Samples and Found Sounds: Summer’s Cauldron

XTC: Summer‘s Cauldron

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In nature, crickets and birds do not chirp precisely on the beat. That they do here is most likely the fault of producer Todd Rundgren. This approach to music making perfectly fits this paean to the natural world. Elsewhere on the album Skylarking, Rundgren’s production gets a little heavy-handed for my taste. But here on the song that opens the album, everything works just right.

Samples and Found Sounds: If You Were Here

Poe: If You Were Here

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Imagine, if you will, having your beloved father pass away and having dreams of him telling you "you're forgetting my voice" which makes you go searching for old answering machine tapes that might have that voice on it. But instead, what you find are long lost recordings of letters he had written to you when you were very young. A voice from the grave.

That is what happened as Poe, aka Annie Danielewski, was embarking on writing her sophomore album. This album, "Haunted" is littered with recordings of her father and of her own voice on answer machines and these (quite literally) "found" sounds make an album which promised to be something emotional and rich into something heart-wrenching and breath-taking. This same occurrence was shared by her brother, author Mark Danielewski who was also inspired and wrote his novel "House of Leaves". Poe's "Haunted" also works as a sort of soundtrack to her brother's novel.

The song I chose is the album's closer, which, like the moral of the story, finds redemption and release for the character of the story and album and for Poe herself as she says her final farewell to her father as an adult and a child, and he answers her via his tapes from the grave.

Samples and Found Sounds: What The World Needs Now/Abraham, Martin, & John

Tom Clay: What the World Needs Now Is Love/Abraham, Martin and John

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Few top 10 hits have featured live recordings of murder. This peace anthem, released on Motown subsidiary MoWest and a #8 US hit in 1971, includes the live coverage of John F Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and, chillingly, the sound of Robert Kennedy being murdered in 1968, including his last, optimistic words. All that, plus Ted Kennedy’s tear-choked eulogy at Bobby’s funeral and Martin Luther King’s poignant words in his last speech before he was gunned down in Memphis, is interspersed with army drill singing (the “I don’t know what I believe” stuff), and, framing the whole thing, a rather affecting interview with a child about definitions of such terms as bigotry and prejudice.

With all that, it matters little that the covers of Bacharach/David’s What The World Needs Now Is Love and Dion’s overly sentimental Abraham, Martin & John – performed by session band The Blackberries – are rather cheesy. Actually, the way The Blackberries launch into What The World Needs Now after the Ted speech compensates for the cheesiness.

Tom Clay, it seems, was a bit of an operator. In the 1950s, he was one of the radio DJs nabbed in the payola scandal (which was really an attack on rock & roll, rather than a fortification of ethical principles). At the height of Beatlemania, Clay cashed in on having interviewed the Fab Four by launching a Beatles Booster Club, which offered in exchange for a fee of a dollar an item used by the Beatles. Clay got 80,000 payments of a dollar. Allegedly, not everybody got the promised Beatles item, and the few who did received stuff like used tissues and cigarette butts.

Clay died in 1995 at the age of 66.

Samples and Found Sounds: One in Ten

808 State: One in Ten

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This is not the post I set out to do. It’s all the fault of a reader named Leopold Stotch. Two years ago, Stotch left a comment on one of my posts. It was the second part of my survey of polyrhythm, from Tricky Beats week. I had posted Help Me Somebody, by Brian Eno and David Byrne. Byrne and Eno had created an entire album of music built around samples of talk shows, radio preachers, and other spoken word found sounds. Stotch, in his comment, let me know that some of this music was sampled in turn by a group called 808 State. In checking them out, I found One in Ten.

One in Ten is technically a remix, but I really don’t like the term. It is built on a snippet of a recognizable song, but the resulting work is something new entirely. This one takes as its starting point the old UB40 song One in Ten. I suspect that the 808 State song also contains other samples that I don’t recognize. I still love the original UB40 song, but I find 808 State’s take off from it fascinating.

Samples and Found Sounds: AM Radio

Everclear: AM Radio

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This 2000 ode to the glories of AM radio (back when it actually featured music you wanted to hear) starts with a radio announcer from LA station KHJ, followed by the intro to Jean Knight's Mr. Big Stuff. There's a bonus TV laugh track in the middle, too.

