Night Music: Bonzo Dog (Doo Dah Band) – “The Intro And The Outro”

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Peter and I have written back and forth about what it is that triggers the “Night Music” pieces, at least for us.

For me, sometimes the impetus is simply hearing a song on the radio (yes, I still listen to that old fashioned medium) or on my shuffle. Sometimes a tune just pops into my head. Sometimes something will occur during band practice and remind me that “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love” was not a bad tune and one the Biletones could cover.

And, sometimes it is a stimulus-response thing, as in one of us will write about a song and band, and that starts the whole association moving along.

So, Peter, writing about the Rutles has done for me.

As an already crazy Python fan when The Rutles All You Need is Cash was released in 1978, I watched it, loved it, and even bought it on DVD years later.

I am still a fan of all things Python related, but my familiarity with the music of Python pre-dated my seeing the comedy act by a handful of years. Before that, my friend Stephen Clayton and I had been big fans of the Bonzo Dog (Doo Dah Band), whose principle song writer was Neil Innes.

Innes moved on to do the music for the Python films, and as Peter noted, headed up the Rutles (with Eric Idle, from Python) and also did some solo stuff. Innes also appeared on Saturday Night Live, when I believe Idle was the guest host, and if memory serves, he wore white and played a white grand piano, a la Lennon, and performed the Rutles Cheese and Onions.

The Bonzo Dog band were a goofy consortium of great British musicians with a slight twist on everything, pre-dating quasi pop-rock Big Band sound Squirrel Nut Zippers and their ilk produced by nearly 30 years.

The band’s biggest hit–at least in England–was the venerable I’m the Urban Spaceman but my fave song of theirs was the opening cut to the album Gorrilla from 1968 called The Intro and the Outro, a shameless grab of Duke Ellington’s C-Jam Blues, although in the Bonzo’s treatment,Count Basie gets the nod over the Duke lyrically, shall we say.

Still, a great riff, funny words, and everything that is Innes, Bonzo, and Python.

Night Music: Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “TKO Boxing Day”

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The 1983 Punch the Clock album, along with it’s follow up, Goodbye Cruel World, were the first Costello albums that didn’t deliver fully. One had the impression that after the art move of Imperial Bedroom, the decision was made to get commercial. New producers added horns, there were 12″ dance mixes, and to tell the truth a lot of really good songs on both records. But on Boxing Day every year I wake up singing this song, because it’s the only one I know about Boxing Day.

It has a driving beat and driven insistent horns, and it feels like it should get you jumping, but like many of the less successful tunes on this album, there is a lack of warmth and a brittleness to the arrangements. What sounds like it should be rollicking, like Dexy’s Midnight Runners, sounds mechanical and a little heartless. But I hear, with a little more relaxed groove and a suppler beat, a song with a hard groove and an appealing hook. Until they do it that way we have it this way.

Night Music: The Rutles, “With A Girl Like You”

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I remember seeing the Rutles mocumentary, All You Need Is Cash, back in 1978, and being quite fond of it. A story about it in the NY Times last week sent me to YouTube, where my reaction was of a somewhat different sort. What I remembered as cute parody back then, plays as alternative Beatles tracks now. As Paul Simon says in the Times’ story, “it is more of a panegyric than it is a satire.” I think maybe the confusion stemmed from the title, which sounds satirical. Meanwhile, the music is so much like the Beatles sound that on the surface on crummy speakers it can almost pass.

That’s why Neil Innes, the songwriter, paid when the Beatles’ publishing company sued. And why these songs are a pleasure to hear even today.

Happy Holidays Night Music: All the xmas tunes are posted and Pussy Riot is free.

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A point they are deliriously using to show how screwed up Putin’s system is. I like to listen to music people went to jail for on Christmas.

Keep kicking Putin, Pussy Riot! And a happy new year!

Happy Holidays: Stephen Colbert and Elvis Costello, “There Are Much Worse Things to Believe In”

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Sweet!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98590039

Happy Holidays: Dr. Dog, “I Believe In Santa Claus”

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Feels kinda classic, but very new.

Happy Holidays: Tracey Thorn, “Joy”

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It’s because of the dark, we see the beauty in the spark.

Night Music: The Turtles, “Happy Together” (without instruments)

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I remember a snow day, hanging at my friend Bobby’s house, (this would be when we were 11), listening to this song over and over. It was No. 1 that week, and a fantastic pop song by a couple of Zappa dudes who worked the edges.

