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.
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.â€
With Winehouse tossing f-bombs like a drunken sailor and name-dropping Slick Rick and Nas (aka “Mr. Jonesâ€) 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.
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.
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.
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.
[audio:http://stuckbetweenstations.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/01-bamboo-banga-1.mp3]“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.
A Tribute to Devendra Banhart
And hey there mister happy squid, you move so psychedelically
You hypnotize with your magic dance all the animals in the sea
For Sure
[audio:http://stuckbetweenstations.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/littleyellowspider.mp3]
Devendra Banhart – Little Yellow Spider
At first spin of Devendra Banhart’s Little Yellow Spider, one might think it a children’s song. That is what came to mind when I first heard it on a mixed CD a friend sent as a New Year’s gift. Then I reached the line about the pig mating with a man. The appeal only grew.
Who was this poetic troubadour artfully warbling lyrics that were both playful and taboo, naturalistic and psychedelic, odd and profane? Suddenly a drawer had been opened and in it, amongst the lacy vintage shirts and bright paisley dresses, lay the sparkling spangles and baubles of wonder, magic and healing. Every time Little Yellow Spider came on my daughter would yipe, “I love this song,” and I would cough loudly over the pig verse.
I was driven to learn more about this man who could equally endear my child and myself, yet had a secret darkness, a seedy underbelly, a heart that had been broken by human folly.
And hey there Mrs. Lovely Moon, you’re lonely and you’re blue
It’s kind of strange the way you change
But then again we all do, too.
Over the course of a few months I purchased all of Devendra Banhart’s CD’s and found myself enraptured by song in a way I hadn’t been since my birth in the Summer of Love. Wordsmith of alchemical poetry, knitter of connections between microcosm and macrocosm, Banhart was projecting a wolf cry for our generation. In one album I could find pagan spell work, poignant love ballad and subversive declarations of liberation. Banhart was showman with a bowler hat and cane, skinny 60’s love child smoking peace pipe amongst oat straw and star thistle, edgy outrageous queen performing acts of desire behind closed doors, mother, yogi, long haired child. All this, and multilingual vocalist extraordinaire, who can, as my husband likes to say, “play his axe.”
Canadian reggae and soul, eh? If you expect that combination to go down as easily as curried goat with a side of Canadian bacon, you may be surprised. By the late sixties, economic strains, liberalized Canadian immigration laws, and fear among draft-age men that a United States passport would lead straight to Vietnam led a growing number of Jamaican expatriates to relocate in Toronto. Just 236 miles from Motown, visionary keyboardist/ arranger Jackie Mittoo, who had already cofounded the Skatalites and served as music director at Jamaica’s Studio One, helped guide a gang of upstarts eager to mix their Island recipes with generous helpings of sweet soul and heavy funk. The Jamaicans in Toronto included rhythm king Wayne McGhie, gritty vocalists Johnny Osbourne and the Mighty Pope, dub-savvy crooner Noel Ellis (son of rocksteady legend Alton Ellis), and roots rocker Willi Williams, whose “Armagideon Time” (“versioned” from a Mittoo riff and showcased below) later became the Clash‘s most moving reggae cover. The Toronto scene produced music of surprising range and vision for almost two decades, and then seemingly disappeared.
Thanks to Vancouver-based music historian Sipreano (AKA Kevin Howes) this vibrant body of work has been brought back from cultural extinction. The innovative small label Light in the Atttic—whose catalog includes everything from Brazilian iconoclasts Os Mutantes to the Velvets-meets-Roky apocalyptic sound of Austin’s Black Angels—has released two fascinating anthologies and reissued several crucial solo albums (by Mittoo, McGhie and Noel Ellis) chronicling the best of the Toronto scene. Last year’s mostly soul and funk-centered Jamaica to Toronto anthology, discussed more below, already ranks as one of my favorite music collections released in the Zeroes. Worth the price all by themselves are the tracks by Jo-Jo and the Fugitives—the righteous wanderers’ anthem “Fugitive Song,†and the delicious, McGhie-penned “Chips/ Chicken/ Banana Split,†whose huge break-beat deserves a place on your ultimate chicken dance playlist alongside the Meters’ “Chicken Strut” and Cibo Matto’s “Know Your Chicken.â€
[audio:http://stuckbetweenstations.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/01-fugitive-song-1.mp3]
Jo-Jo and the Fugitives, Fugitive Song
[audio:http://stuckbetweenstations.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/03-chips-chicken-banana-split.mp3]
Jo-Jo and the Fugitives, Chips/Chicken/Banana Split
The new Summer Records Anthology, 1974-1988, captures Toronto’s homegrown reggae as it traversed the path that Sipreano describes as “dub to digital,†although only Unique Madoo’s spirited dancehall workout “Call Me Nobody Else†really represents the latter. After a few tracks of Johnny Osbourne’s soulful crooning and house band Earth Roots and Water’s supple rhythms, it becomes easy to forget that Lee Perry’s Black Ark Studio, which operated around the same years, was thousands of miles away. An interesting short film (excerpts below) accompanies the anthology. In it, Summer Records vocalist/ impresario Jerry Brown, Willi Williams, and Jackie Mittoo weave a cosmic, rhythmic and economic thread that connects dub reggae, bicycling and auto body repair. Did you really think those rat-a-tats were just random noises?