Tuwa's Shanty and The Roots Canal

The Roots Canal: Honeydripper (the movie)

2008-01-01T21:00:00.000-05:00

I just thought I'd bring this blog back to life momentarily by suggesting that everyone go out and see John Sayles' new movie, Honeydripper, about the evolution of blues into R&B and rock'n'roll -- not just because it's a fantastic movie but because it's a historic one for anyone who cares about the forgotten roots of American popular music. I saw it this afternoon in New York, where it's currently in limited distribution (along with Los Angeles), but it's due for a rolling national release in January and February. (Tuwa, it's opening at the Hippodrome in Gainesville on February 22nd.) Here's the trailer:

The film is set in rural Alabama in 1950, right in the middle of that incredibly fertile period when jazzmen, bluesmen and other musical pioneers created an exciting new kind of music that went on to sweep the world. Danny Glover gives the performance of his career as a fading bluesman who now runs a juke joint and is watching his music get passed by, as young people flock to the newfangled juke box in the joint next door. To make a long story short, he saves his bar by hiring a young guitarist played by 22-year-old Gary Clark Jr., who knocks everyone's socks off by playing -- what else? -- Good Rockin' Tonight.

Keb Mo plays a mysterious street musician whose character has a surprise twist at the end. Charles Dutton, Stacy Keach, Mary Steenburgen and a bunch of other actors I wasn't familiar with were uniformly outstanding. Ruth Brown was supposed to play an aging blues singer, but when she became too ill to perform she suggested her friend Mable John (a former Raelette!) to cover her role. (Brown actually died on the last day of filming.) The musicians were great, of course; in fact, they played a few gigs last year as the Honeydripper All-Star Band. (The soundtrack will be released February 5th on Rhino Records.) There's also an important part played by the coolest handmade guitar you've ever seen; if you're interested in that sort of thing, here's an interview with the guy who made it.

Now I suppose I shouldn't quibble, but I don't fully agree with Sayles' interpretation of music history. R&B and rock'n'roll didn't grow out of rural blues, but from the jazzy urban jump blues that became popular in the 1940s as jazz musicians started playing in small combos like Louis Jordan's Tympany Five. In this otherwise terrific interview with Sayles, the writer quotes him as saying:

“There was no single moment when R&B, blues, gospel, jazz, and country all came together to create this thing called rock ‘n roll, but a big change came with the advent of the electric guitar."

Actually, the dominant instrument in early R&B and rock'n'roll was the saxophone, particularly the honking-and-screaming style pioneered by Illinois Jacquet in the early '40s. You put that together with the boogie-woogie piano that became popular in the late '30s; the Texas-style blues guitar of people like T-Bone Walker and Goree Carter (and later Chuck Berry); and some great blues shouters like Big Joe Turner and you had rhythm and blues. All it needed was for Wynonie Harris to add a gospel-inspired back beat to Roy Brown's Good Rockin' Tonight in 1947 to ignite the rock'n'roll revolution. That really was the "single moment" when it all came together.

This isn't my theory; it's all laid out in Morgan Wright's Hoy Hoy website which first turned me on to this music and inspired my earlier post on Good Rockin' Tonight. Just for new readers, I've made those songs available again. Listen to Roy Brown's remake (which he called Rockin' at Midnight) and then Elvis's version, and you'll understand why some people think Elvis was nothing but a second-rate Roy Brown impersonator!

Okay, I can't quit without posting a couple of songs for y'all. Gary Clark Jr.'s performance in Honeydripper reminded me a lot of Goree Carter. If you ever wonder where Chuck Berry got his guitar style, listen to this 1949 performance and wonder no more:
Goree Carter and His Hepcats -- Rock Awhile

Here's one more. John Sayles is credited with co-writing three of the songs in the movie. (Does this guy ever run out of talent?) One was called China Doll, after a character in the movie. Another was one of the movie's big gospel numbers. The third played over the closing credits and seems to express Sayles' musical philosophy: The Music Keeps Rolling On. It's performed by Barrence Whitfield, who I'd never heard of before but here's an apropos song of his since I saw Honeydripper on New Year's Day:
Mercy Brothers -- The New Year Blues

Here's something else that's pretty interesting. The filmmakers created a station on Pandora called Honeydripper Radio of music inspired by the movie.

And if you want to know more about the movie's title, check out my earlier post on the original Honeydripper, Joe Liggins. I've made those songs available again, too.

Finally, here are some youtubes of Mable John and Gary Clark Jr. performing with the Honeydripper All-Star Band in New York last summer:

2007-08-25T23:37:00.001-04:00

on hiatus indefinitely.

the hands of a government man

2007-07-22T11:29:00.000-04:00

Talking Heads -- Born Under Punches (live in Rome, 1980)
On the cusp of Remain in Light, before Speaking in Tongues, Talking Heads explored moody funk: dark, brooding, and danceable, as evidenced by this Metafilter post about a concert in Rome in 1980 with Adrian Belew (formerly of Frank Zappa and David Bowie, soon to be of King Crimson).

Belew's work here hints at an influence on Byrne's guitar work which showed up as early as Stop Making Sense but, more importantly, the songs stand on their own merits: featuring a meaty slapping bass, ethereal laments, wailing feedback.

The lyrics are elliptical, as any Talking Heads fan could tell you: perhaps they're about shallow consumption; perhaps they're about drug use; perhaps they're a paranoiac nightmare of an encroaching surveillance state. If they are, does it undercut the exuberance that the performance is at least partly planned, calculated to be worth recording? (And what does it mean that it was recorded and passed around in increasingly inferior versions--from broadcast TV to videotape to glitchy upload on Youtube to glitchy lossy mp3? Byrne could write something clever and pointed about it; for my part I'll just hope the concert gets a professional DVD release.)

Other highlights on that concert: "Drugs," "Crosseyed and Painless," "The Great Curve."

children and cartwheels and chandeliers

2007-07-11T09:35:00.000-04:00

Elizabeth Mitchell -- Who's My Pretty Baby
At ten years old, there was nowhere Elizabeth Mitchell would go that couldn't be gone there by cartwheels or somersaults. At ten and a half she learned how to walk on her hands and was sure that her feet would never touch the ground again. She insisted that her parents lower the counters throughout the house. They refused, so she insisted they buy her stilts. Her parents did not want to take down the chandeliers or to clean footprints from the ceiling, and it seemed sure the situation was headed towards a crisis. Luckily, Elizabeth's uncle was clever enough to buy her a guitar for her birthday. It was a challenge for Elizabeth to play A maj with her feet, but G maj was impossible. B7 was whatever was a step beyond impossible. Elizabeth decided she could sit "like normal," provided no one saw her; and that her feet could touch the ground as she sat, provided she washed them afterwards.

Each day her parents would make excuses to pass her door and overhear her practicing, and each day when she was done she'd put the guitar away and walk on her hands to the kitchen to find a snack. And each day her mother would say "don't ruin your appetite for dinner, honey," and each day Elizabeth would say "yes ma'am."

And then one day her parents heard her practice stop and the door open, and Elizabeth came walking down the hall but not to the kitchen, and on her feet, not on her hands. She was carrying her guitar and she walked into the living room where her astonished parents sat, and she stood there in front of them and said "Mom. Dad. Listen to this." And then she played something which sounded like all the joy and energy of an eleven-year-old channelled into music.

You Are My Little Bird is an album for children. Jordan @ Said the Gramophone posted "Three Little Birds" in March, and then Folkways sent me the CD as part of a package of promo materials. I do like it, but am sure that my niece would like it even more.
[Elizabeth Mitchell @ Folkways; various reviews @ Ryko Distribution]

9Seven for IV 121 -- Before Finish

2007-07-06T00:18:00.001-04:00

9Seven for IV 121 -- Before Finish
Receiving a transmission, captain.
--Onscreen.
[Onscreen: a trio of Japanese travelers in a steampunk spaceship, stars and planets floating distant in the viewport behind them, contextless and serene. They begin to speak. Their words, constellations of sounds, also float: unmoored, drifting, supremely calming. They are not cosmonauts but monogatarinauts.]
--Ensign, decode.
The computer can not understand it fully, captain. ... CRM 114 ... C57D ... 1701 ... Baratu.
[The transmission ends. Captain raises his eyebrows.]
I will attempt to reestablish contact.... No response, sir. Records indicate the transmission arrived from Audiogalaxy.
--I wish to know more, ensign.
I'm sorry, Captain, there is no further information.
--Then let us hear it again.

[Anyone know anything about this band? Please post it in the comments.]

Hum Dum Dinger

2007-06-29T01:11:00.000-04:00

Jimmie Davis -- She's a Hum Dum Dinger From Dingersville
What kind of slide does Jimmie Davis use? It's not a knife on electric guitar, aggressive, thick, chunky, distorted. It's not a knife on electric guitar, gruff and impetuous, with a sense of timing all its own, dropping flats and sharps in where it pleases. It's not a dobro, not a lap steel, not a sonic papaya smoothie. It's not medicine bottle on nylon; it doesn't sound like Valium on dreamscape lullaby.

No, it's got a slight bite to it and it's played with finesse. It's a sweet and durable melody, even if the lyrics (like Davis' politics) haven't aged well.
[Available on a number of albums, including The Voice Of The Blues: Bottleneck Guitar Masterpieces and The Roots of Rap.]

of mountains and monasteries and music

2007-06-13T11:27:00.000-04:00

Jed and Lucia -- Off the Ground
Jed played guitar in a band. On the weekends when they weren't booked and weren't practicing, he would drive his car out of the city to climb mountains. His favorite was Mt. San Isidro, a moderately tall and moderately difficult mountain which he would nevertheless climb solo. In the early afternoon one day as he reached the summit, he found there a building that had never been there before. It was a modest structure, made of wood and stone, and inside he found it attended by silent men with shaven heads. They let him wander about, unbothered, and when he lay down his pack and removed his coat and gloves they did not comment or even seem to notice. In one hall he found an empty room with a pallet on the floor and a low-cut rock for a pillow. He moved his belongings into it and had potato soup and a small cup of water for dinner. Over time he learned the customs of the place, beyond the overwhelming silence: where and when to bathe, how to help with custodial duties, what to cook and where to gather the ingredients. The ingredients were usually potatoes and dinner was usually potato soup. The soup was made from potatoes and water. Depending on the cook, it might be flavored with additional water.

Jed came to enjoy the silence because it allowed him to reflect more on its absence: on what to say and when to say it, and what to play and when to play it. On his seventeenth day at the monastery he found himself unable to shake a stupid couplet from a song he'd last heard years ago and last enjoyed never. He had found his mantra, though he did not know it.

Over and over it played: "won't you take me back to school / I need to learn the golden rule." The melody was facile, trite, the instrumentation facile, trite, the vocals soppy and ineffectual. The song itself was the very definition of rubbish, and in fact he could find nothing about it to recommend it. Nor could he stop thinking about it. He began to reflect on what this obsession might mean, on what melody might mean, on how rhythm could fit with melody to expand its meaning and leaven its sweetness.

After six weeks of meditation he decided to share his discoveries. "Music reveals itself through study, showing truth not only about specific instances but also about governing principles in general."

There was a silence, and he imagined this insight might be well received. It stretched on until he imagined it might not.

The man to his right spoke. His voice was hoarse, and cracked midway: "Dammit, Jed, we are not Sufis. And this is not a talk show." This was followed by another silence.

Then, from across the room: "He has not spoken for seventeen years."

It was a stinging rebuke.

That night he wondered if he could manage longer than six weeks of silence. He wondered if he wanted to. He missed his guitar; he missed creating.

In the morning he pulled his pack from the corner, put on his boots and coat and gloves, and made his way from the monastery. Halfway down he slipped, caught himself, slipped again, began to tumble. He woke up, which was more than he'd expected just moments before. He was in a bright cloudiness with a burning pain in his chest: covered in snow. He dug himself out, gasped for breath, coughed up icy water. Once he realized he could breathe he realized also that he had twisted his ankle. He limped down the mountainside, making it to ground level just before dusk. He carried on until it was dark, then made camp and slept in his coat and snowboots. The pack felt too comfortable as a pillow; he emptied it and put a rock inside.

In the morning his ankle was still swollen. He had decided on North as a direction and continued that way, concentrating on music, trying to tease out further revelations. He was bitten by a snake while within sight of the highway. On the highway itself he passed out, trying to work a bassline into that rattle he had processed as merely a fast tempo, a rhythm in search of a melody. A descending bassline could work, ascending could as well--eight to the bar? four to the bar? three to the bar? Simple repeating, repeating with variations, alternating patterns? The world was full of possibilities.

...

The desert was flat and Lucia was not yet hypnotized by interminable monotony; she slowed her car from well ahead and recognized the shape on the asphalt as human. She dialed 911 on her cell and approached the person with her finger on the call button. When she pressed it, it was to report a man delirious and feverish, leg swollen until the pants were tight around it.

Jed was airlifted to the hospital, his leg cut open to relieve the pressure from the swelling, a chunk of calf removed due to necrosis.

Lucia met him at the hospital as an excuse to miss a family reunion. She had not been on good terms with them since she had abandoned polyrhythm in favor of monorhythm: they were shocked about her behavior, worried for the future, unsure what to think but sure that somehow they had been deceived and betrayed.

Jed and Lucia began to chat, as people do when in a room together. Over a course of months Jed had new skin grafted on followed by extensive rest and physical therapy to learn to walk again. It was tedious and painful but the food was good. They began to get to know each other. Jed had ideas for some melodies. Lucia had ideas for some rhythms. They decided to form a band.

[Jed and Lucia probably have a Fanatic Promotion page, but I got the email about them so long ago that I lost the URL and Google isn't turning it up]

Roots Canal: Luther Kent

2007-06-11T00:01:00.001-04:00

Luther Kent & Trick Bag - Just a Little Bit
Talo first introduced me to Luther Kent, who I wrote about in one of my earliest posts. In fact, Talo introduced me to New Orleans music. And New Orleans food. And New Orleans culture. And New Orleans itself. Talo grew up in Slidell, just across Lake Pontchartrain from the Big Easy. He was a friend of Lisa's from college, and later our tenant (until we took over our entire brownstone for our growing family and had to evict him -- but found him a similar situation with good friends around the corner). He always was an iconoclast, if not an eccentric. In school, he rode to class on a unicycle. Now he ties flies. Writes and draws travel journals from his trips to Scotland, New Zealand, Alaska. Smokes Cuban cigars and drinks single malt Scotch. But what would you expect from a five-foot-tall Japanese guy from Louisiana? He used to bring us New Orleans memorabilia after his trips home. One year, he brought us live crawfish. After that, we airfreighted 40 or 50 pounds of the things to Brooklyn every year for a Mardi Gras blowout. (You have to look in their eyes to figure out whether they're dead or alive, we learned.) Later, he brought us down to New Orleans for our first Jazzfest trip. And joined us again last year for our second, which I wrote about here.

Talo had to quit his advertising job a few months ago because he was spending so much time back home with his father, who had cancer. Talo was in town for a few days last week and was supposed to join our barbecue on Friday night, but his sister called that afternoon to tell him his father'd taken a turn for the worse. Weakened by chemotheraphy and other complications, he died that evening. Before Talo flew back to his father's deathbed, he brought us a CD of Luther Kent at this year's Jazzfest. Charles Brent, the musical director of Kent's band, Trick Bag, who used to arrange the giant horn section that gave the band a sound as big as Kent's voice, also died recently and is remembered in this song, Just a Little Bit.

Requiescat In Pace.

[Jazzfest Live]

Peter Tosh -- Stop That Train

2007-06-04T23:28:00.000-04:00

Peter Tosh -- Stop That Train
Peter Tosh was murdered in his home by a robber who did not rob him. It's a curious thing, perhaps as curious as a dying hallucination of a lifetime unspooling until the most significant choices are again unchosen and alternate paths stretch out ahead.

On one of those paths Tosh did not joing the Wailers, did not leave them, did not become a reggae icon in his own right. Instead he flew with just his acoustic guitar and the clothes on his back to the U.S., home of the radio stations he picked up at night through drifting clouds on a staticky patchy lo-fi signal which was still enough to leave him charmed and changed.

And so he sat on town squares, park benches, and busy sidewalks playing his guitar, case open beside him until finally the right businessman passed by, passed by again, passed by a third time to listen and make requests. And then he was taken to cut a demo, just him and his guitar and his croonings; the demo was patchy, lo-fi, but still enough to leave people charmed and changed, and it earned him a band which, with a patient guiding hand and some careful production work could rival much of what Motown and Stax had to offer.
[Talking Revolution (caveat emptor: you'll have to be a diehard Tosh fan to enjoy all of this; you might do better with it a la carte @ emusic.com.)]

sending up a flare

2007-06-04T08:41:00.000-04:00

Rosswords, your email quit working.

Everyone else: music post later today.

Swedish pop and riot grrrls: in celebration of fun

2007-06-01T12:16:00.000-04:00

Komeda -- Binario
Le Tigre -- After Dark
Is it a hyperacute critical sense or a complete lack of critical sense that leads to judging everything harshly, to watching a brilliant film or listening to a complex and demanding album and thinking it mildly interesting? What changes to cause a reassessment, to allow a three-year-old album or an eight-year-old album to register as what it is rather than what it was seen as needing to be? And why is that, in all the characteristics a work of art can be judged by, fun is typically considered the least pressing or, by some dour critics, even something to be merely tolerated? Why honor this Puritanical streak insinuating that only the unpleasant has merit, that life is duty and nothing more? Wouldn't (couldn't) humanism serve as a useful antidote?

A constellation of questions, all ones I don't know the answer to and put to myself more than to anyone else.

Which is by way of saying I've only just discovered I very much like these two bands, and I'm sad that Le Tigre is on hiatus but I'm happy they've left behing some discs worth listening to. And there are more from Komeda to search out.
[What Makes it Go?]
[This Island]

I don't know if anyone is still reading this site, especially given the sporadic nature of posts lately. I'd like to blame it on a new job and moving, but the truth is that I've become unsure of what I'm doing with the space or why. I remember having a clear purpose when I started (way back in the 13th century internet days of 2004)--to put together the kind of playlist I'd like to hear on the radio--and that still holds, but more and more I find I don't know how to write about the music I like the most. And so I find myself gravitating towards approaches which might not make any sense to anyone else, which leads back to fundamental questions about art and communication. I'm not ready to pretend solipsism.

Readers, what do you want from this site? Why do you read it? Which posts did you like and which did you dislike?

looking for logic in the chambers of the human heart

2007-05-17T00:15:00.000-04:00

Randy Hobbs -- Slowly But Surely
Roosevelt Sykes -- Yes Lawd
Funkadelic -- Maggot Brain [alt mix]
He was alone in the lobby of his hotel in Isla Mujeres, watching Hitchcock's La Ventana Indiscreta and misreading Jeffries' misgivings for disregard, zoning out looking through Lisa's face to the blue and red and green rectangles. Jorge banged on the glass by the door, smiling sleepily, holding his left crutch, his right crutch leaned against his side.
"Jorge," he said. "¿Qué pasa?"
"Nada, man."
"¿Qué tal?"
"Bien, ¿y tú?"
"Bien bien." Jorge lifted himself in off the sidewalk. "What you doing?"
"Nothing. Nothing. Just watching this movie."
"Yeah?" He came around the TV to took a look. "Válgame Dios."
"Yeah."
"Yeah." Jorge turned and hopped backwards twice, then sat down and rested his crutches beside him.
They sat there staring at the screen, red and green and blue rectangles brightening and fading away, brightening and fading away: in the commercials, in the break-in, in the theft, in the climax, in the credits.
"Buena película," Jorge said, halfway through an infomercial.
"Buenísima."
"You flying, man?"
"No, I don't smoke. You?"
"I am ... so flying, man."
"That's cool."
"Shoooooo," Jorge said. "So flying."
Flashes of light, electrons hitting the screen, red-blue-green.
"Do you smoke?" Jorge said.
"No, I don't smoke." I'm staring at a light source, Nick thought. It's furniture and it's a light source and people stare at it. And I do too.
"No smoke?"
"No, gracias."
"So flying."
"Hm...." The tick of the clock on the wall. Somewhere down the street, far off, someone telling Carlos he didn't know anything, ni una putísima cosa, coño. Cars coming by, whoosh.
"Shoo," Jorge said.
"Shoo-wee."
"Buena onda, tú."
"¿Sí?"
"Sí. ¿No fumas?"
"No, no fumo. Let's go."
"Where? To where we go?"
"I want a beer."
"¿Cómo?"
"Cerveza. Lager. Dos Equis. Vámanos."
"Muy bien. Buena onda," he said, pushing himself off the sofa and grabbing his crutches. "¿Listo?"
"Claro. Ko'ox."
"Ko'ox," he said, laughing. "¡Vámonos!"

"Buena película," Jorge said in the bar.
"Muy buena." He knocked back the last of the beer and sat staring at the table: mahogany under a dark varnish, the reflection of the ceiling fan broken by the ring from the bottle, the bottle now cool and slick in his hand as he spun it around and stopped it, spun it again.
"Buena película."
The breeze wafted in from the beach carrying that unmistakable saltwater smell, waves pounding the surf, people chatting a few doors down, Jorge and Nick and the mesero alone in the bar.
"Aren't you hungry?"
"¿Cómo?"
"¿No tienes hambre?"
"Mucha hambre."
"Well, order something then."
"¿Cómo?"
"¿No vas a pedir?"
"¡Camarero!" Jorge said. The waiter came over to take their order. He was wearing stiff leather shoes with faded blue jeans and a tan guayabera. "Dos tamales," Jorge said, and something else Nick didn't catch. The guayabera never caught on stateside, did it? he thought. There was a couple outside, looking in, speaking softly in a Scottish accent. Of course, kilts didn't either.
"¿Algo más?" the waiter said.
"Otra cerveza," Nick said.
"Dos más," Jorge said.
The waiter nodded and left. Nick spun the bottle, let it go, stopped it. Jorge contemplated the table. Nick looked out at the street. The couple had left.
"What are we doing here?" he said.
"Drinking."
"No, in general."
"¿Cómo?"
"Por lo general."
"Drinking."
"No, la gente por lo general."
"Eating, too. Sometimes eating."
"No," Nick said.
"Buena onda," Jorge said.
"¿Qué hacemos aquí? ¿Cómo gente?"
"Vinimos a beber."
He sighed. A beer opened behind him, then another. The door in the counter opened, swung back and forth, came to a stop. The waiter set down a plate of chips, a dish of guacamole, and two more beers.
[Midnite Blues Party @ amazon, and @ emusic]
[The Honeydripper @ amazon, or @ emusic]
[Maggot Brain @ amazon, or @ emusic]

Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra

2007-05-10T11:57:00.000-04:00

Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra -- Sí, Se Puede
Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra are a Brooklyn-based musical collective expanding the sound laid out by Fela Kuti, who originated the term Afrobeat and set its political tenor in the 1970s.

Si alguien te dice que no se puede hacer algo, sólo dílo <<sí, se puede. Mientras vivo, mientras respiro, lo haré, lo hago, en hacerlo yo sigo.>>

I've seen this one listed as "si se puede." It is not. "Sí, se puede" means "Yes, it's possible" whereas "si se puede" means "if it's possible." Diacritics and punctuation are not optional in Spanish; aside from the años/anos trouble some early Spanish students stumble into, there are other more common semantic differences.

One I've noticed recently: an early Alfonso Cuarón movie cited as Solo con tu pareja, which means "alone with your wife," whereas the title is actually Sólo con tu pareja, or "only with your wife." I'm not sure if the second one is a more lecherous title or a more prim and proper one, as I haven't yet seen the film, but given Cuarón's other films (Harry Potter excepted) I think I can guess.
[Liberation Afro Beat, Vol. 1]

Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra -- Indictment
Or, a list of people who should be indicted, and how we can dance as it's done. I'm not sure why Noam Chomsky makes the list, or if by that point people are groaning and booing because politics isn't fun.

The indictments continue; Antibalas pave over them with horns blown from the bottom, electric guitar lines, funky beats, polyrhythm, and syncopation: the aural equivalent of a protest with puppets.
[Who Is This America?]

Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra -- I.C.E.
This one is not the typical Afrobeat (or Antibalas) song. It starts with a sedate trombone over a two-bar metallic percussion figure with alternating accents, is joined by electric bass, rimshots, and a pensive organ, and then by a horn section and electric guitar playing against the organ ... and then the song deconstructs itself into a kind of grand cinematic music that might play over some inexplicable revelation.
[Security]
[Antibalas' official site: they're gonna code it like it's 1999]
[Antibalas concerts @ archive.org]
[and from Well-Rounded Radio, some background about the group and an interview]

Vanya and Julia

2007-04-30T00:17:00.000-04:00

Vanya pretends she is called Julia, pretends she wasn't born where she was, pretends she doesn't look how she does, pretends she's graceful and witty, glamorous and poised. Yet she is not ugly, not dull-witted, not socially incompetent; what she is is self-conscious. She spends her spare time composing a soundtrack to a film that's never been made, a film she imagines as a musical Amelie, though her deepest convictions will lead it astray.

Opening credits: a woman in her mid-30s in an overcoat, dress, and heavy shoes, walking down a snowy sidewalk. An immediate sign that the film is more expressionist than realist: the buildings in the background are all missing their facades as Vanya passes them. Inside each apartment the people go about their daily business, apparently oblivious to their exposure: a mother playing peekaboo with her toddler; a woman in curlers at the stove, smoking as she fries liver and onions; a man doing pushups, the TV blaring behind him; a couple in bed in flagrante delicto; a young man in bed flat on his stomach, holding a pillow over his head. Vanya walking down the sidewalk, a distant look in her eyes.

Waiting at the bus stop: Vanya pines for Stefan yet he pays all his attention to Dora. Dora: bold, beautiful, flashy, flirtatious, the kind of girl with a reputation.

Listening to the seemingly random bleats and blats of traffic, Vanya begins to sing her frustration: what's a woman to do, and maintain her dignity? How can you compete with women who don't? She imagines herself Julia again.

The sound of traffic merges into muted trumpet and tuba and drums and triangle, the people at the bus stop nodding in rhythm; pedestrians accenting the downbeats; passing traffic in both lanes joining in, bicyclists and cab drivers and businessmen all together singing "Stefan: come to your senses." She is Julia, taking the lead, respectable, well-dressed, and intelligent. The song dies and the fantasy dies with it, and then she's just Vanya waiting for a bus.

