Les McCann Trio: With These Hands
[purchase]
I was invited to SMM the week following Trios week. I bet I'd've posted this song, which is one of my all-time favorite jazz ballads, like, ever. Les McCann excels at slow piano ballads, and this time he adds his mellow vocals to this tune from 1969's Much Les. It's just a gorgeous love song. The Les McCann Trio has Leroy Vinnegar on bass and Don Dean on drums.
The Story: The Angel In The House
[purchase]
Long before Jonatha Brooke was a folkpop star, and Jennifer Kimball a lesser-known but no less talented interpreter and craftsperson in the Boston singer-songwriter scene, the two whet their teeth on the folkscene as The Story, a duo which came together when the two discovered each other finding beautiful, oft-dissonant harmonies among the more mainstream triads while in a chorus at Amherst College in 1981.
Local buskers at first, and then struggling artists with day jobs through most of the decade after graduation, the girls were finally signed in 1989, and things looked good for a while. But sadly, artistic differences soared even as Electra Records cherry-picked 'em from lesser-known folk label Green Linnet for a debut rerelease and a second album in 1993, using their sound to leverage an entry into the fledgling AAA radio format. Though the effort was a critical success by all accounts - WXPN listeners named The Angel In The House the #1 album of the year upon its release - the band dissolved the following year, and Brooke took the name and ran away with it, only shedding "and the Story" from her band name for her own sophomore effort.
Since then, both artists have tended to avoid mention of their time together, as if to suggest that their small canon represents the best of neither. But though the duo was obscure and short-lived, thanks to a command performance as "Jonatha and Jennifer" in the library at my high school just after their first album came out on, their twenty-odd collected works still echo in my ears, surfacing on mix tapes and finding their way into the perennial lists I make in anticipation of a week's theme here at Star Maker Machine - which is where I found this one, a high-production yet no less moving also-ran worth reheating, the title track from their final release.
Come to think of it, this would have made a solid story for our recent Discoveries theme, too. C'est la vie, I guess.
Unto Ashes: Don‘t Fear the Reaper
[purchase]
It may be hard to believe, but there was a time when I was not a part of Star Maker Machine. Advice week happened two weeks before my first post, so I never had the chance to share this one.
I had heard of Goth music. The goths were the ones with the dark make-up rings around their eyes, who hung out in poorly lit clubs. They shopped at Hot Topic, wore mostly black, and were obsessively morbid. I always assumed that the music was loud and dirgy, a sort of very slow metal with glam touches. But, one holiday season, my wife found herself in Hot Topic with my niece’s Christmas list. The music playing intrigued her enough to bring home a CD of music from the Projekt label, and this version of Don’t Fear the Reaper was on it. I discovered that there is a softer side to goth music, and that I like it. Here, Reaper is reimagined as a folk ballad, with beautiful vocal harmonies on top of a solo acoustic guitar. Some other instruments come in late in the song, but that’s mostly it. Elsewhere, Unto Ashes brings medieval and Renaissance classical influences into their music, and it’s a fascinating mix.
Bay City Rollers: You Made Me Believe In Magic
[purchase]
The Bay City Rollers have undergone a partial rehabilitation over the past few years, with their music now unironically regarded as better than we (that is, people who grew up in the 1970s) were used to acknowledge, and their silly tartan outfits seen as a marker of their taste-challenged times rather than as the fashion disasters that they were, and the girls who screamed for them now our wives (whisper it, though, that I was a young male fan before the first public follicles fought their way to the surface).
Truth is, the music mostly was not really good, a few stand-out tracks aside. Oh, but how good these few tracks are. Saturday Night is an almost perfect pop song, but even better is the song only Americans, Germans and Japanese seemed to like. Recorded by an act with greater credibility, You Made Me Believe In Magic might have become a pop classic. Appearing on BCR’s final album with Leslie McKeown on lead vocals, 1977’s It’s A Game, it stalled at #34 in the UK charts. With David Bowie’s producer Harry Maslin at the console (which explains the bizarre cover of Rebel Rebel on the LP), BCR came up with a catchy, muscular pop song that, despite disco strings, has aged very well. A good cover version by the right act could become a huge hit.
Soon McKeown would leave the band, to be replaced by Duncan Faure, singer of the iconic South African band Rabbit (which also produced Yes’ Trevor Rabin). I’ve been told that the BCR albums with Faure were pretty good, but the band sank like a stone. Apparently there are at least two rival reincarnations of BCR touring; one of them led by McKeown.
Post by Any Major Dude. Being that he's the newest SMMer around these parts, he missed Magic week (and nearly every other week too), but we hope he's game to never miss another. Thanks again, Dude!
