As you enter the dread confines of middle age, the likelihood of spending every night in a hallucinogenic stupor gets less and less. I think this is down to a number of factors. Perhaps you’ve lost touch with the sort of chancer who used to help you achieve such a state, and you feel that asking your new best friends (the yummy mummies at the school pickup for example) where you could get a quarter of something mellow might be rather frowned upon. Possibly your career as a top judge/school teacher/shadow home secretary doesn’t really knock along with a class C habit. You might have found that your increasing years needed to kick off a review of your lifestyle, and that you were only going to allow into your body ingredients to feed, rather than addle, your brain.
Whatever your reasoning, it’s quite likely that you miss your decadent years. You might find yourself nodding along to that old joke about the man that goes into the doctors:
“Doctor, I really want to live to be a hundred”
“Certainly, all you need to do is give up drinking, smoking, chasing women, fried food and start exercising twice a day.”
“And if I do, will I live to be a hundred?”
“No, but it will certainly feel like it.”
But, if you’re one of those former hemp-heads, listlessly yearning nostalgically for your more agreeably wasted days, help is at hand, courtesy of the Emu, the blog that always aims to please. All you have to do is tune in to BBC1 at just after 7pm on Saturday evening. For there you will find hallucinogenic treats that you thought you’d left just to the back of your very own Camberwell carrot.
The programme is called “Over the Rainbow”, and features a number of nubile young hopefuls desperate to appear in the latest Andrew Lloyd Webber masterpiece* “The Wizard of Oz”. And if you’re short of time, don’t feel you have to watch it all the way through. But you must, repeat must, watch the last 10 minutes of each show, and you’ll be thankful that you did.
At the end of each episode is a ‘sing-off’, where through some complicated mathematics known only to Graham Norton and the BBC pension fund, two girls are pitted against each other and forced to sing a duet in which one of them will lose and be unceremoniously kicked out of the show. Which they seem to do with good humour, although it must be very tempting to try to distract your competitor during the song with a raised eyebrow, surreptitious cough, or discreet wedgie. Then the panel, which includes a slightly camper version of John Barrowman, keeps one Dorothy and loses another. If in doubt, the casting vote goes to ALW himself. Who appears to be on a throne, and is referred to at all times as ‘The Lord’. I must have missed the news on the day that popular multi-millionaire and plagiarist songwriter ALW became a conservative life peer, as I’m sure I would have remembered such a ringing endorsement of the UK political system. Anyway, the dear girl is booted out, but not before some ringing words of sympathy from ALW (sorry, LAWL), such as “I know you’re going to go far” and “Let’s keep in touch”, words which the girls are bound to hear the next time a well-educated bounder dumps them in real life. And then comes the really good bit. Rather than thanking the panel and LAWL, and offering firm handshakes all round before exiting stage left, our Dorothy is asked to sing for the final time. Which she does, with her (soon to be ex) chums, in front of a pair of 15-foot high sparkling slingbacks. And in a croaking voice, she begins a song which includes a line to the panel which goes “You’ve ditched her so completely”, that her fellow competitors gladly sing along to. Then, for reasons best known to the producers of the show, she takes her own sparkly shoes off and symbolically presents them to LAWL, whose putty-like features have creased further into the vacant stare of the rest home client. And then, she takes a few steps up the stairs to a crescent moon seat, and begins a rousing version of “Somewhere over the Rainbow”. And (this gets even better), as she sings, the seat raises up and over the stage so that she’s singing down at her erstwhile competitors. The camera angle changes at this point and looks down at the wide eyed lovelies, all fighting back the tears, and to the untrained eye, all on the verge of a stirring rendition of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me". As the latest Dorothy to go blasts out her last note, the crowd goes mad, and there are no doubt nods on the panel and whispers backstage about the latest one being a real trouper. And the very very best bit, far better than anything you could get from a tenner exchange in the back room of the Dog and Duck on a Saturday night, is as the camera pulls back. Because without warning, the crescent moon accelerates at some pace roughly North West (ie into and past the top left of your TV screen), taking Dorothy into the spotlights that you can’t see, and also very possibly into a forgotten oblivion. I believe this is called a metaphor.
