Boogie Woogie Flu

Fluville on WFMU's Rock 'n' Soul Ichiban

2012-01-31T00:31:00.010-05:00

Folks, I'm thrilled to announce that I'm now doing a weekly show on WFMU's Rock 'n' Soul Ichiban. It streams to your computer, mobile device, internet radio, as well as the tinfoil you've attached to your skull LIVE on Wednesday nights from 8-10PM EST. Or, you can listen to the ARCHIVE at your convenience anywhere, anytime.

You can hear my first show from January 25th >HERE < and more as they're added weekly. I'm still working out the kinks and the mic breaks from show #1 are a little rough. It'll get better, I swear. There's great music streaming there 24 hours a day and live shows being added to the line-up soon, as well as the Ichiban overlord Debbie D on Fridays from 3-5PM EST.

I played this record last week...

Download:

"Nobody's Fault But Mine" mp3
by Otis Redding, 1967.
available on Immortal Otis Redding

artwork by Takeshi Tadatsu

Only Women Bleed

2012-01-26T23:36:00.005-05:00

by Polly Bresnick

Etta James, who passed away last week, could not only sing with searing soul that simultaneously strikes fear and sorrow and strength into the hearts of anyone who hears her voice, but she also bridged the gap between R&B and Rock & Roll back when people were still impressed by that kind of feat, way back when a band of light-skinned black girls was called the "Creolettes," way back when the song title "Roll With Me Henry" was so suggestive for a fourteen-year-old girl to sing, that the title was changed for the radio. Her songs have helped me muscle through serious heartsickness, and her signature wolf/owl howl/hoot grace notes give me chills even though I know each one by heart. I won't go into her haunting and solemn vocal opening to a performance of "Something's Got a Hold On Me" in 1966 on a television show called The !!!! Beat. And don't even get me started about all her songs about being heartbroken at a wedding and desperately wishing to speak now instead of forever holding her peace.

She was 73 years old, mentally and physically ill, but her death was a strange thing in my mind. Each time I listen to her soul-wringing, tear-salted mournfully lonesome rants it sounds a bit like the intimate sound of someone dying a little death, having a petit mort, an orgasm or paroxysm or all of the above. Her songs so convincingly chronicle her experience of emotional murder by loves who left her — got married or cheated or lied or didn't listen or didn't trust her or just didn't love her back — that in my mind, she died and revived enough times to achieve immortal status. This isn't to say that I didn't feel sad to learn she'd died. I did, a nagging bit of sad, like a pebble in my boot. I hadn't been following her later career very closely. I only knew she'd recently released an album because my father asked for it for his birthday. What she did with her voice and her soul when it was still so street, so raw and ambitious and broad, like her life actually depended on getting the pain out — "W.O.M.A.N.," "I'd Rather Go Blind," "All Could Do Was Cry," "Stop the Wedding," "Something's Got a Hold on Me" — these are the songs that go and put a hurtin' on me. But, when Etta died, a friend pointed out to me a late-career recording of her cover of Alice Cooper's "Only Women Bleed." Admittedly, it caught my ear initially for what I thought to be it's absurdity. But then it lingered.

Maybe I'm being an overly sensitive post-post-feminist, but I hear an interesting note of old-fashioned chauvinism in the opening lines of this track: "Man's got his woman / to take his seed, he's got the power / she's got the need." It quickly becomes clear, though, who's side this song is on. Etta's version is a pained and sweating, R&B/gospel, unsentimental sermon/anthem for abused women, while Alice Cooper's (especially next to Etta's) sounds more like a soundtrack for a domestic violence PSA or a commercial for a charity to help battered women in inner city Detroit. Etta owns the lower register of this song with rumbling force that is bigger and louder and more convincing than any garden-variety "girl power" or feminism, the surface of which Alice Cooper seems to be attempting to scratch with his wimpy and predictable smooth rock growl-harmonize-falsetto-hook-bridge-jam. Etta James breathes life into the song's disturbing subject matter with more bone-rattling truth and with more survivor's spirit than Alice Cooper (or perhaps any other singer for that matter) can.

I like thinking about how in the weird world she ever came across the song. It makes me think she was more open-minded about music than I might have thought. Maybe she heard it on the car radio. Or maybe someone at Betty Ford played it on the boombox in the common room. Or maybe her manager was friends with Alice Cooper's manager. However she found her way to those lyrics, it doesn't shock me that, once she heard them, she understood she'd sing them. Her songs bring you back to times the world opened up beneath you, and you fall in with her, but then her voice finds your hand in the deep darkness and yanks you up to where you find a sturdy stone to grip at the edge of the crevasse. Her voice and that stone save you from falling every time. She was an expert on bleeding women. I'm glad she found this song. She found its truer cry.

I like to believe she succeeded at this because she felt she had sung out so much pain that she'd begun to channel the collective pain of all women. She drank the sorrow and carried it inside of her, bore the burden on behalf of all women who didn't think we were pretty or lovable or didn't think we deserved to be treated like shit and knew exactly how it felt, but didn't quite know how to vocalize those feelings until Etta did it, and we all said, "YES!" and we maybe even said, "YES, GIRL!" and sometimes we whispered, "Sing it," and, "Mmmhhmm," and other times we were without words because our breath had been taken away by the glowing truth bleeding out of the voice pouring out of Etta's lungs and through our speakers and into our ears and deep down into our souls which were healed, if only for a short time, if only until the end of the song.

Download:

"Only Women Bleed" mp3
by Etta James, 1999.
available on Heart of a Woman

Five Years in Fluville

2012-01-08T18:27:00.010-05:00

Today we celebrate five years of the Boogie Woogie Flu, and while this strange endeavor may be limping along at a limited capacity, we are, still here. And, what better way to celebrate this miraculous event than to listen to the the b-side of James Brown's 1978 smash hit, "The Spank." JB's own version of "Love Me Tender," because, after all, it's Elvis' Birthday too.

Happy Birthday Elvis from all your friends in Fluville.

Download:

"Love Me Tender" mp3
by James Brown, 1978.
available on James Brown: The Singles Volume 10: 1975-1979

Jerry Ragovoy in the Cathedral Of Soul

2011-12-27T16:34:00.005-05:00

by Andy Schwartz

When Howard Tate died on December 2, 2011, most obituaries for the great soul singer mentioned the name of another man who’d passed on in July of this year. Jerry Ragovoy (September 4, 1930 – July 13, 2011) was a songwriter, producer, pianist, and the studio Svengali behind Tate’s career masterpiece, the 1967 Verve album originally issued as Howard Tate and later retitled Get It While You Can.

Arguably, Ragovoy never made a better album in his career. In fact, Rags didn’t make that many albums: Much of his most influential music appeared on singles released before 1967, when Sgt. Pepper broke the “album market” wide open. Howard Tate/Get It While You Can features superb vocal performances by Tate, whether singing church–flavored ballads (the title track, “I Learned It All The Hard Way”) or blues standards (“How Blue Can You Get”); sturdy arrangements by Ragovoy, frequent partner Garry Sherman, or Artie Butler; and tough, committed playing by a cast of NYC session players including pianist Paul Griffin and guitarists Cornell Dupree and Eric Gale.

Finally, Howard Tate/Get It While You Can contains the original versions of some of Ragovoy’s best and most–covered compositions including “Ain't Nobody Home” (B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt), “Get It While You Can” (Janis Joplin), and “Look At Granny Run Run” (Grand Funk, Ry Cooder). Several notable non–LP singles emerged from the Tate sessions including “Stop,” written by Ragovoy with Mort Shuman, later covered by both Sam Moore and Jimi Hendrix.

But if Jerry Ragovoy had never worked with Howard Tate…had never written “Get It While You Can” or “Ain’t Nobody Home”…we’d still be hanging his name in the Soul Hall of Fame. Here are some of the reasons why:

GARNET MIMMS & THE ENCHANTERS – “Cry Baby” mp3
Written by Jerry Ragovoy (as “Norman Meade”) and Bert Berns (as “Bert Russell”) Released July 1963 as United Artists 629. No. 1 Billboard R&B (three weeks), No. 12 Pop. available on Cry Baby

In his liner notes for the 1993 CD Cry Baby: The Best of Garnet Mimms (all 25 tracks produced by Jerry Ragovoy), Robert Pruter wrote that prior to the July 1963 release of this landmark single, the sporadic soul hits of the period were “mainly easily digestible songs by Sam Cooke and Chuck Jackson that fitted well into the pop mainstream of the day, so that nothing seemed alien or new about them. ‘Cry Baby’ was different. The song was a gospelized production so full of the soul–saving, fire–and–brimstone ecstasies of the black sanctified church that it singularly stood apart…Never had the public heard anything so intense and so emotional on Top 40 radio.”

Ragovoy told Pruter he’d worked on the song “on and off for about two years” and, in his efforts to place the finished master, had been given the brush–off by executives at various labels: “Typically, in the record industry, if it doesn’t sound like anything the record executives are familiar with, they turn it down.” With Jerry as writer and producer, Garnet Mimms placed eight more songs on the Billboard R&B Singles chart. The consistent excellence of their output was such that even Mimms’ commercial misfires later became ideal cover material: “Look Away” for the Spencer Davis Group with Stevie Winwood, “My Baby” for Janis Joplin.

ERMA FRANKLIN – “Piece of My Heart” mp3
Written by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns
Released 1967 as Shout 221. No. 10 Billboard R&B, No. 62 Pop.
available on Piece of Her Heart: Epic & Shout Years

Ragovoy co–wrote this soul classic with frequent collaborator Bert Berns and probably played the piano part that forms the bedrock of the arrangement. One of only two singles ever charted by Aretha Franklin’s older sister, “Piece Of My Heart” is probably Rags’ best–known song thanks to Big Brother & the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin), whose cover version reached No. 12 in 1968 and has remained a staple of classic rock radio ever since. Erma’s original was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1968; twenty–five years later, in 1992, after renewed exposure in a British TV commercial for Levi’s, her recording entered the UK Top Ten.

THE ENCHANTERS – “God Bless the Girl and Me” mp3
Written by Samuel Bell & Lorraine Ellison. Produced & arranged by Jerry Ragovoy. Released March 1966 as Loma 2035.
out of print

Garnet Mimms and Sam Bell were members of a Philly vocal group, the Gainors, who left to form the Enchanters. The success of “Cry Baby” pushed Mimms to the forefront, however, and soon the other members (including Zola Pearnell and Charles Boyer) were cutting tracks without him. The Enchanters’ “I Wanna Thank You” struggled to No. 91 R&B in the fall of ’64, but with Ragovoy producing and Sam Bell as a contributing writer, the group came up with two more deep–soul stunners, “I Want To Be Loved” (Loma 2012, released February ’65) and “God Bless The Girl and Me.” I’m pretty sure Sam Bell is singing lead on these sides; if so, then he’s nearly the equal of Garnet Mimms for church–bred intensity and passionate articulation. The combination of piano and organ is another key element derived from gospel music and a trademark of Ragovoy’s sound in this period.

MIRIAM MAKEBA – “Pata Pata” mp3
Written by Miriam Makeba & Jerry Ragovoy. Produced by Jerry Ragovoy.
Released 1967 on Reprise 0606.
available on Pata Pata

Ragovoy’s biggest crossover hit of the Sixties after “Cry Baby” was also among his least typical. Thanks to the support of Harry Belafonte, by 1967 South Africa’s Miriam Makeba was already established in the US: She had released several LPs on RCA and been nominated for a Grammy the previous year. I’m not sure if Makeba was signed to Reprise at the time she recorded “Pata Pata,” or if Ragovoy independently produced and then shopped the master.

In any case, singer and producer retooled a South African folk song (that Makeba had first recorded in 1956) and the result was a sui generis hit that reached No. 7 R&B/No. 12 Pop in 1967. “Pata Pata” was the first song of South African origin since “Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)” to make a major impact on American audiences. Makeba’s hit preceded by about a year the Number One success of “Grazing In The Grass” as recorded by her then–husband, trumpeter Hugh Masakela.

LORRAINE ELLISON – "Stay With Me" mp3
Warner Bros. LP 182, released 1969. Produced by Jerry Ragovoy.
available on Stay With Me

Along with Howard Tate/Get It While You Can, this is the other great Jerry Ragovoy album.

Its creation began with the title single, “Stay With Me,” co–written by Ragovoy and George David Weiss. Sometime in 1966, Frank Sinatra canceled a New York recording session, potentially leaving his label Warner Bros. with the bills for a 46–piece orchestra and no music to show for it. On two days’ notice, Ragovoy, arranger Garry Sherman, and singer Lorraine Ellison (born 1931, Philadelphia PA) hustled into the studio and recorded “Stay With Me” – a towering, operatic ballad that many consider the pinnacle of East Coast “uptown soul.”

“To many people, ‘Stay With Me’ still typifies the basic idea of what real soul music is all about,” wrote UK soul music maven David Nathan in a 1974 article for Blues & Soul. “And there aren't too many soulful people around who don't get that spine–chilling tingle when they hear it, even to this day.”

“‘Stay With Me’ was a song that Jerry Ragovoy had written with Mr. Weiss, and I thought it was going to be a monster smash,” Lorraine Ellison told Nathan in Blues & Soul. “It certainly looked that way – the record had twenty-six national breakouts in the States, and it did make it onto the soul charts and made some headway onto the nationals.

“But at that time, Warners was just not into black music, period. They really had no idea how to promote the record and they had no real way of getting into the R&B market.”

The single made it to No. 11 R&B/No. 64 Pop, and these stats – along with some positive reviews and a certain underground buzz – were enough for Warner Brothers to green–light a full album. Heart and Soul: Introducing Miss Lorraine Ellison was released as WB 1674 in 1966. Produced by Ragovoy but arranged and conducted by jazz man Oliver Nelson, it was an uneven set that found Ellison singing familiar standards (“Cry Me A River”) and other people’s hits pop (“A Change Is Gonna Come,” “If I Had a Hammer”). “Stay With Me” was buried in the middle of Side Two, and only one other song, “When Love Flies Away,” bore a Ragovoy writing credit. Heart and Soul did not chart and was soon deleted.

“Then interesting things began to happen,” West Coast rock critic John Mendelsohn wrote in his liner notes for Stay With Me – the second Lorraine Ellison album, unexpectedly issued by Warner Bros. in the fall of 1969. “[Such] diverse musical figures as Laura Nyro and Carl Wayne [of The Move] listed Lorraine Ellison as their favorite female vocalist. And in Harlem...an enterprising pirate tape–duplicating operation found mobs of takers when they offered tapes of ‘Stay With Me’ at the somewhat outrageous price of $5.00 apiece.”

“… Having realized that they had an artist of almost limitless potential, both commercial and artistic, sitting around their house, [Warner Bros.] got Jerry Ragovoy busy producing a straight–ahead album of gospel–based soul, the music that Lorraine had been doing for years with such unrewarded brilliance.”

Indeed, this was the album that should have followed the single. Stay With Me is eleven tracks of pure uptown soul, with an unswerving stylistic focus and the sustained mood of a secular cathedral. Ragovoy arranged and produced the entire set; he co–wrote seven songs with (variously) Mort Shuman, Doc Pomus, Sam Bell, Bert Berns, and Ellison herself. The title song closes Side One with a bang, in a manner analogous to the placement of “Get It While You Can” on Howard Tate.

It was all too little too late, however, and Stay With Me followed Heart and Soul into the cut–out bins. But Janis Joplin must have gotten hold of a copy: She later covered “Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)” on Pearl, along with four other songs co–written by Jerry Ragovoy.

LOU COURTNEY – “What Do You Want Me Yo Do” mp3
Written by Lou Courtney. Arranged by Jerry Courtney. Produced by Lou Courtney & Jerry Ragovoy. Released 1973 as Epic/CBS 5–11062. No. 48 Billboard R&B in spring 1974.
available on I'm in Need of Love

By 1973, hardcore Southern soul was pretty much a spent force, commercially if not inspirationally. Otis Redding had been dead for years, Atlantic had dropped Wilson Pickett, and Aretha Franklin was cutting jazz–flavored material with Quincy Jones. Ragovoy hooked up with R&B journeyman Lou Courtney, whose biggest chart record – the quasi–Motown dance novelty “Skate Now” – was six years behind him. Together they came up with a flute–flavored, proto–disco sound that was closer to Johnny Bristol’s “Hang On In There Baby” than to the glories of Garnet Mimms or Erma Franklin. Still, “What Do You Want Me To Do” is a genuinely infectious record with an arrangement that positively pops, and Courtney sings the hell out of it. The single crawled to No. 48 R&B and died, but not before singer and producer managed to squeeze out a pretty good album, I’m In Need of Love, also on Epic/CBS.

***************************

“Open Up Your Soul” mp3
by Erma Franklin, 1968.
available on Piece of Her Heart: Epic & Shout Years

“I Want To Be Loved” mp3
by Loraine Ellison, 1969.
available on Stay With Me

Garnet Mimms – “Look Away”
by Garnet Mimms, 1964.
available on Warm & Soulful

"Malayisha" mp3
by Miriam Makeba, 1967.
available on Pata Pata

“Ain’t Nobody Home” mp3
by Howard Tate, 1967.
available on Get It While You Can

“Stop” mp3
by Howard Tate, 1967.
available on Get It While You Can

Jeff Chandler: My Second Cousin Removed

2011-12-26T16:34:00.005-05:00

by Dave the Spazz

“Don’t ever let them operate on your back. That’s how we lost Jeff Chandler.”
--Don Van Vliet 1

Today’s Hanukkah’s Jew answers to the name of 1950s movie star Jeff Chandler. My Aunt Penny used to swear that Chandler was her cousin from the old neighborhood; however, his absence from any and all family functions caused some concern at the time that Aunt Penny might be full of shit. Claiming familial ties to Jeff Chandler was just schlubby enough to be true so I believed her. Aunt Penny’s son David changed his name from Abramson to Chandler so you can count him as another believer. 2

Jeff Chandler was one of the biggest box office leading men of the 1950s but any enduring fame seems locked into that nervous decade. After serving in World War II, the East New York native sharpened his acting chops in radio comedies and dramas (most notably as doofus biology teacher Philip Boynton on Our Miss Brooks). By the early fifties the former Ira Grossel reinvented himself into the tall, dark and Semitic matinee hero Hollywood had apparently been searching for.

Chandler was generally typecast as the affable, prematurely gray, leading man sort of chap--a stack of good looks with the charisma of a goldfish. He was Cary without the Grant, Gregory sans Peck, he was more Clark Kent than Clark Gable. Tanned and bland, Chandler was just a yutz with a granite chin.

In the seventies I remember he would occasionally pop up on Channel 9's Million Dollar Movie or whenever the Mets got rained out. Unfortunately, Chandler's movies were unremarkable and predictable affairs. If it sucked, he was in it: turgid romances, drab military dramas, sword and sandal epics, crappity-crap horse operas. If Warhol ever sat through a Jeff Chandler epic then maybe his eight hour Empire State Building movie might have seemed unnecessary.

For a blank sheet of paper, Chandler surprisingly shared the screen with a litany of leading lady goddesses of the 1950s: Kim Novak, Liz Taylor, Carol Lynley, Susan Hayward, Lana Turner, Julie London, Joan Crawford, Jane Russell, Dorothy Malone, and Anne Baxter were among the lucky gals who kissed up on ol' Jeff. At one point he was romantically linked with M-G-M swimming star Esther Williams until the day she allegedly caught him in a dress. In her 1999 autobiography Williams recalled telling him at the time "Jeff, you're too big for polka dots."

In or out of polka dots, Chandler was well-liked and he swung with the swingingest chums that Hollywood had to offer. When good pal Sammy Davis, Jr. lost his left eyeball after a horrific car wreck on Route 66, Chandler famously offered him one of his own. (A few years later Sammy served as a pallbearer at Chandler’s funeral.) Jeff's generous offer, along with constant noodging from Eddie Cantor and Tony Curtis are likely responsible for Sammy turning to the Jewish faith.

Chandler had a singing career as well--who didn’t back then? He released a few tuneless LPs and in 1955 opened at The Riviera in Vegas to celebrity-studded crowds and tepid reviews. Comedienne/singer Rose Marie was at the opening and remarked "Jeff Chandler was a great guy, but he was no singer… he came with a conductor, a piano player, light man, press agent and manager. None of it helped."