Without the instruments, it is less sugary.

But most importantly, they got paid, and felt bad about it. (Hmmm, did they? We should look into that.)

Art dudes made pop music that worked, and they got paid. Bingo.

60 Minutes: My name is Prince!

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by Eugene Freedman

Most of Prince’s music is not on Youtube, but if you add kroyte AT gmail.com to your Google+ profile you should get access to a playlist of all these songs. Good luck. You will not be spammed.

Prince-highcontrastWhen Peter suggested that I write a 60-minute playlist for Prince I immediately balked. I thought it would be far too hard to condense Prince’s material into only 60 minutes. I was already working on ranking his top 200 songs—for my own personal edification—but that too proved very difficult.

Prince can’t be easily categorized. He started off as an R&B artist with mainly ballads and dance tracks for his first few albums. As he grew as an artist he started adding in a lot more funk, synth-pop, and ultimately hard rock style guitar. Before he became a headliner in his own right he opened for Rick James on one tour and the Rolling Stones on another.

Peter placed Prince and the Revolution’s Purple Rain #26 on his Essential Remnants list. I immediately pointed out that Sign O’ the Times is Prince’s best studio album. It shows the greatest depth and breadth of his skill—many of the tracks were written, produced, and performed exclusively by Prince. I started there in putting together my 60 minutes of Prince—but alas Sign itself is longer than 60 minutes, it was a double LP when it was released.

I didn’t include a lot of Prince’s longer tracks even though some are my favorites, because when you’ve only got 60 minutes, you have to go for variety and quantity in my mind, not necessarily the best. I also only included album or primary release format versions of the songs avoiding longer live versions in order to cram as much as I could into 60 minutes. I kept everything under six minutes and most under five in order to include more tracks. So, with all due respect to Days of Wild, Come, and Adore, here are my 60 minutes of Prince:

Head, Dirty Mind (4:45): Head is one of Prince’s most directly sexual songs on his most sexual album; I once told a friend that Prince’s songs were either about sex or God. If you listened to Dirty Mind you’d believe that they were all about sex. Tipper Gore would not approve.

When Doves Cry, Purple Rain (5:54): Q- When does an R&B track not include bass? A- When Prince is experimenting with his first major guitar riff driven album. It was Prince’s first Billboard hot 100 No. 1 and hit No. 1 on the Black Singles chart and the Dance/Disco chart. It was the No. 1 song of 1984, and Prince had the No. 1 Movie, Album, and Single in the country at the same time. Yet, listen to this song, or almost any song from the Purple Rain album, and you will not accuse it of being pop. Before 1999 almost all of Prince’s songs were bass and drum driven or slick synth-pop, with rhythm guitar in the background. On 1999 Prince started integrating rock guitar with limited solos on some of his tracks, but they were still bass and drum driven. The Purple Rain album was the first album that had guitar driven tracks. And, with When Doves Cry, he completely eliminated the bass line.

Another Lonely Christmas, B-Side of I Would Die 4 U (4:52): Although sex or God are consistent themes in Prince’s catalog, some of his best songs are are lamentations, and this is the best of those. The song begins, “Last night, I spent another lonely Christmas,” and Prince played this song only once live—appropriately on December 26, 1984. Prince conveys real pain from loss on this track.

Raspberry Beret, Around the World In a Day (3:33): Now, this song has a pop groove. Yet, it manages to tell a good story. Only charted as No. 2, yet I include it on the list as Prince’s truest pop song. Bear in mind the Prince released this single only four months after his last single from Purple Rain was released. Unlike other “pop” artists, Prince never took breaks. He wrote multiple albums per year, condensing them down, and releasing only about one third of his work because of Warner Bros. fears about saturating the marketplace with his work. It’s also why there are so many bootlegs and vault compilations out there from about 1982-2000. Meanwhile, he was writing and performing everything for The Time, except lead vocals, plus writing and playing on all of his own side acts—Vanity 6, Apollonia 6, Andre Cymone, The Family, Madhouse, plus many of the tracks on Sheila E.’s albums during that period.

Sign O’ the Times, Sign O’ the Times (4:57): Another lamentation. This one about social ills affecting the world in 1987. Yet, it does not sound dated today. “In France a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name, by chance his girlfriend came across a needle and soon she did the same. At home there were 17 year old boys and their idea of fun, was being in a gang called the Disciples, high on crack, and toting a machine gun.”

