Today, St. Patrick's Day, marks three years since Alex Chilton's
unexpected death. In his memory, I'm posting a record, that until very
recently I had never heard. Earth Man Blues by the somewhat
mysterious John Byrd Band, was recorded at Ardent in 1976 and released
the following year on the local Memphis label, Power Play. Alex is
listed as a "Guest Singer" in a band that includes John Byrd, Haines
Fullerton, Phil Gallina, and Rit Ritennour. The two songs are credited to
John Byrd, whomever that may be. Perhaps he is an invention of Alex (?) in
one of his many guises, in the year before he would release his Ork
single, produce The Cramps, play with Chris Stamey and the Cossacks in
New York, and eventually go on to begin recording his ramshackle
masterpiece, Like Flies On Sherbet.
The A-Side,
"Earth Man Blues," is sort of a white boy jazzy blues number with a
harmonica that nearly ruins it. It has a throwaway feel, but is saved by
Chilton's wry delivery a la Bach's Bottom where he goads the guitar player through a pedestrian solo, "Look out It's Byrd, I'm gonna have a fit!" The singer, as usual, is detached and
cracking himself up, and he likes it that way.
The
B-Side, "Friend At Very Good Time," is a pretty good post-Big Star folk
rock ditty that plods along sweetly to an acoustic guitar, probably
strummed by Chilton, with the refrain "You opened my mind to whiskey and
wine, and it's right back to blowing my mind." Sweet as it may be,
there's something amiss on both of these sides, which like most of Alex's mid
70s output, has a tension that threatens everything to fall apart, which is
what makes them interesting and compelling.
If any of you sleuths out there know anything about this band, feel free to illuminate me with the details.
Download:
"Earth Man Blues" mp3
by the John Byrd Band, 1977.
Power Play 45
out of print
Today is the second anniversary of Alex Chilton's untimely passing. Last year I posted a handful of the records that Alex covered. Today, I offer a few more of those songs that he lovingly interpreted over the years. Some you know, some you might not, all of them great. For more of these, tune into the archive of my March 14th show on WFMU's Rock 'n Soul Ichiban: HERE
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.
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/SisterLovers 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...
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.
I want to say a few words to all you young girls out there. Yeah, you’re too much! First you try casting your spell on a guy with a little Oogum Boogum Boogum. And if that don’t do. You try a little Ooga-ga-oosay Ooga-ga-oosay Ooga-gapoo. And if that don’t do it, you give him a Psychotic Reaction. It goes something like this…
In 1967, the mantle of top breadwinner at LA-based independent record label, Double Shot, was changing hands from The Count Five—the Dracula cape-wearing teenage quintet from San Jose who made it to #5 on the national charts in 1966 with their garage rock rave-up, "Psychotic Reaction"—over to Compton-by-way-of-Louisiana R&B singer and songwriter, Brenton Wood (born Alfred Smith) who was charting with his top-10 hit "Gimme Little Sign," and "The Oogum Boogum Song." Wood had diligently studied the popular hits of the day and approached the craft of songwriting as a code to be cracked, teaching himself what made people want to buy records. His answer, in the form of "The Oogum Boogum Song," was to write a song about "current events." Unlike other topical songwriters of his day, for him, this didn’t mean writing about politics or the war in Vietnam, but rather the news he could see on the street: "There were bell bottom pants coming into view, hot pants, mini skirts, stylish stuff that young people were getting into," he told me in a recent interview. "I just packaged it all and gave it back to them." He made this magic-themed song catchy by replacing words like 'abracadabra' and 'hocus pocus' with his own made-up, African-inspired slang, "oogum boogum" and "ooga-ga-oosay," prefiguring the Michael Jackson-quoted "Soul Makossa" chant by 5 years. That same year of ‘67, the two Double Shot hitmakers would come together, if not in person (Wood says he never met The Count Five), then on wax, when Brenton Wood recorded a remake of "Psychotic Reaction," released as a single and on his LP, The Oogum Boogum Man.
Brenton Wood starts his version of “Psychotic Reaction” by reminding his audience ("all you young girls out there") that he was the one who gave them "The Oogum Boogum Song." But if that self-penned hit just wasn’t enough, he offers this cover of someone else’s hit—a decision that had been imposed on Wood, who had no affinity for the song, by label boss, Steve Winn. Double Shot owned the rights to "Psychotic Reaction," and presumably wanted to milk the known hit at a time when its original artist, The Count Five, was already beginning to fall from view, while padding out a planned long-player compilation of Woods’s singles. "It was just a song they gave me to sing," Wood told me. "I don’t need to sing everybody’s song. Nobody wrote a song for me. I wrote my own songs. When you start giving me songs and asking me to sing them, what do you want me to do with this? I don’t know; I just do what I’m told."
