Forget Kenny Rogers (and really, please forget Kenny Rogers). The musician best deserving the title “The Gambler” is our favorite Sonoma County rancher, Tom Waits. On July 10, Anti- will release Healing the Divide, the long-anticipated album version of a semi-legendary 2003 benefit concert at Lincoln Center. The concert features four performances by Waits with Kronos Quartet and Greg Cohen, including the previously unreleased “Diamond in Your Mind,” which may be familiar from Solomon Burke‘s version. Other performers on the concert album include the throat-singing Gyoto Tantric Choir, sitarist Anoushka Shankar (Ravi’s daughter who isn’t named Norah Jones), the ubiquitous Philip Glass with kora player Foday Musa Suso, and Tibetan flutist Nawang Kechong in a duo with Navajo flutist R. Carlos Nakai. Internationally renowned impresario the Dalai Lama is the opening act. Sales from the album will support efforts of Healing the Divide, an organization founded by humanitarian and fugitive kisser Richard Gere, to provide health services to Tibetan monks and nuns living in refugee settlements.

That may sound like a safe bet. But as Monica Kendrick of the Chicago Reader has noted, Tom Waits’ sales pitch for the album is a new variation on Pascal’s wager. “I’m no fool,” Waits noted, “It’s a spiritual insurance policy. Hell, at my age, the next group I put together, everyone may be playing a harp. All kidding aside, I owed His Holiness a favor. He did all my papers in school.”

Even Waits’ musical selections for the show hedge his spiritual bets, ranging from “Way Down in the Hole,” a Jesus-thumping gospel blues traditional enough to have been covered by the Blind Boys of Alabama, to the self-explanatory “God’s Away on Business.” As he sings in the latter, “there’s always free cheddar in the mousetrap baby, it’s a deal, it’s a deal.”

Remember ingesting the Talking Heads’ 1979 Fear of Music for the first time? You may have come away with your brain drenched in a hybrid African / New Wave alchemical sweat. Not quite as aromatic as the sweat that oozed from Remain in Light, nor quite as pungent as the sweat that squirted from the somewhat more ragged 77. Fear of Music-generated sweat had a darker scent: More earthy, with an undercarriage of oak and peat moss. Beneath all that deep African funk was something very American – iconic portrait/bursts on simple themes: Drugs, Paper, Heaven, Animals, Cities. And underneath it all, something strange and wonderful and unlike anything you had heard before. But on the first track — I Zimbra — the African stuff did something sneaky to your brain: It set you up for deception. If you’re like most people (not saying that you are, but if you are), you may have assumed that the lyrics were a lifted tribal chant, cribbed from somewhere deep in the bowels of the Serengeti. The rhythms told you to assume that.

As for Marie Osmond… we’ll get to that.

Continue reading I Zimbra →

Mmmm… Skinny dipping on a cool autumn night, river rocks basking in the moonlight, perfect banjo and ukulele* strings glancing gently off rippled water. The sweetest canary floating through the pines, crooning in French. Kurt Hoffman and Meg Reichardt (aka Les Chaud Lapins, aka The Super-Turned-On Rabbits) perform Il m’a vu nue at Midnight Ukulele Disco, lovely and just a little bit naughty.

* Banjolele, to be exact. Via Clusterflock.

Don Bolles (better known as 70s drummer for punk outfits The Germs and 45 Grave) has reportedly has been arrested for (wait for it): possession of soap. That news comes from a recent posting by musician Nora Keyes. We haven’t independently confirmed the details of her account, but if it’s even mostly accurate, the charges are outrageous. According to Keyes, police, searching Bolles’ van in uptight Orange County, CA, found nothing suspicious but a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s liquid soap in the back.

Continue reading Dilute! Dilute! OK? OK? →

I admit I was predisposed to dislike British soul chanteuse Amy Winehouse’s new album Back to Black until I finally listened to it. How could the future of R&B lie with a troubled diva who vaguely resembles a goth version of Barbarella-era Jane Fonda? But appearances can be deceptive. I played Back to Black right after my beloved Chess Sisters of Soul anthology, and while it’s not in the Chess league, it sounded surprisingly good. Winehouse’s voice comes somewhere between the two Ettas—the powerhouse belting of Etta James, and the sultrier shadings of Etta Jones, whose “Don’t Go to Strangers” she has covered in a live duet with Modfather Paul Weller. And while Winehouse isn’t going to set the world on fire with her lyrics, it’s hard for me not to love someone who sings, in the catchy Ghostface Killah collaboration “You Know That I’m No Good,” that “by the time I’m out the door/ you tear me down like Roger Moore.”

With Winehouse tossing f-bombs like a drunken sailor and name-dropping Slick Rick and Nas (aka “Mr. Jones”) alongside Donny Hathaway, nobody would confuse her with a Ronette or a Vandella. But at its core, Back to Black fulfills its promise of delivering sweet soul music that is both contemporary and classic. Best of all may be the haunting title track, which updates the Phil Spector-style Wall of Sound to lethal effect.

Still, I have to wonder about a young star whose biggest hit has her saying “no, no, no” to rehab because she can learn everything she needs from Ray Charles records. Yeah, that’ll straighten her out. I’m going out on a limb, but maybe Amy Winehouse resists rehab because she thinks it would have a boring soundtrack. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a twelve-step playlist that might help her stick it out next time.