The Ballad of Dorothy Parker, Sign O’ the Times (4:02): Sign was a double album culled from the triple album Crystal Ball (not to be confused with the release under the same name) which had combined the projects Dream Factory and Camille written for Prince’s female alter-ego of the same name. Warner Bros. balked at a triple album and couldn’t release a non-pop, genre-less track as a single. Prince selected this song to be the fourth cut on every iteration of the album and this song should not be missed.

Forever in My Life, Sign O’ the Times (3:30): This is not one of Prince’s famous falsetto R&B songs. It’s another in-between song that doesn’t really have a category. Maybe those are my favorites. They are not R&B, funk, pop, or rock; they are Prince songs. My wife and I printed the lyrics to this song on the back of our wedding program.

Shockadelica, B-side of If I Was Your Girlfriend (3:31): Both this and it’s A-Side were from the Camille project. I could have selected anything from that un-released album, but this is my favorite track. The track is so funk laced it’s got you in a trance. ‘Cause when this woman say dance, you dance.

The Cross, Sign O’ the Times (4:46): Prince has a lot of music about his spirituality and religious beliefs. I picked this one because of the imagery it conjures as it describes religion as escape from everyday problems—from a believer’s perspective. But, it also contains a great guitar solo. The main riff was later used in “7” on the O(+> album.

Alphabet St., Lovesexy (5:39): Prince lays down a funky groove in this song that is almost unfair. There’s research showing that people who listen to certain classical music have better ability to perform special temporal tasks immediately after listening. It’s referred to as the Mozart Effect. While it doesn’t change people in the long term, when I learned about that effect, I thought of Prince, and his songs like Alphabet St. The songs are so complex musically, or at least seem that way to someone untrained like me, they sound three-dimensional, whereas most songs are only two-dimensional. This song has a musical depth.

Joy in Repetition, Graffiti Bridge (4:54): My favorite song. Another Prince song without the ability to categorize it otherwise. Another song originally from Crystal Ball recorded during the Dream Factory sessions. Sometimes things recorded in 1986 show up on albums released as late as 1990. That’s the nature of having too much material. The song is a story, written as a riddle—at least the first time you hear it. Joy in Repetition has a terrific guitar solo and is even better live, especially when Prince doesn’t ruin the riddle too soon in the performance.

Call My Name, Musicology (5:16): Many think that Prince stopped creating great music in the 90’s. That’s not true. He keeps cranking it out today. Call My Name is another one of his falsetto classics and it’s not from the back catalog. It’s from 2004.

Fury, 3121 (4:02): Fury is a driving, guitar driven track from Prince’s most recent masterwork album. Prince’s pace has slowed in recent years. He no longer writes three full-length albums a year. And, he no longer releases one album a year. It’s a bit disappointing. But, when he puts together a perfect album like 3121 he covers all of his range and leaves you wanting more. Fury is my favorite track from this 2006 album.

If I were to put together a list of my favorite Prince works, it would not be the same list. This list attempted to cover all of Prince’s different styles, eras, and fit within the format of 60-minutes of essential Prince. Ask a different question and you would get a different answer.

Night Music: Cheap Trick, “Sgt. Pepper Reprieve” and “A Day in the Life”

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A lot of Beatles buzz on the site the last few days, and I wondered how much of the world knew that Cheap Trick actually covered the entire Sergeant Pepper album a few years back, taking it to the road (kind of like Phish, who do someone’s classic album every Halloween)?

Though I was a big Trick fan during their early years–especially In Color and Black and White,  Heaven Tonight, and Dream Police–I sort of lost track of their newer stuff after that (shame on me, as that is when Buddakon came out, but as good a live band as the Trick are, that one seemed like too much hype too after I had found them).

Not that I ever wrote the band off: I still love all three of those albums from the Rockford band (about 40 miles from where Diane lived in Algonquin) who so emulated the Beatles with their own spin. Though the Trick have been a lot more. Poppy, tuneful, funny, and they don’t take themselves too seriously, which to me means if they take from other bands (like the great bridge chords in I Know What I Want and I Know How to Get It that are lifted from Eight Days a Week)  it is more of an homage than a rip.

Well, a few years ago my friend, drummer Steve Chattler turned me onto the Trick doing Sergeant Pepper in its entirety, and the band does a killer job.

See for yourself. I mean, this is nothing like watching a tribute/cover band.