End credits: Vanya and Stefan paying the bill and leaving the cafe together, Vanya with a quizzical, half-sad smile. The music longs for the whimsical chintziness of Herb Alpert; feels itself pulled towards the mournful dissonance of Sketches of Spain: what to do when you've got what you want and are no longer sure you want it? Isn't achievement supposd to lead to happiness?
[Last Balkan Tango and @ emusic which, in spite of its crummy user interface, is increasingly coming to seem like a public service.]
[Queens & Kings and @ emusic]
[The Promise and @ emusic]

If you listen to internet radio...

2007-04-18T20:06:00.000-04:00

I've been following the news about internet radio with some alarm: in essence, the rates are being increased quite a lot, so sites like Pandora and soma.fm are in danger.

I'm quite fond of Pandora, which lets you to enter an artist or song in a search and have it generate a playlist of other songs you might like based on how you rate the results; in fact I've been using it for research recently.

If you like internet radio, or if you've ever wondered why internet radio and satellite radio should have to pay licensing fees while public radio gets a free pass (perhaps so the public will always have somewhere to go to hear Kansas sing "Dust in the Wind,") you might be interested in this note that Pandora sent out recently:

Hi, it's Tim from Pandora,

I'm writing today to ask for your help. The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays, and broadcast radio doesn't pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

In response to these new and unfair fees, we have formed the SaveNetRadio Coalition, a group that includes listeners, artists, labels and webcasters. I hope that you will consider joining us.

Please sign our petition urging your Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio: http://capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/issues/alert/?alertid=9631541

Please feel free to forward this link/email to your friends - the more petitioners we can get, the better.

Understand that we are fully supportive of paying royalties to the artists whose music we play, and have done so since our inception. As a former touring musician myself, I'm no stranger to the challenges facing working musicians. The issue we have with the recent ruling is that it puts the cost of streaming far out of the range of ANY webcaster's business potential.

I hope you'll take just a few minutes to sign our petition - it WILL make a difference. As a young industry, we do not have the lobbying power of the RIAA. You, our listeners, are by far our biggest and most influential allies.

As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.

-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder)

you can stop counting

2007-04-17T08:46:00.000-04:00

The Legendary Pink Dots -- The Made Man's Manifesto
I don't know enough about the Legendary Pink Dots to say if it's rare that they sound like pre-Dark Side Pink Floyd, but Allmusic.com does, and does.

All I know is I like this track, and it reminds me a bit of Floyd but, to indulge a cliche, "not in a bad way," and I don't know which made man's manifesto it might be referring to; I'm having a hard time relating the lyrics to any fictional or real mobsters I know of. Also:
1 2 3, 4 5, 6 7 8, 9 10, 11 12,
You can stop counting.

5 10, 15 20, 25 30, 35 40, 45 50,
You can stop counting.

Ten, ten ten ten ten, ten ten ten ten, ten,
You can stop counting.

0 1, 10 11, 100,
You can stop counting.

128, 64, 0, 0, 8, 4, 0, 1,
You can stop counting.

One-two-many,
You can stop counting.

The Legendary Pink Dots have been around for a quarter-century and have released about 40 albums. Twenty-four of them are on emusic. I haven't yet heard The Maria Dimension, though right off it reminds me of a friendlier and less demented Aphex Twin crossed with a less moody/brooding early Dead Can Dance.
[Your Children Placate You From Premature Graves @ emusic]

The Octopus Walks Across the Coral

2007-04-16T02:28:00.000-04:00

Morningbell -- The Octopus Walks Across the Coral
Morningbell has a new album out. It's a Choose Your Own Adventure album; the adventure I chose was to listen to the tracks in numerical order, and then to give it some time and listen again. I'm happy for the ways it shows the group stretching out, expanding their sound, and while there aren't any tracks on it I dislike, I think the two being promoted are not the two I would have picked: my money is on "Utopian Fantasy at the Center of the Earth" and "The Octopus Walks Across the Coral."

I've written about Morningbell twice before, once for kicks and out of general excitement, and once as part of a failed experiment. What I haven't written much about is octopuses.

What can you say about octopuses that doesn't involve ink or the lack of a skeleton? They can camouflage themselves amazingly well, sometimes to ambush a shark; they can open jars for food and climb onboard boats to get at food stored in the hold; they can walk on two legs, six arms wrapped around them so they look like a coconut taking a stroll, or hold the other six arms up, twisted about so they look like algae. They can also regrow an arm, unless the budget doesn't allow it. And they can play the guitar but not the bagpipes.
[Morningbell's site]
[Morningbell's MySpace page]
[This was a Team Clermont promotion, but I would have picked it up anyway given my fondness for the band.]

Roots Canal: everybody look what's going down

2007-04-14T00:07:00.000-04:00

Sex Mob -- For What It's Worth
This is on a totally different track, but Tuwa's last post reminded me of a great version of For What It's Worth by Sex Mob, which was Steven Bernstein's last band before Millenial Territory Orchestra. Bernstein takes jazz in all sorts of interesting directions, trying to make it a little less cerebral and more accessible. He describes it this way:

Jazz used to be popular music. People would go out to clubs, listen to the music, go home, and get laid. Simple as that. We're bringing that spirit back.

Give a listen. Maybe you'll get lucky.

[Solid Sender] Also on emusic.

stop, hey, what's that sound?

2007-04-10T22:26:00.000-04:00

College was a culture shock: going from true poverty to an artificial poverty with secure housing and a clear end, from a small town where I was considered brilliant to a college town where I was surrounded by people who were, from oversight that was vindictive and capricious to authority that were indifferent, all of it coupled with an exhilerating and terrifying freedom. My first roommates were from Boca Raton, the three of us sharing the second-cheapest room on campus, built for four, their friends coming over to drink or smoke, one of them once memorably complaining about being given a car which cost more than my mother's house but wasn't what he wanted.

I was a teetotaller losing his faith, bitter and angry and self-righteous, and took comfort in my arrogance. Cypress Hill was a fixture in the room that year, even before "Insane in the Brain" hit MTV; I heard their first two CDs constantly and hated them for their stoner vibe and the gangsta theatrics, but still I wondered if it was a deeply ironic word choice or a sly wink and a bit of hiding in plain sight that--among the machismo and claims to murder--they'd drop lines like "I'm a chicken hawk huntin' for a chicken."

Some time back I remembered the group with some fondness, and bought Black Sunday, and found that their sound on the CD was actually fairly interesting. In trying to describe it, I thought it would be like a pitchfork: deep prominent bass, high far-off (far-out) sounding noises, vocals in the middle. And going back a bit further, to high school, to Young MC, I stumbled onto what seemed like a precursor to their sound; a track with all that lethargy and sonic separation yet from someone who, from his lyrics, would clearly not approve of Cypress Hill's lifestyle. I'm not sure if Young MC has changed his attitudes towards drugs since 1989, as mine did, and did again, since 1993; his first CD was the only one I listened to, and I listen to it still: I enjoy the beats and the facility with rhyme (even silly rhyme) ("I'm sloppy like Oscar but neat like Tony Randall"?) and the general party atmosphere of it, which is light and fun as long as it's not taken seriously. In this regard it's like the early Tribe records, which also have some green lyrics, some clumsy seductions and misplaced wallets.

But the more I think of it, the more I notice songs flirting with this Cypress Hill sound, this same sound predated by Young MC's track: decades earlier, in Bill Wither's "Ain't No Sunshine"; and a few years later, in The Coup's "Fat Cats, Bigga Fish," in Louise Attaque's "Du Nord Au Sud"^* and, to a lesser extent in Radiohead's The National Anthem (the vocals at the high point, the horns starting in the middle ... but too thick a sound overall, too much overlap and chaos) and in The Cure's remix of "Fascination Street" (the bass needs to be thicker, the middle thinner).

The more I think of it, the more I think I hear it (Pink Floyd, Depeche Mode, Baaba Maal), leading me to wonder if it's everywhere or if it's anywhere at all. It's possible I'm imagining it: representative samples in a frequency analyzer show some similarity, but not the separation of sound I thought I'd heard:

But quite distinct songs (Tears for Fears' "I Believe," The Beatles' "Helter Skelter") don't show nearly as much difference as I'd expected:

In '93 I'd probably bend over backwards, making any contortions necessary to prevent saying "I don't know" or "I was wrong." I don't know, and I may be wrong. Yet I'm not sure that recognizing that puts me any closer to finding what the similarities are, if they even exist.

Readers, if you care to comment (musicians, music theorists, music historians and/or critics--anyone with a clue really), is there actually any similarity between the Young MC track and the Cypress Hill track? If there is, how would you go about finding more of it?
[Stone Cold Rhymin' @ amazon, @ emusic]
[Genocide & Juice: out of print]
[Black Sunday @ amazon]
[Comme on a Dit]
[Mixed Up]
[Kid A]

* First posted 63 years ago in internet years on my guest post to Said the Gramophone.

White Elephant Blogathon: Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

2007-04-01T05:04:00.000-04:00

This post is part of the White Elephant film Blogathon, in which volunteers throw a movie suggestion into the hat for someone else to review. The only restriction was that the movie be widely available; and the implication was that most of them would be bad because bloggers could already use their site to review good movies. I ignored that implication, as I didn't have the heart to recommend a film I thought was truly bad; instead I recommended one I thought was quite good but somewhat obscure.

And in return I got Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. I'd remembered it fondly, but I'd last seen it in high school, when it probably spoke to me more, and I'd seen it with a group of friends, which can shore up a mediocre comedy. It's a truism that actors in a comedy should act as if they're in a drama; else the comedy becomes less about situation than about actors showing out. The performances here are oversold and the timing poor, each joke delivered with a wink and a beat after it as if to slot in a laugh track. This is not Howard Hawks direction with a Ben Hecht script, though the script does have potential.

The story is about two exceptionally ignorant and lazy but good-natured bad musicians who are on the verge of failing their history class and, hence, flunking out of high school. At a convenience store the night before they have to give the history presentation that could help them pass the class, a phone booth falls from the sky. In it is a man named Rufus who came from the future and takes them back in time to see Napoleon Bonaparte. From there Bill and Ted jaunt through history collecting historical figures and nearly getting killed in various ways. If Ted doesn't graduate he'll be sent to military school, so it's clear why they want to get a good grade on the presentation, but it's less clear why they have any interest in being musicians since it's clear they never practice.

The movie has a few moments that work and a lot more that don't; for every nice touch like Napoleon cheating on his bowling score there are more attempted jokes which fall flat, such as the notion that Joan of Arc is Noah's wife. Many of the scenes may have worked on paper but don't work on screen; in one of them, Bill's father and stepmother kick Bill out of his room so they can get it on. The scene could have been very funny if handled right; instead it just seemed like a scene that could have been very funny if handled right. And some of the other jokes would have been better left for the viewer to discover, like Bill's Oedipus complex.

It's disorienting in a comedy to wonder if the cleverest jokes were intended as jokes--Rufus goes back in time to ensure that the past happens as it should, yet rather than going back in time far enough to allow Bill and Ted to research and prepare a proper presentation, he goes back to the night before it's due. Research would make for a dull comedy (or a much more cerebral comedy than the screenwriter wanted), so Rufus' choice may be a narrative necessity, or it may be a subtle joke about the culture Bill and Ted have inspired, in which everything is done at the last minute. (If I remember right, Bill and Ted devise a similar solution in the sequel, just before the competition when they still don't know how to play guitar: they go back in time to practice, then return to just a few seconds after they left.) The clever joke, or perhaps plot hole, is that Bill and Ted spend all night traveling through time rather than sleeping and that staying up all night would render most people exhausted and inarticulate, yet they are more eloquent in their presentation than they ever have been before.

I wondered more than once if the film were actually a personal fantasy written by a young man in high school with a project due very soon--I was never convinced that the future Rufus comes from would be one I would want to live in. And I couldn't help wondering also if Mike Judge didn't address the movie and its sequel twice: first in Beavis and Butthead, making the dimwitted teenagers petty and vicious, and then again in Idiocracy, making a future populated with dimwits a nightmare rather than a fantasy.

White Elephant Blog-a-thon:
The Ongoing Cinematic Education of Steven Carlson on Bio-Dome.
Flickhead on Teen Witch.
Zoom In Online on Tale of the Bunny Picnic.
Eddie's Blog-a-Thon Board on Purple Rain.
Ben @ Lucis Screening on Nude for Satan.
Andrew @ Lucid Screening on Troll 2.
Lazy Eye Theatre on Forbidden Games.
Filmsquish on Air Bud: World Pup.
As Cool As a Fruitstand on Picnic.
goatdogblog on Making the Grade.
Talk to Me Harry Winston on Riki-Oh: the Story of Ricky.
The Exploding Kintetoscope on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the Next Generation.
Ben @ Lucid Screening on The End.
Case @ Lucid Screening on Minoes.
Rufus @ Lucid Screening on Dark Harvest 2: The Maize.
Additional links to be added as I find them....

And two mp3s, since this is an mp3blog:
Primus -- Tommy the Cat
Primus -- Bob
"Tommy the Cat" is actually used in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, not the original, but the soundtrack to the original doesn't impress me at all and the soundtrack to the sequel outdoes it by having one song worth the time spent listening to it.

Primus are a divisive band; most people I've met either love them or hate them. For my part, I thought Sailing the Seas of Cheese and Pork Soda were good and the rest were not.

Les Claypool has a unique approach to playing bass, but what surprises me most about this track is Tom Waits as Tommy the Cat. The song is originally from Sailing the Seas of Cheese and tells an amusing story; "Bob" is from Pork Soda and is a sober track about a friend's suicide, aptly hinting at the darkness and obsession that surround the event but avoiding emo territory in its delivery.
[Sailing the Seas of Cheese]
[Pork Soda]

And, on the subject of comedies centering on research, some wonderful detective work at Making Light, about what looks roughly similar to an Elmore Leonard story set in the publishing business.

short break

2007-03-26T10:22:00.000-04:00

I'm taking a short break. I'll have a post up, with tunage of some sort, April 1st for the White Elephant Blogathon.

free your mind

2007-03-21T21:05:00.000-04:00

Lil' Lavair & The Fabulous Jades -- Cold Heat
10 Verily didst the Shantyans say, "wouldst not thou deliver unto us some dirty funk so that we may celebrate?" 11 And didst the Shanty reply, "woe unto me! remiss in mine duties; 12 I beg of thee forgiveness."
[Cold Heat: Heavy Funk Rarities 1968-1974, Vol. 1 @ amazon, emusic]

Amnesty -- Love Fades
Gur enqvnapr bs gur fgne gung yrnaf ba zr
Jnf fuvavat lrnef ntb. Gur yvtug gung abj
Tyvggref hc gurer zl rlrf znl arire frr,
Naq fb gur gvzr ynt grnfrf zr jvgu ubj

Love gung loves abj znl abg ernpu zr hagvy
Vgf svefg qrfver vf fcrag. Gur fgne'f vzchyfr
Zhfg jnvg sbe rlrf gb pynvz vg ornhgvshy
Naq love neevirq znl svaq hf fbzrjurer ryfr.
[Free Your Mind: The 700 West Sessions @ amazon and also at emusic]

Funkadelic -- Funky Dollar Bill
IF George = "God of funk" THEN
Response.Write("<br>21 Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto George the things that are George's.<br>")
ELSE ' nil
END IF
[Free Your Mind...And Your Ass Will Follow @ amazon, emusic.]

Roots Canal: The Woes

2007-03-18T08:22:00.000-04:00

The Woes -- Sunset
Saw another unusual band at Barbes last night, called the Woes. The mix of banjo and French horn, backed by violin (no, it wouldn't be right to call it a fiddle) and sousaphone, just slayed me. Their CD has different instrumentation, but the core of singer/banjoist/guitarist Osei Essed and French-hornist/organist Cicero Jones is still at the heart of it. Osei (pronounced a lot like Jose) writes the songs and sings the lyrics with a gruff, sometimes Tom-Waitsy, sometimes almost howling voice. They're tough to pigeonhole. On their MySpace site, they call it "experimental/country/blues." Barbes called it "post-Apocalyptic traditional music." I suppose that will have to do.

Bonus track: Osei's banjo reminds me of Otis Taylor's unconventional take on the blues, so here's one of his tracks:
Otis Taylor -- Shakie's Gone

[That Coke Oven March]
[Truth Is Not Fiction]

The kitchen diaries

2007-03-16T22:23:00.001-04:00

Harold Burrage

2007-03-15T21:35:00.000-04:00

Harold Burrage -- Betty Jean
Harold Burrage -- You Eat Too Much
Harold Burrage was a pianist whose career started in the 1950s and lasted until his untimely death in the mid 1960s; in that time he cut blues, rock'n'roll, and R&B sides for a few labels, including Cobra (which, as you might expect, meant he recorded a bit with Otis Rush and Magic Sam).

"Betty Jean" sounds like the kind of track the good Reverend might post, all roots rock and driving rhythms, whereas "You Eat Too Much" is more rosswords's taste, a comedy song from the fringes of a strained relationship: a lament, a condemnation, a documentation of excess:

A pound of baloney, a gallon of ice cream too
You ate the sole off of my left shoe
You started in the kitchen and ended in the hall
You chewed up the rug and ate the paper off the wall
You know you eat too much

[Messed Up: out of print @ amazon. emusic rides to the rescue.]

(I accidentally deleted this post, could not undelete it; had to pull it up from browser cache and republish it. Apologies for dumping an old entry into site feeds, and for losing the accompanying comments.)

Of God and Science, Barton Carroll

2007-03-12T00:02:00.000-04:00

Of God and Science -- America's Queen
Fuzzed guitar, booming drums, singalong melody, banjo mixed low: this song is like a three-piece hemp suit, the fabric woven just rough enough to be distinctive but tidy enough to get you into a nice restaurant.

Of God and Science are from Albuquerque and are Matthew Dominguez on guitar and vocals, Jeremy Fine on bass, Julian Martinez on piano, guitar, pedal steel, vocals, and banjo, and Ryan Martino on drums. They have an album coming out on May 1st.
[Of God and Science's official site, record label, and Myspace page]

Barton Carroll -- Scorched Earth
Brushed drums and violin, melody in leg-irons, a quiet charm to a forlorn track: the kind of thing that reveals itself slowly, weary but determined, hurt but not bowed.
[Barton Carroll has more tracks up at his site and at his Myspace page. His Love & War is on Skybucket Records.]

a million miles from reality

2007-03-08T22:22:00.000-05:00

I'd thought of doing a "trouble" mix some time back and abandoned it, thinking half the songs too obvious and the other half not good enough. And now I've landed myself a cold, days suffused with the taint of unreality, going from meal to bed to meal to bed to meal to bed, so here I am again. I hope you'll forgive me if these tunes aren't exactly new to you but for the moment it's back to comfort music, old friends, familiar joys.

Kings of Convenience -- Stay out of Trouble
The beauty of this song completely defies my attempts to describe it. Picture a Norwegian Simon and Garfunkel with syncopated violin, plucked strings, and acoustic bass. And it's just the mellowest thing you've heard, a warm blanket, shadows on the wall, light falling in from the hall golden and nostalgic. Feist guests on the album and is, as usual, excellent.
[Riot on an Empty Street ]

Bob Marley -- So Much Trouble in the World
I remember loaning someone this CD in 1993 and being utterly amazed that he couldn't get into it. This is Bob! backbeat! sweet melodies! fiery political lyrics! Mon Dieu.
[Rebel Music]

Cat Stevens -- Trouble
Surely one of the supreme editing achievements in film is Harold getting the news at the hospital and driving away angry, shocked, tearful, speeding, to Cat Stevens' plaintive lament. Surely one of the more deliciously perverse decisions in music was to leave this song "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out" unavailable for thirteen years except on the film. (thanks, David!)
[Footsteps in the Dark: Greatest Hits, Vol. 2]

Lylas, Conner, Candy Bars

2007-03-05T21:52:00.000-05:00

Got behind; now I'm playing catch-up. Here are three from the mail bag (more tomorrow):

Lylas -- Tiny Echoes
It's possible that Lylas have more than a passing acquaintance with Alan Parker and that they most like Paul McCartney's work on the white album. It's also possible (always possible) that I'm wrong but that, even when you're tired and hungry and don't understand the lyrics, you can walk around in a relatively good mood humming this melody.
[Lylas' site]
[Lylas' Team Clermont page]
[Lylas @ Myspace]

Conner -- Cold Feelings
Conner were born at the intersection between danceable New Wave and artsy alt-rock, producing head-bobbing smile-making music that sounds like a summer road trip.
[Conner's site]
[Conner's Team Clermont page, with additional mp3s]

Candy Bars -- Violets
This song is dark and cold and beautiful, like a Polish winter landscape seen from indoors. If it were a film it would be Decalogue Eleven: make a joyful noise unto the Lord. In this film Candy Bars would strive for, and never reach, catharsis, the film's text implying that pain is perpetuated in its expression, its cultural context implying the reverse: the audience would experience catharsis, happy to have known about the pain but not lived it, able to turn off the television and go make a sandwich.
[Candy Bars seem not to have an official site or Team Clermont page.]

...
Team Clermont sent me these songs; I don't always remember to say who sent me what but I think I have labeled all the IODA/promonet, band-sent tracks, and other PR (or partly PR) posts here, in case anyone's interested.

I'm not always prompt about looking over tracks sent to me but I do try to give them all a chance; and I'm always happy to find new (or new-to-me) good music.

Otis Spann -- The Hard Way

2007-03-01T16:57:00.000-05:00

Otis Spann -- The Hard Way
The blues are a distinctively American creation; and among them this song has a distinctively American sensibility, the narrator proud of his individualism even while recognizing that with some help he could have gone much further.

You know I came up the hard way
I just about raised myself
I been in and out of trouble
but I never begged no one for help

And what kills me: one word in a couplet:

After a few years passed
I soon learned how to sign my name

It's a Jim Crow song to be sure, released after Brown v. Board of Education but well before the government, in its "all deliberate speed," managed to integrate most schools (and even so, today the process of steering and school vouchers seeks to reestablish de facto segregation where de jure isn't possible).

Spann was pianist for Muddy Waters before Pinetop Perkins took over. I imagine the hiring process went something like this:

"There's the piano."
"Yeah."
And then Spann sat down at it and proceeded to show it who's boss, a blur of hands slamming ivories, hammers on strings, keyboard solid but the legs beginning to groan, threatening to crack. And they toured with one more carpenter than usual, just in case.
[Otis Spann Is the Blues]

Brenton Wood -- Oogum Boogum

2007-02-23T17:36:00.000-05:00

Brenton Wood -- Oogum Boogum
I don't know about the weather where you are, Dear Reader, but here, today, it's been perfect: warm, sun out, high feathery clouds, cool breeze. And here's a song to match, all cotton candy and carefree ebullience.
[Brenton Wood's 18 Best]

Sun Kil Moon -- Carry Me Ohio

2007-02-21T11:03:00.000-05:00

Sun Kil Moon -- Carry Me Ohio
This song is a tricksy time machine. You start it up and the melody and the harmony take you back to the nearest time when everything was okay: for some it was last night, everything accomplished, stretching out, drifting to sleep smiling; for others it's decades, unraveling the years, the conflicts and disappointments, the heartbreaks which will not be silent, to arrive at 6 minutes 21 seconds of bliss. And then the present returns.

It's a salve, a temporary fix, requiring inattention to the lyrics expressing that same loss the listener had hoped to escape. In a Philip K. Dick world some might hack the song into a permanent fix, programming it to repeat ad infinitum, increasing exponentially in volume and intensity in a doomed hope of shortcircuiting all conflicting thoughts, of rattling the skull so hard the words don't make sense, just the lullaby.

Christopher Porter/Suburbs Are Killing Us posted this track in mid-April 2004, and I'm only just now catching up to the CD: it had been half-forgotten (not the melody; no, that stays) until I recently stumbled onto it again, used and in great shape.

Ghosts of the Great Highway has been re-released recently with six bonus tracks, and allmusic.com considers the alternate version of "Carry Me Ohio" better than this one. Have any of you heard it? Thoughts on how they compare?

technical difficulties

2007-02-19T00:00:00.000-05:00

Ruby Isle -- Atom Bomb

2007-02-15T12:10:00.000-05:00

Ruby Isle -- Atom Bomb
The Machine of Death is an upcoming collection of fiction about a rather terse machine predicting how people will die. Ruby Isle have got their entry in early.

As the Machine of Death site says:

The realization that we could now know how we were going to die had changed the world: people became at once less fearful and more afraid. There's no reason not to go skydiving if you know your sliver of paper says "BURIED ALIVE". The realization that these predictions seemed to revel in turnabout and surprise put a damper on things. It made the predictions more sinister -- yes, if you were going to be buried alive you weren't going to be electrocuted in the bathtub, but what if in skydiving you landed in a gravel pit? What if you were buried alive not in dirt but in something else? And would being caught in a collapsing building count as being buried alive? For every possibility the machine closed, it seemed to open several more, with varying degrees of plausibility.

Or, as Ruby Isle would have it,
"I called my baby, said 'baby, the end is coming'; she said
'Na na na na na, na na na na na, naa naa naa naa, na na na na na.
'Na na na na na, na na na na na, naa naa naa naa, na na na na na.'"

Ruby Isle's narrator is distraught (this is a horrible time to die). Ruby Isle are not (this is a great time to party).
[Ruby Isle's MySpace page and Fanatic Promotion page]

Odawas -- Alleluia

2007-02-14T19:55:00.000-05:00

Odawas -- Alleluia
Titles are treacherous things, conjuring up images of what they will, regardless of what songs they're affixed to. I suspect this one slipped away in the night and found itself a home more to its liking.

If it's a song of praise, I have either never properly heard praise or never recognized it. It's a song of spare beauty, of echoing in a cave, of "this is all I have, stop it, this is all I have." Perhaps it's a song of resignation, of guilty relief, of a friend's death after protracted and painful illness.

Odawas have a website and a myspace page and an album due out March 6.

...
A fascinating discussion on the general American acceptance of rape in prison and what it says about the psychology of people accepting it.

...
I've recently noticed people accessing the site through proxies skirting censorship. It's useful to remember that there are always more than one; and in some cases there seem to be networks of them. In any case, here are some additional tips on how to access banned sites (like blogspot.com and typepad.com) from within India, Pakistan, and China, (and presumably also Iran and many other countries) and some more tips on circumventing censorship.

Frederick Knight -- Trouble

2007-02-12T00:01:00.000-05:00

Frederick Knight -- Trouble
Here's a rare unreleased Cee-Lo track.

Erm, no, it's Frederick Knight, best known for writing "Ring My Bell." He should be better known for being an all-around funky soulster with a hip sense of style (dig the coat) or, barring that, for having a damn good ear. "I've Been Lonely for So Long" and "Your Love's All Over Me" are top-notch R&B; and "Trouble" is no slouch either.