You couldn’t make it up and you couldn’t buy a trip like that.
*I am marginally outnumbered in my house in not being a particular fan of ALW. If ever I find myself in a tight corner in trying to put him in his place, I always remind myself of the great Humphrey Lyttleton joke: “History has seen some great musical pairings, from Gilbert and Sullivan to Rodgers and Hammerstein, right through to Andrew Lloyd Webber and his Photocopier”.
This is a blog which starts off with me in the shower, so readers of a nervous disposition may wish to look away now.
Jr Emu #1 bought me a radio for my Christmas present; one that I can listen to when I'm out of the shower in the mornings. Given that I take a morning shower in the basement of the office after running into work, however, this creates an issue. My radio stations of choice for the morning are Radio 4 (light political grillings - just the thing to kick off the morning meetings) or Radio 5 (relatively inane banter that might inform the odd conversation during the day on football). And unfortunately, even though the great British Broadcasting institution reaches all around the world, it is unable to penetrate the lower ground floor in the NR4 postcode area.
Unless, it seems, it is masquerading as BBC Radio Norfolk, which has signal like you wouldn't believe. I don't quite understand this, as I thought that all BBC channels would be transmitted from the same masts at the same strength, but the truth is there to be heard in glorious mono, every morning at 8am.
So, to get to the point, I am compelled to listen to Radio Norfolk in the morning. Now, me and Radio Norfolk actually go back quite a long way.
In my youth, I worked at Radio Norfolk for what was probably all of about 4 weeks. I had a very brief stint as an assistant to an assistant, and very briefly reached the position of bona fide assistant when the teatime show presenter went on holiday, thus allowing his assistant to stop being an assistant, and thereby needing his own assistant.
The best fun on local radio was devising phone-in competitions, and at Radio Norfolk we had the added challenge of having no audience with any enthusiasm for phoning in. Or possibly no audience with any enthusiasm. Or possibly no audience.
Which left us pretty much to our own devices, and this meant getting our friends to phone up in a style that I like to think was ripped off wholesale by shock-jocks a few years later. So, for example, we would announce the 'talented pets competition'. "Phone us with your talented pets, and we'll let the county know", we'd call out. "If you can't get through right away, keep trying, as the phones are really hot here at Radio Norfolk", we'd cry, looking out into the control room, where the work experience girl was looking intently at a phone that was steadfastly refusing to ring. At which point, we'd call in our special weapon, which for the sake of this blog, we'll call Mike Todd, on account of that being his name.
Mike would appear on the phone (we had to dial him, which always left the work experience girl a bit more miserable), and he'd pretend to be a caller with an interesting pet. Initially this was a yodelling dog, which was basically his flatmate making howling noises while MIke played the piano. Then it was a tap dancing tortoise, introduced by a nervous schoolboy, who'd discovered this talent while a) his Dad was out, and b) he'd let the tortoise stand on the hotplate. And so on. We did get a few genuine callers, which left us a bit flustered, but we soldiered on. I don't think anybody from Radio Norfolk noticed anything was unusual - largely you were alright, even on primetime, as long as you didn't use up any of the 'needletime' budget.
This may have changed now, but certainly in those days, the royalties you had to play on records, calculated by 'needletime', could make or break the budget of the show. So you did one of three things. 1. Talk about absolutely anything for as long as possible. 2. Play music from unsigned bands. 3. Play music from 'pre-paid' albums (Now that's what I call… etc). Fortunately, we managed to fill hours and hours with 1 & 2 and seldom resorted to 3.
But the best bit about Radio Norfolk was the institutional parochialism that filled the place in a pleasant, practical fashion. The best example of this was the traffic report. Growing up near London, I was familiar with Capital Radio's 'Eye in the Sky', swooping down on the North Circular and giving up to the minute reports at all hours of the day. Things in Norfolk were slightly different. Firstly, the only road that anyone was bothered about was the A11. It got people into Norfolk, and it got people out. Secondly, the budget didn't really run to helicopter surveillance. So, very practically, one of the editorial staff would phone up her Dad every morning. Her Dad lived on the side of the A11, just outside Wymondham. So, after the normal father/daughter greetings were complete, he'd put the phone down, go to the front door, look to the right and to the left, then report back accordingly.
