Star Maker Machine

Standards: Bridge Over Troubled Water

2012-01-27T10:39:00.005-05:00

Merry Clayton: Bridge Over Troubled Water

[purchase]

Despite recording six studio albums of her own (the first four of which are very much worth owning), and working with both Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd (which I find amusing considering their Southern Man/Sweet Home Alabama rivalry), Merry Clayton is still best known for providing the soaring vocals on The Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter.

Perhaps less known is that in 1970 she released her very own version on her debut album, also entitled Gimme Shelter. The best track on it however, in my humble little opinion, is her rendition of Bridge Over Troubled Water, originally by you-know-who.

Standards: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning

2012-01-26T21:46:00.001-05:00

Richard Thompson: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning

[purchase a different live version]

In June, 2000, my family went to London. As it turned out, Richard Thompson was playing in Croydon, not too far away, and we got tickets. My wife and I were big fans, and my kids, who were 10 and nearly 7, also loved his music. WFUV, currently my favorite radio station, plays him often, and he regularly appeared at the Tarrytown Music Hall, just down the road from our house, and his shows were a family outing. If you are a fan, you know this song, probably the one song that Thompson has to play every night to avoid rioting. It is a modern ballad, in the style of an old English ballad, about the love of a boy (James) for a girl (Red Molly) and a motorcycle (the Vincent). To me, it is also a perfect short story. In only a few minutes and verses, Thompson immerses you in the setting, fills out the characters and tells his story. I’m an American professional who has never ridden a motorcycle, yet Thompson’s artistry makes me feel what it is like to be an English criminal and understand why he loves both the woman and the bike. And when he plays the song live, his guitar playing is always mind blowing.

The concert at Croydon was an excellent show. It is remembered particularly in my family for three reasons. First, the opening act, a singer/songwriter, was awful. I won’t name her here, but if you want to know, I’m sure you can find it on the Internet somewhere. Second, early in the set, Thompson broke a string, and was able to change it himself while playing and singing “Twist and Shout.” Finally, there was this version of “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” with two added verses, which are rarely performed. In his pre-song banter, Thompson says that they are “more for the enthusiast.” (Unfortunately, the banter is attached to the end of the prior track, so I am not including it here).

One of the extra verses, which becomes the second verse, describes the history of the Vincent Black Lightning, and how it broke the land speed record, This is why, James explains, he had to have one of his own. In the standard version, after James is shot during a robbery and is dying, he hands the keys to the Vincent to Molly, gives her one last kiss, and dies. The narrator concludes, “He gave her his Vincent to ride.” But the additional verse goes on to describe how Molly stole James’ body from the hospital, had him cremated, his ashes contained in the Vincent’s fuel tank and buried at the side of the road. In this version, the narrator concludes, “And even the hard men cried, And forever on his Vincent he rides.”

Is the song better with the two verses? Presumably, Thompson, the writer, doesn’t think so, or he would have recorded the song with them, or at least perform the song live with them on a regular basis, and he doesn’t. I have to agree. But I’m glad I was able to hear them.

Standards: Time After Time

2012-01-26T17:59:00.001-05:00

I snapped this just last week. How…timely.

Cyndi Lauper & Sarah McLachlan: Time After Time

[purchase]

Cassandra Wilson: Time After Time

[purchase]

Here's a 1983 classic that always seems more recent to me than it is…I have to remember that the 80s were 30-ish years ago. A boatload of covers exist for this song from artists all over the musical spectrum: I've got ones from Willy Nelson, Miles Davis, Bon Jovi, Ronan Keating, and Matchbox 20. It's got cross-genre appeal, for sure.

The first version I've posted is a self-cover from Cyndi's 2005 album, The Body Acoustic. It's slowed down a bit, plus it's got Sarah McLachlan trading verses with Cyndi. I like it better than the original.

The second is a gorgeous arrangement for guitar and bass and, of course, Wilson's soulful vocals. It's from her tribute album to Miles Davis (who'd recorded this song earlier, the year after its release).

Standards: Summertime

2012-01-26T15:21:00.006-05:00

Brainbox: Summertime

[purchase]

Perhaps you were expecting Ms. Joplin? Don't be so disappointed. This version of the "Porgy And Bess" classic is performed by a Dutch prog rock group led by pre-Focus guitar god Jan Akkerman and a histrionic vocalist named Kaz Lux. The year is 1969. "Subtlety" did not sell records. And let's face it, when Kaz hits that falsetto "SkkkkyyyYY!" 80 seconds in, you're hooked.

Standards: Wayfaring Stranger(s)

2012-01-26T11:59:00.000-05:00

Maria McKee: Wayfarin' Stranger

[purchase]

Jerry Reed: Wayfaring Stranger

[purchase]

"Wayfaring Stranger" is a standard in the folk music catalog, dating back to the 19th century. A religious ballad, it gained new meaning during the 1930s, with lyrics seemingly reflecting the plight of the displaced and homeless -- poor wayfaring strangers, "traveling through this world of woe." In the 1940s, it became a signature tune for Burl Ives, who named both his autobiography and radio program after it.

"Wayfaring Stranger" remains an oft-recorded song -- an iTunes search brings up more than 400 matches. Here are two distinctly interpretations.

The first is strictly traditional, performed by Maria McKee on the Songcatcher soundtrack album. It is one of McKee's finest vocal performances, in a recording career full of them.

The second is by Jerry Reed. Thanks to his novelty records and good-ol'-boy persona honed in movies like Smokey and the Bandit and The Waterboy, Reed's many fine records of the 1960s and early '70s have sadly been forgotten. Among the most interesting is 1967's Jerry Reed Explores Guitar Country, on which he reworks a dozen folk and pop classics. Reed's "Wayfaring Stranger" starts with his signature acoustic guitar picking. Soon, a Hammond organ joins in, and Reed's playing gets jazzy, and he even offers up some scat singing. His unique take is a reminder that standards can not only be honored, but reinterpreted as well.

Standards: Minnie the Moocher

2012-01-26T02:46:00.000-05:00

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy: Minnie the Moocher

[purchase]

Minnie the Moocher is the timeless tale of a good girl gone bad, prohibition style. The song was written by Cab Calloway, who first recorded it in 1932. Calloway was a great showman. His dance moves look impossible even now, and may have inspired James Brown. Minnie the Moocher has the famous hi-de-hi-de-hi call and response between Calloway and his band. He used to get his audiences to sing the responses, and then Calloway would sing more and more complicated strings of nonsense syllables, until the audience could follow him no longer. All in good fun, of course. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy was part of the swing revival movement that broke out in the mid 1990s. Unlike many of their peers, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy performed mostly original songs. Obviously, Minnie the Moocher was an exception, but, heard along side their originals, it served to validate just how good at writing these kinds of songs the band was.

As a bonus, I thought I would share something fun that I came across while researching this post: the Betty Boop cartoon Minnie the Moocher. The song comes in about half way through the cartoon, and the version you hear is by Cab Calloway and his band. The dance moves of the walrus-like ghost were taken from a rotoscope of Calloway’s stage moves.

Standards: My One and Only Love

2012-01-25T20:48:00.000-05:00

John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman: My One and Only Love

[purchase

So, what is a ‘standard’ anyway? The temptation is to see the term as defining that special type of popular song that has, through no real fault of its own, managed to move beyond mere ubiquity into the realms of cliché. Ask a cross-section of people to name a standard and the songs mentioned would be telling – My Way, perhaps, or Unforgettable. My Baby Just Cares For Me. That type of thing.

The only trouble there, of course, is that these songs aren’t standards. We equate them with a particular artist, but would be hard pressed to name a version of the song recorded by anyone other than that person. To an extent, they become cabaret fodder, or the purview of lazy impressionists in need of some kind of shorthand with which to telegraph to an equally lazy audience who it is they are trying to pastiche.

My One and Only Love, on the other hand, is a true standard having been recorded by a huge number of artists despite never exactly achieving the type of fame that can so effectively rob a song of all its power. This version comes from John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman’s self-titled 1963 masterpiece, and words can’t do it justice. Suffice it to say that if you are unfamiliar with Hartman this recording will make you wonder how it’s possible that a singer of such warmth and emotional range could possibly be so comparatively little-known. As for Trane – well, the avant-garde’s gain was certainly lyrical jazz’s loss: this was the only vocal album he would ever record as band leader, and that seems a damn shame.

Guest post by Houman

Standards: Lovesong

2012-01-25T20:27:00.000-05:00

Jack Off Jill: Lovesong

[purchase]

Since its 1989 release via Disintigration, The Cure’s “Lovesong” (often titled “Love Song,” to the general apathy of its copyright owner) has been the object of dozens of published covers and countless live renditions by a mélange of artists representing all manner of genre. Its straightforward lyrics and their accessible expression of emotion guaranteed the song plenty of publicity and airtime, and its hooky, downbeat guitar and bass riffs laid over an anxious drumbeat and haunting, typically Goth-rock synthesizer chorus all proved not only catchy and memorable, but also easily replicable to even the amateur musician.

Though certainly not alone in exploiting the aggressive potential latent in “Lovesong,” now-defunct Floridian band Jack Off Jill bring the song’s energy to the forefront of the presentation. Vocalist Jessicka implies a world of meaning that Robert Smith, whether intentionally or not, left missing from his tremulous, downtrodden vocalisations. Beginning the song in breathy seriousness, she sets a tone of intimate address that increases in intensity as the timbre of her voice clears and rises throughout the verses. In true ejaculatory fashion, Jessicka’s grungy vocals erupt into a scream that highlights for the listener the energy and passion that Smith’s version ignored in its representation of devoted love.

Jack Off Jill’s version of “Lovesong” appears as track 66 (tracks 15-65 are each comprised of six seconds of silence, a digital trick used by artists who wish to argue that something something tracks aren’t songs something something, as on Korn’s 1998 release Follow the Leader) on Clear Hearts Grey Flowers, the 2000 album immediately preceding their breakup. Many other artists have performed noteworthy versions of this standard—particularly memorable is the smoky, punky, overdriven anthem delivered by The Deluxetone Rockets on 2008’s Green Room Bluesbut Jack Off Jill’s carefully delivered sounds create what is, to me, the most moving adaptation.

Guest post by Andrew

Standards: Fools Rush In

2012-01-25T08:46:00.001-05:00

Bow Wow Wow: Fools Rush In

[purchase]

14 year old Burmese Londoner Annabella Lwin had been working in a dry cleaners when punk impressario Malcom McLaren recruited her and three members of Adam and The Ants to form the Burundi drummers-inspired Bow Wow Wow. Two years before their cover of the Strangeloves' "I Want Candy" hit the UK Top Ten , they released a poppy cover of this forty year old Johnny Mercer/ Rube Bloom standard, originally sung by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ray Eberle and Billy Eckstine.

While Annabella sings like a breathless, flirty 14 year old, the real triumph belongs to bassist Leigh Gorman, who frantically riffs through the entire two minutes. "Fools Rush In" appears on the second disc of the 2006 Marie Antoinette soundtrack.

Standards: Knockin' on Heaven's Door

2012-01-24T22:33:00.000-05:00

Warren Zevon: Knockin' on Heaven's Door

[purchase]

There are dozens of songs penned by Bob Dylan that can be considered standards, but to me no other Dylan song has the "universal appeal" or an all-encompassing feeling quite like "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." The song is originally from the 1973 soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and describes that thoughts and feeling of a dying deputy. From what I can tell, it's been covered by over 400 different artists ranging from hard rockers Guns N' Roses to Canadian pop princess Avril Lavigne, to reggae, country, soul, hip-hop, and R&B interpretations.

"Knockin' on Heaven's Door" is ultimately about facing one's own mortality. Warren Zevon was acutely aware that his life was ending when he recorded his 2003 swan song The Wind. In August of 2002 Zevon was diagnosed with inoperable peritoneal mesothelioma, a cancer of the abdominal wall and lungs, and was given months to live. Despite the concerns of his friends and collaborators, Zevon included "Kockin' on Heaven's Door" on The Wind, in addition to original songs that reference the triumphs and failures of his 56 years. His version is very close to Dylan's original recording, with a tired but heartfelt voice scratching out the lyrics while a solitary electric guitar, played by Brad Davis, grinds out a counter melody. Throughout the repeating chorus at the end of the song you can hear Zevon sing "Open up, open up for me," as if Zevon is saying "it's your last chance to tell me what you need to tell me." The Wind was released on August 26, and Zevon passed away on September 7, 2003.

Standards: Blue Skies

2012-01-23T23:13:00.001-05:00

Special Consensus: Blue Skies

[purchase]

If it’s a cloudy, gray day and you’re feeling down, then find a happy, upbeat version of “Blue Skies” to get yourself smiling again. At least that’s what we do out here in rainy Oregon. After being written in 1926 by Irving Berlin for the Rodgers and Hart musical, Betsy, the song became an immediate hit. One unique rendition is a bluegrass instrumental arrangement by the award-winning Special Consensus band. Besides traditional and contemporary offerings, they’re a band that specifically looks for songs from other genres to ‘grass up. They might find something with Celtic flavorings, or they might take a liking to an old classic country number. In this case, Special Consensus took the popular classic jazz standard and turned it into a signature tune for their band.

Together since 1975, Special Consensus knows what works and doesn't. Their main ingredient is driving banjo-centric material that allows Greg Cahill to demonstrate his flexibility, creativity and eclecticism with the others band members’ solid instrumental prowess. From Chicago, Cahill is highly respected by his bluegrass peers as a consensus builder, and he has served as the International Bluegrass Music Association’s President and Board Chairman.

On their 2007 album release with this track, the band was rounded out with Ron Spears (mandolin), Justin Carbone (guitar) and David Thomas (bass). “The Trail of Aching Hearts” album also featured some key guests to embellish their sound -- Tim Crouch (fiddle), Rob Ickes and Phil Leadbetter (Dobro), Tres Nugent and Tim Dishman (bass). It’s Dishman who actually got the nod for the grooving bass break in “Blue Skies.”

Special Consensus is a bluegrass band with a long track record of success. Their aptitude and diversity displayed with a jazz classic like “Blue Skies” will give you a small taste as to why they garner so much notoriety and fame.

Guest Post by Joe Ross

Standards: A Whiter Shade Of Pale

2012-01-23T10:56:00.003-05:00

King Curtis: A Whiter Shade Of Pale

[purchase]

I remember the wonder I experienced when I first heard “A White Shade Of Pale” as an 11-year-old, a decade after it was first released. It’s a wonder I retain to this day. Never mind the wilfully impenetrable lyrics employing nautical metaphor to describe a seduction, it is the melody that arouses in me (as it were) a peculiar feeling, one of yearning and unease and, oddly, comfort. Like other Procol Harum favourites, such as “Homburg” or “Salty Dog”, it’s gothic and just a bit creepy.

King Curtis instrumental version of the song, recorded in early March 1971 at San Francisco’s Fillmore West with his group The Kingpins (Aretha Franklin’s backing band), retains that strange beauty, but displaces Procol Harum’s gothic sensibility with a soulful vibe. It later featured in the opening credits of the British cult movie Withnail And I (set in 1969, two years before Curtis’ recording).

Live At Fillmore West was released in August 1971. A week later, King Curtis was stabbed to death in New York by junkies whom he had asked to move from his property. He was 37.

Curtis died just as jazz fusion was making headway. One wonders how things might have panned out for him. He might have set an agenda quite different to that of fellow saxophonist Grover Washington Jr (never mind the even smoother David Sanborn). He surely would have been aghast at the later popularity of the elevator sax stylings of Kenny G, who has almost single-handedly robbed the great instrument of its street-cred.

Standards: We'll Meet Again

2012-01-23T04:44:00.000-05:00

Johnny Cash: We'll Meet Again

[purchase]

"We'll Meet Again" is a song hope in times of trouble. A mega-hit in England at the dawn of World War II, the song was popularized by Vera Lynn, who is still alive and kicking at age 94. (In 2009, Dame Vera Lynn's "Best of" CD reached #1 on the British charts, making her the oldest person to achieve that distinction.) The song captured the national mood, helping Britons keep stiff upper lips as their soldiers headed off to battle and uncertain fates.

