BEGINNINGS: IKE TURNER

If, as is widely surmised, 'Rocket 88' was the first evidenced relic of ye olde rocke and roll, by definition, Ike Turner, tho' neither the writer nor the singer was the first rocker. Sung, written and credited to one Jackie Brenston (and his Delta Cats), the band was actually Ike's Kings of Rhythm, for whom Brenston played sax. Dating from an astonishing 1951, when Ike was 19, a cocktail of western swing, jump blues and the accidentally 'fuzzed' guitar produced by a damaged amplifier. Raw and raggedy around the edges, to my ears it holds up a lot more successfully than other and later contenders for title as first.

Which made me think a bit about Ike, more famous now for his alleged misogyny and mistreatment of Tina, than for this or any other part of his wide-ranging legacy. Now this is not the place to assess his character and I won't. If we are to only glory those spotless in reputation, then the canon of modern music, like literature and art, will shrink to nought. OK, neither should we necessarily celebrate the blemishes and behaviours, even though we often do. Especially as it is difficult to tiptoe through the morals of one era in the shoes of another. So what about Izear Luster 'Ike' Turner, junior, 1931 - 2007?

Born the son of a minister, a recurring theme in rock music, he immersed himself in the musics of the juke joints from an early age, boogie boogie, blues, jazz, setting up and setting out on the road with his Kings of Rhythm, gaining experience by backing anyone from Sonny Boy Williamson to Muddy Waters. The success of 'Rocket 88' led to a temporary suspension of the band, as Turner became a session man and record producer, until, with 3rd wife Tina, or Annie-Mae Bullock as she was christened, a reformed Kings of Rhythm hit the road in 1956, becoming the Ike and Tina Turner Revue 4 years later. No more the rock'n'roll frontman, Ike was now the understated conductor of the band, Tina and her Ikettes taking the full focus of what was and to become a full blown R'n'b extravaganza, second only to James Brown. Arguably their best remembered early song would be the Phil Spector production, 'River Deep, Mountain High', the deal for the song being that Ike had little to do with it. And Ike, maybe uncharacteristically, always shrewdly, went along with it. Not initially a hit in the U.S., it was huge in Europe and beyond, leading to tours with the Rolling Stones.

Roll forward into another decade, popular on both sides of the atlantic by now, a staple in the charts, with covers, 'I Can Take You Higher' and 'Proud Mary', there was one further classic in store, with even now there being barely a wedding disco, or similar, that doesn't include 'Nutbush City Limits.' Both of mine did!

After that it was all about Tina, her revelations about life with Ike piling on the wretchedness already there courtesy old showbiz faves, drink, drugs and paranoia. I can't help but note some irony in that, aged 30, he was teetotal and drugs eschewing, and yet to introduce Miss Bullock into his band and his life, but that's conjecture. He did, however, manage to survive the storms, reputationally and personally, reviving again the Kings of Rhythm in 2001 and achieving his 2nd Grammy in 2006, for solo album, 'Risin' with the Blues.' He died the following year.

So let's get a bit of his finishings, remembering him for his music, not just his onetime amanuensis. (Sadly YouTube didn't have an available version of '18 Long Years', his re-write of earlier Ike and Tina song '5 Long Years'. They, inevitably, were married for 18.)

Beginnings: Brand New Day

Purchase: Brand New Day

While certainly not his finest hour as a lyricist, Van Morrison’s Brand New Day, from Moondance (the album every one you know has in their collection), fits the bill for our theme this month. It’s a simple song, both hopeful and soulful. The mellow groove is pure Van Morrison blue eyed soul, with his lush and plaintive vocal styles, wavering piano and guitar lines and gospel chorus. Van Morrison crosses genres with grace—balladeer, soulster, mystic poet, party hound. Brand New Day is a small blip in the catalog he’s created, but it’s a beautiful song, in its own sense. The man himself explains the origins of Brand New Day as:

"Brand New Day" expressed a lot of hope. I was in Boston and having a hard job getting myself up spiritually...Then one day this song came on the FM station and it had this particular feeling and this particular groove and it was totally fresh. It seemed to me like things were making sense....I didn't know who the hell the artist was. It turned out to be The Band. I looked up at the sky and the sun started to shine and all of a sudden the song just came through my head. I started to write it down, right from "When all the dark clouds roll away…” (Wikipedia)

What song do you think it was? Have to be The Weight? Perhaps I Shall be Released?