On the set of his last film Merrill's Marauders (1961), Chandler herniated his spinal disc while playing baseball with U.S. Army soldiers who served as extras in the movie. He entered a Culver City Hospital on May 13, 1961 and due to a botched surgery he never checked out.

At age 42 Jeff Chandler joined the lost-in-time stars of Hollywood's last golden era, remembered today for nobody knows-quite-what, except from this point on for being my Aunt Penny's cousin from the old neighborhood.

"I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm" mp3
by Jeff Chandler, 1955.
available on Spotlight on Jeff Chandler

1. The Book of Changes: Interviews by Kristine McKenna, Fantagraphics Books

2. My first cousin removed, David Abramson (hailing from East New York) could pass for Italian and frequently did. He changed his name to David Roya and eventually David Roy Chandler in a nod to his movie star cousin once removed. He did walk-on bits (usually as an Italian American thug) on Mission Impossible, The Rookies, Black Sheep Squadron and other TV shows. He abandoned his Fonzie image to play an Apache savage who tries to kill Henry Gibson in a very special episode of F Troop. Returning to his bad-ass roots, David found enduring psychotronic fame as Bernard Posner, the spoiled Sheriff’s son in the extremely dated hit Billy Jack (1971). David is currently a 4th degree black belt Tae Kwon Do instructor in Rockaway Beach.

The Atheist Who Stole Christmas

2011-12-25T16:34:00.006-05:00

by Nicole Audrey Spector

How a guy who once pulled over the car upon espying a black glitter rosary on my neck (I was 12 and the rosary was from Claire's Accessories) was ever impelled to give the world a self-declared “Christmas Gift” is ironic. Yet my dad, in making A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector was hardly a grinch won over. I don't exaggerate when I say that he'd rather have a tick burrowed in his ear than a sentimental Christian on his back. Or a sentimental Jew for that matter (though one may elicit from him a gentle smirk, a boyhood memory). My dad is so outrightly disgusted with religion that when something bad doesn't happen he says “Thank Darwin!”, a phrase I taught him when he told me he'd give me $500 if I read all of On The Origin Of Species. That's roughly a dollar per page. Add the exhaustive intro and afterthoughts I was also required to read and you have about half that. Not to mention I'd have to provide written notes. Still, not a bad deal for a kid, right? Well, I was 23 and unable to finish it. Point is, my Pops' Christmas music has nothing to do with Christian folklore – it indeed dispossess Christ from Christ-mas, and is concerned only with a mirth and merriment that is wholly secular.

When I visited my dad last Sunday and imparted the news of Christopher Hitchen's death, he gazed at my Einstein T-shirt and frowned. “Einstein should have been more outspoken about the non-existence of God,” he said. A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector may as well be called The Atheist Who Stole Christmas or, if you want to get silly, It's My Birthday, Too; So What? – for my father was born on Christmas Day. Around this time of year a lot of people tell me, “You know, it doesn't feel like Christmastime until I listen to your Dad's Christmas album.” The key word is feel. Christmastime, in again the secular sense, has a distinct essence and texture. It's busy, buttery, effulgent, and loud – pairing well with the lavish mania that distinguishes The Wall Of Sound. Nearly 50 years after its incipient release, A Christmas Gift For You is emblematic of an era long gone, but it's not the 1963 time stamp on the work that induces nostalgia. Songs like “Winter Wonderland”, “Frosty The Snowman”, and “Parade Of The Wooden Soldiers” (my childhood favorite) feel to have been born nostalgic, dreamed up in a reverie of how good it feels to be a child at Christmastime. The one original song on the album, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” pines for a Christmas past with Darlene Love belting, “They're singing 'Deck The Halls'/But it's not like Christmas at all/'Cause I remember when you were here/And all the fun we had last year.”

Perhaps my dad had a bit of the Christmas blues himself growing up. He and his older sister, Shirley, were brought up sparingly in a strict but struggling Jewish household. Christmas was of course not observed and though Hanukkah was I can't imagine it was a hugely happy affair. My paternal grandfather Ben suffered from acute diabetes and ended his life when my father was nine, leaving my Grandma Bertha (after whom my dad's record label Mother Bertha Music is coined) to raise the two kids on her own. She moved the family to L.A, where my dad snuck into jazz clubs and at 14, met his hero: jazz guitarist Barney Kessel. It wasn't long under Kessel's wing before my Dad decided that he would never be as good a guitarist as the remarkably under-recognized genius – “not even a close second”, he says, and so, he turned his ambitions toward record making. In my father's few shared memories of growing up, seldom do I get the sense that he was ever doing much of anything aside from growing up – working as hard as he could to assume responsibility for his family. Even the move to L.A from NY, when he couldn't have been more than 12, he remembers as a vehicle for equipping him with the tools he needed to become a young success – to make it big fast.

As far as the family my dad co-created with my mother, Janis, much later in life (he was 42 when my twin brother Phillip. Jr. and I were born) goes, we were raised on Christmas. Hanukkah was there, but off to the side, a corner piece of piety we were unsure how to regard. Phillip and I took turns lighting the menorah (Grandma Bertha probably had one for every light socket in her home), but we didn't quite know what to do with a holiday that, next to Christmas, was so complicated and sombre, so...holy. When Grandma Bertha gave us a dreidel to play with, Phillip and I just stared at it and exchanged worried glances, hoping Grandma would walk away so we could play with real toys.

Jewish as Grandma Bertha was (she took great care in teaching my Mexican Catholic mother how to be a good Jewish wife, mentoring her in the making of many a matzoh ball soup and potato latke), she indulged us our Christmas. Every year she dug the same plastic tree out of a closet, along with other customary Christmas junk – light up Santas and reindeer, boxes of candy canes. Always a sucker for kitsch, my dad would create his own mega marshmallow world in our foyer – replete with fake box presents under a dazzling Rockefeller tree. But the true Christmas fanatic, on either side of my family, was my dad's older sister, Shirley. A virtual Mrs. Claus, Aunt Shirley stormed into rooms with literal bells on, singing the Christmas hits. My father couldn't stand her. She seemed to physically make his skin crawl. Twenty minutes into her company and he was on the brink of a genuine eczema outbreak. To me she was the most wonderful person in the world. She was a brilliant woman, I later learned, but disturbed. She'd go missing for months and eventually years at a time, abducted by some secret darkness in her mind. I only ever saw her as ebullient, glowing. She was a guaranteed presence on Christmas day. She arrived at our house in the late afternoon (the earliest my father would let her in) with her annual trunk load of presents for me and Phillip, singing all the way up our driveway.

A fragment of one such Christmas afternoon exists on VHS, when Phillip and I were about 6 years old. Before the Record button was hit Aunt Shirley somehow guilted my father into getting out his electric guitar. She starts to sing a pitchy falsetto “Silent Night” and my dad strums obediently along, each chord appearing to hurt his face. “All is caaallllm,” Aunt Shirley sings, with proud bravado, “All is brighhhht.” He doesn't let her get very far, abruptly transitioning into “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”. Aunt Shirley wavers but catches on – used to him changing things up without prior consult. Two verses into that song and my dad ditches Christmas altogether, digressing into an improv jazz bit none of us understand. Aunt Shirley, jilted, but ever-joyous, takes the camera from my mother and interviews her niece and nephew, truly her favorite people in the world, about their Christmas day. “Such a beautiful family,” she says. The camera shuts off.

That video is the only evidence of my mother, father, brother, and me together. There are no family photos. It's the only recording of Aunt Shirley, as far as I know, that exists. She's at least 50 years old there, and as fragile and beautiful as I imagine she was as a girl, that remarkably bright girl whose mind shattered when her father left. It's one of the only videos of Phillip, Jr. A few years later, when we were nine he succumbed to a complicated illness. He died just a few days before Christmas. I don't remember our last Christmas together, but this one on tape looks like it was pretty good, and it's the one that makes every Christmas since feel not like Christmas at all.

Download:

"Sleigh Ride" mp3
by the Ronettes, 1963.
available on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

"Parade of the Wooden Ships" mp3
by the Crystals, 1963.
available on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" mp3
by Darlene Love, 1963.
available on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

"White Christmas" mp3
by Darlene Love, 1963.
available on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

Good Tidings: Christmas In The Heart

2011-12-24T16:32:00.004-05:00

by Polly Bresnick

I'm half Jewish, half Christmas. Jew-ISH. My family lights the menorah when we remember to, usually uncertain of which night we're on, and we mumble out the prayer that even my father barely remembers, with a crescendoing finale of SHALL HANUKKAH! Or is it with a "Ch-"? Does it have an "h" at the end? (I'm barely "culturally Jewish," which is to say that I'm not really religious at all.)

In grammar school I learned that, for Hanukkah, kids traditionally received eight presents — one on each of the holy, candle-lit nights. Also, there was a dreidel and gelt. That all sounded pretty good. On Christmas, of course, children awoke to find piles of gifts under the tree. Also a very appealing concept to my greedy little kid mind. Since I was both, I was thrilled to realize that maybe I'd get to do both! I did. Sort of. But then the deep holiday laze kicked in, and the Hanukkah gifts were skipped. I didn't complain — there were still plenty of Christmas gifts. One year the laze deepened and I was just on the brink of losing track of my belief in your favorite fat man and mine, the one and only chimney diver, bearer of brightly wrapped and bowed boxes, still cold from the icy pole from whence they came, Mr. Santa Claus. My parents figured they could get more sleep on Christmas Eve if they got some of the wrapping done in the weeks before the special day and put them under the tree as they wrapped. I must have gotten confused about my combo-faith (or just uncontrollably impatient for toys), because I started to sneak one present a day back to my bedroom to unwrap in the solitude of my room, hushed and high on the adrenaline of a child's crime. Didn't take long for my parents to notice. They were pretty mad. As Dylan himself laments on his Theme Time radio show, "Some people just don't have the spirit of Christmas. They think it's all about gift-giving. Though, to be more honest, I think a lot of 'em think it's more about gift-getting. Christmas is not about runnin' around the stores, spendin' money, and tryna' buy people's love and affection." It's about a lot of things. Including comfort, joy, figgy pudding, and music.

I love Christmas music. My mom was/is an old-school, screamin' and faintin' Elvis fan, so we have plenty of Elvis Christmas music. I like that "Silent Night" can sound kind of sexy in Elvis's voice. I can't seem to sing along to his "Blue Christmas" without lowering my eyelids and letting my top lip quiver. And I know the lazy velvet of Bing's Christmas repertoire like I know the smell of fresh baked bread. I impatiently look forward to it all year long like a little kid waiting for the first snowfall sticky enough for snowball wars and snow forts and snowmen. But those guys were church-going, God-fearing Christians, right? They can sing those songs however they want to and it will all sound like golden gospel. Those same songs in Bob Dylan's (née Zimmerman's) voice come out as a different gospel, and one that feels no less true. Dylan's voice singing Christmas songs is sweet and comfy. It conjures the gauzy memory of sitting on the rug next to the teetering, over-ornamented tree, when I was too young to even quite know who Santa was or what Christmas meant or that those big shiny colorful boxes had toys in them, but knowing all the words to all the songs and smiling with easy joy because if Christmas music is playing, it must be Christmas.

I first heard Dylan's polka-romp cover of "Must Be Santa" when it was meming around as a music video. It's the stand-out song on Christmas in the Heart, for me. It has a Santa-gone-wild, runaway sleigh energy that truly warms my halfie heart. And it's a weird roller-coaster dream to hear Dylan clowning the "ho, ho, ho's." The video is a little unsettling: Dylan's at a holiday house party and he keeps popping up unexpectedly. He's out of place, but comfortable, still enjoying himself, even amidst the maniacally smiley (super goy) partiers and the drunken chase-brawl that careens through things, sacrilegious and hip and honest in its interruption of the celebration of — what is it? — Christ's birthday? No one other than the camera notices the throwing of glasses or even the man swinging from a chandelier on his way out the door. Everyone, including Dylan, continues the song, knows all the words. The song itself, in humorous contrast to the adult-beverage setting, is a nursery rhyme list of Santa factoid essentials, an instruction manual for how to believe in Santa, a dictation of what to see in your mind's eye as you imagine him. So Dylan singing this song seems like proof that he may not exactly fit in at this Christmas party, but he still knows all the things there are to know about Santa. And really, what American doesn't?

This may offend some die-hard Dylan fans (and/or Tom Waits fans), but "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" comes out sounding a heck of a lot like a Tom Waits song (Dylan drawls it as "HAYrald Angels"), until his angelic back-up singers slip in, mugging sweetly in close harmonies, like the Boswell Sisters or some other assemblage of voices from another time that would sound just right on an old record player, the dustier the better. "Little Drummer Boy" is a bit over the edge for me. Hearing Dylan do the "ba-rum-ba-bum-bum" made me feel embarrassed for him. Though, again, the female back-up singers find some haunting slant-matched harmonies that give this track its own, new idiosyncratic personality. And, perhaps, maybe I just never liked singing this one. In junior-high chorus, I always imagined the little drummer boy as the baby Jesus — a personage I knew far too little about — which made me feel like I wasn't in the club, and maybe Santa wouldn't put anything but coal in my stocking that hung festively next to the rusting and tarnished menorah. Singing "Little Drummer Boy" in chorus as an awkward preteen atheist was about as comfortable as singing the same token Kwanza song every year, which is to say that it was no fun at all.

In "O' Come All Ye Faithful," "The First Noel," and "O' Little Town of Bethlehem," Dylan really does sound to me like a self-conscious Jew in a church (a feeling I have experienced on the few occasions I've been inside of an actual church during an actual service with singing and praising and whatnot). These are the songs I remember my gentile grandfather singing in a booming, choir-trained baritone beside a piano in a living room in Delaware with a fire roaring and "bubble-lights" (which, I believe, have been recalled due to the serious fire hazard they pose) bubbling merrily on the Christmas tree, though I'm not sure this did, in fact, ever happen in my life.

The rest of the album is perfectly reasonable 'round-the-yule-log fare, with some trickster flourishes here and there. Dylan's poetic sensibility sneaks in as he relishes the swinging alliteration of "Walking in a Winter Wonderland," letting all the w's wash together into a warm and cozy lullaby mumble. There's something deeply satisfying about the cheesy key modulations and boozy swaying rhythms of these songs that I really do know as well as some people know their prayers. I know them so well I don't remember learning the words, as if I were born with the knowledge of them — I know them in a way that really deserves to be described as "by heart" because I know them in my heart and not in my brain. One doesn't get in the Christmas "mindset" one gets into the Christmas spirit. It's reassuring to hear Dylan humoring this cross-section of melodies that I hold so dear. It's as if he's agreeing with me, that Christmas is not in the church or in Macy's or in Daddy Warbuck's Nutcracker-scale living room. It's truly in the heart. And I'm not afraid to say it if my ol' pal Bobby Zimmerman isn't.

Dylan has surprised us so many times, that even a Christmas album wasn't all that shocking to me. The man loves the music of the American everyman. And in this country, where, starting the day after Thanksgiving, it's difficult to find much else on the radio, it doesn't get much more universal than Christmas music. As silly as some of the songs may sound in Dylan's lupine sneer, he sings as if he loves these songs in the same ways I do — and he seems to be proving that these songs are for everyone to sing. As Christmas does in this country, these songs also, for the most part, transcend religion. They're part of the weird warm collective memory of Home and Childhood and Magic.

Download:

"Must Be Santa" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2009.
available on Christmas In the Heart

"Hark the Herald Angels Sing" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2009.
available on Christmas In the Heart

"Winter Wonderland" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2009.
available on Christmas In the Heart

*****************

"Mistletoe" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2006.
from Theme Time Radio Hour: Christmas and New Year

"Figgy Pudding" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2006.
from Theme Time Radio Hour: Christmas and New Year

"The Night Before Christmas" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2006.
from Theme Time Radio Hour: Christmas and New Year

*****************

El Judío Maravilloso!

2011-12-23T16:32:00.002-05:00

by Ariella Stok

It was a classically Semitic combination of chutzpah and horniness that led Lawrence Ira Kahn, a white Jewish kid from Brownsville, Brooklyn to become Larry Harlow, a king of salsa, a musical movement that combined Cuban son with New York bebop, and served as much to fuel the dance floors of nightclubs numbering in the hundreds during its heyday in the early 1970s, as to define the cultural voice of New York’s influx of Latino immigrants—mostly Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican—that began in the 1950s. Harlow not only was the leader of one of the hottest bands in town during the salsa boom of the late 60s and early 70s, but a pioneer who helped define and expand the genre via his ambitious arrangements and songwriting, engineering and production, and an approach that returned the music to its traditional roots while informing it with the popular sounds of his day. As the first to present salsa in a mainstream American context, Harlow was critical in positioning salsa as not just a piece of ethnic exotica, but an important cultural movement of late 20th century music.

Harlow was born in 1938, raised, and Bar Mitzvahed in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a pastoral neighborhood known for its meadows and farms prior to the building boom that was heavily colonized by a community of Jews who had been lured from their cramped, dilapidated tenements on the Lower East Side by the come-ons of land developers to “move to the country.” His was the kosher household of a musical family. His grandfather provided the piano accompaniment in silent movie theaters and was a theater critic for the Daily Forward, New York’s Jewish newspaper, published in Yiddish and English. His father, mother, Rose Sherman, was an opera singer of Russian-Jewish descent, and his father Nathan Kahn, performed in the Borscht Belt circuit in the Catskills as a musician and bandleader along with two brothers, a comedian and musician. The Khans lived in two adjoining apartment buildings joined together by a courtyard that were filled entirely with a tight-knit community of other Jewish families. It was a happy childhood filled with music, primarily that of his Jewish heritage.

“My Aunt Frida used to sit in the house and sing all the Yiddish songs,” Harlow told me during a recent visit to his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “She’d play the piano and get so excited, her false teeth would fall right out of her mouth and onto the keyboard,” Harlow describes, feigning the guffaws he and his brother Andy used to break into at this scene. He got his first taste of Latin music, in the form of the mambo and cha-cha, at the Latin Quarter, a Times Square club owned by Lew Walters. He and Lew’s daughter, future news anchor Barbara Walters, would sit together in the club’s spotlight booth and watch all the big acts of the day—Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Sophie Tucker, and Eddie Brown, with his father leading the house band under the name Buddy Harlowe, a name both sons Larry and Andy would later adopt (dropping the final e for good measure) for their professional careers. It was here that Harlow first fell in love with his favorite ambassador to Latin culture: “I got to hang out with the chorus girls, mostly Spanish women, and they would pat me on my head and say, ‘oh the cute little boy.’ They’d pull me into their bosoms and I was in heaven. I would smell their bodily sweat and sniff their costumes when they weren’t around.”

A gifted pianist whose mother forced him to practice under the threat of a raised wooden ruler that greeted mistakes with a thwack on the back of his hand, when all of Harlow’s neighborhood friends attended the local high school, he took four busses and trains to make the two-hour trip to Music and Arts High School in Harlem. He was there studying jazz, his first love, but one night after his father took him to see his favorite pianist, Art Tatum in concert at the Hickory Horse, he realized that if he practiced for every minute of his life, he’d still never be as good. His thoughts began to turn to the music he heard in the streets and pouring out of the bodegas of the Harlem neighborhood where he attended school. In the Latin music, he heard a kinship with the improvisatory structures of the jazz that he loved, and understood it as similarly rooted in the modal structures of the Eastern European music with which he’d been raised. But important to Harlow’s ambitions, he sensed here an opportunity to not only distinguish himself but evolve the music into something that wedded it to the popular sounds of the day. He started attending dances at the Palladium and playing in Latin bands made up of other Jewish guy and Italians. These early bands’ repertoire consisted mostly of instrumentals since no one in the band spoke enough Spanish to be able to convincingly sing, and performed in the dancehalls of the old Catskills hotels, where vacationing Jews were perpetuating Latin dance music and taking mambo and cha-cha lessons by the pool. Here he was reunited with the Spanish women he had fallen in love with as a kid at the Latin Quarter, except this time he was old enough to do more than get patted on the head.