A quarter century later, "We'll Meet Again" was played for laughs in Dr. Strangelove, a tone that was echoed in what to many sounded like a tongue-in-cheek cover by the Byrds. But, to me, the most memorable version is the one on Johnny Cash's American IV - The Man Comes Around. Released in late 2002, American IV is the final album of new material issued during Cash's lifetime, and "We'll Meet Again" is the final track.

It's a fitting sign off; Cash was in ill health and repeated in interviews that his time was short and that he was looking forward to the afterlife. As a Johnny Cash fan from childhood, the song sent chills down my spine when I first heard it (even more so than "Hurt," whose companion video also foretold of Cash's demise). On "We'll Meet Again," Cash's voice is wobbly, but the instrumentation is surprisingly breezy. The opening guitar run by Thom Bresh (son of Cash's longtime friend Merle Travis) borrows from "Happy Trails to You." An uncharacteristic (for Cash) clarinet and Hawaiian-style dobro create the image of the singer sailing off into the sunset. Family and friends seem to be waving goodbye as they join in on the closing chorus. June Carter Cash can be heard in the crowd -- she would die less than six months after the record's release, with her husband joining her just a few months later.

Standards: Good Lovin'

2012-01-23T00:11:00.000-05:00

Monkeys Typing: Good Lovin'

[Not available for purchase, but see below for more downloads]

1965 was the year I began listening to pop music. It's also the year Good Lovin' was written and released, though I can't claim to having heard either the Limmie Snell or The Olympics versions. I was, however, very much tuning in to AM radio when the more popularly known Young Rascals version hit the charts in 1966. The song is ranked number 325 in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and as such, has been a standard for more than one musican and group.

The one band that I associate most strongly with the song as one of their "standards" is the Grateful Dead. It appears on their 1978 Shaedown Street album and I recall more than one Dead concert where I heard them play it.

The version here is a live cover by a Binghamton, NY "jam band" band called Monkeys Typing. My ears tell me the Grateful Dead rather than the Young Rascals must be the driving influence behind this version. In fact, Typing Monkeys list the Greatful Dead as one of their influences. Aside from the relative polish of their live performances, one thing that impresses me about Monkeys Typing is the fact that they - and the Grateful Dead - offer up a large collection of legally free music for you to download and listen to at www.archive.org, and that is where this version comes from.

posted by KKafa

Standards: Up a Lazy River

2012-01-22T03:33:00.002-05:00

Rickie Lee Jones: Up a Lazy River

[purchase]

I enjoy complex storytelling in songs as much as anyone, but songs that become standards often feature simple lyrics that give them a universal appeal. The songwriter captures a moment in time perfectly, and sets the mood in a way that is relevant to generations in both the present and the future. Up a Lazy River is a Hoagy Carmichael tune from 1930, but it still speaks to us today. Carmichael gives us a blissful summer day, and a couple drifting slowly down a stream, free of care, if only for a moment.

Rickie Lee Jones included the song in an entire album of standards, 2000’s It’s Like This. Her definition of a standard includes the Gershwins, the Beatles, and even Steely Dan. Jones finds the perfect setting for Up a Lazy River. She opens the song in a state of languid bliss, but halfway through, the current hastens and she is joined by a male chorus. This is a device that goes back at least to the swing era, and possibly also a nod to the hit version of the song by the Mills Brothers. The male chorus here is Dan Hicks, Ben Folds, and Taj Mahal. Jones sums up the proceedings perfectly at the end. “That was mighty good,” she says. Indeed.

On the Air: Never Too Late

2012-01-21T14:26:00.000-05:00

Michael Franti and Spearhead: Never Too Late

[purchase studio version]

When I started thinking about this week's theme I begin to think about how the internet, for better or for worse, has changed the way that many of us listen to the radio. With an internet connection you can essentially listen to any radio station which live-streams their programming. For example, I am in Boston, but I regularly listen to sports programming streaming from WGN radio in Chicago.

My first experience with streaming music came in 2004 when my then boyfriend introduced me to KEXP. KEXP is a public supported (minimal advertising) radio station based in Seattle on the University of Washington campus. They began live streaming in 2000. Most of their daytime playlist is dominated by whatever is popular in alternative rock (or indie pop or whatever), but they also have a huge variety of shows featuring country, jazz, world, hip-hop, local music, etc.

My favorite part of their programming is their live guests. In 2005 KEXP released their inaugural Live at KEXP volume 1 limited edition album which featured 19 of their best live performances (out of over 250) from over the past year. One of the most striking performances on this stellar set is by Michael Franti and Spearhead and his song "Never Too Late." Before performing a stripped down version of the song, which really highlights Franti's powerful vocals, Franti describes the meaning of the song and dedicates the song to am important person in his life.

On the Air: El Cumbanchero

2012-01-20T08:10:00.000-05:00

Desi Arnaz: El Cumbanchero

[purchase studio version]

I Love Lucy was the first live television sitcom to be shot on film and to make use of three-camera production techniques. It's also perpetually rerun (even now, 60 years after it debuted, six times per day on the Hallmark Channel). Lucy's popularity is due in no small part to its evergreen comedy. But, its reputation as one of the most profitable TV shows ever is testament to the business acumen of the show's producer and co-star, Desi Arnaz. Desi may have played second banana to Lucille Ball on TV, but he ran the show -- literally. (Arnaz's business chops were likely genetic: His grandfather was a co-founder of Bicardi Rum.)

Arnaz achieved his first taste of fame in the 1930s as a guitarist in Xavier Cugat's orchestra. After WWII, he struck out on his own, with a band made up of Cugat castoffs, most of whom couldn't play the tropical music Arnaz favored. As a result, his orchestra offered an eclectic mix of styles, embellished by Arnaz's energetic singing and playing.

"Babalu" was Arnaz's best known song, but "El Cumbanchero" is his most exciting. Arnaz first recorded "El Cumbanchero" in the 1940s, and it appeared on I Love Lucy a couple of times, most raucously in an episode where Lucy and Ricky host a hoedown in their apartment, trying to get the Mertzes to tear up their apartment lease. This version is taken from a 1951 CBS radio special, Your Tropical Trip.

"El Cumbanchero" was written by Rafael Hernández, the leading composer of Puerto Rican music. That Arnaz's Lucy renditions make this the best-known Hernández composition in the continental United States speaks to the enduring impact of Lucy and the extra boost music receives when performed on prime-time TV.

On the Air: To Be Surprised

2012-01-19T00:13:00.000-05:00

Sondre Lerche: To Be Surprised

[purchase studio version]

Norwegian artist Sondre Lerche is not exactly a household name. My first encounter with the man and his music was an appearance on the David Letterman Show a few years back. Following in a long tradition of late night TV talk shows, one of the better sections of Letterman's show is the regular musical offering at the end, sometimes introducing us to a musician we might not have otherwise been exposed to.

This performance was a breath of fresh air: a song that struck me as commercially viable - yet played with a style that felt off the beaten path. My interest piqued, it led me to locate a studio version of To Be Surprised, which further confirmed my positive impressions. Here was a musician whose live versions of his music were no less professional than his controlled, studio-crafted recordings. In several YouTube clips showing him in informal pre-concert appearances he came across as fun, down-to-earth, skilled and comfortable with his tools (his guitar, voice and lyric writing skills.) His musical genre has been described as lounge/folk/pop.

posted by KKafa

On The Air: KX

2012-01-19T00:10:00.000-05:00

Morning Bride: KX

[Free download of studio version here]

For my first ever post I thought it made sense to look to the classics. Well, classic to me at any rate: Morning Bride are particular favourites of mine and have been for a good while now. They’re one of those bands that seem effortlessly better than celebrated acts who plough the same furrow despite garnering so much less in the way of kudos. Their debut album Lea Valley Delta Blues is a marvel, in as much as it manages to do exactly what its title promises by delivering authentic Americana while remaining true to its roots in North East London.

Factoring an even further-flung destination into this equation comes this track: a version of their 2007 single KX recorded live on Gothenburg’s local radio station P4 during the band’s Scandinavian tour of the same year. In contrast to the studio version this performance strips the song back to two acoustic guitars and the clear, haunting voice of vocalist Amity Dunn. Despite having grown up listening to the mighty John Peel, I confess that I am not usually one to seek out radio sessions. This band is the exception to the rule.

Guest post by Houman

On The Air: Secondhand Furniture

2012-01-17T05:00:00.003-05:00

The Go Betweens: Secondhand Furniture

[purchase]

On an Autumn day in 1984, The Go Betweens appeared on John Peel's BBC radio show and performed four songs that would become available on an EP. They'd just completed Spring Hill Fair, their third album. Their single "Bachelor Kisses" was getting some airplay and the band was in terrific form--bouncy, edgy, tight. You can hear early Talking Heads and Gang of Four, I suppose, but the band's songwriters Grant McLennan and Robert Forster also approached lyrics with the humanity of short story writers. In this song, a divorced man sees his old marriage bed in a secondhand furniture store. All four songs benefit from the stripped down production. It's not surprising to hear fans say, despite its 14 minute length, this is their favorite Go Betweens release.

On The Air: ABC-DEF-GHI

2012-01-17T04:06:00.004-05:00

Sesame Street: ABC-DEF-GHI

[purchase studio version]

A month before I began primary school in West Germany in 1972, the TV authorities broadcast a pilot run of the revolutionary (and therefore controversial) US educational kids’ programme Sesame Street, in English, to measure parents’ reaction to it. I remember my mother, my younger brother and I watching it, and being enthused (I also think watching Sesame Street in a language I couldn’t understand planted in me the first seeds for my growing love of English).

Clearly it was well received by other viewers as well: by early 1973 Sesame Street, now dubbed into German and titled Sesamstrasse, was screened twice daily throughout the country, except in conservative Bavaria.

I loved it. I could do without the repetitious counting and presentation of the day’s letter, but the interplay of the characters, especially the Cookie Monster and Ernie and Bert, and Bob McGrath’s retelling of fairy tales (with a wink and a nod at watching adults) was top notch TV. I also loved the street scenes: real-life characters Susan, Gordon, Bob and Mr Hooper (known in Germany as Herr Huber), and especially Oscar, whom I dressed as at a First Grade fancy dress party.

The song here is preceded by some of the interplay between real people – Gordon and Susan – and Big Bird, voiced by the great Carroll Spinney, who also did Oscar. The rather dim bird then sings about “just about the biggest word I’ve ever seen”, which turns out to be the alphabet, but pronounced as a single, tongue-fracturing word. Like so many of the Sesame Street songs, it is superbly catchy; had it been part of a hit musical – and it sounds like a musical tune – it would be regarded as a Broadway classic.

“ABC-DEF-GHI” was co-written by Joe Raposo (1937-89), whose catalogue of Sesame Street tunes includes some of the best, such as “Being Green”, “C Is For Cookie”, “Sing”, “Doin’ The Pigeon” and the theme tune. He went on to write songs for his pal Frank Sinatra and other TV theme tunes, including that of Three’s Company.

Raposo wrote “ABC-DEF-GHI” with Jon Stone, a pivotal figure in the Sesame Street history, who helped develop many of the show’s stock characters and served as writer, director and producer for many years until his death at 66 in 1997. Crucially, it was Stone who introduced Jim Henson to Children's Television Workshop president Joan Ganz Cooney, the remarkably woman who spearheaded the Sesame Street concept.

On the Air: Cry

2012-01-16T18:40:00.000-05:00

Rockpile: Cry

[purchase Live at Montreaux]

"Rockpile is usually Terry Williams on drums, Billy Bremner on guitar, Dave Edmunds on guitar, and my name is Nick Lowe, I play the bass...Let's have some fun tonight!"

That's how Nick Lowe introduced his band Rockpile during its 1980 appearance on the King Biscuit Flower Hour. King Biscuit was a syndicated concert series, which ran in the '70s and '80s on U.S. radio stations that played cool music. (And, that in the '10s are likely the ones in your town running sports talk or Jack FM. Thanks, CBS, Cumulus and Clear Channel!) Many of the original King Biscuit Flower Hour shows can be streamed for free on the Wolfgang's Vault web site.

The Rockpile show was recorded at The Ritz in New York City, part of a tour in support of Seconds of Pleasure, the band's only official studio recording. (An excellent streaming audio documentary about Rockpile's rise and fall is available here.)

Rockpile's King Biscuit Flower Hour appearance later circulated as a bootleg, Provoked Beyond Endurance. That title reflects the band's experience on what turned out to be its last tour. Shortly after it concluded, Lowe and Edmunds decided they'd had enough of each other, and Rockpile ceased to be. For 30 years, Seconds of Pleasure remained the band's only official release until 2011's Live at Montreaux. That record, taken from a Montreaux Jazz Festival appearance a few of months before the King Biscuit session, features many of the same songs, but the intimacy of the Ritz venue brings out a better show.

"Cry," featuring lead vocals by Billy Bremner, was written by Lowe's then-wife, Carlene Carter. It's the only song on the King Biscuit Flower Hour program that has never appeared on a Lowe, Edmunds or Rockpile record. Carter included it on her "Musical Shapes" album, on which she's backed, most effectively, by Rockpile.

On The Air: One Of Us

2012-01-16T12:49:00.001-05:00

Joan Osborne: One Of Us

[purchase]

It's hard to fit a whole band inside a radio station soundbooth. As such, in-studio covers often provide a chance to hear the heart of a song, stripped down to its singer-songwriter essentials. And the result can be startling, revealing a song for what it should have been, before some producer decided to make it...well, a production.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Los Angeles-based KSCA fm101.9's Live From The Music Hall series, a multi-part "best of" compilation series released in the early and mid nineties which I picked up randomly along the way, and have since reveled in for its hushed, intimate takes on everything from Howard Jones' No One Ever Is To Blame to my favorite version of Bruce Cockburn's Wondering Where The Lions Are, from Jeffrey Gaines' infamous acoustic cover of Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes to an acoustic folk-rock take on early b-side Alternative Girlfriend from Barenaked Ladies. But this Joan Osborne song takes the cake, eradicating all traces of the bombast found in her biggest radio hit, and replacing it with something redemptive: a song worth saving and savoring.

Happily, although long out of print, the first volume of this series was recently posted in its entirety on Popdose. It doesn't have the Howard Jones, sadly - but it has all the other songs named above, plus Dave Alvin, Dar Williams, Willy Porter, and much, much more. Click the "purchase" link above to snag it.

On The Air: Were You There

2012-01-16T04:58:00.004-05:00

Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys: Were You There

[purchase studio version]

The Grand Ole Opry got its name as a result of a gag. Introducing the DeFord Bailey following the Music Appreciation Hour show on 10 December 1927, announcer George D “Judge” Hay riffed on the transition from the just finished classical music show to the upcoming Old Time Music (as country was then called) programme WSM Barn Dance by saying: “For the past hour, we have been listening to music taken largely from Grand Opera. From now on, we will present the ‘Grand Ole Opry’.”

The Barn Dance show changed titles several times, often to reflect sponsorship, but wasn’t officially termed the Grand Ole Opry till the 1950s. When people talk of artists being members of the Opry before that, they are referring to frequent performers on the show, much like a club or hall of fame.

The track featured here is from the 28 December 1940 show, then called The Prince Albert Show, after the sponsoring cigarette brand, and recorded at the War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville, which still serves as a concert venue today (and which in 2010 temporarily housed the Opry). Apart from Bill Monroe, the 28 December 1940 show also featured Roy Aycuff, Brother Oswald, Pap & Odie, Ford Rush and Paul Womack and the Gully Jumpers.

Bill Monroe (1911-96) is regarded as the inventor of bluegrass, a sub-genre of country that drew from the traditional music of the Appalachians, ranging from furious and intricate breakdowns dominated by fiddle and banjo to broadside ballads to gospel. It took it its name from Monroe’s backing band, the Blue Grass Boys, which had been formed just a few months before this recording.

