And Bands: Almost Fed Up With the Blues

John Hiatt and The Goners: Almost Fed Up With the Blues

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Is it fair, this week, to post a song by a long-time solo artist who made exactly one album billed as the work of an And Band? In the case of John Hiatt and the Goners, I would say yes. In addition to Hiatt, the Goners included Sonny Landreth, Kenneth Blevins, and Dave Ranson. Although Beneath This Gruff Exterior is the only album credited to the Goners, they had been Hiatt’s touring band for many years. Almost Fed Up With the Blues is the sound of a group of musicians who know each other well having fun. The fade out at the end is needed because these guys sound like they would happily jam away on the song for hours if nobody stopped them. The baritone sax on the song is by guest musician Bobby Keys.

And Bands: Let’s Make Love Not War

Charles Wright and The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band: Let’s Make Love Not War

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As far as monikers go, it is fair to say, The 103rd Street Rhythm Band does lack the concise zip of your assorted Pips, Blue Notes or Family Stones. Precede that unwieldy handle with the name of your frontman, and you will over the years have annoyed more than one person trying to scribble your outfit’s name and title into the tiny space provided for tracklistings on cassette tapes. Or the pedant who had to suffer the torment of file name limitations on old operating systems or the first version of ID3 tags. Yes, I mean me.

Charles Wright and The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band may be unsnappy by name, but the funky sound of their late ’60s/early ’70s soul music offers reparation. They are best known (and most feared by Billboard’s typesetters) for hits such as “Express Yourself”, “Do Your Thing” and, best of all, the superb “Love Land”.

Before forming a succession of incarnations of the 103rd Street Rhythm Band, Charles Wright – who clearly enjoyed the sound of his name – led a group which he called Charles Wright and the Wright Sounds. The Wright Sounds’ keyboard player was one Daryl Dragon, who later would tinkle the ivories for the Beach Boys, where he was given the nickname “Captain”. With that moniker, he’d go on to have a few hits with his wife, Toni Tennille.

The Charles Wright and The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band song here appeared on their 1971 album You’re So Beautiful, which defied its soppy title by featuring some seriously funky grooves. “Let’s Make Love Not War” is not one of them, but it recalls Wright’s early days as a doo wop singer – though few doo wop songs have been anti-war numbers introduced by traumatic gunfire followed by the forlorn sound of the death-proclaiming bugle.

And Bands: Pygmy

Akira Ishikawa & The Count Buffaloes: Pigmy

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As the entries below already made clear, this week's theme provides ample opportunity to go obscure. And why not indeed? So let me highlight Japrockers Akira Ishikawa & The Count Buffaloes, one of the first bands to come up when I punched in & The in my iTunes. The psychedelic sludge groove of Pigmy ('72) was inspired by an actual visit to Uganda, where drummer Ishikawa spent some high times studying African percussion techniques. Space guitar courtesy of Kimio Mizutani.

And Bands: Glide / Living With God

Gandalf Murphy & the Slambovian Circus of Dreams: Glide

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Gandalf Murphy & the Slambovian Circus of Dreams: Living With God (live, WXPN)

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At least four of our regular contributors have heard Gandalf Murphy & the Slambovian Circus of Dreams, the upstate NY-based Pink Floyd-meets-The Allman Brothers hillbilly psychedelic folk rock band which takes over the dance and main stages at our fave folk festival each summer for successive evenings of total mayhem and their infamous extended ecstatic jams. I know, because you can hear it from every distant tentsite - and for three years running, the energy has brought me out of my own camp circle like a will-o-the-wisp to dance in the moonlight with the young'uns, umbrella at the ready, already festooned with lightsticks for the journey.

The band members, several of whom are related by blood or marriage, but not one of whom is named Gandalf Murphy, style themselves as the sonic spirit guides to a mythical state of being somewhere between nirvana and Atlantis, where kindness and love reign supreme. Their leather-and-lace costumes are outlandish and cosplay-retro-fantasy, as befits their ridiculous backstory, but the mythos works: their followers are legion, known for travelling hundreds of miles to attend one of their pre-Halloween Grand Slambovian Hillbilly Pirate Balls, and I'm fast becoming one of them, thanks to those few precious nights of uncontrolled wantonness which they provide for me every summer.

