I saw the Neville Brothers play a few years ago. Okay, maybe in 2008. They were great, but what impressed me was that they said this was their 30th year. I saw them in 1978 at the Bottom Line in New York, opening for the Wild Tchoupitoulas. At the time the Nevilles seemed timeless, and the Tchoupitoulas even more so.
But while Art was a seasoned veteran with the Meters and countless sessions, the Brothers had only stepped out on their own that year, backing up Big Chief Landry. It was a great show, maybe the best live show I’ve ever seen, in part because it was impossible not to dance and while the Bottom Line crew tried to enforce the city’s no-dancing rule, everyone knew that was hopeless on this night.
The Nevilles and the Meters before them played with everyone. Part of the magic of New Orleans is how this music helped create ska and reggae, and how the jazz of Louie Armstrong and the amazing Professor Longhair led to a culture of breadth and rhythm.
So, choosing a song is impossible, but rest in peace Art. I saw you plenty, felt I knew you, but that was an illusion.
My second influential elpee was the Rascals Time Peace, which was a greatest hits collection that went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts. For me it was a chance to play this great band’s great songs all the time. It was also an introduction to Wilson Pickett and the Atlantic R+B style, which has been a treat ever since.
In any case, Come on Up was a single off their second album, Collections, and was not a huge hit. But it sure is a cool song.
Gene named me in the 10 most influential elpees in 10 days challenge on Facebook. My Day 1 choice was Cream’s Disraeli Gears, which was in no way obscure but did feel like my music, rather than pop music everyone liked that I liked too, like the Beatles, Stones and the Who. I thought I’d post a song from each of my albums over here, just for fun.
This one was a Clapton song rewritten by producer Felix Pappalardi and his wife Gail. It’s the lead song on Disraeli Gears and seems like the epitome of the band’s psychedelic blues.
Today is the 50th anniversary
of the first time a man walked on the moon.
If you were alive at the time, you remember it like you remember where
you were and what you were doing when America was attacked on 9/11.
I was totally into the space program. I knew the names of all the rockets and loved to build and launch Estes model rockets. I even built the Estes model of the Saturn V – The booster that launched the Apollo XI mission.
As you may predict, I need to find a song
that is a proper tribute to the occasion.
There are hundreds (thousands?) of songs that make reference to the moon
and I love many of them. Sinatra’s “Fly
Me to the Moon” immediately comes to mind, as does Van Morrison’s
“Moondance.” There are more obscure
candidates like Television’s “Marquee Moon” or “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”
but I’m still not there.
This being the song of the week, I need to go even more Obscure. My pick is “Man in the Moon” by Village. I’ll bet you never heard it!
One of the reasons I picked this song is
because it is of its time. It was
released in 1969, the year of the moon landing, and has the psychedelic sound
of its day. The “Man in the Moon” single
was even released on a label called Head!
The blog site Anorak Thing describes the track as follows:
“Man In The
Moon” starts out with some ethereal organ and then gets a bit heavy with
some great bottom end bass. What I love about this record is it’s from
1969 and despite the organ work it’s not overly heavy like some of the
plodding/wanky Deep Purple stuff of the period. Halfway through it gets a
bit “improvisational” but never too “way out” either.
It reminds me of early Atomic Rooster if they were a bit more
“lysergic”.
Village was led by British R&B
musician Peter Bardens and included Bill Porter on drums and bassist Peter
Thomas, who would later to be in Elvis Costello’s Attractions. Before Village, Bardens was in Them with Van
Morrison (1965). After Village, he would
go on to found the progressive rock band Camel.
“That’s one small step for man. One
giant leap for mankind.”
I wrote about these guys a few years ago, posting one of their new wavey songs with an excellent video. That was then.
After they made that good song their drummer left, and rather than replace him they remade themselves as a bizarrely earnest harmony band. They stand on the stage, no matter how big, closely together so they can hear their partners and make incredibly lovely harmonies.
They played tonight in the park by our house, and we were jazzed. This is music that is far from rock, but also music that has no genre. I think sometimes they sound like Mumford and Sons, revivalists with big ideas, but they resist that. They aren’t old style. They’re still new-wavey, only they eschew the drum kit (they have a kick drum) and they love their voices, which they surely should.
Moyer will roll over tonight. Good for him.
So, YouTube fed me this one I didn’t know. I like this band.
I remember driving in the car somewhere with my dad, maybe to the library, which is a place we went every week.
What I remember is trying to explain how much I loved this song, the Lulu version, even though every part of me that had any aesthetic sense of value versus cheese knew that it was Top 40 folderol. I might have phrased it that way, that’s the sort of kid I was.
But I didn’t hear this version until today. When Al Green proves that with Willie Mitchell almost anything can work. Excellent song.
h/t Darrin Viola.
Yesterday was the 40th
anniversary of the (in)famous “disco sucks” night at Comiskey Park in
Chicago. The event was officially called
the Disco Demolition.
A local radio DJ, Steve Dahl, lost his job when his station went to an all disco format in response to the trend of the day. I did a little research and was surprised to see that most of the hits that held the #1 spot on the Billboard singles chart in 1979 were disco (OK, maybe some were R&B) tracks. This week in 1979, Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” was #1, “Hot Stuff” was #3 and Chic’s “Good Times” was at #13 – with a bullet.
When Dahl landed at another rock
station, he decided to seek revenge and would “explode” disco records on the
air.
“Back
in the day when we had turntables, I would drag the needle across the record
and blow it up with a sound effect, and people liked that.”
He decided to take this a step further
and stage an actual demolition of disco records at Comiskey. He persuaded the White Sox to co-sponsor a
promotion that would allow fans to attend a twi-night double header against the
Detroit Tigers for less than $1 if they would bring a disco record to be
demolished in a center field explosion between games.
About 50,000 people showed up, way more
than the typical 16k that attended most games.
The park’s security at the event wasn’t up to the task of crowd control. Thousands of fans poured onto the field in a
riot. They stole the bases and tore up
the field, forcing the second game to be postponed.
Here’s a short ESPN documentary about the event.
Ya know, at the time I was one of those
“disco sucks” rockers. But today, I
kind of like to hear the best of those songs.
Guitar Slim cut a record for the Specialty label in 1953 that would play a significant role in the history of rock & roll – not only for the singular performance but also for the impact it would have on future artists. The track was produced by a then 23-year-old Ray Charles!
Slim applied his trademark distortion on “The Things That I Used to Do,” an effect that influenced guitarist legends. You can connect his sound to guitarists from bluesmen Buddy Guy and Albert Collins to iconoclast Frank Zappa. Hendrix, Johnny Winter, and Stevie Ray Vaughn recorded versions of Slim’s standard as did Elvin Bishop, Ike & Tina Turner, and countless others.
This Hendrix recording was released on the
2018 album Both Sides of the Sky. It was cut at a session that featured Winter joining
Hendrix on a second guitar, Billy Cox on bass and Dallas Taylor (who was
playing with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young at the time) on drums.
“The Things That I Used to Do” was voted
as one of the 500 that shaped the rock genre by former Rock & Roll Hall of
Fame curator, James Henke.
I didn’t know Duncan by name, but he was a vocalist and guitar player in the Quicksilver Messenger Service, one of the great San Francisco bands of the late 60s. Quicksilver made a great impression on me with the brilliantly adolescent and epic first song on their first album.
QSM were nothing if not quintessential hippies, living on a commune, jamming constantly, living on health food and drugs, as this obit describes. But Duncan had an earlier incarnation as a musician in The Brogues, whose I Ain’t No Miracle Worker was included on Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets collection.