So, although I would never listen to Radio Norfolk if I had any real choice, if I do have to then it's always a bit nostalgically. Certainly I listen to the webcam driven traffic reports with some disappointment, as I'd just really like to know that the A11 is clear at Wymondham. And I listened with abject horror on Friday, when the phone in was 'what do you look for in a chicken'. Just asking for trouble, quite frankly.
And imagine my surprise when I came across this on the BBC Norwich City website tonight.
You need to look at the last item under 'local news'.
And if you can't read this, it says "Farmer reunited with lost fowl". I suppose when you see real life imitating stereotypes, we may as well enjoy it.
MusicPosted by kevin Sat, December 05, 2009 09:35:04
There's a danger that this blog ploughs the troughs of predictability, but bear with me, do.
I made the huge mistake of venturing 'up the city' last weekend. It was of course, late November, but no reason not to have every single shop dolled up like a Vegas Elvis, with the shop assistants all wearing those hilarious festive caps. And every shop I went into* was playing a loop of jolly yuletide songs. Cue the grumpy old man blog about Christmas coming far too early, completely missing the point of being festive, and feeling suicidal every time Sir Noddy yells 'It's Chriiiiiistmas'.
But no, I am nothing if not unpredictable, as my wife remarked a few years back when her birthday presents were all centred around a golfing theme. For this is a short blog about rhyming couplets.
I don't really get the whole rhyming thing, to be honest. If you really strip it down, the idea of expressing yourself in the form of rhyme is really weird. It means that every time you say something you immediately limit yourself on the second line. And yet we've all had a go in our time, and usually to disastrous and embarrassing effect.
My personal trick with this, incidentally, is to start with a really more obscure word on the second line, so that from a distance, it looks like you have contrived the whole thing out of nowhere. So:
'For you I would defy temptation, or mastermind matriculation'
has got a lot more hope of getting through the censors than
'It's only a matter of time before you, become the doo be doo be doo**'
Anyway, you get the general idea. The point of rhyming to express yourself is just mad. And sometimes, in a bid to just make a song rhythmic in the most contrived way, it all goes horribly wrong. Which brings me back to the shops. A fantastic example of the ouvre*** is my personal favourite at this time of the year:
On a worldwide scale, It's just another winter's tale
(Winter's Tale - David "Bard of" Essex)
And, if you care to look, almost every line in this song is a similar appalling lyrical crime.
And let's knock up a quick top five while we're here:
2. I'm serious as cancer, When I say rhythm is a dancer
(Rhythm is a Dancer - Snap!)
And they say there are no taboos left....
3. Giant steps are what you take, walking on the moon, I hope my legs don't break, walking on the moon
(The Police - Walking on The Moon)
From the group that brought you 'Da Doo Doo Doo', and other great classics. You could easily have had "You don't ever want to see me again, And your brother's going to kill me and he's six feet ten", but I prefer the idea of Sting/NASA worrying themselves about breaking their legs. On the moon.
4. And fiery demons all dance when you walk through that door, Don't say you're easy on me you're about as easy as a nuclear war
(Duran Duran - Is There Something I Should Know)
Err, yes. That lyric is an embarrassment. You've let yourself down, you've let your school down, etc etc
5. There was a little old lady, who was walkin down the road, She was struggling with bags from Tesco. There were people from the city havin lunch in the park, I believe that it's called al fresco
(Lily Allen - Ldn)
I would hope that in future songs, 'Our Lil' will manage Lidl/Fiddle, Aldi/Mouldy, and very possibly M&S/Hedonist.
So that's my pre-Festive gift to you. If you want to populate numbers 6-10, please do let me know. Almost any Bob Dylan songbook from the 'lost years' would give you a good start.
