Song of the Week – Chitlins Con Carne, Kenny Burrell

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86 year old Kenny Burrell is one of the most influential guitarists in jazz history. His crisp clean tone was influenced by Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt but also has one foot in the door of the blues.

Perhaps his most important album was Midnight Blue, recorded for the renowned Blue Note label in 1963. On this album Burrell is backed by Stanley Turrentine (sax), Major Holley (bass), Bill English (drums) and Ray Barretto (conga).

Midnight Blue contains today’s SotW, “Chitlins Con Carne.”

A blog called Jazz Rock Fusion Guitar has a posting that describes the song very well:

… “Chitlins con Carne”… is the low-key original that set the standard for this now standard Latin-tinged blues. The eight-bar intro lays down a pulsing Latin clave, with Holley pedaling the bass as Barretto takes liberties on the congas. Turrentine’s matter-of-fact statement of the melody establishes his by turns lugubrious and diaphanous sound.

Burrell’s sparse comping sets the album’s precedent for succinctness, one of his hallmarks. His deceptively clean guitar solo walks a tightrope between endless space and airtight rhythmic motifs; a devil-may-care attitude in the face of death that comes from having been down and out and having lived to tell about it. Turrentine plays foil, Captain Kirk to Burrell’s Spock, singing the blues right out of the gate, but the two show their psychic connection when seamlessly trading not fours, but ones, until the blistering out chorus.

This song has been covered numerous times by artists as diverse as Horace Silver and Junior Wells. But perhaps the most familiar cover was by Stevie Ray Vaughan. If this song sounds familiar I’ll bet it’s because you’ve heard Vaughan’s version, even if you don’t specifically recall it.

It’s pretty clear that Burrell influenced many blues guitarists that followed him – Hendrix, Santana and of course, Vaughan.

He must have even made some impression on Elvis Costello. Check out the tribute paid with the cover to his album Almost Blue.

Enjoy… until next week.

You Really Got Me: The Locomotion, Little Eva

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Of course, once again I was in the car, driving to the links, when the Locomotion came on my shuffle.

I can write a lot about the song, How it nailed me (as documented) at family camp. How it is just a killer Goffin/King song with that monster sax grooving with the machine gun snare to start, and then drive the song.

But, when I was listening the other day I thought “man, I first heard this song in 1962 and it still sounds as good to me today as it did then.”

So, I started thinking about other  songs like that, and the Kinks, You Really Got Me was the first to pop into my head and that seemed an apropos title for a new category of fun.

The parms are just that: a song that nailed you first time and always, but, the caveat is that you have to remember distinctly where you first heard it.

So, here are six of mine in no particular order (and, though both You Really Got Me and the Locomotion match the category, I went to other songs for my list):

Drug Test, Yo La Tengo: I read about Yo La Tengo for the first time in the Utne Reader as their critic, I think named Jay Waljasper, waxed on for a couple of albums worth about how great this band I never had heard of was. So, kind of like Steve went to see Baby Driver to prove to himself it was lousy, I bought President Yo La Tengo/New Wave Hot Dog to prove to myself that the Tengo were nothing. This was 1998, and the opening track, Banaby Hardly Working was ok, but the second cut, Drug Test came smoking out of the car stereo and it remains an all-time favorite song. Needless to say, Waljasper was right: I own seven of the bands discs and have seen them three times.

Please Please Me, The Beatles: My family all lived in London and my cousin Eve sent us a copy of Please Please Me on Parlaphone records in 1963 and it completely knocked my socks off. I remember putting on our little Philco phonograph, and that we didn’t need to use the little center spindle thing for 45 rpm singles because British singles did not have that gaping hole in the middle. The couplet “It’s so hard to reason, I do all the pleasin’ with you…” still stands as one of my all time favorites.

Holidays in the Sun, The Sex Pistols: I had heard of Johnny and the Sex Pistols, as they were referred to in the San Francisco Chronicle and was dubious. But, in October of 1977 I went to London for the first time to meet my cousins and travel some. I was taking a bath in my grandmother’s house which was a 150-year old Victorian, listening to Top of the Pops on my aunt’s funky transistor which was on the floor and pow, the #1 song of the week blew me away.