By 1940, Monroe was already a big name as half of the Monroe Brothers. He would go on to become a long-serving and massively influential country icon (Elvis’ “Blue Moon Of Kentucky” was a cover of Monroe’s original).

The song here is the spiritual “Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)”. I would surmise the vocals are by Clyde Moody, “The Genial Gentleman of Country Music” who was a member of the Blue Grass Boys until 1944.

On The Air: Meet Me Tonight

2012-01-15T20:42:00.000-05:00

The Stanley Brothers: Meet Me Tonight

[purchase]

[purchase “on Radio“]

Back in the old days, radio was an important way for old-time and bluegrass musicians to get heard.

Radio provided much needed exposure, publicity and income. Bristol’s WCBY was located on the Tennessee/Virginia state line. Every day around noon, folks would stop whatever they were doing to tune into WCBY’s “Farm and Fun Time” for the latest music and news. The Stanley Brothers first appeared on the show on December 26, 1946. The photo shown here (courtesy of Muleskinner News) shows the band at WCBY about 1948. Ralph and Carter Stanley left Bristol a few times for radio shows in North Carolina, West Virginia, Louisiana and Kentucky. However, they always returned to Bristol.

Finances were tight, and it wasn’t easy to make a living as musicians despite successful recordings on the Rich-R-Tone and Columbia labels. In 1951, Carter and Ralph quit the music business to work at Ford Motor Co. in Detroit. It wasn’t long before guitarist Carter was back, singing lead with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. Banjo-player Ralph was in a serious auto accident. Ralph (and mandolinist Pee Wee Lambert) built rooms in the old Stanley country store, attended an agricultural course, and had plans to become farmers.

Despite the tough times, The Stanley Brothers were at a peak in their musical career during the mid-1950s. So on March 24, 1956, they accompanied Curley Lambert (mandolin), Ralph Mayo (fiddle) and Larry Ehrlich (recording engineer) to the WCBY studio around midnight to record live around a single mic. At the time, the Clinch Mountain Boys included either Bill Lowe or Doug Morris on bass, but the session took place without a bass-player. There was no audience, no set list, and the session starts with Ehrlich exclaiming, “Let ‘er roll.” What you hear is some of their own personal favorite songs, many their first recorded renditions of them. You get spontaneity, energy, and even a few comments, ambient noises, whoops, hollers and throats clearing. Listen carefully, and you’ll hear a door closing on “Meet Me Tonight.”

It was a sad day when Carter met his untimely death in 1966. Songs on the album “An Evening Long Ago” would be recorded again in later years on fancier equipment. However, the March 1956 WCBY session is simply a rare opportunity to experience the beauty and power of The Stanley Brothers with the Clinch Mountain Boys from a radio station’s studio. The feeling allows us to nostalgically relive a time when their Cadillac traveled circuitous, narrow mountain roads between radio stations, churches, barn dances, and tiny schoolhouse auditoriums. For more music from their actual radio shows, also check out The Stanley Brothers “On Radio” CD put out by Rebel Records.

Guest Post by Joe Ross

On The Air: 18 Wheels of Love

2012-01-15T13:49:00.005-05:00

Drive-By Truckers: 18 Wheels of Love

[purchase]

I used to be a member of one of those record clubs where you got a bunch of records for a penny, then had to buy a bunch more at full price, and it still ended up as a good deal if you knew how to play the game. I once ordered a CD from the club, and as a bonus, got a copy of “Decoration Day” by the Drive-By Truckers, a band I had never heard of. I have no recollection of what I bought, but “Decoration Day” became, and still is, one of my favorite CDs, and the Truckers became one of my favorite bands. I started to fill in their back catalog, including their debut, “Gangstabilly”. At the time, I liked it, but didn’t think it measured up to more mature efforts like “Decoration Day”, “Southern Rock Opera” or “The Dirty South”. But there are good songs on there, and they have grown in my estimation over time.

“18 Wheels of Love” is a good song, telling the story of Patterson Hood’s mother’s romance with a massive trucker, Chester, who drove for the company she worked at, but I can’t really say it is a great song. However, when they played it live, Hood told the whole background story, and a version with the ful story was released on “Alabama Ass-Whuppin’”, a live album that came out in 1999. One of the things that can elevate a live performance over a studio version is when the band tells you about the song or comments on it. I think of some of the great Springsteen monologues as an example. Patterson Hood is similarly a master storyteller. Hood’s father is David Hood, a studio musician who played on many great Muscle Shoals recordings, and many other great songs. You can look them up. Patterson’s parents divorced, and as he tells the story, his mother did not handle it well, taking to her room. Ultimately, she got a job as an auditor at a trucking company, and one of the drivers kept messing up his logs so that he could spend time with her. They fell in love and got married. This song was her son’s wedding present.

I have purposely not told this story well to encourage you to listen to the way Patterson Hood tells it—he does it so much better than I ever could. However, the version I have posted is not the “Alabama Ass-Whuppin’” version, but one that was recorded during a September 2008 taping of Austin City Limits, the great PBS music series. Here, not only does Hood tell the usual story, but he adds “the rest of the story.” In this version, Hood tells about getting a call from his sister, informing him that Chester was dying. But Chester recovered to drive his truck again. Honestly, it gives me chills every time I hear it. You can hear in the way he tells the story the love that Hood has for his stepfather and mother and his joy that Chester cheated death.

Unfortunately, and as probably was expected considering Chester’s health issues, the recovery was short-lived. Chester Adams died in May, 2010. Announcing the death to the Drive-By Truckers fans who knew the story, Hood wrote: “Chester was a cool guy and truly a force of nature that will be forever missed in our family.”

On The Air: Released

2012-01-15T12:24:00.006-05:00

Glen Phillips: Released

[download]

On-air coverage is the sensitive coverblogger's bread and butter: many artists perform songs live that they never record, and the purity of sound from an in-studio bootleg is far superior to stage recordings, with none of the crowd noise and fuzzy recoding quality that so often undermine clarity and comfort.

As such, I am an avid collector of such performances, with a huge collection of in-studio recordings that combine coverage and originals alike. And because it is coverage and interpretation which bring me to this particular soundtable, I fully intended to start the week off here with a favorite cover or two from the usual haunts: folk sources such as Austin's KUT, Boulder's KBCO, Boston's WBUR, and Philly's XPN, and the practically infinite number of pop stations which host acoustic sessions in-studio (and occasionally release the best of these in album form in frustratingly small batches, creating an infinite series of rarities).

But then I dug up this 2005 World Cafe recording from Glen Phillips, the former Toad The Wet Sprocket frontman whose solo work in recent years has turned towards such tracks as this: gentle, hopeful, melodic and deep, dipped in the sparsest of harmonies for maximum effect. And, as a bonus, I discovered that the whole set is available on archive.org.

Coverage, and more contributions, to come, I guess. In the meantime, this will serve to spread the beauty.

On The Air: Touch

2012-01-15T10:33:00.010-05:00

The Lyres feat. Wally Tax: Touch

[purchase original version]

Jeff 'Monoman' Conolly was a huge fan of so-called nederbiet, mid-sixties pop from Holland, and of wild Amsterdam cultband the Outsiders in particular. So when he was invited to play a session for VPRO radio in 1987 with his garage band the Lyres and was informed that übercool former Outsiders frontman Wally Tax would drop by as well, Conolly understandably got rather nervous. Fortunately, he regained his cool in time to back his hero on a glorious version of the Outsiders classic Touch, originally released back in '66 in the sleeve pictured above. Wally Tax is second from right by the way, supposedly wearing the longest hair in all the lowlands.

On the Air: On Your Way Down

2012-01-15T02:51:00.001-05:00

Little Feat: On Your Way Down

[purchase studio version]

Musicians and bands often do interviews on the radio, and these usually include in studio performances of songs from their current album. These performances have an immediacy to them that can compensate for the lack of polish that can come from hours spent polishing in a recording studio. Radio stations often lack the ability to host all of the technology that was used in the recording, so the musicians must show their versatility. As a result, a side of their music comes out that wasn’t on the album. This week, we will be presenting the music that can result from this. Television stations often have better facilities, but even so, the artists can still show an aspect of their art that we, the listeners, don’t usually get to hear. There are times when that is the whole point of a particular television program. And we will be presenting that as well.

To begin, here is a performance by Little Feat of On Your Way Down, from a visit to radio station WLIR in 1974. This is Little Feat in its classic configuration, and at the height of its powers. In the studio, the band worked with extra musicians, particularly female background singers. Here, they have to cover that themselves. The equipment that was available at the radio station did not allow the band to duplicate the mix they used in the studio either. Here, the piano and organ parts are much more prominent in the mix than before, and they sound great. There were, of course no overdubs, so Bill Payne switches from piano to organ halfway through the song, and it works. In 1974, bands did not try to duplicate the sound of their albums when they played in any live setting. Lowell George changes the phrasing in his vocal line here. What this performance shows is just how emotionally invested in their music Little Feat were.

All That Jazz: Big Butch Bass Bull Fiddle

2012-01-14T23:23:00.001-05:00

Corb Lund: Big Butch Bass Bull Fiddle

[purchase]

While upright bass solos are common in jazz, they are fairly uncommon in country music (with the possible exceptions of bluegrass and tradition "old style" country). Corb Lund is a Canadian country musician, and while he does has a bit of a following in the US, he is quite popular in the mainstream Canadian country music scene. Lund's family is from southern Alberta where they are actively involved in ranching and rodeo. Many of Lund's songs reflect his unique heritage. However, before he started to compose country music, he moved north to Edmonton go to school to study jazz guitar and bass. He eventually joined a hard/alternative rock called The Smalls who were active in Western Canada, but in the mid 90s he started experimenting with the style of country music that he grew up on in ranching country.

The Corb Lund Band released their first album in 1995, and by the release of their four album in 2006 they were known as Corb Lund and the Hurtin' Albertans. On that 2006 album, Hair in My Eyes Like a Highland Steer, appears the song "Big Butch Bass Bull Fiddle." In the liner notes Lund states, "This one's for Kurt to show his stuff on. He's been going down the road, faithfully backing me up for a lo-o-ng time and I keep promising to make him rich." "Kurt" is Kurt Ciesla and his bio on Lund's web site states that he is "an extremely versatile musician, he is a former member of funk acts Blue Locutus and Bubba and is a familiar and respected musician in the Edmonton Jazz music scene."

The song itself describes trials of playing the upright bass. The sound of the song is reminiscent of 1940's swing jazz, with a lively piano in the background, and, of course, a prominent bass line and a bass solo, which is extended during a live show. I've seen Lund and his band play this song live several times and he always introduces this song as "an ode to Air Canada or WestJet," and you can imagine how fun it must be dealing with the airlines with an over-sized instrument. It's a pretty remarkable jazz song from a former rodeo kid who is now known for his country music.

All That Jazz: Hubbin’ It

2012-01-14T16:50:00.002-05:00

Asleep at the Wheel with Huey Lewis: Hubbin‘ It

[purchase]

I couldn’t let this week’s theme go by without sharing some western swing with y’all. And I can’t think of a better way to do that than to feature Asleep at the Wheel paying tribute to Bob Wills. Huey Lewis, (Really? That Huey Lewis? Really!) is just a bonus.

Western swing is a hybrid of country music and big band swing. It arose in the 1930s and 40s. Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies are the pioneers of the style, but Bob Wills was the man who popularized it. Western swing was almost a fad and nothing more. By the 1950s, a song or two might show up in the repertoire of a Texas country artist, but nobody played it full time. I first heard of the style growing up. My father grew up in Oklahoma, and he would fondly reminisce at times about hearing Brown, Wills, and the Light Crust Dough Boys on the radio during his childhood. Then, in the 1970s, Asleep at the Wheel emerged. They were a band that was committed to reviving western swing, and they succeeded to the extent possible. The style is still not massively popular, but new bands have emerged, and country artists such as George Strait have had hits with western swing songs.

Hubbin’ It was written by Cindy Walker, and was a standard for Bob Wills and his band. Huey Lewis used to play the song with his band Clover before he became famous. In Clover, someone else sang the song, so this is the only recording of Huey Lewis singing it.

All That Jazz: Sir Duke

2012-01-13T09:12:00.000-05:00

Stevie Wonder: Sir Duke

[purchase]

Those of us living in the environs of Washington, D.C., have many reminders that we live in Duke Ellington's home town. There's a Duke Ellington Bridge, leading into the hipster Adams Morgan area. The Duke Ellington School for Arts serves as the city's performing arts high school. Until recently, D.C.'s premiere jazz festival bore Ellington's name. Venues like the Lincoln Theater and the Bohemian Caverns boast "Duke Ellington played here" credentials. A larger-than-life mural of Ellington looks out onto the Shaw neighborhood. Ellington even appears on the back of D.C.'s "state" quarter, issued in 2009 (making him the first African-American honored by name on U.S. money).

Yet one of the most enduring tributes to Ellington isn't found in the city in which he was born. It's in the grooves of a hit record by Stevie Wonder, "Sir Duke." Released in 1977, three years after Ellington's death, the song became one of Wonder's biggest chart successes. Besides mentioning Ellington, "Sir Duke" also name checks Count Basie, Louis Armstrong ("Satchmo"), Ella Fitzgerald and Glenn Miller. The sound of "Sir Duke" doesn't necessarily remind you of Ellington; indeed, the horns that dominate the arrangement are reminiscent of Miller's stylings. But, it's clear from the song's title and the lyrics that Wonder considers Ellington to be "the king of all." "I knew the title from the beginning," Wonder said of the song, during a Billboard symposium in 1977. "[I] wanted it to be about musicians who did something for us. So soon they are forgotten." Wonder said he just wanted to show his appreciation -- and, well, you can feel it all over.

All That Jazz: Like Someone in Love

2012-01-11T20:58:00.000-05:00

Medium Cool featuring Alex Chilton: Like Someone In Love

[purchase]

When I think of Alex Chilton, I think of at least half a dozen different voices. There's the horny teenaged, weary beyond its years, husky voice of the Box Tops' “The Letter.” In the famous Big Star years there was the vulnerable, love-struck voice of “I'm In Love With A Girl,” the joyous, giddy voice of “September Gurls,” and the burned out, utterly despairing voice of “Holocaust.” In his early solo years there was the sleazoid, sex tour guide voice of “Bangkok.” Later there was the winsome but not entirely to be trusted dive bar voice singing old R&B and vintage rock numbers on a slew of releases. But Alex Chilton, smooth jazz crooner? Well maybe not quite smooth, but jazz it is, as the three songs Chilton sings on the obscure early 1990s release by Medium Cool, Imagination, attest.

Imagination, a tribute album to Chet Baker, seems to be Medium Cool's only album. The group consisted of Ron Miller on bass, Robert Arron on piano and tenor sax, Richard Dworkin on drums, and A.J. Mantas on vibes and piano. Chilton, Adele Bertei, Angel Torsen, and James White each contribute vocals on a couple numbers. I can't say Chilton's songs here are anywhere near the top of my list of his best performances, but there is definitely something appealing about hearing that vulnerable voice, wiser with age maybe, but still aching, some twenty years after “Thirteen.”

Guest post by Dan

All That Jazz: The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul

2012-01-11T01:47:00.001-05:00

XTC: The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul

[purchase]

I don’t like the label “post punk”, but if I have to tell you what it means, I point to the music of XTC. Over a strong rhythmic pulse, you find crunching guitars and highly politicized lyrics. But XTC’s leader, Andy Partridge, is also heavily influenced by the Beatles. So in 1986, Partridge got some help to expand XTC’s sonic pallet, in the form of producer Todd Rundgren. The resulting album was Skylarking. Here, one hears nature sounds, there is a string quartet on one song, and, in general, there is a great spirit of experimentation on the album. A few of these experiments miss, but one that does not is also the most surprising. Nothing that XTC had done before, and nothing I know of Todd Rundgren either, led me to expect the jazz of The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul. The band is augmented here by percussion, flute, and horns. The song has an amazing slippery groove. Colin Moulding’s deceptively simple bass line anchors the whole thing, and the song really swings.

