David Bowie :: Some Are: Will we ever get aBerlin TrilogyBowie boxed set stuffed with outtakes and alternates? Let us pray. Until then, this one showed up as a bonus track on Rykodisc’s out-of-print 1991 reissue ofLow, giving us some tantalizing hints of what may be lurking in the vaults. Whatever — “Some Are” is a treasure all on its own, a delicate dirge with a bewitching melody and typically enigmatic lyrics. Bowie claimed the song was about “the failed Napoleonic force stumbling back through Smolensk. Finding the unburied corpses of their comrades left from their original advance on Moscow.” If you say so, David!
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A master Boogie pianist and songwriter recorded influential singles like "Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu" and "Don’t You Just Know It," penned the Freddie Ford hit "Sea Cruise” I first came across him aged about 14 through a Georgie Fame single Hi Heel Sneakers who’s B-side was Rockin’ Pneumonia and The Boogie Woogie Flu that I adored and had me in hysterics as well as dancing in my sock feet! Then again on the medley on Dr John’s ‘Gumbo' album and had to check out more on Ace and all the Nawleans compilations!
Huey “Piano” Smith, a New Orleans R&B legend and an early pioneer of rock n’ roll, has died at the age of 89.
This from Rolling Stone:
Smith’s daughter, Acquelyn Donsereaux, (now THAT’s a beauty of a Nawleans name right there!) confirmed her father’s death to the New Orleans Times-Picayune/Advocate, adding Smith died in his sleep Tuesday 14th February (St Valentine’s day) at his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
A renowned boogie pianist who recorded alongside the likes of Little Richard, Lloyd Price, Earl King, and countless Big Easy musicians, Smith was best known for his Fifties recording “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu.”
While the single was only a minor hit in 1957, its influence continued to be felt in the decades that followed as Johnny Rivers (who turned the track into a hit single in 1972), the Grateful Dead, Aerosmith, the Flamin’ Groovies, and more all covered the track.
While at Ace Records, Smith also wrote and recorded the single “Sea Cruise” in 1958; Smith’s vocals — but not his boogie piano — were ultimately stripped from the track and replaced by Frankie Ford, who had a platinum-selling hit with the single in 1959. “Sea Cruise” would later be covered by dozens of artists, including Bruce Springsteen, John Fogerty, the Beach Boys, the Eagles, Jimmy Buffett, and more.
“Don’t You Just Know It,” the most successful single for Smith and his band the Clowns, was inspired by a catchphrase often said by their then-driver Rudy Ray Moore, the singer/comedian who would later create the character of Dolomite and have his own lasting impact on hip-hop. “Don’t You Just Know It” reemerged at the turn of the millennium when it featured prominently in the 2000 film Snatch.
Smith largely left music behind in the early Eighties, when he moved from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, but would sporadically perform at concerts and events that honored his legacy on R&B and rock, including the Pioneer Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation.
The late Dr. John, a protege of Smith’s, said the pianist (via nola.com) opened “the door to funk, basically as we know it, in some ridiculously hip way, and putting it in the mainstream of the world’s music.”
I would be remiss if I didn’t post any music for Mardi Gras.
I accidentally posted my Fat Tuesday song on Sunday (stupid queue), so here’s some funky New Orleans brass band music.
I was going to post some Fess for Fat Tuesday but completely forgot . . . . . (too busy tossing my pancakes and burned my hand!🥞
Legend has it that Nawleans releases the 'Fess classic Mardi Gras in New Orleans every year but you pays your money and takes your choice I guess, Apocryphal it may be . . . . . just dance around the room in your pants anyhoo!
Thanks as ever to the excellent Guess I’m Dumb!
"Mardi Gras In New Orleans" by Professor Longhair.
The song was originally written by Henry Roland "Roy" Byrd (aka Professor Longhair).
Byrd recorded the earliest version on November 3, 1949 for the Talent label.
Recorded December 1949, New Orleans
Released on Atlantic 897 (A-336) b/w "She Walks Right In".