Like the Grateful Dead before them, studio recordings from the Grand Slambovian camp offer but a faint hint of what their live performances provide, and so much of their recorded output is in fact live recordings released officially; appropriately, then, I've included not one but two tunes above, the first from their 2003 sophomore studio release, the second a truncated teaser from a live radio show the following year, so you can hear the difference. But really, travel the hundred miles if you can. We'll make a Slambovian of you yet.

And Bands: I Could Be So Good To You

Don and The Goodtimes: I Could Be So Good To You

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Portland's Don Gallucci is the one man link between The Kingsmen and The Stooges and it's quite a story. As a high school kid, he played those memorable electric piano riffs on The Kingsmen's 1963 hit "Louie Louie" but was too young to go on tour when the single went nationwide. Down but not out, he got some buddies together and formed Don and the Goodtimes.

They toured the Northwest circuit in top hats-- filling a gap left by the now LA-based hit making machine Paul Revere and the Raiders. In 1966, Don and the Goodtimes became the house band on Dick Clark's TV show "Where The Action Is". They got signed to Epic and, with the help of studio musicians, recorded and  released "I Could Be So Good To You" in 1967. The single went #1 in the Northwest, but failed to claw its way into the Billboard Top 40.

    After an album produced by the prolific Jack Nitzsche and a  few more singles, Don and the Goodtimes  broke up and Gallucci started a legendary progressive rock band called Touch. Alas their self titled album went nowhere and Don lent his studio wizardry to Elektra. His best known producing effort is the one Don says he just tried not to "screw up": The Stooges's Fun House, arguably rock's first punk record.

And Bands: So You Think You’re In Love

Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians: So You Think You‘re In Love

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You probably have never heard of Dennis and the Experts. I certainly hadn’t until I did research for this post. Formed in 1976, they soon changed their name to The Soft Boys. The Soft Boys included Robyn Hitchcock, Morris Windsor, and Andy Metcalfe, plus one of three guitarists, depending on when you asked. It was only in the last year the band was together that Metcalfe left, to be replaced by Matthew Selligman. The band broke up, having released two albums, and Hitchcock started his solo career. But when Hitchcock decided that he wanted to work with a band again, Metcalfe and Windsor were back on board. There was also a keyboard player, but he was only there for a year. The “new” band was Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians. By the time the band recorded the album Perspex Island, the lineup was augmented by guest musicians, including Michael Stipe and Peter Buck from REM. So You Think You’re In Love comes from that album, and it finds the band coming as close as they ever did to pop music. Earlier, the band featured Hitchcock’s surreal lyrics, backed by edgy music that could slip into an odd time signature without warning. But here, Hitchcock sounds like he has returned from his journey to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, and is becoming reaclimated to life on earth. I love both the earlier and this later sound, but I thought this would be a better starting point for anyone discovering Hitchcock’s music for the first time.

Tarot Cards (The Moon): I Can’t Understand the Moon

Andrew McKnight: I Can‘t Understand the Moon

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I collect Tarot cards, as much for the artistry as anything else. Tarot seems to inspire some amazing artwork at times, although it can also bring out the corniest side of some people as well. But the decks I like bring out all of the mystery and power of the Tarot. The Moon card I have chosen for this post is by Salvador Dali, and it comes from a complete deck that he painted. The card represents dreams. These can be the source of inspirations for great endeavors. But the Moon can also represent nightmares, or even insanity. To me, that is the aspect of the card the Dali captured best.

In my Halloween post on Oliver di Place, I promised that I would be posting another Andrew McKnight song here. McKnight captures another aspect of the Moon card. His narrator is lamenting the loss of a lover who was unattainable in the first place. He identifies her with the moon. But maybe he is literally referring to the moon, and maybe the rest is just his fevered imagination. To me, the song allows for either interpretation, and therefore is a perfect song to go with the card.

Tarot Cards (Justice): Justice

Alan Price: Justice

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We all want justice but you got to have the money to buy it/
You'd have to be a fool to close your eyes and deny it.

