Bo Knows Qaddafi

Diatribes

Bo Diddley’s tombstone head finally joined his graveyard mind last week, and if there’s one thing Bo knew, it was how to distill the sound of danger. Warren Zevon was understating the case when he called him a gunslinger; as the featured clip below from the Ed Sullivan show attests, one-chord cavalry was more like it. The year was 1955. Bo, who claimed he had promised to perform a Tennessee Ernie Ford number, launched into “Bo Diddley” instead, galloping through his mutant variation on the son clave and hambone rhythms like a field general with a war to win and no time to waste. It’s a germinal beat that makes you want candy on a magic bus in 1969 while teetering between faith and desire that will not fade away. It makes you want to smash a rectangular guitar in a state of panic, wondering whether she’s the one, or asking how soon is now. Bo was human and needed to be loved, but he also wanted to be feared. It’s equally fitting that Bo entered his golden years opening for the Clash, and that back in the day, the Rolling Stones opened for him.

But none of the Bo Diddley retrospectives I’ve read have uncovered the secret of something Bo definitely did not know diddley about: foreign policy. I can attest that the author of the worst topical song in all music history was…Bo Diddley. (The close second runner-up: “I Hate the Capitalist System” by Barbara Dane). The year was 1986. While the United States’ past and future headliners in the Axis of Evil, Iran and Iraq, were busy fighting each other, Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi enjoyed fifteen-plus minutes of fame as the most hated man in America. During his celebrity run, nothing seemed to vanquish the madman of the moment; not the Reagan Administration bombing raid that took out a hundred civilians, and not even the New York Post article that ran a picture of what Qaddafi would look like if he dressed in drag.

There was clearly only one gunslinger whose rattlesnake hide was tough enough to take on the President-for-life who inexplicably remained a colonel: Bo Diddley. And so it was that during Summer 1986, when I watched Bo Diddley open for the Blasters in Washington D.C., Bo announced that the next song would be a little ditty called “Hey, Qaddafi!” I’m roughly paraphrasing, but the lyrics went something like:

Ooh Qaddafi, we’re gonna put a flag in your ear
Ooh Qaddafi, we’re gonna put a flag in your ass.

It never got any better than that. It seemed to go on forever. It was a slow-motion train wreck that made me feel crassly voyeuristic because I couldn’t bring myself to turn away. It reminded me that virtually all my favorite performers have at least one song that flat-out makes me cringe. If you’ve experienced one of your favorites having a “Hey Qaddafi” moment, we’d like to hear about it.

Bo Diddley, “Bo Diddley”

Carrie Nation

Slow Jams

Forced to choose my favorite American rock guitarist of the last dozen years, I’d need two seconds to answer: Carrie Brownstein. If you want a showoff guitarist who plays arpeggios with her teeth while wearing a bucket on her head, she’s not going to be your axeperson of choice. And sure, I have moods that demand the range of Nels Cline, the subtlety of Ry Cooder, or the visceral rush of Bob Mould. But riff for riff, I’ll take Carrie for her grasp of what the guitar can say within a song, and for almost singlehandedly restoring the legacy of the late, great Ricky Wilson of the B52s. Almost two years after the breakup of Brownstein’s signature band, Sleater-Kinney, I still miss their combination of raw power, depth of purpose, human compassion, and sheer rock and roll fun. Sleater-Kinney also saved my love life, but that’s the subject for another post.

Carrie hasn’t been resting on her laurels. ThunderAnt, her new duo with SNL’s Fred Armisen, has released what is, scientifically speaking, the perfect pop song (clip below). Slate featured her test-drive of the Rock Band video game. She coaches and promotes a rock camp for girls. Best of all, her Monitor Mix column for NPR’s website has, in just over half a year, become one of my favorite sources of music writing; her written work is passionate, personal, and refreshingly free of hipster posturing. In recent posts, Carrie delivers a great road trip playlist (Wipers, Go Betweens, Music Go Music, Richard and Linda Thompson, Cal Tjader), captures the gift of the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg (“his songs have an adult acuity sung in an adolescent idiom”), admits her weakness for reality television (“I suppose that I’d rather get that artifice-parading-as-truth from The Bachelor instead of my government”), and explains why she enjoys, but can’t bring herself to love Vampire Weekend (“if you take preppy yacht rock too far, you end up back at Jimmy Buffett”).