Henry Roeland ‘Roy' Byrd(vocal,piano, whistling), Robert Parker(alto saxophone), Charles Burbank(tenor saxophone), John Boudreaux(drums).
This was the first version (and Fess album) I bought and I first thought was the 1949 recording although there is an earlier sounding version on YouTube that makes that claim
This week on Transmissions, we’re settling in for a tremendous conversation with Jason Stern and Don Fleming of the Lou Reed Archive . A decade on from his passing in 2013, Lou Reed’s work […]
Blimey, The Velvets are never far from Aquarium’s Drunkard’s thinking huh? Yesterday John Cale and today I spotted this . . . . . . on Uncle Lou!
You’re A Ghost :: John Cale’s Paris 1919, Re-Imagined
“Paris 1919 is John Cale’s furthest excursion into musical imagination, illuminating horizons heretofore unsighted,” went the PR copy for John Cale’s third solo effort, which was released 50 years ago this month. And though he’s certainly illuminated countless more horizons in the past half-century (have you checked out his 2023 opus Mercy, yet?), Paris 1919still stands as one of his undisputed masterpieces — an album as lovely as it is disquieting, as beautifully rendered as it is cloaked in dark shadows. With the help of members of Little Feat and the Jazz Crusaders (not to mention the UCLA Symphony Orchestra) Cale crafted a total classic, featuring some of his finest songs, most astonishing arrangements and best singing.
“These songs are populated by field marshals and tired soldiers, fallen nations and ruined beauties,” writes Matthew Specktor in the excellent essay included with the album’s 2006 reissue. “What seems clear with time is that this murderous record is about ambition of every stripe: personal, historical, political, its costs and qualities, and about dislocation. The record’s fractured geography takes in not just Paris but the Transvaal, Barbary, Andalucia, Dunkirk (all places that have suffered incursion, and spilled blood) to arrive at what one assumes, or assumed, was the 20th century’s great gift to us: numbness.”
Antarctica starts here, in other words. To celebrate Paris 1919‘s 50th anniversary, here’s a re-imagined version of the LP, featuring some choice covers, oddities and even a few appearances from Cale himself. Take down the flags of ownership and listen in. |t wilcox
“Child’s Christmas In Wales” – Superchunk ++ “Hanky Panky Nohow” – Yo La Tengo ++ “The Endless Plain Of Fortune” – Pontiak ++ “Andalucia” – Mary Lou Lord ++ “Macbeth (Instrumental)” – John Cale ++ “Paris 1919″ – Final Fantasy” ++ Graham Greene (Live 2010)” – John Cale ++ “Half Past France” – Sally Timms ++ “Antarctica Starts Here” – David J ++ “Child’s Christmas In Wales (Live 1979)” – Nico w/ John Cale
Voodoo Chile. If there is a case for reviewers’ claims that Electric Ladyland was a collection of “studio jams”, this 15-minute epic would be the main culprit. In Rolling Stone, Tony Glover dismissed it as “the sort of jam you’d hear in any club”—I’d like to join one of those clubs—yet “Voodoo Chile” has become one of Jimi’s best-loved tracks. The guests on this track are (from Traffic) Stevie Winwood on Hammond organ and (from the Airplane) Jack Cassady on bass. These were the final days of the era when musicians under contract to one label were not supposed to record with artists signed to another, hence Jimi’s guardedly coy statement:
I start with a few notes scribbled down on some paper and then we get to the studio and a melody is worked out and lots of guys all kick in little sounds of their own. Maybe if you listen real close you’ll recognise some of the guys working behind; if you do you’d better keep quiet about it ‘cos they’re contracted to other companies.