To save costs for the session, the label had Wood add his new vocal and an organ part played by The Candidates’ Maurice Rodgers (who also played Farfisa on "Gimme Little Sign") on top of The Count Five’s original backing track. The distance between the original song’s grungy, fuzzed-out rock sound and Wood’s effortlessly smooth and soulful style was made literal when The Count Five’s backing track was mixed so low under Wood’s overdubs as to sound in the finished product like it was being pumped in from another, far-away room. "I would have preferred to cut it over again," Wood says, "but if you’re gonna do a cheap session, you use what you have in the can."
Despite it not being his choice to record "Psychotic Reaction," Wood did his best to make the song his own. "I didn’t want to just copy the same thing that was already out. So what I did was add a little bit to it to make it my story. I had to consume the story that The Count Five was singing and reproduce it as being me." In addition to personalizing the song’s introduction, Wood also added an impassioned vocal performance over the original’s instrumental centerpiece in which he attempted to fully realize the song’s theme by having a psychotic reaction of his own—a rapid-fire recitation of the opening lyric, which degenerates into a frenzied stream of falsetto pleas: "Gimme gimme gimme gimme!" Of the final result, Wood says, "I love the way it came out. I just did a psychotic reaction on it!"
Alex stuck his finger down his throat and gagged, showing me that’s how much he hated Memphis. We laughed about it. He didn’t like me much either (something I wrote perhaps, or his interpretation of my horoscope charts), but that didn’t mean we couldn’t laugh together, and it didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy Memphis. He’d recently boarded a flight for a European tour, and the movie showing was The Firm, shot in Memphis—he gagged again. Memphis was a cloak that was hard to shake.
Alex Chilton became a public figure at the age of 16 when, not long after he’d first seen the inside of a recording studio, a song from that session became a 1967 #1 worldwide hit, “The Letter” by the Box Tops. At that impressionable age he became a product packaged and sold, considerable talent yielding considerable profits—for the manager and not the artist. Soon, the monkey walked away from the organ grinder to do his own thing.
His thing: He channeled the future by capturing the underground zeitgeist, three times in the 1970s alone—an audience for the clean pop of the first two Big Star Records caught up to the music a decade after it was made; the third Big Star album was nihilistic and beautiful (hello Elliot Smith and the ‘90s); the shambolic Like Flies on Sherbert deemed hip the wealth and diversity of Americana roots while becoming a punk rock classic. The art of these efforts has become canonized, but the financial return was—again—basically nil. So the monkey bit the hand that fed the banana and cut its own path.
Instead of profit, he was assigned prophecy. But the Replacements only got it half right in their tribute song. Children by the million might have screamed for Alex Chilton, but he’d never have come running. Waves of admiration and love were an assault, and he was scornful of those who needed to make more of his songs than he did. His lifelong interest in astrology makes sense: What is colder, more beautiful, more distant than the stars? Astrology is the province of the seeker, not the sought.
Alex Chilton’s career in song is a testament to his seeking, to his eye for precise detail, his adventuresome ear, his empathetic heart. In a few lines he could chillingly evoke the angst and maelstrom of young adulthood, touching strangers in a personal way (their responses leading to his notorious friction with admirers). He could be a sweetheart as often, and less notoriously, than the contrarian. His mind remained curious all his life, making its own way through politics, the humanities, and sciences with the same zeal he mined R&B, country, classical and all music. He was never predictable, and kept his audience on its guard. In the same late-night late-1970s radio appearance when he sang Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”—years, of course, before Whitney Houston made a career out of it, he also broke into a filthy racist ballad. His songs were not unlike William Eggleston’s photographs—crisp, saturated, and composed, with an underlying menace, with a throat-aching wistfulness.
Alex was as complicated as Memphis itself. XL Chitterlings, my favorite of his stage names, stole Wilhelm Reich books from the Memphis Public Library because he said no one checked them out, and he gave them to people whom he thought would appreciate them. When a friend heard him explain his world view, he chided him, “You're right Alex, the world is wrong.” Telling me about this later, Alex added “And, hell. I believe that. The world is wrong, I am right.”