All That Jazz: Jazz Saxophone Version

2012-01-10T21:37:00.006-05:00

Sadao Watanabe: Turning Pages of Wind

[purchase]

Stan Getz : Desafinado

[purchase]

Sonny Rollins : God Bless the Child

[purchase]

John Coltrane : Giant Steps

[purchase]

Such a hard choice this time around, deciding what to leave out…I had to go with four, 'cuz three wasn't going to be nearly enough. But even though I go to more live performances of jazz guitarists, I myself played jazz sax back in the day, so I've got a ton of favorites to pick from.

First off is a song I used to play by Japanese saxophone giant, Sadao Watanabe. He's a bit of a hybrid, in a way, since he grew popular during the rise of smooth jazz (which in some circles is a sort of curse word). And yes, some of his stuff is pretty, well, smooth. On the other hand, he's no Kenny G: for example, he came out with a great album of Charlie Parker tunes in the 80's that's well worth buying. The song I'm sharing's got two other great talents as well in keyboardist Dave Grusin and guitarist Lee Ritenour (I knew I could sneak them in). It's from 1978's California Shower.

Next is another from my (very limited) repertoire. It's Stan Getz with a cover of Antonio Carlos Jobim's Desafinado, released in 1962, and it helped propagate the bossa nova enthusiasm in America. It features Charlie Byrd on guitar.

Sonny Rollins and guitarist Jim Hall together create an expressive cover of Billie Holiday's God Bless the Child from his best album, The Bridge, also released in 1962.

Finally, and probably best, is the sax legend unto himself: the great John Coltrane. Picking just one song was hardest of all. I nearly went with Naima, which is probably my favorite song, but I thought his 1960 classic, Giant Steps, might demonstrate what made his style unique.

I mourn that I can't share other favorite sax players like Cannonball Adderley, Gato Barbieri, Paul Desmond, Dexter Gordon, Eddie Harris, Charles Lloyd, Charlie Parker, Art Pepper, Houston Person, Dewey Redman and his son Joshua Redman, David Sanborn, Wayne Shorter, Zoot Sims, Grover Washington, Jr., or Sonny Stitt.

All That Jazz: Jazz Guitar Version

2012-01-09T23:39:00.003-05:00

Wes Montgomery : Four On Six

[purchase]

Pat Martino : Impressions

[purchase]

Larry Carlton : Emotions Wound Us So

[purchase]

Hey, I didn't have to wait long at all before I could share Four On Six with you (2 days, to be exact). This is one of Wes Montgomery's best tunes.

I introduced you to Pat Martino during Circuses and Carnivals week this summer. What an incredible and inspiring guitarist he is. Here is his 197 version of John Coltrane's Impressions.

Finally is the most emo guitar song I think I know, one that is appropriately named: Emotions Wound Us So. It starts out gently with keyboards, then Carlton's expressive jazz fusion guitar starts up, and I'm quickly gone to another emotional state….

Maybe I'm crying over other favorite guitarists I didn't get to include, like Jeff Beck, George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Al DiMeola, Grant Green, Jim Hall, Earl Klugh, Pat Metheny, Joe Pass, Django Reinhart, and Lee Ritenour.

All That Jazz: The Lady In My Life

2012-01-09T23:20:00.000-05:00

Stanley Jordan: The Lady In My Life

[purchase]

You can argue whether Stanley Jordan is the most talented guitarist ever (whatever that means), but there is no argument that he is the most talented musician that I am personally acquainted with. Stanley was a year ahead of me in college and worked at WPRB, where I sometimes followed him on the air. Even then, it was clear that he was prodigiously talented, and we were all in awe of his playing, not to mention the fact that he was, and is, a nice guy. His claim to fame was his mastery of the “tapping” technique, in which he uses both hands to tap the strings, allowing himself to play multiple lines at the same time, so it often sounds like more than one guitar is playing.

After he graduated from Princeton in 1981, he went off and, I understand, played on the streets. He released an independent record in 1982, but burst upon the jazz scene in 1984 when he made a surprise unscheduled appearance at the Kool Jazz Festival in New York and blew the audience and critics away. I remember reading articles in The New York Times about this and being so excited for Stanley. He followed up this triumph with his major label debut on Blue Note Records, “Magic Touch”, which included his versions of jazz standards, originals and covers of pop and rock tunes, including “The Lady in My Life”, originally done by a little-known singer named Michael Jackson. It was amazing to hear the quality and confidence of his playing on “Magic Touch”, and amusing to see Stanley—the guy from college—in the video for this song on MTV, back when they played music, back when they even played good music. (Possibly more amusing was his cameo in the Bruce Willis/Kim Basinger movie “Blind Date”). “Magic Touch” topped the jazz charts, and appeared on the Billboard 200 and R&B/Hip Hop charts. I got to see him perform a couple of times in jazz clubs in New York, and continued to be impressed by his music and his graciousness. (That means he either actually remembered me, or pretended to).

Unfortunately, the music business isn’t really set up for someone with Stanley’s eclectic tastes, and certainly wasn’t in the ‘80s and ‘90’s. His albums bounced around from straight jazz, to rock covers (even “Stairway to Heaven”), to Ravel’s Bolero, and other places in between. This meant that he was not doctrinaire enough for the jazz purists, and there was really no market for instrumental versions of popular songs. Ultimately, he cut back on touring and recording and devoted himself to music therapy.

I ran into Stanley last summer at his 30th college reunion, and he was excited about his soon-to be released album, “Friends”, in which he played with a number of great guest musicians, including Kenny Garrett, Christian McBride, Nicholas Payton, Regina Carter, Kenwood Dennard, Bucky Pizzarelli, Mike Stern and Charlie Hunter. The album came out a few months ago, and reaffirming his eclectic tastes, it includes jazz standards, classical pieces, originals and a Katy Perry cover. I heartily recommend it. Maybe now, in the Internet era, where music distribution is more democratic, the world will finally catch up to Stanley Jordan’s virtuosity and broad vision.

All That Jazz: Zoot Allures

2012-01-09T11:02:00.000-05:00

Frank Zappa: Zoot Allures

[Purchase]

For those who have written off Zappa's music as a bit too busy and a bit too weird, here's a four minute instrumental that will hopefully make you give the former "Movie King of Cucamonga" another chance. Recorded live, the title track to his 1976 album is a mid-tempo jazz/rock fusion piece featuring Zappa's guitar solidly in the forefront. You can also hear Zappa regular Ruth Underwood on marimba, Dave Parlato on bass, Lu Ann Neil on harp and future Missing Persons Terry Bozzio on drums. (Only Bozzio and Zappa made the album cover.) Here's Zappa your grandma would like and , even so , a prime example of why he's a guitar god ( ranked #22 in Rolling Stone's recent list of Greatest Guitarists).

Not that the whole album is like this. In fact "Zoot Allures" is followed by the goofy "Disco Boy" with lyrics featuring Zappa's adolescent bathroom humor. As a certain 65 year old British rock star once sang "He took it all too far, but boy could he play guitar".

All That Jazz: That's Neat, That's Nice

2012-01-08T17:14:00.000-05:00

NRBQ: That's Neat, That's Nice

[Purchase]

NRBQ: The Music Goes Round and Around

[Purchase]

Sadly, this morning's headlines provide an opportunity to combine two Star Maker themes: "All That Jazz" and the recent "In Memoriam." Tom Ardolino of NBRQ passed away yesterday.

The story of how Adrolino came to play drums for NRBQ is an inspiring one for groupies and lurkers everywhere. From his Wikipedia biography: "Ardolino was initially a fan of the band, and began corresponding and trading tapes with keyboardist and co-founder Terry Adams. On one occasion, original NRBQ drummer Tom Staley did not feel up to returning for an encore, so Adams invited Ardolino to fill in....When Staley decided to leave the band in 1974, his bandmates agreed that Ardolino was the natural choice as his successor."

Adrolino went on to play with NBRQ from 1974 until it went on long-term hiatus in 2004.

Throughout its long run, the New Rhythm and Blues Quartet did not limit itself to R&B (nor to having just four members on stage). The band's name was inspired by the Modern Jazz Quartet, and NRBQ embraced MJQ's improvisational ethos. The band was nothing if not versatile. In 1984, NRBQ played the Berlin Jazz Festival, the New York Folk Festival and the Grand Ole Opry. The group's leader, Terry Adams, modeled his keyboard style after Thelonious Monk and Sun Ra. The strains of modern jazz can be heard throughout NRBQ's recordings, but it's the numbers influenced by traditional jazz and swing that are the most infectious. The two cuts here are from 1978's At Yankee Stadium (fittingly, not recorded at Yankee Stadium) and 1980's Tiddlywinks.

Adams reformed NRBQ this year, but Adrolino wasn't in the group (nor are any other NRBQ alum except Adams). However, Tom Adrolino did design the cover to the band's record, Keep This Love Goin'.

All That Jazz: The Magnificent Seven

2012-01-08T03:21:00.002-05:00

Alison Brown: The Magnificent Seven

[purchase]

How many banjo players can boast that their music has been played in the depths of outer space? Well, Alison Brown can because her music was used in early 2000 as the official wake up call for the crew of the U.S. Space Shuttle Destiny on their journey to the International Space Station. Knowing few constraints, Brown epitomizes individualism. She enjoys the challenge of adventurously pushing the envelope and her own technical skills into banjo’s final frontier. While on her voyage, Brown’s mission is to explore strange new musical worlds, to seek out new musical life, to boldly go where no woman has gone before! Thus, I chose a wonderful little new acoustic jazz tune called “The Magnificent Seven” that she wrote with Solas guitarist John Doyle. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear a seven-beat meter in the tune’s head.

The song appears on her innovative album “Stolen Moments” with its expressive elements of many genres from Jazz to Celtic, and Pop to Bluegrass. The album is an astounding display of melodic invention that characterizes this one-of-a-kind banjo player. Another favorite jazzy cut on the album is “The Sound of Summer Running.” Alison Brown’s 5-string lays perfectly into the greater ensemble’s kaleidoscope of sound with such accomplished masters as Stuart Duncan (fiddle), Sam Bush, Mike Marshall (mandolin), Seamus Egan (low whistle on one track), John Doyle (guitar), John R. Burr (piano), Kenny Malone (percussion), and Garry West (bass). Some pop numbers on the album include superb vocals from folks like Amy Ray, Emily Saliers, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Andrea Zonn, and Mary Chapin Carpenter.

How did the impressively virtuosic Alison Brown get to be such a hot picker? Her expedition has actually taken her from Connecticut to California to Tennessee. Early bands were The Stringbenders and Gold Rush. The 1991 International Bluegrass Music Assn. (IBMA) Banjo Player of the Year went on to play, record or tour with Northern Lights, Alison Krauss & Union Station, Michelle Shocked, New Grange, and others. She owns her own record company (Compass Records). The Alison Brown Quartet formed in 1996. Her confidence and talent allow this daring stalwart of the banjo to play many genres including jazz. Listen to her creative and courageous musical statements that know few boundaries.

Guest Post by Joe Ross

All That Jazz: Consider Me Gone

2012-01-08T02:52:00.002-05:00

Sting: Consider Me Gone

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Here’s one way to find songs for this week’s theme. Look up Dream of the Blue Turtles on Wikipedia, find the section where it lists the personnel on the album, and then follow the links to find out what else they each played on. You will find that this band had some serious jazz credentials, and that they went on to work with many mainstream artists who wanted to add a taste of jazz to their sound, if only for a song or two. Indeed, Sting said in interviews at the time that he was looking for the looseness and freedom that jazz offered for his debut as a solo artist. The title track from The Dream of the Blue Turtles was actually a jam session that was not even planned in advance, and it shows how good this band was. But, of the songs that Sting wrote coming into the sessions, Consider Me Gone best shows off the jazz qualities that came out in this music. Firstly, the song swings. But there are also some subtleties that surely come from the world of jazz. Listen to how the phrasing in Sting’s vocal line changes from verse to verse. Notice the little ornamental figures that Omar Hakim sneaks in on the drums. And then notice how the song’s tight groove loosens as the song comes to a close. The song runs just over four minutes, but it sounds like the band is just getting started, and like they jammed for another two or three minutes at least. I would love to hear what happened next.

New => All That Jazz: What's New?

2012-01-07T18:18:00.004-05:00

Wes Montgomery: What's New?

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The popular torch standard What's New? was written in 1939 and like all great standards has been recorded by many terrific jazz musicians over the years, including Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and Larry Coryell. The version I'm highlighting is much more understated and seductive. It features one of the finest guitar performances of Wes Montgomery (I can't believe we've never showcased him before!), here with the Wynton Kelly Trio—Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Jimmy Cobb on drums. It's from the 1965 jazz classic Smokin' at the Half Note (although this cut was actually recorded in the studio), which also includes one of my favorite tunes, Four on Six (she writes wistfully, as she waits for a numbers theme so she can post it, too…)

New: When the Wagon Was New

2012-01-07T17:25:00.005-05:00

Sam McGee: When the Wagon Was New

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In recent decades, country music has branched off in a hundred different directions. In the days before “outlaw country” or “alt-country,” we had just simple, plain ol’ “country” music. I occasionally revisit those traditional roots to remind us of what the genre once was. So for that reason, I’ve chosen a song called “When the Wagon was New,” written by Sam McGee.

Who is Sam McGee, you ask? He and his brother (Kirk) were born in Franklin, TN. back in 1894 and 1899, respectively. Their father was a fiddler, bought 12-year-old Sam a banjo, and soon both boys (influenced by local black musicians) were out performing on banjo and guitar. After hearing Uncle Dave Macon about 1923, they joined his Fruit Jar Drinkers, and played on the WSM radio show that became the Grand Ole Opry. They began recording in 1928. The formed a popular trio called The Dixieliners with Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith in 1930. After WWII, we hear them on the Folkways record label, recording with Macon Smith (with the Delmore Brothers), touring with comedy act Sara and Sally, and playing regularly on the Opry. Sam died on August 21, 1975 in a tractor accident.

About this song he wrote in the 1920s, “When the Wagon was New,” Sam McGee once said, “Back in the days when I was just a kid we did a lot of that – went to church in wagons and even on horseback. Those were the horse and buggy days. I seen a lot of that during the twenties and thirties in Alabama and down through there in places that I played. In some places, especially in the hilly countries, some of that is still going on right now.”

I really like the straightforward, nostalgic feeling conveyed in the song. What better song is there to remember the “good old days” as we begin 2012. In the first verse, Sam mentions the “old rusty wagon that’s left to rot away,” and he remembers how “people all loved their neighbor, everybody was so free.” It’s an old style of country music, and why aren’t songs written today that mention daddy, mom, the children, grandma and grandpa too, riding off to church on Sunday “when the wagon was new”? Even though the song is nearly 100 years old, look how relevant and insightful the last verse still is today:

The automobiles are here now, and the wagon days are through,
The airplanes are a-hummin’, good neighbors are so few,
Everybody’s in a hurry, it’s the money that takes you through,
We didn’t need much money, when the wagon was new.

Now, that’s one heartfelt sentiment with a lot of wisdom that is very germane today.

Guest post by Joe Ross

New: New Virginia Creeper

2012-01-07T16:58:00.001-05:00

Old Crow Medicine Show: New Virginia Creeper

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Never shying from creating modern railroad songs (and working their instruments to imitate the chugging, whistling sounds of the big, iron trains), OCMS gives us this song invoking the imagery of a relatively short-lived interstate railway between Virginia and North Carolina intertwined with some pretty heavy-handed euphemisms. The narrator in these lyrics comes across as a big-talking wooer seeking company in his plainly referenced bed. As always, OCMS does an exceptional job of recreating the plucky, easy-to-sing-along-to bluegrass style of old. Enjoy the train-like harmonica and traditional sounding bounce of this tune.