“I’m a white Jewish Kid from Brooklyn and all of a sudden I’m thrown into this world of hot-blooded, dark-haired brunettes with fiery eyes who knew how to take care of business and I’m in cha-cha heaven. It was quite an eye-opening experience to make love to a Latin dance instructor with no body fat who had rhythym. The Latin women took me to another dimension!” At 17, in his first semester at Brooklyn College, he and some of his mambonik friends went on a week-long trip to Cuba, and once again, he was in cha-cha heaven, falling deeply in love with the music, culture, and women, for the first time hearing the Afro-Cuban music he loved played by actual Cubans. He quickly returned to Cuba as soon as he could, the next time staying a few months, and then another trip, where he laid down roots, immersing himself in the music scene and following his favorite bands around with a tape recorder, while collecting records of Cuban music, until he was forced to return home by the Cuban Revolution in 1959, hopping a flight to Miami the day Fidel Castro marched into Havana.

Once back in New York, he played for a while in a band led by Harvey Averne, but was soon fired for not wanting to take direction. “I’m a natural born leader,” he explains. He started putting together his own outfit, built around a new sound that was anchored by dual pairs of trumpets and trombones in the front, and a rhythm section in the back, like the bands he had seen in Cuba, and writing songs that expanded the traditional 1-4-5 structures of the mambo and cha-cha to include bigger harmonies made up of 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, and diminished chords. Once constructed, his band, Orchestra Harlow hustled a regular gig at Chez Jose, a Latin music club across the street from the Museum of Natural History that catered to an “uppity Puerto Rican crowd.” The club was owned by Joey Artanis (who renamed himself from Rodriguez by reversing the surname of his hero Frank Sinatra – “that’s how white he was”) who wouldn’t let anyone in whose skin was a little too café con leche. One night, Jerry Masucci, a Latin music fan who had studied in Cuba during the same time as Harlow, came into the club to see Orchestra Harlow and offered them a spot on his fledgling label, Fania, which he’d started with the goal of spreading New York salsa to the rest of the world and make a buck off the burgeoning phenomenon. Orchestra Harlow was the first outside artist signed to Fania, which at the time sold records made solely by label co-owner, bandleader Johnny Pacheco out of the trunk of Masucci’s car.

Harlow’s first record for Fania, Heavy Smokin’ was inspired by his other love, The Beatles, both in its chord structures, and its use of four-track recording, making it the first salsa album to be recorded in stereo. He was so excited by the sound he’d created, that as soon as the first acetate was pressed, he got in his car and drove to Brooklyn to play it for his father, accidentally leaving the record on the car’s roof, and losing his first recording as a bandleader. He would later pay tribute to the Beatles more overtly by dropping acid for the first time while listening to Magical Mystery Tour on repeat, and in his 1969 record Mi Mono y Yo, which featured a salsified cover of “Me and My Monkey” as its title track. That year he also decided to try his hand at a different kind of crossover success, forming the 10-piece horn-fronted Ambergris, and applying his knowledge of writing orchestral arrangements within the context of a rock band. Ambergris did a US tour, playing alongside bands such as the Grateful Dead and Small Faces, and recorded one and a half albums, which Harlow tried to have produced by one of his heroes, George Martin. According to Harlow, Martin agreed, but only if Harlow was willing to wait three years for an open spot in his schedule. Then, George Harrison offered his production services, but the band declined, thinking him not funky enough, settling instead on Booker & the MGs’ Steve Cropper, who also wasn’t quite right for the job, according to Harlow. Harlow quotes the Village Voice review of their 1970 performance at the Fillmore East, which cites the etymology of the band name in its dismissal of their act, “Whale puke? Yes they are.”

Despite his success as a recording artist for the increasingly influential Fania, he was still an outsider even after having several successful albums under his belt as the rare white Jewish guy in the big leagues of Latin music, and faced a lot of what he calls “reverse Uncle Tom-ism: What is this white boy doing in our world? Why does he play our music better than we do?” He was able to overcome many of these hurdles by hiring José Carbelo, who also managed Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri and who packaged Orchestra Harlow with his other clients so he was able to slip in through back door of the Latin clubs. As his command of Spanish improved, he was able to do the interviews he had previously declined, and started to become more accepted by the Latin music community as his star continued to rise. He describes himself and the Fania gang as the “Latin Rolling Stones,” 14 handsome, well-dressed guys who had girls chasing them in the streets trying to tear off their clothes. As an outsider, Harlow was also able to influence the aesthetics of the scene, bringing his psychedelic style (lots of jewelry, bright colors, long hair) to both the album art of Fania and the dress code of its artists.

When Harlow heard The Who’s rock opera, Tommy, he was seized by the idea to create his own version—a symphonic Latin album that could tell a complete story, rather than just being a collection of songs like most salsa records. The result, Hommy, was released in 1973 and told the story of a deaf, dumb and blind boy (Larry Harlow described the character to me as proto-autistic, before anyone knew what autism was) who was a prodigy of not pinball, but conga drums. Harlow recruited Latin music’s erstwhile queen, Celia Cruz from her artistic exile in Mexico, and gave her a big hit in the album’s “acid queen” analogue, “gracia davina,” a move that effectively brought her out of retirement and restarted her career. Hommy had its premier at Carnegie Hall, bringing Latin music for the first time out of the barrios, social clubs and salsa joints, and into a mainstream American concert venue. Harlow still gets giddy when he describes the event. “I’m pissing in Toscanini’s toilet!” he remembers thinking to himself that night in Carnegie Hall. His dressing room up in the wings of the hall had a peephole that overlooked the stage, providing a panorama of the entire house, and in his white tails and scruffy beard, he lit up a joint and blew the smoke through the opening, a small prank that symbolized to him that he, and his music, had truly arrived.

Using the same rhythm section as he did with Hommy, Harlow followed up later that year with Salsa, an exemplary album that contributed to the growth in popularity of the charanga sound, with its prominent flute leads and string sections, and would coin the sobriquet that has become his legacy. At the instrumental break of “La Cartera,” corista Aldaberto Santiego introduces his boss’s piano solo, “Ya viene, Larry Harlow,” and the singer Junior González finishes the sentence, “El Judío Maravilloso!” or the Jewish Marvel. It was a reference to Harlow’s musical hero and subject of his 1971 LP, Tribute to Aresenio Rodriguez, the Cuban composer and tres (Cuban guitar) player who was known as “Ciego Maravilloso” after being blinded as a child from a mule’s kick to his head. The nickname represented Harlow’s accepted place in the firmament of Latin music and he adopted it as his second name.

Harlow identifies his next album, Live in Quad from 1974, as the only quadraphonic salsa recording ever made. He rigged up a quad setup in the studio he partly owned, Good Vibrations, to mix a record he had recorded behind bars at Sing Sing prison, motivated by his desire to best Eddie Palmieri’s 1972 record, Recorded Live at Sing Sing, on its own turf. Unfortunately, quadraphonic sound never caught on commercially and the effort was wasted, but it was an example of Harlow’s continuously growing engineering expertise and experimentation with production, skills he’d learned by shadowing Fania engineer Irv Greenbaum. In addition to Harlow’s own recorded output, he produced over 260 albums for Fania and was instrumental in assembling possibly the most famous salsa band of them all, the Fania All-Stars.

Although by 1975, as El Judío Maravilloso, Harlow enjoyed acceptance as one of New York’s top salsa bands, the success brought heat onto his scene, and his singer Ismael Miranda convinced him that he needed protection. He had been exposed to the Santería religion during his travels to Cuba, and now began to practice its rituals.

Harlow’s 87th street apartment is a small space with every surface covered by the art and antiques he collects—Calder paintings, black and white photography, and a collection of century-old musical instruments from all over the world. Tucked into the furniture of his living room are three different pianos, none of which I can spot until he uncovers them for me. A shelf near the entrance proudly displays elegant menorahs and other Jewish iconography. He opens a cupboard and reveals a multitier soltero shrine, draped with talismans: several sets of handcuffs, beads, feathers, and he solemnly explains what each is for. I want to ask if practicing Santería, a syncretic religion derived from Christianity and known for its use of ritual animal sacrifice, is a conflict for his Judaism, but he changes the subject as he whisks me away to a restaurant for lunch, to combat his falling blood sugar level (and I suspect to ogle the female diners, judging by the amount of times he pauses mid-sentence, his mouth agape, as a pretty lady walks by.) Harlow says of the growing Latin immigrant community in New York, which numbered half a million by the 1950s: they wanted something to call their own and that’s what we gave them with salsa. Sometimes it takes the perspective of an outsider, and the chutzpah of a Jew, to give the people what they need.

Download:

"El Exigente" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1967.
available on El Exigente

"Groovin' to the Afro Twist" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1967.
available on El Exigente

"Tu Tu Ratan" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1965.
available on Heavy Smokin'

"Larry's Complaint (Me and My Monkey)" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1969.
available on Me And My Monkey / Mi Mono Y Yo
(out of print)

"El Malecon" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1969.
available on Me And My Monkey / Mi Mono Y Yo
(out of print)

"Something Happened To Me" mp3
by Ambergris, 1970.
available on Ambergris
(out of print)

"Grazin' in the Grass" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1971.
available on Orchestra Harlow Presenta a Ismael Miranda

"El Dia de Navidad" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1973.
available on Hommy a Latin Opera

"Quirimbomboro" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1973.
available on Hommy a Latin Opera

"Gracia Divina" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1973.
available on Hommy a Latin Opera

"No Queremos Sermon" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1973.
available on Hommy a Latin Opera

"La Cartera" mp3
by Larry Harlow, 1973.
available on Salsa

That's What the Good Book Says

2011-12-22T16:32:00.013-05:00

by Alex Abramovich

Dedicated readers of the Boogie Woogie Flu (which is to say, you people, with too much time on your hands) could tell you right off that if (1) "Good Rockin’ Tonight" (2) "Rocket 88" (3) "Rock Around the Clock" (4) "That’s Alright, Mama" and (5) "Maybellene" have anything common, it's that, at one time or another, some music critic (which is to say, someone with too much time on his or her hands) has put them forth as candidates for “first rock and roll song.”

Now, this is the sort of argument that no one’s going to win. You could just as easily cue up (6) “Cow-Cow Boogie,” which Freddie Slack and Ella Mae Morse recorded in 1942 (though, I’ve always preferred Ella Fitzgerald’s 1943 cover)—

"Cow-Cow Boogie" mp3
by Ella Fitzgerald & The Ink Spots, 1943.
available on Ella: Legendary Decca Recordings

Singin' his cowboy songs
He's just too much 
He's got a knocked out western accent… with a Harlem touch 
He was raised on loco weed 
He's what you call a swing half breed
Singin' his “Cow Cow Booogie” in the strangest way:
‘Comma ti yi yi yay
‘Comma ti yippy yi yay

—and which sets cowboy songs, Harlem accents, jazz cigarettes… all the basic rock and roll ingredients, bubbling together, while Elvis et al. are still in short pants. Or, you argue for Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and the Robins, who tossed yet another song onto the stack (or, as Jim Morrison would have had it, funeral pyre) of “first rock and roll songs,” sixty-some years ago.

"That's What the Good Book Says" mp3
by The Robins, 1951.
available on Leiber & Stoller Present the Spark Records Story

(7) “That’s What the Good Book Says” was recorded by the Robins, in Los Angeles, in 1950. “We let loose with something we had just written,” Leiber recalled, as “a different take on the bible than what I’d studied in Hebrew school:

Well, back in the days of old King Saul
Every night was a crazy ball
The cats smoked hay through a rubber hose
And the women, they wore transparent clothes
That’s what the good book says, boy,
That’s what the good book says….”

"The Robins dug our new creation myth and cut ‘That’s What the Good Book Says’ a month later. It came out in early 1951. A real record. Our very first, with our names on it, although misspelled. But it was real.”

The rest of this first, real Leiber & Stoller record, is worth quoting in full:

Now Moses said to old Pharoah,
“You’ll have to let my people go
If you don’t take their chains off and set them loose,
I’m going to put the plague on all of your Jews”
That’s what the good book says, boy
That’s what the good book says

Now the snake said to Eve,
“You listen to me, go and take that apple off the tree.”
Now, the Lord tried to guide her, but he was blind
She said, “this apple cider tastes mighty fine!”
That’s what the good book says, boy,
That’s what the good book says….

The devil was sitting on a nest of coals,
Giving boiled brew to the sinnin’ souls
They was taking that brim and mixing with wine
And having their self a real crazy time
That’s what the good book says, boy,
That’s what the good book says….

Leiber and Stoller with The Coasters (formerly The Robins) at Atlantic Records

What a great song to write, straight out of the gate! One that turns the bible upside down, and shakes it. It’s got Jewish authors. African-American singers. A heavy backbeat. Bacchanalian (or, pace Jim Morrison, Dionysian) lyrics. Gospel shadings. References to the biblical Exodus (or, as Bob Marley would have put it, “movement of Jah people”). A xylophone solo that anticipates Jimi Hendrix’s work with the Band of Gypsies... Why has Greil Marcus not written a book about this song? What would Christopher Hitchens, or Vaclev Havel have made of it? And was it even included in Jim Dawson and Steve Propes’ 1992 book, What Was the First Rock 'N' Roll Record?

None of us can answer these questions. (I’ve heard that Havel and Lou Reed had this song on repeat, in Prague, as they plotted the Velvet Revolution; according to Wikipedia, their conversation went unrecorded.) But we do know that the Robins, who started off as the “A-Sharp Trio,” in San Francisco, in 1945, eventually turned into the Coasters, and went on to record more than a few classic Leiber & Stoller songs. In parting, here’s Paul McCartney, singing along to one of those songs, talking about John Lennon, and (I think) crying:

top illustraion: Michelangelo's "The Fall of Man and the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden" at the Sistine Chapel

The Silver Jew

2011-12-21T16:31:00.006-05:00

by Jesse Jarnow

There's no real sport in arguing the semeticism of David Berman, who named his band the Silver Jews, and very publicly rediscovered Judaism himself after becoming sober around 2004. "Ain'tcha heard the news? Adam and Eve were Jews," he'd sung on 2005's Tanglewood Numbers. When the 15-year running outfit started to perform live for the first time in 2006, Berman brought them to Israel, where he was filmed at the Wailing Wall, wearing tefillin and weeping. One doesn't have to go hunting for it. Unlike Bob Dylan or Lou Reed or Neil Diamond, he's probably perfectly happy to be considered a Jewish songwriter. So, what do we do with that information? No where one goes looking for David Berman--his six full-lengths with the Jews, his book of poetry actual air, interviews, documentary, art shows of strange cartoons, his Menthol Mountains blog, even his Judaism--one runs into a strange, unknowable figure.

"That guy's a better songwriter than Dylan," a friend of mine once said of Berman, in an attempt to be provocative. "I bet you didn't know that, did you?" It took me a few years to come around to what he meant, to be able to hold it in my head as a true statement and really believe it -- which I think in a circular way has a lot to do with Berman's Jewishness. His music obviously works with the same basic stuff as (especially) mid-'60s Dylan, verse/chorus forms, surreal/funny non-sequiturs as vehicles for wry beatitude. But where Dylan's songs grab for familiar phrases of folk music, borrowing a change or an image, Berman never seems to need to do that. That is, one can pick apart Dylan's songs -- a line from the Anthology of American Folk Music here, a Woody Guthrie phrasing there, on up through his borrowings from Confessions of a Yakuza in 2001. Those phrases, in their way, remain holes in Dylan's shtick, places where there is quantifiable evidence of his imitative creative process. Berman has no such holes, at least not so gapingly open. Bob Dylan might have written better songs, but I think Berman might really be the better and more original songwriter, if such a distinction can be made. But true originality, even the kind that might be dismissed as simple indie-era post-modernism, is exactly what remains unknowable.

One observable thing about David Berman: his total command of language. Throughout the fantastic 2008 documentary, Silver Jew, he slips into parable. Berman recalled, "One day when I was making [Tanglewood Numbers] I was having a very hard time with the engineer, the producer, and I didn't know what to do--this is the first time I tried it, and I asked for a sign--and I walked the three blocks and, leaning up against a tree at the very end [of the street] there were these really nice shears for pruning trees, just sitting there. I said, 'Okay, well, I still don't believe in super-nature, but maybe this means I should cut the relationship off with this person and pare back the tracks and start the album somewhere else."

Elsewhere, he speaks of coming across a field of wild strawberries and deciding to turn the Silver Jews into a touring outfit. Another story about Berman that struck me pretty hard was Nick Weidenfeld's astonishing Fader piece "Dying in the Al Gore Suite," about Berman's 2003 suicide attempt, in which he attempted to overdose on Xanax and crack in the Nashville hotel room where Al Gore conceded the 2000 election. "I want to die where the Presidency died!" He wore his wedding suit. Sometimes, he just acts in parable. When he retired the Silver Jews in 2009, they played their last show in a cave.

If all of this sounds like cult of personality mumbo jumbo to get at the music of a favorite musician, it might be. But Berman (again, perhaps not quite literally) once declared that the Silver Jews were an abstract art project conceived while he and future Pavement founder Stephen Malkmus worked as security guards at the Whitney. It doesn't really matter if Berman is telling the literal truth in his stories about strawberries and shears or wedding suits. There is the sense, almost always, that he is simply operating on a much more abstract level than most. In a way that is almost completely lost in the over-informed age, he remains the archetypal mystic.

Unlike the once-mysterious S.M. and dozens of other musicians from their generation, Berman has never gone for the big reveal, never outed himself as just a normal guy who likes sports and aims for a pleasant life in the 'burbs. Despite moving to Music City U.S.A., there's not a single Nashville Skyline in his catalogue. In 2009, he declared that the Silver Jews were over entirely. Partially--he said--because of his father, Richard Berman, an anti-union lobbyist apparently legitimately known in his field as "Dr. Evil." "My life is so wierd [sic]," the Silver Jew wrote. "It's allegorical to the nth."

The sum total of all of Berman's gestures shines nearby, but never so close that we can touch it, a mythic figure passing from a life of addiction to redemption, of a seemingly tyrannical father, of poetry, of parable. One might go looking for traditional Hebrew archetypes to describe him. There's the Wandering Jew, the Kabbalistic Jew, the Curious Jew, the Happy Jew, the Quiet Jew. Maybe. Maybe I'm just making these up. But no matter how expert one might be in the old stories, David Berman long ago invented his own self to travel inside, whether or not he records as him again: the Silver Jew.

Download:

"Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 2005.
available on Tanglewood Numbers

"Suffering Jukebox" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 2008.
available on Lookout Mountain Lookout Sea

"San Francisco B.C." mp3
by The Silver Jews, 2008.
available on Lookout Mountain Lookout Sea

"Animal Shapes" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 2005.
available on Tanglewood Numbers

"Honk If You're Lonely" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 1998.
available on American Water

"Inside The Golden Days Of Missing You" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 1996.
available on Natural Bridge

"Tennessee" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 2001.
available on Bright Flight

"Buckingham Rabbit" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 1998.
available on American Water

"Death of an Heir of Sorrows" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 2001.
available on Bright Flight

"I Remember Me" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 2001.
available on Bright Flight

"Advice to the Graduate" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 1994.
available on Starlite Walker

photos: by Michael Scmelling from Dying in the Al Gore Suite

God Help the Troubadour

2011-12-20T16:31:00.004-05:00

by Ben Greenman

Phil Ochs was born five months before Bob Dylan and died sixteen months before Elvis Presley, and that tells you all you need to know about him, and that tells you nothing. Ochs was an earnest activist, and a rebel, and a satirist, and a town crier, and a crack-up. He built and dismantled personae with such rapidity that it’s sometimes difficult to find the real person who, in theory, provided the foundation on which those personae were built and dismantled. Born in Texas, raised in Ohio, gifted musically and culturally omnivorous, Ochs appeared on the Greenwich Village folk scene in 1962 and performed at Newport, the folkies’ Mecca, in 1963. Early on, he defined a certain kind of straightforwardly sardonic protest song, bringing Woody Guthrie’s plainspokenness into the tumult of the sixties. Bob Dylan famously remarked that Ochs was getting better and better, and that Dylan could’t keep up with him. In 1967, he took a sharp left turn in his work, abandoning guitar-and-voice for a lavishly pretentious folk-rock. He brooded, marvelously, and then broke out of the brooding with both gallows humor and lovely, clear poetry. Many of his most beloved songs come from this period, such as “Pleasures of the Harbor”and “Tape from California.”