Until we meet again. (Don't know where, don't know when.)
*And reader, sadly there were many. My bid to get 'something special' for Mrs Emu at this time of year extends my patronage well beyond my normal haunts of Thorns the Ironmonger and Chadds the Gentlemen's Outfitter.
**You can insert a number of endings here. Blue, True, New, and even, in the right circumstance, Glue. The only really great example of this rhyme in pop music that I can think of is:
'Alison, I know this world is killing you, Alison, my aim is true'
MusicPosted by kevin Mon, November 23, 2009 21:51:58
I'm hoping that this will be a cathartic experience, because I can't remember ever feeling quite so low about the world of popular music.
Let me explain.
Following another challenging week, Friday evening found me curled up on the sofa, snoring lightly after couple of pints of home-brew. When I awoke, it was to the sounds of the cast of Eastenders ritually murdering the best of Motown. Even in the relative clarity of sobriety two days later, I still can't understand why anyone thinks that having a group of unconvincing actors being less convincing on the singing and dancing front is in the least bit entertaining. Unless it's in the name of shameless self-promotion (which I think is pretty much what celeb cheridy passes for these days). Anyway, it was horrible.
In my more structured daydreams, I've often thought that the one possession which I would cherish for the rest of my life would be a 200 play jukebox (probably an Ami Continental, if any of you are reading this with a view to that special Christmas present). 50 of the singles will be Motown, the other 50 will be the Stiff back catalogue, and frankly, I'll need for nothing else in my life. Although after Friday, I've added an Ian Beale voodoo doll to my wish list. The point is, where something is good, be careful about messing it about. And if something is great, leave well alone.
Which brings me to Sunday night, when it was time to catch up on the immersion in popular culture that is the X Factor. And, as you may have seen, the return to the stage of everyone's favourite misfit, the fairground exhibit that goes by the name of Susan Boyle. Who was singing 'Wild Horses'. And frankly, reader, I wept for her. Well, I went to bed early, anyway, which in our house counts as about the same.
I will find it hard to describe to you how fantastic I think Wild Horses is as a song. It's constructed brilliantly. It has flawless and yet relaxed guitar work on it (using Nashville tuning, fretboard fans). It manages to point Jagger's louch public schoolboy sneer in a perfect embodiment of decadent self loathing. Crikey, any more of this and I'll be writing for the Spectator. The point is, it works, in a way that 'Angie' and 'Dead Flowers' do, because on their day, the Glimmer twins could write songs that were just perfect rock and roll. And as such, it needs to be approached with caution. And putting Susan Boyle on the job, in a sapphire evening dress, singing tremulously in the style of Judy Collins with full orchestral accompaniment is Not The Way To Do It*.
As a result of this shenanigans, there are generations of people who will think that this is the way that 'Wild Horses' is supposed to sound, as a saccharine drenched sub-standard song, complete with sloppy timing and over ambitious wailing**. It makes even less sense than the cast of Eastenders frankly, but I guess we shouldn't be surprised. After all, it's only a few months since the same crew took Leonard Cohen's finest round the back of the X factor studios and kicked it to death in the company of our very own Alexandra Burke.
This is popular music we're talking about, so it's really really really important. Something must be done.
Sorry, that wasn't cathartic at all. I'm still very cross.
* For an example of The Way To Do It, see The Sundays version of Wild Horses. And if you're really into this sort of nonsense, listen to Neil Young's 'Powderfinger', back to back with the Cowboy Junkies cover. That (as Mr Punch might say)'s the way to do it.
MusicPosted by kevin Fri, August 28, 2009 12:09:52
Michael Jackson - A Nation Mourns and the jokes keep rolling in...
Probably a bit late to be writing anything about the decline and fall of everybody's favourite moonwalker, but in previous weeks I'd run out of time, and in any case, it's easy to say things you regret if you haven't really thought them through.
