She’s one of the greatest of gospel voices, and this band slow burns, careful to let Shirley deliver.
Night Music: ザ・ダイナマイツ 恋はもうたくさん (The Dynamites), “There is already a lot of love”
Lunch Break: More Japanese Sounds of the Sixties
I initially titled this post More Japanese Group Sounds of the Sixties, but these bands were not Group Sounds bands. Too weird, too individual for that.
You have to think the Mops have heard the Monkees.
Yuya Uchida & The Flowers moved toward the psychedelic and darkness. Uchida was friends with John Lennon.
Boogie on, from the Apryl Fool.
Breakfast Blend: Japanese Group Sounds
Stumbled on this stuff this morning, via this site.
Not surprising, there was a vibrant Japanese beat music scene in the 1960s, called Group Sounds, which borrowed from the harmonies and sounds of the British Invasion and psychedelica and turned them into something else.
Too soon to curate, too good to wait.
Lind and the Linders
The Toys
The Jacks
Night Music: The Records, “Starry Eyes”
I have the UK version of this just about perfect pop song, so perfect it reached No. 56 on the Billboard charts, down in the basement. It has the little hole, not the big one US 45s have, and a picture sleeve. A reminder that the first punk explosion was followed by a wave of jangly power pop. Or maybe they were happening at the same time. Starry Eyes landed in 1978. It was the Records’ only hit as a band. They did contribute a hit to the Searchers’ 1979 comeback.
Tick Tock Boom
Was driving home from the Jersey Shore yesterday afternoon. No baseball games on mlb. No CDs in the car. Had to resort to Jango, the Pandora-thing I use, when forced. (Hadn’t signed in for months.)
I use Jango because it seems at least a little bit better than Pandora.
I hate all of these because:
1) I much, much, much prefer the comfortable continuity of an entire CD. Like I’ve mentioned before, where I come from, singles were for babies and albums were for grown-ups. I rarely want to be labeled a grown-up, but in this case I’ll take it.
2) The catalog of an artist consists of about two albums and five songs. Neither the Jango nor Pandora catalog contains Dudes or Ass Cobra on my “Turbonegro Radio.” That’s like having a baseball catalog without Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb.
3) Their suggestions suck. They don’t get what I like.
4) They give me suggestions at the expense of the artists I include to be played. Sometimes they’ll give me two songs by a suggestion band before playing even one from what I told them to play. Can’t there be a “just play what I told you because your suggestions suck” setting?
5) Their independent bands are godawful. I haven’t been in any great independent bands, but I can assure you that every independent band I’ve been in has been better than every independent band I’ve heard on these music services.
But I did get one good suggestion song yesterday, not that I hadn’t heard it before. The Swedish Hives are friends with the Swedish Hellacopters and you can see why. And they have a “tick tock” drummer too.
(The most assinine derogatory term I’ve heard in ages. Drummers are supposed to keep time, by the way. Sometimes they even use devices called “met-ro-nomes” to help them keep time even better. But Keith Moon is “innovative” – constantly pitter-patting all over the drums, sapping the power from music that could really use a power boost. For heaven’s sake, his own guitarist wished for a real drummer. Perhaps guitarists should loosen all their strings and just wank away. That would be “innovative.” It would also “suck.”)
Let’s steer this ship back to rock ‘n’ roll with The Hives:
Night Music: Lee Michaels, “Do You Know What I Mean”
My great aunt died and my mother said we, as a family, could decide how to spend the small inheritance.
My recollection is that Lee Michaels convinced me that the money should be spent on a Hammond B3. In terms of musical enrichment, that’s a no brainer. But my mom decided we’d do better with a pool table, and my geometry skills improved, for sure. Maybe my brother’s did as well.
Breakfast Blend: I Believe
I’ve always liked this Stevie Wonder song. I like Petra Hayden. And I kinda like Bill Frisell’s guitar playing.