Then came Ochs’ sixth album, Rehearsals for Retirement, which he released in 1969. The album was recorded after Ochs appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and it’s at once a document of the deepest despair—it grew out of terror and sorrow over the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and the cover image was of Ochs’s tombstone—and a rollicking good time. “Pretty Smart on My Part,” the leadoff track, skips along on a fleet acoustic riff before descending into a disturbing, if hilarious, series of psychosexual portraits of America. Phil, in chracter, is menaced by a hitchhiker, whips a woman with big breasts, is terrorized by an intruder, experiences humiliation at the hands of the cops, and plots to assassinate the president. Elsewhere, Ochs is the subject of his own pained investigation: “My Life” is almost unbearably naked in both its sound and its subject (“My life,” he sings, “is now a death to me”). “William Butler Yeats Visits Lincoln Park And Escapes Unscathed” is a ghostly piano ballad that, in its last thirty seconds, gives way to a glib bit of vaudeville:

Where were you in Chicago
You know I didn’t see you there
I didn’t see them break your head
Or breathe the tear gas air
Where were you in Chicago
When the fight was being fought
Where were you in Chicago
‘Cause I was in Detroit

The album closes with its spectral title song, which starts with one of the most depressing couplets in pop music (“The days grow longer for smaller prizes / I feel a stranger to surprises”) and gets worse from there. Worse, but not even more beautiful: Ochs’s singing in this period is, I think, his best: his limited range and keening style are a perfect match for both the personal lyrics and the more baroque production. “I wear a different kind of garment,” he sings, “in my rehearsals for retirement.”

As it turned out, the garment wasn’t metaphorical. After Rehearsals for Retirement, Ochs commissioned a gold suit from Nudie Cohn, Elvis Presley’s tailor, and transformed himself in a kind of pre-Andy Kaufman King manqué. That period produced exactly two records: the sarcastically titled Greatest Hits, in 1970, which consisted of all new material, and then Gunfight at Carnegie Hall, a chronicle of an utterly chaotic March 1970 live date that included a bomb threat that cut short the first show, an altercation with unhappy fans who wanted to get into the second show, and Ochs’s idiotic solution to this problem—he smashed the glass window of the box office, severely lacerating his thumb, and performed the second show with his hand bandaged. And that’s just the offstage drama. Onstage, Ochs played some of his beloved protest songs but also the standard “Mona Lisa,” Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee,” and medleys devoted to the work of Elvis and Buddy Holly.

Gunfight at Carnegie Hall was, for most purposes, the last of Ochs as a singer. He began to suffer from crippling writer’s block and equally crippling alcoholism. He traveled extensively (he was mugged in Tanzania, damaging his voice), became interested in Chilean politics, performed at a huge rally in Central Park in April 1975 when the Vietnam War ended. And then, the eternal darkness of madness: Ochs started telling people that he was a man named John Butler Train who had murdered the real Phil Ochs and taken his place. This eventually passed, but what remained behind was insurmountable depression and suicidal thinking. Ochs hanged himself on April 9, 1976.

Many artists have recorded tribute songs: Tom Paxton, Billy Bragg, John Wesley Harding, Todd Snider. Snider’s “Thin Wild Mercury” is built around the famous story of Ochs getting kicked out of Dylan’s taxicab after weighing in unfavorably on “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window.” Well, unfavorable is a relative term. “It’s not as good as ‘Positively 4th Street,’” Ochs said, telling the truth, and Dylan took the mixed review in stride, ordering the driver to stop the car and throwing Ochs out onto the sidewalk. He also delivered a parting shot that stung like an epitaph: “You’re not a folksinger, Ochs, you’re a journalist.”

And then, of course, there’s Dylan’s own “Lenny Bruce,” which isn’t about Ochs, except that it is. Ochs, of course, also wrote a song about Bruce (the heartbreaking “Doesn’t Lenny Live Here Anymore?”), and Dylan’s mournful, clumsy elegy starts by talking about freedom and rebellion and shining the light of truth in the eyes of power. It ends, though, in a cab, which makes me wonder if he’s been talking about Lenny Bruce at all:

Lenny Bruce is dead but he didn’t commit any crime 
He just had the insight to rip off the lid before its time 
I rode with him in a taxi once 
Only for a mile and a half, seemed like it took a couple of months

Download:

“Pretty Smart On My Part” mp3
by Phil Ochs, 1969.
available on Rehearsals For Retirement

“William Butler Yeats Visits Lincoln Park & Escapes Unscathed” mp3
by Phil Ochs, 1969.
available on Rehearsals For Retirement

"Chords of Fame" mp3
by Phil Ochs, 1970.
available on Phil Ochs Greatest Hits

“Tape From California” mp3
by Phil Ochs, 1970.
available on Gunfight at Carnegie Hall

“Thin Wild Mercury” mp3
by Todd Snider, 2006.
available on The Devil You Know

“Lenny Bruce” mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1981.
available on Shot of Love, 1981

"Doesn't Lenny Live Here Anymore?" mp3
by Phil Ochs, 1969.
available on Rehearsals For Retirement

England's Newest Hitmakers

2011-07-28T15:24:00.008-04:00

In April 1964, the Stones released their debut record in the UK, it would appear in a slightly different form in the US six weeks later. Recorded at the tiny Regent Sound studio in London, these would be their last recordings (aside from a few stray tracks) made in England until 1966's Between The Buttons. It's an amazing debut, and again is comprised almost entirely of covers. On the day of it's release in the UK, it sold 100,000 copies, and by early May had knocked With The Beatles off the top spot of the charts.

It opens with Bobby Troup's "Route 66," originally a hit for Nat King Cole, which they undoubtedly learned from Chuck Berry. Keith transposes Johnny Johnson's piano riff to the guitar, and it is one of their most searing live numbers of the early years. The song selection includes blues numbers they had been playing around London in the clubs, as well as their take on current US Soul and R&B hits. There's a version of Gene Allison's "You Can Make if you Try, which they probably learned from the Solomon Burke version, the b-side to "If You Need Me" which they would lay to wax months later at Chess Studios in Chicago. The single from the LP in the US, "Tell Me" was the first recorded Jagger-Richards composition, and went to #24 on the US Billboard charts. Keith plays a 12 string acoustic and sings harmony into the same microphone. It's also their first great pop record.

(to be continued)

Download:

"Route 66" mp3
by Chuck Berry, 1961.
available on New Juke Box Hits

"I Just Want To Make Love To You" mp3
by Muddy Waters, 1954.
available on His Best 1947-55

The boys get "roasted" by Dino:

"Honest I Do" mp3
by Jimmy Reed, 1957.
available on Best of the Vee-Jay Years

"Mona" mp3
by Bo Diddley, 1957.
available on I'm A Man: The Singles As & Bs 1955-59

"Now I've Got A Witness" mp3
by The Rolling Stones, 1964.
available on England's Newest Hitmakers

"I'm A King Bee" mp3
by Slim Harpo, 1957.
available on The Excello Singles Anthology

The Rolling Stones on the Mike Douglas Show:
Soundman out to lunch, but stay tuned for interview at the end.

"Carol" mp3
by Chuck Berry, 1958.
available on The Great 28

"Tell Me" mp3
by The Rolling Stones, 1964.
available on England's Newest Hitmakers

"Can I Get A Witness" mp3
by Marvin Gaye, 1963.
available on Gold

"You Can Make It If You Try" mp3
by Gene Allison, 1958.
available on You Can Make It If You Try

"You Can Make It If You Try" mp3
by Solomon Burke, 1963.
available on If You Need Me

"Walking The Dog" mp3
by Rufus Thomas, 1963.
available on Walking the Dog

part 1 : here

********************

Gather No Moss

2011-07-27T16:39:00.004-04:00

Between June of 1963 and February of 1964 The Rolling Stones released three singles, one EP, and a couple other tracks on a compilation. All in the UK, and all before the release of their first LP. All but two those songs were covers. The trajectory of their career couldn't yet have been imagined. Firstly, they wanted to be the the best blues band in London (they were), and by the time they started recording, they wanted to share their love of American Blues, Soul, and R&B with a larger audience (which they did). The Stones weren't the only band in London doing this, but they were the best. They eventually wrote songs of their own (as urged by their manager Andrew Loog Oldham) but for the most part, their early records, up until 1966's Aftermath are heavily comprised of covers of black American music.

So, as the story goes, nearly fifty years ago, in late 1961 on the outskirts of London in Dartford, Mick and Keith, old boyhood friends reunite at a train station. Mick is carrying a copy of Chuck Berry's Rockin' at the Hops and The Best of Muddy Waters. BINGO! The alliance is born. in the coming months they start playing, and find Brian Jones, who is masquerading around town as a slide-guitar playing Elmo Lewis. Later they add Stu, Bill and his Amp, and Charlie.

It's no accident that their first single would be a Chuck Berry song on one side and Muddy Waters on the flip, two artists they would re-visit frequently, and soon enough meet at Chess Studios in Chicago. Their second single "I Wanna Be Your Man" is a song they got from Lennon and McCartney, when Oldham invited them to the studio. It was a something that McCartney considered a throwaway, and the Stones took it gladly. I've never been one to choose between the Beatles and the Stones, but if you were comparing the their versions of this particular song, which the Beatles eventually recorded in their next sessions, the Rolling Stones win this one hands down. The b-side, "Stoned" was their first original 'composition,' - basically a blues jam - and was banned in the U.S. for it's suggestive lyrics. Their third single, "Fortune Teller," was shelved and eventually appeared on a UK compilation. Next, an EP of more great American R&B, and a single of a Bo Diddelyized version of Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away," backed by "Little by Little," a Stones original based on a Jimmy Reed riff - both recorded for the first LP which was soon coming. At that session, were Phil Spector and Gene Pitney, who contributed some maracas and piano respectively, and Spector copped a partial songwriting credit for "Little by Little."

(to be continued)

Download:

"Come On" mp3
by Chuck Berry, 1961.
available on The Great 28

"I Want To Be Loved" mp3
by Muddy Waters, 1955.
available on Anthology: 1947-1972

***********

"I Wanna Be Your Man" mp3
by The Beatles, 1963.
available on With the Beatles (Mono)

"Stoned" mp3
by The Rolling Stones, 1963.
available on Singles Collection: The London Years

***********

"You Better Move On" mp3
by Arthur Alexander, 1961.
available on The Greatest

"Poison Ivy" mp3
by The Coasters, 1959.
available on Baby That Is Rock 'n' Roll

"Bye Bye Johnny" mp3
by Chuck Berry, 1960.
available on The Great 28

"Money (That's What I Want)" mp3
by Barrett Stong, 1959.
available on Collection

***********

"Fortune Teller" mp3
by Benny Spellman, 1962.
available on Fortune Teller

"Poison Ivy" mp3
by The Rolling Stones, 1963.
available on More Hot Rocks: Big Hits & Fazed Cookies

***********

"Not Fade Away" mp3
by The Crickets, 1957.
available on Buddy Holly Gold

"Little by Little" mp3
by The Rolling Stones, 1964.
available on Singles Collection: The London Years

***********

Bonus:

"Andrew's Blues" mp3
by the Rolling Stones (and others), 1964.
unreleased

"Mr. Spector and Mr. Pitney Came Too" mp3
by the Rolling Stones, 1964.
unreleased

An All American Trilogy... Boy

2011-07-04T12:40:00.002-04:00

"Uncle Sam needs you, Boy
I'm a gonna cut your hair off
Take this rifle, Kid
Gimme that gui-tar
Yea-ah..."

Today, on the 4th of July, when we Americans do what we do to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence (eat meat, drink beer, and blow shit up), let us pause and reflect on the glory that is "The All American Boy."

In 1958, when Bobby Bare was about be inducted into the Army and his pal Bill Parsons was returning from his own call to duty, they teamed up with a forty year old drifter of Irish and Cherokee descent named Orville Lunsford and recorded a one-off demo talking blues called "The All American Boy" at Syd Nathan's King Studios in Cincinnati along with a Parsons original, "Rubber Dolly."

There are many versions of this story, and it's hard to tell what's what. But what we do know is that these two recordings were released as a single on the Fraternity label, and Bare, who had allegedly said that he didn't want his name on the record, got his wish. When the single came out it was credited to Bill Parsons on both sides. The songwriting credit for "The All American Boy went to Parsons and Lunsford, and unbeknownst to Bare who was then overseas, it raced up the charts to #2 a few months later.

Many thought the track to be about Elvis who had also been inducted into the Army, but it was more than likely an autobiographical joke that Bare improvised before he shipped off. Parsons, with a hit on his hands, was touring for Bare's record, including a spot in early 1959 on Buddy Holly's final tour, The Winter Dance Party, where Cricket Waylon Jennings heard Parsons rehearsing one day and asked if that was him on the record. "No, he's in the Army now." When, Bare was discharged, we went on to record a sequel "I'm Hanging Up My Rifle," and later, a third variation, "Brooklyn Bridge," making it a trilogy of sorts.

Mickey Newbury's "An American Trilogy" is an arrangement of two Civil War songs and a folk ballad. Elvis used it as a grand finale to finish his shows in his later years, and it is the staple of every fat Elvis Impersonator's repertoire. What's more American than that?

Happy Independence Day, Folks...

Download:

"All American Boy" mp3
by Bobby Bare, 1958.
available on Singles (1959-1969)

"I'm Hangin' Up My Rifle" mp3
by Bobby Bare, 1960.
available on All American Rock 'n' Roll: The Fraternity Story Vol 2

"Brooklyn Bridge" mp3
by Bobby Bare, 1963.
available on Detroit City

************

"All American Boy" mp3
by Grandpa Jones, 1959.
available on Country Music Hall of Fame

"All American Boy" mp3
by Bob Dylan and The Band, 1967.
available on The Genuine Basement Tapes

************

"An American Trilogy" mp3
by Mickey Newbury, 1971.
available on Frisco Mabel Joy

************

"Dixie" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2003.
available on Masked & Anonymous

"Glory Hallelujah" mp3
by Furry Lewis with Lee Baker Jr, 1969.
available on Take Your Time

"All My Trials" mp3
by Dave Van Ronk, 1957.
available on The Mayor of MacDougal Street: Rarities 1957-69

*************

Radio Free Song Club

2011-06-21T03:01:00.012-04:00

For the past year and a half, I've been hanging out with some of my friends about once a month to record a podcast called the Radio Free Song Club. I'm there as a photographer, but the others assembled are songwriters, musicians, sound engineers and visiting guests. It's hosted by Nick Hill (formerly of the Music Faucet on WFMU) and singer-songwriter Kate Jacobs. Dave Schramm is the bandleader, and is joined by a semi-rotating band known as The Radio Free All Stars, which includes David Mansfield, JD Foster, Jeremy Chatzky, Doug Wieselman, Andy Burton, Paul Moschella, Ted Reichman, Anton Fier and many others.

The concept of the show is that the club members-- which include (among others) Freedy Johnston, Jody Harris, Laura Cantrell, Peter Blegvad, Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby, Peter Holsapple, Victoria Williams, Kate Jacobs, and Dave Schramm--contribute a newly written song each month. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't, but the results are always interesting. Some come as finished masters sent by email from across the sea or out on the road. Others come as demos which are then dubbed live by the all-stars in the studio. On one episode, the band played live with Victoria via Skype. Peter Holsapple has released a CD of new material comprised entirely of songs written for the show.

There have been numerous guests as well as live performances by the club members on each show, including Syd Straw, Beth Orton, Ronee Blakley, Bob Neuwirth, Mary Lee Kortes, Lianne Smith, Susan Cowsill, Glen Hansard, Alana Amram, Steve Wynn, Katell Keineg, and Michael Hurley.

Everyone involved, including Gary Arnold and Andy Taub, who have offered their studios as well as their services, have worked for free, giving their time and their talent to this labor of love. The shows are available for free and have produced some 150 masters of new songs thus far.

This is top-shelf entertainment, folks.

So, the Radio Free Song Club has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for incidental costs in producing this fine show.

Won't you please consider sending a donation? This project will only be funded if at least $5,555 is pledged by Thursday Jun 23, 11:58am EDT. We are most of the way there, and every little bit helps.

In the meantime, here's a few of the songs from the show, including Victoria Williams's version of Townes Van Zandt's "Buckskin Stallion," recorded for the last show, live at The Living Room in New York City, in tribute to her recently deceased horse, and for now, only available here.

Download:

"Do You Remember That?" mp3
by Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby, 2010.
from Radio Free Song Club: No. 007 Double Issue

"Buckskin Stallion" mp3
by Victoria Williams, 2011.
from Radio Free Song Club: Sweet Sixteen Tons
(coming in August)

"Cote d'Azur" mp3
by Peter Blegvad, 2010.
from Radio Free Song Club: Third One Now

"Letters She Sent" mp3
by Laura Cantrell, 2010.
from Radio Free Song Club: If 9 Was 6

"Don't Call Me Pete" mp3
by Peter Holsapple, 2010.
from Radio Free Song Club: Third One Now

"A Little Bit of Something Wrong" mp3
by Freedy Johnston, 2010.
from Radio Free Song Club: Second Number

"Mister Control" mp3
by Jody Harris, 2010.
from Radio Free Song Club: First Issue

********

Visit the Radio Free Song Club on the web: HERE
on Facebook: HERE
and at Kickstarter: HERE

video by Tony Cenicola:

all photographs © Ted Barron, 2011.

Gil-Scott Heron

2011-06-01T08:07:00.014-04:00

"The youth was gone, and he looked like an old man, freshness erased by some unknown blackboard cleaner. It was a new day for John Lee. There had always been a smile on his lips and a chuckle rolling over his vocal chords, ready to be exposed with only the slightest provocation. The daytime was gone from his eyes. All that remained was the night."

Gil-Scott Heron, from The Vulture, 1970.

by Drew Hubner

Gil-Scott Heron wrote "The Bottle" in the late 60's but he never stopped drinking. He never left Harlem, he smoked crack, and when I saw him last summer in Marcus Garvey Park, he had the gap-toothed gleeful grin of a bum. Whenever the band kicked in, he threw his head back and no one looked happier to be there. He looked like a six foot seven homeless guy leading the band. He also looked like a three year old kid. Most artists when they make it, they go live in LA or whatever. Gil-Scott Heron never did. He was not a rapper, though he did rap in the same way that Bob Dylan rapped. Dylan was not a folk singer either, he's a blues guy. He always was. Heron is jazz. That night in the park he told a story about the origins of jazz. He rapped. He was from the generation that used that word a little differently; Rap Brown comes to mind. It seemed incongruous that someone like Heron smoked crack, someone so intelligent, so aware. But he was eaten up by the same monster that ate Rap Brown. It also seemed incongruous when we heard that Brown shot a black sheriff in Alabama with a big ol' pistol.

Heron knew America. He wrote about America like no one else and the America that he lived with and lived in was not kind to black artists or to black men. Some can live in the suburbs, Heron never could. This is not even a black thing altogether; it's an artist thing. And it's not a value judgement either. Why does Dylan keep touring, when he can't even sing really? Why did Joe Strummer go to raves and hang out with wankers half his age, when the consumers of his music wanted the Clash to play "Rock the Casbah"? Heron's final album, I'm New Here from last year was amazing. It was just like those Johnny Cash records produced by Rick Rubin, spare genius in the raw, a voice in bare essence. In Harlem on 3rd Ave there's a bike shop that has that photograph of all the jazz guys taken on an afternoon in the late 50's, right there in the neighborhood. Everyone from Diz to Monk. Dozens of guys along with 10 lucky neighborhood kids. The thing that amazes you is that all those guys could be in the same place at the same time to pose, but they all lived right there in Harlem. That's the NYC Heron lived in, still. But the city passed him by. The city had changed, not altogether of course, but Heron had not left. That's what that album said. Listen to it. It is not even music, more of a testament, like the pictographs on canyon walls left by the Apaches to tell us what they saw of the world. Heron did rap but he was not a rapper, he was a jazz singer. RIP, brother.