Guest post by Andrew

New: A New England

2012-01-07T16:30:00.004-05:00

Billy Bragg: A New England

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An oft-covered punkfolk youth anthem from UK singer-songwriter and left-wing activist Billy Bragg's 45 rpm debut that chugs along with the momentum of a train hurtling down the tracks, deliberate proof that the same combination of anger, frustration, innocence and optimism that fuels so much of his explicitly political work can be just as deftly applied to the age-old story of boy meets girl - or, at least, to the liminal narrative that comes of setting aside the old affections for the new unknown - in part because, to Bragg, moving on from the inevitabilities of cultural narrative is, after all, part and parcel of the political.

Because sometimes, you don't need to change the world, just your heart.

New: New Toy

2012-01-07T16:28:00.003-05:00

Lene Lovich: New Toy

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In the fall of 1981 I was a freshman in college who had unfortunately been raised on some pretty lousy radio in Cleveland. I was ready for something other than the Springsteen-Eagles-Zeppelin stuff I had heard to death for years. Luckily I soon fell into a pretty musically savvy crowd and my listening pleasures grew exponentially. One guy, Jim, was a junior and a DJ at the college station. I remember his big passions at the time were Joy Division and Echo and the Bunnymen, the first I had ever heard of those two groups. One day he was all excited and couldn't stop playing this weird (to my naïve ears at the time) song, angular music with funny lyrics sung by a hyper-sounding, possibly whip-wielding woman and a catchy “oh-ay-oh” background chant. “New Toy” by someone named Lene Lovich, I was informed by Jim as he put the needle down on the vinyl for the fifth or sixth consecutive time. When I think back on all the great music I listened to in college over the next four years, I always think of “New Toy” as the initial jolt. It still sounds great. The song was actually written by a pre-fame Thomas Dolby, who played in Lovich's band. So far, 2012 has been filled with new toys for me: a new (used) car, a new (used) computer screen, and a new (old favorite) blog for me to contribute to. Thanks Star Maker Machine.

Guest post by Dan

New: Love Puts On a New Face

2012-01-07T00:08:00.002-05:00

Joni Mitchell: Love Puts On a New Face

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I divide Joni Mitchell’s career in my mind into three distinct periods. These are not even divisions by time, but rather periods where Mitchell tried various modes of expression. The first, early period is the one most people know her for, and her mode was the folk-based confessional songwriting that gave rise to the singer-songwriter movement. The second period is Mitchell’s jazz period, starting with the album The Hissing of Summer Lawns, and ending with Shadows and Light. In her songwriting, Mitchell turned away from her confessional mode, in favor of storytelling. Mitchell’s late period began with Wild Things Run Fast. Here, Mitchell decided to try her hand at rock n’ roll, with mixed results. Some of the more uptempo songs from this period are almost hard rock, a style that fits Mitchell uncomfortably. But some of the quieter moments are overlooked gems, and as fine as anything in her catalog. The late period also has some fine poetry by Mitchell, but there are also songs that are little more than angry screeds.

Love Puts On a New Face is one of the overlooked gems from this late period. There are only three players on the song, Wayne Shorter on soprano sax, Greg Leisz on pedal steel, and Mitchell on guitar and keyboards. There are no drums. Together, the band creates a wash of sound that shifts like a thing alive. The lyric is a wonderful poem, presenting three stages of a relationship in three stanzas. The song features key lines that come just before the chorus: “What a pocket of heavenly grace” becomes “Some bad dreams love can’t erase” becomes “I long for your embrace”. It’s brilliantly economical piece of storytelling, and Mitchell hit’s the right emotional chord. As brilliant as her folk and jazz periods were, I can’t imagine Mitchell doing a song with this kind of feel in her earlier days.

New: A Brand New Me

2012-01-05T10:46:00.005-05:00

Dusty Springfield: A Brand New Me

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Released two weeks into a new decade – the 1970s – A Brand New Me was the title of Dusty Springfield’s first and only Philly album, and the title of the hit single from the LP (which would be released in Britain a month later as From Dusty…With Love).

Having previously done the Southern Soul thing with the immortal Dusty In Memphis album, Dusty now turned to Philly soul under the guidance of producers Kevin Gamble and Leon Huff, who together or with others wrote all songs on the album, and arranger Thom Bell.

The single “A Brand New Me”, a cover of Jerry Butler’s 1969 single which had been written by Gamble, Butler and Bell, provided Dusty with her last US hit for 17 years, reaching #24 in 1970. In her native Britain it didn’t even chart. In both countries, she’d not feature in the Top 40 for 17 years, when the Pet Shop Boys revived her career.

The album itself tanked, stalling at #107 in the Billboard charts, and a second set of recordings with Gamble and Huff was shelved.

When the album was made, Gamble and Huff were still relatively unknown and Dusty Springfield was a star. Soon the producers would become soul giants as serial hitmakers for The O’Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Billy Paul, The Three Degrees and so on, and would be invited to write the theme for Soul Train (read the story of that here).

New: The New Soft Shoe

2012-01-05T08:30:00.002-05:00

Gram Parsons: The New Soft Shoe

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E.L. Cord was a visionary and innovator, the brains behind the famed Cord automobile of the 1920s and ‘30s. Cords were the first to sport front-wheel drive and retractable headlights. As technologically advanced as his cars were, Cord was known for lavishing even more attention on the way his vehicles looked. That tendency to put style ahead of profits had predictable results. Cord was derided by rivals, and his company, Illinois-based Auburn Automobile, went belly up during the Depression. Later, Cord headed west, where he made and lost and re-made a fortune in investments. He dabbled in politics and bought and sold real estate, oil wells, radio stations and the company that eventually became American Airlines. His critics claimed he lacked focus, his admirers said he was too wild and creative to be pigeonholed.

Something in Cord’s story resonated with Gram Parsons -- himself a restless spirit, who jumped from enterprise to enterprise. In his autobiography, Keith Richards recalls being told by Parsons that he was “writing a song about a guy that builds cars.” That song was “The New Soft Shoe,” one of the shining moments on "G.P.", Parsons’s debut solo album. The Parsons song offers only a brief biographical sketch. But he makes his point: Art has its place. Each generation needs a new Cord. And each will face new challenges.

New: Hope You Like the New Me

2012-01-04T01:30:00.002-05:00

Richard Thompson: Hope You Like the New Me

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Richard Thompson can be downright creepy at times. Hope You like the New Me gives another meaning to the term “identity theft” Thompson imagines a narrator who takes everything he admires in a perceived rival, and steals it. The musical setting for this is disturbingly simple, as if Thompson is saying, “see how easy that was!” It’s mostly an acoustic guitar, playing a repeating pattern that changes only by getting louder and then softer. There is a subtle bass part, and a cello joins in for emphasis, and that’s about it. Nevertheless, the tension in the song builds to a climax, and then pulls back a bit, but there is never a release. Thompson’s vocal performance is suitably menacing. This is the kind of song that shows why Richard Thompson is so admired by his fellow musicians. The elements of the song are sparse, but Thompson knows that he has all that he needs, and he makes every bit of it count.

New: New Feeling

2012-01-02T21:58:00.000-05:00

Talking Heads: New Feeling

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"The name of this song is 'New Feeling'. That's what it's about."
--David Byrne.

New: Part of the New America

2012-01-02T00:26:00.000-05:00

The Groceries: Part of the New America

[unavailable]

I was a college radio DJ at WPRB in Princeton, NJ during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and we enthusiastically supported a couple of local bands—Regressive Aid and The Groceries. Someday, I will try to post about Regressive Aid, who had a few members that went on to more well-known projects, but this post is about The Groceries, particularly, their song Part of the New America.

I liked The Groceries, and almost certainly played them on the air. Through the fog of history, I’m pretty sure that I saw them play live, at both an eating club on campus (Terrace?) and at the somewhat legendary City Gardens in Trenton. Based on some recent research, they are fondly remembered in the Central New Jersey area. They were a good band, with an interesting sound. My friend and former WPRB colleague Hal posted on his blog a few months ago—“The Groceries were musical soup. In today’s terms, boil the Barenaked Ladies, and drop in Bob Marley and flavor with Madness, and you get the taste.” That’s a pretty fair description, and I don’t think I can do better. To my knowledge, were never signed by any record label and I don’t think you can buy it anywhere. (Aside—after I graduated from college, I worked at a major record label for the summer, and worked with another kid my age who later became a serious player in the industry. I found a Groceries tape or record in a pile of submissions and asked him about them—he told me that the band had been trying to get signed for a while, but no one seemed interested.)

The song is a satire of the American materialistic culture that was being fostered by the Reagan administration, but the song also skewers liberals and the “politically correct”. I’d have to say that its message is still timely in the “Occupy” era, too. (Another aside—the lead singer of The Groceries was Richard Auguste Morse, who later moved to Haiti, has released music under the name RAM and bought the supposedly world-famous Hotel Oloffson—and in that role appeared in an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations.) It is a fun song, and if you look on the Internet, you can find an amusing video.

New: New Hymn

2012-01-01T16:38:00.005-05:00

James Taylor: New Hymn

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Put away your image of James Taylor as a poetic lightweight, mere chronicler of the gentle muse: though his radio popfolk canon is tailor-made for easy listening, this track is a difficult one, with slant rhymes, an odd flowing meter, and a baffled imagery of the unknown, chock full of despair and darkness.

And yet, in many ways, New Hymn represents the under-appreciated apex of Taylor's prowess as a songwriter. Released only on his 1993 live album, this new hymn lives up to its titular promise, honoring the challenge of modern spirituality head on in a song that lingers long after its final notes fade. If it doesn't give you chills, you're not listening right.

So sit with it for a while: it's worth the visit. Soak in the tensions of the warm harmonies against the known darkness and the unknown fears evoked in its dense lyrical incantation. Note how the arrangement supports its fragmented vision, how the performance so effectively parallels its flares and flashes. Let its tiny coda sink in, and play it again, reveling in the short uplifting moment, the four word rise into hope at the song's end a deliberate echo of the Zen perfection psychedelic visionary Baba Ram Das described. Listen, and then accept its challenge: may we work to be here now, and in every moment, for this year, and for the years to come.

New: New Speedway Boogie

2012-01-01T00:30:00.001-05:00

Grateful Dead: New Speedway Boogie

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First of all, let me wish all of our readers a very happy new year.

To start our “New” theme, I wanted to share a song by the Grateful Dead. So, I had to decide whether to post New Minglewood Blues, New, New Minglewood Blues, or All New Minglewood Blues. I could even have gone with an obscure version of the song that is not the Dead at all, called Even Newer Minglewood Blues. I decided to avoid the problem by going with New Speedway Boogie instead.

Now, some of you have probably realized that the picture above is not the Grateful Dead at all, but rather the Rolling Stones. In preparing this post, I finally learned, after all these years, what New Speedway Boogie is about. The free concert at the Altamont Speedway in 1969 was originally conceived as a sort of Woodstock west. The show was headlined by the Rolling Stones, and the Grateful Dead were supposed to be in the line-up, but they decided not to do the show. Where Woodstock is remembered as an outporing of peace and love, Altamont is notorious for the violence that marred the occasion, even resulting in one death. It’s hard to say what accounted for the difference between the two shows. At Altamont, the presence of the Hell’s Angels is frequently cited as the cause of the violence, but the Angels had peacefully provided security at Grateful Dead shows for some time at that point. Whatever the case, Altamont is remembered as the concert shown in the documentary Gimme Shelter, and is sometimes regarded as a marker for the end of the hippie era.

New Speedway Boogie was written in response to the events at Altamont, and the Grateful Dead included the song for about nine months afterwards. The lyrics are typically cryptic, and the band probably assumed that their audiences would know the reference. But the Dead dropped the song from their set lists, possibly because they felt that it was too topical and becoming irrelevant. It would be almost twenty years before the band started playing New Speedway Boogie in their shows again. I heard the song when it was released on Workingman’s Dead in 1970. I was ten years old, so I hope I can be forgiven for not understanding what the song referred to.

In Memoriam: Bill Morrissey

2011-12-30T23:48:00.004-05:00

Bill Morrissey: Handsome Molly

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Bill Morrissey: Birches

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His songs were like Elmer Rising's pen and ink masterpieces--you could admire each confidently executed lyrical brushstroke and melodic twist on the finest of scales, and never diminish the overall impression of their honesty and truth. At the height of his powers, on 1989's Standing Eight, 1992's Inside and 1993's Night Train, each Bill Morrissey record contained several songs that each would have been the life's work of a lesser artist. There may have been others writing songs equally detailed as "These Cold Fingers," "The Man From Out Of Town" or "Birches," but none were better.
- Mark Erelli, August, 2011

Darius and I have posted several tracks by Bill Morrissey over the years, including several duets of traditional folk numbers recorded with Greg Brown. But while I appreciate his handy coverage, and posted several of my favorites back in July over at Cover Lay Down, I'm partial to his more pensive songwriting - I count Mark Erelli's cover of Birches, for example, as one of the better covers in my vast collection, though in this case, at least, it's hard to outdo the original. And Handsome Molly was the very first track of his I heard, way back on Legacy, a 1989 folk compilation that perfectly captured the eighties folk movement, and my heart.

But I also owe that song an apology of sorts, one I hope to rectify by sharing it. Because at the time, I wasn't sure what to make of Morrissey's fragile, croaking tenor. It scared me a little, I think; the emotion was raw, and at sixteen, I wasn't ready. And so, although I treasured the album as a whole, I skipped over this track for decades, having not yet outgrown my penchant for the melodic.

Only in the least couple of years have I finally come to appreciate that the best music is most often wrung from a broken instrument, bringing me to Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, and through them, back again to Bill Morrissey, a man well admired by his songwriting peers even as they worried about his lifestyle. And so I rediscovered the genius songwriter, chronicler of pain, his lyrics still and hollow on the surface, yet possessed of intimate and universal depth, each song like a Raymond Carver story. And I shared what I had found, in the very first month of my foray into music blogging, in the form of a feature on his tribute to Mississippi John Hurt, which I highly recommend.

And then I filed him in my mind alongside a hundred other songwriters I admire without dwelling too heavily in their sounds.

And then, just like that, he was gone.

As I wrote on my own blog after his passing, Morrissey had his demons: he was known for his drinking, and the weariness of the solo road warrior which caused no amount of stress and desperation in his actions. The heart disease which killed him before his sixtieth birthday was a symptom of the hard life he led, to be sure. And as Cliff Eberhardt, who as a fellow Fast Folk alumni and friend served as pallbearer to this fallen giant of the folk movement, noted on Facebook after his funeral, “The casket felt so light. That’s when I knew he was really gone, because if his soul was in there with him, that casket would have weighed a ton.” I can offer no more fitting epitaph. May there be no more pain where he lies.

In Memoriam: Charlie Louvin

2011-12-30T20:30:00.000-05:00

The Louvin Brothers: When I Stop Dreaming

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Charlie Louvin:"What Are Those Things (With Big Black Wings)?"

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The grand arbiter of what's popular and significant in music (a/k/a Billboard) would have us believe the Louvin Brothers were a minor act in country music. The Louvins scored just one number one hit and had only 11 other charting singles. (About the same as the O'Kanes.) Record sales don't accurately reflect the Louvins' far-reaching influence. Their harmony-soaked sound is echoed in the music of the Everly Brothers, the Byrds, Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris and others. Charlie and Ira Loudermilk began singing as the Louvin Brothers after WWII, achieving their greatest popularity (and Opry membership) in the 1950s. By all accounts, Charlie was a saint and Ira was a jerk. Ira's high-maintenance personality and carousing broke up the act in 1963. Charlie went on to have a productive solo career, logging many more Billboard-certified hits as a soloist than he did as a Louvin Brother. Most of those records, weighed down by 1960s countrypolitan arrangements, are forgotten. The music he made with his brother remained Charlie's claim to fame. While Gram Parsons was the first hipster to cover the Louvins (starting with the Byrds), it was Emmylou Harris's championing of the Louvin catalog that brought Charlie back into the limelight. He toured and recorded with Lucinda Williams, Elvis Costello, Cake and Cheap Trick, among others.