The posts in Monitor Mix are thoughtful and reflective, even when Carrie is giving simple shout-outs to recent favorites, such as Bon Iver and Blitzen Trapper. One great recent piece uses the strange worlds of underground Christian/ alt-rock pioneer Larry Norman and Colorado hardcore obscurities Bum Kon to segue into the fertile subject of bands that fall under the radar screen. And instead of just sneering at the reviewer recently caught rating a Black Crowes album he’d never heard, Brownstein uses it as a springboard for some hilarious fictional music reviews. Here’s Brownstein on the Shins’ nonexistent opus Honey Poke Shimmy Lantern: “James Mercer and crew can do no wrong. They’ve added the Decemberists, the Thermals, and Spoon to their lineup. Recorded inside a deer carcass, the sounds on Honey Poke are haunting and cervid. These songs will change your life back to the way it was before The Shins changed it the first time.”

ThunderAnt, “Perfect Song”

After the click-through: Carrie on Saddam Hussein and Liz Phair.

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The Best of Marcel Marceau

Quick Shots

Waits3 As if you needed more evidence that Tom Waits has big ears, excellent interview (“True Confessions,” actually) with He Who Fears Giant Squid at the Anti-label blog. Excerpts:

Q: What’s the most curious record in your collection?
A: In the seventies a record company in LA issued a record called “The best of Marcel Marceau.” It had forty minutes of silence followed by applause and it sold really well. I like to put it on for company. It really bothers me, though, when people talk through it.

Q: Most interesting recording you own?
A: It’s a mysteriously beautiful recording from, I am told, Robbie Robertson’s label. It’s of crickets. That’s right, crickets, the first time I heard it… I swore I was listening to the Vienna Boys Choir, or the Mormon Tabernacle choir. It has a four-part harmony it is a swaying choral panorama. Then a voice comes in on the tape and says, “What you are listening to is the sound of crickets. The only thing that has been manipulated is that they slowed down the tape.” No effects have been added of any kind except that they changed the speed of the tape. The sound is so haunting. I played it for Charlie Musselwhite and he looked at me as if I pulled a Leprechaun out of my pocket.

Q: What’s wrong with the world?
A: We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. Leona Helmsley’s dog made 12 million last year… and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio made $30,000. It’s just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains. We are monkeys with money and guns.

Can Obama Overcome his Big Pink Problem?

Diatribes

Barack Obama can’t even do an interview anymore without having to address one of his least-favorite subjects: the suspicion that beneath his calm demeanor and business-suited exterior, he is a fanatical Pink Floyd fan. The long-simmering suspicions boiled over last week at California’s Coachella Music Festival. Former Floyd leader Roger Waters arranged an unauthorized airdrop of Obama leaflets that missed its target, creating an unwelcome source of precipitation for golfing retirees. Then, during a performance of “Sheep,” from Pink Floyd’s Orwellian-themed Animals, Waters’ inflatable pig prop flew away, festooned with left-wing slogans (“Don’t be led to the slaughter”; “Impeach Bush”) and OBAMA written on the underside. The rabble-rousing Obama pig sailed over the Coachella Valley and crashed, winding up in a condition that its finder described as resembling “pulled pork.”

Hillary Clinton noted that “there is no clear evidence that Barack Obama is an America-hating Pink Floyd fanatic. As far as I know.” “But let me tell you,” she continued, “during my administration, we’ll have no time for laser light shows, ponderous guitar solos, vague anti-capitalist lyrics, and 23-minute songs about albatrosses. From day one, we’ll be rolling up our sleeves for the working people of America, pausing only for some Carly Simon, James Taylor and maybe a few aromatherapy candles.” Blushing as she adjusted her gun holster, she quickly added, “excuse me, I meant Toby Keith, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and a few rounds of target practice.”

While Obama’s suspected Pink Floyd past has dogged him for months, many supporters hoped he had put the subject to rest two months ago with a rousing speech in Philadelphia that some historians hailed as one of the most important speeches ever on the role of psychedelic rock in Anglo-American life. Obama’s speech criticized Waters’ occasional “Us and Them” mentality, as well as his apparent belief that “we don’t need no education” because it might lead to some sort of “thought control.” Yet Obama refused to entirely disavow Waters, saying nothing to quell the rumors that Pink Floyd songs were played at Obama’s wedding, or that at least one of his children was conceived while “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” played on his stereo. “I could no more ‘disown’ Roger Waters,” he said in Philadelphia, “than I could disown my stoner aunt in Hawaii who liked to have a little herb with her Bob Marley albums.”