Take the death of Elvis, for example. If you held any sort of connection to the punk scene in 1976, or even if you were mildly rebellious in your own special, angst-fuelled way, Elvis's demise was an absolute gift. The doyen of your parents' generation, who still played Las Vegas in a ridiculous glittery catsuit, died eating a huge cheeseburger. On the toilet. So, in death, there was a natural follow on from the joke that was his life, and this gave you all the permission and ammunition that you needed in order to poke fun at the tragic quiffy tears that ensued. In fact, Elvis, and his death, remind a fairly standard and standing joke to anyone on my generation for at least a decade. Then, with a fairly embarrassed sense of maturity, we played his back catalogue and realised that here was someone who really did change the world by…well, just being, really.
So, just as we split Elvis into 56 & Sun & Sam Phillips, morphing into post-GI film singer into Vegas Karate kid into overweight pastiche, we can probably plot a similar course for M Jackson, although I would probably claim that there was rather less to his rise, and a bit more to his decline.
Jackson's entry into the public consciousness was as the lead singer/lead vehicle for the Jackson 5 in the early 1970's. It's easy to forget that they broke new ground in accessibility to a fusion of soul, gospel and pop music, and that, despite, or because of Jackson Sr's approach, they worked as hard as any professional outfit. And Michael was 7 at the time. Just think of any 7 year old child that you know and ask yourself if they could knock out 100 gigs a year, if they could ever be that musically mature, and if they could make the hairs on the back of your neck by singing 'Who's Lovin' You'.
The thing is, I'm not sure that Michael Jackson, in my head, ever managed to build on that fantastic period at Tamla Motown; and era that gave us ABC, Mama's Pearl, Going Back to Indiana, Rockin' Robin; songs that didn't really mean that much (and why should that ever matter in pop music), but that just sounded pretty cool. Some might say that he reached his zenith during his 20's and 30's, on the back of Thriller, and Bad, but, let's face it, that was Michael Jackson in the hands of the genius that is Quincy Jones, rather than anything more creative, or mature.
The third era of Jackson trying to find some purpose while apparently going slightly mad in a fury of flashguns and celebrity splurges, was, frankly embarrassing. And I think it is that lack of maturity, in fact that pretty regressive approach to growing up that was irritating and annoying.
And given that the third era is the one that has sold and continues to sell papers, it would be easy to focus on that alone. But, learning from EA Presley's rollercoaster of public affection in life and in death, we should be wary of being too dismissive. The Michael Jackson that I thought was fantastic had disappeared by 1980 (and if you don't believe it, just listen to the Jackson 5 back catalogue, back to back with the Thriller fillers). But just because his equivalent of the Vegas years were tasteless, suspect and embarrassing doesn't mean that we shouldn't continue to celebrate the good stuff.
Last night I dreamed that somebody loved me...well, kind of, insofar that I found myself 18 rows back from the god-like genius that is Stephen Patrick Morrissey.
I've always thought of Morrissey as someone completely at ease with his (slightly snobbish) lot, so it was a bit of a surprise to me that his shows at the Royal Albert Hall (cancelled due to throat infection) and the Birmingham Symphony Hall (ditto) were followed by The Great Yarmouth Britannia Pier. Because Great Yarmouth doesn't really have that high culture feel to it - to complete Norfolk snobs like myself it's always been a bit of a tacky embarrassment, the bit that you visit once every couple of years to remind yourself how lucky you are not to have to go there more often.
Anyhow, by Friday, his master's voice had cleared up sufficiently for an attempt at a gig, and thanks to my good friend DJ78 we had tickets clutched in our hot and sweaty hands. And as a result myself and Mrs Emu fair skipped along the pier to one of the more surprising venues on Morrissey's world tour. As we queued, we passed under massive signs for forthcoming attractions - the Chuckle Brothers, Cannon and Ball, and (of course) Jim Davidson. Then a huge sign for "Long John's Show Bar - where the stars of stage and TV enjoy a drink". I'm not making any of this up. I did venture into the bar before the gig, hoping to catch a sight of Morrissey enjoying a pre-gig chaser with old 'nick-nick' himself, but no joy - they were probably in Long John's VIP area.