To the end, he did it his way. Apparently he’d been feeling bad for several days, but not so bad he couldn’t refuse advice to visit the doctor. Dead at 59, the loss magnified by its abruptness, this meteoric musician is stilled but his great recordings live on. The eulogies will too, much to his likely irritation.
A couple of Wednesdays ago, I got off the train on the lower west side and started walking towards Gary's Chop Shop, a recording studio where my friend, Nicholas Hill, hosts and records a show called the Radio Free Song Club. I chose my path carefully, avoiding crowds outside bars. It wasn't any ordinary Wednesday. It was March 17th, Saint Patrick's Day, and the streets of New York were overflowing with inebriated revelers, mostly of non-Irish descent, celebrating their alcoholism.
But that's not the point.
As I approached Hudson Street, my phone rang. It was my old friend, Jared, who calls infrequently, and told me he had some bad news. "Alex Chilton died," he said. I didn't believe him. "Are you sure?" I asked. In this age where information flies around so quickly and sometimes incorrectly, it just didn't seem right. He said it was confirmed by the local Memphis paper. I thanked him for calling to let me know, and still didn't quite believe it. It's funny, because neither of us could say we were friends with Alex, but still, it was the kind of thing that people who were affected by his music would be compelled to share with one another.
When I got upstairs to the studio, I don't think I even said hello, only "Alex Chilton died." It was still breaking news and I had to consult Google to be sure. Everyone assembled there were also in disbelief. I checked, and indeed, it was true. The Radio Free Song Club is a loose conglomeration of songwriters, all of whom have been affected by his music, either directly or indirectly. For that evening's taping, the scheduled phone interview was with Peter Holsapple, who was a friend of Alex's, and also recorded with him. Peter had accompanied some fellow North Carolinians on a pilgrimage to meet Alex and Chris Bell in Memphis in 1978 that was chronicled at this blog a few years ago. Nick wanted to be sure that Peter already knew before the call, so we we checked a certain social networking site where the deaths of many are first publicized by the ubiquitous R.I.P. status updates.
Peter knew.
Still processing the loss of his friend, he had this to say: "It's hard to say how much Alex influenced me and a generation of people to pick up guitars ... you hear him in so many songs, and especially recently ... and I'm just grateful that the mythology of Big Star, that he kind of fought against for years, finally kind of seems to have won out, and people realize what a superb band they were and are ... he will be missed."
The special guests for the March 17th taping were Beth Orton and Sam Amidon. They walked in and we shared the news. Sam said he knew Alex's early Big Star song "Thirteen," and I went to work looking up the lyrics on the internet. Beth and Sam worked out a version, accompanied by the more than able house band of Dave Schramm and David Mansfield, and recorded it in one take. None of the assembled musicians had ever played this song together. It's exceptionally beautiful and was recorded only hours after Alex's death. You can hear it HERE.
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To a lot of people, Alex Chilton was "that guy from Big Star" or "the singer in the Box Tops." He was, of course, a lot more than that. Some, first learned of him from Paul Westerberg's song, "Alex Chilton" on the Replacements' 1987 record, Pleased To Meet Me, recorded in Memphis with producer Jim Dickinson - who also died prematurely this past year. Dickinson collaborated with Chilton on his two most important records: Sister Lovers and Like Flies onSherbert. They are records that are both dark and full of light at the same time - the sound of things falling apart and settling into a beautiful mess.
Producer Jon Tiven also tried to record Alex in 1975 in another attempt at capturing the mayhem that was midtown Memphis. He was duly treated as a carpetbagger, and arrived to find Chilton unable to play guitar - his arm was broken. The sessions went on, regardless, and produced a few minor masterpieces, and several other things that probably should have never seen the light of day.
I probably saw Alex Chilton play about twenty times. He was, at times, brilliant, and other times just half-assed. Alex was as good as anyone when he felt like it. Talking to a musician friend of mine who also knew him, I suggested that Alex was a guy who just didn't give it a shit. He corrected me, "No, Chilton was a contrarian." The more I think about it the more I think it's a pretty accurate picture of a guy who did whatever he felt like, especially if it was contrary to what others expected him to do. God bless him, he made a career out of it, and re-invented himself continually while always staying true to his ideals. He would have made a fine aging New Orleans bluesman.