Gerard McMann: Cry Little Sister
[purchase]
It's Black Friday here in the U.S., and what better music to celebrate it than a nice organ-filled, creepy-kids-choir'd goth rock tune, eh? Okay, I know it's not supposed to mean that kind of Black Friday. I remain unconvinced. Me, I'm staying home today and writing blogs like a sensible 21st century gal.
This song was the theme of the 1987 American teen horror film The Lost Boys. For benefit of us Americans, Gerard used the name "McMann" on the soundtrack, since he thought we'd have a tough time with "McMahan", his real name. It's not that we don't pay attention to these sorts of nuances; we're just seriously sleep-deprived from all this 3 AM shopping. We're zombi-i-i-e-e-es!
Dick Gaughan: Your Daughters and Your Sons
[purchase]
The Duhks: Your Daughters and Your Sons
[purchase]
Two favorite versions of a well-covered tune by Irish folk troubadour Tommy Sands, who tends towards the political, and sure enough: its litany of international struggles for rights and recognition is capped effectively by the reminder that, though strife and hard times often follow those who fight for justice with their art, their work, and their lives, the seeds they've sown in their progeny is ample evidence of the change that they fought for. The second person delivery only serves to drive it home harder, making it clear that, though we may not see the fruits of our own labors either, the rewards of social justice are no less effective for being the beginnings of a multi-generational process of protest, absorption, acceptance, adoption, and - eventually - peace.
Kate Rusby: The Cobbler‘s Daughter
[purchase, priced in British pounds]
Kate Rusby is surely one of the leading voices of English folk music. The Cobbler’s Daughter comes from Rusby’s 1999 album Sleepless, which was her breakthrough album. Sleepless was nominated for a Mercury Prize. The Mercury Prize is the British equivalent of a Grammy. The Mercury goes to the best album of the year, and folk albums are almost never considered. But Rusby is that good.
As far as I can tell, The Cobbler’s Daughter is a traditional song. I can not find any recording of it before Rusby’s, however, and the song seems like a modern twist on a situation that often occurs in traditional songs of the British Isles. A beautiful young maiden catches the eye of a young man who then comes to court her. In traditional songs, it is assumed that she will fall in love with him in turn, and their love will either lead to tragedy, or it will overcome all obstacles, and the song will end happily. Rusby gives the young maiden a choice in the matter, and love goes off the rails from there. I’ll let you discover the rest for yourself.
Squirrel Nut Zippers: Little Mother-in-Law
[purchase used]
An odd little Hawaiian-esque acoustic number complete with slack key, uke, brush and holler from the kings of the zoot suit swing revival, recorded in their demo years, rereleased on Merge Records via a limited edition EP when the band got big in the late nineties, and now long out of print.
The titular mother-in-law actually appears to be the narrator's mother, best as I can tell - but like so much of their work, this one really isn't about the lyrics, it's about the mood.
Lonzo and Oscar: I'm My Own Grandpa
[purchase]
It may sound like material for a Jerry Springer episode, but the roots of I’m My Own Grandpa reside in Mark Twain, who once showed that it was possible to be one’s own grandfather (though he most likely lifted the idea from early sources). Twain’s story inspired one Dwight Latham, member of 1930s novelty and comedy band The Jesters, to co-write with Tin Pan Alley resident Moe Jaffe a song about the cartwheeling genealogy which would make for interesting family reunions. It was first recorded in 1947 by country-jokers Lonzo & Oscar (Oscar, whose real name is Rollin Lillian Sullivan, is still alive at 91).
Almost half a century after the song first was released, Bill Wyman and Mandy Smith and their respective son and mother tried to put the theory to the test, but in so half-assed a way that nobody really cared.
Let's give a warm SMM welcome to our guest poster, Any Major Dude With Half A Heart, whose blog I've loved for quite a while. Thanks!
Crowded House: Sister Madly
[purchase]
One of the most popular bands of the 1980s was The Stray Cats, with their slightly punked-up take on rockabilly. As a result, a lot of musicians tried out a rockabilly sound, at least for a song or two. Many of these have been forgotten, as they should be. But Sister Madly was Crowded House’s take on it. The song swings appropriately, but it also has touches that sound only like Crowded House. For me, this one stands up.
Neil Finn wrote this one when he was awakened by his sister having a nightmare. The guitar solo is by Richard Thompson.
Billy Bragg & Wilco: Walt Whitman's Niece
[purchase]
As a listener and blogger, I tend to favor a focus on history, production and musicality over text. From that perspective, today's song is easy to present: penned by Woody Guthrie fifty years before it was set to music and recorded by Billy Bragg and Wilco on their Grammy-nominated Mermaid Avenue collection, Walt Whitman's Niece is a fun rockabilly stomper that recounts a based-on-fact narrative of a night with a seaman friend and some girls. Period.