Borrow Your Cape, Bobby Bare, Jr: I hit pay-dirt with an Amazon order around 2007 when I bought my niece Lindsay a couple of discs from Amazon for her birthday. At the bottom of the page was one of those, “people who liked this, liked that” and The Longest Meow by Bobby Bare, Jr and his Starving Criminal Brigade was the disc. “What the fuck?” I thought to myself and I bought it (a lot of four and five star reviews on Amazon) and man is it a killer album. And, Borrow Your Cape is my fave. The Biletones even covered it for a while.

Complete Control, The Clash: I was totally caught up with the punks and saw every band I could in the process, including the Pistols final performance at Winterland, and the Clash four times. I was going to sleep, though, shortly after my return from my European trip of ’77, smoking a doobie when Complete Control came on during Richard Gosset’s evening show on KSAN. By the time the second solo began I was totally lost in it. Still am.

Modern Love, Peter Gabriel: I was standing in Odyssey Records on the Ave in Berkeley in late 1977 when Gabriel’s first album came out, and the crew at the record store put the album on. So, as I was browsing Modern Love and Solsbury Hill came on and I bought the album without having ever heard any of the rest. I still love Modern Love.

Never Too Old To Rock ‘n’ Roll

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The Ramones asked them to sell t-shirts at CBGB because they were always there. The Mekons Jon Langford created a comic strip in Spin about them. She broke her leg in the 90s after being knocked to the floor in the mosh pit at an Oasis show. They say their bodies have aged, but they have not. They flew to Manchester England (England) five times last year to see shows and visit with their friends.

News got you down? This is inspiring.

This is the song Happy Mondays wrote about them. I was never a Happy Mondays fan.

Song of the Week – Way Down Now, World Party

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Today’s SotW was written by another guest contributor, Steve Martin (no, not that one!). Steve moved to SF from Staten Island, New York in 1979 (which pert near makes him a CA native) to attend San Francisco State University where he had a college radio show called the “Esoteric Dinosaur.” His favorite musical experience is the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. His musical interests cut across many different genres but tend more recently toward “Americana.” When he’s not listening to music he is working at the Oakland Coliseum where he has been a Facility Manager for the last 26 years.

World Party is a “band” started by Karl Wallinger in 1986 after 2 years as a member of The Waterboys. World Party is essentially a Wallinger solo project. He plays most of the instruments himself in the studio and tours with a variety of different musicians.

They had a string of FM radio friendly hits in the late 80’s and 90’s that showed Wallinger’s influences including The Beatles, The Beach Boys and Prince. (They recorded a version of John Lennon’s “Happiness is a Warm Gun.”) He wrote and recorded the original version of “She’s the One” that later became a hit for Robbie Williams.

Goodbye Jumbo was World Party’s second album (1990) and featured many of Wallinger’s signature catchy hooks, including “Way Down Now” that reached #1 on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart.

The sardonic lyrics are sung with a voice mildly imitative of Bob Dylan. The music drives a solid beat all the way through and culminates just past the 3:00 mark with “whoo-whoos” that are a direct link to the Stones “Sympathy for the Devil.”

In 2001 Wallinger suffered a brain aneurysm but he was able to return to musician’s work again after 5 years of rehabilitation. He is currently writing and recording at his studio in England.

Enjoy… until next week.

Obit: June Foray (September 8, 1917, July 26, 2017)

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June Foray certainly does not spring to mind as a name anyone would associate with music, let alone rock’n’roll; however, she was an integral part of the aging of the Boomer Generation.

June, who passed away a couple of days ago, just months shy of the Century Mark, was the voice of the following cartoon characters:

  • Rocket J Squirrel
  • Natasha
  • Granny on Looney Tunes (owner of Tweety)
  • Nell Fenwick
  • Witch Hazel
  • Daisy Duck
  • Mother Magoo
  • Betty Rubble
  • Cindy Lou Who (How the Grinch Stole Christmas)
  • Jokey Smurf

And, a host of other voices, participating in a list of shows that is, to say the least, overwhelming.