The first time I actually saw him play, was also on a Wednesday night, at Folk City's Music forDozens - shows for three bucks booked by a pre-Yo La Tengo, Ira Kaplan. I was awestruck. Alex was embarking on a new phase of his career, and had (I think) yet to release Fuedalist Tarts, where he covered Slim Harpo, Willie Tee, and Carla Thomas. For me, and a generation of younger post-punks, we learned about a lot of music from Chilton. His records from the 80s have some songwriting by him, but are mostly flavored by his excellent skill as a song-finder. So were his shows. An incredibly talented songwriter (he could rhyme "Flakier" with "Tammy Baker") and a musician who could effortlessly play nearly anything, including Bach and Jazz standards. He approached songs from an astoundingly democratic position, and was at ease in covering "Volare" (in Italian), as well as K.C. and the Sunshine Band, Jimmy C. Newman, Brenton Wood, Porter Wagoner, Troy Shondell, The Velvet Underground, Frank Sinatra, The Seeds, Guitar Slim, Ronnie and The Daytonas, The Carter Family, The Troggs, Sir Mack Rice, Loudon Wainwright III, Carole King, Ernest Tubb, The Beach Boys, or "Disco Lady" by Johnnie Taylor.
The last time I saw him play, he was also booked by Ira Kaplan, at one of Yo La Tengo's 2007 Hanukkah shows at Maxwell's. I felt lucky, because when buying tickets for these shows, no one knows who the special guest is gonna be on any given night during the eight-night stand. I met Alex a few times over the years, photographed him, made small talk, smoked a joint with him (as most people that spent any time around him did) and after the show with Yo La Tengo, talked to him about sending some photographs that I had made of him. I asked him for his email address. He said he didn't have one, and that he'd never used a computer in his life. He may have been pulling my leg, but I kind of believed him. I took my notebook out of my bag and handed him a pen, and he wrote down his home address in New Orleans. We talked a little bit about New Orleans, and how he had gone "missing" during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Friends tried to persuade him to flee with them to Memphis, but he stayed behind giving them his car. For about a week, no one knew if he was dead or alive. He survived, and was eventually air lifted from his house in Treme. In the Replacements' song, "Alex Chilton," Westerberg sang a line that probably never sat well with Alex, "If he died in Memphis, then that'd be cool, babe."
He didn't.
On March 17th, 2010, while cutting his lawn, he suffered a heart attack and died en route to the hospital in New Orleans, the city that he called home for nearly half of his life. Thanks for the music, Alex.
Tonite is an astrologer's wet dream. Did I just say that? I know very little about astrology, but the moon in our skies is a blue one, or more precisely the second full moon of the month, with a partial eclipse, and it's made of (blue) cheese. It's also New Years Eve. The term, "once in a blue moon" has come to mean seldom, rarely, or perhaps never. Apply this as you wish, to whatever may be your current milieux. A full moon is prone to wreak emotional intensity or mahyem. Wolves howl at them, and singers sing about them.
"Blue Moon" is a Rogers and Hart standard. Lorenz Hart wrote four different sets of lyrics to it for four different Hollywood films. The one that stuck, has been recorded by hundreds of artists, and the Elvis Presley version of 1954, is in my mind, one of the most beautiful and haunting records ever recorded. Sam Phillips summoned up some real magic that day in Memphis. Another beautiful and different song of the same name, was recorded by Big Star, in the same city twenty years later with another shaman producer--the late great Jim Dickinson--at the helm.
Bill Monroe's 1947 hit, "Blue Moon of Kentucky" is also a standard, in bluegrass, country, and rock 'n roll. Elvis recorded it in the same sessions that yielded "Blue Moon." In Monroe's version, it's a sad and plaintive waltz to a lost love, ("It was on a moonlight night/ The stars were shining bright/ and they whispered from on high/ Your love has said goodbye"). The stars are whispering to Monroe and he asks the moon to shine on the one that's gone and left him blue. Bill Monroe was a spiritual man, and made some of the spookiest records I know. In some folktales, a blue moon has a face and talks to those in it's light. Elvis, states the same, but asks a favor of the moon in a new set of lyrics for the introduction, "Keep on shining bright and bring me back my baby tonite."
What does all this mean? I haven't a clue. Consult an astrologer.
Happy New Year, and may the moon shine on you and yours, brightly, tonight.
... Eyewitnesses say they are ordinary-looking people. Some say they appear to be in a kind of trance. Others describe them as being misshapen monsters. At this point, there's no really authentic way for us to say who or what to look for and guard yourself against. Reaction of law enforcement officials is one of complete bewilderment at this hour. Police and sheriff's deputies and emergency ambulances are literally deluded with calls for help. The scene can be best described as mayhem.
