Star Maker Debuts: Grace Jones

Grace Jones: Love Is The Drug (Roxy Music cover)

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Grace Jones: Inspiration

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I came thisclose to posting Grace Jones during great album covers week, but I ran out of time. Oh, hai, looks like I posted it anyway. I love this week's theme!

Grace made her compelling brand of club dance/electronica in the eighties. I don't know why her mesmerizing contralto voice fell out of favor; I certainly kept playing her stuff in the nineties and beyond. She released a number of covers of top musicians like Tom Petty, the Pretenders, Iggy Pop, Sting, Sly and Robbie, and the Marvelettes… Still, even though she was Jamaican/American, her music was always more popular in Europe than in the states. She was one of the first female stars to incorporate costuming as part of her distinctive, androgynous style. She also modeled and acted. Still does, I think.

The first song is a pretty faithful Roxy Music cover, and the second is an ethereal tune that my sister-in-law put on a mix tape for me a loooong time ago.

2001 => Star Maker Debuts: Sliding Delta

Ben Harper: Sliding Delta

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I first heard Ben Harper in 2000, like so many other people. He had been releasing albums since 1992, but in 2000 his song Steal You Kisses broke through to a wider audience. Steal Your Kisses is a great pop song, but nothing about it suggests that Harper should be any good at the blues. But it turns out that the blues was Harper’s first musical love, and he got his first major gig opening for Taj Mahal on a tour. So it makes sense that he was chosen in 2001 to contribute a song to a tribute album to Mississippi John Hurt called Avalon Blues. Ben Harper shows that he deserves to be there with his take on Sliding Delta.

2001: The Cowboy Bebop Edition

The Seatbelts: Slipper Sleaze

The Seatbelts ft. Mem Nahadr: Butterfly

The Seatbelts ft. Raj Ramayya: Ask DNA

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I've been wanting to feature music from the many soundtracks of Cowboy Bebop for yonks but never had the chance to properly write it up until now.

Short summary: Cowboy Bebop is a Japanese anime series about futuristic bounty hunters traveling the universe on their spaceship, the Bebop. What is especially noteworthy, especially for us, is the Americentric music that was integral to the series. In fact, it's so Western---jazz, mostly, but also fusion, blues, hip-hop, funk, country-western, pop, alt-rock, and electronica---that I bet I won't even get flamed for posting it. Each episode had a unique musical theme, with names reflecting that: Jamming with Edward, Bohemian Rhapsody, Speak Like A Child, Black Dog Serenade, The Real Folk Blues…

Nearly all of the music was composed and arranged by Yoko Kanno, (think John Williams for anime scores, except she also sings from time to time). The music performance is credited to The Seatbelts, a changing mix of dozens of Japanese, American, and French musicians. Kanno and the Seatbelts released seven or so albums for Cowboy Bebop. Luckily for us, three of them were released in 2001. I swear, though, it was hard to narrow it down to just three songs, and I hope to be able to feature more in future SMM themes. Or, you know, you could check out the albums yourself!

Slipper Sleaze, from Cowgirl Ed is a laid-back jazz fusion piece that features a pretty sweet guitar/piano/bass melody.

Butterfly, from Future Blues the soundtrack to Cowboy Bebop: The Movie is a slow jazz ballad, with gorgeous English vocals by Mem Nahadr.

Ask DNA, from the album of the same name, is an alt-pop tune. The guy who sounds like Rob Thomas, is actually Indo-Canadian singer Raj Ramayya.

2001: Back In Black

Hayseed Dixie: Back In Black

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Coverlovers know 2001 as the year that Hayseed Dixie released their debut album "A Hillbilly Tribute To AC/DC," thus introducing the world to "rockgrass", and the inevitable imitators that would follow.

It's hard to find the real story behind the absurdism here. The band's entirely implausible mythos, as presented in this picture-perfect parody of a down-home Disney YouTube video, has them as true redneck hillbillies, all coveralls and beards, shotguns and twang, who discovered the complete works of namesakes AC/DC when a city slicker's car crashed on their rural Appalachian property. The Boston Globe says they're "way out of left field"; Word Magazine says their music is like "The Beverly Hillbillies suddenly gripped by a death wish"; their first show ever was at SXSW; their most recent album is in Norwegian, and no one is sure why. Feel free to put on your ironic hipster glasses before rejoicing in their faux-thenticity.

2001: Chrystal Frontier (Widescreen Version)

Calexico: Chrystal Frontier (Widescreen Version)

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The name of the band Calexico arises by combining California with Mexico. Chrystal Frontier (Widescreen Version) comes from an EP of flip sides and rarities, but the song is a perfect example of how the band mixes these two places. Mexico, in this song, is a land still haunted by the ghosts of ancient cultures, and also a wild place of violence akin to the Old West. Immigrants to California come seeking a place that has been tamed, but they also bring some of that modern wildness and ancient magic with them. The song presents a few of these immigrants at the border, caught between the old and the new. The music includes the Mariachi horns that are such an important part of Calexico’s sound, but also a modern beat that you can dance to. Both lyrical and musically, Calexico makes the combination work.

2001: Linger

Jonatha Brooke: Linger

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It's funny the things you remember. I was only ever in Missouri for a few hours, when I flew into the St. Louis airport to visit a friend living in Southern Illinois, and yet in my few hours there, I purchased this album.