Official recognition by the Country Music Hall of Fame was strangely slow in coming -- the Louvins weren't enshrined until 2003, 40 years after they disbanded. Charlie continued to record and perform live until the end; he succumbed to pancreatic cancer in January 2011.

Guest post by Mt Vernon Mike

In Memoriam: Gerry Rafferty

2011-12-30T00:31:00.005-05:00

Gerry Rafferty: Big Change in the Weather

[purchase]

Stealers Wheel: Outside Looking In

[purchase]

$125,000 a year in royalties can buy an awful lot of booze. Thanks to "Baker Street", Gerry Rafferty never needed to do anything else after 1978... but drink. He passed away in January of 2010 from liver cancer after spending his last two decades seeped in alcohol. Among his final performances was a five day drinking binge at a five star London hotel which led to both his hospitalization and newspaper headlines that he had "disappeared".

But let's remember the more sober and creative days. The Scottish born singer first played with comedian Billy Connolly and Joe Egan in a folk act called The Humblebums. When they broke up Rafferty and Egan started up Stealers Wheel. I'm posting "Outside Looking In" instead of the more obvious "Stuck In The Middle With You" ( or that Beatlesque gem "Late Again") just to ensure you that dipping deeply in the Stealers Wheel catalog is well worth your time. The duo disbanded in 1975. Only the lawyers got rich.

But with his 1978 album City To City, which sold 5.5 million copies and knocked Saturday Night Fever off the the top of the charts, Gerry Rafferty became a millionaire. ( "Big Change in the Weather" is the B-Side to "Baker Street".) He didn't like being a star. You won't find a treasure trove of Rafferty videos on YouTube. The Proclaimers' Charlie Reid, whose 1987 hit album was produced by Rafferty said " He struck me as a very very very sensitive man and for someone like that, fame was probably not appropriate."

From the outside, looking in, it appears Gerry Rafferty found his hiding place inside a bottle. But just give a listen to what he left behind.

In Memoriam: Ralph Mooney and Marshall Grant

2011-12-29T15:38:00.000-05:00

Ray Price: Crazy Arms

[purchase]

Waylon Jennings: Rainy Day Woman

[purchase]

Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two: Luther Played the Boogie

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The names Ralph Mooney and Marshall Grant may not appear above the title on many records. But, their contributions to music were instrumental -- in both senses of the word.

Ralph Mooney co-wrote one of the greatest country songs ever, “Crazy Arms.” It’s been covered zillions of times; Ray Price and Patsy Cline own the best-known versions, and it's one of the few covers in Chuck Berry's Chess catalog. It sounds good every time, in part thanks to some of the greatest lines of despair in country music. (“This ain't no crazy dream, I know that it's real, you’re someone else’s love now.”) But Mooney is even better known as one of the all-time great country sidemen. A pioneering steel guitarist, he’s often associated with the Bakersfield sound and can be heard on the early hits of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. He also did some solo turns and made a fine duet album with James Burton. He found new fame in the 1970s as Waylon Jennings’ steel guitar player. Waylon’s band, The Waylors, lacked a standout lead guitarist. It was Mooney’s licks that propelled the arrangements. Mooney’s and Waylon’s interplay was at its finest on the 1974 hit, “Rainy Day Woman.”

Unlike Mooney, Marshall Grant didn’t leave behind distinctive solos or significant songwriting credits. But, he played an integral role in constructing the sound of Johnny Cash. He was the entire rhythm section of Cash’s original band, the Tennessee Three. (That was the group’s original name, the other two being Luther Perkins and Red Kernodle. They became the Tennessee Two when Kernodle dropped out, and went back to Three after drummer W.S. Holland joined a few years later.) Particularly on the Sun records, before Holland joined the band, it was Marshall Grant’s upright bass that provided the basis for the boom-chick-a-boom sound. The inevitable switch to electric bass dampened Grant’s sound, and his role in Cash’s shows and recordings diminished as players and singers flitted in and out of Cash’s band. He acrimoniously left Cash’s employ in the early 1980s, though the two reconciled shortly before Cash’s death. Grant died in the service of his old boss, after falling ill during rehearsal for a Cash tribute concert organized by Rosanne Cash.

Guest post by Mt Vernon Mike

In Memoriam: Bert Jansch

2011-12-29T02:21:00.002-05:00

Pentangle: Sweet Child

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Bert Jansch: Angie

[purchase]

Most of the time, Bert Jansch is described as a British folk musician. Fair enough, since many of the songs he performed were from the British folk cannon. But Jansch’s first inspiration was the American blues musician Big Bill Broonzy. Broonzy started out playing for dancers in juke joints, so he had to lay down a solid beat. But, on top of that beat, Broonzy had a gift for improvising. He could get that beat so solid that you could still feel it, even when Broonzy wasn’t playing it during a solo. Bert Jansch learned his lessons well, and always provided rock solid rhythm for the group Pentangle, while John Renbourn took the flashy solos. In Pentangle, Jansch also played the intricate finger-picked rhythm lines that are a feature of tradition British folk, and the group added rock, jazz, and even Indian influences. As you can hear on Sweet Child, Jansch could handle it all beautifully. But, as a solo artist, Jansch often looked back to the blues, albeit with a British accent. His performance of Angie is a fine example of this. There is that solid beat, but the freedom of the solos is also very much there. Jansch did not play by the musical rules, which is a fine definition of creativity. But he always gave the song what it needed. He won’t be laying down that solid beat any more, but I can still feel it.

In Memoriam: Amy Winehouse

2011-12-28T13:20:00.004-05:00

Amy Winehouse: Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow

[purchase]

There's not much left to say about R&B crooner Amy Winehouse, whose July death by "misadventure" was foretold clearly by her blazing climb to fame - a trail littered by drug abuse, acts of violence, dangerous weight fluctuations, publicity disasters, and mental illness. But though the somewhat ironic posthumous autobiography that remains in the form of gigantic radio hits such as Rehab and You Know I'm No Good was all the rage on the blogs in the hot summer of her passing, the aching soul she brings to this Carole King hit always made me believe there was still a little girl in there, all hope and heart, struggling to break free.

Now a member of the pseudo-mythical 27 Club, Winehouse takes her place alongside Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Robert Johnson, Brian Jones (Rolling Stones), Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (Grateful Dead), Chris Bell (Big Star), Kristen Pfaff (Hole), and many more interpretative geniuses whose flames burned out in their youth, all casualties of the conflagrant combination of the fickle temptation of fame and the fragility of the body. May her life and death remind us of how precious, and how volatile, the life of the artist on the edge can be.

In Memoriam: Isshi

2011-12-27T21:53:00.003-05:00

Kagrra,: Haha e

[purchase]

Kagrra,: Arishi Hi no Bishou

[purchase]

One of the saddest things in Japanese culture is the high rate of early deaths of her young, which isn't ever discussed properly. Instead, we read terse announcements such as this one about the death of 32-year-old singer Isshi, whose band Kagrra disbanded this year, only to be followed by the dispassionate notice of the lead singer's death. The reason was not, nor will ever be, discussed in public, but I'm inferring suicide. And as a fan of the band it saddens me to read this.

Kagrra, embraced the visual kei genre with a Japan-heavy twist. They performed in traditional garb, titled their songs in Japanese as well, and didn't try to emulate the Engrish-laden lyrics of other groups. Their album covers were gorgeous, and I featured them earlier this year in cool covers week, sadly a short week before Isshi died. Isshi's voice began to fail after their 10-year run as a popular VK group, and the band broke up earlier this year, calling it the demise of Kagrra,. They'll definitely be missed.

In Memoriam: Loleatta Holloway

2011-12-27T09:58:00.004-05:00

Loleatta Holloway: Cry To Me

[purchase]

Among the soul deaths this year were those of Marv Tarplin (you know his guitar from “Tracks Of My Tears” and virtually every Smokey Robinson hit), Sylvia Robinson (founder of Sugar Hill Records and a soul singer in her own right), Coasters founder Carl Gardner, Dobie Gray, Vesta Williams, Gene McDaniels, Marvin Sease, Howard Tate, Gladys Horton of The Marvelettes, percussionist Ralph MacDonald, guitarists Cornell Dupree and Melvin Sparks, J Blackfoot of The Soul Children, St Clair Lee of The Hues Corporation, Donald Banks of The Tymes and – above all – Nick Ashford.

But the death I want to highlight is that of Loleatta Holloway, whose voice was behind one of the biggest international hits of 1989, without her getting credit for it. The hit was “Ride On Time” by Black Box, sung on the video by a beautiful, thin girl. Loleatta was not thin, and the lithe girl was not the singer.

“Ride On Time” sampled profusely from Loleatta Holloway’s 1980 dance number “Love Sensation”, right down to her vocals, on which she sang “right on time”; the Italians producers of the Black Box hit thought it was “ride on time”, hence the title. The producers of “Ride On Time” had cleared the samples with Salsoul, who had released “Love Sensation”, but Hathaway rightly insisted that she should receive royalties from the 1989 hit which, after all, would have been pretty uninteresting without her vocals. A settlement was reached eventually.

So Loleatta Holloway is mostly remembered as a disco queen and the subject of the “Ride On Time” story. But before “Love Sensation”, she was a great soul singer. Especially her 1975 album Cry To Me (of which we feature the gorgeous title track) was outstanding. But before Holloway could establish itself herself, her label went bust. She went on to the Salsoul label where she had dance hits with songs like “Love Sensation”, “Crash Goes Love” and “Hit And Run” (and a big soul hit in 1978 with Bunny Sigler’s “Only You”), and sang on dance classics like Dan Hartman’s “Re-Light My Fire”.

In 1991 she topped the US pop charts with Markie Mark and the Funky Bunch’s “Good Vibrations” – which featured, fully credited, vocals from “Love Sensation”.

Loleatta Holloway died on 21 March of heart failure at the age of 64.

In Memoriam: Cesaria Evora

2011-12-26T15:04:00.001-05:00

Cesaria Evora: Sodade

[purchase]

The Cape Verde Islands are a chain of ten volcanic islands off the coast of Senegal. Much of the land is desert, there is a live volcano on one island, and the area has a particular kind of hurricane named after it. So it really isn’t that surprising that the islands were uninhabited until the fifteenth century. At that time, Portugal established an outpost there to service their slave trade. The Cape Verde Islands remained a Portugese colony until independence came in 1975. Since the end of the slave trade, the country has been an important port in the Atlantic shipping lanes. As such, the people of Cape Verde come in frequent contact with people from many lands, and singing for the sailors is a viable way to make a living. It was what Cesaria Evora did for thirty years, starting in the 1950s.

In 1985, a friend took Evora to Paris. It was the first time she had ever left her homeland, and it led to the making of her first album three years later. Worldbeat was all the rage then in world music, and Evora’s first two albums set her singing against a backdrop of heavy electronic beats. Her third album, 1991’s Mar Azul, was the first to feature her voice in an acoustic setting like the one she had always used at home. The album would prove to be her breakthrough.

Evora’s style is called Morna. The instrumental part of the music features Portugese rhythms, but influences from jazz, west African music, and all of the cultures that have passed through Cape Verde are in the mix as well. But the feature of this music is the voice. Evora sang of history, of love, of course, and of justice for poor people like she had been. Evora insisted on performing bearfoot, in solidarity with the poor. In her voice, you can hear a land buffeted by the whims of nature, but also the determination of her people. Her words are in Kriola, the native creole version of Portugese. Not many people know the language, but her meaning is completely clear. Morna is first of all music of the heart, and no one who sang it had more heart than Cesaria Evora.

In Memoriam: Kent Morrill

2011-12-26T14:38:00.001-05:00

The Wailers: Tall Cool One

[purchase]

The Wailers: I Want To Walk With You

[purchase]

The Fabulous Wailers were the Zeligs of the Northwest Rock 'n' Roll scene. They were still Tacoma high school kids when they formed in 1959, the same year as another Tacoma band, The Ventures. The Wailers hit it big first, playing their top 40 instrumental "Tall Cool One" on American Bandstand. Then in 1960, with vocalist Rockin' Robin Roberts, they recorded an obscure R&B tune called "Louie Louie" which became a regional smash. Alas, it was the Portland-based Kingsmen who scored a nationwide hit with their sloppy copy-cat version based on The Wailers arrangement. With "Out of Our Tree", available on the Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era compilation , The Wailers introduced the punk rock sound to the Northwest, inspiring The Sonics, and Paul Revere and the Raiders. Among the band's early fans: Jimi Hendrix, who offered to lend the Wailers an amp if they'd let him on stage to play with the band. ( It never happened).

When Beatlemania swept through the country, The Wailers brought their secret weapon to the fore: keyboardist Kent Morrill's voice. Listen to "I Want To Walk With You" from the 1966 album Outburst! and you'll hear a voice every bit as good as those of the lead singers of The Byrds and The Turtles. It should come as no surprise that when The Wailers finally broke up, Kent found success as a Roy Orbison tribute artist.

He was reminding his wife of an upcoming tribute show the April week he passed away at the age of 70, after years of battling cancer.

The legendary Seattle DJ Pat O'Day said "Fame of all kind is 75 percent talent and 25 percent luck. Kent had all the talent, all of the skills, all of the emotion, all of the writing ability to be a big star. The fact that he didn't become one was just a case of luck...We don't have to cry for his disappointments because he knew how good he was and that's what counts."

In Memoriam: Matt Jones

2011-12-26T02:32:00.000-05:00

Matt Jones: Ballad of Medgar Evers

[purchase]

The civil rights movement peaked during my childhood. I vaguely remember reading about it in the newspapers and seeing things on TV, and I remember hearing that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. On my mother’s birthday. Of course, growing up in the 70’s in a liberal suburban New York family, the civil rights movement was always there, always something that I was aware of, but not something that directly affected my life.

Fast forward to about 10 years ago. My wife and kids and I are living in a small village on the Hudson River, and we get invited to a “music party” at a neighbor’s beautiful brick house. The owners lived in Manhattan and used this house on the weekends. We were told that they had friends who were folk singers, and that we should come, bring a bottle of wine and be prepared to sing, if we wanted to.

Over the next few years, my wife and kids and I attended a few of these parties. There was a rotating group of singers and musicians—playing guitars, mandolins, banjos, concertinas—and singing old labor songs, anti-Vietnam War songs, Civil Rights songs, as well as classic and modern folk songs, and original compositions.

It was an amazing experience. The clear leaders of group were two brothers, Matt and Marshall Jones. Using the power of the Internet, I learned that they were true heroes of the Civil Rights movement—members of the SNCC Freedom Singers and participants in many of the famous marches and demonstrations. Being in the same room as them made me feel a connection to something that I had only previously read about, and hearing them sing songs that they probably played at demonstrations gave me chills. I was also glad that my children, who have grown up in a multicultural community where the legacy of the Sixties is, often, taken for granted, got a chance to get a personal connection to some of the people who put their comfort and safety on the line and fought for equality and peace. Matt Jones once said “I don’t think of myself as a cultural worker, I am a freedom singer; a freedom fighter. I’ve always been a freedom fighter; I’ll probably go down that way, too.”

A few years ago, one of the hosts had a stroke, and the parties ended. Earlier this year, I read that Matt Jones had died. I haven’t seen his name on any lists of musicians who died this year, and maybe that would be OK with him, but he left an amazing legacy. Listen to his Ballad of Medgar Evers, sung by the SNCC Freedom Singers, a tribute to the civil rights leader who was assassinated by a KKK leader in 1963.