If you're as old as Everclear vocalist Art Alexakis (and me), you'll get the lyrics to this song right away.

I'd be in bed with the radio on
I would listen to it all night long just to hear my favorite song
You'd have to wait 'til you could hear it on the AM radio…

Do you remember that sinking feeling when you turned on the radio just to hear the final chords of your favorite song you'd usually wait hours to hear…which meant you wouldn't hear it again for a while. I remember getting a little portable tape recorder and pressing the microphone to the AM radio speaker to capture that horrible, tinny sound just for the pleasure of The Monkees music on demand.

I know I too often don't appreciate the instant access of nearly any song nowadays. Look here, you can just click that little arrow in this post and hear AM Radio instantly! Enjoy…

Samples and Found Sounds: It's Only Natural

Crowded House: It's Only Natural

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Surely, there are choices of more obvious and consistent substance for this week's theme - songs which utilize found sound throughout, and depend on them to carry the tone of a musical piece. But let us not underestimate the establishment of that tone, as evidenced here in the madcap, cartoonish, don't-blink-you'll-miss-it found sound collage which kicks off my favorite "guilty pleasure" Crowded House single, released as the last of five charting singles for Woodface (1991), a critical and popular success and the first and only Crowded House album to feature songwriter and band founder Neil Finn's brother Tim, who had previously worked with him for decades in Split Enz. The breezy artpop which follows is all the more perfect for having emerged from such a short, sweet cacophony.

Earth Day = > Samples and Found Sounds: Some Houses

Billy Jonas: Some Houses

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In our journey through Samples and Found Sounds, we will be hearing plenty of music that uses electronically sampled sounds. But I want to start off with found sounds, specifically home made instruments. I can think of no better example of that than the music of Billy Jonas. In Some Houses, Billy Jonas takes the listener through a list of various materials that a house might be made of. But, in the end, Jonas reminds us that our most important home is this planet. Listen closely, and you will notice that the percussion in each verse corresponds to the material that house is made of. Most of the instruments used will not sound familiar; Jonas uses a percussion kit made of common household items. So there are pot lids and trash can lids, even a bicycle horn, but nothing you would normally think of as a musical instrument. All of this could be put together with samplers, but Jonas plays all of these instruments in real time. This makes his live performances wonderous events. Try to sit where you have a good view.

Earth Day: Crazy Horses

The Osmonds: Crazy Horses

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It was one of the strange moments in pop when the South African Broadcasting Corporation, the apartheid-era cheerleaders for racist Puritanism, banned those clean-living Osmonds from its airwaves because they assumed Crazy Horses was about drugs. The song is, in fact, the rockingest environmental anthem of its day – at least among those songs of that kind aimed at the pubescent crowd or younger.

The song is, of course, not about heroin, but about the air pollution caused by automobiles. Written by Alan, Merrill and Wayne (the three older brothers), the Osmonds at other times apparently suggested it might about smoking cigarettes, one of the hundreds of things their Mormonism bans. Why in that case the single cover (and the LP of the same title) would show exhaust fumes emanating from heaps of cars copiously corrupting the air in clouds of poison, heroically breathed in by Donny and his brothers for my benefit and yours, is as unclear as the air of any urban conurbation in rush hour traffic.

Crazy Horses certainly is not your typical Osmonds number. If one didn’t know better, one would imagine the gruff lead singer to sport a beard bigger even than that of the dude in Kansas; the keyboardist not being happy young Donny, but some bespectacled evil genius whose excess consumption of hallucinogenic substances has given him the illusion that his screaming synth riff will literally blow your mind, man (and if you are under the influence of hallucinogens while listening to Crazy Horses, our putative malevolent mastermind might well be right); and the guitarist being the newly-recruited glam rocker who by sheer force of glitter and make-up infuses the old band’s hard rock sound with a pop sensibility.

Instead, as we know, the performers are not drugged dropout hippie veterans who in 1972 still coming to terms with the cold ’70s, but a gang of clones created by a mad orthodontist and his flamboyant hairdresser brother.

