Elsewhere…

Advertisement for a record company, 1980

• Producer and Mad Decent label honcho Diplo on his pet genre, Brazilian baile funk: Australia has crazy-ass marsupials because it’s an island and they bred themselves into something weird. That’s kind of what happened with baile funk. Miami bass got trapped there and became this strange, hybrid Brazilian thing. But the thing about funk was there wasn’t an industry. For a while they were selling singles, but it was only in Rio. It was done on bootleg CDs. There was no giant hand helping to move it one way or another. It’s just how kids wanted it, as raw as possible. And that’s what’s so interesting about that scene. I’ve never seen it develop like that anywhere else while I’ve been traveling. [Pitchfork]

• Kelefa Sanneh’s latest is an enjoyable profile of Brad Paisley (subscription): Paisley fared better with the follow-up, “He Didn’t Have to Be,” in which a boy pays heartfelt tribute to his mother’s new husband. It built a chorus—“I hope I’m at least half the dad that he didn’t have to be“—that was designed to make remarried mothers cry. The song was a deft and novel articulation of family values, and it was Paisley’s first No. 1 hit. It was also profoundly square, with plaintive piano chords and cozy lyrics about a happy family “crowded ‘round the nursery window,” and the literal-minded music video looked a lot like a commercial for something (maybe a mortgage company, or powdered lemonade). [New Yorker]

• On the excellent blog Gemini Spacecraft, a piece on the origins of rockabillist Glen Glenn: [He] might have continued playing country & western music, instead of cutting some of the greatest sides from the rockabilly era, if not for one thing: Girls! “If you played country, girls might want your autograph,” Glenn has said. “If you did this kind of [rock’n‘roll] music, girls freaked out.”

Flashing eyes

Sam Phillips, “Out of Time.” Live in Philadelphia, 1988.

I admit I don’t have much to say about this video. I’m just amazed at the way she completely captivates the attention without so much as blinking. It makes the gestural theatrics of many of her peers all the more ridiculous. For all the squealing, rolling-on-the-floor guitar solos I’ve squirmed out of the way of, I’m pretty sure nothing has been as engrossing as what I get from this VHS dub.

Ranch-style blues

Detail from a music promotion, 1974

Delbert McClinton and the Ron-Dels put out a handful of 45s in the mid-60s. The second, “If You Really Want Me To, I’ll Go,” was cut in 1963, in an era where Texas seemed uniquely blessed at combining blues and country music: blues structure and sentiment were married to country subjects and instrumentation. This combination seemed on the whole less conscious than that of examples elsewhere—e.g., the brilliant, but more deliberate musicians at Muscle Shoals. (And in later decades, much of the work in this direction dressed itself a motley of the exterior tics and lyric tropes of both genres.) McClinton’s lyric is as simple as any: somewhat repetitively emphasizing the sense of desperation at the prospect of loss. It’s the strain in his voice, reinforced at intervals with harmony, that provides necessary dimension. I would contrast this with typical genre-form lyrics, which may be successful combinations of words and music, but fail to convey a particular sense of the speaker: they are songs—often good songs—but songs without a voice. McClinton connects.

McClinton was a professional musician from fifteen—not quite as prodigious as Doug Sahm¹—at which point he was in a Ft. Worth house band backing Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Parker, and Bobby Bland. In a story recounted in Hit Parader he says:

One night we were playing a song called “Fanny Mae” by Buster Brown. We were backing him up and Jimmy Reed in the same night, and I had just bought me a harmonica because they were two of the best, ya know, and I was ready to learn. Well, we were sittin’ in the dressing room before the show—I didn’t drink at the time—but they were both passing a quart of Old Grand-Dad, and I was sittin’ in the middle helping em drink it—never did see the show.