Continue reading A Rehab Playlist for Amy Winehouse →

On the 231st birthday of an outrageous experiment in nation-building with a pretty decent soundtrack, I asked our regular Stuck Between Stations contributors to take time from their five-alarm barbecues and traffic jams and hissing summer lawns to answer a simple question: What songs would you like to hear on the Fourth of July, in any style and for any reason? Faster than you can say “Sufjan Stevens,” we all went to look for America, and I said “be careful, my laptop is really a camera.” (Thanks, Apple).

Our stable of beloved revolutionary sweethearts proved worthy of the challenge. In what follows after my opening playlist, Sal Reyes casts George Washington as our founding prophet of rage, tucking into his knickers a “battle-scarred iPod” loaded with classic Public Enemy tracks. Scot Hacker surveys the state of a nation under a groove bold enough to mix Dylan and MC5 with Parliament/ Funkadelic, and explains why Condoleezza Rice won’t serve in President George Clinton’s cabinet. Malcolm Humes passionately describes Robert Wyatt’s relevance to our era of self-evident “truthiness” and freedom with asterisks.Christian Crumlish puts the jam back in holiday jamboree, from the Dead’s slow stew to the Minutemen’s quick sizzle.

Since my list includes James Brown’s Ford Administration civics lesson, “Funky President,” I’ll get things rolling with a teaser—David McMillan’s classic rant about the cosmic connections between James Brown and Gerald Ford.

Continue reading Stuck on the Fourth of July: Five Holiday Playlists →

Against my better judgment, I’m succumbing to the craze among online music fanatics to rewite songs in limerick form. Borrowing the popular idea to rewrite famous poems, Carl Wilson at Zoilus wrote limericks for an assortment of rock chestnuts ranging from Zep’s Jurassic classic “Stairway” to Sonic Youth’s adult-aged “Teenage Riot.” Rock, soul and hip-hop limericks started spreading like wildfire.

While this was all good fun, most struck me as stronger in concept than in execution. Then Idolator directed me to “There Once Was a Man From Garageland,” Twin Cities critic Nate Patrin’s Ogden Nash-worthy limerick version of the Clash‘s entire London Calling album for his excellent site, Rebel Machine. It’s a complete tour de force. Here’s Patrin’s version of “Lost in the Supermarket“:

Ennui strikes in the middle of Tesco
I don’t fit in where all of the rest go
My life is the pits
But at least Salsoul Hits
And some lager will make it feel less so.

All of the attempts I’ve seen, including Patrin’s, at least have lyrics that can be condensed in limerick form. To make things more sporting, I decided to try John Coltrane’s Live at Birdland album, one of only a few that has changed my life as much as London Calling. Here’s my limerick transcription of Live at Birdland, including the bonus track available only on CD:

Afro-Blue

A fleet-fingered drummer named Mongo
Wrote a rhythm best suited for bongo
But Trane tore it asunder
Elvin thrashed through the thunder
You could hear it from Jersey to Congo.

The rest of the album follows after the click.

Continue reading John Coltrane, Transcribed to Limericks →

Karl Marx viewed “the economic formation of society as a process of natural history,” where individuals could not control or direct the growth of commerce. The result is that capitalism inevitably creates an infinitely complex web of social interconnections. Meanwhile, the Russian constructivists were more interested in portraying man and mechanization than they were in “fine art” (ironically, a lot of Constructivist collage is mighty fine). And so is this video by Belarussian band Lyapis Trubetskoy, whose work is so popular in Russia it’s apparently become prime karaoke fodder. The socio-economic jungle, natural history, contructivist themes, and some damn fine collage work come together in Trubetskoy’s “Kapital”:

I can only imagine the amount of capital it must have taken to produce the video.

via WFMU

Via WFMU, wonderful video clip of a youngish and very dapper looking John Cage, appearing on a TV game show to perform his piece “Water Walk” on a motley collection of household objects. By 1960, when this piece aired, Cage was already controversial for his seemingly innocuous idea that “music is a production of sound” and because of his hallmark piece “4:33” (a.k.a. “Silence”), composed a few years earlier. The list of instruments for the game show performance included a rubber duck, ice cubes, a blender and five radios.

Continue reading Water Walk With Me →

M.I.A. mania is starting to sweep the world in anticipation of the official release later this month of Kala. The new album follows the thoroughly unclassifiable British/ Sri Lankan aural graffiti artist’s breakthrough Arular album and Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape, the sources of several of the Zeroes’ most arresting rhythms so far. Since the artist otherwise known as Maya Arulpragasam–whose website should remain unvisited if you are not wearing sunglasses–has been known to draw from everything from bhangra and baile electro-funk to dancehall and Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, you might wonder about the source of the leadoff sounds you will hear on her new album. Uh, how about…Jonathan Richman?

That’s right. In her continuing quest to bring the noise to college radio-obsessed geek rockers, Maya’s new “Bamboo Banga” starts out with a twisted, tripped-out reworking of the Modern Lovers’ car radio classic “Roadrunner,” which will remain Richman’s most iconic song no matter how many charming ditties he writes about dinosaurs, bumblebees and lesbian bars. Achieving speeds usually reserved for professional stunt drivers and Lindsay Lohan, M.I.A. doesn’t even notice the Stop n’ Shop as she drives “with the radio on,” and I’m betting that her car is equipped with satellite radio. Here’s an audio snippet from M.I.A.’s mini-cover, juxtaposed with a video playing “Roadrunner” Modern Lovers-style.

“Bamboo Banga” isn’t even the most interesting reworking of a rock classic on the new album; after the click-through we’ll present her take on the Clash.

Continue reading M.I.A., with the Radio On →