Roger Waters’ “Obama pig” takes flight

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The Thao of Now

Heavy Rotation

Because spring is all about dancing through contradictory strains of melancholy and joy, it’s a perfect time to listen to the tangled, effervescent music of Virginia native Thao Nguyen, showcased on the almost surreally catchy “Bag of Hammers” and most of her soulful sophomore album, We Brave Bee Stings and All. Thao draws plenty of comparisons to Cat Power’s Chan Marshall, and while I can see the similarity when she covers Smokey Robinson and Aretha Franklin, I suspect that this is simply shorthand for describing a strong-willed female singer who is hard to figure out. I hear flashes of a few other singers; at times, she resembles a more forthright Jolie Holland, a less deadpan version of her former tour partner Laura Veirs, or even a young Rickie Lee Jones channeling the whimsical, world-wise mood of the Velvets’ Mo Tucker (I’d love to hear Thao try “Afterhours” or “Woody and Dutch on the Slow Train to Peking”).

But most of the time, she really just sounds like the Thao of now, pouring water and gasoline on my ever-changing moods of 2008. Musically, “Bag of Hammers” is like getting an extra couple of months of summer vacation, with transportation courtesy of the supple rhythm section in Thao’s brilliantly named backing band, the Get Down Stay Down. Pay only casual attention to the classic pop hook and the kid-friendly claymation video, and faster than you can say “Leslie Feist,” you might swear you are listening to the new Apple theme song.

But if you think Thao can be written off as this year’s poster girl for quirky charm, listen carefully and you’re going to get dunked in the swimming pool. She’s a real writer (and former critic for No Depression) who has a knack for distilling her song’s essence in a pithy phrase (“as sharp as I sting, as sharp as I sing, it still soothes you, doesn’t it, like a lick of ice cream?”; “geography’s gonna make a mess of me”; “we splash our eyes full of chemicals/ just so there’s none left for little girls”). She’s a real musician who can play killer guitar riffs with a toothbrush. She’s capable of rocking out, as she did live in a great recent set opening for Xiu-Xiu, and does in spades on the new wavy “Beat.” She can be moving, hilarious, or both at the same time. She has the good taste to list the Funk Brothers and Orchestra Baobab among her favorite bands. And let’s face it, do you know any other alums from the William and Mary women’s studies department who are able—or willing—to simultaneously beatbox and hum Gary Glitter’s sports arena anthem, “Rock and Roll, Part Two”? (See the clip of “Geography” below.)

Thao, “Bag of Hammers”

Thao, “Geography”

Thao, “Beat”

Jon Langford: South By East By Midwest

Diatribes, Slow Jams

A short trip to Austin earlier this month felt like a homecoming, even though I’ve never been there before. I’ve rarely been bombarded with so much music, with so little planning or effort, for so long into the night, since I left Chicago for California more than two decades ago. Austin is the sort of place where you venture out for coffee after your night of music and find out that the coffeehouse (in this case, Jo’s Hot Coffee on South Congress) has its own house band playing a bang-up set of western swing. A record store mural across the street from the UT/ Austin campus registers the city’s sense of music history: among others, Buddy Holly, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash share wall space with Dylan, Iggy, and the Clash.

If one figure spans all those influences, it is the provocateur, painter, raconteur and raver Jon Langford. The Welsh-born Leeds-to-Chicago transplant and Bloodshot Records mainstay has—in the 23-year stretch dating from the Mekons’ often-mentioned, seldom heard Fear and Whiskey—done more than just about anyone else to resuscitate the withered heart of post-punk and reclaim the tarnished soul of American country. In Austin, I was thrilled to discover that the Yard Dog Gallery has a fantastic collection of Langford’s visual art, mostly densely layered, distressed images of iconic American roots musicians in graveyard settings. Blindfolded, sullied and marked for extinction, the characters remind me of Chicago artist Ivan Albright’s studies of decay and corruption; constantly “dancing with death,” they are unsettlingly alive and a reminder of the slow death that comes out of greed, fear and homogenization.

As a curmudgeonly first-generation art school punk who writes lines like “John Glenn drinks cocktails with God at a café in downtown Saigon,” Langford is smart enough to realize he doesn’t play or paint “authentic” honky tonk any more than Vampire Weekend is a gang of African tribesmen. And unlike some of his retro-worshipping peers, he acknowledges that the “golden age” of county music had its own problems with pills and pretenders and poor directions. Yet he uses his outsider’s distance as an advantage. While bemoaning the death of country music at the hands of what he calls “suburban rock music with a cowboy hat on,” Langford’s work cuts deeper than that, excavating the signs of life in a cultural landscape pockmarked with interchangeable strip malls and Kenny Chesney records. There’s also a redemptive element in the search; like his protagonist in his Waco Brothers anthem “Hell’s Roof,” he’s reclaiming a lost history, “walking on hell’s roof, looking at the flowers” (and not “walking in a clown suit, looking at the flowers,” as I misheard Langford’s impassioned growl for more than a year).