But as a teacher of English and Communications, trained in poetic parsing, it's hard not to notice the concrete power of the text here. These are heavily down-to-earth lyrics, with the first two verses constructed of structurally consistent couplets of event-oriented plot lines paired with self-aware lines protecting the anonymity of the people and places involved, ad infinitum, until we reach absurdity of not even being able to know which rug they lie on, which stairs they climbed to get there, which book of poems the unnamed seaman and narrator heard from the unnamed girls of the titular lyric.
If that were all he wrote, then the song would be an interesting exercise, nothing more. But perhaps not surprisingly for those who recognize the literate poetic genius of Guthrie himself, in that it reads a bit like a Whitman poem, especially at the end, the lyrical structure belies the crypticism of the words it contains. Here's verse three of three in its entirety, a testament to both the project and the poet it pays tribute to:
My seaman buddy and girl moved off
after a couple of pages and there I was,
All night long, laying and listening
and forgetting the poems.
And as well as I could recall
or my seaman buddy could recollect,
My girl had told us that she was a niece,
of Walt Whitman, but not which niece,
And it takes a night and a girl
and a book of this kind
A long long time to find its way back
Ass Ponys: Earth to Grandma
[Purchase]
In the grand scheme of the music world, there sure aren't a lot of homages to dear ol' Grams. This contribution from rock band Ass Ponys is mostly just a list of the kooky stuff that so many grandma's seem to like to make and give to others that makes everyone else think "what the heck is this and why would anyone want one?". So this is more an homage to the crazy kitch crafty world of dear old granny and her ilk than to the lady herself.
It makes me smile, but then again, my grandma never made me anything out of popsicle sticks.
Vic Chesnutt: Aunt Avis
[purchase]
Widespread panic w/ Vic Chesnutt: Aunt Avis
[purchase]
Left a paraplegic after a car accident in his teens, celebrated but never-famous singer-songwriter and collaborator Vic Chesnutt struggled with depression up until Christmas of last year, when he passed at the age of 45 due to complications following an overdose.
In the year since, I've delved much deeper into his work, and though his stark realism sticks to the soul if you let it, it's well worth the trip to hell and back.
Take Aunt Avis, for example, a plea to Vic's ancestors to save him from himself. The original is shaky and sparse, the jamband version with Widespread Panic eerier and dark. But both bear the self-depreciating humor and cynical grit which made Chesnutt a darling of the post-grunge underground. And the suicide-note lyrics? The plaintive cry of the vocal? Aunt Avis is dead, and so is her nephew: whether that makes the song that much more prescient, or merely a promise fulfilled, is a question best left open to discussion.
Emerson, Lake and Palmer: Daddy
[purchase]
If there were a more disturbing song recorded by ELP I haven't heard it yet. In Daddy, we hear the story of a father's worse nightmare: the loss of a child. The song was written in 1993 in memory and to raise awareness of Sara Anne Wood who went missing riding her bike home from summer Bible School less than one mile from her home in Frankfort, New York on August 18 of the same year. Her body has never been found. Three years after Sara was last seen, a suspect was brought to trail and was convicted, even though after his confession he recanted. He was also a suspect in the disappearance of at least four other children. I don't think his name is worth mentioning here because this is for Sara and for anyone else who has been touched by such a horrible crime.
Judy Collins: Me and My Uncle
[purchase]
An entire day went by with our new theme, and no one posted. I wanted to, but I was waiting to see if anyone had a transition song for us. That’s where a song fits both our old theme and our new one. I was drawing blanks. Well, life goes on. After a full day, I decided to get things started with one of my favorite Grateful Dead songs, Me and My Uncle. Just for the heck of it, I decided to make sure that I knew who wrote it. I got quite a surprise, and a great story, which comes from the Grateful Dead Lyric & Song Finder. It turns out that Me and My Uncle was written, kind of by accident, by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. How do you write a song by accident? Here’s the story:
John often used to tell the story behind "Me and My Uncle." Years ago he began receiving publishing royalties from a song on a Judy Collins record with which he was unfamiliar. It was titled "Me and My Uncle". He called Judy to let her know of the mistake because he hadn't written any such song. She laughed and told him that about a year before, in Arizona after one of her concerts, they had a 'Tequila Night' back at the hotel with Stephen Stills, Neil Young and a few others. They were running a blank cassette and John proceeded to write "Me and My Uncle" on the spot. The next day, John woke up to the tequila sunrise with no recollection of the songwriting incident. Judy kept the cassette from that evening and then, without informing John, recorded the song for her own record. Over the years the song was recorded by several people, and eventually became a standard of the Grateful Dead. John used to joke that, little by little, with each royalty check, the memory of writing the song would come back to him.