This song became my favorite from the album, I loved the lyrics. A few years later when I was attending grad school I used a quote from this song as an away message on my computer. The quote being:

You saw me through the key hole
Of a door that I kept locked
But I decorate the threshold
Just in case you knocked.
I thought it made a nice away message, and one of my roommates at the time very much agreed. She saw it and instantly loved it and wanted to know what it was from. I ended up making her a mix with the song on it. She was grateful, but thought the song didn't live up to the marvelous quote. I had to explain that Jonatha Brooke was what they often referred to as a "songwriter's songwriter" and it took a few listens to fall in love...as I had felt the same way when I first listened to her and now she is one of my favorites. And indeed, my roommate kept listening and then began to adore it. It's always a fond memory when you can share something you love with others and see the light go on for them as well.

2001: Joy

Silverbullit: Joy

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Silverbullit - one of all of those great bands destined to die in obscurity. Though they partly have themselves to blame for that; not only are they unproductive (three albums in fourteen years, and not a new album since 2004), they're also notoriously reluctant to do anything that might be considered crowd-pleasing.

The first album Silverbullit, released in 1997, was a hell-raising, high octane rock 'n' roll juggernaut inspired by The Stooges, MC5 and The Doors. After much turmoil, the follow-up Citizen Bird was released in 2001. Despite being recorded on and off for several years in a few different studios and with six different drummers, Citizen Bird has no problem holding together like one cohesive and mightily impressive album.

While it in parts retained the all American Detroit-tinged boogie r'n'r' energy, the band now took most of its cues from Spiritualized/Spacemen 3, The Velvet Underground, Suicide, DAF, Joy Division/New Order, krautrock and old school computer game music, creating something wholly unique and endlessly fascinating.

No doubt one of my favorite albums of all time. Get your copy today.

2001: The Wedding Song

Charlie Robison (with Natalie Maines): The Wedding Song

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The Wedding Song is a duet, and it came out on a major label from their Nashville division. So you would expect a lush production with a wall of strings, and you would expect to hear a couple proclaiming their undying love for each other. What you get is evidence of why Charlie Robison probably should never have been on a major country label, despite the fact that the album made a respectable showing on the country charts.

At the time of this song’s release, Charlie Robison had been married to Emily Robison of the Dixie Chicks for two years, but his duet partner here is Emily’s bandmate Natalie Maines. To the ear, The Wedding Song is indeed a love ballad, based on an acoustic guitar, and sweetened with pedal steel. Other than that, the production is refreshingly low key. But then there are the lyrics. Robison and Maines each sing one of the first two verses, and each of those verses starts with these lines:

“Well, you are still here,
And I am still here,
Whether I ever loved you is
Not perfectly clear.”

Hardly the stuff of romance. As I see it, there are two ways to read this. Maybe the song is about a couple whose lack of romance means that they are realistic about what they have, and therefore their marriage is likely to endure. Or maybe the song is a droll send-up of romantic love ballads. I have always felt that this kind of ambiguity is a mark of great songwriting, and I stand by that here.

2001: Baby, You're My Light

Richard Hawley: Baby, You’re My Light

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Richard Hawley, a former member of Britpop groups Longpigs and Pulp, has produced a series of delightful and always affecting albums that started with his full debut in 2001, Late Night Final (it was preceded by a self-titled EP in 2000), and culminated in a masterpiece with 2009’s Truelove Gutter. The gorgeously melancholy, late night mood of that great triptych of Hawley albums — Coles Corner, Lady’s Bridge, Truelove Gutter — is already evident on the debut, from which the lovely ‘Baby, You’re My Light’ comes. His voice has now dropped a register and the arrangements have become more intricate since Late Night Final, but the basics of the Hawley sound, and the quality, are already there.

Most Hawley songs that address the fancies of romance are downbeat, speaking of loneliness, longing or disappointment. ‘Baby, You’re My Light’, as the title suggests, takes a more upbeat direction as we follow the narrator’s through three stages. First we meet the young man who is awkward in matters of the heart, then the more confident adult who allows himself to take the risks of a broken heart, and finally the seasoned campaigner in romance who yields to love. The opening line is quite wonderful: “First time, the longing in you wears the girl that grows it.”

2001: Angeldust (Please Come Down)

Jump, Little Children: Angeldust (Please Come Down)

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Jump, Little Children was an alt-rock band made up of students studying classical music at North Carolina's School of the Arts. They started by playing live traditional Irish music, then added a dash of Delta blues before switching (mostly) to their own stuff. The group's vocalist, Jay Clifford, wrote all of the songs on this, their sophomore release. Yes, his voice reaches some pretty high ranges, isn't that cool? Are you surprised, given my affinity for falsetto, that I love this band? Most people who have actually heard them did, too, but unfortunately not enough of us existed, so sadly they called it quits after album #3 in 2004.

The islands off the coast are on fire
Orange and violet,
Standing on a thundering beach
Frozen in silence.
The rising sound of burning ground
Is like a carbon echo of a smoking gun.

2001: Broken Things

David Byrne: Broken Things

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By 2001, new wave music had happened twenty years earlier. Talking Heads had made some of the most original music of the 80s, but now leader David Byrne was well into his solo career. Byrne had always thrived on defying expectations. By 2001, that could mean making heavily produced music, with live strings and other orchestration. In Byrne’s hands, this evoked the sounds of Brazil, and that was the basis for much of his 2001 album Look Into the Eyeball. Broken Things is something of a throwback to Byrne’s earlier sounds. Yes, there is a horn section, but it is used with great subtlety. This one has real bite, more so because of the music that surrounds it on the album. As for lyrics, Byrne has always been an elliptical writer, but the most important repair to be made in this song is emotional rather than physical.