Download:

"New York Is Killing Me" mp3
by Gil-Scott-Heron, 2010.
available on I'm New Here

"On Coming From A Broken Home (Part 1)" mp3
by Gil-Scott-Heron, 2010.
available on I'm New Here

"On Coming From A Broken Home (Part 2)" mp3
by Gil-Scott-Heron, 2010.
available on I'm New Here

**********

The Other Side of Gil-Scott Heron
video and photographs by Monique de Latour
from The New Yorker

Seventy

2011-05-24T17:28:00.009-04:00

Bob Dylan is seventy today. Here's seventy versions of songs that he's written. I was hard pressed to narrow it down to seventy, so that's saying something and I think it's enough. These are the songs that folks will still be interpreting in another seventy years.

Happy Birthday Bob.

*************

Download:

"Please Mrs. Henry" mp3
by Peter Laughner, 1972.
unreleased radio session

"Million Dollar Bash" mp3
by the Fairport Convention, 1969.
available on Unhalfbricking

"Baby Blue" mp3
by the Chocolate Watchband, 1968.
available on Inner Mystique/One Step Beyond

"Like A Rolling Stone" mp3
by the Soup Greens, 1965.
available on Pebbles, Vol. 1

"She Belongs To Me" mp3
by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, 1966.
available on Volume 1

"I'll Keep It with Mine"mp3
by Betty Serveert, 1996.
available on I Shot Andy Warhol

"Stepchild"mp3
by Solomon Burke, 2002.
available on Don't Give Up on Me

"Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" mp3
by Jimi Hendrix, 1967.
available on BBC Sessions

"Positively 4th Street" mp3
by Lucinda Williams, 1991.
available on In Their Own Words Volume 1

"I Threw It All Away" mp3
by Yo La Tengo, 1987.
available on President Yo La Tengo / New Wave Hot Dogs

"Spanish Harlem Incident" mp3
by the Byrds, 1965.
available on Mr Tambourine Man

"Down Along The Cove" mp3
by Johnny Jenkins, 1970.
available on Ton-Ton Macoute

"If Not For You" mp3
by George Harrison, 1970.
acoustic demo

"I Believe In You" mp3
by Cat Power, 2008.
available on Jukebox

"Maggie's Farm" mp3
by Solomon Burke, 1965.
available on Platinum Collection

"It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry" mp3
by Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper & Stephen Stills, 1968.
available on Super Session

"Can't Leave Her Behind" mp3
by Stephen Malkmus & Lee Ranaldo, 2007.
available on I'm Not There

"Gates Of Eden" mp3
by Marc Carroll, 2003.
available on All Wrongs Reversed

"Up To Me" mp3
by Roger McGuinn, 1976
available on Cardiff Rose

"Mama, You Been On My Mind" mp3
by the Beatles, 1969.
unreleased outtake

"Man Gave Names To All The Animals" mp3
by Townes Van Zandt, 1994.
available on Roadsongs

"Love Minus Zero – No Limit" mp3
by Buck Owens & His Buckaroos, 1971.
available on Bridge Over Troubled Water

"You Ain't Going Nowhere" mp3
by the Byrds, 1968.
available on Sweetheart of the Rodeo

"On A Night Like This" mp3
by Los Lobos, 2003.
available on Masked & Anonymous

"Going, Going, Gone" mp3
by Son Volt, 2000.
available on A Retrospective 1995-2000 EP

"I Was Young When I Left Home" mp3
by Antony with Bryce Dessner, 2009.
available on Dark Was the Night

"Billy" mp3
by Gillian Welch, 2006.
available on Music From The Revelator

"Buckets of Rain" mp3
by Vic Chesnutt, 2003.
available on Crossing Jordan

"Dark Eyes" mp3
by Dirty Projectors, 2010.
Like A Version Radio Session

"Knockin' On Heavens Door" mp3
by Television, 1977.
available on The Blow Up

"Every Grain Of Sand" mp3
by Emmylou Harris, 1995.
unreleased demo

"Girl Of The North Country" mp3
by Howard Tate, 1972.
available on Howard Tate

"Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You" mp3
by Esther Phillips, 1969.
available on Best of Esther Phillips (1962-70)

"I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" mp3
by Bobby Darin, 1972.
available on Aces Back to Back

"One Too Many Mornings" mp3
by Jerry Jeff Walker, 1977.
available on A Man Must Carry On

"Tomorrow Is A Long Time" mp3
by Nick Drake, 1968.
available on Family Tree

"Don't Think Twice It's Alright" mp3
by Waylon Jennings, 1964.
available on Phase One: The Early Years 1958-1964

"It Ain't Me Babe" mp3
by Johnny Cash & June Carter, 1967.
available on Carryin' On With Johnny Cash & June Carter

"Love Is Just a Four Letter Word" mp3
by Joan Baez, 1968.
available on Vanguard Sessions: Baez Sings Dylan

"Only a Hobo" mp3
by Hazel Dickens, 1985.
available on It's Hard to Tell the Singer From the Song

"Blowin' In The Wind" mp3
by O.V. Wright, 1970.
available on How Many Roads: Black America Sings Bob Dylan

"Fur Slippers" mp3
by B.B. King, 1999.
available on Shake Rattle & Roll

"Percy's Song" mp3
by the Fairport Convention, 1969.
available on Unhalfbricking

"Ballad Of Hollis Brown" mp3
by Tony Joe White, 1968.
available on Swamp Music: the Complete Monument Recordings

"Changing Of The Guards" mp3
by Patti Smith, 2007.
available on Twelve

"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" mp3
by Bryan Ferry, 1973.
available on These Foolish Things

"Tell Me Mama" mp3
by Robyn Hitchcock, 2002.
available on Robyn Sings

"She's Your Lover Now" mp3
by Luxuria w/ Howard Devoto, 1988.
b-side of Redneck single.
out of print

"If You Gotta Go, Go Now" mp3
by Mae West, 1966.
available on Way Out West
out of print

"Baby, I'm In The Mood For You" mp3
by Dion, 1965.
available on Bronx Blues: The Columbia Recordings (1962 - 1965)

"Rita May" mp3
by Jerry Lee Lewis, 1979.
available on Jerry Lee Lewis Box Set

"Wallflower" mp3
by Buddy and Julie Miller,
available on Buddy & Julie Miller

"Halls Of Justice/Positively 4th Street/Like A Rolling Stone" mp3
by Terry Melcher, 1974.
available on Terry Melcher

"When I Paint My Masterpiece" mp3
by the Band, 1971.
available on Cahoots

"Goin' To Acapulco" mp3
by Jim James & Calexico, 2007.
available on I'm Not There

"Nothing Was Delivered" mp3
by the Byrds, 1968.
available on Sweetheart of the Rodeo

"Too Much of Nothing" mp3
by Albert Lee, 1969.
available on Thats All Right Mama

"Wanted Man" mp3
by Johnny Cash, 1969.
available on Essential Johnny Cash

"Seven Days" mp3
by Ron Wood, 1979.
available on Gimme Some Neck

"George Jackson" mp3
by JP Robinson, 1972.
available on Sanctified Soul

"Winterlude" mp3
by Joe Ely, 2005.
available on To: Kate a Benefit for Kate's Sake

"This Wheel's On Fire" mp3
by the Band, 1968.
available on Music From Big Pink

"Tears Of Rage" mp3
by Gene Clark, 1971.
available on Gene Clark (aka White Light)

"Most Of The Time" mp3
by Sophie Zelmani, 2003.
available on Masked & Anonymous

"Emotionally Yours" mp3
by the O'Jays, 2006.
available on Beautiful Ballads

"Paths of Victory" mp3
by Cat Power 2000.
available on The Covers Record

"City Of Gold" mp3
by the Dixie Hummingbirds, 2003.
available on Masked & Anonymous

"Just Like A Woman" mp3
by Nina Simone, 1971.
available on To Be Free- The Nina Simone Story

"Farewell Angelina" mp3
by Jeff Buckley, 1992
from WFMU's The Music Faucet
(courtesy: Nicholas Hill)

"I Shall Be Released" mp3
by the Flying Burrito Brothers, 1970.
available on Farther Along: Best Of The Flying Burrito Brothers

Shopping List

2011-05-19T02:25:00.002-04:00

flour
toilet tissue (pink)
broccli 2 frozen
potatoes small onions (few)
a loaf of bread (Colonial)
manayaise (Miracle Whip)
lettuce
1 chicken (cut up)
2 pds thick sliced (Hunlas) bacon

and One Mint Julep

Download:

"One Mint Julep" mp3
by Ray Charles, 1961.
arranged by Quincy Jones
available on Genius + Soul = Jazz

*********

Ray Charles photo by Joe Adams

A Century of Big Joe

2011-05-18T01:59:00.005-04:00

Big Joe Turner lookin’ east and west
From the dark room of his mind
He made it to Kansas City
Twelfth Street and Vine

-Bob Dylan "High Water (for Charley Patton)"

Big Joe Turner was born one-hundred years ago today. I could listen to him all day long. In fact, I may just do that. It's my birthday too. Bob Dylan is gonna be seventy next week. That's pretty old to be dragging your ass and a rock' n roll band all over the world every year. I tip my hat to him, and he tips his hat to Big Joe at least twice on 2001's Love & Theft. First, by name check (cited above) and second, by melody on "Summer Days." Songwriter, Doc Pomus said his life was changed when as a fifteen year old kid he first heard Joe Turner's record, "Piney Brown Blues," a recording that merged Jazz and Blues into an intersection of what would become R & B and eventually Rock 'n Roll. Pomus modeled his early singing style after Turner's deep wide shout, and later wrote songs for him including "Boogie Woogie Country Girl" which you can hear below. The other side of that record, "Corrine, Corrina," was a blues standard and recorded by dozens artists. It was written by Bo Chatmon, fiddler for the Mississippi Sheiks, (whose music Dylan is well acquainted with). However, I'd venture to say that it was most likely this version that Bob Dylan first heard as a teenager.

"Get it Daddy, get it!"

Download:

"Boogie Woogie Country Girl" mp3
by Joe Turner, 1956.
available on Very Best of Big Joe Turner

"Corrine, Corrina" mp3
by Joe Turner, 1956.
available on Very Best of Big Joe Turner

******

"Boogie Woogie Country Girl" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1995.
available on Till the Night Is Gone: Tribute to Doc Pomus
out of print

"Corrina, Corrina" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1962.
available on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan Outakes
out of print

30/40 Days

2011-05-06T01:37:00.012-04:00

Ernest Tubb is gonna call up the gypsy woman, and she's sending out a worldwide hoodoo. Those are Chuck Berry's words of course, and it's a gift to us to hear Tubb sing them on his 1955 version of "Thirty Days" released two months after Chuck put out his second single for Chess. They both raced up the R&B and Country charts respectively, and established Chuck Berry as a first rate crossover artist/songwriter. Berry's guitar solo is chunky and rhythmic, soaring over and leading the rhythm section. Tubb calls out to his soloists: Billy Byrd, "Half-Moon" Bradley, and Tommy Jackson of the Texas Troubadours, making it sound like his own. It was, after all, Berry's version of Bob Wills' "Ida Red" (a western swing number) that finally caught Leonard Chess's ear (on the insistence of Chess star Muddy Waters) from his homemade audition tape earlier that year. It evolved into "Maybellene," his first single.

Ronnie Hawkins recorded a blistering rockabilly version as "Forty Days." Maybe he was a more patient man giving his woman an extra ten days to come back home. Or perhaps, it's a biblical reference to Noah's Ark, after living with the torrential rains and flooding back home in Arkansas, where he and his band, including teenage drummer Levon Helm, had fled for the brighter pastures of the Toronto music scene.

Chuck Berry's liaison to Chess, Muddy Waters, recorded a single (different song) "Forty Days & Forty Nights" around this time with future murderer Pat Hare on guitar. Waters, also using the biblical reference, is "like a ship out on the sea" waiting for forty days and nights, and it's "raining all the time." His lover hasn't returned and most likely won't.

"Thirty Days" mp3
by Ernest Tubb, 1955.
available on Thirty Days - Gonna Shake This Shack Tonight

"Forty Days" mp3
by Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks, 1958.
available on Roulette Years

"Forty Days & Forty Nights" mp3
by Muddy Waters, 1956.
available on The Chess Box: Muddy Waters

*************

"Thirty Days" mp3
by Chuck Berry, 1955.
available on Johnny B Goode: His Complete 50's Chess Recordings

*************

available on King of Western Swing

Record Store Day

2011-04-16T12:54:00.005-04:00

Attention people.

In case you don't know it, today is Record Store Day. What does this mean? It means you should get out and support your local record store and buy something more tangible and sexy than an mp3. Be it a CD, LP, 45 or whatever. There's a plentiful bounty of special limited edition stuff for purchase this year and you can only buy it in the stores.

I made the rounds here in Brooklyn this morning and bought a pile of cool stuff including 45s by the Velvet Underground, The Yardbirds, Steve Earle, Justin Townes Earle, The Rolling Stones, and a set of two 78rpm discs of Beach Boys tracks from the soon to finally be released Smile record. Omnivore Recordings have issued their first two releases today, a Buck Owens 45 and a limited edition pressing of Big Star's 3rd. It's a release of the 'test pressing' version of the LP, and Within the 2000 records, there are five actual test pressings from 1975 randomly placed in the run like Wonka tickets. See if you can find one. There's a new release by the dB's who are playing live today in Atlanta for RSD, and there are live performances at record stores all over.

Full details HERE.

You can't hide behind an mp3.

Ronnie Lane

2011-04-01T15:35:00.006-04:00

Today would have been Ronnie Lane's sixty-fifth birthday.
He was the heart of the Faces, leader of a traveling circus, a court jester and an April Fool.

Download:

"April Fool" mp3
by Pete Townshend & Ronnie Lane, 1977.
available on Rough Mix

"Flags And Banners" mp3
by The Faces, 1973.
available on Ooh La La

"Sweet Virginia" mp3
by Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance, 1974,
from You Never Can Tell: The BBC Sessions
out of print

"Ooh La La" mp3
by Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance, 1973,
from You Never Can Tell: The BBC Sessions
out of print

"You Never Can Tell" mp3
from You Never Can Tell: The BBC Sessions
out of print

What's That Song?

2011-03-17T02:02:00.018-04:00

Alex Chilton died a year ago today. Among his many attributes (singer, songwriter, band leader, and troublemaker) he was an interpreter and connoisseur of songs - all kinds of songs. I'd like to think that Alex had a big record collection but he probably did not. It would have only weighed him down. He was more likely a kind of musical sponge absorbing everything and spewing it out artfully in his own way. Today, in remembrance, we'll listen to a few of those songs as performed by the original artists, songs that he brought into his repertoire and made his own. Some are well known and some are not. A few of these songs, I'm fairly certain, I may have never heard had he not decided to record them. Thanks Alex.

Download:

"Make A Little Love" mp3
by Lowell Fulsom, 1967.
available on The Tramp Years
by Alex Chilton on High Priest

"Thank You John" mp3
by Willie Tee, 1965.
available on Teasin You
by Alex Chilton on Feudalist Tarts

"With A Girl Like You" mp3
by The Troggs, 1967.
available on The Singles A's & B's
by Alex Chilton on 19 Years: A Collection of Alex Chilton

"Girl After Girl" mp3
by Troy Shondell, 1961.
available on This Time: The Best Of Troy Shondell
by Alex Chilton on Like Flies on Sherbert

"Nobody's Fool" mp3
by Dan Penn, 1973.
available on Nobody's Fool
recorded by Alex Chilton on High Priest

"I've Never Found A Girl (To Love Me Like You Do)" mp3
by Eddie Floyd, 1968.
available on Rare Stamps
by Alex Chilton on Loose Shoes and Tight Pussy

top photo: Alex Chilton, Bowery, 1977. by Godlis

**********************

Also:

Chris Stamey has assembled an all-star ensemble that have now twice performed Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers LP in its entirety in NC. The next performance of Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers will be on Saturday, March 26, at Mason Hall in NYC, Aided and abetted by an all-star cast of performers including Tift Merritt, Matthew Sweet, M. Ward, Norman Blake (Teenage Fan Club), Ira Kaplan (Yo La Tengo) and others to be announced shortly to join the core group complete with the rhythm section of Jody Stephens (Big Star), Mike Mills (R.E.M.), Will Rigby (dB's), Charles Cleaver, and Mitch Easter(Let's Active) and the expanded Lost in the Trees Orchestra with full strings, brass, winds, orchestral percussion and basketball. You will not want to miss this...

Tickets are available by following this link: Tickets Mason Hall, NYC, March 26

More information on this amazing project here: bigstarthird.com
All proceeds for this show benefit the New Orleans Musicians Clinic, and El System's Corona Youth Project in Queens.

Two-Sider Tuesday: The Stewart Brothers

2011-03-15T15:08:00.004-04:00

Today is Sly Stone's 68th birthday. I sincerely hope he's having a good one. Things have been somewhat rocky for Sly for nearly 40 years now, and while he is truly one of the greats, attempts to get himself together and make a comeback have unfortunately been elusive. I was first hipped to this record-- the first single by the Stewart Brothers--by my pal Phast Phreddie. Young Sly is at the helm and begins the a-side with an introduction:

The name of this tune is...uh, "The Rat."
and uh, we are the Stewart Brothers and
Sylvester Stewart, that's myself, I wrote it.

It's a doo-wop record with some fine guitar playing by brother Freddie. I'm not sure who the rest of the personnel are on this session.

Dig it... and Happy Birthday Sly.

Download:

"The Rat" mp3
by the Stewart Brothers, 1959.
Ensign 45-4032
out of print

"Ra Ra Roo" mp3
by the Stewart Brothers, 1959.
Ensign 45-4032
out of print

Two-Sider (Fat) Tuesday

2011-03-08T16:27:00.002-05:00

Today, we begin a new and maybe regular feature here at the Boogie Woogie Flu to be known as Two-Sider Tuesday, featuring two sides of a single platter. In honor of Fat Tuesday, and our house band here in Fluville, I present to you a classic New Orleans two-sider, Ace #571 by Huey 'Piano' Smith and the Clowns.

***********

Download:

"Tu-Ber-Cu-Lucas and the Sinus Blues" mp3
by Huey Smith, 1959.
available on This Is Huey Piano Smith

"Dearest Darling (You're the One)" mp3
by Huey Smith, 1959.
available on Ace is Wild

***********

painting: King Zulu, 1986. by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Psychic Payne

2011-03-04T01:45:00.005-05:00

by Will Rigby

Leon Payne's song "Psycho" is legendary, and rightly so.

Payne was a blind country singer and songwriter who has the distinction of having two of his songs recorded by Hank Williams: "Lost Highway" (listen to Leon's version here) and "They'll Never Take Her Love From Me." Other well-known songs he wrote are "I Love You Because," which Elvis Presley recorded at his first session for Sun Records in 1954, and "Things Have Gone To Pieces," originally a hit for George Jones.

On a day off in Nashville in 1999 I poked around Elder's Book Store on Elliston Place. Elder's must be one of the premier sources of books on the Civil War, but when I asked Mr. Elder where his books on music were, he said he had just gotten some in that he didn't know quite what they were. In retrospect I find this a bit surprising, because he is a prominent used book dealer in Music City, and these books are uniquely Music Row products.

The books are/were songbooks printed (rather inexpensively) by music publishers to give/loan to artists, producers, and studios in Nashville for the purpose of learning the songs in order to record them. They measure 12" wide by 9" high, typically with two pages of sheet music reduced to fit side by side on one page (although there are exceptions). Some of the songs are written out by hand and photocopied.

The purpose of these books has been supplanted by CDs, MP3s, etc., so I presume they are obsolete artifacts that are no longer made. Which makes me wonder why Mr. Elder hadn't seen them before. I suspect that he has seen more of them by now, and wouldn't be surprised if there is a collector's market for them. He also had books of the Louvin Brothers, Don Gibson, and Don Everly (I bought all these), and others.

(click on image to enlarge)

Of course, "Psycho" sheet music is the most unusual find. We present it here as an artifact and a public service. Note the restriction at the bottom of the first page: "The use of the lyrics to this song with any other music is expressly prohibited". There are a couple of lyric differences from the recorded versions: "my hands near his throat" is printed but generally sung "around his throat"; and most significantly, the usual recorded ending "Mama, why don't you wake up?" is NOT in the sheet music.