But anyway the harmonica took him on a European tour for Bruce Channell’s “Hey Baby” in 1962, where he met the Beatles and, as quoted in Hit Parader “taught whichever one to play something on blues harp” (some other accounts have it as Lennon). A certain resemblance also follows between “If You Really Want” and the Beatles’ “I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party.” Perhaps that was what helped it eventually hit Billboard, if two years after its initial release. It finally became something of a Texas country standard probably thanks to a version recorded by Waylon Jennings. But success eluded McClinton himself until the late-70s, when he penned “Two More Bottles Of Wine,” which became a number one hit for Emmylou Harris. And in the ’80s—on, as it happens, the Muscle Shoals label—his music became commercially successful but slackened compositionally, trading its hard-earned blues for what sounds to these ears like second-hand soul.

1. Sahm was a San Antonio blues-country musician asked on as a permanent member of the Grand Ole Opry while still in primary school. In fact, Sahm’s Sir Douglas Quintet covered this tune on their first LP, Mendocino — in 1969, by which point they were hippies and this song was firmly an oldie; yet reconfigured on that album to accommodate Augie March’s Vox transistor organ, it melds in perfectly with their repertoire: McClinton and Sahm, as different as their lyric personalities may be, do seem to share that particular Texas country-blues sensibility.

Pipe dreams

Television advertisement for frozen foods, 1981

A new contributor to the blog, Megan’s investigation of the cultural climate for pop music in 1994 will appear in the first issue of Ply. She writes regularly for Mere Duchess as Not Susan.

Mariah Carey early on was a constitutionally perfect substrate in which to suspend the industry of pop. Of ambiguous race, donning, always, a denim bottom and a black top, the female effect was somewhere between inner city first grade teacher and Disney princess. Her role was simple: provide an aspirational vocal track against a backdrop of hi-fi karaoke. No prismatic cultural opuses like Madonna or Janet dance sequences necessary, just a set of pipes and some hand gestures orbiting around a velveted bed of princess neckline.

The ’89–’94 pleasure in hearing a singer soar was parallel to the figure skater mania of the time; it was watching a mouth form a word and do aural nonsense with it from behind. When Mariah got into the whistle tones—into registers only a dog could hear—there was a sort of 4H quality to the experience. Athletic vocals like these had an uplifting element, the kind of thing that could transport an accounts payable clerk from the earthly limits of a Wednesday. It was a broad experience manufactured for a broad audience, with no need to deal in symbology or lyrics.

On the right track now

Advertisement for international travel, 1984

Every month The Mixtape Club, a project started by Micah Panama and Brian Thomas, publishes ten tapes contributed by guests from around the music world. The results are difficult to predict (this time they range from Alejandro Jodorowsky to the Beatnuts): but then everyone seems to have their own rules for the construction of these somehow ceremonial mixes. On their info page, they quote Nick Hornby’s book High Fidelity: “A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, …” Many of my old pals insisted there could only be one song per artist, or that the ideal length was a 45-minute, or a 30-minute side, or that there ought to be some sort of comprehensible message. In the film version of High Fidelity, the protagonist characterizes this as “using someone else’s poetry to express yourself.” I dunno; that sentiment is something I’ve always found to be pretty specious, and probably undesirable. The songs keep their own poetry: that’s why you want to listen to them.

For the July episode of the Mixtape Club, I sent Micah the second half of a tape I made about a year ago, Always Crashing In The Same Car. The night time complement to a brighter, more trebly first half, it chugs from the early Tears for Fears through a forest of 70s and 80s synthesizers before arriving at the present with the Chromatics’ cover of “Running Up That Hill,” originally by Kate Bush. Ever since I started dubbing things onto Maxell XLIIs in fourth grade, I’ve tended to engineer these things for roadtrips or late-night car rides. Originally they were heterogenous to a fault, leaning heavily on Graceland and dipping into contemporary alt-radio hits from the time, but sometimes would bafflingly digress into a crackly Vladimir Horowitz performance or some other passing fancy. That formula took a turn when I started driving (and discovered girls). This one draws its lineage from that later era, when the midnight drive home called for something that stayed a course, but still took you from one place to another.

