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.
Some graphic violence
Detail from the cover of IDCA brochure, 1976
William Lyons, 25, a levee hand, was shot in the abdomen yesterday evening at 10 o’clock in the saloon of Bill Curtis, at Eleventh and Morgan Streets, by Lee Sheldon, a carriage driver. Lyons and Sheldon were friends and were talking together. Both parties, it seems, had been drinking and were feeling in exuberant spirits. The discussion drifted to politics, and an argument was started, the conclusion of which was that Lyons snatched Sheldon’s hat from his head. The latter indignantly demanded its return. Lyons refused, and Sheldon withdrew his revolver and shot Lyons in the abdomen. When his victim fell to the floor Sheldon took his hat from the hand of the wounded man and coolly walked away. He was subsequently arrested and locked up at the Chestnut Street Station. Lyons was taken to the Dispensary, where his wounds were pronounced serious. Lee Sheldon is also known as ‘Stag’ Lee.
This 1895 account from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat gives the background for the blues standard known variously as “Stagger Lee,” “Stagolee,” “Stackerlee,” “Stack O’Lee,” and “Stack-a-Lee.” It was recorded definitively by Mississippi John Hurt in 1928, and adapted by Lloyd Price in the late-1950s into this parcel of straight R&B. By regularizing the extant folk lyrics, which revolved with many variations around the Lee Sheldon story, he constructed a narrative clear enough that it could be performed for the military in the Korean War: “There were hundreds of lyrics for the old song, but no story. While entertaining the troops, I had put together a little play based on it. I’d have soldiers acting out the story while I sang it.”
The result is the unusual marriage of a high-form Tin Pan Alley lyric (complete with scene-setting intro) and a loose R&B recording. Unexpectedly, it went to #1 in 1959, probably near the end of the era that a recording with a band this wobbly could achieve that. Though Price didn’t put together the framework of the song or invent the story, his contribution is extraordinary in its own merits: the meter of the verse and its consistent tenor wear their craft subtly, through the pitch-perfect significant details: the moon and leaves in the intro (an established metaphor for fallen soldiers), the narrator’s bulldog, the “swore” in the couplet “Stagger Lee threw seven / Billy swore that he threw eight,” Lee’s euphemistic apostrophe about “paying that debt I owe.” It’s classicism, and the structure of the chorus reflects that: its straining repetition, rather than emphasizing a recurring verbal theme and setting verses off from each other, is merely interpolated into the drama (it’s a chorus in the oldest sense), which adds textural emphasis while allowing Price’s plot to advance at a set pace. The relative reserve of all this development sets up the last — hyper-cinematic — line to stand out more plangently: “Stagger Lee shot Billy / Oh he shot that poor boy so bad / ‘Til the bullet came through Billy / And broke the bartender’s glass.”
The ‘stone tone
The “Beau Brummelstones” were a central plot point in this 1965 episode of The Flinstones, wherein starstruck Wilma and Betty end up at a taping of “Shinrock.” In the segment above, the band performs “Laugh, Laugh,” San Francisco’s answer to the British Invasion, an irresistible and quirkily arranged nugget produced by Sly Stone. It peaked at #15 in the US in early 1965; the band appeared on Shindig! in March of that year and by December on its Bedrock equivalent. I especially like Betty’s blatant, night-show-esque shill for “their new record.” (“Laugh, Laugh” led off Introducing the Beau Brummels, which is strong straight through: twelve Bay Area twists on the Beatles — and all but two originals!)
For more cutesy ephemera like this, ask me for a copy of my first music video mix, “Marsh Mellow Nuggets,” which also features The Association, a soda spot by Dino Desi & Billy, The Animals, performances from teensploitation beach movies, Syd Barrett in Belgium, Bewitched, the 13th Floor Elevators, and an all-velvet Japanese psych band. Volume two — “Eighties Ectoplasm” — coming soon.
Texaco daydreams
Still from a Peter Paul Candy television advertisement, 1970s
I’m not sure quite when it was, must have been age six or eight, that I first pumped gas. After much pleading, I recall my mom handing me the ungainly, unexpectedly heavy nozzle. I hooked it awkwardly into the Honda, and, using both hands, squeezed with all I had. There was the lurching of the hose under me, and the gas shot out, sloshing against the inside of the housing for the gas cap, and coming right out again, directly into my wide-eyed excitement.
