This isn’t their best song, but it’s close enough and it’s the best PAWS video I’ve seen. For what that’s worth.
I’m wanting to blame young rockers for not rocking, and in this video when we land on the plastic insects on the snare I started to rethink PAWS.
Give them room for being Scottish, but this is too fey by half. Or twice two fey.
But I’m not sure it’s their fault. That’s what the kids want, along with songs about moms having contractions. It’s a different world than the one I grew up and hated. It’s a different world than the one Steve lives in now.
So, give this a listen. For modern rock it doesn’t suck. It’s three guys with instruments making a bunch of noise. The bass player seems to have some good ideas. The drummer isn’t afraid to hit it hard.
And this came up in one of the little side boxes. I liked this song a lot. I was nine at the time. What it lacks in sclabubbiness, it more than makes up for in chumbleeb.
What else would I be doing during the day than working and listening to KTKE? Even if baseball is on in the background, the volume is down, essentially sparing me the observations of commentators explaining what I can see for myself.
This time, the nugget from the past they hit me with was Wicked Gravity by the Jim Carroll Band
Carroll was a young poet who emerged from the New York arts scene of the late 70’s, along with Patti Smith and Robert Maplethorpe, with whom he apparently shared living space as the punk movement was burgeoning.
He published an autobiographical volume, The Basketball Diaries, in 1978 that dealt with his adolescence, sex, shooting hoops in high school, and drugs, specifically the author’s heroin addiction.
Largely a product of a Catholic upbringing, the young poet hit the music scene to, forming a band and releasing a decent enough first album, Catholic Boy.
The big hit from the disc was For All the People Who Died, but I always dug the cut here, Wicked Gravity a little more as a song.
Apparently this clip was posted on YouTube by Carroll Band bass player Steve Lisnley, who noted the video is from the band’s final live performance.
Carroll produced music, prose, and poetry through 2000. He passed away in 2009 at the age of 60 from a heart attack, and one posthumous volume, The Petting Zoo was released in 2010.
John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote a long story for the New York Times Magazine published April 13 of this year, called the Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie, about looking for two women who recorded a handful of songs in 1931 (or maybe 1930) that still resonate today, but whose biographies have been lost. Sullivan first learned about them in Terry Zwigoff’s documentary about blues enthusiast and cartoonist, R. Crumb.
It is an oddly shaped bit of writing, partly because it starts out describing a void (the missing women), then floats through the world of serious blues enthusiasts, before actually getting into the actual story. These researchers have scoured the planet for old 78 recordings, and traveled from town to town trying to document the lives of the musicians who played this music locally but never came to national attention.
One unlikely hero in the story is Paramount Records, a large record company which was run by business folks, not enthusiasts. Untethered from aesthetic judgment, Paramount cut a wide swath through the south, recording everyone they could get their hands on, thus creating a sizeable library of the sounds of the time that would otherwise have been lost. It was in this sweep that they found Geeshie and Elvie, two blues guitar playing singers, and brought them to a recording studio outside of Milwaukee for their only recording session every.
Using material from perhaps our most tireless blues researcher, Mack McCormick, and aided by a young woman named Caitlin Rose Love, who hoped to spend her days working with McCormick, but didn’t, Sullivan gives shape to a vast and ungainly subculture, the art that spawned it, and some very particular stories about the blues life, the South and the ways history is filtered, found and sometimes lost.
You can play the music while reading the piece, but here’s Geeshie Wiley’s amazing Last Kind Words Blues.
Some time ago we linked to a fantastic story about death metal that ran at Slate, and now Slate’s photo blog has a post about a photographer, Alexandra Crockett, who has taken a lot of pictures of death metal musicians and their cats. Her new book is called Metal Cats.
It’s the No. 1 bestseller right now in the Heavy Metal category.
I shared this with the Remnants a while ago, before we were Remnants. Thought of it again the other day, went to recheck it out and it has moved. The original site is now about yeast infections.