Elsewhere…

Still from a Koratron television ad, 1960s

• Chris Sievey, the inventor of Frank Sidebottom and leader of The Freshies, died Monday of cancer. He was 54. Mark Radcliffe of BBC4: [Sievey was] one of the very few people I have ever met in my life who I would call a genius. He was so creative, so brimming full of ideas, and it wasn’t just his act, he lived his life as an elaborate extended act. It wasn’t just the gig that was always fun with Chris, it was the whole day. One time we were talking about travel games and he decided that a good idea would be travel snooker. The next gig we went to, which was in London, he’d brought one that he was developing with Velcro balls. We went from Timperley to London in a van with a snooker table in the middle of it, which meant there was barely any room to sit. [BBC]
• James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, interviewed by Joe Colly: So I just think it takes a couple decades to kind of clear your brain now. So it makes more sense to me that I could find my footing when I was 30 instead of when I was 19. It seems a little more clear. You know, novelists are older now. Things are happening later in people’s lives. They’re kind of living lives and then creating things about the lives they’ve lived. Rather than being an artiste at an early age and coming out with a ball of fire. That energy has been co-opted because you haven’t immunized yourself yet against media. It’s easier to get swept up things then take a couple of years to get over your, like, indie rock hangover. I’m scraping the fucking Quarterstick Records crust out of my eyes when I’m like, 27. You know, “Why am I playing in 5/7? How is that fun?” [Pitchfork]
• Trevor Cox on the instrument of choice at the 2010 World Cup: The vuvuzela is like a straightened trumpet and is played by blowing a raspberry into the mouthpiece. The player’s lips open and close about 235 times a second, sending puffs of air down the tube, which excite resonance of the air in the conical bore. A single vuvuzela played by a decent trumpeter is reminiscent of a hunting horn—but the sound is less pleasing when played by the average football fan, as the note is imperfect and fluctuates in frequency. It sounds more like an elephant trumpeting. This happens because the player does not keep the airflow and motion of the lips consistent. “But that din sounds nothing like a trumpet or an elephant.” When hundreds of the vuvuzelas are played together, you get the distinctive droning sound. People in the crowd are blowing the instrument at different times and with slightly varying frequencies. The sound waxes and wanes. The overall effect is rather like the sound of a swarm of insects. [New Scientist]

High fidelity

Love Unlimited, “I Belong To You” (US #27, 1974)

Love Unlimited is one of the many unjustly forgotten female R&B groups of the 1970s. Their music is a celebration of unbridled love, devotion, and femininity—as far from the values expressed in contemporary R&B as one can get. In fact, Love Unlimited’s musical messages seem tame for their time, a decade that has come to symbolize the height of American cynicism, sleaze, and excess.

Go your own way

Fleetwood Mac, “Tusk” (1979). Design by Vigon/Nahas/Vigon.

There were a lot of things going on with Tusk, most notoriously the final unwinding of the twist-tie romances between the band members. As a band, Fleetwood Mac was ripe for this: the most Frankensteinish of groups, in the late-60s they were a London blues band who made their mark with an instrumental (“Albatross”, #1 in the UK) but by the late-70s had wholly reconfigured based on two new hires: the Los Angeles chanteurs Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. This schizophrenia seems like it was the source for a lot of deeply-plumbed pop, since they managed to consistently meld their highly different styles into discernible, if often rather idiosyncratic, songs. Tusk in particular was the moment Lindsey Buckingham emerged as the singularly perfect talent for chaining all these links. Following the huge success of Rumours, he was permitted unlimited expenses and maneuvered into position to oversee the project without intervention. The result was a double-album littered with top-tier radio pop, recorded in constantly-changing, lo-fi arrangements. The production cost ran into the millions, and the sessions are said to have dragged on with a single-mindedness recalling Brian Wilson.

