Been practicing for a few weeks in preparation for a duo act with a guy I played with in a band in the late-80s, before my move to Chicago to begin my baseball career at STATS. He played this song for me tonight, which is a no-doubter, for all kinds of reasons. Fits the first commandment like a glove.
Take this, American Songbook!
When I was a mere boy I listened to a lot more Muddy Waters than Howlin’ Wolf, more by circumstance than design I think. I saved up and bought the Muddy Waters Chess box, but never got to the Wolf’s until later. So, when I first heard Lucinda William’s eponymous third album, her cover of I Asked for Water (He Gave Me Gasoline) was a revelation. This is a smashing version.
It’s a smashing version even after you listen to Wolf’s version, which is heavier and darker and even more mournful. I could listen to it all day long.
1) Agreed that one knows a great song when one hears it, as at least a couple others have suggested. This overrules anything else (except #17).
2) A great song makes one bob one’s head, shimmy one’s shoulders or purse one’s lips. Multiples are best.
3) Melody is good. The voice should be considered an extra instrument. The better the voice and the better the melody, the better the chance the song is great. A melody that adds to the song is better than one that simply mimics a riff. To use Black Sabbath as an example, War Pigs is a great song, Iron Man is not. The vocal melody has a lot to do with this.
4) Speaking of riffs, they are good.
5) Good harmony is good. Weird, innovative harmony that is still good is best.
6) At this point I’m reminded of something I once heard about The Smithereens. Their goal was to be The Beatles and AC/DC at the same time. They never came close, but it was a noble goal.
7) Hooks are good. A great musical hook is felt somewhere between the belly and balls.
8) Fast is good. There are great slow songs, but they are few.
9) Heavy is good. Most great slow songs make up in heaviness what they sacrifice in tempo.
10) Mellow is bad.
11) Great music demands attention. One cannot multitask in the presence of great music.
12) Good lyrics help, but good lyrics are not essential. If everything else is there, who cares what the band is singing about? By the same token if everything else is there, who cares whether one can decipher what the band is singing about? Misogyny and profanity are good when used properly.
13) Lyrics ideally take the listener to a fantasy world the average Joe will never experience. Songs about screwing exotic women while high on smack are better than songs about admiring one’s wife as she drives the kids to the soccer game (see pop country).
14) Electric guitars are good. Keyboards and synthesizers not so much. There are exceptions.
15) Musical proficiency sometimes helps, but is never a deal breaker. There are many great three-chord songs. Musical talent alone never makes a great song (not even a decent song).
16) Drums. Let me tell you a little story. I was at a birthday party for a relative last fall. As I sat with my brother at the beginning of the party, the DJ was playing Frank Sinatra, etc. I hate that stuff. My brother detected my displeasure and eventually exploded with something like, “This is the American Songbook! How can you call yourself a musician if you don’t at least appreciate the American Songbook?” While the American Songbook was playing, folks were milling around, generally socializing, not really paying attention. Eventually, the DJ bagged the American Songbook. He began with Hang On Sloopy. As dippy as Hang On Sloopy is, the floor immediately filled with people dancing. Drums.
17) The dark side of dancing is modern choreographed dancing. Modern choreographed dancing has been the worst thing to happen to pop music in the past 20 years. Any sniff of greatness a modern song may possess is negated by choreographed dancing. The two cannot coexist. There are surely great songs that include great choreographed dancing, but none since 1980.
I had this piece in my head when back a few weeks ago when we were discussing those lost years of the 60’s, btween Elvis and the Beatles, which as Gene noted were not quite so lost if you knew where to look and listen.
I do confess that Top 40 and pop, and the Four Seasons and then the Beachboys ruled the airwaves in my bedroom during that time. Those were also the days of Bobbys Vee and Rydel and Vinton, all of whom were safer than Elvis, let alone Little Richard, and well, in 1961, When Gypsy Woman was released, I was still just 9 (didn’t hit 10 till the end of October).
I do confess to liking Vee’s Take Good Care of My Baby, and the truth is by then the Elvis who released tunes like Return to Sender bore very little resemblance to the bluesy guy who covered That’s Alright Mama so wonderfully during the Sun sessions.
Though I am sure there were a myriad of songs in between Peggy Sue, which really triggered my consciousness and subsequent love for rock’n’roll, and Gypsy Woman, somehow with each I remember thinking at first listen, “man, how could anything sound so good?”
So here it is, with greats Curtis Mayfield (who penned the tune) and Jerry Butler leading the charge.
Swear. I’ll be back soon. More tunes festering, and the “What makes a great song?” issue is something I tried to tackle almost a year ago but it went nowhere (lots of words, little point).
