Song of the Week – Judy in Disguise, John Fred & His Playboy Band

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Today’s SotW is the “one hit wonder” called “Judy In Disguise (With Glasses)” by John Fred & His Playboy Band, released 50 years ago this month.

This song is often considered a novelty because it made a play on the Beatles’ popular “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” that was released on Sgt. Pepper just a few months earlier. It even has some goofy, pseudo-psychedelic lyrics to further the parody.

Judy in disguise, well that’s what you are
Lemonade pies with a brand new car
Cantaloupe eyes come to me tonight

But John Fred was no novelty. The dude had been in bands since he was 15 and made records in his home state of Louisiana since 1958.

After a hiatus to go to college, he put together an updated version of his Playboys in 1963 and began recording again on several different labels. By 1966 he was signed to the Paula label and released “Up and Down” (which is on the same album as “Judy…,” Agnes English). That song was a regional hit at home in Louisiana but wasn’t able to generate much notice nationally.

Then came “Judy…” that, ironically, booted the Beatles’ “Hello Goodbye” out of the #1 position in the singles pop charts in January 1968!

The song is actually pretty good. The iconic bass line is the hook but the song would have been even better if they had ditched the cheesy string solo and let a guitar or sax rip one off instead. And if you listen to the rest of Agnes English you will hear that the band was a very competent rock & soul bar band. In fact they preceded the more popular “horn rock” groups (BS&T, Chicago, etc.) by including brass and woodwinds as full time members of the band as early as the mid-60s.

Enjoy… until next week.

RIP Fats Domino

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When rocknroll started selling in the mid-50s, there were lots of head-scratching media pieces. There was one interview with the perpetually smiling Fats Domino, who said, “What they call rocknroll, I been playing in New Orleans for 15 years.” And he was. He had 11 Top 10 singles when the competition was a lot stiffer (not that there wasn’t ALWAYS plenty of shit on the radio). All of them are at least fun, some are great. If this thing lets me post my two faves here goes. You could hardly imagine a simpler song than “My Girl Josephine,” which proves everything.

This one I like just as much. That rocking swing thing will never die.

He made people happy. You can’t have a better tombstone than that. RIP

Song of the Week – Modern Act, Cloud Nothings

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At the beginning of this year the Cleveland based band Cloud Nothings released their fourth full album, Life Without Sound.

The band was originally a virtual group named by founder Dylan Baldi when he was releasing music he wrote and recorded using Garage Band during college back in ’09. A New York promoter came across the music and wanted to book the band for a show. Baldi sprang into action to form a real Cloud Nothings band in order to accept the gig.

“Modern Act,” today’s SotW, was the first single released from Life Without Sound.

“Modern Act” is power pop, but with a little dirt under the fingernails. It has both polished hooks and snarly guitar riffs.

The band is currently on tour – Canada, the Midwest, South, then onto Europe.

Enjoy… until next week.

Perfume Genius, Just Like Love

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I stumbled across a Top 50 albums of 2017 list that was published on a website in July. No reason to share, so far the returns have been a big yawn, except for this tune.

Just to get this out of the way, I think Perfume Genius is a terrible, perhaps career wrecking, band name (even if this is a single artist taking a collective name). The artist’s real name is Mike Hadreas, which is better I think, but whatever. It’s his choice.

His latest album is called No Shape, and I’d suggest that the record lacks shape. It has too many spare slow songs that don’t really go anywhere, even when they’re adorned with interesting rhythms and strong singing. Maybe more listens will reveal more. If there are more listens it will be because of the song Just Like Love.

It has that Chris Isaac reverb and a little Willy DeVille strut. It sounds like the fifties, like Roy Orbison (and Isaac and DeVille), and it sounds contemporary, not nostalgic. Or maybe it’s on other songs, where he can sound like Prince and at other times like David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors, that he doesn’t sound nostalgic. Ultimately, this is an art band, and in the case of Just Like Love, often the best art steals from the best sources.

Hadreas is from Seattle, but lived for a number of years in Williamsburg and worked in an East Village bar. I hope he adopted his nom de tunes because he knows that when the New York Times writes about him, on the second reference to his name, they’ll have to call him Mr. Genius. Aim high!

Update: Original post called Perfume Genius Patrick Hadreas. His given name is actually Mike. I fixed it.

Worth Noting: The album track and the live track are arranged similarly, but the album track is sonically very different. The music on the album is electronic and layered track upon track. The live version captures the shape of the song, but is a much more organic version than the album version. This is not an indictment of the album.

This is a Google Music link to the album track. I don’t know what happens if you’re not a Google Music subscriber. https://play.google.com/music/m/T3coz2krxwyb7s5jzkgwd73txpm?t=Just_Like_Love_-_Perfume_Genius 

Remakes, Remodels

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A few weeks ago I heard the current Dead Boys (Cheetah Chrome, Johnny Blitz and some other guys) totally remade the first album Young, Loud and Snotty. The reviews on Amazon are pretty horrible, so I stayed away.