The cover of Tusk mirrors that shift of emphasis. On the previous two records in the band’s Buckingham/Nicks-era — their second eponymous record, and Rumours, — members are portraited in Renn Faire, underneath spidery, awkwardly-ornate lettering; those LPs contained consistent, crisply recorded three-and-a-half minute AM favorites like “Go Your Own Way” and “Rhiannon.” The front of Tusk is sparse and balanced — a mélange textile coloration with some tone-on-tone capitals for the band name, and scattered darkened patches, like the remnants of adhesive after tape is ripped off, and then that unplaceable Polaroid. Its precise typesetting and modulating but irregular color has a disorienting cleanliness that could just as easily describe Buckingham’s production. On “Save Me A Place,” for example, his yearning ballad is recorded through a pristine vintage condenser microphone and paired with a rhythm track of a box of two-inch tape struck by hand. Elsewhere, parallel drum tracks are panned to opposite ends of the mix; tape is sped up, looped; double-tracked guitars clash on overdubs; and five vocals recorded in Buckingham’s bathroom, on his knees, make the final cut. And then there’s a marching band.

In place of the stagey, black-and-white backdrop costume shots on the previous record, the back of an import version of Tusk has only a candid of the band laughing uncomfortably. (The Vigon/Nahas/Vigon team was nominated for a 1981 Grammy Award for the packaging, but lost to a brick of mild cheddar by Roy Kohara.)

Elsewhere…

Still from a PANTONE promotional shoot, 2010

• Stephen Holden on Hoagy Carmichael: As affably easygoing as the early jazz that wound through his music like a lazy river: that would describe this season’s final program of the 92nd Street Y’s Lyrics & Lyricists series, devoted to Hoagy Carmichael, the proto-Midwest hipster. Carmichael, who has been described as the first singer-songwriter in a tradition that includes obvious descendants like James Taylor and Tom Waits, once described himself as sounding “like a shaggy dog looks.” He added, “I have Wabash fog and sycamore twigs in my throat.” [New York Times]
• Derek Walmsley covering the Montreal Mutek festival: I was blown away once again by Moritz von Oswald trio, whose set was simply one extended track, with Vladislav playing percussion at the side of the stage, Moritz (dressed absoultely immaculately in a suit, tie, with hankerchief poking out of his pocket) playing keyboard lines and dubbing Vladislav’s percussion parts on the fly, and Max Loderbauer working on the far side of the stage. Half way through, those Rhodes-like keyboard lines (stuck through dozens of echoes) sounded like mercury slithering around the floor. You could have taken and looped any four bars from the middle of the performance and it would have made an extraordinarily good 12”. Organic’s the wrong word… it ends up deliciously complex yet finely focused on the groove. Towards the end Mortitz elbowed some growling notes out of his keyboard John Lennon at Shea Stadium style, nudging Delay into even wilder drumming, and with that liberated gesture they concluded after fully 45 minutes. [The Wire]
• From Simon Reynolds’ profile of Ariel Pink: Depending on how you calculate, “Before Today” is Pink’s ninth album or his 24th. The Haunted Graffiti discography is a chaotic sprawl of ultra-limited-edition cassette, CD-R and vinyl releases, confused further by rereleases and reconfigurations of earlier material. But Pink insists that “Before Today” is “the first album” … “Before Today” strips away a lot of the echo-laden wooze that swathed Pink’s earlier music. What emerges, glistening and majestic like a yacht through fog, often sounds like chart material. The only catch is that these would be radio smashes in 1986, or 1978, or whichever year that a particular song refers to stylistically. You can’t imagine anything on the record making a dent on today’s radioscape. [Los Angeles Times]

Everybody wants something

Degrassi High. Season 1, Episode 5. “Everybody Wants Something.”

Lucy finally agrees to shoot The Zits’ video – if they can all agree on a script, persuade Clutch to lend them his car and coax Lucy into shooting it with Clutch around… Life is almost perfect for Joey – he’ll deal with the small problem of Caitlin just as soon as the video’s done. The hate campaign against Erica escalates, and Erica is determined to find out who is putting pamphlets and slogans on her locker. [TV.com]

windsofchange345 (8 months ago) This is a true story of 3 young canadians at thier finest.

Catfux (3 weeks ago) This song is pure musical genius, “Everybody wants something, and never give up.”

SuperSaiyanAl (6 months ago) …Who WROTE this?!

rileymakeupgirl (6 months ago) joey and wheels are hot

Xervosh23 (5 months ago) Its like a commercial for AIDS.