Anyway, suffice to say the gig itself was fantastic - the band was as tight as ever and Morrissey exuded his rather bored coolness with a lot more self-deprecation than he used to manage in his younger years. Shirts were ripped off, the security bods on stage were kept busy by a series of reverse stage dives, and the venue suddenly seemed just the right mix of intimate and ironic.
But the most extraordinary thing was the audience. Having spent my formative years in the shadow of the Smiths, I thought I understood the importance of looking right at indie gigs. You need to work hard at not looking as if you've tried too hard, and look bored and interested at the same time. Ideally you will wear clothes belonging to someone now dead. But the audience at Yarmouth seemed to have missed these vital lessons in deportment. I witnessed a really challenging pair of elasticated velour trousers, and not sure that was the worst crime.
And yet, we should presume that every member of the audience had shelled out £32 on a ticket, so you'd think they must have been fans. So, either you can't judge a book by its cover, or we are being overrun by morbidly obese philistines with too much money. Or both. To test this theory, the next time you see somoene lumber towards you in a massive pink velour leisure suit, try singing a couple of lines from 'The Queen Is Dead' or 'Meat Is Murder'. After all, what's the worst that could happen?
MusicPosted by kevin Wed, March 18, 2009 22:12:08 I'm not absolutely sure how this current stream of consciousness will end, but a funny thing happened to me while walking through Prague last weekend with Mrs Emu.
I heard a song I couldn't quite place. Then, the horrible dawning that it was Gary Glitter singing, rather ironically, about wanting me to be in his gang.
So a number of things struck me, all in a very short space of time: - for a fleeting moment, just before I realised what the song was, I enjoyed it, thinking 'I've not heard this for a while'... - then very quickly chastised myself for enjoying the work of someone who, let's face it, is a pretty despicable individual... - then felt slightly miffed that the person in the shop with the music on hadn't realised that civilised people just don't listen to GG any more for very good reason.... - then began to wonder the degree to which we should separate or integrate what we think of people with their artistic output...
Which is where I got a bit stuck. So we just don't hear anything by the Glitter Band any more , which is kind of understandable, up to the point at which we deny people the pleasure of listening to some fantastic glam rock self-deprecation.
At the other extreme, we listen innocently enough to music that, for all we know, might be being played by Nazi sympathisers, Paedophiles, or...well, actually most other things are pretty ok in Rock n Roll.
Sometimes a terrible dawning hits you like a brick after you've been enjoying the music, then you feel obliged to discard, or end up listening to it with an apologetic grimace. To my knowledge, this has happened to me three times in my listening career (Herbert von Karajan, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Eric Clapton, seeing as you ask), and I genuinely find it difficult to listen to those artists any more without thinking of their political or moral views. But I'm probably enjoying listening to output produced by even more extreme individuals without knowing it.
So maybe we should just completely separate the political from the music. But then we wouldn't have Bessie Smith, Woody Guthrie or Billy Bragg, and the world would be a worse place for that.
So, as I say, I'm stuck in this stream. I rather fear that the answer will be that we should always have an eye on the alignment of the artist's views, but there's probably a degree of forgiveness along the madness/genius axis. Which still doesn't help your correspondant, who ironically has just found himself tapping his feet along to Rockin' Robin by Michael Jackson...which is a fantastic song that I'd really like to recommend, but...
MusicPosted by kevin Mon, February 16, 2009 23:04:56
So, I get an email from a friend….
‘I know its strange to email you at this time but sitting in a blues bar in Chicago and thought of you - fantastic I have a new appreciation’
And these, gentle reader, is a fantastic email to get, as it gives me a very easy excuse for a blog, and a chance to write about probably the most under-valued and misunderstood music around these days.
Almost 30 years ago, I wandered into a record shop in Edinburgh, all new wave attitude and stupid haircut, and heard some music that just completely blew me away. I had a related discussion with Mrs Emu about this a few nights ago; where she claimed that there was something about sound systems in record shops that makes music sound great, whereas I believe that there are just sussed people in charge of the music. Whatever, this was fantastic – it was ‘Boom Boom Boom’ by John Lee Hooker, and I did something that I’ve only ever done that once – I went up to the counter and asked for a copy of whatever was playing. Now, slightly unfortunately this was the ‘Blues Brothers’ soundtrack, so my next few years were spent trying to backtrack from that to the source of this fantastic music, and that in turn meant some pretty challenged purchases, but it was a reasonably entertaining journey.