Once down this remakes rabbit hole I found out there’s a band who did a somewhat well-known remake of Rocket To Russia. The Amazon reviews for that aren’t quite as bad but the gist is mostly, “just listen to the real Rocket To Russia instead.”

The best of this ilk from a critical perspective is a band called The Vindictives’ remake of Leave Home. It receives Amazon kudos for not simply trying to re-do The Ramones and rearranging the songs, etc.

So my CD arrived yesterday – more expensive than the usual as it came all the way from Japan. Popped it in today and it’s disappointing. Valiant effort, I guess, but the singer is damn annoying. A combination of the male Rezillos singer, who sounds good in The Rezillos, and Darby Crash, who rarely sounds good ever, but that was kinda his schtick.

Oh well. Another experiment bites the dust. If you need anything it’s this album-opening version of Pinhead. Cute idea to intersperse Freaks audio clips. I made it about halfway through the album as I increasingly thought, “I really should be listening to the real Leave Home.”

Funny, if I’d heard this version out at a bar somewhere, I’d have gone crazy chasing down the source of this “cool” other version. As they say, often the chase is better than the catch.

If nothing else, it beats The National doing The Ramones.

Obit: Gord Downie

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I’ve only been to see Saturday Night Live live once, in 1995, and the musical guest that night was Canadian band The Tragically Hip, which I’m told all Canadians call The Hip.

What I noticed is that they took their name from an Elvis Costello lyric (Town Crier), and they rocked, but seemed oddly removed. I’ve heard about them over the years, but never really revisited them until today. They had a rep as one of those bands that can’t find an audience outside of Canada. So there you go.

But the band’s lyricist and leader, Gord Downie, died this week at 53 after a long struggle with brain cancer. Reading an obit in New York magazine turned me on to the song Fifty-Mission Cap, from a 1993 album. It’s a driving rocker that tells the shaggy dog story of a Canadian hockey player, a Maple Leaf, who disappears in 1951 while on a fishing trip, and whose body isn’t found until a 1962 plane crash. Good lyrics, tough song, weird combo. I’ll be listening some more.

The Clash, Armagideon Time

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After hearing this Clash cover and profound remix I bought the Willie Williams version. Williams has all the parts, but doesn’t have the whatever it is that makes the Clash version epic.

The Clash version is also not religious. And while the whole Clash excursion into the Third World is culturally suspect. To their credit, they seemed to know that. At least a little bit.

If pressed, I’d call this my favorite (most powerful) Clash song.

Another Band Song-Ranked

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I have to admit that I’ve never heard the last “Clash” album. Without Mick Jones they aren’t and can’t be The Clash and Strummer had some nerve pretending otherwise.

This Bill Wyman guy amazes me. How can anyone be so knowledgable and so clueless at the same time? Of course a lot of this has to be pure opinion, but I think the story of this band and therefore their best songs is simple: they started, they had talent, they developed their abilities to the fullest as much or more than any other rocknroll band ever, and they declined. But at least they declined experimenting rather than repeating themselves, musically anyway. As for the lyrics, the politics that began so refreshingly honest quickly devolved into boilerplate leftism. But even in decline they came up with a few more great songs.

To me it is completely and utterly obvious that the best Clash song is Complete Control.

Song of the Week – Grow Old with Me, John Lennon

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Last Monday, October 9th, would have been John Lennon’s 77th birthday. Today, October 14th, is my 33rd anniversary.

I’ve decided to combine the two events with today’s SotW, “Grow Old with Me,” by Lennon.

This is one of the last songs he wrote and recorded as a demo before being murdered in 1980. For several years it was only heard by fans who sought out bootleg recordings. But the song was given an official release on 1984’s Milk and Honey album, albeit in the original demo form.

According to Wikipedia:

The song was inspired from two different sources: from a poem penned by Robert Browning titled “Rabbi ben Ezra” and a song by Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono called “Let Me Count the Ways” (which in turn had been inspired from a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning).

Lennon and Ono had for some time admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, and the two songs were purposely written with the couple in mind.

Ono woke up one morning in the summer of 1980 with the music of “Let Me Count the Ways” in her head and promptly rang Lennon in Bermuda to play it for him. Lennon loved the song and Ono then suggested to him that he should write a Robert Browning piece to accompany it. That afternoon, John was watching TV when a film came on which had the poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra” by Robert Browning in it. Inspired by this turn of events, Lennon wrote “Grow Old with Me” as an answer to Ono’s song, and rang her back to play it to her over the phone.

The song was later covered by Mary Chapin Carpenter and the late Glen Campbell.

Enjoy… until next week.