For those expecting Fu Manchu, go home, but Frisell is a guy who straddles the jazz world and some other world, which is not the one of hammered chords. But as this cover shows, he’s down with reverb and looping and extending his strings as far as he can. And it all sounds good, usually without sounding pretty.
I’ve seen him live a few times, twice with the great now-deceased drummer and composer Paul Motian and the great tenor sax player Joe Lovano at the Village Vanguard. I wish he got dirty more, at least sometimes, but on the other hand, that’s so old.
For breakfast lovely harmonies and harmonics rule!
Stevie Wonder was making sounds when this came out that no one had heard before.
Night Music: Petra Haden, “Tattoo”
Lawr’s impassioned defense of the Who Sell Out, an album that has fantastic highlights, but also shows the unsightly spread of Pete Townsend’s ambition to warp the pop machine to large scale narrative. In any case, there are many great moments in Sell Out, and one of the most delightful and out of left field is the album’s inspiration of the singer Petra Haden to cover its entirety in multitracked vocals, she singing all the parts.
Perhaps if Keith Moon was more of a tick-tock machine this would come across as deracinated, but I imagine a young woman creating these complex arrangements, using her voice to mimic the whole of the sounds, in the dark night of her idea, realizing just how crazy the whole thing was. And then she pushes the record button and sings again. There are more tracks to be laid down.
Seth MacFarlane Knows
Life is busy.
That is my cheap shit excuse for neglecting to surrender my share of contributions to the Site here over the past weeks.
Truth is, my life is very busy, although I am in the process of transitioning from one of those more than demanding day jobs that really pays the bills and provides my health care, to the ranks of the retired. Although for me retired means writing four or five baseball columns a week, working on some fiction, being at the ball park, playing music, writing songs, and well, writing here too among other things.
Well, rest assured, just because I get distracted and forget to post stuff here, it doesn’t mean I am not thinking about it.
And, while I have a lot of fodder floating around in my grey cells, somehow when watching Family Guy a couple of weeks ago I saw this which demonstrates just how brilliant Seth MacFarlane and his mates can be.
I get if you hate Family Guy. Peter Griffin is as oafish and mostly offensive a character as we can imagine. In fact if The Simpsons has proved to be the best representation of American Family life ever recorded, the Griffin family has pushed that envelope by showing our basically soulless full of reality TV instant experts internet cell phone culture in an even more visceral way.
In other words, yeah: lots of fart and toilet jokes, too much blood and vomit, lots of gags that no one can let go of, and on and on.
However, if you can indulge creator MacFarlane just a little, when he is on, he is so on it is scary.
And, very often, that on is the result of some musical genius.
Not that we are talking Lou Reed or the Hellacopters or original music.
More like knowing that the ever-hot Lois Griffin banged all of Kiss as a young woman, something that makes her Trog husband Peter proud.
But, the show also riffs other songs and genres and stuff so brilliantly. As in the song/sequence below where MacFarlane and mates take on Disney, not only in song, but with just a few deft line changes from the animators, and a little creative use of metaphor, well, you get this:
OK, so it ain’t rock’n’roll, but it is funny and I do like it. It is also smart, which I also like.
When I think about it, in fact, most of my earliest exposure to classical music–aside from what my parents usually had going in the background–was the result of Looney Tunes, as in this great clip of Bugs playing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody #2 (although when I first saw it, I had no idea what the music was):
To finish off, I am going back to Family Guy, again with a song and dance number that is so clever, and to pair with Bugs and his ilk, links back to the 30’s with the song Bag O’ Weed which totally riffs on the Marx Brothers and Duck Soup (I looked for a video clip of the brothers banging on the helmeted heads of the enemy Sylvanians with dubbed xylophone music that MacFarlane parodies, and could not find one).
However, if you watch carefully during the finale, you will indeed see a Groucho head spill out (at 2:49) among the images, giving credit where credit is due right after the Duck Soup riff (instead of helmets, Brian and Stewie are banging on bongs).
OK, so I got that out of my system, and I can start writing about some serious music. Like Foghat.
Happy and safe holiday to you all.