For good measure, we should also mention Morrison’s Into the Mystic, itself a soulful meditation on a new beginning of sorts, magical and supernatural, and of heading into new and unknown places, concerning love and other delights…

Happy New Year to all our readers—I hope history proves 2016 to be a far better year than all the doomsayers are predicting. Starting out a year with forecasts of our guaranteed destruction before the next one begins gives me all the more reason to listen to good music and try to see the brighter side of sun. Harmony!

Beginning: Windows 95 Sound

[purchase Windows 95 For Dummies, because, why not?]

Remember Windows 95? Probably not, but when it was released, appropriately in 1995, it was a pretty big deal. For the first time, Microsoft merged its Windows and MS-DOS (remember MS-DOS?) products, and made a bunch of technical improvements that I don’t really understand (although being able to use long file names was convenient). But what was great was that, for the most part, I didn’t need to understand them because they were buried behind an improved graphical user interface, which included a taskbar and a better file navigation system.

However, what is most important for our theme, is that Windows 95 marked the introduction of the “Start” button, which allowed a (relatively) quick way to start stuff. The Start button was part of all subsequent Windows releases, in some form, until the powers that be decided to leave it out of the crapfest that was Windows 8. The outcry was such that it was immediately put back, in the slightly improved Windows 8.1, and was included in the much superior Windows 10.

Now, the personal computer world is mostly divided into two camps, Windows and Mac, with a fringe of Linux and other operating system users. But back in 1995, there were other players in the market, particularly IBM’s OS/2, and the success of Windows 95 essentially drove them out of business. Part of that was based on the technology, but most of it was marketing.

Part of the strategy was to create an iconic “Microsoft Sound” to play when the system was booting up. Microsoft execs approached the master of ambient sounds, Brian Eno, to create the startup music. As he said:

The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem – solve it." 

The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3-1/4 seconds long." 

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel. 

In fact, I made eighty-four pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time. 

The final version of the sound, as heard in the video above, was actually 6 seconds, and it successfully became ingrained into the psyches of Windows users. Amusingly, Eno wrote the music on a Mac. I admit that hearing it again for the first time brought me back 20 years to an age of smaller, but bulkier, monitors, slower processors, tiny hard drives and floppy discs. But others have used Eno’s snippet as inspiration. Here’s a piano cover version:


And here’s a version slowed down 23 times, so it sounds like something from Music For Airports:


And here is just one of many remixes of the sound:


In addition to commissioning Eno’s genius to create a 6 second sound, the Windows 95 marketing blitz included a 30 minute cheesy faux-sitcom operating guide starring Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry of Friends, and a memorable commercial, highlighting the Start button, in which they licensed the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.” At the time, it was reported that the cost to license the song was in excess of $10 million, but that was apparently not true, and was an attempt by the Stones to inflate the licensing value of their catalog.

Beginning: Velvet Underground

 

[purchase it]

The summer of 69, my rather small LP collection would be enhanced with a copy of Blind Faith (there's really only one LP), because I had seen them live in July 69. And some Doors (by then,both the first and second albums, both of which I memorized the entire lyrics to).

I wish I could recall just from where the Velvet Underground came into my peripheral vision. I was starting to become somewhat eclectic at the end of the 60s - moving on from Top of the Pops and into music that various folks were introducing me to.