Marshall Crenshaw was one of the better pop revivalists of the ’80s, though the deliberateness of his act weighs heavily on some of the tracks and a shimmery gloss of production at times can distract from the craftiness of his borrowing. He covers Arthur Alexander’s “Soldier of Love,” and — like the Beatles and Stones, who took on “Anna” and “You Better Move On” respectively — firms it up somewhat without squeezing any new feeling from the song. But on the lead-off, “There She Goes Again,” the influence is perfectly tempered. When I heard it eight or so years ago in college — not knowing what it was — it glowed like that splash of gasoline under my nose: and I returned to that afternoon, when, wiped down and placated with Dairy Queen, we resumed our errand at the laundromat. The first chords brought me back there, where the song jangled through a tinny overhead radio. From my dorm I had the brief sensation I was seated very high up, on a folding table, above the mountainous sound of the machines, swaddled with the smell of fabric softener, unusually sedate at age eight.
Elsewhere…
Still from a television advertisement for AMF Sports Equipment, 1970s
- Martin Cizmar finds out what happened to all of the original NWA posse on LA Weekly.
- Andrew Nosnitsky of Cocaine Blunts unpacks crate-digging culture in the South with a short ditty on the occasion of a new mixtape by Mississippi’s Big K.R.I.T.
- In Crawdaddy, sound engineer Dinky Dawson has a regular feature in which he recounts his life on the road with the Byrds, Fleetwood Mac, Warren Zevon, Steely Dan, and so on. The latest installment features a monkey, Doris Day, a shotgun, and “Kokomo.”
- One-liner from Camille Dodero of the Village Voice: “the fact that the baby chasing the dollar bill on the iconic symbol of ’90s ‘alternative’ culture now works for Shepard Fairey, who embodies the 21st-century commodification of underground culture, is, well, rich.“
Artificial paradise
Calvin Klein advertisement (detail), 1993
Every time I go to Rosemary’s Tavern (a red vinyl cave on Bedford Avenue that, for me, usually bookends a sausage pizza) I hear Can’s “Mother Sky.” It doesn’t really matter when you come in during the first half, since even on the record it starts in the middle of a guitar solo — but at the midpoint it takes several turns that aren’t really comprehensible without the previous seven minutes of tortured development. Rosemary’s serves Budweiser in thirty-two ounce styrofoam cups: the bartender is an old man in a state of contented stupefaction: the color of the decorations has gradually averaged to a warm ochre. A few minutes in, Damo Suzuki sings a meandering pattern around a languid bassline, and the setting and the song settle into a comfortable congress with each other.
“
Mother Sky” is the first cut on the flip side of Soundtracks (1970), a compilation album of Can’s early work for films, and Suzuki’s first work with the band. In this period their deep, loose psychedelia proved to be unusually well-suited to his frail wailing. With most fourteen-minute freakouts, the danger is in formlessness: improvisation gradually unwinding until the song’s drive relies entirely on the thinning appeal of a clocked-in rock beat. But the level of technical competence of Can was always dangerously high, and they go in the other direction: the longer they’re allowed to attach and reattach components to their compositions, the more formally airless they can become. That doesn’t happen with “Mother Sky,” though, its shrill guitar tones just gauze over a lock-step but ductile rhythm section, and it finds its changes at just the right moments, allowing the groove to deepen only just long enough and then get slowly rubbed out, always moving at the pace of one individual instrument. The familiar metaphor of schizophrenia in psychedelic music seems like it might be oversold by Suzuki’s plaintive refrain of “madness is too pure like Mother Sky,” but the combined effect is opioid, sensually balming while remaining distantly unsettling.
What is pop?
Detail from a Maxell advertisement, 1989
In an interview with the Village Voice’s Sounds of the City blog, Karl Hagstrom Miller talks about how the subculture of record collecting can distort the perception of the social significance of music. Miller, who is a professor of cultural studies at the University of Texas, points out some specific examples of scholars or enthusiasts who have historically muddied things up — the classic example being white interest in the blues, which in its early days tended to fantasize about the music’s origins in a way that now seems ugly and primitivist. But as a rule, he is more interested in how the conditions of a society are revealed in its music, and how that is potentially obscured by selectivity in its scholarship. Since I tend to go the other way — I’m interested in the internal qualities of music, and how they’re affected by society — my response will itself be rather selective. The passage that caught my attention dealt with the difficulty he had with defining “popular music.”