Steve Paul’s Scene Club, just around the block from the Record Plant, was Jimi’s favourite jamming joint. He would warm up at the Scene then, once he’d found a groove, carry the energy round to the studio; there seems to have been no shortage of volunteers to help him with the carrying. Even by Jimi’s standards, the studio seems to have been exceptionally full on this night, crammed with both musicians and hangers on. Winwood says there were so many musicians that they were lined up outside the studio, waiting their turn. Noel Redding says he had difficulty finding a place to sit. When he suggested to Jimi that it might be easier to work with a few less bodies around, Jimi just told him to cool it. Eventually Noel gave up and left the studio. Casady, who had his trademark semi-acoustic Guild bass with him, slipped into the vacant spot—though as far as he knew, he was joining a blues jam, not making a record. Winwood slid behind the Hammond organ and Hendrix led off on a long, medium slow blues in E. It must have become evident that this was more than just a jam when Hendrix led into a second, then a third take of the song: jams typically leap from one number to another with repeats being rare. At least six takes of “Voodoo Chile” were recorded, though several of these were breakdowns (i.e. halted in mid-song) and it’s the final take, plus overdubbed crowd sounds, that appears on the album.
The song doesn't need a great deal of musical analysis. Conceptually, it blends two of Jimi's great loves, Chicago blues and Science Fiction—interstellar hootchie-kootchie. Jimi had been playing the main figure from "Voodoo Chile" for years, in straight Muddy Waters style, as "Catfish Blues" or "Two Trains Running". Like them, the verse stays on a pedal-E (no chord changes) although in early demo form Jimi was playing "Voodoo Chile Blues" as a conventional 12 bar blues.
John Perry. Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland
"I still recall hearing ‘Voodoo Chile’ jam (so called) for the first time when we had first rushed out to buy the album and it was first played to me on a friend’s dad’s state of the art Hi-fi system and it blew us totally away! I had never heard anything like it then (or since) I knew then Jimi came from another planet!!
As Perry notes I’d like to go to THAT club but we all know and knew then it did not exist. Glover projects his own shortcomings perhaps that made him a something of a hack critical writing it wasn’t His harp playing and lack of fame might allow for sour grapes as he admits he was determined to dislike the new Jimi album (why is that? very revealing but sadly Glover is no longer with us so we can’t ask him!“)
* actually interestingly its not a quote from Glover’s orginal article that whilst somewhat jaded is overall uniformly favourable and what he actually says is:
"then a live cut, which sounds as though it was recorded late at night in a small club" . . . . clearly it isn’t live but overdubbed and their three takes were arranged and remixed in the studio but he doesn’t say ’the sort of jam you’d hear in any club’ at all! It was Jimi meaning it to sound like a jam session in a club hence the 'audience' after the fun he had playing with Winwood and Casady!
Monday, February 20, 2023
THE BEATLES PLAY OXFORD
[for my dear friend and ex-colleague Phil M]
The Carfax Rooms the only appearance by the Beatles in Oxford City 1963 - I would have been ten years old . . . . . . others not even that!?! 😂
Carfax Rooms Oxford above the old HSBC bank
The Beatles in the Carfax Rooms with local dignitaries and specially invited guests
This was The Beatles’ only live appearance anywhere in the county of Oxfordshire. It was arranged by John Smith, a London-based promoter.
Also on the bill were The Madisons. Tickets cost six shillings in advance.
While in Oxford The Beatles met Jeffrey Archer, who was then a student at Brasenose College, but later became a novelist, Conservative Party politician, and disgraced peer.
The group accepted Archer’s invitation to Brasenose’s senior common room, although they didn’t perform at the college. They did, however, agree to take part at a charity concert to be held on 12 June 1963 in Liverpool, in aid of the NSPCC.
At the interval I went to the toilet, and there beside me was Ringo Starr. He asked if I knew this Jeffrey Archer bloke. I said everyone in Oxford was trying to work out who he was. Ringo said: ‘He strikes me as a nice enough fella, but he’s the kind of bloke who would bottle your piss and sell it.’
Tom Waits: Grammys are kind of like the Food and Drug Administration. People like to be USDA-approved, with the little sticker on it and everything. It's safer. It's kind of people formulating their tastes for what they like. They like the company of others. But it's a good thing.