I wasn’t going to dwell on dubstep because I thought I had a simple point to make about it. But this turned up tonight and it is such a crazy hash of rockish ideas and this other music, it seemed worth passing it along. For the video, for the most part, though it is the way it comments on the music and vice versa that is of interest.
Isn’t it priceless how the hero’s dream is to play guitar in a rock band, but the track makes no attempt to simulate that sound or culture. Just the story.
One of the immutable structures of dubstep is called the drop. This is when the music, in this case the r+b groove singing about Another Day, starts to get a little discombobulated. The pace hurries, the sound starts to disintegrate, and when the drop comes the sound becomes massive and sawing or seething. For a while. And then you’re back to the easy groove (or abstract atmospherics) that started the whole thing, until it happens all over again later.
This Lou Reed and company (Pavarotti!) is an ad to promote the tax the BBC exacts for every TV (and radio?) sold in the UK in order to pay for itself.
But that seems less important than the simple loveliness of the whole thing. Right now I can’t imagine a more positive and less maudlin tune with a catchy melody. You hit me with your flower.
Fun sightings for me: Shane McGowan (I think that’s him without the teeth), Dr. John (who got me here), and Robert Cray. You’ll have your own.
Sometime back in the 1970s producers found they could rearrange the elements of a song and turn it into something else.
The first time I heard of this involved the album King Tubby Meets the Rockers Uptown, which was produced by Augustus Pablo. He released an album, this was the title tune:
It was based on his production of Justin Miller’s song “Baby I Love You So.”
The Rockers version omits the words and spaces out the sounds. That’s the dub program.
I’m no historian of dub reggae or it’s somewhat recent progenitor, dub step, but the two are related by being producer acts rather than performance tracts.
And then there is Skrilex, uber dub producer, mixing Damian Marley’s performance, which sounds like this: http://youtu.be/PR_u9rvFKzE.
I’m not a fan, too crushing without dynamics for no apparent reason, but I can see why the kids like the harsher sounds. The ones that mystify their elders? Haven’t the kids always?
Louie “Satchmo” Armstrong lived a pretty middle class life in Corona Queens, while also traveling all around the world to play and present music that delighted many and introduced even more to Jazz.
But before that, Armstrong may well have been the most important figure in all of jazz history musically, pushing and extending and disciplining the form, before he then helped popularize it.
Which is why his old house out in Corona is now a museum.
Yesterday, Dr. John, the Nite Tripper and an icon of the New Orleans music scene that Armstrong came from long ago, visited and played Satchmo’s piano in Satchmo’s museum, promoting Dr. John’s new album, which is a tribute to Armstrong’s overwhelming influence on New Orleans music and the creation of jazz in the early part of the 1900s.
A master in a masters house.
IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED
The British indie rock band alt-J has a minor hit on their hands this summer. It’s the single “Left Hand Free” from their latest album, This Is All Yours.
The band’s name is a substitute for their original name which was the Greek letter ∆. They decided to pronounce it alt+J because that’s the keyboard command used to display the symbol on Mac computers.
Now back to the song…
If you read any reviews you’ll quickly learn that “Left Hand Free” isn’t your typical alt-J song. It’s a simpler, more straight ahead psych-pop song than their normal “intellectual” rock fare.
The Guardian’s Sam Richards reported:
Alt-J resolved to write “the least Alt-J song ever”, taking a “joke riff” (guitarist/vocalist) Joe (Newman) had been playing in rehearsals and fleshing it out with the most perfunctory chords and rhythm imaginable. Whereas the band typically spend weeks agonising over every note, Left Hand Free was written “in about 20 minutes”. Needless to say, the US label loved it.
The playful lyrical reference to guns may lead to some to think it’s a pro 2nd Amendment manifesto.
I tackle weeds just so the moon buggers nibble
A right hand grip on his Colt single-action army
Well your left hand’s free
And your right’s in a grip
With another left hand
Watch his right hand slip
Towards his gun, oh no
I think they’re just goofing on us but it’s all good fun.
If you’d like to check out a cut that sounds more like what fans expect to hear from alt-J, check out “Something Good” from their 2012 album, An Awesome Wave.
This is a very good band that I’ll be following for the next few years.
Enjoy… until next week.
Amy Rose Spiegel was 22 when she wrote this story at Buzzfeed, about going to see the Replacements during their reunion tour in 2013.
She was a one year old when the Mats broke up originally, and grew up and into a fan who never expected to get a chance to see them live. But then she did.
Along the way she has some observations about teens and musical passion and the Mats, as well as the way music imprints on teens and how teen taste reflects teen values, that seem to fit here.
Spiegel prefers the introspective songs, by the way, which in the piece seems a little sadly stereotyped. But fortunately she will put up with the noisy ones, because they matter to her, even if she doesn’t like them as much.