The album as a whole is a long revelation, like repeatedly turning the corner and running into an old friend, even if it's someone you've never seen before.
[I've Been Lonely for So Long @ amazon or @ emusic]

Nancy Wilson and John Fahey

2007-02-09T14:02:00.000-05:00

Nancy Wilson -- A Brand New Me
A Sunday drive, holding hands. Maybe you'll stop somewhere for a leisurely brunch, maybe you'll trade friendly in-jokes, wink at each other behind the waitress's back, maybe you'll drive home with a pleasant anticipation.
[Can't Take My Eyes Off You, out of print]

John Fahey -- Summertime
Summertime, yes: early morning before it's hot, sunrise through a screen door, golden light crosshatched over floorboards. An owl in the woods hooting still, the crows not yet awake.
[Red Cross @ amazon.com or @ emusic]

Demis Roussos -- L.O.V.E. Got a Hold of Me

2007-02-08T13:23:00.000-05:00

Demis Roussos -- L.O.V.E. Got a Hold of Me

At the end of a slow sappy LP leading me to think I'd misspent my $1, there was this disco track, which is quite enjoyable provided you don't have a Pavlovian aversion to disco. Apparently there's a 10-minute version of it which is expensive and highly regarded among DJs. Alas, all I have is the LP version, clocking in at just under 6 minutes.

I don't know much about Roussos, except that if you rearrange the letters in his name you can spell "Soused Morris" and that I doubt I'll be buying anything more by him.
[out of print]

IODA: Wailin' Jennys

2007-02-07T10:40:00.000-05:00

The Wailin' Jennys -- Long Time Traveller

[Jericho Beach Music @ iTunes Music Store, and @ eMusic]

Bataan and Darondo, cake and ice cream

2007-02-05T11:21:00.000-05:00

Darondo -- Let My People Go
I love the DIY attitude behind Darondo's music; the audio's a bit muddy; his singing is not highly trained; this song finds a groove and rides it for all it's worth. Still, there's something refreshing about gritty soul, or any music that's not overproduced and autotuned.

"Let My People Go" is a simmering political funk which I'd thought of posting on MLK day but decided not to (perhaps in a bit of unChristian judgment which would shame the reverend's memory--Darondo was a pimp. No, not metaphorically).

I first encountered Darondo on Soul Sides, then got a reminder on Said the Gramophone, both in posting "Didn't I," a plaintive lovelorn song with sour guitar. It's a fascinating song, but for me the star of the show is "Let My People Go."
[Let My People Go @ amazon or at emusic.com.]

Joe Bataan -- It's a Good Feeling (Riot)
Allmusic slams this song in its review of the Riot! and looks on it with a puzzled affection in its review of Mr. New York, but I'm not puzzled or ambivalent about it. It evokes a street party rather than a riot, yes, but I don't think that's any great failing. It makes more sense musically, and unless you're smashing things, riots aren't any great fun anyway.

I first encountered Joe Bataan with the terrific track "Subway Joe" posted on Tofu Hut; Soul Sides followed suit a year later.
[Riot! @ amazon or at emusic.com.]

Catching Up:
I've been catching up on CD purchases for tracks I heard on mp3blogs. Some exceedingly brief reviews:

Abner Jay: Rev. Frost posted the three best tracks, but damn is "I'm So Depressed" a great song, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of blues tunes (the Mr. Olympia Arnold, not the post-heart-surgery Arnold).

Mirah: posted at StG. Very nice, with some unexpected (and welcome) experimentation offsetting the sweetness of it.

Gomez: wow. This one's cheating, maybe, since Sean gave me their first two CDs directly, but Bring It On is just amazing work and Liquid Skin is good too. Their latest (How We Operate) is occasionally very good but is saddled with a couple of radio-pop wankfest emo tracks.

Bruce Springsteen (We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions): Rosswords posted the best track, and there's another knockout, but all the rest are solid and have grown on me with time.

Feist: Let It Die. Finally bought this one after loving the track posted at StG and at fluxblog for, oh, the last three years. Very very mellow, pleasant.

John Fahey: more on him later.

There are a lot of other albums I've bought because of various mp3blog postings, but these are the recent ones I can think of that I've bought that I didn't first hear somewhere else.

California Soul & The Who-Who Song

2007-01-31T18:40:00.000-05:00

Marlena Shaw -- California Soul
Handclaps, a horn section, violins, a backbeat, and impassioned vocals put together in a funky little soul gem people go crate digging for. Luckily you won't have to go digging for it unless you're a vinyl purist. The track is on a few different CDs, including a rerelease of Shaw's Spice of Life and this Northern Soul compilation I picked up on a whim. Shadow and Cut Chemist sampled it on Brainfreeze; it's the second sample from that set that I stumbled onto (the other was an Eddie Bo track).

Jackie Wilson -- The Who-Who Song
Who? Who? Nobody but my sweet baby. You better believe it.
[The Original Northern Soul Selection: 36 Dancefloor Shakers]

I don't know who allmusic are kidding in calling this CD "electronica";I can only conclude that they haven't listened to it. It is in fact Northern Soul, and generally fit to get the dancefloor moving.

Schuman the Human

2007-01-30T22:59:00.000-05:00

Schuman the Human -- Tow That Line
Schuman the Human is an alt-country band unafraid to experiment. On their debut they serve up a strange and wonderful mix of sounds, from the pop bluegrass "Klutz," to a banjo-accompanied children's singalong reinterpretatiing of the Northern Soul "Oh How Happy" to the lighter-tempting violin-and-backbeat "Dark Regrets."

"Tow the Line" is one I like for its reverberating guitar, elliptical vocals, let's-all-hold-hands protest, and hints of mournfulness giving way to joyous hoedown.

Schuman the Human are Mark Foster on guitar and banjo, Chili Gold on vocals, Mick Frangou on drums and Gordon Maguire on bass and keyboards. Their CD is on SVC Records, record label of Simon from the returned-from-hiatus Spoilt Victorian Child.
[Schuman The Human]
[Schuman the Human's MySpace page]

Also missed, and also returned: Tofu Hut.

body snatchers mix, part 10

2007-01-28T23:55:00.000-05:00

Helen Merrill -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (1988)
A leisurely paced version with subdued instrumentation giving it a somber and somehow chilly feel. There are a number of ways to deliver the lyrics, with or without the wink; Merrill opts for without, performing it as high drama.
[from Helen Merrill Sings Cole Porter, out of print]

Hank Jones -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (Nov 1990-1991)
The bass and drums are steps up a hill; the piano carries the melody them; the strings sprint ahead like a cat, looking back, weaving between the piano's feet, affectionate or maybe just hoping to trip it.
[Hank Jones with the Meridian String Quartet, used for a dollar]

Keely Smith & Nelson Riddle -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (released Aug 1991)
If Shirley Bassey were to sing the song, this is how she'd do it: swinging for the fences, horns and drums like something lifted from the soundtrack to a retro spy film.
[Capitol Sings Cole Porter: Anything Goes]

Mandino Reinhardt and Note Manouche -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (January 1, 1994)
What do I know about Mandino Reinhardt? It wouldn't fill the back of a postage stamp: he's from Alsace; he's a well known guitarist there; he has the same surname as Django. Related? Biologically, maybe. Musically, yes.
[Gypsy Swing From Alsace @ emusic]
A very brief writeup on Mandino Reinhardt.

Dan Barrett -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (Jul 23, 1997-Oct 28, 1997)
This is a very muted presentation, and not just in the trumpet. It swings, yes, but it's the swing of a grandfather clock in slow motion. Barrett follows it not with a security guard explaining the rules of the game but with a jog past a lake with distant sailboat and setting sun reflected in ripples, complete with lakeside dog jumping to catch a frisbee.
[Melody in Swing, also @ emusic]

Dick Hyman and Derek Smith -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (1998)
Dick Hyman and Derek Smith turn in the spiritual brother to the Freddie Hubbard/Jimmy Heath version, except on piano instead of horn: the two in competition for how quickly they can play while holding a rhythm and how hard they can bang the keys as they do.
[Dick & Derek at the Movies ]

Beegie Adair -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (Feb 2001)
This one starts off sounding like it's going to be a typical sleepy approach, but Adair shows more imagination than that, giving it a driving rhythm and dropping bits of the melody as she sees fit. I'm not sure how much of the tune was improvised, but from the starts and stops I get the feeling that some of it was but that she has a perceptive band in tune with each other and having fun.
[Dream Dancing: Songs of Cole Porter]

Lemar -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (2004)
Allmusic.com describes this one as "swell-egant," which leads me to suspect I'm not a big fan of swell-egance. I hoped for a more dynamic range on the vocals though I'm not sure why: I don't have that reaction to Billy Holliday's version or to Lena Horne's, though they're arguably working within an equally narrow range.

I'm sure it's just a matter of taste; Lemar has a successful career across the pond.
[De-Lovely soundtrack]

And a song not by Cole Porter!
Tom Waits -- Earth Died Screaming
This is a bizarre and sinister track with funky guitar, off-kilter percussion, and snarling slurred vocals proclaiming death and doom: John the Revelator with a sense of melody and a junkyard band.
[Bone Machine]

Thanks again to Girish and Rev. Frost for suggestions and for helping me track down many of these covers.

body snatchers mix, part 9

2007-01-23T22:56:00.000-05:00

Buddy Tate and Claude Hopkins -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (March-October 1960)
If this were a scene in one of the films it would be an extended take from Siegel's version, Miles and Becky in the bar, close dancing and pretending they're not falling in love again, the barman studiously not paying them any mind.
[Buddy and Claude @ emusic]

King Curtis -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (April 1960)
King Curtis was a record producer who started as a session player for R&B groups before moving on to a solo career. He recorded with John Lennon, Billy Preston, Aretha Franklin, and Duane Allman, as well as releasing a number of his own albums, before he was stabbed to death outside his New York apartment.

When I first heard this version of the song I wondered whether Curtis had cribbed from Cannonball Adderley or the other way around. The dates were one clue; the other was that on this track King Curtis has Nat Adderley on cornet.

I think I prefer this version for its concision, though the piano by Wynton Kelly is also quite nice (but, naturally, Victor Feldman on Cannonball's version acquits himself nicely).
[Soul Meeting ]

Cannonball Adderley -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (November 1960)
The rhythm is the same as the King Curtis version, but the tempo sped up, the song stretched out, the group treating the song like a pencilled map they aim to fill in.
[What Is This Thing Called Soul?]

George Shearing -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (June 1962)
George Searing and his group swimming against the tide of bop, turning in a sedate version with the bass riding a groove, the piano swapping between syncopated melody, vamps, and flights of fancy.
[Jazz Moments ]

Carmell Jones -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (1965)
Doubletime bass with trumpet (Carmell Jones) and tenor sax (Jimmy Heath) taking turns on the melody over nine minutes, seeing which one of them can blow hard and fast enough to reheat the cup of tea behind the microphone. It bubbles a few times; they give up, winded.
[Jay Hawk Talk]

Freddie Hubbard & Jimmy Heath -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (1965)
Eleven and a half minute version with sax and trumpet in competition again, Jimmy Heath trying to outbop himself. By the end of it, the tea has boiled and the ceramic cracked. I imagine the applause at the end is partly gratitude for turning in such an intense performance and partly relief for not killing themselves in the trying.
[Jam Gems: Live at the Left Bank]

Chris Connor -- Love Medley: What Is This Thing Called Love? / You Don't Know What Love Is (Aug 1986)
Chris Connor with a version which is energetic enough on its own but sounds positively tranquil in comparison to the last two versions.
[Classic]

Jessica Williams -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (Oct. 1986)
Jessica Williams on a whimsical, agile, and energetic piano rendition recorded live.
[Encounters, Vol. 2]

Mel Powell -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (October 21, 1987)
Mel Powell on his return to jazz after decades as a classical composer, recorded live on a cruise ship. It's a good track; Powell's in fine form; the bass gets a solo which maybe goes on a bit too long; but the group are obviously stretching themselves a bit and having a good time, and they have an appreciative audience.
[Return of Mel Powell]

...
Well, today didn't go as planned. Still, I think I've probably said all I have to say about the Body Snatchers works, at least without further reading. Next post will wrap it up, most likely with some brief summary of findings about sleep and dreams.

a geeky non-musical post

2007-01-23T11:37:00.001-05:00

Brief technical post for Beta Blogger users using Classic templates (this may also apply to the new templates; I couldn't say, really, as I've left off experimenting with them until they get their XHTML fixed):

If you're sticking with your classic template rather than the newer (non-validating XHTML) templates^*, you might be wondering how to get an autogenerated link from the labels pages back to your home page.

Blogger doesn't seem to have a classic template conditional tag that will cover it. The accepted conditional tags for the classic template are MainPage, ArchivePage, ItemPage, and MainOrArchivePage. Blogger shows how to put a conditional tag on your header text (or image) to autogenerate a link from certain pages back to the main page (for, say, people coming in by search engine to a specific post).

Typically that's done with something like
<ItemPage><a href="<$BlogURL$>"><$BlogTitle$></a></ItemPage>

Since there isn't a classic template tag for labels, one option which seems like it would work is to change the default behavior to be to generate the header link and then to cause MainPage not to link it. Since you can't tell a specific page not to do something, the hack would be to tell MainPage to add an </a> before the header text or image and then to add another start href tag after it (to keep them paired and keep the HTML validating). For whatever reason, that doesn't work: Blogger treats label pages as still being at the main URL and so the link doesn't show up.

What does work is to use a bit of JavaScript to search the URL for the string "/search" and to add a link if that string is present. That code is below:
<script type="text/javascript"></script>
<$BlogTitle$>
<script type="text/javascript"></script>

Of course this code won't work in Lynx or in browsers with JavaScript turned off, but according to this page, 95% of users do have JavaScript enabled.

Music post later today.

update: corrected a typo in the second If statement above which was preventing it from closing the tag.

update: modified this again to search the URL for "/search" rather than "search/label/", as the second one doesn't catch people going to a different page on the site through the search box at top left of blogs on *.blogspot.com.

*Blogger Beta bungles the XHTML validation even on otherwise-good classic templates, failing to encode ampersands in URLs, but two dozen errors is much better than 650 or more.

Roots Canal: Martini Cowboy

2007-01-21T11:11:00.000-05:00

Jack Grace Band -- Try Not to Cry

OK, let's take a short break from the old stuff. I went out to my favorite club last night and heard an urban country singer named Jack Grace, who bills himself as the Martini Cowboy. I particularly liked this song, so I bought the CD and I'm sharing it with y'all.

He told a pretty funny story about opening for Jerry Lee Lewis the night before, at B.B. King Blues Club in Times Square. Jerry Lee refused to sign his guitar, saying he only signs pianos. But after the set, Grace said he overheard Jerry Lee tell someone, "He's like that Cash boy, but good."

Oh, well. I guess you had to be there.

Bonus track: I'm pissed off because I looked at the forward calendar and saw that the yodeling banjoist Curtis Eller will be at Barbes this Friday night. I've been waiting for months for Eller to play one of the local Brooklyn clubs, but I have theater tickets on Friday night for a play written by an old friend, so I'll have to miss it. And I'll be out of town next Wednesday when he plays Joe's Pub in the city. Shit. Well, if you're in or near Park Slope on Friday, check it out. I already posted my favorite Curtis Eller song, Taking Up Serpents Again, so here's another song from the same album:
Curtis Eller's American Circus -- Never Hide That Scar

[The Martini Cowboy]
[Taking Up Serpents Again]

body snatchers mix, part 8

2007-01-20T22:17:00.000-05:00

Art Tatum -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (August 1, 1955)
A leisurely stroll down Vibraphone Lane. I can't help picturing this in a Woody Allen film, one of his light comedies, accompanied by a tracking shot with Allen and his love interest walking through Central Park.
[The Tatum Group Masterpieces, Vol. 3]

Art Tatum -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (September 7, 1955)
This time Tatum and his group have eight minutes to play a ten minute song; as soon as the last measure fades out, they throw down their instruments and dash outside to catch a bus.
[The Tatum Group Masterpieces, Vol. 5]

Ella Fitzgerald -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (Feb - Mar 1956)
Ella Fitzgerald turns in an effortlessly classy big band version, strong and confident.
[Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Cole Porter Songbook]

Tito Puente -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (May 2, 1956)
Puente leads a big band Latin jazz version: sax, trumpets, bass, drums, and piano supplemented with William Correa on bongo and Ramon Santa Maria on conga. The liner notes for this CD are both odd and brief, switching between defensiveness about Puente's body of work and scorn towards towards the perception of multiculti trendiness and the politically correct.
[Puente Goes Jazz]

Red Garland -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (Aug 1956)
Red Garland leading his first album with the jazz trio. I enjoy this version more each time I hear it: the drums and bass step in and out at will; Paul Chambers delivers a solid acoustic bass solo; Arthur Taylor serves up two nice drum breaks; and the piano? If it's good enough for Miles Davis I'm willing to pay attention to it to try to figure out why. I'm sure I don't understand as much of it as Davis did, but I'm glad to give it the attention.
[A Garland of Red]

Julie London -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (1958)
I wish I had Girish's ear and could say something clever about this song's construction. It seems over before I expect it, and I'm at a loss as to how to describe the guitar.
[Julie London Sings Cole Porter ]

Anita O'Day -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (April 1959)
Anita O'Day delivers the line with a frantic melody, followed by some improvisation, scat and drum breaks, a sudden slowing and outro.
[Anita O'Day Swings Cole Porter with Billy May]

Mel Tormé -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (Apr-Aug 1959)
This is not an unexpected delivery from Tormé, though if the date on this is correct I think it is an unexpected performance from his backup singers: the vocal style is a throwback to twenty years earlier (a style I enjoy quite a lot, but find in short supply for most post-WWII music).
[Night and Day: The Cole Porter Songbook]

Bill Evans -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (1959)
If music is the space between the notes, Evans is a master of feng shui, playing the melody like a familiar face in newsprint dots.
[Portrait in Jazz]

Apologies for posting so many tracks at once; this is not how I usually do it but I've started this mix so I want to finish it, and I'm feeling increasingly ready to move on to talking about songs which are not by Cole Porter.

In thinking of Ferrara's Body Snatchers, it occurred to me that Marti for some reason never attends school like her little brother, which led me to wonder why she was still at home, which in turn led me to wonder why I should assume that if she's old enough to have graduated then she should have moved. It's a cultural assumption about something that's not always true even in the U.S. Yet it's a useful assumption, insofar as it leads to questions about the various Body Snatchers works' inherent Americanness.

Siegel's 1956 version has been selected to the National Film Registry and honored by the American Film Institute, and yes, it seems informed by a distinctly American political landscape, whether the film serves as a metaphor for Communist or McCarthyist fears. But what about the other two films, and the text versions? I'm reminded of Stephen King's note in Danse Macabre that The Exorcist made little money in Germany, but that ticket sales for Dawn of the Dead were through the roof. King takes that as a sign of different culture: Germans were not particularly troubled by flower power and rebellious teenagers and so, lacking the cultural backdrop of The Exorcist, found the film uninteresting, yet Romero's satire of commercialism hit home. I wish I knew how the Body Snatchers films performed in other countries compared to other American releases. More than that, I wish I'd found some thoughtful writing about the cultural implications of the later two films, but most of the writings I've found on them either take the cultural background for granted or treat it in brief detail in service of a larger point.

I wonder, for instance, how a Japanese Body Snatchers might look, or what themes a Body Snatchers in The Netherlands would explore, or for that matter a Body Snatchers set in an English boarding school (think If.... as a horror film). I think the closest we got to that was Robert Rodriguez's The Faculty, based on an entertaining but hardly horrifying Kevin Williamson script.

Williamson makes the odd choice of having one of his characters accuse Finney's story of being a blatant ripoff of Robert Heinlein's Puppet Masters, another Cold War novel about an alien invasion. I haven't read the book but from conversation with Sean at Said the Gramophone, and from various readings about the book, it seems apparent that the novel's Cold War setting is as far from subtext as it is from tasteful. Yet Body Snatchers and Puppet Masters have some apparent differences: in Puppet Masters the aliens are parasites which attach to humans to control their minds; in Body Snatchers the aliens replicate the human bodies and memories and destroy the originals. The Faculty, in its alien-parasite/mind-control angle, shows more similarities to Heinlein's Puppet Masters than Body Snatchers does, and so its accusations against Finney come off as a bit cheeky (which is perhaps to be expected from the screenwriter of Scream).

Of the three official film versions, Ferrara's is the only one to have a sympathetic psychiatrist and, as it turns out, the main character in the The Invasion, played by Nicole Kidman, is also a psychiatrist. As mentioned in an earlier post, The Invasion was originally based on Finney's story, yet after a number of plot changes the producers decided the film was no longer based on Finney's work. But imagine if it still were--or, for that matter, imagine other settings the story might have to allow some easy commentary about our culture and what it means to be human.

1) An intern working in a mental hospital--ostensibly studying schizophrenia but secretly studying confirmation bias in diagnosis and treatment--finds that the ward's patients mysteriously become completely sane, one by one.

Ferrara's version at the end notes that the human experience is much more complicated than simply allowing love; imagine a Body Snatchers unafraid to tackle existential despair. Prior film versions have had characters, horrified, rejecting the notion of a world without love; this one asks whether to reject a world without hate, impulsiveness, despair, and paranoia. And what about mankind's fundamental freedom to do anything at all, including make unwise decisions?

Budget: $15 million.
Key scene: a bipolar woman accepts the alien assurance of a world without misery.
Direction: a cross between Mario Bava and Ingmar Bergman.
Tomatometer: 73%
Cultural influence: film geeks remember it fondly; the film is mentioned in a footnote in a Master's thesis in mass communications submitted in 2012.
Recoups investment: two weeks into French release.

2) The Faculty suffers a few flaws, not least that the plot is fairly predictable and that the characters occasionally act more like chess pieces than people. Still, a high school or middle school would be a fantastic place for a Body Snatchers film, exploring what Ferrara touched on: adults don't listen to children, and children have little power. This remake sets the film in a typical U.S. high school and asks the audience to imagine a put-upon main character dealing with constant harassment, mounting anxieties, indifferent teachers, and unhelpful parents.

Budget: $25 million.
Key scene: The bullies allow the geek to eat his brownbag lunch without addenda, confrontation, or even a sidelong glance.
Direction: like a less careful but more cosmopolitan Steven Spielberg.
Tomatometer: 58%
Cultural influence: carvings on 3% of the nation's middle school desks.
Recoups investment: opening weekend.

3) The congregation of a Southern Baptist church loses its passion for Hallelujahs and Praise-the-Lords. They have dinner on the grounds; Mrs. Johnson fails to comment about the amount of onion in Mrs. Smith's casserole. Tithes go up as everyone begins contributing the 10%; SUVs become less common in the parking lot as carpooling increases.

Budget: $14 million.
Key scene: "Oh Hallelujah, Mrs. Sullivan! You had your baby already!?"
"Oh, no; Harold and I decided we didn't want it. Isn't that right, dear?"
"Yes, dear."
Mrs. Sullivan gets solemn, approving nods from most of the choir.
Direction: wildly variable, with a script that critics wish were a subtle satire.
Tomatometer: 6%
Cultural influence: The Unitarian Universalists condemn the film and Pat Robertson praises it, in both cases for being homophobic and witless.
Recoups investment: Twelve years after theatrical release.

Roots Canal: You Can't Catch Me

2007-01-16T01:03:00.000-05:00

The Blues Project: You Can't Catch Me
Chuck Berry: You Can't Catch Me
While we're doing covers, let's switch from Body Snatchers to auto catchers. I've always loved this cover by The Blues Project of the great Chuck Berry song, You Can't Catch Me.

Is Chuck Berry one of the world's most underrated lyricists, or what? It's not just his amazing guitar work, or his duck walk. His lyrics rock. I just love it on his original version when he stretches out the syllables, "When you get too close, I'll be gone like a cool breeze."

Danny Kalb was a lightning-fast guitarist who founded The Blues Project in 1965, but the band didn't take off until it was joined by Al Kooper, fresh off his studio gig providing those unforgettable organ licks on Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone. For a while, The Blues Project was the hottest band in Greenwich Village. They seemed to headline just about every weekend at Cafe Au Go-Go, which despite its funky name was the top rock venue downtown at the time (before Fillmore East opened). They mixed blues and folk and rock'n'roll in a big psychedelic jam; they used to be considered the East Coast equivalent of the Grateful Dead. They broke up in '67 when Kalb had a bad acid trip and Kooper left to found Blood, Sweat & Tears (apparently, Kalb wouldn't let him add a horn section to The Blues Project).

You Can't Catch Me comes from The Blues Project's only studio album, Projections, recorded in 1966. It's also included on a 1997 anthology of their music called, simply, Anthology.

Bonus Tracks:
The Blues Project: I Can't Keep From Crying
Al Kooper: Can't Keep From Crying Sometimes
On the subject of covers, here's an unusual one: Al Kooper covering himself. The first version is from the same Blues Project album, Projections; the second is from an amazing compilation album released the same year called What's Shakin' with songs by Kooper, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Lovin' Spoonful, Tom Rush and a band called Eric Clapton & The Powerhouse, which is actually John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers. I'm not sure whether they couldn't use Mayall's name for contractual reasons, or they just thought Clapton was a bigger star.

Which is the original and which is the cover? I have no idea.

[Anthology]
[What's Shakin']

body snatchers mix, part 7

2007-01-15T07:54:00.000-05:00

Carol screams (Ferrara, 1993)
(a.k.a. "You! Problematic director! Front and center!")