There was this guy (we are talking 13 years old) who was a friend of my younger brother's who was pretty well musically informed. He's the one who brought Are You Experienced our way and likely changed my musical perspective forever.

I guess it must have been his infuence that led to our purchase of the Velvet Underground and Janis Ian - a long cry from the Motown that made up a majority of my LP collection.

I confess: I was never really wild about VU: Yes, I recognize the "genius". Yes, I listened again and again ... but it always hit me as a little too hypnotic, too mesmerizing for true enjoyment. Maybe not enough joy. Kind of like what I imagine heroin might be like, and that's a path I never wanted to trod. David Bowie ... maybe ... Velvet Underground ...at arm's length.

That said, 40 years down the road, I guess that is part of what drew me to Talking Heads. There is a lot of similarity in the repetitive style. And I still - at a distance - appreciate the Velvet Underground (and Bowie and John Cale and Lou Reed). Within limits.

The live version above slightly more up tempo than the original on the eponymous album from '69, below.

Beginning: From the Beginning

Emerson, Lake and Palmer were never a take it or leave it band. You were either on their bus or off it, at least when I was a boy and they were just beginning. It's funny, all these years later, wondering quite what the fuss was all about, their star having faded both so far and so fast. Even their erstwhile fans seem content to dismiss them as the stuff of youthful inexperience, with very rare ever a kind word said in retrospect. And I'm not even sure if this is it, but, hell, yes, I was on the bus.

So, in the beginning was (were?) the Nice, I guess Keith Emerson's prototype for the later band, a trio of keyboards, bass and drums. We'll ignore their starting block for transplanted-to-the-UK ex Ikette, P.P.Arnold's backing band, as they were, or the short-lived 4 piece with eternal nearly man Dave O'List, later to be nearly man again, for Roxy Music, ahead of Phil Manzanera's joining. I confess I struggled with the Nice, as the bassist, Lee Jackson, couldn't sing. And I mean, really couldn't sing. But, between the songs came the most remarkable of hammond organ histrionics, an instrument that was mainly for adding background in pop and rock until then. Combining a driving rhythm section with half-remembered classical themes was pure catnip to my teenage tastebuds. Try some:

Come 1970 and the band broke up. Emerson clearly was the one to watch, lifting doleful bassist and singer Greg Lake from King Crimson, and drumming wunderkind Carl Palmer from The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, forming what the rock press greeted as one of the first supergroups. The brief was much the same, driving classically influenced instrumental rock music, up a few gears from the Nice, but with, this time, a singer who could sing. The instrumental palette was likewise wider, with a lot more piano and shedloads of the brand new Moog synthesiser to complement the organ, Lake competent also on guitars electric and acoustic, six string and four. His powerful songs would give respite to the sheer freneticism of Emerson's set piece juggernauts, a break in the records and on stage. I think it fair to say that their first 3 LPs were amongst my most treasured possessions back then, 'Pictures at an Exhibition', their live interpretation of Mussorgsky, being my 2nd album purchase ever and certainly my favourite of theirs. Here's my favourite moments:

At my school it was all very simple. You either liked Yes or you liked ELP, strangely never being allowed to like both, which led me to missing out on a lot of music I only came to later. But the honeymoon had to end. The sheer exuberance of 'Pictures', the majesty of the first eponymous record and the inventiveness of 'Tarkus' were followed by the is-that-all of 'Trilogy'. Sure, I lauded it at the time I bought it, on the day of release, as bravado demanded, but the rot had set in. Not even the thrill of my first big arena show, at London's Earls Court, could hide the fact that 'Brain Salad Surgery' was an empty vessel. The dream was over and I bought the 'Yes Album'.

So that's it, from the beginning, my all too brief infatuation with my first musical love. 3 or 4 years. Their legacy lives on with me, however. Unlike rather more fickle folk, I still have a yen for an occasional blast of 'Tarkus', side 1, or the whole of 'Pictures'. Or 'Lucky Man', killer end piece from the first record. I'm transported back to a mixture of acne and innocence. Let me finish with the title song for this scribble, ironically from 'Trilogy', perhaps the epitome of a Lake interlude, all vocal and multi dubbed guitars, before Emerson weaves in at the end, to remind that it's his group really.