I am indeed a huge fan of animation, dating back to the first Jay Ward show, Crusader Rabbit wherein at the age of six I got my first puns. Crusader Rabbit featured a two-headed dragon named “Arson/Sterno” which didn’t really mean anything to me. I knew what Arson was, but it was a cartoon. (There was also a villian named “Dudley Nightshade,” a pun I never got till I was a lot older!)

One evening my mother was having a cocktail party and she had a chafing dish that needed a Sterno can to keep the contents warm and I saw her prepare the dish, read the label and a light went off in my head (it might still be going off).

From that all the cartoons of my youth became the filter for my  viewing and reading and interpretation of literature and movies and TV, for it not only taught about puns, but also how characters define themselves, often by action and name. Additionally, I got the author gets to play with characters and names and situations to emphasize things like irony, hypocrisy, and many other personality traits.

As I delved deeper into literature as an undergrad, then grad student, and learned that Charles Dickens, for example, was among the best at portraying his characters as round or flat, modifying their names in deed and action. So, I got that the Arson/Sterno tradition was pretty old, going back at least to Chaucer in the English language.

I still watch toons. I love Family Guy and Bob’s Burgers and Adult Swim in addition to old Looney Tunes because they still push art in areas where live action human stuff cannot go.

Are they important? Just listen…

RIP June, and I hope where you are is as much fun as the shit you created!

Alice Cooper Connoisseur

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Good story about Alice Cooper, fame hound, meeting Andy Warhol, fame hound, and buying one of Warhol’s Little Electric Chair silk screens.

Fast Forward 50 years and Alice discovers a multi-million dollar work of art in a tube, never having been displayed after he bought it for $2500.

Today Alice says it makes sense that he bought it, even though he doesn’t remember it, because he was in a fog of drink and drugs. Shep Gordon says it totally made sense for him to buy it, because his girlfriend liked it, the electric chair and all. And what a happy ending!

 

Song of the Week – Easy Street, Edgar Winter Group

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Brothers Johnny and Edgar Winter were born in Texas and encouraged by their parents from an early age to pursue musical interests. They performed together as children. The elder, guitarist Johnny, was the first to break out with a recording contract with Columbia Records in the late 60s.

Edgar (keyboards and sax) played in Johnny’s bands but struck out on his own in 1970 when he received his own recording contract and formed Edgar Winter’s White Trash. In 1972 he formed a different group, The Edgar Winter Group, that included guitar hero Ronnie Montrose and singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist Dan Hartman. The album they released, They Only Come Out At Night, reached #3 on the Billboard Album charts and spawned two hit singles – “Frankenstein” (#1) and “Free Ride” (#14).

For the follow up album, Shock Treatment, Winter recruited Rick Derringer who had the hit “Hang on Sloopy” as a teenager with the McCoys to replace the departed Montrose. This album has gone down in rock history as a disappointment. But that’s really unfair! Not only is it a very good album all the way through, it actually reached #13 and had a top 40 single (“River’s Risin’”).

My favorite song on Shock Treatment is “Easy Street”, today’s SotW.

“Easy Street” was written by Hartman but includes one of Winter’s best performances, both vocally and on alto sax. The sax solo perfectly embodies the sleazy, swagger of the bluesy rhythm (in 6/8 time) and nighthawk lyrics. Hartman’s bass is solid too.

Enjoy… until next week.

Galaxie 500, “Blue Thunder”

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Again, Spotify drops a band and album on me I never heard of. This one came up on my “Discover Weekly” playlist, and I looked the guys up on Wiki and it seems there is some relationship between the band and The Reverend Horton Heat, but I could not track it down.

Galaxie 500, named wonderfully for the car, released this song and album (On Fire) in 1989 and it is sort of sweet melancholy and haunts in the same way Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark–which I call music to slit my wrists too and is go-to when I am sad–does.

I guess Blue Thunder is in a minor key because that does seem to help but man, I cannot pinpoint, and the song and album just get to me. I am not even sure of the words in this one as the mix is thick and the words sort of mumbled/slurred, but shit, I do like it a lot.