This came up on my Pandora and caught my ear. Roxyesque. It seems to be very popular.
Song of the Week – So Real, Jeff Buckley
IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED
Jeff Buckley was an artist with unlimited potential that left us all too soon. While working on his second album in Memphis he drowned in the Mississippi River. His fully clothed body was found a few days later. He was only 30.
His first album, Grace (1995), was received with boundless critical acclaim. It contained his take on Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” that may have been responsible for causing that song’s ultimate ubiquity.
Today’s SotW is “So Real,” the last song to make it onto the album. It was co-written by Buckley and guitarist Michael Tighe, who contributed the song’s distinctive riff.
“So Real” packs an emotional punch both vocally and musically. It begins with a gentle guitar figure. Buckley’s fragile voice describes a mundane situation that is “so real” to his senses – the smell of a woman’s dress.
After the second verse and chorus the song breaks into a fuzzy, distorted rave and a false ending. This builds the tension that leads into the final section of the song where the band rocks out and Buckley continues to wail.
The pain in his voice raises the possibility that the love that is so real to him may not be reciprocated. He cries “I love you, but I’m afraid to love you.”
Considering the way he died, there is another line in the song that is particularly creepy – “And I couldn’t awake from the nightmare, that sucked me in and pulled me under.”
Buckley was the son of the 60s folk and jazz artist, Tim Buckley, although Jeff only met his father once when he was only 8 years old.
Enjoy… until next week.
Bo Knows
Was cooking dinner the other day. . . Nah. I have no clue how to cook.
Speak the truth, Bo Carter.
Cooking with Little Willie John
I was making dinner tonight. Sauteed green beans and broccoli rabe with a creamy lime dressing, and some shrimps. For some reason I put on Little Willie John, who I see has been referenced on the site only once. His biggest hit, a John Cooley/Otis Blackwell tune called Fever, is no remnant. But I think we’ve been neglecting a great singer who sang great songs.
Mr. John, as the Times would say (no they wouldn’t), was a hit making machine for a while, and like many hit making abusers of alcohol, he died in jail.
His brother wrote this song.
This is a terrific song. This is the version I hear when I think of the song.
This is great.
So is this. This is the blues.
Charming interview with LWJ’s sons and biographer. A story of Detroit.
Song of the Week – Judy in Disguise, John Fred & His Playboy Band
IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED
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.
Marmalade – 1971
The Remnants overlords informed me that we’re running way behind on our heavy quota for October.
A friend just turned me on to this song. Sounds like Burton Cummings singing for the Sabs.
Anyone know this? I did not.
RIP Fats Domino
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
IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED
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
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
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.