(click on image to enlarge)

Payne supposedly told his publisher, Fred Rose, not to allow "Psycho" to be recorded until after he died. The first recording, by Eddie Noack, came out in 1968, but Payne did not die until 1969, so perhaps the tale is apocryphal. I recall reading a review of the 45 around 1971 (by Greg Shaw, I think), so perhaps the record came out later than the citations I can find.

There is not a lot of information on this unusual song to be found on the Web. Perhaps, someone will at least make a Wikipedia page for it, and while they're at it, one for Eddie Noack, too.

Eddie Noack

Download:

"Psycho" mp3
by Eddie Noack, 1968.
froim K-ARK 45-843
out of print

"Psycho" mp3
by Jack Kittel, 1975.
available on Psycho (Jack Forever)

"Psycho" mp3
by Elvis Costello and the Attractions, 1981.
available on Almost Blue.

"Psycho" mp3
by Teddy Thompson, 1998.
available on Psycho

...and from reader, Tex. I don't know how this one slipped by us,
it is by far the scariest version:

"Psycho" mp3
by Andre Williams and the Sadies, 1999.
available on Red Dirt

*************

Written and Performed by Leon Payne...

"Empty Dreams" mp3
by Leon Payne, 1951.
available on I Love You Because

"Poke Salad Green" mp3
by Leon Payne, 1952.
available on I Love You Because

"Two by Four" mp3
by Leon Payne, 1956.
available on A Living Legend Of Country Music

"Close To You" mp3
by Leon Payne, 1963.
available on A Living Legend Of Country Music

*************

written by Leon Payne...

"Lost Highway" mp3
by Hank Williams, 1949.
available on Hank Williams - 40 Greatest Hits

"They'll Never Take Her Love From Me" mp3
by Doug Sahm, 2000.
available on Return of Wayne Douglas

"I Love You Because (Take 3)" mp3
by Elvis Presley, 1954.
available on The Complete Sun Sessions

"Things Have Gone To Pieces" mp3
by George Jones, 1971.
available on Sings the Great Songs of Leon Payne

"Take Me (Take 1 with string overdub)" mp3
by George Jones, 1965.
available on Walk Through This World With Me - The Complete Musicor Recordings, 1965-1971 (Part 1)

"Blue Side of Lonesome" mp3
by John Prine and Mac Wiseman, 2007.
available on Standard Songs for Average People

New Scenery, New Noise

2011-02-09T01:01:00.003-05:00

"An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion."
Charles Baudelaire on Edgar Allan Poe, 1856.
from The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

"Well, could you play a car crash with an electric guitar?"
Patti Smith to Lenny Kaye, 1971. from Just Kids

Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye performed together for the first time on February 10, 1971 at The Poetry Project at the St. Marks Church in New York City. It was also the first time an electric guitar had ever been played at the church, and Lenny uses it to demonstrate the auditory car crash sounds in "Ballad of a Bad Boy," one of four selections from this rarely heard performance, and would serve as the the first of many collaborations between these two. Later becoming the Patti Smith Group, they helped to forge a new alliance between rock n roll, art and poetry in New York's punk scene of the mid 1970s. The historic venues in New York where they originally played before touring the world are now all gone except for The Poetry Project which tonight will host their return in celebration of the 40th anniversary of that first performance.

So, if you're in New York City, you might wanna check it out.

*******

Download:

"Mack The Knife" mp3
by Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye, 1971.
available on February 10, 1971

"Dedication" mp3
by Patti Smith, 1971.
available on February 10, 1971

"Oath" mp3
by Patti Smith, 1971.
available on February 10, 1971

"Ballad of A Bad Boy" mp3
by Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye, 1971.
available on February 10, 1971

*******

"Hey Joe (Version)" mp3
by Patti Smith, 1974.
on Mer 601-45
out of print

"Piss Factory" mp3
by Patti Smith, 1974.
available on Land (1975-2002)

*******
"Radio Free Ethiopia" mp3
Patti Smith, 1976.
WNEW New York Hungerthon Radio Broadcast

*******

top photo: Patti Smith in Subway, 1971. by Gerard Malanga.

Consolation Prize

2011-02-03T13:33:00.012-05:00

Once upon a time there was a band from Glasgow named Orange Juice. Formed as punk rock group the Nu-Sonics in the late 70s, they went on to record several records that flirted with rock, pop, soul and disco sounds, all the while being audaciously twee and unafraid to use major seventh chords. The singer and frontman Edwyn Collins, had an unusual feylike baritone voice sounding at times like (among others) Bela Lugosi. Collins, also displayed an unusual and unique guitar style, that when interweaved with original OJ guitar player James Kirk could conjure up an Anglo-like version of Television. They were brilliant and virtually unknown on these shores (they never played in the US) and went on to influence countless bands in the UK, including Belle and Sebastian, the Teenage Fanclub, The Smiths, and Aztec Camera. A few months ago Domino Records released a long overdue career spanning box set compiling their singles, LPs, some rarities and BBC recordings from the John Peel Show as well as a DVD: seven discs in all. Most of their catalog has been out of print or only available as expensive imports for several years.

Download:

"Felicity" mp3
by Orange Juice, 1982.
available on Coals to Newcastle

In conjunction with Domino Records, we are offering the first ever giveaway here at the Boogie Woogie Flu. An 18 song sampler from Coals to Newcastle plus 10 groovy Orange Juice pins, pictured below. We have three of these packages to give away. If you'd like one, send an email with your mailing address (US Residents only) to boogiewoogieflu@gmail.com and explain in 25 words or less why you want it. These will go fast. Good luck.

Gone!

The giveaway is over, and all winners have been notified. Two of the three winners are from Texas. So as an addendum I think it's appropriate to add this:

"Texas Fever" mp3
by Orange Juice, 1981.
available on Ostrich Churchyard

**********

Bonus:

"You Old Eccentric" mp3
by Orange Juice, 1980.
Peel Session
available on Ostrich Churchyard

"Consolation Prize" mp3
by Orange Juice, 1981.
available on Glasgow School

"Wan Light" mp3
by Orange Juice, 1982.
available on You Can't Hide Your Love Forever

"I Guess I'm Just A Little Too Sensitive" mp3
by Orange Juice, 1984.
available on The Orange Juice

"What Presence?!" mp3
by Orange Juice, 1984.
available on The Orange Juice

*********

"I Don't Care" mp3
by the Nu-Sonics, 1979.
available on Glasgow School

Like A Complete Unknown

2011-01-28T14:53:00.021-05:00

"I Was Young When I Left Home" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1961.
available on Love And Theft (Bonus Disc)

"When I arrived, it was dead-on winter. The cold was brutal and every artery of the city was snowpacked, but I'd started out from the frostbitten North Country, a little corner of the earth where the dark frozen woods and icy roads didn't faze me. I could transcend the limitations. It wasn't money or love that I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot. My mind was strong like a trap and I didn't need any guarantee of validity. I didn't know a single soul in this dark freezing metropolis but that was all about to change -- and quick."
-Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, Simon & Schuster © 2004.

New York City is covered in snow, just as it was fifty years ago this week when Bob Dylan first arrived here. And though the exact date is in dispute, it was on or around January 24, 1961. His ambition had outgrown the appropriately named Dinkytown coffeehouse scene in Minneapolis, and while having reinvented himself a few times already at the age of nineteen, Dylan, a self-described "musical expeditionary" with "no past really to speak of, nothin' to go back to, (and) nothin' to lean on" set his sites on brighter pastures: New York City, and the burgeoning folk scene in Greenwich Village to be exact. He also set out to meet his hero Woody Guthrie, who was spending his final years in a hospital in New Jersey suffering from Huntington's Chorea disease.

Dylan arrived in town via the George Washington Bridge in a 4-door Pontiac driven by his friend Fred Underhill. As legend has it, he disembarked and caught a train downtown where he promptly met Fred Neil and found himself a spot in the revue at Cafe Wha? backing Neil on harmonica and playing his own three song set which was the standard alotted time for each performer. His own repertoire at the time consisted almost entirely of Woody Guthrie songs, of which he'd learned most of the catalog. He had yet to write any of his own material to speak of, and from most accounts back in Minnesota, Dylan was a fairly ordinary folk singer with great ambition who did a good Woody Guthrie imitation. He had a lot of game and a "schtick" as was needed to succeed, but whatever it was that he considered success at that time, he certainly could have never imagined what lay in store for him in the coming year.

Dylan describes this moment as his "crossroads," as in Robert Johnson at the crossroads, and this particular one (give or take a block or two) was at the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal. The transformation that took place in the coming months is nothing short of remarkable. In the right place at the right time, he quickly met, learned from, and collaborated with a cast of characters including Dave Van Ronk, Karen Dalton, Fred Neil, and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, as well as his future muse Suze Rotolo. He also met Guthrie. He'd regularly board a bus to New Jersey with his guitar and sit with him in the hospital. Woody would call out song titles (his own) and the young disciple would oblige his requests. He learned fingerpicking, and slowly started writing his own songs, borrowing melodies and form from the vast American songbook of country, blues and folk that he and his contemporaries were mining and appropriating into another new form.

In April, he got his first paying gig, at Gerdes Folk City, with a two week run opening for John Lee Hooker. Izzy Young, of the Folklore Center, offered guidance and tried to help the fledgling midwestern transplant find a record deal. The folk labels all balked. In September, while playing harmonica on a Caroline Hester session for Columbia, he caught the ear of John Hammond, who signed him to a record deal a month later. This was far beyond his wildest dreams that a label such as Columbia would be interested in what he was doing. In Chronicles, Dylan recalls getting a copy of the yet to be released LP of Robert Johnson's Vocalion sides (still relatively unknown outside of a small group of blues aficionados) from Hammond on the day of his signing.

"Over the next few weeks I listened to it repeatedly, cut after cut, one song after another, sitting and staring at the record player. Whenever I did, it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition."

In early November, he played his first concert as a headliner at the Carnegie Chapter Hall, a small annexed room upstairs from the main hall. A typewritten program for the event included a self-penned biography of his reinvented self. It begins: "Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941. He was raised in Gallup N.M. and before he came to NY earlier this year, he lived in Iowa, S. Dakota and Kansas. He started playing carnivals at the age of 14, accompanying himself on guitar and piano." It goes on to say that he "learned many blues songs from a Chicago street singer named Arvella Gray" and met "Mance Lipscomb, from the Brazos River country of Texas, through a grandson that sang rock and roll."

A few weeks later Dylan would enter the studio and record his first Columbia LP in three short sessions over three days of mostly other people's arrangements and songs. He'd save his own compositions for his next record, which he began working in by the middle of 1962. A half a century after his arrival in New York City, he continues to perpetrate his peculiar brilliance, appropriation and reinvention.

Download:

"This Land is Your Land" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1961.
live at Carnegie Chapter Hall, Nov. 4, 1961.
available on No Direction Home

"In the Pines" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1961.
live at Carnegie Chapter Hall, Nov. 4, 1961.

"Baby, Let Me Follow You Down" (mono) mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1962.
available on Bob Dylan

"Mama Let Me Lay It On You No. 2" mp3
by Blind Boy Fuller, 1937.
available on Complete Recorded Works 4 (1937-38)

"Song To Woody" (mono) mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1962.
available on Bob Dylan

"Hard Times In New York Town" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1961.
available on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 : Rare And Unreleased, 1961-1991

"Down On Penny's Farm " mp3
by The Bentley Boys, 1929.
available on Anthology Of American Folk Music

"Talkin' New York" (mono) mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1962.
available on Bob Dylan

"Mean Talkin Blues" mp3
by Woody Guthrie, 1945.
available on The Asch Recordings, Vol. 1-4

"Ramblin' Round" mp3
by Woody Guthrie, 1944.
available on The Asch Recordings, Vol. 1-4

"New York Town" mp3
by Woody Guthrie, 1944.
available on The Asch Recordings, Vol. 1-4

"Hard Travelin'" mp3
by Ramblin' Jack Elliott, 1961.
available on Hard Travelin'

"Little Bit of Rain" mp3
by Fred Neil, 1964.
Live at Cafe Au Go Go

"Bleecker & MacDougal " mp3
by Fred Neil, 1965.
available on Bleecker & MacDougal

"Red Are The Flowers " mp3
by Karen Dalton, 1962.
available on Cotton Eyed Joe

"Pastures Of Plenty" mp3
by Karen Dalton, 1962.
available on Cotton Eyed Joe

"Georgie on the IRT" mp3" mp3
by Dave Van Ronk, 1961.
available on The Folkways Years, 1959-1961

"He Was A Friend Of Mine" mp3
by Dave Van Ronk, 1963.
available on Inside Dave Van Ronk

"He Was A Friend Of Mine" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1961.
available on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 : Rare And Unreleased, 1961-1991

"Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie " mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1963.
available on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 : Rare And Unreleased, 1961-1991

top photo: Bob Dylan on my Rooftop, Third Avenue, New York City, 1962. by John Cohen, from There Is No Eye, Powerhouse Books
© 2001.

Bob Dylan, Karen Dalton, and Fred Neil, 1961.
photograph by Fred McDarrah

4th Time Around

2011-01-08T16:50:00.009-05:00

Today is January 8th, which means two things around here. It's the fourth anniversary of the Boogie Woogie Flu, and, of course, it's Elvis's birthday. So, in celebration of these two miraculous events, I, T-Bone Carruthers, Mayor of Fluville, offer you four groups of four songs, four square and for today. They are: four versions of Bob Dylan's answer song to "Norwegian Wood," four songs covered by Elvis on his Memphis Record, the same four songs performed by the King, and four songs about him. Think of them as little EPs.

Things have been somewhat quiet here this year at the Boogie Woogie Flu and without all of the writers who contributed pieces, I don't think I could have kept it going. So, as we begin our 5th time around I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all of you readers and everyone who has helped keep this insane endeavor alive.

Drive safely and have a nice day.

*******

Download:

"4th Time Around" mp3
by Terry Melcher, 1974.
available on Terry Melcher

"4th Time Around" mp3
by Yo La Tengo, 2007.
available on I'm Not There

"4th Time Around" mp3
by Robyn Hitchcock, 2002.
available on Robyn Sings

"4th Time Around" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1966.
available on The Original Mono Recordings

*******

"Stranger In My Own Hometown" mp3
by Percy Mayfield, 1964.
Tangerine 45
out of print

"The Long Black Limousine" mp3
by Wynn Stewart, 1958.
available on California Country

"Any Day Now (My Wild Beautiful Bird)" mp3
by Chuck Jackson, 1962.
available on I Don't Want to Cry

"True Love Travels on a Gravel Road" mp3
by Percy Sledge, 1969.
available on It Tears Me Up

*******

"Stranger In My Own Hometown" mp3
by Elvis Presley, 1969.
available on From Elvis in Memphis

"The Long Black Limousine" mp3
by Elvis Presley, 1969.
available on From Elvis in Memphis

"Any Day Now" mp3
by Elvis Presley, 1969.
available on From Elvis in Memphis

"True Love Travels on a Gravel Road" mp3
by Elvis Presley, 1969.
available on From Elvis in Memphis

*******

"He Was The King" mp3
by Neil Young, 2005.
available on Prairie Wind

"A Century Of Elvis" mp3
by Belle and Sebastian, 1997.
available on Lazy Line Painter Jane

"There's A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop" mp3
(country version)
by Kirsty MacColl, 1981.
from Desperate Character
out of print

"Johnny Bye-Bye" mp3
by Bruce Springsteen, 1983.
available on Tracks

*******

top photo: © Ted Barron, 2011.

Stuck in the Middle

2011-01-07T02:16:00.026-05:00

With all due respect to the recently deceased.

Tonight, I was working from home. I read a bit, did my dishes, and then headed out to a local restaurant/bar in my overly-hip and totally uncool Brooklyn neighborhood. I sat down at the bar to eat as I always do when I go out for a late dinner by myself. I know the owner and the staff fairly well, and I like them all very much. There were a group of men sitting at the bar who had all probably had too much to drink about an hour before I showed up. I tried to ignore them as they were deciding where True Grit ranked in the pantheon of Coen Brothers films, and one of them, who seemed to dominate the conversation by talking more loudly than the rest, (as drunks are prone to do), was starting to get on my nerves, "somewhere below Lebowski, and above Fargo," he said. The others cheered him on.

I talked a little bit to the bartender, a friend (who's probably in his late 20s or early 30s) as I finished eating. "Time for some Rafferty," he said. I shook my head in disbelief. "He's too young to know," I thought to myself. He walked over to the stereo, and with a remote control, there it was, the opening bars of "Baker Street," the monstrously huge hit from 1978.

And then the saxophone.

I excused myself and walked outside to have a cigarette. I could still hear the song clearly, and watched the guys at the bar through the plate glass windows fall all over themselves with excitement while pantomiming to the song. What the fuck? I was amused, but this record is still, after all these years, lame. I stayed outside until it was over, but heard it all including the cheesy guitar solo I had forgotten all about. It touched a raw nerve I guess. Maybe some suppressed memory from a Jr. High School dance. I'm not sure.

In the year of it's release, I turned 13 years old and was very much into music. There were some great records that year. A few that come to mind off the top of my head are: Road to Ruin by the Ramones, the vastly under-rated Street Legal by Dylan, Darkness on The Edge of Town by Bruce Springsteen, and the Rolling Stones last moment of true greatness, Some Girls. And while at least two of those records got a fair amount of radio play, a lot of things didn't. The airwaves were dominated by the worst of the worst: Styx, Kansas, Boston, Rush and Journey (a band who has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in recent years, by those too young to remember that they sucked then and will always suck.)

That same year, Elvis Costello, released, This Year's Model with the song "Radio Radio," which got him all but banned from my hometown when the corporate rock radio station KSHE, that sponsored his local appearance were not amused when he dedicated that very song to them. They deserved it then and still do.

"...and the radio is in the hand's of such a lot of fools trying to anaesthetize the way you feel."

Elvis got into a lot of trouble that year, most notably, when he played that same song--after being instructed not to do so-- on Saturday Night Live (the appearance was actually late 1977). Costello started playing the scheduled song, "Less Than Zero" from his then current record, My Aim Is True, and abruptly stopped the band, and announced "I'm sorry Ladies and Gentlemen, there's no reason to do this song here." He then called out "Radio Radio" to the band and launched into it. It's live television at it's finest. Producer Lorne Michaels was also not amused. You can't watch it on YouTube, but it is available HERE. Costello recreated that moment with a planned bum-rush on the Beastie Boys who backed him on SNL's 25th anniversary show.

The purpose of this rant is not to disrespect Gerry Rafferty. He was probably an okay guy, and while I admit I don't know that much about him, I am a fan of his first hit record, "Stuck in The Middle With You," which he recorded in 1972 while fronting Stealers Wheel. It's a good record, but it is, after all, a pretty good imitation of John Lennon imitating Bob Dylan. It's best known today as the soundtrack to Michael Madsen's sociopathic character "Mr. Blonde," in a gruesome torture scene from Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. I much more prefer this song than his cheeseball fluff of six years later.

Download:

"Stuck In The Middle With You" mp3
by Stealers Wheel, 1972.
available on Stealers Wheel

"Radio Radio" mp3
by Elvis Costello and the Attractions, 1978.
available on Live at the El Mocambo

The Junky's Christmas

2010-12-25T03:24:00.012-05:00

William S. Burroughs tells a Christmas tale for the ages, in which Danny the Carwiper, dopesick and freely sprung from prison, learns the true spirit of giving on Christmas Day. He is rewarded with divine intervention, and scores "for the immaculate fix."

Merry Christmas

Download:

"The Junky's Christmas" mp3
by William S. Burroughs, 1993.
available on Spare Ass Annie & Other Tales

This can also be seen as an animated claymation short:
Francis Ford Coppola Presents
William S. Burroughs' The Junky's Christmas

or found in the book: Interzone

*********************

bonus:

"The Ruling Class" mp3
by Loose Fur, 2006.
available on Born Again in the U.S.A.

top photo: by Loomis Dean, 1959.

Obligatory Yuletide Offering

2010-12-22T04:05:00.006-05:00

Here's some stuff.
Don't say we never gave you anything.

Merry Christmas and Season's Greetings
from the Fluville Chamber of Commerce.

Drive Safely.