Les Paul -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (June 1950)
Les Paul with some overdubbing experimentation, second guitar like a dream where someone is shouting in a windstorm, sound snatched away, yet somehow you understand and it's all okay.
[The New Sound]

Dave Brubeck Octet -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (July 1950)
Brubeck's version starts somber, melancholy, and cautious, exploring a cage by lanternlight, then the lights come up and it's not a cave at all but a milquetoast ball at a military installation. The band strives to be polite, wanting very much not to meet the MP.
[The Dave Brubeck Octet]

Charlie Parker -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (1950)
Is it silly to say about a Charlie Parker song that you like the saxophone? Hm, then I won't. Instead I'll say I like the strings, and the brushed drums with the occasional kick, and the piano skipping down the street, and how Parker plays around all of them, and how the audience seems maybe unsure of what to expect but willing to go along with it.
[available on Charlie Parker with Strings]

Charlie Parker -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (March 25, 1952)
Parker and the band doing their damnedest to blow the roof off (Parker is a gunslinger, see; he uses the first half-dozen notes or so, then shoots holes in the melody until it's alive but barely recognizable. And that's how he leaves it, so its loved ones can identify the corpse in full realization that it was not as badass as it thought).
[digitized from The Verve Years (1952-1954), VE-2-2523, now available on Confirmation: The Best of the Verve Years]

Frank Sinatra -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (1953)
There are a lot of ways I could have imagined the song. This isn't one of them.
[Hello Young Lovers]

Frank Sinatra -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (April 1954)
Sinatra tries again, this time taking a much more melancholy approach to the song which probably suits it better.
[In the Wee Small Hours]

Charlie Mingus -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (Dec. 1954)
Some time in the mid 1990s, I read someone disparaging jazz by saying it was what happened when four different people played four different songs at the same time. I don't think I ever heard a jazz track that fit that definition until I sought out this one for this mix. The back of the LP tells me that what we have here is John LaPorta on alto sax playing the title track, Thad Jones on trumpet playing "Hot House," and Teo Macero on baritone sax playing "Woodyn You." Very strange, frequently dissonant, and 100% wonderful. Sorry for the few rubs on the LP though.
[Digitized from Everest Records FS235, which has since gone out of print; also available on Jazzical Moods.] [--thanks, Jason!]

(more Body Snatchers discussion: spoiler warnings still in effect)

Rereading "Genre and Closure in the Seven Versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Finney ('54, '55, '78), Siegel ('56, '56), Kaufman ('78) and Ferrara ('93)" I'm struck by how similar my take on Ferrara's film is to Robert Shelton's, but I suspect that Shelton is the more perceptive reader. Shelton notes that the pacing in Ferrara's film slows "when Marti (played by Gabrielle Anwar) has no clothes on," which includes both her leisurely bath and the scene later when she's been taken to the hospital for some very un-Hippocratic treatment. I'd noticed the slowed pace the first time, missed it the second. In the hospital, pod tendrils snake into Marti's nose and mouth and the pod figure sits up, nude, back arched and mouth open as if in rapture, and then turns to Tim and strikes (and holds) a rather seductive pose, speaking to him in a soft tone. All of these are behaviors we have no reason to expect from a pod person. I'd be tempted to relate the pod's indifference to her public nudity to the alienness of the pod people, as in Kaufman's version, except that it's not, really; it's saddled with an imitation of human behavior which Marti's pod has no reason to indulge in. At this point in the film Tim is surrounded with enemies who will gladly and permanently subdue him, so the nudity seems to be there for reasons other than story-logic, which is already saddled with the stipulation that Marti survive and that (nearly) everyone else is expendable.

Shelton also points out the "idiot plot hole" of the General allowing Marti and Tim to leave: "Let them go," he says, "no one will believe them." As Shelton notes, "When the equivalent of this remark was made in Siegel's 1956 version, a solitary, unarmed, exhausted small town doctor was being 'let go'; in Ferrara's 1993 version, General Platt has just 'let go' an armed attack helicopter and pilot."

All of this suggests (to me at least) that Ferrara's film is what a feminist would call "problematic," yet I have to admit that it's also successful on somewhat unexpected terms: I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Maybe that ties back to Rosenbaum's notion that a great film doesn't have to be a good film (or, stated another way, that the quality of a film is distinct from how much it causes the audience to think). I'm not sure if Ferrara's film is a great or even a good film but it's definitely been a thought-provoking one.

body snatchers mix, part 6

2006-12-16T00:14:00.000-05:00

Andy and his painting (Ferrara, 1993)

When you play a piece of music there are so many different ways you could play it. You keep asking yourself what if. You try this and you say but what if and you try that. When you buy a CD you get one answer to the question. You never get the what if.
--Kenzo Yamamoto in The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt.

I have to wake up in four hours and take a ten-hour flight. Please forgive the lack of description of the tunes.

The tunes are in chronological order, or as near to it as I could get them; if someone knows the recording dates on any of these and wouldn't mind sharing, I'd appreciate it.

These early versions aren't my favorites, though I do like them; my favorites will come later: Ella Fitzgerald, Hank Jones, Keely Smith and Nelson Riddle, Bill Evans, Buddy Tate and Claude Hopkins, Charlie Mingus, Charlie Parker, King Curtis.... Some of those versions want to blow the top of your head off and douse your brain in gasoline.

Wrapup post (or posts? I have over 30 more versions of the song, most of them good, most of them worth sharing) in January.

Big thanks to Reverend Frost and to Girish for making recommendations and helping me track some of these down.

Ray Vega -- Greenhouse
This one is here because greenhouses figured largely in the first two body snatchers films (and a swamp in Ferrara's, sorry) and because I'd already decided on "What Is This Thing Called Love?" for the end when I stumbled onto this track and read that it was based on the same changes. Synchronicity.
[Ray Vega]

Artie Shaw and The Meltones -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (1938/39)
[Artie and the Singers]

Jo Stafford -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (anywhere between 1939 and 1946)
[Too Marvellous For Words]

Anita O'Day -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (1940s)
[And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine ]

Lena Horne -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (1941)
[Stormy Weather: The Legendary Lena (1941-1958) ]

Nat King Cole -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (1943-1944)
[This Side Up ]

Billie Holiday -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (1945)
[Billie Holiday's Greatest Hits (Decca) ]

Django Reinhardt -- What Is This Thing Called Love? (1947)
[The Classic Early Recordings in Chronological Order or, you know, get the box set a la carte @ emusic]

(Spoiler warnings still in effect: plot details, including endings.)

Ferrara's Body Snatchers, in spite of removing the sensational "Invasion of the," does not return to the roots of Finney's story. Of all the versions, it's probably the least like the original serialized story, in spite of having an ending most like it.

The film centers on a teenage girl named Marti Malone, who, like most of the film's characters, has no direct match with any character in the previous stories. Marti is moving to an Army base in the southern U.S., where her father Steve has been sent as an agent of the EPA to monitor use of chemicals on site. Steve's job prompts discussion of chemicals and toxicity, showing a concern for the environment most likely borrowed (like the garbage trucks and those hair-raising alien screams) from Kaufman's film. Yet there are differences with all prior versions of the film, some of them quite striking. Finney's stories were in the first-person; Siegel's mimicked that with the (occasionally cheesy) voiceover. Kaufman's version did not have a voiceover; and Ferrara's version restores it, yet only as a bookending device: two by Marti, at beginning and end, and one at the end by Carol.

Near the beginning of the film, Marti and her family are shown driving across rural highway. When they stop at a gas station somewhere outside the base, looking like approximately the middle of nowhere, Marti goes to the restroom and is rushed by a large man in camouflage. He pushes her up against the door with his hand over her mouth, warning her about people who "get you when you sleep"; Marti manages to slip out the door and away from him, where she screems for her father. Inside the restroom, Steve and a gas station attendant find that there's no one there. It's an odd resolution to the scene, since there seems to be nowhere for the man to have hidden and so it seems to hint that Ferrara is both bending the rules and playing with kid gloves in regards to Marti. This choice, coupled with the choice to have Marti provide voiceover, immediately leads the audience to expect that Marti will most likely survive and therefore reduces the tension in the rest of the film.

Also, by having Marti provide voiceover, Ferrara hints at the possibility of a feminist take on the Body Snatchers story--but it's a version that he is not particularly interested in authoring, though Marti is much more proactive than either Becky or Elisabeth. Marti doesn't share the "wait and see" attitude of the characters in the other films, instead recognizing and dispatching one pod person nearly as soon as she suspected it wasn't human. Siegel's version, on the other hand, is marked by its time, seeming to think that women are mostly for screaming and for being carried. One scene in particular: Miles and Becky in Miles' office, with pod people waiting nearby for them to fall asleep. Miles begins to formulate an escape plan: he'll get the pod people to rush in and then inject them with something to incapacitate them. "It wouldn't work," he says, "I might get one or even two but I couldn't possibly get three of them." And Becky responds: "You're forgetting something, darling--me. It isn't three against one; it's three against two." Every time I see the film, I think that Becky is probably using 1950s-talk for "Goddammit, Miles, breasts don't cause incompetence."

Of all the versions of the story, Ferrara's is most explicitly about the nuclear family. In fact, the shift in focus from a potential couple to an existing family is so striking it causes some critics (like Robert Shelton in "Genre and Closure in the Seven Versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers" to claim that "There are no children or adolescents at all in the Finney narratives or the Kaufman movie." There are; in Kaufman's version Elisabeth is first shown picking a flower as a group of schoolchildren walk past, being encouraged by their teacher to pick the "pretty flowers"; and later in the same film there is a busload of children unloading and going into a building, a young girl complaining that she isn't tired and doesn't want to go to sleep. Similarly, both versions of Finney's novel contain the prototype for Siegel's Jimmy Grimaldi, the son of the farmers who closed the vegetable stand (presumably to grow pods instead): "A nine-year-old boy came in with his grandmother, with whom he was now living, because he became hysterical at the sight of his mother who, he said, wasn't his mother at all." (Finney '55, p. 22; '78, p. 25)

How did this boy reach this conclusion? What did he see, if anything? Finney and Siegel both leave it to our imaginations; Ferrara shows us: at their new home, after the delivery of several boxes supposedly containing equipment for Steve Malone, Andy walks in on his mother, who is sleeping. As he watches, her body crumples and disintegrates, and the closet door opens. A woman looking just like his mother is standing there, completely nude and impassive. He runs, screaming, and his father catches him to ask what's going on. The pod-Carol descends the stairs and says that the boy had a nightmare. This scene is one of the more terrifying in the film, perfectly capturing what it's like to be a child: dismissed and patronized, worries ignored. Andy's situation is complicated by the fact that in Andy's first day at his new day care, the children were told to paint--their paintings are all strikingly similar; his is different. He's an outsider and knows it, and everyone else does too; and now he knows why.

And here, I think, is where the film falters: Marti is a typical U.S. teenager, at that age where she seems to think most of her family is insufferable, including her six-year-old brother and especially her stepmother. She's somewhat alienated, somewhat self-involved, yet most of her troubles seems rather superficial given the broader context of the story. Andy is a more sympathetic character, old enough to know that something is deeply wrong but too young to do anything about it. He is in danger and knows it; Marti is in danger and doesn't know it; the film has an implied sympathy with Marti's point of view; we know that Marti will most likely live; Marti meets a man she is attracted to, whom her father doesn't like; and Marti has pointless arguments with her family about independence.

The trajectory of the story seems clear early on yet, oddly enough, for me the film serves as a counterexample to Hitchcock's ticking-bomb theory: rather than delighting in suspense I checked off items on a list as they happened. It's probably my coolness towards both the plot and the characters that caused this emotional distance; and I know that some reviewers (including Roger Ebert) found the film very effective. For me the film seemed a strange beast, interesting in how it's different from the others, interesting in what it attempts and where and how it succeeds and fails, but not emotionally engaging. It seems a "faster" watch than the others, the plot developing more quickly and arriving at a sprint sooner (though it slows to a trot in the scene with Marti taking a bath--I'll leave it to the viewers to decide whether that's because Ferrara really enjoyed filming those scenes or because he was both paying homage to Hitchcock and trying to exploit that suppressed knowledge that you're most vulnerable in the bathroom).

In spite of Forest Whitaker's overacting and the general predictability of the story, the film is well-crafted and at least never dull, yet at the end of it all I'm left wondering if at heart the film is really a teenage revenge fantasy in horror-film clothes: after her family is destroyed, Marti and Tim fly away in a helicopter, blowing up the pod peoples' trucks and buildings along the way. In voiceover Marti talks about how revenge, hate, remorse, despair, pity, and fear are all human emotions. This retaliation, coupled with the military setting--military destroying humanity, one civilian and one soldier left striking back at the military--makes me wonder what the film means, or if it even means anything. Are we to make anything of the military setting? Is it merely there for, as Ebert points out, somewhere where pod people would seem to blend in?

And what does it mean when Marti and Tim land in Atlanta and Carol's warning to Steve plays back in slowed voiceover? "Where you gonna go?" Carol says. "Where you gonna run? Where you gonna hide? Nowhere. Because there's no one like you left." Is that to be taken as a haunting memory or an accurate omen? I don't know the answer to these questions.

Ferrara fades to black. In a way it's a spiritual brother to Siegel's ending.

body snatchers mix, part 5

2006-12-15T10:59:00.000-05:00

Lightnin' Hopkins -- Feel So Bad
Acoustic country-blues with Hopkins' distinctive reedy voice and some banging piano backup.
[Blues Kingpins]

Waylon Jennings -- Crying
Jennings is not quite up to the melody; his reach isn't as agile as Orbison's, his touch not as deft. He's like a blackhat hacker whose social engineering fails and so he decides to brute force it. It's inelegant but it works.
[Country Giant @ emusic]

Rebekah Del Rio -- Llorando (Crying)
This one's from Mulholland Drive; supposedly it was a one-take recording, which (if true) is all the more amazing considering how well it turned out. This performance is like an angel, watching mute for six thousand years, then deciding it has something to say about sadness.
[Mulholland Drive: Original Motion Picture Score]

Lee Dorsey -- Tears, Tears and More Tears
Lee Dorsey just sounds so damn affable in his songs, like somebody's hip grandfather in sharp shoes and a fedora, incorrigible, bawdy, a metric ton of fun. He's known for working with Allen Toussaint and also the Meters; this one is a Toussaint production with the bass and muted guitars holding down the rhythm and pianos low in the mix accenting it. The horns are in tiptop shape and the vocals give them a run for their money.
[Yes We Can/Night People]

James & Bobby Purify -- You Don't Love Me
Uptempo soul number from James and Bobby Purify, most known for "I'm Your Puppet." This one's a rowdy track with knockout vocals.
[Shake a Tail Feather]

Bo Diddley -- You Don't Love Me (You Don't Care)
Bo Diddley can sing songs that don't contain the words "Bo Diddley," and they're often good, too. Love the harp on this one, especially the echo, and the pounding piano solo is good too. The song has an interesting structure: several verses, a solo, an outro.
[Bo's Blues ]

Oingo Boingo -- Imposter
This song is not afraid. Not afraid of you, or your mama, or your cyborg from the future with the chip in the head. It's from Only a Lad, an album with a gleefully creepy song about a pedophiles, but this isn't that one. This one's about music critics, who are painted less sympathetically than pedophiles. "You take the credit while others do all the work / You like to think you discovered them first / We all know you moved in after it was safe / That way you can never get hurt / You like to play God / You don't believe what you write / You're an imposter" and later, "Your head is firmly lodged way up your butt / Where it belongs."
[Only a Lad ]

(Discussion of Kaufman's film, with spoilers, follows.)

Philip Kaufman, in his remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, changed the setting from a small town outside San Francisco to San Francisco itself: at the start of the film, pods drift up off the surface of a barren planet, float through space, and descend on earth, the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. There they cover various plants with a gelatinous, translucent substance and begin putting out first roots and then flowers.

Elisabeth Driscoll finds one of the flowers, picks it, gets stared at by a teacher encouraging her young students to pick them, and goes home, where she tells her boyfriend Geoffrey that it might be a completely new species of plant that cross-pollinated from two others, something invasive and dangerous. Unlike in the first film and in the text versions, Elisabeth (the Becky character) is not divorced, but there are signs early on that their relationship is in trouble--the first thing Elisabeth says to Geoffrey is "Too much trouble to pick the mail up off the floor, Geoffrey?" She goes over to him and he pulls her into his lap; they kiss, and Geoffrey interrupts it to shout about the basketball game on the TV behind her.

Matthew Bennell, for his part, is not a doctor but a health inspector working for the Department of Health; he angers the wrong restaurant workers with a promise to have their permit revoked and then spends the rest of the film driving a car with a busted windshield. Elisabeth also works at the Department of Health, and though it's not clear if they've dated before, it is clear that they are attracted to each other. This attraction lends a certain tension to the early scenes in the film, when Elisabeth is still trying to make her relationship with Geoffrey work.

For someone who's seen the original film and noticed the teacher's interest in getting the children to take the flowers home it's probably no surprise that the next morning Geoffrey isn't acting like himself, that Elisabeth is curious and alarmed about it, and that Matthew has a psychologist friend with a number of fairly convincing explanations about why they might be imagining things. In this case the friend is David Kibner, played by Leonard Nimoy. It's an unusual casting choice, especially given the success of the original Star Trek series: Kaufman no doubt expected audiences to be unsurprised at his coolly logical demeanor and perhaps to wonder if it's too obvious that he would be a pod person.

Kaufman also makes a few recontextualizations: not just in changing the setting from suburban to urban but also in making explicit comparisons to disease, evolution, and pollution. All of the topics are covered in dialogue, generally more than once; so the subjects are not subtext but text itself. The change in Matthew's job is interesting, as it shifts him from private practice to civil servant, implying a certain amount of faith in the government yet maintaining the character's interest in contagion and infection. And while Jack is still an author (in this film a poet), he and his wife Nancy also own a mud bath. Nancy is explicitly concerned about environmental damage, at one point commenting that they don't know how the aliens invade humans--"We would never even notice it, not from the impurities we have. I mean we eat junk, we breathe junk--" And Elisabeth's interruption: "Look, I don't know where they're coming from. But I feel as though I've been poisoned today. We've got to take those flowers in and have them analyzed. This is the only thing we know; there is something here."

A number of critics and horror fans have commented that the new urban setting doesn't work (Stephen King, for instance, stating in Danse Macabre that Kaufman lost more than he gained in the change), but I suspect that's a matter of taste. Kaufman is not working on the same scale as Siegel or Finney: Finney's story is a somewhat harrowing but ultimately hopeful story. Siegel aimed for something darker--more loss, more betrayals, a grimmer ending--but had a more hopeful ending (or faux-hopeful ending, depending on your interpretation) forced onto the film. Kaufman states very calmly that there is no reason for hope and will be no survivors.

The aliens in this version sweep up and dispose of their human remains, and throughout the film we see garbage trucks compressing grey fluff in clouds of dust. The first vehicle seen in the film is a garbage truck; and the morning after Elisabeth takes home the flower, Geoffrey is already awake, sweeping something up when the alarm clock goes off. He ignores Elisabeth's questions and takes the trashcan downstairs to a waiting garbage truck. They're everywhere in the film, a constant reminder of both consumption and waste.

The film is also concerned with media, like the Siegel version and the various texts: at Matthew's house on top of a hill, Jack can't pick up any radio stations. Matthew tries several times to call for help, and while some of his later calls are intercepted, most of them go through because the people he's contacting have already been changed. They're careful to appear to help, at least until it no longer matters. When it's clear that the aliens are tired of waiting and are going to force the four of them to be changed, Matthew, Elisabeth, Jack, and Nancy flee Matthew's house, chased by a horde of pod people emitting a hair-raising, thoroughly alien, klaxxon-sounding alarm. The four humans run through dark city streets casting giant shadows, chased on foot and by motorcycle police, tracked by helicopter, and once they're cornered Jack decides to split up from them to find help. Nancy runs after him, leaving Matthew and Elisabeth to go in a different direction.

Eventually they hear some music coming from a ship, giving Matthew the idea to sail away. He goes to investigate, as in the previous film; and what he sees is a ship being loaded with pallets of pods. When he returns, Elisabeth has fallen asleep and won't wake up. He tells her comforting lies as her body disintegrates; and then her replacement sits up and tells him he should quit resisting. This scene is similar to the one near the end of the original film, except that in the original Siegel didn't dare show or imply that Becky was naked (most likely the Hayes code wouldn't allow it). As a result, in Siegel's film we're supposed to believe that the pod person came to life, took the clothes off the remains of the original, put them on itself, and then lay down to pretend to be tired for when Miles returned. No, in this one Elisabeth is naked and she doesn't care: not as she stands up, not as she follows Matthew to the greenhouse nearby, not as she walks through it with dozens of workers milling about, paying her no attention whatsoever. Some people take the nudity as gratuitous, but it strikes me as both logically consistent and purposeful, underscoring the complete alienness of the invaders. It's here in the greenhouse that Matthew makes his final stand, destroying some of the pods and causing a fire before fleeing again to hide.

Throughout the film, Matthew and Elisabeth have been the holdouts in government, trying to maintain their humanity against soul-crushing odds. At the very end we see Matthew at work, appearing dispassionate around the pod people, then in his office cutting out an article, as he did at the beginning of the film. And as the pod people begin to leave the Department of Health, Matthew does too: outside, to the plaza where those strange twisted unforgettable trees are growing, where he hears a voice behind him calling his name. It's Nancy. She steps forward, looking stressed and tearful and relieved to find him, and Matthew raises his arm and emits that klaxxon alarm. In a film explicitly concerned with the environment, starring two civil servants, this ending could be read as both a statement about the effectiveness and integrity of government and as a death knell for hippie idealism: the world is doomed; your government will make sure of it.

body snatchers mix, part 4

2006-12-13T21:14:00.000-05:00

And the pods march on: next: Kaufman, Ferrara, closing thoughts. You're liking the music at least, I hope.

Howard Tate -- Hold Me Tight
Atypical reggae-inflected soul from Howard Tate.
[Howard Tate's Reaction ]

Otis Rush -- My Love Will Never Die (solo take with piano)
This is a slow, somber take, with Rush apparently still trying to figure out whether the song was meant to be a dirge. The occasional laughter in the background, and Rush's own laughter at the end, suggests that maybe it wasn't.
[Mr. Dixon's Workshop]

Otis Rush -- My Love Will Never Die
Otis Rush tries again, giving the song a lurching rhythm, trilling piano, guitar lines that are sinuous and somehow yearning, and banshee-like vocals leaving no doubt about the pain.
[Essential Collection: The Classic Cobra Recordings 1956-1958]

Magic Sam -- My Love Will Never Die
Magic Sam taking an approach very similar to Otis Rush's, ten years after. Sam and Rush were both on Cobra; West Side Soul is one of the classic blues records. (Interestingly enough, Sam used to play with fellow Chicagoan Syl Johnson in the 50s.)
[West Side Soul]

Dallas String Band -- So Tired
I think it might be easy to take this song ironically, but I love it: the washboard, the fretwork, the melody, the harmony, the progression. And the lyrics, at least what I can make out of them: "So tired of crying / so tired of sighing / so tired of being alone" ... "Though we are drifting far apart / My arms are empty but never my heart / So tired of yearning / For your returning / So tired of waiting for you."
[Texas Black Country Dance Music (1927-1935) @ emusic]

Kay Star -- So Tired
Another one you could take ironically, I guess, but I'm not hip enough to do it. I like the song; I hear something in the vocals that's anachronistic; I can't pinpoint it or explain it, but I like it. It's a very sweet song, uncomplicated and sincere.
[Kay Starr: the Best of The Standard Transcriptions @ emusic]

Junior Wells -- So Tired
Very murky sound on this one, no doubt on purpose--it's like the aural equivalent of squelching your way through thick dark muck that keeps trying to eat your shoes. Wonderful song, though, and the blues were meant to be at least a little discontent.
[1957-1966]

Eddie Bo -- I'm So Tired
Gritty early R&B, Bo rolling out piano riffs and howling about love given in vain.
[I Love to Rock 'N' Roll ]

(Ongoing spoiler warning: texts and films, including endings, discussed below.)

Siegel's 1956 filming of The Body Snatchers hews closely to the established text for most of the film: the story still deals with Miles, Becky, Jack, and Theodora (now called "Teddy"); and Miles' friend the pyschiatrist (now called "Danny" rather than "Mannie"). Miles was divorced more recently than in the book (five months rather than five years) and Becky more recently still (the weekend before the start of the story). As in the book, they had dated each other prior to marrying someone else, and, as in the book, they find themselves falling in love again after the divorces. Early in the film, after scattered reports of people feeling that their family members weren't themselves, Miles jokes that he'd hate to wake up and find that Becky wasn't Becky.
"I'm not the high school kid you used to romance," Becky says, "so how could you tell?"
"You really want to know?" he says. Becky does, so he kisses her.

The film has its differences, though, some of them interesting and others less so, and a few just as inconclusive as the differences among the Finney versions. In Siegel's film, Miles' self-doubts are greatly diminished and the concern over neighborhood upkeep almost entirely eliminated; the only mention of anything decrepit is near the beginning as Miles is driving into town from the train station: he nearly runs over Jimmy Grimaldi, the young son of farmers who have recently closed their vegetable stand.

The film follows Miles, Becky, Jack, and Teddy as they begin to suspect that the people claiming the impossible are in fact correct. Halfway through the film, Miles discovers four pods in his greenhouse, splitting open and beginning to look human. Miles urges Jack and Teddy to leave for help, and Becky tries to phone the FBI as Miles tries and fails to dispatch all the pods in the greenhouse. He lingers, pitchfork in hand, over the one turning into Becky, then decides he can't kill it and instead kills the one turning into him.

Outside town, desperate for somewhere to go for help, Miles drives to his receptionist's house, where he overhears some chilling dialogue:
"Baby asleep yet, Sally?"
"Not yet, but she will be soon, and there'll be no more tears."

Hiding in his office with Becky, Miles delivers the director's message:
"In my practice I've seen people who've allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happened slowly instead of all at once. They didn't seem to mind."
"Just some people, Miles."
"All of us. A little bit. We harden our hearts, grow callous--only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear--as you are to me."

In the morning they see trucks arrive on the plaza and the tarps pulled back, the trucks full of pods. The townspeople collect pods and take them to their cars for distribution. When Jack arrives, their relief is quickly crushed: he's been changed into a pod person; and Danny was one all along. They explain the alien origins of the pods and explain what it's like to be a pod person:
Miles: "I love Becky. Tomorrow will I fell the same?"
Danny shakes his head. "There's no need for love."
"No emotion? Then you have no feelings? Only the instinct to survive. You can't love or be loved, am I right?"
"You say it as if it were terrible; believe me, it isn't. You've been in love before; it didn't last. It never does. Love. Desire. Ambition. Faith. Without them life's so simple, believe me."

And as if one betrayal were not enough, there's the climax of the film: Miles and Becky, exhausted, on the run from the entire town, just like in the book. Except they hide in a tunnel under some slats, rather than under some brush in the fields, and Miles leaves Becky to investigate some beautiful music which Becky says must mean that someone still knows what love is. When he returns he finds Becky in a different location; she's too tired to walk so Miles picks her up and begins to walk out of the tunnel. He trips and they fall into a mud puddle, where they kiss, and Siegel springs a surprise on a 1950s audience familiar with the source material: Becky looks up at Miles exceptionally coolly; Miles pulls away, face registering alarm and disgust. She's been changed. She tells him it's not painful, and he should quit resisting; then as he flees she shouts at the others that he's there.

