Stevie Wonder Week at Slate

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They’re publishing 17 pieces about Stevie Wonder over at Slate this week. The idea seems to be an effort to appreciate our greats before they pass on, which is a nice idea but also a bit embalming of someone who is alive.

This story about the greatest Beatles cover has links to many of the stories. It also has a video embedded, but I’ll embed it here, too.

Is this really the greatest Beatles cover? Off the top of my head I think I’d go with Wilson Pickett’s Hey Jude, but I’m sure I’m forgetting something even better.

Little Walter, Just Your Fool

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I keep meaning to write about the new Stones album, Blue & Lonesome. It’s their first in 10 years and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard chart. Which is likely why I heard the first single from it, Just Your Fool, so many times on the radio in recent weeks. But I keep getting distracted.

For instance, one of my favorite old blues guys is Little Walter, who contributes a number of songs to this collection of covers. Little Walter is a revolutionary harmonica player, the guy who turned the mouth harp from something small to something big. He’s the most virtuosic harp player out there, the Segovia of the harmonica, if you catch my drift. He was also a great songwriter and terrific singer. So it’s great the Stones cover his tunes on their look back on the blues they have loved, but when I listen to their cover of Just Your Fool all I hear is Little Walter. What extra are they bringing?

It’s amazingly little. Here’s Little Walter.

Here’s the Stones.

The Stones version is so good because it totally mimics the original. Fine. I suppose if they did something different they could be charged with some sort of crime of appropriation, but for the time being the Stones version seems less than essential, we already have that, and that’s not the way their old blues and R&B covers felt.

Plus, that album cover! Ugliest thing ever!

You can listen to Lonesome & Blue and enjoy it, these are great old rock musicians who love the blues playing the blues. But I’m not sure they bring much more than appreciation and chops to the project, and you’re probably better off searching out the original versions. That’s easy on YouTube.

And if you’re in to eye candy, here’s a video of Eddie Taylor’s Ride Em On Down starring Kristen Stewart! Case closed.

 

 

Rolling Stones, Happy

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Keith Richards birthday today. This is upbeat.

But when I think of Keef these days I think of Wingless Angels, the recordings he made with his Jamaican neighbors. According to his book, these live recordings in his yard were pretty much done on the fly. A record of neighbors getting together for nightly jams, maybe around the fire pit. On the actual releases, you can hear the crickets. It’s beautiful.

Appalling.

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A Google thing reminded me that Steven Biko would have been 70 years old today. Which reminded me of this Peter Gabriel song about him called Biko.

I like some political songs, and don’t like others. The dividing line for me seems to be similar to the one I apply between songs I like and songs I don’t. Catchy, compelling, somehow feels like it means it.

In this case, Peter Gabriel’s Biko is an incantation, a testimony to someone who gave his life for the cause. It is understated and honoring, and it wins for me because I don’t hate it. I worry about a super rich rock star lending his power to the cause of a martyr, but what better use is there for rock presence? And what better use for an artist’s sense of style and grace.

Anyway, here is is:

And while we are here we should also think about the CIA overthrow of the democratically elected government in Chile and an Arlo Guthrie song about a brave resistor then.

Arlo Guthrie’s Victor Jara is an earnest tribute to Jara, a folk song, and when I hear it today I’m still outraged by what happened in Chile in 1973. The song is more a marker for that outrage, but serves as a reminder.

 

Song of the Week – Mother Russia, Renaissance

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IGNORED OBSCURED RESTORED

Vladimir Putin and Russia have been in the news quite a bit lately. The annexation of Crimea, bombing of Syrian rebels and civilians in support of the Assad regime and cyber hacking interference in our 2016 presidential election have left US-Russian relations in worse shape since the end of the Cold War.

This reminded me of the song “Mother Russia” by the 70s prog rock band, Renaissance.

“Mother Russia” was inspired by the Soviet treatment of writer/political activist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who was sent to a labor camp for 8 years for criticizing Joseph Stalin (in private letters).

Punished for his written thoughts
Starving for his fame
Working blindly, building blocks
Number for a name, his blood flows frozen to the snow

Red blood, white snow
He knows frozen rivers won’t flow
So cold, so true
Mother Russia-he cries for you

This is a heavy song, musically and lyrically, written about a weighty subject at a time when artists did such things.

Enjoy… until next week.

Beach Boys, It’s About Time

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Enjoy the talk about the Beach Boys, who are one of the weirdest pop bands of all time.

Gene made the great point that a lot of the music on Beach Boys elpees was made by the Wrecking Crew. Lawr likes a great song that was apparently a b-side, though the cover art says it was the a-side. Whatever. An excellent song.

Gene replies with a song I didn’t know, but which points out how personal rather than general they were as lyricists, and how determined they were to frame very prosodic and psychologically exposed verses with catchy choruses and brilliantine arrangements.

So, my newsletter guy Lefsetz posts his list of most played songs on the year and this one from the Beach Boys Sunflower album comes up as No. 2. We can psychoanalyze that another time. It’s Carl singing, the rhythm is more Chambers Brothers than anything else, but the lyric strategy has not changed. A great song? Maybe a good one, but a fine tune to listen to.

Time has come today.

Honky Tonk

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I’m reading Springsteen’s book. It’s a good read, he’s as bold an overwriter as an autobiographer as he is (or was) a lyricist, and that’s a good thing. It’s very lively and evocative of the time and his passions as a boy, and as a teen learning to play guitar and gig around. That’s how far I am.

When he gets his first electric guitar, which costs $69 with a small amp the size of a breadbox, a Kent from Japan, he sets to learning to play Honky Tonk. Which got me to thinking about what Honky Tonk sounded like, and I couldn’t conjure it. Though, of course, it’s a song we’ve all heard a million times. Here’s Bill Doggett’s original, parts 1 and 2 combined.

It’s a blues, so of course Johnny Winter covered it. Sans shirt, for some reason, which isn’t really an impressive look.

The Winter recording is from an Italian show in 1988. A look at the Honky Tonk Wikipedia page shows tons of covers, very few of them after the 1960s. What’s funny is that the Beach Boys, that premiere harmony group covered the vocal-free song.

The Boss talks about how in the early 60s, before the Beatles, the idea of a rock combo singing was pretty much unheard of. Bands with electric guitars played instrumentals, like Honky Tonk and Pipeline and Wipe Out! Thank you Beatles.