Useful Numbers: 3

Bob Dorough: Three Is A Magic Number

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De La Soul: Magic Number

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Jack Johnson: The 3 R's

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My first choice for this theme has already been blogged, and Anne described my attachment to it so well. But this eleventh-hour 3x3 submission, while a bit minimalist and tongue in cheek, is nonetheless as important as a phone number. And the song tells you why.

Bob Dorough is a great Jazzman, but he's best known as composer and occasional vocalist for the Schoolhouse Rock series, from whence this came. Playful hip hop pioneers De La Soul sampled and remade for their 1991 seminal 3 Feet High...and Rising. Jack Johnson transforms, rewiring the lyrics for a modern, green society.

There's good covers out there from Elizabeth Mitchell (gentle) and Blind Melon (grungy), among others. But then our numbers would've come out all wrong.

3. It's the magic number. No more, no less.

Useful Numbers: # 807

Pieta Brown: # 807

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Number 807 is a street address, and Pieta Brown takes us to the front door, and then opens it. This begins a series of slides which show a man living on the bad side of town. The song may present one character or a series of different men, and the ambiguity is deliberate. We the listener see their poverty, but also their humanity. The slides are in black and white, but are no less real for that. The bluesy groove that accompanies this slide show is perfect.

Useful Numbers: 1865 (96 Degrees In The Shade)

Third World: 1865 (96 Degrees In The Shade)

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This song has both date and temperature – a twofer! It describes the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica, a protest turned riot turned massacre, in which over 400 black citizens were killed and a further 300 executed without trial by the English colonial government.

Reggae band Third World, riding the wave of reggae-love beyond their Jamaican shores, released the title track of their second album in 1977, and it became one of their most popular songs.

Useful Numbers: 853-5937

Squeeze: 853-5937

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853-5937 is one of those songs I liked as a child and I can look back on and say I am proud of childhood me for choosing Squeeze (I liked their other single "Hourglass" from their 1987 album Babylon And On even better) over a lot of the other stuff they were playing on the radio. I remember thinking back then that when I was older and had my own phone I would want to sing the chorus of this song as my answering machine message. Oh, how things change, but this song is still fun to sing along with.

Squeeze is a pop rock band from England that was making music from the late '70s, so when Babylon and On came out they weren't a new band, but new to most American ears, as this song and the previously mentioned "Hourglass" became their only hits in the U.S. The song is cute and catchy. A cute little story of a guy freaking out because he keeps calling his girlfriend's number and she never answers, and then he calls his best friend and he doesn't answer either and he starts getting paranoid that they were off somewhere together. They just don't make songs like this anymore.

Useful Numbers: 14th Street

Laura Cantrell: 14th Street

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The picture above says it perfectly. You are looking down the middle of 14th Street in New York City. On one side of the street, the buildings are all a washed out brown color. On the other side, the buildings look vibrant and alive, decked out in that rich reddish brown. 14th Street marks the northern border of Greenwich Village, the famous Bohemian enclave. In Laura Cantrell’s song 14th Street, her narrator seemingly comes from the brown side of the street, while the man she walks behind is from the reddish side. Most of Cantrell’s songs are on the folk or country side of things, but this one is pure timeless girl-pop bliss. That works perfectly for this tale of a woman who is trying to find the courage to act on a crush.

Useful Numbers: 2541

Robert Forster - 2541

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  When Husker Du broke up at the end of 1987 it was drummer Grant Hart who released the first solo recording, an EP named "2541". The following line pretty much sums things up:
 "Now everything is over /Everything is done/Everything is in boxes/ at 2541"


  A little googling identifies 2541 as the street address of the old Husker Du office and practice space, but Grant Hart told Spin Magazine that, coincidentally, it was also the number on a house he shared with a lover.

   "I wrote the song while waiting for the truck to move me out of this apartment where me and this person had just split up. And there were so many parallels with the dissolvement of (Husker Du)'s office and our being a  band."

   Must have been some place: "Billy put down the money and I picked up the keys/We had to keep the stove on all night long so the mice wouldn't freeze".


   As you've probably already noticed, I'm not offering Grant Hart's version . (You can hear it here.) I have a soft spot for a cover version by The Go-Betweens' Robert Forster. It's from an album of mostly obscure covers called I Had A New York Girlfriend.

Useful Numbers: 24-7-365

Keni Stevens: 24-7-365

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24-7-365 is the number that “gets you on the loveline” with Keni Stevens (except, presumably, in Olympic years). It’s the sort of lyric one might expect from a 1980s soul song. But don’t let this slive of cheese mislead you about the soul stylings of the sadly underrated Keni Stevens.

The British soulster of distinctive style and voice released only three albums of sophisticated, cool soul. The debut, 1987’s Blue Moods is the best-known of them. The song here comes from the 1988 follow-up, You, which I consider to be the better album. Indeed, the first side of You is absolutely exquisite (when Stevens sings about the pain of heartbreak in 'Hurt This Way', you feel it with him), as good as any soul LP first side released in the 1980s. It's a superb laid-back soul album by a self-assured independent singer who never got his due.