They let him go to the highway, where he is taken for a drunk or a maniac; he finds the back of a semi loaded with pods and then, on the street, continues to shout his warnings into the camera: "They're coming! You're next!"

And there it would have ended, except that the film tested poorly and the studio forced a change. So Siegel shot a pair of tacky bookends: starting the film with a psychiatrist arriving at a hospital to find Miles panicked and unconvincing; and ending the film with the psychiatrist leaving the room and encountering a truck driver being pushed in on a gurney, with a broken arm and two broken legs. The psychiatrist is informed that the man ran a red light and crashed into a bus, tipping his truck over and spilling a cargo of large and unusual things that look like seed pods. So he goes to the phone, where he shouts at the operator to get him the FBI right away, and yes it's an emergency. And there the film ends.

It's a strange ending for a number of reasons. Generally it's accepted as an inferior ending to the one Siegel intended, which was to leave Miles looking like a stark raving lunatic on the freeway. The new ending might be considered a challenge to the auteur theory in that the studio forced Siegel to add it, against Siegel's wishes. Yet it's also somewhat appropriate in that the new ending hews more closely to the ending to the serial originally optioned: invoking the federal government to come solve local problems with national implications. And yet it's also a sly ending, a subtly suversive ending, on Siegel's part: the pyschiatrist believes Miles and calls for help. "Excellent," we think. "The day is saved." Except we see "The End" before we hear what happens next, and so it's easy to forget that Miles also tried to call for help, and that he could not get through because the pod people already controlled the phone system.

Besides, I'm not sure how many people the new ending relly convinced: I saw the film as a child and didn't see it for a decade afterwards; what I remembered of it was not the call to the FBI but Danny's betrayal and the unveiling of the truck loaded with pods.

In some ways Siegel's The Invasion of the Body Snatchers reminds me of Howard Hawk's The Thing: both deal with an alien invasion of murderous perambulatory plant matter; but The Thing has no patience for the federal government or the visitor, and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers takes a more patient, cautious, watchful stance. There's probably fertile soil there for someone willing to argue that the two films are the Rio Bravo and High Noon of science fiction.

It's common to put Finney's novel and Siegel's film into a Cold War context, and Glen M. Johnson does it as well as anyone. A bit from "'We'd Fight .... We Had to': The Body Snatchers as Novel and Film":

Finney complicates the simplistic them-vs-us forumula by making his invaders invisible--a force or consciousness that conquers by taking over the minds and personalities of ordinary people. So the "body" snatchers become apt symbols for ideological subversion, fear of which was a characterisitc form of anxiety in the American fifties.

Johnson, like many authors discussing the story's Cold War origins, mentions brainwashing: "it is suggestive that The Body Snatchers is set in August 1953, immediately after the Korean armistice, when American newspapers were full of incredulous reports about the 'turncoats' who chose Communism over a return home."

At the time of the stories' publication, HUAC's investigation into Communist propaganda in Hollywood, followed by its blacklist of the Hollywood Ten in 1947, was not yet ten years past. Joe McCarthy had spent several years in Congress making rabid declamations against suspected communists as chair of the Subcommittee on Investigations, and only in late 1954, after several years of bellicose and frequently baseless accusations, had he netted a formal censure in the Senate. It's easy to imagine that the alien invasion in the body snatchers stories serves as a metaphor for Cold War anxieties--either as a fear of communism or as a fear of McCarthyism. If there's one thing central to U.S. belief it's rugged individualism, and both sides were no doubt feeling an overwhelming pressure to conform. So it's somewhat common that the series of betrayals in the story, executed by family and friends, reminds people (ironically or not) of J. Edgar Hoover's sensationalist warning in Masters of Deceit that "there are thousands of people in this country now working in secret to make it happen here." Furthermore, it's easy to view the sleep metaphor as freighted with political baggage, especially given the "sleep no more" propaganda common during the Cold War.

Yet as J. Hoberman notes in "Paranoia and the Pods,"

Sorting out the politics of the men who filmed Invasion of the Body Snatchers is not easy. Siegel has described himself as a liberal, although his ouevre is more suggestive of a libertarian belief in rugged individualism. Wanger, a producer with an interest in topically political material, was responsible for both the crypto-fascist Gabriel over the White House (1933) and the prematurely anti-fascist Blockade (1938) as well as for such New Dealish genre exercises as You Only Live Once, Stagecoach, and Foreign Correspondent.

Hoberman goes on to note that Mainwaring, the film's screenwriter, had written the "relentlessly perfunctory" anti-communist film A Bullet for Joey and that Invasion of the Body Snatchers' script was rewritten by Richard Collins, "a former Communist Party functionary, co-author of the once notorious Song of Russia (1943), [and] an announced unfriendly witness first subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee in autumn 1947 among the original Hollywood Nineteen" who later turned witness for the FBI. So the film might be read as an anti-Communist fable, or as a satire of McCarthyism, or simply as a richly metaphorical work authored by a number of men with strikingly different philosophies.

Siegel, for his part, seems content to think of the film as about conformity in general: "It's the same as people who wlecome going into the army or prison. There's regimentation, a lack of having to make up your own mind, face decisions.... People are becoming vegetables. I don't know what the answer is, except an awareness of it. That's what makes a picture like Invasion of the Body Snatchers so important." (Parkes, "There Will Be No Survivors")

And Finney denies all of these interpretations, both here and elsewhere:

For years now, I've been amused by the fairly widely held notion that The Body Snatchers has anything to do with the cold war, McCarthyism, conformity... It does not. I was simply intrigued by the notion of a lot of people insisting that their friends and relatives were impostors.
--"Paranoia and the Pods," Sight and Sound May 1994, p.31

I have read explanations of the "meaning" of this story, which amuse me, because there is no meaning at all; it was just a story meant to entertain, and with no more meaning than that. The first movie version of the book followed the book with great faithfulness, except for the foolish ending; and I've always been amused by the contentions of people connected with the picture that they had a message of some sort in mind. If so, it's a lot more than I ever did, and since they followed my story very closely, it's hard to see how this message crept in. And when the message has been defined, it has always seemed a little simple-minded to me. The idea of writing a whole book in order to say that it's not really a good thing for us all to be alike, and that individuality is a good thing, makes me laugh.
--personal letter to Stephen King, December 24, 1979, as cited in Danse Macabre, 1983 Berkeley paperback, p. 306-307

So the question is, then, whether the author is the final word on what a text means. I think the author often has a good idea of what he intended, except that even he might not realize all of the intentions and subtleties: I'm reminded of Ray Bradbury's comment in the afterword for Fahrenheit 451 that for decades he didn't notice that Faber was the name of a pencil company and that Montag was the name of a paper company.

And, too, it's obvious that the reader (or viewer) must understand, process, and interpret the parts of a story for it to have any meaning. Those interpretations are necessarily personal affairs, at times idiosyncratic or conflicted but always dependent on associations with existing knowledge. Is the story about communism? McCarthyism? The Red Scare? The case for each of those could be made, sure, and frequently is. Art is largely an interpretive matter and almost never yields as unequivocal results as math. And should it?

body snatchers mix, part 3

2006-12-12T21:41:00.000-05:00

Some more songs tangentially related to the Body Snatchers stories, and more about the stories (with spoilers) below that:

Jimmy Bo Horne -- Get Happy
There's something here that reminds me of much of George McCrae's work, probably in the simple composition and the repetition, but also in the reliance on a sweet hook and an energetic horn section in a poppy R&B track with high-flying vocals. Another happy song, appropriately enough.
[The Legendary Henry Stone Presents: Jimmy Bo Horne @ emusic or @ amazon]

Shirley Bassey -- Hey Big Spender (Wild Oscar mix)
Bassey likes to make these big brassy music numbers that go well with Bond films (Goldfinger, Moonraker, Diamonds are Forever) and that get a deft parody in The Life of Brian ("He had arms ... and legs ... and hands ... and feet / This boy whose name was Brian"). The remix here decides that brassy isn't brassy enough, and so kicks it up a notch: adding breakneck percussion, muted guitar, vocal effects, and tempo changes.
[Shirley Bassey - The Greatest Hits]

J.J. Cale -- Call the Doctor
Countrified blues-rock, subdued delivery, plodding bass, sour horns, and electric guitar swelling into a stoned melancholy solo. The description sounds horrible but Cale pulls it off somehow.
[Naturally]

Eddie Floyd -- Bring It on Home To Me
Easy-going R&B, not pining, not pleading, not arguing a case so much as pointing out what a good time you could be having--hoping you'll come to your senses and come join in.
[Eddie Floyd - Chronicle: Greatest Hits]

Lou Rawls -- Bring It on Home
Nevermind the showboating at the beginning; give the song a minute (actually, 45 seconds). Let the bass come in and the funk get dropped; let Lou gather his evidence and practice his line of argument. It's a smooth-talking dapper performance, pitch-perfect and with just enough edge on it to let you know he's serious, but not so serious as to keep the jurors from clapping.
[Anthology]

Jack Finney has published at least three different versions of Body Snatchers: first as serialized in Collier's in November and December 1954, then as a book in 1955 (expanded and given a different climax) and then with further edits in 1978 to coincide with Philip Kaufman's second film version of the story.

The three have strong similarities, as could be expected. The text versions take place in Santa Mira, a small town outside San Francisco, and feature a doctor named Miles Bennell, a former flame named Becky Driscoll, a psychologist friend named Mannie Kaufman, a writer friend named Jack Belicec, and his wife Theodora. At the start of the story, Becky approaches Miles and tells him of her cousin Wilma who's become convinced that her Uncle Ira is not actually Uncle Ira; when they visit Wilma, she explains that her aunt hasn't noticed because she is also not her aunt. From there the details accrue suggesting that the humans are being besieged by aliens intent on replacing them, and the small group of humans decide to fight.

Along the way Becky and Miles, both divorced, find themselves increasingly attracted to each other. Becky has divorced recently and Miles five years earlier, yet Miles continues to be bothered by his divorce, taking it as a sign of some shameful defeat. There are scattered mentions throughout the novel, most of them wry, and others which seem either self-deluding or callous and sexist:

I'd seen Becky at least every other night all the past week, but not because there was any romance building up between us. It was just better than hanging around the pool hall, playing solitaire, or collecting stamps. She was a pleasant, comfortable way of spending some evenings, nothing more, and that suited me fine.
--Body Snatchers, '55, p. 24

Then there's this more telling passage as Miles is shaving:

'You handsome bastard,' I said to my face. 'You can marry them, all right; you just can't stay married, that's your trouble. You are weak. Emotionally unstable. Basically insecure. A latent thumb-sucker. A cesspool of immaturity, unfit for adult responsibility." ... I cut it out, and finished shaving with the uncomfortable feeling that for all I knew it wasn't funny but true, that having failed with one woman, I was getting too involved with another, and that for my sake and hers, she should be anywhere but here under my roof.
--Body Snatchers, '55, p.76

Both the paperback versions share Miles' self-doubt following his divorce, his penchant for prescribing sedatives, his passive wait-and-see attitude in the face of an obviously mounting crisis, and the curious marker of the body-snatched: an indifference to neighborhood upkeep. A visiting salesman complains that it's hard to get into and out of the town; coffee is hard to come by and tastes bad when a restaurant has it; and Miles notes that his Coca-Cola is warm. And outside the restaurant, on a littered street:

"Miles," she said in a cautious, lowered tone, "am I imagining it, or does this street look--dead?"
I shook my head. "No. In seven blocks we haven't passed a single house with as much as the trim being repainted; not a roof, porch, or even a cracked window being repaired; not a tree, shrub, or a blade of grass being planted, or even trimmed. Nothing's happening, Becky, nobody's doing anything. And they haven't for days, maybe weeks."
--Body Snatchers '55, p. 108

Of the three versions, the Collier's version is probably the hardest to find: so far as I know it was never collected and published separately without changes, and it doesn't seem to be available in various academic databases, so finding it most likely requires access to the original magazines. I haven't read this version but I have the other two, and they're fairly similar. One of the more striking differences between the two novels happens early on when Miles mentions his car: "I drive a '52 Ford convertible, one of those fancy green ones, because I don't know of any law absolutely requiring a doctor to drive a small black coupé." (Finney '55, p. 13)

So early on Miles seems like a big spender, maybe a bit arrogant, maybe living a lavish lifestyle, with no time for Becky. In the 1978 version the passage is changed: "I drive a 1973 Mercedes two-seater, a nice fire-engine red job, bought used, to maintain the popular illusion that all doctors are rich." (Finney '78, p. 13)

Yet most of the differences between the two versions are subtle, perhaps inconsequential--instead of golf and swimming, Miles plays tennis, things like that. (In fact, the two versions seem so similar that the cynic in me suggests that the 1978 revisions were published simply to allow an extension on the copyright--copyright terms at the time were much more limited and the one on Body Snatchers had nearly run out.)

In the two novel versions Miles, Becky, Jack, and Theodora are increasingly persecuted, then flee town only to find that they don't know where to go or what to do. So they return to town, where they are split up. Becky and Miles hide in a field just outside town--the field where, it turns out, a professor had discovered what he thought was most likely an alien plant, and then a few days later retracted his story. It is here where the aliens are growing their pods for distribution, and Miles and Becky make a desperate last stand, setting fire to the fields and smashing pods. The aliens recognize their defeat and the pods detach from the plants, fly up off the ground, and leave the planet. Miles and Becky reunite with Jack and Theodora and discover that the aliens have a curiously short lifespan; most of them die off within a few years.

The serial version is apparently much different: Robert Shelton in "Genre and Closure in the Seven Versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers" mentions that the 1955 Dell paperback "is based on, and twice the length of, the serial" and that "in the 1954 serial, a posse of FBI agents armed with 'riot guns' and 'small, light, almost dainty-looking machine guns'" arrives on site, attracted by Miles' fire, and helps fend off the alien invasion.

What does it mean that the endings are so different? What point was Finney trying to make, or deciding not to make? Catherine Jurca, in "Of Satire and Sofas," calls the novel "an allegory of postwar suburbanisation," yet the article is too brief to offer much supporting evidence and it's left to the reader to remember the United States' postwar population boom and the move from the cities to the suburbs.

Michael Parkes, in "There Will Be No Survivors," takes the novel as a metaphor for a different kind of encroaching conformity, and the pods as representing a different threat to identity: the introduction of television into American culture. Parkes notes that "between 1948 and 1955, television was installed in nearly two-thirds of the nation's homes and became the mythic and ideological unifier of the fragmented post-war family" and served "as a sign of suburban achievement," yet one that moved the family away from the hearth and conversation to the television and silent viewing. Parkes notes the effect of television on bars and cafes, as well, and its corollary to the cafe scene in the novel when Miles and Becky go to the Sky Terrace in the Siegel film to find few customers and no live music, but instead a jukebox: "the artistry and individuality of the original band has been 'snatched' and replaced by an inferior technological substitute." In this reading, Parkes considers the story's message somewhat ironic, calling it "an anti-media discourse which in itself is contradictory, as the film [and book] itself exists within the media."

This interpretation of the book as an anti-media, Luddite response to technological innovation is interesting; yet by far the most common reading of the story is as a metaphor for the political climate in the United States during the Cold War--whether as one about McCarthyism or as one about the Red Scare. More on that, and on Finney's and Siegel's reactions to it, next post.

Roots Canal: The Bug's Got a Big Bazoo!

2006-12-11T00:17:00.000-05:00

Gene Phillips -- Big Bug Boogie
Tuwa sent me a link the other day to a wonderful album on eMusic full of songs I'd never heard before, mostly by artists I'd never heard of. Not only is the music exceptional, but the story behind it is pretty good, too. It was put together by a Toronto blues collector and DJ named Eddy B, from records in his private collection that were so rare they weren't even listed in the standard blues discographies. The first in the series was hard-core blues from the '50s and '60s, but Volume Two goes back to the late '40s and early '50s when jazz was metamorphosing into jump blues into R&B and finally into rock'n'roll (see How Rock Really Began). According to Eddy B's website, Volume Three is coming out next year featuring "Midnite Mammas" from the '40s to the '60s. Can't wait.

This song, by one of the few artists on the record whose work I already knew, has some of the funniest R&B lyrics ever put on wax:

Hey bartender, there's a big bug in my beer
Hey bartender, there's a big bug in my beer
One eye is red, the other is green
The craziest old bug that I've ever seen
Hey bartender, there's a big bug in my beer

Whoo bartender, the bug's got a big bazoo
Whoo-ee bartender, the bug's got a big bazoo
Big old head from there to here
Big old mouth drinking all my beer
Hey bartender, the bug's got a big bazoo

One more beer, without the bug
One more beer, without the bug
One more beer, without the bug
One more beer, without the bug

Well there's bugs on the ceiling, bugs on the floor
All kinds of bugs creeping through the door
There's bugs on the table, bugs on the beer
I do believe there's bugs in my hair

Hey bartender, the bug's made himself a home
Hey bartender, the bug's made himself a home
Every time I take a sip
The big old bug tries to bite my lip
Hey bartender, he's drinking up all the foam

Hey bartender, one thing I've got to know
Hey bartender, there's one thing I've gotta know
If the beer is his, then he can stay
But if it's mine, all I can say
Hey bartender, the big bug's gotta go!

Gene Phillips played Texas-style blues guitar in LA's pioneering R&B scene and recorded regularly with many of the great artists whose songs I've already posted like Wynonie Harris, Jack McVea, Wild Bill Moore, Duke Henderson and Rabon Tarrant. He must have been quite a character. What else can you say about a guy whose CD collections are named Drinkin' and Stinkin' and I Like 'em Fat?

Bonus Track: As I was listening to some of the tracks from this CD, I was startled to hear another "voot" song. About two minutes into the song, you'll clearly hear them sing, "Voo-it! Voo-it! Voo-it!" I guess I'll have to add this to my definitive Voot Detective post.
Billy Langford with His Combo -- Be-Bop on the Boogie

[Midnite Blues Party, Volume Two (eMusic)]

body snatchers mix, part 2

2006-12-07T21:59:00.000-05:00

I guess I should have explained a bit more about the mix last time: most of the songs are tangentially related to the Body Snatchers stories at best, and the mix isn't limited to what could fit on a CD (mostly because I'm not one to make tough decisions). Along the way we'll see some songs with a passing resemblance and others that are different from how we remembered them.

Betty Everett and Jerry Butler -- Love Is Strange
I've written about Betty Everett twice before. This one is one of the better tracks off Together--sweet lyrics and a sweet duo, but what sells it for me is when each of them take it solo towards the end. And then I'm completely sold, yes.

(As for the rest of the LP ... no. It's mostly middling, with tracks that tend to stop at competent without making it to genuinely affecting, and I'm not surprised it's gone out of print. I can't speak for the CD linked below, though--haven't heard it and it's awfully pricey for me to pick up.)
[They're Delicious Together]

Little Milton -- If You Love Me
If guitars were animals, PETA would stage a protest about this song.
[Anthology 1953-1961 ]

Little Johnny Taylor -- If You Love Me (Like You Say)
Keeping with the Chicago blues, the horns, the electric guitars, and the general theme--this one has a smoother melody on the vocals, less grit on the delivery, more syncopation on the horns, and an organ buried in the mix.
[Greatest Hits]

Muddy Waters -- I Feel So Good
Blues piano with a harmonica and a drumset rocking the joint, letting the public know that feeling good can be contagious.
[At Newport]

Ann Peebles -- Slipped, Tripped, and Fell in Love
Three great things about this song: the bass, the organ, the background vocals. The first one runs throughout; the next two stop in for tea and leave right after. You'd consider it rude, except now you're friends and you just hope they can stay longer next time.
[The Best of Ann Peebles: The Hi Records Years]

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.
--William Dement of the Stanford University Sleep Research Centre, Newsweek, November 30 1959

A bare-bones plot description of the Body Snatchers stories (all of them): residents of a community come to suspect that certain loved ones are not themselves, but are perfect physical replicas without any genuine emotional responses. They discover that people are in fact being destroyed and replaced by impostors hatched from alien pods, one by one, as each one of them sleeps. A small group of people decide to fight the aliens, and at least two of them are in love.

From there the details differ--in the characters, locations, resolution, and treatment of themes, with implications about each story's beliefs. But fundamentally the story is about love and vulnerability and the loss of individuality. It's about being human and getting tired and needing to sleep. We're no more vulnerable than when we sleep, as Wes Craven knows, but Finney didn't create a sardonic villain to dispense gory deaths; instead he poses the more psychological question: who will we be when we wake up?

It seems a silly question, easy to laugh off, yet sleeping itself is somewhat troublesome. "We all go a little mad sometimes," sure. We might go a bit unhinged on hearing some devastating news, but that's not all, is it? It's a truism that no one wants to hear about anyone else's dreams, and probably even psychiatrists are faking it, but what are these things? Our brain tells us the earth is a swamp and that people drive Yugos over fallen mossy trees past dully interested brontosauri, and then we get up in the morning and yawn and stretch and go make tea or cofee. Our brain sorts out the desk and dusts the bookshelves and dumps the dreams in the trash. We go around with this tacit agreement that dreams are mostly meaningless, yet the brain keeps making them; and we go to bed knowing that we'll go a bit insane but that it's no big deal, really, that in the morning breakfast and a shower will set us right again. And it does.

Yet in the Body Snatchers stories, sleep doesn't make people temporarily insane; it makes them perfectly and utterly sane, endlessly and coldly logical. It destroys the identity in a more permanent way; falling asleep leads to being replaced by an alien being who has all the same memories but none of the emotion. The consciousness is transfered to another body, the humanity left behind somewhere in the gray fluff, to be swept away and thrown in the trash.

The stories feature alien characters encouraging humans to quit struggling, to give up and accept their fate. It's a conversation that enhances the horror and the sense of betrayal: former friends have changed--changed horribly--and don't mind at all; in fact they want us to join them. Given that humans are fond of thinking that emotions are distinctly human (a dodgy proposition given the evidence that dogs, primates, and countless other mammals show grief, insecurity, jealousy, and indignation), the stories can also be read as an exploration of the fear of evolution. The pods are much more efficient at reproducing than humans are, and they seem to get along much better; and in each version of the story the chances of human survival begin to look slim. Perhaps each story is asking if it's not merely an accident that humans have reigned so long, and if we truly deserve our self-proclaimed perch at the top. If so, it's no surprise that the stories have proved enduringly horrifying.

body snatchers mix, part 1

2006-12-05T15:52:00.000-05:00

So I've made a Body Snatchers mix which I'll be posting over the next week and a half or so.

Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes -- Wake Up Everybody
Philly soul wearing its heart on its sleeve, confident in its sincerity and optimism and urging positive change. Sing it, Teddy.

The Beatles -- I'm Looking Through You (alt version)
This one is probably one of the most thematically related to the Body Snatchers stories, though written for quite different reasons: "I'm looking through you / where did you go? / I thought I knew you / What did I know? / You don't look different but you have changed / I'm looking through you; you're not the same." It's the alt take off Anthology 2, naturally enough, and it says something for the general quality of the Beatles' work that for most bands this version would have been a perfectly acceptable release.

Sam Roberts -- Paranoia
Radio-friendly pop-rock, the kind of track I wouldn't usually post, but there's something about this one that keeps bringing me back to it. Maybe it's the ooooooohs.
[If You Don't Know Me by Now: The Best of Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes ]
[Anthology 2]
[We Were Born in a Flame]

A brief philosophy of horror fiction: horror is deliberately transgressive and cheerfully untactful; it's not interested in chitchat about the weather, instead it wants to talk (metaphorically, or literally) about taboos. A good horror writer is like a tough-love psychiatrist, finding our most vulnerable spots and prodding them; the horror story is like Ingmar Bergman with optional religious iconography, yet it has no pre-defined point of view and no social obligations beyond investigating and reporting. It may or may not advocate social revolution and may even be reactionary--Night of the Living Dead is not advocating cannibalism; Frankenstein would be a poor witness for science--but it's speculative fiction and it must address taboos, regardless of whether doing so will shock any of the audience.

It's probably an oversimplification to say that horror fiction is about death, since there are some perfectly horrifying horror stories in which no one dies and since, in any case, death is the result of vulnerability. Yet "vulnerability" covers a lot of ground: it's a theme common to the shower scene, being lost in the woods, being chased by a plane, and having an eyeball sliced with a razor.

Of all the kinds of vulnerability, there are a number of horror films about a threat to current identity, about the threat of continuing life in a radically different form: films as diverse as Dracula, The Howling, and Night of the Living Dead; The Fly, The Thing, and The Exorcist; Misery, Rosemary's Baby, and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The ghost, vampire, werewolf, and zombie films have centuries of legends behind them and have the most variants as a result, but Invasion of the Body Snatchers gives a fair showing considering its relative youth. The story was first serialized in Collier's in late 1954 under the title Body Snatchers; Jack Finney expanded it and rewrote the ending for publication as a novel in 1955, and the book was republished with more trivial changes in 1978. As of 2006 the story has had three authorized film versions (with four different endings among them); a fourth film version was finished in October 2006 but was rewritten so much after the novel was optioned that the producers decided it was not actually a version of Finney's work.

All these stories--the body snatchers and the rest--are fertile soil for a writer (any writer, including satirists like Terry Pratchett and the Futurama crew) and are firmly a part of the culture. But what do they mean as cultural artefacts? What do they say about the environment they were made in; what kinds of changes did people fear, and what cultural and historical backgrounds help explain those fears?

I doubt I'll find the answer to all of these questions, but in exploring them I can at least see what other questions crop up along the way. So. The start of the Body Snatchers mix. More later on Finney's three versions, Siegel's two versions, Kaufman's 1978 film, and Ferrara's 1993 film.

Robert Pete Williams

2006-11-30T02:55:00.000-05:00

Robert Pete Williams -- This Wild Old Life
Robert Pete Williams -- I Got the Blues So Bad
Robert Pete Williams -- Thumbing a Ride
Robert Pete Williams -- Matchbox Blues

Supposedly Robert Pete Williams made his first guitar out of a cigar box, killed a man in self-defense, and spent a couple years in Angola before earning recognition as a musician and being pardoned.

Common enough blues tale: poverty, violence, injustice, pardon; unfortunately it's not true. What really happened is that Robert Pete Williams found his guitar in a thrift shop, where he bought it from a clerk curiously eager to get rid of it. He first played it right outside and a passing drunk asked for "Dust My Broom"; Williams, usually an affable and patient fellow, attacked and killed him then a policeman, a bus driver, a beet farmer, a stray horse, a two-day-old newspaper, and a museumful of formerly bored high schoolers. Williams escaped into the swamps, where he sat on mangrove knees playing droning angular blues, luring stupidly curious alligators close enough to club them over the head with an Ebdim7. And while Thoreau was proud of his tough stringy squirrels, Williams was never proud of his alligators; mostly he passed his days wishing he could sell the guitar back, or at least put it down for good and get a job as an accountant.