***********************************

Download:

"White Christmas" mp3
by Bob Marley and The Wailers, 1963.
available on Destiny: Rare Ska Sides From Studio 1

"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" mp3
by Darlene Love, 1963.
available on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

"If Christmas Can't Bring You Home" mp3
by the Reigning Sound, 2005.
available on Home for Orphans

"Christmas Eve Can Kill You" mp3
by The Everly Brothers, 1972.
available on Stories We Could Tell

"Santa Claus Go Straight To The Ghetto" mp3
by James Brown, 1968.
available on Funky Christmas

"Merry Christmas, I Love You" mp3
by James Brown, 1966.
available on Funky Christmas

"Let's Make Christmas Mean Something This Year" mp3
by James Brown, 1966.
available on Funky Christmas

"All I Want For Christmas" mp3
by Solomon Burke, 1972.
Pride 45-1022
out of print

"Christmas Must Be Tonight (Alternate)" mp3
by The Band, 1975.
available on Northern Lights Southern Cross

"Christmas Wish" mp3
by NRBQ, 1979.
available on Peek-A-Boo: Best of 1969-89

"My Mom and Santa Claus" mp3
by George Jones, 1968.
available on A Good Year For The Roses:
The Complete Musicor Recordings 1965-1971 (Part 2)

"Rock & Roll Santa Claus" mp3
by Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns, 1962.
available on Twas the Night Before Christmas

"'Twas The Night Before Christmas" mp3
by Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns, 1962.
available on Twas the Night Before Christmas

"Doing The Santa Claus" mp3
by Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns, 1962.
available on Twas the Night Before Christmas

"Christmas In Prison" mp3
by John Prine, 1973.
available on Sweet Revenge

"Jesus Christ" mp3
by Alex Chilton, 1975
from Radio Broadcast WLXY Memphis

"The Christmas Song" mp3
by Dexter Gordon, 1970.
available on The Panther!

More Christmas music can be found:
HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

top photo: © Ted Barron, 2010.

Got To Scrape The Shit Right Off Your Shoes

2010-12-18T18:25:00.027-05:00

Today, Keith Richards turns sixty-seven in mortal human years. To say he's an "old soul" is an understatement--he's more like an embalmed soul--one who's avoided death more times than the combined lives of an entire litter of kittens. Despite topping the notorious NME's Most Likely to Die list for 10 solid years--while those around him perished or wasted away--Keith kept nodding along, making some of the greatest (and a few not so great) rock and roll records along the way. You can read all about it in his extended 550 page interview/auto-biography, Life, which is alternately, a gripping and fascinating read, and at other times, a grandiose tale of a supreme denial.

The inside cover flap reads: "This is the life. Believe it or not, I haven't forgotten any of it." And while that's partially true, and the best parts of the book--the first 350 or so pages-- are filled with incredible details on the emerging Rolling Stones and their dedication to music and their initial goal: to be the best blues band in London--something they quickly achieved and far exceeded--becoming the greatest rock and roll band on the planet. Keith's lucidity and ability to remember takes a vacation sometime after the '72 tour, and while this is understandable considering his extreme condition in the mid-70s, it seems the year 1974 pretty much eludes his memory.

But enough about the book.

2010 has been a banner year for Richards, starting in May with the re-release of his greatest achievement, 1972's Exile on Main Street--the sprawling Rolling Stones classic recorded in Keith's sweaty basement in the south of France; his book, of course; a reissue of his long out of print Wingless Angels recordings; and a collaboration with Jerry Lee Lewis of the Rolling Stones' "Sweet Virginia" for an album of duets. Lewis also collaborates with fellow Stones, Ronnie Wood on the title cut "Mean Old Man," and with Mick Jagger on a lackluster and tentative sounding version of "Dead Flowers," but it's the duet with Keith that rises amongst the heap.

This isn't the first time Keith and the Killer have teamed up, and it's clear, that the two of them share a mutual admiration for one another. And while they seem to be from two separate generations of rock 'n rollers, the 50s and 60s, respectively, they are only eight years apart in age, still active, and were both at the top of their game throughout most of the 60s and 70s. Lewis was born into the Pentecostal Deep South during the Great Depression, and Richards, outside of London during the final wave of the German Luftwaffe attacks of World War II. Lewis began recording in 1957, and the Rolling Stones were in full swing with the acquisition of Bill Wyman and his amp by 1962--a mere five year difference--a blip in the grand scheme of rock and roll time. I see them as contemporaries, as well as kindred spirits, both who have openly shared a fondness for (among other things) firearms, whiskey, controlled substances, the songs of Chuck Berry, Harold Arlen, and Hank Williams, as well as the possession of an instantly recognizable and singular voice in their instrumental style.

When I first heard the new version of "Sweet Virginia," I was disappointed to hear that Lewis had changed the word "shit" in the chorus to "shine." It's one of the Stones' great throwaway lines, and the word substitution actually changes the meaning of the song in subtle ways. But Lewis--who knows shit from Shinola--is prone to all kinds of profanity in conversation, he is, however, not one to record such language. During the recording sessions for "Great Balls of Fire" at Sun in 1957, Jerry Lee, became weary and convinced in his drunkenness that he was going to go to "H-E-L-L" if he sang that song. Sam Phillips and Jack Clement went to great lengths to convince him that he had to do it. In speaking about his 1974 version of the Stones song "Satisfaction," he humbly remarked, "They done that one so good that me singin' it would be like stickin' a greasy noodle up some critter's ass." In 1977, when Keith holed up in a Toronto recording studio at a piano, while awaiting trial on drug-trafficking charges that threatened to put him away for several years, he recorded a suite of still unreleased tracks, some that he had learned and played with his then dead running buddy Gram Parsons, and some other old favorites, among those, two Jerry Lee Lewis numbers.

With the promise of a bonus disc of unreleased Stones tracks announced prior to this year's re-release of Exile (which I dutifully bought for the fourth time) I was excited and ultimately let down to find that it was largely a hoax, which I'll get into another time. It did, however, contain a rough version of "Soul Survivor" with Keith making up lyrics as he goes along. It's full of profanity, makes no sense at all, and I love it. Jerry Lee wouldn't have sung it that way, but that's beside the point. Both of these guys have fished in the same pond for many years, and today, in celebration of Keith's birthday we will listen to both of these old coots.

Happy Birthday Keith.

Download:

"Sweet Virginia" mp3
by Jerry Lee Lewis and Keith Richards, 2010.
available on Mean Old Man

"That Kind of Fool" mp3
by Jerry Lee Lewis and Keith Richards, 2006.
available on Last Man Standing

"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" mp3
by Jerry Lee Lewis, 1974.
available on The Complete Session Recorded in London

"She Still Comes Around" mp3
by Keith Richards, 1977.
from Out on Bail (and out of print)

"She Still Comes Around" mp3
by Jerry Lee Lewis, 1968.
available on Anthology: All Killer No Filler

"Your Cheating Heart" mp3
by Jerry Lee Lewis and Keith Richards, 1983.
from Rolling His Own
out of print

"Little Queenie" mp3
by Jerry Lee Lewis and Keith Richards, 1983.
from Rolling His Own
out of print

"Little Queenie" mp3
by the Rolling Stones, 1972
from Exiles Afternoon Revisited
out of print

"Little Queenie" mp3
by Jerry Lee Lewis, 1959.
available on Sun Recordings 1956-1963

"Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On" mp3
by Keith Richards, 1977.
from Out on Bail (and out of print)

"You Win Again" mp3
by Jerry Lee Lewis, 1979.
available on Complete Palomino Club Recordings

"You Win Again" mp3
by The Rolling Stones, 1977.
from Place Pigalle
out of print

"You Win Again" mp3
by Keith Richards, 2001.
available on Timeless: Hank Williams Tribute

"Over The Rainbow" mp3
by Keith Richards and Bobby Keys, 1981.
from Rolling His Own

"Over The Rainbow" mp3
by Jerry Lee Lewis, 1980.
Anthology: All Killer No Filler

"Soul Survivor (alternate take)" mp3
by The Rolling Stones, 1971.
available on Exile on Main Street

top photo: Jerry Lee Lewis, Memphis, 1997. © Ted Barron, 2010

The Fascinating Life of Albino Red

2010-12-08T16:28:00.013-05:00

by Joe Schwab

So it’s the final night of Hanukkah 2010 and this will be the last musical candle on the menorah for the Boogie Woogie Flu. A perfect way to end this festival of lights is with the legendary Jewish trumpeter whom during his lifetime crossed paths with both Charlie Parker AND Wayne Kramer. I’m talking about the great red headed Be-Bopper Red Rodney - born Robert Roland Chudnick - a boy that became a man after he received his first trumpet at the age of 13 for his Bar Mitzvah.

Although he was originally self taught, He later studied the trumpet at Jules E. Masterbaum Vocational School in his hometown of Philadelphia. Among his classmates was Buddy DeFranco, the great clarinetist who helped to transform the clarinet from a Big Band staple into a weapon of Be-Bop dexterity. A young alto saxophonist named John Coltrane also attended the school, as well as the often overlooked trumpet master Joe Wilder. In 1942, at the tender age of sixteen, Red left Philly for Atlantic City. Though he was too young for the draft, he wasn’t too young to lie about his age and start hitting the road with the orchestras of Benny Goodman, Jimmy Dorsey, Tony Pastor and Jerry Wald. In 1945 shortly after his return to Philadelphia, Red’s life was changed forever after seeing a set by Dizzy Gillespie. While playing a gig at the Down Beat Club, Red was able to sit in with his hero. Leaving a lasting impression on Dizzy who remembered Red and later introduced him to Charlie Parker after the two had reunited at The Three Deuces in NYC.

For much of the remaining years of the 40’s, Rodney continued playing with Big Bands. Claude Thornhill’s band was at the forefront of taking Be-Bop and smoothing it down into an experimental, yet danceable formula with arrangements by Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan. He also spent time with the Bop leaning bands of Gene Krupa and Woody Herman, but his life was about to be changed forever when in 1948 Charlie Parker invited Rodney to come to New York to replace Miles Davis in his Quintet.

Despite the fact that Rodney spent time in the hard drug hot beds of the Herman and Krupa bands, he resisted heroin. While playing with Bird in ‘48 and throughout 1949, Parker used himself as an example of why Rodney should avoid the temptations of hard drugs, but as so many Bird disciples before him, seeing was believing. If Charlie Parker could play so brilliantly while high, then why couldn’t he? As legend has it, Parker did a Southern tour in 1949, tagging the light skinned redhead as “Albino Red” as to not lay credence on the fact that it was, indeed, a mixed race Quintet. By 1951, Rodney had succumbed to dope, developed a habit, and became a full fledged junkie leading to only occasional sessions and a short stint with Charlie Ventura. Although he had kicked and began a successful career fronting dance bands in his home town of Philadelphia, the Jazz life had driven him back to Be-bop and heroin use. His life changed dramatically in 1958 while in San Francisco. Broke and out of work, he impersonated an Army officer and stole $10,000 from the Atomic Energy Commission. Caught in 1964, Rodney did prison time on a sentence of 27 months. During this time he received his Bachelors degree and began studying law. After his jail term was up, he continued his law studies only to be detoured by the fact that convicted felons could not apply for the bar.

Music once again became his priority, landing in Las Vegas, accompanying everyone from Barbara Streisand to Elvis Presley. His dependence on heroin was still in effect throughout the 70’s which found him relocating to Europe where in 1975 he was busted once again by U.S. Narcotic agents, this time in the middle of the night. While serving time in 1975 he befriended the MC5’s Wayne Kramer, by teaching him, as Kramer has said, “a Berklee School of Music course in writing and arranging” as well as playing in the prison band with the guitarist.

Finally clean and sober, Rodney’s career once aging took off in the 1980’s with a series of recordings in Europe and the U.S. as well as reuniting with his long time collaborator Ira Sullivan. Much of the final years of Red’s life were spent playing with young musicians such as pianist Gary Dial and saxophonist Chris Potter. While revisiting many of the Be-Bop staples, his youthful sound along with a young band seemed to revitalize Rodney and his career. Having seen Rodney myself in 1993, there's no doubt in my mind that he was rejuvenated and playing the best he had in his career.

In 1994, Rodney died of lung cancer at the top of his powers. He’s survived by his two sons, one of which, Mark Rodney had moderate success in the 70’s as part of the Soft Rock duo of Batdorf and Rodney.

Download:

"Elevation" mp3
by Red Rodney's Be-Boppers / New York City January 29, 1947.
Red Rodney t, Allen Eager ts, Serge Chaloff bs,
Al Haig p, Chubby Jackson b, Tiny Kahn d.
available on Bebop

"Hot House (Long)" mp3
by Charlie Parker Quintet / Live in Chicago, Pershing Hotel, 1949.
Charlie Parker as, Red Rodney tp, Al Haig p,
Tommy Potter b, Max Roach d.
available on Complete Pershing Club Sets

"Swedish Schnapps" mp3
by Charlie Parker Quintet / New York City August 8, 1951.
Charlie Parker as, Red Rodney tp, John Lewis p,
Ray Brown b, Kenny Clarke d.
available on Complete Verve Master Takes

"Little Willie Leaps" mp3
by Red Rodney Quintet / New York City - November 1990.
Red Rodney tr, Chris Potter ts, David Kikoski p,
Chip Jackson b, Jimmy Madison d.
available on Red Alert

********************************

This is the last of eight posts at the Boogie Woogie Flu, in which eight Jewish writers discussed the works of other Jewish artists for eight consecutive nights in celebration of Hanukkah. I'd like to extend my thanks to everyone who contributed these wonderful posts.

Happy Hanukkah,
Ted.

top photo: by William P. Gottlieb, 1948.
above photo: © Ted Barron, 2010.

********************************

King Nathan

2010-12-07T16:28:00.012-05:00

by Jesse Jarnow

"The record business is not a freak business. It is the same as being in the coffin business, or a funeral parlor..." - Syd Nathan

At an industry dinner, Goddard Lieberson--the president of Columbia Records for nearly 20 years--once introduced an associate as "that rare combination, a practically unknown combination, I would say--a charming, cultured witty man, an astute businessmen... and a gentile." Lieberson was clearly not referring to Syd Nathan, founder and "Chief" of King Records.

Like Hollywood, the early record world--and especially the independent corners of it--was littered with Jewish entrepreneurs--Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records, Morris Levy at Roulette, the Chess brothers in Chicago. All have their own rightful claims on pieces of rock history, and their own lore to go with them. Levy, born Moishe Levy, was the onetime owner of Birdland who died in 1990, a later-indicted Mob buddy who pirated John Lennon demos after personally borrowing the tapes from Lennon.

What distinguishes Syd Nathan of Cincinnati's King Records isn't merely that he established the first self-contained indie record company, which included A&R, studios, pressing plants, a publishing company, a groundbreaking branch system, and that everybody from Motown to Matador owes him a debt. And it's not even the groundbreaking catalog that integrated early sides by James Brown and the Five Royales with hillbilly favorites like the Delmore Brothers and Moon Mullican. It's that Nathan was batshit enough to record an LP documenting himself straight babbling about it for two generous sides. For anybody interested in a field recording of the archetypal shyster Jewish bastard record company swine, look no further, Syd Speaks is primary source material.

"Boys, this is something I should have done five or six years ago," Nathan croaks just after the needle-drop, and one can almost hear the saliva gumming the cigar to his lower lip. "Unfortunately, you or other people may disagree with me 100%, but somebody has to be the chief, and I am elected as the chief. I'm spending my money, not yours, therefore, unless I change my ideas, then it has to be as you will hear on this record." He sounds like Waring Hudsucker in the Coen Brothers' Hudsucker Proxy, from big-headed intonation to his comedic rhetorical dead ends. "I'm more Dutch than I am Jewish!" he declares later.

In one version of the story, Nathan got into the biz because--when he was working as a radio salesman--he was paid a debt in the form of 300 used 78s, which he turned for a profit, and smelled dollars. It was a scent singed permanently in his nose.

"Nathan once congratulated one of King's most successful country artists, "Cowboy" Copas, for refusing to pay $50 for the rights to a song he discovered on one of his scouting forays down to Nashville. "You did the right thing, Copas; ain't no song in the world worth fifty bucks," said Nathan. (That might have been a shortsighted view: The song was "The Tennessee Waltz." from Music Man: Ahmet Ertegun, Atlantic Records, and the Triumph of Rock'N'Roll by Dorothy Wade and Justine Picardie.

Nathan was an almost literal cartoon character. "A nose like Porky Pig and two Coca-Cola bottles for eyeglasses," a former employee once described. But like a semitic, penny-pinching Mr. Magoo, he accidentally became a civil rights pioneer in the bargain.

King Records, founded in 1943, was the launching point and melting pot for R&B singers like James Brown and Country and Western artists like the Delmore Brothers. Brown and the Delmores had a common attraction for Nathan: they sold records. But it went deeper than that. Though black artists were initially confined to the Queen imprint, they merged with King proper and Federal Records by 1947. Later, the label encouraged its country artists to cover songs by its R&B roster, and vice-versa.

Nathan's staff was likewise fully integrated at every level, including top A&R man Henry Glover, who signed artists (including Hank Ballard), oversaw sessions, and contributed several hits. (In 1976, he arranged the horn section for The Last Waltz.) During the World War II-driven labor shortage, King's several hundred employees included whites and blacks, alongside Chinese, Japanese, and Appalachian immigrants. Nathan needed people to do the work and he saw no reason why they couldn't. Pallbearers at Nathan's 1968 funeral included James Brown and protege Seymour Stein, whose supply of Nathan anecdotes should someday fill a proper biography. (Indeed, the recording of Nathan helming an A&R meeting in 1954 is rumored to be a Stein bootleg.)

King disappeared after Nathan's 1968 death, swallowed into the industry afterlife of bone-picking licensing deals. It lives on in the music, of course. If there is a lesson to be found, it's the value of a focused craziness able to see the big picture. "Some wild deals are being made by record companies and we know it," Nathan observes on Syd Speaks. "We don't intend to compete with some these crazy damn deals that are being offered. And we never will compete with them ... We can all be smart enough to eat DAMN WELL, if we are smart, patient, and observant."

"The day will come when I pass on, and maybe King will be better for it, I don't know," Nathan concludes later. "I'm going to wait, because I don't have any contract with God. I'm just going to wait and see what happens. In the meantime, it's got to be done, boys as we see it here. And if you don't want to do it that way, then the best thing to do is say, 'I disagree, I will not concur, and give me my hat' and I'll give it you and Godspeed."

Download:

"Syd Speaks (Part One)" mp3
by Syd Nathan, 1964.
from an in-house promo for King Employees

"Syd Speaks (Part Two)" mp3
by Syd Nathan, 1964.
from an in-house promo for King Employees

"Syd Nathan Addresses an A & R Meeting" mp3
by Syd Nathan, 1954.
available on King R&B Box Set

"Blues Stay Away From Me" mp3
by The Delmore Brothers, 1949.
available on Blues Stay Away from Me

"Blues Stay Away From Me" mp3
by Lonnie Johnson, 1949.
available on A Life in Music Selected Sides 1925-1953

"Think" mp3
By The "5" Royales, 1957.
available on It's Hard But It's Fair: King Hits and Rarities

"Think" mp3
By James Brown and the Famous Flames, 1960.
available on Star Time

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This is the seventh of eight posts at the Boogie Woogie Flu, in which eight Jewish writers will discuss the works of other Jewish artists for eight consecutive days in celebration of Hanukkah.

Still Meshuguna After All These Years

2010-12-06T16:28:00.007-05:00

by Ben Greenberg

Listening to Paul Simon’s music, it isn't immediately apparent that he's Jewish. He sings “Jesus Is The Answer," on an early live record. Then of course, there's the famous lyric, "And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson / Jesus loves you more than you will know." This year he even recorded a straight-faced Christmas song, and his gospel tinged hit "Loves Me like A Rock" features vocal group, The Dixie Hummingbirds. But upon closer inspection, the man is revealed to be a pure blooded Tribesman. Looking even more closely, perhaps it could have been inferred from songs with titles like “That Was Your Mother,” “The Boy In The Bubble,” “Allergies,” “Voices Of Old People,” and “Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes.” According to Wikipedia (source: Citation Needed) Paul Simon’s parents were Hungarian Jews.