Things could’ve gone better for the son of a US serviceman. Two singles he released on the independent Elite label in 1985 attracted interest from a few majors. Polygram reportedly offered him an £2,5 million contract. Stevens turned it down in favour of maintaining artistic independence. He became something of a favourite among British soul fans. Though he never bothered the UK Top 75 singles charts, Blue Moods sold 150,000 copies in Britain, and a reported million worldwide.

The saxophone on '24-7-365' is by Mike Stevens, who also did guitar duty. I presume that this is the same Mike Stevens who served as musical director for Take That and released a jazz-fusion album.

Useful Numbers: October 26

The Pretty Things: October 26


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This 1971 single sounds like one terrific hangover from a party so "happening" it must have been revolutionary.

   October 26, 1917 is the day after the Bolsheviks took over Russia and began spreading Communism in the 20th Century. The plan was to implement worldwide revolution. It didn't quite happen that way.

   But aside from the date, this song appears to be about the end of another revolution. This one was orchestrated by hippies and it ended after a ten month span in which The Beatles broke up and Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Altamont concert-goer Meredith Hunter all died.

   For The Pretty Things "October 26" ends a string of remarkable albums ( S.F. Sorrow, Parachute) and singles cut at Abbey Road. At this point vocalist Phil May was the only original member of the band left. The single made no impact in the UK but broke the Top 30 in The Netherlands. You can find "October 26" on the re-issued Parachute album.

Useful Numbers: Dayton Ohio 1903

Randy Newman: Dayton Ohio 1903

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Randy Newman has become known for full band pop and lushly orchestrated soundtrack music. He does both things with wonderful artistry. His songs in recent years, especially the ones used in the Pixar films, display a tenderness that very few songwriters can match. But I first heard Newman in ballads like this one, arranged for just voice and Newman’s piano playing. All of the tender emotion of his later work is here as well. This is a sepia-toned song, with a wonderful nostalgic feel. The song is short, under two minutes in fact, but that’s all Newman needs to set the mood.

Tom Waits Covers: Come On Up to the House

Sarah Jarosz: Come On Up to the House

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God and heaven are never mentioned in the song, but Come On Up to the House has the fervent quality of a gospel prayer nonetheless. This is true in Tom Waits original version, but perhaps even more so in Sarah Jarosz’ cover. Jarosz uses bluegrass instrumentation, but also gives the song a jazzy feel. It all adds up to that rare cover that actually improves on the original. And I say that from the point of view of a Tom Waits fan who feels that covers rarely even do his songs justice. This one does.

Tom Waits Covers: Big Black Mariah

John Hammond: Big Black Mariah

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I can understand why no one has posted Big Black Mariah this week. The song is one of Tom Waits’ most menacing works. The band on the original sounds like an ancient steam engine, threatening to shake itself apart at any moment. On top of that, Waits adds his signature growl. The song also has a mystifying lyric. Tom Waits can be coy about his song meanings, but “big black mariah” can be a slang term for either a paddy wagon or a hearse. So the song could be about a man being taken away by the police, who expects to wind up on death row. The ambiguity is deliberate on Waits’ part. You can find notes on the meaning of the song here.

But Big Black Mariah is an emotionally powerful song. Love it or hate it, you can not be unmoved. And that is probably what inspired John Hammond to include the song in his collection of Tom Waits covers, Wicked Grin. Hammond has remade the song as a Chicago blues number. Now it sounds like the original artist might have been Howlin’ Wolf, and it suits the song perfectly. Tom Waits apparently agreed; he produced Wicked Grin.

Tom Waits Covers: (Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night

Shawn Colvin: (Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night
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Madeleine Peyroux: (Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night

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Shawn Colvin's mostly-live 1994 covers album Cover Girl marked a key moment in my evolution as a cover fan; it also introduced me to one of Tom Waits' most hopeful, beautiful songs. It's not the strongest cut on the album - a privilege shared by songs originally by The Band, John Prine, Talking Heads and others - but I found Colvin's version of Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night a gem nonetheless, with that little girl voice and a light acoustic swing offering a nuanced, wistful exploration of the eternal pursuit of the nirvana moment, the perfect meeting of place and time and company of which every barfly dreams.


Then, in 2006, Madeleine Peyroux released her own version - a slow, low cowboy ballad of a song, utterly gorgeous and dripping with late-night drowsiness - and my life was transformed again. And so we see through this, and a thousand other takes from a thousand other jazz-bent female vocalists, how Tom Waits compositions translate so well to the female chanteuse. Writ large, it is a near-universal truth of musical performance: the inevitable feminine counterpart to gruff and gravely was, is, and always has been sultry and smooth. But nowhere does this play out better than in Tom Waits coverage, in this coverblogger's opinion.

Tom Waits Covers: Downtown Train

Moneybrother: Tåget Som Går In Till Stan

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After ska rockers Monster parted ways in 2000 frontman Anders Wendin started his solo project Moneybrother.

Everything he has even done under this name has gotten pretty much rave reviews in his native Sweden, but his biggest commercial success to date was the 2006 album Pengabrorsan, on which he covered songs by everyone from My Morning Jacket and Wire to Ron Sexsmith and Donna Summer, all translated into his native tongue.

The best of the bunch though was this one, Waits' Downtown Train.