Williams died in 1980, that much is true, but there never was a fire that did anything more to his guitar than make it cranky. It's out there still, tangled in roots, half-submerged in fetid muck, waiting for something with opposable thumbs to pass by close enough.
[Robert Pete Williams]
[I'm as Blue as a Man Can Be]
[Free Again]
[When a Man Takes the Blues]

All of these are also available at emusic.

Murray Macon -- Jesus Cares

2006-11-20T22:52:00.000-05:00

Murray Macon -- Jesus Cares
Allmusic.com calls this song "industrial gospel," and that sounds like as good a description as any. I wouldn't agree that it's jarring, though; I find it fascinating, quirky, and unexpected but not perturbing or unpleasant. Instead I find I stop what I'm doing and listen to that high voice over the dull rattle of the pressing of cheap metal.
[Angola Prison Worksongs@ amazon]
[Angola Prison Worksongs @ emusic]

Robert Pete Williams covers "John Henry" on this disc, and he was a great find. But I'm going with this track and saving Williams for an upcoming post.

Off for a week to be with family.

The Roots Canal: Ruth Brown, R.I.P.

2006-11-19T10:25:00.000-05:00

Ruth Brown -- 5-10-15 Hours
Ruth Brown died on Friday. I'm sure most people will link to her two biggest hits, "Teardrops From My Eyes" and "(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean," so here's a lesser-known but equally great song. And a rare video from YouTube:

Here's a Ruth Brown anecdote: Apparently, she heard she would be featured in the Ray Charles biopic, Ray, and told Charles she wanted to be played by Halle Berre. "Honey," Ray told her, "I ain't that blind."

(I can't remember where I first heard this. If anyone knows the source, drop me a line.)

Update: Found it! Oh, irony -- it was in the same edition of Saturday's Washington Post whose obituary I linked to above. In a separate appreciation, staff writer Richard Harrington tells the same story (which, he says, Ruth used to tell about herself). We'll miss her.

Here's a great Rhino Records compilation. She also has a few albums available on emusic.
[Rockin' in Rhythm: The Best of Ruth Brown]

The Roots Canal: Golden Age of Raunch, Part IV

2006-11-16T00:03:00.000-05:00

Margie Day -- Take Out Your False Teeth, Baby
This song speaks for itself. What else can you say about an R&B song with a chorus that goes:

Take out your false teeth, Daddy
Your Mommy wants to scratch your gums
You're gonna feel good
After I've rubbed 'em some

And who can forget a sexy verse like this:

You sound like Donald Duck
Every time you make a sound
I'm so afraid
They're gonna fall on the ground

'Nuff said.

Bonus track. I don't know, maybe I have an oral fixation tonight. But how can I resist pairing "Take Out Your False Teeth, Baby" with this:
Piano Red -- Your Mouth's Got a Hole in It

[The R&B Years: 1954]
[The R&B Years: 1953]

Waylon Jennings -- You Can Have Her

2006-11-14T12:01:00.000-05:00

Guest post today from Aesop, a Greek friend since early childhood. Aesop has spent time traveling around the Mediterranean, becoming something of an author along the way. And apparently he shares an affection for outlaw country.

Waylon Jennings -- You Can Have Her
One hot summer's day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. "Just the thing to quench my thirst," quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: "I am sure they are sour."
[Lonesome, On'ry and Mean]

Thanks, Aesop. I had no idea Jennings was popular in Greece.

...
R.I.P. Sid Davis. The NPR piece is rather odd--they cover a man making films about drug abuse, venereal disease, kidnapping, date rape, murder, gang war, and a teenager who brings a gun to school, and then conclude with something about the "good old days," which is kind of amazing considering the piece isn't by FOX News.

Clue-less crossword. After you play a few rounds, it gets easier because you notice their limited vocabulary. Expect "kiwi," "electricity," and "astrology."

Genetically Engineered Crops May Produce Herbicide Inside Our Intestines. Awesome. Too bad I don't have kudzu growing in my small intestine.

Betty Everett -- I Can't Hear You

2006-11-08T12:43:00.000-05:00

Betty Everett -- I Can't Hear You
Like a number of R&B singers, Betty Everett grew up in the church and left it for secular music, though she'd return to gospel several times over her career. Unlike a number of R&B singers, Everett can convincingly carry a blues tune and got her start thanks to Magic Sam inviting her onstage to sing at a club. Everett started out on Cobra (where Magic Sam and Otis Rush were); after Cobra closed shop she worked for Carl Jones and then made her way to Vee Jay.

At Vee Jay she cut a version of Clint Ballad Jr.'s "You're No Good" with background vocals from The Dells. The track charted, stopping at #51. Her biggest hit followed shortly after--"The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss)," one of those omnipresent tracks nearly everyone is familiar with even if they don't know its name. She also had hits with "There'll Come a Time" and "Let It Be Me," a duet with Jerry Butler; though she's not a household name, it's hard to equate being a household name with having a solid catalog as a musician.

"I Can't Hear You" is a driving uptempo track with horn stabs and handclaps, Everett's patience lost and her telling a man what's what.

[This track is off The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss), which seems to be out of print. A similar (and similarly regarded) best-of comp with the track is Best of Betty Everett: Let It Be Me.]

The Roots Canal: Golden Age of Raunch, Part III

2006-11-03T22:53:00.000-05:00

The Swallows -- It Ain't the Meat (It's the Motion)
What else can you say? One of the great early doo-wop hits, by a bunch of Baltimore teenagers. Swinging tune. Great vocals, behind the rollicking baritone of Norris "Bunky" Mack. Hands clapping on the backbeat. But the lyrics, written by King Records A&R man Henry Glover and someone named L. Mann, say it all:

It ain't the meat, it's the motion
Makes your daddy want to rock
It ain't the meat, it's the motion
It's the movement that gives it the sock

Now I had a girl so doggone thin
No meat, no bones, she was just all skin
One thing about her I can understand
She wraps all around me like a rubber band

It ain't the meat, it's the motion
Makes your daddy want to rock
It ain't the meat, it's the motion
It's the movement that gives it the sock

It ain't the meat, it's the motion
Makes your daddy want to rock
It ain't the meat, it's the motion
It's the movement that gives it the sock

You find some girls who are big and fat
Some fellows don't like to see them like that
But I like to see 'em big and tall
The bigger they come, the harder they fall

It ain't the meat, it's the motion
Makes your daddy want to rock
It ain't the meat, it's the motion
It's the movement that gets it to sock

It ain't the meat, it's the motion
It ain't the meat, it's the movement
It ain't the meat, it's the action
That makes your daddy want to rock all night

Got a little girl who lives down the street
It ain't much of her but she's mighty sweet
When she starts rockin', she don't want to stop
It makes a man want to blow his top

It ain't the meat, it's the motion
Makes your daddy want to rock
It ain't the meat, it's the motion
It's the movement that gives it the sock

So tell me. Was this the source of the phrase "it ain't the meat, it's the motion?" Or did the expression already exist, and they wrote the song around it? Whaddya think? Might as well ask if it was it the chicken or the egg.

[The Very Best of the Swallows]

The Orb, Neko again, Kwaidan

2006-10-31T15:50:00.000-05:00

The Orb -- Ghostdancing
Neko Case -- Ghost Wiring
Kwaidan is a quartet of ghost stories directed by Masaki Kobayashi based on Lafcadio Hearn's adaptations of Japanese legends. Often classed a horror film, it's not especially horrifying: the stories are simple, the pacing deliberate, and for a gaijin audience the resolutions are predictable (whereas for a Japanese audience, there's less need for prediction: people in the audience unfamiliar with the legends would still know that the film's title means "ghost story").

In the first segment, "The Black Hair," a samurai leaves his devoted wife to marry a woman from a prestigious family, then realises both her selfishness and his own and returns to his first wife. In the second, "The Woman of the Snow," a woodcutter sees his companion killed by Yuki-onna, the spirit of winter; she spares him on the condition that he never tell anyone what he's seen. In the third, "Hoichi the Earless," a blind biwa player is approached by samurai ghosts and ordered to play for a long-dead audience. In the fourth and final segment, "In a Cup of Tea," a samurai finds that whenever he pours himself a bowl of water, it always reflects a man who isn't there.

Though the film fails to terrify, its pleasures lie elsewhere: Kobayashi gifts the stories with a painstaking visual sense, favoring bold composition:

He films in the studio and uses blatant backdrops in outdoor scenes:

He makes use of theatrical lighting:

Colors are carefully controlled, often dominated by neutrals, and with only a few accents outside the dominant color scheme:

The Criterion Collection's essay on Kwaidan
[The Orb -- Cydonia]
[Neko Case -- Blacklisted]

Martin / Nosferatu

2006-10-30T01:57:00.000-05:00

Lonnie Johnson -- No Love for Sale
Mississippi John Hurt -- Since I've Laid My Burden Down
(Spoiler warning: this post discusses plot elements of Bram Stoker's Dracula, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, Whitley Strieber's The Hunger, and George A. Romero's Martin.)

The conductor's call goes out over a black screen; the scene opens on passengers boarding a train. The titles begin as the train approaches a crossing, warning lights flashing, bell dinging. Inside, a POV shot: walking down a hall, approaching a hand protruding past a curtain, palm up, its owner apparently asleep. The film cuts to Martin: tall, thin, pale; he eases past the hand looking frightened. In the restroom he opens a kit and prepares a syringe; in the hall he crouches to listen at a door, syringe gripped between his teeth. He picks the lock; the film cuts to a black and white shot of Martin opening a door, a woman in bed turning to him, arms outstretched. The film cuts back to color as Martin opens the cabin door; the bed is empty. The passenger can be heard in the restroom. Martin hides behind the restroom door, waiting for her. When she goes to her bed he rushes forward and stabs her with the syringe. They struggle; she is loud, terrified, enraged, pleading, curious: what did he inject her with? He tells her not to worry; he is always careful with the needles. She is not comforted with this knowledge. Eventually she passes out and he cuts her wrist with a blade and drinks her blood. When he's done he cleans up the cabin, leaving the razor and adding a bottle of spilled pills. The film is clearly a modern vampire story, yet director George Romero is not interested in indulging in the conventions of vampire fiction over the last century.

The classic vampire story, heavily influenced by Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, is set in an isolated, foreboding setting indicating centuries of unminded wealth and indifference to public opinion. The story is typically told from the point of view of the potential victims; the vampire can not enter a victim's home without permission; and the vampire has a curious hypnotic power over his victims--typically buxom women in nightgowns--as well as a weakness against garlic and crucifixes, to be finished off by sunlight or a stake to the heart. Bram Stoker wrote Dracula just before the turn of the 20th century; the film Nosferatu blatantly plagiarised the novel and was nearly lost as a result--Stoker's widow filed a suit charging copyright infringement, and the court ordered all copies of the film destroyed.

Without becoming distracted by all the stakes, it's safe to bring Freud into the conversation. The classic vampire story is about sexuality and repression, the id and the superego: the vampires can't enter a room without permission and so their victims have to allow their desire to cloud their judgment, arranging their own destruction. Jonathan Harker, in one of his nights in Dracula's castle, finds himself tempted by three of Dracula's women; he admits to his "repulsive" urges in his journal, though he notes that the admission would hurt Mina's feelings if she were to find it. And it's easy to imagine the passage in question loosening Victorian collars:

I lay quiet, looking out from under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.

I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth.

Since Stoker's and Murnau's work, some authors have expanded the scope of the myth. Richard Matheson in the 1950s and Whitley Strieber in the 1980s both explored vampirism as a disease, Matheson in an ominous futuristic backdrop with a sole human survivor and Strieber in an elegaic examination of love and loss in the face of weakened immortality. Anne Rice gave the genre her own distinctive treatment, starting in the 1970s, in a series of gothic novels largely concerned with ambience and glamour^*.

Romero's treatment of the myth, just a year after Rice's Interview with the Vampire, is decidedly low-key. Martin is not wealthy; he is not powerful; he is not particularly intriguing or charismatic. The story is set in working-class Pittsburgh; Martin meets his uncle, Cuda, at the train station. Cuda walks Martin to his house, the walk filmed in a series of handheld shots, piano and flute on the soundtrack.

The general tone of the film is one of melancholy and longing, informed by skepticism and aware of preceding myth. Martin can't get people to do what he wants, he's not repelled by garlic or crucifixes; he doesn't sleep in a coffin on cemetery dirt. There's nothing seductive about Martin's process, nothing darkly attractive about the results. He finds the vampire stories exasperating, like the people who believe them, including his uncle.

The story comes across as a slice-of-life drama, perhaps because of the emphasis on relationships: Martin's antagonistic relationship with Cuda, his cautious relationship with Christina, with his slightly freer relationship with Mrs. Santini. In the broadest sense, the story is about a confused, unhappy young man who longs for human companionship yet has an overwhelming need preventing it. The treatment of the subject is surprisingly deft, light, and leavened with a gentle humor, as in the first scene at Cuda's home ("Vampire," Cuda says. "First I will save your soul. Then I will destroy you. I will show you your room.") And the conclusion, when it comes, is sudden, neat, and unexpectedly ironic, almost Hitchcockian in temperament, as if to imply that the particulars are insignificant since everyone is guilty of something.

*Rice's vampire books, for all their faults, are not as silly as Joel Schumacher's campy suburban horror film Lost Boys--which itself comes across looking like cinematic high art in comparison to Mel Brooks' execrable Dracula: Dead and Loving It. There are clever and interesting things that can be done with the vampire myth still; Brook successfully avoided all of them.
[Blues By Lonnie Johnson]
[The Immortal Mississippi John Hurt]

This post is part of the Vampires blogathon and will be updated with links to additional entries as they are published.

IODA , usability, habeas corpus

2006-10-23T01:36:00.000-04:00

Roscoe Shelton -- Worry (1962) (MP3, 192kbps. Left-cllick download.)
Allmusic.com tells me that Roscoe Shelton was in the Fairfield Four before joining the spinoff The Skylarks. I'd never heard of The Skylarks, though I'd heard of the Fairfield Four--I saw three of them in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (a Coen brothers joke, since there are five members in the group. Speaking of, the Radio Four also have five members. Is that some peculiar counting system specific to gospel groups?)

I can't help thinking The Skylarks were probably misnamed; Roscoe Shelton's voice, at least, is a trained falcon, snatching notes from the underbrush and soaring away until it's a speck in the sky.

Bloody writhing metaphors aside, this is a very nice soul track that I'm glad to be introduced to.
[Remember Me Baby @ iTunes]
[Remember Me Baby @ eMusic]

The African Brothers -- Practice what you preach (MP3, 192kbps. Left-cllick download.)
Righteous political reggae taking some preachers to task for being hypocrites and leading children astray. Can I hear "amen."
[Want Some Freedom @ iTunes]
[Want Some Freedom @ eMusic]

Embee -- Send Someone Away (feat. José Gonzáles) (MP3, 192kbps. Left-cllick download.)
Embee is the Tin Man and José González is the heart. The producer is the Wizard, one of the few who can magic warmth into electronica.
[EP @ iTunes]

Pierre Ardene -- Cristalina (MP3, 192kbps. Left-cllick download.)
This track has such a warm and effortlessly welcoming feel to it that it puts me in mind of an infinitely generous host with a cozy house, the kind of place that in your weaker moments you might wish you lived. But you know it's absurd; you can't overstay your welcome, so you just thank the host, and mean it, and go on your way.
[Casa de Praia @ iTunes]
[Casa de Praia @ eMusic]

These four are all from IODA/Promonet, the site I mentioned a couple of months ago that lets mp3bloggers poke through their catalogue for tracks to post.

I'm not getting kickbacks (or getting paid for anything I'm doing here); I just like the service more than most of the PR firms that send me tracks. For starters, I get to pick the tracks, rather than having them foisted upon me (most of the ones I get sent are ones I'd never have any interest in posting), and the site's interface is good: the embedded Flash players give a brief sample so you don't have to download an entire track just to find out if you like it.

Speaking of usability, I reworked this site's HTML and CSS recently so that the main column appears before the sidebar in the source but the visual layout is the same. The result should be that the posts appear before the sidebar on PDAs and cellphones, as well as in Lynx and text-to-speech browsers. I've also tried to simplify the site's CSS for handhelds but I notice that Google's and MSN's mobile proxy both serve up the images that the stylesheet instructs it to strip. I'm still trying to figure out why it's done that; I think I have an idea but don't know how to get around it.

I'm still debating whether to strip the sidebar altogether from the information sent to handhelds; if you have one and use it to access the site, I'd love your feedback on it. I probably wouldn't use all my fingers counting the number of times I've used a cell phone, but I'm interested in making the content as accessible as possible.

Even if you don't use a PDA or cellphone to access the site, if you've noticed any bugs in the layout or behavior, or if you have any other suggestions, please send them along.

And now for some politics. Keith Olberman on The Military Commissions Act and the death of habeas corpus. And again. The reaction to this law among the general population seems to have been a protracted yawn, and I can't imagine why. The points in brief: Congress has decided, and Bush has agreed, that people can be thrown into jail, without ever facing charges, and with no legal right to challenge their jailing. Since this new law states that people in jail under the law have no right to challenge their jailing in court, there is also arguably no standing to challenge the law's Constitutionality. Yet the new law goes against our entire history of legal precedent and also is blatantly un-Constitutional since it destroys the balance of power set forth in the Constitution, exceeding the legislative authority and the Presidential authority both also set forth in the Contstitution. It's a stupid, dangerous, reprehensible law, the kind of thing that absolutely must go before the Supreme Court anyway and be defeated.

End rant, climbing off the soapbox.

The Roots Canal: Golden Age of Raunch, Part II

2006-10-21T17:13:00.000-04:00

Wynonie Harris — All She Wants to Do Is Rock
Wynonie Harris arguably invented rock'n'roll by adding a backbeat to rhythm-and-blues (see How Rock Really Began), but he never really went wild and started rockin' out like Roy Brown, Wild Bill Moore, Big Joe Turner, Bull Moose Jackson, Jimmy Liggins, Big Jay McNeely, Jimmy Preston, Fats Domino, Johnny Otis and the other rock'n'roll pioneers who followed in his wake.

What he did do was turn out a series of great jump blues hits while staying in character as Mr. Blues — a slick, smooth singer who loved to drink, party and womanize. He celebrated the lifestyle in drinking songs like Rot Gut and Bloodshot Eyes, but really became known for his over-the-top ribald lyrics in songs like I Like My Baby's Pudding and the sci-fi fantasy Lovin' Machine.

Wynonie's raunchiest songs weren't his best — with one knockout exception. I think All She Wants to Do Is Rock was as good as anything he ever did, a classic of early rock'n'roll. It was one of a series of hits that Wynonie and Roy Brown traded back and forth, starting with Good Rockin' Tonight (which Brown wrote and Harris turned into a smash hit), each one taking the formula a little farther and rocking it a little harder. These could be the raunchiest lyrics ever to reach #1:

My baby don't go for fancy clothes
High class dinners and picture shows
All she wants to do is stay at home
And hucklebuck with Daddy all night long

Of course, "hucklebuck" didn't mean then what you think it did. It was actually the name of the first rock'n'roll dance craze, back in 1949. (Did you notice in the movie Ray that one of the bars on the street was called The Hucklebuck Club?) But really...when he says "all she wants to do is rock and roll all night long," I don't think he was talking about the lindy hop.

Bonus track: As long as we're getting down with Wynonie Harris, why not go all the way? This song isn't nearly as good as All She Wants to Do Is Rock, but it's a whole lot nastier. This has got to be Wynonie's raunchiest song — and that's saying something.

Keep on churnin' 'til the butter comes
Keep on churnin' 'til the butter comes
Keep on pumpin', make the butter flow
Wipe off the paddle and churn some more

I can just picture slick Wynonie Harris down on the farm churning butter. Right.
Wynonie Harris — Keep on Churnin'

[Bloodshot Eyes: The Best of Wynonie Harris]

Hey, why are you so happy?

2006-10-19T00:50:00.000-04:00

Dear and Glorious Physician -- Spooky Action
Fugazi -- Waiting Room
Bob Dylan -- Idiot Wind
"Spooky Action": the punctuating grunts are cheesy and the vocals dip into emo but I can't stop listening to this track. I think it's partly the bass and partly the guitar but mostly where the vocals snarl and pop.

"Waiting Room": withdrawal, inertia, the laying of plans: the end of paralysis or a comforting fantasy?

"Idiot Wind,": the bitterest of breakups and recriminations.
[Dear and Glorious Physician's site]
[13 Songs]
[Blood on the Tracks]

The Roots Canal: Golden Age of Raunch, Part I

2006-10-18T00:22:00.000-04:00

Dinah Washington -- Big Long Slidin' Thing
I'm feeling raunchy tonight. No, I don't have a bad stomach. I want to hear some great risqué double-entendre lyrics like they used to sing in the 1940s and 50s. For all the talk about how licentious our culture has become, nothing they're singing today is as delightfully filthy as those awesome raunchy lyrics of old-time R&B.

Here's one of my favorite "dirty" songs. Just listen to the Queen of the Blues work her way through an entire band while she pines away for her favorite trombone player:

I've been in every bar
Been in every honky tonk
Been tryin' to find my daddy
With that broke-down piece of junk
Asked everyone to help me
Cried, help me if you can
You'll know my daddy
He's that trombone-playing man
Where is my daddy
Tell me where is my daddy
With that big long slidin' thing

No wonder the good burghers of America rose up in horror when their fresh-cheeked sons and daughters started listening to that awful primitive music called rhythm-and-blues (later, rock and roll). It was just as sexy and seditious as they said it was.

[The R&B Years: 1954]

Pédaler en grand braquet

2006-10-13T15:03:00.000-04:00

[camarades et amitié]
Matthieu Chedid -- Belleville Rendez-Vous (French Version)
Kraftwerk -- Tour de France (French Version)
A young boy grows up to become a cyclist whom the French mafia want to kidnap to use as a power source. Yes. This is a common problem.

A few points about the French mafia:
1. They are better-dressed than the American mafia.
2. They are less interested in practicality than in the je ne sais quoi of an idea.
3. They tend to be broad and squarish and so thin they nearly disappear when they turn to the side. For this reason, they could be lurking anywhere.

Childhood events exercise a curious power over the mind (whether human or canine). Yes. They are called "formative years" for a reason.

A few points about The Triplets of Belleville:
1. It's quirky (you guessed that).
2. It's visually innovative.
3. It has sparse dialogue.

Benoit Charest writes, and Matthieu Chedid sings,^* warm organic music with real instruments. Kraftwerk makes cold computerized music with circuits and knobs and switches.

A few points about Belleville Rendez-Vous (French Version):
1. acoustic guitar, muted strums.
2. classical guitar with the fingers breakdancing down the frets.
3. the voice. the voices. the harmony.

A few points about Tour de France (French Version):
1. drum machines, bike chain, grunts of a cyclist up a long hill.
2. the guitar, sounding like steel drums, with an unlikely melody.
3. the harp suggesting that might be the warmest Kraftwerk get.
[Triplets of Belleville]
[I think the French version is the same as the Francois K. remix on this disc but I'm not sure, as I only have the LP EP.]

...
If you don't read Girish's site you probably missed the notice, and even if you do read it, you might have forgotten about it, but I'm calling for a horror film blogathon on October 31st. (And today is a bit late to make the announcement, yes; suffice it to say that organizing movements is not one of my strong points.)

The blogathon is an idea Girish cooked up: bloggers write about one topic and all post on the same day; all you have to do to be a part of it is to post on the topic and say you're a part of it. In the past people have written on Showgirls, avant-garde film, Abel Ferrara's films, Hayao Miyazaki's films, Michelle Pfeiffer's films, and Code Unknown. If you decide to take part, please send me the URL once you've posted so I can link to it.

Elsewhere:
Soulheads, don't miss Darcy's post on The Ohio Players, Dan Phillips' post on Bobby Rush, and Soul Sides' post on Johnny Otis.

...
The House Next Door with a Jonathan Rosenbaum interview.

...
Fast Film, an animated movie mashup short. I've seen this before, though I can't remember where.

...
For the sidefills, can we have two great big enormous things please, of a type that might be venerated as gods by the inhabitants of Easter Island, capable of reaching volumes that would make Beelzebub soil his underpants, and driven by amplifiers that could provide the power for a Monster Truck Rally.
Iggy Pop's concert rider

...
Free Hugs: much better with the sound off. I like it with Ernie K-Doe's "Te Ta Te Ta Ta."

...
one-dimensional Tetris.

*Thanks to Vincent for correcting me on the attribution.

The Roots Canal: Fanfare Pourpour

2006-10-12T00:17:00.000-04:00

Fanfare Pourpour -- Le Temps du Bonheur
Fanfare Pourpour -- La Vieille Valse du Dimanche Après-Midi
For some reason, listening to MTO reminded me of a strange band I heard a couple of years ago when I took my daughter bike-riding in Montreal. We went up to ride the Tour de l'Île de Montréal, a 48-km joyride taken by 30,000 bicyclists around the island city each June. She valiantly toughed out the long ride in the summer sun, finishing at a small park where there was a festival for the tired riders. We collapsed on the grass, popped open some water bottles, and started listening to an odd band playing on a nearby stage.

A stranger agglomeration of instruments I could scarcely imagine. Fifteen or so musicians with a couple of accordions, guitars, clarinets, trumpets, flutes, saxophones of various sizes, snaredrum, keyboard, stand-up bass, violins and the occasional banjo -- playing a chaotic, spirited, gypsy-like music that inspired children and adults to dance free-form before the stage.

"What do you call this," I asked one of the musicians during a break. "Fanfare" came the reply. That didn't help much. My own best effort to describe their music would be as a cross between circus and movie music, running largely to waltzes.

The band was announced as Fanfare Pourpour (pronounced "poo-poo"). I bought one of their CDs and brought it home. Nobody in my house understands why I like it so much. In fact, they don't even let me play it when they're around. I don't care. Whether it's the memory of my original enjoyment, its overall oddness, or even that it's actually pretty good, I'm not sure. Judge for yourself.

I'd like to know more about this unusual group. As best I can tell, it seems to be some kind of street music collective that's been playing together in one form or another for 30 years or so.

These are my two favorite songs on the album, Le Bal. The first is a haunting melody that sounds to my ears like a World War I-vintage antiwar song (although with my high school French, it could be something altogether different). I think the title translates as "Where has the happiness gone?" The second is described as "traditional Cajun"; the tune sounds vaguely familiar but transformed in their imagination into something unique and spontaneous.

