Good Song, New To Me

by

It seems to be the fashion to knock the music streaming services, although not with you guys which is good. I have Spotify but I rarely listen because of the commercials. I already pay to have no commercials on Pandora, and since I have no serious complaints with Pandora I figured why pay twice? Indeed, almost all the great songs I’ve discovered in the last ten years I first heard on Pandora. When you subscribe for a long time and are specific in creating your “stations,” you WILL hear great music new to you. You can create stations based on genres, which is dumb and you’ll get dumb if you do, or you can use artists, which is good as long as you don’t get too broad like Rolling Stones Radio. And you can use songs, which is often what I do. These are my stations:

That Great Love Sound (Raveonettes)

X Offender (Blondie)

New York Dolls

Howlin Wolf

Viginia Plain (Roxy Music)

The Kids Are Alright (Who)

The Marvelettes

Lee “Scratch” Perry

You’re Gonna Miss Me (13th Floor Elevators)

Rock and Roll Sinners (The Pillows)

Don’t Let The Green Grass Fool You (Wilson Pickett)

Finger Poppin Time (Hank Ballard/Midnighters)

Halfacre Gunroom (punk/country band)

Mike DeVille

Gimme Shelter

The Senders (NYC R&B)

Jeepster (T Rex)

Johnny Thunders

Of those stations, I had never heard of The Pillows, The Raveonettes, or Halfacre Gunroom until Pandora. And damn right the algorithm knows what to do with them.

I put it on mix and if I don’t want to hear a particular song I am virtually assured that I will love the next one. Turns out there is quite a bit of good new music out there. Of course it helps that I consider anything less than 20 years old as new – you know you’re old when you see nostalgia for Y2K. But anyway, this came up on my X Offender station. It’s got a boatload of influences but what it really really has is a killer chorus. Anybody know this babe, Santogold?

Song of the Week – Melody, Serge Gainsbourg

by

Ignored           Obscured            Restored

Serge Gainsbourg was a French Renaissance man.  He made his mark in music (singer, composer, pianist, guitarist) and film (screenwriter, director, actor) but he was also a writer, poet and artist.

In the music world, his most renowned work was the 1971 concept album, Histoire de Melody Nelson.  In seven tracks over about 28 minutes, the album tells the story of a middle-aged man that crashes his car into a 15 year old girl, Melody Nelson, on her bicycle. The accident leads to seduction and an affair.  Eventually Melody meets her demise in a plane crash.

Today’s SotW is the album’s opener, “Melody.”

This is an astounding piece of music.  It combines a rock guitar with a funky bass and an orchestral string arrangement.  Gainsbourg’s vocal is more spoken than sung, like many of Leonard Cohen’s recordings.  The track as a whole is simply mesmerizing.

The link below to a blog post by YellowOnline provides more detail about the album and handy translations of the French lyrics into English.

YellowOnline – Histoire de Melody Nelson

Histoire de Melody Nelson has influenced many other musicians, including Michael Stipe (R.E.M.), Portishead and Stereolab.  Beck found inspiration from Histoire… for his own “Paper Tiger” on his breakup album, Sea Change.  Histoire… was also cited by Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys as an inspiration for their recent album Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino.

Enjoy… until next week.

Song of the Week – My Pledge of Love, The Joe Jeffrey Group

by

Ignored           Obscured            Restored

Today’s SotW is squarely in the category of “restored” songs.

I recently picked up a very large box of 45’s of rock and soul music from the ‘60s, gifted to me by my second cousin Donna.  I had as blast looking through them, organizing them, and playing a few as I went along.

I picked up a 7 incher on the Wand label called “My Pledge of Love” by The Joe Jeffrey Group.  What is this, I thought to myself.  I dropped the needle and recognized it immediately.  I have to admit, I don’t think I ever knew who the artist was, but the song I couldn’t forget!

So I did some research for you and here’s what I found:

The Joe Jeffrey (born Joseph Stafford Jr.) Group was an R&B outfit based in Cleveland, Ohio and took “My Pledge of Love” to #14 in the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969.

The song is driven by a relentless rhythm guitar and, of course, Jeffrey’s powerful vocal performance.