Tom Waits Covers: The Piano Has Been Drinking

Dan Hicks and The Hot Licks: The Piano Has Been Drinking

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Dan Hicks' delightfully weary "cowboy jazz" take on this old Tom Waits tune lurches around like its unreliable narrator's attention span: it's a different bar, of a different type, than the woozy original - better populated, too - but it still spins like a wobbling top in its own way. It's also the cover which finally turned me on to the Tom Waits songbook in its entirety in the first place, way back at the turn of the century, despite a few others which had already come my way with their own power and potency, so I'm getting this one out of the way today, as our week begins.

Those unfamiliar with Dan Hicks should know he's a musician's musician, a critical success who never sold much in the way of albums even though he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone way back in - gulp - the year I was born. Beat The Heat, his 2000 comeback album as bandleader of the Hot Licks, features this and numerous other gleefully sly, silly tunes, and special guest spots from Bette Midler, Elvis Costello, Rickie Lee Jones, Tom Waits himself, and other well-known luminaries who came out of the woodwork for Hicks when he called, proving his continued relevance after a few decades piddling around off the charts entirely as an ensemble member and solo artist.

Circuses and Carnivals => Tom Waits Covers: Table Top Joe

Neptune Quartet: Table Top Joe

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Tom Waits is an interesting subject for a week of covers, because his art is almost impossible to duplicate. Waits has a knack for portraying vagabonds, drunkards, and freaks in a way that is honest but sympathetic. Waits shows these characters with all of their warts, but he gives them their dignity. This delicate balance comes as much from Waits’ performance as his writing, so this quality is often lost in cover versions. But artists are drawn to his writing, so they must make these characters their own. Reinvention is almost always required, as we shall probably see for most of this week. But I keep hedging. That’s because I found this remarkable performance of Table Top Joe that largely preserves the feel of Waits original, while filling out the arrangement.

In fact, for all of the reasons I mentioned above, Table Top Joe is one of the most unlikely Waits songs for anyone to cover at all. The title character is based on the life of Johnny Eck, who was born with the lower half of his body missing. That’s a picture of Eck above. Even the thought of it is enough to make a person uncomfortable. Eck appeared in the notorious cult horror film Freaks, and he wanted to appear in another film as a mad scientist’s monster. Yet, Tom Waits focuses on Eck’s hopes and dreams, and finds his essential humanity The real life Eck accomplished many things that most people would have considered impossible for him, including conducting an orchestra. He also spent most of the Great Depression working in circus and carnival freak shows. By all accounts, Eck never lost his optimism until a robber took advantage of his physical limitations when Eck was in his seventies. He never seemed to accept the word impossible, and that is what Tom Waits sees in him.

Neptune Quartet is normally an instrumental group, but, for their version of Table Top Joe, they added singer Wes Ivankovich. Neptune Quartet arrange the song for guitars, mandolin, bass, and accordion, in a way that Tom Waits might have done if he thought of it. Ivankovich delivers a vocal that is somewhere between Tom Waits and Dr John, if you can imagine, and it all works beautifully.

Circuses and Carnivals: That Song About the Midway

Joni Mitchell: That Song About the Midway

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In British folksongs, gypsys represent freedom, or the yearning for it. A woman in the song runs off with a gypsy, but she is really seeking to escape the yoke of class expectations. In the United States, class consciousness is less overt, but the urge to run away is still there. We represent it in popular culture as the urge to run away and join the circus. Joni Mitchell’s That Song About the Midway combines these two archetypes, by presenting a woman who wants to run off with a potential lover in a traveling carnival. Mitchell’s narrator knows that this man probably won’t be good for her, but the “urge for going”, if you will, is still strong.

Circuses and Carnivals: Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!

The Beatles: Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite

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A blog request!

This poster, nabbed in an antique shop, was the inspiration for John Lennon to write Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite, one of the stellar songs from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Apparently he wanted this song to recreate the sounds of the circus, down to the "sawdust on the floor." How many lyrics can you spot?

Not only didn't I know about the cribbed poster, I also didn't know this factoid, courtesy Wikipedia (aka, the blogger's bible): It was one of three songs from the Sgt. Pepper album that was banned on the BBC, supposedly because the phrase "Henry the Horse" combined two words that were individually known as slang for heroin.

Circuses and Carnivals: Five From The Midway

Dan Zanes: Wonderwheel

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I went to a weekend fair
met someone while I was there
we put flowers in our hair
and rode the wonderwheel...

It sure sounds like a carnival, thanks to a rollicking accordion, a bouncy beat, and a subtle surfer's acoustic groove. And that's the point, for sure: after all, Dan Zanes is a master of the seemingly-casual kidsong, when in actuality, every note and tone is designed to add to the perfect festive mood, the inner child called to exquisitely.


Richard & Linda Thompson: The Wall of Death

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Roller coaster as metaphor for the nauseating thrill-ride risk of the love affair? Yes, please. REM covers this one, but the Richard Thompson original is better by far, a perfect take from his mid-eighties solo work with ties to both true-blue rock and roll and his early folk rock sound with Fairport Convention.



David Wilcox: Top of the Roller Coaster

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A bit more specific, softspoken southern folkie David Wilcox - a master of the sustained metaphor - looks at the roller coaster's moment of anticipation as a model of the inner heartjump turning thirty can bring. Love the way the bouncy tonality and sweet harmonies bring midlife crisis alive. So much joy.



