn’t. I really liked it as a contemporary soul/jazz sounding version of an old song. It’s good to be soft. I love his voice. It is clear and melodic. I liked it. I have to admit it.
I remember seeing Pink Flag in a record shop window on Eighth Street in the Village in 1977. It was an import, expensive, and I hadn’t even heard of the band, but the look was clean and lovely, different than the artwork that smudged across a lof of the new punk music elpees, and it made me curious. Not long after, reviews started appearing and Wire were quickly critics’ darlings. That’s what short and incisive pop noise and catchy melody does.
I waited for the US release, I think, a few months later to finally hear what I’d been reading about. I was rewarded, with a punchy tunes that got in and out quicker than you’d want, but more powerfully than you could hope for. Pink Flag is one of the great rock ‘n’ roll albums of all time. Rolling Stone says No. 412, NME says 378, Steve Moyer says 32. I say closer to Moyer than NME, but whatever.
So, this comes up because Wire has a new song out. They’ve been releasing records off and on for the past four or five years, and even more off and on through the aughts and 90s. I have to admit that I haven’t been paying attention, so I can’t speak to what they’ve been doing, but this is a good one. Short Elevated Period.
I posted here about a Husker Du cover the Mary Tyler Moore show theme song a few years ago. Not sure why, at that point.
This week, Mary Tyler Moore died. Which is a reason think about her. That is why we die, right? We hope someone thinks about us.
In my life I thought a lot about Mary Tyler Moore. I loved the Dick Van Dyke show, I loved the Mary Tyler Moore Show, I liked that she made an issue of Pale Male. MTM ranks in my pantheon of cultural gods, a list I should probably inscribe on the surface of excellent knishes. Or something.
Enjoy the clip, which I think shows just how essential Joan Jett is and how unfortunately that didn’t change the world.
When I moved to New York late in 1976 punk was breaking. Patti Smith’s Horses was already out, and the club scene was lively and exciting. New records, new great records seemed to come out every day, and the music press, the Voice, the Soho News, NME and others were crazy with coverage and analysis of the vibrant music and the scene that came with it. It was an astonishing time to be in New York, a city that was bankrupt and dangerous and eating itself from within, but also reinventing the world.
While the punk scene was centered in the East Village, and I visited all those clubs there, I somehow ended up hanging out in the Village itself, mostly at Gerdes Folk City on West Fourth Street, and Kenny’s Castaways on Bleecker Street. There the music was also hot, artists were being signed, but it was a singer-songwriter scene that was evolving, birthing a new generation of folkies, these far less interested in folk songs per se and far more interested in songwriting and confession and reflections on the quotidian and how life is lived by everyone and themselves.
I would have to do a little research to find a list of names of performers from that scene, some of whom I’m sure got a little famous and some of whom did not, but the two acts I admired most and saw many times were Steve Forbert and the Roches. Forbert wrote aching songs and sang with an aching voice, but the result wasn’t morose. His honesty and clever melodies are compelling and enduring, at least from his first two elpees, and it was hearing him live on the radio play a rocking careering version of Telstar on his acoustic that helped me develop the idea that the rock ‘n’ roll spirit isn’t just about volume and drive, but also about an honest and straightforward accounting of whatever you’re doing in song.
Which brings us to the Roches. The three sisters were delightful, funny, vivacious, and clever. They lit up the stage as presences, even Maggie the shy one, and lit up the room with their clever and lovely and surprising harmonies. We is their far too cute origin song.
As Tom recounts below, their first album as a threesome was produced by Robert Fripp, the famed progressive and experimental rock guitarist. The result is a spare and resonant sound, full of room without obvious reverb. Pretty and High was a song by Maggie, it closes the album with surreal drama and poetry and a clanging guitar. Play it loud, as if it rocked.
Yes, it’s an internet thing. The prompt goes like this, and is irresistible: List 10 albums that made a lasting impression on you as a TEENAGER, but only one per band/artist. Don’t take too long and don’t think too long.
I turned mine in last week, before I knew it was a thing. I made two mistakes in my first pass, listed two elpees that hit when I was 12, though I suppose maybe I wouldn’t have gotten into them until the next year. Hard to know.
List 10 albums that made a lasting impression on you as a TEENAGER, but only one per band/artist. Don’t take too long and don’t think too long.
1. Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen – Lost in the Ozone
Originally had Cream’s Disraeli Gears and Blood Sweat and Tear’s Child is the Father to the Man, but they were released before I was a teen. As I type this I realize that Blind Faith should be on, but I don’t know what to bump. I’ve written about all of these here before, except Benefit. And I’ve seen all these bands live, too, which may explain some of the attachment, except Jethro Tull. I once saw Commander Cody open for Jefferson Starship in Santa Monica. Weird show.
One odd thing to note is that I’m older than most everyone who made lists I’ve read. I turned 20 before punk broke or new wave hit. Feel free to add your list in the comments. In the meantime.
I was listening to the Bristol Sessions tonight. There was an open mike recording session in Bristol Tennessee on July 29, 1927, hosted by the Victor Talking Machine Company. They made record players, and wanted to make records.
Singers, songwriters, musicians from all over the south travelled for an opportunity to record their work and sell it. These were the beginning days of the record industry. The Carter Family and the Jimmie Rodgers recorded their first sides that day. That stuff is gold.
But the tune that caught my ear was a standard and classic murder ballad, Darling Cora, recorded by a guy named BF Shelton. This song is something of a banjo requirement, and it is irresistible because of its structure and chorus, but this early version does something wonderful and hypnotic with the sound. Singer and banjo, alone, play and sing with a hypnotic rhythm, and the banjo sounds like a trance instrument and chime, rather than a, well, banjo. That’s good. Check it out.
Although Shelton went on to record some other sides, the only surviving cuts of his are from the Bristol Sessions. So there is the chance that his lovely spectral banjo sound is an artifact of the recording process, but when you listen to another of his recordings that day, a less captivating song by spades, his picking is still pretty awesome. Here’s Oh, Molly Dear:
These old cuts bring so much extraneous noise they alienate us from the start, but when you dig in it is revelatory to find pickers and players who are rocking new sounds out of the traditional. Shelton is doing that for me. Which is why it excites me to listen to old stuff.