Guest Post by J David

In Memoriam: Hazel Dickens

2011-12-25T00:01:00.001-05:00

Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard: Who's That Knocking

[purchase]

Hazel Dickens: Only A Hobo
Hazel Dickens: Hills of Home

[purchase]

Raised in and ultimately hailed as the authentic voice of the West Virginia mountains, born into poverty and a factory-worker until she was discovered by Mike Seeger in the early sixties, early bluegrass trailblazer and singer-songwriter Hazel Dickens channeled the pain and hardship of coal country and holler culture into a wailing plea for social and economic justice - first alongside classically trained partner (and Seeger's spouse) Alice Gerrard, where they were arguably the first true female bluegrass tenor-and-lead harmony duo on the circuit; later as a solo act and collaborator.

Their arrangements of classic bluegrass and appalachian tunes would become standard in the country music world, with coverage by Emmylou and others. Hazel's stature would ultimately win her several major industry achievement awards, and a National Heritage Fellowship from the NEA. And later, Hazel's originals, such as Coal Tattoo and union song They'll Never Keep Us Down, would find no small placement in a myriad of documentary soundtracks about the region and its woes, giving her influence enough to merit major coverage in the NYT upon her passage at 75 due to complications from pneumonia.

I didn't know much about Hazel until this year myself, having only started digging into older bluegrass in the past few years. But these three tracks - the first from Hazel and Alice's early years as pioneering women of bluegrass, via a prescient Art Decade post in January and recorded with sidemen Lamar Grier, Chubby Wise, David Grisman, and Billy Baker, the second a track from a 1987 solo album snagged as part of a 70-song set of Dylan covers in honor of his birthday this year over at Boogie Woogie Flu, posted just a month after her passing, the third another track from that album I fell in love with after tracking it down - show both evolution and common conviction, saying more in song that I could in words.

Holiday Classics: Blue Christmas

2011-12-24T15:15:00.004-05:00

Leon Redbone: Blue Christmas

[purchase]

Blue Christmas provides the template for the holiday heartbreak song. Usually, the emotion gets heaped on, with big string sections, cloying background vocals, and a lead vocal performance that milks the song for every ounce of emotion it contains and then some. Elvis Presley’s version of Blue Christmas is exactly the sort of thing I mean, but the song is treated this way by almost everyone who records it. There are some odd counter-examples that set the song against a sterile techno backdrop, with a passionless vocal up front. But Leon Redbone shows in his version what can be done with the song by taking it at face value. The emotions here are real, not pumped up to theatrical proportions. The heartbreak is presented honestly, not glossed over or denied. I always hated the song until I heard this version. To me, Redbone finds the essence that so eludes others, and delivers a fine performance.

Holiday Classics: Coventry Carol

2011-12-24T14:11:00.004-05:00

Chris Smither: Coventry Carol

[unpurchaseable]

As I wrote about earlier this month over at Cover Lay Down, the conceit of the Holiday Classic is confounded a bit by the existence of several historical waves and source-period songtypes which, together, comprise the current spate of familiar tunes for the season, as heard on the radio, in the mall, and at the hearth itself.

But though my own tastes generally run to the modern folkworld during the rest of the year, and though others tend towards the mid-20th century pop canon when citing their holiday favorites, my own true preferences for this sort of music trend much earlier - all the way back to the early wassails and church songs, and to the hymnal which collects them.

As such, even as I blog the new and the novelty, my secret household Christmas mix is mostly full of centuries-old songs done up in a modern and mellow folkstyle, from Cindy Kallet's Cherry Tree Carol, Brooks Williams' I Wonder As I Wander, Shawn Colvin's In The Bleak Midwinter, and Mary Chapin Carpenter's Sill, Still, Still to Sufjan Stevens' indiefolk takes on O Come O Come Emmanuel, Lo How A Rose E'er Blooming, The Friendly Beasts, and more.

And then there's this: a mellow, rich take on an old, unsourced traditional carol from the oft-blogged catalog of Chris Smither, originally released on a 1996 holiday sampler which - like so many other such Christmas treats from a pre-webbed world - was only made available for that one year, and has since become a rarity. As with so much of my late 20th century folk treasures, it comes direct to us from my father's CD collection, making it especially dear to me. And so I offer it in the spirit of the season, from my generations to yours. May it serve you well.

Holiday Classics: Joy to the World

2011-12-24T02:02:00.000-05:00

Eef Barzelay: Joy to the World

[purchase]

According to our friends at Wikipedia, "Joy to the World" is the most published Christmas hymn in North America. The words were written by Isaac Watts from his interpretation of Psalm 98 in the bible, and were published by Watts in 1719. The musical arrangement that we use today is by Lowell Mason, and it is believed that the melody of this 1839 adaptation was inspired by or taken from parts of Handel's Messiah. Watts originally intended for this hymn to be a song of praise and triumph for the Christian Savior's return to earth at the end of the world. It's unclear how this song eventually ended up being a Christmas song, celebrating the Savior's birth. It's equally difficult to research this song as I kept coming up with the song by Three Dog Night.

Most of the well-known versions of "Joy to the World" are triumphant, celebratory songs, often with lush orchestral or organ arrangements featuring soaring sopranos or jubilant brass sections proclaiming the news of Jesus's birth. Conversely, there is this version by Eef Barzelay, better known as the lead singer and principal songwriter of the alt country band Clem Snide. This very understated version from Barzelay's 2006 solo album Bitter Honey features his distinctive voice, an acoustic guitar, and minimal production. One can interpret Barzelay's version as more of a contemplative, purposeful hymn, something that may not be as triumphant as the original author and arranger had intended, but may be more suitable for a cold night in a stable in a far away Middle Eastern land.

Holiday Classics: Frosty The Snowman

2011-12-22T20:59:00.001-05:00

The Brady Bunch: Frosty The Snowman

[purchase]

The first single from the first album by The Brady Bunch was a Holiday song released in 1970. Cindy's "Frothty The Thnoman" will make even a white Christmas feel like a sunshine day. You're welcome!

Holiday Classics: The Christmas Song

2011-12-22T11:10:00.006-05:00

Les Brown & his Orchestra feat. Doris Day : The Christmas Song
[purchase]

John Edwards: The Christmas Song
Out of print

Smokey Robinson & The Temptations: The Christmas Song
[purchase]

The Christmas Song might be the best of all Christmas songs in the pop canon. It was written in the space of 45 minutes on a hot summer’s day in 1944. Mel Tormé wrote the lyrics, Bob Wells the lyrics — on that hot day the lyricist sought to conjure images of winter in a bid to keep cool.

It was first recorded in 1946 by the King Cole Trio, also on a hot day. These recordings apparently did not make great waves. The trio recorded a new version in 1953, with an orchestral arrangement by Nelson Riddle. The version that we are most familiar with is Nat ‘King’ Cole’s 1963 recording, which is closely patterned on the 1953 take, right down to the jingle bells outro.

Tormé recorded the song he co-wrote in around 1954, and again in 1961 for the My Kind Of Music album, and in 1992. Also see this delightful video of Tormé and Judy Garland (wondering about flying rainbows) from Garland’s 1963 Christmas show. A couple of weeks ago, Glee paid homage to Garland’s Christmas special, to great effect.

But none of these versions feature here. First we have Doris Day and the Les Brown Orchestra doing The Christmas Song in 1946, around the same time the Cole Trio recorded the orignal. Note how this version incorporates strains of the "Noel" carol, and plays out with a nod to "Silent Night" where Nat would later opt for "Jingle Bells".

Then there is a slow-burning version by John Edwards from 1976, which sounds a lot like Donny Hathaway might have sung it. Edwards, an excellent soul singer in his own right who was once mentored by Curtis Mayfield, later became lead singer for The Spinners, most notably on "Working My Way Back To You".

A rather different soul version is delivered by Motown giants Smokey Robinson and The Temptations. I am unsure when they recorded it, but comments on the video on YouTube suggest the year 1987.

Normally contributors to the Star Maker Machine don't really plug their own blogs, but I think it is fair, at this time of the year when some may need a fix of new seasonal music, to make readers of this blog aware of the Christmas mixes I have posted in the past, ranging from soul to country to "Christmas in Black & White" and, of course, pop. ALL HERE.

And so, to my fellow contributors and all readers, may your Christmas be bright and may the new year bring you lots of joy.

Photo by Phill Joynes (www.wellexposed.com)

Holiday Classics: Christmas Time’s A-Coming

2011-12-22T00:51:00.002-05:00

Emmylou Harris: Christmas Time’s A-Coming

[purchase]

Country music Christmas albums: Bah, humbug. They are almost all forgettable, often featuring the same couple of dozen songs, ("Little Drummer Boy," anyone?), philharmonic-style string arrangements and overly solemn vocals.

But there's one I will defend: Emmylou Harris’s first and only Christmas record, "Light of the Stable." And not just because it's the only Christmas record I know of with a Neil Young song as the title track. It's a significant record because it heralded (hark!) Emmylou's neo-traditional stylings of the early 1980s. Released in Europe in 1979 (It became available in the U.S. a year later; the cover above, showing a pregnant and not particularly comfortable Emmylou, is from the original English release), "Light of the Stable" came out a half-year before "Roses in the Snow," Emmylou's traditional country/bluegrass standard bearer. "Light of the Stable" also featured the first officially released "Trio" track, with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt providing supporting vocals on the title song. Thanks to the bright, acoustic arrangements, "Light of the Stable" still sounds fresh today. Even "Little Drummer Boy." Though, in deference to the Facebook "Little Drummer Boy Challenge," the album's opening track, “Christmas Time’s a-Coming,” is offered here instead.

Guest post by Mt. Vernon Mike

Holiday Classics: Mele Kalikimaka

2011-12-21T02:43:00.003-05:00

Poi Dog Pondering with The Dirty Dozen Brass Band: Mele Kalikimaka

[purchase]

I must apologize to one of our readers, who sent me an e-mail to request T-Bone Burnett’s version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen during our Offbeat Holiday Music week. I did not post it then because I knew that it would fit this week’s theme better. But I’m not posting it now either, because the album it comes from, Acoustic Christmas, has another song I wanted to post more: Mele Kalikimaka. The song was written by R Alex Anderson in 1949. A year later, it was a hit for Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. Oddly, the notes in the Acoustic Christmas album list the song as traditional. Mele Kalikimaka is an example of a Hawaiian musical genre called Hapa haole, in which Hawaiian phrases or pidgen English ones are sprinkled into mostly English lyrics, and native Hawaiian rhythms are used. The words Mele Kalikimaka are what apparently happens when a native Hawaiian tries to say Merry Christmas.

The version heard here is a collaboration between Poi Dog Pondering and The Dirty Dozen Brass Band. That was either going to be a nightmare or a blast. I’m happy to say that it was the latter.

Holiday Classics: We Three Kings

2011-12-20T21:29:00.000-05:00

Book Of Love: We Three Kings

[purchase]

See if you can name the decade in which this song was recorded.

The Philadelphia-based synth popsters Book Of Love give us an immensely dance-able version of "We Three Kings", now available on the two CD version of their debut. It's worth noting for two reasons. First there's the way vocalist Susan Ottoviano sings as though she'd rather be scrubbing toilets. And secondly, because it provides the soundtrack to an outrageous 60,000 LED Christmas display near Miami, FL which you can see here .

Holiday Classics: O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

2011-12-19T22:31:00.003-05:00

David Lanz : O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

[purchase]

The origin of this Advent hymn is lost to time---some sources say it began as an 8th century Gregorian chant, some say it's from the 12th century, some say it's later. Regardless, it's got this great minor key going for it (rare for Christmas music), which I love. This version in particular by new-age artist David Lanz is special to me. A good friend who was the organist at the church I used to attend always began Advent with this arrangement. I especially like the phrasing, the way Lanz makes you wa-a-i-i-t for resolution, just like Advent itself. It's already a bit late in the season to listen to it, I suspect, but I hope you like it too, regardless of the day.

Holiday Classics - Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

2011-12-19T16:15:00.005-05:00

Lou Rawls: Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

[purchase]

When Judy Garland sang “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” in the MGM musical Meet Me In St Louis, the song was a hymn of comfort to the narrator’s little sister – and, indeed, herself – in a situation of personal upheaval. It’s sweet and tender and fragile.

Over the years that meaning became roundly ignored in such ways that it assumed the dimension of a recyclable Christmas card. It is the equivalent of the tinselled “Season’s Greetings” banner in your local footwear store.

So if we need to take Judy’s quiet embrace of a song as the ubiquitous exuberant handshake of seasonal well-wishes it has become, we ought to be selective about whom we allow to convey the greetings. I might propose Luther Vandross’ quite lovely version, but if we are going to flip Judy’s intent upside down, we may as well go with the big band bombast of Lou Rawls, who delivers the song in big style on his 1989 album A Merry Christmas. In fact, I think I’d rather have Lou’s version.

Holiday Classics: Deck the Halls

2011-12-18T19:02:00.000-05:00

The Roches: Deck the Halls

[purchase]

The one constant in my family’s holiday celebrations over the past 20 odd years has been The Roches’ Christmas album, We Three Kings. The Roches were a band that my wife, whose tastes ran toward the folky, and I, whose tastes were a bit harder edged, both liked. We appreciated the beautiful and quirky harmonies, and the music snob in me was impressed by their work with Robert Fripp.

In 1990, We Three Kings was released, and we heard it on WFUV, Fordham University’s amazing radio station. I wanted to get a copy, to surprise my wife, who loved it, and who had only a few months earlier given birth to our first child. In those pre-Amazon, pre mp3, days, you actually had to go to a record store to buy CDs, and like an idiot, I waited until right before Christmas to try to get a copy. I walked into J&R Music, probably the best record store in NY, and was encouraged to hear that very CD playing on the in-store sound system. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a copy in the bins, and wanting to make my wife happy, I dragooned one of the workers, who told me that the copy playing on the sound system was the last one in the store. I made him take it out of the CD player and sell it to me.

Since then, We Three Kings has become the harbinger of Christmas. My wife dusts it off when she starts her baking, and I know that delicious things are about to happen. Coming from a secular Jewish family that didn’t celebrate Christmas, I never really understood the power and fun of Christmas music until I started spending the holidays with my future wife and her family. Now, even though we have a large CD library of holiday (mostly Christmas) music, and I have compiled a large iPod playlist of holiday music, both classic and otherwise, We Three Kings continues to be my favorite.

It is hard to pick a favorite song on the disc. I can eliminate the few that they sing in overdone New York accents, and the more religious ones. Deck the Halls ultimately jumps out at me. The way they hit the first “Deck”, and the classic Roches’ harmonies, and the crazy fa la la la las. Enjoy.

Guest post by J. David

Holiday Classics: You’re a Mean One, Mr Grinch

2011-12-18T02:23:00.002-05:00

Carnival of Shame: You’re a Mean One, Mr Grinch

[unavailable]

I have no intention of stopping Christmas from coming, so I thought I had better clear this one off early. I can’t tell you much about Carnival of Shame. I know that they were based out of the Philadelphia area, and they released a holiday EP in 1993 with the wonderfully subversive name of Happy Alcoholidays. Of course, that is where this song comes from. You might think that their lead singer had a knack for imitating Thurl Ravenscraft, who sang the original version of Mr Grinch. But I was able to hear a couple of other tracks from Alcoholidays; it seems that Carnival of Shame’s lead singer always sang this way. The arrangement sounds like the classic four piece rock band: drums, bass, and two guitars. But the band stays loose, making odd interjections throughout that are just right for this woozy version of Mr Grinch.

Here’s a bit of Grinch trivia: aside from singing the original Mr Grinch, Thurl Ravenscraft’s other claim to fame was that he originated the role, and provided the voice for Tony the Tiger for many years.

Accidental Kidsongs: Je t'aime moi non plus

2011-12-17T04:20:00.017-05:00

Jane Birkin with Serge Gainsbourg: Je t'aime moi non plus (vinyl)

[purchase]

I bought my first record when I was five years old (this masterpiece, if you want to know). Before that, I loved playing my grandmother’s singles – of which I remember only a recording of the Slave Choir from Verdi’s Nabucco – and, once I was given my own little record player for my fifth birthday, I liberally borrowed my mother’s singles, which were kept in an album with plastic sleeves.