Earth Day: (Nothing But) Flowers

Talking Heads: (Nothing But) Flowers

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One day some time ago, I was in New York City, and I overheard a remarkable conversation. Two young ladies, both vegan, were talking about an awful experience one of them had had recently. She had decided that she ought to get closer to nature by getting a pet. She chose a snake. She wanted to find vegan food for it, but she learned to her horror that it only ate live animals. Almost sobbing, she told her friend that she was forced to get rid of it. Now, these two young ladies might have gained from this a greater appreciation of the balance of nature and its delicacy. But no. They both agreed that snakes were immoral creatures because they ate meat.

This story gets to the heart of what makes the lyrics to so many potential songs for this week’s theme so “hippy-dippy”, as FiL put it so well. And (Nothing But) Flowers starts off this way. But then comes the line, “If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawn mower.” From there, the song becomes a lament for bygone suburban sprawl and technology. I don’t think that David Byrne meant the song to be a celebration of certain parts of New Jersey, however. Rather, Byrne is using irony to say that, yes, we as humans need to change our relationship with our planet, but this does not mean renouncing every footprint of human habitation from the planet. We must find a balance. Earth belongs to whales and dolphins, but also to human beings, and none of us would know how to live without our technology. Try not using any electricity in your house for 24 hours, and you will see what I mean. I think this is also what David Byrne is saying.

Earth Day: Don't Kill the Whale

Yes: Don't Kill the Whale

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1978's Tormato is generally considered one of Yes' worst albums, and I won't argue with that. Most of it is a mess. ("Arriving UFO", anyone?) However I always thought that this song rocked. But with it's proggy keyboards and hippy-dippy lyrics, it was probably Exhibit #1 in the case for punk rock.

Earth Day: Grazing in the Grass

The Friends of Distinction: Grazing in the Grass

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Grazing in the Grass was a #1 Billboard hit in 1968 for the South African trumpet player Hugh Masekela. In that incarnation, it was originally an instrumental song, but in 1969 the pop group The Friends of Distinction set lyrics to it and made the top ten with it once again. And what cheerful, nature-loving lyrics they are:

The sun beaming down between the leaves,
And the birds dartin' in and out of the trees,
Everything here is so clear, you can see it,
And everything here is so near, you can feel it…

Can you dig it?

Fiddle and Violins => Earth Day: Gentle Arms of Eden

Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer: Gentle Arms of Eden

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Dave Carter gives us a lyric that offers the history of life on earth as a prayer of thanks for all that She gives us, and he manages the neat trick of not sounding at all preachy. So Gentle Arms of Eden seemed to me to be the perfect overture for our week-long celebration of Earth Day. Tracy Grammer’s fiddle enters on the second verse, and she takes a solo after the second chorus. Grammer is not a flashy fiddler, which may be why we got through all of last week without hearing her playing. But flash is not what this song needs. Her part here is the perfect complement to the mood of the song.

Fiddle and Violins: Stringed Quartet

Jay Unger and Molly Mason: Ashokan Farewell

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Still on the Hill: Round Barn

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It's a Beautiful Day: White Bird

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GrooveLily: Gotham City Breakdown

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Whether Cajun, country, jazz, classical or rock, the fiddle/violin is my favorite instrument in the world - I should have posted a song a day for this right-up-my-musical alley theme, but I started a new job in an accounting firm two months ago... and we are heavily immersed in tax season!

However, the IRS deadline is April 18 this year and I am beginning to see the proverbial end-of-the-tunnel light - a vision of my newfound freedom has prompted me to share this quartet of favorites:

~ Jay and Molly's signature tune of loss and longing was showcased in Ken Burns' The Civil War - it brings me to tears each and every time I hear it...

~ Still on the Hill went from a foursome to a duo, but Donna's fiddle (and broad smile and bare feet) remains a constant - her joy of playing is only matched by those listening and watching...

~ It's a Beautiful Day will always remind me of my high school years - the soaring violin solo is part-escape/part-climax...

~ I had the sincere pleasure of hosting GrooveLily in a house concert in November 2001 - Valerie's Viper is going strong, composing for musical theater these days...