Peter & Gordon: A World Without Love
[purchase]
You know you're a top-drawer songwriter when even your rejects make #1 hits for someone else. This someone else was lucky enough to be the brother of the songwriter's girlfriend. The songwriter was Paul McCartney, who deemed this song not quite good enough for the Beatles. Lucky Peter. He also got "Nobody I Know" from Paul as well.
Cannonball Adderley: Mercy Mercy Mercy
[purchase]
Joe Zawinul started his recording career as a bandleader in 1959, but he was soon working as a sideman. By 1966, Zawinul had been with Cannonball Adderley for five years. That was when he wrote Mercy Mercy Mercy. This was the rare jazz song to hit the pop charts, peaking at #11. Zawinul was a pioneer in the use of electronic keyboards in jazz; in this case, it is the electric piano.
The song became a jazz standard. But something else happened as well. The song acquired words somewhere, and was recorded by such artists as The Buckinghams and, later, Phillip Bailey of Earth Wind & Fire. Queen Latifah recorded a version with a different set of lyrics. And finally, Joe Zawinul, coming off a highly successful tenure in Weather Report, recorded a version as a leader, also with vocals. But, for me and many others, the original recording of Mercy Mercy Mercy will always be the real one.
Rita Coolidge: Superstar
[purchase]
Joe Cocker: Delta Lady
[purchase]
This explanation will read more like Six Degrees of Separation than a normal musical post. Let's see if I can get us through the maze.
Leon Russell began his career as a 60's session musician and songwriter. Sometime around 1969, he was an integral member of Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, a transient group made up of Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett plus or minus George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Duane Allman, Dave Mason, Booker T. Jones, Isaac Hayes, Bobby Whitlock, Jim Keltner, Rita Coolidge, and a boatload of other musicians. Together Russell and Bonnie wrote "Superstar," an unnoticed B-side single for Delaney and Bonnie in 1969.
In early 1970, Russell went on to produce Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, and he's featured soloing on several tunes on the very successful live album. As was Rita Coolidge, who does a bust-up job on "Superstar". Even so, you are probably most familiar with The Carpenters' 1971 version. Richard Carpenter, though, had heard neither Bonnie's or Rita's version, but instead caught it on a TV show performance by a then-new vocalist, Bette Midler.
Meanwhile, in this fertile period of cross-collaboration, Leon Russell also wrote a song about the aforementioned Coolidge, at the time nicknamed "Delta Lady". Cocker picked up that song and made it a hit in 1969. Leon recorded his own version a year later.
Sam & Dave: You Don't Know Like I Know
[purchase]
Before Chef, before Shaft, and before his 18-minute version of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", Isaac Hayes was half of a potent Stax songwriting/producing duo with David Porter. Soul singers Sam & Dave were the prime beneficiary of their talents, having been gifted with classics like "Hold On, I'm Comin'", "When Something is Wrong with My Baby", and most notably "Soul Man". The first hit the duo had with Hayes & Porter was "You Don't Know Like I Know", which went to #7 on the black singles charts in March of 1966. It started a string of ten consecutive Top Twenty R&B hits for them.
In 1968 Hayes recorded his first album, which bombed. But his second album, Hot Buttered Soul (the one with the 18-minute version of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix") was the first in a series of hit albums that made him a star in his own right.
Incidentally, Porter also became a recording artist, but never achieved anything approaching Hayes' success.
Howlin‘ Wolf: Spoonful
[purchase]
Here is my audacious statement of the week: Willie Dixon was as important to the classic sound of Chicago blues as Muddy Waters. That’s because you can’t look at the best work of any of the Chicago greats without finding a song that Willie Dixon wrote, and possibly produced. We heard Wang Dang Doodle here during nonsense week; that’s a Dixon tune. Willie Dixon became a house songwriter, producer, and studio musician, at Chess Records in the 1950s and early 60s. So just about anyone who went through Chess played some of his tunes. Some, like Spoonful, became signature tunes for the first artist who recorded them, in this case Howlin’ Wolf.
I’m stretching the definition of our theme a bit with this one. Yes, Howlin’ Wolf was the original artist, and yes, the song’s author, Willie Dixon, would later record the song under his own name. But Willie Dixon also plays bass on Howlin’ Wolf’s original version. So, even though Dixon’s later recording has him singing the song for the first time, he was more than just a bystander here. But I wanted to pay tribute to Dixon this week, and I don’t have a complete discography for all of the songs he wrote for others. So this is my solution. I hope nobody minds.