Partway through (at about 1:35) Jeffrey starts to riff on the Four Tops’ “Baby I Need Your Loving,” a song that had hit the charts 5 years earlier, in 1964.  But making a musical reference to a Motown hit could never hurt.

Despite that reference, this song strikes me as more of a rock song than soul number.  The buying public in 1969 must have felt the same way.  “My Pledge of Love” failed place on the Billboard soul chart!

Enjoy… until next week.

Song of the Week – Understand Your Man, Johnny Cash

by

Ignored           Obscured            Restored

I’m posting today from Newburgh, New York – my hometown – which makes today’s SotW especially appropriate.

When I was a kid, growing up in Newburgh, my dad owned and operated a roller skating rink called the Avalon.  Occasionally the building would be used to promote special events like professional wrestling (I remember Bruno Sammartino, Haystacks Calhoun and Gorilla Monsoon) and concerts.

The most famous person to perform at the Avalon was Johnny Cash.  In my adult life I was able to find references to his gig there on November 13, 1964, but I’ve never been able to find any memorabilia from the event.  I’ve scoured the internet for a poster, a bill or a newspaper ad for the show and always came up empty.  But I recently found these:

It turns out Cash did two shows that night – 7:00 and 9:30. In November ’64, he would have been at the tail end of promoting his I Walk the Line album (released in May 1964) and starting to promote Bitter Tears (October 1964).

One of the songs he must have played would have been “Understand Your Man” which held the #1 spot on the Billboard Country Charts for six weeks in the spring of ‘64.

As you listen to “Understand…” you will undoubtedly hear the resemblance to Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”  This should be no surprise.  Cash and Dylan were connected from the earliest days.  They both listened to and respected each other’s music.  They first met at the Gaslight in 1963 and again at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964.

Cash openly admitted morphing “Don’t’ Think Twice…” into “Understand…”  He kept most of the melody, and lyrically turned another one of Dylan’s many put down songs into a Cash styled “my way or the highway” rant.

But the story goes even further.  Dylan’s song is itself a variation of a folk song by Paul Clayton called “Who´s Gonna Buy You Ribbons When I´m Gone” from 1960.  If you have any doubt about it listen to the lyrics to Clayton’s recording that contains the lines “T’ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, darlin” and “So I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road/You’re the one that made me travel on.”

And you can take that a step further – Clayton’s recording was an adaptation of a public domain folk song called “Who’s Gonna Buy You Chickens When I’m Gone,”

You can check them out on YouTube to decide for yourself if the lineage holds up.

Apparently there is a recording of a medley Cash and Dylan did of their two songs.  I have a bootleg of their session together but it doesn’t include the medley.  Darn!

“Understand Your Man” was the last song Cash ever performed in public, at the Carter Family Fold, Hiltons, VA on July 5, 2003.

Enjoy… until next week.

Song of the Week – Blackbird, Piggies, Rocky Raccoon, The Beatles

by

Ignored           Obscured            Restored

As I write this I’m aware the 50 years ago today, the Beatles were in Abbey Road Studios recording The Beatles, better known as the White Album.  Recording of The Beatles would eventually be completed on October 14th and it would be released on November 22, 1968, just in time to be placed under the Christmas tree for millions of adoring fans.

I love the White Album and will probably post about it again before the end of the year.  But I’ll start with today’s observation that it is the Beatles’ animals album.  Well what the hell does that mean?

There are four songs on the album that specifically mention an animal in the title:

Blackbird

Piggies

Rocky Raccoon

Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey

Martha My Dear was written about Paul’s sheep dog, but does not explicitly mention it in the lyrics.  However, there are several other songs that do mention animals in the lyrics.  “He went out tiger hunting with his elephant and gun…”  “She’s well acquainted with the touch of the velvet hand like a lizard on a window pane…”  And several more.  Go find them.

Today’s SotW are the three that were presented all in a row on Side 2.

Enjoy… until next week.

Song of the Week – Onion, Shannon and the Clams

by

Ignored           Obscured            Restored

Shannon and the Clams is a band based out of Oakland, CA that played the Outside Lands festival in San Francisco last night.  Next, they’re off to Europe.