Paul Simon (real name, no gimmicks) was born in Newark, NJ and raised in Queens, and from what I can put together, he was more of a cultural Jew than a religious one. If you are reading the Boogie Woogie Flu and are Jewish, I’m willing to bet that you can identify with that. We are the heathen Jews. We know who we are. I’ll see you all in whatever the Jewish equivalent of Hell is.

From the Late 50s to the early 60s, Simon & Garfunkel, performed alternately as Tom & Jerry and Tico and The Triumphs. During this time, Paul also wrote and recorded solo material under the pseudonyms True Taylor and Jerry Landis—an even more Jewish-sounding name than his real one. He went to London in 1965 to establish himself on the folk scene, and while there, produced what is to my mind one of the greatest folk albums of the era, the eponymously titled debut by Jackson C. Frank. If you ever want to go on a real bummer, read any bio of Jackson Frank. His getting shot through the eye by a passing stranger while sitting on a park bench doesn’t even begin to plumb the depths of travesty that befell this man. In fact, the gunshot through the eye is only usually mentioned briefly, in passing.

Returning to the States, Simon and Garfunkel recorded a string of enormously successful LPs in the years that followed. But rather than open up a new Wikipedia page, let’s just move right along into his solo career, and to what is probably my personal favorite Paul Simon album, the self-titled debut from 1972—the one with Paul hiding under a yeti on the front. It’s got the hits “Me & Julio” and “Mother & Child Reunion”, but this album is packed with lesser-known gems, my favorites of which are the one-two punch of “Peace Like A River” and “Papa Hobo,” both, brilliant songs.

What else can I say about him? Other than that I think the music from The Capeman is vastly underrated, and for anyone who thinks that the interpolation of World Music into Simon’s pop songs began with or around Graceland—I offer up the track “Duncan” from Live Rhymin,’ performed with the South American group Urubamba, recorded in 1974, a full twelve years before Graceland. Pan flute chorus attack! What could be more World Music than that? Also, I offer an unfinished version of the same song with totally different lyrics and sections where he only has a line or two done. It's an interesting take, and a song with a fully different meaning (seemingly about someone named Benson McGuire and someone, possibly Benson, getting something buried deep in his shoulder). Below you can find a suite of songs from the early years, prior to Simon and Garfunkel, and a selection of choice nuggets.

Happy Hanukkah, and here's to you Mrs. Rubinstein...

Download:

"Dancin' Wild" mp3
by Tom & Jerry, 1957.
available on Two Can Dream Alone

"True or False" mp3
by True Taylor, 1958.
available on Two Can Dream Alone

"Motorcycle" mp3
by Tico and the Triumphs, 1961.
available on Two Can Dream Alone

"The Lone Teen Ranger" mp3
by Jerry Landis, 1962.
available on Recorded As Jerry Landis & Artie Garr

"Blues Run The Game" mp3
by Jackson C Frank, 1965.
produced by Paul Simon
available on Blues Run the Game

"Peace Like A River" mp3
by Paul Simon, 1972.
available on Paul Simon

"Papa Hobo" mp3
by Paul Simon, 1972.
available on Paul Simon

"Duncan (demo)" mp3
by Paul Simon, 1972.
available on Paul Simon

"Duncan" mp3
by Paul Simon, 1974.
available on Paul Simon in Concert: Live Rhymin'

"Loves Me Like A Rock" mp3
by Paul Simon, 1973
available on There Goes Rhymin' Simon

"You're Kind" mp3
by Paul Simon, 1975.
available on Still Crazy After All These Years

"God Bless The Absentee" mp3
by Paul Simon, 1980.
available on One-Trick Pony

"Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War" mp3
by Paul Simon, 1983.
available on Hearts and Bones

"Trailways Bus" mp3
by Paul Simon, 1997.
available on Songs from The Capeman

"Getting Ready For Christmas Day" mp3
by Paul Simon, 2010.
from the forthcoming album So Beautiful Or So What
available at paulsimon.com

Ben Greenberg is a senior editor at Grand Central Publishing.

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This is the sixth of eight posts at the Boogie Woogie Flu, in which eight Jewish writers will discuss the works of other Jewish artists for eight consecutive days in celebration of Hanukkah.

Hello Allan...

2010-12-05T16:28:00.006-05:00

by Scott Schinder

He's been somewhat forgotten by today's retro tastemakers, but for a few short years in the 1960s, Allan Sherman was a major star. Although he remains best known for his smash 1963 single "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah!"—a deadpan account of a tortuous summer-camp stay, set to the tune of Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours"—Sherman was much more than a one-novelty-hit-wonder. Indeed, the eight albums of song parodies that he released on Warner Bros. between 1962 and 1967 comprise a remarkable body of work that shows him to be the greatest musical satirist of his era.

An ingratiating performer, an agile wordsmith and a vivid troubadour of the middle-class Jewish American experience, Sherman mixed post-Borscht Belt humor with pop-culture references to create music whose wit and warmth transcended mere yuks. His standard m.o. was simple enough: borrow a familiar pop, folk, Broadway or classical melody and outfit it with a gloriously absurd set of new lyrics. In his hands, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" became "The Ballad of Harry Lewis," which recounted the heroic struggle of the titular garment-business drone. "Alouette" became "Al 'N Yetta," a chronicle of a middle-class married couple's TV-watching habits. "Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey?" became "Won't You Come Home, Disraeli?," in which Queen Victoria laments the absence of her prime minister.

Sherman's best tunes boasted multiple layers of audacious wordplay, along with an insight into the human condition that allows his material to connect with contemporary listeners who might not recognize his references to David Susskind, Metrecal and Bo Belinsky. Although his stardom was relatively brief, Sherman would be a seminal influence on virtually every pop parodist who followed (including avowed admirer Weird Al Yankovic, whose first album cover depicts a Sherman LP at the foot of Weird Al's bed).

Sherman wasn't the first parodist to work in the pop medium. Mickey Katz had begun retooling contemporary pop standards with Yiddish schtick in the 1940s, and Homer and Jethro started infusing pop tunes with hillbilly humor at around the same time. But Sherman's deceptively earthy, self-effacing output possessed a verbal sophistication and internal logic that put him in a class of his own. And while Sherman had no discernable affinity for rock 'n' roll (as his "Pop Hates the Beatles" confirms), his songs' gentle sense of subversion marked him as a rock 'n' roller in spirit. The same can be said for his untrained but enthusiastic singing voice, which novelty-song authority Doctor Demento once described as a "shower baritone."

Although his ascent as a recording artist was something of a fluke, Sherman had already been an entertainment-business professional for over a decade by the time he became a household name. Born Allan Copelon in Chicago on November 30, 1924, he suffered through a bleak childhood, adopting his mother's maiden name Sherman after his ne'er-do-well father walked out on the family when Allan was six. He and his mother relocated frequently, and Allan was often left with relatives for months at a time. At some point during his youth, he began writing parody numbers, which he'd sing for friends at parties.

After flunking out of college and being discharged from the Army for medical reasons, Sherman arrived in New York on V-J Day in 1945, with aspirations of becoming a professional entertainer. He managed to find a series of short-lived jobs as a low-level gag writer on various radio shows and in the embryonic TV industry, largely on the strength of a file of stolen jokes that he and his wife had compiled.

Sherman actually made his first record in 1951, releasing a single containing a pair of his song spoofs. Although that disc was little noticed by the public, he achieved a major break the same year, when legendary game-show producers Mark Goodson and Bill Todman turned a Sherman concept into the long-running CBS hit I've Got A Secret. Rather than pay him for the lucrative idea, Goodson and Todman hired Sherman as the show's producer. The gig gave him numerous opportunities to exercise his creativity in the nascent medium, but Sherman's penchant for elaborate studio stunts eventually got him fired, after a stunt featuring Tony Curtis misfired during a 1958 live broadcast.

In 1961, Sherman moved west to produce the short-lived game show Your Surprise Package. He then took an even shorter-lived position as producer of Steve Allen's new syndicated talk show, from which he was fired before the show even hit the airwaves. An extended period of joblessness followed, but fate would soon lead Sherman back to his true calling.

Although he was unemployed, Sherman had won numerous high-profile fans while performing his songs at Hollywood parties. Those admirers included such showbiz heavyweights as Jack Benny, George Burns, Jerry Lewis and Sherman's next door neighbor Harpo Marx. Another new pal was powerful agent Bullets Durgom, who reportedly helped Sherman to get the attention of Warner Bros. Records by having him record a risqué number to be played at a Warner executive's retirement party.

Sherman won a record deal with Warner Bros., a company that had achieved limited results with music but which had scored big with Bob Newhart's early standup comedy LPs. It was decided that Sherman's first album should consist of reworkings of public-domain folk songs. That approach would avoid the hassle of getting music publishers' permission to rewrite mainstream pop material, as well as allowing the label to take advantage of the then-current folk-music craze.

Sherman's debut LP My Son, the Folk Singer, was cut at a Hollywood studio on the evening of August 6, 1962—the day after Marilyn Monroe's death—in front of an invited studio audience that included Harpo Marx, Theodore Bikel and Johnny Mercer. Released two months later, My Son, the Folk Singer quickly became one of the fastest-selling albums in history, selling nearly a million copies (a massive quantity by early-'60s standards) and reaching the top spot on Billboard's album chart. The album wasn't just a hit; it was a cultural phenomenon. President John F. Kennedy was even supposedly spotted crooning Sherman's "Sarah Jackman" in the lobby of New York's Carlisle Hotel.

The unsung hero of My Son, the Folk Singer, and of most of Sherman's subsequent releases, was composer/arranger Lou Busch, whose lush, mellifluous orchestrations provided a perfect, straight-faced contrast to Sherman's absurdist lyrics and lovably gawky bellow. Sherman described the juxtaposition thusly: "You're looking into Tiffany's most elegant show window, and in the middle of the window is a black velvet pillow, and right in the middle of the pillow is an onion. That's me."

By all accounts, Sherman had a tough time adjusting to his abrupt stardom, and his initial discomfort with the idea of performing for large audiences of strangers cost him some high-profile television appearances. Despite his misgivings, he soon became a familiar presence on the TV variety shows of the period—including some of those that had previously fired him. He also achieved considerable success as a concert attraction, headlining Carnegie Hall on New Year's Eve 1963. By the following summer, Sherman was enough of a beloved institution that he spent a week guest-hosting Johnny Carson's Tonight Show.

Sherman's sophomore album, My Son, the Celebrity, appeared in 1963. It largely continued in its predecessor's funny footsteps, also reaching the Number One spot on the Billboard album chart. My Son, the Nut, released later that year, achieved the same distinction. It also launched Sherman onto AM radio with "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah!" which spent three weeks as America's Number Two pop single. later winning a Grammy as the year's top comedy recording.

"Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah!" became an instant cultural touchstone, spawning a Milton-Bradley board game (which Sherman hawked in a TV commercial), a children's book and a stage musical incorporating several Sherman compositions. It also became Number One in Hong Kong, and reportedly inspired versions Hebrew, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian and Esperanto versions. Sherman also rewrote a new version of "Hello Muddah" sequel with updated lyrics, which he debuted on The Tonight Show. Although not released on record, the sequel's popularity was such that radio stations played tapes of Sherman's TV performance.

Although "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah!" made Sherman more famous than ever, it proved to be his last major success. He continued appearing on TV and performing on stage, but subsequent albums (including the Peter and the Wolf takeoff Peter and the Commissar, a collaboration with the Boston Pops Orchestra) sold disappointingly, and 1967's Togetherness marked the end of his recording career. More disappointment followed when the 1968 Broadway musical The Fig Leaves Are Falling, for which Sherman wrote the book and lyrics, closed after four performances.

By that point, Sherman, ill-prepared emotionally to deal with his sudden fame, had already had paid a heavy personal price for his success. His longtime wife Dee (whose pictured on the cover of My Son, the Celebrity) had divorced him in 1966 and gained full custody of the couple's two children. He would subsequently lose his money and his health as well. Sherman dealt candidly with his insecurities, and his use of humor to keep some of his demons at bay, in his 1965 autobiography A Gift of Laughter, which is long out of print but well worth reading.

Although his days as a record-maker were over, Sherman continued working in TV, contributing to some of Bill Cosby's specials, making occasional Tonight Show appearances and providing the voice of Dr. Seuss' animated Cat in the Hat in a much-loved 1971 special. He also won acclaim as author of the 1973 book The Rape of the A*P*E*, a controversial meditation on the sexual revolution and American puritanism.

By that point, Sherman had fallen upon hard times financially and health-wise, fighting diabetes, emphysema, high blood pressure and the effects of his overindulgence in food and alcohol. Despite his troubles, he continued working on new material, developing a non-musical standup act that had convinced Warner Bros. to sign him to a new recording deal.

Before a new album could be completed, though, Sherman died on November 20, 1973—just ten days short of his 49th birthday, and a mere decade after "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah!" had stormed the charts. Steve Allen, who had remained a friend and supporter even after Sherman was fired from his talk show, delivered the eulogy at his funeral, and later penned a touching tribute to Sherman in his 1982 book More Funny People.

Rhino released My Son, the Greatest, a single-CD Sherman compilation, in 1988, and issued the comprehensive My Son, the Box in 2005. The latter is pricey and now out of print, which is OK since it's more Sherman than any sane person needs. A smarter bet is Collectors' Choice's recently released individual reissues of Sherman's four best albums: My Son the Folk Singer, My Son the Celebrity, My Son the Nut and For Swingin' Livers Only.

Download:

"Al 'n Yetta" mp3
by Allan Sherman, 1963.
available on My Son the Celebrity

"Sarah Jackman" mp3
by Allan Sherman, 1962.
available on My Son the Folk Singer

"Shake Hands With Your Uncle Max" mp3
by Allan Sherman, 1962,
available on My Son the Folk Singer

"Mexican Hat Dance" mp3
by Allan Sherman, 1963.
available on My Son the Celebrity

"Barry Is The Baby's Name & Horowitz & Get On The Garden Freeway"
by Allan Sherman, 1963.
available on My Son the Celebrity

"When I Was A Lad" mp3
by Allan Sherman, 1963.
available on My Son the Celebrity

"The Twelve Gifts Of Christmas" mp3
by Allan Sherman, 1964.
available on Songs for Swingin Livers Only

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This is the fifth of eight posts at the Boogie Woogie Flu, in which eight Jewish writers will discuss the works of other Jewish artists for eight consecutive days in celebration of Hanukkah.

Jewy Ramone

2010-12-04T16:30:00.009-05:00

by David Gordon

RIP Jeff Hyman

Believe it or not, it wasn’t always cool to be a skinny, nerdy Jewish kid from Queens. Williamsburg was where my mom took me to buy cheap school clothes from the Hasidic shopkeepers. Long Island City was a wasteland where we went to wreck shit as kids or later on, as young artsy types, to make Super 8 films of ourselves wrecking shit. Those were the days when cool downtown people loathed Brooklyn and one could, literally, go for weeks without crossing above Fourteenth Street or going west of Broadway. In that Old World atmosphere, I had Manhattanite friends who had barely ever set foot in Brooklyn, (a trip to BAM maybe or the Botanical Gardens) but who never, ever touched Queens. Nowadays, just being a native makes me one of the last Mohicans, but back then I was definitely second-class. I was also 125 pounds, allergic and bronchial, sniffly and pasty, bookish and and pathologically shy. I hung in the back of jazz clubs, haunted used record stores, kung-fu triple features, midnight gore films and dusty book and comic shops, but it never crossed my mind that anyone like me could actually do anything cool like that. All those heroes were from a different tribe: cooler, older, richer, poorer, blacker or whiter.

Then, one spring evening, I was sitting in the passenger seat of my parents’ car, parked on the Upper East Side, waiting for them to finish getting their hair cut and twirling the radio dial. I don’t know what year it was, but I was young enough that my family all still got our hair cut together. Somewhere in the air, I stumbled across a tune that changed my life, (for the second time –– the first was hearing what I learned was Bitch’s Brew). I didn’t know the name of the band or the song, but from the minimal lyrics it was easy to guess: "I Just Wanna Have Something To Do."

Coming into consciousness as I did around 1980, in the second wave of punk, or post punk or whatever, and having been drawn first to blues and jazz, and loving the old Stones and Who but finding their shows and recent albums appalling, I would not, at the time, have described myself as a rock fan at all, finding the whole concept embarrassing and overblown, commercial mush for the meathead masses. Nor did the loudness and speed of the Ramones shock me. But it made me re-connect to rock and roll as something that mattered, that was not made for waving a lighter in Giants Stadium, but for prowling the streets, riding the subway, sitting on the stoop waiting for something to come by, writing bad poems, stealing books and doing whippets. It was alive, in all the best and worst senses of the word.

Much of that incredible vitality came from anger, aggression and hopeless energy, the amazing power they unleashed. But there was something else, something that wasn’t there, for me, with The Sex Pistols or The Clash. A note of longing, of yearning, of loss. A bittersweet tone, a beauty, that I think came from Joey’s singing, from his voice. I recognized it immediately in that song, in the choked off last word to the line “I just want to be with you…” and the haunting sweep of the repeated “tonight,” that opens up to take in the world of everything we love and can’t touch. It shows up in many other places too, in “I Want to Live,” in “I Wanna Be Sedated,” even in the dark majesty of “Don’t Bust My Chops” or the strange sob in the immortal “Somebody Put Something in My Drink.”

I connect this note, this tone, both deep and soaring, to blues, to doo-wop, to Sinatra, to Iggy, to something ancient and poetic but also completely modern American urban: the heart in the beast in the jungle. That feeling always grabs me by the throat. I know it’s anathema to say this, but I love those songs as much as the Beatles. Maybe more. Once, when I was in the fashion business (another story) we recruited the cheerleaders from the local, mainly Hispanic high school to perform, and as they leapt and yelled and waved their pom-poms, and formed a pyramid, I had them blast, “I Just Wanna Have Something To Do.” It gave me chills. I think the DJ and I hugged.

In the recent Ramones documentaries, there were two bits I found especially moving: the map that showed where the Ramones played across the country and the world and which bands sprang up in those cities, as if, seeing the guys from Queens triumphant, kids everywhere suddenly realized they could do it too. And I love the footage from Latin America, where crowds of fanatical teens filled stadiums and chased the limo, chanting for Los Ramones.

CBGB is gone, my hearing is going, and Jeff Hyman, in the foreshortened perspective of time seems like what he always was: another great Jewish songwriter and New York pop-singer. But for the angry, lonely, hungry, horny, dorky and lame, for young people all over the world who know they are fucked, that they have nothing but their lives to bet, Joey Ramone will always be a hero. This, to me, is the message behind every Ramones tune: You are a star, and your life, today, is a song.

Download:

"I Just Want To Have Something To Do" mp3
by the Ramones,
available on Road to Ruin

"Listen To My Heart" mp3
by the Ramones, 1976.
available on Ramones

"Today Your Love, Tomorrow The World" mp3
by the Ramones, 1976.
available on Ramones

"It's A Long Way Back To Germany (U.K. B-Side)" mp3
by the Ramones, 1977.
available on Rocket to Russia

"Slug" mp3
by the Ramones, 1977.
available on Rocket to Russia

"Commando" mp3
by the Ramones, 1977.
available on Leave Home

"The KKK Took My Baby Away" mp3
by the Ramones, 1981.
available on Pleasant Dreams

"My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes To Bitburg)" mp3
by the Ramones, 1986.
available on Animal Boy

"We're A Happy Family" mp3
by the Ramones, 1977.
available on Rocket to Russia

"Rockaway Beach" mp3
by the Ramones, 1977.
available on Rocket to Russia

"I Want You Around (Original Version)" mp3
by the Ramones, 1977.
available on All The Stuff (And More), Vol. 2

"Questioningly" mp3
by the Ramones,
available on Road to Ruin

"Danny Says (demo)" mp3
by the Ramones, 1980.
available on End of the Century

"What A Wonderful World" mp3
by Joey Ramone, 2004
available on Don't Worry About Me

"Bye Bye Baby" mp3
by Ronnie Spector and Joey Ramone, 1999.
available on She Talks to Rainbows

top photo: © Roberta Bayley, 1977.

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This is the fourth of eight posts at the Boogie Woogie Flu, in which eight Jewish writers will discuss the works of other Jewish artists for eight consecutive days in celebration of Hanukkah.