Years later, and a bit more up to speed on what was what in the Blues canon, I ordered an Elmore James album from my local HMV. I happened to know the manager there, and when I went in to pick it up, I asked if I could play a couple of tracks through the sound system. (Thereby, incidentally, proving both mine & Mrs E’s theories to be correct.) Now, Elmore James is an artist who you just have to listen to. I could go on about why he is so fantastic at some length, and I may well do just that in a future blog, so to hear him thumping out throughout the shop was something pretty special. But not nearly as special as the woman who rushed up to the desk….”That music – I’ve never heard anything like it before – where can I get a copy?”.
And so it is with some sorts of music. It’s a pretty good feeling to be able to share it with people, so, in the style of Hi Fidelity, here’s a top 5 blues artists you really, really ought to own. Note that this concentrates on Chicago blues, we could go down to the delta, but that will have to wait for now…
Muddy Waters – has an astonishing history – the Father of the Blues, kept Chess records alive, inspired the British Blues revival in the 60’s, worked with Sunnyland Slim, Howlin’ Wolf, Big Bill Broonzy, gave Chuck Berry his first break…so he was a pretty influential sort of fellow. And in 1977 he recorded ‘Hard Again’, with James Cotton and Johnny Winter. Recorded it in 2 days indeed. And, in my opinion, you’ll never hear a harder, more perfect blues album. If you don’t own it, buy it. If you do own it, take it down to your local record shop and get them to play it back to you and see what happens.
Elmore James – could play the slide guitar like no-one else before or since. His technical genius owed a lot to Hawaiian influences, and in addition the two great complimenting factors were his screaming, almost falsetto voice, and his band – the Broomdusters. You’ll be hard pressed to find a tighter backing band, and it’s a huge shame that EJ and the Broomdusters never found the fame they deserved in the early 60’s. So track down what you can – if you can find a copy of the Charly album ‘One Way Out’, fantastic, otherwise try to get a recording with ‘The Sky Is Crying’, ‘One Way Out’ and ‘Dust My Blues’. You should find yourself crying or dancing, and ideally both.
Sonny Boy Williamson (2). There were two SBW’s, but the one you want to listen to initially is SBW (II), aka Rice Miller. Mad as a bucket of frogs, but you can’t fault his influence. I saw some footage of him on a recording of ‘Ready, Steady, Go’, dressed in a ‘city gent’ suit, and wearing a bowler hat – I think he was trying to fit in with the English audience. He once et fire to a hotel room by trying to cook a rabbit in a coffee percolator. Anyway, the point about SBW is that he was playing straight Chicago Blues that people just felt they had to reference, or in some cases, downright plagiarise. There was something about the way that he approached his music that made it instantly accessible, which given that he was taking often fairly sinister songs from the delta, hopping up to Chicago, and then travelling to play to audiences in Europe, is no mean achievement. You really ought to listen to ‘Help Me’, Eyesight to the Blind’ and ‘Checkin’ Up On My Baby’ to understand what I mean here.
Koko Taylor – Not a big name outside blues afficianados, but her stuff is pretty easy to get hold of, and you could do worse than go to one of the Alligator compilations. Try to get something that uses the big Chicago sound with lots of horns, like she has on ‘Wang Dang Doodle’. The inspiring thing about Koko Taylor is the ease with which she can move towards a gospel sound while still sounding completely genuine.
Howling Wolf – another huge influence on the British Blues scene in the 60’s, and his ‘The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions’ album, is worth buying just to hear him make mincemeat of the trendy blues wannabees. He sometimes comes across as pretty scary, which is all part of the package, and he must come pretty close to Willie Dixon in the output he’s produced over the years. Have a listen to the anthology album (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Howlin-Wolf-Anthology/dp/B000NIWITA/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1234824783&sr=1-2) if you need an introduction.