Of course the band played on. And on, becoming eventually what legendary DJ John Peel called, famously, a waste of electricity. Pity, that.

From the beginning, the song, is here, (but I'd get this or this if I were you.)

Beginning: Beginnings

Chicago: Beginnings
[purchase]

As the end of the old year makes us think about those we have lost, the start of a new year makes us think of beginnings, fresh starts and new things, and thus the theme for the next two weeks.

I’ve previously mentioned that the beginning of my concert going life was a Chicago show at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center with my parents. Chicago was one of the first bands that I called my favorite, and I will defend their early output as brilliant. After that though, they went downhill, and fast, to the point that they became a joke. Take their first 5 or 6, or even 8 albums, and they created a body of work that warrants their impending induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Take their next almost 30 albums, and you have an impressive stack of mostly junk.

I’m not going to get into a long analysis of what happened. I mean, listen to the first album—Chicago Transit Authority from 1969. Complex songs, long, interesting solos, intricate horn arrangements, political statements, and yes, some catchy tunes. As time went on, though, the balance between the complex and the commercial began to shift until, certainly by Chicago X, and probably sooner, there was little interesting, and lots of shlock. Whether it was the influence of Svengali producer James William Guercio, or an increasing desire by some band members to make a buck, or the changing music marketplace, or whatever, it happened, and that’s about where I jumped off the Chicago train, never really to return. And then came David Foster, and the guys from Toto, and a revolving door, and it really got ugly.

But let’s forget all of that stuff, because it is forgettable, and just focus on “Beginnings,” from the debut. CTA was a double album, a rarity for a first album, and side one of the original vinyl has three songs—the aptly titled, “Introduction,” a jazzy, horn laden song, which then flowed into the piano intro to the great “Does Any Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? (wait—you don’t remember the piano intro? Because it was cut for radio play), which led into the guitar strum opening of the nearly eight minute long “Beginnings.” Written and sung by keyboard player Robert Lamm, it is a wonderful love song. It captures that feeling of the start of a relationship, when everything is exciting, time stops when you and your lover are together, and you want that feeling to go on forever. It expresses these emotions without being sappy or maudlin, and features great horn work, fabulous drumming by Danny Seraphine, and, yes, a nearly 2 minute Latin percussion fade out (wait, you don’t remember that? Because it was cut.....) “Beginnings” was the band’s second single and failed to chart. But in 1971, when Chicago was more popular and established, it was re-released, and hit #7 on the Billboard Singles Chart.

It would be easy to analogize the new love feeling of “Beginnings,” a feeling that everyone knows doesn’t last, to the gradual crappification and critical rejection of Chicago, so I’m going to do that, because unlike Ike & Tina Turner, sometimes, I like to do something nice and easy. The question (not "Questions 67 and 68," the next song on the album, a personal favorite of mine, and from the number of times he played it on The Late Show, of Paul Shaffer’s), is what happens after that first heady rush of love cools down. Does it morph into a real, true, long-term love, like you find with people who are happily married for decades (like me!), or with bands that you like forever, or does it flame out, and lead to separation, or giving up on a one-time favorite?

When Chicago gets inducted into the Hall, there are going to be articles bemoaning their inclusion, and I get it—they have inflicted many, many bad songs on our ears since the mid-1970s. But before you join the hater bandwagon, listen to Chicago Transit Authority, from its “Introduction,” through the noise of Terry Kath’s “Free Form Guitar,” past the great cover of “I’m A Man,” to the overtly political last side, featuring samples from anitwar protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention and the searing nearly 15 minute instrumental, “Liberation,” and tell me that these guys didn’t begin their career with a masterpiece.