On the inner groove of Beale Street Saturday Night, amongst the various engravings that exist on old LPs, are four words in quotations: "WORLD BOOGIE IS COMING." This was a saying of Jim Dickinson's, who died on Saturday. His contribution to American music puts him in the company of men like his mentor Sam Phillips, about whom he said: "...God created all men equal. I think God gave Sam just a little extra." The same could be said about him.
I never met Dickinson, and always just took it for granted that someday I would. I saw him play a few times in intimate surroundings here in New York: first at the Lakeside Lounge, accompanied by Eric Ambel (who wrote a fine tribute to Dickinson HERE) and again at Joe's Pub a few years later. Sometime in the late 90s, I was in Memphis, and went to meet writer Robert Gordon for lunch at a midtown deli. As we sat there eating our sandwiches, Robert looked up and out the window. "Is that Dickinson?" he said. He paused for a moment, as we watched him amble across the street and past us. "He must be coming from the bank...Dickinson takes care of a lot of things, but himself is not one of them."
Apparently, there was a lot of truth to that statement. He loved the Bar-B-Q--maybe a little too much-- and earlier this year Dickinson underwent heart surgery, and never made a full recovery.
In Gordon's bookIt Came From Memphis, Dickinson recalls his early education in suburban Memphis:
"Everybody learned it from the yardman." says Dickinson. "Alex Tiel taught me everything he thought was important to teach a nine-year-old white boy. How to shoot craps, how to throw a knife underhanded--the important lessons in life. When it came to something he didn't know, he brought in an expert. He wasn't a musician, but he sang as he worked, unaccompanied, and when he realized I was interested in music, he brought in a man who taught me this technique that I learned to play from."
And so Dickinson's piano lessons began.
James Luther Dickinson went on to play in numerous bands in Memphis. In 1969, when the Rolling Stones were recording in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, he went down to hang out, and ended up playing piano on "Wild Horses" --apparently Stu couldn't play minor chords on the piano--he was also present and (probably) helped with the arrangement of their version of Mississippi Fred McDowell's "You Got To Move" which was also recorded that day. In the early seventies, with a group of fellow Memphians--The Dixie Flyers-- he went to Miami, as the backing band for countless Atlantic Record sessions; played on and produced Ry Cooder's first records, and later a handful of soundtracks (including Paris, Texas); recorded his own record, the classic Dixie Fried in 1972, following it up late in life with a string of great solo LPs. As a producer, he worked with Alex Chilton as a solo artist, and helped craft the collection of songs known as Big Star's Third. Later, he produced The Replacements, Toots Hibbert, Green on Red, Chuck Prophet, Amy LaVere, and many others including his sons, The North Mississippi All-Stars. In 1997, he played keyboards on Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind, andwhen Dylan received a Grammy for the record, he thanked his "Brother," Jim Dickinson. His accomplishments are far and wide, and it's doubtful there will ever be anyone quite like him again. The world is a different place, and a better place for him having been a part of it.
Here are some of Dickinson's great recordings, as a frontman, multi-instrumentalist sideman, producer, arranger, and recording artist. This is really just the tip of the iceberg.
I'd like to thank all of the contributors for their thoughtful posts here this week at the Boogie Woogie Flu. As I sit here on the eve of the last night of Hanukkah, trying to write something about today's selections from the songbook of Gerry Goffin and Carole King, I am, perhaps at a loss for words, but more than likely, humbled by the quality of writing turned out by everyone's entries. I'm really floored, thank you. It's hard to keep this thing going, and to have such generous and talented friends and cohorts makes it much easier.
The idea for this week's Hanukkah posts was simple: first night - one song, second night - two songs, etc. Some of these were assigned, and some not. I tried to get everything up at sundown each night, and miraculously, like the oil in the temple - it all worked out. All the writers and all the subjects are Jewish, but as Alex so poignantly pointed out in his post, we'd all be better off by a softening of these distinctions. Does it really matter what we are? We're humans, and from the look of things in the news right now, we don't treat each other very well. These very distinctions are the basis for most of the the hate and war we inflict on one another.
So, excuse me while I break free of format, and play one by a non-jew: Steve Earle, who introduces the following song every time he performs it by saying that he's "gonna keep on playing it until there's peace in the Middle East." I think it fitting that we listen to it today.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming: Eight songs written by the Jewish songwriting team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Happy Hanukkah.
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