Norah Jones: Carnival Town

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A broad title belied in the first few lines - this is actually a song mostly about carnival rides and their motion as a reflection of life-movement, with each of the first two verses taking on a different ride (the third verse covers clowns). Loneliness on the downswing makes this a perfect lullaby.


Mary Gauthier: Merry Go Round

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Gauthier holds off on her titular metaphor until the chorus, setting the stage with the violent and stark images of an early life of drug and family abuses that fit cleanly among the rest of the songs on powerful third album Filth & Fire. The carousel "horse" here is heroin; the turning of the wheel a path of addiction and recurrence - and so we come full circle, as it were, from the cheerfulness of Dan Zanes, proving the versatility of midway as macrocosm, reflecting the vastness of the inner world.

Circuses and Carnivals: Crocodile Man

Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer: Crocodile Man

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Our Circuses and Carnivals theme is almost done, and no one has visited the freak show until now. There must be other songs that would work, but let me at least share a favorite of mine. I suppose that the term “freak show” is not appropriate for this song. The crocodile man tells the story from his point of view, as a human being just trying to get by as best he can. And that is exactly what makes this song so special. Oh, and a killer groove doesn’t hurt either.

Circuses and Carnivals: Send in the Clowns

Pat Martino: Send in the Clowns

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Send in the Clowns, now a jazz standard but originally a 1973 show tune by Stephen Sondheim, is a slow, regretful ballad. This guitar version by Pat Martino, one of my new favorite artists (and I can't believe this is the first I've posted by him!), brings out the most soulful, introspective nuances of the song.

Martino has an astounding musical history: a prominent guitarist by 1980, he suffered an aneurism followed by brain surgery that caused him to lose all memory of how to play guitar. Painstakingly, he relearned, regaining his former abilities the hard way. You'd be hard-pressed to hear the difference between his "before" and "after" recordings unless you looked at the date. This one is from 1976.

Circuses and Carnivals: State Fair

Rasputina: State Fair

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It may not be about a specific attraction at a carnival, but this song definitely fits the bill as far as being about the wonders of the summer carnival, or as we here in U.S. are accustomed more often than not, the fair. State fairs are notoriously pretty cheesy, and lacking integrity. Of course, if you ask me, that's part of the appeal. Where else can you ride a ferris wheel after eating your weight in food items that were unhealthy to begin with, but then the good people at the state fair had the good sense to fry and put on a stick, all while enjoying the lovely smell of menure? It really is a miraculous event. All that, and pig racing as well? The Ohio State Fair is currently running and I am not sure I am going to have a chance to go. This makes me sad. I do so love funnel cake.

But listening to this song helps ease the pain. Rasputina, the all cello rock band fronted by singer-songwriter Melora Creager in her creepy dusty corset collection sings her tongue-in-cheek ode to the State Fair. I am sure her tongue is in cheek as much as mine is. The events can hardly be taken too seriously, but are still seriously fun to attend.

Circuses and Carnivals: Tight Rope

Leon Russell: Tight Rope

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I'm up on the tightwire,
Flanked by life and the funeral pyre,
Putting on a show for you to see.

Leon Russell is best known as a session player, where his distinctive keyboards (mainly) and guitar back up too many rock, bluegrass, country, blues, and pop musicians to even begin to list. He wrote early hits for diverse folks like the Carpenters (A Song For You), George Benson (This Masquerade), Joe Cocker (Delta Lady)…and himself – this song was his first hit in 1972. Russell was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last March.

Allmusic calls his style "swamp fusion," punched up by his Oklahoma-tinged vocals and bayou-laced lyrics. I'd certainly never heard music like this when I left suburbia for Ann Arbor. This album, Carney, became the most-played of my first freshman term, and I even got my roommate, a classical music kind of girl, hooked too. Goes to show that sometimes all we need to fall in love with new music is enough exposure.

Drums => Circuses and Carnivals: Tears of a Clown

The English Beat: Tears of a Clown

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The sad clown is an irony that many artists have found irresistible. Smokey Robinson took it and created a pop music classic. But, for me, this version by The English Beat really does the job. The opening rat-tat-tat of the drums sets the stage musically, and that figure reappears throughout the song to push it forward. Tears of a Clown was the first ska cover I ever heard. The sheer surprise of it, plus the undeniable energy of the performance made this version a classic in its own right. Since then, I have noticed that many ska bands include an unlikely cover in their repertoire, and many of them are great. But, for, me this one has never been topped.

Drums: X

X Japan: X

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Man, it's almost too hot to blog here.

Almost.

I can't let Drum Week go by, though, without paying tribute to one of the hottest drummers I know. We've actually seen him before on this blog in his pianist incarnation, but he's also one of the world's most intense, diva-like drummers on any continent. I'm talking, of course, about Yoshiki, the prima donna, leader, and producer of J-rock group X Japan. He's one of those musicians who's larger than life.

This version of their self-titled anthem was recorded in 1989. After a ten-year hiatus, X Japan is back touring, and as you can see, Yoshiki is a bit worse for wear. That neck brace protects him after years of headbanging and recent spinal surgery.

The song, though doesn't do him justice. For that you'll have to check out some concert footage, where his over-the-top antics during extended drum solos sends the crown into a screaming frenzy. He's got it down: first there's the slow build-up, then his drum platform takes off into the sky and circles around, then there's water fountains, then fireworks, then a rousing finish followed by Yoshiki collapsing and crawling off the stage. The whole thing takes long enough for the rest of the band to catch the first half of the Lakers game.