A cynical sentiment from former Animal Alan Price, "Justice" is one of the minor cuts on his O Lucky Man! soundtrack. (So you can imagine how great the major cuts are.) Price appears in the Lindsay Anderson film in the same Greek Chorus role as Jonathan Richman in "There's Something About Mary" and Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye in "Cat Ballou". In the film our hero, played by Malcolm MacDowell, must abandon his principles to succeed in capitalist society. Will he succeed and at what cost? The hairstyles and clothes may be dated but, in light of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the film's message has never been more relevant.

Tarot Cards (The Hanged Man): The Hanged Man

Mr. Fox - The Hanged Man

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The Hanged Man or Le Pendu (XII) is the twelfth trump or Major Arcana card in most traditional Tarot decks, and amongst others signifies suspension, rebirth, sacrifice, and transformation. Now I'm not sure of course, but I've got a hunch that the early seventies British folkers of Mr. Fox were well aware of this when they wrote the rather spooky The Hanged Man. "Walking a valley that never saw the sun, step by the stones where the icy waters run, stand in a church where the village choir once sang, and run along the pathway where the dead man used to hang..."

Tarot Cards (The Fool): The Fool

The Fixx : The Fool

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I'm not at all familiar with the Tarot or the various meanings of its cards. Let's just say everything I know about it I learned from Wikipedia, the blogger's friend.

I know more about the British band The Fixx, though, 'cuz they're one of my favorite 80s New Wave groups. They've always shown more complexity in their melodies and lyrics than most bands of the time. This song is from their first album, Shuttered Room, which also gave us the better-known hits Stand or Fall and Red Skies at Night. The group is still active, touring, and working on a new album that will come out next spring.

The Tarot's fool is a childlike spirit on a journey. In contrast, The Fixx's fool is a sad madman wasting away in confinement (So I'm locked away in my padded cocoon, A square of hell where nightmares bloom). I think I prefer the Tarot version, especially since I'm out of town on my own journey for a few weeks.

Tarot Cards (The Tower): Franklin’s Tower

Grateful Dead: Franklin‘s Tower

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To begin our week of Tarot cards, I wanted to make a fairly obvious connection between a card and a song. I will get all mystical on everyone later in the week. But I’m starting with Franklin’s Tower, simply because it has the word Tower in the title of the song.

Actually, Franklin’s Tower has one of Robert Hunter’s more mysterious lyrics. I could make a somewhat forced connection to the meaning of the card if I wanted to. But I think it suffices to say that a tower is, symbolically, a solid structure, a foundation upon which to build. For Hunter, it is a beacon, guiding the traveler through a mysterious landscape. It is a song that asks the listener to use their imagination to fill in the blanks. The Grateful Dead were famed for their musical imaginations, so this song represents at least one side of their artistry perfectly. The version of Franklin’s Tower heard here is a live version from the album Dead Set.

World Tour: Turning Japanese

Liz Phair: Turning Japanese

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No Use For A Name: Turning Japanese

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Asia represent! This well-covered and oft-parodied song is undeniably catchy, as noted by its long life in popular culture. The above image comes from the song's most recent incidence, a stylized art video featuring actress Kirsten Dunst first presented at a Tate Modern exhibit in London two years ago, seemingly in homage to the global cosplay movement.

But long before anime, manga, and other Japanese "identity artifact categories" swamped nerd and geek culture, the song's easily sung chorus and verses had featured in many iconic media products, from the original Jackass movie to video games (Rock Band 3, Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks The 80s) to an old and overplayed KFC commercial. As an homage to this cultural cachet, I've skipped the crisp, bouncy 1980 original, and shared instead a pair of mid-nineties punk versions - both grungy as hell, as befits the song's frenetic pace updated for the angry, ironic pre-millennial set.

There's some debate on the interwebs about whether songwriter David Fenton of British new wave/power pop band The Vapors is being honest when he claims that this song is about "all the clichés about angst and youth and turning into something you didn't expect to"...or whether the term "turning Japanese" actually refers to the face males make when reaching masturbatory climax, an easy interpretation which would set Fenton's VH1 True Spin comment as a specious attempt to rewrite his own wild youth by saying otherwise. The song works both ways, and the original video doesn't help, with its geisha girl imagery merely muddying what would really be a question of which sort of racism we're talking about here - "Japanese" as a euphemism for distant and isolated, or "Japanese" as equivalent to squinty-eyed - so we'll let you make your own conclusions.