It certainly was an eclectic collection. It included Manfred Mann (Ha! Ha! Said The Clown), Gilbert Bécaud (Nathalie; German version), The Archies (Sugar Sugar), The Peels (Juanita Banana), Trini Lopez (America), Al Martino (Spanish Eyes), Esther & Abi Ofraim (Noch einen Tanz; a deliciously sinister number in which a couple observe the death of the woman’s rich husband), Chris Andrews (Pretty Belinda) and Jane Birkin’s “Je t'aime moi non plus”.

My brother and I played them all, as well as later additions, such as The Sweet’s “Poppa Joe”. And my mother evidently saw no cause for withholding Birkin’s orgasmic stylings from us. I assume that she calculated, correctly, that her sons would not realise exactly what (never mind who) was going down on the song. So we cheerfully played the song with its lovely organ (the instrument!). I don’t know what we made of the lady’s noises. Maybe she had a sore tummy from sucking on too many lollipops. Whatever it was, we had no idea that there was such a thing as sex, and if we did, we had no idea what it sounded like. We just really dug the tune.

I’ve read that on the recording Birkin didn’t fake her orgasm; if it was faked, then Birkin certainly would trump Meg Ryan.

This is a vinyl rip, which is superior to the sterile digital rendering of a CD rip.

Accidental Kidsongs: Lucky Star

2011-12-16T20:53:00.003-05:00

Madonna: Lucky Star

My first music memory is of climbing over the front seat in our old blue station wagon as we pulled into our driveway when I was about 4 years old to turn up the volume because this song came on the radio. I exclaimed loudly "I LOVE THIS SONG!". Of course, that dates me since it's been years since they've had all sorts of car restraint laws for children, but back then I could show my love for a song by doing that.

If you think about it, it makes sense for a small child to like this song. The lyrics are very simple and pull from from a nursery rhyme, and it is easily sung along with. There's not much risque about it either, considering it's from an artist known for pushing the envelope for her sexual image, so it all works out pretty well and my parents didn't mind getting me the 45 single of it.

It still makes me smile when I go through my old record collection and come across this single, as I was so young when I was listening to it that I used to have to harass my mom to tell me which side of the record the song was on every time I wanted to hear it. She got sick of me asking so she drew a star on the side where the song was so I didn't have to ask her anymore. So now when I see the record I see the star my mom drew on it almost 30 years ago because I couldn't read yet and I wanted to listen to my favorite song, and it always makes me smile.

Accidental Kidsongs: Skin Lake

2011-12-16T16:56:00.003-05:00

Judge Dread: Skin Lake

[purchase]

I grew up in a time when The Beatles and Motown dominated the world of music. My parents were both amateur classical musicians, so they were intent on making sure my brothers and I had every opportunity to learn to love classical music as well. We had Peter and the Wolf in the house, and we went to a theatrical rerelease of Fantasia. And, for the most part, it worked.

Fast forward forty years. When my son was about four, he discovered classical music through a side door, so to speak. He knows more about classical music now, four years later, and I don’t think he even makes the connection, but here’s what happened. My wife and I both love ska music. Before I became a blogger myself, I started collecting mp3s from other people’s blogs. I tended to grab all of the ska I could find, and I would put the songs together on a series of discs I called Ska Boxes. Skin Lake is on the volume that became my wife’s favorite, volume III. So, my daughter was amenable, and we would play these in the car, as we still do. There was and is plenty of other music we play in the car as well. We always thought that my son wasn’t paying any attention, but we did notice that he liked to make up his own names for songs. One day, he started asking for “The Hick-it Song”. Huh? Now, to this day, he will ask for something over and over until he gets it, or we convince him that it ain’t happening. Over the next week, we realized that our sanity depended on figuring out which song was “The Hick-it Song”. Finally, I realized that he was picking up on the sound effect that ska artists make sometimes. As soon as I told my wife this, she figured out which song it was, and our lives were saved. Despite this harrowing experience, the song and the disc it is on are still favorites in my family. The melody, of course, comes from Swan Lake, and was also turned into a different ska song by Madness. The words are probably not much more appropriate for an eight-year-old than they were when he was four, but what can you do?

Accidental Kidsongs: I Want to Hold Your Hand(s)

2011-12-16T00:06:00.000-05:00

The Chipmunks: I Want to Hold Your Hand

[purchase]

The Beatles: I Want to Hold Your Hand

[purchase]

My introduction to “grown up” music was served up by Alvin and the Chipmunks. Capitalizing on the success of a seasonal novelty record, “The Chipmunk Song (The Christmas Song)”, Ross Bagdasarian (a musician and actor who can be seen playing the cool jazz guy in Hitchcock’s classic “Rear Window”), working under the nom de plume “David Seville,” recorded a series of Chipmunks albums in the 1960s. By the time I was six years old, my record collection included two Chipmunk albums: first “Chipmunks a Go Go” and then “The Chipmunks Sing the Beatles.” Until then, all the records I'd been given featured kiddie songs or storybook adaptations. And, in fact, many of the songs on “A Go Go” sounded like they were written for the elementary school crowd – “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rain,” “What’s New Pussycat?” and “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” among them. I preferred the music on “Sing the Beatles,” but little did I know I was listening to the same songs my babysitters were, albeit with the vocals sped up. I figured these “Beatles” the album cover referred to were members of another cartoon animal singing group. Even after learning the Beatles and the Chipmunks were not on the same artistic plain, it didn’t register that “I Want To Hold Your Hand” wasn’t meant for children.

Knowing they had been one-upped Alvin and the lads always kept me from thinking of the Beatles as being too subversive.

Guest post by Mt Vernon Mike

Accidental Kidsongs: A Worried Man

2011-12-15T23:42:00.001-05:00

Kingston Trio: A Worried Man

[purchase]

On the Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving my mother would usually take the bus to my grandparent's home in southern Wisconsin to help grandma prepare for the next day's feast. My father would pick me and my little brother up after school, and we would drive down to meet them. Our mini two hour road trip would wind south down Wisconsin Highway 26, through rolling hills in the heart of America's Dairyland. Some of the small municipalities would already have their downtown's decorated for Christmas, much to my delight. We would always stop halfway at McDonald's for a kid-approved dinner, and be on our way.

One evening as we pulled out of the Golden Arches and got back on the road, my dad fiddled around with the radio trying to find something to listen to. News? Boring. Early 1980s rock? Awful. So dad put in a cassette: The Best of the Kingston Trio, harkening back to my dad's late teenaged years of hanging out at the rathskeller with his buddies, drinking warm beer and eating cold pizza.

Traditional folk music by it's very nature is easy for kids to pick up. The lyrics are relatively simple, verses and choruses are repeated often, and themes at their most basic level are things that children can relate to. It wasn't long after my dad popped in the tape that we were singing along to "Tom Dooley," "Tijuana Jail," and "M.T.A." My most vivid memory is of my little brother, who was around age six, singing "A Worried Man" at the top of his lungs. "We're worried now, but we won't be worried looooooooooong!" I sang along, and my dad laughed and laughed, as we headed down the highway to our grandparent's house for Thanksgiving.

Accidental Kidsongs: She Is Beautiful

2011-12-15T22:40:00.005-05:00

Andrew W.K.: She Is Beautiful

[purchase]

When my first child was born, we brought her all the songs we had been sung, plus our own songs, the ones we adopted together, and defined ourselves as family through: You Are My Sunshine, The Water Is Wide, James Taylor's You Can Close Your Eyes. We sang to her at night, and in the morning; we sang as we played, and walked, and we sang along as we listened to Daddy's folk music and jamband stuff in the rare working hour.

And then one day in the car, when she was about nine months old, I dropped a random CD single that had come free with a can of Axe deodorant into the CD player on the way home from buying it at the supermarket, and suddenly everything between us changed in a heartbeat as the screaming thrashmetal strains of hardcore singer-songwriter Andrew WK's second-best known single brought her to sudden ecstasy.

For the next four months, it was impossible to get into the car with my child without her immediately asking for the "deedle deedle deedle" song, an apt description of the song's keening opener serving adeptly as a coded signal for us to thrash out together with glee as we drove into town. And thus, I knew: this child would be her own beautiful soul, with depths and hidden secrets, a joy to celebrate and respond to. And she would love and recognize good music, of every genre, in a single note, no matter the source - like her father, and his father before him.

(postscript: Since his debut dropped in 2001, Andrew W.K. has gone on to become a successful new age self help motivational speaker, TV host, and nightclub owner. Meanwhile, my oldest child is now nine, going on 14, and she likes novelty and parody songs, mostly. But she'll get over it. We did.)

Accidental Kidsongs: Sugartime

2011-12-15T19:48:00.002-05:00

The McGuire Sisters: Sugartime

[purchase]

This is the first song I have memory of. I adored it.

I have a vivid image of myself in my parents' bedroom, playing this 45 over and over and over again on my little portable record player. Since it came out in Feb. of 1958, that puts me at barely age 4. I remember I also had those red and yellow plastic kiddie records but those memories are all gone (thankfully). But this one is so strong that even though I haven't listened to it since then, I still clearly remember the words and some of the parts like that ending "su-gaaa-ah-aaaa-ah-aaaa" at the end.

I never did break the habit of listening to songs I like over and over and over again. Sugartime may have been my first, but my latest is a Korean pop number called Where U At by Taeyang (also of the group BIGBANG). (Like all K-pop, this song's got great songwriting, terrific production quality, and precision dance moves; check it out). To complete the circle, I've turned on both my kids (who are in their 20s, so not exactly kids any more) to K-pop---they both loved SHINee's Lucifer. In fact, my daughter, a school teacher, played it for her second grade class as a reward, and they now have their own accidental kidsong.

I think the music industry and your faithful blogger have both come a long way since 1958.

Accidental Kidsongs: Only You

2011-12-15T01:17:00.002-05:00

Yaz: Only You

[purchase]

As two exhausted parents of what could only be described as a "spirited" child, my wife and I looked to Mix CD's of high energy techno-pop from the 80's and vente sized lattes to get us through some days. Our daughter had sleep issues at night and car seat issues during the day. The parenting handbooks all suggested we let her cry these issues out rather than give in. On one such noisy ride, this Yaz ballad came on. Maybe it was the strange electronic noises at the beginning that first caught our one year old's attention. But she stopped crying. When the song faded out we heard a voice from the backseat: "Again". We played it again. Then we heard her little voice sing the line "Only You". At long last, peace was at hand.

Seven years later, this simple song is still a favorite of our daughter's and of a great many other people as well. It was a #2 hit in the UK originally. Since then, Judy Collins, Rita Coolidge, Enrique Iglesias and an a cappella group called The Flying Picketts have all recorded cover versions. The latter's single topped the UK charts Christmas week in 1983.

Accidental Kidsongs: Lather

2011-12-11T03:10:00.002-05:00

Jefferson Airplane: Lather

[purchase]

Nowadays, there is an entire industry built around kid’s songs. Most record stores or sections of much size at all have at least a few titles. Amazon has more than anyone could possibly keep track of. But none of that existed when I was a boy. Even if an artist released an album intended for children, it would be found in the appropriate section with their other releases. So my parents had to use their judgment about what my brothers and I should hear. The artists I was most exposed to intentionally were Spike Jones, Tom Lehrer, and Alan Sherman. But there were certainly times when I heard, and latched onto, something they probably would not have chosen for me. In particular, my oldest brother would bring home the latest music, and strange things could happen.

I was not quite eight years old when Jefferson Airplane released their album Crown of Creation. My brother was thirteen, and not the best judge of what was suitable for his little brother. All he knew was that he had something he was excited about, and he wanted to share it. So he put on the album, and I was immediately taken with the song Lather. I suppose it may have been the concept of a grown-up who I could relate to. I still love the song, but now I get some of the more disturbing details that went right past me as a child. I certainly am not “snorting the best licks in town”, but I still miss my old toys sometimes, and those are the times I am glad I have children of my own.

Offbeat Holiday Music: Santa Claus Got Stuck in My Chimney

2011-12-10T13:31:00.002-05:00

Ella Fitzgerald: Santa Claus Got Stuck in My Chimney

[purchase]

All week long, the picture above has been sitting on the sidebar, and you probably never suspected that anyone had a song for it. In fact, not just anyone, but the great Ella Fitzgerald herself. The song had acquired legendary status at one time. Fitzgerald sings it with the innocence of a child, but someone in record company land had a filthy mind, and decided the song was too risqué to release. In fact, it only came out after Fitzgerald’s death in 1966. Personally, I think you have to work pretty hard to get something naughty out of this, but you be the judge.

Offbeat Holiday Music: How to Make Gravy

2011-12-10T01:35:00.005-05:00

Paul Kelly: How to Make Gravy

[purchase]

While this song isn't necessarily "offbeat," it's one that you won't
normally hear during the North American version of holidays. Paul
Kelly is an Australian singer/songwriter who I think is massively
underrated in the northern hemisphere. In this song the narrator, Joe,
is in prison, and is making a phone call to his friend Dan. Joe is
genuinely regretting and lamenting whatever he did to get himself in
trouble, and is asking Dan to kiss his kids on Christmas, to look
after his girlfriend, to give his best to a number of other friends,
and to not screw up the gravy for the roast. As one of my friends from
down-under pointed out, Australians celebrate Christmas just as the
English do, but it is summer during that time of year so after
Christmas dinner everyone hits the beach. Except for those who are
incarcerated, of course.

Guest post by Rock Star Aimz

Offbeat Holiday Music: Santa Claus On a Helicopter

2011-12-09T22:00:00.003-05:00

Wing: Santa Claus on a Helicopter

[purchase]

I wasn't going to post another song this week, but I accidently scrolled through this section of my database and…well…

I learned about Wing from popdose.com a few years ago. Wikipedia tells us "Wing is a New Zealand singer of Hong Kong origin. She is known for her unique, offbeat singing style." See? Fits the theme!

Wing has released 19 albums to date. After listening to this sample, you too will find this fact amazing.

Offbeat Holiday Music: A J-Rock Christmas

2011-12-08T23:28:00.001-05:00

DBSK: Silent Night

[purchase]

B'z: Itsuka No Merry Christmas

[purchase]

GLAY : Karera no HOLY X'MAS

[purchase]

Kiyoharu: Christmas

[purchase]

Tell me you're surprised that I'm posting J-Rock Christmas songs. I've got lo-o-o-ots! Clearly, being a Buddhist/Shinto nation doesn't preclude embracing the Christmas spirit. I can personally attest that in early November, the Starbucks in Kanazawa, Japan, was cheerily blasting out Dean Martin's Let It Snow! despite the warm fall weather.

Japanese musicians seem to crank out just as much Christmas music as their western counterparts (probably for the same reasons). The quality is comparable as well, but I've spared you the truly horrific stuff, like the cover of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer by the metal band Nightmare.

The first selection isn't actually J-Rock, though, it's K-Pop. DBSK was a highly popular Korean boy band who made it big in Japan about 6 years ago, but recently broke up. Everyone's holiday collection needs a German carol sung in Japanese by a Korean boy band, right? You'd be the only one on your block playing it, that's for sure.

The next two are pretty straightforward, original Christmas-themed songs by big-name J-Rock bands. Every now and then, the seasonal English words shine through: dah dah dah dah dah Merry Christmas!

That last one, by one of my fav singers, Kiyoharu, sounds like the kind of Christmas song you'd play just before deciding to top yourself. I mean, I do actually like it, but it's awfully grim going for what's supposed to be an uplifting season. Apparently some of the lyrics translate to: I made a wish and touched my rosary; let's kiss. I smiled at the transparent blue orchid. You are my Christmas, running along my frozen skin. Er, yeah, well it does have the requisite (English) holiday words in it:

Merry Christmas!