And no time for BB King, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells and all the rest. But this was just to get started, so maybe another time, another club and another blog.
MusicPosted by kevin Fri, December 19, 2008 22:28:03
When I was a young, easily influenced wannabe musician (well, let's face it, a wannabe bloke who hung around with musicians), I was convinced that the defining quality of a really good song was the ability to pull it back to a vocal line and one instrument, typically a guitar or piano.
This theory stood me in fairly good stead as it managed to distance me from any prog-rock in the 1970's. And largely the songs that were around in the 1970's which sounded good acoustically then, still sound good now. For example, I heard an acoustic version of Whiskey In The Jar the other night that was every bit as powerful as Thin Lizzy, who, I'm ashamed to say, I had always thought wrote the song. And, at the other extreme, if you were to play, say, any song by The Rubettes on any combination of acoustic instruments, they'd still sound, at best, shite.
However, as Rick Wakeman, cape flying, was kicked down the King's Road by the spit of punk & new wave in the late 70's, the only thing that really mattered was being in a group. And with some notable exceptions, that's pretty much the way it stayed, and, because the dynamics of music in groups are so fantastic to listen to and watch, for me they took over, and the 'strip it back' test sort of lost its meaning.
And then my friend James sent me this MP3 file, of a single lead vocal track from Marvin Gaye. And listening to it without the song that we're all familar with makes it even more resonant; I knew he could sing, but somehow the full recording softens the emotion. So, consequently, I'm thinking about going back to basics. You?
Anyway, I'm going back to listen to some delta bluesmen...
MusicPosted by kevin Thu, November 20, 2008 21:23:39
So, best guitar solo in the world ever* goes to The Carpenters, for a slightly bizarre song; Goodbye To Love. Bizarre, because it really shouldn’t work. The lyric was inspired by Richard Carpenter watching a 1940’s film with Bing Crosby and Basil Rathbone**, in which the lovely (and pre pipe/deerstalker) Rathbone claims to have written a song called ‘Goodbye To Love’. Looking at John Bettis's lyrics, it definitely feels like it was written especially for Karen C:
"I'll say goodbye to love, No one ever cared if I should live or die, Time and time again the chance for love has passed me by, And all I know of love is how to live without it, I just can't seem to find it
So I've made my mind up I must live my life alone, And though it's not the easy way, I guess I've always known, I'd say goodbye to love"
The song starts in fairly traditional Carpenters style – soft, sweet, sad, sentimental, soporific, and probably some other words beginning with s. There’s even a clarinet (I think) popping up in the orchestration on the second verse. Then, after a minute or so, a band of angels start harmonising with Karen in a way that only really happens in MGM musicals or Carpenters songs. So far, so standard.
Then, an odd thing happens. Apparently, when they were recording the song, Richard hired Tony Peluzo to play a guitar solo. He recorded something very Carpenters-like, at which point RC said ‘Burn It’. He may well have said ‘Burn It, Man’, but I like to think that no member of the Carpenters family ever got that carried away. Anyway, what resulted was the most fantastic guitar solo, with feedback that actually harmonised with itself. And if that wasn’t enough, you get another verse,then just as the angels pop up again, in drives Tony with the real guitar solo.
The Carpenters actually received hate mail when their fans heard this song for the first time; ironic as it triggered off a whole range of pompous power ballads which probably deserved some real vitriol.
Anyway, the point of this is that it shouldn't work, it does, and because it's so fresh, and so well executed, it says more than a thousand axe-shredding copyists will ever do. Even if it is by The Carpenters.
*My opinion, and possibly only lasting this week
**They were in the film, rather than sat on the sofa watching it with him
MusicPosted by kevin Tue, November 18, 2008 22:49:17
I hadn’t really thought about blogging guitar solos before, but I just re-heard (and then repeated far too many times) a song on my ipod, and came to the conclusion that it’s just the best guitar solo…ever*