Here's one from last year in Yokohama. You can check out YouTube for a boatload more ("Yoshiki drum" will get you all you need).

Drums: Tales of Brave Ulysses

Cream: Tales of Brave Ulysses

[purchase]

I remember the first time I heard Cream. My oldest brother bought the album Disraeli Gears when it came out, and my other brother and I had to hear it. We listened in silence until the end of side one, and before my oldest brother turned the record over, he said, “and that’s only three guys!” Listening to Cream now, I can hear how the trick was done. Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce each has a big sound, and each covers part of the rhythm guitar part. And Ginger Baker thunders along, covering both the drum part and part of the bass. Most drummers in rock hit the beat, and play fills in between. Baker plays a continuous rumble of pulses, varying the pattern in unexpected places but always keeping perfect time. And he makes it sound like it’s something that just happens; it is forceful, but never forced. Tales of Great Ulysses shows this off beautifully. The song opens with Baker playing just a wash of sound on the cymbals, but then the drums kick in. In the course of the song, there are spots where Baker goes back to just the cymbals, and then back to his full kit again. The contrast between these sections makes it easy to appreciate just how important Baker’s playing was to the band’s sound. The other trick to Baker’s sound was that he had two bass drums in his kit instead of the usual one.

Drums: Pursuance

The John Coltrane Quartet: Pursuance (Part 3 of A Love Supreme)

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I may be coming to this week's theme the wrong way round. I suspect that the rest of the SMM gang will first think of a song with a striking drum part; instead, I'm checking out some of my favorite drummers and looking for songs where they really shine. And for me, the shiniest drummers are found in jazz.

Elvin Jones played on a bunch of jazz albums you've probably heard, or heard of. His lengthy recording career (from the 40's to this century; he died in 2004) saw him backing major artists such as Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Art Farmer, Sonny Rollins, Kenny Burrell, Yusef Lateef, Freddy Hubbard, Grant Green, Ornette Coleman, John McLaughlin, Dewey Redman, Bill Frisell…well, you get the idea. But one of his greatest periods was during his 5 year stint with tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. The Quartet also featured McCoy Tyner on piano and Jimmy Garrison on bass.

A Love Supreme is one of the best examples of modal jazz, a free-form style pioneered by Miles Davis and John Coltrane in the late 50's and 60's. This four-part suite, released in 1965, is widely considered to be one of the best jazz recordings ever. Part 3 begins with a 90 second solo by Jones and demonstrates his polyrhythmic style, which is why I chose this track, but I encourage you to listen to the entire album, which was powerful and spiritual enough to launch the St. John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church of San Francisco.

DRUMS: I'M CHIEF KAMANAWANALEA

The Turtles: I'm Chief Kamanawanalea

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For their 1968 concept album, Battle of the Bands, The Turtles tried to sound like a different group on each track. They even had photographs taken of themselves disguised as each group. The Turtles recorded the Top 10 hit "You Showed Me" as Nature's Children and another big hit, "Elenore" , as Howie, Mark, Johny, Jim & Al.
   As Chief Kamanawanalea and his Royal Macadamia Nuts, they let drummer John Barbata lead the way. Kamanawanalea ( named after the fictitious "God of Lust and Perversion") is of course the kind of silly pun that makes Hawaiians roll their eyes.
    But it's those drum breaks that make this 94-second song irresistible, especially to rap artists like The Beastie Boys, Big Daddy Kane and De La Soul, the latter of whom used the breaks ( and samples from "You Showed Me") without crediting the Turtles. De La Soul met the fury of the litigious lead singers, Flo & Eddie. They won a share of the royalties and punitive damages.
   Today Eddie ( Howard Kaylan) looks back on the critical reception this album received with disappointment.
  "Battle of the Bands was our Sergeant Pepper." He told blogger Cody Conard ."And it still bugs me, all these years later, that it was under-appreciated by the music critics upon its release. I was happy with it then, and I still think it's the strongest stand-alone album that the band ever recorded".

Drums: Saved

LaVern Baker: Saved

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Could I be asked to choose a favourite drum track between the percussive detonations on Stevie Wonder’s ‘Uptight’ and the assault of drums on Tim Rose’s pre-Hendrix version of ‘Hey Joe’? And if I do, will I not be lacking in fidelity to the pulsating flourishes on The Five Stairsteps’ ‘Ooh Child’?

I suppose none of those would qualify in terms of this week’s theme, with its expectation that the drums be part of the song’s essence.

Of course, the use of drums reached a zenith in a gospel song recorded on 12 June 1960 by the R&B singer LaVern Baker, who had been recording since she was a teenager in the mid-’40s, going by several names, most famously Little Miss Sharecropper .

‘Saved’ was written by the legendary songwriting and publishing team Leiber & Stoller. Fans of Elvis’ Comeback Special in 1968 will know it as a decent little gospel number, but Elvis couldn’t possibly hold a candle to Baker’s explosive version. She sings it forcefully, but it’s the thundering bass drums with which she proposes to do her missionary work that makes this track rock furiously. Try and sit still to this!