You know, we just buy music now. We don't make it any more. And that goes for just about everything. I think it's so important that people develop and subscribe to and have confidence in their own ability to make music, however rough it is. The rougher the better for me.
What have I been listening to? I've got all of those Lomax reissues, 'Southern Journeys', all that Library of Congress stuff that was recently released on CD, the Georgia Sea Island Singers and prison songs and field hollars and a lot of Leadbelly. I was born the day after Leadbelly died. I'd like to think we passed in the hall. When I hear his voice, I feel I know him. Maybe I was a rock on a road he walked on or a dish in his cupboard, because when I heard him first I recognized him.
You see, I'm like everybody else in music. I don't have a formal background. I learned from listening to records, from talking to people, from hanging around record stores and hanging around musicians and saying, "Hey, how did you do that? Do that again. Let me see how you did that." And then I kind of incorporated it into what I was doing.
Everybody's still really involved in the folk process of listening to each other. Even if you really try to do exactly what you think someone else did the night before, you can't, unless you're some kind of impersonator or impressionist. When you hear breakthroughs in music, it was their attempt to replicate something incorrectly, and that's what puts a hole in the door and lets the light in. You know, Chuck Berry was trying to play guitar the way Johnnie Johnson, his piano player, played keyboards, with the same kind of stride feeling. When I was a kid picking up a needle and trying to learn how someone did something over and over again ... it's kind of how it gets passed along, and I'm proud to be part of that whole tradition.
Blues Revue magazine No. 59 (USA). July/August, 2000 by Bret Kofford.
THIS . . . . . . . . . . . Joy Division Derby 1980
40th Anniversary remix remaster Joy Division ‘SHADOW PLAY’ introduced by the legendary Tony Wilson [R.I.P.] - of the Hacienda Manchester UK, here on ITV Granada Television
Built at the turn of the century as a Baptist Sunday School, the building was converted to a theatre and opened as the Derby Playhouse Theatre on 1st October 1952 with J.B. Priestley’s “When We Are Married”. Films were screened (on Sunday’s?) by the Derby Film Society.
In March 1956 the building was gutted in a serious fire, but was quickly rebuilt within the existing walls and reopened with very plain 1950’s decor in the auditorium, and at the same time it took over the pub next door which became the Playhouse bar and box office.
With lots of acclaimed plays and actors throughout the 1970’s the reputation of the theatre grew and when funding became available from the newly formed arts council bodies, a new theatre was planned in the city centre. The old Playhouse closed on 31st May 1975 with a triumphant production of “Tommy”, and was quickly forgotten and boarded up.
A few years later it reopened as the Ajanta Cinema to serve the local Asian population playing Bollywood films. It also had a brief period operating as a cinema club screening uncensored adult films in 1977 until May 1978.
It was also in this period it became a venue for punk and new wave bands to perform at, many legendary names played here and the venue suffered riotous gigs where seats were ripped out and thrown on stage. Bands in this period included Joy Division, Psychedelic Furs, Throbbing Gristle, The Photos and UK Subs.
By 1983 the very rundown building was once again boarded up and stood alone as the surrounding blocks of terraced houses had been demolished. A few years later it was demolished to allow the car park at the rear to be extended.
Derby Playhouse circa 1950
The Ajanta demolished in 83 to enlarge the car park
The six original Tighten Up albums are now available as a two-disc, 52-track package. Credited with really selling the English public on reggae, the series featured now-classic work by the Maytals, Delroy Wilson,the Upsetters, Bob Marley & the Wailers, Slim Smith, the Uniques, and the Pioneers. The British skinheads were particularly impressed, especially by such stomping anthems as Clancy Eccles' "Fattie, Fattie" and the Upsetters' "Return of Django." And for those favoring a slower pace, this mix of 1968-1974 sides includes plenty of smoky relaxants by the likes of Judy Mowatt, Johnny Clarke, and Nicky Thomas, among many others.
Long out of print the original six albums are here compiled into a two disc set