World Tour: Cuban Pete

Jim Carrey: Cuban Pete

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Keep in mind that, in 1946, Cuba had not yet been taken over by Fidel Castro. There was no US embargo, and so artists of various sorts traveled freely between the two countries. So it is not surprising that a Hollywood studio would have made a movie that year to promote the newest Cuban musical sensation. The movie was Cuban Pete, and the star was Desi Arnaz. The song was a smash, with Louis Armstrong among others doing his own version.

Almost fifty years would pass. The song disappeared during my childhood in the 60s and 70s. In fact, I never heard it at all until 1994, when it was in a hilarious scene in the movie The Mask. Remember this?

World Tour: Canada

Pilot: Canada

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Ear Worm Warning: Listen at your own risk

Look out California
Ooh-Ooh, I gotta warn you
Here comes Canada

So maybe it wasn't the smartest commercial move --trying to pit The Golden State against The Great White North, but the Scottish trio Pilot ( best know for their Top 5 hit "Magic") just couldn't help themselves.

 They named their third album, Morin Heights, after the tourist town in Quebec where they recorded with Roy Thomas Baker.With generous measures of Beatlesque melodies and Queen-like harmonies, Morin Heights has been called Pilot's "Abbey Road".

 Lyrically though, they've always been lightweights.Witness:

Canada, you proved your worth
You got snow peaked mountains tumbling down
You had them from birth

Though I prefer British Columbia with its majestic mountains and sunny islands, the list of rock bands who've recorded in Morin Heights is impressive: Rush ( naturally), The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, The Police, Cat Stevens and The Bee Gees, among others.

World Tour: Far Away In Australia

Dolores Keane: Far Away In Australia

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Known primarily for her work as an interpreter of Irish folksong, both as a solo artist and as a founding member of longstanding Galway-based Celtic Folk band De Dannen, Dolores Keane toured and recorded non-stop for a quarter decade before throwing in the towel in the late nineties to focus on family and home life. But her songs live on, as does her reputation as the queen of the soul of Ireland: this traditional ditty, most recently re-released on her 1998 "Best Of" Greatest Hits collection, is short and sweet, with none of the disaster that so often accompanies the canon; its simple, direct interpretation showcases both the depression-era Irish ideal of Australia as a land of opportunity, and her strong lilting alto, providing apt entry for an artist whose debut appearance here at Star Maker Machine is long overdue.

World Tour: Vietnam

Jimmy Cliff : Vietnam

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Leon Thomas: Damn Nam (Ain't Goin' To Vietnam)

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There's Vietnam, the country, and then there's Vietnam, the war. Both these songs, written in 1969, refer to the latter, when 550,000 American soldiers were serving there, Nixon had begun serving his second term, the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam demonstrations took place, and a growing majority of Americans thought the war was a mistake.

Jimmy Cliff in 1969 was a Jamaican reggae singer whose worldwide popularity was growing. Leon Thomas was an American soul/jazz singer releasing his first solo album. Both songs capture the anti-war sentiments of the day.

World Tour: Long Bed From Kenya

Betty Elders: Long Bed From Kenya

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Between 1981 and 1995, Betty Elders released four albums that show her to be a very talented songwriter. Four albums in fourteen years is not a lot, but that turned out to be it. From the fact that she sung back-up on Norwegian artist Roy Lonhoiden's three albums, I’m guessing that Elders may have relocated to Norway no later than 2004, but that is just a guess. What I know is that Elders has an album’s worth of unreleased songs on her website. If anyone knows why Elders has not done an album in her own name in so long, please let us know in the comments.

Songs like Long Bed From Kenya are why I wish Elders would do more. Long Bed sounds at first like a song about growing older in a relationship. But, in the second verse, Elders adds a key detail. While the singer feels herself growing older, her partner remains smitten with a woman he met on a long ago trip to Kenya. The narrator ages, but the woman in the memory never does. The long bed sent home from that trip serves as a constant reminder to the narrator of a competition she can never hope to win. The story is told in just a few economical lines, but the emotional resonance is strong.