The band is shaped around songwriters Shannon Shaw (bass/vocals) and Cody Blanchard (guitar/vocals), and supported by Nate Mahan (drums) and Will Sprott (keyboards), 

Their latest album, Onion, was released last February.  I’ve been listening to it a lot.  If you think you would enjoy a modern take on ‘60s girl group music, you need to check them out.

Onion was partially inspired by the December 2016 fire at the Ghost Ship warehouse in their hometown that took the lives of 36 people.  This touched the group deeply because the Ghost Ship was a haven for local artists and musicians – and was a place that Shannon and the Clams had performed.

It was hard to decide which cut to feature as today’s SotW, but I settled on the title track.

“Onion” contains all of the elements that make me a fan of Shannon and the Clams’ music.  It’s part Del Shannon, part garage rock (fuzzed guitar), part soul, with a power pop twist.  It straddles the space between the campiness of The Cramps and the oldies covers recorded by Blondie (“Denis Denis” and “I’m Gonna Love You Too”).

The lyrics to “Onion” are simple, but interesting – dealing with the “layers” of personality of those afflicted with mental illness.

Well I’m working on it
Holy shit I avoid so many problems
Holy shit this isn’t it
No one told me I was just an onion
I’m just a kid oh so I thought
Please doc, make it stop
Let me go home
I’ll keep working on it
But I’ll be gone before I peel this old onion

But the music keeps the tragic lyrics from becoming depressing.  You may still want to dance to it.

Onion was produced by the omnipresent Dan Auerbach (Black Keys), at his Nashville headquarters.

Enjoy… until next week.

Night Music: Tinariwen, “Sastanisqqam”

by

I apologize, again for any absence of contributions of late, but I am working on this book (third rewrite) and trying to drive some decent mileage to my site (lawrmichaels.com gets you there!) and help Diane with her dog walking business.

And, of course I am still playing in the band, though I quit the Biletones around Christmas time. But, cooly, my pals drummer Nick Bell and songwriter/singer/guitarist Tom Nelson wanted to keep playing with me.

So, we formed a new band called Jackknifed Big Rig. We are already playing out, in fact there is a pretty good vid of us I will post shortly in the new configuration.

Anyway, I was at my guitar lesson the other day, and after 20 years, Steve Gibson, my master and I talk about a lot of stuff in addition to playing scales and licks and such. A lot of music theory discussion, and engineering, and sharing of ideas and songs and bands and such.

Well, a couple of weeks ago Steve saw these guys at a nice little Berkeley venue, and he turned me onto them. And, just the visuals–traditional middle eastern garb, mixed with sand and camels and Gibson SGs played upside down and backwards–are great.

But, these guys are really good. I mean, really good. Check out these tunes and tell me if you can resist…

This one has a killer vid!

Graham Parker and the Rumour, Mercury Poisoning

by

He’s pissed. The sound isn’t great, but the spirt is clear.

Here’s the original version. Better sound, and you can get the lyrics if you click through YouTube.

Looking at the picture sleeve, which I think I have a version of, the A-side was I Want You Back. How about that cover?

 

 

Nico, 1988

by

I saw this new film last week with friends. None of us knew much about the film, it had just opened, but it was Nico, about whom good books have been written, and who sang three songs on the first Velvet Underground album (the banana one). We knew that Lou Reed hated her, that Andy Warhol added her to his house band perversely, and our favorite song of hers was a cover of Jackson Browne’s melancholy These Days. Rael thought the trailer was a stinker.

But the movie was very good. Most notably, Trine Dyrholm acts and sings as if she’s living the part of the mordant junkie who can’t help but talk about how she feels and why she lives. But the movie makes excellent narrative choices that pile up, like leading with Nico’s These Days, and then moving on to her much broader music made in an atmosphere of chaos and imprecision.

This review on Slate by Carl Wilson does a good job of explaining the film, and puts it into the context of many other movie bio pix that don’t follow the form of Ray and Walk the Line. Read that, see the movie, and I’ll leave you with this. Not a spoiler, but a game changer in the film’s narrative, surprisingly enough.