Jon Langford, “Hell’s Roof”

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Cachao’s Legacy: Two Nations Under a Groove

Rants and Raves, Slow Jams

cachaobass.jpeg

Although Cuban bass virtuoso Israel “Cachao” Lopez took his final breaths this week, it’s hard to imagine this humble giant, who played in more than 250 groups from the 1920s on, as not having a pulse. Cachao would have been legendary even if he had retired around 1940. As a member of Arcaño y Sus Maravillas in the late 1930s, Cachao and his multi-instrumentalist brother Orestes “Macho” Lopez reworked the rarefied French-influenced parlor music of the danzón into the mambo. But by the 1950s, when Perez Prado and many others (from Rosemary Clooney to Bill Haley) rode the mambo to international fame, Cachao had moved on to perfect the descarga, the “jam session” format that provided breathing room for serious instrumental improvisation. More than a rhythm master, Cachao united melody and harmony into an irresistible connecting thread—what George Clinton would later call a “groove.”

Because Cachao was a Cuban expatriate who spent his postwar years in places ranging from Madrid to Miami, it would be easy to give his career the Buena Vista Social Club treatment, viewing him as a nostalgic relic of Cuba’s romantic past. But that would understate his legacy. One of Cachao’s few peers, pianist Bebo Valdes, has noted that before Cachao, Cuban music had counter-tempo, but still lacked real syncopation. Cachao, who spent decades in the Havana Symphony performing with conductors ranging from Ernesto Lecuona to Igor Stravinsky, elevated the seriousness of the bass even as he made it dance, swing and shimmer.

Some of Cachao’s obituaries quote from a hero of mine—musicologist and “cowboy rumba” innovator Ned Sublette–whose astonishingly good book Cuba and its Music describes Cachao as “arguably the most important bassist in twentieth century popular music.” While this may beg the question of whether Charles Mingus was “popular,” Sublette has a point. As he notes, “with Cachao, the modern bass feel of Cuban music begins. And with that begins the bass feel of the second half of the twentieth century in U.S. music as well—those funky ostinatos that we know from later decades of R&B, which have become such a part of the environment that we don’t even think about where they came from.”

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Monk's Dream

Cut-Out Bin

Sun RA One of our oldest and dearest friends, who goes by the name Rinchen, is a devout Buddhist currently two thirds of the way through a three-year hitch in a monastery in the Santa Cruz mountains, where he is studying with the teacher he’s chosen for life, and practicing almost total silence. Rinchen has no access to the outside world — no phone calls, no newspapers, no internet, no television… and no music. The latter fact is particularly striking, as Rinchen is one of the deepest listeners we know – a man who could spend an entire day tapped into an 8-disc Cecil Taylor free improv set, then put on some Parliament or Missy Elliott and jam the night away. Rinchen’s music collection was breathtaking — before he sold it all to finance his silent expedition.

A few times a year, Rinchen is granted a day or two to visit with family and to write letters to friends. We wrote him a few months ago asking what music runs through a monk’s mind in between the long periods of silence. Today we received the following poem/riff on Cage, Monk, Miles, The Meters and more (with bundled playlist).
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The LP, Unspun

Cut-Out Bin

Groove200 Is a record not spun a record not played? Dragging a needle across old, brittle vinyl records or wax cylinders can damage them — not something you want to do with rare historical recordings. At the Library of Congress, researchers have developed a scanner that can extract audio from records by scanning them digitally – no spinning required. Images are analyzed and transformed back into audible sound. “Stuck” records magically become unstuck, while physically broken records can be pieced back together with great results.

How does it sound? “The machine is not adding its own color. It's not adding anything of its own nature,” says the device's developer. The samples on the NPR site are low-res internet audio, but the comparisons to the original are impressive, despite a persistent viagrapill.com background hiss.

The technology could eventually become available to general consumers, meaning that the daunting task of MP3-encoding piles of vinyl would become way less daunting. It's a strange and beautiful world.

Thanks Jeb

Practice in Front of a Bush

Cut-Out Bin

Rsbeef Budding guitarists (hell, all guitarists), take note: Guitar music is church, and there are ten commandments you gotta internalize if you want that axe to say something that will raise souls to the ether. Prophet / spiritual leader / ghost dancer Captain Beefheart, whose voice allegedly once destroyed a $1200 Telefunken microphone, saw (sawed?) through the blues, took them to metaphysical planes, twisted them up in old socks and dish rags, made your spine vibrate with surrealistic pleasure.

More on the Good Cap'n another day, but for now: Beefheart's 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing:

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