P.S. My graphic is a gorgeous quilted piece made by my friend Elizabeth Crisfield, who is quite a fine fiddler in her own right!

Fiddle and Violins: Red Wing

Johnny Gimble: Red Wing

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Speaking of obvious choices, no survey of fiddle music would be complete in my mind without some western swing. And the only choice to represent the genre has to be Johnny Gimble. Gimble was born in 1926 and played with Bob Wills in his peak years, but Gimble was still there to join western swing revivalists Asleep at the Wheel about fifty years later, and he still sounded great. Amazingly, he still does. Gimble’s most recent album came out just last year, and it was fine. Red Wing may sound familiar to some readers, even if you don’t know the title. Somewhere, it acquired a set of lyrics, and became Union Maid.

Fiddle and Violins: Orange Blossom Special

Vassar Clements & the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band: Orange Blossom Special

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I've danced around not posting any obvious songs this week, but heck with it. If we can't post Vassar Clements on fiddle week, then what can be said for us? And Orange Blossom Special is known as the fiddle player's national anthem, so it's a natural fit.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken was the first bluegrass album I'd ever heard, and it came courtesy of two of my college freshman roommates at the University of Michigan. Robyn played violin, but we made her play fiddle; Meryl played banjo, and me, well, I played guitar. What we lacked in talent we made up for in enthusiasm. Robyn especially liked to play this spirited song from her album at full volume at 7 in the morning after our other hallmates kept us awake until 2 am. (She liked to alternate this with Gregorian chants).

It might be easier to list musicians that Vassar Clements didn't play with over his long career, but here's a quick list of some of those he accompanied: Bill Monroe, John Hartford, Norman Blake, Earl Scruggs, the Grateful Dead, Jimmy Buffett, David Grisman, Dicky Betts, Paul McCartney, Stephane Grapelli, Woody Herman, and Linda Ronstadt. He was an early innovator in what's now called newgrass.

This album, both innovative and well-received in 1972, brought together many traditional bluegrass and country-western artists with the country rock group, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. It also introduced Clements to a broader audience, including Robyn, Meryl, me, and those hapless hallmates at U of M.

Fiddle and Violins: Eck Robertson and Fiddlin' John Carson

FIRST EVER COUNTRY RECORD:
Eck Robertson: Sally Gooden
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FIRST EVER COUNTRY HIT:
Fiddlin' John Carson: Little Old Cabin In The Lane
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The first-ever country record was recorded on 30 June 1922 (or possibly on July 1) – not in a random southern location, but in New York City, at the Victor Talking Machine Company on West 38th Street – and it was a fiddle number.

Over two days, the 35-year old Texan fiddler Eck Robertson put on record several tracks, accompanied on some by Henry C Gilliland, a 70-year old Civil War veteran wearing an old Confederate uniform. Robertson had been performing with his wife since 1906. At a gig in Richmond (though they probably didn’t call public performances “gigs” then) he met Gilliland, and both were urged by a lawyer with connection to Victor to go to New York and audition for the label, one of the biggest even then (it would go on to become RCA Victor).

Victor, which later became RCA Victor, had been decidedly mainstream. It had been Enrico Caruso’s label. But as the 1920s dawned, sales were dropping, so fiddlers like Robertson promised to serve the ethnic (read rural and/or black) niche markets. After a few months, Victor chose to release Robertson’s signature song, Sally Gooden. It made no impact whatsoever, nor did the fiddler’s four follow-up releases.


The first country hit came soon after, and it was recorded in the South. In March 1922, an Atlanta radio station, WSB, invited local fiddlers and other folk string musicians – pickers – to perform in its studio. The experiment proved popular, and the star performer was Fiddlin’ John Carson, then already 44. He was heard by a visiting A&R man, Ralph Peer, who three years earlier had released one of the first blues records, Mamie Smith’s Crazy Blues. Peer, a key person in the development of country music, signed up Carson for the Okeh label.

On 14 June 1923, in a make-shift studio on Atlanta’s Nassau Street, Carson recorded Little Old Cabin In The Lane, a minstrel song from the 1870s written by Will S Hays. Peer thought Carson’s vocals were nothing like anything he had heard before, and not in a good way. Yet, what Peer thought was “pluperfect awful” singing would provide a template for generations of country singers. The recording was a hit – country’s first ever hit record.