[Le Bal]

The Roots Canal: Millenial Territory Orchestra

2006-10-09T23:54:00.000-04:00

MTO -- Signed, Sealed, Delivered
In last week's post on Johnny Otis, I wrote that he got his start in the "territorial orchestras" of the 1930s. Of course, to write that, I first had to look up what a territorial orchestra was. Then, this morning, I was listening to the news on NPR when they did a piece on a band called Millenial Territory Orchestra, or MTO. Naturally enough, I turned up the volume and listened in.

As Steven Bernstein explains on the NPR segment, territorial (or territory) orchestras were regional dance bands that wandered the country before big bands and kept alive a more raucous style of jazz than you'd hear on the radio at the time. The best definition I found on the Internet is by saxophonist Hal Singer, who also got his start in that era:

I played in what we called a "territorial band," which was just the best jazz band in whatever region you lived in in America at that time.

MTO is Bernstein's latest effort (after Spanish Fly and Sex Mob) to bring back the original sense of fun in jazz without making it any less challenging or ambitious. It's not an exercise in nostalgia. It's a unique combination of old and new, capturing the spirit of an earlier time but updating it for modern ears. I immediately downloaded MTO - Volume I from emusic, and loved it. I think you will, too.

Here's a killer cut, a 9-minute version of Signed, Sealed, Delivered. Imagine a 21st-century Count Basie rising from the grave and reinterpreting Stevie Wonder. If that intrigues you, give this a listen. But go on and play the whole album; each track is completely different. Others are more "jazz-like" than this one. There's nothing typical on this record.

Update (bonus track): On second thought, I'm not sure the Stevie Wonder song gives the full flavor of how MTO has updated the territorial orchestra idea. So here's another track from the album, a raucous instrumental, also long but definitely worth the seven minutes of your time.
MTO -- Darling Nikki

[MTO, Vol. 1] Also on emusic.

Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers

2006-10-04T14:24:00.000-04:00

[Pablo Picasso and a girl who never called him an asshole.]

The Modern Lovers -- Pablo Picasso
Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers -- The Bank Teller
Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers -- Affection
I looked for Orson Welles' F for Fake for about five years before finding it. Gainesville is a smallish place, and Criterion did the world a service re-releasing the film last year. The film is a documentary about an art forger and his biographer, who himself begins forging documents. The film has stuck with me, not just because of the surprise ending but also because of the basic questions of expertise, reliability, trust, and sincerity. It's thoughtful and thought-provoking work, presented accessibly--yet its method is avant-garde (thanks for pointing that out, Girish!)--and it's only now occurring to me how much my last post owes to it.

Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers is not the same band as The Modern Lovers, though they do have the same Jonathan Richman. The Modern Lovers were a rock&roll/punk band and lasted from late 1970 to late 1973; after they broke up, Jonathan Richman continued recording with a different band under the same name.

Lyrically, Richman is a goofy geeky fellow with the occasional spark of nastiness. "Pablo Picasso" probably serves as a good example:

Well the girls would turn the color of avocado
When he would drive down their street in his El Dorado

Funny, right--cheesy? Then:

He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist his stare
Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole
Not like you

Is this a commiserating "Not like you"? No; the delivery makes that clear; it appends a mental "you asshole." It still doesn't fill out the meter, but meter isn't Richman's forte anyway.

"The New Teller" is an ode to the new bank teller, with handclaps, a rockin' country solo, and more cheesy rhymes ("teller" and "tell her", "There's only three in the other line / but in mine I count eleven / well, that's fine 'cause I'm in Heaven").

And then "Affection" is a simple, somber look back at Richman's earlier days, pointing out that being a snob makes you unhappy and that people need to risk pain for love. You could fault Richman for his sincerity and cheesiness, and plenty of people do, but I'm not one of them....

I posted The Modern Lovers last year as part of the jogging mix, but I find that the longer I post the less I'm concerned about if I've posted someone before. I doubt that that is Sturgeon's Law coming into play; if anything it's more a reflection of how much awesome music I still haven't heard.
[The Modern Lovers]
[Back in Your Life]
[Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers]

...
"It was a hot day when the horse came in and I was shocked at first because I have never run a pub before."

...
Sock puppets invade LJ. I was eager to see The Science of Sleep, but the studio falling back on sockpuppetry, astroturfing, and asshattery to promote it tells me that it's maybe not so very good after all.... Or maybe they just don't know how to market it (though God knows why that would be the case, with Michel Gondry, Gael García Bernal, and an arthouse theme).

...
Tone Memory, from which I deduce that I do not have perfect pitch, or possibly even any pitch at all.

The Roots Canal: Johnny Otis

2006-10-02T10:33:00.000-04:00

Johnny Otis with Mel Walker -- All Night Long
Did you like that Shuggie Otis track? Try going back a generation. Shuggie's father Johnny Otis was one of the most remarkable figures in the history of R&B and rock'n'roll. You could describe him as the first white R&B star, but that wouldn't be quite right because Johnny Otis was white in skin tone only. Raised as Yannis Veliotes in Oakland, he basically decided he'd rather be black than Greek. He immersed himself in African-American music and culture, changed his name to Johnny Otis and has pretty much lived as a black man in the black community for the last 70 years.

Johnny Otis lived more lives than most of us get to dream of. He started as a jazz drummer with "territorial bands" in the late '30s and early '40s. He was a session man on such landmark recordings as Illinois Jacquet's Flyin' Home (the song that kicked off the screaming saxophone rage) and Charles Brown's Driftin' Blues. He had his own band by 1945 and his first hit with Harlem Nocturne. But he gravitated to the new rhythm and blues scene and opened the first R&B-only club, The Barrelhouse, in 1948. The club became the center of the LA R&B scene, where Johnny discovered and showcased stars like Little Esther, Etta James and Big Mama Thornton. He toured the country repeatedly with The Johnny Otis R&B Caravan. He arranged and played drums on the original Hound Dog. He started a couple of record labels. He hosted several popular R&B radio and TV shows. In the late '50s, he became a rock'n'roll star himself with Willie and the Hand Jive. By the 1960s, R&B was out of favor and Johnny turned to other endeavors with the same boundless energy. He started a chicken farm. He painted and sculpted. He got involved in politics and became Deputy Chief of Staff to a congressman. He wrote a couple of books about black music, culture and politics. He launched an R&B revival. He helped his son start his own career. He was ordained as a minister. He started a natural foods store. He still runs his own website.

Johnny's heyday was in the early 1950s. In 1950 alone, he had ten songs in Billboard's Top Ten, including three at #1 featuring Little Esther. I particularly like All Night Long, a wild early rocker featuring Mel Walker, released in 1951. You can still hear them hand-clapping on the back beat, just like Wynonie Harris' Good Rockin' Tonight.

Want to hear more? There are a zillion Johnny Otis albums out there, like The Original Johnny Otis Show and The Greatest Johnny Otis Show. For a quick introduction, try The Essential Recordings on emusic. There are also a couple of boxed sets that capture the whole era: Midnight at the Barrelhouse on emusic or The Johnny Otis R&B Caravan at Amazon. You can check out his raunchier side on Snatch & the Poontangs. Unfortunately, his 1970 R&B revival album, The Johnny Otis Show Live at Monterey, featuring comeback performances by Roy Brown, Big Joe Turner and Roy Milton along with Shuggie on lead guitar, is out of print but 14 of the 19 cuts are on iTunes.

Want to learn more? Check out this three-part bio on JammUpp, the bio on Johnny's own site, or these bios at allmusic and Wikipedia.

Bonus track: Here's a great novelty song from 1950, Wedding Boogie. It was released under the name The Johnny Otis Congregation. Little Esther plays the bride, Mel Walker the groom and Lee Graves is the preacher. Have some fun!
The Johnny Otis Congregation -- Wedding Boogie

Shuggie Otis -- Aht Uh Mi Hed

2006-09-30T02:31:00.000-04:00

Shuggie Otis -- Aht Uh Mi Hed
In college I was roommates with someone named Shuggie, a tall muscular man with a moustache and an afro. He said the nickname came from "Sugar," itself a reference to his boxing in high school; apparently he could knock the shit out of somebody. He spent most of his spare time running and at the gym, though I don't know how he had any spare time; he was double majoring in physics and electrical engineering. I spent most of my spare time reading or playing guitar on the plaza; I was majoring in English. I doubt it was as demanding as any of the sciences.

We didn't have a lot in common except for a love of dark comedies; the day The Big Lebowski came out on DVD we'd both bought it. We smoked a sack together watching it; it was safe to say we were friends after that.

He didn't talk about boxing much, though one of my friends downstairs said he still used the punching bag at the gym. Shuggie's conversations always seemed to be about physics or music. In music, he'd get excited talking about ways to mix psychedelia, soul, funk, blues, and jazz. He didn't play anything, though, or at least I didn't think he did, and there weren't yet any good programs for making mashups. I guess it was just the concept that blew his mind so much; I had a cheap 4-track and I tried to get some of his ideas to work but couldn't.

One day I came back from class to find him playing my guitar. We'd been roommates for about three months. He wasn't bad; I wanted to hear more, but he was embarrassed and just apologized and put the guitar away. I didn't press the issue. I don't know how long he'd been playing; if it was only a few months then he learned faster than anyone I'd met. I meant to ask him about it again but I never did.

One night he started talking about the nature of space and time and how a planet's gravity warps the time around it like a ball bearing on rubber sheets. I didn't understand him, but when Shuggie was talking about physics I rarely did. Maybe it was the same for him when I talked about transcendentalist yearnings in pop fiction. I guess he got tired of the conversation; at any rate, he went to his desk and started writing something; and when his CD was done I put on a Charlie Mingus LP. I lay there stoned, listening to the bassline, and dozed off; when I woke up he was soldering some wires to a circuit board. It put an acrid smell in the room but it seemed oddly pleasant.

Over the next few days he set the circuit board into a big metallic box he'd assembled with wires running off in all directions. I was curious about it and he answered my questions, but they were the kind of answers that were highly technical and--to me, at least--unsatisfactory. I decided he probably didn't want me to know, so I'd just leave him alone about it. After all, he wasn't asking me about the non vidi citations in my paper on systemic inhumanity in Catch-22.

The week before Thanksgiving, he asked what I would do if I could go back in time but only about thirty years.
"Why only thirty?" I said.
"Suppose you'd got just enough energy for it."
"What do you mean? Like you had a nine-volt but it took a car battery?"
"Something like that," he said, in the kind of voice he used sometimes when I was trying to keep up but failing.
"I don't know." On TV, The Dude was dancing down a flight of black and white stairs and teaching Maude how to bowl. "I guess I'd try to prevent Martin Luther King from being assassinated."
"You think you could do all that?"
"Maybe. I don't know. Probably not. What would you do?."
"Probably just go to college."
"Well, don't go to Kent State."
He laughed ruefully. "No. And I'd burn my draft card."
"Yeah," I said. "I need another hit"
"We smoked it all."
I prodded the pizza box. "And the pizza is gone."

In the morning Shuggie was gone too. He left all his stuff but he took my guitar. I called his parents two days later to ask if he'd gone home early. They said he hadn't. When he still hadn't come back by the end of the week they showed up in town and the police came around to ask some questions. I didn't mind; I could understand how they felt. At the end of the semester his parents came back to collect his stuff. They seemed dazed but polite. A couple of semesters later we fell out of contact. I don't know what happened to him; you'd think he'd have finished the degree and taken a job teaching physics. Maybe he decided to be a boxer instead.
[Inspiration Information @ amazon.com]
[Inspiration Information @ emusic.com]

None of this post is true, but Inspiration Information is ahead of its time.

The Roots Canal: Bill & Bonnie Hearne

2006-09-28T00:10:00.000-04:00

Bill and Bonnie Hearne -- New Mexico Rain
Bill and Bonnie Hearne -- Fusion
When they first walk out to play, you wonder what you've gotten yourself into. They're not hipsters, to put it mildly. Bonnie's completely blind, and Bill's not far behind. He leads her out wearing glasses thicker than the beer bottle you're drinking from. They're both stocky, rough-hewn, flashing crooked smiles, perhaps best described as "frumpy." You wonder if you've just wandered into an old movie. Then they start tearing up the joint on guitar and piano, taking turns singing with sweet expressive voices, and you think, oh my god where in creation have these guys been hiding?

New Mexico, actually. Bill & Bonnie have been playing the honky tonks of Texas and New Mexico since before a lot of their listeners were born. After meeting at the Austin School for the Blind, they became fixtures of the Austin scene in its heyday before exiling themselves to northern New Mexico in the 1970s. But they kept in touch with their old friends and still get together to record and tour with the likes of Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, Tish Hinojosa and Emmylou Harris. They're still there, knocking around from town to town in the Southwest (although Bonnie's not well enough to play anymore, so Bill formed his own trio).

Their best record is Diamonds in the Rough, their first on a major label (there are three left on Amazon, and it's available on iTunes). But I've got a particular weakness for these two songs from an earlier record, New Mexico Rain. The album's never been released on CD but these songs are available on a collection of their earlier work called Most Requested Plus (available on their own website). Bonnie's got an album of her own that I've never heard, Saturday Night Girl. There's also a so-so album of road songs called Watching Life Through a Windshield (available on iTunes). There's a live album from La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, where you can still hear Bill when he's not on the road. And Bill recently put out his own CD, From Las Cruces to Santa Fe (available on CD Baby). They're also featured on a strange record called The I-10 Chronicles along with people like Willie Nelson (who Bonnie used to back up on piano in the old days) and Joe Ely of the Flatlanders.

This article, reprinted on their site, is the best I've seen about Bill and Bonnie.

Enjoy!

Bonus Tracks: Oh, what the hell. I can't resist posting a few more songs. Here's a couple of duets from Diamonds in the Rough:
Bill and Bonnie Hearne -- Going Back to Georgia
Bill and Bonnie Hearne -- Wild Geese

Paul Phillips & His Band -- Naked City

2006-09-27T02:11:00.001-04:00

Paul Phillips and His Band -- Tenderly
Paul Phillips and His Band -- In the Still of the Night
An argument:
1. The soundtrack to The Naked City is awesome.
2. There is an LP titled Naked City.
3. Some of the tracks on that LP are awesome.
:. The tracks are from the film The Naked City.

If this were in Introduction to Logic I'd have to question the conclusion. See, there might be other audiovisual entities named Naked City, for instance a TV show that was popular a decade after the film. There's also the premise that some tracks on the LP are not familiar to a viewer of the film. And one could introduce the premise that there are tracks on the LP which stop at "good," but by that point one would be making qualitative judgments and edging away from the purely mathematical/logical. Let's just say that the conclusion is not supported by the premises and try for another, avoiding any hint of linguistic hanky panky.

How about "There are millions of tracks from films, and these might be some of them"? No. Not a good conclusion--where it's not flippant it's vapid, the statement of a politician with few convictions beyond the necessity of his own re-election. And, besides, it doesn't follow necessarily from the premises.

Maybe we could escape the strictures of logic altogether, abandon the argument, present simply four premises, no conclusion?

"4. The full title of the LP is The Sound of Midnight: Naked City, by Paul Phillips and His Band, arranged and conducted by Joe Harnell, Kapp Records release MS-7517."
[LP out of print]

The Roots Canal: Blue Alert

2006-09-22T22:51:00.000-04:00

Madeleine Peyroux -- Blue Alert
Anjani -- Blue Alert
I got lucky tonight. I stopped by one of my local hangouts where Madeleine Peyroux was tuning up for a new tour by playing the "early bird special," as she put it, in the back room. Just her and a terrific bass player named Matthew Penman and a pretty good keyboard guy from Australia. No drummer, which she bemoaned but I kind of liked. I have mixed feelings about her work. I really enjoy listening to her, but she's been over-hyped. I think her popularity is partly due to a kind of shtick, that her voice is so reminiscent of Billie Holiday and, at times, Edith Piaf. But if you don't get hung up on that kind of extraneous stuff and just listen to her, she's very enjoyable. It was a real treat to hear her in such an intimate venue, maybe 30-40 people at most, where she could be more informal than in a big concert hall. She played a bunch of songs from her new album, which I hadn't heard yet. I was really struck by this one, which she said was written by Leonard Cohen.

When I got home, I looked up the song online and found out it was actually co-written by Cohen with a young jazz singer named Anjani Thomas, who must think she's a Brazilian soccer player because she only uses her first name. Wow. What an unforgettable performance. If you want to hear a sultry singer who knows how to make a song come alive -- and even provides the songs herself -- you have to check this out. This is the title song on her new album, her first on a major label. (She also has an earlier vocal album and a religious album available on emusic, which seem to be pretty good but not as spectacular as this one.) It's a gorgeous song. The lyrics are worth repeating here:

There's perfume burning in the air
Bits of beauty everywhere
Shrapnel flying, soldier hit the dirt
She comes so close you feel her then
She tells you no and no again
Your lip is cut on the edge of her pleated skirt
Blue alert

Visions of her drawing near
Rise, abide and disappear
You try to slow it down, it doesn't work
It's just another night, I guess
All tangled up in nakedness
You even touch yourself, you're such a flirt
Blue alert

[chorus]
You know how nights like this begin
The kind of knot your heart gets in
Any way you turn is gonna hurt
There's perfume burning in the air
Bits of beauty everywhere
Shrapnel flying, soldier hit the dirt
Blue alert, blue alert

She breaks the rules so you can see
She's wilder than you'll ever be
You talk religion but she won't convert
Her body's twenty stories high
You try to look away, you try
But all you want to do is get there first
Blue alert

[repeat chorus]

If you're in the neighborhood, it's not too late to catch Madeleine Peyroux. She'll be there a few more nights, playing the early shift before the regular shows begin.

[Half the Perfect World]
[Blue Alert (album)]

Bettye Swann -- Don't You Ever Get Tired (Of Hurting Me)

2006-09-21T12:28:00.000-04:00

Bettye Swann -- Don't You Ever Get Tired (Of Hurting Me)
I just saw Battle Royale and I think I can safely say that I don't get it. It's a film in which a classroom of students is gassed and brought to an island, collared with explosive devices, given food and weapons with which to kill each other. The students are warned that trying to remove the collars will cause them to explode, and warned also that the contest will last only three days: if more than one student survies by the end of it, every collar will detonate.

The story strikes me as "The Most Dangerous Game" crossed with Lord of the Flies, but unfortunately it has none of the brevity of the former or the mounting dread of the latter. It has a real visual audacity; and the plot is superficially transgressive but deeply flawed. The scenes range from suspenseful to predictable to downright silly; and the film, in spending so long on gore and spectacle, hints at an intellectual emptiness: a blood-soaked impaling commands the attention, yes, but the more troubling premise is not how to survive, but what to do with yourself after.

The film probably makes most sense when seen as part of a dystopian sci-fi/action tradition, but it doesn't have the satisfying conclusion of either Death Race 3000 or the more recent District B13, in which citizens put through their paces for the gratification of a corrupt government manage through pluck, cleverness, or sheer cussedness to bring that part of the government to its knees. No, these citizens manage to kill their most immediate tormentor and then escape, leaving the system itself intact. It's a callous film not just because of the body count but also because of the inherent selfishness of the conclusion, which considers atavism a briefly shameful memory rather than an ongoing threat and which posits that escape in itself constitutes a happy ending. The characters indicate in dialogue that they just want to sweep the last few days under the rug; and if polite company doesn't talk about barbarism, maybe it should. At least Lord of the Flies was sensible enough to posit paranoia and destruction of community as a tragedy.

Director Kinji Fukasaku was diagnosed with prostate cancer shortly before his last film, a sequel to this one which is generally held in poor regard. He refused treatment so that he could make the sequel, and he died shortly thereafter. I like to imagine the sequel is one in which the surviving contestants spend the entire time in painful unfolding self-realization: a Bergmanesque sequel to a Bruckheimer original.
[Bettye Swann @ amazon.com]
[Battle Royale @ imdb.com]

...
A half-ton of awesome clips at Youtube. Mississippi John Hurt, Howlin' Wolf, Professor Longhair, Muddy Waters, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.... Amazing.

...
15 ways to get more out of Pandora Music.

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Chavez shows a talent for hyperbole, calls Bush "The Devil." If anything, he's more like a shit demon.

Blind Willie McTell -- Dying Crapshooter's Blues

2006-09-18T06:48:00.000-04:00

[Blind Willie McTell, with 12-string guitar, hotel room, Atlanta, Ga. Photo from The American Memory Collection]

Such a strange song--cadences flowing, changing paths, unpredictable yet non-negotiable--water running down an arid hill.

Blind Willie McTell -- Dying Crapshooter's Blues
Take one: young, hoarse, slow pace, melody like your grandfather's voice settling into a long story.

Blind Willie McTell -- The Dyin' Crapshooter's Blues (live)
Take two: Older, stronger, fiercer. Decades later, McTell in a casual concert, putting away a pint of bourbon.

Here's the long story, the song's background--a song written over the course of three years at the request of a friend shot by the police. The cadences (unpredictable, organic, non-negotiable) took some time to figure out. What do they want? What are they after? McTell didn't write the song; the song chose a venue to be written in. How many attempts at this did it take? How many bottles of bourbon am I listening to?

Both takes: bonus points for the funkky high-pitched strums which sound like NES sound effects.
[Atlanta Twelve String]
[Last Session]

...
Boingboing has an interesting post about This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a documentary about the MPAA's idiosyncratic and intermittently Puritanical ratings system.

...
Maybe it's the sci-fi aspect of this cartoon that distances it enough from current events to allow me to laugh at it.

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The stolen election of 2004: a compelling report which is just as disgusting as it is enraging.

The Roots Canal: Joe Liggins & The Honeydrippers

2006-09-15T11:43:00.000-04:00

Joe Liggins -- The Honeydripper
Joe Liggins -- The Honeydripper, Pt 1
Joe Liggins -- Dripper's Boogie, Pt 1

After going bonkers for his kid brother Jimmy, I would be remiss to ignore the pioneer in the family, big brother Joe Liggins. His music may sound relatively tame in retrospect, but in his day he was one of the most important figures in the evolution of R&B from swing to jump blues to rock'n'roll. I already posted Joe's Goin' Back to New Orleans (yes, that's the song covered by Dr. John on his album of the same name) back in April, but here are some more.

If ever a musician was defined by a song, it was Joe Liggins with The Honeydripper. Joe quit Charlie Franklin's big band when they wouldn't cut a record of it. He formed one of the small combos that would become a hallmark of jump blues, called it The Honeydrippers, and got a regular gig at a place called the Samba Club. There was a midnight curfew in LA because of the fear of Japanese bombing after Pearl Harbor, so every night they'd play The Honeydripper from quarter-of-twelve until closing. He cut it as a two-part record on Exclusive Records in 1945. It sold two million copies and spent 18 weeks as #1 on the R&B charts (then known as the Race charts), still tied for longest with Louis Jordan's Choo Choo Ch'Boogie.

This version of The Honeydripper is a remake Joe made after joining his brother at Specialty Records in the early '50s. It's basically an instrumental, and is actually patterned after Part Two of the original. Part One, less known today, was predominantly vocal. He followed that up with a similar but even hotter two-part song, Dripper's Boogie, the next year. I've only posted Part One of that song.

Like so many other R&B pioneers, Joe's music was considered too old-fashioned to survive the onslaught of rock'n'roll in the mid-'50s. Joe hung around, though, and actually reformed The Honeydrippers during the blues revival of the 1970s and '80s. He continued playing The Honeydripper right up to his death in 1987, even performing at the Monterey Jazz and Chicago Blues festivals that year.

There's a fabulous double-CD import of Joe's music on Proper Records. I highly recommend it. A lot of this post came from the liner notes. There are also a couple of CDs of Joe's later work on Specialty Records on emusic.

[The Shuffle Boogie King]
[Joe Liggins & The Honeydrippers]
[Dripper's Boogie]

Yusef Lateef -- Blues for the Orient

2006-09-13T16:40:00.000-04:00

Yusef Lateef -- Blues for the Orient
Yusef Lateef's oboe is humble, taciturn, uncomplaining, quietly efficient. If it were a man it would be the kind of man people barely notice as he moves through a company making sure that everything that needs to happen happens--the kind of man who helms a crack crew, turning in critical work ahead of schedule and well-executed, then immediately moves on to the next thing and gets passed up for a raise.

The bass, drums, and piano hang out with him because of the work, which is unusual and challenging; afterwards they smoke outside alley doors under the eaves in the rain, then head off in different directions: the nearest bar, the movies, a party across town, the subway home. In the morning they yawn and stretch and lie in bed, smiling, wondering what will happen today.
[Eastern Sounds @ amazon.com]

...
Target loses a lawsuit brought against it about providing a commercial website which is not very accessible to the blind.

The Roots Canal: Jimmy Liggins & His Drops of Joy

2006-09-11T00:10:00.000-04:00

Jimmy Liggins --That's What's Knocking Me Out
Jimmy Liggins -- Saturday Night Boogie Woogie Man
Jimmy Liggins -- Drunk
As the song says, Jimmy Liggins knocks me out. His hard-driving, bluesy proto-rock'n'roll gets me right in the guts. His voice isn't pretty, like his big brother Joe's. His diction is rough. Sometimes he's not singing so much as talking to the music. And his guitar work isn't dazzling. But his band lays down a groove that grabs you like a locomotive and doesn't let go until you're halfway to Santa Fe. Boogie-woogie piano riffs, powerful bass lines and a nasty horn section just wring you out.

Jimmy started out as a chauffeur for brother Joe, whose smash hit The Honeydripper put Los Angeles at the center of the R&B universe in the mid-'40s. He put together his own band in 1947, patterned after his brother's but with a more aggressive style, heavier on the rhythm and dominated by surging, growling saxophones. It captured the spirit of the times, riding the shift from smooth, jazz-oriented jump blues to the rockin' R&B of the late '40s and early '50s. His second record hit the charts with Cadillac Boogie (precursor to Jackie Brenston's Rocket 88) on the B side. He had a string of R&B hits for the next five years but faded from view when rock'n'roll went mainstream. Jimmy's music was just too grown-up for the teenage market. His last hit was a bit of rhythmic funk called Drunk without a single chord change.

I can't believe Jimmy Liggins isn't better remembered. In a way, he was one of the first great rockers. The difference between Joe's smooth jump blues and Jimmy's aggressive R&B is like the difference between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Polite vs. pushy. Nice vs. nasty.