Album Cover Art => Drums: Dance of the Hunter’s Fire

Mickey Hart: Dance of the Hunter‘s Fire

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[purchase book]

Planet Drum became the first album to win a Grammy for World Music in 1991. But that was only part of the story. I got it as a book and CD set, and the book was amazing. Mickey Hart, of Grateful Dead fame, had traveled the world on tour, and had learned about the local drums and drummers wherever he could. The book was a highly readable and fascinating survey of the world of percussion, with lavish illustrations. The CD was just as amazing. Hart gathered some of the greatest percussionists from various parts of the world, and gotten them to work together to prove that drumming is a universal language. Players on Dance of the Hunter’s Fire include Babtunde Olatunji from Nigeria, Airto Moreira from Brazil, as well as players from the United States, Puerto Rico, and India.

The album cover shows the planet earth, with drummers and dancing animals circling it. The whole thing appears on a drumhead. Artist Nancy Nimoy perfectly captured the spirit that Mickey Hart was trying to present.

Album Cover Art: Kagrra, - Miyako

Kagrra,: Urei

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Kagrra, (yeah, with the comma as part of the band name) was a J-rock band whose style deliberately blended classical Japanese traditions (both musical and sartorial) with rock. Sadly, they just disbanded a few months ago, but they were pretty decent for the ten years that they lasted. During that time they released nearly a dozen albums (depending on how you count), a slew of mini-albums, a raft of maxi-singles, a bunch of concert DVDs, and some stray singles.

In Japan, artists don't merely release one album or one single; there are commonly multiple versions: a regular version, a limited version, perhaps an 'A" version, and 'B' version. They've all got the same single, but each variation has a different second or third song, some may have a version with the vocals stripped out for karaoke, and the limited version will have a DVD with the promotional video of the song. And a diehard band fan will buy each version (and each purchase counts separately to determine the Oricon chart rating, which is how it evolved into such a racket).

Can you tell where I'm going with this? Each version also has a unique cover.

Kagrra, was unique in that the group had a long-term relationship with one artist, Fukaya Yuichiro, who created most (but not all) of their artwork. His style similarly merged classical Japanese themes with a modern feel to them. Check out more of his artwork for Kagrra, on his Facebook page. He would create a series of related pictures for the various incarnations of a release, often with a bit of subtle humor to them. Notice some of the paired images of the regular and limited covers in the Facebook examples (and he doesn't have all of his stuff here, so Google 'images' can find more for you).

The artwork above shows the expanded cover for the 2004 album, Miyako. The right side of the artwork was featured on the front of the CD, showing only the kanji and a bit of hair and sleeve, and the left wrapped around to the back cover. Pretty, ne?

Album Cover Art: Okkervil River - The Stage Names and The Stand Ins

Okkervil River: You Can't Hold the Hand of a Rock and Roll Man

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Okkervil River: Calling and Not Calling My Ex

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Okkervil River is an indie rock band mostly based out of Austin, Texas. The cover art for all six of their full-length releases and some of their EPs has been done by artist William Schaff. Many other bands use the same artists for all of the their album art (Steve Earle has featured Tony Fitzpatrick's artwork since 1995, and the Drive-By Truckers featuring Wes Freed's art since their 2001 opus Southern Rock Opera. What I particularly love about Schaff's artwork for Okkervil River's 2007 release The Stage Names and 2008 album The Stands Ins is that first, they were both done entirely in embroidery. Second, the album covers were designed to go together (to get a closer look, see Schaff's Flickr album art page). But fans didn't realize this when The Stage Names came out in 2007. We fans just thought is was another cool William Schaff abstract creation. The album itself is a loose concept album of the perils of being an entertainer, be it as a touring musician, a poet, or even a porn star. The Stage Names and The Stand Ins were recorded at the same time, and the music on The Stand Ins mostly doesn't fit The Stage Names theme. But how delighted were we fans when The Stand Ins was released a year later and we found out that the hand reaching out of the gerpy water
was actually that of a drunken skeleton-man, reaching out for help? Wonderful concept, and a very unique design.

Guest post by Rock Star Aimz of My Aimz is True

Album Cover Art: Bee Gees - Odessa

Bee Gees: Suddenly

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   On the heels of their massive number one UK hit "I've Gotta Get A Message To You", The Bee Gees were ready to make their big statement album. That statement was the 1969 album Odessa, two lps wrapped up in a red velvety flocked cover with gold lettering.
"I think Odessa was an attempt to do a rock opera," Barry Gibb told The Guardian's Alexis Petridis in 2009. "It sort of turned itself into a bit of a mish mash, but our intentions were honourable. I think we wanted to do something that could be put on stage. There was supposed to be a thematic thing going on," he added, "but it just kind of wandered off into the distance."
  While it was nice to own an album cover you could actually pet, the flock reportedly caused a major allergic reaction among some of the workers during production.
   The reissues all came out in boring old cardboard sleeves.

Album Cover Art: Ramones - Ramones

Ramones: Loudmouth

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For their '76 debut, the Ramones were originally looking for an album cover that would be somewhat similar to Meet The Beatles!, but that didn't really pan out. Which proved to be a streak of luck really, as da brudders then decided to use a Roberta Bayley photograph which had already been published in Punk magazine. One look at it and you knew you were dealing with radically different stuff here. What you saw was what you got: Bayley had managed to epitomize the no-frills aesthetic of punk rock in just one shot. Four street kids from New York City - Johnny, Tommy, Joey and Dee Dee, from left to right - in stark black & white, standing in front of a dirty brick wall looking bored but confident in their trademark leathers, jeans, and sneakers. And boy, did they look cool... Anyone still wear that uniform on a regular basis? Thought so.