This performance of Long Bed comes from a mainstage performance of the song at the 1998 Kerrville Folk Festival. Elders also recorded a more fully arranged version of the song on her last album Crayons. But this version, with just voice and guitar, puts the focus on the songwriting, and it holds up just fine.

World Tour: Dominion/Mother Russia

The Sisters of Mercy : Dominion/Mother Russia

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Mother Russia, released in 1987, is about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster the year before. The "old man in a dry season", a reference to a T.S. Eliot line, is Reagan, and the whole song expresses Andrew Eldritch's anti-American sentiments, with numerous references to the Cold War.

The Sisters of Mercy released 3 albums, each with a different line-up; the consistent member is Eldritch (well, and his drum machine, Doktor Avalanche). Their last recording was in 1993, but they (for various values of "they") still tour. In fact, I enjoyed their gothic rock sound so much that I ventured off to see them live a few years ago, which turned out to be one of the weirder and most distancing concerts I'd ever been to. The continuous use of 3 fog machines rendered the stage nearly opaque, so much so that it wasn't until halfway through the show that I realized there was actually a live bass player up there—and I was a mere 15 feet from the stage. At least I presume he was live. I don't think any of us could tell if the musicians were simply acting out to prerecorded music or not, and the in-between comments were kept to an absolute minimum.

I do recommend their music as great work-out stuff, though. That heavy drum beat is hard to surpass for exercising to.

World Tour: It's A Long Way Back To Germany

Ramones: It's A Long Way Back To Germany (link now working)

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As a German living outside Germany, the title of the Ramones song appeals to me. The track turned up as a bonus track on the 2005 remastered edition of the Ramones’ 1977 album Rocket To Russia. It is billed as a UK b-side, without any further information. It seems it was also a b-side elewhere, to 1978’s “Do You Wanna Dance”.

“It's A Long Way Back To Germany” was written by Dee Dee Ramone, whose mother was German and who spent much of his formative years in West-Berlin, until he returned to New York City at the age of 15. He also sang a bit in German on “Born To Die In Berlin”, the final track of the final Ramones album in 1996. Dee Dee died six years later, not in Beelin but in LA.

Rocket To Russia featured a song that has been covered twice by German bands. “Rockaway Beach” was first done in 1979 as “Müngersdorfer Stadion” by the Zeltinger Band, a punk rock band fronted by the balding, overweight and often kaftan-wearing Jürgen Zeltinger, one of West Germany’s first openly gay recording artists. Performed in Kölsch, the dialect that is unique to the city of Cologne, the setting of Rockaway Beach in the Ramones song became the public swimming baths adjacent to the football stadium of the same name, and hitching a ride there in the Ramones song became fare-dodging on public transport. (You can get the song HERE.)

In 2005, another German punk band, Die Toten Hosen (from Düsseldorf, just down the road from Zeltinger’s Cologne), covered “Rockaway Beach” in English, as the b-side for their “Alles wird vorübergehen” single.

You might find it quite easy to sing along to “It’s A Long Way Back To Germany”. Just sing this: “You by the phone, you all alone. It’s a long way back to Germany. It’s a long way back to Germany.”

(Image borowed from 45cat.com)

World Tour: Baby, Let's Go To Mexico

Sir Douglas Quintet: Baby, Let's Go To Mexico

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While we're visiting Mexico....

The godfather of Tex-Mex rock'n'roll, Doug Sahm earned the nickname Doug Saldana from South of the Border fans. "They said I had so much Mexican in me that I needed a Mexican name" he told biographer Joseph Levy.

This song sure makes visiting Mexico sound like a good idea. I've been there a few times and I'd suggest visiting somewhere other than one of the country's famous resorts mentioned in this tune. The shot above is of Taxco, the silver capital of Mexico. It's a beautiful city with streets so narrow even the VW bugs used as taxis have to do three-point turns to get through town. One very "Taxco" experience involves another kind of bug: jumiles. Stink bugs that are often eaten alive. Quite spicy. And crunchy too.