I don't know where to begin with Jimmy's music. There's not one song that stands out above all the others. At least half a dozen are just as good as -- or better than -- his biggest hits. So I just picked a few of my favorites. Enjoy.

Specialty has released a great collection of Jimmy's work, along with a second volume if it turns you on as much as it does me. Both are available on emusic:
[Jimmy Liggins and His Drops of Joy]
[Jimmy Liggins and His Drops of Joy, Vol. 2]

Lee Dorsey -- Confusion

2006-09-08T23:23:00.000-04:00

Lee Dorsey -- Confusion
Here's an energetic track about love and confusion--having your world turned upside down and shaken until everything falls out.

According to wikipedia, Lee Dorsey's highest-charting tracks were "Ya Ya," "Working In The Coal Mine," "Holy Cow," "Ride Your Pony," and "Do-Re-Mi," which leaves me wondering what happend to "Night People," "Draining," and "Yes We Can" (yes we can, I know we can, yes we can can).

According to the liner notes of All Ways Funky, Lee Dorsey worked in an auto shop and went out and cut some records whenever the pay was good and he had the time and inclination. And according to Dorsey, usually others would work out the track's instrumentation and arrangement; he would just go in and provide the vocals, occasionally suggesting changes on the rest. It's a disarming admission that he saw himself as nothing more than a hired gun; if it's true, maybe it points to the influence (read: brilliance) of Allen Toussaint that most of Dorsey's work is so good and has aged so well.

Aside from Toussaint, another frequent collaborator (director?) was The Meters. This track has Toussaint but not The Meters--that's Allen Toussaint on piano (but you knew that as soon as you heard it, didn't you?), Frank Trepanier on trumpet, Wendell Eugene on trombone, Nat Perilliat on tenor sax, Carl Blouin on baritone sax, Walter Peyton on bass, and June Gardner on drums. There's some doubt (confusion) about who it is on guitar--Roy Montrell, or maybe Vincent Toussaint, or maybe John Moore.

All Ways Funky is out of print; the track is originally from New Lee Dorsey, which allmusic.com considers to have two great tracks and the rest just good; it's also on Wheelin' and Dealin', a greatest hits collection that allmusic.com has higher regard for.

...
"Funtwo" with Pachelbel's "Canon in D maj". The New York Times looks into it, finds his identity (Jeong-Hyun Lim, from Seoul); NPR covers it, helpfully pointing out the obvious (he plays tastefully & with great skill), then saves the piece with a mention of a man playing a twelve-string guitar with a spoon for a slide. Now this is amazing, and it's also a good tune. As for the man's identity, Beware of the Blog says his name is Hannes Coetzee and the clip is from Karoo Kitaar Blues, which IMDb doesn't know about and which seems to sell for $295, a price guaranteeing that the film will remain obscure.

The Roots Canal: Freddie Bell (courtesy of Bob Dylan)

2006-09-07T00:05:00.000-04:00

Freddie Bell & The Bellboys -- Hound Dog
Here's a new one on me. On Bob Dylan's radio show, he played a version of Hound Dog by a band I'd never even heard of. I always assumed Elvis picked up Hound Dog directly from Big Mama Thornton. But according to Dylan (and confirmed by a Google search), Elvis actually heard it performed live by Freddie Bell & The Bellboys in Las Vegas. Once you hear this track, you'll believe it. Elvis's arrangement is much closer to this than to the original.

According to Wikipedia, Freddie Bell was an Italian kid (nee Belo) from South Philly who formed a band to start playing R&B in the early 50s. It was pretty rare for white kids to play R&B back then. Bill Haley also got his start in Philly around that time, and Jimmy Cavallo was doing the same in North Carolina and upstate New York. The Bellboys covered Hound Dog in '55. Elvis heard them play it in Vegas the next year, and politely asked their permission to record it himself. Freddie and his band went on to star in a few films, notably Rock Around the Clock, but faded like most early rock groups by the end of the decade.

I trimmed this song from an mp3 of the radio show. I left in Dylan's patter at the beginning and end of the song. I still can't get over Dylan doing a radio show. Kind of like Zeus coming down from Mt. Olympus and opening a corner coffee shop. Still, the guy's got an amazing knowledge of American music. I guess you'd have to expect it.

Bonus track: If you've never heard Big Mama Thornton's original, you're in for a treat. It's down and dirty, backed by Johnny Otis's band with Pete Lewis on a mean guitar. (You'd never guess it was written by a couple of white kids, Lieber and Stoller at the start of their career.) It spent seven weeks as the #1 R&B hit in 1953.
Big Mama Thornton -- Hound Dog

Brook Benton -- Singing the Blues

2006-09-04T12:55:00.000-04:00

Brook Benton -- Chains of Love
Brook Benton -- Got You on My Mind
Brook Benton was a baritone known for his smooth R&B tracks, his sassy duets with Dinah Washington, and his melancholy song "Rainy Night in Georgia." His work on Singing the Blues is unlikely to impress listeners expecting a "pure" blues record--the guitar tends towards rhythmic accents, not minor keyed progressions and scorching solos; the vocals are more hot chocolate with marshmallows than unsweetened dark chocolate; the tracks as a whole tend towards the affable: easy melodies, easy harmonies, violins, backbeat, lazy piano. Still, in spite of the misleading title, I've been listening to this LP a lot, because sometimes hot chocolate with marshmallows really hits the spot. And Benton is an excellent vocalist.
[out of print]

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Neurons and the universe.

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I recently signed up for a Blogger Beta account, at blogger.com's Help Page suggestion, tinkered with it for a day, was logged out, and then could not log back into the Dashboard to continue testing it. Still, the new features--especially comments feeds and labels for posts--look good, and I'm eager for Blogger to work out the bugs so I can start tagging the posts. As Harry Tuttle pointed out, better still would be feeds for labels--if you're interested only in certain genres you wouldn't have to bother with the rest.

The Staple Singers -- Slow Train

2006-08-31T13:45:00.000-04:00

The Staple Singers -- Slow Train
Gospel/soul/R&B today from The Staple Singers--a violin, a guitar, a cello, a quartet, sedate drumming--a lullaby for troubled souls.
[Soul Folk in Action]

Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work, and its history.

Assault by racoon.

Are you being astroturfed? The ever-impressive Teresa Nielsen Hayden has a roundup of posts about it.

The communicative power of silence. With my recent silence I wasn't trying to communicate anything, but if I had been, it would have been "I'm out of town because of a family emergency."

On the trip, my thoughts kept circling back to "Bartleby the Scrivener"--nearly every day I was reminded of mankind's fundamental freedom, even to do pointless or harmful things. I'm tempted to relate that to the myth of the omnipresent enemy, and the reality of the enemies that the U.S. does have, but that's only because I'm a dirty hippie who thinks that freedom is good, subjugation and exploitation are bad, and that rage (even insane self-destructive rage) is a common result of the latter.

Zero 7 -- This World

2006-08-21T09:43:00.000-04:00

Zero 7 -- This World
As a child she saw her uncle kill her father: argument, handgun, collapse. After that her life was marked by bouts of rage, depression, and spontaneous causeless joy snatched away by the slightest morbid thought: cut grass bleeding water in the hot sun, a leaf seesawing to the ground, apple seeds rotting unplanted.
[Simple Things @ amazon.com]

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A Girl Like Me, an impressive and affecting short documentary about skin color, expectations, identity, and self-perception.

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Explaining things through simple diagrams on index cards. (via metafilter)

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A police report about a missing car and a car that seems subtly different. I did this once, with what I'd thought was the company van. It had several bins of computer parts inside, providing a clue that something was not right.

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Mahnamanah (via boingboing)

IODA || Yoda eta pi

2006-08-17T15:35:00.000-04:00

Three tracks today from IODA/promonet, a new service to promote independent musicians, allowing use of certain mp3s on mp3blogs and in podcasts. I poked around a bit, found some things I liked, look forward to returning in a few weeks to see how the selection has expanded....

The Big Three Trio -- Till The Day I Die (MP3, 192kbps)
This is an early R&B group put together by Willie Dixon. I like the song for the background vocals, the alternating leads, and the anachronistic melody. The piano doesn't hurt either--it's very simple, because sometimes simple is perfect and complicated is not.
[The Best Of Delta Records @ eMusic]

Spot Barnett & Friends -- Fence Walk
Latin soul/funk that tiptoed out of the 1960s all the way to 2006. You'd think that after a walk that long it must be tired, but no. It wants to stay up all night and plan heists. It has the suit, it has the fedora, it has the unfiltered cigarettes and strike-anywhere matches.
[Soul Diggin' @ eMusic.com]

Innerstance.Beatbox -- Helium Disco
Turntables, thick distorted bass, RJD2's soundbanks, a modem connecting, and a whimsical arrangement with looped lyrics encouraging you to dance. What can I say? The song bakes a pineapple-carrot cake and gives it a cream cheese frosting. Who can argue with that? Why would they want to?
[Your Eyes Are Like UFOs My Darling @ iTunes]

Teenager in Love

2006-08-14T23:53:00.000-04:00

Bob Marley and the Wailers -- Teenager in Love
This is not the typical Wailers sound here--it was recorded in 1964, well before their most famous work--but it's got that same sense of affable melody and uncluttered composition. The song is a cover of a Dion and the Belmonts tune, but I think there's a real economy and grace to it that saves it from being merely a pre-fame Wailers curiosity.

In any case, I keep listening to it, though I wonder if the lyrics might not be a bit cheesy (answer: the doubt is probably answer enough).
[Simmer Down at Studio One, Vol. 1 ]

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Video treats:
Post vs. truck. Amazing, even if it is a commercial.

David "Elsewhere" Bernal poppin' and lockin' (the second dancer) and poppin' and lockin' some more.

"Marvelous old man," a heavily artefacted but funny video from Japanese TV, with Cyril Takayama performing illusions on an unsuspecting audience.

Also good: Downtown no gaki no tsukai ya arahende, a Japanese show about contestants having to stay silent (often in a library) while facing pranksters and/or odd punishments. This one with Ernesto Hoost is hilarious; this one without the subtitles is also good. (links via metafilter.com) And I'm having the nagging feeling that I've posted these two before, but I can't find any evidence of it. Apologies, if so.

Musical Family Tree

2006-08-13T00:27:00.000-04:00

Chevy Downs -- Jesus, Heal My Hangover
Far be it from me to say someone was doing miracles by halves, but it's written that Jesus turned water into wine yet there's no record of him healing anyone's hangover. Chevy Downs wants to set that straight. They want to set that straight with a bluegrass stomp, because Jesus is a sucker for catchy music, especially if it makes him tap his foot in a steady two-four beat underlying some fancy fretwork.
[Chevy Downs' site]

Tremendous Fucking -- Every Fucking Time I Believed In You
This song sounded somehow familiar when I first heard it, so of course I had to grep the hard drive to see if it had been posted as part of John's "Fuck" mix (starting here and going through the next four posts). Apparently not. The song is a cross between The Pixies and being thumped by the Hulk. And there's someone else it reminds me of, but I can't place it.
[TremFu's site]

Both of these tracks are releases from Musical Family Tree, which focuses on indie music in Indiana. Their CD release Delicious Berries is ace, but neither of these tracks are on it. (Highlights on the disc include Heidi Gluck's "Wake Up,"Brando's "Your Nelson Now," and Emperor Penguin's "Overboogie," but there's enough diversity on the disc that everyone will probably have different favorites.

Don and Claire and Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla

2006-08-06T00:17:00.000-04:00

Schoolhouse Rock! -- Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla
If you're in your 40s or younger and grew up in the U.S. you're probably familiar with Schoolhouse Rock. A series of educational musical cartoon shorts, three minutes apiece, the episodes aired between Saturday morning cartoons from 1973 through to the mid-1980s. The shorts took on a number of subjects, falling into broad areas like math, English, science, civics and history; but they were not dryly "educational"; instead, they were infectious entertaining mnemonics apt to get you singing along, even about multiplication tables or interjections.

In this regard, the shorts were ahead of their time, integrating perfectly with Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences, which holds that there aren't simply two kinds of intelligence (linguistic/verbal and logical/mathematical) but at least eight, including visual/spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, musical, naturalist, intrapersonal, and interpersonal. I've never met anyone who'd seen the shorts as a youngster and didn't like them; most people, even if they hadn't thought of the series in decades, could at least respond to "Conjunction Junction" with "What's your function?"

One of my favorites in the series is "Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla," which is a cheerfully over-the-top explanation of the usefulness of pronouns, but if I had to pick a second it would probably be "The Tale of Mr. Morton." "Mr. Norton" is a story of predicates and loneliness which toys with melancholy and then resolves itself quite nicely with both humor and a bit of forward-thinking action. In terms of Gardner's theory, this episode is probably the most complete--it touches on all of them, really--but it's not as fun as "Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla" or "Electricity, Electricity."

The program had a lot of good tracks, though, in addition to the ones mentioned already: "Three Is a Magic Number" is a tuneful work sampled by De La Soul; "Ready or Not, Here I Come" is about counting and multiplying by fives, with the trademark Schoolhouse Rock humor ("Look at that boy with seventeen fingers sticking up. How do you do that, kid?"); "Little Twelvetoes" is a sci-fi track about what it would be like if man had twelve fingers and toes (he'd count by the base-twelve system); "Sufferin' Till Suffrage" is a soulful song about Susan B. Anthony and other suffragettes; "Them Not-So-Dry Bones" explains bones and the need for calcium; and "A Victim of Gravity" is a comedic doo-wop science lesson.

The series is mostly very sensible, but a couple of the episodes made in the 1990s show the ad-men roots, with a blatant emphasis on consumption not apparent in the earlier ones. Which is not to say that the others are completely without problems; "Elbow Room" in particular indulges in the great national lie of Manifest Destiny, apparently agreeing that it was "our" destiny to expand across the country and implying, by extension, both that "we" are not black or Native American, and, further, that the black and Native American destiny was to be subjugated. It's ugly, vicious stuff packed in a saccharine melody, completely out of step with most of the series.

Also troubling is that suffrage got mention in the original series but slavery and civil rights both did not. In a series that spent three songs on the fight for independence, one on The Preamble, and another on the three branches of government, it's a bit jarring to jump ahead from that to Women's Suffrage. The series debuted in 1973, so it's possible that the producers or the network considered slavery and civil rights still (!) too contentious, especially for the Southeastern market, where much of the public has no compunctions about showing its racism. The series released new episodes in the 1990s, including ones dealing with computers and "The Tale of Mr. Morton," mentioned above. You'd think that would give the authors a chance to redress their error, but they didn't; I think the absence points towards one of those "polite fictions" the powerful like to indulge in to avoid dealing with uncomfortable discussions.

If self-perception and willful self-delusion are subtext in Schoolhouse Rock, they serve as the text itself in the experimental film Panorama Ephemera. The film starts with Don and Claire, a young man and woman sitting at a desk, being asked if they know what the signal was that will cause them to fall into a deep sleep again. Neither of them can remember it. The voice offscreen says that perhaps they can find the signal.

The film cuts to a clip asking if we think it's strange that the land might develop a fondness for its people; and both the film's means and its main theme are soon apparent. Edited together from what Rick Prelinger calls "ephemeral films," Panorama Ephemera incorporates social guidance films, industrial films, home movies, and other disparate sources into a feature-length examination of how the U.S. portrays itself.

The clips are often grouped thematically and, in a sense, the film is a glorification of B-roll--these kinds of clips are often used to depict some point being made in documentaries--but in another sense the film is a glorification of the invisible, a cousin to Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart, which Girish wrote about as decontextualizing reaction shots to foreground them in the viewer's attention.

In Panorama Ephemera the connections between the clips are sometimes blatant and sometimes not--footage of a scientific experiment using mice follows footage of toy cars on a toy highway, weaving past each other. In the experiment, mice must push a button for rewards; one of the mice ends up doing all the work and the other two become social parasites. A title card in the original footage informs us "A 'class society' has emerged." It's tempting to relate this experiment to the previous shot of cars and to dismiss the traffic as part a "rat race"; it's equally tempting to relate the experiment to later footage of police beating down union members on strike.

Many of the connections, though, are less immediately obvious. Halfway through the film, Don and Claire witness the signal again: a book closes. They both fall into hypnosis. The offscreen voice continues asking them questions. In the clips that follow, a principal arrives at school to serve as poll-place volunteer; settlers travel west; a worker loads corncribs with corn; a couple drives through the country to picnic, the woman working herself up to announce that she's pregnant, the man steadfastly not understanding her allusions.

There is so much to consider, so much of it open to interpretation and so much of it potentially related to half a dozen other clips both before and after, that interpretation is something of a challenge. It's clear, though, that the film deals with some overarching themes, conveyed directly through visuals and through diegetic sound: dependence on oil, mechanization, alienation, anxiety about child safety, consumption as an entertainment or distraction.

What isn't clear, even as Don and Claire come out of their long hypnosis, is whether we the audience are waking up as well. A woman sitting in a circle of friends states that sometimes the land loves its people and that sometimes people must be hurt to force them to learn. In the next clip a cat sitting on a windowsill gets up and goes to clean another cat's head. The footage could point towards selfless socialization, an answer to the alienation presented earlier; or it could be an echo of the class societies that the mice established and the police enforced. It's possible the film, like The Day the Earth Stood Still, was meant to end with a lingering question rather than an easy statement.

Sing along with "Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla."
[Schoolhouse Rock! @ amazon.com]
[Panorama Ephemera @ archive.org]

John Saw the Holy Number

2006-07-27T00:04:00.000-04:00

Neko Case -- John Saw That Number
Tea time in hell. A quick one before break's over.

Being raised in a fundamentalist Christian church isn't something I'd wish on people, but it gives a certain appreciation for gospel music, myth, irony, and horror fiction.

As a kid I was encouraged to read the Bible and as a teen I was discouraged from reading Stephen King ... it's a bit amusing, since Revelation puts King to shame, and Solomon was the preincarnation of Henry Miller, but both of those books barely scratch the surface of a strange, fascinating, contradictory, and ultimately disturbing text (filled with incest, murder, torture, racism, and other national hobbies).

My neighbor and I used to talk fiction sometimes. We both loved pulp but she prefered Dean Koontz; she said King always had "depressing endings." She was a heavy smoker, overweight when I first met her; and then she took it upon herself to get into shape. She quit smoking, started daily walks, began losing weight and was generally looking better and better until she died in the middle of a daily walk of an apparent brain embolism. It's not the kind of ending Dean Koontz would write, sort of untidy and relentlessly realistic.
[Fox Confessor Brings the Flood ]

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Echolocation among the blind.

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Stop motion Space Invaders, with people as pixels. (via boingboing)

Syl Johnson -- Concrete Reservation

2006-07-17T21:16:00.000-04:00

Syl Johnson -- Concrete Reservation
Here's Syl Johnson with a song about living in the ghetto. This isn't the maudlin Mac Davis ghetto, and Syl Johnson isn't most interested in mamas crying because they had a baby; he's more interested in mamas crying because they lost a baby, in couples fighting becaue they're jealous, and in people burning to death because there's no back door on the apartments. The vocals are, appropriately, not mournful but full of a simmering rage; the guitar snaps, the strings stab, the lyrics sting:
Here in the ghetto, it's a bad situation / Call it what you want to; it's just a concrete reservation.

Johnson's also known for his track "Is It Because I'm Black?" which I have by Johnson only in a version that drags on a bit too long for my interest, though Ken Boothe also recorded an impressive version of it.
"Concrete Reservation" is off Is It Because I'm Black?, which is also available in a pricy re-release with Dresses Too Short; or you can pick it up on the greatest hits comp Twilight and Twinight.

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More HiFi finds: "I Am a Demon and Will Swallow Your Soul," "Olivia," and "Ocean Bottom," another track from The Scarring Party. It's my favorite song about writer's block at the bottom of the ocean with percussion by a typewriter.

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Monday last week I got a promotional email for an indie rock band--not at all uncommon for an mp3blog--but the music was good, which is somewhat less common. Gentleman Caller's track "Bomb the Castle" seemed likely to be an A-B-A-B-C construction with chunky distorted guitar on the bridge, with people screaming into the mic, and it wasn't, and I liked it for it. They have other tracks up, mostly with a dreamy pop-rock vibe with countryish vocal stylings. They self-compare to Okkervil River and Rilo Kiley.

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Secretly Canadian sent me an email about a new release from Jason Molina, and I enjoyed the track there for download, and so I'm passing it along.

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Vindaloo, the fight song, and the response: a writer's fight song. 99/100 for that, -1 for failure to include "B.I.C."

The Roots Canal: Ray Charles

2006-07-16T00:08:00.000-04:00

Ray Charles -- Greenbacks
As I was relaxing after work at my favorite fancy cocktail bar the other night, I was surprised to hear this rare old Ray Charles track come on the stereo. The bartender told me he put the mix together himself, but didn't know much about that song so I filled him in.

What makes Greenbacks so great isn't just the ironic lyrics --

If you want to have fun in this man's land
Let Lincoln and Jackson start shaking hands

-- but that it shows Ray Charles on the cusp of his transition from lounge singer to soul pioneer. As everybody who saw Ray knows, his career started in the cool blues tradition of Charles Brown and Amos Milburn but didn't take off until he heated it up by putting gospel singing to a secular (and often ribald) purpose, essentially inventing soul music. This song combines both styles in one: verses sung in the cool semi-talking style of Charles Brown (best known for his hit Merry Christmas Baby) and in the chorus erupting with a short gospel-style burst:

On a greenback, greenback dollar bill
Just a little piece of paper, coated with chlorophyll.

I picked up this compilation of Ray Charles' early work after Ray came out because I wanted to hear more of the great early R&B where he made his mark -- and where the movie rightly spends its time -- instead of the later pop and country experimentations (noteworthy in their own right, but not as much to my taste) that made him a national superstar but where only flashes of his unique talent occasionally shine through. I can't recommend this CD highly enough; it's got all of his great early work in one place.

Bonus track: Ray Charles fans will love this, too. It's the original a cappella demo of Hit the Road Jack by Percy Mayfield, a great R&B singer in his own right who specialized in songs of depression like Life Is Suicide, Memory Pain and Two Years of Torture until he was seriously injured and disfigured in a car crash and focused his efforts on songwriting.
Percy Mayfield -- Hit the Road Jack

[The Best of Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years]
[Percy Mayfield, Part 2: Memory Pain] (also available on emusic)

The Roots Canal: Grace Potter

2006-07-11T00:11:00.000-04:00

Grace Potter & The Nocturnals -- Left Behind
It's strange to start blogging and all of a sudden total strangers start sending you music. I haven't decided yet if it's a privilege or a pain. A little bit of each, I guess. I like hearing new things, but I hate being harassed by professional promoters. Mostly, though, it's just irrelevant, because I don't really listen to much current music unless it's steeped in roots of one sort or another. (With a few idiosyncratic exceptions like the Mountain Goats, whom I adore.)

I guess this is just a long way of expressing my surprise that someone actually sent me something I like. Following in the well-trod footsteps of Bonnie Raitt and Susan Tedeschi, Grace Potter sings soulful rock blues with a woman's touch. She's still a little green around the edges, but she has the right stuff. Personally, I think she does best when she doesn't try too hard, as on this song from her new album and the one they're apparently trying to promote as a single, Toothbrush and My Table. She and her band, The Nocturnals, will be the opening act in a benefit concert at Central Park Summerstage next week. I might just go uptown and catch their act.

Bonus Track: Following Grace on stage will be Galactic, a great funky rhythm band from New Orleans. I'm sorry I don't know Galactic's music better, because I really like what I've heard. (They were at Jazzfest this year but I didn't get to hear them because they were on at the same time as Eddie Bo.) To my ears, they sound a lot like a West Coast acid jazz band I enjoy, Karl Denson's Tiny Universe. Here's a song I picked up a few years ago on a WFUV sampler album. It's also available on their own record, of course.
Galactic -- Running Man
[Nothing but the Water]
[Late for the Future]

Barbara Lynn -- Ring Telephone Ring

2006-07-10T12:32:00.000-04:00

Barbara Lynn -- Ring Telephone Ring
Darcy Feels It posted two Barbara Lynn tracks on Thursday, and then this morning London Lee posted one. And I'm feeling it too so here's another, off her You'll Lose a Good Thing compilation, which unfortunately has the kind of liner notes that look like they were printed on someone's inkjet and more unfortunately seems to have gone out of print. (On further thought, I wonder if those two are unrelated....)

"Ring Telephone Ring" is a strange track: a lurching rhythm guitar, backed by a very subdued organ and "big" cymbal hits, with lyrics about a woman wondering about a failed or failing relationship. None of that gets across the stoned dirge-like mood of the track, though--allmusic.com describes the compilation as "idiosyncratic stuff with a bluesier, swampier feel than most any other soul being made during the time," but as far as I can tell, that's a good description of only this track. "Swamp blues" would describe this track perfectly, but not the rest of the tracks. The rest of the music has much more chipper instrumentation, giving a sunny, cheerful feel to the tracks even when the lyrics are about conniving women or relationships turning sour.

Standouts on the disc include "You'll Lose a Good Thing" (featured in Hairspray), "Don't Be Cruel" (yes, that one), and "Can't Buy My Love" (no, not a typo + the Beatles track).
[You'll Lose a Good Thing]

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Another MuFi (HiFi? MeFi Music?) find: How To Fight Loneliness, a cover of a Wilco song I've never heard. Wilco fans, does it stack up to the original?

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I missed posting this on the 4th of July: a sixth-grade essay on What the American Flag Stands For.

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Mohammed Raffi can expect to have trouble wiring money to someone, as can Ahmed Ahmed.

In general I despise the IMF, not least because it values commerce over the will of democratic nations, but sometimes they get things right. (Which is to say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.) Hey Western Union man, I wonder what Mesud Ahmed thinks about your policy.

The Roots Canal: Old Crow Medicine Show

2006-07-09T09:38:00.000-04:00

Old Crow Medicine Show -- Down Home Girl
Old Crow Medicine Show -- Wagon Wheel
At Tuwa's suggestion, here's a cover of Down Home Girl by one of my favorite retro country bands. Old Crow Medicine Show was a group of street musicians discovered by Doc Watson's daughter playing in front of a drugstore. That led to a gig on the plaza in front of the Grand Ole Opry, and the rest could be scripted by any cheap Hollywood screenwriter. Allmusic describes them as "traditional folk and bluegrass...with a rock and roll attitude." I agree.

Down Home Girl is from a new EP of the same name, which won't be released for a few more weeks but is already available online. While I'm at it, I should also post one of my all-time favorite songs of any kind, Wagon Wheel, from OCMS's eponymous full-length CD. Both are available on emusic.

[Down Home Girl]
[Old Crow Medicine Show]