(The above is reproduced and slightly expanded from a post in a series on the history of country music on my blog)

Fiddle and Violins: H.C.M. (Violin Cadenza) / Pushin' the Button

Tiny Lights: H.C.M. (Violin Cadenza)
Tiny Lights: Pushin' the Button

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I remember the moment I fell in love with Hoboken's Tiny Lights, even if I no longer remember the exact date. It was somewhere around April 1990 and they were opening for Throwing Muses at the campus center at Rutgers' Cook College in New Brunswick, N.J. Lead vocalist Donna Croughn was wailing away on her electric violin on what I later came to know as "H.C.M. (Violin Cadenza)" and my mind was suitable blown.

I have a feeling you had to be there to really get this track and it's other half, "Pushin' the Button", but if you were there, you know how much fun a Tiny Lights show was. And after that first show, I was there whenever they were in town. Which was quite often back in the early '90s, when it seemed like they played the Court Tavern every couple of months.

Both of these tracks come from the album Hot Chocolate Massage, an album recoded hastily and on the cheap after what should have been their Enigma Records debut got lost when the record label reorganized just before the album's release date. The band never really recovered from that bit of bad luck, and after several more indie releases, finally called it quits in the late '90s. Guitarist John Hamilton, who also shared lead vocal duties on "Pushin' the Button", is now a professor of comparative literature, at Harvard. Not a bad consolation career.

Fiddle and Violins: Oxford Suite Part 2

Ed Alleyne-Johnson: Oxford Suite Part 2

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This fascinating electric violin track has been on my replay list for a while. Oddly enough, when I juxtapose it with the J-Rock tune I posted a few days ago, there's not a lot of difference between them: they're both pretty solid electronica pieces, even though they're by artists from opposite ends of the globe.

Ed Alleyne-Johnson deserves to be better known, I think. He's made a small splash online, but is better known as a world-travelled busker from northern England. This song's a self-penned instrumental tune from his 90s release, Purple Electric Violin Concerto, but lately he's been putting out albums of covers that are well worth buying.

There's something both simultaneously distancing and intimate about electric violin, especially in electronica, I've decided. What's your opinion?

Fiddle and Violins: Bulgars/ The Kiss

Itzhak Perlman with The Klezmatics: Bulgars/ The Kiss

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In the comments earlier this week, Owyn asked about the difference between a fiddle and a violin. His answer was a punch line, and it made me smile. But, if I may, I would like to answer the question seriously. The answer is how the instrument is played. No one is a better example of this than Itzhak Perlman. Perlman is a world-renowned classical violinist, but he explored his Jewish roots a while back, and he learned about Klezmer. Klezmer is a traditional Jewish music from eastern Europe. I did a post about it two years ago on Oliver di Place, and you can see that here for a fuller explanation. When Itzhak Perlman plays Klezmer, he is a fiddler. The song I have chosen finds him, not on the roof, but on the stage of Radio City Music Hall in 1996. Bulgars/ The Kiss is a medley of four tunes. A Bulgar is a traditional dance, and the three heard here are Tate Ziser, A Galitsyaner Tentsl, and Undzer Toyrele. The Kiss is a tune that was written by Frank London and Lorin Sklamberg for The Klezmatics.

Before I go, let me wish a happy Passover to all of our readers who celebrate.

Fiddle and Violins: Spirit

Wild Colonials: Spirit

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I have previously written about the band Wild Colonials and even then mentioned that they had a fantastic violinist that participated on almost every song.

Their violinist, Paul Cantelon, works with numerous bands and also scores movies, including The Other Boleyn Girl, but I know him as a founding member of Wild Colonials, a band born of collaboration between talented artists that had made careers for themselves, but enjoyed working together enough to form this dynamic band.

This track from their 1996 album "This Can't Be Life", and I enjoy the way they use the violin to temper the song, it works beautifully. The song also features strong songwriting, exceptional vocalist Angela McCluskey, and backing vocals by Rickie Lee Jones as well.