This site is automatically great because it’s the greatest site ever. Read the Hellacopters and Turbonegro reviews to realize this woman could probably be my soulmate. (I don’t even know a woman with “supershit” in her vocabulary.) Reviewing your entire collection, one-by-one, is a great idea, something I still aspire to do since I’ve kind of given up on having the time to write a book.
The bad part of the site is it’s hardly updated (maybe never) and you can read the whole thing in a couple hours (maybe that’s not a bad thing).
I hardly ever get a chance to play guitar these days. Which is a drag because though I am an adequate lead player, I am a pretty strong rhythm guy.
But, sort of by default, I have become a bass player over the past six or seven years, and that has been interesting as part of my growth as a so-called musician.
What this has done is now when I hear a song, I not only listen to the bass on the song more carefully, but similarly do I imagine what I would play, humming the line and notes to myself.
When I do find a run I like, I have been dragging the tune the bass line is attached to over to my teacher Steve Gibson, and try to pick it apart, and learn some new stuff.
So, this list represents the last cluster of songs where I just found the bass deadly and fun to learn.
Long Way to Go (Alice Cooper): I was driving to band practice a couple of weeks ago and looked for something to sing along to while driving to get my voice warm. And, though I have loved the Love it to Death album since it came out in 1971, and even knew bits and pieces of the bass parts throughout, I had never really let the bass of Long Way to Go–which is the song that gives the album its title–hit me. Well, till a couple of weeks ago, and I stopped singing and dug just how great this bass line is.
Some wonderful chromatic walkdowns, and isolated notes are all great, but what really nailed me was the completely different path during the interlude/breakdown before the final verse. Just brilliant playing by the band’s bassist, Dennis Dunaway.
The original Alice Cooper band might well be the best garage band ever (gotta give props to the Ramones here, too), and it is such a shame that they mostly self-destructed after Killer.
I know my mate and fellow bass player Steve will love it to death that I put this song atop the list.
Secret World (Peter Gabriel): Peter Gabriel sometimes seems overlooked to me considering how what a great visionary and explorer of music and art he is.
Arguably, his Sledgehammer video was among the early really c0hesive pieces of celluloid to grace the scene.
Though I was never a big fan of Genesis, his mark on that group goes without saying. And, though I am not that crazy about Phil Collins as a singer/songwriter, he is an excellent drummer, and Gabriel’s influence on Collins as a tunesmith speaks for itself. Or at least it used to.
This song, though is such a tour de force number it is hard to deny, and the great Tony Levin’s bass playing just kills me.
The studio version of Secret World is good, but when Gabriel and his band do it live, things move, shall we say, to another planet and level.
Watch the video here and you will both see what I mean, including Gabriel’s vision as an artist.
Cold Sweat (James Brown): I probably would not have been stung quite so hard by this song, had teacher Steve not brought it to my attention. This line created by the Flames Bernard Odum is a case study in time, discipline, and the selection of notes.
Not much more I can add to that.
Dazed and Confused (Led Zeppelin): While I have always owned albums by the Zep, and dug their songs, it was not till I started seriously playing music 20 years ago that I began to really appreciate just how good they are/were.
The first eponymously titled album was influential in ways I have described before, but over the last few months, the Biletones were trying out a new drummer, whom I subsequently fired a few weeks ago.
His biggest crimes were not keeping time for the band, as opposed playing the drums and not paying any attention to the rest of us, and in the process, not locking into me. I think the drums are the heartbeat of a song, and the bass the pulse, and they need to be in lockstep, complementing one another.
There were other musical transgressions committed by Scott, but that was the most egregious, as in I simply couldn’t, and then wouldn’t play with him. Cos he would never look at me or synch with me.
Bad.
Anyway, Dazed and Confused is textbook synch between drummer John Bonham and bass player John Paul Jones.
In particular, the call and response between the bass and the drums during the interlude might seem overly simplistic, but that is the feel I always want with whomever I am sharing the rhythm section.
And Your Bird Can Sing (Beatles): Anyone who doubts just how brilliant Paul McCartney’s playing is has obviously not listened too carefully. But this song, among my favorites of the group’s catalogue, just shows every piece of clever and musicianship these guys had in less than two minutes. The bass line is beyond musical. It is magical.
.